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THE POSSIBLE LIFE

AND OTHER SERMONS

JOHN W. CHAD WICK

TWENTY-FIRST AND TWENTY-SECOND SERIES

BOSTON

Geo. II. Ellis, 141 Franklin S:; ifej i

1897

BLIC LIB

ASTOR, LENOX AND
TILDEN FOUNDATIONS
R 1919 L

CONTENTS

TWENTY-FIRST SERIES.

I'AGE

I. The Public Service of Religion i

II. The Beseeching God 17

III. Christian Unity 29

IV. Peace and War 43

V. The Lifelong Joy 59

VI. The New Sinai 71

VII. No Backward Step 87

VIII. Gravitations ok the Spirit 107

TWENTY-SECOND SERIES.

I. The Possible Life 1

[I. The House of Pain 13

III. Moral Athletics 27

IV. A Liberal Faith 41

V. The Continuing City 55

VI. The Old Testament and the Higher Criticism . . 67

VII. The New Testament and the Higher Criticism . 83

VIII. The Daring Hope 97

THE PUBLIC SERVICE OF RELIGION.

It cannot be inappropriate for us, coming together as we
do to-day after a period of separation, and about to enter on
another year of common thought and work, to seriously con-
sider why we are here, what business we have in hand, what
justification there is for this religious institution, and for the
more general institution of which this church of ours is an
infinitesimal part. Mr. Balfour may be fully justified in his
persuasion that men generally think and speak and act from
habit and tradition and authority; but, when he adds "and
not on reasonable grounds," we say : " Hold there ! Are you
quite sure of that?" May it not be that habit and tradition
and authority hold a good deal of reason, as it were in solu-
tion ; that they are to a considerable extent reason gone
into structure ; that reason is the kobold of Scandinavian
folk-lore which cannot be shaken off, but mounts the cart of
household goods, and goes with them wherever they go ?
They reckon ill who leave him out. When him they fly, he is
the wings. There is no reason here for our abdication of the
rights of reason and their habitual exercise. However much
of reason is implicated in habit and tradition and authority,
there is plenty of unreason, too, which demands the exercise
of reason for its elimination. And though, doubtless, the
days would not be long enough for the reasoning out of
every principle or persuasion upon which we act, and we
may well be thankful for the fund of traditional principles
and persuasions which we each inherit, yet does it behoove
us to be adding something to this stock by the application of
our own minds to many things. If all our predecessors had
been content "to take, and give not on again," the fund of
rational authority would have been much smaller than it is

2 The Public Service of Religion.

n0W) — a mole-hill, not a mountain for us to mine and quarry
in at will. And then, too, there are man}- traditional con-
ceptions which are of reason all compact, but it is other
men's reason ; and it makes a world of difference whether we
open our mouths and shut our eyes in the hope of something
to make us wise, or re-think what has been thought before,
and make it ours as it was theirs who thought it out before
us. We all of us believe that the earth is round, and that it
is flattened at the poles, and that it revolves around the sun.
But what a difference it makes if we know these things by
hearsay or have followed up the lines of thought that lead to
them ! There are a thousand similar things, and one of them
is — going to church. The great majority go to church be-
cause other people go, or because their fathers and mothers
went before them. But there is a better way. It is that of
the New Testament writer when he said, " Let every man be
fully persuaded in his own mind." I will not say that men
had better cease from "the assembling of themselves to-
gether" than not be able to give a reasonable account of
their assembling ; but I will say that, by so much as a man
can give a reasonable account of his conduct, by so much is
he more a man, entitled to his self-respect and to the respect
of other rational beings.

And then, too, of this particular we are bound to take
some earnest heed, — that the public ministration of religion
is subjected in our time to such a challenge as it has not
been subjected to for many a day, if ever in the world before.
For it is not the challenge of the fool, who has said in his
heart there is no God ; of the brutal sensualist, who is re-
solved to make sure of the only pleasures that appeal to him
as worth pursuing; or the prudent epicure, who proposes to
make sure of the good things of the present in fit measure
and proportion, so that, if nothing at all or nothing better
should materialize beyond the veil, he shall have had his
day; or the sordid money-getter, who conceives that getting
money is the chief end of man, the top and crown of all his
possible success. If the religious institution and observance

The Public ' Service of Religion. 3

of our time were subjected to no more serious challenge than
is sounded by these several instruments, there would be
much less occasion than there is now for those who are
heartily persuaded of the importance and reality of this in-
stitution and observance to consider their position, and ask
themselves if they can justify it to their perfect satisfaction
at the bar of reason, or even in that lower court where
common sense holds its serene assize. No : the most seri-
ous challenge of our religious institution and observance is
the tacit one that comes from an increasing multitude of
men and women of good intellectual and moral standing
who find themselves refraining more and more habitually
from the public ministration of religion. It is the existence
of a large and steadily enlarging body of earnest, thoughtful
people whom we respect and admire who seem to get along
without religion, at least without its public recognition and
support. That the two things are widely different I am well
enough aware. There are not many towns or villages, or
even cities, where a man cannot get better spiritual food
than is served upon the tables of the churches in his imme-
diate vicinity. If it is sermons that they want, they can get
those of Channing and Parker and Martineau and Brooks ;
and there is many a preacher whom it would be an impiety
to go and hear when one might stay at home and read such
words of strength and peace. And we have, especially on
the part of religious liberals, too much complacency rather
than too little sympathy in the treatment of religious institu-
tions which we cannot approve. The Unitarian in partibus
iiifidelium is too ready to unloose his purse-strings for the
local church as such. If there is a man in the pulpit preach-
ing from week to week good tidings of sincerity and hope and
cheer, that is another matter. But, when it comes to aiding
and abetting a ministration of religion in which you do not
believe or trust, there is something to be said for common
honesty and self-respect as well as for good-nature and the
desire to please one's neighbors or one's friends. With so
many worthy objects crying for sympathy and help, money is

4 The Public Service of Religion.

not the stuff that one should scatter with a careless hand,
and, least of all, to fertilize a field of noisome weeds. More-
over, it is not as if all the resources of the non-church-going
multitude were exhausted when they have read the best
words of the best preachers of religion. Especially

" To one who has been long in city pent
'Tis very sweet to look into the fair
And open face of heaven, — to breathe a prayer
Full in the smile of the blue firmament."

It was never bluer than at the very moment when I was
writing that a week ago, and the church bell was tolling with
a sweet and lingering invitation which I did not heed. More
worshipful for me to lift up mine eyes unto the hills from
whence cometh my help, to see the great white clouds trail-
ing their dusky shadows over them. And yet, again, the
non-church-goer has the mighty poets, "in their misery
dead," it may be, but in their power and grace and helpful-
ness alive forevermore, and the great thinkers of the ages,
the good books of many kinds, — one, very little known,
called the New Testament, which contains "the story of a
man " that is very helpful and inspiring, and as little like
"the old, old story" of our traditional Christianity as one
story can be like another.

You will think I have forgotten what I would be at, and
that I am entering an earnest plea for total abstinence from
church-going and the cultivation of home worship and indi-
vidualism in religion ; but I am doing nothing of the kind.
Only I would not willingly believe that non-church-going is
coextensive with indifference to religion and with failure to
respond to its peculiar influence and charm ; and I am glad
that, without any wilfulness or perversion of the facts, I am
encouraged to believe that it is not ; that it may be, that it
often is, the preference of a higher to a lower way, of good
thoughts to bad, of something helpful and inspiring to some-
thing hindering and depressing. At the same time I cannot,
without wilful blindness, fail to see that indifference to the

The Public Service of Religion. 5

public ministration of religion has not everywhere and al-
ways this lofty character, does not everywhere and always
mean this preference for the higher and the highest things.
It means, and not infrequently, that the home-staying,
church-neglecting people are persuaded that religion is
something which they can get along without, and that, too,
very comfortably and decently, without loss of any real good.
And here, exactly here, is the challenge of their method
and observance which those who are heartily persuaded of
the reality and importance of religion and its common rec-
ognition are bound to give attention to at the present time,
and that right earnestly. It is a very serious challenge. If
religion is not the greatest thing in the world, but a mere
superfluity or absurdity or impertinence, we want to know it.
We do not want to be watering a stick in the desert when
there are so many things that have in them a principle of
life and growth, and well deserve all the abundance of our
wells and springs. We do not want to be wasting precious
time and money on a plant that has in it no real vitality, no
perfectly sincere relation to the needs of human life. We
want to quit ourselves like men ; and we are not doing so
if we cannot give a reason for the faith that is in us, and
feel that we are making a good honest contribution to the
spiritual commonwealth of man. As for myself, there are
some other things that I could do to good purpose and with
much enjoyment ; and I should like to be about them if I
have been following an ignis fatuus these thirty years.

But, though it may seem presumptuous to differ from so
many of the wise and excellent who are persuaded of the un-
reality of religion or of the uselessness of its public recog-
nition, I do not find myself inclined — no, not in the least
degree — to be of their assembly. For one thing, I cannot
look at the succession of the ages, and see what a tremen-
dous part religion has been playing on the busy scene, with-
out being convinced that here is something essential to the
completeness of humanity, something so deeply implicated
in its structure that it can no more be taken out of it with-

6 The Public Service of Religion.

out destructive consequences than the bones can be taken
out of a man's body or his muscles be unstrung of every
quivering nerve. No other force or institution has played
such a stupendous part in human history, has reared such
splendid fanes, dominated such mighty nations and events,
inspired such hopes and fears.

I am perfectly aware of the deductions that must be made
from this account by the impartial critic. "O Liberty,"
cried Madame Roland, "how many crimes have been com-
mitted in thy name ! " Yes, certainly, but not a tithe of
those that have been committed in the name of religion.
What superstitions and idolatries and persecutions have
been multiplied along her course ! How often she has
blocked the path of civilization and checked the growth of
science and thrust back the births of intellect into the womb
of time ! From none of these things must we avert our eyes.
We could not if we would, they are so thrust upon us. But,
if they were exhaustive of the measure of religion, could we
be less convinced than we are now of the fundamental
reality of that in which such things inhere? We might feel
obliged to think it something abominable, infernal, devilish,
and consequently to revise our theories of human nature, and
conclude that Augustine and Calvin and Edwards said no
worse of it than what is true. But they are not exhaustive
of the measure of religion, these cursed and abominable
things. They are the spots upon the sun. They are the
least dust of the balance as compared with the inspirations of
goodness, reverence, comfort, peace, heroism, sacrifice, trust,
long-suffering, patience, that have been as much a part of it
as warmth is of the sunlight and fragrance of the rose.
And, when we think of what religion has been in its total
manifestation, in its terror and its beauty, in its loveliness
and joy, in its strength to build, its energy to sway, its might
to set up and cast down, then might we not as rationally
believe that the art of government, the State, or the passion
for beauty, or the love of men and women for each other,
was something superficial, something that might have its day

The Public Service of Religion. 7

and cease to be, as to believe these things of religion ? It
may be subjected to incalculable transformations in the
future as it has been in the past, but they will not destroy
its identity nor bring upon its perpetuity the shadow of a
doubt.

But there is another way of looking at the matter and a
much higher one than this with which we are now done.
It is to consider religion not in its historic course, but in
its ideal significance. What is religion so considered ? It
is man's sense of the power and mystery of universal life,
and his endeavor to convert this sense into a binding law of
life. It has not always been this ; for this has a moral ele-
ment,— the endeavor to convert the sense of universal power
and mystery into a binding law of life, — and there was no
such moral element in the beginnings of religion. Religion
and morality were originally two separate streams, one rising
in the contact of man's spirit with the mystery of nature
and the mystery of his own life, and the other in the con-
tacts between man and man ; but long since the two streams
coalesced, and now you might as well endeavor to separate
them as to separate the waters of the Hudson and the Mo-
hawk below their junction with each other. Here and there
you find an individual like Benvenuto Cellini or the last pious
defaulter whose religion seems to have no moral character,
and here and there you find a splendid ethical development
with no conscious lifting of the heart to God ; but, in the
wide average of history and of our semi-civilization, the relig-
ious and the moral elements are inextricably interwoven.

Separated in theory they often are by moralists and theo-
logians. So are the bones and muscles on the dissecting
table or irr anatomical treatises; but in the living organism
they are mutually supporting and sustaining, and cannot be
torn asunder without the destruction of that unity in which
they both inhere. There are those who, because they were
originally separate, would keep them separate still ; but
they have coalesced as naturally as two rivers winding to
the sea, and it would be as absurd to seek to isolate them

8 The Public Set-vice of Religion.

now as to seek to isolate the Hudson's or the Mohawk's
streaming flood. At the first swelling of the waters they
would reunite ; and separate religion and morality as you will
in theory or practice, given some inundation of the one or
of the other, and they would rush together with a joy and
welcome as when long-parted lovers reunite.

Whatever religion has been, this is what it is, — man's sense
of his relation to the power and mystery of universal life, and
his endeavor to convert that sense into a binding law of life.
You might as well say that the "Valkyrie" or the " De-
fender," par nobile sororum, ought to be a raft or dug-out be-
cause the original water-craft was a raft or dug-out as to say
that religion ought to be exclusively man's sense of nature's
power and mystery because it was so once.

" Pleads for itself the fact
As unrepentant Nature leaves her every act."

Here is the "Valkyrie" or the "Defender," — a fair miracle
of flowing lines and bellying sails and glorious motion, — and
here is religion as it has come to be in the course of half a
million years of human toil and stress, contact of the human
spirit with the outer and the inner mystery, contact of man
with man in the oppositions and the sympathies of social life.

" The highest is the measure of the man,
And not the Kaffir, Hottentot, Malay,
And such horn-handed breakers of the glebe,
But Homer, Plato, Verulam."

The highest is the measure of the water-craft, the govern-
ment, the social state, the domestic relation, the religion.
Nor in the reasoning of this present time is there a grosser
fallacy than the attempt, which is so common, to interpret
this thing or that in the terms of its original endowment,
and to tie it down to the significance of that.

Somehow, by God's grace and man's, the raft or dug-out
has become the ocean steamer and the yacht. Somehow, by

TJie Public Service of Religion. 9

God's grace and man's, religion has become the twofold
energy of a divine and human inspiration, the twofold re-
sponse of human nature to the All-embracer, the All-enfolder,
and to the obligations of a social life. And, seeing that
these things are so, how is it possible for any one to be a
man, in all the fulness of his intellectual powers, and not
make the religious confession and take the religious attitude ?
It must be that the man who thinks seriously and feels pro-
foundly is the true, the ideal man ; and how is it possible
for a man to think seriously and feel profoundly concerning
the power and mystery of universal life, and that need men
have of one another which we call morality, without having
that sense of the former and that conviction of the latter
which, in their interplay and mutual support, make up the
fulness of religion ? Of course, it is entirely possible for a
man to live from hand to mouth, for bread alone, — the mere
material commodity, — and so long as he has a superabun-
dance of physical comforts and freedom from all pecuniary
anxiety snap his fingers at the greatness of the mystery of
his environment and the necessity for "the fellow-heirs of
this small island life to plough and sow and reap like
brothers." But to say this is very much like saying that
a man may, if he chooses, forego the privilege of his man-
hood, and be a selfish epicure or sensual brute.

" Im Ganzen, Guten, Schonen
Resolut zu leben."

Resolved to live in beauty, goodness, wholeness, — that is the
mark of our high calling, that is what it means to be a real,
true, ideal man ; and there are those who come nearer to
this mark on $300 a year than some who count their millions
by the double score.

There are those among us at the present time who would
assent to half of what I have just now affirmed, and dissent
from the other half. They would say " Yes " to the moral
part, and " No " to the universal. In English law, it has
been often said, the man and wife are one ; and that one is

io The Public Service of Religion.

the man. So here there are those who say that religion and
morality are one, and that one is morality. But no. Moral-
ity is not religion until it is thought out, felt out, lived out
in such a fashion that it is something more than " mere
morality," — the relation between man and man, — and has
become also and equally the relation between the soul and
that universal Power which,

" call it what we may,
Is yet the master-light of all our day,
Is yet the fountain-light of all our seeing."

We may live in beauty and in goodness, but we do not live
in " wholeness " until we live in this. Religion in its earliest
dawn, before it was yet moralized, was exclusively this sense
of man's relation to a Power unseen, but felt in all the
wonderful and strange appearance of the world; and to call
that religion, be it never so sublimely moral, that has nothing
of this most characteristic glow upon its face, is to use lan-
guage with disloyal freedom and abuse.

But it is loyalty to facts as well as to the sanctities of
speech that makes the religious attitude and the religious
confession an absolute necessity for every man who thinks
seriously and feels profoundly concerning the deep things of
life. Here, pressing on his mind and heart, is not only that
need men have of one another which we call morality, but
also pressing on his mind and heart are the immeasurable
power and beauty, order and bounty, of the material universe,
flowering and fruiting in the glory of the human, in golden
deeds that "pierce the night like stars, and by their mild
persistence urge men's search to vaster issues." How is it
possible for a man to be a man, and not experience in every
deeper moment, however it may be with him in the stress of
business anxiety or in pleasure's giddy whirl, that expansion
of the heart, that joyous lift, that happy confidence, that awe,
that tenderness, which, call it by whatever name you please
or by no name at all, is of the incorruptible essence of relig-
ion ? If such a thing is possible in any way, it is not in my

TJie Public Service of Religion. 1 1

imagination to conceive that it is so; and I must hold that
every man who is in truth a man is as much bound to be
religious in religion's primal sense as he is to be moral, as
he is to eat for hunger and to sleep for rest and love for
love's sweet pain.

But to assert and prove so much is far and away from
either proving or asserting that the public ministration of re-
ligion is a valid institution, deserving of the support and sym-
pathy of all people of intelligence and earnest will. Men
and women can be and do everything that makes for relig-
ion in its twofold power and grace in private isolation. In-
deed, they must often be religiously compelled to withdraw
themselves from such religious institutions as invite their
sympathy and co-operation. If a man would have any re-
ligion left, the less he has to do with some of the most popu-
lar manifestations of religion at the present time, the better.

But to vulgarize religion here does not prevent its con-
temporaneous existence there untainted and unspoiled.
Art and literature are continually vulgarized, and yet
Raphael and Shakspere sit no less securely on their thrones.
If the popular ministration of religion is not what it ought
to be, so much the more need is there that those who cher-
ish a lofty and serene ideal of what such ministration should
be should band themselves together for its public recog-
nition. If there are but two in any given community, then
those two ; if there are two score, then those two score ; if
there are two hundred, then those two hundred, and so on.
The common recognition of religion is of the very essence
of religion in its most characteristic quality. It is the sym-
bol of men's common needs and aspirations, and therefore
it demands a common recognition and a common life. The
Latin proverb, unus homo nullus homo, — one man is no
man, — has nowhere a more striking application than ex-
actly here. Morality has never been defined more aptly
than as "the art of living together." And what, then, is
more natural than that men should come together for the
contemplation of its generous ideals, and band themselves

12 The Public Service of Religion.

together for its sure defence, unless it be that with the same
heaven above them all, the same earth beneath their feet,
the same mystery enfolding them, they should come together
to lift up a common heart of wonder, reverence, awe, and
trust, and love to the Eternal Power in whom we live and
move and have our being?

For it is not, you will notice, as if the beginning and
end of the whole matter were the attainment for one's self
of the best quality of the religious life. Granted that,
with such spiritual helps as are now generally accessible in
any solitude not hopelessly remote from the express com-
pany and mail, a man might nourish in himself a spiritual
life of noble purity ; yet no man liveth to himself, and no
man dieth to himself, said the apostle, and Shakspere
echoed him across the ages, — " Spirits are not finely
touched but to fine issues."

" God wills that in a ring

His blessings should be sent
From living thing to thing,
And nowhere stayed or spent.

" And every soul that takes,
And gives not on again,
Is so a link that breaks
In heaven's love-made chain."

From first to last, in the course of my Brooklyn ministry,
a good many people have come to me with a kind of flat-
tery, my response to which has somehow disappointed them.
One and another has said : " I do not come to hear you any
more, because you have helped me to get along without
you. You have enabled me to go alone." I should not
speak of an experience so personal, were I not sure that
it is that of many other ministers in our Unitarian pul-
pits at the present time. I have but one answer to make
to all such flattering protestations : All the more reason,
then, why you should be my helper, why you should gird

The Public Service of Religion. 1 3

yourself to spread in wider circles the truth and good to
which you think you have attained. The true church no
more exists exclusively for the saving of individual souls
from spiritual penury than it exists for the saving of indi-
vidual souls or bodies from an eternal fiery hell. It is
a company of men and women less bent on the getting of
some moral and spiritual benefit for themselves than bent
on the doing of some moral and spiritual good to others.
We are proud of the motto over our church door : " The
truth shall make you free." It is a good motto. But it
needs to be supplemented with another: "To do good and
to communicate." The old motto is subject to a gross and
miserable interpretation ; namely, that, the truth once safe
in our possession, we are free to go our way in selfish
isolation. If you have a truth which stirs your mind, your
imagination, and your heart, which quickens you to brave
surrenders and to generous deeds, it is a sword upon your
shoulder knighting you to join with each and every other
who has been likewise called for the communication of that
truth to souls that hanker for they know not what, but whom
you dare believe your vision can sustain, your word can
satisfy and cheer and bless. There is no discharge in this
war. To enlist at all is to enlist for every march and every
battle till you fall, one soldier of the many who have some-
what advanced the unconquerable hope of man.

Of course there is nothing in all this to make it clear why
you, or you, or you, or anybody else, should stand by me in
my particular work, should give your time and thought and
money to the maintenance of this particular church. There
are various tendencies at work in the community. One is a
tendency to obscure and bury in emotional slush all of those
intellectual aspects of the religious situation which are so evi-
dent and so important, not only to the learned scholar, but
to every honest mind. Another is a tendency to exaggerate
these aspects, and to identify them with the substance of re-
ligion ; and hence to conclude that for this substance we
have no longer any need. Another is to privately acknowl-

14 The Public Service of Religion.

edge all that criticism and science have done to invalidate
the traditional formulas, but to go on using them as if noth-
ing had happened, — as a kind of practical humbug that we
cannot get along without, or without much inconvenience.
If these tendencies were exhaustive of the religious situation,
it would be impossible to find any work for such a church as
this of ours in the religious field. But there is another ten-
dency. It is to frankly acknowledge all that criticism and
science have done to invalidate the traditional formulas, and
at the same time to recognize that the reality, not of these
formulas, but of the essential dignity and glory of religion, is
in no wise impeached by such invalidation. And with this
tendency this little church of ours has been in line through-
out its brief and uneventful history from 185 1 till now. It
invites the sympathy and co-operation of those to whom this
tendency seems sound and sweet and good, — sounder and
sweeter and better than it could otherwise be, — because the
danger threatens more and more that the enthusiasm of
an ignorant emotionalism and the calculating selfishness of
ecclesiastical dishonesty will divide the religious world be-
tween them, and rule it according to their will. Is it not
worth while, think you, for those who are neither of this
house nor that, and who still do not believe that the reality
of religion has perished with its superstitions, to band them-
selves together here and there and everywhere for the main-
tenance of this reality ? I believe it from the bottom of my
heart. You must believe it, too, or you would not be here.
But you may very well believe at the same time that this
church is not doing what it ought to do for the great principle
it represents. There, too, we are agreed. But whose the
fault ? Not yours or mine, but yours and mine, — in what pro-
portion it would be invidious to set forth if I could. Of this,
however, I am sure : that, if we all could bring, to serve our
purpose here, the enthusiasm and devotion which some of
you have always brought, we should enjoy a far more vigor-
ous life than we do now. It is a purpose worthy of the
strongest manhood and the rarest womanhood that this town

The Public Service of Religion. 15

affords. There is no truth it does not welcome, no science
that it fears. If we could make it known to all the people
of Brooklyn as it is known to us in our most serious hours,
these narrow walls — no, nor the widest in the city — could
not contain the company that would throng to do it honor
and to sound its praise abroad.

THE BESEECHING GOD.

However it may be about our prayers to God, how is it,
do you think, about God's prayers to us ? You have not
thought, perhaps, that there are any such prayers. But
there is certainly a beautiful suggestion of them in the New
Testament phrase of the apostle, "as if God did beseech
you." This, also, is one of the phrases that the revisers
have despoiled, so that now it reads, "as though God were
entreating by us." But the old meaning is not gone ; and, if
it were, it would not make a particle of difference. Every
good thought of the old mistranslation is just as good to-day
as ever and just as much a divine revelation and a word of
God, for what makes any saying or writing a divine revela-
tion and a word of God is the beauty and the truth and the
help that there is in it. That is the most inspired which is
the most inspiring. This cannot be insisted on too often or
too earnestly, so long as the majority persist in seeking for
the signs and proofs of inspiration and revelation in some
particular place or time or personality.

As if God did beseech you ! The phrase as it occurs in
the New Testament is but a figure of speech. It says "as
if." It does not say that God does pray to us, that he does
beseech us. And yet that he does actually do so is one of
the most obvious things in the whole range of our experi-
ence. And while to many excellent people the wonder of
the centuries has been that God has not answered their
prayers, or the prayers of other people better or more relig-
ious than themselves, the real wonder all along has been
that God's prayers to men have so often met with no re-
sponse or with only the faintest and most superficial. Is it
not so ? Consider just a few of these innumerable prayers

1 8 The Beseeching God.

that like a fountain rise continually from out the world's
great heart, and then find me mistaken in this strong assur-
ance, if you can.

One of them is the habitual order of the world. Of
course, this is a circumstance which makes a different im-
pression now from what it did in the faint red and greyish
morning of the times. Who does not know Richard
Hooker's large and sumptuous affirmation of the signifi-
cance of order in the world, or, as he called it, law? "Of
law," he said, "there can be no less acknowledged than that
her seat is the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the
world. All things in heaven and earth do her homage, —
the very least as feeling her care, and the greatest as not
exempted from her power." But there was a time when
many people were extremely disinclined to this way of think-
ing about law, a time when the difficulties of science were
the consolations of faith, and the victories of science were its
despair. Every field annexed to the demesne of order was
supposed to make so much narrower the range of God's
complicity in the world of matter and of man. It must be
confessed that the scientific people were often quite as fool-
ish as the religious in this matter; for they imagined the
same foolish thing, only, where the religious were anxious
and frightened, the scientific, especially the smaller kind,
were arrogant and hilarious, and did their best to aggravate
the anxieties and fears of the religious with the assurance
that in a little time they would have a world without God.
But there could hardly be a grosser misconception than that
the order of the world, or rather the sense of this order, had
always been opposed to the feeling of God's presence in it
until very recently, when a few philosophers and poets came
to the help of an atheistical science and a trembling faith
with the assurance that more law meant more God, and that
the mysteries of law were more religious and inspiring than
the mysteries of ignorance and blind credulity had ever been.
The Old Testament abounds in praises of the orderly ar-
rangement of the world, — "The sun knoweth his going

The Beseeching God. 19

down," " Seed-time and harvest shall not fail," and so on.
And these orderly arrangements are cited as the proofs of
God's protecting care. New every morning and fresh every
evening are the pledges of his constant love.

But what did I mean by saying that law, or order, is one
of the prayers of the beseeching God ? I meant that the
order of the world has always been an invitation and an ex-
hortation to mankind to make its life an orderly and law-
abiding thing. The ordered circumstance of life has in all
ages been an answer to this glorious prayer, whose words
are constellations, galaxies, sun, moon, and stars, the faith-
ful seasons, gravitation, weight and measure, heat and cold.
It is the order of the material world that has initiated and
enforced the order of the human world. This has ticked
into time with that as one clock, in the fable, ticks into time
with another clock. Man in his orderly arrangements does
but "fetch his eyes up to God's style and manners of the
sky." The very secret and the end of life is the harmony
of organization and environment. The unhappy man, the
unsuccessful man, the wicked man, is simply a misfit, a round
peg in the square hole.

Now, when I said that the wonderful thing is not that
God does not answer our prayers, but that we do not answer
his, I did not mean that we do not answer his at all. To say
that would be a foolish or a wicked misrepresentation ; for
the answer to God's great prayer of law and order has been
only less glorious than the prayer itself. It is as glorious as
all the manifold arrangements of our human life that are
conformed to the regularities of natural law, to the seasonal
changes, to the properties of matter, magnetism, electricity,
chemical affinity, and so on. By the known properties of
steam God prays men to make their boilers thick and strong ;
by the known properties of wood and iron he prays them to
lay this way and not that their beams and rafters and the fair
courses of those gleaming stones with which they build the
habitations of their peace, the monuments and temples of
their pride. *

20 The Beseeching God.

Man, then, is not inexorable to God. He listens to that
great heart-moving prayer which is syllabled in the majestic
order of the world. Beholding as in a glass this order, he is
changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by
the Lord, the spirit. He has his choice to do this or suffer
and be broken on the wheel he will not use to turn his mill
and grind his wheat and corn. The burnt child dreads the
fire. Men are but children of a larger growth. They dread
the various things that hurt and hinder them. They cleave
to those that give them help and speed. And thus they
come to find an ordered beauty in their lives. And still the
wonder is that, where the voice of the divine beseeching is
so sweet and strong, men do not always listen to its prayer,
that they so often disobey the laws which are already known,
and are so indifferent to the discovery of those which, if dis-
covered and obeyed, would bring them an assured felicity
and an abiding peace.

Another prayer of God to men is that whose words are,
to a wide extent, the same words that resound in that great
prayer of the divine order which is continually making its
appeal to men. The words are the same ; but they are differ-
ently arranged, and so the meaning is different, — beauty, and
not order. It is observation and analysis that attune the
ear to the beseeching of the world as it is conceived by
science in the harmony of its laws and adaptations; but the
apprehension of beauty is synthetic. It is a flash, a revela-
tion. Science has beauties of its own ; but neither the tel-
escope nor the microscope has anything in its field so
beautiful as that which almost every night hangs over us,
the beauty of the heavens as it strikes the naked eye, noth-
ing so beautiful as the unanalyzed woods and waters, the
grasses and the flowers, the clouds that make the morning
and the evening fair, and sketch on the celestial blue a
beauty rarer than its own. Is it not in all these things as if
God did beseech us to co-operate with him, to resolve not
to be satisfied with mere passive appropriation of the origi-
nal beauty of the world, but go to work to make something

The Beseeching God. 21

beautiful with our own hands, with our own brains, with our
own shaping spirit of imagination ? And to this prayer of
the Eternal, as well as to the other, the answer has been
often rich and full and grand. We call this answer art, and,
like the divine commandment, it is exceedingly broad ; for it
includes painting, architecture, sculpture, poetry, and music.
There are those who imagine that some of these are super-
fluous. What painting of the artist is as beautiful as the
living, breathing beauty that we know in woods and fields,
in skies and waters, in faces fair enough " to slay all a man's
hoarded prudence at a blow"? Ah! but we want the beauty
of the woods and fields to come and stay with us. We want
to be reminded of these things when we are far away from
them here in the city's loud and stunning tide of various
care and crime, to know that they will wait for us until we
come again. And, as for the beauty of fair faces, men are
not privileged to look at more than one or two in any satis-
fying way. I know that there are portraits, too, so personal,
so intimate, that, if we look at them too long, they seem to
look at us with injured modesty and soft reproach. And,
still, there is a difference between the painted and the real
flame. Then, too, it should be said, the painter, the sculp-
tor, never dreams that he is making something better than
the living form or face. Only he wants to be a fellow-work-
man with God, to renew the ancient rapture of the Almighty
in the creative act ; and it must not be forgotten that there
are forms of art wherein there is, as it were, some elongation
of the Almighty's arm, something achieved which he cannot
achieve without the human help.

What is there in nature corresponding to the melodies and
harmonies of Mozart and Mendelssohn and Beethoven and
Wagner ? Those who are wise in such things tell us that
not even Shelley's lark or Keats's nightingale could sing one
single chord, only a succession of notes, — these certainly
of a most rare and penetrating sweetness. And this men-
tion of Shelley and Keats reminds us that the poet's art, as
well as the musician's, is a distinct addition to the range of

22 The Beseeching God.

natural beauty. Granted that not even Wordsworth could
report half the beauty of the natural world ; that no dream
of fair women Tennyson might dream could equal the reality
which daily walks abroad ; that Shakspere's men and
women have their match and shame in living Hamlets and
Othellos, Portias and Cordelias. And, still, as all our sensu-
ous perceptions of the outward universe are, as the psycholo-
gists assure us, non-resembling signs, — ■ a truth which our
own observation easily confirms, — so are the forms the
poets use to express their fancy and imagination so many
non-resembling signs ; and one, without irreverence or im-
piety, may conceive the conscious God as finding a new
pleasure in the creations of his poets, as, in a less degree, in
a fine show of rhododendrons or chrysanthemums, such as
you and I have often seen. And once they stirred my heart
in such a way that I broke out into a little sonnet-song about
them after this fashion : —

O you great beauties, who can never know
How passing fair you are to look upon !
I, 'mid your glories slowly wandering on,
And almost faint with joy that you can glow
With hues so rich and varied, row on row,
A corner in my heart for him alone
Must keep who hath in your fair petals shown
Such things to us as never had been so
But for his loving patience, sweet and long;
Ay, and no less to the clear eye of God,
Who never yet in all his endless years,
Till you out-bloomed in colors pure as song,
Had seen such fairness springing from the sod
As this which fills our eyes with happy tears.

Well, so it happens that God's prayer of beauty has not
gone unheeded altogether, — nay, but has had a large and
wide response ; and yet, when we remind ourselves what
a prayer it is, full of what strong entreaty, pulsing through
time and space for countless centuries, the answer to it has
not been — I think you will agree with me — so very gener-

The Beseeching God. 23

ous or remarkable. To go about our city streets, to look
into our Christmas windows, is to wonder whether men do
not prefer ugliness to beauty, after all. That is, the most of
them. They go on making ugly things, — ugly houses, ugly
furniture, ugly clothes, — when they might make things beau-
tiful and lovely with less trouble and expense.

But, you may say, all are not artists born, and very few
are made. As with the poet of the proverb, so with all the
rest. True, very true ; and what then ? Is there no answer
that those who are neither born artists nor made artists can
make to the beseeching beauty of the world ? Do not be-
lieve it.

" I saw the beauty of the world

Before me like a flag unfurled, —

The splendor of the morning sky

And all the stars in company.

I thought, How wonderful it is !

My soul said, There is more than this."

And there is more, — the beauty of the inner life. It is
true, as Milton said, that that also ought to be a true poem.
Yes, a true picture and a statue white and pure ; a temple,
too, broad-based upon the earth, but lifting up a spire like
Salisbury's into the heavenly blue ; a piece of music full of
wandering melodies, with a great harmony pervading all. It
is true that there are such lives, — that they outnumber far
the pictures and the poems, the symphonies and sonatas,
the statues and cathedrals. It would go hard with us if they
did not. And they are everywhere. " Even in a palace
life may be well led." Even in a palace ! It was an em-
peror who said it, and he said but what he knew. Even in
a hovel, too. Even in the most ordinary slices of our city
brick and stone, houses tipped up on end, like the micaceous
slate and other strata of our New England hills. So, then,
if we cannot make pictures and poems, why not do this
better thing which is possible for you and me ? As if God
did beseech you, shine the stars of heaven, and the earth
puts on her beauty ever fresh and new. Why make our

24 The Beseeching God.

lives a blot, a stain, a smirch, on this beseeching loveliness ?
Why not take up the song of Whittier, and sing, —

" Parcel and part of all,
I keep the festival."

And why not do more, — not merely sing as Whittier sang,
but do as Whittier did? Why not?

But time would fail me if I should endeavor to enumerate
the hundredth part of all the prayers which the beseeching
God sends up to us from out the glorious meaning and the
splendid pageant of the world. In the fore part of my ser-
mon I spoke as if the new translation of my text, " as though
God were entreating by us, " were something less suggestive
and impressive than the former rendering, " as if God did
beseech you." But now it comes to me that the new render-
ing goes back into the old, and carries it a step beyond, or,
rather, furnishes it with a new and striking illustration.
" As though God were entreating by us." That is the sig-
nificance of all the great and good who have made the
course of history beautiful and noble with their high ex-
amples and their holy trust.

" Ever their phantoms arise before us,
Our loftier brothers, but one in blood;
At bed and table they lord it o'er us
With looks of beauty and words of good."

In the traditional theology it is said that we have a medi-
ator, an intercessor, with God. That is a doctrine which
need not be examined at this present time. Meanwhile,
how many mediators, how many intercessors, God has with
us! all heavenly and mundane things, and then — immeasur-
able addition ! — all human things as well.

"God's doors are men; the Pariah hind
Admits thee to the perfect mind."

Yes, and admits the perfect mind to us. And, if the lowest,
how much more the higher and the highest in their various

The Beseeching God. 25

degrees ! This is the reason why it is so good for us to
read of saintly and heroic lives, of golden deeds, of noble
sacrifices gladly made for truth and righteousness. For if
these examples do not summon us to braver things, if the
music there is in them does not lift at our feet so that they
are weary with forbearing, and they cannot stay, but must
take the forward path, however steep and hard, then are
they verily our accusation and our shame. And here is the
inestimable advantage of such a book as the New Testa-
ment, or rather three such early pamphlets as the first three
Gospels, telling the story of the life of Jesus in such a way
that not all the integuments of the mythologists can so dis-
guise his actual proportions that we cannot see what a true
life was here, what a true poet, what a great loving heart,
what a passionate sympathy with all sorrowful and sinful
folk, what an honest hatred of self-righteousness and hypoc-
risy! It is true that the New Testament is like the sun and
air. We are so habituated to it that we take it for granted,
and we make good the wisdom of Goethe : " Words often
repeated ossify the organs of intelligence " ; for with words
often read it is the same. It was a devout Episcopalian
who told me that she had put her New Testament out of
reach for a whole year, and then came back to it with a new
sense of its importance. And I know another lady who
went the round of nearly all the great religions, dabbled in
Brahminism and Buddhism, knew all about Atma and Karma
and that sort of thing, or as much as anybody, and then
woke up one morning and discovered — the New Testament,
and found it wonderfully sweet and good.

" She had wandered on the mountains, mist bewildered ;
And, lo ! a breeze came, and the veil was lifted,
And priceless flowers, which she had trod unheeding,
Were blowing at her feet."

I have often thought how wonderful the New Testament
and the life of Jesus would appear to us if we could come
upon them in an entirely fresh and natural way. I never

26 The Be seedling God.

read my dear friend Samuel Johnson's sympathetic studies
of Brahmanism and Buddhism and so on without wishing
that he might have come to the study of Christianity just as
he came to them, not tired of hearing Aristides called the
Just, Tesus called perfect man and perfect God, but with
unbiassed mind and heart. But all this is by the way ; and
I must hasten back into the main road of my discourse.

For it is not as if God's intercessors with us, by whose lips
and lives he is forevermore beseeching us to make our lives
some better, holier thing, were all dead and buried, all men
and women of the past. They walk the earth to-day; their
tender shadows fall upon us as we, lame from our birth, lie
at the gate of the temple which is called Beautiful ; their
words encourage us ; their actions shame the dull inertia
and the sordid selfishness of our habitual lives.

" Whene'er a noble deed is wrought,
Whene'er is spoken a noble thought,
Our hearts in glad surprise
To higher levels rise."

And, if we do not content ourselves with "feeling good,"
as people say, or with feeling bad,— i.e., with the luxury of
self-accusation and contempt, as many do, — but straightway
go about to practise some obedience to the heavenly vision,
then for that time, at least, God gets an answer to his
prayer : his beseeching has not been in vain.

Consider also how the happiness of a good conscience,
the pains and penalties of an evil conscience, are, or should
be, of such potency with us that here also it is as if God did
beseech us to choose the straight and narrow and avoid the
broad and crooked way. That wickedness is the pursuit of
pleasure is a doctrine that from first to last gets much un-
favorable comment from the course of things. The wicked
people are often miserably unhappy. Perhaps the wickedest
are not. It may be with them as it was with those whom
Swedenborg saw, or imagined that he saw, in hell, — as
happy there as were the good in heaven. Not punished, there-

The Beseeching- God. 27

fore? Nay, because "they that are in sin are also in the pun-
ishment of sin." But, however it may be with the wickedest,
with those whose conscience is not dead the way of the trans-
gressor is hard. Truly, they make their bed in hell ; and,
if God is also there, it is to stir the fire. They cannot read
of any fault akin to theirs, and not flush hot with burning
shame or feel a sudden coldness at the heart. A nobility
contrasting with their shame has much the same effect.
Hardly can they take up a novel that it does not seem
written about them, or go to see a play that does not seem as
obviously prearranged to catch their conscience as Hamlet's
was to catch the conscience of the king. Then all the
powers of the imagination league and lend themselves to
make the misery more keen. The most unsuspecting visitor
is awaited as a messenger of doom ; and they are as if they
rode in spiritual nakedness, their every sin exposed, while
every key-hole had its peeping Tom, a witness of their
shame. And, then, upon the other hand there are the
visions of a pure and honest life ; and they stand abashed in
their presence, and feel "how awful goodness is, and virtue
in her shape how lovely, — see and feel their loss." To
think of these things seriously — and how can we think of
them at all, and not think of them seriously and solemnly? —
is to wonder that more people, if they are not enticed into
the right way by the beauty of holiness, are not scared from
every other by those shames, regrets, and agonies which are
the portion of the man or woman who, knowing what is best,
chooses the poorer and the worst.

Once more, God makes the voice of others' pain and
misery his voice, pleading with us to remember those whom
he seems to have forgotten. Among all the golden deeds of
history, what one do we remember with more admiration
than that of Sir Philip Sidney dying on the disastrous field
of Zutphen, and foregoing the cup of cold water because an-
other's necessity was greater than his own ? There is a battle
raging which has centuries for its hours, and races for its
regiments and battalions, whose incidents are revolutions,

28 The Beseeching God.

reformations, here the initiation of a new religion, there the
emancipation of a race. And in this battle we are soldiers
each and all ; and, if sore wounded now and then and crav-
ing a cup of water for our thirst, behold some fellow-soldier
hurt more cruelly, and, if we have the knightly temper, there
is no other thing for us to say but, " His necessity is greater
than mine," no other thing for us to do but to put the prof-
fered cup aside. But this is not the most common situation.
The most common situation is that some have all they need
of water, wine, and every sweet and precious thing, and some
have none of all these things ; and the necessity of these is
not to those as it should be, — as if God did beseech them
out of their abundance and excess to give the fainting
brother, be he friend or foe, that which shall stanch his
wound, and, if it cannot save his life, so touch his death with
human pity that he may say as one did say in a soldier's
hospital at Washington, as he felt the strong embracing of
the nurse's arms about him, " Underneath me are the ever-
lasting arms."

As if God did beseech you ! O friends, it is not as if his
prayer to us were this or that. It is the boundless whole.
It is all worlds and times, all men and things, all literature
and history, all art and song, all exaltations of triumphant
love, all agonies of shame and sin, all blessed memories of
those who have expected us to be good and true, all ten-
der hopes of some day meeting them again and being with
them where they are. "As if God were entreating you
by us." To-day, if you have heard his voice, harden not
your hearts.

CHRISTIAN UNITY.

There has been a great deal of talk of late concerning
Christian unit)- ; and various conferences and churches have
proposed bases of belief and form on which, it seemed to
them, all Christians might unite in cordial fellowship. The
Roman bishop whom we call the Pope, — an ugly transfor-
mation,— the Italians, very prettily, Papa, and the French
Le Pope, has earnestly expressed a wish that there should
be one fold and one shepherd, — his Church the fold, and he
the shepherd, — and, encouraged by the remarkable approxi-
mations which the English Church has made to the Roman
in matters of doctrine and ritual, has invited it most cor-
dially to reunite itself with the Church from which it schis-
matically separated three centuries ago. Not to be outdone
in courtesy, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Primate of
the English Church, answers the papal letter, and invites the
Roman Church to join the Anglican, that there may be one
fold and one shepherd, — the fold his Church, and he the
shepherd. Then, too, there have been certain Grindelwald
conferences arranging terms of mutual concession ; and the
Congregationalists at their convention took a similar course.
But the scheme of unity which has been most talked about
is the famous " Lambeth Quadrilateral," by which is meant
the proposals for unity issued by the conference which met
at Lambeth, the palace of the English Primate, in 1888. It
was a conference attended by the bishops of the whole An-
glican communion, and the four propositions were : —

A. The Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments,
as containing all things necessary to salvation, and as being
the rule and ultimate standard of faith.

B. The Apostles' Creed as the baptismal symbol, and the

30 Christian Unity.

Nicene Creed as being the rule and ultimate standard of
faith.

C. The two sacraments ordained by Christ himself, bap-
tism and the Supper of the Lord, ministered with unfailing
use of Christ's words of institution and of the elements or-
dained by him.

D. The historical episcopate locally adapted in the
methods of its administration to the varying needs of the
nations and peoples called of God into the unity of his
church.

The term " Quadrilateral," as applied to these four propo-
sitions, is, I suppose, of military origin. In military parlance
it means four mutually supporting fortresses. Now, fort-
resses are intended to keep other people out rather than to
draw them in. And this Lambeth Quadrilateral seems to
make good this military origin of its name in several par-
ticulars. It seems well adapted to keeping people out, — all
those who do not believe that the Bible contains everything
necessary to salvation, or that it is the ultimate standard
of faith ; all those who do not believe that the Nicene Creed
is a sufficient statement of Christian faith, seeing that it is
all theology without a syllable of ethics ; all those who find
nowhere in the New Testament any reason to believe that
Jesus instituted either baptism or the Lord's Supper ; all
those who, on the one hand, question whether the Episcopal
is the best form of church government, and all those, on the
other hand, who want something more than an historical
episcopate, even an apostolical, basing its magical efficiency
on a direct descent of episcopal ordination from the twelve
apostles. The Lambeth proposals were substantially the
same as four propositions issued by the American House
of Bishops in 1886. But at the last Episcopal Convention
these same propositions were voted down by a large ma-
jority, and the cry was, " The Prayer Book from cover to
cover the only door by which the heathen can come into our
inheritance " ; and, as the Thirty-nine Articles have not yet
been "bound on the outside," as Dr. McConnell prophesies

Christian Unity. 3 1

they will be soon, the cause of Christian unity, so far as the
Episcopalians — its leading advocates heretofore — are con-
cerned, seems to have had a violent set-back.

None of the schemes that I have indicated have made
any overtures to people of your faith and mine. The Pope
is ready to receive us, if we will acknowledge his supremacy
and infallibility and all that follows in their train ; the
Congregationalists are willing to receive us back, if we will
assent to theological propositions which hundreds of their
own clergy cannot accept in any simple and straightforward
manner; the Lambeth Quadrilateral encouraged our sur-
render with four propositions, no one of which we could
accept without extensive qualifications, if at all ; while the
new basis of union offered by the Episcopalians, " the
Prayer Book from cover to cover," invites us as the oppos-
ing guns at Balaklava invited the six hundred to their
doom.

But, if we cannot accept any of the proffered hospitalities
of the older churches, may they not possibly accept ours ?
They are very simple even in comparison with the simplic-
ity of the Lambeth Quadrilateral : " These churches accept
the religion of Jesus as love to God and man ; and we cor-
dially invite to our working fellowship any who, while differ-
ing from us in belief, are in general sympathy with our spirit
and our practical aims." This is our basis of unity. It is
not a quadrilateral. It is a circle whose centre is every-
where, whose circumference nowhere ; whose centre is
everywhere where there is honest thought and purpose,
whose circumference is exclusive of no honest thought or
doubt. It has worked well among ourselves. It was
adopted at our Saratoga Conference in 1894 with tumult of
acclaim, with trembling hearts and streaming eyes, when
some that had for long years been of us, but not with us, or
with us under protest without equal rights, found themselves
reinstated in our fellowship as securely as they had always
been established in our heart of hearts. And, not to be
outdone by the Pope or the Archbishop of Canterbury or

32 Christian Unity.

the Congregationalist Convention or the Lambeth Confer-
ence, some of our good people at Washington offered a
resolution which, after some amendments in committee, was
passed by a unanimous vote. It was : " Resolved, That the
National Council give the basis of our Conference the widest
possible publication, as a sufficient basis not only for 'Chris-
tian unity,' but for the religious unity of the world."

But, should this publication be never so wide, I, for one,
should not expect to find our little kingdom suffering vio-
lence and the violent taking it by force in their sharp haste
to unite with a communion so simple in its terms of union
and so inclusive in its spirit. Its terms are too simple
for the great majority of Christian folk. Its spirit is too
inclusive. There never was an honored legend which said
less, except for its last phrase, than that which runs, "In
things necessary, unity ; in things not necessary, liberty ; in
all things, charity." The trouble is that we are not agreed
as to what things are necessary and what things are indif-
ferent. The Roman Catholics think that their infallible
Church and Pope are necessary ; and, consequently, if our
National Council should send our Resolution to the Vati-
can, it would get no favorable answer. It would probably
get none at all. Nor would the Archbishop of Canterbury
be a whit more appreciative of our extended hospitality than
the Pope ; while, of course, our " love to God and love to
man " can have no attractions for those whose ideal basis
of unity is " the Prayer Book from cover to cover," and as
little for the Congregationalists, whose basis of union. is sub-
stantially the creed which was exhumed a few years ago in
the old burying-ground at Plymouth, and is called " The
Burial Hill Confession." And yet I trust that there are
wandering sheep who do not love any of the folds ecclesi-
astical that I have named, nor the Methodist fold any better,
nor the Baptist, nor the Presbyterian, but who will be at-
tracted to our simpler keeping and our wider range, to
whom love to God and love to man are a sufficient bond, or
who, unable to say even " God " aloud, yet find themselves

Christian Unity. 33

drawn to men who can, or by our open-mindedness and our
evident desire to make life better worth the living for as
many as we can help and cheer.

Hence you will see that the horoscope which I have cast
for Christian unity is not so favorable as to commend itself
to those who are particularly interested in this line of
thought and work. And yet I would not be inappreciative
of the good that is involved in it, while I cannot but be-
lieve that many of those who imagine themselves aspiring to
Christian unity in a broad and generous way do wofully
deceive themselves. Their aspiration for religious unity is
at the bottom only an aspiration for the extended power and
greater glory of their particular church. They are like po-
litical partisans who are ready and enthusiastic for a union
ticket, a citizens' ticket, a non-partisan municipal ticket, if
their party may be allowed to name the candidates and to
scoop the spoils. "We Episcopalians," said Dr. Greer, of
St. Bartholomew's, New York, at a meeting of some Baptist
union, — " we Episcopalians have had a good deal to say
lately about Christian unity ; but, if you look at us real hard,
you will find out that our unity means that we want you all
to believe as we do." But sometimes it means worse than
that, which wouldn't be so bad ; for, if men believe a thing,
and find it good in the believing, comforting them in their
sorrows, strengthening them in their temptations, shaming
them in their sins, there is nothing shameful in their wish-
ing all men to believe as they do, however foolish it may be
for them to expect it. But sometimes this aspiration for
Christian unity only means that we want other men to come
and swell our crowd, whether they believe as we do or not.
In the amenities of churchmanship during the last quarter-
century there has been quite as much covetousness of wealth
and numbers as indifference to theological dogmas or relig-
ious liberality.

And then, too, is it not quite within the bounds of possi-
bility that in ecclesiastical matters, as in political, "har-
mony " may be overdone ? Harmony is a good thing, but

34 Christian Unity.

we can pay too dear for it. We may give up to party what
was meant for mankind. It was certainly an interesting
fact that the Lambeth Conference was willing to make its
basis of unity so broad, as it was a painful one that the late
Episcopal Convention narrowed it to " the Prayer Book from
cover to cover." But, if men believe that " the Prayer Book
from cover to cover " is the best possible basis of union,
they are more to be commended if they stand resolutely
by it than if, so believing, they surrender their belief for an
ecclesiastical advantage. There are bishops, Anglican and
American, who do not believe in the episcopate as some-
thing historical and traditional, but as something apostolical
and magical ; and such would not have proved themselves
better men by acceding to the Lambeth statement than by
opposing it. There are others to whom baptism and the
Lord's Supper mean appalling mysteries ; and it would be
simply wicked for them to accede to the free and easy state-
ment of the Quadrilateral. Such overtures as those of the
Quadrilateral could only tend to alienate such men as these
I have described, to drive them into the Roman Church.
Are we quite sure that the loss for Christian unity upon
this side would be made up by the gains of a few Presbyte-
rians and Congregationalists upon the other ? for this is the
utmost the overtures of the Quadrilateral were likely to
affect. To imagine that any Congregationalist Convention
or any Presbyterian Assembly could hand over the Congre-
gationalists or Presbyterians bodily to the Episcopalians is
to imagine foolishly. They might make the formal contract,
but they could not deliver the goods.

There is this also to be said : that, for the soundness and
efficiency of intellectual life and moral purpose in the Chris-
tian world, it would not be a good thing for all the churches
to come together on a basis of Christian unity, exclusive of
all differences. Christendom is better as it is, with the in-
finite variety and richness of its creeds and forms, than it
would be with a creed so short and simple as that of our
National Conference, — "love to God and love to man."

Christian I Tn it) •. 35

The other churches will either make no answer to our invi-
tation or they will say : We believe that, but also something
more. And, though the something more is not so grand and
high as " love to God and love to man," it is something
worth standing for and living by ; and we are not willing to
give it up or to relegate it to any dust-hole for old lumber,
any limbo of dead-and-alive beliefs and forms. Nor do I
see how any Unitarian can repress a sympathetic motion of
his heart when such an answer is borne back to us upon the
eastern or the western wind. Take our own case. I thank
Heaven that we can show better cause for our existence
than the "glittering generality" or "blazing ubiquity" of
our Conference preamble, whichever it may be. I grant
you that that is the white light of heaven. But, as I prefer
to have that light in nature broken into colors of transcend-
ent beauty by the huge prisms of the earth and sky, so I
prefer to have that light as it shines in our Conference
preamble broken up into the transcendent beauty of our
thoughts of God and man, and life and death, and truth and
duty. Our Western brothers found the better way. They
made their welcome broad enough for all, and then they
made a frank and noble statement of "things commonly
believed among us." That is the kind of statement we
should make. But it is of less importance that we make it
in the contracted space of one or two pages published for-
mally than that we make it with the generous amplification
of our habitual speech and publication. So made, it may
not only attract, but repel ; but we shall at least say some-
thing that is not being said all the world over, and those
that come to us will be our own.

But we should make a great mistake if we imagined that
uniformity or similarity of belief is the only or the most
efficient bond which can hold men together. Let commu-
nism have its way ; let all the material possessions of man-
kind be divided among our fourteen hundred millions, share
and share alike, and how long would it be before some
would have twice, thrice, ten times, a hundred times, as

2)6 Christian Unity.

much as others ? Not very long. And let all the believers
of the earth establish a church of universal unity on the
basis of that minimum of belief they hold in common, and
how long do you imagine it would be before the indefinite
homogeneity began to differentiate into a definite heteroge-
neity of contrasting and opposing sects ? Not very long.
But what would tend to such a process quite as much as
the inability of men to think alike — so long as they haven't
all one brain and mind — would be the loyalty to things tra-
ditionally precious. Let us take a concrete illustration that
is close at hand. It is a fact beyond impeachment that the
modern Unitarian and the modern Jew, or even the most
orthodox, are much nearer together in their thought of
Jesus and their religious thought in general than the mod-
ern Unitarian and the Christian orthodox. And, if Jesus
could come back, as many have been imagining of late,
while he might feel tolerably at home in a Jewish syna-
gogue, he would be utterly dumfounded in an orthodox
Christian church. What a lot of notions of which he had
never thought or dreamed ! What a jangle of words this
Nicene Creed, without a syllable of mercy or justice or any
of the weightier matters of religion ! But this is by the way.
What I am driving at is this : that, because of this commu-
nity of thought between the Unitarian and the Jew, it does
not follow that they should or that they can immediately
coalesce into one homogeneous religious body, as here and
there they are advised to do by well-meaning persons. And
why? Because our Unitarian tradition is not the Jewish
tradition, and traditions furnish many points of coalescence
and coherence where beliefs furnish few or none. " We do
not bear the root," said the apostle, " but the root us."
And our root is a Christian root. Therefore, we must
" abide in the vine." And the Jew must do the same. This
matter has been brought very close to me during the last
few weeks by a remarkable little book written by a sister of
that Emma Lazarus who sang the songs of her people, good
as the " Marseillaise," with such a splendid vehemence that

Christian Unity. 37

her heart broke in the singing, and she died. But this
book by the sister is an impassioned summons to the Jew to
merge himself in Christianity. Do you know that, as I read,
I found myself reading as a Jew, and well-nigh the words
of scornful reprobation and rejection burst from my lips :
"No, no, and no a thousand times! By all the disabilities
of my people in the past, by all the insults and injuries they
have suffered and are suffering still, by their persecutions
and expatriations, by the Ghetto's sordid hell, this people
shall be my people, and their God my God. If Jesus, who
was a Jewish prophet, has any higher word for me than Jere-
miah or Isaiah, that will I take to heart; but it shall be as
a Jew I hear, even as a Jew he speaks. A race we are not,
as your anti-Semites fancy when they would excuse their
wickedness; but we are a people naturally selected by two
thousand years of struggle for existence, by ignominy and
shame and wrath and bitterness, and a people we will re-
main,— if less miserably isolated than we have been, so
much the better, but loyal to our tradition of unspeakable
suffering and misery unto the bitter end, if bitter it must be."

So said the Jew in me in answer to the summons to her
people to surrender, or to unite with Christianity, which
sounds unmistakably in Josephine Lazarus's little book.
And I am sure that what I said was said in order that the
thoughts of many hearts might be revealed. Just after
reading the book, I expected to meet my dear friend Rabbi
Gottheil, and I was greatly disappointed in not doing so; for
I meant to speak with him about the book, and I had lively
expectations of the splendid outburst of indignant scorn
with which he would repudiate its meaning and intent.

Well, if the Baptist and the Methodist, the Presbyterian
and the Episcopalian, the Universalist, the Unitarian, and
the Orthodox Congregationalist have no such tradition as
the Jew inviting them to loyalty, each has its own tradition,
abounding in great names and high examples, in stirring his-
tories of things bravely done and borne ; and it is more power-
ful to maintain their several autonomies than any minimum

38 Christian Unity.

of common religious thought and feeling is or should be to
compel the merging of their several autonomies in a com-
mon fellowship, — " thanks to the human heart, by which we
live " far more than by any theological belief.

And yet, and yet, we must not be too easily discouraged
in this matter of our vision of religious unity, which, if it
means for some only more names upon their lists, for many
others means something very grand and beautiful, something
so grand and beautiful that the vision ought to be a prophecy
and pledge of its embodiment soon or late in a divine reality
in which many thousands will rejoice. The wind bloweth
where it listeth, and you cannot tell whence it cometh or
whither it goeth. " Even so the kingdom of heaven," Jesus
said, "cometh not with observation." And with that king-
dom of heaven, which is named Christian unity by some,
and religious unity by others, it is much the same. It does
not come by ecclesiastical management, by Grindelwald con-
ferences, and Lambeth quadrilaterals, and such things. It
comes by steadily increasing mutual understanding and re-
ligious sympathy, by admiration of the men who, in this or
that body, transcend its limitations, and are acknowledged
all around as worthy of all love and praise. It comes by
the steadily increasing interchange of personal amenities.
The ocean steamer and the summer resort are doing more
to develop a very real religious unity than all the ecclesias-
tical conferences and politicians. The Unitarian meets the
Presbyterian on the polished deck or broad piazza, and finds
there is no smell of sulphur in her garments. The Presby-
terian discovers that the Unitarian has neither horns nor
hoofs. How many thousands, reading the sermons of Phil-
lips Brooks, have felt their hearts leap up as much in answer
to his word as if he had been of their own Sect ! We have
a nice bit of religious unity, too inclusive to be merely Chris-
tian, at our ministers' meetings in New York. There are
about as many Universalists as Unitarians, and our unity
would not be more complete if the Universalists should call
themselves Unitarians or vice versa. And there comes Rabbi

Christian Unity. 39.

Gottheil ; and no one is more welcome, though he comes
frankly as a Jew, and says many things which we do not be-
lieve. If he doesn't believe that Paul wrote the Love Chap-
ter in Corinthians, he believes it is the greatest chapter in
the world ; and we are quite content with that. But this sort
of thing is not the exclusive privilege of our little coterie.
There is something like it in hundreds and thousands of
cities, towns, and villages in the United States. Everywhere
the ancient barriers are broken down. My Roman Catholic
friend, whom I have never seen, writes to me every week,
and sometimes oftener. He, a priest, calls me his godfather
in his affectionate letters ; and we have much religious agree-
ment, as when he sends me one of his little poems, like the
following, called "The Cowslip," to which my heart re-
sponds : —

" It brings my mother back to me,
Thy frail familiar form to see,

Which was her homely joy.
And strange that one so weak as thou
Should'st lift the veil that sunders now
The mother and the boy ! "

Innumerable the friendships and the courtesies that unite
in one humanity the members of the most widely separated
sects. In the smaller places the cordial interchange of sym-
pathies increases at a more rapid pace than in the cities,
where the question, " Who is my neighbor ? " is one that
thousands cannot answer right. In the smaller places min-
isters of the different churches, whose pulpits fifty years ago
would have shrivelled like a snake-skin and cast out a
preacher not accredited as Baptist or Methodist, and so on,
as the case might be, now make exchanges without even
causing popular surprise, and their people, who fifty years
ago were segregated from each other in gloomy and sus-
picious isolation, now have to stop and think whether so and
so is true blue or not ; or, if they know, they hardly care.
And then there is the unifying element of scientific thought.
It is not here or there, but everywhere, — an atmosphere which

40 Christian Unity.

people must breathe if they breathe at all. And to breathe
it is to acquire a certain movement of the blood and brain,
which makes all who feel it of one mind and heart to a very
great extent. I am sure that we are tending to a more inclu-
sive unity of intellectual perception and belief, and I expect
the time will come when there will be a wonderful agreement
among all the churches as to all the important things ; but,
when it comes, I hope and trust that we shall not have one
all-including Church, but pretty much the churches that we
have now, each loyal to its own traditions of nobility and
saintliness, devotion to principle, enthusiasm for truth and
righteousness, but willing and glad to have its priests
and prophets free to come and go, hearing in their own
tongue in which they were born the speech of many lands.
Even now, of such Christian and religious unity we have no
mean development. It has grown fast of late, and it will
grow and grow until its tide of generous sympathies shall
catch up and sweep along the most unwilling minds and the
most selfish hearts.

There are great unifying forces working in our time.
Science is one, and literature is another. When a hundred
thousand people read the same great book with glowing
heart, they are worshipping together quite as beautifully,
their religious unity is quite as perfect, as if they should all
come together, and recite the Apostles' or the Nicene Creed
in unison. And literature, for all its aberrations, is making
for the one thing that was more characteristic of Jesus than
any other, — sympathy with human misery, a passionate de-
sire to lift up the hands that hang clown and confirm the
feeble knees. It is making equally for intellectual sincerity
and for the subordination of the letter which killeth to the
spirit that maketh alive. Another unifying force is common
work. "The communion of saints!" Did it ever occur to
you that the meaning of "communion," the root signification
of the word, is "common work" ? And such communion is
one of the most unifying things under the big sky. The
Abolitionists never called themselves " the Anti-slavery

Christian Unity. 41

Church." But what a true Church of God they were! — as-
similating to themselves their own from all the churches, and
welding them into a unit}' compact as the primeval granite
against the onset of the slave power, North and South. Our
partisan politics are divisive in these days. Like Martin
Luther for his theses, here we stand for protection or com-
mercial freedom ; and, so help us God, we can no otherwise.
And we are no worse for that so long as we allow to every
man the right to think as he must think, which we claim for
ourselves. And, so far as I can make out, there are just as
good men and just as intelligent and thoughtful men for
free silver or bimetallism as for the one metal, and that
gold.* But there are other things concerning which all
honest, earnest, and right-minded men must think alike, —
the reform of our municipal administration, the purging of
our civil service, municipal, state, and national, from those
elements of personal and party greed which demoralize it
and disgrace it, and make it a by-word and a hissing among
men. Here are two kinds of work, closely allied no doubt,
in which good men of every church and sect can join with
mutual sympathy and trust, and the Romanist cannot say to
the Protestant, " I have no need of thee," nor the Unitarian
to the Presbyterian, " I have no need of thee " ; for they all
need each other, and the good causes need them all for their
prosperity. There are other causes that I have not named
in which also good men of every communion and opinion
can unite, the promotion of temperance, and the organization
of charity, so that it shall not pauperize three or four for
every one it helps. But I am keeping you too long. I trust
that I have said enough to make it plain that, if there is
much in the planning and scheming for Christian unity that
does not appeal to us as sound and good, and that is sure to
come to nothing, there are within our reach the possibilities
of a Christian and religious unity that is very real and true,
and large and fair, and excellent and grand. Nay, more: it
is not wholly in the future tense. Its kingdom is at hand.

* But not so many of them, I sincerely hope and believe.

42 Christian Unity.

The forces of civilization and sympathy, of literature and
science, of common social work for generous and lofty ends,
have already built it up into a form and comeliness which
are not by any means to be despised, —

"A temple neither pagod, mosque, nor church,
But loftier, simpler, always open-doored
To every breath from heaven ; and Truth and Peace
And Love and Justice come and dwell therein."

And why not we with them ?

PEACE AND WAR.

Peace on earth, good will to men ! How can we but be
glad that such a sentiment, worthy of being sung by angel
choirs, was rescued from oblivion and set in the forefront of
the gospel history ! A sentiment so pure and high might
well be the salvation of any legend in which it is imbedded.
And who shall say that it has not been the sentiment that
has preserved the legend rather than the legend that has
preserved the sentiment ? But, whether it has been so or not,
the sentiment has been preserved ; and, though it did not
prove prophetic of any sudden change in the habits of com-
munities or individuals, and though not even yet does the
world's international life embody its ideal force and beauty,
I dare believe that by the music of this angel song the hearts
of men have been allured to gentler ways than they would
else have known, that there would have been still less peace
on the earth, and still less good will to men, if the Christian
world for nineteen centuries had not been confronted and re-
buked by this ideal, however unattained as yet, however un-
attainable for centuries to come.

Peace on the earth ! Does it look much like it in the news-
papers, magazines, and official papers of the day, in the war
budgets of the different nations? Does it look much like it
in Armenia, where the antipathies of race and of religion
have engendered feuds of an infernal bitterness and barbar-
ity, whose daily incidents are as indiscriminate slaughters as
have ever marked man's inhumanity to man ? Does it look
much like it when all the European powers are menacing the
Turk, and could, if they would, compose " the sick man " to an
everlasting sleep by a mere fiat of their collective will, but,
should they do it, would probably proceed at once to tear

44 Peace and War.

each other in pieces over his emaciated corpse ? Does it
look like it in France, with one laughing eye on her new-
stolen Madagascar, and the other, ever sleepless, on her
German frontier, biding her time to stab her hated conqueror
in the back or fling her gauntlet in his face? Does it look
like it in the Far East, where the collapse of China in her
conflict with Japan has made a carcass of her for the vulture
eyes of Russia and the other powers? Does it look like it
in Germany, where the young emperor, a miserable anachro-
nism, a feudal overlord in modern clothes, is always clamoring
for more money, for more soldiers, when already his gigantic
military system is an intolerable vampire, sucking away the
strength of Germany's young manhood, the vitals of her in-
dustrial prosperity ? Does it look much like it in England,
doubling her naval armament and the appropriations for her
army in a hardly less degree ? Does it look much like it in
America, where the voice of an irresponsible and reckless
press is still for war, with whom or for what it matters pre-
cious little, so that there be war, where legislators who do not
deliberate are industriously occupied in promoting inter-
national feuds, where the Congressional chaplain, with a
sharp eye to windward where consulships and such things
await a change of administration, in the name of one who
has been called the Prince of Peace, prays thus with the war-
dogs : " May we be quick to resent anything like an insult
to our nation ! ... So may thy kingdom come, and thy will be
done on earth as it is in heaven." Peace on earth ! Does
it look much like it when the President of the United States
sends to our Congress a message which contemplates the
awful possibility of war between the United States and Great
Britain, and representatives and senators tread upon each
other in their wild haste to stampede the House and Senate
and the country into a rush of blind and stupid acquies-
cence ?

Fifty years ago the peace societies were flourishing.
They do not flourish now. Then Charles Sumner gave the
great oration of his manly youth, "The True Grandeur of

Peace and War. 45

Nations" ; and many there were who believed on him, though
the great, thieving expedition into Mexico was already well
begun. Would as many now believe on a young man
of whatever splendid parts, whatever wonderful nobility of
face and form, whatever voice of deep-toned melody, who
should come believing such things as Charles Sumner be-
lieved in 1845, and saying such things as he said? I doubt
it very much. I am not sure that good men should desire
to have it so. "In our age," he said, "there can be no
peace that is not honorable, there can be no war that is not
dishonorable." Could he himself say this in 1861, when the
war for union and emancipation had actually begun ? Lowell
had been with him in 1845 5 but in 1861 he recognized that
"the sheathed blade may rust with darker sin," and sang, —

" God give us peace, not such as lulls to sleep,
But sword on thigh and brow with purpose knit ;
And let our ship of state to anchor sweep,
Her ports all up, her battle-lanterns lit,
And her leashed thunders gathering for their leap."

Without shedding of blood, there was no remission. Peace-
able emancipation would not have cost one-third as much,
to say nothing of the loss of life and joy and the long entail
of social misery and crime. But peaceable emancipation
was impossible. The South did not wish to sell her "divine
institution " for mere sordid gold. And so there had to be
another war; and there may have to be another yet, — ay,
many more down the dark future.

But meantime it is unquestionable that to be "first in
peace " is unsatisfactory to a great many people at the
present time. I am speaking now without any reference
to immediate events. Various factors have contributed to
this state of mind. For one thing, a good many have
stopped short in the first pages of the history of social
evolution ; and, because war was formerly a divinity that
rough-hewed the ends of social justice, they assume that
it must be looked to for the shaping of them to the finest

46 Peace and War.

issues of the present and all coming time. Such would do
well to notice that Spencer, the first of evolutionists, is the
most inflexible antagonist of the military spirit now alive.
Another factor, and a far more general one, in our fighting
temper is the increase of our national strength, and with it
the increased consciousness thereof. Here, too, men learn
by halves, remembering that it is excellent to have a giant's
strength, but tyrannous to use it like a giant. Another
factor in this temper is the hope of gain which feeds upon
the recollection of the splendid fortunes that were made by
the army contractors of the war, the nation's torn and bloody
plumage but an opportunity to feather their own nests.
But the principal factor in our altered temper is the ideal-
ization of war in the abstract in the light of our own great
contest and our own glorious victory. If you want to see
the ruddiest flower of this idealization that has bloomed
upon our soil, you must get a late number of the Harvard
Graduates1 Magazine, and read Judge Oliver Wendell
Holmes's Harvard Memorial address upon "The Soldier's
Faith."* It is, as he interprets it, faith in the divine beauty
and eternal necessity of war. " Some teacher of the kind,"
he says, "we all need. In this snug, over-safe corner of the
world we need it, that we may realize that our dull routine
is no eternal necessity of things, but merely a little space of
calm in the midst of the tempestuous, untamed streaming of
the world, and in order that we may be ready for danger."
To have shared "the incommunicable experience of war" is,
he tells us, "to have felt, to still feel, the passion of life to
its top." Given that, and the soldier is content, — content
even to be forgotten in his grave.

•' And, when the wind in the tree-tops roared,
The soldier asked from the deep, dark grave,
' Did the banner flutter then?'
' N'ut so, my hero,' the wind replied :
' The fight is done, but the banner won.
Thy comrades of old have borne it hence, —

• \ personal letter from Judge Holmes regrets the coincidence of its publication with
the present hue and cry.

Peace and War. 47

Have borne it in triumph hence.'
Then the soldier spoke from the deep, dark grave,
' I am content.' "

"Then he heareth the lovers laughing pass;
And the soldier asks once more,
' Are these not the voices of them that love, —
That love, — and remember me ? '
' Not so, my hero,' the lovers say :
' We are those that remember not ;
For the spring has come, and the earth has smiled,
And the dead must be forgot.'
Then the soldier spoke from the deep, dark grave,
' I am content.' "

Thank God, our soldiers are not forgotten, and are in no
danger of being forgotten, even if they were content to have
it so, counting themselves of all men the most fortunate to
have died for their country in her hour of sorest need !

It may be that such a passionate idealization of war as
that of Judge Holmes is necessary for the instruction of
those people who can see only one side of war, — the awful
sacrifice of life. No, that is not the word for it : the sacri-
fice, the voluntary sacrifice, is just exactly what they do not
see. They see men killing one another. They do not see
the being killed, the gladly being killed, in some great cause.
But those are few who have this optical defect. With most
people it is just the other way. What makes the literature
of war so fascinating to us all is the splendid courage it
displays. I almost broke my heart the other day reading
a story in which there was a dead soldier lying across the
breast of his companion as tragically as Cordelia on the
breast of Lear. It was a story of the Franco-Prussian war,
and that was one of the most wicked wars that ever choked
the course of history with its stream of blood. And the
young man had no business to be there, for he was neither
French or German; but that didn't make his courage any
less. That courage fascinates us all. It is that which draws
the boy to his Henty book, the grown man to his " Napier "
or "Grant." Sometimes, I am bound to say, the killing part

48 Peace and War.

is at the fore. It was often so with Robert Louis Stevenson,
his reeking shambles burying his native genius out of sight.
But, in general, the terrible beauty of war in literature and
in the popular imagination is in the "good courages" which
it involves. These bulk the vision of the ardent youth or
man. They see this side intensely, and they see no other.

And be it far from me to dim by one mis-spoken word
the shining of this splendor in your hearts. But let us look
at it as eagles at the sun ; and is there anything in the
history of our own memorable conflict and its subsequent
results that should make war as such seem any more de-
sirable to us, any less to be avoided, shunned, and hated
than if there had been no Grant or Sherman, no Gettysburg
or Shiloh?

We must not forget the splendid courage nor the willing
sacrifice. No, we must not. But, then, no more should we
forget the horrible details of slaughter, wounds, and death,
the shattered limbs, the lacerated flesh, the hospital's slow,
weary, wasting agony, and homesick tears in the long
watches of the nights that would not tell, the broken lives,
the broken hearts and homes. And there are other things
which we must not forget. You know, perhaps, the German
proverb that every war leaves behind it an army of heroes,
an army of cripples, and an army of thieves ; and we have
had them all. Alas! how many of the heroes under ground,
how many of the cripples wishing they had shared their
fate ! Can we deny the thieves ? Is that too harsh a name
for the great swarm of human vultures who fattened on our
vitals, when we were bound, Prometheus-like, upon our frosty
Caucasus ? for those who, when the war was over, must
find new fields for the rapacity which its sordid opportuni-
ties had nourished, forever crying, like the daughters of the
vampire, "Give, give!" coming down on the administration
of Grant, — too generous and unsuspicious for his place, —
and capturing it by a more subtle strategy than he had en-
countered on the embattled field ? Another obvious legacy
of the conflict was the inflation of all business methods, all

Peace and War. 49

standards of prosperity. The modest gains of former times
no longer satisfied. Luxury was henceforth the habit of the
rich, lavish expenditure the habit of the poor. And then a
great war costs so much money, and the expense goes on
long after the time when the war-drums throb no longer and
the battle flags are furled. Ours costs us every year of
late some two hundred and fifty million dollars. The most
of it is, no doubt, well spent ; but what a drain upon our
industrial energies, what a bias on our questions of revenue
and taxation ! No reasons here for not going to war again
to-morrow, if that is the right thing for us to do, but reasons
manifold and impressive why we should not go to war if
we can abstain from it with honor, why we should not think
war a good thing in itself one whit more than we did forty
years ago. The vast demoralization of our currency, which
to-day hampers our business prosperity, is nothing but one
hateful legacy which has come down to us from the artifices
to which we were compelled to resort under the stress of war
to meet the swelling flood of national liability. These are
not merely economical considerations, and, as such, too triv-
ial or sordid to be considered for a moment, when a great
crisis thunders at our doors. They are intensely moral.
They enter into the every-day morality of every citizen of
the United States. They are not beneath contempt, nor
even beneath the serious consideration of any man or woman
who is trying to think what is true and right and best about
the business which is now uppermost in all our thoughts.
They prove, I think, that, in despite of our inexpugnable con-
sciousness of the necessity and righteousness and crowning
good of our great civil conflict, so far is that experience from
making war as such any more beautiful or desirable than it
did before, it makes it more hateful than ever, more than
ever something to be avoided, if it can be avoided, as the
very gate of hell.

What President Cleveland said is true, " There is no
calamity which a great nation can invite which equals that
which follows a supine submission to wrong and injustice,

50

Peace and War.

and the consequent loss of national self-respect and honor,
beneath which are shielded and defended a people's safety
and greatness." But between "supine submission" and
war's dread alternative there be many stations at which,
without the slightest loss of self-respect and honor, we may
arrest our steps. Nor can I doubt, I must not, will not
doubt, that we shall pause at one of these. If we do not,
whichever party to the strife is most to blame, the event will
be such a disgrace to the civilization of our century as it has
not heretofore sustained ; and woe be to that nation at
whose door shall lie the folly and the sin of plunging Eng-
land and America into fratricidal war !

In certain press despatches printed on Friday last, and
which in almost every paragraph ran blood, like Caesar at
the base of Pompey's statue, it was not without a pleasant
shock of difference and surprise that I came upon the fol-
lowing words : " Men who have seen war, and remember
some of the miseries and the train of expenses and excesses
following war-conditions, deplore the fighting talk, and
counsel the wise discretion that will enable us to avoid a con-
flict." Does that sound to any of you very un-American,
very unpatriotic? It sounds to me as sweet and good as if
Washington were speaking, or Lincoln or John Bright or
Richard Cobden or Tom Hughes, all equal friends and lovers
of America. It indicates, I think, the position which we all
should take and hold, until to hold it longer is impossible.
The general and quite satisfactory assumption is that war is
sure to come. Such an assumption is all the easier now be-
cause it has been the assumption all along of a great multitude
of noisy ranters, whenever there has been a difference with
England or Spain or Chili or any other country. But here-
tofore it has not come, in spite of the assumption and the
noisy rant, in spite of thousands of editorials and speeches
admirably calculated to bring about a war, if there was any
excuse for one whatever.

The force of public opinion is immense ; and in such times
as these every man should see to it, if possible, that he

Peace and War. 5 1

counts one in the formation of that opinion. He should en-
deavor to understand the merits of the case ; and until he
does understand them pretty well, or thinks he does, he
should not put on his warpaint and shatter the firmament
with his battle yell. How many of those who are most vo-
ciferous for " the honor of the nation " have taken the
trouble, do you imagine, to inform themselves what the
Monroe doctrine is, or have given to the despatches of Mr.
Olney and Lord Salisbury the six or seven hours it takes to
read them carefully? Not one in a thousand. Not one in
a dozen of the Congressmen who were for rushing through
the indorsement of the President's message without send-
ing it to committee. And every self-respecting man in the
community should resent the endeavor of the thoughtless
and passionate majority to drag the questioning and dis-
passionate minority at their chariot wheels. In the annals
of American journalism I have seen nothing more contempti-
ble than the attempt to brand as mean and cowardly and un-
patriotic any tendency to deprecate haste, or to question the
soundness of the President's position, or to deplore the need-
less threat with which he brought his message to an end.
" It is above all things necessary," we are assured, "that the
President should seem to have our undivided and unquali-
fied support." Then it is above all things necessary for us
to tell an abominable lie, for nothing is clearer than that he
has not our undivided and unqualified support. Leave out
of the account the partisan opposition, which reflects merely
a comic fear that this business may inure to his advantage,
and there are many of our most learned jurists, our most
distinguished civilians, our most thoughtful publicists, our
most substantial business men, and among these as loyal
friends as Mr. Cleveland has ever had, who profoundly ques-
tion the soundness of his position, and regret unspeakably
the tone of his message, as better calculated to aggravate
existing difficulties than to make them less. And it is above
all things necessary that at this painful juncture these "men
of light and leading " should get in their word. Of igno-

52 Peace and War.

rant acclamation there is sure to be enough. So, too, of
cowardly subserviency to what seems to be the ruling spirit
of the hour. But, if there are any people who have a steady
pulse, a level head, a talent for deliberation, we should
attend to them as best we can.

But there are other things I deprecate as much as igno-
rant acclamation ; and one of these is the ungenerous and, I
must believe, unjust imputation to the President of unworthy
motives, — motives of political ambition, — in short, of an at-
tempt to rehabilitate the waning fortunes of his party, and
perhaps his own, by means of the popularity accruing from
the assumption of a warlike attitude in behalf of Venezuela.
I have respected him and honored him too long, too ear-
nestly, to pay a moment's heed to such a railing accusation,
even when it is voiced most definitely and loudly in the
house of those who have been hitherto the most loyal of his
friends. To think such things of him, I should have to
think of him as one who would have to take his place in his-
tory lower than the lowest of his predecessors, — lower than
Johnson, lower than Buchanan, lower than Polk or Tyler.
The man who could put our national peace in jeopardy in
furtherance of his personal ambition or a partisan success
would be a moral monster ; and the man who should indulge
in big war talk to " tickle the ears of the groundlings," with
a mental reservation in favor of a quiet backing down a few
months hence, would be a man for whom no suit of motley
could be sufficiently absurd. I dismiss as utterly unworthy
of a moment's deliberate assent such an impeachment of
Mr. Cleveland's honor or intellectual sobriety; and, if any
of you have given it shelter in your bosoms, I beg that you
will cast it out as if it were some loathsome thing.

But it is quite another matter to conceive that Mr. Cleve-
land has succumbed at last to the imperious stress of that
public sentiment which has been clamoring all along for "a
vigorous foreign policy," and which has been fertile of de-
nunciation of the President as un-American, unpatriotic,
indifferent to the recognition of America as a great world

Peace and War. 53

power, and so on, ad infinitum and ad nauseam. He is a man
of morbid sensibility ; and it has chafed and fretted him be-
yond endurance to have his patriotism and national pride
impeached, until, at last, it is as if he had said to those of
his own party and those of the opposition who have been
hounding him on to some warlike demonstration, " The vil-
lany you teach me I will execute ; and it shall go hard but
I will better the instruction." And one of the compensa-
tions which I anticipate for the innumerable ills that will
be sure to flow, and are already flowing, from the present
posture of events, is a very general retirement of those
editors and politicians who have been dancing the war-
dance of late with so much mutual admiration. They have
been so noisy that their numerical strength has been greatly
overrated. They have stirred their witches' cauldron with
great glee, and now on their affrighted eyes dawn the dark
shapes of what their words would mean when written large
and red in the concrete of action. It would be safe to
prophesy that, when things have settled down again, we shall
hear a great deal less about " a vigorous foreign policy "
and "manifest destiny" and universal annexation than we
have been hearing for some years past.

But I am speaking quite too much as if I understood the
merits of this controversy, — a thing which as a layman in such
matters it would be presumptuous for me to pretend. But I
have done my best to understand them, and much that I have
said already is unwarrantable and absurd except as it harks
back to my persuasion that the refusal of Great Britain to
accept our arbitration was not unnatural after the receipt of
Mr. Olney's letter of July 13. The tone of that letter was, to
my thinking, clearly the tone of prejudgment, although it
was elaborately iterative of our freedom from all bias. Hardly
can I conceive of a letter less adapted to the end it had in
view, yet no one can wish more heartily than I that our arbi-
tration had been accepted. Notwithstanding the prejudg-
ment that inhered in Mr. Olney's letter I think our arbitra-
tion would have been entirely just. Heretofore our relation

54 Peace and War.

to the matter has been largely ex-parte ; for Venezuela, the
plaintiff, has been our client, and Great Britain, the defendant,
has been at little pains to put her case in our hands. But
with the responsibility that a formal arbitration would have
entailed, with all the facts and arguments in our possession,
and with the best judicial mind our country can afford
brought to bear upon them, I am quite sure we should have
arrived at a just decision.

As to the merits of the controversy, the fact that we have
just voted $100,000 for a commission to decide upon them
makes it absurd for any private individual to speak confi-
dently of them. It would appear that, at the cession of
British Guiana by Holland to Great Britain in 18 14, the
boundary line between that province and Venezuela was
quite indeterminate. It became a matter of controversy in
1844, and has remained one ever since, except when the
Venezuelans have been too busy cutting each other's throats
to give it any thought. Read Mr. Olney's letter, and you
will be convinced that the course of England has been a
course of irregular aggression ; that the boundary of her
colony has swept back and forth, like the waves of a tide
upon a beach, — more forth than back. But read Lord Salis-
bury's despatches also, and you may not feel so sure of that.
The retreating boundary from time to time has, he assures
us, been a gracious concession to the Venezuelans of what
Great Britain had always claimed as hers by right. But the
matter is full of uncertainty ; and I should think it would
take our commission from now until the election of — his
name does not occur to me — next November, to work it
out. Meantime it is the height of the ridiculous for any
one to dogmatize about it, or to get angry with any one who
is not prepared to say exactly where the line should be.

But, if Mr. Olney's letter had ended with the history of the
controversy and a plea for the allowance of our impartial
arbitration, it would, I cannot but believe, have been much
more efficient than it has proved to be in its entirety.
Thomas Benton once complained that somebody had in-

Peace and War. 55

jected a stump speech into the belly of a certain bill, and
Mr. Olney has certainly injected a stump speech into his
letter. Its second half reads much more like an old-fash-
ioned Fourth of July oration than like a grave and cautious
diplomatic paper. This part is an exposition of the Monroe
doctrine and its application to the case in hand. In advance
of the present stage of this controversy, some one, with a
touch of humor in a serious discussion, said that the Monroe
doctrine had " no more to do with it than with the damna-
tion of non-elect infants." That is a liberal phrase, but it is
hardly an exaggeration of the fact. I am giving you my own
impression, but not without the happy consciousness that I
am one of many in this view, and that some of the many
are persons of the greatest weight. The Monroe doctrine
was announced by President Monroe in his message of
Dec. 2, 1823. It had two leading positions : 1. " That our
Western continents are not henceforth to be considered as
subjects for future colonization by any European powers."
We have Mr. Olney's assurance that position does not con-
cern us now. 2. "We could not view any interposition for
the purpose of oppressing [the free and independent States
of this hemisphere] or controlling in any other manner their
destiny, by any European power, in any other light than as
the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition * toward the
United States." So cordial was the sympathy of England
with this doctrine that it was published by her advice ; and
Charles Sumner contended that it should be called the Can-
ning doctrine rather than the Monroe doctrine, Canning
being in 1823 the king's prime minister. It was inspired by
the character and conduct of the Holy Alliance, — Russia,
Prussia, Austria, and France, — which, violently reacting
from the French Revolution, was trying everywhere to force
its absolutist principles and governments upon the world.
Those principles have nowhere now, except in Russia, any-
one so poor as to do them reverence. It was against the
attempt of the Holy Alliance "to extend its system" to our

* Not necessarily entailing a retaliatory war.

56 Peace and War.

hemisphere — a very real danger in 1823, when we were a
young nation of nine million people — that the Monroe doc-
trine was declared. But will any one outside a lunatic
asylum maintain that Great Britain is attempting to impose
the despotic system of the Holy Alliance, which she repudi-
ated even in 1823 as earnestly as we, or any system of
her own, despotic or monarchical, on Venezuela ? Will any
one maintain that we have less political sympathy with Great
Britain than with a characteristic Spanish-American state,
whose inhabitants have been busy for nearly twenty years
out of the last fifty cutting each other's throats ?

Is it not agreed to-day that the British system is practi-
cally more democratic than our own,* seeing that they could
abolish their monarchy to-morrow by act of Parliament, while
we could not lengthen the term of our President's office with-
out a constitutional amendment adopted by Congress and
by two-thirds of all the States ? The Monroe doctrine op-
posed the extension of European despotism to this country
as " dangerous to our peace and safety." Does any one
imagine, with England already owning half the hemisphere,
our neighbor from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and as good
a neighbor as could be desired, that the acquisition of a few
thousand square miles of territory in South America would
be " dangerous to our peace and safety " ? To answer this
question in the affirmative would be humiliating in the ex-
treme for a nation of seventy million people.f

Here is the sum and substance of the Monroe doctrine :
We should consider the attempt of any European despotism
to impose its system on a free American State as dangerous
to our peace and safety. Is Great Britain a European des-
potism, and is she trying to impose her despotic system on any
free American State in a manner that is dangerous to our
free institutions ? If not, the present controversy does not

* See Sir Henry Sumner Maine's " Popular Government."

i What would endanger our peace and comfort, if not <>ur safety, would be a war
that would find Canada as friendly as need be, and leave her as unfriendly as possible.
Such, at any rate, was the result of the northern campaigns of 1776-77 in the Revolu-
tionary War.

Peace and War. 57

come within the scope of the Monroe doctrine. The matter
in dispute is a boundary which apparently has never been
clearly defined, and therefore leaves either side free "to
claim everything " within certain extreme limits. It is a
monstrous shame and pity that the dispute should not be
amicably settled.

That the action of our government will conduce to such
a happy consummation we have little reason to believe.
There was no need of any threat of war. It has encouraged
evil passions abroad and at home. It has already been the
ruin of much honest business ; and will be of a great deal
more. Our national currency, already in a precarious con-
dition, is put in a much graver plight. But let us hope for
better things. The political opposition will see to it, above
all things, that no advantage inures to the President or his
party from the course of events ; and therein we have one
powerful brake upon the flying wheels. Then, too, it may
be that the finding of our commission will be favorable to
Great Britain ; and, if it should be so, the only thunder of the
war-cloud will be the crack of a tremendous joke, the ex-
pense of which we shall share with Venezuela. If the find-
ing tends the other way, as not improbably it may, we shall
not, I trust, tender it to England as our ultimatum at the
cannon's mouth, but with so much gravity and serenity and
good humor that, if she does not accede to it, she will feel
obliged to show us most convincingly that we are in the
wrong. There are a thousand noble artifices which we must
exhaust before, in a cause so complicated and obscure, we
make the dread appeal that will involve us in an awful con-
flict with that people to whom we are allied as with no other
by ties of blood and history and literature and the heritage
of glorious names, and to whom, with us, have been com-
mitted in trust the largest promise and the dearest hope of
human life on earth.

The final outcome of our trouble will depend upon the
thought and feeling of innumerable men and women ; and
what I have tried to do this morning has been to contribute

58 Peace and War.

something to the justice of your minds, something to the
goodness of your hearts, so that your individual contributions
to the common stock of better thought and feeling may be
compacted of the things that make for peace.

" My song save this is little worth :

I lay the weary pen aside,
And wish you health and joy and mirth

As fits the solemn Christmas-tide.
As fits the happy Christmas birth,

Be this, good friends, our carol still, —
Be peace on earth, be peace on earth,

To men of gentle will ! "

THE LIFE-LONG JOY.

It is hardly too much to say that the Bible has been more
highly valued in the past and to this present time for what
it does not than for what it does contain, for what men have
put into it and taken out again rather than for what is
actually there, for the mistakes of its translators rather than
for the truer meanings they have missed. This state of
things has been only natural, if not unavoidable, so prone
are men to seek and find their own opinions in any scripture
to which they go for an infallible rule, and so difficult is it
for the mind of one age to enter into and interpret simply
and exactly that of another far remote. The " New English
Dictionary " teaches a lesson which theologians have been
very slow to learn : that the meaning of words is a continual
flux, and that to treat them as if they were signs indicating
fixed quantities of meaning is absurd. Do our best, and
there will remain hundreds of words, ideas, thoughts, in the
Old Testament and New that we can never understand, their
meaning, is so relative to the total intellectual, and moral
outlook of the ancient world. There is much that we have
recovered that is so relative to changed conditions that it
has no value for us, save as a record of entirely obsolete
ideas ; and, with regard to much that we have not yet re-
covered, and may never, we may console ourselves with the
reflection that, once recovered, it would have no word of
counsel or encouragement for our present difficulties, doubts,
and fears. At the same time there are other sentences and
passages in the Old Testament and New that roll up the
ages like a scroll, fill up as 'twere the gap of centuries
between our time and that of the prophets and apostles, and

60 Tlie Life-long Joy.

bring us face to face with them, heart answering to heart.
It is not that these sentences and passages are, as we say,
written out of time and space. It is that they are written as
with the life-blood of humanity, whose ruddy color does not
fade from age to age. These are the best the Bible has to
give, — better, even, than the inspired mistakes of the trans-
lators which have such lodgment in the affections of the
world that they can never be displaced.

One of these sentences of imperishable beauty and signifi-
cance is that in the great ninetieth Psalm, — " Oh, satisfy us
early with thy mercy, that we may rejoice and be glad all our
days."

Simple as is the text, it contains, you will observe, an im-
plication and an argument of which the major premise is
suppressed ; namely, that, if we are early satisfied with the
goodness of the Eternal, we shall rejoice and be glad all our
days. It is not absolutely true. There is many a life which
has a brave beginning, lacking nothing of external comfort or
advantage, or of intellectual and moral help and cheer, which,
as the day wears on, sees clouds arising on its fair horizons,
— clouds that roll up the sky, big, not with mercy, but with
trouble, grief, and pain, making a ruin of its love and joy.
This happens frequently, unless life is very different now
from what it was in the far times men measured by Olym-
piads, when the danger of being too happy so impressed
them that they conceived the doctrine of Nemesis, — the doc-
trine of a grudging Fate, that, just when men were perfect in
their happiness, would come like a strong wind, and beat
upon their house and bring it to the ground. Quite oppo-
site, moreover, to the Psalmist's implication is that lament of
Dante in his immortal song, which Tennyson had made his
own by conscious reproduction, when he sang —

" For a sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things."

If this is true, then was the Psalmist quite mistaken in his
thought ? Such are the contingencies of life, such the

The L ife-long Joy. 6 r

dangers that attend our happiness, so many are the doors
by which it slips away, that, the less we have of it, the better,
if Dante's thought and Tennyson's echo of it are a true re-
port. If they are so, the Buddhist and the Stoic way of
wanting little which it would be hard to lose or miss is the
way of the blessed life. But I, for one, do not believe that
their report is true in any large and spiritual way. The
memory of mere outward wealth, comfort, ease, and luxury,
or of mere worldly position, influence, and reputation, may
be a crown of sorrow for the man whose whole life has been
made up of these external things ; but, for those who have
resources of the mind and heart, no memory of the mere
trappings and encumbrances of life which they have had and
lost can be to them the hardest sorrow. I grant that, when the
loss is not of these poor outward things, but of some visible
presence that is dear to us beyond the possibilities of speech
to tell, in the first agony of our bereavement our sorrow gets
the keenest edge of its heart-piercing pain from the remem-
bered goodness, sweetness, tenderness, of loved companion-
ship that we have lost ; but if, as time goes on, and we enter
into spiritual relations with our dead, I know, you know, we
would not spare one moment of remembered joy. And, if
the recollection of our lost happiness is indeed a crown of
sorrow, it is no crown of thorns wounding our aching brows
or wreathing them with subtle mockery, but a crown of re-
joicing that such blessed things were ours, — a royal crown,
whose high nobility compels us to all best and holiest things.
The early satisfactions which make through all the years
of our maturity and age for gladness and rejoicing are not
by any means coincident with the outward things that most
men are striving for as if they were the only things worth
having. There is a hint of this in the biographies of famous
men. How uninteresting to read about are the early years
of the thinkers, poets, statesmen, inventors, musicians,
scholars, and reformers who were born and reared in every
circumstance of luxury ! How trippingly the biographer
passes over such men's childhood, knowing that he can no

62 The Life-long Joy.

more make it interesting for us than the painter can a pict-
ure of children richly dressed amidst luxurious surroundings !
A fashion-plate is quite as good. But it is different with
the childish years that were inured to hardship and denial.
These are the biographer's opportunity. How he likes to
dwell — and we with him — on the frugality and stern sim-
plicity of Emerson's boyhood, on the one coat that he and a
little brother wore on alternate days, the off days going cold !
It is "the bobbin-boy," "the rail-splitter," or "the mill boy of
the slashes," who is a good magnet to draw the political en-
thusiasm of men who, being human, have in them the love of
poetry and adventure and romance. And these predilections
are not confined to literature. In men's own lives, what is
looked back upon with gladness and rejoicing is not the lux-
ury and surfeit of its earliest years, — no, but the hardship
and frugality, the scanty clothing and the simple food, the
bed in the unplastered room, the frozen breath upon the
sheet, the sifting snow across the floor, the few books,
the fewer toys ; and, though they would not willingly subject
their children to a like ordeal, they feel that they are losing
something which nothing can quite take the place of in the
retrospect of the full-grown man. Even if some should in-
sist that the real source of pleasure is the contrast of the
later comfort and success with the frugality and hardship of
the early time, — which I do not believe, or only as a very
partial explanation, — even then it would appear that, to fully
enjoy the foreground of our comfort and success, it must
have a background of hardship and frugality.

How then ? Are we arriving at the amusing paradox that
the early satisfactions which we should desire for others and
be grateful for in our own lives are not the things we have,
but the things that we have not, — the deprivations and denials
of our childhood and our youth? So it would seem, and yet
it is not so. The real blessing, mercy, satisfaction, is not in
the having or the lack of merely outward things, but in the
consciousness that the true sources of life and happiness are
deeper than all these ; and, if we cannot learn the lesson

The Life-long Joy. 63

otherwise than by going to the school of hardship and mis-
fortune, then we had better go to that school. Whether in
literature or in our personal experience, the satisfying mercy
is not the having or the lack of merely outward things, but
the fulness of life, as such, so great that it can dispense with
much that some account essential good. It is the tender-
ness and love, the beautiful fidelity which no wealth can
give, no hardship take away. Satisfied with such mercy, we
shall rejoice and be glad all our days in fond remembrance
of that early satisfaction. That is a miserable philosophy of
life which finds in each succeeding period only a preparation
for and stepping-stone towards the next. " I do every-
thing," said Francis Wayland, " as if there were no next " ;
and that w*as better than to make every part of life merely
preparatory, and so rob the whole of its significance. But
memory is so large a factor in our lives — and, as we grow
older, the memories of childhood and of youth enter so much
more largely into our inner life — that, for the happiness of
later manhood and of age, there is no better surety than a
fountain of memory welling up from childhood full and pure
and sweet, no better preparation for whatever comes in
any after time than to be early satisfied with the Eternal
Goodness as it shows itself in the goodness of fathers and
mothers, and brothers and sisters, and kinsfolk and teachers
and friends. Life may be hard and dry in after years, a
desert blowing blinding sand ; but to have that memory of
early satisfaction is to have an oasis always near at hand
where one can stand up to his knees in cool water, a garden
of refreshment into which the weary mind may draw apart,
and rest itself from every curse and care.

But I am speaking quite too much as if the mercies of
our youth, whose sweet returns gladden the later years, were
all that we receive. Indeed, it is not so. In fact, there is
no fount of bitterness that works its way through all the
ledge and soil of that country intermediate between our
childhood or our youth and our maturity, and breaks forth
when least expected, proffering its poisoned chalice to our

64 The Life-long Joy.

lips, that is to be compared with a remembered goodness
which we grieved and wronged with wayward wish and
will. The sweet obedience and thoughtful care with which
the growing boy or girl seeks to repay the mother's anxious
love, the father's patient care, are treasures incorruptible
laid up for them in the heaven of all future recollection.
What wealth and honor would the grown man not some-
times give, what admiration and obsequious following the
successful woman, if with them they could buy forgetfulness
of things of which no others know, — thoughtless or cruel
words spoken long years ago, selfish pursuit of their own
happiness at the cost of pain (of foolish pain, perhaps) to
loving hearts. I do not mean that our maturity has no
sources of intolerable regret in the various relations of the
home, in the parent's failure to appreciate the child's mis-
take, or to take the proper measure of his fault in the hot
anger loosed and the injustice done at such too memorable
times. Saddest of all sad pictures is that at Byron's New-
stead Abbey, a picture of Lord Arundel,

" Who struck in heat the child he loved so well,"

and such a blow that the child's reason flickered and went
out. The picture shows the father in the act, and the child's
vacant eyes are piteous prophecies of the evil wrought.

" Methinks the woe that made that father stand
liaring his dumb remorse to future days
Was woe than Byron's woe more tragic far."

Oh, but it does not need such tragedy as" that, — it does not
even need the hasty blow : the cruel word is sometimes quite
enough to hang a picture where the eye turned inward sees
it every day, not without agony ! Happy the man or woman
who, either as. parent or as child, has dashed upon the mind's
interior walls no pictures of his baser self with hasty, cruel
hand ! Thrice happy they who, looking on the dear Ma-
donna painted there, their holy mother, see in the eyes no

T/i e L ifc- long Joy. 6 5

look of sad reproach, and read upon the lips no quivering of
unrequited trust or injured love !

But there are other aspects of my theme which I must
hasten to report. The tendency, especially of our American
life, is to postpone so long the pleasures of existence that
when at length it is men's time, as they conceive, to build
or travel, to read good books and to enjoy the beautiful
things of art, their strength is weakness and their appetite
is dull. The house is a mere vestibule to the tomb, the travel
is a weariness. Experiences that should have furnished
years of gladness and rejoicing, gone over hand in hand
with memory, are so long delayed that there is neither time
for any afterglow nor the capacity for any rich and full im-
mediate enjoyment. Visible surroundings that should grow
familiar by long happy use, and gather sweetness of associa-
tion from a thousand joys and hopes and fears, from friendly
faces and from children's play, are postponed until in life's
brief remainder it is impossible for the new places ever to
be anything but new and strange. Nothing is sadder than
the immense disqualification of many persons of great
wealth or ample means for the enjoyment of those things
which these can easily procure. They have time for travel,
and the money, too ; but they have not the preparation, with-
out which travel is a mere Barmecide feast of splendid
dishes empty of all pleasant food. I do not think that Mr.
Henry James exaggerates the misery of the wealthy Ameri-
can gentleman abroad, dragged around by his wife and
daughters to see things he does not care to see, hear things
he does not care to hear, taking more pleasure in his furtive
glances at the "Stock Market" in the New York Herald
than in any lake or mountain scenery or any glories of
architecture or painting that Europe has to show.

If there is any sight more tragical than this, it is the man
who has retired from business without the tastes which alone
can prevent leisure from being an intolerable bore. He has
a library, of course. If he has sought the advice of a judi-
cious bookseller or friend, it has good books in it by dozens

66 The Life-long Joy.

and by scores; but, alas! he has never contracted a liking
for good books. He likes the poor ones better, and the vain
surmises and the idle gossip of the daily paper best of all.
He may have pictures, too, and good ones, if he has stuck
close to the famous names or availed himself of some tal-
ented and honest connoisseur; but, as for his enjoyment of
them, in a moment of desperate frankness he will let you
know that it is very little, or he will tell you of their fabu-
lous cost, and retail to you the dislocated phrases he has
gathered from the talk of those more confident than he, if
not better qualified to judge of " values " and " technique "
and "chiaroscuro," and so on. And if it so happens, as it
often does, that such a man with all his limitations has been
simple and sincere, he will shortly sicken of his leisure as of
tasteless food. He will relish more the crumbs that fall from
the tables of his money-changing friends than the whole
feast of his leisured opportunity. He will long for the ad-
ventures of business as Ulysses for the adventures of the
sea; and, when he can restrain himself no longer, he will
set out again in search of them, and, if he does not wreck
the fortune he has built and rigged for steady winds upon
some unknown coast of random speculation, he will do bet-
ter than some others whom we all have known.

Mind you, I do not say that such an order, or disorder,
of experience as I have described is predicable of men of
wealth, as such. I do not even say it is the rule, not the ex-
ception, though, if judgment were demanded of me on this
head, I think I should incline to this decision. Enough
that it is all too common, that their name is legion whose
experience answers to the experience I have described, as
face answereth to face in water. And where it is quite
otherwise than so, where the man of wealth or ample means
brings to the leisure he has earned the ability to appreciate
and to enjoy it, the love of good books and the knowledge
what they are, delight in art and some discrimination be-
tween the noble and the trivial, the sincere and the artificial,
the love of natural beauty, the aptitude for social help, it is

The Life-long Joy. 6y

where he has not put off his culture in these things until he
has the leisure to enjoy them. It is where in some high way
he has built his life after the pattern we have seen this
morning in the mount of the great Psalmist's vision of life's
natural sequence : " Oh, satisfy us early with thy mercy, that
we may rejoice and be glad all our days ! "

Just at this point I seem to feel a kind of protest coming
back to me from those whom I address, quite general,
though not equally from all, — a protest against my estima-
tion of a business life, as if that had no mercy in it, no
goodness, that we should desire it, as if the mere heaping up
of money were its beginning, middle, end. If I have made
any such impression, the protest is entirely just; and I bow
to kiss the rod of your displeasure with a humble mind.
But I hold to no such estimation of a business life. How
frequently have I contended that a man's business, his call-
ing wherein he is called, is his one great opportunity for
doing good and establishing his right to be here on the
planet, getting his share of sunshine and sweet rain and all
the other beautiful and blessed things life has to give ! Yes,
and I have insisted that no munificence of social help or
charity can justify a business that is not fundamentally be-
neficent, or make up for the lack of justice, sympathy, and
generosity in the management of one's manufactory or trade.
Besides all this, I recognize that the mere money-getting is
to many business men the smallest part of it. They care
more for " the rigor of the game " than for the stakes. They
like to link their judgment and their powers with other men,
as rival stags their horns upon the cliffs in terrible encoun-
ters. Nay, 'tis no trial of brute strength or mere endurance,
but a trial of foresight and intelligence ; and victory in this
splendid game brings with it the joy and satisfaction of the
chess-player's " Mate ! " a hundred or a thousand fold. But,
when due allowance has been made for all these things,
there remain things of the mind, things of the imagination,
things that bring the individual into large, vital sympathies
with the great currents of humanity, its stumblings and its

68 The Life-long Joy.

fallings on the way to truth and holiness and God. There
remain revelations of God in nature, history, and art, without
some share in which no life is even tolerably complete,
no life is anything but marred and spoiled, — the merest
fragment of its possible reality of truth and good.

There is this also to be said : that, although to some men it
is given to keep up in business, like a Gladstone or a Met-
ternich in politics, the strain of unabated energy even till
past their fourscore years, while still their labor is not
sorrow, it oftener happens that there remaineth a rest for the
people of Mammon, a time of slackening strength and will,
a period of reaction from the violence of the earlier storm
and stress ; and that, when this time arrives, it must go hard
with those who have not laid up for themselves treasures in
heaven, — treasures of thought and taste, the love of nature
and the love of art and books, the aptitude for public spirit
and for social help. And those who would lay up for
themselves these incorruptible riches must begin betimes.
Hardly can they begin too soon. In middle life it is too
late. The passions and the tastes that are to dominate the
later life must be established in our youth or early prime.
Even if it were safe to wait till life becomes " more solemn
and serene when noon is past," who that is wise would have
the splendor of his prime untouched by all that makes for
ideality in our mortal life ? " Oh, satisfy us early with thy
mercy, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days ! "

And now, if you have followed the later drift of my dis-
course, you will perceive that it has been in quite a different
direction from the former part. There my insistence was
that all our earlier years should be as full as we can fill them
with all sweet and noble satisfactions, — having, doing, and
being, — to the end that in all the after time we may find in
them a place of blessed recollection, — books of remem-
brance, which we cannot open save at some pleasant picture
or delightful poem or tender story of the times forever gone
away. But life is not all memory, and there is better rea-
son far than this for taking on our lips the Psalmist's prayer.

The Life-long Joy. 69

It is— and this has been the later drift of my discourse —
that not only our memory, but our life, — the meaning and
the purpose of it, the energy and passion of it, — will be
according to the manner of our early satisfactions, be they
with things unworthy of our admiration or desire or things
that have in them the making of a man. It is no absolute
rule. There are men who are made glad according to the
years in which they have done evil. Some influence of
health and healing wrestles with them in the darkness of
their self-contempt, and will not let them go until they have
received its blessing. Let us be glad there are such insur-
rections of the better life in men. But, surely, it were
a foolish thing, so far as we have in these matters any
measure of control, to squander half of life upon the chance
that something higher than ourselves may seize upon the
other half with irresistible, redeeming power. No ! All of
life is not too much for high and noble things. What we
want is to rejoice and be glad all our days ; and, that we
may do so and be so, we cannot begin too soon to satisfy
ourselves with the mercy of God, the goodness of the Al-
mighty that is extended to us, that is pressed upon us, in all
the various ordering of our lives, — in the affections of the
hearth and home, in the fidelities of our habitual tasks, in
the beauty of the external world, in the great wonders of
the painter's and the sculptor's and the builder's glorious
arts, in the illimitable wealth of thought to which so many
have brought all the patience of their toilsome years, in
the not less illimitable wealth of character that the saints
and heroes and the faithful workers of all ages have
funded for our use. Not only to the God that is above us,
but to the God that is in us, let us direct our prayer \ and to
that God let our importunity be such that, like the man of
the parable crying for bread at midnight, it cannot, will not,
be denied.

I know that many of us have left so far behind their morn-
ing visions that, whatever of sad or joyful illustration we may
find of these things in our lives, they cannot be to us an in-

yo The Life-long Joy.

spiration. For better or for worse, we have already made
our choice. But there are those near and dear to us whose
hearts are singing still the song of youth, —

"All before us lies the way."

And some of these, perhaps, may find some meaning in my
words. Some of us may try to bring it home to them with
strong appeal ; and all of us, in one way or another, can
make ourselves ministers of the eternal goodness to some
little child or boy or girl or youth or maid, and, if we may
not satisfy them with that mercy which shall rejoice and
gladden them all their days, add to their stock something
which in both memory and character shall work for blessing
and for peace. If we can do but little, let us not on that
account withhold our hand. The whole round world is
made of atoms that no eye can see. Take rather on your
lips and to your hearts this music of a rude and strange and
yet most wondrous singer in the choir of God : —

" If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain.
If I can ease one life from aching
Or cool one pain
Or help one fainting robin
Into his nest again,
I'shall not live in vain."

THE NEW SINAI.

I have read to you this morning the story of the transfig-
uration, as it appears in the Gospel according to Luke; and
I was strongly tempted to read you the same story as it ap-
pears in Matthew and Mark, just for the sake of a little in-
cidental lesson in New Testament criticism. In the story,
as I read it, you will remember that it was the overshadow-
ing cloud that caused the fear of the disciples. But in Mat-
thew it is the voice proceeding out of the cloud that causes
their alarm ; while in Mark it is neither the cloud nor the
voice, but the apparitions of Moses and Elias. It is a matter
of no practical importance, but it affords an interesting com-
ment on the doctrine of Biblical infallibility and a more in-
teresting one on the mutual relations of the Gospels. It is
evident from these differences that no one of them slavishly
copied another of the three, and quite as evident that they
were not all derived from a single primitive writing. There
are scores of such discrepancies between the first three Gos-
pels (the fourth is one grand discrepancy with all three of
them together), and they point unmistakably to a variety of
documents back of the Gospels or to a variable oral tradi-
tion. Where the Gospels are best agreed among them-
selves, there is most likelihood of contact with the earliest
tradition and with the actual facts concerning Jesus' life and
teachings. It is interesting to observe that within the range
of their agreement there is no miraculous birth or definite
resurrection, and that the number and portentousness of the
miracles is very much reduced. Sometimes we can see the
legend growing, as it were, before our eyes. Thus in one
Gospel, as originally written, we have no details of the resur-
rection and no ascension whatever ; in another, a visionary

72 The New Sinai.

appearance after death ; in a third, the resurrection followed
by a physical ascension on the same day ; next, and
strangely enough by the same writer in Acts, a period of
forty days elapses between the resurrection and ascension.
How can the superstitious blame the rational thinker for
preferring the least exorbitant of these accounts or even for
imagining that the legend had stages antecedent to those
which have survived in the New Testament? And how can
any one who is not wholly blind to the significance of these
considerations presume to dogmatize upon the strength of
any word ascribed to Jesus or any event associated with
his name ? For this negative conclusion has been estab-
lished, if nothing else, — that we can have no perfect cer-
tainty concerning anything that Jesus said or did.

So much for my incidental lesson in New Testament criti-
cism ; and now I come back to the story of the transfigura-
tion and to the particular text whioh I have chosen as the
starting-point of my discourse. "They feared when they en-
tered into the cloud." I have no present care as to what
actually happened in that far-off time to give rise to such a
story. This is the harder to make out because the working
of our minds in many ways is different from that of people
living then. Nor have I any present care to make out which
reading is the best, that of Matthew, which makes the voice
out of the cloud the fearful thing, or that of Mark, which
makes it the apparition of Moses and Elias, or that of Luke,
who says it was the overshadowing cloud. I take the last
because it is the one I want for my immediate purpose. For
life has its overshadowing clouds ; and, when they gather in
about us, fear is the natural emotion of our hearts. Some-
times, indeed, we cannot fear too much. There is the cloud
of sorrow, so enshrouding us that some dear friend, it may be
"a nearer one still and a dearer one yet than all others," is
no longer visible to us. We grope for him in the darkness,
but we cannot find the hand whose strength supported us in
many difficult and trying hours. What do we fear ? Not
that some harm has come to the loved one, nor so much,

The New Sinai. 73

either, that in the boundless heavens, " where the skyey road-
ways part," we may not find the one that leads to his em-
brace ; but whether we shall find our life worth living with
so much that helped to make it so taken away from us ;
whether, unshared, the daily burdens will not press us down
and crush us with their weight ; whether we can solve alone
the painful questions that are sure to rise in every soul that is
confronted with life's awful mystery. And, sometimes, alas !
the fearful heart finds, as the days go by, it has not feared
too much ; while there are others who are a wonder to them-
selves, where so much has been taken so much still abides ;
so much the recollected goodness, wisdom, cheerfulness,
avail to lift up the hands that hang down and confirm the
feeble knees.

And, then, there is the cloud of business anxiety. There
are many in these times who have had sore experience of this.
What smiling faces have concealed from us what tragedies of
sleepless nights and days of miserable futility and hopeless
gloom! If the strong man had only himself to care for, he
would snap his fingers in the face of fortune. But there are
those to whom he has given bonds of service and protection,
whom he has spoiled perhaps for hardship with his soft
indulgence ; and there are the good causes he would so
gladly help, and the old strugglers to whom he would extend
no empty hand. My observation may have been at fault ;
but, so far as it has extended, the impression I have got in
these hard times has been one of brave endurance, of quiet
heroism, under the grinding pressure of those terrible anxie-
ties which the commercial situation has entailed. We often
speak of the industrial age as if it had no opportunities for
heroism equal to those afforded by the military age, of
which, with monstrous unreality, we speak as something past
and gone. And, certainly, its opportunities are different ; but
I have sometimes thought that they demand a firmer courage
and a nerve of stronger iron. As between sudden death
within the foeman's lines and fortune's utter wreck, how
many, think you, would not choose the former as the better

74 TJic New Sinai.

part? But how many have borne the latter quietly,
doing their best to keep the cloud enwrapping them from
chilling other hearts ! And I have not lived for thirty years
upon a shore where the great waves of business prosperity
alternate rise and fall, without learning well enough that
with loss of money there is often gain of character, — that, as
between prosperity and adversity, the former, quite as often
as the latter, is too heavy to be borne. I have seen men
whose self-respect was so implicated in their bonds and
mortgages that, losing these, the other also went ; and I
have seen those who with increasing wealth have come to
measure all things by a gold standard, their only question
henceforth what their investment will pay, be it in railroads
or electrics or politics or marriage or religion ! And be-
tween such diversities of moral wreck there is not much to
choose. A man's life is not in the abundance of the things
that he possesses ; and not a few, both in the possession of
material wealth and in the loss of it, have found that this
is so.

And now I pass to the particular application of my
text, which is to me peculiarly impressive. "I was born
free," said the apostle ; and many of us here could doubt-
less say as much. I mean that we have never had to
undergo the anxiety and strain which are inseparable from
the transition from the traditional faith of Christendom,
intensely realized, to the free mind of science and the
order of ideas and beliefs which goes along with this.
But this transition is immensely characteristic of the present
time ; and I have seen too much of the sufferings which it
entails to wonder that anybody should be smitten through
and through with fear when the cloud of intellectual doubt
first broods with overshadowing wing over their minds, dim-
ming the outlines of those traditional dogmas which have
always been so firm and hard, and at the same time revealing,
like a phantom ship seen through the mist of dawn, the
ghostly mystery of the new order of beliefs, lowering porten-
tous, vague, obscure, " a grief without a pang, void, dark, and
drear," for some, for others meaning poignant misery.

TJic Nczv Sinai. 75

For it is not in these things, you will notice, as if, over
against the old in all its horrible deformity or selective
and engaging charm, the new were seen in all its fair pro-
portions, beautiful, complete. Abraham in the story, going
forth he knew not whither, was a prototype of many who
have left behind them some Chaldean Ur of long-established
creed, and gone forth seeking a city that hath foundations,
whose builder and maker is God. It is a cloud into which
they enter, not into clear, bright sunlight, making all things
sharply visible and showing them divinely fair. I remember
well enough how it was with me — forgive the personal con-
fession— when such a cloud enveloped the conception of
supernatural Christianity, which before then had been about
as definite in its outline as a dry-goods box or a picture
frame or any other purely mechanical object. If I could
then have seen the natural conception of Christianity, — I
will not say rounded and complete, — but as I see it now
or even as I came to see it in a few years, it would have
been a very different matter. But I was granted no such
vision. What I saw was that certain things which I had
believed to be true were not true ; but the new things
that should come and fill the void which these would make
by their departure, — these I could not clearly see. Some-
thing of this sort, as I go on, I seem to have told you
once before ; but I am so far in that it will be less trouble
now to cross the stream than to turn back. At last there
came a time big with the possibilities of grave mischance.
I had read Francis W. Newman's "Phases of Faith";
and now the question came, should I read Strauss's Life
of Jesus which I had borrowed from my friend Samuel
Johnson, enriched with hundreds of notes that he had
made, crowding the margins and the fly-leaves of the three
volumes. I seemed to know that, if I read that book,
my tottering faith in supernatural Christianity would fall ;
and that was by no means what my selfish heart desired.
And thereupon the devil came to me, arrayed as an angel of
light, and suggested that I should go over and see Dr. Noyes,

y6 The New Sinai.

and get his advice. I knew perfectly well what he would
say, — that Strauss was not milk for theological babes, but
meat for strong men, and that I must tarry in Jericho until
my critical faculty had grown before settling down to such a
book as Strauss. I knew that he would say something like
that, and that was why I was going to ask him for his advice.
I set out on my errand, and soon reached his door. But I
did not go in. I walked up and down in the clear moonlight
for some time ; and then I struck off toward Arlington and
Lexington, along the road the British took on the night of
April 18, 1775. It meant defeat for them, but it meant
victory for me. For, walking miles and miles, when I got
back to Cambridge, it was much too late to call on Dr. Noyes,
even if I had cared to do so. To "consult my pillow"
seemed the wiser course ; and I did that, going to sleep at
last, and waking in the morning and settling down to
Strauss for six weeks of good hard reading, which, if they

lefjt me

" Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born,"

made it impossible for me ever to build again the house of
my traditional belief. In course of time my joy and satis-
faction in my new order of belief became incomparably
greater than they had ever been in what had passed away.
I often wonder how it would have been if I had been
obliged to pass at once from my snug and cosey supernatural-
ism to the wide spaciousness of scientific thought. As it
was, the Transcendentalism of Theodore Parker invited me,
a cheerful half-way house, vouchsafing every man his private
revelation of God, immortality, and the moral law. Then
came a time when, reading Mill and Spencer much, again
there came a cloud and overshadowed me ; and again I
feared when I entered into the cloud. And well I might ;
for, again, it was not as if I could see the coming things in
their completeness set over against the things in which I
had rejoiced, and shaming them with a diviner beauty. The
cloud that overshadowed me made all the former things un-

TJi'e New Sinai. 77

certain, vague, intangible: it hid the others almost wholly
from my view. Again, like Abraham, I went forth, not know-
ing whither. But of one thing I was resolved, — that, if I con-
tinued to wait on my ministry, — a matter as to which I had
many painful doubts and grave misgivings, — however meagre
the message might be, it should be well within the boun-
daries of my own personal conviction. It was ; and, to my
increasing satisfaction and delight, it was not so very meagre,
after all. Once and for all I found how many inspirations,
sanctions, and defences of the moral life are safe against all
shocks of theological or philosophic or scientific scepticism
or dogmatic opposition. If at that time all that I now per-
ceive to be implied in science as applied to the great prob-
lems of religion had been apparent to my mind, it would
have been an easy matter to burn all my ships, and take up
my home in the new country to whose coasts I had arrived.
How glad I am that grace was given me to burn them, all
the same, albeit confronted with a mountain wall that hid
from me the pleasant lands which I have since explored !

For the individual any time may prove to be a time of
theological transition. And, when this arrives, happy are
they who do not find their moral life involved to some ex-
tent in the same cloud that winds their intellectual appre-
hensions in its baffling folds. Morality may be independent
of theology ; but, when a moral system has been long asso-
ciated with a particular system of theology, it is inevitable
that with the decay and ruin of the latter there should be
some danger threatening the former for at least a time.
Frances Power Cobbe has told us in her autobiography how
it was with her at the time when her orthodox belief col-
lapsed. She had been doing right, or imagined she had
been, because the Bible or Jesus had issued this or that
command, or because the hope of heaven and the fear of
hell had encouraged her to right action and deterred her
from wrong-doing. But with a human Bible and a human
Jesus and the old hell " dismissed with costs," the old mo-
tives and sanctions disappeared ; and, their place not being

y8 The New Sinai.

supplied at once by others equally impressive, she found
herself sliding down in all her feelings and conduct from the
high levels of which she had been secure under the old
rdgime. Profoundly conscious of her deterioration and pro-
foundly miserable in that consciousness, she found herself
one day out under the open sky ; and clear as that there
came a voice in her own breast, asking the question, " Can
I not rise once more, conquer my faults, and live up to my
own idea of what is right and good, so that, even if there be
no life after death, I may yet deserve my own respect here
and now, and, if there be a righteous God, he must approve
me ? " And she goes on to tell us how, from that hour, all
things were made new for her ; the tides of faith and prayer
that had ebbed away began to swell again and moisten the
dry places of her heart. But there was nothing very strange
in her experience. It has been that of thousands entering
into that cloudy atmosphere, that dim, half light in which old
beliefs grow vague and insubstantial, and the new loom more
as things of terror and affright than as the tabernacles of
the righteous or the city of the living God. For men so
tried there are two principles which have been beaten out
into true swords of the spirit by the experience of many gen-
erations. One is, Pretend to believe nothing which you do
not believe. The other is, Live by the truth you know,
however meagre it may seem. As if divining his own future,
his own temptation, and his own glorious victory, Stopford
Brooke wrote in his Life of Robertson : " It is an awful mo-
ment when the soul begins to find that the props on which
it blindly -rested are many of them rotten. ... I know but
one way in which a man can come forth from this agony
scathless : it is by holding fast to those things which are
certain still. In the darkest hour through which a human
soul can pass, whatever else is doubtful, this at least is cer-
tain : if there be no God and no future state, even then it
is better to be generous than selfish, better to be true than
false, better to be brave than a coward. Blessed beyond all
earthly blessedness is the man who, in the tempestuous

The New Sinai. 79

darkness of the soul, has dared to hold fast to these realities.
I appeal," he says, "to the recollection of any man who has
passed through that agony and stood upon the rock at last
with a faith and hope and trust no longer traditional, but his
own."

For the individual, I have said, any time may be a time
of theological transition. And this is true ; but it is not less
true that our own time is one of general change, — a time
when many hundreds and thousands are finding it impos-
sible to accept any longer the creeds and doctrines and so-
lutions to which they have assented heretofore with more
or less deliberate attention. A criticism of the Bible which
has revealed its natural history, which has made it impos-
sible for any scholar at once well instructed and perfectly
sincere to attribute a supernatural character to its various
parts or an authority over and above that of its intrinsic
force and charm, — this criticism for the upper millstone, and
for the lower the Darwinian development of species by nat-
ural selection, and not by special creation, as before, — be-
tween these two the traditional belief of a great multitude of
people has been ground to powder; and, while some of these
have easily adjusted themselves to the new order, — as if
they had been "not unclothed, but clothed upon," and have
not missed " the raiment warm by faith contrived against
our nakedness," — with many it has been quite otherwise than
so, and these, it must frankly be confessed, have not been
the least intelligent or thoughtful among those concerned,
but frequently the more intelligent and thoughtful. It has
often been the purblind and the superficial who have leaped
at once to some plausible reconciliation of the results of
science and the demands of the religious life ; while those
of closer observation and of deeper thought, while accept-
ing the results of science with a courageous heart, have
mournfully confessed that they cannot find in them anything
sincerely corresponding with the great thoughts of God and
immortality and the divine authority of the moral law. In
truth, a cloud, a huge, portentous cloud, has come and over-

80 The New Sinai.

shadowed the religious life of these, — a cloud generated by
the great mountain summits of the scientific range and grad-
ually enveloping that other mountain on which heretofore
our human life has been transfigured in the light of faith and
hope.

In the mean time the traditionalists, the apologists, are
pointing with great satisfaction to this state of things. They
are asking : " What did we tell you ? Didn't we say that sci-
ence had no message for the soul ? " They did, indeed,
thus making an appeal to coward hearts, imagining that fear
of entering the cloud would keep men on the plain, content
with worship of tradition's golden calf. It has kept many
there ; and many others have found the bosom of the over-
shadowing cloud so cold, so numbing to their sense, that
they have made haste to get away from it, and back to the
old comfortable haunts.

But there are those — and they are many in our time —
for whom such things are impossible- There are some things
from which they cannot get away. Kuenen and his fellow-
critics have destroyed the supernatural basis for religion.
Darwin and his fellow-scientists have substituted organic
evolution for special creation in the production of all ani-
mal structures, from the moneron to man. Granted that sci-
ence builds again no unity of religious thought which an-
swers to the needs of the religious life, the despair of science
does not mean the rehabilitation of the traditional belief.
That has been irretrievably dishonored by the plain discov-
eries of critical investigation. Thank God — or, if there be
no God, thank them — that there are men made of such stuff
that they cannot be scared by any blank negation, or by such
constructions as the great scientists have sometimes urged,
into the reacceptance of beliefs which they know, if they
know anything, are proved unsound.

" Is this a voice, as was the voice
Whose speaking told abroad,
When thunder pealed and mountain reeled,
The ancient truth of God ?

The New Sinai. 8 1

Ah, not the Voice : 'tis but the cloud,

The outer darkness dense
Where image none, nor e'er was seen

Similitude of sense.
'Tis but the cloudy darkness dense

That wrapt the mount around;
While in amaze the people stays

To hear the coming sound."

And now to make the cloud more dense, while promising
the dissipation of its bewildering gloom, there comes one
after another to assure us that science and reason are not
the trusty guides we have imagined them. Here it is Mr.
Kidd assuring us that we must have some ultra-rational
sanction for the social spirit, but leaving us very much in
doubt how or where we are to get it ; and here it is Mr. Bal-
four supporting the claims of an irrational authority for two
reasons : first, that the fundamental concepts of science are
as inscrutable as those of theology ; and, second, that, log-
ically carried out, a demented (i.e., mindless) materialism
would land us in some very disagreeable, not to say hor-
rible, practical conclusions. These " Down with reason ! "
prophets have been received, as we should naturally expect,
with tumult of acclaim by those high in places of ecclesias-
tical preferment. It was exactly what we should expect that
Bishop Potter, from applauding Mr. Kidd's performance,
should sink back into his episcopal chair to sign the famous
Pastoral Letter. Undoubtedly, the advice of Kidd and Bal-
four and their kind will be economized to an extent far in
excess of what those who offer it would feel justified in de-
liberately accepting for themselves or recommending to their
friends. They have merely said, " Make to yourselves
friends of the Mammon of irrationality, that, when you fail,
they may receive you into their habitations" ; and one cannot
but question whether they have not already doubted the wis-
dom of their course when there comes back to them from
the purlieus of traditionalism and conventionalism and apol-
ogetics the sound of many voices, crying, " The villainy you

82 The Neiv Sinai.

teach us we will execute ; and it shall go hard, but we will
better the instruction."

But whatever multitudes may find in such brilliant aberra-
tions as those of Kidd and Balfour permission to go on
worshipping in a temple that has been condemned as untrust-
worthy by a consensus of those competent in such matters, it
is a certain thing that not a few will much prefer " the bitter
heroism of science," if it must needs be that, to any wilful
abjuration of that mighty Scientific Spirit which for a thou-
sand years was left well-nigh without a witness on the earth,
but which now for three centuries has been adding countless
increments of knowledge, power, and use, and happiness to
man's estate, creating for him anew heaven and a new earth,
and making all things new, — among these the traditional the-
ology. For this, as now conceived by the most orthodox,
except where an incorrigible ignorance prevails, is something
very different from what it was even a century or half a cen-
tury ago. And, lo ! we have this interesting spectacle : Or-
thodoxy on a monument frowning at Science for her heartless
creed, when her own creed, but for the transformation which
Science has wrought on it, would be a thousand times more
heartless than the creed of Science in its most negative form,
or the most positive unloveliness that the Calvinistic science
of Professor Huxley was able to conceive. It is Science
which has damped down the fires of hell and despoiled the
Almighty of those attributes which an English Churchman
tells us made him "the most horrible being it is possible for
the imagination to conceive." It is only Orthodoxy as trans-
formed by Science that has any beauty that the kind-hearted
and the merciful should desire it for their own. If one had
to choose between Orthodoxy as it was before the mystery of
Science began working in its hideous bulk and Science in
its most negative statement or its most painful implications,
the man would be a fiend who would not choose the Science
ten to one. For, surely, it were better to be " without God in
the world " than to be in the world with such a God as Cal-
vin's ambushed in the dark. Better to be without any hope

The New Sinai. 83

of the immortal life than to believe in such a future as that
which has satisfied and delighted the theological imagination
until the most recent times.

But let me say just here that, while I am obliged to think
that both Kidd and Balfour and some others of their kind
have altogether missed the true significance of certain facts
of our experience, we are under obligations to them for their
attention to these facts, because others will now attend to
them, and resolve them into some more adequate generaliza-
tion than that of the great English commoner and the brill-
iant pamphleteer. What one of these is driving at with
his irrational authority, and the other with his ultra-rational
religion, is a kind of social rationality inherent in the race,
wiser, at least for social purposes, than the reasoning of any
individual person. It is Emerson's doctrine —

" All are needed by each one ;
Nothing is fair or good alone" —

exemplified upon the social plane. Here is something not
ultra-rational, as Kidd would say, but compounded of the
rationality, good, bad, indifferent, of all the countless millions
of mankind. Here is something not independent of expe-
rience, as Mr. Balfour thinks, but something compounded of
the experiences of all those who have at any time encoun-
tered the bright appearance of the outward universe and the
mystery of its indwelling life.

And hence it is that those have much to justify them who
hesitate to adopt this or that negative construction of science,
this or that pessimistic interpretation of it, as a finality set-
ting aside the Supreme Power, which, being one, men have
called by many names, or that Blessed Hope which has per-
sisted in despite of its intolerable associations, or that divine
authority of the Moral Law, without which the moral life of
man could never have the dignity and glory which it has had
heretofore for the great ethical leaders of the race. For you
will notice that, for the most part, what is called scientific ne-
gation or pessimistic science is not so much science as some

84 The New Sinai.

hesitation of Science to dogmatize where as yet she does not
know, or some daring generalization based upon what may-
be insufficient scientific data. Theology has been growing
for I do not know how many thousand years, and certainly
it has not yet attained the fulness of its stature. Science
was later born, and what could be done for a long time was
done to stunt its growth ; and yet you will find the theologians
continually speaking of Science as if it were in possession of
its maturest powers and had already spoken its last word.
Nothing could be more absurd than this. Under what pon-
derous hammers theologians and moralists have crushed
Darwin's hypothesis of the development of the moral sense !
Of course, it was imperfect, insufficient, unsatisfactory. It
was bound to be, for it was the first attempt to work out
a moral theory on the basis of organic evolution ; and first
attempts are always the simplest possible, and therefore, gen-
erally, the most inadequate. This is one instance out of
many that might easily be named. And they all carry the
same lesson ; namely, that neither the scientists nor the the-
ologians must be in haste to accept this or that negation or
pessimistic inference of science as a finality, and as such
subversive of the rough affirmations of that social rationality
which is compact of the reason and experience of the human
race, and not, I think, without some clear reflection of that
infinite rationality of God, which is forever immanent in all
the working of the natural and human world.

Here is no call for any one to accept for himself conclu-
sions which he is obliged to think irrational nor for any one
to withhold what he conceives to be the fair result of scien-
tific thought. We cannot spare the brave sincerity of any
of the humblest or the wisest of mankind. The more honest
and courageous the individual mind, the more excellent will
be the social rationality which is compounded of the think-
ing of an innumerable company of human beings in the long
years behind us and in this present time. Only let us keep
steadily in mind the fact that ours is pre-eminently a time of
intellectual transition, and be slow to accept any sweeping

The New Sinai. 8$

generalization, especially if it is subversive of the great faith
and hope to which the social rationality of the human race
has heretofore acceded with something approaching to a
cordial unanimity. There is a day after to-day. The end is
not yet. There is more truth, as Robinson, of Leiden, said,
to break forth from God's word, — not from the Bible only,
but from that book whose leaves are time and space, whose
sentences are writ in constellations and in galaxies upon the
evening skies. If it must needs be that offences come, why
not in our time as well as any ? Let us be as patient as we
can under the burden of the mystery. But, while appreci-
ating that every fact indubitably attested is a revelation as
authoritative as if God had rent the heavens and come
down, let us suspend our judgment for a time whenever we
have urged upon us a teaching, be it in the name of science
or theology, that appears to offer us only a mean and paltry
rendering of the universe or of the human soul.

"The man that went the cloud within

Is gone and vanished quite ;
' He cometh not, the people cries,

Nor bringeth God to sight ' :
' Lo ! these thy gods, that safety give,

Adore and keep the feast,'
Deluding and deluded, cries

The Prophet's brother-priest ;
And Israel all bows down to fall
Before the gilded beast.

" Devout, indeed ! That priestly creed,

( I .Man, reject as sin ;
The clouded hill attend thou still,

And him that went within.
He yet shall bring some worthy thing

For waiting souls to see :
Some sacred word that he hath heard

Their light and life shall be.
Some lofty part than which the heart

Adopt no nobler can,
Thou shalt receive, thou shalt believe,

And thou shalt do, O .Man ! "

NO BACKWARD STEP.

For some months I have been hearing much of Dr.
Gordon's new book, " The Christ of To-day," and have
anticipated great pleasure in the reading of it when the
convenient season should arrive. Reading it very carefully,
I finished it some days ago ; and I propose to make it the
subject of my discourse this morning. But why should I
do this ? Because the book is one of the most significant
that have recently appeared ; because it is particularly sig-
nificant to the Unitarian body, for which it has the finest lot
of compliments this body ever has received from such a
source, while at the same time it is invited to gird itself like
one in solemn haste for its return to the rock from which it
was hewn and the pit from which it was digged, — the ortho-
dox conception of Jesus, who is called the Christ. Its
author, Dr. George A. Gordon, is the minister of the Old
South Church in Boston, the most representative Congrega-
tional church in that city, and, consequently, in the United
States. He is a man of great ability and culture, a writer of
great force and brilliancy, the master of a noble rhetoric and
a happy gift of illustration, a preacher whose habitual note
is one of profound moral earnestness and spiritual invitation.
Moreover, his book is not an isolated product. It is one of
many which in these last days are coming in upon us like a
flood, — the characteristic books of what is sometimes called
Progressive Orthodoxy and sometimes the New Theology.
(The second of these names is certainly the better, because
"Orthodoxy" and "Progressive" are mutually destructive
terms. Orthodoxy ceases to be Orthodoxy the moment it
begins to be progressive. Progress ceases to be progress

SS No Backward Step.

the moment it becomes orthodoxy ; i.e., a doctrine which is
a dogma because it is held as a finality.)

I am a diligent reader of these books, though, in general,
they contribute little to the sweetness of my temper or the
improvement of my mind. But they are very interesting to
any one who is interested in the stupendous theological
transition of the time. It is no exaggeration to say that
three or four new ones have come to me in a single day.
They are of all degrees of merit, and I will only name some
of the most conspicuous of the most recently arrived :
" Social Theology," by President Hyde, of Bowdoin College ;
Dr. Coyle's "Spirit in Literature and Life," — certain " Rand
Lectures," delivered in Iowa College ; Rev. Frederic Pal-
mer's " Studies in Theologic Definition"; "The Morals of
Evolution," by Professor Harris, of the Andover Theological
Seminary; and with these the book to which I am inviting
your particular attention. They all agree in being wide
departures from the traditional standards of Orthodoxy,
but they agree in little else. The departure is in different
degrees. The devices whereby the new things are made to
look like the old things are extremely various. Here and
there a writer is quite indifferent to the old forms of
thought, and spends his strength in developing the new ideas.
Such an one is Professor Harris, of Andover; and how he
can ever sign again the creed which Andover professors are
obliged to sign every few years it is impossible to conceive.
But the Rev. Frederic Palmer, who is an Episcopalian clergy-
man in the same town, proposes to go on using the old
creeds and articles, with the understanding that they shall be
accepted as meaning not what they say, but what they do
not say, what the authors of them wanted to say, but couldn't
manage to articulate, what they would say if they were
living now in Mr. Palmer's skin and with his individual
mind.

But Dr. Gordon's book is, if not unique in the advancing
host, exceptional in the degree of its insistence on the divin-
ity and deity of Jesus Christ. In Professor Harris's book, as

No Backward Step. 89

in Dr. Lyman Abbott's " Evolution of Christianity," the
specialization of Jesus is simply an arbitrary assertion of his
unique perfection, — a perfection, nevertheless, entirely human
and attainable by other men, albeit with supreme omni-
science we are assured (at least by Dr. Abbott) that no other
human being has so far attained an equal height. If deity
is predicated of Jesus by writers of this class, it is only in the
sense that it is predicable of every human being; and the pred-
ication is built out of the ruins of the traditional doctrine of
the depravity of human nature, and on the deep founda-
tion of Channing's "one sublime idea," — the dignity and
grandeur of the human soul. In the Christology of such
writers we have a reproduction of the Unitarian thinking
midway of the century, when it was freeing itself from the
Arian and Socinian traditional forms and endeavoring to
find a speculative basis for its emotional persuasion of the
singularity of Jesus. It so happens that the Christology of
Professor Harris and Dr. Abbott and such men is far more
rational and progressive than the Christology of Channing
and his contemporaries who agreed with him, and even than
the Christology of Dr. Priestley and those who agreed with
him. The former was the Arian conception of Jesus as
a being sui getter is : the latter was the Socinian conception of
Jesus as a human being exalted to the right hand of God in
token of his moral victories over sin and death. But, be-
cause the Christology of Progressive Orthodoxy is far more
liberal and progressive than that of our early Unitarians, it
does not follow that it is any final resting-place for Orthodoxy,
^ny more than it was for Unitarianism when it arrived at it
some half a century ago. For this it was a theological
Samaria. But it must needs go to Jerusalem. Leaving
behind the half-way house that gave it comfort for a while, it
must push on to a more rational and consistent doctrine of
the humanity of Jesus, a less arbitrary specialization. And
we have every reason to believe that it will be as impossible
for the New Orthodoxy to go thus far and no farther as it
was for the Unitarianism of fifty years back.

90 No Backward Step.

But, as I have said, Dr. Gordon's book is not to be con-
founded with such restatements as Dr. Abbott's and Pro-
fessor Harris's. It is like them in its general departure
from the traditional theology of the Congregational churches.
It is unlike them in its persistent and emphatic specialization
of Jesus to a degree that makes him absolutely unique in
history and in the universe of souls. As compared with the
majority of the restatements of Christian doctrine that are
in these days " marching single in an endless file," it is, to
my apprehension, a restatement of commanding height. It
has a positive and affirmative and aggressive air and carriage
that are very interesting and engaging, especially in compar-
ison with the compromising, minimizing tactics of some
others. And then, too, there is little or nothing of the en-
deavor, so common and so unlovely and repellent, to put the
new wine into old bottles, and label them with the old labels,
and powder them with artificial dust, with a nice bit of cob-
web here and there, — tricks that are as familiar to the ob-
server of our theological transition as the successions of the
day and night. To the extent that Dr. Gordon differs from
the traditional theology, his difference is frank and unmis-
takable ; and there is not the least attempt to make it seem
less than it is or to call new things by old misleading names.
So far as he affirms the special and unique, divine and dei-
fied* character and function of Jesus, he is equally frank and
unmistakable ; and, while his goal is that of Orthodoxy all the
ages down, he does not pretend for a moment that his
path to it coincides precisely with the beaten track. It cer-
tainly does not. His despair of that is written upon every
page, — not in the way of criticism, but of avoidance and
complete neglect. The mighty theologians of the past have
"added to him nothing," as Paul said of the apostles at
Jerusalem. " Behold," he says, " I show unto you a more
excellent way." His book is a tremendous tour deforce,
whereby he is resolved to save, if possible, the threatened

* Not the right word, but there is no better to express something more than divine,
the actual deity of Jesus which Dr. Gordon predicates.

No Backward Step. 91

citadel of the peculiar and unique pre-eminence of Jesus,
even his eternal power and godhead.

1 could not, I think, have come to Dr. Gordon's book
with a more active prepossession in its favor than actually
possessed my mind. I had seen the man, and heard him
speak j and there was something in his speech and bearing
so strong and masterful, so simple and transparent, that I
could expect from him only fine and admirable things.
Then, too, I read the book in the warm light of a dear
friend's enthusiastic admiration ; and that continually gave
me pause, and, where my judgment was unfavorable, obliged
me to reconsider it, if haply a more favorable judgment
might ensue. My favorable prepossession was increased by
a wide tumult of acclaim from out the liberal ranks and by
the distrust and disapproval of those of high repute for an
orthodoxy as immaculate as the new-fallen snow. Last, but
not least, my friend Minot J. Savage had said of it in a
printed sermon, "There is almost nothing in it which I
should wish to attack. ... I have little else for it than un-
qualified praise."

Did I expect too much ? It is always dangerous to ap-
proach a book along an avenue that rings with cries of ad-
miration. I read " Rab and his Friends," for the first time,
on the strength of a comment on it, to the effect that any
one was less than human who could read it without shedding
tears. Less than human I was obliged to think myself, for
not one bedewed my cheek. (Another time I had a dif-
ferent experience.) Whatever the reason, I am obliged to
say that Dr. Gordon's book has grievously disappointed me.
I did not expect it to reverse all the deep-seated habits of
my theological belief. But I did expect a more serious and
imposing challenge of these habits than I found in the
event. Its rhetorical mountains are lofty, but the arguments
are mean. The texture of the book is that of a web heavy
with gold and precious stones, but so rotten in its fibre that
it falls to pieces in the admirer's careful hands. Uncon-
sciously, the writer has endeavored to make up for the pov-

92 No Backward Step.

erty of his reasoning by the splendor of his imagery and
style ; and many will, no doubt, be more than pleased and
satisfied to accept in lieu of bread the jewels that are scat-
tered with a lavish hand. Others will be more exigent.
Cardinal Newman has a noble sermon upon "Unreal
Words." Seldom have I read a book in which I have
seemed to find so many as in Dr. Gordon's "Christ of
To-day." It is as full of unreal thinking as an egg is full of
meat. It is smitten through and through with unreality.
Often, where there is most show of argument, we have a mere
juggle of words. Often, where the argument becomes most
tenuous, it is wound about with iridescent films of lovely
and beguiling speech, or suddenly we are invested in a rosy
mist, or dazzled with a blaze of rhetoric that makes men
appear as trees walking and everything uncertain and ob-
scure. Not for a moment do I imagine that there is any
conscious and deliberate device in this. " It is an insult to
allow that we are honest," Channing said ; and, if Dr. Gor-
don should resent my disavowal in this manly fashion, I
should not think it strange. But, as the eye spontaneously
closes to defend itself against any danger from without, so
I am obliged to feel that Dr. Gordon's mind, in the passion-
ate ardor of his desire to rehabilitate a tottering theology,
has closed spontaneously at the approach of anything that
made against his preconceived opinion, and opened only to
what seemed to favor it ; and not only so, but that he has
a rhetorical astigmatization which magnifies a hundredfold
whatever favors his foregone conclusion, and correspond-
ingly diminishes whatever fact is prejudicial thereunto.

But as yet I have not sounded the depths of my disap-
pointment in Dr. Gordon's brilliant and (for all its limita-
tions) fascinating performance. I go a little deeper when I
remark that I find in its central argument nothing of that
scientific method which the opening pages led me to expect
in the discussion of the lofty theme. I am reminded of that
'• Christian Science," which, however Christian it may be, has
nothing in its method which an instructed man of science

No Backzvard Step. 93

would recognize as having the least affinity with the patient
methods of his class and school. Everywhere we have
" a ladder let down " from an imaginary height, and dang-
ling in the air; everywhere the "high priori road," the stren-
uous endeavor to compel the echo of a foregone conclusion
from the facts, — and not a patient scientific investigation of
the facts, if haply, knowing what they are, we may adjust
ourselves to them with a courageous heart. In what some
would fain imagine they have found the radiant morning of
a new day of scientific Christianity I can only find the splen-
did sunset of the long cloudy day of mediaeval theology,
pre-scientific thought ; the last attenuation, elusive, vague,
impalpable, of a belief which once was solid to men's grasp
and like the earth under their weary feet.

Let me, in passing, beg you to notice this, — and you can-
not notice it too carefully : that, whatever the intrinsic merit
of Dr. Gordon's conception of Jesus, it is a pure specula-
tion. It has so much value, and no more, as his private
thought can give it, his personal argument. It has no dog-
matic value whatsoever. All of the old supports are gone.
The Bible has for him no supernatural character or author-
ity. For the old "Thus saith the Lord" we have simply,
"Thus saith Dr. Gordon." And, if his results are generally
accepted, they must be accepted solely upon his authority
by nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand people.
Even if his argument is valid, there are not two persons in a
thousand who can appreciate its force, so vague is it, so
mystical. It is hard to answer such a book. As the Span-
ish proverb says, " You cannot take soft cheese upon a
hook." Propositions to be answerable must, first of all, be
apprehensible. And Dr. Gordon's frequently are not. They
may be to him : they certainly are not to me. The fault may
be entirely on my side. Like foolish Ixion, I embrace a
cloud. But my self-respect demands that I should not con-
sider myself entirely singular in this regard. Wherefore, I
hope and trust that we have not here the last word of Ortho-
doxy, if Orthodoxy is to dominate the world for any length

94 No Backward Step.

of coming time. If we are to have no more of dogma, no
more finality, no more of irrational or ultra-rational or super-
natural authority, then, unless the hungry sheep are to look
up and be not fed, if the common people are to hear the gos-
pel gladly, and with an understanding mind, the statement
that is to attract and hold them and bind them in a high alle-
giance and a holy trust has got to be something ten times,
a hundred times, a thousand times, more <;lear and simple
and straightforward than Dr. Gordon's magnificent obscurity
and incomprehensible sublimity.

I go deeper still in fathoming my disappointment when I
say, as say I must in all sincerity, that Dr. Gordon has not
succeeded in developing a conception of Jesus, — " of the
Christ," I ought to say, for there is little or nothing of Jesus
in the vast ethereal abstraction which he has substituted for
his sweet human worth, — he has not succeeded in develop-
ing a conception of the Christ which can be relied upon to
touch the common heart, or indeed more than a few people
of exceptional imaginative genius or power of theosophic
speculation. Many will complain, as one did in the New
Testament legend, "They have taken away my Lord, and I
know not where they have laid him." Dr. Gordon has taken
Jesus away from the familiar earth and all the sweet
habitudes of its experience, and wrapped him in a winding-
sheet of cloudy speculation, and buried him in some hollow
cave between the confines of the human and divine, forever
inaccessible to men and women to whom he cannot lend his
mighty pinions and his winged heels. I know well enough
the limitations of Renan's portraiture of Jesus ; but, passing
almost directly from that — as brightened and renewed by
Dr. Allen's careful hand — to Dr. Gordon's rhapsodic varia-
tion on the immortal theme, I must confess that it is vastly
more attractive to my imagination and appealing to my
heart. Over and over again, a thousand times, we have had
it pleaded that the Nicene theology saved the humanity of
Jesus even while insisting on his deity. It was for this
reason that Dr. Hedge and other Unitarians were more

No Backward Step. 95

attracted to it than to the Arian conception, which interprets
Jesus as a being sui generis, — as one* said, "but an iota less
than God." But Dr. Gordon's Christ is as " remote from
the sphere of our sorrow " as the Christ of Arius. If here
and there his humanity is verbally expressed, the expression
is a mere logomachy. The whole stress of the argument is on
his singularity, his divinity, his deity, with immense rhetori-
cal agility the writer swinging himself back and forth between
these various expressions.

Let me quote a sentence here and there which bears upon
this matter: "The ultimateness of Christ's thought and the
finality of his spirit differentiate his transcendence from the
greatest and best of mankind, and ground his being in the
Godhead in a way solitary and supreme." I will not pause
to show how unscientific and unsatisfactory are the argu-
ments, if arguments they can be called, for such ultimateness
and such finality, but pass on to other sentences which en-
deavor to assimilate this idea of a supreme and solitary
Jesus, unique, divine, yea, " very God of very God," in a
manner wholly peculiar to himself, to the idea of Jesus as a
human being. For example, "That our Lord is the moral
ideal of humanity implies these two things, — that he is one
with humanity and that he transcends it infinitely." If we
have not here a contradiction in terms, I do not know the
meaning of the words. Again, in the same manner, " He is
the perfect humanity after which we must forever strive, and
short of which we must forever fall."

" Chip, chop, chain ;
Give a thing and take it back again.''

Such is the method over and over again in this discussion.
Dr. Gordon is an Hegelian of the Hegelians in his confidence
that the unity of truth is made up of contradictory proposi-
tions. Thus, "The mere fact of Christ's transcendence of
earthly conditions joins him to the race of which he is a
perfect specimen : the extent and character of this trans-

' Dr. Francis Park man.

96 No Backzvard Step.

cendence call for a deeper origin in God for him than for the
rest of mankind." If there is any meaning in these words,
it is entirely past my finding out.* So, again, where we are
told : " Only a Christ whose antithesis to humanity means the
presence of the very God can by his union with humanity
assure us of union with God. Discredit the infinite difference,
and we must doubt the sublime identity." Words, words,
words ! If Dr. Gordon has succeeded in deifying Jesus, he
has succeeded at the same time in utterly dehumanizing him
and in robbing humanity of any help that Jesus has
seemed to offer heretofore to the confirmation of its natural
heredity from God.

The fine things which Dr. Gordon has said about Unita-
rianism and Unitarians have, I fear, so dazzled many of our
people that they have had no eyes to see his fundamental
propositions, and the stupendous differentiation of his thought
and purpose from that of the Unitarian movement in the
present stage of its advance. That his words concerning us
are very fine there is no doubt. Fairer have never yet been
spoken by a preacher of commanding orthodox position,
and that the preacher of the Old South should have given
them utterance is something marvellous. One passage is as
follows : —

Any words of mine bearing upon Unitarianism are written, I trust it
is needless to say, in honor and gratitude for the great movement of
thought whose power for good has been so vast, but from whose con-
ception of Christ I differ. Mutual recognition is the basis of all fruitful
discussion. As a tenacious Trinitarian, I rejoice to recognize the bene-
fit to the Christian Church of the Unitarian contention. No intelligent
religious person can fail to honor its insistence upon the Fatherhood of
God, the real and therefore the divine humanity of our Lord, the func-
tion of history as a revelation of God, the place of the Bible at the cen.
tre of religious history, and salvation as a moral process under the Spirit
of God. Against a Trinitarianism that was tritheism, in opposition to
a view of the person of Christ that slighted his humanity and dishonored
the Eternal Father, in the face of opinions that made history godless and
terrible ; that construed salvation as outward, forensic, mechanical ; that

* But they are the key-stone of his argument, and that is strong only as they are
strong.

No Backward Step. 97

regarded religion as alien to the nature of man, at war with the intellect-
ual and moral wealth of the world, and that turned it into a provincial
and deformed thing, — the Unitarian protest was wholesome, magnificent,
providential.

Even less remarkable is the cordial recognition in this pas-
sage of the good things which Unitarians have done than
the indictment that is brought against traditional Orthodoxy.
Surely, no Unitarian has ever brought against it a more terri-
ble indictment, not Theodore Parker in his utmost joy of
battle. Another passage varies the form of this indictment,
but maintains its spirit, and reiterates the praise of Unitarian
truth. Here it is : —

Under the supremacy of the Augustinian and Calvinistic conception
of human nature, the consciousness of sin necessarily tends to become
exclusive, and the task of Christian living to become more and more
a lamentation over the defect of character and a despair of goodnes^.
More and more salvation must become, not the act by which God edu-
cates his children and claims his own, but the triumph of Almighty pity
over sheer worthlessness. This overdone sense of depravity, hardened
into dogma, stood for centuries against the truth that the morality of
God in Christ is the morality for mankind. The truth has at last pre-
vai'ed, and at this point of belief Christian people everywhere are under
an immense debt to the great Unitarian leaders.

Listen to this also, which does not more generously praise
our Unitarian leaders than it condemns the orthodox posi-
tion upon which they trained their guns : —

Channing and Hedge and Peabody and Furness, and their contempo-
raries, refused to be forever shut up within the consciousness of moral
defect and infirmity. They held that the morality of Jesus has power to
give life to the spirit to which it comes; that it elicits into clearness and
strength the aboriginal human endowment, sets free the divine in man's
constitution, and invests it with new vigor and prophetic invincibility.
The leaders of the Unitarian movement were men of exalted spirit; in
them the ethical and religious principles lived in great power. They
were unimpeachable examples of the high doctrine that they proclaimed.

We cannot be too grateful for this liberal appreciation,
and we cannot but be glad when a distinguished orthodox
preacher adopts the Unitarian criticism of the five points of

98 No Backward Step.

Calvinism, the Universalist doctrine of the salvation of man-
kind, the opinions which the higher criticism has developed
concerning the Bible in general and its various parts ; and
some of you, perhaps, will think that it is most ungracious and
ungrateful in me, where such immense concessions have
been made and such fine compliments have been bestowed,
to take a critical attitude, and put my emphasis on those
things which differentiate the thought of Dr. Gordon's book
from that of the consistent modern Unitarian. But, in doing
this, I only do what Dr. Gordon has done himself. He has
not spent his strength in complimenting Unitarians on the
virtues of their leaders and their sires, nor in laying bare the
hideous deformity of the theology of Augustine, Calvin, and
Edwards. The expression on these lines is brief and inci-
dental. When he girds up his loins like a man, and says,
" I will speak, and answer thou me," it is to frankly state his
difference from our Unitarian position in respect to the
humanity of Jesus. To repeat what I have said already, In
its main purpose and its almost exclusive emphasis his book
is a tremendous tour de force, whereby he is resolved to save,
if possible, the threatened citadel of the peculiar and unique
pre-eminence of Jesus, and ally him and identify him with
the Deity in a manner wholly unparalleled by any human
being, and impossible for any such. And not only so, but
Dr. Gordon's book is the frankest possible challenge to the
modern Unitarian to accept his doctrine of the peculiar
divinity and deity of Jesus, or perish for his fault. He says,
" The Unitarian movement has its opportunity here : it must
contemplate some kind of a return, — a return consistent
with its magnificent protest and achievement, — or it must
engage in a serious meditation with death." Not to accept
so frank a challenge would be simply pusillanimous.

I must confess that my impression of the book is very
different from Mr. Savage's, who says, as we have seen, that
he finds "little in it to attack," that he has "little else for
it than unqualified praise." Comparing it with Theodore
Parker's epoch-making sermon of 1841, "The Transient and

No Backward Step. 99

Permanent in Christianity," he says that that "was not
nearly so radical as related to the theology of that time as
Dr. Gordon's book is as related to the theology of our time."
I wonder how he could say that. I should say that not only
was Parker's sermon more radical in its day than Gordon's
book in ours, but that Parker's sermon preached in our day
would be much more radical than Gordon's book. For,
though Dr. Gordon's book is radical enough in its concep-
tions of the Bible and revelation and total depravity and
sacrificial atonement, it is immensely, strikingly, magnifi-
cently unradical, conservative, reactionary, traditional,
orthodox, in its conception of Jesus of Nazareth and his
relations to humanity and God.

The arguments by which Dr. Gordon endeavors to estab-
lish the unique divinity and deity of Jesus are anything but
stale. They are wonderfully fresh and new. They take up
into themselves what is favorable to them in modern thought,
as the purple ash takes from the soil the color of its leaf, the
rose the blood-red of its heart. There is nothing of the old
marshalling of texts. If texts are quoted here and there, it
is in a poet's fashion, as no one has ever quoted them before
or will again. It is not a little strange that a doctrine which
has been prominent in Christendom for fifteen hundred years
should find all its historical foundations rotten, and require
others, quarried from the most superficial deposits of the
modern mind. But one advantage of this situation is that,
gravitating to all that is most noble and encouraging in
modern thought, Dr. Gordon's book abounds in happy
inspirations. The way he travels may not reach the goal of
his desire ; but in the mean time it is generally a very pleasant
way, opening out here and there on landscapes of great
breadth and beauty, with flowers at every turn that have the
color of the writer's mind, the fragrance of his heart.

It is not an easy thing to reproduce the argument of Dr.
Gordon. To reproduce the music of an organ out of church
would be hardly more difficult, so set to music is his
thought, — the music of a beautiful and nohle ^style^ t -I^e,

IOO No Backward Step.

begins with the assertion that "certain great advances have
been made in the appreciation of the person " of Jesus. First,
as Channing phrased it, " the imitableness of Christ's char-
acter." "This, once an exclusive Unitarian possession, is
now," says Dr. Gordon, "the common property of all Chris-
tians." " The second great gain," he says, " lies in the repre-
sentative character of Christ, Godward." He is not the only
son of God. The universal sonship of mankind is written in
his face. So far we have good Unitarian thinking, and it is
interesting to our curiosity to see how by such steps Dr. Gor-
don can get any nearer to the deity of Jesus and his " social "
position in the blessed Trinity. Another great gain, he says,
is that "it is now becoming clear that the final meaning of
nature and the character of ultimate reality are given through
Christ." Nothing could exceed the looseness in the devel-
opment of this proposition. It is simply monstrous to say
that, " by all believers in God in our western world, Christ's
intelligence and will have been selected as representing the
Supreme Intelligence and will"; and the looseness becomes
absurd, if not immoral, when Shelley and Emerson are cited
with Wordsworth and Tennyson and Browning as "beholding
in nature one vast form of the Eternal Christ." In this con-
nection the scientific arraignment of nature comes up to be
judged. Dr. Gordon calls it a " horrible caricature," and
tells us that a different view is "beginning to control our
thoughts," the view of Professor Drummond, in his "Ascent
of Man," that there is in nature " a struggle for others," as
well as the mere egotistic, selfish struggle for existence. But
what is a mere beginning on page S8, on page 92 is a perfect
consummation. "Our universe," he says, "is now Chris-
tomorphic " ; t.e, it has the form of Christ's intelligence and
love. This upon the strength of a few brave endeavors to
withstand the swelling tide of pessimistic science. I have
the liveliest sympathy with those endeavors. But I am
appalled at Dr. Gordon's putting the goodness and benefi-
cence and tenderness of nature to a vote, and declaring a
unanimous affirmative, when Huxley was but one of many who

No Backward Step. 101

have had the conclusion that the universe is unloving, cruel,
anti-ethical, forced upon their minds ; and to affirm that the
natural order has "the mind of Christ," even if the tide of
pessimistic science had been turned back victoriously, is to
use the name of Christ so loosely that it becomes a delusion
and a snare which every one believing in clear thinking
should avoid.

A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and that, in
Dr. Gordon's " three great advances," is his last. The first
and second are advances in the Unitarian direction. The
imitableness of Christ's character and his representative
sonship are. Unitarian ideas of such early date that the pat-
ent on them has run out. The third of Dr. Gordon's " three
great advances " involves so much looseness, vagueness, and
assumption that I cannot conceive that it would have value
for any one who has a predilection for clear and definite
thought. I cannot conceive how Dr. Gordon himself can
put it forth as a piece of valid thinking. But, even if it were
entirely valid, and the universe were proved to have a lov-
ing heart, there would not be the least advance, "not in the
estimation of a hair," toward the enormous specialization of
Jesus which is the "butt and sea-mark of his utmost sail."

Dr. Gordon is himself of this opinion. Beyond the three
advances specified he tells us " all is dark " ; and they do not,
he says, bring us to any essential difference in Jesus from
mankind, "any relationship to the Deity that sets him apart
from mankind, any attribute in virtue of which he is the
Eternal Son of God." To establish this essential difference,
this peculiar relationship, this special attribute, is the main
purpose of Dr. Gordon's book. How does he go to work ?

In the first place, he says that to deny the possible
supreme divinity of Jesus means the destruction of all indi-
viduality. That may convey no meaning to your minds.
The meaning is that, if men are not all alike, if there are in-
numerable degrees of personality, one may be supremely
good ; and that one may have been Jesus. I think that we
shall none of us object to that. But so far we have only

102 No Backward Step.

possibility, and a possibility which, if converted into cer-
tainty, would not involve the essential difference from man-
kind, the peculiar relationship to God, the special attribute
of eternal sonship, which Dr. Gordon attributes to Jesus, and
would fain confirm as his inviolable trust. And, if it did, the
deity of Jesus, of which Dr. Gordon freely allows himself
to speak, would be almost as remote as ever. But how
does he convert his possibility of the unique supremacy of
Jesus in the universe of souls into the certainty of this ?
He shall answer for himself in his own words: "The path
to this eternal contrast between Christ and all the other
sons of God is his perfect humanity." We have a pure as-
sumption here — that perfect humanity dehumanizes. I
should consider it much more rational to affirm that the
most imperfect humanity does so. But here is a test which,
working it either way, would reduce the limits of humanity to
those of the Scotch orthodox kirk, ''me and Sandy," with a
doubt whether Sandy was quite orthodox. When Dr. Soule
at Exeter proposed to expel one of the boys because he was
the lowest in the class, the boy fell back upon his ounce of
mother wit, and said, " If you keep that up, you won't have
anybody left." Eliminate Jesus from humanity as the high-
est of mankind, and you have as good reason for eliminat-
ing the next highest, and so on.*

Dr. Gordon's supreme divinity of Jesus rests upon his
perfect humanity. Here is the elephant, and here are the
four tortoises ; and what next ? What do the four tortoises
rest upon? How prove the perfect humanity of Jesus?
" The scheme that is to prevail, that is not doomed to a dis-
astrous collision with reality, must grow [it is Dr. Gordon
who says so] out of the historic truth." Now, the historic
truth concerning Jesus is found in the New Testament. All
that is there is not historic truth, but there is no historic
truth about Jesus that is not there. Do we find the perfect

•This is a homely illustration, but is not homelier, I think, than Dr. Gordon's " grin
without a cat," — " the classic illustration of Alice in Wonderland," — to express the
futility of an exalted moral ideal without the personal Jesus.

No Backward Step. 103

humanity of Jesus in the New Testament, when we have
stripped away what is most obviously the accretion of a
credulous imagination ? Can we conceive of perfect man-
hood without that quality of fatherhood from which Jesus
drew his image of the Divine Perfection, — without the reali-
zation of those glorious passions which are the master pas-
sions of the human heart ? Moreover, are there not things
written of Jesus which, if they are true, take something from
the fulness of his perfection ? And one thing is sure, — that
Jesus did not consider himself perfect. He said: "Why
callest thou me good ? There is none good but one, and
that is God." Those are as certainly the words of Jesus as
any in the New Testament, because they would certainly
never have been invented by his admiring followers. They
stand so in Mark. In Matthew we can see the endeavor to
break their force : " Why speakest thou to me of the good ? "
It would be strange if the idealizing temper of the apostolic
age left anything in the record that could suggest a doubt to
that age of the moral perfection of Jesus. Probably it did
not, with the exception of the disavowal to which I have
referred. But however little the defect, and however beauti-
ful and glorious and tender the positive excellence disclosed,
appealing, as Dr. Gordon says we must, to historic truth, I
must confess — and here I know that I am one of many —
that I do not find anything in the New Testament to estab-
lish, or even to suggest, the essential moral difference of Jesus
from the best and greatest of mankind. But that is because
moral excellence is never a surprise to me. I expect it,
just as I expect the sun to rise, the stars to shine, the spring-
time or the falling snow to be most fair. I have seen too
much of it in history and in my own personal experience to
be astounded by its most lovely manifestations. What I am
astounded at is that any one imbued with the critical and
scientific spirit should find it necessary to isolate Jesus,
separating him from the great human order. Seen in the
light of critical research, he stands as naturally in the
human order as the trees stand in the woods. There are

104 No Backward Step.

human personalities which are much more baffling than his
in their source and stream.

The fact is we have discovered what Dr. Gordon's four
tortoises — the perfect humanity of Jesus — are resting on.
It is not on the historic truth of the New Testament. It is
on his theological inheritance of the Calvinistic persuasion of
human incompetency and depravity. Nowhere is he more
eloquent than where he is discarding this persuasion. But it
is one thing to intellectually disown a traditional doctrine,
and another thing to free one's self from its unconscious
working in our thought. The bed-rock of Dr. Gordon's
book is his inability to think greatly of mankind, to expect
from it a sublime morality. He frees himself in words from
the besetting sin only to find his thought enmeshed with it
a moment hence. He praises Channing for his lofty
affirmation of the dignity of human nature, but he never is
possessed by his spirit. If he had been, his work would
never have been written. The moral excellence of Jesus
never would have suggested his essential difference from the
best and wisest of mankind.

To sum up, Dr. Gordon has "three great advances" in
the appreciation of Jesus, two of which are commonplaces of
Unitarian belief, — "the imitableness of Christ's character"
and the universal sonship of mankind ; while the third, — the
heart of nature, the heart of Christ, — is too vaguely stated
and too loosely reasoned to deserve consideration. - Where-
fore at this point everything remains for him to do along
his special line. First, from the richness of the diversity of
human character he infers that one human being may exceed
all others, and that Jesus may be this one. Then by the
high priori road, with supreme indifference to the New Testa-
ment history, he arrives at the perfect humanity of Jesus, —
a perfection which isolates him from all others, makes him
absolutely unique, and not only the peculiar Son of God, but
God himself. For the later stages of this journey we have
beautiful words, with no corresponding realities of intellect-
ual seriousness. Between the perfect humanity of Jesus and

No Backward Step. 105

his deity there is a great gulf fixed, which Dr. Gordon spans
by a gossamer bridge, to which we are invited to intrust
ourselves. But we decline with thanks.

But the whole argument is of the flimsiest. In the first
place, upon the rich diversity of human nature is based the
possible supremacy of Jesus. In the second place, this su-
premacy is made the basis of his separateness from human-
ity and his unique relation to God. Could any two premises
be more absolutely exclusive and destructive of each other ?
Finally, for the unique perfection of Jesus we have no appeal
to history, but an argument whose silent major premise is
the Augustinian, Calvinistic, Edwardsean distrust of human
nature, which Dr. Gordon formally rejects, but unconsciously
reproduces upon every page.

No backward step ! If the alternative to such a method
and conception as Dr. Gordon offers us is, as he says, " a
serious meditation with death," then be it this. It will then
be at least " serious " ; and that his method is not, and his
conception is not. But I, for one, do not believe that " a
serious meditation with death " is the only alternative to our
acceptance of an unserious scheme of thought, or to any sort
of a return to the traditional theology. The Unitarian op-
portunity is not here, but in a conception of humanity so
generous and so expectant that the lofty and inspiring ex-
cellence of Jesus shall be to us more natural and human
than the baseness of the wicked and the vileness of the vile,
and in a conception of the Incarnation that must have
ampler evidence of the Human Heart of God than is sup-
plied by one supreme attainment, — even so much as glows
and shines and burns for us in the unnumbered lives of
those who have lifted up their hearts to great ideals, and
have embodied them in the joy and sorrow, in the struggle
and the anguish, in the yearning and devotion, of their
daily walk with God.

GRAVITATIONS OF THE SPIRIT.

When we read in the New Testament, " To him that hath
shall be given, and from him that hath not shall be taken
away even that which he hath," we may think that we have
here a hard saying \ but we are constrained to recognize that
it has in it a great deal of truth. It is the conclusion of a
parable based upon the aggregating quality of money; and
no one, I imagine, will deny that the parable was well
conceived. The destruction of the poor is their poverty.
Everything costs them more because they have to purchase
it in the smallest quantities. The shabby clothes stand in
the way of the employment which would make better possi-
ble. The lack of capital handicaps the smaller manufact-
urers and tradesmen in the race. The big fish eat up the
little ones : we have many kinds of business in one, and
the great trusts annihilating individuals to left and right.
The more gigantic these, the greater their capacity for ab-
sorbing enterprises of more modest character into their por-
tentous bulk. So with the private fortune.* Once a certain
point is reached, and under normal conditions the great
financier has little more to do than sit beside his nectar, and
see his wealth making itself greater by spontaneous aggrega-
tion. While he is musing, the fire burns. And what is true
in these particulars is true of every kind of individual and
social aggregation. Let the preacher attract a thousand
hearers, and another thousand will come easily enough. Let
the magazine or newspaper get one hundred thousand sub-
scribers, and another hundred thousand comes inevitably.

' I have read in the Life of Samuel Tilden that what he left increased from five
to seven millions in the short time between his death and the final judgment of the
courts which robbed his benevolent intentions of one-half their moral force.

ioS Gravitations of the Spirit.

" Trilby " or some other novel of the day runs up a sale of
fifty thousand copies. Whereupon another fifty thousand is
secure, and another hundred on the hundred thus attained.
The Bible asks, " Is not a man much better than a sheep ? "
In one particular they are very much alike. If anything,
man is the more imitative of the two.

It is very interesting to see how soon men's dominant
tastes and admirations become principles of aggregation in
their lives. No one liked a pleasant story better than Dr.
Furness, and consequently his many were continually gather-
ing more. When his friends heard of a new one, they were
unhappy until they had imparted it to him. When I went to
see him on his ninety-third birthday, he had two or three
which he had just added to his collection, — one of the lofty
carriage of a darling little fellow, three or four years old, and
very near to death, whose trained nurse, a stranger in the
house, had called him a baby. " Show her my trousers," he
said to his mother, reporting the indignity. The same prin-
ciples operated writh Dr. Furness in the matter of his New
Testament criticism. His friends were always bringing to
him reports and incidents that fitted into his theory, like a
hand into a glove. And, if ever it received a wound, he had
only to stretch out his hand, as Thoreau did when he got a
fall in Tuckerman's Ravine, and there was the Arnica mollis,
the very thing he needed for his hurt.

It is with reputations as it is with personal experience.
They grow by the attraction of their quality. How many
cynical observations have been attributed to Rochefoucauld
that are not his ! How many witticisims to Sydney Smith !
How many homely parables to Abraham Lincoln ! One
might say without exaggeration that here is a key that un-
locks more mysteries of literary aggregation in the Bible
than any other. Moses — rightly enough, perhaps — ac-
quired the reputation of being a law-giver. Hence century
after century laws were credited to his genius and received
the stamp of his authority with which he had nothing to do.
In 620 b.c. the whole book of Deuteronomy was attributed

Gravitations of the Spirit. 109

to him, and that made it the most easy and natural thing in
the world to attribute to him en bloc the whole Levitic leg-
islation which we have in Numbers and Leviticus. In the
same way David got the reputation of being a hymn-maker,
a psalmist ; and, of our one hundred and fifty Psalms,
seventy-three are attributed to him, while the tendency of
our most learned criticism is to put the entire Psalter on this
side of the exile, — that is to say, five centuries later than
his time ; if averaged, six or seven. The case of Solomon
is precisely similar. His was a reputation for proverbial
wisdom ; and so a Book of Proverbs, which is made up of
several other books, and which was the growth of centuries,
was attributed to him, and not only that, but Ecclesiastes,
because of its proverbial character, and the Wisdom of Sol-
omon, for the same reason, and the Song of Songs, because
it seemed to be a good deal in his line. There are many
other illustrations of this principle of qualitative aggregation
in the Bible. Two-thirds of the Book of Isaiah have got
there in this way, much of Job, Zechariah, Micah, some of
Jeremiah, and so on.

This kind of thing has both absurd and painful illustra-
tions in our every-day affairs. Reputations are built up by
it, and others are destroyed. A rolling stone gathers no
moss, but a revolving rumor gathers abundant incident and
confirmation. Given the disposition to believe well or ill
of any one, and the pound gathers ten pounds very soon.
The testimony to which we should not give the slightest
heed, as against our own political chief, would be utterly
damning for us, as against a political opponent. Fere Hben-
ter homines id quod volunt credunt. I remember so much of
Caesar's Gallic Commentaries the more easily because it has
been rubbed into me by the experience of forty years.
" Men very readily believe that which they want to."

In short, to him that hath shall be given. It is a principle
of spiritual gravitation which finds its illustrations in a hun-
dred different aspects of the intellectual and moral life of
individuals. It is the principle of inertia and the law of the

no Gravitations of the Spirit.

least resistance carried over from the material into the
spiritual sphere. Every physical body has a disposition to
maintain the condition in which it finds itself. That is the
principle of inertia. It is commonly understood to mean
only that bodies have a disposition to remain immovable
and unchanged. And this misunderstanding is carried over
into the metaphorical meanings of the word ; and, when we
say that a man is inert, we mean that he is sluggish, dull,
immovable. But there is as much inertia in a physical
body's disposition to go on in the way it is going as to
remain in the position in which it is. As with the physical
inertia, so with the spiritual, for which Habit is another name.
Every habit — idleness, industry, generosity, meanness, in-
temperance, temperance, selfishness, benevolence — tends to
its own perpetuation and increase. If you don't want to be
a thing, then do not do it many times. If the line of the
least resistance manifestly leads to physical or intellectual
or moral ruin, then — right about face !

We are permitted not only to perceive that these things
are so, but, to some extent, how they are so. Like loveth
like, the proverb says, or, should I say, the poet sings ?
There is a proverb that says something to the same effect :
"Birds of a feather flock together."

Now there is warning here, as well as simple and indif-
ferent fact. We must beware of the fatality of an environ-
ment selected by our dominant tendencies of thought and
feeling. When we discover that we are having everything
pretty much our own way, that all is grist that comes to our
mill, that almost everything we read and almost every one
we meet tends to confirm us in our personal opinion, we
must begin to suspect ourselves, to ask whether we are not
following too complacently the line of the least resistance,
seeking too much the sympathy of those who are likely to
agree with us, or for the sake of good fellowship avoiding
grounds of difference with our acquaintances and friends.
Friendship is hardly worth the having that puts a padlock
on our lips. Far better that which is equal to the stress
and strain of manly difference !

Gravitations of the Spiiit. 1 1 1

To him that hath shall be given. The modus operandi
in the sphere of public thought and action is as clear as
clear can be. The belief or policy once dominant be-
comes selective of our environment of men or books ; and
this re-enforces our belief, strengthens our confidence in our
policy, whatever it may be. We read the newspapers, the
arguments, the speeches, that will confirm us in our faith ;
and we give a wide berth to those of a different and oppos-
ing character. So doing, we follow the line of the least
resistance. As with matters of public thought and action,
so with matters of the pure intellect, and with matters of
social theory and religious doctrine and observance. I look
into my own heart, and write. My inclination is to read the
books that will confirm my well-established thought, philo-
sophic, economic, theological. I dare not say that I should
not have been the chief of sinners in this kind but for my
happy fortune as a reviewer of many books. As they come
to me, they are of all kinds, — realistic, idealistic, experiential,
intuitional, socialistic, individualistic, conservative, heretical,
theistic, atheistic, and so on. And the consequence is that
I am not so cock-sure, so absolutely certain, so dogmatic
about many things as I might otherwise be. For there are
a good many things which, to feel entirely sure about, you
must only read one book or one set of books. If you read
more, you will have to stop and think ; and before you know
it you will have " the fatal disqualification of seeing the
other side." But there are great compensations in the
wider view. It is destructive of Carlyle's estimate of the
human population, " mostly fools." You find that people
who have ten times your brains and your patience of investi-
gation have not arrived at your opinions ; and, though it may
still be hard for you to see how this one or that can think
as he does theologically, or, thinking as he does, stay where
he is, it is not so hard as it would be without this discipline.
If there is any one set of books that has helped me more
than others, it is the biographies of men distinguished in the
different religious sects. They have not made me doubt —

112 Gravitations of the Spirit.

no, never for an hour — the essential soundness of my Uni-
tarian faith ; but they have enabled me to see to what
extent men's theological beliefs are symbolical, and how
sweet and excellent the things they symbolize may be, while
to the symbol itself one is not attracted in the least. And
they enable you to see how wonderfully the character and
life transcend their doctrinal concomitants. When, as a
little boy, I asked the apothecary to put a " libel " on the
bottle, he seemed to be amused ; but that theological labels
are very often, if not generally, libels I have since found to
be a good saying and worthy of all acceptation.

As it is in intellectual matters, so is it in the moral. You
know about the Concord woman who said to Emerson,
" When you enter a room, I resolve that I will try to make
human nature seem beautiful to you." I could wish that
she had done so, and succeeded, and not said anything about
it. Doubtless there are many who have worked the mystery
this wise, perhaps unconsciously. That is the way of the
world. If men expect goodness and nobility, it comes to
them, like doves to the windows. If they expect things
hateful and unclean, such rain upon them. Max Nordau
has a fixed idea that degeneracy is the salient feature
of the closing century. So possessed is he with this idea
that his own sanity is endangered, and is sometimes
seriously impeached ; but on this account its attractive
force is not less conspicuous. He finds all the facts he
wants to justify his preconception. The excesses and
mistakes of genius make genius itself intolerable to him ;
and he hails the utter lack of it in Mr. Alfred Austin as a
delightful omen of the clay when the kingdoms of this world
shall become the kingdoms of Commonplace, and Dulness
shall enjoy a universal reign. So it was with Schopenhauer.
He was just the man to whom to turn one's seamy side ; and,
consequently, for confirmation of his pessimism he did not
lack. You know there was a Scotch woman who said of her
minister that, if there was a cross text in the Bible, he would
be sure to find it for his sermon. But given a man or

Gravitations of tJie Spirit. 113

woman who believes in human goodness heartily, and life
seems to organize itself into a conspiracy about them to sus-
tain their cheerful faith. For them there are no bearers of
ill tidings. All their friends are like the sparrow that the
Greek orator saw midway of his oration, and stopped to say,
" I see in the court-yard a sparrow that has seen a slave spill-
ing a sack of corn, and he has gone to tell his fellows."
Sure enough he had, and back he came with them to riot in
the bounteous store. Such hearers of good tidings are not
few. Goodness attracts goodness, kindness attracts kind-
ness, love attracts love. Attracts ! It does more than that.
It creates it, teases it from what seems the most reluctant
soil. I have read a story* of a man who was a potter, and
who had a " wee lad " at home, who was frail and sick and
never likely to get well. And every night he carried home
to him some pretty little thing, — a bit of colored glass, per-
haps a flower, — anything bright and cheerful that could lie
on the white counterpane in the narrow room, and help to
wear away the long and tedious days. Pretty soon the other
workmen in the shop got wind of what was going on, and
they were not going to be left out. They made little jars
and cups, and stuck them in the corners of the kiln at
baking time ; and, when these had been taken out and
cooled, they put them in the poor man's hat or somewhere
where he would know that they were meant for him to take
and carry home. They did the same with pictures and with
flowers. Not a day went by without some token of their
silent sympathy. For it was silent, for the most part, on
both sides. The wee lad's father was a man of few words ;
and, even when the others took a little of their leisure to do
something that would shorten his day's work, so that he
might have more time at home, he hadn't much to say. And
he had still less, and yet enough, one day, to tell them that

* [n the volume of Rev. Oscar C. McCulloch's beautiful discourses, where it is given
as " cut from a paper " ; but the form, I think, which I have not followed closely, is Mr.
McCulloch's. His book, "The Open Door," should have a hundred readers where it
has but one.

114 Gravitations of tlie Spirit.

the little boy was dead ; and when, a day or two later, the
bell tolled for the funeral, just around the corner from the
shabby door there were a hundred of the workmen, all in
their best clothes, waiting till the tiny coffin was brought out,
and then falling into line and walking to the grave. It cost
them a half day's work to do this gentle office ; but when did
ever poor men stand upon a thing like that ? And so again
it was fulfilled as it is written, " A little child shall lead
them."

And now do you know that in such a story as this which I
have told it seems to me we have in little all the sphere
of human life. The whole round world is but a pottery in
which some workman always has a " wee lad " sick, or a
poor wife ailing and broken, or some other trouble ; and,
given a faithful, loving heart, the gravitation of the planets
is not surer than that sympathy and love and help will
gravitate to it, and, so doing, build up the man or woman
to whom such things come into a sweeter faith, a nobler
purpose, and a better life. Human nature and human life,
in general, is for the most of us only our personal experi-
ence of human nature and of human life writ large; and
men's faith in God is generally much or little in proportion
to their faith in human kind. Supposing any one could have
made the poor man of my story understand the pessimism
of Schopenhauer and Hartmann, do you imagine that he
could have been made to believe it ? I do not. Nor the
atheism of some others. This is the true revelation of
the Father in the Son of which we hear so much, — the reve-
lation of the divine in the human. Only thank God, and
thank a multitude of men and women that no man can num-
ber, that the revelation is not confined to one Son of God
who lived and loved and taught and died in far-away Judea
eighteen centuries ago, and that he was not even the
first-born of many brethren, seeing that thousands before
him had shown little or much of the Eternal Goodness, and
men and women had rejoiced to see their day. And when,
as now often happens, well-meaning persons tell us, " Yes,

Gravitations of the Spirit. 115

we know all that ; but we prefer to use the ancient doctrine
as a symbol of the modern thought," happy are we if grace
is given to us to say, " I pray thee have me excused," or
"Get thee behind me, Satan," or words to that effect. For
the doctrine that Jesus is " the only begotten of the Father"
is no more a fitting symbol of the universal sonship of
humanity than a brick is a fitting symbol of a house or a unit
of a million ; and the revelation of God in Jesus is no more
a fitting symbol of the revelation of God in humanity than
one perfect rose is a fitting symbol of the boundless wealth
of June and all the summers that have ever come and gone.

You will think, perhaps, that I have left my story of the
kindly potters far behind ; but I will return to it for a mo-
ment, just to say a word that may not be altogether pertinent,
but which I am moved to say, which I am always moved to
say, as I have opportunity. It is that those workmen in the
pottery were, probably, miserably imperfect men. I have
not the least doubt that they drank and swore and did other
equally disreputable things. But on this account my faith
is in no wise shaken in the goodness of their particular con-
duct in the case of their companion and his suffering child.
As it was there, so it is everywhere. I find few perfect men
and women. Some of the most respectable would not bear
turning inside out so well as some of the most disreputable.
But few, if any, are without some better part, which only
waits for the appropriate touch to openly declare itself.

That the laws of health and the laws of disease are the
same laws is an old maxim which few, if any, are disposed
to doubt. The illustrations of my leading thought come
with an equal abundance and impressiveness from the upper
and the lower side of life. In little things or great the doc-
trine holds, To him that hath shall be given. On that am-
brosial night when we saw Browning at home, and he showed
us the veritable book out of which grew his marvellous poem
"The Ring and the Book," he showed us other things that
had been sent to him because the senders knew that they
were things after his own heart, — a medal of his beloved

1 1 6 Gravitations of the Spirit.

pope, a contemporary picture of the execution of his
wretched Guido Franceschini, and so on. Let a man have
any dominant taste or sentiment or aspiration, and it be-
comes magnetic to the things that nourish it and give it
power and scope. I have never forgotten a phrase in one
of Mr. Staples's sermons, — he that flamed up where I am
standing now, before I came. It was "a fate of good fel-
lows." It was a fate of bad fellows that he meant ; for the
connection was: "Has a man chosen coarseness? His
choice seems at once to embody itself in his companions,
who become a fate and fury to him. . . . How many a man
becomes fixed in habits of indulgence in this way ! Before
he is aware of it, his indulgence, at first casual, gets organ-
ized into a fate of good fellows who almost force him to
his ruin.1' But, whether good fellows or bad fellows, the
law, the principle, is just the same. Given a prurient ten-
dency, and what encouragement it gets from men and
books ! As for the latter, they seem to shape themselves
from out the circumambient air ; and those that the clean-
minded find innocent enough yield to the baser sort some
contribution to their stock in trade, something confirmatory
of the fault with which they palter when they ought to
strike it down. It is just so with any evil tendency. It
is a principle of aggregation that is selective of the com-
panions, the friends, the books, the studies, the circum-
stances, that will establish and entrench a man in a fortress
almost impregnable to the assault of good or ill, according
as the dominant, selective principle is one that makes for
blessing or for bane.

And the upshot of the whole matter is, Beware ! In
the early Christian scriptures, not included in the New
Testament, there are some pregnant sayings attributed to
Jesus ; and one of these, "Be ye good bankers," looks as if
it might originally have been a part of the parable of the
talents which I have read to you this morning, and from
which my text was taken, " Be ye good bankers." That is
to say, Knowing this universal tendency of life to aggre-

Gravitations of the Spirit. Wj

gate about a man and in a man such things as are according
to his dominant tendencies of mind and heart, beware what
you invest. Ask yourselves honestly, Is this or that some-
thing that I am willing and glad to have increase till it be-
comes my fate, my character, my life ? For these are those
who, not having asked this question manfully, or having
failed to act according to the answer given, have gone on
from bad to worse until there has seemed to be for them no
place for repentance, though they have sought it diligently
and with tears. But if we would be good and true, helpful
and kind and brave, thank Heaven the world abounds in
men and books, in situations and events, with a celestial
ichor in their veins, which, if we choose, can be transfused
into our own, in order that thereby we may be strong for the
upholding of all honorable contentions and the beating of
all mean and hateful passions down.

THE POSSIBLE LIFE.

I have had some very pleasant Sunday services in the
course of my vacation, but only two or three of them have
been of the conventional type. More frequently they have
been of that kind the robins and the thrushes institute in
their leafy choirs, and which has found in the most quaint of
modern poets a felicitous interpretation, thus : —

Some keep the .Sabbath going to church :

[ keep it staying at home,
With a bobolink for chorister

And an orchard for a dome.
Some keep the Sabbath in surplice ;

But I just wear my wings,
And instead of tolling the bell for church

My little sexton sings.

God preaches, — a noted clergyman, —

And the sermon is never long.
So instead of going to heaven at last,

I'm going all along.

One of our best of these out-of-door services was a few
Sundays since. Stepping southward, we felt the wind blow
as refreshingly upon our faces as if it came from its familiar
western cave. And, as we went along, the fields new-mown,
or with their scanty rowen softer for the foot, invited us con-
tinually to leave the beaten track, and try their possibilities of
homely pleasantness. For all the bars were down, as if to say
to us, Come in ! come in ! How could we choose but heed so
sweet an invitation ? So in we went upon the right hand and
the left, and made such beautiful discoveries that we said
how foolish we had been to come that way so often, and
never turn aside before with vagrant feet to seek a newer

2 The Possible Life.

world. The very rudeness of our mountain scene, the
roughness of our meagre soil, made beauty for us as we went.
The way of the transgressor may be hard in spiritual things,
but in things natural I- have ever found going across lots
one of the most inspiriting and free and glad. What nooks
and corners shadowed by the gigantic bowlders which the
glaciers had brought down with them as they went crawling
south ! What lordly trees which by their proud magnificence
had prevailed upon the thrifty farmer to withhold his axe,
albeit conscious of a wealth of firewood lavishly foregone,
and some armfuls of good hay diminished by the shade !
In these seclusions, how far away, how non-existent, seemed
the city's madding crowd, and even the village neighbor-
hood !

O peace and rest ! upon the breast
Of God himself we seemed to lean ;

No break or bar of sun or star,

Just he and we, and naught between !

So many treasures did we find, belated blueberries, and
small black cherries, tasting of our early prime, — what taste
more sweet upon life's westering slope! — that straightway
then and there it was highly resolved that in future we would
make such ventures oftener, and see what riches we could
find.

That day I found my sermon for this morning with the
rest ; and here it is, — a sermon of the possible life, the open
doors, the bars let down, the frankest invitation to such
travellers as you and I to leave the beaten tracks and try the
neighboring fields. I know well enough how the sweet habi-
tudes of our domestic life and our customary relations with
each other in the round of social duties and amenities con-
serve much that is excellent. There has been a struggle for
existence on these lines, as well as in the animal and vege-
table worlds ; and the established order is in no small degree
the survival of the fittest. But, however it may be with the
plant or animal in which fixity of type is everything and

The -Possible Life. 3

there is no tendency to variation, the social or domestic,
the political or religious life that comes to this has reached
the beginning of the end, — the end of growth, if not of
mere existence, between which and death there is not much
to choose. The conventional is a vampire that sucks out
the life of individuals and institutions, slowly it may be, but
with an insistence that is sure as the habitual alternations
of the day and year. What can be more inane than is the
formal interchange of social compliment among persons who
make up what is called good "society"? And what can be
more encouraging than the damage clone to this by the more
active intellectual and moral life of women, bringing them to-
gether in some earnest, vital way, and leaving them no time
to waste on mere formalities ?

Religion has no deadlier enemy than conventional accept-
ance of its creeds, and a similar observance of its forms.
There is more religion in the deliberate atheism of some
people than in the voluble assent of some others, because it
corresponds to something real, because it means that the
man is really thinking for himself, that he is really touched
and moved, impassioned and tormented, by the insoluble
problems of existence and the tragic aspects of the natural
and social worlds. I have told you probably of an old-time
minister in Marblehead who used to pray twice every Sunday
for those who go down to the sea in ships, — "May they be
blessed with a perpetual calm." Dis alitur visum : the old,
weather-beaten skippers in the pews saw it quite otherwise.
Now there are always people whose ideal of the perfect in
religion is that of Parson Dana for his fisherman, — a per-
petual calm. But the history of religion shows that its
periods of vitality have been its periods of controversy,
agitation, change. Some of our Unitarians are quite too
easily troubled by a little difference of opinion between dif-
ferent sections of the body ; and when a few years ago we had
a love-feast at Saratoga, and wiped out our old preamble and
began again, they thought that we had arrived at length to
a definite, coherent homogeneity, and that we should never

4 The Possible Life.

have any differences of opinion any more. We were to stop
thinking, and just chant in unison, "Love to God and love
to man ; Love to God and love to man," till the millennial
dawn. Some of you must remember how happily Mr.
Crothers satirized this notion at one of our social meetings,
telling the story of the preacher who demanded with such
vociferous iteration, "Who would be a goat ? " that at last
a man in a back seat got up and announced that, as no one
else seemed willing to officiate in that capacity, he would be
a goat. So Mr. Crothers told us that, so necessary was it to
have some honest difference of opinion for the health of
our religious body, that, if nobody else was ready to start
in with some novel bit of heresy or schism, he would offer
himself in that capacity. " Not as if I had already attained,"
said the apostle ; and some of us, I know, have wondered
whether a certain flatness, which has succeeded to our pre-
vious exaltation has not resulted from our thinking that we
had already attained, and would be no more troubled with
the void and pang of unfulfilled desire.

All this is episodical, and has perhaps kept me too long
from the main stream of my discourse. But the lesson is
extremely pertinent when so many mere apologists, masked
as philosophers, argue with much plausibility that here and
there evolution, to which of course they heartily subscribe,
has done its best, and can no farther go. Christianity is its
consummate flower. If, yes, and perhaps ! If so, it is a
Christianity which has not yet seen the light, a Christianity
of the future, not of any past. " Revolutions," said Victor
Hugo, "never stop half-way." Evolution never stops any-
where. When it stops, it ceases to be evolution, and be-
comes arrested development. The race, the institution, the
religion, having the promise of no further growth, enters
upon a period of death in life, and slow, immitigable decay.

But I am more anxious to apply my doctrine of the open
doors, the invitations of fresh opportunities from the beaten
tracks, to our individual experience than to that of any social
aggregates, religious or political. Those of you who have

The Possible Life. 5

read the life of Dr. Holmes must have had a kind of shiver
at the thought what a mere accident it was that revealed to
him that power the genial exercise of which made him an
autocrat to whose rule we have subjected ourselves with great
joy and gladness ; and the shiver has been more searching
of our joints and marrow when we have thought of Abraham
Lincoln, how, but for the contest with Douglas, which gave
the world assurance of a man, he might have been merely
a long-limbed, story-telling circuit lawyer all his days ; or of
Grant that, but for the war's great opportunity to prove him-
self, he might have sunk in a few years into that drunkard's
grave toward which in 186 1 his feet were set upon a sharp
incline. Here for a moment let me pause to say that such
things should encourage us most pleasantly, when our good
Ship of State seems to be drifting on a shore that ominously
roars as if it hungered for its prey. Where are the men,
we say, to lead us now as we were led before ? And you will
hear some talking as if

Once to every man and nation

Comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth with falsehood,

For the good or evil side,

and as if that once were now, and, choosing wrongly, we
should float forevermore a derelict among the nations of
the earth or go to pieces on the jagged rocks. These dole-
ful prophecies are gross exaggerations of a trouble that is
real enough. For, if we make some terrible mistake, through
the swift misery and destruction it will bring upon us we
shall find out how foolish we have been, and seek the better
way ; and in the day of our distress men will emerge from
deep obscurity equal to the event, whatever it may be. No
one had a classified list of the men who brought us through
the red sea of the Civil War in advance of that momentous
time. Fame does not sound a trumpet before her, as the
hypocrites do in the synagogues and at the corners of the
streets. She can keep her secrets, as we common mortals
seldom can or do. The shore of time is strewn with nations

6 The Possible Life.

that have gone to wreck. It is like that "ocean graveyard,"
as they call Sable Island, where so many ships lie buried in
the sand. But there would be ten to one, if not an hun-
dred, if all the prophecies of doom which timorous and cow-
ard hearts have spoken had been fulfilled. If America can
be ruined by a financial blunder of the East or the West, she
does not deserve the sacrifices that have been made for her;
and, the sooner History blots out her name, the better for
mankind.

But what I had in mind when I spoke of Dr. Holmes's
glad self-revelation and of those continental men which
Lincoln and Grant discovered in themselves, when all the
winds were loose, was that, however special their experience,
it hints at the fact that even the most ordinary lives run
parallel with splendid opportunities, — splendid, that is, com-
pared with the habitual life with which we are contented, if
not satisfied. Of all Philip Gilbert Hamerton's books the
most delightful has ever been to me "The Unknown River,"
the book itself too generally, I find, unknown. Now, by
" The Unknown River " he does not mean any river which
has not heretofore been discovered or set down upon the
maps. He means a river by. whose banks men had built
their houses, and in whose rippling waters women had
washed their clothes, and boys and girls had dabbled with
untroubled joy, but of whose possibilities of gleam and
gloom, of fitful wandering, of infinite beauty of one kind
and another, all these had been as unconscious as if no
such river had ever stolen, with shy whispers and low laugh-
ter, through their sunlit fields or given them back from its
unruffled breast the light of moon and stars. Oh, there are
many unknown rivers in the world, and unknown mountains,
too, and hills and glades and woodland solitudes, — un-
known or known but to a few, and known in various de-
grees. I think, sometimes, that I know pretty well our
Hampshire County woods and waters. But if John Bur-
roughs or my friend William Hamilton Gibson, with whom I
shall have pleasant speech no more, could have had my

The Possible Life. J

twenty years among them, what blankest ignorance would
my knowledge be compared with theirs !

All this is parable of spiritual realities. There is a river
the streams whereof make glad or sad the places where we
live and love and have our joy and sorrow, — the river of life,
of your individual life and mine. And it is for the most of
us an unknown river, or known so dubiously and imperfectly
that our knowledge in comparison with what it might and
ought to be is hardly worthy of the name.

Perhaps in us all there are heights of will

And shadowy deeps of thought,
A land in the heart of each one's life

With self-surprises fraught.

Why do we say " perhaps," when every one of us at times has
had some "intimation clear of wider scope," of "larger life
upon our own impinging " ? Nay, but it is our own, only un-
recognized commonly as such, unclaimed or unreclaimed, left
for chance growths of thought and will 1o thrive upon, when
we might make it laugh with the abundance of its cheer.
The surprises of genius, the awakening of great writers and
captains and statesmen to undreamed of possibilities in their
own natures, are but the signs and pledges of the outlying
powers and graces that surround the actual accomplishment
of the most ordinary men and women. These, too, have
their surprises, "when their passions seem to speak for them,
and they only to stand by and wonder," as George Eliot has
written, and not only, as her special instances suggest, their
evil passions, but their passions of heroism and fidelity, of
devotion and self-sacrifice, of sublime nobility, where they
themselves and those who know them best imagine no such
possibilities. We have had a literature of such things dur-
ing the last twenty years, a better comment than our liberal
theology on the old dogma of total depravity, revealing as
it does the beneficent and god-like forces that are masked
by faces dull with the moral inertia of a life unvisited by
soft persuasion or by strong appeal, or brutalized with the

8 The Possible Life.

experience of private shame or others' curse and ban. Are
these stories, do you imagine, an exaggeration of the better
side of human nature, so different from the obverse which it
presents to our habitual knowledge and regard ? I have
not thought them so. Rather have I thought that the sur-
prises of genius, wonderful as they are, are not so wonderful
as the surprises that are hidden in the most unfeatured or
disfeatured lives that make up the majority of those which
constitute our personal environment from year to year. And
my happy confidence that this is so is no mere wilful opti-
mism, but an inference entirely logical from the things I
know to those beyond my ken. So splendid are the revela-
tions of nobility in the sphere of our habitual knowledge
that we are bound both to imagine and believe that the dark
we cannot see is starred all over with like admirable in-
stances of things bravely done and sweetly borne and loftily
withstood for truth and righteousness.

And yet, and yet, — is not the wonder this, not that there
are so many of these revelations which assure us of a mul-
titude beyond our personal horizon, but that with such good
and great things possible, and so often actualized, our aver-
age life keeps so persistently the beaten tracks of thought
and will, so seldom ventures to explore the possibilities that
lie, it may be, only a little way off from these ? Alike our
physiology and our psychology, as now developed, make
plain as possible that people generally are living on the thin-
nest outer crust of their capacity. There is something in-
finitely suggestive in the things done for a Laura Bridgman
or a Helen Keller and their family of pitiable souls, in the
persistency with which science, love, and patience have
stormed all the shut gates of sense until the siege is raised,
and those within the sevenfold bars find themselves in glad
communication with the outer world and with the friends
who have so wrought for their release. But, within the range
of normal sensibility and physical condition, we are hardly
less impressed with the wide reach of the outlying possibil-
ity. We demur at Plotinus because he was ashamed of his

The -Possible Life. 9

body. But have not the most of us good reason to be so,
when over against our sickly flabbiness we see the athlete's
muscles hard as iron, the dancer's supple as a Damascus
blade ? Consider, too, what patience and persistency can do
with that marvellous instrument, the human voice. You will
say, perhaps, that we are not all professional singers, and
cannot devote years of painful labor to the development of
our vocal cords. True, very true ; but, if the singer's pa-
tience can achieve so much, why, asks Professor Hiram
Corson, who is a master in this sphere, should not thousands
of men and women have some use of their voices, some skill
in reading or in conversation that would add no trifling in-
crement to the pleasantness of human life ? For then a
pleasant voice, or one well used, would not be so rare a
thing as to fairly startle us with its divine surprise.

And still I talk in parables ; but these last considera-
tions bring me home to what has been from first to last my
central thought, — the wealth of our outlying possibilities of
use and joy. This is my argument: If patience and persist-
ency, wisely directed, can enable the blind to see, the deaf
to hear, the dumb to speak, or at least give them something
corresponding to each normal sense, vastly delimiting the
bounded sphere of their original condition, what might not
a tithe of such patience and persistency do for the man of
normal sensibility ? Hardly should we exaggerate if we
said that it might do as much for him as all the skill of Dr.
Samuel G. Howe did for the objects of his supreme devotion
and his patient skill. Hardly should we exaggerate if we
said that there is all the difference between the actual and
possible world of the average man or woman that there is
between the deaf and dumb and sightless world and that
which science and devotion give to those who wander aim-
lessly in such a world, most miserable to see. These things
are true upon the physical plane. They are true of man's
whole bodily constitution in the range of all its powers and
gifts. And they are not less true of all the higher ranges
of his life, if, indeed, there is a higher and a lower in an or-

10 The Possible Life.

ganism in which every part has its consenting function to
perform, in which every part is implicated in the play of all
the rest. I know how some of you have thrilled all through
with perfect joy when reading that part of the engineer's
story, as told by Rudyard Kipling, which describes the en-
gine in the ocean steamer's hold : —

" Lord, send a man like Robbie Burns to sing the song o' steam !
To match vvi' Scotia's noblest speech yon orchestra sublime,
Whaurto, uplifted like the just, the tail-rods mark the time.
The crank-throws give the double-bass ; the feed-pump sobs and

heaves ;
And now the main eccentrics start their quarrel on the sheaves.
Her time, her own appointed time, the rocking link-head bides,
Till — hear that note? — the rod's return whings glimmerin' thro' the

guides.
They're all avva ! True beat, full power, the clanging chorus goes
Clear to the tunnel where they sit, my purrin' dynamoes.
Interdependence absolute, foreseen, ordained, decreed
To work, ye'll note, at any tilt and every rate of speed.
Fra sky-lift to furnace-bars backed, bolted, braced, and stayed,
An' singin' like the mornin' stars for joy that they are made."

It seems we have a man like Robbie Burns to sing the
song of steam. And now God send another such to sing the
song of man ! Think you that, rightly sung, it would not be
a higher and a deeper song than this of the great engine,
throbbing and panting in the ocean steamer's hold, a grander
song than that ? For there is no such piece of work as man
in the consenting unity of all his physical and intellectual
and moral powers. And, as Robert Fulton's first invention
was to the Cunarder of our time, — with the power of seven
thousand horses active in her machinery, — so are the ma-
jority of men and women, in their various ineptitude of body,
mind, and heart, in comparison with the possible develop-
ment of these that waits for them beyond the verge of their
accustomed life and never far away.

Such is our case that both the surprises of power and
goodness in great and little men, and the slow strenuous-
ness and rich rewards of long endeavor after this or that
ideal excellence, assure us of our infinite reserves of various

The -Possible Life. 1 1

power and use. Here are the roadside fields wherein I
found the hint of my discourse that pleasant Sunday morn-
ing. What was their utmost mystery and charm compared
with the immeasurable satisfactions and delights that con-
stantly impinge upon our daily walk ! But the open gates,
the bars let down, the frank and pleasant invitations to for-
sake the travelled road and try the springy turf, the homely
cheerfulness, the sweet seclusions of the fields, — where do
I find things parallel to these in our habitual experience of
intellectual and spiritual things ? Where do we not find
them, rather ? For it is not as if the good of life were in^the
main a matter either of those moments which surprise and
startle us into a nobler life or of those strenuous endeavors
whereby men brace their faculties to deeds of daring excel-
lence. These grand surprises and these strenuous endeavors
give us the measure of our possibilities. They apprize us
of "the man beyond man," whose beatific vision and whose
high behavior shame our average works and days. They
are a portion and an inheritance for which we may indeed
be grateful and of which we may well be proud. But,
thank Heaven, our dependence for the average good of
life and for its constant betterment is not on these divine
surprises nor upon these strenuous endeavors. The "fee
simple " in which we hold this good and betterment is
much simpler than it would be if we were so conditioned.
It is the frank and pleasant invitation which is extended
to us every day and hour to venture on some noble en-
terprise of thought or will. Here the open door is a good
book, a better book than we are commonly contented with,
— a book to make us think, a book that may require some
bracing of the mind in order to be successfully encountered.
Here it is an opportunity to perform some act of kindness,
just to say a kind word, perhaps, where it would do some
good, or to withhold an unkind word where it would hurt
and harm. Again, it is some full exposure of our minds to
some novel system of ideas, something that affronts all of
our prejudices and preconceptions, but no less on that ac-
count may be a higher truth than we have known. What

12 The Possible Life.

we want is a habit of open-minded approach to the unhabit-
ual in thought and life, so that life may keep its freshness
for us, and not degenerate into mere humdrum or routine.
And, once we can establish such a habit of cordial welcome
to the unhabitual, we shall find that the opportunities to
practise it are not infrequent or remote.

Fixity of type and a tendency to variation are the poles
between which the evolution of the planet swings secure,
and that of all its myriad forms ; and the same poles appear,
or should appear, in every individual life. There must be
stability with variation, or a man will be carried about by
every wind of doctrine, by every impulse of his personal and
social life. So, too, we must be on our guard lest the new
thing that is offered us is not some old and outworn prin-
ciple or creed. Our social markets, political and religious,
abound in panaceas that have been tried and found want-
ing; and the mirage which is so tempting to the reformer
often lights the way to " that Serbonian bog where armies
whole have sunk."

But take my thought in its simplicity. It is not, I trust,
a bad one for the beginning of another year. It is first the
fulness and the richness of the possibilities that lie just be-
yond the average round of our experience. It is next that
these, however they may be assured to us by the surprises
of power and genius or by the strenuous fidelities of much-
enduring men, are not exhausted by these exceptional ex-
amples, but plead with us at doors that open out from the
activities of the most ordinary lives, wherever there is
thought to think, or help to give, or choice is proffered be-
tween less and greater things. Life's countless leasts mount
up to larger sums of truth and good than its great moments
of heroic energy and daring will. But it is true, as Emerson
has written, that difficult duty is never far off ; and it is also
true that the most difficult, yet most inescapable, is fre-
quently a door that opens for us into some treasure-house
of our own being, some better appreciation of our social
opportunities, some closer access to the patient heart of
God.

THE HOUSE OF PAIN.

What a great House it is ! And the rooms in it, how
many ! They say there are eleven thousand in the Vatican ;
but there are more in this. Those in the Vatican are great
and small ; so these. There is the Armenian room, " a sym-
phony in red" for Mr. Whistler's daring hand, one monstrous
flow of crimson everywhere, one hundred thousand men,
women, and children slaughtered horribly. We think that
we are getting on. What splendid things the poets say
about the day before us and the night behind ! But how
far back must we go to find a chapter of horrors in the book
of history that is so terrible as this ? And we hardly think
of it. The great powers of Europe that might by their con-
certed action put a stop to all this devilry without the firing
of a gun are paralyzed by mutual jealousies ; and the Sultan
goes his way dancing, how gracefully, along an ever widening
stream of blood and tears. How little do we realize the
meaning of these things ! If they only meant so many mur-
dered, so many killed outright, it wouldn't be so bad. But
the intolerable fear, the homeless wandering, the sufferings
and horrors worse than death, — these make the Armenian
room in the great House of Pain something to make our
breathing hard, something to stop the heart, or would if we
were not so powerless to imagine what we cannot see. And
then, too, we are much engrossed by the sad condition of
our own farming population, — so many millions of them
starving ; not actually, but in the rhetorical exaggeration of
the political stump orator and the party press.

This great Armenian room is not at our end of the house.
There is another one that is, — the Cuban room. This, too, is
furnished in crimson, like the other. But it is not so bad as
that. In Cuba the insurrectionists are making such a fight
for independence as puts the heroisms of our literature of

14 The House of Pain.

blood and iron, so popular at present, quite to shame.
These, too, will have their novelists some day, and then
men's blood will quicken or will freeze to think of such
things done and suffered. Moreover, the Spanish soldiers
are something different from the Turkish murderers.
Whether they know or not that some one has blundered,

" Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die."

And if they are not doing much to quell the insurrection,
they are dying fast enough, — faster of fever than by sword
and shot. And how meagre is our realization of what is
going on in this one room of the great House of Pain ! For
us the twenty thousand young men of the Spanish army who
have perished in this monstrous struggle are merely so many
Spanish soldiers. But in reality they are so many brothers,
lovers, husbands, sons, — loved, cherished, missed, and
mourned as tenderly as those whom we sent up to battle
in our times that tried men's souls. Here is another scandal
of our civilization, — that there should be no comity of na-
tions that can prevail to stay this awful strife. " All men
become good creatures,-' sings the poet, " but so slow." Ah,
yes, indeed, so very, very slow.

Many of those eleven thousand rooms in the Vatican must
be very little rooms, and the meanest of them are probably
much finer than some of the smallest in the House of Pain.
What impresses us is the big rooms like those we have been
visiting, and the earthquake room, the tornado room, the
inundation room, in all of which, however, the destruction of
life is not the most tragic incident. But in reality there is
always more suffering going on in the smallest rooms of this
sad house than in the largest ones. Why but because they
are so many, though each had, as so many have, only a
single sufferer. The great railway accident which destroys
a score or two of lives sends a great shudder through the
whole community: but in 1S93 there were 2.727 employe's
killed on the railroads of the United States, 31,729 injured

77/ e- House of Pain. 1 5

more or less cruelly. One employe' was killed of every 320
men ; one injured in every 28. Now, if we could follow up
each one of these fatalities into the family, the home, on
which it fell, what an amount of suffering, physical or mental,
would be brought into our ken, what broken fortunes,
broken limbs, and broken hearts ! Yet what an infinitesimal
fraction it would be of all the suffering the sun and stars
look down upon at any given time ! I have spoken of the
physical, so far, almost exclusively, or of that which has
some physical cause. But how small a part is this of the
great sum ! Another part is furnished by the reverses of
fortune or the hopeless struggle against odds, another by
the more hopeless struggle with some strong temptation,
some besetting sin ; and if you would see the veriest torture-
chambers in the House of Pain you must go into those soli-
tary rooms, some of them beautiful with the loveliest things
the artist can devise, where there are men and women who
have had their trust most shamefully abused or who have
themselves abused the trust of others in some shameful way.

Old is this house of which I tell. Our oldest houses in
America, even those of the Aztecs and the cliff-dwellers, are
affairs of yesterday compared with this. We have writings
thousands of years old which make it plain enough that in
that far-off time this "house of many mansions" was already
builded huge and strong, but these writings seem like
modern literature when we think of the ages of suffering
before they were written. For centuries and milleniums
before the coming of man their endless corridors recede. The
words of the apostles did not exceed the fact : " The whole
creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now."

Of all the ancient books that made some brave attempt to
grapple with the problem of suffering, the grandest and the
noblest is the Book of Job. It has had much conventional
admiration accorded it as a part of the Bible ; but, if it could
be discovered now for the first time, what an outburst of gen-
uine admiration there would be ! " There is a book for
you ! " the anti-Bible folk would say. " Nothing in your

1 6 The House of Pain.

Bible to compare with it." Time was when it was piously
imagined to be the oldest book in the Old Testament, written
long before Moses wrote the Pentateuch. The argument
was a very simple and ingenuous one : The book was about
the patriarch Job; therefore some patriarch must have writ-
ten it, — probably Job himself. Who else could know so much
about his personal affairs, and give such verbatim reports of
his own speeches and those of his three friends, and Elihu
and the Almighty ? Our later criticism makes out the book
to be one of the latest in the Old Testament canon. Like
the cathedrals of the Middle Ages, which still fill the eye and
heart with joy unspeakable, it was centuries in the making,
and, like those, its different parts are different in their style.
In some of the cathedrals you will find a Norman crypt, and
then an early-pointed choir, a decorated transept, and a nave
with the flat-roof and characteristic traceries of the perpen-
dicular period. In the Book of Job there are as many styles
of thought as there are styles of architecture in such a cen-
tury-growing pile as that. First came the prologue and the
epilogue ; and their teaching was that, if the good man suf-
fered (and the whole book is restricted to the problem of the
good man's suffering), it was only for a time. In the epi-
logue Job gets back all that he loses in the prologue, and
something to reward him for his sufferings into the bargain.
This was the Jewish way of looking at the matter for many
hundred years. No suffering, it argued, but as the punish-
ment of sin. If good men suffered, it was because their
goodness was not genuine or complete. This was the doc-
trine of the three friends of Job in the dialogue which makes
up the body of the book. Those miserable comforters in-
sisted to his face that he must be a bad man, or he could not
be so unfortunate ; and he as strenuously denied their alle-
gations. In his denial we find the purpose of the dialogue
which is par excellence the Book of Job. The three com-
forters all harp on the same thing; but Job does not budge
a jot from his conviction that he is a righteous man. We
have still another explanation of the problem in the speech

The -House of Pain. 17

of Elihu. Evidently, we have in this speech an afterthought
and an interpolation. This is made plain by the fact that,
after he has got through, the book goes on just as if he had
not spoken. What follows his speech harks back to what
goes before it, and its omission simply closes up the ranks.
The writer of this speech of Elihu plainly thought he could
improve upon the speeches of Eliphaz and Bildad and
Zophar. His improvement was that Job's sufferings were
not meant for punishment, but for purification. " As gold is
tried in the fire, so men are tried in the furnace of adver-
sity." These are the words of another book, " The Wisdom
of Solomon " ; but they expiess the thought of Elihu quite
perfectly. We have another solution in the speeches of
Jehovah. It is that there is nothing for the good man suffer-
ing but to submit ; as Thackeray said,

To bow before the awful will, *
And bear it with an honest heart,

without trying to explain it, or to understand why it is so.

These various solutions of the problem of suffering, and
particularly the suffering of the good man, — although they
are from two thousand to twenty-five hundred years old, —
are still worth considering. Each one of them contains an
element of truth, if no one of them is wholly satisfactory.
Job's comforters were partly right in their contention that the
presence of suffering argues something wrong in the man
who suffers. It is a very dangerous doctrine which we often
hear proclaimed, that success in business or in any field of
enterprise or thought is more likely to attend the dishonest
than the honest man. There are too many facts that lend
themselves to the support of this doctrine. Nevertheless, in
the long run and the wide sweep, the evidence is overwhelm-
ingly in favor of honesty as the best policy, — as indeed it
would be if it brought only ruin in its train. Most commonly,
where business honesty is the precursor of misfortune, the
honesty is not to blame, but some defect of insight or fore-
sight, or the dishonesty of others. Given first-rate abilities,
and first-rate character will be no handicap in the race for
mercantile or political success.

1 8 The House of Pain.

One of the biggest chambers in the House of Pain is that
occupied by those whose sufferings are the result of accident.
We call it accident ; but how much of it is something else ?
Take the 2,700 deaths of railroad employes in a year, the
31,000 injuries, was there no " contributive negligence," as
they call it, think you, in all these, or were the most of
them on that account ? The amount of suffering is enor-
mous, which need not have been if men had done what
they knew well enough to be the fit, the sensible, the hon-
orable thing. The old Jewish doctrine of material success
proportioned to the amount of character was not a doctrine
which fitted close to every personal experience. Job did
well to resent its application to himself ; and, speaking as
he did, his words were spoken that the thoughts cf many
hearts might be revealed. Nevertheless, a great deal of
suffering comes unquestionably from doing wrong ; and be-
fore we "curse God and die," or curse our neighbors or
our fate, we had better ask ourselves what we have done to
bring ourselves to such a low estate. Better, far better, that
we should revert to the old Jewish doctrine — so much char-
acter, so much success — than teach our boys and our young
men that character has nothing to do with success, and that
the rewards of business and politics are for the tricksters
and the knaves. Surely it is not so.

Those who affirm the integrity of the Book of Job, — i. e.,
that all its parts belong to it just as they stand, — are obliged
to admit that the contribution of Elihu to the discussion is
passed over by Job and the Almighty with something less
than that "comparative respect which means the absolute
scorn." But it does not deserve to be treated so contemptu-
ously. It is a better contribution than Jehovah makes him-
self. As gold is tried in the fire, so men are tried in the fur-
nace of adversity. We may be slow to say that suffering is
intended as the school of virtue, and we are very sure that it
is not always a successful one ; but that many thousands, aye,
many millions, have from this nettle of disaster plucked the
flower of character, how can we doubt who within the narrow

The House of Pain. 19

range of our own observation have seen men doing it so
man}' times ? Even " calamity falling on a base mind " does
not always harden it. Sometimes and often it turns men
from their evil ways. Sweet are the uses of adversity, as you
and I have often seen them working in one chamber or
another of the many-chambered House of Pain. We have
known men and women whose characters were steadily de-
teriorating in the glow of health, the sunshine of prosperity,
but who have become kinder, gentler, every way more lov-
able, under the stress of disappointment and anxiety and loss
and pain. Especially we have known that hardening of
men's disposition, of women's equally, which so often comes
with the long tide of happy, prosperous years, to be so
changed by sorrow and misfortune that it was just as if a
rock in the fierce sunshine should become a sod of violets.
And where the original tendency was to the higher things,
what ineffable beauty and sweetness have we not seen bud-
ding and blossoming under the stress of storms that should,
it would seem, have crushed the stoutest heart ?

Unquestionably, Jehovah's part of the discussion repre-
sents the opinion of the main author of the Book of Job, the
author of the great debate between Job and his three friends.
He would not have put into the mouth of Jehovah a solution
which did not seem to him superior to all the others and
which was not the best he had himself to give. And what
was this solution ? That God did a thousand things Job
could not understand. Why then should he hope to under-
stand the mystery of his own suffering? You all know, I
trust, the passage, the most magnificent in the Old Testament,
if not in any literature, in which Jehovah makes a recital of
his wondrous works and crushes Job under the weight of
his own feebleness in comparison with the Almighty and his
ignorance of the Almighty's ways. Here is really no solu-
tion at all, and it has not been accepted as one by the earn-
est thinkers of the world. Job might lay his hand upon his
mouth ; these have declined to follow his example. Shall
the clay say unto the potter, Why hast thou made me thus ?

20 The House of Pain.

Yea, verily it shall, or prove itself a vessel of dishonor. But
if the answer of Jehovah out of the whirlwind was no an-
swer, there was in it the suggestion of a helpful one. If
man's ignorance of the universe may not crush him down
into abject submission, his knowledge of it may enable him
to trust the Power which manifests itself in its sublime order
and beauty and beneficence. The modern Job can answer
a great many of the questions which the man of Uz
found altogther answerless. And from his answers he de-
rives a noble confidence in that power as the sufficient
guardian of our human life. Theologians have always made
a great virtue of trusting where we are blindly ignorant.
But there is no virtue in such trusting. Ignorance as such
is no ground for trust whatever. But when we know in part
and what we know is good, then we may rationally trust in
good beyond our ken.

One thing is sure : Jehovah's answer out of the whirlwind
did not make an end of the discussion. It has been going
on from the time when Job fell silent until now. Never was
it more active than at the present time. The several answers
of the book of Job have constantly recurred, more or less
varied in their form. We have had some insisting on the
doctrine of Job's comforters, that all suffering is the punish-
ment of sin ; some on his stout denial of that doctrine ; some
taking up the parable of Elihu, and pleading for the disci-
plinary and redeeming quality of pain ; and some, also, en-
deavoring, after the manner of Jehovah in the old Hebrew
drama, to crush us down into abject submission, because we
are so little and the Almighty is so great ; because we know
so little, and he knows so much.

It would manifestly be impossible for me to enter into a
detailed account of the different forms these different doc-
trines have assumed, or of the multitude of other theories
which have from time to time been broached. The most
popular in Christendom has been the silliest of all, — that
Adam and Eve, by eating the forbidden fruit in Eden,
'•brought sin into the world, and all our woes.-' Within

The Hvuse of Pain. 21

fifty years we have had scholars of great reputation teaching
sincerely, or at least without the Roman augur's grin satiri-
cal, that the suffering of the animal world for ages before
Adam was anticipatory of his fall and was the imputed pun-
ishment thereof. Such stuff as this still furnishes harmless
amusement to a few isolated minds ; but the great tides of
modern thought have left them high and dry, braiding their
ropes of sand with great self-satisfaction. But if we may not
consider separately the multitude of theories which have
been brought into existence to account for the House of
Pain and the innumerable tragedies that are enacted in its
innumerable rooms, we can at least distinguish a few ten-
dencies of thought which rise from out the multitude of
explanations,— as from the long line of the Alps you see
rise into loftier air, as you look southward from the Rigi's
top, the Wetterhorn, the Silberhorn, the Jungfrau, and other
dark or shining peaks.

We have first, then, the tendency of optimistic evolution,
This is pre-eminently the tendency of liberal theologians
who have taken up with the doctrine of evolution. These
allow the reality of the House of Pain ; but they insist that
it is only a prison and a hospital on its way to be a palace, — a
people's palace, with every convenience and enjoyment that
can be desired. All pain and suffering and sin, they tell us,
are simply maladjustment : the organization and the environ-
ment are out of gear with each other, and they consequently
create friction ; and that means suffering and sin. There is
much here that is worth considering. Evidently a world
a-making should not be judged as if it were already made.
As well might we have judged our Brooklyn Bridge when
only the foot-walk was swung across, and said, " What a
miserable bridge ! " But there are many aspects of the
problem of suffering which this optimistic evolution does
not seem to touch ; and not only so, but there are many
aspects of evolution which do not seem to help this optimis-
tic scheme of thought. At any rate, we have our pessimistic
evolutionists as well as our optimistic evolutionists ; and they

22 The House of Pain.

are many. Moreover, they are oftenest found, I think,
among the teachers of pure science, — men who go to Nature
simply to find out her secrets, and not among the theologians
who too often go to her with a preconceived opinion for
which they ingeniously seek her confirmation. These men of
science march with Huxley, and with him find the cosmos
anti-ethical and full of pain. But some of them have Hux-
ley's courage, and believe that, if man against the universe
cannot do everything, he can still do much. This is the
temper of the pessimistic evolutionist when he is at his best ;
and he is not the worst fellow in the world to have round.

Next we have the tendency of the religious optimist.
From first to last we have had much of this tendency. It is
not a bad tendency for good people ; it is not a good ten-
dency for bad people. It suggests too pointedly that they
should continue in sin that grace may abound. In its confi-
dence that all is for the best, it is in danger of becoming, as
Professor Royce has shown, "out and out immoral." It
denies squarely that there is any House of Pain. Those
who imagine they have seen it towering high up against the
sky and shutting out the sun, have been the victims of an
illusion. Those who imagine they have wandered through
its endless wards, or that they have themselves suffered in
them grievously, have equally been the victims of an illusion.
The corollaries of these propositions should, it would seem,
be evident enough. If sin is an illusion, why should we not
sin ? " If all is well, what is there to resist, to conquer, to
meet courageously, to regret, to avoid ? . . . If divine wisdom
is equally present in the highest and the lowest, equally in
the good and the ill, why then resist the unreal evil ? " * If,
as Emerson has written of God,

■' Alike to him the better, the worse,
The glowing angel, the outcast corse,"

why should we be so careful to discriminate ?

j ce's " Spirit of Modern Philosophy " (p. 449). The whole chapter is the most
inspiring treatment of my subject that 1 know, as my liberal quotations from it would.
make evident if I withheld this grateful recognition.

The House of Pain. 23

There is another tendency which so much resembles this
that it is frequently confounded with it ; and indeed the
average man cannot be expected to distinguish one of these
tendencies from the other. Do not imagine that, in describ-
ing the one or the other, I am simply describing covertly the
Christian Science doctrine of our time. This, as it comes
within the range of my attention, is not careful to discrimi-
nate between the religious optimism I have described and the
religious mysticism which finds in pain only absorption in
our own finitude, and for its cure commands absorption in
the contemplation of God's infinite perfection. There is,
there can be, we are assured with endless iteration, no imper-
fection and no pain in God, and whoso dwelleth in God,
dwelleth in painlessness and perfect peace. To whichever
of these tendencies the Christian Science of our time is most
allied, it is no parvenu, no new-comer in philosophy or relig-
ion ; it is but the recrudescence of a doctrine which has had
as many positively last appearances as a famous actor, who
is always sure of coming back. With its practical efficiency
I have no present concern. That is a matter of psychology ;
and all that is claimed for it may be entirely sure, and still
the religious theory of it be utterly unsound. Leaving the
friends of Christian Science to decide to which of the two
tendencies that I have last described their own doctrine is
allied most closely, I hasten to say that whatever sanctities
and beatitudes may be associated with the optimism that
denies the existence of evil, and the mysticism which allows
its reality only to our finite apprehension, " the two views "
— as Prof. Royce has plainly shown — "agree in this: that
they both deprive the finite world of all reality and of all
deeper ethical significance. What we do here, he says, — our
work, our purposes, our problems, our doubts, our battles, all
these things have for the mystic as for the religious optimist
no essential meaning. There are no issues in the finite
world for either view. And this idea that, just because there
are no issues in the finite world, just because there is no
gravity about it, nothing stern, nothing worthy of a good

24. The Ho7tse of Pain.

fight, no salvation that may be lost and is hard to win, no
significant toil that ought to be entered on, and that is call-
ing for us with the voice of a positive duty, — what is such an
idea but the very essence of pessimism itself ? "

I am bound to say that I for one agree with this most
heartily. I do not know of any sadder pessimism than that
which denies the reality of the fight in which we are en-
gaged. I am far enough from holding every theoretic opti-
mist and mystic to the logical significance of their belief.
"Gray is all theory," said Goethe, "and green the glittering
tree of life." Theorize as they may, good earnest men and
women will act as if the poet's " Life is real, life is earnest "
had divine meaning for us yet, as if the House of Pain were
not something non-existent or man's shadow on the void of
heaven, but something as substantial as the pyramids or the
Matterhorn ; which, too, shall pass away. But it is always
a great pity when our real life is at variance with our theory
of life, when it is only through the seams and fractures in
our logic that we see the face of God and the men and
women who require our love and care.

There is an optimism which believes that we can reconcile
the facts of life, however hard, with confidence in the Eternal
Goodness. " Were it a problem," it tells us, " how to have
a better world," that Goodness " would have solved the
problem." " Were it a question of a wise choice," that
Goodness " would have executed from eternity this wiser
choice." "Were it a matter of foreign necessity that in-
flicted evil," that Goodness " would in existing have eter-
nally absorbed this foreign element into his own organic
nature. The world is then indeed, as Leibnitz said, the
best of all possible worlds." "Yet one who finds himself,"
says the great teacher* who has argued thus and who has
gone nearer then any one else, to my thinking, to the heart of
this great matter, — " Yet one who finds himself close, as it
were, to the gates of the celestial city and to a glimpse of
the golden glories within it, nigh to the palace of the king,

* Professor Josiah Royce, Harvard University.

The House of Pain. 25

does, after all, well to tremble nevertheless, when he con-
siders how easy it is to say such things about the perfection
of God's world and how hard it is to give concreteness and
weight to the mere abstractions of the religious conscious-
ness." And why ? Because here is the House of Pain, no
unreality, no mere projection of ourselves upon the void,
but as real as anything can be, a terrible reality. How can
it be so real if God is infinite perfection and all things are
in God ? That is a question to which I believe, if I had
time, and following reverently another's careful feet, I might
give some satisfactory reply. One thing is sure, if man is in
any real sense the measure of things, seeing that without a
real fight with evil his manhood could not be complete, a
world debarring us from the possibility of this fight would
not be a perfect world, nor the God creating it a perfect
God. But the near end is always best in studying God or
man. Better a thousand times deny the infinite perfection
than not to feel that, however it can be so, the House of
Pain is a reality, our fight with suffering and sin is just as
real as anything can possibly be. For how can we fight a
good fight if we believe our enemies a phantom horde ?
We know that they are not. If we have the toothache we
have the toothache, and we are not going to lie about it,
even if by so doing we can reduce the pain. As here, so
everywhere. The great teacher whom I have been following
so eagerly assures us that without suffering, his own suffer-
ing, God could not be a perfect God.* Nevertheless, even
at the risk of fighting against God, we will do all that in us
lies to make the burden of man's pain lie lighter on his heart.
There will still be enough left for God's perfection, let us
hope. Or what if the good of pain and evil, for him as for
ourselves, consists in there being something for him to con-
quer,— the crown of his perfection, as of ours, the conquering
of these ? However this may be, suffering exists for us as
something to abate, something to destroy. Forget every-
thing else that I have said this morning, if you cannot help
it, but do not forget this.

"This in a remarkable address before the recent Ministers' Institute, at Concord,
Mass.

26 The House of Pain.

If I can keep one heart from breaking

. Or ease one pain,

Or help one fainting robin

Into its nest again,
I shall not live in vain.

Less so than if with boundless confidence in the infinite per-
fection I stood lost in adoration before that, and in the
mean time let slip some opportunity to help another's need,
to cure another's hurt, to comfort another's sorrow, to for-
give another's sin. I do believe that there is a divine phi-
losophy which can reconcile the reality of evil with the
perfection of the Eternal Goodness. Happy are they who
can attain to this and hold it fast through every evil time !
But life is more than theory ; and the one thing needful is
for us to believe in the reality of pain, the reality of evil, the
reality of sin, and the reality of our ability to cope with
these, reduce their bulk and power, and from our tough
resistence win for ourselves some truer manhood, some di-
viner womanhood, than we ever yet have earned. Better
the rankest pessimism which goes resolutely about to make
less the mountain of iniquity than the most cheerful optimism
which is lost in adoration of the beatific vision while there is
wasted opportunity on either hand. Great is the House of
Pain ; many the rooms therein ; many the weary sufferers
whose eyes watch for the morning. Theirs are no phantom
miseries. God may be infinitely perfect ; but their days are
full of agony and strife and wrong. If happily we are not
of these — yet, who of us is not, at one time or another? —
our part (and nothing can be plainer) is to do something,
much if we can, and little if it must be so, for the abatement
of their misery and pain. Trust me, our least endeavor in
this kind will more approve us loyal sons and daughters of
the most high God than would the most enraptured contem-
plation of his infinite perfection while still we left undone the
things that touch the windows of the House of Pain as with
the brightness of his everlasting light, the warmth of his
eternal love.

MORAL ATHLETICS.

My subject is not a novel one. A most distinguished
preacher made it quite his own some eighteen centuries ago.
He called himself the least of the apostles, — this Saul of
Tarsus, afterward called Paul ; but men do not always take
their own measure rightly, and we think of him to-day as
overtopping all the rest. In speaking of the moral strifes
and wrestlings of mankind, he expressed himself so often in
the terms of the athletic games the Greeks delighted in so
much that we could easily believe he had at some time run
a race himself or tried a fall with some one in the Greco-
Roman city where he was born ; or, if not this, that he had
no languid interest in the trials of speed and strength in
which other youth engaged.

You might say, possibly, that his subject was not so much
moral athletics in these passages as it was athletic morals ;
and I should answer that my subject, too, is not so much
moral athletics as athletic morals. It is moral athletics in
the sense of athletic morals. But incidentally we have in
these sayings of the hero-saint something about moral ath-
letics, something about the morals of athletics ; as where
he says (or another in his spirit), "If a man strive for mas-
teries, yet is he not crowned unless he strive lawfully."
There is an entering wedge ; and, following it up, I could
easily enough split my discourse this morning into two parts,
— the first part about moral athletics, and the second part
about athletic morals. For the question of moral athletics,
the morals of athletics, is a much wider one than that which
the New Testament's " striving lawfully " suggests. That is
not unimportant ; only, alas ! it is not always true with us
that those who strive for masteries are not crowned unless
they strive lawfully. Literally, of course, our athletes are
not crowned at all; instead of the crown of wild olive which

28 Moral Athletics.

the Greeks gave to their contestants, we give a medal or a
cup. I am not sure that theirs was not the better way ; and
where our common and revised versions call that crown of
wild olive a corruptible crown, remember that it means simply
perishable, and always read it so. But this is by the way.
What is more to the purpose is that sometimes in our con-
tests those who contend unlawfully receive the prize. In
our professional athletics this happens, I imagine, not un-
frequently. It is arranged beforehand which side shall win,
and so the betting is much more intelligent. At my only
horse-race I saw a splendid creature sold out in this way ;
and then, mounted by a jockey who had never sat upon his
back before, he, like Ben Adhem's name, "led all the rest."
In the athletics of our college men such things are never
done, but there has from time to time been much discussion
as to whether the players have not deliberately, or in the
ardor of the contest, exceeded the brutality which is un-
avoidable and is permitted them by the rules of the game.
There was, you will remember, some two years ago, a very
general feeling that " anything to win " was getting to be
quite too much the order for the day ; or that, if the game
of foot-ball necessitated such brutalities as were in evidence,
then it was not a game for gentlemen to be engaged in, nor
one in which young men of honorable mind and decent char-
acter could engage without deteriorating to a lower plane.

But the morals of athletics is a much wider question than
the New Testament "striving lawfully " either covers or sug-
gests. It is not a question that I feel myself competent to
discuss either in its narrower or wider implications. But
certainly the amount of interest attaching to athletics in our
universities and colleges and preparatory schools, as com-
pared with that attaching to those studies for which these
universities and colleges and schools were primarily in-
tended, makes the broader question of the moral influence
of athletics on our educated youth one of immense impor-
tance ; and, quite as certainly, the incidents of death and
mutilation which attend our school and college games should

Moral Athletics. 29

give us pause upon the road which we are taking with such
eager haste. So far as the athletic tendency means a grow-
ing sense of the importance of a good physical foundation
for a man's culture and character it is most admirable. And
no one can admire more than I do the splendid pluck and
courage, and the magnificent energy and endurance, which
our young athletes exhibit on their various courses, tracks,
and fields. I am perhaps somewhat morbid in my admira-
tion for these things, so painfully conscious am I of my own
miserable inefficiency upon the physical side, so horribly am
I cut off from even that fine indifference to wind and
weather which I see in others with a shamed and envious

heart.

" God who created me

Nimble and light of limb
In three elements free —

To run, to ride, to swim ;

Not when the sense is dim,
But now from the heart of joy

I would remember him :
Take the thanks of a boy."

That is a bit of poetry which I love to impress upon the
boys now growing up, though I can never recite it without a
pang of sorrow and regret and shame that I have been so
little free in two of the three elements my whole life long.

Yes, let us have the physical basis of culture and char-
acter. Let us have the strength and the endurance which
can only come through manly exercises on the cindered
path and the contentious field. And let us not make hypo-
crites of our young men by asking them to pretend that phy-
sical culture is their only motive in the matter. There is
also the gaudium certaminis, — the joy of battle. Man is a
competitive animal. Our socialists and communists imagine
that they can make him over into a purely co-operative one ;
but they never can or will. But one thing is sure : if our
athletics are not all for fun, if they have some justification
from the side of physical culture, we have a right to demand
of our young men that they shall not poison, with tobacco or

2,0 Moral Athletics.

with drink or baser things, the blood which they have tried
to sweeten, the strength which they have tried to harden, in
their various sports.

One other thing is sure : that whatever value we may set on
physical strength and courage and endurance, these things are
not sufficient for the making of a man, and they are not suffi-
cient to justify the splendid gifts which have been lavished
on our schools and colleges by their various benefactors,
from their foundation until the present time. To train men
for the ministry and to educate the Indians were the two
objects which the founders of Harvard College had in mind.
One of these objects is about as far as the other from the
hopes and purposes of those who are now interested in the
welfare of the college. Lowell says that the Indians showed
much greater aptitude for disfurnishing the outsides of other
people's heads than for furnishing the insides of their own.
But, if physical energy and endurance are the be-all and the
end-all of a college course, what the Indians were at the begin-
ning of the business is what the young collegiate of the
athletic kind aspires to be upon the crowning height. Let
us, by all means, have physical strength, courage, and endur-
ance,— the more of these the better; but let us not have
the emphasis which these things are getting in the popular
and student mind blind us entirely to the fact that our
schools and colleges are institutions of learning, devoted to
"the humanities," the liberal arts, and that the young men
who seek them mainly as a stage on which to show off their
physical prowess are false to their most honorable traditions,
and should betake themselves elsewhere.

Great is physical culture \ but it is not all. Indeed, we
can conceive a man lacking it altogether, like Dr. Channing,
whose social weight could not be measured by any number of
foot-ball champions who are merely that. I have known
women shut up in the house for years, — invalids, suffering
much of pain, and more of deprivation, — the sum of whose
enjoyments, intellectual and moral, the measure of whose
spiritual significance, I would no more exchange for that of
your physical giant, indifferent to intellectual and spiritual

Moral Athletics. 3 1

things, than I would exchange so much weight of gold or
precious stones for an equal weight of dirt swept from the
street. Let us have the physical energy and prowess, but
let us also have "the things that are more excellent." And
let us rejoice and be exceeding glad that the whole story of
our collegiate life has not been told when some wit has said,
in Byron's memorable phrase, " These are our young barba-
rians all at play T They are not all at play; and some of
those who are, do not play all the time, but give themselves
in fuller measure to those intellectual exercises and encoun-
ters by which the mind is braced for the great contests of the
business or the political arena in which every educated man
is honor-bound to take no sneaking part.

I am dwelling much longer than I meant to on this part of
my discourse. You will begin to think it was suggested by
the various rivalries which have adorned Thanksgiving week.
But I had not thought of these as coming when I chose the
subject some weeks in advance. They have, perhaps,
detained me longer in the vestibule of my discourse than I
should have stayed there but for their dominance in the
social atmosphere we have all been breathing latterly. But
now I come to the moral athletics which I had specially in
mind when I said in my heart that upon this subject would I
write. As I have said, perhaps Athletic Morals would be
a better indication of the matter which I am meaning to
bring home to you with such clearness and such cogency as
I can command. It is this matter : That we do not lack for
opportunities in our personal and social life for something as
athletic for the mind and will as are the physical contests of
the time for those who are engaged in them ; that all the
" good courages " are not confined to such contests, and
were not exhausted by the military ardors of the race ; nor
are they to be looked for only where these still have full
scope. Nothing is surer than that a love of danger and of
daring is a factor inseparable from the constitution of the
race. It is not the sea, as Emerson has sung, that makes

" Some coast alluring, some lone isle,
To distant men who must go there or die," —

32 Moral Athletics.

who must go there whether they die or not : it is the
spirit of adventure in the human heart. Read Mr. Roose-
velt's volumes on the taming of the mighty West, read any
of the myriad books about the discoverers and explorers and
colonizers of new lands, and you will find their lesson just
exactly that which, for one thing, is taught by the fierce
rivalries of our athletic youth ; namely, that man is not the
namby-pamby creature that he seems to be to our more
casual observation ; that to baby himself and spare himself,
coddle and fend himself, are not the most characteristic
features of his mind. Of how many might it have been
written, as it is written in the great anonymous Epistle to
the Hebrews, " If they had been mindful of that country
from which they set out, they had opportunity to return."
Look at the Mayflower's company : half of them dead, and
buried on the bleak hillside before the vessel went back in
the spring ; and the others, " they had opportunity to return."
How many availed themselves of it ? Not one. Whence
came such stuff as that ? All from the desire to worship God
according to the dictates of their own consciences? Oh, no ;
not all. Some of it from the fascination of the dangers and
anxieties of the new life there 'twixt the Indian devil and the
deep Atlantic sea. We read in many books of the hardships
which early settlers have endured, and we wonder what
could tempt men to endure such things. What tempted
them was the hardships, the stand-up fight with cruel opposi-
tions, the exhilaration, the delight, the rapture of treating
such things with contempt or crushing them into an inarticu-
late pulp under their steadily advancing feet.

Now let the young man act upon this hint as he stands
upon "the threshold of life's awful temple" with "uncov-
ered head and breathless listening," or likelier with the nil
admirari simper on his face we know, alas ! so well. Let
him ask himself who are the men who are having a good
time, who are glad to be alive, who are thanking God that
their lives have fallen to them in such pleasant places, who
would not have been born a day earlier or a day later because

Moral Athletics.^ 33

" now is the accepted time and now is the day of salvation."
Who are these men ? Are they the men who are dealing
softly with themselves, who are prone to cushioned ease,
who avoid everything hard and disagreeable ? Are they not
rather the men who "scorn delights and live laborious
days," who, when there is hard work%to be done, abuse and
contumely to be borne, gravitate to such opportunities as do
the planets to the stars about which they swing forever as
with solemn joy? It is no vain imagination, I am sure, that
a general of division can get ten men for dangerous service

— a forlorn hope it may be — easier than one to do some easy
thing ; that men will tread upon each other for precedence
when wounds and death are offered, as they would not were
the call merely one for foragers where foraging would be
comfortable and safe. And I do not see why the same spirit
and the same principles should not prevail throughout the
whole of life ; why men should not be fascinated and
allured by opportunities to do difficult things in other
spheres of thought and action, as well as on the play-ground
or the field of battle, as well as in the exploration of new conti-
nents and the colonization of their lonely wildernesses and
their dangerous frontiers.

We hear, and not infrequently, that we are living in de-
generate times and that good courage is but little in demand,
has but few opportunities to express itself in thought or
action. And here is the very reason, some would say, why,
if there are no good wars to go to, we must have our athletics
and have them of the most strenuous and exacting kind,
making some sharp and terrible demand on a man's fearless-
ness and scorn of death. But I believe, I cannot but be-
lieve, that in our modern life as it is organized in these years
of grace, there are just as good opportunities for courage as
there ever were at any time in the world's history; just as
good as any that were offered by Grant and Sherman to
their bravest men ; just as good — see how I cap the climax

— as any captain of an athletic crew has ever offered, or ever
can offer, to his men, whose muscles are like braided steel
and whose bosoms are incapable of fear.

34 Moral Athletics.

I am speaking more particularly of the opportunities for
good courage that inhere in modern life upon its higher
table-lands, in its more cultivated fields; but I commend
you to a recent article by President Eliot in the Atlantic
Monthly, in which he essays to show how much of danger,
and, consequently, of rjossible courage, are implicated in the
mos^ serviceable occupations of our ordinary life. "Think,"
he says, "of the locomotive engineer, the electrical lineman,
the railroad brakeman, the city fireman, the police in our
great cities." That he does not draw too much on his
imagination is evident from the fact that in 1893 and 1894
there were 59,000 trainmen and other railroad employees
killed or wounded in the United States. The trained nurse
"simply in the way of duty, without the stimulus of excite-
ment or companionship, runs risks from which many a soldier
in hot blood would shrink." How true it is that "no one
need be anxious about the lack of opportunities in civilized
life for the display of heroic qualities." How true it is that
no day of the year lacks exhibitions of a courage stout as
that which drives the flying wedge into the opposing mass
in glorious play or gathers quietly a sheaf of bayonets into
the soldier's breast, tender with thoughts of dear ones he
shall see no more ! One of the finest types of this every-day
courage goes by the vilest name. The man possessing it
is called a "scab." "In defence of his rights as an indi-
vidual he deliberately incurs the reprobation of many of
his fellows, and runs the immediate risk of bodily injury
and even death." This is but one of many illustrations that
President Eliot has brought forward to support his thesis
that our industrial civilization has opportunities for courage
equal to the most warlike periods of the past. He has other
illustrations which bring the matter home to the most culti-
vated men, and show how little ground they have for fear
that, when their foot-ball days are over, all their heroic
occupations will be gone, unless somebody at Washington
succeeds in trumping up a war with England or some less
formidable antagonist. One of these illustrations is so fine,

Moral Athletics. 35

so apt, and so impressive, that I cannot deny myself the
pleasure of giving you the whole passage, a thing I seldom
do, — lest a mere reference to it should leave you ignorant of
its force. " Another modern personage," he says, " who
needs heroic endurance, and often exhibits it, is the public
servant who steadily does his duty against the outcry of a
party press bent on perverting his every word and act,
Through the telegram, cheap postage, and the daily news-
paper, the forces of hasty public opinion can now be concen-
trated and expressed with a rapidity and intensity unknown
to preceding generations. In consequence, the independent
thinker or actor or the public servant, when his thoughts or
acts run counter to prevailing popular or party opinions,
encounters sudden and intense obloquy, which, to many
temperaments, is very formidable. That habit of submitting
to the opinion of the majority, which democracy fosters,
renders the storm of detraction and calumny all the more
difficult to endure,— makes it, indeed, so intolerable to many
citizens that they will conceal or modify their opinions
rather than endure it. . . . This habit of partisan ridicule
and denunciation in the daily reading-matter for millions of
people calls for a new kind of courage and toughness in
public men, not in brief moments of excitement only, but
steadily, year in and year out." That President Eliot was
not drawing on his imagination here I was convinced anew
when almost simultaneously with the appearance of his
article I read of the re-election of a man to Congress who
had amply shown this sort of courage. You may think his
re-election is convincing, that his case was not so serious after
all. But he could not see that re-election through the blind-
ing hail of partisan detraction and abuse a year or two ago.
What he thought he saw was the complete collapse and ruin
of his political aspirations ; and yet he went right on. Give
our political societies time enough, and they generally come
to their senses and applaud the men they cursed most heartily.

"Far in front the cross stands ready, and the crackling fagots burn,
While the hooting mob of yesterday with silent awe return
To glean up the scattered ashes into history's golden urn,"

36 Moral Athletics.

or to re-elect the honest congressmen ; but neither of these
possible events does much to brace the courage of the man
who stands four-square to all the winds that blow, as from
the mouth of hell.

Here is a particular instance taken from our political con-
ditions, but the opportunities they furnish for good courage
are not few and far between. The corruption of our politi-
cal system means the opportunity for highest courage in our
men of light and leading. " The brave man's hope is the
coward's excuse." The coward's excuse for letting politics
alone is that they are so miserably corrupt. The brave
man's hope is that he can do something to better them.
And, setting out to do so, the endeavor has not been all
trouble and anxiety by a good deal. As in Sarah Battle's
whist, there has been " the rigor of the game " and the
corresponding satisfaction and elation. Theodore Roose-
velt and Colonel Waring have not had a bed of roses to
lie on ; but, like the Indian yogi, they have rather come to
like their bed of spikes. How much of base concession and
of its political remuneration do you imagine it would have
taken to give Governor Greenhalge of Massachusetts a tithe
of the divine exhilaration that he got from braving once,
twice, and again the rage of partisans who thought, and
seemed entirely justified in thinking, that they held his po-
litical future in the hollow of their itching palms ? When
our Brooke Herford mourned to Phillips Brooks what long?
slow, uphill work it was getting the good cause fairly started
on its triumphant way, the great preacher answered, " Yes,
but what fun it is ! " What fun it always is to fight a good
fight, to keep the faith, to stand up and be shot at for the
dear love of some great principle, or concrete social or politi-
cal advantage ! Why, there are thousands of young men in
our great cities, graduates of our colleges and universities,
wondering why nothing seems to stir their pulses now as did
the dear old athletic games, — and all the time the air they
breathe is that of an Augean stable, which, if they should
go in to clean it, would give them such a tussle as they

A/cm/ Athletics. 37

never had behind the flying ball, and such fun, too, as they
never had in driving it beyond the line of victory.

But I must not draw my illustrations too exclusively from
the political field. Every young man should be a politician
in some sort. He should be interested in politics ; he
should understand them, not merely as they are rendered
in the high lights of a political canvass, but as they are
rendered on the historian's juster page. But for most men
politics must be an organ of self-sacrificing devotion to the
common weal. They must look elsewhere for a livelihood.
And there are those who tell us that it is impossible for any
one to amass a fortune within the limits of our industrial sys-
tem, and be at the same time an honest man. I do not believe
it. I should be most miserably unhappy if I did. But then,
if you think so, ox you, or you, there is your work cut out;
there is your opportunity for heroic action plain enough, —
to go without the fortune that cannot be honestly amassed.
The thing that most impresses me is this : to what a vast
extent, for all our checks and balances, the stability of the
business community depends upon "the unbought grace of
life," the spontaneous honesty of innumerable men. But
there can, I think, be no doubt that, with the increasing in-
tricacy and complexity of our modern business organization,
the temptations to wrong doing are much greater than they
were formerly. The prizes contended for are much greater.
The avoidance of personal responsibility appears to be much
less difficult. Now let the man who mourns the loss of such
great opportunities for personal courage as the military age
could boast, and who thinks that our athletics cannot be too
brutal if haply they may furnish something of the chance to
be heroic and enduring that the men of old enjoyed, — let
such a man be set well in the midst of our great business
field, its splendid prizes shining in his eyes, opportunities
offering continually to make ten dollars instead of one dollar
by doing something just a little bit"" irregular," or winking at
another man's irregularity, and if he does not have all the op-
portunities for the exercise of a manly courage that he wants

38 Moral Athletics.

he must have a stomach for such things of Falstafflan propor-
tions. The temptations which beset the business man are
many. One of the most common is to depreciate the value
of his goods, once he has got his market, and so double his
profits for a few years before he is found out. But this is
one of the most gross, and the man who succumbs to it must
be pretty nearly dead already in trespasses and sins. There
are others which are very subtle in their operation. Subtle
or gross, their name is legion ; and the man of business who
is to meet them and to conquer them has no holiday affair
upon his hands. The decision may mean poverty instead
of riches, or, at the best, the merest competency instead of
"growing rich beyond the dreams of avarice." Let him that
thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall. Let him who
thinks there is no opportunity for courage in the sphere of
business keep well the law of perfect honesty and truth in
all his dealings for one uneventful day.

New types of courage are developed by new conditions in
the political and industrial and religious world. The ethics
of theological transition furnish one of the most conspicuous
of these in our own time. Nothing is more popular and
attractive in our time than the preaching of heretical
doctrines in orthodox pulpits, the preacher generally finding
some ingenious excuse for damning those who have said his
good things before him. Nothing is more popular and
attractive than this sort of thing, but nothing is more dan-
gerous. There came to me last Sunday evening, after Dr.
Savage's installation, an Episcopal clergyman, who said : " I
am as good a Unitarian as you. But I asked President
Eliot," he continued, "how his university methods would do
for little children. Little children must have their kin-
dergarten, and, as an Episcopalian clergyman, I am a relig-
ious kindergartner." And he seemed to think I would
applaud him for thus making himself accursed for his breth-
ren's sake. But- 1 could'not find it in my heart to do so.
What I said was, that the religious kindergartner should
believe in his own toys. But what I wished to say was

Moral Athletics. 39

something you know pretty well, the great adjuration of
Carlyle, — " Go to perdition if thou must, but with a lie in
thy mouth ? by the Eternal Maker, no ! "

Moral athletics here in great abundance ; chances for the
exercises of good courage not a few. The story of " Robert
Elsmere " was written that the thoughts of many hearts might
be revealed. To-day there are hundreds, if not thousands,
of ministers, standing in orthodox pulpits, who do not believe
the traditional orthodoxy any more than you or I. What
shall they, do ? They can stay where they are, and preach
what they like, so long as they do not say, " This is the thing
called heresy, and it is what it is called." But it takes
courage, a great deal of courage, to do that. On the one
hand is comfort, ease, applause ; on the other, nobody
knows what. Heresy in orthodox pulpits is the taking and
the paying thing. Heresy in heretical pulpits is quite
another matter. And do not imagine for a moment that all
the "good courages " in the religious sphere are reserved for
the heretical preachers. The most orthodox have their
opportunities of standing on the weaker side against the
vested wrong ; and laymen, young and old, can follow their
convictions into the unpopular church, and work for it, and
make sacrifices for it, or " bow down in the house of Rim-
mon", — go with the multitude that keep holy day, having an
eye to windward, whence may blow to them some social or
personal advantage, some business connection, or some
eligible match.

There is an aspect of this matter of moral athletics, ath-
letic morals, which is more strictly personal. Men, young
and old, have their besetting sins. I need not specify. You
know the motley crew. Now if a man really wants a good
fight, a good opportunity for courage and endurance, let him
stand up to one of these and fight with it till he is standing
with his heel upon its head. And the parable is not for
men alone. The athletic figure of speech may not be well
adapted to the feminine gender. But women, too, have
their besetting sins, and no metaphor is needed to exagger-

40 Moral Athletics.

ate their ugly force, nor can exaggerate the courage which it
takes for them to overcome them and from the sordid con-
flict rise into that height of glorified and perfect womanhood
which is the brightest boon that heaven has for earth.

In these personal conflicts one of the hard conditions is
that they have no spectators to applaud the things well done,
to nerve the wavering strength. My friend is thoroughly
convinced that he or I could furnish all the courage needed
for such a game as that which Princeton won the other day
if we had twenty thousand people shouting like devils in our
ears. He might, but as for me, — well, I would rather not be
tried. But that the twenty thousand shouters make all cour-
age easier there cannot be a particle of doubt. It is of the
very essence of the situation that in so many of our personal
conflicts with temptation we have to stand up to our work
alone. Alone, yet not alone ; else was Apollos, or whoever
wrote the great Epistle to the Hebrews, much mistaken
when he said, " Therefore, seeing that we are compassed
about by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every '
weight, and the sin which cloth so easily beset us, and let us
run with patience the race set before us." And in these
struggles of the inner life, these battles with inveterate
faults, with selfish dispositions, with impure desires, is it not
as if we were Childe Roland in the desperate pass, and all
around us were the friends, alive and dead, who have always
expected us to do well and to whom we have given bonds of
memory and hope and secret tears never to disappoint their
gracious trust ? Seeing that we are compassed about by such
a cloud^of witnesses, how dare we play our parts unworthily?

" Here eyes do regard you
In Eternity's Stillness :
Here is all fulness
Ye brave to reward you :
Work and despair not."

A LIBERAL FAITH.

Said Phillips Brooks in one of his discourses, " We talk a
great deal in these days about a liberal faith. What is a lib-
eral faith, my friends ? It seems to me that by every true
meaning of the word, by every true thought of the idea, a lib-
eral faith in one that believes much, and not a faith that be-
lieves Little." With this expression of the great preacher's
personal conviction I find myself heartily agreed ; and what
I wish to do this morning is to expand his thought, to distin-
guish a faith that believes much from one that believes
little, and to distinguish certain forms of thought and feel-
ing that are considered liberal from certain others that have
a better right to be considered so. But if a liberal faith
is the faith that believes much and not little, who are there
that believe so much as the most credulous people ? I know
that many will say this, and I am the more glad on this
account that I find Phillips Brooks declaring, " It is true, in-
deed, that, as soon as a man becomes eager for belief, for the
truth of God, and for the mysteries with which God's universe
is filled, he becomes all the more critical and careful. He
will no longer, if he were before, be simply greedy of things
to believe, so that if any superstition comes offering itself to
him, he will gather it in indiscriminately and believe it with-
out evidence, without examination. He becomes all the
more critical and careful the more he becomes assured that
belief and not unbelief is the true condition of his life."
Here I must bid Phillips Brooks good-by and go the re-
mainder of my way alone. The truth would seem to be, that,
in the best possible meaning of the term, a liberal faith is
not a liberal disposition in the matter of belief; that is, a
disposition to believe much, and especially much of that

42 A Liberal Faith.

which has been traditionally handed down. It is a faith
whose contents are liberal, whose thoughts of God and man
and life and destiny are broad and deep and high.

Notice, in this connection, that here, as in the art of read-
ing books, non multa, sed multum is the rule, — not many
things, but much. There are men, for instance, who believe
a hundred things about God and those who believe thirty-
three or thirty-nine (so many and no more) who do not believe
in him so much as some others whose articles of belief are
only two or three. The quality of the belief is much. And
this also is to be remembered : that the credulous, the greedy
mind is not confined to those who are most open-mouthed to
swallow the traditional belief. The passing time is very
much like that which corresponded to the first centuries of
Christianity and the last centuries of the Roman paganism.
As we look back upon that time, we see that the most credu-
lous people were not those who clung to the old faith and
ordinance : they were those who abandoned themselves to
one or another of the many forms of new belief which, simul-
taneously with Christianity, were pressing on the Roman
mind. And in our own time the most credulous are certainly
not always those who swallow the traditional doctrines of
religion as readily as if these were strawberries and cream :
they are those — their name is legion — who are so hungry
for the things which they have needlessly foregone that they
snatch at anything which comes to them noisily advertised as
the bread which cometh down from heaven. They are those
who have gone the whole length of negation, only to tumble
over finally into an abyss of bottomless credulity. Even
among those who have not tumbled over, but are very near
the edge, you will often find a more absolute credulity than
in the traditionalists to whom they are most violently op-
posed. We are obliged, sometimes, to entertain a doubt
whether this boasted age of science will not, from the stand-
point of the future, seem pre-eminently superstitious.

A liberal faith is neither the credulity of the traditionalist
nor the credulity of crude, irrational negation and mere cob-

A Liberal Faith. 43

web speculation. And no more is it that slackness of in-
difference which so frequently imagines itself worthy of the
name, and representative of the thing. Of this slackness of
indifference we have a great abundance in our time. It has
domesticated itself in the conventional churches. The
young person seeking admission to their communion is as-
sured that it really makes very little difference what he
believes. There are the creeds and articles, to be sure, but
they are historical documents : they are preserved to indicate
what was formerly believed, and they are subscribed to or
recited with the tacit or explicit understanding that they are
subject to individual diminution or addition or interpreta-
tion. This slackness of indifference is the veriest Proteus
and has many forms. One is the ecclesiastical, which I have
already named. Another is the scientific, which resolves re-
ligion into a mere sentiment, declaring that it has no intel-
lectual contents; and there are found students and teachers
of religion who have sunk so low that they meekly and thank-
fully accept the crust that is thus thrown to them by those
who sit at groaning tables in the great hall of science. The
philosophical form of this Proteus is much the same. Its
doctrine is, that just as we may digest our food and live a
healthy life without any knowledge of physiology, so we may
digest our sentiments and duties and live a healthy, moral,
and religious life without ethical or theological reflection.
The antithesis of reason and faith is not more definite with
those who, in the traditional manner, regard faith as a sup-
plementary faculty whereby men can attain truth without
reason, or in spite of reason, than it often is with our philoso-
phers ; nor more contemptuous of reason than are these.
They present this funny paradox : by the use of reason they
would convince us that reason is of no account.

The slackness of indifference takes on another and more
popular form. "What difference does it make," we hear,
" what a man believes ? Theology is not religion." And
the corollary of this proposition is sometimes one thing and
sometimes another, — sometimes abstention from all public

44 A Liberal Faith.

recognition of religion, but oftener adhesion to the particular
church which is most convenient or most fashionable or most
socially engaging, though it may be the most orthodox in the
community. The churches of the traditional theology are
largely re-enforced by men and women who are aiding and
abetting what they cannot possibly believe, and encouraging
the preacher in a course destructive of his moral character
and his self-respect. If sometimes more consistent and con-
scientious people protest with these for countenancing and
supporting things which they do not believe, the answer is
that they believe them as much as anybody. It is not true,
and it would not absolve them if it were. Two wrongs, or
two hundred, cannot make a right.

Religion is degraded when it is made a mush of sentiment,
and denied all intellectual significance. Theology, that once
queened it over all the arts and science, does not propose to
abdicate her throne. Here is a science that can hold up its
head among the best. Some one has said that metaphysics
is the finding of bad reasons for what we know by instinct,
but it is an instinct to seek those reasons. Good ! and if
theology is the finding of reasons bad or good for many
things that are spontaneous in our spiritual nature, the find-
ing of these reasons is as spontaneous for humanity in gen-
eral as for men to breathe or sleep. Nor do I know anything
more honorable to humanity than the finding of the same
reasons, the seeking of them if they have not and cannot be
truly found. It would be a miserable race of men that could
live in such a world as this and not try to fathom its mystery,
not try to name aright the power that surges through it in a
tide whose waves are ages of immeasurable time. Over and
over again, now by the philosopher and anon by the scientist,
we are reminded of the limits of religious thought, and of the
presumption of endeavoring to tear away the veil of the Un-
knowable. But the only way of finding out what is unknow-
able is by pushing ever forward the limits of the known.
For Socrates, the presumptuous thing was to seek to pene-
trate that region which is now commensurate with the whole

A Liberal FaitJi. 45

field of natural science. Think of the loss if men had been
obedient to his word ! Yet was he a very great philosopher.
Wherefore, even though some very great philosophers of our
own time would interdict us from that sphere of the divine
activity which theology endeavors to explore, let us go on re-
gardless of their prohibition. Seeing that we cannot know
anything without knowing something of Him who is all in all,
the very science that arrays itself against theology is nothing
if not theological. The Unknown is a mighty sea that
surges round about the known with ceaseless ebb and flow.
How much of it is unknowable mankind will know a great
deal better fifty or a hundred thousand years hence than it
does now. In the mean time the presumption is in fixing
any limit to the intellectual force which already has achieved
so much.

Do we not congratulate ourselves unduly on a state of
things whose characteristic note is the inability to distinguish
things that differ, an easy-going assurance that one system of
theology is about as good as another ? This sort of thing is
what a great many people mean by liberality. But where
does the liberality come in if there is no particular differ-
ence ? A man without much effort or without doing himself
any particular credit may be liberal enough to tolerate his
natural face in a glass, or his theological opinions reflected
in another man's. But what we want is the liberality that can
be tolerant of the most radical difference from one's own
opinions. There was better stuff for making manly men in
the old dogmatism and bigotry than in the liberality which
can tolerate every possible difference of opinion because it
has not a conviction of its own. We have had our World's
Parliament of Religions, and very beautiful it was in many
ways. It brought out the unity in diversity, but it also
brought out the diversity in unity, and 1 am not sure
that this was not the more important lesson. There are
those who have a vision of the different religions, stripped
every one of its peculiar qualities, and of a world-wide unity
of religion compounded of the simple common elements that

46 A Liberal Faith.

would remain. It will come, perhaps, when men and women
wear only the most necessary clothing and eat only the most
necessary food. Let us hope it will not come before. For
how much better than any uniformity like that of the prime-
val fiery cloud is a diversity like that of the firmament we
know, thick set with stars, one star differing from another
star in glory, the different religions clothing the nakedness
of their common substance of belief with the many colored
draperies of their several and diverse historical traditions !
And how much better in each particular community the clear-
cut conviction, and the manly difference of manly men, than
the good-natured indifference of sheer mental laziness, or the
unqualified homogeneity that would invite no splendid rival-
ries of athletic minds, no generous mutual toleration on the
part of men whose doctrines are as inconvertible as ice and
fire!

True liberality is every way desirable, and it never shows
more beautiful than when associated with a theology that is
severe and hard. As between such liberality and liberal
opinion, as we designate opinion that is free from the bond-
age of traditional authority, there is no question which has
the greater moral beauty. The liberal opinion, as such, may
not have any : it may have come to a man as naturally as the
air he breathes ; or it may be the result of a moral heroism
that can hardly be surpassed. We have no more burnings
for heresy, and you may think we have no more persecution ;
but here in Brooklyn there are men and women suffering for
their liberal opinion's sake pangs not less horrible than those
of wheel and stake. Those were self-limiting : they made an
end of both the sufferer and suffering ; but these go on year
after year, — the averted looks, the bitter accusations, the
old-time sympathy and affection cruelly withheld. I speak
of what I know and testify to that which I have seen. But
even here the moral beauty is not in the liberal belief, but
in the openness of mind and the indomitable will to seek
the truth, let who will favor or forbear. Happy are they who
have both liberal opinion and that liberality which can be

A Liberal Faith. 47

patient with the utmost difference ! They do not always go
together. There is a radical bigotry as intolerant as that of
the most intolerant conservatism of our time. If one must
be denied us or the other, let it by all means be the liberal
opinion. Better the theology of Calvin with the liberality of
Channing than the theology of Channing with the bigotry
of Calvin : difficult and rare associations both, but not im-
possible. Reading the Life of Dean Stanley, some of us have
been disappointed in his opinions, — that they were not more
liberal. But we have been more than compensated by his
liberality, — his genial tolerance of beliefs that differed from
his own through a wide range of difference and opposition.
There was nothing mean or stinted about that. And it was
all the more beautiful because it was not the expression of
any intellectual indifference, and because his toleration was
for those on either side of him, the more radical and the
less. Some "good Unitarians," who are none too good,
might profitably consider his example. For some of them
can be very sweet and pleasant to the difference on one side
of their own opinion, but cannot be anything but intolerant
of the side which is away from their own tendency, whatever
that may be.

True liberality is every way desirable, and so is liberal
opinion ; but neither true liberality nor liberal opinion an-
swers to the full-orbed significance of a liberal faith. Either
of these is better than mere open-mouthed credulity, whether
directed to the oldest or the newest things, or mere slack
indifference. But there are men whose liberality is beauti-
ful who have but little faith. There are pessimists who
have none at all, who are nothing if not tolerant of the
most diverse opinions, — for them so many diverse symptoms
of that intolerable disease which we call life. And to be
convinced that liberal opinion does not necessarily imply a
liberal faith, we need only take some representative of lib-
eral opinion in whom the freedom from traditional limita-
tions is only equalled by the lack of faith in man or God.
Such an one was Professor Huxley. Surely, no one of his

48 A Liberal Faith.

contemporaries was more free than he in his opinions, less
able or anxious to conform them to traditional lines. But
had he a liberal faith ? Does it look so when he says,
" Even the best of modern civilizations appears to me to
exhibit a condition of mankind which neither embodies any
worthy ideal nor even possesses the merit of stability " ?
Does it look so when he continues, " I do not hesitate to
express the opinion that, if there is no hope of a large im-
provement of the condition of the greater part of the human
family, if it is true that the increase of knowledge, the win-
ning of a greater dominion over nature which is its con-
sequence, and the wealth which follows upon that dominion,
are to make no difference in the extent and the intensity of
want, with its concomitant physical and moral degradation
among the masses of the people, I should hail the advent
of some kindly comet, which would sweep the whole affair
away, as a desirable consummation " ?

Even here we have a certain faith, no doubt, — a faith in
the ideal and a faith in the ability of men, in spite of Nat-
ure's enmity, to make the good things better and the bad
things good. But surely it is not a liberal faith which holds
that what men do achieve must be achieved in spite of Nat-
ure's enmity ; nor is it a liberal faith which holds that, in
some half a million years of various experiments, men have
achieved so little that the hope of the race is in its extinc-
tion unless it can do much better. A liberal faith does
not so read the creed of evolution as to hold that all the
generations of the past have been merely so many rounds by
which the coming man has climbed to that on which he now
stands, far, far below the top. It holds that every genera-
tion, every stage of the advance, has been a good thing in
itself, if not the best thing possible. Mivart, a pious Roman
Catholic, has so far disengaged himself from the cosmology
of Genesis that he accepts Sir William Thomson's estimate
of the period during which life has existed on our planet —
one hundred million years ! So, then, for ninety-nine and
a half millions the creatures were waiting for the manifesta-

A Liberal Faith. 49

tion of the sons of God. But they did not know that they
were waiting ; and they had a good time all the while, after
a fashion of their own. And it is to repeat the folly and the
egotism of the old theology, — questioning "Doth God care
for oxen ? " and answering, " Certainly not, these things are
for our sakes," — to imagine that those ninety-nine million,
five hundred thousand years of animal life had no justifi-
cation save as their dust became the soil from which the
human race should spring. Be ours the liberal faith that, if
the crowning race had never come, Wisdom would have been
justified of her children in the mud and scum of things!
Be ours the liberal faith that all the generations of mankind
have had their justification in their immediate satisfactions,
struggles, victories, whatever further justification they may
have had in their reaching forward to the crowning age of

ages, where,

" On the glimmering summits far withdrawn,
God makes himself an awful rose of dawn."

A liberal faith — I come back to my original definition —
is a faith the contents of which are liberal, whose quality is
confident and brave, whose thoughts of God and man and
destiny are broad and deep and high. Ye believe in God.
says a New Testament Epistle ; ye do well : the devils also
believe, and tremble. Now the faith that has the quality of
such belief is not a liberal faith, however perfectly assured.
The habitual action of a liberal faith is not to make a man
tremble, but to steady him and stiffen him, to brace him for
the adverse shocks of circumstance. Seeing that God is
infinite, it would seem that any true faith in him must be a
liberal faith. And, indeed, it is so. But we must not be
fooled with words. We can believe in a man's existence
and yet have no faith in him, and it is exactly so with God.
When we believe in a man, as we say, then we have faith in
him. We have a sweet and joyous confidence in his in-
tegrity and justice and humanity that is not shaken by this
or that isolated circumstance which we cannot at once adjust
to it. So with our faith in God. What we believe about

5<D A Liberal Faith.

him does not so much matter, — not so much, and yet we
must not be disdainful here, for what we believe about him
has a very potent influence in its mass and aggregation on
our belief in him. But our belief in him is the thing that
counts.

And whence comes this belief ? Not wholly from the
sweep of science gathering in the facts of cosmic order to
build up its splendid generalizations. If it were not so, it
would go hard with the majority of men and women whose
scientific knowledge is no great affair. Yet these also have
their life to live. If they could live in the moment only, if
they might never stop and think, it might be well enough
till sickness came, or ruinous misfortune, or the death of
precious friends. But they cannot live in the moment ;
they must sometimes stop to think ; if their own affairs do
not oblige them to, then others' pain and sorrow press on
their hearts. Moreover, if they go to the scientific people
for the faith they need, they are sometimes sent away uncom-
forted. There are men very wise in science who have very
little faith in God. That is because of their intense engross-
ment with some particular part which makes the broader
look impossible. They save others ; themselves they cannot
save. The chastisement of our peace is upon them, and by
their stripes we are healed. What then ? Shall we fall
back on the old antithesis of faith and science? God forbid!
Far from us be any such book-keeping by double entry !
But our science must look in, as well as out. The facts of
the inner life are no less substantial than the facts of the
astronomer and the geologist. And these facts are as " all
compact " of faith in God as the stars are of atoms, as the in-
terstellar spaces are of the ether which eye hath not seen
but science has conceived.

" The stream cannot rise higher than the fountain " : that is
good science. " Nothing is evolved which is not first in-
volved " : so is that. "Can mortal man be more just than
God ? " that also ; and " God is greater than our hearts."
The attraction of gravitation and the law of the radius vector

A Liberal Faith. 51

are not more sure than are these laws of man's reflection of the
life of God. They mean that we cannot conceive or hope or
dream of anything better than the divine reality. We may
not accept the Fourth Gospel as a valid testimony to the life
and words of Jesus. We cannot do so. And therefore we
cannot believe he ever said, when Philip wished to see the
Father, " He that hath seen me hath seen the Father." But
he might have said as much, and so might thousands of
others, men and women. Might, but could not ; for those
who do most to reveal the Father are ever slowest to lay
claim to such a revelation. All human goodness is a revela-
tion of God's goodness, but the highest revelation is the
voice of one's own heart. We have known men and women
so full of loving help and tenderness, so full of sweet encour-
agement and divine compassion, that we have said, " A God
as good as these is good enough for me ! " and at the same
time we have known that his goodness is inclusive of ten
thousand times ten thousand such examples, and, beyond
that, incalculably more and more. It is only the merest tyro
who imagines that our scientific knowledge is limited to the
visible world. Tyndall indoctrinated us in the scientific uses
of the imagination, and showed us that there was an ideal
extension of our knowledge infinite in scope beyond the vis-
ible. There is no sounder science than the ideal extension
through all the infinity of God of the goodness which is
known to us. Happy are we if we know many bright
examples of the goodness which invites to such ideal exten-
sion ; but happier if we also have in our own hearts the
goodness which is prophecy and pledge of the eternal and
divine.

" Do I find love so full in my nature, God's ultimate gift,
And doubt his own love can compete with it, — here the parts shift,
Here the creature surpass the creator, the end what began ? "

To do that — so to find and so to doubt — were as illog-
ical, as unphilosophical, as unscientific, as absurd, as to find
two things equal to the same thing and yet doubt that they
are equal to each other.

52 A Liberal Faith.

It follows from this vital dependence of our faith in God
upon our faith in man that we cannot have a liberal faith in
God without a liberal faith in man. And such a faith is
quite inseparable from any large appreciation of the course
of human history, — the arts men have developed, the tasks
they have accomplished, the civilizations they have reared,
the inventions and discoveries by which they have subdued
the original harshness of the earth, the sciences that have
revealed the boundless mystery and order of the world, the
heroisms that have sustained good causes and made bad
causes almost good by the splendor of their absolute devo-
tion. Nor less this faith sustains itself by visions of the
possibilities of human nature projected for us by the ex-
ceptional splendor of great deeds which have lit up the cen-
turies, and by such brave fidelities as we ourselves have
known, of one substance with the fidelity of Jesus and all
great and holy souls, as good as any ever shown by martyrs
at the stake, which flame could not destroy or make one
fraction less. Why, friends, if the Almighty were not good,
but evil utterly, I think that he would soon or late be
shamed into all sweet benevolence by the spectacle of
human excellence, the golden deeds that men and women
have so bravely and so sweetly done. That is a very lovely
story which Dr. Abbott tells us about the young girl who
came to him wishing to join the church, and he asked her,
" Do you wish to be like Christ ? " and she answered, " I
wish to be like my mother." Oh, happy mother, to deserve
that perfect praise ! Oh, happy world, in which it is de-
served by tens of thousands of each generation ! And when
Jesus loved to say " Our Father ! " how near was Nazareth
to Brooklyn, his thought to that of the dear girl who an-
swered Dr. Abbott in that blessed way! And how tenderly
Theodore Parker took up her thought and that of Jesus and
blended them in sweet accord in his habitual prayer, " O
Thou who art our Father and our Mother " ! Thus ever-
more inextricable is our liberal faith in man and God.
I have shown how far removed from liberal faith in God

A Liberal Faith. 53

may be mere liberal opinion. It may be as far removed
from liberal faith in man. In fact, we must go to Calvin for
any estimate of human nature so contemptuous and so con-
temptible as that of certain modern thinkers and reformers,
who arrogate to themselves the sole representation of liberal
opinion, and who think they have a faith in man so liberal
that there is no other that is worthy to be called liberal in
comparison. For it is utterly illogical to believe in man as
he now is, or as some few hundreds of particular men are,
while holding that all the generations of the past and all the
present race, some few thousands excepted, have been and
are insane and idiotic in their religious mind. Yet that they
have been and are insane and idiotic is undeniable if there
has been no reality in the religious hopes, beliefs, and aspi-
rations of the past. The hope of the race would be in its ex-
tinction if these things were true, and Huxley's comet could
not come too soon. But those who have a liberal faith in
human nature will not accept as true the railing accusation
that has been brought against it by some thinkers of our
time, who do not think too much. They will believe that
there has always been a reality in religion, however irrational
its manifestation. They will believe,

" That the feeble hands and helpless.
Groping blindly in the darkness,
Touch God's right hand in that darkness,"

and by that touch are thrilled with something better than the
haughty sciolism of the half-educated intellect, which makes
its ignorance the test of others' knowledge, and its self-suffi-
ciency the condemnation of the multitude who, in all ages,
have said with the apostle, " Our sufficiency is of God."

The same apostle said, " I have fought a good fight ; I
have kept the faith." Now, in this busy, work-day world of
ours, we are so circumstanced that we have not only our own
faith to keep but that of other men. Doubtless men are not
so scientific as they should be in their reasoning from day to
day. Doubtless if they understood the logic of induction

54 ^ Liberal Faith.

better they would not argue from the turpitude of one man
or woman, or even a dozen or twenty, to the essential turpi-
tude of human nature and the injustice or indifference of the
Almighty. But nothing is surer than that they do argue in
this way continually, and that any base or even thoughtless
man or woman can do more to destroy the faith of others in
a day than Paley's "Natural Theology," or even the best
things of Martineau, could do to rebuild it in a year. And,
therefore, it is not enough that we shall carefully consider
what we can do to make our own faith in God and man more
liberal, and sweet, and glad. We must consider also what we
can do to make the faith of others after the pattern we our-
selves have seen in mounts of vision, haunts of silent prayer;
what we must not do, that would, if done, hasten the swift
inference from our baseness to the baseness of mankind and
to the divine indifference to human good or ill. Happy are
they whose goodness daily builds anew, in human hearts, faith
in humanity and God! — thrice happy, seeing that it is a
divine impossibility that they should do this service to their
fellow-men, and not at the same time build up, in ever
stronger and more glorious fashion, their own sweet and
blessed confidence in all mankind and in him who is over
all, God blessed forever.

THE CONTINUING CITY.

The complaint of the New Testament writer that he and
his fellow Christians had no continuing city is one that
sometimes finds a very literal echo in the modern heart.
Schiller's notable saying, There is nothing changeless but
change, is nowhere found more true than in the cities of
to-day, — miracles of impermanence, the waster and the
builder too forever at their work, the march of improve-
ment signalized by perpetual sapping and mining, with up-
heaval as by earthquake shocks. The cities of Europe are
much stabler than our own ; but in the most venerable of
them all — Rome, the Eternal City of the poet and the rheto-
rician— we found a lively transformation scene was being
everywhere displayed. The Appian Way was choked with
carts loaded with materials for new buildings destined to
replace the old ; and when we went to the Fountain of Trevi,
and threw in our soldi and drank the water for augury of
our return some happy day, they told us that we must not
long delay or there would be no Fountain of Trevi pouring
its flood of diamonds into the emerald pool below, that
some smart new street was going to obliterate it from men's
sight forever. I think it has not done so yet.

But of course the New Testament writer was not troub-
ling his spirit over such little things as these. Little he
cared for the impermanence of Jerusalem of Ephesus or
Antioch or Rome. He looked for a city that had founda-
tions, whose builder and maker was God ; a Jerusalem the
golden, like that of the Apocalyptic vision coming down from
God out of heaven prepared as a bride adorned for her
husband. And so it happens that his meaning was not one

* Preached on the first Sunday of the year.

56 The Continuing City.

that comes home to us more forcibly or appealingly than
our trivial application of his words would have come home
to him. Whatever hopes we cherish of new life, new love,
new opportunity, upon the other side of death, they reflect
no discredit on the world that now is. We shall be satisfied
if we find anything there so beautiful and good as the things
which here delight us and sustain us, sense and soul. We
remember Dr. Holmes's poem, "Homesick in Heaven," and
we wonder if we shall not sometimes be homesick for the
dear old mountains of the earth and the multitudinous laugh-
ter of the sea ; yes, and for the faces and the voices that we
knew of old, if they are different there. If different, they
cannot be so good, whatever angel-folk may think or say.

" Hours fugitive as precious return ! return !
Let the old life once more enmesh us ! "

Moreover, we have here a continuing city. So had the
New Testament writer, only it did not exist for his imagina-
tion ; and what does not exist for the imagination does not
practically exist at all. It is the City of Dateless Time.
How long has been, how long will be, its secret and sublime
continuance ? Once it began for men as yesterday, and to-
morrow it would cease to be. Now the six thousand years of
Bible reckoning are not a drop in the bucket to the millions
that have come and gone since first the starry tides set
toward the centre of the fluid haze and eddied into suns that
wheeling cast the planets. And in " the nature of the times
deceased," as Shakspere said, " there is a history, the which
observed, a man may prophesy with a near aim of the main
chance of things as yet not come to life," and know that they
will have as free a scope, as boundless a duration, as the
things already gone. And in this vast continuance there is
no break.

The days and years are correspondent with the earth's
revolution on its axis and around the sun ; and these obvious
motions serve our convenience excellently well, yet have in
them as little of the essential quality of time as has a yard-

The Continuing City. 57

stick of the stuff it measures off. The new year did not
always begin with January, and the old reckoning had the
virtue of a nearer correspondence with the year's solar history.
And so it happens that all the emotions which now seem so
proper to this parting of the ways — the backward and the
forward look, the regrets for wrong things done and things
undone that should have been performed, the resolutions
and the hopes with which the future beckons and exhilarates
our hearts — are only artificially related to the passing time.
If the old reckoning had been kept they would have clung
to that with the same energy with which they now cling to
the new ; and if a new reckoning should be adopted, making
any other day of all the year the first, all of our new-year
emotions would betake themselves to that, like migratory
birds, and all the old-year emotions to the immediately pre-
ceding days. Do not imagine, therefore, that you can choose
your own old year and new, and transfer to them all of the
old-year and new-year emotions that now cluster round
December 31 and January 1. We are the dupes of our own
artifices and arrangements. Our social nature has adjusted
itself to the present order. It is as real for us as if it had
a rational basis, an essential quality. If by universal agree-
ment some other day should be made the first of the new
year, long afterward there would be found the old emotions
springing up about the former starting-place and goal, like
garden roses where there was once a house and home, or
like the seaside flowers which bloom upon the shores of
Lake Superior in memory of a time when the waters of the
lake were salt as the Atlantic's waves.

No continuing city? We have not only the City of Date-
less Time, of unbroken temporal sequence, but also the City
of Organic Evolution. Many and great have been those who
have labored for the building of this city in which now we
dwell secure. One of the greatest of them all (I speak of
Herbert Spencer) has but just now completed the great
system of philosophy which he conceived thirty-six years
ago, now seeing what he then foresaw.

58 The Continuing City.

Of this same city Darwin was a master-builder ; Tyndall
another ; Huxley another ; and Haeckel and Wallace and
Gray, and a great company besides filled with their spirit,
have added street to street, and tower to tower, and spire to
spire, and made the walls impregnable against the assault of
superstition and the traditional theology. Here is a city of
God that binds together in one grand conception all that
was disparate and fragmentary in the old order of belief.
For innumerable special creations, — the mud-pie of the
urchin working in the sedimented pool furnishing the style
of the divine activity, — we have now one eternal process
sweeping through all times and things ; each present bound
to every future and to every past by a genetic bond, each
kind to every other ; the production of species by natural
selection and the preservation of the fittest.

"A subtle change of countless rings
The next unto the farthest brings ;
The eye reads omens where it goes,
And speaks all languages the rose ;
And striving to be man, the worm
Mounts through all the spires of form."

" That they all may be one," prays the New Testament.
Jesus and our nineteenth-century science adopts that glori-
ous prayer, making it more glorious by expanding its " all "
from a little company of the great Teacher's friends to a
great company, a mighty company, that includes all human
and all animal races, all suns and moons and stars. What
a continuing city have we here ; continuous in time, continu-
ous in the unbroken sequence of its development, continuous
in the present, actual relation of each part with every other !
How the conception dwarfs the former, with its mechanic
deity now pottering at this and now at that, from time to
time the machinery breaking down and the maker coming
round to patch it up ! How it rebukes the equally mechani-
cal conception of society and politics and religion which was
the current stock of radical opinion about a century ago !
Concerning nothing else was Thomas Paine so eloquent as

T/ie Continuing City. 59

the iniquity of one generation's making laws and institutions
for another. Rub it all out and begin again, was his device
for general reformation. An easy thing to say ; a harder
one to do. The parchment proved a palimpsest and the
old writing far more indestructible than the new, which had
been written over it with ink of blood and tears. Like the
German kobold on the household cart, some impish spirit
of the past attends all new departures, stamping on them his
sign and seal. And with the consciousness of this there has
come into our thought of the past something very different
from the old superstitious reverence for it as a good thing
in itself, and as different from the old radical contempt for
it as intrinsically bad, — something very tender for its faults
and glad of its intense humanity, working the designing priest
far less assiduously, finding in human nature a sufficient
explanation of the domination of religion and of the priest
himself. The general outcome has been immensely favor-
able to our judgment of the past. Our constructions of
individual conduct here and there may be as stern as ever ;
but for the general aspects of the past, however harsh, how-
ever superstitious, we are developing a very tender side, con-
sidering ourselves lest we also be too sternly judged by
those who, coming after us, shall find our social and politi-
cal and religious methods very far from their ideal of what
is right and good.

No continuing city ! Nay, but this phrase for many in
our time, as for the early followers of Jesus, has a much
deeper sense than any so far named. For there are those
who have no continuity of purpose, no persistency of will,
no constancy to an ideal, to bind together youth and man-
hood and old age into a unity of character in which they
may abide with perfect confidence and into which their
friends and all the world may enter without fear of ambush
or of open harm. It is the first step which costs, the proverb
says, but frequently it is one long subsequent to the first which
costs the most. The mountain-climber starts off at a run, —
the novice not the experienced mountaineer. He saves his

60 The Continuing City.

strength for the last stages of the long ascent, where the
way is steep and a foothold sometimes hard to find and the
strong winds buffet like a mace. Many are the proverbs
that furnish to this principle, circumstance and illustration.
He that endureth to the end shall be saved, says the New
Testament, and there, too, is the parable of the virgins, with
their exhausted lamps, their lack of reserve power, and that
of the hungry man at midnight who would have three loaves
and got them because of his persistency. Everybody knows
of Robert Bruce's instruction in this virtue from the spider
who after half a dozen vain attempts to stretch his web made
a seventh trial with better luck. And a good many know of
Mr. Crawley's neighbor, — Mr. Crawley the curate in Trol-
lope's "Last Chronicles of Barset," — who met him bowed
with misery, and, simple and rough of speech, said to him
for the strengthening of his heart, "It's dogged as does
it." Confucius was of the same opinion twenty-five centuries
ago when he said, "The man who lays one shovelful of earth
upon the ground a?id goes on, that man is building the moun-
tain " ; and Lowell joins the chorus in his great poem of
Columbus, worth all the poetry that our Columbian anni-
versary inspired, telling us that

" Endurance is the crowning quality,
And patience all the passion of great hearts."

I like these many variations of a single theme. Their variety
and the wide extent of time and space from which they come
suggest the soundness of the lesson which they teach.
There is another variation that by a long way round will
bring me home to my continuing city which I have had in
sight from every milestone of the way. It is the saying of
General Grant's father when the general was on the way to
Richmond and had been for a long time. " I think Ulysses
will get there," said the old man, " for when he was a boy
he had the gift of continuance." The gift of continuance is
that which captures Richmond every time ; captures the
thing desired, the craftsman's skill, the scholar's learning, the

The Continuing City. 61

merchant's tact, the artist's power, the statesman's mastery.
It is that which captures the continuing city, the unity of
character which binds in one the hopes and aspirations of
our youth and the attainments of our maturer years.

It is so with little things as well as with the enterprises of
great pith and moment. Talking with my father not very
long before his death about an experiment in business which
he made in 1854, and did not make it go, and tried again in
1869 with better luck, I asked him, "Why did you do better
the second time ? " and he said : " Why, don't you see ? /
held on." Three simple words, but they would tell the story
of thousands and ten thousands who having the gift of con-
tinuance came at length unto their desired haven. As I read
the biography of greatness, it is not the rule but the excep-
tion that the continuing city of its excellence and fame and
influence comes like an exhalation of the dawn. It is built
up stone by stone of slow, sweet patience and unconquerable
hope, the foundations deep down out of sight where it is
damp and chill and liker to a grave than to a pedestal or
throne. The men of sudden reputation do not come to stay.
In Tom Paine's happy and immortal phrase, they go up like
a rocket and come down like the stick. Patiently and long
the truly great ones struggle against odds, and make them-
selves of no reputation because they will not be disobedient
to the heavenly vision. Sometimes the reputation never
comes till they are gone, and

"The hooting mob of yesterday in silent awe return
To glean up the scattered ashes into History's golden urn."

Sometimes it lights their dying eyes with a bright momen-
tary gleam. But that does not matter much. They have
held on, they have had the gift of continuance, they have
laid the first shovelful upon the earth and have gone on ; they
have been constant to their ideal, they have not disobeyed
the heavenly vision, they have endured unto the end and
they have been saved from weakness, vacillation, littleness of
soul. And theirs is the continuing city, a life not fragmen-

62 The Continuing City.

tary or dualistic, but mastered from the beginning to the end
by the same constant inspiration.

" This is all well enough," I seem to hear you say, " for
the elect, the mighty ones of genius, power, and fame. Such
are not we." Yea, verily, and yet the power which rounds
the pebble rounds the sphere. There is one gravitation
only of the stars and aerolites, and the apple falling into
Newton's mind to trouble it (as if it were the angel of
Bethesda's pool) with some strange and secret charm. The
gift of continuance is not the possession of a favored few :
it is the possession of great multitudes of men and women.
Their lives are narrow, meagre, hard. The temptation to
give over the conflict often comes to them in the pauses
of labor, in the night watches. But they do not yield to
it. They hold on. They endure unto the end. And so
doing the freedom of the continuing city is made theirs as
absolutely as a Corot's or Millet's or Beethoven's, a Ra-
phael's or Garrison's or Darwin's. And here, once more,
let me remind you that we are too apt to underrate the
moral quality of a man's regular vocation, his daily task, his
business, to look somewhere apart from this for his oppor-
tunity for achieving character and doing good. But there
is nothing else that is so determinative of a man's character,
nothing else that so furnishes hands for his beneficence, and
feet to run his errands of good will. Here is the scene of
his temptations, ruinous for the weak, but to the strong new
strength, making true the imagination of the savage warrior
that the energy of the enemy he conquers is straightway
added to his own. Here is the school of virtue, the gymna-
sium where it must run and wrestle, and find out its ability
to stand up and resist when stoutly buffeted. As there is
a statue in every block of marble, so in every enterprise of
honest work for every man or woman there is an image of
some goodliness of character, not to be liberated without
many a well-directed blow. As you go about in these great
cities you find all sorts of business going on. But it turns
out that one great co-operative enterprise includes them all.

The Continuing City. 63

They are all making men, and sometimes the human speci-
mens turned out are cheaper than the wares ; and then
again they shame the sculptor's statues and the worth of
precious stones.

I could speak of these hard times, hardly beginning yet to
better, and of the opportunity which they afford for making
or unmaking men. And yet I am inclined to think that,
after all, it is not the financial crisis, nor the long, slow,
up-hill work that follows it that is most trying to the stuff of
which the business man is made. These bring with them a
certain courage of their own, an esprit de corps that helps the
individual to pull himself together. Then all are in one boat,
or they are all " companions on a desert waste who share the
same dire thirst and therefore share the scanty water." It is
the continuity of life that tests the continuity of character,
" the same dull round " and common task each day renewed,
year after year, each unromantic, undramatic as the last.
In the parable of the sower, you will remember that there
was certain seed which started well enough ; but when the
sun was up it was scorched, and because it had no root it
withered away. Is there nothing in this figure correspond-
ing to the facts of modern business life ? If so, why is it
that we have so many disappointments in the business and
social world ; so many instances of men of whom we have
expected nothing but good and who have done nothing that
we know unworthy, suddenly unmasking and revealing to
us a vicious or a criminal countenance ? I use a doubtful
figure ; for it suggests that all along the man has been differ-
ent from our imagination, and generally that is not true.
But the sun is up, — the hot blaze of manhood, so different
from its dewy morning hours, when everything was fresh and
glistering in an ideal and rosy light. And how many men
there are that have no root of personal conviction ; only a
few flat and silly fibres spreading out into the surface-soil
of habit and conventionality ; no root that strikes deep
down into earth where it may twine and twist itself about
some bowlder of conscience, of duty, of social loyalty, and

64 The Continuing City.

so be honor-bound and able to defy whatever winds may
blow ! There are men who are so happily endowed, who
have such native strength of will, or whose early circum-
stances have so welded it, that they do not know the mean-
ing of temptation. They can look upon the wine when it is
red, or the gold when it is yellow, or the beauty of forbidden
things when it is warm and palpitant, with an equal freedom
from all base desire. There are those less favored at the
start whom circumstances so befriend that they as little
know the meaning of temptation. Either they have all they
want or the more liberal allowance is not forced on their
imagination with a persistency that shreds away their
moorings to the good and true. But there are also those
who, with the poorer outfit, also have the strain and fret of
a continual temptation working on their lives. A hundred
or a thousand times perhaps they have resisted before they
have succumbed. There are men without fleck or stain
whose whole lives long have not shown a half, a tenth, the
energy of resistance that have some others which have
gone to utter wreck. These tire of the perpetual struggle.
They have given honesty a fair trial, and if it has been the
best policy for them it has not been a money-making one.
There are those who have tried some other and they have
done much better, by the world's standards of success.
Why not go after them ? Besides, to many men midway of
their career there comes, it would appear, a certain slacken-
ing of energy, impatience with life's humdrum quality, and
the desire for change, that mean for them an anxious,
dangerous time.

Some there are — the most, thank God — who can rally
the good in the depths of their own natures, fortify them-
selves with precious memories and lofty hopes, and so get
past the strait 'twixt Scylla and Charybdis into calm seas
beyond. Some are less fortunate. Moreover, in the sphere
of talent, we see that no man can afford to be content
with any past attainment. To do as well as he has done,
he must do better. As the old sculptor said to the young

The Continuing City. 65

one, he must get his second wind. The fable of Narcissus
is a fable which the history of art continually makes good, —
the tragedy of self-admiration. Hence, self-imitation, repe-
tition. Certainly, Cazin's pictures are very lovely. But
have you not a fear that once too often he may repeat the
beauty of that evening sky ? When Pygmalion fell in love
with his own workmanship it was granted life. But that
was an exception. Death is the general consequence of
the artist's satisfaction with his statue, picture, poem, score.
And as in art, so in life : the common tragedy is the self-
content which poisons good desire ; the sinking down, the
falling back upon the thing achieved, upon the goal attained,
and so inevitably falling below that and short of it as time
goes on. We must do better than we have done or we cannot
do as well.

Time was when the ideal conception of the preacher was
"a youth of folly, an old age of cares," — of pious cares, pre-
sumably, redressing the eternal scales and making the bad
fly up, the good remain below. But what the poet wrote
was different, "A youth of frolics, an old age of cards," — a
likelier sequence than the other. But even if the ideal of
sainthood or the ideal of the novelist, — wild oats and then a
crop of orange blossoms and the wide respect which money
always wins, — could be generally realized, what nobler
spirit would not sympathize with Martineau's contempt for
a life in two volumes : the first a jest-book, and the second
a mixture of the satire and the liturgy ? Were the second a
cash-book or a religious novel, would it be any better ? No ;
let us have the whole life of a piece, from youth to age one
constant inspiration of nobility and truth and kindliness and
earnestness and peace and love. No fear that such an in-
spiration would entail the loss of any joy of youth on which
maturity could look back without regret. There have been
thousands who have dwelt in this continuing city, and left
untasted never a joy that is the proper food of any healthy
boy or girl, never a satisfaction in which a noble youth or
maid could take unqualified delight. And the most persua-

66 TJic Continuing City.

sive argument for such a constant inspiration is the spectacle
of a life obedient to its sacred law.

"We have here no continuing city," said the New Testa-
ment writer, " but we seek one to come." We have one here,
and more than one, — the City of Unbroken Time, the City
of Organic Evolution, and the City of Persistent Character,
wherein all those do dwell who keep from youth to age one
purpose strong, one steadfast, high intent to learn those
things that are true and do those things that are right. Yet
here so trebly rich we still can say with the New Testament
writer, " We seek one to come." And never more eagerly
than when such men as we have known, inhabitants of the
continuing city, obedient to its laws, are taken from our
sight. We cannot make them dead. Somehow, somewhere,
we feel, and seem to know, they must be living still, " in other
kingdoms of a sweeter air." However that may be, the cen-
tral fact remains that here and now

" There is a city builded by no hand,

And unapproachable by sea or shore,
And unassailable by any band

Of storming soldiery forevermore."

THE OLD TESTAMENT AND THE
HIGHER CRITICISM."

In the first place, what is the Higher Criticism ? It is
an attempt to view the different parts of the Bible in a large
and general way, to discover when the different books were
written, and, if possible, by whom they were written (though
this particular is generally of much less importance than
the other) ; and, yet further, their relations to each other
and to the various times in which they were produced, —
how they were influenced by these, and what influence
they had upon them, — if, haply, in this way the line of
evolution may be traced from the beginning to the end of
that millennium which, speaking roughly, synchronized with
the production of the Bible from its earliest to its latest
parts, — from the ninth century B.C. to the second after and
inclusive. I say "speaking roughly," because, no doubt,
there are fragments inhering in the Old Testament books
which come down from a greater antiquity than the ninth
century r..c. Twelve hundred years would cover the devel-
opment of English literature from Caedmon and Baeda, its
earliest beginners, to Watson and Kipling, the latest of the
long and honorable line. A similar period would cover
nearly or quite everything in the Bible, the earliest frag-
ments which are imbedded in the histories and other books
included. Hence the rank absurdity of thinking or speaking
of the Bible as if it were one book. It is a compendium of
Jewish literature until the end of the second Christian cen-
tury. The sixty-six books which this compendium contains
do not begin to tell the number of the authors who took

*To be followed by a sermon on the New Testament.

68 The Old Testament

part in their composition ; for there were, probably, scores
of writers implicated in the production of the Psalms and
Proverbs, and many more in the composition of the prophets
than appears upon their face.

To speak of the Higher Criticism seems to imply a lower.
It does, — a lower and a lowest. The lower criticism of the
Bible is that which is merely textual. Of course, this and
the Higher Criticism often play into each other's hands : the
age of the book and the circumstances of its production
help us to understand the individual texts, and the individ-
ual texts help us to understand the age and character of the
books in which they appear. The Higher Criticism takes up
into itself almost bodily the lower textual criticism, but is as
much more than that as a man is more than the food which
he consumes. It is one of the loveliest ironies of man's
intellectual history that the superstitious reverence for the
Bible has contributed immensely to the demonstration of its
natural genesis and human character. Its text never would
have received the attention which it has received if it had
not been regarded as a sacred text. Every line has been
interrogated, every word. And all this work has been the
getting out of material for the Higher Criticism to work with
in its day. Indeed, some of the most important elements of
the Higher Criticism have been developed by the lower
textual criticism, which said, " I will water my garden bed " ;
and, lo ! "its brook became a river, and the river a sea."

There is a much lower criticism than that of the merely
textual critic. It is that of the dogmatic critic, subjecting
the Bible to the necessities of his particular system of theol-
ogy. In this business there has been much bullying of the
witnesses, much putting of them on the rack. Texts have
had a meaning tortured out of them, agreeable to the wishes
of the dogmatist. But the violence done has been for the
most part unconscious. Because unconscious, it has been
no less miserable in its effects. Beautiful as is our King
James translation, it fairly reeks with the theological precon-
ceptions of the translators, — so much so that a great linguist

and the Higher Criticism. 69

declared not long ago that to retranslate the Bible would be
to revolutionize the religion of the English-speaking world.
Yet even more perversive of the meaning of the Bible than
its translation has been its theological interpretation, the
reading into it of all sorts and conditions of theological and
ecclesiastical ideas.

Criticism, strictly speaking, is judgment; and hence the
so-called criticism of the dogmatic theologian hunting up
proof texts for his dogmas is not criticism at all. It is advo-
cacy, and as unlike the true criticism as the advocacy of the
lawyer for his client is unlike the judgment of the judge
upon the bench. And still we have not reached the lowest
deep. That is the so-called criticism of the wilful and delib-
erate depredator of the Bible. This is criticism in the
vulgar sense of those to whom all criticism is identical with
fault-finding and depreciation. There are even clergymen
who have not unlearned this childish notion. Said one of
them, speaking of Dr. Briggs, "That he or any one should
presume to criticise the word of God ! " But we have plenty
of what is called criticism which is nothing but deliberate
depreciation. It revels in "the mistakes of Moses," un-
aware that the Higher Criticism finds but " ten words " of
Moses in the Old Testament (if so many), — the Ten Com-
mandments, which, in their simplest form, are possibly from
that great leader's shaping hand.

Having thus distinguished between the Higher Criticism
and certain lower forms, let me, in the next place, remind you
that the Higher Criticism is not something new. You would
imagine it to be so from the way many people talk of late in
our city, where a distinguished clergyman has been putting
out, in a very genial and fascinating way, some of the results
of the Higher Criticism as it concerns the Old Testament.
What he has done he has done very modestly and cautiously,
sometimes with a strong accent of personal preference, as in
his utterly uncritical idea that Job is the oldest whole book
in the Bible. The leading scholars in our theological
schools would seldom find his opinions unduly radical ; much

yo The Old Testa in cut

oftener unduly conservative and traditional. They are no:
new opinions. With one significant exception they were
familiar to me in my Divinity School days ; and my dear
teacher, Dr. George R. Noyes, held them fifty years ago, in
common with the most learned German scholars of his time,
and the most learned English scholars also, — these, however,
a much smaller company. Some of the most important of
these results were clearly and irrefragably developed early in
the present century, the documentary character of the Penta-
teuch earlier by half a century. Even the newest of Dr.
Abbotts critical conclusions, which — the late origin of the
priestly portions of the Pentateuch — is more central to the
Higher Criticism of the Old Testament than any other, — even
this conclusion had its "seeds and weak beginnings " sixty
years ago in the simultaneous but mutually isolated intui-
tions of Reuss and Vatke, was clearly indicated by Graf in
1866, and splendidly developed by Kuenen in 1869, from
which time its conquests were as rapid as those of the Dar-
winian biology. I cannot but be just a little proud that I
appropriated this conclusion with enthusiasm twenty years
ago, and made it central to my lectures On the Old Testa-
ment given in 1S77, and that my book, "The Bible of
To-day," was the first book published in America (1878)
expository of a critical idea which was destined to be as
fertile in Old Testament matters as Darwin's natural selec-
tion in biology.

No, the conclusions of the Higher Criticism are not new.
The surprising thing is that they should seem so to so many
persons in this community. Where have they been ? What
have they been reading ? One thing is sure : a good many
of the clergy know how little novelty there is in them.
They know that they are taught in many of their theological
schools, and taught there with all possible reverence and
sobriety. There could not be anything more foolish and
absurd than the industrious circulation of the idea that
there is something of enmity to the Bible in the Higher
Criticism. The most tender of the saints have not studied

and the' Higher Criticism. ji

the Bible more reverently than the most revolutionary critics.
These have been not only reverent of the Bible, but of the
truth. They have only accepted results that have been
forced upon them by the onset of the facts in irresistible
array. If the field had been an open one, unfortressed by
traditional prejudices and opinions of the most impregnable
character, they would not have held out so long. But there
has been this advantage in the situation : obliged, because
of traditional prejudices and opinions, to give ten reasons
for each onward step where one would have been sufficient
but for those prejudices and opinions, their advance, if much
slower than it would otherwise have been, has been much
more incontrovertible, much more incontestably assured.

The method of the Higher Criticism has been the method
of science. Beginning with what is most surely known, it
has slowly and cautiously worked out its way from that into
the adjacent region, and then into the regions more and
more remote. In the Old Testament the most authentic
writings of the prophets have been the starting-point. The
most obvious outcome of this process, availing itself of what-
ever helps the narrower criticism of texts and separate books
could furnish, is the negation and destruction of a great
many traditional conceptions as to the age and authorship of
the various books. Taking the Old Testament books in
their traditional English order, which is not altogether that
of the Jewish and other early versions, we are assured that
Moses did not write the Pentateuch nor Joshua the book
which bears his name, nor David the Psalms ascribed to him
in their headings, nor Solomon the Proverbs or Ecclesiastes
or Solomon's Song ; that Isaiah wrote only about one-third
of the book which bears his name ; Jeremiah, less than the
whole of that ascribed to him and no part of Lamentations ;
Daniel, the prophet of the captivity, not a syllable of the
book ascribed to him ; Zechariah, a part only of the book
called Zechariah's.

With these negations of traditional authorship, which by
no means represent the full amount, there have been as

72 The Old Testament

many, if not more, of dates traditionally assigned, as of the
Pentateuch to the fifteenth century b.c, and Job to a much
older date, to which Dr. Abbott fondly clings ; of the
Psalms to David's and the immediately succeeding time ;
of the books ascribed to Solomon to this time ; the book of
Daniel to later years of the captivity in the sixth century ;
and so on. There has been a movement forward all along
the line, but a few centuries here and many there, only a
few of the thirty-nine Old Testament books even approx-
imating to the dates assigned to them in the traditional
chronology. To go into particulars would be to pass
from the negative to the positive aspect of the matter, and
I wish to give the former all its naked force.

If these negations of dates and authorship traditionally
assigned to the Old Testament books were all the Higher
Criticism had to show, it would deserve the contumely
heaped upon it by its more violent opponents, and the in-
difference or distrust of all whose spiritual appetite demands
something more than a Barmecide feast of negative conclu-
sions, empty of all traditional dates and personal associa-
tions. But even the negations of the Higher Criticism are
not so barren as they might be, by a great deal. They are
a notation by which very real values are expressed. They
carry in their train a host of positive results as much more
interesting and impressive, as they are in themselves, as are
the movements of the heavens more interesting and impres-
sive than the algebraic x by which their unknown quan-
tities may be expressed.

For example : the main interest of the Old Testament
criticism has centred in that set of five books, the first five
in our Bibles as commonly published, which is called the
Pentateuch. Now what proportion do the results attained
concerning the Pentateuch bear to the mere negation of the
Mosaic authorship ? To say a hundred or a thousand to one
would be no exaggeration, yet the criticism of the Penta-
teuch has been destructive of much more than its Mosaic
authorship. It has destroyed the unity of its composition.

and the Higher Criticism. 73

It has made Deuteronomy, the fifth section of the fivefold
Pentateuch, a book by itself, dating from the last quarter
of the seventh century b.c, when Moses was some seven
centuries dead. The four preceding books the critics have
broken up into, first, an early set of laws, the "Book of
Covenants," which you will find in Exodus xxi.-xxiii. 19 ;
second, a document in which Elohim is the name used for
God ; third, a document in which Jehovah is the name
used for God ; fourth, a document fusing these ; fifth, a
priestly code containing nearly all the priestly regulations
of Exodus, Numbers, and Leviticus, which was not fairly
published until Moses had been dead about nine centuries,
— all these parts being fused together with Deuteronomy and
Joshua at a still later date, forming a Hexateuch, a sixfold
book, which, and not the Pentateuch, is the true compound
unit of the earlier Hebrew history. All this is destructive
criticism, certainly. But it is the same kind of destruction
which goes on when an incongruous heap of stone and iron
and lumber is sorted and selected and used for building a
house, most solid and symmetrical, fit shelter of a living,
loving home.

If we could have the Hexateuch arranged for ordinary
reading as it has been in the ideal constructions of the critics,
it would have all the advantage over the present arrangement
that a noble building has over the raw materials from which
it is made. Thanks to the constructive genius of the Higher
Criticism, a unity that was merely one of clumsy aggregation
has become vital and organic. Every separate part is vitally
related to some stage of Israel's growth in spiritual things.
It reflects a changing civilization, a deeper ethical and relig-
ious consciousness, as we pass from the Book of Covenants,
a product of the ninth century B.C., to the Prophetic Narra-
tives, called the Jehovistic document, the story book of which
we never tire ; next to the Elohistic document ; then to the
fusion of the two, with added parts, — all this eighth-century
work; then to Deuteronomy (621 b.c.) and a revision of the
parts already named in the Deuteronomic — i.e., half priestly,

74 The Old Testament

half prophetic — spirit ; and, finally, in the fifth century B.C., to
the Priestly Code, and the grand fusion of this with all the
rest, and the re-editing of the whole which, in the third or
fourth century, brought the Pentateuch and Joshua into their
present shape, twelve centuries later than the popular imagi-
nation has conceived.

Nor do the constructive achievements of the Higher Crit-
icism end with the rearrangement of the Hexateuch, even
as far as the Hexateuch is concerned. The order thus dis-
covered is that of a great army, which, as it goes marching
on, sweeps into its files the wavering swarms of national
allies and bordering states, and makes them energetic and
consenting parts of its own unitary force and might. The
critical rearrangement of the Hexateuch, far from ending
with itself, furnishes a unifying principle of Old Testament
relations, which brings the books of Samuel and Kings and
Chronicles and the prophetic books in their true chrono-
logical order, the Psalms and other writings, such as Ruth,
Jonah, Proverbs, into harmonious alliance with the Hexa-
teuch, corresponding with and illustrating one part or an-
other of its composite unity.

Thus it appears that the books of Samuel and Kings fall
into line with those portions of the Pentateuch which are
strongly marked by the prophetic spirit, the prophets Amos
and Hosea, Isaiah and Micah, at the same time into the
same line. Not without real critical insight did the Jews
call the books of Samuel and Kings "the Early Prophets,"
so strong in them is the spirit of the eighth-century prophets,
the first who left a written record of their prophecies.* But
Jeremiah's place is with the Deuteronomist, so much so that
some have imagined Deuteronomy to be his work, as part
prophet and part priest doing his best to reconcile discord-
ant elements; and Ezekiel is significant of that more priestly
tendency which culminated in the Priestly Code after the
return of the captive Israelites from Babylon where the

* It should be understood that all preexilic writing were much edited and altered
after the exile.

cuid the' Higher Criticism. 75

priestly code was worked out, not without much ingenious
and affectionate inclusion of such ritual forms as had been
generally in use or had fallen into innocuous desuetude in the
hurly-burly of invasion and expatriation.

The Psalmists who are many, equally with the Prophets,
bring their glory and honor into the evolution of the Hexa-
teuch. The most of their Psalms are nothing more nor less
than the echoes of the law in the hearts of the people ; and
the collection has been very properly called the Hymn-book
of the Second Temple, the temple built after the captivity
and finished about 516 B.C. Thus all, or nearly all, of them
are assigned to a time from five hundred to nine hundred
years after the time of David, to whom the most searching
criticism allows no part or lot in them whatever. But, if it is
a little matter thus to determine their chronological relations,
it is not a little matter that by this determination they be-
come to us the voice of a great congregation, and not merely
the unreal pietism of a semi-barbarous and immoral king.
It is not a little matter that to the priests, whom we have
habitually depreciated or despised in comparison with the
prophets, we are most indebted for those parts of the Old
Testament which have made it precious to innumerable
hearts. To the same priests we owe the books of Chronicles
and Ezra and Nehemiah, as history prejudiced and imperfect,
but as memoirs of their times, the third and fourth centuries
B.C., most serviceable to the historians of those times, who
are now endeavoring to pluck out the heart of their mystery.
These books are on the best of terms with the priestly portions
and the last editions of the Pentateuch, as also are the first
part of Zechariah (chapters i.-viii.) and Malachi, the last
book in the popular Old Testament ; while the books of
Jonah and Ruth are in spirited rebellion against the narrow
and exclusive policy of those who would shut Israel up in
selfish isolation.

In the development of this progressive relation of so many
books to the evolution of the Hexateuch we have a con-
structive achievement even greater than the rearrangement

j6 TJie Old Testament

of the Hexateuch. It substitutes for a purely mechanical
and irrational arrangement of the Old Testament material
such a relation and connection that we can say,

" Mark how one string, sweet husband to another,
Strikes each in each by mutual ordering."

Immeasurable the gain of every part in interest, in vitality,
in historical and spiritual significance. And there are many
incidental gains which are of great importance. What a
gain, for instance, to the character of God, to find that Deu-
teronomy is no authentic revelation of his character and pur-
poses, but a magnificent literary tour rfe force to effect a
compromise of diverse religious elements ! The character of
the Hebrew people makes an equal gain when the slaughter
of the Canaanites, for which such lame excuses have been
made, and which has often furnished terrible instructions to
fanatical religionists, is remanded to the ideal sphere : some
pious soul so dreamed what ought to be, but never altogether
had his way. Another incidental gain is in the matter of
Isaiah. The criticism which makes chapters xl.-lxvi. a sepa-
rate prophecy, two centuries later than the rest, leaves to the
prophet Isaiah all that he needs for his imperishable fame.
The later portion gives us another prophet equal to, if not
greater than, Isaiah, singing " the Lord's song in a strange
land," singing it with the pathos and the passion of a captive
Jew rejoicing in the prospect of his people's going back to
rebuild the waste places of Jerusalem." We have a similar
gain when the book of Daniel is transferred from the sixth
century B.C. to the second, where it becomes the expression
of that passion of revolt against the tyranny of Antiochus
Epiphanes which raised the standard of the heroic Macca-
bees, and carried it to victory. If it is any loss to have even
a criticism so conservative as that of Dr. Driver detach the
Psalms entirely from King David, surely, the gain is infi-

■ Cheyne, Duhm, and others argue convincingly that the Second Isaiah ends with
chapter Iv. and that the remaining chapters are a series of different prophecies, mainly
from the time of Nehemiah, about 432 B.C.

and the Higher Criticism. 77

nitely greater which interprets them as the growth of several
later centuries. As much as ever they contain

" Words that have drunk transcendent meaning up
From the best passion of all bygone times,
Steeped through with tears of triumph or remorse,
Sweet with all sainthood, cleansed with martyr fires,"

though not unmixed with baser elements. Henceforth they
are the spiritual biography of Israel for five hundred years,
with here and there an accent so purely personal that we feel
as if we ought to veil our faces from the agony and contri-
tion of a troubled soul. As the name of David became the
centre of aggregation for the hymns and spiritual songs of
Israel, so did Solomon's name for its proverbial wisdom and
pessimistic philosophy, and the name of Job for the long
debate concerning the misfortunes and the sufferings of right-
eous men. In every case the gain is large which makes the
individual wither, while the race is more and more. How
grandly, too, the Higher Criticism has rescued the book of
Jonah and the Song of Songs from the contempt of vulgar
literalists and the qualms of prurient prudes (the latter no
less from the stuff and nonsense of allegorical interpreta-
tion), and set them both on high as worthy of all honor, — the
one for its catholic sympathy with alien peoples, and the
other from its praise of simple, faithful love, so radiantly
beautiful and so passionately pure !

But these incidental gains, to which indefinite additions
might easily be made, must not detain us from that larger
synthesis which is involved in the gradual evolution of the
Hexateuch and the other books that correspond to the suc-
cessive stages of its development, which was a business of
some five centuries' duration. The positive, constructive
achievement, par excellence, of the Higher Criticism within
the Old Testament limits is the history of a national relig-
ious evolution from a fetichism or totemism deifying trees
and stones to the worship of one God, not of and for Israel
alone, but of the universe, and, if through Israel, for all

78 The Old Testament

mankind. From an original fetich worship, safely con-
jectured from the survivals of a later time, Israel in Egypt
went forward to the worship of great natural forms and
forces, and principally to the worship of a dreadful god of
fire, much like the Ammonitish Molech and the Moabitish
Chemosh, whose worship was with human sacrifices and
other cruel rites.

This god would seem to have been worshipped under dif-
ferent names, one of them Yahweh, as nearly as we can
make out ; or there were different gods from which the one
called Yahweh came uppermost in course of time. It would
also appear that Moses was influential in effecting his as-
cendency, perhaps, and likely enough, because Yahweh was
the god of his own tribe. The name matters little. What
does matter is that Moses connected the worship of this
Yahweh with morality in the Ten Commandments, not as
we have them now, but much more simply and somewhat
differently ; for Moses was no monotheist, and did not ob-
ject to the idolatrous worship of Yahweh, however it may
superficially appear in the Old Testament narratives. (As
George Washington in his later life set out to make over
his early correspondence, so Israel, growing older, set out
to revise its early records ; and no pre-exilic writings have
come down to us in their integrity. Eternal vigilance is the
price of critical accuracy and a real knowledge of the early
world.) From the time of Moses to that of Hosea, the
eighth-century prophet, availing ourselves of every possible
check and countercheck, we make out that for these five
hundred years monolatry, the worship of one god, without
denying the existence or the power of other gods, was Is-
rael's loftiest ideal, too lofty for common or habitual realiza-
tion.

The worship of other gods with Yahweh was commoner
than his exclusive worship. Witness the Baal worship of
the northern tribes, and the motley worship of Kings Solo-
mon, Ahaz, and Manasseh. In the eighth century B.C. Is-
rael, for the first time, under the lead of such great prophets

and the Higher Criticism. 79

as Isaiah and Micah, arrived at the purely monotheistic
idea that there was only one God, that he was to be wor-
shipped without any image, that he was' a righteous God, and
was rightly worshipped not by sacrifices, but by the right-
eousness of his people. Only a small minority were ready
for so high a truth. A century later there was a compro-
mise, the details of which are to be found in Deuteronomy.
It was substantially that the true worship of Yahweh con-
sisted of sacrifices and righteousness, only the sacrifices
must be offered in Jerusalem, and there only. This was a
prudential measure to prevent the idolatrous worship of
Yahweh or the worship of other gods. The violent revolu-
tion by which this compromise was enforced was soon fol-
lowed by the Babylonian captivity, a period of intense lit-
erary activity, whose most signal fruit was the Priestly Code,
the Levitical legislation of the Hexateuch, which is most
prominent and exclusive of other matter in Leviticus. Not
amid the thunders of Sinai, but by the waters of Babylon.
was the law in its full sense delivered, and not to Moses,
but to some school of daring innovators and editors working
very quietly, lest they should undo their shrewd and patient
toil.

With much bold invention there was no doubt much of
liberal appropriation and the freest handling imaginable of
venerable documents. The compromise of Deuteronomy had
come full circle. There the priests had the best of it : here
they had everything their own way. But the religious evo-
lution still went on. A loftier spirituality, a more inward
righteousness, is witnessed by the later Psalms and other
writings of the centuries that bring us forward to the be-
ginning of the Christian era.

This meagre outline is almost a travesty of that history
of Israel's religious evolution which the Higher Criticism
has achieved. Can these dry bones live ? They can and
do under the magic spell of the great master critics, such as
Kuenen and Wellhausen and Cheyne, and our own faithful
and courageous Toy. Touched by their hands, they are

So The Old Testament

clothed upon straightway with palpitating flesh : their blood
is warm with human love and hate and hope and fear and
joy. And the history so made alive, as compared with the
mechanical traditional scheme of Israel's general decadence
from, and spasmodic efforts to regain, the heights of an
original supernatural revelation, is full of a superb reality
and an incalculable interest and inspiration.

There is one negative aspect of this matter which I have
not touched. And some will say that, whatever compensa-
tion there may be for the particular negations indicated here-
tofore, there is no compensation for the general negation
which I have in mind, — the negation of the claim made for
the Old Testament, that it is a book of supernatural in-
spiration. This claim is not abandoned entirely, however
modified, by some whose honorable rank among the higher
critics is assured. Canon Driver, the English Churchman,
who would assent to almost every proposition I have set
forth, tells us that neither the inspiration nor authority of
the Old Testament is affected by these critical results.
True enough, if the measure of inspiration and authority is
the ability of any speech or writing to inspire us and to bind
our wills in loyal service of the truth as recognized and
known, but utterly and miserably false, if what is meant is
that the old-time doctrines of inspiration and authority
emerge from the seven-times-heated furnace of the modern
critic with their feet unscarred. They are shrivelled, and
they turn to ashes in its steady flame. And why not ?
There is no claim in the Old Testament for the special
supernatural inspiration of its various parts. If individual
writers thought themselves supernaturally inspired, that only
means that their psychology was primitive, naive. None of
the individual writers knew of the Old Testament as a
whole. The older writers, of course, knew nothing of the
later parts ; the later writers, little or nothing of those con-
temporaneous with their own. The older writings had for
them no supernatural character. If they had, how could
they hack about among them so freely, adding here, sub-
tracting there, as certainly they did ?

and the' Higher Criticism. 8 1

The formation of the Old Testament set of books was very
gradual, a process covering some eight hundred years and in-
volving many doubts and uncertainties even among those
who were most influential in the matter. The doubts and
uncertainties would have been multiplied indefinitely if the
compilers had imagined they were making up a list of in-
spired books in our traditional sense, but they imagined
nothing of the sort. The belief in supernatural inspiration
and authority was a gradual development; and there was
nothing in the process of its growth to commend it to an
intelligent mind, nor to any one not bound to stultify him-
self at any cost. To read and understand the natural his-
tory of the Old Testament as the Higher Criticism has de-
veloped it, and still cling to any theory, however attenuated,
of its supernatural inspiration, is more irrational and absurd
than to believe in the Ptolemaic astronomy, in full view of
all that the astronomers have taught us since Copernicus.

But the negation of the supernatual inspiration of the
Old Testament is but the open portal to a large and noble
affirmation. Anti-supernaturalism, like godliness, with con-
tentment, is great gain. Great gain for God, whom it re-
lieves of many monstrous imputations. Great gain for those
who wrote the several books, no longer seen as puppets, but
as living, thinking men, tempted in all things just as we are,
and not always without sin. Great gain for us, in that we
are no longer bound to justify everything contained in the
Old Testament, but can doubt and deny on the same grounds
as in other literature ; and because, moreover, by the nega-
tion of the supernaturally sacred character of the Old Testa-
ment the scope of sacred literature is indefinitely increased,
and we find its great examples wherever there is anything
written by any man or woman that thrills us with the touch
of truth or beauty, that wakens us to nobler aspirations, that
comforts and sustains us in the sorrows and anxieties which
are inseparable from the discipline and progress of our mor-
tal life.

THE NEW TESTAMENT AND THE
HIGHER CRITICISM.*

In popular apprehension, which corresponds to the tradi-
tional chronology, there is a gulf of some four centuries and
a half between the last book of the Old Testament and the
first book of the New. The idea of this gulf has been
wonderfully effective in perpetuating the idea that Jesus was
" a high priest after the order of Melchizedek " ; that is to
say, without historical antecedents, a man unrelated to the
development of his time and race. Now one of the most
significant achievements of the Higher Criticism has been
to bridge this gulf, partly with material brought forward
from the Old Testament, partly with material from the
Apocrypha, and partly with material from sources wholly
external to the Bible and Apocrypha. The consequence is
that the gulf between Malachi and Matthew has been not
merely bridged, but filled in with a mass of literature which
makes the passage of this period as secure as that of any
period in either Testament. Moreover, the wilderness has
been made to blossom like the rose ; for the quality of the
literature to which these centuries, formerly a blank, gave
birth is not surpassed by any in the Old Testament. Its
mass includes the majority of the Psalms and Proverbs, the
splendid prophecy of Joel, the best part of Zechariah, the
immensely interesting book of Daniel, Ecclesiastes, Esther,
Solomon's Song, and Chronicles with their appendices, Ezra
and Nehemiah. It also includes the whole of the Apoc-
rypha, some books of which surely are not unworthy to be
bound up with the best books of the Old Testament or New.
It is only the madness of inveterate prejudice that does not

* Preceded by a sermon on the Old Testament.

84 The New Testament

find the Wisdom of Solomon superior to Ecclesiastes or the
first book of Maccabees superior to Esther. The Prayer
of Manasses is interesting as an early form of the fictitious
death-bed repentance of the famous infidel, the delightful
book of Tobit as a counterblast to the book of Job. Beyond
the verge of the Apocrypha, we have such books as the
Apocalypse of Enoch and the Psalms of Solomon and the
Sibylline Books, all, with the rest, of great importance in
making clear the line of evolution from Malachi to Mat-
thew. With such a gulf as formerly opened here, the
supernatural origin of Christianity was an almost inevitable
hypothesis ; but, with that gulf filled in as it has been by
the Higher Criticism, a rose upon its stem is not more
natural than was Jesus with his gospel of compassion and
his Messianic consciousness at the time when he appeared.

Coming now to the New Testament, it must be confessed
that in many instances the representatives of the Higher
Criticism have not dealt with it with the same sincerity and
courage they have brought to the Old. " The reason, of
course, is obvious," says Dr. Gore, one of the principal
authors of the book called " Lux Mundi," a volume of
English High Church contributions to current problems of
criticism and theology, — " the reason is obvious why what
can be admitted in the Old Testament could not, without
results disastrous to the creed, be admitted in the New."
Even a critic so free as Cheyne, in his Old Testament deal-
ings, proposes to make the safety of the Church's creed a
factor in the decision of New Testament questions.

All this is very natural. Turn the thing about, and you
will find counter-illustrations of the same disposition. My
dear friend, Rabbi Gottheil, is much more easily disposed
to radical conclusions in the criticism of the New Testament
than of the Old. But the value of evidence is not in the
least affected by the magnitude of the issues at stake. The
evidence that would justify a certain conclusion concerning
the Old Testament will justify a similar conclusion concern-
ing the New Testament. The Higher Criticism has only

and the 'Higher Criticism. 85

one method, the method of science in dealing with all docu-
ments in or beyond the Bible's liberal scope. Honestly ad-
hering to this method, we arrive, first of all in the New Tes-
tament as in the Old, at certain negative results. Here, as
there, the movement forward of the various books from their
traditional anchorage has been strongly marked, though
not without occasional recessions. These recessions have
been rejoiced over by the conservative and apologetic critics
with exceeding great joy and some hilarity. Andrews Nor-
ton, in his "Genuineness of the Gospels," broke down the
criticism of Eichhorn, which assigned them to the last dec-
ades of the second century ; and the admiring followers of
F. C. Baur have conceded that the Gospels reached their
present form from twenty-five to fifty years earlier than that
giant among critics confidently believed and taught.

But these movements backward of the tide leave the tra-
ditional conceptions of the character of the New Testament
as effectually stranded as before, if not quite so high up the
beach. As the case now stands, we have the Synoptic (the
first three) Gospels assigned to the last quarter of the pres-
ent century ; Luke and Matthew, possibly, beyond ; the
Fourth Gospel to the first quarter of the second century
or a somewhat later time ; Acts, also to a date a good deal
forward from its traditional date to 100 to 120 a.d. ; the
Pastoral Epistles (to Timothy and Titus), to a much and
Ephesians to a somewhat later date than that of Paul's ;
the Epistles ascribed to Peter, to times long after his death,
the first to the first quarter of the second century, and the
second to the third or fourth. It is evident at a glance that
these changes of New Testament dates involve many changes
of authorship. Of negative conclusions the maximum of
certainty as concerns the Epistles commonly ascribed to
Paul is that he did not write the Epistle to the Hebrews : it
is quite certain that he did not write the Epistles to Timo-
thy and Titus and the Ephesians ; also that John did not
write the Apocalypse, nor Peter and John the Epistles that
bear their names, nor Matthew, Mark, and Luke the first

86 The New Testament

three Gospels in their present form, nor John the Fourth
Gospel in any valid sense. Closely affiliated with these
negative results there are grave doubts as to the authorship
of other books, — the James Epistle and the Pauline * Epistles
to the Philippians and Colossians.

Slight, indeed, would be the gratitude that we should owe
to the Higher Criticism of the New Testament if the results
already named were all it has to show. But these results, so
purely or dominantly negative as I have presented them, are
but the obverse of a shield which on the other side is radi-
ant with the glow of many positive results. Wide, from first
to last, has been the range of inference as to the priority of
one Gospel or another. Only Luke has never (?) been assigned
to the first place. John has been, and Matthew ; but now it
is almost or quite universally agreed among the critics of the
highest rank that the priority belongs to Mark, but whether
Luke or Matthew next is still in doubt. The allowances of the
most conservative critics and the revised opinions of the most
radical conduct us to the last quarter of the first century as
the anterior limit that includes all three of the Synoptics.

But the ground of interest in the New Testament that is
more attractive than any other, more fascinating and en-
grossing, is the Fourth Gospel. The interest attaching to
this Gospel has been hardly less central to New Testament
criticism than that attaching to the Pentateuch has been to
the Old. After much pushing backward and forward on the
smoky field, the fight seems nearly at an end, and the victory
to be with those denying the authorship of John. For thirty
years the tendency has been as strong this way as for twenty
years before (after the Rupert charge of Baur) it was the
other. The criticism of Baur, about 1845, was utterly hos-
tile to John's authorship of the Gospel, and assigned it to a
date so far advanced toward the end of the second century
as 170 a.d. The reaction from this position was most stren-
uous, and the tide was increasingly favorable to John's au-
thorship until Theodore Keim applied himself to the matter

•That is, developed on the lines of Paul's later specula:

and the Higher Criticism. 87

about thirty years ago. But the recession of the last thirty
years toward the position of Baur has never brought us back
to his exact position.

There came a time, in tunnelling Mont Cenis, when the
workmen from one end heard the click of the tools which
the workmen from the other end were driving into the great
rocky wall. Something like this has happened in the criti-
cism of the Fourth Gospel. We have had two parties
working in opposite directions; but each has been obliged
to make concessions by the changing fortunes of the great
debate until, at last, we find them standing quite comfortably
together on the common ground that the Fourth Gospel in
its present form was written early in the second, or late in
the first, quarter of the second century; that its long dis-
courses are the parts furthest removed from the historic
truth, and are no genuine reflections of the actual teachings
of Jesus ; that, nevertheless, there are elements of a genuine
tradition in the Gospel, both of fact and phrase, which may
have derived their impulse from the apostle John ; and,
more surely, from some authentic source. One of the great
contentions concerning the Fourth Gospel has been as to
whether Justin Martyr, writing about the middle of the
second century, knew the Fourth Gospel. It is pretty cer-
tain that he did not know it, and very certain that he did
not know it as John's. But, as the discussion has pro-
ceeded, this point has become of less importance.

There are still those who are not without hope that they
can push this Gospel back to the beginning of the second
century; and it is comical to see how eagerly any new dis-
covery that seems to promise this result is seized upon, as
if it were a hand to pluck up their drowning honor by the
locks. The reason for this eagerness is that the Fourth
Gospel represents the high-water mark of the progressive
idealization of Jesus in the New Testament. Particularly
notable is the way in which those called the progressive
orthodox cling to the authenticity of John. Look through
their books, and you will find them quoting him a dozen

88 The New Testament

times where the Synoptics are quoted once. That is to
say, they are building their toppling edifice of the super-
human Jesus on the quicksand of the New Testament terri-
tory. But an earlier date for this Gospel by some twenty
or thirty years will not save its character as an authentic
reproduction of the facts of Jesus' life. Professor Toy as-
sures me that, could it, by any critical violence, be pushed
back to the beginning of the second century, its character
would remain the same : it would still be a dogmatic render-
ing of the life of Jesus in terms of Greek philosophy, fore-
shadowing the unethical character of the Nicene Creed in
its avoidance of all ethical significance. I quoted this opin-
ion to a professor in one of our most orthodox theological
schools, and he assented to it heartily.

The utmost to which the greed of passionate conserva-
tism is likely to attain is this : that the Fourth Gospel is a
dogmatic treatise of the first quarter of the second century,
holding imbedded in its unhistorical discourses a few
golden grains of genuine tradition. And the gain to the
natural, human Jesus from this conclusion will be in direct
proportion to the loss to the traditional supernatural con-
ception or any recent adumbration of that conception in the
new orthodox theology.

The Higher Criticism has worked out not only the obvi-
ous differences of the Synoptic Gospels from the Fourth,
but also the resemblances and differences of the Synoptics
among themselves. The resemblances are strongly marked,
and point unmistakably to a common basis of traditional
information. In fact, they are called the Synoptics (and
their writers Synoptists), not because they present a synop-
sis of the facts of Jesus' life, but because a synopsis can be
made of the three narratives. Not only is the thread of the
narrative the same in all three, but the general arrangement
is the same. There are only about thirty verses in Mark
which do not appear in Matthew or Luke. Forty like sec-
tions appear in Matthew and Luke, and these have each
twenty in common with Mark. Nevertheless there are, with

and tUe Higher Criticism. 89

the agreements and resemblances, differences which are ex-
tremely baffling, and which have led to many different ren-
derings of their mutual relations and their relations to their
common sources. Critics who place Mark first in order of
time, generally place Matthew next, but not all of them.
Evidently, in both Matthew and Mark there has been much
working over and re-editing. We have here the same pro-
cess of aggregation and redaction that obtained in the book-
making of the Old Testament.

The matter which the Synoptics have in common has been
called "The Triple Tradition''; and it is very interesting
in that it contains a much simpler and less miraculous ac-
count of Jesus than the three Gospels in their entirety.
This triple tradition brings us very close, no doubt, to the
oral tradition that was most widely current among the fol-
lowers of Jesus some forty years after his death. But we
should by no means wish to limit ourselves to this common
matter. Luke's additions to it are particularly precious,
containing as they do, among other things, the story of the
Good Samaritan and the parable of the Prodigal Son.

Passing from the Gospels to the Epistles, Paul's quadri-
lateral, impregnable even to the assault of F. C. Baur, is
made up of Romans, the two Corinthians, and Galatians.
Baur would allow none but these of the fourteen attributed
to Paul to be authentic ; but even those who have the
greatest admiration for his genius have added to "the big
four" First Thessalonians, Philippians, and Philemon, and,
less confidently, Colossians. Taking these eight, we have
in them the growth of Paul's ideal Jesus from a man in
Thessalonians through the increasing grandeurs of Corinth-
ians and Romans until, at length, in the Epistles to the
Philippians and Colossians, he stands upon the utmost verge
of super-angelic power and grace, where, but a step, and he
has crossed the mystic line which divides him from the
Eternal Logos of the Fourth Gospel.

As for the other six Epistles ascribed to Paul, in the
New Testament headings and in popular belief, that to the

90 The New Testament

Hebrews is the most certainly not his of them all. It is a
superb continuation of his thought in a manner very different
from his, but with a genius equal to his own : from the liter-
ary standpoint, much superior. The pastoral Epistles to
Timothy and Titus have been related to the developments
and controversies of the second century. They may contain
a few sentences from other letters of Saint Paul ; but, in
general, they presuppose a state of the Church much more
definitely organized than in the time of Paul's literary ac-
tivity. The Epistle to the Ephesians, as we have it, is
evidently an attempt to bring Paul on the scene of second-
century problems, just as the book of Daniel was an attempt
to bring the prophet Daniel of the captivity on the scene of
the M accabean struggle. But it must be confessed that the
resemblances of Ephesians and Colossians furnish the critics
with some of their most difficult problems. Holtzmann, one
of the ablest of them, has worked out the idea that the two
Epistles are daring variations on some theme of Paul's, — a
short Epistle of his to the Colossians. One thing is sure :
if the two Epistles are not Paul's, they are Pauline, — natural
continuations of his thought upon that line which made him
a favorite with the Gnostics of the second century, and sus-
pected by orthodox Christians.

Strangely enough it was in 1835 that Baur published his
work on the Pastoral Epistles, assigning them to the second
century. I say "strangely enough," because in 1835 Vatke
published his " Religion of the Old Testament " ; and, as he
proposed to work out from the terra finna of the prophets
into the unknown regions round about, so did Baur pro-
pose to work out from Paul's known Epistles into the
rest of the New Testament, making the tendency of each
particular book with reference to the differences between
Peter and Paul the test of its chronology. This is why the
criticism of Baur and his followers of the Tubingen school
has been called the "tendency" criticism. Unquestionably,
this method has been overworked. But, when every proper
abatement has been made, it remains as central and inter-

and the Higher Criticism. 91

pretative to the New Testament as the tendency to a priestly
or prophetic standpoint is to the old : like that, marshalling
the different books the way that they should go ; and, like
that, giving a splendor of dramatic interest to the whole
body of literature in question which it never had before.

To speak briefly of the other Epistles, — those ascribed to
John, Peter, James, and Jude, — that of Jude is an attempt
to give the authority of Jude, or Judas, a brother of Jesus,
to certain strictures on the Gnostic heresies of the second
century, midway of which it probably appeared. Similarly,
the Epistle of James is an attempt to give the authority of
James, the brother of Jesus, to certain strictures on the
Pauline doctrine of salvation by faith. It contains excellent
matter, and is, moreover, interesting as an example of the
Wisdom literature in the New Testament, a New Testament
book of Proverbs or Wisdom of Solomon. The relation to
the Fourth Gospel of the three Epistles ascribed to John is
their most interesting feature. The first of these, if not
written by the author of the Fourth Gospel, was written in
his manner and spirit, to confound the Gnostic heretics of
the second century. Even the early Church, so little critical,
doubted whether the second letter of John should be in-
cluded in the Canon. It is put forth as John's, but is evi-
dently none of his, nor even by the author of the Fourth
Gospel and First Epistle, of which Epistle it is a mere echo.
The early Church doubted the Third Epistle also, and quite
properly. As the Second Epistle is imitative of the first,
so this is imitative of the second. But it is a nice little
" memoire pour servir." It shows us as by a flashlight to
what hard treatment some of the evangelists of the early
Church were subjected.

There are two Epistles ascribed to Peter, in neither of
which had that apostle any hand. The first was written in
the time of Trajan (98-117 a.d.), and reflects the terrors of
the edicts issued by him against the Christians. The second
of these Epistles is probably the latest book of the New
Testament, written well along the third quarter of the

92 The New Testament

second century, when the hope of Christ's return was dying
out, and people were saying : "Where is the promise of his
coming? For, since the fathers fell asleep, all things re-
main as they were from the beginning." Evidently, it was
already quite a while " since the fathers fell asleep." But
the letter is very serviceable as showing some good man at
work to heal the breach between Peter and Paul, and make
them seem as much alike as possible.

But the New Testament book which addresses itself par
excellence to this task is the book of Acts. From the same
hand as the Third Gospel, it enables us to see how little
critical was the temper of the most critical of the New Testa-
ment writers. Read the introduction to Luke, and you will
see that, "inasmuch as many had taken in hand" to write
the life of Jesus, this writer proposes to write something
more accurate. And yet in Luke he puts the ascension of
Jesus on the day of his resurrection ; and, in Acts, without
explanation or apology, forty days after. It is a most inter-
esting book, so full of brave adventures that it has been
called " the Christian Odyssey." Reading it carefully, you
will notice that in one place the person changes from the
third to the first; and we read "we" did so and so. In
that " we " passage we have apparently our only contempo-
raneous historical document in the New Testament. But, as'
a whole, the book is a deliberate perversion of the apostolic
history. The book appeared obedient to an impulse to make
up the difference between Peter and Paul, to smooth over
the scandal of their opposing theories and aims. But either
Paul did not know his own mind and his own experience, or
we have no faithful representation of him in the Acts of the
Apostles. Both he and Peter are made over there : Peter is
Paulinized, and Paul is Petrinized. Paul is about as narrow
as Peter, and Peter almost or quite as broad as Paul. But,
however cautiously the book is to be taken as a history of
the time of the apostles, it is invaluable as an illustration of
the methods by which the Church consolidated herself in the
last decades of the second century, and stopped the mouths
of heretics and schismatics.

and the Higher Criticism. 93

And now, if I remember rightly, I have spoken deliber-
ately or incidentally of every book in the New Testament
except the last, as they are commonly arranged, the
Apocalypse, or " Revelation of Saint John the Divine."
This formerly was the impregnable fort of John, from
which the authenticity of the Fourth Gospel was battered
down. At least, it was pretty generally agreed, by all those
who were at all disposed to see things as they are, that
John, "the beloved disciple," could not have written both
the Gospel and the Apocalyse ; but some held fast by the
former, and some by the latter. The problem was beset with
many difficulties, and still is ; but there are those who think
they have been satisfactorily resolved by the discovery that
the basis of the composition is a Jewish Apocalypse of 69
a.d., made over by Christian editors to suit their ideas and
purposes in the course of the next fifty years.

It is an interesting fact that the great German critic
Harnack, who had, as it were, given bonds to accept no
such theory, was convinced of its soundness by his own
pupil, Vischer. "The proffered solution came upon me,"
he writes, "as the egg of Columbus." Once done, nothing
could be more simple and self-evident. Dr. Martineau has
accepted this solution with almost hilarious joy. " How
strange," he says, "that we should ever have thought it
possible for a personal attendant on the ministry of Jesus
to write or edit a book in which Jesus leads the war-march
and treads the wine-press of the wrath of God till the
deluge of blood rises to the horses' bits ! "

Some of you will remember that I questioned Professor
Toy upon this point last Sunday evening, and that he spoke
of the result as still in doubt ; but afterward, in private
conversation, I found that his inclination to the new theory
was unmistakable. Whenever, wherever, and by whomso-
ever the Apocalypse was written, it is most unchristian in its
spirit. As for its predictions, they refer to an immediate
future, and embody the superstitious fancy of the time, that
the Emperor Nero was not dead, and that he was coming

94 TJie New Testament

back to reign a second time. From first to last many pious
souls have found great satisfaction in identifying their politi-
cal and religious enemies with " the Scarlet Woman " and
"the False Prophet" and "the Beast." It will be long
before the book furnishes no entertainment of this sort.
" Bray a fool in a mortar with a pestle, yet will not his fool-
ishness depart from him."

The Higher Criticism of the New Testament has encoun-
tered some of its most serious problems in the processes
which determined the formation of the New Testament
Canon, the list of New Testament books as we now have
them. These processes were of long duration. Not until
the sixth century was there universal agreement on this list
of books to the exclusion of all others. At first the Old
Testament was the only sacred scripture of the Christian
Church. Gradually, the New Testament books came to
enjoy an equal reverence with those of the Old Testament ;
and, finally, the Old Testament books were forced into a
secondary rank.

It is a very interesting fact that the first New Testament
of which we have any knowledge was in heretical keeping, —
that of the Gnostic Marcion, whose list of books comprised
some ten of Paul's Epistles and a single Gospel, evidently
our Luke, but with a difference, making it even more Pauline
than is our version. The first orthodox collection (that of
Justin Martyr, 147-160 a.d.) was very different from Mar-
cion's. It omitted all of Paul's Epistles, and had three Gos-
pels (our Synoptics, probably), and possibly the fourth, but
with no idea of its being John's. But, as we say the devil
must not have all the good tunes, so the Church said the
heretics must not have all the good books or even so many
as Paul's Epistles, more or less. Thereupon it laid claim to
these and the four Gospels, and, in order to make this con- ,
junction less awkward, took the book of Acts, and set it
between them as the interpreter of their mutual relations.
The so-called Catholic Epistles of James, John, and Peter
took their several places in the New Testament, obedient to
the same impulse.

and the Higher Criticism. 95

In short, whenever, wherever, and by whomsoever the
New Testament books were written, the principle of natural
selection which determined on those we now have as the
fittest to survive was the practical necessity of the growing
Church to meet and combat certain developments of thought,
Gnosticism and Montanism pre-eminently, that were threat-
ening her very life. But the growing Church had no geo-
graphical or political unity ; and throughout the third century,
and fourth and fifth, the decisions here and there as to what
books constituted the New Testament varied through a con-
siderable range. Even when all that we now have were
included, there were others which were given up with great
reluctance. Not until 495 a.d. did a papal edict decide
upon those we now have, and no others. But not all the
local churches conformed at once to this decision.

Here is the true story of the making of a book of which
the majority of Christian people still speak as if it were
written by God's own hand, and given out at the beginning
of our Christian history. It was four hundred and fifty
years in the making, and there is not the ghost of a suspicion
anywhere discoverable that the process of manufacture had
any superhuman oversight or inspiration. The incongruity
between these facts (which every scholar knows, and every
clergyman whose education is not shamefully imperfect) and
the claims made for the New Testament everywhere in or-
thodox circles is a scandal of such proportions that the
worst scandals of our politics are altogether sweet and lovely
in comparison.

The Higher Criticism of the Old Testament explains the
evolution of a national religion from a miserable fetichism
to the worship of one universal God. The Higher Criticism
of the New Testament gives us another evolution, — the evo-
lution of Jesus as an ideal conception, beginning with the
pure humanity of the Synoptic Gospels and ascending by
degrees through the earlier and later Epistles of Saint Paul
until it reaches its climax in the Fourth Gospel, where, as
the Eternal Logos, though infinitely more than man, he is

96 The New Testament.

not yet identical or commensurate with God. It is to invert
all the methods of interpretation which we use elsewhere, to
hesitate for a moment to accept the obvious conclusion which
these premises involve. But you will find apologists who,
while conceding the evolution, as they must, insist that it
was an evolution of the Church's progressive appreciation of
the true nature of Jesus; some say, of progressive revelation.
Miserable subterfuges these (the last a monstrous one), by
which men endeavor to evade the truth that in the New
Testament we have the earlier stages of that irrational deifi-
cation of the human Jesus which culminated at Nicaea in
325 a.d. If there is one constructive achievement of New
Testament criticism that is more obvious than any other, it
is the pure humanity of Jesus, the natural and inevitable re-
lation of his thought and work to the time and place which
made the circumstantial setting of his life and death.

But the grand achievement of the Higher Criticism is not
a separate synthesis of Old Testament and New : it is a
synthesis including both in its majestic sweep. There is no
break in the development from the fetichism of the early
Hebrews to the filial and fraternal heart on which the loved
disciple leaned. And the development is as strictly human
as that of any child from its first infant feebleness to the
maturity of all its powers. Human, but not therefore any
less divine ; for there is nothing without God. And why en-
deavor to make it appear otherwise than so ? Why stretch
out the hands to save " the sifted sediment of a residuum "
when a cup of blessing, full to overflowing, is so near ?
There is a kind of atheism in the endeavor to save some
special aspect of the world to God, as if all things and per-
sons and events were not the channels of his boundless

grace.

" Henceforth my heart shall sigh no more
For olden time and holier shore :
God's love and blessing, then and there,
Are now and here and everywhere."

THE DARING HOPE.

Strictly speaking the Easter argument from the resur-
rection of Jesus from the dead is not an argument for the
immortality of the soul, but for the resurrection of the body.
So it has been always understood in popular thought and
feeling, which are much more sincere and logical than the
careful afterthoughts of compromising theologians. Disem-
bodied spirits have never yet been the desired of all nations
nor of many individuals. The people who call themselves
Spiritualists are as concrete as possible in their descriptions
of the spiritual world. Tennyson expresses the almost
universal aspiration, when he cries, —

"Eternal form shall still divide
The eternal soul from all beside ;

And I shall know him when we meet."

It is this aspect of the argument from the resurrection of
Jesus which has commended it to the majority. If it proves
anything, it proves this. The argument is, of course, beset
with difficulties. A single resurrection from the dead, how-
ever well established, seems hardly adequate to establish the
resurrection of the innumerable millions of mankind whose
bodies have returned to the earth during a period of some
five hundred thousand years. It was only a few Christians
who were to be raised at first, but gradually more and more,
and finally the dead of all the innumerable years. The new
anthropology, carrying back human life some half a million
years, made the induction of a general resurrection from a
single fact much more precarious. A little pyramid upon
its apex does not impress the imagination as so unstable as
one to which that of Cheops were a baby's toy. Such an

98 The Daring Hope.

inverted pyramid is the argument from the resurrection of
Jesus to the general resurrection of mankind.

Then, too, the argument is a complete non sequitur. The
resurrection of Jesus is argued from his superhuman charac-
ter, his deity. Now what man has done man may do, but
not what God has done. Either the argument from the
resurrection of Jesus proceeds upon the ground of his
humanity or it proves simply and only the resurrection of
Jesus.

But, before the resurrection of Jesus can prove anything
whatever, it must itself be proved. Before we can work it
as a cause, we must find it as an effect. A distinguished
clergyman of our own city has declared it to be " the best
attested fact of ancient history." That would be thorough-
going historical scepticism if Dr. Abbott had not forgotten
that, in proportion to the departure of any fact from our
habitual experience, it requires more evidence for our be-
lief. Dr. Abbott proceeds on the assumption that the
same evidence which would justify us in believing that the
sun rose in the east on such or such a day would justify
us in believing that it rose in the west. The resurrection of
any one from the dead is exceptional in the ratio of one to
some thousands of millions. Consequently, to accept it as
historic truth, we should have evidence some thousands of
millions times stronger than for such a fact as the birth or
death of a man at such or such a time. As it is, the evi-
dence for the resurrection of Jesus does not seem to me
sufficient for our belief, were it merely any important but
entirely probable event. I would not go over to New York
to meet a friend at the station with no more reason to
believe that I should find him than I have reason to believe
that the resurrection of Jesus, waiving its supernatural char-
acter, actually happened.

Doubtless to some of you it will seem ungracious that I
should make this prelude to my discourse upon this joyous
holiday. But, surely, I could do no less. If I am to speak
of immortality with intellectual seriousness, I must first

The Daring Hope. 99

divest myself of all complicity with the prevailing supersti-
tion. I cannot without apology, nor without some misgiv-
ings, take for my subject one so solemn and august as the
daring hope of an immortal life without protesting earnestly
against the stupendous folly (I had almost said the stupen-
dous wickedness) of entangling such a hope with an event
of infinitely doubtful authenticity and significance, which
happened or did not happen some two thousand years ago.
Men must care vastly less for immortality than for some
plausible construction of a traditional opinion who can use
their strength in trying to secure for that opinion a longer
lease of life, and the chief place among the reasons for
believing in a future state.

Theology has berated science roundly for its inadequacy
in the spiritual realm ; but, in truth, the methods of its own
protagonists have had in them some scientific implication.
Theology has been sensational with the sensational philos-
ophers, and transcendental with the transcendentalists. For
a sensational philosophy the argument from the resurrection
of Jesus was as sensational as it could ask. It argued the
immortality of the soul (or at least the resurrection of the
body) from the physical resurrection of Jesus from the grave
two days after his burial.* The content of the argument
was supernatural ; but its method was scientific, — not soundly
and securely so, but still scientific. It argued from one con-
crete phenomenon to another. So far, so good. But it ar-
gued from a particular to a universal, of all fallacies the
most preposterous. I speak of this only to show that the
least scientific are often more scientific than they think. Be-
cause their science is hasty and imperfect science, it does
not cease to be science. We do not think of excluding
the earlier geologists and biologists from the great hall of
science because they were not as accurate as Darwin and
Huxley, who in their turn will have to be revised.

A much more scientific method than that of the theolo-
gians, arguing from the resurrection of Jesus to a universal

•Thirty-six hours. The traditional three days cannot possibly be made out.

100 The Daring Hope.

resurrection, is that of the Spiritualists, arguing from their
"phenomena" to the reality of a spiritual world. Some of
these also you will find decrying science. Science, they tell
you, deals with matter, and can know nothing about spirit.
But the word "phenomena" is, par excellence, a scientific
word. It is the reproach flung at science by metaphysics
that it knows nothing but phenomena. The phenomena of
science are sensuous appearances. So are the phenomena
of the Spiritualist. They appeal to eye and ear and touch.
The wiser Spiritualists not only admit, but boast that their
method is scientific. It is so, but not always so rigorously
so as it might be. The scientific Spiritualist is confronted
by certain facts. First, he makes sure that they are facts.
He eliminates the element of fraud. Then he endeavors to
explain the facts. The new psychology enables him to ex-
plain a dozen now where he could not explain one a few
years ago without resort to the hypothesis of extra-mundane
interference. The range of this hypothesis has been indefi-
nitely narrowed by our new studies in hypnotism, uncon-
scious cerebration, the subconscious mind, telepathy, and so
on.* But there are men who do not wish to be deceived,
men who are resolved to deal sternly with the phenomena,
who find a small residuum which they cannot eliminate and
to which they feel obliged to give an extra-mundane expla-
nation. These men are truly scientific. But you will notice
that they offer us no proof of immortality. They simply
prove that certain phenomena are without ordinary, or even
extraordinary and yet natural, explanation. Then they say,
Assuming immortality, these things could be accounted for.
But all that is proved is that we have certain inexplicable
facts. The case is similar to that of the perturbations of
the planet Uranus. The astronomer determined that an-
other planet of a certain size would cause those perturba-
tions. Then he turned his telescope to the spot where such
a planet should be, and there it was. But the Spiritualist

•The argument for Spiritualism from these things is certainly unsound. Surely they
make it likelier that the " phenomena" are produced by subtle interrelations of people in
this world.

The Daring Hope. 101

has no telescope with which to verify his theory. Nay, but
indeed he has. Our name for it is — death. Dying, the
Spiritualist will discover if his Neptune, too, is there. He
cannot know till then.

I have called the hope of immortality a daring hope be-
cause, for one thing, it goes so in the teeth of the appearance
of the soul's implication with the fortunes of the body, and
for another thing because it is a daring thing to hope for the
responsibilities of an everlasting life. As for the soul's im-
plication with the fortunes of the body, it is so intimate that
it cannot be exaggerated. So testifies a recent thinker,
whose confidence that the intimacy is not identity is abso-
lutely perfect and entire, wanting nothing. But, where the
intimacy is so intense, it surely is not strange that many
think it means identity. Where the mind is so powerfully
and seriously affected by bodily changes, it is not strange that
the great change which we call death should seem to mean
the ruin of the tenant with the house. How dare to hope
for immortality when in the presence of our dead there is
absolutely nothing to suggest that anything remains of them
except the impassive form which soon will be resolved into
the earth from which its constituent parts were drawn ?

As for men's daring to assume the vast responsibility of
an eternal life, it must be said that many, when the matter
is presented to them in this way, draw back from it affrighted
and appalled. But it does not often so present itself; and,
where it does, the most of us are so weak in our imagination
that the conception of eternal life is a mere verbal form, con-
taining little thought. For the most part, the idea is that
we want more life than we have, or can have, in this mun-
dane sphere. We may be ready in some dim hereafter to
lay down the burden of our life : we are not ready yet. Like

Tennyson,

" We seek at least

"Upon the last and sharpest height,
Before the spirits fade away,
Some landing-place to clasp, and say :
' Farewell ! We lose ourselves in light.' "

102 The Daring Hope.

But what if time and space are, as the idealist declares,
only the forms in which we pour the molten substance of our
thought, as that thought is conditioned now and here ? Or,
even if they persist, who cannot easily imagine that we may
live a life so full of thought and love that to us, as to the
Eternal, a thousand years shall be as one day ? What do
we know of time or space here in this present life, when we
are at the top of our condition ? Are there not hours of
thought and love that are not so long as minutes of mere
drudgery or vacancy ? May we not dare to hope that some
such principle as this, when charactered in heavenly form,
will make the burden of our immortality as little burden-
some as are an eagle's wings, —

" Where he will, swooping downward ;
Where he will, soaring onward " ?

The hope of immortality would indeed be a daring hope
if, its appeal to a concrete sensuous appearance (the resur-
rection of Jesus) proving utterly vain, and the phenomena of
the Spiritualist not being available for one reason or another,
or not satisfactory, the case against immortality from the
standpoint of science were as complete and damaging as it
has been represented by the traditional theologians and
apologists of recent times. But you will notice that their
representation has been like that of men with lawn-mowers
and bicycles or daily newspapers to sell, — they depreciate
the rival article. The supernaturalist has done his best to
depreciate all rational arguments for immortality, if haply
so men might be obliged to come to him for it and pay his
price. It was only yesterday that our Unitarian fathers
were as deep in the mud of this business as were the other
churches in the mire. One of our most distinguished
preachers, whose father was a preacher before him, tells
me that, in looking over his father's sermons, he was as-
tonished to find him continually minimizing reason and
science in order to maximize revelation. I do not see why
he should have been astonished. That motley was pretty

The Daring Hope. 1 03

much the only wear some fifty years ago ; and there are still
suits of it in good repair, or tatters, which are worn by theo-
logians of great local reputation, here and there. Their
argument is an argumentum ad terrorem : You've got to take
the belief in immortality upon our terms, because you can't
have it upon any other.

It is not at all strange that science has as yet done little
to confirm men's hope of an immortal life. So long as the
traditional ideas held their own, the fifth wheel to a coach
was not more superfluous than any scientific argument.
Why add a farthing candle's sputtering gleam to the inef-
fable splendor of the sun ? With an infallible revelation of
immortality in the New Testament, why spend a moment in
endeavoring to work out some rational argument ? This
was the line taken by the dogmatists, while as yet their
dogma remained unimpeached. But, when men began to
impeach it, then the scientific temper was depreciated, in
order to make the supernatural dogma seem impressive in
comparison with the scantiness of the scientific argument.
When we consider these things, and how short the time
since any serious scientific interest in immortality began, the
wonder is to me, not that the scientific argument is so
incomplete, but that it possesses so many elements of
enduring strength already, and has so much of glorious
promise in its eyes.

Consider with me some of those particulars in which the
development of science tends to make the hope of immor-
tality less daring than it was, more reasonable; but first a
few considerations of a more general character. One of
these, and not the least important, is the vast accession we
have had to our persuasion of the unspeakable wonder of
the universe. Telescope and microscope have maintained
a generous rivalry in this regard. Innumerable experiments
and observations have brought their glory and honor into
the grand result. Hence a universe vastly more wonderful
than that formerly conceived. But what has this to do with
immortality ? Much every way. To hope for it is to

104 The Daring Hope.

"fetch our eyes up to God's style and manners of the sky."
The wonderfulness of immortality suits the wonderfulness
of the great whole. And this makes many things seem
possible which could not seem so formerly. The more
wonderful immortality, now, the more likely its reality,
responding to our hope and need.

But in the wonder of science there inheres one awful
prophecy. It is that ultimately this whole earth of ours will
be as lifeless and forlorn as those strange regions of the
farthest north into which the Norwegian " Fram " pushed
her adventurous prow. There will come a time, we read,
when the moon that makes our nights so beautiful will come
ricochetting across the surface of the earth, ploughing it
fathoms deep. Like the old lady who was told that Univer-
salism had abolished hell, " I hope for better things." But
the consensus of the competent tends to anticipate some
such catastrophe, and I submit that we have here a negative
suggestion of immortality of first-rate importance. Given an
earth forever swinging joyously upon her way and the idea
of a social immortality, the idea of George Eliot's " Choir
Invisible," might be sufficient for our aspiration and our
hope. But this idea is negatived by the prophecy of the
cessation of human life upon the earth. And hence it
seems that, if our human thought has any slightest corre-
spondence with the eternal verities, there must be an im-
mortal individuality to conserve the long result of time. I
would not say that the whole human course is worse than
wasted if there be no immortal conservation of its energy.
But, if I would not play the fool in order that I may justify
the ways of God, I must say that a depopulated earth
without soul-immortality would be an anticlimax of immense
irrationality, "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and
fury, signifying " — what ?

One other general consideration that contributes not a
little to our daring hope, or at least clears the ground for
it to build upon. It is that, in the region of things dead and
done for, materialism is as conspicuous as Lucifer in Mil-

The Daring Hope. 105

ton's hell. Not long ago materialism seemed to have the
middle of the road. Now it is pushed against the side, over
the edge, and into the abyss of things discredited. Science
and philosophy are perfectly agreed that this is so. And
why ? Because it is so evident that all that we know of mat-
ter is some form of our own consciousness. It is only mind
of which we know anything by first intention. No one has
ever seen an atom. There are two millions of these hypo-
thetic particles of Dalton in the minimum visible of the mi-
croscope. If we could isolate one of them, and with a mi-
croscope two thousand times more powerful than the most
powerful of to-day, see this marvellous little thing, we
should be as much as ever in an ideal world. Certain sen-
sations of color and form and hardness would be our utmost
goal. Now this evident superiority of mind to matter and
resolution of matter into mind, to a very great extent, are
certainly calculated to diminish the terrors of matter as a
"commensurate antagonist " of the spiritual self. The ma-
terialist talked so loudly about matter as the real thing, the
thing we know about, that he fairly scared us into taking
things at his value. But it turns out that matter is the un-
real thing, the thing that eludes us when we try to pin it
down ; that what we really know about, and all we really
know about, is thought, is mind. This we know directly,
and matter only as " a kind of a sort of a something " which
we infer as the substance causing our sensations.

And yet one other general consideration, one of first-rate
importance : the thing that we are surest of and the thing
of greatest permanence in the whole range of our expe-
rience is that which we express by the capital letter " I."
And just here, to make sure that my wish is not fathering
my thought, and that I am not taking up with the opinion
of any mushy sentimentalist or half-cast theologian, I will
quote the words of Fitzjames Stephen, about the hardest-
headed man with whom I have any intellectual acquaint-
ance, a great English jurist, and a man profoundly scep-
tical, attaching no value to the claims of Christian super-

106 The Daring Hope.

naturalism, and scrutinizing those of rational religion of
whatever kind with hard severity. The quotation is a long
one, but I think that it can justify itself at your tribunal
both on account of its intrinsic merit and on account of the
peculiar source from which it is derived. It is as follows :
" All human language, all human observation, implies that
the mind, the 'I,' is a thing in itself; a fixed point in the
midst of a world of change, of which world of change its
own organs form a part. It is the same yesterday, to-day,
and to-morrow. It was what it was when its organs were of
a different shape, and consisted of different matter from
their present shape and matter. It will be what it is when
they have gone through other changes. I do not say that
this proves, but surely it suggests, it renders probable, the
belief that this ultimate fact, this starting-point of all knowl-
edge, thought, feeling, and language, ' this final inexplica-
bility ' (an emphatic though a clumsy phrase), is indepen-
dent of its organs ; that it may have existed before they were
collected out of the elements, and may continue to exist
after they are dissolved into the elements. The belief thus
suggested by the most intimate, the most abiding, the most
widespread of all experiences, not to say by universal expe-
rience, as recorded by nearly every word of every language
in the world, is what I mean by a belief in a future state, if in-
deed it should not rather be called a past, present, and future
state all in one, — a state which rises above and transcends
time and change. I do not say that this is proved ; but I do
say that it is strongly suggested by the one item of knowledge
which rises above logic, argument, language, sensation, and
even direct thought, that one clear instance of direct con-
sciousness in virtue of which we say, ' I am.' This belief is
that there is in man, or rather that man is, that which rises
above words and above thoughts, which are but unuttered
words; that to each one of us, 'I' is the ultimate central
fact which renders thought and language possible.'' Here
endeth the quotation, and I do not wish to press it on you
for more than it is worth. I do not ask you to accept this

The Daring Hope. 107

persistency of self-consciousness through a life of seventy or
eighty years and all manner of physical changes and vicissi-
tudes, the body's growth, the body's slow decay, as a proof
of its superiority to death itself; but, surely, you will all
agree with me that this persistency suggests with overwhelm-
ing force that it is the things that are seen which are tran-
sient, the things that are unseen that are permanent.

" The hills are shadows, and they flow

From form to form, and nothing stands ;
They melt like mist, the solid lands ;
Like clouds they shape themselves and go."

But what does not flow from form to form, what does not
melt like mist, what does not shape itself and go, is this
inexpugnable, ineradicable I, this self-consciousness which
no metaphysical analysis can disintegrate or destroy. And
we have here, it seems to me, a rejoinder of the most crush-
ing weight to that popular imagination or materialistic
theory which finds in things spiritual the impermanent and
transitory and in things material such as are relatively fixed
and strong.

All these considerations are general ; and, as I have said,
they do but clear the way for those of a more positive
nature, make, as it were, a sky, an atmosphere, on which
a positive argument can unfold its wings and trust itself to
the illimitable air. So far, I have done little more than
show that some of the ordinary presumptions against immor-
tality are wholly invalid, and indeed, when thoroughly
examined, yield conclusions quite the opposite of those
habitually drawn. But, of those considerations of a more
positive nature which science yields, I will name two only ;
and on these I need not dwell, because I have more than
once before now told you how much they mean to me.
Here, I believe, are two " natural laws in the spiritual world "
which Mr. Henry Drummond did not name; and yet I am
persuaded that they are more valid and important than any
named by that lamented writer in his fallacious and mis-

io8 The Dating Hope.

leading book. One of them is the conservation of energy.
It may well be doubted if this, and not natural selection or
evolution, is not the great scientific doctrine of the century.
It is a natural law of quite immeasurable significance. Is it
also a spiritual law? No physical force is ever lost. It is
conserved even where it is most widely dissipated, and
reappears in other forms. How is it with that energy which
we call the soul, which we call Shakspere or Newton or
Lincoln, which we call wife or mother, husband or child or
friend ? What conservation is there of the energy that was
in these, in what remains of them to bury in the earth or
burn with fire, after the last farewells? The question comes
home to us as pointedly from any grave where humblest worth
lies buried as from the splendid mausoleum where a grateful
nation lavishly enshrines her mighty dead. If the conserva-
tion of energy is a law which stops short at the bounds of
matter, then there is nothing more to say; but, if it is a law
of matter and of spirit, then must we believe that somehow,
somewhere, not only the mighty ones of intellect and imagi-
nation, but those who had a genius for affection and devo-
tion, will live again, a conscious individual life. And, mind
you, those who can find nothing in man but the material are
bound, as are no others, to subscribe to this. If the soul is
a material commodity, what conservation is there of its
energy in the solids, liquids, gases, into which the body is
resolved ? Can these write immortal poems, save nations
from destruction, divinize the most humble life with the su-
preme significance of love ? No, they cannot ; and, if the
conservation of energy is a natural law in the spiritual
world, then have we a suggestion of the utmost dignity and
importance that death does not end all.

But there is another natural law in which I find another
argument for immortality. It is the law of vital correlation.
Let me explain. In the development of animal structures
there goes along with the development of special organs,
parts, and functions the development of certain others,
adapting the animal structures to changed conditions. Now

The Daring Hope. 109

in the spiritual life of man there goes along with all that is
best in his intelligence, noblest in his affections, grandest
and sweetest in his moral nature, the development of the
hope of an immortal life. Of course, we have our moments
when the pulse of life is slack, and we imagine that we
should prefer eternal sleep to any wakening. But I am
speaking of the normal man, not of the slack-twisted and
down-hearted. And here, at the top of our condition, is a
correlated growth ; and, if the hope which is thus developed
correlatively with our noblest living is not a solemn and
majestic portent of a sublime reality, then have we a radical
contradiction in our nature, every higher thought or nobler
act or purer purpose tending to immerse us deeper in a
terrible illusion. It is the same Power which organizes in us
the purest splendors of our thought and love which organ-
izes in us correlatively the hope of immortality, so that if, in
very deed and truth, " it is impossible for God to lie," that
hope must mean its realization as surely as the earth's rev-
olution on its axis means alternate night and day.

But I would not make too much of these considerations.
Let Science do all that she can — it is much more than I
have said — for us, and still our best resource will be a daring
hope. If the most and best of science are but little, then
the hope is all the more daring, and no worse on that ac-
count. Our relations to a conscious individual life hereafter
would lose the finest essence of their religious character if the
Spiritualist or anybody else could give us a complete scien-
tific demonstration. That finest essence is the precipitation
of ourselves upon our hope, — not nourishing that in any
deliberate fashion, but simply living our best life, and then,
if that life flowers into a great fragrant hope, daring to cherish
it, though all the arguments of science seem to press the
other way.

We read in Xansen's "Farthest North" — a book that
expands our faith in human nature more than our knowledge
of the northern seas — that, when the vessel was drifting
south or too much west, the men were dispirited and sad ;

iio The Daring Hope.

but, when she was moving onward toward the unknown
world, their hearts were always glad. If we are not so
impatient of the winds and tides which hold us back from
the unknown as were Nansen's men, I would that we mi^ht
be as fearless as were they of the unknown. And, indeed, I
am persuaded that, the further on we go, the more we leave
behind us of familiar things, and the stranger the new as-
pects of the sea and sky, the quieter become our hearts.

"Naked from out that far abyss behind us
We entered here.
No word came with our coming to remind us
What wondrous world was near, —
No hope, no fear.

" [nto the silent, starless night before us
Naked we glide.
No hand has mapped the constellations o'er us,
No comrade at our side,
No chart, no guide.

•' Yet, tearless, toward that midnight, black and hollow,
Our footsteps fare.
The beckoning of a Father's hand we follow, —
His love alone is there."
And that

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