^lJ>~ 1 ^i.'^* k"^^~~^^ ^ '^ V^J' *^f-\ I ,,,,vi ^^ ** ^''"^"^'^^^ ^^UH, Shelf., i^/^- PRINCETON, N. J. % BL 27 .F6 1849 \ Fox, William Johnson, 1786- ' 1864. On the religious ideas «jrj 3i>lllt i^lHTii \\\ - . ve .. --^v "r^_ us-^/ . r^ m ^'iW i ■Iff. ■?^i i.ijInJMBMBB^^^K^^'^ 1 ' Wk •> -Jitfa^iS' .^i^j,. ON THE RELIGIOUS IDEAS BY WILLIAM JOIINSON^^OX, M.P. Miiul, Mind alone (bear witness Earth and Heaven!) The living fountains in itself contains Of Beauteous and Sublime. Akekside. LONDON: CHARLES FOX, 67 PATERNOSTER ROW. 1849. l.ONIioN : IHlMtlt nV 1.1'VIlV, ll<)ll>>ltN, ANP HtANKl-V>, (jMBI Ntw Sinn, hiiui Lane. V" ' MAR 2 4 ]r'>5 — - — ■» CONTENTS. I. The Religious Ideas ; tueik Univehsality 11. The KELKiioLS Ideas ; their Objective Keality III. Revelation IV. God ... . V. Divine Attiubutes VI. Creation and Providence VH. Redemptkjn VIII. IIlman Immortality [X. The Moral Sense . X. Heaven XL The Religion of Huslvnity XII. Christianity . XIII. Political Establishment XIV. Education XV. Practical Influences 1 10 34 55 75 92 106 125 141 151 164 177 195 211 227 ON THE RELIGIOUS IDEAS. LECTURE I. THE RELIGIOUS IDEAS; THEIR UNIVERSALITY. All religions arc constructed of the same ma- terials. They arc all developments of the same germs : the developments varied and modified by the influence of circumstances. But still, the diversities of religions are upon the surface ; and, as we penetrate deeper, an approach to identity is always perceptible. Whatever may be their names or their pretensions j whether they are enshrined in creeds and sacred books, or only exist in the legends of the poet or of the multitude ; whether they were promulgated by legislators, when society itself was framed, by some monarch-priest dictating the spiritual as well as the temporal law, or only preached by some hermit or self-ordained peasant, " the B 2 THE RELIGIOUS IDEAS ; voice of one crvinfj in the wilderness," or in the streets ; whether they bear upon them the stamp of Oriental enthusiasm, or of the calmness and severity of European intelligence ; whether they hold their solemnities amid the pomp of courts, or seek the darkness and the security of the cavern, or worship in some humble barn ; whe- ther their worship be one of strict simplicity, or call to its aid all the resources of all the arts ; still religions, however diversified, are the same in their essentials. They are manifesta- tions of the same ideas ; they are formed from the same elements. As all buildings, from the cottage to the palace, or the enduring pyramid, are constructed with a few materials, wood, stone, metals, &c. ; or as the letters of the alphabet, by their combinations, form all we can express in record and oratory, in poetry and science ; or as, from time to time, we find how few are the elements that in their different states and combinations produce all the pheno- mena of this material world ; so are a few sim- ple ideas the source, the essence, the elements, and the power of all religions. Yes, they are few and simple, — revelation, God, providence, the sense of right and wrong, duty, redemption, heaven, — these, and such as THEIR UNIVERSALITY. 3 these, arc the primeval elements of religion. Tliey arc the Eeligious Ideas. My purpose is, to deliver a succession of lectures on these, the religious ideas, separately considered, but pur- suing a similar course with them, which I shall indicate on the present occasion. These are the conceptions which we find in the most intellectual forms of religion, in the most dissenting Dissent, and the most protest- ing Protestantism ; we find them in the strongest assertion of individual judgment in matters of faith, and we find them also in the most im- plicit submission which the devout believer in the Itoman Catholic system renders to the guide of his conscience, his priest, who is his medi- ator. We find them in all forms of Christi- anity, and we find them in that Judaism which originated Christianity. We may trace them in the fierce mythology of the Goths, and in the graceful mythology of the Greeks. We behold them in the multitudinous idolatry of the Hin- doo, and in the stern monotheism of the Mo- hammedan. We find them in the different forms which each rclioion has assumed under o differing circumstances ; and we may go back till we behold them shadowed out in the re- mote and gigantic forms of primeval Egyptian 4 THE RELIGIOUS IDEAS ; superstition. They are in all ; although, diver- sified bv various influences, thev form different and hostile religions, seeking for the conversion of one another, mutually excommunicating, and influencing by their conflicts the rise and fall of empires. As we trace these, the religious ideas, in succession, I think it will appear that they have a deeper foundation than the mere ceremonies, the creeds, the books, the priesthood, the teach- ers, the oracles, by which religions are distin- guished, and from which they are called. I think we shall find that they have their root in human nature ; that they are the growth of man's intel- lectual and moral constitution ; that they are in their essence a reality, as much as he is a reality. I do not call them innate ideas ; that doctrine of innate ideas has been exploded from the days of Locke. We are not born with thoughts, but we are born with tendencies to thought, and to certain modes and forms of thought, which af- terwards take a definite existence. For though Locke exploded the doctrine of innate ideas, his comparison of the mind of man to a sheet of blank paper fails egregiously; there are some things which cannot be written upon that paper by any hands ; and there are symbols of ideas THEIR UNIVERSALITY. 5 which will appear upon it, although no hand be excited to trace them there j which, under the appropriate influences, will come out, like the writing on paper with sympathetic ink when it is held to the fire, and will grow plain and legible even to untutored tribes. There are tenden- cies to modes of thought, such as what philoso- phers mean by " the moral sense j" not a power born with us, like the physical and external senses, but such a constitution as that, in due time, the conceptions of right and wrong, of good and evil, of duty, will arise in the mind and exist there to a certain extent, though that extent may be diversified by the acquirements and the exercise of the faculties of the indivi- dual. The assumption that such tendencies are physically manifested is the foundation of phren- ology, and is a correct conception in itself, whether the phrenology which is thus founded be true or false, complete or imperfect, accurate or inaccurate in its deductions. Whether there be or be not in the head an organ of veneration, the tendency of man's being is to venerate ; and this tendency will discover or create for itself an object. Veneration seeks the majestic ; it will delineate and believe in the majestic. It has a tendency towards this ; and although it may be 6 THE RELIGIOUS IDEAS ; often wrong, and may be corrected by logic and philosophy, by experience and observation, yet this is only saying the very same thing that we have to say of the physical and external senses. Our sight and hearing are corrected by the ope- rations of our mind, and bv the deductions of knowledge and experience. And as the testi- mony of these senses yet carries with it the assurance that leads to belief in the external existence of objects, so is there in the intima- tions of the internal senses, in the objective ten- dencies of our different faculties, veneration, love, hope, fear, and so on, — so is there in these an assurance that leads to a belief also in the objective and external existence of corresponding realities. There is in human nature an internal impulse towards the divine. Hence religion, — but religion modified in a thousand different ways, and by a thousand different influences ; most extensively modified by the claimants of re- velation ; by the uttcrers and expounders (what- ever the testimonials of their authority) of what they call divine oracles ; by those who speak in the name of the Lord, or in the name of the mul- tiplicity of gods whom their people worship ; by those who have left the impress of their indi- viduality on religions that have prevailed over THEIR UNIVERSALITY. 7 islands and continents and the broadest empires, and who have exercised authority upon large portions of the human race, and through the lapse of long ages. They have all been modi- fiers, and no more, of these internal universal conceptions of human nature, without which to work upon, priests, kings, prophets, or re- formers, would vainly have endeavoured to esta- blish their systems. But in this work of mo- dification they have sometimes played most fan- tastic tricks, opposing the legitimate influence of the growth of knowledge and science upon conceptions dictated by our own constitution, — physical, intellectual, and moral. They have given to certain names and ceremonies, certain outward and physical expressions, a factitious sanctity. By making consecrated ground of some spots, they have desecrated the rest of God's earth. They have given names to the Deity, " Allah" or " Jehovah ;" they have en- deavoured to define the Infinite ; they have sought to give a strict outline, an external em- bodiment, to that which is only susceptible of an internal and spiritual existence. Many re- ligions, partaking of the historical character, have exalted into importance the commemora- tion of different events — natural or preternatural. 8 THE RKLIGIOUS IDEAS ; real, fictitious, or exaggerated, and so on — which they have raised to the dignity of that moral truth which is essentially difi*erent from, and above, mere historical truth. By these varied agencies, by the establishment of different classes of teachers, by the power of different priesthoods, they have thus very often, while differing from one another, plunged also into a much more im- portant difference from man's first, natural, ori- ginal instincts, the instincts of his own moral sense, of his own spiritual nature and tendencies, which are a surer guide than any external autho- rity. In like manner the power of governments, their peculiar characters — despotic or republican — the influence of climate ; these have their effects very legibly written upon the religion of different countries. Different races of mankind, for assuredly a very striking diversity of race may be traced, —that too has its effect, disposing some to one form, and some to another. Con- sequently, even in the religions which seem the best founded there has been change, continuous chanfife. Literature and science have wrought their work upon them. No Church claiming a continuity of miraculous powers can stand against any thing like freedom of discussion and open thought, and a literature which bears the im- THEIR UNIVERSALITY. 9 press of those qualities. And in the Christi- anity of the present day, what modifications have not been enforced by the power of successive dis- coveries in astronomy and geology I Religions succeed to one another ; or a religion preserving the same name becomes a different thing. Scep- ticism, as to all, has its room and ground of tri- umph ; but even in that gloomy triumph there is a latent conviction of something which really belongs to nature, and therefore belongs to eter- nity. There is a remarkable instance of this sort of latent conviction in an exceedin^rlv well- known passage, — I mean the sceptical stanzas which occur in Lord Byron's " Childe Harold," suggested by the ruins of Athens. " Son of the morningj rise, approach you here ; Come, but molest not yon defenceless urn ; Look on this spot — a nation's sepulchre — Abode of gods, -whose shrines no longer bui'n. Even gods must yield, rehgions take their turn ; 'Twas Jove's — 'tis INIahomet's ; and other creeds Will rise with other years ; till man shall learn Vainly his incense soars, his victim bleeds ; Poor child of doubt and death, -whose hope is built on reeds !" And then, in the intended continuation of this same scornful vein, how a protest of humanity beams out : " Bound to the earth, he hfts his eye to heaven !'* 10 THE RELIGIOUS IDEAS; The same powers, the same influences, that did bind man to earth, have taught him also to lift his eye to heaven. It is the peculiarity of his condition, that, being so bound, his senses and his thoughts do not grovel with his position ; that in the various influences that have made him what he is, that have planted him on this globe, and rendered it alike his cradle and his grave, the scene of all his exertions, and the limitation of his knowledge, there is still, to- gether with this, the universal result, confessed by the poet of scepticism, even when most scep- tical, perhaps unconsciously, that — " Bound to tlie earth, lie lifts Lis eye to heaven !" and so he xclll raise it. There are yet other modifications than those introduced by the founders of religions, prophets, and priests, and kings, the tendencies of govern- ments and of social condition. There are other influences besides these, — the powers of nature around us as well as in us, which modify these modifying influences themselves ; which tend to keep man true to his first, simple, original thought ; which very often, in their power upon him, brinixin"- out different forms of devotion, shew the universal identity of devotion j which. THEIR UNIVERSALITY. 11 while they cast on religion the shadows of gloomy regions, or excite to aspiration by the altitude of mountains ; while they colour man's piety with all their own hues, whatever they may be, giv- ing to all the sono: of birds as the lyrical music of worship, and the eternal roar of the ocean as its profound anthem, do yet in all bear testi- mony to the identity of the sentiments whose expression is so infinitely varied. The Unita- rian preachers of England stood astonished at the translations made by Rammohun Roy, the Brahmin, from those ancient Hindoo books, the Veds. " The gospels themselves," said ]\Ir. Belsham, " teach not a purer monotheism than do the sacred writini^s of the Hindoos." The prayer of Epictetus, what character has it to distinauish it from a Christian pravcr ? Is it not a form of devotion which the sinccrest be- liever of the present day may adopt as the ex- pression of his own desires, wants, and wishes, and his reliance upon divine wisdom ? The language of the " Divine Dialogues" of Plato harmonises with the mystic spirituality of mo- dern times. Pope was abundantly justified in his " Universal Prayer." That the " Father of all" has been " in every age" adored "by saint, by savage, and by sage," is a fact which we 1^ THE RELIGIOUS IDEAS J are compelled to recognise ; and the red man of the woods talks of the " Infinite Spirit" in language which the European philosopher ad- mires for its truth and its sublimity. There is, then, a religion of humanity, of which perchance we may gain some glimpses as in succession the religious ideas are made to pass before us. There is a religion of humanity, thouofh not enshrined in creeds and articles, — though it is not to be read merely in sacred books, and yet it may be read in all, whenever they have any thing in them of truth and moral beauty ; — a religion of humanity, more ancient than the oldest superstitions, more divine than the best-attested oracles, more enduring than the faith which seems to be the most firmly estab- lished in the world; — a religion of humanity, which goes deeper than all, because it belongs to the essentials of our moral and intellectual con- stitution, and not to mere external accidents ; the proof of which is not in historical argument or metaphysical deduction, but in our own con- science and consciousness; — a religion of hu- manitv, which unites and blends all other reli- gions, and makes one the men whose hearts are sincere, and whose characters are true, and good, and harmonious, whatever may be the deductions THEIR UNIVERSALITY. 13 of their minds, or their external profession ; — a religion of humanity, which cannot perish in the overthrow of altars or the fall of temples, which survives them all, and which, were every defined form of religion obliterated from the face of the world, would re-create religion, as the spring re-creates the fruits and flowers of the soil, bidding it bloom again in beauty, bear again its rich fruits of utility, and fashion for itself such forms and modes of expression as may best agree with the progressive condition of man- kind. Strange changes have of late been rife in the world. There has been a season of confusion and of destruction, and of the strufjMinfT forms of new social arrangement, like Milton's " tawny lion" half imbedded in the soil, and "pawing to get free." Thrones, and principalities, and powers have been shaken. They have reminded us of the bold simile in the Apocalypse, where the stars of heaven are said to fall " as a fisf-tree casteth her untimely figs when she is shaken of a mighty wind." Revolution has succeeded re- volution. The authors have followed the objects. Those hurled from power by convulsions have been speedily succeeded in their exile by the authors and leaders of those convulsive move- 14 THE RELIGIOUS IDEAS ; ments ; and throughout the earth men's minds have seemed involved in a chaotic condition. There has been universal turmoil ; and those peaceful influences by which man generally feels that he treads his path in safety, — which give their assurance to commercial enterprise and industrial undertaking, — these, too, have been strangely warped and interrupted ; and through- out the earth there have been scenes of change in rapid and astounding succession. And well it is, amid all this, in the very time of chaos, to look onward in confiding reliance on the harmoni- ous operation and results of the system by which hitherto humanity has been conducted. Well it is to look from the evanishinsf to the lastino', and feel assured that as, in all change and vicis- situde, there is no safety but in holding fast by the great, the enduring principles of our moral being, — wisdom, virtue, truth, justice ; so, in the turmoil of our thoughts, it is well to rest on that w^hich is enduring, and keep steadily before us what cannot be overwhelmed by revolutions, but will abide the shock of all convulsions. Let us do the duties of our position, whatever they may be ; and happy arc those who, what the hand findeth to do, do it with their might ; yet hap- pier if, while achieving the peculiar business of TliEIll UNIVERSALITY. 15 the day, vvliilo working the work of time, they do it with "thoughts that wander through eter- nity," and repose upon the Infinite. LECTURE II. THE RELIGIOUS IDEAS; THEIR OBJECTIVE REALITY. First: All religions are constructed from the same materials ; and, however varied they ap- pear when only superficially considered, are, as to their essentials, compounded of certain thoughts or conceptions, which, in these lectures, I term the Religious Ideas, such as Revelation, God, Providence, and so on. Secondly^ These reli- gious ideas, although perhaps we cannot tech- nically term them innate ideas, are yet so pre- valent, as to shew themselves the genuine result of the human faculties, of the moral and intel- lectual constitution of man, however modified and obscured by the claims of those who pre- tend to peculiar revelation, by different forms of religious establishments, or by the dogmas of different teachers. And thirdJij, That they are so — that they maintain their existence and their power even beneath the superincumbent weight of a pile of superstitions and incongruities — shews that however much we may be warranted in doubting, disregarding, or rejecting many TIJEIR OBJECTIVE REALITY. I7 forms of religion, still religion itself is a reality, a permanent and enduring- reality. These three propositions are what I endeavoured to illustrate in the last Lecture, as introductory to a series of discourses on the Religious Ideas ; and it seems to me that, before proceeding to consider these ideas separately, I may yet further prolong my introductory remarks, by amplifying somewhat more the third, and the most likely to be disput- ed of these assertions, namely, that because these ideas are consonant with human nature, — the common growth of human nature, — they there- fore point to religion as in itself a reality, how- ever it may be misrepresented, or blended with what seems falsehood to men's perceptions. And this is an important result to arrive at. It is surely something, knowing how much there is of mere invention, of superstition, of igno- rant fancv in what is called religion — it is some- thinfij to know that there is more than this in it, and elements of a very different character and tcndcncv. Eelioion is not a dream ; it is not mere cloud-scenery ; it is not a vain and evanescent imagination. Such delusions have prevailed,- they have overshadowed nations and ages, but they have passed away, because they were no more than dreams, before the rising sun c 18 THE RELIGIOUS IDEAS ; of knowledge. Religion has not so passed away. It is something to arrive at the conclusion that religion is not a fraud, a deception. Deliberate and gross deceptions have no doubt often been practised in its name. Claims and professions have been set up utterly devoid of all grounds ; there have been seasons when, as we are told of Home, augur could not meet augur without laughing in each other's faces : but these times have never long endured ; they have come in the corruptions of states, and have passed away with the corruptions of states. They are ex- ceptional in human history ; the world were else one great lie : and what is much more ex- traordinary, that very falsehood would be the stimulus to the noblest aspirations, a source of comfort in the deepest and darkest sorrows, and the impulse of the most devoted heroism. It is something to arrive at the conclusion that religion, being neither fancy nor fraud, is not, cither, to be classed with mere historical legend. The historical forms which it has often assumed arc very unimportant as to its essence. All historical legend is full of prodigy — has large masses of f\ilschood intermixed with truth — requires the application of a close and search- ing criticism to distinguish the one from the THEIR OBJECTIVE REALITY. 19 other f its wonders fade away with the lapse of ages, becoming more and more incredible. Ke- lis'ion is not to be mixed with this : it is moral truth, resting on moral proof, and cannot fade or waste away. Nor is it a mere chance. We cannot say that religion came upon earth, as some say America was peopled, by accident. It is there as the flowers are there which grow on the soil ; it is there as the stars are in the hea- vens, shining in their perennial brightness ; it is there by the ordination of that omnipotent Nature from which all result. It grows as they grow ; it blossoms in the heart as surely as those flowers upon the soil ; it ripens in the character as surely as do the fruits of harvest in the fields. It belongs to nature ; it belongs to humanity. This is the position I am endeavouring to illus- trate. And as there is continual confusion from requiring an inappropriate kind of evidence, especially on religious topics, it may perhaps be useful to remind a certain class of reasoners that logical forms are not essential to satisfactory con- clusions ; that as, in the history of invention, the greatest discoveries have not been made by w^ork- ing out a process of demonstrative thought, so there are truths which will not yield themselves to the common forms and arrangements in which 20 THE RELIGIOUS IDEAS ; the logician delights, and in which very often he mistakes the means for the end — the dexterous use of his own implements for the value of the result at which he professes to arrive. There are instances of common convictions — firm ones too — which you cannot put to proof in a looical form. There is our reliance on the joermanency of the lazvs of Nature. One of the ablest reasoners, and with no bias towards Chris- tianity or any particular form of religion in his mind, has found himself unable to account for this reliance but by terming it a human instinct, something analogous to the instincts of animals. That the sun rose to-day is no logical proof that the sun will rise to-morrow. That the grain grew last year docs not argue, by syllogistic de- duction, that the grain will grow next year. And yet where is there a confidence stronger than this ? Where is a belief more firm ? We rest on this, while there is much that, with all its array of professed demonstration, would fail of commanding our credence, still more our con- fidence. Our conviction of tJie real'ilij of ex- ternal nature is another instance of the same description. That, too, baffles the logician. You cannot shew that there is matter, or existence at all, beyond yourself; and yet you believe it, THEIR OBJECTIVE REALITY. 21 rely upon it, act u])on it. It may all be only impression on our consciousness. The Berke- leian can dispose of the whole material universe in this way with the greatest ease. There may be no stars shinino; in heaven, no trees "fro win fj in the forest — all may be but sensation, thought, in us ; still, who does not rest upon, w^ho docs not act upon, the reality of something which is out of us with an assurance as strong as that of our belief in our own existence ? Those who require direct agencies of demonstration in such matters as these — who contend that belief and the logical forms of proof have an inseparable union — must find their way out of this dilemma as well as they can ; and how far they will find their way in real knowledge, and that which relates to the business of life, it is difficult to say. It must be left to themselves. Now, I think this association of the religious ideas in the human mind with their being repre- sentatives of actual realities, is countenanced by the fact, that all our faculties are objective. All our faculties have relation to something out of ourselves, which something is a reality. Whe- ther we analyse man phrcnologically, and take his organs as they are mapped out upon the skull, or whether we resolve his faculties into 22 THE RELIGIOUS IDEAS ; associated ideas, according to the philosophical doctrines of Hartley,— still the argument which I propose in this case holds just the same. On both theories human faculties are objective ; they relate to existence beyond ourselves, to real existence. The eye has its relation to light, and the ear to those vibrations of the atmosphere which we call sound. Human feelings and ten- dencies have all their external relations; love and mutual need build up society. Our ten- dency to enjoy regular intervals, and the re- peated occurrence of certain movements, che- rishes music. Every quality which we seek to cultivate has this relation ; a relation which the phrenologists, such as Combe, have largely traced, between what is within us and something which is without us. Are we, then, to suppose that this holds only of the lower faculties ? that the higher are exceptional to this law of objec- tivity ? Are we to suppose that objects of sight are provided for the eye — that that organ has every thing which corresponds with its functions ; that sounds are provided for the ear ; that there arc objects for every tendency, even of cupidity or dcstructiveness — that all the inferior faculties have their corresponding objects with- out ; but that such faculties as veneration, won- THEIR OBJECTIVE REALITY. 23 der, hope, conscientiousness — which all philoso- phers alike place at the very highest elevation of our mental constitution — are alone unprovided for ; have nothing which corresponds to them ; but fail of indicating, as all the inferior faculties indicate, actual and external being? Through the whole range of faculties, beginning with the very lowest, this objective relation obtains. It holds true of the common bodily senses ; of the various animal propensities which link humanity with inferior natures ; of the intellectual powers framed for exercise in so many spheres of exist- ence ; and it cannot be supposed to cease just when we reach the noblest class of tendencies. The moral faculties of man require the reality of the religious ideas. Further, the affinity of religion with human nature is observable in this, that both human nature and religion are results of the same in- Jliieiices and agencies. They are portions of the same system ; the power which provides for the one provides for the other also. The svstem in which we live is full of these harmonics ; they beset us around ; we find them every where. The hero of an age, the great man who is to stamp his intellectual portraiture upon the pages of history, who is to give his 24 THE RELIGIOUS IDEAS ; name to an era, who is to make revolutions in the concerns of humanity, in sciences, arts, arms, religions, or governments, — he is prepared for by a thousand previous contrivances, leading us back through long ages : for him other heroes have fought and conquered, or endured ; for him historians have recorded the rise and fall of states ; for him the poet has felt the burning glow of inspiration ; for him have artists put forth their varied powers ; for him did time and circumstance conspire, — the material with the spiritual, the unconscious with the human, the heavens with the earth ; these all uniting, and combining their diversified influences, produce, just at that time, just that combination of facul- ties, powers, tendencies, and aspirations, which make him the hero of his age, which give him his pre-eminence, and through him form and fashion the destinies of humanity. There is this provision in all things ; in those harmonies of external nature which become the inspiration of the poet or of the musician ; in those diversities and arrangements of colour which beam their rainbow light upon the painter's eye, and give him the enthusiasm of his art. We find them even in reference to what is most material and mechanical. Long and countless ages ago THEIR OBJECTIVE REALITY. 25 mighty forests were whelmed by the floods ; they changed their qualities beneath the superincum- bent pressure, and were formed into those mines of coal which minister to steam, the great mate- rial agency of civilisation in our time. This production has been the result of processes con- tinued through periods too vast for our arith- metic ; but comes at last into its proper combi- nation, and renders to humanity its unparal- leled service. As these arc parts of one great plan ; as we see the same power which provided habitations for humanity causing man to arise therein, and take possession of his abode ; as there is the framework of nature, through all its different gradations, giving food to bird and beast, and arranging according to their several properties the climates to which thev are indigenous, and where they find their nutriment, and whence they spread their numbers, — so there is the same kind of harmonv, the same kind of uniformitv, in the productive power with regard to religion. That, too, is thus provided for from the first dawn of human intelligence ; it is thus minis- tered unto, sometimes by the ignorant and err- ing, and sometimes by the enlightened and wise ; sometimes by force and fraud, and at others by 26 THE RELIGIOUS IDEAS ; persuasion and example ; but still it springs up, and grows on the earth : it is part and parcel of humanity itself. The power which makes man makes religion ; the power which sustains man sustains religion ; the power which multiplies humanity till it subdues the earth renders reli- gion universal. We resolve both into the same source ; and as we trace in them the common products of one system of causation, we are led to pronounce the one a reality as much as the other. All imaginative creations, all conceptions of the mind which are congruous with the ascer- tained laws of nature, are indicative of reality. The public taste even more and more requires this congruousness in fictitious creations. No- body believes now in " men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders ;" the anatomical laws and principles are too well understood. We become impatient of allegory, because allegory requires in its creations qualities to be blended together which do not exist together in fact, either in the nature of animals or in the human mind. In ignorant times, conceptions are free from the restrictions imposed by the discovery of scientific laws. Those which are at variance with such laws gradually subside, are exploded. THEIR OBJECTIVE REALITY. 27 and disappear ; whilst those which remain, re- main because they are in harmony with the reality, and are indicative of reality. Take, for instance, the finest characters in Shakspeare : who can doubt that they do exist, or have ex- isted ? We may not know them ; the poet might not know them himself; they may have borne or may bear other names ; they may live in dif- ferent countries or ages to what he has assigned them J they may not yet have come into exist- ence ; but of those characters we may safely assert, that they are of real existence, that they have existed, or that they shall exist; for the mere conception of them is a pledge that amongst the boundless modifications continually going on in the production of actual human character, prototypes of these have, and have had, and will have their place. They have interaal evidence of a corresponding actual external existence ; the metaphysician reasons upon them as if literally historical. So it is with those religious concep- tions which, not fading away with the progress of knowledn^e, have become clearer and briohter as the mind of man was more expanded. That notion which is itself the source and yet the summit of all — the conception of Deity, the lof- tiest thought of man's ideality, which, produced 28 THE RELIGIOUS IDEAS J SO early, disfigured, it may be, by savage igno- rance, or perverted by abstruse and fanciful doc- trines — still, that notion ever clears and brightens itself in the human mind, and seems even an independent existence there, enlarging and rais- ino" the humanity by whose faculties the percep- tion is produced. The thought of Deity is a p?'oof of Deity. And so powerful are these natural ideas, these religious ideas, in humanity, that no system of faith and worship, however strong its external recommendations to support, has ever proved powerful enough to keep them down. Look at the Polytheism of antiquity, how firmly it was established ; look at its prevalence among the wandering Arabs of a comparatively late period ; look at the gross idolatries of those old Israelites ; yet they did not suppress the ten- dency of the human mind to think of the Di- vinity as One ; and Monotheism was proclaimed first by Moses, and then by Mahomet, and hu- manity heard and reverenced the proclamation. It was the same in Greece : Greece patronised the Polytheistic system, — Greece, with all the beauty and sublimity of its mythology ; Athens, where it was said that it was easier to find a god than a man ; and yet even there, m spite of establishments, in spite of policy, in spite of TllElIl OBJECTIVE REALITY. 29 popular opinion, and in spite of martyrdom, did Socrates arrive at and inculcate the same mono- theism which holds its power in the minds of Hindoo Brahmins, which even teaches the sa- vages in their Fetish idolatry something of an universal principle, an infinite spirit. It is the relijrious idea connruous with human nature — the produce of human nature ; and you cannot keep it down. The future state is another of these ideas. The Mosaic institutes were founded either in ignorance or intentional disregard of the expec- tation of a future life. It was ignored by Moses; it had no place in the inscriptions on the tables of stone lodged in the sanctuary ; there was no future in the Book of the Law ; the people were not instructed therein ; their teachers did not surround it with authority ; their oracles and their miracles alike had regard to the transac- tions of this life — to a retribution here; and yet, in spite of all this, the notion of a future life would come, did come, and, with the slight exception of a small and comparatively irreli- gious sect, prevailed over the whole people. And so it is, whenever the dictates of that moral sense, which I class amongst the religious ideas, are violated by the professed enactments of 30 THE RELIGIOUS IDEAS; religion. The right of self-defence, for instance, is one of the dictates of that moral sense ; it is too strong for doctrines and precepts, for creeds and articles. A man's Bible may say to him, "When thy right cheek is smitten, turn thy left ;" hut generally and permanently he will not do that, whatever may be his faith in, or reverence for, his Bible. He evades it ; he finds some mode of interpreting it which takes his case out of the law. If he does not relinquish the authority which teaches it, he explains away, and endeavours himself to escape from that au- thority. One of the Thirty-nine Articles of our Church of England is meant to prevent the simple and literal adoption of such a text as that ; and condemns those who hold it not lawful, on certain occasions, or under certain circumstances, to bear arms. The instinct of self-defence and self-preservation, harmonising with the moral sense of humanity — with one of the reli"ious ideas which grow in our mental and spiritual being — is too strong for precept, however allowedly divine, and however direct and explicit in its enactments. It is the same with the doctrine of total depravity, and vin- dictive and eternal torment. It becomes a conventionalism ; it is explained away j casuists THEIR OBJECTIVE REALITY. 31 and teachers devise different means of escapino- from sucli a punishment for all about whom they are interested. The heart revolts from it ; and forms and creeds cannot enforce it. And thus it ever is, when the religious ideas are invaded. There is no sanctity of books, however infallible they may be deemed ; there is no power of mi- racles, though they were wrought before one's own eyes, instead of being merely the legendary record of long past ages ; there is no authority or persuasion of teachers ; there is no force of establishments, that can prevail against such notions : they baffle them all, they outlive them all ; they stand unshaken, whilst creeds and forms totter and fall ; they maintain their iden- tity with human nature, the enduring, — with the world, the permanent, — with God, the everlasting. There are, then, presumptions of various kinds which still lead us to this association of thoughts. Certain conceptions are native to man ; they are indicative of real existence ; they point us towards religion as something which, however it may be disfigured by arts and devices, still retains its own certaintv of beins: — will revive wherever humanitv revives — will shew itself in affinity with our nature, our highest nature, wherever that nature has most oppor- 3^2 THE RELIGIOUS IDEAS J tunities of development, and, if the different modes and forms that now constitute religion were all to pass away, would replace them with natural and appropriate expressions, hy which they would still maintain their influence, diffuse their consolations, and excite the aspiring hopes of humanity. I dismiss these introductory remarks by merely adding, that it is not with the ignorance of man, but with his knowledge, that these thoughts have an affinity ; they are associated with progress. Real and essential religion has a harmony with our condition, of which the external forms imposed upon it for various pur- poses are generally destitute. They seek to fix some mode as the enduring standard of faith and excellence ; they say to the human mind, " Thus far shalt thou come, and no farther." They arc thus at variance with humanity, just in the same degree and to the same extent as they are untrue to religion. But if religion really belongs to ourselves ; if we may in its genuine spirit look abroad and recognise its reality, though in forms most alien from our own convictions and our own feelings ; if we may see it purifying and exalting even those whom we deem the victims of idohitry and superstition , if we can trace it amidst some THEIR OBJECTIVE REALITY. 33 of the darkest clouds that liave brooded over human thought ; and, at the same time, if we find it in the closest affinity with whatever is purest and brightest : why, then it is something destined to endure — it is a reality — it is beyond ourselves ; and in our conceptions of it we are exalted as it were to a higher mode of percep- tion and of enjoyment ; we trace in it, and along with it, a tendency to progress, which is the noblest item in tlie charter of the privileges of human nature — which belongs to us in our af- finity with Heaven — which raises us towards higher grades of being — which infuses into us a spirit of oneness with that Power who rules every where, and is still educing good from evil, and making good more vast and more lasting. Let us rejoice in such a view of religion, which calls upon us for no base submission to that at which " reason stands aghast, and faith herself is half confounded ;" but appeals only to our best powers, is in harmony with our brightest prospects, and tends to make man worthy of the position that he occupies on earth, and not un- worthy of having in him a principle of enduring life, for which yet ampler spheres, and nobler occupations and enjoyments, are provided. D LECTURE III. REVELATION. Religion and revelation are twin thoughts : wherever we find the one we find the other also. All religions claim to be or to contain revela- tions. It is not improbable that they all make the claim with some degree of truth ; but if so, the exclusive claim of any must fall to the ground. In this country we are accustomed to identify revelation with Christianity. When we speak of revealed religion, as distinguished from that of nature, we mean what is contained in the Old and New Testaments. We indulo^e in that common fallacy by which people assume that their own notions are the truth, that their own institutions arc the wisest form of government, that their own religion is the only religion, and that their circle is the world. But if we look abroad we find a similar disposition in a great variety of directions. The Koran much more distinctly claims to be, in its entirety, a revela- tion, than the Bible. The Koran docs not mix up, as the Bible does, history, poetry, argument. ilLVELATION. 35 and a great variety of the forms of conimunica- tion between man and man. It is one lontJ" o appeal of Deity to his creatures. It is a Divine monologue: the prophet is merely the amanuensis. God speaks, and jMahomet writes. Other reli- gions have simikir pretensions. Where is tliere one which does not rest on the notion, or that does not at least include the notion, of a re- velation ? The institutes of j\Ienu come with similar chums of authority to the institutes of Moses. Zoroaster tau<:lit divine things, havinix arrived at them by divine knowledge. Odin sought Hcla for the soUition of mysteries. The Grand Llama of Thibet is a living revelation, continually renewed. And the idolatry of the old classical times abounded in oracles. They came from trees and caverns, from rivers and mountains ; the priestess uttered them on the tripod, and " still her speech was song." The cravinof after revelation makes man believe al- most any pretender to the rank of priest or pro- phet. Strange methods have been devised to obtain revelations : corpses have been exhumed ; they have been, it is said, reanimated, that they might tell the fate of ensuing battles. The flight of birds has been watched, the entrails of animals have been dissected, in order thereby to arrive 36 THE RELIGIOUS IDEAS J at some intimation from the gods. It was done by the augm*s of Rome ; it was done by the pa- triarch Abraham when he sacrificed ; for the Jews had recourse to these methods, as well as other people. Even the glittering of a stone has been sometimes made the medium of an oracle. The Urim and Thummim, the breast- plate of the high priest, with its jewels, shone or was darkened, according to the favourable or unfavourable answer of Divinity. Even those who have advocated a natural religion, as op- posed to all preternatural revelation, have clung to the same belief or practices. Socrates had his attendant demon, for monition, warning, and encouragement ; and Lord Herbert of Cherbury, seeking a sanction for the publication of his work against Christianity, knelt down and prayed, and heard the affirmative response of Heaven's thun- der in an unclouded sky ! Revelation, then, is eminently entitled to class amongst what, for the purpose of these lectures, I have called the religious ideas. It has an intimate association with the very notion of religion itself. And why is this, but that for religious principle, guidance, and support, there is a general want and craving in humanity ? and there is a persuasion as general, that for every REVELATION. 37 want there is a supply in the arrangements of nature or of providence. Man finds this by experience in his inferior wants and cravings. He needs sustenance ; the fields bear him their fruits. Plis eye requires light, and it beams around him, and becomes the medium of his perceptions. His ear has the want of sound, and sound comes to him borne on the waves of the atmosphere. And if it be true, that " the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing," it is that in our very senses there is something of that tendency which dis- tinguishes the higher faculties and the general constitution of humanity ; and therefore, that dissatisfaction is the mode bv which nature sti- mulates art, in order to provide yet higher gra- tifications — with them higher wants — and so again, in a progression which nature and art are yet very far indeed from having exhausted. The different races of mankind are found in the localities best adapted to their peculiarities of temperament. The very beasts of the field vary in different regions, and are sure to seek for the region best adapted to them. Where their appropriate habitation is, where their na- tural food grows, where their different powers can be best exerted, there they are, as in their 38 THE RELIGIOUS IDEAS ; natural seat, their original nest, from wbicli, in- deed, they may be moved to other regions, but where we find, as it were, the fountain of their existence. The craving mind of man seeks after the knowledge of the qualities and properties of things and of past ages ; and here again, in the natural progress of society, arise the means of meeting this want, and filling his mind with acquirements in which he becomes possessed of the supplies of all ages ; and perceiving this, he is led to infer, that for other wants, belong- in"- to a different set of faculties, there must also be a provision. For the religious wants are at least as obvious as any other. They are, wherever humanity exists. Where it is, there is darkness to be dispelled, exertion to be made, sorrow to be borne ; there are all the different actions and influences which, in their operation upon our frame, make us conscious how much we need of that highest kind of knowledge, of that strongest form of consolation and support. How soon is man doomed to be perplexed in his spirit, to be compelled painfully to say of himself, that he does not know, that he cannot penetrate the darkness around him ! How often has man to endure a calamity that presses heavily upon him, when sympathy fails him, REVELATION. 39 when his own resources fail him, except as in those resources he finds the suggestion to look beyond and to look above ! Who is there that has not been perplexed like David at " behold- ing the prosperity of the wicked ?" Who is there that has not felt the sense of injustice keen and strong at his heart, in the view of man's oppressions over his brother man ? Who is there to whom the grave has not covered up hopes and affections, and made the mind long — painfully and intensely long — for some discerning power, — that is, for some revelation ? There have been books published under the name of " Inquirer." " Inquirer" is the name of huma- nity. Man every where is naturally seeking, grasping, groping after something which is to support, to guide, to strengthen, and to impel him onward. As yet, religions in their peculiar and dis- tinctive forms have generally failed of satisfying this want. The religions of the old civilised world have passed away, vanished from the earth ; or they remain only in the glorious works of art which they have produced, looked at with other eyes, with the admiration of taste, but not with the homage of worship. By no power can those ancient faiths be revived. 40 THE RELIGIOUS IDEAS ) What religion has thoroughly satisfied the crav- ing mind and heart of man ? Christianity has had eighteen centuries, and where, for two- thirds of that period, has been its extension ? Mohammedanism reigns over a larger number of the human race ; and yet what enlightened mind is satisfied with the attributes of *' Allah," or with the trees and fountains of the paradise of the Koran ? No religion has so appealed in its entirety to the common human heart as to become the religion of human nature ; and yet they have all had ample time for doing so, had it been in them. As to Christians, they have taken of late rather to split than to multiply ; to divide rather than to extend. They cannot convert one another, and hence there is little chance of their converting the Hindoos or other heathen. Man is yet seeking for something of a different kind from any religion considered in its technicality, its entirety, and its exclusive- ness. They have all paltered with humanity ; they have all professed to give more than the human mind found they actually realised. The light w'hich they shed abroad has been found frequently to "lead astray," and could not be recognised as " light from heaven." They have not given the abundant satisfaction after which REVELATION. 41 our nature is still striving", and after which it will continue to strive, though in its fulness it may be found unattainable. They have not raised the veil of Isis, or if they have, only to discover that there was no great truth beneath to shew to the nations. They have baffled the inquiries of mankind, as the young Epictetus, in his studies, was baffled by his tutor, who ex- pounded to him Hesiod's Theogony, and told him that — " Eldest of beings. Chaos first arose." " And Chaos whence ?" said the young inquirer. Poets and theologians, he was told, had no an- swer for that, he must go to the philosophers. And what could they achieve ? The greatest oracle of Greece, that of the far-seeing Apollo, was solicited to designate the wisest of men. It named Socrates ; and the philosopher's account of his own wisdom was, that he knew only that he knew nothin":. The world has been left un- satisfied. We are accustomed to say, in familiar lan- guage — some sects — that the Bible is a revela- tion ; others, aiming at a nicer distinction, that it contains a revelation. There is a sense in which both these are true ; but it is not the sense in 42 THE RELIGIOUS IDEAS ; which they are commonly affirmed. Indeed, few books bear less of the character of claiming in their entirety to be a revelation, than the Jew- ish and Christian Scriptures. One of the best condensed descriptions of them was given by Edmund Burke, in the discussion on the cleri- cal petitioners, who, about a century ago, had claimed relief from subscription to Articles. " The Scripture," he says, *' is no one sum- mary of doctrines regularly digested, in which a man could not mistake his way ; it is a most venerable, but most multifarious collection of the records of the Divine economy ; a collection of an infinite variety of cosmogony, theology, history, prophecy, psalmody, morality, apologue, allegory, legislation, ethics, carried through different books, by different authors, at different ages, for diflPerent ends and purposes. It is necessary to sort out what is intended for example, what only as nar- rative ; what to be understood literally, what figuratively ; where one precept is to be con- trolled and modified by another; what is used directly, and what only as an argument ad liomi- nem ; what is temporary, and what of perpetual obligation ; what appropriated to one state and to one set of men, and what the general duty of all Christians." REVELATION. 43 Such was the true and just description given by that illustrious man. What was his inference from it ? That the Scriptures needed the addi- tion of the Creeds and Articles of the Church, in order to fix their meaning. And what was this, but to make the Church the revealer, and not the Scripture, — to raise the agent above the author, — and by this authority of interpretation, to make another effort, but a much vainer one, towards the object commonly ascribed to the Scriptures. What, indeed, is there on which we can lay our finger, and say, " Here is a truth, in some distinct preternatural form, communicated from heaven to earth ?" The very being of Deity is taken for granted in the whole of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. When did men learn that God was their father ? We cannot tell when the tho-ught first occurred ; it is most preva- lent in the New Testament, but we find it in the Old Testament. The Jew exclaims, " Have we not all one father ? hath not one God cre- ated us ?" We find it in the prophets, and we find it also in the ancient poets of Greece and Home, as well as in the speculations of the Ori- ental Monotheists. The notion of Deity grows before our eyes in the history of the human 44 THE RELIGIOUS IDEAS j mind; — at first imperfect, confused, partaking of the material forms of humanity, surrounded by attributes that belong rather to the warrior than to the legislator, as afterwards rather with those that belong to the legislator than to the parent. We behold it every where growing with the growth of human nature, and enlarging with the extension of the human mind. Was the future life a revealed doctrine, in this preternatural way ? There is no text for it ; no communication even by the greatest of the prophets ; but the Jews picked it up in Babylon. Having found it there, though in the land of sorrow and captivity, it had so much affinity with their thoughts and feelings, that it speedily became the general faith of the nation. Is the doctrine of the devil a revelation ? When, where, or how ? The conception is only an at- tempt, an abortive attempt, at a solution of the great problem of the origin of evil. We see him taking varied forms, — some sublime, some ludi- crous ; passing through all gi'adations, from an obedient though an accusing spirit — the attorney- general of Heaven's court, — until he claims a co- ordinate throne with God, and maintains a uni- versal struggle with his power for dominion over life, and heart, and soul. The idea of a divine REVELATION. 45 preternatural revelation cannot be brought into contact with associations such as these. We must look elsewhere. We must look further. Where is revelation ? Every where ; every where that man, cherishing his purest thoughts and highest faculties, finds his spirit in commu- nion with the great universal Spirit. It is not here or there exclusively. It is with the poet of an idolatrous country; it is with sages arising in barbarous times, their light shining amidst the thick night of ignorance ; and it is with those who, enjoying higher degrees of knowledge, sur- rounded by an atmosphere of intelligence, find their own minds enabled thereby to look yet higher, even to the great Source of light. Where- ever moral and spiritual truth suggests itself to the mind, grows in that mind, passes from it to other minds, — there is revelation ; by whatever name it may be called, under whatever external forms of religion it may be conveyed, with what- ever establishments and institutions of priests or churches it may be associated, — revelation is there, and there should we thankfully acknow- ledge its existence. There is a state of mind to which it comes — not preternaturally — there is no conjuration in the case, there is no violation of law ; it comes 46 THE RELIGIOUS IDEAS *, in harmony with the great laws of matter, mind, spirit. When a man has meditated in solitude, or has discom'sed in society, — if he has become familiar with antique volumes, or has listened to living teachers, — whenever and wherever he has felt himself most at one with the scheme of things in which he exists ; when, his mind retiring from petty struggles and petty enjoyments, or seeking relief from its weight of sorrows, allowing the course of his thoughts to run freely, he has per- ceived, amid the great confus'ion of things, some moral truth, as it were beaming from above, — there has been God's revelation ; and let him lay it to his heart, and cherish it. There is something analogous to this in science. It was by no logical process, by no cal- culation, that the theory of the universe first arose in the mind of Newton ; at least, accord- ing to the story, the apple fell, and the thought sprung up, — how the power of gravitation might bind the planets into a system, and unite system with system, through all the regions of space. And thus it is that moral truth, in the minds of men disposed to be recipients of Heaven's bounty, has come to them in all countries, and in all ages, and will continue to come, while nature and man exist as they are now constituted. It is UEVELATION. true, thought works on these conceptions. It may supply some degree of external evidence, though it does not discover them ; but after all, such is not the basis on which they rest. It may endeavour to hew them into a shape more accordant with the acknowledged principles of the time and the country; but this will not af- fect the essence of the thought itself, the dis- covery of the moral truth, — what I call the re- velation. Bcntham laboured all his life in merely amplifying a sentence which he found in the writings of Dr. Priestley — " that the proper end of government is the greatest happiness of the greatest number," — a sentence probably written by that fluent author without himself having any distinct comprehension of the extent and grandeur of the meaning of that on which he thus conferred expression. Bcntham, the most logical of men, spent his life in amplifying and applying this truth ; but he never proved the as- sertion itself, — the basis of all his philosophy, the spirit and life of his whole system, that which to deny reduces all his juridical and social specula- tions to a mere hypothesis : he never did prove that — he never dreamt of proving it ; and per- haps he might be unaware through his whole life, that he was thus receiving a truth on the ground 48 THE RELIGIOUS IDEAS ; of its moral fitness and consonance with the best dictates of human nature, which had really no- thing of the logical demonstration and foundation that he was endeavouring to give to all his minor propositions. Such is the way we deal with things in this western world. The Orientals affect not the loo-ical forms as we do ; a thought darts into their minds, and they receive it as something from without — something (if it bear marks of truth and beauty) from above. Hence inspira- tion is to the Orientals what logic is to the western world; they ascribe their thoughts di- rectly to the great Source of thought. Keligions have generally originated with them, and bear the Oriental character. The East has been their cradle, though elsewhere they may have been cherished to maturity. But all that has been done for these elementary thoughts in morals and religion has been only to endeavour to systematise and arrange them, to give them logical forms which did not belong to them originally, and perhaps never can belong to them in the dawn where they were first produced. The revelations, then, which religions make, are only modifications, — modifications of these thoughts ; and I might have replied at once to REVELATION. 49 this question of " Where is revelation ?" by the words of William Penn, the Quaker, who, in his work entitled FruUs of a Father's Love^ thus gives his conception of true religion : *' That blessed principle, the eternal word, I began with to you ; and which is that light, spirit, grace, and truth I have exhorted you to, in all its holy appearances and manifestations in yourselves, by which all things were at first made, and men en- lightened to salvation. It is Pythagoras's great light and salt of ages ; Anaxagoras's divine mind; Socrates's good spirit ; Tima^us's unbegotten principle, the Author of all light ; Ilieron's God in man ; Plato's eternal, ineffable, and perfect principle of truth ; Zeno's maker and father of all ; and Plotin's root of the soul. These were some of those virtuous Gentiles commended by the Apostle, that though they had not the law given them as the Jews had — those instrumental helps and advantages — yet, doing by nature the things contained in the law, they became a law unto themselves." It is not in what is peculiar to them that religions are revealers, but in what is common to them with other religions. Generally, what they have as a peculiarity is something which will ill bear the test of time, as compared with £ 50 THE RELIGIOUS IDEAS ; " what is essential. For instance, the doctrine of a future life is common to religions : the Chris- tian apostles blended with it the resurrection of the body — a physical impossibility. Hindooisra also teaches a future life, and blends with it the transmigration of the soul — a great improbability. The Greek philosophers had some notion of a future life, and they blended with it the prc- existence of the soul — a very questionable addi- tion. But the hope itself, the anticipation, is common to them all. That is the revelation, the most important of the whole ; it is the source of consolation and of guidance ; it is what alone the soul can rest on, whilst all else, though pe- culiar, is disputable, and may pass away. Keligions have much in common, even of what we may deem their light and graceful orna- ment, as well as that which is essential to their substance. The circlet of glory that surrounds the head of Christ and of saints in our paintings, first shed its rays from the heads of the old gods of Greece. " The mother and child," so wor- shipped over the European continent, you will find in the zodiac of the Egyptians. Humanity trampling on the serpent is an emblem deriving the materials of its description, not only from the book of Genesis, but you may see it in the REVELATION. 51 pictorial illustrations of the Hindoo religion. And when " the cross" surmounts " the ball," and we behold the emblem of Christianity predomi- nant over a world, we only repeat a form which may yet be seen in the tombs within the IVra- mids, — the symbol of that aspiration which has ever stimulated the efforts of men after immor- tality, — a sign that the good king or hero had become a divinity. There is similar identity in what has most importance, in the truths which have the most relation to the mind and heart, the life and circumstances of humanity. Now, if this be really the state of things as to the different religions of the world, we no longer feel it a mystery that there should be characters the most eminent for piety, wisdom, beneficence, in all religions ; and we see the ar- rogance of the presumption that claims alone to know the path to heaven, and of a benevolence that is degraded by the principles with which it is conjoined ; that w^ould convert other na- tions ; that would call on all to tread in this path, and this alone ; which tells them that we have saving truth, and they have only damning error ; that our assertions must be admitted, or their souls cannot be saved ; and which calls upon them to pass condemnation on all their 5^ THE RELIGIOLS IDEAS ; ancestors — on all whom they have venerated — all whom they have loved, and to consider them all as one mass of corruption, destined to eternal hurning ; while, verily, we have the light — with us alone are its beams to be perceived, and from us alone must it go forth and irradiate the universe. It ill befits man, this sort of assumption — this claim of infallibility; it is quite certain this is no revelation from heaven ; it bears no mark of divinity as to its truth, its spirit, or its mode of operation. Revelation is not something out of law, or beyond law. It is not the petty wonder of a transformation of one substance into another that is really miraculous ; but the enduring works of nature, renewed every night and morn- ing, renewed every seed-time and harvest. Why stand amazed at a multitude fed with five loaves ? Nature feeds man with as little material from year to year ; her fields are enriched by Di- vine power, and nations eat and are satisfied. Throughout the world there are wonders ever adapted to excite our veneration, far more than all those contrivances, those fantastic wonders, that may for a time lay hold of our imagination, but while they *'play round the head," assuredly " come not near the heart." It is in the course REVELATION. 53 of those influences which belong alike to all beings that man finds himself the subject of re- vealing power ; that moral truth becomes clearer, brighter, lovelier, dearer to him ; and whether it be enshrined in the words of a text, whether it take the pictorial form or that of sculptured thought, whether it come to him in written book or l)v tradition, it is ever welcome, so louix as it bears these distinctive and exalted marks. And this I take to be the true spirit of reli- gion ; alike free from enthusiasm or scepticism ; treating respectfully the myths and legends that have associated themselves differently in different countries, but in all going to the heart and life of religion ; free from the fervour of proselyting zeal, shrinking back from the denunciations of spiritual pride, abhorring lines of demarcation and exclusion between different portions of God's rational beings ; turning from all these as things that can have no affinity wdth religion, any more than they have with genuine humanity ; looking within for the source of thought and truth, by deep meditation on our own nature, as harmonised with the nature of things around us, and in these *' seeing Him who is invisible," and perceiving not only his existence, but his power and loveliness, his majesty and glory. We thus imbibe a univer- 54} THE RELIGIOUS IDEAS. sality of spirit akin to that which we behold in the entire system of Providence ; — a universality of spirit like that of the ages, which in the long succession of their march demonstrate that hu- manity is moving onward, and still onward, in civilisation and knowledge, science and religion ; — a universality of spirit like to that which is manifested in human nature itself, in its diver- sity of races and religions, of climates and na- tions, all so varied, yet each with its peculiar type of goodness, power, and greatness, and all ministering to the common advancement and progress ; — a universality of spirit akin to that of the earth, whose rich soil bears the frailest and loveliest flowers, and yet the enduring oak, and dark and eternal forests ; which bears what- ever can minister to animals, or to human beings j fashioning itself, as it were, into one great altar, on which man may present his of- fering to the supreme and directing Power ; — a universality of spirit akin not only to the ages, to human nature, to the earth, but to the hea- vens themselves — the boundless heavens, with their comets and planets, their suns and stars and constellations. LECTURE IV. COD. The human ever believes in the Divine. The notion of Deity is as natural to man as that of humanity. Ileal atheism is an abnormal con- dition ; it is out of the rule of human life and human feelings. It was said by an old divine, that a nickname was the hardest stone the devil could throw at a man. The imputation of atheism is the hardest of those hard stones : it is a mere calumny in nine hundred and ninety- nine cases at least out of a thousand. Often it is rather in words than in reality that the im- putation has any basis ; and perhaps scarcely an instance can be found of an intellectual life, the whole of which bears the mark of atheism. It is a phase, a variation, an exception, holding such proportion in the lives of those who avow themselves to be atheists, as disease does to health in the ordinarv routine of human aflPairs. Many are not atheists who profess themselves to be so, and believe themselves to be so. " Queen 56 THE RELIGIOUS IDEAS ; Mab" is not an atheistical poem, whatever Shelley might think or profess. It recognises that per- vading spirit of love presiding over universal being which is only one phase of theism, — a pe- culiar phase, and certainly not amongst the least lovely. Exceptional cases prove nothing as to the human constitution ; and however it may have occurred, in times of dreadful suffering or violent confusion, or in times of great luxury and wide- spreading and deep depravity of manners, that numbers have made profession of atheism, it has still been but an exceptional case in the his- tory of nations, as it is in the history of individual life. That great logician and mathematician, Hobbes, would never believe that he had not accomplished the impossible problem of squaring the circle ; and yet we bring this forward as no proof that mathematical demonstration is not irresistible. Recently, horror has been excited by the profit made of those burial societies established in some parts of our own country, where it seems the parents have trafficked in the lives of their infant children ; and yet no one infers from this that the parental affection, the parental instinct, is not essential to the human constitution. To great and pervading princi- ples, instances like these offer little difficulty ; GOD. 57 and against such exceptions as these we have the otherwise universal voice of human nature. Civilisation and barbarism, science and iirno- ranee, despotism and freedom, manners the most refined and the most uncultivated, ages of prosperity and of calamity, the inhabitants of regions the most remote, from the frigid to the torrid zone, — through all its varying phases humanity proclaims " There is a God," and renders that God its homage. Revelation has been treated of as the first of those religious ideas to which these lectures re- late, and the illustration of which I have pro- posed to myself. But revelation, though the first noticeable phenomenon of the human mind, yet implies at least a latent idea ; revelation pre- supposes a revealer. This thought, this moral truth, which seems to beam and dart into man's mind as he is groping his way amongst the difl[i- culties of his nature or his condition; — this new thought, recognised at once as an emana- tion of truth and loveliness, — whence emanates it ? Whence came it ? It is a messenger ; and who sent it ? It is an agency ; and who is the author ? We cannot rest in such a notion as truth revealed to inquiring humanity, without the notion of a revealer. Different nations and 58 THE RELIGIOUS IDEAS ; different habits of thought may furnish dif- ferent phraseology for the same phenomena ; but this in-coming of truth upon the human mind is really and essentially the idea of revela- tion, however much it may have been coupled with the childish adjuncts of inspired books and oracles. When the impulse came to Gibbon, in the ruins of the Coliseum, amid mouldering walls and deepening shadows, — when it blended with his recollections of grandeur passed away, and of its contrast with that other strange form of grandeur which had taken its place, — no voice, indeed, from the clouds or from the earth said audibly to him, "Go and write the history of the Decline and Fall of the Eoman Empire, in sen- tences as gorgeous as the hues of that sunset by which it is typified;" but the impulse came, — came combinedly from without and from within ; it was the sort of occurrence w^hich, told in Oriental phraseology, would be, " The word of the Lord came to such a one, and said. Go thou, and do this great work." We have an unavoid- able tendency, when truth thus comes upon us, to look at it as one link in a chain — a revela- tion, connecting the recipient with the revealer ; and accordingly, there have been many times and countries in which Wisdom itself was dei- COD. 59 fied and worshipped. In the mythology of the Greeks, Minerva sprang full-armed from the head of Jove. In the book of Proverbs, Solo- mon has personified Wisdom as dwelling with the Eternal, as preceding all creation, and then, even then, rejoicing before its almighty Parent ; as laying the fomidations of the earth, and mea- suring the courses of the stars. And this, in the Gospel of John, is varied by " the Word," which, " in the beginning, was with God, and was God," and that came and tabernacled amongst men ; thus going as near as the genius of the Jewish and Christian systems admitted, to that which the Gentiles have done in their personi- fication and deification of Wisdom; and shewing, in both cases, the tendencv of the human mind to associate these thoughts together, and in the progress of truth to perceive an emanation from that great and eternal orb of truth to which they traced it back. In this way, the relation which man perceives in himself to wisdom, to nature, to some invisible suggestive power, — all make the revelation, the notion of revealed thought, essentially connected with that of a re- vealing power. Sometimes the mind may pause a while in intermediate agency, — " the friend, philosopher, and guide," — the angel, the spirit of Go THE RELIGIOUS IDEAS ; the departed, the local deity ; the earthly pro- phet, the heavenly Logos, or " Word ;" but these are only pauses. It never rests till it reposes in the thought of the ultimate and infinite Source of wisdom. That which is done by the relation which re- velation suggests, is also intimated by the other and varied relations of human nature with this same objective existence as to our faculties, with this same power as to phenomena around us and within us. We have been sometimes told, that " Fear first made gods." Whether it be true literally or not, the apprehensiveness of danger, the feeling of pain inflicted from without, must suggest the notion of such a power. There must be something which thunders, strikes, blasts, de- stroys. That realises itself to man's mind j and, according to the grossness or the loftiness of his nature, he bows the knee in sordid apprehen- sion, or in enlightened reverence. Gratitude, the result of another of our relations, has a similar effect. We cannot receive good without thinking of a bestower of good ; we cannot rest in the sense of bounties without some concep- tion of a donor. The mind craves after it. That would be almost a miserable life which was spent in the continual reception of boun- GOD. 61 ties from an unknown liand. Man would become restless and enfevered to find out the author. Gratitude demands expression, and enforces it. We must thank and bless somebody, or something', for the good of which we are the recipients. Thus gratitude, like fear, like the notion of revelation, still leads us to a God. The sense of beauty, the perception of power, the emotions that arc excited in us by the gran- deur and loveliness of natural objects, — these all, again, as they possess themselves of the mind, and aggrandise themselves there, and give us new intellectual, which arise into new moral, perceptions, — these, again, make us inquire after the *' first good, first perfect, and first fair." The conscience within us has a relative cha- racter. Conscience accuses, approves, judges ; but who does not feel, while before its tribunal, that conscience is but a delegated judge, — that this authority within us is but the type and symbol, is but the individual agency of a more pervading authority ? And as its voice is heard, whether in the loud thunder of reprobation, or in the gentle whisper of self- applause, still that voice also proclaims — proclaims in its every judgment — " Verily there is a God that judgeth in the earth." Thus the varied relations that exist 62 THE RELIGIOUS IDEAS ; between us and the something exterior or un- known to us, but which all, in their different ways, still point to an object — an object of vene- ration, of love, and of confidence — are all the means of rendering the conception or idea of God natural and general to the human mind. The progress of man has been commonly- traced, as to theology, through the three forms of the Fetish divinities of the savage, the Polytheism of more refined countries, and the Monotheism which has become the religion of European nations. And as to the expression of opinion, the forms of worship, and the con- dition of the great mass, — at least the surface of that condition, — there is truth in this grada- tion. It is what the historian of opinion must delineate, looking only to the apparent. But there is something more than this in human thought, even in its first, faint, struggling ef- forts. The Fetish of the savage — the first object which the Indian sees after he has been made a warrior, and gained a substantive exist- ence in the clan or tribe to which he belongs — which becomes a sacred symbol to him through life, and which he adores — does not this imply a previous thought, perception, idea, though la- tent ? The notion of the divine must precede GOD. 63 the notion of a d'winitij. Some recognition, therefore, of the universal principle, of pervad- ing presence and power, blends itself even with the Fetishism of the savage ; much more does it with the Polytheism of people more enlight- ened. The notion of God must precede the multiplication of divinities, of gods. We find the thoufxht of a divine nature amon^^st the earliest of all in the speculations of poets and philosophers. It holds its way contemporane- ously with all ; and were we to imagine a solitary world, — solitary human life in the world, — a conscious and reflective being living perfectly alone — no brethren, no animated inferiors — sweep all away besides himself, except uncon- scious matter, — and still that individual would have the idea of I'lfe^ and by it, in another state of thinnfs, he would recoonisc and idcntifv the Uvino: be'in": ; and thus does the notion of the divine naturally precede the individual recogni- tion of the particular divinity. God is before and above all gods. And although the different relations are intimatelv connected, either with the suggestion or with the growth and expansion of this thought, yet there is an abstraction of it that inevitably occurs, and occurs too at a very early period. AVe arrive at the notion of a re- 64 THE RELIGIOUS IDEAS ; vealer, a punisher and rewarder, a benefactor, a judge ; we thus strengthen our dawning notion of a God ; but we withdraw it from these — we regard it in itself. The conception of Infinity- is associated with it. It is something to be re- cognised apart from these relations, essential to us, but not essential to the Deity who has thus arisen upon our conceptions. The thought of God stands alone in the mind ; and in so doing it aifects all other thoughts and all external con- templations. It is like the sun in the heavens, other things become visible in its light. What a wonderful conception it is when man becomes aware of this entrance, as it were, of an inde- pendent and commanding thought into his own mind ! It is well described bv the old Hebrew simile, as "the coming of a king into the camp ;" all are conscious of the presence, and render their homage. Every thought assumes a new relation ; and as in the abstraction we have something in which every expansion of our own knowledge, every enrichment of our own thoughts, finds its appropriate object to invest with that aggrandisement and enrichment, so do we be- come more and more possessed with it, till the very action or operation of abstraction leads to that of universal identification ; and by looking GOD. (j5 at God alone, man learns to see God in every thing. It is the natural occurrence of these phases of the idea of Deity — of this succession of thoughts, emotions, or conceptions — which throws light on what to some has been a puzzling problem, namely, that of the anti(iuity of a pure and elevated Theism ; for nothing can be more in- consistent either with the philosopliy of the case, or with the facts of the case, than to assume that nations, even in the earliest periods, were at first, and naturally, all Polytheistic, and gra- dually advanced from that to ISIonotheism. Tiie one is at least as ancient as the other ; nay, it has been remarked, and often remarked with astonishment, by inquirers who have deeply pe- netrated into antiquity on that dark subject — the condition of primeval man — that we often find symptoms of a more distinct conception of divine grandeur and infinity than prevailed in later aaes. Mr. Ikdsham and other theo- loffians have endeavoured to account for this by supposing a primeval preternatural revela- tion, analogous to their views of the Jewish and Christian sacred books, that vanished from the earth, whelmed in the deluge, perhaps, and not a copy left for the scribe, or subsequently p 6G THE RELIGIOUS IDEAS ; for the printer. That early revelation is bet- ter looked for in the source of all revelations, in that with which all revelations must be identified to be genuine — the moral constitu- tion of human nature, the human mind and heart J for by the process to which I have just referred — the mental process of abstraction and identification — the idea of God, suggested by relations that may be called external, becomes an independent and self-expansive thought in the mind, and by it man attains at a very early period the notion of infinity, and of eternity, both associated with that of God. Then he has the impulse and inspiration of the grandest thoughts that can be poured forth. Who, with all the advantages of the Christian dis- pensation, and of modern times, — who surpasses, who approaches Plato in his conceptions of Deity — conceptions arising in the midst of an idola- trous people, and in an age which, theologically at least, was one of comparative darkness ? "What can be more sublime than the language of some of the Old Testament worship? — language ut- tered amongst a people whose hands were im- brued with the l)lood of their neiohl)ours, who had possessed themselves of their nciglibours' countries, — a tierce and warlike race, and seem- COD. Gy iiigly incapable of any high degree of mental action, or of the mental refinement and expan- siveness of other Orientals, even of the Per- sians, for instance, to sav nothin"- of the Grecian people. Yet there we find such descriptions as those famiUar ones in the Psalms and the Pro- phets : " The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament shevveth his handyvvork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge. There is no speech nor lani>ua