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MY STUDY 
 
 AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 B3 
 
 AUSTIN PHELPS, D.D. 
 
 PROFESSOR EMERITUS IN ANDOVER THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY 
 
 NEW YORK 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 1886 
 
Copyright, 1885, by 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS. 
 
 ELECTROTTPED AND PRINTED 
 
 BY RAND, AVERY, & COMPANY, 
 
 BOSTON, MASS. 
 
vxr V r\r.n n.~ 
 
 PEErAOE. 
 
 The discussions contaiDed in this volume are in 
 great part republished from various periodicals. They 
 have been so greatly enlarged, however, that nearly 
 one-half of the material is new. The large space 
 given to the subject of future retribution and kindred 
 themes, is the natural sequence of the revival of 
 public interest in them in recent years. Some rep- 
 etitions of thought will be observed, which could 
 scarcely have been avoided in essays of this kind 
 which do not profess to be a continuous treatise. 
 Such material has been eliminated wherever it could be 
 without damage to the argument in hand. The author 
 can give no better reason for this republication than 
 the request of many correspondents, strangers to him, 
 and the hope that the enlargement of the essa3^s may 
 render them more helpful to minds interested in the 
 class of subjects to which they belong. 
 
 iii 
 
COlfTElSrTS. 
 
 NUMBER PAGB 
 
 I. My Study (I.) 1 
 
 II. My Study (II.) 13 
 
 III. My Study (III.) 27 
 
 IV. Vibratory Progress in Religious Beliefs . . 31 
 V. Oscillations of Faith in Future Retribution, 42 
 
 VI. Retribution in its Biblical Atmosphere . . 53 
 
 VII. St. Paul on Retribution 69 
 
 VIII. Correctives of Popular Faith in Retribu- 
 tion (I.) 84 
 
 IX. Correctives of Popular Faith in Retribu- 
 tion (II.) 97 
 
 X. Retribution in the Light of Reason (I.) . . Ill 
 
 XI. Retribution in the Light of Reason (II.) . . 125 
 
 XII. Endless Sin under the Government of God . 138 
 
 XIII. The Hypothesis of a Second Probation . . . 154 
 
 XIV, Scholastic Theories of Inspiration 169 
 
 XV. The New-England Clergy and the Anti- 
 slavery Reform (I.) 179 
 
 XVI. The New-England Clergy and the Anti- 
 slavery Reform (II.) 194 
 
 XVII. Massachusetts and the Quakers 214 
 
 XVIII. Does the World move ? 232 
 
 V 
 
vi Contents, 
 
 NUMBER PAGE 
 
 XIX. Is THE Christian Life worth living? .... 245 
 XX. A Study of the Episcopal Church (I.) . . . 262 
 XXI. A Study of the Episcopal Church (II.) . . . 273 
 XXII. Prayer as a State of Christian Living . . . 288 
 XXIII. Why do I believe Christianity to be a Reve- 
 lation FROM God ? 309 
 
MT STUDY. 
 
My Study: and Other Essays. 
 
 I. 
 
 MY STUDY. 
 
 PAET I. 
 
 It has been my lot to live for tliirty j^ears on a 
 spot which has been the scene of a great, though 
 unwritten, history. At the time when Anclover 
 Seminary was founded, as is well known, the old 
 faith of New England was decadent. Its stanch 
 friends were few. But one of the old churches of 
 Boston was loyal to it. Even that one was of the 
 school which, in the church-history of Scotland, 
 is significantly titled " moderate." Its aged pastor 
 was not the man to lift up a fallen banner, and 
 lead a forlorn hope. A few godly men resolved 
 that there should be one school of biblical learn- 
 ing in New England where a coUegiately educated 
 and orthodox clergy could be trained for the de- 
 fense of the theology of the Pilgrims. 
 
 The "house I live in" was one of those built 
 for the professors of the new "divinity school." 
 
 1 
 
2 My Study: and Other Essays, 
 
 Its occupant, in his daily walk to his lecture-room, 
 leaped from stone to stone through the swamp of 
 a whortleberry lot in which Phillips Hall stood. 
 The driver of the daily stage to the metropolis 
 used to point out to his merry passengers the 
 hillock on which the hall was erected as " Brim- 
 stone Hill," in token of the fiery and nauseous 
 theology which he had been told was taught there. 
 The tradition is, that one of the passengers on a 
 wintry day responded by thrusting his hands out 
 of the window, as if to warm them at a blazing 
 fire. The sobriquet followed Dr. Griffin to the pas- 
 torate, to which he was soon called, of the Park- 
 street Church in Boston. "Brimstone Corner" 
 was the polite and fragrant cognomen which the 
 angle of Tremont and Park Streets bore in the 
 popular dialect of the time. 
 
 The late Charles Stoddard, Esq., of Boston, for 
 many years the senior deacon of the Old South 
 Church, has told me that he was more than once 
 crowded off the sidewalk by well-dressed enemies 
 of his faith while leading his mission school to 
 church on a Sunday morning. It was not the first 
 nor the last time that " fanatics " have found that 
 they had no rights which " gentlemen " were bound 
 to respect. A drayman in Tremont Street, who 
 had missed his way with a load of sulphur, was 
 once directed by a gentleman, of whom he made 
 inquiry at a crossing, to go and deliver his freight 
 at the house of a man by the name of Griffin 
 which he would find on the door-plate, for "he 
 
My Study. 3 
 
 was the chief dealer in the article in the city of 
 Boston." 
 
 So general and intense was the antipathy to the 
 ancient faith, that it swayed the learned profes- 
 sions, and gave tone to cultivated society. Young 
 men beginning the practice of law or medicine in 
 Boston found that they lost caste by attending an 
 Orthodox church. When Andover Seminary was 
 founded, it was doubtful whether a charter could 
 be obtained from the Legislature. The institution 
 was therefore attached as an annex to Phillips 
 Academy, which already had a charter. Ten years 
 later, when Amherst College was founded in the 
 interest of the same religious views with those 
 represented at Andover, the petition for a charter 
 was again and again refused. The same was true 
 when a charter was sought for the American Board 
 for Foreign Missions. 
 
 The bitterness of that controversy was no more 
 acrid than that which commonly attends the be- 
 ginnings of religious disruptions. But such were 
 the spirits in the air of Massachusetts when Dr. 
 Griffin was called to Andover. In the building of 
 his study he had a magnificent ideal of a worlcing- 
 room for a studious recluse. It filled the southern 
 wing of the house. The morning sun greeted its 
 eastern windows ; the noonday sun gave it good 
 cheer as he traveled southward; and the setting 
 sun flooded it with a golden glory, in which few 
 horizons equal that of Andover. The glow which 
 illumined it from sun to sun was a fit emblem of 
 
4 My Study: and Other Essays. 
 
 the light which was to go from it around the 
 world. 
 
 Dr. Griffin never occupied it. He was called 
 to the pulpit of the Park-street Church just as he 
 was about to take possession. Dr. Porter, his suc- 
 cessor, was a lifelong invalid. Meetings of the 
 faculty and others for conference were therefore 
 held in his study. Thus the spot became memo- 
 rable. The few leading minds who felt the gravity 
 of the crisis in the history of our churches felt, 
 also, the need of concentration of resources and 
 of mutual alliance. For this purpose they estab- 
 lished, in 1812, a weekly meeting for prayer and 
 consultation. Its chief object was to devise ways 
 and means of lifting the old faith of New England 
 from the obsolescence into which it was falling. 
 Then, as now, men called it "moribund." There 
 are things which thrive in dying. That meeting 
 was continued for many years, and was generally 
 held in Dr. Porter's study. I find evidence of but 
 one occasion on which it was held elsewhere. 
 
 During all that time that little conclave at An- 
 dover was the center of New-England Calvinism. 
 Its regular attendants were seven : Dr. Woods ; 
 Professor Stuart; Dr. Porter; Samuel Farrar, Esq., 
 who was then the treasurer of the seminary, and 
 one of the lay-theologians of the time ; Dr. John 
 Adams, father of the late Rev. WiUiam Adams, 
 D.D., of New York, and then principal of Phillips 
 Academy ; Dr. Justin Edwards, the youthful pastor 
 of the Old South Church in Andover ; and Mark 
 
My Study, 5 
 
 Newman, Esq., its senior deacon. To these should 
 be added, as occasional guests. Dr. Griffin of Bos- 
 ton ; Dr. Pierson of Andover ; Dr. Worcester of 
 Salem ,• Dr. Morse of Charlestown ; Dr. Spring of 
 Newburyport ; and, at a later period, Dr. Wisner 
 of the Old South Church in Boston ; and Jeremiah 
 Evarts, " the silent man," father of the present 
 Hon. William M. Evarts of New York. These 
 came, as occasion called them, to consult with the 
 wise men on " Brimstone Hill." 
 
 In that thoughtful and devout conference were 
 started the germs of great ideas. Here, as I write, 
 those grave and reverend men seem to sit around 
 me in grand council. I see their earnest faces. 
 I hear their awe-struck voices as they kneel in 
 prayer. I listen to their solid and growing thought 
 as they talk of fruitful schemes, and throw out 
 spontaneously the seed-thoughts of institutions 
 which are to take their place in God's plans for 
 building states and redeeming nations. 
 
 There sits Dr. Woods, slow and bland in speech, 
 wise in counsel, safe in act, and masterly in com- 
 promise. Here stands or walks about, peering at 
 the books, Professor Stuart, on whom, as he used 
 to say, " The doctorate would never stick." He is 
 quick in movement, original in plan, and intrepid 
 in execution. The same mercurial traits ajDpear 
 in his professional character which made him the 
 most agile athlete in Yale College fifteen years 
 before. His alert mind keeps his tall, gaunt body 
 in incessant motion. His head is never still. He 
 
6 My Study: and Other Essays. 
 
 rises to shut the door if it is open, and to open it 
 if it is shut, or to work off the overplus of nerve 
 by a needless thrust at the fire. He hurries on 
 the business lest he should not live to see it 
 matured. He is one of the chronic invalids who 
 live in daily lookout for death, and who disappoint 
 themselves by living as he did beyond the full 
 threescore and ten. 
 
 Dr. Porter presides, erect, vigilant, and urbane. 
 He is precise to a fault in the proprieties of time 
 and place. His hollow cough is premonitory of 
 the end yet twenty years away. Dr. Justin Ed- 
 wards, of tall, angular frame, which moves like an 
 ox, is silent till all the rest have had their say. 
 Then he sums up the gist of the matter in a few 
 terse words, which give the practical outcome of 
 the business in hand. His colleagues recognize in 
 his remarks the very wisdom they would have said 
 if they had thought to put it so. There are men 
 who are created to be chairmen of committees. 
 They are born executives. As such they are great 
 men. Other things they do — as they do. Dr. 
 Edwards was one of them. Had he been bred to 
 the bar, he would have found his way to the bench. 
 In ancient Athens he would have been one of the 
 Amphictyonic Council. 
 
 Great and good men invite caricature. The 
 world does not caricature imbeciles. I remember 
 seeing in my youth a rude woodcut representing 
 the three leading spirits of the Andover Seminary. 
 It portrayed their differences, if not reverently, 
 
My Study. 7 
 
 yet not untrutlifiilly. As I recall it, after forty 
 years, it pictured a huge, clumsy machine, such 
 as was then used for winnowing wheat. Dodtors 
 Porter and Woods and Professor Stuart are hard 
 at work with it, dressed in th-e professional robe 
 and bands. Dr. Woods is carefully, yet smilingly, 
 as if he entered into the joke of the thing, drop- 
 ping into the hopper pumpkins of goodly size, 
 which have a rude carving on them of human 
 faces. They remind one of the Jack-o'-lanterns 
 we used to carve with jack-knives in harvest time 
 when the pumpkin-fields were golden. Dr. Porter 
 is picking them up with stately bend as they roll 
 out from below in the form of little preachers, 
 also full dressed in canonical bands and robe ; and 
 lie daintily brushes off the dust with a whisk- 
 broom. Professor Stuart is working with might 
 and main, with the impetuous look of a man who 
 is putting his whole soul into it, turning the 
 crank, and bending almost double. To use his 
 own favorite phrase, he is '•Hotus in iUis." Dr. 
 Woods exclaims with anxious drawl, " Not-so-fast, 
 Broth-er Stu-art, not-so-fast ! " The professor 
 replies with a jerk, " Work away ! work away I " 
 Such were the pleasantries behind which conflict 
 was going on in dead earnest. 
 
 The caricatures of an age, like its coins, are 
 signs of its most truthful history. These men 
 could afford to be caricatured. We may be very 
 sure that they did not look glum over it. Grave 
 men they were, who took life intensely ; but they 
 
8 My Study: and Other Essays. 
 
 were not of tliat class of devotees who, in a parox- 
 ysm of remorse, resolve that they will never laugh 
 again. They were of too robust grain to be men 
 of disconsolate and despotic conscience. They 
 were believers in the inspiration of the Old Testa- 
 ment, and they took it literally that " fhere is a 
 time to laugh." They were men before they were 
 theologians ; and they had their comic side, like 
 other men. They suffered no paralysis of the ris- 
 ible muscles. Dr. Porter I never saw : he had 
 passed on before my time. But from what I know 
 of the other two, and of their associates in the 
 Andover Council, I can readily imagine that they 
 at some time relieved the gravity of their long 
 session by a canvass of the uncouth picture, and 
 a hearty laugh over the likenesses so truth-telling 
 of their leaders. 
 
 Since the foregoing paragraph was written, I 
 have been informed of an incident which confirms 
 it, and which discloses a new side to the character 
 of Dr. Woods. On one occasion he was seen 
 standing before a shop-window in Cornhill, exam- 
 ining this same caricature of himself and his col- 
 leagues. He was so intent ujDon it, that he did 
 not at first perceive the approach of Dr. Ware, — 
 his chief opponent in the controversy of the time, 
 — who came up behind him. Dr. Ware at length 
 tapped him on the shoulder, and said, " Good- 
 morning, Dr. Woods. I see that you have a new 
 machine at Andover, by which you manufacture 
 Orthodox ministers out of pumpkins." — " Ye-s," 
 
My Study, 9 
 
 said Dr. Woods, with his inimitable deliberation 
 of utterance, " ye-s : don't-you-want-to-come- 
 up-there, and-be-ground-over ? " The sequence 
 need not be told. Good-nature diluted the bitter- 
 ness of that honorable warfare on both sides. 
 
 Those ancient men builded better than they 
 knew, and some of them knew a great deal. Like 
 all religiously earnest men, they thought and 
 planned and acted for far-off coming time. Their 
 life was energized by their faith that this world 
 is to be converted to Jesus Christ. Their hands 
 were on the wheels of its destiny, and they knew 
 it. They felt the prophetic thrill of it in every 
 nerve. They had faith in themselves as men 
 chosen of God to apostolic service. There are 
 men in the service of the Church whom the Church 
 lifts: there are other men who lift the Church. 
 Those Andover pioneers were of the latter class. 
 They had a work of construction and of forecast 
 to do, and they did it with a will. 
 
 It is said that every great discovery is a pre- 
 sentiment in somebody's mind before it is a fact 
 in recorded science. That Andover company con- 
 tained minds of the premonitory order. They were 
 in profound sympathy with the biblical future of 
 this world. When the prophetic book was un- 
 sealed, they were ready with the ways and means 
 for executing its decrees. Had they been prophets, 
 and sons of prophets, they could not have entered 
 into the spirit of the opening age more cordially or 
 more intelligently. Their life's work was prophecy 
 
10 My Study: and Other Essays, 
 
 fulfilled. They worked as all great workers do, 
 in line with hidden providences and supernatural 
 forces. 
 
 It was in that conference in Dr. Porter's study, 
 that the project of American missions to the hea- 
 then first took the visible and tangible form which 
 gave rise to the American Board. Judson, Nott, 
 Newell, and Mills, the pioneer missionaries, were 
 in the seminary. Their petition to the General 
 Association of Massachusetts for support in their 
 resolve to preach the gospel to the heathen was 
 drawn up by the advice of the Andover brethren 
 in council, who sent two of their number to advo- 
 cate it before the fathers at Bradford. It is sig- 
 nificant of the wary enterprise which it was 
 thought necessary to practice in broaching the 
 subject, that the names of Rice and Richards, 
 which were at first appended to the memorial, 
 were struck off, lest the Association should be 
 alarmed by too large a number. 
 
 It is only in the beginnings of great movements 
 that a timid dijDlomacy sways action. When the 
 idea central to the movement gets possession of 
 the popular mind, it goes with a rush. In the 
 multitude of counselors all feel safe. Grooves of 
 destiny begin to appear, and safety insures speed. 
 Such was the early history of American missions. 
 The prophetic thought at Andover anticipated 
 what was coming. The group behind the hay- 
 stack at Williamstown had adjourned to Andover, 
 to find their plans matured, and purpose deepened, 
 
My Study. 11 
 
 by the inspiration which came from Dr. Porter's 
 study. 
 
 One feature of the movement is significant of 
 the moral pressure under which both the missiona- 
 ries and their advisers acted. Under the guidance 
 of their Andover counselors, the young mission- 
 aries did not leave their going to the heathen 
 dependent on the readiness of the Massachusetts 
 churches to send them. Their going was a foregone 
 conclusion. Go they must : it was fore-ordained. 
 If Massachusetts had not consecrated wealth 
 enough to send them, the Lord had. Could not 
 God raise up men after his own heart from the 
 very stones in the streets of Bradford? 
 
 What was the secret of the intense conviction 
 in the Andover conclave, that the gospel must be 
 preached to the darkened nations ? It was their 
 faith that this is a lost world. Without Christ it 
 is doomed. They saw in vision the long proces- 
 sion of heathen souls unsaved passing on into a 
 lost eternity. They were wakened to a great exi- 
 gency. It brooked no delay. No dream of hea- 
 then probation after death blurred the vividness 
 of their faith. Whatever may be true on that 
 subject, their faith was fixed. They were a unit 
 in it. So were the founders of the seminary and 
 the churches of Massachusetts. The whole splen- 
 did structure of American missions to the heathen, 
 with its magnificent history of achievement, had 
 its origin in a profound, undoubting, intense, and 
 unanimous belief that heathen probation began 
 and ended here. 
 
12 My Study: and Other Essays, 
 
 Was the Andover Creed silent about it? It 
 said as little of the Book of Mormon. Polygamy 
 could as normally be taught under its sanction as 
 the discovery of a second probation. They were 
 silent where they saw no reason to speak. They 
 were practical men. It is not the way with prac- 
 tical men to build cob houses of defense against 
 errors of which nobody has ever dreamed. Their 
 action said more than their polemic words. It 
 discloses where and how the wheels of their sys- 
 tem of beliefs interlocked. Their whole missionary 
 policy revolved around their faith in the restriction 
 of heathen probation to this one life in this one 
 world. Without that faith, that whole chapter in 
 the history of those times would have been a fable. 
 Those pioneer missionaries would have sought pas- 
 torates in the Green Mountains and among the 
 hills of Berkshire. Their advisers in the Andover 
 Conference would have rolled up the map of the 
 heathen world, and put it away for ever. 
 
 They were not so taught of God. Their intense 
 faith disclosed itself in a monumental work which 
 continues to this day. Had it been the whole life's 
 work of those seven men to bring into organized 
 being the ideal of American missions to the hea- 
 then, they would have lived in the history of the 
 millennium ; but that was not the whole. 
 
n. 
 
 MY STUDY. 
 PART n. 
 
 I HAVE told the story of the way in which my 
 study became memorable in the history of the 
 Massachusetts churches, and of its tribute to the 
 organization of American missions to the heathen. 
 Other institutions followed in natural sequence. 
 
 Here was originated the American Monthly Con- 
 cert of Prayer for the conversion of the world. 
 Something similar to it in Scotland had caught the 
 eye of the Andover watchmen in their lookout for 
 new ideas. It was talked over and prayed over in 
 this place. Grave doubts were expressed. Would 
 the churches feel interest enough in the heathen 
 to meet and pray for them once a month? The 
 resolve to send four missionaries abroad was re- 
 garded by many as a doubtful movement. Dr. 
 Dwight, president of Yale College, thought it un- 
 wise. So grave had the responsibility seemed, to 
 those who must bear it, that one who was present 
 when the memorial of the young missionaries was 
 read, says, " We all held our breath." At the first 
 meeting of the American Board at Farmington, 
 
 13 
 
14 My Study: and Other Essays, 
 
 a private parlor held all who were in attendance. 
 They were just six persons. The prospect was 
 not cheering to men of little faith. 
 
 What to do at a monthly concert to give it a 
 distinctive character was an open question. One 
 pastor of those times, in relating his pastoral remi- 
 niscences, said, " At our first monthly concert we 
 could think of nothing to do but to read the clos- 
 ing proj)hecies of Isaiah." Even the missionary 
 hymn was not then known to the American 
 churches. Would the missions achieve success 
 enough to sustain such a concert ? If they failed, 
 what would be the effect of the re-action ? The 
 heathen were a great way off. The experiment 
 was a novelty. It had no history of success to 
 reason from. Would it not be wise to wait until 
 it had ? 
 
 The wise men of Andover saw the two sides of 
 things. But they were not of dilatory habit when 
 the balance was once struck. They had committed 
 themselves at Bradford to the project of missions 
 to the heathen, and now the way to create a his- 
 tory of success was to back them up by concerted 
 prayer. Any thing must succeed which was sup- 
 ported by supernatural auxiliaries. So they rea- 
 soned. A circular was sent forth to the churches, 
 and the monthly concert found an unexpected 
 welcome. 
 
 Where else in the wide world did so grand and 
 far-reaching an institution ever spring from a be- 
 ginning so diminutive ? Seven men, unknown to 
 
My Study. 15 
 
 fame, meet for a plain talk in a private house in a 
 country-town of Massachusetts, and their plain 
 talk soon weaves an electric network of concerted 
 prayer around the globe. Response comes from 
 the islands of Pacific seas, and rejoinder from 
 Constantinople and " flowery Ispahan." 
 
 The monthly concert was followed by the an- 
 nual Concert of Prayer for Colleges. This also was 
 one of the creative ideas which went forth from 
 Dr. Porter's study. When we recall the religious 
 awakenings in our colleges which have so often fol- 
 lowed that anniversary, beginning at the very hour 
 of its observance, we can not but revere the inspi- 
 ration which put that thought into the minds of 
 the men who gathered in this place to inquire of 
 God. That idea of the combination of the forces 
 of prayer for world-wide objects became from that 
 time fixed in the spiritual policy of our churches. 
 Then we first discovered what reduplicated power 
 concert gives to religious enterprise. Concert in 
 prayer reproduced itself in concerted action. It 
 was enough to crown any man's life's work to 
 initiate that conception as an executive factor in 
 Christian history. It is the most significant illus- 
 tration on record of the spiritual unity of the 
 Church, and of its command of invisible resources. 
 
 In 1813 one of that vigilant band met with a 
 little book which interested him by its compression 
 of large materials into little space and portable 
 form. The thought struck him, that religious lit- 
 erature may be made cheaper in cost, and cir- 
 
16 My Study: and Other Essays. 
 
 culated widely. He laid the matter before the 
 Andover fraternity, and soon it grew into work- 
 ing-shape in the New-England Tract Society. 
 Andover was the seat of its operations till 1825, 
 when it became the American Tract Society at New 
 York. 
 
 A little incident has come to my knowledge 
 which illustrates the range of forethought, from 
 great to small, and from small to great, which char- 
 acterized the enterprise of those men. Professor 
 Stuart was then just at the outset of his splendid 
 career as the Father of Biblical Literature in 
 America. He was absorbed in the construction of 
 Hebrew grammars and the conquest of German 
 learning. He was teaching his own printers to 
 set up Hebrew types. Yet he found time to super- 
 vise the first edition of American tracts, and he 
 writes to the binder to be sure and make the cov- 
 ers attractive to the reader. He believed with 
 George Herbert, that nothing is small in God's ser- 
 vice ; and. so said they all. 
 
 Dr. Porter was the son of the Hon. Judge Por- 
 ter of Tinmouth, Vt. On one of his visits to his 
 father, he heard of a little local society for the 
 aid of young men in their education for the min- 
 istry. He called to it the attention of the next 
 conference at Andover. There, as usual, the idea 
 from the Green INIountains expanded into that of 
 a national organization. A meeting was called in 
 Boston, at which four of the Andover professors 
 were appointed to draught a constitution, under 
 
My Study, 17 
 
 which substantially the American Education Society 
 has been in operation seventy years. It has aided 
 in their training for the pulpit more than seven 
 thousand men, most of whom could not otherwise 
 have given to the Church the service of educated 
 mind. INIore than one-half of the ordained mis- 
 sionaries of the American Board have been of their 
 number, as well as many pastors of metropolitan 
 churches, and many presidents and professors of 
 our schools of learning. 
 
 We often laud and magnify the religious news- 
 papers of our land. They rival the pulpit in moral 
 power. The first weekly religious newspaper in 
 the world was originated in the Andover conclave. 
 The way in which it came about gives us a 
 glimpse of the simple and natural processes by 
 which great things were done there. Such things 
 are not done by such men with blast of bugle, and 
 beat of drum. On one evening the desecration of 
 the Lord's Day comes up for discussion. A German 
 conclave on the same topic would have appointed 
 a committee to go home, and consider and inquire 
 and investigate and collate and report on the na- 
 ture of the Christian sabbath, and what constitutes 
 its desecration. One of the Andover brethren, 
 with quick Saxon sense, asks, " What can be done 
 about it ? " Another replies, " Let us prepare 
 short, pithy articles on the subject, and print them 
 in the newspapers." A third responds, "Not a 
 newspaper in the land would publish them." Then 
 comes the upshot of the whole business, "It is 
 
18 My Study : and Other Essays. 
 
 high time that we had a newspaper that will." 
 Here was " The Boston Kecorder " in embryo ; the 
 original of " The Congregationalist," and the pio- 
 neer of all kindred publications in the world. 
 Said Dr. Morse, in writing to Mr. Farrar soon 
 after, " We depend on you at Andover to ripen 
 the plan. We are ready to unite in carrying it 
 into execution." 
 
 It was the mission of that group at Andover to 
 "ripen plans" of great things with small begin- 
 nings. Theirs were inventive and constructive 
 minds. They illustrated the fact, of wliich Mr. 
 Froude has made emphatic mention, that hard- 
 headed Calvinist thinkers are long-headed, practi- 
 cal workers. In their thinking, they exalted God : 
 in their working, God honored them. They illus- 
 trated also the fact, so often observed in unwritten 
 history, that earnest men, by simply walking in 
 the way of duty, and doing that which most 
 imperatively needs to be done, will inevitably do 
 great things. They can not help it. The plain 
 way of duty is the highway of greatness. The 
 word " ought " is kindred to every great thing in 
 the universe. 
 
 They have a custom, in the villages on the 
 Rhine, of anchoring a grist-mill in the middle of 
 the river, where the current is strongest, and 
 making the rapids grind the food of the whole 
 community. The river is a docile laborer. "It 
 asks for no wages," threatens no strikes, and never 
 quits work for a carouse. It puts into the mill a 
 
My Study, 19 
 
 power independent of drawbacks, and which has 
 no caprices. So let any man plant himself in the 
 midstream of God's plans, and take manful grip 
 at the thing that first comes to hand, working 
 with a will at it, and the current of eternal decree 
 will impart its own momentum to his work, so that 
 it will grow into grand achievement. The law of 
 spiritual gravitation works in line with such men. 
 Every such man stands in the thick of godlike 
 opportunity. So was it with the simple-minded 
 yet eager men of the Andover brotherhood. They 
 seized the thought which came from God to them 
 through the exigency of the time, and did their 
 duty about it like men ; and great things came of it. 
 It was not the scintillation of meteoric genius : it 
 was the gravitation of consecrated common sense. 
 It was more than the founding of an empire to 
 pioneer into the world the weekly religious press. 
 In a similar manner the American Home Mission- 
 ary Society came to its birth on this spot. The 
 need of pastors for feeble churches was imperative. 
 Pioneer preachers for the founding of churches in 
 the waste places of the West were wanted. It 
 was the ambition of the men at Andover to send 
 an educated ministry westward as fast as emigra- 
 tion could blaze trees for roadways through the 
 wilderness. But how should the churches in 
 regions where commerce was carried on by barter, 
 support pastors who had nothing that was worth 
 barter? It was a grave question. But to the 
 inventive enterprise of the Andover circle, to ask 
 
20 My Study : and Other Assays. 
 
 it was to aiisAver it. It was not their way to 
 moon over difficulties. 
 
 There had been for a considerable time local 
 societies, scattered here and there, limited by State 
 and county lines, for the aid of feeble churches. 
 In a single evening the deliberations at Andover 
 matured a plan for making those isolated associa- 
 tions auxiliary to a national institution which 
 should lift the work up into national importance. 
 The American Home Missionary Society was the 
 result of that evening's session. At this date it 
 has assisted nearly five thousand churches. Most 
 of these have been in localities which could not 
 otherwise have received the ministrations of the 
 gospel in season to give character to the great 
 States of the North- West. Many of them were 
 planted at strategic points at which the dominant 
 moral power ruled the infancy of those States. 
 Here, again, great effects from little causes are 
 illustrated in the history of that fragment of the 
 olden time which we are reviewing. 
 
 No more magnificent illustration of the same 
 thing can be found than that furnished by the his- 
 tory of the temperance reform. It is not generally 
 known that all the organizations now existing 
 for the promotion of abstinence from intoxicating 
 liquors OAve their origin ultimately to the Andover 
 Conference. 
 
 Things happened in this wise ; in- 1814 Dr. Ed- 
 wards formed in his congregation a society called 
 "The Andover South Parish Society for doing 
 
My Study, 21 
 
 good." The homeliness of its title suggests the 
 simplicity of its aim. One object named in its 
 constitution was "to promote temperance." His 
 afterthought was, that that method of " doing 
 good " was capable of expansion. He brought it 
 to the notice of his colleagues in Dr. Porter's 
 study. The result was the formation of a society 
 entitled " An Association of Heads of Families for 
 the Promotion of Temperance." The first seven 
 names signed to its pledge of total abstinence 
 were those of members of the little fraternity 
 whose life's work is here recorded. TJiat ivas the 
 first organized movement in the ivo7'ld founded on the 
 pledge of entire abstinence from intoxicating drinks. 
 The same consultations led circuitously to the 
 founding of the American Temperance Society. 
 For several years the Andover brotherhood num- 
 bered among its members Rev. Dr. Hewitt, whose 
 career as the " apostle of temperance " has been 
 equaled by no one but that of John B. Gough. 
 His eloquence is remembered to this day, by those 
 who heard it, as something wonderful in the his- 
 tory of public debate. 
 
 Few things illustrate so signally the progressive 
 ideas of those far-seeing men as these pioneer 
 efforts for a revolution in the drinking-customs 
 of the world. The earlier associations for the pur- 
 pose, besides being limited in locality, all touched 
 only the surface of the evil which they attempted 
 to remove. They were all founded on the princi- 
 ple of temperance^ not only as distinct from, but 
 
22 My Study: and Other Essays. 
 
 as opposed to, abstinence. The moderate use of 
 intoxicants they encouraged. This was universal 
 in the drinking-usages of society. Its effect had 
 become alarming in its prognostications of the 
 future. An aged clergyman, who had been in 
 his prime at that period, once remarked in my 
 hearing, " It was a wonder that we did not become 
 a generation of drunkards." Intoxication among 
 gentlemen of culture and refinement was too fre- 
 quent to excite surprise, or to provoke censure. 
 Everybody was expected to make the slip some- 
 times. Lawyers came to the bar, and judges to the 
 bench, and ministers to the pulpit, occasionally in 
 a state of inebriation. Young preachers at their 
 ordination were sometimes charged not to allow 
 themselves to be intoxicated by the hospitality of 
 their parishioners. 
 
 The late Rev. Dr. Hill of Virginia once related 
 his experience in his first pastorate substantially 
 as follows ; viz., he rode in the saddle through 
 the outlying districts of his parish, to make his 
 first acquaintance with his people. At every 
 farmhouse the decanter and the wineglass were 
 forthcoming. The good people knew no better 
 way of entertaining their pastor than to make him 
 drunk. He perceived as the afternoon wore on, 
 that he found it difficult to mount his horse. He 
 saw both sides of him at once. He at length said 
 to himself, " John " (if I have his baptismal name 
 correctly), " this will never do: you'll be a drunk- 
 ard before you know it." That advance into an 
 
Mij Study. 23 
 
 inebriate ministry was cut short, and a good man 
 saved. 
 
 Such was the peril everywhere attendant on a 
 young preacher's career. The popular theory was, 
 that to abstain wholly from spirituous liquors was 
 cowardice ; to remove the decanters from the side- 
 board was parsimony ; and to pledge one's self or 
 others to total abstinence was a sin against the 
 example of our Lord. 
 
 Even so late as 1844 the clerp^v of Scotland 
 were not emancipated from the old regime^ if in- 
 deed they are now. When the reverend deputa- 
 tion from the '' Free Church " came to this country 
 to solicit aid, their countrymen in Boston regaled 
 them with the national punch-bowl. Rev. Dr. 
 Cunningham, in rehearsing afterwards his impres- 
 sions of New England, said in substance, "Your 
 free churches are a surprise to me, your frame- 
 houses are a novelty, and your ivliishy is execrable.'''' 
 
 Nobod}^ thought of disturbing the time-honored 
 custom of moderate drinking, associated as it was 
 with the marriages and funerals and public festivi- 
 ties and private rejoicings of many generations, 
 till that little company of " fanatics " appeared at 
 Andover. The pledge of one clerical association 
 in Massachusetts whose members w^ere frightened 
 at the increase of drunkenness among themselves, 
 ran thus : " We solemnly pledge ourselves not to 
 use more of intoxicating beverages than we con- 
 scientiously believe to be good for us ! " Could 
 the " National Association of Brewers," in their 
 
24 My Study : and Other Essays. 
 
 late crusade against prohibitoiy legislation, ask for 
 a more satisfactory pledge than that ? Look into 
 the pamphlets and magazines and sermons of those 
 days, and you will find that the Lord's Supper and 
 the marriage at Cana were used as an absolute 
 embargo on all efforts to discourage the moderate 
 use of rum. It is more than a twice-told tale, that 
 New-England rum and New-England missionaries 
 went abroad in the same brig, and nobody saw the 
 farce of it. 
 
 The temperance societies at Andover, and after 
 them the national society at New York, were 
 formed upon the idea of keeping temperate people 
 temperate by entire abstinence. Of this idea a 
 European writer, quoted by the late Rev. Dr. 
 Jackson of the Massachusetts Board of Educa- 
 tion, — to whose researches I am indebted for 
 many of tlie facts here narrated, — writes, " On 
 whose mind this great truth first rose is not 
 known. Whoever he was, peace to his memory ! 
 He has done more for the world than he who en- 
 riched it by the discovery of a new continent." 
 
 The fact undoubtedly is, that that radical re- 
 formatory idea was originated by some one of the 
 pioneer reformers at Andover. Certain it is, that 
 they first gave to it a practical development in a 
 great organization of world-wide influence. 
 
 As a whole, those septemviri were a rare group 
 of men, fitted into a rare juncture of opportuni- 
 ties in the history of the times. Most of them 
 were not extraordinary men, except as the crisis 
 
My Study. 25 
 
 they were called to meet, and the duties they set 
 their hands to, made them such. They belonged 
 to that class of men whose fidelity to duty in 
 emergencies lifts them above the level of their 
 own ambitions, and surprises the world by their 
 unlooked-for achievement. The very magnitude 
 of the ideas which the work of the hour pressed 
 upon them weighted them with such a sense of 
 responsibility, that they could not help living in- 
 tensely, and working out grand results. They had 
 inherited the old notion of the Pilgrims, of living 
 and working for the whole world, and for all 
 coming timcvS. They lived in sight of all future 
 generations. The glory of a " latter day " gilded 
 their horizon. 
 
 Such is the early history of my study. Such 
 are the inspirations which float in the atmosphere 
 around me. In a certain corner near my table, 
 to which my eye turns with reverent sympathy, 
 Dr. Porter, just as he was giving a farewell kiss 
 to his adopted son, breathed his last. His associ- 
 ates in those hallowed gatherings have since then 
 all gone to their rest. Their works do follow 
 them. A great cloud of witnesses come in at my 
 windows to tell me what Andover icas in the olden 
 time. I am reminded of. what Wordsworth says 
 of som.e of England's historic names, of men " who 
 called Milton friend : " — 
 
 " Great men have been among us ; hands that penned, 
 And tongues that uttered va^doaij betttr uoud." 
 
26 My Study : and Other Essays. 
 
 Another generation and still another have taken 
 their places, to testify what Anclover is. The re- 
 sults of the comparison can be known only in that 
 day when the "fire shall try every man's work, 
 of what sort it is." 
 
in. 
 
 MY STUDY. 
 PART ni. 
 
 Since the foregoing narratives were published 
 in " The Congregationalist," the accuracy of their 
 statements has been questioned in two particulars. 
 One is that of the origin of the first religious news- 
 paper. I find, on investigation of all the facts at 
 my command, that the question is more com- 
 plicated than I supposed. Three or four '' Rich- 
 monds are in the field." The decision turns on 
 three inquiries ; viz., What is a religious netvs- 
 paper, properly so called? when was the first 
 weeMy religious newspaper founded? and when 
 did the first weekly religious newspaper begin, 
 which lived., and has made for itself a history ? 
 
 Now, it is true that the art of printing existed 
 before the Andover conclave ; it is true that a reli- 
 gious periodical, founded partially for the purposes 
 of our present religious newspapers, and issued 
 fortnightly, preceded " The Boston Recorder ; " 
 and it is true that another attempt to create such 
 a paper preceded the Andover movement, and its 
 result was short-lived. But I am satisfied, after 
 
 37 
 
28 My Study : and Other Essays. 
 
 reading, as I believe, all that can be said on the 
 three or four sides of the question, that the Ando- 
 ver men believed that their movement was entirely 
 original. They did not consciously follow in the 
 track of any predecessor. It is nearly, if not quite, 
 as certain that, understanding by the term " news- 
 paper " the thoroughly equipped and broadly aimed 
 organ which we now mean by it, " The Boston 
 Recorder " was the first weekly periodical of the 
 kind which lived to create for itself a history. It 
 was the first, not only in this country, but, so far 
 as I know, in the world. Thus stands the matter 
 at present. The details of the evidence would 
 hardly interest the public. 
 
 The other particular is the origin of the idea of 
 making abstinence, and not temperate drinking, the 
 i3asis of organized effort for the promotion of tem- 
 j^erance. Here, again, I find ample evidence that 
 the Andover men believed themselves to be the ori- 
 ginal pioneers in that direction. They were con- 
 scious of no indebtedness to anybody for the idea. 
 Yet to us at this day the idea is so patent and so 
 necessary that we can readily believe that it may 
 have occurred to scores of other minds, and may 
 have been given to the public in speeches and ser- 
 mons on the alarming increase of intemperance. 
 Our wonder is, that any other idea should have 
 been dominant among tlie friends of temperance. 
 But I can find no evidence whatever that any 
 organization founded on the pledge of total absti- 
 nence preceded the two mentioned in my narrative, 
 
My Study. 29 
 
 as created at Andover. The probability is, that 
 the idea was original with Dr. Edwards, and that 
 his associates co-operated with him in forming the 
 local societies referred to. It is certain, also, that 
 the consultations here led to consultations else- 
 where, out of which all the efficient tem-perance 
 societies in the land grew. 
 
 All such questions of priority, in originating 
 great movements for the growth of civilization, 
 involve the same principles which are involved in 
 the claim of Columbus to the discovery of Amer- 
 ica. Probably more than one sophomore in college 
 has believed that he has made a great discovery in 
 the fact that Columbus did not discover the New 
 World, and that the Northmen did. But history 
 has again and again pricked such bubbles by rec- 
 ognizing two things. One is, that a great idea 
 usually is original to more than one discoverer. 
 Great ideas come when the world needs them. 
 They surround the world's ignorance, and press 
 for admission. They succeed in making an aper- 
 ture for themselves through many minds to which 
 they are original, perhaps as much so to one as to 
 another. It has become a truism, therefore, that 
 great discoveries must be contested as to priority 
 in time. 
 
 The other principle is, that the honor of the dis- 
 covery is due to him who first puts the novel idea 
 for which the world is waiting into such worldng- 
 form as to make it practically valuable to man- 
 kind. The inventions of the mariner's compass 
 
so My Study : and Other Essays. 
 
 and of movable types are not properly credited to 
 the Chinese inventors who first gave them being, 
 and then dropped them into the conservative 
 abyss. They are to be credited to the European 
 minds which first made them factors in the world's 
 civilization. So the discovery of America is not 
 due to the Northmen who first made it, but did 
 nothing with it but to gape at it. It is due to 
 Columbus, who first used it to bring the old and 
 new worlds together, and to open savage wilds to 
 the crowded populations of other continents. 
 
 On the same principles, and by the same tests, 
 the men of the Andover Conference are entitled 
 justly to all that has been claimed for them. The 
 vital points in the claim are two : first, that they 
 were consciously original in the great ideas which 
 they conceived ; secondly, that they were the prac- 
 tical pioneers who first put those ideas to use in 
 institutions which have lived to create a history. 
 
rv. 
 
 VIBRATORY PROGRESS IN RELIGIOUS BELIEFS. 
 
 The world's advances in great ideas commonly 
 imitate the movement of a pendulum. Conquest 
 of a great principle is rarely made and held fast 
 in its healthy and balanced mean till the human 
 mind has swung forth and back between its cor- 
 relative extremes. Often successive vibrations 
 occur before the popular faith gravitates to the 
 exact truth and rests there. Indeed, exact truth, 
 rounded with astronomical precision, without an 
 excrescence or a bulge anywhere, is never realized 
 in popular thought on a subject vital to the world's 
 progress. Approximations to the perfect crystal 
 globe are all that our mental laboratory achieves. 
 
 This vibratory phenomenon has been amply 
 illustrated in the history of religious beliefs. For 
 instance, to our logic, the unity of God seems 
 inevitable. But the world did not make assured 
 conquest of it till after the popular reason had 
 swung loose and often between faith in gods innu- 
 merable, and faith in no God at all. Hebrew faith, 
 even with the aid of divine illumination and an- 
 gelic auxiliaries and miraculous theophanies, did 
 not rest in monotheism, till, after many oscilla- 
 
 31 
 
32 My Study : and Other Essays. 
 
 tions, it had been forced back from the ethnic 
 mythologies by servitude under pagan despotism. 
 Till then, its history is a succession of lapses and 
 reforms and relapses and recoveries. It covers 
 centuries with wrecks of faith and retributive 
 catastrophes. 
 
 The spiritual idea of Christ came to its maturity 
 in a similar way. It did not get possession, even 
 of the chosen twelve, until the crucifixion before 
 their very eyes wrenched out of them the notion 
 of an Oriental monarchy and a golden age. Mas- 
 ters in Israel were ignorant of the first principles 
 of a spiritual kingdom. They sought in the 
 tAvilight to solve the doubts in which their minds 
 swung back and forth, between the letter and the 
 spirit of prophecy. It should seem that men are 
 not competent to become the pioneers of a great 
 spiritual idea, till they have themselves in some 
 sort lived through the opposite error. We know 
 nothing but our experience. 
 
 Turning to the practical working of Christi- 
 anity, we observe there the same phenomenon of 
 oscillatory progress. Is salvation by the heart's 
 faith, or by the vigil and the scourge ? The way 
 to heaven hung suspended for ages, like Mahom- 
 et's bridge in mid-air, between the antipodes of 
 faith and works. The history of those centuries 
 of twilight discloses a surging sea of mingled 
 doubt and superstition, on which honest inquiry 
 was " driven by the winds and tossed." Compara- 
 tively fevv^ found anchorage in the truth. They 
 
Vibratory Progress in Religious Beliefs. 83 
 
 were driven to its discovery by the monstrosities 
 which burrowed in the monasteries of Europe, and 
 flaunted their vileness in open day at Rome. John 
 of Goch, John of Wesel, John Wessel, John Huss, 
 John Wickliife, — five of the saintly name, — rep- 
 resent a goodly succession of men, who, together 
 with fraternities of believers like " The Brethren 
 of the Common Lot," were impelled into a truer 
 faith and a purer life by the putrescence of false 
 and unclean things around them. But half a cen- 
 tury must elapse after the latest of the five before 
 Luther could command the world's hearing. 
 
 Suppose that the demoralization of the age had 
 been but half so stupendous as it was. What 
 would have been the sequel ? No Luther and no 
 reform. Half-grown evils do not compel revolu- 
 tions. They create, not Luthers, but such men as 
 Erasmus. His principle respecting the degeneracy 
 of the times was, " Evils which men can not remedy 
 they must look at through their fingers." 
 
 ^To compel the growth of thoroughbred reform- 
 ers, error must have time to come to a head. It 
 must ulcerate. In the divine economy, the detec- 
 tive feature is never suspended. Evil must declare 
 itself by acting out its character to the full before 
 it dies. Hence came the revolting extreme of 
 Tetzel's mission to Germany, so insolent to the 
 common sense, and so offensive to the indignant 
 conscience of men. A Christian missionary must 
 become a "spiritual hawker," as Froude calls him, 
 whose business was to sell '^ passports to the east- 
 
84 My Study : and Other Essays. 
 
 est places in purgatory." That created the new 
 faith by enforced re-action. Without such detec- 
 tion of wrong at its worst, Luther would not have 
 risen to his full stature, and stood erect, a free 
 man, when half-way down the steps of Pilate's 
 staircase. He would have toiled on cringing 
 knees to the bottom. He would have earned his 
 thousand j^ears of release from purgatory, and 
 gone back to his cell at Erfurt, a shaven monk, to 
 tell his beads, and patter Latin prayers to the end 
 of his days. 
 
 In some things the extreme begat an extreme. 
 Luther and his compeers swung loose from some 
 truths. An iconoclastic faith is rarely an eclectic 
 and well-balanced faith. The destructive force is 
 not commonly the rebuilding force. In the vision 
 of St. John, the angels who were commissioned 
 to devastate sea and land did that and nothing 
 else. They bore in their hands nothing but the 
 golden vials of the wrath of God. Moral revolu- 
 tions tend to the same insulation of service. The 
 men who pull down are not the men who build 
 up, and with the evil some good is left in ruins. 
 So it was with the work of the reformers: the 
 destructive force was in the ascendant. 
 
 Perhaps the most splendid illustration of the 
 vibratory principle in modern Christian history is 
 the recoil from monastic seclusion to the daring 
 activity of Christian missions. It is doubtful 
 whether this self-diffusive type of Christianity 
 could have come into being when it did, but for 
 
Vihrato7y Progress in Religious Beliefs. 85 
 
 the self-centered type which preceded it. The 
 theory of the world's conversion is intrinsically one 
 of the most startling of historic ideas. It is no 
 wonder, that when Alexander Duff first broached 
 the project of missions to India, before the rever- 
 end Assembly of the Kirk of Scotland, he was re- 
 ceived by good and able men, even men of large 
 foreseeing vision, with a pause of incredulous 
 silence. It is no wonder, that, when a few humble 
 students of theology from the hills of Berkshire 
 begged of the General Association of Massachu- 
 setts to send them on a mission somewhere to the 
 heathen, the wisest men present shook their heads 
 in doubt whether the public sentiment of the 
 churches would bear so novel and hopeless an ad- 
 venture. No wonder is it, that the classic mind 
 of Edward Everett derided the enterprise in 
 strains of silver eloquence. 
 
 It ivas a wild idea. Is it not to this day the 
 most original idea in history ? Some secret power 
 must have projected it into human thought. What 
 was that power ? It was the Spirit of God, using 
 to his own purposes the inevitable recoil of regen- 
 erate mind from the extreme of monastic individu- 
 alism. The nature of things forbade that immense 
 bodies of men, inspired by the power of an end- 
 less life, should either stagnate or ferment in the 
 faith of the cloister for ever. 
 
 Relics of that faith filled Protestant Christendom 
 in the form of an intense selfhood in religious life. 
 The theory of salvation appeared to be, ^'Everv 
 
36 My Study: and Other Essays. 
 
 man for himself." The electric elements of Chris- 
 tian theology had no outlet in any large-hearted, 
 Christ-like action proportioned to their expansive 
 power. They were pent np in the cells of indi- 
 vidual being. They were like a spiral spring 
 coiled up and riveted. Believers were still breath- 
 ing a cloistral atmosphere. They were hermits in 
 their religious tastes. The chief business of their 
 religion was self-examination. That duty was 
 more frequently than any other one inculcated by 
 the pulpit. Christians lived with finger ever on 
 the spiritual pulse. Men and women of unusual 
 devoutness, who now would be district mission- 
 aries, then wrote diaries of their fluctuating 
 moods. They wrote marvelous stories of their 
 conflicts with the Devil. Meetings for religious 
 conference were largely given to narratives of 
 their " experience." 
 
 It was not in the nature of things that that style 
 of Christian living should be prolonged without 
 variation beyond the time wlien the Christian mind 
 found it out. jMen must find out both the good 
 and the evil of it. Good men must live it through 
 till they learned it by heart. Then the re-action 
 to something more self-forgetful and adventurous 
 was inevitable. What form could that re-action 
 take more natural than the magnificent develop- 
 ment of Christian missions? A missionary map 
 of the world was the new symbol of Christianity 
 which was sure to come. The swing of the pen- 
 dulum was to be reversed. 
 
Vibratory Progress in Religious Beliefs. 37 
 
 It has become a commonplace, now, that ours 
 is the age of missions. Philanthropic activity has 
 reached a commanding altitude of success. The 
 world no longer laughs at it. Silvern orators no 
 longer entertain gentle and perfumed hearers with 
 predictions of its failure. It has no occasion now 
 to ask for the world's respect : it commands the 
 world's admiration. But what is the sequence ? 
 
 Is it not that signs are beginning to appear that 
 this, too, must undergo revision ? Perils are loom- 
 ing up on the not distant horizon, which are the 
 natural product of an age of vigilant and inventive 
 expansion. We are lapsing into an unthoughtful 
 style of religious life. The meditative graces seem 
 to be waning. Christian work takes precedence 
 of Christian reflection. A man is estimated by 
 what he gives rather than by wdiat he is. Wealth 
 is assuming an undue importance in the worth of 
 individuals and of churches. Gold is morally, as 
 well as by troy weight, a heavy metal. The out- 
 look is ominous, when, in any large fraternity of 
 believers, the leaders take their leadership by right 
 of property rather than b}^ right of mind. It is 
 never so in heroic ages. Then the right to lead 
 depends on the force of character, which creates 
 the power to lead. We need to learn by heart Sir 
 William Hamilton's aphorism, " There is nothing 
 great in this world but man, and nothing great in 
 man but mind." 
 
 From such a condition of things, one peril often 
 comes without premonition. It is a break, one or 
 
38 My Study : and Other JSssays. 
 
 many, in the solidity of that groundwork of belief 
 which must always underlie permanent growth. 
 Great action must be built on great thought. 
 Breadth of expansion must be grounded in pro- 
 found beliefs. Diffusive force must spring from 
 concentrated character. A man can do only to 
 the limit of what he is. Be3^ond that, all is make- 
 shift. Are not these underground foundations 
 loosening ? 
 
 In other words, do not the signs of our times 
 indicate that this busy, mercurial style of Christian 
 activity needs to be iveighted with more consoli- 
 dated thinking? Central doctrines of our faith 
 seem to be jostled out of place underneath. 
 Though not sunk out of sight, they lie loose 
 and inert. They can support none but a rickety 
 superstructure. The structure we are building 
 leans out of plumb, like the Tow^r of Pisa. It is 
 not their fault, but their misfortune rather, that 
 our laity, on whom we rely for leadership in Chris- 
 tian enterprise, no longer hold the independent 
 convictions which their fathers had, the fruit of 
 their own theological reading and reflections. 
 Said one of them at a juncture of affairs at which 
 his official position called for an opinion of a doc- 
 trine in theology, " The clergy must take care of 
 that : T go Avith the majority." Did he not repre- 
 sent the attitude of multitudes of intelligent and 
 earnest laymen ? Yet, in the present drift of the 
 age, what other attitude can they hold ? 
 
 The problem ia not of easy solution. Yet tluik 
 
Vibratory Progress in Religious Beliefs. 39 
 
 attitude of dependent faith, in which a man stands 
 erect only wlien wedged in a crowd, is fraught 
 with immense peril. An inherited belief, flanked 
 on all sides by the forces of stimulant and daring 
 inquiry, iyivites doubt. The doctrinal beliefs of 
 clergymen are always open to the suspicion of 
 professional narrowness. Under such conditions 
 the ancestral faith of laymen seems made for skep- 
 ticism to sport with. Many minds thus situated 
 are preparing, when temptation crowds hard, to 
 doubt every thing but the theorems of Euclid. 
 Errors floating in the atmosphere may captivate 
 the most enterprising minds, and drift them no- 
 body knows where, unless a more thoughtful piety 
 is superadded to that of this philanthropic and 
 grand, but hurried and distracting, missionary 
 business. 
 
 We all need the constructive and tonic influ- 
 ences of solitude. So much solitude, so much 
 character. We specially need a new infusion of 
 theological thinking among the leaders of our laity. 
 We need a class of laymen who will take time to 
 think out for themselves the fundamentals of the 
 faith they profess. Few they might be in num- 
 bers, but an unconscious aristocracy in power over 
 popular thought. Vv'ithout some such auxiliaries 
 to the clergy to steady the popular faith, and to 
 act as conductors of electric thinking from the 
 pulpit to the pew, we may by and by find our 
 churches quaking in secret at phantoms of doubt, 
 which they dare not speak of, and yet can not get 
 
40 My Study: and Other Essays, 
 
 rid of. This is the peril of a " missionary age " 
 which is that and nothing more. Worst relapses 
 follow most splendid advances. Best things are 
 susceptible of most fatal perversions. Does not 
 the pendulum now need the touch of an unseen 
 hand ? 
 
 But we need not quake nor croak Avith pessim- 
 istic fears. The Tower of Pisa leans a long while 
 without toppling over. While the Church remains 
 in her formative age, the look of her condition will 
 be that of transitionary movement. Much of her 
 vitality will go to rectifying abuses, repressing 
 inordinate tastes, and re-adjusting mistaken or 
 exaggerated beliefs. Opirjion will traverse wide 
 spaces from extreme to extreme. The movement 
 will often resemble the ponderous swing of the 
 pendulum of an astronomical clock of huge dimen- 
 sions. Her character vdll seem to consist of ten- 
 dencies rather than of fixed qualities and consoli- 
 dated principles. These tendencies will be variable, 
 now to one extreme, then to its antipodes. The 
 popular faith may never appear to repose securely 
 at the one spot at which lies the exact and bal- 
 anced truth. 
 
 Yet, such a look of things should quicken the 
 courage of thinking men. It is cheering to know 
 that no extreme has the inheritance of longevity. 
 Error does not belong to a long-lived species. It 
 carries in its bosom a momentum towards decay. 
 Its doom is to die in the process of the popular 
 recoil to its opposite. Every transition from end 
 
Vibratory Py-ogress in Religious Beliefs, 41 
 
 to end may bring popular thought under a more 
 potent magnetism from absolute truth. Truth, 
 pure and simple, is the resultant of intemperate 
 advances and indignant rebounds. Only by such 
 oscillatory progress does the popular mind seem 
 able to achieve final and complete mastery of great 
 ideas. But, so sure as the pendulum is to find its 
 point of rest, as sure is the collective belief in 
 matters of great moment for ever to approximate 
 the point of pure truth, without excess and with- 
 out deficit. Grand advances towards this may be 
 achieved by one generation. It needs only the 
 leadership of devout thinkers, inspired of God, to 
 be its pioneers. 
 
Y. 
 
 OSCILLATIONS OF FAITH IN FUTURE 
 RETRIBUTION. 
 
 The dynamic principle of the pendulum was 
 applied in a former essay to illustrate certain 
 phenomena in Christian history. It has a hopeful 
 bearing upon the present drift of opinion respect- 
 ing endless punishment. 
 
 Candid believers will concede that the time has 
 been when this doctrine was held in harsh and 
 repellent outlines. It has put on the look of 
 hideous malformations in nature. Its contorted 
 features have sometimes alternated between the 
 horrible and the grotesque. Biblical emblems of 
 perdition have been interpreted to the letter. The 
 fire, the lake, the brimstone, the worm, the smoke 
 of torment, the physiological signs of speechless 
 anguish, have been made to appear, not only as 
 realities, but as visible and tangible realities. The 
 doomed have been pictured in the full panoply of 
 flesh and blood, "with the nerve-centers alive to 
 agony, plunged beneath Avaves of lambent flame. 
 Dante paints one of the circles of the '' Inferno " 
 as the abode of men who are so inclosed in glow- 
 ing fires, that, when they speak, it appears as if 
 
 42 
 
Oscillations of Faith in Future Retribution. 43 
 
 the very flames were human tongues endowed 
 with human voices. Our own Spenser represents 
 Pilate submerged in the sea of fire, and lifting 
 his wringing hands above the surface. The lit- 
 eratures of many languages and centuries have 
 thus treated the retributive symbols of the Scrip- 
 tures. 
 
 Our tastes do not refuse tJiis license to poets, 
 but when preachers indulge in the same dramatic 
 liberty we rebel. Yet the literature of the re- 
 tributive sentiment, aside from that of the pulpit, 
 offers to the pulpit almost no other model than 
 this of grossly materialized conceptions. It is not 
 strange, therefore, that such discourse lives in the 
 pulpit of our own day. Some passages in "Spur- 
 geon's Sermons" contain this shocking and dis- 
 gusting literalism. 
 
 Practiced preachers well know that it is less 
 difficult to preach severely after a fashion than to 
 preach tenderly in a manly fashion. Painful im- 
 pressions of any kind are a more facile theme for 
 discourse than the winning and the graceful. The 
 bees that dropped honey on the lips of Plato have 
 not swarmed on the homesteads of many of us. 
 Nor is the distinction limited to facility in speech : 
 it appears in other arts as well. Why is it that 
 of the visitors to the galleries of Italy, nine out of 
 ten Avill pause longer before the " Dying Gladia- 
 tor " than before the matchless Apollo ? Why do 
 they remember longer the statue of "■ Laocoon " 
 than that of the " Venus de Medici " ? Even the 
 
44 My Study: and Other Essays, 
 
 dog Cerberus is recalled in after-years more vividly 
 than the bust of Julius Csesar. 
 
 Quite in the natural course of things, therefore, 
 preachers have dwelt upon retributive truth dis- 
 proportionately, as well as intemperately. Unedu- 
 cated preachers have discoursed upon it savagely. 
 Field-preachers have vociferated it with an im- 
 passioned intensity, and with grotesque accompani- 
 ments of style and elocution. The tempestuous 
 successes of one season of evangelistic labor have 
 sometimes required years of pastoral toil to undo 
 them. He is a great man who can preach well on 
 any thing, but of great preachers he is the great- 
 est who can preach well on "the wrath of the 
 Lamb." 
 
 The fact deserves mention also, that Christian 
 art has had a subtle but potent influence in infus- 
 ing inhumanity into the animus of the pulpit. 
 "The Last Judgment," by ^Michael Angelo, has 
 impressed upon the imagination of the civilized 
 world its marvelous expression of the physical con- 
 tortions of retributive pain. Unconsciously the 
 pulpit has transferred it to discourses on the same 
 theme. The influence of other causes has been 
 thus augmented in giving a tinge of materialism 
 to the conception of penal justice. Men who have 
 never seen the painting, have preached under an in- 
 direct iiiS|)iiation from it, and others liVe it. It is 
 not fanciful to doubt whether the celebrated ser- 
 mon by President Edwards, which so appalled his 
 audience at Enfield, would have contained its fiery 
 
Oscillations of Faith in Future Retribution. 45 
 
 imagery if there had been no Michael Angelo, and 
 no paintings of the hist judgment. 
 
 The drama also has exerted a more obvious in- 
 fluence to the same effect. The preaching of puni- 
 tive justice has been demoralized by the taste for 
 stage-passion. The reflection of the metropolitan 
 and the itinerant theaters of England is very per- 
 ceptible in the sermons of John Knox and Bishop 
 Latimer. The retributive preaching of some of 
 their inferior contemporaries received from that 
 source an almost malign ferocity. Many things 
 have thus conspired to emphasize the comminatory 
 doctrines of our faith. They have often made the 
 pulpit a throne of judgment. Fellow-sinners with 
 their hearers have preached like avenging angels. 
 
 If space would permit, it would be a deeply in- 
 teresting study to note the influence of popular 
 profaneness, in interpreting into the language of 
 the pulpit the materialized uses of biblical symbols 
 of retribution in their grossest and most repulsive 
 form. Many hearers, by force of their own de- 
 pravity, hear in the most innocent dialect of the 
 pulpit the ideas in which they are accustomed to 
 swear. Such hearers, and by unconscious sympa- 
 thy other hearers, often see the retributive visions 
 of the pulpit through this distorting lens of pro- 
 faneness in popular speech. 
 
 From such materialism in both the pulpit and 
 the pew, however it was created, a re-action was 
 sure to come. Never does the composite nature 
 of the human mind assert its claims more impera- 
 
46 My Study : and Other Essays. 
 
 lively than when it has been assailed, long and 
 without rest, by motives of a somber cast, in which 
 the chief element is fear. The tendency is to 
 either an intemperate outbreak of religious furor^ 
 or an equally intemperate recoil. But for some 
 such convulsive relief, the end would be an epi- 
 demic of insanity. 
 
 Such was often the incipient drift of things 
 under the preaching of retribution which has been 
 here described. In sporadic cases, under the 
 preaching of Whitefield and Wesley, it produced 
 hysteria and catalepsy. But the great bulk of 
 the common mind never takes the way to the in- 
 sane-asylum. On that mind, the effect was to 
 generate an exasperated antipathy to retributive 
 ideas. This co-operating with causes outside of 
 the pulpit has wrought out an intemperate rebound 
 to the opposite extreme. Now retributive truth 
 in any form rouses defiance rather than fear. The 
 pendulum has sw^ung clear over to the opposite 
 end of the arc. 
 
 The signs of this re-action are patent. Mark 
 the relaxation of public sentiment upon the whole 
 circle of truths cognate with penal justice. What 
 else is punishment now than the reform of Ujc 
 criminal? AVho ever emphasizes its penal force 
 as an expression of moral indignation? Penal 
 justice among us is capricious in its judgments, 
 and spasmodic in its execution. Thinking \\\c.\ 
 are beginning to question whether any tribunal 
 can be safely trusted with the power of pardon. 
 
Oscillations of Faith in Future Retribution. 47 
 
 The same decline is more obvious in popular 
 notions of divine benevolence. In the biblical 
 ideal, benevolence in God or man is an athletic 
 virtue. It rules a moral universe with stout em- 
 phasis on mora] principles. Does this robust ele- 
 ment live now in the popular notion of it? Where? 
 Is it not so thoroughly eliminated, that retribution 
 and benevolence have become antipathetic ideas ? 
 They are things to be ''reconciled" by adroit casu- 
 istry. The one must be " vindicated " before the 
 other can be trusted. The popular notion of the 
 divine government, therefore, is an asthenic non- 
 descript, which would subject any human admin- 
 istration to contempt. It is love without rectitude, 
 and law without penalties. Atlieistic nihilism can 
 go no farther. Such is the drift of the popular 
 theology. It assumes that there can be no endless 
 pains for endless guilt, because the love of God 
 can not endure either. Scripture or no Scripture, 
 this is claimed to be the intuition of the human 
 mind, and its decree is final. 
 
 Is not the pulpit also sliding downi the slope of 
 the popular tastes in this thing ? It becomes me 
 to inquire rather than to judge. Are not many 
 preachers preaching upon the benign aspects of 
 God's character, disproportionately and effemi- 
 nately ? Does not an ominous silence reign upon 
 the sanctions of God's law ? Some months ago a 
 comminatory sermon appeared in " The Congrega- 
 tionalist" from the pen of Rev. Dr. Channing. 
 Did not its stern fidelity strike even its orthodox 
 
48 My Study: and Other Essays. 
 
 readers with surprise ? Is not tliat style of preach- 
 ing obsolescent in many representative pulpits ? 
 
 Now and then an exceptional evidence of moral 
 relaxation startles us. Mormonism astounds the 
 nation and the age by the shock it gives to 
 the moral sense of the world. What, then, is the 
 meaning of the suggestion from a Christian pulpit 
 of well-known fame, that that hideous mass of 
 putrescent depravity must be handled with silken 
 gloves, lest the suppression of crime by penal 
 severity should make somebody unhappy? Has 
 it come to this, that a defiant hierarchy of brothels 
 must be welcomed to the fraternity of Christian 
 States, trusting to the amorous cooing of politi- 
 cians and preachers, to win the " erring sisters " 
 back to virtue ? 
 
 We seem to have fallen under the reign of tur- 
 tle-doves. The time of the singing of birds has 
 come. The atmosphere grows heavy with volup- 
 tuous perfumes. Is this a sporadic case of eccen- 
 tric morals? or is it a straw which shows that a 
 tainted and pestilent wind is blowing over the 
 land? The most threatening factor in the Mor- 
 mon problem is the effeminacy of public sentiment 
 among our own people respecting the retributive 
 repression of crime. We coddle it when we ought 
 to crush it. Thomas Carlyle was an extremist, 
 but he said some ver}^ necessar}^ truths to a mor- 
 ally hysteric generation. 
 
 What, then, should be the polic}^ of the pulpit ? 
 Shall we concede tliat the ancient faith is mori- 
 
Oscillatio7is of Faith in Future Bet7'ibution. 49 
 
 bund, and adjust ourselves as best we can to its 
 doom ? Not yet ! Not quite yet ! This faith has 
 a great history. Its archives are full of great con- 
 quests. Let us possess our souls in patience, and 
 expect another swing of the pendulum : it is sure 
 to come. The thing which has been will be, as 
 surely as gravitation will bring back the evening 
 and the morning stars. 
 
 When Rev. Dr. Lyman Beecher was arraigned 
 for heresy by the Synod of Cincinnati, one of the 
 charges in the indictment was, that he had ignored 
 in his preaching the ancient doctrine of divine 
 sovereignty. He defended his pulpit by saying 
 substantially this : " When I was ordained, I found 
 that the doctrine of God's sovereignty had been 
 overworked. It had been preached so exclusively, 
 and in such extremes of statement, that the cor- 
 relative doctrine of human resjjonsibility had got 
 knocked out from under; and I thought it my 
 duty to put it back into its place. This has been 
 the gist of my heresy." 
 
 The venerable father spoke good theology and 
 good sense. So in these times of partial decadence, 
 we need to study the popular affinities in respect 
 to those things in which the balance of truth is 
 disturbed. Then, the pulpit should throw its 
 heaviest weights into the scale which is in danger 
 of kicking the beam. If a central biblical truth 
 like this of endless punishment has "got knocked 
 out from under," the first business of the pulpit 
 should be to " put it back." 
 
60 My Study: and Other Essays. 
 
 Let, then, the blarxd and winning aspects of the 
 gospel be presented in more even balance with 
 the sterner truths which lie over against them. 
 Discourse more frequently on the unutterable 
 guilt of sin. Uncover the sunless abysses into 
 which sin gravitates by its own weight of evil. 
 Supplant the sensuous by the spiritual conception 
 of the " second death." Emphasize the identity of 
 guilt and damnation in the ultimate experience of 
 sin. Be as wise as Milton's Satan in the discovery 
 that conscious guilt is hell. Declare the reality 
 and perpetuity of the world of despair, and the 
 appalling doom of consignment to a demonized 
 society. Teach the necessity of that doom to 
 matured guilt, because of its demonized character 
 and its own supreme choice of supreme evil. Let 
 these truths be re-enforced by discourses upon the 
 ineffable holiness of God, the intensity of His in- 
 dignation towards wrong, the intrinsic excellence 
 and serene beauty of the retributive sentiment in 
 the divine mind. 
 
 These and cognate principles should be, for a 
 time^ the emphasized message of the pulpit. Let 
 it be intensified by a refined and wary fidelity in 
 the use of the biblical emblems of perdition. 
 With what Milton calls " heartstruck " convic- 
 tions, revive the use of the words v\^hich the lips 
 of our Lord have hallowed for all time. Keep 
 them .clear of unscriptural elaborations. Reveal 
 the Aveight of spiritual significance which they 
 carry. Preach them tenderly. Preach them as a 
 
Oscillations of Faith in Future Retribution. 51 
 
 fellow-sinner with the most guilty of the lost. 
 But preach them so that they shall seem to mean 
 something. 
 
 Why should we take from unbelievers the horo- 
 scope of our faith ? Why accept their too-willing 
 augury that it is moribund ? We are of an ancient 
 and lofty lineage. We have our own traditions. 
 Let us honor them. If this doctrine of our sacred 
 books is doomed, the whole system of which it is 
 a fragment is doomed. The concession is a case of 
 dynamite stowed under the fort we are defending. 
 
 I have seen the statement, that, in the manu- 
 facture of porcelain, there is a process by which a 
 globular ball may be constructed of such exquisite 
 delicacy of material, and with such refinement of 
 art, that, if so much as a scratch be inflicted on its 
 surface, the whole flies into a thousand atoms. 
 Similar is the structure of God's moral govern- 
 ment. All through it, from center to circumfer- 
 ence. He has wrought His OAvn infinite sensibility 
 to the antagonism between right and wrong. To 
 His thought, nothing else in the universe is so in- 
 effably sacred. If He permits one iota of it to be 
 dishonored, the whole falls into moral chaos. 
 
 Therefore we claim that this doctrine of a retri- 
 bution^ commensurate with guilt in degree and in' 
 duration^ can not die out of human faith. It is one 
 of those truths which Wordsworth calls "truths 
 that wake to perish never." Though it is the doc- 
 trine of the Book, yet we do not depend for it on 
 the Book alone. We depend on the nature of the 
 
62 My Study: and Other Essays. 
 
 mind of God for its groundwork ; on the moral 
 forces of the universe for its auxiliaries ; on every 
 prophetic menace of a human conscience for its 
 confirmation ; on the moral sense of every new- 
 born child for proof that it luiU come direct and 
 fresh from God, to the end of time ; and on the 
 analogies of human law for assurance that moral 
 government can exist nowhere without its majestic 
 and imperative working. The religious beliefs of 
 mankind never can break loose from such under- 
 ground anchorage, in the nature of things. That 
 is a very sure thing in the destiny of one world, 
 which has the moral gravitation of all worlds 
 flanking it on every side to hold it in position. A 
 moribund theology I Is the north star moribund ? 
 
VI. 
 
 RETRIBUTION IN ITS BIBLICAL ATMOSPHERE. 
 
 The thought has become a familiar one, that 
 every man has an atmosphere which he carries with 
 him, as the earth's globe carries its ambient ether. 
 Through this inaudible and invisible envelope, a 
 man makes his individuality felt. It goes out to 
 the cognizance of other men without words of his. 
 A bad man bears about him a tainted atmosphere, 
 the odor of which reveals his secret vileness. His 
 words may be lies, yet no one is deceived. They 
 come back to him, as dreams are said to do, in con- 
 traries. An ancient legend tells of a false echo, 
 which contradicted every voice that broke the 
 stillness of the valley. So does a bad man's 
 atmosphere belie his soft, wily speech. 
 
 So a good man has an atmosphere of integrity. 
 It telegraphs his secret life when he knows not of 
 it. It publishes to all observers his unconscious 
 virtues. It has been said that all true biography 
 is autobiography. It is only what a man tells of 
 himself that comes to be known and believed. To 
 this should be added, that the most truthful of all 
 autobiograpliv is that which a man tells of himself 
 unconsciously. A silent chronicler is always at 
 
 53 
 
64 My Study: and Other Essays, 
 
 the shoulder of a good man to record his involun- 
 tary graces. At the final judgment good men ap- 
 pear as good Samaritans unawares. '' When saw 
 we Thee in prison, and came unto Thee ? " In 
 like manner, a man of abounding force, good or 
 bad, carries an atmosphere weighted with power. 
 Wherever he is, the atmosphere is surcharged with 
 electricity. When he moves, men feel his move- 
 ment as they do the wind of a cannon-ball. 
 Colossal men do not know their own size. 
 
 Similar to this psychological phenomenon is a 
 certain accompaniment which we may aptly term 
 their atmosphere, which we find enveloping great 
 central truths as they appear in the Scriptures. 
 Many things enter into its composition, but chiefly 
 the character of the man who proclaims a truth, 
 and the spirit with which it seems to imjDregnate 
 his own mind. Often the man is the message 
 more than his words. His quickened sensibilities 
 are the revelation. What he is, discloses the mean- 
 ing of what he says. The interpretation of his 
 words which is most consonant with the animus of 
 the man, is most probably the true one. Even his 
 silences often put life into his utterances. What 
 he does not say has capital significance. The 
 Word of God gives out no false echo. 
 
 1. It is instructive, therefore, as a help to our 
 conception of the idea of retrilmtion^ to observe 
 how it looks through its biblical atmosphere. And 
 in the first place, what is the look of it as it 
 appears in the historic records of the Old Testa- 
 ment? 
 
Retribution in its Biblical Atmosphere. 55 
 
 The first tiling that strikes the reader as signifi- 
 cant, is that the principle of retributive justice is 
 made to pervade the whole history by means of 
 signal and appalling examples. It is acted rather 
 than defined, painted rather than said. So far as 
 the character of the divine government is there 
 disclosed, the impression is made with ineffaceable 
 distinctness, that sin and suffering are inseparable. 
 Law in the natural world is more uniform, but not 
 a whit more distinct in the infliction of pain on the 
 transgressor than the law of the moral world is, as 
 rejDresented in certain phenomenal events which 
 mark epochs in biblical history. These occur with. 
 sufficient frequency to act as memorials of God as 
 a righteous governor who will by no means clear 
 the guilty. The moral impression to this effect is 
 even more vivid for their occasional occurrence. 
 They seem to emanate from the secret reserves of 
 a force whose limitations no man can define, and 
 whose disclosures no man can foresee. God comes 
 out for the moment from the seclusion in which 
 commonly His power hides itself, and strikes a 
 blow, the echo of which reverberates through ages. 
 Nations quake at the sound. It lives for ever in 
 the world's memory. 
 
 When we come to note the animus of the writer 
 who puts the facts on record, we observe further, 
 that he tells the story with the most absolute 
 equanimity. Although his mission is to declare 
 that " it shall come to pass that the ears of every 
 one that heareth shall tingle," yet he is not shocked 
 
56 My Study: and Otlier Essays. 
 
 or offended by the severity of the inflictions. He 
 does not stand aghast at penal suffering as an 
 unnatural phenomenon. He sees nothing in it in- 
 human or malevolent. He does not treat it as an 
 interpolation which disturbs the moral equipoise 
 of events, by introducing a strange element which 
 needs to be explained. Not a syllable is recorded 
 in apology for it, or in defense of God's govern- 
 ment. Nothing in the bearing of the historian 
 suggests that the facts need explanation or apol- 
 ogy. Penalty under given conditions is treated as 
 the most natural thing to happen. The probabili- 
 ties of history demand it. Nothing else fits into 
 the becoming sequence of events. The absence of 
 it would be a vacuum of mystery to be explained. 
 Not suffering, but sin, is the inexplicable phenome- 
 non. The lapse of man into its bottomless abysses 
 is the appalling tragedy. 
 
 We note especially /oitr great catastrophic illus- 
 trations of the retributive element in the divine 
 government which made profound impression on 
 Hebrew character. They are the Noachian Del- 
 uge, the volcanic destruction of the " Cities of the 
 Plain," the miraculous burial of the Egy^Dtian 
 army in the Red Sea, and the extermination of 
 the aboriginal tribes of Canaan. These facts we 
 find recorded with the calm dignity of history. 
 They are embedded in the national annals of the 
 Hebrews as symbols of the character of the God 
 they worshiped. They stand in their sacred 
 writings as memorials of the faith of their fathers, 
 
Retribution in its Biblical Atmosphere. 57 
 
 which they in turn are to teach to their children. 
 Not so much as a mark of interrogation appears in 
 question of their rectitude ; not a syllable in vin- 
 dication of divine benevolence. The writer never 
 has the bearing of a defendant or an apologist. 
 He records the astounding tragedies with no more 
 defensive comment than he gives to the story of 
 Moses in the bulrushes, or that of Joseph in the 
 well at Shechem. Children reading the volume 
 consecutively are sensible of no shuddering or 
 recoil on the part of the writer in its retributive 
 pages. 
 
 The tragic narratives are intrinsically natural. 
 That a world wallowing in the filth of moral 
 putridity should be indignantly buried from the 
 offended eye of the universe by avenging waters ; 
 that cities steeped in vices to which language could 
 give no other name than theirs should be swept off 
 the face of the earth by a storm of fire ; that Na- 
 ture herself should suspend the operation of her 
 laws, that the oppressor of God's people, the rep- 
 resentative of a tyranny of four hundred years, 
 might be ingulfed in the sea ; that idolatrous races 
 whose stock was already caving in, in their corrup- 
 tion, should be crowded to their doom to make 
 way for more virile blood and a nascent theocracy, 
 — all these things occur in the inevitable course 
 of nature, and as such they are recorded. They 
 are monumental tokens of God's righteousness. 
 The doomed ones were monuments of guilt : they 
 must be made monuments of retribution. As such 
 
58 My Study: and Other Essays. 
 
 they must go into tlie world's history, and abide 
 there for ever. This is the story and the whole 
 of it. 
 
 When a traveler wanders over the excavated 
 ruins of Pompeii, and notes the evidences of the 
 moral corruption of the generation entombed there, 
 he feels that it was well to bury such a depraved 
 civilization from the sight of men. Science may 
 say what it will of nature's law in the catastro^^he. 
 He reads there a profounder statute than any of 
 nature's teaching. It declares eternal justice in 
 the ruin around him. Something in his own being 
 responds to it as a decree of God. He tells the 
 story to his children without misgiving. He knows 
 that to the moral sense of childhood it will speak 
 for itself. It needs no apology or defense. He 
 says, "Here men offended a holy God by their 
 putrid vices, and here He laid His iron hand upon 
 them in retribution." 
 
 So it is that the Hebrew historian records the 
 retributive catastrophes of the ancient world. He 
 declares them with the same equipoise of feeling 
 with which he pictures in backward prophecy the 
 six days of creation. To these as to those he 
 might fitly have appended the finale., " And God 
 saw that it was good ! " It is left to later times to 
 raise tangled questions in the ethics of the story, 
 and to pile up volumes of apologetic criticism. 
 Not a word of this seems to have occurred to the 
 contemporaries looking on, or to the annalist re- 
 hearsing the tragic history. The ancient wisdom 
 
Retribution in its Biblical Atmosphere. 59 
 
 saw no mystery which needed solution. For the 
 ancient ethics it was enough that retribution was 
 visited on guilt. Why should it not be so ? What 
 else could be in its place ? Penal justice was riglit ; 
 right was ultimate. Hebrew philosophy held her 
 peace. The author of Ecclesiastes indulges in a 
 great deal of skeptical comment on the vicissitudes 
 of human life, but has not one word to say in 
 doubt of the rectitude of these monumental records 
 of God's justice in the sacred books of his coun- 
 trymen. Those he seems to have accepted in 
 believing silence. He saw nothing in them to 
 swell the volume of skeptical inquiry. Such was 
 the silent verdict of Hebrew philosophy. 
 
 But Hebrew piet^ was not content with acquies- 
 cent silence. It gave to the retributive decrees 
 an approval vocal with praise. Prophets foresaw 
 them with complacency. The people exulted in 
 them at their national festivals. The popular 
 songs rehearsed them in the temple-worship. In- 
 spired poets poured forth imprecatory hymns 
 without stint, and the people chanted them with 
 accompaniment of lyre and dance. God's enemies 
 were their enemies. They appeased their own 
 retributive instincts in celebrating the retributive 
 achievements of Jehovah. 
 
 Such is the atmosphere in which the idea of 
 retribution appears in the Hebrew Scriptures. Not 
 that we find there no other than retributive memo- 
 rials of God. They are full of foretokens of His 
 redeeming purposes. Retributive records form but 
 
60 My Study: and Other Essays. 
 
 a fragment of the whole. But alternating now 
 and then with promises and blessing, appear these 
 terrific disclosures and mementos of avenging law. 
 Through the lunar radiance of redemptive grace 
 runs this line of lurid red. 
 
 There can be no question how the ancient faith 
 received the record as a whole. Devout men made 
 no election of part above part. They rejoiced in 
 the story of punitive justice as cordially as in 
 that of Messianic promise. They sang the one 
 hundred and ninth Psalm, heaping imprecations 
 upen the enemies of Judah, as heartily as the 
 twenty-fourth, opening the gates to the King of 
 Glory. The man of Hebrew lineage who should 
 have looked on the lyric poetry of his people w^ith 
 repugnance because of its imprecatory songs, would 
 have been false to his ancestral blood. 
 
 2. Pass on now to the personal teachings of our 
 Lord. What is the look of the retributive senti- 
 ment as it appears there ? We are now in a new 
 world. Another hour has struck : it is the me- 
 ridian hour. The world's thought is at its best. 
 Preparatory ages have brought all nations to an 
 epoch of transcendent progress. New ideas are 
 dawning. New institutions are struggling to the 
 birth. New truths are ripening in minds which 
 are one day to sw^ay the advanced thinking of the 
 world. We miglit plausibly ask, in the way of 
 hypothesis, is not the retributive feature of the 
 divine government among the old things which 
 have passed away? Is it not a fragment of the 
 
Retribution in its Biblical Atmosphere. 61 
 
 tlieological debris which tlie world has outlived ? 
 Shall we not look for it in the gulf of revolution 
 which separates the modern from the ancient faith? 
 We look back on dismantled cities, and disinte- 
 grated empires, and enslaved nations, and exter- 
 minated tribes, and dead races, and a depopulated 
 world ; and we might plausibly ask, Is not that 
 scroll of history rolled up, and deposited in anti- 
 quarian libraries, for ever ? Is it not time for the 
 ingenious benevolence of God to express itself in 
 the invention of some more amiable policy of ad- 
 ministration than that by which retributive justice 
 has held the rod of iron over the past? May not 
 an awe-struck and trembling world hope for this ? 
 Almost the first page of our Lord's discourses 
 gives the answer. We find no such innovation 
 borne on the atmosphere of the new world. We 
 do indeed find new disclosures of the benevolence 
 of God. We discover an innovation of redemp- 
 tive wisdom which lights up and interprets all the 
 past. But it is not such as to do away with the 
 old elemental idea of retribution upon incorrigible 
 guilt. On the contrary, because of it that idea is 
 re-enforced and intensified. The furnace is heated 
 seven times more than it was wont to be heated. 
 A design is obvious to forestall and forbid the 
 abrogation of retributive decree in deference to 
 the birth of Christian liberty. The very frontis- 
 piece of our Lord's instructions is, " I am not 
 come to destroy the Law." His words emphasize 
 the declaration. 
 
62 My Study: and Other Essays. 
 
 Heretofore retributive threatenings have dealt 
 chiefly with temporal pains. Their outlook into 
 eternity has been shadowy and uncertain. Now 
 that immortality looms up in human destiny, the 
 punishment of guilt rises and expands in lurid 
 accompaniment. A world is discovered, in which 
 undying guilt is hedged in and weighed doAvn 
 with undying woes. Literal utterance can not 
 compass it. Therefore emblems the most appall- 
 ing that human sense can realize to the imagina- 
 tion are invented to paint it. A more intense 
 thought of retribution than was ever conceived by 
 comminatory prophet or avenging angel, is thrown 
 out into the theology of the future. That is God's 
 ultimate idea in His dealing with incorrigible guilt. 
 
 In this climax of revelation on the subject, ret- 
 ribution is localized : it receives the definiteness 
 of place. Hell henceforth appears in the map of 
 the universe. A world wrapped in billows of 
 flame, and nauseous with the fumes of burning 
 sulphur, becomes the symbol of retributive pain. 
 It passes into the literatures of nations. Dante 
 and Milton write poems upon it which men will not 
 let die. Genius numbers and classifies its crowded 
 population. It pervades the dominant religion of 
 the world. It dwells as a thing real and familiar 
 in the thoughts of e very-day life. The depravity 
 of men makes its name a household word in the 
 dialect of profane speech. Its murky atmosphere 
 hangs over deathbeds. No nation or tribe of an- 
 cient times possessed in their religion or their lit- 
 
Retribution in its Biblical Atmosphere. 63 
 
 erature so intense and fearful a conception of the 
 final abode of guilt as we have in the Christian 
 revelation of an eternal Hell. And the teaching 
 which has wrought out this terrific reduplication 
 of the retributive idea in human thinking, has come 
 from the lips of One who was God's supreme im- 
 personation of love ! 
 
 Let us inquire further how does the great 
 Teacher Himself seem to regard His message in 
 the handling of it? What atmosphere does His 
 language and His personality throw around it? 
 Does He dilute or minimize it ? Does He give it 
 a gloss of gentle words ? Does He conceal it be- 
 neath hints and innuendoes. Does He apologize 
 for it? Does He labor to vindicate it? Does He 
 philosophize about its necessity? Does He dilate 
 upon its intrinsic excellence ? Does He even con- 
 descend to prove it ? Does He attempt to refute 
 objections, and forestall the cavils of coming ages, 
 against it ? Does He betray by word or deed, or 
 ingenuity of rhetorical art, the shadow of a cloud 
 of doubt about it in His own mind, or of a sus- 
 picion that it ma}' need proof or vindication? 
 
 Not a syllable of all this. Not a sign appears 
 of any of those ingenious arts of speech by which 
 men betray the consciousness of a weak cause or 
 a doubtful dogma. He simply says the word 
 which it is given Him to say. ''As My Father 
 hath taught Me, I speak these things." With the 
 serenity of conscious Deity He pours out the fiery 
 symbols of indignation against evil and of its 
 
64 My Study: and Other Essays, 
 
 swift destruction, with no word of comment, or 
 attempt to explain or qualify. He unrolls the 
 scroll of Judgment on which is written in fire 
 what He will do with the mcorrigibly guilty, and 
 leaves it there. Such is the atmosphere in which 
 the teachings of our Lord envelop the idea of 
 punitive justice, pure and simple. It is an atmos- 
 phere of sovereignty. Other elements of His mes- 
 sage reveal other aspects of His character. But 
 this threat of retribution to incorrigible guilt is 
 the forecast , of a righteous sovereign, just that 
 and nothing less. 
 
 Our Lord's absolute unconsciousness of having in 
 these terrific disclosures uttered any thing which 
 a loyal conscience can recoilfrom, is sublime be- 
 yond the reach of words. In no other message 
 from His lips is the majesty of His Godhead more 
 luminous than in this. 
 
 3. Reserving for a separate essay, a review of 
 the apostolic epistles, let us note the biblical as- 
 pect of the retributive idea as it appears in the 
 pictorial visions of St. John. 
 
 We have here a glimpse which it is impossible 
 to misunderstand of the retributive sentiment of 
 Heaven. How, then, is the retributive element in 
 God's administration regarded there? Two orders 
 of intelligence, if no more, are there engaged in re- 
 searches into the ways of God. If spiritual em- 
 bodiment adds any thing to the conditions of 
 human insight into divine mysteries, that improved 
 vision is given to redeemed men there. If ages of 
 
Retribution in its Biblical Atmosphere. 65 
 
 sinless study of the great problems of the universe 
 add any thing to the means of their solution, an- 
 gelic minds possess that advantage there. If the 
 intermingling of the efforts of different orders of 
 mind to penetrate the deep things of God, helps 
 to clarify and balance judgment in the result, 
 the conditions existing there must realize this ad- 
 vantage. It is not forbidden us to believe that all 
 possible facilities for making ultimate and finished 
 discoveries of truth must exist there. 
 
 There, if anywhere, then, we should expect to 
 find the element of penal justice in the divine gov- 
 ernment outgrown. Are endless pains for endless 
 guilt intrinsically antagonistic to the pure benevo- 
 lence of God ? and is the moral universe destined 
 to discover this ? Then, we should expect to find 
 some hint of this in the advanced thinking of the 
 redeemed. Does angelic foresight of God's ways 
 detect the final expurgation of retributive devices 
 from the divine government? Then, we should 
 expect to receive some intimation of this in the 
 scenic painting of angelic worship. 
 
 There is a spot in the heavens where a star once 
 shone which has gone out in darkness. Astrono- 
 mers mark a vacancy on the chart of the stellar 
 universe where it once glistened. So we might 
 reasonably believe, that, if the world of despair is 
 ever to be blotted out of the government of God, 
 the telescopic prevision of archangels would surely 
 discover in anticipation the vacancy which is one 
 day to be made by its disappearance. Should we 
 
GQ My Study: and Other Essays. 
 
 not, then, look for at least some distant and cau- 
 tious hint of so stupendous a phenomenon in this 
 picture of their liturgic service ? What else could 
 so profoundly move a devout universe to thanks- 
 giving ? 
 
 What do we find, in fact, in this revelation of 
 St. John ? Not a word, not a hint, not a syllable, 
 not a significant silence even, from which the most 
 dexterous, even crafty, exegesis can extort any such 
 idea. Angelic and redeemed minds are in sympa- 
 thy on this subject. They take up the problem 
 where earthly research leaves it. They adoj)t the 
 same conclusions, and continue the same adora- 
 tion of the divine mystery, which devout men 
 have acknowledged here. The public sentiment of 
 Heaven is all one way. Retributive justice is the 
 theme of song. The surging multitudes before the 
 throne exult in it. It is not tolerated there as an 
 evil incidental to a weak government. It is not 
 accepted as a temporary device necessitated by un- 
 developed resources or inadequate power. It is 
 not accepted as the anomaly of a mysterious inter- 
 regnum in which the universe is left to the work- 
 ing of merciless law. It is not held in reserve as 
 a thing to be endured in awe-struck silence, or 
 told in secret and in whispers. But as a thing 
 intrinsically grand and excellent, it is proclaimed 
 aloud. On account of it, incense is offered in ador- 
 ation. The endless duration of it is no offense 
 to holy sensibilities. That, too, is a joy for ever. 
 
 And this condition of things is a matter of 
 
Retribution in its Biblical Atmosphere. 67 
 
 course. Does the inspired seer explain it ? Not 
 by a word. Does he reconcile it with the benevo- 
 lence of God? Not by a syllable. Does he at- 
 tempt to conceal divine agency in it, under cover 
 of impersonal law ? Not by a moment's silence. 
 No argument is suggested in proof of it, no apol- 
 ogy is offered for it, no hint is given that it is a 
 weak spot in the divine economy which needs re- 
 enforcement. Something there surely is in this 
 retributive idea as it is there conceived, which 
 speaks for itself to beings whose ear is attuned 
 to the mysterious disclosure. Something in it 
 proclaims its intrinsic excellence. Some radiance 
 from its interior glory illumines the very heaven 
 of heavens. The assembled hosts are a unit in 
 its recognition. They lift up their voices as the 
 sound of many waters. What is that something 
 which so transforms and glorifies the punitive 
 justice of Jehovah ? It can be but one thing : 
 Tlie retributive sentiment and the benevolent senti- 
 ment in the mind of Grod are one. Justice and love 
 in the ultimate analysis of moral ideas are the 
 same. Love necessitates justice, and justice illus- 
 trates love. Thus and there the inspired seer 
 leaves it. 
 
 Such is the atmosphere which the retributive 
 idea carries with it from one end of the Scriptures 
 to the other. In this review, one thing appears 
 very certain. It is that our popular and inherited 
 notion of the place which retribution holds in the 
 divine government, and of the nature of the re- 
 
68 3Iy Study: and Other Essays. 
 
 tributive sentiment in holy minds, needs radical 
 correctives to adjust it to the ideas which pervade 
 the Word of God. Those ideas are repugnant to 
 our modern tastes. One or the other must give 
 way in a re-adjustment of the popular theology. 
 We need the infusion of some element into our 
 theological diathesis which shall tone up our faith 
 in more profound likeness to that of patriarchs 
 and apostles and our divine Lord. We need a 
 change of temper like that which iron receives 
 when it becomes steel. Some suggestions looking 
 to such a re-adjustment are reserved for a subse- 
 quent essay. 
 
VIL 
 ST. PAUL ON RETRIBUTION. 
 
 In the construction of the Scriptures, inspira- 
 tion was wise, we may reverently say adroit, in 
 the selection of its human instruments. Each 
 was fitted to his mission. The man and the junc- 
 ture in the progress of revelation which he repre- 
 sented were correlative. At any epoch in the 
 history of revelation, therefore, something may be 
 learned of the forthcoming development of truth 
 from the character of the man elected to execute 
 it. What he was, will throw light on what he 
 said. What intimations, then, did the election of 
 St. Paul to inspired office give of the chapter 
 which it was his mission to add to the accumulat- 
 ing volume of revelation ? 
 
 It is something to the purpose to observe in 
 reply that he was a man of large far seeing and 
 foreseeing vision. He was superlatively a man 
 of progress. He had broken away from a vener- 
 able faith. It had been sacred to him as the faith 
 of an honored ancestry. A mind like his, alert 
 with the spring of its transition from an old to 
 a new theology, was prepared for any thing of 
 the nature of an onward movement in religious 
 
 69 
 
70 My Study: and Other Essays. 
 
 thought. He could not be wedded to the old 
 because it was old, nor antipathetic to the new 
 because it was new. If a supplementary chapter 
 of eschatolog}^ was about to open in the growth 
 of revelation, he was the man above all others to 
 receive it into his own faith, and to ingraft it on 
 the faith of the infant church. 
 
 Moreover, he was a man of profound sensibili- 
 ties. He was not predisposed to ascetic teaching 
 by the hardness of his own mental structure. His 
 sympathetic nature was loyal to the humane side 
 of truth. His mind was intellect and soul, blended 
 in perhaps as healthy balance as is ever found in 
 men of great force. Though an acute thinker, 
 he was not a " thinking-macliine," as President 
 Edwards has been termed by his opponents. 
 Though a predestinarian, and one who had the 
 courage of his convictions, he was not a bigot, as 
 predestinarians are often called, nor did he crowd 
 his faith into a fatalistic theology, as predestina- 
 rians often do. He originated the elements of a 
 theology to which JNIr. Fronde ascribes the pro- 
 foundest thinking, and the most forceful reforms 
 of modern times. Yet he was not the man to 
 sacrifice, even to such a theology, the instincts of 
 a large-hearted humanity. 
 
 Again, he had been elected to the supreme rank 
 of inspired seers in extending the canon of revela- 
 tion. He lived in a state of j^rophetic vision, he 
 had looked upon the risen and ascended Christ, 
 he had been caught up to the heaven of heavens. 
 
St. Paul on Retribution, 71 
 
 In inspired trance he had made discoveries which 
 his human tongue could not utter. His eye had 
 been struck sightless by the overwhelming glory 
 of the Lord in person. The memory of those 
 visions was the atmosphere of his life. If, there- 
 fore, any new truth was on the eve of disclosure 
 concerning the destiny of man and the eternal 
 worlds, he was of all men the man to know it. 
 He above all men was fitted to be its pioneer to 
 the faith of the Church. Of all men living, the 
 man to whom we should most naturally look for 
 the discovery of an improved Christian theodicy, 
 was St. Paul. 
 
 Further, we find that he does initiate a new era 
 in the history of Christian thought. He is a dis- 
 coverer, not merely a teacher of the ancient faith. 
 His conversion formed an ejioch. He was inspired 
 to herald advances, even upon the teachings of 
 our Lord. On central doctrines of our faith, he 
 gives us advanced ideas : they are the fulfillment 
 of ancient promise. The immortality of the soul, 
 the resurrection of the body, the Deity of Christ, 
 the significance of the Atonement, the spiritual 
 import of the Jewish ritual, the person and mis- 
 sion of the Holy Ghost, are all taught by St. Paul, 
 in more full and luminous disclosure than by any 
 other inspired teacher. Truths upon which our 
 Lord was reticent are taught by this elect apostle. 
 Speaking in the dialect of modern controversy, St. 
 Paul founded a new school of theological beliefs. 
 Certain great ideas which form a compact and 
 
72 My Study: and Other Essays. 
 
 welded system of faith, which has been the favor- 
 ite of the more thoughtful minds in the Church 
 for ages, we can not define more tersely than to 
 call them the Pauline theology. 
 
 Now, in view of these preliminaries, we claim, 
 that, if anywhere in the Word of God we should 
 look to find a new revelation of eschatology, it is 
 in these elaborate and original epistles of tliis 
 chief of apostles. Was the time ever to come, 
 for example, when a new interpretation of our 
 Lord's teachings should be given to the world by 
 divine authority? Was any appendix to them to 
 be evolved by subsequent inspiration ? Had they 
 any occult significance which a later exegesis must 
 read between the lines ? Was any recondite pi;in- 
 ciple of interpretation, like that of Swedenborg, 
 to be invented, which should extort from them a 
 hidden sense, even a sense contradictory to their 
 obvious reading? Did the full and exact truth 
 require any re-adjustment of their perspective, to 
 be discerned by the profounder insight, or more 
 scholarly criticism, of a coming age ? Did they 
 need any eclipse of their intensity, any obscura- 
 tion of their fiery symbols, to make them true to 
 the ethical instincts of more enlio-htened times ? 
 
 The response we make to all such conceivable 
 hypotheses is, that, if so, we should reasonably 
 look for such supplementary revelations to the 
 writings of this chief apostle of progress and re- 
 form. He was the man to know them, if they 
 were true. He was the man to foresee them, if 
 
St. Paul on Retribution. 73 
 
 they were approaching in the near or distant 
 future. His was the mind to take them in, and 
 appreciate them, if they Avere needful to round 
 out the system of revealed truth. And he was 
 the man of all men to launch them upon the faith 
 of the Christian world. 
 
 Yet again, the conditions of his apostleship 
 were unique. He was a Jew. He had been one 
 of the most rigid believers of the most rigid sect 
 of the Jewish Church, yet he had become the 
 supreme apostle to the Greek and Roman world. 
 From one extreme he had swung over to the 
 other. His mission now was to win to the new 
 religion men whose prepossessions were intensely 
 antagonistic to Jewish traditions. 
 
 He had a delicate task before him, therefore, in 
 his treatment of any thing for which Christianity 
 was indebted to the Hebrew Scriptures. If they 
 had transmitted to it a notion of retribution which 
 was a relic of a semi-barbarous age, it would have 
 been the part of wisdom to let it drop silently 
 into oblivion. If that might not be, he had every 
 inducement to moderate its severity, to strike off 
 the edge of its appeal to enlightened consciences. 
 Above all, he had good reason, if his apostolic lib- 
 erty permitted it, to mitigate the intensity of the 
 symbols of retribution set forth by the authority 
 of One, who, to the classic Greek or Roman mind, 
 was known only as the " crucified Jew." In some 
 way the apostle would have relieved the mordant 
 pungency of the truth, if he could have done so 
 
74 My Study: and Other Essays. 
 
 with fidelity to the Spirit that was in him. " They 
 of Csesar's househokl," some of them of refined 
 culture and noble birth, would have heard from 
 him a tranquil philosophic doctrine of retributive 
 penalty which would have been re-actionary in its 
 relation to that of the ancient Scriptures and of 
 our Lord. 
 
 We now look to discover signs of these varia- 
 tions and improvements upon the earlier records. 
 And what do we find ? Is there a sentence, word, 
 or syllable indicative of a re-actionary movement 
 of the apostle's mind ? We find the main drift of 
 his teachings devoted to the truths needful for the 
 organization of the infant church. His work is 
 largely of the executive order : he builds founda- 
 tions. The elemental doctrines of redemj^tion are 
 unfolded with a fullness and magnificence which 
 make his writings a treasury of Christian thought 
 through all time. Moreover, his instructions in 
 the main are not comminatory: they are cheering 
 and commendatory. Benedictions are thrown out 
 in jets unexpectedly, showing that his mind is full 
 of them. He enters joyously into the spirit of the 
 new religion as a message of hope and gladness. 
 Never is his discourse misanthroj)ic or ascetic. 
 His life is a soldier's march of conquest, and his 
 anticipation of its close a song of triumph. And 
 what his personal faith is, that also is the spirit of 
 his ministry. 
 
 But what of the world of eternal loss, to which 
 Christ had but a few years before given such aj)- 
 
St. Paul on Retribution. 75 
 
 palling vividness? What has this hopeful, pro- 
 gressive, exultant, triumphant apostle to say of it ? 
 We find that feature of our Saviour's teaching 
 treated by St. Paul as men are wont to treat a 
 truth which has reached its maturity, and is now 
 full grown, and fixed beyond debate. He accepts 
 it as serenely as our Lord delivered it. He adds 
 nothing, abstracts nothing, changes nothing. He 
 explains nothing, proves nothing, vindicates noth- 
 ing. He handles it as a truth which has passed 
 beyond the stage of apology or defense. It is 
 embedded in the groundwork of his theology. 
 He has now only to build upon it as a foundation, 
 and to use it as a moral force in his practical 
 instructions. It is he who says in the tone of 
 assured faith, '^ Knowing the terrors of the Lord, 
 we persuade men." 
 
 How is it that other men are accustomed to 
 treat principles or facts which have crystallized 
 in a system of general belief or of social order? 
 They treat them chiefly by casual allusion : they 
 put them to use in practical affairs, not pausing to 
 prove or to defend them. In our jurisprudence, 
 for instance, the principles most firmly rooted in 
 civilized government find no statement in statute- 
 books. They exist unwritten, as common law: 
 they are recognized as authorities by courts and 
 juries. Men build empires and republics upon 
 them without once putting them into written 
 speech. So, in ordinary life, usages and prece- 
 dents which have the j)^estige of the common 
 
76 My Study : and Other Essays. 
 
 consent, we do not constantly re-affirm and vindi- 
 cate. We take them for granted. We speak of 
 them allusively. Our discourse about them is 
 fragmentary. We use them as things which no- 
 body assails, because nobody denies. Nobody asks 
 for proof, because nobody doubts. 
 
 Thus it is that St. Paul handles the retributive 
 teachings of the elder Scriptures. He treats them 
 mainly by allusion here and there. He assumes 
 them, hints at them, gives a glimpse of them, and 
 passes on. But never are they contradicted : never 
 are they blinked or evaded. He does not ignore 
 our Lord's most terrific symbol of them. He ap- 
 plies them to the demands of his case in hand with 
 the same calmness of assurance with which Christ 
 proclaimed them. No more here than there do 
 we find apology or argument or reserve of truth. 
 Never by a word, or by silence, or by speech 
 askance, is the idea suggested of any possible mis- 
 understanding of those symbols. He says nothing 
 to arouse a suspicion that they may not mean 
 what they seem to mean. Still less is any hint 
 given of their retraction or displacement by later 
 revelations, or their obsolescence through unfitness 
 to later ages. 
 
 We find nothing, for example, in the apostle's 
 theologic temper corresponding to that suspense 
 of faith in which infirm believers search for some 
 j^ossible loophole of escape from the obvious mean- 
 ing of our Lord's discourse. St. Paul is the syno- 
 nym of courage. He is a man of positive ideas. 
 
St. Paul on Retribution. 77 
 
 What he believes, he knows. His theology con- 
 tains no half-truths. His words suggest no lurking 
 doubts underneath. As on all other themes, so 
 on this of retributive decrees, his deliverances are 
 those of a believer who has no misgivings. The 
 words, "know," "knowing," and their correlatives, 
 are favorites in his vocabulary. More than one 
 hundred times they occur, and generally in such 
 connections that their force is intensive. So it is 
 that positive men put their case, and so it is that 
 this most positive of men puts the fact of retri- 
 bution. " Knowing the terrors of the Lord," he 
 says what it is given him to say. 
 
 Theologians may be classified as the men who 
 believe, and the men who know. St. Paul belonged 
 pre-eminently to the latter class. In the Koran, 
 it is said that the word " assuredly " sometimes 
 stands in the original as a sentence by itself. 
 Mahomet, like all predestinarians, was an assured 
 thinker. He had no doubts : he believed in his 
 religion when he alone believed it. This is the 
 style of mind which St. Paul represented. The 
 tone of unqualified assurance runs through all his 
 teachings on the subject of retribution. 
 
 \Ye run the eye at random over the pages most 
 dense with the Pauline theology, and we find in 
 broadcast those allusive fragments of speech which 
 form the boldest utterances of truth, because they 
 are the words of a mind consolidated in its convic- 
 tions, and at ease from doubts. We catch them in 
 glimpses like these ; viz., " The Lord Jesus re- 
 
78 My Study: and Other Essays, 
 
 vealed in flaming fire." "Taking vengeance on 
 them that know not God." " That all might be 
 damned who believe not the trnth." " Tribula- 
 tion and anguish upon every soul that doeth evil." 
 "Enemies of Christ whose end is destruction." 
 " The wrath of God revealed from heaven." 
 " Fearful looking for of judgment and fiery indig- 
 nation." " A fearful thing to fall into the hands 
 of the living God." " God is a consuming fire." 
 
 Such is the method chiefly of the Pauline records 
 in handling the fact of retribution. By allusion 
 here, and by partial statement there, and undoubt- 
 ing utterance everywhere, the apostle throws out 
 retributive ideas as if they were a thing of course, 
 and would carry their own authority. No more 
 to him than to our Lord does it seem to occur that 
 the appalling truth needs vindication, or that it 
 will shock a loyal conscience. He uses it without 
 reserve or cautious speech as a thing fixed and 
 familiar in the beliefs of men. He uses it as men 
 use the rainfalls and the tides. That men profess- 
 ing to believe in the inspiration of St. Paul, should, 
 in the face of these records, believe also that end- 
 less retribution can not exist in the universe of 
 God, or that it can not be inflicted for the sins 
 of this life, is an astounding phenomenon in the 
 history of religious faith. Even a doubt or a hypo- 
 thetical belief on the subject by such a believer is 
 a sign of an erratic mind. 
 
 For the sake of the contrast, let us, for the 
 moment, make the Pauline theology on this theme 
 
St. Paul on Retribution, 79 
 
 hypothetical. Let us contrive to relax the posi- 
 tiveness of the Pauline style of discussion in the 
 glimpses it gives of retributive penalties. Put 
 into it hints of the doubts and the half-beliefs and 
 the hy23otheses of suspended faith by which modern 
 theology is often enervated. How do such frag- 
 mentary Scriptures as these read ? viz., " If the 
 Lord should be revealed in flaming fire." " Per- 
 haps taking vengeance on them that know not 
 God." '•^ Per adventure that they might be damned 
 who believe not." " Tribulation and anguish may 
 come upon souls that do evil." " Enemies of 
 Christ whose end possibly is destruction." " Ves- 
 sels of wrath probably fitted for destruction." " If 
 the wrath of God sJiould be revealed from heaven." 
 " W7io hioivs but that God is a consuming fire ? " 
 "We conjecture that fearful looking for of judg- 
 ment may remain." " Siij)pose that it be a fearful 
 thing to fall into the hands of God." " Suspecting 
 the terrors of the Lord." 
 
 Put an "if" before, and an "if" behind, and 
 scatter "ifs" all through this Pauline theology, 
 and how does it match what we know of the Paul- 
 ine character ? Has it the sound of apostolic sua- 
 sion ? Has it the ring of inspired speech ? Who 
 would ever be moved by it to fear the wrath of an 
 offended God ? Yet is it not a fair expression of 
 the dubious and volatile faith with which many 
 in our day are dallying with the stupendous veri- 
 ties of biblical retribution ? Is it not the kind of 
 inspired Scriptures required by that state of mind 
 
80 My Study: and Other Essays, 
 
 in which men come to the Word of God prepos- 
 sessed with the conviction that a retributive the- 
 ology is not to be found there, must not be found 
 there, because of the debilitated " ethical instincts " 
 which can not bear a disclosure of the indignation 
 of God against sin? 
 
 Fragmentary allusion and practical assumption, 
 however, are not all that the Pauline theology 
 advances concerning retributive truth. We find 
 two distinct affirmations which have great signifi- 
 cance in the framework of the retributive senti- 
 ment as it appears in apostolic thinking. 
 
 One is the positive declaration that life in this 
 world without a knowledge of Christ constitutes 
 an adequate probation, — adequate for the purposes 
 of a fixed destiny in eternity. In the first chapter 
 of the Epistle to the Romans, the chief premise, 
 w^ithout which the argument amounts to nothing, 
 is the sufficiency of the light of nature to give 
 to the heathen conscience a knowledge of God. 
 Then, it must be sufficient, and the apostle assumes 
 this, to give an equitable moral trial. The whole 
 force of that magnificent reasoning is invalid, ex- 
 cept on the assumption that men ignorant of the 
 Christian faith have an equitable trial. In the 
 dialect of the world, they have a "fair chance." 
 Even under the moral obliquities of hereditary 
 paganism, man, so long as the stars glisten, and 
 the sun rises, and the rivers flow, has that above 
 and around him which proves to him a living God. 
 
 No example of pagan character could be a fairer 
 
St. Paul on Retribution, 81 
 
 test of the question than that which St. Paul had 
 before him in the Roman civilization. If that ex- 
 ample could not test it, none could. Yet he gives 
 his verdict with no intimation of a doubt or an 
 exception. Man without Christ can know God. 
 The proof is ample. The force of it is patent to 
 his every sense. If he refuses to know God, he is 
 without excuse. If he is incorrigible in that re- 
 fusal, his damnation is just. The indignation of 
 God is righteously displayed in his destruction. 
 The apostle puts it in no siken speech. "Is 
 God unrighteous who taketh vengeance? God 
 forbid!" 
 
 If the Pauline idea of retributive decrees had 
 been purposely so developed as to forestall the 
 modern objection to their infliction on men who 
 have not known and rejected Christ, it could not 
 have achieved that purpose more explicitly or 
 conclusively. That punishment can not be justly 
 inflicted on sinners outside of a Christocentric 
 system of probation, certainly never entered the 
 mind of the author of the Epistle to the Romans. 
 
 The other declaration, equally significant, is to 
 the same purpose. It is that a knowledge of 
 Christ aggravates the retributive experience of 
 those who know and reject Him. That is to say, 
 so far is it from being essential to the equity of 
 moral trial that men must be put into the Chris- 
 tian range of belief and opportunity, that the 
 working of such privilege, if abused, is to augment 
 both guilt and penalty already incurred. The 
 
82 My Study: and Other Essays, 
 
 Epistle to the Hebrews, whoever was its author, 
 may be fairly taken as a representative of the 
 Pauline theology. Its argument turns in part on 
 this pivot : "Of how much sorer punishment shall 
 he be thought worthy who hath trodden under 
 foot the Son of God ! " 
 
 Although the apostle is not contrasting here the 
 light of nature and the light of revelation, yet he 
 distinctly recognizes the principle that probation 
 is a matter of degrees. This, in its bearing on the 
 subject in hand, can mean but one thing. Chris- 
 tian birth and training do not create the probation 
 to which man is subjected here. They intensify 
 that probation. The rejection of the Christian 
 offer of salvation does not create the doom of in- 
 corrigible guilt, nor is it essential to the justice of 
 that doom. It aggravates both the guilt and its 
 penal consequences. 
 
 Two distinct systems of moral trial are here 
 going on. One is superinduced upon the other. 
 The light of nature illumines the one : the light of 
 revelation illumines the other. Each is complete 
 in its way. Trial under either is perfect in its 
 kind. Guilt under either is proportioned to its 
 conditions. Punishment under either is graduated 
 to guilt. Thus the Pauline conception of retribu- 
 tive inflictions comes into exact line with the 
 teachings of the elder Scriptures and with the 
 disclosures of our Lord. Starting from different 
 points of departure, they all converge to one result ; 
 viz., that retribution commensurate with guilt in 
 
St Paul on Retribution, 83 
 
 degree and in duration is a law of the moral uni- 
 verse which the retributive sentiment in the mind 
 of God requires. It is a law, therefore, to which 
 minds loyal to God take no exception, and ascribe 
 no wrong. 
 
vni. 
 
 CORRECTIVES OF THE POPULAR FAITH IN 
 RETRIBUTION. 
 
 PART I. 
 
 The biblical idea and the popular idea of retri- 
 bution are wide apart. To assimilate the two, the 
 23opular idea needs certain corrective and tonic 
 appliances, which, for the most part, are seldom 
 thought of. 
 
 1. One is a more distinct recognition of the 
 infirmity under which the human mind labors in 
 forming a judgment of the retributive element 
 in the government of God. Conscience once un- 
 balanced by the overweight of wrong, tends to an 
 underestimate of the wrong. It inclines to dis- 
 placency towards the whole working of moral 
 government which condemns and punishes wrong. 
 Conscience thus distorted is like the needle de- 
 flected by a disturbing magnet. 
 
 Such is the condition of the human mind in 
 forming its ideas of retributive suffering. Man is 
 not an impartial judge of God in this thing. We 
 live under violated law. Our life is an interval 
 of reprieve between sentence and execution. We 
 
 84 
 
The Popular Faith in Ret^'ihution, 85 
 
 naturally feel repugnance to both, and to tlie law 
 which demands them. Our instinct is to assume 
 an attitude of glum resistance. This matures into 
 defiance. We fling our concentrated and angered 
 will against the will of God. The old couplet, — 
 
 " N"o man e'er felt the halter draw, 
 With good opinion of the law," 
 
 expresses in homely phrase the natural mood of 
 man towards comminatory decrees. We under- 
 rate the evil of sin. We gloss it over with smooth 
 vocabulary. We expurgate from our dialect the 
 words most expressive of its enormity. We in- 
 fold it in the contradictions of fatalistic philosophy. 
 When nothing else will do, we laugh at it. A 
 multitude of the facts and fancies on which the 
 risible faculties of men disport themselves are vaga- 
 ries of sin. Probably more than half of the moni- 
 tions of awakened consciences are drowned in 
 laughter. The laugh of guilt is as distinct from 
 that of innocent amusement as that of insanity. 
 
 We calumniate the divine government of sin. 
 We call penalty vengeance, and law tyranny. We 
 disguise transgression into a shadow of virtue. 
 This is a world of men and women in masks. Lit- 
 erature paints vice as force of character. Poetry 
 makes heroes of vile men. When will the world 
 decide upon Milton's Satan, whether to hate him, 
 or to admire? In popular fiction, it is the dull 
 men who pray : the geniuses drink hard and swear. 
 Mother-wit is oftener profane than reverent. Phi- 
 
86 My Study: and Other Essays. 
 
 losophy follows in the same track. It indulges in 
 wire-drawn speculations upon the consistency of 
 penal justice with benevolence, till the old, plain, 
 homespun notion of guilt is '' in wandering mazes 
 lost." Milton hinted at a profound truth when he 
 remanded such speculations to the world of Pan- 
 demonium. In the ultimate issue, the whole idea 
 of retributive inflictions becomes abhorrent to our 
 silken tastes. We jump to conclusions which de- 
 throne God. Then what ? 
 
 This deterioration of moral sense needs to be 
 reversed. We need to go back to the beginning, 
 and start anew, taking God's idea of retribution 
 as our model. There is in every erect conscience 
 an element of robustness which does not flinch at 
 the spectacle of pain inflicted on wrong. Shak- 
 speare has the opposite weakness in mind when he 
 makes Hamlet, in self-reproach for not having 
 avenged his father's murder, say, "I am pigeon- 
 livered, and lack gall." We are all " pigeon-liv- 
 ered" in our natural mood towards the penal 
 consequences of sin. Guilt enervates our moral 
 judgments. On no other subject of human thought 
 do we need more profoundly the tonic of moral 
 sympathy with God. 
 
 2. Further, for truthful convictions on this sub- 
 ject, we need a cordial recognition of the intrinsic 
 excellence of the retributive sentiment in a right 
 mind. This is the vital point of our departure 
 from the divine ideal in this thing. We repel 
 from us the retributive idea because we mask it in 
 
The Popular Faith in Retribution, 87 
 
 unrighteousness. We make wrong right, and right 
 wrong ; evil good, and good evil. That which in 
 the divine government is vindicative of right, we 
 degrade into the vindictive. The fragment of a 
 syllable may be the pivot on which our thought 
 turns into hostility to one of the most amiable 
 attributes of the divine character. That senti- 
 ment which uplifts holy minds into adoring song 
 in view of God's judgments, is the sense of the 
 intrinsic excellence of retributive dealings with 
 sin. 
 
 What is sin in the last analysis? It is pure 
 malignity. It ripens into malign passion towards 
 God. This is the germ and the efflorescence and 
 the fruitage of it. The retributive sentiment in 
 all right minds is the opposite to this. It is noth- 
 ing else than an instinctive antagonism to malign 
 character. It is hatred of that which hates God. 
 Its assumption is, that it is right to punish that 
 which hates God, and that in the nature of things 
 such punishment is a necessity. Like all other 
 right things, righteous punishment is intrinsically 
 good. Minds loyal to God approve it, delight in 
 it, find in it a profound satisfaction to something 
 within them which refuses to be at peace without 
 it. Pure justice is pure benevolence. Justice 
 and love are twin stars of a binary constellation, 
 in which each revolves at the bidding of the other. 
 This Avas the sentiment Avhich inspired the impre- 
 catory Psalms. This it is that inspires gratulatory 
 song in heaven in view of God's retributive deal- 
 
88 My Study : and Other Essays. 
 
 ing with guilt. To hate guilt, or to hate God, this 
 is the alternative. To punish guilt, or to anni- 
 hilate God, this is the dilemma. Sin matured 
 brings these intense extremes into contrast and col- 
 lision, and the loyalty of right minds in heaven 
 or on earth does Hot waver in its choice. 
 
 In certain conditions of things in this world, we 
 all feel the excellence of retribution. Exigencies 
 occur, in which, with the whole concentrated force 
 of our being, we exult in retributive inflictions. 
 Head Milton's sonnet on the slaughter in Pied- 
 mont : — 
 
 " Avenge, O Lord! thy slaughtered saints, whose bones 
 Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold!" 
 
 What is the meaning of the passionate appeals 
 to Heaven, of which all free literatures are full, 
 for the justice of an avenging Power to fall on 
 tyrants ? Are they all delusions ? Are they inhu- 
 man and malign ? If they are, the best poetry in 
 history is a cheat. We must expurgate our li- 
 braries, and commit their noblest treasures to the 
 flames. What means that human instinct of all 
 nations and ages, which voiced itself in Hebrew 
 jurisprudence, " Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by 
 man shall his blood be shed " ? 
 
 " For murder-stroke shall murder-stroke be paid." 
 
 Come down to the trasfedies of common life and 
 recent history. When Jesse Pomeroy allured a 
 little ghi to a desolate spot, and there, while she 
 
The Popular Faith in Retribution. 89 
 
 begged for life and mother, mangled her hands 
 and face with a shoemaker's knife in malign blood- 
 thirst, and then murdered his victim to hide his 
 crime, what said the public sentiment of Massa- 
 chusetts? Did not something in us all — man, 
 woman, and child — rise up, and demand the pun- 
 ishment of the wretch ? We called him miscreant, 
 brute, wild beast, fiend. No superlatives could 
 exaggerate our indignation. The Sovereign State 
 sprang to its feet to crush him. That on a dimin- 
 utive scale was the retributive sentiment in right- 
 eous outburst. 
 
 When we read Motley's story of the Nether- 
 lands, and image to ourselves the scene of men 
 burning, women buried alive, and children tossed 
 from bayonet to bayonet, for Avorshiping the God 
 of their fathers, do we not refuse to be at peace 
 till our indignation is in some way appeased ? The 
 doctrine of a day of judgment becomes an exceed- 
 ing comfort. " There are Scriptures Avritten in- 
 visibly on men's hearts which do not come out till 
 they are enraged." They become legible only 
 under the white-heat of moral wrath. 
 
 When the sentiment of judicial anger is thus 
 set aflame, we all understand the imprecatory 
 Psalms. We are not squeamish in their interpre- 
 tation, lest their severity might shock velvet tastes. 
 We read them with eyes like steel. They say 
 what we feel as nothing else does, and we under- 
 stand why they are inserted in the Word of God. 
 We thank God for the prophetic glimpse they 
 
90 My Study: and Other Essays. 
 
 give us of a day of reckoning when things will 
 be balanced. 
 
 It is recorded of the Rev. John Ryland, an 
 English dissenting clergyman, that on one occa- 
 sion he listened to a recital of the horrors of the 
 slave-trade. He was so overAvhelmed by the story 
 of the "middle passage," that he lost his self- 
 control. He paced the floor in an almost frantic 
 agony of indignation, and exclaimed, " O God ! 
 preserve me. O God ! preserve me." At length 
 the cultured reverence of years gave way : proba- 
 bly the profane habits of his youth came back like 
 a flood upon him. He broke out into a volley of 
 imprecations upon the perpetrators of such out- 
 rages upon God and man. Can we find it in our 
 hearts to blame him ? 
 
 This is the retributive sentiment. Do we not 
 revere the man who feels it, more than the man 
 whose frigid soul is void of it? Who feels respect 
 for the paralytic sensibilities which condemn it? 
 Grant that it is a perilous virtue : still it is a virtue. 
 Under the restrictions of right conscience, it is a 
 noble thing to feel and to obey. A late writer, in 
 describing the person of Daniel Webster in mo- 
 ments of oratorical passion, speaks of his " splendid 
 wrath," in which " his eyes became lamps." Just 
 that is the sense of retributive justice when it 
 is set on fire by a great wrong. No government 
 void of it is either great or wise or good. In the 
 administration of a holy government, like that of 
 God, it is pure benevolence — that, nothing less. 
 
The Popular Faith in Retrihution. 91 
 
 He would be less than Gocl if lie did not feel it : 
 we are less than men if we do not reverently sym- 
 pathize Avith Him in it. Until we can do this, our 
 whole conception and judgment of eternal retribu- 
 tion inflicted on eternal guilt will be twisted awry. 
 Our puny impulses of compassion for the guilty 
 will set themselves against His grand, robust be- 
 nevolence. We shall find ourselves resisting with 
 maudlin tears that which the great Heart of the 
 universe approves exultingly. 
 
 3. Another corrective of our views of the retrib- 
 utive element in the divine government is a more 
 adequate conviction than that which commonly ex- 
 ists of the freedom and sovereignty of the human 
 will. Here, perhaps, is the point of supreme weak- 
 ness in the moral convictions of men. It is made 
 such by two prolific sources of evil. One is, that 
 sin itself tends to enervate man's consciousness 
 that he is free. The freedom is in him, sovereign 
 and intact, under any accumulations of depravity : 
 but the consciousness of it is debilitated ; and the 
 evidence of the fact, therefore, from that source is 
 impaired. Men read it awry, and sometimes back- 
 ward or upside down, — in any way that shall 
 confute conscience, or give it the lie. 
 
 The other evil is, that we have inherited from 
 the past an immense legacy of fatalistic philosophy. 
 Pagan theology is the science of "the Fates." 
 Heathen poetry celebrates resistless destiny. The 
 tragedies of JEschylus recognize no superior divin- 
 ity. Our English literature is pervaded with 
 
92 My Study : and Other Essays, 
 
 the notion tliat sin is a constitutional disease. 
 Guilt shares responsibility with ill-luck. As Lord 
 Byron puts it, "Man is an unlucky rascal." 
 Christian theology, all along the line of its his- 
 tory, has had to contend with this inherited 
 tyranny of fatalism. Our old historic creeds, 
 which contain the best thought of Christian ages, 
 bear scars significant of the conflict. Some of 
 them jump the difficulty by flat contradictions. 
 Slowly and with militant tread has the truth of 
 the freedom of the will toiled up the highway 
 of our modern faith. Not yet even has it laid off 
 its coat of mail. 
 
 Meanwhile, other central truths of our theology 
 have been kept in practical abeyance by the want 
 of an uncompromising conviction of the sover- 
 eignty of the human will over belief, over conduct, 
 over character, over every thing that makes a man, 
 and therefore over destiny. One illustration of 
 this is, that the moral glory of retribution has 
 been, and is still, under an eclipse. We behold it 
 through clouds and darkness. If sin is a joredes- 
 tined necessity, to punish it would be infinitely 
 more criminal than the sin. If temptation rises 
 above the level of will-power, and drowns it out, 
 or even momentarily submerges it, so that the 
 consciousness of its supremacy expires", sin, inider 
 such conditions, is no more sin. Penalty for crime 
 in such circumstances is malevolent torture. Llan 
 thus caught in the toils of fate is no more a sinner, 
 but a victim. Inherited depravity, if it could 
 
The Popular Faith in Retrihution. 93 
 
 exist, would be only inherited misfortune. Inher- 
 ited degeneracy does exist, and that is misfortune. 
 Inherited depravity is quite another thing. The 
 damnation of a soul for it would be an outrage 
 upon the moral sense of the universe : it would 
 exalt the sufferer to the rank of martyr. He 
 would be the superior of his judge. Moral gov- 
 ernment built on such acts of retribution would 
 be the supreme of all tragedies. It would be the 
 government of a malignant God. 
 
 It must have been some such notion as this of 
 man's lapsed estate, that led Carlyle to say in one 
 of his cynical moods, " If hell must be dared, it 
 must." Under the tyranny of such a faith, we 
 must all say it in sheer resistance to despair. 
 Faith in such a government of the world, admin- 
 istered by an almighty Being, would be enough to 
 make it a world of maniacs. No man ever real- 
 ized its existence, and lived. John Foster, by a 
 false theology at this point, was driven to falsify 
 his faith at other points. As the bulging of an 
 elastic ball at one spot compels compensatory in- 
 dentation at another, so in the structure of a man's 
 moral beliefs, excess here necessitates deficiency 
 there. Fatality in guilt compels the denial of 
 retribution. 
 
 Our popular theology to-day is suffering im- 
 mensely, yet to the believers unconsciously, from 
 the causes here indicated. Men are making light 
 of sin because they more than half believe that 
 they can not help it. They are " unlucky rascals," 
 
94 My Study : and Other Essays. 
 
 and their ill-luck has to bear the brunt of the ras- 
 cality. Men who are standing on the confines of 
 the world of woe, and are slowly ripening for its 
 demonized society, are thinking very well of them- 
 selves because false teaching, seconded by self-pity, 
 has persuaded them that they are doing about as 
 well as they can do. Man is frail ; it is human to 
 err ; who is he that sinneth not ? Men are more 
 sinned against than sinning ; sin is the heritage of 
 an unbalanced brain ; the fathers have eaten sour 
 grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge ; 
 certainty is the equivalent of necessity ; who ever 
 acted the contrary? Thus men reason when hard 
 pressed by an accusing conscience. In certain 
 moral exigencies we are all Mohammedans. " It 
 is kismet — what can we do ? " Even our charity in 
 judgment of others, we turn into self-justification 
 in judging ourselves. 
 
 Accordingly, penal justice, when we face it as 
 a sure reality, loses its divine radiance ; and we 
 think of it, not as justice inflicted on the guilty, 
 but as misfortune heaped upon the weak. Half 
 the human race, more or less, must have another 
 probation because they are so unlucky in this. 
 Another world must give compensation for their 
 faring so hardly here. To our distempered vision, 
 eternal pains inflicted upon such " miserable sin- 
 ners " would be eternal despotism. Shall not the 
 Judge of all the earth do right? 
 
 There is a vast amount of this sophisticated rea- 
 soning grumbling in the popular theology against 
 
The Popular Faith in Retribution. 95 
 
 the faith of oiir fathers. Good and able men, too, 
 are drifting into sympathy with these vagaries 
 through the force of amiable sensibilities. They 
 are duped by a craving for an -^olian theology. 
 They are unconscious of the fatal hurt they are 
 doing to minds less intelligent, and consciences 
 less pure, than theirs. 
 
 As a partial corrective of all this, we need to 
 tone up our faith in the absolute sovereignty of 
 the human will. Never under any conceivable 
 conditions is sin a misfortune only : the instant 
 that it becomes that, it is no more sin. A just 
 God never damned a soul for moral disease, and 
 never will. He will as soon send a man to hell for 
 a dislocated hip or an infirm memory. AVill in man, 
 within the range ordained for its free action, is as 
 autocratic as will in God. To a being with such 
 a lordly endowment, probationary existence any- 
 where, so far as we know, is a fair trial. Around 
 the universe he would carrj^ his destiny with him. 
 He has that in his possession wdiich no power but 
 his own can crush. Every human soul is a moral 
 Gibraltar : its conquest is impossible but from 
 within. God never touches it, or permits tempta- 
 tion to touch it, in such manner as to paralyze its 
 supremacy. " God will not suffer you to be 
 tempted above that ye are able." When Satan 
 was permitted to try the moral temper of Job, the 
 Lord said, "He is in thine hand, but save his 
 life." So in every instance of temptation, there 
 is one thing which God holds in impregnable 
 
96 My Study : and Other Essays. 
 
 reserve. Next to His own sovereignty, He prizes 
 that of every being made in His own image. From 
 the archangel to a new-born infant, He guards that 
 jewel as the apple of his eye. If wrong were done 
 to its integrity, the universe would be shattered 
 into chaos. 
 
 Guilt, therefore, is guilt. It is not misfortune ; 
 it is not ill-luck ; it is not imbecility ; it is not dis- 
 ease ; it is not want of moral balance ; it is not 
 inherited depravity ; it is not fate ; it is guilt pure 
 and simple. Any trial consistent with a man's 
 moral freedom, so far as we know, is a fair trial. 
 If a man has more than that, he has more than 
 justice : it is grace. Up to the full extent of 
 conscious wrong, a man is damnable. Fate is for 
 idiots. The soul that sinneth, it shall die. This 
 is justice. It is not justice with a reservation : it 
 Injustice full and absolute. Being just, it is glori- 
 ous and divine : it partakes of God's infinite ma- 
 jesty. It is one of those ultimate ideas, beyond or 
 above which human thought can conceive of noth- 
 ing more pure or more sublime. Yet this is the 
 retributive element in God's government. If it is 
 not right, nothing is right. If it is not a fit theme 
 of exulting song, the universe does not contain 
 such in all its history. 
 
IX. 
 
 CORRECTIVES OF THE POPULAR FAITH IN 
 RETRIBUTION. 
 
 PART II. 
 
 It was observed in the preceding essay, that we 
 need rectified conceptions of tlie sovereignty of 
 the human will to create an adequate idea of 
 the malign nature of sin. Whoever originated the 
 saying, '' It was worse than a crime : it was a 
 blunder," betrayed the atomic notion of sin, which, 
 for the most part, rules the popular morals. As if 
 any thing could be worse than a crime except a 
 blacker crime ! It was a pagan thought. Under 
 its illusions, men find food for comedy in sin's va- 
 garies. Profane men coin sneers and jokes out of 
 the words which express it and its doom. Why is 
 it, that, in certain strata of society, force of utter- 
 ance is appreciated in no other forms ? Why is it, 
 that, on the platform, nothing else is so sure to 
 command the applause of a popular audience as 
 an oath? The more irreverent it is, the more 
 delectable. 
 
 This is sometimes illustrated where we least 
 expect it. On one occasion, Ralph Waldo Emer- 
 
 97 
 
98 My Study: and Other Essays, 
 
 son was lecturing in Boston ; and for a half-liour 
 they found nothing in his refined speculations to 
 respond to with those signs of approval which a 
 popular assembly loves so well. At length he 
 exploded one of his inimitable antitheses, of which 
 the latter clause was, "Damn George Washington." 
 That his audience understood, and they gave hiin 
 their applause. It was not the name, it was not 
 any very definite notion of the thing, it was noth- 
 ing but the word which tickled their frivolous 
 irreverence. If he had said, "Damn the North 
 Pole," the effect would have been the same ; and 
 if he had quoted the favorite anathema of sailors, 
 it would probably have been doubled. 
 
 Indeed, the popular sentiment goes to a greater 
 extreme. There is a prepossession for wickedness 
 in the world which makes it an essential element 
 of a manly character. Alfieri said, " The crimes 
 of Italy are proof of the superiority of the stock." 
 We find a similar idea in Shakspeare : — 
 
 " Best men are molded out of faults, 
 And for the most become the better 
 For being a little bad." 
 
 The collateral evidences of human depravity are 
 nowhere more glaring than in the arts of self- 
 delusion by which we cover up from the vision 
 of our oAvn consciences the blackness of darkness 
 and the weird, chaotic damnation involved in the 
 very nature of this colossal evil which we call sin. 
 Common life is yet immensely below the level 
 
The Popular Faith in Retrihution, 99 
 
 of Scriptural thought m its average conceptions of 
 this thing. 
 
 Yet it deserves remark, that literature often 
 gives the lie to this popular ' delusion. What is 
 the literary idea of sin as represented in the best 
 works of human genius? When genius would 
 portray in fiction the interior working of a great 
 crime in a human soul, it falls back approximately 
 upon the biblical idea. It reproduces some resem- 
 blance to the teaching of St. Paul. Witness the 
 whole history of tragedy from Sophocles to Shak- 
 speare. Shakspeare's Lady Macbeth suffers the 
 biblical "wrath of God." In the modern romance, 
 so far as imagination is successful in awakening the 
 response of the human heart to its descriptions of 
 crime, it works in the line of inspired thought. 
 Genius paints guilt as carrying within itself the 
 penal fires which inspiration represents God as 
 inflicting. In one respect, indeed, the literary idea 
 surpasses that of biblical inspiration. It is a mer- 
 ciless idea. It leaves guilt in solitary helplessness 
 to its self-wrought retributions. It knows no 
 such thing as forgiveness; finds no place in the 
 system for atonement ; discovers no remedial or 
 compensatory expedients. Once guilty, for ever 
 guilty, and for ever doomed — this is the verdict 
 of the literary instinct in its portraiture of guilt 
 at its maturity. Look at Hawthorne's description 
 of its working in the " Marble Faun." Nowhere 
 in the Scriptures do you find a conception so 
 merciless and maleficent. 
 
100 My Study: and Other Essays, 
 
 In Hawthorne's theology, even the knowledge 
 of another's crmie miparts to an innocent looker- 
 on some of the elements of inevitable doom. He 
 says, '' Every crime destroys more Edens than its 
 own. While there is a single guilty being in the 
 universe, each innocent one must be tortured by 
 that guilt." Again, he paints " the chill and heavy 
 misery which only the innocent can experience, 
 though it possesses many of the characteristics 
 that mark the sense of guilt." Again, describing 
 the remorse of Hilda for the crime of Miriam, he 
 tells of her " heart-sickness, her dismal certainty 
 of the existence of evil, her awful loneliness in 
 her secret knowledge of the crime." "It envel- 
 oped her whithersoever she went." It created a 
 '' chill dungeon which kept her in its gray twilight, 
 and fed her with its unwholesome air, fit only for 
 a criminal to breathe and pine in. She could not 
 escape it. In the effort to do so, she stumbled 
 ever and again over this deadly idea of mortal 
 guilt. Poor sufferer for another's sin ! " 
 
 Such is guilt as genius paints it. Such are its 
 appalling ravages when unrelieved by remedial 
 devices. Link, now, with the biblical idea of retri- 
 bution, Hawthorne's idea of incorrigible and hope- 
 less sin, and where can you find in the Scriptures 
 any symbol of an eternal hell which appears unna- 
 tural or inhuman? The two things germinate and 
 grow together, like to like, with hideous affinity. 
 They are in exact keeping. Each necessitates the 
 other. No such suffering can exist without its 
 
The Popular Faith in Retrihution. 101 
 
 antecedent guilt : no such guilt can exist without 
 its compensatory suffering. This is the working, 
 not alone of genius rioting in a fictitious world : it 
 is the working of all deep and intense natures 
 which have brought a Christian conscience to bear 
 upon the awful problem of the existence of evil. 
 Human nature everywhere, sitting in judgment 
 upon it, pronounces it to be true. 
 
 4. Yet another corrective which the popular 
 notion of retribution needs, is a more profound 
 recognition of the impracticable nature of sin 
 under a government of moral freedom. 
 
 In a moral being, the range of sin is bounded 
 only by the range of faculty. Whatever he can be 
 as a moral being in point of magnitude or versatile 
 capacity, that he can be in the magnitude and ver- 
 satility of guilt. All there is of him is free to 
 sin. From this, it follows that one of the most 
 profound problems of moral government, perhaps 
 to Infinite Wisdom the most profound, is, ''What 
 to do with guilt?" If it were subject to govern- 
 ment by mechanical forces, the problem might be 
 soon solved. It might be crushed as by an earth- 
 quake, or exploded like dynamite ; and, fearful as 
 the ruin might be, that might be the end of it. It 
 might go into history as a past, and by and by a 
 forgotten, catastrophe. Human government might 
 rid itself of crime by the extermination of crimi- 
 nals the world over. The tramp of a million 
 armed men has stamped out rebellion in a prov- 
 ince, and it has been heard of no more. Substitute 
 
102 My Study: and Other Essays. 
 
 the scaffold for the penitentiary, and the peniten- 
 tiaries might be vacant in a month. Human rulers 
 have sometimes approximated the policy of exter- 
 mination in the sanguinary severity of their crimi- 
 nal codes, and the savagery of the usages of war. 
 But the moral sense of the world has protested; 
 and the more sensitive it has become to the sacred- 
 ness of human life, the more intricate has the 
 problem grown, " What shall we do with crime ? " 
 Take but a solitary case. Are not all humane 
 governments at their wit's end in devising ade- 
 quate restraints of the crime of wife-beating? It 
 is assuming, in our days, the dignity of a triumph- 
 ant and unmanageable outrage on civilization, 
 which law can neither prevent nor adequately 
 punish. What is the meaning of the blunt pro- 
 posal here and there, to restore the old element of 
 torture to the criminal code for the punishment 
 of this crime ? The nineteenth century looks 
 back helplessly to the ninth. Is it not a confession 
 that we do not know what else to do ? Crime is 
 for ever taking on forms which balk the devices 
 of corrective justice. Our boasted advances in 
 science and invention redouble the resources of 
 guilt to war on mankind. " Dynamite-fiends " set 
 thrones tottering, and nations trembling ; and they 
 laugh at law when it w^ould lay hands upon them. 
 There seems to be no end to this conflict of sin 
 with social order. Humanity goes down in the 
 struggle. Human nature cries out for vengeance, 
 and wise men are dumb. 
 
The Popular Faith in Retribution. 103 
 
 The perplexity is not restricted to the control 
 of gross and brutal crimes. It runs a tangled 
 thread through the unwritten laws and amenities 
 of social life. Why is it that a subtile law of eti- 
 quette commands su^^pression of conversation on 
 personal religion unless some hint has been given 
 that it will not be unwelcome? It is because 
 religious thought, the instant that it assumes a 
 personal bearing, runs against a universal con- 
 sciousness of wrong. Personal religion in every 
 mind starts with the idea of sin. Therefore it 
 disturbs equipoise of feeling. Generally it is un- 
 welcome. It is the key to a dark and secret history. 
 Men are shy of it. They do not know what to 
 do with it. Guilt is coiled up beliind it ; and men 
 do not know what to say of that, or what to do 
 with it. Everywhere present in the lair of human 
 consciousness is this untamed sense of wrong. 
 Our human instinct is to bury it in silence, and we 
 shut the mouths of others by not opening our own. 
 We feel it only to fear it, and to suffer. Therefore 
 we weave over and around it the peremptory ban 
 of social etiquette, to bind it, and thrust it out of 
 speech. What else can we do with it ? 
 
 Still more complicated and unmanageable does 
 the problem become when guilt threatens the 
 very being of society. In the world as it is, guilt 
 and brute force are in the ascendant; and they 
 concentrate and fortify themselves against law. 
 " Dangerous classes " threaten all that makes life 
 desirable. The chief question of law is. How 
 
104 My Study: and Other Essays. 
 
 shall wrong be kept under, and within the bounds 
 necessary to social well-being ? Everywhere it is 
 a disturbing force. Men find no place for it in 
 the constitution of things. It is war against 
 nature. All that we can do with it, is to shut it 
 out of sight, behind bolts and bars, in places of 
 its own, and leave it there. 
 
 Yes, after ages of study and experiment in crim- 
 inal jurisprudence, human law has not advanced 
 in its treatment of incorrigible sin beyond the 
 dungeon and the scaffold. We are all born to 
 the sight of jails and state prisons. We sleep in 
 peace, only because we know that " dangerous 
 classes " are locked up there behind armed senti- 
 nels. If mobs set them loose, we tremble in our 
 beds from nightfall till the morning. If prisons 
 fail us, we take to revolvers ; and with those the 
 desperado is our superior. What shall we do? 
 So obdurate and impracticable a thing is guilt as 
 an element in the social organism ! Time works 
 no change : law grows no wiser. The government 
 of incorrigible guilt has evolved the policy of 
 retributive penalties, and there it stops. Neither 
 justice nor benevolence can take a step beyond. 
 In this respect. Law stands where it did when it 
 laid the iron hand on the brow of the first murderer. 
 
 Now, the conditions of the problem are not 
 essentially different under the government of God. 
 Incorrigible guilt there, moral freedom remaining 
 intact, is the same impracticable thing as else- 
 where. What shall a righteous sovereign do with 
 
The Popular Faith in Retrihution. 105 
 
 it ? What can He do ? Exterminate it by sheer 
 omnipotence H? can not. The million armed men 
 might devastate a continent, and yet not stamp 
 out one guilty thought. Sin, under the law of 
 moral freedom, bears no relation to physical force. 
 It is no irreverence to say that God can not put an 
 end to it by sheer power. Can He make yesterday 
 to-day? For the same reason, and in the same 
 sense, He can not stop the ravages of sin by 
 mechanical devices. He can not bury it by earth- 
 quakes, nor crush it by cyclones. 
 
 Hence it is, that God can not save a sinner if 
 the sinner will not be saved. What shall He do ? 
 Shall He forgive ? But, the guilty remaining un- 
 repentant, that would be a farce. An unholy 
 universe would laugh at universal amnesty, and 
 the moral sense of holy beings would resent it as 
 an outrage upon law and grace. It could not add 
 an iota to the happiness of any being, or relieve 
 one pang of suffering. The great problem would 
 remain unsolved, " What to do with guilt ? " 
 
 Under moral government, if guilt can not be 
 quelled by means of moral suasion or its equiv- 
 alents, nothing can reach it but retribution. 
 Man's own will has the decision within itself: if 
 he will not be saved, he can not be. Nothing is 
 left but retributive devices for the protection of 
 the innocent. And of these, the first and chief is 
 to leave guilt to itself. Give it a place where it 
 can be let alone to act out its own wretched na- 
 ture. As human law has shut u^Don it the doors 
 
106 My Study: and Other Essays, 
 
 of the penitentiary and the dungeon, so divine 
 law has devised a place where guilt matured and 
 incorrigible shall be shut in to its own malign sol- 
 itude, and left there. But guilt thus left and 
 turned back upon itself is hell. Call it what we 
 may, disguise it as we please, it is the "second 
 death." It is the world of weeping and wailing 
 and gnashing of teeth. What else can it be? 
 Who is to blame for it? Would God be worthy 
 of trust if He did otherwise ? 
 
 Let the last inquiry be answered by another. 
 When Chief Justice Shaw, with tremulous voice 
 and streaming eyes, pronounced sentence of death 
 upon his friend. Professor Webster, for the murder 
 of Dr. Parkman, did he do right, or wrong ? Did 
 the deed deserve the reverence, or the execration, 
 of mankind ? One or the other it did deserve, — 
 which? That was an act of retributive justice. 
 Either it was a deed of high and noble virtue, or 
 it was murder. Which was it? So when God 
 pronounces the sentence of eternal death upon 
 eternal guilt. He does the thing that is right, and 
 the only thing. It is just ; being just, it is worthy 
 of God ; being godlike, it is intrinsically excellent 
 and amiable. It deserves, as it receives, the exult- 
 ing approval of all holy minds. He does all that 
 He can do with such obdurate infatuation under 
 the conditions of moral freedom. 
 
 It is futile to say that God's government is un- 
 like man's. As it respects the principle in hand, 
 it is not unlike man's. Both are founded on im- 
 
The Popular Faith in Retribution. 107 
 
 mutable right. The retributive element is the 
 same in both. The only difference is, that in the 
 divine administration retributive judgments are 
 infinitely more equitable, retributive sanctions 
 infinitely more imperative, and the execution of 
 retributive decree is infinitely more exact in its 
 adjustment to ill-desert. In the mind of God, be 
 it repeated, pure justice is pure benevolence.- We 
 can not be in sympathy with God until we acknowl- 
 edge this, and recognize His retributive inflictions 
 with the same grateful reverence with which we 
 adore His redeeming love. 
 
 Moreover, it is due to the completeness of faith 
 in this matter, that we recognize the personal 
 agency of God in His retributive administration. 
 It is true that penal justice comes about through 
 the operation of general laws. The moral consti- 
 tution of things provides for and necessitates it. 
 The make of the human mind causes a transgressor 
 to become at the maturity of his guilt his own 
 executioner. He is self-tried, self-convicted, self- 
 condemned, and self-damned. But in the whole 
 process, from beginning to end, God executes His 
 own decrees. He never abrogates His prerogative 
 as the supreme Judge of sin. Whatever suffering 
 sin creates. He inflicts. The same retributive sen- 
 timent which we find in ourselves approving and 
 demanding the punishment of guilt, exists in the 
 mind of God, and there approves and demands the 
 same. Here as elsewhere God acts through laws ; 
 but they are laws of His own creation, and they 
 
108 My Study: and Other Essays. 
 
 express the decree of His own will. We yield to 
 a moral weakness which dishonors God, if we con- 
 ceal from our own minds the retributive person- 
 ality of God under cover of eternal laws. It is 
 the same error which agnosticism commits when it 
 hides the divine Person behind pantheistic devices. 
 God, the supreme and living One, acts in the fiery 
 judgments and remorseful inflictions of conscience, 
 and in all the ramifications of moral government 
 by which guilt is made to work out its own damna- 
 tion. The popular theology in this respect needs 
 reconstruction. The pulpit in this matter has a 
 mission to this generation which it can not ignore 
 without shame. 
 
 The views here jDresented have a significant bear- 
 ing on one form of objection to the doctrine of 
 retribution which is, for the most part, passed over 
 in silence by the pulpit. The objection assumes a 
 personal character. We are told that a humane, 
 and especially a cultured, mind can not believe the 
 doctrine. It is too abhorrent to benign sensibili- 
 ties. Our inmost souls are shocked and racked by 
 the conce]Dtion. Preachers are charged with an 
 induration of humane sensibilities in proclaiming 
 it. We are told that our souls are flint. We are 
 even believed to be guilty of some intellectual 
 legerdemain by which we preach what we do 
 not at heart believe. We do not because we can 
 not. We preach under stress of professional 
 necessity. 
 
 An English critic gives expression to this charge 
 
The Popular Faith in Metrihution. 109 
 
 in a review of the preaching of President Edwards 
 in this style : " He disrobed himself of human sym- 
 pathies. He resolved himself absolutely into a 
 thinking apparatus. He deliberately looks into 
 Hell, and the whole heat of its burnings can not 
 melt into a tear the ice in his eye. He gazes on 
 the greater portion of his brother-men stretched 
 to eternity upon a wheel, and his eyelid quivers 
 no more than if he saw a butterfly." 
 
 To us who know the traditions of the gentle 
 and quick sensibilities, even the poetic tempera- 
 ment, of President Edwards, this passes by as the 
 idle wind. Whatever else the illustrious author 
 of the " Essay on the Will " may have been, he 
 was not made of cast-iron. But the popular notion 
 of him contains a notion of our faith in retribution 
 which deserves an answer. And our answer is, 
 that be it true, or not true, the biblical reception 
 of God's retributive inflictions by holy minds 
 exceeds it in apparent vindictiveness. The heav- 
 enly temperament is more apathetic than ours. 
 Are believers here malevolent? Then believers 
 there are immensely more so. The redeemed mind 
 not only does not quail before retributive disclo- 
 sures, but exalts and magnifies them. The public 
 sentiment of the holy universe indorses them with 
 rejoicings as a sublime and benignant revelation 
 of God. The distress which we feel in view of 
 the appalling reality is silently rebuked by its con- 
 trast with inspired and heavenly experiences. 
 
 Which, then, is true? Which compasses the 
 
110 My Study: and Other Essays, 
 
 ultimate discoveries of eternity, when our minds 
 shall have grown old in study of the deep things 
 of God, — our enervated, tremulous, paralytic 
 faith, or the robust and exulting vision of St. 
 John? 
 
X. 
 
 RETRIBUTION IN THE LIGHT OF REASON. 
 
 PART I. 
 
 The foregoing discussions on the subject of 
 Eetribution have given rise to a considerable cor- 
 respondence. One letter from a stranger to me, 
 an intelligent and earnest unbeliever in the doc- 
 trine of endless punishment, has called forth this 
 reply. I am not at liberty to publish the letter of 
 my correspondent ; but the answer is given here, 
 though greatly enlarged, in the hope that it may 
 suggest to other minds one way of putting the 
 doctrine which is not open to the objections which 
 are urged against it in other forms. 
 
 Bear Sir, — I thank you for the frankness and 
 courtesy of your letter. I recognize in it the 
 thought of an earnest mind with wdiich it is a 
 pleasure to confer, whether we can agree, or not, 
 in our ultimate beliefs. The most that I can hope 
 to do in manuscript reply, is possibly to put the 
 doctrine of retribution into a different form from 
 that in which you have been accustomed to con- 
 ceive of it, and to deny it. It is a subject on 
 
 111 
 
112 My Study: and Other Essays. 
 
 which the vital question turns on the way we put 
 things. If I succeed in making it clear that there 
 is a way of putting it in which it is not open to 
 the odium with which you now associate it, you 
 will not think your time lost in reflecting upon 
 the following suggestions ; viz., — 
 
 1. The doctrine as I would state it in its sim- 
 plest form is this : That endless sin must be pun- 
 ished with endless misery. It is not that the sin 
 of an hour or of one lifetime will be visited with 
 eternal pains, except as it involves the sequence 
 of eternal sin. God, in the administration of His 
 government, adjusts results to actual conditions, 
 not to conditions only possible or conceivable. 
 He adjusts punishment to character as it is in the 
 concrete, not to sin in the abstract. It is in one 
 sense true, therefore, that man is punished for ever 
 for the sins of this life, but only as the sins of 
 this life create a character which will perpetuate 
 sin for ever. We involve ourselves in hopeless 
 confusion if we attempt to frame a conception of 
 the divine government in the abstract, as related 
 to character in the abstract. God deals with 
 things as they are. He deals with a sinful char- 
 acter as a whole. Time and eternity are not sepa- 
 rated in His decrees, and the one set over as a 
 balance to the other. Both form one destiny. 
 Sin is punished for what it is, and so long as it is. 
 This is just. Both reason and revelation teach, 
 that, so long as a man sins, so long he must suffer ; 
 and this is the doctrine of endless punishment. 
 
Retribution in the Light of Reason, 113 
 
 Unending sin will involve unending suffering. 
 Revelation teaches that some men ivill sin for ever ; 
 therefore they must suffer for ever. 
 
 This to reason seems intrinsically right. Does 
 it not? No moral instincts which are loyal to 
 God revolt from it as an outrage. Why should 
 they? More than this, endless pain to endless 
 sin is inevitable in the nature of things. Sin and 
 suffering are indissoluble evils. Where the one is, 
 there the other must be. What the one is, that 
 the other must be in intensity. As well think to 
 separate pain from a lacerated nerve as from an 
 outraged conscience. As well expect to pierce 
 your eyeball with a lancet painlessly as to save 
 from misery a moral being whose nature is once 
 gangrened through and through with a sense of 
 guilt. A guilty being has only to discover him- 
 self as he is, to be overwhelmed with suffering for 
 ever. That discovery is inevitable in eternity. 
 There are no shams in a spiritual world. 
 
 2. Sin is entirely a voluntary wrong. Here and 
 everywhere, in its initial stages and in its maturity, 
 it is the work of the sinner's own will. So far as 
 it is not that, it is not sin. Temptation is not sin. 
 Inherited bias to evil is not sin. God will not 
 punish it any more than other misfortune. Man 
 never inherits guilt. Man or demon in sin is there 
 because he chooses to be there. In Hell as on 
 earth, man will be a sinner because he will choose 
 to be such. Sin is never inflicted as the punish- 
 ment of sin. Devils are not in sin as a doom. 
 
114 My Study: and Other Ensays. 
 
 Tliey do not suffer it : they create it. It has not 
 come upon them unawares : they have willed it so. 
 This is an elemental truth, which, because we can 
 pack it in a nutshell, we do not appreciate. It 
 covers the moral universe with its corollaries. 
 More than half of the mystery of evil is solved 
 by it. 
 
 3. Sin is of such a nature as to perpetuate itself. 
 This is the law of all character. If left to itself, 
 with no remedial influence from without, sin never 
 dwindles into nothing. Crimes never shrink into 
 foibles ; passions never subside into subacute 
 eccentricities ; vice never shrinks into infirmity. 
 Once guilty, always guilty, is the law of all de- 
 pravity, no external power intervening. Virtue 
 is under the same law. It is the normal condition 
 of character as such. Where the tree falls, there 
 it shall lie, — not by fatality, but by the self-perpet- 
 uating force of moral choice. Hence the intrinsic 
 and appalling evil of sin. Hence the necessity 
 of subjecting it to imperative control in a moral 
 universe. 
 
 4. Sin everywhere is under a law of growth. 
 All character is under the same law. Guilt, there- 
 fore, becomes more obdurate and intense with 
 time. It is so here : we have reason to believe 
 that it will be so in eternity. In a spiritual state 
 of being, the self-delusions and disguises of sin are 
 removed : then sin, by its innate law of growth, 
 mounts up into matured, finished character. Im- 
 pulsive sin settles into a consolidated principle of 
 
Retribution in the Light of Reason. 115 
 
 evil. Guilty desire swells into guilty passion. 
 Evil slumbering below the depths of consciousness, 
 is roused into sleepless vigilance. Sin thus ma- 
 tured is pure malignity. It is character demon- 
 ized. Hatred of God and of all good, is sin at its 
 climax of evolution. We find only approaches to 
 it here, but they are enough to disclose what sin 
 must be when it is left to itself to act itself out 
 without concealment or restraint. It is the most 
 appalling factor in the destiny of a moral being. 
 
 5. The misery consequent upon sin, which com- 
 mon speech calls its punishment, is chiefly spirit- 
 ual in its nature. We do see, indeed, that in tliis 
 world sin creates bodily disorder, and therefore 
 bodily pain. Guilt builds up a physical tyranny. 
 Some crimes have a fruitage in characteristic 
 diseases, which follow from no other cause. The 
 bloated, discolored, mutilated body proclaims its 
 bondage to an evil spirit. A similar law may hold 
 sway over the spiritual body. The analogy of 
 nature seems to suggest that. But the Scriptures 
 do not affirm it ; and I prefer, therefore, to say that 
 the punishment of sin is chiefly spiritual. As the 
 cause is of the spirit, so is its penal consequence, 
 the body being but an incident to both. It is the 
 misery of conscious guilt, of guilt passionate and 
 obdurate, of guilt concentrated and malign, of 
 guilt accumulating and without end ; of moral 
 disorder through and through ; of conscious an- 
 tagonism to God and to all good ; of the recij^ro- 
 cal antagonism of God, to whom guilt is abhorrent ; 
 
116 My Study: and Other Essays, 
 
 of the chronic warfare which this mutual hostility 
 between God and the guilty engenders ; of the 
 self-contempt and self-loathing inseparable from 
 the extreme of full-grown depravity ; and of the 
 intolerable moral solitude in which no second 
 party can share either guilt or doom ; — the misery 
 of this conscious experience, making up the whole 
 being of the man, without alleviation by one right 
 emotion or holy purpose or godlike thought, — this 
 is the punishment of sin. This is the endless 
 curse. 
 
 In your letter, you put the case as that of a 
 tender and guileless maiden in her " teens," guilty 
 of foibles only, yet not a saint, and therefore 
 "roasting" over slow and dancing flames, while 
 God looks on as at an entertainment. I put it as 
 the case of a demonized being, like Nero or the 
 Borgias, or like Mrs. Stowe's " Legare " in " Uncle 
 Tom's Cabin," grown up to the point of supreme 
 depravity, suffering the rage of his own guilty 
 passions, torturing himself by his own choice of 
 evil as his supreme good, malign in his emotions, 
 an enemy of God, while God has done all that 
 infinite wisdom can do to save him. Is there no 
 difference between the two pictures? Is there 
 no distinction between a doom to evil under 
 almighty tyranny, and the voluntary choice of 
 moral suicide? Are both equally open to the 
 odium of revolting and incredible dogmas? 
 
 6. Now combine all the facts thus far named in 
 one, and we have this resultant: That a sinner, 
 
Retribution in the Light of Reason. Xll 
 
 incorrigible in guilt, matured in depraved tastes, 
 at the climax of ripened evil, malignant through 
 all the ramifications of his being, enamored of evil 
 as his supreme desire, makes his own hell. Nothing 
 conceivable as within God's power to inflict, or 
 man's imagination to conceive, can form a destiny 
 of more fearful woe. No damnation can surpass 
 that which a malign being inflicts upon himself. 
 Milton's Satan has the gist of the whole doctrine, 
 — " Myself am Hell." The literature of tragedy 
 in its picturing of remorse abounds with the same 
 conception. And this a guilty being at the summit 
 of matured character chooses as his own. He has 
 created and nurtured his own demonized passions. 
 He chooses and seeks his demonized associates. 
 He elects as his abode the place allotted to a 
 demonized society. 
 
 Swedenborg had one revelation which is true 
 to nature, though one may not believe it the more 
 for his saying it. He declares that angels taught 
 him that " God never thrusts a man into Hell : he 
 thrusts himself in." He says elsewhere, speaking 
 of spirits who had lived wickedly here, yet were 
 taken temporarily into heaven, that "They gasp 
 there, as for breath, and writhe about like fishes 
 out of the water in the atmosphere, and like ani- 
 mals in the receiver of an air-pump, the air being 
 exhausted." 
 
 This accords with all that we know of the nature 
 of moral being. In a spiritual world, state must 
 be as character. The being chooses that it should 
 
118 My Study: and Other Essays, 
 
 be so. Place and character at enmity engender 
 acutest misery. Lost man, therefore, goes to Hell 
 of his own accord. His whole moral nature gravi- 
 tates thither. Like seeks its like. Set a lost man 
 adrift in the universe, with a free pass to go where 
 he will, and he will seek society of his own rank. 
 Guilt will define the frightful caste to which he 
 will of choice ally himself. Heaven, were its 
 doors wide open to him, would be a hell of pro- 
 founder misery to him than the abode of despair. 
 Any thing is a less evil, in his estimate, than exist- 
 ing consciously in the presence and under the eye 
 of a holy God. 
 
 You remember, doubtless, the story told of 
 Lafayette in the prison at Olmutz. His jailers 
 received orders never to leave him one moment 
 out of sight. Through a small aperture in the 
 door of his dungeon, a human eye was to be 
 always upon him. He said, when he was released, 
 that all other tortures of that solitary cell were as 
 nothing to him, in comparison with the unremit- 
 ting consciousness of that human eye. He declared 
 that in time it would have crazed him. So I con- 
 ceive a lost man in eternity would flee, were it 
 possible, from the eye of God. God's j)i'esence 
 makes Heaven a hell to his distorted tastes. You 
 will recall, from St. John's vision, the " Kocks and 
 mountains, fall on us ! " Any thing, any place, any 
 society, any solitude, any chaos, is welcome in the 
 struggle to get away from God ! This is sin in its 
 innate gravitation ! It must be realized in the 
 final evolution of a sinner's destiny. 
 
Retribution in the lAglit of Reason, 119 
 
 This process of moral segregation has its begin- 
 ning in this world. It is perceptible in the volun- 
 tary working of moral affinities. The good and 
 the evil drift asunder. The good seek the society 
 of the good, and the evil that of the evil. Elec- 
 tive affinities incline each one to his moral kindred. 
 Like goes to its like. The cleavage is not com- 
 pulsory : it is voluntary. Its lines are perceptible 
 through all the strata of society. So, in the rela- 
 tion of men to God, the wicked do not cultivate 
 communion with Him. Wicked men are commonly 
 prayerless men. As they approach the maturity 
 of consolidated character, in which opinions are 
 fixed, tastes developed, habits confirmed, they 
 have less and less to do with God and godly men. 
 One such honest correspondent of mine confesses, 
 " The time when I must meet God is unwelcome 
 to me. I do not think of it twice in a year. I 
 never think of it when I can helj) it." This process 
 of moral alienation, at its completion, may be one 
 phase of the " departure " which God decrees at 
 the final judgment. Estrangement from God at its 
 climax is a voluntary going into outer darkness. 
 This it is to be "accursed." Every moral being 
 carries the possibility of it in his nature. 
 
 7. This liability to a voluntary abandonment of 
 all good by a moral being results from the same 
 conditions which render possible his blessedness 
 in God. 
 
 Nature's law from least to greatest things is a 
 law of mysterious duality. The possibilities of all 
 
120 My Study: and Other Essays, 
 
 things are massed in two directions. The same 
 constitution of any thing which is capable of good 
 is also capable of evil. The nerve which can give 
 pleasure can also give pain. The make of your 
 eyeball, which discovers a world of delight to 
 your sense of beauty, may rack your brain with 
 agony under the ravages of that insect discovered 
 by Dr. Graefe, whose natural food is the optic 
 nerve. The even heart-beats which send life 
 throbbing through your frame with no conscious 
 will of yours, may, in the twinkling of an eye, 
 become the throes of angina pectoris. 
 
 We do not know, that, in the nature of things, 
 this dual economy could have been dispensed with. 
 We only see that it exists. It runs through all 
 the ramifications of human life. From a tooth- 
 ache to a soul's damnation, all evil displaces corre- 
 sponding good, which, in the nature of things, was 
 equally possible. Nothing has been created for 
 the sake of evil. No nerve exists for the sake of 
 pain ; no temptation for the sake of sin ; no devil 
 for the sake of his malignity. Balancing possi- 
 bilities of good offset them all. 
 
 This dual structure governs the system of man's 
 probationary discipline and its eternal sequences. 
 By as much as a man may be demonized in char- 
 acter, and therefore accursed in destiny, by so 
 much may he be made godlike in both. Endless 
 blessing and endless curse are in the balance of 
 every man's destiny. The weight which tips the 
 scale is the breath of his own choice. That^ the 
 
Retribution in the Light of Reason, 121 
 
 winds of heaven are not permitted to visit too 
 roughly. Not legions of demoniac tempters can 
 force him to make that choice to his own hurt. 
 God guards its freedom as the apple of His eye. 
 No power but its own can destroy a soul. 
 
 8. The principle of liberty in human destiny by 
 which a lost man achieves his own perdition, needs 
 to be offset by another. It is that God expresses 
 in the inevitable misery of sin His own retributive 
 sentiment as a moral governor. He impresses thus 
 upon the universe His own abhorrence of guilt. 
 The paradox is essential to the truth in its com- 
 pleteness, that man creates his own damnation, 
 and that God inflicts it. This complication is no 
 anomaly : it exists in all those phenomena in which 
 God and man unite in one result. The two agen- 
 cies intermingle. God decrees what man per- 
 forms. RetributiA^e decrees are executed by man 
 m self-destruction. 
 
 We lose one of the prime elements of punitive 
 justice if we so project man's self-ruin as to con- 
 ceal the fact of the divine infliction. This is never 
 the manner of the Scriptures. There the divine 
 infliction is emphasized: it is made a theme of 
 devout adoration. No hint is given that it needs 
 hiding from an upright mind. In the nature of 
 things, this can not be. We know God only as we 
 know ourselves. The same retributive sentiment 
 in kind must exist in Him as in us. It finds ex- 
 pression, as ours does, in the infliction of retribu- 
 tive pains on the incorrigibly guilty. Among the 
 
122 My Study: and Other Essays, 
 
 most amiable attributes of the divine character in 
 the biblical estimate, is that holy abhorrence of 
 sin which goes out from His inmost nature in re- 
 tributive inflictions. Without it He would be no 
 longer God : He could no longer command the 
 affectionate reverence of the holy universe, or the 
 compulsory respect of the guilty and the damned. 
 
 We must not, then, in deference to our debil- 
 itated sensibilities, put into hiding the personal 
 agency of God in the doom of the lost. It involves 
 no contradiction. Nor does it display any more 
 mystery than that which exists in all other phe- 
 nomena in which the agency of God and that of 
 man are interblended. The sowing and the reap- 
 ing of a wheat-field are in this respect the same as 
 the sowing and the reaping of an eternal destiny. 
 The laws of the soil and the sun and the rains are 
 God's will : man's use of them is man's will. So 
 in moral government, man's use of his own being 
 to his own destruction is his own doing ; the 7nake 
 of that being by which, if perverted, it becomes 
 suicidal to its own happiness, is God's infliction of 
 retributive justice. 
 
 9. The numbers of the lost, I conceive, do not 
 enter into the main question at all. If there is 
 one lost being in the universe, the mystery of it 
 is as profound as if there were countless millions. 
 The question of proportions we have no means 
 of solving. When an inquiry on that subject was 
 addressed to our Lord, He evaded an answer. I 
 can make a good showing, I think, for the belief 
 
Retribution in the Light of Reason, 123 
 
 that tlie saved will be the immense majority, and 
 the lost an inconsiderable fraction of the sum-total 
 of the race. But God has chosen to withhold the 
 truth from us, and speculation is useless. Each 
 one of us has enough to do to make his own 
 salvation sure, and to lead as many others to 
 Heaven as he can on the way. But when men 
 pronounce this a lost world, meaning by it that 
 the great majority of the race will at last people 
 the world of despair, they affirm more than I find 
 in the Word of God. 
 
 The question of the numbers of the lost, I repeat, 
 does not affect the argument one whit. But it may 
 aggravate the dramatic impression of the truth on 
 our sensibilities. The tragic look of the retribu- 
 tive element in the divine economy is the more 
 appalling as the numbers multiply who incur its 
 execution. Objection to the doctrine is mainly a 
 matter of feeling. Men feel the same in kind, and 
 often their judgment is distorted by it in their 
 estimate of human government. Why is it so 
 difficult to find jurymen for a capital trial ? Why 
 is it that imprisonment for life, though often in 
 the sentence, is rarely in its execution ? If a thief 
 is running from the sheriff, why does the crowd in 
 the street help the thief? Reason is not clear- 
 headed if sympathy is overloaded. 
 
 Therefore it is pertinent to relieve the present 
 argument from the pressure of overstrained sensi- 
 bilities. The fact should be emphasized, that the 
 Scriptures nowhere affirm that the major part of 
 
124 My Study: and Other Essays, 
 
 mankind are doomed in the retributive purposes 
 of God. The Bible says nothing about majorities. 
 It offers to all men a free salvation. What their 
 free action will be, it says not. I prefer to leave 
 the question of proportion where God has lodged 
 it, — in His kingdom of reserve. We make a wise 
 advance, and achieve a grand conquest over dif- 
 ficulties, when we learn to accept in silence the 
 silences of God. That which He has not seen fit 
 to disclose, we have no call to affirm or to deny. 
 
XI. 
 
 RETRIBUTION IN THE LIGHT OF REASON. 
 
 PAET n. 
 
 SoiviE additional suggestions are necessary to a 
 rounded statement of the subject, as I am accus- 
 tomed to put it to my own mind. Proceeding in 
 numerical order for the sake of definiteness, I 
 remark, — 
 
 10. That the real difficulties of the faith I hold, 
 I freely admit. They are very great, and some of 
 them inexplicable. I do not say unanswerable, but 
 inexplicable. My faith may answer them when 
 my reason can not solve them. Make them what 
 you will, I think I could double your estimate. 
 The whole subject is a gloomy and heaving sea to 
 my troubled vision. I see through a glass darkly. 
 I can not say that forty years of study of what 
 good and able men, on both sides of the question, 
 have thought upon it, have added any thing to a 
 solution of the mystery. They have only relieved 
 the doctrine — and this is much to the purpose 
 of answering difficulties — of contradictions and 
 other infelicities of statement in its ancient forms. 
 "Seraphic doctors" have spent their force upon 
 
 125 
 
126 My Study : and Other Essays, 
 
 the mystery in vain. " Advanced thinkers " have 
 quailed before it, and found refuge in defiant and 
 illogical denials. A new generation has come upon 
 the stage since we were young, and new genera- 
 tions often bring with them new solutions of old 
 problems; but no new thing in religion or in 
 philosophy has advanced human thought one jot 
 towards a solution of this one. Thinkers stand 
 aghast before it as they did four thousand years 
 ago, perhaps, when the patriarch inquired in his 
 inexplicable misery, " Wherefore do the wicked 
 live ? " That question, extended from this to 
 other worlds, finds no answer. The ages are 
 dumb before it. There lies the fact of evil and 
 its penal fires embedded in the Christian theology, 
 and there it lies in reduplicated gloom in the 
 theology of nature. To me it looks as terrific as 
 when it first threw its lurid glare over my childish 
 conceptions of human destiny. I concede all this. 
 I will not shrink from any sequence in the argu- 
 ment which may fairly be derived from the con- 
 cession. 
 
 But the mystery of a truth is one thing; the 
 evidence of the fact, another. My belief has to 
 do only with the evidence of the fact. In the 
 point of fact, I find that reason and revelation 
 conspire to bear witness to one thing. This differ- 
 ence only, I discover, — that reason is the more 
 formidable and portentous of the two. Reason is 
 merciless in its teachings. The only remedial or 
 remonstrant force I find, which is at all commen- 
 
Retribution in the Light of Reason* 127 
 
 surate with the ravages of sin in this world, I read 
 in the words of Jesus Christ. The depth saith it 
 is not in me, and the sea saith it is not with me. 
 Nature is mute as the Sphinx. 
 
 I find the mystery, however, not where you 
 seem to locate it. Why God should have created 
 beings who would weave around themselves the 
 network of the endless curse, is the mystery which 
 I do not pretend to solve. On that problem, I 
 profess no belief. None is required by the Word 
 of God, as I interpret it : none is suggested by 
 the book of Nature. But that some men should 
 go to an accursed Avorld, sin and sinners being 
 what they are, is no mystery. Where else can 
 they go in a spiritual universe? That there 
 should he a Hell, sin and sinners at their climax 
 of moral growth being what they are, is no mys- 
 tery. What other place is in moral affinity with 
 them ? Such a world is inevitable, in the nature 
 of things, in a universe in which sin is embattled 
 against God behind the ramparts of moral freedom. 
 
 That which Emerson goes out of his way to call 
 "the vindictive mythology of Calvinism," is, in 
 this respect, only a reprint of the theology of 
 nature. Both are dumb before the grim facts 
 of sin and pain. The mystery of both, a deist is 
 as much bound to explain as I am. If he is an 
 honest inquirer, he will confess, as I do, that the 
 reasons why God should permit such evils to rav- 
 age the universe which He has created are beyond 
 our comprehension. Their duration has no con- 
 
128 My Study: and Other Essays. 
 
 cern with the problem. Their existence for eter- 
 nity is no more inexplicable than their existence 
 for an hour. Theu^ being at all in the realm of 
 an almighty and benevolent God is the insoluble 
 mystery. 
 
 But must I therefore withhold my faith from 
 the facts ? An affirmative to this reaches a long 
 way. If I refuse to believe every thing, the 
 reasons of which are beyond my depth, my creed 
 must be conveniently brief. Even the testimony 
 of my senses can not do much for me. To a 
 believer in the infinity of God and the finiteness 
 of man, it can not be philosophical to be over- 
 whelmed by the existence of difficulties in the 
 divine administration. To cower before seeming 
 contradictions even, is not manly. Dr. Arnold 
 manifested the self-collection of a philosophical 
 and manly mind, when, as his biographer describes 
 him, " Before a confessed and unconquerable diffi- 
 culty his mind reposed as quietly as in possession 
 of a discovered truth." Such, I conceive, should 
 be the poise of a believer in the biblical doctrine 
 of retribution. 
 
 Dr. Paley has recorded a principle which every 
 wise man finds use for in such researches as these. 
 It is, in substance, that we should never suffer 
 what we know to be disturbed by what we do not 
 know. Bishop Butler, too, — the mind to which 
 the Christian world owes more than to any other 
 for the solid anchorage of faith, — lays down a law 
 which unbelievers in the retributive teachings of 
 
Retribution in the Light of Reason, 129 
 
 Christianity will do well to remember : "If a 
 truth be established, objections are nothing. The 
 one is founded on our knowledge ; the other, on 
 our ignorance." 
 
 11. You seem to me to make much — too much 
 — of the concessions, like those which I here make, 
 and which are often made by believers in this doc- 
 trine, to the effect that it wounds and shocks our 
 sensibilities. Other disbelievers have done the 
 same. So much has been said of the concessions 
 made by the Rev. Albert Barnes, in his sermon 
 entitled " The love of God in the gift of a Saviour," 
 to which you refer, that I venture to say here what 
 I believe he meant to express by those remarkable 
 passages. They have been interpreted as evidence 
 that in heart he did not and could not believe the 
 dogma he professed to teach. We are told that it 
 is too horrible for any sane man's credence, and 
 that we know it. 
 
 Let me say, then, what I personally know of 
 the theologic temper of believers in the doctrine, 
 and specially that of Albert Barnes. We make 
 concessions in good faith. We believe them to be 
 due to candor in the argument, and to the honest 
 convictions of unbelievers. They are entitled to 
 all that can be fairly inferred from such conces- 
 sions. We have no secret faith to shield, no mental 
 reservations to save us from contradiction. But 
 they do not detract from the faith we profess one 
 whit. It is because that faith rests, as we think, 
 on an impregnable groundwork, that we are able 
 
130 My Study: and Other Essays. 
 
 to make tliem. To our own minds, they are an 
 expression of our unwavering confidence. Our 
 habit of mind on this whole class of truths is one 
 of repose in the wdsdom and rectitude of God. 
 We believe them because we believe in God. Their 
 unfathomable mystery we leave to Him. We be- 
 lieve, that, in some way, the endless suffering of 
 endless guilt is not only consistent with, but is 
 itself, a signal illustration of the benevolence of 
 God. We expect one day to see this as we can 
 not now. We do already see in part. We see 
 that, assuming the existence of guilt as a volun- 
 tary evil, the suffering follows as an inevitable 
 sequence, for which God is not responsible. The 
 mystery of His permission of the guilt in His moral 
 government, we expect under improved conditions 
 of research in another life to be able to solve. In 
 this exjjectant faith w^e rest, waiting for our Lord's 
 appearing. We think this as reasonable, as philo- 
 sophical, as the expectant faith of Leverrier, when 
 he declared, reasoning from astronomical phenom- 
 ena, that, in a certain sjDot in the heavens, a new 
 star must one day appear. Such I have reason to 
 know is the prevailing equipoise of mind on this 
 subject among the vast majority of believers. 
 
 I knew Albert Barnes. I had such intimacy 
 with him as a youthful friend has with his senior 
 and pastor. I know that the " surprising confes- 
 sions " of which you speak, were not indicative of 
 any, even momentary, relaxation of his faith. He 
 felt the same recoil of sensibility from the theology 
 
Retribution in the Liglit of Reason. 131 
 
 of nature which he confessed from the biblical 
 revelation of an endless Hell. In his theological 
 temperament he was one of the calmest of men. 
 His faith, as it ultimately cr3^stallized in his mind, 
 was evenly balanced and self-consistent. It was a 
 crescent faith to the last. He entered on manhood 
 with not a shred of inherited belief. He held that 
 form of infidelity which is not the fruit of an un- 
 godly life, to which men flee for refuge from a con- 
 demning conscience : it was the result of an honest 
 intellectual inability to receive the current evi- 
 dences of Christianity. From that point he fought 
 his way against the redoubled forces of skeptical 
 science, which characterized the times, till every 
 doctrine of the biblical system had fixed itself in 
 his mind with the authority of original discovery. 
 He had inherited none of it. In that faith he lived 
 and died. 
 
 Is it manly controversy to use the concessions 
 of a candid thinker like him as proof of secret 
 unbelief or doubt ? He meant no such thing by 
 them, and felt none. Neither do the great major- 
 ity of believers in an endless punishment, when 
 they grant in the argument the appalling nature 
 of the truth in its bearing upon their sympathies 
 as men. They would be less than men if they did 
 not feel it, yet in their own estimate they would 
 be less than Christian men if they did not believe 
 it. 
 
 12. The difficulties of our faith in endless retri- 
 bution seem immensely less to our minds than 
 
132 My Study: and Other Essays, 
 
 those of disbelief. Faith in it is wrapped up in 
 our faith in the Scriptures as a revelation from 
 God. The doctrine is so obvious and pervasive in 
 the New Testament, that the rejection of the one 
 necessitates the rejection of the other. The two 
 stand or fall together. Expurgate the doctrine 
 wherever we find it there, and not enough would 
 be left to be called a revelation from Heaven. 
 The expurgations would riddle the whole of it 
 with exceptions. 
 
 Our Lord certainly teaches the doctrine if it can 
 be taught in human speech. I never knew an 
 earnest educated unbeliever in the Bible, and to 
 that extent an impartial looker-on upon our rival 
 faiths, who did not find in it the revelation of an 
 endless Hell. Did you ? Theodore Parker found 
 it there. Voltaire and David Hume found it there. 
 Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer, Strauss and 
 Kenan, have all found it there. If it is not there, 
 human language can not contain it in intelligible 
 words. The attempt to expurgate the Christian 
 Scriptures of the doctrine by exegetical adroitness 
 is without exception the most astounding example 
 of special pleading in the history of religious con- 
 troversy. Respectable science it is not. Men who 
 believe it to be true, must have a secret fear that 
 it is not so. As to the common readers of the 
 Bible who come to it with no scholastic theory to 
 defend, they have no conception of what we mean 
 when we tell them that the doctrine of eternal 
 retribution is not expressed in the teachings of our 
 Lord. 
 
Retribution in the Light of Reason. 133 
 
 Reason makes another point respecting the ex- 
 clusion of this doctrine from the Scriptures. If 
 we accept the principle of interpretation which 
 that exclusion involves, we must find room for all 
 its corollaries. If, then, we allow our moral in- 
 stincts to explain away the retributive teachings 
 of Christ, we must allow the moral instincts of 
 other men to explain away any thing and every 
 thing else to which they take exception. The 
 Sermon on the Mount would long ago have been 
 foredoomed by the moral instincts of Sparta. The 
 refined idolatry of Athens would have expunged 
 the Decalogue. The moral nature of the Ameri- 
 can aborigines would have laughed at the beati- 
 tudes. Savage intuitions the world over would 
 have scouted St. Paul's picture of Christian char- 
 ity. Not a solitary doctrine or sentiment or song 
 or prophecy in the Scriptures which modern civil- 
 ization exalts for its profound truth, or pure moral- 
 ity, or poetic beauty, can be named which some- 
 body's " ethical instincts " have not denounced 
 and hooted at. 
 
 When John Eliot first preached to the Nipmuck 
 Indians at Nonantum the Christian theory of the 
 forgiveness of injuries, a grunt of incredulous 
 derision ran around the circle of his hearers as 
 they sat before him on their haunches. The 
 " moral intuitions " of Nipmuck culture knew bet- 
 ter than that. On the theory here combated, the 
 Nipmuck theology was right. Why not ? 
 
 But what is a revelation worth which must 
 
134 My Study: and Other Essays. 
 
 " stand and deliver " at the door of every wigwam 
 where the Nipmuck nature in man may see fit to 
 challenge its authority ? Our moral instincts are 
 a better o-uide without than w^ith a craven revela- 
 tion which may be so shorn of its dignity by every 
 passer-by. The boar out of the wood doth waste 
 it, and the wild beast of the field doth devour it. 
 Coleridge very shrewdly says, " Christianity can 
 not probably be of much worth to men who pay it 
 no other compliment than that of calling by its 
 name the previous decisions of their own mother- 
 wit." This is precisely what those do who inter- 
 polate into the Scriptures their own moral instincts 
 in flat contradiction to the plainest records of 
 inspiration. Better, far better, is no revelation at 
 all than one which must be constantly confounded 
 by the " mother-wit " of the reader. 
 
 In accepting the facts of the revelation we have, 
 and in accepting the relief it gives to the equally 
 inexplicable facts of nature, leaving the m3''steries 
 of both unsolved, do I not choose the faith which 
 is infinitely the more credible, the more hopeful, 
 the more consonant with reason and with the 
 intimations of conscience? Faith in an infinite 
 God, without infinite mysteries and insoluble dif- 
 ficulties, would be a contradiction. " A God 
 understood is no God at all." 
 
 13. It amazes me that you find it so difficult to 
 believe in retributive government in the moral 
 world when the natural world is so full of it. The 
 logic of analogy is all one way. Where is the 
 
Retribution in the Light of Reason. 135 
 
 solitary exception ? When does Nature ever for- 
 give ? Strike at a law of nature ever so playfully, 
 and something within it will strike back. You 
 will get the worst of it. You may as safely play 
 with a nest of rattlesnakes. Nature never allows 
 herself to be insulted with impunity. You are 
 always on your good behavior in dealing with her. 
 She may take her time for the retaliatory blow : 
 she is too sure of her victim to be in haste. But 
 the blow will come, and with reduplicated force 
 for the waiting. 
 
 Pagan theology found out long ago that the 
 mills of the gods grind slow, but that they grind 
 to powder. All nations have the proverb in their 
 own way. Why should not the mills grind in the 
 same way in the moral world ? God in conscience, 
 and God in nature, are one Being. He will not 
 contradict in one kingdom the law He has enacted 
 in the other. To deny it seems to me insanely 
 unphilosophical and inconsecutive. 
 
 Besides, the fact deserves to be repeated that 
 nature is vastly more relentless than the Scriptures 
 in her retributive teachings. Swedenborg says 
 that "nature makes almost as much demand on 
 our faith as miracles do." She makes more. Her 
 retributive dealings are harder to understand, more 
 difficult to reconcile with the perfections of God. 
 Not a gleam of redemptive promise do we find in 
 the world of matter. Order and sequence there, are 
 always the order and sequence of law, never those 
 of remedial devices. The iron rod is never laid 
 
136 My Study: and Other Essays. 
 
 aside, never broken, never bent out of plumb. It 
 is not Calvinism that is " vindictive : " it is gravita^ 
 tion. If you wish to find the original of the old 
 Greek Nemesis, you must go, not to the sacred 
 books of Christianity, but to the volumes of mod- 
 ern science which treat of the laws of mechanics, 
 of electricity, of heredity. There, if anywhere, is 
 vengeance. 
 
 The God we worship is one God. Then, His 
 handiwork in nature should lead us to expect the 
 disclosure of endless penalty for endless guilt in a 
 revelation of His moral government. If it were 
 not there, an unanswerable presumptive argument 
 would be established that it is not a revelation 
 from heaven. 
 
 14. One thing more, and my story is ended. 
 The use so often made of the biblical symbol of 
 fire to make the retributive idea odious and hide- 
 ous, seems to me unworthy of manly and cultured 
 controversy. We must expect it from ignorant 
 and passionate thinkers, but as argument it is 
 very shallow. You and I do not need to remind 
 each other that that symbol is not a dogmatic form 
 of truth. The veriest tyro in biblical interpreta- 
 tion ought to know it. In common speech we em- 
 ploy the same and similar figures to express vividly 
 similar ideas. We speak of "burning passions," 
 of " fiery lusts," of " flaming anger." We tell of 
 a man who frothed at the mouth, or ground his 
 teeth, in impotent rage. Our Saviour takes sim- 
 ilar liberties with dramatic and figurative speech. 
 
Retribution in the Light of Reason, 137 
 
 Suppose, now, that some one sliould report us as 
 affirming that we saw a man roasting over a slow 
 fire in his lusts, or showing signs of hydrophobia in 
 his wrath. Would that be argument ? He might 
 raise a ripple of inane laughter at his conceit, but 
 would he discredit our story ? 
 
 So I take all attempts of men to render odious 
 or ridiculous the doctrine of endless punishment 
 by putting the symbol of fire to a use for which it 
 was never employed by Him who originated it. 
 In His lips it meant the most solemn and appalling 
 reality in the history of the universe, so far as it 
 is known to us. It meant that guilt, at its climax; 
 of finished and indurated character, involves in its 
 own nature, and by inevitable sequence, a spiritual 
 misery of which literal speech can give no adequate 
 conception. It is such that no other material 
 emblem can give us so truthful an impression of 
 it as that of a surging sea of flame. This, if it he 
 a reality, of which some who walk our streets, and 
 give us daily greeting, may be in peril, is too ter- 
 rific a reality to be set in the frame of burlesque. 
 
 Is it not ? 
 
 Very truly yours. 
 
 In the fellowship of search for truth, 
 
 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
XII. 
 ENDLESS SIN UNDER THE GOVERNMENT OF GOD. 
 
 Is its existence consistent with tlie Divine char- 
 acter? On this inquiry ultimately hang all objec- 
 tions to the retributive teachings of the Scriptures. 
 Obvious as those teachings are on the face of them, 
 they will be nullified by violent and tortuous in- 
 terpretations if the secret feeling of the reader 
 is, that they are a calumny against God. As one 
 objector expressed it in the argument, '' Your God 
 is my Devil." So long as this conception of the 
 doctrine exists, argument is useless. The plainest 
 assertions of the Bible go for nothing. A book, 
 no matter what its claims to inspiration are, which 
 ascribes Satanic character to God, its professed 
 author, can have no force as an authority to a 
 reasonable mind. 
 
 The question narrows itself in the -.last analysis 
 to the endless existence of Sin. Suffering is not 
 the mystery of this world. Sin is the mystery. 
 Assume sin as the great moral fact of its history, 
 and no suffering is inexplicable. Sin and suffer- 
 ing — suffering and sin — are twin factors in hu- 
 man destiny. Can, or will, a benevolent God create 
 
 138 
 
Sin Under the G-overnment of God. 139 
 
 beings — millions or one, it makes no difference — 
 who, He knows, will sin for ever? This is the 
 crucial question. 
 
 1. In reply, let it be observed that we do not 
 know that the prevention of sin, under a perfect 
 system of moral government, is possible to the 
 power of God. In the constitution of things, — 
 we utter a truism in saying it, — some contingent 
 cies involve contradictions. God can not decree 
 absurdities. He can not so change the mathemati^ 
 cal relations of numbers, that, to the human mind, 
 twice five shall be less or more than ten. God 
 can not so metamorphose the nature of colors, 
 that, their relations to the human eye remaining 
 what they are, black and white shall change places 
 in our vision, or the sky be green, and the grass 
 blue. God can not so transmute the pleasures of 
 the senses, that, their nature remaining unchanged, 
 the eye shall delight in a symphony of Beethoven, 
 and the ear in the " Sistine Madonna." These 
 are changes which God is as powerless to effect as 
 man. They involve absurdities. They bear no 
 relation to omnipotent power. 
 
 For aught that we know, this same principle may 
 pervade the moral universe. We live under moral 
 government. Our chief distinction is the posses- 
 sion of a moral nature. Within the limits pre- 
 scribed to moral freedom, a moral being, be he nmn 
 or angel or devil, is as imperial in his autocracy as 
 God is in the immeasurable range of His being. 
 This, God has Himself ordained in the creation of 
 
140 My Study: and Other Ussays. 
 
 a moral universe. Moral freedom is a prerogative 
 of godlike nobility. It is the chief thing in which 
 man is God's image. The stellar universe is not 
 equal in imperial dignity to one thinking, sentient, 
 self-determining mind. Man's supreme endowment 
 is not immortality : it is his ability to be what he 
 wills to be, to do what he chooses to do, to become 
 what he elects to become in liis growth of ages. 
 This ethereal faculty in man eludes analysis. 
 Beyond the tamest of tame words, no man can 
 define or describe it. A child can exercise it, but 
 royal academies can not tell me what it is. It 
 is the ultimate and superlative something which 
 makes man a man. Without it, he would have no 
 right to say " I." Without it, a humming-bird is 
 his equal : with it, he is the kindred of angels. 
 
 Now, we do not know that such an imperial 
 being, remaining sovereign of his moral freedom, 
 autocrat of himself, creator of his own character, 
 framer of his own destiny, can be kept under all 
 conditions of probation from a moral catastroj)he. 
 There is more than a poet's fancy in Wordsworth's 
 conception of " man's unconquerable mind." Mind 
 is as absolute over its own act in evil as in good. 
 From the nature of the case, therefore, it can not 
 be proved that a being who can sin will not sin. 
 Power to do is itself temptation to do. " The free- 
 w^ill tempted me, — the power to do, or not to do," 
 says Coleridge's Wallenstein. Few men can stand 
 on the summit of a lofty tower without a momen- 
 tary sense of peril in the consciousness of power 
 
Sin Under the G-overnment of God. 141 
 
 to plunge headlong. A special police guard the 
 Colonne Vendome in Paris, to prevent that form 
 of suicide. So fascinating often is the power to 
 do an evil deed ! 
 
 The same fascination is involved in the con- 
 sciousness of moral freedom under the government 
 of God. Its possibilities of good are balanced by 
 equal possibilities of evil. Which shall become 
 history depends on the tempted being, and ulti- 
 mately on him only. His biography, in this par- 
 ticular, is autobiography. His own hand holds 
 the iron pen. In the case of man, therefore, we 
 do not know but that God could not have saved 
 him from the fall, except by annihilating his moral 
 freedom : or, if not that, inflicting some unknown 
 damage, which to his moral destiny would be 
 equivalent. True, we can not affirm that it was 
 so ; but we must prove that it was not so before 
 we can reasonably charge God with wrong in the 
 permission and punishment of incorrigible sin. 
 
 2. We do not know that the prevention of sin, 
 under a perfect moral government, was possible 
 to the wisdom of God. The infinite and eternal 
 expediencies of the moral universe may have for- 
 bidden it. We do not know the interminable 
 complications of any act of God. A moment's 
 thought is enough to baffle us in the inquiry. 
 Nothing that He does is unrelated. Every thing 
 is linked by invisible chains of sequence and 
 causation to every other thing. A sublime unity 
 compacts together all His ways. His dominion is 
 
142 My Study : and Other Essays. 
 
 imperial : one aim, one plan, one animus, rules the 
 whole. Speaking in the dialect of human govern^ 
 ments, one policy sways the universe. God never 
 unravels His own decrees. There are no contra^ 
 ries and confusions in the system of things. Law 
 here is law there. Orion does not collide with 
 the Pleiades, and the Pleiades do not jostle Orion. 
 One force holds all things to their grooves. " Pie 
 is of one mind, and who can turn Him ? " 
 
 The same unity belongs, so far as we know, 
 to moral law. We do not know, therefore, the 
 remote consequences of a policy chosen for the 
 administration of one world. It may have invis- 
 ible convolutions and reticulations in the history 
 of other worlds. To have chosen the policy of 
 prevention in the control of sin here, might have 
 necessitated revolutionary changes elsewhere. As- 
 tronomers say that a minute less or more in the 
 diurnal revolution of Jupiter, gravitation remain- 
 ing as it is, would sooner or later fill the universe 
 with clashing planets. A change of ]3roportion 
 in certain chemical elements, which now lie peace- 
 fully side by side in the bowels of the earth, would 
 rend the globe asunder. Who can prove that 
 there are not similar niceties of adjustment in the 
 working of moral laws? To have prevented sin 
 here, by any power not fatal to moral freedom, 
 might have shattered the foundation of moral 
 government everywhere. True, we can not affirm 
 it, but neither can wq deny it. 
 
 We reasonably ask, then, may it not have been 
 
Sin Under the Grovernment of God. 143 
 
 conceivably better that one world should have 
 been left to voluntary ruin than that all worlds 
 should have been void of populations of intelligent 
 and moral beings ? That some inhabitants of one 
 such fallen world should be left unrepentant to the 
 doom they have chosen, — is not even this a less 
 appalling calamity than that the history of sinless 
 worlds without number should have remained un- 
 written ? Shall all best things in the universe be 
 forbidden, that some may be saved from abuse ? 
 
 We affirm, then, in view of such unanswerable 
 questions, that it may not have been possible to 
 the wisdom of God to prevent the entrance of sin 
 and consequent retribution into the moral universe 
 through the history of man. Infinite expediency 
 may have been against it. True, we can not affirm 
 that it was so ; but we must prove that it was not 
 so, before we can charge God with wrong in the 
 infliction of endless retribution upon endless sin. 
 
 3. If it may not be possible to divine power, 
 and if it may not be possible to divine wisdom, to 
 prevent sin in a perfect moral government, then 
 we affirm further that it may not be possible to 
 divine benevolence. A benevolent God can do 
 only things in their nature practicable. He can 
 do only wise things. He can do only that which 
 infinite power can do under the direction of infinite 
 wisdom. 
 
 The non-prevention of sin, therefore, in this 
 world of ours may have been the best thing which, 
 under the conditions here existing, benevolence 
 
144 My Study : and Other Essays. 
 
 could desire and plan for. Speaking after the 
 manner of human governments, the policy of non- 
 intervention may have been the policy of love. 
 In other departments of God's working, that 
 policy often assumes to our short-sighted vision 
 frightful developments. 
 
 To accomplish, in certain contingencies, the 
 purposes of benevolence, man must be let alone. 
 The laws of nature must be allowed to do what 
 they will with him. Invisible and inodorous gases 
 in the atmosphere must poison his life-blood. Un- 
 seen tempters must be let loose upon him. Malign 
 influences must contest the supremacy in his des- 
 tiny. Individual well-being must be overborne 
 by the fall of nations. Majorities must crush the 
 few. Great wheels must crumple up the little 
 wheels. Infancy and helplessness must go under 
 the hoof of power. Above all, man's own will 
 must often be left in moral solitude. It must 
 work out his destiny, for weal or woe, alone. For 
 reasons unknown, God must stand aloof, and be 
 still, while the tragedy of life goes on. Such is 
 sometimes the look of things to our bleared vision. 
 
 Now, the point of the present argument is, that 
 this principle of non-interference may lie back of, 
 and under, the non-prevention of sin. Within cer- 
 tain bounds, and as related to the destiny of certain 
 races, and in certain contingencies of moral trial, 
 to let sin alone may be the dictate of benevolence. 
 Who can say that it is not so ? To leave guilt in 
 the awful extremity of evil, to which it naturally 
 
Sin Under the Government of God. 145 
 
 gravitates by the force of its own momentum, may 
 sometimes be the first and last and best decree of 
 infinite benignity. 
 
 True again, reasoning from the nature of things, 
 we can not affirm that it is so ; but the fact perti- 
 nent to the present argument is, that we must 
 prove that it is not so, before we can hold God 
 unworthy in His treatment of endless guilt by the 
 infliction of endless pain. 
 
 4. The views already advanced involve another, 
 which demands a distinct development. 
 
 It is that we do not know that the prevention 
 of sin is possible under that feature of God's moral 
 government by which the universe is bound to- 
 gether in a community of interests like those of a 
 human family. This is one of the devices of in- 
 finite wisdom. We have observed that God's gov- 
 ernment is a unit. It is more than this. It is a 
 parental government. Angels and men are united 
 in filial sympathies and affections. They are stu- 
 dious of the same disclosures of God. Their expe- 
 riences make up one great family history. The 
 creation, the fall, and the recovery of this world, 
 are themes of angelic as they are of human re- 
 search. The ties which bind together human and 
 angelic destinies are the ties of one household, of 
 which Christ is the Head. In Heaven, as pictured 
 by St. John, angels and men unite in the same 
 liturgic service, sing the same songs of adoration, 
 form one devout assembly. They surround God's 
 throne in fraternal companionship. 
 
146 My Study: and Other Essays. 
 
 How many more orders of intelligence people 
 the universe, we do not know. Analogy suggests 
 the probability that they are practically beyond 
 computation. Telescopic research has never found 
 the frontier of the sidereal creation. It is incredi- 
 ble that so vast and complicated a system of mate- 
 rial things is not filled, or to be filled, with moral 
 systems of equal magnitude. We discover in the 
 ways of God the element of aspiration. He is 
 content only with best things. We reasonably 
 infer, therefore, that our resplendent heavens are, 
 or are to be, the abodes of intelligence and virtue, 
 not of ichthyosauri and mastodons. If so, they are, 
 or are to be, the homes of one immense family, over 
 which God administers a paternal government. 
 This earth is but an infinitesimal fragment. As 
 proportioned to the planet Jupiter alone, our globe 
 is of the size of a pea on a circular ground three 
 or four inches in diameter. What must be its 
 inconceivable minuteness as compared with the 
 whole stellar universe ! Such is the probable 
 diminutiveness of our human races in the com- 
 parison with the whole family of the Heavenly 
 Father. Most reasonably did the Psalmist antici- 
 pate the discoveries of modern science, and exclaim, 
 " When I consider the heavens, what is man ? " 
 
 Relationships of family on a scale of such im- 
 measurable amplitude must, speaking in human 
 dialect, lay a heavy tax on the wisdom and benev- 
 olence of God in the administration of His laws. 
 To a human eye, it must be an administration of 
 
Sin Under the Government of God. 147 
 
 inconceivable intricacy. Reasons for and against 
 any policy of government must be of immeas- 
 urable reach, and unfathomable depth. Problems 
 which no human wisdom can solve, must be 
 involved in its execution. Who, by searching, 
 can find out God ? A wise and loving father can 
 not seek the good of one child at the cost of all 
 the rest. The interests of all are bound up in the 
 welfare of each, and that of each in those of all. 
 John Quincy Adams once amended the aphorism 
 of human government, that "it should seek the 
 greatest good of the greatest number." "No," 
 said " the old man eloquent : " " Government should 
 seek the greatest good of «7Z." This is pre-em- 
 inently true of God's parental government over 
 the universal family. He can not wisely care for 
 one being or one world without a thoughtful and 
 parental adjustment of things to the welfare of all 
 beings in all worlds. 
 
 The project has been suggested, as one of pos- 
 sible achievement in a future age, of a universal 
 federation of all human governments by which all 
 nations should be combined in one political broth- 
 erhood, so that standing armies and the arbitra- 
 ment of war and retaliatory policies should be 
 no more. The bare thought of such interlocking 
 without interfusion of conflicting interests op- 
 presses a human mind with a sense of colossal 
 intricacy. Yet this is but a remote suggestion of 
 what the universal government of God must be 
 through the intimacies oT one spiritual family. 
 
148 My Study: and Other Essays, 
 
 We are apt to be oblivious of the immense realm 
 of the unknown in the alliances of human history 
 with that of other orders of intelligence. Take 
 the fall of this world, for example. How little we 
 know of its remote and complicated relations ! 
 What problems of mysterious import it must have 
 started in distant jjlaces of creation ! It may have 
 sent a shock, for which the fatherly government 
 of God must provide counteraction, to the remotest 
 frontier of populated space. The moral destiny 
 of Sirius and Neptune may be bound up with ours. 
 It may be, that the prevention of sin here by the 
 only means possible or wise under the moral econ- 
 omy which God has elected, would have been a 
 work involving infinite impossibilities. To our 
 angelic brethren, it may have seemed a perilous 
 anomaly. 
 
 Here it should be remembered that the govern- 
 ment of sin by any other devices than those of 
 free-will and restrictive retribution is anomalous to 
 a loyal conscience. Speaking as we should of the 
 devices of human law, we should pronounce it 
 extra-constitutional. To cherubim and seraphim 
 it might have threatened incalculable disaster to 
 adopt a policy which should even have the look of 
 tampering with the liberty of a free being. The 
 history of the nameless orders of intelligence 
 which may fill the unknown regions of space, may 
 have contained in its archives no precedent for it. 
 It may not, therefore, have been congenial with any 
 principles of moral government known to them, 
 
Sin Under the Government of God, 149 
 
 and fixed in their faith. It might have been pro- 
 ductive of a violence to the moral sense of the 
 universe infinitely more weighty in the general 
 scale of evil, than to have chosen the policy of 
 non-interference in the government of one world, 
 and to have left it to its own chosen way of guilt 
 and desolation. 
 
 It is very true that conjectures like these open 
 into a region of shadowy possibilities. Positive 
 faith can not enter it one step. We do not know. 
 Our vision is very dim. In such adventurous re- 
 searches we soon come to the limit, even of con- 
 jecture. We can not affirm, therefore, that one or 
 another of these conjectures is true. But it^ is 
 very much to the purpose of the present argument, 
 that they indicate our boundless ignorance. This 
 they prove beyond conceivable doubt. They block 
 up our way solid with possibilities which we must 
 disprove ; and this is the turning-point of the pres- 
 ent argument, — that we must prove that they are 
 not true, before we can hold God's government to 
 account as unjust or inhuman because He has not 
 saved all His intelligent creation from the endless 
 penalties of endless guilt. The very measure of 
 our ignorance is the measure of our reasonable 
 faith. 
 
 5. The argument as thus far developed implies 
 one more phase of it wliich is worthy of emphatic 
 notice. We do not know that the prevention of 
 evil in tliis world, and of consequent retribution in 
 eternity, is possible under that feature of God's 
 
150 My Study: and Other Essays. 
 
 government by which evil is overruled, and made 
 the instrument of good. 
 
 This is one of the devices of infinite wisdom, 
 which, like its source, may be infinite in the range 
 of its working. How far it is concerned with the 
 non-prevention of moral evil, we do not know. In 
 certain conditions, it may be prohibitory of divine 
 interference. Good in this world could not be 
 what it is, but for the evil which often underlies 
 it. Our sight into this mystery, too, is very short. 
 Our ignorance is very dense. But we can not 
 help seeing that the principle exists. We follow 
 it a little way, and beyond we see that its possible 
 range outreaches all human thought. It goes into 
 human history laden with infinite and strange con- 
 tingencies. To all appearance, it has a mysterious 
 power of contradiction. It appears often to make 
 evil good. It brings to pass good which over- 
 weighs a thousand-fold the evil which is used in 
 the evolution. 
 
 This law of the greater good from the lesser 
 evil pervades the whole kingdom of nature. Every 
 grain of wheat that germinates in the soil illus- 
 trates it. It expands with reduplicated force in 
 the sentient creation. Physicians say that the 
 province of pain in the human system is one of 
 benevolent design. Life could not long survive 
 without its kindly ministration. " Pain," said an 
 eminent German physiologist, "is the cry of the 
 nerve for healthy blood." Like the cry of infancy, 
 it is never without a reason. The whole history 
 
Sin Under the Government of God. 151 
 
 of surgical science is the history of evil inflicted, 
 that good might be enjoyed. 
 
 On the grander scale of social and national life, 
 the same law assumes gigantic proportions. What 
 do not civilization and commerce owe to war? 
 The very ideal of manly character, — how could 
 the world ever have conceived it, but for the mili- 
 tary virtues ? Eliminate from poetry and art all 
 that these virtues have contributed, and what 
 would be left ? Strike out from the history of na- 
 tions all that human suffering has done for human 
 liberty, and where would the great nations be to- 
 day ? The world over, and through all time, good 
 from evil, pleasure from pain, fruit from rotten- 
 ness, growth from deca} , strength from weakness, 
 life from death, is the law of being. Enumerate 
 the whole vocabulary of evil by wdiich language 
 expresses its varieties, and do you not find that 
 every one has its opposite in the vocabulary of 
 good, to which it is often tributary ? 
 
 Pass over the line into the kingdom of grace. 
 You find the same law there, in more magnificent 
 working. God is never cheated of His purpose 
 by the audacity of sin. Wicked men never get 
 beyond the reach of His uses. They think not so, 
 neither is it in their hearts. Unconsciously they 
 serve His will in the very act of refusing. Demon- 
 ized being never escapes from the hollow of His 
 hand. He uses sin as grandly as an earthquake, 
 and as easily as a violet. The vices of men are 
 His instruments, though they be a flaming fire. 
 
152 My Study: and Other Essays. 
 
 Tyrants create heroes ; inquisitors, martyrs ; devils, 
 saints. At the foot of the cross, do we not stand 
 dumb before the treachery of Judas ? It were 
 good for that man if he had never been born, — 
 but what of the good of other men? It might 
 have been good for this world if it had never been, 
 — but what of its mission to other worlds ? The 
 whole heavens were darkened at the crucifixion, 
 — but, without that event, what were the history 
 of the universe ? 
 
 We have reason to believe, therefore, that this 
 law of the greater good from the lesser evil may 
 enter into the reasons prevailing in the mind of 
 God for the non-prevention of sin. We know not 
 how far, nor to what magnitude of results. But 
 we see so much as this, — that the usefulness of 
 evil, as God rules and overrules it, is as legitimate 
 as that of any other instrument of God's decrees. 
 Its being evil does not forbid its use : the enormity 
 of the evil does not seem to limit its use. If any 
 law governs its instrumental value, it is, that the 
 greater the evil, the more immense is the good 
 extorted from its existence. The power and the 
 wisdom of God for ever overreach and outweigh 
 the force and the cunning of him who defies them. 
 The wrath of man praises Him. 
 
 It is true that this principle is a two-edged 
 sword. We can not wield it but with reverent 
 and tremulous hands. But all great principles 
 are two-edged swords. This one warns us off 
 from forbidden ground. It forbids us to accuse 
 
Sin Under the Government of God. 153 
 
 God's wisdom or benevolence of wrong in not 
 saving all His intelligent creation from the catas- 
 trophe of sin and the doom of retribution. It 
 may be that He can not do it without a sacrifice 
 of the greater good to the lesser evil. The uni- 
 verse might be shorn of half its glory as a monu- 
 ment of God's character, if the principle of evolving 
 good from evil were eliminated from its adminis- 
 tion. 
 
 Again, — we concede it, — we can not affirm 
 that these tilings are so. Our ignorance grows 
 more dense as we penetrate farther into these con- 
 jectural researches. Does the objector urge that 
 we knoiv nothing about such themes of inquiry? 
 We answer, " Very true ; and we affirm nothing." 
 But the very pivot of the argument is, that, because 
 we know nothing, we must not affirm the negative 
 of God's integrity. We must prove that certahi 
 possibilities are not true, before we can venture 
 to distrust either the revelations or the silences 
 of God. Distrust, under such conditions, is as 
 unphilosophical as it is ungodly. 
 
xni. 
 
 THE HYPOTHESIS OF A SECOND PROBATION. 
 
 The theory of a continued probation after death 
 is entitled to a respectful hearing. Those who are 
 learned in the history of doctrine affirm that this 
 theory has never received the exhaustive discussion 
 which has been given to other fundamental doc- 
 trines in the evolution of the faith of the Church. 
 If so, it should receive such discussion now. Those 
 who advocate it are entitled to our gratitude rather 
 than our suspicion, so far as they have new truth, 
 or new interpretations of old truth, to add to our 
 beliefs. 
 
 Especially should we welcome any new light 
 which may dawn upon the fearful problem of end- 
 less retribution. Fearful it is to the wisest of us. 
 Unwavering as our faith is, we confess that it is 
 an expectant faith, in which we wait for more 
 light. We do not understand the mystery. We 
 are dumb before its appalling darkness. We give 
 the hand of welcome to any one who can help us 
 to the light we crave. If the prospect of another 
 probation, under conditions more favorable than 
 those of this world, is the way out of the admitted 
 difficulties, be it so, if it can but be proved as a 
 
 154 
 
The Hypothesis of a Second Probation. .15^ 
 
 revealed, indubitable fact. It is but fair to sus- 
 pend the ancient faith so far as may be needful to 
 give to this new hypothesis a candid hearing. No 
 authority of the ancient creeds should close the 
 door upon progressive inquiry. 
 
 But, as the process of discussion goes on, we 
 need to be watchful of its bearings on the popular 
 belief. Re-adjustments of old beliefs are neces- 
 sarily subject to perilous contingencies. In the 
 present case, belief is founded on revelation. A 
 revelation from God must be assumed to be a gift 
 to the popular mind. It is not a monopoly of 
 schoolmen. The chief claim of the Bible to supe- 
 riority over the philosophy of Plato is, that it is 
 level, in its great central ideas, to popular compre- 
 hension. It is intended to meet popular wants. 
 If a truth is in it, the common mind can find it 
 there. It has no contrasts of esoteric and exoteric 
 dogmas. What it reveals to one, it reveals to all. 
 
 A strong presumption, therefore, is created 
 against a proposed interpretation, if any one of 
 several contingencies appears. If that interpreta- 
 tion can not be understood by the common mind ; 
 if it does not commend itself to the common sense ; 
 if it does not meet the religious necessities of com- 
 mon life ; if it is of such a nature as to pervert the 
 workings, or lower the tone, of the common con- 
 science ; if, therefore, the practical drift of it is 
 laxative rather than tonic in its effect on the 
 solicitudes of men respecting their eternal destiny ; 
 if all or any of these conditions accompany a pro- 
 
156 My Study : and Other Ussays. 
 
 posed interpretation of the Scriptures, — a strong 
 presumj)tion is thereby created that it is not true. 
 This presumj)tive argument appears to be unan- 
 swerable against the hypothesis of a continued 
 probation after death. 
 
 In the first place, the fact should be emphasized, 
 that the popular mind will make no practical dis- 
 tinction between a continued probation and a second 
 probation. The distinction is a real one, and the 
 advocates of the hypothesis are fairly entitled to 
 all that can be made of it. Among experts in 
 theological debate, it is not fair to ignore it. But 
 it is equally true and equally important, if not 
 more so, that the popular mind ivill ignore it in its 
 practical use of the doctrine. No caution of reli- 
 gious teachers can prevent this. The pulpit is 
 powerless to neutralize it. Ages of settled belief 
 have fixed in the popular theology the end of life 
 as synchronous with the end of moral trial. All 
 that lies beyond is a new existence. Death is the 
 most absolute finality we knovv^ of. No other revo- 
 lution conceivable in moral conditions can break 
 the continuity of probation so radically and sum- 
 marily. It impresses all minds, not prepossessed 
 by an adverse theory, as the natural ending of tliis 
 period of trial. If it is not such, that fact creates 
 an anomaly in the divine order of things. Death 
 puts an end to all other preliminaries to fixed 
 destiny. The end is so absolute as to start pain- 
 fully the inquiry whether the soul itself exists in 
 the region beyond. Why, then, should it not put 
 
The Hypothesis of a Second Prohation, 157 
 
 an end to this preliminary, — the moral trial for 
 eternity ? 
 
 Practically, therefore, to the popular mind, the 
 question concerns a second period of probationary 
 disciplme. One such period ends : does another 
 begin? In this phase of it, we must meet the 
 question in the pulpit. In scholastic discussion, 
 it may take the other form, and ought to be so 
 treated ; but the pulpit must encounter it as it 
 frames itself in the popular thought. We shall 
 not, for any long time, hold the popular thought 
 to any other. Discuss a continued probation in a 
 morning's sermon, and hearers will be talking of 
 a second probation before nightfall. 
 
 A more serious peculiarity of the discussion, 
 and one tending to relax the popular faith, is the 
 hypothetical way in which the advocates of the new 
 departure deny the ancient belief that the end of 
 probation and the end of life are simultaneous. 
 "7/," we are told, "there are beings — infants, 
 idiots, and some heathen — who have no fair trial 
 in this life, they will not be denied such trial in 
 another. If this world gives them no fair chance 
 of salvation, another world will. If they have not 
 known and intelligently rejected Christ here, they 
 will not be debarred from the opportunity else- 
 where. Beyond the grave, in Hades, in Paradise, 
 in some city of refuge, in some prison of suspended 
 destiny, such infirm souls, if they exist, shall find 
 the gospel preached, and salvation offered." The 
 corollary follows inevitably, that prayer for such 
 
158 My Study: mid Other Essays. 
 
 " spirits in prison " is not forbidden. Tacitly it is 
 encouraged. 
 
 We pass OA^er, for the present, the startling 
 revolution which this novel theology proposes in 
 the ancient theory, so dear to bereaved parents, 
 of the destiny of those who die in infancy. The 
 j)oint which demands review, is that this hypo- 
 thetical way of holding in suspense the ancient 
 faith is fraught with peril. To a scholarly mind, 
 in matters which are proper themes of scholastic 
 debate, a hypothesis may be a very harmless thing. 
 It may be a very necessary device in the initial 
 stage of discussion. It is not such to the common 
 mind, in matters of grave practical faith. Minds 
 unused to speculative theology may find it difficult 
 to deny a hypothesis so plausible as the one now in 
 hand. They may not easily see where the fallacy 
 lies. If two and two do not make four, they may 
 make five. Why not ? Yet the hypothesis loosens 
 the whole basis of mathematical demonstration. 
 So, in the case now before us, the fallacy lies in 
 the fact that the hypothesis contradicts known 
 and indubitable truth. It loosens the foundation 
 of much more than the truth in question. 
 
 Apply the hypothetical method to truths not 
 susceptible of demonstration, and to the common 
 mind it may be revolutionary in its effect. It is 
 likely to carry the force of assertion. Popular 
 thinking does not hold truth long in solution. A 
 precipitate is soon formed of positive belief or un- 
 belief. Discourse in the hypothetical vein will 
 
The Hypothesis of a Second Probation. 159 
 
 soon be believed to affirm more than it does affirm. 
 We shall be understood to deny more than we do 
 deny. When confronted with the perils of our 
 teaching, we may honestly shelter ourselves behind 
 our hypotheses. Logically they protect us from 
 the charge of error, because they affirm nothing. 
 But the popular mind does not follow us to our 
 retreat. We shall be quoted as holding a secret 
 faith. That which we hold suspended on an " if," 
 the common mind will hold in downright affirma- 
 tion. The common sense of men is not diplomatic. 
 It does not hold beliefs in reserve or in balance 
 with provisos. It does not handle truth with 
 silken gloves. 
 
 Furthermore, on the subject of retribution the 
 popular faith is quick to seek shelter from the 
 terrific forms of inspired speech. If a chance is 
 opened for escape from the old belief with a re- 
 spectable show of scholarly authority, men spring 
 to it. In the biblical forms we utter our faith in 
 low and tremulous tones. It requires but a little 
 impulse of doubt from trusted religious teachers, 
 first to remand our belief into silence, and then to 
 substitute for it more than the hypothetical nega- 
 tion. Men will deny on this theme more than 
 their teachers deny : they will believe on the nega- 
 tive side more than their teachers believe. Such 
 is the drift of the popular thinking. The descent 
 from an old, high-toned, outspoken, uncompromis- 
 ing type of the truth to a practical suspension, 
 ending in a flat denial, is very facile. The road is 
 
160 My Study: and Other Essays, 
 
 very smooth, made so by the tread of many feet. 
 It needs often but the suggestion from a revered 
 instructor of the hypothetical negative to invite 
 the unwary to a surrender of faith. 
 
 In few things is the superlative wisdom of 
 inspiration, and especially that of our Lord, more 
 obvious than in the unmitigated, peremptory, ab- 
 solute revelation of eternal woe. In nothing does 
 inspiration disclose more strildngly its prospective 
 bearing in looking onward to after-times, and fore- 
 stalling objections created by the effeminate senti- 
 ment of ages to come. The revelation of retribu- 
 tive purposes from the lips of our Lord is the divine 
 ultimatum. In His imperative speech, the truth is 
 relieved by no hypothesis to the contrary. It is 
 diluted by no hint of exceptions. The eternal 
 prospect is lighted up by no possibilities of re- 
 prieve. Compromise and proviso are forestalled. 
 The great gulf is fixed. The uttermost farthing 
 shall be exacted. This is preaching great truth in 
 great speech. No other way of putting the stern 
 reality will ever hold the popular mind to it as a 
 reality. Eelax its severity, and you destroy its 
 tenacity. Give men the inch, and they will take 
 the ell. Make the error possible, and they will 
 make it sure. Hypothesis will be assertion, and 
 plausibility will be proof. 
 
 Probably not an ungodly man lives who does 
 not believe, that, if there are to be any exceptions 
 to the doom of incorrigible guilt, his own case will 
 be one of them. Men trust to luck in this thing 
 
The Hypothesis of a Second Prohation. 161 
 
 with awful temerity. Tliey find some overbear- 
 ing of temj)tation, some infelicity of circumstance, 
 some force of ancestral impulse, some tyranny 
 of temperament, which will create, if not in eter- 
 nal justice, yet in the magnanimity of God, a way 
 for their escape from the threatened penalty of 
 sin. In some way or other the elastic " If " can 
 be made to cover a fair chance of salvation for 
 them, whatever may be the luck of worse men. 
 
 Such is the pagan theology on the subject which 
 finds currency in the world. Indeed, is it not the 
 fact, that, to the majority of us all, crimes are worse 
 in other men than in ourselves ? Few men weigh 
 themselves with their fellows in even scales. Do 
 we not count it an exceptional virtue if a man is 
 as severe in self-judgment as in the criticism of 
 others? A subtile breath generally tilts the bal- 
 ance in our favor. Here, therefore, lies imminent 
 and deadly peril in the preaching of hypothetical 
 faith on a truth so appalling to the sensibilities, 
 and so overpowering to the self-love, of men, as 
 that of an eternal Hell. 
 
 We may perhaps obtain some conception of this 
 perilous tendency by extending this hypothetical 
 stjde of teaching to others of the central doctrines 
 and duties of our religion. Why not, as perti- 
 nently as to this one ? Express in this style the 
 doctrine of depravity. If there are beings, such 
 as infants, idiots, and some heathen, who, by reason 
 of constitutional infirmity or unfortunate condi- 
 tions, are not susceptible of moral government, 
 
162 My Study: mid Other Essays. 
 
 such as Cliristianity represents, then the govern- 
 ment of God may not cover them at all in the 
 range of its requirements and sanctions. If there 
 are men, women, children, who, by reason of their 
 amiability of temperament or the innocence of 
 youth, are not subject to the disabilities of the 
 Fall, then the law of God does not rest upon them 
 as being in the bondage of sin. The Word of God 
 does not admonish them as lost beings who need 
 to be saved. At least this may be true. We 
 " must not dogmatize " to the contrary. 
 
 Apply this dubious method of speech to the doc- 
 t]'ine of regeneration. If there are men of cul- 
 ture, and women of refinement, and children of a 
 godly ancestry ; and if to these are to be added 
 scholars, philosophers, scientists, statesmen, whom 
 a Christian civilization has elevated and rounded 
 in the virtues and amenities of life, so that their 
 moral deficiencies seem insignificant, their faults 
 venial, their sIds invisible to the world's eye, — then 
 they do not, or may not, stand in need of moral 
 renewal by supernatural power. If there are some 
 such elect spirits among hearers of the gospel, the 
 Christian pulpit can not fairly treat them as dead 
 in trespasses and sins. They can not reasonably 
 be counted as habitants of a lost world, by nature 
 the children of wrath, and needing to be born 
 again. They constitute, as many such believe of 
 themselves, an intermediate class between saints 
 and sinners, of whom the drift of biblical teaching 
 seems to take no cognizance. At the best, this 
 
The Hypothesis of a Second Probation. 163 
 
 may be so. We must submit to a suspense of 
 faith till we can prove that it is not so. Preach- 
 ing on this doctrine, instead of presenting a solid 
 front as the ages of faith have believed, must be 
 riven through and through by its exceptions. 
 
 Subject to the same strain of hypothesis the 
 doctrine of the Atonement. If there are favored 
 classes of the human brotherhood, in which sin 
 itself takes on aspiring and beautiful and heroic 
 forms, so that they become the theme of eulogium 
 and song, which carry the implication that sin in 
 such forms does not need to be washed away by 
 the atoning blood of Clu'ist, then it follows that 
 of such beings Christ is not a Saviour. If there 
 are such men and women, the corollary is, that 
 they do not depend on the sacrifice of an infinite 
 and sinless One to shield them from the wrath 
 of an indignant God. Such elect ones are not 
 required to look upon themselves as saved by 
 grace, and grace only. 
 
 An English nobleman once said, that to him the 
 most incredible thing in Christianity was, that, in 
 the conditions of salvation, it makes no distinction 
 between the noble and the base of human birth. 
 Napoleon spoke in the same strain. Said he, " For 
 my part, it is not the mystery of the incarnation 
 which I discover in religion, but the mystery of 
 social order which associates with heaven the idea 
 of equality." How can the hypothetical theology 
 answer him ? It must at least be conceded that 
 his objection may be unanswerable. It will not 
 
164 My Study: and Other Essays. 
 
 do for us to affirm that it is not so. " We must 
 not dogmatize." Hypothetical wisdom sets all 
 tilings sailing in a beautiful mist in mid air. 
 
 Carry this style of hypothetical negation into 
 the discussion of inspiration. How does it sound 
 from a Christian pulpit? Moses, though lifted 
 above his age in his religious intuitions, was still 
 a Hebrew of the Hebrews. When he, honestly 
 perhaps, read prophecy backward, and experi- 
 mented upon the age of the world and the order 
 of its birth, if he took Hebrew legend for revela- 
 tion, and was sadly out in his reckoning; if he 
 really knew no more about it than other men who 
 had dreams, and saw strange sights; and zf science 
 convicts him of that ignorance and presumption, — 
 then we must roll up the parchment of Genesis, 
 and store it in the library of myths. Our respect 
 for Mosaic inspiration must keep it company. 
 
 St. Paul believed, honestly enough, that it was 
 given him to see things which it was not lawful 
 for man to utter. Yet he was a Jew. He dragged 
 behind him the crudities of a race to whom sci- 
 ence was unknown, and in whose ethics art was a 
 sin. If therefore, he at one time believed in good 
 faith that he saw the end of the world close at 
 hand, and said it, and if a month or two later he 
 declared in faith not so good that he never said 
 that, we must, then, treat him as we would any 
 other blundering prophet, in whose reckoning the 
 end of the world has not come to time. His 
 claim to inspii-ed authority must pass for what 
 
The fff/pothesis of a Second Probation, 165 
 
 it is worth. The popular mind will make quick 
 work with it. 
 
 Jff^ an inspired Psalmist uttered very worldly 
 imprecations ; if he cursed his enemies roundly, 
 like other exasperated men j if inspired lawgivers 
 commanded things abhorrent to the moral sense 
 of mankind; if even our blessed Lord pictured 
 retribution in panoramic horrors, which our ethi- 
 cal instincts recoil from as contradictory to the 
 character of God, — then we must let go the record 
 of psalmist and lawgiver and of the most godlike 
 of teachers. We must hold our notions of inspira- 
 tion with so loose a hand, that our own reason 
 shall at least be its equal, and our moral intuitions 
 vastly its superior. In the ultimate evolution of 
 the argument, we must at least concede that this 
 mat/ be true. " It will not do for us to dogmatize " 
 to the contrary. 
 
 Once more apply this style of hypothesis and 
 possible negation to the adjustments of the pulpit 
 and the revision of creeds, if Christianity itself 
 uplifts some portions of the race, possibly some 
 entire generation in a golden age, to such a height 
 that culture does for them what grace, and grace 
 only, can do for others, then these select ones do 
 not, or mai/ not, — we do not know, and dogma- 
 tizing is out of place, — ma^ not be proper objects 
 of the preaching of the gospel in its ancient types. 
 It must be reconstructed to meet their advanced 
 thinking. It must be mellowed to suit their deli- 
 cate sensibilities. They must not be disgusted 
 
166 My Study: and Other Essays. 
 
 by its ancient horrors. The sterner elements of it 
 must be eliminated. The poet was right who 
 sang of a place which " must not be named to ears 
 polite." The old creeds must be woven anew of 
 more facile stuff. Love must take the precedence 
 of Law. Silk must take the place of steel. The 
 pulpit of the coming age must be attuned 
 
 " To the Dorian mood 
 Of flutes and soft recorders." 
 
 Even now the new dispensation may be at the 
 door : who can tell ? 
 
 Ring the changes of these hypothetical nega- 
 tions through the whole gamut of revealed truth, 
 and what must be the working upon the whole 
 tone of the pulpit ? How long could the popular 
 faith stand that style of doctrinal discussion? 
 How long could any tiling stand in the popular 
 theology which could deserve a biblical nomen- 
 clature ? How long could the faith of the wisest 
 and the best of us bear the strain ? A man's real 
 faith is the residue which his doubts leave intact. 
 Hypothetical beliefs are beliefs suspended. Life 
 can not use them as factors in achievement. Char- 
 acter can not appropriate them as elements of 
 growth. In war, no territory is so severely rav- 
 aged as the neutral ground. So is it with beliefs 
 which are made the pendants of an " If." 
 
 Why should the doctrine of retribution be sub- 
 jected to such neutrality more than the cognate 
 doctrines of our religion? No other element in 
 
The Hypothesis of a Second Probation. 167 
 
 our system of faith bears tampering with so poorly 
 as this. The popular mind must hold it with close 
 grip, or it can not long hold it at all. It never 
 can live subject to the law of chances. Men must 
 hear in it the old apostolic ring of unquestioning 
 and unqualified speech. Only when we ''''know 
 the terrors of the Lord," can we "persuade men." 
 One fact more is conclusive evidence of the 
 peril of this way of putting things in our exposi- 
 tions of the ancient faith. It is, that its hereditary 
 enemies exult in this novel departure. General 
 Grant said of the battles of the Wilderness, 
 " Where the enemy does not want me, there they 
 must find me." The converse principle is perti- 
 nent in theological controversy. That is perilous 
 to the faith which its enemies delight in. We can 
 not afford to preach it in ways which are a boon 
 to unbelief. We should be wary of qualifications 
 and provisos which are welcomed by the whole un- 
 believing world. Yet when in the history of the 
 New-England Theology has such a greeting been 
 given with such loud and general acclaim by its 
 opponents as that which has applauded this hypo- 
 thetical teaching of a second probation? The 
 theological successors of Dr. Channing have joined 
 hands with those of Dr. Ballou and of Theodore 
 Parker in a triangular benediction upon the dis- 
 coverers of this new theory of the future life. It 
 is hailed by them all as a sign that the last days 
 of the faith of the fathers are at hand. A wise 
 man will watch what his enemies say of him. 
 
168 My Study: and Other Essays. 
 
 Mr. Emerson admits that the Calvinistic theol- 
 ogy — mythology, he calls it — has great tenacity 
 of life. He says it will be the last to die of the 
 ancient beliefs. So it will. But we have only to 
 put its massive pillars into the stock and structure 
 of hypotheses, to see them topple over before their 
 time. Errors develop themselves in systems as 
 truths do. As one truth ushers another into the 
 general faith, so does one error lead to a system of 
 errors in which each one is a prop to the rest. 
 One error never stands long alone. Especially in 
 the derivation of beliefs from a divine revelation, 
 to extort an error from it requires a theory of 
 inspiration which undermines the whole. This is 
 the result to be feared by the friends, and this is the 
 result hoped for by the enemies, of our faith. The 
 disintegrating process may be very rapid. An 
 innocent hypothesis may in the twinkling of an 
 eye be the ruin of a system. 
 
XIV. 
 SCHOLASTIC THEORIES OF INSPIRATION. 
 
 OuES is the religion of a Book. The inspira- 
 tion of the Book is, therefore, to the popular faith 
 especially, a necessity. No other Christian truth 
 reaches so far underground. Yet the drift of 
 what may be called scholastic as distinct from 
 popular opinion concerning it, in recent years, has 
 tended strongly to take the doctrine out of the 
 range open to popular inquiry, and to remand it to 
 speculations in which only cultured minds, and 
 to some extent only professional minds, are inter- 
 ested. In some quarters, the result is a change 
 amounting almost to revolution. What, then, do 
 we need to find m the doctrine of Inspiration to 
 make it effective in the theology of the people ? 
 
 First, We need a theory of inspiration which is 
 easily understood. A theory packed full of criti- 
 cal distinctions and of qualifications not easily 
 intelligible, except to educated minds, is not the 
 theory needed by the common mind. It will not 
 long hold the common mind. It is not a practi- 
 cable theory, therefore, for the uses of the pulpit. 
 All Christian history shows that the masses of a 
 Christianized nation must have the idea of inspira- 
 
 169 
 
170 My Study : and Other Essays. 
 
 tion, if at all, in clear forms of statement, and 
 supported by obvious methods of proof. With 
 the people, inspiration is that or nothing. The 
 moment that you involve the doctrine in intricate 
 forms, or obscure its proof by wary reserve in 
 argument which suggests more doubt than faith, 
 or suspend its integrity on nice points of criticism 
 which invite interminable conflicts of learning, 
 you take it out of the range of the moral sym- 
 pathies of the people. It slips out of keeping 
 with their sense of moral need. They no longer 
 see in it a truth which fits in to their condition. 
 Men of the common mold will say of such an 
 involuted and nicely balanced theory, " That may 
 do for men of learning, but it contains no help 
 for me." Human nature in tlie average craves 
 another vision. 
 
 We need, also, in a working theory of inspira- 
 tion, something which makes the authority of the 
 Scriptures iraj)erative. We must have the doc- 
 trine in a bold and decisive form. Plain men must 
 be able to carry it from the pulpit to their homes, 
 and trust it with a sense of assurance in their 
 devotional reading of their Bibles. On such a 
 subject, men will not long believe a doctrine which 
 they can not use. Indeed, it is suspiciously notice- 
 able, that even experts in biblical learning are 
 sometimes burdened with learning overmuch on 
 the subject. They are apt to flounder when they 
 attempt to define a very " liberal " and scholastic 
 notion of inspiration in few words. They seem 
 
Scholastic Theories of Inspiration. 171 
 
 to be tongue-tied by fear of believing too much. 
 One modern expert of this class declares that such 
 are the complications and qualifications of the doc- 
 trine, that it can not be truthfully stated in exact 
 language. That is a disastrous concession to 
 infidelity. 
 
 The late Rev. Starr King, D.D., of Boston, once 
 illustrated, in his own person, the same peril. He 
 had just preached a sermon on the doctrine, which 
 was eminent for almost every quality of scholarly 
 discourse except those of clear statement and posi- 
 tive faith. Among his hearers was his neighbor 
 and friend, the late Rev. Nehemiah Adams, D.D. 
 As they left the church, arm in arm. Dr. Adams 
 said to him, in substance, " Dr. King, your sermon 
 leaves me in doubt as to what you mean when you 
 call the Bible inspired. Will you explain to me 
 wha': 3'our idea of inspiration is ? " — " Yes," said 
 Dr. King substantially : " I think I have a satis- 
 factory notion of it, and it is just this : inspiration 
 is — it is — hm ! — it is a kind of mental uplifting ; 
 it is an illumination ; it is — well, it is an ifispiror 
 tion of the whole man." 
 
 This may do for minds like that of Dr. King ; 
 but it will never do for the plain Christian believer, 
 who feels the need of a revelation from God which 
 is authoritatively God-like. Plain men, when in 
 earnest in religious inquiry, incline to believe 
 much rather than little. They are, by stress of 
 their necessities, believers, not doubters. They 
 need a conception of inspiration which shall make 
 
172 My Study: and Other Essays. 
 
 the Bible resonant with the very voice of God. It 
 must be something which the soul can hear in the 
 far distance, when conscious of estrangement from 
 its Maker. It must give visions of truth wliich 
 men can see in the dark. Nothing less authorita- 
 tive than this is the inspiration needed to commend 
 the religion of a Book to a lost world. Lost men 
 need a voice which can find them. 
 
 A fact supremely vital to the doctrine in ques- 
 tion is that proof of any revelation must start with 
 the inquiry, "Does man need a revelation?" If 
 we need none, the presumption is that we have 
 none. This presumption is irrefutable by any 
 ulterior reasoning. God is not a God of waste. 
 Even Socrates grounded his belief that a teacher 
 must conib f^om God, on the simple fact that the 
 world was in so l:"'d a plight without one. Does 
 it not plainly follow, Lli^t the theory of inspira- 
 tion here combated knocks out from under it the 
 initial argument in proof of any revelation ? For 
 the only revelation it supports is not the revela- 
 tion we need. We need an authority. We need 
 an obvious authority, an imperial authority, an 
 authority from which there is no appeal. We 
 need a clear light shining in a dark place. We 
 need something which shall illumine blinded eyes, 
 and be audible to deafened ears. A revelation 
 which in the very groundwork of its claims multi- 
 plies our questionings, and reduplicates our doubts, 
 is 7iot the revelation we need. Therefore the pre- 
 sumption is conclusive, that it is not the revelation 
 we have received. 
 
Scholastic Theories of Inspiration. 173 
 
 Another element needed in a working-tlieory 
 of inspiration, is that it shall be one which shall 
 comprehend in its scope the entire Scriptures in 
 their moral and religious teachings. 
 
 The assertion that " the Bible contains the Word 
 of God " is amphibious. It belongs to two widely 
 diverse realms of thought. It is true, or it is false, 
 accordmg to its occult meaning. The Bible is a 
 unit. In its unity lies the climax of its purpose 
 and its power. That unity can not be broken with 
 impunity to the fragments. The whole or nothing 
 is the Word of God. A revelation supported by 
 intermittent authority, inspired in patches and pa- 
 rentheses, we may be very sure is not a revelation, 
 either of God or from God. Its structure is not 
 Godi-like. Its errors infuse a baleful suspicion 
 through its very truths. Whose is the preroga- 
 tive to sit in judgment for us, and tell us where 
 error ends, and truth begins ? We grope at noon- 
 day as in the night. 
 
 The " higher criticism," for instance, in some of 
 its vagaries, claims to prove to us that St. Paul 
 spoke truth in one epistle, and contradicted it in 
 another. What, then, is St. Paul to us, more than 
 Swedenborg ? The same wisdom teaches us that 
 Moses was inspired to construct the Hebrew juris- 
 prudence, but not inspired to record his vision of 
 the history of creation. Who, then, is Moses to 
 us, more than Confucius? As a historian of the 
 divine cosmogony, he is not so much as an expert 
 in modern geology. Again, we are instructed that 
 
174 My Study: and Other Essays, 
 
 our Lord, in giving His sanction to the Jewish 
 faith of His day in the Old-Testament Scriptures, 
 meant only to lend His authority to the Messianic 
 Psalms and a few historic and biographic frag- 
 ments, and left the rest to the learned and 
 destructive criticism of future times. He is made 
 to appear as if His main object in His use of the 
 ancient Scriptures were to fend off their imposi- 
 tions on modern faith. Is not the sequence inev- 
 itable, that the major part of the Old Testament 
 to-day, and to us, has no more moral authority 
 than the Vedas ? Whether it has as much, what 
 means has the unlettered mind of knowing? Such 
 a revelation can not live in the trust and the affec- 
 tions of common men. It has no place in the 
 homes of the people. It must retire to the upper 
 shelves of scholastic libraries, or be locked in the 
 Vatican behind oaken doors. Sooner or later it 
 must go into oblivion with the sacred books of 
 other mythologic and obsolete theologies. 
 
 To teach effectively the religion of a Book which 
 is progressive in its construction, we must have a 
 volume which is one in its system of moral ideas. 
 It must be a structure in which every part gravi- 
 tates to a center. It must be written by men who 
 knew that whereof they affirmed, and who, con^ 
 sciously or unconsciously, wrote under the direc- 
 tion of one controlling Mind. In their religious 
 teachings, they must have made no mistakes, and 
 not written by guess-work. They must not have 
 contradicted each other or themselves. The earlier 
 
Scholastic Theories of Inspiration. 175 
 
 writers must have been forerunners to the later ; 
 and, in the end, there must be a fulfillment of 
 divine plan which shall throw back a light upon 
 the beginning. An epic poem or a tragedy is not 
 more truly a structure, compact and one, than we 
 have reason to expect a progressive revelation to 
 be which shall express to men of all ages the mind 
 of God. 
 
 On the other hand, a theory of inspiration, of 
 which the final outcome is that Moses contradicted 
 Christ, that the imprecations of David conflict 
 with the Epistles of St. John, and that St. Paul 
 could not even repeat himself correctly, abrogates 
 all claim of the Scriptures to imperative and 
 divine authority. God has not thus contradicted 
 God. He has not given to such a world as this a 
 volume through which runs no golden thread of 
 truth unbroken. That He has given to a lost 
 world a book inspired here, and not inspired there, 
 historic now, and mythic then, blunderuig some- 
 times, and by hap right at other times, and that 
 He has left it to man's infirm intuitions to divine 
 whether it is oracular anywhere, is absurd. It is 
 not like God to build such a rickety structure. 
 
 Nor is it like man to interpret such a volume 
 truthfully. The uncultured mind especially can 
 not solve the riddle of such a book. The princi- 
 ples of its interpretation are too recondite, and 
 the result too dubious. Under the intellectual 
 infirmities induced by sin, man can not by any 
 skill in mental ricochet pick out the inspired frag- 
 
176 My Study: and Other Essays, 
 
 ments from such a medley of fable. Whatever 
 may be true of the cultured few, the many would 
 flounder through its pages as hi a quagmh-e. 
 What else could the vast majority of men do with 
 it, but to give it up, — some in contempt, and 
 some in despair? Socrates, when he prayed that 
 a teacher might be sent from God, craved no such 
 revelation as this. In all soberness, would not 
 Cicero be as valuable a teacher of immortality? 
 Would not Marcus Aurelius be a better guide to 
 a manly philosophic life ? The book of Nature 
 surely would be infinitely superior to such a Book 
 of God. 
 
 The views here advanced are further enforced 
 by another fact. It is, that we need in our theory 
 of inspiration to find an adaptation to men who 
 are undergoing the discipline of probation. One 
 thing seems to be often strangely overlooked in 
 discussions of this and kindred doctrines. It is, 
 that man here is in no ideal world. Life is too 
 severe a strain upon his physical and moral nature 
 to leave him mental force enough to settle for 
 himself the interminable questions to which scho- 
 lastic theories of such doctrines give rise. We 
 need in such a life a revelation from God and of 
 God which shall speak its own authority. That 
 authority must be such that ignorant men can be 
 made to understand it. Men not trained in schools 
 must be able to see the reason for it. Men bur- 
 dened by life's discipline must be able to take it 
 home to life's emergencies. 
 
Scholastic Theories of Inspiration. 177 
 
 The argument for the evidences of Christianity, 
 which has for ages commanded the faith of believ- 
 ers, is mainly that derived from the response of 
 the Christian heart to the Bible as a revelation 
 from God. We believe it because it is such a 
 revelation as we need, and such as it is like God 
 to give. We have thus claimed that the Bible 
 does speak for itself. The unlettered mind has 
 credible evidence of its divinity, without harassing 
 itself with the scholastic side of the proof. This 
 evidence we can not afford to surrender. Yet we 
 are in danger of losing it in the complications 
 of criticism on the subject of inspiration, which 
 suggest more qualifications than principles, more 
 exceptions than rules. We need the doctrine, its 
 statement and its proofs, in such forms as shall 
 commend both to common men in common life. 
 
 In the shock of overwhelming sorrows, when 
 men's need is sorest, and their mental force ex- 
 hausted, they must be able to find God everywhere 
 present in the Book, without the drawback of mis- 
 givings, lest it be mistaken here, and fabulous 
 there, and perhaps absolute nowhere. Sick men 
 must be competent to find comfort in it, and 
 tempted men to find strength, and dying men 
 peace, without abatement by reason of doubts of 
 its authority. 
 
 All these uses of the Book are impracticable to 
 the extreme of absurdity, if the best and only 
 revelation we have is one which has for its chief 
 aim to put us on treble guard against believing too 
 
178 My Study: and Other Essays, 
 
 much. We are in no condition to be so morbidly- 
 shy of faith. We are in a wretched plight indeed, 
 if our only medium of converse with God plunges 
 us all into the vortex of scholasticism, and leaves 
 us there, to find out by our own distempered vision 
 what inspiration is, and where it is, and how much 
 it covers with authority, and how much with doubt, 
 and how it gets along with its own inconsistencies 
 and blunders. Of all men most miserable are we, 
 if, in response to our despairing cry for help, God 
 has given us a revelation, in which, when we sum 
 up the whole of it, and cast the balance of its 
 teachings, we must find more to reject than to 
 believe, more to foster doubt than faith, more 
 to start new despairs than to relieve old ones. 
 Such a revelation, be it repeated, is not the revela- 
 tion which a lost world needs. Therefore the 
 presumption is beyond rebuttal, that such is not 
 the revelation we have received. 
 
XT. 
 
 THE NEW-ENGLAND CLERGY AND THE ANTI- 
 SLAVERY REFORM. 
 
 PART I. 
 
 In every great revolution of opinion, three classes 
 of men are the chief belligerents. They are the 
 resistants, the destructives, and the reformers. 
 The resistants are the men who hold on to things 
 as they are. They resist change because it is 
 change. The destructives are the men who would 
 break up society itself to get rid of its abuses. 
 They are the men of one idea. The reformers 
 are men of balanced ideas who look before and 
 after. They are tolerant of evils which are curing 
 themselves. They labor patiently for bloodless 
 revolutions. 
 
 With these distinctions in mind, it is not dif- 
 ficult to classify the men who were eminent in the 
 war of antislavery opinion, thirty to fifty years 
 ago. The proslavery men were resistants. They 
 resisted, not only the liberty of the black man, but 
 almost every thing else which a free people value. 
 Free speech, a free press, a free postal-service, free 
 soil, fi"ee pulpits, free schools, they resisted as 
 
 179 
 
180 My Study : and Other Essays. 
 
 stoutly as free negroes. The very word " free " 
 was a bugbear to their fancy in the daytime, and 
 a nightmare to their dreams. 
 
 The Abolitionists, technically so called, were 
 destructives. They were honest, outspoken men, 
 who made no secret of their aim to destroy the 
 Union of these States. The national Constitution, 
 in their amiable dialect, was a "covenant with 
 hell.!^ Their code of ethics was sublimely simple 
 and compact. They saw no difference between an 
 individual and an organic wrong. Wrong was 
 wrong. That was the end of argument. What 
 was left to argue about? A wrong interlaced 
 with, and grown under, the traditions, the usages, 
 the laws, the institutions, and the wills of thirty 
 millions of independent minds, must be treated as 
 if it were the whim of one. A wrong inherited 
 centuries ago was to be no more patiently dealt 
 with than a wrong enacted yesterday. They there- 
 fore trusted nothing to the slow foot of time. 
 Institutions which had taken ages in the building, 
 must be revolutionized in a night. Their theory 
 took the whole siibject of American slavery out of 
 the domain of practical statesmanship, and con- 
 signed it to the conscience of a child. 
 
 As in all other developments of fanatical reform, 
 a vein of malign passion ran side by side with 
 much that was noble through their theories and 
 policies and speech. In debate, their habit was 
 abusive as opposed to suasive. The singleness of 
 their aim gave them the power which all earnest 
 
New -England Clergy and Antislavery. 181 
 
 men have, who are not trammeled by qualified 
 convictions. The opinions of most men are prob- 
 abilities. Theirs were certainties, absolute in evi- 
 dence, and imperial in authority. They were 
 passionate thinkers, who talked, right on, and acted 
 as they talked. 
 
 So much as this must be admitted for them : they 
 had a sylvan robustness of thought which impelled 
 them to say what they meant, and to go straight 
 to their objects. If they had talked less about 
 their honesty of purpose, and truth of speech, one 
 would give them credit for more of both. But, 
 in the main, they were loyal to their thought. 
 They believed in themselves, and trusted theu* own 
 intuitions against the world. It would be a libel 
 to question their sincerity. 
 
 It is not a libel to say that the intensity of their 
 convictions on the slavery question was not all the 
 intensity of conscience. It was, in part, the fury 
 of dissent. Conscientious men are apt to be tem- 
 pestuously conscientious if they have something 
 to hate. George Ripley, the accomplished presi- 
 dent of the "Brook Farm," said of one. of that 
 eccentric household, " He would hoe corn all day, 
 Sunday, if I would let him ; but all Massachusetts 
 could not make him do it on Monday." The con- 
 science of reform has a double nature. One-half 
 of it is the iconoclasm of dissent. So it was with 
 the leaders of abolitionism in New England. 
 
 It was in keeping with their temper, that they 
 should avowedly, and on principle, fling the chief 
 
182 My Study: and Other Essays, 
 
 weight of their cause upon the power of invective. 
 Argument was secondary, because conclusions were 
 foregone. They made a study of denunciation as 
 of a fine art. A new epithet of vituperation, or 
 figure of objurgatory speech, was to their dialect 
 like a new rifle to an arsenal. The author deserved 
 a patent for it. When Mr. Garrison had hatched 
 overnight, in his inventive brain, a new lampoon 
 upon the American Church, Marlborough Chapel 
 resounded with it the next morning. He orated 
 with beaming smile about the Church as " the 
 spawn of hell." Then the few scores of listeners 
 on the floor were titillated in sympathy. 
 
 Those were rare days for studying the art of 
 eloquence in its failures. Probably history does 
 not contain an example of another body of men, 
 possessed of a fair average of brains, and some of 
 them of culture, and led by one man who belonged 
 to the supreme rank of modern rhetoricians rather 
 than orators (for orators win their audiences : 
 Wendell Phillips seldom did), who on the platform 
 practiced so little tact in dealing with men, or who 
 threshed the mother tongue so ferociously in the 
 dialect of abuse. They were destructives in their 
 theories of government ; they were destructives in 
 their measures of policy ; they were destructives 
 in their judgments of institutions and of public 
 men; they were destructives in their style of 
 debate. 
 
 Their magnetism drew into alliance with them, 
 as that of such men always does, sympathetic de- 
 
New -England Clergy and Antislavery. 183 
 
 structives of every stripe and color. To a looker- 
 on, it seemed as if all the " cranks " on the conti- 
 nent were drawn in invisible grooves to the plat- 
 form of abolition. Divorced women could talk 
 there of the tyranny of the marriage laws ; beard- 
 less boys could expose there the blunders of Moses 
 and the barbarism of the Old Testament; social- 
 ists could expound there the inhumanity of prop- 
 erty in land ; laborers on a strike could denounce 
 there the despotism of capital ; " Come-outers " 
 could recite there in sing-song the corruption of 
 the Church ; and " Father Lampson," a harmless 
 lunatic, who, with his snath bereft of blade, per- 
 sonated "Old Time," could denounce there the 
 crimes of Scribes and Pharisees. In short, every 
 bee in everybody's bonnet had a chance to hum 
 there. If a long-haired man had a revelation from 
 heaven against the sin of short hair, and a short- 
 haired woman had her dispatch against the crime 
 of long hair, both could join hands there lovingly, 
 and have their say out. This is a caricature, but 
 it is a caricature of real life. 
 
 That it is so, is confirmed by a description given 
 by Ralph Waldo Emerson of a similar assemblage, 
 of which he was himself a member, in which fig- 
 ured the majority of those who were leaders in 
 those daj^s of the antislavery reform. He says, 
 "If the assembly was disorderly, it was pictur- 
 esque. Madmen, madwomen, men with beards, 
 Dunkers, Muggietonians, Come-outers, Groaners, 
 Agrarians, Seventh-day Baptists, Quakers, Aboli- 
 
184 My Study: and Other Essays. 
 
 tionists, Calvinists, Unitarians, and Philosophers, 
 — all came successively to the top." 
 
 The " picturesqueness " of the abolitionist as- 
 semblies reminded a spectator of Edmund Burke's 
 celebrated caricature of Lord Chatham's coalition 
 ministry. " He made an administration so check- 
 ered and speckled, a piece of joinery so crossly 
 indented and whimsically dovetailed, such a tes- 
 sellated pavement without cement, here a bit of 
 black stone, and there a bit of white, patriots and 
 courtiers, Whigs and Tories, who had never spoken 
 to each other in their lives until they found them- 
 selves, they knew not how, pigging together in the 
 same truckle-bed." 
 
 To a good-natured looker-on, who had strolled 
 in on a May morning, — a country parson, perhaps, 
 who sought recreation in hearing himself casti- 
 gated, and in finding out what a crimsoned sinner 
 he was, — there were two redeeming features of 
 the show. One was the bland, fatherly smile 
 of William Lloyd Garrison in the chair. He was 
 at heart a benignant man ; and his look seemed to 
 overflow with the oil of human kindness, at the 
 very moment when his speech was as the oil of 
 vitriol. Like Isaak Walton's angler, he hooked 
 his worm " as if he loved it." The good of that 
 to the worm was not so obvious, but that was the 
 way of it. The other was the grand and stirring 
 songs of the "Hutchinson Family." They were 
 the bugle-call of freedom. For downright anti- 
 slavery effect, they were worth all the rest put 
 
I^ew -England Clergy and Antislavery, 185 
 
 together. They made one's heart swell with sym- 
 pathy for the slave till it was big enough to lift 
 the roof off. The philippic from the platform 
 went in at one ear, and out at the other. The 
 song lived in one's soul for many a day. 
 
 Between these two extremes in the conflict of 
 the century stood the genuine reformers. These 
 constituted the great bulk of the thinking minds 
 of the North who gave to the subject reflection 
 enough to have serious convictions about it. In 
 this immense intermediate class stood the vast 
 majority of the clergy — well, for the want of a 
 more exact dividing-line, we will say — north of 
 a line running zigzag westward from New-York 
 City, and following northward the Atlantic coast. 
 And foremost of these were the clergy of New 
 England. 
 
 Mr. Webster never uttered a truer word than 
 when he told the Senate of the United States that 
 hostility to slavery was born in the religion of his 
 constituents. It was their ancestral birthright. 
 They drank it in with their mother's milk. They 
 breathed it in the atmosphere of their Sunday 
 schools and their family prayers. They were 
 taught it in the thoughtful sermons of their pul- 
 pits, and in the masterly decisions of their courts. 
 They sang it on Thanksgiving and Fast Days, and 
 in the ballads of the farm and the workshop. 
 Even the doggerel of "Yankee Doodle," by its 
 associations with Independence Day and Bunker 
 Hill, had become their festal song of liberty. No 
 
186 My Study: and Other Essays. 
 
 power of suasion or of force could change the 
 convictions of such a people. President Lincoln 
 spoke the intuition of the New-England mind from 
 its cradle when he said, '' If slavery is not wrong, 
 nothing is wrong." So believed, and on that belief 
 acted, the churches and clergy of these Eastern 
 States. 
 
 There were exceptions. But these owed their 
 notoriety chiefly to the paucity of their numbers, 
 to the contrast of their opinions with the back- 
 ground of public sentiment, and to the fact that 
 they had no perceptible influence on the general 
 mind. Outside of the Episcopal Church, we can 
 not recall a dozen names in the entire clergy of 
 New England, of men eminent in position and in 
 character, who held proslavery views. We may 
 safely venture the guess, that more than half of 
 the dozen, if they could be found, would have 
 pocketed in silence the " Fugitive-slave Law," if 
 a hunted negro had come to them at midnight, 
 begging for food and a hiding-place. One of the 
 curious psychological phenomena of those times 
 was, that good men could be proslavery in theory, 
 yet antislavery at heart. The Rev. Nehemiah 
 Adams, D.D., the author of " The South Side 
 View," never could understand why men called 
 him an advocate of slavery. He considered him- 
 self as honest an antislavery man as any of us. 
 So true is it that 
 
 "Man sees not what he seems to see : 
 He seems not what he is." 
 
New -England Clergy and Antislavery. 187 
 
 The political opinions of that small group of 
 clergymen carried no weight with the rank and 
 file of the New-England churches. The Rev. Dr. 
 Lord of Hanover, president of Dartmouth College, 
 was one of the few Northern preachers who found 
 in the Bible the enslavement of the black man as 
 the law of the ages. This theory he honestly 
 advocated for thirty years. It was one of a group 
 of pessimistic notions which he elaborated with 
 great learning and ingenuity. He backed them 
 up by a personal character of unquestioned force 
 and rare purity. Yet near the end of his life, 
 when he came to record his farewell message to 
 the world, he confessed that his thirty years of 
 faithful teaching had not resulted, so far as he 
 knew, in the conversion to his views of a single 
 mind outside of his own kindred. 
 
 So it was everywhere. Proslavery opinions 
 fell stillborn from the New-England press. They 
 found unresponsive or indignant hearers from 
 New-England pulpits. The pulpits were few that 
 ventured to proclaim them. As to other litera- 
 ture, where on the broad earth is there a pro- 
 slavery poem or drama or history, or so much as 
 a ballad fit to be sung by a milkmaid ? The world 
 sings liberty, never servitude. 
 
 A story went the round of ecclesiastical gossip 
 in those days, which illustrates the popular esti- 
 mate of the intellectual force which gravitated 
 into the antislavery ranks among the clergy. 
 Two parishioners in a metropolitan congregation 
 
188 My Study: and Other Essays, 
 
 were discussing the merits of a certain candidate 
 for their vacant pulpit. They were resistants in 
 their politics. Said one, respecting the popular 
 candidate, " I don't want him : I am told that he 
 is an abolitionist." — "Well," said his friend in 
 reply, "I have made up my mind, that in these 
 times we have got to have an abolitionist or a 
 fool." To men of that stripe, all antislavery min- 
 isters were abolitionists. The story loses some- 
 what of its piquancy by the expurgation of certain 
 expletives which were in the original. But it illus- 
 trates where the popular judgment looked to find 
 the men of weight in the clerical profession. The 
 candidate was Rev. Dr. Stone of the Park-street 
 Church, Boston. 
 
 It must be conceded that the Christian senti- 
 ment of reform at that time varied greatly in 
 intensity. Some men were at tropic heat, others 
 in a cooler zone. Good men differed in their pol- 
 icies. They were not agreed as to the limits of 
 Northern responsibility for Southern wrong. Espe- 
 cially, they were not at one respecting the duty of 
 benevolent societies, chartered and holding funds 
 for other purposes, to bear public testimony against 
 the national sin. We have no word of apology to 
 utter for those adroit societies whose mission under 
 their charter laid upon them the duty of speech, 
 and whose diplomatic voice was silent. Silence, 
 then, was more than speech : it was connivance at 
 wrong. Let it receive from impartial history the 
 verdict it deserves ! No word of ours shall gloss 
 
New-England Clergy and Antislavery, 189 
 
 or lighten it. But what we claim is this, — that 
 those differences were but surface-currents. Like 
 other surface-currents, they took on at the time 
 the look and the dignity of the tides ; but they 
 were not the tides. They never represented the 
 great deeps of New-England thought. 
 
 Looking back to those times, now that the long 
 agony is over, it is easy to see that God was moving 
 more rapidly than men were. He was moving in 
 the whirlwind, we in the evening zephyr. We can 
 see now, that had we all felt more intensely, and 
 spoken more imperatively, and acted more aggres- 
 sively, we still should not have kept pace with the 
 swift-footed angel of revolution. 
 
 But the fact, vital to the present purpose, is that 
 the great undercurrent of Christian opinion was 
 moving in only one way. The great deeps were 
 agitated to but one purpose. They massed them- 
 selves as with the volume of the sea agfainst the 
 great national crime. They were crowding it 
 steadily to its doom. If the movement did not 
 equal in velocity that of the providence of God, 
 still it was in profound sympathy with that. 
 
 Moreover, it represented, on the ethical side of 
 the conflict, the only movement which was so 
 grounded in temperate opinions, and conducted by 
 practical wisdom, as to encourage hope of accom- 
 j)lishing any thing but the horrors of civil war. 
 The religious mind of New England was a sub- 
 stantial unit in its aim at a peaceful abolition of 
 slavery. Its convictions were outspoken, and fore- 
 
190 My Study: and Other Essays. 
 
 most in their expression were the New-England 
 ministry. The charge which is now sometimes 
 made, either in ignorance or in malice, that the 
 New-England pulpit was craven and time-serving 
 on the subject, is libelous. Nobody who knows 
 those times well, really believes it. It is worthy 
 only of that acrid class of minds who are best 
 known as "minister-haters." 
 
 We find proof of the position here claimed for 
 our clergy in the volumes upon volumes of Fast 
 Day and Thanksgiving sermons which accumu- 
 lated all through that half-century. Confirmatory 
 evidence appears in the records of our ecclesiasti- 
 cal associations. Those, year after year, bore sol- 
 emn testimony against the crime which threatened 
 the life of the Republic. Then, as the conflict 
 deepened, and to him whose ear was near the 
 underground of society the roar of artillery boomed 
 from the near future, we see three thousand and 
 fifty of the clergy of New England, led, I believe, 
 by the reverend editor of "The Congregational- 
 ist," entering their protest as ministers of God 
 against the iniquity before the United-States Sen- 
 ate. That protest would have had the names of 
 nine-tenths of the New-England ministry, if there 
 had been time to collect them. 
 
 The significance of that testimony may be meas- 
 ured by the wrath with which it was resented. 
 Senator Douglas was astute enough to see in it 
 the most fatal single blow which had been struck 
 at slavery in his day. He was a son of Vermont. 
 
New-England Clergy and Antislavery, 191 
 
 He knew that back of that protest stood, in solid 
 phalanx, the Christian mind of these Eastern 
 States. He knew, too, that that was a power 
 which had never failed to make its words felt in 
 deeds in crises of the nation's destiny. He heard 
 in it the prophecy of doom. His own political 
 aspirations, founded on the extension of slavery, 
 were fated from that hour, even if a more grim 
 and imperative fate had not been creeping upon 
 him. Hence arose the incontroUable ire with 
 which he greeted the expostulation of the New- 
 England pulpit. 
 
 If further proof were needed, it is forthcoming 
 in the almost universal tone of the religious press. 
 With the exception of one sect, small in numbers, 
 whose temperament and traditions held it aloof 
 from all reforms, our periodical press spoke almost 
 as with the voice of one man. It varied as the 
 people did in intensity of utterance, but in sub- 
 stantial meaning that utterance was one. The 
 trumpet gave one prolonged blast of warning. 
 
 These tokens of the Christian sentiment of New 
 England do not admit of question. They have 
 gone into history. They are graven in the rock 
 for ever. As Mr. Webster said to Gen. Hayne of 
 the national fame of Massachusetts, so say we 
 of all New England : " There is her history. The 
 world knows it by heart." And we claim, that in 
 the forefront of the warfare of antislavery opin- 
 ion, which this group of States conducted, stood 
 our churches and their ministry. 
 
192 My Study: and Other Essays, 
 
 We claim for them more than this. We claim, 
 that, if they had been let alone, they would have 
 been successful. Turn back a hundred years. 
 Look at the public sentiment of Virginia at that 
 time. Read the deliverances of Jefferson, of Pat- 
 rick Henry, of James Madison, of George Wyeth, 
 — indeed, of all the public men of the Old Domin- 
 ion. Mark their abhorrence of the policy which 
 threatened to make Virginia a slave-breeding State. 
 Note the social degradation of the men who con- 
 ducted the domestic slave-trade. Observe the 
 unanimous voice of the pulpit against the break- 
 ing-up of negro families by sale. One can not 
 recall these signs of the drift of public opinion, 
 without discerning that Virginia was on the verge 
 of peaceful emancipation. Every thing leaned that 
 way. And, as the social forces of the Republic 
 were then poised, as went Virginia, so went all the 
 rest of the slave States. That was fore-ordained. 
 
 Now, we claim, that starting with that drift of 
 public sentiment in the Old Dominion, and with 
 the prestige which that State had in the politics 
 of the country, if the great alliances of Chi^istian 
 faith had been left to work in their normal way, 
 unhampered by the inflammatory policies of the 
 extremists on either side, and specially by those 
 which at the North soon succeeded in identifjdng 
 antislavery with infidelity, slavery would have 
 succumbed to moral power. To doubt it, is to 
 doubt all Christian history. The negro would 
 have come up to the rights of liberty, as he grew 
 
New-England Clergy and Antislavery. 193 
 
 up to the duties of liberty. He would not have 
 been exploded from the cannon's mouth into the 
 miserable fiction of it which he has to-day, in 
 which he has neither the intelligence to prize, nor 
 the power to use, a freeman's ballot. Every decade 
 adds to the proof, that our ministry, and those 
 who thought with them, were right in their faith 
 that liberty grozvs : it never sails into the sulphu- 
 rous air on the wings of dynamite. 
 
 This nation, in the first century of its existence, 
 had the grandest opportunity that nation ever had, 
 of putting to the proof the power of Christianity 
 to extirpate a great national wrong, without stroke 
 of sword, or beat of drum — and we flung it to 
 the winds ! In the forefront of the hosts who 
 committed the awful sacrilege, w^e charge that 
 there stood the " fire-eaters " of the South and the 
 abolitionists of New England. On their heads 
 rests the responsibility for the civil war, and the 
 outpouring of the life-blood of five hundred thou- 
 sand men! Such is the verdict which history 
 will render in the coming ages, when the world 
 has become used to the righting of organic wrongs 
 by bloodless revolutions. 
 
XYI. 
 
 THE NEW-ENGLAND CLERGY AND THE ANTI- 
 SLAVERY REFORM. 
 
 PABT n. 
 
 What were the causes which created mutual 
 repulsion between those who, in a former article, 
 have been termed the reformers and the destruc- 
 tives in the antislavery controversy? The story 
 is soon told. 
 
 1. The reformers believed, as the destructives 
 did not, in the rectitude of tolerating organic evils 
 till a Christian civilization had an opportunity to 
 undermine them. They had great faith in the 
 reformatory force of truth, working slowly and 
 underground. They accepted, with amendments, 
 the Mosaic economy in dealing with human servi- 
 tude. They did not believe that the world had 
 outgrown it. Their religion had, in other ages 
 and countries, uprooted barbarisms more inveter- 
 ate than that of American slavery. It had done 
 this, not by tempestuous and bloody assault, but 
 on the Mosaic principle, by silent and gradual 
 undermining. They believed that it could do the 
 same again. It might act with labyrinthal intri- 
 
 191 
 
New-England Clergy and Antislavery, 195 
 
 cacy of movement, but with exactest clockwork, 
 which would never go back on its ow^n advances. 
 
 They accepted it, therefore, as one of the politi- 
 cal principles, wrapped up in the very life of Chris- 
 tianity, that sanguinary revolutions and "reigns 
 of terror " are not the normal method of organic 
 changes in social order. On this principle they 
 acted. They conceived that they had no right to 
 effect the destruction of the wrong which threat- 
 ened the nation's life by the convulsions of civil 
 war. They had no right to prevent death in one 
 way by inflicting death in another. What for, 
 they asked in homespun Saxon, should they do 
 that thing ? If, in the purposes of God, such was 
 to be the permitted manner of the end, the bolt 
 must be forged and hurled by other hands than 
 theirs. They would meet their solemn duty in 
 the tragedy if it came, when it came ; but it was 
 not theirs to create the duty, nor to inflict the 
 tragedy. Theirs was a mission of peace. 
 
 We confidently ask what other position could 
 they hold, as preachers of Christianity ? Our reli- 
 gion, from the beginning, in its relation to political 
 reforms, has been a power of peaceful revolution. 
 As related to African servitude, it was that or 
 nothing. Its ordained ministers could do no 
 otherwise than to choose a policy which would 
 not set rivers of blood to flowing. Were they 
 sinners above all other men for this? Had this 
 been the only cause of repulsion between the two 
 wings of reform, it would have been imperative. 
 
196 My Study: and Other Assays. 
 
 2. But it was not the only cause. The reformers 
 believed, as the destructives did not, that slavery 
 could be abolished without sundering the union 
 of the States. The dissolution of the union was 
 the avowed object of agitation by the destructives. 
 This was their supreme aim. Till it was achieved, 
 nothing was achieved. The Union, like the 
 Church, was a " fraternity of man-stealers " and a 
 "band of thugs." No honest man could parti- 
 cipate in it for an hour. Wendell Phillips could 
 not vote for a deputy sheriff in Boston, so long as 
 a bedridden slave was fed by his owner in Texas. 
 For forty years he and his colleagues lived for the 
 disruption of the republic. 
 
 The reformers denied both the premise and the 
 conclusion. To the clergy of New England, espe- 
 cially, tills republic was a sacred thing. They saw 
 in it, not the work of man. The hand of God 
 was in it from the beginning. Their godly an- 
 cestry had founded it in prayer. They had a 
 religious faith about it which took in the destinies 
 of the world within its range. The liberty and re- 
 demption of all mankind were susx3ended upon 
 its perpetuity. 
 
 This conception of the mission of these States 
 they had inherited from the colonial and revolu- 
 tionary times. Says John Adams, " I always con- 
 sider the settlement of America with reverence 
 and wonder as the opening of a grand scene and 
 design of Providence for the illumination of the 
 ignorant and the emancipation of mankind all 
 
New-England Clergy and Antislavery. 197 
 
 over the earth." John Adams obtained that idea 
 from the clergy of his time. The pulpit then was 
 full of it. From thence it came down to the pul- 
 pit of the period we are reviewing. To the min- 
 istry of that period, it was a relic of a more than 
 heroic age. It was never forgotten at their 
 Thanksgiving festivals ; they were wont to pray 
 for the Union and the bondman in the same breath. 
 Such was their politico-religious creed. They be- 
 lieved it with heart and soul. What for, they 
 asked, after these years of fidelity to it as a sacred 
 trust, should they be faithless to the republic now ? 
 Had there been no other reason for the antagonism 
 of the two antislavery forces, this alone would 
 have driven them apart. 
 
 3. But there was another reason. The reform- 
 ers believed, as the destructives did not, in the 
 efficacy of the suasive as opposed to the abusive 
 policy in debate. The ascendency, almost the 
 monopoly, given by the destructives to invective 
 in the controversy, was offensive to the good taste, 
 and revolting to the good sense, of the reformers. 
 
 The great bulk of any large, and specially an 
 educated, body of public men is made up of men 
 of robust sense. The ministry of New England 
 were men of that stamp. They were not im- 
 beciles, and they were not savages in controversy. 
 They could see no reason for exempting slavery 
 from the laws of courteous and honorable discus- 
 sion. To make the exemption was a confession. 
 It confessed that their cause could not stand the 
 
198 My Study: and Other Essays, 
 
 test of the manly modes in wliicli thinking men 
 were accustomed to deal with thinking men. 
 Frantic vituperation in a great national debate 
 is a sign of conscious weakness or of conscious 
 wrong. 
 
 The principle of the destructives in this thing 
 was criminal ; if not criminal, it was ungentle- 
 manly ; if not ungentlemanly, it was silly ; if not 
 silly, it was insane. The policy of agitation 
 founded on it was not worthy of bearded men. 
 It was the eccentricity of a common scold. States- 
 men at the head of sovereign republics, and hard- 
 knuckled men at the polls, could not be expected 
 to yield their convictions, and change their votes, 
 for a deluge of clapperclaw. It was but a truism 
 of common sense, that self-respecting men any- 
 where would not tolerate such methods of ap- 
 proach. The abolitionists themselves never would 
 have done it. The reformers would not do it. 
 Nobody would do it. Nothing but fanatical pas- 
 sion could make such an exorbitant demand on 
 human nature. In asserting that demand, fanati- 
 cal passion was puerile. 
 
 As practical men, therefore, the reformers de- 
 nounced the policy of invective as one which, 
 seconded by that of the resistants at the opposite 
 extreme, blocked up every avenue to emancipation 
 except the via mala of civil war. Thus they looked 
 at it as a question of policy. Looking at it as a 
 question of principle, they could not help seeing, 
 that to suspend on such a policy the success of a 
 
New-England Clergy and Antislavery. 199 
 
 great humanitarian revolution, and the peace of 
 a great nation, and the liberty of a great race, was 
 a crime against the civilization of the world. 
 Looking now at the grim history of the end, who 
 was right? 
 
 In any aspect of the case, the vituperative fero- 
 city of the destructives could not fail to repel from 
 them the tastes and the convictions and the good 
 sense of an educated and dispassionate clergy. As 
 gentlemen, as wise men, as patriotic men, as Chris- 
 tian men, they could not seek such an alliance. 
 What for, they asked again, shall we do this great 
 folly? The two wings of antislavery sentiment 
 must have parted asunder for this cause alone, even 
 if there were none more sacred. 
 
 4. But there was a cause more sacred. The 
 reformers believed, as many of the destructives 
 did not, in the inspiration of the Old Testament 
 and the divine origin of the Christian Church. It 
 has been the misfortune of the cause of liberty, 
 the world over, to attract to its support men who 
 have been more hostile to Christianity than to 
 tyranny. Such was the fate of American anti- 
 slavery as represented by the abolitionist wing in 
 the controversy. 
 
 The abolitionists welcomed to their fellowship, 
 and in part to their leadership, men and women 
 whose chief resources in debate were denuncia- 
 tions of the Mosaic institutions and the teachings 
 of St. Paul. Some of them were expert in their 
 flings at Him whose name is above every name. 
 
200 My Study: and Other Essays. 
 
 They shocked our most sacred sensibilities. They 
 travestied our supreme hopes for ourselves and fur 
 the world. 
 
 Not all of the abolitionists were of thiv3 character. 
 William Jay was not : Arthur and Lewis Tappan 
 were not. Indeed, a marked distinction grew up 
 between the abolitionist platform of Boston and 
 that of New York — the latter being much less 
 given to outrage of Christian convictions. Long 
 before the war, the distinction grew to alienation. 
 The Tappans, William G. Burney, the " Free-soil " 
 candidate for the Presidency of the United States, 
 and others of that ilk, could not work with the 
 leaders of the Boston platform any more genially 
 than the New-England clergy could. Each wing 
 had its separate organ. " The Emancipator " and 
 " The Liberator " represented policies as wide 
 apart almost as the poles. 
 
 But geograpliical locality compelled the New- 
 England clergy to deal chiefly with the abolition- 
 ists of Boston, not with those of New York. In 
 Massachusetts they encountered the anti-Christian 
 type of abolitionism, in its most virulent form. It 
 infected weak ones in our churches. Under the 
 advice of its apostles, they were enticed into faith- 
 lessness to their Christian vows. We were com- 
 pelled to perform a duty which is the most painful 
 one devolving on a Christian pastor, — to subject 
 to discipline men of whose conscientiousness we 
 had no more doubt than of our own. We must 
 do it, or officially connive at treachery to our sacred 
 Scriptures and the ordinances of Christ. 
 
Neiv-England Clergy and Antislavery. 201 
 
 The collision concerned no question of abstract 
 dogma. If it had, our duty might have been the 
 same. But it did not. It came home to us in the 
 most hallowed duties of Christian fellowship. We 
 felt the shock of it in our assemblies for social 
 prayer and at the Lord's Supper. We were in- 
 truded upon by some of the leaders of the reform, 
 who came into our meetings to tempt away from 
 us beloved members of our churches. Tracts ca- 
 lumniating the Bible and the Church were put into 
 the hands of our children, and circulated in our 
 Sunday schools. What could we do ? Should we 
 have sat idle ? Should we have taken the intruders 
 by the hand, and bade them God-speed ? We did 
 not so read our commission from our Lord. 
 
 Yet it is due to honest history to say that 
 Wendell Phillips was not understood to ajDprove 
 the antislavery assaults upon the Scriptures. The 
 clergy had no more bitter foe than he ; but of the 
 Word of God, he was said to be a reverent believer. 
 Doubtless there were many others less eminent 
 among the abolitionists of New England who 
 agreed with him in that respect. 
 
 But we were not tempted to trust him as a 
 Christian leader of a great reform, nor was our 
 respect for him as a Christian man increased by 
 such occurrences as the following. On a memor- 
 able occasion, he was indulging in his usual tirade 
 against men and institutions and States in general. 
 Massachusetts came in for her full share of his 
 abuse. He took up the formula which the mem- 
 
202 My Study: and Other Essays, 
 
 ory of tlie fathers ought to have made sacred on 
 his lips, " God save the Commonwealth of Massa- 
 chusetts ! " By interpolating the most vulgar of 
 the profane words which one hears in the slums 
 of Boston, he transmuted it into an execration of 
 his native State. We did not follow him as a 
 model, either in religion or good taste. Ought we 
 to have done so ? Should the reverend clergy of 
 Boston have imitated him in their next reading 
 of the governor's proclamation of a day of thanks- 
 giving? We did not so interpret our ordmation 
 vows. 
 
 Men whose tastes craved such things, and whose 
 religion approved them, were numerous enough on 
 the platform of abolition in New England, to give 
 coloring to the policy represented there. To this 
 day, all over the South, the name of "abolitionist" 
 is the synonym of every most virulent type of infi- 
 del and scoffer. A reform, like a man, is known 
 by the company it keeps. 
 
 The clergy could not join hands with such men 
 without treachery to Christ. They could not form 
 alliance with even the nobler class of the destruc- 
 tives without lending the sanctity of their profes- 
 sion to the moral support of other men, whom they 
 believed to be enemies of their Lord. They were 
 but human if they felt on personal grounds, also, 
 that it was an insult to ask it of them. Whatever 
 other men might think of them, they respected 
 themselves. They revered their calling. When 
 men came to them, seeking their fellowship, and, 
 
New-England Clergy and Antislavery. 203 
 
 at the same time, branding the Church of Christ 
 as the " brotherhood of thieves," and the " spawn 
 of hell," humility was not just then the chief of 
 their graces. It would have been a dishonor to 
 them if it had been. There is a great deal of 
 human nature in Christian ministers, and well is 
 it for them and for truth that it is so. 
 
 But, in the historical juncture now under review, 
 necessity laid an embargo on their fellowship with 
 the destructives. There was no common ground 
 on which men who believed first in Christianity, 
 and then in civil liberty, could even carry on dis- 
 cussion very freely with men who believed first in 
 civil liberty, and in Christianity not at all, and 
 whose destructive appetite was so voracious for 
 sacred things. Two or three fragments of history 
 will give a picture of the times. After the lapse 
 of thirty years, I claim for them, not a literal, but 
 a substantial, accuracy. If they err, it is rather 
 within than beyond the truth. 
 
 Once upon a time we made respectful mention 
 of Moses, as authority for the toleration of organic 
 WTongs. The only reply we got was, " So much 
 the worse for Moses, then." Again, we reverently 
 quoted St. Paul, in proof of exceptional cases in 
 which the legal ownership of a slave might not be 
 the "sum of all villanies." The rejoinder was 
 flung contemptuously in our faces, " Who, pray, is 
 St. Paul ? " We were innocent enough to recall 
 with reverence the words of our Lord, "I have 
 many things to say unto you, but ye can not bear 
 
204 My Study: and Other Essays, 
 
 them now ; " and we were about to ask whether 
 the principle of reserve of truth, in consideration 
 of the infirmities of men, might not possibly admit 
 of a broader application. But the autocrat of the 
 platform thundered in reply, "Reserve of truth 
 about slavery, by God or man, is the policy of 
 hell." Once more we ventured to cite the silence 
 of the Master upon Roman slavery, as possibly 
 instructive to later times. But, before we had 
 finished our story, the war-whoop came back, " If 
 Jesus Christ was tolerant of slavery, then down 
 with Jesus Christ ! " And — could it be that we 
 heard aright? — the voice Avas the voice of a 
 woman ! 
 
 What could we do ? The hypothetical gauze of 
 such flings at the person and teachings of our Lord 
 could not conceal their venom. They were blas- 
 phemy to our ears. They made the whole at- 
 mosphere sulphurous. Reverent believers in the 
 Scriptures would have been recreant to their faith 
 if they had entered into alliance with men who so 
 maligned the name of Jesus. We could not lift 
 them to our level of thinking ; and we would not, 
 if we could, descend to theirs. What for, we 
 asked again, should we commit such sacrilege? 
 
 5. Added to these causes of alienation between 
 the abolitionists ana the clergy was another. It 
 was not good policy for the religious men of New 
 England to act in alliance with the extremists, 
 even if on other grounds it had been possible. 
 Bear with the word " policy " a moment. Prac- 
 
Neiv-England Clergy and Antislavery. 205 
 
 tical men in a great reform aim at practical results. 
 They are not content with blurting out their say. 
 They aim so to put things with such alliances of 
 auxiliary opinion as to gain their object. They 
 seek to allay prejudices, to convince opponents, to 
 win over dissenters, to convert wrong-doers. It 
 is one thing to do this : it is a very different tiling 
 to explode opinions from the platform in sound 
 and fury. The luxury of doing good is in the one, 
 the luxury of oppugnation in the other. 
 
 The New-England churches were made up of 
 practical men. Their clergy contained few men 
 to whom the luxury of oppugnation was a neces- 
 sity. They had access to the Southern religious 
 mind through community of religious faith. Sev- 
 eral great Christian denominations bound the two 
 sections of the country together. For once and a 
 half the lifetime of a generation, good men at the 
 South were open to conviction on the slavery ques- 
 tion, if approached in a sensible way by good men 
 at the North. The clergy of the North were not 
 willing to sacrifice that hold upon the Southern 
 conscience by affiliation with extremists. They 
 ought not to have been so. It was good policy, in 
 the sense of sound practical wisdom, to hold aloof 
 from men of destructive aims and passions. An 
 alliance with such men was too heavy a load to 
 carry. 
 
 Many of our ministry did avail themselves of 
 their religious hold upon the South as long as it 
 was of any practical use. The ablest arguments 
 
206 My Study: and Other Essays, 
 
 in defense of the antislavery cause were published 
 by them. When the abolitionists were boiling over 
 in the frenzy of the reform, the ministry, like sol- 
 diers in trenches, under fire of shot and shell from 
 both sides, were calmly laying down its principles, 
 and building up its proofs. When the one class 
 were denouncing the Bible for its complicity with 
 slavery, the other were using it as the great bul- 
 wark of freedom. The most effective arguments 
 in antislavery literature are the biblical arguments, 
 and the most masterly summary of them in the 
 language is the work of a Northern clergyman.^ 
 It was published chiefly in the hope of reach- 
 ing the conscience and reason of the Southern 
 churches. It probably had ten readers at the 
 South where "The Liberator" had one. 
 
 As a matter of practical wisdom, it would have 
 been insane for such men as the author of that 
 book to join hands Avith abolitionists of the school 
 of Wendell Phillips and Mr. Garrison. The Rev. 
 Albert Barnes spoke the conviction which the 
 policy of that school had forced upon the thought- 
 ful Christian men of the time, when he said, " If 
 a just cause could be killed by the folly of its 
 friends, the cause of African liberty would have 
 been so by the s^^irit and methods of the aboli- 
 tionists." 
 
 A single reminiscence of the civil war will illus- 
 trate this fact of the impolicy of alliance with 
 the abolitionists on the part of the clergy. A 
 
 1 See "Barnes on Slavery." 
 
New-England Clergy and Antislaverg. 207 
 
 Massachusetts chaplain in the war-time was under 
 the command of Gen. Butler at Yorktown. He 
 was ordered to take possession of a Presbyterian 
 pulpit. He was obliged to spend a half-day, more 
 or less, in defending himself from the charge of 
 infidelity. " Where are you from ? " — " From Mas- 
 sachusetts." — " Doesn't Garrison live in Massachu- 
 setts? Theodore Parker — isn't he in Massachu- 
 setts? Are they not Congregationalists, as you 
 are ? Do you come here from red-handed fellow- 
 ship with the men who have brought all this trou- 
 ble upon us, to preach to us the gospel of Jesus 
 Christ ? " Such was the animus of the colloquy. 
 It illustrates how ponderous was the load of ob- 
 loquy which a clergyman had to carry, if he was 
 tainted with suspicion of fellowship with the aboli- 
 tionists of Boston. To the Southern religious 
 mind, they represented the extreme type, not only 
 nor chiefly of hostility to slavery, but of more 
 venomous hostility to Christianity itself. 
 
 On all the grounds here considered, the two 
 classes of antislavery men noAV under review 
 parted by an intense and unconquerable repulsion. 
 They could not do otherwise. There were no 
 moral affinities which could outweigh these anti- 
 pathies. The poles of an electric battery are not 
 more repellent and mutually destructive. Which 
 was right, ultimate history must determine. But 
 right or wrong on either side, the two could not 
 amalgamate. Nor was there any vinculum strong 
 enough in fiber to hold them together, even as dis- 
 
208 My Study: and Other Essays, 
 
 tant allies. They sprang asunder with irresistible 
 rebound. The lines of their divergence were like 
 those of an hyperbola, diverging now, and diver- 
 ging for ever. 
 
 So far as the attitude of the clergy had the look 
 to a superficial observer of complicity with slavery, 
 or indifference to the outrage it inflicted on the 
 rights of man, it was only in the seeming. It was 
 a repetition of the social phenomenon which has 
 so often overclouded the history of liberty, — that 
 thoughtful reformers are outrun and overborne by 
 passionate reformers. Men of passion in such a 
 conjunction of elements have the advantage over 
 men of reason. Reason argues : passion storms. 
 Reason persuades: passion denounces. Reason 
 wins : passion drives. Reason builds : passion 
 burns. If, then, religion happens to be brought 
 into the conflict, it is very apt to be driven to the 
 wall. Liberty and Christianity are forced into an 
 unnatural antagonism. The best that good men 
 can do is to make a choice of evils. In their resist- 
 ance to infidelity, they must seem to be enemies to 
 freedom. Their fidelity to God takes on the look 
 of treachery to men. 
 
 Many times over has this monstrous alliance of 
 right with wrong taken place in the history of civ- 
 ilization. The phenomenon is visible to-day in 
 almost every country in Europe. Religion and 
 despotism seem to be allies. The Church supports 
 the re-actionary State. Hengstenberg in the pul- 
 pit joins hands with Trendlenburg at the bar, and 
 
New-England Clergy and Antislavery, 209 
 
 both bow to Bismarck at the palace ; and all con- 
 spire against nihilistic reform. 
 
 When, anywhere, the critical juncture comes 
 in which reform under infidel leadership demands 
 the sacrifice of religion to liberty, there can be no 
 question where the Christian ministry ought to 
 stand. If they are men, they will be true first to 
 their Christian vows. To denounce them as trai- 
 tors to the rights of man because they will not be 
 traitors to the ordinances of God, is not only a 
 calumny. It is proof either of woful prejudice or 
 of densest ignorance. A very moderate knowl-x 
 edge of history ought to suffice to save any fair- 
 minded man from such a blunder in public affairs, 
 and such cynicism in judgment of men. 
 
 Such was at times the enforced attitude of 
 the New-England clergy towards the infidel wing 
 of antislavery reformers. Looking back now to 
 those days of suspended destiny, we claim for the 
 churches and clergy of these States, that, as a 
 body, they did what men on whom rested the 
 responsibility of Christian vows ought to have 
 done. That they did no more, was due to tlie 
 unfortunate complications of the reform with 
 infidelity. But we claim, that, in what they did 
 do, they represented the vital and regenerative 
 forces which finally won the victory. To them, 
 and to men in sympathy with them, belonged the 
 moral weight and momentum which carried the 
 nation through those perilous years, and through 
 the catastrophe of the civil war. They, and that 
 
210 My Study: and Otlier Essays. 
 
 portion of the national mind which thought with 
 them, were the power whose decree put an end to 
 slavery. It is the unthinking mood of the present 
 to laud the abolitionists as the pioneers and the 
 autocrats of the antislavery reform. Not so will 
 history finally write that page in our annals. 
 
 It is never the destructives who carry to its 
 triumph a salutary revolution. It is never they 
 who in perilous crises save the State. They and 
 the resistants create such crises. The State lives 
 through their disastrous agitations in spite of both. 
 Its true conservators are the great intermediate 
 class between the two extremes. These are led 
 by men of collected and balanced minds, men of 
 " large discourse," men of long head and not head- 
 long in opinions and in policy. The real pioneers 
 of the antislavery reform came over in the " May- 
 flower." The germs of its triumph circulated in 
 the blood of the Puritan stock. And of this no 
 other single representative has been so potent all 
 along the line of history as the collective mind 
 of the New-England churches and their clergy. 
 
 The abolitionists of half a century ago were 
 the pioneers of the antislavery conflict, only as the 
 Jacobins of Paris were pioneers of the French 
 Republic of to-day ; only as the Carbonari of Italy 
 were the pioneers of the Italian unity originated 
 by Count Cavour ; only as the nihilists of Russia 
 are the pioneers of the Russian liberties that are 
 to be. It was in perfect -keeping with his natural 
 affinities that Wendell Phillips left behind him, as 
 
New-England Clergy and Antidavery. 211 
 
 the last significant act of his career, a justification 
 of the nihilist assassins of St. Petersburg. He 
 had been a nihilist all his life. Never is a great 
 nation indebted largely to such men for its liberty. 
 It is a falsification of history to advance them to 
 the front rank of a nation's reformers, and to revere 
 them as the rebuilders of the national life. 
 
 The time for writing that antislavery chapter of 
 our annals has not yet come. When it does come, 
 the historian will ascribe the overthrow of slavery, 
 not to the extremists who played their little part, 
 and s^Doke their little pieces, on the stage, and 
 passed away. He will trace it to the statesmen, 
 the political economists, the journalists, the histo- 
 rians, the poets, the novelists, the educators, the 
 scholars, and the preachers, who have been the 
 normal leaders of the thought of the great middle 
 class. They are the men wdio have held this 
 reform in even balance with other interests of 
 State and Church. They are the men of mental 
 equipoise, of temperate opinions, of patient reason, 
 of wise policies, of weighted speech, and of steady 
 force. Such are always the men who carry in their 
 persons the destiny of nations. 
 
 The clergy of New England, from John May- 
 hew down, have been profound believers. Theirs 
 has been a great faith in great ideas. One of those 
 ideas has been the identity of the cause of human 
 liberty with the cause of Christ. They have been 
 at the direct and extreme antipodes to one of the 
 New-England abolitionists, wlio, in the frenzy of 
 
212 My Study: and Other Essays, 
 
 reform, said, " We must get rid of Christ." Our 
 ministry have never for an hour separated these 
 two things, — Christianity and Freedom. 
 
 When Choiseul, prime minister of France in the 
 time of our revolution, desired to know the temper 
 of the American people respecting independence 
 from Great Britain, he gave orders that extracts 
 should be collected from the sermons of the New- 
 England pulpit. He would know what teaching 
 the people received from their religious leaders. 
 Those papers are still to be found among the 
 archives of the French Republic. It was on such 
 testimony that he advised the alliance of France 
 w^ith America. He found our people instructed 
 in the principles of free government, and devoted 
 to the cause of liberty. They were the pupils, in 
 this respect, not so much of their statesmen as of 
 their educated and scholarly ministry. Indeed, 
 it is interesting to see the evidences, in the State 
 papers and legislative discussions of those days, of 
 the indebtedness of our statesmen to the instruc- 
 tions of the pulpit under which they had grown 
 up. Choiseul trusted both the statesmen and the 
 j)eople for the sake of their religious teachers. 
 " Like priest, like people," was the proverb of his 
 nation. 
 
 The same trust has been deserved by the New- 
 England clergy to this day. They have never 
 been false to their inheritance. They have been 
 reformers without being fanatics. They have 
 been advanced thmkers without being destruc- 
 
New-England Clergy and Antislavery. 213 
 
 tives. They have been men who could build the 
 new without ruin to the old. They have held 
 their own valiantly among the elect spirits of all 
 ages, on the side of right, of fi:eedom, of progress, 
 and of God. 
 
xvn. 
 
 MASSACHUSETTS AND THE QUAKERS. 
 
 It is an old story, but it needs revision. We 
 are accustomed to excuse the action of Massachu- 
 setts in that business of the Quakers, on the ground 
 that she was fully abreast with the age, and by some 
 paces beyond it, in the humaneness of her legisla- 
 tion. But this is not all. A careful investigation 
 of the case discloses other grounds, which would 
 have made it seem an anomaly to the judgment of 
 the age if Massachusetts had not hanged such 
 Quakers as she had to deal with. 
 
 One ground of her defense is the unique tenure 
 by which the Colony held their ownership of the 
 territory. They held it, not by royal patent alone. 
 That might have given to others the same right 
 that they had to a local habitation and to civil 
 rights here. They held it by individual and col- 
 lective purchase. Their charter confirmed in un- 
 equivocal terms the right they had in common law 
 to say who should, and who should not, set foot on 
 the soil. It made that right the full equivalent 
 of individual ownership, not merely the right of 
 political sovereignty. Every rod of land covered 
 by their charter, they held by the same tenure by 
 which a man owned his door-yard. 
 
 2M 
 
Massachusetts and the Quakers. 215 
 
 Every man's house is his castle. He has the 
 right to eject from the lands covered by his title- 
 deeds any intruder thereon. If he says the word, 
 the trespasser must go. If the unwelcome guest 
 refuses to obey the order, the owner has the right 
 to use so much of personal force as may be neces- 
 sary to rid his property of the nuisance. Law is 
 not nice, and was not then, in estimating the rea- 
 sons for the ejection. With reason, or without rea- 
 son, the owner might remove the intruder from the 
 premises. That a man had red hair, or wore a 
 beard, was reason enough if the owner thought so. 
 Law is not squeamish, and was not then, in meas- 
 uring the exact degree or kind of force used in 
 the expulsion. While aiming at substantial jus- 
 tice, it left a large leeway to the discretion of the 
 proprietor in this respect. It made large allow- 
 ance for passion and mistake in the righting of a 
 wrong. It did not hold the owner to the bond as 
 severely as Portia held Shylock. It recognized a 
 right in the matter, which must somehow be vin- 
 dicated, and not sacrificed through fear of hurting 
 somebody. 
 
 Such was law as applied to colonial ownership 
 of the land. Our fathers held the streets and 
 commons of Boston as their own estate as sacredly 
 as Gov. Winthrop held the house he lived in. 
 This ownership by the body politic was carried so 
 far, that, when Judge Sewall wanted to build an 
 ell seven feet square to his house on the present 
 site of the building of the Massachusetts Histori- 
 
216 My Study: and Other Essays, 
 
 cal Society, lie was obliged to ask leave of the 
 General Court. It was this precise and sacred 
 right of domain that the Quakers outraged. They 
 did it in ways the most offensive that could be 
 devised to the stern proprieties and the sterner 
 morals of the Pilgrims. 
 
 Who, and what, were the colonial Quakers of 
 those days? We must not imagine to ourselves 
 meek and saintly men and women in modest drab 
 apparel hanging on four gibbets on Boston Com- 
 mon. They were not such men as William Penn, 
 and such women as Lucretia Mott. The sect was 
 in its infancy; hardly that — it was in embryo. 
 Every new sect is at first composed, in part, of 
 men whose minds move in tangents. Eccentric 
 men, crotchety men, men to whose vision notliing 
 has two sides, are apt to get astride of a new thing 
 in religion or in politics, as of a hobby-horse, and 
 to ride off with it from the solid globe peopled by 
 sensible men into the boundless spaces. Such men, 
 too, are always attracted to a new country. Under 
 the influences of such minds, the Quaker fraternity 
 in Massachusetts passed its embryonic stage. It 
 was not nearly so maturely developed as in the old 
 country. Fanaticism overweighted piety. Eccen- 
 tricity took precedence of good sense. The sect 
 had not reached the age of respectability. It had 
 not acquired that position in the world wliich 
 wealth and numbers give, and which in every reli- 
 gious organization bring in worldly considerations 
 to balance the tendency to fanaticism. The four 
 
Massachusetts and the Quakers. 217 
 
 men and women — or woman rather, for there was 
 but one — of whom the Colony rid itself so tragi- 
 cally, were people who, in the name of conscience 
 and the " divine light," outraged the laws of de- 
 cency and morality. They need the mantle of 
 charity more than Massachusetts does, and they 
 deserve it less. 
 
 It goes against the grain of something in our 
 better nature, to admit the plea of conscience in 
 their behalf. A good conscience is good sense. 
 When it is the voice of God, it speaks with dig- 
 nity and self-possession. It is perilous to train the 
 public conscience or one's own to shield a thing 
 which the common sense of mankind can not re- 
 spect. The world is very keen in knowing when 
 to spell the word with a large " W." Men vener- 
 able for conscience' sake do not tramp naked 
 through the streets at mid-day. Saintly women 
 do not march unclothed, yet unblushing, up and 
 down the broad aisles of churches at the hour of 
 public worship. Even the dying words of " mar- 
 tyrs " ought not to pass for much when they suf- 
 fer for shameless deportment. Mary Dyer on the 
 scaffold is a sad spectacle, but not a respectable 
 one. We can not weep a great while at her 
 saintly words. 
 
 Yet this was the style of Quaker which the 
 magistrates of Massachusetts had to deal with. 
 A very different sort of being evidently from 
 Benjamin Franklin and George Fox. To hang 
 him was not well ; but, under the circumstances, 
 his resolve to be hanged was worse. 
 
218 My Study: and Other Essays, 
 
 Another fact which has seldom received the 
 weight which it deserves, is that, as it respects the 
 plea of conscience, the magistrates stood on ground 
 at least as lofty as that of the Quakers. The scru- 
 ples of the one were as worthy of respect as those 
 of the other. Both lived in an age of twilight. 
 Each party regarded the other as advocates of pes- 
 tilent beliefs and damnable practices. The con- 
 science of each denounced the other in the name 
 of God. The Quaker obeyed his " inner light : " 
 the magistrate obeyed his oath. Looking at the 
 conflict at its worst for the case of the government, 
 it was an action of " Conscience versus Conscience." 
 If the recusants committed a venial offence in their 
 resistance to the State under stress of conscience, 
 an equal stress of conscience must relieve the 
 State also with equal reason. In the court of 
 conscience, we can discern only an immovable 
 body in the pathway of an irresistible force. Who 
 shall give a verdict? If the execution of the 
 Quakers was murder, their resolve to be executed 
 was suicide. What is the moral distinction be- 
 tween the two ? 
 
 But the contestants for conscience' sake were 
 not equal. They did not stand on common ground 
 in asking for the verdict of mankind. The State 
 represented the moral convictions of the age. She 
 was supported by the common conscience of the 
 world. Numbers do not make a right, but they 
 do palliate a wrong. The State had the moral 
 authority of numbers at her back. She was ex- 
 
Massachusetts and the Quakers. 219 
 
 eciiting tlie ancient laws of England. Those laws 
 she had not originated, but inherited. She contin- 
 ued a policy which the ablest statesmen and the 
 wisest jurists of the past had created for the safety 
 of public order. Till then, nobody had ventured 
 to question its rectitude or its necessity. The 
 recusants represented a novelty in government, 
 and a frenzy in religion. They defied the laws of 
 morality as enacted in all civilized lands and times. 
 They claimed the right to do it in defiance of law 
 of ancient usage, and of the moral sense of nations. 
 
 Under these conditions, we claim, that, in the 
 court of conscience, the two contestants were not 
 equals. The State was morally the superior. She 
 anticipated in her final action the jurisprudence of 
 enlightened nations down to our own time. She 
 was in the same dilemma, in kind, in which the 
 United-States Government now is in the solution 
 of the Mormon problem. She defended that which 
 the common sense of the world now defends as 
 essential to the well-being of society, the qualms 
 of fanatical consciences to the contrary notwith- 
 standing. With these accompaniments as a frame- 
 work, the " murder " of the Quakers is a less 
 repulsive picture than their " suicide." 
 
 Another fact pertinent to the matter is, that, 
 when the law of banishment was enacted, the 
 Commonwealth did not mean to execute it. It 
 was the explosion of a blank cartridge. Until the 
 time of that tilt with the offending Quakers, the 
 threat of legal penalty had been sufficient to rid 
 
220 My Study: and Other Essays. 
 
 the colony of such nuisances. English precedents 
 had placed many penal statutes on record, which 
 were meant as threats only. Nearly two hundred 
 and fifty crimes were then by English law punish- 
 able with death, not half of which probably ever 
 resulted in the execution of the penalty. True, 
 it is not good government to enact laws to be a 
 dead letter; but such was the usage of the age. 
 In Massachusetts it had not worked badl}^ Other 
 men had been exiled; and, when the State told 
 them to go, they went. Other impracticable con- 
 sciences had been banished for the peace of the 
 infant nation ; and, when told that they were not 
 wanted here, they went where they were wanted. 
 Roger Williams, under sentence of exile, migrated 
 over the State-line into Rhode Island; and he 
 stayed there. All the experience which up to 
 that time our fathers had had, with delinquents 
 of tangential minds and crotchety conscience, had 
 been with men and women who had not thought 
 it worth wliile to defy the whole artillery of the 
 State for the hum of the " bee in their bonnets." 
 
 Other such laws remained a score of years on 
 the statute-books without a solitary execution. A 
 law was passed, that, for certain offenses, the cul- 
 prit should have his tongue bored tlu'ough with a 
 hot iron. The fathers had a great many irons in 
 the fire, but that iron was never once withdrawn. 
 The threat sufficed. So they expected the law 
 against Quakers to work, and with good reason. 
 Neither government nor people desired to hang 
 
Massachusetts and the Quakers, 221 
 
 a Quaker. They were not affectionately fond of 
 Quakers, but neither were they ferociously fond 
 of hanging Quakers. They did not take kindly 
 to the Quaker sect, nor to its notions of social 
 decency; but as little did they take thirstily to 
 the business of the scaffold in social discipline. 
 
 In picturing the scene, therefore, of the four 
 gibbets on Boston Common, we must not fancy 
 that we see a crowd of sanctimonious Puritans 
 exulting with nasal psalmody in the sufferings of 
 meek and godly offenders. There was no such 
 thing. Our fathers were there in no bloodthirsty 
 spirit. They did not visit upon helpless victims 
 a malign authority. They did not even go out of 
 their way to seek occasion for the execution of the 
 law. On the contrary, they did every thing in 
 their power to avoid it as a misfortune. They 
 reasoned, they pleaded, they coaxed, they preached, 
 they exhorted, they threatened, they expostulated, 
 they prayed, they tried silence, they tried time, they 
 appointed a fast-day, they consulted the clergy, 
 they took counsel of the judges, they sought 
 wisdom from the wisest men in England, they 
 summoned the General Court, before they would 
 give to the refractory and defiant Quakers the 
 doom they sought. When at last the tragic end 
 came, both Government and people were heartily 
 tired of the whole business. If they could have 
 begun it with the experience with which they 
 ended, the deed never would have been done. 
 "We desire their life absent, rather than their 
 
222 My Study: and Other Essays. 
 
 death present," said the magistrates ; and the peo- 
 ple responded, "So say we all." On this point, 
 there were not two opinions in the whole colony. 
 
 But the Quaker of colonial Massachusetts was 
 an anomalous being. Only in the nickname, and 
 a few other trifles, did he resemble the clear- 
 headed and sound-hearted " Friend " of our times. 
 He was a monomaniac. He was open neither to 
 reason nor to suasion. He yielded to neither 
 threat nor promise. He lived in a delirious antag- 
 onism to other men. In Shakspeare's "Julius 
 Caesar," Brutus says of Cicero, — 
 
 " He will never follow any thing 
 That other men begin." 
 
 Such was the colonial Quaker. His theory of the 
 " inner light " made every man his own God. He 
 had visions and dreams which lifted him above all 
 law. He heard voices in the air, and saw things 
 uncanny in the night-time. What other men 
 " began," he could not " follow." What other 
 men would not begin, he was very apt to have a 
 revelation from heaven that he must begin. A 
 blissful mania for minorities possessed him. That 
 other men took off their hats in courtesy to a 
 stranger, was reason enough to him for keeping 
 his hat on. That other men said "You," was 
 equivalent to a divine command to him to say 
 " Thou." That men generally wore rolling collars 
 to their coats, was enough to make it a sin to him 
 to wear any collar at all. 
 
Massachusetts and the Quahers, 223 
 
 The world is large enough for only one such 
 man. Two of them, with the whole planet to 
 themselves, would fight, and the weaker would 
 get the worst of it. Such men are fanatics, not 
 of the colossal type, like Ignatius Loyola, not 
 even of the terrible and malign type, like Tor- 
 quemada, but of the puny sort, like our wretched 
 Freeman of Pocasset, who butchered his sleeping 
 child in emulation of Abraham, and whom we 
 have shut up in a madhouse for no very satisfac- 
 tory reason, except that we do not know what else 
 to do with him. Our fathers of the olden time 
 would have hanged him. Is it certain that they 
 would not have been wiser than we? The plea 
 of insanity for every abnormal horror which human 
 nature perpetrates in its freaks of vanity, is quite 
 too slippery for sensible government. The halter 
 is less so, and less liable to abuse. 
 
 Such was the unreasoning, somnambulistic Qua- 
 ker of Massachusetts in the colonial age. He came 
 to Massachusetts, not because he had any business 
 here, but because he was told to stay away. One 
 of them could invent no excuse for coming till he 
 saw the gibbet awaiting him if he did come. His 
 soul hankered after the service of God in an 
 exalted station. He longed to make a grand spec- 
 tacle of his mission, even though it should be given 
 him at the rope's end. Had he been a Frenchman, 
 he would have committed suicide by a leap from 
 the summit of the Tower Vend6me. The world 
 has always been at its wits' end to know what to 
 
224 My Study: and Other Essays, 
 
 do witli siicli men. They are not downright ma- 
 niacs , they are not imbeciles ; they are too old for 
 asylums for feeble-minded children ; yet they are 
 not men of sense. Unfortunately, we have no 
 half-way refuge between the asylum and the scaf- 
 fold. 
 
 There is a border-land between insanity and 
 crime which neither our medical science nor our 
 jurisprudence has yet thoroughly explored. Clouds 
 and darkness envelop it. The most accomplished 
 experts of the age were divided in opinion as to 
 the execution of Guiteau. In that cloudland the 
 colonial Quaker roamed and dreamed. The au- 
 thorities of the Commonwealth had too many other 
 things to do to allow them to solve the obscure 
 politico-moral problems upon which the culture of 
 our own age is yet so reticent. 
 
 Martyrdom unsought and for a great principle, 
 is a sublime and holy thing. It deserves monu- 
 ments in the highways, and shrines on the hills, to 
 which pilgrims shall go for inspiration and prayer. 
 But martyrdom invited is of quite another sort. 
 There have been times when martyrdom was a 
 fashion. Men and women fell into a fi^enzy about 
 it, and sought it as horses are said to rush into a 
 burning stable. Some minds are born with that 
 kind of idiosyncrasy. '' There are ever appearing 
 in the world, men who, almost as soon as they are 
 born, take a bee-line for the rack of the inquisitor 
 or the ax of the tyrant." Many years ago, in the 
 old days of slavery, a slave-insurrection broke out 
 
Massachusetts and the QuaJcers. 225 
 
 in South Carolina. The leaders were arrested and 
 hanged by the dozen. At last a passion for the 
 scaffold grew up among the negroes. They in- 
 formed falsely against themselves. They con- 
 fessed in the face of a proved alibi. Life was a 
 feather in the scale against the drama of the scaf- 
 fold. The masters were compelled to stay the 
 slaughter of their human chattels. 
 
 Martyrdom thus sought and prayed for, and 
 when the thing in dispute is the pitiful right to 
 outrage the common decencies of life, is no longer 
 the sacred thing which history calls by the name. 
 It is not even respectable — no more so than any 
 other kind of insane delusion : it is only pitiable. 
 If it is not insanity, it is not even misfortune : it 
 is a crime. The judgment of the world ranks it 
 with suicide. Its victims by ancient law were 
 buried at cross-roads. Such was the "martyr- 
 dom" of the Massachusetts Quakers. The chief 
 fault of the colonial government was not, that it 
 executed the laws of the land against them, but 
 that it was not wise enough to let them alone, 
 except to clothe the naked, and send them to the 
 lockup. If " Punch " had existed then, they might 
 have been safely left to the pillory of its ridicule. 
 It is an error to dignify such indecencies, when 
 committed in the name of conscience, by the inflic- 
 tion of solemn penalties. The only penalty they 
 need is the broad laugh of common sense. 
 
 Under all the provocations which the colonists 
 suffered, the public opinion through the whole 
 
226 My Study: and Other Essays. 
 
 transaction was averse to the extreme penalty of 
 the law. The humane sentiment which soon after 
 reformed the sanguinary laws of England in the 
 colony, was then struggling to the birth; and in 
 the House of Deputies the Act against the Quakers 
 was carried by a majority of one only. The tem- 
 per of the people was humane. At a time when 
 the penal code of England recognized nearly two 
 hundred and fifty capital crimes, that of Massa- 
 chusetts counted less than ten. A century and a 
 half later Sir Samuel Romilly said of the code of 
 the mother country, " I have examined the codes 
 of all nations, and ours is the worst. It is worthy 
 of the Anthropophagi." 
 
 Such was the school of jurisprudence in which 
 our fathers had been trained. They were not in 
 spirit a persecuting race of men. Their severity 
 was a short-lived experiment, almost the last wave 
 of intolerance from the shores of England, which 
 expended itself in Boston in but four cases of 
 execution. The law which made Quakerism a 
 felony remained on the statute-books of England 
 many years after it was repealed in Massachusetts. 
 New England has often been contrasted to her dis- 
 advantage in this respect with the Old Dominion, 
 as if all the mtolerance of the country was con- 
 centrated in the four Eastern colonies. But the 
 Puritans of Massachusetts had repealed the laws 
 against the free exercise of religion by the Quakers 
 a long while before the Cavaliers of Virginia did it. 
 
 Why, then, did Massachusetts execute the an- 
 
Massachusetts and the Quakers. 227 
 
 cient law at all ? A fair question, and quickly an- 
 swered. She was weak, and in peril. This is the 
 exiDlanation, and the whole of it. Like other weak 
 powers in danger, she vaulted into the extreme of 
 self-defense. The whole business was the work of 
 conscious feebleness in an emergency. It was not 
 yet proved that the Colony could live. The age 
 was one of eccentric beliefs and abnormal prac- 
 tices. All the religious and political cranks in the 
 kingdom, as is usual with new countries, seemed 
 to gravitate towards New England. In all the 
 colonies, there was an abnormal proportion of dis- 
 orderly elements. Men of broken fortunes, fugi- 
 tives from creditors and from justice, abounded. 
 When to these were added emigrants who came 
 with fanatical religious ideas, it is not surprising, 
 that, to thoughtful minds, the danger sometimes 
 appeared imminent that the Colony would be over- 
 whelmed by elements not in sympathy with the 
 objects of its foundation. In dread of that catas- 
 trophe, some had already begun to think of a new 
 migration, they knew not whither. 
 
 Danger from the savages also was by no means 
 obsolete. King Philip's war was yet to come. 
 The firelocks on the kitchen-walls of the settlers 
 had had no time to become rusty. There were 
 outlying settlements remaining, in which men wor- 
 shiped in the churches on the Lord's Day, lean- 
 ing on their muskets ; and hoed their corn in the 
 spring, and gathered in their crops in the summer, 
 with muskets loaded and primed on the stumps 
 
228 My Study: and Other Essays. 
 
 not yet cleared from the forest-soil. Besides, the 
 old generation of pioneers were gone. Heroic 
 men and more heroic women had passed away. 
 New-comers felt weakened by the loss. Gov. 
 Winthrop lay in what is now King's-chapel grave- 
 yard. He had been a host in himself. He was a 
 foreseeing man, who discerned new truths in their 
 dawning, and whose mind was inventive of expe- 
 dients. Had he been living, the Quaker tragedy 
 might not have happened. His wise and balanced 
 judgment would have discovered some other way 
 of extricating the State from its dilemma. 
 
 All these things combined to deepen the sense 
 of insecurity in the popular mind, and specially in. 
 the minds of the magistrates on whom the respon- 
 sibility for the public safety rested. To them it 
 seemed of prime importance, that the prestige of 
 law should be kept inviolate. In troublous times, 
 it would not do to show the white feather. It was 
 not safe to let the savages of one continent, and 
 the bedlamites of the other, know, that, when 
 Massachusetts made up her mind, she did not 
 know it. The suspicion must not be bruited, that, 
 when she expressed her mind in statute, she did 
 not mean it, or dared not execute it. No: this 
 would never do. 
 
 Gov. Bradford of Plymouth, in the infancy 
 of that colony, when his whole force of fighting- 
 men was reduced to fifty against the five thou- 
 sand whom the Narragansetts threatened to bring 
 against him, sent back to them his belt filled with 
 
Massachusetts and the Quakers, 229 
 
 powder and shot in response to their challenge 
 with a rattlesnake-skin. The same policy of bra- 
 vado may well have prompted the magistrates of 
 Massachusetts, a generation later, to put on stern 
 faces, and stand by their law against disturbers of 
 the peace. They had said it, and the world must 
 not think them too weak or too timid to do it. 
 Weakness in an emergency struggling, not for 
 life, but for things dearer than that, was at the 
 bottom of the whole sad business. 
 
 This, at least, was the meaning of it, as it seemed 
 to the vigilant judgment of those who must bear 
 the responsibility of it before God and man. Tak- 
 ing all things into account, it was a less unworthy 
 thing to do, and is more deserving of the respect 
 and sympathy of mankind, than the conduct of the 
 Quakers in braving the law and the public senti- 
 ment of the age. It is time that history should 
 reverse the proportions of her verdict. She should 
 transfer to the suffering offenders a large part of 
 the censure which thus far Massachusetts has 
 borne almost alone. Mr. Bancroft is quite too 
 abject in his apologies for the colonial govern- 
 ment. So, it is respectfully suggested, was the 
 tone of the " confession " volunteered, some time 
 ago, to a Friends' Meeting by some of our good 
 brethren in Maine. That confession might better 
 have read in this wise: "We humbly confess, that, 
 in the ancient tilt between Puritanism and Quaker- 
 ism, there was fault on both sides ; and, as it was a 
 great while ago, we are glad to believe that they 
 have made it up before this time.'* ' 
 
230 My Study: and Other Essays, 
 
 It has been too long the fashion, with a class of 
 thoughtless critics, to fling at the Pilgrims for this 
 Quaker business and the more dismal affair at 
 Salem. That their fame has been able to bear so 
 much of that kind of criticism, is proof that mate- 
 rial for fair censure must be very scant in their 
 history. The fame of Greek philosophers and 
 Roman poets and English statesmen and French 
 scientists could not have borne the half of it. 
 These men the world has set in the frame of the 
 ages in which they lived, and judged them by 
 the temper of those ages. But the Pilgrims have 
 been isolated from the world they knew and 
 judged by the illumination of times, of which, with 
 all their foresight, they never dreamed. It is time 
 to have done with this. Let the Pilgrims have 
 fair play. Set them in the place where their des- 
 tiny put them, and judge them by its opportunities 
 and possibilities. Their descendants have no fear 
 of the result. They need no laudation of ours. 
 
 As soon as the condition of the colony improved, 
 and the public safety seemed to be assured, the 
 laws against Quaker immigration became a dead 
 letter. They died out, as such laws have commonly 
 done, because nobody cared enough about them to 
 execute them. Persecuting powers commonly be- 
 come more cruel as they grow stronger. Not so 
 Massachusetts. When time and numbers consoli- 
 dated her resources, and gave her the conservative 
 consciousness of strength, she grew more humane. 
 The cultured instincts of her religion came to 
 
Massachusetts and the Quakers, 231 
 
 the surface, and diffused .a Christian civilization 
 through her institutions and social customs. She 
 became, without exception, the most enlightened 
 and liberal government in the world. The Quakers 
 came and went at their pleasure, with none to 
 molest them or make them afraid. And such is 
 human nature in Quaker garb, as in that of Cava- 
 lier or Roundhead, that, when the State no longer 
 gave them the dignity of the scaffold, they did not 
 care to come in large numbers ; and the sect has 
 always been small on our soil. Cotton Mather 
 quaintly told the denoHment of the story. " Since 
 our Jerusalem was come to such consistence, that 
 the going up of every fox would not break down 
 our stone walls, who has ever meddled with 'em ? " 
 
XYin. 
 
 DOES THE WORLD MOVE? 
 
 A STORY is told of a thrifty old lady in New 
 York, who once listened to a colloquial discussion 
 of the merits of modern progress. At the close, 
 she summed up her own wisdom on the subject 
 by observing, " For my part, the best signs I see 
 of progress are two, — omnibuses and lucifer 
 matches." Had she put it thus, Facility of travel 
 and the preservation of fire, she would have been 
 a home-made philosopher of the materialistic school. 
 These are great facts in modern life. Civilization 
 owes much to them. 
 
 If the question were circulated for a vote in an 
 assembly of intelligent men. Is the human race on 
 an advance rather than a retreat ? nine out of ten 
 would vote in the affirmative, and would give in 
 evidence things belonging to the same school with 
 the omnibus and the lucifer match. Material 
 progress is sure to make itself heard and seen. 
 The rumbling of a railroad train burdens the very 
 night air. The tramp of an army makes the earth 
 tremble. An Armstrong gun, if not heard, is 
 heard of, around the globe. Such things compel 
 observation, and force their way into history. 
 
 232 
 
Does the World Move? 233 
 
 They often crowd out of sight and hearing the 
 silent revolutions. 
 
 Is the evidence as clear that there are silent 
 revolutions in which the world is moving to the 
 conquest of great intellectual and moral improve- 
 ments ? Is man on a line of march forward in the 
 realm of Ideas? 
 
 I. It is very certain that the time lias been when 
 the world did advance in the growth of great ideas, 
 which we of to-day inherit. Wordsworth said that 
 in his day, '' plain living and high thinking " were 
 no more; but they had been in better times. 
 History has stored them in imperishable records. 
 The Greek idea of beauty, for example, has become 
 the world's treasure. It will never grow obsolete. 
 The Greek idea of poetry has passed into all sub- 
 sequent literatures, and will live there for ever. 
 Plato and Aristotle to this day are the two foci of 
 all the philosophy which the world has thought 
 out. So much, at least, the past has conquered 
 from barbarism, which the future will never let 
 die. 
 
 Rome also had her mission to the generations of 
 all subsequent time. It was a mission of ideas 
 more than of material progress. The Roman idea 
 of law lives in all the jurisprudence of the world, 
 which has any chance of perpetuity. Its ramifica- 
 tions run through the institutions on which every 
 great national Hfe of to-day depends. An empire 
 like that of England never could have lived, but 
 for Rome's tribute to its foundation in law and 
 
234 My Study : and Other Essays, 
 
 obedience to law. The Middle Ages would have 
 been a fatal and final relapse into Vandalism, but 
 for the conservative ideas infused into them by 
 Roman history. 
 
 The same creative idea of Law was the thing 
 which made possible the birth of the American 
 Republic. To Rome as a republic, herself realiz- 
 ing republican institutions, we owe very little in 
 comparison with our debt to Rome the empire, 
 which gave solidity to law as a power capable of 
 ruling a world. American eloquence from the 
 Revolution down has been adorned with a great 
 deal of flourish over the Roman and Greek democ- 
 racies, but it is surprising how little our fathers 
 really appropriated from the ancient stock of ideas. 
 It was almost nothing worth mentioning. The 
 ancient democracy was not the modern republic. 
 The real power from antiquity, which built the 
 foundation of our free institutions, was the mailed 
 hand of Roman law which pervaded all Roman 
 history, from the Tarquins to the Caesars, and 
 which grew to its full, athletic muscle in the best 
 days of the empire. 
 
 The critical question respecting modern progress 
 is. Has it any thing equal to that of ancient times 
 to show for itself in the world of ideas? Is it 
 adding any thing to the world's stock of heroic 
 and immortal thought ? A railway map of a con- 
 tinent is a grand thing to look at. The tramp of 
 a million armed men is an imposing thing to hear. 
 An invisible spirit seems to live in a telescopic rifle 
 
Does the World Move? 235 
 
 which kills at a distance of a mile. But these are 
 things of course, in a world so full as this of mate- 
 rial forces. Such forces must come out in some 
 such marvelous inventions. They do not symbol- 
 ize the ultimate or the best conquests of mind. 
 What is a minie-rifle compared with the Parthe- 
 non? What is a Pacific railroad by the side of 
 Homer's Iliad? What is the army of Marshal 
 von Moltke as an offset to the Laws of Justinian ? 
 
 The triumphs of material progress are toys and 
 gewgaws in the comparison with those of mind. 
 The true welfare of nations is in the world of 
 Ideas. Its central force is conscience. " The 
 evolution of a highly destined society must be 
 moral. It must run in the grooves of the celes- 
 tial wdieels." 
 
 II. Have we, then, any thing in our modern civ- 
 ilization which can rival the great ideas of the an- 
 cient world ? Yes, — things so many and so grand 
 that they outweigh all the past. Yet they are so 
 inwrought into the warp and woof of our social 
 life, that we are, for the most part, unconscious of 
 them. The rehearsal of them seems like recount- 
 ing a string of truisms. We live them without 
 knowing it. We of this generation have been 
 born to them : we know no other way. Yet the 
 most of them and the best are mainly the growth 
 of the last three hundred years. 
 
 One of these formative ideas, on which modern 
 society is built, is that of the human brotherhood. 
 So trite is it, that our literature indulges in a great 
 
236 My Study: and Other Essays, 
 
 deal of cant about it. But men do not cant about 
 ideas that have nothing grand in them. This idea 
 to the ancient world was as completely unknown 
 as the American continent. One of the silent 
 revolutions which change the face of nations, was 
 that in which the fundamental idea of society was 
 changed from the state to the family. That men 
 of all races, nations, classes, and conditions are 
 brother men, each one responsible for all, and all 
 for each, the equal children of one household whose 
 Father is God, is a theory of society which in its 
 fullness has been the growth of the last two centu- 
 ries. Now, it is semi-barbarism not to believe it. 
 To go back of it in legislation is like reverting to 
 the Chaldsean astrology in place of the astronomy 
 of Copernicus and Kepler. That astronomy is as 
 likely to become obsolete in our observatories as 
 the idea of brotherhood in our legislation, or in 
 our unwritten social laws. The world took a long 
 stride forward when this idea became fixed in mod- 
 ern jurisprudence. 
 
 Another of the creative ideas of modern life is 
 that of individual liberty. When the freedom of 
 class, of tribe, of nation, of race, was exchanged 
 for the freedom of the individual, a great leap was 
 made over the chasm which separates the ancient 
 from the modern world. The chief reason why 
 our fathers found so little in the institutions of 
 Greece and Rome which they could utilize directly 
 in the building of the Republic, was that the 
 Greek and Roman ideas of freedom were so radi- 
 
Does the World Move ? 237 
 
 cally diverse from theirs. Liberty, to the ancient 
 mind, was liberty of race, or nation, or tribe. It 
 involved liberty to enslave another race. England 
 was the first great empire which recognized, ever 
 so dimly, the right of the individual to himself. 
 It was never formally and fully enunciated as the 
 cornerstone of government till the Declaration of 
 Independence, in 1776, proclaimed that all men 
 are created free, and have the right to life and lib- 
 erty. Observe, the right to life was not more 
 sacred in their theory than the right to liberty. 
 Imperfectly as the fathers realized it in the insti- 
 tutions they founded, they did see its reality in 
 theory; and theirs was a modern discovery. As a 
 practical principle of government, to be put to use 
 in the construction of a great republic, it was a 
 new idea. The democratic idea which had ger- 
 minated long before in the forests of Germany was 
 not this American idea. 
 
 Our fathers left it for this generation to settle 
 by the right of the strongest, the question of 
 human servitude everywhere. And we have set- 
 tled it for all time. Never will another state be 
 founded on the right of man to hold property in 
 his brother man. Never will another great war 
 be waged for the principle that a man may be 
 owned and whipped and branded and bought and 
 sold by his fellow like an ox. This idea of indivi- 
 dual liberty is fixed in the law of nations beyond 
 the reach of any refluent wave of barbarism. 
 
 Kindred to this, and a necessary corollary from 
 
238 My Study: and Other Essays, 
 
 it, is the modern idea of independence in religious 
 belief. It has l)ecome a truism in history, that 
 even Puritan faith, so stanch and true to liberty 
 in all things else, could not see the logic of its 
 own principles working out freedom in religion. 
 Its well-known notion of religious liberty was lib- 
 erty to believe right. To believe wrong, was a 
 crime. Liberty to believe it, was anarchy. It 
 deserved rather the scourge and the branding-iron. 
 That the civil government ought to punish a man 
 for believing falsely, was as plain as a pike-staff to 
 them. Why is it not as plain to us ? Because a 
 new and original idea — which, perhaps, John 
 Barne veldt, prime minister of Holland, was the 
 first to enunciate in its completeness, and for 
 which in part he paid the penalty of his life — has 
 now become the common property of the age. 
 How trite is that idea to us, and how much a 
 thing of course ! Our children marvel that great 
 men and good men could ever have denied it. 
 That their own ancestors did so, has about the 
 same reality to them as that their ancestors were 
 cannibals. They are horror-struck at Motley's 
 story of the Netherlands, as at the rage of maniacs. 
 A great idea is fixed in history when children are 
 born to it, and can think no otherwise. 
 
 Following in the train of the ideas already 
 named, and in necessary alliance with them, is the 
 modern theory of the elevation of woman. Of 
 slow growth, yet as sure as the growth of a coral 
 continent, and as lasting, is this principle of our 
 
Does the World Move ? 239 
 
 most refined and purest civilization. Woman suf- 
 frage — that crowing lien — burlesques and retards 
 this reform for a little while ; but it is fast accu- 
 mulating its trophies in the higher education of 
 woman, in the recognition of her rights of prop- 
 erty, in the enlargement of the range of her indus- 
 trial employments, in just legislation for her in the 
 laws of divorce, in her special pre-eminence in 
 social charities, and, more than all else, in the 
 unwritten social law, by which her companionship 
 with man is established without statute to affirm 
 it, because without a voice denying it. 
 
 Yet what a change is this from the Roman ideal 
 of woman to ours ! Imagine such an institution 
 as Smith College in the Rome of the Csesars ! 
 Cicero has made the name of his daughter, Tullia, 
 immortal by his grief over her death; but what 
 do we know of Cicero's wives ? Almost nothing, 
 except that he divorced them both by his own 
 sheer will. What immeasurable progress from the 
 status of the wife of Augustus Csesar to that of 
 the wife of President John Adams, or the wife 
 of President Garfield ! From woman the slave, 
 to woman the companion of man ! What a reach 
 of revolution it measures ! And from the Oriental 
 notion of woman, the advance is beyond measure. 
 'A Chinese proverb says, "When a daughter is 
 born, she sleeps on the ground. She is incapable 
 of evil and of good." China and America are on 
 opposite sides of the globe in more ways than one. 
 
 These are but a few of the representative ideas 
 
240 My Study: and Other Essays. 
 
 of modern life, which show the immensity of human 
 j)rogress in the world of mind. Associated with 
 them, or corollaries from them, are many others. 
 They are such as the recognition of the freedom 
 of the press and of public speech, of a popular 
 literature, of the sacredness of human life, of the 
 criminality of war, of the inferiority of a military 
 life, of the murderous character of the duel, of the 
 dignity of labor, of the equal claims of chastity 
 upon the sexes, of reform in the criminal code, of 
 the inhumanity of torture in courts of justice, 
 of the reformatory element in punishment, of 
 humanity in the treatment of the insane, of the 
 right of animals to protection from cruelty, of 
 gentleness in family government, of the abolition 
 of brutality from public schools and from the 
 discipline of armies and navies, of the disgrace 
 attached to the drinking-usages of society, of the 
 subjection of the sale of intoxicating drinks to law, 
 of the subordination of wealth to character, and 
 of manners to mind in estimating the worth of a 
 man. 
 
 To these should be added those germs of ideas, 
 which Hazlitt calls the "tops of thoughts," now 
 just visible above the surface of society, and pre- 
 monitory of the reforms of the coming age. These 
 suggest, among other things, the sure approach of 
 a more equitable balance of capital and labor, the 
 fixing of limits to the accumulation of private 
 property, and the regulation of its use by the 
 principles of benevolence, and of restrictive legis- 
 
Does the World Move? 241 
 
 lation against the monopoly of land. They indi- 
 cate that the time is approaching when it will be 
 a personal disgrace to a man to be possessor of a 
 property, the magnitude of which is itself evidence 
 that it is an injustice or a menace to the common 
 welfare. 
 
 Here is a resplendent galaxy of ideas which light 
 up the modern firmament. The whole heavens are 
 aglow with them. They prove a world in forward 
 and upward movement. The clockwork of the 
 sidereal universe is not more certain. They are 
 ideas, also, which create great men for their devel- 
 opment. When the world is ripe for a truth, that 
 truth ripens in some elect mind, one or more, 
 whose mission it is to tell it. Every such truth 
 creates its own prophet. More than this : it makes 
 all men great who accept it, by the use of that 
 which is on a level with their immortality. 
 
 Great formative and reformatory ideas, it should 
 also be observed, once born into the world, never 
 die. They come into it to stay. , Power can not 
 crush them: time can not wear them out. The 
 destructions of nations never bury them in the 
 debris^ like those works of immortal art which till 
 lately were buried under the soil of Rome. The 
 conflagration of all libraries could not burn them 
 out of the world's thought. Arts are lost : ideas, 
 never. So long as one man lives to think them, 
 they will sway the civilization of the future. The 
 look of things sometimes threatens them. The 
 world rolls backward, and seems about to crush 
 
242 My Study: and Other Essays, 
 
 out its Hstory. But occult forces hold it in the 
 grooves of progress. 
 
 Furthermore, these creative thoughts are from 
 one source, and ultimately from only one. In 
 their fullness, and in forms fitting them for use 
 in practical affairs, they all spring from the reli- 
 gion of Christ. In every age, those truths which 
 have moved the world, and have made the world 
 move of itself, have been religious truths, or truths 
 born of religious intuitions. Every thing great 
 springs from conscience. All our civilization is 
 wrapped up in the Lord's Prayer. The world 
 never gets to the circumference of the central 
 lesson of a Christian nursery. 
 
 It was quite in the natural course of things, that, 
 on the night before the " Emancipation Act " went 
 into operation in the West Indies, the slaves — 
 chattels to-day, men to-morrow — should crowd 
 their churches and chapels at midnight, to greet 
 the first hour of their liberty with songs of praise 
 and prayer to the Most High. Their simple faith 
 taught them better than statesmen knew, from 
 whence their redemption came. They must needs 
 render back the boon to Him who gave it. 
 
 Never was a cannon fired for liberty which had 
 not a religious thought behind it. Never was a 
 bill of human rights fought for with success which 
 had not somewhere for its preamble a bill of human 
 duties. The word " ought " is the supreme word 
 in all languages. It is the sovereign of all ideas. 
 Two thousand years ago Plato discovered that 
 " piety is necessary to knowledge." 
 
Does the World Move? 243 
 
 When Clarkson first laid before William Pitt 
 the argument for emancipation in the West Indies, 
 he says, " Many sublime thoughts seemed to rush 
 into his mind." Sublime thoughts always rush into 
 the wake of one great moral idea. It takes but a 
 few such ideas to make a history of a thousand 
 years. So is it now. These principles on which 
 the noblest modern life is constructed are the 
 direct outgrowth from the Christian faith. Under- 
 neath them are the Christian doctrines of the per- 
 sonality and the fatherhood of God, the immortality 
 of the soul, the unity and brotherhood of the race, 
 a universal atonement, and the freedom of the 
 human will. Blot out these doctrines from the 
 religion of the few, to whom they are a personal 
 faith, and you obliterate in the end, from the civ- 
 ilization of the many, the great creative forces 
 which have made that civilization what it is. 
 Then chaos comes again. 
 
 Yes : the world does move. It did move in the 
 ancient ages. It is moving in these times of ours. 
 Whatever the surface-currents may seem to indi- 
 cate, the lower depths of modern thought are 
 moving Godward, beyond the reach of counter- 
 currents. They have gained a momentum into the 
 still waters of faith which no possible re-actionary 
 forces can counter-check. 
 
 One fact out of a score like it gathers into itself 
 a volume of proofs of this. Look at the postal 
 service of the world. Our very children sjDort 
 with it, and their fathers use it with little or no 
 
244 My Study: and Other Essays. 
 
 thought of what it means. It is reported that the 
 letters dispatched to and fro through the post- 
 offices of the nations during the year 1884 num- 
 bered fifty-two thousand millions. What a power 
 of mind that represents, in what magnificent move- 
 ment ! What had the Greek civilization to com- 
 pare with it? What had the Roman? Then, 
 what significance it carries ! It means intelligence ; 
 it means mental activity ; it means alert and intri- 
 cate thinking ; it means faith ; it means the flowing 
 of all the great ideas which the past has generated 
 into the world of the future. Dark ages can never 
 come again. 
 
XIX. 
 
 IS THE CHRISTIAN LIFE WORTH LIVING? 
 
 RiCHAED Baxter was a lifelong sufferer. In- 
 c arable disease ke]3t him for years at death's door. 
 " I live with one foot in the grave," he used to say. 
 For twenty years he probably did not know the 
 sensations of health. The jubilant spring of life 
 in other men became a forgotten joy to him. As 
 if this were not enough, he was persecuted for his 
 religion. For j)reaching five sermons he was con- 
 demned to imprisonment for five years. Sermons 
 were costly luxuries in those days, — a year of pris- 
 on-life for each one 1 He escaped only by the in- 
 terposition of his physician, who swore that the 
 execution of the sentence would cost him his life. 
 
 Not a very fascinating life this, to the looker-on ! 
 We should not have thought him querulous against 
 the providence of God, if he had been the author 
 of an essay published not long ago, entitled, "Is 
 Life Worth Living?" But the invalid and per- 
 secuted preacher published no such thing as that. 
 He had no time to ask or answer such a question. 
 He was living, and he made the best of it by liv- 
 ing to some purpose. He published a hundred and 
 forty-five distinct works in the intervals of his 
 
 245 
 
246 My Study: and Other Essays, 
 
 pains. He was one of the busiest of men, as, 
 indeed. Christian invalids have commonly been. 
 
 Of all men in the world, he was the one who 
 was moved to write " The Saint's Rest." And so 
 understandingly did he write of it, that to a mil- 
 lion of readers since his day, it has seemed as if 
 he must have had a foretaste of the heavenly 
 blessedness himself. It is supposed that nearly half 
 a million of copies of that book have been pub- 
 lished, and the popular verdict upon it has every- 
 where been the same. It is one of the few books 
 so profoundly written from the heart, that their 
 insight into truth borders on inspiration. 
 
 Danto wrote of purgatory so feelingly, that 
 people, meeting him on the street, used to say, 
 " There goes the man who has been in hell." To 
 Baxter's million readers, it has seemed that he must 
 have been on the other side of the "great gulf." 
 Such are the contrasts and contradictions of Chris- 
 tian living. Suffering men are the happiest men. 
 Women on beds of anguish sing most honestly our 
 hymns of Christian triumph. Men in prisons know 
 most of Christian liberty. People who have least 
 of this world, have most luminous foresight of 
 heaven. Sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; poor, 
 yet making many rich ; having nothing, yet pos- 
 sessing all things; such ideally is the privilege of 
 holy living. 
 
 St. Paul appears to have been another of the 
 great Christian contradictions. As one reads his 
 autobiography, it does seem to lend reason to the 
 
Is the Christian Life Worth Living? 247 
 
 conundrum, " Is life worth living ? " He is a man 
 of bold nerve who would select St. Paul's life as 
 a model of his own. On the human scale of meas- 
 urement, the apostle can not be pronounced a happy 
 man. He was not hilarious in his temperament. 
 He did not sing many comic songs. Men who do, 
 can not make much of him. The world would 
 not call his life a lucky one. It went hard with 
 him at the best. What a history of ill-luck he 
 gives us ! Flogged like a slave in the market-place 
 five times, and three times in court ; shipwrecked 
 three times j pelted with stones by vagabonds till 
 he was left for dead ; in prisons so many that he 
 does not count them ; hungry, cold, thirsty, naked, 
 robbed ; hunted by murderers, with nothing but a 
 wicker basket between him and death ; betrayed 
 by friends whom he trusted and prayed for ; in the 
 city, in the country, in the wilderness, on the sea, 
 everywhere in the wide world, beset by dangers ; 
 always guiltless, yet always an outlaw; he was 
 saved at last from being clothed with pitch, and 
 used as a candle to light the streets of Eome, by 
 having his head cut off. And as if the cruelty of 
 man were not enough, he must find the Devil on 
 his track, and must put to hazard body and soul in 
 fight with invisible foes, more ferocious than the 
 beasts of Ephesus. 
 
 No : this '' bald-pated Galilean," as Lucian con- 
 temptuously calls him, was not a lucky man. I 
 have somewhere read of a man who, on a journey 
 of many weeks, encountered a continuous succes- 
 
248 My Study: and Other Essays, 
 
 sion of accidents. He fell through broken bridges, 
 he was buried under a wrecked rail-car, he was 
 caught in a mountain freshet, highway robbers 
 assailed him, a stray pistol-shot grazed his cheek, 
 runaway horses threatened his life, a bolt of light- 
 ning splintered the tree under which he sought 
 shelter in a shower. At last, in the final stage of 
 his journey, some of his fellow-passengers, on hear- 
 ing his story, declared that a curse was on him ; a 
 malign fate was after him ; he would surely die of 
 it ; and they hurried out of the car where they had 
 found him. They would not risk their lives in 
 company with a man whom a legion of fiends pur- 
 sued so malignantly. So, judging in the world's 
 way, we should say of this old Jew of Tarsus, that 
 " the stars in their courses fought against " him. 
 He was born to misfortune ; and wise men, who 
 valued their lives, would fight shy of him. 
 
 Yet, of all men in the world, this man is the one 
 to say, "I will glory in my infirmities." This 
 hunted and outlawed " babbler," as the wise men 
 of Athens called him, is the man to tell us what a 
 blessed thing life is, how grandly worth living, 
 what a good fight it is, full of what magnificent 
 chances, what a precious thing suffering is, and 
 what an imperial coronation glorifies it at the end. 
 This is the man who goes to his grave exultingly, 
 and celebrates a victory over death ! Can we not 
 hear his ringing voice, as he flings the gantlet to 
 the great enemy, — O Death, where is thy sting ? 
 O Grave, where is thy victory? He really seems 
 
Is the Christian Life Worth Living? 249 
 
 to have been one of the happiest of men, yet one 
 of the most illustrious of sufferers. Where in all 
 history shall we find his peer, — his peer in sorrow, 
 his peer in joy ? 
 
 What is the secret of it all ? Christian history 
 is full of such contradictions. Unwritten biog- 
 raphy abounds with them. Men and women are 
 now living such lives in secret. The world does 
 not know them, and never will while time lasts. 
 But they are a great multitude, whom no man can 
 number. Not that there are many Baxters, nor 
 do St. Pauls come in crowds. But there is an 
 innumerable host of plain men and women, and 
 children even, whose lives do approximate and 
 honestly claim rank with illustrious saints. Mar- 
 tyrs, as a class, have been the most cheerful of 
 men. This is the Christian theory of living, — 
 that such life is a victory, not a conflict only, and 
 least of all is it a losing fight. The " Saint's Rest " 
 begins here. Baxter told in plain words what he 
 knew. Conquest of death, and triumph over the 
 grave, are initiated here in ten thousand Christian 
 homes. The psalm of life, as it is sung at count- 
 less firesides, is a jubilant one. On beds of pain, 
 the songs of Zion are most exultant. 
 
 This is the Christian ideal of life. But what is 
 the secret of it ? Can a man enjoy pain ? Does 
 God expect us to be happy on a rack ? Are thumb- 
 screws and Scotch " boots " playthings ? Is cruci- 
 fixion a comedy ? An old legend tells of a species 
 of animals which live in fire. They dance on 
 
250 My Study: and Other Essays. 
 
 burning coals. They gambol in a furnace at white- 
 heat. Are men and women made of stuff so sym- 
 pathetic with fire ? We, who are not Baxters and 
 St. Pauls, but only men of common sort, want a 
 solution of the mystery. Some men are weary — 
 very weary — of life, or, what is the same thing to 
 them, they think they are ; and they need the solu- 
 tion desperately. In the watches of the night they 
 cry out, " Oh that I had the wings of a dove ! " 
 
 But disconsolate views of life are not the prod- 
 uct of healthy Christian living. The protest which 
 some assert against their own creation without 
 their own consent is profane. No wise man will 
 foster such moods in himself. They are a mental 
 weakness and a moral wrong. The Bible is a 
 manly book. It cherishes an athletic piety. When 
 the angel directed Lot's flight from Sodom, he did 
 his best to persuade the old man to seek refuge on 
 the mountain-top. Only by concession to age and 
 fright was he permitted to rest in the lowlands. 
 This is emblematic of that type of religion which 
 the Bible fosters. It enjoins the difQcult duty, 
 encourages the arduous achievement, exhorts to 
 the aspiring aim, inspires the buoyant hope, makes 
 men stout in crises. It puts into a man's religion 
 the old feudal element of chivalry. On the same 
 principle, it withholds sympathy from cowardly 
 views of life and the chronic desire for death. It 
 was Christianity which first made suicide infamous. 
 
 The Scriptures do not encourage, even an habit- 
 ual meditation on death. They lend no sanction 
 
Is the Christian Life Worth Living? 251 
 
 to that monastic life in which men kept a human 
 skull always in sight. Christianity never built 
 the " Church of St. Ursula and the Eleven Thou- 
 sand Virgins " at Cologne, in which the walls are 
 made of the virgins' skulls, and glass cases are 
 filled with them in ghastly rows around the choir. 
 They have no word of sympathy for men who 
 build their coffins before the time, and store them 
 in their chambers. Emerson tells of a woman 
 who for years made up her bed every morning in 
 the shape of a coffin, and regaled her fancy with 
 the discovery that the tower of a church near by 
 threw its shadow in the figure of a coffin on the 
 sidewalk every evening. God would have no such 
 beggarly piety as this among men and women of 
 His creating. In such a world as this, we should 
 be too busy to make a hobby of dying. We should 
 think of it, only enough to be prepared to meet 
 it calmly when it comes, and to look at the life 
 beyond as a progress. The majority of thought- 
 ful men think too much about it. 
 
 The desire for death is commonly a counterfeit. 
 Men do not know their own minds when they 
 think death would be welcome, and is long in 
 coming. Men who talk in that strain are not con- 
 scious hypocrites ; but they fight for dear life when 
 the need comes, like the rest of us. One such 
 man, at the age of ninety, said that he should be 
 glad to die ; but he wanted to live till he was an 
 old man. Men who ask with a sneer whether life 
 is worth living, if wrecked at sea, swim if they 
 
252 My Study: and Other Essays. 
 
 can. If attacked by Asiatic cholera, tliey send 
 for a physician, choose the best expert, and send a 
 fleet horse for him. If threatened with consump- 
 tion, they cross the sea in search of more salubrious 
 climes. I have observed, too, that men who fling 
 insult at their Creator for giving them an exist- 
 ence they never asked for, do not take kindly to 
 annihilation. 
 
 Even the mental habits of good men sometimes 
 need a correction of perspective in their ideas. I 
 once knew a clergyman whose mind was inordi- 
 nately intent on heaven. It was the favorite theme 
 of his sermons. His prayers often seemed to be 
 an inspiration from thence. His favorite hymns 
 were descriptive of the better world. In conver- 
 sation, he dwelt much upon its employments and 
 discoveries. He used to imagine his interviews 
 with prophets and apostles. He made up his mind 
 w^ho should be the first object of his search among 
 them. He lived at the gates of the New Jerusa- 
 lem, and they appeared to be ajar to his ^dsion. I 
 thought to myself, that it Avould be an easy tiring 
 for him to die. He gave a beautiful example, as 
 many thought, of what the Scriptures mean when 
 they say, " Let your conversation be in heaven ! " 
 I anticipated, that, in his last hours, he would have 
 visions of the place, and hear music in the air, as 
 some dying saints do. 
 
 When the time came, however, he had no visions, 
 he heard no songs of angelic rapture. He died of 
 a painful, lingering disease, but, through it all, 
 
Is the Christian Life Worth Living? 253 
 
 never expressed a desire to go. On the contrary, 
 he was one of the most resolute invalids I ever 
 knew, in his determination to live. He lived for 
 years on his will-power. He sought health, as 
 other men do, at every cost. If Heaven then 
 seemed to him the more attractive world, he never 
 said it to his friends. His favorite Scriptures then 
 were not those descriptive of heaven, nor were his 
 favorite hymns such. And at last he died, one of 
 the silent saints. 
 
 No man knows, or ought to judge, the inner life 
 of another. There was much that was beautiful 
 and inspiring in the life of that man in his days 
 of health. Yet I suspect that his closing years 
 were, as a whole, more natural and truthful. 
 There was less glamour about them. Probably he 
 was a better man in his desire to live, than in his 
 old dreams of hastening to see the prophets and 
 apostles. He ought to have desired to live, and 
 to have done his best to prolong life. The real 
 man, the inner core of character, probably came 
 to light in his faithful performance of that duty. 
 If he could meet the end trustfully, as he did, it 
 was not his business to hasten it by so much as a 
 wish. While he lived, it was his duty to live. 
 One of the most godly things he ever did, to the 
 admiration of ministering angels, may have been 
 the exercise of that splendid will-power in the 
 struggle for life, which he would not relax one jot. 
 
 The Christian ideal of life is health, not disease. 
 The beauty of holiness is never hectic. Healthy 
 
254 My Study: and Oilier Essays. 
 
 hopes, healthy desires, healthy aims, healthy pray- 
 ers, healthy work, healthy retrospects, — these are 
 Christian living. The Christ-like ideal consists 
 rather in the will-power than in moods of feeling. 
 The concentration of the strength of a man upon 
 the opportunities and resources which this world 
 gives for use in great endeavor, is more Scrij^tural 
 and more natural than going into hiding in the 
 chambers of an invalid piety, and there waiting 
 for death. In such a life, we are nearer to the life 
 of God. We find no time to ask. Is life worth 
 living ? and we have as little disposition as time. 
 
 Let us not overlook here the fact that God does 
 not sit aloft in remote and inaccessible seclusion 
 from our human woes. They are more real to God 
 than they are to us. No being in the universe feels 
 the pains of human life so deeply as He feels them. 
 Not one pang of suffering rasps any human nerve, 
 which God does not appropriate as if it were His 
 own. This is the working of infinite sympathies 
 in the heart of a loving Creator. "In all their 
 affliction. He was afflicted." Yet over and above 
 the billows of human sorrow, the blessedness of 
 God remains intact. In those very sorrows, He 
 finds cause of joy, because they are the instru- 
 ments of His own benevolence. They have never 
 taken Him by surprise. He has made no mistakes 
 in them ; nor has He ever permitted one of them 
 which He could not use, to more loving purpose 
 than He could use ease and comfort and indulgence 
 in its place. He is blessed, therefore, not only in 
 
Is the Christian Life Worth Living? 255 
 
 spite of them, but in them. And the principle of 
 Christian living is, that what God enjoys we can 
 enjoy. 
 
 For example, the works of God, the Word of 
 God, the plans of God in redemption, His pur- 
 poses in the development of a Christian civiliza- 
 tion. His joy in Christ, His delight in His own 
 perfections. His outflow of benevolence to the 
 holy universe. His complacency in the reciprocated 
 love of angels and men, and whatever other orders 
 of being may people space. His beneficent vigi- 
 lance over human sorrows. His foresight and 
 decree of their fruits in building character, — all 
 these objective tributaries to the great ocean of 
 felicity which fills the heart of God are equally 
 fitted to be tributary to ours. Why not ? Are we 
 not made in God's image ? Are we not like Him 
 in our better nature ? Why not like Him, then, in 
 our resources which make life worth living ? 
 
 True, all this implies that we are something 
 more than creatures of sense. We belong to 
 another genus than that of mammalia. We have 
 other faculties than the five which physiologists 
 count. We are beings of thought, of faith, of 
 illimitable desires, of aspirations which penetrate 
 eternity. It implies that we ought not to be, 
 and can not be, satisfied with pleasures of sense. 
 Satiated we may be, but not satisfied. There is 
 an antipodal difference between the two. A man 
 whose supreme enjoyments are in fine houses and 
 costly furnishings, and tasteful grounds, and rich 
 
256 My Study: and Other Essays, 
 
 conservatories, and fleet horses, and the master- 
 pieces of fine art, and the thousand and one things 
 which make up the possibly innocent pleasures of 
 a sensuous millionaire, is sure to weary of it all in 
 the end. Such men often desire, or think they 
 desire, to die. They are the men who talk most 
 glibly of "the great PerhajDS." Suicides are not 
 found mainly, or chiefly, among the miserably 
 poor. 
 
 Sensuous men have a revolution to undergo 
 before they can understand what a grand thing 
 life is as a life of godlike opportunity. New tastes 
 must come uppermost in their nature. They are 
 living on .the under side of the universe. Occult 
 realities must be revealed to them. They must 
 come up into the life of Christ. Wings must 
 grow. 
 
 Even a life which, though preponderantly right, 
 lacks fullness and intensity in its sympathy with 
 the life of God, as the lives of most men do, will 
 declare the ascendency of discomfort in the ret- 
 rospect at the end. The testimony of the ages 
 to such an imperfect life is given in the words of 
 the patriarch, " Few and evil have been the days." 
 
 The elder President Adams in his ninetieth year 
 said, " I have lived a long, harassed, and distracted 
 life." When a friend suggested, "The world 
 thinks a good deal of joy has been mixed with it," 
 he responded, " The world does not know how 
 much toil, anxiety, and sorrow I have suffered." 
 Is there no remedy for this never-ending contra- 
 
Is the Christian Life Worth Livi^igf 257 
 
 diction between the memory of a prosperous life 
 and its seeming to observers? Does it exist in 
 any other world than this ? Carlyle expressed it 
 in his savage way, " The ground of my existence 
 is as black as death." John Foster says of him- 
 self, " Something seems to say to me, ' Come away ! 
 Come away ! ' I am but a gloomy ghost among 
 the living and the happy." And his father used 
 for twenty years before his death to pray on every 
 New- Year's Day, that the coming year might be his 
 last. What is it that such men need? Something 
 surely is awry with them. God never meant that 
 men should live "gloomy ghosts" on "ground as 
 black as death." Who can disclose to us the great 
 secret? 
 
 Physicians have a short way of settling the 
 matter. They tell us to get rid of dysj)epsia. 
 " Obey nature's laws, and get health, and things 
 will right themselves ! " As if a rtian were noth- 
 ing but stomach and spleen, such as they preserve 
 in alcohol ! But suppose we can not be rid of 
 dyspepsia. What then? Must every diseased 
 man be miserable? Must the decline of life be 
 the decline of every thing that makes one desire 
 life ? A genuine soul, possessed of a genuine sym- 
 pathy with the life of God, need never see the 
 hour when death shall be desirable. The apostolic 
 idea means just what it says, " Rejoice in the Lord 
 always ! " It is a practicable idea to any man who 
 will give Christianity a chance to do what it can 
 for him. 
 
258 My Study: and Other Essays, 
 
 Carlyle would have been a happier man if his 
 manhood had realized to him more profoundly the 
 faith of his childhood as his mother taught it to 
 him. He would have made his home more serene 
 to his disconsolate wife. The mother in her nurs- 
 ery was wiser than the wise man of whom the 
 world stood in awe. Let God be as real to a man 
 as an excruciated eyeball, and the excruciated eye- 
 ball will become a myth. Many times Christian 
 martyrdom has proved this. 
 
 I know there seems to be an exasperating un- 
 reality in such a notion of life as this. We are not 
 mart}T:s. We have not the faith of martyrs. So 
 we put it to ourselves in honest thought, and we 
 wish preachers would talk like men of the world. 
 This " life of God " is very high up, and very far 
 away. We look up to find it, and we see nothing 
 but mocking stars. Scientists tell us that we 
 should freeze to death before we could reach the 
 nearest of them. That seems to us an emblem of 
 our vain attempts to realize this hidden life. 
 
 Yet this Christian ideal contains nothing im- 
 practicable to common men in common life. If 
 we have not the faith of martyrs, neither are we 
 called to the life of martyrs. The faith practicable 
 to us is adequate to the life we are appointed to 
 live. The grace and calling balance each other. 
 
 The Rev. William Jay of Bath, England, has 
 left on record one of the most healthful reminis- 
 cent views of life which it has been my privilege 
 to meet with. It is so apt an answer to the ques- 
 
Is the Christian Life Worth Living? 259 
 
 tion, " Is life worth living ? " and so pertinent an 
 offset to the desire for death which some good men 
 feel, that it is worth transcribing. After a labori- 
 ous pastorate of fifty years, he writes, "I have 
 heard many express the sentiment of Cowper, — 
 
 " < Worlds would not bribe me back to tread 
 Again life's dreary waste, 
 To see the future overspread 
 With all the dreary past.' 
 
 Such language is not for me. I should not shrink 
 from the prospect of repetition. My duties have 
 not been irksome. My trials have been few com- 
 pared with my comforts. My condition has been 
 the happy medium between poverty and riches. 
 I do not believe that in this earth misery prepon- 
 derates over good. I have a better opinion of 
 mankind than when I began public life : I can not 
 ask what is the cause that the former days were 
 better than these. I do not believe the fact itself. 
 God has not been throwing away duration on the 
 human race. The state of the world has been 
 improving, is improving. Blessed are our eyes for 
 what they see, and our ears for what they hear." 
 
 This is Christian health in an old man's ret- 
 rospect of life. It illustrates what Christianity 
 can do for a man in forming his judgments of men, 
 and bringing him en rajppoi^t with the providence 
 of God. Such a man can never bury himself in 
 monastic meditation upon another man's skull, or 
 a morbid longing to get rid of his own. Such a 
 
260 My Study: and Other Essays, 
 
 man will never ask the question, " Is life worth, 
 living ? " It is for such men as Voltaire and 
 Thomas Paine to cry as they did, " Oh that I had 
 never been born ! " For Christian believers re- 
 mains the Pauline vision which discloses in both 
 worlds such magnificent opportunity to be and to 
 do, that we can not make choice between them. 
 
 Say what men may of it, there is such a thing 
 as living in sympathy with God. There are men 
 who k7iow it. It is the most real thing that is, 
 in any man's life. It is the province of Chris- 
 tianity to make it a common reality to common 
 men. The fruit of it is to make men participants 
 of the life that God lives. His will becomes ours, 
 His plans ours. His look into the future ours. His 
 joys Qurs. Our whole being is held in trust by 
 His eternal choice. The most ignorant and sen- 
 suous of us, those of most wooden indurated 
 natures, are called of God to this lofty and pure 
 alliance. We may become one with Him, as 
 Christ was and is. Is not such a life worth 
 living ? 
 
 Jeremy Taylor, the illustrious preacher at Golden 
 Grove, himself a suffering, and sometimes perse- 
 cuted, believer, in a sermon on a theme kindred to 
 the one before us, after enumerating vividly life's 
 trials, says, " They have taken all from me. What 
 now ? Let me look about me. Unless I list, they 
 have not taken away my merry countenance, and 
 my cheerful spirit, and my good conscience. They 
 still have left me God's providence, and Christ's 
 
Is the Christian Life Worth Living? 261 
 
 promises, and my religion, and my hopes of Heaven. 
 I can delight in all that in which God delights, 
 and in God Himself. He that hath so many causes 
 of joy, and so great, must be very much in love 
 with sorrow, who loses all these treasures, and 
 chooses to sit down on his little handful of 
 thorns." 
 
XX. 
 
 A STUDY OF THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH. 
 
 PAET I. 
 
 It has been wisely said, that no belief conscien- 
 tiously held by large bodies of men, and wrought 
 into institutions which have a history, can be 
 utterly false. Such is the make of mind as related 
 to truth, and of truth as related to mind, that, on 
 the large scale, they must discover each other. 
 
 This principle underlies the divisions of the 
 Church into denominational sections. Every de- 
 nomination is what it is through certain inborn 
 affinities, in which it differs from the rest. It rep- 
 resents some truth, or phase of truth, or propor- 
 tions, shadings, combinations of truth, which other 
 denominations do not represent with equal author- 
 ity. Every denomination lives, therefore, because 
 it must live. In the divine order of things, it has 
 a call to live. It is a spoke in the wheel which is 
 needful to the completeness of the circle and the 
 safety of its revolutions. Every denomination, 
 therefore, has its mission. In some things, it is 
 wiser than its peers. We lose one of the divinely 
 ordained means of Christian culture if we are too 
 lofty to learn of each other. 
 
 262 
 
A Study of the Episcopal Church. 263 
 
 The rise of the great Christian sects marks 
 epochs in Protestant history. They were the prod- 
 ucts of great agitations. Sometimes they were 
 signs of great discoveries, for which the world 
 was waiting. Again, they indicated great revivals 
 of an expiring faith. What would the English- 
 speaking churches of to-day have been but for the 
 rise of Methodism? Even the secular history of 
 England was revolutionized to an extent which 
 has molded the destiny of the empire, by the 
 rise of the Independents in the Church. 
 
 A friendly study of the Episcopal Church dis- 
 closes certain dominant ideas^ which we who cher- 
 ish Puritan traditions may with profit add to our 
 stock of wisdom. One of those ideas is that of 
 the dignity of worship. Other denominations are 
 its superiors in appreciating the dignity of the 
 pulpit. But of Christian worship, no other branch 
 of the Church universal has so lofty an ideal as 
 the Church of England and its offshoot in this 
 country. In all the liturgic literature of our lan- 
 guage, nothing equals the Anglican Litany. Its 
 variety of thought, its spiritual pathos, its choice 
 selection of the most vital themes of prayer, its 
 reverent importunity, its theological ortliodoxy, 
 and its exquisite propriety of style, will commend 
 it to the hearts of devout worshipers of many gen- 
 erations to come, as they have done to generations 
 past. For an equipoise of balanced virtues, it is 
 unrivaled. Its union of intensity with simplicity 
 will go far to protect its use from the danger 
 
264 My Study: and Other Essays, 
 
 of formalism, to which all fixed liturgies are 
 exposed. 
 
 The liturgic forms of other denominations would 
 be saved from some excrescences and inanities if 
 the venerable Book of Common Prayer were more 
 generally revered as a model. In the stock of 
 clerical anecdote, which contributes so largely to 
 the comicalities of the newspapers, the infirmities 
 of extemporaneous prayer hold an unfortunate pre- 
 eminence. Their repellent influence on cultured 
 minds is mournful. The growing taste among us 
 for responsive worship, and for the alternation of 
 prescribed with extemporaneous forms of devotion, 
 is a healthful one. With the increase of culture, 
 in large communities especially, the demand must 
 grow for such improvements upon our ancient 
 ways. A valuable portion of the constituency 
 most germane to our Puritan churches will seek 
 them elsewhere if we do not provide them our- 
 selves. 
 
 Nearly allied with an appreciation of the dignity 
 of worship, is another idea, in honor of which the 
 Church of England sets a commendable example. 
 It is that of the sacredness of the House of God. 
 
 Democracy is not friendly to reverence for places. 
 Many of our churches are, in this respect, more 
 democratic than religious. Our revolt from pil- 
 grimages and shrines and sacred relics has swung 
 us over to the antipodes, in which we scarcely 
 recognize any thing material as more venerable 
 than another thing. Science settles the question. 
 
A Study of the Episcopal Ohurch. 265 
 
 Are they not all resolvable into imponderable 
 gases ? We are but just beginning to know what 
 church architecture is. In one thing, we have 
 not outlived the barbarian age. Some among us 
 still prefer to see, surmounting our church-spires, 
 a horrible satire on our faith, in the form of a 
 weather-vane or a cockerel, rather than the golden 
 cross, its only proper symbol, if we have any. 
 
 What shall we say of the uses to which we often 
 put our places of worship? In rural parishes, 
 their doors are often open to town-meetings and 
 strolling lecturers. In the vestibule of one church 
 was once posted a notice, humbly requesting that 
 shells of peanuts and expectorations of tobacco 
 should not be left upon the carpeted floor. Not 
 long ago a raffle for a sewing-machine was held 
 in the auditorium, and the conditions were an- 
 nounced glibly from the pulpit. Church-fairs 
 around and on the sacramental table are too old 
 a story to bear recital. It is a grief to reverent 
 taste, that the basements of our sacred edifices 
 should be devoted to commercial uses. One in- 
 stance I have known, in which worshipers assem- 
 bled on the Lord's Day through a darkened passage, 
 flanked on either side by a grocery and a provision 
 store. The atmosphere they breathed on a Sunday 
 morning was redolent with cheese and raw beef. 
 
 The climax of this semi-barbarism was reached 
 in a church in the city of Boston. It could not 
 be excused on the score of the simplicity of rural 
 taste. The pastor and some of his congregation 
 
266 My Study: and Other Essays, 
 
 were models of refinement and Christian reverence. 
 On a sabbath morning in midsummer, the audience 
 were mysteriously seized, in the midst of the ser- 
 vice of song, with a paroxysm of uncontrollable 
 sneezing. First the children, then the choir, and 
 at length nearly the whole assembly, the preacher 
 included, broke out into that involuntary convul- 
 sion which a former president of Harvard College 
 once protested that he had not perpetrated in the 
 presence of another for seventeen years. It was 
 as if they had regaled themselves with the hele- 
 nium autumnale^ popularly known as " sneeze-weed." 
 Did ever American savage or African Hottentot 
 bring such an offering to his gods ? When the 
 premises were searched by the astounded sexton 
 amidst the cachinnations of the boys, the cause of 
 the ridiculous catastrophe w^as found to be a cargo 
 of pepper^ which, during the previous week, had 
 been stored in the cellar. The enterprising trus- 
 tees had rented the place to a wholesale grocer. 
 They thus eked out the salary of the pastor and 
 the wages of the sexton. 
 
 Since the foregoing paragraph was written, I 
 have been informed of an incident which indicates 
 that there is a climax above the " climax." It 
 appears that a church in Philadelpliia was for sev- 
 eral years burdened with current expenses beyond 
 receipts ; and, to supply the deficit, the trustees 
 leased the basement to a wholesale brewery for the 
 storage of beer. A preacher who once occupied 
 the pulpit, testifies that the fumes from the beer- 
 
A Study of the Episcopal Church, 267 
 
 barrels were very perceptible to the congregation 
 on the Lord's Day. 
 
 There is a certain old Book in which it is 
 written, "Incense is an abomination unto Me." 
 Was not that prophetic, since prophecy often has 
 a double sense, of those Philadelphia beer-barrels? 
 One hardly knows whether to condole with, or to 
 congratulate, that church, that their economical 
 thrift did not save them from bankruptcy. The 
 sooner the auctioneer's hammer falls on such an 
 edifice, the better. The Lord never owned it : the 
 brewer had the better claim. 
 
 Illustrations of this evil multiply ad nauseam. 
 In a thriving city of Connecticut, then one of the 
 dual capitals of the State, a benevolent tailor — I 
 think he was — was once applied to for a subscrip- 
 tion to the building of a church. He responded 
 with great alacrity. He said that he would give 
 the building-lot himself. The countenances of the 
 committee brightened. He went on to explain, 
 saying that he was about to build a new store for 
 his increasing business, and that he would build 
 one story, and the church was "welcome to all 
 above that, upward to Heaven." The usage of the 
 churches he was familiar with had not suggested 
 to him a doubt that his benevolent offer would be 
 gratefully accepted. 
 
 Are such uncivilized associations ever found 
 connected with an Episcopal Church? If so, it 
 has not been my misfortune to meet them there. 
 If, on entering a New-England village, your eye 
 
268 My Study : and Other Essays. 
 
 falls on a place of worship more comely than the 
 rest in architecture, and free from nnchurchly 
 accompaniments, do you not know, without asking, 
 to what denomination of worshipers it belongs? 
 Grant that Episcopal usage sometimes crowds its 
 churchly reverence to an extreme ; but is not that 
 a safer extreme than ours ? We would not imitate 
 the scruple of Dr. Johnson, who lifted his hat 
 when he passed a church in the street ; but we 
 would rather do it than to wear the hat from the 
 pew to the vestibule. The educating influence of 
 this sentiment on children of the Church is of un- 
 told value. One of the most difficult of the Chris- 
 tian virtues to instill into youthful character is 
 that of reverence. The place where God dwells 
 is its natural auxiliary. 
 
 The value of the House of the Lord for this 
 purpose must increase as our country grows old, 
 and its temples of worship become venerable with 
 hundreds of years. They should be built, if pos- 
 sible, with stone, that they may defy the ravages 
 of fire and of time. The recollections of the expe- 
 riences of childhood in the House of God may 
 then be among the most precious treasures of 
 Christian culture. They may come back in after- 
 years, " trailing clouds of glory." They make the 
 very walls eloquent above all human speech. The 
 stone cries out of the wall, and the beam out of 
 the timber answers it. That instinct of our na- 
 ture which reveres the place where God's honor 
 dwells, is no fiction. God has not wrought a false- 
 
A Study of the Episcopal Church. 269 
 
 hood or a frivolity into the very make of the human 
 mind in creating it. The intuitions of the race 
 have expressed it through all history. 
 
 This reverence for the place where the distance 
 seems to be lessened between man and God is 
 surely scriptural. Remember Jacob's dream of 
 converse with angels, " How dreadful is this place ! 
 The Lord is here, and I knew it not ! " Recall the 
 night which he spent under the open sky, when in 
 his troubled sleep he seemed to wrestle with a 
 mysterious stranger, and calls the spot Peniel. 
 For he says, " I have seen God face to face ! " 
 The biblical narrative of the building of the Tem- 
 ple represents it as a place of singular and awful 
 sanctity. " I have halloived this i:)lace, to put my 
 name there." The House of God must be made 
 " exceeding magnifical, of fame and glory through- 
 out all countries." The wisest of monarchs sum- 
 moned to its erection the most accomplished 
 architects of the age. So sacred was it, that it 
 must be built without noise. No hammer nor ax, 
 nor "any tool of iron," must resound in it. It 
 must grow in silence, as the forests grow. 
 
 Such is the Scriptural idea of the holiness of the 
 House of the Lord. " The holy place ; the place 
 where My honor dwelleth ; the gate of Heaven." 
 So the Bible portrays in brief its unutterable sanc- 
 tity. Picture a church-fair in the Temple of Jeru- 
 salem ! Conceive of a raffle for a gold-headed 
 cane, or a Chickering piano, in the " Holy of 
 holies ! " Lnagine the humdrum of an auction- 
 
270 My Study: and Other Essays. 
 
 sale of the fag-ends of the fair from the altar of 
 sacrifice ! Do not such things remind us of One 
 who, on a memorable occasion, found a use for " a 
 whip of small cords "? 
 
 The views here advanced must be held within 
 bounds. We must not insist on the impracticable. 
 Spiritual necessity knows no law of good taste. 
 Leeway must be given and taken for the straits 
 of pioneer churches in infant settlements. There, 
 worshipers have often to remind themselves that 
 the Christian Church began in an " upper room." 
 It has often sheltered itself in caves and dens, in 
 forests and catacombs, and by the sea at low tide. 
 It must now often find a temporary home in halls 
 and schoolhouses, in log-cabins and barn-lofts. 
 One of the most helpful services of an Episcopal 
 Church that I ever attended was held in a ball- 
 room. In such unchurchly surroundings, a gen- 
 uine Church of Christ can compete successfully 
 with a corrupt one in gothic cathedrals under a 
 vaulted roof, amidst memorial windows and mas- 
 sive pillars. Any place is made sacred by the 
 worship of the living God by living souls. 
 
 But the tiling we plead for is, that, in the older 
 settlements, the House of God should be in keep- 
 ing with the civilization around it. In cities, where 
 all the other tokens of high culture abound, let 
 the Christian Temple be "exceeding magnifical." 
 In thriving towns, where men build for themselves 
 elegant and costly homes, let the home of their 
 worship be churchly in itself and its accompani- 
 
A Study of the Episcopal Church, 271 
 
 ments. That is a mistaken economy which would 
 retrench expense on the House of the Lord for 
 charity's sake. The story of the alabaster box 
 settles that question for all time. Nothing is 
 extravagant which is honestly expended for the 
 love of Christ. 
 
 We have something yet to learn of the rudiments 
 of biblical worship. Our Episcopal brethren are 
 farther advanced than we in this line of Christian 
 culture. That is a becoming, because a natural 
 and sensible, act of reverence, in which they begin 
 and end the services of public worship by kneeling, 
 or bowing the head in silent prayer. Their bishops 
 exercise a most valuable authority in withholding 
 consecration from a church burdened with debt. 
 They are right in refusing to offer to the Most 
 High a treasure over which the auctioneer's 
 hammer is suspended. 
 
 That was a refined Christian feeling, whatever 
 may be said of it as a sanitary error, which led 
 our fathers to bury their dead, and erect tombs 
 for themselves, underneath the temples in which 
 they and their godly ancestry had worshiped, or, 
 better still, in the cheerful '' God's acre " around 
 them. They would be at hand when the morning 
 dawned. Reason about the theology of it as we 
 may, who can help sympathizing with the senti- 
 ment? The man who can stand in the Campo 
 Santo at Pisa, only to jeer at the faith which has 
 transported thither earth from the Holy Land to 
 create a resting-place for the dead, is none the 
 
272 My Study: and Other Essays, 
 
 better for it. Many things which we would not 
 do now, we may well respect in the usage of a 
 former age. They may be things which, in other 
 forms, ought to perpetuate their spiritual meaning 
 in this brazen age of ours. 
 
XXL 
 
 A STUDY OF THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH. 
 PAET n. 
 
 The Church of England, and the American off- 
 shoot from it, have been wisely conservative of 
 one idea, to which our Puritan traditions are not 
 very friendly, and yet which, for that reason, we 
 greatly need to incorporate into our ideal of the 
 Christian Church. It is that of the unity, and the 
 consequent moral authority, of the Church. We 
 have drifted to a perilous extreme in our passion- 
 ate zeal for individuality in religious life. It often 
 degenerates into individuaKsm. Then the sequence 
 is inevitable, that eccentric and crochety believers, 
 and unbelievers as well, who can find a home 
 nowhere else, steal one from a Congregational 
 Church. This is vanity and vexation of spirit. 
 We have contended, not too stoutly perhaps, but 
 altogether too singly, for the liberty of a church, 
 as contrasted with the authority of the Church. 
 Our inherited faith, in this respect, is truthful; 
 but it is not all the truth. A principle lies over 
 against it. That principle our Lord hallowed in 
 the closing scenes of his life ; " That they all may 
 be one.^^ 273 
 
274 My Study: and Other Essays. 
 
 By just so much as we undervalue churchly 
 unity, do we lose our sense of churclily authority. 
 There is a moral power which nothing else creates 
 in numbers compacted and unified. This power is 
 the legitimate prerogative of the Church of Christ. 
 A church can possess but an infinitesimal fraction 
 of it, and that often infinitesimal in results. But 
 the Chuixh, the temple of the Spirit of God, is 
 well-nigh omnipotent. In no other development 
 is the principle absolutely true, " Vox populi vox 
 Beir Our plans of church extension suffer for 
 the want of the unifying principle as a check upon 
 disintegration. In the moral as in the material 
 universe, there are twin forces of centripetal and 
 centrifugal attraction. Either alone works ruin : 
 both in union create order and beauty. 
 
 The Church of England does good service for 
 us all in conserving this churchly idea without 
 crowding it to the tyranny of the Romish hie- 
 rarchy. After all that we have said, and must say 
 to every generation, in resistance to ecclesiastical 
 despotism, there is, even in ecclesiastical despotism, 
 an underlying truth which no large body of be- 
 lievers can afford to part with. Divine hfe is con- 
 centrated in one true and living Church. That 
 article in the Apostle's Creed, " I believe in the 
 Holy Catholic Church," has more than apostolic 
 authority. It is the word of God. It represents 
 the power which is to convert this world to Christ. 
 
 When this idea of churchly authority is pre- 
 sented in its biblical simplicity, the common sense 
 
A Study of the Episcopal Church. 275 
 
 of men approves it. Under right conditions, the 
 world reveres it. On a certain occasion, an im- 
 mense meeting of Chartists was held in London, 
 They had been wrought up almost to ferocity by 
 the atheistic abuse which had been heaped upon 
 the Christianity of the age. Charles Kingsley 
 made his way through the crowd to the platform ; 
 and, folding his arms till he could command a hear- 
 ing, he uttered these simple words, " I am a clergy- 
 man of the Church of England and — a Chartist." 
 The bold committal of the Church to the welfare 
 of the laboring people awed the angry assembly 
 into silence. Their ears were open to any thing 
 which the athletic churchman could say to them. 
 He corrected them, rebuked them, proved their 
 mistakes, denounced their vices, heaped scorn upon 
 their crimes, and flung the gauntlet to their un- 
 godly leaders ; and they listened to it all like chil- 
 dren. They felt that he had the right to say it, 
 as no other man than a Christian minister could 
 have. He spoke as one having authority. Behind 
 his words and him was the great body of Chris- 
 tian believers of all ages, wliich Christ had hal- 
 lowed by His own name. 
 
 It is almost impossible to overestimate the pres- 
 tige which this churchly idea has given to the 
 Church of England in the civilization of the Eng- 
 lish people. With all its defects, — and honest 
 churchmen know that these are not few nor small, 
 — still that church has more to show than any 
 other Protestant sect, of humble, effective service 
 
276 My Study : and Other Essays, 
 
 in humanizing, comforting, educating. Christian- 
 izing, the masses of the English people. I have 
 mentioned the name of Charles Kingsley. He is as 
 good a representative as any one of hundreds of 
 others, of a self-denying country-parson, consecrat- 
 ed to his work as a minister of God to the poor 
 and the lowly. Where can we find a better model ? 
 
 But for the spiritual elements which the Church 
 has built into the foundations of the English Gov- 
 ernment, that government could not exist a year. 
 We democrats marvel at the loyalty of the Eng- 
 lish people to a system of government which is 
 unequal, unnatural, in some respects tyrannical. 
 To our sharp republican eye, they appear stupid in 
 their blind allegiance. But it is no mystery when 
 we give due weight to one thing. Every English- 
 man from his infancy upward has heard prayers 
 offered for the queen, the royal family, and the 
 parliament of the realm. The government is asso- 
 ciated with all that he reveres as the representative 
 of God. That infinite idea which the word " Law " 
 embodies, exists in the concrete to an English- 
 man's conscience, as it seldom does to that of a 
 republican. Loyalty is a more profound sentiment 
 than mere submission. At the bottom, it is a reli- 
 gious sentiment. It is the voice of conscience. 
 
 This it is which has kept alive the English Gov- 
 ernment, though rocking on the billows of threat- 
 ened revolution, for a thousand years. And it is 
 the work of the English Church. It is not easy 
 for men to lay violent hands on that for which 
 
A Study of the Episcopal Church. 277 
 
 they have been praying all their life long. Some 
 element must be eliminated from their life-blood 
 before they will do it. It is like the death-blow of 
 a parricide upon his mother. I repeat, the princi- 
 ple of reverence runs through the warp and woof 
 of England's civilization, and her ancient church 
 has put it there. She owes it to the poor, burnt 
 hand of Cranmer. With all her national defects 
 and follies and crimes, England is a blessing to the 
 world. That will be a sad day for mankind when 
 she falls, if fall she must, from the summit of 
 nations. It is not yet proved that we of the new 
 world have any thing to offer which can take her 
 place as a civilizing and Christianizing power to 
 the nations. And, if we have, the best of it is 
 our inheritance from England. We are but a 
 New England in our mission to the world. We 
 are but the offspring of a venerable Mother : our 
 churches are but the offshoots of the Mother- 
 church. The churchly idea is as necessary to us 
 as to her. 
 
 True, the idea of the individuality of the soul, 
 which it has been our mission to develop, is 
 equally potent. We will not be faithless to it. 
 But, in our zeal for it, we have been too oblivious 
 of the twin-idea represented by the church as a 
 unit. These two ideas are correlatives. Either 
 works ruin without the other. The churchly sen- 
 timent has special power in the forming of pop- 
 ular opinions. It is a most essential force in every 
 wise reform. Rid it of the pettiness of formalism. 
 
278 My Study : and Other Essays. 
 
 and the abuses of despotism, and the craft of 
 priesthood, and it is the most potent lever of re- 
 form that history has known. The world will 
 never be truly reformed till it is converted to 
 Christ ; and it will never be converted to Christ, 
 except by means and methods which bring to the 
 front the Church of Christ. Christ lives in his 
 Church. Every generation creates its voluntary 
 organizations, which aim to do the work, and rep- 
 resent the principles, for which the Church exists ; 
 but they all work at disadvantage, because they 
 do not represent Christ. In the end, they all be- 
 come effete, and pass away. The Church is the 
 only representative of associated and compacted 
 benevolence which has a destiny of conquest. 
 
 The Church of England, furthermore, does good 
 service in the conservation of the idea of the his- 
 toric continuity of the Church. We can not defer 
 to her claim of apostolic succession as any more 
 valid than our own. Yet in her articles of faith, 
 and in her forms of worship, as well as in her years, 
 she represents a venerable and eventful history. 
 Institutions are strong which are built into ages 
 of accumulated growth and achievement. Human 
 nature everywhere has roots in the past. We all 
 have historic feelers, which reach out, like the ten- 
 drils of a vine, for something to lay hold of, and 
 to steady our faith. A thing is presumptively 
 true if it is old. A faith which has been handed 
 down through ages of inquiry has solidity in the 
 very fact of its endurance. Nothing else tries a 
 
A Study of the Episcopal Church. 279 
 
 truth, a book, an institution, a system, a man, as 
 time does. Any thing that has lived long, has so 
 far proved its right to live. 
 
 This principle has special pertinence in matters 
 of religion. To religious institutions, time is a 
 hint of eternity. A creed which remote ages 
 originated, and have sent down to later days, must 
 have in it central truths which the world needs. 
 A Church which dates back for its beginnmg to 
 the Abrahamic pilgrimage is venerable for its 
 power of continuance. Its longevity is a history. 
 The spirit of worship is deepened by the use of 
 liturgic forms, in which holy men and women of 
 other generations have expressed their faith. It 
 is a most formative element in the religious culture 
 of children, that they are taught to pray in the 
 words which a godly ancestry have hallowed. To 
 offer the prayers which their fathers offered, and 
 to sing the hymns which their mothers sang, will 
 set going sanctifying influences which will grow 
 with their growth. 
 
 Will not the use of ancient forms degenerate 
 into nothing but form? Always possibly; never 
 necessarily. I seriously question whether such 
 repetition induces any more formality than the 
 silent attempt of listeners to follow the im- 
 promptu thought of a leader in extemporaneous 
 prayer. Prayer impromptu may be the superior 
 to the leader ; but, to the hearer, the following is 
 a difficult and complicated act. Such prayer to 
 the hearer is a series of surprises. It requires a 
 
280 My Study : and Other Essays. 
 
 quick mind to follow it with no loss of devotional 
 sincerity. To children it is commonly a dead loss 
 of time. They do not participate in it, and are 
 not reverently interested in it. During the first 
 fifteen years of a child's life, the public devotions 
 of our churches are generally a blank. 
 
 Try the experiment with an intelligent child 
 of eight years. Ask him what he was thinking of 
 during the " long prayer." I venture to think you 
 will be startled by the answer, for the evidence 
 it will give you, that, for any religious value of 
 the service to him, he might as w^ell have been 
 on the playground. Is this the best we can do to 
 make our sanctuaries contribute to the religious 
 culture of our children? 
 
 But, granting the peril of formality in the use 
 of an ancient liturgy, the form which ages have 
 sanctified can not lose all its sacredness in the use. 
 Probably the peril is nowhere greater than among 
 a crowd of college-students. Yet in Oriel College, 
 England, the same form, in part, is in use to-day 
 that was there five hundred years ago. A recent 
 visitor testifies that it is rehearsed with apparent 
 reverence. That must be a brutish mind which 
 could rehearse it otherwise. Is the man living, 
 who was taught to repeat the Lord's Prayer at 
 five years of age, who can gabble it at the age of 
 fifty? John Quincy Adams, in his eighty-fourth 
 year, repeated every night the old stanza of infant- 
 worship, — 
 
 "Now I lay me down to sleep," etc. 
 
A Study of the Episcopal Church. 281 
 
 I have recently heard it said, that, as the air of 
 "Home, Sweet Home" is the most memorable 
 music in the world for its power over the human 
 mind, this prayer of infancy is the most memor- 
 able poetry. One can well believe it. This and 
 the Lord's Prayer have been the most potent 
 educators of infancy and childhood that the Avorld 
 has known. If places are revered for their anti- 
 quity, and their association with the great and good 
 of other times, much more is the language sacred 
 in which they have communed with God. 
 
 This reverence for historic continuity as a factor 
 in religious culture is developed in no other Prot- 
 estant sect so profoundly as in the Church of 
 England. By her fidelity to it, she does good 
 service to the Church of the future. The only 
 thing in which other denominations cultivate it 
 largely is their hymnology. But why should we 
 not foster it in the service of prayer, as well as in 
 the service of song? We teach our children to 
 pray in the words of the Lord's Prayer. Why 
 should we stop there in our recognition of the fact 
 that prayer has a history ? Might not our worship 
 be enriched by sometimes using the prayers of 
 Chrysostom and St. Augustine and Jeremy Tay- 
 lor? We sing the hymn of St. Bernard: why not 
 pray his prayer as well ? 
 
 One other element of religious life, for which 
 we have reason to respect the Anglican Church, is 
 that of order in religious observances, and a con- 
 sequent distaste for reckless change. This ten- 
 
282 My Study: and Other Essays. 
 
 dency easily runs to the extreme. A Church 
 is unfaithful to the chief end of its being if it is 
 nothing but a conservative machine. Its vener- 
 able liturgy is an abomination if it is the service 
 of a treadmill. Yet the taste which is thus abused 
 is indispensable to permanent religious growth. 
 There is no conservative power without it. We 
 are creatures of routine in religion, as in other 
 things. The ScrijDtures recognize this ; and Nature 
 indorses it, in the institution of the sabbath. Even 
 the animal world echoes, in its dumb way, this 
 demand of human nature. Our beasts of burden 
 fail us before the time if we deny them their 
 sabbaths. Life itself is distributed by sevens. 
 The stellar universe is engineered on a sublime 
 system of routine, more exact than clockwork. 
 Besides, duties which have to do with God, surely 
 require to be performed with reverent decency; 
 and to this, fixedness of succession and recurrence 
 is auxiliary. The foundation for it is built deep 
 in the constitution of mind. 
 
 Episcopal usage, in this respect, though to the 
 taste of many it is too restrictive of individual lib- 
 erty, yet to as many more is helpful and strength- 
 ening. In periods of religious disorder, when zeal 
 runs away with wisdom, we find reason to prize 
 the help of Episcopal conservatism and propriety. 
 A reverent faith at such times always leans that 
 way. The late Rev. Dr. Hawes of Hartford was, 
 by temperament and training, a Puritan of the 
 Puritans. The athletic and progressive virtues of 
 
A Study of the Episcopal Church. 283 
 
 his Puritan ancestry were as innate in his blood 
 as in theirs. Yet at a time of religious efferves- 
 cence in Connecticut, when zeal ran riot, even to 
 profaneness, he said, " I thank God for the exist- 
 ence of the Episcopal Church." We all have 
 reason for the same thank-offering, when popular 
 reverence is overborne by religious frenzy. 
 
 This suggestion is the more significant because 
 of our denominational faith in revivals of religion. 
 We believe in revivals. Our history is full of 
 them. Our great preachers have been honored of 
 God in great awakenings of religious life. Our 
 theory of preaching is adjusted to the quickening 
 of great assemblies by the Spirit of God. The 
 history of New England especially has been illu- 
 mined by days of Pentecost on which her pulpit 
 has spoken as with tongues of flame. 
 
 One consequence of a great history is the dan- 
 ger of an extreme. The better the thing, the more 
 open is it to abuse. Our Puritan denominations 
 have sometimes encountered the peril of too exclu- 
 sive reliance on revivals for church-extension. 
 Imperfect education in the ministry tends to wild 
 and wasteful ways in the conduct of revivals. 
 We need the balancing weight of more conserva- 
 tive tastes. 
 
 We can not follow the lead of the Episcopal 
 Church in this thing with unqualified trust. We 
 should be false to the divine providence in our his- 
 tor}^ if we should do that. Yet with entire fidel- 
 ity to our own traditions, we may wisely learn 
 
284 My Study: and Other Essays, 
 
 something from Episcopal faith in ancient ways. 
 We can use more faithfully the principle of Chris- 
 tian nurture in the training of our children. We 
 can arrest the decline of infant baptism with the 
 whole train of duties and privileges A\diich it 
 involves. We can assume in our system of activ- 
 ities that the children of the Church shall be 
 worthy of her full membership in the natural order 
 of religious growth. The form of Episcopal " con- 
 firmation " is not essential, but the thing it sig- 
 nifies is so. We need it. We should abandon the 
 theory of despair, that children must for a time be 
 reprobates, and then be converted by convulsive 
 revolution. That theory is of Satanic origin. 
 
 We can set a guard also more faithfully against 
 the abuses of revivals. We can keep our pulpits 
 out of the hands of ignorant or half-educated 
 men. If our polity is not such that it can protect 
 our churches from the inroad of unw^orthy pastors, 
 we should create a polity that will. We can give 
 the place which of right belongs to them, to men 
 of cultured minds and refined tastes, and not com- 
 pel such men to take back seats in our churches. 
 Our ways of doing things would be improved by 
 such precautions and safeguards. We can even 
 afford to make some sacrifice of numbers to im- 
 proved quality. Some ways of doing things which 
 are popular among us we should silently lay aside. 
 
 In our Puritan communion, there are other ideas 
 than those here enumerated, which are too valua- 
 ble to permit us to leave the Church of our fathers 
 
A Study of the Episcopal Church. 285 
 
 in search of wisdom. We will rather import what 
 we need than to exile ourselves. We are more 
 than pardonable if we believe, that, on the whole, 
 we should suffer loss if we should exchange our 
 own for any other of the great Churches of 
 Christendom. We confess to a childlike clinging 
 to the Church of the Pilgrims. When we see 
 what it has made New England, and what it has 
 achieved for our country and for the world, we 
 can not help feeling as De Quincey did, in view of 
 the religious history. of England, "I thank God 
 that I am the child of a magnificent Church." 
 Our Pilgrim faith surely has more than a " magni- 
 ficent " history. Oh those grand, lofty, unworldly 
 souls ! How lordly were their aspirations, yet 
 how childlike their trust ! How profound was 
 their sense of eternity, and how close their ap- 
 proach to God ! They are sacred to us above all 
 earthly fame. Princes of blood royal were they 
 all. We say of our Jerusalem, " If I forget thee, 
 may lay right hand forget her cunning ! " The 
 child who is born to such a faith, should give to it 
 the strength of his manhood, and die in it at the 
 end exultingly. 
 
 This, like all rules governing a life's choices, 
 must be held with elasticity enough to enclose 
 exceptional cases. Denominational affinities are, 
 in part, matters of temperament. There is an 
 Episcopal temperament, as there is a Methodist 
 temperament. There are men who, though born 
 under Puritan constellations, are born churclnnen. 
 
286 My Study: and Other Essays, 
 
 Not their tastes only, not their acquired convic- 
 tions chiefly, but their inmost spiritual structure, 
 inclines them to conservative opinions and fixed 
 liturgic forms. They take in more spiritual vital- 
 ity from an Episcopal atmosphere than from any 
 other. Such men should be allowed to follow the 
 bent of their natures without restrictive criticism. 
 Let them go where those who are born Puritans 
 can not follow them. In the exercise of the same 
 liberty, let the vast majority of men of the Puritan 
 make count it their honor to abide by the faith 
 and polity of their fathers. 
 
 Very significant testimony to this effect was once 
 uttered by that accomplished scholar and model 
 churchman, the Rev. Dr. Washburn of New York. 
 If I do not mistake, he was born in New England, 
 and passed his youth in a Congregational church. 
 In early manhood he took orders in the Episcopal 
 Church, and became one of the brilliant ornaments 
 of her pulpit. It could have been no want of suc- 
 cess m his life's work which led him to say to me 
 near the close of his life, "My experience and 
 observation have led me to the conviction that a 
 young man of Protestant training had better stay 
 in the Church in which God has given him birth." 
 Much as he loved the Church of his adoption, and 
 proud as she was of him, he thought, that, as a 
 rule, the gain from the transition was not sufficient 
 to warrant so grave a change. 
 
 As a rule, then, we of Puritan antecedents can 
 have no inducement, on the whole, to abandon our 
 
A Study of the Episcopal Church, 287 
 
 birthright. But we may enrich it, and augment 
 the resources of our religious culture, by studying 
 the ideas, and importing some of the usages, of the 
 old Mother Church of England. 
 
xxn. 
 
 PRAYER AS A STATE OF CHRISTIAN LIVING. 
 
 Prayer in real life is an object of discovery and 
 surprises. Said one believer, " I had been a long 
 time in the Church, before I found out that prayer 
 is something which one can make a business of." 
 A growing experience of the divine life will con- 
 stantly discover something new in prayer as a 
 moral force. Three stages of growth are com- 
 monly discernible respecting it in the Christian 
 consciousness. They are, prayer as a refuge in 
 emergencies, prayer as a habit at appointed times, 
 and prayer as a state of continuous living. 
 
 The privilege and power of prayer in this last 
 development of it are realized by comparatively 
 few. It was one of the infrequent expressions of 
 his inner life by the late Professor Stuart, " I have 
 learned that the value of prayer does not depend 
 so much on its intensity in moods, or its regularity 
 in times, as on its constancy as a continuous way 
 of living. "VVe need to live in a state of prayer." 
 I quote his remark substantially from memory. 
 Suffering had taught him the truth of it. Few 
 men reach the discovery, except through some 
 sort of disciplinary trial. In spiritual experience, 
 
 288 
 
Prayer as a State of Christian Living. 289 
 
 necessity is the mother of discovery, as it is of 
 invention in material things. 
 
 Our fathers, especially of the earlier generations 
 in this country, seem to have understood this 
 phase of prayer more profoundly than we do. 
 They understood it in a more practical way. They 
 prayed for what they wanted, and they expected 
 to receive it. If they did not receive it, the fail- 
 ure set them upon great "searchings of heart." 
 The result commonly was, that they prayed again. 
 They had faith in importunity. They noted the 
 fact, that the promise, "Ask and ye shall receive," 
 was given in immediate sequence to a parable 
 which represents a failure in prayer. 
 
 There is something sublime in their application 
 of prayer to the common exigencies of life. Look 
 at the records of the ancient Courts of Probate 
 in New England. How did their Wills read? 
 First and above all, "I commit my soul to the 
 Infinite and Almighty God ! " So they were wont 
 to go about the work of setting their house in 
 order for their last journey. Look at their reli- 
 gious diaries. They are childlike in the devotional 
 faith they record. The writers take God into their 
 confidence as a Friend. They make their business 
 His business. If one of them moves to a new home, 
 he leaves the old one, and consecrates the new one, 
 with prayer. If he buys a house or a horse, he 
 prays over his bargain. A harvest, a journey, a 
 " cold spell," a dry summer, an autumnal freshet, 
 — the things which make up the talk of a country 
 
290 My Study: and Other Essays. 
 
 village, — make up also the converse of good men 
 with God. Their faith was not restricted to Sun- 
 days and sermons, to funerals and epidemics. 
 
 The articles of their daily food are, each one, a 
 gift of God, for which thanksgiving is prompt. 
 Many times in the history of those days is the 
 gift of Indian corn gratefully acknowledged. It 
 was a new esculent to them, of ready and abun- 
 dant growth ; and it often saved them from starva- 
 tion. The pious chronicler of the early days of 
 Concord writes, " The Lord is pleased to provide 
 great store of fish in the spring-time." Again, he 
 records, " Let no man make a jest of pumpkins ; 
 for, with this fruit, the Lord was pleased to feed 
 His people till their corn and cattle were increased." 
 
 In such familiar uses of religion, there is always 
 danger of twaddle. But nothing of that sort mars 
 the manliness of the olden times. Religion was 
 admirably weighted with good sense. It made a 
 compound of tough, practical fiber. One of the 
 ancient customs was, to invite the minister to 
 come and ask the divine blessing on the land of 
 the farmer. "Blessing the land," it was called. 
 A clergyman once, on being called thus to visit a 
 farm on Cape Cod, found it in a miserable plight 
 for the want of good husbandry. " No," said he, 
 "this land does not need prayer : it needs manure." 
 Such were the homely and sensible ways in which 
 the Most High was welcomed to their j)lain and 
 frugal homes. Was ever Wordsworth's "plain liv- 
 ing and high thinking " more grandly illustrated ? 
 
Prayer as a State of Christian Living. 291 
 
 Even the comic side of prayer, in certain condi- 
 tions, did not escape them, yet did not disturb 
 them. A hundred years ago a good citizen of 
 Sudbury attended the " Thursday Lecture " in 
 Boston, and heard the preacher pray for rain. At 
 the close of the service he took the preacher's 
 hand, and said, " You Boston ministers, as soon as 
 a tuhp wilts under your windows, go to church, 
 and pray for rain till all Sudbury and Concord are 
 under water." It was comical, and they both saw 
 it. But, none the less, they believed, that, if good 
 men prayed for rain, they got rain. Failure was 
 only a reason for praying again. It was very 
 unscientific. Be it so ; but a grand fact which 
 underlies science was expressed in it. The grand- 
 est life man can live was in it, settle it with science 
 as we may. 
 
 This profound faith in prayer as a constant 
 accompaniment of life was the secret of the ex- 
 treme length of the prayers of our fathers. They 
 often interpreted literally the command, " Continue 
 in prayer." Their ministers sometimes indulged 
 in such prolixity of devotion, that, if one of their 
 successors should imitate them now on a Sunday, 
 his congregation would ask for his resignation on 
 Monday. It was because, as a rule, they succeeded 
 in it. Prayer was the most effective force they 
 knew. It swayed the universe. They knew noth- 
 ing of power in steam, except to raise the lids of 
 their teakettles. They did not know lightning by 
 the name of electricity. They did not know that 
 
292 My Study : and Other Essays. 
 
 grayitation held their feet to the ground, and that, 
 without its permission, they could not weigh a 
 pound of sugar, or adjust their knee-buckles. The 
 Corliss engine and the Cunarders and Hoe's print- 
 ing-press were not. If they had been predicted, 
 they would have been treated like the " moon- 
 hoax " of later days. The telephone would have 
 savored of witchcraft to them. They would have 
 kept a fast-day before using it. But they knew 
 prayer as the superlative of all forces. They used 
 it in good faith. 
 
 They prayed long, therefore, because it was 
 their way of accomplishing their objects. Objects 
 which, in their theory of life, ranked first in value, 
 they could achieve in no other way. In vulgar par- 
 lance, " it paid " to pray. They never heard the 
 Italian proverb, — or, if they did, they heard only 
 to scorn it, — " If you would succeed, you must not 
 be too good." To their notion, goodness was the 
 prime success. Every thing they did, therefore, 
 they baptized with prayer. Where Lord Nelson 
 would have broken a bottle of brandy over the 
 prow of a ship at the launch, they would have sent 
 for the minister to offer a prayer for safe sailing. 
 Their praying was the best half of their doing. 
 
 " Father Wilson " of the First Church of Boston 
 often prayed two hours continuously. Men came 
 in from Dedham to hear his prayers, as they now 
 do to hear Phillips Brooks's sermons. They used 
 to caution each other not to ask him to pray for a 
 thing unless they were prepared to have it with all 
 
Prayer as a State of Christian JLiving, 293 
 
 its corollaries and implications. Once, at least, 
 he was begged to cease praying for rain, because, 
 since lie began, some of the neighboring towns had 
 been flooded. Science may say what it will, or 
 can, of these things. But there was a real life in 
 them. Nothing was more real in those heroic times. 
 The revolution for independence was not a more 
 ef&cient factor in the world's destiny than the 
 power of prayer which was put into history by 
 those grand believers. After all, it is faith in the 
 unseen that sways the world. 
 
 Here, also, was the secret of their resolute and 
 cheerful temper. It is an egregious mistake to 
 paint them as men of disconsolate conscience. 
 That they were sour-faced men, is as much a 
 fiction as the " Blue Laws." Mr. Emerson thus 
 describes them : " A sadness as of piled mountains 
 fell on them. Life became ghastly, joyless, a pil- 
 grim's progress, . . . beleagured round with doleful 
 histories of Adam's fall and curse behind us, with 
 doomsdays and purgatorial and penal fires before 
 us ; and the heart of the seer and the heart of the 
 listener sanl^ within them." This is the heredi- 
 tary notion of the Pilgrims. It goes down from 
 father to son, bulging with accumulating lies, as it 
 advances, till its figure has become hideous. 
 
 Never was there a more stupid blunder in the 
 judgment of historic characters. They were not 
 such men. Jeremiah, the prophet of the broken 
 heart, was not their model: St. Paul was their 
 model. Their ministers preached a score of ser- 
 
294 3Iy Study : and Other Essays. 
 
 mons on the Epistles to the Romans to one on 
 the books of the " weeping prophet." Their minds 
 were freighted with great convictions. They lived 
 in the rapids of great events. Their piety was 
 sympathetic with both. Such piety is always of 
 the resolute and cheering type. 
 
 It has been said, that no man can be a true poet 
 who has not a cheerful temper. It is more strictly 
 true, that no man can be a Christian of the Pilgrim 
 type without such a temper. No man or woman, 
 without such a temper, could have lived through 
 the first winter at Plymouth after the landing in 
 1620. Such believers live in light, not in twilight. 
 They may not be hilarious men, but they have and 
 give the good cheer of indomitable courage. Our 
 fathers, especially of the earlier generations, were 
 men of that guild. They were men of the meridian 
 and the morning. 
 
 It is not given to men of " ghastly, joyless life," 
 whose minds are intent on " purgatorial and penal 
 fires," to do the deeds our fathers did. Downcast 
 and sour-faced men, weighed down by " a sadness 
 as of piled mountains," are not the men who build 
 States, and emancipate nations. Men who walk 
 with eyes on the ground, "with hearts sinking 
 within them," do not found colleges in their 
 poverty, when the gift of a bushel of corn is a 
 sacrifice. They do not form churches, and free 
 governments, which illuminate the globe in after- 
 times. It takes stalwart and uplooking faith to 
 make history. Such men were the fathers. If 
 
Prayer as a State of Christian Living. 295 
 
 they observed more fast-days than we do, they 
 observed more days of thanksgivmg as well, and 
 did it more religiously. There is not in the 
 world's history an institution which blends a pro- 
 found piety with social festivity more beautifully 
 than the New-England Thanksgiving Day of the 
 olden time. That and the English Christmas are 
 twin products of a cheerful religious faith. 
 
 Our fathers prayed more in every way than we 
 do. If they had personal conflicts with Satan, 
 they conducted them in a soldierly way. They 
 fought like men who meant to win. They did 
 win. If they hanged witches, they did it in dead 
 earnest, believing that they were in conscious con- 
 flict with the Devil. They grappled with the arch- 
 enemy with stout heart, where many of our day, 
 with the same faith in malign powers, would have 
 run away. They were born conquerors, and they 
 had the reward of conquest. They lived, in the 
 main, a life of victory and of gladness. The fact 
 is, that, like all successful men in the tug of life, 
 they had no time to mope ; and they had as little 
 disposition as time. 
 
 But the grand secret of their gladsome courage 
 was the state of prayer in which they lived. They 
 had faith that whatever ought to interest them did 
 interest God. Whatever ought to engage their 
 faculties, and fill up their life, did engage the per- 
 fections of God. They were the subject of divine 
 decrees. God had ordained from eternity what- 
 soever should come to pass, and had elected them 
 
296 31y Study : and Other Essays. 
 
 to be His instruments in bringing things to pass. 
 They were co-workers with God, and could not be 
 overreached or defeated in life's work. Reverently 
 they talked with God as with a Friend. Theirs 
 was the faith of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. 
 Therefore they enjoyed God. If ever men lived, 
 who, in the sense of lofty courageous hope, enjoyed 
 life, they were such men. 
 
 Prayer as a state of holy living is abundantly 
 recognized in the Scriptures. " Continuing instant 
 in prayer." " In every thing by prayer, let your 
 requests be made known." '' Continue in prayer, 
 and watch." "Praying always with all prayer and 
 supplication." Such fragments come to view in 
 the Bible, like the edges of geologic strata on the 
 surface of the earth, signs of the deep creation 
 underneath. Anna continued all night in prayer. 
 St. Paul's model of a Christian widow was one 
 who lived in prayer night and day. St. Peter in 
 prison was remembered by the church in prayer 
 without ceasing. Far back in the elder dispensa- 
 tion, prayer as a continuity of exalted privilege 
 dawned on the Psalmist's mind. In a tone of tri- 
 umph he sings, "At evenmg and morning and 
 noon will I pray." Constancy of devotional spirit 
 is inborn in the nature of holy living. One age 
 has handed it down to another in the line of bib- 
 lical revelation. 
 
 Such continuity of devotional habit gives large 
 place in a godly life to ejaculatory prayer. St. 
 Augustine, Madame Guyon, John Tauler, Luther, 
 
Prayer as a State of Christian Living, 297 
 
 President Edwards, Edward Payson, and a host of 
 others, were often overheard in fragmentary col- 
 loquy with God. Professor Stuart used to hallow 
 his learned researches by mterspersing audibly 
 chants of the Psalms in the original Hebrew. On 
 one occasion, in taking his morning walk, he ob- 
 served in a door-yard as he passed it, a rare and 
 beautiful specimen of a French dahlia. He paused ; 
 and, leaning over the fence, he was heard ejaculat- 
 ing in low tones liis thanksgiving for such an im- 
 pressive proof of the benevolence of God. 
 
 Such moments of holy utterance were the feed- 
 ers which gave to these men their spiritual strength. 
 Who can tell how much they owed even of their 
 intellectual vigor to such spiritual resources ? Ev- 
 ery faculty of a good man's mind receives incre- 
 ment from his virtues. Gifts grow on the strength 
 of graces. Zinzendorf used to write little notes 
 to "the Lord Christ." This is what every reli- 
 gious diary ought to be. No human eye but that 
 of the author should ever see it. Thomas a Kem- 
 pis says of Christ, " He alone is a w^orld of friends. 
 That man never knew what it was to be familiar 
 with God, who complains of the want of friends 
 while God is with him." 
 
 We need the state of prayer as a counteracting 
 force to the state of temptation in which we are 
 always living. In such a world as this, life itself 
 is one long temptation. The defense needs to be 
 proportionate to the peril. The spirit of our age 
 is skeptical of the reality of Satan. Few of us 
 
298 My Study: and Other Essays. 
 
 have the vivid faith which our fathers had in his 
 personality as the chief of a malignant empire. 
 We have reason to believe his subject angels to be 
 a great multitude. A " legion " of them once held 
 possession of one soul. They give to temptation 
 a fearful force and perilous ubiquity. We have to 
 contend with principalities and powers. No man 
 is beyond the reach of their malign enchantments. 
 Here, there, and everywhere, now, then, and 
 always, personal and mighty foes are at hand to 
 allure men to ruin. If spiritual attributes give 
 any advantage over minds enclosed in fleshly forms, 
 tempters have that advantage in this world of ours. 
 We do not know that they ever slumber, or are 
 ever absent. That saintly woman was a wise one 
 who taught her children to take example from the 
 Devil as the most industrious being in the created 
 universe. There is but one refuge for a mortal 
 man living under such conditions of spiritual trial. 
 It is to live in a state of prayer as constant as the 
 peril. God has ordained no other means by which 
 we can summon from unseen worlds spiritual allies 
 to re-enforce our conflict with spiritual foes. 
 
 Luther may have had an exaggerated estimate 
 of the attributes of Satan, and of his liberty of 
 access to human souls. His imagination realized 
 the presence of the Adversary in visible and audi- 
 ble signs. He heard voices threatening or seduc- 
 tive over his left shoulder. " Ha ! you are there, 
 — are you ? " was the salutation he once gave, in 
 response to an evil thought which he believed to 
 
Prayer as a State of Christian Living. 299 
 
 be a suggestion from the Devil. His vision of 
 Satan in his cell at Erfurt, when he threw his ink- 
 stand at him, may have been, probably was, a 
 strained and unnatural fancy, yet possibly not. 
 The Reformer lived in an age when Satan was at 
 large in great liberty. Abnormal manifestations 
 of his presence may have been becoming to the 
 crisis, as they seem to have been in our Saviour's 
 lifetime, and as in the judgment of some they are 
 now, in some of the phenomena of spiritualism. 
 At all events, Luther's extreme, if it was such, 
 was a safer error than the incredulous security 
 from malign enchantments in which men of our 
 times are living. Spiritual perils are the more 
 fatal for being unseen and unheard. Odorless 
 malaria is the most destructive to life. Burglars 
 enter our homes in velvet slippers, and in the dark. 
 Their dark-lanterns do not waken us from our 
 slumber, though held at our bedside. So do in- 
 visible tempters creep stealthily upon us and 
 around us, night and day. Our unbelief in their 
 existence is their safety from detection. Every 
 man has an unseen enemy at his left shoulder. 
 Better is Luther's credulity than our dead faith. 
 Such a continuous state of peril demands a con- 
 tinuous state of prayer as its offset and counter- 
 action. ^ 
 
 We need the state of prayer also as a corrective 
 of the restlessness and turmoil which life in this 
 world engenders. Our life is full of distractions 
 from spiritual peace. We call God our Father. 
 
300 My Study : and Other Assays. 
 
 He is a wise Father ; He does not cosset His child ; 
 He inclines rather to the robust discipline. Life 
 to many of us has a good deal of rough experience, 
 like that of the backwoods. We often find our- 
 selves in tumultuous agitations w^hich seem to for- 
 bid communion with God. Emerson says that 
 ''the human race are afflicted with St. Vitus' 
 dance. A man acts, not from one motive, but 
 from many shifting fears and short motives. It is 
 as if he were ten or twenty less men than himself, 
 acting at discord with one another; so that the 
 result of most lives is zero." 
 
 Is it so ? Where, then, shall we find the unify- 
 ing force ? How shall we obtain concinnity and a 
 purpose? How otherwise than by coming into 
 God's atmosphere, and living at one with Him? 
 Only so shall we emanci^^ate ourselves from the 
 thralldom of anxieties and vacillations which take 
 all joy out of life. So shall a great peace come to 
 us. Not the most gifted, but the most godly, know 
 most of this. 
 
 Often it is a discovery to us that the consistence 
 of our character can not stand the strain of pro- 
 longed disease. Our best resolves give way before 
 physical pain. The four walls of a sick-room are 
 like those of the prison so contrived that one of 
 them approached its opposite on rollers a foot in a 
 day till it crushed the prisoner. Death found him 
 a raving maniac. The monotony of a hopeless 
 sick-room is intolerable to one not inured to it by 
 long discipline. Surprises of evil overcome us in 
 
Prayer as a State of Christian Living, 301 
 
 hours of nervous prostration. The first thing that 
 disclosed to Dr. Chalmers the futility of the moral- 
 ism which was all the religion he had when he 
 began his pastorate at Kilmany, was the discovery 
 that it could not bear the scrutiny of the sick-bed. 
 When brought face to face with death, he found 
 out his need of something better than scientific 
 culture to give him rest. 
 
 Rest in God is the great necessity of our nature 
 when any thing brings a strain upon the fiber of 
 our moral being. Sin tends always to unrest. It 
 often creates tumults of conflict, and shocks of self- 
 discovery. A keen conscience is an alert foe to 
 peace of mind, unless it is appeased by something 
 which brings the soul into sympathy with God in 
 its choices. The complacency of God is the only 
 thing that can give a man complacency in himself. 
 Unsettled questions of duty, also, often create 
 perturbations and alarms. Doubts of truth in 
 some minds open abysses of despair. Such are 
 contingencies in even a good man's life of proba- 
 tionary discipline. 
 
 Even the innocent cares of life are not always 
 innocent of encroachment on mental rest. Those 
 which Montgomery calls " the insect cares," some- 
 times are so numerous, that, like an atmosphere 
 full of stinging creatures, they make life a burden. 
 The shame a man feels for his minding them is 
 itself a discomfort. Pascal lamented, that, in cer- 
 tain moods, he could not bear the alighting of a fly 
 on his face without irritation. One godly man 
 
302 3Iy Study : and Other Essays. 
 
 wept because he lost his self-control, and swore 
 profanely at the sting of a hornet. 
 
 Toil for a living in such conditions as this world 
 furnishes is a daily discomfort. Human labor is 
 heavily weighted with human wrongs and humilia- 
 tions. The common conception of it is that of 
 conflict with other men. A battle with the world, 
 we call it : as if another man's success were our 
 failure. Competitions, heart-burnings, rivalries, 
 deceits, overreachings, treacheries, enmities, and 
 opj)ressions make up large jiortions of the life of 
 trade. Penitentiaries and dungeons are symbols 
 of our laws. Both are constructed for self-defense. 
 We have little notion of what labor for a liviug 
 would be in a world not racked and ruined by sin. 
 Think of a store of jewelry, or a bank, without 
 lock or bolt ! Imagine a world in which protec- 
 tive laws and retributive penalties should be un- 
 known ! Conceive of a world in which no state 
 should contain a prison, and no county a jail ; and 
 in which a rifle and a revolver should be unintel- 
 ligible relics of a lost art ! What a life of labor 
 in such a world would be, labor in this world is 
 not. 
 
 To encounter happily the conditions of self- 
 support in this world, we need to make life a 
 continuous prayer. We must retire into God's 
 silence, in the stillness of a state of prayer. We 
 need that condition of things of which Emerson 
 gives us a glimpse, when he says, " When a man 
 lives with God, his voice shall be as sweet as the 
 
Prayer as a State of Christian Living. 303 
 
 murmur of a brook and the rustle of the corn." 
 Poets send us to the works of nature for it. Very 
 good, if in the works of nature we discover God's 
 thoughts. Men in the tug of life and the antago- 
 nisms of trade must know where to find the lull 
 which nothing else gives to a perturbed spirit but 
 the consciousness of being one with a personal 
 God. This is the Psalmist's thought, when he 
 speaks of the "light of God's countenance." With- 
 out this divine incandescence, nature is a cheat. 
 An oak is no more than a bramble-bush. Orion 
 is no more than a firefly. Nothing above, beneath, 
 around, has in it the divine idea. Nothing, there- 
 fore, gives help or compensation. 
 
 Sir Fowell Buxton was engaged for twenty 
 years in the British Parliament, in a conflict with 
 almost all the dominant forces of the empire, for 
 the emancipation of the slaves. To this he added 
 the distracting cares of an immense business inher- 
 ited from his father. Near the close of his life he 
 wrote to his son, " The experience of my life is, 
 that events always go right when they are under- 
 taken in the spirit of prayer. I have found assist- 
 ance given, and obstructions removed, in a way 
 which has convinced me that some secret power 
 has been at work." 
 
 This is what we all need, — ability to carry on 
 the complicated affairs of a laborious life with a 
 sense of rest in a secret force, not our own, which 
 is all the while co-operating with us. Meditation 
 and prayer are twin-helpers to this sx3iritual repose. 
 
304 My Study : and Other Essays. 
 
 Tlie habit of " undertaking things in the spirit of 
 prayer " is the secret of happiness in a life of toil. 
 The busiest and most heavily burdened life is full 
 of spiritual analogies, by the aid of which thought 
 may alternate in quick succession between earth 
 and heaven. Thus the most intense and diversified 
 life may be enclosed in God's life, and made tribu- 
 tary to His plans. In no other way can we live in 
 sympathy with God, or be assured of His sympathy 
 with us. 
 
 The fact deserves emphasis, that prayer, as a 
 continuous state of religious living, is independent 
 of conditions. No calamity of life can overpower 
 it, or make it untimely. It becomes an atmosphere, 
 pure, life-giving, tonic, invariable. It is difficult 
 for religious moods to exist under its equal press- 
 ure. In glad hours, it is a joy ; and in sad hours, 
 a comfort. It keeps life in equilibrium against 
 disturbing forces. Like a finely finished chro- 
 nometer, it is self-adjusting to variations of tem- 
 perature. St. Paul struck out a scintillation of 
 its virtue, when he said, " If God be for us, who 
 can be against us ? " We believers of the common 
 stock come to it often as a discovery which takes 
 us by surprise. We respond, "Surely enough. 
 Who ? Where is the fury of the oppressor ? " 
 
 Yet another fact deserves mention. It is, that 
 every human life contains peculiarities of proba- 
 tionary trial. Every man finds that Ms lot is, in 
 some respects, singular. As no two faces are 
 alike, no two lives are the same in point of disci- 
 
Prayer as a State of Christian Living. 305 
 
 pline. Each one seems to be singled out for a test 
 of character, which no other one is called to bear 
 with the same degree of severity. 
 
 The proverb says that every house has its skele- 
 ton. It is more forcibly true, that every man has 
 his thorn. St. Paul had his : we all follow in our 
 several ways. One, like the apostle, has his thorn 
 in bodily disease. A disease develops itself, of 
 which he says, " Any thing but this ! " Another 
 discovers his burden in an infelicity of tempera- 
 ment, which keeps him in a chronic state of self- 
 contempt. A third is prematurely, and, as it 
 seems to him, ruthlessly, retired from active use- 
 fulness, in which he does not think it vanity in 
 him to believe that he did the world some service. 
 He vexes liimself in secret with the problem why 
 God should have deprived Himself of so valuable 
 an auxiliary. A fourth thinks he is selected — and 
 perhaps he is — for one of those clusters of sorrows 
 which have created the proverb, that " misfortunes 
 never come singly." 
 
 Some men succumb to such peculiarities of dis- 
 cipline. Faith expires. Any thing else they could 
 have borne, but why this ? Another man's trials 
 they could have met serenely, but their own seem 
 a great mystery. It is not difficult to most of us 
 to bear the troubles of other men. But, when our 
 own are the test of faith, no spirit is left in us, if 
 we belong to the class of these elect sufferers. 
 The whole head is sick, and the whole heart 
 faint. 
 
306 My Study: and Other Essays. 
 
 For such specialities of probationary destiny, 
 we need a special welcome to the recesses of the 
 hidden friendship of God. Else we may come 
 suddenly to the border-line of despair. Every 
 man carries the possibility of suicide in his des- 
 tiny. We can never know what might have been, 
 but for the loving care of God in forestalling our 
 weakness in critical exigencies. To gain the refuge 
 of such hidden life, we need unwavering fellowship 
 with Christ. We need sometimes to rise up with 
 Him a great while before day, and to depart into 
 a solitary place, continuing all night in prayer; 
 " the morning-star finding Him where the evening- 
 star left Him." 
 
 Great emergencies are the final test of great 
 forces. If ever a suspense of faith in a life of 
 prayer might reasonably take place, we should 
 imagine that such a collapse would attend that 
 extreme of human woe in which reason itself gives 
 way. What can prayer do for a mind which has 
 ceased to be a mind? What result an induction 
 from the history of insane-asylums might give, I 
 do not know. But, in the unwritten history of 
 insanity, facts are not wanting, which, so far as they 
 go, tend to prove that the long use of prayer in 
 the habits of a healthy religious life generates a 
 remedial force which reaches over into the mind's 
 derangements and entanglements, and helps to 
 bring it again into self-possession. Having long 
 moved in the grooves of prayer, the lost mind, by 
 means of those grooves, has sometimes found its 
 
Prayer as a State of Christian Living. 307 
 
 way back to the living world. An instance from 
 real life will illustrate tliis. 
 
 Many years ago a clergyman in New England, 
 after a long period of godly service, became, as his 
 physicians and friends believed, hopelessly insane. 
 So far as the diagnosis of cerebral disease could 
 determine, remedy was impossible. They only 
 waited, praying for his release. His delusions, 
 among other vagaries, took at last the form of reli- 
 gious melancholy. The unpardonable sin weighed 
 grievously upon his conscience. He told his at- 
 tendants, that he had been, through all his life, a 
 hypocrite. He thought it had been revealed to 
 him that he was going to hell. He had been told 
 that no other place in the universe was fit for him, 
 or he for it. The calmness of despair brooded over 
 his days and nights. 
 
 It was useless to reason with a mind which had 
 no reason. But at last, one of his clerical brethren 
 resolved on an experiment. He said to Iris afflicted 
 
 brother substantially this: "Well, Dr. B , it 
 
 may be true. If God has revealed it to you, it 
 must be so. Doubtless, some appalling examples 
 of hypocrisy and retribution must be held up as a 
 warning to the universe, and you may be one of 
 them. Will it not be wise for you to lay your 
 plans for it, till you are otherwise instructed, and 
 think what you will do in hell ? You will not wish 
 to be surprised there by an unknown experience. 
 What will you do with yourself ? How will you 
 fill up the time there ? " At this weird suggestion, 
 
308 My Study : and Other Essays. 
 
 the good man's religious faith first righted itself, 
 and sprang into its wonted channel of operation. 
 He replied, "I will pray the very first thing. I 
 will set up a prayer-meeting the very first day!"* 
 At that juncture of tangled thought, in which he 
 " saw men as trees walking," his reason began to 
 right itself. That also sprang into its accustomed 
 logical grooves. He thought it at first to be a new 
 discovery, that wherever a sinner could pray, and 
 where God was within hearing, that could not be 
 hell. From this feeble hold upon his old trains of 
 ideas, he proceeded till his old faith came back to 
 him in full, and with it his old thinking-power. 
 He lived for a short time after, and died in full 
 possession of his faculties and his Christian faith. 
 
 Isolated facts like these must not be laden with 
 inferences which they do not bear. But taken in 
 connection with other facts illustrative of the sani- 
 tary effect of religious services, and specially of 
 Christian song, upon the condition of the insane, 
 they do give something more than the interest of 
 conjecture to the idea that a profound affinity 
 exists between worship and mental health. Prayer 
 is an element of moral being which life craves. 
 Why should it not be a remedial agent in mental 
 disease ? Nothing in psychological or physical 
 science hints the contrary. 
 
XXIII. 
 
 WHY DO I BELIEVE CHRISTIANITY TO BE A 
 REVELATION FROM GOD? 
 
 An esteemed correspondent requests me to give 
 publicly an answer to this inquiry. In reply, I 
 must premise that my faith in Christianity is large- 
 ly an inheritance. I trace it back through the 
 life-blood of nine generations of godly forefathers. 
 I am not vain enough to believe that I have any 
 such independence of ancestral influences that I 
 can approach the question in a state of mental 
 equipoise. I do not believe such a state to be 
 either necessary or desirable. The laws of hered- 
 ity are among the factors which create any wise 
 man's belief in a system of religion. The attempt 
 to be rid of them can only create a bias the other 
 way. They may be reasonably tested : they can 
 not be reasonably ignored. 
 
 In testing my ancestral faith, I find it confirmed 
 by the following facts ; namely, — 
 
 1. In examining the sacred books of Christian- 
 ity, I find there a Person whose being seems to me 
 to be a supernatural disclosure of God. Jesus 
 Christ is the great miracle of history. I can not 
 reconcile His character and life with the theory 
 
 309 
 
310 My Study: and Other Essays. 
 
 that He was man only. I do not know enough of 
 the psychology of infinite being to deny the pos- 
 sibility, or even to question the probability, that 
 deity and humanity are blended in one person. It 
 is as likely to be true as the opposite. It must be 
 determined, as other possible things are, by cred- 
 ible proofs. Those proofs point to such a mysteri- 
 ous blending in the person of Jesus Christ. Napo- 
 leon expressed the natural belief of a fair-minded 
 man of the world who came to the question with 
 a balanced mind open to the weight of evidence, 
 when he said, " I know man, and I declare to you 
 that Jesus Christ was not a mere man." If Jesus 
 was not God, His words disprove His honesty, and 
 His actions disprove His good sense. 
 
 In the four fragmentary narratives of His birth 
 and life and death, I find peculiarities which are 
 unparalleled in biographical literature. No evi- 
 dence appears of imbecility or insanity or knavery. 
 Yet one of these must be true of Him if He was a 
 man, and no more. He makes assertions respect- 
 ing the significance of His own Being to all man- 
 kind, which no honest man would make in his 
 right mind if he were man only. He assumes an 
 authority and a relationship to the Most High, 
 which a sane man could not honestly make if he 
 were not in some mysterious sense conscious of 
 identity with the Most High. He takes upon 
 Himself the responsibility of a mission to this 
 world which no man could believe to be laid upon 
 himself, and could seriously undertake to discharge. 
 
Christianity a Revelation from Qod, 311 
 
 without a loss of reason, unless it were accom- 
 panied by a consciousness of divine power to sus- 
 tain it. 
 
 By the laws of mental disease as recognized by 
 sanitary science, a mind conscious of only human 
 resources, and yet honestly believing itself to be 
 the Saviour of a fallen world through atoning 
 pains, should become a maniac. The mental equi- 
 poise of this mysterious Being under the disclos- 
 ures of His mission to His own consciousness, and 
 in the awful solitude of it, as it advanced to its 
 fulfillment, is itself a miracle. It is a token of a 
 Power within, not limited by human conditions, 
 nor subject to human infirmities. It is not in 
 human nature to bear the consciousness of such a 
 mediatorial relation between God and man with- 
 out a wreck of reason hopeless and irremediable. 
 The psychological phenomena developed by the 
 life of this anomalous Person are inexplicable upon 
 any theory of His nature, but that affirmed by St. 
 John, " The Word was with God, and the Word 
 was God." 
 
 2. I find, further, in the teachings of this anom- 
 alous Being, the germs of a system of ethics which 
 can not be of human origin. That is to say, it is 
 unlike man as he has expressed himself in other 
 ways. Fragments of it are found elsewhere. But 
 as a whole, and specially in its freedom from 
 absurdities and excrescences, it stands alone in the 
 history of human thought. It is as remarkable for 
 what it does not say, as for what it does. In the 
 
312 My Study : and Other Essays. 
 
 truthfulness and power of its appeal to the best 
 intuitions of the human mind, it is unequaled. I 
 can not account for it on any other theory so prob- 
 ably as on that which derives it from the mind of 
 God. 
 
 Other religions profess to be founded on sacred 
 books. They contain the elements of ethical sys- 
 tems. In the form of aphorism and of ritual, they 
 attempt a moral government of human life. One 
 feature marks them all as the work of imperfect 
 mind, and of mind debilitated in its intellectual 
 processes by moral infirmities. It is the inter- 
 mingling with fragmentary truth of much that is 
 false, much that is petty, and much that is impure. 
 They are in this respect such as might reasonably 
 be expected from an uninspired human intellect. 
 If Christianity were of human origin, we should 
 look for similar excrescences in its ethical teach- 
 ings. We do not find them. We find nothing 
 that lowers the dignity of moral truth, and noth- 
 ing that offends the purity of a good conscience. 
 It is the only religion known to history which 
 appreciates woman. This is a remarkable hint of 
 its probable origin. Taken by itself, isolated from 
 other evidences of its source, the Christian ethics 
 would not be proof conclusive that Christianity is 
 from God ; but its character fits in with other 
 proofs so strikingly that no other theory of its 
 origin is so probable. 
 
 3. I find in other teachings of the Christian 
 books, and especially in the Epistles of the New 
 
Christianity a Revelation from Crod. 313 
 
 Testament, the germs of a system of tlieologic 
 belief which does not impress me as being from 
 unaided human sources. No other religion has 
 taught its equal. The sacred books of no other 
 faith have contained its like. The true way to 
 test its character is to imagine it blotted out of 
 human history. Blot out all that it has contrib- 
 uted to human thought. What then? Would 
 any thing remain worthy to be compared with it ? 
 What answer would Plato have given to this ques- 
 tion? My conviction is, that when Plato longed 
 for a teacher sent from heaven, the Pauline theol- 
 ogy would have satisfied the longing. He would 
 have said, " This is the system which my mind has 
 craved." Therefore I must believe that the most 
 probable, the only probable, theory of its origin is 
 that, through inspiration of its human authors, it 
 came from the Infinite Mind. 
 
 4. I find, moreover, in these sacred books, evi- 
 dences of a growth which makes them one in 
 structure and in aim. Ideas are started at the be- 
 ginning which are expanded and deepened at the 
 end. The Book of Leviticus is fulfilled in the 
 Epistles to the Hebrews and Galatians. The sac- 
 rifice of Abel finds its interpretation in the cruci- 
 fixion of Christ. One continuous chain of history, 
 of prophecy, and of moral teaching, runs through 
 the whole. No other succession of thought in the 
 history of literature discloses such a unity in the 
 result, or any approach to it. It is incredible that 
 men of different ages and nations, and formed by 
 
314 My Study: and Other Essays. 
 
 different languages and types of civilization, should 
 have planned this unity of construction, and exe- 
 cuted it with conscious purpose. Human produc- 
 tions of successive ages do not so lap over upon 
 each other, in one consistent and consecutive 
 design. Back of this anomaly in literature, there 
 must have been one overruling and ins^^iring Mind. 
 That mind can be none else than the mind of God. 
 On the same principle on which I infer from the 
 revelations of geology, an intelligent and continu- 
 ous design in the construction of the earth's strata, 
 I must infer the working of the same mind in the 
 construction of the Bible. If the one can be the 
 work of chance, or of impersonal law, the other 
 may be. 
 
 5. I find this unity of the biblical structure 
 becoming the more marvelous when I discover the 
 central idea at which the whole is aimed. Start- 
 ing with the primeval fact of expiatory sacrifice, I 
 find this volume developing through a complicated 
 ritual, and through the revelations of centuries, a 
 way of salvation, which is adjusted to the pro- 
 foundest cravings of our nature in the emergency 
 of sin. It answers, as no other book has ever 
 done, the great question of the ages, " How shall 
 man be just with God ? " It appeases, as no other 
 religion has ever done, the wrath of a remorseful 
 conscience. My nature springs in response to it, 
 as does that of other men. 
 
 In this respect, it stands in marvelous accord 
 with the cravings of tlie human mind, yet in 
 
Christianity a Revelation from God. 315 
 
 astounding contrast with all human devices to 
 meet and satisfy those cravings. Other religions, 
 as remedial systems designed to effect man's deliv- 
 erance from guilt, are stupendous failures — melan- 
 choly proofs of man's need of a redemption which 
 he is powerless to achieve. Christianity is the 
 only religion which the human conscience ap- 
 proves as adequate to satisfy its own retributive 
 sentiment, while it satisfies the same sentiment in 
 the mind of God. I can not believe this way of 
 deliverance from the catastrophe of sin, so perfect 
 in its adjustments to the moral nature of both God 
 and man, to have been a human invention. It is 
 just like God to have devised it. It is unlike man. 
 I must believe it to be the thought of God. 
 
 6. I find, still further, the process by which the 
 biblical religion has grown to its maturity accom- 
 panied by events and revelations which are mir- 
 aculous in their character. This book is largely 
 historical in its materials. It is history seen and 
 foreseen. A segment seems to be selected from 
 the experience of mankind, and a divine plan 
 wrought into its development. The evidence of 
 this is scattered along the line, from its beginning 
 to the end, in these supernatural occurrences. 
 They appear whenever and wherever such occur- 
 rences seem to have been needed to attest the 
 presence and agency of God. They are of all 
 varieties in detail, from the fulfillment of a dream 
 to the raising of the dead. The object of them 
 was of such transcendent dignity as to justify 
 
316 My Study: and Other Ussays. 
 
 belief in miracle. They convinced contemporaries 
 that they were sujDernatural in their character. I 
 must believe, that, if I had been a witness to them, 
 they would have convinced me of the same. By 
 the laws of human testimony, I am bound to believe 
 it now. They add to other evidences all the weight 
 of present miracle in proof that the Book which 
 records them is the Word of God. 
 
 7. The confirmation of my faith is reduplicated 
 by the singular resemblance which I discover be- 
 tween the Christian religion and that taught by 
 the phenomena of the natural world. The two 
 are so remarkably alike, that they must be expres- 
 sions of the same creative Mind. Each supports, 
 by its alliance, the credit of the other. The mate- 
 rial world is so replete with analogies, linking it 
 with the revelations of the Scriptures, that, in one 
 aspect of it, it seems as if it were created to illus- 
 trate and prove those revelations. Both teach 
 the existence of the same God. Both proclaim the 
 same attributes of His nature. Both affirm the 
 same sacredness of Law. Both teach the same 
 conceptions of the evil of sin. So far as the reli- 
 gion of nature goes, it covers the same ground 
 with that of the Christian books. The Being who 
 created the heavens and the earth must be the 
 Being who constructed the Bible. 
 
 So far as the Bible differs in its teachings from 
 the book of Nature, it is but an advance, not a 
 contradiction, not an independent and dissimilar 
 record. The peculiarities of the biblical religion 
 
Christianity a Revelation from God. 317 
 
 are those which the religion of nature leads us to 
 expect. Nature teaches man's need of a revela- 
 tion, and of such a revelation. Nature suggests 
 what Christianity affirms. Nature inquires, and 
 Christianity answers. Nature promises, and Chris- 
 tianity fulfills. Nature brings man to the Christian 
 books, needy, craving, expectant : the books sup- 
 ply the need, satisfy the craving, and realize the 
 expectation. This unity of a dual revelation of 
 God is too manifest and significant to be ignored. 
 
 8. I find, in following the history of Christianity 
 from the completion of the canon of its sacred 
 books, one thing more. My faith in it as a revela- 
 tion from God is confirmed by the faith of other 
 minds. Mohammed recognized an important factor 
 in all human beliefs, when he said that the. faith 
 of Fatima, then the only believer in his pretensions, 
 strengthened his own. Such are the relations of 
 the human mind to truth, that, what one mind 
 believes, another mind has, so far forth, reason to 
 believe. Applying this to the history of Christian- 
 ity, the confirmation of individual faith becomes 
 overwhelming. Success is not alone evidence of 
 truth, but it is an immense tribute to the evidence 
 drawn from other sources. 
 
 It is much to the purpose, therefore, that I find 
 among the believers of Christianity those who, by 
 proximity in time, were, of all men, best qualified 
 to judge of the historic facts which it affirms. 
 Following them, I see a long succession of believ- 
 ers, not the great and the wise alone, not the 
 
318 My Study: and Other Essays, 
 
 ignorant and the weak alone, not the more impul- 
 sive sex alone, but minds of both sexes, of all 
 ages, of every variety of condition and culture. 
 Children and philosophers alike have found re- 
 sources of moral strength in its teachings. It has 
 swayed a larger proportion of the thinking-power 
 of mankind than was ever given to any other 
 system of religion or philosophy. It has created 
 the most magnificent literatures and the most 
 advanced civilization in history. Its great ideas 
 have been central to the most vital reforms which 
 men have achieved in government, and in the 
 unwritten laws of social life. It has accomplished 
 what no other religion has attempted in the eleva- 
 tion of woman. It is, above all others, the reli- 
 gion of culture, of freedom, and of progress. The 
 faith men have given to it has thus proved itself 
 to be a working faith, such faith as men give only 
 to things of supreme worth. Its believers have 
 borne witness to it in the face of torture, and at 
 the cost of life. Women have been buried alive 
 in testimony to its truth. Children have been 
 crucified rather than to betray it. Every form of 
 human testimony which a religion can have, this 
 religion has commanded for ages. And this im- 
 mense accumulation of human faith, which has 
 created such magnificent history, has been given 
 to it on the ground that it is the religion of a 
 Book inspired by God. 
 
 This confirmatory evidence proves to me that it 
 is what it claims to be, — a religion for the world 
 
Christianity a Revelation from God. 319 
 
 and for all time. Other religions are local, national, 
 tribal : this is world-wide. Other religions grow 
 old, and become effete : this grows youthful in the 
 increase of its age. Others are religions of the past : 
 this is the religion of the future. It has become 
 an axiom among wise men, that, if we wish to 
 make any thing live to the end of time, we must 
 identify it with the religion of Christ. This is 
 just such a revelation as I should expect from a 
 benevolent God to a world suffering for the want 
 of a revelation. It is such as I could not reasona- 
 bly hope for from any other source. * 
 
 In this faith I have rested for many years, with 
 a mental repose unbroken by an hour of misgiving 
 or wavering. If it is not true, nothing is true. If 
 it is not from God, nothing is from God. If God 
 has not disclosed Himself in it. He has not done 
 so in the discoveries of geology and astronomy. 
 Nature gives no hint of an intelligent Creator and 
 a benevolent Ruler of the universe, if the Chris- 
 tian Scriptures are not the work of an almighty 
 and omniscient Author. The religion of Christ 
 and the religion of Nature stand or fall together 
 in their claims to the faith of the human mind. 
 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS' 
 
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 CHRISTIAN CHARITY IN THE ANCIENT CHURCH. Crown 8vo. $2.50. 
 
 "Dr. Uhlhorn possesses three necessary qualifications for the work he 
 has undertaken, viz.: great learning, philosophical grasp of the principles 
 which underlie the early history of Christianity, and great beauty and 
 strength of style. ^'' 
 
 Henry J. Van Dyke, Jr., D.D. 
 
 THE REALITY OF RELIGION. i2mo. $1.00. 
 
 " The style is so graceful and the thought so clearly put, that the volume 
 is admirably adapted to be put into the hands of any educated person who 
 has become confused or troubled by the wild speculations that are current." 
 — Presbyterian Review. 
 
 Marvin R. Vincent, D.D. 
 
 GATES INTO THE PSALM COUNTRY. r2mo. $1.00. 
 FAITH AND CHARACTER. i2mo. fi.50. 
 
 " It is a book written from the heart, and there are few who can care- 
 fully read it without feeling their faith strenghtened and their hopes 
 made surer."