'“'-J B 905 .C7 1877 Cook, Joseph, 1838-1901 Transcendentalism BOSTON MONDAY LECTURES. BY JOSEPH COOK. BIOLOGY. With Preludes on Current Events. Three Colored Elustrations. i2mo. Sixteenth thousand.$1-50 TRANSCENDENTALISM. With Preludes on Current Events. 12mo. Tenth thousand.1*50 ORTHODOXY. With Preludes on Current Events. Seventh Thousand . . 1.50 CONSCIENCE. With Preludes on Current Events. Fifth Thousand . . 1-50 HEREDITY. With Preludes on Current Events.1.50 MARRIAGE. With Preludes on Current Events.1.50 LABOR. With Preludes on Current Events.1.50 SOCIALISM. With Preludes on Current Events. . 1.50 OCCIDENT. With Preludes on Current Events. (A new volume) . . .1.50 ORIENT. With Preludes on Current Events. (In Press) ...... 1.50 “I do not know of any work on Conscience in which the true theory of ethics is so clearly and forcibly presented, together with the logical inferences from it in support of the great truths of religion. The review of the whimsical and shallow speculations of Matthew Arnold is especially able and satislaetory.” — Professor Francis Bowen, harvard Univer¬ sity. ‘•These Lectures are crowded so full of knowledge, of thought, of argument, illumined with such passages of eloquence and power, spiced so frequently with deep-cutting though good-natured irony, that 1 could make no abstract from them without utterly mutilating them.”— Rev. Dr. Thomas Hill, ex-President of Harvaid University, in Christian Register. “Joseph Cook is a phenomenon to be accounted for. No other American orator lias done what he has dine, or anv thing like it; and. prior to the experiment, no voice wouid have been bold enough to predict its success.” — Rev. Professor A. P. Peabody of Harvard University. “Mr. Cook is a specialist. His work, as it now stands, represents fairly the very latest and best researches.”— George M. Heard,- M.D., of Sew York. “By far the most satisfactory of recent discussions in this field, both in method and execution.”— Professor Borden P. Bourne of Boston University. “ Mr. Cook is a great master of analysis. He shows singular justness of view in his manner of treating the most difficult and perplexing themes.’’ Princeton Review. “The Lectures are remarkably eloquent, vigorous, and powerful.” — .ft. Payne Smith, Dean of Canterbury. . “They are wonderful specimens of shrewd, clear, and vigorous thinking. ' — Rev. Dr. Angus, the College, Regent's Park. "These are very wonderful Lectures.” — Rev. C. H. Spurgeon. “Traversing a very wide field, cutting right across the territories of rival specialists, the work on Biology contains not one important scientific misstatement, either of tact or theorv.” — Bibliotheca Sacra. “ Vigorous and suggestive. Interesting from the glimpses they give of the present phases of speculation in what is emphatically the most thoughtful community in the United States.” — London Spectator. .... “ I admired the rhetorical power with which, before a large mixed audience, the speaker knew howto handle the difficult topic of biology, and to cause the teaching of German philosophers and theologians to be respected.” — Professor Sch'dberlein, oj Gottingen Uni- versity. . . . . ' “ H is object is the foundation of a new and true metaphysics resting on a biological basis, lhat is the proof of the truth of philosophical theism, and of the fundamental ideas of Cnristianity. These intentions he carries out with a full, and occasionally with a too full, application of his eminent oratorical talent, and with great sagacity and thorough knowledge'of the leading works in physiology for the last thirty years.” — Processor Ulrxci, University of Halle, Germany. HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO., Publishers. Boston Monday Lectures. TRANSCENDENTALISM WITH PRELUDES ON CURRENT EVENTS. / By JOSEPH COOK. SEVENTH EDITION. “ They who reject the testimony of the self-evident truths will find nothing surer on which to build.” — Aristotle. BOSTON: HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY. New York: 11 East Seventeenth Street. dtoerjaiDe Cambri&fic. Copyright, 1877, JOSEPH COOK. All Rights Reserved. INTEODUCTION. The object of the Boston Monday Lectures is to present the results of the freshest German, English, and American scholar¬ ship on the more important and difficult topics concerning the relation of Religion and Science. They were begun in4.he Meionaon in 1S75; and the audiences, gathered at noon on Mondays, were of such size as to need to be transferred to Park-street Church in October, 1870, and thence to Tremont Temple, which was often more than full during the winter of 1870-77. The audiences contained large numbers of ministers, teachers, and other educated men. The thirty-five lectures of the last season were stenographically reported in the Boston Daily Advertiser, and most of them were republished in full in New York and London. The lectures on Biology oppose the materialistic, and not the theistic, theory of Evolution. The lectures on Transcendentalism contain a discussion of the views of Theodore Parker. The Committee having charge of the Boston Monday Lectures for the coming year consists of the following gentlemen: — His Excellency A. H. Rice, Governor of Massachusetts. Hon. Alimieus Hardy. lion. William Claflin, Ex- Govemor of Massachusetts. Prof. E. P. Gould, Newton The¬ ological Institute. Rev. J. L. With now, D.D. Rkuhf.x CltOOKE. Rev. William M. Baker, D.D. Russell Sturgis, Jr. E. M. McPherson. Boston, September, 1S77. Prof. Edwards A. Park, LL.D. Andover Thelogical Seminary. Right Rev. Bishop Foster. Prof. L. T. Townsend, Boston University. Rorert Gilchrist. Samuel Johnson. Rev. Z. Gray, D.D., Episcopal Theological School, Cambridge. William B. Merrill. M. H. Sargent. M. R. Deiung, Secretary. Henry F. Durant, Chairman . PUBLISHERS’ NOTE. . In the careful reports of Mr. Cook’s Lectures printed in the Boston Daily Advertiser, were included by the stenographer sundry expressions (applause, &c.) indicat¬ ing the immediate and varying impressions with which the Lectures were received. Though these reports have been thoroughly revised by the author, the publishers have thought it advisable to retain these expressions. Mr. Cook’s audiences included, in large numbers, representa¬ tives of the broadest scholarship, the profoundest philoso¬ phy, the acutest scientific research, and generally of the finest intellectual culture, of Boston and New England; and it has seemed admissible to allow the larger assembly to which these Lectures are now addressed to know how they were received by such audiences as those to which they were originally delivered. CONTENTS i. ii. hi. IV. Y. YI. VII. VIII. IX. X. XI. I. II. III. IV. V. VI. VII. VIII. IX. X. XL LECTURES. PAG* I n tuit ion, Instinct, Experiment, Syllogism, as Tests of Truth. 1 Transcendentalism in New England .... 27 Theodore Parker’s Absolute Religion ... 53 Caricatured Definitions in Religious Science 83 Theodore Parker on the Guilt of Sin . . . 109 Final Permanence of Moral Character . . 135 Can a Perfect Being permit Evil ? . . . . 165 The Religion required by the Nature of Things.*91 Theodore Parker on Communion with God as Personal. 219 The Trinity and Tritheism.. . 247 Fragmentariness of Outlook upon the Divine Nature.277 PRELUDES. PAQB The Children of the Perishing Poor. ... 3 The Failure of Strauss’s Mythical Theory . 29 Chalmers’s Remedy for the Evils of Cities . 55 Mexicanized Politics.85 Yale, Harvard, and Boston.HI The Right Direction of the Religiously Ir¬ resolute . 1^7 Religious Conversation.167 George Whitefield in Boston.193 Circe’s Cup in Cities.221 Civil Service Reform.249 Plymouth Rock as the Corner-Stone of a Factory.279 INTUITION, INSTINCT, EXPERIMENT, SYLLOGISM, AS TESTS OP TRUTE. THE FIFTY-NINTII LECTURE IN THE BOSTON MONDAY LEO* TURESBIP, DELIVERED IN TEEMONT TEMPLE, JAN. L «« He would be thought void of common sense who asked on the one side, or, on the other, went to give, a reason why it is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be.” — Locke: Essay, Book i. chap. iii. “ There is here a confession, the importance of which has been observed neither by Locke nor his antagonists. In thus appealing to common sense or intellect, he was in fact surrendering his thesis, that all our knowledge is an educt from experience. For in ad¬ mitting, as he here virtually does, that experience must ultimately ground its procedure on the laws of intellect, he admits that intellect contains principles of judgment, on which experience being depend¬ ent, cannot possibly be their precursor or their cause. 'W hat Locke here calls common sense he elsewhere denominates intuition. — Sir "William Hamilton: Reid's Collected Writings, vol. ii. p. 784. TRANSCENDENTALISM. -» I. INTUITION, INSTINCT, EXPERIMENT, SYL¬ LOGISM, AS TESTS OF TRUTH. PRELUDE ON CURRENT EVENTS. Unless the children of the dangerous and perish¬ ing classes are to blame for being born, they, at least, whatever we say of their parents, cannot be shut out from a victorious place in our pity. This is a festal day; and, if the Author of Christianity were on the groaning earth to make calls, probably the most of them, in the cities of the world, would be in unfash¬ ionable places. Why should we be so shy of the visitation in person of death-traps and rookeries? There is ineffable authority and example for going from house to house doing good. Visits thus en¬ joined cannot be made by proxy. No doubt organ¬ ized and unorganized charity is usually, in its modern form, a result of the Christian spirit. Celsus said Christianity could not be divine, because it cared insanely for the poor. Old Rome’s mood toward the miserable the world of culture now loathes. Philan¬ thropy swells the tide of commiseration for the un* 4 TRANSCENDENTALISM. fortunate; and sometimes the most erratic opinions have been conjoined with the soundest behavior toward those who have hardly where to lay their heads. Orthodoxy itself is often shy of personal con¬ tact with the very wretched, and goes from house to house by proxy. Organized charity, we think, is the whole of our duty. But Thomas Guthrie, and Dr. Chalmers, and all who have had much to do with the perishing classes in great cities, have taught the Church, that, when men are sick and in prison, they are to be visited. I know a great orator in this city, whose name is a power from sea to sea, and whose sil¬ vering honored head often bends over couch and cradle in the most miserable houses. It is safe to go to the North End now: it is not safe in the fiercest heats of summer. Our North winds in winter strike us all the way from Boothia Felix, and their iciness seals some fever-dens, whose doors swing wide open every sum¬ mer under the guardianship, as one must suppose, of the negligence of the Board of Health. [Applause.] I am not speaking at random; for, according to the city reports, there were in 1876 sixty-eight houses condemned as not conforming to the sanitary regula¬ tions of this city; and of these only seventeen were really vacated; the rest were white-washed. [Ap¬ plause.] The truth is, that if there were ten Boards of Health, and if they all did their duty, we could not avoid having a large population born into the world miserable. This nation now has one-fifth of its population in TESTS OF TRUTH. 5 cities. What are we to clo with the social barriers which allow a great city to be not only a great world, but ten great worlds, in which one world does not care at all for what the other worlds are doiiis* ? In every great town there are six or ten strata in society; and it is, one would think, a hundred miles from the fashionable to the unfashionable side of a single brick in a wall. Superfluity and squalor know absolutely nothing of each other — such is the utter negligence of the duty of visiting the poor, in any other way than by agents. I do not undervalue these, nor any part of the great charities of our times; but there is no complete theory for the per¬ manent relief of the poor without personal visitation. Go from street to street with the city missionary or the best of the police; but sometimes go all alone, and with your own eyes see the poor in the attics, and study the absolutely unspeakable conditions of their daily lives. Not long ago, I was in a suffocated tenement-house where five or six points on which I could put my hand were in boldest violation of the laws which it is the business of the Board of Health in this city to see executed. [Applause.] The death-rate of Boston in summer, in the North End, is often above thirty-five in the thousand. The regis¬ trar-general of England says that any deaths above seventeen in a thousand are unnecessary. Live one day where the children of the perishing poor live, and ask what it is to live there always. I know a scholar of heroic temper and of exquisite culture, who recently resolved to live with the poor in a 6 TRANSCENDENTALISM. stifling part of this city, and who, after repeated and desperate illness, was obliged to move bis home off the ground in order to avoid the necessity of putting his body underground. You cannot understand the peer by newspapers, nor even by novels. Our distant lavender touches of the miserable show the barbaric blood yet in our veins. Going about from house to house doing good is a great Christian measure permanently instituted by a typi¬ cal example, which in a better age may be remem¬ bered, and be the foundation of a nebility not yet visible on the planet. There was One who washed liis disciples’ feet, and in that act founded an order of nobility; but this second symbolic act seems not to be apprehended even yet by some good Samari¬ tans— in gloves. The way from Jerusalem to Jeri¬ cho lies now through the city slums; and, for many an age to come, there will be the spot where men oftenest will be left stripped and sore and half dead. We want all good influences of the parlor and press, from literature and the interior church of the church, to work upon the problem of saving the perishing and dangerous classes in great cities. [Applause.] Poor naked wretches, whereso’er you are, That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, IIow shall youi’ houseless heads and unfed sides, Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you From seasons such as this? Take physic, pomp; Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, That thou mayst shake the superflux to them, And show the heavens more just. Lear, act iii. sc. ir. [Applause]. TESTS OF TRUTH. 7 THE LECTURE. Napoleon I., one day riding in advance of his army, came to a bridgeless river, which it was necessary that his hosts should immediately cross on a forced march. 44 Tell me,” said the great emperor to his engineer, 44 the breadth of this stream.” — 44 Sire, I can¬ not,” was the reply. 44 My scientific instruments are with the army; and we are ten miles ahead of it.” — 44 Measure the breadth of this stream instantly.” — 44 Sire, be reasonable.” — 44 Ascertain at once the width of this river, or you shall be deposed from your office.” The engineer drew down the cap-piece on his helmet till the edge of it just touched the opposite bank and then, holding himself erect, turned upon his heel, and noticed where the cap-piece touched the bank on which he stood. lie then paced the dis¬ tance from his position to the latter point, and turned to the emperor saying, 44 This is the breadth of the stream approximately; ” and he was promoted. Now, in all the marches of thought, metaphysical science measures the breadth of streams with scien¬ tific instruments, indeed; but it uses no principles which men of common sense, at their firesides, or in politics, or before juries, or in business, do not recog¬ nize as authoritative. Your Napoleon’s engineeer, after his instruments came up, no doubt made a more accurate measurement than he had done by his skil¬ ful expedient of common sense; but the new and exact determination of the distance must have pro¬ ceeded upon precisely the same principle by which 8 TRANSCENDENTALISM. he had made his approximate calculation. Both the estimates would turn on the scientific certainty that the radii of a circle are equal. The distance to the opposite bank is one radius in a circle, of which the position of the observer is the centre ; and, if now he wheels round the radius, of course the radius here is just as long as the radius yonder; for things which are equal to the same thing are equal to each other. The most exact instruments ever invented would have behind them only that incontrovertible, axio¬ matic, self-evident truth. You can measure a river in the way Napoleon’s engineer did; but you think that research of the metaphysical sort has something in it incomprehensible, mystical, and suspicious. Let us not stand in too much awe of the theodolite. As the engineer’s final measurement of the river with scientific instruments was simply his pacing made exact, so metaphysics is simply common sense made exact. After three months on Evolution, Materialism, and Immortality, the current of discussion in this Lec¬ tureship enters on a, new vista; but the river is the same, for it flows out of that tropical land of Biology we have been traversing together, and the chief theme is always the relations of religion and science. It will yet be our duty to meditate on the applica¬ tion of the principle of evolution to philosophy, and especially to ethics; fori am now bidding adieu to Materialism as a topic, and am approaching Tran¬ scendentalism, and so Conscience, and so the natural conditions of the peace of the soul with itself and TESTS OF TRUTH. 9 with the plan which inheres in the nature of things that is, with God. Here, as everywhere, religious science, like every other science, asks you to grant nothing but axio¬ matic truth. In considering Transcendentalism, or axiomatic tests of certainty, I must seem, therefore, to be almost transcendentalistic at first; for such is and must be all sound thought, up to a certain point. I am no pantheist ,• I am no individualist; I am no mere tlieist, I hope: but so far forth a>s Transcen¬ dentalism founds itself upon what Aristotle and Kant and Hamilton have called intuition, self-evident truths, axioms, first principles, I am willing to call myself a transcendentalist, not of the rationalistic, but of the Kantian, Hamiltonian, and Coleridgian school. Both wings of the army front of Transcendental¬ ism must be studied, and it will be found that it is only the left or rationalistic wing that has been of late thrown into panic. . That serried and scattered and very brave host made bold marches in Boston thirty years ago. Its leaders now confess that it has been substantially defeated. It is time for the right wing and centre to move. This portion of Transcen¬ dentalism never broke with Christianity: the other poition did; and to-day, according to its own admis¬ sion, is not only not victorious, but dispirited (Froth- ingham, Transcendentalism in New England, passim). •Its historians speak of it as a thing of the past. Self- evident truths, axioms, necessary beliefs, however, can never go out of fashion; they can be opposed 10 TKANSCENDENTALISM. only by being assumed; they are a dateless and eter« nai noon. Mr. Emerson’s theoretical tests of truth aie the intuitions or axioms of the soul, and undoubtedly these are the tests which the acutest philosophical science of the world now justifies, and has always justified. Whether the tests themselves justify pan¬ theism, whether they give countenance to individ¬ ualism like Mr. Emerson’s, whether they establish mere theism, are grave and great questions that can¬ not be discussed here and now, but which we shall reach at the proper time. The whole of metaphys¬ ics, the whole philosophy of evolution, the whole of materialism, the whole of every thing that calls itself scientific, must submit itself to certain first truths; and therefore, on these first truths we must fasten the microscope with all the eagerness of those who wish to feel beneath them, somewhere in the yeasting foam of modern speculation, a deck that is tremorless. What is an intuition? Theodore Parker held that we have an “ instinc¬ tive intuition ” of the Divine Existence, and of immortality, and of the authority of the moral law. He constantly assumed that these facts are intuitive or self-evident, and as incontrovertible as the propo¬ sition that every change must have an adequate cause. He used the word u intuition ” carelessly, and did not carefully distinguish intuition and instinct from each other. Very often, in otherwise brilliant literature, this vacillating and obscure use of the word “intuition” leads to most mischievous confu- TESTS OF TRUTH. 11 sion of thought. We are told that woman’s intui¬ tions are better in many respects than man’s; we are assured that the intuitions of childhood are purer, clearer, or more nearly unadulterated, than those of middle life: in short, our popular, and many of our scientific discussions, so far as these proceed from persons who have had no distinctively metaphysical training, use the word “intuition” with the most bewildering looseness. Individualism is justified by intuition; pantheism, mere theism, orthodoxy, or whatever a man feels, or seems to feel, to be true, he says his intuitions affirm. There are those who con¬ fuse intuition, not only with instinct, but with mere insight; that is, with an imaginative or reflective swiftness or emotional force, which, by glancing at truth, catches its outlines better than by laborious plodding. The loftiest arrogance of individualism justifies itself often simply by calling its idiosyncra¬ sies intuitions. In all ages mysticism of the devout- est school has frequently made the same wild mis¬ take. Gleams of radiance across the inner heavens of the great poetic souls of the race we must rever¬ ence ; but shooting-stars are not to be confounded with the eternally fixed constellations. Undoubted¬ ly a single flash of lightning from the swart, thunder¬ ous summer midnight, often ingrains the memory of a landscape more durably on the memory than the beating of many summer noons; but even lightning glances are not intuitions. Our first business then, my friends, will be to ob¬ tain a distinct definition of the strategic word “ intui- 12 TRANSCENDENTALISM. tion.” This is a scientific technical term; and, when correctly used as such, has outlines as clearly cut as those of a crystal. We must approach the definition in a way that will carry all minds with us, step by step. 1. It is possible to imagine all the articles in this room to be annihilated, or not in existence. You feel very sure, do you not, as you cast a glance on the capacities of your mind, that you can balieve that these articles might never have existed; and so of all other objects that fill space ? - Orion flames in our skies now; but you can at least imagine that this constellation might never have been. The Seven Stars we can suppose to be annihilated. I do not mean that we can prove matter to be destructi¬ ble, but that we can imagine its non-existence. You are entirely certain of your mental capacity to im¬ agine the non-existence of any material object in any part of space. 2. It is impossible to imagine the space in this room to be annihilated, or not in existence. Notice the strange fact that you cannot so much as imagine the annihilation of a corner of the space in this room. You bring down in thought the space from one corner, as you would roll up a thick cur¬ tain ; but you have left space behind, up yonder in the corner. You lift up this floor and bring down the ceiling: but you have left space beneath and above. You draw in all four sides of this temple at once, and cause its dimensions to diminish equally in every direction; but in every direction you have left TESTS OF TRUTH. ltf space. If you go out into infinite space with the best exorcism of your magic, if you whip it as Xerxes whipped the ocean, you will find your heaviest lashes as unavailing as his. No part of space can even be imagined not to be in existence. We cannot so much as imagine that the space through which Orion and the Seven Stars wander should not be; by no possi¬ bility can you in thought get rid of it, although you easily get rid of them. That is a very curious fact in the mind. # is possible to suppose all the events since sun¬ rise not to have taken place. I know not but that at this moment the English fleet lately in the Bosphorus is floating across* the purple ripples of the Piraeus harbor at Athens, in sight of the Acropolis. It may be that the Russians are commencing a march upon Turkey. But what¬ ever has happened since sunrise I can imagine not to have happened at all. It is perfectly easy for me, in thought, to vacate all time of all events. Any thing that has taken place in time may be imagined not to have taken place. We can imagine the non¬ existence of whatever we call an event. 4. It is impossible to suppose any portion of the duration from sunrise to the present moment not to have existed. If you will try the experiment with yourselves, and analyze your minds, you will find that it is really impossible to think of any portion of duration as annihilated. You annihilate an hour, as you say ; but there is a gap left, and it is an hour long. You anni- 14 TRANSCENDENTALISM. hilate an age in the flow of the eternities, and there is a gap of an age there. If you will simply notice your own thoughts, you will find that in this case, as in the case of space, we strike upon a most marvellous circumstance. The mind is so made, that it is not capable even of imagining the non-existence of time or of space. There are hundreds of proofs of this; and those who hold the materialistic philosophy do not deny the existence of this necessity in the human mind. They explain its origin and meaning in a way that I do not think clear at all; but they, with all men who understand their own mental operations, admit that all events and all objects we may annihi- , late in thought, but not space, not time. Moreover, we are convinced that always there was space, and always there will be; that always there was time, and always there will be. 5. It is possible to believe that any effect or change that has taken place might not have taken place. 6. It is impossible to believe that any change can have taken place without a cause. This latter is an amazing but wholly incontroverti¬ ble fact in the mind. Our idea of the connection of cause and effect is equally clear with our ideas concerning space and time; and the axiom which asserts that every change must have a sufficient cause is not a merely identical proposition either. I know that materialistic schools in philosophy are often saying that most axioms are simply equations between different expressions foi i TESTS OF TRUTH. 15 the same thought. Whatever is, is. That, undoubt¬ edly, is an identical proposition. It means simply, as John Stuart Mill said, that, when any proposition is true in one form of words, we have a right to affirm the same thing in any other form of wcrds. But take an axiom which is not an identical proposition, and that is admitted even by materialists not to be one : the proposition that the equals of equals are equal to each other. (See Baix, Pbofessob A., Mental and Moral Science, English edition, p. 187.) You feel perfectly sure about that; you cannot be made to believe that that is not true. Take the prop¬ osition, that every change not only lias, but must have, an adequate cause, and that is by no means an iden¬ tical proposition. What is beyond the verb there does not mean only wliat that does which is on the first side of the verb. An identical proposition is simply an equation: what is on the left side of the verb means just what that does which is on the right of the verb. But in the proposition, that every change has and must have an adequate cause, these words on the right of the verb do not express just the meaning of the words on the left; and yet you are perfectly sure of the connection between these two phrases. Not only has , but must , you and all men put in there ; and you are sure about that vast double assertion. For all time past, and all time to come, that is an axiom, you say, not only for this globe, but for the sun, and the Seven Stars, and Orion. You are sure about that truth; and, if you try ever so skilfully, you cannot make yourself 16 TRANSCENDENTALISM. believe but that every change must have an adequate cause ; and yet, if you try to prove that proposition, you cannot do it by any thing that does not assume it. It is not only evident: it is self-evident. It is not evident through any other truth. It is a primi- * tive and not a derivative truth. It is a first truth. Nevertheless, although there is no demonstration of that proposition, except by looking directly on it, or the supremest kind of demonstration,—absolute men¬ tal touch,—you are sure that it is true not only here, but everywhere; not only now, but forever. [Ap¬ plause.] 7. The ideas of space and time are called in phi¬ losophy necessary ideas. 8. The belief in the connection of cause and effect is called in philosophy a necessary belief. 9. All real axioms are necessary truths. • 10. All necessary truths are not only evident, but self-evident. You may say that the proposition that it is two thousand feet from here to the gilded dome yonder is evident, but not that it is self-evident. You ascer¬ tain the distance by measurement and reasoning. But it is self-evident that the shortest distance be¬ tween this point and that is a straight line. On that proposition you do not reason at all; and yet you are unalterably sure of it. 11. Self-evident and necessary truths are univer¬ sally true ; that is, everywhere and in all time. We feel sure that it is, always was, and always will be true that a ■whole is greater than a part, and that TESTS OF TRUTH. 1? tlie sums of equals are equals; tliat a thing cannot be and not be at the same time and in the same sense. We are confident that these laws hold good here, and in Orion, and everywhere. We arrive thus at an incisive definition: — 12. An intuition is a truth self-evident , necessary , and universal. It is a proposition having these three traits , — self¬ evidence, necessity , and universality. 13. Since Aristotle, these three have been the established tests of intuitive truths. (See Sir Wil¬ liam Hamilton’s celebrated Note A , Appendix to Keid’s Works.') 14. An intuition is to be distinguished from an instinct. The latter is an impulse or propensity existing independent of instruction, and prior to experience. 15. An intuition is to be distinguished from in¬ sight, emotional, reflective, or poetic. 16. An intuition is to be distinguished from inspi¬ ration or illumination, sacred or secular. IT. In scientific discussion any use of the word “ intuition ” to denote other than a proposition marked by self-evidence, necessity, and universality, is a violation of established usage. 18. The supreme question of philosophy is wheth¬ er the self-evident, necessary, and universal truths of the mind are derived from experience, or are a part of the constitution of man brought into activity by experience, but not derived from it, nor explicable by it. Do these self-evident truths arise a priori , or d 18 TRANSCENDENTALISM. posteriori ; that is, do they exist before or only after experience ? Up to this point we are all agreed, and we have attained distinctness, I hope, as to our fundamental term. From this point onward we may not all agree; hut I must venture these further pioposi- tions: — 19. This fundamental question has a new interest on account of the recent advances in philosophy, and especially in biology. 20. These advances, if the German as well as the English field is kept in view, favor the d priori or the intuitional school. On one point there is no debate any longer; namely, that there are certain truths which are not only evi¬ dent, but self-evident; winch are absolutely necessary beliefs to the mind; and which are, therefore, univei • sal, both in the sense of being explicitly or implicitly held by all sane men, and in that of being true in all time and in all places. (See Mill’s admissions pas¬ sim, in his Examination of Hamilton’s Philosophy.') Immanuel Kant instituted a great inquiry,you remem¬ ber, as to the origin of this particular class of truths, especially of those which are not identical proposi¬ tions; and now I beg leave to ask this audience whether it is not worth while for us—now that Ger¬ many has gone back to Immanuel Kant, and dares to-day build no metaphysical superstructure except on his foundations or their equivalents — to ask over again, in the light of all the recent advances of bio¬ logical science, the supreme question: Are the self TESTS OF TRUTH. 19 evident , necessary, and universal ideas of the mind derived solely from experience , or are they a part of the original furniture of the soul , not derived at all from sensuous impressions ? [Applause.] I am quite aware that Mr. Frothingham of New- York City, who in philosophy seems to have very little outlook beyond the North Sea, says that the Transcendentalism of which he is the historian has for the present had its day. Here is his graceful book; and, although it is only a sketch, there is large meaning between its lines in its plaintive under¬ tone of failure. This coast of New England the Puritans made mellow soil for all seeds promising re¬ ligious fruitfulness. Transcendentalism rooted itself swiftly here for that reason; but the effort was made to bring up that seed to the dignity of a tree without any sunlight from Christianity. Mr. Frothingham says the attempt has failed. I believe the seed, if it had had that light, might have lived longer. [Applause.] Let it never be forgotten that there are two classes of those who revere axiomatic truth, — the Kantian, Hamiltonian, and Coleridgian on the one side, and the purely rationalistic on the other. Mr. Frothingham says New-England Transcendentalism deliberately broke with Christianity; but in that remark he overlooks many revered names. His own school in Transcendentalism was indeed proud to shut away from the growth of the seeds of intuitive truth the sunlight of Christianity. No oak has appeared in the twilight; but does this fact prove that the tree may not attain stately proportions if 20 TRANSCENDENTALISM. nourished by the noon? Already axiomatic truth is an oak that dreads no storms; and forests of it to-day stand in Germany, watered by the Rhine, the Elbe, and the Oder; and one day similar growths will rustle stalwart in New England, watered by the Mystic and the Charles; and the stately trees will stand on the Thames at last, in spite of its grimy mists. [Applause.] There will be for Intuitionalism in philosophy a great day, so soon as men see that the very latest philosophy knows that there is a soul external to the nervous mechanism, and that materi¬ alism must be laid aside as the result simply of lack of education. [Applause.] 21. The positions of Kant, Sir William Hamilton, and Coleridge, and not those of the rationalistic wing of Transcendentalism, are favored by the researches of the most recent German philosophy. 22. As materialism and sensationalism assert, there is in the spiritual part of man nothing which was not first in the physical sensations of the man. 23. Leibnitz long ago replied to this pretence by his famous and yet unanswered remark: There is nothing in the intellect that was not first in the sen¬ sations, except the intellect itself. (Nihil est in intel- lectu, quod non fuerit in sensu, nisi ipse intellectus . — Leibnitz, Nouveau JEssais.') 24. It is now proved that the soul is a force exter¬ nal to the nervous mechanism, and that the molecular motions of the particles of the latter are a closed circuit not transmutable into the activities of the former. TESTS OF TRUTH. 21 25. We Tcnow now , therefore , that , besides what furni¬ ture sensation and association give to the soul , are in us , wholly independent of experience , the soul and the plan of the soul. [Applause.] 26. Of this plan, which must be the basis of all philosophy relating to man, the self-evident, necessary, and universal truths, or the intuitions on the one hand, and the organic or constitutional instincts on the other, are a revelation. 27. Every organic instinct must be assumed to have its correlate to match it. 28. Every really intuitive belief must be held to be correct. [Applause.] Proof that there is a soul is proof that there is a plan of the soul. It is now a commonplace of science that the uni¬ versality of law is incontrovertible. If the soul has an existence, it has a plan, for the universality of law requires that every thing that exists should have a plan; and, if the soul exists, there is no doubt a plan according to which it was made, and according to which it should act. When, therefore, we prove that the soul is some¬ thing different from matter, or that it is as external to the nervous system as light to the eye, and the pulsations of the air to the ear; when physiological science, led by the Lotzes and Ulricis and Beales, asserts that the soul is possibly the occupant of a spiritual body; or when, not going as far as that, we simply say there is a soul, —we affirm by implication that it is made upon a plan. In the light of the best TRANSCENDENTALISM. 09 Ml* biological science of our day, it is incontrovertible that we have in man two things at least that did not originate in his senses ; namely, the soul and the plan of the soul. [Applause.] That is not a proposition of small importance. It means that these necessary beliefs, these self-evident truths, these first principles, inhere in the very plan of our soul; and that they are, therefore, a supreme revelation to us from the Author of that plan. Self-evident truths thus take hold of the roots of the world. If, now, I raise the question whether instinctive beliefs, whether the first truths, which Aristotle said no man could desert and find surer, whether self-evident propositions, are not made self- evident of necessity by the very structure of our souls, you will not think I am running into mysti¬ cism, will you? You believe there is a soul, and you hold that every thing is made on a plan; or that from the eyelash that looks on Orion, up to Orion itself, there is no escape from the universality of law: therefore, you must hold, that, since every thing is made on a plan, the soul itself is.. Just as you know that your hand was not made to shut toward the back, but toward the front, you know that the soul is made according to a certain plan. If we can find out that plan, we can asceftain what is the best way in which to live. It is said we can know nothing; but do we not already know that there is a best way to live, and that it is best to live the best way, as assuredly as we know that our hand was not made to shut toward the back, but towaid TESTS OF TRUTH. 28 the front ? I think I know that [applause] in spite of all the wooden songs of materialism. Germany yet listens to Immanuel Kant, and to those who, succeeding him with the microscope and scalpel, have carried biological knowledge far beyond its state in his time, and are now asserting not only the- existence of the soul, and its independence of the body, but that, because law is universal, the soul must be made on a plan; and that, therefore, the supreme question of moral science and intellectual philosophy, and of all research that founds itself on mere organism, must be to ascertain what the plan of the soul is, in order that, through a knowledge of the plan, we may learn to conform to it. [Ap¬ plause.] What, then, must philosophy to-day call the su¬ preme tests of truth? In the ceiling of this temple will you imagine a great circle to be drawn, and will you call one quar¬ ter of it Intuition, another quarter Instinct, another Experiment, another Syllogism? Let our attempts at arriving at certitude all consist of endeavors to rise to the centre from which all these arcs are drawn. If y ju will show me what the intuitions are, and do that clearly, I can almost admit that you may strike the whole circle from simply a knowledge of that quadrant. I know, that, if you can inductively deter¬ mine any curve of the circle, you can then determine deductively the whole. But, my friends, we have seen too many failures in this high attempt to de¬ scribe the circle of the universe by determining three 24 TRANSCENDENTALISM. points only. No doubt through any three points a circle may be drawn; but so vast is the circle of infinities and eternities, that our poor human com¬ passes cannot be trusted, if we use one of these quadrants only. Let us be intuitionalists , but much else. Let us test quadrant by quadrant around the whole circle of research. Let us conjoin the testi¬ mony of Intuition, Instinct, Experiment, and Syllo¬ gism. Show me accord between your quadrant of Intuition and your quadrant of Instinct, and be¬ tween these two and the quadrant of Experiment, — this latter is the English quarter of the heavens, and that of Intuition is the German, — and between these three and the quadrant of Syllogism; and, with these four supreme tests of truth agreeing, I know enough for the cancelling of the orphanage of Doubt. I know not every thing; but I assuredly can find a way through all multiplex labyrinths between God and man, and will with confidence ascend through the focus of the four quadrants into God’s bosom. [^-Ap¬ plause.] Archbishop Whately said, that, the wider the circle illumination, the greater the circle of surrounding darkness. Acknowledging that this is true, we shall be devoutly humble face to face with inexplicable portions of the universe. Nevertheless, let us, with the faith of Emerson, with the insight of Theodore Parker, with the acuteness of John Stuart Mill, as well as with the deadly precision of Kant, and of all clear and devout souls since the world began, hold unalterably, in this age of unrest and orphanage, TESTS OF TRUTH. 25 that, if these four quadrants agree, we may implicitly trust them as tests of truth. [Applause.] The su¬ preme rules of certitude were never more visible than in our distracted day; and they are Intuition, Instinct, Experiment, Syllogism. Each is a subtle verification of every other. Let us image these vast quadrants of research as so many gigantic reflectors of a light not their own. At the focal point of the four, Religious Science, strictly so called, lights its immortal torch. [Applause.} \ n. TRANSCENDENTALISM IN NEW ENGLAND. THE SIXTIETH LECTURE IN THE BOSTON MONDAY LECTURE* SHIP, DELIVERED IN TREMONT TEMPLE JAN. 8. “ $7jfirj 6’ ovtcote na/izav airbXkvTai rjv riva ttoTJwI Aaol r)fu£ovoi‘ Qeog vv tic earl nal avrriP Hesiod: Works and Days “Let us do what we can to rekindle the smouldering, nigh quenched fire on the altar. The remedy is first soul, and second soul, and evermore soul.” — Emebson: Address at Cambridge , July 15 , 1838 . n. TRANSCENDENTALISM IN NEW ENG¬ LAND. PRELUDE ON CURRENT EVENTS. A serious man must rejoice to have Christianity tested philosophically, historically, and in every great way, but not in a certain small, light, and inwardly coarse way, of which the world has had enough, and is tired. Yesterday the most scholarly representative of what calls itself Free Religion told Boston that the Author of Christianity is historically only an idolized memory inwreathed with mythical fictions. Will you allow me to say that the leading universi¬ ties of Germany, through their greatest specialists in exegetical and historical research, have decisively given up that opinion ? Thirty or forty years ago it was proclaimed there in rationalistic lecture-rooms very emphatically: to-day such lecture-rooms are empty, and those of the opposing schools are crowded. On the stately grounds of Sans Souci, where Frederick the Great and Voltaire had called out to the culture of Europe, “ Ecrasez Vinfame ! ” King William and his queen lately entertained an 29 BO TRANSCENDENTALISM. Evangelical Alliance gathered from the Indus, the Nile, the Danube, the Rhine, the Thames, and the Mississippi. Histories of the rise and progress and decline of German Rationalism, and especially of the power of the Mythical Theory, have been appear¬ ing abundantly for the last fifteen years in the most learned portions of the literature of Germany. The incontrovertible fact is, that every prominent German university, except Heidelberg, is i ow under predomi¬ nant evangelical influences. Heidelberg is nearly empty of theological students. Lord Bacon said that the best materials for prophecy are the unforced opinions of young men. Against twenty-four theo¬ logical students at rationalistic Heidelberg there were lately at evangelical Halle two hundred and eighty-two ; at evangelical Berlin two hundred and eighty; and at hyper-evangelical Leipzig four hun¬ dred and twelve. Before certain recent discussions and discoveries on the field of research into the history of the origin of Christianity, the rationalistic lecture-rooms were crowded, and the evangelical empty. It is notorious that such teachers as Tholuck, Julius Muller, Dorner, Twesten, Ullmann, Lange, Rothe, and Tischendorf, most of whom began their professorships at their universities with great unpopularity, on account of their opposition to rationalistic views, are now par¬ ticularly honored on that very account. (See ar¬ ticle on the “ Decline of Rationalism in the German Universities,” Bibliotheca Sacra , October, 1875.) We often have offered to us in Boston the crumbs TRANSCENDENTALISM IN NEW ENGLAND. 31 from German philosophical tables; and, although I must not speak harshly, the truth must he told, namely, that the faithful in the uneducated ranks of scepticism — I do not deny that there are vast masses of Orthodoxy uneducated also — are not infrequently fed on cold remnants swept away with derision from the scholarly repasts of the world. If you will open the biography of David Friedrich Strauss, by Zeller, his admiring friend, and a profess¬ or at Heidelberg, you will read these unqualified words: “ Average theological liberalism pressed forward eagerly to renounce all compromising asso¬ ciation with Strauss after he published the last state¬ ment of his mythical theory.” (See Zeller, Pro¬ fessor Eduard, “ /Strauss in his Life and Writings ,” English translation, London, 1874, pp. 135, 141, 143.) It did so under irresistible logical pressure, and especially because recent discoveries have car¬ ried back the dates of the New-Testament literature fifty years. Thirty years ago it used to be thought that the earliest date at which the New-Testament literature can be shown to have been received as of equal authority with the Old was about A.D. 180 ; but, as all scholars will tell you, even Baur admitted that Paul’s chief Epistles were genuine, and were written before the year 60. This admission is fatal to the mythical theory put forth by Strauss when he was a young man, and now for twenty years marked as juvenile by the best scholarship of Germany. These letters of Pau' written at that date, are incontro- 32 TRANSCENDENTALISM. vertible proof that the leading traits of the charac- tei of the Author of Christianity, as given in the so-called mythical Gospels, were familiar to the Chris¬ tian world within twenty-five years after his death (Thayer, Professor J. Henry, of Andover, Boston Lectures , 1871, p. 372). There is now in the hands of scholars incontrovertible evidence that even the Gospels had acquired authority with the earliest churches as early as A.D. 125. Schenkel, Renan, Keim, Weizsacker, and others widely removed from the traditional views, teach that the Fourth Gospel itself could not have appeared later than a few years after the beginning of the second century. (See Fisher, Professor George P., Essays on the Su¬ pernatural Origin of Christianity , 1870, Preface, , p. xxsviii.) These discoveries explain the new atti¬ tude of German scholarship. They carry back the indubitable traces of the New-Testament literature more than fifty years. They shut the colossal shears of chronology upon the theories of Baur, Strauss, and Renan. They narrow by so much the previously too narrow room used by these theories to explain the growth of myths and legends. Strauss demands a century after the death of Paul for his imaginative additions to Christianity to grow up in. It is now established that not only not a century, but not a quarter of a century, can be had for this purpose. Hie upper date of A.D. 34, and the lower date of A.D. GO, as established by exact research, are the two merciless blades of the shears between which the latest and most deftly-woven web of doubt is cut TRANSCENDENTALISM IN NEW ENGLAND. 33 in two. [Applause.] There is no room for that course of mythical development which the Tubingen school describes. As a sect in biblical criticism, this school has perished. Its history has been written in more than one tongue (Thayer, Professor J. Henry, Criticism Confirmatory of the Cospels, Boston Lectures, 1871, pp. 363, 364, 371). Chevalier Bunsen once wrote to Thomas Arnold this incisive exclamation: “ The idea of men writing 1 mythic histories between the time of Livy and Taci¬ tus, and Saint Paul mistaking such for realities ! ” Arnold’s Life, Letter cxliv.) Paul had opportunity to know the truth, and was, besides, one of the bold¬ est and acutest spirits of his own or of any age. Was Paul a dupe ? [Applause.] But who does not know the history of the defeat of sceptical school after sceptical school on the rationalistic side of the field of exegetical research ? The naturalistic theory was swallowed by the mythi¬ cal theory, and the mythical by the tendency theory, and the tendency by the legendary theory, and each of the four by time. [Applause.] Strauss laughs at Paulus, Baur at Strauss, Kenan at Baur, the hour¬ glass at all. [Applause.] 44 Under his guidance,” says Strauss of Paulus (New Life of Jesus, English translation, p. 18), 44 we tumble into the mire; and assuredly dross, not gold, is the issue to which his method of interpretation generally leads.” 44 Up to the present day,” says Baur of Strauss (. Krit . Unters . uber die canoniscJie Evangel., 121, 40-71), 44 the mythi¬ cal theory has been rejected by every man of educa* 34 TRANSCENDENTALISM. tion.” And yet New-York lips teach it here in modern Athens ! [Applause.] “ Insufficient,” says Renan of Baur (Etude d' Hist. Rel., 163), “ is what he leaves existing of the Gospels to account for the faith of the apostles.” He makes the Pauline and Petrine factions account for the religion, and the religion account for the Pauline and Petrine factions. “ Criti¬ cism has run all to leaves,” said Strauss (see Zeller, Life of Strauss , p. 143) in his hitter disappointment at the failure of his final volume. Appropriately was there carried on Richter’s cof fin to his grave a manuscript of his last work, — a discussion in proof of the immortality of the soul: appropriately might there have been carried on Strauss’s coffin to his grave his last work, restating his mythical theory, if only that theory had not, as every scholar knows, died and been buried before its author. [Applause.] The supreme question concerning the origin of the New-Testament literature is now, whether, in less than thirty years intervening between the death of the Author of Christianity and A.D. 60, in which Paul’s Epistles are known to have become authori¬ ties, there is room enough in the age of Livy and Tacitus for the growth and inwreatliing of mythical fictions around an idolized memory lying in the dim haze of the past. An unscholarly and discredited theory was presented to you yesterday gracefully, but not forcefully. Let us see what a vigorous and unpartisan mind says on the same topic. “I know men,” said Napo- TRANSCENDENTALISM IN NEW ENGLAND. 35 leon at St. Helena — the record is authentic; read it in Liddons’ Bampton Lectures on the Divinity of Our Lord, the best recent book on that theme, — “I know men, and I tell you that Jesus of Nazareth was not a man.” Daniel Webster, on his dying-bed, wrote on the marble of his tombstone “ The Sermon on the Mount cannot be a merely human production.” Renan was particularly cited to you yesterday; but when I went into the study of Professor Dorner, Schleiermacher’s successor, at Berlin, and conversed with him about the greatest sceptics of Europe, I came to the name of Renan, and said, “ What are we to think of his 4 Life of Jesus ’ ? ” “ Das ist Nichts,” he answered, and added no more. “ That is nothing.” [Applause.] No doubt, in the fume and foam and froth of liter¬ ary brilliancy serving a lost, bad cause, there may be iridescence, as well as in the enduring opal and pearl; but, while the colors seven flashed from the fragile spray are as beautiful as foam and froth, they are also just as substantial. [Applause.] THE LECTURE. Side by side under the lindens in the great ceme¬ tery of Berlin lie Fitche and Hegel; and I am tran- scendentalist enough myself to have walked one lonely day, four miles, from the tombs of Neander and Schleiermacher, on the hill south of the city, to the quiet spot where the great philosophers of tran¬ scendentalism lie at rest till the heavens be no more. I treasure among the mementos of travel some 36 TRANSCENDENTALISM. broad myrtle-leaves which I plucked from the soda that lie above these giants in philosophy; and, if 1 to-day cast a little ridicule upon the use some of their disciples have made of the great tenets of the masters, you will not suppose me to he irreverent towards any fountain-head of intuitive, axiomatic, self-evident truth. You wish, and I, too, wish, cool draughts out of the Castalian spring of axioms. You are, and I, too, am, thirsty for certainty; and I find it only in the sure four tests of truth, — intuition, instinct, experiment, syllogism, — all agreeing. [Ap¬ plause.] But of the four tests, of course the first is chief, head and shoulders above all the rest. Even in Germany the successors of the great tran- scendentalists have made sport for the ages; and no doubt here in New England it was to have been expected that there should be some sowing of “ tran¬ scendental wild-oats.” [Applause.] That phrase is the incisive language of a daughter of transcen¬ dentalism honored by this generation, and likely to be honored by many more. I am asking you to look to-day at the erratic side of a great movement, the right wing and centre of which I respect, but the left wing of which, or that which broke with Chris¬ tianity, has brought upon itself self-confessed defeat. What has been the outcome of breaking with Christianity in the name of intuitive truth in Ger¬ many? Take up the latest advices, which it is my duty, as an outlook committee for this audience, to keep before you, and you will find that Immanuel Hermann Fichte, the son of this man at whose grave TRANSCENDENT ALT SM IN NEW ENGLAND. 37 I stood in Berlin, has just passed into the Unseen Holy \ and that, as his last legacy, ho left to the ages a work entitled “ Questions and Considerations con¬ cerning the Newest Form of German Speculation.’ 1 When, one day, the great Fichte heard the drums of Napoleon beat in the streets of Berlin, he closed a lectuic by announcing that the next would be given hen Prussia had become free; and then enlisted against the conqueror, and kept his word. The son has had a more quiet life than the father; but he has given himself exclusively to philosophy. The second hichte was the founder of the “Journal of Specula tive Philosophy,” now conducted by Ulrici and Wirth; and he has lived through much. Fie knew his father’s system presumably well. Has it led to pantheism or materialism with him, as it has with some others? If Emerson has made pantheism a logical outcome of Fichte's teachings , what has Fichte's son made of them f The son of the great Fichte has been a professor at Dusseldorf and Bonn, and, since 1842, at Tubingen. He is a specialist in German philosophy if ever there was one; and his latest production was a history of his own philosophi¬ cal school. He attempted to show that the line of sound philosophy in Germany is represented by three great names, — Leibnitz and Kant and Lotze. You do not care to have from me an outline of his work ; and perhaps, therefore, you will allow me to read the summary of it given by your North-American Review, for that certainly ought to be free from partisanship. Thus Fichte loftily writes to Zeller, 38 TKANSCENDENTALISM. the biographer of Strauss, and his positions are a sign of the times : — “ Ethical theism is now master of the situation. The attempt to lose sight of the personal God in nature, or to subordinate his transcendence over the universe to any power immanent in the universe, and especially the tendency to deny the theology of ethics, and to insist only upon the reign of force, are utterly absurd, and are meeting their just condemnation.” [Applause.] {North-American Review, January, 1877, p. 147.) Concord once listened to Germany. Will it con¬ tinue to listen ? Cambridge cannot show at the foot of her text-book pages five English names where she can show ten German. In the footnotes of learned works you will find German authorities a dozen times where you can find English six, or American three. Let us appeal to no temporary swirl of cur¬ rents, but to a Gulf Stream. Of course, history is apt to be misleading, unless we take it in long ranges. Head Sir William Hamilton’s celebrated summary {Note A, Appendix to Heed’s works'), if you wish to see the whole gulf current of belief in self-evident truth since Aristotle. But here in Ger¬ many is a vast stretch of modern philosophical dis¬ cussion, beginning with Leibnitz, running on through Kant, and so coming down to Lotze; and it is all on the line of intuitive truth, and it never has broken with Christianity, nor been drawn into either the Charybdis of materialism or the Scylla of pantheism. [Applause.] TEANSCENDENTALISM EST NET7 ENGLAND. 39 The latest and acutest historian of German the- °l°gy> Schwartz of Gotha, says that Strauss desig¬ nates not so much a beginning as an end, and that the supreme lack in his system is twofold, — the absence of historical insight and of religious sensi¬ bility. Now, I will not deny that rationalism in New England, with eight generations of Puritan culture behind it, has often shown religious sensitiveness. Some transcendentalists who have broken with Christianity I reverence so far forth as they retain here in New England a degree of religious sensibility which is often utterly unknown among rationalists abroad. Ileaven cause my tongue to cleave to the roof of my mouth if ever I say aught ironical, or in any way derogatory, of that consciousness of God which underlay the vigor of Theodore Parker, which is the transfiguring thing in Emerson, and which, very much further down in the list of those who are shy of Christianity, is yet the glory of their thinking, and of their reverence for art, and is especially the strength of their philanthropic endeavors! [Ap¬ plause. J W"e have no France for a neighbor; wars have not stormed over America as they have over Europe; and it cannot yet be said, even of our erratics, as undoubtedly it can be of many French and German ones, that they have lost the conscious¬ ness of God. What is Transcendentalism ? Pou will not suspect me of possessing the mood of that acute teacher, who, on the deck of a Missis¬ sippi steamer, was asked this question, and replied, 40 TRANSCENDENTALISM. “ See the holes made in the* bank yonder by the swallows. Take away the bank, and leave the aper¬ tures, and this is Transcendentalism.” The answer to this is the certainty that we are all bank-swallows. The right wing and the centre of this social, twitter¬ ing human race live in these apertures, as well as the left wing; and it would be of little avail to ridicule the self-evident truths on which our own peace de¬ pends. I affirm simply that Transcendentalism of the left wing has not been consistent with Transcen¬ dentalism itself. My general proposition is, that rationalistic Tran¬ scendentalism in New England is not Transcendental¬ ism, but, at the last analysis, Individualism. Scholars will find that on this occasion, as on many others, discussion here is purposely very ele¬ mentary. 1. The plan of the physical organism is not in the food by which the organism is sustained. 2. The mechanism by which the assimilation of food is effected exists before the food is received. 3. But, until the food is received, that mechanism does not come into operation. 4. The plan of the spiritual organism is not in the impressions received through sensation and associa¬ tion. 5. The fundamental laws of thought exist in the plan of the soul anterior to all sensation or associa¬ tion. 6. But they are brought into operation only by experience through sensation and association. TRANSCENDENTALISM IN NEW ENGLAND. 41 7. It is absurd to say that the plan of the body is produced by its food. 8. It is equally absurd to say that the plan, or fundamental intuitive beliefs of the soul, are pro¬ duced by sensation and association. 9. Therefore, as the plan of the body does not have its origin in the food of the body, so the plan of the mind does not have its origin in the food of the mind. You receive food, and a certain plan in your physi¬ cal organism distributes it after it is received, assim¬ ilates it, and you are entirely sure that the mechan¬ ism involved in this process exists before the food. It may be that every part of my physical system is made up of food and drink which I have taken, or of air which I have breathed; and yet there is one thing in me that the food did not give me, or the air; and that is the plan of my physical organism. [Ap¬ plause.] Not in the gases, not in the fluids, not in the solids, was there the plan of these lenses in the eye, or of this harp of three thousand strings in the year. Besides all the materials which go to make up a watch, you must have the plan of the watch. If I were to place a book on my right here, and then take another copy of the book and tear it into shreds, and cast these down on the left, it would not be law¬ ful to say that I have on one side the same that I have on the other. In one case the volume is arranged in an intelligible order: in the other it is chaotic. Besides the letters, we must have the co- 42 TRANSCENDENTALISM. ordination of the letters in tlie finished volume. So in man’s organism it is perfectly evident that the food which we eat, and which does, indeed, build every th in g in us, is not us; for the plan of us is something existing before that food enters the sys¬ tem, and that plan separates the different elements, and distributes them in such a way as to bring out the peculiarities of each individual organism. Now, whether or not you admit that there is a spiritual organism behind the physical, whether or not you agree with your Beales and Lotzes and Ulricis in asserting that the scientific method re¬ quires that we should suppose that there is in us a spiritual organism which weaves the physical, you will at least admit, that, so far as the individual ex¬ perience is concerned, we have within us laws, funda¬ mental, organic, and, if not innate, at least connate. They came into the world with us; they are a part of the plan on which we are made. When we touch the external world with the outer senses, and the inner world with the inner senses, no doubt food is coming to our souls ; but that plan is the law accord¬ ing to which all our experiences through sensation and association are distributed. 10. The school of sensationalism in philosophy maintains that the soul’s laws are only an accumula¬ tion of inheritances. 11. To that school, self-evident truths themselves are simply those which result from an unvarying and the largest experience; or those which have been deeply engraved on our physical organisms by the TRANSCENDENTALISM IN NEW ENGLAND. 43 uniform sensations of our whole line of ancestors back to the earliest and simplest form of life. 12. Human experience cannot embrace all space and time. 13. Sensationalism in philosophy, therefore, which holds that all the intuitive or axiomatic truths arise from experience, must deny that we can be sure that these truths are true in all space and time. 14. But we are thus sure; and sensationalism is wrecked on its palpable inability to explain by experience this confessed certainty. Face to face with this inadequate explanation which evolution offers for the self-evident, necessary, and universal truths of the soul, let us look at the worst. It matters to me very little how my eyes came into existence, if only they see accurately. You say con¬ science was once only a bit of sensitive matter in a speck of jelly. You affirm, that, by the law of the survival of the fittest, in the struggle of many jelly- specks with each other for existence, one peculiarly- vigorous jelly-speck obtained the advantage of its brethren, and so became the progenitor of many vig¬ orous jelly-specks. Then these vigorous jelly-specks made new war on each other; and individuals, ac¬ cording to the law of heredity with variation, having now and then fortunate endowments, survived, and transmitted these, to become better and better, until the jelly-specks produce the earliest seaweed. By and by a mollusk appears under the law of the sur¬ vival of the fittest, and then higher and higher 44 TRANSCENDENTALISM. forms, till at last, through infinite chance and mis¬ chance, man is produced. Somewhere and somehow the jelly-specks get not only an intellect, not only artistic perception, but conscience and will, and this far-reaching longing for immortality, this sense that there is a Mind superior to ours on which we are dependent. Now, for a moment, admit that this the¬ ory of evolution, which Professor Dawson, in an arti¬ cle in the last number of the “ International Review,” on Huxley in New York, says will be regarded by the next age as one of the most mysterious of illu¬ sions, is true, the supreme question yet remains, — whether my conscience is authority. Take something merely physical, like the eyes. When I was a jelly-speck of the more infirm sort, or at least when I was a fish, I saw something, and what I saw I saw. When I was a lichen, although I was not a sensitive-plant, I felt something, and what I felt I felt. So when, at last, these miracu¬ lous lenses began to appear, as the law of the sur¬ vival of the fittest rough-hewed them age after age, I saw better and better ; but what I saw I saw : and to-day I feel very sure that the deliverance of the eyes is accurate. I am not denying here any of the facts as to our gradual acquisition of the knowl¬ edge of distance and of dimension ; that comes from the operation of all the senses; but we feel certain that what we see we see. Suppose, then, that, in this grand ascent from the jelly-speck to the archangel, the process of evolution shall at last make our eyes as powerful as the best TRANSCENDENTALISM IN NEW ENGLAND. 45 telescopes of the present day. It will yet plainly be true, will it not, that what we see we see ? and as the eyes are now good within their range, so, when they become telescopic, they will be good within their range. Just so, even if we hold to the evolu¬ tionary hypothesis in its extremest claims, we must hold, that, if conscience was good for any thing when it was rudimentary, it is good now in its higher stage of development. If by and by it shall become tele¬ scopic, what it sees it will see. [Applause.] I will not give up for an instant the authority of connate , although you deny all innate truth. You may show me that fatalism is the result of your evolutionary hypothesis; you may prove to me that immortality cannot be maintained if your philosophy is true; you may, indeed, assert, as Hackel does, “ that there is no God but necessity,” if you are an evolutionist of the thorough-going type, that is, not only a Darwinian, but an Hackelian. But let Hackel’s consistent atheistic evolutionism, which Germany rejects with scorn, be adopted, and it will yet remain true that there is a plan in man; and that, while there is a plan in man, there will be a best way to live; and that, while there is a best way to live, it will be best to live the best way. [Applause.] There is, however, no sign of the progress of the Hackelian theory of evolution toward general accept* ance. On every side you are told that evolution is more and more the philosophy of science. But which form of the theory of evolution is meant? The Darwinian is a theory, the Hackelian is the theory, of evolution. 46 TRANSCENDENTALISM. 15. Observing our mental operations, we very easily convince ourselves that we are sure of the truth of some propositions, concerning which neither we nor the race have had experience. 16. If it be true that all these certainties that we call self-evident arise simply from experience, it must be shown that our certainties do not reach beyond our experience. It is very sure, is it not, that the sun might rise to-morrow morning in the west? Neither we nor our ancestors have had any experience of its rising there. Space is a necessary idea, but the rising of the sun in the east is not; and yet our experience of the one is as invariable as that of the other. That blazing mass of suns we call Orion might have its stellar points differently arranged; and yet I never saw Orion in any shape other than that which it now possesses. I am perfectly confident that the gems on the sword-hilt of Orion might be taken away, or never have been in existence ; but I never yet saw Orion without seeing there the flashing of the jewels on the hilt of his sword. John Stuart Mill would say, and so would George Henry Lewes, — whose greatest distinction, by the way, is, that he is the husband of Marian Evans, the authoress of “ Daniel Deronda,” — that, although my own experience never has shown to me Orion in any other shape than that which it now possesses, per¬ haps my ability to give it another shape in thought may arise from some experience in the race behind me. We are told by the school of evolution, that it TRANSCENDENTALISM IN NEW ENGLAND* 17 is not our individual experience that explains our necessary ideas, but the transmitted experience of the race behind us. We have inherited nervous changes, from the whole range of the development of the species; and so, somewhere and somehow in the past, there must have been an experience which gives you the capacity to say that the sun may rise in the west, and that Orion might have another shape. But is it not tolerably sure that none of my grand¬ fathers or great-grandfathers, back to the jelly-speck, ever saw the sun rise in the west ? The human race never saw Orion in any other shape. The truth is, that experience goes altogether too short a distance to account for the wide range of such a certainty, as that every effect, not only here, but everywhere, must have a cause. 17. Experience does not teach what must be, but only what is; but we know that every change not only has , but must have, a cause. I never had any experience in the Sun, or in the Seven Stars. I never paced about the Pole with Ursa Major, across the breadth of one of whose eye¬ lashes my imagination cannot pass without fainting; I know nothing of the thoughts of Saggitarius, as he bends his bow of fire yonder in the southern heavens: but this I do know, that everywhere and in all time every change must have a cause. You are certain of the universality of every necessary truth. How are you to account for that certainty by any known experience ? 18. We cannot explain by experience a certainty that goes beyond experience, 48 TRANSCENDENTALISM. John Stuart Mill, perfectly honest and perfectly luminous, comes squarely up to this difficulty, and says in so many words, “ There may he worlds in which two and two do not make four, and where a change need not have a cause.” (.Examination of Hamilton’s Philosophy; see, also, Mill’s Logic , hook iii. chap, xxi.) So clearly does he see this ob¬ jection, that, astounding some of his adherents, he made this very celebrated admission, which has done more to cripple the philosophy of sensationalism, probably, than any other event in its history for the last twenty-five years. Even mathematical axioms may be false. You and I, gentlemen, feel, and must feel, that this conclusion is arbitrary; that it is not true to the constitution of man; that we have within us something which asserts not only the present earthly certainty, that every change must have a cause, but that forever and forever, in all time to come, and backward through all time past, this law holds. 19. Everywhere, all exact science assumes the universal applicability of all true axioms in all time and in all places. Rejecting in the name of exact science, therefore, Mill’s startling paradox, we must conclude that we are not loyal to the indications of our own constitu¬ tion, unless we say that there is in us a possibility of reaching certainty beyond experience. Now to do that is to reach a transcendental truth. 20. Transcendental truths are simply those neces¬ sary, self-evident, axiomatic truths which transcend TKANSCENDENTALISM IN NEW ENGLAND. 49 experience. Transcendentalism is the science of such self-evident, axiomatic, necessary truths. Kant gave this name to a part of his philosophy, and it is by no means a word of reproach. Of course I am treating Transcendentalism, not with an eye on New England merely, but with due outlook on this form of philosophy throughout the world, especially upon Coleridge and Wordsworth, Mansel and Mau¬ rice, and Sir William Hamilton, and Leibnitz and Kant and Lotze. I am not taking Transcendental¬ ism in that narrow meaning in which some opponents of it may have represented it to themselves. That every change, here and everywhere, not only has, but must have, a cause, is a transcendental truth: it tran¬ scends experience. So the certainty that here and everywhere things which are equal to the same thing are equal to each other is a transcendental certainty. Our conviction in the moral field that sin can be a quality only of voluntary action is a transcendental fact. This moral axiom we feel is sure in all time and in all space. There are moral intuitions as well as intellectual. There are aesthetic intuitions, I be¬ lieve ; and they will yet produce a science of the . beautiful, as those of the intellect and the conscience produce sciences of the true and the good. If man have no freedom of will, he cannot commit sins in the strict sense, for demerit implies free agency; and we feel that this is a moral certainty, and you cannot go behind it. Coleridge complained much in his time of. “that compendious philosophy which contrives a theory 50 TRANSCENDENTALISM. for spirit by nicknaming matter, and in a few hours can qualify its dullest disciples to explain the omne scibile by reducing all things to impressions, ideas, and sensations ” QPiograpli. Liter aria, chap. xii.). What would he have said to the recent attempt by Tyndall to nickname matter, and call it mind, or a substance with a spiritual and physical side ? Only the other day, Lewes endeavored to nickname sensation, and call it both the internal law of the soul and the ex¬ ternal sense. Will you please listen to an amazing definition out of the latest, and perhaps the subtlest attempt to justify sensationalism in philosophy ? “ The sensational hypothesis is acceptable, if by sense we understand sensibility and its laws of opera¬ tion. This obliterates the very distinction insisted on by the other school. It includes all psychical phenomena under the rubric of sensibility. It en¬ ables pyschological analysis to be consistent and ex¬ haustive.” (Lewes’s Problems of Life and Mind , 1874, vol. i. p. 208.) This passage affirms, that, if you will say food is the body, food will explain the body. If you will take the metal which goes to make the watch as not only the metal, but the plan of the watch too, then your matter and your plan put together will be the watch. He wants sensation to mean sensibility and its laws; that is to say, he would have the very fundamental principles of our soul included in this term, which, thus interpreted, I should say, with Coleridge, is a nickname. Such a definition concedes much by im¬ plication ; but Lewes concedes in so many words, that, TRANSCENDENTALISM IN NEW ENGLAND. 51 “ if by sense is meant simply the five senses, the reduction of all knowledge to a-sensuous origin is absurd.” Such is the latest voice, my friends, from the oppo¬ nents of the Intuitional school in philosophy ; and it is substantially a confession, that, unless a new defini¬ tion be given to sensation, the sensational philosophy must be given up. Stuart Mill affirmed that two and two might make seven in Orion, and that a change possibly might not have a cause in the North Star. He was forced to no greater straits than the husband of George Eliot is, when he says that the only escape from the necessity of adopting the intuitional philoso¬ phy is to assume its definitions as those of the sensa¬ tional school itself. Bloody, unjust exploits, are often performed by lawless men on the battle-field of philosophy; but, after all, the ages like to see fair play. We must observe the rules of the game. When Greek wrestlers stood up together, the audience and the judges saw to it that the rules of the game were observed. These were defined rigidly. All religious science asks of scepticism, in this age or any other, is, that it will observe the laws of the scientific method. We must adhere to the rules of the game ; and when established definitions are nicknamed, as they now are by materialism, suicide is confession. [Applause.] II THEODORE PARKER’S ABSOLUTE RELIGION. THE SIXTY-FIRST LECTURE IN THE BOSTON MONDAY LEC¬ TURESHIP, DELIVERED IN TREMONT TEMPLE JAN. 15. “ Si 1’experience interne immediate pouvait nous tromper, il ne saurait y avoir pour moi aucune verite de fait, j’ajoute ni de raison.” — Leibnitz. “ Corpus enim per se communis deliquat esse, Sensus; quo nisi prima tides fundata valebit, Haud erit, occultis de rebus quo referentes, Confirmare animi, quicquam ratione queamus.” Lucretius. THEODORE PARKER’S ABSOLUTE RELI¬ GION. PRELUDE ON CURRENT EVENTS. It was once my fortune in the city of Edinburgh to visit the famous room in which Burke and Hare committed fourteen murders by dropping men through a trap-door, and afterwards strangling them, that they might obtain human skins to sell to physicians for medical purposes. Across the street from this classical cellar of horrors, there used to be an old tan-loft, in the midst of a population one quarter of which was on the poor-roll, and another quarter measly with the unreportable vices. When Thomas Chalmers was a professor in the University of Edin¬ burgh, he deliberately selected this verminous and murderous quarter as the spot in which to begin a crucial trial of a plan of his for the solution of the problem as to the management of the poor in great cities. It was his audacious belief, that there is no population so degraded in any of our large towns, that it will not maintain Christian institutions if once these are fairly set on foot. Southward from 56 TRANSCENDENTALISM. * the gray cliff on which Edinburgh’s renowned his¬ toric castle stands, he took the district called the West Port, with a population of about two thousand, and divided it into twenty sub-districts, and ap¬ pointed over each one a visitor, sometimes a lady, and sometimes a gentleman. It was the business of these angels of mercy to go once each week into every family, without exception, and to leave there, not often money, not always food, but an invitation to the children to attend the industrial and religious schools, and to parents to become members of the church of which Chalmers had the supreme courage to begin the formation in the old tan-loft, face to face with that room in which fourteen murders had been committed. This visitation was made thorough. Every person aided was taught to pay something, however little, for the support of the school and church opened for his benefit. A feeling of self- respect was thus systematically cultivated. This was an essential portion of the Chalmerian plan. The enterprise of founding a self-supporting church among the poor and vile in the West Port of Edin¬ burg was in five years so successful, that, out of a hundred and thirty-two communicants, more than a hundred in the church were from the population of the West Port. Not a child of suitable age lived in the district and was not in school. A savings bank had been instituted, a washing-house had been opened, an industrial school had been maintained day and night in the secular portions of the week. Better than all, the entire expense of all these insti- THEODORE PARKER’S ABSOLUTE RELIGION. 57 tutions, amounting to thirty thousand dollars a year, was paid by the West Port; and that improved section of paupers had money enough every year to contribute seventy pounds for benevolent purposes outside the borders of their own territory. [Ap¬ plause.] It was thought this enterprise would fail on Chal¬ mers’s death; but, so far from doing so, his famous territorial church is to-day in a flourishing condition, and has been extensively copied in Scotland. His plan of territorial visitation and self-supporting reli¬ gious enterprises has become one of the best hopes of the poor in Scotland’s great cities. I worshipped once in the West Port church, and found there the names of fifty or sixty church-officers of various kinds posted up on the doors, and arranged in couples, with their specific districts for visitation definitely named on the bulletin. A hushed, crowded audience of the cleanly and respectable poor listened to a vigorous address, and made touching contributions for reli¬ gious purposes. Mr. Tasker, the pastor whom Chal¬ mers had chosen, said to me at his tea-table, “ There is nae rat in yon kirk. I told the people at the first I would na minister to a congregation of paupers. Every steady attendant pays more or less, and so keeps up self-respect. He helps the poor most who helps them to help themselves. Yon kirk is self-sup¬ porting.” Chalmers did not live to see these larger results; but he saw enough to cause him to anticipate them; and he perfectly understood the vast political impor- 58 TRANSCENDENTALISM. tance of the complex problem be had attacked. He foresaw that more and more the population of the world must mass itself in cities. His experiment he did not consider complete without aid from the civil arm, which ought to second the efforts of philanthro¬ py by executing all righteous public law. Most eloquently Chalmers wrote in his advancing years : “ I would again implore the aid of the author¬ ities for the removal of all these moral, and the aid of the Sanitary Board for the removal of all those physi¬ cal, nuisances and discomforts which are found to exist within a territory so full of misery and vice at pres¬ ent, yet so full of promise for the future. Could 1 gain this help from our men in power, and this co-opera¬ tion from the Board of Health, then with the virtue which lies in education, and , above all, the hallowing influence of the gospel of Jesus Christ, I should look, though in humble dependence on the indispensable grace from on high, for such a result as, at least in its first be¬ ginnings, I could interpret into the streaks and dawnings of a better day ; when, after the struggles and discomforts of thirty years, I might depart in peace, and leave the further prosecution of our enterprise with comfort and calmness in the hands of another generation. (See Me¬ moirs of Chalmers , by Reverend William Hanna, London, 1859, chapter entitled “The West Port,” p. 413.) Chalmers’s Cf 3 lebrated scheme for throttling the troubles of the poor and vicious in great towns em¬ braced these three provisions: — Territorial visitation, or systematic going about from house to house doing good. THEODORE BARKER’S ABSOLUTE RELIGION. 59 Self-supporting benevolent and religious institu¬ tions among the needy and degraded. The execution of righteous law against the tempt¬ ers and fleecers of the poor. [Applause.] Gentlemen, some of us here are young yet; and we have heard the departing footsteps of the great problem of slavery in our own land. We who have in expectation our brief careers are listening to the first heavy footfalls of a far more menacing problem, that concerning greed and fraud in politics, when the gigantic and crescent party-spoils of a land greater than Csesar ever ruled are made the reward of merely party success. But behind that black angel, with his far-spreading Gehenna wings shadowing both our ocean shores, some of us who are looking forward, and are rash, as you think, can but notice the stealthy ad¬ vance of another fell spirit with whom we must con¬ tend; and his name is, The Metropolitan. He is the genius that presides over the neglect of the poor in great towns. He is the archfiend, who, as the growth of all means of intercommunication, causes the world to mass its population more and more in cities, breathes upon many fashionable churches the sirocco of luxury, and leaves them swinging in hammocks, attached, on the one side, to the Cross, and on the other to the forefinger of Mammon, and not easy even then, unless they are eloquently fanned [applause], and sprinkled, as the Eastern host sprinkles his guest, with lavender ease. [Applause.] Meanwhile, the fiend Metropolitan Evil advances with a footfall that already sometimes rocks the continent, and yet it appears 60 TRANSCENDENTALISM. to be unheard. Now and then the cloven, ominous hoof breaks through the thin crust, and there starts up a blue flame, as at Paris in communism; but the light is unheeded. Twenty centuries will yet be obliged to look at it. One-fifth of the population of the United States is now in cities, and we had but one twenty-fifth in cities at the opening of the century. The disproportionate growth of great towns is a phenomenon of all civilized lands, and not simply of the United States. London increases faster than England, Berlin than Germany, as well as New-York City than New-York State, and Chicago than Illi¬ nois. This last week in Boston, the American Social Science Association discussed work schools in cities, — a topic not likely to look empty to honest eyes. Much after Thomas Chalmers’s plan, there was found¬ ed at the North End, yesterday, a biblical and evan¬ gelical, but wholly undenominational, church for the poor. It is a good sign. [Applause.] Boston is now a crescent, stretching around the tip 'of the tongue of Massachusetts Bay, from Chelsea Beach to the Milton Hills. When you and I are here no longer, this growing young moon will embrace Mount Auburn, and line with its increasing light both shores of our azure sea for miles toward the sunrise. It is, however, unsafe to act upon the supposition, which some seem to harbor, that all the old peninsula her e will be needed as a stately commercial exchange, and that the very poor can be crowded out of it, into homes beyond a ferry, or reached only by railway. THEODORE PARKER’S ABSOLUTE RELIGION. 61 The poorest of the poor must live very near their work. We want model lodging-houses for them, like the London Waterlow buildings, which pay six per cent on their cost. For a more fortunate class we must have cheap houses outside municipal limits. But, more than all, we want self-supporting churches among the destitute and degraded. Boston is more favorably situated than any other American city to show how democracy and Chris¬ tianity can govern a great town well. First at the throat of Slavery, will Boston be the first American city to throttle Metropolitan Evil ? Chalmers used to affirm, that cities can be managed morally as well as the country-side, if their religious privileges are made as great in proportion to their population. But, gentlemen, while we embrace every opportu¬ nity to call out the efforts of the church in personal visitation of the poor, and in the founding of self- supporting religious institutions, let us not forget the responsibility of the civil arm for the shutting up of the dens of temptation. [Applause.] If you will visit your more desolate quarters in this city, — and the most Infamously vicious are not at the North End,— you will find reason to go home with something more substantial as your programme of future efforts than weak regrets, expressed at your fireside over aesthetic tea and your newspaper, about the lack of the execution of good laws here. [Applause.] Sev¬ enty-five millions of dollars in this city are engaged in the liquor-traffic; and, if I could shut up the multi* 62 TRANSCENDENTALISM. tudinous doors to temptation, I might shut np the alms-houses. This is so trite a truth, that you blame me for presenting it; but your Governor Andrew used to say, that this truth is trite only because it is so superabundantly true and important as to have been repeated over and over. You loathe the unjust judges of history; you place in pillories of infamy men whose duty it has been to execute law, and have not done it. Are you safe from such pillories? When we, as American freemen, give in our account before that bar where there is no shuffling, we shall do so as a population to whom the sword of justice was given largely in vain. We the people, and especially that professional class represented here, are intrusted with power, most of which is not a terror to evil-doers, nor a praise to them who do well. Under the murky threats of the years ahead of us, it is the duty of the parlor, the pulpit, the press, politics, and the police — the five great powers of these modern ages — to join arms and go forward in one phalanx for the execution of all those just public enactments which shut places of tempta¬ tion, and leave a man a good chance to be born right the second time by being born right the first time. [Applause.] THE LECTURE. Professor Tholuck, in his garden at Halle-on-the- Saale, once said to me, “ The Tubingen school, as you know, is no longer in existence at Tubingen it¬ self: as a sect in biblical criticism, it has perished: THEODORE PARKER’S ABSOLUTE RELIGIOK. 63 its history has been written in more than one lan¬ guage. Only a few years ago, however, we had six broad-backed Englishmen take their seats on the university benches at Tubingen, and ask to be taught Bauer’s theology. But Professors Beck and Landerer and Palmer, who oppose that scheme of thought, now outgrown among our best scholars, told the sturdy sons of Britain, that they must seek elsewhere for instruction of that sort; whereupon they turned their faces homeward, sadder, but wiser.” Theodore Parker was a scholar of the Tubingen school. His characteristic positions concerning the Bible are those which have seen battle and defeat of late in Germany. They are perfectly familiar to all who have studied that great range of criticism called the Tubingen exegetical biblical criticism. This had great influence about the time Parker was forming his opinions; and he began his public career by launchiug himself upon what time has proved to be only a re-actionary eddy, and not the gulf-current, of scholarship. (See article on the u Decline of Ra¬ tionalism in the German Universities,” Bib. Sacra , October, 1875.) His first work was a translation of De Wette. In his formative years of study the now outgrown Tubingen critics were his chief reading. In philosophy, as distinguished from biblical re¬ search, we all see that Theodore Parker has founded no new school. His distinctive positions have no large following, even among our erratics. Mr. Froth- ingham of New-York City, who is one of his biogra* phers, and perhaps more nearly than any other man 64 TRANSCENDENTALISM. his successor, said in 1864, in the North American Review, that he anticipates for Theodore Parker as a metaphysician no immortality. Let me quiet your apprehensions, gentlemen, by affirming at the outset my reverence for Theodore Parker’s antislavery principles. [Applause.] Theo¬ dore Parker’s memory stands in the past as a statue. The rains, and biting sleet, and winds beat upon it. A part of the statue is of clay: a part is of bronze. The clay is his theological speculation: the bronze is his antislavery action. The clay will be washed away; already it crumbles. The bronze will endure; and, if men are of my mind, it will form a figure to be venerated. [Applause.] What are the most essential positions of Theodore Parker’s absolute religion ? 1. That man has an instinctive intuition of the fact of the Divine existence. 2. That he has an instinctive intuition of the exist¬ ence and authority of the moral law. 3. That he has an instinctive intuition of his own immortality. 4. That an infinitely-perfect God is omnipresent or immanent in the world of matter and in that of spirit. 5. That this idea of the Divine Perfection and Im¬ manence is unknown to both the Old Testament and the New, and to every popular theology. 6. That the accounts of miracles in the Bible are all untrustworthy. T. That, when we are free from the love of sin, we are also free from the guilt of it. THEODORE PARKER’S ABSOLUTE RELIGION. 65 8. That sin is the tripping of a child who is learn¬ ing to walk, or a necessary, and, for the most part, inculpable stage in human progress. A very ugly and dangerous set of propositions are these last four; a rather inspiring set are the first four: but all eight were Theodore Parker’s. (See Weiss’s Life of Parker , yol. ii. pp. 455, 470, 472.) Some of his hearers fed themselves on the former, some on the latter; and hence the opposite effects he seemed to produce in different cases. It was on the first four that he not doubtfully supposed himself to have been successful in founding what he called an absolute, or natural religion. No other document written by Theodore Parker is so important, as an exposition of his views, as that touching, but in places almost coarsely irreverent, letter sent from the West Indies to the Twenty eighth Congregational Society, after he had fled away from America to die. Nothing else in that letter, which he called “ Parker’s Apology for Him¬ self,” is as important as this central passage: — “ I found certain great primal intuitions of human nature, which depend on no logical process of demonstration, but are rather facts of consciousness given by the instinctive action of human nature itself. I will mention only the three most im¬ portant which pertain to religion: — “1. The instinctive intuition of the divine, — the conscious¬ ness that there is a God. “2. The instinctive intuition of the just and right, — a con¬ sciousness that there is a moral law independent of our will, which we ought to keep. “ 3. The instinctive intuition of the immortal, —a conscious- 66 TRANSCENDENTALISM. ness that the essential element of man, the principle of individ¬ uality, never dies. “ Here, then, was the foundation of religion, laid in human nature itself, which neither the atheist nor the more pernicious bigot, with their sophisms of denial or affirmation, could move, or even shake. I had gone through the great spiiitual tiial of my life, telling no one of its hopes or fears; and I thought it a triumph that I had psychologically established these three things to my own satisfaction, and devised a scheme, which, to the scholar’s mind, X thought could legitimate what was sponta¬ neously given to all by the great primal instincts of mankind. From the primitive facts of consciousness given by the power of instinctive intuition, I endeavored to deduce the true notion of God, of justice, and futurity. Here I could draw from human nature, and not be hindered by the limitations of human history; but X know now, better than it was possible then, how difficult is this work, and how often the inquirer mis¬ takes his own subjective imagination for a fact of the universe. It is for others to decide whether I have sometimes mistaken a little grain of brilliant dust in my telescope for a fixed star in heaven . [Applause.] (Weiss: Life of Parker, vol. ii. p. 455.) Julius Muller, professor in the University of Halle, is commonly regarded now as the greatest theologian in the world. His chief hook is a discussion of sin. From first to last, his scheme of natural religion is built with scientific exactness on self-evident, axiom¬ atic, intuitive truth. The very rock on which Parker planted his foot is a corner-stone of the acutest evangelical theology of the globe to-day. Read Julius M filler’s discussions (.Doctrine of Sin , trans. in T. & T. Clark’s Library, Edinburgh), and you will find him more reverent than Theodore Parker toward intuitive, axiomatic, self-evident propositions of all THEODORE PARKER’S ABSOLUTE RELIGION. 67 kinds. He, however, has cleared the whole surface of the rock of which Parker, in his haste, saw but a part. Instead of building on that broader founda¬ tion a slight structure, he has begun the erection of a palace. He has been obliged to stretch its founda¬ tions out to correspond in every part with the once unsuspected extent of this whole support of natural adamant. Parker strangely overlooked the fact that we have an intuitive knowledge of sin as a fact in our personal experience. That knowledge must shape our philosophy. Building upon it, Julius Mul¬ ler did not ask whether the rising walls he con¬ structed would or would not meet, point for point, the walls of the celestial city, which, Revelation teaches, lay in the air above him. He did not look upward at all, but downward only, upon this revela¬ tion in the constitutional intuitions and instincts. He explored conscience. He brought to the light the surface of the whole rock of intuitive moral truth, and not merely that of a part of it. He built around its edges after the plan shown in the adamant itself. It turns out, that to-day Germany calls that man her chief theologian, because it has found that these walls, rising from the adamant of axiomatic truth, wholly without regard to the foundations of the floating celestial city above, are conterminous and correspondent with those upper walls in every part, and that the two palaces are one. [Applause.] It is a solemn provision of the courts of law, that a man under oath must tell the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. In the use of intuitions and 68 TRANSCENDENTALISM. instincts, experiment and syllogism, tlie tiling I am chiefly anxious about, is, that we clear the whol$ platform before we begin to build. We must take the testimony of all the intuitions ; we must be will¬ ing* to look into the deliverance of all the instincts; we must neglect no part of man’s experiments, con¬ tinued, age after age, in his philanthropic and reli¬ gious life ; we must revere the syllogism everywhere. James Freeman Clarke has repeatedly pointed out, that an inadequate use of our intuitive knowledge of the fact of sin in personal experience is a most searching and perhaps fatal flaw in Parker’s scheme of thought. Give our intuitive knowledge of the fact of sin its proper place, and, if you are true to the scientific method, the fact that you are sick will make you ask for a physician. I am not asserting the sufficiency, but only the efficiency, of a wholly scientific, natural religion. Every day it becomes clearer to philosophical scholarship, that the whole deliverance of the Works is synonymous, in every vocal and in every whispered syllable, with the whole deliverance of the Word. Certain it is, that the whole list of moral intuitions, of which Theodore Parker made use of but a part, is the basis of the acutest evangelical natural theology to-day. When I compare the structure that Theodore Parker erected here in Boston on a fragment of this adamant of axiomatic truth, it seems to me a careless cabin, as contrasted with Julius Miiller’s palatial work. What your New-York palace, appointed in every part well, is to that wretched squatter’s tenement, THEODOEE PAEKEE’S ABSOLUTE EELIGION. 69 standing, it may be, face to face with it in the upper part of Manhattan Island yonder, such is the com¬ plete intuitional religious philosophy, compared with Theodore Parker’s absolute religion. [Applause.] What are the more important errors in Theodore Parker’s system of thought ? 1. It is possible to imagine that the^ soul is not immortal. Every materialist here will of course grant me this proposition. I am willing to admit that I think it entirely possible to imagine the non-existence of the soul as a personality after death. The idea of the soul’s immortality is, therefore, not a necessary idea. Of course spiritual substance, like material substance, we suppose to be indestructible; but, as a personal¬ ity, the soul may at least be imagined to cease to exist. I cannot, however, so much as imagine that space should not exist, or that time should not, or that every change should not have a cause. There is a perfect incapacity in my mind to conceive of the annihilation of space or time: therefore it is per¬ fectly clear that the idea of the soul’s immortality is not a necessary idea in the same sense in which my ideas of space and time are necessary ideas. Nor is this idea of immortality a universal idea, as that of space or time is. Some sane men appear to be without any confidence in immortality as a fact; but there never was a sound mind that did not act upon the practical supposition that every change must have a cause, and that a thing cannot be and not be at the same time in the same sense. Your 70 TRANSCENDENTALISM. urchin on Boston Common who holds a ball in his hand behind him, and who hears the assertion from some other urchin, that the ball is in another place, knows better. He has the ball in his hand; and he is perfectly confident that the same thing cannot be and not be at the same time and in the same sense. You state that proposition to him, and he will stare at you with wide eyes. He knows nothing of the metaphysical statement: nevertheless, that propo¬ sition is in his possession implicitly, though not explicitly. He acts upon it with perfect intelligence. He knows that the ball is in his hand, and that therefore that ball is not anywhere else. This is a self-evident, axiomatic, necessary belief, or an intui¬ tion in the scientific sense of the word. Not in that sense, can we call the fact of immortality an intuitive truth. We have an instinctive anticipation of existence after death. We can prove that. There is no real intuition of existence after death. The proposition that the soul is immortal is there¬ fore not marked by the three traits of intuitive truth, — self-evidence, necessity, and universality. Only a slovenly scholarship could assert that this proposition is marked by these traits. Theodore Parker asserted, however, that the fact of immortality is an intuitive truth. This unsupported assertion was a corner-stone of his absolute religion. You will, therefore, allow me to say, that, — 2. Theodore Parker did not carefully distinguish from each other intuition and instinct . THEODORE PARKER’S ABSOLUTE RELIGION. 71 • To blunder on that point is so common, that I shall be unable to convince you of the importance of error there, unless you take pains in your libraries to apply these tests of self-evidence, necessity, and universality to a certain class of truths, and see how the tests distinguish that class from every other set of proposi¬ tions that you can imagine. Only those truths which show the traits of self-evidence, necessity, and univer¬ sality, are intuitive. Loose popular speech may use the word intuition carelessly; but when a great reader like Theodore Parker confounds instinct and intuition, and speaks now about our having an intui¬ tion, and now of our possessing an instinctive intui¬ tion of the immortality of the soul, we must say that he is careless ; for it is two thousand years now that self-evidence, necessity, and universality have been used as the tests of intuitive truth. Between an in¬ stinct and an intuition there is as palpable a distinction as between the right hand and the left; and to con¬ fuse the two, as Theodore Parker’s deliberate speech does, is unscholarly to the degree of being slovenly. I put once before the chief authority of Harvard Uni¬ versity in metaphysics the question, whether meta¬ physical scholars have commonly classed immortality among the intuitive truths. He smiled, and said, “ Who taught you that they have ? ” — “ Why, I have read,” said I, “ that there was once in Boston a reli¬ gion built up on the idea that immortality is an intu¬ ition,” And the smile became even broader, although the man was very liberal in his theology. “ Theodore Parker,” said he, “ was not a consecutive, philosoph- 72 TRANSCENDENTALISM. ical thinker. No metaphysician of repute has ever classed immortality among the intuitive truths, al¬ though it has again and again been classed as a deliv¬ erance of our instincts.” 3. It is not safe to assert, as Parker does, that the Divine Existence is a strictly intuitive truth. Pace amantis ! Peace to all lovers of the doctrine that belief in the Divine Existence is intuitive! I wish to treat reverently that school of philosophy which asserts that we have an intuition, strictly so- called, of the fact that God exists. To me the Di¬ vine Existence is evident; but it is not, strictly speaking, self-evident. It is evident by only one step of reasoning, and is the highest of derivative, but is not really a primitive, first truth, or axiomatic fact. It is as sure as any axiom; but it is not an axiom that God is. I can, I think, imagine that God might not exist. I cannot imagine that space does not, or that time does not. I know that Sir Isaac Newton said that space and time are attri¬ butes, and that every attribute must inhere in some substance, and that if space and time are necessary existences, and are really objective to the mind, and not merely a green color thrown upon the universe by the mental spectacles which we now wear, then God must be, for space and time must be. Pace amantis , once more! I know how many scholars agree in the opinion that time and space are merely necessary ideas, and not objectively real. They are in the color of the glasses through which we look. The truth is, that recent philosophy more and more THEODORE PARKER’S ABSOLUTE RELIGION. T3 approaches the conclusion of Sir Isaac Newton, that space and time are objectively real. Dr. McCosh of Princeton, George Henry Lewes, materialistic though he is, and a score of other recent representatives of rival philosophical schools, regard space and time as mysterious somewhats, which very possibly have a real existence outside our spectacles. They are not simply necessary ideas, fixed colors in our spectacles, but something outside of us. Now it is true, that, if space and time be objec¬ tively real, they imply the existence of something that is just as necessary in its existence, and just as eternal, as they. If they are qualities of any thing, instead of mere colors in the lenses through which we look, there must be a substance that is necessary in its existence, eternal, and absolutely independent; and that can be only an infinitely perfect being. You cannot imagine the non-existence of space or time; you cannot think that they ever were not, or that they ever will cease to be; and so, if they are attributes, they are the attributes of a Being that was, and is, and is to come. Many are now turning to that philosophy which the later and the older investigation supports,— namely, that space and tinm are objectively real, and that this fact contains incontrovertible proof of the Divine Self-Existence. But you derive that argu¬ ment from the existence of space and time; you do not look directly upon the Divine Existence even then. There is a single step of reasoning; and so the truth, although evident, is not self-evident. T4 TRANSCENDENTALISM. I know how many are puzzled to prove the Divine Sell-Existence. Paley’s argument from the watch, we are told by some who misunderstand it, proves too much. A design proves a designer? Yes. But must not God himself, then, have had a designer, and his designer a designer, and his designer a designer, and so on forever ? This inquiry is familiar to reli¬ gious science under the name of the question as to the Infinite Series. The reply to all that tantalizing ob¬ jection is, that intuitive truth demonstrates the exist¬ ence of dependent being, and that there cannot be a dependent without an independent being. There cannot be a here without there being a there , can there ? There cannot be a before without there being an after , can there ? There cannot be an upper with¬ out there being an under , can there? If, therefore, I can prove there is a here , I can prove there is a there; if I can prove there is a before , I can prove there is an after; if I can prove there is an upper , I can prove there is an under. Just so, by logical necessity, there cannot be a dependent being without an independent; and I am a dependent being, and therefore there is an Independent or Self-Existent Being. [Applause.] Thus I must be cautious or modest enough not to assert that we have a direct intuition of the Divine Existence. This truth is instinctive, not intuitive. It seems to lie capsulate in all our highest instincts. Our sense of dependence and obligation, great facts, if barely scratched with the point of a scalpel of analysis, reveal Almighty God, and make the soul’s THEODORE PARKER’S ABSOLUTE RELIGION. 75 cheeks pale. I cannot affirm, however, that the Divine Existence is self-evident, although it is evi¬ dent as the noon. Theodore Parker’s assertion that the Divine Exist¬ ence is known to us by intuition implies that this truth has the three traits of self-evidence, necessity, and universality. Only a slovenly scholarship can assert that the truth possesses these traits. On a score of other points, it might be shown that Parker was misled, by not making a sharp distinction between instinct and intuition. 4. He did not carefully distinguish inspiration from illumination. Once more: peace to the lovers of the doctiine that modern men of genius are inspired more or less — especially less! There is a book composed of sixty-six pamphlets, written in different ages, some of them barbarous; and I affirm that there are in the volume no adulter¬ ate moral elements. It is a winnowed book. Its winnowedness is a fact made tangible by ages of the world’s experience. Of course I need not say to this distinguished audience, what Galileo said to his persecutors, that the Bible is given to teach how to go to heaven, and not how the heavens go.. Do not suppose that inspiration guarantees infallibility in merely botanical truth. A small philosopher said to me once, “ The Bible affirms that the mustard-seed is the smallest of all seeds. Now, there are seeds so small, that they cannot be seen with the naked 76 TRANSCENDENTALISM. sye. Where, therefore, is your doctrine of inspira¬ tion ? ” I thought that man's mind was the smallest of all mustard-seeds. Inspiration is rightly defined in religious science as the gift of infallibility in teaching moral and religious truth. The Scriptures are given by inspiration in this sense, and therefore are profitable for what ? For botany ? That is not the record. They are profitable for reproof, correc¬ tion, and instruction in righteousness. They are a rule of religious, and not of botanical, faith and practice. My mutsard-seed philosopher, like many another objector to the doctrine of the inspiration of the Scripture, appeared to be in ignorance of the definition of inspiration. Perfect moral and religious winnowedness exists in the Bible , and in no other booh in the world . Is there any other book the ages could absorb into then veins as they have the Bible, and feel nothing bur health as the result? Mr. Emerson told a convention of rationalists once, in this city, that the morality of the New Testament is scientific and perfect. But the morality of the New Testament is that of the Old. Yes, you say; but what of the imprecatory Psalms ? A renowned professor, who, as Germany thinks, has done more for New-England theology than any man since Jonathan Edwards, was once walking in this city with a clergy¬ man of a radical faith, who objected to the doctrine that the Bible is inspired, and did so on the ground of the imprecatory Psalms. The replies of the usual kind were made; and it was presumed that David THEODORE PARKER’S ABSOLUTE RELIGION. 77 expressed the Divine purpose in praying that his enemies might be destroyed, and that he gave utter¬ ance only to the natural righteous indignation of conscience against unspeakable iniquity. But the doubter would not be satisfied. The two came at last to a newspaper bulletin, on which the words were written, — the time was at the opening of our civil war, — “Baltimore to be shelled at twelve o’clock.” “ I am glad of it,” said the radical preach¬ er; “I am glad of it.” — “And so am I,” said his companion; “ but I hardly dare say so, for fear you will say I am uttering an imprecatory psalm.” [Ap¬ plause.] One proof of the inspiration of the Bible is its perfect moral winnowedness; and there are a thou¬ sand other proofs. Inspiration must at least guaran¬ tee winnowedness ; and I find no modern inspiration that guarantees even as little as that. I am not giving the proof of inspiration, but only illustrating the distinction between inspiration and illumination. Why, our literati will probably bow down before Shakspeare as an inspired man, if that phrase is to be taken in the loose, misleading sense in which Parker used it. How often otherwise brilliant litera¬ ture tells us that inspiration is of the same kind in all writers, sacred and profane, differing only in degree! Very well: if any modern man has been inspired, perhaps Shakspeare was. But is there moral winnowedness in his writings? Shakspeare's father was a high bailiff of Stratford-on-Avon. John Shakspeare, alderman, high bailiff, and justice of the 78 TRANSCENDENTALISM. peace, the worshipful, — these were SI akspeare’s father’s titles; and it was his business to execute the laws. But in 1552 he was fined for the unsavory offence of allowing a heap of refuse to accumulate in front of his own door. The next year he repeated this violation of law (White’s Sliakspeare , vol. i. p. 15). The son afterwards exhibited by fits much of the father’s mind. [Applause.] I never read certain passages in Shakspeare without thinking of that experience of the high bailiff on Henley Street, in Stratford. Nevertheless, although Shakspeare’s mir¬ ror is so wide that it takes into its lower ranges the gutter and the feather-heads, it takes in, also, in its upper ranges, eternity itself. [Applause.] This great soul held the mirror up, not merely to time, but, in some sense, to the Unseen Holy. I reverence him fathomlessly, but not as a winnowed writer. “ He never blotted a line,” said Ben Jonson. u Would he had blotted a thousand! ” There is no winnowed writer outside of the Bible. You cannot put together out of the world a dozen, or six, to say nothing of sixty-six pamphlets, that shall contain, as the sixty-six in the Bible do, an harmonious system of religious truth, and no morally adulterate element. Where are there six volumes that could be stitched together, even from among those that Christianity has inspired, of which we can say they possess this lowest, and by no means ex¬ haustive trait of true inspiration, — perfect moral and religious winnowedness ? The difference between illumination and inspiration is as vast as that between THEODORE PARKER’S ABSOLUTE RELIGION. 79 the east and west. Long enough we have heard, here in Boston, that all men are inspired more or less; and long enough have we learned that the con¬ fusion of inspiration and illumination with each other may work endless mischief, even when a man as honest as Theodore Parker endeavors to build up, after confusing them, a system of faith. It is not unimportant to notice that our faith in inspiration, rightly defined, would not be touched at all, even if we were to prove a geological error in every verse of the first chapter of Genesis. I do not believe there is any geological error there. With Dana, with Guyot, with Pierce, with Dawson, we can hold that the record of the progress of events in the creation of the world is correct. If this is correct, it must have been inspired; for, unless it was taught to him from above, no man could have known the complex order accurately of events that occurred before man was. Dana says, in his last chapter of his Geology, 14 This document in the first chapter of Genesis, if true, is of divine origin. It is profoundly philosophical in the scheme of creation it presents. It is both true and divine. It is a declaration of authorship, both of creation and the Bible” ( Geology, pp. 767, 770). Read Thomas Hill’s subtly powerful articles just issued in a book on 44 The Natural Sources of Theology,” and you will find this ex-president of Harvard University, together with Professor Pierce, holding similar views. The biblical record states that light was created before the sun, — a most searching proof of inspira- 80 TRANSCENDENTALISM. tion; for we know now that the first shiver of the molecular atoms must have produced light; and the sun, according to the nebular hypothesis, must have come into existence long afterwards. But what if merely geological or botanical error, touching no religious truth, were found in the Bible, we should yei hold, that, in the first leaves of the Scriptures, we have most unspeakably important religious truth. They teach the spiritual origin of creation; they teach that man had a personal Creator; they show, that in the beginning, God, an individual Will, brought into existence the heavens and the earth. I do not admit that scientific error has been proved against the Bible anywhere; but if an error in merely physical science, touching no religious truth, were proved, inspiration would yet stand unharmed. Parker’s trouble with the Bible arose largely from his carelessness in definitions. Confusing intuition and instinct, and inspiration and illumination, he made almost as great mistakes as when he confused the supernatural with the unnatural . Call up, gentlemen, that day when Theodore Par¬ ker left New York, and put in his Bible an Italian violet opposite the words, “ I will be with thee in the great waters.” I stood alone at Florence, at the side of the grave of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and )ked on the grave of Theodore Parker. The sturdy Apennines gazed on the soft flow of the Arno ; melodious murmurs whispered through the fatness of the olive-branches; there fell in deluges out of the unspeakable azure in the Italian sky the light of the THEODORE PARKER’S ABSOLUTE RELIGION. 81 sun and of the sun behind the sun. I remembered the culture of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and her faith. I could not forget how wide was her outlook upon the inner world as well as upon the outer, how subtle beyond comment her instincts and intu¬ itions; and in my solitude I asked myself, which faith—hers, or his—was likely to be of most service to the world in the swirling tides of history, and which the best support to individual souls in the great waters on which we pass hence. I remembered tenderly the good there was in this man and in this woman; but I asked which had the better faith for service in great waters. Both loved the poor; there was in each one of these souls at birth a spark out of the empyrean; and, under that Italian azure, I asked which faith had been the most efficient in fanning that spark to flame. It seemed to me, at the side of those graves in Italy, that Elizabeth Bar¬ rett Browning, had she stood there alive, would have had eyes before which those of Theodore Parker would have fallen, to rise again only when possessed of her deeper vision. Strike out of existence that teaching which has come to us through the God in Christ, whom Elizabeth Barrett Browning wor¬ shipped, but whom Theodore Parker held to be a myth, or merely a man; strike out of existence that \ealing which is offered to the race in an ineffable Atonement, which in the solitudes of conscience may be scientifically known to be the desire of all nations; strike out of existence these truths,—and then, if the moral law which Parker glorified none too much 82 TRANSCENDENTALISM. continues its demands, you will have stricken out the solution of life’s greatest enigma. Great is the law, said Theodore Parker. Yes, I know it is great, said Elizabeth Barrett Browning; I know that the law is spiritual; it is glorious; all you say of it, I affirm with deeper emphasis : but I am carnal; I am not at peace before that law: who shall deliver me? Faith¬ fulness to all the intuitions would have brought that man, as it brought this woman, to this supreme ques¬ tion, the resounding shore of our mightiest inner sea; and it would have given assured safety there in the last day for your reformer who disbelieved, as for your poetess who believed; and the safety would have been in this only possible answer: 44 1 will bo with thee in the great waters.” [Applause.] CARICATURED DEFINITIONS IN RELIGIOUS SCIENCE. THE SIXTY-SECOND LECTURE IN THE BOSTON MONDAY LEC¬ TURESHIP, DELIVERED IN TREMONT TEMPLE JAN. 23. “In natural philosophy there was no less sophistry, no less dispute and uncertainty, than in other sciences, until, about a century and a half ago, this science began to be built upon the foundation of clear definitions and self-evident axioms. Since that time, the science, as if watered with the dew of heaven, hath grown apace: disputes have ceased, truth hath prevailed, and the science hath received greater increase in two centuries than in two thousand years before.”— Reid: Collected Writings, vol. i. p. 219. “ It is well said by the old logicians, Omnis intuitiva notitia est definitio; that is, a view of the thing itself is its best definition. This is true both of the objects of sense and of the objects of self- consciousness.”— Sm William Hamilton. IV. CARICATURED DEFINITIONS IN RELI¬ GIOUS SCIENCE. PRELUDE ON CURRENT EVENTS. If Belgium or Holland had two kings, we should loftily look down on those European states as illus¬ trations of the effeteness of monarchical government. But South Carolina is twice as large as Belgium, and Louisiana three times as large as Holland, and each of these States has two legislatures elected in our centennial year. Nevertheless, face to face with' our wide areas of Mexicanized politics, we loftily foster our pride, or lightly excuse ourselves from political duties, as if after us were to come the deluge. Something of a deluge, one would think, has already swept over us in a civil war; hut it fell out of a cloud that was once thought to he not larger than a man’s hand. A murky threat in it, indeed; hut when that cloud had overspread all our national horizon, when its leagued massive thunders filled all our azure, when its forked zig-zag threats hlazed above all business and bosoms, the best of us were yet doubtful whether there was to be much of a shower. 85 86 TKANSCENDENTALISM. The most popular orator of this nation I heard address a collegiate audience three days before Sumter fell; and, walking to the edge of the plat¬ form, he asked, “ What is going to happen ? ” and then whispered, with his hand above his lips, “ Just nothing at all.” Perhaps it is worth while to look a little at the murky threat of Mexicanization in portions of our politics; for who knows whether we are to be saved from all our difficulties by an ex post facto electoral law ? Will troubles never come again ? What if a presidential election as close as the last had taken place in the midst of our civil war? Will indecisive contests for political primacy in a territory greater than Csesar governed never again tempt the gigantic contestants to fraud ? Will colossal partisan spoils and political corruption soon cease to stand in the relation of cause and effect? Our fathers studied British precedents to avoid British dangers; but is it not high time to begin to study American precedents in order to avoid American dangers ? Are we now seeking to throttle the real causes of our civil dis¬ tresses, or dealing only with a few of their effects ? How long is intimidation to last on the Gulf? How long will the ignorant ballot be a threatering politi¬ cal fact in the slums of Northern cities ? Massachusetts, you say, is very highly cultured, and is outgrowing the evils that attend On the youth of republics. Are you sure, that, when the popula¬ tion of Massachusetts is as dense as that of England, your Massachusetts laws will make every thing CARICATURED DEFINITIONS. 87 smooth here ? Has this Commonwealth a right to be proud of its exemption from illiteracy? There are here a million, six hundred thousand people, and a hundred thousand of them are illiterates. Of a hun¬ dred thousand citizens in Massachusetts above ten years of age, and of seventy-seven thousand above twenty-one, it is true either that they cannot read or that they cannot write. The days that are passing over us are serious in the last degree, because it is very evident that our present difficulties—with the ignorant ballot, and with intimidation and trickery in close elections, and with the atrocious rule that to political victors belong all political spoils — will grow. Certainly the perils arising from the ignorant ballot, and from greed and fraud in contests for spoils greater than Caesar, Antony, and Lepidus fought for, will enlarge as cities grow more numerous and populous, and as political party patronage becomes fatter and vaster. We may escape from intimidation at last, but not in your generation or mine. There will be, while we are in the world, whole ranges of States, in which it will be at times hardly safe to vote against the will of the governing class, and where a perfectly free election will be the exception, and not the rule. Lord Macaulay, you know, in letters lately pub¬ lished, though written in 1858, predicted, that, when¬ ever we have a population of two hundred to the square mile, the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian parts of our civil polity will produce fatal effects. You say Macaulay is unduly full of tremor as to the future 88 TRANSCENDENTALISM. of republican institutions, and that France frightened him too much with her revolution; but he is exceed¬ ingly cautious. Europe has only eighty inhabitants to the square mile; and this historian says, that, when we have two hundred to the square mile, we shall be obliged to manage our politics on some other plan than that which supposes that all problems can be settled “by a majority of the citizens told by the head; that is to say, by the poorest and most ignorant part of society.” What do I want ? Am I here to make a plea for aristocratic institutions ? Massachusetts has a read¬ ing-test: New York has not. It was my fortune, or misfortune, to be born in the Empire State, and it is a grievous thing to me to know that that vast com¬ monwealth, which, above and west of the Highlands of the Hudson, is only a prolongation of New Eng¬ land, is politically under the heels of New York, below the Highlands, and would not be if the read¬ ing-test, which my State used to have, had been retained in the popular suffrage. In 1821 our State constitution was revised in New York; and Martin Yan Buren, when the reading-test was stricken out, predicted precisely the metropolitan evils which have arisen from the ignorant ballot in New-York City. Eighteen or twenty thousand votes in every munici¬ pal election in New York cannot read or write; and they are a make-weight sufficient, in the hands of a few astute and unscrupulous men, to determine the result of any ordinary political contest in that city. Drop out her twenty thousand ignorant ballots, CARICATURED DEFINITIONS. 89 and New-York City, politicians say, could, with no great difficulty, be restored to the control of her industrious and intelligent classes. If New York were London, and if her ignorant ballot were large in proportion to her size, not merely New-York State, but, I fear, New England, would be under the heels of the lower half of New-York City. What are we to do about these things ? Civil-ser¬ vice reform is up for discussion from sea to sea; and why should not President Grant’s repeated offi¬ cial words on the ballot be also up in this serious time for public thought ? In this distinguished audi¬ ence it cannot have escaped attention that his recom¬ mendation of the reading-test in the national vote has escaped attention. President Grant would take the ballot from nobody who has it now. He would let all men who have received the right to vote hold that right. But he would open the school doors; he would cause a common school education to be free as the air; he would make it as compulsory as the summer wind is upon the locks of the boy, trudging his way to the recitations of the morning; he would remove every obstacle to the acquisition of a knowl¬ edge of reading and writing; and then, after, say, the year 1890, he would refuse the ballot to everybody who has not learned to read and write. [Applause.] I am glad that Boston does not let this presidential recommendation sleep. We must be more thoughtful of what is to come in America, or much will come of which we do not think. Which is the more worthy of the culture of 90 TKANSCENDENTALISM. a scholar in politics,—to throttle evils before, or only after, they themselves throttle ns? Theodore Parker was a pastor in Boston, and he writes in his journal one day, concerning William Craft, the fugitive slave: “ I inspected his arms, — a good revolver with six caps on, a large pistol, two small ones, a large dirk and a short one: all was right.” That was efficient pastoral inspection of a parish. Yonder, on the slope of Beacon Hill, Theo¬ dore Parker performed the rites of marriage for William and Ellen Craft, two cultured colored people belonging to the society of which he had charge. At the conclusion of the ceremony he put a Bible into the left hand of the hunted black man; and, as some one had laid a bowie-knife on the table, an inspiration of the moment caused Theodore Par¬ ker to put that weapon into the man’s right hand. He then said to the escaped slave, “ If you cannot use this without hating the man you strike against, your action will not be without sin; but to defend the honor of your wife, to defend your own life, and to save her and yourself from bondage, you have a right to use the Bible in your left hand and the bowie-knife in your right.” Say, if you please, that all that was melodramatic; say, if you will, that this style of action was Parker’s first, and not his second or his third thought. I affirm, that, in the little cloud which we thought had in it no deluge, he fore¬ saw civil war; and that, if pastors all through the North had been equally efficient, there would have been no bloody rain at Gettysburg. [Applause.] CAEICATUEED DEFINITIONS. 91 THE LECTTJKE. When Daniel Webster was asked how he ob¬ tained his clear ideas, he replied, “ By attention to definitions.” Dr. Johnson, whose business it was to explain words, was once riding on a rural road in Scotland, and, as he paused to water his horse at a wayside spring, he was requested by a woman of ad¬ vanced age to tell her how he, the great Dr. Johnson, author of a renowned dictionary, could possibly have defined the word “pastern” “the knee of a horse.” “Ignorance, madam,” was the reply, — “pure igno¬ rance.” For one, if I am forced to make a confession as to my personal difficulties with Orthodoxy of the scholarly type, I must use, as perhaps many another student might, both Webster’s and Johnson’s phrases as the outlines of the story. Before I attended to definitions, I had difficulties: after I attended to them in the spirit of the scientific method, my own serious account to myself of the origin of my per¬ plexities was, in most cases, given in Johnson’s words, “Ignorance, pure ignorance.” Theodore Parker’s chief intellectual fault was inadequate attention to definitions. As a conse¬ quence, his caricatures or misconceptions of Chris¬ tian truth were many and ghastly. I cannot discuss them all; but in addition to his failure to distinguish between intuition and instinct , and between inspira¬ tion and illumination , it must be said, in continuance of the list of his chief errors : — 5. He did not carefully distinguish from each other inspiration and dictation . 92 TRANSCENDENTALISM. When Benjamin Franklin was a young man, one of kis hungriest desires was to acquire a perfect style of writing; and, as he admired Addison more than any other author, he was accustomed to take an essay of the “ Spectator,” and make very full notes of all its thoughts, images, sentiments, and of some few of the phrases. He then would place his manuscript in his drawer, wait several weeks, or until he had forgotten the language of the original, and then would take his memoranda, and write out an essay including every idea, every pulse of emotion, every flash of imagination, that he had transferred from Addison to his notes. Then he would compare his work with the original, and humiliate himself ky the contrast of his own uncouth rhetorical garment with Addison’s perfect robe of flowing silk. He studied how to improve his crabbed, cold, or obscure phrases by the light of Addison’s noon of luminousness and imaginative and moral heat. Now, Franklin’s essay was, you would say in such a case, not dictated by Addison, but was inspired by Addison. Plainly there is a difference between inspiration and dictation. Orthodoxy believes the Bible to be inspired; and her definition of inspiration is the gift of infallibility in teaching moral and religious truth. But, by inspiration thus defined, Orthodoxy does not mean dictation. She means that the Bible is as full of God as Franklin’s echoed essay was of Addison. As in his essay there were both an Addi¬ sonian and a Franklinian element, so, speaking roundly, there are in the Bible a divine and a human CARICATURED DEFINITIONS. 93 element; but the latter is swallowed up in the for¬ mer even more completely than the Franklinian waa in the Addisonian. All the thought in Franklin’s essay is, by supposition, Addison’s, and some of the phrases are his ; but Franklin’s words are there. All the moral and religious thought of the Bible is, ac¬ cording to the definition of inspiration, divine, and so are some of the phrases; but human words are there. The chief proof, after all, that the Bible is good food, is the eating of it. The healing efficacy of a medicine when it is used is the demonstration that it is good. Now, the world has been eating the Bible as it never ate any other book, and the Bible has been saturating the veins of the ages as they were never saturated by the food derived from any other volume ; but there is no spiritual disease that you can point to that is the outcome of biblical inculcation. We all feel sure that it would be better than well for the world, if all the precepts of this volume were ab¬ sorbed and transmuted into the actions of men. The astounding fact is , that the Bible is the only booh in the world that ivill bear full and permanent translation into life. The careless and superficial sometimes do not distinguish from each other the biblical record and the biblical inculcation. I know that fearful things are recorded in the Bible concerning men, who, in some respects,were approved of God; but it is the biblical, inculcation which I pronounce free from adulterate elements, not the biblical record. Of course, in a mirror held up before the human heart, there will bo 94 TRANSCENDENTALISM. reflected blotches; but the inculcation of the Scrip tures, from the beginning to ihe end of the sixty-six pamphlets, is known by experience to be free from adulterate elements; and I defy the world to show any disease that ever has come from the absorption into the veins of the ages of the biblical inculcation. [Applause.] And, moreover, I defy the ages to show any ether book that could be absorbed thus in its inculcations, and not produce dizziness of the head, pimples on the skin, staggering at last, and the sow¬ ing of dragon’s teeth. [Applause.] There is something very peculiar about this one book, in the incontrovertible fact that its inculca¬ tions are preserved from such error as would work out, in experience, moral disease in the world. Plato taught such doctrines, that if the world had followed him as it has the Bible, and had absorbed not his account of men’s vices, but his positive inculcation, we to-day should be living in barracks, and we could not know who are our brothers, and who are our sisters. (Grote’s Plato , The Republic, “ Social Laws.”) There was in Plato, you say, inspiration. Very well. His inculcation under what you call inspiration, and I call illumination, would, as every scholar knows, have turned this fat world into a pasture-ground for the intellectual and powerful on the one side ; but the poor on the other side it would have ground down into the position of unaspiring and hopeless hewers of wood and drawers of water; and, worse than that, it would have quenched the divinest spark in natural religion, — family life. [Applause.] CARICATURED DEFINITIONS. 95 Dictation and plenary inspiration are not the same. I avoid technical terms here; but you must allow me, since Theodore Parker so often spoke against the plenary inspiration of the Bible, to say, that, by plenary inspiration, Orthodoxy does not mean verbal inspiration. Franklin’s essay was plen- arily, but not always verbally, inspired by Addison. If the Bible is written by dictation or verbal inspira¬ tion, as Theodore Parker often taught that Orthodox scholarship supposes that it is, even then it would not be at all clear that any translation of the Bible is verbally inspired. If any thing was dictated, of course, only the original was dictated. In places I believe we have in the Bible absolute dictation; and yet inspiration and dictation are two things; and the difference between them is worth pointing out when Orthodoxy is held responsible for a caricature of her definition, and when men are thrown into unrest on this point, as if they were called on to believe self-contradiction. The fact that all portions of the Bible are inspired does not imply at all that King James’s version, or the German, or the French, or the Hindostanee, or any other, is dictated by the Holy Ghost. Even these versions, however, are full of God, as Franklin’s essay was of Addison, and fuller. They, too, will bear translation into life. Sometimes, as in the Decalogue and the Sermon on the Mount, and in transfigured Psalm and prophecy, it well may be that we have in the original, words which came not by the will of man. There are three degrees of inspiration; and the 96 TRANSCENDENTALISM. distinctions between them are not manufactured by me, here and now, to meet the exigency of this dis¬ cussion: they are as old as John Locke. It is commonplace in religious science to speak of the inspiration of superintendence, as in Acts or Chroni¬ cles ; the inspiration of elevation, as in the Psalms; and the inspiration of suggestion, as in the Prophe¬ cies. The historical books of the Scriptures have been so superintended, that they are winnowed com¬ pletely of error in moral inculcation. But the inspiration of superintendence is the lowest degree of inspiration. We come to the great Psalms, which assuredly have no equals in literature, and which are palpably rained out of a higher sky than unassisted human genius has dropped its productions from. These Psalms, we say, are examples of the inspiration of elevation. But we have a yet higher range of the action of inspiration in passages like the distinct predictions that the Jews should be scattered among all nations, and nevertheless preserved as a separate people, as they have been ; or that Jerusalem should be destroyed, as it was; or that there should come a supreme Teacher of the race, as he has come. We find in the biblical record unmistakably prophetic passages, and these are seals of the inspiration of suggestion; for they could have been written only by suggestion. Infidelity never yet has made it clear that the Old-Testament predictions concerning the Jews have not been fulfilled. Rationalism, in Germany, whenever it takes up that topic, drops it like hot iron. “ What is a short proof of inspira* CARICATURED DEFINITIONS. 97 tic ii ? ” said Frederic the Great to his chaplain. u The Jews, your majesty,” was the answer. If there be in the Bible a single passage that is plainly prophetic, there is in that passage a very peculiar proof of its own divine origin. We have our Lord pointing out the prophecies concerning himself, and he makes it a reason why we should turn to the Old Testament, that they are they which testify of him. Now, if there be some passages of the Bible that contain these prophetic announcements, then the Teacher thus announced is divinely attested, and we .are to listen to him. If, however, we stand simply on the amazing fact of the moral and religious winnowedness of Scrip¬ ture, we have also a divine attestation. That win¬ nowedness is providential. What God does he means to do. He has done this for the Bible,—he has kept it free from moral and religious error in its inculcations. He has done that for no other book; and what he has done he from the first intended to do. Therefore the very fact of the winnowedness of the Bible is proof of a divine superintendence over it. Superintendence, elevation, suggestion, are differ¬ ent degrees of inspiration, which is of one kind. But inspiration and illumination, according to estab¬ lished definitions, differ in kind, and not merely in degree; for inspiration, as a term in religious science, — I am not talking of popular literature, — always carries with it the idea of winnowedness as to moral and religious truth. 98 TRANSCENDENTALISM. There is nothing in the +intuitive ranges of truth that comes into collision with biblical inculcation ; but there is no other sacred booh on the globe which those same ranges of axiomatic moral truth do not pierce through and through and through in more places than ever knight's sword went through an opponent's shield. A few brilliants plucked out of much mire are the texts sometimes cited to us from the sacred literature of India, China, Arabia, Greece, and Rome. I defy those who seem to be dazzled by these fragments, to read before any mixed company of cultivated men and women the complete inculcations of the Yedas, Shastas, and Koran. Those books have been ab¬ sorbed into the veins of nations; and we know what diseases have been the result. They must be tried by the stern tests which the Bible endures; that is , by intuition , instinct , experiment , and syllogism. All the sacred literatures of the world come into collision with the intuitions of conscience, or with the dic¬ tates of long experience, except that one strange volume, coming from a remoter antiquity than any other sacred book, and read to-day in two hundred languages of the globe, and kept so pure in spite of all the tempests of time that have swept through its sky, that above the highest heavens opened to us by genius, and beyond all our latest and loftiest ideals, the biblical azure spreads out as noon risen on mid-noon. [Applause.] 6. Theodore Parker was not careful enough to dis¬ tinguish between inspiration and revelation. By revelation I mean all self-manifestation of God, CARICATURED DEFINITIONS. 99 in liis words and his works both: inspiration is his self-manifestation in the Scriptures alone. Allow me to assert, face to face with the learning of this audi¬ ence, in the presence of which I speak with sincere deference, that Christianity would stand on the basis of revelation, — that is, on the self-manifestation of God in his works, including the facts of the New- Testament history, — even if the doctrine of inspira¬ tion were all thrown to the winds. You have been taught too often by rationalism that Christianity stands or falls on the truth of the doctrine of inspi¬ ration, whereas the nature and the degree of inspira¬ tion are questions between Christians themselves. Christianity, as a redemptive system, might stand on the great facts of the New Testament, if they were known as historic only, and the New-Testament literature were not inspired at all. Religion based on axiomatic moral truth would stand on revelation thus defined, even if inspiration were given up as a dream. [Applause.] Will you remember that the configuration of New England is the same at midnight and at noon ? It is my fortune to be a flying scout, or a kind of outlook committee, for my learned brethren here, and I carry a guide-book to this delicious nook of the round world; but what if I should lose that volume ? Would not the Merrimack continue to be the most industrious river within your borders, the Connecti¬ cut the most majestic, the White Hills and the Green Mountains the most stately of your elevations? Would there be any gleaming shore on your coast, 100 TRANSCENDENTALISM. where the Atlantic surge plays through the reeds, that would change its outline at all by day or by night because of the loss of my guide-book? Would not north and south, east and west, be just the same ? Inspiration gives us a guide-book: it does not create the landscape . Our human reason, compared with inspiration, is as starlight contrasted with the sunlight; but the landscape of our relations to God is just the same whether it be illumined or left in obscurity. We might trace out by starlight much of the map. The sun of inspiration arises, and we know the Merrimack and Connecticut as never be¬ fore ; but the sun did not create the Merrimack or the Connecticut. On all our shores the orb of day shows to the eye the distinction between rock and wave; but it does not create that distinction, which we not dimly knew before by the noises in the dark, and by the wrecks. There is a soul, and there is a God; and, since law is universal, there must be conditions of harmony between the soul and God. Since the soul is made on a plan , there must be natural conditions of its peace , both with itself and with God; and these conditions are not altered by being revealed. [Applause.] New¬ ton did not make the law of gravitation by discover- ing it, did he ? The Bible does not create, it reveals, the nature of things. As long as it remains true lhat there is a best way to live, it will be best to live the best way; and religion is very evidently safe, whether the Bible stands or falls. [Applause.] 7. Theodore Parker did not carefully distinguish CARICATURED DEFINITIONS. 101 from each other the supernatural and the unnatu¬ ral. There are three lands of natural laws, — physical, organic, and moral. It is very important to distin¬ guish these three from each other; for penalty under the one class of laws does not always carry with it penalty under the others. A pirate may enjoy good health, and yet lose his desire to be holy, and thus be blessed under the organic, but cursed under the moral, natural laws. A Christian, if he is thrown into the sea, will sink in spite of his being a saint; that is, he will be condemned under the physical law of gravitation, although blessed under the moral. We are stupid creatures; and so we ask naturally whether those on whom the Tower of Siloam fel.' were sinners above all others. Were those who per¬ ished in the Ashtabula horror sinners above all others ? A sweet singer — one whose words of me 1 ody will, I hope, for some centuries yet, prolong hi? usefulness on this and every other continent — may have been rapt away to heaven in a bliss which his own best poems express only as the spark expresses the noon. But there was somewhere and somehow a violation of physical law, and the penalty was paid. While that penalty was in process of execution, the bliss of obedience to the moral law may have been descending also ; and thus, out of the tire and the ice, and the jaws of unimaginable physical agony, this man may have been caught up into eternal peace. [Applause.] The distinction between the physical, organic, and 102 TRANSCENDENTALISM. moral natural laws, however, is not as important as that between the higher and the lower natural laws, Do you not admit that gravitation, a physical law, is lower than the organic force that builds animal and vegetable tissues ? In the growth of the elms on the Boston mall yonder, is not gravitation seized upon by some power superior to itself, and is not matter made to act as gravitation does not wish ? Is it not a common assertion of science, that chem¬ ical forces are counteracted by the organic forces which build up living tissues ? Has not my will power to counteract the law of gravitation ? A higher may anywhere counteract a lower natural law. Scientific Theism does not admit that all there is of God is in natural law. He transcends nature: therefore he may reach down into it, as I, with the force of my will, reach into the law of gravitation. If he counteracts nature , his action is supernatural , but it is not unnatural. Charles Darwin and your Archbishop Butler say that the only clear meaning of the word “ natural ” is “ stated, fixed, regular,” and that “ it just as much re¬ quires and presupposes an intelligent agent to effect any thing statedly, fixedly, regularly, that is, natu¬ rally, as it does to effect it for once, that is, supernat- urally ” (Butler’s Analogy , part i. chap, i., cited as a motto in Darwin’s Origin of Species'). Accord¬ ing to Darwin and Butler, therefore, a natural law is simply the usual, fixed, regular method of the Divine Action. A miracle is unusual Divine Action. In the former we see the Divine Immanency in Nature ; CARICATURED DEFINITIONS. 108 in the latter the Divine Transcendency beyond it. In fundamental principle a miracle is only the subjec tion of a lower to a higher law, and therefore, al¬ though supernatural, it is not unnatural. (Art. on “Miracles,” Smith’s Bible Dictionary.') But Theo¬ dore Parker taught that “ a miracle is as impossible as a round triangle ” (Weiss’s Life of Parker , vol. ii p. 452), because it involves a self-contradiction. Brought up in the benighted New-England and Ger¬ man schools called evangelical, it never entered my head that self-contradiction was involved in the supernatural; for I was trained to think that there is a distinction between the supernatural and the unnatural. Mr. Furness of Philadelphia says that a marvel¬ lous character, such as our Lord was, must be ex¬ pected to do marvellous works. We know, that, when men are illumined by the poetic trance, they have capacities that no other mood gives them. There are lofty zones in human experience, and, when we are in them, we can do much which we can do in none of our lower zones. What if a man should appear filled with a life that leaves him in constant communication with God ? What if there should come into existence a sinless soul ? What if it should remain sinless? What if there should appear in history a being in this sense above nature, is it not to be expected that he will have power over nature, and perform works above nature ? Endowed as the Author of Christianity was, we should natu¬ rally expect from that supernatural endowment works not unnatural, but supernatural. [Applause.] 104 TRANSCENDENTALISM. It is Parker’s teaching that said the resurrection has “no evidence in its favor.” De Wette, whose book he translated, affirmed in his latest volume, as I showed you the other day, that the fact of the res¬ urrection, although a mystery that cannot be dissi¬ pated hangs over the way and manner of it, cannot be brought into doubt, any more than the assassina¬ tion of Caesar. Theodore Parker, in his middle life, stood vigor¬ ously for the propositions which he reached at the Divinity School at Cambridge and in West Roxbury. He was attacked too early. He says himself that he had not completed his system of thought. But he was attacked vigorously; and with the spirit of his grandfather, who led the first charge on the British troops, he stood up and vehemently defended himself. [Applause.] But that early attack caused some of his crudities to crystallize speedily. He was after¬ ward too much absorbed in vast philanthropic enter¬ prises to be an exact philosopher in metaphysics or ethics. He never made himself quite clear in these sciences, or even in the latest biblical research. His own master, De Wette, went far beyond him, and admitted, in the face of German scholarship, that the resurrection can be proved to be an historic certitude. Theodore Parker, although De Wette did not make that admission till 1849, lived ten years longer, and never made it. Attacked early, and defending his unformed opin¬ ions vigorously, Parker’s scheme of thought crystal¬ lized in its crude condition. Theodore Parker's abso* CARICATURED DEFINITIONS. 105 lute religion is not a Boston , but a West Boxbury creed . [Applause.] It is the speculation of a very young man, besides. 8. Theodore Parker seemed to understand little of the distinction between belief and faith. He never misconceived Orthodoxy more mon¬ strously than when he said, “ It is this false theology, with its vicarious atonement, salvation without moral¬ ity or piety , only by belief in absurd doctrines , which has bewitched the leading nations of the earth with such practical mischief” (Weiss, Life of Theodore Parker , vol. ii. p. 497). Gentlemen, is that Ortho¬ doxy ? [Cries of “ No! ” “ No! ” “ No! ”] This audi¬ ence says that this is not a fair statement: I therefore shall undertake to call it a caricature. It is omni¬ present in Parker’s works. Whether it was a dis¬ honest representation I care not to determine. My general feeling is, that Theodore Parker was honest. He rarely came into companionship with Orthodox scholars of the first rank: when he did, he seemed to be pleased and softened, and was, in many respects, another man. Attacked, he always stood up with the spirit of the drum-major of Lexington under his waistcoat. [Applause.] What is saving faith ? What is the difference be¬ tween belief and faith ? I venture much; but I shall be corrected swiftly here if I am wrong. Saving faith, rightly defined, is — 1. A conviction of the intellect that God, or God in Christ is, and 2. An affectionate choice of the heart that God, or 106 TE ANSCENDEKTALISM. God in Christ, should be, both our Saviour and oui Lord. The first half of this definition is belief; the whole is faith. All of it without the last two words would be merely religiosity, and not religion. There is noth¬ ing in that definition which teaches that a man is saved by opinion irrespective of character. Belief is assent, faith is consent, to God as both Saviour and Lord. On April 19, 1TT5, a rider on a horse flecked with blood and foam brought to the city of Worcester the news of the battle of Lexington, in which Theodore Parker’s grandfather captured the first British gun. The horse fell dead on the main street of the city, and on another steed the rider passed westward with his news. Some of those who heard the intelligence were loyal, and some were disloyal. They all heard that there had been a victory of the American troops over the British, and they all believed the report. Now, was there any political virtue or vice in the belief by the Tory in Worcester that there had been a victory over the British ? Was there any political virtue or vice in the belief by the patriot yonder that there had been a victory over the British? Neither the one nor the other. Where, then, did the political virtue or political vice come in? Why, when your Tory at Worcester heard of the victory, he believed the report, and was sorry; and was so sorry, that he took up arms against his own people. When the patriot heard the report, he believed it and was glad; and was so glad, that he took up arms and put him- CARICATURED DEFINITIONS. 107 self side by side with the stalwart shoulders of Par¬ ker’s grandfather. [Applause.] In that attitude of the heart lay the political virtue or political vice. Just so, in the government of the universe, we all hear that God is our Saviour and Lord, and we all believe this, and so do all the devils, and tremble. Is there any virtue or vice in that belief taken alone ? None whatever. But some of us believe this, and are sorry. We turn aside, and, although we have assent, we have no consent to God; and we take up arms against the fact that he is our Saviour and Lord. Others of us believe this, and by divine grace are glad; we have assent and consent both; we come into the mood of total, affectionate, irreversible self¬ surrender to God, not merely as a Saviour, but also as Lord. When we are in that mood of rejoicing loyalty to God, we have saving faith, and never till then. [Applause.] How can salvation be obtained by assent alone, that is, by opinion merely ? What is salvation ? It is permanent deliverance from both the love of sin and the guilt of sin. Accepting God gladly as Saviour, we are delivered from the guilt of sin, and, accepting him gladly as Lord, we are deliv¬ ered from the love of sin. Only when we accept God as both Saviour and Lord are we loyal; only when we are affectionately glad to take him as both are we or can we be at peace. When we believe the news that he is Saviour and Lord, and are glad, and so glad as to face the foe, we are in safety. [Ap¬ plause.] THEODORE PARKER ON THE GUILT OF SIN. THE SIXTY-THIRD LECTURE IN THE BOSTON MONDAY LEC« TURESHIP, DELIVERED IN TREMONT TEMPLE JAN. 29. ftpei