Ml LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. ©lap. itijning]^ !|a* Shelf i:.:i.A t ^n UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. ESSAYS, LETTERS, AND POEMS ELIZA THAYER CLAPP AUTHOR OK " STUDIES IN RELIGION " AND " WORDS IN A SUNDAY SCHOOL " " All these will I give thee, if thou wilt show me the sources of the Nile." ; O V BOSTON 1888 Copyright, 1888, Bt angelica SCHUYLER PATTERSON. All rights reserved. The Riverside Press, Cambridge : Electrotyped and Printed by H. 0. Houghton & Co. PREFACE. Tegese writings are founded upon the prin- ciples of Mr. E. L. Frothingham's Philosophy. All the deductions, illustrations, and sugges- tions therefrom are entirely original, and for them the writer only is responsible. The Poems, which give the story of a soul, from youth to age, have been preserved for my nieces. E. T. C. CONTENTS. ESSAYS. PAOB Statement of FtruDAMEUTAii Laws .... 1 Essay upon Religion 34 The Stoky of Cain and Abel 62 Christianity and Natural Religion ... 78 Unttarianism 93 The Ideal Church 106 LETTERS. Fancy and Imagination ...... 115 Spiritual Laws 120 Atheism and Pantheism 128 Early Christian Art and the Renaissance . 130 Leonardo da Vinci 134 Art 136 Representation 139 Symbolism 146 The Cross 151 Greek Myths ...,...- 154 Heredity 161 The Supernatural 163 Growth 168 vi CONTENTS. The Emotions and Sentiments .... 174 Holy Grail 180 Opposites 182 Education 186 Law of Subjection 191 Materialism 194 Greece and Rome 199 Bereavement 201 Extracts 210 Progress 211 POEMS. Nature's Content 214 Star-Child 216 One Hour 217 Day and Night 218 To Mr. Hall 221 Prayer 223 The Dying Artist to his Wife .... 224 Dreams 228 Spring 231 Two Hymns 233 Clouds 238 "The Future is better than the Past" . . 241 To Ralph Waldo Emerson 242 August Shower 245 Autumn Leaves 247 Sunlight and what it stands fob .... 249 Prayer 251 Substance and Form 253 The Days . 256 CONTENTS. VII AiiTHUR : A Ballad 258 Stkuggle and Victory 260 The Old and New Learning ..... 262 Hannibal 263 To Rev. Nathaniel Hall 264 Written for a Sunday School Anniversary . 266 Virgin and Child 267 On Miss Peabody's Eightieth Birthday . . . 268 Age 269 Reply to a Christmas Greeting .... 270 Faith and Hope 271 Ode 272 INTRODUCTION. The author of this book, Miss Eliza Thayer Clapp, published more than forty years ago, during the Transcendental period of her life, two small volumes entitled, respectively, " Words in a Sunday School," and " Studies in Reli- gion." They were read and ardently appreci- ated by persons in the same sphere of thought, and often used as text - books in instructing others. In the mean time her earnest mind led her onward into new fields of thought, and she arrived at the recognition of a philosophical statement which was radically opposed to the views which she bad held in her earlier days as a Transcendentalist. The present volume is made up of selections from the abundant manu- script of her later years. It is the expression of the faith which she accepted as absolute X INTRODUCTION. truth, which sustamed and invigorated her through many years, and was her full support to the end of her life. We are privileged to give Dr. Hedge's tes- timony to his appreciation of Miss Clapp's thought as shown in the " Studies in Religion." In reply to a note asking for an expression of his estimate of Miss Clapp, he writes as follows : Cambridge, April 2, 1888. I entertain the very highest opinion of the merits of the late Miss Eliza T. Clapp. Of all my female friends — and indeed of all my friends — there was none who seemed to me to possess more profound spiritual insight. Especially her " Studies in Religion " were a revelation to me, at a very important period of my life, of the most weighty and searching religious truths. In these, I can sincerely say, she was my instructress. I shall ever bless her memory. Frederic H. Hedge. ESSAYS. STATEMENT OF FUNDAMENTAL LAWS. My purpose is to say in as simple a way as possible what I understand by " The Philoso- phy," as stated by Mr. E. L. Frothingham, for those friends who are interested in the thought, and yet are not attracted to his own large work. I wish to say that I have no superstition about Mr. Frothingham or his book. I do not think him inspired otherwise than as all men of genius are inspired. I think him as much so as Swe- denborg was, and that the law of dualism which he states explains the facts of Correspondence, which was the great revelation of the other. Objections are often made to any system or systems of thought. I must have a system of thought, and this system must have a certain logical coherence. It is eternally true that " Order is Heaven's first law." I think mental and moral confusion has its root in intellectual 2 ESSA ¥3. confusion. Christianity is a system of belief, and if it has come to its end, see how it has educated the world, among other ways, by the intellectual meat it has furnished to the human brain. The mind must have something ob- jective to itself to assimilate in order to grow. It loses health and sanity if shut up to make sustenance of itself. Are not all morbid con- ditions consequent on this introversion ? The soul, like the eye, must look out and up. The essential point is the statement of the fundamental laws of existence and creation, which, if accepted as self-evident, or as logical deductions from one self-evident principle, must underlie and explain all existence, absolute and phenomenal. " The Philosophy " posits at the base of crea- tion two opposite spheres of indefinite being, which it names the infinite and the finite, — the latter not a reflex nor limitation of the for- mer, but an absolute, independent sphere, the inversion of the infinite. Here are primarily two opposite independent spheres of indefinite being. In order to pass from indefinite being into definite existence, there must be a union of these two spheres, each being necessary to the other for manifestation. By the universal laws of opposition and attraction (which laws, to- STATEMENT OF FUNDAMENTAL LAWS. 3 gether -vvitli the conception of two primal prin- ciples, are shown to be intuitions of the reason) these spheres become co-present and form the consciousness of one definite absolute being. This definite absolute being, subjecting within himself the finite life and law to the infinite life and law, becomes one with infinite spirit, thus constituting himself the second person in the Godhead, the soul of deity, the divine, ab- solute sphere. By the law of unity, every existence is one, or individual ; by the law of duality, all defi- nite existence, absolute or phenomenal, is the product of the union of opposites ; by the law of trinity, everything must exist in three spheres as spirit, soul, and body : and these together form the law of tri-personality, which is the fundamental law of all existence, absolute and phenomenal. The indefinite sphere of being is the sphere of infinite life or the Spirit of deity ; the defi- nite, absolute sphere is the sphere of the Father, the creator, the soul of deity ; and the manifest- ing sphere is the spiritual sphere, the body of deity, the Son by whom He made the worlds. Outside of this divine sphere lies its opposite, the finite, as material for creation. The defi- nite, absolute being having become one with the infinite life by the sacrifice in himself of 4 ESSAYS. the finite principle or selfhood, becomes crea- tor of the universe by his manifesting power or body, who has in like manner become one with the divine and infinite life by the sacrifice within himself of the finite principle or self- hood ; and the three spheres are one living God, a trinity of spirit, soul, and body, of which spirit is the manifesting principle, — Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. All creation is made in the image of God ; a tri-personality of body, soul, and spirit. All existence is dual as the product of two opposite principles, combined and represented first in that sphere which constitutes the nat- ural, and afterward by union through sacrifice, manifested in that sphere which constitutes the spiritual. Thus the facts represented in all creation and, consciously, in the religious sphere of the human soul, — the facts of opposition, attraction, and union through sacrifice, — are primarily facts in the experience of the God- head. In the very passage of the living God from the consciousness within himself of two opposite spheres of life and his voluntary union with the infinite by the subjection of the finite, or principle of selfhood, to the infinite life and law ; and this same passage repeated in the third sphere of deity or the body or Son of STATEMENT OF FUNDAMENTAL LAWS. 5 God, — in this sublime experience is found the origin and cause of all the ideas of worship ; sacrifice, and redemption, the essential ideas of all religions, being intuitions in the conscious- ness of man through the medium of his reli- gious and moral sentiments. The supernatural sphere in man, which is the sphei-e including all the phenomena and intuitions of the reli- gious and moral nature, relatively to the spir- itual, or the sphere of the reason, is natural; but relatively to the external or spheres of the understanding and instinct is supernatural or medial, or representative of spiritual laws. The three spheres of consciousness into which the human principle successively comes are relatively body, soul, and spirit, and the soul is the medial or supernatural sphere, represen- tative of that which finds its reality in spirit. These great laws, — the law of existence or tri-personality, and the law of creation or oppo- sition, attraction, and union through sacrifice, — being facts in the divine and spiritual spheres, are represented in every fact of nature, in every phenomenon of natural and material life. Thence it is that all natural and material ex- istence corresponds to all spiritual existence. This correspondence is the rational cause and significance of symbolism. All legitimate sym- bolism is founded on the real and eternal re- 6 ESS A T8. lation between the natural and spiritual. But a searching discrimination must be made be- tween true and false symbolism. There are symbols, so called, which are creations of the fancy merely, the offspring of superficial resem- blances. They have no vital life and no pos- sible permanence. Such resemblances never produce the immortal myths of any religion. They come of the will of man, and one spurt of the fancy may eject them to-day and another outwit them to-morrow. A true symbol comes from an intuition of supernatural and eternal relations between natural facts and the spiritual law. The intuition of spiritual laws, rightly conceived, must underlie the symbol, or the re- lation expressed is fanciful. The conception of true relationship between the outward fact and the inward idea is expressed in a material form supplied by the imagination, and is permanent to-day and forever. Symbolism is the speech of God to man. All language is symbolic. All creation is symbolic. No other teaching is possible. Words are mere tinkle unless they stand for things : either things out of the mind or things in the mind. The highest statement of truth man can make is but the correspon- dence between natural forms of thought and spiritual ideas. All religions and all histories of all peoples are symbolic. The Hebrew and STATEMENT OF FUNDAMENTAL LAWS. 7 Christian religions are the highest myths of all, as symbolic of the eternal facts in the divine existence. To the Hebrews these facts were revealed in material images outside of the human consciousness ; to the Christian they were revealed in the facts of the human con- sciousness, the soul of man, at the advent of Christ, being born anew, out of an external, material sphere, into an internal sphere. The sacred books of the Hebrew and Christian nations are sacred through their symbolism. But for the symbolism of a book to be sacred it must be a true symbolism. Therefore, all symbols must be tried by the law. If they do not correspond with the eternal laws of exist- ence and creation they are spurious. The religious mind experiences the phenomena and recognizes the symbol by religious intuition ; the philosophic mind understands the symbol through appi-ehension of the law. In the one case the law is felt in the phenomena without being understood ; in the other it is perceived and stated. " The Philosophy " purports to be a statement of laws, of which all creation, in whole and in detail, is the illustration. We understand, then, that the law of ex- istence or tri - personality and the laws of creation, which are opposition, attraction, and union through sacrifice, founded upon the posit 8 ESSAYS. of infinite and finite, as indefinite, opposite, absolute spheres, are repeated and represented in every phenomenon of material, natural, and spiritual life. Every thought we think is a union of two elements, the sensuous impres- sion and the percipient act, made one in a third manifesting principle. Even every ma- terial substance is a union of two elements in a manifesting third. The laws of development are the same laws repeated on another plane. All movement in creation is dual. The movements of living organisms combine growth and development. The one is from below upwards ; the other from within outwards. The universal and in- dividual forces representing the infinite and finite necessitate this, and act upon and in every phenomenon. Every individual is a du- ality of two spheres of existence, becoming constantly individualized in his consciousness. The one is the universal sphere, which is con- stituted by the principles of the mind or gen- eral consciousness of humanity ; and the other is the individual sphere, which is constituted by the principles of the human soul or the indi- vidual per se. The race and the child begin in the feeblest form of the individual conscious- ness or individualizing power. The individual is developed by the appropriating powers of the STATEMENT OF FUNDAMENTAL LAWS. 9 personal consciousness. These appropriations are made from material furnished through me- diums in the mind, the appropriation being made from that department in the general con- sciousness which corresponds with the individ- ual need at the time. This general conscious- ness of the human mind has three departments, namely : the Reason, which is relatively the spiritual sphere ; the Supernatural, containing the religious and moral sentiments, which is relatively soul ; and the Natural sphere or body, which includes the understanding or in- tellectual powers and the instinct or affectional powers. The primary institutions of family, church, and state are institutions founded on super- natural intuitions, embodying ideas that are relatively universal and spiritual, subjecting and educating the individual man into self-con- sciousness by gradually elevating the plane of his natural life. Left to himself he would inevitably go to destruction, for the instinctive is blind and destructive unless subjected and guided by a law outside of itself. Religious ideas, embodied in the church or organized religious life, are the great educators of the race, because they connect the individual with a supernatural sphere. Man, in being subjected to the church, is put under the au- 10 ESSA YS. thority of that which represents the universal, the infinite, the eternal as subduer and ruler of the individual and the finite. He willingly accepts this authority, even finds his greatest joy in it, there being that in his own nature which corresponds to the demand. Thus it is that the highest ideas of the reason, which represent absolute truth and good, and the vital sentiments of obedience and sacrifice, are brought face to face with the lowest condition of the individual consciousness and accepted through religious feeling. The individual is sub- ject to what "The Philosophy" calls the princi- ple of direction in the will ; that is, he receives the laws of his thought and life from truth in- carnated in institutions, with their rites and dogmas, and obeyed without being understood. Through training and teaching from vital ideas, through the supernatural instrumentality of family, church, and state, the man grows in- dividually and socially, — increases in inward stature, becomes reflective rather than instinc- tive, and begins to live and move in an inner world of feeling and thought. With the deepening consciousness, the under- standing makes its demand for logical conclu- siveness and rational evidence, and the power of the sentiments declines. Then follows what is called the age of enlightenment for the indi- STATEMENT OF FUNDAMENTAL LAWS. 11 vidual and the race. Great ontologicai ideas recede into the background ; all forms of be- lief are tried by the crucial test of the reason- ing powers, and the demands that the natural affections and sympathies make for just ex- pression. The great religious myths, bereft of spiritual significance, become monstrous and childish stories. Man must be free. He struggles to throw off from his developing indi- viduality everything that would limit it. As his nature grows more self-conscious he grows more self-reliant, and will recognize no law as binding or governing but the law of his own nature. The latest doctrines of the emancipated soul are freedom, eternal natural progression, and right to self-assertion. Thus in his fullest per- sonal development and refinement he is spirit- ually in antagonism to the vital ideas of the reason, which are represented by the doctrines of subjection, redemption out of the natural, and the sacrifice of the individual to the uni- versal. Individually considered, he has risen through growth from below upward, from a lower to a higher plane of thought and action ; universally considered, he has through devel- opment from within outward receded from truths that represent the real and spiritual, and come into a condition of self-assertion and self- 12 JsssA rs. sovereignty. Now is he, for the first time, a candidate and subject for redemption in and through ideas that represent the universal and absolute and spiritual. Now first can he see that Christianity, instead of being an enforced religion imposed from without, is the repre- sentation through sj^mbolic rites and doctrines of the laws that underlie the universe, and that the Christian religion is the training and edu- cating of the inner nature into the conception and observance of these laws. In " The Philos- ophy " there is nothing narrow, nor individual, nor sectarian. It deals with universal laws. It looks at phenomena as symbols of those laws. It sees religions and institutions as necessary expressions of eternal ideas. It interprets all history, criticises all science, classifies all sys- tems of thought, by showing their place in the sure unfolding of principles, the circular movement of human thought. As all exist- ence is dual, there must always be two sides in the natural development of thought and life ; that is, the human soul must be developed in forms of thought and life that correspond with both infinite and finite, the universal and indi- vidual. Philosophy is developed through three spheres, beginning with ontology, or the science STATEMENT OF FUNDAMENTAL LAWS. 13 of being, its most universal, sublime, and masculine form, and the farthest removed from the human consciousness, dealing with objective ideas conceived in the reason. Ontology has two sides, namely : conceptions of the infinite and finite represented in opposite material and spiritual pantheistic systems, as in the philo- sophic theories of Egypt and Persia ; in a later development represented more internally and intellectually in the opposite ontologies of the Greek schools. As man becomes more con- scious and begins to study his own mind and to seek for truth amid the secret springs of his own individual life, philosophy passes into psychol- ogy, which in its turn is developed into moral and intellectual schools, each phase having its birth, decline, and death according to laws which preside over the development of mind, invariable, inevitable, universal. No philoso- pher is responsible for his views or statements. He utters himself according to the position he occupies in the development of mind, and speaks for all that stand on his own plane. Man's natural development goes on contin- ually, but not collaterally. He is of necessity one-sided. He represents laws and phenomena that are for the time predominant in his con- stitution, and which must, to a greater or less degree, exclude opposite laws and phenomena. 14 ES8AY8. His manifestations are either vital or destruc- tive. And the severity of this distinction seems to be according to a less or greater sin- gleness and force of nature. We are all more or less imperfect specimens of a type. The majority of men and women are not logical. They hold the most opposite beliefs and opin- ions in a heterogeneous manner without suffer- ing mental distress. But the philosophic mind cannot abide this mixture and confusion in the children of its brain. It loves method and order. It seeks some central thought that shall hold in solution all other thought, or around which all other thoughts shall revolve in plane- tary order. Thus it is that all philosophic sys- tems, starting from one principle, logically deny the infinite or finite, running into spiritual or material Pantheism, and when seeking to unite the two as in the eclectic philosophers, and fail- ing to perceive the true relationship of union through sacrifice, deduce one from the other in defiance of reason, or simply hold them together in illogical tolerance. The great ontologists of the ancient and more unconscious world are re- peated in later times more internally and intel- lectually. Pantheists like Spinoza, who posit one infinite substance, necessarily deny crea- tion, because the infinite has no material for creation, and development from itself, if that STATEMENT OF FUNDAMENTAL LAWS. 15 were possible, must result in forms that can be only modifications of infinite substance. Pan- theism is either spiritual or material ; either starting from some force that represents the spiritual, and making creation a modification of that, or from the finite, and making creation a development of one material power. Every system of thought that starts from unity or one universal sphere must result, and always does result, in denying God or the universe ; that is, such systems must deny either that which represents the infinite or the finite. The Uni- tarian principle in philosophy is utterly un- productive. Out of one nothing can come. The whole history of philosophy, from Thales downward, proves, and is proving, this. Of course such philosophies are utterly destructive to religion, and to the Christian religion pre- eminently. In the church, as long as it is vital, is always represented duality, or the union of opposites through sacrifice. But as its teachings are always dogmatic and poetic, they can only be received through the sentiments and personal religious convictions. Philosophy always begins historically with religion, because it seeks to explain the rid- dle of human life; but as the understanding develops, philosophy invariably and inevitably separates itself, because, being no longer fed by 16 ESSAYS. principles in the reason, incarnated in symbols, it rejects as irrational and absurd what the church teaches ; the latter, as has just been said, teaching its mysteries through poetic sym- bols, and never as scientific or rational state- ments. It is of no man's merit or demerit that philosophy runs into Atheism or Pantheism. It must do so to the logical mind that starts from the premise of one principle. Religion is not logical ; does not reason ; indeed, antago- nizes human reason. She only asserts and af- firms. She is perfectly right on her own plane. But when the reason is so far developed that the mind cannot accept any statement other than on rational grounds, then comes in this *' Phi- losophy," to show that the essential doctrines of Christianity, which are trinity, incarnation, and redemption, are poetic, illogical affirma- tions of rational and logical truths; and that Christianity is separated from other forms of religion, not by its purer ethical element, but by being a revelation to the religious natui'e of truths, which are truths of the reason also. That philosophy in its historic development separates from religion is neither the fault of religion nor philosophy. With the development of the understanding, the mind ignores phenomena, made known only through the religious senti- ments, and rejects any formula of such phe- STATEMENT OF FUNDAMENTAL LAWS. 17 nomena. It is only from a vision of higher law that it comes to see that these revelations to the sentiment, covered by such narrow forms of speech, are intuitions of the reason and data for philosophic study. The old formulas are worn out. They are being thoroughly sifted and expurgated from modern thought, which is Uni- tarian thought. The Protestant Church, which is relatively soul in Christianity, has in its neces- sary separation from the symbolic body gradu- ally and surely become so etherealized and trans- cendental that it has lost even the form of truth, and has evaporated into naturalism and individu- alism on the one side, or degenerated into senti- mentalism and externalism on the other. The best and most advanced thinkers are Unitarian and transcendental, seeking in the individual consciousness the law of life ; or devoting them- selves to material science, trying to find in that which is less than man the solution to the problems of man's nature and destiny ; reassert- ing the old pagan doctrine of evolution from one material force. We are taking up the burden of Egypt without its simplicity and ter- rible earnestness. That Protestantism has come to this pass many bolder Protestants aflBi-m, and, looking on Catholicism as an effete body left over unburied from the Middle Ages and fit only to please the most unenlightened among 18 ESS ATS. men and women, they wait, as they say, for new truth. From whence is it to come ? Surely the whole philosophic development of the human mind has issued in despair. Every ad- vance in that direction has carried us farther from what is profound in thought and sublime to the imagination. Looking downward into the face of the ape, does one believe in the seri- ous and grand tragedy of human destiny ? Here a " Philosophy " offers itself that reaffirms to the mind the sublimest facts presented to the contemplation of humanity. It shows that what the Christian world has passionately clung to as divine revelation are symbols of eternal truth. It posits principles which interpret all religions and philosophies, showing the necessary steps of their birth, decline, and fall ; it explains all religious symbolism, floods history with light, unites the race in a common development, and sanctifies and dignifies the individual story by uniting it to, and interpreting it by, universal laws. It satisfies the reason by its statement of law, delights the intellect by its invincible logic, and legitimates to the heart and imagina- tion the sublime old symbols of the Cross and sacrificial worship. A work has been published recently, called the " Nineteenth Century," in which it is shown that this of all centuries has exceeded in great STATEMENT OF FUNDAMENTAL LAWS. 19 industries, commercial supremacj^, supply of precious metals, in the steamship, the locomo- tive, the electric telegraph, the newspapers, mechanical inventions, improved weapons, art of healing, the lucifer match, the sewing-ma- chine, photography, and agriculture ; in chari- table efforts, freedom, self - government, and progress. Do all these appliances denaonstrate any relation between this living, pulsating uni- verse and its mysterious source ? Do they frame an answer in reply to the unceasing ques- tionings which may not perhaps have yet stirred in breasts drugged by content, but which, once awakened, never sleep again? Is man the nobler because the pain and seriousness of thought may be smothered in soft appliances of living ? I believe in the oneness of human- ity, not in the equality of races or of individ- uals, but that the human soul incarnates itself hourly out of one common humanity ; one sub- stance, but myriad manifestations. I believe that it begins its incarnation in this atmosphere. Development and growth, and not plenty of material enjoyment, are the measure of good for the individual and for the race. Man is created natural and spiritual, to be developed naturally and spiritually through the ages until he come into the realization of absolute truth. If this development come through pain 20 ESS ATS. and disaster, then pain and disaster are better than ease and success. All growth follows the laws of succession and circularity. Drop the germ, and its develop- ment of form must be outer and outer to its final and most external expression, while the change of substance takes place from below up- ward to ever-increasing refinement and indi- viduality. The corolla is but the root trans- formed ; all that is in the root etherealized and beautified, yet having no life in itself separate from the root, and no value in itself save as the shelter of a new germ. Material phenomena represent natural phe- nomena, as all natural, in their turn, represent the spiritual. The same laws pervade all cre- ation, these eternal laws being themselves the representation of operations in the divine and absolute spheres of life. All phases of religion and all phases of philos- ophy must have their birth, decline and decay. Religion is the recognition in man of the super- natural element which enters into every form of his consciousness, indeed, but is particularly revealed through the moral and religious senti- ments. It belongs to that department of his constitution which is soul in his trinity of body, soul, and spirit. Out of these religious and STATEMENT OF FUNDAMENTAL LAWS. 21 moral sentiments, which are vitalized uncon- sciously from ideas of the reason, are incarnated through the incorporating power of the imagi- nation all the symbolic rites and ceremonies which make the liturgies and litanies of na- tions. All religions embody the sentiments of worship and sacrifice. All nature is laid under contribution to express these sentiments. The fancy follows in the train of the imagination, and all the flowers and fruits of the field, all poetry and music and dancing, cluster about the altars of worship, and the blood, which is the life of the animal, is shed in sacrifice and atone- ment. Driven by this indestructible instinct, the body and its joys are sacrificed to the soul, and even the soul would put out its own individuality as propitiation to the all-excluding, all-absorb- ing demand of the unmeasurable and infinite. These ceremonial rites and sacrifices differ with the innumerable varieties of human culture and condition ; ever ascending and refining from the coarser and more external forms of the shedding of blood to the more and more internal sacrifices of every form of self-love as gradually revealed in the consciousness. Wide as seems the difference between the immolation of beasts upon the altar and the cutting off of the wild beasts, the hydra-headed forms of self-love in the heart, the essential idea running through 22 ESS A rs. all is the same : the instinct of sacrifice in the religious and moral nature ; the unconscious sentiment that the individual must be subjected to the universal. The religion of adoration with sacrifice is the natural religion of the human heart, more or less enlightened, more or less internal, as the nation or individual has risen in the plane of existence by successive births into more and more internal spheres of consciousness. But the enlightened Unitarian, who of plan and premeditation puts away from him in the course of the day's work every self- ish and self-absorbing motive, may touch the hand of his brother offering the blood of lambs and goats, or his other brother stifling all natural affection and innocent joy at the demand of an irresistible inward power, since the impelling power of each is a supernatural sense of obli- gation, the influx of the religious and moral nature. The " Philosophy " conceives that at the ad- vent of Christianity a new germ was dropped into the soul of man, an opening of an internal experience by which he became receptive of the distinctive ideas of Christianity which, repre- sented from the beginning of time and in every phenomena of human life in natural forms, were now represented in supernatural forms in the awakened human consciousness. These STATEMENT OF FUNDAMENTAL LAWS. 23 primal ideas, which are themselves represen- tative or symbolic of facts in the nature of deity itself, and thence the universal laws of existence, being attraction, opposition, and union through sacrifice, form the great doctrine of redemption, the glad great news to the adoring, sacrificing, suffering humanity. The great doctrine of Christianity is that of union through sacrifice, the marriage of the infinite and finite, the spiritual and natural, the di- vine and human, through the voluntary sac- rifice of the principle of life in the one to the life and manifestation of the other. Hu- manity at the time of the Advent was devel- oped through its natural forms to a condition capable of receiving internally the open secret of creation. The Son had been made one with the Father through the sacrifice within himself of the principle of selfhood, before the founda- tion of the world was possible ; and now here was humanity, made in the same image and in a phenomenal way going through the same process that had taken place in the absolute spheres. There was no passage for humanity from the human to the divine, no reconciliation between spheres so absolutely and irretrievably opposite. No prayers, nor rites, nor ceremonies could bridge that gulf. No power in man could unite man to God. Nothing could do this but 24 ESSAYS. the formation of a medium of communication by which the facts of the divine life could be revealed to man's consciousness and made the germ of a new life in him, — a divine life in human form. Thus, it is said, the manifesting power of God, the brightness of his glory, be- came incarnated inhuman form, — the union of the divine and human, forming a divine-human or spiritual sphere of existence into which all men should enter by faith in this spiritual sphere, the divine-human, the Christ of God. By the law of creation everything must be first natural and afterward spiritual, and so the Christ must first appear to men in his natural manifestation as man, born, suffering, and dying, experiencing in essence all the ills of humanity, and afterward as universal spiritual truth ; the risen Christ, the divine humanity ; the enlightener and redeemer of the race, just so far as it accepts the supremacy of the divine- human life, of which the principle is the infi- nite love and law, over its own life, of which the principle is self-love. This has been received by man because there was that in the religious consciousness which represented this divine experience, and the opening of which conscious- ness made men Christians. As the individual becomes more and more external though appar- ently more enlightened and cultivated, he loses STATEMENT OF FUNDAMENTAL LAWS. 25 the sense of this internal consciousness, and so loses belief in that which is distinctively Chris- tian. We have said that all the prayers and sac- rifices and religions of the race were unavail- able to unite man to God, until the formation of a divine-human sphere by the incarnation of the Son in humanity. But they were available and necessary as means and modes of develop- ment in the natural life. The awakening of the internal supernatural experiences as medi- ums to incarnate Christian ideas could not have taken place until the race had gone through all the more external and preparatory steps. It is true that not one prayer nor one pain is in vain. Every experience is necessary to the in- dividual and the race. It is permitted and overruled by the Divine Wisdom and Provi- dence. The child may do his task through pain and tears. The special task may be a thing to be unlearned in after-life, but the mental acts that went to the acquiring were processes in the formation of the understanding and individualizing the will of the child. All humanity is a child in various stages of devel- opment. All have one book with an almost infinite number of leaves. The subject matter is one; the pages are myriad. The Advent was a turning-point in man's existence upon 26 ESS A Y8. earth because it opened a new page in man's consciousness. It brought into light a sugges- tion, premonition, and experience of a new life. " The Philosophy " through the principle of dualism recognizes two forms of development in the religious nature. There is a vital and a destructive side to the religious and moral sen- timents. The moral and religious sentiments constitute what is relatively the supernatural sphere in the general consciousness. The indi- vidual is in a vital condition when the lower principles in that department are in subjection to the higher ; that is, when the moral senti- ments are vitalized by the religious sentiments, or the sense of obligation which is the mani- festing principle of the moral nature is ruled by revelation, the manifesting principle of the religious nature, and through which vital reli- gious ideas are communicated. Now these vital religious ideas are communicated either through the sentimental nature, while subject to the doctrines and institutions of the church, or to the reason, as rational ideas representative of spiritual truth. The point of peril is when the individual has come into an internal condition, conscious of intuitions internal to the external symbolism of Christian teaching, and is still in the senti- mental region. He then is inspired from the STATEMENT OF FUNDAMENTAL LAWS. 27 personal or individual side of the supernatural department, and becomes lost in the phenomena of naturalism in the religious, and governed by the law of sympathy in the moral, department. Religious phenomena in his consciousness, phe- nomena that represent opposition, attraction, and union through sacrifice, being separated from their vital law, become inverted, and the personal, the individual, the phenomenal, is put above the universal and real. The soul is lost in the maze of internal phenomena, without guide or master, and all forms of religious fanat- icism are the result. The individual is insane. All fanaticism is religious insanity. It is living from the phenomena of one's consciousness, the subtle form of self- worship, instead of looking into the face of law or spiritual truth and sub- jecting the soul to that. The religious per- son who has ceased to be governed by vital ideas communicated from without seeks in the phenomena of his own consciousness for inner light and direction, and stumbles on these dark mountains. It is the separation in his con- sciousness of good from truth, and the good is a demand of his nature, the highest form of self-love. Good is only an affectional princi- ple, demanding satisfaction of its desire, and its worship is self- worship. It is the old story of Eden. The woman is separated from the man, 28 £SSA YS. and falls a victim to the evil principle. And the principle of good separated from truth is spiritual evil. It is the same experience in transcendentalism, only the transcendentalist is more intellectual or rational than religious, seeks in his intellect or mind the law of his life, and, unable to apprehend spiritual law, recog- nizes finite law, or the law of his own nature, namely, naturalism and individualism, as his authority, and becomes as surely chaotic and destructive to all vital forms of thought and life and utterly separated from every form of spirit- ual truth. It is sometime asked why this sepa- ration of truth and good in the consciousness is necessary, leading as it does to every form of intellectual and moral insanity. The answer seems to me this. Every experience is necessary to the soul's development. The goal of the soul's development is to come into the knowl- edge of absolute truth. To know anything we must know its opposite. To know a thing is to be conscious of it. Consciousness implies two elements, and all real knowledge is conscious knowledge. Consciousness is the attribute of the reason. All growth is from lesser to deeper consciousness. We cannot know spiritual truth unless we know spiritual falsehood. Every soul in its unfolding must eat of the tree of knowl- edge of good and evil. Spiritual knowledge has STATEMENT OF FUNDAMENTAL LAWS. 29 two sides, because the universe has two sides. Creation is the union of forces that represent opposite, universal spheres. All that is in the spiritual must be represented in the natural, for the natural is only a representation or corre- spondence of the spiritual. The repetition of absolute laws and phenomena, in the phenom- enal sphere of human consciousness, we call the soul's experience ; that is, the experience or passing through phenomena or phases of thought and feeling that represent spiritual facts. Now, in the natural condition of the soul, these experiences only represent spiritual phenomena. They are not manifestations of spiritual principles, but representations of them. They are means of knowledge. We learn a principle by seeing it carried out to its legiti- mate and necessary and inevitable results. Ex- perience is more or less intei-nal according to the constitution of the individual. The most external persons realize in this atmosphere only material experiences and the most external forms of afiectionalism and intellectuality. Per- sons of deep religious sentiments touch the sphere of supernatural thought and feeling, and are kept safe as long as they are subject to the church or organized religious thought which is the most external exponent of spiritual truth. Development is not by the will or at the 30 ESSAYS. option of man. It goes on by certain inevitable laws. No one can actually commit spiritual suicide or arrest his own development. Surely and inevitably man must unfold from within outward, and grow from below upward. All stagnation and retrogression are apparent. The facts of absolute truth, that is the dual- ism in the eternal principles of life, and the destructive nature of the finite separated from the Infinite, the good from truth or the indi- vidual from the universal, are constantly being told and reiterated in the experience of the in- dividual and the race. In this way man learns these facts, and as in his development he rises out of the sphere of the understanding and sen- timents into the rational sphere, he becomes capable of perceiving the law of life which all these facts illustrate, though they could not of themselves reveal them. Phenomena illus- trate law, but in no accumulation nor general- ization of phenomena can the law be found. As long. as everything is told somewhere and somehow, every absolute fact represented upon the plane of the senses, it is not necessary that every individual soul should pass through the same forms of experience ; only every individ- ual soul must know the principle of every ex- perience. We know a phenomenon when we know its principle. Humanity is one. There STATEMENT OF FUNDAMENTAL LAWS. 31 is one humanity, and myriad individualized manifestations. Every individual has the ex- perience, internal and external, and that only which is necessary to his development. As soon as we see the law we can see its working out in another as well as in ourselves. No one suffers to himself alone. If this seems to press hard upon individuals who are so made that they necessarily pass out in external forms of evil, the answer is that all these forms of natural evil are only phenomenal, have no root in reality ; material evil and suffering doubt- less belonging to this material sphere, and more internal evil and suffering to a more internal sphere. All evil in the world is the result of the more or less false relation between the forces that represent on the natural plane the infinite and finite. This disturbance in the relation of these forces is the necessary accompaniment of the development of the natural. If there could be a continuous, harmonious action of these forces, man could never come into the realization of natural life ; never find his own individuality as separate from the divine ; never have suggestive material for the incarnation of spiritual thought and ideas. He could never know anything human or divine. Moral evil is that disturbance in the human constitution 32 ESSAYS. necessary to its development. Its process is separation from the divine, and without sepa- ration no development is possible ; the plant would remain forever in its root. What we call moral evil is only a more external form, not essentially more evil than the fairer forms of good. All natural good and evil are forms merely which furnish suggestive material in the expe- rience. We judge of one's development by the quality of his knowledge. How that knowl- edge has been gained is unimportant. The result is the one great thing. Processes are only means to ends. No amount of what we call moral or intellectual superiority is any sign of true spiritual knowledge. Many persons may lag in their development because there is too little antagonism in their nature. There is too much superficial harmony. What we call sin is insanity ; that is, want of balance between the internal and external elements of our mental constitution, as all physical illness is disturbance of the balance in the physical forces. Man is developed under the inevitable law of necessity. Our sense of responsibility and free will is a phenomenon necessary to suggest and train us into the conception of freedom in the passage from the natural to the spiritual. Our appear- ance in this atmosphere is but a short part of STATEMENT OF FUNDAMENTAL LAWS. 33 our career. Here we make our first initiation into individuality. Here we manifest the most external forms of our life. Here we get into existence. We are becoming always more and more internal, self-conscious, and real. ESSAY UPON RELIGION. I CONSIDER Religion, by which I mean the impulse of the sentiments that lie interior to the understanding to express themselves in praise or adoration, in states of feeling or lines of action towards an invisible and correlated Presence, to be universal and irresistible. As soon as man is conscious man, he worships a somewhat that is not man. Disrupting him- self by the inevitable law of development from that unconscious dreaming which is the morning mist around our first foothold upon ex- istence, conscious man yearns to unite himself with somewhat, and this somewhat he conceives as antipodal to himself, and therefore divine. The urgency of this worshiping instinct is greatest in the primitive phases of man's de- velopment, in that childlike period of every people's history when the imagination and the sentiments are the ruling powers of the mind, and the understanding, which includes the fac- ulties that appropriate and generalize material facts, is biding its time. This interior sentiment of worship, although ESSAY UPON RELIGION. 35 thus early and apparently precociously devel- oped in the individual and the race, is, like all other feelings and desires, without eyes. It feels, but does not see. Like Eve in the Garden of Eden, when separated from its intellectual partner, it is liable to all manner of beguile- ments and sophistries. The religious sentiment must have a guide. So in the story or tradition of the earlier ages and races, we always find great religious teach- ers or leaders, founders of a religion, as we call them. I understand these leaders to be men so organized mentally and morally, that is, to have an internal organism of so fine affinities, as to be exceptionally receptive of religious in- tuitions, conceptions, and suggestions. They are the religious geniuses of the age ; men con- stitutionally inspired to awaken and purify the worshiping instincts of the many, but, even more than this, to give a definite object and di- rection to these aspirations. I do not beUeve in the equality of men in any given department of thought or action. I do not believe that, in any age of the world (though it contra- venes the words of our most eminent thinker), every soul can " acquaint itself first hand with Deity." I believe in special men, — men preem- inently gifted to lead the race in the direction of the unseen realities. Such men must not 36 ESS A TS. only be especially intuitive of a spiritual order of thought, but must be exceptionally and pre- eminently gifted with a pure and large imagi- nation. By imagination I do not mean merely vividness of conception by which absent or in- visible scenes and circumstances are pictured on the mental retina and given forth in adequate expression, though this is one of the noblest of its subordinate functions ; or that narrative power by which events and characters are evolved from their primary elements, though the narrative power is immensely stimulated by it ; still less, any mere perception of the beauti- ful in line or color, or the embodying of feelings and fancies in artistic forms. The imagination of which I speak, and which unlocks the secret doors of revelation, is that power which, recog- nizing the fact that not only all material, but all human nature, all the forms of our thinking and living, are a grand symbolism of opposite spiritual principles and relations, spontaneously seizes upon that material image or natural fact which corresponds to and represents the spirit- ual idea, and is the only way by which that idea can be communicated. The material images that most readily recur to the mind of students of religious literature are the universal physical facts of eating and drinking, assimilation and rejection, and the ESSAY UPON RELIGION. 37 permanent, universal, natural facts of the at- traction and union of man and woman, of father and child, master and servant, — facts universal to the race and patent to the ob- server. The intellectual power that perceives the corresponding image, and embodies in it the spiritual idea, is the creative power of the imagination. It is the power that mediates between the spiritual order of thought and the natural apprehension. The imagination is not only the mediator between the sense and the soul, but in an infinitely more subtle way is the mediator between that which cannot oth- erwise be revealed to the purely natural appre- hension on account of the utter oppositeness and want of continuity between the two. The spiritual order of thought and life is opposite to and set over against the natural. As the dome of the sky, though correlated with the plane of the earth beneath, is not continuous, but inverted, needing a medium which shall unite both, so does the spiritual idea necessitate a natural fact, thus establishing a supernatural order o'f thought and life as mediatorial con- necting link. Religious rites and dogmas are the embodiment of a spiritual idea or fact in its corresponding material or natural form ; and such rite or dogma, to be universal and immortal, 38 ESSAYS. must not and cannot be the product of any man's faith or fancy, wish or will. It must be the perception and expression of a real cor- respondence between the actual fact and the thing signified. To perceive this is the highest function of the imagination, and a direct gift from the Creative Power. Every religious rite and dogma is a symbol, or the balling, or orbing into one, of two opposite conceptions. I wish to emphasize that these symbols are not inventions, but inspirations through the rea- son and imagination. Neither Orpheus nor Moses could invent a symbol. They are born of no man's wit or fancy. They have their origin in the very constitution of the divine and human minds, and are themselves a living and persistent proof that the spiritual is not an ex- altation or idealization of the natural, but an opposite order of thought and life, a difference in the very life-principle. Man inevitably and instinctively tends to organization. Wherever there is a soul, there must be a body. A soul cannot and will never exist without a body. The man of genius is not only more intuitive and imaginative than the less gifted, but is of a more comprehensive understanding, that is, he has a bolder and surer sweep of intelligence in the adaptation of means to ends. Thus, JESSAY UPON RELIGION. 39 throngli the agency of these men, the rites and dogmas of religion, which are the material forms of spiritual facts, become organized into a ritual, and the religious ritual of any people is the expression and embodiment of its highest thought and feeling. But humanity is one, though races are differenced one from the other, and man exists as individual men. It is this oneness of humanity, and the fact that rites and observances come from no man's fancy or ca- price, but are the record of the real symbolism of nature and the soul, inspirations of universal meaning, that account for the wonderful fact that they have no appreciable beginning in his- tory. In the earliest and undated records of the race are extant hymns of adoration and praise, the confession of sin, the offering of gifts, and the altars of sacrifice. Whatever might be the theology of the pe- riod, that is, the conception and statement con- cerning the nature and traits of the object of worship, the worship itself is always a ritual of sacrifice and reconciliation. And so loyal has been the imagination of men to the conservation of legitimate corre- spondences, the offspring of the imagination, not of the fancy, that Christendom did but take up and perpetuate the rites and symbols of the Jewish and Pagan churches, retaining the form, 40 ESSAYS. but transmuting it by an ever-deepening signi- ficance. The observance and celebration of the win- ter solstice, the offerings at spring-tide, the bap- tism and communion-table, even the glorified Mother and Child, are found as symbol and commemoration in the oldest civilizations, and in religious organizations outside of and op- posed to Christianity . What, then, constitutes the difference be- tween the universal religion that these forms express and the Christianity we hold so dear ? I conceive that the difference in religions, and the superiority of Christianity over all others, consists in the theology that lies behind them. Religion is very external to theology, and takes its character and coloring from what is received as revelation of the nature and attri- butes of the object of worship. Religion is, as we have said, the natural im- pulse or movement outward of the soul in search of a somewhat upon which to pour out its love and praise. It has no objective value. It does not in itself tell aught reliable concern- ing this object of its search. It is merely the uplifted hands stretching upward to " that in- verted cup we call the sky, which so impo- tently rolls." The subtle pangs of contrition and the pleadings of prayer are as unisrersal ESSAY UPON RELIGION. 41 and natural as the emotions of pity or the em- braces of aifection. A Brahmin or a Buddhist is as religious as a Christian. No religionist Can exceed in devoutness a devout Mahometan. Religion or religious exercises, more or less, are no test of truth. Theology is what people think about God. Religion is what they feel in their own souls. I believe it is of immense consequence what people think. I know it has been said by great authorities that it is no matter what one's creed is, provided the life is right. But I believe that the life will inevitably follow the thought. Perhaps not to-day nor to-morrow, but sooner or later, somewhere or other, we shall be con- formed to what we really believe. Persons differ greatly in this respect, from original temperament and characteristics. Many per- sons will be intellectually possessed of views radically false, but, from inherited conservative tendencies of taste or circumstances, will not be rapidly affected to ill. Others, with more of the Celtic element in their make-up, will rush upon the realizing of their thought, and if the thought is an inversion of the truth, or the crys- tallizing of a false tendency, the result will as- suredly be disease or dissolution of the moral status. The law of life abides. Sooner or later, " as one thinketh, so is he." The virile 42 ESSAYS. element of thought asserts its mastery over feeling in that inner domain. I repeat, the superiority of a religion is in the theology that lies behind it. I consider the enmity and sepa- ration of the Hebrews from the surrounding nationalities to have its cause and reason Justin this, that the theology of the Hebrews, as far as their revelation went, was a true theology. The ancient Egyptians were thinkei's, and doers of their thought. That which brought them face to face and step to step in irreconcil- able hostility to the Hebrews was the differ- ence in the conception of the Divine Being. The Egyptians were a very religious people. The hierarchy was the highest order in the state. The days of the year were full of devout observances. Society was orderly. The details of life were rigidly adjusted ; the inventive faculties wonderfully alert ; the moral sentiments of veneration, justice, and benevolence as fairly developed and exercised as in contemporary States. But their theology was false. For that cause, efficiently and finally, their religion had no vital underlying element, and tended ir- resistibly to deterioration and decay. As thinkers, the Egyptians had surmounted mere nature-worship. They did not fall down in stupid adoration of mere outward phenom- ESSAY UPON RELIGION. 43 ena. I doubt if any Aryan or Caucasian peo- ple, any historic race who have contributed their iota to the cultivation of human society, ever did. The ancient Egyptians had meta- physical notions of visible things. Isis was the personification of the universal, material, productive principle, throughout nature, — the great brooding, breeding mother, the mother of mysteries, whose veil modern science rends into gaps here and there, but has never lifted or thrown aside. And Isis is a great fact. The fatal error is, not in admitting her exist- ence, but in worshiping her as Deity. As- cending from the plane of material nature into the sphere of humanity, we find that this lower material element has its counterpart in the universal, teeming, affectional principle in hu- man nature from which issue all the soul's desires and longings for good, or that which shall meet and satisfy these yearnings. This affectional principle in human nature, to which the productive principle in material nature cor- responds as type and emblem, was deified by the Egyptians as the Creative Power, the object of adoration. But no abstraction or metaphys- ical conception can be made by any people an object of worshiping rites until fused, sym- bolized, and personified by the imagination into the forms and attributes of personal deities. 44 EssATa. The metaphysical notion of the universal pro- ductiye principle is transformed into the god- dess Isis, who as Queen of Heaven takes the lead of her mate Osiris, though she is represented as bewailing his dishonored remains. The en- thronement of a goddess exalts in political and social life the feminine properties of thrift, in- genuity, orderliness, and excessive attention to detail, but, in the inner province of religious thought and observance, degenerates into the worship of all natural forms that represent pro- ductiveness and fecundity. Passing into still lower conceptions, but by a thoroughly logical sequence, the sensuous imagination of the com- mon people fell into the horrible vagaries of animal worship, and the cow and the cat came to represent divine attributes. The Persians, in their deification of a crea- tive, ethereal principle, Mithras, — symbolized in the sun and the concomitants of the sun, fire and light, — were obliged, for purposes of practical worship and for explanation of oppo- site moral and physical phenomena, to posit and personify opposite principles of light and darkness, good and evil. The Persians, in their theology, religion, and culture, expressed the op- posite but correlated thought to the Egyptians. But the revelation to the Hebrews was not of a metaphysical principle that could be symbolized, ESSAT UPON RELIGION. 45 as water or fire, but the revelation of an abso- lute Being, a divine personality, — not a tribal God, more or less noble than his brother gods, but a Being incomprehensible and inconceivable to the unaided human intelligence. I under- stand the Hebrew people to have been so inter- nally organized that they were adapted to re- ceive a ritual of worship that embodied this en- tirely different and opposite order of ideas from that which made the substance of the surround- ing worships, particularly that of the Egyptians, from whom some scholars have affirmed their religion to be derived. The underlying thought of the two was diametrically opposed, — so opposed that it might well have called out re- sponsive thunders from the ever-listening hills. Without doubt they carried over into their tem- ple-service much of the pomp and parade of the Egyptian. This does not prove that the two re- ligions coincided. So has the Christian church in its Easter celebration borrowed from our Saxon ancestry the festival of the spring goddess Os- teria, with her floral offerings and symbolic eggs. The early Christian teachers, with fine religious instinct, retained the gorgeous pagan festival, and consecrated it to supernatural and Christian thought. I consider the great religious genius of the Hebrews, whom we call Moses, to have been in- 46 ESSAYS. spired through the intuitions of the reason and imagination, those spiritual interiors of the soul which no man openeth and no man shutteth, with a conception of God fundamentally and equally opposed to the nature- worship and pan- theism of the East, — the personification of ab- stract supernatural principles as in Persia and Egypt, and the deification of human powers and attributes as in the Greek and Roman mythologies. The Jehovah of Moses is a con- ception of a Being entirely out of and opposite to man ; not a god, but the God, — a Being enthroned in the heavens, or a sphere of exist- ence utterly transcending the created human sphere. Not a Brahma, incorporating himself in the visible and invisible forms and processes of existence, a doctrine as abhorrent to the pure imagination as destructive to all genuine rev- erence ; not the weak, deluding, degrading in- carnations of nature and natural life embodied in the goddesses Diana, Astarte, and other female deities who trailed their slimy worship all along the Philistine coast, justifying even to the natural reason the extermination of the serai-civilizations that were dominated by them. The Jehovah of the Hebrews was not a pro- duct of their mental or moral status, not a con- ception of their understanding, nor a phantasm of their fancy, nor any outgrowth or outcome ESSAY UPON RELIGION. 47 of their material surroundings. Kevealed as a spiritual conception to the highest genius of the Hebrew people, his appointed service consisted of a series of material images corre- sponding with and representing the Almighty's relation to man, a relation of absolute separa- tion and possible union. It is right to call the Hebrews a peculiar people, — that is, pecu- liarly fitted, in their mental and moral organi- zation, to the place they filled in the religious development and education of the world. They ■were not pure, gentle, nor lovely. They lacked the subtle grace and interesting mobility of the Greeks, and the broad, comprehending intel- lect of the Romans. They were materialistic in thought. They thought in concrete images. They could not understand abstractions. The conservative structure of their brains protected them against the seductive influences of the feelings and fancy. The Jew, as an individual and a race, was fierce, dark, and cruel. The men could in assembled council condemn a fellow- man to be stoned for some slight violation of the national Sabbath ; and the women could, or certainly one woman did, confident of the after-echo of praise and laudation, allure and betray her country's enemy to death under the guise of a kind and tender hospitality. Such acts are abhorrent to our developed moral 48 ESSAYS. sense and more refined affectional instincts. But these acts are temporary. They leave no permanent trace. They do not affect the uni- verse of thought, or the eternal interests of man. We owe infinitely more to the Hebrews than if they had been gentle and loving. The very materialistic constitution of their minds, their very stupidity if you will, has been a boon to us, inasmuch as it made them incapable of mix- ing their own fancies and conjectures with the revelation of the Supreme Being, — a being incomprehensible to man, and as inaccessible save in the way of his own showing. The God of the Hebrews was not a God to be handled by the understanding, nor caressed by the affections, but a spiritual Being to be worshiped in humility and awe. The sole peril, the one crime possible to the Hebrew, was idolatry. And such is the consti- tution of the human mind that the same peril and the immanence of the same crime beset it on every plane of life and culture. I consider the Christian religion to be He- braism on an internal and relatively spiritual plane. I consider that the human conscious- ness has undergone radical changes since the Hebrew era, — that with the incoming of spir- itual truth there was a corresponding change in the capacity of the human mind for internal, ESSAY UPON RELIGION. 49 conscious experiences. With every new pre- sentation of truth the human soul unfolds a new capacity of reception. It is the inevitable law of growth, — the interplay of revelation and development. Even in external conditions and circumstances a close observer will note a cor- responding internal change as both cause and consequence. Least of all is any revelation of truth possible to the soul that does not find the corresponding affirmation within the soul. When God speaks, then indeed do the people say amen. As to every form of existence, so to every conception or idea there must be two sides, the perception and the phenomena ; two halves to every whole ; two vaults to every sphere ; two principles combined and coactive in every possibility of life and thought. With the incoming of spiritual truth into the universe of life, and its perception, is born the internal power to incarnate it in forms of men- tal and moral experience. Every thought and feeling, in order to be expressed, must come out of the vagueness of the universal into some special form. This form must be either an image taken from the material world, as, on the religious plane, the shedding of animal life rep- resents sacrifice ; or an inner experience or mental act, such as the crushing down an emo- tion or passion under the feet of a moral senti- 50 ESS A TS. merit. Man becoming more self-conscious, the imagery of his thought is transferred from the outward to the inward world. Types and fig- ures are translated into thoughts and feelings. The attestation to and confirmation of truth comes from within. That which was prescribed ceremonial in the old worship is transformed into internal knowledge in the new. The child reads the nursery fable as story and adventure ; the older mind apprehends it as a picture of thought and life, and reads the same story in its own experience. In the great picture-book of the Hebrew ritual, that which was told to the eye, namely, the absolute separation of the divine and human, of the spiritual and natural, and the possibility and method of the transfu- sion of life from the one into the other, becomes part of the religious consciousness of the early Christians in a mysterious sense of sin wholly independent of outward act, and oftenest most intense in persons of immaculate life ; in a marvelous sense of separation from the divine, followed by as marvelous a sense of ineffable union. Just so much of the material symbol- ism was retained as served for suggesting and intensifying the more internal forms. These internal experiences were limited by the same law of correspondence, and were not and could not be spiritual, but only supernatural ESSAY UPON RELIGION. 51 representations of the spiritual, revealing in an internal, human, natural way the same great facts of sacrifice and reconciliation as were pre- figured in the external religious rites. Christianity is as old as creation and as eter- nal. It is revelation to the reason, not the un- derstanding, and suggestion to the sentiments of the modes through which the Godhead lives and acts. But the Christian religion I conceive to date from the era when a new opening of the human consciousness answered to and affirmed the advent of spiritual truth into the world in a supernatural form. But I think we of the lib- eral ranks of thought need to remember that the Christian religion has a theology behind it. Its foundation-stone is essentially the Hebrew theology. Consequently the same peril besets it which in old time beset the Hebrew faith, namely, that of being drawn away into the vagaries of opinion. The idolatries of the old world are forever repeated in the speculations of modern thought. Old Egypt and Philistia reappear in more refined and intellectual forms in the metaphysical thinking of so-called Chris- tian sects. At the inauguration of the Chris- tian religion, human thinking and feeling bor- rowed for its symbols less from material nature, and found expression in more exclusively 62 ESS A ¥8. human-natural forms and relationships. But it was no less founded upon objective truth, that is, the announcement of certain facts re- garding the eternal relations of the human and divine. These facts must be facts concerning the divine nature and its necessary relation to the human. It is therefore a theology. If Christianity were a religion merely it would be subjective, that is, a part and parcel of each one's consciousness and subject to all the vari- ations, delusions and illusions of that conscious- ness. But founded upon objective truth, upon facts of the eternal relations between the divine and human, it can only be revealed through a symbolism as universal as creation, and as in- timate as the profoundest phases of the human soul. It helps the thought upon metaphysical sub- jects to accept the fact that all creation in whole and in detail is symbolic. Every phenomenon, from the growth of a plant to the roll of the planets, takes place according to a certain mode or method, and this mode or method represents spiritual facts, and is the language in which they are written and must be read. Thus the only possible communication between the divine and human, the spiritual and natural spheres of life, is earlier by a series of imagery, and later by a series of mental experiences, in ESSAY UPON RELIGION. 53 which the lower represents the higher and the higher interprets the lower. Humanity learns the things of God through the things that He has made. The fact of the revelation to the Hebrews being made in material images ac- counts for the persistency of the religion not- withstanding the otherwise unappreciative char- acter of the recipients. These images are the body of truth and do in their prescribed time hold the soul of truth in its place. Without this material safeguard, objective truth, prior to its incarnation in human consciousness, would have been dissipated in the contradictory asser- tions of the human mind. Every religion must have an organism, and the Christian Church is the organism of Chris- tian thought. Its dogmas and doctrines, more or less complex, its rites and observances, whether two or two hundred, are nothing unless they embody and represent everlasting spirit- ual facts. Christian doctrines are true just in proportion as they are intellectual state- ments, more or less confused, of these facts. A rite expresses the fact under a corresponding material form. A dogma is an authoritative assertion unaffected by the assent or dissent of the individual mind. A doctrine supposes an appeal more or less convincing to the judgment of the believer. The two latter hold higher 64 ESS ATS. rank in religious education than a rite, and yet rites have a persistent value. Being the body of truth, they have the solidity and inert- ness of the body ; while doctrines, being more internal and intellectual, change and develop with the developing intellectual phases. The baptismal and sacramental rites persist, while the thought they represent wavers like a flame in the wind. The Christian Church, being formed in the likeness of man, as every organ- ization must be, man being the type of all or- ganism, is necessarily twofold. It has an in- ternal and external form, both equally essen- tial to its existence, as the soul and body of man constitute the man, and without the union of the two the spirit of man could not be mani- fested. This soul and body of the Christian Church, present from its beginning, have ob- tained the names of Catholic, or universal, and Protestant, protesting. The Catholic is uni- versal and persistent, and comparatively un- changing, as is the body. The Protestant is the protest which the soul always makes against the materializing tendencies of the body, yet without which it could not exist. I respect the Catholic church as I respect my body, as that which manifests, on the most external plane, my life and presence. Our bodies are as necessary to us as our souls, and the union of the two ESSAY UPON RELIGION. 55 makes possible the shadowing forth of the spirit, Avhieh is the breath of God. Tlie value of this Church lies in the fact that it is body, a material organism, preserving and expressing the great fundamental facts that are the stuff out of which the Christian religion is woven. Believing as I do with Gui- zot, that Christianity never could have been preserved through the ages, never could have kept its hold upon the senses and affections of man, had it not been formulated in an organ- ized institution, I believe in the existence and perpetuity of the body, as essential and contin- ual. Men often deny the existence of a soul. They rarely deny the existence of a body. The spiritual ideas expressed through the two organizations, Catholic and Protestant, are the same sublime, universal verities, namely, the separation and oppositeness of the divine and human, the spiritual and natural, and the pos- sibility and method or mode of their union. Whatever sect or society may be founded, more or less avowedly, on other ideas than these may be intellectual, refined, charitable, but certainly is not Christian. I honor the veracity of the extreme Radicals, who, basing their thought and action upon the theory of spiritualizing all forms of life through education and culture, set aside the Christian name. High-minded, con- 66 E8SAT8. scientious, noble in purpose they undoubtedly are, but simply are not Christian, and do right to reject the word. Neither that which we call historically the Christian Church, that is, the embodied con- sent or consensus of Chi'istendom, nor the edu- cation of the individual soul begin in freedom. The very sanity of the mental faculties requires that thought and action should begin in obedi- ence to authority. The consciousness of a child and of child- humanity is in a confused, inchoate state. It needs for its direction an external conscience, founded upon wider knowledge and keener per- ception. It must be trained in obedience to somewhat outside of its own unaided sense of right and wrong. Conscience is a more or less vague, a more or less controlling inner sense or sentiment of obligation, but has not within itself the knowl- edge of that to which its allegiance is due. Every desire or sentiment is born blind. Most of all does the sense of religious obligation need a guide, lest it stumble on dark moun- tains. The essence of all fanaticism is involved in following the lead of personal feeling or con- viction, undirected and unbalanced by any ex- ternal standard. Every legitimate form of re- £SSA¥ UPON RELIGION. 57 ligion is based upon authority. Every church whose office is to educate humanity through all the phases of the soul's life must found its ini- tiatory teaching upon uncompromising author- ity. This great fact in early Christian disci- pline, represents to my mind the sublime des- tiny of humanity itself ; represents the final subjection of the perfected soul to absolute truth, — that ultimate act by which and through ■which alone the finite creation can become a manifestation of the glory of the Infinite. I wish to dwell on the word represents. Rep- resentation of a thing is as far removed from its reality as the reflection of our face in a mirror is from the face itself. The reflection answers to the reality, line to line, angle to angle, but the one is shadow, the other sub- stance. So in the education of the soul in truth. We cannot study truth face to face. We are taught all through our earlier stages by representations, figures, symbols and types. No soul could receive spiritual truth at first hand. No man can see God and live. The Christian Church on its most external plane and in its most material form, represents, I repeat, the sublimest fact in the universe, that is, the absolute authority of truth over the soul of man. The other vital doctrine that this exter- nal church represents is the union of the di- 58 ESSAYS. vine and human in one soul and one body, as typified in the most sacred and significant of its rites. These doctrines of passive obedience and of transubstantiatiou become interesting and sublime as soon as we look upon them as material representations of eternal verities. The majority of the persons who take these pictures literally are undeveloped natures, who feel but do not reason, who have not begun to think, but who in their cradles are not forgot- ten by the Divine Providence, which softens the very bread of spiritual life in the milk which nourishes. But humanity must grow up. It must become thoroughly independent of the divine. It must come out into the clear, inci- sive light of the understanding. It must put aside its picture-books. It must follow the fast inflooding intuitions of the moral sense ; must cease to be religious, strictly so called, and must become internal, moral and rational. There is no merit nor demerit in this. It is simply the inevitable law of growth and de- velopment which every soul, more or less con- sciously, here or elsewhere passes through. It is a remarkable fact that as we rise through successive stages of development, as individuals or as races, we come out more and more into the materializing region of the under- standing. We recede more and more from ob- ESSAT UPON RELIGION. 59 jective, spiritual truth, and become immersed in forms of our own thinking. As we become more pronounced in our natural powers, more thoroughly human, become more real men and women, we lose our representative spiritual character. The illustration is complete, as drawn from actual childhood. The child, in its unconscious- ness, docility, and trust, has been the favorite example of supposed spiritual conditions. The mistake is in looking upon the child as already spiritual, whereas it has not yet come into the fullness of its natural development. The child's apparent spirituality is picture merely. As be develops into the consciousness of individ- uality and freedom, he inevitably loses his so- called spiritual characteristics, and becomes more or less self-assertive and aggressive. In the beginning he is ruled by precepts. As he feels his growing power to think, he questions the authority of the precept, and comes into self-government through allegiance to princi- ples. Precepts are obeyed. Principles are elected and adhered to. Just so with the human soul, child as it is of the eternal Providence. It is being educated through rites and doctrines which represent divine verities ; and also, and in due order, educated through the rejection of these sym- 60 ESSAYS. bols ; for inevitably, at a certain point in his de- velopment, when the understanding takes the lead of the sentiments, and the consciousness is only a consciousness of natural affections and affinities, the man-soul rejects these representa- tions as effete superstitions, and through this rejection works his way out to freedom and individuality. I consider our Unitarianism as an example of this. Unitarians do not believe as masses. They are units of thinkers. They are clear-headed, clear-eyed, and pledged to the Highest. Born and bred a Unitarian, I esteem it as a broad and liberal culture. It is the extremest form of Protestantism, and Protestantism is the soul of Christianity. It demands the meaning of the ritual ; the reali- zation in consciousness and life of the doc- trine ; the assent of reason to the claim. It is coeval with Catholicism, because it is al- ways the religion of internal, originally-think- ing persons. Such persons instinctively assert the right of the individual to his own judg- ment of all his activities. It was the predominance of the sensations and of the emotions, which are only internal sensations, that prolonged the date of Catholi- cism to the sixteenth century. But we are all Catholic or Protestant, — perhaps one or the other at different periods of our life, — either ESSAY UPON RELIGION. 61 believers in passive obedience to authority, or asserters of the rights and responsibilities of the individual. Christendom includes the utmost variety and shadings of these mental conditions, from the child-soul, typified in the legendary Christ- child, that lies swathed and cradled in its moth- er's arms, or toying in innocent wonder with the cross and the nails, to the full-grown man- soul, who in full consciousness of self-direction rejects as puerile and effete superstitions all objective revelation, holding no fact sacred but the fact of his own thinking. Christendom includes these extremes of be- lief and practice, and all the innumerable gra- dations between them that make up the diver- sity of sects. I look upon all these phases as tentative and educational — none as ultimate or rational expressions of truth. They are ne- cessary and invaluable as showing forth the inevitable phases in the soul's history. They are all steps by the way, and looked at from a universal point of view are seen in their ex- tremest arcs to be complemental sides of one perfect sphere. THE STORY OF CAIN AND ABEL. I BELIEVE humanity was created dual because there are two sides to the spiritual and natural order of thought and life, from the most internal to the most external mode of existence. Every form of life and thought, every phase of con- sciousness exists in pairs, is internal and exter- nal, intellectual and affectional, spiritual and natural, masculine and feminine. I consider this duality of the human consciousness to be symbolized in the primeval history of the old Hebrew Bible. Modern scholars assert that this primeval his- tory was not written by Moses, and not written at all, some assert, until the Hebrews came into contact with the Babylonians. I do not under- stand how this statement, whether true or false, should affect the value of the story. It is very credible that the great lawgiver of the Jews collected the traditions of the race and with his profound intuition of the spiritual, or rather of the natural forms that represent the spiritual, arranged them in the sublime simplicity that has come down to us. THE STORY OF CAIN AND ABEL. 63 I consider the myth of Cain and Abel to represent opposite states of the human con- sciousness, which necessarily externalize them- selves in opposite orders of society and forms of human development. The opposite phases of human consciousness are relatively to each other internal and external, natural and supernatural. Recollect by the term supernatural is not meant the spiritual, but that which represents it to the imagination and sentiments. The natural and supernatural on a more external plane consti- tute the opposite departments of the reason and understanding, the sentiments and affections, which, through all natural phases of the mind, are relatively to each other internal and exter- nal, natural and supernatural. Acting upon the religious instinct, both Cain and Abel ap- proached the Divine Being in the act of wor- ship. Cain brought of the produce of his fields an offering of his works ; but upon this act, al- though possibly an act of praise and thankful- ness, no true religion could be founded, because the act did not embody a spiritual idea. A church, that is an organization for the preser- vation of spiritual ideas and sentiments, could not be founded upon a merely natural senti- ment, however genuine. An act may be an offering of joy and gratitude, a sort of har- vest-home, but containing no spiritual principle, 64 ESSAYS. it can have no internal or permanent value. Abel's story, on the contrary, represents a more internal consciousness, an intuition of the idea of sacrifice, which is not a natural but a spir- itual idea, and an intuition of the religious rite or form which should best symbolize this idea, and this rite or symbol is the sacrifice of an in- ferior life. Upon this idea or conception of sacrifice sym- bolized in a corresponding act could be and was founded a church recorded in these earliest an- nals. This institution was not a product of civ- ilization nor a result of moral culture, but from the beginning a representation in outward acts of the true relationship between the opposite realities of infinite and finite, divine and human, spiritual and natural, intellectual and affectional. The offering of Abel constituted a church, the supernatural form of a spiritual idea, an eternal church representative of Christianity. But the nature of man is dual, and he must of necessity be developed upon the material and natural side also, and the two developments do not seem to have a continuous and reciprocal unfolding, but as the one advances the other recedes. Inevitably in the development of man, and in the records of history, the forms of material civilization and natural religion supersede the mental affinities and forms of life that repre- THE STORY OF CAIN AND ABEL. 65 sent spiritual truth or the true relationship between the divine and human, and conse- quently spiritual ideas and their corresponding or symbolic forms die out. So in this won- derful narrative Cain, the representative of ma- terial, natural life and worship, kills Abel. He is killing him to-day. This story represents the inevitable develop- ment of society in successive eras from vrithin outwards, and as the more practical, material and natural life is developed, just so surely the perception and acceptation of supernatural forms suggestive of spiritual truth recede, are lost sight of for a longer or shorter time. Cain must kill Abel. Material civilization prevails. From the de- velopment of Cain cities arise and all the arts that explore and cultivate the earth, and this movement must not be killed. A mark is set upon it that it shall have its turn and time. It is the assertion of human nature ; the pre- dominance of the aggressive, the selfish, the material, the natural ; a descent from the more internal regions of the consciousness into the use of the powers and abilities that deal with material things and make them subserve the will. This is the law of development equally in the race and in the individual. Ever and ever in the successive periods of transition the 66 ESSAYS. soul and society become more external, more sensuous, more keen in the processes of the un- derstanding ; richer in the products of the fancy as distinguished from the imagination ; mar- velously inventive in all arts that perfect in- dividual and social comfort and convenience; adepts in natural life and in all appliances that soften and decorate the bodily life. Ever and ever, by the same necessity and in the same ra- tio, the supernatural forms in the Church and State, forms that embody and represent spirit- ual ideas, decline and are rejected as supersti- tions, the product of barbaric ages, and opinions and rules concerning social and individual life, forms born of the reasoning powers and the fancy, usurp their place. I repeat that this ancient myth is the narrative statement of the origin, decline, and fall of the highest spiritual ideas; a process which inevitably takes place in the sure unfolding into individuality of the human soul, and is as surely expressed in the transitions of social life and thought. It is in- teresting to remember that this profound meta- physical fact is symbolized in high art by the picture of the dead Abel, which picture repre- sents the same fact as the dead Christ on a more external plane. After Cain, the type of the material order, has been developed, there must be another awaken- THE STORY OF CAIN AND ABEL. 67 ing of the internal nature, another revelation thi'ough appropriate symbols of spiritual ideas, or man will become a mere creature of sense and time. The predominance of the material inevitably leads to moral dissolution, the end of which is the destruction of the soul itself. Thus the narrative goes on to say that Seth is born to take the place of the dead Abel. But that •which Seth represents will be killed out as Abel was killed unless it is organized in stated forms of belief and worship. To prevent this loss Enos is born from Seth, Enos, the earliest organiza- tion of religious and supernatural thought, the symbolization and embodiment of true religion in rites and forms, which are supernatural as representing spiritual ideas. The narrative says, " Then men began to call upon the name of the Lord." It was the establishment of the first church. The record goes on to say that this supernatural order again declines in the growth and development of the natural and material, and to such a degree that society, bereft of all supernatural and consequently conservative principles, becomes utterly disorganized and so far incapable of recovery that it has to be swept away, and State and Church reared from new foundations. We read that a great natural catastrophe drowned the nations, and Noah, the only man capable of receiving a spiritual idea. 68 E8BA78. was forced to begin anew, like a second Adam, and save out of every created thing so much as was necessary for new production in every form of life. He sets up a new altar upon the renovated earth, and reinstates a religion based upon spiritual ideas. It is perfectly rational to believe that owing to the correspondence be- tween the natural and spiritual, so great an event as the dissolution of society, through the decline and death of religious and spiritual ideas, should be accompanied by great physical con- vulsions in the letting loose of the destructive forces in nature. I wish to emphasize this dualism by aflBrming that no consciousness is possible in the divine or human nature without the presence of two principles. Simple unity produces nothing, not even a thought. Consciousness means to know with. The infinite and finite, divine and human, spiritual and natural, intellectual and affectional, never run into each other, are never evolved, the one from the other, and can only be united by a third intervening principle — a mediator between the two. Every thought is made up of a sensa- tion and perception, and the union of the two constitutes reflection. When a child begins to think, he recognizes not only the object but him- self as separate from it, and says /, by which he emphasizes the percipient power. The union of THE STORY OF CAIN AND ABEL. 69 himself and the object constitutes his thought. We cannot say anything without thinking its opposite. Language is full of descriptive terms, every one of which suggests its contrary. Depth, height — above, below — within, without — also, true and false — good and bad. There are two sides to the spiritual as well as the natural. The Church, as the organized worship of man, did not grow out of society, was not a result of more or less external culture or civilization. It cannot be too often repeated in this darkened age that the two ordei's of thought and life, the supernatural and natui'al, had their origin in different departments of human nature ; the one through the mind's affinity with spiritual truth and its apprehension of the form in and through which alone it is revealed, and the other in its affinity for and adaptation to natural and mate- rial forms of activity. Thus was man created a twofold being as man and woman, and called by the generic term Adam, a Hebrew word, meaning man, of which Eve is the feminine form. Man must get a material hold upon this earth. He cultivates the ground and brings his offering of fruit and grains to the Lord, as external reli- gion founded upon the sentiments of praise and gratitude, but not being grounded upon a spir- itual idea, it does not even represent Christi- anity. The latter, being the revelation to the 70 ESSAYS. reason of the laws and methods of creation, is as old as deity. The offeiing of Abel is not one of simple thankfulness or joy in the good, or the products of human industry and skill. His offering is a sacrificed life, a mystery that can only be appre- hended by the religious sentiments and imagina- tion, and represented in symbolic images until it can be presented to the developed reason in statements of absolute truth. From the creation to this hour, Cain and Abel express two sides of human consciousness, two forms of religion, two opposite conceptions of the relation between the human and divine. This piece of primeval history, so wonderful in graphic power and profound significance, is a fragment of sublime metaphysics ; the first philosophic account of the founding, develop- ing, antagonism, decline and revival of these perpetual forms of human society, the Church and State, put into narrative form, — a great myth forever and forever true. Modern schol- ai's, with regard to races, recognize the Aryan or Indo-European (so called from its extreme boundaries from the Mountains of Caucasus to the Atlantic Ocean), which is said to have mi- grated in pre-historic times from northern India and spread over Europe ; the Semitic, which in- cludes the Arabs, the Assyrians, and Hebrews ; TEE STORY OF CAIN AND ABEL. 71 and the Touranian, which takes in the inhabi- tants of China and Mongolia. This classification is more or less changing, and Mr. Frothingham prefers the old classifica- tion of Blumenbach (born in Germany, 1752) into five races, the Caucasian, Malay, Mongo- lian, Indian, and Ethiopian. I think these classes can be easily reconciled by including the Aryan and Semitic in the Caucasian, where they undoubtedly belong, and letting the others fall into the Touranian if need be. The Semitic race includes the Hebrew, the Japhetic corresponds to the Aryans of modern nomenclature, and the Hamite takes in the Ca- naanites and other tribes which covered Palestine and the neighboring countries, including per- haps the Egyptians. The Hamite races tended to a coarse mate- rial civilization, destitute of the principle which represents Christianity, and were necessarily destroyed by the Hebrews as a pernicious and baneful civilization. The Japhetic races are those that have over- spread Europe and developed a full natural civilization, and been distinguished in natural science and art. Their religion, which is Chris- tianity, has been received through the Semitic race, because this race was especially that to whom, on account of its aflfinity for vital super- 72 ESSAYS. naturalism, or the laws and modes of the God- head and its relation to humanity, it could be revealed in and through material symbols, or a grand, material, significant ritual of worship. Of the ancient nations, I will speak first of the Babylonians and Assyrians as being those out of which Abraham, the founder of the Hebrew nation, emigrated. Between the famous rivers Euphrates and Tigris, that rise in the mountains of Armenia and flow south into the Persian Gulf, in the plains of ancient Mesopotamia, now called Armenia, stood the cities of Babylon and Nin- eveh. Babylon is reputed the oldest, and as having been founded by Cush, the son of Ham. There was first what scholars call the Arabic dynasty, perhaps that from which Abraham went. This was superseded by what is called the Babylonish dynasty, to which, perhaps, the famous Semiramis belonged. Though we have reason to believe that these cities were in high civilization at least twenty -five hundred years before our era, the first really historic date is as late as that of 759 b. c, when the old Baby- lonian empire was divided, through a political revolution, into the separate kingdoms of Baby- lon, Media, and Assyria. The fact that particularly interests us is the character of the religion from whose dominating THE STORY OF CAIN AND ABEL. 73 influence Abraham escaped. Some genealogists give the era of Abraham as 2300 B. c. Whether this date approximates the fact by a few hun- dred years more or less is of immeasurable in- significance compared to the fact of the eter- nal ideas with which the great Hebrew was inspired, and which ideas are the foundation of all that is vital in our religious thought to-day. To understand the principle of the false reli- gions, which from the beginning have strug- gled with the true for preeminence, we must study and analyze the elements and constitu- tion of human nature ; because false religions, if advanced beyond the mere worship of ma- terial nature, are always a deification in some form of an attribute or instinct of human nature; whereas true religions are a revelation of divine laws, apprehended by the sentiments of worship and obligation, and embodied in forms by the plastic power of the imagination. We find in human nature the presence of instincts, sentiments, and the understanding — the great intellectual power. The instincts are individual, such as the instinct of self-preser- vation or the instinct to appropriate food ; the domestic, as the instincts that found the family ; and the social, or the instincts which bring men into society or found the State. These taken together constitute the affectional nature, or 74 ESSAYS. that part of our being which seeks its good or gratification in whatever way the special in- stinct demands. It is the great substratum of our nature from which issue the motives or movements that constitute human activity. Every instinct is utterly blind, and if left to itself tends to self-destruction ; therefore, along with every instinct, and as its accompaniment, appears an intellectual principle which controls and guides it. The perceptions and principles which control and direct the instincts taken together, we call the understanding or intellect. Thus we have in our nature fundamentally the affections and the understanding as opposite departments; the one affectional, the other in- tellectual, and the intellectual as the legitimate guide and controller of the affectional. The power of generalization man begins to use as soon as he is man. Every child general- izes as soon as it begins to talk. If this power of generalization were not primitive and in- herent, no child could ever learn a language. No mother-tongue is learned entirely by imita- tion. There are words which can never be taught. They are the products of the mind's own action — as but, for, and perhaps. The power of abstraction, that is, of rising from particulars to generals, is the mark of common sense. Not to have it is idiocy. To think is THE STORY OF CAIN AND ABEL. 75 to generalize, and one thinks about and general- izes that of which one is most conscious. This consciousness, to all external people of every age and nationality, is the consciousness of the affections or desires. Tlie intellectual principle which accompanies every instinct is always there, but it is more internal, and the affec- tions are more clamorous, so that all false religions in every age of the world, and under every form of civilization, are a worship of the affectional principle as contrasted and opposed to the intellectual or rational principle. Every fact in humanity has its correspond- ence in material or external nature, and, there- fore, every principle in human nature can be symbolized or expressed by a material principle or the generalization of an activity in external nature. There are in the world of nature two forces always at work, namely, the creative and the productive forces. Every plant that grows from the earth upward, and is suckled and nourished by the productive powers in the earth in the forms of soil, heat and moisture, must be implanted as a seed, and the creative forces by which the plant lives are drawn from the air and sky, that is, the material sphere directly opposed to the ground in which its root is. Even in the material and most external world every existence draws its life from a sphere of 76 ESS A ¥8. existence outside of and above itself. This law holds good throughout creation. The false worship of the old world was the deification of the productive forces of nature in the personifications of gods and goddesses. The creative forces of nature are primitively worshiped under the images of the sun, and that which represents the brightness, warmth, and majesty of the sun. The decline in these nature-worships is the falling into a more and more exclusive worship of the productive as dis- tinguished from the creative powers. These productive forces are represented in the form of goddesses, because these forces are in their func- tions and characteristics feminine. As false religions decline from the worship of the creative to the worship of the productive principle in nature, the rites and ceremonies by which the religion is symbolized and expressed simultaneously decline to a greater coarseness and sensuality. Every religion has its vital and destructive side, and every religion begins in its best and declines to its worst. All religious ideas and sentiments are ex- pressed through a corresponding ceremonial, and the tendency of false worships is to degenerate into coarseness and license. This same law of the decline in the principle of worship is shown on the internal plane, in THE STORY OF CAIN AND ABEL. 77 which good, as the spiritual essence of the pro- ductive power, takes precedence over truth, which is the internal form of the creative. These false religions are essentially the wor- ship of good over truth on the most external, material plane. When we see it in its greatest externality, patent to the senses, we are shocked at its grossness. This grossness of form is owing to the great externality of the age to which it belongs. But whenever and wherever the affec- tional principle is deified, and truth sacrificed to good, the degradation of religion takes place. The degradation means a more refined garb as the product of greater external refinement in thinking and acting, but this only hides the actual principle of the change. It adds really to its deceptive character. Satan, in the form of an angel of light, is no less Satan, however beautiful he looks. I would repeat that the worship of the productive forces of nature in the heathen goddesses Ashtaroth, Ceres, Diana, and others is the worship of the instinctive, the affectional, the natural, the good, unsubjected to the creative, the intellectual, the supernat- ural, the truth. These old civilizations, out of which Abraham was called, put the lower for the higher, and so does every form of thought in Christendom that puts good above truth, and so worships the manifestation for the reality. CHRISTIANITY AND NATURAL RE- LIGION. Dr. Hedge, after saying that Protestant Christianity has two foes, Romanism and science, limited himself to the conflict between religion and science, assuming at the outset that Chris- tianity and religion were one and the same. This fusion of Christianity and religion has come logically from the more and more stren- uous denial by the Unitarian community of any and all doctrines strictly theological. To give up all statement concerning the nature of the Divine Being and His supernatural relations to man is to retain only natural religion, which is the worship of an infinitely great and good being, the ruler of the universe. Christianity, properly so called, is not one with natural religion, whether considered separately or collectively. It assumes this as its basis, as belonging to or proceeding from the natural de- velopment of the religious sentiment in man, but is itself a revelation of a quite distinct and opposite order of truth. Natural religion, by which is meant the instinct of worship and the CHRISTIANITY AND NATURAL RELIGION. 79 intuition of a being corresponding to this primal need of the soul, is the necessary basis of Chris- tianity. These sentiments and intuitions con- stitute man a religious being, and so make him capable of becoming a recipient of Christianity, as he must be first an individual man before he can come under the conditions of organized society. It is this fact, that he is a religious being receptive of the intuition of a God in his reason, and conscious of soul-experiences which demand a spiritual world as counterpart, as the impression upon our senses demands a correla- tive external world, which makes possible to him a revelation of spiritual truth, of which his religious experiences are natural forms and sug- gestions. The reverence for an infinite being, a per- fectly wise and beneficent ruler of the universe, and the correlated truths of the superiority of the moral life, and the continuance of life to the spirit after the death of the body, belong to the normal susceptibilities and gradual un- foldings of man's nature. In this natural de- velopment of thought and sentiment, the sure and unvarying process is from the internal to the external, " out of the everywhere into the here." In the earliest conditions of the soul and the race, the religious intuitions suggest prayer and 80 ESSAYS. expiation and sacrifice, accompanied, as these intuitions invariably are, with a pervading sense of sin. As the moral consciousness rises to a higher individual plane, that is, as the mind becomes more perceptive of vs^hat is individual rather than of vrhat is universal, this sense of sin dies out, and is replaced by a sense of im- perfection, which in its turn passes off in the processes of moral culture, and is dissipated at last in the quiet of self-approval. With the obliteration of the sense of sin in the consciousness, the more secret intuitions of the methods of pardon and atonement are ban- ished into unreality. The words themselves begin to ring false, as conventional and tradi- tional. Surely where there is no separation, no at-one-ment is possible. With the expulsion of the sense of sin every other primitive doctrine must vanish. They stand or fall together. Unitarian Christianity is the transcript of the moral consciousness. It is a psychology. No revelation is needed, only the quickening of cer- tain intellectual faculties and the refining of the moral perceptions. Its form of thought is the result of moral culture. The individual and the race having risen to a higher plane of indi- vidual thought and consciousness, pass, as it were, into a well-ordered room, clean, still, and light. The soul is scarcely conscious of any CHRISTIANITY AND NATURAL RELIGION. 81 antagonism within itself of a higher and lower impulse and principle, far less of any enmity to the divine love and wisdom. It looks within and finds noble aspirations and loving purposes, dashed now and then by a shadow of self-love, but on the whole far more in harmony with purity and right than the reverse. In consistent and sincere self-respect, it banishes as abhorrent to enlightened reason the spectres of sin, de- pravity, and an offended God that haunted the imaginations of the earlier world. Necessarily in this reading of the consciousness all the peculiar doctrines of the medieeval church con- cerning reconciliation and redemption are re- jected as outworn fables. There is no need of them. The more candid the soul the more decided its rejection. It does not find within itself any correlated need. But such a soul accepts in delight, grows, and takes com- fort in the unrestricted development of natural religion. It was a living faith to our fathers, and they christened it by the ancient name because the old name was still a spell to con- jure religious emotion and faith ; but the bolder thought and freer speech of this generation logi- cally rejects the christening and calls it Free Religion. I respect every free religionist who says he is not a Christian. I think Unitarianism, with its 82 ESSA Y3. clinging to Christian names and rites, as Bap- tism and the Supper (which are very lovely in their way as consecration and memorial, but should not be named christening and commu- nion), tends more to delay the announcement of true Christianity than does Radicalism. Let Unitarianism call itself the highest form of natural religion. Let it have its rites of conse- cration and memorial, and gather around them all that is lovely and attractive to the eye and heart ; but let it be done as an offering to the Father, the beneficent ruler of men, and in respect for the brother and teacher, Jesus of Nazareth, — not observed in the name of the Christ, for the Christ in any other than a fanci- ful sense is not needed nor demanded if the soul is by nature in harmony with the divine order. It is true, as Dr. Hedge asserts, that there is no conflict possible between religion and science, because they are both developments of human thought and experience in different departments. But between all natural thought and inferences, whether religious or scientific, and the truths of Christianity, or the doctrine of a Christ as mediator between God and man, there is and must be an eternal conflict, because they repre- sent, not only different, but entirely distinct and opposite orders of thought. Men are wiser than they know. The Uni- CHRISTIANITY AND NATURAL RELIGION. 83 tarian consciousness, no longer finding within itself any condition expi'essive of sin or sepai-a- tion, (for the words are i-adically the same,) ne- cessarily repudiates it as a doctrine, and with it the correlated doctrines of atonement and re- demption. It is true that these terms cover no fact of the natural relation between man and deity. When the mind conceives these spiritual ideas under natural forms of thought, it shows that that mind is dominated by the religious sentiments, and has not come into the light of the understanding, or has not allowed that light to fall upon its religious beliefs. It is in the primitive condition of the consciousness, in the race as in the individual, that the sense of separation is embodied in rites of expiation and sacrifice, or in dogmas which are the intellectual statements of the same. To this condition of the consciousness revela- tion is possible, because it possesses within itself natural forms of thought and feeling which in- carnate and .so make a reality to the mind of spiritual ideas. We repeat that the revelation of the Christ or divine humanity into which the soul must be redeemed through the sacrifice of its own principle of life, and by which alone it can be- come recipient of the divine inspirations, can be accepted by the consciousness when domi- 84 ESS A Y8. nated by religious intuitions and sentiments ; but the Unitarian consciousness, being moral and consequently external, is not cognizant of these truths, and consistently rejects them as the products of a barbaric era. I consider Unitarianism to have done a noble work by developing and elevating the moral nature. It has freed the mind from formulas that had become narrow and material. It has brought out the human side of thought and life. It has emancipated man. It has won the battle for freedom. It has refined the natural life in its gentle and beneficent ministrations. Yet it is natural religion only. It does not need to be revealed in any special sense. It is the product of the gradual uplifting and unfolding of hu- manity as fitted for this primal plane of exist- ence. But it really does not open any vista for the ages beyond. Neither does it dare to face the terrible mysteries of existence, — the mys- teries of wrong, cruelty, destruction, and ven- geance that fill the world of nature and of humanity with cries of suffering. Advanced Unitarians themselves begin to feel that their central doctrines of the integrity of the human will, and the fatherly providence of the Most High, do not solve or explain the open tragedy of existence. A disobedient child of a loving father cannot CHRISTIANITY AND NATURAL RELIGION. 85 be called a sinner. He is at most a fractious child, to be taken back to the embrace upon the first signs of sorrow. But the religious consciousness, in contradistinction to the moral consciousness, attests to something far more radi- cal than this. All religious confession attests in all ages a sense of separation and antagonism, recognizes the phenomenon of sin as entirely different from vice or crime. These latter are individual or social ; sin is generic. In natures where the understanding is highly developed, the moral sentiments supreme, and the internal conditions orderly and harmonious, these depths are shut over like earth-caverns once open to sight, but latterly closed in and covered with flowers. Such persons know only the outer- most crust or top-layer of their being. Now and then into this delicate crust enters the harsh ploughshare of some terrible sorrow or profound passion, and the soul finds itself amid the roots or ground-soil of its being, and be- comes convulsed with problems that find no solution nor consolation in the voices of nature within or without. The God of nature is piti- less, executing his laws with merciless exacti- tude, omnipotent indeed and all-wise, but sepa- rated by impassable barriers from this creature- man, this thwarted, deceived creature, betrayed by all the hopes and visions that floated in his 86 ESSAYS. morning sky. This God is strong, impassible, self-centred. This creature is convicted of in- competence, weakness, defeat. The gulf be- tween the two is impassable. What can puny human efifort or will avail to bridge it? Man cannot go up to God. If God comes not down, the two can never meet. Where the meeting is, must the mediator be. Twice in the soul's history is this experience of sin and need, and the conditions of a revelation, made possible. First, when passing through the phases of a true religious experience, it receives divine truth through these, as the natural forms of spiritual ideas. And, secondly, when, having used all it can appropriate of the moral side of truth, it is awakened out of its smiling calm by some convulsion of thought or life, an illuminar tion from the highest reason flashes a light into its darkness, and Christian or spiritual truth is apprehended as the rationale of creation, the revealing of the law or method of the universe. Then is seen the meaning of the doctrine of the Christ, and why Christendom has clung so tenaciously to it. At once humanity is seen as one ; the soul as one ; character, history, destiny, deliverance, as one. No conception of union from without, no touching of bodily hands, no community of person or property, no ministrations of aid or sympathy, can approach CHRISTIANITY AND NATURAL RELIGION. 87 this sense of unity in one life ; one in sin or separation, one in the hope of redemption. The consciousness of separation brings the rec- ognition of the revelation, and the announce- ment of revelation awakens the sense of sin. They are coordinate. The sense of need is the condition of perception. The forms of thought and life in religious experience, being natural, can only represent spiritual verities. Revelation is made through representation. The most universal form of religious experience is a sense of sin, not of this or that overt act, but a sense of separate- ness from ineffable purity ; and the earliest reli- gious rites are sacrificial and expiatory. These rites, like the dogmas that accompany them, are the symbolizing by the imagination of the conceptions evolved from the religious nature. As the plane of consciousness is ele- vated, all the phases of thought and feeling becoming more orderly, the formulas that the understanding makes of these internal facts are more moral and human, and being products of the understanding and fancy, instead of the religious sentiments and imagination, are less stimulating to the religious nature. Even Lu- ther complained of the decline of piety in his household. " How is it," he says to Katherine Von Bora, " that we prayed often and fer- 88 ESSAYS. vently in the cloister, and now so seldom and coldly?" And Unitarians acknowledge with wonder and sadness the coldness of their re- ligious services. Dr. Gannett, the ardent and militant Unitarian, confesses that he is refreshed and set aglow by contact with Orthodox soci- eties. The doctrines of natural religion, evolyed from the development of the human conscious- ness, cannot reach the profoundest depths of the human soul. Deep only calleth unto deep. The eternity of the infinite must appeal to the eternity of the finite. Man may glorify him- self and find a certain satisfaction in the facts of moral development, but he truly responds only to that which is not himself. Out of his " deeps," indeed, man cries out, but the answering word must come from deeps not his nor of him. And the answer to his profound- est cry is always concerning the nature of deity. In great crises, man is not curious about the wonders of nature or the mode of its processes, or the means and method of doing external good to his fellows, but feels intuitively that a reve- lation of God's nature will solve all other prob- lems. Who and what art thou ? " Let me see thee," said Moses ; and the highest beatitude is not any assurance of personal wellbeing, but the promise of seeing God. CHRISTIANITY AND NATURAL RELIGION. 89 This demand to see God, I consider to be the demand for a theology, and no luxury of moral or religious sentiments, no concert of moral harmonies in character or society, can supersede this deepest demand of humanity. If the thing were not too absurd, we could say, rather let all religion go and give us a theology ; for the former concerns our own Tightness and con- solation, but the latter supposes and demands a knowledge of Him who fills the heavens and the earths. Religion, it is said, is not only pos- sible, but actual. It is the yearning of the human soul toward ever nobler conditions ; but theology, it is contended, is neither possible nor actual. Certainly here comes in the necessity of a revelation : God himself must tell of him- self. Paul claims that he has done this, that he has shown the mystery of the Godhead in the things that he has made ; that all nature, includ- ing the soul of man as its head, represents iu its constitution the mode of the divine exist- ence, and that this constitution is triune. Two opposite spheres are made one by the subjection of the external to the internal, for use or manifestation. God the Christ is the manifestation and glory of God the Father, being made one with the Father through the sacrifice within himself of the principle of the finite life, and through the Father one with 90 ESSAYS. the infinite, indefinite spirit, the Holy Ghost of God. If God is simple unity, then is no crea- tion possible. How can variety come from unity, say the old thinkers ; how can differen- tiation proceed from that in which there is no difference ? If God is simple unity, then there can be but one kind of life, — either the divine life and the degrading and trifling incarnations of Indian mythologies, or the life of nature and the development of all consciousness from one primal force, subject to infinitesimal modes of motion. This wipes out all boundary lines between God and man, and man and the brute, and certainly fails to solve the riddle of aspira- tion and struggle. If God is unity, then the innermost of every man is God, as the Tran- scendentalists claim, and there is no way of accounting for the constant fact of physical and moral evil, and the constant failure of the actual to substantiate the ideal. But if God is conceived as an absolute being, containing within his consciousness the union of infinite and finite principles, the one sub- jected to the other as manifestation, and both one with indefinite, infinite spirit, then we can conceive two opposite spheres of being and of life, the spiritual and the natural ; and the opposition of the two is seen as the source of all the contradictions of life, and their recon- CHRISTIANITY AND NATURAL RELIGION. 91 ciliation through sacrifice the fruition of man's destiny. The Christianity of the day is not particu- larly assailed by science, as it has already suc- cumbed to the influx of nature in thought and life. What Christendom needs is to have the foundation truths of Christianity enunciated in formulas broad enough to substantiate the dif- ference of the spheres, and recast in doctrines that shall be to the advanced reason enuncia- tions of spiritual law, yet profound enough to baptize the soul with an ever new sense of un- fathomable mystery. What Christendom needs to oppose the en- croachments of natural religion is, not the as- sertion of the existence of a God, the sponta- neousness of prayer, or the continuance of life beyond the grave, because these are treasure- trove in its own domain, but rather the state- ment of a doctrine concerning the divine na- ture itself, a theology corresponding to rational conceptions ; the opposition of the natural man in the height of his glory and beauty to the plan and purposes of God ; the consequent neces- sity of redemption in the very principle of his nature, and the offer not only of natural immor- tality, but of eternal life, through the Christ, or divine humanity. The development of these sublime themes, and the grand solutions they 92 ESSAYS. offer to the slights and havocs put upon the interests and happiness of the natural life, told with conviction and power, will, when the full- ness of time comes, and humanity is recovered from the drunkenness of itself, from " the wine that never grew in the belly of the grape," so convince and enravish the reason and heart that the progress and triumphs of natural thought shall recede to their lower, appropriate place. The miracles of Christianity, or the proofs of the laws of creation working in and through the redemption of man, shall surpass to the imagination the marvels discovered by science. UNITARIANISM. I "WOULD suggest that Unitarianism is not so much a doctrine or body of doctrines as a phase of development. Few of this name have the same form of thought concerning the occult subjects of God, man, and the relation between the two. But with these intellectual differences, there are definite mental and moral character- istics which classify minds as Unitarian. The most decisive of these marks are an activity of understanding which demands the adjustment of all ideas and sentiments to the world of action, and a habit of insisting upon worth of character as the result and test of religious attainment. For the freedom it secures to individual de- velopment, and for this persistent demand that thought shall be actualized in life, let all praise be given to this Alma Mater of our religious life. We may thank God that we have been born and bred Unitarians, since by this and through this we stand on our own feet and think with our own heads. We are surely strong enough to look about us and see if we 94 £88 ATS. really have all that we need. We are clean from bigotry and tradition, so clean that we can afford to look back and ask what this bigotry and tradition mean ; and forward, too, and ask if we have enough spiritual food and light to front the ineffable and inevitable eternities. I wish, first of all, that we could bring ourselves to a more searching confession. I wish that we would not use words and phrases that do not belong to us, — that do not express any of our experience or aspiration. I wish that we could have a certain brave and loyal consistency between the substance of our beliefs and hopes, and the words of our prayers and hymns. We have thrown off the heavy doctrinism of the churches, but we keep more or less its phraseology. This, I think, is a great hindrance to the coming into mental and moral clearness. We are not a church ; we are a congregation of individuals. We are not a mass of believers ; we are units of thinkers. Our honest protest against irrational beliefs, and strenuous effort to transform belief into life, have developed us into more or less pronounced individuality. We are separated, not only from the past, but from each other. We think and live apart, and have no communion of life. Our very individuality forbids it. We have come too far out into the light and UNITARIANISM. 95 clearness of personality to give the august name of unity of life to mere bodily proximity or social and affectional reunions. Let us cease altogether from the profanity of giving to simi- larity of thinking and feeling, or the meeting together for work or discussion, the sublime name of Christian union. I do not think we do this to any great degree. We stand upon our individuality. By suggestions from this we learn our own personal and present need, but get no hint to any universal and eternal de- mand. We know where we are and what we want, but when we come to teach, what have we to say ? This : I am bound to live my life, and you equally so to live yours. What you have learned and know is of worth to you. Is it of worth to me? What do you know that is equally mine as thine and thine as mine? I appreciate your excellence, but your meekness, disinterestedness, and benevolence may, or may not, be the result of your finer organization and temperament. That state of mind and heart, which in one is the spontaneous play of emotion and thought, may be wrought out by another through energies of will that at once concen- trate and consume life. What is the common meter ? Our very virtues separate us ; we talk of the good and bad, and become lost in the maze of subjective judgments. 96 ESS ATS. We are separated and labelled as individuals. We are afifectional, moral, religious ; but are we Christian ? That is the vital question. I con- ceive that Christianity is the opposite of indi- vidualism. It is not moral or religious culture, not more or less perfectness of life. It is life indeed, but not a life which is mine or thine. The life that issues in the development of the individual in moral and religious wellbeing is the natural life, — is what makes man, man. Virtue, according to its etymology, is the nature or condition of manliood. The good man is the complete man. But goodness is not Christian- ity. Goodness separates and distinguishes. It is modest but not humble : humility belongs to a different order of experience. We call humil- ity a grace, and so distinguish it from a virtue. Language is full of terms representing these two orders of thought. Unitarianism, as a phase of culture, is full of virtues. It is honest, loving, and giving. It is at home in nature. It finds fellowship in the morning sweetness and the evening hush. It is not abashed before the purity of the woods and the bold innocence of the rivers. It is helpful, self-controlled, and brave. It is the true natural life ; the working out of individual activities to healthy and legitimate aims, and the issue into free, harmonious development. UNITARIANI8M. 97 Natural life has the right to be. It comes first in the order of thought and time. But history is written all over with names that men do not make but find. One of these inefface- able words is Christianity. I think this term means just that life which is not the natural life of man. A man may be at the apex of human excellence and yet not be a Christian. Unitarians do right in clinging to and cherish- ing human excellence in all its forms. No other sect has so readily and heartily recognized it under whatever form of belief, or as result of whatever variety of culture. But we make it not only first, but final. It is introductory, and we make it ultimate. We know its worth. We know that out of this free putting forth of the natural has resulted the civilizations of the world, as well as its confusions. It is of neces- sity, and has the rights of necessity. Without it no other could be. It is the timing of the timeless, the form to the formless. But by making the development of the natural life the ultimate of creation and destiny, we overlook or deny the great instincts and intuitions of the race. We leave out of language (that wonder- ful retainer and revealer of mysteries) a whole vocabulary of terms. Or, if we accept and use them, we belittle and pervert them by forcing upon them dishonest definitions. Better reject 98 E88AT8. them wholly and bravely than make them stand for what they do not mean. Disgusted with the formal and irrational repetition of them, we put upon them an interpretation of our own as irrational and far more deceptive. Now does the word Christianity cover any fact or idea deeper, or different in kind, from the highest and purest religions of the old civili- zations ? Does it excel in precept or example the pietism of the olden world or the pure and lofty moralism of Epictetus ? Surely not, if it is in the same line of direction. But I do not think that it is this ; that is, merely a later and fairer form of the golden results of civilization and culture. I think it is not moral precept, nor good and wise living, nor the recognition of the divine fatherhood and providence. It is a doctrine of the Christ. It is a doctrine, — that is, a truth to be taught. As Unitarians, we have in myriad instances scaled the heights of human virtue. No sec- tarian list is ampler with pure reputations. No saints' calendar may more bravely confront the questioning of the skeptic. But in looking upon virtuous attainment as the end and aim of man's destiny, we set up an idol in the place of God. Not content with adorning it with the beauty that belongs to it, we crown it with glory stolen from another UNITARIANISM. 99 sphere of being and doing, and so do, in fact and word, deny the Christ. I think we must acknowledge this. If we believe that we have the whole truth, let us be bold in saying it. In this I respect the radical wing of our denomi- nation. It denies the Christ consistently and honestly — and so puts itself in harmony with the policy and science of the age which recog- nizes but one kind of life in the universe, one grand unity of creator and creation. Professor Everett finds in language the proof of certain processes of thought. Thus and thus do men speak, because according to this method and no other do they think. As forms of expression follow necessary laws, independent of human will or caprice, so do words represent and interpret conceptions and experiences native and universal to the soul. Language is strewn with wonderful words, like sacrifice, redemption, communion, faith. Because these grand terms have been used by lips that have never quivered with the fire of self-consciousness, and so have become degraded in our association, let us at least leave them alone, and not put upon them the narrow and destructive definitions of our own individ- ualism. Let us stand steadily for what we know and for what we do not know. Let us avoid 100 ESS ATS. mistiness and confusion, and intermixing of that which is distinct, separate, and opposite. As Unitarians, our honest and logical words are development, progress, good-fellowship, ex- perience. If we keep these clear and sweet from alien admixture, we shall be more likely to use the others with insight and equity. Surely these terms are not convertible and will not be converted by the clear head and honest lip into the others. Sacrifice, redemption, communion, faith, be- long to an entirely different order of thought. They stand for quite opposite conceptions. The fact that they have been and still are used formally and irrationally does not affect their value as terms representing realities. I think that in the intuitions of the race, Christianity and its correlated terms of sacri- fice, redemption, and communion, reveal and represent the conception of a life which is not the issue of the varied human activities culminating in their completion and perfection. It expresses the opposite of individualism. And the intensest individualism is the neces- sary and legitimate outcome of moral and re- ligious culture. But on this indispensable natural basis a life is to be inducted which Christianity rep- resents and expresses as a divine descent pos- UNITARIANISM. 101 sessinjr itself of the soul ; in the fullness of time superseding personal and individual aims by making the perfected soul a medium of its divine manifestations. It is the inspiration in humanity of a life which abolishes all pride, merit, and distinc- tion, revealing its own glory through man. The redemption into this divine life is, in this sphere of our consciousness, the object of faith and hope, not of fruition. This life is hidden in God, and by faith in it, and hope of it, we live the natural life out to its end, where- ever in space and time that end may be. Consequently upon the exclusive belief in the natural order of thought and experience, which is the belief of the most prominent thinkers of the present age, are our views con- cerning the treatment and education of child- hood. Believers in the divineness of natural good- ness, and looking upon children as morally in- nocent, we have exaggerated their innocence into sanctity, and have mistaken the charm of their immaturity for the beauty of holiness. Our loving-kindness to them is cruelty. In- stead of being instructed and subjected, child- hood is consulted as authorit}'-, and respected as example. It is so entirely trusted that it is left unguarded, — so revered that it Ian- 102 ESS A YS. guishes unguided. For the same reason and under the same social surroundings, age is pushed aside as effete and useless. Youth de- spises it, because it has no future, — disre- gards its wisdom as obsolete — and in its broader and advancing generalizations, in- cludes, as Dr. Holmes says, its own father. For result we have childhood and youth, keen to perceive and eager to act, but neither self-distrustful, deferent, nor dependent. Age, dismantled of the glory and mystery of a new birth and nascent destiny, grasps backward at the fast receding merits of the natural order, as it finds itself without dignity or authority in a world where no longer is held sacred the crown of thorns, but of value only is the jubi- lant step and incisive will. Childhood is overestimated and age is under- valued. Thus the increase in society of child- ish characteristics, superficiality, unreason, and love of pleasure. Surely the one remedy for the confusions of society and disharmonies of homes is the reestablishment in our midst of Christianity ; the republication of the doctrine of the Christ. Not that this life is to be set aside or con- temned in any of the methods of its better- ment. But surely it has had its chance. It has pleaded its cause and gained it. UNITARIANISM. 103 From the moment when humanity, pulsing with new thought, protested its maturity and rights in the face of its exacting and domineer- ing mother-Church, all thi'ough its long educa- tion in the various and varying sects, it has constantly advanced in freedom and assertion, until, under Unitarian culture, it stands exempt from all outside restraint and authority. Now it may be, the time has come for it to be con- victed of weakness and dependence. It should be shown that it is of subsidiary value, subservient and preparatory to a life that differs not only in degree but in kind; a life that may or may not be actualized for ages, because it does not depend upon time, but upon more or less com- pleteness of conditions. The faith in and hope of this life must be the element to control and subject all natural manifestation, and the recognition of which can alone keep the indi- vidual and society safe and pure through all the perilous but necessary and inevitable phases of development. Children, far from being spiritual, are only imperfectly natural. It is to the unfolding of this nature, which is the creature of God, that adults apply themselves through nurture and education. How much more effectively might this be done, if we could recognize the subsid- iary character of all education, moral and re- 104 ESSAYS. ligious as well as intellectual ; that its value lies in the fact that the whole nature must be developed as condition and means ; that it is the maturing of the plant, all the fruit and foliage of which is but the varied expression of what lay inclosed in the native germ. But education (and what is all life in its minutest and largest experience but a series of lessons learned, and tasks set and done) does not in- duct into the spiritual. In the natural order, we ascend from the lower to the higher, ever and ever upward. Thus do we gain fullness and vigor. But the spiritual is a descent from heaven, which comes not as reward of merit or guerdon of endeavor, but offered in the fullness of time to whomsoever has learned that with Him is no respect of persons. In the faith and by the hope of that divine life which shall ultimately make the human soul a me- dium of itself, and by that alone, can we bear the disquietudes and disharmonies of the pres- ent, and the obsolete words of patience and resignation resume their pristine meaning and power. Is the Unitarian world ready to make these distinctions ? Has it not done sufficient justice to the natural ? Is it not drawing to the close of the defense of the life that now is? Do we not begin to feel our overestimate and exag- UNITARIANISM. 105 geration of this life — and long for the recog- nition of that which can only be made perfect in the heavens — and before which and in which our petty individualism shall vanish ? Once and again must the old symbolism be revived, be- cause it covers truths as profound as the being of God ; truths, without the apprehension of which, humanity must wither as the cut flower or uprooted tree. Let us be true to our Unitarian birthright of honesty and veracity, and not use this sym- bolism, save as it represents ideas as ancient and universal as itself. Let us search our faith and see if not in its own deficiencies lies the reason why it cannot meet the great, dumb, unintellectual need, or interpret the advanced religious consciousness, and so does not save from the present tragedy or solve the spiritual problem. Surely the old symbolism, the forever old and forever new, be- cause founded in eternal correspondences, shall again speak to the imagination and heart of mysteries, unfathomable to the understanding, and temper the rush and gamesomeness of the natural life by the grand seriousness and sublime pathos of eternity. THE IDEAL CHURCH. The Ideal Church must recognize the right of the natural to its free expression and develop- ment. It must recognize not simple unity but union of twain in a higher third, that is, trinity. The trinity has been held as a dogma, resolvable either into unity or tri-deity. It has not been accepted as a philosophic formula. Godhead has been conceived either as one, simple, uni- form essence, a unity inseparable even in con- ception, from which nothing could proceed, or a union of distinct Godheads ; not as the one God in three descending spheres of life or per- sonality. The Ideal Church must be founded in the law of trinity. It must recognize the Godhead as a complex being, infolding within himself all the laws of the spiritual and material universe. It must recognize the divine human- ity, or the method of union between God and man, by humanity's reception of the principle of spiritual life, and becoming one with God by change of substance — the spiritual manifesting itself through natural forms. Humanity in its redemption must enter into one life^ individual- THE WEAL CHURCH. 107 ities being only multiplied and varied expres- sions of this. One life, one faith, one baptism. The Ideal Churcli will cherish the natural life, holding in perspective its union with the spiritual. The spiritual and natural, the Catholic and Protestant churches shall have no outside union, no mere tolerance and compromise, but recon- ciliation in the spirit, the recognition of each other's rights, and the anticipation of the blend- ing and fusion of claims in and through love. In the Ideal Church the two factors must be kept distinct. The spiritual must not deride and tyrannize over the natural, forcing it into a premature and hated subjection ; nor must the natural assume to itself the prerogatives of the spiritual, setting itself up as the ultimate of the soul, or confounding and merging its position and qualities in that of the other. It must be self-contained, self-respecting, insisting upon its singlehood, a Diana upon the mountains, chaste, coy, content. The natural must not hasten to give itself away ; it must learn to wait. Noth- ing can exceed, to my imagination, the dignity of the natural when true to its law and biding its time. Life is development and movement. Radi- cally it is full of labials, the most fluid of articulate sounds. Death is stagnation. In all 108 ESSAYS. languages the word is uttered in dentals, ex- pressing the passed, the outworn. Negation impoverishes. The union of the infinite and finite in their representatives, the spiritual and natural, is a feast, a marriage sup- per. It can only be expressed in language by a rhythm, a song. Heaven is a perpetual hymn of praise. The Ideal Church represents, as the Catholic does, something done and finished, an accom- plished fact, the reconciliation of the infinite and finite in creation, and the " Lamb slain from the foundation of the world " in redemp- tion. That i^ done, that is provided for. The work of humanity is simply to adore and to unfold. The relation between deity and hu- manity is infinitely varied, thence complexity of worship. Both the natural and spiritual forces act constantly upon man. He is man, that is, the middle term, the point of meeting. He is not pure spirit, infinite or finite. The finite principle in itself, unsubjected in creation, is the separate, that is the Satan. Satan is separa- tist, revolter, rebel. The Ideal Church must be both father and mother. Father in the presentation of ideas of the reason (laws of trinity in unity, laws of creation and redemption), and mother in the nurture of the natural to its free and full de- THE IDEAL CHURCH. 109 velopment. But this nurture must be according to law, in obedience to the authority of the spiritual. It must be a nurture in and through admonition. The Ideal Church will mother humanity until it is grown up. Then the soul must choose its life itself. I would repeat that the Catholic Church is sublime in so far as it represents the Ideal Church, in the assertion of unity and univer- sality of doctrine, because truth is one, indi- visible, the same yesterday, to-day, and forever ; being the statement to the reason of the abso- lute fact of things, or the eternal relations of infinite and finite life. Truth is perfect from the beginning, full grown, inviolable, immutable, admitting no shadow of change, eternal as God himself. Again, the Catholic Church represents the Ideal Church as it recognizes the complexity of man's nature, a nature having a within and a without, all sights and sounds awaking corre- sponding receptivities, so that a ritual of wor- ship to be perfect must be as varied and grand, as infinite in form and suggestion as is nature itself, or as the chords possible to be touched in the soul of humanity which in its gamut is as high as heaven, as deep as hell. To the Ideal Church belong architecture, 110 ESSAYS. sculpture, painting, poetry, and music. The Catholic Church has been right in claiming that art should use Christian symbolism. But the Ideal Church shall recognize nature also, but in its due place, nature in order not in dis- order, as human subject to divine ; the oxen and sheep shall be present, but they must kneel in the presence of the infant Christ. Nature must look upward not downward. The Ideal Church will recognize religion as a part, the crown, indeed, of man's natural de- velopment, but Christianity as the assertion of great rational or spiritual ideas. The central of these ideas is the divine humanity, or the doctrine of the reception of the divine life in humanity. The divine humanity is the method of union between God and man, the redemption of man's nature into the divine by the transub- stantiation of the principle of selfhood (through which alone it gets its development or hold upon individual existence) for the principle of divine love, which is the communication and transmission of life to universal not personal ends; the subjection of individual to community of life. Now the presence of these ideas (which are only the statement of the nature of God and man and their mutual relation) can never, when absolutely and broadly stated, hinder or repress THE IDEAL CHURCH. HI development, but only stimulate the nature to an orderly, not disorderly, unfolding. Human- ity tends to disorder, as we have said. It goes astray as soon as it is born. Being the junc- tion, not union of opposite forces, it continually oscillates, and, its life-principle being selfhood, it constantly tends to run off the balance even in its noblest manifestations. It is safe only when it is under authority. The soul begins with an inherited, traditional life. We call ourselves free, and yet we are hedged in by social and moral traditions that enter even into our physical being. These tra- ditions are the laws of the soul's life, and the child-soul gets nurture, expansion, and growth by and through them. Its individuality is re- strained and governed by the social and moral laws, which upon that plane stand for the uni- versal principle in the universe. Thus the gi'eater part of humanity is kept safe and sure. The rampant individuality is subdued and modi- fied by social and moral influences. Peril begins when the soul starts to go alone. Upon every plane, the highest as well as the lowest, there are excesses and vagaries. The Catholic Church represented spiritual authority when it branded all escape from its controlling idea as heresies, even when these escapes were the outcome of the religious ex- periences of a Guyon or Behmen. 112 ESSA YS. The inner mystical life of the soul is full- est of all perils when the authority of cer- tain great spiritual ideas, the inspirations of the reason, are not recognized. In proportion to the force and originality of the soul is the peculiarity of its danger. These inter- nal experiences and convictions, when the soul sounds the depths of its individuality, unguided and unheld by light and limit outside of itself, issue out in ordinary cases in all the forms of egoism that belong to the Transcendental phase, or in rarer cases, in attributing to the person- ality divine qualities and an unconscious wor- ship of the Me in the place of the Christ. The Ideal Church allows and demands the development of humanity to its perfection, but under the control and authority of ideas which represent objective, eternal truth ; a develop- ment not for its own sake, but for the sake of the divine humanity which ever hovers over the natural as the ideal, or in the old formula, for Christ's sake. We thank thee, we pray to thee for Christ's sake. This is the essence of sub- liraest prayer, the grand refrain of all worship. The development of humanity for its own sake, its unfolding as the culmination of things, make it its own God, and is the only real idolatry. Religion, all religions recognize the father- hood and providence of God, the training of THE IDEAL CHURCH. 113 the soul through sacrifice and worship and obe- dience to a better and more harmonious con- dition. Christianity does not do away with this necessity of religion. It recognizes God as creator, governor, and father. It insists upon worship and obedience as so many school- masters. It is the doctrine of glad tidings, inasmuch as it announces an end to the " end- less toil and endeavor," the weary reaching up and on to an unattained and unattainable ideal; to the disappointment and dismay that perfection recedes just in proportion as it is sought, so that the ascetic, utterly unworldly Edwards bewails his vileness, and St. Paul counts himself chief of sinners. This is a fact of religious experience. The more faithful and devoted the soul, the more its inward eye sharpens to every fly-speck of failure, till at last self is felt to be a Nessus shirt that clings the closer the greater the ef- fort to cast it off. It is the intensified religious consciousness that has the haunting sense of sin. This is philosophically so, because the more intense the consciousness, the more completely is developed the selfhood, the necessary core of our being, that which makes man, man, which antagonizes man to God and constitutes the soul a candidate for redemption. Childlike souls, who dwell in the outskirts of consciousness, feel their power and inno- 114 ESSAYS. cence, and are right from their standpoint in insisting upon these. Their deeps are not broken. The way of the human is untrod. Humanity as yet is an unexplored and undis- covered region. These have but stepped upon its border land. The Ideal Church will not hasten this de- velopment. It will respect the fullness of times. It will wait for the midday hour. But in the presence of the spiritual, inexperience will not be aggressive and assertive. It will be reverent and humble, enjoying the goods that Providence gives, serving out its time in the modesty and reverence of ideal youth. But to the awakened and experienced consciousness, Christianity is the good tidings of emancipation from toil, from unsuccess, from despair. The distance between the infinite and finite has been bi'idfjed. God has descended and meets man halfway ; the divine humanity reconciles the two extremes; faith supplants works. This Christ is the accepted Son. All shortcomings vanish into the abyss of nothingness, forms and shadows that flee into the night. " Just one touch of his hand clears the distance." Christianity, the assertion of absolute, objec- tive truth, the Son of God transubstantiated into the life and love of the soul, living bread and living wine, is the tidings forever new, forever glad, and of great joy. LETTERS. Fancy and Imagination. September 20, 1887. My dear Feiends, — I am so surprised at the way you speak of the fancy, as if it were inferior or worthless in itself. Why, the fancy in its legitimate place and function, and under subjection to the internal law that should guide it, is as important and necessary as any mental function. It is to the fancy we owe our per- ception of the beautiful in nature and art, and certainly the richness of expression in language. Nearly all poets (not the highest) owe their place to the possession of a rich and culti- vated fancy. I consider Mr. Emerson to be predominantly a poet of the fancy rather than of the imagination. Milton, Dante, and Tasso are poets of the imagination, and Browning in a few of his greatest poems. I do not know any poem of Mr. Emerson's that I should call a poem of the imagination, though I was one of the very earliest and have been the most per- 116 LETTERS. sistent in insisting upon the exquisite subtlety of his thought and marvelous perfection of ex- pression. The Bible is a work of the imagina- tion. So are the rites and ceremonies of the Christian Church. These rites and ceremonies are so purely products of the imagination that they are evidently pure inspirations. Gregory First, in the sixth century, did much to arrange and develop them, but the poems of baptism, communion, and supreme unction had come down through the ages, — God's inspirations to the human race as revelations of the spiritual verities. The fancy is the power that mediates be- tween the natural or human mind and heart and the external or material creation. We go to nature to find words to express our ideas, sentiments, emotions, and sensations, and these words are symbols of the internal things. Poets and poetic natures are largely gifted with the power to appropriate from nature some one or more of its phenomena to express the internal condition. Without fancy there would be no compari- sons, no similitudes, no metaphors ; indeed, no language whatever, excepting the emotional cries of the animal nature. But of course there is a true and false exercise of the fancy, as there is nothing existent in God's creation that has FANCY AND IMAGINATION. 117 not two sides. Fancy must not run riot ; it must be subjected and kept in its rigbt place, •which is to furnish expression to the varying phases of the human constitution. When it undertakes to express revelations of spiritual truth, or phases of spiritual condition, it usurps a place that does not belong to it, and falsehood and absurdity are the result, as false religions and false philosophies show. When kept in its proper sphere, beauty and order are the result. When it breaks its bounds, disorder and lies are rampant. The imagination is the power that mediates between natural thought or facts and spiritual facts or eternal verities. It is the great me- dium of revelation from the infinite to the finite. All vital religious literature is the lan- guage of the imagination. This makes the pe- culiar sacredness of the Bible, and of all books that follow its imagery. It is the great mascu- line power in poetry, and comparatively very rare. No purely transcendental poet like Mr. Emerson can produce works of imagination, because he did not perceive through the reason or imagination the great law of life which is the opposition of the eternal principles at the base of existence and their union in creation. No mere poet can see this through the rea- son. If he did he would be a philosopher, and 118 LETTERS. SO far cease to be a poet. The philosophic insight interferes with the poetic insight, and with all artistic expression other than its own. Compared to the philosopher, the poet, indeed all artists, whether the medium be language, music, or painting, ai'e external and unreliable. It is the philosophic mind, when it is possessed by the true law of life, that is internal and vital. Mr. Emerson was a man of genius, and said many things which he had not the rationality to develop. One of his sentences was the seed dropped into Mr. Frothingham's more internal nature that became expanded into " The Phi- losophy." Natures are more or less internally developed. There is an internal development which corresponds in every phase to the phys- ical development. It has nothing to do with more or less intellectual gifts. A child may die a hundred years old, and a man of a hun- dred years may die a child. There may be, I cannot say it too often, great intellectual and artistic gifts with great internal immaturity. I am also so surprised, my dear friend, that you should so reluct at the statement of the phantasmal, phenomenal character of human experience. Every religion in the world rec- ognizes this more or less distinctly. All genu- ine religious literature in prayers and hymns is full of moanings over the shows and illusions FANCY AND IMAGINATION. 119 of life, and longings for realities. When the Unitarian mind began to emphasize the worth and value of the moral virtues in themselves, it was the decline of vital, representative religious thought and the advent of mere mor- alism. The Unitarians were right in enacting their necessary phase in the development of the human mind ; the religious world was also right in insisting that their opponents had elim- inated the need and fact of Christ from human history. We are born into a " sea of forms." Every true poet as well as philosopher recog- nizes this. Every Christian knows it from supernatural experience. To me it is inexpressibly sublime that the eternal verities which underlie the throne of God are so brought down to our daily experi- ence that in their image and representation we may taste, touch, and handle them. I experi- ence the phenomenal facts of good and evil, and learn thereby that there are not only two sides to natural thought and experience, but that this dualism stretches backward and upward into the home of eternal principles ; the reality, of which all our good and evil is the image and revelation. I know their pictures could not exist unless there was a reality to be pictured. I learn to follow the forms of good because they represent the vital side of the spiritual, 120 LETTERS. and to avoid the forms of evil because they represent its destructive side. But we accumu- late no treasure of virtue and merit in so doing, for our virtues are apparent only, and the re- verse of what they seem, being rooted in self- love, out of which we are made, and forming no claim upon divine approval any more than the opposite forms. Indeed, these apparent virtues are more deceitful and dangerous if they are felt even for a moment to be a passport to divine love. The sphere in which we now exist is a mate- rial sphere, that is, it is the most external man- ifestation of spiritual forces. Do you read Mr. Emerson's Nature, yet deny this ? It is a world of appearances, as all religionists, speaking from the inspiration of the religious sentiment, so truly say. This cannot be new to any thought- ful reader of litanies and liturgies. It is only new when looked at rationally as a basis of philosophic thought. ^{ritual Laws. OCTOBEB 24, 1887. I DO claim to have some perception of spirit- ual laws, which I conceive to be the true secret of the universe. The univei'se, to my concep- tion, is no bundle of fixed facts, however evolved or created, but a heaving, pulsating, outcom- SPIRITUAL LAWS. 121 ing and progressing life. It is a teeming, striving, producing life in every core and cranny of its activity, but this life is finite, feminine, receptive, productive ; is that out of which all mundane things are made. That which sub- jects, controls, and directs this teeming life is its opposite and master, relatively spiritual, descending upon the more external plane from an interior plane directly over and above it in the order of existence. So there are always at play two kinds and orders of life, and no phe- nomena are possible save by the union of the two through the sacrifice of the lower as mani- festation of the higher. This universal law of life is as absolutely necessary on the most ex- ternal plane in the production of the lowest fact, as in the manifestation of deity through the in- carnate Christ. A law is a fact or principle so universal that it of necessity includes all possible phenomena. I stumble at no miracles or non- miracles, for the whole universe is flux, and things are as they seem to us. I believe this law of life will come to be more perceived by rational minds, and felt by the religious con- sciousness, as that which underlies and gives significance to all religious rites and ceremonies, and is the dividing knife separating the true from the false. The law of dualism pervades all creation, and 122 LETTERS. necessitates two sides to every conceivable form or fact in existence. The natural fact should always be subjected, veiled, and controlled by that which is relatively its spiritual partner ; so when Christian art introduced the veiled and clothed human figure, it was a far higher and more spiritual suggestion than the nude figure of the ancients. Some transcendental writers try to show that tlie worship of the emblem of natural life in the Asiatic religions was a sign of greater inno- cence and purity. On the contrary, it is a sign of ignorance ; the absence of any true re vela-" tion which would show that the principle of natural life is not divine nor a legitimate sub- ject of worship, — that such worship leads to corruption, imbecility, and death, as is so clearly seen in all false religions. The spiritual, and that which represents the spiritual, is alone the object of worship. The natural, however beau- tiful or enchanting, is to be held in check by spiritual ideas, or it soon becomes rampant and disgusting. The Transcendentalism of forty years ago was the same movement, modified by the difference of the centuries, which the Renaissance was in the fifteenth century. It was the protest of a cramped, oppressed, and slandered natural order of thought, feeling, and activity against the ex- SPIRITUAL LAWS. 123 ternalism of the Christian Church, its unmean- ing formalism on the one hand, or its doctrinal statements that had become such dead formulas as to be rather statements of falsehood than truth. Every phase of Unitarianism and its higher Transcendental forms was a legitimate and purifying process. It was only when it began to usurp the place of that which, poor as it was, did in some dim way represent the spir- itual and supernatural order, and assert itself to be spiritual, that its destructive character re- vealed itself. So the Renaissance was a protest of an utterly overlaid human nature, a demand for freedom, rationality, and opportunities of development : for the natural life, with its hopes, desires, and longings, has as much right to be, as have spiritual longings — only it must not seek to be the master, and call itself by names of supremacy and authority which do not belong to it. First that which is natural, afterward that which is spiritual. Both are right in their place, but they must not be con- founded. All false statements in the universe come from the confounding of planes. We must learn more and more to divide and discrimi- nate, and call things by their right names. Greek art did justice to the beauty and per- fectness in its way of the human body. Its ideal was idealized humanity. 124 LETTERS. The gods were no raoi'e spiritual than their worshipers — only handsomer, more powerful, more irresistible. To be like the gods was to be more free from restraint and control in all directions — bigger and mightier men. When Christianity came, it created nothing that had not existed from the beginning. It merely brought down to the plane of the senses the great fact of two opposite orders of life and thought, and the necessity of the subjection of the lower to the higher as the law of the true development of humanity. The ideal of Chris- tianity was not the flaunting of the natural as if it were divine, but its subjection and orderly obedience to ideas and purposes that represented another and quite different ideal of truth. In ' Fra. Lippo Lippi,' the boy was right and the monks were right. They were both holding on to their side of the truth. I consider that the pure and helpful side of Transcendentalism culminated in Mr. Emerson, and that its expression now is the expression of spiritual falsehood, whether it appear in churches, in art, in literature, or whatever. All the joys of childhood and youth, all in- nocent song and jollity, love, friendship, and poetry, study of literature, art and science, are beautiful and legitimate in their place and time ; but they do not exhaust or even suggest the SPIRITUAL LAWS. 125 whole possibility of man's nature, because it is not the way man was made. He was made to represent two sides ; therefore he is never in this imperfect and undeveloped sphere in bal- ance. Balance belongs to the spiritual order only. Man is always, like children playing on a tilting-board, one side up and one side down. This first, initial world is a world of sugges- tions only. We come to nothing here. We are being trained to right perceptions. We live among spelling and picture, and picture books. The wisest and best of men and women are like children studying their early lessons, — some more or less advanced, and some text- books better than others. The religions of the world are the great edu- cators of the race ; but religions are either true or false according as their central idea corre- sponds with and represents spiritual truth or falsehood. The Christian religion, with all the crudeness, narrowness, and stupidity of its ad- herents, is nevertheless true, because it repre- sents under supernatural forms the great spirit- ual idea of the sacrifice of the principle of the natural for the purpose of becoming a manifes- tation of the divine ; the union through sacrifice of the lower to the higher ; the eternal marriage of the infinite and finite. A young friend comes in and gives me a 126 LETTERS. picture of beautiful conditions and interesting natural life, of which a certain family among her intimates stand as type. The father, a man of distinguished intellectuality and great dignity of character ; the mother, a fair, charming em- bodiment of all womanly capabilities and devo- tion to domestic duties ; the home, a temple of art, not gaudy with fashion or display, but ex- pressive in every recess of the most refined perceptions of the fit and beautiful ; the chil- dren, models of all normal perfectness of mind and body, with the physical and moral sweet- ness that result from the conditions of health and happiness. The ideal and aim of life in this favored home is to live day by day to the purest aspirations, and to educate and train these children in the way of goodness and use- fulness. Then is the question asked, Is not such life desirable? Is it not beautiful and consonant to the designs of the divine Provi- dence ? Most assuredly so. Life is the highest art, is, or should be, the expression of the ideal in appropriate forms, and if man were made or constituted in a single, homogeneous form or substance (the very statement is absurd) it might be possible to conceive of the persistency of such like forms of human good. But the inexorable law of change and death is upon all these forms, however apparently worthy to en- SPIRITUAL LAWS. 127 dure. Children develop, individualize, and part off from the parental influence. The parents grow old or die, and in dying are cut off from the material conditions which make so much of their joy. Death is a separation. I do not believe in the projection of material conditions into the ethereal or supermundane world. I fully be- lieve that the series and phenomena of ethereal development will correspond to the representa- tion of it here in material forms ; but the at- mosphere being ethereal, not material, will necessitate a cessation of material relationships which make up so much of our life on this initial side ; so that death, I believe, will always be a separation. We have hidden its austerities under the flowers of a transcendental philos- ophy, but the instinct of mankind will always prompt the standing beside the dead in awed silence or passionate weeping. Facts are facts. We cannot alter or annihilate any fact by dis- guising it under some spurious or fanciful name. The mother feels in the depth of her heart that with whatever of faith and prayer she may give her child over to the divine care, the enchant- ment of the material, the witchery of the mortal roses and lilies, has passed from her lips and arms forever. Death, under all pagan forms of civilization, was the most terrible of facts. 128 LETTERS. because it meant just this, the shutting out from beautiful material conditions. When Christianity descended among men in a form comprehensible to the heart and imagination, it came as the Consolator. It did not promise to restore the past, but opened vistas of glory and satisfaction out of the depth of the divine riches. Atheism and Pantheism. Atheism and Pantheism are both words from the Greek. Atheism is from theos, God, and a particle denoting negation. It denies the ex- istence of any intelligent will or power in crea- tion. It asserts that the universe is a develop- ment or evolution of material forces, working according to certain methods, without any pur- pose or final cause. It denies the possibility or actuality of any presiding, intelligent Creator. The pantheist, from two Greek words meaning God and the All, — Theos and Pan^ — asserts that the universe itself, in whole and in parts, is a manifestation and modification of the crea- tive power, that which has no existence as a personal being, but only exists through the life of man and nature. There are various forms and modifications of atheism and pantheism, according to the mental and moral status of the individual hold- ing these views; but the simple definition is ATHEISM AND PANTHEISM. 129 always correct, that atheism denies any God whatever, and pantheism sinks his existence and personality in the All of nature, conceiv- ing with Fichte that He comes to his highest consciousness in man. I have been through a great deal of meta- physical thought and read largely in that direc- tion, and both these views of creation are as abhorrent to my reason as they are to my high- est sentiments and aspirations. I believe in a revealed God, revealed through the teachings of the highest religious geniuses of the race, and revealed to the reason and conscience of the highest developed souls. I believe in an absolute being, infinite in wisdom, who is not part nor parcel of the universe nor of the con- sciousness of man, but who constantly creates and governs the world, and is educating the human race for higher intelligence and infi- nitely higher and more varied work in spheres superior to this we call earth, where we do but get our initiatory footing into life. We are bound to make the most of this material sphere we call earth, knowing we shall pass as individuals into higher opportunities of in- telligence and action. Let no one shake you in this pure and enlightened faith. I say en- lightened, and I know what I say. You will learn after the profoundest study that the 130 LETTERS. most enlightened reason is in accord with the humblest worshiper in a Christian church in the belief in an infinite being who creates and rules the world. Early Christian Art and the Renaissance. The period of time called the Middle Ages, which I suppose may be counted from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries A. D., is almost uni- versally spoken of by modern writers with contempt. I neither understand nor sympa- thize with this feeling. This period of seven or eight hundred years seems to me especially rich in the incubation of religious sentiments and dogmas that repre- sent spiritual ideas ; and Christian art, as dis- tinguished from the art of the Renaissance, leads me into deep secrets of the soul's experi- ence that can find no expression in the greater pictorial beauty of the Roman school. In the earliest Christian centuries, the di- vine man, upon faith in whom was founded the church of St. Peter's at Rome, was rep- resented in rude drawing, in crypt and cata- comb as the good shepherd, mild and loving, gathering his followers into the sheepfold of the church, and carrying the lambs in his bosom. By the fifth or sixth centuries, the widespread misery and confusion of society, EARLY CHRISTIAN ART. 131 and the development in the human con- sciousness (stimulated into deeper life by suf- fering) of a sense of sin or separation from the divine love, caused the figure of the gentle Christ to recede into the distance, and the good shepherd became transformed in the imagina- tion of men into an austere judge, and we begin to find pictures of wrath and retribution. It is a phase of the human consciousness. But the human heart torn with anguish can- not bear this. It must have for consolation and hope the human side of deity as a medi- ator between it and the eternal, incomprehen- sible Father. Thence, as the true idea of the Christ was lost in the picture of an Avenger, there grew up by an irresistible necessity the worship of the Virgin Mother. This worship was al- ways considered by stronger minds, particu- lai'ly by St. Bernard in the eleventh century, as a heresy in the church. It was so, but to my mind it was one of those necessary and beneficent heresies that supply the place for the time of an absent truth. The conception of the Christ had become falsified in the minds of men. He was no longer the redeemer into purity and peace, the mediator between the majesty of the infinite and the childishness of humanity, but a wrathful judge of human weak- 132 LETTERS. ness. Men had lost sight of the human side of the deity, and they must have it under some form or dogma to save the race from despair. This I consider to be the rationale or logical reason of the heresy of the Virgin in the Cath- olic church, and her early appearance in Chris- tian art. All the way through, she represents phases of the religious consciousness of the soul. Very early the Virgin appears, evidently as the soul itselfy with the Christ-child on her knees, pre- senting him to the church or united Christen- dom. The Christ appears at this time always as an infant, because the Christian conscious- ness always begins in an infantile, tender, weak state, and needs the nurture of the Christ-beam (Christopher), who always stands for the Chris- tian church or its guardian saint. Then, again, we see the Mary on her knees before the infant Christ, who represents the eternal spiritual truth which the soul must worship as " Sent of God." I have also seen pictures which showed the Christ on the heart of Mary, which surely represents the Christ or spiritual truth as having become the internal life of the soul. These old artists never represent the Virgin as a beautiful young mother with a lovely child in her arms. This came later, and was merely the deification of natural maternity, and, how- EARLY CHRISTIAN ART. 133 ever lovely to look at, has no spiritual signifi- cance whatever. These Christian Madonnas are mature, mostly care-worn and care-burdened, as the soul must be before spiritual truth is incarnated in its depths by the power of the divine spirit. This is one of the mysterious phases of the soul's life that the Middle Ages has be- queathed to us in sensible images. Then, again, from the tenth to the fifteenth century we have the struggle for supremacy in author- ity of the church and state as representing the temporal and spiritual powers, most promi- nently carried on by Hildebrand (Gregory the Seventh) and Henry Second, Emperor of Ger- many. Gregory the Seventh, who was, as I think, a very great man, withstood the assump- tion of the emperor, and from his time, for two or three centuries, the spiritual power organized in the papacy was very despotic in Europe until it was shaken to its foundations in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by the as- sertions of individual and national freedom, which is the other side in the twofold devel- opment of the human race. The balance is never even. The fight is never over. All history is a record of the ups and downs of the two principles. When authority becomes oppressive, it must 134 LETTERS. be warred upon until the human being gets a full and free place for individual activity. When freedom of thought and action runs into license, and the soul is on the verge of destruction from the absence of any conserva- tive element, then must authority be reinstated in church and state, to represent to the senses that freedom alone is ruin, and that there is always a truth and right to which the soul is bound in unconditional allegiance over and above its own inclination and attractions. Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo da Vinci belonged to the age of the Renaissance. He is considered a Christian artist because he painted subjects furnished by the church or the legendary lore of Christen- dom. But he was immensely affected by the opening out of the early Greek mythologies and the early Greek art that burst upon the world in the fifteenth century, through the fall of Constantinople into the hands of the Turks, the dispersion of Greek scholars over Europe, and the founding of schools of Greek literature and art in the Italian cities, principally Florence, under the Medicean princes. Christian art be- gan almost immediately to lose its purely sym- bolic character as the suggestion of the spirit- ual through natural forms, in which the form LEONARDO DA VINCI. 135 was utterly subjected to the idea. The beauty of form in itself came to be asserted, — the right of the natural to be, of and for itself. It was the protest of nature. The spiritual and natural are not at one or in harmony in this initial stage of existence. They are op- posite elements in our life, and when one gets too much the upper hand, it has to be limited by the protest and assertion of the other, be- cause both are necessary to our unfolding. The spiritual perception and the natural form are equally necessary ; both have their rights. The time when the representation of devo- tion, adoration, self-sacrifice, in lines that ex- pressed no human beauty, and did not look like anything human, had done its work, the right to represent the beauty of the natural, in forms such as the old Greeks saw and copied, asserted itself and made the school of the Re- naissance. Da Vinci's Last Supper was a re- markable instance of this. Hitherto the Last Supper had been represented as a purely super- natural symbol. The heads had no human in- dividuality. They were all alike, with a halo around each. They were simply souls. Da Vinci draws human beings around the table, faces full of the human emotions of hope, fear, love, expectation, curiosity. We get the hu- man side of things. We feel a certain actuality 136 LETTERS. in it. It comes home to the human heart, but its distinctively supernatural character is lost. It is precisely the same thing, under different form, which took place in the world of religious thought and belief when the Unitarians parted off from the Trinitarians in the church. The Unitarian movement was a protest of the hu- man heart against the doctrine of total de- pravity, which was the favorite doctrine of puritanic Calvinism. Unitarianism asserted the rights of human nature, as artists of the Re- naissance asserted the rights of the human form ; but in so doing, both went to extremes and lost sight of certain supernatural significance in the old method. All periods of coming back to nature, whether in art or religion, are very like to be accompanied with the revival of the inductive method of reasoning, in opposition to the deductive. Art. There is but one goal for the aspirations and longings of the human soul, and all our studies, whether in philosophy, history, art, or religion, conspire to this one end, that is, that the soul shall know the truth, and be developed and matured thereby. Truth is, as I have repeat- edly said, the statement to the intellect of ob- jective facts, and spiritual truth is the statement to the soul of spiritual facts, in language which ART. 137 it can best understand, whether that language be philosophic statements or pictorial images. A work of art which did not portray truth on the plane which it purported to represent, I should say was no work of art at all. A land- scape must be true to nature, even when the artist paints ideal scenes. The ideal is the true, the real, the spiritual, intellectually (not spirit- ually) discerned. Beauty is the union of truth and good, — that is, of the principle (the underlying reason) and the manifestation. There can be no beauty when truth, either on the natural or spiritual plane, is absent. Truth is the vital, creative principle. When the manifestation outruns the principle the forms degenerate, and we have that kind of beautiful which is false art and false life, and leads to artistic and moral death. The Greeks were perfect artists ; they were so organized within and without. Their gods were idealized men and women. They had an in- tuition that the human is the highest of forms. They could make the human grander, larger, nobler, nearer perfection, than the actual (which is always more or less blurred), but their in- stinctive genius and perfect taste kept them from ever vitiating the natural form by altering its fundamental proportions, as the Assyrian and Egyptian nations did in their monstrosities of 138 LETTERS. three-headed and four or more-handed divini- ties. Such symbolism is indeed as inconsistent with beauty as it is with vital truth. From this false symbolism the Hebrews were wonder- fully guarded. " Thou shalt make no likeness of me " was the prohibition, because the infinite could not be at that time represented in any finite form without degrading and falsifying the idea. In the symbolism of Christian art the human form, when it represents the divine, is never travestied or made monstrous in any way ; only the expression of mere human beauty is so lost sight of in the conception of somewhat higher, that the human form suffers from deple- tion, as it were, but never from exaggeration or caricature. Great as the Greeks were, they had no spirit- ual conception, and could not have it, as it was not revealed to the human soul in their day. The world is infinitely richer since there has come into the human consciousness the concep- tion of a redeemed humanity (through the story of the Christ), which differs from the idealized humanity of the Greeks, as it recognizes the infusion of a life-principle from a divine sphere, subjecting the human and recreating it out of natural into spiritual beauty. Thus it is that Christian art prior to the Renaissance has a tenderer, deeper significance than the perfected REPRESENTATION. 139 forms of Greek art because the underlying idea is infinitely more sublime, however imperfectly it may be expressed. . . . Representation. This is a world of show or representation, not substance, and the religions of the world educate men into the belief of this. It is only philosophy (which differs from religion in ex- plaining the causes or the why of things) which educates the more advanced minds to see the why and wherefore, the meaning and signifi- cance, of religious rites and dogmas and doc- trines. Probably the majority of persons live in the senses, and this may not be a sensual life (which is another thing), but a life of keen appreciation and enjoyment of all that this material life has to give ; and a vast deal of the beautiful this world has to offer. With keen senses and perfect health, the sailor, the trav- eler, the artist, may revel in all the multitudi- nous sights and sounds of this beautiful earth, and it is a good and legitimate joy. I would not underrate if I could the grandeur of skies or the magic of falling waters. But no soul can live in these appearances. There is no will nor choice in it. The sailor, the traveler, the artist, is compelled by his nature, more or less according to his development, to put into the 140 LETTERS. starry heavens and the rolling seas the majesty, the sublimity, the marvelous melancholy, which come entirely from within, and constitute his own soul's contribution to the picture. It is he, and not the stars or sea, that burns and longs and sparkles. Thus even in the sensuous life, if it be only pure and simple, there are almost unlimited sources of enjoyment, — almost, but not perennial, because man is not made so, because the human constitution is not simple, but complex. If man were merely emotional and affectional, he might possibly get his fill of enjoyment in this atmosphere with pure senses and uninvaded health. But he is not made so. That is the crucial fact. There is a world within of religious, moral, and aesthetic senti- ments. He pines for the unseen, he longs for union and communion with the eternal and in- visible. He must know that somewhere or somehow God is, and cares for man. Thence the religions of the world. Thence the highest re- ligion, as being the expression of the best and most developed of the human race, that which most perfectly represents eternal truth, namely, the Christian religion. Multitudes outside of Christendom are edu- cated according to their capacities and needs by their racial religions, and in Christendom multitudes are kept in purity of life and sanity REPRESENTATION. 141 of mind by the observances and doctrines of the Christian religion. The vital value of these observances and doctrines is that they represent in a symbolic way spiritual or universal truth, and therefore are vitally important to the edu- cation of men and women, and are absolutely necessary in the development, preservation, and stimulating of the interior life. The majority of Christian men and women demand nothing more. To externalists of whatever phase or degree, these observances and beliefs are the best culture they can have. There are some who are born with a tendency to grow into a deeper self-consciousness and a more exhaustive rationality, and they cannot help saying, What does all this mean ? Why does the Christian world pour into churches, and pray and preach and sing anthems ? And it is in vain to try to stop this why and wherefore. If we do we drive it into skepticism and agnosticism. I have come to see, in all this Christian expres- sion, movement in the right direction. It is the education of the multitude through pictorial and intellectual representation and symbolism of universal, spiritual realities or absolute truth. To know the why and wherefore is philosophy, not religion. Religion is the training of the emotions, sentiments, and understanding, and the adjustment of the habits and observances 142 LETTERS. of life to one's highest conception of truth and good, however this truth and good may be in- carnated to the imagination and faith of the worshiper. Thus the Buddhist and Mahome- tan may be religious though not Christian. As I have said before, the Christian religion takes its unquestionable superiority and sub- limity from the fact that what it stands for is truth, the fact of things, and not falsehood. We see this when we come to look upon it philosophically, or with an insight into the eternal reasons upon which it rests. I think self-abnegation and self-denial are taught in the Christian Church, because, like all the rest of its teachings, it represents a spiritual condition which is only attained in this atmos- phere by aspiration and conception. Christians are not spiritual any more than the rest of the world. They are religious. They believe in and worship that which represents the spiritual, and the most advanced come into spiritual con- ceptions, not spiritual realities. Self-abnegation and self-sacrifice belong to Christian discipline, as they do to the discipline of all religions, but they are not especially Christian doctrines. We must do the highest we know always, what- ever sacrifice of feeling or personal good it may involve. So did the oldest pagan hero. So does the sincere Buddhist. This is all reli- REPRESENTATION. 143 gious and moral culture, and of great benefit when regulated and controlled by the clear light of reason. Sacrifice of any kind, unguided and unenlightened by reason, is the very essence of fanaticism. This is why it is always dan- gerous for persons who are led and governed by feeling, instead of reason, to go outside of the express direction of Christian ordinances. They run into fanatical actions, and are not fit guides to themselves. There are fanatics in all reli- gions ; the Christian religion has abounded with them ; it is the religious sentiment running wild. No sentiment or affection is to be trusted unguided and unguarded by the understanding and the reason. Therefore it is that common sense is so often a safeguard to persons who are not capable of a more inner perception. Com- mon sense, which is the average intuitions of the human mind, is a good and faithful servant,- though plain and common of aspect. He is worthy of respect, and keeps the mass of man- kind in due order. We must do faithfully, ac- cording to our best abilities, the work of the day, of whatever kind, following out our noblest aspirations, as long as these aspirations them- selves are under the control and guidance of the highest reason, or the most rational concep- tions made known to us through our own intui- tions, or those of wiser or more matured minds. 144 LETTERS. The aspirations themselves are all feelings. They are impulses or desires born of concep- tions or images of the true or beautiful or good. No feeling is safe as a guide. It is a spur, an incentive, the very spring and push of life. It is life, and not death. But it needs light and direction. This the Christian communion fur- nishes to myriads. The point of danger is always when the soul begins to go alone — to pick out its own path. I must repeat, feeling, however lofty, is never a safe guide. It must be controlled by the best judgment of what is most fitting and consonant to the highest welfare. I use the words "natural" and "spiritual" in a different sense from their ordinary use. I call everything natural, every phase of thought or feeling or action that belongs to the consti- tution of man in his creation and development, over whatever spaces of this world or others that development may occupy. There is a natural order and there is a spiritual order in the universe. Every possible creation, includ- ing man in his whole constitution, is at first natural, that is, governed and supported by opposite principles of life of which he is un- conscious, and between which he has only a phenomenal and educative choice. Thus, nat- ural life is a collision, a struggle, an effort, an REPRESENTATION. 145 unrest, guided and governed by a divine Provi- dence, but not at one in or with itself. It is a process of growth, of development, of becom- ing. And such process throughout nature is always a ferment, a bubbling, an interchanging, a striving, and so must continue (time is noth- ing) until its opposite and opposing elements are brought into equilibrium or balance. All nature, in whole and in detail, is an illustration of this. This is a natural condition, and is perfectly innocent and legitimate, and in the order of divine Providence. It is not to be blamed or despised. It is simply the method of creation that the natural order must always precede the spiritual, the time of fruition and completeness. I consider religion, whether emotional, senti- mental, or practical, to be, strictly speaking, natural to man. It constitutes his highest nat- ural condition. I honor all religious persons. The more devoted, sincere, internal they are, the more I honor them ; but I do not call them spiritual, neither in condition nor conception. They are religious, ethereal, ideal, but not spiritual, because this latter term stands for a universal or completed condition. This world, this initial state of existence, is not to be despised. Indeed, it is a grand foot- stool for ascent. We get here the foundation 146 LETTERS. of our knowledge both in human and divine things. We shall always be human, and I do not believe there is any real knowledge of man or nature but has its service and use for man. We must do the duty of the day serenely, trustfully, looking forward into endless vistas. The ideal is within and about us, — the ideal in art, literature, and life. These voices call us upward and onward. Symbolism. Symbolism lies at the foundation of all my- thology, indeed of every form of religion. All religions have their mythology, because there are certain spiritual or universal truths that can be conveyed to the mind only through the medium of myths or narrative form. These myths are forms merely. When they convey spiritual truth they are true in the highest sense, not necessarily true to the exter- nal understanding, but true to the imagination and the sentiments. All creation is a picture- book or i-epresentation of what would not be apprehended through mere rational statements. Thi^ is what I mean when I say that every fact in nature, even every form and mode in and of animal life, is symbolic, or represents a fact more internal and universal than itself. In all religions, in every form of speculative SYMBOLISM. 147 thought, the serpent especially, of all animal forms, has always represented and expressed the principle of selfishness, self-worship, or the most internal principle of self-love, separated from its controlling partner, universal love. There are two kinds of love in our moral con- stitution, as there are two kinds or two sides to everything in the universe. Self-love, or the instinct to appropriate whatever is outside of us to our own use and benefit, is the very essence of our nature. Strictly speaking, it is not evil : it is natural. From the time the infant first takes food, all life is an imbibing and appropriation of somewhat outside of us to our own physical, mental, and moral growth. The evil begins when this appropriation is made, not from a love and worship of good and truth in themselves, but as ministering to our own personal greed of vanity or ambition, or to base and unworthy aims. If I love what is good and true, my appro- priation of them, in every form of thought or word or life possible to me, is not evil. This constitutes my moral growth. If I use my appropriations of knowledge to purely per- sonal, greedy, or base ends, they become in me moral evil, and stultify and deform the soul, instead of developing it. As illustration, we may say that to eat food as a child eats, from a 148 LETTERS. simple and unconscious pleasure in juiciness and sweetness, is natural and helpful to the building up of the body ; but when the natu- ral instinct is transgressed, and eating becomes- a thing in itself, as to the epicure and high- liver, then the results are disease, physical deg- radation, and death. The moral side of all re- ligions is directed to the control of self-love, or the instinct of self-appropriation, by the awak- ening of the affections in the love of others, or the awakening of the religious sentiments in the love and worship of divine attributes in some divine personality. The purpose and office of religion and morality are to keep the rampant self-love in its place as subject, not master. Now, of all animal forms, that which seems the most involved, the most sheathed, the most earth-clinging, is the serpentine. Some one has remarked that it puts forth no limbs nor wings : it creeps. I do not wonder that the fancy and the imagination have always seized upon it as the emblem of selfism, indi- vidualism, self-love in its most undiluted ex- pression. In religions, it is the worship of the material principle in nature, as opposed to the spiritual, or what represents the spiritual. For instance, the earth-worship, or worship of the python, in early Greece, was overthrown by the religion of Apollo, which was the purest SYMBOLISM. 149 and sublimest religion of ancient Greece. You know the myth of Apollo slaying the python, — one of the grandest of the old myths. In the Hebrew myth, the story of the fall (so called) in our Bible, I consider the profoundest truth concerning ther mental and moral consti- tution of man, and their necessary development is conveyed in forms that are eternally true to the imagination. Man and woman are ne- cessary to each other. They are the comple- ments of one another. Together, they make society and perfect the civilization of the world. Apart, they run into savagery or weakness. Metaphysically considered, truth and good are one, the masculine and feminine sides of life united. Truth, separated from good, is imprac- tical, severe, unfitted for " human nature's daily food." Good, separated from truth, is unen- lightened, running into all manner of weakness and illusions. It is fatal when Adam and Eve separate and undertake to carry on the world's work alone. Adam needs the practicality and adaptability of Eve, and Eve needs the uni- versality and intellectuality of Adam. Satan, which is the name the imagination of men has given to the principle of evil, means separation. It is the separation or divorce of good from truth. The serpent sometimes represents also the acuteness of the natural understanding, 150 LETTERS. never, I think, the divine wisdom. We must recollect that the finite principle, of which I consider self-love or selfism the representat'-^e on the natural plane, is evil only when in rebe ■ lion to the infinite. It is as essential in crea tion as in the infinite itself. It is only when it sets itself up in opposition to the infinite that it is Satan. All natural knowledge and quali- ties are good in their place. The cultivation of the natural understanding is right. Practical good sense is a virtue. Courtesy, discretion, prudence, are not spiritual qualities, but they are natural virtues and have their place. We can be perfectly high-toned and true without of- fending or unnecessarily irritating others. This is a sort of natural wisdom. I do not know why the serpent has ever been used to express it. I suppose the ring it makes with its tail in its mouth suggests eternity, which we always conceive as a circle, never as a line merely. But in all religious symbolism I recognize it as a wonderful emblem of selfism, individual- ism, egotism, materialism, or all merely natural forms of being, thinking, and doing, in opposi- tion to the controlling and sovereign principles of spiritual truth. TEE CROSS. 161 The Cross. The symbol of the cross is of perennial wonder and interest. Symbolism is the lan- guage in which divine verities are conveyed to the apprehension of the human mind. It is, we may say, a great picture-writing addressed to the mind's eye or imagination, and through that stimulating the affection and sentiments. The religions of the world are all symbolic. It is through their religions that men and races are brought into contact with invisible realities. Philosophical statements can only reach minds that are philosophically developed, and as yet there has been no philosophical statement ^{vew to the world which covers the whole religious ground. Religions are not philosophies, though they can be shown to have a philosophic basis. Religions are addressed to what is most univer- sal in man ; that is, his moral and religious nature and his imagination. The imagination is the great incarnating power of the intellect. It puts into shape, or into the form of some ma- terial image, an idea that could not be otherwise expressed. The memory and affections take hold of the idea so expressed in its correspond- ing material type, and treasure it up, until, through the growth of the mind, the spiritual significance is discerned. 152 LETTERS. All creation, material, supernatural, and spirit- ual, is the product of the union of two eternal elements, combined and manifested by infinite power and wisdom. These elements we call by different names, according to the planes of thought from which we contemplate them. We may speak of the infinite and finite prin- ciples, or of the spiritual or natural, accord- ing as we speak more or less internally or ex- ternally. They all rest upon the great law of creation, which is the union of opposites through sacrifice ; the lower or more external principle being subjected to the higher or more internal, as being the manifesting principle. There must always be present in any phenomena a crea- tive or manifesting principle, and a productive principle, or that through which the former is manifested. In every thought we think, there is the sensation from some outward object or fact, and the internal perception of the sensa- tion; these united produce the conception or thought, which is a thing in the mind, ety- mologically having the same root-sounds. The conception of union through sacrifice is the re- ligious phase of the profound philosophic idea of the product of all thought and fact by the sub- jection of the lower to the higher, — the use made of the finite by the infinite, or of the nat- ural by the spiritual. The cross, or the union TEE CROSS. 153 in one diagram of two opposite lines, has always been spontaneously used to express or represent the union of opposites. It is the symbol spon- taneously furnished by the imagination to the religious sentiment. I should expect to find it wherever there was any genuine religious ex- pression. It represents the method of crea- tion^ — the use or subjection of the more exter- nal principle to the more internal or creative, for the purposes of manifestation. Creation could not be expressed or represented by the material symbol of a continuous line. It must always be a line crossed by another. There is no possible product otherwise than from the union of two elements. The cross is a ma- terial symbol representing the universal fact of creation. It has been particularly appro- priated to express the passage into the spirit- ual, because that is the ultimate and goal of the natural ; and the use and purpose of the reli- gions of the world is to suggest to the mind the fact of this ultimate destiny, and to train and educate the human being for it. The cross is as essential an idea in the creation of the nat- ural world as of the spiritual. Every spiritual fact is first a natural fact. The symbol is made more prominent in religious rites and dogmas, and preeminently in the Christian re- ligion, because, in the development of human- 154 LETTERS. ity, man becomes more self-conscious ; and in the religious experience the outward symbol of the cross becomes an internal fact of the consciousness, — an internal symbol, purporting that the union with the divine principle of life can only be obtained through the sacrifice of the life principle of the finite, which is selfism, and the surrender of itself as manifestation of the divine purpose. Greek 31yths. The Greek myths are poems, and so fur- nish material to be vroven into other poems, ■whether in music or verse. Their immortality is owing to the fact that they are true poems, that is, products of the imagination and the legitimate fancy, and so embody, or repre- sent universal experiences. The story of Or- pheus and Eurydice is of this kind. I think Orpheus is an historical person, probably the organizer of the religious and social instincts and intuitions of the early Greeks, doing a similar work to that ■which Moses did for the early Hebrews. That he was a person of re- ligious insight may be inferred from the ac- count that he interpreted the mysteries, that is, gave the esoteric meaning to what the people already believed. His music and poetry show him to have been of a highly artistic nature, a GREEK MYTHS. 155 typical Greek, and the stories of what he was able to effect by his music and poetry do not exceed what we often feel, as if all nature were fluid and pliant to the inspirations of genius. The story of Eurydice gives a lovely picture of the sweetness and purity of the marriage tie in the earliest ages of the Caucasian or Aryan races. An imaginative story or myth may be interpreted by each one according to what it represents to that one's imagination, or ex- presses of his or her experience. The higher the myth, the more will the interpretation be one and the same, because the profounder the experience, or the deeper the insight, the more universal it is. What belongs to our common humanity is greater, that is, more representative of the spiritual, than what is individual to us. To me, the having brought Eurydice back and up from the land of shad- ows and darkness into the light of day, is the recovery of her in a more real and glorified personality ; but when, not satisfied with this, Orpheus looks back, to count his steps as it were, to analyze the ways and means by which he has come into this glorious possession, the radiant vision vanishes. This is my own origi- nal interpretation. I impose it on no one. I have felt myself the peril of looking back, of being assured by the senses of that which can only come through the higher intuitions. 166 LETTERS. Human Constitution. Infinite life is the creative power in God, and finite life is that coexistent principle out of which and from which he has created the universe and all its contents. I do not believe in one divine life flowing down from the eter- nal through all his creations, and of which his creations are only modifications. This is the philosophy of Buddhism, and has crept in, under various disguises, through modern Chris- tian thought and phraseology. This subject is the most abstract possible, and it is difficult to state it in terms sufficiently simple. The finite mind cannot comprehend life in its ori- gin. I do not apprehend the infinite Creator as infinite life or infinite spirit. He is an ab- solute Being, in whose complex nature infinite life or spirit is the creative power, or, in reli- gious phraseology, the first person in the God- head. Man also is a complex being. He is not merely reason or sentiment or sense. He is all these combined and individualizt^d through a personal principle or will. I do not think of man, the human being, as a spirit, or a soul or a body, more or less, but as a composite crea- ture, body, soul, and spirit, made one through the individualizing will, but who has just got foothold in existence, who is in a very unde- HUMAN CONSTITUTION. 157 veloped condition, and whose more or less de- velopment depends upon the more or less un- folding in his composite nature of the reason, which is the highest power in man, and the condition of which is always the consciousness of an internal personality by which he is a person, not a thing. Every normal human being has reason. It is that which differen- tiates man from the brute. But very few in this life in the material sphere we call earth, come into the self-con- sciousness of reason. In very few is rea- son an active principle, and even of these few no one has come into the fullness of it which belongs to a more exalted sphere of existence. Because human beings are sensu- ous, affection al, intellectual, artistic, it does not follow that they are rational. People dif- fer from birth in nothing so much as in the development of the reason. Therefore I do not believe human beings have as yet come into responsibility. There can be no respon- sibility, strictly speaking, without self-con- sciousness. We do not reproach any animal however it may simulate human vices. We do reproach men for the same acts because they are rational in germ and possibility ; and these reproaches and exhortations are the sub- stance of all religious training, and quicken into 158 LETTERS. life the living germ of rationality. But strictly and philosophically speaking, human beings act from their mental and moral affinities, and are not responsible because they do not as yet know what they do. We are obliged to use the same words in different senses, according to the plane of thought we are speaking from. To train children or men and women, we are obliged to address them as moral and ac- countable, because this is the way to make them so. It is the educating process, the external fire that quickens the dormant inter- nal spark into flame. This is practical teaching, the preaching which is necessary for the whole world, of whatever clime or condition. But philosophically speaking, there is as yet no sin in the world, because there is as yet no spir- itually conscious creature. There is vice, which is the violation of natural law in one's personal experience ; there is crime, which is the viola- tion of social natural laws : but of sin, which is the conscious separation of one's self from the divine order, there is no possibility, excepting a representative or pictorial one. You will now understand when I speak of the forms of good and evil that abound in humanity as representa- tive forms of opposite spiritual principles. We look upon all human beings as in process of de- velopment. None of us have come into spirit- HUMAN CONSTITUTION. 159 ual reality, only approximately. The majority of persons have no spiritual consciousness what- ever. They are conscious of desires, affections, wants, aspirations, but have not come into the light of reason, and so are not capable of self- guidance. They need to be trained by parents, teachers, churches, institutions, into habits of obedience to a wisdom higher than their own. Life must first of all be orderly, as you feel and say, before it can be beautiful. The passions and instincts must be subject to the sentiments, the sentiments subject to the teaching of the highest reason through instituted formulas, and the whole being brought into obedience to the highest law, however revealed. This is why you instinctively feel that obedience is the pri- mal virtue of the individual and the race. This is what is meant by the story that the first sin was an act of disobedience. The best lesson the children you deal with could learn is to obey a superior, not a master merely, though that is better than nothing, but to obey a superior in mind, morals, and manners, without question or hindrance, without hesita- tion or demur. It would be the first real step in education, intellectual or moral, the initiative into conscious life as distinguished from the mere instinctive. Great spiritual ideas are revelations always. 160 LETTERS. The forms or statements into which they are put depend upon the intellectual status of the individual or the race. I do not believe they are evolved out of the progress of human so- ciety. I believe they are always revealed to certain great intuitive minds, and embodied in forms that can be apprehended by the im- agination and sentiments of the people whom they teach and train into these truths. The presentation of truth varies with the mental advance of the race. But the revela- tion does not. The form varies, but not the substance. We are not the religious and moral descendants of the ancient Phoenicians, nor of any pagan people. Our moral and religious ancestors were the Hebrews. The Hebrews, with all their narrowness, darkness, and con- fusion, were not pagans. They had a revela- tion of a spiritual God in so far as they could apprehend him through their great religious geniuses. The religion of the Hebrews never countenanced barbaric sacrifices. All their le- gends, like that of Abraham, emphasized the directly contrary. We have come down from the great Caucasian (or, as it is now put, the Aryan) stock, but our religion we have taken from the great Semitic race. I believe the rev- elation of a spiritual God was revealed with the very origin of man. Its forms have been HEREDITY. 161 refined in the development of the sentiments and intellect. I know all this doctrine of evo- lution. I have read many works of its best advocates. While I do not doubt that much scientific truth is discovered through its ac- ceptance, I believe that a vast deal is left out, and that before you are as old as I am now, there will be a reaction from the overwhelm- ing and well-nigh irresistible materialism of modern thought. Heredity. The fact and law of heredity is indeed one of the most mysterious elements in our com- plex organization, and it is difficult to state it without overstating it. We are organized beings. To exist is to have the power of manifestation. To be manifested we must have an organism by which and through which we can be known. Our most external organism is our bodily senses and powers, which relates us to the material world that environs us, and is perfectly adapted to our physical constitution. There is a harmoni- ous interaction between the perceptions and the objects that minister sensations. No less true is it that our deepest emotions and farthest- reaching thoughts must be expressed through a material organism, the workings of a ma- 162 LETTERS. terial brain ; and it is undoubtedly true that this material organization, this birth by blood, is transmitted from sire to son. But in every department of this complex being, man, there is a within and a without. The eye sees by the light of the sun and cannot see without it, but it is not the light of the sun that causes the eye to see. It is the union, or product of the union, of the external sensation and the in- ternal perception, that produces the phenome- non of sight. Sight is not the light nor the seer, but the product of the union of the two. So it is throughout our whole nature, from the most internal perception of material sights and sounds to the perception of absolute or spiritual truth. There must be two principles present always, — the phenomenon or the object pre- sented to the intellect, and the intuition of that which it is. All through our consciousness, the object or phenomenon on one side, and the intuition or law on the other, makes percep- tion possible. We inherit the shape, size, and power of our brains. We are related by blood to those who in the physical line have pre- ceded and will succeed us. But we are con- stantly and inevitably related to internal spheres which correspond to the internal states of con- sciousness ; and from and through them come the intuitions, each in its sphere and in its de- THE SUPERNATURAL. 163 gree, which make thought, aspiration, worship, and knowledge possible. We act according to our mental, moral, and physical organiza- tion. The will or organized individuality only combines and controls these manifestations. It creates nothing. We are also created inter- nally with affinities for certain forms of truth and good, and we aspire and grow according to them. The forms of supernal life are multitudinous, and the affinities for this or that form or series of forms constitute the numberless in- dividualities. The will acts in the direction of the strongest affinities ; and the more these are allied to the pure and true, the more vital and beautiful is life. The Supernatural. If I should put on my hat and go to your house to-day to visit you, the act would be simply natural, individual, trivial, having no supernatural significance whatever. A fact or act to be supernatural must in the first place be primal, universal, racial, and then, through religious inspiration embodied in religious usage, be separated from secular to special use, and so become the medium of ex- pression, or the only language possible between the spiritual and natural orders of thought and 164 LETTERS. life. Eating and drinking are universal facts. Wherever there is life, from its highest to its lowest forms, it is supported by imbibing. Every form of existence eats and drinks in order to* live. The eating and drinking go to constitute the environment, and the prin- ciple of life descends into it from an interior or superior plane. This is relatively super- natural to that of the environment. It is so because it represents a spiritual law. It is separated from its common or local use and becomes a sacrament or somewhat set apart, consecrated within the fane. This is the ori- gin of all communions. The influx of life from a higher into a lower environment, thus making it possible for the lower to live at all, is the great central fact of the universe. Drummond recognizes it as the great natural law pervading the natural and spiritual worlds. I insist that it is supernatural on every plane, because it represents what is relatively spirit- ual ; and to do away with the term is to cut out the most expressive word in the language, as in cutting away the fact we should make all revelation impossible. The descent of life from the higher to the lower environment is received unconsciously by that which it enters, because there is no consciousness apart from life. The descending THE SUPERNATURAL. 165 life must bring its own consciousness. The vegetable world knows not how or why it is supported from the animal, nor the animal from the human, nor the human from the superhu- man. The environment is furnished from be- low. The principle of life, with whatever more or less of consciousness it may bring, is from above, and the meeting of the two, the environ- ment and the life, constitutes a new organiza- tion or individuality. When we come into the interior spheres of human individuality, this influx of life includes all the wide phases of religious consciousness. There could be no experience without the condition and the influx. These two are abso- lutely necessary, and they are always super- natural, that is, representative of spiritual law, as method according to which the worlds were made. The religious consciousness never knows the method, only the fact. It is a religious mys- tery. On this material plane the supernatural influx of the Christ into the soul cannot be a matter of consciousness, but is received as represented by the religious life of Christen- dom. Our life is a life of faith. Every attempt of the individual worshiper to pass into the spiritual life in this atmos- phere results in individualism, self-exaltation, and fanaticism in its various forms, according 166 LETTERS. to natural temperament and organization. It is the evil one. " Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil." Now the great question comes, What is this Christ, the influx of whose life into the soul of man constitutes spiritual life ? The Christ is the eternal, universal manifestation of the life of deity — the outermost of God, — the divine body, the minister of God, as our body mani- fests every thought of our interior nature, and we could have no manifestation without it, and could make no revelation of ourselves to an- other. By the Christ, which is his most exter- nal sphere. He made the worlds and makes himself known to man. But the worlds are material, ethereal, and spiritual, and it is never directly, but only in a supernatural, represen- tative way, that the life of God in Christ can be brouffht down to the human consciousness and made the educator and developer of the soul. So this material universe is a sphere of representation merely, — a great phantasma- goria where we learn the forms of things but never touch reality, which glory is reserved for the final condition. The Christ is the all- pervading, all-manifesting life of deity, rep- resented in a supernatural way through all the orders of creation, but manifested only to the prepared soul under spiritual conditions. THE SUPERNATURAL. 167 The Christ is the one great fact of the spir- itual universe, — the manifested God, the face of the Father, the one central fact and doctrine of the Christian religion ; the one word for Christianity, tlie only name by which man can ever be redeemed into immortal conditions ; tlie mediator and only possible interpreter be- tween God and man. His blood or life-princi- ple is the life of the supernatural and spiritual worlds. Every manifestation of God, every possible revelation of his attributes or designs, is made through a man or men. Hence there is a line of supernatural men, and He who consum- mated the law of life in his own experience, transferring it from outward material symbols into a human experience, is especially the man- ifestation of the nature of the Father and the revelation of his will. He was perfectly man^ — that is, neither satanic nor angelic, not be- longing to divine or infernal spheres, but con- structed human, and passing a human experi- ence in this material and most external sphere of the universe. All his experiences were nat- ural and yet supernatural. I do not pretend to explain the phenomena of his birth, life, and death. I believe they were supernatural. I cannot explain the phenomena of my own life. I believe there are a series of supernatural 168 LETTERS. facts of which we are utterly unconscious, con- stantly infolding and pervading our life. None of our lives can be read literally. Just so far as we are literal^ just so far are we clods of the valley. " The letter killeth." Growth. By " quiet " I do not mean passivity. There is a passive or receptive element in the human soul, but that which fructifies the soul is life, movement, communication, the giving forth into thought and word and deed. Growth is constant activity, the transition or passing over from one plane of feeling, thought, or activity to another. All growth, to use the phraseology of the day, is a mode of motion. The one vice is indolence. The etymology of the word is, to be free from dolor or pain. But pain is better. All life is the product of the interaction of opposite ele- ments. All history is the story of conflict. I do not believe in peace upon what I call the natu- ral plane, or the initiatory sphere of thought and life. All history is the record of war of tribe with tribe, nation with nation, or, more intellectually, of civilization with civilization, ideas with ideas, — the passing away with the oncoming, the past with the future. (See Cousin's " Introduction to the History of Phi- losophy."} GROWTH. 169 The present is always a battle-ground. Not to feel, not to protest and assert, is not to live. Better to grow gray and wan in thinking and living and acting than be soft and sleek in the mere surface-life of pleased sensibilities. This is what earth is and means. You are right in standing out for the present. This earth is in its way as good and necessary as any hea- ven. It is a great error, and one which my philosophy especially repudiates, to believe that any divine or ideal life is to be reached by setting aside or contemning the human and earthly. Whatever we may mean by " an- gel," no man should wish to be one by ceas- ing to be man. We could not be if we would. The inexorable law of creation forbids it. The door is bolted that way. Only in the perfection, the fullness of our human, can we join hands with the divine. I believe in the freest and fullest development. But we must first learn what this mysterious somewhat is, that in our consciousness we call our nature, and generalized we name humanity. How is its development to be accomplished ? Now the study of humanity, in ourselves or in his- tory or in contact with the world, constitutes moral thinkers. Our plan of study is not now in question. What we want to learn is the secret of this human nature, what it de- 170 LETTERS. mands, what it craves as its greatest good, or fears as its greatest evil. The full manifes- tation of all that is in the soul, that is, the desire of man to express himself in life un- trammeled by any law but that of his own individuality, being in a word the law unto himself, has been expressed by moral and meta- physical schools in ancient times, and in latest of days by the various theories of freedom in extreme transcendental circles. Now these theories of unlimited freedom of development have been originated and advocated both in ancient and modern times by persons of ex- ceptional purity and elevation ; and the reason why they inevitably and necessarily degener- ate into viciovis maxims is because the doctrine of free development is but one side of a truth, and taken by itself is a falsehood, and the offspring of falsehood are necessarily crime and misery. There is no more valuable ex- perience than to see principles carried out to their ultimatum. Well, then, if the doctrine of unlimited free- dom of development as the highest good of man is falsehood, and would if not arrested lead to the dissolution of the soul and so- ciety, what is the truth? This, as I conceive it, that through every opening phase of hu- manity, on every plane of life, along with the GROWTH. 171 struggling upward and outward into free ac- tivity, must be present the conserving and con- trolling element, the principle of subjection, and under these two opposite forces humanity is held in safety and sanity, like the planets revolving around the sun. This has been al- ways recognized under some form. In ancient times, the Stoics opposed and neutralized the Epicureans ; and in ancient and modem times religion has taught the necessity of some re- straining and subjecting power. In our modern thought it appears as religious and moral ob- ligations ; but philosophically considered, it is the conservative element in creation. I have come to see in Christianity the state- ment of a profound philosophy, a statement of the ultimate harmony between the conflicting principles of development and subjection. In other words, Christianity is the statement to the reason, that is, a philosophic statement of the ultimate union of the human and divine, and the method of that union. This method is never the crushing out or destruction of the human, but its renewal and transfiguration. The Christian religion is not a philosophy ; no religion is. All are addressed to and realized through the affections, sentiments, and imagi- nation. It is as true as ever that man believes with his heart. 172 LETTERS. It is comparatively few who turn round and demand a reason for their belief. And yet this is the best, the noblest, and truest thing to do. The mind especially asks the meaning of things. It is the intuition of the intellect to ask. What does it mean ? Just now thinkers are more interested in studying external nature than their own souls. I feel sure that there will be a reaction from this. I believe in the revival of theology. By that I mean the science that treats of God and his relation to man. You will not doubt, I think, that I believe in the earth, that is, in that plane of thought and life on which man is working upward into the fullness of human- ity, — through toil, through conflict, through thought, coming into the realization in his con- sciousness of the whole secret of life, namely, to know himself, and so to know the human race. I believe in a revelation, more or less obscured, but growing clearer and clearer, of the fundamental fact in human nature, that is, the relation of humanity to its Creator, and that is the burden of all religions. The Christian religion, as I have said, represents this revelation in forms suitable to the needs and conditions of individual souls. The ex- ternal organization of Christian churches is the GROWTH. 173 supply to what men in some of their phases demand. It is always right to oppose the false, to protect the weak, to face down the tendency in human nature to tyranny and lordship in church or state or private life. This is work to do, good work, and in so doing does one emancipate his own soul and help on the life of the race, for we are so bound up that good or evil to us is so to all. There is a solidarity of the race. I believe in the earth and in earth's work, and that nothing in creation sur- passes it in importance and necessity ; but it is one side, and there is an upper and under side to the crystal globe of life. I believe also in heaven, that is, in the fruition of man's life in its union with the divine, or divine human- ity, wherever or whenever in the ages that frui- tion may be. The practical service of this be- lief, this essential idea underlying Christianity, its value here and now, is that it alone keeps human life pure and true. It is the conserving principle arresting the precipitous rush into the seen and temporal, and, by setting a barrier upon the absorbing hunger of individualism, making human society possible. It is indeed a philosophic axiom that man individually and in society is saved, that is, preserved in the integrity of nature (integrity meaning whole- ness) by hope. 174 LETTERS. Religion is the aspiration, the stretching up- ward to the ideal, the life crowning the actual. The Christian religion is the promise of the divine humanity, the Christ of God brought out upon the plane of the actual. As such I consider it represented in Jesus of Nazareth, and so made a tangible reality to the faith and hope of men. I consider that Jesus of Nazareth has repre- sented this ideal to the Christian world. I take this merely as fact. The disputed whole ques- tion of why and how the Christian church have taken him as their head does not touch the fact of history that such has been the case. The story of Jesus has arrested and fixed in time the conception of the divine humanity, and so has been of incalculable benefit to the world, which, untouched by abstractions, can only love and adore the divine in human form. T^e Amotions and Sentiments. I consider the emotional nature to be more superficial and external than the sentiments. These are departments of the mental constitu- tion which seem to be separated not so much by doors as by waving and folding portieres, so that we pass from one to the other by easy and almost imperceptible gradations. The most external mediums of knowledge of that which THE EMOTIONS AND SENTIMENTS. 175 is objective to our personality are undoubtedly the senses. The note the mind takes of the objects presented, is called sensible perception and reflection. These objects awaken our af- fectional nature, and produce what we call emo- tions, or movement out of, which are simply more internal sensations. We designate the sensations as hot, cold, soft, hard, bright, and dark ; and we designate the emotions as joy, sorrow, hope, fear, love, hate, admiration, and contempt. Observe how all these states or conditions go in pairs or opposites, showing the dual nature of the human constitution. In- terior to these emotions or internal movements are the sentiments, which, as their name im- ports, (the root-word being mens or mentis^') partake of an intellectual or rational character. Of the sentiments, the moral and religious are the highest, expressing themselves through a controlling sense of obligation or duty — that which is due or owing. Spiritual or absolute truth, apprehended by the individual, is incarnated or embodied in that form of thought or feeling which is most characteristic of the individual at the time. The majority of people are self-conscious only to the extent of sensations and emotions which the influences of life and thought educate and deepen into sentiments. This is the reason 176 LETTERS. why religious teaching and observances are so refining. They open the nature from within, and bring into the light of consciousness the world of the sentiments, transforming the crude feelings or emotions of hope, fear, gladness or grief, which we share in a certain way, more or less, with the animal world, into the senti- ments of hope, love, adoration, duty, awakened by recognition of supernatural forms of thought and obligation, into which no mere animal ever comes. All religions are emotional or sentimental, ac- cording to the status of their adherents. The normal human being is neither one nor the other exclusively, but is designated as one or the other as the emotional or sentimental side pre- dominates in his make-up. External people, if of a quick, lively nature, are generally very emotional, and such people give what I think you would call color to society. They are full of emotional life, and contrast pleasantly with more stolid temperaments. But deepening life and experience bring them into the region of reflection. Here thought comes in. Religion tones the emotions into sentiments or internal emotion, as emotions may be called internal sensation. The call of the true or Christian religion is always to think. " Think on these things," it says. THE EMOTIONS AND SENTIMENTS. 177 Now this semi-intellectual world of the senti- ments is not the affections, the understanding, nor the reason. The affections or instincts are the underground of our whole nature, the mo- tive power or ground-spring of human life. The understanding includes all the intellec- tual powers, or what we generally call mind, and the reason is the highest department of this. We know perfectly that the majority of men and women are neither intellectual nor rational. The intellect and reason are latent, present but latent. Now the intellec- tual world, or the processes of the understand- ing, do not induct us into the region of super- sensuous ideas and conceptions. This appre- hension of and attraction to supersensuous ideas and images belong to the vast interior, unexplained region of the sentiments, the sen- timents of veneration, adoration, intuition, and obligation, to which religion is addressed. Re- ligious people have right on their side when they say that religion does not come through the intellect, but through interior experiences. In some persons the intellect or understand- ing predominates over the sentiments. Their minds are clear, incisive, logical. They de- mand to understand rather than feel. Such persons make up more or less the denomina- tion of Unitarians. They set aside the ele- 178 LETTERS. ment of mystery. They are, as a general fact, educated, well-to-do, highly conscientious and moral, and contemn all feeling that does not issue in good conduct. The more emotional class of Christian sects take in the less cul- tivated, more impressible classes. The great organized churches, the Catholic and Episcopal, take in the more conventional, less individual class of minds, those that delight in order, pre- cedent, authority, and the stateliness and poetry of symbolic forms. Of course you will under- stand that this classification is ideal. Actually the churches are a conglomeration of persons, opinions, and conditions. It is only the more earnest portions, the thinkers, always rare in any community, who choose their mode of worship and religious instruction. The majority go where their fathers went, and think no more about it. Every one is right to go where he or she finds the best nutriment to mind and heart. Every healthy human being has affections, emotions, sentiments, understand- ing and reason, more or less active. We speak of a person or institution or race according to its characteristic qualities, the quality which is uppermost at the time and colors all the rest. The presence of reason, or that mental power which perceives the inner cause or law of phe- nomena, is rare even in intellectual persons. THE EMOTIONS AND SENTIMENTS. 179 . . . Reason teaches us to wait, not to hurry or expect solutions of the insolvable. Do not try to solve the problems of life by too in- tense thinking. Wait, cultivate quiet, and the light will often come of itself, — frequently in some unexpected way. There is an intel- lectual humility which is as sweet in its way as moral humility. It consists in being will- ing to be kept in tutelage. The highest minds on this earth are in a state of development, and see things more or less partially. That is why persons seem lacking in breadth and depth. There is no universal person. That belongs to the spiritual era, which will never be in these material conditions. We have a great deal to learn, and there is a great joy in add- ing to our store little by little. Was it not Lessing who said that if God held absolute ti'uth as a gift in one hand, and in the other the powers and opportunities to obtain it, he would take the latter? so pro- found was his sense of the joy of degrees, the supreme satisfaction of growth. Every good in the universe is oi-derly and comes in the fullness of its time. . . . Besides the emotional, senti- mental, and practical phases of religion, there is a phase in which the reason is the predominat- ing element. This phase sees through all others, including them all, respecting them all, and as- 180 LETTERS. signing to each its due place and utility. It is a divine nectar which more than anything else quiets the soul. It is resting in the depths of infinite wisdom. Holy Grail. Lowell has written a beautiful poem upon " The Quest of the Holy Grail." It is an un- dying legend, because it symbolizes an eternal fact in the soul of humanity. The soul of man is always seeking the cup of divine life. It is turned out of its path by the constant temp- tations of the senses. It often loses all be- lief in the celestial treasure through the blind- ing influence of evil desires. But the longing and the search "are persistent and immortal. As I have said before, the legend is of super- lative beauty and profoundest significance, and every heart and mind will put upon it, or find in it, its own interpretation, according to the intensity of the aspiration or the depth of the experience. To me it has the same symbolism as the cup which the Christian Church uses in its communion service. Both signify the re- ception of the divine life as something inex- pressibly more profound than eating of the bread, which is equivalent to hearing and obeying the truth. This is the reason why in the Catholic Church (the most representa- HOLY GRAIL. 181 tive church because the most universal in its symbolism) the cup is partaken of only by the priests, who stand for a deeper initiation into spiritual knowledge, and the wafer, or the body of Christ, is all that is received by the laity. Remember, when I write this, I am speaking of what things stand for in their meaning and principle. I am not referring to any practical working. The ideal is the true and rational meaning. We know what close allies all the arts — painting, poetry, music, and certainly archi- tecture — are to religion, because they seek to express universal or spiritual ideas in indi- vidual forms of line, tint, or melody. All reli- gious rites, the preeminently Christian rites, — for instance, baptism and the Lord's supper (to speak only of these, though I consider the other sacraments as equally significant), — are really high art, as expressing universal ideas, or universal facts in the soul's history, in ap- propriate material forms. These forms are appropriate because there is a perfect corre- spondence between the use of water in bap- tism and the purifying influence of Christian teaching and supernatural influences from above ; and the most sublime correspondence between eating the consecrated bread and drinking the consecrated wine, and the re- 182 LETTERS. ception into the soul of divine truth and life. Humanity has always been taught its pro- foundest truths through the imagination and the sentiments. Legends like the Holy Grail, have educated the soul through centuries. That men have not understood their significance mattered little. The profoundest knowledge does not come through the understanding. Opposites. When I speak of oppositeness between the divine and human, or the spiritual and nat- ural, the fact involves no fault nor crime nor sin on the part of the human and natural, only that man must be created opposite to God in order to have any human individuality. His destiny is to be united to God, and there can be no union except through opposites ; and this union can only be brought about by the sub- jection of the lower to the higher through the sacrifice of love. You are created for a full, natural development ; first the natural, then the spiritual. You are called by your Maker to use all your powers of body, soul, and mind to the best and highest purpose that you at the time know. No inspiration is to be smothered, no talent cramped, no opportunity for larger life neglected, save under the restraining influence of a pervading and regnant sense of duty, OPPOSITES. 183 which is the united outcome and expression of the moral and religious sentiments. Trust God nobly, and worship Him faithfully, and He will not fail sooner or later to lead you up into full- ness of life. We are here in our initial sphere. We are in a material body with material sur- roundings, but we are immersed in a supernat- ural sphere, which lies all about us as the air encircles the earth. Our life is fed from this higher sphere. Genius is inspiration through the imagination and reason from this interior sphere. Prophets and apostles are inspired through profoundest religious intuition into the knowledge of sublime, eternal facts respecting the relation of man and God, which they utter forth in a symbolism that ofttimes they them- selves do not understand. But the source is the divine Creator, the maker and ruler of all. There can be no direct communication between God and man. The infinite One is revealed to the finite soul only through mediums or medi- ators. The one great revelation of the union of the divine and human was made in the birth, life, and death of the Lord Christ ; a rev- elation of profoundest, universal, absolute ideas and facts through the medium of a great super- natural fact, patent to the apprehension of man. By the supernatural I mean every word or fact or event that intervenes between the 184 LETTERS. spiritual and natural, and is the only revelation of the former to the latter. For the natural mind cannot, from its very nature, discover spiritual truth. It can only receive it through the language of symbolism, and that not until divine inspirations throw light upon the sym- bolism. The reason why the modern scientific spirit rejects all spiritual ideas is because it rejects the supernatural order. There are perceptions of the reason which, when we come into them, shed floods of light over all the phenomena of religions and life. There are primary facts that we must accept as we find them, or wait until we understand them, such as the distinction of races, as well as the distinction of individuals. One race is white and historic ; another is black and infe- rior. So one man is a Homer or Dante, and another digs a ditch. We accept these primary facts. Mahometanism and Buddhism are suita- ble religions for the nations to which they be- long. The Father of all takes care of all. No- body can go to a Christian hell excepting a Christian. Do not think of the divine nature as oppos- ing the natural. It never does. The Father is forever drawing humanity to his Son. No man can come to Christ unless the Father draw him, is written. The most opposite things in 0PP0SITE8. 185 nature are drawn to each other through their very oppositeness. The opposite poles of a magnet attract. The same poles repel. The attraction between man and woman is the at- traction of opposites. The passion of love is, when genuine, attraction of opposites made one by this supernatural medium. God is one, yet He is constituted as man is, who was created in his image in spirit, soul, and body, a trinity in unity. We approach Him through his body, or most external manifestation, which was represented on the plane of the senses in the man Christ Jesus. So it is true, taking it in its most universal sense, that we can only know God through Christ, the supernatural mediator between the divine and human. Try to form the most sublime, universal ideas regarding spiritual and divine things. Very good per- sons often narrow God down to man by their attempted definitions. There is no distinction respecting the inspira- tion, spirit, and personality of God. He is one, indivisible, — a divine person, but revealed only through successive manifestations of himself. We never err more than when attributing to Him feelings and motives borrowed from the human natural consciousness. We can never think too largely, too grandly, too sublimely, of God. He teaches us through the medium of 186 LETTERS. great facts. We can understand no other spir- itual language. The greatest fact in the uni- verse is the revelation of the divine humanity, the union of opposites in the supernatural fact of Christ the Lord. Education. I think the acquisition of knowledge a very serious thing. If I thought of it only as an ac- complishment, it would lose its interest for me, but I believe it enters as an element into char- acter, and so probably forms the body of our spiritual life. In every one of us is going on a dual process, the development from within and the appropriation from without. We study to get materials for thought, and to think, that is, to look at our knowledge as a thing in the mind. To consider or sit down with it, to hold it as an object under the powers of our reflection and reason, is to bring it into the light of certain laws which are the intuitions of the reason, and by these laws we judge it and use it. For in- stance, here is a piece of Roman history, we will say the first four hundred years of Rome. The narrative charms of itself. From childhood up, we like to hear a story. Accustom your- self to tell that story, simply as story, to some friend or child, or better, write it out, as straight and simple a story as you can. No matter if it EDUCATION. 187 has been done a hundred times. No matter if you can take down the book and read it. Put away the book, and write or tell the story. Then ask who were the onlookers to that story ? Who and what were the people that came and went, bought and sold, fought and were fought with, in this story, and what did each give and take of their best and their worst? Then seek out some prevailing quality of character and action that goes to make a national characteristic ; write these things all out, and you will have materials for thought when you come to compare this people with another, and are trying to find out what valuable element they furnished to the common life of humanity ; what marks they have left on time ; what is their immortality as a nation ; what result, in substance or in power, they worked out for the great life of humanity. One life explains another. What we are always seeking, is to get life explained. The child lives on spontaneously and unre- flectingly. The hour has not come when life presents itself as a problem to be solved, a mystery to be explained. History may be studied, as a story to be told, just as the child lives along and the day's occur- rences happen to it, and it likes to be told what happens to another child-, or man, or people, or nation. It is a series of happenings, and if 188 LETTERS. they awake agreeable sensations or emotions, then there is happiness in the hfe or the story. There comes an epoch in every life when the mind stops in the midst of this flow of things, and asks why and whereto this is, or what is the meaning of this life ? Now we seek an an- swer that shall correspond to the depth or com- prehensiveness of the question. The answer to any question which a people or nation has put concerning its life and destiny, is the religious belief of that time or people. The early life of any great nation is like childhood and youth, in its unconsciousness, its spontaneity, its love of adventure, fighting, or hard play and hard work. The forms of its religious thought are the products of its emo- tions and imagination, more than of the under- standing and reason. Hence the mythology of all religions, or the narrative and personified form into which was put its notions and beliefs, intuitive or traditional, of God and man, and the relation between the two. I conceive that the child in its early life shares in the uncon- sciousness of nature : that which makes it es- sentially human, its inner personality, is not yet developed. It is more or less at the mercy of impressions and influxes from the world of na- ture, and the tide of emotive and intelligent life that is setting in through it from the great ocean EDUCATION. 189 of humanity, out of which it is newly individ- ualized. It needs to be controlled and guided by a maturer intelligence and more developed personality. It is born into natural humanity, but is not yet grown up in it. In its humanity lies all its possibilities ; it must explore the ocean upon which it is launched, must learn all that humanity knows, and experience or trans- mute into its individual life all that humanity has learned and suffered. The child's destiny is, first of all, to be man. The beauty and charm of childhood is like the beauty of nature, only far more interest- ing, because man is made in the image of God, and is centralized by a personality which im- ages the divine ; only it is but a form — an im- age, not a transfusion. I conceive that human- ity is, in a special sense, a creature of God, but not yet a son. I do not know what nature is, unless it is in some way an expression or im- itation of humanity, or a creation of God with the personality left out. The unconsciousness, innocence, simplicity of the child, and even the childish virtues, belong to his non-development. It is true that he has just set out, just in a sense left the creating hand ; that heaven lies about him ; but the shutting down of the glory is the coming out into that for which he was made. He is more human the less he seems 190 LETTERS. divine. The angelic nature of the child is a seeming only. There is no reality in it. It is the foreshadowing, the presentiment, of a re- ality that is to come. He must leave that in- nocence, that Eden behind him, — learn all the heights and depths of humanity, grow into a perfected human being, oppose himself more and more to that which created him, and become an opposite to God. This is hidden from the soul until the full time comes. Man believes that through his intellectual, moral, and religious ac- tivities he is drawing nearer to the Father, be- coming more and more the image of the divine ; and yet he is not deceived, for he is walking in the way he should go, taking the only route possible by which he can reach heaven at last : for the way is, to be man first of all, man po- tentially and actually, man in all the capabil- ities of knowledge and suffering, before he is in the condition or status to worship God. So that all our studies and efforts, our passivities and activities, bring us at last to the knowledge of ourselves, or humanity in our individual person. Just so far as we are conscious personalities are we emancipated from external nature, are we at the head of the natural creation, and ready for the divine offer of redemption. LAW OF SUBJECTION. 191 Law of Subjection. We come into this world full of impulses and affections, without experience, because we must live before we accumulate the results of life ; and without self - consciousness, because that comes from the interaction of life and thought. As we develop, come into con- scious relations between our desires and sur- roundings, we find we are not free or isolated. There has been woven about us link upon link, and we find ourselves in relations with others, involved in duties and responsibilities more or less voluntary. Now we can turn round and assail fate (as we call it), and beat our brains out in spite on account of our surround- ings, which is the act of madmen ; or we can free ourselves from all that belongs to us, and rush out into the savagery of self-indulgence, and so lay up for ourselves future agonies of remorse ; or we may take the only wise and ra- tional course, which is to accept life as we find it, and, by bringing our highest powers to it, make it the best we can. The law of the universe is subjection. All nature moves in obedience to laws that restrict and restrain ; and the human mind and will work most strenuously and effectually when they work in harness. It is the mistake and 192 LETTERS. folly of youth to suppose that growth and hap- piness come in freedom from limitations. The man is free by using his limitations to noble purposes and aims. No man is free to do as he pleases. He is only free to do what is right and best in the circumstances. Through this assiduity, and application of his mind to emer- gencies, he gains mental and moral strength. I think the true cause of the conflict in the modern mind between Christianity and non- Christianity is misconceiving or ignoring that the great underlying principle of Christianity, its philosophic element, is the principle of obe- dience. Man must obey something or he ceases to be man, — which word signifies a creature who means or reasons. Until the child or the child-man can perceive and obey the law of life revealed to the reason, he must obey external rules. Tims the rules of religion and moral- ity as embodied in the Christian Church are the external conscience of the race, until man comes into the perception of spiritual law in the reason. When he does so, he will see that the obligations of religion and morality, and the highest intuitions of the reason, coincide in enforcing upon man that the law of mental and moral growth, and the only way to peace, lies in the fact of self-renunciation. Nothing enchains us but the tyranny of a selfish will. LAW OF SUBJECTION. 193 Our will is our individuality — is the organic unit of our whole being. When it is domi- nated by our desires and impulses which seek only their gratification, it becomes a slave ; and though apparently it has the liberty of a despot, it is all the time beating about in the narrow sphere of self-love, and feels the grat- ing and pressure of the invincible limitations that shut self in. It is only as the will rises into the region of principles, and sacrifices its selfism on the altar of truth and duty which represent universal laws, that the soul of man comes into true freedom. Some inspired poets have described this change as " being trans- ported to a large place." We know that the senses are good subjects but terrible masters, and we call a man ruined who is under their feet. Now the emotions are only internal sensations, more refined, more subtle, but they are utterly blind and unintel- ligent masters. To be ruled by them is to be torn by whirlwinds. Subdued by reason and subjected to the wise ordering of a concen- trated and disciplined will, they give all the softness and variety to life ; but like everything within us, their whole beauty and grace depend upon their subjection to something higher than themselves. 194 LETTERS. Materialism. Yes, my dear friend, we must shut our eyes resolutely upon the swarm of material facts that bob their ugly heads up and down in the choicest domain of our thoughts. I am realizing as never before the reality of this temptation. In my best and clearest hours, I have accepted the sublime truths of Christianity as inter- preted by " The Philosophy," and their work- ing has deepened my consciousness, clarified my mind, and given elevation and scope to all the purest and most disinterested longings of my nature. These are as much facts as those hor- rible material facts that seem at times to swamp us. I will cling to what " The Philosophy " has given me ; the rationale of all Christian doc- trine and dogma in the constitution of the Godhead, — the rationale of revelation from and in the very creation of man. I believe man is a threefold being, a trinity, as is his Maker ; and that as we now correspond in our whole material construction to the ma- terial sphere in which we dwell, so there is another sphere, internal and ethereal, to which we as fittingly and perfectly correspond inter- nally, and upon which we shall open our eyes at the death of this body. That men miscall this other world spiritual, or that we, wearied MATERIALISM. 195 and worn with the fret and fever of the pres- ent, can often think of nothing so sweet or good as to sleep on and on, a baby's dreamless sleep, does not alter the fact of things. The one belongs to that blur and confusion of thought in which most persons dwell, and the second belongs to our over-strained hearts and spirits. I have myself been painfully impressed by the dying out, as it seemed to me, of the wish to live again. But I believe it is one of our myriad experiences. We are bound to know and understand all the phases of the soul's natural history. I have found a certain power in being able to say to persons in bereavement, not that I had always believed and trusted, but that I had also protested and accused the living God of hardness and in- justice. So I believe it is not in vain that I can say to some world-weary and pain-weary hearts that I, too, have cared more to rest forever than to waken even to hallelujahs. And then, again, this experience is of service in freeing us from that petting of our own individuality which even fine persons have. It is a joy to me to believe that certain vani- ties and peculiarities, that cling to our identity here, will die out and be succeeded by a deep- ening consciousness of existence ; a sense of particular recipiency of the wisdom of God as 196 LETTERS. we study hour by hour the method and mean- ing of his works, and become conscious co- workers with Him in the redemption and regeneration of the universe. We have so much to learn, and oh the joy and sweetness of learning it from no consideration of personal advantage ! — to study the wisdom, beauty, and meaning of God's universe for its own sake because He made it ! When Cardinal Newman speaks of music, even I have so fath- omless a swell of uninterpreted suggestions, and intimations float in upon the deepest spheres of my being, that I feel faint with the thought of what it must be to the musi- cally organized. And yet I shall be musi- cally organized there. The defect is in the most external physical construction. Crea- tion is an eternal poem set to the most ade- quate music. Stray bits of it come to the favored now. I have hardly dared to look too steadily into a star's eye, so ravishing away of the senses is even a gleam of beauty. I do not care what God will do with me when I die. If He puts me into the lowest purgatory, even He cannot put me out of place. If He will only give me some of his great books to read, some of his profound secrets to solve, I will praise Him and exalt Him for- ever. But He will do more than this. He MATERIALISM. 197 will open within us the capabilities of love which have been hindered in expression. I do not mean the paltry, initial love which serves its turn here. But the joy of being enriched and enlarged in and by the act of giving one's self away is, I doubt not, one of the grand lines of the future. There are two cups of knowledge and of specu- lation put before us. One sparkles to the brim with the light of hope, cheer, personal dignity, sublime vistas, and is proffered by the purest attainment and keenest mental and moral in- sight. The other is thrust upon us by all the materialistic science of the age. It is nauseous to the taste. If we drink of it, we do it with a wail of despair. I cast it down and let it shat- ter in the name of the Most High. Whether evolution be true or false, one thing is true, — that man is made in the image of God, triune ; an image merely, natural, phenomenal, pic- torial ; and that he is made to be developed in this natural form until he becomes a full-grown natural creature. He must be first natural be- fore he is a candidate for the spiritual. To call a (supposed) half-bestial creature natural, as Mr. Fiske does, is an utter misnomer. He tries to drag in the ministry of Christ, making him a mediator between the bestial and hu- man, which is simply horrible, as the mediator must be bestial himself. 198 LETTERS. Drummond's view is better. He makes a genesis of new life in man by the incarnation, calling this life spiritual, when we know it is only supernatural and representative, and that the founder of Christianity is both natural and spiritual and so supernatural, — the mediator between the two. Drummond tries to do away with the word " supernatural " altogether, not aware that he is doing away with the whole mediatorial region. This term seems to have become greatly vulgarized. It seems as if it were held as a term identical with the irra- tional, the superstitious, the non-natural. Let us do what we can to redeem it from these poor, trivial associations into the grandeur and breadth that " The Philosophy " gives it. It is the broad middle region, the only possible plane upon which the spiritual and natural meet. I see clearly that there can be no revelation to man other than a supernatural one. If divine revelation were not in mythical form, it would convey no spiritual truth to the human mind. There is nothing so sublime to my imagina- tion and conception as this grand, mystical region. The highest poetry, the profoundest music, contribute to it. I know why you are so moved by the story of " Clarchen." I know why love seems better than life, — that death is sweeter than life. It is the mystic principle GREECE AND ROME. 199 of sacrifice that underlies all great thoughts and emotions. The doctrine of the cross must be reinstated to bring back into life any of the grand seriousness of eternity. Drummond does not see that in denying the supernatural he is cutting away the ladder between us and heaven. He seems to think he is doing a great work in bringing all possible experiences within the range of natural law, and that the great stum- bling-block is the term "supernatural." He does not recognize the necessity of the media- torial. This middle term is at the root of our " Philosophy." Let us cling to it. Crreece and Rome. Maech, 1885. I wish you could have been present at my talks. I have gone through the old Egyptian, Persian, and Hebrew civilizations in the light of *' The Philosophy," and the last two or three mornings have been upon Greece, and many new thoughts came to me. I reviewed its phi- losophy and culture until I brought it down to the feet of the great, universal, absorbing Ro- man Empire. I was newly impressed with the great agency of the Macedonian conquests in bringing the human race through Greek cul- ture to the point of personal consciousness which was necessary as a receptive condition 200 LETTERS. for Chrisfcianity. Next time I shall take Rome, and show how it always, from its very begin- ning, represented universality and authority, — how it necessarily subjected to itself all other forms of human development. Rome was indeed the Eternal City. The capital and queen of the pagan world, it only passed on to a higher and more internal basis as the capital and queen of Christendom. It represents to my mind the authority, even despotic authority, of truth. It was the great conquering, comprehending, unifying, virile principle in human progress. I do not see any other time in history, save at this unifying point of the Roman sway, when the Christian ideal could have been introduced into the world ; and this Christian ideal was the doctrine of the divine humanity. Men longed to know God. There was no other way possible but in the creation of a divine-human sphere in which God and man should meet as one ; and there was no way to communicate this divine concep- tion to man excepting through incarnation in a supernatural human life. So I have come at last, after a life-long naturalism, to accept the life of Jesus the Christ as supernatural and symbolic ; and once accepting this, I stagger no longer at supernatural manifestations, though the same or similar ones surrounded the cradle BEREAVEMENT. 201 of Buddha. And why not ? I feel bold enough to say. Buddha was supernatural — a revela- tion from the opposite or destructive side of the spiritual. I see more clearly than ever how purely transcendental is Buddhism. My very dear Young Friend : I sympathize with and grieve for you as another dear face and form is taken out of your home. I do mourn for those that are gone. Look at it as we may, under whatever elevating and inspiring influences, the fact re- mains the same. In death our beloved vanish out of our sight and away from the touch of our eager hands, and the pang of separation cannot be evaded. I know no way of escaping this pain. Our mortal life is full of it, and so I believe that the pain of itself clarifies and purifies. But there is surely something more than this ; and what is it ? All that I have learned seems so trite to say, and yet the com- monplaces of religion, words that are on every one's lips, cover the profoundest verities, the most startling and supernatural revelations, could we but realize these truths and make them actual to our lives as is the daily sun in the heavens. We must and do believe in the divine Providence that inwraps and mvolves our little lives as completely, as perfectly, as 202 LETTERS. each drop of water is as full of the presence of the divine laws as is the vast ocean itself. With Him there is no little and no great. His work is perfect in all its details ; and it is eternally true that even the hairs of our head are num- bered. Then cannot we give up ourselves, nay, more than ourselves, the mother, the sister, the friend, for whom we would lay down our own lives, — cannot we give these dear ones away to that infinite love and care, feeling sure that they can never throughout the universe of worlds get astray, or beyond that encircling arm? I think that often, in the fervor of our human affections, comes the painful sense of how little we can do. Our utmost efforts are so impotent to save. It is only in the most unreserved, most abounding faith and trust in One who is mighty to save, that we give them away ut- terly to Him, — to be his forever and wher- ever, as they assuredly were his here and now. My dear girl, I have nothing to say but this : The more absolutely we trust Him, the deeper grows the sense of his sufficiency. January, 1883. .... I know well that every one must bear his own burden, that we all have a peculiar BEREAVEMENT. 203 and individual constitution, and the form that sorrow and trial take to each one of us varies according to our individuality. And yet it is true, also, that we are all alike, — more alike than different, — all subjects of a Will that is over and above our own, all bearers of this bur- den of an ever-changing and progressive human- ity. We have a common lot. We all, sooner or later, suffer with sorrow and moan with pain ; and so we sympathize with and pity each other. No one knows better than I do what a help along the way is the sympathy of friends. But I sometimes think that we can help each other better, if we can only more deeply realize that we are one in another bond than that of natural joy and sorrow. We long with long- ings unutterable to sit together at the table, and to drink from one cup ; and that table and that cup are the spiritual truth and life which have been so symbolized by all Christian art. No wonder these symbols have been so cherished, so clung to by the heart of the race ! " Eat and drink." "This is my body and my blood." And I know nothing to soothe in sorrow and to assuage in anguish but the conviction that there is objective, absolute, spiritual truth and life, upon which in the hunger of the soul we may feed and grow and live, we know not when or how, and that this spiritual truth is the Christ of God. 204 LETTERS. And yet I know it seems very cold and un- satisfactory to say that all we have of help and comfort is through faith in that divine human- ity through which, and only through which, God touches the soul. We are full of pain and tears, and faith seems so cold, high, and barren a path. It is so indeed, but there are allevia- tions and condescensions in the providence of God to the weakness of our humanity, — the tenderness and sympathy of our friends, the joy of serving and being served, the loveliness of nature, the suggestions of art, and more than all, far more than all, the inexpressible solaces of prayer, and the limitless suggestions and af- firmations that the longings and satisfactions of the religious nature give to the reality of the ultimate union with God through faith and worship of the incarnate or spiritual truth. It is our right to take every comfort and help by the way, — to listen to the voice that suits our present need, or cherish the sentiments that sweeten our cup. There is One who ap- portions the food and drink, and there is no haste nor hurry nor delay with Him. I be- lieve that everything comes to us in the fullness of its time ; and though I would gladly close this letter by saying, as so many religious per- sons do, that I have seen and heard of the glory of the Lord, I do not say it. I live by BEREAVEMENT. 205 faith, a growing and deepening faith. Others may speak from knowledge. I know He gives me all the light I can bear. I am glad to know that He will not unbind our eyes until the full- ness of our time shall come. . . . The absolute need of every human soul is the same, and the infinite Providence infolds every soul like an atmosphere. I could give up the dearest object in the universe out of my love, into that divine, all - sufl&cing care. Always to be with Him, here or there, con- sciously or unconsciously ; always to be with Him, who is as essentially human as essentially divine, — to trust Him utterly ; not that He always does or always will bring or give what we call happiness, but that He will always do for us and ours that which He knows is the best. Oh, do not think, my dear friend, with the poet Tennyson, " How common is the commonplace ! " Great truths are commonplace because they are revelations of the universal or spiritual judgment ; but when they find us out in our in- dividual need, it is as if they were spoken to our private ears. Temporal things seem to roll together like a scroll, and we learn that the deepest cry of our heart is to follow Him, at 206 LETTERS. whatever cost, and to give our beloved to Him, and to Him only. Every heart knows its own sorrow. Every heart knows that for its deepest pain there is no remedy but in the thought of God, our maker. Yes, I use the old-fashioned words : He made us and knows us as no human being does, or can, or ought. To trust Him through the doubt of the senses is, I truly believe, the greatest act of the soul, — the act of spiritual obedience. And the noblest instinct of the soul is to obey. Mat, 1865. .... I should hardly believe that dear F. could find strength anywhere to sustain this shock, did I not know the wonderfully recuper- ative power there is in the human soul, — had I not learned from experience and observation, not so much to wonder at what we pass through, as that things touch us so slightly, — that after all, in spite of moments of anguish and hours and days of weariness, we emerge from the shadow of distress and disaster so intact, so unspoiled of any real wealth, so unshorn of any vital strength. Nothing makes me so realize the value of every individual soul, and its su- premacy to its conditions, as the way it sheds BEREAVEMENT. 207 disappointment and even bereavement. I know no one who can bear to hear this in the first access of grief. I know that sorrow loves its sorrow better than any consolation. How true, and beautiful because true — since truth and beauty are one — are the lines of Tennyson ; " Let Love clasp Grief, lest both be drown'd ; Let darkness keep her raven gloss : Ah ! sweeter to be drunk with loss, To dance with death, to beat the ground. Than that the victor Hours should scorn The long result of love, and boast, ' Behold the man that loved and lost, But all he was is overworn.' " And yet it is not the victor Hours : it is the victor Soul. But we never believe that the future has anything to give so good as the past. There is a certain loyalty within that is offended if any one hint that any new joy can take the place of the old, that any other love can compensate for the vanishing of the old love. It is in vain to tell us that archangels will come in the room of our angels. We are jealous of the new-comers. The heart is not ambitious ; it would rather have the old content than a nobler newness. The soul in sorrow is homesick, and pines for the well known and dear, and faints before untried paths ; and I 208 LETTERS. believe it is better to have its sorrow out. The deepest grief is comparatively momentary ; all the courses of nature are remedial. The sure onmoving of time, the successions of thought, the reactions of emotion, tend to restore equilibrium to the tortured sensibilities. The soul moves on ; its states vary and ad- vance ; and when at any marked point of its career it pauses for a new introspection, it finds, that the life that lies behind it, so full in the passing, so quivering with sharp thrills of joy and sharper thrills of pain, has filtered itself into a few facts of consciousness, or has crys- tallized itself into the perception of a truth be- fore which the soul stands and says : " I have bought thee at a price, but I could not have won thee for less." For her who has lost the tender and wise friend, the sure and gentle counselor, no voice is gentle enough to speak consolation. There can be no pressure on that wound tender and delicate enough, save that touch which is the breath of the infinite spirit. When that comes, no sun of May is so cheering, no June breath so healing, for is it not the shine within the sunshine, the aroma within the fragrance ? bereavement. 209 My dear : My heart urges me to write to you, though I really do not know the right word to say in this very great bereavement. Great sorrows must be borne more or less alone. I know how far off and unavailing is the consolation friends would so earnestly offer, when all the stricken heart yearns for is to see once again the face, and hear once again the voice, that never were so beautiful and precious to us as when the veil of death has hidden them from our sight. Oh, how we think, if it could only be once again I What years of our life we would give for one recovered hour out of the impenetrable shadow ! But they do not come again. The beautiful in person, the lovely in spirit, the tender, gen- tle, and dearly beloved, do not come again. And our life would be sorrowed out of us, if God did not send his angels in their place. We could not bear it, we could not let these in- expressibly dear ones go, did not He who made us, and who has opened within us these deep fountains of human affection, himself draw near in his own profound, mysterious way, and in- fuse the strength we need. No human sym- pathy is delicate or efficient enough in our ex- treme need. But he does most assuredly, slowly perhaps, and little by little, so unseal deep, inner resources, so touch with anointing 210 LETTERS. our blinded eyes, that we do come to feel the reality of his overshadowing providence, and to trust Him for now and ever. My dear, I cannot intrude upon you with more words. I know no other balm for the wounds of time than that deepening and up- lifting of our whole being which is the outcome of great griefs, borne in faith and trust. Extracts. There is one Creator, the Lord God of Hosts. He makes and governs man by and through man, but never lays down his creator- ship. I believe in development and in comple- tion. I believe in a glorified humanity, but not to the doing away of the necessity of an imper- fect and progressive humanity, any more than I believe that the time will ever come when children will be born full-grown, and so super- sede the cares and vexations of the nursery and school-room. I believe, according to the old catechism, that man is made for the glory of God, and to enjoy Him forever ; and having be- come completed, his individuality will be used as a medium for the creation by God of ever- renewing spheres of beauty. In the mean time earth exists for schooling, for discipline and development : it is the veil PROGRESS. 211 woven around the too tender soul that would only be destroyed by premature light, but in whose inmost depths is the prophecy that it shall awake, and be satisfied when it finds it- self in the likeness of God. With the perception of universal law there comes a silence in heaven. On earth we talk and have our say, and the speech of some is silvern. In the golden silence, souls will blend with- out speech. Progress. We have lived long enough and felt deeply enough to know that " things are not as they seem ; " that pain and loss upon one plane of the soul's experience is but purification and gain on a higher plane ; that the world of reality lies interior to the world of the senses ; that the soul cannot be hurt nor hindered, strictly speaking, in its development, but by sure and inviolable laws its progress goes on, orbital like the earth, "now through shadow, now through sun," until it "comes full circle," and is then made capable of redemption into another and spiritual order of being and exist- ence. But that great preliminary development 212 LETTERS. nothing can stop, and death is but one of the rounds in its ladder. It is very pleasant to me to think of those we call the dead as sharing in the same great development as ourselves, the same nature, the same primal faculties, and perhaps a not unlike discipline ; for earth ex- tends far beyond this corporeal change we call death, so that no one is cheated of full stature as a human being, no one is cut down in his prime, but each and all shall know the whole of earth, suck all its sweetness and learn all its limitations, ere they stand at the portals of Heaven. For a Heaven there is ; not merely a state or place for the departed, not merely a prolongation or a refining of earth, — this there is, too, beyond the grave, but that is not Heaven, — but a Heaven there is of absolute, spiritual conditions ; a rest from the finite ; a redemption out of nature into spirit. For those of us who have tested the whole of earth, either actually or essentially, is not this hope of Heaven, this faith in the offered redemption out of the bonds of nature into the freedom of spirit, — is not this faith the deep refuge of the soul, the only sufficing faith, the word of God by which we live ? Nothing can express to you what the mere dawning of this faith seems to me. We are not bound to climb forever and forever with blinded eyes and sinking heart, PROGRESS. 213 and ever and ever slipping steps up and up the high, steep mount of goodness ; no, we may sit down at its very foot, and another will take us and carry us in his bosom, as a shepherd does a lamb. We need no longer wring our hands over failures, nor weep in anguish at the burden disproportioned to the strength ; no, for another has taken up our task. He will see that it is done, or let it be undone ; we have nothing to do but believe in Him. POEMS. NATUKE'S CONTENT. The reindeer loves his icy home, Nor murmurs o'er its stinted flowers ; Patient within his sultry zone The noiseless camel treads the hours. Dashing along his polar seas, The huge whale keeps his fleet career, Deafening and dark ; the vessel's keel Touches its wave in doubt and fear : Near him the mighty vortex opes, The whirlpool rears its dripping cone ; With the fierce storm he fiercely copes In his sea-wilderness, alone : Nor needs he other, — needs no band Of fellow-toilers ; hope nor fear Nor discontent his heart expand ; Harmonious to his savage sphere. NATURE'S CONTENT. 215 Close to their birthplace and their kind The valley flowerets softly cling, Nor care how mountain tendrils wind On high, and far their fragrance fling. The bright-winged birds love well the hue They borrow from the lavish sun ; Them lures no northern heavens' blue, Nor cooler streams nor coverts dun : Thus too, the tribes that learn their notes, Their sweeter notes, in softer grot ; That song as unrepining floats, — All have and know and love their lot. All have their place : in happy bounds The fish, the birds, the flowerets grow ; Duteous and sweet the air surrounds, Obedient still the waters flow. All have and know and love their place Save man's lone spirit, careful clad In garments of the human race ; Nor duteous he, content nor glad. But passion-tossed and fancy-stirred, Longing and ever missing bliss, Lord of the happy beast and bird, Ah, wherefore and whereto is this .-* 1839. 216 POEMS. STAR-CHILD. In a pleasant chamber, close beside A lofty window, deep and wide, Stood a little bed, in whose bosom deep A young boy went to his nightly sleep. The window was as a crystal door, Opening out on the silent night ; And the radiance of the clear starlight Lay in white streaks on the chamber-floor, And shone on the pillow and the bed, And brightened the sleeper's beautiful head. And all the night, as one by one The shining stars went up the sky, They paused and looked through that window high ; And as each and every star in turn Like a crown of silver lustre shone Round the head of the boy, more still and deep, More starry and bright, grew hia innocent sleep. One night he awoke, and one star alone Through that lofty casement was shining down. He gazed and he gazed, till it grew like an eye. Placid and clear in the midnight sky ; Then the boy looked trustfully up and smiled. And the star looked brightly back to the child. The morrow he went to his pictures and play, But ever and often he turned him away. ONE HOUR. 217 And smiled to his thought, as though a fair dream Were passing him and his sports between. The mother questions him gently the while, " Why does my boy look upward and smile ? " *' O mother ! O mother ! I would you might see The beautiful angel that 's watching me ! " ONE HOUR. Let me be content in this still room ! I have no past nor future : I will live an hour, One present hour, bounded and limited, An independent, self-existing hour. I nothing know nor see but only this : The sun is bright, lying in full, large squares Upon the brightened floor ; shadows of leaves, Or branches bare, tremble and leap, Then sudden rest, then interlace again, Shiver and wave and cross in dance grotesque ; The fire is pleasant, with its restless flame And soft uptending smoke : I will so live An utter, dreamless, unremembering hour. Alas ! a power almighty masters me ; Spirits invade my presence ; the loud wind, I needs must hear it, the autumnal wind, — It bears my soul reluctant from its rest ; (I am a mortal wrestling with a power That will not be put by ;) its moan, Its full, deep, swelling, sinking wail, It bears me to the everlasting sea ; 218 POEMS. I hear its murmur in the mighty deep. The echo of the wide, the ever full, The omnipresent wail of Memory. A single hour ! a single fireside hour Of present being : there is never such ! An hour is infinite ; its elements Are in the past and future ; it is linked With universal time ; the wind, the wave. Tear it and rend it till it utter out Its note of the great concert. Life is one, And the autumnal wind, with sudden wail ; Or lisping breeze of spring ; the cricket's sound ; The very ticking of the household clock, — (Oh, this monotony, this sure return. Is it not in the soul ?) — all sounds, in moan, Or musical of joy, are echoes all Or prophecy, the Coming or the Been ! 1840. DAY AND NIGHT. Light of Day ! How lovely, how divine, Thy revelations are ! each golden line And imitative mount of sleeping foam That on the o'erbending arch repose or roam, Their glory to thy magic influence owe, Creator and revealer of their glow ! Each shape of leaf, so deUcately clear, Imprinted on the light-obstructed ground. DAY AND NIGHT. 219 The graceful openings 'mid leaflets near, Or crossing twigs, or nest obtrusive found. Thou turn'st, all-bathing Light, to portals sweet, The foliage kindling with thy myriad feet. Light of Day ! O Artist most divine ! What hues in hue, what forms of form, are thine ; Voiceless yet calling sounds from hill and dell, Viewless, yet making all else visible ! Alas, thou world-awakener ! vast and far Thy searching fire, from morning star to star. Thine is the living world ; thy power is shed On the material eye : thou showest not the Dead ! In deepest nook, the deepliest-shaded flower That hides dew-hiddeii in the morning hour, Is found at last by thy resistless power, And stands like vestal at discovered shrine, Drooping, yet lofty, shrinking, yet divine ! The tear-swelled eye, that loves the hiding night, The blind, dumb night, the dear, unspeaking night, Is yet betrayed by thee, unpitying Light ! One secret only is not tliine to show. One abyss unsealed by gleam or glow : Many thy sweet revealings from afar, Oh wouldst thou tell where vanished spirits are ! Beloved Darkness ! beautiful and sweet, The soft envelope of the weary eye ! With hush refining ever, dost thou seek The hut of noisy words and misery, The hut forgotten, ne'er forgot by thee I 220 POEMS. All awe-inspiring is thy mute embrace, And erring brain and hand that overfill The glaring day with forms of busy ill Are cleansed with quiet for a little space. O Night, redeeming that thou bringest sleep ! The breath of childhood's statuary rest Goes up like incense in thy circling shade ; And those that sigh in sadness know thee best For sighs and tears and prayers that shrink afraid, Even in tliy bosom, at the woe betrayed. O Darkness, wakener of the spirit's beam, Moment of Inspiration, when the soul Is borne resistless on a mighty stream Of images and visions not its own. The gloiy passes, and the mortal form Lies mute and still and gasping from its dream. Like fainting priestess from the tripod borne ! Beloved Darkness, that with modest pride Bring' st out thy starry treasures, soft and slow. Filling with startling shadows, heath, and side Of sloping hill, and river's silvering flow. What know'st thou of the ever-gathering Dead ? Where are the beautiful ? the spirits rare That gazed through lustrous eyes and shining hair ? Athenian ones of every age and clime. Who moved about in drapery so fine Of rose and white that all the soul shone through, As light, pervading, fills the drop of dew ? And vanished childhood, — ah, that witchery ! Where has it passed, in sea or air or sky, TO MR. HALL. 221 That sparkle of life's wine, ethereal glow, Where went it when it melted from below ? Oh, listen. Day and Night ! their wail is borne Back to the primal hour, earth's earliest home ! Ye cannot speak ? — then is your beauty vain, Your morning freshness and your evening glow : We scorn you, in our majesty of pain ! Some hour, some time, the patient soul shall know ; Some other Night shall come with deeper thrill, Some other Day with light resplendent fill. 1840. TO MR. HALL. ON RECEIVING A VOLUME OF MR. EMERSON's ESSAYS. The book is full to mind o'erflowing, The picture bright to fancy glowing. Not to the dull, the cold, the lonely, Is home a magic word, but only To those whose soul, aU self above, Can find the common hearth divine. Where draperies and faces shine In the transfiguring light of love : So, gentle book ! thy lines that flow, " Golden and glad," my lip along, Receive amid their mellow flow, Secret and sweet, an undersong Of harmonies that rise forever, Linked with the spirit of the Giver. 222 POEMS. The sunbeam streaks amid the leaves, Yet not displaces their soft line ; The rumiing brook the star receives, Its waters mingling with the shine : So from this soft poetic page The giver's spirit gleameth through, And inward flow the memories Of holy calls and opened skies, Of meekest prayer and worship free, And gentle might of sympathy : They mingle in the poet's song, And flow as flow its words along, Adding a charm its own transcending, And yet harmoniously blending. So, gentle book, with thee is wove A charm thy graceful life above. More music than the Artist meant Is stricken from his instrument ; For as the pearly lines flow on, Keeps time in gentle unison The music of a friendship high Of counsel true and ministry. And each to each in concord rare Blend as the perfect light and air. Christmas, 1840. PSA YER. 223 PRAYER. God, how overfull art thou Of beauty ! how divine From the o'erarching heavens' glow To the earth's circling hne ! My eye with glad content is fraught To sit absorbed and still, Watching the workings of thy thought, The quickenings of thy will. The stirring grass, — is it aHve ? The shadows' graceful faU, 1 would their wondrous secret rive, I long to know it all. This only can my spirit see : In thee they hve and move, — The sweet, the simple, and the free Out-tracings of thy love. Would I might share that spirit's glow ! Would thought and life might be A gladsome and obedient flow Of beauty caught from thee ! Make me a perfect summer-time, A blossoming, a growth, A living voice of love divine, A trembling ray of truth ! 1841. 224 POEMS. THE DYING ARTIST TO HIS WIFE. Written after reading William Blake's last words to his wife : " Thou hast ever been an angel to me." Have we not lived and loved ? Ay, lived a life intense, Each day a hidden mine revealing, In bars and veins of liquid gold, Its glowing thought and earnest feeling ; And every sunray falling free From out the urn of Deity Wove in our sovd its parted beams In rainbow hopes and starry dreams. Have we not lived ? when every morn Some fetter from the soul hath torn ? And in the freedom of our prayer We drew the breath of mountain air ; And in the grandeur of the skies We felt the strength of our uprise ; And streaked and tinged in thoughts of gold We knew the morning of the soul ! When every walk by ocean-shore Is lingering in moan and roar, And every sense is stUl imbued With the wild wanderings in the wood ; And every flower we pressed between Our hands stiU vivifies our dream. Ah ! smell you not the violet ? The blue-tinged odor floweth yet THE DYING ARTIST TO BIS WIFE. 225 From off thy lips in song and word, And smile and glance are as the hoard Of sweetness, gathered as we stood By hill and lake and stream and wood. Have we not lived ? when every night, These garret walls to chaos shriven, Forwards and backwards to the sight A shining banquet-haU hath risen ; In flowed our glorious company, Poet and prophet, regal ones From cross and stake and battle thrones ; And still the tinted clouds would gleam Like waving tapestry between : White were their garments, without soil, And on their brow nor haste nor toil, But deep within the starry eyes The light of spirit victories. They fade, they sink, as fades away The light more radiant than day : In music from our lips would burst The truths these spirit guests rehearsed. Have we not loved ? Oh, not the dew, The myriad drops that sweet and far Touch the hot leaves at evening-star. Sheds half so seraph-bright a hue. Brings not so angel-winged relief, As soft in care and bright in grief. Life's myriad moments, every one. Its quivering, fleeting leaves among, Crystal and cool, thy love hath shone. 226 POEMS. Have we not loved ? In hue and line I 've sought to stay the vision glowing Of Grace and Love my soul o'erflowing ; The child, in innocence divine ; The girl, her first deep thought concealing, But in her mystic eyes revealing, As stars through summer skies soft stealing ; The mother, with her gaze intense, The mother-Mary radiance, — Thou the creative thought awoke ; From thee the earnest imjiulse broke ; And pencil but repainted thee My visible Divinity ! And in the dark and hapless hour When, faint and sad and earth-inbound, I 've shrunk before the mighty power Of the inflooding sight and sound ; And hid mine eyes, and longed to be A mortal from the Godhead free. And fain would to the desert fly An exile from my destiny, — Then, while thy murmured music hushed The tumult of the soul away. From thine own radiant mind hath flushed A light upon the hidden way ; Thy clear, serenal glance could tell The missing key-note of the spell To the immortal powers inlying Like shut-in fire agasp and dying ; THE DYING ARTIST TO HIS WIFE. 227 And in thy quick imaginings My spirit pruned its drooping wings, And from the rapture of thy eyes Relit its fainting energies : I knew that thou an angel wert, Bringing me bread to eat and wine From thy exhaustless thoughts divine, And thy unfathomed wealth of heart. Call ye it toil and poverty ? Have we not lived ? a streamlet free From out the sea of Deity ! A gleam of planetary light Upon the void, unfathomed night, — A thought, a victory, a will, A symbol of the Invincible ! A struggle from the Eternal Might, A ray of the Eternal Light, A segment of the Infinite ! I tell thee that these meagre walls Have been a palace, my beloved ! Pillared and roofed as monarchs' halls ; And thou, my spirit's Queen, hast moved Begirt in gems : I see them now. Glistening on robe and hand and brow ; Gems polished in the mine of thought. By faith and hope and toil inwrought, And flashing in thy crystal love The diamond's purity above. 228 POEMS. Nay, earth is but a sumptuous gem, Bright resting-spot of winged feet ; It moves 'mid stars, and chimes with them Harmonious in motion sweet : I sway unto its melody ; I vibrate in its Sowings free. Day vanishes, the stars are gone, A sapphire radiance flashes down ; My soul floats off on a pulsing sea, I sink in the depths of Infinity ! 1839. DREAMS. Come to me, bright Dreams ! Let not this night forever glide along, — This night, beloved of the partial noon : All common things rejoice in her caress, And throw their chiseled shadows pure and true, Re-uttering the calm beauty they receive. Come to me, bright Dreams ! And while the weary form lies motionless. And hand and Up are still, and restless eye Is pressed by night pervading, let the soul Disport harmonious to the magic hour ; While the great moon rolls onward round the world, And the moist air and swelling buds make inter- change of hfe In sure and true and wordless ministry. DREAMS. 229 The day is poor and torn, and scarred all o'er With vexing trifles, and the facts of life Lie bare in weary sameness, echoed back In language long forgetful of its birth 'Mid sounding stream and many murmuring leaf ; Day is bound down and hemmed and harnessed in By the stern rule of unremitting law, Cause and effect, — rulers inflexible Of human fantasy, that rears and stamps Like a young war-horse in the hated rein. All things go on demurely : night, the morn, In footfall regular ; the earth pursues In fruitless constancy the imperial sun, Who keeps the circled area of his state Inviolate from approach of meaner ball ; Still bears the seed the flower, and still the spring, By mildew blighted, fails in future grain ; Still summer's dust is dust, and never gold, Nor foamy bubbles, airy palaces. But Sleep upturns this iron-girted realm, And builds a dynasty fantastic, strange ; Day lawless breaks on night, and stars run wild, Glimmer and shine, in glorious rivalry Of the all-piercing sun ; in clearest air Light as a rose-leaf riven navies float. Nothing is strange ; we do all things and see In glorious freedom from astonishment, The dead return, and in their grave-clothes talk, Speaking old words in unfamiliar sounds, Looking upon us with remembered eyes, 230 POEMS. That peer and glisten from a stranger face, Themselves and yet another ! Come, bright Dreams ! The day forever tells me what I am ; Day is a mirror that reflects us back In weariful identity. But Dreams ! In thee I stand upon a boundless wild ; I hear the roaring of its mighty herds ; My step grows like the leaping of the deer. And my eye shames the eagle ; or upborne Upon the ocean's breast I float sublime, Pilot nor steersman save the living Eye That fills the circling dome ; or in some vale Made cool by mountain shadows, and the scent Of curling blossoms, passively I sink, And hear a voice breathing upon my soul, The glory of the sky made audible, The voice of sympathy and love. Oh, such a sleep, so fed by vivid dream, Were worth a common day ; and I should wake To the worn sunshine and the old detail, Like one who in the nightly hours had found That fabled fountain of perennial youth. And drank thereof, and loved, and was reborn ! 1842. SPRING. 231 SPRING. How reticent is the opening, The opening dear and good of Spring ! It Cometh not with sudden glare, Smiting its joy on our despair, Bringing us rudely to the light, With brows imbound with winter blight, But soft and delicate and slow. As if too diffident to show The wealth it longeth to bestow. The vestal blossoms come the first ; On the bare, rugged branch they burst ; They come in frail and fickle weather ; They wait not though the east wind grieves, They stay not for the pomp of leaves ; (It were too much to come together !) But the leaves come when the blooms are o'er. Come in their turn, and nothing more. All nature breathes humility ; Ever a gentle self-disowning. As beauty for itself atoning ; An asking in meek courtesy Permission so divine to be, Lest its white purity should kill Man's heart with awe, not raise and fill. 232 POEMS. You cannot tell when Spring is here ; You think to go into the air, And take her floral gift in hand, And kneel and bless her where you stand. The keen wind smites, she is not there ; The welkin lowereth gray and dim : Aside we turn in mute despair. When suddenly, from sky or ground Some breath or quiver, or the spring Of latent bird on sudden wing, A yellow sheen within the air, A shadowy odor to the sense, A flooding of a life intense O'er soul and body, tUl we seem To move in deeps of love supreme. And know the primal fact that lies As base beneath all mysteries. It passes, and the earth and sky Take the old area of the eye. But in unconscious, soulic cells For aye the vital glory dwells. Most delicate and tenderly Nature her secret great discloses, As if she feared to let us soe How near to God her heart reposes ; How near were she, how far off we. She passeth with a sad, grave blush From out our praise, as she would hush The pride that thinketh aught to know ; Yet on the goddess' parting face TWO HYMNS. 233 Lingers a smile of kindly glow ; A gleaming benedict of grace, A promise of empyrean ways Crowning our short and solemn days ; A hint of high poetic mood, Atoned with gentleness and good ; A soothing thrill, a hushing touch That lifts the heart yet not too much. TWO HYMNS. God of those stars sublime ! I need Thy presence, need to know That thou art God, my God indeed. Cold and far off they shine, they glow, In their strange brightness, like to spirits' eyes, Awful, intensely on my naked soul ; Beautiful are they, but so strange, so cold, I know them not : I shrink, I cling Like a scared insect to this whirling ball, Upon whose swelling lines I woke one morn. Unknowing who I was, or whence I came ; And still I know not : fastened to its verge By a resistless power, with it I speed On its eternal way, and those strange eyes, Those starry eyes, look ever on me thus ; I wake, I sleep, but still they look on me, Mild yet reproachful, beautiful but strange. 234 POEMS. Visions are round me, — many moving things, In clothing beautiful, soft and colored forms With drooping heads caressing ; eyes so meek And loving and appealing, but they hold A nature strange and different, each envtrrapt In its own mortal mystery : near they are, And yet how distant, — familiar, fond, Yet strangers all ! I know not what they are. And higher forms, from out whose mystic eyes, Gracefully curved and vestal-like, obscured By shading lashes, looks a being out. That seems myself and is not, — kindred linked, Yet most communionless : I know them not. Nor they know me ; nearest, yet most apart, Moving in saddest mystery each to each. Like spellbound souls that coldly meet in dreams Which in some waking hour had intertwined. Yet some, too, woven with me in a veil, Viewless, but all-enduring, — kindred love : Their eyes are on me like awakening light ; They touch my forehead, press my given hand. Smile rare or oft, or sit most silently ; Yet all is xiuderstood, — the watchful care, The sympathetic joy, and the unutterable wealth Of helping tears, — ail, all is understood : Sure these are me ; sure my affections, theirs. Awe-stricken thoughts and over-rushing sins, My hopes, my loves, my struggles, and my straits Are theirs to bear, to know, to carry out. TWO HYMNS. 235 To sift, to learn, to war and wrestle through. Ah, no ! oh, no ! for every spirit round There is a circle where no other comes. Even when we lay our head upon the breast. And pour our thoughts as liquid jewels out. And feel the strength that comes from soul beloved Steal through our own as steals the living heat. Nurture and bloom into the opening leaves ; Yet is the spirit lone, — its problem deep No other may work out ; its mystic way No other wing may try : passionate hopes. Mighty yet powerless, and most awful fears. Its strength ne'er equal to the burden laid. Longings to stop, yet eagerness to go. Is its alone ; a wall unscalable Circuits the soul, — its fellows cannot pass ; The mother may not spare the child, to take Its youthful burden on her wUling heart. Nor friend enfranchise friend. Alone, alone The sovl must do its own immortal work ; The best beloved most distant are ; the near Far severed wide. Soul knows not soul. Not more than those unanswering stars divine. God of these stars sublime ! I need Thy presence, need to know That thou art God, my God indeed. Shield me, 'mid thine innumerable worlds ; Give me some point where I may rest. While thy unceasing ages flow ; Hide me from thine irradiated stars. 236 POEMS. And the far sadder light, untraceable Of human eyes ; for strangers are they all, A wandering thought o'er the unlistening sea. Recall, Eternal Source ! and reassume In thine own essence peace unutterable ! n. A night of stars ! Thick studded o'er the sky From line of vision, vanishing high Into the far immensity. To where the dark horizon bars The earth-restricted eye. Brilliantly serene, In the near firmament. The brighter planets beam ; While from the void supreme The paler glories stream. Making earth radiant, As an angelic dream ! Athwart the gilded dome Sudden the meteor glides : The gazer starts, lest doom Of chance or change had come On that eternal home. Whose still sublimity abides Through ages come and gone. The moon is fondly near ; Pale, watchful, mother-like, TWO HYMNS. 237 She smileth on our cheer, She husheth up the tear ; But with a holy fear These starry splendors strike The distant worshiper. Where mighty oceans sweep They shine afar ; Where softer rivers leap, Where trickling fountains weep, Where the stUl lakelets sleep, Gleams back each star, Like torches from the deep. In rapturous mood, Silent with clasping hands. And earnest brow subdued. The ancient Shepherd stood. As night to night he viewed These glory-clustered bands In Heaven's vast solitude. Borne ©n the mighty sway Of thought, his spirit ran 'er the resplendent way, Leaping from ray to ray To uncreated day ; Then — " What is man ? " He sang — " The child of clay." A spirit answered, 'Midst bursts of wavy light, — 238 POEMS. Meekly and glad he heard, — " Man is the Son, the Word, The best beloved of God, With glory crowned and might, And stars are his abode." CLOUDS. Ye clouds ! the very vagaries of grace, So vrUd and startling, fanciful and strange, And changing momently, yet pure and true, Distorted never, marring beauty's mould ; But now ye lay a mass, a heaped-up mass, Of interwoven beams, blue, rose, and green, Not blended, but infused in one soft hue. That yet has found no name. A sudden thrill, A low, sweet thrill of motion, stirred the air. Perhaps a tremor of self-conscious joy. That the contiguous breezes, moving slow, Transmitted each to each : instant as thought, Yet imperceptibly, your form dissolved Into a curtain of so fine a stain The young sky-spirits, that behind it clung. Betrayed their glancing shapes ; a moment more, Solid and steep, and piled like earthly mount. With juts for climber's foot, upholding firm. And long, smooth top, where he may gladly fling His palpitating form, and proudly gaze Upon a world below, and humbly up, For Heaven is stUl beyond. CLOUDS. 239 Stretches now The gathering darkness on the silent west, Smooth-edged, yet tapering off in gloomy point. With that long line of sultry red beneath, As if its tightly vested bosom bore The lightning close concealed. Ye fair and soft and ever-varying clouds ! Where in your golden circuit find ye out The Armory of Heaven, rifling thence Its gleaming swords ? Ye tearful clouds ! Feminine ever, light or dark or grim, I fear ye not : I wonder and admire. And gladly would I charter this soft wind, That now is here, and now will undulate Your yielding lines, to bear me softly hence, That I might stand upon that golden edge. And bathe my brow in that delicious gloom. And leaning gaze into the sudden gap From whence the lightning passes ! Night has come, and the bright eyes of stars, And the voice-gifted wind, and severed wide Ye flee, like startled spirits, through the sky Over and over to the mighty north, Returnless race, forgetting and forgot Of that red, western cradle whence ye sprung ! As wild, as fitful, is the gathering mass Of this eventful world, — enlarging heaps Of care and joy and grief we christen Life. Like these, they shine full oft in green and gold. 240 POEMS. Or brightly ravishing foam : utterly fond. We seek repose, confiding on their breast, And lo ! they sink and sink, most noiseless sink, And leave us in the arms of nothingness. Like these, they pass in ever-varying form, As glancing angels, or assassin grim. Sharp-gleaming daggers 'neath concealing garb Might we but dwell within the upper Heaven ! In the immensity of soul, — the realm Of stars serene, and suns and cloudless moons, Ranging delighted, while far down below The atmosphere of life concocts its shapes Evil or beautiful, and smUe on all. As gorgeous pictures spread beneath the feet. O Thou, supreme infinitude of Thought ! Thou, who art height and depth ! whither is Life, And what are we but vanishing shadows all O'er the eternal ocean of thy Being ! It is thy will, the sunbeam of thy will. That perviates and modifies the air Of mortal life, in which the spirit dwells : Thou congregatest these joys and hopes and griefs In thee they beam or gloom, Eternal Sun ! Let them not come between my soul and thee ; Let me rejoice in thy o'erflooding light ; Fill up my being's urn, until a Star, Once kindled, ne'er extinct, my soul may burn In the pure light of an excelling love, Giving out rays as lavishly as given ! THE FUTURE IS BETTER THAN THE PAST. 241 "THE FUTUEE IS BETTER THAN THE PAST." Not where long-passed ages sleep Seek we Eden's golden trees ; In the future, folded deep, Are its mystic harmonies. All before us lies the way, Give the past unto the wind ; All before us is the day, Night and darkness are behind. Eden with its angels bold, Love and flowers and coolest sea, Is not ancient story told But a glowing prophecy. In the spirit's perfect air, In the passions tame and kind, Innocence from selfish care. The real Eden we shall find. It is coming, it shall come, To the patient and the striving, To the quiet heart at home. Thinking wise and faithful living. When all error is worked out From the heart and from the life ; 242 POEMS. When the sensuous is laid low, Through the spirit's holy strife ; When the soul to sin hath died, True and beautiful and sound, — Then aU earth is sanctified, Upsprings Paradise around. Then shall come the Eden days, Guardian watch from seraph-eyes ; Angels on the slanting rays, Voices from the opening skies. From this spirit-land afar All disturbing force shaU flee ; Stir nor toil nor hope shall mar Its immortal unity. TO R. W. EMERSON. Graceful and sweet and strong, Poet and Sage, thy lessons glow, The sheen refined of autumn's sun, The dawning day's ethereal flow. Thoughts of distant eras come, Veiled in mystical star-shine, Filling the imperial dome, Spirit-hour of earliest time ; Hour of faith with beauty's zone, Faith that scorns the weeper, Hope, TO R. W. EMERSON. 243 And high resolves that bravely cope With the far sky, that soft and fine Involves us in its curve subhme. No vexed nor turbid thought, No passion's muddied sea. No dreams of foam and fury wrought Win melody from thee, But the quiet deeps of soul, But the spirit's ocean roll. Knelt we in the pathless wood, Which to heaven its branches rears, Stately growths, the taU and good Nurslings of uncounted years ; Filled with nature's darlings bold. Quick of foot and keen of eye, And where God, m evening gold, 'Mid the whispering leaves is nigh, We might venture to prolong In our heart thy lofty song. Lay we by the mountain rill, And awakened from a dream. Pure as that, as deep and still. Ministered, Uke Hebrew seer. By waving wings that glance and gleam, Dark and lustrous from the stream Of inner deeps of joy and fear, Yet rich and purpled in the day. Like angels in high heaven's array. We might dare to look upon Hope and might and deed as one. 244 POEMS. But we wander by a pool, Reeds and mires of sense among, And the air of heaven's song Floats above, far off and cool ; And the perfect light comes down On a plot to weeds o'ergrown, And the croak of earthly words Mars the music of the birds, That a ceaseless anthem keep In the Eden soft and deep. In the bridal bower apart Of the poet's inmost heart. Rays of the supernal light Fall not on our daUy eye, As the child in mild delight Glads him 'neath the common sky ; Gentle and accustomed lot, Keen and warm, yet wounding not ; But, as lightning pressing back In a fierce and vivid chain, Densest clouds upon its track, Then bequeaths the gloom again. Of the Godhead's mighty sea, Rare we taste the mystic wave. Not as at a fountain free Hastes the child to drink and lave, Simple haste and simple draught, "With recurring freshness fraught ; But as in a fevered dream, AUGUST SHOWER. 245 In a parched, sirocco land, Hasteful touch and taste, and then See it vanish in the sand. In a narrow tent Linger we, and pensively, Time and time through wind-torn rent, Glorious earth and sky we see ; But the spirit's flight is bound, And as a majestic strain, Music to the artist dear, Pours its finer notes in vain, Falling on uncultured ear But as thrilling rush of sound, — So 'mid wonder and believing, Losing much and much receiving. Breathless with joy, as thought on thought Moves on in crystal form inwrought. Sweet shuddering as the stately sweep Unfolds new meanings deep in deep. Yet firm in reason's grand repose. As softly shines, as simply glows, As morning star or opening rose. AUGUST SHOWER. The gladsome music of the shower ! The hasting, tripping, mingling sound, Above, beneath me, all around, On bank and tree and flower. 246 POEMS. The rose lifts up its lip serene ; The insect 's still, that restless thing ; He makes no noise, he stirs no wing ; So fresh he grows and clean. The branches thrill and drip, and bow Luxurious to the air ; How green they look, how sweet and fair, They gladly seem to know. And still it pours, the welcome rain, Far down its rivers creep ; The very roots are bathing deep, ^ The fainting roots of grain. Yet more ! exhaustless 'tis as love ; The bladed grass is full, The pebble-stones are beautiful, So cool and wet above ! A pause, — again, — it 's almost past, The flowers seem to think. As, gasping eagerly, they drink The fresh, the sweet, the last. The earth is like recovered child. Heeding not how an hour ago It panting lay and faint and low. So glad it is and wild. The lighted west ! O God of Love ! .Below, in silvery streams, AUTUMN LEAVES. 247 Like to Aurora's softest beams, While gold bursts out above ! AUTUMN LEAVES. Woe, woe for the withering leaves ! Flimsy and lank and falling fast, Hither and thither, twirling and whirling In the freshening wind, in the bright blue sky ; Glistening and clear and keen is the sky, But it has no mercy, none. For the pitiful, pelted, driven leaves : I saw ye, leaves ! in your cradle lying On that day far back, — oh, where is it now ? — In your varied, velvety hues of green. That softer and softer grew to the eye As the loving sunlight went glancing by. Out of the dark, hard tree. Wonderful things, ye came ; A summer hour has passed, Sultry and red and stiU, As life were pressed down by a mighty force ; A summer rain has fallen, A liquid light and sound, And dripped the drops from your shivering edge, But they '11 drip no more : your hour has come. Remaineth the tree, but passeth the leaf. Into the damp ground silently sinking, Sinking, and matted in mud and in snow. Leaves nevermore, ye colored and veined, 248 POEMS. Ye pointed and notched, and streaked round about, Ye circled and curved and lateral-lined. Protean shapes of the spirit of form ! With the Sun for a nurse, feeding with light Out of his bosom, and moon with the dew Filched from the air under secret of night. Tenderly nurtured and royally served, A company regal, innumerable. Crowning the hilltop and shading the vale, Clustering archly the country-house, And filling the eye of the passer-by, The wanderer's eye with tremulous tears, At the thought of its hidden blessedness. Its fount of life-gladness welling within. Shaded and covered from scorching outside By greenness and coolness and deep repose ; Leaves, the delicate setting of flowers. Tempering the ruby ; round the queen-blossom Modestly crowding, never self-seeking, Giving the beauty they seem but to follow ; Living meekly as leaves, only as leaves ; Yet were they reft from wayside and bower, From weed and from tree, — the gaudy flowers, Shameless and bold and tarnished all o'er. Would weary the eye like a shadowless wall, A glaring day that casteth no night. An eye without lashes, a mind with no thought Deep hid in its cell, a heart with no love. Never uttered, a home with no curtained room ! But ye are perishing, perishing fast ; So lovely, so soft, so graceful, so good. SUNLIGHT AND WHAT IT STANDS FOR. 249 So many, so varied, — why were ye here ? Out of night ye sprung, tender and juicy, Unto night ye return, withered and scorned. Birds sung at your birth, and youth leaped to see ; But none to the burial gather, not one. Woe, woe to the spent and withering leaves ! I too am a leaf : one of a forest Seek I to be, and not part of the whole ? The wide Forest laughs, and crushes me carelessly As it sways to the wind of Eternity. Circlets and curves and veinlets and stems Must bow to the sweep of the merciless hour. The Eternal remains, and out of its depths Shall issue the sap, exhaustless and free, In forests as mighty and multitudinous. SUNLIGHT AND WHAT IT STANDS FOR. Thou morning Sunlight glorious ! Hail Seraphim sent down to us ! Hail Raphael from the Presence, come To grace and gild our mortal home ! I touch thy glittering robe with awe ; The golden mantle floats afar O'er hill and stream ; and yet its fringe Is by my hearth ; my own door-hinge Has opened to let in the Lord Of Beauty as he moves abroad. 250 POEMS. Thy teeming touch with gems is full ; They sparkle sharply on the duU, Down-looking eye of lame and sick ; They start again, their hlood grows quick ; The earth-born, cowering Dark has gone, Gone with its whimperings and moan ; Another death-stream is passed o'er, A shining day-jaunt lies before. Angel and brother ! can it be So gracious thou, and this deep me, This far inlying force I feel Pauper for help, inert for weal ? Art thou the elder-born, God's joy, And human will the tottling boy ? Art thou his heir, his prince, his pride And Soul, the serf that runs beside ? If human Love is brother-born, Sprung from the same celestial urn, Be this the presence angel-bright, Be this the Raphael, this the Light ! This the pervasive, wondrous charm Old Midas wore, burnt clean from harm ; The sorcery that swift and bold Transmutes-life's sands to living gold ; The spell that kindles where it moves, Trailing its glory as it goes ; PRAYER. 251 This be the common, grand surprise, The morning-break to watching eyes ; The stir, the leap to life again, The Memnon touch on heart and brain ; The calling to the open door Whence path and progress lie before ; Sun and sunUght, rayer and ray, Day-bringer and itself the Day. 1848. PRAYER. O Thou who from a height intense Watchest our human destiny, See ! thou hast made us, soul and sense, To taste the rill of life — and die. Didst thou not give the hint sublime Of powers mature and love divine ? Didst thou not stir the soul's uprise, Lure on to deeds of sacrifice, And prompt the young, confiding tongue To sing its brave, preluding song ? Is this the outcome, Mighty Mind ! The broken hope, the wasted strife, The hastening like a wounded hind In pain and terror forth from life ? Ah, no ! When consciousness began, The spirit of the living Lord 252 POEMS. Within the pulsing ear of man Uttered one sweet, ethereal word ; Full tenderly its echoes roll Through the soft chambers of the soul, And symbolized to ear and eye Passed out in creed and prophecy ; A promise and a vision given In yearning earth and brooding heaven : We linger in the senses' night, Their mortal deafness shuts our ear ; StiU floats from out the house of light The spirit's rare, translucent sphere, A note that, pure from earth's alloy, Vibrates like rhapsody of joy : The will to do, the power to be, Awhile in inner cells withdrawn, Await in silent ecstasy The pearly coloring of the morn, When, quivering from the touch divine, The soul with new-born eyes shall learn (As pass the blearing spots of time) Eternal visions to discern : Made sweet from self s enfeebling stream, A sea of purity inflows, And folded in the law supreme, She drinks the rapture of repose : Whilst, bowed in mute, adoring thrill, Descend from heights no mind can scan SUBSTANCE AND FORM. 263 The vital tides of thought and will, The Godhead passing into man. O Whisperer ! breathe in tones more clear ; O Helper ! bow thy heavens down ; The subtle shapes of doubt are near, They crowd and cower us in our gloom ; We sit within our darkened room, Let in the day through heavenly doors ! Oh, crown us with the light of noon, Set our weak feet on shining floors ! Not yet, O nursling Soul ! not yet ; Still must the tender lips be wet With milk of faith, — the narrow stair StiU guard the wavering will with care : When the full heart is ripe and free, The bridegroom hasteneth to thee. SUBSTANCE AND FORM. As heeds the child with spirit gain The fairy tale or mythic rhyme That wakes a vision in its brain That suits its dream of coming time, So hear I, as the pages tell The secrets of Egyptian cell, What arts the covering years infold. On pristine walls what records bold 254 POEMS. Of times as soft as times of May, Of man as innocent of care, Of forms of social life as fair, More fair perchance, more near divine, Than those that mould this life of mine And thine upon the earth to-day. As he who earliest pyramid From iron bolt and bar undid, And entering crypt and crypt inmost, Stood in the central chamber lost In awe before the clear footprint On falling dust the sure indent Made ages upon ages gone, Now first to human sight made known ! - With tenderer shudder, nobler awe, I mark the clear imprint of Law. Some God has passed with foot sublime And touched the quivering sand of time, And earth throughout its deep recess Forever keeps the soft impress. Substance and Form make interstrife. One rising as the one declines, The fairer form, less real the life The deepening substance rends the lines. From pastoral play and shepherd song, From manners docUe, wise, and still. Leaps forth the race to war and wrong, To deeds of victory and will. SUBSTANCE AND FORM. 255 Fairest the soul in earliest years : jEnone, 'mid her bowers of dew, — What rainbows glisten through her tears, What music in her words of rue ! The Spirit calls, — the Acadia Of outer life is rent and gone : The inner caves yawn blank and free, The soul must enter and alone. Pale Beauty passes with a moan, Harsh lines the inner strife betoken ; The teeming substance tears the form. The tender vase is bruised and broken. In sadness nears the soul its prime, Its mystic ringlets riven low ; The seal of victory divine Is set on temples bared with woe. Substance and Form make interstrife, One rising as the one declines. The fairer form, the shallower life, The deepening substance rends the lines. Fair Nature's forces fail to weave The perfectness of one and one ; Her the contesting powers aggrieve. The variance of Come and Gone. The aureal gleam in primal year. The tint untarnished of the New, 256 POEMS. Is Eden but to eye and ear, Illusive gold on morning dew. The hint and foretaste of the hour, Hid in Eternity's deep mine, When life evolved to living Power Shall exhalate a form divine ; When soul and body, mystic pair, The dissonance of groveth outgone. Shall meet as peers in beauty rare, Eterne in spirit, blend as one ; — When form shall conscious life infold, Substance the vital form inspire, — That spheral love in lines of gold Shall radiate immortal fire. THE DAYS. July 16, 1835— Jijly 16, 1860. The summer air flowed fast and free. The summer glory shone, That other day we welcomed thee, Some twenty years agone. The sun still pours his golden rain ; And earth, as fond and fair, Tricks out her ever-varying mien In gauds of light and air. TEE DAYS. 257 That other day — this other day, Like spirits they arise, Confront upon the parted way, And gaze with eager eyes. Gaze deeply into deepening eyes. And watch the shadows dim, As distant thoughts and memories Mount slowly to the brim. Is youth or hope or pleasure gone ? Then gently lay the sod ; Our foot is on their buried form, Our eye straight up to God. We wail not for the past and gone, We front the living ray ; We hail the present and the come, We greet our life to-day. Our hope has bloomed to memory. Our trust has flushed to faith ; Our love has won a clearer eye. The eye that looks through death. We count our time by victories, A triumph-arch of hours, Earth unto earth ; our calendar Is writ in stars, not flowers. The days — that other day and this — Athwart the edge of night, 258 POEMS. They leap and blend in sober bliss, A trickling line of light. Pure from the dross of earth and pain, Move on the spirit-rays ; A sunshine seen through summer rain^ A bridal of the days. ARTHUR: A BALLAD. A story told by a colored servant who was witness of the tragedy. A SPARKLE on the brow and eye, A ripple on the lip, The youthful sailor gamboled by, The darling of the ship. So brimming with the wine of life. Mere living was a joy, The whistling winds a playful strife, The gray old sea a toy. He loved its cold, wide, sparkling brine, He loved its creamy foam ; He beat responsive to its chime, Nor feared its under-moan. Sheer off the tall old vessel's side He 'd leap in sportive whim : What finny thing could him outglide, Outdip, outdive, outswim ? ARTHUR: A BALLAD. 259 So near to Nature's heart he lay, She gurgled in his ear A brave, relying roundelay That kept from fret or fear. So pure of heart, so lithe of limb, So healthy-toned and true, His comrades crowned him with their love, As crowns the flower the dew. One day, while dance and song betide And sport and revelry, A young child from the tall ship's side Fell prone within the sea. As springs a dancer from his place Sprang forth our sailor boy, Bore upward in his strong embrace And saved the infant joy. Now haste thee, Arthur ! close behind Two direful eyes are lurking ; Now haste thee, for the foul sea-fiend His deathly speed is working ! Alas ! too fearless and too brave, Our boy with careless aim Stabs quick the monster on the wave, Then seeks the ship again. Alas ! too proud in youth and strength, Too high of hope and mood : 260 POEMS. The Horror leaps its measured length, The sea is red with blood ! My sable nurse, with eyes like rain, Told through the lonesome night, And murmured low the sad refrain, Too good, too brave, too bright ! O made for strength and made for love, And made for daring high ! O roses on the lip and cheek ! Life's lightnings in the eye ! O vigor from the wide earth gone ! O mournful hardihood ! And still my sable nurse sighed on, Too brave, too bright, too good ! 1867. STRUGGLE AND VICTORY. I SIT within my idle chair In softest sackcloth bound ; I fold my hands, I wear the air Of one by patience crowned ; So lowly meek, no need to be A finer-strained humility. Alas ! it is an outward guise : Within the soul, within •^ STRUGGLE AND VICTORY. 261 Cowers Sorrow with her torrent eyes ; And jeer with dance and din Old scarlet pride and yellow shame, And spotted fears and cares ; I pin them with a will of flame, I pile the iron bars. Alas ! I am so still and mild, While hidden robber bands Of discontent make havoc wild, All wring their fettered hands : I rise, I rise on wings of fire ; I bid them bide or die ! Where art Thou, eternal Sire ? Shall sorrow last for aye ? Why soar the birds at prayer in vain, And faint beneath the tempest's strain. Nor find an opening sky ? Ah, hush ! the evil midnight feet Steal o£E in slow, reluctant beat. And in the Orient overhead Group noble visitants instead : They fill the air and softly say, The light is lightening to the day. The house is swept and garnished, come I The happy angels are at home. 1867. 262 POEMS. THE OLD AND NEW LEARNING. Shut off the soft, white book, The fair poetic page, The rhythmic joy, the wisdom dear Wrought out from depth of pain and fear ; I am a bird in cage : Shut off the soft, white book, The fair, poetic page. These brains were brains of fire, Their lips were wet with wine ; I had my heart's desire, I touched their timbrels fine ; They sat as gods above, I stood as helot bound. Then rose with censer swinging. My inmost soul onflinging, A helot in love's fetters bound, And them with garlands crowned. And prayerful eyes that sought to die And hft the veU of leaden skies That hid from men the golden eyes, The golden kings of Poesy. A freedman now, I turn To thee, Lord, to learn : Spread out thy primer old. Show forth the lessons bold ; My eye is dim with tears. Make large the characters ; My sense is dull with time, HANNIBAL. 263 Point with thy hand sublime. Say softly, one by one, The unused brain shall follow on ; Spread out thy primer wide, Thy nursling stands beside, And longs to say the old refrain, (A freedman with his broken chain,) Waiting the word that setteth free, The perfect law of liberty, And humbly ask the mystic key That shall interpret Fate and Thee. HANNIBAL. SU<5GESTEB BY A PHOTOGRAPH FROM AN ANTIQUE BUST. O LARGE, sad brow ! deep and mournful eyes ! The burden of a ruined nation lies Within thy glance, the anguish and the strain. The wrestle with despair, the struggle sore and vain ! Why mov'st me thus, man of ages old ? 'Twixt me and thee the floods of time have rolled. And left their debris on the weary earth, — The task incessant, toil to death from birth ; Heroic souls, like unto thine, whose doom Has flashed in glory and gone out in gloom ! ancient hero, bowed in thought and care, Single through genius, great through great despair ; 264 POEMS. Foreign in form, in garb, in speech and song, Alien to music of my mother-tongue ; Thy God not mine, my hope of heaven not thine, O soldier, born to do great deeds in Time ! Yet ever to my thought thy face shall be The symbol of our one Humanity ! The poor, grand soul of man, when hope is high, Forever seeks his dream to satisfy. His vision to mature, his plan to meet Its reason in success, in end complete. Then, amid sinews stretched and torn in vain, Asks the great why and wherefore of his pain. TO REV. NATHANIEL HALL, ON THE FORTIETH AlfNIVERSABT OP HIS MINISTRY, JULY 16, 1875. They come with girded memories, Come crowding all the ways ; Keen glancing from their spirit-eyes. The train of vanished days ! They come, a grave and longsome band, The torches blink and glow. Bringing their scroU upon their hand. Their record on their brow. In quivering lines looms up the morn, When first, 'mid hope and cheer. TO REV. NATHANIEL HALL. 265 The prophet mantle wrapped thy form, And touched thy lips with fire. O earnest toil and graceful word, And face that inly shone ; O prayers that found the heart of God, Like nestlings in their home ! From shine of joy and dark of woe. We plait the tender rays, And place the halo round thy brow, O crowned with love and praise ! Tell forth, departed days, the tale ; Read out his record true ! A perfume floateth from the page ; The leaves are fresh like dew. O clean from worldliness and guile, O true to prayer and hymn ! The burdened years look back and smile Through all their archway dim. The wondrous shadow of thy past Is filled with grateful eyes, — A bower of noble memories, A tent of Heaven's surprise. In tones as reverent and sweet, Ring out thy sunset bells. As when they called thy early feet Across the morning hills. 266 POEMS. Take up thy meed of fair renown ! Soon God's imperial tone Shall bid thee lay these flowerets down For guerdon of his own ; When all memorials of time, All human praise and worth, Shall shrivel in the cleansing flame Of his descending breath. O tenderness divinely deep, That folds the child away, The child-soul to its dreamless sleep, To waken to tJiat day. Percival Avenue, Dorchester. WRITTEN FOR A SUNDAY-SCHOOL AN- NIVERSARY. Ever through years, or more or less, The supple forms of childhood press, In happy homes, by hearth and stair. With winsome eyes and shining hair. Ever through smiles and toils and tears, Childhood glides onward into years ; And steps mature, their labors done, Yield to the young feet hurrying on. O Thou, who see'st, as turn by turn Bloom speeds to flower and flower to germ. VIRGIN AND CHILD. 267 Save up the sweetness of our prime, The graces of our childhood's time, And give them back, more soft and fair, To deck the soul beyond compare, When, cleansed from earth, we drink the wine. Anew with Thee, of life divine. VIRGIN AND CHILD. Oh, look not back on childhood's hour As if that soft, chaotic prime Were God's high festival in time, The giving of Himself in dower. Oh, tender be the guarding wing That broods above this charming fay, This creature made by Him, the King, To grow in stature to the day, — To grow and open, layer on layer, Fold within fold, until the core Of inmost being shows the rare. High effluence of the human flower. The soul evolved by sun and storm, By fire to fire itself refined. Expands unto the virgin form. That waits the passing of the wind, — 268 POEMS. Alone, apart, absorbed, awaits The Gabriel from the Presence, come Bringing a message from the gates That unto her a child is born. O wondrous symbols ! sacred bands ! Eternal as the heavens and earth, The angel, tj'pe of wondering faith, With drooping brow and clasping hands Salutes the mother of his Lord, The virgin, waiting for the word. This is the child that art divine Forever seeks, forever sees : — The Soul in fullness of its time The incarnated Law receives, The infancy of Life divine. ON MISS PEABODY'S EIGHTIETH BIRTHDAY. We thought to grace her silver hair An autimin leaf to bring. But lo ! a presence unaware Steals in with sounds of spring. We thought in soft and tender hues To touch the past to tears, But colors bright as jewels use Light up her house of years. AGE. 269 For hope and heart, for love and lore, That scarce knew stint or stay, For vistas widening more and more, We give her thanks to-day. Others may win in later hour, Her meed of wealth and fame ; The purest fragrance of the flower Shall float around her name. Within the frail and aging form, From out the darkening eyes. Her spirit moves alert and warm To face the lifting skies. Of work sublime in homes above, More hearts to wake and win, Open, ye folding-doors of love. And pass your votary in ! AGE. The fancies, nimble, fresh, and young, That turned all feeling into song ; The quick heartbeats that found in breath Of cadenced verse a facile sheath ; The lavish love that light and warm, Like mistiness of early morn, Rounded to grace each passing form ; The eye that saw in other eyes The rapture of its own surprise ; 270 POEMS. And ear that melted every sound, Mere floatings in the air around, To one pure tone without alloy, The perfect tone of inward joy, — All these are gone, as gone away The roses of that other day, Ideal fruits and flowers that grew In gardens that our childhood knew. grace of life ! O pretty sheen ! 1 thank the high, the wise Control That your soft nurturing hath been. Your downy cradling of the soul. I make no moan for glint or gleam ; (Let music pass, let rainbows die ;) I have no wail for vanished dream, For rose on cheek or fire in eye. We leave our playthings in the sim, We face the heaven of truth's abode The veil is lifting from the throne. We touch the very feet of God ! REPLY TO A CHRISTMAS GREETING. O GIFTED eyes with genius fraught, To catch where'er the hint divine. And read thy God's ascending thought Through silvery mote or quivering line ! O joyful heart that out the storm Knows the high arch of light will come FAITH AND HOPE. 271 And let its gentle glory down To win the fainting spirit home ! O prophet soul that wise and well Sees the ripe grapes within the germ, Oh, what thy radiant fancies spell, So does the Lord of Life discern ! FAITH AND HOPE. Enchanting form with silver wings Woven of morning light and air, Of all earth's freshest, fairest things. The fairest one to win and wear ! O darling Hope ! who dare deny Thy perfect touch and angel guise ? The poetry of earth and sky Fades with the fading of thine eyes. Yet does thy ringing voice grow less. The carols sound more faint and dim, As pain and sorrow and distress Flood their dark gohlet to the brim. Then steps into thy seat, o'erthrown By cruel rush of earth's despair, A silent, grave, and reverent form, A vision more sublimely fair ; 272 POEMS. And Faith, the soul's perfected dower, (Not greed of gain or fear of ill,) Awaits within the present hour The mandates of the perfect Will. 1886. ODE. Thou living Truth and vital Power ! We cling unto thy changeless breast, The phantoms of a mortal hour, And find immortal life and rest. Our fathers spoke their thought of thee In words austere, with lips aglow, And told in prayer, on bended knee. The mystic tale of human woe. We, children of a later hour. Seek in soft speech and gentler tongue To veil the splendor of thy power, And do thy brooding love no wrong. Our fathers caught with straining ear The echoes of the Sinai storm. And we a rarer music hear, — The worship of the Life new-born. But guard us, thou living Lord, If, lost our silken lines among, ODE. 273 We miss the high, heroic chord That through their manly accents rung. Shone on their brows the fervid beam Of truth, in human symbols given ; Oh, guard us, lest earth's tender sheen Shut off that grander light of heaven.