OF RELIGIONS GE R.DODSON Class. Book- GopyrightW.. an COPYRIGHT DEPOSm THE SYMPATHY OF RELIGIONS THE BEACON PRESS PUBLICATIONS IN RELIGIOUS EDUCATION THE NEW BEACON COURSE OF GRADED LESSONS William I. Lawrancc Florence Buck Editors. The Sympathy of Rehgions BY GEORGE R DODSON, Ph. D. 6 6sd9 J PURE EELIGION 45 gives of *^pure religion'^ is remarkable chiejBy for the language in which it is expressed, his con elusions being already familiar. *^ There is he says, ^*a certain uniform deliverance in which religions all appear to meet. It consists of two parts : — 1. An uneasiness. 2. Its solution. 1. The uneasiness, reduced to its simplest terms, is a sense that there is something wrong about us as we naturally stand. 2. The solution is a sense that we are saved from the wrongness by making proper connec- tion with the higher powers. In the more developed minds . . . the wrong- ness takes a moral character, and the salvation a mystical tinge. I think we shall keep well within the limits of what is common to all such minds if we formulate the essence of their re- ligious experience in terms like these : — * * The individual, so far as he suffers from his wrongness and criticises it, is to that extent con- sciously beyond it, and in at least possible touch with something higher, if anything higher exist. Along with the wrong part there is thus a better part of him, even though it may be but a most helpless germ. With which part he should iden- tify his real being is by no means obvious at this stage ; but when stage 2 (the stage of solution or salvation) arrives, the man identifies his real be- ing with the germinal higher part of himself; 46 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS and does so in the following way. He becomes conscious that this higher part is conterminous and continuous with a mobe of the same qual- ity, which is operative in the universe outside of him, and which he can keep in working touch with, and in a fashion get on board of and save himself when all his lower being has gone to pieces in the wreck. ' ^ lb. 508. This reads like a paraphrase of Emerson's essay on the Over-Soul. ' ' We grant that human life is mean, but how did we find out that it was mean? What is the ground of this uneasiness of ours?'^ It is because there is a better self which we trust in self -trust and which is con- terminous with a MORE of the same quality, with ^^that great nature in which we rest as the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere; that Unity, that Over-soul, within which every man's particular being is contained and made one with all other ; that common heart of which all sincere conversation is the worship ; that overpowering reality which confutes our tricks and talents, and constrains everyone to pass for what he is, and to speak from his character and not from his tongue, and which evermore tends to pass into our thought and hand and become wisdom and virtue and power and beauty." ^^As there is no screen or ceiling between our heads and the infinite heavens, so there is no bar or wall in the soul, where man, the effect, ceases, and God, the cause, begins. The walls are taken away. PUEE RELIGION 47 We lie open on one side to the deeps of spiritual nature, to all the attributes of God." The most explicit statement is perhaps that given in the ^^ Method of Nature." Emerson here attempts to tell us what he thinks about the fundamental religious experience : ^^I conceive a man as always spoken to from behind, and un- able to turn his head and see the speaker. . . . That well-known voice speaks in all languages, governs all men, and none ever caught a glimpse of its form. If the man will exactly obey it, it will adopt him, so that he shall not any longer separate it from himself in his thought, he shall seem to be it, he shall be it. If he listen with insatiable ears, richer and greater wisdom is taught him, the sound swells to ravishing music, he is borne away as with a flood, he becomes careless of his food and of his house, he is the fool of ideas, and leads a heavenly life. But if his eye is set on the things to be done, and not on the truth that is still taught, and for the sake of which the things are to be done, then the voice grows faint, and at last is but a humming in his ears." Everywhere, therefore, we are confronted with the same great fact. Multitudes of men in various ages, races and nations have left inde- pendent records of their converse with the di- vine. When they try to frame conceptions of this divine mobe with which the better self is conterminous and continuous, the differences be- 48 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS gin. Few are content with Prof. James to state the bare ^^fact that the conscious person is con- tinuous with a wider self through which saving experiences come.^' Some speak of God or gods, while others are ^* satisfied to conceive of it as a stream of ideal tendency embedded in the eternal structure of the world. ^ ^ But whether we say God, Spirit, Christ, Buddha, Brahma, Over-Soul, Father or Living Presence, the thing of importance is the experience, not the name for the cause of it, the process by which the natural man is born of a new spirit and begins to adjust his life to the divine order, and not any surmise as to the way in which that process is to be ex- plained. A remarkable illustration of the universality of this experience is its occurrence among those who have been taught not to believe in its possibility. Buddhism was originally a system of ethical culture through which the individ- ual was to save himself. Gotama taught his disciples not to depend upon assistance from the gods. They were to refrain from all reli- gious speculation. When they asked him, *^Does the Buddha exist after death, or does he not exist ? Or does he both exist and not exist, or does he neither exist nor not exist T^ Go- tama 's reply was that all such questions were pragmatically valueless, in that they made no difference to those whose main concern was the PURE RELIGION 49 absence of desire, freedom from passion, right effort, higher insight, inward peace. Permanently to repress the religious nature proved impossible, and in some later forms of Buddhism the teacher who had explicitly denied that the gods had any place in his way of sal- vation became himself a spiritual presence with whom the believer might enter into blessed com- munion. As Maitreya, he hears their prayer, guides them to truth, and they aspire to become ^'partakers of the Buddha nature." What John Fiske called ''The Everlasting Reality of Religion'^ is strikingly illustrated in this evolution into a religion of a system of ethical culture which denied the existence of the soul and which had no place for prayer or the belief in God. In an article on ''The The- istic Evolution of Buddhism, '^ New Worlds Vol. I, No. 1, pp. 89-106, Prof. J. E. Carpenter com- pares Buddhism with Christianity as follows: "The last words addressed by Gotama to his disciples summed up his fundamental principle of escape from the round of transmigration by personal moral discipline : Work out your own deliverance with diligence. The later Buddhism might quite well have added the correlate of the second part of the paradox of Paul and said, — For it is the Buddha that worketh in you to will and to do. Hindu devotion, therefore, readily moved along lines that have many paral- 50 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS lels in the West. When the Brahman Eama- chandra was converted to Buddhism in the eleventh century, he seems to have been driven by persecution from his native land into the Ganges Valley, and to have found shelter in Ceylon. There he poured out his trust in a little garland of verse • . . which might have been written by a mystic of mediaeval Christen- dom. ^Whether I live in heaven or in hell, whether in the city of ghosts or of men, let my mind remain fixed on thee, for there is no other happiness for me. Thou art my father, mother, brother, sister ; thou art my fast friend in dan- ger, dear one, thou art my lord, my teacher who imparts to me knowledge sweet as nectar. Thou art my wealth, my enjoyment, my pleas- ure, my affluence, my greatness, my reputation, my knowledge and my life. Thou art my all, all-knowing Buddha!' '^ CHAPTER IV SPIRITUAL. BIOLOGY EOF. FEANCIS G. PEABODY has spoken of religion as ^^the living sci- ence of spiritual biology/' The ex- pression is as felicitous as it is strik- ing. For life is one through all its ranges from the amoeba to man. The word biology- suggests to most minds the study of the struc- ture and functions of plants and the lower ani- mals. Others understand it to mean also zo- ology, physiology, agriculture, animal breeding, bacteriology and parasitology. But the science of life must he as wide as life itself, and if we can attain to knowledge of those higher ranges of human life which we call spiritual, that knowledge, when it is systematized and set in order, may properly be called spiritual biology. There are two reasons why the science of life has not usually been taken in this inclusive way. In the first place, the simpler forms of life are the easiest to understand, the material is abun- dant and we feel free to experiment with it as we please ; and, in the second, the method which alone is fruitful in the study of the highest pur- poses, aspirations and ideal strivings of hu- 51 52 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS manity is, as we have seen, different from that employed in physical science, and the knowledge which has been accumulated, though of supreme practical importance, consists of a collection of insights and spiritual laws which have not been organized into a coherent system. All things conspire to deepen our apprecia- tion of the significance of the unity of life. Thus the greatest and most fruitful theory in modern thinking is that of evolution. Derived from a study of the lower forms of life, it has revolutionized our views of all the higher forms. Edwin Grant Conklin, Professor of Biology in Princeton University, says apropos of this fact {Science, March 5, 1915), ^^The greatest theme of evolution is not the origin of species, nor even the origin of living things, but rather the oneness of all life. This is indeed the greatest principle of biology, namely, that through all the endless diversity of the living world there runs this fundamental similarity and unity. ' ^ But not only is human life one with the life of humbler creatures; it is itself a unity. Its physical functions which are studied by the physiologist are related to the conscious activi- ties which fall within the province of psychol- ogy, ethics and religion. Philosophers have sought to understand the relation between the physical and the conscious, and religious think- ers to arrive at some rational view concerning the relation between lower, natural life con- SPIRITUAL BIOLOaY 53 trolled by appetite, impulse and instinct and the higher spiritual life of love and service, of the worship of truth, beauty and goodness and consecration to the ideals of perfection. This higher life is, like the lower, not a chaos, but a realm of law, and there is, as the New Testa- ment says, though we use the words in a differ- ent sense, a *^law of the spirit of life.'' This region has not been fully explored, but it is well known. Many visit it, and some dwell in it. To investigate this inner life, these higher ranges of our being, to reveal the conditions and order of its development, is the function of spiritual biology. Centuries ago the prophet Jeremiah said, ^^ After those days, saith the Lord, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts. . . . And they shall teach no more every man his neighbor, saying. Know the Lord : for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them.'' And another Hebrew writer, Deut. 30: 11-14, says of the di- vine commandment that it is not in heaven or beyond the sea that messengers should be sent for it. ^^But the word is very nigh thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it." We may not understand perfectly the issues of the ancient time from which these words come, but the voice of the Hebrew seers calls from the same depths as that of forest thinkers of India who have left us the Upani- 54 THE SYMPATHY OF KELIGIONS shads. And this at least is certain : they knew where to look to find the spiritual laws which it is life and happiness and salvation to know and to obey. Now it was the conscious enterprise of Emer- son's life to discover these laws which are writ- ten in the human heart. He read books, he talked and travelled, but he was always listen- ing, he was alert to ^'detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across the mind from within.'' And he was not unsuccessful. He has not, it is true, left us a spiritual biology. But if we could organize the numerous insights he has bequeathed to us and unite them in a sys- tem with the spiritual laws which have been dis- covered by other seers we would indeed have a science of the spiritual life. For the systemati- zation we can wait. The practically important fact is that we may know and use the laws. What did the Over-Soul say to Emerson, who believed that by ^4owly listening we may hear the right word"? Open any of the essays, and you find the answer. They are the result of his effort to report faithfully his conversations with the divine. One essay is named /^Spiritual Laws," but almost every other deserves the title equally well. A few of these experimentally verifiable principles are as follows : What a man does, that he has. He may have his own. Everywhere he may take what belongs to his spiritual est?ite, nor SPIRITUAL BIOLOGY 55 can he take anything else though all doors were open, nor can all the force of men hinder him from taking so much. He may see what he maketh. He may set his own rate. He shall have his own society. A man passes for what he is worth. Always as much virtue as there is, so much appears ; as much goodness as there is, so much reverence it commands. Human character does evermore publish itself. Envy is ignorance ; imitation is suicide. Fear never but you shall be consistent in whatever variety of actions, so they be each honest and natural in their hour. Ineffable is the union of man and God in every act of the soul. The simplest person, who in his integrity worships God becomes God, yet forever and ever the influx of this better and universal self is new and unsearchable. ... It inspires in man an infallible trust. He has not the conviction, but the sight, that the best is the true, and may in that thought dismiss all par- ticular uncertainties and fears, and adjourn to the sure revelation of time the solution of his private riddles. He is sure that his welfare is dear to the heart of being. . . . He believes that he cannot escape from his good. The things that are really for thee gravitate to thee. And this is because the heart in thee is the heart of all. 56 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS Our life is embosomed in beauty. Heartily know, When half-gods go, The gods arrive. That only which we have within, can we see without. If we meet no gods, it is because we harbor none. What is excellent, As God lives, is permanent. Emerson perceives and clearly states that ^^mere morality'^ is impossible. Whenever the moral life is deep and strong, whenever men are loyal to the highest within them, there rises inevitably in their hearts a sense of harmony with the heart of things, a joyous confidence that their acts have more than temporary sig- nificance. In the famous Divinity School Ad- dress, Emerson puts it thus: ^^When a man says, ^I ought ^; when love warms him; when he chooses, warned from on high, the good and great deed ; then deep melodies wander through his soul from Supreme Wisdom. . . . The per- ception of this law of laws awakens in the mind a sentiment which we call the religious senti- ment, and which makes our highest happiness. . . . Thought may work cold and intransitive in things, and find no end or unity ; but the dawn of the sentiment of virtue on the heart gives and is the assurance that Law is sovereign over SPIEITUAL BIOLOGY 57 all natures; and the worlds, time, space, eter- nity, do seem to break out into joy." It would be easy to continue these quotations, but for those who have had a normal spiritual experience and who therefore can recognize the accents of the Holy Ghost, this list will be suflficient. The seer of Concord, the ^ ^friend and helper of those who would live in the spirit," understood perfectly that his percep- tions were desultory, that while he had helped gather the material for a spiritual science, the house has not been built. And in the Divinity School Address he expresses the hope that a great spiritual genius will sometime appear to perform this constructive task. ^^I look for the hour when that supreme Beauty which ravished the souls of those Eastern men, and chiefly of those Hebrews, shall speak in the West also. The Hebrew and Greek Scriptures contain im- mortal sentences that have been bread of life to millions. But" (and here he well character- izes his own writings) ^Hhey have no epical integrity; are fragmentary; are not shown in their order to the intellect. I look for the new Teacher that shall follow so far those shining laws that he shall see them come full circle; shall see their rounding complete grace; shall see the world to be the mirror of the soul ; shall see the identity of the law of gravitation with purity of heart; and shall show that the Ought, 58 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS that Duty, is one thing with Science, with Beauty, and with Joy. ^ ' The supreme fact in human life, apart from all interpretations or theories about it, is that as there is a physical order with which the physical part of us must make and maintain its adjustment, so there is a moral or spiritual or- der to which in the course of our development we become sensitive and with which we come into harmonious relation through a certain spir- itual attitude. For those who are perplexed and have not learned how -to establish this re- lation, Emerson is one of the best guides. His directions are simple : Get your life on a basis of truth, cease to pretend, trust the highest within you, and go forward without fear. Many have tried this and had a thrilling experi- ence. They have felt instantly that they have done right. ^^Deep melodies have wandered through their souls from the supreme wisdom. '^ As the electric energy is transmitted to the motor when the trolley is placed on the wire, so there is a sense of new life when the soul con- sciously consecrates itself to the highest. Be- wilderment ceases, and the mind orients itself, gets its bearings in the world. Some of those who have come to this phase of their spiritual career speak of it as a conversion, as a religious experience, and that is what it essentially is. For it means that man has **come to himself,'* that he has attained to a vivid awareness of the SPIRITUAL BIOLOGY 59 moral and spiritual order, to a conscious real- ization of himself as a spirit, destined for citi- zenship in this ^^ kingdom prepared from the foundation of the world.'' He has discovered that the vast process of the cosmos which, in its physical aspects, seems indifferent to every- thing that is humanly precious, has after all a spiritual structure in which only the true and the loving can find a place and which automati- cally casts out him that loveth or maketh a lie. PAETn CHEISTIANITY AT ITS BEST CHAPTER V AS LOVE TO GOD " Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment." T is clear, then, that when once we learn to distinguish between onr deep- est experiences and the different in- terpretations that may be put upon them, we at the same time begin to perceive the unity of humanity ^s spiritual life and to recog- nize the religion in and behind all the religions of the world. But this ^^pure religion '^ is something that we may eventually come to: neither as individuals nor as peoples do we begin with it. Practically all religious men are parts of a religious community, have their place in a historical religious movement such as Judaism, Christianity, or Islam, and are nourished on certain definite spiritual tradi- tions. To refuse to accept and profit by these concrete spiritual movements because they are not identical with absolute religion is like re- fusing to eat apples, peaches, and pears be- es 64 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS cause they are not simply fruit. He who wishes to enjoy fruit must partake of some particular kind. So the only religion that most men know is that which comes to them in the shape of some great historical movement. In the western world our concern is with Judaism and Christi- anity. The two really form one organic de- velopment, and we have now to ask what is the highest they have reached? What is Christi- anity at its best? Fortunately, we have a definite and authori- tative answer. When Jesus was asked for a concise statement of what lay at the heart of the religion of his people, he was able to ex- press his highest thought and deepest spiritual perception in two quotations from the Old Tes- tament: ^^Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind,'^ and ^^Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." The seed which the Great Sower cast into the world was not a new creation, but the fruit of Israel's spiritual life. The answer which he gave had been prepared before him and awaited the use he made of it. Christianity at its best is love to God and man, and this statement of Jesus is confirmed not only by many other sayings in the New Testa- ment but also by its whole spirit and by char- acteristically Christian lives in all ages. Its essential nature comes out when we attempt to discover the relation of the spirit of the Gospels AS LOVE TO GOD 65 and Epistles to the spirit of Emerson ^s essays. The comparison is most instructive. Emerson's great word is truth. A passion- ate longing for sincerity breathes through all his pages. Now the spirit of truth is, as the New Testament expressly tells us, the Holy Spirit. Emerson is one of its incarnations and no one can associate with him without receiving it. From him as a radiating center the con- tagion spreads evermore. Yet still greater heights are possible. To find and keep our places in the divine order, it is not enough to be true. The heart must glow with love. Ill will is as destructive of the highest as is insin- cerity. The Holy Spirit is that which speaks the truth in love. Essential Christianity is thus higher than Emersonian religion, for it teaches that con- scious union with the divine is conditioned upon love as well as truth, that it is enjoyed by those who overcome evil with good and who, regard- less of the treatment they receive, remain free from hate and live in steadfast good will. In this the Synoptics, the Fourth Gospel and the Epistles agree. Eeligion is a spirit in which we live, its characteristics being ^4ove, joy, peace, good temper, kindliness, generosity, fidel- ity, gentleness, self-control." To *^walk in the Spirit" or ^4ive in the Spirit" is to deliberately maintain this attitude which is transmitted from person to person. The disciples, some of 66 THE SYMPATHY OF RELIGIONS them at least, catch it from Jesus, others from them and so on to us. There is thus an apos- tolix5 succession of the spirit. Those who have it are the way, the truth, and the life to those who have it not. As torch is lighted by torch, so is the Christian spiritual attitude trans- mitted from generation to generation, from life to life. The beauty and applicability of the truth that lies at the heart of Christianity are obscured for us by several veils which, fortunately, are removable. In the first place, it appeals to us only on our noblest side. The natural man, who comes first in the order of development, does not easily believe that idealism is a practical creed and is afraid to trust anything but the cruder forces. He knows that force and fear and greed move men, but is sceptical when told that ^^ hearts are overcome not by arms, but by love and generosity.^' We are also troubled by the fact that the New Testament dates from a pre-scientific age, and the truths discerned by the spiritual genius of prophets and seers are presented in a literature which also contains ac- counts of miraculous occurrences and obsolete views of the universe. Furthermore, we are so accustomed to formal, technical and abstract statements of our rapidly growing knowledge that it requires some historic sense, some effort of the imagination, to appreciate the fact that the quaint, archaic, Oriental sayings of the New AS LOVE TO GOD 67 Testament are unscientific, or rather pre-scien- tific, expressions of truth which may easily be restated in more precise, scientific form. For instance, it is said that God is love, and every one that loves is born of God and knows God. The same writing contains the statement that God is light, and that we have fellowship with him when we walk in light and practise the truth. It would be more natural for us to say simply that through love and truth the human spirit comes into harmonious and happy adjustment to the spiritual order. And as love is life-giving, so hatred is fatal. The false, the insincere, the capricious are misfits in the world; so also are they who nourish feelings of pride and contempt. There is no place in the divine order except for men of good will. No proposition in geometry is more demon- strable, no physical principle more readily veri- fiable, than the spiritual law that to be without love is to close the gates of life. Hatred ^^ pre- vents us from coming into living and filial con- tact with those forces of the world which give us growth, and free us from narrow ends and unf raternal ways. ' ' Of all things in the world, hatred is that which we can least afford. On the other hand, to find the secret of truth and the secret of love is to * ^ open every door in life which faces the sun, and the clear sky, and the face of the infinite Life.'' In the Sermon on the Mount it is said, ^*If 68 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS therefore thou art offering thy gift at the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath aught against thee, leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way, first be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift/' In the light of the foregoing statement it is easy to see that this is not merely a recom- mendation: it is the statement of a spiritual law. What is meant is that when the heart is not right toward another, it has lost its right relation with the world of spiritual reality. Nothing can be achieved by remaining at the altar. Until love begins to flow, the currents of life will not circulate. It is useless to try to pray or to offer gifts. It avails nothing to sac- rifice all one's goods to feed the poor, or even to give one 's body to be burned. Without love, we are at cross purposes with the universe. * ' The thing of first importance is what we are, the second is what we do, and the third is what we say.'' It is a great day in our development when we perceive that these New Testament sayings, with which we have been familiar from our youth up, are statements, not merely of beauti- ful poetic ideas and ideals, but of the nature of things, when we find out for ourselves that ill will and untruth cut us off from that which quickens, inspires and illuminates life, that they unfit us for our highest functions, destroy the sympathy which is a condition of insight and AS LOVE TO GOD 69 are in their nature suicidal. Baudelaire spoke truly : ^^ Hatred is a precious liquor, because it is made of our blood, our health, our sleep, and two thirds of our love.'^ In one of the few places where the New Testament states a spir- itual law with Emersonian conciseness (I John 3:15), it is said that ^* Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer. ' ' That is precisely true. Hatred is murder in the heart. It means from the first the destruction of the hated object. That is what it comes to unless it is inhibited by opposing motives such as prudential and moral considerations. If this emotion monop- olized the consciousness, it would proceed swiftly toward its natural goal. We know, too, that to think of an action and desire to perform it is really to begin it, for such thought is incipi- ent action. To brood over it is to practise it. And even though the tendencies do not find ex- pression beyond the limits of the body, the atti- tude is fatal to our higher interests, for, as the New Testament writer puts it, ^^ye know that no murderer hath eternal life abiding in him.'' If the new teacher Emerson hoped for ever does appear, one who ' ^ shall follow so far those shining laws that he shall see them come full circle,'' it is doubtful whether his scientific training will enable him to give a more terse and exact statement of Christianity's magic secret of living than the precepts we already have : Love your enemies, overcome evil with 70 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS good. Here is the law of all construction of the higher values. If we love only those who love us while we hate those who hate us, it is ob- vious that love cannot increase in the world. The only way it can grow in amount is through the transformation of enemies into friends, of haters into lovers, by love given even when it is not received. Those who not only praise this principle but live it are as lights on a hill which dissipate the surrounding darkness. The Holy Spirit, which is at the same time the spirit of man at his best and of God, is in them, and they in some degree illustrate the working of the law of the life and influence of the ideal Christ. The fact is that when our spiritual vision clears and we see for ourselves what Paul and the writer of the Fourth Gospel have tried to tell us, we are brought face to face with a tran- scendent faith which it requires supreme cour- age to accept, but from which, when the impli- cations of our deeper experiences are realized, there is absolutely no escape. We are the chil- dren of love. There is a *^law of the spirit of life ' ' of which Jesus may be the supreme though by no means solitary illustration. In countless other instances can we say that ^^the word was made flesh and dwelt among us.'' ^^ Grace and truth came by Jesus Christ.'' This is the way spiritual truth always comes, through human lives. Paul tells his disciples that they have re- ceived the truth as it is in Jesus, and we know AS LOVE TO GOD 71 that while some truth can be learned from a book or taught by an intellect without feeling, in the sphere of the spiritual life the only influ- ential truth is that which is incarnate in some man or woman. The Holy Spirit ^^proceedeth from the Father and the Son/' This statement can be generalized. It does come from the Over-Soul, but it is usually through some son or daughter of the Highest. And when the Johannine Christ says, ^^I am the way, the truth, and the life,'' the experience behind the state- ment was not unique in human history. For although the mother may shrink from saying that she is all this to her young child, and though it may frighten her to realize it, the law nevertheless applies in her case. And in the other fundamental relations in life it is given us to be this to one another. We may be tempted to cry out, ^^Who is sufficient for these things, for a responsibility so great?" For if the world is helped upward by the ideals that come shining through people's lives, it is pulled downward and backward by those who are in- carnations of the opposite spirit. Conscious of the mixture of good and evil in us, we are as much appalled as inspired. The first realiza- tion of the fact that we are more than intelli- gent animals and that Christianity must be taken seriously, that we are spirits and have to do with living laws, is an experience as full of solemnity as of joy. Yet we must not shrink 72 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS from taking Christianity at its best. We must identify ourselves with the highest in us, and although we know that we have this treasure in earthen vessels, the great truth that we do have it should be recognized with courage and thank- fulness. ^^Thou shalt love/^ — ^this is the first and great commandment, and the insight of the finest men and women in all the intervening centuries has confirmed this declaration of the master of the religious life. We are to love God with all the heart, with all the soul, with all the strength and with the whole mind. When life glows with this passionate love of and yearning for ideal perfection, it becomes uni- fied and its discords pass into music. There come into it a new sense of ease and power and a new joy. It rises above the former level where being good consisted merely in not being bad. Duty is transformed into privilege, the law is fulfilled without any sense that life is re- strained, for the service of the ideal is perfect freedom. Paul cannot speak of the new ' ' way ' ' of life without the greatest enthusiasm. Breth- ren, says he, we are not slaves any longer, but children of the spirit. We are not even minor children, but have attained our majority. Good- ness is not repression, but the free and joyous expression of the higher nature, our true na- ture, our divine or Christ nature, which we have put on. AS LOVE TO GOD 73 This means that so long as life is coldly true and conscientious, its adjustment to the uni- verse is incomplete. When it glows with high affections, it comes into more intimate and vital relations with the divine order. This is only what must be expected if the Christian teaching be true that love is at the heart of things. The solution of those difficulties which seem so great before we love is not thought out. It is lived out, the difficulties disappearing with the pas- sionate and joyous consecration of the soul to the highest. There are times during our spiritual imma- turity when we wish to obey the commandment to love God with the complete devotion of the whole nature, but we do not know how. But later we discover, to our astonishment and in- effable joy, that we have always loved God, even in the days when we were not sure that we be- lieved in him. We find that we cannot, in fact, love anything else. Before we come to our- selves, we do not distinguish between our wishes and our will, between what single passions tend toward and that which the whole man wants. Fractional parts of our nature seek this or that, but when the whole nature becomes clear as to its intent, when its constitutional longings are felt, it cries out: ^^0 God, thou hast made us for thyself and our hearts are restless till they rest in thee. '' Before a man reaches this point, he often gropes his way along many paths. Not 74 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS knowing himself, the voice of his deeper self drowned by the clamor of passion, he misses the mark, and only after painful experiences is he disillusioned. But he finds at last that what he has sought so eagerly is but husks that do not satisfy. In time he comes to know that he is a theotropic animal, determined by his constitu- tion to be an incorrigible lover of the best. The deepest in him loves God, and when it at last hears and answers the call of the highest, it realizes that it is a child of the perfect, a native of the ideal world for which it is homesick for evermore. It is necessary at this point to make a quali- fication in order to avoid an injustice. The statement at the beginning of this chapter that Emerson fell short of the highest, of Christi- anity at its best, may, to some who have been helped by this pure and elevated spirit, seem unfair. They will call to mind golden sentences of his, such as the following: ' ' There is no beautifier of complexion or form or behavior, like the wish to scatter joy and not pain around us. ' ' '^His heart was as great as the world, but there was no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong. '^ ' ' Love would put a new face on this weary old world, in which we dwell as pagans and. ene- mies too long; and it would warm the heart to AS LOVE TO GOD 75 see how fast the vain diplomacy of statesmen, the impotence of armies and navies and lines of defence would be superseded by this un- armed child. . . . An acceptance of the senti- ment of love throughout Christendom for a sea- son would bring the felon and the outcast to our side in tears, with the devotion of his faculties to our service. . . . This great, overgrown, dead Christendom of ours still keeps alive at least the name of a lover of mankind. But one day all men will be lovers ; and every calamity will be dissolved in the universal sunshine." ^*Man the Reformer." ** Everything that is called fashion and cour- tesy humbles itself before the cause and foun- tain of honor, creator of titles and dignities, namely, the heart of love. This is the royal blood. • . . This impoverishes the rich, suffer- ing no grandeur but its own. What is rich? Are you rich enough to help anybody? to succor the unfashionable and eccentric, rich enough to make this swarthy Italian with his few words of broken English, the lame pauper hunted by overseers from town to town, even the poor in- sane or besotted wreck of man or woman, feel the noble exception of your presence and your house, from the general bleakness and stoni- ness ; to make such feel that they were greeted with a voice which made them both remember and hope? ... Is not this to be rich? this only to be rightly rich ? " ^ * Manners. ' ' 76 THE SYMPATHY OF RELIGIONS These passages show that Emerson was able to see the place of love in life and to praise it in sentences that read like scripture. The im- portant fact, however, is that neither the per- ception nor the eulogy can make the heart to glow. This power belongs only to those who are in the apostolic succession of the Christian spirit. For him as for the most of us, it was easier to be true than to be loving. If we refer not to particular passages in his essays but to the total influence of his writings, is it not just to say that what they inspire is rather a high courage and a passionate longing for sincerity and truth rather than the spirit that pervades the New Testament, that wrote the wonderful thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians, the finest page perhaps in the religious literature of the world? CHAPTER VI AS LOVE TO MAN "And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." OME of the early Christian writers speak of their religion as a form of wisdom. It is of heavenly origin and is in strong contrast at every point with the wisdom which is merely a successful way of finding satisfaction for the tendencies in the lower side of human nature. They say that man is a spirit in process of evolution and when he becomes sensitive and obedient to the demands of the moral and spiritual order, not only does his higher manhood, his true nature, come into fellowship with the divine, but his lower life falls into order when it is controlled and sanctified by the new spirit. This higher wisdom is not a theory, but a way of living, and those who have found it are easily recognized by their characteristic attitude. They are ^^ first of all pure, then peaceable, forbearing, conciliatory, full of mercy and wholesome fruit, unambiguous, straightforward, and as peace- 77 78 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS makers they sow in peace and reap in righteous- ness." This designation of the Christian insight as Sophia is profoundly just. These early writers were also correct in speaking of the spiritual attitude they had gained as new and from above, for it is one of the greatest contributions ever made to the spiritual wealth of humanity, and it is one that most needs to be universally dif- fused by the international commerce of the spirit. This will be apparent if we can restate it in modern terms and in images that belong to our life. If we cannot do this, if we can express a truth in only one way and in words quoted from others, we betray the fact that we do not understand it, that we are second-hand ,men talking about what lies beyond our experi- ence and is known to us only by report. The great secret, the magic key to the life of joy and serenity, of poise, peace and power, has been rediscovered over and over again in the Christian centuries. When a man ceases to make his frail, confined self the center of the universe, when he no longer estimates every- thing by what he may get out of it for himself, when he becomes a lover, first of all of God and directs his life towards the ideals he worships, and a lover, then, of his fellow-men whom he passionately desires to serve, he for the first time sees reality from the highest point of view ; new visions of truth open before him, and his AS LOVE TO MAN 79 mind, his heart and his life have come into nor- mal relations with all that is. He discovers to his astonishment that the idealistic paradoxes work. The wisdom which is from below says, **Get all yon can.'' The wisdom from above declares that the structure of the universe and the nature of human nature are such that it is more blessed to give than to receive, that the way to live is to place the emphasis on the outgo rather than the income, and that the lower goods come by indirection to those who serve the higher interests, who, in ancient phrase, ^^seek first the kingdom of God and his righteous- ness.'' The central truth of Christianity, restated in the language of to-day, is that human welfare and happiness depend not alone on the adjust- ment of the body to the physical world, but also upon the establishment and maintenance of vital and harmonious relations of the higher human nature with the moral and spiritual uni- verse ; furthermore, the latter adjustment is ef- fected in part by keeping the commandments to refrain from evil and by living in the spirit of truth, but it is incomplete until all life is re- garded with sympathy, until the purpose is steadfastly constructive and the heart glows with good will. Those who take and keep this attitude in the practical relations of life realize at once that they have taken hold of the world by the right handle. Its value for conduct is 80 THE SYMPATHY OF RELIGIONS to some extent appreciated, but what is not so generally appreciated is that love is as neces- sary to undistorted vision and clear thinking as it is to right action. This may not be true when we are dealing with inanimate things. To understand them, it is not necessary to love them. But in the case of human beings, love is a condition of vision. Far from being blind, it alone can see. What is blind is selfishness. The very first con- dition of insight into the truth of other lives is the desire and the power to see them as they are and not merely in relation to ourselves; it is to delight in them for their own sake, to be free from any desire to exploit them, to recog- nize that they have value for themselves and not merely because they may be of use to us. It was said in old time that the pure in heart see God. Certainly it is the loving in heart and they alone who see man, whose vision pene- trates to the inner truth of life and who attain to a just conception of human nature. An in- dispensable qualification for the successful stu- dent of human life, of education, politics, art, law, morals or religion is the keeping, in the spirit as well as in the letter, of the second great commandment, which has been so well restated by Kant: ** Always treat humanity, whether in yourself or another, as an end, and never merely as a means." The study of human life is the study of values AS LOVE TO MAN 81 which cannot be understood unless they are felt ; it is the study of tendencies, strivings, purposes, loves and ideal aims, which cannot be under- stood unless they are shared. The perception of that which is precious in each life is insepara- ble from a love of it and a desire to assist it in realizing its high possibilities. Love and knowledge in this case go together. A cold, cynical or contemptuous spectator of human life sees only actions, deeds, imperfections, and since he takes no account of the inborn love of the best and striving toward ideal goals, he misses that which is essential, the very heart of reality. For nothing merely is, not even a crys- tal. Consider a box of rock candy. What you see is a mass of crystals, some large, others small, but all imperfect. In every one can be discerned what the forces of crystallization would produce under ideal conditions. Here they have been at work, but the crystals in their formation have interfered with one another, and not one is complete. Something like this is true of men and women, only in them the tendencies are more or less conscious. Their aspiring life is their essence. They are determined by their nature to seek for a higher, to the worship of ideal perfection, and to the effort to realize a best. They may or may not outwardly pray, but each one is a prayer. Men are tendencies toward ideals, approximate expressions of an ideal humanity. They are lovers of, because 82 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS children of, the Perfect. An inborn love of truth and goodness, an invincible idealism, — this is what lies at the very heart of humanity. Those who perceive this are the only true ' ' real- ists,^' for their experience and their sympathy enable them to penetrate beneath the surface of human life to those upward tendencies which are the fundamental reality of human nature. Inanimate things may be successfully studied and profitably used without sentiment, but in human affairs sympathy is a condition of under- standing. It is necessary to love in order to know the truth about men, women and chil- dren, and the insight, the philosophy which un- derlies the Christian view of human nature, has well been called, love in thinking. In this exposition, I have sought to use the language of to-day, not because I hope to im- prove upon the venerable words of our sacred books, but for the reason that it is important to distinguish between the Christian principles and spirit and their first and most familiar form of expression. The Christian attitude of love is a way of living which works like magic. What is important is not forever to repeat the words in which it was first stated and taught to us, but to use it and to recognize its use in history and the contemporary world. There is a great deal of unrecognized religion, of Christianity that has not become self-con- scious, and a perception of this fact makes for AS LOVE TO MAN 83 peace and spiritual unity among men. A tool is of little value to one who cannot use it. The Christian view of human nature, although it is the truest, is almost useless so long as it is only nominally accepted. Although love is the most potent force in the human world, mere eulogies of love are impotent. The natural man has a difficulty in perceiving spiritual truth, and when he gets a glimpse of it he is usually afraid to commit himself to it in action. It is therefore necessary to illustrate in a concrete way how the Christian idealism works. Whenever an incarnation of its spirit appears, it is seen to be irresistible. A famous example of its magical power is given in the eighth chapter of the Fourth Gos- pel. To him who comprehends its significance, the meaning of Christianity as love to man stands revealed in the clearest light. Although the story is out of place in its present position, it is obviously a fragment of the primitive tra- dition. Some of the leading religious men in Jerusalem had detected a woman in adultery, and they decided to use the case to try an ex- periment upon Christ. The page in ^^Ecce Homo" in which Prof. J. E. Seeley paraphrases the gospel account is one of the finest '^ etch- ings'^ in literature, and the spirit of the scene is so vividly portrayed that I will transcribe it entire : They brought the culprit before the master 84 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS and asked whether he agreed with Moses as to what ought to be done with her. ^^A judgment he gave them, but quite different, both in mat- ter and manner, from what they had expected. In thinking of the ^case' they had forgotten the woman, they had forgotten even the deed. What became of the criminal appeared to them wholly unimportant ; towards her crime or her character they had no feeling whatever, not even hatred, still less pity or sympathetic shame. If they had been asked about her, they might probably have answered, with Mephis- topheles, 'She is not the first'; nor would they have thought their answer fiendish, only prac- tical and business-like. Perhaps they might on reflection have admitted that their frame of mind was not strictly moral, not quite what it should be, that it would have been better if, be- sides considering the legal and religious ques- tions involved, they could have found leisure for some shame at the scandal and some hatred for the sinner. But they would have argued that such strict propriety is not possible in this world, that we have too much on our hands to think of these niceties, that the man who makes leisure for such refinements will find his work in arrears at the end of the day, and probably also that he is doing injustice to his family and those dependent upon him." ' ' This they might fluently and plausibly have urged. But the judgment of Christ was upon AS LOVE TO MAN 85 them, making all things seem new, and shining like the lightning from the one end of heaven to the other. He was standing, it would seem, in the centre of a circle, when the crime was narrated how the adultery had been detected in the very act. The shame of the deed itself, and the brazen hardness of the prosecutors, the legality that had no justice and did not pretend to have mercy, the religious malice that could make its advantage out of the fall and ruin and ignominious death of a fellow-creature — all this was eagerly and rudely thrust before his mind at once. The effect upon him was such as might have been produced upon many since, but perhaps upon scarcely any man that ever lived before. He was seized with an intolerable sense of shame. He could not meet the eye of the crowd, or of the accusers, and perhaps at that moment least of all of the woman. Stand- ing as he did in the midst of an eager multitude that did not in the least appreciate his feelings, he could not escape. In burning embarrass- ment and confusion he stooped down so as to hide his face, and began writing with his finger on the ground. His tormentors continued their clamor, until he raised his head for a moment, and said, ' He that is without sin among you let him first cast a stone at her,' and then instantly returned to his former attitude. They had a glimpse perhaps of the glowing blush upon his face, and awoke suddenly with astonishment to 86 THE SYMPATHY OF RELIGIONS a new sense of their condition and their con- duct. The older men naturally felt it first and slunk away; the younger followed their exam- ple. The crowd dissolved and left Christ alone with the woman. Not till then could he bear to stand upright; and when he had lifted him- self up, consistently with his principle, he dis- missed the woman, as having no commission to interfere with the office of the civil judge. But the mighty power of living purity had done its work. He had refused to judge a woman, but he had judged a whole crowd. He had awak- ened the slumbering conscience in many hard- ened hearts, given them a new delicacy, a new ideal, a new view and reading of the Mosaic law.'^ Pp. 115, 116. Here in the clear light and in strong contrast we have brought before us two types of men with their characteristic ways of regarding hu- manity. To the group around Jesus the woman was a thing, to him she was a personality. The former, being without love, were also without perception and could see nothing of value in her, and no reason why she should not be used merely as a means for their low ends. He had the insight which love gives and was able to de- tect and recognize the imprisoned soul. To the despised and abandoned around him he spoke in a voice which bade them ^^both remember and hope.'' The divine humanity in him perceived it in others and called it forth. Hatred and AS LOVE TO MAN 87 contempt could not see what is open to the eyes of love, ''this hidden treasure, this concealed but incomparable value-personality." Some other stories have come down to us of the life- giving power of Jesus, his ^^ gracious, discern- ing, vitalizing recognition" of depressed and submerged personalities. Prof. John Wright Buckham has put it well: ^'It was characteristic of the spiritual insight of Jesus to say, not only, ^Thou ailest here, and here,' but ^here, and here, thou art rich with undreamed potency.' It was not, in his case, — as it has been with so many others who have had skill in finding men, — the mere keenness to see, ^This man or this woman can be useful to me, ' but the discernment that each had in him something of intrinsic worth to himself, to God, to the world, which should be brought from its hiding into the light of recognition and fruitfulness." ^^Personality and the Chris- tian Ideal," p. 163. And when the latent di- vine life is awakened, when the best self answers the call of the best self in others, the change is that described in the New Testament as being born of a new and higher and holier spirit. ^^Like an unexpected sunburst, the opening of a new world of fair and friendly benignity, comes true recognition to an imprisoned and unrecog- nized soul. Unsunned flowers lift up their faces in the garden of the neglected heart at the touch of sympathetic recognition, and a sudden 88 THE SYMPATHY OF RELIGIONS fragrance exhales from crushed and unused faculties.'' Ibid., 161. Love is therefore not merely a beautiful and desirable thing. It is an absolute necessity. Without it, we cannot even see the truth of the most important part of our environment, namely, other lives. It is a spiritual law that the Self must be loved both in the self and in others. I must avail myself once more of Buckham's power of expression: ^^To despise the true self, to treat his own personality as a thing to be thrown to the dogs of appetite and passion or sacrificed to sloth or despair, — ^that is a temptation that comes to all. Pride on the one hand, self-contempt on the other, reduce personality to impersonality by putting it into the scale of market values, — appraisal by com- parison, — something wholly foreign to its na- ture. Unless one respects his own personality, he certainly cannot respect that of others. Jesus recognized this when he said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. The self-love which serves as a standard for true love to others can only be an unselfish love of the true self within." Ibid., 154. Christianity at its best, then, is love to God and love to man. That inborn love of God of which man becomes conscious when he *^ comes to himself, ' ' that native love of perfection, that worship which is the promise and potency of all spiritual progress, is the conscious working in AS LOVE TO MAN 89 us of that power which has lifted life all the way from the beginning until now. '^Our innate yearning toward the higher is the movement of the Higher itself within us.'^ Man's visions of the better keep the world moving upward and onward. They act like a spiritual magnet. The uplifted ideal draws the race after it. On the other hand, the love of man is transforming the social world. The growing sense of the worth, the sacredness, of life is abolishing an- cient evils, slavery, prostitution, war, child labor, the exploitation of human lives for other ends. When reverence for personality becomes the great virtue, violation of it is felt to be the great sacrilege. ^^It is this that constitutes the hatefulness of slavery, the meanness of treach- ery, that makes the dastard motive of the liber- tine so damnable, and lurks as the secret poison in the meanest and most despicable acts that men do.'^ Christianity in its history has brought with it doctrines, ceremonies and or- ganizations, but the heart of it has always been these two loves which after all are but one love. Together they constitute the divine meaning of life. CHAPTER VII LIVING EPISTLES HRISTIANITY to be understood must be studied in the lives of the men and women it inspires. Books such as this may be of service to those who desire to comprehend it by making clear the distinction between that in it which abides and that which in time is done away, but the only effective ^introduction'' to Christianity is a Christian life. This is the key to the scriptures and the best commentary on sacred literature. To those who have been born of the new spirit and know in experience what its quality is, the Christian writings are an open book; for all others, they remain sealed. This is true, of course, of other religions. In the introduction to ^^Sadhana," Tagore says, *^The meaning of the living words that come out of the experi- ences of great hearts can never be exhausted by any one system of logical interpretation. They have to be endlessly explained by the commen- tary of individual lives. ... To me the verses of the Upanishads and the teachings of Buddha have ever been things of the spirit, and there- 90 LIVING EPISTLES 91 fore endowed with boundless vital growth ; and I have used them, both in my own life and in my preaching, as being instinct with individual meaning for me, as for others, and awaiting for their confirmation, my own special testimony, which must have its value because of its indi- viduality. ' ^ The spirit of a religion is its own evidence, and they who are filled with it are its apostles. Thus David Livingstone was an Introduction to Christianity for the savages and barbarians of Central Africa. He was a message, a ^^ liv- ing epistle," which they could understand. He had no need to talk about kindness and good- ness, sympathy and service, for his spirit was superior to theirs and conquered their hearts. His rescuer. Sir Henry M. Stanley, remarked how Livingstone's influence spread by conta- gion among the natives and how he was himself affected. Although they did not talk about re- ligion, the result of their association was that ^^ after a while he found himself looking at things as Livingstone did, and before he knew it he was a Christian." Although this spirit is difficult to describe, it is easily recognized when it has once been met with in other lives. Paul regarded its presence in him and his power to produce it in others as the all sufficient evidence of his having a commission from Christ. The significance of a passage in one of his letters to the Church at Corinth is clearly set forth by 92 THE SYMPATHY OF KELIGIONS Eev. F. S. C. Wicks, as follows : ^ ^ The Apostle- ship of Paul was questioned. He was not of the Twelve. What warrant had he to speak as if divinely commissioned to spread the new gos- pel? Attempts were made to undermine the loyalty of his converts. In his answer, Paul submitted no proofs of h,is apostleship. He laid no claim to special appointment by his Mas- ter. He advanced as proof what he had written in the hearts of the Corinthians. It was as if he said, ^Look into your own hearts. Do you jBnd that a great love has taken possession of you? Do you find a new spirit at work? Do you find that your sight has been cleared by a new truth? Do you find your lives yielding the peaceable fruits of justice, mercy, love ? If you do, you may be sure that the Divine Spirit has come to you through me.' '^ The progress of religious thought consists partly in the discovery that the highest experi- ences of the spiritual geniuses of the race were not unique. They are merely the greatest in- stances of a general law. What was true of them is in some measure true of us, and our religious life ought to be an experimental veri- fication of the principles of which they have been the chief historic illustrations. Every one who has caught the spirit of the Fourth Gospel wiU find that the author was trying to present something more than the Greek speculations of the day ; he will realize that in some humble LIVING EPISTLES 93 measure he can say, must say, of himself some of the things which Christ as the great type, the great leader, is represented as saying of him- self. The great idea is, — the more humanity the more God, and the more divinity the more truly human. When we put into words the im- plications of our moral and religious experi- ence, the lower nature is shocked by the seeming irreverence with which the higher human life is identified with the life of God. But when there is presented to us a life which is an incarnation of this divine spirit, the difficulty vanishes away. Lives like those of Samuel June Barrows and Alice Freeman Palmer, full of grace and truth, set our hearts in a glow. Their approximate realization of the highest ideals has irresistible attraction for that which is best in us, and the call of the divine without is answered by the latent divine within. The biography of those lives might each bear the sub-title — '^ A Eevela- tion of God in one of his American Children. ' ' The kind of message transmitted through these living epistles is well expressed in a trib- ute paid by Mr. Barrows to an ^^ Ideal of good- ness, sweetness, purity and tenderness beauti- fully and winningly embodied in the life of a beloved teacher. It was she who made goodness real and virtue lovely. Her character was one which was not only good enough for heaven, but, tried by a more exacting standard, was good enough for this world. By an unconscious and 94 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS irresistible attraction, she drew us from the old dream world into the living present through the charm of her saintly womanhood. Here was a beautiful blending of veneration, spirituality and affection, in an actual, tangible, human being, in a woman who sung and spoke and smiled. Other characters might be mythic, but this was indisputably real. The Hebrew wor- thies whom we were taught to revere were all masculine. There was not a womanly figure among them to command our love and admira- tion. But the child mind and heart had other resources. It needed not to spell out letter by letter, the old Hebrew word; it could recognize the Word made flesh and dwelling among us. Here was a living exposition of that doctrine of the incarnation, whose genesis we can never find and, whose revelation we can never limit. ^' The change wrought in a human life when it comes to be dominated by the Christian spirit is described in the New Testament in various ways. It is a new birth, a putting off of the old nature and a putting on of the new, a death to former way of living and a resurrection to newness of life. The transformation is pro- found, although it is not always or necessarily sudden, and it may be described in more modern and familiar terms. It is a veritable revolution which takes place in a life when concern for the interests of the lower self is replaced by a love which reverses the direction of the life currents LIVING EPISTLES 95 and no longer turns inward toward the self but goes out toward the highest interests which a human being can have at heart. Copernicus proved that the centre of the solar system is not the earth but the sun. So Jesus taught that we can neither see nor live our life aright so long as its centre is believed to be where to the natural man it seems to be. But when a man identifies himself with all that he loves when he loves God, with the ideal interests which keep him growing, the old discord and perplexi- ties cease and are replaced by peace and power. Pride vanishes and a sincere and beautiful hu- mility appears. Confession, which before was so difficult, now becomes easy and brings with it a purifying power. The nature of the change is made clear the moment we ask. Why was it once so hard to acknowledge faults? The an- swer can only be that it was because we then identified ourselves with the lower self, so that confession was really self-condemnation. But when the realization comes that impulses, appe- tites and passions are but the raw material of life which are to be organized and controlled by the higher, truer, diviner self, it is felt at once that the mistakes into which they lead us are overcome and in a sense made objective and foreign by the very act of confessing them. This has been very beautifully stated by Maeterlinck in his essay on *' Sincerity ^^: ^^In this state, the idea no longer comes to us 96 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS to hide a secret thought or a secret sentiment, no matter how vulgar or contemptible. They can no longer make us blush, seeing that, in owning them, we disown them, we separate them from ourselves, we prove that they no longer belong to us, no longer take part in our lives, no longer spring from the active, voluntary and personal side of our strength, but from the primitive, formless and enslaved being that af- fords us an entertainment as amusing as are all those in which we detect the play of the instinctive powers of nature. A movement of hatred, of selfishness, of silly vanity, of envy or disloyalty, when examined in the light of per- fect sincerity, becomes nothing more than an interesting and singular flower. This sincerity, like fire, purifies all that it embraces. It steril- izes the dangerous leaven and turns the great- est injustice into an object of curiosity as harm- less as a deadly poison in the glass case of a museum. Imagine Shylock capable of knowing and confessing his greed ; he would cease to be greedy, and his greed would change its shape and no longer be odious and hurtful. . . . The knowledge and admission of our faults and de- fects chemically precipitates their venom, which becomes no more than a salt, lying inactive at the bottom of the heart, whose innocent crystals we can study at leisure. ... It is not we but a stranger who now stands in the place where we committed a fault. The fault itself we have LIVING EPISTLES 97 eliminated from our being. It no longer sullies any save him who hesitates to admit that it sullies us no longer. It has nothing more in common with our real life." The Christian is therefore a lover of that which is above and beyond him. This love sets him free from selfishness and makes it possible for him to see truth and beauty and to work ef- fectively in the human world. So long as think- ing cannot for a moment lose sight of profit and loss and seek truth for its own sake, it fails of the highest. So long as we are primarily interested in our own advantage, and in the sat- isfaction of our passions, our perceptions are in slavery, and there is no aesthetic enjoyment, no art, possible. To selfishness the only beauty is that defined by Stendhal as une promesse de bonheur, that is, that which promises the satisfaction of all those desires which are other and lower than the love of beauty. The gospel then states a great law of the spiritual world in saying that the man who is intent on saving his life is the man that loses it. Although given clear statement centuries ago and illustrated in thousands of lives, this truth is not universally understood and accepted and in certain quar- ters it is even categorically denied. It is re- markable that the most celebrated of recent efforts to give an account of human thinking places its point of reference in the self. It says that 98 THE SYMPATHY OF RELIGIONS **To attain perfect clearness in our thoughts of an object, we need only consider what con- ceivable effects of a practical kind the object may involve — ^what sensations we are to expect from it and what reactions we must prepare. Our conception of these effects, whether imme- diate or remote, is then for us our whole con- ception of the object so far as that object has positive significance at all.'' In other words, we are rational only when we look at the world as a lumber magnate looks at the California Big Trees or as the lion looks at a gazelle. In the one case the object means profit, in the other it means meat. The nation that adopts such principles will condemn itself to scientific and artistic medioc- rity; it will find philosophy but boredom, and will be unable to produce heroic lives. For- getfulness of self in devotion to high interests is a condition of great work. We have seen that love must have a place in the theory of knowledge, since its absence destroys the power of seeing things as they are. Hatred is an absolute disqualification. It has an eye for de- fects, but not for excellences. Are you uncer- tain whether you love or hate another? Ob- serve whether you are inclined to pick out his defects or his good qualities. No cynic can be a great artist or philosopher. A German scholar restates the maxim of Jesus as follows : ** We see that disinterestedness, self-abnegation, LIVING EPISTLES 99 just as it leads to beauty, leads also to truth, and that no one can preach selfishness without at the same time attacking truth and science." In ^^The Man of Genius," Mr. H. Tuerck shows that Goethe, Schopenhauer, and Spinoza have all rediscovered the fact that the secret of normal and happy living is to be found in the outgoing of the heart and mind in a love of truth and beauty, of man and God. They agree that love is the secret of all genius. Said Goethe, — ^^The first and last thing that is demanded of genius is love of truth. ' ' According to Spinoza, ^^Disinterested absorption in the contemplation of the object is identical with love for the ob- ject. . . . Love is joy with the accompanying idea of the external cause ; it is the will which is directed to the existence of another, selfishness is the will whose only aim is one's own existence. We do not love an object because it is beautiful ; it appears to us beautiful because we love it." So Schopenhauer: ^^He only is great who in his work, whether it is practical or theoretical, seeks not his own concerns, but pursues an ob- jective end alone." He is absolutely right in this and merely paraphrases the gospel in say- ing that genius is the most complete objectivity of mind, for this is still will, only it is a good will. In the light of this principle, it is interesting to reread history and observe how often the lives of the greatest men illustrate the insight of 100 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS Jesus that the way to live is to seek first the supreme values while forgetting self, to go to the uttermost with the constructive good will, to seek first God's kingdom and his righteous- ness. All great men in fact do this. Some- times they end on crosses, but more and more often in places of responsibility. No man can be trusted until he is ruled by this spirit. We are beginning to realize the truth of these words of Sir Henry Jones: ^'It is a dangerous ex- periment to lay the world at the feet of the natural man; it is safe at the feet of the spir- itual. Let a man devote and dedicate his pas- sions, his intellect, his will, his very self, identi- fying himself with the good that is working in the world — and especially the good of the weak and humble — he may then affirm himself, or rather the God that is with him and within him, to the uttermost. ' ' This is only saying that love to God and love to man bring about the perfect orientation of the soul in the spiritual world and fit men for leadership in society. He who is not concerned for his lower self, who forgets it in his devotion to the highest interests, can neither be seduced by bribes nor coerced by threats and fears. The great leaders are those who are unhampered by petty, egoistic desires and anxieties, who see what is best and strive for it with energy and boldness. When we see that the interests they have at heart are the high interests that are LIVING EPISTLES 101 common to us all, we feel inclined to trust them and extend their power. As Tuerck says, — ^^To the altruistic, disinterested man power is given sooner or later ; he is the free man and his authority is gladly acknowledged. The selfish man sooner or later suffers shipwreck, his au- thority is borne only with resentment, and the moment occasion offers, his tyranny is broken; he is the real slave, and only so long as he is able to rely on rude force is he apparently free. . . . The man who attains to disinterestedness acquires at the same time sovereignty, power, and freedom ; for the selfish man may be ruled by every one who knows how to work on his pas- sions and desires ; but the disinterested man is not to be influenced, for he neither fears nor hopes anything for himself. . . . Oall up then all your energy, all your vital power, and direct them solely and exclusively to your work, re- main indifferent to whatever is unconnected with your work of love, and has reference only to your finite and perishable self, then will life emanate from you, you will be life-inspiring, like unto God.^' PAET in THE RELIGION OF GREECE CHAPTEE Vin THE RELIGION OF GREECE N the civilization of the West there are four factors of the first impor- tance, namely, a temperate climate, a vigorous race, the Greek culture, and the Hebrew-Christian religion. Europe and North America are rich in natural resources, they enjoy a bracing climate and are favorably situated for commerce. These vast regions are peopled by a mixed race of immense energy and progressive spirit. Its vitality is so great that it overflows in sport, that is, in the overcoming of artificially created difficulties. The spiritual matrix of its life has been inherited from the two pre-eminently creative races of antiquity, the Jews and the Greeks. From the one has come the greater part of our religion, from the other we have received the fine arts, the noblest of philosophies and the beginnings of science. It is a marvellous combination. To a vigorous people, with the disposition to take life strenu- ously and feeling the capacity and the need of creating, there has come a great inspiring tra- dition, the creation of the two peoples distin- 105 106 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS guished above all others for their positive atti- tude toward their world, for their conviction that beauty and goodness were at the heart of it, and that man is the child of the highest. Is- rael's thought climbed and underwent purifica- tion for more than a thousand years, and the vi- sion of truth finally attained was won not for itself alone but for humanity. The message of Israel to the world is that God is love and light and in him is no darkness at all. I say *^of Israel,'' for Judaism and Christianity are one religion, one spiritual stream, one organic gtrowth. The founder of the latter was the product of the former, and when he was asked for his highest thought, his deepest insight and most fundamental principle, he was able to give an entirely adequate reply in two quotations from the Old Testament: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and soul and mind and strength, and thy neighbor as thyself. It is true that Judaism and Christianity are in- stitutionally different and that in the last nine- teen centuries each has absorbed many alien ele- ments, but the fact remains that both are parts of one development and that when they are taken at the very highest, their spiritual mes- sages are much the same. For this reason an introduction such as this, which aims to go at once to the heart of the matter and to consider beginnings and details in the light of achieve- THE RELIGION OF GEEECE 107 ments and principles, must treat Judaism and Christianity not separately, but together. The Christian world is a debtor to classic Greece not only for contributions to its spir- itual life through art, science and philosophy, but also, far more than we realize, for religious thought and religious inspiration. Christianity at its very beginning was transplanted to the world of Greek education and culture, and when it felt the need of a rational understanding and interpretation and statement of its message, the forms in which it sought to give clearness and precision to its thought were Greek. And when other nations were converted and in their time reached the age of reflection, they naturally tried to interpret their religion in Aristotelian terms, since it was Aristotle who had taught them to think. But if this were all, the subject would not be as important as it really is. For scholastic philosophy is largely neglected and ignored to-day and the earlier creeds are not very intelligible. The fact is that there is a great deal of unrecognized religion in the world and that a large part, more than is generally realized, of what is instructive and inspiring in our spiritual tradition is Greek. To recognize this is not only a delight; it is also most salu- tary. For educated Christendom is just now reaching the stage of development attained by the Greeks when of their noblest thoughts and 108 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS highest aspirations they made a religion for. thinking men. Their achievement is ^^a posses- sion for all time^' and of incalculable service to our age. Where shall we find Greek religion at its best? Not where many would at first look for it, — in the Homeric poems. These are in reality secular writings, and, despite the fact that they tell of the gods, their motive was entertainment. The ^* Greek epic is aristocratic poetry, com- posed and sung for the delectation of princes and nobles by the recital of the heroic deeds and adventures of their kind in olden time, or of their own forefathers. '^ Later, this poetry be- came the foundation of education for the upper classes in Greek society and in this way exer- cised a very great influence on the ideals of the finest youth. But the actual religion of the masses was something far less elevated, less beautiful, and much more passionate, mystical and crude. There were certain elements in this popular religion of great value, and these have not been lost. But the great gods of Homer and Hesiod were poetic conceptions, and of this fact the Greeks themselves were well aware. The service renderd by the Hellenic poets to re- ligion was, indeed, in part the same as that per- formed for Israel and for humanity by the great prophets of the eighth and seventh centuries B. c. Even Pindar conceives of the go(Js as THE EELIGION OF GREECE 109 *^iiot only powerful and beautiful, but consist- ently wise and good.'' For ^schylus and Sophocles, Zeus practi- cally becomes identical with the moral order of the world. In the tragedies of the former we have vivid dramatic presentations of the idea that the law of cause and effect holds in the moral world, that the wages of sin is suffering and death, and that the penalty of wrong-doing cannot be escaped. In the Eumenides he de- clares, — *^ Whosoever commits all manner of transgressions, and swerves from right, he per- force in time shall lower sail, when trouble has overtaken him, and his yard-arms are breaking. Then he calls in his trouble to those who heed him not, and strives in vain amid the surge. And God laughs at the man of fiery heart, who boasted that no evil should come nigh him, when he sees him worn with inextricable woes and ever failing to round the terrible promontory. And he perishes forever, unwept, unseen, wreck- ing his former bliss on the shores of justice." Sophocles, like JEschylus, remodels and puri- fies the grosser traditions and legends of the popular religion, and, while speaking the fa- miliar language and using the old images, really substitutes for the old content a high and beau- tiful moral faith. He has attained to the con- ception that the world is ruled by divine laws. His Antigone speaks of them as no THE SYMPATHY OF RELIGIONS " The unwritten laws of God that know not change. They are not of to-day nor yesterday, But live forever, nor can man assign When first they sprang to being." They are inscribed in the hearts and consciences of men, and though they sometimes clash with human ordinances, they are invariably the strongest. We do not break them when we dis- regard them ; rather do they break us. Creon, who collides with them, realizes at last that ^4t is best to keep the laws established by heaven, even to the end of life.'^ The incurable defect of even the very best lectures, essays and books on great literature is that they cannot transmit its spirit. Nothing can take 'the place of long study of the great masterpieces themselves. Commentaries and criticisms may clear up obscurities and reveal new beauty and depth in works of genius for those who have read them, and introductions may serve by creating a desire to know at first hand the best that has been thought and felt and achieved in the world. But nothing can take the place of association and companion- ship with great minds and noble hearts. We feel this keenly when we lay down a volume of JSschylus or Sophocles, and it is vividly and profoundly realized as we read the glowing pages of Plato's dialogues, the literary expres- sion of Greek religion at its best. For these are religious writings par excellence. They are THE EELIGION OF GREECE 111 ordinarily regarded as works on philosophy, and there is philosophy in them, but they are also expressions of the deepest moral feeling and the purest passion for perfection. These superlatives are used advisedly. No appreci- ative reader of Plato will feel that they are not justified. One has only to read a few pages of the Phcedo, the Phcedrus or the Repuhlic, to realize the truth of Jowett's remark that ^'un- der the marble exterior of Greek literature was a soul thrilling with spiritual emotion.'' Many misunderstandings are due to failure to remember that important words undergo im- portant changes of meaning. Philosophy to- day suggests to many certain highly technical researches and almost unintelligible theories about the nature of knowledge. Since Kant's time, we do not mean by the word what Plato and his greatest contemporaries and disciples meant by it. Greek philosophy was essentially an effort to answer the questions, ^^What is real and what is the relation of that reality to human life?" Professor Burnet is entirely right in saying that ^^to any one who has tried to live in sympathy with the Greek philosophers, the suggestion that they were intellectualists must seem ludicrous. On the contrary, Greek phi- losophy is based on the faith that reality is di- vine, and that the one thing needful is for the soul, which is akin to the divine, to enter into communion with it. It was in truth an effort 112 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS to satisfy what we call the religious instinct. Ancient religion was a somewhat external thing, and made little appeal to this, except in the ^ mysteries,^ and even the mysteries were apt to become external, and were peculiarly liable to corruption. We shall see again and again that philosophy sought to do for men what the mys- teries could do only in part, and that it there- fore includes most of what we should now call religion. Nor was this religion a quietist or purely contemplative one, at least in its best days. The mysteries had undertaken to regu- late men's lives, and philosophy had to do the same. Almost from the beginning it was re- garded as a life. It was no self-centred pur- suit of holiness either. The man who believed he had seen the vision of reality felt bound to communicate it, sometimes to a circle of dis- ciples, sometimes to the whole human race. The missionary spirit was strong from the first. The philosopher believed that it was only through the knowledge of reality that men could learn their own place in the world, and so fit themselves to be fellow-workers with God, and believing this he could not rest until he had spread the knowledge of it to others. The death of Socrates was that of a martyr, and 4ntellectualism, ' if there is such a thing, can have no martyrs.'^ ** Greek Philosophy,^' Part I, p. 12. (Italics mine.) This is no isolated judgment. It may easily THE RELIGION OF GREECE 113 be supported by the statements of a long list of intellectual, moral and spiritual leaders in all the Christian centuries. In one of the most satisfactory books of the last quarter of a cen- tury, **The Teachers of Emerson,'' the author, Dr. John S. Harrison, shows ^^the essentially Platonic quality of Emerson's thought. It is often held that his transcendentalism has its source in the philosophy of Germany, and that his mysticism is an inheritance from the sacred books of the East. But a careful study has con- vinced the author that Greek thought has been the most important factor in Emerson's intel- lectual development. Beneath the surface of his days and years there ran a spirit of philo- sophic inquiry which was fed by repeated read- ings in the old philosophers of Greece. From these sons of light he drank in large draughts of intellectual day." The proof is clear and leaves nothing to be said. Emerson marked the passages in his books which interested and helped him and when these are compared with passages in his own essays, ^^they appear as veritable sources of his thought." Further, Emerson had no technical interest in Platonism, but ^^used his books for their service to his spiritual needs," to help him to live in the spirit. Although his contact with the great master was chiefly indirect, through the Neo- Platonists, he nevertheless caught the spirit of the original. And he testifies that the reading 114 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS of Plato himself gave him a noble and solemn joy. To Carlyle he writes: ^^I had it fully in my heart to write at large leisure in noble morn- ings, opened by prayer, or by readings of Plato or whomsoever else is dearest to the Morning Muse.'^ The fact is that Emerson was steeped in Plato, the Greek spoke to the New Englander soul to soul and through him to the modern world. It is impossible to discover how much the seer owes to the philosopher and it is largely unprofitable to inquire, for their message and their influence are practically one and the same. Emerson notes that Plato has been the feeding- ground of the noblest minds in the long cen- turies since he lived and taught : *^How many great men Nature is incessantly sending up out of night, to be his men. Pla- tonists! the Alexandrians, a constellation of genius; the Elizabethans not less; Sir Thomas More, Henry More, John Hales, John Smith, Lord Bacon, Jeremy Taylor, Ealph Cudworth, Sydenham, Thomas Taylor. '' And Milton says of himself, — ^^Thus from the laureat fraternity of poets, riper years and the ceaseless round of study led me to the shady spaces of philosophy, but chiefly to the divine volumes of Plato and his equal Xenophon. ' ^ Very interesting also is the frank testimony of Martineau to the inspiring influence of Plato THE EELIGION OF GEEECE 115 on his own religious life. In one of his letters written while staying in Berlin, he says : *'I finished the Republic some time ago, and closed it with the melancholy feeling of a long leave-taking from the greatest and most delight- ful of all one's masters in philosophy. '' And in his ^^Plea for Biblical Studies and Something More,'' quoted by Dr. Drummond in the '^Life and Letters," Martineau makes the further acknowledgment: ^'I well remember (perhaps it is only a per- sonal confession which I make) the half guilty feeling, with which in young and fervent days, I found myself surprised into passionate ad- miration of the story of Socrates, and taken captive by words that seemed to me of unspeak- able religious depth in Plato, or even in Cicero or Seneca. I accused myself of an unchristian perversity — a want of evangelical simplicity and humbleness — because often Greek and Eoman history stirred the tides within me more than the image of Galilean Apostles; because the struggle for Hellenic freedom appeared more sacred than the conquest of idolatrous Canaan, and Leonidas nobler than Gideon; be- cause, read what I might in favour of a general resurrection in the body, the Phcedo tempted me to hope rather for the immortality of the soul." The dialogues of Plato influence spiritual life because they express spiritual life. They stim- 116 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS ulate the aspiring life, the noblest emotions of our nature, or, in Plato's own phrase, they cause *^the wing of the soul to grow/' Theodore Parker, in the following description of the effect of these ancient writings upon him, expressed what many feel : ^^I am reading the Phcedrus. It was the first of Plato's own I ever read. Several years since, strolling about the library, I took down the volume which contained the Phcedrus. I read it in a night. I was appalled by the grandeur of the thought, by the beauty of the style. The noon of night passed before I could lay it down, and then sleep came not, for the procession of the gods, and the ideal flight of the soul, upborne on celestial wings not yet defiled by earthly stain, gazing upon the lofty counte- nance of truth — all this floated in my mind and kept off the drowsy god. I shall never forget that event in my life." It is obvious, then, that the Platonic writings belong to the literature of religious inspiration since they still have power to inspire. They contain noble thoughts which are a part of phi- losophy, but they are not the product of the in- tellect alone, and intellect alone cannot appre- ciate them. They are an expression of passion- ate longing for the higher values, and values are not known; they are felt. To the pure, cold intellect, if there could be such a thing, there THE RELIGION OF GREECE 117 would be no values. It could recognize that some things are, other things have been, and something else will be. But nothing w^ould be good or bad, for there would be no interests at heart which might be promoted or injured. In Plato the whole man finds expression, — intel- lect, aesthetic feeling, moral passion and reli- gious aspiration, — and to be appreciated he must be read by the whole man. In him the re- ligion of Greece is seen at its best, partly because he is perhaps the finest and most perfectly de- veloped nature Greece produced, and partly be- cause his religion is not isolated, but is fulfilling its normal function in a complete life. He was like Jesus in that each was interested supremely, not in religion, or morality, or science, but in an abundant, harmonious, and complete life, in bringing human development to full term, in raising human life to its highest power. His language, like much of that of the New Testa- ment, is archaic; but if we have a first-hand even though elementary religious experience or knowledge of divine things, we have the key to the understanding of both. If we really know about a thing, we can recognize it under all the many diverse forms in which it may appear and we shall find in such recognition a delight. And as regards Plato, we have only to translate his thought into modern terms and drop what is local and transitory in him, to find not only the 118 THE SYMPATHY OF RELIGIONS religion of Greece at its best, but something very like Christianity at its best and a close approximation to that pure and undefiled reli- gion which is the goal of the spiritual progress of our race. CHAPTER IX AS LOVE OF THE DIVINE |REEK religion at its highest, as it has found expression in the Phcedo, Phce- drus, Symposium, Gorgias, Republic, TimcBUS, Philebus, and several other dialogues, may be concisely stated as follows: Reality is divine and the soul of man, his essen- tial nature, is akin to it. The feeling of this kinship lies at the heart of life and, though it is at first implicit and does not understand itself, it is really from the very beginning a love of truth and beauty. Man is, by his very constitu- tion, a seeker for the good. He often fails to perceive the true direction of his natural goal and so ^'misses the mark,'' but by his nature he is predetermined to the quest of the best. He is a thinker but, more fundamentally, and in virtue of this affinity of his nature for the high- est, he is a lover. There are for him two ^* path- ways to reality. ' ' A gifted man might conceiv- ably, Plato thinks, be so educated that his intellect would at last attain to a vision of the very truth of things, of the ^^Idea of the Good,'' that ultimate principle of which the universe is 119 120 THE SYMPATHY OF RELIGIONS the expression and with which human life, to achieve its highest possibilities, must come into accord. The other pathway by which the soul may ascend is that of love. Although we are at first unconscious of the fact, there is in love, even in its crude and half-animal beginnings, a principle of development in virtue of which it is capable of gradual purification and spiritual- ization until it finally becomes an adoring vision of the divine reality under the aspect of perfect and absolute beauty. This is no mere speculation with only an aca- demic or historical interest. The deepest and practically most important truth about human nature was revealed to the insight of Plato. He saw clearly that man is essentially a group of tendencies toward the divine, although it is usually late in his spiritual career before he realizes what is involved in his native affections and understands the religious significance of his love and upward striving. He cannot help lov- ing beautiful things, but he does not at first per- ceive that in and through them he is really wor- shipping the divine beauty of which they are imperfect expressions, and which is akin to his own nature. He has a passion for truth and is active in its pursuit, but this is because he is *^ driven onward by an impulse which is of iden- tical nature with the goal toward which he presses. '^ In many ways, Plato tries to make it clear that ^^the acquisition of moral and spir- AS LOVE OF THE DIVINE 121 itual truth is not a process of putting something into the mind ab extra, but the evolution of something involved in our own nature," or, as his pupil Aristotle concisely says, ^^the soul potentially is all that it can know." The Symposium. The only ideas that are easy for us to express in a definite and adequate way are either abstract or those that refer to material objects or elementary and familiar ex- periences. But when a new truth of life is in question, as when Jesus came with his message, it is necessary to use parables and figures of speech and to illustrate one aspect of the great idea at a time. And even though the speaker be a master of language and strain its resources to the utmost, those who see the truth for them- selves realize that he has indicated and sug- gested it rather than given it complete exposi- tion. In two famous pages of the Symposium, Plato has done his best to sketch the Pilgrim's Progress of the soul along the highway of love. Although twenty-three centuries separate us from him, we, the children of men who were barbarians in his time, are able, when we read his words, to detect his meaning, catch his spirit and understand the spiritual experience which he tried to express. This is his statement : ^^But I will do my utmost to inform you, and do you follow if you can. For he who would proceed aright in this matter should begin in youth to visit beautiful forms; and first, if he 122 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS be guided by Ms instructor aright, to love one such form only — out of that he should create fair thoughts ; and soon he will of himself per- ceive that the beauty of one form is akin to the beauty of another ; and then if -beauty of form in general is his pursuit, how foolish would he be not to recognize that the beauty in every form is one and the same ! And when he per- ceives this he will abate his violent love of the one, which he will despise and deem a small thing, and will become a lover of all beautiful forms; in the next stage he will consider that the beauty of the mind is more honorable than the beauty of the outward form. So that if a virtuous soul have but a little comeliness, he will be content to love and tend him, and will search out and bring to birth thoughts which may improve the young, until he is compelled to contemplate and see the beauty of institutions and laws, and to understand that the beauty of them all is one family, and that personal beauty is a trifle; and after laws and institutions he will go on to the sciences, that he may see their beauty, being not like a servant in love with the beauty of one youth or man or institution, himself a slave mean and narrow-minded, but drawing towards and contemplating the vast sea of beauty, he will create many fair and noble thoughts and notions in boundless love of wis- dom; until on that shore he grows and waxes strong, and at last the vision is revealed to him AS LOVE OF THE DIVINE 123 of a single science, which is the science of beauty everywhere." What this is he proceeds to indicate, liot to describe, asking for the very best attention. ^^He who has been thus far instructed in the things of love, and who has learned to see the beautiful in due order and succession, when he comes toward the end will suddenly perceive a nature of wondrous beauty.'' This is absolute and perfect and everlasting, what Emerson meant when he spoke of ''the uncontained and immortal beauty," that divine reality of which we catch a glimpse in every lovely thing on earth. He who from these perishing beauties *^ ascends under the influence of true love, and begins to perceive that beauty, is not far from the end. And the true order of going, or being led by another, to the things of love, is to begin from the beauties of earth and mount upwards for the sake of that other beauty, using these as steps only, and from one going on to two, and from two to all fair forms, and from fair forms to fair practices, and from fair practices to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute beauty, and at last knows what the essence of beauty is. This," he con- tinues, '4s the life above all others which man should live, in the contemplation of beauty ab- solute ; a beauty which if you once beheld, you would see not to be after the measure of gold, and garments, and fair youths," a beauty the 124 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS pursuit of which would redeem life from all that is vulgar and low and make it a converse with the divine. Pp. 210, 211. Jowett's trans- lation. That is to say, love through all stages of its development is one. Normally, it is in its be- ginnings an attraction for the physical and the personal, but it is capable of an ideal develop- ment, a progressive sublimation. The poet in his youth may be fascinated by a Beatrice and not be aware of the treasure that lies concealed in his affection; but, if it is not checked in its development, his love for the maiden will lead him at last to the Beatific Vision (Plato used the very words, Phcedrus 250 B). Personal affection is transmuted into worship, or in our phrase, love of man grows into love of God. Love is one. It is a process. Its ultimate pos- sibilities are not suspected at first. We may say of it what Browning says of life: ^^ Youth shows but half.^' Multitudes of husbands and wives have discovered this truth for themselves and their experience is the key to the meaning of these immortal pages from the Symposium. They thought they loved each other and were happy when they stood with clasped hands and took their marriage vows, and they were. But love had deeper depths and greater heights which they did not then suspect. They find to their wonder and delight that the ardent affec- tion that first united them grows more tender AS LOVE OF THE DIVINE 125 and sacred through many beautiful years, until at last their marriage appears as something sacramental, an avenue of divine grace. The clear perception of this truth is one of the things that make the great Greek thinkers so helpful to men of this time and of all time. They did not judge life processes by their be- ginnings, but by their entirety and especially by their outcome. We have only to translate Plato from the Greek into English and then restate his thought in the language of to-day and illustrate it with images that belong to our life to find that we have a true account of spiritual experience and growth. Our modern logic in explaining the relation of the individual and his class would say, e.g., that the statement ^'Socrates is a man" means that Socrates is one member of the group men, whereas Plato says it means that Socrates possesses humanity.^ The former view of this relation is, of course, the only one that has any use or value in physi- cal science, but the latter is perfectly natural and legitimate when we are considering the meaning of the aesthetic and moral life. The artist who tries to express ideals of beauty feels that he approaches reality in proportion as he succeeds; the thinker with a passion for truth instinctively identifies truth and reality, and they who hunger and thirst after righteousness I "Plato," by A. E. Taylor, 47. 126 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS know that they draw near to the heart of things in proportion as they find it. We but use the natural language of the aesthetic and moral life when we say that all beauty is of one family. As our love of it develops and our taste becomes refined, we realize that our life, in one of its aspects, is an education in the appreciation of beauty. Its elementary forms, which make the strongest appeal to us in the days of our imma- turity, are as schoolmasters which lead us to the highest. All beautiful things, all noble lives, serve to introduce us to that which it is our joy and highest good to worship. They are approximations to the perfect which we are to use as stepping stones till we arrive at the con- templation of that divine reality in which they participate and whose presence in them makes them what they are. The divine possibilities of human nature were never more clearly seen or more adequately stated. Here is an independent vision of the truth that that is not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural. We confuse the two at first and identify the ideal with the sensible, but give life and love time and growth and we find that insight clears. The beginnings of life are not to be understood by themselves; they are to be interpreted in the light of what they may become. All our imperfect loves are, if our lives are developing aright, on their, way to worship, just as our mixed opinions are on AS LOVE OF THE DIVINE 127 their way to philosophy and truth. The disci- plined mind may hope through laborious study and the dialectical training sketched in the Re- public to ascend out of the cave and see the sun of reality. In the Symposium Plato has indicated the love way to the highest. The beauty which is finally revealed to the adoring vision is, of course, seen not by the senses, but by the mind. As the New Testament would say, it is * ' spiritually discerned. ' ^ And in the Phce- drus, Plato tells us that what is seen on the mount of vision is incommunicable and has never been worthily sung by any poet. 247 C. The The^tetus. The passion of reason, of our higher nature, with which Plato wrote this famous passage on the ideal course of love, glows on many of his pages. In the following from the Thecetetus, he not only explicitly de- clares that the true aim of human life is to be like God, but he has succeeded in making us feel his longing for that likeness. It is full of the spirit of prayer, and might be summarized thus : ** Deliver us from converse with evil and from growth into its likeness," and ^^May the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us. " ^ ^ Evils, ' ' he says, ^^can never pass away; for there must always remain something which is antagonistic to good. Having no place among the gods in heaven, of necessity they hover around the mor- tal nature, and this earthly sphere. Where- fore we ought to fly away from earth to heaven 128 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS as quickly as we can; and to fly away is to be- come like God, as far as this is possible ; and to become like him is to become holy, just and wise. But, my friend, you cannot easily con- vince mankind that they should pursue virtue or avoid vice, not merely in order that a man may seem to be good, which is the reason given by the world, and in my judgment is only a repetition of an old wives ^ fable. Whereas, the truth is that God is never in any way un- righteous — he is perfect righteousness; and he of us who is the most righteous is most like him. Herein is seen the true cleverness of a man, and also his nothingness and want of manhood. For to know this is true wisdom and virtue, and ignorance of this is manifest folly and vice. All other kinds of wisdom or cleverness, which seem only, such as the wisdom of politicians, or the wisdom of the arts, are coarse and vul- gar. The unrighteous man, or the sayer or doer of unholy things, had far better not be en- couraged in the illusion that his roguery is clever; for men glory in their shame — ^they fancy that they hear others saying of them, ^ These are not mere good-for-nothing persons, mere burdens of the earth, but such as men should be who mean to dwell safely in a state.' Let us tell them that they are all the more truly what they do not think they are because they do not know it; for they do not know the penalty of injustice, which above all things they ought AS LOVE OF THE DIVINE 129 to know — not stripes and death, as they sup- pose, which evil doers often escape, but a penalty which cannot be escaped. . . . There are two patterns eternally set before them; the one blessed and divine, the other godless and wretched ; but they do not see them, or perceive that in their utter folly and infatuation they are growing like the one and unlike the other by reason of their evil deeds; and the penalty is that they lead a life answering to the pattern which they are growing like." Not only will ' ' the place of innocence not receive them after death," but ^^even here on earth they will live ever in the likeness of their own evil selves, and with evil friends." P. 176, Jowett's transla- tion. The Eepublic. The same ideas, ideals and spiritual longings find expression in the Re- public, which for men and women of a kindred spirit is in many respects the greatest book ever written. It is by no means the mere fantastic Utopia which some suppose it to be, but is really an attempt to answer the question which two young men put to Socrates at the beginning of the second book. They ask, What is justice or goodness? What is morality in itself? They want to know, not its accidental and extrinsic results, but its significance and value for the inner life of man. Socrates replies that no con- cise definition is possible, and that he can an- swer if at all only by showing what properly 130 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS educated human nature might become in a state so arranged as to bring out its finest possibili- ties. Books H-Vn of the Republic give an out- line of an ideal education in an ideal state and the rise of the soul in such surroundings to the greatest height, while books VIII and IX give a picture of the reverse process of dissolution. *'The loveliest of lives'^ {Philehus, 61 E) is the result of progressive organization of the con- stituent elements of human nature, and its ruin is its gradual disorganization and disintegra- tion. Plato 's theory of education is based upon his conviction that man is an imitative creature, that he cannot help admiring something and that he inevitably becomes like what he admires. His first concern, therefore, is with the imagi- nation and admiration of children. The object of primary education is to produce love of the beautiful, to develop a high taste, to make the good seem natural and the bad seem, strange, and in youth this is to be supplemented by phi- losophy, the love of truth. ^^The ultimate ob- ject of both kinds of education is,'' as Nettle- ship truly says, ^^to present to the soul the good under various forms, for beauty is the good under a certain form, and so also is truth.'' The supreme purpose is to lead the soul to a vision of that Good of which everything good, everything true, and everything beautiful in the world is the reflexion," to recognize and ^^glo- AS LOVE OF THE DIVINE 131 rify this Good and enjoy it forever/' By what are the admirations of children chiefly guided? Plato answers by literature, music and art, by the drama and the first stories they hear. This being true, it follows that these influences should be purified of elements which might confuse the mind or mislead the heart. He first lays down two principles, namely, that God is good and the cause, not of all things, but of the good only, and that he is true and incapable of change or de- ceit. In accordance with these canons he would expurgate the literature of his people. Many of the Greek myths he considers blasphemous and immoral. Young people ought not to be expected to condemn in men what they excuse in the gods. ^^God is always,'' he says, ^^to be represented as he truly is, whatever be the sort of poetry, epic, lyric or tragic, in which the rep- resentation is given. . . . These are our princi- ples of theology. . . . God and the things of God are in every way perfect." Noble concep- tions of God are necessary in order that, ^^as far as men can be, the young may be true wor- shippers of the gods and like them J' The twentieth century reader, to whom Plato has been but a name, will, as he peruses these wonderful pages, be surprised at the nobility of his religious conceptions and the depth of his moral interests. The modernism of his plea is astonishing. It is this: The soul becomes, by a law of its being, like what it admires. A 132 THE SYMPATHY OF RELIGIONS good God is therefore the deepest of all needs. But if you wish to teach the principles of the Sermon on the Mount and nourish the faith that God is light and love, you must not begin by telling children that God gave orders for ex- terminating wars in the times of the Judges in Israel. Reverence, to be ennobling, must be discriminating. It is painful to have to muti- late Homer and Hesiod, but there must be no flinching in this duty, since the supreme ques- tion is not, Plato says, whether these ancient story-tellers delight us, but whether we shall be good or bad. A great artist himself, a passion- ate lover of beauty, and living among the most glorious creations of Greek art, Plato explicitly puts the moral first and will tolerate nothing, however beautiful, whose influence is degrading. He even declares that physical exercises are not primarily for the training of the body, but for **the improvement of the soul." Rep., 410 C. CHAPTER X AS LOVE OF THE DIVINE (Continued) HE Eepublic. Christianity, as we have seen, teaches that the supreme human function, the highest duty, is to love. ^^Thou shalt love the Lord, thy God, with all thy heart and mind and soul and strength.'^ Substitute for God, ^Hhe Good,'^ and you have a statement with which Plato's teaching agrees. The end of the first education in literature and art, he explicitly states, ' ' ought to be the love of the beautiful/' Eep., 402 D. The higher education was to lead to the love and vision of the truth, and he would agree that to love the truth is greater than to know any par- ticular truth, for it is in fact the spirit of truth which leads to all truth. In many places Plato declares that the love of truth and beauty is an adoring recognition by the soul of a divine reality akin to itself in the world. This feeling of kinship with the highest and attraction to- ward it exists in human life from the beginning. Man is a child of the perfect, and with acute spiritual intelUgence Plato perceives that the great task of education is to make our higher 133 134 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS affections and longings explicit, self-conscious and dominant. The means he proposes are well adapted to achieve this end. He would keep the young in the presence of the best, and eliminate from the environment everything which sug- gests evil because it expresses evil and which might pervert taste and lead to bad habits and low standards. His own statement is as follows : ^^But shall, our superintendence go no fur- ther, and are the poets only to be required by us to express the image of the good in their works, on pain, if they do anything else, of ex- pulsion from our State? Or is the same con- trol to be extended to other artists, and are they also to be prohibited from exhibiting the oppo- site forms of vice and intemperance and mean- ness and indecency in sculpture and building and the other creative arts ; and is he who can- not conform to this rule of ours to be prevented from practising his art in our State, lest the taste of our citizens be corrupted by him? We would not have our guardians grow up amid images of moral deformity, as in some noxious pasture, and there browse and feed upon many a baneful herb and flower day by day, little by little, until they silently gather a festering mass of corruption in their own soul. Let our artists rather be those who are gifted to discern the true nature of the beautiful and graceful ; then will our youth dwell in a land of health, amid AS LOVE OF THE DIVINE 135 fair sights and sounds, and receive the good in everything; and beauty, the effluence of fair works, shall flow into the eye and ear like a health-giving breeze from a purer region, and insensibly draw the soul from the earliest years into likeness and sympathy with the beauty of reason. ^^ There can be no nobler training than that, he replied. *^And therefore, I said, Glaucon, musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul, on which they mightily fasten, imparting grace, and mak- ing the soul of him who is rightly educated graceful, or of him who is ill-educated ungrace- ful; and also because he who has received this true education of the inner being will most shrewdly perceive omissions or faults in art and nature, and with a true taste, while he praises and rejoices over and receives into his soul the good, and becomes noble and good, he will justly blame and hate the bad, now in the days of his youth, even before he is able to know the reason why; and when reason comes he will recognize and salute the friend with whom his education has made him long familiar.'^ Eep., 401. The great thought in this passage is that di- rectors of religious education should use litera- ture, music and fine art to introduce to young souls reason under the form of beauty. In the 136 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS first of the two lines which I have italicized in this passage, the words which Jowett translates as ^^the beauty of reason ^^ and Bosanquet as *^the law of beauty'^ are in the Greek ^^the beautiful reason. ' ' Plato believed that it is our destiny to come into fellowship with the divine reason in the world, but that we make our ac- quaintance with it through art rather than through philosophy. We feel it as beauty be- fore we perceive it as truth, ^Hhe beautiful being the form in which the ideal comes nearest to the senses.'' The function of the artist is to show us the beauty which we cannot at first see for ourselves. As Browning's Fra Lippo Lippi says, — " We're made so that we love First when we see them painted, things we have passed Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see ; And so they are better, painted-better to us, Which is the same thing. Art was given for that; God uses us to help each other so, Lending our minds out." Edward Caird puts it well : * ^ Art is for Plato the great means of presenting the higher under the form of the lower. . . . Art and poetry bring down the idea into the sensible world for those who cannot raise their minds above that world to the intelligible reality of which it is but a semblance." Plato's ideal of education is that although it begins with religion and goes on to science and philosophy, there is no break, but a AS LOVE OF THE DIVINE 137 real continuity, education being but a single process. Eeligion is implicitly rational, al- though it is not begun or developed by reason- ing. It is 'Hhe first grasp of the soul at truth," the intuitive perception of what will later be- come explicit and clear when the reflective pow- ers have developed, when we come to ^^know what we have believed." Plato was the first great theologian and he is still one of the best. He has seen and correctly stated the nature of human nature, the order of development of the human soul and its ideal goal which is likeness to God, fellowship with the divine. He knows that religion must grow into theology in the sense that man's aspiring life must become self- conscious and understand its self, but for him there is no schism between the life of aspiration and the life of thought since the divine reality, which the thinker seeks to know, is that which the worshipper adores. The Ph^do and the Ph^deus. The souPs kinship with the divine and its passionate long- ing to return to the ideal world from which it sprang is expressed with great clearness and beauty in two dialogues which may be consid- ered together, namely, the Phcedo and the Phcedrus. The latter is remarkable for its spir- itual insight, while the former is one of the greatest creations of literary art in all history. The story of the last day of Socrates^ life, as in prison and with his friends about Mm he 138 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS naturally discusses the immortality of the soul, is told in such a way that the scene of sorrow- ful parting and of death is clothed in beauty, and the martyr of the philosophic life, as he leaves the world, draws all hearts after him. There are several ways to read this work. It may be subjected to critical examination as an exercise in logic, in which case it is fairly easy to show that some of the arguments are purely verbal and that others require modification be- fore they can be accepted as valid. Plato was very human, and his faith was stronger than the reasons with which he tried to support it. But the first time we read this precious human docu- ment, it should be not only with the logical powers alert but with the whole nature open to its appeal. It is well to read it through at once, allowing it to make its impression, and penetrating to its spirit and intention, lest we be ^^ike a myopic ant running over a building'' and getting no sense of its proportions and its design. It is extremely instructive to observe what Plato's argument assumes. He takes for granted the existence of moral and spiritual realities, ^^ truth, beauty, goodness, justice, holi- ness." What the objects of sense are to the senses these objects of aspiration are to the soul ; in the quaint language of the Phcedo they are in ^^the region of purity, and eternity, and immortality, and unchangeableness, which are AS LOVE OF THE DIVINE 139 the souVs kindred, and with them she ever lives, when she is by herself, and is not let or hin- dered.'^ The great difficulty with which the soul has to contend is the body and the distrac- tions of the Ufe of sense: '^this is the conclu- sion from all that we have said, that the soul is most like the divine and immortal and intel- lectual and uniform and indissoluble and un- changing, and the body, on the contrary, is most like the human and mortal and multiform and dissoluble and ever changing." 85 D and 86 B. The temper of the PTicedo is somewhat different from that of the Symposium. For the latter our imperfect loves are stages in the great de- veloping process of love, are stepping stones by which we rise. For the former they constitute a danger. The impulses, instincts, desires and pleasures connected with the physical life are liable to lead us astray, to distort our percep- tions of truth and act as a hindrance to spiritual longing and vision. The Phcedo is therefore ascetic in tone, the emphasis being placed, as Caird says, on the negative rather than the posi- tive relation of sensible experience to ideal per- fection. The body ^^half reveals and half con- ceals the soul within," but when Plato was writ- ing the Phcedo he was more impressed with the hindrance than the help, and, exaggerating the opposition, spoke of the body as the tomb of the soul. It was a passing mood and must not be taken too seriously, for Plato ^s teaching is cer- 140 THE SYMPATHY OF RELIGIONS tainly not to be judged solely by those sentences in which he seems to say that in order to attain the ideal nothing more is necessary than to get away from the body and the life of sense. The explanation of the apparent contradiction with which he may be charged by those who do not read him comprehensively, but go over his pages with a microscope, is the fact that it is impossi- ble for even the greatest of teachers to present all aspects of a truth at once. In the endeavor to make one side of it clear, one is inevitably unjust for the time to other sides. All exposi- tion involves emphasis on what engages the at- tention, and the temporary neglect of other and perhaps equally important aspects of truth. And Martineau is therefore right in saying that ^^ There is nothing inconsistent in this double view, which regards the material system, now as the opaque veil to hide, and now as the trans- parent medium to reveal, the inner thought which is the divine essence of all ; and seeks at one time to ascend into the intellectual glory by escape from detaining appearances ; at another, to descend with that glory as it streams into the remotest recesses of the phenomenal world. '^ In the Phcedo he presents the negative side of his doctrine, but in the Phcedrus and the Sym- posium there is set forth the positive side in which is found ^^a function for parts and ex- pressions of human nature that asceticism is most apt to persecute and suppress. . . . Love, AS LOVE OF THE DIVINE 141 in its various stages of impulse from the lowest to the highest, he recognizes as the sigh of the mortal after the immortal, the tendency of the finite back to the infinite, ' ' as that which in the end makes man the adoring and consecrated worshipper of intellectual, moral and spiritual truth and beauty. Thus Plato performs the supreme function of a great religious teacher. He interprets our common experience in such a way as to make clear that it has spiritual significance, and that there are sublime possibilities in human life and a divine meaning in the world. Scattered through his pages are many sentences which ex- press unsurpassed insight, and which are like the nuggets of divine wisdom that abound even in the less profitable portions of the Bible. De- spite the logical flaws in the Phmdo and its tendency to a view of the body which has been the cause of immeasurable evil in the world, it does effectively stimulate the higher long- ings and spiritual cravings of our nature. Plato here also speaks a word of advice which is widely and urgently needed to-day, as when he tells us that in these high matters the soul should ^Hrust in herself and her own pure ap- prehension of pure existence.'' 83 A. When our spiritual intuitions are in question, it is vain to look for evidence in physics or physi- ology. It is not thus that men have reached and maintained the faith that ^'the eternal God 142 THE SYMPATHY OF RELIGIONS is our refuge and underneath are the everlast- ing arms/^ but they have come to it by the way of Emerson and the prophets that were before him: Trust thyself, thy best self, and you will find that ultimately your trust is in the Over- soul, in God. In the Phcedrus there is a beautiful myth, in which Plato says that he ^^ views the affections and actions of the soul, divine and human, and tries to ascertain the truth about them and also seeks to show that the madness of love is the greatest of heaven's blessings.'' As no para- phrase can give an idea of the wondrous beauty of the original, it is necessary to read at least the beginning in Plato's inimitable words: ^^Of the nature of the soul, though her true form be ever a theme of large and more than mortal discourse, let me speak briefly, and in a figure. And let the figure be composite — a pair of winged horses and a charioteer. Now the winged horses and the charioteers of the gods are all of them noble and of noble descent, but those of other races are mixed; the human charioteer drives his in a pair ; and one of them is noble and of noble breed, and the other is ignoble and of ignoble breed; and the driving of them of necessity gives a great deal of trou- ble to him. I will endeavor to explain to you in what way the mortal differs from the immor- tal creature. The soul in her totality has the care of inanimate being everywhere, and trav- AS LOVE OF THE DIVINE 143 erses the whole heaven in divers forms ap- pearing; — when perfectly and fully winged she soars upward, and orders the whole world; whereas the imperfect soul, losing her wings and drooping in her flight at last settles on the solid ground — and there finding a home, she receives an earthly frame which appears to be self -moved, but is really moved by her power; and this composition of soul and body is called a mortal creature. ' ' Such a union is essentially temporary, and God cannot by any reasonable supposition be believed to have a body, whatever fancies may arise in our anthropomorphic imagination. The reason why the soul loses her wings is as follows: ^^The wing is the corporeal element which is most akin to the divine, and which by nature tends to soar aloft and carry that which gravitates downwards into the upper region, which is the habitation of the gods. The divine is beauty, wisdom, goodness, and the like; and by these the wing of the soul is nourished, and grows apace ; but when fed upon evil and foul- ness and the opposite of good, wastes and falls away. Zeus, the mighty lord, holding the reins of a winged chariot, leads the way in heaven, ordering all and taking care of all; and there follows him the array of gods and demi-gods, marshalled in eleven bands ; Hestia alone abides at home in the house of heaven ; of the rest they who are reckoned among the princely twelve 144 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS march in their appointed order. They see many blessed sights in the inner heaven, and there are many ways to and fro, along which the blessed gods are passing, every one doing his own work ; he may follow who will and can, for jealousy has no place in the celestial choir. But when they go to banquet and festival, then they move up the steep to the top of the vault of heaven. The chariots of the gods in even poise, obeying the rein, glide rapidly; but the others labor, for the vicious steed goes heavily, weighing down the charioteer to the earth when his steed has not been thoroughly trained: — and this is the hour of agony and extremest conflict for the soul. For the immortals, when they are at the end of their course, go forth and stand upon the outside of heaven, and the revo- lution of the spheres carries them round, and they behold the things beyond. But of the heaven which is above the heavens, what earthly poet ever did or ever will sing worthily? It is such as I will describe ; for I must dare to speak the truth, when truth is my theme. There abides the very being with which true knowledge is concerned; the colorless, formless, intangible essence, visible only to mind, who is the pilot of the soul. The divine intelligence, being nur- tured upon mind and pure knowledge, and the intelligence of every soul which is capable of receiving the food proper to it, rejoices at be- holding reality, and once more gazing upon AS LOVE OF THE DIVINE 145 truth, is replenished and made glad, until the revolution of the worlds brings her round again to the same place. In the revolution she be- holds justice, and temperance, and knowledge absolute, not in the form of generation or of re- lation, which men call existence, but knowledge absolute in existence absolute; and beholding the other true existences in like manner, and feasting upon them, she passes down into the interior of the heavens and returns home; and there the charioteer putting up his horses at the stall gives them ambrosia to eat and nectar to drink. **Such is the life of the gods; but of other souls, that which follows God best and is likest to him lifts the head of the charioteer into the outer world, and is carried round in the revolution, troubled indeed by the steeds, and with diffi- culty behold'ng true being; while another only rises and falls, and sees, and again fails to see by reason of the unruliness of the steeds. The rest of the souls are also longing after the upper world and they all follow, but not being strong enough they are carried round below the sur- face, plunging, treading on one another, each striving to be first ; and there is confusion and perspiration and the extremity of effort; and many of them are lamed or have their wings broken through the ill-driving of the chariot- eers ; and all of them after a fruitless toil, not having attained to the mysteries of true being, 146 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS go away and feed upon opinion. The reason why the souls exhibit this exceeding eagerness to behold the plain of truth is that pasturage is found there, which is suited to the higher part of the soul ; and the wing on which the soul soars is nourished with this. And there is a law of Destiny, that the soul which attains any vision of truth in company with a god is preserved from harm until the next period, and if attain- ing always is always unharmed. But when she is unable to follow, and fails to behold the truth, and through some ill-hap sinks beneath the double load of f orgetfulness and vice, her wings fall from her and she drops to the ground. ^^ The soul's state on earth depends upon the amount of truth it has seen. That which has had the highest visions will be incarnated in some philosopher, or artist, or some musical or loving nature. Such a soul has wings, its life is aspiration, all truth and beauty set it to longing for the perfect truth and beauty. In extreme cases, the soul becomes indifferent to earthly in- terests, is rapt in the divine, and is inspired though it may seen! mad. Plato then declares that ^^he who loves the beautiful loves it because he partakes of it/^ Emerson's way of saying it was, — *^I, the im- perfect, adore my own perfect." Jesus had the same truth in mind when he taught us that we are the children of the perfect. Plato says that the fact that we are men and have these aspiifa- AS LOVE OF THE DIVINE 147 tions is evidence of our heredity from the high- est: ** Every soul of man has in the way of nature beheld true being ; this was the condition of her passing into the form of man, for the soul that has never seen the truth will not pass into human form.'^ The difference between men is due to the fact that we are not all equally sensitive to the divine that shines through ^^this muddy vesture of decay.'' Some are corrupted by evil influences and ^^have lost the memory of the holy things which once they saw.'' Few retain an adequate remembrance, and with dif- ficulty as through a glass darkly do they discern the ideal in the actual world. In this way Plato has tried to bring home to his fellow men his conviction that the measure of our humanity is to be found in the nobility and strength of our aspirations, in the quality of our loves. We are human just so far as we are lovers of the divine. The Perfect is a spir- itual magnet that acts upon us incessantly. Every perception of the beautiful is like a mes- senger from heaven, and every new vision of truth strengthens the desire for more and makes the ^ ^ wing of the soul to grow. ' ' The key to the interpretation of this famous myth is not to be found in any learned commentary, but in the life of aspiration and the experience of the fact that our higher desires are increased by fulfilment, that the best in us grows by what it feeds upon. Certain impulses in our nature often throw our 148 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS lives into disorder and are always difficult to control, but the diviner part is ^4ike a bird flut- tering and looking upward and trying to fly away/' A homing instinct of the soul causes it to seek ^Hhe plain of truth where its fitting pasturage is to be found/' truth and beauty being the bread of life to that which is best in us, the nourishment by which we are *^ re- plenished and made glad/' We are of one family with the gods and have some degree of likeness to them. The great dif- ference is that the horses of the gods are both white, i. e., their impulses are in accordance with reason, and they are always in the presence of the divine realities of which the human soul in rare moments has a fleeting vision, ^ ^ those things in which God abides, and in which abiding He is divine," or, more accurately translated, ^^the communion with which causes God to be divine." The divine is what we partly are and, when we are fully awake, what we wholly long to be. Truth and beauty and goodness, which make God divine, are that by which we grow like him. The moral nature of God, if we may use such an expression, was never more explicitly asserted than in the words, — '^But the divine is beauty^ wisdom, goodness, and all such qualities; by these the wings of the soul are nourished and grow, but by the opposite qualities, such as vile- ness and evil, they are wasted away and de- stroyed." Phcedrus, 2^6 'Ej. AS LOVE OF THE DIVINE 149 In order to realize how perfectly and purely the fundamental religious feeling of kinship with the highest and yearning for perfection is expressed in this passage from the Phcedrus, it is necessary to understand the net result of re- flection on this subject to the present. The phil- osophers who have the greatest reverence for the intellect agree that man is not a purely in- tellectual being. Love, e. g., may be guided by intelligence, but it wells up spontaneously within. It is entirely rational to recognize that love has its place in every normal life. The same is true of religious feeling. It comes from the same source as love and is like love in that no life is complete without it. Perhaps the statement of the late Friedrich Paulsen, Pro- fessor of Philosophy in the University of Berlin, is as concise and adequate as any yet made: ^'Feelings of humility, reverence, yearnings after perfection, with which man's heart is in- spired by the contemplation of nature and his- tory, determine his attitude to reality more im- mediately and more profoundly than the con- cepts and formulae of science. Out of these feelings arises the trust that the world is not a meaningless play of blind forces, but the revela- tion of a good and great being whom he may ac- knowledge as akin to his own innermost essence. For in truth the real essence of every religious belief is the assurance that the true nature of reality reveals itself in that which I love and 150 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS reverence as the highest and the best, it is the certainty that the good and the perfect, toward which the deepest yearning of my will is directed, forms the origin and goal of all things.'^ ^^Introduction to Philosophy, '^ Thil- ly^s translation, p. 8. From this statement, few if any competent scholars would dissent. But this essential re- ligion is the very substance and spirit of Platon- ism. The words which Plato has spoken in the dialogues we have been considering are spirit and life. These writings are not merely books about religion, but books of religion, and as such are still of the greatest value. Professor Paulsen's judgment is sound: ^^This teaching supplies the moral preacher with a wonderful weapon, which Plato himself handles with great force and skill, and we ought to make more extended use of his writings ; they would appeal more powerfully to our young men than the weak-kneed Cicero; the Republic is the very thing for young people whose thoughts are pre- occupied and confused with Nietzsche's t/ber- mensch. ^^ Ethics,'' p. 47. One of the intellec- tual surprises of history is that there were Nietzsches in the Greece of the fourth century B. c, and that their case was stated in the Re- public with a force and clearness which the greatest modern representative of their class has not surpassed. And so far as his gospel, which is a pessimistic and reactionary transval- AS LOVE OF THE DIVINE 151 nation of all values, can be refuted by argument, it has been refuted by Plato for all time. But it is not so much an intellectual position, which may be attacked or defended, as an expression of feeling and will. And the defense against a seductive literary expression of bad feeling is life and literature dominated and permeated by a nobler spirit. Here Plato is of the greatest service, for the simple and often demonstrated fact is that companionship with him makes un- acceptable and even revolting the ideals and standards of Nietzsche and his kind. CHAPTER XI Plato's theism N the course of a thousand years the Elohim of early times and the tribal deity Jahveh, whose dwelling place was a mountain top in Arabia, came to be thought of as the God of righteousness and as such the God of the whole earth. It is a long way from Jephthah and Gideon to Isaiah and Jeremiah, from the conception of deity as a leader in tribal wars to Jeremiah's thought of him as dwelling in the pure mind and writing his law in the heart and planting in our nature an instinct for God, so that we have only to fol- low our deepest yearning to reach the highest. ^^The God of the Old Testament" is a phrase without definite meaning. For it to have sig- nificance, we must know what part of the Old Testament, what stage of Israel's development is referred to. In like manner the conception of Zeus among the Greeks was completely trans- formed in the centuries between Homer and Plato. When the latter speaks of the head of Olympus in the second and third books of the Eepublic, it is in the language and spirit of 152 PLATO'S THEISM 153 moral monotheism. So, too, the name God was used in Greek philosophy before Plato, as, e.g., by Heracleitos, but it signified chiefly an im- personal principle of explanation in physical speculations. The God of religion must be an object of worship and therefore personal or more than personal, and the clear conception of and belief in such a God was among the Greeks first attained and set forth by Plato. Much has been w^ritten upon Plato's theism which is obscure and confusing, because the con- clusions reached are based upon isolated pas- sages rather than upon a comprehension of the whole course and total sweep of his thought. There are those who say that his God cannot possibly be anything but the changeless and im- personal Good which, in his ideal theory, occu- pies the place which the conception of God would have in modern philosophy, and it is easy to cite numerous passages to support this view. We know that he believed the universe to be the expression of a single principle, or law, and he tells us that if we could ascend through the process of dialectic to a clear comprehension of this principle, we might from it deduce all science. And in the Phcedo he represents Socrates as saying that in his youth he was greatly interested in physical theories, but that eventually he realized that a mechanical expla- nation cannot fully satisfy. Mechanical causes he regarded as subsidiary, as conditions, and 154 THE SYMPATHY OF RELIGIONS beyond these he sought a final cause, an intelli- gent purpose. The presupposition of both Plato and Aristotle is that everything expresses some good. Man is no exception. He is deter- mined by his nature to seek the good which is his natural goal. He is rational because he has ideals and strives to realize them. Life is rea- son in operation. Everything has some func- tion, some purpose, in the great whole. To un- derstand anything is to see what it is for, to know the good of it. To be intelligent is to know oneself, one's own work and do it. But the world as a whole moves to an end, there is a meaning in it, and we cannot ^^walk in the light, ' ' but must live by instinct and our higher affections till we find it. It is generally agreed to-day that teleology of a certain kind has been left behind in the ad- vance of thought. This is true. We can no longer suppose that all things were contrived by some artificer for human benefit. We also realize that we have no clear grasp of the un- ceasing purpose that through the ages runs. Our teleological schemes are all acknowledged failures ; but to conclude from this that the uni- verse is a purposeless material mechanism is altogether unjustified. Like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, we still seek a final cause, for we find in our hearts the religious conviction that the world is not irrational, is no chaos, but that behind the vast process or complex of processes PLATO'S THEISM 155 which science studies there is either a national purpose or meaning, or, if not precisely what we mean by these words, then something that is more and higher and that we may legitimately call purpose, with the understanding that the word signifies too little rather than too much. Science, which describes natural processes and ascertains the sequence of events, has, of course, nothing to do with teleology, with the religious interpretation of the world. But science is only one of our interests, and it can neither prove nor disprove that with which it has nothing to do, which lies beyond its province. And it is just as possible and as rational for us as it was for Plato to rejoice in science and go with it as far as it goes, and at the same time to trust our intuition that ^^this world's no blot for us nor blank, but that it means intensely and means good." As we now come to close quarters with the question as to Plato's conception of God and seek to discover whether he definitely attributed personality to the Highest, it is well to indulge in some independent preliminary consideration of the subject, for the obvious reason that we shall understand better what Plato means when we know what we ourselves mean by our terms. Is it true, as some think, that he did not quite reach the idea of God as personal, and that the best thought of the present is leaving this idea behind? The net result of reflection on the 156 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS subject seems to be as follows : Personality is the highest form of being that we know, the highest of which our experience enables ns to frame any conception, but it does not follow that it is the highest that there is. Both Plato and Aristotle believed that in the universe there are modes of being higher than human life and with their view many of the strongest and clear- est minds of all ages agree. There is no rea- son to suppose that spiritual evolution has reached its term or that the possibilities of growth are exhausted. And while our thoughts cannot go beyond our experience, it is perfectly rational to believe that there is something higher than our experience. When we think of God, the alternative is, as Spencer said, not between personality and something lower, but between personality and something higher. We are therefore justified in thinking and speaking of God as a personal life, as wisdom and love, provided we remember that these words are not descriptive, but are symbols which mean too little rather than too much. This outcome of reflective thought, of human effort through all the ages to the present time to know the truth about this great theme, is well stated in the following report of an actual conversation: *^ Speaking with one of the most religious men I know, I said to him, ^I want to put to you a question, and I want you to answer it without regard to any theories of your own ; PLATO'S THEISM 157 I want you to come as near the raw material of experience as you possibly can. The question is this: Does the Divine, in your experience, approach you as personal? Does it come to you in the personal form? Do you feel in your intense religious moments as if there were an- other person in communication with you?' His answer was, *No. The nearest analogy that I can find is this. Suppose I were on a mountain, breathing the exhilarating air, bathed in the sunshine and the wondrous light, it would have a wonderful uplifting influence that would pene- trate body and spirit. Nobody could persuade me that it was not so ; I should have the proof in myself. Something like this is my highest religious experience. The divine is the atmos- phere of the soul, it is the light of my world, it is life-giving power to my spirit. I feel the uplift of the great assurances, and I grow cer- tain of the Eternal Good.' In further conver- sation I said to him: *Now that is your reli- gious experience. You know that it is the best thing in your life, and though it does not come to you in the personal form, when you reflect upon it and think it out, you would say, would you not, that the Divine Reality which lights and empowers and revivifies your spirit, and is to you the one source of strength, must con- tain in itself the equivalents, and much more than the equivalents, of what you call personal- ity!' He agreed that it was so. *So you can 158 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS pray to your God, and have communion with Himr ^Certainly I can.' ^' ^^The Working Faith of a Liberal Theologian/' by Eev. T. R. Williams, p. 78. The result of reflective thought upon reli- gious experience is thus fairly summarized by this writer: ^^We need not hesitate to speak of a personal God, because we are giving to our God the highest term of our own being, and we know that this cannot be too much; it must be less than the truth. ... If He is not a person in the sense that we are persons. He is more than a person. Everything of value in per- sonality is there, and more. . . . The thought is not too high, it is only too low.'' lb., 82. Keeping in mind, then, the fact that the terms which thought must use in dealing with the highest themes are not precise, but are ^^ thrown out," as Matthew Arnold said, at a reality which can be indicated but not described ; remembering also that the distinction between the personal and impersonal was not as sharply drawn in ancient Greece as in the modern world ; we may now answer the question what, in Plato's mind, was the relation of God to the Idea of the Good. The latter, he could not, as he expressly acknowledges, precisely define. It is at once the unattained goal of thought and of moral and spiritual striving. The Greek conception of life differed from the modern in its assumption that what is supremely impor- PLATO'S THEISM 159 tant is, not a duty to be performed or a law to be obeyed, but a capacity to be developed, a pos- sibility to be realized. There is an end toward which we are determined, a good which we seek from the first without having any clear ideas about it. This good is the goal of our individ- ual life; but, since man's real, concrete life is social, it is also the natural goal of social effort. It is more than this; it is a principle of order in the cosmos which we may approximately em- body in the individual life and the social order, but which is never completely apprehended or expressed. The highest human life is to this Ideal Good what the best triangles we can draw on paper or blackboard are to the conceptually perfect triangles with which mathematics deals. We cannot but believe in this Good, it seemed to Plato, since thought leads to it, and to our moral and religious life it is what objects of sense are to the senses. It is the source of knowledge and the source of being, or, in modern phrase, it transcends the distinction between them, and of course it cannot be described in terms of the transcended parts. The Idea of the Good is, therefore, included in what we mean by God, and there are indica- tions that in Plato's mind the two conceptions tended to run together. In the Sophist, e.g., he declares that reality cannot be abstract and motionless and lifeless: ^^And, heavens, can we ever be made to believe that motion and life 160 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS and soul and mind are not present with perfect being? Can we imagine that it neither lives nor thinks, and exists in awful unmeaningness an everlasting fixture?" 249 A. Neverthe- less, we must let the facts lead us and not let logic betray us. And the fact which the Phce- drus and the Timceus make perfectly plain is that for Plato *^God was a living soul and was good, while the Good was not a soul, but an Idea or Form." This is not the place for ar- gument, and I can Ijere only refer the reader for proof to Prof. John Burnet, who has beau- tifully cleared up the subject, ^' Greek Philoso- phy," I, 335 fip. There can be no doubt that while in the Phcedo Plato has considered a num- ber of arguments for the immortality of the soul, he himself believed that in the Phcedrus he had given a scientific demonstration both of this doctrine and of that of the existence of God. The Good is independent of God, since it is the pattern by which he fashions the world ; and truth and beauty and their family are the things ^Hhe communion with which causes God to he divine/^ Phcedrus, 246 E. If in the light of the Phcedrus we read the Timceus and Philehus, we shall not find Bur- net's words too strong — ^^we can hardly doubt that Plato was a monotheist." In the Timceus ^ Plato expressly states that he is giving his con- viction, that he believes his view to be some- PLATO'S THEISM 161 thing like the truth. Scientific precision is impossible, and he therefore sets forth his meaning in a myth. *^The maker and father of this universe,'' he says, ^4s past finding out; and even if we found him to tell of him to all men would be impossible." The created world is a copy of the ideal world, and as nearly like it as God, ^Hhe best of causes," could make with the refractory materials at his disposal. He found the visible world ^* moving in an ir- regular and disorderly fashion," or, as Genesis says, *^ without form and void," and ^' out of the disorder he brought order." The motive of creation was the best : * ' Let me tell you why the creator made this world of g^eration. He was good, and the good can never have jealousy of anything. And being free from jealousy, he desired that all things should be as like himself as they could be." 28 E. Here is the clear and definite conception of God *'as a goodness which communicates itself . . , which by a ne- cessity of its nature goes beyond itself and manifests itself in the universe." E. Caird, *' Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philoso- phers," I, 245, 254. The Timceus presents a new reason for believing in the immortality of individual souls, a reason of which much is made to-day. What is created is essentially mortal, yet we may hope to live, because ^ ^ only an evil being would wish to imdo that which is 162 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS harmonious and happy/ ^ and ^^to destroy what he has made is inconsistent with the goodness of God.'' With Plato's views should be compared the exalted and beautiful conception of God reached by his pupil and friend Aristotle. Neither the older nor the younger man attained what we set such store by, namely, a complete and har- monious system, but both had a clear vision of divine truth which the world can never afford to forget. Aristotle, in particular, although he could not put the two together or explain the relation between them, realized and taught both the immanence and transcendence of God. He saw that God is our ideal, and yet understood perfectly that this ideal is not merely subjec- tive and irrelevant, but natural and with a basis in the nature of things, in short, that there is ideality in the world, that life is tendency and that God is its goal. For him the world was no dead mechanism, but a vast hierarchy in which there was a constant conversion of mat- ter into form, a breaking of the primeval sub- stratum out into life, into higher and higher ideal formations. There was an upward striv- ing in all realms, becoming in man conscious aspiration toward the ideal; worship, adora- tion, longing for the perfect life being more and more the great factor in human progress. There is no ideal without a natural basis ajid everything natural is capable of ideal develop- PLATO'S THEISM 163 ment. Even matter, he quaintly says, has a de- sire for God, who is therefore the goal of all the activity of the world. God is what nature potentially is, what nature forever desires to be. Nature is a realm of aspiration, of tendencies toward a divine ideal, and God acts upon it as the beloved moves the lover. This great idea is substantially true, and a fresh perception of it is one of the greatest needs of the religious life of the present age. For it is obvious that some of our theologians and philosophers of religion are really pre- Aristotelian ; they have lost sight of a truth clearly stated more than twenty-two hundred years ago, and are moving with surface cur- rents backward rather than with the onward tide of humanity's thought and life. It is as- tonishing to find thinkers giving the name of God to subhuman forms of being, to some crude world-urge, to some unconscious stream of tendency, to the cruder stages of the process which has produced human life and civilization. If there be, as these men assert, a blind, stupid, or wicked will at the heart of the world, we may contemplate it with interest or pity, but to call it God and worship it would be as irrational as it is degrading. Aristotle taught us once for all that worship of anything less than our high- est conception of the perfect is immoral. A nebula is more vast than a noble man ; neverthe- less the nebula-stage of development lies behind 164 THE SYMPATHY OF RELIGIONS us, — innumerable millions of years behind, while the ideals which the finest human beings imper- fectly express represent stages in the advance of life which are still ahead of us. Being men, it is our business to live as men and perfect our own type. God and man are so far one that man in his highest experience has a fleeting realization of the divine life. These blessed mo- ments are those when we enjoy the beatific vision of a new truth. But while for mortals the win- dow is rarely opened through which we see into heaven, God abides in the light, or, in Aristotle's phrase, ^^God is always in that good state in which we sometimes are.'' In these moments of vision we have a taste of the divine life, and attain to that which is ^^ thought in the fullest sense and which deals with what is best in the fullest sense." No extended discussion of these famous say- ings is needed, for those who have had such experiences will easily understand the great page in book XII of the Metaphysics and the equally famous passage in the Ethics in which the Greek thinker states his conception of God ; those who have not can only read explanations and peruse commentaries in vain. Here, as in all these high matters, life is the key to the in- terpretation of the literature which expresses life. Those who have once felt the blessedness of a life of ever- widening intellectual horizons and deepening insight will read with under- PLATO ^S THEISM 165 standing and joy the pages of these men, who are spiritual contemporaries of ours, even though they lived so long ago, and be strength- ened by them in the conviction that we draw nearer to God as we go on in our development, and that as worshippers our concern is not with physical vastness or cosmic energies, but with the ideals of perfection which are our natural goals. Aristotle makes it very plain also that our thirst for ideals is no perverse passion for abstractions. Our ideals are not aliens in the world ; rather are they its very life ; they spring out of our constitution, and a divine discontent prevents us from being satisfied with anything less. God is our goal and he is also in our longing for the goal. We are essentially a race of worshippers becoming like what we worship, and it is literally true of our life that it rests upon ideal foundations. CHAPTER XII THE GREEK CONCEPTION OF THE GOOD LIFE HE contribution of Greece to ^^The Symphony of Religions'^ is illumi- nated by Plato's conception of the good life. The reason of this is clear. Goodness is not purely an ethical conception ; it has also a religious significance. For while it is true that by a law of their being men tend to become like the God they worship, it is also true that changes in ethical conceptions and views of human nature work changes in theology. What is fundamental, e.g., in those Christian churches usually called liberal is their thought of man. Channing came preaching the dignity and worth of human nature, and as his view finds an ever wider acceptance and the belief in human corruption and helplessness passes away, we realize that the change is revolutionizing our thought of God. Doctrines and ideals that were supposed to have an unimportant connection with the belief in the depravity and infinite guilt of our race ard seen to have rested upon it, and now that it is decaying they are without real support. 16(5 THE GREEK CONCEPTION 167 Ethical. Theory of the Republic. Plato's conception of the nature of human nature as akin to the divine and possessing a capacity for gradual transformation into the likeness of God has, as we have seen, been set forth in the Phcedo, the Phcedrus, the Thecetetus, and the Republic. His ideal of concrete human good- ness he has outlined in the Republic and the Philebus. His view has more than a historical significance. Indeed, as we read the pages in which he tells us what we might be, we realize that one of his greatest services to the age and the ages is through the conception he has given us of the good life. His ethical theory as stated in the Republic I have tried to summarize as follows: ^ ^'He regards the moral life as a problem in organization, which it essentially and normally is, and not as a fight, which badly born and unhappily situated natures find it to be for themselves, and which, generalizing from their own case, they suppose it must be for all. For Plato, the good life is the life that is set in order. There is a natural scale of values for all the many instincts, impulses, needs, tenden- cies, desires, and aspirations of human nature. None of these is bad when in its subordinate and proper place. All are good when function- ing normally in an organized life. The highest in man is reason, intelligence, together with the 1 "The Relation of Plato to Our Age and to the Ages," Har- vard Theological Review^ Vol. VI, p. 108 S. 168 THE SYMPATHY OF RELIGIONS corresponding desire to use this power. Next is a group of nobler emotions, for which in Eng- lish we have no adequate collective term. It in- cludes that which makes men worthily am- bitious, which gives them a sense of honor, and makes them capable of moral indignation at injustice and wrong. Lower still is a hetero- geneous mass of desires, all useful and indis- pensable, but difficult to control, and frequently strong enough to throw the whole nature into disorder. These are the raw materials of the moral life. Our supreme task is to organize them, not out of enmity to any, but from regard to all. The ideal is fulness of life through order. When the hierarchy of impulse has been established, and the life, so to speak, has been graded, the result is such happiness as is possible to our nature. It is health of soul. This is the answer to the great question which Glaucon and Adeimantus put to Socrates at the beginning of the Second Book of the Republic. We want to know, they say in substance, what the good life essentially is. Please do not tell us about the way it is rewarded in heaven or on earth. Suppose it did not pay in terms of ex- ternal prosperity, suppose even that it brought suffering, what is the good life in itself? The reply is that the good life is the life which, through education and citizenship in a well-or- dered state, is itself set in order, with the high- est and divinest in our nature in control and THE GREEK CONCEPTION 169 everything else in its appropriate place. After sketching an ideal human career in which the soul rises to the greatest height, he outlines the reverse process of utter ruin through progres- sive disorganization." There is one passage in which Plato, con- cisely and with entire clearness and adequacy, sets forth his conception of the good life, and which I always want to quote in every ethical discussion. He says: ^^In reality justice was such as we were de- scribing, being concerned, however, not with the outward man, but with the inward, which is the true self and concernment of man: for the just man does not permit the several elements within him to interfere with one another, or any of them to do the work of others; he sets in order his own inner life, and is his own mas- ter and his own law, and at peace with himself ; and when he has bound together the three prin- ciples within him, which may be compared to the higher, lower, and middle notes of the scale, and the intermediate intervals — ^when he has bound all these together, and is no longer many, but has become one entirely temperate and per- fectly adjusted nature, then he proceeds to act, if he has to act, whether in a matter of prop- erty, or in the treatment of the body, or in some affair of politics or private business ; al- ways thinking and calling that which preserves and co-operates with this harmonious condition, 170 THE SYMPATHY OF EELiaiONS just and good action, and the knowledge which presides over it, wisdom, and that which at any time impairs this condition, he will call un- just action, and the opinion which presides over it ignorance." Republic, 443, D-E. Note here the apparently parenthetic but im- portant words, ^^the intermediate intervals.'' Plato knows that his statement is merely sche- matic, and that he has not given a complete list of the impulses in our nature which it is our life task to organize. We must, he says, find for each power, or *^part," of the soul its proper position in the structure of life. The social problem is practically the same. He knows that men differ, and that individual- ity implies organization. So he aims to utilize the fighting instinct, the artistic instinct, and the powers of the thinkers. His great problem is to prevent the waste of human resources, especially the highest. Corruptio optimi pes- sima. He strives for a form of social organiza- tion in which each member should render to society the particular service he could perform best. Each man would then have an organic place in human society. And as the danger to the individual moral life is from insubordinate impulse, so the structure of society is menaced by ^Hhe inorganic man.'' Observe how concrete and serviceable this conception of goodness is. Here is no abstract moral imperative, practically useless in our THE GREEK CONCEPTION 171 ethical difficulties. Instead, Plato says, in sub- stance, that we must discover all interests, from the highest to the lowest, and provide for all. Some of them are troublesome and unattrac- tive, nevertheless each has its place, its func- tion. And all can come to expression together only by being organized. That which is good, then, means that which is good for one as a whole. Our parts and passions and ideals are members one of another, and the same is true of individual men and women in the perfect spir- itual community. When everything in man serves what is divine in him, when, to use Plato's words, one has made an order, a cosmos, of his inner life, when he has brought about ^ * a harmony in his body and a symphony in his soul,'' when he has ^'set his house in order" and has built ^^a city within," he is prepared to live. Moreover, we are told that the real self is this whole self and only this self is free. Bad is whatever violates this principle of unity and order, whatever tends to disorganization, whatever makes for something less than the maximum possible satisfaction of human nature by elevating to the supreme place some passion or impulse that should be subordinate and play its part lower down in the scale. This way of viewing the moral and social life is not antiquated. It is coming more and more into favor, and indeed it is indispensable to our highest development. The comprehending stu- 172 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS dent of our time realizes that one of our most urgent needs is for a revised conception of goodness. Much Christian preaching repels young people for the reason, which usually neither they nor the preacher understand, that the sermon produces the impression that good- ness is a negative thing. Now what young peo- ple desire and are entirely right in desiring is, not less life, but more. What makes lawless action attractive to some of them is their idea that such action is freer and gives more scope to human powers, that it means larger, fuller life. The traditional conception is too narrow, too ascetic, too Pauline. For the great apostle the moral life was for all, as no doubt it was for him, not a problem in organization, but a fight between two parts of our nature, the flesh and the spirit ; and the ideal, as stated in the letter to the Eomans, is, not to control the life of im- pulse, but to kill it. Mortify the deeds of the flesh, kill one part of the self in order that the other may live in mystic union with the divine spirit. Of course, when success is attained life is poorer by the portion destroyed. For men of PauPs temperament, whose passions threaten to sweep them away, war to the death is prob- ably the only practicable policy. But not all people are like him, and we must not thought- lessly accept his view of the good life as a fight. The Platonic conception of our moral task as consisting essentially, not in an internecine war THE GREEK CONCEPTION 173 in our members, but in an intelligent organiza- tion of our richly endowed nature, is much more rational and wholesome. To our young people and to all who crave activity, experience and development, we should say: ^^You want life? That is what you should want. It is life that we preach to you, abundant, rich and full, and it is precisely in order that you may have it that we urge you to organize your im- pulses and desires, for in that way only will your nature as a whole be able to attain its maximum fulfilment. Ideal goodness is sim- ply the amplest expression of human nature. As young men, you find the fighting instinct active within you. Well, this is very necessary to you, but it has other and nobler expressions than in killing men and burning cities. It is capable of being transmuted and used in chival- rous ways, and you will need every bit of it in combating the difficulties that will confront you in attempting to realize your ideal aims. A similar thing is true of all other impulses, and in pressing upon you the necessity of making each serve all your other interests, both present and future, we but show you how to realize what you really and supremely desire, namely, ful- ness and completeness of life. ' ' There is a defect in the Platonic ethics, as set forth in the Republic. The main conception is fundamentally true and is clearly and ade- quately stated: still it is pre-evolutionary and 174 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS consequently too rigid. In recent times we have come to think of life in terms of growth. The moral life is a process, and while we agree that the elements which enter into it must be organized, we know that the organization can- not be effected once for all. Nothing can be done once for all. Adjustments and unceasing readjustments — in these life consists. We must therefore supplement Plato's idea with another, namely, that since the moral life is a process of growth toward an ideal of organiza- tion, good is that which promotes this develop- ment, bad is that which hinders it. These two ideas, that of organization and that of evolu- tion, are complementary. Taken together they round out ethical philosophy. From this point of view, the ideally good life is the life that is set in order, but one whose organization is plastic and capable of constant adjustment in a world whose law is change. The Philebus and ^^The Loveliest op Lives. ' ' The very heart of old Greece, her rev- erence for the intellect, her passionate love of order and beauty in human life, are expressed in the PMlehus, in which Plato defines as pre- cisely as possible his ideal of character and happiness. It is easy to summarize the plot or argument of this discussion, but almost impos- sible to convey an impression of its spirit. The object of the conversation is to determine the nature of ^*the good'^ which is the end of human THE GREEK CONCEPTION 175 striving. Philebus, ^^with thousands of oth- ers," affirms that it is pleasure: the Platonic Socrates gives the first place to wisdom. At the outset it is agreed that the parties to the dialogue are not contending that any personal view may prevail, but that both are ^^ fighting for the truth.'' Socrates remarks upon ^^the power or faculty which the soul has of loving the truth, and of doing all things for the sake of it." 58 E. This is the tone of all these great writings. In the Gorgias, 458 A, Socra- tes says: ^^I am one of those who are very willing to be refuted if I say anything which is not true, and very willing to refute any one else who says what is not true, and quite as willing to be refuted as to refute." It is thus clear that ^^the Spirit of Truth" which Jesus promised should be with his disciples had come to Greece four centuries before. The discussion does not proceed far before it becomes clear that a life of pleasure devoid of intelligence is undesirable, and on the other hand that pleasure is a necessary ingredient in a normal life. It is explicitly stated that these good things are not good when isolated, and that the ideal is the concrete mixed life in which each has its place. Man's real good is neither to be immersed in sweet sensations nor to be a cold, passionless being, an incarnation of pure reason. The argument then reveals the fact that there are many kinds of pleasure, physical 176 THE SYMPATHY OF RELIGIONS and mental, and all kinds of combinations of both. There are also different kinds of knowl- edge. It is also discovered that pleasure is, in many instances at least, to be regarded as a means, and that the lower kinds of pleasure are a menace not only to the higher, but also to health, to the order and sanity of life, and even to reason itself. It finally becomes a question of the nature of the mixture, of the ingredients and their relative place. The book closes with a prescription or recipe for ^Hhe loveliest of lives/ ^ The formula is quaint and implies dis- tinctions that we do not make, but we are left in no doubt as to the scale of values in the mind and heart of the greatest man of classic Greece. First came measure, the mean, that which tends not to excess, beauty, symmetry and truth, and ^^all that belongs to that family''; then mind or wisdom ; next the sciences and the arts ; and finally the pleasures of the variety called pure. Thus, in the ^^fair and perfect mixture,'' which is the highest good, the best of the pleasures at- tain only to the fifth place, and in this way does Plato attempt to refute those who ^^ determine that pleasures make up the good of life and who deem the lusts of animals to be better witnesses than the inspirations of divine phi- losophy.'' 67 B. We have seen that Christianity at its best is a life of faith, hope and love, a life filled with and dominated by the victorious spirit of good- THE GREEK CONCEPTION 177 ness and truth. Those who would have accu- rate knowledge of it must look for it in human lives, in those personalities which are its living representatives. Something of it may be ex- pressed in literature, but the key to the inter- pretation of this literature is Christian experi- ence and Christian life. Now what is true of Christianity we have seen to be true of that highest form of Greek religion which is not called religion but Platonic philosophy. And not only do we understand this, but it was clearly realized, expressed, and acted upon by Plato himself. Professor Burnet is accurate in saying that *^It was Plato's belief that no philo- sophical truth could be communicated in writ- ing at all ; it was only by some sort of immediate contact that one soul could kindle the flame in another. ' ' Philosophy for him was a life which was transmitted by a contact of souls. As we know, he ^'did not believe in books for serious purposes. In the Seventh Epistle he complains that, even in his lifetime, some of his hearers had published accounts of his doctrine of the Good, which, however, he repudiates.'' The passage is as follows: ^* There is no writing of mine on this subject, nor ever shall be. It is not capable of expres- sion like other branches of study; but, as the result of long intercourse and a common life spent upon the thing, a light is suddenly kin- dled as from a leaping spark, and when it has 178 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS reached the soul, it thenceforward finds nutri- ment for itself. I know this, at any rate, that if these things were to be written down or stated at all, they would be better stated by myself than by others, and I know too that I should be the per- son to suffer most from their being badly set down in writing. If I thought they could be adequately written down and stated to the world, what finer occupation could I have had in life than to write what would be of great service to mankind, and to reveal Nature in the light of day to all men? But I do not even think the effort to attain this a good thing for men, except for the very few who can be enabled to discover these things themselves by means of a brief indication. The rest it would either fill with contempt in a manner by no means pleasing or with a lofty and vain presumption as though they had learnt something grand.'' 341 C-E. Burnet: ^^ Greek Philosophy,'' Part I, 221. Plato's procedure was in accordance with this theory. He believed that philosophy (or as we should say a life inspired by the religious and scientific spirit, by the fused and blended pas- sions for truth and beauty and goodness) could not be put in a book. It must be a man's very own. The function of the teacher *4s to rouse the soul, to turn it to the light, but the soul must see the light for itself." It must come up out THE GEEEK CONCEPTION 179 of the cave and have a vision of the sun of reality. Otherwise its knowledge would be at second-hand. Why, then, did Plato, who re- fused to write his lectures, write the dialogues? In the Phcedrus, 275-278, he tells us. The writings fall into the hands of those who mis- understand and misinterpret them and they are powerless to explain or protect themselves. He therefore prefers ^^the living word of knowl- edge which has a soul . . . the intelligent word graven in the soul of the learner, which knows when to speak and when to be silent.^' He re- garded his thoughts as germinal truths to be sown in fruitful minds, saying that ^^even the best of writings are but a reminiscence of what we know, and that only in principles of justice and goodness and nobility taught and communi- cated orally for the sake of instruction and graven in the soul, which is the true way of writing, is there clearness and perfection and seriousness; such principles are man's own and his legitimate offspring; — ^being, in the first place, the word which he finds in his own bosom; secondly, the brethren and descendants and rela- tions of his idea which have been duly implanted by him in the souls of others.'' The wonderful dialogues he declares he wrote ^^for the sake of recreation and amusement ... as memorials to be treasured against the forgetfulness of old ^S^y t)y himself, or by any other old man who is 180 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS treading the same path. ' ' So deeply did Plato feel that the letter killeth and that it is the spirit that giveth life ! There is, finally, another respect in which Greek religion is, at least to some extent, like Christianity. Its principles and spirit were in- carnated in a great personality. In many of the dialogues, in the Phcedo, the Republic, and the Gorgias especially, we see the impression made npon Plato by the life of Socrates and the sublime spirit in which he faced its close. ^^Such, Echecrates, was the end of our friend, a man, as we should say, the best and also the wisest and most righteous of his time.'^ I do not wish to introduce here any controversial matter, and will merely say that I believe Profes- sor Burnet's conclusions are correct, that in the Apology, Crito, and Phcedo we have Socrates as he substantially was, that the picture has not been idealized as much as has been generally supposed, and that Plato's account is far truer than Xenophon's. Then, it should not be for- gotten, that it is in the nature of the case impos- sible for us to know how far any great ideal cbaracter of history is purely ideal. Nor is it necessary for the purposes of present religious life that a historical character should have been identical with our ideal of him. If the actual Socrates was in some respects less perfect than the picture painted by his admiring pupil, the picture is none the less significant. If it is THE GREEK CONCEPTION 181 ideal, it is the ideal of the Greek race at its best, the ideal which lay implicit in the hearts of the people. They needed Socrates to be that kind of a man in order that he might help them to rise to the same moral and spiritual height. If the Greeks had not had within them the capacity of living and dying as the Socrates of the Apol- ogy, the Crito, the Phcedo, and the Gorgias lived and died, if in the deepest depth of their hearts this was not what they most wanted to be, the great genius in whom their thoughts became clear and their spiritual yearnings found ex- pression would never have been able to paint these eternally attractive pictures of ideal hu- manity. PAET IV THE EELIGIONS OF INDIA CHAPTER XIII APPROACH TO THE SPIRITUAL. LIFE OF INDIA N our comparative study of religion we now approach a difficult and deli- cate task. The great prophets of Is- rael, the founders and apostles of Christianity and the philosophers of Greece are not strangers, but parts of our religious world. It is on their ideas and ideals that we have been nourished ; to us their words are spirit and life. Their hunger and thirst after righteousness, their passion for beauty and truth, their spirit of love and service, have spread by contagion from life to life and are among the chief motive forces in personal and social progress. We are now to try to understand the higher spiritual life of India, to comprehend the thoughts and aspirations of a gifted people for whom reli- gion has been the chief interest in life, w^ho have shown a courage and consistency in the pursuit of ideal aims unsurpassed in human his- tory, but whose condition, temperament and course of development have produced results different from anything we have ever known. When we first open the ^^ Sacred Books of the 185 186 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS East/' we are fascinated by the noble truths and beautiful sentiments we find expressed, puzzled by the magic and the fantastic super- stitions which abound, as in the Atharva Veda, and impressed by the strangeness of the ^in- tellectual landscape." There is, however, dan- ger that the alien and uncongenial elements in the Indian view of life may so repel us that we shall indiscriminately condemn the whole, and it requires an effort to remember that in the first contact between two civilizations which have developed along different lines, it is the defects, the failures and the ugly features which are most striking. Europeans and Americans travelling through India see the land covered with temples, some of which by reason of the multitude of sacrifices are veritable slaughter-houses ; innumerable lin- gams, phallic emblems used in the worship of Siva, which are obscene to us although they are without impure suggestion to devotees of that cult ; countless fakirs incredibly ingenious in de- vising modes of self torture; and a people di- vided into exclusive casts. The Hindu family is built on a religious idea which involves the com- plete subjection of women, which does not permit a husband to eat with his wife, which brings mar- riage to girls before puberty, thus depriving them of girlhood and education and laying the burdens of marriage upon them when they are physically and mentally unprepared, which pro- SPIRITUAL LIFE OF INDIA 187 hibits the remarriage of girl widows and for- merly burned them alive on the funeral pyre of their husbands (sati), until the practice was stopped by British law, and which now con- demns these children to joyless lives and drives them away from every scene of happiness. Ob- serving these and similar aspects of Indian life, travellers of Christian training are apt to ask, What can we learn from a people whose aesthetic, social and moral standards are so out of accord with those we have been taught to regard as the highest? There is something there, nevertheless, some- thing of truth and beauty, something that may contribute to our own higher life. It is true that the extravagant expectations entertained in Max Mueller's time have not been realized, and that while we have learned that all reli- gions are deserving of respect as expressions of the longings, yearnings and aspirations of the human heart, it has become clear that not all are of equal value, and it is only the best in each that can have part in the symphony of religions. It is this best here and everywhere that we are seeking, and we are, therefore, re- lieved of the necessity of considering the less admirable side of Hindu life, the defects which the leaders of that life are even now struggling to overcome. Ours is the more pleasant and in every way more profitable task of discovering the summits of Indian thought, and the highest 188 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS and purest expressions of its aspiration, the goals toward which India is moving and by which it is to be judged. But even when thus simplified, the problem remains difficult by rea- son of the vast complexity of thought and the bewildering variety of religious experiences, or, it may be more accurate to say, the variety of interpretations which the thinkers of India have put upon the fundamental religious experience. Indeed, Hinduism is an ocean, or, as one might feel on approaching its immense literature, a jungle. One Buddhist writing enumerates six- ty-two different theories of existence, and the western student is astonished both at the meta- physical subtlety and the intense interest with which these theories are developed. He will be inclined to agree that ^^no people on earth took religion so seriously, none toiled so on the way to salvation as they did.'' It will be conven- ient to present the higher life of India in its three chief aspects. Indeed, this is a natural classification, for the Hindus themselves have recognized three paths to salvation, namely, the thought path, the path of works, and the way of devotional faith, love and worship. The first is that of emancipation through knowledge ; it is expounded in that part of the Veda called the Upanishads and systematized in the Vedanta philosophy, the Sankhya and other systems. The second we shall pass over in order to give an account of Gautama, the Buddha's ^^Four SPIRITUAL LIFE OF INDIA 189 Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path,'^ which a large part of the human race has ac- cepted as the law of life. The third is Bhakti- Marga, the Vishnuite religion of faith and love which is the inspiration of 150 millions of Hin- dus to-day. There are, however, certain pre- suppositions which practically all these systems have in common, which are foundations on which India's thinkers have built. They are deeper than the thought-structures that rest upon them, and have grown out of the heart, character and disposition of the people. Levels of life deeper than logic have furnished the premises, and as these are almost precisely the opposite of the assumptions on which the West has built its spiritual life, it is necessary, if we are to understand India's philosophies and re- ligions, to examine the foundations on which they rest. CHAPTEE XIV FUNDAMENTAL IDEAS OF THE RELIGIONS AND PHILOSOPHIES OF INDIA HE idea or conviction from which nearly all Indian thinking starts, which is assumed as an axiom practi- cally without debate, is one that to the greater part of the Christian world seems false. It is that life is essentially evil, that it is not worth living and cannot be made worth while. The assumption is not that there are many evils. This we admit, but we believe that the concrete evils which trouble us can be overr come. We do not spell Evil with a capital E, nor do we trouble ourselves much about the metaphysics of our difficulties. With the means that science has placed in our hands we have practically abolished certain terrible diseases, and we dare think that the rest are doomed. We believe that progress in this direction will continue, and that with better education, more efficient social organization and methods of dis- tribution, we shall in time abolish poverty and disease and fear. But the Hindus, except so far as they have come under western influence, do 190 EELIGIONS AND PHILOSOPHIES 191 not believe this. They build on a pessimistic as- sumption. Professor Deussen explicitly admits this fact : * ' The question of the possibility of a release from individual existence, which forms the cornerstone of the Vedanta, as of other In- dian systems, presupposes the pessimistic view that all individual existence is a misery/^ ''The System of the Vedanta,'^ p. 474, ^^ Joyless are these worlds/' says the Bri- hadaranyaJca, 4, 4, 11. Why, then, is not the solution, the true salvation, to be found in death? The answer is surprising. The reason is that we die only to be reborn. We have lived countless lives, and, unless we can find a way of escape, we shall have to go through an infi- nite number of individual existences in the fu- ture. We are held by a remorseless force, are bound in an endless chain of existences. Sal- vation means, not happiness here, not a happy immortality in heaven, but release from this process of living and dying only to be reborn. Whatever be the differences between the reli- gions and philosophies of India, they are prac- tically all identical in these two respects, and salvation in every case means escape from transmigration. If the Hindus were strictly logical, if they had no happy inconsistencies, if they cherished no thoughts and feelings not in accord with these assumptions, we should not need to go farther. For we build on opposite assumption. The first book in the Bible says 192 THE SYMPATHY OF RELIGIONS that God looked on his creation and called it good, and, despite acknowledged evils in the world, we feel that the divine judgment was just. The famous word of our latest seer awakens a response in our hearts: we dare aspire to ^^ convert the furies into muses and the hells into benefit.'' Of course, there have been pessimists in the West, but they are re- garded, not as truly representative, but as curi- osities ; and it is a well known fact that nearly all of them have been sick men, or, despite their intellectual brilliancy, not quite normal in their constitution. Our literature, both secular and religious, is healthy-minded. The soul of a people comes to expression in its poetry, and our hymnbooks, for example, con- tain an increasing number of such hymns as these : This is my Father's world: Upon its wondrous birth The stars of light in phalanx bright Sang out in heavenly mirth. Maltbie B. Baheock. The harp at nature's advent strung Has never ceased to play; The song the stars of morning sung Has never died away. Whittier. Typical also are Eobert Grant's paraphrase of Psahn CIV: worship the King all-glorious above, EELIGIONS AND PHILOSOPHIES 193 and J. Vila Blake's beautiful lines, beginning Father, thou art calling, calling to us plainly. So, too, in history, we do not find mere repe- tition, but progress, something like the develop- ment of a divine purpose, and with Samuel Johnson, we sing: Life of Ages, richly poured, Love of God, unspent and free, Flowing in the prophet's word And the people's liberty! Never was to chosen race That unstinted tide confined; Thine is every time and place, Fountain sweet of heart and mind! Breathing in the thinker's creed, Pulsing in the hero's blood. Nerving simplest thought and deed, Freshening time with truth and good! For us life is good, and our reasonable hopes keep us striving to make it much better. Our ideal is not escape from existence. 'Tis more and fuller life we want. The ^'more abundant life'' which the supreme leader of the religious life came to give is what we most desire. And if we admit that there is pain in evolution, that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth, we are nevertheless sure that ^^the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that shall be," and even in the 194 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS darkest hours we rejoice in ^'the first fruits of the Spirit.'' It is of the greatest importance to realize this difference of fundamental attitude. And the importance is not merely theoretical, but prac- tical. The world is rapidly becoming one, and isolation will soon be impossible. Whether we like it or not, the East and the West are to be thrown into much closer contact and the result- ing influence is bound to be mutual. India is already showing the effect of Christian influ- ence in the new movements for education, for charity and philanthropy. We have doubtless much to learn from India, but what is offered should be thoroughly examined, and we should deliberately guard against the infection of pes- simism. What has led so many millions of our fellow men for so many centuries to take such a despairing view of life has not yet been ex- plained, although there are many guesses. Some have found the cause in a depressing climate, others in a decline of vitality due to the marriage of the immature, others still attribute it to an unhappy social state. Whatever be the solution of the problem, it is pathetic that mul- titudes have found so little in life that their deepest longing has been for release. It is true that we have experiences that make possible the beginning of an understanding. When weak- ened by ill health, poisoned by fatigue, or dis- couraged by failure, we know moments of gloom. RELIGIONS AND PHILOSOPHIES 195 But they pass, our faith and hope and courage return, and we feel that life is the richer for these incidents. We know that love brings re- sponsibilities and oftentimes suffering as well as joy, but it does not occur to us to doubt that it is worth all that it costs. Our richest pleas- ures are not unmixed, but, as a great teacher of ethics has said, are ' ' fat with pain. ' ' And as to difficulties, the best evidence that they are a tonic, and that the conflict with them and tri- umph over them is a joy, is sporty which is noth- ing but the setting up of artificial difficulties for the sake of struggling with and overcoming them. We must, however, guard against a misunder- standing. Because the presuppositions of In- dian thought, the foundations of the Vedanta of Sankara and of the Buddhism of Gautama, are pessimistic, it does not follow that the In- dian outlook upon life is that of steady and consistent despair. All that is meant is that the doctrine is that of hopelessness as to our natural life, as to the future of humanity on earth, and that it casts a shadow wherever it comes. As a matter of fact, there is hope in India as elsewhere. The people believe still in the endless series of rebirths and few hope to escape it, just as few in Christian lands ex- pect to be saints; but the average man finds comfort in the thought that, if he lives well, karma will ensure his reward. He will be re- 196 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS born in a better state on earth, or in one of the numerous heavens; besides, ^^the gods of Hin- duism are now believed to be able to save those who put their trust in them. ' ^ If, as Professor James has said, religion is a man's total reaction upon life, — this positive or negative vital response which precedes logic and argument, — it will be well to consider fur- ther the two characteristic attitudes of pessi- mism and optimism, of despair and faith. And there is the more reason for this because inter- est in religious matters is becoming less aca- demic and more practical and vital; and while it is very important to understand the Vedic view of life as systematized by Sankara, what we are most concerned about is to know what we mean, what in the light of the spiritual ex- perience of the world is the attitude we should take. It is, therefore, illuminating to discover that in the West, as in India, there are two very different temperaments, which F. W. Newman had in mind when he said that ^^Grod has two families of children on this earth, the once-born and the twice-horn.^^ The former are the ^^healthy-minded''; they find the kingdom of God within, but they also believe in a kingdom of God that is growing up in human society. They believe in progress, they love the earth and have a deep sense of the goodness and pres- ent worth of our natural life. The others are the ^^ sick-souls," who feel deeply the need of KELIGIONS AND PHILOSOPHIES 197 deliverance, and regard *^the earthly life not as an end in itself, but merely as a road by which we must travel to our true destination. ' ' When they read the New Testament the pas- sages that appeal to them most strongly are such statements as ^^The whole world lieth in the evil one, ' ' and * ^ the friendship of the world is enmity with God.'^ As interpreters of life and religion they prefer Bunyan and Tolstoy to Channing, Parker, and Emerson. Indian pessimism is more congenial to them than such a spirit as found expression in these words of Theodore Parker: ^^I have swum in the clear sweet waters all my days ; and if sometimes they were a little cold, and the stream ran adverse and something rough, it was never too strong to be breasted and swum through. From the days of earliest boyhood, ... up to the gray-bearded manhood of this time, there is none but has left me honey in the hive of memory that I now feed on for present delight. When I recall the years ... I am filled with a sense of sweetness and wonder that such little things can make a mor- tal so exceedingly rich.'' An expression of this healthy-minded attitude that is probably destined to become classic is that of Edward Everett Hale. In response to a questionnaire, he said that as a child and young man he was trained in a simple and ra- tional religion, so that he had no religious or irreligious struggles and no idea what the 198 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS *^ problem of life'' was. ^^I always knew God loved me, and I was always grateful for the world he placed me in. . . . To live with all my might seemed to me easy ; to learn where there was so much to learn seemed pleasant and al- most of course; to lend a hand, if one had a chance, natural ; and if one did this, why, he en- joyed life because he could not help it, and with- out proving to himself that he ought to enjoy it.'' We can never be too clear about assumptions, and as we now approach Indian religion, it is with the explicit recognition of the fundamental difference of attitude. We love life and believe in it and salvation means more of it. For our kinsmen on the other side of the world the su- preme good is present peace and ultimate re- lease. One of the ways by which millions have sought to reach it is the Vedanta — the thought path to salvation — and to understand this, if we can, is our first task. 1 CHAPTER XV THE RELIGION OF THE VEDA AND THE SYSTEM OF THE VEDANTA HE Veda is an extensive literature, the date of whose origin is unknown, but it was certainly in existence before there was a city in India. Like the Bible of the West, this Oriental Bible was a gradual growth, and it presents to the Higher Critics, who seek to arrange its elements in the order of their development, a very difficult problem. According to Professor Oldenberg, ^Hhe texts in the shape in which they have been transmitted to us resemble paintings by old masters, which bear unmistakable traces of alternate injuries and attempted restorations by competent and incompetent hands. . . . The Eig Veda, indeed, is not unlike a ruin." ^^ Ancient India," 17, 26. It is like our Bible also in this, that it con- tains parts that point backward and others that look forward, traces of the savage religion of the past and the beginning of conceptions which are the light and inspiration of later ages. In it may be found the germs of most of the phi- losophies and religions that have arisen in India 199 200 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS since its time. Among other interesting dis- coveries is this, that the ethical theism which Judaism and Christianity have given to the world was present, in tendency at least, in the Vedic age. The association of the ideas of God and the good had begun, and Varuna, who seems to be the same as the God of light and goodness proclaimed by Zoroaster, was well on his way to become India's God of holiness and mercy. But for some reason unknown to us the process of development was arrested, and the sin-aveng- ing and sin-forgiving Varuna was supplanted by such ^^ bruiser and tippler divinities" as Indra. We know that India did attain to exalted con- ceptions and a noble idealism, but they are obviously the products of reflexion and not reached by the path followed by the western world. As Oldenberg remarks, the God of Is- rael was created by history. Thought had part in his development from a tribal deity, for the prophets were thinkers ; but the stirring events, the crises and tragedies of Hebrew history, had much to do in shaping the conception of his na- ture and function. The Brahman of the Upani- shads and the Vedanta, on the other hand, was created by reflexion, and those who seek him find him, if at all, not through worship, love, acts of will or good works, but through knowledge. For this reason the most sympathetic exposition of the Vedanta system necessarily seems like an THE RELIGION OF THE VEDA 201 intellectual performance rather than a religious discussion. Fortunately for those who would understand this highest result of India's reli- gious thinking, such an exposition exists. Pro- fessor Paul Deussen, of Kiel, has not only brought to the task an unsurpassed scholarship, but he is so completely in sympathy with the fundamental conception of Vedantism that he frankly avows his acceptance, and claims for it * ^ an inestimable value for the whole race of man- kind. . . . Whatever new and unwonted paths the philosophy of the future may strike out, this principle will remain permanently unshaken. . . . The New Testament and the Upanishads, these two noblest products of the religious con- sciousness of mankind, are found, when we sound their deeper meaning, to be nowhere in irreconcilable contradiction, but in a manner the most attractive serve to elucidate and complete one another.'' ^^The Eeligion and Philosophy of India," pp. 39,40,49. The problem of salvation is, as we have seen, that of escaping from the endless series of lives, the ceaseless round of living, dying and being reborn. The law that governs this process is called karma. The universe is regarded as a moral order, all merit being rewarded and all sin expiated, if not in one incarnation then in another. Every man's life is morally prede- termined. He inherits from his own past, and is now shaping his future. His character will 202 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS decide his destiny, and his present condition is evidence of his character. We say, ^'Whatso- ever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.'' India says that what we are reaping we must have sown. Has a man been blind from baby- hood? The cause is not a neglected ophthalmia due to a well-known minute organism. The real explanation is that this man is expiating sins committed in a former existence. It is not retributive justice, sent by the gods, but the result of the moral structure of the universe. This view, we may well believe, had its origin in the faith that the heart of the world is some- how just, in the unwillingness of men to rest in the thought that injustice is final, and it tre- mendously reinforces the sense of responsibil- ity. It offers a solution to those minds that are distressed by the inequalities of existence, by the suffering of the innocent and the prosperity of the wicked. It teaches men not to complain, but to build up a happier future by present righteousness. ''Every act that a man per- forms as a moral agent is seed cast into the ground. When he acts a crime, he sows night- shade instead of corn, and his punishment is that he reaps poison instead of bread. . . . The seed was planted when the deed was done, and no power in heaven or on earth can prevent the ripening of the penal fruit." If the sinner seems to escape the necessity of reaping, it is because we see only his present life. Eeap he THE EELIGION OF THE VEDA 203 must, if not in the present, then in some future existence. With regard to this explanation of human experience, this way of connecting character and destiny, three observations may be made. Those who attribute all suffering exclusively to moral causes, will obviously not be led by their theory to look for and attempt to remove the physical and social causes of evil. There will be no societies for the prevention of blind- ness due to ophthalmia neonatorum and tra- choma. Organizations for the prevention of tuberculosis could get no support from believers in karma. Furthermore, and this is explicitly admitted, the nerve of western philanthropy would be cut if such a view were generally ac- cepted. For it means that our desire to help one another is futile, that although it is well for us, for our own spiritual life, to try to be help- ful, after all we really cannot help. The un- fortunates who move us to pity are not unjustly treated, their misery is but the inevitable result of sins they must have committed. It is use- less to try to interfere with karma. And, thirdly, whatever be the satisfaction it affords to the moral theorist by justifying the ways of the universe to men, karma has not been a pleas- ant thought to India. Indeed, men have loathed this ^^ eternally revolving wheel of birth and death"; and deliverance from it is precisely what they crave. The Vedanta, Buddhism, and 204 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS the Vishnuite religion differ in fundamental re- spects, but they agree that salvation is escape from transmigration. According to the Vedanta, the blessed release comes to those who attain to knowledge. Men are saved by metaphysics. Our misery arises from the fact that we take the world to be real, whereas it is an illusion. It is a dream-world and life is a kind of nightmare. Until we are awakened, the dream is a horrible reality. Sal- vation consists in being disillusioned, in com- prehending the fact that the world of the senses consists of appearances only, in the discovery of the saving truth that behind the universe is the eternal principle of all being, Brahman; that beneath the superficial self with whose in- terests we are chiefly concerned is the deeper and real self, Atman; and, finally, that these two are one. Moreover, this oneness is identity. The soul of each of us is not a manifestation, a part, of Brahman; it is Brahman. The Chan- dogya-TJ panishad, 3, 14, says that though the ^^soul in the inmost heart is smaller than a grain of rice, or of barley, or of mustard seed, or of millet, or a grain of millet's kernel, it is yet greater than the earth, greater than the atmos- phere, greater than the heaven, greater than these worlds.'' No more courageous disciples of reason have ever lived than the men who originated and de- veloped this view. In our time and country, THE RELIGION OF THE VEDA 205 science has taught us to respect facts and on them to build our theories. But the Indian thinkers had more confidence in their religious convictions and their reason than they had in the evidence of the five senses. They were therefore uncompromising in their loyalty to the conceptions to which their thinking led. Were these contradicted by the data of the phys- ical world? The answer is that that is no dif- ficulty, for the physical world is seeming only ; it is not what it appears to be, it is Maya, illu- sion. Their thought led them to the conception of a divine Spirit of which they could say little except that it was one, that it did not lose its unity in the universe which it sustains, and that it is not really divided in our seemingly sepa- rate souls. The inference is clear, and a time came in the forests of ancient India when some man was bold enough to say : ^ * The self in man is not merely the divine Self showing itself at one point ; the human self is the divine Self, the divine Self whole and complete. I am Brah- man. '^ This, says J. N. Farquhar, *^was but a natural inference from foregoing thought, yet it was the boldest, the greatest venture ever made by the Indian mind. ' ' ^ * Crown of Hinduism, ' ^ 223. Brahman = Atman. In this simple equation is expressed the philosophy of the Upanishads. God and the soul are identical. ^^Tat tvam asi,'^ what Brahman is, what God is, *Hhat art 206 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS thou/' When one attains this knowledge, the immediate intuition of the identity of his soul with the absolute being behind the shifting scenes, behind the phantasmagoria with which he had been concerned, he recognizes the un- reality of the world of transmigration and the great illusion imposes on him no more. He awakes from his dream. There *4s no longer a world, a body, or suffering. '' There is noth- ing but Brahman, no individuality separate from him. He is spiritual reality, but is above consciousness, and beyond good and evil. The disillusioned saint is not saved by his action or his moral striving. He does not, of course, do evil, neither is he concerned to do good. In- deed, good works keep a man under the domin- ion of karma just as completely as evil deeds. If Brahman did anything he himself could not escape karma. He who realizes that all action is in the dream-world, which is only an illusion wrought by the great magician, ceases to act. He is undeceived, emancipated from love as well as hate, free from all desire, and attains the peace of detachment. He will not be reborn, for ^^ knowledge burns the seed of works so that no material is at hand to cause a rebirth. '' He will live out his natural life, his body will exist for a while, because, poor fool, in past exist- ences, he craved life and thought to be happy, and he must now both reap the reward of merit and pay the penalty for his sins. But as he no THE RELIGION OF THE VEDA 207 longer desires or acts, no new existence will be necessary. He lingers among his fellows for a while, '^ just as the potter's wheel goes on re- volving even when the vessel it supported is completed," but this is due to acquired momen- tum, and no new impulse is being given. When death comes, he is ^^ resolved into Brahman,'' and returns not again. " As rivers run and in the deep Lose name and form and disappear, So goes, from name and form released, The wise man to the deity." If we are curious to know more about the state of the liberated saint after his death, the answer is that he is not merely united to Brah- man ; he is Brahman, and Brahman as absolute spirituality is not to be known or perceived, for in knowing and perceiving he is always subject and can never be object. He is not in time or space, and no idea that we can have corresponds to his real being. The Vedanta doctrine, then, is that when a man '^ comes to himself,'' he ^^ knows himself to be the Eternal God, present in all the universe, the sum and substance of all reality. He stands immortal, fearless, desireless, beyond the reach of pain, or sorrow, or doubt, his experience all ended, his soul filled with the blessedness of a great peace. ' ' Extravagant as such a view may seem, Christian scholars recognize the fact that 208 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS the Indian thinkers who hold it have had a vi- sion of a great truth; moreover their concep- tions have remarkable parallels in the philoso- phy and religion of the West. The author of the ** Crown of India'' freely admits this: *^The doctrine of the identity of man with God suggests a great many valuable thoughts. No modern thinker is likely to accept it as it stands ; but all will agree that it comes so near to being the right expression of a group of priceless truths that it is no wonder that early India hailed it as a revelation. Every one will recog- nize how close the relationship is between the doctrine and the following ideas: man's dignity and spiritual grandeur; the immensity of his intellectual faculty; the boundlessness of his desires; his passion for immortality; his near- ness, likeness, and kinship to God; the imme- diacy of intercourse which he may have with God; God's actual presence in the human heart and conscience ; and, lastly, the spontaneous de- sire of the soul for union with God. But we may go one step farther. These men had not merely thought out a conception of God and of man. Their new belief touched them in the depths of their spiritual nature, and overflowed in religious experience. The exalted language of the best passages of the earliest literature is sufficient to attest the reality of their inter- course with God." P. 226. The supreme achievements of the Indian THE RELIGION OF THE VEDA 209 thinkers will appear less strange if stated in the familiar terms of western thought. We know that the view of things which suflSces for the needs of everyday life, which accepts onr per- ceptions at their face value, which regards the world as a collection of things', of objects which have or have not value for human use, is super- ficial as compared with the conceptions of sci- ence. For physics and chemistry, reality is a vast number of molecules, atoms and ions moving in accord with mechanical laws. But thought goes to a still deeper level. The small- est particles of matter are now conceived of as charges of electricity, that is, in terms of energy, a view that has been developed by Ostwald. For Bergson the ultimate reality is a great life that flows through time, the physical world being a materialization due to a reversal of the cur- rent. It is not necessary to dwell on this sub- ject longer than to observe that the answer to the question which view is the most useful de- pends on what our purposes are. For every- day life the first is adequate. It would hinder rather than help action for us to be thinking of chairs and tables, not as things, but as sys- tems of complex moving molecules. Still, we know ^that thought draws nearer the truth as it penetrates to deeper levels. We have seen that the Greek thinkers believed in some- thing permanent in and behind the world of be- coming, whose presence in the latter gives it 210 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS whatever reality it possesses. And for the Kan- tian philosophy, the world as perceived by the senses consists of appearances only. As there would be no sweetness in a world where there was no man or other sentient being to taste it, so in a world without man and without creatures possessing senses and a mental apparatus simi- lar to his, there would be no space, no time, no causality. These are merely forms of percep- tion and thought. We do not know the nature of the reality behind the scenes, the thing in itself. All we know is the way in which it af- fects us. If we were differently constituted, we would be differently affected. We know as lit- tle of the Absolute as the Vedantists know of Brahman. For them the universe is Maya, illu- sion ; for the Kantians, it is appearance, an ap- parition. Our consciousness can tell us how the ultimate reality affects us, constituted as we are, but it can tell us nothing more. What we call the naive, empirical view works very well in practical life, where we are frankly dealing with appearances, but there are needs of our nature which it does not satisfy. If all our thoughts were on this level, we could never hope to find God and so satisfy our ardent longing, for the reason that we could only look for him somewhere in the physical universe or at some time in history. The Vedanta, Western Philosophy, and Chris- tianity therefore agree at least in this, that THE RELIGION OF THE VEDA 211 finding reality and God is not so much the task of sight as of insight, that our quest for him is successful when we look for him, not in the world of physics, but in the depths of thought and love and life. Indeed, it is true, as Pro- fessor Deussen has pointed out, that Indian thought at its best is strikingly like the highest conceptions to which Christian thinkers have attained: ^^The Indians, setting out from the worship of personified powers of nature, recog- nized in that raising of the feeling above the consciousness of individual existence which oc- curs in prayer, that is, in the Brahman, the central force in all the forces of nature, the shaping and supporting principle of all Gods and all worlds ; the word Brahman in the whole Eigveda never meaning anything less than this lifting and spiritualizing power of prayer.'' *'The System of the Vedanta,'' 49. That is, the Indians, when trying to frame some concep- tion of the ultimate reality, of what is at the source and heart of things, did what men always do; they identified reality with their deepest spiritual experience, they were convinced that reality was closely akin to and was best sym- bolized by what was highest and most precious to them. The spiritual genius to whom we owe the Fourth Gospel has in a similar way hyposta- tized what was divinest for him, and so he tells us that the Word, the divine Reason or Logos was in the beginning, that he not only was with 212 THE SYMPATHY OF itELIGIONS God, but that he was God. Through him all existence came into being, and no existence came into being apart from him. For this writer Jesus was the Logos become incarnate, who walked and taught among men, yet was one with the Father. That which was the principle of creation lies at the heart of humanity and is indeed the light that lighteth every man. Similar as the Indian and Christian concep- tions are, they are not identical, and the differ- ences are of the greatest practical importance. In the West, the experience of mystic union with the divine is felt to be consistent with the exist- ence and intensification of the personality. Logic may say ^^ Either God or man,'' but Chris- tian experience rejects the alternative, and de- clares that conscious union with the highest does not submerge the personality, but raises it to its highest power. Man feels that he is never so completely and truly himself as when he is the expression, the implement, of infinite good- ness and truth. The greatest contrast, however, is in the ethi- cal and social result of the two ideals of salva- tion. The Christian who believes that he has experienced union with God in love is aflame with the passion for human service, whereas the saint who has reached emancipation by way of the Vedanta, who has got rid of the illusion of separate individuality and all plurality and no longer feels a desire of any kind, is charac- THE RELIGION OF THE VEDA 213 terized by his detachment from the world. He does no evil, he does no good, for he is the actionless Brahman. The world which he seems to neglect, but really transcends, is worthless because it is unreal, and the result is that he dissolves the ties which bind him to what are but objects moving in a dream. As eternal Brah- man he has nothing to do with wife and chil- dren, with property and business, with prog- ress or social and political duty. The ideal life, according to this view, is divided into four parts : As a student, the young man learns the Vedas; he then becomes a householder, and rears a family; as he grows older, he forsakes his home and becomes a hermit in the forest, devoting his life to reflection on the mystic sig- nificance of the ritual; and finally as a san- nyasin, or renouncer, he wanders about, a prac- tically naked beggar, outside of society and without concern for any human interest. He is not moral, he is not immoral, he is Brahman, who is apart from all action and above time and change. He does not worship, he does not hate, he does not love, he is harmless and, from the social point of view, useless. Professor Deussen himself frankly admits this *^ fundamental want of the Vedanta system, this absence of a true morality. '^ He thinks the command, ^^Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself is an immediate consequence of the fundamental concept of the Vedanta. One can 214 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS love his neighbor as himself ^^just because he has recognized him as his own Self. This fol- lows from the doctrine that the world is Brah- man, and Brahman is the Soul; and we do in fact find this conclusion drawn, though not in Sankara and indeed nowhere to the extent we should have expected. '^ It is found in the Bhagavadgita, 13, 27-28. "This highest Godhead hath his seat in every being, And liveth though they die; who seeth him, is seeing, And he who everywhere this highest God hath found, Will not wound self through self.'' " System of the Vedanta," 59, 404. How this should work out in the concrete world is illustrated by an incident cited by Far- quhar: *^Two Hindu women fell out in the street. One became very violent. The other turned to her and said solemnly, ^Hush, you will hurt the Brahman in you. ^ ^ ' We thus observe the importance of the thought side of the religious life. If you be- lieve that the world and human individuality are an illusion, that salvation is to be awakened from ignorance as from a dream, you will not, if you are logically consistent, be greatly inter- ested in social endeavors to improve the dream- world. If an impersonal Brahman is for you the first principle of things and at the same time the goal of your personal endeavor, you naturally will not care greatly to share in edu- THE RELIGION OF THE VEDA 215 cational efforts to develop human personalities through education and to make our natural life on this earth worth while. You will have but a slight sense of the objective worth of moral action and will be almost exclusively concerned with your subjective state. If, however, you have been nurtured on the ideals of Plato, who would through education bring his citizens up out of the cave and make them see the light only to send them down again into the slums to help their less fortunate fellow men; or if you have heard and believed the great teaching that God is love and that to love, and hence to serve, is to be born of God and know God, you go out into a real world which is slowly climbing out of animalism and barbarism, and become an effec- tive instrument for the furthering of the divine purpose and for the promotion of intel- lectual, moral, social and political progress. The Vedanta is the systematization, by San- kara in the eighth century of our era, of the main ideas of the Brahma-Sutras of Badarayana. But the Upanishads themselves are not the product of a single thinker or school, and ideas not at all in accord with the Vedanta are found therein. Indeed, more space is devoted to the expression of theistic and pantheistic views than to the philosophy of the impersonal Brahman. Sankara recognizes this difficulty, and meets it by drawing a distinction between the ^^ higher knowledge'* of Brahman and the 216 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS ii lower/ ^ The former is indeed the very truth, but since not all are able to receive it, a concession is made to human weakness. Those who cannot endure the strong meat must be treated as babes and fed with milk. The eso- teric doctrine alone is true, but as few can reach it, and as even they find that holding consistently to it is like standing on a giddy height in a slippery place, some accommodation is neces- sary, and views are proclaimed which are more in accordance with the demands of the human heart. Brahman is no longer impersonal, but endowed with various perfections, and those who worship him are rewarded with happiness. After death they go to the realm of the gods, and eventually, if they keep on their way, they may attain to the higher knowledge and conse- quent deliverance. Good men, who perform their religious duties but do not attain either to the higher or lower knowledge, are neverthe- less rewarded. After death they go to the realms of the blest on the moon and may hope for happy reincarnations on earth. The wicked will suffer in hell or be reborn in low condition and unhappy state. Although Sankara called this a ^4ower'^ knowledge in contrast with the ^^ higher^' knowledge expounded in his system, we need not take these terms seriously. That India's religious life has broken away from his doctrine is due not to weakness or perversity, but to THE RELIGION OF THE VEDA 217 man's instinct for the God of love and grace, to his profound sense that the source and goal of all is at least as high as personality, and to his ineradicable optimism, his constitutional tendency toward a view of life that opens and leaves open the doors of opportunity and hope. Of the many systems of religious and irre- ligious thought which have been developed from the various views and tendencies ex- pressed in the Upanishads, there are two others that are of especial interest. The atheistic Sankhya philosophy, which is closely related to Buddhism, will be discussed in the next chapter. Ramanuja's interpretation of the Vedanta- Sutras is a revolt against the doctrine of the impersonal Brahman and against pantheism. He teaches that through the grace of God to man and through man's love to God, the soul attains release from transmigration, but retains its individuality in an eternity of bliss. His teaching has been incorporated into the Vish- nuite religion which is dominant in India to-day, and will be discussed in chapters XVIII-XXI. CHAPTER XVI THE WAY OF SALVATION PBOCLAIMED BY GAUTAMA, THE BUDDHA those who have been nurtured on the Christian tradition and who, not- withstanding certain doctrinal dif- ferences, practically all agree that that religion, reduced to its lowest terms, means at least belief in God and an attitude of faith and courage, hope and love, that is, spiritual optimism, it seems strange that a pessimistic atheism such as that proclaimed by Gautama, the Buddha, should be called a religion. With our faith in life and our craving for more of it, the gospel of Nirvana at first appears to be a kind of religious nihilism. Yet a half hour's perusal of the Buddhist literature is enough to convince us that, whatever be the Buddhistic view of existence, the followers of Gautama are no strangers to that religious experience which he was thinking of who said that the kingdom of God is righteousness, joy and peace in the Holy Spirit. Since we are fortunate enough to live in an age when the sweeping condemnation and the wholesale approval of views different 218 THE WAY OF SALVATION 219 from our own are no longer acceptable, and since we are convinced that we have everything to gain and nothing to lose by an examination at once critical and sympathetic of other phi- losophies and religions, let us proceed to the business we have in hand, namely, that of trying to get an inside view of a religion, or way of salvation, in which millions of good men and w^omen have found comfort, inspiration and help for nearly twenty-five centuries. If we are to do Buddhism justice, we must first of all make a distinction between the original message of Gautama, which it is the concern of scholars such as H. Oldenberg and T. W. Rhys Davids to set in clear light, and Buddhism as a living force which is to-day transforming and inspir- ing the lives of men and women in Ceylon, Burma and Japan. Primitive Buddhism. The views proclaimed by Gautama were not unrelated to those which prevailed in his country in his time, and they can in fact be understood only when studied in relation to other systems. Besides the ideas systematized in the Vedanta, there are other tendencies and views in the Upanishads which have been taken up and developed by bold and consistent thinkers into different systems, which have, either by modification or reaction, pro- duced still other philosophies and religions that have played a great part in the life of India. From one of these, the Sankhya, Bud- 220 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS dhism has, so some scholars think, been derived. At any rate, they are very closely related. According to the Sankhya, reality consists of matter and souls. These really have nothing to do with each other, although the misery of our human state depends upon the illusion that they have. The real self lies deep and neither suffers nor acts, and salvation comes with the realization of this truth. This is, of course, seemingly contrary to experience. The expla- nation of the paradox is that much of what we call the self is not the self at all, but is part of the external and material realm (prakriti). All our perceptions, sensations, association of ideas, all the activities and 'affections of the soul, the whole psychological mechanism, be- long in prakriti. We must get rid of this illusion, and make and keep clear the distinc- tion between the superficial and the deeper self. Prof. Gr. F. Moore has put this view concisely: ^^The source and substance of the misery of life, the ground of the endless succession of re- births, is that the soul confounds itself, the true self, with the empirical self thus constituted, mistakenly imagining that it is actor or sufferer in the tragedy of existence, as though a crystal on which the image of a red hibiscus flower falls should deem that it was itself red. The salva- tion of the soul is the knowledge of itself as metaphysical, not as empirical, ego.'' That is to say, a man is saved not by what THE WAY OF SALVATION 221 he does, not by love or worship, but by what he thinks, by metaphysics. In this respect the Sankhya agrees with the Vedanta; the dif- ference lies in the nature of the saving thought. According to the latter, he is saved who can say, '^I am Brahma, and Brahma does not suffer; Brahma is not imposed upon by the unreal dream world in which alone there is suffering. ' ' The Sankhya teaches that salvation lies in the perception of the absolute diversity of the soul from the very real world of matter and misery, in the clear knowledge of the fact that the soul does not and cannot either suffer from or act upon the realm of prakriti, which is wholly foreign to its nature. Gautama, or Siddhartha, the historical Bud- dha, was a high caste Hindu, born in the Ganges Valley in Northern India 624 b. c. or, accord- ing to another reckoning, 563 b. c. At the age of twenty-nine he abandoned his home, his wife and child, to seek salvation. Thousands of others in his day, led by the same craving, pur- sued the same course, and they seem not to have suffered the social condemnation which an aban- donment of domestic and social duty and of those dependent upon him would bring upon a man to-day. He sought illumination first in trance states. Disappointed, he then turned to the practice of self -mortification through which, in accordance with the belief of the time, the ascetic could win the favor of the gods and at- 222 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS tain to a vision of the truth. He carried his austerities to the extreme limit and became the admired model of those who sought salvation by the same path. Convinced at last that the mind could not attain to illumination through repres- sion of the body and lowering of the energy of life, he took food, sacrificed his fame and the esteem of his followers and companions, and finally, after terrible mental struggles, discov- ered what he believed to be the nature, the cause and the way of escape from the miseries of life. The forty-five years that remained to him after the light dawned upon him as he sat in thought under the Bo tree, he spent in pro- claiming his gospel and establishing his order of mendicant monks. Many legends have grown up around him, as they always do about great men who are loved much because they have served much. The legends present interesting parallels to those which adoring love have woven around the great figure of Jesus. They may be read in H. C. Warren's ^^ Buddhism in Transla- tions,'' Harvard Oriental Series, Vol. 3, and they are retold in nearly every book on Bud- dhism. Nowhere perhaps are the main facts of Gautama's career more realistically presented in all their pathos and beauty than in H. Field- ing Hall's ^^Soul of a People," in the chapters entitled ^^He Who Found the Light," and ^^The Way to the Great Peace. ' ' By the magic of his insight and sympathy he makes Gautama to THE WAY OF SALVATION 223 live before us; we feel the wondrous charm of the great teacher's personality and are wit- nesses of his beautiful death. Here too is pre- sented the moving story of Yasodhara, the wife, who in the beginning sympathized with Gau- tama's religious feelings and helped him on his way to be one of the world's saviors, not sus- pecting, in her devotion, that he would go away and leave her. It has been said that women are more religious than men, in that more of them are interested in religion to a certain ex- tent, but that when a man turns to it with the whole heart, there is always danger that he will carry it to an extreme. Mr. Hall recalls a con- versation with a woman who said of Buddha's wife, — ^'Surely she was very much to be pitied be- cause her husband went away from her and her baby. Do you think that when she talked reli- gion with her husband, she ever thought that it would cause him to leave her and go away forever? If she had thought that, she would never had done as she did. A woman would never help anything to sever her husband from her, not even religion. And when after ten years ' waiting a baby had come to her ! Surely she was very much to be pitied. ' ' She did, in- deed, protest against being sacrificed on the altar of her husband's religion, but without avail. He came back once to see her and their son, when he had found the light and all the 224 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS world loved Mm. But he was not the same man who went away. Indeed, he did not come home until all the old impulses, the old longings, which created the home, were dead, and he was sure that the desire for the sweet home life would not return. ^^And Yasodhara was full of despair, for if all the world had gained a teacher, she had lost a husband. So will it be forever. This is the difference between men and women. She became a nun, poor soul ! and her son — his son — became one of his disciples.'' Buddha's Eecipe for the Conquest of Sor- row. What was it that Gautama discovered, when after six years of struggle, he sat in re- flexion under the Bo tree? We know exactly, for he put his solution of the problem of exist- ence in systematic form, and the formula was memorized and has been transmitted probably without change to the present. There are four Noble Truths and an Eightfold Path. The first of the truths seemed to Gautama self-evi- dent, an axiom which no one would question, al- though our own thinking starts from an assump- tion almost precisely opposite in character. He states it as follows : ''Birth is suffering, age is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering; contact with what we dislike is suffering, sepa- ration from what we like is suffering, failure to attain what we crave is suffering — in brief, all that makes bodily existence is suffering.'^ The second Noble Truth is that the suffering THE WAY OF SALVATION 225 which fills our life is due to the craving for life, for the gratification of the passions, for the satisfaction of our natural impulses. This is what causes us to be reborn. The third Noble Truth is the logical outcome of the sec- ond : the way of escape is through stilling these desires in whose satisfaction we deluded crea- tures think to find happiness, but which really keep us from the Great Peace and chain us to existence. The fourth Noble Truth is that the way which leads to the destruction of suffering and to salvation is the Noble Eightfold Path. This is the way of Self -conquest, a' system of in- tellectual and moral discipline through which we may destroy the fatal desires and attain emanci- pation of the heart, the Nirvana of present peace, and, when lifers fitful fever is over, final release from transmigration, those ^'renewed becomings which are only renewed sorrows.^' The eight steps of the Path are 1. Eight Views 5. Eight Livelihood 2. Eight Aspirations 6. Eight Effort 3. Eight Speech 7. Eight Mindfulness 4. Eight Conduct 8. Eight Eapture At first glance, these phrases create the im- pression that more is to be said for Buddhism as an ethical system and a way of life than as a philosophy and a religion, and although they require some explanation in order to be per- fectly understood, the impression is correct. 226 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS As a matter of fact, Buddhism does produce lives of great beauty. Eeserving till later a discussion of the path, we must now, first of all, be perfectly clear about the Noble Truths, the foundations of the whole structure. Note first the assumption that life is essen- tially evil. ^^ Just this have I taught and do I teach," said the Buddha: ^411, and the ending of ill." Life is intolerable. Moreover, our sorrows are all bound up with our individuality which is itself the result of our past karma. Notwithstanding this gloomy presupposition, Mrs. T. W. Ehys Davids, in her valuable little book, ^^ Buddhism: A Study of the Buddhist Norm," has endeavored to defend Buddhism against the charge that it is pessimistic. All movements of social and religious reform, she thinks, start with pessimistic utterances, but no system is really pessimistic that points out an available way of escape. Now Buddhism does not counsel resignation to an inevitable doom: it urges revolt and indicates the way to victory through a mastery of one's inner forces and a conquest of one's own life. ^^With respect to the desirability of life taken quantitatively, or en bloc, Buddhism is, I repeat, frankly pessi- mistic. The craving for mere life or living was eondenmed as ignoble, or stupid, as a moral bondage, as one of the four mental intoxications. The plunge into the full tide of human life, which Faust was to find so interesting, was from THE WAY OF SALVATION 227 their point of view, too much compact of Van- ity Fair, shambles and cemetery to be worth the plunge. ' ^ We must recognize, however, that just as Christians teach that man may be born again and put on a new nature, so Buddhists believe that when the lower life dies and the saint nears the end of the Eightfold Path, there comes a state of mind, a quality of life, and a great peace which is salvation. Much has been written on Nirvana, which means a blowing out, an extinc- tion, of the fire, and which, according to the logic of Gautama's system, ought to mean annihila- tion. But we must beware of drawing this con- clusion. Certainly, to the Buddhists them- selves, who have an inside view of their religion and who are in the apostolic succession of its spirit, the term Nirvana has, not a negative, but a positive signification. Nothing is more absurd than to say that because it is clear to us that others logically ought to feel in a certain way, therefore they do feel in that way. Now people do not go into ecstasies over mere negations, and nothing is more universal than the tone of vic- tory, the elation, the joy of the Buddhist saints. Mrs. Ehys Davids presents a piece of evidence that is pertinent and of extraordinary interest. In translating a book of the lives and ^' psalms '* of Buddhist saints, she issued ^^a referendum among these single-minded, devoted winners of the summum bonum of their faith — some three 228 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS hundred and thirty-seven in all — inquiring what, in each case, the Nirvana enjoyed by the Arahat meant for him or her. ' ^ She found that they are nearly all expressions of triumph, of peace, of joy. As to the future, they were silent, and in that respect were faithful to their master. What Gautama himself thought about Nir- vana we shall never know. All that he would say was that at death, the saint was like an ex- tinct flame, ^^ whereof no one could say, the fire that has gone out went here or went there. ' ^ He said that those who taught that life continued after death and those who held the opposite view were both wrong, and finally that all such specu- lations were unprofitable. He was the original pragmatist, the strictest, most literal and con- sistent of all. When asked *^Why has the Ex- alted One not declared whether the saint exists after death T^ he replied, ^^ Because, brother, this is a matter that does not make for things needful to salvation, nor for that which concerns the holy life, nor for distaste for the world, nor for passionlessness, nor for cessation, nor for calm, nor for insight, nor for enlightenment, nor for Nirvana. ' ' He declared that he had but one message, namely, — ^^ These are our suffer- ings, this is the cause, this is the way of es- cape.'' All speculations that did not help to keep the feet in the eightfold path and lead to peace were irrelevant, and he absolutely and persistently refused to consider them. THE WAY OF SALVATION 229 This characteristic position is elaborately set forth in Sermon No. 1, on ^^ Questions Which Tend not to Edification/' in the Majjhima Nikaya. It is too long to quote, for the ancient followers of Gautama had plenty of time and sermons in those days were not short. More- over the repetitions, which make much of their literature so tiresome to the modern reader, were almost necessary in an age when precious teaching was not written down but was trans- mitted orally from generation to generation and preserved only through memory. The sermon was inspired by the eager metaphysical curi- osity of an inquirer who wanted to know about many questions concerning which the Buddha had refused to speak. When urged to say whether the saint exists or does not exist after death, whether the world is or is not eternal, whether it is infinite, whether the soul and body are identical or different, and so on, the master replies thus: ^'It is as if a man had been wounded by an arrow thickly smeared with poi- son, and his friends and companions, his rela- tives and kinsfolk, were to procure for him a physician or surgeon; and the sick man were to say, I will not have this arrow taken out until I have learnt whether the man who wounded me belonged to the warrior caste, or to the Brahman caste, or to the agricultural caste, or to the menial caste." Then follows a long list of other things which the wounded man must 230 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS know before he will be relieved, such as the name, height, complexion and residence of the archer, the material and shape of the arrow, the kind of head with which it was tipped, the kind of feathers on the shaft, the shape and material of the bow. So, declared Grantama, mentioning the doctrines in question, the religious life does not depend upon any of them. What is thought about any of them profits not, is irrelevant. In the words of the late Prof. William James, all such questions and their answers are pragmati- cally valueless, for the reason that they are with- out practical consequences and so make no real difference. History has shown that but few in the East or the West have been able to rest contentedly in this incurious piety. The majority of earnest minds desire to know not only enough truth to enable them to do right and that they may do right; they want to learn for the mere joy of learning and knowing, and the desire grows by what it feeds on. The thirst for truth, once awakened, is insatiable, and we not only do not think it is unprofitable or impious, but we dare to believe it is a part of our love of God and contains in it the promise and potency of human progress. The modern disciples of Gautama, for whom their religion is a living force and not a mere study in archaeology, have, as we shall see when we come to consider Japanese Bud- dhism, found interesting answers to the ques- THE WAY OF SALVATION 231 tions to which their master refused to reply. The system of Gautama is made clearer when it is compared with the Vedanta and Sankhya philosophies. All three agree that the prime need of men is to be saved from the ^'whirlpool of rebirths," from the endless series of exist- ences to which we are held by our karma. What keeps us in our unhappy state is ignorance rather than sin, and escape is effected through intellectual activity, through the knowledge of a saving truth. The gods cannot help, for they, too, are transmigrating souls, their existence in any of the numerous heavens being only tem- porary. Their position in the scale of being is lower and less happy than that of the emanci- pated saint approaching his final release. For the Vedantist, salvation comes with the dis- covery that the evil of the world together with the world itself is unreal, with the realization of the truth, temporarily obscured by the condi- tions of individuality, that the soul is God and the whole of God, and hence is above all strug- gle and all suffering. According to the San- khya, the Vedantist God, Brahman, is unreal. The material world is no maya, no illusion. Matter exists, but to the souls of men, their real selves, its existence is irrelevant, since it can- not touch or affect them in any way. Gautama goes further and denies the existence of the soul altogether. The universe is soulless, man is soulless, and there neither is nor ever will be a 232 THE SYMPATHY OP EELIGIONS real self. Our individuality, with which all our sorrow is bound up, is but a temporary colloca- tion or compound. Neither in us nor out of us is there anything permanent. We are, in a sense, like the bubbles on the surface of a flow- ing stream. In our ignorance we cling to our individuality as something precious, and think to find happiness in the satisfaction of our de- sires. If we are to be saved, we must take the eightfold path which leads in the opposite di- rection. Through it we may hope to rise above hatred, care, regret, and sorrow, to attain to a passionless bliss, and when death comes to es- cape from individuality forever. CHAPTEE XVII TRANSMIGEATION AND KARMA NE of the greatest difficulties with Gautama's view is that he takes the doctrine of the transmigration of the soul, current in his time, drops the belief in the soul and yet clings to transmigra- tion. The logical problem did not escape him and, when pressed for an explanation, he re- plied with similes and illustrations which show marvellous ingenuity and subtlety, but do not satisfy. It is all very well to say that human lives in successive incarnations are like a row of lamps, each of which is kindled from the one before it and kindles in turn the one just after. If the individuality has no substance, no iden- tity, the doctrine of Karma seems to lose its moral significance. The criminal who is exe- cuted for his crime is not the miserable wretch who will expiate his wickedness in a future ex- istence. L. de la Vallee Poussin (^^Boud- dhisme: Opinions sur PHistoire de la Dog- matique,'' p. 55) remarks that if Gautama taught this, he based morality on the desire we may have to relieve some future representative 233 234 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGI0:NS of our acts from the necessity of paying the penalty of our sins. His call to Nirvana would have as a motive the desire to save other crea- tures from coming into existence in the future. Despite his respect for Oldenberg and Ehys Davids, this writer hesitates to accept their con- clusions. However unspeculative and even un- reasonable we may assume the Buddha to have been, he thinks it is unsafe to attribute to him a mass of contradictions and absurdities, that we should look farther for an explanation, and consider whether it is not possible that the in- congruous mixture of ideas may not be due in part to later disciples of Gautama. In the lat- ter case, what we have to explain is the super- position of contradictory ideas in the minds of the followers, instead of mental confusion in the leader. The true solution of the logical puzzle in- volved in keeping the idea of transmigration after ceasing to believe that anything exists which can transmigrate was given nearly forty years ago by T. W. Rhys Davids in his little manual on Buddhism, prepared for the So- ciety for Promoting Christian Knowledge. He makes the sagacious remark that if Gautama, although preaching the non-existence of the soul, was not able to give up the belief in transmigra- tion, it was because he, like some other seekers after truth who are at the same time deeply re- ligious, had ^^ formed his belief — ^not by working TRANSMIGRATION AND KARMA 235 up from the simple to the complex, from the well-known to the less known, and pausing hum- bly where uncertainty begins — but by gradually rejecting those parts of his earliest creed which could be proved (to his mind) to be inconsistent with what he held to be actual fact. In such cases every surrender causes a wrench; each standpoint is defended more strongly than the last; and the ultimate belief is not necessarily more true than those which have been aban- doned; but only less easily proved false. It is natural, moreover, for the mind to resist the longest the disproof of those hypotheses which satisfy it most completely by the explanation they afford of otherwise inexplicable mysteries. Now the doctrine of transmigration, in either the Brahmanical or Buddhist form, is not capa- ble of disproof ; while it affords an explanation, quite complete to those who can believe it, of the apparent anomalies and wrongs in the dis- tribution of happiness or woe.'^ P. 99. This is a true account of the way in which most men reach their world view. They begin, as they ought, by accepting the traditions handed down to them from the past and sifted by their parents and teachers. In many cases, what is received is held almost unchanged through life. But in those who are more fortunately situated, the critical faculties ultimately awaken, a proc- ess of pruning begins which stops only when courage or mental energy or plasticity fails. 236 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS What if Gautama had been more logical and thorough-going? The answer is clear. So far as Buddhism is a blessing, the result would have been disaster. Had Gautama drawn what seems to us the logical conclusion from his premises and given up the doctrine of transmi- gration, his contemporaries would not have lis- tened to him for a moment. Men regard as ab- surd and unworthy of consideration those who deny their moral axioms, the principles on which their thinking and their life are based. Had Gautama been more clear, had he denied what the men of his time never doubted, he would have had no influence upon them whatever. It is quite possible, too, as Poussin suggests, that he thought he had got rid of metaphysics because he needed to assume nothing which was not granted by all. **What everybody admits, that I admit; what the world does not admit, that I do not admit. '^ Like many modem men who affect to despise metaphysics, he had a metaphysics of his own, but there can be no doubt that he honestly tried to distinguish be- tween unprofitable speculations and ideas that are of practical value for the conduct of life. It is clear, then, that Gautama's gospel had a negative and a positive side. The former was set forth in his ^'Four Noble Truths'' and in his teaching that the universe is soulless, that man is soulless, that human life is evil in a godless world, and that our fleeting individuali- TEANSMIGEATION AND KARMA 237 ties are held in the iron grip of an impersonal moral order. The positive side of his doctrine is contained in his ethical recommendations for the promotion of love and goodwill, for the conquest of passion, the victory over vain re- gret, and the achievement of peace. Before coming to the more pleasant task of examining this aspect of primitive Buddhism with which we have deep sympathy, it is necessary to dis- pose of the pessimistic pre-suppositions and to be perfectly clear about the Four Noble Truths. For these are not academic questions, but life questions, even for the great scholars, whose aim is truth. They are evidently influenced by their researches. Professor Deussen, e.g., is, as we have seen, a Vedantist, and Prof. T. W. Ehys Davids not only writes of Buddhism with great sympathy, but he expressly declares (** Ameri- can Lectures on the History of Religion, ' ' pp. 41 and 42) that *Hhe Buddhist position is the in- evitable logical outcome of all discussion of the soul theory,'' agreeing with the Buddhist teach- ers that to enjoy emancipation of the heart and reach the highest spiritual blessings it is neces- sary to give up the belief in the soul, in God and immortality. The first ^^ Noble Truth" is the most impor- tant of all, viz., that birth is painful, old age is painful, unsatisfied craving is painful; in fact, so many of our experiences are painful that life may be said to be suffering. This is no isolated 238 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS statement, but is constantly repeated and every- where assumed. Our western feeling is that this Noble Truth is not a truth at all. We are here dealing with original vital responses to the world which, like matters of taste, are not a subject for argument. All we can say is that our reaction to life is almost precisely opposite. We see the loveliness of infancy, childhood, ma- turity and ripe age. It is good to be little chil- dren, welcomed into loving arms; it is good to be boys and girls, to have the experience of young men and maidens, to play, as men and women, our part in the world's life; and good, very, very good also are the hours of life's aft- ernoon as we walk toward the sunset. Death, too, in its time, at the end of a finished life, is a welcome friend. ^^For God hath made every- thing beautiful in its time.'' We have learned to ^^ think of death not as inevitable merely, but as something divine ; a process of the universal Love, a moment in the universal life. Here is nothing monstrous or out of the way ; no fright- ful anomaly, no dispensation of wrath; but something of a piece with the setting sun and the waning moon and the falling leaf, — a part of the great order, a necessary link in the uni- versal chain which binds all being to the throne of God. St. Francis, who embraced all nature, brute and plant as well as man, with affection- ate sympathy, included death also, as a part of nature, in his infinite good will. Welcome, TBANSMIGEATION AND KAKMA 239 Sister Death, he said, as he felt his end draw near.'^ These words, by a Christian theolo- gian, Dr. F. H. Hedge, awaken a response in our heart. We face death and life with gladness and a serene trust. "So be my passing! My task accomplished and the long day done, My wages taken and in my heart Some late lark singing, Let me be gathered to the quiet west, The sundown splendid and serene, Death." —W. E. Henley. The contrast of the western Christian atti- tude toward life with that expressed in the first of Gautama's four *^ Noble Truths'' can prob- ably be sufficiently realized by those who will read ^^The Four Intent Contemplations" (Warren: *^ Buddhism in Translations," pp. 368, 369) and then consider the following prose poem on Life, which is famous not only for its beauty, but also because it so well expresses what might be called our first ^^ Noble Truth." It is true that its author was not a member of any religious organization and that he was in violent reaction against the churches. But that was a mere accidental result of the conditions that surrounded him when his mind was form- ing. All the sentiments of this kind which he so eloquently expressed were nourished in him in his home and could have been proclaimed, as 240 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS they are in fact proclaimed, from countless' pulpits, in the name of religion. ' ' Born of love and hope, of ecstasy and pain, of agony and fear, of tears and joy — dowered with the wealth of two united hearts — ^held in happy arms, with lips upon life's drifted font, blue-veined and fair, where perfect peace finds perfect form — rocked by willing feet and wooed to shadowy shores by siren mother singing soft and low — looking with wonder's wide and startled eyes at common things of life and day — taught by want and wish and contact with the things that touch the dimpled flesh of babes — lured by light and flame, and charmed by color's wondrous robes — learning the use of hands and feet, and by the love of mimicry beguiled to utter speech — releasing prisoned thoughts from crabbed and curious marks on soiled and tat- tered leaves — puzzling the brain with crooked numbers and their changing, tangled worth — and so through years of alternating day and night, until the captive grows familiar with the chains and walls and limitations of a life. *'And time runs on in sun and shade, until the one of all the world is wooed and won, and all the lore of love is taught and learned again. Again a home is built with the chamber wherein faint dreams, like cool and shadowy vales, di- vide the billowed hours of love. Again the miracle of a birth — the pain and joy, the kiss of TRANSMIGRATION AND KARMA 241 welcome and the cradle-song drowning the drowsy prattle of a babe. **And then the sense of obligation and of wrong — pity for those who toil and weep — tears for the imprisoned and despised — love for the generous dead, and in the heart the rapture of a high resolve. ^* And then ambition, with its lust of pelf and place and power, longing to put upon its breast distinction's worthless badge. Then keener thoughts of men, and eyes that see behind the smiling mask of craft — flattered no more by the obsequious cringe of gain and greed — knowing the uselessness of hoarded gold — of honor bought from those who charge the usury of self- respect — of power that only bends a coward's knees and forces from the lips of fear the lies of praise. Knowing at last the unstudied ges- ture of esteem, the reverent eyes made rich with honest thought, and holding high above all other things — high as hope's great throbbing star above the darkness of the dead — the love of wife and child and friend. *^Then locks of gray, and growing love of other days and half-remembered things — then holding withered hands of those who first held his, while over dim and loving eyes death softly presses down the lids of rest. **And so, locking in marriage vows his chil- dren's hands and crossing others on the breasts 242 THE SYMPATHY OF RELiaiONS of peace, with daughters' babes upon his knees, the white hair mingling with the gold, he jour- neys on from day to day to that horizon where the dusk is waiting for the night. — At last, sit- ting by the holy hearth of home as evening's embers change from red to gray, he falls asleep within the arms of her he worshipped and adored, feeling upon his pallid lips love's last and holiest kiss." — R. G. Ingersoll. It is obvious that people who delight in such a ^^ picture of life," who when they come to lay their dead away read the Twenty-third Psalm and Tennyson's ^^ Crossing the Bar," cannot possibly sympathize with the despairing feeling about life and death on which primitive Bud' dhism was based. The second and third of Gautama's funda- mental principles are in character very like the first. They are as follows : *^Now this, recluses, is the noble truth con- cerning the origin of suffering. Verily it origi- nates in that craving thirst which causes the renewal of becomings, is accompanied by sen- sual delights, and seeks satisfaction now here, now there — ^that is to say, the craving for the gratification of the passions, or the craving for a future life, or the craving for success in this present life (the lust of the flesh, the lust of life, the pride of life). ^^Now this, recluses, is the noble truth con- cerning the destruction of suffering. Verily, it TEANSMIGRATION AND KARMA 243 is the destruction, in which no craving remains over, of this very thirst; the laying aside of, the getting rid of, the being free from, the har- boring no longer of, this thirst/^ That is to say, no happiness can come through the satisfaction of natural instincts, impulses, longings, desires, needs, ambitions and loves. The thing to do is first to become disillusioned and then to quiet the impulses, kill the desires and so attain a passionless peace. In discussing the ethical conceptions of Plato, we learned a more excellent way. It is a difficult but not hopeless task to organize our desires and allow each function to be exercised so far as it con- duces to the good of the whole. No primitive passion is to be regarded as purely evil and as such to be forced back into isolation or de- stroyed. It is rather to be made organic. The * insistent Dionysiac impulses" may be infused with higher emotions, and in this way sancti- fied, and made to play a part in the complex unity of a rich and abundant life. Nothing in all Buddhism is so alien to our feeling as the meditations which it prescribes to cure us of the love of life. The curious reader may turn to Warren's '^Buddhism in Trans- lations" (pages 297-300), and read the passage entitled *^ Beauty is but Skin-deep." The chances are that he will not be able to finish it. That men and women may cease to be attractive to one another and that the foundations of do- 244 THE SYMPATHY OF RELIGIONS mesticity may be removed, the candidate for Nirvana is recommended to consider all the vile- ness and repulsiveness of the human body when uncared for. If the thought occurs that such an attitude universally accepted would depopu- late and ruin any country, it can only be said that that is true. Apologists for Buddhism, however, claim that much of its teaching was never intended for the majority of men. If you come to Buddha, the first question for you to de- cide is whether you go in for complete salvation, or merely desire such blessings' as come to those who do not aspire to be more than pious laymen, who would sow good deeds and reap their re- ward. But at most this is only a concession, and does not affect the claim that a life based on the four noble truths would be more nearly ideal. And here again we must clearly recog- nize, since ^^the sympathy of religions'' is not promoted by obscuring important principles, that our faces are turned in a different direc- tion. Instead of meditating on the body as a mass of filth, it seems to be better in every way to consider its wondrous beauty and to regard it as the temple of the Holy Spirit. More and more we are learning to see and rejoice in natu- ral beauty. Alice Freeman Palmer, called upon to speak to some children in a slum district, ad- vised them to try each day to find something they could admire and love, a bit of blue sky, a sparrow, a swaying branch, the sound of a TRANSMIGRATION AND KARMA 245 church bell, etc. Not long after she saw these children again, and they reported their success. One girl, who had to serve as ^4ittle mother '^ to the other children when her mother went out to work, said that one day she nearly failed. Life had been hard for her and full of vexations, with no bright spot in it till she happened to notice the loveliness of the baby's hair. So, however it may have been in Gautama's age and country, surely the gospel we need is that of appreciation, and the view which we believe to be ideal is the ^^sacramental view of the world." The sweet home life we do not regard as second best, as inferior to that of the mendicant monk with the yellow robe. It is not as a concession to human weakness that we advise men and women to follow their higher leadings, to ac- cept love's guidance. "God hides himself within the love Of those whom we love best ; The smiles and tones that make our homes Are shrines by him possessed." One of Gautama's own countrymen, a great spiritual leader of this century, has expressed our feeling about the relation of the domestic and the religious life, in the following lines : ^ ^^ At midnight the would-be ascetic announced : *^ ^This is the very time to give up my home 1 Used by permission of the publishers, the Macmillan Com- pany. 246 . THE SYMPATHY OF EELiaiONS and seek for God. Ah, who has held me so long in delusion here?' ^^Grod whispered, ^I,' but the ears of the man were stopped. ^^With a baby asleep at her breast lay his wife, peacefully sleeping on one side of the bed. ^^The man said, ^Who are ye that have fooled me so long?' ^^The voice said again, ^They are God,' but he heard it not. *^The baby cried out in its dream, nestling close to its mother. ^^God commanded, ^Stop, fool, leave not thy home,' but still he heard not. ^*God sighed and complained, ^Why does my servant wander to seek me, forsaking me?' " — Tag ore. ^^ The Gardener." There is one other point at which the Bud- dhist view of human life and existence touches the living issues of the present. Gautama taught a system of intellectual and ethical cul- ture according to which no man could save an- other, and no help was to be looked for from the gods. No man ever preached a faith of greater ethical sternness. He proclaimed the doctrine that the law of cause and effect holds in the moral world, that we are parts of an im- personal moral order, and that ^^Our deeds still travel with us from afar; And what we have been makes us what we are." TRANSMIGRATION AND KARMA 247 This, of course, is very fine, as far as it goes. The sense of responsibility is immensely deep- ened by a realization of the extent to which our destiny is in our own hands. But one of the most important of all truths is that isolation is ruinous, that nothing, not science, not art, not even love or religion, is at its best when it is separated from what is naturally in living rela- tions with it, and when it is cultivated alone. This is as true of morality as of anything else. Ethical culture without religion is as disap- pointing as religion without ethical culture. ^* Holiness," as W. R. Inge has happily said, ^4s virtue rooted in the religious relation." All that Gautama taught about the relation of morality to character and happiness can be bet- ter taught by men who have not accepted the view that the universe and the body of man are empty and devoid of soul. Those among us who have made the transition from the one view to the other have not felt that their change was progress. Professor Clifford, for example, was reared in the faith expressed by Mrs. Browning in the lines, — "Oh, the little birds sang east and the little birds sang west ; And I smiled to think God's greatness flows around our incompleteness ; Round our restlessness his rest." When, later, his studies led him to feel that his childhood faith was untenable, and his view ap- 248 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS proximated that of Gautama, he described the experience as follows: *^We have seen the sun spring out of an empty heaven to light up a soulless earth; we have felt with utter loneli- ness that the Great Companion is dead.'' Another result is to be considered, one that is even more important than the sadness of those who feel themselves orphaned, who view our race as a band of marooned sailors, as a com- pany of aspiring beings on a dead cinder whirled through a lifeless universe which meets their lower needs but mocks at their higher longings. All our hope of social progress, of the development of a finer, nobler humanity is involved, since it is bound up with the sense of the reality and worth of the human personality. Nearly every movement for the saving of chil- dren, for improving the status of women, for the uplifting of the weak and helpless rests at last upon the growing respect and reverence for per- sonality. This age is coming to feel that im- personal thinking about men and women, the thinking that leads to the treatment of them as things instead of as human beings, is sacrile- gious. Everywhere the great need is to per- sonalize human relations, the relations between the sexes, between parents and children, be- tween employers and employees, between the members of different races and religions. When, therefore, we see the exceeding stress TEANSMIGEATION AND KAEMA 249 that Gautama laid upon his view that there is no personality, that the individuality is but a fleeting compound which is so far from being precious and deserving of reverence that it actually is the cause of all our sorrows, we may be thankful that this part of Buddhism at least has not succeeded in getting any hold in the West. So much had to be said in the interest of truth. Other precious interests, too, are at stake, our faith in life, in humanity, in God, and we imperil them when we deal in a superficial way with a religion which is based on their mili- tant denial. Moreover, it can be said, because the attitude of discrimination is entirely com- patible with the unreserved appreciation of that which stands criticism, and because at last we are really able to '^try all things and hold fast that which is good. ' ' Now the Noble Eightfold Path is a more pleasant thing to examine than the depressing view of life it sets out from or the Nirvana it leads to. For the peace which is no more troubled by the sorrows of the world is not our goal. Our ideal is love, which feels responsible, which is full of care, which is trou- bled over the imperfections remaining in the individual life and in the social order, which goes out ever in self-forgetting servi<3e, but which, with all its anxiety and even suffering, is worth all that it costs. 250 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS The steps of the Path are as follows : 1. Eight Views 5. Eight Livelihood 2. Eight Aspirations 6. Eight Effort 3. Eight Speech 7. Eight Mindfulness 4. Eight Conduct 8. Eight Eapture. Hardly any of the phrases mean to us exactly what they signified to Gautama, and to explain them fully and precisely would require more space than is at our disposal. But the path was intended to lead to freedom from superstition, to a peaceful, pure and honest life. Gautama's disciples were to be kindly, open and truthful; to hurt no living thing; to be alert, active and watchful in mind ; to have a true scale of values ; to discipline and control all natural impulses; and, finally, to enjoy the noblest happiness. The last remark seems to contradict what was said before. But that is not the fault of the ex- position. Indeed, Buddhism, like some other religions, is full of paradoxes, so that it is al- most impossible to make a statement about it which will meet with universal acceptance. Anyone, for example, who has studied the second and third ^' Noble Truths, '^ namely, that the suf- ferings of life are caused by desire and that the remedy is suppression of desire, would naturally and logically suppose that the Buddhist ideal was to be without emotion. This statement has, indeed, often been made. But Prof. Ehys Davids insists that this is incorrect. He points TEANSMIGEATION AND KAEMA 251 out that the second and the last steps in the eightfold path, that is, two of the eight, signify emotion, Eight Aspirations and Eight Eapture. Although the latter seems to include hypnotic trances, the point is well taken. Indeed, it is conclusively proved by the declarations of the Buddhist saints. It would be hard to find in literature more truly typical expressions of re- ligious peace and joy. Utterances such as the following abound : "There is no fire like unto passion's greed, No hapless cast of dice like unto hate, No ill that equals all that makes the self, Nor is there any greater bliss than peace. These things to know e'en as they really are, This is Nirvana, crown of happiness." "I what 'twas well to do, have done, and what Is very delectable, therein Was my delight; and thus through happiness Has happiness been sought after and won." Quoted by Mrs. Rhys Davids, " Buddhism," pp. 177, 231. And, finally, it must be said that, in spite of its defects, primitive Buddhism did include that which is best in all the great faiths of the world. It has nourished love, and where love is, God is. It teaches that there are ten fetters which bind us, and which he who enters the eightfold path must break, and, indeed, does break, since hav- ing once entered he never turns back. ^^The doctrine of the Final Assurance of the saints is a part of the Buddhist system." Gautama ex- 252 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS plains how each fetter is to be broken. When contending against the fifth, which is ill-will, ^*He lets his mind pervade one quarter of the world with thoughts of love, and so the second, and so the third, and so the fourth. And thus the whole wide world, above, below, around and everywhere, does he continue to pervade with heart of love, far reaching, grown great, and beyond measure. Just, Vasettha, as a mighty trumpeter makes himself heard, and that with- out difl&culty, towards all the four directions; even so of all things that have shape or form, there is not one that he passes by or leaves aside, but regards them all with mind set free and deep-felt love." A message like this can come only from a great, loving heart. And if it is true, and not a mere figure of speech, not an Oriental exaggeration, that whosoever loveth is born of God and knoweth God, we know that Gautama and the followers who caught his spirit had fellowship with the highest. They may not have had a place for God in their philosophy, and their view of life was unnecessarily gloomy, but the love which they nourished covers a mul- titude of errors of thought as well as sins of the flesh, and made them members of ^Hhe kingdom of God, which is righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit." CHAPTER XVIII BUDDHISM AS A LIVING FORCE E now turn to a very pleasant picture, that of Contemporary Buddhism at its best. For Buddhism is a living force, and not merely a dead religion. It is the province, not of the archaeologist, but of the student of the forces that are moulding the char- acters of men and inspiring their lives to-day. In Ceylon, Burma, China, and Japan are mil- lions of people upon whom the spirit of Gua- tama has descended and who strive to live by his law. We are now much more sure of our ground, for living voices speak to us. With all the resources of modern scholarship at our dis- posal, and with the disposition to be not only fair but generous, we are never quite sure that any statement of primitive Buddhism is just. It is not easy always to understand our con- temporaries with whom we have so much in common, and when we look across twenty-five centuries, and try to penetrate the veil woven by traditions and legends, to make due allow- ance for difference in circumstances, and for temperament, we cannot be sure that our state- ment preserves ^*the proportion of faith.'' 253 254 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS But now, fortunately, we have the books of those who have lived long among Buddhist peo- ples and so have an inside view of their reli- gion. Best of all, we have representatives of the ancient way of Gautama trying to make us understand their ideas, their ideals and spirit. There is, for instance, the valuable book, ^^The Soul of a People,'^ by H. Fielding Hall, who has lived long in Burma, and who was with the English expedition when the country was con- quered. He knows that ^^that which stirs the heart of a man is his religion whether he calls it his religion or not.'' He has loved the Burmese so deeply that he has caught much of their spirit, and he makes clear that it is still in large measure the spirit of the Gautama who said, ' ' Love each other and live in peace. ' ' He tells of the perplexity of the English soldiers at the conduct of the Buddhist priests. In the time of invasion, they did nothing to inspire re- sistance, but preached peace and love, and in- sisted that it is always, everywhere and under all circumstances, wrong to kill. With us in the West, religious conviction has often made good soldiers; witness Cromwell's Ironsides. But this is inconceivable to the Burmese Bud- dhists. Their faith '^is a terrible handicap to them in any fight; it delivers them bound into the hands of the enemy. . . . But it must never be forgotten that, if this faith does not assist the believer in defence, neither does it in of- BUDDHISM AS A LIVING FOECE 255 fence. What is so terrible as a war of religion! There can never be a war of Buddhism. No ravished country has ever borne witness to the prowess of the followers of the Buddha ; no mur- dered men have poured out their blood on their hearthstones, killed in his name; no ruined women have cursed his name to high Heaven. He and his faith are clean of the stain of blood. He was the preacher of the Great Peace, of love, of charity, of compassion, and so clear is his teaching that it can never be misunderstood. Wars of invasion the Burmese have waged, that is true, in Siam, in Assam, in Pegu. They are but men and men will fight. If they were per- fect in their faith, the race would have died out long ago. They have fought, but never in the name of their faith. They have never been able to prostitute its teaching to their own wants. Whatever the Burmans have done, they have kept their faith pure. When they have offended against the laws of the Buddha they have done so openly. Their souls are guiltless of hypoc- risy — for whatever that may avail them. They have known the difference between good and evil, even if they have not always followed the good." P. 85. A study of Contemporary Buddhism by those whose interest is religious as well as historical and scientific affords some delightful surprises. Many have the impression that the primitive forms of the great religions were higher than 256 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS the modern forms. It is doubtful if this is ever the case. Those who believe the first Christian churches were more nearly ideal than the churches of to-day have only to read Paul's let- ters to be undeceived. In his letters to the young church at Corinth he has to rebuke its members for gross immorality and for un- seemly conduct at the Lord's Supper, from which one goes away ^^ hungry and another drunken." There are divisions among them and their intelligence and spiritual discernment are so poorly developed that he can teach them only the most elementary truths. It was cer- tainly the conviction of the author of the Fourth Gospel that the Spirit of Truth would be with the disciples and lead them gradually into all truth. And history has in fact verified the prophecy of this great spiritual genius. Our ideas have changed, but the change has been in the nature of development. Eeligious truth is not like a diamond, which can be handed down from gen- eration to generation unchanged. Eather is it like a seed. Planted in the hearts and minds of men, it seems to die, whereas it germinates and produces new conceptions after its kind. So was it with the good seed sown by our great teacher in the minds of Palestinian peasants nineteen centuries ago, and so has it been with the ideas proclaimed by Gautama more than five centuries before his time. The two lines of development present .some BUDDHISM AS A LIVING FORCE 257 very interesting parallels. In Buddhism, as in Christianity, there are present both the Prot- estant and the Roman Catholic types of religion. The Lamaism of Tibet was a surprise to the first Catholic missionaries, because they found the religion of those whom they went to con- vert to be, in external features at least, very like their own. There were ^^ shaven priests, bells and rosaries, images and holy water and gorge- ous dresses; a service with double choirs, pro- cessions, creeds, mystic rites and incense, with the laity as spectators only; the worship of the Virgin, and of saints and angels ; fasts, confes- sions and purgatory ; images and pictures, huge monasteries, gorgeous cathedrals, a powerful hierarchy, cardinal and Pope. " Masses for the dead are also used in China and Japan. In the latter country we have something very like Prot- estantism. In the first place, Japanese Bud- dhism is divided into thirteen main sects and forty-four sub-sects. This in itself is an evi- dence of vitality. Whatever lives grows and what grows differentiates. A branching elm tree is the symbol of nearly everything alive, a plant or animal species, a race, a language or a religion. Whatever is precious to men, what- ever they think about long and intensely, will in time divide them. They will draw ever finer distinctions and new forms of thought will arise. Regrettable as this may seem from the point of view of those who have organizations to direct, 258 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS it is an inevitable incident of the process of de- velopment. Furthermore, the main lines of division be- tween sects and parties are much the same in the East and in the West. Modern Vishnuism in India, e.g., has its Calvinists and its Meth- odists. The former maintain the ^^ cat-hold'^ theory, according to which the seeker after sal- vation can do nothing for himself, but is like a kitten whose mother carries it holding it by the neck. The other party defends the ^' monkey'^ doctrine, saying that man can do something to promote his own salvation, that he is like the little monkey which co-operates with its mother by holding firmly to her as she moves it from place to place. Some of the Pure Land Sects of Buddhism in Japan present a remarkable similarity to Lutheranism. Their faith is in Amida Buddha, who in his infinite goodness provided that all who call on his name shall be saved, and on an overflowing gratitude to him for this the moral and religious life of men is to be based. The parallels are so close that efforts have been made to discover some relation of depend- ence between the two religions. These efforts are now generally admitted to be futile and hopeless. The slight relations known to exist between Buddhism and Christianity cannot ex- plain the similarity in lines of development or their result. We know, for instance, that the BUDDHISM AS A LIVING FOECE 259 Japanese who have developed a kind of Bud- dhist Lutheranism had never come in contact with Christianity of that type. The explana- tion lies in a different region. "Out of the heart of nature rolled, The burdens of the Bible old." So in the heart of man are the issues of life and out of the heart of man, with substantially identical needs and longings, have grown the great historic forms of religion. As we have seen, primitive thought was a unity, and the mature thought of the world is converging to- ward a new unity of religious conceptions. What we now have before us is that in the long intermediate period the lines of development are sometimes parallel. Those who would get at the heart and soul of living Buddhism can probably not do better than to read very carefully an exposition by one of its representatives. Among the best of these is ^'The Religion of the Samurai: A Study of Zen Philosophy and Discipline in China and Japan," by Kaiten Nukariya, Professor of Kei- o-gi-jiku University and of So-to-shu Buddhist College, Tokyo. London: Luzac & Co., 1913. This author frankly acknowledges that Zen is a product of development and that it is not to be found in the fossil remains of ancient thought, but he rightly declares that it is not to be con- demned on that account. Of the two great 260 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS schools of modern Buddhism he admits that Zen does not belong to the more conservative, Hinayanism, which is closer to the original teaching of Gantama, but to Mahayanism, the more liberal and progressive form, and he claims this as a merit. In his quaint but vigor- ous Japanese English he states his position as follows : '^Some Occidental scholars erroneously iden- tify Buddhism with the primitive faith of Hinayanism, and are inclined to call Mahaya- nism, a later developed faith, a degenerated one. If the primitive faith be called the genu- ine, as these scholars think, and the later devel- oped faith be the degenerated one, then the child should be called the genuine man and the grown-up people the degenerated ones; simi- larly, the primitive society must be the genuine and the modern civilization be the degenerated one. So also the earliest writings of the Old Testament should be genuine and the four Gos- pels be degenerated. . . . Zen is completely free from the fetters of old dogmas, dead creeds, and conventions of stereotyped past, that check the development of a religious faith and pre- vent the development of new truth. ' ^ P. 55. He thinks that those who would know Bud- dhism should not '^dig out the remains of Bud- dhist faith that existed twenty centuries ago,*' and which is pessimistically inclined, but turn their attention to the optimistic view of life BUDDHISM AS A LIVING FORCE 261 which was first introduced into Japan for the Samurai or military class, and which has * ^moulded the characters of many distinguished soldiers. Afterwards it gradually found its way to palaces as well as to cottages through literature and art, and at last permeated every fibre of national life.'^ The following are some of the main character- istics of Zen : ^*The Universe is the Scripture of Zen." This is the title of the third chapter, in which the author seeks to show that this form of Bud- dhism is a spiritual attitude which cannot be expressed in scripture. Even Gautama himself could not describe it. It is transmitted by con- tagion from life to life. There is ^'no need of scriptural authority for Zen, the to-days and to- morrows of actual life being its inspired pages. The Holy Writ of Zen is not parchment of palm leaves, but the heart and mind.'* These sen- tences indicate the main idea of this chapter which is devoted to the exposition of the convic- tion that ' ^ the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life,'' that we must try to get at the soul of things, and that to do this it is necessary to di- vine rather than define, to observe, sympathize and grasp and not to depend solely on criticism and calculation. But Jeremiah, Jesus, and Paul taught this. The question is how did the Zen thinkers find it out ? Could they have reached it except by the way of experience ? And if their 262 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS great convictions are reached along independent lines by people with such different traditions and in such unlike circumstances, is that not the best evidence of their truth? Savages have been found who could not count beyond four or five. But when they do develop, wherever they are, near the pole or under the equator, they eventually come to the same multiplication table. They cannot learn without coming upon the truths that lie directly in the path of their ad- vance. The identity of the highest Christian teaching with that of Zen shows that there is a unity of developed religious experience. ^^ Buddha, the Universal Spirit,'^ is the title of the remarkable fourth chapter, which will be understood at once by all who see any real mean- ing in the first chapter of the Gospel of John. It is observed that as the experience of Chris- tians deepen they turn more and more to this gospel. For them the divine Word (which is a very inadequate translation of Logos, which meant also reason and wisdom) is not ^^the technicality of an extinct philosophy, '' but a reality which they have found in the depths of their experience and which they know of them- selves, and not by hearsay only, to be the light that lighteth every man. This is what men mean to-day when they speak of ^^the Eternal Christ.'^ Now by Buddha, the Zen Buddhists do not mean Gautama, but a universal spirit. As BUDDHISM AS A LIVING FOECE 263 Emerson said that we find our life in its depths one with the Over-soul, they report a similar experience, namely, that of the ^^Enlightened Consciousness which is the Universal Spirit awakened in the human mind. This is not a bare intellectual insight, for it is full of beautiful emotions. It loves, caresses, embraces, and at the same time esteems all beings, being ever merciful to them. It has no enemies to conquer, no evil to fight with, but constantly finds friends to help, good to promote. Its warm heart beats in harmony with those of fellow beings. . . . Thus relying on our inner experience, which is the only direct way of knowing Buddha, we con- ceive Him as a Being with profound wisdom and boundless mercy, who loves all beings as His children, whom He is fostering, bringing up, guiding and teaching. ' ' Pp. 94, 95. Consider the significance and wonder of this statement. What does it mean, what can it mean, except that the Japanese Buddhists have found in the depths of their lives what Jeremiah found, what Paul was so ecstatic about, — the light that lighteth every man? All these inde- pendent observers are not reporting fancies, for fancies do not agree. What they profess to see is really there. When matters it that men on the other side of the world call it Buddha while we speak of it as the Logos, the Word, the Eter- nal Christ? Only savages believe that the name of a thing is a part of the thing. In the light of 264 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS this truth, we understand perfectly that St. Augustine was right in sajdng that what is now called Christianity was in the ancient world, that the true religion has been with men from the beginning, although it began to be called Christian only after Christ came in the flesh. And with the Zen disciples of Gautama in our minds, we may gladly assent to Justin Martyr's famous saying that ^^They who have lived with the Logos are Christians even though they have been considered atheists. '^ The fifth chapter on ^^The Nature of Man'' is very beautiful. First comes a consideration of the four theories of human nature, namely, that men are good by nature, that they are bad, that they are partly good and partly bad, and that they are neither good nor bad, but morally blank and that their character is determined by circumstances. All of these are rejected and the theory advanced that men are Buddha-na- tured, and that the difference between them is a matter of development. The bad are undevel- oped, the immature. The divine nature that lies implicit within them has not been awak- ened. ^^The bad are the good in the eggy the good are the bad on the wing." An action is good in proportion to the extent of the interests it serves. ^' An action is good when it promotes the interests of an individual or a family; bet- ter when it promotes those of a district or a country; best when it promotes those of the BUDDHISM AS A LIVING FORCE 265 whole world. . . . So-called bad persons, who are properly designated as ^ small persons' by Chinese and Japanese scholars, express their Buddha-nature to a small extent mostly within their own doors, while so-called good persons, or 'great persons,' as the Oriental scholars call them, actualize their Buddha-nature to a large extent in the whole sphere of a country, or the whole earth." Pp. 109, 110. This entirely ac- cords with the highest ethical conception yet reached by the West, namely, of goodness as the amplest expression of human nature, as fulness of life through organization. This view of man as the child of the perfect, as a partaker of the divine nature, is not differ- ent from the highest Christian view. Indeed, as we read the words of the Japanese professor, we seem to be hearing what we have long known, expressed in a different language. And if we ask him what the Zenists think of the universal spirit, he replies that **Some people named Him Absolute, as He is all light, all hope, all mercy, and all wisdom; some. Heaven, as He is high and enlightened; some, God, as He is sacred and mysterious; some. Truth, as He is true to Himself; some, Buddha, as He is free from illusion ; some. Cre- ator, as He is the creative force immanent in the universe ; some. Path, as He is the Way we must follow; some. Unknowable, as He is be- yond relative knowledge; some. Self, as He is 266 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS the Self of individual selves. All these names are applied to one Being, whom we designate by the name of Universal Life or Spirit." P. 95. But he warns us to remember that this divine reality is ^^too sublime to be named after a tra- ditional deity, too spiritual to be symbolized by human art, too full of life to be formulated in terms of mechanical science, too free to be rationalized by intellectual philosophy, too uni- versal to be perceived by the bodily senses ; but everybody can feel its irresistible power, its invisible presence, and touch its heart and soul within himself. ' ^ . . . ^ ^ Thus Buddha is unnam- able, indescribable, and indefinable, but we pro- visionally call him Buddha. ' ' Pp. 78, 79. Has any Christian theologian or prophet expressed in a better or clearer way the highest that thought has yet reached? Is not this view practically identical with that of Goethe as stated in Faust's reply to Margaret when the simple girl asks him if he believed in God? '^Him who dare name And who proclaim, Him I believe? Who that can feel, His heart can steel, To say: I believe him not? The AU-embracer, All-sustainer, Holds and sustains he not Thee, me, himself? Lifts not the Heaven its dome above? BUDDHISM AS A LIVING FORCE 267 Doth not the firm-set earth beneath us lie? And beaming tenderly with looks of love, Climb not the everlasting stars on high? Do I not gaze into thine eyes? Nature's impenetrable agencies, Are they not thronging on thy heart and brain, Viewless, or visible to mortal ken, Around thee weaving their mysterious chain? Fill thence thy heart, how large soever it be ; And in the feeling when thou utterly art blest, Then call it what thou wilt, — Call it Bliss! Heart! Love! God! I have no name for it ! 'Tis feeling all; Name is but sound and smoke Enclouding Heaven's glow." In a paragraph entitled ^^Our Conception of Buddha is not Final," the author provides for the future. He declares that as our concep- tions surpass those of the men of the past, so to those who will come after us new and higher visions will be revealed. ^^We should always bear in mind that the world is alive, and chang- ing, and moving. It goes on to disclose a new phase, or add a new truth. . . . Therefore Uni- versal Life may in the future possibly unfold its new spiritual content, yet unknown to us. . . . Thus to believe in Buddha is to be content and thankful for the grace of His, and to hope for the infinite unfoldment of His glories in man. ' ^ The Optimism of Zen. The history of Bud- dhism throws a brilliant light on the nature of 268 THE SYMPATHY OF EELiaiONS huinan nature. For its transformation shows that even if men accept a pessimistic and atheis- tic system of intellectual and ethical culture, they will inevitably make of it in time an opti- mistic theism or pantheism. Nothing is more curious than the way in which Zen interprets the fact of change. Gautama and his contempo- raries, like many in other lands and centuries, have seen in that constant change without and within which nature presents only a reason for gloom and the basis for a philosophy of despair. They grieve because youth is fleeting and mourn because the morning lasts for but a few hours. Since all is impermanent, nothing is worth while — that is the argument. But the modern disciples of Gautama ask — ^^What would you have? You lament the brief life of the morn- ing-glory. Do you really like glass flowers bet- ter?'^ It is just because there is change that there is hope. And so the Japanese professor names his paragraphs ^ ' The World in the Mak- ing," ^*The Progress and Hope of Life,'^ ^^The Betterment of Life,'' and tells us in glowing sentences that man is yet in his cradle, that the golden age is ahead of us, that ^4ife is growing richer and nobler step by step and becoming more and more hopeful as we advance in the Way of Buddha." The aim of life, says this Gospel according to the Japanese, ^4s to bring out man's inborn light of Buddha-nature to illu- mine the world, to realize the universal brother- BUDDHISM AS A LIVING FORCE 269 hood of all sentient beings, to attain to Enlight- enment, and to enjoy peace and joy to which Universal Spirit leads us/' Surely one who can give us back our highest thought so well does not need conversion. His religion at its best is identical with ours at our best. That is, it is Religion. He is as far from the pessimism of primitive Buddhism as we are from those conceptions of our ancestors which have cast such darkness on the world. He and his people have found the secret, the spiritual attitude from which the good life flows. He has taken life by the right handle. Think once more of the *'Four Noble Truths" of Gau- tama and then ponder these beautiful words of his modern disciple : *^Life is full of anxieties, pains, struggles, brutalities, disappointments and calamities. "We love life, however, not only for its smooth- ness, but for its roughness; not only for its pleasure, but for its pain ; not only for its hope, but for its fear ; not only for its flowers, but for its frost and snow. . . . Adversity is salt to our lives, as it keeps them from corruption, no mat- ter how bitter to the taste it may be. It is the best stimulus to body and mind, since it brings forth latent energy that may remain dormant but for it. . . . Troubles and difficulties call forth our divine force which lies deeper than our ordinary faculties, and which we never be- fore dreamed we possessed. How can we sup- 270 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS pose that we, the children of Buddha, are put at the mercy of petty troubles, or intended to be crushed by obstacles? . . . Difficulties are no match for the optimist, who does not fly from them, but welcomes them. He has a mental prism which can separate the insipid white light of existence into bright hues. He has a mental alchemy by which he can produce golden in- struction out of the dross of failure. He has a spiritual magic which makes the nectar of joy out of the tears of sorrow. He has a clairvoy- ant eye that can perceive the existence of hope through the iron walls of despair.". . . ^^ Therefore we must practically sow optimism, and habitually nourish it in order to reap the blissful fruit of Enlightenment.'^ Pp. 172^174. Zen, or Dhyana, is also a method of medita- tion, of letting bygones be bygones, of leaving behind vain regrets, of keeping the mind buoy- ant and serene, of coming to conscious union with the Universal Life, of reaching that Nir- vana which is realizing that ^Hhe world is the holy temple of Buddha.'' One more quotation from our spiritual kinsman across the sea may be given, one which every religious mind will understand. Indeed, if for Buddha other names for the same reality be substituted, names more familiar to us, God, Christ, Over-Soul, Holy Spirit, the passage might be taken for a selection from some Christian writing. ^*We must purge out all the stains in our hearts, obey- BUDDHISM AS A LIVING FORCE 271 ing Buddha's command audible in the inner- most self of ours. It is the great mercy of His that, however sinful, superstitious, wayward, and thoughtless, we still have a light within us which is divine in its nature. '^ P. 169. This * innermost wisdom, pure and divine, the Mind of Buddha, is the divine light, the inner heaven, the key to all moral treasures, the centre of thought and consciousness, the source of all in- fluence and power, the seat of kindness, justice, sympathy, impartial love, humanity, and mercy, the measure of aU things. When this innermost wisdom is fully awakened, we are able to realize that each and everyone of us is identical in spirit, in essence, in nature, with the universal life or Buddha, that each ever lives face to face with Buddha, that each is beset by the abun- dant grace of the Blessed One, that He arouses his moral nature, that He opens his spiritual eyes, that He unfolds his new capacity, that He appoints his mission, and that life is not an ocean of birth, disease, old age and death, nor the vale of tears, but the holy temple of Buddha, the Pure Land, where he can enjoy the bliss of Nirvana. '^ Pp. 133, 134. The ^^ sympathy of religions'' thus turns out to be the sympathy of men who realize that the great religions have something more in common than rites, ceremonies and ecclesiastical orders and organizations, that each religion at its best is not merely like unto, but is identical with, 272 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS every other religion at its best. The clear per- ception of this truth means much for the peace and unity of the world. A young man once said, *^The trouble with the philosophers is that they never get anywhere/' and the same thing has often been said of the theologians. There is much to explain and to excuse this attitude, but it is none the less wrong. Those who are abreast of the best scholarship of to-day, and who have insight enough to interpret properly its results, see clearly the great lines of religious thought converging toward conceptions which are to inspire and sustain the spiritual life of the race through the unknown future. The light which was from the beginning, the Light of Asia, the Light of the World, the light that light eth every man, shines ever more brightly, and the shadows begin to flee away. CHAPTER XIX HINDUISM AT ITS BEST lEDANTISM and Primitive Buddhism are essentially thought paths to sal- vation. The latter, it is true, involved some ethical elements, but it made a considerable demand upon the intelligence of those who sought in it a way of escape from constant rebirth, from that sorrowful experi- ence which the individual human life involves. It was a philosophy the first aim of which was to destroy the ^'delusion of being a self." The Vedanta is pure metaphysics, and no one can get help from it who cannot convince himself that the world is an illusion, that his sufferings are unreal, and that he is God and the whole of God. These requirements can be met by compara- tively few, even in India, and it is not strange, therefore, that there, as elsewhere, the vast ma- jority of men have taken the way of religion, of devotional faith and love. Lofty summits have been reached by those who have sought the highest through insight and the sublimation of religious experience. It is with these that 273 274 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS we are now concerned and not with the super- stitions which they have left below them as they climbed. The Vishnuite, or Vaishnava, religion seems to have been founded by Krishna Vasudeva, who was a popular hero before he came to be regarded as an incarnation of Vishnu. His legend is interesting rather than morally edi- fying, at least when judged by western stand- ards. He called his God Bhagavat, the Ador- able One. His followers, the Bhagavatas, be- lieved their deity to be infinite, eternal and full of grace. Salvation was perpetual bliss in his presence. No religion long retains its original purity. It is changed by those who receive it, for it must make terms with what is already in their minds. Moreover, its disciples have to define their position in relation to other sys- tems, and in such case each is influenced by the other. It was not long, therefore, before the Krishna religion adopted important ideas from the Sankhya-Yoga philosophy with which it was logically incompatible. Then it was captured by the Brahmanic priesthood, who induced the Bhagavatas to believe that the Adorable One was identical with Vishnu and who accepted Krishna himself as one of his incarnations. This device has been used for ages by the Brah- mans, and it is very effective from the point of view of the interests of their class. For the worshippers nothing is really changed but some HINDUISM AT ITS BEST 275 names, while they have the advantages of being a caste recognized by the priesthood, which in this way gains and keeps the support of all classes, all castes, all religions. No transfer of loyalty is required, the local and aboriginal deities being simply identified with one of the greater gods recognized by all. There are other points of view, however, from which this seemingly happy plan of spreading the mantle of Hinduism over even the most savage superstitions of wild tribes may be re- garded. It gives standing and official recogni- tion to what should be outgrown and left behind as quickly as possible. Moreover, in partner- ships between religions of two stages of culture, almost the whole advantage generally accrues to the lower. The downpuU is stronger than the uplift. The higher interpretation which the cultivated place upon crude beliefs and rites is ignored by those who have a living interest in them, and it is not of much importance to those who have reached a more advanced stage of de- velopment. In fact, all high values are difficult to main- tain. In his ^^ Social Psychology," Prof. E. A. Eoss points out that ^'just as bodies of differ- ent temperature interchange heat, so classes on different levels interchange characteristics, and to a certain extent the superior borrows from the inferior. Slang or argot invades literature ; darky songs win the entree to the drawing- 276 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS room,'^ etc. ^^ Whites in contact with abo- rigines let down. Certain of the first trans- Alleghany settlers become so Indianized as to wear a buckskin dress, marry a squaw, and let the scalp-lock grow.'^ That the down-pull is very strong is shown by the fact that these ^^ squaw-men '^ often slip down not only to the customs and habits of wild tribes, but to their moral and social ideals as well. Those who suc- cessfully meet the danger of losing their higher culture and descending several rungs on the ladder of civilization do so only through an intense and almost intolerant conservatism. It is in this way, and in this way alone that, as Miss Schreiner has shown, the Boer has for two cen- turies maintained the civilization which he took with him into the wilds of South Africa. *^ You say he still wears the little short jacket of his great-great-grandfather 's great-grandfather ? Yes, and had he given it up, it would have been to wear none at all! You say he stuck gener- ation after generation to the straight-backed elbow chair and the hard backed sofa of his forefathers? Yes, and had he given them up, it would have been to adopt nothing more aes- thetic ; it would have been to sit upon the floor ! . . . You say he had only one book, and clung to it with a passion that was almost idolatry? Yes, but had he given up that one book, it could not have been to fill his library with the world ^s literature ; it would have been to have no litera- HINDUISM AT ITS BEST 277 ture at all ! That one book, which he painfully spelled through, and so mightily treasured, was his only link with the world's great stream of thought and knowledge ... his one possible inlet to the higher spiritual and intellectual life of the race. ... If the Boer had forsaken his Bible, we should have found him to-day a sav- age, lower than the Bantus about him, because decayed. In nothing has he so shown his strength as in clinging to it. *^To one who wisely studies the history of the African Boer, nothing is more pathetic than this strange, fierce adherence to the past. That cry, which unceasingly for generations has rung out from the Boer woman's elbow chair, ^My chil- dren, never forget you are white men! Do al- ways as you have seen your father and mother do!' was no cry of a weak conservatism, fear- ful of change; it was the embodiment of the passionate determination of a great, little peo- ple, not to lose the little it possessed, and so sink in the scale of being. To laugh at the con- servatism of the Boer is to laugh at the man who, floating above a whirlpool, clings fiercely with one hand to the only outstretching rock he can reach, and who will not relax his hold on it by one finger till he has found something firmer to grasp." Quoted by Eoss, ^^ Social Psychol- ogy," pp. 152, 153. The English settlers in America realized the barbarizing influence of the wilderness, and 278 THE SYMPATHY OF EELiaiONS struggled to ^^ avoid a breach of continuity in the higher spiritual life of the community/' To this end they strove to keep up their connec- tion with the mother country and founded schools and colleges in the new land. How they understood their danger and sought to meet it may be read in their statement of their purpose in founding Harvard College : ^^ After God had carried us safe to New England, and wee had builded our houses, provided necessities for our livelihood, rear'd convenient places for God's worship, and settled the civill government : One of the next things we longed for and looked after was to advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity ; dreading to leave an illiterate min- istery to the churches, when our present minis- ters shall lie in the dust." New England^ s First Fruits y in respect of the progress of learn- ing , in the Colledge at Cambridge, in Massachu- setts-hay, London, 1643. While the Brahmans have managed to retain their privileged position in this way, namely, by promulgating the theory that the gods of the native religions are forms of one supreme God, or that they are incarnations of Vishnu, pure religion has gained nothing by the compromise, since for *^the uninstructed worshipper his gods remain what they were before this benevolent assimilation.'' A further consequence is that there is created an ^^ impression of simplicity and unity which is widely remote from the truth, HINDUISM AT ITS BEST 279 and Vishnuism and Sivaism are actually vast amorphous conglomerates of the most hetero- geneous elements." To give an account of the many discordant varieties of religion that have been incorporated into Vishnuism, or of the hundreds of sects which continually arise, flourish and decay within it, is not part of our plan, and such a study would be without profit, for no one can remember, even for a little while, such a series of dissolving views. The gene- alogy of what is noblest in it seems to be as follows : — The Adorable One, the supreme God of Krishna, was identified with Vishnu, who was originally */a much more civilized god than Siva, as becomes the gods of more civilized tribes or regions.'^ Vishnu is worshipped in his incar- nations in Krishna, Eama, and twenty-one oth- ers, and there is one more incarnation yet to come. The theory is that at each appearance of the divine the world is made better, but that as the inspiration fades out of life, men gradually sink back into wickedness, so that new avataras, or descents of the god into the world, become necessary. Eama, like Krishna, was a hero and founder of a sect, before he was regarded as Vishnu in the flesh. The tendency that raised these men to the godhead may be observed to- day in India in the extravagant respect which certain sects pay to their Gurus. Once such a teacher or master is chosen, the disciples make 280 THE SYMPATHY OF RELiaiONS no reservations in their devotion, holding freely at his disposal their property, their persons, their all. The Bhagavata religion is of unknown date, but certainly is as old as the fourth century b. c. Its best is much like our best. It proclaims a personal God, who is to be loved with the whole heart, who is to be served in moral ways, and who gives eternal happiness to his people. The book of this religion is the Bhagavad-Gita, which is a poem of love to God. In it are to be found very beautiful sentiments and expressions of lofty faith, of which the following are among the best: ^^That worshipper of mine who cherishes no hate against any being, but is full only of friend- liness and compassion, who is free from self- seeking and from the illusion of self, to whom sorrow and joy are the same, always patient and content, given to meditation, self-controlled, resolute, with heart and mind set on me, and loves me — ^he is dear to me. He before whom none are disquieted, and who is disquieted be- fore none, free from elation and vexation, fear and disquiet — he also is dear to me. . . . He who does all his works for my sake, who is wholly devoted to me, who loves me, who is free from attachment to earthly things, and without hate to any being, he, son of Pandu, enters into me.'' Translation of G. F. Moore, History of Religions, p. 333. HINDUISM AT ITS BEST 281 The reader who is delighted with such selec- tions and turns from the books in which they are quoted to the Gita itself is more or less dis- appointed. For he finds there, as in other sa- cred books, much that is on a lower level. He finds also a mixture of thought, confused and contradictory ideas, in one passage the concep- tion of a personal God, in another that of an impersonal world-soul, and in a third the identi- fication of the two. The doctrine of personal immortality is proclaimed and also that of ab- sorption of the personality into the absolute. The Higher Critics have a problem here. Part of the book appears to date from the second cen- tury B. c. and part from the second century a. d,, but it is still uncertain whether the contradic- tions in it are due to its being an expression of a transitional stage of religious thought or to the attempt to combine conceptions and ideas that are really incapable of being harmonized. This Bhagavata religion of impassioned and personal love of the one God, this mystical and ethical faith, in which the worshipper sought communion with the Adorable One, was, accord- ing to Evelyn Underbill, one of '^Life's false starts. It was a reaction against the arid per- formances of the religious intellect, a premature movement towards levels on which the human mind was still too weak to dwell. Thwarted and finally captured by the philosophizing tendency of Brahmanism, against which it was in origin 282 THE SYMPATHY OF RELIGIONS directed, it sank to a static and intellectnalistic system of vaguely pantheistic piety/' *'The Mystic Way," p. 22. Other influences, how- ever, conspired to produce this result. This re- ligion in its early form was that of a class, namely, the warriors. Moreover, it was only for the wealthy. Official Vaishnavism is costly, and this is one reason for the spread of Sivaism, which is cheap enough for the poor. (See G. 0. Grierson, ^^Encycl. of Eeligion and Ethics," Article, Bhakti-Marga.) The consequence was that by the eleventh century a. d. it was at a low ebb and had almost disappeared. At this discouraging time, however, religion was ^^ new-given," and India rediscovered faith and love. The greatest religious revolution in her history began, and ''sl wave of passionate devotion, demanding as its object a personal and attainable God, swept over the land, under the influence of three great spiritual teachers and their disciples." Nothing in the spiritual his- tory of mankind is comparable to it except the beginning of Christianity. Nor is the impulse yet spent. Its influence is felt to-day by at least a hundred and fifty million lives. The first of the leaders of this revival was Eamanuja, whose name is borne by one of the many sects into which Vishnuism is divided. As we have seen, the Upanishads contain expressions of theistic and pantheistic tendencies as well as the ideas systematized by Sankara in the Ve- HINDUISM AT ITS BEST 283 danta. These were developed by Eamanuja in such a way that the result was not unlike Chris- tianity in certain fundamental respects. The impersonal Brahman was rejected for a per- sonal and gracious God, human souls were inde- structible, and the world was not illusion, but what Goethe called it, the living visible garment of God. "In Being's floods, in Action's storm, I walk and work, above, beneath. Work and weave in endless motion! Birth and Death, An infinite ocean; A seizing and giving The fire of the Living; 'Tis thus at the roaring Loom of Time I ply. And weave for God the Garment thou seest Him by." The Ramanujas teach that the human body is the temple of God, that man has communion with the highest in his own heart, that increas- ing likeness to God and eternal happiness in the divine presence are his destiny. Involuntary sin may be expiated by ceremonial acts, but vol- untary sin, intentional wrong doing, of which the Ramanujas think there is very little among them, is forgiven those who turn to the Ador- able One in faith and love. The likeness to Christianity is so striking that attempts have been made to show that Bhakti- Marga is our own religion in Indian form. And, indeed, Christianity has been in India from very 284 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS early times. That Ramanuja may have been in- fluenced by it, directly or indirectly, is not im- possible. That Ramananda had some acquaint- ance with it is not improbable, and in the case of Kabir there is little doubt. There is no way to decide this question definitely at the present time. Moreover, the matter is not of very great importance, since it is generally admitted that the religion of love to and communion with a personal God of love and grace is indigenous in India, however greatly it may have been rein- forced by influences from Christian sources. The great significance of this movement, accord- ing to Evelyn Underbill, lies in the fact that in the Vaishnava religion of Bhakti-marga, Hindu mysticism has turned away from the *^ negative path,^' which history had proved to be only a blind alley, and assumed the ^^ outgoing and fruitful, world-renewing attitude of Love.'^ Those who have taken the ^^main road of Brah- min theology '^ have not reached a more abun- dant life, but have ended in a Quietism, ^^an other-worldly specialism, so complete as to in- hibit all action, feeling, thought: a condition which escapes from love no less than hate, from joy no less than pain; an absorption into the Absolute which involves the obliteration of everything that we know as personality. '' The religion of the West is, in part, a mysticism, but it is active and positive. Those who have found what Harnack calls the secret of Christianity, HINDUISM AT ITS BEST 285 who live the ^^ eternal life in the midst of time/' seek the development of personality, not escape from it, and for them *Hhe world assumes not the character of illusion but the character of sacrament; and spirit finds Spirit in the lilies of the field, no less than in the Unknowable Abyss.*' ^^The Mystic Way/' Ch. IL CHAPTER XX HINDUISM AT ITS BEST: KABIB NE of the greatest of the leaders of this mystical religion of love was Kabir, 1440-1518. He was an unlet- tered man of lowly origin, by occupa- tion a weaver, a disciple of Eamananda, a mu- sician and poet, the founder of a religious sect and indirectly the creator of a state. The Sikhs were at first a religious community, a militant sect based on the teaching of Kabir, and in the course of an interesting history they have become a nation. Like all great mystics, Kabir is hard to classify. He appears to have been a Mohammedan, a Sufi, and is not unlike the great Persian mystics, Sadi, Hafiz, and Jalalu 'ddin Eumi. Yet he is one of the greatest exponents of the religious ideas of Eamananda and Bhakti-Marga, and at times speaks lan- guage familiar to Christian ears. Such men are the cosmopolitans of religion. They are original, and find the truth where the great seers and prophets of the race have always found it ; they report what they see and know, not what they have learned from other men. Kabir 's 286 HINDUISM AT ITS BEST: KABIB 287 poems have recently been published, and they show that his insight and religious enthusiasm did not impair his sanity. Many of them are of extraordinary beauty and express in an Ori- ental way some of the finest inspirations of the West. It is true that the East is often frank where we are reserved, and with our feelings of propriety we are perplexed by the frequent use of passionate human love as a symbol of devotion to the divine. We are not surprised to learn that ' ' this movement, on its lower and popular side, gave support to the most erotic and least desirable aspects of the Krishna cult,'^ so that one who realizes how much of good there is in it, feels it necessary to warn us that this fact ^^ ought not to prejudice our judgment of its higher and purer aspect/' No faith ought to be condemned for its by-products, but it is only the part of a justifiable prudence and of loyalty to the truth to note them if experience has shown them to be a danger. A few selections will serve better than any description to give an impression of this mystic poet and religious genius. The following quo- tations are from '^ Songs of Kabir.^' * Servant, where dost thou seek Me? Lo! I am beside thee. 1 am neither in temple nor in mosque : I am neither in Kaaba nor in Kailash : 1 These selections from " Songs of Kabir " are used by per- mission of the publishers, the Macmillan Company. 288 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS Neither am I in rites and ceremonies, nor in Yoga and re- nunciation. If thou art a true seeker, thou shalt at once see Me: thou shalt meet Me in a moment of time. Kabir says, "0 Sadhu! God is the breath of all breath." There is nothing but water at the holy bathing places ; and I know that they are useless, for I have bathed in them. The images are all lifeless, they cannot speak; I know, for I have cried aloud to them. — XLII. Further quotations of this kind are unneces- sary to explain Kabir 's fate. However great their tolerance for the eccentricities of an ac- knowledged saint, the Brahman priesthood could not endure an opposition that threatened their very existence, and the too clear sighted poet was driven into exile. He proclaims the folly of those who go to the wilderness to find God, and of those who seek to draw near to him by ascetic severities, or by dyeing their garments instead of dyeing their *' minds in the colors of love.'' If we can but realize it, we do not need to leave home, for our common daily life is divine. "He is dear to me indeed who can call back the wanderer to his home. In the home is the true union, in the home is enjoyment of life: why should I forsake my home and wander in the forest? If Brahma helps me to realize truth, verily I will find both bondage and deliverance in home. Kabir says: "The home is the abiding place; in the home is reality; the home helps to attain Him Who is real. So stay where you are, and all things shall come to you in time." — XL. HINDUISM AT ITS BEST: KABIR 289 We can reach the goal without crossing the road. — LXXVI. Your Lord is near: yet you are climbing the palm-tree to seek Him.— XXI. Some of the poems are magnificent psalms, No. XVII ranks with the most glorious religious poetry of the world. Kabir exults in a view that is the exact opposite of Gautama's first '* Noble Truth.'' The universe to him is the expression of love and joy. The earth is His joy; His joy is the sky; His joy is in the flashing of the sun and the moon; His joy is the beginning, the middle, and the end; His joy is eyes, darkness, and light. Oceans and waves are His joy: . . . and life and death, union and separation, are all His plays of joy ! His play the land and water, the whole universe! His play the earth and the sky ! In play is the Creation spread out, in play it is established. The whole world, says Kabir, rests in His play, yet still the Player remains unknown. — LXXXII. For him the world is love and play and joy and music. A wonderful lotus blooms at its heart. ^^ Music is all around it, and there the heart partakes of the joy of the Infinite Sea." *^Look within, and behold how the moonbeams of that Hidden One shine in you." In order to realize the splendor of this poet's view, one should re-read the 19th, 139th, the 103rd and 104th psalms, and immediately after ponder such poems as numbers 16, 17, 76 and 82 in this collection. 290 THE SYMPATHY OF RELIGIONS A few lines from No. 17 ^ will give some idea of these expressions of vision and of love. The light of the sun, the moon, and the stars shines bright : ^The melody of love swells forth, and the rhythm of love's detachment beats the time. Day and night, the chorus of music fills the heavens; and Kabir says, "My Beloved One gleams like the lightning flash in the sky." Do you know how the moments perform their adoration? Waving its row of lamps, the universe sings in worship day and night, There are the hidden banner and the secret canopy: There the sound of the unseen bells is heard. Kabir says : " There adoration never ceases ; there the Lord of the Universe sitteth on His throne." Behold what wonderful rest is in the Supreme Spirit ! and he enjoys it, who makes himself meet for it. Held by the cords of love, the swing of the Ocean of Joy sways to and fro ; and a mighty sound breaks forth in song. See what a lotus blooms there without water! and Kabir says, " My heart's bee drinks its nectar." There falls the rhythmic beat of life and death; Rapture wells forth, and all space is radiant with light. There the Unstruck Music is sounded; it is the music of the love of the three worlds. There millions of lamps of sun and of moon are burning; There the drum beats, and the lover swings in play. 1 From " Songs of Kabir." Used by permission of the pub- lishers, the Macmillan Company. HINDUISM AT ITS BEST: KABIR 291 There love-songs resound, and light rains in showers; and the worshipper is entranced in the taste of the heav- enly nectar. Look upon life and death; there is no separation between them. The right hand and the left hand are one and the same. Kabir says : " There the wise man is speechless ; for this truth may never be found in Vedas or in books.'' It is not possible here to give quotations suf- ficient to illustrate the different aspects of Kabir 's thought and to show the great sanity of his nature. He escapes the danger of excessive emotionalism, yet he does not inhumanly sacri- fice the most precious of interests on the altar of metaphysics. He has the wisdom to see that life is the expression, not of a few tendencies only, but of many, and the unity he seeks is one that includes them all. There are many poems which express a sense of intimate communion with God, that *^union-in-separateness of God and the soul," familiar to the experience of Jews and Christians, but which the Hindus have found it so hard to attain. In reading Kabir one realizes that when religious feeling comes from a sufficient depth and is associated with thought of adequate elevation it is not sectarian, but universal and human. He has given expres- sion to the great intuitions, longings and needs of the heart, and some of his sentences seem to be but paraphrases of passages from the psalms and prophecies of Israel. ^ ^ As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after 292 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS thee, God. My soul thirsteth for God/^ He for whom these words are spirit and life will have no difficulty in recognizing the same spirit in Kabir's words: ^^As the night-bird Chakor gazes all night at the moon: so Thou art my Lord and I am Thy servant. From the begin- ning until the ending of time, there is love be- tween Thee and me : and how shall such love be extinguished? Kabir says: ^As the river en- ters into the ocean, so my heart touches Thee.' '^ XXXIV. Poem LVn sings of ^^that Word from which the Universe springeth.'^ The conception is closely akin to that of the first chapter of the Fourth Gospel. There are two possible ways of accounting for this fact : the poet has come under Christian influences or he has discovered for himself ^Hhe light that lighteth every man.'' And even if the former rather than the latter be the true explanation, it is significant that the insight and feeling of this Mohammedan-Hindu seer are so naturally and so well expressed in forms which were created to clothe Greek and Christian spiritual thought. CHAPTER XXI HINDUISM AT ITS BEST: BABINDBANATH TAGOBE EMPTING though it is to linger over the poems of so great a spiritual ge- nius as Kabir, we shall do well, if we wish to know Hinduism at its best, to turn from him to its greatest living representa- tive. Nothing could be more to our purpose than the exposition of Tagore, who is remark- able in several ways and whose achievements have won him recognition and distinction in the West. He is a musician and poet of extraordi- nary influence in his own country, and all his writings have a deep human interest. Some of the poems in the collection entitled ^^The Cres- cent Moon'' are of exquisite beauty. ^^Gitan- jali" is a record of some of the poet's conversa- tions with the Over-Soul. In them is the spirit of a fine, brave, sweet humanity. One may be given as an indication of the way the poet faces life and death. ^ ^^I have got my leave. Bid me farewell, my brothers! I bow to you all and take my de- 1 Used by permission of the publishers, the Macmillan Com- pany. 293 294 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS partnre. Here I give back the keys of my door — and I give up all claims to my house. I only ask for last kind words from you. We were neighbors for long, but I received more than I could give. Now the day has dawned and the lamp that lit my dark corner is out. A sum- mons has come and I am ready for my journey. At this time of my parting, wish me good luck, my friends ! The sky is flushed with the dawn and my path lies beautiful. ^^Ask not what I have to take with me there. I start on my journey with empty hands and expectant heart. ^^I shall put on my wedding garland. Mine is not the red-brown dress of the traveller, and though there are dangers on the way I have no fear in my mind. *^The evening star will come out when my voyage is done and the plaintive notes of the twilight melodies be struck from the King's gateway. ^^I was not aware of the moment when I first crossed the threshold of this life. What was the power that made me open out into this vast mystery like a bud in the forest at midnight? ^^When in the morning I looked upon the light I felt in a moment that I was no stranger in this world, that the inscrutable without name and form had taken me in its arms in the form of my own mother. *'Even so, in death the same unknown will ap- EABINDEANATH TAGORE 295 pear as ever known to me. And because I love this life, I know I shall love death as well. ^^The child cries out when from the right breast the mother takes it away, in the very next moment to find in the left one its consolation." Is not this the Indian equivalent of Tenny- son's ^'Crossing the Bar"? What follows is equally beautiful : ^^When I give up the helm, I know that the time has come for thee to take it. And now I am eager to die into the deathless. . . . Let all my songs gather together their diverse strains into a single current and flow to a sea of silence in one salutation to thee. Like a flock of home- sick cranes flying night and day back to their mountain nests, let all my life take its voyage to its eternal home in one salutation to thee." There is one book, however, which was written by Tagore with the express purpose of bringing western readers ^4nto touch with the ancient spirit of India as revealed in the sacred texts and in the life of to-day." For this work the writer has been prepared by his religious train- ing and spiritual experience as well as by his scholarship. He was reared in a home in which the Upanishads were not mere ^^ mummied specimens of human thought and aspiration and as such possessing only a retrospective and archaeological interest," but they were used in daily worship and were obviously the inspira- tion of his father, the Maharshi Debendranath 296 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS Tagore, a man of great force of character and saintly life. He pleads with us to remember that ^^AU the great utterances of man have to be judged not by the letter but by the spirit — the spirit which unfolds itself with the growth of life in history,'' and he reminds us that only in this way can we get to know the real meaning of Christianity. What is important is the re- ligion of to-day, and not merely that of the past. In the preface to this book, ^^Sadhana,''^ he ex- plains that his treatment of the religion of India is not historical or technical, but vital, since to miss the spirit of it, as many do, is to miss all. The contrasting spiritual attitudes of the East and the West are set forth by Tagore with great clearness. He shows that for us nature means the physical world, that is, nature with man left out. We emphasize the difference between the natural and the human. For Indian thought this break does not exist, but nature and human nature are like bud and blossom, and there is a deep feeling of kinship and unbroken relation- ship with all that is. India seeks not to subdue nature but to realize man's harmony with it. The result, so far as she succeeds, is not power but joy in spiritual vision and sense of vital union. The Oriental feels the need of realizing his place in the infinite, and never quite forgets 1 The sentences quoted from " Sadhana," in this chapter and the paragraph at the chapter's end are reprinted with the per- missioB pf the puhlishers, the Macmillan Co. RABINDRANATH TAGORE 297 the great frame in which our life is set. In the pursuit of her ideal of perfection and the en- deavor to find peace in a sense of harmony with the Infinite, India has neglected, as Tagore sees and frankly acknowledges, other things which she ought to have regarded. Living the contem- plative life too exclusively, she has paid little attention to organization and to the use of the resources of the earth, and so has not achieved worldly success. He also perceives that what is needed is not for Hindus to give up their ideals or for Europeans and Americans to sur- render theirs, but that ^^It is best for the com- merce of the spirit that people differently situ- ated should bring their products into the mar- ket of humanity, each of which is complemen- tary and necessary to the others." P. 12. Tagore 's use of the Upanishads is very in- structive. He fixes upon the sentences which express his high and beautiful faith, and ignores the rest. The passages on which the Vedanta and Sankhya systems and Buddhism are based, he seems not to see. He denies that the Brahma of India is an abstraction or that the conception of the unreality of the world is an essential part of the philosophy of the Upanishads. ^^It may be,'' he says, '^that such a doctrine has been and still is prevalent with a section of our country- men. But this is certainly not in accord with the pervading spirit of the Indian mind." He declares that the God-conscious man of the 298 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS Upanishads is marked by his deep feeling of adoration, that the spirit of Brahma is the light and life of all, — the spirit of love and joy. What is characteristic of the Indian attitude is the glad recognition of our kindred with the All, a conscious unity in which there is no break. ^^They did not recognize any essential opposi- tion between life and death and they said with absolute assurance, ^It is life that is death.' They saluted with the same serenity of glad- ness ^life in its aspect of appearing and in its aspect of departure.' " For him the key note of the Upanishads is, not the words of the Bri- hadaranyaka, ^^ Joyless are these worlds," but Prano virat, ^^Life is immense." According to Tagore, who evidently believes sincerely that he teaches nothing that is not taught, implicitly at least, in the Upanishads, man's chief need is to find a truth that will unify his life, reconcile its contradictions, harmonize its knowledge, love and action, and bring order into the chaos of his desires. ^^ Facts are many, but the truth is one." Where can man find the truth that will illumine his whole life ? Where, indeed, except in himself? For a man to come to himself, means to attain the ^^ absolute cer- tainty that essentially we are spirit." As the chick must break through the shell which cov- ered it so long, but is not really a part of its life, so man must break through his ignorance and the sin which is but ^^the blurring of the RABINDEANATH TAGOEE 299 truth that hides the purity of our conscious- ness,'^ and allow the spirit of truth and love which wells up within to have its way with him. The King stands without and knocks. If in- vited, he will enter as a guest, but he will not use compulsion or do violence to the human spirit, so that the only fellowship we can have with him is in freedom and love. All that Ta- gore has said in his chapter on Soul Conscious- ness might be preached as a sermon in a Chris- tian church from the text, — ' ' Behold, I stand at the door and knock : if any man hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me. ' ' One of the functions of science is to enable us to master and do away with evils, both old and new; and one of the services which religion ren- ders is that of so interpreting the evils which are still unconquered that we may be able not only to endure them but to turn them to good account, and even to transmute necessary suffer- ing into joy. In his treatment of the problem of evil, Tagore has done more than set forth the best in Hinduism; he has shown what the experience of the ages has proved to be the wisest and noblest attitude toward the darker side of life. Indeed, his thought is obviously *' advanced thought; it is so like the highest interpretations which Christian thinkers place upon their own religion that some are unable to believe that the truth he teaches has not been 300 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS derived from Christian sources. Thus Mr. Leslie Johnson, in the Quarterly Review for January, 1914, points out that Tagore's father was one of the founders of the Brahma-Samaj, the formation of which was *^ largely the result of the preaching of Christian missions, working itself out partly in an attempt to remove the most crying abuses in Hinduism. In its devel- opment, it was very strongly influenced by west- ern writers and in its final form presents most of the features of the best Victorian Unitarian- ism as shown, for instance, by Martineau.^' This writer attempts to show that the probabil- ity of Christian influence is so great that it is * impossible to treat Mr. Tagore's utterances as prophecies coming from another sphere to occidental minds that have been groping after the same truth. He is, at any rate to a large extent, a member of our religious world.'' As to the Brahma-Samaj, it is to be said that it has already divided into three branches, and that Tagore was reared in the section which, if not anti-Christian, is, or at least aspires to be, purely Hindu. Then, the poet himself believes that in his noblest utterances he is an exponent of Hinduism, and it is as unprofitable as it is ungenerous to try to prove him in the wrong. He may very well be m the right. Eeligion is in one respect like geology. When Agassiz studied the glaciers, he came on ^^the imposing truth that the geological processes of past aeons RABINDRANATH TAGORE 301 which have made the earth are still going on at the present day, that they have never ceased, that they will never cease.'' So, those who study religion, using both the historical and com- parative methods, have discovered ^^the truth that the process of religion-making has never ceased and that the same forces which shaped religion in ancient Egypt are still operative in our midst and continue to mold our own religion to-day/^ J. H. Breasted, *^ Development of Re- ligion and Thought in Ancient Egypt,'' p. XI. We do not think it strange that men of science, who study the physical order, arrive at the same conclusions. Is it not natural, a thing to be expected and even inevitable, that our percep- tions of the moral and spiritual order should show a closer agreement in proportion as they increase in clearness, purity and depth? Tagore's philosophy of evil is not only very beautiful, but, so far as it goes, it is also pro- foundly true. He declares that pain is inci- dental; it *4s not an end in itself as joy is. To meet with it is to know that it has no part in the true permanence of creation. It is what error is in our intellectual life. To go through the history of the development of science is to go through the maze of mistakes it made cur- rent at different times. Yet no one really be- lieves that science is the one perfect mode of disseminating mistakes." There are some who get so close to the evils of the world that they 302 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS can see nothing else. To them a river is all banks, and in a towing rope which binds a boat they see only the bondage, and fail to consider that it is by means of the rope that the boat is drawn forward. The real *^ wonder is not that there should be obstacles and suffering in this world, but that there should be law and order, beauty and joy, goodness and love.'' The child in learning to walk stumbles and falls, yet the main thing is not these failures but ^Hhe impe- tus of joy'' by which it is sustained. The fact is that ^^man does not really believe in evil, just as he cannot believe that violin strings have been purposely made to create the exquisite tor- ture of discordant notes, though by the aid of statistics it can be mathematically proved that the probability of discord is far greater than that of harmony, and for one who can play the violin there are thousands who cannot. The potentiality of perfection outweighs actual con- tradictions." The world does not take its pessimists seri- ously and cannot, for *4ife itself is optimistic: it wants to go on . . . and we have a faith which no individual instances can shake, that the direction of humanity is from evil to good. ' ' When reading such expressions, we are con- scious that what they bring to us is a fresh vision of reality, and it is difficult to say how much the writer really owes to the scriptures which he loves so much. This noble teaching is RABINDEANATH TAGORE 303 not, we feel, Hindu, but human. The mode of approach and the form of expression are Ori- ental, but the content is a truth of which we have independent vision. In the exposition of his conception of good- ness, Tagore is strikingly like Socrates and Plato. He declares that when we do wrong we do not express ourselves, but are for the time the servants of some impulse or passion. The will, which is what the whole man wants when he comes to himself and realizes what he means and intends, is good. The moral conflict is that of the lesser, fractional man with the larger and more complete man. To live the life of good- ness is to take into account all our relationships and not a few only. Moral vision is simply a comprehensive view of the wholeness of life. Our real life is in families, states and human- ity, and is one with God's life, and we never learn to live victoriously until we realize ' ' that in us we have the world-man who is immortal, who is not afraid of death or sufferings, and who looks upon pain as only the other side of CHAPTER XXII INDIA'S CONTBIBUTION TO THE SPIBITUAL LIFE OF HUMANITY OCEPTING Tagore as representative of the highest thought and deepest spiritual life of India, let us consider what is central in his message. It is a truth so noble and so beautiful that it seems at first impossible to take it seriously. Yet it is only what we have heard from the greatest seers of all time. At the heart and source of things, Tagore tells us, is a spirit, a life, which is also love, beauty and joy. He delights to quote from the Hindu scriptures such sayings as the following : *Trom joy does spring all this creation, by joy is it maintained, towards joy does it progress, and into joy does it enter. ''For He manifests Himself in forms which His joy as- sumes." "Verily from the everlasting joy do all objects have their birth.'' "The immortal being manifests himself in joy- form." "Who could have breathed or moved if the sky were not filled with joy, with love?" 304 INDIA'S CONTRIBUTION 305 The tone of such passages seems to us so en- tirely opposite to that of the Vedanta and primi- tive Buddhism that we ask if it is possible that we may be mistaken and have failed to under- stand those philosophies. To this question Ta- gore replies with an emphatic affirmative. If we suppose that the annihilation of the self has been held by India to be the supreme goal of humanity, it is, he says, because we have not really understood. He reminds us that *4n an unknown language the words are tyrannically prominent, '^ and that those ^^who are cursed with literal minds'' and seek to comprehend a religion by a study of texts, while ignoring the living beings who are incarnations of its spirit, are like *'the unfortunate ones who are always busy with their nets and neglect the fishing. ' ' Buddha, he declares, preached with fervor the ideal of the selflessness which is love and not the destruction of anything that is positive and real. Our individuality is like a seed which is not to remain as it is, but to die into a larger life. Our self is like a lamp which holds oil only that it may give it up in light. So, Buddha said, Let the light shine, and culminate in the Nir- vana of love. He discovered that the secret of life was to reverse the direction of effort, to re- place self-seeking by that expression of the real self which is love and joy in loving. Whether this is an adequate interpretation of original Buddhism is an historical question of 306 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS more or less importance. What really interests living men is whether it is or is not a true read- ing of life. Is the universe the expression of physical force and necessity, or has it its source in a great, loving Life ? Both Tagore and Kabir support the latter view. They explicitly assert and emphasize a truth which lies implicit in the Christian faith, but on which we have placed but little emphasis. God is love — this is the great message of the New Testament; but we have not sufficiently realized that where there is loving life there is also joy and beauty. Kabir feels this deeply and never tires of telling us that creation is God's play, that the universe is joy, that it is full of music. Tagore supports him in two wonderful chapters on ' ' Eealization in Love,'^ and ^^The Eealization of Beauty.'^ Why is this truth hid from so many of us? Tagore 's answer is that we are like men who are concerned with the physics of the printer's and bookmaker's art and have failed to read the story. But as there is a meaning in the printed words, so there is a meaning in the physical universe, although to read this is not the business of natural science. Another rea- son is our spiritual immaturity. We have not arrived at love, and ^^Want of love is a degree of callousness ; for love is the perfection of con- sciousness. We do not love because we do not comprehend, or rather we do not comprehend because we do not love. For love is the ultimate INDIA'S CONTRIBUTION 307 meaning of everything around us. It is not a mere sentiment ; it is truth ; it is the joy that is at the root of all creation. ' ' We can never have a true view of men when we wish to exploit them, to use them as means for our ends. We can never know them till we love them. ^*As with man, so with this universe. When we look at the world through the veil of our desires we make it frail and narrow, and fail to perceive its full truth. Of course, it is obvious that the world serves us and fulfils our needs, but our relation to it does not end there. ^' Emerson has told us this. Nature, he says, is Commodity, but it is also Beauty, and it always speaks of Spirit, and ^^the essential nature of things is beauty and joy.'' Although we have had glimpses of this truth and for generations have repeated the word of the psalmist that the Lord rejoices in all his works, we have not taken it greatly to heart. Our main practical interest has been to control natural forces for our benefit, and our religious faith has been in a God of righteousness. Amongst us there are, indeed, some who feel the passion for truth, and who have the convic- tion that when they find it they have come into contact with reality and drawn nearer to God. But few have seen or properly appreciated the fact that beauty, as well as truth and goodness, is one aspect of the divine. Tagore avows his acceptance of the doctrine of the Vaishnava re- 308 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS ligion that beauty is God's wooing of our heart, that the ultimate meaning of creation is not the display of power, but love, beauty and joy. He thinks that as our intellect has made great con- quests, as it has discovered vast regions of truth which it did not create, so will it be with our sense of beauty. For as truth is every- where and everything is a possible object of our knowledge, so beauty is omnipresent and there- fore everything is capable of giving us joy. As mathematicians find that the infinite has a struc- ture and science discovers an order in the world ; as the moral agent striving for good reveals the ideality of the world; and as religion seeks to bring in the kingdom which in a real sense has *^been prepared from the foundation of the world;'' so the poets and seers declare that ** Beauty is one of the fundamental attributes of God, which he has impressed upon his world. I hold it to be a quality residing in the objects, and not imparted to them by the observer. I hold Beauty to be, like Truth and Goodness, an end in itself, for God's creation." W. E. Inge, ^^ Faith and Its Psychology," 203. To many excellent people this may seem to be only the fancy of imaginative natures, yet they may be wrong and what the prophets and men of vision report that they see may really be there. Indeed, it is not strange that apprecia- tion of truth and righteousness should precede INDIA'S CONTRIBUTION 309 the perception of beauty. The two values first named have the right of way. Man's existence has long been so precarious that he has had little time or opportunity to concern himself with truths that did not bear on his survival. Moreover, the animal instincts, impulses and de- sires with which nature has endowed him have been so imperious, so hard to control and to adjust to the needs of social life, that the great questions have naturally been those of right and wrong and the supreme need has been for a God of righteousness. Even now a large part of the race is so absorbed in the elementary tasks of making a living and keeping the commandments that the intellectual and aesthetic life is some- thing of a luxury. But must it always be so? Suppose that our daily labor does not exhaust us, and that we are consecrated to the right, what then? May we not find that Kabir, Ta- gore, and our own seer Emerson are right in saying that our life is ^^ embosomed in beauty, '^ that its source is in joy and love and that into joy and love it may always be retranslated? In an article entitled ^^ Twenty Minutes of Reality" Atlantic Monthly, May, 1916, the re- porter of the vision says that it ^^ seemed as though beauty and joy were more at the heart of Reality than an over-anxious morality. It was a little as though (to transpose the quota- tion), 310 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS I slept, and dreamed that life was duty ; I woke, and found that life was beauty.^ Perhaps at such times of illumination there is no need to worry over sin, for one is so trans- ported by the beauty of humanity and so poured out in love toward every human being, that sin becomes almost impossible. Perhaps duty may merely point the way. When one arrives at one's destination it would be absurd to go back and reconsult the guide-post. . . . Perhaps this may be the great difference between the saints and the Puritans. Both are agreed that good- ness is the means to the end, but the saints have passed on to the end and entered into the real- ization, and are happy. (One of the most en- dearing attributes of saints of a certain type was — or rather is, for one refuses to believe that saints are all of the past — their childlike gaiety, which can proceed only from a happy and trustful heart.) The Puritan, on the other hand, has stuck fast in the means — is still wor- rying over the guide-posts, and is distrustful and over-anxious. '^ When a man in our practically-minded West has a vision of love, beauty and joy at the heart of things, he is liable to have his sanity brought in question. It takes some courage to avow the conviction that Wordsworth and Stevenson saw truly, and it is not surprising to find that the 1 Altered from a poem by Ellen Sturgis Hooper. INDIA'S CONTRIBUTION 311 editors of the magazine submitted the article mentioned above to a distinguished physician for comment. His report is a sign of the new age now dawning. He declares that he finds nothing pathological in the condition of the writer, nothing to discredit his vision. On the other hand, he does think that '^Ordinary per- ception is untrue, because it has become blinded by over-use. . . . Our ordinary prosaic percep- tions show strong evidence of morbidity. . . • A keener delight in perception is notoriously a mark of health." A rising tide of vitality ^^ might well crack the crust of habit and show us reality. In my belief this is just what hap- pened." After all, then, Hegel may have been right in saying that the beautiful is essentially the spir- itual making itself known sensuously, and Plato may not have been wrong in his conviction that beauty is ^^a joyous witness within us to the kinship of the human spirit with that source of spiritual life from which whatever is fair and noble in the world proceeds. ' ' The great values belong together, and truth, beauty and goodness are of one family. No member of this family can be neglected by any nation except at its peril. Social disorganization is the inevitable result of injustice. Neglect of science and of education means inefficiency and failure in com- petition with nations which have a deeper sense of the importance and the sacredness of truth. 312 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS So, too, as Eev, W. E. Inge has happily said, *^inany of the unsatisfactory features of our civilization are due to the fact that we see noth- ing wrong in unnecessary ugliness/' and they cannot be done away until we learn to appreciate beauty and do justice to the aesthetic as well as to the moral aspects of reality. The reaction of the sense of beauty has ^'a distinctive qual- ity, the loss of which cannot be made good from any other source. The mind that is dominated by perception of the beautiful, and by the love of it which can hardly be dissociated from this perception, will certainly carry its habit and its method into every part of life. Among a really artistic people we find a joyful desire to do everything well and appropriately. What has to be done is done imaginatively; what has to be spoken or made is spoken or made fittingly, lovingly, beautifully. ' ' Op. cit., pp. 48, 206. As these values belong together, and, though distinguishable, are not really separate, but are aspects of one reality, of a perfection, a goodness ^^ which is wider than the ethical ideal," so it is only together that they can be effectively cultivated. Morality apart from art and science and a wide culture becomes repul- sive, fanatical and cruel. Isolation always means distortion. Much of the art of our time deserves the contemptuous disregard which it receives, for it has lost touch with the life it should adorn. The business of art is to help us INDIA'S CONTKIBUTION 313 to see what without it we cannot see, to select and bring out the latent loveliness in things, and the best tendencies in men, to represent to the senses that which we are made to love and for loving which we are nobler and happier. But the only artists that can do this are those who have the religious spirit of faith, hope and love and the insight that love gives. The greatest technical skill cannot save from failure the cynics, the misanthropists, those who ^^ despise life, hope for nothing, love nobody." As we learn to interpret our experience wisely, we shall find that to isolate any value, whether goodness, beauty or truth, tends to make it valueless. Nor is such isolation necessary. All good things are ours. When we separate them we do violence to them and injure ourselves. We perceive with increasing clearness '^the truth and beauty of the good, the goodness and beauty of the truth, and the truth and goodness of the beautiful." Ever more profoundly do we feel the holiness of beauty and the beauty of holiness. Inexpres- sibly attractive to us are the lives that are loyal to the highest, and as we contemplate them it is with the wish that we may be like them, and with the prayer, uttered or unexpressed, ^^May the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us." It thus appears that Hinduism at its best has a very important contribution to make to our spiritual life. It brings home to us a truth which we theoretically admit, but which we do 314 THE SYMPATHY OF BELIGIONS not deeply feel. We have been prevented from seeing what India has seen by the very work we have had to do. According to the first chapter of Genesis, when God created man he com- manded him to replenish the earth and subdue and have dominion over it. In the fulfilment of this command the best energies of the western nations have been spent. The establishment and maintenance of the family and the conquest of nature, — in achieving these ends we have realized the need of righteousness and the value of truth. We have been very serious and prac- tical, but in the struggle with nature we have developed a sense of separation from that of which we are part. India, on the other hand, has neglected the interests we care for and has remained poor and unsuccessful. But in the minds of her greatest children she has perceived what has escaped us, for she knows that nature and man are included in one great truth. She intuitively knows that at the heart of things there is not only a God of righteousness and a Holy Spirit which leads into all truth, but that love is there also and that where love is beauty is and joy is, for these three are one. She de- clares that despite war and suffering and all the ^^ unredeemed opposites whose unity faith sees,^' the universe is a love story, that when our eyes become clear we shall see that the truth of things is far more beautiful than anything we have ever dared to believe. INDIA'S CONTRIBUTION 315 Christianity at its best has deeply felt that truth, righteousness and love are rooted in eter- nity. India, through Kabir and Tagore, ex- presses her high faith that beauty and joy also rest upon the same foundation and have their source in God. And both understand that man 's longing for all these values is the response of his mind and heart and spiritual nature to the call which God makes to him through them. Man's love and prayer and upward striving and God's wooing of his heart are but two different aspects of one ascending life, a fellowship of the human and divine. Higher than this, thought has not yet reached, and with its clear statement by Tagore our exposition of India's religious achievement may fitly close : ^^ Beauty is God's wooing of our heart; it can have no other purpose. It tells us everywhere that the display of power is not the ultimate meaning of creation ; wherever there is a bit of color, a note of song, a grace of form, there comes the call for our love. ... It is a call to us, but not a command. It seeks for love in us, and, love can never be had by compulsion. Compul- sion is not indeed the final appeal to man, but joy is. And joy is everywhere; it is in the earth's green covering of grass ; in the blue serenity of the sky ; in the reckless exuberance of spring ; in the severe abstinence of grey winter ; in the liv- ing flesh that animates our bodily frame ; in the perfect poise of the human figure, noble and up- 316 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS right ; in living ; in the exercise of all our pow- ers ; in the acquisition of knowledge ; in fighting evils; in dying for gains we never can share. Joy is there everywhere; it is superfluous, un- necessary; nay, it very often contradicts the most peremptory behests of necessity. It exists to show that the bonds of law can only be ex- plained by love; they are like body and soul. Joy is the realization of the truth of oneness, the oneness of our soul with the world and of the world-soul with the supreme lover/' Sad- hana, p. 116. PAET V THE BEGINNINGS OF EELIGION INTEE- PEETED IN THE LIGHT OF ITS HIGH- EST DEVELOPMENT CHAPTER XXIII THE CHILDHOOD OF KELIGION E have thus traced the majestic curve of humanity's religious thought. It began in the unity of a crude concep- tion of man and the world ; in its de- velopment it has produced great systems whose adherents were more conscious of their differ- ences than of what they held in common; and now we see the lines of growth converging to- wards a new unity of purified conceptions which express the essentials of the spiritual life. Through the long centuries men have been en- larging, criticising, and revising their ideas and comparing their insight into spiritual things. They have been learning to distinguish between that in their experience of the divine which is fundamental and that which is merely local and accessory. At last we can say that "Wherever through the ages rise The altars of self-sacrifice, Where love its arms hath opened wide, Or man for man has calmly died, We see the same white wings outspread, That hovered o'er the Master^s head; 319 320 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS And in all lands beneath the sun The heart afiSrmeth, ^ Love is one/ " Whittier. We now see clearly that there is one Eeligion behind all the creeds and in all the religions of the world. The spiritual life of humanity is one life, and between the yearnings and crude guesses of primitive men and the purified faith and noble philosophy of the present there is a rational connection. The germ of the most elevated thought and the purest love was pres- ent in the beginning, and the relation of the lower stages to the higher is that of bud and blossom or flower and fruit. Each stage in the religious life of mankind has its value, its im- portance, and its right to exist, and no religion is beneath notice. Evolution thus puts a mean- ing into human history. But, as Eev. John W. Chadwick has said, we must not interpret our doctrine of progress in such a way as to dis- franchise the countless generations of the past. Childhood is a preparation for maturity, no doubt, but it is also for itself. Every stage of personal and racial development has its peculiar good. Those who have gone before us had life in themselves and they rejoiced in it with great joy and gladness. ^^ Because men are men and hearts are hearts, in earlier as in later times, with the blue sky above them and the green earth round about and the indomitable sea, with work to do and love to give and take. Life, the great THE CHILDHOOD OF RELIGION 321 deep-bosomed mother, is justified of her children in whatever guise they come. Not alone be- cause they tend to further possibilities of use and joy, but because at every stage in the long march they drain their cup and laugh their laugh and sing their marching song. Even in the most intellectual things, life does not wait for the last full expression to be something worth living. . . . That is a great phrase in Hebrews where, speaking of the saints and he- roes of the past, it says, ' God having provided some better thing for us, that they without us might not be made perfect.' As truthfully it might be written, ^God having provided some good thing for them, that our perfection might not be their sole excilse for being.' '' Address on ^^ Life's Constant Good," by J. W. Chad- wick. This writer beautifully says that deep down in the religions of the past, amid much that is discouraging and repellent, ^^ there was the awe- struck wonder in the presence of the main facts of human life, there was devotion to ideal ex- cellence, there was the yearning soul singing its universal song,— "Nearer, my God, to thee, nearer to thee !" In the apparently irrational views of the world and in the conceptions of man and nature that seem strange to us there is an element of reality, sincerity and pure humanity, and under- 322 THE SYMPATHY OF RELIGIONS neath the ^^wild and whirling thoughts sound and practical ideals. ' ' The real God has always been the ideal best, and the curious doctrines which are impossible to the present *^were merely men's clumsy, stammering way of saying something sweet and good.'' To be sure, religion has its night side, and confusion of thought and baseless terrors have been the cause of innumerable tragedies and countless miseries. In its beginnings religion is often associated with taboo and magic. These superstitions, as Professor Toy tells us, have *'a common basis in the conception of an occult force (which may conveniently be called mana) resident in all things, but they contem- plate different sides of this force, and their social developments are very different. ' ' Taboo is concerned with its injurious manifestations and the way to avoid them, while magic seeks to find out its law and to control it. Magic is thus a way of directing or coercing an occult force for human benefit, and as such ^^has fostered belief in a false science of sequences and thus helped to introduce confusion into thought and the con- duct of life." Eeligion seeks to establish friendly relations with the gods and to co-oper- ate with them, and its *^aim has been, and is, to banish magic from the world." Because of the repulsive and injurious super- stitions with which it was naturally long con- fused and because its beginnings were neces- THE CHILDHOOD OF RELIGION 323 sarily humble and unrefined, some have made the mistake of regarding religion as an incident of an immature culture to be discarded in more civilized times. To such minds every high and fine thing in the world is a case of *^ nothing but'' its unlovely and scarcely recognizable be- ginnings. But a more rational way of thinking, it would seem, is to interpret processes by their outcome and things that grow by what they grow into rather than by what they start from. The central fact of religious experience being communion and union with the deity and the evolution of religion being the evolution of man's sense of the divine, we understand it most clearly when we study its civilized forms. Among savages it is, of course, savage, among barbarians it is barbarous, — witness shamanism, the cult of Dionysus among the Greeks, and prophecy in Israel in Saul's time, as described in I Samuel, Chapters X and XIX. Through the centuries the sense of God's presence grew into higher and purer forms, and at last we have the 23rd and 139th psalms and Wordsworth's po- etry. The patriarch Jacob, when he awakened from the sleep in which he dreamed of a ladder reaching from earth to heaven with angels as- cending and descending thereon, thought that he had discovered the gate of heaven, the place where he might hope in the future to find God. He realized the unsuspected sacredness of the spot and exclaimed, ** Surely the Lord is in this 324 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS place; and I knew it not.'' But religious thought and feeling grew, and perhaps a thou- sand years later one of his descendants was able to say of the universe what he thought was true only of his solitary refuge for a night. Jacob thought as a child, he felt and spoke as a child because he was a child, but his feeling and his conceptions were capable of development into that higher sense of communion which is ex- pressed for humanity in the magnificent words : — Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning, And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; Even there shall thy hand lead me, And thy right hand shall hold me. If I say, Surely the darkness shall overwhelm me, And the light about me shall be night; Even the darkness hideth not from thee, But the night shineth as the day. The darkness and the light are both alike to thee. How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, God I How great is the sum of them ! If I should count them, they are more in number than the sand: When I awake, I am still with thee. Eeaders of books of travel, or of the treatises of such men as Tylor and Spencer, do not usually see, beneath the strange and partly re- THE CHILDHOOD OF RELIGION 325 pulsive rites, customs and beliefs of savages, the truth and beauty which are really there. For clear perception, profound insight, sympathy and diligent study are needed. When, for in- stance, we read such a report of the spiritual life of an uncivilized people as that given by Walter McClintock in ^^The Old North Trail," we realize how impossible it is for any one to understand that life who depends for his infor- mation upon travelers, hunters and traders who despise as worthless what they see but do not really comprehend. In this account of the *^Life, Legends and Religion of the Blackfeet Indians," it is made perfectly clear that ^Hhe untutored savage" has not wholly missed the mark. In the Sun-dance Ceremonial, e. g., the head chief utters the following prayer : ^* Great Sun Power! I am praying for my people that they may be happy in the summer and that they may live through the cold of win- ter. Many are sick and in want. Pity them and let them survive. Grant that they may live long and have abundance. May we go through these ceremonies correctly, as you taught our forefathers to do in the days that are past. If we make mistakes pity us. Help us. Mother Earth! for we depend upon your goodness. Let there be rain to water the prairies, that the grass may grow long and the berries be abun- dant. Morning Star! when you look down upon us, give us peace and refreshing sleep. 326 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS Great Spirit! bless our children, friends, and visitors through a happy life. May our trails lie straight and level before us. Let us live to be old. We are all your children and ask these things with good hearts. '^ Here, as always, if we know how to look for it and to recognize it when we see it, we discover in ^Hhe childhood of religion'^ the humble but beautiful beginnings of pure and undefiled re- ligion. Through the studies of such intelligent and sympathetic observers we are gaining a new in- sight into and a better appreciation of the spir- itual life of primitive people. Those who are striving to understand the evolution of the re- ligious life of our race must be deeply grateful for such service as that which has been ren- dered by Miss Alice C. Fletcher who, in the Twenty-second Annual Eeport of the Bureau of American Ethnology, has given an account of * * The Hako : A Pawnee CeremoniaL ' ' The rec- ord was taken from the lips of an old Pawnee who gave Miss Fletcher the ritual songs, the words and the music, and also interpreted them. A summary of Miss Fletcher's report, together with a poetization of the Hako, entitled *^The Mystery of Life,'' has been made by Prof. H. B. Alexander of the University of Nebraska. (Chicago: The Open Court Publishing Co., 1913.) THE CHILDHOOD OF RELIGION 327 What these scholarly writers make clear is the deep meaning and great beauty of this cere- monial, which symbolizes the relation between the divine and human by the relation of a father to his children by adoption and his children by birth. They find striking analogies to the Eleusinian Mysteries of the Greeks, and an ex- pression of fine and noble feelings which will seem incredible to those who have seen only the externals of Indian life. Professor Alexander considers it ^^the most complete and perfect ex- ample of a type of religious rite world-wide in its development. The essentials of the rite are a mystic representation of the union of Father Heaven and Mother Earth and the resultant birth of a Spirit of Life, primarily a Vege- tation Spirit, vegetation being the basis of ani- mal life. . . . The Ceremony of the Hako is throughout symbolic, but the symbolism em- ployed is so elemental that it must seem the very portrait of truth as it appears to the mind un- taught in science. Further, it is a symbolism that is not merely Pawnee, not merely Ameri- can Indian, but in its main features it is world- wide. Hardly a hint is required to make it in- telligible to any human being who has breathed the free air of the open country, who has looked up to the blue sky, to sun and moon and stars and moving clouds, who has looked about him at the green earth and growing fields. Indeed, 328 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS we may fairly say that the Pawnee conception of the frame and governance of the world is nearer to the ordinary thinking of even edu- cated men than is the conception which the sci- ence of astronomy presents. For however hon- estly we may believe astronomical doctrines, they are still doctrines that must be intel- lectually mastered and held; they are not in- stinctive in human experience. Our senses tell us each day that the blue heavens are above and the green earth below and that the sun and stars in their daily courses journey through the arc of the skies. And our senses are powerfully fortified in their interpretation by language and literature — the props and stays of our ideas — in which are embalmed the conceptions of sense as they have come to expression throughout the course of history.'^ There are many passages in the ceremonial strikingly like sentences from noble Hebrew psalms. Much of the Pawnee symbolism lends itself beautifully to Christian meanings, but the writer, while noting this, is careful to say that ^^It is not to be understood that we credit the Pawnee with this spiritual meaning. We can- not even credit him with a pure and exalted re- ligion, for certain of his rites were of the darkest heathendom. But in this ceremony of the Hako, singularly pure and exalted, we do find so much that is common to the best in all religion that it cannot but bring the Indian closer to the White, THE CHILDHOOD OF RELIGION 329 if once we permit it to command our sympa- thies/' In one part of the ritual, the leader imitates the building by a bird of its nest. To Miss Fletcher it was explained that when doing this, ^^we are thinking of Tirawa making the world for the people to live in. If you go on a high hill and look around, you will see the sky touch- ing the earth on every side, and within this en- closure the people live. So the circles we have made are not only nests, but they also represent the circle Tirawa-atius has made for the dwell- ing place of all the people." The child's feet are then placed within the circle. The little one represents the new generation, and the putting of its feet in the circle means the giv- ing of new life. Then come the songs as fol- lows: ^^Hearken! List! We are calling you. Come! Chil- dren, come! Come ! We're ready and waiting, your Father's "waiting. Come! Children, come! Hear us calling, calling you ! Children, come ! Children come! Come hither! Harken! List as we call you, call to the Children to come. ... ''Look, where they come, see them, see them, young ones and old ones! Look! Here they come, this way, that way flocking to- gether. Hither they come, shouting like eagles, Shouting come. 330 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS Joyous, happy, gladly come they, gaily coming, coming hither. See where they come, flocking like birds, shouting like eagles As they come to the Fathers." The following is from the Blessing of the Child: "Breathe on him! Breathe on him! Life thou alone canst give to him. Long life, we pray. Oh Father, give unto him !" In another part of the ritual occurs this song: "I know not if the voice of man can reach to the sky ; I know not if the mighty one will hear as I pray; I know not if the gifts I ask will all granted be; I know not if the word of old we truly can hear; I know not what will come to pass in our future days; I hope that only good will come, my children, to you." "I now know that the voice of man can reach to the sky; I now know that the mighty one has heard as I prayed ; I now know that the gifts I ask have all granted been; I now know that the word of old we truly have heard ; I now know that Tirawa barkens unto man's prayer; I know that only good has come, my children, to you." "Father, unto thee we cry! Father thou of gods and men; Father thou of all we hear; Father thou of all we see. Father, unto thee we cry." Further light is shed upon the inner meaning of this ceremonial by Tahirussawichi who, after repeating to Miss Fletcher the Blessing of the Child, said: THE CHILDHOOD OF EELIGION 331 *^When I sing this song I pray to Tirawa to come down and touch with his breath the symbol of his face and all the other symbols on the little child. I pray with all my spirit that Tirawa- atius will let the child grow up and become strong and find favor in its life. *'This is a very solemn act, because we believe that Tirawa-atius, although not seen by us, sends down his breath as we pray, calling on him to come. ^^As I sing this song with you I cannot help shedding tears. I have never sung it before except as I stood looking at the little child and praying for it in my heart. There is no little child here, but you are here writing all these things down that they may not be lost and that our children may know what their fathers be- lieved and practised in this ceremony. So, as I sing, I am calling to Tirawa-atius to send down his breath upon you, to give you strength and long life. I am praying for you with all my spirit.'^ Alexander. Op. cit. 47. As we look at this spiritual interior, we realize that religion at this immature stage of development is not without nobility and beauty. There was some truth even in the animistic be- ginnings of religion. Primitive man was not wholly wrong in his feeling that something akin to his own life was in the world around him. This intuition was the spiritual foundation of much that is high and beautiful in the life of 332 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS to-day. It is true, he fell into fantastic and pernicious errors, he drew wrong inferences from what he vaguely felt, he mixed his reli- gion with fetichism and magic; nevertheless even his fears were evidence of his capacity for recognizing and coming into spiritual relations with higher powers. He had entered upon the path that leads to the knowledge of a great ^^Life, both beyond us and within us, real, mighty, righteous, friendly, loving, out of which we come, in which we may rest, in whose com- panionship we need never be lonely, in the sight of whom we need never have a fear. ^ ' The line of development has not, of course, been straight. It almost never is. Miss Kingsley, in her de- lightful ^^West African Studies, ^^ says: ^* Al- though a Darwinian to the core, I doubt if evolution in a neat and tidy perpendicular line, with Fetich at the bottom and Christianity at the top, represents the true state of things.^' The matter is not so simple, for life runs into blind alleys and there are many cases of arrested de- velopment and of degeneration. Still, she sees that ^ ^ the shy yearnings of the savage, unfold- ing thought by thought, ' ' eventually become part of the poetry of Goethe and the philosophy of Spinoza. The truth which the savage felt, but about which he could not be clear, is the same truth that in higher and purer form has attained to THE CHILDHOOD OP RELIGION 333 expression in much of the poetry in which we find inspiration and delight, as, for example, in the familiar lines, — "God of the granite and the rose, Soul of the sparrow and the bee, The mighty tide of being flows Through countless channels, Lord, from thee. It leaps to life in grass and flowers, Through every grade of being runs, Till from Creation's radiant towers Its glory flames in stars and suns." Elizabeth Doten. It is, therefore, clear that when we see the religious life of our race in perspective, we are justified in saying that amidst all the perver- sions and distortions, the agonizing fear, the sacrifices of life and honor, the persecutions and religious wars, there has been a striving for a better and a higher, for a fellowship with the di- vine. Miss Kingsley perceived the motive and spring of the whole movement when she de- clared that ^^The final object of all human desire is a knowledge of the nature of Grod.'^ Op. cit. P. 95. The correlative of this truth is well stated by Professor Bousset when he says that man strives because God leads, and that the ulti- mate explanation of the religious life is the fact that God ** draws men individually from error to truth, from imperfection to perfection, from egoism to fraternity, from the sensual to the 334 THE SYMPATHY OF RELIGIONS moral, from the natural to the spiritual, and at- tracts them to himself.'^ *^What is Religion,'^ P. 28. There are indications that our spiritual life will be greatly enriched when to our science, and our reverence for moral and personal ideals, we add a sense of the world's life. We are not the better or more efficient in our purely intellectual life for the belief that the earth is but a dead cinder. Consider the instructive case of Q. T. Fechner, one of the most remark- able men in the history of science, acknowledged as a master by such scholars as Preyer, Wundt, Paulsen and Lasswitz. (See the chapter on Fechner in ^^A Pluralistic Universe, '' by Wil- liam James.) Fechner 's mind was ^^one of those multitudinously organized cross-roads of truth which are occupied only at rare intervals by children of men, and from which nothing is either too far or too near to be seen in due perspective. '' He passionately believed that nature is no barren wilderness. This belief did not interfere with his marvellous scientific work, but it did give him what he called ^ ' the daylight view'' of the world. His vision is of extreme beauty. The form in which he reports it is new, for the vision is fresh. If we cannot see it, if it seems too good and too beautiful to be true, this may be either because our own vision is defective or because we have to deal with pure fancy. In the light of the fact that religion is THE CHILDHOOD OF RELIGION 335 nearly, if not quite, universal, and that it has always felt or perceived the kinship of man's life with the life of the world, and that the poets and prophets of the race, from the writer of the 104th psalm to Tagore, render the same report, it does not seem irrational to believe that what they say they see is really there. Moreover, this is not merely a matter of poetry, or of a new joy in nature. An accept- ance of this view is probably necessary to pro- duce a change in our attitude toward the earth which must come if we are to use it in the best way and to live wisely and happily together. Thus, in a sober, earnest book, written by L. H. Bailey to bring about a radical alteration in our thought and feeling concerning the world in which we live, and which is entitled ' ' The Holy Earth," there are chapters as follows: "The earth is good.'' "It is kindly." "It is holy." "The spiritual contact with nature." "The keeping of the beautiful earth." The author writes because he wishes us to find *^a vast joy in the fellowship of nature, some- thing like the joy of Pan," and also because he is convinced that a religious view of our relation to the earth, to other living things and to those who are yet to be born, is a necessary condition of a just, harmonious and happy social life. This is very curious and unexpected testimony. 336 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS What we are told is that the religious view of the world is not merely an illusion of primitive minds or a fancy of cultivated poets, but that there is a truth in it which is a necessity of civ- ilized social life. In its long history, our race has fallen into many errors, hat in its main course what has led it has been no ignis fatuus, but the true light which was from the beginning, which lighteth every man, which was with God and was God. A comparative study of the great religions of the world, in their essentials and development, only makes clear the truth which has been divined by men of insight and which has found expression in religious poetry, as, for example, in the following lines by Samuel Longfellow : Light of ages and of nations ! Every race, and every time, Has received thine inspirations, Glimpses of thy truth sublime. Always spirits in rapt vision Passed the heavenly veil within, Always hearts bowed in contrition Found salvation from their sin. Reason's noble aspiration Truth in growing clearness saw; Conscience spoke its condemnation, Or proclaimed the Eternal law. While thine inward revelations Told thy saints their prayers were heard, Prophets to the guilty nations Spoke thine everlasting word. THE CHILDHOOD OF EELiaiON 337 Lord, that word abideth ever; Revelation is not sealed; Answering now to our endeavor, Truth and Right are still revealed. That which came to ancient sages, Greek, Barbarian, Roman, Jew, Written in the soul^s deep pages, Shines to-day, forever new I The beginnings of man's spiritual life were indeed humble. Eeligion has had its childhood, but from the first it felt the truth which we more clearly see. The history of religion may be said to be the story of the evolution of man's sense of God's presence. It can hardly be sum- marized better than in the following words by Eev. Charles F. Dole: ^^This presence appears at first to the child or the savage as a dim and dark realm, full of fears, tenanted with ghosts and monsters and unknown powers of darkness. But even to the early man it is also a realm out of which the sun shines and the harvests come, and the strange boon of life and the laughter in chil- dren's eyes. There is not fear only, but also a sense of companionship in the mysterious groves and the hill-tops where the sacred shrines were set up. But by and by, as the child becomes a man, and the man becomes human- ized, there grows to be a joy in the desert places, in the lonely hills and forests, in the vast spaces of the star-lit heavens; fear passes away; the mystery of darkness changes to a mystery of 338 THE SYMPATHY OF EELIGIONS power and light and beauty ; the man belongs to the mighty universe as a child of its Life ; its noblest society here opens up into reaches of possibility beyond his present sight; its laws become his normal conditions of health and wel- fare; its duties of obedience, truth, justice, honor, loyalty, devotion become his chosen de- light. ' ' ^ ^ The Coming Eeligion, ' ' P. 41. This is what we see when from the vantage ground of the present we look backward to the childhood of religion and the beginnings of the spiritual life. Those beginnings were very humble and they are very far away, but from them the great climb has gone on until at last a being appears who wants to know all, who has a quenchless thirst for perfection, who aspires to have dominion over the earth, who has reached the conception of God as light and love, and who dares to believe that he is God^s child. This grand and beautiful conception he holds with in- creasing clearness and consciousness of its sig- nificance, but he has felt its truth ever since he was human. To the men of to-day the religious thought of the ages has come full circle. From the unity of savage apprehensions of truth, through the centuries in which countless systems have had their day, we have at length come, and we see the long lines converging to a new unity of civilized and truly humanized thought on the heights. To our exultant gladness in being the in- THE CHILDHOOD OF RELIGION 339 heritors of the result of the ages of thought and aspiration "Since the first man stood GKxi-conquered with his faec to heaven upturned/' and our joy in our vision of the coming unity we can but add our aspiration for its com- pletion : "We would be one in hatred of all wrong, One in our love of all things sweet and fair, One with the joy that breaketh into song One with the grief that trembles into prayer, One in the power that makes thy children free To follow truth, and thus to follow thee.'^ Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide Treatment Date: Dec. 2004 PreservationTechnologies A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive Cranberry Township, PA 16066 (724)779-2111 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 013 435 475 6