■::<-r. I "f '*• S i N1TR ^ ^m /fo». ;, R>-:U>;Y Y * CopigkN - COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. OTHER BOOKS BY THIS AUTHOR THE RIPENING EXPERIENCE OF LIFE. Crown 8vo. Net, $1.50 DOWN THE ROAD. Crown 8vo. Net, $1.50 THE ILLUMINED FACE. i2mo. Net, 50 cents TREES AND MEN. nmo. Net, 25 cents A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE BY WILLIAM VALENTINE KELLEY I go to prove my soul ! I see my way as birds their trackless way; I shall arrive: what time, what circuit first I know not. But some time, In God's good time, I shall arrive. He guides me and the birds. In his good time!" — Browning's Paracelsus. THE METHODIST BOOK CONCERN NEW YORK CINCINNATI ^>i3 4- a» ^ Copyright, J9-4, by WILLIAM VALENTINE KELLEY SEP 24 1914 ^)CI.A379646 id *•» 3 d TO THE RADIANT MEMORY OF RICHARD WATSON GILDER A POET OF THE SOUL, A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE "In youth I looked to these very skies, And, probing their immensities, I found God there, His visible power; Yet felt in my heart, amid all its sense Of the power, an equal evidence That His love, there too, was the nobler dower. For the loving worm within its clod Were diviner than a loveless god Amid his worlds, I will dare to say." — Browning, "Christmas Eve." "Earth breaks up, time drops away, In flows heaven, with its new day Of endless life, when He who trod, Very man and very God, This earth in weakness, shame, and pain, Dying the death whose signs remain Up yonder on the accursed tree, — Shall come again, no more to be Of captivity the thrall, But the one God, All in all, King of kings, Lord of lords, As His servant John received the words, 'I died, and live forevermore.' " — Browning, "Christmas Eve." A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE "I dare at times imagine to my need Some future state revealed to us ... , Unlimited in capability For joy, as this is in desire for joy, — To seek which the joy-hunger forces us: That, stung by the straitness of our life, made strait On purpose to make prized the life at large — Freed by the throbbing impulse we call death, We burst there as the worm into the fly, Who, while a worm still, wants his wings." — Browning, "Cleon." The greatest fact in the universe, the paramount reality, is Person- ality. There can be no region in which that is not true. At any rate, we are not able to imagine any- thing that can outrank, transcend, or supersede personality. For a crit- ical definition we have neither time nor need here. Avoiding metaphys- ical subtleties and ignoring philo- sophical quibbles, we may say simply that by personality we mean intelli- 7 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE gence, feeling, moral perception, and will gathered up into a center of self- conscious, self -contemplative, and self-determining being — a being who can say, "I," and who is both a sub- ject who knows others and an object knowable by others. The most fundamental theme of philosophy is the problem of Personality, upon which all great philosophers have bent their energies; in our day William James and Henri Bergson especially, although the clearest, ablest, and most convincing modern master of the subject is Borden P. Bowne in his book entitled Person- alism. Personality, as a fact seen in God and in Man, is really inescapable, ultimately undeniable. Truly is it said that if a man imagines himself constrained by science or psychology to deny the real existence of person- ality, he is bound to say of himself, "I do not exist." If he shrinks from 8 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE that absurdity, he admits person- ality to be a reality. At the top of the universe is Personality — an eternal, supreme, infinite Person, the personal Abso- lute whom we name God. Who says so? Jesus Christ says so; does anybody pretend to know better than he? Matthew Arnold in Liter- ature and Dogma strangely con- tended that the God revealed in the Old Testament is not a personal deity, and cited a number of texts to prove that Israel's God is an eternal It. Whoever denies the per- sonality of God is not a Christian thinker. Illingworth in his Bampton Lectures said that it is Christianity that has developed and completed the conception of personality as we now have it. Hegel had gone fur- ther by affirming that the world owes to Christianity the very idea of personality. Recently a Hindu monk, one of the numerous Swamis 9 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE who have visited America from India, said, while addressing two hundred people, "We are not persons; there is not a person in this room." That shows the hopeless futility of pagan philosophy, groping in the dark with- out the one clue that can guide it out into the light. That eminent Japanese scholar, Dr. Harada, Presi- dent of the Doshisha College at Kyoto, says that his countrymen as well as their co-religionists in Asia, have never attained to an adequate conception of the worth of the human individual, and that their lack of a clear perception of the personality of man, with its central significance and circumferential im- plications, goes far to explain their lack of any clear conception of a personal God. The two things go naturally and logically together, each illuminating and confirming the other, the personality of man and the personality of God, the two 10 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE supreme resplendent facts "the ac- knowledgment of which, accepted by thy reason, solves for thee all questions in the earth or out of it, and hath so far advanced thee to be wise." Denial of human person- ality is absurd, and belief in a personal Deity is necessary not only because, in Kant's phrase, any other is "not a God that can in- terest us," but also because any other is to us unthinkable. While Tennyson was sitting for his portrait to the great artist, Watts, the two veterans, who had been friends for many years, talked much about their religious beliefs. "Both felt that the world could not get on without a personal God." Even ex-President Eliot of Harvard affirms that "so long as man is man God will be thought of as a Person." The qualities or attributes which we ascribe to deity and which are largely manifested in the universe, ii A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE such as intelligence, will, wisdom, purpose, beneficence, cannot be im- agined to exist apart from person- ality. At the top of the universe is unde- niably some supreme reality, some infinite entity. Mr. Arnold, describ- ing it by one of its manifestations, calls it "An eternal Power (not our- selves) which makes for righteous- ness.' ' Herbert Spencer calls it "The eternal and infinite Energy from which all things proceed." They both say "which," not "who" nor "whom." But John Tyndall said, "Standing before this power, this energy, which from the universe forces itself upon me, I dare not do other than speak of a He, a Spirit, a Cause." His doing this in a non- scientific or extra-scientific sense does not make it any less real. And after Tyndall, Romanes, the eminent biol- ogist, speaking as a scientist, said, "Within the range of human observa- 12 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE tion personality is the fact which most wears the appearance of finality — the appearance of that unana- lyzable and inexplicable nature which we are bound to believe must be- long to the ultimate mystery of Being." When Schelling, misinter- preting some of Hegel's reasoning, cried out, " Consequently there is no Personal God," Hegel quickly cor- rected the misunderstanding by say- ing: "Not so! The exact contrary is true. There is a personal God." Lotze also insists that God is God because he is the perfect Person. Emerson, who was accused of pan- theism, does not, in speaking of Deity, agree with the gentlemen who prefer "which" to "who." In one place he writes, "in its highest moods the soul gives itself alone, original, and pure to the Lonely, Original, and Pure, who, on that condition, gladly inhabits, leads, and speaks to the soul." For our part, not being 13 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE persuaded of the superiority of the impersonal pronoun, we look up to the Highest- We-Know and say He, Who, affirming an infinite intelligence and will, a supreme personal Being at the summit and center of things. And this we do not only by phil- osophic warrant and necessity, but also as the mind's only refuge from the most horrible of all possible conclusions ; for we cannot help agree- ing with Von Hartman, the chief apostle of reasoned pessimism, that "if the Absolute Being be impersonal, the gospel of despair necessarily follows" for us. And so long as the mind can find any footing above and outside of that blackest of all abysses, it refuses to make the suicidal plunge into that bottomless pit. At the top of earthly existences is Personality. On earth there is noth- ing higher than Man. His distinc- tion and significance lie in his being 14 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE a person. This differentiates him from all other creatures on this planet. To ascribe personality to brutes would be preposterous; nor, we remark, parenthetically, is there any ground for supposing them im- mortal — John Wesley, to the con- trary notwithstanding — since im- mortality is an attribute or perquisite of personality; and the most intel- ligent animal ever seen was not a person; no, not even Consul, the famous chimpanzee. Being a person classes man scientifically in the same category with God, relates him gener- ically to Divinity, and separates him from the animal by a great and impassable gulf. The Christian affirmation of personality in God and in Man is clearly stated by Dr. Sterling, the British philosopher, who says: "There can no Supreme Being be but that must to himself say, 'I Am that I Am.' It is the very heart of the Christian religion 15 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE that the Infinite God who is a Person and says T became finite as Man who is a person and says 'I.' Man is I; even by having been made like unto God [Gen. i. 2j], Man is I. It is that that he has of God in him." At the top and climax of divine Revelation is Personality. God's revelation of truth, progressively disclosed through ages, came to its culmination in Christ, made its complete, luminous, and efful- gent expression in a unique and peerless composite personality, Di- vine-human, the Man of Nazareth, in whom dwelt all the fullness of the Godhead bodily; a personality nowise explicable as a human evolu- tion, a truly divine embodiment, and 1 'stepping/ ' as even Theodore Parker said, "thousands of years before the race of man." More complete illu- mination the soul cannot receive, the mind cannot imagine, than radiates 16 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE from the light of the knowledge of the glory of God shining in the face of Jesus Christ, who said, "I am the Truth/' "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father." From this glance at the reality, the nature, and the rank of personality, we pass to consider the Meaning and Range of the Human Personality. It is a great thing to be a person, because i. Personality means Power. In creating each new individuality and adding to the ranks of being another intelligent self-conscious ego, the Creator sets off a fresh center of energy and action, of choice and causation, of self-determining pur- pose and influence. Among the elements a new force has been introduced, among the intelligences a new and independent mind able to assent or dissent, to obstruct or further plans and operations which may be proceeding here, able also 17 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE to devise and initiate plans and operations of its own. Each individ- ual is a thinker and a doer in realms of thought, volition, action — a pos- itive factor participating in affairs, a party to various transactions. Per- sonality is a center of original and elemental energy, radiating influence and producing effects. Each living person introduces something incalcu- lable, purposeful, determinant amid the workings of the laws of physics; he can superintend physical and chemical processes, arrest them, or permit them to go on, and can guide and direct them. Recently Sir Oliver Lodge, president of the British Scientific Association, spoke to that great body of scientists as follows: ' 'Existence is like the output from a loom. The pattern, the design for the weaving, is in some sort 'there' already; but whereas our looms are mere machines, once the guiding cards have been fed into 18 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE them, the loom of time is different in being complicated by a multitude of free agents who can modify the web, making the product more beau- tiful or more ugly according as they are in harmony or disharmony with the general scheme. I venture to maintain that manifest imperfections are thus accounted for and that free- dom could be given on no other terms, nor at any less cost. The hu- man being's ability thus to work for weal or woe is no illusion; it is a reality, a responsible power which conscious agents possess; wherefore the resulting fabric is not something preordained and inexorable. The power of the human free agent to modify the course of things and events is no fiction, but an actual factor which must be counted in and reckoned with." Personality means power. It is a great thing to be a person, because 19 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE 2. Personality means Proprietorship. To be a person is to have a freehold on the rich and fertile soil of existence. Just to be alive is to hold some things in fee simple. As a living creature with lungs I have a lien on millions of cubic miles of atmosphere for my share of oxygen. Whoever put me here made me a resident and property holder, occupant and part owner of extensive premises, of valuable mes- suage and curtilage. I am born a shareholder in the benefits of the cosmos, holding some certificates of capital stock in an incorporated universe, with coupons maturing as the seasons roll; possessor of the multifarious privileges, adjuncts, and emoluments of this life. And when I said "this life," and paused on that period, I heard a Voice coming from between the lids of a Book, a voice which breaks to temporal ears news of eternity, and which 20 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE bade me add that to be a person means to have beyond this life a claim to real estate located where no surveyor can run his chains around it — to be heir to an inher- itance greater than any surrogate can make record of — "heir," says that authentic and supremely author- itative Volume, possible "heir of God and joint heir with Jesus Christ," by and for whom the worlds were made, capable of receiving from Him whose right it is to bestow the enormous information that in some sense "all things are yours." Down over every human personality that stupendous announcement converges its thrilling tidings for the soul awakening to a knowledge of itself, its sphere, its possible reaches and possessions. It is a great thing to be a per- son, because 3. Personality means Citizenship. If the visible form be only twelve 21 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE inches long and twelve hours old, the little stranger is at home in the universe, drops into natural and inevitable relations with the system of things, and has already estab- lished a sweet and satisfactory modus vivendi with his immediate environ- ment. Ask the mother if it is not so. Politically speaking, he may be called a subject in a cosmic theoc- racy, or more properly in our Arminian view, a citizen and an elector in the Republic of God, having a personal voice and vote in the determining and ordering of things, each individual sharing to some extent in directing and governing the world. Of no mean city is he a citizen. The toga he puts on at coming of age invests him with a higher dignity than that which swelled the breast of the Roman with pride as he said amid the Seven Hills or in the ends of the earth, "I am a Roman 22 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE citizen.' * Through conferment by Christ, through grace divine, man holds the option of suffrage in a more than worldly state, for besides citizenship in this earthly ward and precinct, he receives in the gold box of his personality the proffer of the freedom of the City of God, distinguished privileges in the munic- ipality of Heaven; which superior franchise and distinction he may either appropriate or refuse. Anax- agoras had his eye on this celestial citizenship in his calm reply to his critics : When shallow hearts reproached this pilgrim wise, "Wanderer, why dost thou not thy country prize?" He raised to heaven his tranquil smiling eyes: "I do," he answered. "There my country lies." It is a great thing to be a person, because 4. Personality means Royalty. Really it is kingliness done up in a small package. Man not only votes; he rules. Each birth is the arrival of a prince or princess of 23 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE the blood royal. You teach the little tots to assert their royal lin- eage; they are singing everywhere, "I am the child of a King/' You organize circles of King's Daughters. Literally the creation of a free agent is the installation of a potentate who will take his ordained and legitimate place among the powers that be; autocratic Lord Rector of something or other, perhaps of many things. His mouth is like the Pasha's gate: out of it go swift messages of command. There is sufficient reason for saying now and here, "His Majesty, Man," "Her Royal Highness, Woman." And beyond these narrow borders, past the bounds of all earthly dominion, the faithful soul may read afar, in an almost blinding splendor of an- nouncement, the imperial bulletin, "I will make thee ruler over many things." That means a larger and loftier kingliness to come. 24 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE It is a great thing to be a person, because 5. Personality implies Obligation. Existence is not all privilege; it is duty as well. The more royal man's nature and state, the larger and more binding his responsibilities. Noblesse oblige. The equities require that property owners shall be tax- payers, each assessed in proportion to his possessions. Every consumer is obligated to be in some way a producer, to contribute his proper share to the general weal. "Freely ye have received, freely give/' is the law. No personality is isolated and free from responsibility toward others. Each is under moral bonds, captive to relationships, party to a reciprocity treaty, and must live up to its requirements. One speaks of "the mighty hopes that make us men." It is as fit and relevant to speak of the immense and weighty obligations, born of august relation- 25 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE ships, which constitute us men. Per- sonality involves obligation and responsibility. Conscience tells man that he is a responsible being. Chesterton says of Herbert Spencer: "He rejected dogma and affronted heaven and the angels with his doubts and denials, but there was one hard, arrogant dogma that he never doubted: he never doubted that he was responsible." It is a great thing to be a person, because 6. Personality means Perpetuity, or if immortality be by any held to be conditional, then it means possi- ble perpetuity — a possibly perma- nent place among the orders of existence which people the living universe. To admit this does not subject man's reason to inordinate strain nor press faith to the point of credulity. Nothing incredible is implied, since it is more likely that we, being now alive, shall continue 26 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE to exist than that, when we were not, we should have begun to be. The wonder of the possible per- sistence of personality is less great than the marvel of our origination. The irresistible force of that reason- ing even Thomas Paine urgently in- sisted on, as did also Voltaire, who asserted that we have at least as many reasons for affirming immor- tality as for denying it. John Bigelow, the eminent lawyer, jour- nalist, and diplomat, held a brief for the belief in immortality and argued it ably in the Court of Reason. To the question, "Is there existence after death?" his reply was, "As a lawyer I would naturally begin by saying that the burden of proof rests upon those who deny the continuity of life." Mr. Huxley, a competent author- ity as to what science teaches, wrote concerning the doctrine of personal survival beyond death that physical 27 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE science has nothing to say against it; while Professor Bowne from his chair of philosophy, surveying the whole field of modern reasoning and research, declared that, "If the moral nature demands continued existence or any word of revelation affirms it, there is no fact or argument against it." Well, the demands of the moral nature do require it, and Holy Scripture written in the Bible, harmonious with the deeper holy scripture written by the Spirit of the living God in fleshly tables of the human heart, does declare it — indeed, can have no particle of meaning or value without it. An- other respectable and representative modern voice is that of John Fiske, who says in his book on The Destiny of Man in the Light of His Origin that the scientific doctrine of evolu- tion, of which he was a chief ex- ponent, so far from prognosticating that death ends all, really predicts 28 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE a post-mortem progress to further stages of development. It is a simple fact that with nothing in our hands but evolution's latest word we would have warrant for asking incredulously with John Hall Ing- ham, Did chaos form, and water, air, and fire, rocks, trees, the worm work toward Humanity, merely in order that man at last beneath the churchyard spire might be once more the worm, the tree, the rock? Only this and nothing more? Dust to dust the miserable, pitiable, and con- temptible conclusion of all the climb- ing and enlarging life which has made its mighty march by slow steps up the gradual slope of the long ages? Science says,' "No!" Reason says, "No!" The moral sense says, "No!" Socrates says, "No!" Great- est of all, Jesus says, "No!" Even the peripatetic rhetorical platform scoffer, the thrifty professional blas- phemer, the itinerant lecturer on 29 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE "The Mistakes of Moses," said, "No!" when he uncovered beside his brother's grave and babbled incon- sistently of an "eternal hope," and afterward wrote that "in the night of death hope sees a star and listen- ing love can hear the rustle of a wing." In the whole earth not one voice entitled to respect denies to personality a probable, or at least possible, persistence beyond bodily dissolution ; while he speaks for man- kind who says sturdily, "My foothold is mortised in granite; I laugh at what you call dissolution"; as he also does who says, "Only speak the name of Man, and you announce the doctrine of immortality. It cleaves to his constitution"; and as did Robert Browning when he wrote in his wife's New Testament these words from Dante, "Thus I believe, thus I affirm, thus I am certain it is, that from this life I shall pass to another better." At the time when 30 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE this essay is being written, Sir Oliver Lodge, at the climax of his distinguished career as a scientist, is using the most exalted, dignified, and commanding hour of his life as an opportunity for declaring to the scientific world his firm belief in the persistence of personality beyond bodily death, his conviction that man is a pilgrim of the Infinite; while Bergson the great philosopher, supports the great scientist by de- claring, " There is positively no reason to deny the continuity of individual spiritual existence after bodily dis- solution. There are no facts that warrant such a conclusion." It is a great thing to be a person, because 7. Personality means immeasurable Possibility of Progress, Personality has an amazing off- look, a prospect vastly and magnif- icently disproportioned to its earthly and temporal platform and to its 31 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE visible dimensions. Only set the smallest individual on his tiny feet and he looks away into realms remote and spacious — realms which may hold for him extensive and sumptuous opportunities, to whose gates, perchance, he has the key, or may obtain it. Give personality a start, and it has the propensity and the power to travel, no one can calculate how far; so that the human creature, stepping forward from his first self-conscious hour, is warranted in singing as the song of his pilgrimage, "Thus onward we move, and, save God above, none guesseth how wondrous the journey will prove.' ' Simply let personality begin, and the angle of possible progress opening outward from the mathematic point of birth is one the subtending arc of which no trigonometry can measure. Though the human person have no larger foothold on the earth than the print 32 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE which the bound foot of a Chinese woman makes in the dust, he has a boundless firmament overhead, and is aware of regions above and be- yond, elsewheres and hereafters con- cerning which he has surmises and presentiments, and the contents of which he may to some extent explore and in some sense possibly appro- priate. To what extent and in what sense? is an inquiry worthy the serious meditation of every earnest mind, and, indeed, obligatory upon everyone who has any sense at all. If this is not a question of dignity and import, then there can be no momentous questions, and existence itself must be a frivolous triviality, the story of which can have no more meaning than a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Our present meditation is in the august presence of that tremendous question, in the solemn shadow of 33 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE its gigantic interrogation point. How extensive is the range of our per- sonality? How much of a traveler may the soul be? What is the human itinerary? Now, evidently, demonstration by diagram is not here in place, nor is that sort of certainty aimed at which is born at the end of a syllogism. In the highest things of life it is impossible to bind the under- standing to conclusions by the clamp of a logical ergo. There are ranges of reality to which the methods of logic, mathematics, and physical sci- ence are as useless as they are inapplicable. Nevertheless, knowl- edge is not shut out from those realms, and toward them agnosticism is not the necessary or respectable attitude of mind. With reference to their contents we may arrive at certitude as solid and satisfactory as any mathematic, scientific, or syl- logistic conclusion. We simply pre- 34 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE sent a few facts and suggestions which may open here and there a vista, flash a searchlight off into the dark, and help to substantiate the distinctively Christian affirmation : Great is personality. Its dignity is lofty. Its assets are large. Its fellow- ships are noble. Its sphere and range are possibly immense. Consider its amazing range, actual and possible. Beginning with the lowest, the physical, observe the Range of man's Bodily Powers. Is it not somewhat impressive that this human mite should be able to look so far? From here to the most distant discovered fixed star is so long a journey that a beam of light is hundreds of years in making it; yet man's eye takes that journey and gazes upon and examines that star. Does some one ask whether animals have not the same range of sight? We answer promptly, No! For one thing, man can piece out 35 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE his powers of vision and extend his view indefinitely up and down. The brutes have no establishment for grinding magnifying lenses and re- flectors. There has never been an Alvan Clark in business among them. No smart chimpanzee from ''Pro- fessor" Garner's kindergarten in the woods of Africa has invented tel- escope or microscope or even knows how to use one. No educated gorilla has handled the spectroscope and re- ported what Aldebaran and Alcyone are made of. Furthermore, brute vision, if it had equal range, bears small resemblance in its quality to ours; for even if things visible make the same image on the animal retina as on the human, the reflection there is incidental, superficial, meaning- less, futile. Whatever vision brutes may have of distant regions con- veys to them no significance, awakens no interest. The lion prowling in the ruins of Persepolis sees the 36 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE yellow moon shedding mellow light on moldering plinth and column, and the Siberian wolf sending his long howl across white frozen plains receives into his lifted eye star- beams from the frontiers of space; the same was true of Newton's dog, "Diamond," but then, as Carlyle said, "to Newton and Newton's dog, what a different pair of universes !" Moonlight and starlight stir no in- quiry in the brutes, tethered and limited as they are every way to the ground they stalk upon. Lion and wolf have nothing in them that goes prowling up the heavens; much less do they turn a look of recog- nition above them or suspect them- selves akin to anything higher. With man it is totally otherwise. This short and slender perpendicular midget not only sees the skies, but mounts them. Finding himself alive on a small globule which he names the earth, he plants his feet on a 37 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE few inches of surface-dust and thence takes a great leap into immensity, goes to see where the stars are and how they live ; circumvents them and dives into the fountains of their light; frustrates their eternal silence and makes them tell their paths; passes from station to station and marks the outline of their geometry; accosts the wildest comets, detains them long enough to make engage- ments with them for ten thousand years, and they will keep their tryst with him or his successors; saunters up endless avenues of light, comrading with huge and mighty worlds; and then drops back on this little grass-plot, unwearied by his stupendous excursions and mur- muring something about "many mansions" in his ' 'Father's house," strangely rolling that saying over like a sweet morsel under his tongue. Preposterous as it seems for a creature who, when he presently lays 38 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE his visible part down under the daisies, may apparently be bounded by a headstone, a footstone, and a tiny mound, we nevertheless know that the range of the human per- sonality by use of his bodily powers is literally immense. In general, the physical perquisites of merely being alive are varied and extensive. As foothold and an ear are equivalent to a life-lease of a reserved seat in the world's great concert hall with all its manifold music — hum of in- sects, song of birds, sounds of winds and waters, human voices and all instruments — so also existence and an eye furnish a complimentary ticket to the whole vast panoramic exhibition of the spectacular uni- verse; eyesight enters free to that enormous cyclorama that is tented between zenith and horizon. No human life is so poor or form so petite but it has through its physical organs a range amazingly dispro- 39 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE portioned to its own feebleness and littleness. Diminutive David, the He- brew lad, lying at night beside his flock among the Bethlehem hills, can see the whole celestial splendor over- head, When in heaven the stars about the moon Look beautiful, when all the winds are laid, And every height comes out, and jutting peak And valley, and the immeasurable heavens Break open to their highest, and all the stars Shine, and the shepherd gladdens in his heart. The simple question at this point is whether there is anything signif- icant and suggestive in the plain prosaic fact that man's wide-away vision ranges from so narrow a foot- hold as he has to so enormous a firmament as he sees; that this ridiculously infinitesimal human dot casts his visual line into the depths of a boundless sphere; that his organs of sight put him as actually in touch with distant suns and systems, nebulae and galaxies, as if his eyeball were a marble and he 40 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE shot it across a pavement of sapphire to strike the outer rim of space. Note next the Ranging Power of the Human Intellect. Give the mind a small foothold and it may explore a large sphere. A squirrel can go through a whole forest up in mid- air by running out on the longest limbs and jumping from one tree to the next. The mind is such a squirrel. In the deep, wide forest of the universe it travels through empty spaces by long leaps. Give it a limb to leap from, it will find something beyond to leap to. The mind is capable of such procedure, and habitually practices it. Con- fucius said, "When I have presented one corner of a subject to anyone and he cannot from it learn the other three, I do not repeat my lesson.' ' The normal mind can al- ways do that; the mind that cannot is sub -normal and deficient, so excep- tional as to be incapable of education 41 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE or extensive development and prog- ress. As to the physical universe, wide exploration of it by the investigating human mind is made possible by its organic and constitutional unity, by the homogeneity of its materials and the uniformity of its laws. It is like a seamless garment, and woven of the same texture throughout. Analysis of the minute and near gives the constitution of the enormous and remote, because the spectroscope re- ports that the same constituents compose both. Give the chemist one drop of human blood and he knows what qualities are in the veins of the fifteen hundred millions who populate the earth. Within a raindrop's compass lie a planet's elements, and both are globular by virtue of the same laws. State an asteroid and by inclusion the solar system is stated, with all its acces- sories and relationships. The mole- 42 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE cule confesses and exposes Aldebaran. Because all forces of nature are at play in the atom, therefore the atom samples and publishes the universe. Physical science by studying and analyzing the common soap bubble reaches conclusions concerning the plenum that fills the interstellar spaces. How much Jesus Christ was thinking of when he said, "Consider the lilies," no man fully knows, but one thing which makes the lily wondrously worth considering is that the contents and mechanism of the entire material cosmos are reported and recorded by measurable effects in the development of its delicate life. Astronomy, geology, mineral- ogy, biology, and meteorology are referred to in its roots and stem, its bud and bloom, its fibers and its sap. An explanation of the lily involves the whole physical creation. Mrs. Browning set scientific truth to poetry when she wrote, 43 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE No lily-muffled hum of summer bee, But finds some coupling with the spinning stars; No pebble at your feet but proves a sphere; No chaffinch but implies the cherubim. And the same involvement of one with all gives the meaning to Tenny- son's lines: Flower in the crannied wall, I pluck you out of the crannies; Hold you here root and all, in my hand, Little flower — but if I could understand What you are, root and all, I should know what God and man is. William Watson thanks Wordsworth for making him See that each blade of grass Has roots that grope about eternity, And see in each drop of dew upon each blade A mirror of the inseparable All. The human intellect avails itself of this cosmic unity by traversing the universe far and wide as if on highways cast up and roads mac- adamized for the journeyings of a Pilgrim of the Infinite. Mathematical processes especially put on exhibition the ranging power 44 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE of the mind, its ability to proceed from known to unknown, from the little to the large. One brief equa- tion contains the elements of a great problem which the mathemati- cian can work out through intricate and extensive processes to complete solution. A single proposition dem- onstrated may have as many crystal- clear corollaries as Jupiter has moons. Give the geometer any three points of a circle and he constructs the circle, fixes its center, draws with confident precision its whole circum- ference, and is as certain of all the points not given as of the three points you gave him. Such things are natural and easy to man's intel- lectual powers. And there are proved mathematical laws on which, as on a ladder, the human mind can climb. The ladder is invisible, intangible; the eye cannot see it, the feet can- not feel it; but the mind knows it and mounts sure-footed. To deal 45 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE with infinity is part of the regular business of mathematics. A Pilgrim of the Infinite is the human mind. By such methods the mind ranges far abroad through the material uni- verse, ascertaining its extent, its nature, its construction, acquiring knowledge which is considered trust- worthy. Beyond dispute personality has passports and a firman to travel and explore and excavate throughout vast regions of the physical realm. But at this point arises a momen- tous and disputed question: Has man the power to carry his progressive knowledge beyond to non-material, supernatural, spiritual realms and realities? And thinkers divide into two classes on opposite sides of this interrogation point; they go to right and left like the sheep and the goats. The mere physicists assert that no one can have assured and valid knowledge extending beyond the uni- verse of matter, while the opposing 4 6 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE spiritual party affirm that man has satisfying knowledge of entities and verities altogether independent of matter, and that an actual realm of things spiritual is discernible by trustworthy faculties of the human spirit. Mr. Huxley disparaged Lord Ba- con's division of the realm of knowl- edge into two worlds and insisted that there is only one world that we have any knowledge of, and that is the world which physical science perceives, apprehends, and reports. Now of natural science several things are true: (i) it deals with the lower facts of the universe; (2) it employs the lower faculties of the mind; (3) its results and acquisitions are of secondary import, transient use, and perishable value. But there is another world than that of matter — a realm superior, spiritual, eternal — and there is a reputable and ration- al science relating thereto. Of this 47 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE science also, as of the other, three things are true: (i) this science lives and moves in the sublimest regions of reality; (2) it employs the noblest of human faculties, fac- ulties higher than those by which man solves an equation or calculates an eclipse; (3) the knowledge it ob- tains is in dignity supreme and in importance primary and perpetual. Of the existence of this superior realm, man has, to begin with, in- tuitive conviction, and, in addition, a propensity to investigate and ex- plore it, and even to make with it a reciprocity treaty establishing so- cial and commercial relations. It is vain to call halt to the intellect at the boundary line of matter, for the mind's curious, inquisitive eagerness, the momentum acquired in its lower progress, the silent attraction of things beyond of which human na- ture has premonitions and for which it has predilections, all insure that 48 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE the unchecked mind will pass the border of the visible and palpable and ponderable. The same impulse which carries it forward among phys- ical facts should carry it over in sight of other facts beyond. John Tyndall in his famous Belfast address said: "I cannot stop abruptly where the microscope ceases to be of use. The vision of the mind author- itatively supplements the vision of the eye. By a necessity engendered and justified by science, I cross the boundary of experimental evidence and discern" — discern what? Why, something beyond; for our purpose here it matters not what. All that we care for is that Professor Tyn- dall declared precisely 'what we here assert, that a necessity engendered and justified by science compels the mind to recognize realities which are not disparaged by the fact that they are not scientifically or mathemati- cally or logically demonstrable. And 49 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE these are the incomparably majestic realities. Natural science has neither dignity nor meaning unless it merges at the top into the highest questions of morals and theology. Its knowl- edge only "yields mere basement for the soul's emprise." Thinkers unsurpassed in intellec- tual power and culture by any of the physicists assert spiritual facts and demonstrate them by methods which science approves. One such wrote a book showing that the cre- dentials of science are the warrant of faith. Here are some specimen thinkers in whom we see the human reason on its travels ranging out and up through spiritual regions. Here is Descartes. He began his reasoning by standing as with feet pressed together on the one small fact of his own existence, which was to him indubitably real firm footing. But above and around this arched the vision of things which this fact 50 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE involved, implied, or had sight of; and he proved a firmament of human knowledge which included all that religion asks men to trust — a fir- mament of truth and reality so vast that the exploration of it made him a pilgrim of the Infinite. Here is Kant. He stood on the fact of consciousness. Standing there, he found himself within hear- ing of the Categorical Imperative and saw a moral law which covered him ; saw an actual sphere overhead that contained between its zenith and horizon facts which stood steady as fixed stars and shone like a reflection from the glory of God's face — the sublime and splendid facts of free agency, liberty, divine providence, and immortality. And thus Im- manuel Kant, though he never left his native city of Konigsberg except for a few miles' walk into the country, was a tremendous traveler — a pilgrim of the Infinite. 51 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE Here is Bishop Butler, who framed his noble Analogy by standing on the admitted fact of an intelligent Author and Moral Governor of the world, and showed that the teachings of Christianity hang their essential concave over whoever stands there with the faculty of sight: that Wil- liam Pitt could not see it did not prove that Butler was wrong. Some men need to purge their vision with moral "euphrasy and rue." Even Pitt would admit that the author of the great Analogy was a pilgrim of the Infinite. And back yonder, tallest of them all against the sky, stands Paul, who entering as a stranger the city of violet-crowned Athena, found the wise men of Greece standing on two points of conviction, one expressed in their altar inscription, "To the unknown God," and the other in their poet's line, "We also are his offspring." Then the apostle vir- 52 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE tually said to them, "Ye wise men of Athens, stand right there, just where you are, with your feet on those two points, and 111 show you more than you ever saw before." Straightway he unveiled before them the Christ and unfolded to them the religion of salvation. Him whom they ignorantly worshiped declared he unto them; and from the Hill of Mars, shouldering Minerva's mount, Athenian gossips and philosophers had that day a glimpse of the full- ness of saving truth. Anyone stand- ing there on the Areopagus and listening to Paul could have a clear view into the heaven of heavens, though Athens slept that night upon the Attic plain among her marble divinities without realizing that the ambassador of an eternal Empire had arrived and presented his credentials. Descartes, Kant, Butler, Paul, they were all pilgrims of the Infinite. So much for the far-ranging power 53 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE of the human intellect with its insatiable curiosity and inquisitive- ness, its eager and tireless pro- pensity to travel, discover, and investigate. Consider now the possible Range of Man's Spiritual Intercourse and Appeal. Man is aware of an in- ward tie binding him to the Infinite. The religious feeling is described by Bergson as "the sense of not being alone in the universe, the sense of relationship between the individual and the spiritual Source of life." Evolution, however it be defined, has reached its consummation and triumph in man, a creature upon whose consciousness is impressed the feeling of a tie connecting him with the Infinite and Supreme. This in- born sense of not-aloneness is the sign of relationship, and the prompter and door-opener to fellowship between the Father of spirits and His human child. Man has a way of presenting 54 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE himself as a petitioner at the court of heaven. He is a solicitor of favors. When his desire reaches the intensity, definiteness, and dignity of prayer, he sends it forth as on wings ; enea nrepoevta — winged words — is a fitter phrase in this connection than in any other. With man prayer is instinctive, and they who try to reason against it make no headway. An instinct pays no more attention to objectors or critics than Niagara pays to the bubbles on its brink or to the butterflies playing hide and seek among its rainbows. Prayer is futile, is it? Or has no effect be- yond self-excitation, by means of which a man performs the fine old feat of lifting himself by the straps of his boots? Well, it is necessary to look this matter squarely in the face. There cannot be many opinions; everybody is shut up to one of two. Prayer is communion with a personal God and with the 55 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE benign Father of men, or it is noth- ing but make-believe, and all the rest of the spiritual life is nothing but illusion. Take a good look at the consequences and then make your choice. If man's praying be only as "the murmur of gnats in the gloom,' ' then his industry, as Tennyson saw, signifies nothing more than "the buzzing of bees in their hive," and human life is but as "a trouble of ants in the gleam of a million million suns"; that awesome star-sprinkled splendor yonder is but a spangled pall flung over the bier of human hope; man's only heaven is located inside the cemetery gate, six feet under ground, and to be buried on his back in the dark and the dirt is all the fulfillment a per- fidious universe allows to the sublime yearnings which it has permitted to arise in the bosom of this aspiring creature with the upturned face and the beseeching eyes. Believe that 56 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE who can. We cannot. We agree with Frances Power Cobbe that "if man be not immortal, God is not just"; and with that robust woman, Rosa Bonheur, when she wrote, "Dear Madame Fould, the Creator would really be the devil himself if he made us to live, love, and aspire in order to annihilate us afterward like generations of bugs which swarm in the old houses of Nice, Auvergne, Brittany, and the Pyrenees, and which we clean people destroy for- ever without respite and without mercy." In like spirit, Tennyson and Queen Victoria agreed together in an interview of which the Queen says: "Tennyson is grown very old, his eyesight much impaired. He talked of the many friends he had lost, and what it would be if he did not feel and know that there is another world, where there will be no partings; and then he spoke with horror of the unbelievers and philos- 57 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE ophers who would make you believe there is no other world, no immor- tality, who try to explain all this away in a miserable manner. We agreed that, were such a thing possi- ble, God, who is love, would be far more cruel than any human being." Against such a God our moral sense would prompt us to blaspheme; and to demand of him, before he blots us out of existence, how he came to blunder into making Man a being nobler than himself and capable of properly despising him. As to such things as prayer and communion with Heaven, Tennyson asserted that he knew God better than he knew matter. With matter he felt no kinship and could not understand its nature. Near the end of life he said to a friend: "I cannot form the least notion of a brick. I don't know what it is. It's no use talking about atoms, extension, color, weight. I cannot penetrate 58 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE the nature of a brick. It remains incognizable by my mind, which has nothing in common with it. But I have far more distinct ideas of God, who thinks and wills and loves. I can understand and sympathize with him in my poor way. His nature and mine have something in com- mon; he is spirit, I am spirit. The human soul seems to me in some way — I cannot say just how — identi- fied with God; and there comes in the value of prayer. Prayer is like opening a sluice between the great ocean and our little channels. 1 ' That is to say, Prayer is interflow and communion between God and the soul. To Tennyson the only intel- ligible reality is Mind — mind finite and Mind Infinite. God is, and he is personal. Man is, and he is personal. Between these persons ex- ists both close resemblance and real relationship; hence communion is possible and natural. 59 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE Speak to him thou for he hears, and spirit with spirit may meet — Closer is he than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet. Thus did the greatest of English laureates reason and feel. If, now, somebody objects to the testimony of a poet as vision- ary and calls for a more sober, practical witness who will adhere to prosaic matter of fact, he can surely desire nothing better than Benjamin Franklin, whom all men accept as the type of sane, sound sense, a sturdily sagacious and broadly bal- anced mind. Read, then, his cel- ebrated speech in the Constitutional Convention, when he moved for daily prayer: In the beginning of the contest with Britain, when we were sensible of danger, we had daily prayers in this room for the divine protection. Our prayers, sir, were heard, and they were gra- ciously answered. All of us who were engaged in the struggle must have observed frequent instances of a superintending Providence in our favor. To that kind Providence we owe this happy oppor- tunity of consulting in peace on the means of 60 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE establishing our future national felicity; and have we now forgotten this powerful Friend, or do we imagine we no longer need his assistance? I have lived, sir, a long time [eighty-one years], and the longer I live tlie more convincing proof I see of this truth: that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice, is it probable that an empire can rise with- out his aid? We have been assured, sir, in the sacred writings, "that except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it." I firmly believe this; and I also believe that without his concurring aid we shall succeed in this political building no better than the builders of Babel. We shall be divided by our little partial local interests; our projects will be confounded; and we ourselves shall become a reproach and a byword down to future ages; and what is worse, mankind may hereafter, from this unfortunate instance, despair of establishing government by human wisdom, and leave us to chance, war, or conquest. I therefore beg leave to move that henceforth prayers, im- ploring the assistance of heaven and its blessing on our deliberations, be held in this assembly every morning before we proceed to business, and that one or more of the clergy of this city be requested to officiate in that service. That grim and rugged thinker George Meredith, whom nobody ever considered a credulous person, said: "I certainly think prayer is good, good for children and for men. It 61 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE rouses up and cleanses the nature, and searches us through to find what we are. It keeps us from living thoughtless lives and suffering the vapor of our own self-conceit." To his own boy, away from home at school, he wrote, in 1872, "Do not lose the habit of praying. Prayer for strength of soul is that passion of the soul which catches the gift it seeks." And thirty-four years later, near his life's end, he writes: "Be sure that the spiritual God is acces- sible at all moments to the soul de- siring Him, and would live in us if we would keep the breast clean." After the first Atlantic cable was laid, an electrician who came down from New Foundland to New Ycrk told Henry M. Field that he had sent a message two thousand miles under the sea from Heart's Content, New Foundland, to Valentia Bay, Ireland, by a current of electricity generated in a battery formed in a 62 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE percussion cap with a single drop of water. Dr. Field, being skeptical about this, asked Sir William Thom- son (later Lord Kelvin) in London some years after if the electrician's story could possibly be true; and the great scientist replied: ''Your in- formant might have made a stronger statement. With a capsule one quar- ter the size of a percussion cap, containing a piece of zinc hardly visible to the naked eye, wet with a drop of water as big as a dew-drop or a tear, he could generate a sufficient current to carry a message from the New World to the Old." Now no man comprehends how that is done, or, except by its effects, can tell anything about the nature of the fluid which makes it possible. It is really as inexplicable, as incom- prehensible, as any miracle recorded in the New Testament, and yet it is a fact. Does anybody say now that it is incredible that a human 63 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE heart with a tear in it can generate some kind of a current which may carry a spirit message afar to an unseen and spiritual world? If I could have stood beside that operator when he was sitting at the American end of the Atlantic cable at Heart's Content, and with a touch of his finger was flashing his thought swift as lightning under the ocean and getting quick answer from a distant continent which perhaps he had never seen, I would have asked him if he considered Mrs. Browning's words absurd when she writes: I think this passionate sigh which, half begun, I stifle back, may reach and stir the plumes Of God's calm angel, standing in the sun. I would have asked him if he thought it improbable that the thin piping voice of Tiny Tim praying, "God bless us every one," might fly the firmament through and with- out getting lost in the vast solitudes and silences find the ear of God. 64 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE And if he answered that it seemed to him unlikely, I would dumfound him by demanding why. It is proper to ask that man there with his ringer on the key, conversing mysteriously with another remote and invisible hemisphere, whether he thinks it incredible that the prayer which issues from out the narrow gateway of the penitent's lips, kneel- ing and raising his small face to the infinite heaven whose stars mix and tremble in his tears, may fly like a dove to the windows of heaven. And if he replies with skeptical scientific coolness that he thinks it incredible, then ask him if he will deign to tell us why physical science should have all the inexplicable and miraculous things and religion be permitted to have none. Man is capable of converse with heaven ; the range of his fellowship includes the Soul of the Universe. The Great Companion is not dead; but Pro- 65 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE fessor Clifford, who reported the de- cease of the God who made him, is dead, and it remains true after Clifford as it was before him that nothing is more reasonable, real, persistent, and inextinguishable than prayer. Prayer is as credible and feasible as submarine cables or wire- less telegraphy. Such is the possible, credible, act- ual range of the human personality in its spiritual communion with the Father of Spirits. Sir Oliver Lodge reminds his scientific brethren that even in prescientific ages men were competent to know something, and that ages before there were any sci- entists there were souls — intelligent, studious, needy, and aspiring souls, souls of prophets and poets, saints and penitents, feeling after God if haply they might find him, restless unless they could find rest in him. The president of the world's great- est association of scientists declares 66 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE himself firmly convinced that such souls have had actual access to the Heart of the Universe — access as profound and intimate as it is real. And he is clearly of opinion that the voices heard by Socrates and Joan of Arc, and no less by count- less souls who have sought spiritual guidance, are genuine experiences, real and natural parts of a rational, consistent, coherent, and measurably intelligible universe. As to the range of the human personality through its possible fellowships and com- munings, this man of authority among scientists, standing on the summit of the most modern science, is in full accord with the apostle who said, " Truly our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ." Close after Sir Oliver Lodge comes Arthur J. Balfour, one of the ablest of England's Prime Ministers, a thinker of great acumen, author of "The Foundations of Be- 67 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE lief," who when lecturing on " The- ism' ' at Glasgow University in Jan- uary, 1914, under the Gifford trust, declared his belief in a God whom man may adore and love, whom it is not profane to call a social God; a supreme Spirit who engages with other spirits, a God who takes sides, who works for great ends and asks us to work with Him. And if any complain of this as anthropomor- phism, he hoped to commit worse crimes before finishing his lectures. Consider the Range of man's Ac- quisitiveness — his restless ambition to obtain and possess. His acquisi- tiveness is almost as eager and in- satiable as his inquisitiveness. A near-animal named Whitman said he would like to go and live with animals because they "are so placid and self-contained; they are not dissatisfied with their condition; they do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins; they do 68 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE not discuss their duty to God; and especially over the whole earth no one of them is demented with the mania of owning things." That is true, and is the sign and proof that they are brutes. That they are content as they are with what they have proves that they were meant for that and nothing more. With man it is entirely otherwise. He is dissatisfied with his condition; he does sometimes weep for his sins; he is sometimes concerned about his duty to God; and he is uneasy with a desire to obtain and possess. And that is because of the fact that he is a man and not a beast. "What means this immortal demand for more?" asks Emerson. ' 'There is no such greedy beggar as this terribly in- satiate soul." "Unappeasable," Kip- ling calls the spirit of man. First and nearest we perceive that man's covetousness reaches out after worldly values. Born with much or 69 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE with nothing, he wants the earth, and sometimes comes near getting it. A barefoot boy who drove the cows to pasture in Delaware County, New York, coveted wealth, reached for it, and got it, dying at the age of fifty-eight, owner of a hundred millions. A curiously suggestive fact is that our courts declare that physical ownership is not limited to the sur- face of the earth, but extends in- definitely upward. There is no law on any statute book that attempts to bound a landholder's possessions skyward. The Maoris of New Zea- land shrewdly undertook to claim what was on and above the ground they had sold to the white settlers, and proceeded to cut off the timber; but at once the principle was em- bodied in law that whoever holds a deed to a bit of land is entitled to everything on it and above it ad infinitum. A court enjoins a tel- 70 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE ephone company from running wires across a field without the owner's consent, for the reason that he owns the space above his land indefinitely, even to the fixed stars. Furthermore, there are court decisions making ownership include also whatever may come down on a man's land from above. The Supreme Court of Iowa decided that an aerolite falling from the sky is the property of the owner of the soil on which it falls. It is, therefore, matter of judicial decision that a man may be a legal possessor of something that has come to him from beyond this world. Remark- able range of ownership this human creature has. But man's covetousness extends beyond the possession of worldly goods. Having knowledge of better things, knowledge awakens desire, and after desire goes active ac- quisitive pursuit. You say covet- ousness is forbidden? No! It is 71 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE divinely ordained. It is instinctive, and to forbid the instincts is useless; their cravings are bound to reach actively toward satisfaction. In- stinct is God's directest command. Man's inborn passion for possessing is also sanctioned by Scripture, only he is bidden to elevate his acquisitive- ness to the level of the highest objects of desire. " Covet earnestly the best gifts." They who are risen with Christ are in sight of great prizes and must seek those things which are above. The search is endless, the seeker is immortal, and the things themselves imperishable. With reference to realms supernal, man may be an investor as well as an investigator, and from this world may make investments in another as easily as a London banker can buy United States bonds in New York by cable. While still here in this life a man may lay up such treasures on the other side of his death-bed 72 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE as will make dying gain. There is a safe-deposit for the soul's val- uables. We may store our goods where neither moths nor thieves nor fire can get at them. It is possible for this human tourist to obtain a letter of credit here on which he may travel through eternity. One whom no- body is wise enough or good enough to be warranted in contradicting said, "Do certain things and thou shalt have treasure in heaven/ ' I have seen a woman in a poorhouse who said substantially that, by the infinite grace of a rich and beneficent Friend, she held a mortgage on the real estate of upper realms; that the mortgage was recorded up there and down here; that some day she ex- pected to foreclose, and from her death-bed would fling her possessive pronoun against the sky, crying, My God, my Saviour, my Heavenly Home! Blessed are they, and as wise as blessed, who joyously take 73 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE their Lord at his word. One such confident sweet saint, lifting her thin hands, exclaimed with her last breath, "I'm coming. Give me my palm," with as good a right as Paul had to say, "There is laid up for me a crown of life." A prodigious claimant surely is this covetous mortal creature, entered on the lists of life here between the sod and the sun. He wants some satis- fying portion, is bound to have it, will litigate his claim persistently through all disappointments against any number of adverse verdicts, carrying his case up from court to court, confident that the last and greatest tribunal, the Supreme Court of the Universe, will confirm and declare his claim to satisfying riches and issue an order putting him in possession of his heritage. The man- agement of his case is believed to be in good safe hands. He is said to have a transcendently able "Advo- 74 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE cate with the Father.' ' We speak of the man who avails himself of his birthright and his privileges. Nothing less than we have indi- cated is the range of the human personality in its covetous desire of possession. Finally, it is legitimate and easy, as Sidney Lanier said, to explain and prove to man what he may be in terms of what he is. Present attain- ment and development intimate but do not measure his significance and worth. Not the show he makes, but the promise he gives; not ac- tualities, but potentialities, constitute his value. Much in him is rudi- mentary. His future is in germ. Growth is his privilege. Quickening influences brood over him to be- friend and foster his latent possi- bilities. Germination, or something like it, our life here is. An acorn lies in the ground. Sun and air awake it and encourage it to make 75 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE an effort to rise in life. They put their lips to the earth and whisper down to it through the spongy pores of the soil with soft, warm breath, saying, "Come up! Come up!" till they stimulate and coax that buried acorn up into an oak. Incubation, or something like it, our life here is. Up yonder on the rocky cliff in a rough nest of sticks lies an egg. The eagle's breast-feathers warm it, the sky bends down and invites it, the abysses of the air beckon to it, saying, "All our heights and depths are for you; come and occupy them"; and all the peaks and the roomy spaces up under the rafters of the sky, where the twinkling stars sit sheltered like twittering sparrows, call down to the pent-up little life, "Come up hither!" and the live germ inside hears through the thin walls of its prison and is coaxed out of the shell and out of the nest and then off the cliff and up and 76 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE away into the wide ranges of sun- lit air and down into the deep gulfs that gash the mountains apart. Yes, our life on earth is incubation. A mothering immensity overbroods us as we lie on this ledge of Time over- beetling eternity till instincts latent in us burst alive and the soul be- comes like a nest astir with flutter- ing things that are getting ready to range and mount and float from height to height. C. B. Upton, the Jew, professor of philosophy in Mansfield College, England, says that "the ideals of the soul are invitations' , ; and au- thentic invitations they are indeed from the Lord of a high manor to be his guest above. Many years ago some stranger asked William Taylor in Australia, "What is your place of residence?" "I'm residing on the earth at present, but do not know how soon I shall change my res- idence," answered the world- wander- 77 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE ing evangelist. He talked as if he thought he had somewhere else to go to. Years later he went. He is there now. Was Abel Stevens a fool when he wrote to Zion's Herald, "Thank God, I am walking by faith and hoping for higher worlds"? "I should like," wrote Wordsworth to a young lady, "to visit Italy again before I move to another planet." A crippled boy sat in his wheeled chair on the ferryboat and a sympa- thetic lady, pitying his helplessness, exclaimed to her friend, "Poor fel- low! What has he to look forward to?" The cripple overheard it, and turning his head, said pleasantly, "Wings, some day." A woman who lived a shut-up life wrote: I never hear the word "escape" Without a quicker blood, A sudden expectation, A flying attitude. I never read of prisons broad By soldiers battered down, But I tug childlike at my bars — Longing for things beyond. 78 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE Man looks for an hour of libera- tion which shall repeal the flesh and cancel the clod. He has a notion that earth's roof is heaven's floor, and expects to break jail by way of the skylight. His understanding is that when discharged and man- umitted here he is requisitioned and subpoenaed elsewhere. Renan said in his last days, "The inward worth of a man is measured by his religious tendencies." What are these but gravitations to draw him home? Perhaps the most superb face in art is that of the Virgin in Titian's Assumption at Venice. A man has been seen to sit motionless and almost breathless for hours, rapt in the fascination of that face and the spell of that great picture. The wonder is not the woman alone, but the rich bathing splendor into which she rises. It is humanity being drawn home by the hovering heaven. Hid somewhere underfoot in the 79 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE heart of this rock-crusted globe is the seat of the power called gravita- tion which holds man's body down. Anchored in the hidden heart of God above is the attraction which controls the spirit and commands and orders home a liberated human- ity when it slips the leash of matter and goes free. What better can we say than that life here is incubation, and death is the final launching away off this narrow ledge of Time? When lib- eration and levitation come, it will not seem strange to be afloat on the bosom of eternity, but as natural as nature's self. We were made for that life as surely as for this, and folded within us are the faculties that fit us for it. The young eagle, pushed out of the nest and off the cliff's edge, is buoyed by wings suffi- cient though before untried. Some "full-grown power informs her from the first," and she sweeps easily 80 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE away through superior spaces vast and unexplored, then turns and slides softly down smooth slopes of air, then turns again, wheels and ascends by unseen spiral inclines, nor mar- vels in the least to find herself "strenuously beating up the silent boundless regions of the sky." She is as much at home there, afloat in and supported on the unseen, as ever she was on the crag. She knows neither strangeness, nor dan- ger, nor fear. She is meant for the airy heavens when her time comes, as certainly as for the cliff until her time comes. Nor could you coax her back to be content with the nest of sticks and the narrow ledge whence she launched away into her legitimate, large natural liberty. Likewise, the soul is secretly uncon- sciously equipped to survive and sub- sist hereafter as naturally and easily as here. True for all realms and worlds are the lines: 8t A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE Go where he will, the good man is at home; Where the good Spirit leads him, there's his road, By God's own light illumined and foreshowed. August with lofty dignity are the antique words of Sir Thomas Browne, the Norwich physician: " Those that look merely upon my outside, perus- ing only my condition and fortunes, do err as to my altitude, for I am above Atlas' shoulders. The mass of flesh that circumscribes me limits not my mind. You cannot measure me, for I take my circle to be above 360 degrees. There is surely a piece of divinity in us, something that is more lasting than the elements and owes no homage to the sun. Nature tells me I am the image of God; he that understands not this much hath not learned his first lesson and is yet to begin the alphabet of man." A daring but wholly justified declara- tion, which recalls a similar saying of Chrysostom about the apostle to the Gentiles, "Thus this man, Paul, 82 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE three cubits high, became tall enough to touch the third heaven." Geometry cannot measure Man; his circle exceeds 360 degrees. As- tronomy cannot calculate his orbit; it knows not the equation of his path. A Pilgrim of the Infinite is he; and the old hymn, familiar to our childhood, sings on in our souls: Thus onward we move, and save God above None guesseth how wondrous the journey will prove. 83 A PILGRIM OF THE INFINITE They desire a better country, that is, a heavenly: wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God."— Heb. ii. 16. "Thy statutes have been my songs in the house of my pilgrimage." — Psa. 119. 54. Hark, hark, my soul! angelic songs are swelling O'er earth's green fields and ocean's wave-beat shore: How sweet the truth those blessed strains are telling Of that new life when sin shall be no more! Angels of Jesus, angels of light, Singing to welcome the pilgrims of the night! Onward we go, for still we hear them singing, "Come, weary souls, for Jesus bids you come"; And through the dark, its echoes sweetly ringing, The music of the gospel leads us home. Far, far away, like bells at evening pealing, The voice of Jesus sounds o'er land and sea, And laden souls by thousands, meekly stealing, Kind Shepherd, turn their weary steps to thee. Rest comes at length, though life be long and dreary; The day must dawn, and darksome night be past; All journeys end in welcome to the weary, And heaven, the heart's true home, will come at last. Angels, sing on! your faithful watches keeping; Sing us sweet fragments of the songs above; Till morning's joy shall end the night of weeping, And life's long shadows break in cloudless love. — Frederick W. Faber. 84 Deacidifted using the Bookkeeper process Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide Treatment Date: Sept. 2004 PreservationTechnologies A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATIO* 1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive Cranberry Township. PA 16C66 (724) 779-21 1 1 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 013 190 019 3 %