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PARSIFAL
THE FINDING OF CHRIST THROUGH ART
OR
RICHARD WAGNER AS THEOLOGIAN
BY
ALBERT ROSS PARSONS
president of THE MUSIC teachers' national ASSOCIATION
"The God revealed to us by Jesus-this God who never can be revealed again, because then and
for the first time he was revealed to mankind."-RICHARD WAGner.
NEW YORK & LONDON
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
The Knickerbocker Press
1890
COPYRIGHT BY
ALBERT ROSS PARSONS
1890
The Knickerbocker Press, Acw York
Electrotyped, Printed, and Bound by
G. P. Putnam's Sons
PREFACE.
THE main text of the present work is substantially
identical with a lecture entitled "The Finding of
Christ through Art; or, Richard Wagner as Theo-
logian," delivered before the Lecture Chapter of the
Guild of All Souls Church (Episcopal), New York
City, Sunday afternoon, May 19, 1889, by invitation
of the Guild, through the Rev. R. Heber Newton,
D.D., rector of the parish.
As the time at the lecturer's command upon such
an occasion would not admit of an exhaustive presen-
tation of the evolution and final outcome of Wagner's
thoughts upon religion during a period of forty
years, the matter chosen and the form of the lecture
were determined by the circumstances of the occasion,
including the time and place of its delivery and the
audience which was likely to assemble to hear it.
In preparing it for publication, the determining
circumstances connected with the occasion of its first
public reading lose their importance, and it becomes
a duty to extend its dimensions and add to its mate-
rial in ways which a regard to the larger circle of the
reading community would naturally suggest. In
the present edition of this lecture, the additional
5
6
PARSIFAL.
material is presented mainly in the form of notes and
appendices.
Of writing many books on the story and the
musical and dramatic workmanship of Wagner's
music-dramas there is no end, and in this interpreta-
tive labor the Parsifal is by no means being neglected.
In the present work we are to consider the master's
creation from quite another point of view. We are
not to ask what Wagner wrote in Parsifal, nor how
he wrote it, musically and otherwise, but instead,
how he came to write the work at all. Or, in other
words, we are to inquire what sort of a personal
relation to, and what sort of an interest in, Christian-
ity it was which impelled him to the toil involved
in the design and execution of such a work, and
which caused his genius to glow with the sublime
devotional and emotional inspirations which charac-
terize this, the Swan's Song of his astonishing
artistic career.
By some, Wagner has been deemed a Buddhist,
and not without a show of reason; for his study of
Schopenhauer would naturally lead to more or less
familiarity with the principles of Hindu religion.
Indeed, in Parsifal, in the scene in Klingsor's gar-
den, in which we are reminded of the apostolic
expression, "in all points tempted like as we are
yet without sin," to meet the requirements of dra-
matic art, Wagner obviously turns to the legend
of Buddha's temptation by the daughters of Mara dis-
guised as beautiful women. But the words quoted
A STUDY.
7
on our title-page would seem to show conclusively
that Wagner's sympathetic attitude towards what-
ever of the True, the Beautiful, and the Good is
contained in uncorrupted Buddhism, did not mislead
him into committing the anachronism, for a Christian
land and era, of reverting to Buddha as the supreme
master, and thus subordinating the Light of the
World to the Light of Asia.
Wagner's position in theological speculation may
be compared to a Continental water-shed; for the
more clearly we understand his position, so much
the clearer and more far-reaching is our understand-
ing of the course and destiny of the currents of
thought which flow in various directions from that
commanding height.
No study offers richer rewards to the cautious and
clear-headed explorer than that of the various streams
from which the children of men in all ages and climes
have been accustomed to take their portion of the
water of life which ever cometh down from above.
Only we shall do well to avoid confounding the
"ocean of commonplace," in which all religions alike
find their lowest level, with the true point of unity
discovered by following them upwards from the
plane of ordinary human life to their sources along
the way to the Throne above. For want of such
precaution, Major-General Forlong, author of the
monument of human research which he published
under the title of "Rivers of Life," who went to
India confident that he knew all, and that he was
8
PARSIFAL.
prepared to convert the heathen, made shipwreck
of the faith, being, at the end of his far-reaching
researches, unable, apparently, to see any thing in
any religion beyond the external marks of all the
degradations which all religions have suffered at the
hands of the ignorant, the superstitious, and the
debased; while, on the other hand, F. Max Müller,
who may never have thought of converting anyone
from one religion to another, has followed the
currents of Hindu religion upward, until, reaching
the plane of the highest ideas to which the Hindu
ever attained, he has gained for us from those
heights a new and open vision of the lofty superior-
ity of Christianity, "towering o'er all the wrecks of
time."
But apart from the interest and value attaching to
the lines of thought opened up by an examination of
Wagner's utterances upon the subject of Christianity,
such an examination seems imperatively demanded
by the prevalent ignorance, not only among culti-
vated people at large, but among music-lovers as
well, and nowhere more pronounced than among
admirers of Wagner's art, of the fact that he ever
gave any thought to sacred subjects. Indeed, so
certain were the editors of two influential news-
papers that Wagner never had any religious opinions,
that they had the temerity to review the present
lecture without having heard a word of it, in supreme
assurance that there was nothing to be said on the
subject!
A STUDY.
9
Thus, on the morning of the Sunday when this
lecture was to be delivered, a Brooklyn journal
placed before its readers the following editorial
paragraph:
"A discourse on 'The Finding of Christ through
Art; or, Richard Wagner as Theologian,' is an-
nounced for to-day at All Souls Episcopal Church
in New York. Inasmuch as Wagner rejected Chris-
tianity and all other forms of religion, as he regarded
utter annihilation or unconsciousness as the ideal
destiny of man, and as he avowed a purpose to teach
the philosophy of pessimism by his music, it would
seem as if Dr. Heber Newton's pulpit guest had
undertaken a somewhat difficult task."
While, at the distance of four hundred miles from
New York, viz., in the city of Buffalo, a long news-
paper editorial was printed, falsely purporting to re-
port the lecture, the temper of which editorial will
appear from the subjoined extracts:
"All Souls Church, New York, was filled with an
audience which listened to the Gospel according to
St. Richard. The particular Richard thus canonized
was surnamed Wagner. . . Like many another
gospeller, he has begun to be misrepresented by his
adherents since his death, even as he was falsified by
his enemies while living.
Mr. Parsons asserted
that the spirit of Christianity and of music alike was
love, and hence drew the conclusion that their essen-
tial spirit was the same. Thence he argued that
music, dispelling external things, brought the soul of
ΙΟ
PARSIFAL.
man into direct and powerful communion with God.
This is only one more rhapsody. Music has been
mistaken for Christianity before now, and by much
humbler persons than Mr. Parsons. To drop-or
rise-from Wagner through prayer-meeting hymnol-
ogy and the wild improvisation of the negro camp-
meeting will illustrate the point where the lecturer
missed the truth. Had he not missed it his lecture
would never have been written. . . . The purposes
of music and Christianity are not the same. . . .
Mr.
Parsons has attempted that inartistic labor which the
truest artists shun, of displaying art in places and
in lights where it was never meant to be seen.
""
The reader who compares the lecture itself with
these newspaper utterances will be prepared to fol-
low Wagner where he writes (in his "Essay on
Beethoven"):
"With the invention of newspapers, and since
journalism has attained full bloom, the good spirit
of the people has been forced to retire altogether
from public life. For now only opinion rules, and
indeed public opinion; it is to be had for money;
whoever takes a newspaper has procured not
only the waste paper, but also its opinions; he no
longer needs to think or to reflect; what he is to
believe of God and the world is already thought out
for him in black and white."
Touching the statement made by the reporter of a
leading New York daily newspaper, that the lec-
turer said that, "From Wagner's thirtieth year on he
A STUDY.
II
studied Christianity until he became a sincere Chris-
tian," the present writer can only say that he
does not know at what point in the lecture that
remarkable affirmation was made! Without presum-
ing to determine for others precisely what consti-
tutes a "sincere Christian," he deems it exceedingly
improbable that Wagner ever did become a Chris-
tian in any popular acceptation of the term. But
that Wagner found the Christ, the Son of the Living
God, of that the writer is convinced by the simple
fact, among other things, that to his personal knowl
edge, the reading of this lecture at All Souls Church
was the means of bringing into the sacred edifice
certain intelligent persons, unaccustomed to church
going, and in the habit of regarding Christianity as
a mixture of delusion and conventionality, who sub-
sequently confessed that Wagner's earnest words
had illuminated their minds and caused their hearts
to burn within them with a new sense of the mean-
ing of Christianity as a great fact and factor, not
only in civilization, past, present, and future, but
also in personal life!
Over against all such ex parte newspaper statements,
we may pause to place the conclusions to which the
results of the present work will be found to point.
In the evolution of each individual human body,
it passes through various phases in succession of
definite resemblance to familar animal forms, and the
body retains vestiges of some of those forms of ex-
istence through life; yet for all that, a man is not an
12
PARSIFAL.
animal, nor can an animal ever be a man. Something
suggestive of this appears when we study the de-
velopment of Wagner's religious thought. In his
earlier years the nature of his studies and the
natural revolt of conscious genius against prevalent
abuses in political, artistic, and religious affairs
brought him into contact at many points with the
spirit of scepticism; yet Wagner was not a sceptic,
nor can a sceptic ever be a Wagner.
To be sure, he, like many another great spirit, first
saw only as through a glass, darkly; his soul had to
"Draw from out the vast
And strike his being into bounds,
And-moved through life of lower phase-
Result in man, be born and think."
But then, not having been destroyed by error, but
like an Augustine of old, made wise by experience,
he is gradually revealed to us as
No longer half-akin to brute;
For all he thought, and loved, and did,
And hoped and suffered, was but seed
Of what at last was flower and fruit
For God, who ever lives and loves,
One God, one law, one element,
And one far-off divine event,
To which the whole creation moves.
(In Memoriam.)
For the Christian it must ever be a satisfaction to
know that the thoughts we are about to follow from
A STUDY.
13
the writings of the grandest musical and dramatic
genius who has appeared in modern times, are not
early opinions accepted at the hands of teachers in
youth, and subsequently disowned, but are the last
utterances, at the ripe age of sixty-five years and up-
wards, of a mind of dauntless self-reliance, indepen-
dence, and daring, the deliberately expressed views
of a man who detested conventionality and policy
and showed the courage of his opinions at all times, re-
gardless of consequences, and who withal was learned
in and a master of the metaphysical science "which,
certain professing, concerning their faith do swerve."
The Scriptural quotations which occur in these
pages are mostly from "Young's Bible Translation,"
which, except in following convention in translating
the titles of Deity in the Old Testament, aims at
reproducing the Holy Oracles in English literally
and in the exact idioms of the original.
GARDEN CITY, LONG ISLAND,
Lent, 1890.
PARSIFAL.
THE FINDING OF CHRIST THROUGH ART; OR,
RICHARD WAGNER AS A THEOLOGIAN.*
In a sermon on "Inspiration," delivered in All
Souls Church by the rector, Rev. R. Heber Newton,
it was said: "Men of business, physicians, inventors,
political economists, statesmen, novelists, dramatists,
painters, musicians,-all may feel 'the inbreathing
of the Divine Spirit, all may be most truly inspired.'
Every knowledge and every power forms a step in
the world's great altar stairs that 'slope through
darkness up to God.' God claims all the varied
fields of His own Creation as the spheres for His
Spirit's action.
All lines of true human thought
focus in Religion."
We
e propose to subject this teaching to an ap-
parently severe test, by taking the case of Richard
Wagner, and examining the religious views to which,
*"In Christian phraseology theologos meets us first as the name of the
author of the Apocalypse, John the Divine, or the Theologos. This
name, however, we are told, was given to him not simply because he was
what we call a theologian, but because he maintained the divinity of the
Logos. In the third and fourth centuries theologos is said to have meant
usually one who defended that doctrine." (F. Max Müller,
"Natural
Religion," 1889.)
15
16
PARSIFAL.
solely as an artist, he was led, and upon which his
last and loftiest creation, Parsifal, is based.
This is the Christian Sunday, and we are assembled
in a Christian church. It is, therefore, neither the
time nor the place for a panegyric either on Wagner
or upon Art. Neither must this Church, its Lecture
Chapter, nor the present speaker stand committed,
even by implication, to any peculiarities in the ideas
about to be presented for your consideration.
We are simply to examine the religious views
finally reached by an artist who, orphaned in earliest
youth and never systematically educated, became in
the course of his favorite studies, in the field of the
classical drama, so thoroughly a pagan at first that
as late as 1849, at the age of thirty-six years, he
expressly exalted the beautiful Greek god, Apollo,
above Christ, as the true ideal of humanity.
"The Christian," said he, "rejects both Nature
and Self. He can make offerings to his God only on
the altar of renunciation; deeds he dare not bring.
While Jesus teaches the Brotherhood of
Man, Apollo puts upon that Brotherhood the seal of
strength and beauty, and leads mankind from doubt
of their own worth, to the highest consciousness of
their Divine power." (Wagner, "Collected Writ-
ings," Vol. III., pp. 20, 50.)
As, subsequently, Wagner created a series of
works which, in spite of their alleged difficulty of
comprehension, at present rule over the opera-
houses of his native land, besides drawing lovers of
A STUDY.
17
art from all lands to the remote Bavarian city where
he celebrated his crowning triumphs, and where his
ashes are entombed, it concerns us to ask the source
of his power. Was it culture or religion? Paganism
or Christianity? Was it of man or of God? Is or
is not, great art still, as of old, the handmaid of
religion?
That there is an ethical tendency in Wagner's
works is clear.
But, since it is a common idea that the actual un-
reality of theatrical representations tends to destroy
all belief in the reality of any thing ideal, two ques
tions are asked by many, viz.:
1. Was not Wagner everywhere dealing, at least
in his own opinion, with mere myths?
2. Is not the ethical tendency in Wagner's works
a mere artistic calculation of stage-effect?
As to the first of these questions, namely, that of
dealing with "mere myths," it should be remembered
that there are various ways of looking at myths.
Thus in the Popular Science Monthly for February
and March of the current year (1890), under the
title of "Chapters in Comparative Mythology," by an
American College Ex-President, the writer seems
to take for granted that all myths are at bottom both
empty and false; and accordingly in the blundering
attempts made from time to time through the ages
to restate and explain those astonishing stories, the
memory of which an overruling Providence has
ordained, it would seem, that men shall preserve in
18
PARSIFAL.
some form or other and hand down to times of
greater light, in which both the original events and
their moral shall at last be understood,-in all of
this the Popular Science writer in question sees
chiefly something over which to raise a laugh!
To all such barren views of the nature and signifi-
cance of myths, it suffices to apply the words: “By
their fruits ye shall know them!"
On the other hand we have the fruitful view of
myths entertained by such great minds as Schelling,
Ruskin, Wagner, etc.
Says Schelling, rejecting the notion that in myths
we see simply the flower of human folly: "How, if
in mythology the ruins of a superior intelligence and
even a perfect system were found, which would
reach far beyond the horizon which the most ancient
written records present to us?"
Says Ruskin: "We may take it for a first prin-
ciple both in science and literature, that the feeblest
myth is better than the strongest theory: myth
recording a natural impression on the imaginations
of great men and unpretending multitudes, the
theory an unnatural exertion of the wits of little
men and the half-wits of impertinent multitudes.
The myths, like all thoughts worth having, came
like sunshine, whether people would or not: theories,
like thoughts not worth having, are little lucifer
matches people strike for themselves" (to "lighten
their darkness," Ruskin might have added).
That these natural impressions, or myths, were no
A STUDY.
19
mere poetic toys or trifles in Wagner's estimation is
abundantly shown by his saying that "Feeling is
the beginning and the end of understanding, as the
myth is the beginning and the end of history, and
tone-language the beginning and the end of word-
language; the intermediate between beginning and
middle-point, as also between middle-point and end,
being imagination." ("Wagner," IV., p. 114.)
Touching the second question, viz.: that of Wag-
ner's personal sincerity in the ethical tendency of his
works, we may cite three remarks.
The first states his attitude towards religion:
"The only religious liberty we claim, is liberty
to deal seriously and honestly with holy things."
(Wagner, "Baireuth Leaves," 1878, p. 36.)
The second citation is a bit of counsel to young
dramatic composers, disclosing his own personal
methods:
"I never have been able to compose at all before
something had occurred to me. I would say to the
young composer, never adopt a text before you have
found in it an action carried on by persons in whom
you take a lively interest. Of these persons, regard
with closest scrutiny the one who interests you most
in the light of to-day. If it wears a mask, away
with it; if it appears in theatrical costume, tear
it off! Place the figure in the twilight, so as to
perceive only the glance of its eye, and now the
shape itself will manifest a vitality which may per-
haps startle you, but that is something you will have
20
PARSIFAL.
to put up with; and now its lips will move, and a
spirit voice will say to you something real and
thoroughly comprehensible, yet never before heard,
as did once, say, the Marble Guest, and the page
Cherubino, to Mozart. On hearing this, you will
awaken as from a dream. Every thing will vanish
from sight, but in the spiritual hearing the message
will sound on. Something has occurred to you, and
that is a musical motive." ("Wagner," 1879, p. 264.)
Our third citation throws light on the question of
mere calculation of stage-effect, by disclosing Wag-
ner's conscious attitude toward the amusement-seek-
ing public:
"When I am alone by myself, and the musical
fibres begin to tremble within me, when confused
sounds shape themselves into harmonies, and from
those harmonies arises the melody which, as Idea,
reveals to me my whole being; when the heart
in loud beatings adds its impetuous metre, and
inspiration pours itself out in divine tears through
the mortal eye, which now no longer sees, then
I often say to myself: 'What a great fool art thou,
not to keep always by thyself and dwell there in
these unique joys, instead of pressing out into that
hideous crowd called the public! What can that
public, even with its most brilliant receptions, give
to thee, which will possess even the hundreth part
of the value of that sacred refreshing which wells up
within thyself?"" ("Wagner," I., p. 223.)
Before proceeding to exhibit the Christian theol-
A STUDY.
21
ogy to which Wagner was led by his labors in the
field of musical drama, it is proper to say a word to
those who, affected by the conduct popularly at-
tributed to him, may be startled by the idea of
considering him in the light of a Christian theo-
logian. Suffice it to say, that certainly for years
previous to the expression of the religious conclu-
sions which we are about to consider, Wagner lived
subject to the forms of German law, and under the
formal sanction of the Protestant Church of Ger-
many. That is all which we, as good citizens, are
concerned to know. The rest is a matter between
Richard Wagner and the Divine Redeemer, whom
he learned to confess before his fellow-men in words
and tones of glowing enthusiasm.
"Only in his deeds," says Wagner, "are the
thoughts of a man convincingly revealed. Precisely
in the perfect agreement between his thoughts and
his deeds does his character consist." ("Wagner,"
IV., p. 43.)
We have already remarked the ethical quality of
Wagner's artistic deeds, and we are now to follow
the thoughts which resulted from his pursuing art
up to the point of its vital union with Christianity.
At the very outset of our investigation the reader
may find it hard to postpone the question: Did
Wagner himself become a Christian? To answer
that question satisfactorily, perhaps we should first
all have to agree as to what is essential to Chris-
tianity. Roman Catholic he was not, nor was he
22
PARSIFAL.
either Churchman, Presbyterian, or Unitarian. His
lofty admiration for the genius of Luther, as a fore-
most representative of German spirit, in the courage
of its convictions and its "irrepressible protest
against all external burdens laid upon it" of a
formalistic nature, is well known to all students
of Wagner's writings; but, for all that, his plane
of vision was such that he viewed neither life nor
religion through Lutheran spectacles exclusively,
but, instead, drew many a profound lesson from the
lives and teaching of Roman Catholic saints.
Indeed, there are so many sorts of Christians now,
that it seems just as impossible for all of us to be of
one sort as for one of us to be of all sorts. It would
seem, however, that we may all of us either find, or fail
to find, the Christ. If we shall conclude that Wag-
ner found the Christ, perhaps we may defer the
question of his Christianity until we have settled
among ourselves the question of our own.*
A thinker on Christianity, Wagner unquestionably
became. If we further ask, what sort of thinker he
became, and whether he, self-taught in theology, came
to think as all think who ever think at all upon
Christianity, the questions answer themselves. God is
obviously not the author of confusion, with its neces-
sary consequence-endless sameness, but, instead, of
unity in boundless diversity. Hence, while all Chris-
* For testing the quality of one's own religious life, a simple criterion is
afforded by F. Max Müller's concentrated definition of Religion as
a per-
ception of the infinite under such manifestations as are able to influence the
moral character of men.
A STUDY.
23
tians may be united in charity, the only ones who
can think just alike are those who never think at all,
beyond the point of thinking it best to let others do
their thinking for them.
Wagner thought for himself. Hence, what he
brought to light is in the native ore, and full of ele-
ments characteristic of his own personality. To the
degree, however, that this ore contains real gold, its
intrinsic value will be obvious, even in the absence
of the form and impress of products of an authorized
theological mint.
A convenient point of departure for our investiga-
tion is offered by Wagner's view of the attitude of
physical science toward the least animal and most
truly human side of human nature, viz., the spiritual
side. Says Wagner, with keen irony:
"Since, with the advance of physical science, all
the mysteries of being must necessarily be exposed
as merely imaginary mysteries, nothing will be left
but knowledge, and even then intuitive knowledge
will have to be excluded, since it might lead to
metaphysical assumptions from which abstract scien-
tific knowledge must be kept free, until logic, guided
by chemistry (!) has become clear concerning intui-
tive knowledge! To the Goliath of modern science,
art daily becomes more and more of a mere rudiment
of a former cognitive stage of human life, a sort of
tail-bone surviving in us from an actual prehensile
tail of earlier times. Hence this Goliath only in-
dulges in intercourse with art so far as is necessary
24
PARSIFAL.
་
!
for the maintenance of academies, colleges, etc., hon-
estly doing his best, meanwhile, to prevent any thing
like true artistic productivity from arising, because
that might all too easily induce a relapse into the
inspiration swindle' of surmounted periods of cul-
ture!" ("Wagner," 1878, p. 218.)
But, does some one exclaim: Is not modern science
the champion of progress? Let us hear Wagner again:
"Those who float with the stream may fancy they
belong to the party of continual progress. It is, at
all events, easy to let themselves be borne along by
the current, and they do not notice that their destiny
is to be swallowed up in the ocean of the common-
place. To swim against the stream must seem ridicu
lous to all who are not irresistibly impelled to make
the enormous effort which is required to do it. But
we really cannot prevent being swept away by the
current save by swimming against it toward the true
source of life. Often it will seem impossible to
avoid succumbing; but just as often we shall emerge
from the waves and find ourselves rescued at the
moment of deepest exhaustion-and lo! the aston-
ished waves will hear a voice, and for a moment
stand still, as when a great spirit unexpectedly speaks
to the world! Then the bold swimmer will again
strike out, not life, but the true source of life
being his quest! Who that has once reached that
source could ever find pleasure in again plunging
into that current? From blissful heights he looks
down upon the distant ocean with its mutually-
7
A STUDY.
25
destroying monsters. Can we blame him for renoun-
cing forever all that there destroys itself?" ("Wag-
ner," 1878, p. 285.)
W
agner was a student of the dramatic art of
the Greeks from boyhood on. It was, therefore,
but natural that he should finally approach Chris-
tianity by the same path as did the ancient
Greeks, who, occupying by virtue of the cultivation
of mythology a plane of thought superior to any
merely materialistic, physical view of life, developed
a metaphysic which rendered the doctrine of In-
carnation at once rational and philosophical. Says
Wagner:
"Of the Greek belief in gods it may be said that,
conformably to their artistic endowments, that belief
was always combined with anthropomorphism, or the
manifestation of the Divine in human form. Their
gods were well-defined shapes of the most distinct
individuality, and the names of those gods desig-
nated the notion of a species precisely as names of
colored objects designated the different colors them-
selves, for which the Greeks employed no abstract
names, such as ours. Gods they were called only to
designate their nature as Divine. The Divine Him-
self, however, the Greeks called simply God. It
never occurred to them to think of God as limited
to personality. Hence they never gave Him an
artistic shape, like the gods with names. God Him-
self was left to the philosophers to define, and proved
a conception which the Hellenic mind sought in vain
26
PARSIFAL.
distinctly to establish,* until, by a band of wonder-
fully inspired poor people, the incredible tidings
were proclaimed that the Son of God had offered
himself upon the Cross as a sacrifice for the redemp-
tion of the world from the bonds of deceit and sin.
With this, God Himself assumed shape in the most
anthropomorphic manner, viz., the highest conception
of sympathetic love embodied in a human form
stretched in agonizing sufferings upon the Cross. In
this picture, and its effect upon the soul, lies the
entire magic by which the Church first conquered
the Græco-Roman world." ("Wagner," 1880, p. 272.)
The full measure of Wagner's worship of Christ
we cannot learn without listening to his views
concerning the reason why the Redeemer is not yet
found "chief among ten thousand and altogether
lovely" by mankind in general, and by many of the
choicest minds of all ages in particular. In follow-
ing him on this point, we must continually bear in
mind that to Wagner, a self-taught theologian, the
names of God and Jehovah were not synonymous
*"And Paul, having stood in the midst of the Areopagus, said, Men,
Athenians, in all things I perceive you as over-religious; for passing through
and contemplating your objects of worship, I found also an erection on
which had been inscribed To God-unknown': whom, therefore-not
knowing,―ye do worship, this one I announce to you . . . He giving to
all life, and breath, and all things: He made also of one blood every nation
of men, to dwell upon all the face of the earth-having ordained times be-
fore appointed, and the bounds of their dwellings-to seek the Lord, if per-
haps they did feel after Him and find,-though, indeed, he is not far off
from each one of us, for in Him we live and move, and are: as also certain
of your poets have said: For of Him we also are offspring." (Acts, xvii.,
22-23, 25-28.)
A STUDY.
27
in meaning. His train of thought here compels us
to distinguish between the true Jehovah and a false
Jehovah, who was the reflection of the personal
character of His worshippers.
Says a modern writer: "Man-created Gods are
wonderful beings. They possess all the virtues and
vices of those who make them, and they in return
cause those who create them to be vicious or virtu-
ous, foolish or wise, as the case may be. From the
time of the Babylonian captivity, a curse seems to
have been attached to the Jewish nation. They
excel other nations in such virtues as grow from a
state of separateness and isolation; they cling closely
to each other; they assist each other in need; they
love their families, and they are heroes in the de-
fence of what they may legally claim as their own.
Yet they have been persecuted in almost every coun-
try, and have met with hatred wherever they went.
"If we attempt to trace to its origin the curse which
seems to have rested upon them, we may find it in
the fact, that instead of worshipping the true Jeho-
vah, who rejoices within the hearts of men when
they kill their animal passions and sacrifice to Him
their erroneous opinions; they created, after the pat-
tern of the gods of other peoples, a cruel, bloodthirsty
God, whom they called Jehovah, and the God whom
they created reflected upon them his own attributes,
and became the instrument of their punishment. In
creating a separate God of their own, isolated from
the God of Humanity, who is no respector of per-
28
PARSIFAL.
sons, but has in every nation those who fear Him
they became themselves isolated. The God who was
the outcome of their own selfishness became the in-
strument of their torture.
"In vain arose to the clouds the odor of burning
bullocks and sheep from the altars of their temples.
By the mouth of the prophet Jeremiah, the true
Jehovah of Hosts and God of Israel declared unto
them explicitly: 'I did not speak with your fathers,
Nor did I command them in the day of my bringing
them out of the land of Egypt, Concerning the mat-
ters of burnt-offerings and sacrifice, But this thing I
commanded them, saying, Hearken to my voice, and
I will be unto you for God and ye shall be my peo-
ple and shall walk in the way I command you, and
it shall be well with you.' But to the Jehovah
of Jeremiah, Israel did not hearken; and the false
Jehovah, the mental image which they endowed
with their own character, had no power to help his
worshippers. The Unlimited, Eternal, and Infinite
God disappeared from their view, and they endowed
the false Jehovah with all the good and evil quali-
ties which characterized their own selves. Thus
the eternal Reality, the Truth, was deposed from
His throne, the prophets were stoned, and priest-
craft, with its opiates and illusions, assumed the
sceptre. Thus the worshippers of the false Je-
hovah forfeited their own manhood. The interests
of the Jewish Church became paramount to the
pursuit of wisdom; external ceremonies and material
A STUDY.
29
sacrifices took the place of spiritual aspirations and
heart-offerings."
All of this Wagner seems to have seen; and he
further saw how far the Hebrews remained from
realizing the idea of an immanent God, such as Theism
teaches, and that they rather conceived of God deis-
tically, taking so literally the command, "Thou hast
no other gods before me!" that they recognized the
existence of "other gods" by repeatedly and fla-
grantly disobeying the injunction, and worshipping
them. It is, therefore, only unusual, but by no
means inexplicable, that Wagner should have failed
to recognize in Jehovah of the Jews the God and
Father of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ; for
did not the Lord Himself say: "Nor doth any know
the Father, except the Son, and he to whom the
Son may wish to reveal Him"? Accordingly, we
shall represent Wagner's exact meaning more pre-
cisely by translating, "The Tribal Deity of the Jews,"
or the "God of Deism," wherever Wagner refers to
"Jehovah." It will be observed that in Wagner's
opinion, materialistic physical science is destructive
of Deism only, while Christian Theism is wholly
beyond its reach. Wagner writes:
"That which necessarily led to the downfall of
the Church and finally to the continually more pro-
nounced Atheism of our time, was the idea inspired
by the mania for conquest, of deriving this Divinity
on the Cross from the Tribal Deity of the Jews, with
the preaching of whom, as an angry and vindictive
30
PARSIFAL.
God, it seemed to the priests possible to accomplish
more than with the preaching of the self-offer-
ing, all-loving Saviour of the poor." ("Wagner,"
1880, p. 272.) "That the God of our Saviour should
be declared to us as identical with the Tribal Deity
of Israel is one of the most frightful confusions in
the history of the world. It has in all ages revenged
itself, and to-day still revenges itself in the continu-
ally more and more outspoken Atheism of the
coarsest as well as the finest minds. Science is
making the god of Deism continually more and more
impossible. Meanwhile, the God revealed by Jesus
has from the birth of the Church been progressively
reduced by theologians from the most sublime obvi-
ousness, to a continually more and more unintelligi-
ble problem." ("Wagner," 1878, p. 219.)
"The Gospels have now been so often and so
exactly examined critically, and their origin and the
facts concerning their compilation brought out with
such unmistakable correctness, that in the midst of
all that excites contradiction as ungenuine and extra-
neous, the sublime form of the Redeemer and His
work, must, it seem to us, have become distinctly
apparent to the critics themselves. But the God
revealed to us by Jesus, the God which none of the
gods, sages, or heroes of the world ever knew, but
who
now, in the very midst of the Pharisees, Scribes,
and Priests, was revealed to poor Galilean fishermen
and shepherds with such power and simplicity, that
whoever once discerned Him, immediately looked
A STUDY.
31
upon the world with all its possessions, as worthless
and null, this God, who never can be revealed
again, because then and for the first time, He was
revealed to mankind, this God the critics forever
view with mistrust, because they deem themselves
compelled to identify Him with the Tribal Deity
of the Jews and Deistic Creator of the world."
("Wagner," 1878, pp. 219-220.)
"This confusion of thought is so great, that it is
really astonishing to see how the most important
minds of all times, since the appearance of the Bible,
have been cramped by it and betrayed into weakness
of judgment. Think of Goethe, who deemed Christ
problematical, but held the God of Deism to be
a demonstrated fact! In so concluding, Goethe re-
served, to be sure, the liberty to find that God in his
own way in Nature. This of course always results
in all sorts of physical experiments in the field of
natural science, the continual prosecution of which
experiments has again led the ruling human intellect
of the day to the conclusion that there is no God at
all, but only Force and Matter." ("Wagner," 1880,
p. 336.)
"The God of Deism was condemned by art. The
Deity in the burning bush, nay, even the white-
bearded venerable old man looking down out of a
cloud, with a blessing on his Son, did not, even when
represented by the most masterly artistic hand, say
much to the faithful soul: but the suffering God
upon the Cross, the 'Head bowed down with sor-
32
PARSIFAL.
rows,' even in the crudest representation, still fills us
as in all ages, with enthusiastic emotion." ("Wag-
ner," 1880, p. 273.)
"The men of physical science feel very wise over
the fact that Copernicus with his planetary system
has taken away from God his heavenly home. We
do not find, however, that the Church has felt mate-
rially perplexed by this discovery. For her and all
the faithful, God still dwells in heaven, or as Schiller
sings, 'Above the starry zone.' But the God within
the human breast, of whom our greatest mystics.
have always been so certainly and luminously con-
scious over and above all consciousness of being, this
God who needs no scientifically demonstrable
heavenly habitation, has made trouble for the priests.
To us Germans that God had become profoundly
known. Still our professors have done much to
spoil Him. They are now cutting up dogs to de-
monstrate Him to us in the spinal cord!.
("Wagner," 1880, p. 4.)
""
"Nevertheless, our own God, still evokes much
within us, and as [in the confusion wrought by
materialistic physical science] He was about to
vanish from our sight, He left us for an eternal
memorial of Himself our music, which is the living
God in our bosoms. Hence we preserve our music
and ward off from it all sacrilegious hands; for if we
harken to frivolous or insincere music we extinguish
the last light God has left burning within us to lead the
way
to find Him anew!" ("Wagner," 1880, p. 274.)
A STUDY.
33
We are not to understand Wagner to mean that
hearing good music will reform a man's character
and renew a right spirit within him. Lectures on
æsthetics may help one to appreciate and honor art,
but no one knew better than Wagner that to become
an artist one must be not only a hearer, but also a
doer of the word, developing one's individual powers
by a diligent use of suitable means.
In like manner,
although in a materialistic age, holy music, as a wit-
ness of the indwelling spirit, may lead the way to
find God anew, religious perceptions alone will not
ensure personal attainments in religion: that only a
diligent use of suitable religious and devotional
means can do. The Church would have an easy task
before her in laboring for the regeneration of man-
kind if sinners could be turned into saints simply by
hearing good sermons and good music.
Concerning the historic origin of music and what
the divine art may say to the feeling heart, we cite
the following sayings of Wagner's:
"The Christian Church bequeathed to the world
as her noblest treasure, music, the all-plaintive, all-
saying, sounding soul of the Christian Religion. Fly-
ing abroad from within her temple walls, holy music
goes forth breathing new life into every part of
Nature." ("Wagner," 1880, p. 298:) "To-day art
thou with me in Paradise." Who does not hear
the Redeemer's words call to him as he listens to
Beethoven's Pastoral symphony? The effect upon
the listener is precisely that of emancipation from
34
PARSIFAL.
all guilt, just as the after effect with which we return
to everyday life is the feeling of a Paradise lost. So
does music preach repentance and amendment of life
in the profoundest sense of a divine revelation. As
Christianity arose under the Roman universal civili-
zation, so music bursts forth from the chaos of a
heartless, materialistic modern civilization. The
spirit of both Christianity and music is Love; and
both affirm, 'Our kingdom is not of this world."
We are from within, you from without; we are the
offspring of the essential nature of things, you of the
semblance of things. Thus music excites within us,
as soon as we are filled with it, the highest ecstasy of
the consciousness of illimitability. As soon as the
first measures only of one of Beethoven's divine
symphonies are heard, the entire phenomenal world,
which impenetrably hems us in on every side, sud-
denly vanishes into nothingness; music extinguishes
it as sunshine does lamplight. In music's enig-
matically entwined lines and wonderfully intricate
characters stand written the eternal symbols of
a new and different world."
(Wagner's "Beet-
hoven.")
"Above all thinkableness by means of concepts of
Reason, the musical seer, 'speaking the highest wis-
dom in a language which Reason does not compre-
hend,' reveals to us the inexpressible truth; while
we listen we have a presentiment; nay, we feel and
see that this seemingly substantial world of the
Will is only a fleeting show in the presence of the
A STUDY.
35
one truth, I know that my Redeemer liveth.'"
("Wagner," 1880, p. 298.)
Wagner seems to have found reason for making a
vigorous protest against intellectual stagnation in the
preaching of Christianity in the pulpits of Germany.
He writes:
"What a dismal, nay, unworthy, position our
entire theology now occupies since our ecclesiastical
teachers and popular preachers have ceased to con-
tribute to it much of any thing besides material
for a disingenuous explanation of our most precious
Gospels. For what purpose is the preacher in
the chancel save to make compromises between
things involving the deepest contradictions, the sub-
tleties of which necessarily undermine faith itself, so
that finally we are forced to ask: Who, then, still
knows Jesus? The historical critics, think you?
Why, they stand in the midst of Judaism ('Wagner,
1878, p. 220), declaring that with a sinless Jesus
they do not know what to do ('Wagner,' 1880, p.
285); and they marvel to themselves precisely as does
every Hebrew, that early Sunday mornings the bells
still ring for a Jew crucified two thousand years
ago!" ("Wagner," 1878, p. 219.)
In connection with the foregoing paragraphs we
may place the following observations as of impor-
tance to all who would seek to explain the appear-
ance of prophets, teachers, etc., substantially in
accordance with the doctrine of Evolution as it is
applied to the physical world. Says Wagner:
36
PARSIFAL.
"The scientifico-historic school assumes to demon-
strate that every eminent individual must needs be
the product of the spirit of the race to which he
belongs and of his environment in Time and Space.
The correctness of the assumption does not seem
rationally deniable. It only remains for the critics
to explain why the greater the individual, so much
the greater the contradiction with his time in which
he finds himself involved." ("Wagner," 1878, p. 277.)
"To cite the sublimest of examples: neither the con-
temporary world nor his own race deported them-
selves towards Christ as if they had brought Him
forth and rejoiced to recognize in Him a typical
product of their own." ("Wagner," 1878, p.
287.)
With Wagner, human wisdom does not count for
every thing.
"The Founder of the Christian Religion was not
wise: He was Divine. To believe in Him is to
imitate Him, and to seek union with Him."
("Wagner," 1880, pp. 270-271.)
"In consequence of His atoning death, every thing
which lives and breathes may know itself redeemed
as soon as the Redeemer is accepted as example and
pattern for life." ("Wagner," 1879, p. 365.) "Among
the poorest and most isolated people the Saviour
appeared showing the way of redemption, not by
doctrines but by His own example." ("Wagner,"
1880, p. 283). "So the true saint knows, that neither
by theorizing, disputation, nor controversy, can he
!
A STUDY.
37
communicate to the world his inner, deeply blissful
intuitions in such a way as to convince the world of
their genuineness. He can do it only by example,
by deeds of self-renunciation and self-sacrifice, and
by the manifestation of unalterable gentleness, and
of a sublime, serene seriousness diffused throughout
his labors. There is therefore a profound and true
meaning in the idea that only through their beloved
saints can the people turn to God. The saint, the
martyr, the exemplar, are the true mediums of heal-
ing. In them the people may recognize in the only
way comprehensible to them what must be the con-
tents of the religious perceptions in which they can
participate only by faith, instead of by direct per-
sonal knowledge." ("Wagner," VIII., p. 33.)
"We must assume," continues he, "that the Idea,
or rather, the immediate perception of the religious
seer, so indescribably beneficent in its effect, yet only
to be comprehended in the category of illusion, re-
mains both as to its form and content, wholly foreign
and incomprehensible to the common mind. Hence,
all that can be announced by, or about, those ideas
or perceptions, to the profane, to the masses, must
necessarily be nothing else than a sort of allegory,
as it were a translation of things inexpressible, never
seen, and only intelligible through direct intuition,
into the language of ordinary life and forms of
knowledge intrinsically erroneous yet alone possible
to them." ("Wagner," VIII., p. 29.)
"The only element of Revelation which the world
38
PARSIFAL.
:
at large can grasp is Dogma. In this sacred allegory
it is sought to convey to worldly minds the mysteries
of Divine revelation. This sacred allegory is related
to the immediate vision of the seer, only as the
account of a dream while awake, is related to the
actual dream of the night. (VIII., p. 30.) The con-
flict running through the centuries, touching the cor-
rectness and rationality of Dogma, affords us the
painfully repulsive instruction of the history of the
illness of a maniac. Two modes of perception and
knowledge, absolutely incongruous and in their
nature entirely different, are entangled in this con-
troversy, without its being perceived that they are
fundamentally different. In this conflict, the truly
religious defenders of Dogma are right, as far as
they proceed on principle from a consciousness that
their mode of knowledge is different from all mere
worldly knowledge; while the terrible wrong into
which they have suffered themselves to be driven,
lies in the fact, that as they could do nothing with
everyday human reason, they have allowed them-
selves to be carried away by passionate zeal into the
most inhuman abuse of power, and so have degen-
erated into a state the most completely opposite to
that of holiness. On the other hand, we are in-
debted for the comfortless, materialistic, empty, and
wholly Godless condition of the modern industrial
world, to the opposite zeal of a common practical
reason, which seeks to explain Dogma in accordance
with the causal laws of everyday life, and rejects all
A STUDY.
39
which resists such explanation as senseless brain
cobwebs!" ("Wagner," VIII., pp. 31, 32.)
Turning now from the Divinity of Christ and the
Indispensability of Religious Dogma or Doctrine, let
us consider what Wagner has to say of the Christian
virtues. He writes:
"The Christian commandments are quite clearly
exhibited in the so-called Theological Virtues. Yet
these are presented to us in an order which does not
seem to us quite right for the purpose of an intro-
duction to Christianity; for we would like to see
Faith, Hope, and Love transposed to Love, Faith,
and Hope. The degree of merit involved in ac-
quiring these virtues we soon perceive when we
reflect what an almost superfluous demand is made
upon the natural man by the command to 'Love,' in
the sublime sense of Christianity. What is the dis-
ease from which our entire civilization suffers, but
want of love? As the youthful soul learns with
ever-increasing distinctness to know the modern
world, he may indeed ask, how can he love it?
since mistrust and precaution are everywhere com-
mended to him for self-protection in his intercourse
with the world. There certainly is but one way
open before him, viz., that of recognizing that the
essential cause of the unloveliness in the world lies
in the sufferings which are in the world. Pity
awakened by those sufferings implies a conscious
renunciation of their cause, namely, the cravings
of our passions,-in order that we may do our part
40
PARSIFAL.
towards ameliorating and warding off the sufferings
of others. But how is the natural man to attain to
such perceptions, seeing that the most inexplicable
thing of all is our fellow-man? Truly, the natural
man cannot be led to the duty of self-sacrifice by
commandment. He can only be brought to the
fulfilment of that duty by a right understanding
of the origin of all living beings. Here, to the best
of our knowledge, a wise use of Schopenhauer's
philosophy is the surest, nay, almost the sole way to
attain to a rational understanding of the problem,
the result of that philosophy alone, to the shame of
all other systems be it said, being the recognition of
a moral significance to the world, such as (the crown
of all knowledge!) is practicably deducible from
Schopenhauer's Ethics." ("Wagner," 1880, p. 338.)
"Only love rooted in sympathy, and expressed in
action to the point of a complete destruction of
self-will, is Christian Love." ("Wagner," 1880, p.
339.) "In it Faith and Hope are of themselves
included; Faith as the infallibly sure consciousness,
confirmed by the Divinest Prototype, of the moral
significance of the world; and Hope as the blissful
assurance of the impossibility of any deception in
the consciousness of Faith." ("Wagner," 1880, p.
338.)
Closely connected in idea with what has been
cited from Wagner concerning human unloveliness
as the expression of human suffering, are the follow-
ing observations :
A STUDY.
4I
"When at last we necessarily recognize in the
people the artists of the future, the intelligent
artistic egotist of the present day breaks out in
contemptuous astonishment. He views the people
only in the shape in which they now appear before
his culture-bespectacled eyes. From his sublime
standpoint he believes that his own antithesis, the
raw common man, alone constitutes the people.
Hence in glancing at them he is only aware of
the fumes of beer and bitters in his nose.
seizes his perfumed handkerchief, and with civilized
indignation exclaims: 'What! the mob will even-
tually replace us in artistic productivity! That mob
which does not even understand our artistic wares !
From the nauseous tavern and the steaming dung-
hill, the types of beauty shall arise!'"
He
"Quite right!" (rejoins Wagner) "not from the
dirty substratum of your modern culture, not from
the repulsive soil beneath your modern fine educa-
tion, not from the conditions which your modern
civilization deems the sole conceivable basis of hu-
man existence, will the art-work of the future arise.
Reflect, however, that this mob is in no wise a
normal product of real human nature, but, instead,
the artificial product of your unnatural culture ;
that all the crimes and horrors which you find
so repulsive in this mob, are only desperate inci-
dents of the war which real human-nature is waging
against its cruel oppressor-modern civilization; and
that the terrifying feature in their grimaces is in no
42
PARSIFAL.
i
wise the true mien of nature, but instead, the direct
reflex of the grimaces of our State and Criminal
culture.'
27
The scientific doctrine of the Transformation and
Equivalence of Force, Wagner applies to the prob-
lem in hand, as follows:
"As long as you intelligent egotists of fine culture
bloom in an artificial atmosphere, so long there must
necessarily be the human material from whose vital
forces your sweet perfume of life is distilled; and
that material from which for your benefit its natural
and agreeable vital fragrance is abstracted, necessarily
becomes the ill-smelling refuse of human life whose
presence rightly disgusts you, but from which you
are distinguishable mainly by the perfume which
you have pressed out of their natural cheerfulness.
As long as a large part of the entire people wastes
costly vital power in useless occupations, so long
must an equally large, if not a larger, part be over-
taxed with necessary labor in order to replace by its
own toil the work wasted or evaded by others. But
this is not all; for when among the inordinately
burdened workingmen the useful, that which serves
utility alone, becomes the sole end of activity, the
soul of life itself, the revolting spectacle must follow
of absolute egotism everywhere making the laws of
life, while with hateful grimaces it grins back to law-
makers from the countenances of town and country
mobs! Neither the pampered few nor the vulgar
mob do we mean when we speak of the people.
A STUDY.
43
"The Jesuits give to pupils on entering their
schools, as their first and foremost concern, the occu-
pation of representing to themselves, devoutly, and
with the exertion of all their powers of soul, assisted
by the most ingenious and effective aids, the idea of
eternal damnation. On the other hand, a Parisian
workingman whom, for breaking his word, I once
threatened with hell, replied: 'Oh, sir, hell is on this
earth!' Our great Schopenhauer was of the same
opinion, and found in Dante's Inferno' the world
in which we live strikingly portrayed. In truth,
the religious teachers of our youth would proceed
much more to the purpose if they began by explain-
ing this world and our life distinctly and with
Christian sympathy to young hearts, instead of try-
ing to awaken in them the fear of a future hell as the
source of all virtues." ("Wagner," 1879, p. 124.)
""
In Paris, in 1836 (as Wagner once confessed to
Liszt), thievish longings "often possessed him on
watching the dawn of the hot days that were to
"shine" on his "empty stomach." To what Wagner
has to say further concerning the people in their
unloveliness caused by suffering, a suitable intro-
duction is afforded by the Saviour's words to the
egotists and lovers of themselves: "I did hunger, and
ye gave me not to eat; I did thirst, and ye gave me
not to drink; a stranger I was, and ye did not receive
me; naked, and ye put not around me; infirm and
in prison, and ye did not look after me. Then shall
they answer, saying, Lord, when did we see thee
44
PARSIFAL.
hungering, or thirsting, or a stranger, or naked, or
infirm, or in prison, and we did not minister to thee?
Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say to
you, inasmuch as ye did it not to one of these, the
least, ye did it not to me." Says Wagner:
"Could our scientific investigator, regaining sin-
cerity from the contemplation of animals, turn his
gaze to the multitudes of his really suffering fellow-
men, who-born in naked want, and from earliest
childhood driven to health-destroying and excessive
toil, while prematurely enfeebled by bad food and
heartless treatment of all sorts,-look up question-
ingly to him in mute submission, perhaps our man
of science would then say to himself: 'This being is
also human, like myself.' That would indeed be a
success. If then we cannot emulate the sympathiz-
ing animal which voluntarily starves with its master,
let us at all events try to surpass the animal by
helping the poor to their necessary food, as might
easily be done if we could place them on the same
diet with the rich by contriving to hand over to
them the excess of food which at present makes the
rich sick! But we cultivate needless sciences only.
Upon prolonging to a certain distant day the life of
a dying Hungarian magnate depended the fate of
enormous claims to inheritance. The interested
parties offered rich rewards to the doctors to pro-
long the man's life to that day. Here was a chance
for science! God only knows how much bleeding
and poisoning was done. They triumphed! The
A STUDY.
45
%
inheritance was ours! Science was brilliantly remu-
nerated. It must not be assumed that so much
science ought to be employed for the relief of our
poor workingmen!" ("Wagner," 1879, p. 309.)
In following Wagner further in his utterances
upon economic questions, it is interesting to note
that in the ancient order of things upon which he
dwells with evident approbation, neither communism
nor unqualified rights of private property obtained.
The right of possession was regulated by the needs,
not the luxurious cravings, of the individual. Among
conquering races, all excess of spoils was awarded to
those who rendered distinguished services to the
community.
Of the rôle played in history by possessions,
Wagner writes:
"From possessions which have become private
property, and which now, strangely enough, are
regarded as the very foundation of good order,
spring all the crimes, both of myth and of history."
Wagner," IV., p. 82.)
"Thus in the Nibelung Myth we recognize the
view, drawn with uncommon distinctness, of all
those races by which that myth was invented,
developed, and matured, concerning the nature of
* If the Emperor William III., who is an open patron of Wagner's art
at Baireuth, shall succeed in evolving a method whereby to put an end to
the cruelties of industrial slavery, and secure to real workingmen a due
amount of work with reasonable hours, together with an amount of com-
pensation which will both encourage and enable them to live, though
humbly, yet like men, the homage of a world will attest anew how much
greater are the victories of peace than those of war.
46
PARSIFAL.
possessions and private property. While in the most
ancient, religious view, the treasure-hoard represents
the splendors of earth revealed by sunlight, we find
it later on, in poetic form, as the might-giving spoils
of the hero, which, as the reward for the most daring
and astonishing deeds, he has won by overcoming
cruel foe. This hoard, this might-giving possession,
is thenceforth craved by the descendants of the
divine hero; but it is in the highest degree charac-
teristic, that the possessions are never acquired by
them in indolence, but instead only by deeds similar
to those of the first winner. These views, in accord-
ance with which man was originally ennobled, and
conceived to be an initial point of all power, corre-
spond entirely with the mode in which anciently
possessions were disposed of in real life. While, in
the remotest antiquity, the natural and simple prin-
ciple obtained of regulating the measure of the right
of possession or of enjoyment in accordance with
the needs, not the luxurious cravings of the indi-
vidual, it was no less natural that among con-
quering races, wherever there was an excess of
spoils, the might and daring of the most famous war-
rior should be deemed to entitle him to a richer and
more luxurious share. In the historic application of
the feudal system we still see, as long as it lasted in
its original purity, the heroic-man principle distinctly
expressed: the bestowal of favors was solely upon
the one man who could lay claim to them by reason
of some great deed done, some important service
A STUDY.
47
rendered. From the instant that fiefs became sub-
ject to inheritance, men, as regards personal valor
and deeds, lost in worth, this passing over to their
possessions instead. Their possessions, acquired by
inheritance, not their virtues as individuals, gave to
their descendants their importance; and the conse-
quently steadily deeper depreciation of the man over
against the steadily higher appreciation of his pos-
sessions, were finally embodied in the most inhuman
of arrangements, such as the right of primogeniture.
It is from this strangely reversed order of things that
the later nobility have imbibed all their arrogance
and pride, without considering that just because
their worth is derived from petrified family posses-
sions, they have openly denied and rejected real
human nobility. But what a cruelly inhuman form
the right of private property now assumes in our
haggling world of machine-factories, in which, to
speak precisely, workingmen are men only to the
extent which the demands of capital will permit!
('Wagner,' I., p. 196.) And now, according to the
conscience of the State, property has greater sanctity
than religion. For injury to the cause of religion
there is toleration; but for injury to property-rights
only the most merciless severity. ('Wagner,' 1881,
p. 39.) Our God is gold; and money-getting is our
religion." ("Wagner," III., p. 34.)
And now we have, in Wagner's words, "the terri-
bly amazing spectacle of seeing a philosophy like
Schopenhauer's, which is based on a perfect ethics, felt
48
PARSIFAL.
to be 'hopeless,' whence it follows that we would like
to be hopeful without a knowledge of true morality."
("Wagner," 1880, p. 336.)
After Wagner's endorsement of Schopenhauer's
Ethics, it is interesting to hear what Schopenhauer
has to say touching the matter of rights between
man and man.
"A bad man," says Schopenhauer, "is a man who
has so high a degree of egotism that he seeks his
own well-being alone, while completely indifferent
to the interests of others, whose existence is to him
altogether foreign and divided from his own by a
wide gulf, and who are regarded by him as mere masks
with no reality behind them." ("World as Will and
Idea," Book IV., p. 468.) Thus the bad man, “the
egotist, feels himself surrounded by strange and
hostile individuals, and all his hope is centred in his
own good. The good man, on the contrary, lives in
a world of friendly individuals, the well-being of any
of whom he regards as his own." ("World as Will
and Idea," Book IV., p. 483.) "The essential char-
acter of his conduct is that he makes less distinction
than is usually made between himself and others."
("World as Will and Idea," Book IV., p. 480.)
Thus, while egotism is unsympathetic, all love is
sympathy. "The teaching of this kind which lies
nearest to hand is Christianity, the ethics of which
lead not only to the highest degree of human love,
but also to renunciation, perfect indifference to
worldly things, dying to our own will and being
A STUDY.
49
born into God." ("World as Will and Idea,” Book
IV., p. 499.)
The foregoing passage is worthy of the great
Schopenhauer, who said: "There is nothing in which
one has to distinguish the kernel so carefully from
the shell as in Christianity. Just because I prize
this kernel highly, I sometimes treat the shell with
little ceremony; it is, however, thicker than is gen-
erally supposed." ("World as Will and Idea," Vol.
III., p. 447.) "Christianity belongs to the ancient,
true, and sublime faith of mankind, which is opposed
to the false, shallow, and injurious optimism which ex-
hibits itself in Greek paganism, Judaism, and Islam-
ism." ("World as Will and Idea," Vol. III., p. 446.)
Touching egotism in religion, Wagner, whose
"artistic nature" (we quote his words) "and the
sufferings it had had to undergo, had opened his
eyes to see into the deepest depth of things in such
a manner that death alone could ever close them
again,' "writes as follows:
* The last letter written by Wagner is dated January 31, 1883, thirteen
days before his death. It is addressed to Von Stein, who had written a
work, "Heroes and the World," in a series of dramatic scenes. Wagner
approved this setting of history in a dramatic frame, and one sentence of
his letter is: "No step in advance is more pregnant with success than that
from reflecting like a philosopher to seeing like a dramatist. To see, to
see, to really see; here is where they all fail! Have you eyes?' is a ques-
tion that may be forever addressed to this eternally chattering and listening
world, in which gaping takes the place of seeing. Whoever has really seen
knows how he stands with it.
"One hour of real, true seeing taught me more than all philosophy or all
history. It was on the closing day of the Paris Exhibition of 1867, when
all the schools of the city were admitted free. At the exit from the build-
ing I was detained by the entrance of thousands of the pupils, male and
50
PARSIFAL
1
"If any one explains Christianity as an attempt to
gratify boundless egotism on the basis of an arrange-
ment by which one of the contracting parties, in
return for deeds of self-renunciation and voluntary
sufferings in this relatively brief and fleeting life, is
to receive eternal life, he thus designates precisely
the sole mode of contemplation which is possible to
invincible human egotism, but by no means the dis-
illusioned view held by those who actually practise
voluntary self-sacrifice and submission to suffering.
For, by such renunciation and suffering, egotism is
practically abolished, so that whoever practises them
female, of the Paris schools, and remained an hour wrapped in the review
of almost each individual in this youthful army that represented a whole
future. The experience of this hour affected me so terribly that in my
deep emotion I finally burst into tears and sobs. This was noticed by one
of the nuns, who was, with touching care, conducting one of the proces-
sions of girls, and who at the entrance door ventured, as if by stealth, to
look up. Her glance fell upon me for too short a time to give her, even
under the most favorable circumstances, a conception of my condition, and
yet, so versed and practised was I already in the art of Seeing, that in this
glance I could recognize an ineffably beautiful solicitude as the soul of her
life. The impression this vision created was all the deeper, as I nowhere
else in the interminable throng saw any thing like or resembling it. On
the contrary, every thing had filled me with horror and sorrow. I saw in
prophetic outlines all the vices of the great capital, with its weakness, sick-
ness, grossness, and greed, dulness and degradation of natural vivacity,
fear and anguish, insolence and trickery. All this led on by teachers mostly
belonging to religious orders in the hideous garb of fashionable priesthood,
teachers themselves without wills, strict and stern, but rather obeying than
ruling. Every thing soulless-except that one poor Sister.
A long, deep silence revived me from the impression of that terrible
Sight. To see and to be silent-these would be the elements of deliverance
from this busy world."
Wagner concludes: To speak of the things of this world seems to be
very easy, because all the world speaks of them, but to present them so
that they speak themselves is given to few.”—N. Y. Musical Courier.
A STUDY.
51
is thus really emancipated from all the ideas of Time
and Space. Such an one can no longer seek any
happiness lying in Time or Space, even though they
were conceived to be eternal and illimitable. That
which gives him superhuman strength to suffer vol-
untarily must be felt even by himself in the form of
deep inner happiness, unperceived by either him-
self or any one else, and wholly incommunicable to
any one save by external earthly suffering. It must
be a boundless, sublime, and blissful feeling of hav-
ing overcome the world, compared with which the
vain satisfaction of having conquered the world is
childishly empty." ("Wagner," VII., p. 82.) "When,
after severe illness, St. Francis again beheld the
wonderful landscape of the surroundings of Assisi,
he was asked how the spectacle pleased him, upon
which the saint, lifting his gaze from the depths of
the inner world in which he had been so profoundly
absorbed, and fixing his eyes once more upon the
external scene, replied: No longer as before.""
Wagner looked for no immediate social reform.
Apparently the selfish rich will continue to pursue
their own ends, regardless of the continually deeper
degradation of the degraded poor, until, at last, the
accumulated mass of misery will swell above and
overflow all the bulwarks of social order, in another
of the revolutions in which all plutocracies find their
end. Meanwhile, he writes:
"Let us then recognize, with the Redeemer in our
heart, that it is not the deeds but the sufferings of
52
PARSIFAL.
men which bring us near to them, and make them
worthy of our thoughts: that to the defeated hero,
not to the victor, our sympathies belong. In all sur-
rounding nature, in the violence of the elements, in
the unalterable, self-asserting lower will, alike in sea
and in desert, in the insect and in the worm on which
we tread, we see manifested around and beneath us
the enormous tragedy of earthly existence. As the
spectacle overmasters our feelings, let us daily look
to the Redeemer on the Cross as our last sublime
refuge." ("Wagner," 1880, p. 296.)
To cease from worldly-mindedness is assuredly no
light matter. Says Wagner:
“The greatest miracle for the natural man cer-
tainly is the conversion of the Will, in which event
is involved a suspension of the laws of Nature itself.
Whatever can effect this conversion must necessarily
be sublimely supernatural and superhuman, and
union with it becomes the one thing needful. This
something the disciples were taught to call the
Kingdom of God, in opposition to the kingdoms of
this world. He who called to Himself the weary,
the heavy-laden, the suffering, the meek, and the
lovers of enemies, taught them that the all-loving
was their Heavenly Father as whose Son He Him
self was sent to them, His brethren. Here we see
the greatest of miracles and call it Revelation."
"Wagner," 1880, p. 271.)
We have now followed Wagner to the end of life.
What of the Beyond? Wagner writes:
A STUDY.
53
"If it be rational to assume that the certain de-
struction of our globe is only a question of time, we
shall have to accustom ourselves to think of the
human race as doomed to extinction. But, then, the
matter may involve a destiny lying outside of time
and space; and the question whether or not the
world has a moral significance, we may attempt to
answer by asking ourselves how we propose to perish,
like brutes or in a godlike manner?" ("Wagner,
1881, p. 250.)
"9
"In true religion there occurs a complete reversal
of all those aims upon which the State is based and
organized. The happiness which in that way is un-
attainable, the soul abandons the effort to attain, in
order by a diametrically opposite way to attain it.
The truth dawns upon the religious consciousness
that there must be another world besides this,
because in this the inextinguishable craving for
happiness is not to be stilled, and accordingly an-
other world is required for our redemption. (VIII.,
27.) What an indescribable gain would it be to
those who, on the one hand, are terrified by the
threats of ecclesiasticism, and on the other, are driven
to despair by our men of physical science, if to the
sublime edifice of Love, Faith, and Hope we could
annex a distinct recognition of the ideality of this
world, conditioned by the laws of Time and Space
as at present the sole foundation of our perceptions!
For from the point of view of that ideality, all
questions of the disquieted soul after a where and a
54
PARSIFAL.
when of the other world, will, nay, must be, answer-
able by a blissful smile. For if to these seemingly
infinitely weighty questions there is any answer, it
has been given by Schopenhauer with unequalled
precision and beauty in these words: 'Peace, rest,
and happiness dwell only where there is neither any
where nor any when.'" ("Wagner," 1880, p. 339.)
Says Schopenhauer:
"World as Will
"Abolish the concen-
"Dying is certainly to be regarded as the real aim
of life in the moment of death all that is decided for
which the whole course of life was only the prepa
ration and the introduction."
and Idea," Vol. III., p. 463.)
tration of consciousness in the brain by magnetic
sleep, and our existence shows itself beyond our
persons, and in other beings most strikingly by direct
participation in the thoughts of another individual,
and ultimately by the power of knowing the absent,
the distant, and even the future, thus by a kind of
omnipresence. I believe that at the moment of
death we become conscious that it is a mere illusion
that has limited our existence to our persons.'
("World as Will and Idea," Vol. III., pp. 418, 419.)
With this we reach the end of our lecture. We
have heard Wagner's assertion of the right of human
nature to claim scientific recognition for both the
spiritual intuitions and the spiritual inspirations of
man; we have heard his eloquent confession of the
Divinity of Christ as at once Redeemer and Sole
Refuge we have heard his defence of religious
1
!
A STUDY.
55
Dogma from the attacks of every-day common
human reason: we have heard his denunciation of all
ways by which selfishness exalts itself at the cost of
plunging multitudes of fellow-creatures into contin-
ually deeper abysses of want and degradation; and
finally, we have heard his declaration of belief in
another world of redemption. It only remains to
ask how he was led to these doctrines.
In the passage cited at the beginning of this
lecture from Dr. Newton's sermon, it was said that
"All lines of true human thought focus in religion."
Wagner says:
66
My thoughts upon these matters came to me as
creative artist in my intercourse with the public.
Having thus attained to the conviction that true art
can thrive only upon the basis of a true morality, I
could but recognize a proportionately higher mission
for art, since I found true art to be at one with true
religion. ("Wagner," 1880, p. 289.)
""
Do we ask the moral of Wagner's life?
In 1851 Wagner wrote to Liszt:
"I have erred much in my artistic efforts, not
being one of the elect who, like Mendelssohn, re-
ceived the only true, infallible, solid food of art like
Heavenly Manna in their mouths, and who there-
fore are able to say, 'I have never erred.' Only
through error can we poor earthworms get to a
knowledge of the truth, which, however, for that
very reason, we love passionately like a bride whom
we have won, instead of with the genteel approval
56
PARSIFAL.
with which we regard a spouse selected for us by our
dear parents."
"X
Accordingly, we may say the moral of Wagner's
life was: Accept, like Mendelssohn, and ye shall
Have; but Seek, like Wagner, and ye shall Find.
As Columbus once sought a more direct route to the
already known Indies, and found a new world, so
Wagner, seeking a higher type of musical drama,
explored both myth and philosophy to their inmost
depths, and discovered, beneath and above all, as
sole foundation for a true Humanitarianism, the
Logos, the Christ, the Son of the Living God.
On this discovery he placed an enduring seal.
In 1856 he wrote to Liszt of a "splendid subject"
he meant to execute, entitled, "Victory, the most
Perfect Salvation."
In 1872 he said to the writer of this lecture:
"What a grand thing is youth! To youth all things
are possible. I am now old; but I am not as old as
some would like to have me. In three or four years
I shall produce the Nibelung's Ring entire, and
then I shall bring out one more work!"
In 1880 the "one more work" was really brought
out at Baireuth. But then, in naming it, his mind seems
*It is a remarkable fact, that about thirty years after Wagner thus
modestly classed himself among the earthworms, Mr. Darwin published his
famous work on the "Formation of Vegetable Mould," in which he exhibits
the earthworm as a "worker of vast geological changes, a planer down of
mountain sides, and an ally of the Society for the Preservation of Ancient
Monuments"; in a word, the main instrumentality, under Providence, for
conserving the best things belonging to the past, by burying them out of
sight, while providing for future generations the very soil whence their
nutriment must be drawn!
A STUDY.
57
to have reverted to a remarkable passage in St. Paul's
First Epistle to the Corinthians, where the expression
"foolishness" is dwelt upon with striking persistency:
"For the word of the cross to those indeed perish-
ing is foolishness, and to us—those being saved—it
is the power of God, for it hath been written, 'I
will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the intelli-
gence of the intelligent I will bring to nought';
where is the wise? where the scribe? where a dis-
puter of this age? Did not God make foolish the
wisdom of this world? For, seeing in the wisdom
of God the world through wisdom knew not God,
it did please God through the foolishness of preach-
ing to save those believing. Since Jews ask a sign,
and Greeks seek wisdom, also we-we preach Christ
crucified, to Jews, indeed, a stumbling-block, and to
Greeks foolishness, and to those called-both Jews
and Greeks-Christ the power of God, and the wis
dom of God, because the foolishness of God is wiser
than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than
that no flesh may glory before Him.
He who is glorying-in the Lord let him
men.
glory."
And now,-Wagner having long since learned,
contrary to his former opinion, that the Christian
dare bring deeds to offer to his God—the name for
the "Victory, or the most Perfect Salvation" was
found. It was, Par-si-fal, which being interpreted,
is "Fool without Guile," or as St. Paul writes, "The
foolishness of God, which is wiser than men," namely,
"Christ crucified."
APPENDIX.
APPENDIX.
NOTE I.-" That there is an ethical tendency in Wagner's works is clear."
-(P. 17.)
It has not escaped notice that, in the "Flying Dutchman," the heroine,
Senta, illustrates the precept, "Greater love than this hath no one, that any
one his life may lay down for his friends"; that in "Tannhaueser," as the
Rev. Mr. Haweis pointed out, we see contrasted the "Tremendous Em-
pire of the Senses, and the Immense Supremacy of the Soul!" that, in
"Lohengrin," we have a parable of the human soul as typified by Elsa, who,
after seeking supernatural aid, should have abode in faith and trust, saying :
'I have known in whom I have believed, and have been persuaded that he
is able that which I have committed to him to guard-to that day."1
It is not, however, so generally recognized that in Tristan and Isolde,"
where neither a Swinburne, a Tennyson, nor even a Matthew Arnold discov-
ered the possibility of any thing not involving a sinful intrigue, Wagner
gives us two characters ideally created for each other, and whom King Mark
would gladly have seen wedded, and, but for the jealousy of the nobles,
actually seated on his throne, but whose fates are crossed by purely external
circumstances and conventionalities, as well as in part by their own blind-
ness before it was too late to redeem their fortunes. They are led to commit
themselves to each other in the sight of suspicious observers at a moment
when each one believes death imminent, and thenceforth meet but once, and
then at the treacherous instigation of a false friend who induces them to
meet in order that he may profit by betraying them. In that hour, swayed
by the loftiest principles of honor, they exhibit a conversion of will such as
Wagner has termed “the greatest of miracles for the natural man, since it
involves a suspension of the laws of Nature, and hence whatever can effect
it must be sublimely supernatural and superhuman." Accordingly, that to
which the noble pair dedicate themselves is not any "earthly house," but a
'house not made with hands—age-during—in the heavens
that
1 A child of twelve years gave the following interpretation of "Lohengrin," after a first
hearing: "There was an idea back of all they did on the stage. No one believes a man
really came down a river in a boat drawn by a swan; but Elsa prayed in trouble, and her
prayer was answered. Lohengrin came to her aid like Christ, and they tried to kill him,
and Elsa herself did not firmly believe in him, and so he went away and she died."
61
62
APPENDIX.
the mortal may be swallowed up of the life." Meanwhile, King Mark has,
unknown either to his court or to the world, spared Isolde the misery of the
consummation of a loveless marriage to himself, and has thus won her
boundless filial devotion; and when, by circumstances which, at the time, he
himself cannot understand, he is placed before his court in the position of
an injured husband, he becomes a royal embodiment of obedience to the
command to "Judge not according to appearance, but the righteous judg-
ment judge."
After the foregoing instances we are prepared to see in the "Master-Sing-
ers of Nuremburg," conventional art taught by the inspired artist, Walter,
that "The letter doth kill, and the spirit doth make alive"; while both
Walter and Eva learn from Hans Sachs "From all appearance of evil ab-
stain ye." We also understand the scene, by some deemed æsthetically
unintelligible, in Rhine-Gold, where Alberich, to accumulate the golden
hoard, "grinds the faces of the poor" until they are more brute than human,
and almost too degraded and contemptible to evoke pity. In the same musi-
cal drama, the giants, Fafner and Fasolt, show that "Whoso is hasting to be
rich is not acquitted"; the thesis of the "Nibelung's Ring," in its entirety
being, that greed of gain is fatal to all the ideal and innocent joys of life.
In the "
Valkyrie" we see, in the person of Brynhilda, the free impulse
based on sympathy and unselfish love, which is the distinguished mark of
Christianity, introduced in the midst of the fatalistic circle of gods and
heroes; Brynhilda's protecting flames reminding us of the promise in Zecha-
riah, "I am to her a wall of fire round about." In "Siegfried," the seed of
the woman, born in the dragon's cave, bruises the serpent's head; and in
the "Dooms-Day of the Gods," Love and Free Will, in the person of
Brynhilda, triumph over paganism in the destruction of Walhalla, the slain
Siegfried and Brynhilda being, in spite of Wagner's close superficial adhe-
rence to the traditional details of the legend of the Nibelungs, remarkably
suggestive of the slain Lamb and His loving Bride the Church, which fol-
lows Him out of this world to the heavenly city. While, finally, in
'Parsifal" we are reminded of the saying of the great Seer of Sweden:
'Inasmuch as all things subsist from the Divine Principle, and all things
thence derived must needs be representative of those things by which they
had existence, it follows, that the visible universe is nothing but a theatre
representation of the Lord's Kingdom, and this latter is a theatre representa-
tion of the Lord Himself.”
NOTE II.—“ The feeblest myth is better than the strongest theory: myth
recording a natural impression on the imaginations of great men and unpre-
tending multitudes.”—(P. 18.)
Herbert Spencer argues against the superiority of rational theories to
natural impressions as follows :
APPENDIX.
63
"Reason has been instrumental in putting down forms of mental govern-
ment—the government by prejudice, the government by tradition, etc.; and
wherever it has replaced them tends to play the despot in their stead.
•
By extinguishing other superstitions Reason makes itself the final object of
superstition. In minds freed by its help from unwarranted beliefs, it be-
comes that to which an unwarranted amount of belief is given.
The remarkable fact is that this excessive confidence in Reason, as com-
pared with the simpler modes of intellectual action, is not seen in those by
whom Reason has been employed with such astonishing results. Men of
science, now as in all past times, subordinate the deliverances of conscious-
ness reached through mediate processes to the deliverances reached through
immediate processes.
The chemist whose reasoned-out formula for
a new compound implies that the separated precipitate put into his scales
should weigh a grain, and who finds that it weighs two grains, at once aban-
dons the verdict of his reasoning, and never dreams of calling in question
the verdict of his direct perception. So it is with all classes of men whose joint
efforts have brought our knowledge of the universe to its present coherent
comprehensive state. It is rather among the spectators of these vast achieve-
ments of Reason that we find this exaggerated estimate of its powers; and
in the minds of these spectators its usurpation is often marked in proportion
as their converse with Nature has been remote.
In describing the
worship of that which puts down superstitions as in itself the final supersti-
tion, we come, indeed, much nearer to literal truth than at first appears.
For this worship implies the assumption that by shaping consciousness into a
particular form, there is given to it some power independent of the power
which belongs intrinsically to its substance.
While it is impossible
•
for Reason to prove its own superior trustworthiness, it is quite possible for
it to prove its own inferior trustworthiness. Self-analysis shows that all
its dicta being derivative, are necessarily less certain than those from which
they are derived.
By its own account, it cannot possibly do more
than compare and intercept the evidences which perception has given. So
long as it limits itself to detecting incongruities among the evidences of per-
ception, and finding out where they have arisen, Reason performs an all-
important function; but it exceeds its function, and commits suicide, when
it concludes the evidence of perception to be false in substance. Reason
can do nothing more than reconcile the testimonials of perception with one
another. When it proved that the sun does not move round the earth, but
that the earth turns on its axis, Reason substituted for an old interpretation
which was irreconcilable with the various facts, a new interpretation which
was reconcilable with them, while it equally well accounted for the more
obvious facts. But Reason did not question the existence of the Sun, the Earth,
and their relative motion !"—(" Principles of Psychology," 390, 391, 441.)
64
APPENDIX.
!
(Would that our men of physical science oftener took this ground in regard
to religious dogmas as well, many of which represent the most ancient spirit-
ual perceptions of mankind, and embody problems which can no more be
ignored out of existence than Sun, Moon, or Earth!)
In each sermon, I have passed quickly through the husks of popular
dogmas, to find out and bring to you somewhat of that which I understand to
be the inner substance of these doctrines; seeking to show that, so far from
representing exploded superstitions, these doctrines stand for most real prob-
lems; problems which are still before us as they were before our fathers;
problems which we must state, as best we can, in the thought and language
of our day, as our fathers stated them in the thought and language of their
day; or that, failing in any satisfactory statement, we must rest content in
the old formulas, until the Divine Spirit causes the doctrine of knowledge
to appear as the light.' I have thus sought to indicate to you that the old
beliefs, when stripped of the glosses of the popular imagination, read far
more nobly than most men dream; and that we can see that they are capa-
ble of taking on still higher forms; of which dim shadows fall athwart our
path to-day, assuring us that there will be a theology of the future, in which
the old doctrines shall quicken into beliefs full of power over life. Our wis-
dom, in this trying age, when change follows change in our mental outlook,
is to bide patiently under the old forms, even when not satisfactory; reject-
ing the follies and wrongs of the popular theology, but holding by the doc-
trines of which they are distorted images.”—(Rev. R. Heber Newton, D.D.,
Philistinism, or Plain Words Concerning Certain Forms of Modern Skepti-
cism," Putnam's Sons, New York.)
"The theological thaw going on so rapidly all around us is one of words
only, the truth remains unchanged."—(Spencer.)
NOTE III.—“ A spirit voice will say to you something real and thoroughly
comprehensible, yet never before heard.”—(P. 20.)
a
At the side of the world, which we perceive by virtue of the functions of
the waking brain, stands, as is corroborated in every one's experience by
dreams, a second world quite equal to the first in distinctness
world which as Object, cannot lie outside of us.
As the organ of
dreams cannot be excited to activity by external impressions (against which
the brain is then entirely closed) this excitation must occur by means of
changes in the inner organism which manifest themselves to our waking con-
sciousness only as obscure feelings. But it is through this inner life that we
are allied to all nature, and thus partakers in the essential nature of things in
such a way that the forms of external knowledge, Time and Space, are no longer
to be applied to our relations with that nature; whence Schopenhauer con-
vincingly argues the origin of prophetic dreams which make the most distant
APPENDIX.
65
things perceptible, and in extreme cases, the entrance of somnambulistic
clairvoyance.
To this let us now add the other phenomenon of
spirit-seeing; and with reference to it as well, employ Schopenhauer's hypo-
thetical explanation, according to which it is a clairvoyance which takes
place while the brain is awake.
The shape which from the interior
is projected before the eye, in no wise belongs to the real, phenomenal
world; it lives, nevertheless, before the spirit-seer, with all the characteris-
tics of an actual being. With this projection before the waking person's
eyes of the image beheld by the inner Will alone, let us compare Shake-
speare's work, in order to explain him to ourselves as the spirit-seer and
spirit-conjurer who was able, from his inner perception, to place the shapes
of men of all times before his and our waking eyes in such a manner
that they seem actually to live before us.”—(Wagner's Beethoven,"
G. Schirmer, N. Y.)
"The Abbe Trithemius, who in magic art was the master of Agrippa, ex-
plains in his Stenography' the secret of conjurations and evocations in an
exceedingly natural and philosophical manner. To evoke a spirit, he says,
is to enter into the ruling idea of that spirit, and if we rise morally higher in
the same line, we shall draw that spirit after us and it will serve us."-("The
Mysteries of Magic," Waite.)
•
NOTE IV.—“ To the Goliath of Modern Science art daily becomes more and
more of a mere rudiment of a former cognitive stage of human life.”—(P. 23.)
"I have almost lost my taste for pictures or music.
My mind
seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of
large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that
part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive.
If I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read
some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps
the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active
through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possi-
bly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character,
by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature."-(Charles Darwin, “Auto-
biography," i., pp. 101, 102.)
NOTE V.—“ True artistic productivity may all too easily induce a relapse
into the ‘inspiration-swindle' of surmounted periods of culture!”—(P. 24.)
Savants, who are only savants, have been able to deny God. That can
be conceived of, for when the heart does not communicate to the brain its
generous burnings which illumine and fecundate; when it does not inflame
those intuitions which constitute genius, the mind cannot go very far. From
that comes the cold reasoning condemned to a profound sterility, that dry-
66
APPENDIX.
ness of perception and narrowness of vision which explain in some sort the
atheism which certain savants profess. But for any artist to deny God, God
the cause, the beginning and the end of his art, God the source of his inspira-
tions and his genius,—let us say it without fear of contradiction, let us pro-
claim it to the eternal honor of art, never has such a monstrosity been
produced. No, never! Never has an artist denied his God. For him, art
is a magnificent objective upon whose field appears an entire transluminous
world, and to whose visions he incessantly tends to unite himself. For him,
art is still a mystic fountain from which escapes a celestial perfume and
across which he feels, he sees, he touches in some sort that God who fills him
with irrepressible raptures.
"If you own one of those costly instruments called telescopes, why do you
value it? Is it not because of the property it possesses of showing to your
surprised eyes vast and profound perspectives invisible without its aid? It
is, then, the astounding views brought within the range of your vision that
you love the instrument for; certainly you would not say you loved the tele-
scope for the telescope! Now art is the telescope of a supernatural world.
Love art for art! What does that mean? It is idolatry. It is to love the
portrait of a friend not for the friend, but for a portrait; to love an image
for the image, not for what it represents! In art one must love something be-
sides art if one would know how to love art! True art purifies the life,
illumines the mind, makes perfect and sanctifies the soul, and transfigures it
to identity with things divine."-(Francis Delsarte.)
NOTE VI.—“ Instead of worshipping the true Jehovah, who rejoices with-
in the hearts of men when they kill their animal passions and sacrifice to Him
their erroneous opinions, they created a bloodthirsty God whom they called
Jehovah." (P. 27.)
Sanconiatho, B.C. 1000, gives the origin of human sacrifices thus: "It
was the custom among the ancients in times of great calamity, in order to
prevent the ruin of all, for the rulers of the city or the nation to sacrifice to the
avenging deity the most beloved of their children as the price of redemption.
For the Supreme God Il had an only son whom once, when great danger
beset the land, he offered up as a sacrifice to Heaven." ("Assyria," by
Ragozin, chap. v., Putnam's Sons.) *
* Both the natural parental shrinking of the ancients from the sacrifice of their offspring
and the lengths to which they could summon up resolution to go in their efforts to
propitiate the avenging power to which the supreme god Il had sacrificed his only son, is
shown by an occurrence in the history of the Carthaginians, who having been beaten in a
very important battle, made a severe investigation, which showed that the city nobles had
for some time purchased and fattened low-born children and substituted these for their
own children in the sacrifices. To this impiety the anger of the god was attributed, and a
national expiatory sacrifice was ordered on a large scale: two hundred boys of the noblest
1
APPENDIX.
67
In the oldest writings known to us, except perhaps the Book of Job,
namely, those of the Shumiro-Accads, who dwelt between the Tigris and
the Euphrates rivers, above the Persian Gulf, the sign of a star is used to
express the idea of the divine principle. The Semitic language of Baby-
lonia read the sign of the star, Ilu, god. This word Ilu or El we find in all
Semitic languages, ancient and modern, in the name given to God in the
Arabic Allah, as well as in the Hebrew Elohim. ("The Story of Chaldea,"
Ragozin, chap. v., Putnam's Sons.)
66
•
In the Hebrew Scriptures, the name El, or Al, occurs in various forms
and combinations, thus: In the beginning of Elohim's preparing the
heavens and the earth-the earth hath existed waste and void, and darkness
is on the face of the deep, and the Spirit of Elohim* fluttering on the face
of the waters, and Elohim saith, Let light be, and light is."-(Genesis i.,
I-3.) And the sons of Elohim see the daughters of men (Adam) that they
are fair
and they have borne to them-they are the heroes, who,
from old, are the men of name."-(Genesis vi., 2-4.) And Melchizedek
king of Salem hath brought out bread and wine, and he is priest of El.”-
(Genesis xiv., 18.) “I am El Shaddai,† walk habitually before Me
and I will give My covenant between Me and thee, and multiply thee
exceedingly.”—(Genesis xvii., 1, 2.) “Lo, I am seeing four men loose, walk-
ing in the midst of fire, and they have no hurt; and the appearance of the
fourth is like to a son of Elah."—(Daniel iii., 25.) 'Wizards who chatter
and mutter, Doth not a people seek unto its Elohim?"-(Isaiah viii., 19.)
"Lo, the Virgin is conceiving, and is bringing forth a son, and hath called
his name Immanu-el."-(Isaiah vii., 14.) No Eloah of any nation and
kingdom is able to deliver his people from my hand."-(Sennacherib against
"
ruling families perished, and many of their parents voluntarily sacrificed their own lives at
the same time.—(Ragozin's “ Assyria.”)
•
•
•
Thus of the king
they fled before
The Old Testament contains numerous allusions to similar sacrifices.
of Moab we read: "The Israelites rose and smote the Moabites so that
them; and they went forward into the land smiting the Moabites.
Then the king
of Moab took his eldest son that should have reigned in his place and offered him for a
burnt offering upon the wall. And there came great wrath upon Israel, and they
departed from him and returned to their own land.” (This occurred about 850 B.C.
-See 2 Kings, iii., 24-27.)
The Jews themselves had a place outside the walls of Jerusalem, the valley of Tophet,
where sacrificial pyres were constantly kept blazing and were often fed with child-victims.
-(Jeremiah vii., 30, 31; xix., 5-7.)
* Elohim is a plural formed from a feminine singular (Eloh) by adding the usual termi-
nation of the masculine plural (im). “And Elohim prepareth the man in His image, in
the image of Elohim He prepareth him, a male and a female He prepared them.”—(Gene-
sis i., 27.)
+ Shaddai, i. e.,
El of the breast, the nourisher, obviously related to the many-breasted
Diana of the Ephesians.
I. e., to its mighty dead.
68
APPENDIX.
•
Hezekiah; 2 Chronicles xxxii., 15.) "And Saul sweareth to her by Jeho-
vah, saying, Jehovah liveth, punishment doth not meet thee for this thing.
And the woman saith, Whom do I bring up to thee? and he saith, Samuel
-bring up to me. And the woman seeth Samuel.
And the king
saith to her
what hast thou seen? and the woman saith unto Saul,
Elohim have I seen coming up out of the earth. And he saith to her, What
is his form? and she saith, An aged man is coming up, and he is covered with
an upper robe; and Saul knoweth he is Samuel.”—(1 Samuel xxviii., 10–14.)
The incommunicable name Jehovah, which stands over against Elohim in
the preceding passage, is variously derived from roots signifying, respect-
ively, He who exist's, He who causes, and He who causes (rain, lightning,
heavenly bodies) to fall. Thus: “And the day is, that sons of Elohim
come in to station themselves by Jehovah, and there doth come also the
Hater (Satan) in their midst.
And Jehovah saith to the Hater, Lo,
While this one is speaking another
all that he hath is in thine hand.
And Job riseth
also hath come and saith, 'Fire of Elohim' [the star] hath fallen from
the heavens.
and he saith
Je-
hovah hath given and Jehovah hath taken : let the name of Jehovah be
blessed."-(Job i., 6–21.)
We believe that we shall not err if, in the Scriptural distinction between
Jehovah and Elohim, we perceive, on the one hand, in Jehovah, God objec-
tively conceived, God as Transcendent above His Creation; and on the
other hand, in El, Elah, Eloah, Elohim, El Shaddai, etc., we perceive God
subjectively conceived, God as Immanent in His World, and particularly in
the great men and other intelligences through whose instrumentality the des-
tinies of nations, races, mankind at large, nay, even that of planets them-
selves, are wrought out.
Modern metaphysics render such a view easy of comprehension. Who-
ever has learned from Spencer to view the antithetical conceptions of Spirit
and Matter as rendered necessary to us only through the relation of subject
and object, while Spirit no less than Matter is regarded as but a sign of an
underlying Reality, must find it but natural to view the antithetical concep-
tions in Holy Scripture of God Transcendent and God Immanent, Jehovah
and Elohim, as also rendered necessary only through the same relation of
subject and object, both Jehovah and Elohim being regarded as signs of the
underlying Unity. To that which underlies Spirit and Matter Spencer gives
the name of the Unknowable Reality; to Him who appears to us in the Old
Testament now as Elohim and anon as Jehovah, English translations of the
Bible give the names of Lord and God. As Elohim, or God Immanent, ob-
viously is the heart of creation, not fashioning things from without, but instead
evolving all things from within, in placing Elohim at the very beginning of
Genesis, the Old Testament may be said to take Evolution for granted from
APPENDIX.
69
the very outset, and to meet the demands of modern thought still further by
its recognition of the fundamental antithesis of subject and object in repre-
senting the one God now as Elohim or God Immanent, and again as Jehovah
or God Transcendental. Hence it would seem that Spencer himself must
eventually reach the conclusion, that if God be Unknowable to man, this
can be true of Him only as Jehovah or God Transcendental; while as Elo-
him, or God Immanent in His World, this "God Unknown
who
did make the world and all things in it
•
•
giving to all life and
breath
is not far from each one of us, for in Him we live, and
move, and are”; being Him of whom (according to certain ancient poets)
we also are offspring"; the Lord of the conscience; and the "Divinity"
(according to a more modern poet) "that shapes our ends, rough hew them
how we may."
The idea of God which is thus developed is represented in the emblem
known as Solomon's Seal. In it the Evolution of matter upward toward spirit
is symbolized by a triangle resting on its base, ▲ the three sides of which rep-
resent the "Three who are testifying in the earth, the Spirit and the water
and the blood"; while the Involution of spirit into matter is symbolized
by an inverted triangle, ▼ the three sides of which represent the "Three who
are testifying in the heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit";
The latter three, who "are one," and the former three, who "are into the
one," form when combined the six-pointed star so prominent among ecclesi-
astical symbols, reminding us at once of the ancient Assyrian sign of divinity
in general, and also of the star which at the birth of Emmanu-el was seen
of the magi in the east and stood over where the child lay.
The account given by Sanconiatho of the sacrifice of his only son by the
supreme god Il when danger beset the land, plainly connects I with the
gods and heroes of earth, and satisfactorily explains, if not, as he supposes,
the origin of human sacrifices, at least the reason for their perpetuation. We
have, however, in our day, seen no less a scholar than F. Max Müller,
affirm* of the Polynesian story of the destruction of sky-supporting Ru,
whose bones came tumbling down and were shivered on the earth into count-
less fragments of pumice-stone, which are scattered over every hill and valley
of Mangaia, to the very edge of the sea; that "this tearing asunder of
heaven and earth was originally no more than a description of what might be
seen every morning when, after a dark night, the sun of the morning
appeared, the dawn was hurled away, and the sky seen lifted high above the
earth.' (Prof. Müller admits, however, that “ Why pumice-stone should be
called the bones of Ru, [i.e., the Dawn,] we cannot tell, without knowing a
great deal more of the language of Mangaia than we do at present" !) If a
great modern authority can soberly offer such an interpretation of a story
*India: What can it teach us?, Lecture V.
""
70
APPENDIX.
manifestly relating to the supreme catastrophe of history, myth, and legend,
(see Note XXII.), we may be pardoned for not accepting literally the state-
ment of Sanconiatho, and for preferring instead to draw from it the con-
clusion that human sacrifices originated in a gross, materialistic misconcep-
tion of a primitive doctrine of sacrifice dating from the time of the great
catastrophe in the solar system to which reference has been made.
By the Hebrew priests clearly the history and meaning of the sacrifice
made by Il were understood and perpetuated in a way which kept their
followers closely in sympathy with the ideas on which were based the
atrocities of the worship of surrounding nations; whence we understand the
continual lapses of the Hebrew people into the worship of Baal, Moloch, etc.,
in which worship they may have felt that they found the original of which
their own was a copy. By the Hebrew prophets, however, obviously the
sacrifice made by El was understood in a totally different and purely
spiritual way; for they declare explicitly that the "Sacrifices of Elohim are
a broken spirit, a heart broken and bruised."-(Psalm li., 17.)
From this point of view, the doctrine of the sacrifice of his only son by the
supreme god El is a witness, from the time of a catastrophe which may be
outlined from, if indeed it be not actually symbolized for us in, the Book of
Job, of the "
Natural law of sacrifice which runs through all creation and is
the expression of the very heart of God himself; under which law men
are lifted into the human life divine, as men are ready to sacrifice everything,
even to life itself, in the vicariousness of love whose perfect manifestation is
Jesus Christ"; the foundation of the doctrine being belief in the existence
of a Power (to use the words of the Rev. Dr. Parkhurst, of New York City)
"who is the most tremendously obligated Being in the universe," and who
meets His obligations to the uttermost in behalf of all who will hearken unto
His voice and walk in His ways.
In the light of the foregoing facts of etymology, and history, sacred and
profane, it is significant that not only was our Lord's ministry mainly asso-
ciated with the services of the synagogues, which thus became the rallying
points for the primitive Christian congregations, the whole influence of His
ministry being to put an end to the bloody rites of the Temple; but what is
even more to the point, He distinctly connected His Being and Mission with
the great event of which only a dim shadow survives in Sanconiatho's ac-
count of the deed of Il whence human sacrifices originated; and the New
Testament writers and early Fathers supply further links which seem to turn
the fabric from a chain into mail-armor.
Thus, if Sanconiatho tells us that once when danger beset the land the
Supreme God Il sacrificed his only son; the New Testament says that our
Lord was truly Emanu-el, that is El with us. Of the time when, according
to Sanconiatho, danger beset the land, He who was seen in Patmos with the
APPENDIX.
71
seven stars in His right hand, elsewhere affirmed: "I was beholding Satan
falling like lightning from the heavens. He further reminded Nicodemus
(who as a master in Israel should have known these things), that God (Theos,
i. e., Dyaus, the shining one, identical with El), did so love the world that
His Son-the only begotten-He gave that every one believing in Him may not
perish, but may have life age-during. For God did not send His Son to the
world that he may judge the world, but that the world may be saved through
Him.
Again, in the agony of His death-throes upon the cross, just before He
gave up the ghost, He cried with a loud voice, not to Jehovah, but instead
to the Supreme God El; "Eli, Eli, lama Sabachthani,"-El, El, why didst
Thou forsake me!
Was
Most fittingly, then, when the "Lamb slain from the foundation of the
world" appeared to His disciples after the crucifixion,-He asked:
it not behoving the Christ these things to suffer?”*
The Christian Church has ever loved to see the Redeemer's form in the
mysterious Melchizedek, King of Jerusalem and King of Peace, as also in
other divine manifestations recorded in the Old Testament.
Hence we may
come to understand the profound meaning of the learned St. Augustine,
when he writes:
"That in our times is called the Christian religion, which to know and to
follow is the most sure and certain health, called according to that name,
but not according to the thing itself of which it is the name, for the thing
itself which is now called the Christian religion really was known to the
ancients, nor was wanting at any time from the beginning of the human
race until the time when Christ came in the flesh, from whence the true re-
ligion, which had previously existed, began to be called Christian; and this
in our days is the Christian religion, not as having been wanting in former
times, but as having in later times received that name."-("Opera Augus-
tini,” vol. i., p. 12.)
According to this, heathenism would represent a corruption of the original
doctrine, while the truth as it is in Jesus would be the ancient doctrine
restored to mankind by the Incarnation and Precious Death of Christ.
Human and other sacrifices originated in a misapprehension of the spiritual
* Scorn and contumely and the cries of an angry crowd surround that altar on which
the Son of God makes oblation of Himself; and cross after cross strews the long Via Do-
lorosa of the narrow path that leadeth unto Life.
The wrongs of others wound the Son of God, and the stripes of others fall on His flesh.
He is smitten with the pain of all creatures, and His heart is pierced with their wounds.
There is no offence done and he suffers not, nor any wrong, and he is not hurt thereby.
For his heart is in the breast of every creature and his blood in the veins of all flesh.
And inasmuch as a man loves and succours and saves even the least of God's creatures,
he ministers unto the Lord.-(Kingsford.)
72
APPENDIX.
meaning of the primitive doctrine of the sacrifice by the Supreme God Il of
His only Son to save the world.
"Now let our souls on wings sublime
Rise from the vanities of time,
Draw back the parting veil and see
The glories of eternity."
NOTE VII.-" Materialistic physical science is destructive of Deism only,
while Christian theism is wholly beyond its reach.”—(P. 29.)
''
The celebrated contention between Herbert Spencer and Frederick Har-
rison, touching "The Nature and Reality of Religion," was purely on the
plane of Theism. Mr. Spencer who, in the opinion of competent authorities,
possesses perhaps the grandest intellect which has appeared in philosophy in
two thousand years, summed up a paper entitled Religion, a Retrospect
and Prospect," by saying: "The final outcome of that speculation com-
menced by primitive man, is that the Power manifested throughout the
Universe distinguished as material, is the same Power which in ourselves
wells up under the form of consciousness." Mr. Harrison, who is admit-
tedly one of the most brilliant of modern critics and essayists, followed up
Spencer's paper with one entitled "The Ghost of Religion," in which he
affirmed that to him, Spencer's paper seemed frankly unanswerable as a sum-
mary of philosophical conclusions on the theological problem; but Harrison
objects that there is no religion in the consciousness of being ever in the
presence of an Infinite and Eternal Energy, from which all things proceed."
Religion, says Harrison, must be anthropomorphic to be a working real-
ity, and he claims that "the future will have to return to the Knowable, to
the religion of Realism, the religion of Humanity, as the grandest object of
reverence within the region of the real and known." "You can have no
religion," writes Harrison, "without kinship, sympathy, relation of some
kind between the believer, worshipper, servant, and the object of his belief."
To this Spencer rejoined, that as religion began, historically, with the wor-
ship of dead men, followed by that of ghosts continually less human and
more superhuman in attributes, to be told now that there is coming an era in
which the Universal Power men have come to believe in, will be ignored, and
human individualities, regarded now singly and now in their aggregate, will
again be the objects of religious feeling,—this is Retrogressive Religion."
A spectator," says Mr. Spencer, "who, seeing a bubble floating on a great
river, had his attention so absorbed by the bubble that he ignored the river
out of which the bubble arose
would fitly typify a disciple of M.
Comte, who centreing all his higher sentiments on Humanity, holds it absurd
to let either thought or feeling be occupied with that great stream of Crea-
tive Power
of which Humanity is a transitory product."
J
APPENDIX.
73
From this point on, no advance was made in the debate. Harrison con-
tinued to see the need of relation of some kind between the worshipper and
the object of his belief; while Spencer continued to be conscious of the exist-
ence of a Superhuman Power unreached by the deepest analyses of matter,
motion and thought and feeling, which will hereafter continue to be, under
its transfigured form, an object of religious sentiment, a Power which, far
from dwelling apart from man and the world, like the God of Deism, “is
manifested through man and the world from instant to instant." Yet neither
of the combatants could name the name of the Christ, the Mediator between
the Unknowable and Humanity, though this name held the key to the situa-
tion, so that, if Spencer had named it, he must have won the case by holding
his own and showing that with it he also possessed what Harrison insisted
upon as essential! The precise position of the Logos doctrine between
Theism and Humanitarianism may be seen from the following citations :
"As the heart of God the Father, the Son of God is at the same time the
heart of the world, through whom the Divine Light streams into creation. As
the Logos of the Father, He is at the same time the eternal Logos of the
world, through whom the Divine Light shines into creation. He is the
ground and source of all reason in the creation, be it in men or angels, in
Greek or Jew. He is the principle of the law and promises under the Old
Testament, the eternal light which shines in the darkness of heathenism; and
all the holy grains of truth which are found in heathenism were sowed by the
Son of God in the souls of men.
It was the Divine Logos Himself
who imaged Himself beforehand in elect sons of men under the Old Cove-
nant, who moulded human personalities to a limited extent after His own
holy nature, and thus realized beforehand some features of the image whose
entire Divine and human fulness He purposed to express in His revelation as
the Christ. Nay, more in the sons of the gods of heathendom, and in the men
who stood forward as witnesses of a noble, God-related humanity, we may
trace individual features of His image, which He stamped on them, although
the heathen misapprehended them, and did not lay hold on the promise they
contained."-(Bishop Martensen, "Christian Dogmatics.")
"Christ is the Word of whom the entire human race are partakers; those
who live according to reason are Christians, though accounted atheists, while
those who live without reason are enemies to Christ; each man of the heathen
writers spoke well in proportion to the share of the Word of God he had in
him."-(Justin Martyr.)
"The Son of God is never displaced; not being divided, not severed, not
passing from place to place; being always everywhere, and being contained
nowhere; complete mind, the complete paternal light. Christ is called Wis-
dom by the prophets. This is he who is the teacher of all created beings, the
fellow-counsellor of God, who foreknew all things. There was always a na-
74
APPENDIX.
tural manifestation of the one Almighty God among all right-thinking men.
He whom we call Savior and Lord gave philosophy to the Greeks. He has
dispensed His beneficence both to Greeks and to Barbarians. For the image
of God is His Word, the genuine Son of Mind, the Divine Word, the arche-
typal light of light."—(Clement of Alexandria.)
•
Concerning which salvation seek out and search out did prophets
searching in regard to what manner of time the Spirit of Christ that was in
them was manifesting, testifying beforehand the sufferings of Christ and the
glory after these."—(1 Peter i., II.)
Jesus answered them, Is it not having been written in your law; I said,
ye are gods? If then he did call them gods unto whom the word of God
came, (and the writing is not able to be broken,) of him whom the Father did
sanctify, and send into the world, do ye say-Thou speakest evil, because I
said, Son of God I am?"—(John x., 34–36.)
"As many as did receive Him, to them gave He authority to become sons
of God."—(John i., 12.)
There may be observed in the synchronizing of the history of faiths
a remarkable tidal wave of intensity which seems acutely to affect the race,
physically and mentally, and with remarkable regularity every 600 to 650
years, reminding us of the Sothic and other cycles, but especially of the
mystical Phoenix or solar eras of Egypt and the East.
B.C. 3500 Egyptian Sacred Ritual.
3000 Zoroaster (Bunsen).
2500 Flood, Tower of Babel.
2250
1750 Exodus, Hindo Veda, Zend Avesta.
1700
1200)
1100 S
King David, Hebrew Psalms.
600 Buddha, Chinese Sacred Books.
o
Jesus Christ.
A.D. 600
Mahomet, the Koran.
1100
Crusades.
1500 Luther, Protestant Bible.
-Forlong : "Chart of Rivers of Life.")
“Five hundred years, Ananda,' said Buddha in the 'Culavagga,' 'will
the doctrine of the truth abide.' He also prophesied that a new Buddha (i.
e., ‘Divine Intelligence') would come. 'He shall be the last to obtain the
great spiritual light; and he will become a Lord called the "Buddha of
Brotherly Love." ("Saddharma Pundarika.") Buddha died 470 B.C., so
exactly 500 years after his death, the Buddha of Brotherly Love began to
APPENDIX.
75
preach.' '"*—(Arthur Lillie : "Buddhism in Christendom," title-page and
preface, p. vii.)
"And all things are of God, who hath reconciled us to Himself by Jesus
Christ and hath given to us the ministry of reconciliation."
It
"Interest in missions is no longer confined to the Christian Church.
has spread in all directions, and is encountered where least of all we have
hitherto been accustomed to look for it. Twenty-five years ago a serious
editorial in a great secular journal would have been a newspaper eccentricity.
In the last five years we have learned from the secular press almost as much
of the theology and success of missionary enterprise as from the religious.
It is to this interest that the once universal belief that those who never
hear of Christ are doomed to an endless hell, which belief was regarded as
the prime motive of gifts to missions, is no longer a universal belief, and is
no longer urged as a motive for sending missionaries to heathen lands. It
is feared in some quarters, if it is admitted that the heathen are not inevita-
bly doomed, the enthusiasm for missionary enterprise will pass away. This
fear is not a secret. As a consequence, we are all more or less aware of the
changes which time, reason, and a better knowledge of God's Word and of
heathen religions have wrought in the Church's spirit as it bends itself to do
what it knows it ought to do in extending the knowledge of Jesus Christ.
Let us admit the truth, not grudgingly, but gladly. We do not send mis-
sionaries to rescue heathen from hell; we send them out to bring the heathen
to a knowledge of God as revealed in Jesus.
"St. Paul's training, his interest in Jewish theology and the Jewish
Church, his knowledge of his people, his wish to do something for them,
did not fall in pieces when Jesus met him on his way to Damascus, but it got
a new significance. Henceforth he was to go up and down the world, not
to persecute people who were trying to find God and to serve Him by meth-
ods different from His own, but to declare to people who were seeking after
God that He was not far from any one of them, and to make the altar to
an unknown God burn with a sacrifice to the God whom Jesus had revealed.
*The main position of writers like Dr. Oldenburg is that the atheistic literature of Cey-
lon represents the earliest Buddhism, the Buddhism of the Little Vehicle. Hwen Ohsang
contradicts this in toto. "In Ceylon," he says, are about ten thousand monks who fol-
low the doctrines of the Great Vehicle." He says, moreover, the controversy raged fiercely
for a long time before the Great Vehicle was successful over the Little Vehicle. Yet even
in Ceylon, the hotbed of the innovating school of Buddhism that dethroned God and
demolished heaven, Buddha is yet worshipped, though as a non-God. Flowers are flung
daily at this non-God. Morning and evening meals are proffered to him. Daily the non-
God is asked to forgive sins. The mock Mohatmas that the notorious Mme. Blavatski
professed to be in communication with also affirmed that there was no God. Upon all
these atheistic Buddhists of the Great Vehicle, those of the Little Vehicle, who represent
ancient Buddhism, composed a neat sarcasm. They called that Great Vehicle, Sunya
Pushpa (the vehicle that drives to Nowhere).-(Arthur Lillie, "Buddhism in Christen-
dom," pp. 218-221.)
เ
76
APPENDIX.
"St. Paul goes on to tell how the old things become new, which is by our
reconciliation to God. This brings not religion, but Christianity, squarely
to the front. In these later times, when all there is of every thing clear
round the earth has been brought to our notice and knowledge, it has been
suggested that religion was not limited to Christianity; that, for instance,
Buddhism may make its contribution and Mohammedanism do its share.
This suggestion does not frighten or puzzle us as once it did. When we
were children Buddhism and Mahommedanism were regarded as unmixedly
evil, but we don't think of them in that way now. We have come to hope
that every religion may have something of value in it, and that that very
element of value may be the door through which the truth of God is at last
to enter.
But along with this larger view has travelled the idea that one religion
is as good as another, and that the Church of America has its hands full at
home. Here exactly is our point. We know how truly Jesus has completed
our own knowledge of the nature of good; therefore we pray and give that
all the world may have what we know and the peace which accompanies it.
I cannot believe that Buddha has done for a single pagan what Christ has
done for me. Therefore I stand here to speak for the agency which is send-
ing Christ's message to the world."—(Rev. E. Winchester Donald, D.D.)
NOTE VIII.—“ An angry and vindictive God."—(P. 29.)
God spake in His word according to appearances; as when it
is said that He is angry, that He avenges, that He tempts, that He pun-
ishes, that He casts into Hell, that He condemns, yea, that He does evil; while
the truth is that God never is angry with any one, that He never avenges,
tempts, punishes, casts into hell, or condemns. Such things are as far
from God, nay, infinitely farther, than hell is from heaven. They are forms
of speech then, used only according to the appearances.
Infernal
fire comes from the same origin as heavenly fire, namely, from the sun of
heaven, or the Lord; but it is made infernal by those who receive it. For
all influx from the spiritual world varies according to reception, or according
to the forms into which it flows; not differently from the heat and light from
the sun of the world. The heat flowing thence into plantations and gardens
produces vegetation, and also brings forth grateful and delicious odors; and the
same heat flowing into excrementitious and cadaverous substances produces
putrefaction, and draws forth noisome and disgusting stenches. It is the
same with the heat and light from the sun of heaven, which is love. When
the heat or love thence flows into goods,—as in good men and spirits,—it
renders their goods fruitful; but when it flows into the wicked it produces a
contrary effect, for their evils either suffocate or pervert it. So with the
light of heaven; (on the one hand) it gives intelligence and wisdom; but
(on the other hand) it is turned into insanities and fantasies of various kinds.
**
APPENDIX.
77
"There is none besides Me, I am Jehovah, there is none else, forming
light and preparing darkness, making peace, and preparing evil, I am
Jehovah, doing all these things.' (Isaiah, xlv., 4, 5.) A man who is in
evil is bound to hell, and even as to his spirit, is actually there; and after
death he desires nothing more than to be where his evil is. A man there-
fore casts himself into hell after death, and not the Lord."-(Swedenborg.)
NOTE IX.—“ The God who was then and for the first time revealed to
mankind.”—(P. 31.)`
"There exists an immense fact, equally appreciable by faith and by science,
a fact which renders God in a certain sense visible on earth, an incontestable
fact, and one of immense significance; it is the manifestation in the world,
from the epoch of the Christian revelation, of a spirit unknown to the
ancients, a spirit evidently divine, more positive than science in its works,
more magnificently ideal in its aspirations than the highest poetry, a spirit
for which it has been necessary to create a new name, wholly unheard of in
the sanctuaries of antiquity, and which in religion, both for science and for
faith, is the expression of the absolute. This word is Charity, and the spirit
of which we speak is called the spirit of charity, which is God in His earthly
manifestation. Before charity, faith prostrates itself, and science bows down,
overcome, for it is evidently something greater than humanity; it is stronger
than all passions, it triumphs over suffering and death; it reveals Deity to
every heart, and seems already to fill eternity by that realization of its legiti-
mate hopes which it commences here below. By the spirit of charity, Jesus,
expiring on the cross, triumphed over the anguish of the most frightful tor-
ments; by the spirit of charity twelve artisans of Galilee conquered the
world; it is by charity, in fine, that the folly of the cross has become the
wisdom of the nations, because all noble hearts have felt it a more sublime
and worthy thing to believe with those who love and sacrifice themselves,
than to doubt with the egotists and slaves of self-indulgence!"—(Alphonse
Louis Constant in the "Mysteries of Magic," by Waite.)
NOTE X.—“This confusion of thought is so great that it is really astonish-
ing to see how the most important minds of all times, since the appearance of
the Bible, have been cramped by it and betrayed into weakness of judgment.”
—(P. 31.)
In view of Wagner's antipathy towards the Jewish Old Testament and the
Jewish race,-not however toward the latter in their individual capacity, for
he had many distinguished friends and warm admirers among the Jewish
people, from Carl Tausig, the inventor of the plan of Wagner Societies, by
which the Baireuth performances were rendered financially possible, down to
private connoisseurs,—it is curious to note that he himself, as a Saxon, may
have been an Israelite, or a descendant of Israel, though not a Jew, or a
78
APPENDIX.
descendant of Judah. The historical data are as follows: When Tiglath-
Pileser carried the Ten Tribes of Israel into captivity, he called them in a
monumental inscription, a copy of which is in the British Museum, the
people of the land of Beth-Khumri. These Khumri, called sometimes the
Gimiri, were known to the Greeks as Cimmeroi, and to the Romans as
Cimbri. The Crimea is believed to have been called after them, and many
Israelitish tombstones have been found there. According to Rawlinson,
the ethnic name of Gimiri occurs in the cuneiform records as the Semitic
equivalent of the Aryan name Saki. The Sacoe Scythians were termed the
Gimiri by their Semitic neighbors. The Anglo-Saxons were a Teutonic, i. e.,
a Gothic or Scythian tribe. They gave to the most fertile part of Armenia
the name of Sakasena (Saxonia). These Sakai were called in their own coun-
try shortly before their captivity (¿. e., in Samaria) Beth-Isaac, the oriental
pronunciation of the latter name being with the emphasis on the last syllable,
I-saac. (The Danes, Normans, Jutes, Frisians, Welsh, etc., are descended
from the same primitive race as the Anglo-Saxons.) From this point of
view certain noteworthy features of the Reformation in England are strik-
ingly suggestive of a vivid revival of race self-consciousness; as, for example,
the extraordinary revival of Bible, and especially Old Testament, reading
and study; the partiality for Hebrew names in baptism, and the instinctive
fondness for the science of genealogy. ("We all had our genealogies. No
other nation had this science as had the Jews; for all our land belonged to
families, and the scribes kept a record of the boundaries of every piece of
land, so that if it were sold, it should return to the same house at the end
of fifty years."—" Life and Times of Jesus," James Freeman Clarke.) In
view of Old Testament prophecies, such as that of Amos: "I destroy not
utterly the house of Jacob.
I have shaken among all the nations the
house of Israel, as one who doth shake with a sieve, and there falleth not
a grain to the earth;" and that in Genesis concerning Ephraim (i. e., the
Israelites or lost tribes, not the Jews or children of Judah), "his seed is the
fulness of the nations"; and their apparent present fulfilment in the suprem-
acy of the Saxon (Teutonic) race in England, America, and Germany, it is to
be regretted that Wagner should never have had disclosed to him any path
of approach to the Old Testament which would have softened his asperity
towards those venerable writings and the race forever historically identified
with them.
•
•
(See "Our Race," by Lieut. C. A. L. Totten, U. S. A..
Publishing Co., New Haven, Conn.)
"Our Race'
""
NOTE XI.—“The continual prosecution of physical experiments in the field
of natural science has again led the ruling human intellect of the day to the
conclusion that there is no God at all, but only force and matter."—(P. 31.)
The inventor Thomas A. Edison is obviously an exception to the above
rule. In a recent talk to a newspaper reporter, he said: "I do not believe
APPENDIX.
79
that matter is inert, acted on by outside forces.
To me it seems that every
atom is possessed by a certain amount of primitive intelligence. Look at
the thousand ways in which atoms of hydrogen combine with those of other
elements having a most diverse substance. Do you mean to say that they
do this without intelligence? Atoms in harmonious and beautiful relations
assume a beautiful order, interesting shapes and colors, or give forth a
pleasant perfume as if expressing their satisfaction. In sickness, death,
decomposition, or filth, the disagreement of the atoms immediately makes
itself felt by bad odors. Gathered together in certain forms, the atoms
constitute animals of the lower orders. Finally, they combine in man, who
represents the total intelligence of all the atoms. "But where does this
intelligence come from?" asked the reporter. 'From some Power greater
than ourselves," responded Mr. Edison.
intelligent Creator and personal God?"
""
Do you believe then in an
Certainly," said Mr. Edison.
"The existence of such a God can to my mind almost be proved from
chemistry."
Herbert Spencer's Doctrine of the Unknowable :
•
Matter, Motion, and Force, are but symbols of the Unknown Reality. A
Power of which the nature remains forever inconceivable and to which no
limits in Time or Space can be imagined, works in us certain effects.
Every voluntary act yields to the primitive man proof of a source of energy
within him. .. When producing motion in his limbs, and through them
in other things, he is aware of the accompanying feeling of effort. And
this sense of effort, which is the perceived antecedent of changes produced
by him, furnishes him with a term of thought by which to represent the
genesis of these objective changes. . . That internal energy which in
the experiences of the primitive man was always the immediate antecedent
of changes wrought by him. is the same energy which, freed from
anthropomorphic accompaniments, is now figured as the cause of all external
phenomena. Consequently, the final outcome of that speculation
commenced by primitive man, is that the Power manifested through-
out the Universe distinguished as material, is the same Power which in
ourselves wells up under the form of consciousness.
The ultimate
form of the religious consciousness is the final development of a conscious-
ness which at the outset contained a germ of truth obscured by multitudinous
So far from regarding that which transcends phenomena as
• The All-Nothingness' I regard it as the All-Being. Everywhere I have
spoken of the Unknowable as the Ultimate Reality—the sole Existence :
all things present to consciousness being but shows of it. . . . I might
enlarge on the fact that, though the name Agnosticism fitly expresses the
confessed inability to know or to conceive the nature of the Power manifested
through phenomena, it fails to indicate the confessed ability to recognize
the existence of that Power as of all things the most certain. I might make
errors.
•
•
80
APPENDIX.
clear the contrast between the Comtean Agnosticism which says that 'The-
ology and Ontology alike end in the Everlasting No.' . . with the
Agnosticism set forth in [my] First Principles of Philosophy,' which .
emphatically utters an Everlasting Yes. . . . And I might show the error of
implying that Agnosticism as I hold it, is any thing more than silent
with respect to the question of personality . . . in the conviction that the
choice is not between personality and something lower than personality,
but between personality and something higher.
It is true that we are
totally unable to conceive any such higher mode of being . . . But this is
not a reason for questioning its existence; it is rather the reverse. In
all imaginable ways we find thrust upon us the truth, that we are not
permitted to know-nay, are not permitted even to conceive-that Reality
which is behind the veil of Appearance." (Herbert Spencer.)
•
•
•
•
•
Martin Luther's Doctrine of the Unknowable God and the Knowable
Logos:
Although God is omnipresent, He is nowhere; I cannot lay hold of
Him by my own thoughts without the Word. But where He Himself has
ordained to be present, there He is certainly to be found. The Jews found
Him in Jerusalem at the throne of grace; we find Him in the Word, in
Baptism, in the Lord's Supper. Greeks and Heathens imitated this by
building temples for their gods in particular places, in order that they might
be able to find them there; in Ephesus, for example, a temple was built to
Diana; in Delphi to Apollo. God cannot be found in His Majesty—that is,
outside of His revelation of Himself in His Word. The Majesty of God is
too exalted and grand for us to be able to grasp it. He therefore shows
us the right way, to wit, Christ, and says, Believe in Him and you will find
out who I am, and what are my nature and will. This world meanwhile
seeks in innumerable ways with great industry, cost, trouble, and labor, to
find the invisible and incomprehensible God in His Majesty. But God is and
remains to them unknown, although they have many thoughts about Him,
and discourse and dispute much; for God has decreed that He will be
Unknowable and Unapprehensible apart from Christ."-("Luther's Table
Talk.")
That the physical evolution of man has been enormous within the period
covered by authentic history, is well-known. When, however, we come to
compare the doctrine of the Unknowable, on the one hand, as expressed by
Luther, and on the other, as formulated by Herbert Spencer, with the Kab-
bala, with its doctrine of Divine emanations, derived, we are assured, from the
teachings of Zoroaster, it does not seem that the spiritual perceptions of man
have made a corresponding advance; indeed it hardly can be claimed they
have held their own! A comparison of Spencer's doctrine with that of the
APPENDIX.
81
Kabbala, goes far to support the view of Laurence Oliphant in his "Scien-
tific Religion," that the Fall of Man coincided with his spirit's assuming a
gross animal covering, while the history of human evolution has been the
history of the effort of human spirit to raise this vile body into something
more worthy to serve as the temple of the Holy Spirit. Says Mathers, in
his Introduction to the Kabbala:
"The primal forms of the Unknowable and Nameless One, whom in
the more manifest form we speak of as God, are these:
1. Shut Out from Mortal Comprehension.
(a) Ain.
Negative Existence.
(In a seed, the tree which may spring from it is hidden : it is in condition
of potential existence; it is there; but it will not admit of definition. The
seeds which that potential tree may yield are in a condition analogous to
potential existence, but are hardly so far advanced. They are negatively
existent.)
"
(b) Ain Soph.
Limitless Expanse.
2. Only a Dim Conception Formable :
(c) Ain Soph Aur.
The Illimitable Ligin.
These three kabbalistic veils of the Negative Existence, viz., Ain-Nega-
tivity; Ain Soph-the Limitless; and Ain Soph Aur-the Limitless Light,
shadow forth to the mind the idea of the Illimitable One. And before
that idea, and of that idea, we can only say in the words of an ancient
oracle : In Him is an illimitable abyss of glory, and from it goeth forth
one little spark which maketh all the glory of the sun, and of the moon,
and of the stars. Mortal! Behold how little I know of God; seek not
to know more of Him, for this is far beyond thy comprehension, however
wise thou art; as for us who are His ministers, how small a part are we
of Him."
This primal Negative Existence, which bears, hidden in itself, positive life,
and in the limitless depths of whose negativity lies hidden the power of stand-
ing forth from itself, the power of projecting the scintilla of thought into the
utter, the power of re-involving the syntagma into the inner; and which,
shrouded and veiled, is the absorbed intensity in the centreless whirl of
expansion, manifests in itself ten Sephiroth or Numerical Emanations, of
which Number One is Kether, the Crown, and first Sephira. The Divine
name attributed to Kether is the name of the Father, given in Exodus iii., 4 :
Eheih, I AM. It signifies Existence. Among the epithets applied to Kether,
the Crown, are: the Concealed of the Concealed; the Ancient of the Ancient
6
82
APPENDIX
Ones; the Most Holy Ancient One; the Ancient of Days; the Primordial
Point; the Inscrutable Height.
Among these Sephiroth, jointly and severally, we find the development
of the persons and attributes of God. Of these some are male, and some are
female. The translators of the Bible have translated a feminine plural by a
masculine singular in the case of the word Elohim, thus crowding out of ex-
istence the fact that the Deity is both masculine and feminine. Genesis i.,
27: “And Elohim prepareth the man in His image; and in the image of
Elohim He prepared him, a male and a female."
Eheih, Existence, is the Ancient One. Macroprospus, the first Sephira,
the Crown of the Kabbalistic greatest Trinity, is the Father in the Christian
acceptation of the Trinity.
"Jehovah contains all the Sephiroth with the exception of Kether, the
Crown, and specially signifies Microscopus, and is the Son in his human in-
carnation and in the Christian acceptation of the Trinity.
"The first Sephira, Eheih, the Crown (and Father), is called Inscrutable
Height; the remaining Sephiroth, included in Jehovah (the Son), are called,
respectively, Wisdom, Intelligence, Love, Justice, Beauty, Firmness, Splen-
dour, and Righteousness."
(In comparing Spencer's "Unknowable" with Kabbalism, we must not
forget his famous formula of Evolution: "Evolution is an integration of
matter and concomitant dissipation of motion; during which matter passes
from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity, to a definite, coherent heteroge-
neity.")
Between Luther and the Kabbala, stands Swedenborg, who teaches that
"Jehovah God Himself descended and became MAN, and became also the
Redeemer"; in support of which doctrine he cites numerous passages of
Scripture, such as these :
"Understand that I am He, before Me there was no God formed, and
after Me there is none, I-I am Jehovah, and besides Me there is no saviour.'
—(Isaiah xliii., 10, 11.)
"Thus said Jehovah, King of Israel, and his Redeemer, Jehovah of
Hosts; I am the first and I am the last, and besides Me there is no God."-
(Isaiah xliv., 6.)
"I John
was in the Spirit on the Lord's-Day, and I heard be-
hind me a great voice, as of a trumpet, saying, 'I am the Alpha and the
Omega, the First and the Last';
and I did turn to see the voice
that did speak to me, and having turned, I saw seven golden lampstands, and
in the midst
like to a son of man
and His countenance
as the sun shining in its might. And when I saw Him, I did fall at His feet
as dead, and He placed His right hand upon me, saying
'Be not
afraid; I am the First and the Last, and He who is living, and I did become
•
·APPENDIX.
83
dead, and lo, I am living to the ages of the ages, Amen! and I have the keys
of the hades and of the death.'”—(Rev. i., 9–18.)
(Swedenborg,
The True Christian Religion," n. 82, 83, 102.)
NOTE XII.—“ Music, which is the living God in our bosoms."—(P. 32.)
"I well know that God is nearer to me in my art than to others. I
communicate with Him without fear; evermore have I acknowledged and
understood Him."-Beethoven.
NOTE XIII.-"The musical seer, speaking the highest wisdom in a language
which Reason does not comprehend, reveals to us the inexpressible truth; while
we listen, we have a presentiment, nay we feel and see that this seemingly sub-
stantial world is only a fleeting show."-(P. 34.)
“Those vague feelings of unexperienced felicity which music arouses—
those indefinite impressions of an unknown ideal life which it calls up, may
be considered as a prophecy, to the fulfilment of which music is itself partly
instrumental. The strange capacity which we have for being so affected by
melody and harmony, may be taken to imply both that it is within the possi-
bilities of our nature to realize those intenser delights they dimly suggest, and
that they are in some way concerned in the realization of them. On this sup-
position the power and the meaning of music become comprehensible; but
otherwise they are a mystery."—(Herbert Spencer, "The Origin and Func-
tion of Music.")
NOTE XIV.-" Our most precious Gospels."-(P. 35.)
"In this picture of Jesus we are still happily in the morning light-the dew
is on the grass, the mist is in the valley, and a golden radiance from the east-
ern sky suffuses the Divine form of the Son of Man.
"He walks with his disciples among the Galilean hills, with the red lilies
breaking about His feet.
""
His Father's voice seems to roll on the summer thunder, the wind that
'bloweth where it listeth' is full of whispers of the heavenly realm, Moses
and Elias stand with Him on the shining mount, a strong angel descends to
comfort Him in Gethsemane.
"The eye of faith sees Him after the crucifixion in the cool of the day at
Emmaus, the hand of doubt touches the nail-prints, the heart of love is quick
to discern Him in the dim morning by the quiet lake. In that ineffable Pres-
ence no one felt any misgivings-al: found rest. The disciples see and be-
lieve, the Lord raises His hands in blessing. He is suddenly parted from
them, and a bright cloud receives Him out of their sight!
"No time seems able to blur that Vision Beautiful, no skepticism can
84
APPENDIX.
wither its attractive power. After nineteen centuries of assault and misrepre-
sentation, we can still look on the picture of Jesus, as it stands out in the
Gospel Story, and adore without idolatry; for the Word was made flesh and
dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the Only-begotten
of the Father, full of Grace and Truth." "-(" The Picture of Jesus ": Rev.
H. A. Haweis, M.A.)
NOTE XV.—“ His Father's voice seems to roll on the summer thunder, the
wind that ‘bloweth where it listeth' is full of whispers of the heavenly realm.”
-(P. 83.)
'By the immediate consciousness of ourselves alone are we rendered capa-
ble of understanding the inner essential nature of things external to ourselves,
and that too in such a way that we recognize in them the same fundamental
nature which manifests itself in our consciousness of ourselves as being our
own. All illusion with regard to this proceeds solely from our seeing a world
external to us, which, in the semblance of light, we perceive as something
entirely different from us. Our consciousness may at last feel impelled to
exclaim with Faust: What a spectacle
What a spectacle! But, alas, only a spectacle !
Where can I grasp Thee, Infinite Nature?' The most certain of answers
to this cry is given by music. The outer world speaks to us with such in-
comparable intelligibility here because by virtue of the effect of sounds, it
communicates to us through hearing precisely what we call out to it from the
depths of our soul. We understand immediately the cry for help, or of
mourning or joy, which we hear, and answer at once in the corresponding
sense; and no illusion, as in the semblance of light, to the effect that the
fundamental nature of the world external to us is not completely identical
with our own essential nature is possible here; by which, the gulf that to the
sight seems to exist at once vanishes. So the child awakes from the night of
the mother's womb with a cry of longing, and the soothing caresses of the
mother reply; so does the longing youth understand the alluring songs of
forest birds; so speaks the moan of animals, the sighing of winds, and the
raging shriek of the hurricane to the meditative man who falls into that state
of revery in which he perceives through the hearing, that with reference to
which his sight has kept him in the illusion of disper[sion]; i. e., that his in-
most nature is one with the inmost nature of all that he perceives, and that
only in this perception is the nature of things external to him really recog-
nized.”—(Wagner: Beethoven," pp. 25-7, 33, Schirmer, N. Y.).
"
"
'For we have known that all the creation doth groan together, and travail
in pain together till now."-(Romans viii., 22.)
Parsifal.—“ Methinks to-day the meads are wondrous fair !—
The frondage, flowers, and blossoms,—
:
APPENDIX.
85
Their fragrance pure as child's delight,
And speaking fondest trust to me."
Gurnemanz.—“'T is all Good Friday's Magic, Lord!”
Parsifal.—“ Alas! HIS day of agony !
When surely all that buds and blooms
And breathing lives, and lives again,
Should mourn and weep and sorrow.
-(PARSIFAL, Act III.)
NOTE XVI.—“To believe in Him is to imitate Him, and to seek union
with Him.”—(P. 36.)
Prayer in a particular degree pertains to worthy men, because it conjoins
them with divinity; for similars love to be united together; but a worthy man
is in an eminent degree similar to the divine nature.
All nations who
have flourished in the exercise of wisdom have applied themselves to divine
prayers. . . Since we are a part of this universe, it is consonant to reason
that we should be dependent upon it for support. For a conversion to the
universe procures safety to everything which it contains. If therefore you
possess virtue, it is requisite you should invoke that divinity which previously
comprehended. every virtue; for universal good is the cause of that
good which belongs to you by participation. And if you seek after some
corporeal good, the world is endued with a power which contains universal
body. From hence therefore it is necessary that perfection should extend
to the parts.
We must not conceive (say the ancients) that our prayers
cause any animadversion in God, or draw down his beneficence, but rather
they are the means of elevating the soul to divinity, and disposing it for the
reception of the supernal illumination."-(Porphyry, Neo-Platonist, A.D.
233-305.)
"If we are saved by the love of Christ, it is by love also that we manifest
Christ to others. If we have received freely, we also give freely, shining in
the midst of night, that is, in the darkness of the world. For so long as this
darkness prevails over the earth, Love hangs on the Cross; because the
darkness is the working of a will at variance with the Divine Will, doing
continual violence to the Law of Love.”—(Dr. A. Kingsford.)
Though Christ a thousand times in Bethlehem be born,
But not within thyself, thy soul will be forlorn :
The cross of Golgotha thou lookest to in vain,
Unless within thyself it be set up again.”
-(Scheffler, 17th century.)
86
APPENDIX.
NOTE XVII.—"So the true saint knows that neither by theorizing, disputa-
tion, nor controversy can he communicate to the world his inner, deeply blissful
intuitions.”—(P. 36.)
'Words, words,-nay, finally, mere letters and letters, but no living
faith!"-(Wagner, 1879, p. 132.)
"The master of the house formerly read to his family and his guests from
the costly written book; now, however, every one reads for himself in
silence in printed books, and the author writes for [popularity with] the
reader. We must recall the religious sects of the Reformation, with their
disputations and petty tracts, in order to gain an insight into the raging
delirium that has usurped control over human heads literally 'possessed'
with printers' type. It may be assumed that only Luther's glorious choral
rescued the healthy spirit of the Reformation, because it stayed the mind
and thus healed the cerebral typomania."-Wagner: "Beethoven," p. 4.)
NOTE XVIII.- “The only element of Revelation which the world at large
can grasp, is dogma."—(P. 37.)
A distinction is sometimes drawn between Dogma and Doctrine, as in the
following citation:
Dogmatic Christianity I have allowed to creep into these studies almost
as little as it does into the Gospels. The want of definition which Paul, the
disciple, already begins to feel, does not seem to have troubled the Master,
or, indeed, his followers, during His lifetime. Definitions-explanations
suitable to the times, intelligible to the catechumens—naturally enough
came later, and no one need object to definitions in creeds or articles which
aim at embodying sound and teachable truth for a time-for that is doctrine.
Every one has a right to object to the definitions of truth framed in one age
being riveted without apology or explanation upon another-for so doctrine is
petrified into dogma. Most of the schisms and nicknames and heresies
and theological miseries in Christendom, much that has sinned against the
Life and denied the Gospel of Christ, has come from man's wrong-headed
passion for having a fixed definition.
-("The Picture of Jesus," Rev.
H. A. Haweis, M.A.)
"
The position of the "Father of the Pilgrim Fathers,” John Robinson, on
the question of Doctrine versus Dogma, is manifest from his "counsell to
that part of the church of which he was pastor, at their departure from him
to begin the great work of Plantation in New England," on which occasion
“hee used these expressions .
"We are now ere long to part assunder, and the Lord knoweth whether
ever he should live to see our faces again: but whether the Lord had ap-
pointed it or not, he charged us before God and his blessed angels, to follow
him no further than he followed Christ. And if God should reveal anything
APPENDIX.
87
to us by any other instrument of his, to be as ready to receive it, as ever we
were to receive any truth by his Ministry: For he was very confident the Lord
had more truth and light yet to breake forth out of his holy Word. He took
occasion also miserably to bewaile the state and condition of the Reformed
churches, who were come to a period in Religion, and would goe no further
than the instruments of their Reformation: as for example, the Lutherans,
they could not be drawne to goe beyond what Luther saw, for whatever part of
God's will he had further imparted and revealed to Calvin, they will rather
die than embrace it. And so also, saith he, you see the Calvinists, they stick
where he left them: A misery much to bee lamented; for though they were
precious shining lights in their times, yet God had not revealed his whole will
to them: And were they now living, saith hee, they would bee as ready and
willing to embrace further light, as that they had received. Here also hee
put us in mind of our Church-Covenant whereby wee promise and covenant
with God and with one another, to receive whatsoever light and truth shall bee
made known to us from his written Word: but withal exhorted us to take heed
what wee received for truth, and well to examine and compare, and weigh it with
other Scriptures of truth before wee received it; for saith hee, It is not pos-
sible the Christian world should come so lately out of such thick Anti-christian
darknesse, and that full perfection of knowledge should breake forth at once.'
NOTE XIX.—“In Christian Love, Faith and Hope are of themselves
included.”—(P. 40.)
"Faith and Hope there may and must be, but Love is still the greatest,
because it includes the other two, for if we love we must have some Faith in
those whom we love, and if we have Faith who shall deprive us of Hope,
since in Faith we realise the very substance of things hoped for—the evi-
dence of things not seen. Therefore of Faith, Hope and Love, the greatest
of these is Love. It is not a Conception, or a Sentiment, or a Dream, or an
Impulse, or an Aspiration. Love is A Way. It is the way out of every
difficulty—it is the solvent of every doubt-it brings man close to man-it
leads man straight to God through Christ. Love is enough—it takes the
place of bodily comfort-it compensates for material losses—it soothes all
disappointments-—it supplies all needs—it slays death-it is a foretaste of
heaven. Paul found it sufficient, and he preached it without the least con-
cealment or misgiving as the one divine panacea for all the ills that could
happen to the body or assault and hurt the soul.
Love meant to St. Paul the self-life merged in the lives of others, yet
without the loss of an ever energetic individuality, by which it enriched and
built up others with innumerable sympathetic ministries and was itself
reciprocally blessed.
'The ground of this love was a Common Humanity. This again had
its source in the Central Humanity of God Himself, and thus every true and
88
APPENDIX.
love-redeemed life was said to be 'hid with Christ in God.' God's human
nature remained the ground of our human nature-the central power of that
nature was LOVE, or the going forth of Being blessing and to bless. The
whole creation was nothing but that—all disorders which had crept into that
creation would be set right by that. Human love is delegated power. We
who are his offspring have received the spirit of sons and are called upon to
love one another, even as He has loved us and given Himself for us.
The philosophy of this is deep-it will bear inspection on every side.
You can put in your test rod anywhere and the living waters will rise.
"In human society that which alone resists disintegration is Love.
"The cementing power of the state is not the sword, but self-devotion.
You call it patriotism, or allegiance to the throne or the Republic, or en-
thusiasm for leaders-Paul called it LovE.
"That which holds families together, and makes people to be of one mind
in a house is not interest, or argument, or law, or force, or avarice, or am-
bition, or selfish pleasure-but Love.
'That which tempers the administration of justice is again mercy, or a
form of LOVE.
"That which goes forth to seek and to save the lost in our great cities,
which feeds the hungry, clothes the naked, which gives to the suffering the
necessaries of life, which binds up the broken-hearted, warms the spiritually
frost-bound back to life, converts an outward Hell into an inward Paradise,
composes discords and brings back peace to a tormented world, making
Heaven possible to the soul-is ever Love."-("The Picture of Paul":
Rev. H. A. Haweis, M.A.)
NOTE XX.-"This being is also human like myself."-(P. 44.)
'Only by means of the highest power of love do we attain true freedom,
for there is no true freedom save that which is shared in common by all
men, high and low, rich and poor. Two hundred millions of human beings
ruthlessly thrown together in the Roman empire, soon found that where all
all are not equally free and happy, all must be slaves and miserable."-
(Wagner.)
'My friends, if you would see men again the wild beasts they seemed in
the nineteenth century, all you have to do is to restore their natural prey in
their fellow-men, and to find their gain in the loss of others. No doubt it
seems to you that no necessity, however dire, would have tempted you to sub-
sist on what superior skill or strength enabled you to wrest from others
equally needy. But suppose it were not merely your own life that you were
responsible for. The gentlest creatures are fierce when they have young to
provide for. For the sake of those dependent upon him a man might not
choose, but must plunge into the foul fight,-cheat, overreach, supplant,
APPENDIX.
89
defraud, buy below worth and sell above, break down the business by which
his neighbor fed his young ones, tempt men to buy what they ought not and
sell what they should not, grind his laborers, sweat his debtors, cozen his
creditors. Even the ministers of religion were not exempt from this cruel
necessity. While they warned their flocks against the love of money, regard
for their families compelled them to keep an outlook for the pecuniary prizes
of their calling. Poor fellows, theirs was indeed a trying business, preach-
ing to men a generosity and an unselfishness which they and everybody
knew would, in the existing state of the world, reduce to poverty those who
should practice them; laying down laws of conduct which the law of self-
preservation compelled men to break. It is not hard to understand the des-
peration with which men and women, who under other conditions would
have been full of gentleness and truth, fought and tore each other in the
scramble for gold, when we realize what it meant to miss it, what poverty
was in that day. For the body it was hunger and thirst, torment by heat
and frost; in sickness, neglect ; in health, unremitting toil; for the moral
nature it meant oppression, contempt, and the patient endurance of indig-
nity, brutish associations from infancy, the loss of all the innocence of child-
hood, the grace of womanhood, the dignity of manhood; for the mind it
meant the death of ignorance, the torpor of all those faculties which dis-
tinguish us from brutes, the reduction of life to a round of bodily functions.
Ah, if such a fate were offered you and your children as the only alternative
of success in the accumulation of wealth, how long do you fancy would you
be in sinking to the moral level of your ancestors? A number of English
prisoners were shut up in a room containing not enough air to supply one
tenth of their number. The unfortunates were gallant men, devoted com-
rades in service, but as the agonies of suffocation began to take hold of them,
they forgot all else, and became involved in a hideous struggle, each one for
himself, and against all others to force a way to one of the small apertures of the
prison at which alone it was possible to get a breath of air. Yet in the Black
Hole of Calcutta there were no tender women, no little children and old
men and women, no cripples. They were at least all men, strong to bear,
who suffered.
"You know the story of that last, greatest, and most bloodless of revo-
lutions. In the time of one generation men laid aside the social traditions
and practice of barbarians, and assumed a social order worthy of rational
and human beings. Ceasing to be predatory in their habits, they became
co-workers, and found in fraternity at once the science of wealth and happi-
ness. 'What shall I eat and drink, and wherewithal shall I be clothed?'
stated as a problem beginning and ending in self, had been an anxious and
endless one.
But when it was conceived not from the individual, but from
the fraternal standpoint, 'What shall we eat and drink, and wherewithal
90
APPENDIX.
:
¡
shall we be clothed?' its difficulties vanished." (" Looking Backward," by
Bellamy.)
NOTE XXI.
“In all surrounding Nature we see manifested around us
the enormous tragedy of earthly existence.”—(P. 52.)
The foregoing paragraph has a pessimistic sound. Yet Wagner was no
absolute pessimist. He anticipated a future state of mankind which, far
from being a hateful chaos, should be extremely well ordered, and one in
which Religion and Art should not only be preserved, but should, for the
first time, attain their true proportions. (Wagner, 1880, p. 294.) As he
found in Schopenhauer's philosophy the only adequate foundation for a phi-
losophy of music, without, however, following Schopenhauer in his conclu-
sions that music was the most sinfully sensuous of arts, and the voluptuous
Rossini the truest type of musician; so too Wagner found in Schopen-
hauer's philosophy, wisely used, the surest, nay, almost the only, way to
attain to a rational understanding of the problem of life, without, however,
following him in his universal pessimism. Says Wagner: The assumption
of a degeneration of the human race (fall of man), contradictory as it seems
to the idea of a steady progress, must be, seriously considered, the only
thing which can lead us to a well-grounded hope. The so-called pessimistic
view of the world accordingly appears tenable only with the proviso that it
is based on the criticism of historic man. Pessimism, however, would have
to be considerably modified if prehistoric man were to become so far known
to us that, from an accurate knowledge of his natural endowments, we could
conclude upon a subsequent degeneration which was not unconditionally
involved in those natural endowments." (Wagner, 1880, p. 287.) "From
the continually ill-advised creations of statesmen we are able to demonstrate
most distinctly the bad results of the want of such a knowledge of real
human nature. Even Marcus Aurelius could only arrive at a perception of
the vanity of the world, without, however, attaining even to the mere
assumption of a Fall of a world which perhaps might have been different
from the present one, to say nothing of the cause of that fall.* Yet upon
*"It is curious that (materialistic) evolutionism has its fall, like theism; for if the
spiritual nature was awakened by some access of fear, or some grand and terrible physical
phenomenon ; and if thus the idea of a higher intelligence was struck out and the descend-
ant of apes became a superstitious and idolatrous savage; that awakening of the religious
sense must be so designated. How much trouble and discussion would have been saved
had he been aware of his humble origin, and never entertained the vain imagination that
he was a child of God, rather than a mere product of physical evolution! On that theory
the awakening of the religious sense and the knowledge of good and evil must surely be
designated as a fall of man, since it subverted in his case the previous regular operation of
natural selection, and introduced all that debasing superstition, priestly domination, and
religious controversy which have been among the chief curses of our race, and which are
doubly accursed if, as the evolutionist believes, they are not the ruins of something nobler
APPENDIX.
91
the vanity of the world has been based from time immemorial the absolutely
pessimistic view, a view by which, merely for the sake of convenience, des-
potic statesmen and rulers in general willingly suffer themselves to be led."
-(Wagner, 1880, p. 333–334.)
“The assumption of our geologists seems to be incontrovertible, that the
human race, the last to appear among the animal population of the earth,
must have survived a mighty transformation of at least the greater portion
of our planet. It is important to form some idea of the changes among the
races both of man and animals, which had heretofore multiplied in their
primeval native lands, that must necessarily have occurred in consequence
of the scattering of all the dwellers upon earth. Certainly the appearance
of enormous deserts such as the African Sahara must have driven the dwellers
by what had heretofore been luxuriant borderlands surrounding inland seas,
into a starvation the terrors of which we can form some idea when we are
told of the maddening sufferings of shipwrecked men, by which completely
civilized fellow-citizens in modern times have been driven to cannibalism.
In the moist river regions of the Canadian lakes, animals allied to the pan-
ther and tiger still live as fruit-eaters, while on the borders of the deserts
aforesaid the historic lion and tiger have become the most bloodthirsty of
beasts. Accordingly, quite abnormal causes are to be assumed by which, in
the North American steppes, for instance, among the Malay tribes, hunger
has created a thirst for blood."-(Wagner, 1880, p. 288-289.)
"
Among the various attempts to recover the lost Paradise, we find in our
day associations of the so-called vegetarians; but precisely there, where
attention seems to be fixed upon the very root of the question of Regenera-
tion, we hear from isolated exemplary members the complaint that their
comrades, for the most part, abstain from animal food only from personal
dietary considerations*; but in no wise connect with the practice the great
and holier, but the mere gratuitous, vain, and useless imaginings of a creature who should
have been content to eat and drink and die, without hope or fear, like the brutes from
which he sprang.”—(Sir John Dawson: "The Story of the Earth and Man.")
"The Tlascalans said that the men who escaped in the Deluge were transformed into
apes, but that by degrees they recovered the use of reason and speech." (F. Schultze:
"Fetichism.")
*"And God saith, Lo, I have given to you every herb sowing seed, which is upon the
face of all the earth, and every tree in which is the fruit of a tree sowing seed, to you it
is for food; and to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the heavens, and to every
creeping thing on the earth, in which is breath of life, every green herb is for food.'".
(Genesis i., 29-30.)
"Eating the flesh of animals, considered in itself, is somewhat profane; for in the most
ancient times they never ate the flesh of any beast or bird, but only grain,—especially
bread made of wheat-the fruits of trees, vegetables, milk, and such things as are made
from them, as butter, etc."—(Swedenborg.)
"In this paradise man found ample supplies of wholesome and nutritious food. It was
probably at the confluence of the rivers that flow into the Euphrates at the head of the
92
APPENDIX.
moral regenerative thoughts upon which alone it depends, whether or not
the Associations shall become a power.
"Next to the vegetarians, and with somewhat more extended practical
activity already, come the Societies for the Protection of Animals from
Cruelty. Under the guidance of the foregoing societies, and, ennobled by
them, the tendency of the so-called Temperance Societies would lead to no
less important results. (Wagner, 1880, p. 289-290.) In certain Ameri-
can prisons experiments have shown th... the worst criminals were changed
by a wisely ordered vegetable diet into gentle and responsible men. Whose
memory would the members of these Vegetarian and Temperance Societies,
together with that for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, commemorate,
if, after the labors of the day, they always assembled to refresh themselves
with bread and wine?"-(Wagner, 1880, p. 292.)
66
'Do we still await a new religion which shall preserve us from lapsing
into subjection to the power of the blindly raging (selfish) Will in Nature?
In our daily meal we are taught to commemorate the Redeemer."—(Wag-
ner, 1880, p. 295.)
"The Lord's Supper is the sole saving rite of the Christian Faith. In its
observance lies the fulfilment of the entire teaching of the Saviour. The
Christian Church, with anxious torments of conscience, perpetuates this
teaching without ever being able to bring it into use in its purity; although,
seriously considered, that teaching should form the most universally compre-
hensible kernel of Christianity. The Lord's Supper early became trans-
formed into a symbolic action by priests,* while its true sense continued to
be expressed only in the fasts occasionally prescribed, a strict observance of
•
•
Persian Gulf.
Its flora afforded abundance of edible fruits. .”—(Sir John Daw-
son: "The Story of the Earth and Man.")
According to the doctrine of evolution, the present structure of the carnivorous animals
does not contradict the statement above quoted from Genesis i., 29–30.
*One of the most interesting of the changes from the original form of the Lord's Sup-
per was the change from the use of simple bread to that of wafers. These wafers carry
us back to the Persian sun worship, in the sacrament of which the bread used was a
"round cake," emblem of the solar disk, and called Mizd. This religion, known as
Mithracism, first made its appearance in Italy upon Pompey's reduction of the Cilician
pirates. Constantine retained upon his coinage, long after his conversion, the figure of
Sol, with the legend: "To the invincible Sun, my Guardian," a type capable of a double
interpretation, meaning equally the ancient Phoebus and the new Sun of Righteousness.
Similarly the old festival held on the 25th day of December in honor of the Birthday of
the Invincible One, and celebrated by the great Games of the Circus, was transferred to the
commemoration of the birth of Christ, of which the Fathers say the real day was unknown.
In like manner, hot-cross buns remind one of the "Bouns or cakes of flour, oil, and honey
of the Egyptians, Assyrians, and Jews (Jeremiah xliv., 18-19), and also of the round
cakes (the chaputty of evil notoriety at the outbreak of the Sepoy mutiny) which are,
among the Hindoos, the established offering to the Manes of their ancestors.-(See "The
Gnostics and their Remains," by King.)
APPENDIX.
93
it being imposed at last upon certain religious orders only, and even there
more in the sense of an act of self-renunciation, promoting humility, than of
a physical and spiritual means of salvation. Perhaps the impossibility of
insisting that all who professed Christianity should continually follow this
ordinance of the Saviour by wholly abstaining from animal food was one of
the main causes of the early fall of the Christian religion as a Christian
Church." (Wagner, 1880, pp. 283–284.)
As Wagner gives no authority for his views touching the nature and end
of the Lord's Supper, the present writer has consulted the Rev. Dr. Neale's
collection of all known forms of institution. Of the eighty-two forms there
given, the following one, called Syro-Jacobite, and taken from the first
liturgy of St. Peter (the primitive communion office was liturgical; see The
Teaching of the Twelve Apostles," by Rev. Dr. Schaff), is especially
significant :
•
"And when he was preparing that banquet of His Body and Holy Blood,
imparting it to us, and near was His salutary Passion, He took bread in His
immaculate Hands, and lifted it up, and vouchsafed to bestow upon it His
visible aspect and insensible benediction, and blessed it, and sanctified it,
and gave it to the disciples, His Apostles, and said: Let these mysteries be
the support of your journey; and whenever ye eat this in the way of food,
believe and be certain that this is my Body, which for you and for many is
broken and is given for you for the Expiation of Transgressions, the Remis-
sion of Sins and Life Eternal. . . In like manner the Chalice also; after
He had supped, He mingled water and wine, and blessed and sanctified it,
and gave to the disciples, His Apostles, saying: Take, drink ye all of it;
for this is my Blood of the New Testament which for you and for many is
poured and given for the Pardon of Transgressions, the Remission of Sins,
and Eternal Life. . . . And that they might receive the most sweet fruit
of that divine operation, He commanded them after this fashion: As often
as ye shall be gathered together, keep memory of Me, and eating this offered
bread, and drinking this prepared cup, ye shall do it in remembrance of Me
and shall confess My death, until I come."-(Dr. Neale.)
•
·
"The primitive Eucharist embraced the Agape and the Communion
proper.
The Christian Agape was a much simpler feast than the
Jewish Passover. Tertullian describes it as a 'school of virtue rather than
a banquet,' and says 'as much is eaten as satisfies the cravings of hunger;
as much is drunk as befits the chaste.' But occasional excesses of intemper-
ance occurred already in Apostolic congregations, as at Corinth, and must
have multiplied with the growth of the Church. Early in the second cen-
tury the social Agape was separated from the Communion, and held in the
evening, the more solemn Communion in the morning; and afterwards the
94
APPENDIX.
Agape was abandoned altogether, or changed into a charity for the poor."-
(Schaff: "The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles.")
"He took bread and wine to teach the doctrine of life and sacrifice, of
union with Himself and with each other, and He said, 'This is My Body
and Blood,' just as He said, 'I am the Door-the Shepherd-the Vine.'
Was He a Door, a Shepherd, a Tree? Was it His Body and Blood? It
was the sign, the symbol, and the outward rite was given as a memorial of
Himself, as a means of realizing spiritually the life imaged in the nourishing
bread; the sacrifice imaged in the sign of the blood-red wine; the union
imaged in the common food, uniting the Christian group to Himself and to
one another in the common fellowship of a common meal. . . . In every
Christian household it was usual for the head of the family at the evening
meal to hand round bread and wine 'in remembrance' of Him. . . . From
a social usage this act at the family supper grew into an ecclesiastical sacra-
ment, administration being only valid after consecration by the priests, and
thus became, in the hands of the Church, a sort of magical rite of mysteri-
ous efficacy, to be granted or withheld at the good-will and pleasure of the
clergy.
Far may we have travelled from the simplicity which is in
Jesus, but if we wish to know what he meant we must go back and assist at
the first celebration in that upper room after the departure of Judas, and
then all forms will be equally good for us; or at least tolerated by us. We
shall be free; we shall see the Lord's intent, simple and pure, through every
mist and veil of man's invention, and we shall use the rite as an intense and
earnest form of prayer, summing up the great cardinal points of Christianity,
Christ's life, Christ's sacrifice, our union with each other, Christ's union with
us and ours with Him."-("The Picture of Jesus," Rev. H. A. Haweis, M.A.)
NOTE XXII.— "The human race must have survived a mighty transfor-
mation of at least the greater portion of our planet.”—(P. 91.)*
·
"Consider the greatness of that Creator
. by whatever name we
like to call Him,
who has in some inscrutable way set all this
stupendous machinery in motion; yes, and as perfect in its colossal and
illimitable whole, as in its minutest details,—in the path of the sun through
the wastes of space, as in the flash of the lightning along our wires, or in the
*The notes prepared on this point have assumed such proportions that they must
be reserved for a separate work to follow the "Parsifal," entitled, "The Lost Pleiad;
or, the Fall of Lucifer, the Key to the Solar Myths and the Origin of all Known Forms
of Religion." The conclusion developed by the testimony gathered being, that, in
Christianity, far from "something small and local" (vide "Robert Elsmere "), we
possess the religion of Prehistoric Man, and that it is now in process of being re-es-
tablished upon its ancient intellectual foundations largely by the involuntary agency
of Modern Science. The hypothesis is outlined in the above selections; the
demonstration must be reserved for the book to follow.
APPENDIX.
95
structure of the insect's wing.
Let us try to realize what all these
motions really mean, and what the result of the sudden disarrangement, not
to say stoppage, of any one of them in our own system would be
the catastrophe would be of so stupendous a nature that we could hardly
conjecture its effect.”—(Gen. Forlong: "Rivers of Faith.")
·
•
The scientist Bode entertained the opinion that the planetary distances
above Mercury formed a geometrical series,
but this law seemed
to be interrupted between Mars and Jupiter. Hence he inferred that there
was a planet wanting in the interval; which is now supplied by the discovery
of the numerous star-form planets occupying the very place of the unex-
plained vacancy.
Many eminent astronomers are of the opinion
that these telescopic planets are the fragments of a large celestial body which
once revolved between Mars and Jupiter, and which burst asunder by some
tremendous convulsion.
From this discovery, Dr. Olbers first con-
•
ceived the idea that these bodies might be the fragments of a former world.*
Dr. Brewster attributes the fall of meteoric stones to the smaller
fragments of these bodies happening to come within the sphere of the earth's
attraction." (Burritt's "Geography of the Heavens," revised by Mattison,
1873.)
According to the Kabbalah, there were certain primordial worlds
created, but these could not subsist, as the equilibrium of the balance was
not yet perfect, and they were convulsed by the unbalanced force and
destroyed. These primordial worlds are called (in Scripture) the 'kings of
ancient time,' and the 'kings of Edom who reigned between the monarchs
of Israel.'"-Genesis xxxvi., 31.-(Mathers: "Kabbalah Unveiled.")
·
“It is the opinion of many that the planetoids (asteroids) are the frag-
ments of a planet which has been destroyed. The idea has been advanced
that this planet was the seat of a fallen race, and that the 'powers and
principalities of the air,' against which the people of this earth have to con-
tend, are in reality the lost souls of the planet in question. . . [Sir W.
Thomson and Prof. Helmholtz agree in suggesting the meteoric hypothesis
as a possible way of accounting for the origin of terrestrial life, its germs
having been wafted to us from some other world or its fragments. See pp.
102-103.] Many supposed mythological traditions of ancient Greece have
been shown to have a foundation in history; and we may assume that this is
possibly the case to a far greater extent than has yet been proven, and that
it applies to other localities and peoples as well. Isaiah makes reference to
•
*“While recognizing the incompleteness of the evidence, it seems to me to go far to
justify the hypothesis of Olbers
that the planetoids resulted from the bursting of
a planet once revolving in the region they occupy
and is quite incongruous with
that of Laplace.”—(" The Nebular Hypothesis," by Herbert Spencer, originally printed
in 1864, revised and extended to present the author's latest views, 1883.)
•
96
APPENDIX.
Lucifer as having falling from his shining place in the heavens, and inti-
mates that its people were not suffered to rest even in their graves (Isaiah,
xiv., 12–16, 19). This would be literally true if the planet had been de-
stroyed. We have to confront numerous traditions regarding the fallen
race,―tempters of Adam and Eve, etc. The Talmud speaks of the ancient
people of earth as having faces that shone like the sun, and natures that
reached into the heavens. The 'morning star' has vanished, and where
once was unity, light, and power, we now have but a confused mass of
planetoids moving in eccentric orbits. The extremity of individualism
stands exemplified, and the mind and nature of humanity is broken and
divided in like manner, for this was not merely the experience of a planet,
but a tragedy of the solar system, the effect of which is spread over thousands
of years, though it is probable that we are now well advanced in the restora-
tion of order. . . Will this lost star be re-lit in the material heavens? We
judge not. The solar system has established a new equilibrium.
Was this calamity unforeseen? We judge not. Man's extremity is said to
be God's opportunity; and from that period dates a new cycle of this solar
system. Neither this earth, nor yet the solar system, are complete in them-
selves, but are merely parts, physically and spiritually, of one perfect whole.
In the career of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the Twelve Tribes
of Israel, we see a process of spiritual development culminating in the ad-
vent of Christ, in whom the nature of the human race becomes enjoined
again to the order of the heavens. . . . There is a law of involution as well
as of evolution, and there must be some point where forces meet and balance,
or find equilibrium. Humanity ascends (evolution) and unfolds into spirit ;
spirit descends (involution) and finds embodiment in humanity. If not a
sparrow falls to the ground without notice, it is presumable that the fall of
Lucifer is not without an ultimate good to this earth and solar system, and
as a necessary consequence to the countless worlds of the starry heavens.
Christ stood in the place of the fallen son of the morning. The new heaven
was to replace the fallen star. According to His own testimony, He and His
Father were one, and all power was given into His hands, both in the heavens
and on the earth. This is a vast saying, yet what if it be true? It is not in-
consistent with the mysteries and wonders of the heavens.
Nor ought
we to deem it inconsistent with the mysteries of the Luminous and Mighty
One of the heavens that He should once have walked this earth. . . . thereby
joining the least to the greatest, and carrying aloft the chords of this human
nature, thereby rendering mortal access easy, and the kingdom of heaven on
earth not only possible, but certain."-(John Latham, selected.)
"It is the god incarnate, more than the God of the Jews or of Nature, who
has taken so great and salutary a hold on the modern mind. And
what ever else may be taken away from us,
Christ is still left; a
APPENDIX.
97
unique figure, not more unlike all his precursors than all his followers, even
those who had the benefit of his personal teaching. It is of no use to say
that Christ as exhibited in the Gospels is not historical, and that we know
not how much of what is admirable has been superadded by the tradition of
his followers. . . . Who among his disciples or among their proselytes was
capable of inventing the sayings ascribed to Jesus, or of imagining the life
and character revealed in the Gospels? Certainly not the fishermen of
Galilee; as certainly not St. Paul, whose character and idiosyncrasies were
of a totally different sort; still less the early Christian writers, in whom
nothing is more evident than that the good which was in them was all de-
rived, as they always professed that it was derived, from the higher source.
But about the life and sayings of Jesus there is a stamp of personal
originality, combined with profundity of insight, which must place the
Prophet of Nazareth . . . in the very first rank of the men of sublime genius
of which our species can boast, . . . combined with the qualities of probably
the greatest moral reformer, and martyr of that mission, who ever existed
upon earth. . . . To the conception of the rational sceptic it remains a
possibility that Christ actually was
charged with a special, express,
and unique commission from God to lead mankind to truth and virtue.
"-(John Stuart Mill: "Three Essays on Religion.")
•
•
·
"Those who admit my interpretation of the evidence now adduced-
strictly scientific evidence in its appeal to facts which are clearly what ought
not to be, on the materialistic theory-will be able to accept the spiritual
nature of man as not in any way inconsistent with the theory of evolution,
but as dependent upon those fundamental laws and causes which furnish the
very materials for evolution to work with. They will also be relieved from
the crushing mental burden imposed upon those who—maintaining that we,
in common with the rest of nature, are but products of the blind eternal
forces of the universe, and believing also that the time must come when the
sun will lose his heat and all life on the earth necessarily cease-have to con-
template a not very distant future in which all this glorious earth—which,
for untold millions of years has been slowly developing forms of life and
beauty to culminate at last in man-shall be as if it never had existed; who
are compelled to suppose that all the slow growths of our race struggling
towards a higher life, all the agony of martyrs, all the groans of victims, all
the evil and misery and undeserved suffering of the ages, all the struggles
for freedom, all the efforts towards justice, all the aspirations for virtue and
the well-being of humanity, shall absolutely vanish, and, like the baseless
fabric of a vision, leave not a wrack behind.' As contrasted with this hope-
less and soul-deadening belief, we who accept the existence of a spiritual
world can look upon the universe as a grand, consistent whole, adapted in
all its parts to the development of spiritual beings capable of indefinite life
7
98
APPENDIX.
:
and perfectibility. To us the whole purpose, the only raison d'être of the
world—with all its complexities of physical structure, with its grand geologi-
cal progress, the slow evolution of the vegetable and animal kingdoms, and
the ultimate appearance of man-was the development of the human spirit
in association with the human body. From the fact that the spirit of man—
the man himself—is so developed, we may well believe that this is the only,
or at least the best, way for its development; and we may even see, in what
is usually termed 'evil' on the earth, one of the most efficient means of its
growth. For we know that the noblest faculties of man are strengthened
and perfected by struggle and effort; it is by unceasing warfare against
physical evils and in the midst of difficulty and danger that energy, courage,
self-reliance, and industry have become the common qualities of the northern
races; it is by the battle with moral evil in all its hydra-headed forms, that
the still nobler qualities of justice and mercy and humanity and self-sacri-
fice have been steadily increasing in the world. Beings thus trained and
strengthened by their surroundings, and possessing latent faculties capable
of such noble development, are surely destined for a higher and more per-
manent existence. We thus find that the Darwinian theory, even when
carried out to its extreme logical conclusion, not only does not oppose, but
lends a decided support to, a belief in the spiritual nature of man. It shows
us how man's body may have been developed from that of a lower animal
form under the law of natural selection, but it also teaches us that we pos-
sess intellectual and moral faculties which could not have been so developed,
but must have had another origin; and for this origin we can find an ade-
quate cause only in the unseen universe of Spirit."-(Alfred Russel Wallace:
Darwinism," 1889.) *
•
NOTE XXIII.—“ Our existence shows itself beyond our persons, by direct
participation in the thoughts of other individuals, and by the power of know-
ing the absent, the distant, and even the future. It is a mere illusion that
limits our existence to our persons.”—(P. 54.)
To understand the full force of this illustration, it is necessary to recall
the investigations of Schopenhauer's great master and forerunner, Emanuel
Kant, the celebrated author of the "Critique of Pure Reason," touching
the reality of the "power of knowing the absent, the distant, and even the
*"Early in 1856 Lyell advised me to write out my views pretty fully" (“Origin of
Species")," and I began at once to do so. . . . But my plans were overthrown, for, early in
the summer of 1853, Mr. Wallace, then in the Malay Archipelago, sent me an essay . . .
containing exactly the same theory as mine.”—(Darwin: "Autobiography.") "You must
let me say how I admire the generous manner in which you speak of my book ( Origin of
Species'). Most persons would, in your position, have felt some envy or jealousy. But
you speak far too modestly of yourself. You would, if you had my leisure, have done the
work just as well-perhaps better than I have done it."-Darwin: "Letter to Alfred
Russel Wallace," 1860.)
APPENDIX.
99
future." In 1766, Kant published an attack on Swedenborg, entitled
Dreams of a Ghost Seer Illustrated by Dreams of Metaphysics." Two
years after, in 1768, having sifted the matters about to be recalled here, to
the utmost, by a circle of inquiries, epistolary as well as personal, Kant
wrote as follows to Charlotte Von Knobloch, a lady of quality: “On Satur-
day, at 4 o'clock, P.M., when Swedenborg arrived at Gottenburg from
England, Mr. Wm. Castel invited him to his house, together with a party
of fifteen persons. About 6 o'clock Swedenborg went out, and after a short
interval returned to the company, quite pale and alarmed. He said that
a dangerous fire had just broken out in Stockholm, at the Sodermalm
(Gottenburg is 300 miles from Stockholm), and that it was spreading very
fast.
He was restless, and went out often. He said that the house of
one of his friends, whom he named, was already in ashes, and that his own
was in danger. At 8 o'clock, after he had been out again, he joyfully ex-
claimed: 'Thank God! The fire is extinguished the third door from my
house.' This news occasioned great commotion throughout the whole city,
and particularly amongst the company in which he was. It was announced
to the Governor the same evening. On the Sunday morning Swedenborg
was sent for by the Governor, who questioned him concerning the disaster.
Swedenborg described the fire precisely, how it had begun, in what manner
it had ceased, and how long it had continued; and as the Governor had
thought it worthy of attention, the consternation was considerably increased,
because many were in trouble on account of their friends and property which
might have been involved in the disaster. On the Monday evening a mes-
senger arrived at Gottenburg, who was despatched during the time of the
fire. In the letters brought by him the fire was described precisely in the
manner stated by Swedenborg. On the Tuesday morning the royal courier
arrived at the Governor's with the melancholy intelligence of the fire, of the
loss which it had occasioned, and of the houses it had damaged and ruined,
not in the least differing from that which Swedenborg had given immedi-
ately it had ceased, for the fire was extinguished at 8 o'clock. What,"
continues Kant, can be brought forward against the authenticity of this
occurrence? My friend who wrote this to me has not only examined the
circumstances of this extraordinary case at Stockholm, but also, about two
months ago, at Gottenburg, where he is acquainted with the most respectable
houses, and where he could obtain the most authentic and complete infor-
mation, as the greater part of the inhabitants, who are still alive, were
witnesses to the memorable occurrence.
Another instance in the line of Schopenhauer's illustration, also verified
by Kant at the time, was that concerning Louisa Ulrica, a sister of Fred-
erick the Great of Prussia, who was married to King Adolphus of Sweden.
Queen Louisa received a letter from the Duchess of Brunswick, in which
Un
100
APPENDIX.
:
•
•
•
she mentioned that she had read in the Gottingen Gazette an account of a
man at Stockholm who pretended to speak with the dead.
Says
Captain Stalhammer (one of the many authorities whose narratives of what
passed between Swedenborg and the Queen have been preserved):
"A short
time after the death of the Prince of Prussia Swedenborg came to court
(being summoned thither by the senator, Count Scheffer). As soon as he
was perceived by the Queen she said to him: 'Well, Mr. Assessor, have
you seen my brother?' Swedenborg answered: 'No.' Whereupon she
replied: 'If you should see him, remember me to him.' Eight days after-
ward
Swedenborg came to court
so early that the Queen
had not left her apartment called the white room, where she was conversing
with her maids of honor and other ladies. Swedenborg did not wait . .
but entered directly into the Queen's apartment and whispered in her ear.
The Queen, struck with astonishment, was taken ill, and did not recover
herself for some time. After she came to herself she said to those about
her: 'There is only God and my brother who can know what he has just
told me.' She owned that he had just spoken of her last correspondence
with the prince, the subject of which was known to themselves alone." Of
Swedenborg the captain adds: “I knew him for many years, and I can con-
fidently affirm that he was as fully persuaded that he conversed with spirits.
as I am that I am writing at this moment. As a citizen and as a friend he
was a man of the greatest integrity, abhorring imposture, and leading an
exemplary life."
Says the Chevalier Beylon: "I found an opportunity of speaking with
the Queen herself concerning Swedenborg, and she told me the anecdote
respecting herself and her brother with a conviction which appeared extra-
ordinary to me. Every one who knew this truly enlightened sister of the
great Frederick will give me credit when I say that she was by no means
enthusiastic or fanatical, and that her entire mental character was wholly
free from such conceits. Nevertheless, she appeared to me to be so con-
vinced of Swedenborg's supernatural intercourse with spirits that I scarcely
durst venture to intimate some doubts
for when she perceived my
suspicion, she said with a royal air : 'I am not easily duped.' And thus she
put an end to all my attempts at refutation."-" Emanuel Swedenborg; a
Biographical Sketch," by J. J. G. Wilkinson, M.D.)
That death is the bourne from which no traveller has ever returned, has
always seemed to me a poetic but unwarranted assumption.
There
was probably never a time in the history of the world when thousands of
people, by no means lunatics, were not convinced that the dead were alive ;
that they were able by thought, word, or deed to make their existence felt;
that they occasionally had appeared. Such beliefs, founded, it is often said,
on imposture or delusion, have been smitten by modern science with paraly-
APPENDIX.
IOI
•
sis, and are fast dying out amongst educated people; which reads extremely
well, only facts are against the theory, since it would be difficult to point to
any past age in which there were so many thousands of educated people as
are at present convinced that the dead are alive, that they are able by
thought, word, and deed to make their presence felt, and that they have
occasionally' appeared.'
A supernatural vein will be found run-
ning through all history, sacred and profane.
For my part, with
the obvious limitation-suggested by the prevalence of imposture, the human
liability to err, and the equally human propensity to be deceived-I find it
easier to admit the occurrence of some so-called supernatural events in
history, sacred and profane, both in times past and present, than to deny
it with the superficial, ignore it with the scientific, or explain it away with
the sceptical
and the explanations which are put forward to
get rid of such evidence as there is, have always seemed to me quite as
wonderful and not quite as credible as the alleged occurrences which they
are intended to get rid of."-("The Picture of Jesus" : Rev. H. A.
Haweis, M.A.)
•
The great scientific principle of the Law of Continuity means that the
whole universe is of a piece; that it is something which an intelligent being
is capable of understanding better and better the more he studies it.*
Let us suppose that the sun, moon, and stars were to move about in
strange and fantastic orbits during one day, after which they returned to
their previous courses. Here we should have an example of a breach of
Continuity, for even if things were so arranged as to prevent physical disaster,
it is evident that the whole intelligent universe would be plunged into irre-
trievable mental confusion. Never again would it be said that Astronomy is
competent to explain the varied motions of the heavenly bodies. But the
concluding words of the Te Deum have been abundantly fulfilled in the
experience of the astronomer. He has trusted in God, and he has never
been confounded.‡
Continuity does not preclude the occurrence of strange, abrupt, unforeseen
events in the universe, but only of such events as must finally and forever
put to confusion the intelligent beings who regard them.§
Now we can hardly escape from the conclusion that the visible universe
must come to an end. But the principle of Continuity still demanding a
continuance of the universe, we are forced to believe that there is something
beyond that which is visible,—that "the things which are seen are temporal,
but the things which are not seen are eternal." I
*"The Unseen Universe," § 264.
+ "The Unseen Universe," § 76.
+
"The Unseen Universe," § 74.
706 "The Unseen Universe," § 76.
"The Unseen Universe," § 84.
102
APPENDIX.
j
F
Again, it is perfectly certain that the visible universe must have had a
beginning in time; but if it be all that exists, then the first abrupt manifesta-
tion of it is as truly a break of Continuity as its final overthrow.*
In fine, the visible universe cannot comprehend the whole works of God,
because it had its beginning in time, and will also come to an end. Perhaps
it forms only an infinitesimal portion of that stupendous whole which is
alone entitled to be called The Universe.†
We are led by scientific logic to an unseen, and by scientific analogy to
the spirituality of this unseen; in fine, that the visible universe has been
developed by an intelligent resident in the Unseen.‡
Life can be produced from life only. It is some time since science gave
up the idea that life could generate energy; it now seems that we must give
up the idea that energy can generate life. §
In both worlds, alike of energy and of life, the principle of Continuity
requires that, to account for the origin of phenomena, we shall not resort to
the hypothesis of separate creations. Darwin especially imagines that all
the present organisms, including man, may have been derived by the process
of natural selection from a single primordial germ. When, however, the
backward process has reached this germ, an insuperable difficulty presents
itself. How was this germ produced? All scientific experience tells us that
life can be produced from a living antecedent only; what then was the
antecedent of this germ? We are thus forced to contemplate an antecedent
possessing life and giving life to this primordial germ, an antecedent in the
universe. Life is always produced from life, but like is by no means always
produced from like. In this case, more especially, the living antecedent
must be in the invisible universe, and therefore altogether different from the
visible germ.
Our hypothesis, in which the material as well as the life of the visible uni-
verse are regarded as having been developed from the Unseen, in which
they had existed from Eternity, presents the only available method of avoid-
ing a break of Continuity, if we are to accept loyally the indications given
by observation and experiment. It thus appears,
that the visible uni-
verse is not eternal, and that it has not the power of originating life. Life
as well as matter comes to us from the Unseen Universe. T
•
The explanation of the origin of life proposed by Sir W. Thomson had
also occurred to Professor Helmholtz. This latter physicist, in an article on
the use and abuse of the deductive method in Physical Science (Nature
*"The Unseen Universe,” § 85.
"The Unseen Universe," § 86.
"The Unseen Universe," § 221.
"The Unseen Universe," § 229.
"The Unseen Universc," § 230.
"The Unseen Universe," § 243.
APPENDIX.
103
January 14, 1875), tells us very clearly what led himself, and no doubt Sir
W. Thomson likewise, to suggest the meteoric hypothesis as a possible way
of accounting for the origin of terrestrial life: "If failure attends all our
efforts to obtain a generation of organisms from lifeless matter, it seems to me
[says Professor Helmholtz] a thoroughly correct procedure to inquire whether
it is not as old as matter, and whether its germs, borne from one world to
another, have not been developed wherever they have found a favorable
soil."
Thus, according to the meteoric hypothesis, germs may have been wafted
to us from some other world or its fragments, and thus one act of creation
might possibly serve for many worlds.*
Two great laws come before us, the one of which is the Conservation of
Mass and of Energy, pointing, as the most probable solution, to an intelli-
gent Agent, one of whose functions it is to develop the universe objectively
considered; while the other law is that of Biogenesis, in virtue of which the
appearance of a living being in the universe denotes the existence of an
antecedent possessing life, thus leading to the conclusion that there is an
intelligent Agent, one of whose functions it is to develop intelligence and
life. But these conclusions, which most simply and naturally satisfy the
principle of Continuity, so far as they go appear to agree with the Christian
doctrine.t
There is a record which claims to give us the history of a communication
with the spiritual intelligences of the unseen. If it is true it must teach us
many things which science is utterly incompetent to reveal. But science
alone gives us, by logic and analogy combined, a certain insight into this
interesting and mysterious region. Working our way upwards, we have
reached, by the principle of Continuity, certain regions. Working their
way downward, the Christian records have reached these same regions of
thought. Not only are the nebulous beginning and fiery termination of the
present visible universe indicated by the Christian records, but a constitution
and a power are therein assigned to the Unseen Universe strikingly analogous
to those at which we arrive by a legitimate scientific process. Thus the
result of questioning science without mistrust or hesitation, under the guid-
ance of legitimate principles, is that science, instead of appearing antagonistic
to the claims of Christianity, is in reality its most efficient supporter; and
the burden of showing how the early Christains got hold of a constitution of
the unseen universe altogether different from any other cosmogony, but
similar to that which modern science proclaims, rests upon the shoulders of
the opponents of Christianity.
The Unseen Universe,” §§ 238-9.
+"The Unseen Universe," § 244.
"The Unseen Universe," § 221.
Um
104
APPENDIX.
The truth is, that science and religion neither are nor can be two fields of
knowledge with no possible communication between them.
There is an
avenue leading from the one to the other through the unseen universe, but
unfortunately it has been walled up and ticketed with "no road this way,"
professedly alike in the name of Science at the one end and in the name of
Religion at the other.
Whether we take the scientific or the religious point of view, one great
object of our life in the visible universe is obviously to learn, and advance in
learning implies a high purpose kept steadily before us, and an arduous pur-
suit. "This is the victory which overcometh the world, even our faith.” *
Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word
of God; so that things which are seen were not made of things which do
appear."―(Hebrews xi., 3.)
Faith is belief in the unknown portion of the grand totality, whose ex-
istence is demonstrated by its known parts; it can be no negation of reason,
and the object of faith being necessarily hypothetical in form, since knowl-
edge, not faith, alone can define, all definitions of it are a confusion of faith
and science. The true act of faith, therefore, consists solely in the adhesion
of our intelligence to the immovable and universal reason, which excludes
all monstrosity and falsehood from the domain of first causes. The Rea-
sonable Being supposes necessarily the raison d'etre, it is the absolute, it is
the law. God himself, in whatever manner he conceived, cannot exist without
raison d'etre, only insanity will provide a personal, arbitrary, and inexplica-
ble authority as the cause of immutable law. The impossible, unmerited,
and irresponsible supremacy of God would be the highest of injustices, and
the most revolting of absurdities. What, then, is Deity for us? It is the
undefined conception of a Supreme Personality.
True certitude
is the reciprocal acquiescence of the reason which knows in the sentiment
which believes, and of the sentiment which believes in the reason which
knows.”—(“ The Mysteries of Magic": A. E. Waite.)
"The effort of the human intellect is to explain the world and man.
Trusting the illusion of the senses, the ancient Greeks set astronomy the
task of explaining the apparent movements of the sun, planets, and fixed
stars, on the supposition that they were the true ones. But the thought of
Copernicus-anticipated in the secret teaching of Pythagoras and the Kab-
balah-exposed the sense-illusion in which human understanding lay impris-
oned. Philosophy would explain the world. But what world?
But what world? The world
manifested to us by our senses. And philosophy, like astronomy, took the
appearance for the reality. It was believed that the whole real world, as it
lay outside of us, projected itself, by means of our sense-apparatus, into our
brain! Thus the materialist is imprisoned in appearance, and holds the
* "The Unseen Universe," §§ 264-6.
APPENDIX.
105
!
world to be just what it is for his senses.
But, says Huxley, in one of his
Lay Sermons: 'When materialists talk about there being nothing in the world
but matter and force and necessary laws, I decline to follow them. Matter
and force are, so far as we can know, mere names for certain forms of con-
sciousness; meanwhile, as Descartes tells us, "Our knowledge of the soul is
more intimate and certain than our knowledge of the body."-Darwin has
proved that from the standpoint of organism, a transcendental world is con-
tinually given, and Kant has proved the same thing for man by his distinc-
tion between the "thing in itself" and the phenomenon. We know now
that we cannot grasp the reality with our present number of senses.
thus find ourselves at a masquerade, since we are not truly cognizant of the
reality of things, but only of the modes in which our senses react upon
them.'
We
The result of human thought upon the world-problem may thus be ex-
pressed by saying: Consciousness does not exhaust its object, the World.
"We pass to the second great problem for the intellect: Man. As the
world is the object of consciousness, so is the Ego the object of self-con-
sciousness. As regards the world and consciousness, the conception of
materialism has been eliminated; but it is still partially maintained in regard
to self-consciousness and the Ego. Materialism still flatters itself with the
hope of being able to reduce all psychology to physiology. But here again
we find that our self-consciousness does not exhaust its object, the Ego, for
corresponding to the transcendental world we find a transcendental Ego;
hence our sense of personality, by which we know ourselves, does not coin-
cide with our whole Ego. The sphere of our earthly personality is only the
smaller circle included in the larger concentric circle of our metaphysical
Subject, and our earthly self-consciousness does not cast its beams to the
periphery of our being. Man is a monistic double-being, having two per-
sons, one empirical, the other transcendental. Our normal self-consciousness
does not exhaust its object, our Self-it comprehends only one of the two
persons of our Subject, namely, the empirical, not the transcendental.
"
Somnambulism proves that Schopenhauer and Hartmann are right in
laying at the foundation of human phenomena a Will and an Unconscious;
but it also proves that this Will is not blind, and that what to the Ego is un-
conscious, is not unconscious in itself; that between us and the world-sub-
stance a transcendental Subject must be interposed, a willing and knowing
being; that thus the individuality of man avails beyond his temporary phe-
nomenal form, and the earthly existence is only one of the many possible forms
of existence of our Subject.
The human psyche, not by exaltation
of sense consciousness, but on suppression of the same, reveals powers which
physiologically are quite inexplicable, hence the soul is something else than
the effect of the organism, thinking is something else than a mere secretion
106
APPENDIX.
of the brain. The substance of man belonging to the transcendental world,
existing behind the sense-consciousness, and only exceptionally encroaching
upon it, is the prime cause of the organism.
It is certain that
The
in man there is a kernel to which the laws of sensibility do not apply-an
organ for which the cognitional forms of time and space avail differently
than for the sense-consciousness. Since the functions of this organ attain
to freer activity in the degree that the sense-consciousness is suppressed, so that
the latter shows itself to be a hindrance to the development of that activity,
it follows that the total annulment of our sense-consciousness can only be
looked upon as a total removal of this hindrance; thus death does not affect
the true substance of man; nay, it permits the cognitional mode which was
suppressed in the earthly life again to attain unimpeded activity.
We possess our past in the form of images lying in our memory.
feeling of personality arises because we refer the succession of our experi-
ences to an identical Subject which knows itself as permanent in all change
of the feelings.
As the plant grows in the light, but its roots
are sunk in the dark bosom of the earth, so is our Ego sunk with a meta-
physical root in an order of things lying beyond our knowledge.
There is certainly a world beyond, that is, beyond our consciousness; in
other words, our sense-consciousness has its limits just in its senses; we our-
selves belong already now to that world beyond, so far as our Ego exceeds
self-consciousness, thus as-but only relatively-unconscious beings. We
are not temporarily and spatially divided from that world beyond, are not
first transposed there by death, but are already rooted therein, and what
divides us therefrom is merely the subjective barrier of our threshold of
sensibility.
Were our five senses suddenly taken away, and
senses of an entirely different kind given to us, though standing on the same
spot, we should believe ourselves inhabitants of another star."-("The Phi-
losophy of Mysticism": Baron du Prel.)
If we are abroad in the storm of tempestuous seas, where the mountain-
ous waves rise and fall, dash themselves furiously against steep cliffs, and
toss their spray high in the air; while the storm howls, the sea boils, the
lightning flashes from black clouds, and the peals of thunder drown the voice
of storm and sea,—then, in the undismayed beholder, the twofold nature of
his consciousness reaches the highest degree of distinctness. He perceives
himself, on the one hand, as an individual, as the frail phenomenon of will,
which the slightest touch of these forces can utterly destroy, helpless against
powerful nature, dependent, the victim of chance, a vanishing nothing in
the presence of stupendous might; and, on the other hand, he perceives
himself as the eternal, peaceful, knowing subject, the condition of the
object, and therefore the supporter of this whole world; the terrific strife of
nature only his idea; the subject itself free and apart from all desires and
APPENDIX.
107
necessities, in the quiet comprehension of the Ideas. This is the complete
impression of the sublime."-(Schopenhauer, "World as Will and Idea."
Book III.,
P. 265.)
'If we turn our glance to those who have overcome the world: then
instead of the restless striving and effort, instead of the constant transition
from wish to fruition and from joy to sorrow, instead of the never-satisfied
and never-dying hope which constitutes the life of the man who wills, we
shall see that peace which is above all reason, that perfect calm of the spirit,
that deep rest, that inviolable calm and serenity, the mere reflection of which
in the countenance, as Raphael and Correggio have represented it, is an
entire and certain gospel; only knowledge remains, the will has vanished."
("World as Will and Idea." Book IV., p. 531.) “We freely acknowledge
that what remains after the entire abolition of will is for those who are still
full of will, certainly nothing; but, conversely, to those in whom the will
has turned and denied itself, this our world, which is so real, with all its
suns and milky ways-is nothing."—("World as Will and Idea." Book IV.,
P. 532.)
Death is like the setting of the sun, which is only apparently
swallowed up by the night, but in reality, itself the source of all light, burns
without intermission, brings new days to new worlds, is always rising and
setting." ("World as Will and Idea." Book IV.,
Book IV., p. 473.)
"If we lose ourselves in the contemplation of the infinite greatness of the
universe in space and time, meditate on the thousands of years that are past
or to come, or if the heavens at night actually bring before our eyes innu-
merable worlds, and so force upon our consciousness the immensity of the
universe, we feel ourselves dwindle to nothing; as individuals, as living
bodies, as transient phenomena of will, we feel ourselves pass away and
vanish into nothing like drops in the ocean. But at once there rises against
this ghost of our own nothingness, against such lying impossibility, the
immediate consciousness that all these worlds exist only as our idea, only as
modifications of the eternal subject of pure knowing, which we find ourselves
to be as soon as we forget our individuality. The vastness of the world rests
now in us, we are one with the world, and therefore not oppressed, but
exalted by its immensity. It is the transcending of our own individuality,
the sense of the sublime.”—“ World as Will and Idea." Book III., p. 266.)
NOTE XXIV.-"All lines of true human thought focus in religion."
My thoughts upon these matters came to me as creative artist in my inier-
course with the public.”—(P. 55.)
Man was constituted for a time only in this world, that he might ascend
from the inferior things, and seek after the superior things; that is, that by
natural light and wisdom, as it were from a looking-glass or shadow, he
might learn to know and apprehend the heavenly Light, and Wisdom, at
108
APPENDIX.
whose majesty and glory, all natural things, although glorious, might plainly
vanish and be annihilated; and so, leaving the inferior and lesser light, he
should suddenly betake himself to and follow the greater and superior
Light: But these things are not propounded and written to that end that they
should happen in contempt of philosophy, or of natural sciences, arts, and
faculties, which are and flourish among men, and which in this life cannot
but be; but rather that we, being fraught with the sagacity of the Light of
Nature, may be led further, may go forward and be excited to the knowledge
of the greater Light, which may confer upon us a new birth, eternal life and
salvation."—(Astrologie Theologized, 1649.)
We read in Deuteronomy: "My doctrine shall drop as the rain, my
speech shall distill as the dew, or be as the small dew upon the tender herb
and as the showers upon the grass"; and in the Gospel according to St.
John: "If any man thirst let him come unto me and drink." Hence,
according to the symbolism of the Scriptures, water, in the good sense,
signifies divine truth in the Holy Word, and in the Human Mind. But in
its opposite sense, water signifies man's self-derived intelligence and fleshly
or physical wisdom. By the fishes of the sea are signified all the principles
of scientific truth; thus in the Book of Revelations, John hears every
creature that was in the sea praising the Lord. Hence, the curious miracle
of the piece of money in the mouth of the fish is interpreted thus: "The
Divine command to Peter, 'Go to the sea and cast a hook,' meant 'Go and
investigate the inner principles of the sciences, and every one of them will
be found to contain within itself the tribute which it owes to spiritual
religion, and which it cheerfully renders up.' The Lord said to Peter,
'Take up the fish that first cometh up, and thou shalt find a piece of money,'
to instruct us that every science, no matter what, contains its own tribute,
which it pays at the shrine of religion. Every fish when its mouth is opened,
every science when its interior principles are explored by Peter, or those
grounded in a pure faith, will be found to contain the tribute money.
When this is discovered and demanded for the interests of true religion, it is
instantly yielded up. These sciences, when internally explored, will be
found to contain infallible proofs of the existence of a Supreme Being,
pointing at the same time to the spirituality and superiority of religion,
which they constantly serve, and to which they are tributary." (See "The
Science of Scriptural Correspondences Elucidated," by Madely and Barrett.)
The present growing discord between the TREMENDOUS EMPIRE OF THE
SENSES and the SOLITARY SUPREMACY OF THE SOUL must be resolved.
Hitherto, churches, whether Catholic or Protestant, have dealt with the
Senses separately by crushing them, and with the Soul separately by isolating
it; but Asceticism and Mysticism combined have failed altogether to grapple
with the whole truth of life, to place the Senses, to make room for the various
""
APPENDIX.
109
noble activities and desirable pursuits which, in many ways not essentially
religious, make life worth living. . . . The Christianity of the Future . . .
will recognize that some are born to be Reservoirs of spiritual power for the
world, as others are born to be Reservoirs of political, poetic, industrial,
artistic, or scientific power for the world.
The notion that Felix
Mendelssohn would have been better occupied in preaching the Gospel than
in composing music, or that Charles Dickens would have been better em-
ployed as a missionary than in writing books, is plainly erroneous. The
Christian Church (although it began with such-like teaching in a season of
protest and reaction) has long since practically abandoned it in detail; but
the Christian Church has never changed its theory—it has never re-stated its
relations with the world, although the world has entirely changed its relations
with the Church. The Christianity of the future must set itself to solve this
problem. You may say it has been practically solved by a thousand noble
lives. So it has; but not by our Christianity.
The Christianity of
the Future, whilst proclaiming with the voice of an archangel the SOLITARY
SUPREMACY OF THE SOUL, the majesty of the higher intuitions, man's
spiritual affinity with God, and the paramount duty of aiming at a moral
harmony here as the prelude to a blessed immortality, must recognize as on
a parallel, but not antagonistic, plane, the EMPIRE OF THE SENSES, the
claims of the outward and visible world, and the divinity of secular knowl-
edge. Christianity must learn what the religion of Jesus is, after all, best
fitted to teach-that what God has permitted to be true in the world of
Nature cannot really be opposed to any religious truth. She must fit in
science; she must re-state her theological conceptions until they are brought
into some sort of harmony with that state of progress which God has per-
mitted the human mind to reach. . . . Jesus is the Soul-master, not the
School-master; but those ministers and stewards of the mysteries who teach
in His name, are bound to place us in right relations with the constitution
of human nature and all the permanent facts of life, and neither to ignore
them, violate them, nor denounce them.
If the Religion of Jesus is,
as so many of us feel and believe it to be, the Religion of Humanity and the
Hope of the Future, it will be able to deal with the world and all its lights
and shadows, all the weal and all the woe'; it will have the courage at due
seasons to come out of the cloister and throw off the cowl; it will know how
to rejoice with them that do rejoice as well as to weep with those that weep ;
it will not only burn up wickedness and warm our congealed life of selfish-
ness with Philanthropy, but it will glow with the painter's colors, thrill with
the musician's harmonies, brighten with the wreathed smiles of women and
children; . . . and yet, beyond all these, be full also of the things which
eye hath not seen nor ear heard." ("The Conquering Cross": Rev. H. A.
Haweis, M.A.)
!
IIO
APPENDIX.
Man has instinctively felt, in all times and under all religions, that he
must look to Art to express and interpret the feelings into which Science and
Philosophy and Ethics lead him, and to form for him a worship for the In-
finite Truth and Beauty and Goodness. Thus, the architect has reared the
massive temple and the beautiful minster; and the sculptor has adorned them
with the noblest figures of saints and heroes, with dim visions of angels
stooping from the shadowed niches in the walls; and the painter has lifted
above the altar the seraphic form of the Mother and the Child; through the
rich rose-window the golden light streaming in upon the fretted vault and
long-drawn nave and shadowy aisle on the choicest symbols which man has
fashioned through the ages wherewith to express his awe and reverence, his
thought and feeling before the Infinite Mystery; while the music of the
masters filled the vast building with tumultuous waves of sound, thrilling the
soul with joy unspeakable and full of glory, whispering secrets of peace to
hearts bowed down with woe, bearing within souls tempted and tried the
echoes of that voice heard of old-" Come unto me, all ye that labor and are
heavy laden, and I will give you rest." All this has been right. If worship
is the highest act of man, it demands for its rightful rendering the highest
powers of man. Whatever can be brought into the service of the church,
wherewith to express its faith and hope and charity, is legitimate. It needs
no apology. It vindicates its place by appealing to the mind and heart and
conscience of men. Our worship ought to be just as noble and dignified and
beautiful and rich as it is possible for us to make it, so long as it is charged
with true thought and pure feeling, so long as it is an uplift of the soul.
The moment that the symbol obscures the reality; that the music tickles the
ear and starts the feet to the measures of the dance, instead of breathing upon
the soul and stirring the wings of aspiration; that the picture above the altar
arrests the mind as well as the eye, and one stops with thinking about it, instead
of through it feeling its way into that which it signs in form and color; that
the things round about the altar absorb the attention of the worshippers, and
in their due arrangement the sense of worship is discharged-that moment
the presence of art is an impertinence, and being an impertinence becomes a
blasphemy. Then the stern, grim Puritan needs to enter our temple, hew
down our statues, tear our pictures from the walls, white-wash the frescos
stained in the plaster, strip the altar, rear the table again, banish the choir
and the organ, and bring us back to the stern simplicity of mind and con-
science in which we worship that God who is spirit in spirit and in truth.
But surely, friends, it is possible for us now at length to be Catholics in all
rightful emphasis of the imagination, and yet to be Protestants in all right-
ful emphasis of the reason and conscience; and in worship as in life to
declare―That which God has joined together, let no man put asunder. Only
let us be on our guard. The more dignified and noble we seek to make our
APPENDIX.
III
worship, through the ministry of art, the more let us remember the great say-
ing of Confucius: 'If my soul is not engaged in high worship, it is even as
though I worshipped not.'”—(Rev. R. Heber Newton, D.D.)
NOTE XXV.-" True art found to be at one with religion."—(P. 55.)
"One might affirm that when Religion becomes artificial, it is reserved for
art to rescue the kernel of Religion by taking the mythical symbols which
artificial Religion would have accepted as literally true, and instead inter-
preting them according to their symbolical worth, thus enabling us, by
means of an ideal representation of those symbols, to discern the deep truth
concealed within them. Religion becomes wholly artificial when it is forced
to a continual extension of dogmatic symbols, for the sole true and divine
contents are thus buried beneath an increasing accumulation of things in-
credible which are recommended for belief. It is with a feeling of this
truth that Religion has always sought the aid of art: while art in turn
fulfills her true mission only when, by ideal representations of an allegoric
type, she conduces to the apprehension of the inner kernel of Religion, the
inexpressible Divine Truth."—(Wagner, 1880, p. 269.)
NOTE XXVI.-" Only through error can we poor earthworms get to a
knowledge of the truth.”—(P. 55.)
"Thus have we, as closely and perhaps as satisfactorily as, in such cir-
cumstances, might be, followed Teufelsdröckh through the various successive
states and stages of Growth, Entanglement, Unbelief, and almost Reproba-
tion, into a certain clearer state of what he himself seems to consider as
Conversion. 'Blame not the word,' says he; 'rejoice rather that such a
word, signifying such a thing, has come to light in our Modern Era, though
hidden from the wisest Ancients. The Old World knew nothing of Conver-
sion: instead of an Ecce Homo, they had only some Choice of Hercules. It
was a new-attained progress in the Moral Development of Man: hereby has
the Highest come home to the bosoms of the most Limited; what to Plato
was but a hallucination, and to Socrates a chimera, is now clear and certain
to your Zinzendorfs, your Wesleys, and the poorest of their Pietists and
Methodists.'
"It is here, then, that the spiritual majority of Teufelsdröckh commences:
we are henceforth to see him 'work in well-doing,' with the spirit and clear
aims of a Man."-("Sartor Resartus": Carlyle.)
NOTE XXVII.—“The name for the 'Victory, or the most Perfect Salva-
tion' was found. It was Parsifal.”—(P. 57.)
"A great many people were against Wagner's great semi-sacred musical
drama called 'Parsifal' till they saw and heard it. The glamour of medi-
æval fantasy and Catholic legend just saved it from open denunciation, but
112
APPENDIX.
we can all remember the doubtful shudder which ran through some art cir-
cles, as a rule not over-squeamish, and all religious coteries, when it was
proposed to put the Lord's Last Supper on the stage! True, ‘Parsifal
does not quite do that, but it is next door to it. The associations are there,
the function is there, the communicants are there, even the scenic suggestion
of our Lord Himself is there, and an incident in His life finds expression in
the person of Parsifal and the woman Kundry, who, in the hour of her peni-
tence, bathes his feet with her tears, and wipes them with the hair of her
head; and yet no one who has seen 'Parsifal' comes away without the
most reverent sympathy for this ideal representation of all that was most pure
and elevating in mediæval Roman Catholicism.
"Once more I seem to be at Bayreuth when first that stage drama unrolled
itself before the eyes of the pilgrims assembled in the dim musical sanc-
tuary, for such it was to us. We were all silent; nothing moved; nothing
was visible, save an eager mist of faces half seen in the weird light reflected
from the illuminated stage, and the great parables of life and death, of
frailty and sanctification, the spiritual secrets of time and eternity, unrolled
themselves before us, august revelations of the soul, convincing the world of
judgment and of righteousness and of sin. Yes, there was the terrible
struggle between the flesh and the spirit in Kundry's own double nature;
there was the dread but triumphant passage from innocent ignorance to the
knowledge of good and evil in the victorious guileless One. There was the
love that had power to pardon, because it had been tempted without sin.
Was ever, in all art creation, balm for the broken spirit and the contrite heart
like the tender benison of that Good-Friday music which comes with the
weeping of the penitent woman and the waving of the hands that blessed?
But who can tell of the songs of the angels far above the high dome of
Montsalvat, what time the knights of the Sangrail are met in holy conclave
to celebrate their love-feast?
The pain of the crucifixion has long passed. The agony of the 'Beloved'
has become a memory and a faith, enshrined in celestial peace and glory; it
all seems to visit earth for a moment to hallow, to feed, to lift up the faith-
ful, as the Grail passes, buoyed up on the ocean of strange sound, and
smitten with supernal light, rose-red with beatings in it.'
"I shall never forget the indescribable emotion which seized the whole
assembly on the first representation of that daring and unparalleled scene.
The knights seated in semicircle, with golden goblets before them, in the
halls of Montsalvat. The faint plash of distant fountains adown the marble
corridor is heard. Amfortas rises pale with pain and torn by remorse, yet
holding on high the crystal goblet. The light fades out of the golden dome,
a holy twilight falls, and strange melodies float down from above, till, in the
deepening gloom, the goblet slowly glows and reddens like a ruby flame,
APPENDIX.
113
and the knights fall prostrate in an ecstasy of devotion; a moment only, the
crimson fades out, the crystal is dark, the Grail has passed. I looked round
upon the silent audience whilst this astonishing celebration was taking place.
The whole assembly was motionless; all seemed to be solemnized by the
august spectacle-seemed almost to share in the devout contemplation and
trance-like worship of the holy knights. Every thought of the stage had
vanished. Nothing was further from my own thoughts than play-acting. I
was sitting in devout and rapt contemplation. Before my eyes had passed a
symbolic vision of prayer and ecstasy, flooding the soul with overpowering
thoughts of the divine sacrifice and the mystery of unfathomable love.
"The people seemed spellbound. Some wept, some gazed entranced with
wide-open eyes, some heads were bowed as in prayer.”—(Rev. H. A.
Haweis, M.A.)
THE END.

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