CHIRIST'IINITY
RELIGION OF NATURE.
LECTURES
DELIVERED BEFORE THE LOWELL INSTITUTE.
A. P PEABODY, D. D., L.D.,
PREACHER TO THE UNIVERSITY, AND PLUMMER PROFESSOR OF CHRISTIAN MORALS
IN HARVARD COLLEGE.
.%crnb Ebition, Utbieb.
I BOSTON:
G O U L D A N D I I N CO L N,
59 WASHIIINGTON STREET.
NEW YORK: SHELDON AND COOMPANY.
CINCINNATI: GEORGE S. BLANCHARD.
1864.
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THU
BY 
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1863, by
GOULD AND LINCOLN,
in the Clerk's Office of the District Court for the District of Massachusetts
I,    I
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I 
PR E FAC E.
THE author by no means claims as original the conception of Christianity as coincident with the religion
of nature; but he is not aware that precisely this line
of proof or defence has been adopted in any formal
treatise on the evidences of Christianity.  Yet he is
profoundly convinced that it is on grounds of a priori
probability that the controversy between those who admit and those who deny a special, authoritative revelation through Jesus Christ is now to be waged.
It is not a little singular that a priori objections took
precedence of historical in the early days of the Church.
We have no reason to suppose that Celsus denied the
miraculous element in the Evangelical narratives. In
times of ready faith as to the occult and marvellous in
nature and the wonder-working power of demons, it was
easy to admit the salient facts recorded in the Gospels,
and yet to reject the truths which they seemed to authenticate. The two leading considerations urged by Celsus
against the new religion were its promulgation among
amd for the poor, uneducated, and ignoble, and its claim
to universality, both which features appeared to him  so
intrinsically absurd as to be incapable of proof. It is 
PREFACE.
no mean evidence of the penetrating and transforming
power of the religion thus assailed, that these strongest
points of attack are now impregnable stations of defenlce,- that the whole civilized world would demand
as essentials of a divinely authenticated religion that
it should embrace within its blessings and its promises
all sorts and conditions of men, and that it should be
adapted to universal acceptance.
In the last century, Hume indeed maintained the
antecedent impossibility of miracles ill such a sense as
to render them incapable of being authenticated; it
being, as hlie argued, more probable that any conceivable amount of human testimony should be false, than
that they should be true.  But the greater part of the
infidel writers of the century aimed their attacks at the
alleged facts and the historical evidences of the Hebrew
and Christian Scriptures. Accordingly, it was the prime
object of the advocates of Christianity to accumulate
proofs of the genuineness and authenticity of the sacred
writings. This they did, some of them with more zeal
and thoroughness than discrimination and critical discernmenelt. Non mrultum, sed multa, might well have been
the motto of not a few, and testimonies of uniimpeacllhable validity and explicitness were often weakened by
their juxtaposition with those of doubtful authority or
of imperfect relevancy. Lardner's great work lies especially open to this objection, if we consider it as an
argument for Chlristianity, while as a repertory of the
materials for argument it cannot be too highly prized or
too gratefully regarded. Paley's treatise on the Evi
iv 
PREFACE.
denees of Christianity, on the other hand, was admirably
adapted to the exigencies of his time. It seems to us a
complete refutation of historical scepticism. It is not
obsolete, and never call become so. Ill our own day,
with a narrower scope, MIr. Norton's great work on
the Genuineness of the Gospels is unequalled as a comn
pact array of historical arguments.  His motto is, Not
multa, sed multum.  He rejects all testimony against
which a shadow of doubt or a charge of irrelevancy call
be urged, nay, almost all individual testimony; for the
witnesses that hlie places on the stand are, with hardly
all exception, communities or bodies of men, and official
personages who must have virtually spoken in the name
and expressed the belief of the several churches or the
collective Christendom which they represented.   Tie
second and third volumes, comprising the history of the
various Gnostic sects, evince conclusively that those
heretics, who on theological grounds could not but lhave
rejoiced to invalidate our canonical Gospels, could find
no historical pretence for their rejection.  ir. Norton
also, at several points, adduces the strongest circumstaintial evidence for these Gospels, showing that certailn
universally admitted states of belief and ecclesiastical
habitudes could not have existed, had not the genuilieness of the Gospels been universally regarded as beyond
dispute.  In finle, writers of this historical school liave
proved conclusively that the authorship of the four Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, and the Epistles of St.
Paul, by the men whose names they bear, rests on much
stronger evidence than can be adduced for the geiiuine
v 
PREFACE.
ness of any other writings of equal antiquity; and that
the facts which they record or recognize have all, and
more than all, the marks of authenticity which belong
to the universally admitted facts of ancient history.
It may indeed be said that the now dominant school
of infidelity, naturalism, or pseudo-Christianity stands
on the high ground of searching historical criticism.
This we deny. Its historical conclusions are not reasons for, but corollaries from, its unbelief. It assumes
the a priori impossibility of revelation, special inspiration, and miracle, and on that basis erects its theories
of the genesis of the sacred books and of the (so-called)
legends or myths which they record. Their reasoning
is this: " Had the actual companions of Jesus Christ
written the Gospels, their contents could not have been
so utterly false as we know them to be; therefore these
books were of later date, of divided authorship, of
gradual growth." Were the critical canons and processes of Strauss and the Tiibingen divines applied to
any other than our sacred books, the manifest result
would be a reductio ad absurdum. Were these canons
and processes admitted in ally other field of historical
or bibliographical research, no ancient book whatever
could be received as genuine, no fact a few centuries
old could be regarded as otherwise than fabulous or
doubtful, and the whole realm of the past would be
given over to Pyrrhonism.  But the desperate expedients to which writers of this school are driven, may
be regarded as furnishing a valuable contribution to the
Christian evidences.  Their problem is to account for
,VI 
PREFACE.
the existence, internal character, and general reception
of the Gospels on the hypothesis that their contents are
in the main false. They can solve this problem only by
maintaining that these books came into being and grew
into their present shape in ways in which no books were
ever known to have their birth and growth; and that
- mere foundlings, the children of many parents, owned
of none- they foisted themselves at once, as of apostolic authority, upon the faith and reverence of Christian communities in every part of the civilized world.
A problem which admits of no more rational solution
than this is unsolvable.
Meanwhile the phasis of scepticism which now so
extensively prevails renders it incumbent on Christians
to demonstrate that the religion of the Gospel is in all
its parts, in all its apparatus, in all its history, natural
religion,-that it is not a provisional scheme, not a
supplementary dispensation, but co-eternal with the
mind of God, and coeval with the souls of'men, -that
its doctrines and precepts are not true and right because they were revealed, but that they were revealed
because they are essentially true and immutably right.
It is only when this conviction is produced in the mind
of the objector, that he is prepared to listen to argument
and to weigh evidence as to the historical aspects of the
question.
The following Lectures grew out of an invitation
. received by the author, to prepare for the Lowell Insti tute a course of Lectures on Natural Religion.  He, re
. vii 
PREFACE.
garding Christianity as natural religion par excellence,
asked and obtained permission to fill out a programme
for thile prescribed course arranged ill accordance with
this view.  As a treatise this volume is incomplete, and
less nearly complete than it might have seemed had a
single province of the large field of inquiry been selected. But the author deemed it advisable, in a series
of public Lectures, rather to illustrate the extended
application of his mode of reasoning, than to attempt
the thorough treatment of any one department of the
subject to the neglect of all the rest.
The author has in several instances incorporated in
these Lectures passages of his own articles previously
printed in the periodicals to which he has been a frequent contributor. He has not thought it expedient, or
even right, to omit things that needed to be said, because
he had said them elsewhere, or to present in a meaner
guise thoughts which he had once arrayed in the best
attire he could weave for them.
The work is offered to the public, not without sincere
diffidence as to its merits, but with an assurance which
caniot be made stronger, that the citadel of our faith is
for the present to be maintained and defended chiefly
on such grounds as are here exhibited.
HARVAIID UNIVERSITY, October 15, 1863.
viii 
CONTENTS.
LECTURE I.
NATURAL AND REVEALED RELIGION.
PAGX
. 13
Christianity as old as the Creation........ 13
Religion defined. I..........   17
Distinction between Natural and Revealed Religion.....  19
Alleged Sources of Religious Knowledge, - Consciousness...    19
Intuition.... 21
Reasoning...   23
Analogy proves nothing.......... 24
Office of Analogy............   26
Amount of Religious Knowledge attainable independently of Revelation  28
Imperfections of Natural Religion........   29
LECTURE II.
REVELATION.
Revelation defined..........       32
Natural Religion the Material for Revelation.........            33
Revelation a Postulate of Human Nature...........           84
Demanded by the Analogy of the Divine Government.                86
Rendered probable by the Nature of God.....          388
Objections to Christianity grounded on its late Promulgation and limited
Diffusion................                         42
Fitness of the Christian Era for the Establishment of Christianity..  45
1 * 
CONTENTS.
LECTURE III.
MIRACLES.
Revelation needs to be authenticated...... 51
Belief in Miracles natural to Man......   56
Miracles, a part of the Course of Nature...... 58
Not necessarily Exceptions to Natural Laws....   65
Worth of a miraculously attested Revelation, ill Temptation... 67
In Sorrow...   68
LECTURE IV.
RECORDS OF REVELATION.
Man's Need of Authoritative Scriptures.......   72
Revelation must needs create its own Literature.....    75
Marks of Authenticity in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures..   76
Human Element in the Scriptures.......    83
Tokens of the Divine Element in their Authorship.....  88
LECTURE V.
THE LOVE OF GOD.
Man may verify what he could not discover......   93
Beneficent Ends in Nature.........           95
The Natural Theology of Pain.........  98
Mloral Evil............    102
The Paternal Providence of God........ 104
The Case of the Unprivileged........   109
LECTURE VI.
THE PROVIDENCE OF GOD IN HUMAN ART.
Art is but the Use or Imitation of Nature..........    116
Adaptation of Man's Physical Constitution to the Purposes of Art.    123
All Art Mathematical..........  130
x 
CONTENTS.
LECTURE VII.
THE PROVIDENCE OF GOD IN HUMAN SOCIETY.
The Solidarity of the Human Family a Christian Idea..
Mutual Relations of the Races...........
Distribution of Natural Endowments..........
The Laboring Classes not cut off from the Means of Improvement
Man overworked.................
What Machinery will do for the Laborer.......1
LECTURE VIII.
THE HOLINESS OF GOD.-GOD IN CHRIST.
God's Holiness manifested in the Human Conscience....
In his Retributive Providence...
Accordance with Nature of Christ's Mediatorial Office....
Of his Manifestation of the Divine Attributes
Of his Moral Perfectness....
Of his outward Condition and Experiences.
LECTURE IX.
IMMORTALITY.
The Soul Immaterial, and therefore Immortal.....
Perception the Function of the Soul......
Immortality inferred from the Changes that take place in Life.
From the Phenomena of Death...
Arguments for Immortality from Man's Intellectual and Moral Nature
From the Growth of Character in Old Age
From the Waste of Life....
From the Instinct of Self-Advancement
LECTURE X.
CHRISTIAN MORALITY.
Christian Morality universal and eternal.......   196
The Mutual Dependence of Piety and Charity original in the Gospel.   199
134
135
139
145
147
161
156
162
164
165
168
171
. 176
.     180
. 183
. 184
. 186
. 189
. 191
. 193 
CONTENTS.
The Pietistic Element divorced from the Philanthropic..... 201
Philanthropy without Piety.........   204
The two united in Christ and in Christianity...... 206
The Reconciliation of Self-Love and Brotherly Love peculiar to the
Gospel............ 209
LECTURE XI.
THE NATURAL RELIGION OF THE STATE.
The Family the Germ of the State.......  216
The Fifth Commandment of the Decalogue a Political Precept..   217
Relation of Domestic Life to State Life........  221
Civilization, its Means and its Hinderances......   227
Christianity essential to Progressive Civilization......... 232
Contrast between Ancient and Modern Civilization....   235
LECTURE XII.
THE SABBATH A LAW OF NATURAL RELIGION. - CONCLUSION. 
Christian Institutions...............            237
The Sabbath primeval...............             239
A law of the Human Body and of the Material Universe.  242
Essential to Intellectual Growth and Vigor...    244
A Civilizing Agent.............              246
Conduces to Man's Political Well-being...    248
Indispensable to the Religious Nature..    251
recapitulation of the Course.............. 254
Comparative Worth of the Internal and External Evidences of Chris
Conclusion 
xii
.. 255
.. 256 
CHRISTIANITY
THIE RELIGION OF NATURE.
LECTURE I.
NATURAL AND REVEALED RELIGION.
THERE. stands an ancient architectural pile, with tokens of its venerable age covering it from its corner-stone
to its topmost turret; and some imagine these to be
tokens of decay, while to others they only indicate, by
the years they chronicle, a massiveness that can yet defy
more centuries than it has weathered years. Its foundation is buried in the accumulated mould and clustered
mosses of many generations. Its walls are mantled and
hidden by parasitic vines. Its apartments are some of
them dank and cold, as if their very cement were dissolving in chilly vapors. Others, built against the walls,
were never framed into them; and now their ceilings
are broken, their floors are uneven as the surface of a
billow, their timbers seem less to sustain one another
than to break one another's fall. All through the house
you see dilapidated furniture, - ornaments so called,
which lost their last touch of gilding and trace of beauty
ages ago,- articles once of use, which it seems absurd
to call utensils now, so entirely has their need gone by
and their purpose become effete.  There are dwellers in
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14       CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
the mansion whose whole demeanor makes you tremble
lest the structure fall on your head or collapse beneath
your feet. They will not have a cobweb disturbed, lest
the ceiling should crumble at the touch of the broom.
They are afraid to move the furniture, lest there be
found some ugly gap in the wall behind. And as for
righting any of the displaced beams, or substituting new
timbers where the old are thoroughly worm-eaten, they
would as soon consent to have the whole building undermined or blown up. They assure you that it is still
safe and strong, wind-proof and storm-proof, and that
they want no other dwelling till its builder and owner
shall prepare for them a new mansion under a brighter
sky and in a more genial climate. But the very tones in
which they give you this assurance are so hesitating, and
they move about with so soft and cat-like a tread, and
look so much alarmed at the least gust of wind, you can
hardly persuade yourself that they believe what they
say.
You determine, therefore, to make your own investigations.  You dig away the mould, and lo! the foundation
was laid by no mortal hand; it is primitive rock that
strikes its roots down an unfathomable depth into the
solid earth, so that no frosts can heave it, no convulsions
shake it.  You tear the ivy from the walls, and you find
them built of Cyclopean stones tongued and grooved into
each other, betraying a power and skill that have no
counterpart in the masonry of these modern times, and
not a stone can need readjusting while the world shall
stand. In every buttress and cross-wall, in the jointed
slabs that constitute the roof and the Atlantean pillars
that sustain it, you discern, with the unspent strength of
ages past, hoarded strength for unnumbered ages to come.
a 
' —NATURAL AND- REVEALED RELIGION. 
As to the feeble, tottering, effete portions of the edifice
and its contents, you ascertain that all which bears the
marks of decay is of comparatively recent date,- floors
and partitions extemporized to suit the whims of individual occupants, mere personal furniture, movables that do
not belong there,-  so that what seems old is new, while
what is really old gives presage of perpetual youth.
Such an edifice is Christianity. The sceptic denies,
the timid disciple doubts, its stability.  The cry, "The
Church is in danger," is almost as old as the Church;
and there has never been a time when there has not
been in some quarters a tendency to repress inquiry, to
discourage thorough discussion, to distrust learning and
science as forces that might shake the foundation of
man's eternal hope. Even to the most friendly eye
there is much about Christianity - not of it- of which
we cannot say that it will last always, or wish that it
may last long. It has extra-Scriptural technicalities of
phrase and dogma which the world is happily outgrowing.
Some of its rituals and organizations are fast losing their
hold on the popular reverence. Its records are passing
through the fierce ordeal of a scientific criticism, which
may dislodge various old traditions as to their interpretation and office. Its partition-walls are in so crumbling
a condition that they can hardly be propped up much
longer, and through many of them bold breaches are
already made, and strong hands are shaking and loosening the weak mortar and frail rafters of which they are
built.
Yet Christianity none the less presents the aspect of
impregnable strength, its foundation the Rock of Ages,
its walls upheaved, its top-stone laid, by the hand that
built the heavens, and spread the floor of the ocean, and
15, 
16      CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF IATME.
reared the everlasting hills. Tindall's deistical work,
"Christianity as old as the Creation, or the Gospel a
Republication of the Law of Nature," admits in its title
the strongest ground, nay, the only ground, on which
we can believe or defend Christianity. To suppose it a
Divine afterthought, a supplementary creation, an excrescence upon nature, is to dishonor it under shelter
of pretended advocacy, - nay, more, it is to impugn the
Divine immutableness, -the integrity of those attributes
which underlie all religion. The highest view of Christianity is that which regards it as the religion of nature,
as the constitutional law of the spiritual universe, as corresponding to the mathematical laws which are embodied
in the material universe, - absolute, necessary, eternal
truth,- that which always was and ever will be. Revelation did not create it, any more than Newton created
the law of universal gravitation, or Kepler the laws of
planetary motion. What Newton and Kepler were to the
material universe, inspired men and the God-born Saviour
were to the spiritual universe.. Christianity was before
the Word became flesh, before Moses, before Abraham;
it will.equally be when in the open vision of heaven
the written Word shall be no longer needed.
This is the view which I propose to illustrate in the
present course of Lectures. Natural Religion is the subject assigned to me. My purpose is to demonstrate the
identity of Christianity with natural religion,
The residue of this Lecture will be occupied with the
definition of the term religion, with the distinction ordi
narily made between natural and revealed religion, and
with the sources and contents of natural religion as distinguished from revealed. 
NATURAL AND REVEALED RELIGION.
As to the meaning of religion, its derivation gives us
but doubtful and imperfect guidance. I should prefer, in
common with almost all grammarians and lexicographers,
anlcienlt and modern, to derive it from reliqare, to rebind,
that is, to bind anew, and with new tenacity, the human
spirit to its Author and Father. But Cicero, who understood his language better than we do, and whose authority on such a point one hardly dares to disavow, says that
religio comes from retegere, to reperuse, that is, to polnder
seriously and intently, and that' those who gave their
earnest heed to things relating to the gods were called
religious [religiosi], ex releyendo.1 According to the first
of these derivations, religion is the science of our relations and obligations; according to the second, it is the
science of the things which lie beneath the surface and
are taken note of only by the heedful, that is, of things
unseen and spiritual;-two definitions which, widely as
they differ in their terms, coincide as to their contents.
We  might comprehend the two in one, and define religion to be the science of our unseen, or rather our
supersensual relations. When we discriminate between
the religion'of the intellect and that of the heart, we
denote by the former a belief in those relations, by the
latter a state of character in accordance'with that belief.
There are two or three comments to be made on this
definition before proceeding farther.
1. There is a religion.  There are supersensual truths
and facts.  Even to deny the being of God or the existence of the human soul, is not to eliminate religion from
the circle of the sciences. Being has its cause, its laws;
there are reasons for.the existence of things as they are;
and this cause, these laws, these reasons, are religion.
1 Do Natura Deorum, I. 28.
B
17 
18       CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
The theory which substitutes for the sublime genealogy
of Holy Writ, with its anthemn-like close, " which was the
son of Adam, which was the son of God," the descent,
or rather the ascent, of man from the animalcule, the
tadpole, the prone quadruped, the ape, if true, is religion, - it defines our unseen relatiol.
2. There is but one religion. It is, in the nature of
things, impossible that there should be mnore than one.
If any specific proposition or set of propositions with reference to our unseen relations be true, any other proposition or set of propositions covering the same ground
must be false. If Christianity be true, it is not a reiyion,
as it is sometimes called, but religion. If Judaism also be
true, it is so, not as distinct from, but as coincident with,
Christianity, - the one religion, to which it can bear
only the relation borne by the part to the whole. If
there be portions of truth in other religious systems, they
are not portions of other religions, but portions of the
one religion, which somehow became incorporated with
fables and falsities.
3. This one religion, whatever it be, is cognizable by
the human mind. I do not mean that all supersensual
truth is thus cognizable. There are undoubtedly aspects
in which the Divine character is beyond our conception.
Nay, the mode of our own being and the laws oi finite
existence in general are attainable by us only in part.
But our relations we are capable of knowing. What
God is to us, and what we are to him, we are competent
to understand. Our relations to one another, our obligations, our accountability, our destiny, - whether it be annihilation or continued existence after death,- are also
subjects of olir possible knowledge. Let it not be said
that the themes of religious speculation are infinite, and 
NATURAL AND REVEALED RELIGION.
therefore incomprehensible. We admit that the Infinite
as such cannot be comprehended by a finite mind; but
the finite acts and manifestations of the Infinite, so far
from being incomprehensible, constitute in the last analysis all our knowledge.
We come now to the distinction between natural and
revealed religion. These terms designate, not different
classes of truths, but the different methods in which
religious truth becomes known to mankind. What is
ascertained by the unaided exercise of magi's own powers
is called natural religion; what is received on testimony
is called revealed religion. But the latter is no less
natural than the former. The fatherhood of God, the
forgiveness of sins, mediation, atonement, retribution, if
truths, are truths of Divine and human nature, essential,
everlasting truths, no less so because unkltnown, formerly
to all, and still to the greater part of mankind, than if
mnan were born to the knowledge of them. The Bible,
indeed, recognizes the validity of this statement.  Its
Gospel is "the everlasting Gospel."  Its promises are
"the eternal purpose of God."  Its redemption sacrifice
is "the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world."
Our first inquiry in the department of natural religion
is as to the sufficiency of man's unaided powers to arrive
at a knowledge of religious truth. If this knowledge be
attained, it must be attained either by consciousness, by
intuition, or by reasoning.  Let us consider successively
these alleged sources of religious knowledge.
I. Consciousness.   We  are conscious only of ourselves, - of our own conditions of thought and feeling.
Consciousness gives us no knowledge of anything outside
of ourselves,- no objective knowledge. I am not con
19 
20      CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
scious of these lights, these faces, but only of certain
impressions on my visual organs, which I know, on
grounds independent of my consciousness, must proceed
firom gas-lights and human countenances. I am not
conscious of the existence of my friend. I am conscious
merely of my affection for him, and of my own assurance
that the affection is reciprocated.   lis existence and his
regard for me I have learned through other sources. I
am not conscious of the being and attributes of God.
I cannot be conscious of his providence or of his love to
me.  My own consciousness can teach me nothing concerning his consciousness. I am conscious of the capacity
of reverence, but not of its object,- of the conception
of infinity, but not of the Infinite Being.  When I learn
from sources independent of my consciousness that God
is, and that he does good continually, I am conscious of
love and gratitude to him.
Again, consciousness is of the present moment, not of
the past or the future. I am not conscious of what I said
and did yesterday. I am conscious of certain remeimbrances; but those remembrances, though of the past,
constitute my present state of mind,-  the past, when it
loses its hold on my memory, drops out of my consciousness.  Equally little can I be conscious of the future.   I
may be conscious of hopes more or less well-grounded;
but I am full as vividly conscious, often, of fallacious
hopes, as of hopes that are to be realized.  I am  not
conscious of immortality. I mnay be conscious of adaptation, desire, longing for continued existence; but this
consciousness is no more the evidence of its own realization, than my consciousness of adaptation, desire, longing
for some office or emolument that in no wise depends on
myself, is evidence of its own realization. I am, indeed, 
NATURAL AND REVEALED RELIGION.
conscious of tastes, loves, joys, aspirations, which are
independent of my material organization, and which may
outlast it,- I therefore am not conscious that I shall
wholly die when the body dies. But equally little am I
conscious that I shall necessarily survive the body. On
the other hand, my being is not necessary. I began to
be. A few years ago I was not. It is no more necessary that I should be a century hence, than that I should
have been a century ago.
Consciousness, then, is not an adequate source of religious knowledge.
II. How is it with intuition? Intuition is spontaneous belief,- the perception of the intellect. There are
truths which we discern without reasoning, and which
cannot be demonstrated by reasoning.  Thus we know,
but cannot prove, that a part is less than the whole;
that a straight line is the shortest distance between two
points; that, if equal quantities be taken from equal quantities, the remainders will be equal. In like manner we
know, but cannot prove, that an effect implies a cause;
that what is true of a species is true of the individuals that compose it; that the universal experience and
testimony of mankind are a valid ground of belief.
Truths of this class are necessarily developed with the
development of the mind; they are a part of the mental organism; they are wanting only in the infant, the
idiot, and the undeveloped savage. No sane mind that
has attained to self-reflection denies or doubts them.
Now even the most simple religious truths are obviously
not of this class. There have been well-developed and
lLighly-cultivated minds that have believed in no god and
in many gods, that have rejected personal immortality,
that have acquiesced in the most grovelling materialism.
21 
22      CIHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
Nay, among the philosophical thinkers and writers who
profess to regard intuition as the prime source of our
supersensual knowledge, a very large proportion at the
present moment are pantheists, and maintain that the
human soul at death lapses from self-consciousness, and
is reabsorbed into the impersonal soul of the universe.
On the other hand, those who think that they have an
intuitive perception of God and of immortality are, with
rare exceptions, persons who were nurtured under Christian auspices, whose earliest utterances were shaped in
prayer, about whose infancy there hung a sacred atmospliere, and who drew in these sublime verities with the
first rudiments of knowledge.
I confess that, were I to consult my own present consciousness, I might term the primal truths of religion
intuitive; for I am sure that with me they depend not
on reasoning or testimony, nor could any possible weight
of argument disprove them. But then those truths are
inseparable in my thought from  a Christian  mother's
teachings, and from the dying benediction which is all
that I remember of a sainted father; and there are other
collateral beliefs which I know to be questionable, yet
which I can never question, - which are to me equally
like intuitions, because they came to me  through the
same hallowed medium. And when I reflect on the
countless multitude of keen, clear-sighted men who have
lived and died in ignorance of the one God and the life
eternal, and on the less numerous, yet by no means
feeble, host of vigorous minds that have seen and spurned
the full light of evangelic teaching on these same truths,
have denied their God, and have embraced annihilation'
as their certain destiny, I cannot regard the truths of
religion as necessary or intuitive beliefs. 
NATURAL AND REVEALED RELIGION.
III.  There remains to be considered reasoning as a
source of religious knowledge. The proper province of
reasoning is to perform for our knowledge or belief precisely the office which chemistry performs for material
substances, that of analysis or decomposition. It ascertains the contents, the component parts, of what we
previously knew or believed. A conclusion, in order to
be valid, must be contained in its premises. But as to
religious truth, our premises are but few and scanty;
for what underived data for our reasoning as to themes
which exceed the universe and embrace twin eternities
can lie within the observation and experience of us, the
children of yesterday and the dust?
Is it contended, however, that induction may transcend
the bounds of observation and experience,-  may infer
general laws from the repetition of phenomena, universal
truths from the aggregation of particular facts? I answer, that induction has a religious basis, presupposes a
fundamental truth of.religion, and therefore cannot be
employed to establish that on which alone it depends.
Induction is syllogism with the immutable attributes of
God for a constant term. It is a mode of reasoning
which, though so obviously valid to our conceptions,
never entered into the logic of Pagan antiquity. It is
entirely the growth of Christian culture, -of minds
bathed in the Christian doctrine of a universal and perfect, harmonious and self-consistent Providence.
Very nearly the same statement applies to the argument from' analogy. This too rests on the immutableness of the Divine attributes.  On no other ground
can we infer, where observation and experience do not
reach, the extension of the laws and the embodiment
of the principles which we trace and verify within
23 
24      CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
the range open to our inspection. Analogy, therefore,
like induction, presupposes the foundation-truths of religion, and cannot be employed to establish them. Indeed, induction and analogy coincide entirely with syllogism in this,- that the conclusion is contained in the
premises. When we infer a general law, or an analogous
fact, truth, or system, we simply announce what is included in the Divine immutableness which constitutes
the major premiss, and the observed or known fact, or
bundle of facts, which constitutes the minor premiss.
Moreover, analogy, thus defined, proves nothing. At
the most, it establishes a strong probability, but never
without some openinig for doubt. Analogy is resemblance between objects of different classes, or between
different departments of knowledge. When up to a certain point we trace a resemblance between two classes
or departments, we infer that the resemblance extends to
other points in which we cannot trace it. But it is
always possible that at any one of these points resemblance ceases and difference begins.
Let us take for an instance the immortality of the
soul.  Among the many arguments for immortality derived from analogy, the following seems to me to be the
strongest. To every order of organized and sentient
beings, except man, there is open  a sphere of development and action commensurate  with its capacities.
Analogy leads us to believe that man too has such a
sphere. But he has it not in this world. Here there is
so utter a disparity as to be ludicrous, were it not unspeakably sad, between his vast capacities and desires on
the one hand, and his narrow stage and brief span of
being on the other. There must then, we infer, be a life
after death, which shall afford to man the scope for 
NATURAL AND REVEALED RELIGION.
development  which other animals find here.   Every
other terrestrial existence we can comprehend and round
off in a cycle, all whose points lie within the sphere of
our vision.  MIan is not complete within such a cycle.
His being, therefore, if in analogy with that of his fellow creatures, must reach on beyond death, and if beyond
death, why not forever?  To regard death as the extinc tion of his being makes his existence a solitary phendme non, to which nothing in the entire universe corresponds.
This reasoning has indeed a high probability in its favor,
yet it falls far short of certainty; for man differs from all
other sentient beings so widely, and in so many particulars, as to render it at least possible that this very incompleteness of his existence may be one of the points of
difference.
Again, analogy often points equally to two opposite
conclusions. Thus, on this very subject of immortality,
how many hopeful analogies can we cite, -in the caterpillar whose death is but a new and higher birth,in the grain of wheat reappearing in the sheaf, - in
the annual resurrection-fiat that restores the winter's
desolation, and renders back to tree and shrub a life
which had seemed extinct, yet never was more vigorous
than when it gave no sign!  When  in our happy and
hopeful hours we throw out our unbuttressed arch of
dreamy speculation toward heaven, these seem more
than mere poetic fancies; they become symbols, prophecies, pledges of the life eternal. But when the shadow
of death falls heavily around us; when those go from us
who carry with them a solid portion of our own being;
when we count the rapidly stealing years, and feel that
our noon has passed, and we are gliding down the
western slope of our brief day; when the fingers of
2
25 
26      CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
disease are fumbling at our heart-strings, -then a
troop of sad analogies force themselves upon us. We
think of the blighted buds and germs, immeasurably
more numerous than the fructifying, of the destruction
with no resurrection in many departments of organized
being, of the loss of identity in so many cases where
there is a continuity of life; and these resemblances are
melancholy presages of victorious death and a devouring
grave. In fine, there is no form of belief, no hope, no
fear, which may not fortify itself by analogies. Analogy,
therefore, proves nothing, and cannot be a trustworthy
source of religions knowledge.
What, then, is the office of anaiogy?  It serves, in the
first place, to guide us in the investigation of truth, and,
secondly, to answer objections.
1. To guide us in the investigation of truth. The
mere wish to discern truth is fruitless. Nature has but
two answers - yes and no - for her inquirer; and
whether he ever gets a yes, depends entirely on his skill
in shaping his questions. What shall we ask? How
shall we  direct our inquiries in an unexplored  field?
Analogy must frame our questions, must suggest what
we may reasonably expect to find. The likeness of
tiings known and familiar may occur in things new and
unexplored, and it is for this likeness that we are to
look and ask, seeking, in what is as yet unknown, facts,
principles, and laws analogous to those with which we
are already conversant. Analogy thus carries the torch
before us through the dimn aisles of the temple of truth.
2. The second office of analogy is to remove objections
which we cannot answer, against facts or truths in whose
behalf we have a competent weight of positive evidence.
Of course, to answer objections is thle readiest way of 
NATURAL AND REVEALED RELIGION.
removing them. But often, from their very nature, or
from the finiteness of our knowledge, they do not admit
of being answered. In this case they are adequately
met, if we can show that similar and equal objections lie
against facts or truths which all men regard as absolutely
certain. Thus against the evangelic history infidels urge
some objections which we must admit to be unanswerable; but if we can show that precisely the same objections lie against portions of history which no sane man
denies or doubts, analogy proves these objections utterly
futile and nugatory, even though they be unanswerable.
For instance, in the book entitled " Historic Doubts relative to Napoleon Bonaparte," Archbishop Whately,
with consummate skill and yet with transparent fairness
and honesty, applies to the several Memoirs of Napoleon
and Histories of his times precisely the principles on
which Hume and infidels of his school had impugned the
authenticity of the Gospels; and on those principles he
proves that there is not a leading fact of Napoleon's life
which does not admit of the gravest doubt, and yet more,
that in all probability no such man as Napoleon ever
existed.  Now, as this line of argument could shake no
man's belief in Napoleon's existence and history, reasoning from analogy, we conclude that the same line of
argument has no validity against the Gospels.
We  have a masterly specimen of this use of the argument from analogy in the fifteenth chapter of St. Paul's
First Epistle to the Corinthians. He, first, from the
resurrection of Christ proves that of all men, shows that
Jesus rose expressly as the type and pledge of universal
imnmortality, and rests the whole positive stress of his
reasoning on this glorious fact, attested by a cloud of witnesses, most of whom were living when he wrote.   But
27
0 
NATURAL AND REVEALED RELIGION.
removing them. But often, from their very nature, or
from the finiteness of our knowledge, they do not admit
of being answered. In this case they are adequately
met, if we can show that similar and equal objections lie
against facts or truths which all men regard as absolutely
certain. Thus against the evangelic history infidels urge
some objections which we must admit to be unanswerable; but if we canl show that precisely the same objections lie against portions of history which no sane man
denies or doubts, analogy proves these objections utterly
futile and nugatory, even though they be unanswerable.
For instance, in the book entitled " Historic Doubts relative to Napoleon Bonaparte," Archbishop Whately,
with consummate skill and yet with transparent fairness
and honesty, applies to the several Memoirs of Napoleon
and Histories of his times precisely the principles on
which Hume and infidels of his school had impugned the
authenticity of the Gospels; and on those principles he
proves that there is not a leading fact of Napoleon's life
which does not admit of the gravest doubt, and yet more,
that in all probability no such man as Napoleon ever
existed.  Now, as this line of argument could shake no
man's'belief in Napoleon's existence and history, reasoning from analogy, we conclude that the same line of
argument has no validity against the Gospels.
We have a masterly specimen of this use of the argument from analogy in the fifteenth chapter of St. Paul's
First Epistle to the Corinthians. He, first, from the
resurrection of Christ proves that of all men, shows that
Jesus rose expressly as the type and pledge of universal
imnmortality, and rests the whole positive stress of his
reasoning on this glorious fact, attested by a cloud of witnesses, most of whom were living when he wrote.   But
27 
NATURAL AND REVEALED RELIGION.
Yet more, the argument from design does not establish
the unit or the personality of God. The harmony of nature is not readily perceived. Objects appear in isolated
groups; events in isolated cycles.  There is war among
the elements. The sun ripens, the swollen river devastates, the harvest-field. The rain fills, the hot breath of
summer dries, the fountain and the lake.  Nature seems
a vast battle-ground between opposing designs and antagonistic forces. Hence the human mind, constrained to
believe in the existence of superhuman wisdom and
power, resorts to polytheism, and cantons out the creation into separate provinces, each with its tutelar divinity.
Polytheism is the earliest stage of natural theology.
With the progress of knowledge philosophy has birth.
Contemplative minds awake to a sense of pervading
system and order in the material universe. At this point
speculation takes one of two directions. It either, still
impressed with the perpetual conflict of good and evil,
happiness and misery, in the world, resorts to the Oriental
dualism, and conceives of a supremely good and a supremely evil principle, who share the sovereignty of the
universe; or else, as in the Greek philosophy, it blends
inseparably the shaping and benignant spirit with the
brute and resisting matter through which it struggles for
an ever more complete and full manifestation of itself, and
thus frames an essentially pantheistic theology. There
is reason to doubt whether natural religion, where the
light of revelation has not preceded it, has ever transcended these forms of belief; and it is a significant fact,
that in the present age the philosophy which ignores
revelation constantly tends to return to pantheism, so
that in the speculations of many of the profoundest
thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the
idea of a personal God, the object of reverence, worship,
29 
30      CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
and prayer, is wholly eliminated, -nature is God, man
is God become self-conscious, everything is God, and
God is everything or- nothing.
As regards a future life, by virtue of intense longings,
lame analogies, and inconclusive reasonings, natural religion attains to the conjecture, the strong hope of a continued existence; but in no instance has it reached a
confidence sufficient for consolation in the severest stress
of need, or adequate to furnish rules and motives for
the conduct of life. Indeed, Cicero, in his attempt to
prove immortality, is careful to show that, if his reasoning is faulty, annihilation is no great evil;1 and when
his daughter dies, he confesses that he has lost all faith in
his own arguments.2   Nay, the strongest argument for
immortality that has come down to us from the ancient
world is based on the assumption of the past eternity of
the human soul, and may be compressed into the simple
formula,-" That which had no beginning can have no
end." 8
As to the duties growing out of man's relations to God
and his fellow-beings, they are derived in part from the
essential conditions of life and of society, so that they
could not remain wholly unknown; while, on the other
hand, the comprehension of their entire extent and their
mutual interdependence can result only from those clear
and adequate conceptions of religious truth which cannot
be reached by man's unaided powers. Accordingly, while
the ancients promulgated many sound moral precepts,
there is hardly one of themn who has not impressed his
sanction on some atrocious immorality. Even the divine
Plato recommends the murder of feeble and sickly infants, expressly allows drunkenness at the feasts of Bac
2 Ep. ad Atticum, XII. 14.
I Tusc. Qumst. I. 5 - 8.
8 Plato's Phaedo, 47 - 58. 
NATURAL AND REVEALED RELIGION.
chus, and authorizes some of the worst forms of licentiousness.
I admit that modern deists have in numerous instances
maintained a pure and lofty personal monotheism, have
expressed firm faith in immortality, and have inculcated
and practised the severest morality. But I cannot forget
that they were educated as Christians, and their subsequent unbelief could not shut out the light that came to
them from the Sun of righteousness. To determine the
utmost amount of religious truth that man can attain independently of revelation, we must interrogate minds
that can have derived nothing from revelation.  And we
certainly cannot err in assuming that classic antiquity had
reached the climax of extra-Christian culture. In all but
their religious aspects the Greek and the Roman mind
transcended the powers of the modern intellect, and have
left us, in poetry, in history, in philosophy, and in some of
the fine arts, models which we can emulate, but cannot
equal, giving color, indeed, to the belief that the early
ages possessed in mental force and acumen and in creative genius the same pre-eminence.over modern times
which we cannot but recognize in the physical proportions
and strength of the ancients. But even Plato falls short
of the clear conception of one personal Deity, and there
hangs ever about his theology a pantheistic haze. Even
Seneca, with an almost perfect system of ethics, fails to
enter into the mystery of sorrow, cowers under  the
inevitable burdens and sufferings of humanity,'and recommends that recourse to suicide which he illustrated by
his own example.  Even the dying Socrates, though he
trusts that he is going to the society of good men, warns
his friends not to be too confident in a matter attended
by so much uncertainty.
31 
LECTURE II.
REVELATION.
IN my last Lecture, I considered the sources of religious
knowledge which are open to man through the unaided
exercise of his own powers. I propose this evening to
illustrate the place and office of Revelation with reference to Natural Religion.
Revelation denotes unveiling, -  uncovering.  It implies
the previous existence of that which is uncovered, or
made known. It excludes the idea of newness, of invention, of recent creation.  Watt invented the steamengine, and Arkwright the spinning-jenny, which had no
previous existence;- Galileo revealecd thle satellites of
Jupiter, which are as old as the planet in its present
form, and, according to the nebular hypothesis, older;
Harvey revealed the circulation of the blood, which had
been an unrevealed fact through all the antecedent ages
of human history. Joseph Smith, his associates and
successors, created what is peculiar to Mormonism;  M[ahomnet created those portions of Mahometanism that he
did not borrow, which are not truth, because they are the
product of his own mind: we Christians believe that
Jesus Christ revealed what is peculiar to Christianity,
which is truth, because it was not the offspring of his
own mind or age, but the disclosure of what was in the
beginning in the mind of God, and in the nature, duty,
and destiny of man. 
REVELATION.
We thus see that it is only natural religion which can
furnish the material for revelation.   The distinction
between natural and revealed religion is not essential,
but modal, - referring not to the substance, but to the
means of our knowledge.  The clown on the hill-top
and the astronomer in his observatory see the same
heavens; but where the former beholds only glittering
points, the latter can trace the diversified disc of every
planet, and can measure spaces and motions as if he trod
the celestial paths with his chain and compass.  In like
manner, we can with the naked eye of reason and selfspun philosophy discern and know little of the spiritual
universe, little even of our own nature, relations, and
destiny; but when Christ puts the telescope to our eyes,
and the measuring-rod in our hands, we can see and
measure the things of which we had before been dimly
cognizant or wholly ignorant.  The revealed religion of
the earth is the natural religion of heaven, -would be
our natural religion, had we sufficiently comprehensive
and penetrating minds to make it so,- will be our natural religion when the scales shall fall from our eyes in
dying. Christianity, if true, is the fundamental law of
spiritual being, as constant as the laws of nature, as unchangeable as the circuits of the stars. It is the physiology of the divine and the human spirit, the geography
of the world of probation, duty, and accountability in
which we live, the astronomy of those upper heavens
where are the everlasting mansions of the redeemed.
This physiology it is of immeasurable importance for man
to know, that he may act worthily of his nature,- that
he may not dwarf it, or debase it, or leave it undeveloped. This geography it profoundly concerns him to
learn, that he may use the world as not abusing it.
33
2 *
c 
84      CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
With this astronomy it is for his highest interest and
happiness that he become conversant, that from disappointment, and sorrow, and the deathl-shladow, when the
whole lower firmament is darkened, he may lift his eyes
to those unfading lights that burn around the eternal
tlirone. But, as I showed you in my last Lecture, this is
a department in which man has not at his own command
the requisite means of research and sources of knowledge. I therefore maintain, that not only the contents
of revelation, but the fact of revelation, belongs to natural religion; that is, that revelation is not only an historical fact, but a fact that was to have been anticipated on
a priori grounds,-  on grounds connected with the nature of man and of God.
I. For, first, revelation is a postulate of'human nature.
Its subjects are such as necessarily command the curiosity of the mind only a little raised above a mere animal
existence. Religion comprises a department in which
every thoughtful man perceives tlat there is something
to be known,- real, objective truth. There comes up
from the earliest ages that have left us their record the
cry of the inquiring, longing soul,  "0  that  I knew
where I might find Him!  Wherewith shall I approach
Him, and how shall I order my ways before Him? If a
man die, shall he live again?" And with this cry comes
the thought of a revelation, as the only means by which
it can be answered. The sense of this need found voice
repeatedly among the philosophers of classic antiquity.
Iamblichus, in describing the religious belief of Pythagoras and his followers, writes: " It is manifest that
those things are to be done which are pleasing to God;
but what they are it is not easy to know, except man
were taught them by God himself, or by some person 
REVELATION.
who had received them from God, or obtained the knowledge of them through some divine means." 1 There is a
very striking passage in one of Plato's Dialogues, from
which it woul4 appear that he, or Socrates, in whose
name he writes, anticipated a revelation as near at hand.
Socrates meets one of his disciples going to a temple to
pray, tries to convince him that he knows neither how to
pray nor what to pray for, and then adds: "It seems
best to me that we keep quiet...... It is absolutely
necessary that we wait with patience, till we know certainly how we ought to behave toward God and man.
..... Till that time arrives, it may be safer to avoid
offering sacrifices, of which you know not whether they
are acceptable to God or not." 2  But the most remarkable passage of all is in the reply to his arguments for
immortality put by Plato into the mouth of one of the
disciples of Socrates:  "I agree with you, Socrates,
that to discover the certain truth of these things in this
life is absolutely impossible, or at least very difficult.
Yet not to inquire into what may be said about them, or
to desist from our inquiry before we have carried it as far
as possible, is the mark of a mean  and low spirit.  We
ought, therefore, by all means to do one of these two
things,- either by hearkening to instruction and by our
own diligent study to find out the truth, or, if this be im possible, then to fix upon that which to human reason
appears best and most probable, and to make this our
raft, while we sail through life, unless we could have a
more sure and safe conveyance, such as some divine conm munication would be." 3 Simnilar expressions might be
1     IfEpL rou IvOayoptKOV OLOV, Chap. 28.
g Second Alcibiades, 22, 23.
8 Phedo, 78.  X6yov Ofcov rLior.
35
A 
36       CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
multiplied, showing that the religion of nature is through     out an interrogative religion, which yearns for an answer
to its questions from a more than human wisdom.
In accordance with this view, we find a universal
appetency for revelation. Sacred books, oracles, proph     ets, have always been received with a ready faith. Chris     tian missionaries, in earlier and later times, while they
have often encountered insuperable obstacles, have left
no record of antecedent scepticism as to the fact of a
revelation. On the other hand, the very declaration that
they were bearers of a divine message has in innumera     ble instances opened to its reception minds and hearts,
which would have been stubbornly closed against such
teachings as they might have promulgated on their own
authority.
I know, indeed, that modern deists have disclaimed
revelation as a postulate of the human soul. But why?
Because they have enriched their naturalism with the
spoils of Christianity. Were we carefully to explore a
vast and curiously furnished subterranean chamber  by
tile light of a torch, we might on a second visit dis     cern the shape and size of every object by the few and
straggling rays of light from the cave's mouth. But let
another party enter for the first time without a torch,
they would stumble at every step, and would be able to
distinguish nothing by the same light by which we had
seen everything. Modern deists in Christian countries
had the light of the torch, before they deemed them    selves independent of it.  The  ancients, groping from
the'first in darkness, longed for the torch, and despaired
of finding their way without it.
II. Tllheie is antecedent reason in the nature of things
to suppose that the postulate of the human soul for divine 
REVELATION.
revelation would be satisfied. Unless the religious craving be an exception, there is no demand of man that has
not its answer, no want that is not supplied, no yearning
that does not find its response. Hunger levies contributions on every department of nature, and there is no zone
or climate that yields not food fit for its inhabitants. For
thirst there are springs even in the desert, and reservoirs
in the arid rock.  For man's social cravings, provision
is made in the essential laws and conditions of birth and
nurture, and in. the necessities and mutual dependences
of even the lowest types of savage life.  For the still profomunder need of loving and being loved, there is no relation between human beings which has not its instinctive
and spontaneous action upon the emotional nature, so
that in the whole  commerce of domestic and social life
there is a perpetual interweaving of more and more fine
and delicate fibres of sympathy and fellow-feeling. The
same correlation of demand  and supply pervades  the
entire realm of science and knowledge.   No class of
objects or phenomena, however recondite, is presented
to our curiosity, without means of ascertaining its nature,
laws, sources, and causbes. Among things observed and
experienced no question is ever asked, and asked persistently, for which the answer  is not lodged within
the seeker's reach. How profound are the researches,
how severely accurate the discoveries, constantly made
as to objects that might seem too vast for comprehension, or too minute for cognizance, or too remote for
precise measurement and analysis!  We  mark the per turbations of Uranus, detect the metallic particles in the
atmosphere of the sun, trace organic life back to its infin itesimal type and outbudding. MIeanwhile, here is our
instinct of reverence, which has no defiinite object, - our
37 
838      CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
inquiry into supersensual truth, which returns to us as
void, as unsatisfied, as in the infancy of the race,- our
earnest onlooking, before which hangs death, no less than
ever a dense, impenetrable veil.
Not only are the soul's religious wants profound and
intense, but mere mental progress and cultivation, so
far from meeting them, only render them more utterly
hopeless. Thus in the ruder days of Athens and Rome
there was doubtless a sincere, and to a certain extent a
satisfying, faith in the gods of the popular mythology and
in the fables about Elysium; while with the growth of
knowledge, religion on the one hand rationalized itself
into pantheism, and on the other attenuated itself into
atheism. 
These religious wants of man, as I showed you in my
last Lecture, are not susceptible of satisfaction through
the agency of the human mind, with the instruments of
inquiry that natively belong to it. But their very existence authorizes the assurance that they are satisfied
somehow or somewhere. Now revelation is to the religious wants what food is to hunger, water to thirst, kindred to the loving heart, scientific truth to the inquirilng
intellect.
III. There is, also, in the nature of God antecedent
reason to suppose that he would have made a revelation.
I will for the present exclude from my argument those
fatherly attributes of thle Divine character, for which we
are indebted, as I think, to revelation, and which, therefore, we cannot employ in proof of a revelation without
reasoning in a circle. I will simply assume, what the
marks of contrivance in the universe certainly demonstrate, creative design, that is, creative intelligence; and
I will suppose that this intelligence belongs to a single 
REVELATION.
divine mind, though my argument would remain unaffected on the hypothesis of dualism, or even of polythleism.
o                       1  11         
God made manl,- made him not mere-brute existence, but mind, soul, will, affection. He has made each
human mind capable of communion with other created
minds, so that it can take cognizance of their thoughts
and emotions, and can receive from them knowledge,
sentiment, and impulse.  Is it conceivable that he should
have shut out' from himself the very avenues of communion which he has opened to created spirits, -that he
should have put into the hands of his creatures keys
with which they can unlock every chamber of intellect,
fancy, and feeling, and can with ihitimate consciousness
pervade, as it were, the whole of one another's inward
being,- and that, as regards himself, he should have
locked every door and thrown away the keys? The
power to open every soul to the direct communion of
every other soul includes and implies the power to open
every soul to his own direct communion. The fact that
he has thus established communion between soul and
soul, renders it probable that he has also established communion between himself and the souls of men.
Still further, we can hardly conceive of God's having
created intelligent minds, without the will to become
himself an object of their intelligence,- to be distinctly
recognized and known by them. So far is the idea of
revelation from being unnatural, that any mode of communication would seem more natural than eternal silence.
To my mind, while some of the early Scriptural narratives savor so much of anthropomorphism, that I cannot
object to a somewhat free and allegorical interpretation
of them, the literal sense - according to which the voice
39 
40      CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
of the Almighty was heard in the garden in the cool ot
the day, was listened and replied to by the first-born
among men, was made audible to the patriarch in his
tent, and to Samuel in his bed hard by the ark of the
covenant - has a naturalness, a reality, a lifelikeness, 0,
immeasurably greater than the heartless theory according to which the Creator has abandoned his offspring to
perpetual orphanhood, has cut himself off forever from
their conscious intercourse with him, has given them no
authentic and incontrovertible tokens of his being, his
nature, and their relation to him.
Again, man must have been created with some definite
design or purpose on the part of the Creator, as to the
development and exercise of his moral and active powers.
It is impossible that God should not have a will as to the
dispositions and deeds of his intelligent offspring, and
laws which he would have them obey. On all the rest
of creation he has impressed his will and law, and all
thlings are  obedient thereunto.  Inanimate  naturie is
bound by adamantine chains of immutable law. The
fiat, " Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further," throbs
in every pulse of air and ocean, in the waves of light and
sound, in growth, vicissitude, catastrophe, and disintegration. Instinct in animals attends and attests design, and
not one of them call transcend or fall short of his manifest place, office, and purpose in the universe. Man
alone has an autonomic will, the power of choice between
good and evil, between parallel courses of seeming good,
between like, diverse, or opposite aims. Man alone is
capable of obeying or disobeying law.  And  no one
doubts that there are laws in obeying which he fulfils
the purpose, works out the destiny, for which he was
created. But he is capable of attaining to the knowledge 
REVELATION.
of those laws only approximately and imperfectly. He
had a fair opportunity and an open field, room for the
trial of all kinds of moral experiments, ample time for
ascertaining the right and the good, in the thousands of
years that preceded the Christian era. He had all the
lights of prolonged experience, profound philosophy, high
and varied civilization. And with what results? As we
have seen, there had been attained nothing that can now
be regarded as a perfect system of ethics.  There was no
vice which had not its apologists, no virtue which had not
its detractors, among  the wisest and best men of their
day.  Nay, some essential virtues were not even recognized by nanme, or were regarded as tokens of imbecility.
Moreover, if Jesus Christ was not a revealer of God's
will, his system must be ranked among the most grossly
vicious ethical systems of antiquity; for Christianity, if
not a divine revelation, pretended to be one, was foisted
in upon the world by a gigantic imposture, and therefore
can never reckon veracity and honesty in its catalogue
of virtues.  Now it is incredible that an intelligent Creator should, with a definite design, have created a race
of free moral agents; have made them incapable of ascertaining by the best exercise of their own powers what lihe
would have them do and abstain from, and yet at no
time and in no way have given them direct instruction is
to his will and law.
If we further assume the Divine benignity and mercy,
which most writers on natural theology regard as proved
independently of revelation, our argument becomes still
stronger. Benignity in its very essence craves recognition and communion. Love does not conceal itself from
those whom it blesses. If God be a father, his paternal
attributes of necessity involve self-revelation. That he
41 
42      CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
should have left his being to be inferred or surmised;
that he should have given his children neither instruction, warning, assurance, nor hope; that he should have
wrapt them in impenetrable and invincible ignorance, as
to the greater part of what they yearn to know concerning him; that he should have suffered those of them
who  would gladly do his will to be bewildered aid
doubtful as regards that will; that he should have abandoned the less dutiful to waywardness and guilt, without
a single appeal to that filial feeling which often lies deep
in the very worst heart, and becomes an efficient means
of repentance and reformation; this is so atrociously
unfathlierly,  so utterly opposed to what our own natural
affection renders probable, that we must set it aside as
an untenable hypothesis. The fatherhood of God and
revelation, then, suppose and imply each other. If the
former be a doctrine, the latter is equally a postulate,
of natural religion. If God has withdrawn himself forever from direct communication with men, then, whatever else may be his relation to them,- Creator, Sovereign, Judge, - he is not their Father.
On these grounds we claim that revelation rests for
its intrinsic probability on the basis of natural religion.
The denial of revelation rejects the fatherhood of God,
casts doubt on his benignity, negatives the inferences
that flow from intelligent design, and, if it does not land
us in atheism, plunges us into the hardly less dreary mist
and rayless gloom of pantheism, of a self-energizing and
self-organizing nature, an animus gr aninta mundi, which
can be the object of neither trust, reverence, nor love.
Here we are met by the objection, - On these
grounds revelation should have been primeval and uni 
REVELATION.
versal. I answer, in the first place, that to no one who
admits that God has ever made a revelation of himself
will a primeval revelation appear improbable, to few
doubtful. If we admit the authenticity of the Hebrew
Scriptures, revelation was coeval with the creation of
man. The religious history of mankind as recorded in
the Old Testament corresponds with what on a priori
grounds might seem natural and probable on the part of
a father God;  frequent direct interposition in the infancy of the race; rudimentary instruction and progressive methods of discipline during its adolescence; a full
and final disclosure of truth, law, motive, sanction, recompense, for its maturity. And while I believe that
Christianity may stand firmly on its own basis and be
authenticated by its own evidence, I contend that, as
the close and consummation of a series of revelations, it
presents the more manifest tokens of its accordance with
nature, with the progressive development of art, science,
and civilization, with the law of growth and the sucession
of epochs, which we trace everywhere in creation, read in
the strata of the earth's surface, and discern even in the
genesis of the solar system and the stellar universe.
Leaving Scripture aside, we have numerous vestiges
of a primeval revelation. A theogon;, a birth of the
gods, forms a part of the mythology of all nations, —
fabulous tradition thus running back to a time when the
popular deities had not begun to be, and generally to a
time when there was a single divinity, whose offspring
were subsequently born to a rival or superior godshliip.
This tradition has for its only possible historical interpretation a pristine state in which men worshipped one God,
(how taught, except by revelation from himself?) and
from which they gradually lapsed into hero, nature, or
43 
44      CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
idol worship. Of parallel import is the tradition which
represents a Saturnian age, a state of simplicity, justice,
and innocence, a divine rule recognized and felt among
men, as the earliest phasis of society, and fraud, violence,
and sensuality as intruding forces through which the
earth ceased to be a paradise. This, translated into history, means that the knowledge of the right and the
good was in the keeping of the fathers of the race, (how
but by revelation?) and was lost by their posterity.
Now, if there was a primeval revelation, the fact of its
loss by the greater part of mankind is in accordance with
the analogy of nature; for both the influence of character on belief, and the suffering of children and posterity
from the faults, crimes, and guilt of parents and ancestors,
are well known and universally recognized laws. Pure
and noble beliefs cannot be retained with a corrupt heart,
or transmitted by a. corrupt ancestry. In all time, moral
depravity has left its trail on the intellect, and each generation has inherited the errors and falsities of the'preceding'age.  Had  man's religious belief and growth
obeyed other laws, then religion would have been an
anomaly in human nature; and if revelation had been
subject to other laws, then revelation would have been
anomalous and unnatural. Is it maintained that a supremely good Creator could not but have replaced the
forgotten revelation, everywhere and in each generation,
by new communications from himself?  In order to this,
he must have abrogated the law by which children inherit mentally and morally from their parents, - a law
which is of unspeakable benefit as a constant motive to
healthful activity and diligence, and an effective agent in
human progress and improvement.  Indeed, successive
generations could not be sustained as moral beings, were 
REVELATION.
there a direct interposition to replace the losses of each
generation, and to restore the children to privileges forfeited by the parents.  In a world so constituted, there
might be a splendid pageant of divine administration, but
there could be no human forethought, energy or selfdependence.
But it may be asked, Why should Christianity, the
perfect religion, have been withheld from the first four
thousand years of human history? Be it true or false,
does not its arbitrary promulgation at a precise period of
time take it wholly out of the range of natural development, so that it must stand or fall on its claims as atsolutely supernatural? I answer, that if there was no
reason other than the sovereign, unconditioned will of
the Creator for the epoch of its promulgation, -if it
would have taken its place as fitly at an earlier or a latei
period, - then the question concerning it has no pertinency in our discussion of natural religion. But, on the
other hand, if Christ came in the fulness of time, when
the world was prepared for him, no sooner, no later, then
was his advent as natural as are the phenomena of the successive seasons, and there is as much philosophical exactness as poetical beauty in those sacred words commonly
applied to him: " He shall come down like rain upon
the grass, as showers that water the earth." Let us try
the question.
The leading characteristic of Christianity is, that its
disclosures reach through eternity,-  that its sanctions
are drawu from a retribution beyond the grave. It is
only civilized man that can be efficiently influenced-by
motives of this class. The roving savage has neither the
power nor the habit of calculating and depending on the
future. He knows not and cares not what will be on the
46 
46      CHRISTIANITY THiE RELIGION OF NATURE.
morrow. He has no permanent residence, but pitches or
strikes his tent as the caprice of the moment may dictate.
Hle lays no plans, exercises no forethlought, ventures no
predictions, and lives entirely in the past and present.
There is nothing in his mode of subsistence, which should
make him dwell with either hope, doubt, or fear on the
future.  To impress on such minds a profound and enduring sense of a distant and limitless future, is in the nature
of things impossible.  Modern missionaries have found
and pronounced it so, and  the wisest of them  admit
that they must civilize hleatlhen  nations inI order to
make  Christian institutions permale.ent, and  that they
must  therefore  imitate  the  patience  of  Him-i  wlo,
though he purposed man's redemption from the foiiutidationl of the world, waited forty centuries or more for
the fulness of time to arrive.
Now this wandering, unsettled  life was the natural
condition of the human race in its early infancy. It was
the condition of the major part of the race for many
centuries.  It was the condition of the Jews and of most
of the Asiatics in the time of Moses. Hence the appropriateness, and therefore the naturalness, of the Mosaic
revelation. A religion with temporal sanctions was precisely what the Hebrews and the age of the Exodus
needed. Christianity was too far-reaching, too spiritual,
for the apprehension and faith of such a horde of nomads
as the exiles from.Egypt, -a horde much resembling
those that now range over the steppes of Tartary. I regard it as one of the most manifest tokens of the Divine
origin of the Mosaic system, that it was silent with regard to a future life, and promulgated temporal rewards
and punishments alone.  This was as far as the forethought of the people and the age of the great lawgiver 
REVELATION.
could go, and the attempt to draw motives from beyond
the confines of mortality would have been useless and
abortive.
But the institutions of Moses gradually changed his
nation from a pastoral into an agricultural people, from a
wandering into a settled community,  and introduced
among  them the arts and refinements of civilization.
Meanwhile the same process was going on in many lands,
and was culminating in Southern Europe. In morals
there was indeed no progress, nay, rather a retrograde
movement. But civilized man always acquires the habit
of looking forward to the future and providing for it, of
looking far along the ages and laying plans for the benefit of even remote posterity.  Civilized life cherishes
forethought, and makes men live more in the future than
in the past or present.  This forecasting habit had its
genesis and growth in the leading nations between Moses
and Christ.  With it had sprung up everywhere a vague
belief in man's immortality; for, as soon as men thought
of the future, the instinctive desire of continued existence took an objective shape, and, though without adequate proof, assumed a strong hold on the faith of large
classes of enlightened  men, both Jews  and Gentiles.
Thus, in a civilization, corrupt indeed, yet endowed with
forethought, and prepared to occupy the domain in the
eternal future offered to its belief and endeavor, was a
matrix provided for the birth and growth of Christianity.
At this time, too, not only was civilization in the
ascendant, but almost the whole civilized world  had
become united in the Roman Empire, so that every
pulsation of intellectual and spiritual life was felt across
continents, and almost from the Atlantic to the Pacific
shore of the Eastern hemisphere.  The union of so many
47 
48      CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
and diverse nations under a single sovereignty multiplied avenues and modes of intercourse, created a community of language and of thought, and thus presented
a more favorable condition of the world for the promulgation of a relig,ion fitted to be universal, than had ever
existed before, or has recurred until the present century.
Had Christ come earlier, he would, as we have seen,
hlave found men too unsettled and improvident in their
worldly habits to accept a religion whose treasures were
to be laid up in heaven.  Had he come later, even the
area of civilization would have been contracted in the
decline of the Roman Empire; while there would have
been wanting the general currency of the Greek tongue,
the far-reaching filaments of international union, and the
homogeneous elements which, notwithstanding the vast
diversity of races, pervaded the Empire in its palmy
days, and favored the almost simultaneous diffusion of
the new religion throughout the civilized world. But if
Christianity was thus promulgated at the very time when
need, preparation, anid opportunity concurred to crave,
foster, and diffuse it, then was its advent postulated by
man's and God's nature. Its Author's birth and life,
miracles and resurrection, supernatural ~lough they be
in the common acceptation of that word, are in a profounder sense pre-eminently natural; and had that age
passed away unmarked by the coming of Him whose
name makes it illustrious for all eternity, what would
have been called the natural order and sequence of
human experiences and earthly events would bave been
in the last degree unnatural.
If tl-3 argument of this Lecture is not fallacious, I have
shown you that the antecedent probability of revelation 
.
REVELATION.
is a doctrine of natural religion.  Let it not be thought
that this is a matter of mere words, and that the question of the truth or falsity of Christianity is in no wise
affected by our vindicating or disclaiming for it a coinci-,
dence with natural religion. It has been the habit of
Christian writers and preachers to represent the Chlristian revelation as something abnormal, exceptional, in
antagonism to nature, an intrusion on the order of
creation, and therefore not antecedently probable  or
intrinsically credible. It has not been unusual to admit
that the facts connected with the promulgation of Chlristianity are in themselves improbable, and then to set
over against them the still greater improbability that the
array and mass of human testimony in behalf of those
facts should be false.  Now this weighing of opposite
imnprobabilities is a delicate and doubtful process, and few
minds hold so even a balance as to be safely intrusted
witli it.  That which is in itself improbable, is made
scarcely less so by the heaping up of remote testimony,
however strong. With the temper of the present age,
prone to question authority and to rely on intrinsic criteria of truth, an argument like that of Paley's Evidences is full as apt to create scepticism as to confirm
belief.
No one can attach a higher value than I do to the
attestations to the genuineness and authenticity of the
Gospels so industriously gathered by Paley, Lardner,
and the great divines of their school. To my mind,
no series of events in ancient history stands on so
solid a basis of human testimony as that which sustains
the history of Jesus Christ, with its inseparable accompaniment of marvel and miracle. But I confess that
this testimony seems to me immeasurably stronger in
3
49
D 
50      CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
behalf of what is intrinsically probable and natural, than
it would in behalf of facts in themselves unnatural and
improbable. Testimony should never have an unnecessary strain laid upon it. It is adequate to confirm what
it is inadequate to establish.  Even in a court of justice,
the skilled advocate deems it necessary to make the
theory of his case a programme for his evidence, and
is very chary of producing witnesses whose testimony
diverges from that theory, even though it be substantially on his side; and circumstantial evidence which
establishes an assumed theory of a case is more likely to
break down opposing witnesses, than to be neutralized by
them.  Of the testimony for the Gospel history, the limitations of my present course will not allow me to treat.
But  my  argument  is this:  The  testimony- varied
and strong - which may be adduced in corroboration of
the genuineness and truth of the Gospels is urged in
behalf of what is intrinsically natural and probable, independently of testimony. The Divine nature is virtually
pledged to reveal itself. Revelation has its place in the
"circle of natural needs, of necessary truths. The Christian revelation, coming as it did when the world was best
fitted to receive it, meets an inherent want, a universal
craving of mankind, the desire of all nations, the prophecy of all antecedent ages, the earnest postulate of the
religion of nature. 
LECTURE  III.
MIRACLES.
IN my last Lecture I showed you that natural religion
renders revelation probable. But revelation needs to be
authenticated. Unless authenticated, it is no revelation.
It is maintained, however, by many, that divine truth
finds its sufficient evidence in the human consciousness,
and that therefore any authority from without is superfluous, and intrinsically improbable. The following is a
fair statement of a theory, which has among its advocates
not a few ingenious thinkers and excellent men of our
time, and which seems to be the phasis of belief entertained by the greater part of the latitudinarian members
of the English Church, whose recent writings have attracted so much attention on both sides of' the Atlantic.
The Hebrew prophets, the Clhristian apostles, and Jesus
Christ himself, were neither the subjects nor the workers
of miracles. They were good men, Christ pre-eminently
good. All men, in proportion to their moral capacity,
are the recipients of teaching and inspiration from God,
and these men, from the intensity of their religious
genius, had a larger capacity of divine illumination than
belongs even to the better portion of mankind in general. But they had no other authority than that which
accrued to them from their superior capacity and excellence. They stood in no official relation to mankind,
other than that which we should bear if we  had similar 
52  CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
capacity and excellence. Their teachings address themselves to our receptivity, and are truth to us only so far
as they accord with whatever of divine illumination there
is in us. Our inspiration is the only test and touchstone
of thleirs. What we do not feel to be true, we have no
reason for believing to be true. What is not in our own
consciousness is none the more sacred to us because it
entered into their belief. They were not incapable of
error in matters of religion, and we are right in rejecting
as error whatever in their teachings does not harmonize
with our highest conceptions of God, of duty, and of a
future life.
To this theory I would reply, first, that it covers only
a portion of the ground occupied by the Scriptures and
religious teachings.  There are, I grant, some subjects
of prime importance, as to which we may verify the truth
by our own consciousness, and as to which the consciousness of a sincerely good man may be regarded as infallible. This is the case with cardinal virtues and fundamental duties.  The consciousness of every man who has
obeyed the precepts of. the Sermon on the Mount attests
their coincidence with the Eternal Right. I trust that
there are many of you whose belief in the Beatitudes
with which that Sermon commences could not be made
stronger, were they at this moment miraculously republishlied in your hearing. The interior consciousness, closely
interrogated, also confirms the reality of a righteous retribution, which works in the soul's experience even when
it leaves no outward sign. But there are other departments of religious truth, as to which even moral perfection might fail to give certain knowledge, and in which
consciousness offers no adequate test., Thus, as I showed
you in a former Lecture, a good man's mnere desire for 
MIRACLES.
continued existence, and his opinion in accordance with
that desire, are no proof of immortality. There may, for
aught we know, be physiological reasons why life should
cease when the body dies; and if so, no height of moral
excellence or of spiritual illumination could authenticate
the heart-testimony to immortality which would still be
borne by a soul fitted for the life eternal, and debarred
from it only by physical hinderances too occult for its
appreciation. In this matter we crave not the consciousness of one who  feels, but assurance  from one who
knows; and who can know unless he has learned directly
from God? To specify another subject of prime practical
importance, one of the most interesting of all questions
is, whether God exercises a paternal providence over us
individually, or whether we live under an administration
generally beneficent, but under which  the individual
may be a sufferer and a victim without offset or countervailing benefit. Now the best man that ever lived
cannot by virtue of his goodness enter into the Divine
consciousness. Hie may be fully persuaded of the benignity of the Creator,- he may earnestly crave all that the
Christian believes about the providence of God; yet so
conceivable is it as to have been the belief of many
excellent men, that this minute individual providence
is in the nature of things impossible. None can resolve
this question except on the direct authority of the Divine
mind.
Again, it is admitted that the consciousness of spiritual
truth belongs only to the highly developed moral nature.
One knows by consciousness only what he has experienced.  The safety and blessedness of virtue have entered into the consciousness of none except the virtuous.
But bad men are as much in need of religious truth as
53 
54Z  CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
good men, and to them it must come from without,
before they can have its evidence within. They must
be led to virtuous acts before they can have the self-consciousness of virtuous men. And in order to secure their
belief, and so to induce them to make their first experiments of moral truths which they will subsequently know
by experience, there must be teaching that shall rest on
recognized and infallible authority.
There is, then, need not merely of Divine illumination,
but of authoritative revelation, first, to give good men the
certainty of those things beyond the scope of consciousness
which it concerns them to know, and, secondly, to assure
bad men of those moral and spiritual facts and truths, the
knowledge of which may lead to their repentance and
reformation. -
There  are two methods  in which this  knowledge
might be communicated. It might, in the first place, be
given to every human being in some way in which he
could recognize it as Divine revelation. This, however,
would overbear moral agency, annul the power of choice,
and make virtue and piety involuntary and inevitable,
and therefore characteristics not of self-determining individual wills, but of a race of automatons, passively
subjected to the Supreme Will.
The second alternative method is to commit Divine
revelation to individuals chosen for that purpose, and to
render it liable to those conditions of investigation, proof,
and acceptance or rejection, which are attached to all
other subjects on which man is left to exercise his functions as a free moral agent. This desideratum is met by
a revelation resting on evidence adequate, yet not irresistible,- within the reach of inquirers, yet not forced
upon them against their will, - open to scepticism, yet 
MIRACLES.
with ample resources for converting honest scepticism into
confident belief. But in what must this evidence consist? I answer in one word, In miracle, that is, in phenomena aside from the usual course of nature, which are
equivalent to the direct voice or the manifest seal of God.
We can conceive of no other way in which a revelation
can be promulgated  as such.   God  without miracle
might impart to the mind of an individual man so strong
a persuasion of certain truths that he should absolutely
know them to be true.  But he has in that case no tangible, communicable evidence of these truths. To any
other mind they are simply his opinions, not God's revelation.  If he proclaims them, it must be on his own
authority, backed by such reasoning as he can command,
and if they lie beyond the sphere of consciousness, by no
conclusive reasoning. But let him perform such an act
as none can perform by the exercise of his own powers;
let him give sight to a man born blind, or hearing to one
born deaf; let him lift a dead man alive from the bier, or
call forth from the sepulchre one who has lain there four
days,- then, if he talks of duty, God, and heaven, if he
proclaims truths beyond the realm of consciousness, his
hearers know that they are virtually listening to the
voice of God, that the Divine testimony attests his utterance, and that his words are absolutely and infallibly
true.
It is said, indeed, and rightly, that a physical fact cannot prove a spiritual truth. But it may attest a truthteller.  It may invest him with the right to be believed.
The scepticism that actually exists in the community
concerns the occurrence or the possibility of miracles,
not their trustworthiness as testimony. There may be
among you, perhaps, some who do not believe in mira
. 55 
56.    CHRISTIANITY TIHE RELIGION OF NATURE.
cles; but were an undoubted miracle to be performed
this moment in your sight, and were he who performed
it to connect with it such statements with regard to
unseen, spiritual, future things as you had never heard
before, there is not one of you who would not believe all
that he said.
The proof of the miracles recorded in the Bible, it
forms no part of my plan to present. But in the residue
of this Lecture I shall attempt to show you that miracles
belong to the religion of nature. 
Miracles are, in the first place, a demand of human
nature, and an almost universal belief of mankind. They
enter into the traditions of every people, and either lie
at the basis, or are incorporated with the legends, of
every religion.  Even religious unbelief does not rid the
soul of the appetency for them.  We  have the record
of not a few cases in which avowed infidels, even atheists, have been tortured by superstitious fears, and victimized by feeble credulity as to apparitions and events
aside from the common course of human experience.
Every brief reign of infidelity has been succeeded by a
recoil toward easy belief in marvels and wonders from
the unseen world.  At the present moment, the proclivity toward the dominant form of necromancy is immeas
urably stronger among  those who  reject than  among,
those who receive the Christian miracles. None are so
ready to give heed to the drivellings and insane vaticinations of hyper-electrified women personating the voices
and desecrating the memories of the honored dead, as
those who deny the resurrection of Christ. The instances of the utter non-receptivity of miracles, even in
this sceptical age, are less numerous than those of con 
MIRACLES.
genital malformation or of idiocy; ivhile during many
periods of the world's history they have been too sparse
to leave either record or memorial.  So far is the uniformity of nature from being a fundamental law of human
belief, that appetency for the abnormal might with much
greater fitness be deemed an element of man's nature,
the sporadic exceptions to it seeming little else than
defective specimens of their race. The multitude of
confessedly false reports of miracles only strengthens
my statement; for, if miracles not only have never taken
place, but are opposed to the laws of belief, how is it that
the entire history of belief is full of them? Counterfeits
imply a genuine paradigm.  The eleven false ancilia in
the temple of Mars were forged after the pattern of the
one that fell from heaven.  Fiction takes its rise only
from verisimilitude, and obtains currency only by its
analogy to fact.
The true interpretation of the appetency for the marvellous is in this wise.  Because man is spirit as well as
body, and gravitates toward the unseen future while he
lives in the present, there is a demand in his nature that
the barrier between the material and the spiritual be at
some point ruptured, the veil between the seen and the
unseen somewhere parted, thle realmn of the dead revealed
to the knowledge of the living.  In no age, under no
culture, has this demand been silent or inactive. It has
interrogated the stars, peered into the entrails of slaughtered victims, explored the seat of life in human sacrifices,
enacted the foul and horrible orgies of magic and witch.
craft. And Christianity is natural religion, because it
meets this demand, and satisfies this needs because it
has its authentic voices from the parted heavens, its
manifest forthi-reachinigs of the everlastillng arms, its souls
3*
57 
58      CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
rendered back from the death-slumber, its immortality
made manifest in the risen Jesus,- because it answers
the questions which man cannot help asking, and feeds
the desires which are as inseparably a part of his being
as are love and memory and hope.
I would next remind you that miracles, so far from
being inconsistent with the known system of nature,
have confessedly constituted a large part of the history
of the physical universe. By a miracle we denote an
event which occurs without any proximate cause adapted
to produce it. What, then, was each separate creative
act of the Almighty, if not a miracle?  The races of
organized beings now succeed one another by established
laws; but the first man, the first elephant, the first bird,
the first tree, was a miracle. There was no antecedent
physical cause for the shape, or size, or organization of
the first-born of each family.  The details might have
been indefinitely varied without any failure of adaptation
to surrounding objects.  Man might have had as maneay
eyes as the spider, the dove might have had four wings,
the ox a trunk like the elephant's, so far as any antecedent reason was concerned. If we suppose an intelligent
witness of the creation, each new substance, each organized form, each living being, must have been as literally in
his eyes a miracle, an effect without a material cause, a
direct act of the Omnipotent Will on lifeless matter, as to
us would be the sudden reappearance alive of a man
whom we knew to have been dead. And on the very
grounds on which miracles are objected to as inconsistent
with the laws of nature, and unworthy of the immutable
Creator, an intelligent being who had existed before the
earth was inhabited might in subsequent ages have
refused to believe that it had any inhabitants, and have
i 
MIRACLES.
pronounced his brother-spirits who professed to have
seen them impostors or dupes; for not an act of forming
power or organizing wisdom can have obeyed any law
but the attributes of Him to whom all things wise and
good are possible. The objector to miracles can have no
mnore appropriate or logical answer than those words in
the poem of Job, which the Almighty utters out of the
whirlwind: "Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?   Hast thou entered into the
springs of the sea? Or hast thou walked in the search
of the depth 9 Have the gates of death been opened
unto thee? Or hast thou seen the doors of the shadow
of death?  Knowest thou because thou wast then born?
Or because the number of thy days is great?"  When
I contemplate the diversity of the creation, the infinity of resources which it exhibits, the miracles beyond
thought which it offers to our view, dull, leaden uni formity from the creation onward seems the least prob able theory. I expect to see the leading epochs in the
spiritual, as they were in the material universe, marked
by miracle; new life for ment's souls attended and at tested by visible signs of Omnipotence; the promulga tion of the Divine truth and love accompanied by the
shaking of the powers of nature, and the upheaving of
restored animation from the realns of the dead.
But it may be alleged that, whatever may have taken
place in the beginning, man has had experience only of a
uniform system and inflexible laws.  This, however, you
will perceive, is denied by the only authority on which
it can be asserted,- human testimony. We can know
that miracles have not occurred only by the consenting
negative testimony of all mankind, and we have seen
that the vast preponderance of man's testimony is in the
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60      CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
affirmative,- that the belief in miracles is almost uni -Tersal.1
Let us, however, examine this question of uniformity
by the light of science. That in the highest sense of the
word the system is uniform, I cannot doubt; for it can not be otherwise than consistent in all its parts with
the attributes of its sole Creator and Supreme Legislator.
There can be no contrasts that are not comprehended in
a broader generalization, no discords that are not em braced in a more subtile harmony, no divergent ten dencies which do not beyond human vision converge in
ends worthy of the wisdom, declarative of the love, of
Him from whom  behind human vision they issued on
their several tracks and missions. But in the common
acceptationl of the term, the system of the universe is not
uniform. Astronomy reveals no unvarying type in the
structure, environments, and movements of the heavenly
bodies. There are in the remotest outlying provinces of
telescopic vision nebulae unresolved, and, as is believed
by many  astronomers, unresolvable.  It matters  not
whether these nebula are in-the process of consolidation, but at earlier stages of their physical history than
the stars which present a sharply defined disk, or whether
they are permanent conglomerations of nebulous matter.
In either case, the field of telescopic vision presents as
concurrently under the Divine jurisdiction two different
classes of celestial bodies, which must of necessity manifest unlike phenomena, be controlled by different orders
of physical laws, and bear widely different relations to
1 Hume's celebrated argument against miracles is a mere petitio principii.
He assumes, in defiance of multitudinous testimony to the contrary, that
miracles are opposed to the experience of mankind, and maintains that therefore no testimony can substantiate them, -forgetting that the experience of
mankind can be ascertained only by testimony. 
MIRACLES.
their secondaries, if they are centres of systems, and to
animated nature if they are, either or both, inhabited.
The binary stars, revolving about their common  centre
of gravity, hold an anomalous place in the heavens; for
the mutual relations of each pair of these celestial geinii,
and their relations to other heavenly bodies, can be
neither explained by analogies drawn from our solar
system, nor embraced in our theories of the single stars.
In our own system, too, there are wide diversities.   The
diurnal rotation of the planets - the most important of
all their movements, if we consider them as inhabited
worlds - divides them into two classes, the smaller and
nearer planets having days more than twice as long as
those of Jupiter and Saturn. The unequal distribution
of satellites in the system, the solitary revolution of Mars,
the gorgeous retinue of Jupiter, the marvellous environment of Saturn, are differences which science blends in
no theory, legitimizes by no laws, harmonizes by no
sweeping generalization, but can only point to the inscrutable will of Him who has made one star to differ from
another star in glory. The comets, too, remain anomalies in the system. What uses they subserve, what
dreary depths or glorious heights of space they penetrate
in their aphelion, we know not, and on earth can never
know. Hardly to be recognized by marks of identity
when they are reputed to return, or, if cognizable, never
keeping tryst with the astronomer, but before or behind
his appointed time, it may be doubted whether they are
better understood now than when their advent spread
terror among the nations; and in them are the hidings
of His power, and a stern rebuke on the arrogance which
would limit the outgoings of Omnipotence, drop the line
and plummet of ignorance into the fathomless abyss of
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62      CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE,
the Divine counsels, and circumscribe the immeasurable
creation within laws and limits of its own devising.
Equally irreducible to any comprehensive hypothesis are
the asteroids,- that cluster of planets so strangely multiplying under the telescope where our antecedent theories might lead us to look but for one. Has there been a
miracle in that region of the heavens?  We have indeed
set aside the old notion of disruption from some impinging contact or explosive force, and the kindred supposition that moral causes have left the record of an
outraged Deity's righteous displeasure in a shattered
world. But why this pristine parting of the nebulous
ring, which, for aught that we can see to the contrary,
might have globed itself in undivided unity?  Suffice it
to say, that here is a diversity with no cause that we can
trace, a lacuna in our system of the universe, a caveat
against the presumption that would crowd within its own
narrow hypotheses all the possibilities of nature. Whence
come the meteoric stones? Of origin foreign to our
planet, or at least proceeding from sources that elude
our search, their motions reducible to no known law, they
indicate that we are surrounded by forces which we cannot measure or calculate, that there are ordinances of the
heavens which we have not yet learned to register; and
they may well make us cautious in applying the limitations of our theories to events, if more significant to us,
not one whit more abnormal, which may have occurred
in connection with the relioious history of our own
planet.
- I doubt not that there are intelligences that can trace
and comprehend the perfect harmony of the universe,
and can see the vast circumference of creation girdled by
tilhe inscription, " God is one." The point which I would 
MIRACLES.
urge is this,-  In the system of the material universe
there is seeming diversity, and even contrariety of plan,
where we believe that there is only harmony and unity.
We, therefore, have no reason to deny that in the administration of human affairs there may have been  like
seeming diversity and contrariety, as there must have
been, ifat certain periods and at certain places the action
of proximate callses has been suspended, and Omnipotence has wrought on material forms with no intervening
agency. As to anomalies in outward nature, we accept
the testimony, not of our own senses, but of competent
and disinterested scientific observers; - in the case of
miracles we have the testimony of competent and more
than disinterested eye and ear witnesses, -  more  than
disinterested I say; for loss, shame, stripes, and death
were the price expected and paid for their testimony.
But there still lies in many minds so profound a sense
of the inviolableness of general laws, as to make them
sceptical as to miracles, though sustained by the strongest
evidence. We shall be prepared to discuss the inviolableness of general laws when we have proved their
existence. Their existence is a mere assumption, probable, plausible, but resting on no positive ground of
knowledge or necessary inference. That certain consequents which we call effects are wont to follow certain
antecedents which we call causes, we indeed know, and
to the extent of these regular sequences we can expect,
plan, and act with confidence. But how numerous are
the events which we cannot calculate,- as to which the
philosopher of the nineteenth century after Christ has as
little foresight as thle barbarian of the nineteenth century
before Christ! How know we that what we call general laws extend any further than is needed to assist our
.6
63 
64      CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
calculations? How know we that beyond this very
limited range a discretionary Providence may not be
the only law? Mark, - I by no means assert this,I am not inclined to believe it; but he who objects to
well-authenticated, but anomalous facts, on the ground
of general laws, is bound to demonstrate those laws
before he uses them in argument.
This demonstration is rendered the more difficult by
the results, or rather the non-results, of inquiry into
efficient physical causes. Six thousand years of research
have failed to reveal in matter inherent powers that
produce motion, organization, growth, transformation.
We  talk, indeed, of gravitation, caloric, electricity, magnetism, as if we knew what they are; yet these are but
euphemisms for our ignorance,- fence-words set up at
the outermost limit of our knowledge.  In the impossibility of detecting, and even of imagining, an inherent
force in brute matter, we are constrained to refer all
power to mind, intelligence, volition; and the latest
phasis of physical science, which represents force as one,
and its forms as mutually convertible, is but the philosophic expression of the anthem of all pure and clearseeing spirits in heaven and on earth; "Of Him, and
through Him, and to Him are all things."
There is nothing, then, in the laws or forces of nature,
which forbids our belief in the occurrence of events that
seem abnormal, if there have been epochs in the Divine
administration when such events could best subserve the
purposes of the Creator. Nature is synonymous with
God.   Whatever  is consistent with  his attributes  is
natural.  But it is not natural that we should know all
that it was ever possible for God to do,- that his administration should be in all its parts level with our approx 
MIRACLES.
imate philosophy of matter and of mind. Yet the entire
argument of Baden Powell, the most able and reverent
among the recent expositors of -naturalism, is utterly
baseless, if it be once admitted that the scope of Powell's
mind is less than coextensive with the Supreme Intelligence. Were we to take even the popular view of miracles, as the mere arbitrary setting aside of the natural
course of events, of the usual order of cause and effect,
I know not why He who ordained and governs that
course and order may not have suspended it at His pleasure and for His own benign purposes. His decree is the
immediate cause of every death that takes place, as truly
as it would be were death the exception, and continued
life the rule; and if the death-bed, the bier, and the
sepulchre have in some single instances rendered back
their dead, this was manifestly as much within the scope
of His power as it is to decree the death of those who are
daily dying all the world over.  If we assume that at
marked historical epochs  his will has, on grounds of
spiritual utility, departed from its accustomed method of
procedure, and set aside the wonted procession of phlysical antecedents and consequents, all that we need to
vindicate the perfect  naturalness of such  miraculous
events is the difnus rindice nodus, the occasion worthy
of the Divine intervention; and such an occasion is
surely found in the revelation of immortality, the authentication of the world's Redeemer, the instauration
of a new era of spiritual life, when all nations lay under
the shadow of death.
But can it be maintained that miracles are exceptions to natural laws?  What  do we mean by natural
laws?  N_atural is either an absolute or a relative term.  -
In the absolute sense, we have  seen  that whatever
65
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66      CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
is consistent with the attributes of God is natural, and
that in this sense miracles are natural.   But  in the
phrase natural laws, the term is employed relatively, and
refers to the generalizing capacity of him who uses it.
Natural laws to any given person are such portions and
modes of the Divine administration as he is capable of
reducing to system. To the savage, the comet and the
eclipse are beyond the range of natural phenomena. To
us, the authentic facts connected with mesmerism, clairvoyance, and pseudo-spiritualism are beyond nature; that
is, we cannot trace the connection between them and
their proximate causes,- we cannot classify them, we
cannot comprehend them in our philosophy; but the
next generation will probably do all this, and then these
phenomena will be natural. How know we that the
works of power and love alleged to have been wrought
by Christ will not, in an age of higher spiritual philosophy, assume their place in the order of nature, as precisely what should hlave been anticipated a priori in
connection with a theophany,- as the very works which
could not but have proceeded from the Divine attributes
incarnated in a human form, - as bound to the personality
of Jesus by the same constant laws of cause and effect
which make our daily deeds and words proceed naturally
from our limbs, muscles, active powers, and mental,habitudes?  If this were maintained, by parity of reason,
those who by virtue of special measures of Divine inspiration or of intimate communion and sympathy with Jesus
formed a peculiarly endowed class among men, may have
had, as the natural and necessary results of these peculiar endowments, powers similar in kind, though inferior 
in degree, to those exercised by him in whom Christiall
faith recognizes the manifest God. Miracles then may 
MIRACLES.
be natural, not only absolutely, as in accordance witfli the
Divine attributes, but also relatively, so far as the laws
and tie order of the universe are concerned.
Miracles are also natural, because through them, and
through them alone, the Creator stands in certain relations to his creatures, in which it is natural that he should
stand. Prominent among human experiences are temptations and sorrows; they belong to the essential conditions of our existence; they are evidently a part of the
Creator's design; and we should expect also to find as a
part of his design efficient support against temptation,
adequate consolation in sorrow. If the temptation be
natural, the support is equally so. If the sorrow be
natural, the consolation is equally so. Now these essential offices can be supplied by nothing short of an authoritative, that is, a miraculously attested revelation.
We will consider, first, the case of temptation. I will
suppose a young man, ingenuous and of good intentions,
who is placed in a position of great moral danger. A
friend a little older than himself gives him judicious
advice and warning, which he approves with all his
heart, and means to follow. But temptations increase
and multiply, his own feelings become interested on the
wrong side, and evil counsellors, who have the same
claim to be heard with his wise and virtuous friend, do
what they can to turn the balance in accordance with
their sympathies and habits.  And the balance is turned.
The good advice is overborne and crowded out, because
it was mere advice, and not endowed with any authority.
But suppose that same youth under the positive injunc tions of a father, in whose loving discretion he has a
confidence too firm to be shaken or undermined, -  the
father's authority may save himn where the friend's
advice would be of no avail.
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68       CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
Now, if Jesus Christ was merely a profound thinker,
an able moral teacher, worthy of respect and deference
for his wisdom and goodness, yet standing in no official
relation to us, and possessing no right to be believed and
obeyed, his precepts are good advice, and we shall follow them till our passions or surrounding examples induce
us to forsake them; but they will have no hold upon us,
no clinching grasp upon  our consciences, no  righltful
claim to our sacred heed which we cannot help recognizing.  But-his miracles place him in a new and entirely
different relation to us.  They authenticate his absolute
right to be believed and obeyed.  They make  his precepts the word of God, the commands and prohibitions
of the Omnipotent, the eternal and immutable law of His
household; and thus regarded, they have a tenacious
hold, a binding force, which temptation cannot relax, or
evil counsel neutralize. Have not some of you experienced the power of a "' Thus saith the Lord " in these
-fearful crises of your moral being? Has not the entire
marvellous history of the Saviour at such seasons given
to his words the intense emphasis of authority, which
has sustained you in the right when  earthly motives
were all arrayed in solid phalanx against the right?
And have you not then felt that it was natural that He
who suffered you to encounter the full force of temptation
should have given you, in this authority which you could
not set aside or reason away, an adequate support and
defence?
In sorrow there is a similar need. If you look upon
Jesuis merely as having reached higher and seen farther
than any other thinker of his age, as having anticipated
even the best thoughts of our own day, in fine', as a
masterly religious genius, this will seem enough for you 
MIRACLES.
while the shadow of death is remote from your person
and dwelling. It is at such times very pleasant to think
and talk about the intimations of immortality in nature
and in the soul, and to feel that the same- organs of
research and discovery which Jesus had are yours.   But
when your child lies dead in your house; when a friend
dear as your own being is wrestling with the death-angel,
and on the point of yielding up his breath; when mounds
in the graveyard are all that remains to you of those
from whom to part seemed like rending soul and body
asunder; when the final summons sounds in your own
ears, and the voice comes to you, "Put thy house in
order, for thou shalt die, and not live," -then Jesus, as
a philosopher of the unseen, as a suggestive thinker, as a
wonderfully clear and far-seeing mortal, can give you no
support or consolation.  You then want his authority,
his right to be believed. You need his works of omnlipotent love. You neqed to behold the bier stopped on its
way to the grave, the sepulchre yielding up its prey, the
Crucified walking in renewed life among those who saw
him die.  Then, and not till then, can you feel the
power of those sublimest words ever uttered on the
earth, which shall echo from grave to grave till the
last of the dying shall have put on immortality,    " I
am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in
me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and whosoever liveth, alid believeth in me, shall never die."
My object in this Lecture has been to vindicate for miracles their place in natural religion. I have shown you
that there is in the human soul a craving and an appetency for them, as seen in the almost universal tendency
to believe in them; that, so far from their being opposed
to natural laws, they have formed part of the undoubted
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70      CHPISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
history of nature, are in accordance with those Divine
attributes for which nature is but another name, and in a
wider generalization may be comprehended within the
circuit of natural laws; and that they are adapted to the
temptations and sorrows which are among the essential
experiences of human nature. So far, then, are they
from being attended by any antecedent improbability,
that they are capable of being established by competent
human testimony, and especially by so strong an array
of unexceptionable witnesses as attests the Christian
miracles.
9
. 
LECTURE IV.
RECORDS OF REVELATION.
IN my last two Lectures I have considered the grounds
of natural religion on which faith in revelation and in
miracles reposes. A revelation must needs have some
definite form or mnode, and I propose to inquire this
evening in what form we should antecedently expect a
Divine revelation to be communicated and transmitted,
and how far the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures meet
the demands and fulfil the conditions of natural religion.
A revelation, in order to be definite, must be verbal
Men think only in words. Emotions or impressions may
be communicated by looks and gestures; but truth and
fact shape themselves in words alone, and are transmitted
only by words.
A revelation, in order to be made availing to large
numbsrs of mankind, must be promulgated and transmitted either in speech or in writing. The recipient of
a revelation might promulgate it by speech alone, and
might leave it to oral tradition. But tradition, we well
know, is diluted, magnified, distorted in various ways,
as it passes from mouth to mouth, and from generation to generation. In the lapse of time its authenticity
always lies open to question. Thus, a large part of the
traditional history of our own country is already mythical, and there are varying and opposite traditions with
regard to events and personages even of the last century.
I 
72      CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
A revelation committed to so unsafe a vehicle would lose
its hold on enlightened faith, and would have for its
adherents only those whose ignorance made them cred
ulous.
Writing, therefore, is the form in which we should
expect a Divine revelation to be embodied for permanent
use. And we should expect authoritative scriptures. I
use the word authoritative, not inspired; for the former
word, and not the latter, expresses our actual need.
The mode in which the writers of an alleged revelation
were influenced  by the Omniscient  Mind -whether
they were divinely moved to write specifically what
they wrote, or whether, being divinely enlightened, they
wrote narratives, letters, poems, as occasion prompted,
and these writings became authoritative because they
were the works of inspired men - is a question of not
the least practical importance.   But our need of a revelation implies and includes the need of scriptures that
cannot mislead us. We might as well be without a revelation, as to have one on whose record we can place no
confident reliance; for how know we that the very portions of the record to which we cling with the fondest
yearning may not be a foreign admixture, and no part
of the original revelation? If the golden sands of truth
are blended with equally glittering sands that are of no
value, and it is left for us to separate the precious from
the worthless, the Divine from the human, we need
a revelation to teach us what portion of the record co,thins a revelation.
I know it may be said with truth that all language is
ambiguous, and especially that, in translating infallible
scriptures into other than the original tongues,  there
must needs be more or less of vagueness and error. 
RECORDS OF REVELATION.
But similar considerations apply equally to writings of
all kinds. There is often great ambiguity in a statute
drawn by a skilful hand, and passed after careful deliber ation by a body of legislators.  But would there not be
immeasurably greater ambiguity, were the public left to
unauthentic rumor, or to unauthorized letter-writers, for
the transactions of the legislature?  A part of a carefully prepared documnent is intelligible to every reader;
and as for the portions that admit of being differentli
understood by different minds, the range of possible ir
terpretations is limited at the outset, and is still further'~
diminished, or wholly done away, by the comparison and' 
discussion of conflicting views, and of circumstances and
other writings adapted to throw light on the document in
question.  In like manner the range of mistranslation is
limited at the very first, and may be constantly decreasing with growing facilities for understanding the writing
translated and its original language.  Unauthentic and
mixed records of revelation would give rise to a vast and
endless amount of error; for every man would regard
that portion of the sacred writings as true which squared
with his notions, flattered his prejudices, served his interests, or temporized with his frailties; and while some
readers of clear mind and pure heart might detect and
eliminate what was false and worthless, others would
throw away the truth and retain the alloy of error alone,
and there would be no common standard by which those
of either class could verify their conclusions. But in
authentic and authoritative scriptures there will of necessity be some portions of fundamental truth so plainly
written that none can misunderstand them; the range of
diverse interpretations will be limited and measurable
there will be a common standard of jud,gment in the
4
78 
74      CIRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
original writings; and discussion will constantly tei.d to
the elimination of error from the belief, and to growing
harmony among the believers.
This statement may be amply verified by the history
of opinions in Christendom. Among persons calling
themselves  Christians there are three classes.  First,
there are those who profess to receive the Scriptures as
their sole and infallible rule of faith and practice. Secondly, there are those who receive as equally infallible
with the Scriptures the traditions of their respective
churches, the decisions of councils, and the dicta of their
ecclesiastical superiors.   Thirdly, thiere are those who
regard the Scriptures as good books for the most part,
but as simply Jewish literature, not infallible, not authoritative, and containing many questionable facts and erroneous opinions. Now, with all the diversities of doctrine
in the first class, there are certtin fundamental truths in
which they all agree, such as the personality and unity
of God, the divine mission, miraculous birth, sacrificial
death, resurrection, ascension, and intercession of Christ,
the divine influence on the soul of man, the necessity
of regeneration, and the eternal happiness of good men.
Moreover, it cannot be denied, that among different sections of this class there is a constantly growing harmony
of opinion and feeling,- a harmony which has been
cherished, more than by any other agency, by the carefutl study of the original Scriptures with the perpetually
increasing apparatus for their interpretation. On the
other hand, we find in some portions of the second class
a virtual polytheism, insomuch that the worship of God is
almost forsaken for that of idols, and so entire a rejection
of the spiritual element in religion, that salvation is expected on the sole condition of the observance of a, ritual. 
RECORDS OF REVELATION.
Still worse, in the third class, there are those who openly
deny the existence of a personal God, cast discredit on
the most important parts of the Gospel history, and repudiate the belief of a conscious immortality. In fine, if
you will take the two forms of belief that have the least
in common, maintained by those who derive their faith
from the Bible, you will find that they have immeasurably more in common, than either of them has with the
Romish formalism and image-worship on the one hand,
or with pantheism on the other.
WVe now inquire, What sort of scriptures should we
expect as the records of revelation? I answer, first,
that revelation would necessarily produce a literature of
a peculiar kind, and would virtually create its own records. Suppose such a series of revelations as the Christian believes to have been made, - a special divine
movement extending over many ages of human history,
commencing with the early patriarchs, rolling on in successive waves of light along the line of lawgivers and
judges, kings, priests, and prophets, and culminating in
Jesus Christ.  Such a movement would necessarily leave
its indelible traces in the records of human thought and
experience. It would be in this respect like the great
movements of the physical universe. The tornado has
its track, marked by uprooted trees and prostrate ranks
of growing grain.  The shower in the drought of midsummer takes its path, and where it passes there are
greenness, bloom, and beauty, with parched and blighted
herbage on either side. Thus would it be with the
mighty movement of the Divine Spirit over the souls of
men.  Where  miracles were witnessed, where superhuman  fo rms appeared, where voices from heaven were
$
75
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CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
heard, there must have been a corresponding elevation
of the mind and quickening of the emotional nature.
Poetry must have taken on a loftier inspiration, a purer
flow, a profounder depth of meaning.  Precepts  must
have dropped from the pen of the wise with a keener
point and a weightier emphasis. Truth, not surmised or
reasoned out, but beheld as through lightning-flashes that
parted the clouds and scattered the darkness about the
Omniscient Mind, must have been announced with a confidence and an authority that could be derived from no
other source.  And if a being who bore at once the form
of man and the image of God dwelt prolongedly on the
earth, and conversed familiarly with a circle of intimate
friends, to them, so to speak, the lightning-flash must
have been continuous. The clouds must have remained
parted, the curtain of darkness must have been uplifted,
while they were with him.  They must have been literally bathed in light. Truths ordinarily unseen must
have been so long and so vividly visible to them as to
leave indelible images on the mental retina, so that we
should have from them self-verifying representations of
nature and providence, duty and destiny, in writings
which would hardly need any other attestation than the
keen and deep insight they displayed.  Thus would revelation of necessity make and leave its own record, and
subsequent generations could gather up its literary memorials, all marked by infallible tokens of the divine
movement in which they had their birth.
But it may be asked, Is it conceivable that revelation
should have been left to the incidental literature that
would necessarily grow from it, without some more orderly and systematic record? Can we imagine a truly
divine element in writings so miscellaneous and frag.
76
t 
RECORDS OF REVELATION.
mentary as the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures? If
God had a message or a series of messages for mankind,
would he have scattered his teachings, counsels, and
promises, morsel by morsel, among genealogies, narratives of wars and revolutions, stories of human folly and
guilt, dreary wastes of prosaic detail? Should we not
have expected from the wisdom of a self-revealing God
what men have often been wise enough to write, -a
body of divinity, a compend of sacred truth, methodized
under appropriate titles, so that we should have in
one part of the record an outline of dogmatic theology,
in another an ethical code, in another an exposition of
human nature and destiny, in another a digest of the
religious history of the race?  The  Scriptures  might
then be studied like a school-book, and even the child
might be thoroughly furnished with an accurate knowledge of divine things, to which nothing more need
afterward be added. I answer, that if a council of wise
and good men had been commissioned to make a Bible
with a divine revelation for its basis, they would undoubtedly have made a systematic treatise such as I
have described. But of what use would it have been?
Dry, homiletic, full of technical phraseology, it would
have had only a very limited and slow circulation, and
that confined to persons of already thoughtful minds and
scholarly habits. It would have had for its readers a no
larger public than Cicero's Tusculan Disputations, or at
most than Taylor's Holy Living and Dying, or Baxter's
Saints' Rest. Bible societies would have had their issues
returned upon their hands.
Scriptures thus written would also have narrowed and
belittled religious truth,- would have curtailed the Infinite not only to the dimensions of a finite mind, but to
71 
78       CHRISTIANITY THIE RELIGION OF NATURE.
proportions which that mind would outgrow; for the intel lect that comprehended all the religious truth presented
to it in its early years would exceed it, overlap it, look
down upon it, in the pride of its strength. All positive
systems are thus outgrown.  They are of use in departmnents of knowledge with which we are only remotely
concerned, or want but a slender modicum of information. They are, too, of use to really scientific men in
their novitiate, but no longer. No man becomes a proficient in any science, who does not transcend system,
and gather up new truth for himself in the boundless
field of research. In religion there are creeds and catechisms, man-made bibles, good in their way, which profess to teach the whole of religion. But no sooner does
a man place one of these between his own soul and the
fragmentary, miscellaneous Bible of which it purports to
be the summary, than he dwindles into a theological
pygmy, has all his powers of apprehension and reflection
crippled and dwarfed, and thenceforth moves, not even
in a self-retumuling circle, but in a constantly diminishing
spiral.
One chief mark of genuineness, of accordance with
nature, with what we should anticipate from the Divine
counsels, in the Bible that we have, is its adaptation to a
lifelong study,-  its expanding breadth,  and growing
depth, and culminating loftiness of meaning, with the
enlargement of its student's own powers,- its constantly
increasing hold upon the interest, so that none read it
with so much freshness of experience and vividness of
curiosity as those who are most familiar with it. Study
these Scriptures as long and as thoroughly as we may,
we never exhaust their riches, or fail to unearth new
wealth of significance. And we always find more than 
RECORDS OF REVELATION.
we seek.  When we dig for brass, we get gold; when
for gold, rubies and diamonds blaze upon our sight. St.
Paul alone migiht give us work for a lifetime; in his
Epistles the strata of spiritual wisdom grow more and
more precious, the deeper we mine them; and one might
be daily conversant with them for half a century, and
then leave the world with few wishes so dear to his heart
as that of renewing in heaven with that glorious leader
of the Church militant and triumphant the themes in
which he had inspired and guided the meditations of the
earthly pilgrimage.
Again, we should expect in the records of revelation
a wide diversity of form, style, and method, in order to
attract widely various classes of minds. As I have said,
a didactic compend would have been rejected by the
mass of readers.  The natural method of diffusing the
seedling principles of religious truth might be suggested
by what annually takes place in the diffusion  of the
germs of vegetable life. The seeds that spring up in
verdure and beauty by the wayside, on the mountain, in
tie forest, sown by no mortal hand, have their seed-time
provided for, their propagation in new-localities insured,
their harvests guaranteed, by being connected with some
one or more of the ever-moving forces of nature. Some
are wafted to their beds on downy wings by autumnal
winds. Some are borne on the fleeces of migratory animals, to vary the panorama in scenes where their kind
had never before found lodgement. Some are floated
on rills of melting snow, or on rain-swollen brooks and
torrents, and sown in the genial soil prepared for them by
the subsiding waters. Thus would it naturally be with
the seeds of religious truth. In mass they would have
no power of self-diffusion or self-transmission.  But look
79
0 
80      CHRISTIANITY THE I- ELIGION OF NATURE.
at our Bible, and see how adi-nirably it answers this con dition.  In this marvellous series of books the seed of the
immortal harvest, whose germlination is to renew the
soul and transform the character, is attached to all that
can attract and interest man in his neediness and  sin fulness, in his yearnings and aspirations.  Here  it is
iLbedded in the winning portraiture of some venerable
saint, or in the startling experiences of some (God-defying
sinner; there, in the wonderful vicissitudes of a nation's
fortunes, rising or sinking, illustrious or disastrous, in the
ratio of its loyalty or its profligacy. Again it is borne
on the sweet current of holy song.  Then it forms the
fheight of the whole touching narrative of the Saviour's
life, from the hour when angels herald his birth till they
watch with the apostles his ascension on high, when the
everlasting gates are opened that the King of glory may
come in.   Then it is conveyed in the close and pungent logic of Paul, in the terse, sententious ethical
discourse of James, in the tender breathings and the
ecstatic visions of the loving John.  There is that in the
Bible which may arrest the attention and win the regard
of human beings of every age, condition, and culture,
- which may fix the child's delighted interest, and at
the same time kindle the imagination of a Milton or a
Klopstock, initiate a Newton, a Locke, a Boyle, into a
profounder philosophy than that of matter or of mind,
engross and crown the life-toil of a Lardner, a Paley,
a Neander.  Thus in every form in which men's minds
and hearts can be reached do these records convey the
incorruptible seed to its genial bed in the soul, attesting
the divine element in them, more than by all things
else, by their fitness for human nature, by their close
human adaptations, relations, and sympathies. 
RECORDS OF REVELATION.
The miscellaneousness of our Scriptures is natural,
also, because we trace in them in this very particular
God's wonted method of teaching, the stretching forth
of the line that goes out to all the earth, the likeness of
the unwritten word that reaches to the ends of the world.
Not with square and compasses of man's device has God
built the earth, and meted out the heavens. His creation is miscellaneous, broken at every point, - here a
sheltered valley, there a profound abyss, on one side a
mountain with its summit in the clouds, on the other
a leaping cataract, while off in the distance the waves
lift up their voice, and in the depths above the stars move
each on its separate path, and shine each with a differing
glory. When I look into the Bible, I behold there the
same sublime diversity, - on one leaf, as it were pastures
clothed with flocks, and valleys covered over with corn,
where all that grows is ripe for use, and the most ignorant wayfarer cannot reach out his hand in vain; and on.
the next leaf, heights and depths in which are the hidings
of His power, and which it may tax the loftiest faculties
of successive generations to scale and fathom. I follow
the Saviour into quiet home-scenes, where kind and familiar words flow as from the lips of any holy son of man,
and then go up with him on the mountain where the
birightness of heaven glows in his face and gleams from
his raiment, and then look on the dread mystery of Gethsem-lane, the bloody sweat, the agony, the angel  that
camle to strengthen him; and for this blending, alternating, mutual interpenetrating of the genially human and
the ineffably Divine, I trace only the more readily the
image of the God whom in part we see and know, as we
do the countenance of a brother, yet about whose throne
rest clouds and (l'lkniess.  I marl ill the Bible the Divine
F
81
4 * 
82      GlCHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
Providence in the even current of human affairs unruffled
by marvel as in any common history or biography,then replenishing the widow's wasting oil-cruse,- then
spreading darkness over a whole land, rending its rocks,
unsealing its sepulchlres; and for this combination of the
mnemphatic, the quiet, the granm, and  the terrible, I
seem to r'ed OnD)y the mooze natural and ]ielike reco'd
of Him who smiles upon us in the wayside flower, and
then moves in storm, earthquake, and tempest, lashes the
writhing waves, rides on the wings of the whirlwind,
terrifies the nations. And what though in this miscellany there be much which on a superficial reading we
cannot understand, - much that transcends our use,
much, too, that is beneath the standard of our age and
culture? The Bible purports to be the record of the
means employed for the spiritual education of men from
the birth of Adam to the end of time, and for their
education for an inconceivably lofty and expanded sphere
of being. In this record there would naturally be some
thlings which had their use and wrought their work
long ago, having been adapted to the culture of generations whose condition and habits we know too imnperfectly to perceive the divine adaptation to their needs
which may  have existed, -  many things which  may
develop their fulll meaning only to generations of higher
intelligence and truer faith than ours, - many things,
also, which, pondered and inwardly digested, will reveal
new and growing depths of meaning to our own hearts,
-many things, it may be, which, received into our
minds, yet not fully germinating here, may  sprin   g u p,
and blossom, and bear fruit in heaven.
If, on the grounds which I have now urged, it be
granted t'liat a revelatioin Was likely to be coiiimitLted to 
RECORDS OF REVELATION.
writing, not in a set treatise or in a strictly didactic form,
but in such a diversity of methods as to meet the endless
variety of human tastes and wants, we next ask, What
relation would such records naturally sustain to the manners, opinions, culture, and literature of their times?
Would they, in everything except the divine truth they
contained, have borne marks of their human authorship,
birth-land, and birth-time, of imperfect knowledge, narrow philosophical conceptions, national habits of thought,
popular imagery,  provincial idioms?   Or  would they
have been conformed to some high ideal standard, so
that they should transcend all other literature of their
times in purity of style, accuracy of opinion, precision
of historical and statistical detail, freedom from local and
national characteristics, - thus belonging peculiarly to
no one century or people, but bearing an equal relation
to all lands and all ages? Let us test the latter alternative.
We will suppose at the outset ideally perfect scriptures, such as we might imagine to have resulted from
the verbal dictation of the Divine Spirit. But is this a
conceivable hypothesis? If we admnit for sacred scriptures a divine authorship in the sense in which we understand human authorship, is there any style or method
of which human  language is susceptible which would
not fall below'ven our least adequate conceptions of the
mind of God?  Or if there were, would it not transcend
thie comprehension as far as it would exceed the ability
of ordinary mortals? In order to be understood, would
it not be necessary for the Divine Author to fall below
the ideally perfect,- to descend to the common arena
of authorship, and simply to indite more finished history,
more eloquent didactic prose, loftier poetry, than could be
83 
84       CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
found in any other writings of the time, but subject to
the same standards of criticism by which they are tried,
liable to the same limitations from the poverty of diction,
and sure, in the progress of knowledge, the development
of language, and the enlargement of the scope of thought,
to bear a less favorable comparison with subsequent than
with contemporary literature?  Now  this literary competition with man, if you will suffer the phrase, is revolting to every sentiment of reverence. But this is
not by any means the only argument against the theory
which would exempt sacred scriptures from the liabilities
and imperfections of human authorship. Let us follow it
further.
The records of revelation, in order to be transmitted to
coming ages, must have their hold and do their work on
the men of their own time.  Suppose the age when
these records are reduced to writing to be a grossly
material age, and one which has only somewhat coarse
material imagery for the expression of spiritual truth, the
scriptures constructed on this theory must reject all such
imag,ery, and play endless changes on the few, vague,
and seldom employed abstract words and phrases which
the language may afford. The classical Greek might
have furnished a very few such words; I am not certain
that there is one in the earlier Hebrew; the Rabbinical
dialect has two or three. But such as they were, they
must have been employed, and ordinary readers would
have been repelled or hopelessly perplexed. Then, again,
in geography, astronomy, natural philosophy, thlerapeutics, such scriptures must recognize no prevailing error,
no,' not though it were one that had wrought itself into
the current belief and speech of all men. Instead of
speaLkinhg of sunrise and sutinset, tlly n must ex)ounLd the 
RECORDS OF REVELATION.
laws of planetary motion. Instead of using for the sky
the designation  of firmament  (which denotes  a solid
sphere of crystal, supposed to be at the farthest a few
miles above the earth's surface), they mnust employ
phrases that imply the vastness of celestial spaces.  Instead of referring to the ends of the earth, they must
explain its rotundity. Instead of calling insane persons
l.unatics, they must enter a special disclaimer against the
influence of the moon in cerebral disease.  Nay, more,
we, in our enlightened century, have doubtless a great
deal yet to learn, errors in our philosophy to correct,
wider generalizations to make; and scriptures conformed
to the absolute truth of nature and science must be on
a level with the scientific world many centuries hence.
Now books thus written would have been in part unintelligible to the men of their own times, and, so far as they
were understood, would have run so entirely counter to
their received opinions on extra-religious subjects, as to
awaken incredulity as to their religious contents. Scientific truth can be legitimately reached  only step-wise,
often with age-long preparation for a new step in advance, often with a long interval between the announcenient and the popular reception of a new fact, theory, or
law. Scientifically accurate scriptures would have had
laid upon them the impossible task of anticipating this
progress, of revolutionizing men's notions about the universe before they knew the reasons for changing them;
and failing of this, they would necessarily have failed of
a hospitable reception for their religious contents. We
should therefore have  expected that scriptures  written
under the guidance of a more than hunan wisdom, and
fieighted by the providence of God with truth for the
illuitilnation and  redeipil)tioi of  l.t-ikild, wAould have
85 
86      CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
wasted none of their power in teaching geography, astronomy, or philosophy, but would have employed on all
these subjects the current speech and method of their
times, would have used the popular phraseology, though
founded on ignorance, and would have concentrated all
tleir force of representation on the great themes as to
which alone they were destined to be the light of the
world.
Still furthier, sacred scriptures needed to take with
their contents proofs of their genuineness from their own
down to future and far distant ages.  It concerns us
above all things to know whether our Scriptures were
written at the times when they severally purport to have
been written. But where would be the evidence of this,
if they were conformed to the standard of knowledge and
science existing in the nineteenth century or destined to
exist in the twenty-ninth,-if in their divine perfectness of finish they were swept clear of all traces of the
ruder and more ignorant ages from which we believe
them to have been transmitted?  Foremost among ithe
proofs of their genuineness are these very birthmarks
whichl  they indelibly bear; - in the Old Testament
numerous traces of an unhistorical mnethlod of narration,
of infantile conceptions as to the extent and relations of
the universe, and of such scientific notions as men had
before the birth of science; inll the New Testament,
a Hiellenistic Greek which has little in common with
Attic terseness and purity, bristling all over with Hebrew
idioms, with not a few untranslated Syro-Chaldaic words,
-in fine, a dialect which a century after the destruction
of Jerusalem could not have been written by any man
livinig.  Bishop Coleu-so's book on the Pentateuchi and
Joshua lneeds  only an altered auiinus on the wiritcr's 
RECORDS OF REVELATION.
part to become a plea for their genuineness. The argumnent turns solely on certain alleged inaccuracies and
inconsistencies in genealogies, numerals, and statistics,
on the very features which characterize all early attempts
at history, and which belong emphatically to Herodotus,
though he was a much-travelled, all-inquiring, painstaking seeker after historical truth.1  Had these Hebrew
writers drawn up their genealogies as if they were copy
1 Whenl this Lecture was written, only the First Part of Bishop Colenso's
work had appeared. The author has not yet seen the Third Part. The argument of the Second Part rests wholly on the literal construction of the Hebrew
verb A   (know), in Exodus vi. 3: "I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac,
and unto Jacob by the name of God Almighty, but by my name Jehovah
was I not knowon to them."  The name Jehovah does, nevertheless, occur in
the biographies of those very patriarchs. Yet that it was not in common
use until Samuel's time and afterward would appear from its being seldom
used before that period in the composition of proper names, while E1 was
often so used, and also from the fact that, in a portion of the Psalms ascribed
to David, some of which bear marks of being -while others, by Colenso's
usual circular method of reasoning are assumed to be - the earliest, the title
Elohim prevails, while Jehovah occurs in those purporting or assumed to be
the latest.  Now the Pentateuch must have been written after the name
Jehovah had come into current use as the national designation of the God of
the Hebrews. Therefore it could not have been written by Moses, or by any
person earlier than Samuel, who probably wrote a considerable portion of it.
So far as this argument is valid, it bears not against the Mosaic authorship,
buot against any intelligent and honest authorship or editorship of the Peltateuch. Certainly the discrepancy on which it is founded is too obvious and
too utterly irreconcilable to have escaped the notice of the man or men who
first made of the five books one book, or of the people generally when they
began to regard the Pentateuch as consecutive history. The author of Exodus would   have stultified himself by making the statement attributed to him
by Colenso, seei g that he must necessarily have beenconversant either with
Genesis in its finished form, or with the records from which it was compiled,
in which the name Jehovah is so often and familiarly employed. The obvious
laws of interpretation, the genius of the Hebrew tongue, the latitude of use
which we find attached to the Hebrew verb on which the question turns, andc
the somewhat flexible signification which the corresponding verb has in every
language, authorize us to r~ rd the passage under discussion as denloting
simply that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob  did not employ Jehovah as their
accustomed and formal designation of the Almnighty,- an exposition which
liarino dzes perfectly witli th    e notic  of their liutory in Gens.'5.
8T 
88      CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
ing from accurately collated family records; had they
dealt with numerals as skilful arithmeticians; had their
narration been precise and methodical, like the carefully
compiled annals of one of our New England towns,
be would be a bold man who would claim for their books
the venerable antiquity from which they purport to have
come down to us. The very characteristics of these books
which have given ground for ignorant cavil show most
conclusively that they belong to the early infancy of
written language, - to an age when historical research,
the comparative criticism of documents and traditions,
and artistical authorship, had not begun to be.
Yet, while as regards all subjects except religion we
should expect the authentic records of revelation to be
conformed to the current opinions, the ignorances, and
the errors of their times and authors, we should, on the
other hand, expect to see the frequent outcropping of the
Divine element in strong contrast with the human surroundings, position, and culture of those same authors.
On the one hand, we should look in such scriptures for
characteristics which mark the age and people -whence
they sprang; on the other hand, for characteristics which
unmistakably mark the specially Divine origin of their
religious contents.  Or, to vary the form of statement,
we should anticipate at once such scriptures  as none
but their reputed authors could have written, and such
scriptures as neither they nor any other men could have
written except through the direct or transmitted inspiration of God. Now, in examining our sacred books, we
find precisely the contrast between the biographies of the
writers and the religious contents of the writings which
we should expect to find in authentic records of revelation.  Take the case of Mioses, lwho, if not the comipiler 
RECORDS OF REVELATION.
of the Pentateuch, must have been the virtual author of
a very large portion of it. We see him the nursling of a
corrupt court, the quick and reckless avenger, even to
blood, of an insult offered to a brother-Hebrew, a hunted
fugitive from justice, for many years an under-shepherd
in a tribe of idolatrous nomads, and during his subsequent official life hasty, irascible, and querulous. Whence,
then, that theology in its sublime personal monotheism
standing out alone from all antiquity, -  that code of
social morals so rigidly just, so toucliingly humnane,
that Decalogue embodying more of practical ethics and
religion than the rest of mankind had conceived of till
Christ came, and needing firom him to make it perfect
only the light of his example and the sanctlon'of his
revealed immortality?  David was a rude and barbarous
chieftain; his throne was disgraced, his gray hairs dishonored, by the foulest licentiousness, and by deeds of
atrocious violence and malignity which even the savage
manners of his age cannot palliate.  WThence then those
strains of lyric devotion, which more tlhanll fill the purest
aspirations of the most saintly among the children of
men, and which awaken no sense of irrelevancy when
we think of them as the vehicle of praise and prayer
for the Sinless and Heaven-Born on the eve of his crucifixion? The writers of the New Testament appear in
its historical portions very far from faultless, -Peter
by turns the braggart and the renegade, capable of the
meanest falsehood when every  manly attribute cried
shame upon him,   John filled with paltry jealousy,
and fiercely bitter in his resentment, -  Paul the trutculent and unrelenting persecutor, even of helpless women.
Yet in their writings what depth of spiritual insight,
what ripeness of ethical wisdom, what severity of dis
89 
90      CHRISTIANITY THIE RELIGION OF NATURE.
crimination, what a pure and lofty standard of conduct
and character! We cannot get rid of the divine element. Infidels are fond of dwelling on the follies and
crimes of these writers.  They barb the keenest shafts
of Paine's scurrility. They are a constantly recurring
theme in Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary. They
often reappear in the naturalistic writings of our own
day. We rejoice to have them set forth in the fullest
prominence; for the greater the stress laid upon them,
the more utterly impossible is it to deny that the power
of the Highest overshadowed these men, and that they
wrote as they were moved by the spirit of God.
I pass to another point. While we should expect in
the records of revelation the current style of their birthage and birth-land, with all its limitations, imperfections,
impurities, provincialisms, and that style still further
affected by whatever in each individual writer was uifavorable to finished authorship, we should also expect to
find frequent marks of the Divine impulse and influence
in the expression no less than in the thought. All strong
movements upon the mind betray themselves in peculiarly condensed and vivid forms of utterance. Now,
our sacred'books bear, in instances too numerous to be
specified, this mark of their alleged character. They
abound in passages in which a single phrase or word is
charged with a richness of meaning and an intensity of
force, indicating the mightiest of all influences on the
consciousness of the writer. What elsewhere would fill
a tedious treatise, is here globed in a sentence or a fragment of a sentence. A metaphlor, an allegory, a parable,
of a dozen lines, comprehends the pith and power of a
volume of didactic wisdom.   The story of the prodigal
son contains more soul than we can find in a whole folio 
RECORDS OF REVELATION.
body of divinity. The Twenty-Third Psalm tells more
of the Divine Providence than a disquisition which it
would take years to write and weeks to read. There
are isolated sayings of the Bible that have formed the
life-long nourishment of Christians, and given them their
sufficing viaticum for their last journey. I remember an
instance in which a man of fine powers and large culture
said on his recovery from an attack of illness which kept
him for many weeks in daily expectation of death, that
his life for those weeks (and it was a perfectly happy
life) was but a prolonged rumination on a brief text of
Scripture, into which his whole consciousness seemed to
project itself,   in which  his soul was clothed as in
an impregnable panoply against fear, doubt, and suffering. With other good books we gladly become familiar;
their brilliant sayings fix themselves in the memory;
their rhythm glides softly and sweetly through the inward
ear; but it is not to these that we resort in the stress of
need,- it is not these that we rehearse at the death-bed
or in file house of mourning. It is in the very words of
prophet and psalmist, apostle and Saviour, that men
fortify themselves in trial, in bereavement, under the
death-shadow.
It does not accord with my purpose, nor does it fall
within the limits assigned to my course, to exhibit the
positive proof- to my own mind irresistible - that the
Hebrew and Christian Scriptures are the authentic and
trustworthy records of Divine revelation. They in fact
rest on a stronger basis of evidence than we have in
behalf of the genuineness of the undoubted works of the
best writers of Greece and Rome; and their genuineness is impugned on grounds on which, if admitted, we
should be compelled to reject all our established beliefs
91 
92      CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
with regard to the literature of antiquity.  My aim has
been to shlow you, first, what sort of sacred writings the
religion of nature might authorize us to expect, and, secondly, how perfectly our sacred writings fulfil the conditionis which,ve should establish on grounds of a priori
probability.  I rejoice to have performed such an office
for these writings, -not that they need my advocacy,
but that they claim every expression that I can give of
my grateful trust and reverence. 
LECTURE V.
THE LOVE OF GOD.
IN the Lectures I have already given I have shown
the accordance of revelation, miracles, and authentic
scriptures, with what the religion of nature might lead
us to anticipate. The contents of a divine revelation,
however, must be in great part such as could not
have been anticipated on natural grounds; for it is the
depth of man's native ignorance, and his destitution of
adequate sources of religious knowledge, that constitute
the need and create the antecedent probability of a revelation.  Yet there is one important distinraction to which
I solicit your emphatic heed. The discovery and the
verification of truth are two entirely different processes;
and the faculties which are inadequate for the former
process may be amply sufficient for the latter.  Thus
the Copernican system could not have been discovered
earlier than it was discovered; for it was not the happy
conjecture of the one man whose name it bears, but it
marke'd the stage of progress which astronomical science
had attained in his day: yet, had it been announced a
thousand years earlier, there was science enough in
India, at Alexandria, and among the Arabs, to verify it.
The rules of navigation are the progressive discovery of
many centuries, and not one navigator in a thousand
understands the principles on which they are based; yet
three months' study and a couple of voyages will enable 
94     lCHRISTIA\UTY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
one to verify them.  The laws of projectiles have been
discovered only by the profounldest processes of mathematical analysis, and are expressed in formulas which
only the trained mathiematician can read; every guinner
in the army and navy can verify them.
In the realm of religious truth man may verify what
he  could not discover.  Thus, though he mnight not
attain by his own intuition or reasoning to just views
of the Divine nature and administration, he may know
whether the views presented harimonize with his own
observation and experience. Though hle might not construct for himself a perfect code of ethics, he may, by
putting such precepts of duty as are given to him to the
test of practice, ascertain whether obedience to them
tends to his usefulness, happiness, and  highest good.
Though he might not without revelation feel sure of
immortality, still less of any detailed characteristics of
the blessed life, he may test what is revealed to him
concerning the future destiny of man by its adaptation
to his nature, his desires, and his aspirations.  Consciousness and experience, therefore, though they could never
supply the place of revelation, may furnish the strongest
possible evidence of the genuineness of a revelation. In
point of fact, while Christians who are both intelligent and
devout find in the historical evidences of their religion
ample materials for the refutation of unbelief, their faith
rests more on their own consciousness than on outward
testimony.  Testimony assures them that their religion
is true; consciousness, that it cannot but be true. Indeed, we should antecedently expect to be able to verify
the truths of revelation, some of them fully, others approximately; for if lHe who created the soul of man and
administers the government of the universe makes a rev 
THE LOVE OF GOD.
,elation, its contents must of necessity be in harmony with
the souls that he has created and the government that
he administers.  And these contents, so far as they are
thus verified, are natural religion; for they are capablo
of being verified only because they are in accordance
with the nature of the universe and of maln.
I will ask you, in the remainder of this course, to
verify with me some of the contents of the Christian
revelation.  I would speak first of the character of
God, as it appears under the light of nature to the eyes
which revelation has unsealed. The prominent features
of the Christian idea of God- peculiar features, I would
contend, for, though they have entered into the belief of
modern deists, we do not find them before Christ, except
in those earlier revelations which were foreshinings of
Christianity-  are, first, the perfect love of God, including his paternal relation to man and his all-embracing
providence, and, secondly, his holiness or supreme referenlce to moral distinctions.  The first of these, God's
perfect love, will occupy our attention in the present
Lecture.
We remark at the outset, that amiong the ends or final
causes which we have been able to discover in nature,
there are none which are otherwise than beneficent.
There is no one contrivance for the production of evil,
no nerve that was made to ache, no sense adapted to
deceive, no process whose natural working creates misery, no faculty the normal exercise of which interferes
with happiness, no portion of the system or course of
nature which is intrinsically and necessarily malign in its
influence, no cause of annoyance or injury which man may
not, in thie ordinary exercise of his; powers, either remove,
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96       CHRISTIANIT.Y THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
avoid, subdue, or utilize. Now, in a universe full of the
tokens of design, this state of things could not exist,
were not the Creator positively benevolent.  Were  he
malevolent, the mraligni purpose would be patent and
palpable. Were hle simply indifferent to the happiness
of his creatures, that indifference would manifest itself in
the choice of the most direct means to the attainmnet
of ultimate ends, without ally reference to the tendency
of those means to produce happiness or misery. For
instance, death must be an ultimate, and is certainly a
desirable end, in a world of limited capacity, in which
each species is endowed with the power of self-nmultiplication; and indifference to happiness on the part of the
Creator could hardly have failed to manifest itself in tihe
preference of directness and efficiency to mercy in the
choice of death-producing agencies, in which, on  the
other hand, a careful analysis reveals the minimum of
suffering consistent with the end to be attained.  So is it
with the entire range of natural agencies for the attainment of ultimate ends.  We can trace in no one of them
the will, or (if I may use a word more strictly applicable
to man) the willingness to produce suffering.  There is
no apparatus in nature which has an inmmediate or necessary tendency to inflict pain or misery.
On the other hand, enjoyment or happiness is the express and undoubted end of unnumbered portions of the
universe and its administration. In the senses, the affections, anid the intellect, man has many endowments, and
performs many functions in no wise essential to the pieservation or transmission of life, or to his mental or moral
culture, and which have no possible use or office other
than the production of happiness.  Indeed, there is not a
physical, mental, or moral power whose normal exercise 
THE LOVE OF GOD.
is not a source of positive pleasure; and this could not be
the case without a supremely benevolent design on the
part of the Deity. The external world, too, is full of
sights, sounds, flavors, and perfumes, which can have no
end other than animal and human eijoyinenlt.  Contrivances for this sole purpose crowd upon our observation as
we extend it to the lower races of animals. The myriads
of organized beings that float on the summer breeze,
swarm in the waters, and make the forest glad, -the
numberless forms.of microscopic existence that fill the
veiy chinks and crannies of creation with sentient and
rejoicing life, -all demonstrate  the benignity of the
Supreme Being.
The progress of knowledge and of science has been
fruitful, more than in anything else, in the discovery of
beneficent uses, often of obviously beneficent design, in
departments of nature that had been regarded as detrimental to human happiness,- in fine, in the transfer of
supposed evils to the catalogue of goods. I might almost
say that physical science has done nothing else than this.
It has hardly made a discovery which has not been a
new revelation of the Divine benevolence, worthy to be
hailed with a raptttrous Te Deum.  Thus a large proportion of the most effective remedies and prophylactics at
the command of the physician are drawn from the list of
poisons. The gases, which unmixed are fatal to life, in
their natural combinations are salutary, in their chemical
oices inestimably precious.  The very fire-damp which
destroys the careless miner lights our cities. The electric
force, in its cumulative power fearful and fatal, is the
vital force of creation; and the lightning, which leaves
its occasional memento in the scathed tree, the shattered
dwelling, Qor the lifeless human form, dispels miasma,
5                              G
97 
98      CHRISrIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
stimulates growth, and sends a quicker, healthier lifepulse on the track of the thunder-cloud. The volcano
is but the safety-valve of subterranean fires, which bear
an essential part in the economy of nature. Celestial
phenomena once of dire portent are now recognized as
staccato passages in the harmony of the spheres. All
natural objects, events, and processes are in the course
of verification as good in their place and beautiful in
their season; and science is fast encircling the earth
and spanning the heavens with the apostolic inscription,
"God is Love."
In further illustration of the Divine goodness, I would
solicit your attention to the natural theology of pain. In
the brute creation there is, we believe, the minimum of
pain consistent with the law of death and the succession
of generations.  Animals in a state of nature suffer little
from disease, probably still less from fear. The provision
by which they prey upon one another, considered in all
its bearings, is beautifully beneficent. Were they left to
perish by the natural decay of their'physical organization, it could be only with protracted suffering, as that
very decay would preveht them from seeking the wonted means of subsistence. But the condition, whether of
age or of accidental disablement, which prevents their
supplying their own needs, renders them with merciful
promptness a prey to their natural enemies. Moreover,
so far as we know, except where domestication and full
feeding make an animal indifferent to the uses of his
victim, death by beasts of prey is almost instantaneous,
and the life which up to that moment had known neither
care, apprehension, nor suffering, goes to reinforce another equally painless life.
But man is liable to intense and prolonged suffering,
6 
THE LOVE OF GOD.'
and we can fully vindicate the Divine love in man's condition upon the earth only by recognizing the moral
benefit which results from the various forms of painful
endurance.  This, however, hardly needs a labored demonstration; for none are so ready to admit the benignant efficacy of suffering as those who have been themselves the greatest sufferers, and among those who bear
all the marks of the highest spiritual culture, and at the
same time of the fullest measure of conscious happiness,
there are multitudes to whom we can point, not in pity,
but in admiration, and anticipate the announcement which
the Apostle heard in his vision of heaven, "These are
they that have come out of great tribulation."
Considered with reference to its moral and spiritual
ends, pain has its merciful limitations. Up to a certain
point it may be borne with cheerful submission and with
conscious benefit to the moral nature. When it transcends this point, one of three things takes place.  Either
death ensues; or some paralytic or gangrenous affection
intervenes, which separates the suffering organ or member from the rest of the body, and forbids the nerves to
transmit their report to the brain and the consciousness;
or, if neither of these, delirium makes the soul imperfectly
conscious of what the body endures, or even wraps it
in a wild elysium. I hardly need remind you in what
an overwhelming majority of instances either of these
alternatives may be anticipated and prevented by anodynes and anesthetic agents.
There is also a limit of age. The intenser forms of
physical suffering belong for the most part to the period
of active moral discipline, when pain may yield its full
revenue of spiritual benefit. The sufferings of infant
children are doubtless much less severe than they seem.
.   *...'
99 
100     CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
The  infant brain is but imperfectly developed  in its
susceptibility of impression, no less than in its active
power; in many forms of disease it is so far affected
directly or by sympathy as to diminish greatly the
amount of conscious pain that would otherwise be experienced; and we all know how the capacity of enjoyment, and even of absolute mirthfulness, will betray itself
in children amidst paroxysms that threaten instant dissolution, and when already under the shadow of death.
Thus the morbid liabilities of very young children serve
the purpose of sustaining parental vigilance and multiplying those teader offices by which the ties of blood and
birth are made doubly strong and dear, while comparatively little is abstracted from the joyousness of the
irresponsible years of opening life. In old age we may
mark a similar limitation. There is a period of cdecline,
when, though the character still grows from its own
resources, active moral discipline ceases, and the aged
person seems to be merely awaiting the summons to
a sphere of duty in which the worn-out body will be no
longer needed. This period is seldom liable to acute
disease or intense suffering. The nerves and the brain
have lost much of their sensitiveness. There is often
languor or weariness, but seldom continuous or severe
bodily anguish. The gentle steps by which one is led
through declining.years are almost always the subject of
grateful observation, except where vice has thwarted the
kindly purpose of nature, and planted thorns of its own
in the pillow of the hoary head.
Apart from its moral uses, pain serves important physical purposes. It is the sentinel against bodily injury.
It is the guardian of temperance,,purity, and hygienic
regimen.  It is the prime executive as to those natural
!'..*'n:!-?**  
THE LOVE OF GOD.
laws which we are bound to obey, and which ought not
to be violated with impunity. And in this office of pain,
also, we may trace limitations that indicate the Divine
goodness. Thus the pain of hunger recurs in its mildest
form just often enough to induce the regular supply
of our wants that is essential to health and vigor. It
reaches its acme of agony at the very point at which the
supply can no longer be delayed without serious injury
and peril.  If the supply be of necessity postponed, the
pain, having served its purpose of warning, dies away,
and lethargy ensues.  The same is true of suffering from
extreme cold. Intense pain warns the exposed person
to seek shelter, with a call loud enough and long enough
in most cases to effect its object without detriment to life
or limb. But when the injury has taken place, when the
limb is frozen, the sentinel, no longer needed, quits his
post, unconsciousness of suffering ensues, and even sensations of ease and comfort may precede the fatal issue
of the exposure. To the same category belongs the wellknown fact, that the nerves susceptible of the most painful sensations lie in precisely those parts of the body
which we can protect or heal, and which would be perpetually exposed to mailning or injury, did not their liability to pain make us careful of their safe-keeping and
well-being. The seat of the severest suffering is in
almost all cases near the surface. The first touch of the
surgeon's knife inflicts much greater pain than the deep
incision, the laceration of the flesh than the division of
the bone, the wounding or fracture of the arm or leg
than the lesion of those vital organs which are subject to
more occult laws, and can with less certainty be guarded
from injury or restored from disease. In fine, pain, with
few and sporadic exceptions, is most intense where the
101
11 
102      CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
means of prevention or recovery are generally known
or easily attainable.
Now suppose a painless world.  Imagine our children
growing up without liability to suffering or its semblance,
and our friends, our parents, those bowed with years,
those who claim our devoted offices of love and reverence, subject to the death-producing agencies which must
none the less exist and work, yet unwarned by admonitory sensations of pain. This state of things could hardly
fail to induce neglect. The most intimate offices of parental and filial love would be superseded, and in the
same proportion the affections would be deadened and
their joy obliterated. Our homes would lose their endearments, their sympathies, their most grateful remembrances. There would be coldness where there is now
the tenderest love, and severed existence where there is
now the closest union. Imagine, too, the active portion
of mankind no longer liable to suffering. What reckless
exposures would there be, what unconscious neglect of
physical laws, what suicidal feats of strength and endurance! The maimed would outnumber the uninjured,
and the needless, foolhardy deaths would be more than
those that now occur by disease and casualty combined.
These considerations certainly deprive human suffering
of its mystery, and bring forth rich testimony from the
severest experiences of our earthly condition to the
goodness of the Creator.
I have spoken thus far of physical suffering only. In
verifying the Christian view of the Divine character, we
encounter not only the pain that befalls men in the ordinary course of nature, but also moral evil, and the misery
that flows from it. Here we must remember at the outset, that in the nature of things wrong-doing cannot be 
THE LOVE OF GOD.
harmless. Right and wrong are not arbitrary, but essential characteristics. The wrong is in its very essence
unfit to be done, and, if the right has beneficent results,
it is impossible that its opposite should not have opposite
results.  Omnipotence can no more deprive the wrong
of its power of harming, than it can make two and
two five.
In the next place, free agents must needs have the
power of doing wrong, in order that they may have the
power of doing right; and if they have the power of
doing wrong, it is impossible that they should not exercise it, at least in the earlier stages of their history, and
until the entire range of moral experiments has been
exhausted. The only question then is, whether this perilous gift of free-agency is consistent with the Divine
benevolence.  In answering this, we must suppose that
the plan of the Creator would embrace every kind and
degree of happiness of which finite beings are susceptible. Now does not our consciousness assure us that freeagency rightly exercised is the source of immeasurably
higher happiness than can flow from all other sources
combined? With what shall we compare it? With
intelligence? Intelligence brings labor, care, and pain,
and of itself bestows no counterbalancing joy. What
we call the pleasures of knowledge or of the intellect
derive their zest from the moral nature.  Emotions and
affections that have their source in a loyal and obedient
will alone enable us to assimilate the materials of knowledge, and to make them conducive to our nutriment and
growth, our elasticity and gladness of spirit. Without
this moral solvent, the acquisitions of the intellect are
but burdensome and oppressive crudities, ministering to
our isolation, misanthropy, and restlessness. But if such
103 
104      CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
be the case, it was the part of Divine love to provide
for the highest form of happiness, that flowing from
moral goodness, even though it were foreseen that count less multitudes would spurn the noble gift. And if moral
excellence be the supreme good, then is there no more
merciful portion of the Divine administration than the
wretchedness that results from human guilt. The issue
of sin in misery is the surest way of awakening repentance and producing reformation.   Sin never looks so
appalling and offensive as when it is mirrored back from
its consequences to the sinner's own consciousness. By
the desolation and misery into which men plunge themselves and others, they are made to abhor themselves,
and to cherish purer affections and better purposes;
while by the same exhibition the innocent  are kept
innocent, the tempted held back fiom evil, the virtuous
confirmed in their good principles and habits, and the
philanthropic urged to more vigorous efforts for the
restoration of the fallen and the well-being of their
race.
I have thus far spoken of the goodness of God as
manifested in the general administration of the universe.
Christianity goes further than this, and affirms his providence in all events, his paternal providence over every
member of his human family. The Divine Providence
has for its rational grounds the native inertness of matter,
and the necessary omnipresence of the Deity.
Inertness- that is, the tendency to remain in its present state, whatever that be - enters into our conception
of matter. As I said in a former Lecture, philosophy
has abandoned the search after efficient material forces.
Mind, will, is recognized as the ultimate cause of all
motions, changes, phenomena, events. The laws of na 
THE LOVE OF GOD.
ture (so called) resolve themselves into.wonted methods
of the Divine administration. If we deny this, our only
alternative hypothesis is the pantheistic conception of
an inherent force, an immanent and active will, a selfdetermining power, in matter. But when we provisionally adopt this hypothesis, we find it impossible to conceive of the initial impulse, of the beginning to be, of
the self-existence or self-creation of matter; and we are
thus thrown back upon the belief in a creative will distinct from the material universe, which will, as it was
the sole cause of the beginning to be, must equally be
the sole cause of the ever-varying phenomena of continued being, of the ceaseless change of material objects,
inert in themselves, which could no more alter their
mode of being than they could begin to be without a
Supreme Will.
Again, the omnipresence of God is involved in the
very idea of his existence.   But can his be  an inert
presence?   Where  he  is in the plenitude  of his almightiness, can aught take place otherwise than by his
will?
There is no room for the old distinction between a
general and a particular providence. The former cannot be without the latter.  We  can make no discrimination between the greater and the less, which does not
betray the shallowness of our speculations, and convict
us of the folly of meting the universe with our own paltry measuring-tape, and sounding infinity with our own
brief line.  Do we say that God governs vast events,
and exercises no direct supervision over the smaller concerns and interests of his children? What affairs even
of nations, worlds, systems, are vast to him whose stars
crowd by nimyriads tile field of telescopic vision, and pave
5*
105 
106     CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
the highway of the heavens as countless as the sands on
the sea-shore? And, on the other hand, what concerns
of sentient, reasoning man are not vast, compared with
the structure and functions of those curiously and wonderfully formed beings, bearing every token of the Divine handwork, to which a drop of water or a fig-seed
is as a universe? Embosomed as we are between twin
infinities, between the immeasurably immense and the
inconceivably minute, we dare not se.t metes and bounds
to the universal Providence.
"To him no high, no low, no great, no small,
He fills, He bounds, connects, and equals all."
A paternal providence is claimed by many as a truth
of experience. The privileged and happy, if at the same
time devout, see more than a beneficent order of nature
and flow of events in their own conditions and lives, and
think that they can recognize the Divine care and love
for themselves individually. The favorite utterance of
piety is, "How precious also are thy thoughts unto mne!
How  great is the sum of them!  If I should count
them, they are more in number than the sand." There
are in every happy life numerous instances in which the
course of events might seem to have received a special
direction for the benefit of the individual. Large portions of our lives -- crises, it may be, on which our whole
earthly destiny depended - have been shaped without any
planning or foresight by ourselves or others,- by what
the world terms chance, - by circumstances in themselves
trivial, -by our coming, as it seemed fortuitously, into
relation with certain persons or objects rather than with
others, or at one moment rather than at another. An
interview called casual, a delay or hinderance regarded
as accidental, an act so slight and so utterly indifferent in 
THE LOVE OF GOD.
any aspect visible at the time of action that there seemed
a hundred chances against one that it would not be performed, has often determined all the essential events of
a lifetime. A conjuncture of circumstances in itself
trivial, and which a day or two, perhaps a few minutes,
earlier or later would have had no traceable consequences, is often the critical moment of one's fortune,
the first of a series of causes from which his whole subsequent happiness flows. It is contended that in these
cases, in the absence or feebleness of proximate causes,
there is a distinct revelation of the paternal providence
of God.
But in dwelling on the happy experiences thus traced
to the love of our Father, we must not forget that the
statement we have made applies equally to adverse crises,
prolonged series of misfortunes, ruined hopes, thwarted
plans. The slight initial causes in whose train flow the
most momentous consequences, for evil no less than for
good, to men, communities, and nations, form one of the
most curious chapters in human history. A striking
instance occurs to me. In the Twelfth Congress, which
declared the war of 1812 between this country and
Great Britain, a new Senator of the United States, who
voted for the war and voted with the war-party on all
preliminary questions, was chosen by a legislative major ity of one. A member in the majority of the legislature
that elected him was chosen by a majority of one. That
majority was given him by a man who had never before
voted with the party that favored the war, but was
induced to do so in this instance simply because the
cattle of the opposing candidate had trespassed on his
corn-field. Had the opposing candidate for the National
Senate been chosen, the war would probably not have
107 
108      CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
taken place.1 That trespass, then, may be said to have
caused the war.  Now while  I have  the profoundest
faith in a benignant providence always and everywhere,
- a providence that often reveals itself in the fee l)leness or the fortuitous aspect of proximate causes, —
I cannot but regard it as a providence that ordains not
only the blessings which we desire and rejoice in, but
the sorrows that may nourish our higher natures, and
the retributive visitations which men or nations may both
merit and need.
But while God wounds only in love, and punishes that
he may restore, our language bears one testimony of very
great and incontrovertible force to the preponderance of
the joy-giving element in the Divine Providence.   It is
implied and employed in the use of the word happiness,
at once an atrociously irreligious and a profoundly religious word.  It means that which happens or chances,
thus excluding in its form the agency of an overruling
Providence. Yet in the application of this ungodly word
to felicitous events alone, we bear tacit testimony to a
benignant order in human affairs; - we confess that, if
we are the subjects of chance, it is of a chance that plays
with loaded dice; that is, we deny the sovereignty of
chance in the very act of admitting it, and affirm that
of Providence in the very act of denying it; for, were
events fortuitous, the happenings to us would be as often
afflictive as they were glad, and happiness would never
have been chosen to designate joy. While it might not
be safe to reason from individual experiences, the vast
1 The final vote in the Senate for the declaration of war was 19 against 18;
but had the anti-war party commanded only one additional vote, the declaration would have been postponed. and in a very few days the news of the
repeal of the Orders in Council would have rendered the war impossible, by
removing its principal grounds aind pretexts. 
THE LOVE OF GOD.
preponderance of pleasurable sensations over the contrary, - the system under which happiness is the rule,
misery the exception,- is a clear and full demonstration
of a fatherly providence, which wills and promotes the
enjoyment and well-being of its subjects.
There is also an inward experience which cannot mislead us, - a spiritual providence by which we are prepared for such events as God may send, strengthened for
our burdens, sustained under our trials, by resources of
which we were unconscious till the stress of need, and in
which we rejoice to trace the direct action of a Father,
who loves us more than we can love ourselves, upon our
minds and hearts.  These experiences are often clear and
emphatic; they multiply upon our recognition in proportion to the constancy and thoroughness of our introspection; and they leave in the most reflective and, devout
spirits an assurance too profound for doubt, that God is
with us in his fatherly providence where we most need
his inspiration and support, in the region of our sensibilities and affections.
I have spoken of the argument from experience.
There is in the aggregate of human experience a counter-argument which we are bound to meet fully and
fairly. I refer to the case of the multitudes, the myriads
of the utterly unprivileged, - of those who have their
fill share of calamity and sorrow without access to the
faith which might enable them to sustain their trials
patiently and hopefully, and to transmute them into nourishllnenit for the moral nature. It cannot be denied that,
for unnumbered millions, if this life were their only
being, or if they were destined to suffer hereafter for
lack of what they had no means of doing or becoming
here, it had    been better that tihey had not been born.
109 
110     CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NAT URE.
But if the earthly life be for them a brief embryo-state
from which they emerge into a realm of light, privilege, and joy, it is easy to conceive that their present condition subserves essential purposes of the Divine
Providence, which we may not now fully understand.
Let me borrow an illustration from the physical history
of our planet. There were, long before man or the
higher animals had birth, geological ages during which
rank, luxuriant vegetation overspread large portions of
the world. Forests rose in beautiful verdure, ferns and
.grasses clothed the plains, though there were none to
enjoy the shade or to feed upon the harvest; and generations of these forests, unnumbered growths of this profuse
vegetation, were swept by volcanic fires, and piled heap
upon heap in massive strata. Had one of the elder sons
of God, not endowed with foresight, beheld this process,
he might have questioned the Divine wisdom, and asked,
" To what purpose is this waste of what might feed and
shelter living, reasoning, enjoying races?" But these
layers of charred forests are what now  sustain our
fires, and feed our forges, and propel our ships, and
promise supplies for human art and comfort for myriads
of years to come; and all generations will bless the
Omniscient Wisdom whose seeming waste is their unexhausted wealth and strength. Spiritual geology, too,
may have its ages whose meaning is to be studied only
in the remote future. This seeming loss and waste of
souls on earth, redeemed no doubt in heaven, may have
its end in the sure development and ultimate supremacy
of goodness through the whole universe of God.  It may
be essential to the education of our race, that the history
of every form of evil should be written out in gigantic
characters; and the vicious experience of earlier ages 
THE LOVE OF GOD.
may have its ultimate result in ages that shall roll on in
undimmed holiness and blessedness.  He who lays the
beams of his chambers in the waters, while their topstone
is above the heavens, may be laying the sunken foundations of that kingdom of universal righteousness, in
which not fiuture generations alone, but those too whose
earthly destiny was beneath the floods of ignorance and
depravity, shall have their eternal dwelling-place.
I grant that, if this life be regarded as a period of
probation and the only period for all men, as it is a probationary state and may be the only one for the fully
privileged, the condition of the unprivileged would be
irreconcilable with the Divine love. But, so far as these
last are concerned, is it not reasonable to suppose this
world simply a birthplace and conservatory of spirits that
are to be trained and nurtured elsewhere? Go into a
plantation of fruit-trees in which orchard and nursery are
combined. You will there find some trees that have
soil-room and sky-room enough to reach a normal growth,
and to perform their function as fruit-bearers, that is, to
fulfil their destiny; and those trees are in a probationary
state. Their worth will be tested by the quality and
quantity of their fruit. If their fruit be poor or scanty,
after suitable efforts to improve it, they will be cut down,
and others will take their places.  If their fruit be rich
and abundant, they will be cherished with the utmost
diligence. But a large part of these trees are to have
their probation elsewhere, it may be in richer soil and
under more skilful culture. The only aim now is to
make them live, to give them shape as existences of their
own order, to establish their relations with soil and sky;
and when they are fairly made alive and capable of
prolonged existence, they will be transplanted to the
111 
112     CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
respective sites where their fruit-bearing capacity can be
developed and tested.
Now the thronging ranks of the unprivileged can be
compared only to these closely crowded trees planted on
purpose to be transplanted. They do not get their moral
training here. They do not fairly make their election
between good and evil. They know so little of moral
distinctions, that the wrong which they seem to choose is
in no sense the choice of the soul, and may not unfitly
be regarded as a mere habitude of the body. What they
do get here is life, -the capacity of an endless life.
They come into those relations with time and space
which are essential to the detached, personal existence
of a finite spirit. They are placed, also, in certain determinate relations with fellow-spirits, which may through
all eternity render their social condition immeasurably
happier than it could have been had they been isolated
existences, each brought into being by a separate act of
omnipotence. They are made each to have some experience of the straitnesses, infirmities, and sufferings of
this mortal state, and none can say how essential a part
this experience may bear, as a source of gratitude when
God shall have " enlarged their borders," as a term of
comparison by which they may know how highly they
are blessed, as a starting-point to which they may measure back the path on which the Divine love shall lead
them.
At the same time, under precisely this system, while
to many individuals existence and the capacity of being
advantageously transplanted are God's chief and best
gifts, a process of education for the race is developing
itself along the ages,- a process by which undoubtedly
the mlaximum of active goodness, the most vigorous and 
THiE LOVE OF GOD.
salutary exercise of moral freedom, may be insured.
Had equal privilege been at the outset ordained for all,
and preserved by the interposition of Providence from
age to age, human society would present only a dead
level of tame and passive goodness, with hardly vitality
enough to merit the noble, manly designation of virtue.
There would be no room for the loftier and more heroic
forms of excellence.   The greatest names on the annals
of moral attainment and achievement would never have
been written. Nay, there would have been no place
for the " name which is above every name," and for the
tender reverence, profound gratitude, and warm affection which, clustering around it and rising from it with
enhanced fervor to Him who so loved the world that lihe
sent his Son, form the richest portion of man's spiritual
experience. And when the world shall have been all
reclaimed, when the nursery shall all be fruitful orchardground, there will have been created in the veins of humanity, to be transmitted to sinless generations, and to
be translated to its ultimate higher sphere of being, a
vastly nobler, hardier, more energetic type of moral and
spiritual character than could have come into existence,
had the plan of Providence been that of equal privilege
for all and always.
I have thus shown you that the seeming exceptions
to a benign Providence are not really objections, when
viewed in connection with the intensely strong positive
arguments that may be urged in its behalf.
This subject furnishes an impressive illustration of the
office of revelation as regards the truths of natural religion. In the observed course of human experience
there are contrasted facts that seem  at first sight as
utterly irreconcilable as if they flowed from the rival
H
113 
114     CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
working of a benevolent and a malevolent Deity. There
is, on the one hand, mercy, blessing, privilege; on the
other, the seeming absence of all these. Nature, unenlighltened by revelation, refuses to embrace these facts in
one comprehensive generalization. Their harmony eludes
her search. Revelation utters the word PROVIDEN1CE,
around which they all crystallize, and opens the immortal
life which proffers scope for their development in a coherent system initiated and crowned by the infinite love
of God. The truth, Providence, belongs to natural religion; revelation furnishes the clew which leads us
through its labyrinth, lets down from heaven the hand
that unseals its mysteries, utters the voice that interprets
its harmonies of love and praise. 
-LECTURE VI.
THE PROVIDENCE OF GOD IN HUMAN ART.
MY last Lecture was on the Divine Goodness, and
especially on the Providence of God considered as a
doctrine of human experience, that is, of natural religion, and on the objections urged against it on the
ground of the unequal distribution of privileges in this
world. The Scriptures affirm the providence of God in a
more general sense, his providence- forethought, determined provision -in the powers and faculties of man as
adapted to this world and his place in it; and it is t' a
single branch of this wide theme that I ask your attention in the present Lecture.
Man is proud of art and skill more than of all things
else. Virtue and piety are, indeed, greater and nobler,
but they make men humble, not proud; and even they
are indebted to the arts of civilized life for the basis of intelligence, knowledge, culture, and refinement, on which
alone they can be built up in their full strength and
beauty, and by means of which alone they can have their
due manifestation and influence. But what man has
done for himself and for his earthly home, - the wastes
he has reclaimed; the cities he has built; the grandeur
and beauty he has embodied in architecture, enshrined in
marble, portrayed on canvas; the enslaving to his uses of
the giant and wayward forces of nature; the overcoming
of obstacles that once seemed insurmountable; the sover 
116      CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
eign command which he exercises in the entire realm of
material forces and agencies, - these are the burden of
his unceasing self-praise; and especially we are never
weary of admniring the vast mechanical and artistical progress of the last and the present generation. Meanwhile,
the perpetual voice of the Bible is: "All power belongeth unto God." I have taken for my subject this evening
tile Natural Thleology of Art, and my aim will be to show
that human art is but a manifestation of the Divine
Providence; that God is, as the Scriptures represent
him, the sole contriver, artificer, builder,- the author of
all the vast, graceful, cuLrious,.and complicated forms that
grow under the hands of man; and that the achievements
of our race are equally with the sun in his glory, and the
stars on their circuits, and the changing seasons, " but
the varied God."
Let me first remind you that in art man does nothing
except what God either does or provides for in nature.
He only follows out indications that are a divine directory
for his procedure. He creates nothing; hlie only finds
and uses what God has made. He does not confer properties; he only discovers and applies them. We talk of
raw material; but there is none. If there were, it would
forever remain so. What we call by that name has in
it all that is ever made out of it. Our paving and building stones lie, in the quarry, in parallel strata, and with
crystals so grouped and separated as to invite the very
cleavage they receive; and the blocks in which they
are laid or heaved correspond in their surfaces with the
natural divisions of the mother rock. The veins and
fibres of our forest-trees guide, rather than yield to, the
axe, the lathe, and the plane; and they might have been
of essentially the same substance, and yet so gnarled and 
THE PROVIDENCE OF GOD IN HUMAN ART.
knotted as to defy the accumulated science of centuries.
Our silk we could not wind or use, had it not been first
reeled on the cocoon with a delicacy far surpassing our
finest handwork.  We make no dyes, but dip our raiment in brilliant and enduring hues, beautiful as the
rainbow or the sunset clouds, which God has treasured
for us in barks and roots and insects. The telegraplh is
no work of ours, nor yet an invention of our time. The
agent which it employs has been from creation's dawn
the medium of all communication between mind ajid
matter, brain and muscle, brain and brain; and in the
phenomena of mesmerism and pseudo-spiritualism there
can be no doubt that along air-lines and for indefinite
distances thoughts and words are sent with the same
unerring accuracy that marks their transmission on the
artificial lightning-path. We have only arrested for a
specific purpose a force which throbs from zone to zone,
leaps from sky to earth, darts from earth to ocean,
courses in the sap of the growing tree, runs along the
nervous tissue of the living man, and can be commanded
for the speaking wires simply because it is and works
everywhere.
Permit me to carry out this view somewhat in detail
with reference to water, the most essential'of all mechanical agents, with which art does literally nothing of
which God has not given the model or the hint.
How numerous beyond all computation are the artistical contrivances of which water is the means or the
object! Not only is it the destined home of the ship,
-that noblest masterwork of human genius, that most
expressive type of man as the conqueror and lord of nature,- but without water how utterly impossible would
it be to bring together materials for the ship, or for any
117 
118     CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
othler costly and complex structure!  Without its diffusion in quantities and qualities adequate not only to sustain life, but to supply the thousand-fold greater demands
of art, where were the triumphs of that monarch of our
century, the steam-king?  Now mark  how perfect, as
regards human  industry, is the Divine distribution of
water, - gathered into oceans for the world's highway,
- indenting the shore in bays and creeks without whose
shelter navigation would be impossible, and the ship a
mere splendid conception, -radiating in rivers which
alone could develop the resources and furnish the materials that freight our commerce, - branching into streams
and rivulets to irrigate the meadows, to twine among the
valleys, and to laugh by the poor man's door, -now
falling over precipices, and acquiring force to propel the
wheels of those mighty Babels that weave the wealth of
nations,- now swollen by vernal thaws and rains, and
bearing forests from their birthplace to the builder's
axe.
Mark next the beautiful simplicity of the Divine mechanism by which the distribution is made. There is unceasing waste, and yet unceasing fulness; - the ocean
replenishing the fountain, the fountain speeding with
trembling haste to bear its tribute to the ocean; the
river pouring its current into the great sea, and anon
those selfsame waters, through cloud, torrent, brook, and
streamlet, seeking the river again. The circulation of
the waters is like that of the blood in the human body;the ocean, the vast heart; the rivers, the veins that
carry home its tide; the clouds, the arteries that distribute it anew; the brooks and fountains corresponding
to the capillary vessels that bear the rose-tint to the
cheek of youth and beauty. The system, too, is self 
THE PROVIDENCE OF GOD IN HUMAN ART
adjusting, full of mutual checks and offsets, the very
circumstances that create the need expediting the supply.
The solar heat, as it parches the continent, distils and
evaporates the adjacent water of the ocean or lake, forming clouds which, like aerial burden-ships, float away
with their freight of bloom and harvest wealth, and are
drawn by the partial vacuum to the very regions where
intense heat has most rarefied the lower strata of the
atmosphere, at the same time threatening the hope of the
husbandman and exhausting the fountains of man's industrial energy.
But for the numberless demands which man, more as
an artisan than as a consumer, makes on nature's reservoirs, distribution is needed in immeasurably larger
quantities than could be endured in the form of rain in
our fields and about our dwellings, unless we were
amphibious, and our grain and grasses aquatic plants.
Mark next, then, the Divine providence by which the
mountains that must forever remain uninhabitable are
made the ocean's procreant cradle. The levity of the
clouds as compared with the lower strata of the atmosphere, lifts a large proportion of them to a height at
which they are drifted against the tops of the loftiest
mountains, where, amid
" Unceasing thunder and eternal foam,"
or in hail and snow, they discharge their burdens, and
form those fierce and rapid torrents which, as they
approach human dwellings, grow deep and broad, tame
and tractable, so that the very stream which had rolled
huge crags and uprooted primeval forests from the mountain-side can be resisted by the feeble stroke of a child's
oar, or made the servant of all work in a machine-shop.
11.9 
120     CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
M\ark now the relation of human art to this vast system of circulation. The raft, in which form alone could
lumber be delivered at its appropriate depots without
labor and cost that would make a well-built house a
luxury attainable by none but the very rich, simply
avails itself of the ocean's feeding season and of its channels of supply,- commits itself to their swollen bosom,
- forces itself upon them as the companion of their inevitable journey. The ship, hardly less essential to material civilization than is the Bible to spiritual culture, is
the most passive of all creatures, depends for its motion
on the sails which diminish its power of resistance and
render it even more hopelessly passive, and yields itself
to the very atmospheric currents which sustain the circulation of the waters by driving the clouds landward.
The water-wheel, which multiplies and cheapens to an
inconceivable degree the comforts and luxuries of civilized life, merely plants itself in the descending path of
the stream or river, and revolves because its axis is so
secured that it cannot be floated down. The aqueduct,
which gushes as a fountain of health in the great city,
bears the same relation to the course of the stream which
feeds it, that is borne by the air-line turnpike to the
serpentine road that leads by every farm-house; and
depends for its flow on the gradual declivity by which
the ocean-born clouds descend from their mountain-exile
to their native home. Lastly, the steam-engine, the
most versatile of all the works of man, - now bearing on
its fire-wings migrating multitudes and costly merchandise across the waste of waters, now twisting a gossamer
thread or mending a web, - is but the intensifying
(though in miniature) and harnessing to the industrial
yoke of the very process by which the vapor exhaled 
THE PROVIDENCE OF GOD IN HUMAN ART.    121
from the ocean waters the hills and makes the desert
glad.
I might still further illustrate the providential element
in human art by reminding you of the limitations of art.
Take for an instance the cotton manufacture. The SeaIs}and cotton, you know,  is greatly superior  to  the
Upland in length and fineness of staple. Now no mode
of culture, no maritime dressing, no copiousness of irrigation, can overcome this difference.  A  profounder chemistry than ours entails on these respective soils their own
peculiar growth.  Nor can machinery, however delicate,
compensate for this difference, so as to fabricate fine
lawns and muslins from Upland cotton unmixed. Indeed, that we are able to spin cotton at all is in no sense
owing to the perfectness of our machinery. There are
many downy substances in nature which, to the superficial or the naked eye, offer as fair a promise of utility as
cotton, yet which can never be made into thread or
cloth. The late Rev. Dr. Cutler, of Hamilton in this
State, memorable as a pioneer in the settlement of Ohio,
was the first American botanist of his day, and was
eminently utilitarian in his scientific pursuits. He cast
his eye upon the common silk-weed, or milk-weed,
Aselepias cornuti, whose seeds ripen in a most luscious
bed of down, as a plant which might rival or supersede
cotton, and enable us at the North to raise our own
clothing, and that on soil available for hardly any other
purpose. His researches in this matter gained merited
attention, and, it was said, -I know not whether the
story be authentic, - were the specific ground on which
certain literary honors, which he on every account richly
deserved, were bestowed by one of our New England
colleges.  But they had no more valuable result.  On
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122     CItRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
trial it was found that the silk-weed has an incorrigibly
short fibre, and of course the spindle cannot make it
longer; that it has a straight fibre, which cannot be
pulled without breaking, while cotton has a curled and
crooked fibre which the strong pulling of the machinery
only straightens; and that it has no hooks or teeth, so
that it cannot be permanently twisted, whereas the fibres
of cotton are indented with teeth like those of a saw,
which hook into one another when the fibres are twisted,
and without which no force on earth could so twist them
that they should remain twisted.
The sugar manufacture offers us a similar illustration.
Sugar, in order to become fit for the market or the table,
must be granulated, or formed into minute polyhedral
crystals, each capable of adhering to its neighbor crystals, as in lumps, without their running together as in a
paste. The sugar-cane, the beet, and the maple are the
only plants of common and easy cultivation from which
sugar has been successfully made. Yet, as a chemical
ingredient, sugar enters into numerous vegetable productions, and into none, perhaps, more largely than into
our common maize, from which the manufacture, as has
been estimated, would at least double the agricultural revenue of the Free States of our Union.  With this view
the corn-stalk has been subjected to faithful and elaborate experiment. The juice has been expressed, and has
presented hopefully all the characteristics of the canejuice; but the modes of crystallizing the cane-juice, and
all other modes that science or skill could suggest, have
failed, simply because crystallization is a process, not of
art, but of the divine order of nature. Art can merely
supply the conditions, but cannot impose the law, and
the Creator has imposed the law on the cane-juice, and
not on the corn-juice. 
THE PROVIDENCE OF GOD IN HUMAN ART.
These illustrations may suffice to show the entire
dependence of human art and skill on the infinite providence of God,- that providence which has sown in the
bosom of creation the seeds of all uses and capabilities,
whose harvest ripens along the ages under the same genial
care which, in the briefer spaces of a simpler husbandry,
renews the face of the earth, sends the early and the
latter rain, and crowns the year with plenty.
I would next call your attention to the physical structure of man as specially adapted to the purposes of art.
There are in one of our devotional hymns two lines
peculiarly childish in sound, which yet contain the whole
theory of civilization, and expound the earthly position
and destiny of the human race. They are,
"Why was my body formed erect, -
While brutes bow down to earth?"
Were it not for this simple difference, man might  be
possessed of all the native intellectual capacity he now
has, and yet could gain scarcely any accurate knowledge
of the universe, could embody his ideas only in the
rudest forms, could transmit very little of his experience
and wisdom or their results to future generations, and
could bequeath to his immediate posterity hardly anything more precious than some savage booth or burrowing-place.
Man is perhaps the most feeble animal on earth in
proportion to his size, yet he easily walks as sovereign,
leads the behemoth in his train, tows the leviathan by
his warp, makes the everlasting hills bow before him,
lays his mandate and his chain on the giant forces of
nature. And it is chiefly by means of the one divinely
fashioned instrument, the hand,- through the elevation,
128 
124     CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
expansion, and more complex organization of the very
digits which we trace in less perfect development in the
anterior limbs of every quadruped. The hand,- so
slender and flexible that it might seem fitted neither for
doing nor enduring, yet whose closely knit web-work of
nerves and sinews concentrates the entire strength of the
body, constituting a mightier force in proportion to its
magnitude than is found in the whole universe beside; —
the hand, combining all mechanical powers in one,- the
fingers jointed levers, the sinews pulleys, whose elastic
force is but imperfectly typified when by a series of artificial pulleys a slender silken thread is made to sustain as
heavy a weight as a man could carry, the wrist-joint
a perpetual screw without whose circular motion no
screw of steel would ever find its way into its socket
-the hand, capable one moment of wielding a giant's
strength, and the next of subserving the most delicate
uses, dissecting the microscopic proportions of a flowercup or an insect's wing, marking with the graver airlines subtile as the sunbeams, copying the vanishing
hues of clouds and rosebuds and the human countenance,
embodying thought in forms so ethereal that they might
seem inbreathed by viewless spirits, rather than wrought
by material agency,- the hand it is that makes man
what he is, God's viceroy upon the earth. Reflect that
there is no mechanical operation, whether of ruder craft
or of the highest art, the capacity of which is not inherent
in the hand, the direction of which is not one of the complex movements of which the hand is susceptible, the
efficacy of which does not depend on the guidance or
restraint of the hand. And what do we mean when we
speak of water-power or steam-power taking the place of
the hand? Simply tlis, - that, imperfectly copying some 
THE PROVIDENCE OF GOD IN HUMAN ART.
one or more of the countless number of divinely shaped
instruments obtained by division or combination from our
two wrist-joints and palms and our ten digits, we-construct certain artificial hands, and then supply to them
by the impetus of falling water or expanding steam the
force which accrues from the principle of life to the
nerves and sinews of the vital organism.
I have selected the hand as the prilne executive member of the body, and I scarcely know of an object in the
universe which so richly and beautifully manifests the
Creator's wisdom, love, and providence, so that, were I
obliged to confine myself to a single illustration, I would
choose this before all others.  But there is hardly one of
the perceptive or active powers of the body which does
not on analysis reveal kindred adaptations to industrial
uses, showing that man brings into the world and carries
through life fitnesses, capacities, and instrumentalities,
which render art less his choice and achievement than a
divinely imposed necessity of his nature.
Nor are these adaptations confined to the organs and
faculties which we usually connect in our thought with
industrial energy. They may be traced equally in the
interior structure, in the vital organs and functions.
Consider, for instance, the nutritive process in man. I
look indeed with no complacency on the lot of the overtasked laborer, whether he be a slave by arbitrary law or
by a no less tyrannical necessity, and I doubt not that in
a future better than the present all labor will find its due
meed of repose, relaxation, and space for the culture of
the higher faculties. But thus far the requirements of
human industry have demanded of the majority of mankind the constant and vigorous employment of the active
powers through the greater part of every day; and it is
125 
126     CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
believed that in no other animal does nutrition occupy
and digestion appropriate to its own purposes so little
time as in man. A single hour in the day might suffice
for the taking of food (in our country many abridge even
this scanty allotment, though not without injury or peril);
and if food be taken in moderation, it may pass through
all its essential stages without impeding the physical
energy. Thus man may toil his ten or twelve hours
daily with no cost to health or decline of strength.  On
the other hand, the ruminating animals demand for
nutrition the greater part of their time, and are therefore incapable of anything approaching the vigorous and
persistent bodily exertion necessary in many departments
of human industry.  The ox forms no exception.  HIis
strength, indeed, enables him to draw heavy weights;
but he can be quickened only by cruelty, and then but
for brief periods, beyond the naturally sluggish gait of
his species. Nor does the sustained velocity of the
camel, when we consider the length of his steps, bear
any comparison to that persistent celerity of the human
limbs which is essential alike to the more subtile processes and the immense aggregate of man's achievements
in the industrial arts.  Even  the horse,  man's  most
efficient helper, yields to him in the power of continuous
effort.  He needs so much time for feeding, that he is
never capable of so many hours of unintermitted labor as
man, and even in mere locomotion, it is well known that
in a month or any long period of time a well-trained
pedestrian will pass over more ground than the besttrained horse.  You will perceive the pertinence of this
comparison to the  topic under discussion, when  you
reflect that there are not a few departments of human
industry, and not infrequent industrial emergencies, in 
THE PROVIDENCE OF GOD IN HUMAN ART.
which persistency of labor is no less essential than artistical skill, and that this persistency is due, not to manl's
will or genius, but to the providence of the Creator,
which has thus fitted him for his place and office as an
industrial agent.
Again, it is man's boast that hlie can carry his industry
and art over the whole world, and surround himself with
their products in everv climate. Let us look somewhat
in detail at the providential element in this cosmopolitan
adaptation, in which man stands alone among the inhabitants of the earth. It depends on the joint functions of
circulation and respiration.  In the severity of winter we
may observe a strong contrast between different classes
of the exposed.   In the narrow streets and ill-built or
poorly repaired houses of our towns and cities, we may
find poverty-stricken families cowering with contracted
limbs and chattering teeth over their scanty fires, while
their dwellings often seem a mere lattice-work designed
for the free passage of the northern blast. But with the
thermometer at its lowest range, the woodman's  axe
plies with a vigorous and merry rilng; the farmer trudges
unchilled by the side of his team; and warm, glad life
outspeeds the wind it braves in the swift sleighs that
track our interior river-courses and lake-beds.   The
cause is manifestly internal, not external, - personal,
not atmospheric. We are heated chiefly, not from without, but from within, - not by the fuel burned in our
presence, but by the fuel which we ourselves consume.
We carry aboutt with us each his own hearth, with its
vestal fire,- his own stove, with its perpetual radiation
of heat.  Our lungs are the seat of a constant combustion, literally of a coal-fire, kindled with our first breath,
extinguished only with our last. The fuel is the carbon
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I 
128      CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
and hydrogen contained in our food, carried with other
elements through the process of digestion and bloodmaking, conveyed to the lungs, and then oxidized, or, in
other words, ignited and burned, by the oxygen inhaled
from the atmosphere.
This process it is that heats the body, and at the same
time resists to a certain, and in some cases to an almost
incredible degree, the effect of external heat.  In extreme
cold no particle of blood remains near the surface for
more than an instant; but the entire life-tide passes constantly to and from this central hearth, thus sending to
the surface from moment to moment a freshly heated
current. On the other hand, at an excessively high
temperature, the ceaseless withdrawal of blood from the
surface before it can become unduly heated preserves the
internal temperature unchanged. This apparatus is imitated in that most effective mode of warming buildings,- a system of hot-water pipes, in which a heated
and rarefied current of water sets constantly from the
furnace or lungs to the remoter parts of the system, and
a cooled and condensed current returns, as constantly, to
be heated over again. By virtue of this arrangement in
the human frame, a variation of more than two hundred
degrees in external heat, from the drying-room or the
mouth of a forge to the lowest Arctic temperature, occasions a difference of not more than three or four degrees
in the human body.
Now the contrast between the suffering and the nonsuffering in the severer exposures of our Northern climate
is due to the different amounts of fuel employed to feed
the internal flame. Fire, it is said, cannot warm the
very poor, and this is because their meagre vegetable
food, even if it seem unstinted, is deficient in carbon. 
THE PROVIDENCE OF GOD IN HUMAN ART.
On the other hand, those who meet the bleakest exposures without suffering are well fed on carbon-yielding
food, and the fire that they carry with them never burns
low for lack of fuel. The perfect working of this apparatus has its best illustration in the experience of Dr.
Kane and his companions. With a temperature sometimes of seventy degrees below zero, and for weeks
together never rising above forty, often burrowing in the
snow at these low temperatures, they found themselves
more dependent on food than on fire. With an adequate
supply of raw walrus meat and other unctuous, carbonyielding food, they enjoyed health, comfort, vigor, gayety, hopefulness. When this supply fell short, the
red-hot cabin stove seemed to yield no warmth,-  nature drooped, sickened, and was ready to perish, reviving
again, and glowing with its wonted fires, when a kind
Providence again spread their board in proportion to
their need.1
This self-heating apparatus has a most essential bearing on man's industrial capacity. By virtue of it he can
toil at the forge and the furnace-mouth, and chase the
whale and trap the seal in Polar seas; can say to the
North, "Give up," and to the South, "Keep not back ";
can bring together the fruits of every zone, and blend in
the products of his industry the contributions of every
soil and climate.
In man alone does this system attain a perfect adjustment. Other animals have their limits of latitude, some
broader, some more restricted; none are cosmopolites.
The camel and the reindeer could not change places.
1 The reader can hardly fail to be reminded here that in high Arctic latitudes hardly any other than strongly unctuous food is attainable, and that of
this, under ordinary circumstances, the natives are able to obtain an abundant
supply.
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0
129
0
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130     CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
The elephant could not winter in Greenland.  The polar
bear swelters under the tempered heat of one of our
October days. Man alone can live and work wherever
land, iceberg, or ocean gives him room to stand or float.
This vein of illustration might be followed much further; but I leave it, to develop a still more intimate relation between human art and the Creator. All art is
mathematical. Thus music is equally with arithmetic a
science of numbers; Pythagoras and Orpheus were
equally identified with its early development; and it was
better understood by Newton, La Grange, and Euler,
than by Mozart, Beethoven, or Rossini. The problem
of the flute-note is discussed in the Principia with the
harmony of the spheres. The relative magnitude of the
pipes of the organ, the length of their vibrations respectively, and the qualities of the resulting tones, form a
series of numerical proportions no less definite and uniform than those which govern the planetary orbits; and
the reason why the reed-pipes are oftener out of tune
than the others is, that they involve complex problems
which still lack a complete solution, so that the rules for
their construction are but empirical. Musical intervals
are rightly designated by numerical names, and might be
as well represented on the score by numbers as by notes.
Colors have their mathematical no less than their chemical laws, and, as they are separated by the prism or
combined in art, they indicate relations which can be
expressed only by abstract formulae. Painting has no
merit, unless the drawing be true, and all true drawing
corresponds to one or another mode of mathematical
projection. Architecture and mechanical operations of
every kind depend on definite proportions, the violation 
THE PROVIDENCE OF GOD IN' HUMAN ART.
of which can be compensated by no exuberance of beauty
or misplaced accumulation of strength, but must issue in
utter waste and ruin. Every. department of engineering,
the grading of the routes of travel, the construction of
railways and bridges, the safety and efficiency of the
water-wheel, the entire science of navigation, - all depend on mathematical laws coeval and coextensive with
the universe, and navigation, on these laws as they span
the solar system, and extend to stars whose distances
elude calculation. The practical rules of even the inferior arts, the rules recognized by the laborer  who
knows not the multiplication-table, are derived from
these world-embracing, universe-girdling laws. Were
it not for the perception of these laws, we should still
be at the lowest point of civilization. We should dare
to rear only structures frail as a tent, or of ungainly and
superfluous massiveness like the pyramids; no machine
or mechanical power beyond a rude knife or mallet
would help us in our toil; and our hollowed trunks of
trees or bark canoes would still timidly skirt the sea shore, and not venture beyond sight of land.
But the mathematical science in which art has its
birth is literally a portion of the Divine mind. So far
as we are cognizant of it, God gives us glimpses of the
plan of the universe, permits us to handle the compasses
with which he meted out the earth and spread the heav ens, enables us to see precisely as he sees.
Here, then, is the highest dignity of art. It is the
embodiment of absolute truth, the circumscription in
material forms of universal and eternal laws, the tran script by human hands of the thoughts of God. Its
rules could have been devised, codified, and applied only
by minds that were taken up by the Creator into his own
131 
132     CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
point of view,- taught by his inspiration the very relations and proportions that dwelt from all eternity in his
omniscience, and were crystallized by his fiat in worlds,
suns, and systems.
We have now reached the climax of human art. Man
disappears, and what he calls his work is but the manifestation of the' one creative, all-pervading Spirit,great and glorious in the massive and sky-reaching
structures of human genius, in the world-subduing energies of science, in the thronged marts of industry aind
traffic, no less than in the silent mountain, the primeval
forest, or the many-twinkling smile and the multitudinous roar of the ocean-waves.
While the discussion in which I have led you this
evening has its fitting and almost necessary place in a
course of Lectures on natural religion, I am the more
glad to lead you over this ground, because the tendency
of our times is, I might almost say, to art-worship, - to
the sentiment which had its type and reached its culminating-point in the ancient monarch, when  he said,
"Is not this great Babylon that I have built, by the
night of my power and for the honor of my majesty?"
Much of the practical skill, mechanical genius, and executive capacity of the day is materialistic,- Titanic alike
in its strength and its impiety, worshipping only its own
capacity and its master-workmen. The rapidity and
vastness of man's aggressions upon nature, the iron
girdles with which he clasps the continent, the lightnings that bear his mandates from zone to zone, are
constantly dwelt upon, not as outgoings of Omnipotent
Wisdom, but as the apotheosis of art and science, and the
great discoverers, inventors, and mechanlicians of the age 
THE PROVIDENCE OF GOD IN HUMAN ART.
have honors rendered to them hardly less than divine.
Meanwhile the sacred solitudes where holy men were
wont to commune in silence with the Almnighty are solitudes no longer. Art obtrudes her forces where once
were secluded shrines of natural grandeur and beauty,
lays her iron track across the sunless ravines, wakes with
the shout and tramp of her cars the echoes of the ancient
hills.
I have endeavored to show you that these works of
man are in a higher and more intimate sense the works
of God,   that in all in which man seeks his own glory
he but manifests the glory of the Creator.  "Let the
people praise thee, O God, yea, let all the people praise
thee." The views that I have presented blend in worship
the tribute of art with the spontaneous incense that floats
in temples on which there has been no sound of axe or
hammer,- compels the throng and tide of toiling hands
and throbbing brains and reasoning minds to take up the
strain of universal nature, the song of angels and of ransomed men: -" Great and marvellous are thy works,
Lord God Almighty,- great where  thy hand  hath
wrought in everlasting silence, no less marvellous where
thine inspiration hath guided, thy might strengthened,
thy loving providence crowned, the work of thy children
upon earth."
133
14 
LECTURE VII.
THE PROVIDENCE OF GOD IN HUMAN SOCIETY.
My last Lecture related to the Divine Providence in
art. I propose this evening to consider that same Providence as manifested in the diversity of native endowments, capacities, and tendencies among the races of men
and among individuals of the same race.
The Scriptural idea of mankind is that of unity in
diversity, - one body, many members,- the same spirit,
diverse gifts and administrations,- one God, who worketh all in all, but who distributes talents and capabilities
with reference not alone to individual well-being, but
equally to the common good. The solidarity of the race,
so far from being a modern idea, has the most complete
statement of it that was ever made in the twelfth chapter of St. Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians, and
crops out, as one of his favorite conceptions, in numerous
passages of his other Epistles. What more perfect expression of it can human language admit of, than when,
making Christ the head, he adds: "From whom the
whole body, fitly joined together, and compacted from
that which every joint supplieth, according to the effectual working of the measure  in every part, maketh increase of the body to the edifying of itself in love"?
Let us see how this idea verifies itself in the actual
condition of mankind. We will look first at the several
races of men. Nothing can be more obvious than the 
THE PROVIDENCE OF GOD IN HUMAN SOCIETY.  135
indelibleness of national characteristics. Barbarism does
not obliterate them, nor does the highest cultivation supplant them. The types may be improved or deteriorated,
but they always remain distinct.  The Jew is a Jew all
the world over, and as much so now that he has had no
country of his own for nearly eighteen centuries, as when
Jerusalem was in its glory. The Greeks have retained
their love of nature and of art through ages of depression
and enslavement.
"On Suli's rock and Parga's shore
Exist the remnants of a line
Such as the Doric mothers bore,"
and the nation is awaking from its slumber with the very
same salient features which we trace in the Periclean
era. The Hindoo, though imbued with all the literature
and wisdom of Europe, still retains his Asiatic cast of
mind and stamp of character; while Europeans may live
generation after generation in Hindostan or in China without becoming Orientalized, and may found and people
colonies in every zone without any essential change of
the traits that distinguished them in the countries whence
they came. These things premised, we will now, to
illustrate the solidarity of the human family in the differences of the races, consider the Caucasian, the Asiatic,
and the African  groups of nations respectively, - a
division by no means exhausting or scientifically exact,
yet sufficiently so for the use I propose to make of it.
The Caucasian race, wherever found, holds the foremost place as to the cognitive and reasoning faculties,
strength of will, love of power, and executive energy.
These qualities have, indeed, been kept in abeyance
during portions of the history of some nations, through
0 
CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
the repressive force of religious superstition or of governmental oppression; but there is no one of the group that
has not at some period manifested them, and that would
not be expected to manifest them were the limiting. circulmstances partially removed. They seem born rulers
and lawgivers, are impatient of restraint, uneasy subjects
of arbitrary sway, and incapable of being permanently
enslaved or subdued. They have the clear, scientific
eye, the power and habit of ratiocination, an indispositionl to take truth on trust, an aptness for investigation,
research, and discovery. They have furnished all the
great inventors of the race, if we except those that must
at some remote epoch have flourished among the ClIinese
and Japanese, from whom  they differ in the vigorous
and rapid progress of their art, while among the Eastern
nations art is stationary, and its processes slow, conducted with little aid from machinery, and with an indisposition to learn new and improved methods. But with
the Caucasian races, the imagination follows in the wake
of reason, intuition lags behind demonstration, and the
affections, instead of giving law, are in subjection to the
intellectual nature.
The Asiatic mind is easily swayed by impressions from
without, in close sympathy with nature, keenly sensitive
to its beauties and its harmonies, full of gorgeous fancies,
rich in poetic element, kaleidoscopic in the profusion,
variety, and splendor of its imaginative literature. But
it is slow to reason, it has neither prudence nor persistency in counsel, and its affections are subordinated to
the imagination.
The African races, with all their depression, still show
in some directions superior capacity.   Docility, obedience, and love are their native traits,- traits not devel
136 
THE PROVIDENCE OF GOD IN II        SOCIETY.   137
oped by their long servitude, but'essential.1 to render their
enslavement possible; for the experiment of enslaving
other races has been repeatedly tried, but has never permanently succeeded. The Africans often submit to their
bondage, with full consciousness of their wrongs and of
their power to resent them, by virtue of a moral instinct
a'verse from violence, and willing to endure oppression
rather than to avenge it. Whatever culture they receive
goes at once to the affections, -takes a moral and
religious direction. To educate them is, with rare exceptions, to make them devout, grateful, kind, and
exemplary in their social relations and duties. Witlh
the highest culture that they can attain, it is doubtful
whether they will ever excel in science, art, or poetry,
or will furnish any considerable proportion of commanding, cogent minds. But there is every reason to believe
that they may be so trained as to exhibit the richest
traits of moral excellence, to be the ready recipients of
the highest social influences, and to reflect the love, as
other races reflect the wisdom and beauty, of the Creator.
The relations of these several races are now deranged,
and their mutual correspondences obscured, by the presence of moral evil. The Caucasian, in the pride of his
strength, makes the Asiatic his tributary, the African his
slave, and, in his insatiable lust for power and territory, is
always ready to convert the earth into an Aceldama and
a Golgotha. Thus reason and will usurp the supremacy over the gentler elements of character, and mutual
alienation -contempt and fear, violence and wrong-suffering - prevents the nations from recognizing in one
another the traits of the godlike which each might admnire
and copy in every other. But let the ages roll on, and, 
138     CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
while science and skill weave their network of ever closer
material communion and interest, let the gospel of brotherhood clasp its zone around the nations, and put a period
to war, slavery, and oppression,- then may not the differences of the races blend in the most perfect and beautiful harmony? May not each from its peculiar vein
contribute equally to the joint stock of elevating and
refining influences? May not each be at once the
source and the recipient of sentiments and impulses,
without which neither can fill its place and discharge
its mission? Will not reason own the transcendent loveliness of the affections, and they in their turn do homage
to the majesty of reason, and fancy, while it breathes
poetry into science and shapes the paradise of love, seek
where it bestows, and draw truth and fervor from the
very fountains into which it pours its own exuberant
wealth of beauty? Thus in coming ages will the whole
human family combine to constitute the second Adam,
myriad-formed, bearing every capacity and perfection
that the first Adam might have developed had hle remained sinless in Eden.  Thus will the immeasurable
Creator see the whole circle of his attributes reflected
fiom the face of humanity with a resplendence infinitely
brighter thlan can ever be mirrored in the material universe, or has been beheld in the human form except in
ILim alone who in the form of man outrayed the brightness of the Father's glory.  The development of these
harmonies may be yet far distant; but in the capacity
for them which our race manifests in its present blindness and perversion, in the tendency to them which we
discern through all the darkness and misery that brood
over the earth, we mark the tokens of a far-seeing providence, which we can trace back through all the ages 
4
THIE PROVIDENCE OF GOD IN HUMAN SOCIETY.  139
of authentic history, and thus, with undoubting faith, on
through an   ever-brightening future.
From this broad view let us now pass to the distribution of talents among persons of the same age and nation.
Here it cannot be needful to defend the position, that
the differences of ability are in great part native, not
acquired; -that genius and talent, so far from being
the result of education or of favoring circumstances, will
work their way through obstacles that seem insurmountable, and will make any posture of circumstances propitious to their own development; while many persons
who would gladly distinguish themselves in particular
departments, who do all that they can do, and are
helped by others so far as help can be made availing,
hardly reach mediocrity. This diversity of natural gifts
is so almost universally admitted, that any argument in
its favor would seem lost labor. Taking it, then, for
granted, we will proceed to consider the Divine providence in their distribution.
Writers on natural religion are wont to infer the wisdom and goodness of the Creator from the distribution of
land and water, of wood, salt, coal, and metals, in fine,
of all the materials of man's outward well-being, in such
a way that the relation of demand and supply can never
suffer any serious derangement. The same relation of
demand and supply prevails in man's native endowments
and capacities. Talents are bestowed as they are needed
and can be used, with that liberal frugality, that measured
generosity, which enhances the value of all God's higher
gifts, and attests the careful economy of the Giver.
The only universal need is that of moral goodness;
and of this the capacity is universal, except in the rare
case of mental disease; while (as I shall show here 
140     CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
after) the humblest intellectual endowments do not
preclude one even from eminence in goodness. For
hand-labor and mechanical operations a very large supply of human strength and skill is always needed, and, to
meet this need, the great majority of men are so constituted as to be fitted for such departments of industry, to
find improvement and happiness in them, and, with other
walks of life in full view, to be conscious neither of
desire nor of adaptation for a different sphere. Then
there is needed a certain proportion of men capable of
conducting combined industry and extended enterprise,
of directing the skill and employing the labor of others,
and of distributing and exchanging the products of agriculture and handeraft.  It is a patent fact that these
departments of business are sadly overcrowded; but the
multitude of those who cannot by any training be moulded
into a capacity for them, and who flounder on through
successive failures from a sanguine youth to a povertystricken old age, authorizes the belief that the Creator
has fitted for these duties no more than the world needs.
We  verify the same law of distribution in social and
political relations.   Of minds capable of leading and
controlling the action of other minds, bearing the signature of native supremacy, endowed with the legitimate
right and power of influence, there are enough, yet not
more than enough, to serve as interpreters of truth and
duty, counsellors, judges, magistrates, and legislators.
Nor is this proportion essentially modified by the institutions of society. It is as large among savage as among
civilized nations; it furnishes the same relative quota of
leaders and sages for the council-fire in the wigwam as
for the senate or the parliament. Arbitrary forms of
government do not diminish the number of these con 
THE PROVIDENCE OF GOD IN HUMAN SOCIETY.  141
trolling minds, though, when crowded out of their appropriate spheres, they either, as in modern Germany,
waste themselves in fruitless activity, becoming poets
without inspiration, authors without taste or tact, supernumeraries in departments of literature and research that
demand a widely different order of intellect, or, as in
Italy, they employ their genius in undermining the institutions of which they are the natural conservators and
administrators.  Nor does a democratic regime, as it is
sometimes idly asserted, multiply talents of this class
but when offices outnumber the needs of the people, are
created for party purposes, and sought for their spoils, for
lack of fit candidates they must be filled by men destitute of the capacity to counsel, legislate, rule, or judge.
To pass to the realm of literature and art, the poet is
born, not made. If he could be made by mere endeavor
or practice, there would be as many poets as readers; for
the habit of rhyming is contracted at some period by
almost every. person that can write, and is persisted in
through life by very many. Yet of poets by birthright
and the gift of God there are exceedingly few in any one
generation, in some scarce any, though on the musterroll of all ages and lands they constitute no mean array,
and are sufficiently various and divergent in style and
subject to meet every hue and grade of taste, and to furnish every description of demand. Were the poets still
fewer, their works would be inaccessible to many capable of enjoying them to the full, and some veins of true
poetic sentiment would be overlooked, some tastes unprovided for.  Were  they more numerous,  the fruits
of their genius would be less precious, less enjoyed,
less prized, and the world, flooded with true poetry, as
now with its counterfeit, would lose the power of appreciation. 
142      CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
Here I would have you remark the rigid, merciful,
and beautiful parsimony which, in all the higher departments of art and literature, governs the proportion between power and taste, genius and  susceptibility, -
between those who create and those who can enjoy and
appreciate. In these departments one can minister to
thie pleasure and profit of hundreds, thousands, communities, nations; and, accordingly, to one capable of
thus ministering, there are multitudes  that can avail
themselves of his ministry. Of all the higher forms of
art, the most common  is oratory,-  that is, the capacity
of kindling, swaying, convincing, persuading, gladdening
gathered crowds by the vivid presentation, in word and
gesture, of thoughts and sentiments capable of powerfully
interesting and moving the judgment and the emotional
nature. This gift is sufficiently common to bring all
occasionally within the sphere of its exercise, yet sufficiently rare to make that exercise an uncloying and
unwearying joy to the hearers. But of true orators a
large proportion succeed by virtue of endowments evanescent in their nature, and have not the higher power
of clothing their burning thoughts in words that can retain their prestige beyond reach of the living voice; for
authors are much fewer than orators. The capacity of
successful authorship, immeasurably rarer than the endeavor, is yet frequent enough for the needs of the reading public, even were education universal; but among
those who can read with discrimination, pleasure, and
profit the records of fancy, wit, or wisdom, there is not
one in ten thousand whom any possible training could
have made the writer of books that would live and last.
In the plastic arts, of artists worthy of the name, or of
those who by any possibility could have become such, 
THE PROVIDENCE OF GOD IN HUMAN SOCIETY.   143
there are very few.  Were there more, their creations
would cease to be valued and to give pleasure.  There
are enough, and no more than enough, to minister to the
taste of the thousands and millions who can be gladdened, improved, refined, and elevated by their works.
Of musical composers, actual and potential, there are
enough, yet not mo-re than enough, to furnish compass
and variety for the incessant demand made  for social,
festive, and religious uses.  Skilfal musical performers,
also, are to be everywhere found in sufficient number
for the solace, delight, and edification of all who rejoice
in the concord of sweet sounds. Yet the most diligent
use of the Pestalozzian system, the most assiduous drilling of the infant ear and voice, falls far short of developing the predicted universality of musical talent, which we
might well deprecate- had not a kind Providence set
up impassable barriers against it - as rendering the art
chl-eap, paltry, and worthless.  Let  training-schools of
music be established in every hamlet, let musical instruction be proffered to every pupil in all our seminaries of
learning, from the Kindergarten to the college, let a piano
find shelter under every roof, - still the proportion of
those who can yield delight by musical performance to
those who can enjoy, and in some good measure appreciate, the achievements of musical skill and genius, must
ever remain small.
In the distribution of natural endowments which  1
have now exhibited there are several points worthy of
emphatic consideration. 1. The higher tastes~ the intellectual demands, of the vast majority of mankind are fully
met without their being taken from the walks of productive industry. They can enjoy all the pleasure and all
the mental emolument of art, literature, and poetry, 
144     CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF SATLRE.
through labor, self-discipline, and self-sacrifiece in which
they have borne no part. 2. The classes of talent which
are developed the most slowly and laboriously are distrib uted the most sparingly, and are at the same  time en dowed with an extent of influence commensurate with
the outlay of time and effort in their cultivation.  3. In
proportion to the difficulties to be overcome, the toil to
be performed, the sacrifice to be borne, in the cultivation
of any class of talents, is its power of self-diffusi.on in space
and  time.  Thus the poet or the artist of the highest
type, made what he is only by stern self-denial and rigid
self-discipline, gives his name to his age, transmits his
memory to all succeeding centuries, and is compensated
for toil and straitness by the assurance that his works will
live in distant generations, and that his genius will be
recognized and felt throughout the civilized world.
Does not the distribution of natural endowments, thus
symmetrical and mutually self-compensating, manifest a
presiding Providence, if possible, even more fully than
analogous arrangements in the outward creation?  We
here see that the principle of the division of labor, which
has been represented as the great industrial device of
modern times, by which alone skill can be perfected and
its highest productiveness insured, is distinctly recognized
by the Supreme Being in the order and economy of the
creation, so that in this regard man is but copying the
Divine precedent and pattern. You will remember that
in my last Lecture I showed you how the highest art
constantly. resolves itself into the imitation of the Creator.
The case is precisely the same in social and political
economy, which, when not false and mischievous, is little
else than the application — often unconscious - to particilar communities and organizations of the methods of 
THE PROVIDENCE OF GOD IN HUMAN SOCIETY.  145
the Divine providence, so that we might reverently employ concerning whatever is wise and salutary in the
institutions of all God's human children the words in
which Jesus characterizes his miracles: " The  Son can
do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do."
But while as an economical arrangement this distribution of talents satisfies the taste and judgment, certainly
of those who account themselves as among the more
favored, it needs to be further illustrated, and even claims
defence, in the case of those who occupy what is deemed
the lowest place in the scale of Divine allotments. In a
former Lecture I considered the condition of those destitute of moral and religious privilege; I now ask you to
look with me at the case of those who, in the established
order of civilized society, would be termed unprivileged,
- the laborers, the proletaries, the many who seem
doomed to incessant toil and burden for the luxury of
the few.  If they are by virtue of their occupation shut
out from the benefits and blessings which should appertain to them as intellectual and moral beings, if they are
of necessity devoid of privilege, then, though the plan
of the Divine administration which we have been reviewing may illustrate the wisdom, it throws doubt on the
love, of the Creator. But if we find that they are adequately cared for, the argument for a Providence no less
merciful than wise remains untouched. Let us try this
issue.
In the first place, labor is not of necessity unfavorable
to mental or moral development.  Even in its most complex forms it easily becomes so much a matter of routine
as to leave the thoughts free. The mind can in the
humblest sphere find ample materials for reflection and
7                               I
7
.I 
146     CIHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
means of improvement, while the kindly and devout
affections may be cherished, and all the essential duties
of the souLl's life discharged, in a position however obscure
and toilsome. Vigorous minds, distinctly cognizant of
everything within their natural range of knowledge, are
as often and as symmetrically formed in the laborious
walks of life, as in those styled peculiarly intellectual.
Both in England and in America, many have passed from
the last and the loom to conspicuous places in literature
and in public life, by virtue of mental acumen and vigor
largely developed before they stinted the fall measure of
their daily labor. And how many there are, that never
leave the work-bench or the plough, who are shrewd,
sagacious, endowed with sterling good-sense, possessed
of large practical wisdom, skilful in judging of character,
weighing arguments, and testing evidence! How many
too, who have manifested the loftiest moral traits, and
from whose stores of ethical and religious knowledge
Socrates and Plato would have deemed themselves priviIeged learners! What greater man, in that wisdom which
adapts means to ends, in that saintly wisdom which adapts
the choicest means to the noblest ends, has the present
century seen, than John Pounds,  the cobbler?    iHe
entered on his life of unceasing toil with much less than
a New England comnmon-school education.  He never
learned to mnake a shoe, and in his nearly fourscore years
he performed as large an amount of minute and grovelling task-work as any man in Great Britain. Yet he
found time and mind and heart to rescue from ruin, and
to raise to his own humble level in social life, and toward
his own exalted rank in the moral hierarchy, several
hundreds of orphaned and neglected children about the
lanes and wharves of his native city, and to win for 
THE PROVIDENCE OF GOD IN HUMAN SOCIETY.   147
himself anl enduring name among the first philanthropists
in the world's annals.
The'mention of John Pounds reminds me of the fraternity of St. Crispin, in both hemispheres, which has almost
vindicated for itself a place among the liberal professions
by its high grade of general intelligence, and by the number of eminent men who have issued from its ranks, from
Hans Sachs, whose lyrics were among the great forces of
the Protestant Reformation, to our own Whittier, whose
place in the foremost rank of living poets none can challenge. Who workl harder than the shoemakers of Massachusetts? Yet in what class of men is there more
general activity of intellect, not to speak of the numerous
instances in which the irrepressible force of genius has
elevated members of their brotherhood to the highest
eminence at the bar, in the pulpit, in the counsels of
the State and nation? Surely labor is not unprivileged.
But though a life of incessant labor does not preclude
the education of the higher nature, it is beginning to be
admitted on all hands that neither does the order of Providence require, nor can the general welfare permit, such a
life to be the destiny of any portion of our race. Man is
overworked as regards the needs of humanity. Excessive
production is the most fruitful source of commercial convulsions, financial derangements, and of penury and starvation among the laboring classes. But reserving this
point for future discussion, and supposing that all the work
that is done is needed, it is performed by much fewer
laborers than ought to be engaged in it. Vast numbers
properly belonging to the ranks of productive industry
forsake them, or are forced out of them, and if they remained, they would greatly diminish the amount of toil
per capita.  There are multitudes constantly pressing into 
148     CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
commercial life, without talent or education for business,
with no possibility of success, without even elbow-room in
the crowd of competitors. Then there are the wastefil
armies and navies of the Old World and the New,generally worse than useless,l- converting their myriads
of potential producers into unproductive consumers.
Consider also how large a proportion of the products of
the earth is perverted from nourishment into poison. An
immense percentage of the sugar and grain crops goes
into market only in the form of alcoholic liquors, which
in small part are made availing for medicinal and industrial uses, but for the most part are worse than wasted,
and are thie most potent of all agencies in reducing the
working force of humanity.
With these allowances for laborers abstracted and labor
wasted, the handcraft of Christendom, when in fill employ, gluts every market, and heaps up masses of commodities of every kind in the hands of dealers.   Then
prices fall ruinously low, manufactories suspend operations, farmers till less land, laborers are thrown out of
employment by the thousand, and industry suffers a
paralysis, till the supply is reduced, and a fresh demand
raises prices and stimulates enterprise anew.   All this
indicates that, with the industrial machinery in full operation, more work is done than man needs to have done.
i  The writer will not of course be understood as applying the epithet "worse
than useless" to the forces now or at any time employed in protecting the
fundamental law and the essential institutions of the state, in guarding its
frontiers from actual peril, or in preventing depredations upon its commerce
on the seas.  But in time of peace, a very large portion of the military and
naval force in commission and pay in the various countries of Christendom
not only serves no immediate purpose of defence or protection, but is not even
in readiness for such service, an army or navy at the commencement of a war
always evincing full as much need of being purged of inefficient officers and
men, as of new etiiistmentls. 
THE PROVIDENCE OF GOD IN HUMAN SOCIETY.   149
If, when men work twelve or fourteen hours a day, a
large proportion of the laborers must lie idle one year
out of every four or five, to keep the supply of the commodities withlin reach of the demand, the same end would
be more conveniently brought about by their working but
nine or ten hours a day, and having constant employment.
Nor could the laborer lose, nay, he would rather gain, in
wages by the general shortening of his day's work. His
wages are not governed by the value he creates; for labor
creates all value, pays all income and revenue. Every
dollar of the millionnaire's dividends is ploughed for, and
delved for, and hammered for. The entire capital of the
community, in order to be productive, must pass through
the various channels of handcraft. The laborer's share
of what he earns depends, on the one hand, on his own
intelligence, self-respect, moral worth, and appreciation
of the comforts and refinements of civilized life, and, on
the other hand, on his employer's sense of justice. If he
toil unremittingly, and have no space for the culture of
the higher traits of mind and character, he will be compensated on the lowest scale of his absolute necessity;
for he will be too ignorant, thriftless, and reckless to claim
more, and he will not command sufficient respect to have
more awarded to him. But if by a less amount of toil he
yet produce his fair, quota toward a supply of the.wants
of the community, he can, by the cultivation of mind and
heart, place himself on the same moral level with his enmployer, - his demands will rise with his conscious needs,
his wages will grow with the growth of his substantial
claims to respect and deference, and he will be allowed
his just dividend of the annual revenue of his labor; while
the enterprise that employs, the skill that directs, and the
capital that sustains his indusfry will receive their equitable proportion, and no more. 
150      CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
The working of this principle has been tested by the
general establishment of the ten-hour system in some
departments of industry. The operatives in these departments are better paid than before; employers have
felt no injustice; and in the increased intelligence and
respectability of the employed, and in the diminished
tendency to overworking at some periods, and to a consequent glut of the labor-market at frequent intervals,
the relations of capital and industry, and of demand and
supply, have become more stable, and approached a more
equable adjustment. The operation of this same principle
must soon extend itself to all departments of industry.
It cannot be hastened by agitation or by factious combination, which only excites resistance and arrays public
opinion on the wrong side. It will gradually establish
itself with the recognition of sound views of social economy, of thle republican doctrine of equal rights, and of
mutual justice between man and man. The time cannot
be far distant when, in New England at least, the disastrous system of overworking and overproduction will be
permanently set aside, and the hours and amount of regular labor will be so adjusted to the actual needs of home
and foreign markets, as to prevent the spasms of consuming toil and intervals of hungry idleness which have
hitherto alternated in the history of the industrial world.
We are at present concerned with the fundamental
laws of the Divine Providence, not with artificial arrangements in contravention of those laws.   I have
shown you that one of those laws is, that much less
than the incessant toil of the laboring classes will produce all that man requires for subsistence, comfort, and
luxury.  Consequently, Providence has indicated for the
laborer ample season for relaxation and improvement. 
THE PROVIDENCE OF GOD IN HUMAN SOCIETY.   151
In a state of society conformed to its essential laws, no
day would pass for mly member of the community in exhausting toil, - every day would have its leisure hours
for domestic enjoyment, for the culture of the mental
powers, and for the indulgence of refined tastes.  Thus,
by the universal diffision of the elevating influences of
leisure and prosperity, the artificial distinctions of society
would fall away; all occupations would become liberal
professions; the man in every case would ennoble his
calling and reflect honor upon it; and all tie essential
offices'of life would  be  discharged without menial or
degrading associations attaching themselves to any, because hlie who performned even the humblest function,
instead of being wholly merged in it, would have existence and time, a status, an intellectual, moral, and social
life, independent of it.
In even pace with this tendency toward a high general level of social life, the civilized world must approach
nearer an equal distribution of material wealth.  Not only
will capital earn less and labor more, but with the general
diffusion of intelligence and the enhanced compensation
of labor the number of small capitalists will be constantly
on the increase, and the union of capital and labor will
become general.  To be sure, there must always be considerable accumulations of capital. They are demanded
for the general good, as safety-funds and movement-funds.
The sLrface of society must always be diversified.  But
there is no newd of Alpine scenery, -riches piled moultain high, with sunless and barren ravines in the chasms.
Far better is it that hill and valley should alike lie under the common sunlight, and equally wave with harvest
wealth.
There is yet one point more with reference to the 
152     CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
elevation of labor, which I want to illustrate. I exlibited to you in my last Lecture thle Divine Providence
in Art. Of this providence the chief revenue accrues to
the laborer.   Invention, machinery, steam, magnetism,
all are especially for his emolument. Without them, the
heirs of great names and ancestral acres would live ill
rude plenty and barbaric splendor, would lack nothiing
wlhich they could appreciate, and by their monopoly of
land - the only source of wealthl - would keep the
laboring classes in a dependenit and needy serfdom.
But machinery creates a wealth that cannot be inonopolized.  A  labor-saving invention confers a permanent
estate or settles an annual revenue on each of the
laborers of the country where it is used, and even of
the civilized world. Take, for instance, an invention by
which two men can do the work which ten used to do,
and suppose it applied to a department of labor in which
ten thousand men have been employed. It is manifest
that the labor of eight thousand men can be dispensed
with, and the amount of production remain the same as
before.  Now if these eight thousand men were dismissed
summarily fiom employment, the result would be a burden, and not a blessing, to the communlity.  But this is
not the case. In all probability they will remain in the
business, and aid in producing five times as much of the
commodity as was produced before; for, by dispensing
with four fifths of the labor, the commodity is cheapened
to two thirds, one half, or even one thlird of its former
price, and consequently many can afford to use it who
never used it before, and many with whom it was before
a llxmuy or a rarity can now make fiee and common use
of it. Thus the products of the labor of these eight
thousand men, being four times as much of the comn 
THE PROVIDENCE OF GOD IN HUMAN SOCIETY. 153
modity in question as was previously manufactured, are
thrown into the cheap market, chiefly for the benefit of
the laboring classes,-of men who must wait till a commodity is cheap, in order to purchase it fi-eely, if at all.
If it be cotton cloth or calico, they can dress their families
with a neatness and comfort not before attainable. If it
be glass or porcelain, they can gratify their taste in their
table fiirniture.  If it be paper, they can indulge themselves and their children with an occasional new book or
a daily journal.  If it be all article not unproductively
consumed, but used for the production of other g.oods;
they derive the same advantage in the cheaper ra  at
which those goods are procured.  If the commodity'
one adapted to general use, probably not only the eight
thousand will remain in the manufacture, but the demand
will grow so fast as to create a considerable indraft from
the labor-market at large, and thus to enhance in some
measure the average rate of wages. And let it be borne
imn mind that the increased consumption is, almost all of it,
by the poorer classes, - by the laborers. Rich men used
as much as they wanted of the commodity thus multiplied,
at the higher prices; the invention benefits those who
could not previously afford to purchase it.
I have said that in this supposed case the labor of the
eight thousand men is a gift of Providence to the laboring
portion  of t he community.  But there are two forms in
which        they may take the gift.  They may take it in goods,
as I have already shown you, or they may take it in time,
by the absorption of the disengaged eight thousand into
the general mass of laborers, the same amount of produLction being accomplished as before, but by fewer hours of
labor        on t he part of each operative of every class.  The
gift has in fact been accepted in both forms; thus far, how                  7* 
154     CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
ever, principally in the former, while in coming generations it will no doubt be oftener welcomed in the latter.
It has been hitherto taken chiefly in goods, because so
many desirable articles of comfort and enjoyment have
been made easily accessible and temptingly cheap. The
advance in the condition of the laboring classes within half
a century is almost fabulous. The man who unites industry with a moderate degree of skill lacks hardly anything
that could make him happier. As to the essentials of
comfort, the levelling upward, except among the indolent,
thriftless, and vicious, has reached a higher grade than
Utopians would have dreamed two or three generations
ago. And now that laborers have received, in goods,
nearly as much of the revenue which comes to them from
machinery as they desire to receive in that form, they are
turning their attention to the matter of time, and claiming a part of their dividend in hours, - in leisure to enjoy
the homes that have been made so comfortable, the added
measure of goods that has fallen to their inheritance. Invention and machinery, having been first made efficient
in multiplying comforts and luxuries, will now go on to
accomplish their mission in emancipating the laborer from
continuous toil, by enabling the laboring force of the
wyorld to do all the world's work within hours that shall
impose no heavy burden or depressing wearness, and
shall leave the paths of higher culture and superior privilege as freely open to those who are distinctively workers,
as to those who dignify their lives by the name of some
liberal profession.
I have thus shown you, with reference to those who, in
our social system, seem to have the least of privilege, -
first, that, in the order of Providence, the time spent in
labor is not lost to higher purposes; secondly, that more 
THE PROVIDENCE OF GOD IN HUMAN SOCIETY.  155
work is now done, when industrial agencies are in fuill
operation, than the race needs; and, thirdly, that, in the
progress of inventive art, there is ample provision for the
material comfort, the abundant leisure, and the high mental, moral, and spiritual culture of the laborers, - all
which, be it remembered, is not the growth of man's
philanthropy (for man has done next to nothing on a
large scale for his fellow-man), but the development of
the counsels of Him, of whom revelation tells us that his
tender mercies are over all his works, and his lovingkindness unto all the children of men. 
THE HOLINESS OF GOD.
the infant as early as we can trace anything beyondl sensation. It is not the result of education, but the basis of
education.  The parent does not awaken it, but appeals
to it in the earliest forms and acts of moral discipline. It
can no more be expelled or escaped from, than can the
consciousness of existence.
Conscience is unerring.   The  conviction I ought is
never felt with reference to anything but that which is
intrinsically, necessarily, eternally right. There are, indeed, many cases of conscientious wrong-doing; but how?
Not through a perverted sense of right, but through imperfect knowledge or defective judgment as to the proper
means of actualizing the sense of right. in conscientious
wrong-doing the animus of the act is right; the thing
done is what in the abstract ought to be done; there is
merely a mistake as to the method in which the honest,
benevolent, or devout purpose may be fitly carried into
effect, that is, a mistake, not as to one's own obligation,
but as to beings, objects, and relations external to himself. Thus the conscientious persecutor of those whom
he deems heretics is right in believing that he ought to
sacrifice every inferior consideration to the reverence and
worship of God; wrong only in supposing that the prop erty, liberty, and lives of his fellow-citizens are lis for
the purpose of sacrifice. Thus, also, the absurdities and
extravagances of fanaticism are expressions of that loy alty to God in which all moral good has its source and its
end; the mistake is solely one of taste and judgment, as
to the exterior becomingness and utility of certain modes
of expressing the'loyalty of the heart,- modes in thlem selves innocent, and which would be as becoming and
useful as any other modes, were they not inconsistent
wvith conventional propriety. Conscience never sanctions
157 
158     CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
a wrong disposition, motive, or feeling; but its province
lies wholly within, - the mode in which it shall embody
itself is a subject for legislation, human or Divine. When
the law prescribes only outward acts in themselves right
or indifferent, conscience takes the law as she finds it.
But when legislation lays sacrilegious hands on the ark
of God in the soul, invades the realm of conscience, commands what she forbids, or forbids what she commands,
the law is paralyzed before the divine majesty of right.
It may make submissive martyrs, whose blood shall cry
out of the ground for its repeal; but it can no more depose conscience from her judgment-seat than it can usurp
the throne of the universe.
I have said that the office of conscience is involved in
the word ought,-  owed.  But the ouyht must have its object. It implies a double personality,- the person owing,
and the person to whom the obligation is due. It has not
a merely human reference; for it adheres to portions of
our lives in which we can have no human creditor, in
which our fellow-beings have no interest,-to thoughts
and feelings which they cannot even know. When I say
I ought, I confess myself amenable to God; I acknowledge that I owe to him thoughts, words, and deeds conformed to his will, deserving his approval, nay, more,
accordant with his nature; for his will must be the expression of his nature, and if he wills purity, truth, and
love, it must be because he is stainlessly pure, eternally
true, infinitely good.
Still further, conscience is not only the reflection of the
Divine nature,- it is, not in metaphor, but in literal fact,
the God within.  Man constantly errs; conscience is infallible. Man changes from youth to age, from generation to generation; conscience is unchangeable. Man is 
THE HOLINESS OF GOD.
tempted; conscience knows no bribe. Man may make
himself utterly vile; but in the entire wreck and ruin of
his nature conscience is as loyal to the right in plying its
scourge of scorpions, as when it echoes the plaudit of a
justifying God on a life nobly spent or nobly sacrificed.
God is everywhere. He is present in inanimate nature
in those laws which are his unceasing fiat. He is present
with the brute creation in instinct, through whose impulse
the unreasoning races fulfil his bidding. He is present
with men in conscience. And as without his presence in
nature the forms of the visible creation would collapse
and perish; as without his presence in instinct the tribes
of air, land, and sea would rush to ruin; so without his
presence in conscience the bonds of society would be
sundered, government would be impossible, natural affection would be turned to hatred, and our whole race would
be blended in a tumultuous warfare of mutual destruction.
In saying this, I am aware that I ascribe to conscience
a degree of influence over society as it now is, which is
not generally recognized. But with all the wrong-doing
that there is among men, the overwhelming majority of
the individual acts performed in the world are not only
right and good, but strictly conscientious acts; and even
the very worst men are generally conscientious, except as
tc those particulars of conduct in which their ruling appetite or passion is immediately concerned. Go as low as you
will in the scale of moral turpitude, you still do not find
utter indifference to moral distinctions. I doubt whether
there lives a sane man who, when selfish motives are
equally balanced between the right and the wrong, would
not choose the right, though he might not know why, -
by an inward movement closely analogous to that which
i59 
THE HOLINESS OF GOD.
tempted; conscience knows no bribe. Man may make
himself utterly vile; but in the entire wreck and ruin of
his nature conscience is as loyal to the right in plying its
scourge of scorpions, as when it echoes the plaudit of a
justifying God on a life nobly spent or nobly sacrificed.
God is everywhere. He is present in inanimate nature
in those laws which are his unceasing fiat. He is present
with the brute creation in instinct, through whose impulse
the unreasoning races fuilfil his bidding. He is present
with men in conscience. And as without his presence in
nature the forms of the visible creation would collapse
and perish; as without his presence in instinct the tribes
of air, land, and sea would rush to ruin; so without his
presence in conscience the bonds of society would be
sundered, government would be impossible, natural affection would be turned to hatred, and our whole race would
be blended in a tumultuous warfare of mutual destruction.
In saying this, I am aware that I ascribe to conscience
a degree of influence over society as it now is, which is
not generally recognized. But with all the wrong-doing
that there is among men, the overwhelming majority of
the individual acts performed in the world are not only
right and good, but strictly conscientious acts; and even
the very worst men are generally conscientious, except as
to those particulars of conduct in which their ruling appetite or passion is immediately concerned. Go as low as you
will in the scale of moral turpitude, you still do not find
utter indifference to moral distinctions. I doubt whether
there lives a sane man who, when selfish motives are
equally balanced between the right and the wrong, would
not choose the right, though he might not know why, -
by an inward movement closely analogous to that which
159 
160      CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
leads the brute to elect wholesome and to shun unwhole some food. It is on the ground of this innate and never
inactive sense of right that, if you know a bad man, you
may calculate the veins in which his vicious propensities
will run, and can generally trust him in every other direction.
In fine, a large proportion of the trust which we think
we repose in one another, is not trust in man, but trust in
God as he is present with man in the indestructible conscience. The man who would rob you if he met you in
a secluded spot, is more likely than not to show you
gratuitous kindness, if the opportunity of gratifying his
cupidity be wanting. You are on a perplexing journey,
and, without thought of his moral condition, you confidently ask information of the first man you meet. He
may be a person of the most depraved character, yet, if
hlie has no motive for misleading you, you know that you
can depend on what he tells you. You are ill among
strangers, and very probably you will have for your unasked and most assiduous attendants and helpers persons
who in certain ways are the slaves of evil appetites or
passions. In truth, men never sin untempted, and they
generally do right and good when there is no selfish motive to evil.
Nay, more. You often witness great virtues in connection with gross defects and faults, -sincere patriotism
where the private morality bears a low stamp, private excellence combined with political profligacy, honesty in the
sensualist, benevolence among the intemperate, domestic
fidelity among those whose uprightness in business relations you cannot trust. To be sure, the character whlich
in any one respect is faulty is weaker at other points than
if it were without stain,   is more liable to yield to new 
THE HOLINESS OF GOD.
forms of temptation; yet, under ordinary circumstances,
a man who is, in the common pluhase, destitute of principle, may be relied on for the continued performance of
the good which he has been accustomed to do, no less than
he may be expected still to yield, whenever occasion presents itself, to his easily-besetting frailties and sins. Anicl
thus, as I have said, the overwhelming majority of the
acts performed are right and good, salutary and helpffl.
But here let me make a most emphatic distinction.  I
cannot regard this spontaneous goodness as worthy of
moral approbation, which he alone deserves who can resist
temptation and resolutely choose the right, when there
are strong motives arrayed on the opposite side; who can
say with the ancient patriarch, "Till I die, I will not
remove my integrity firom me." But the spontaneous
activity of conscience, where there is no distinct exercise
of moral choice, takes place under the operation of a
Divine law analogous to the all-embracing laws of the
material universe. The vast amount of practical goodness
that coexists with non-religion, irreligion, and specific
forms of vice, should be regarded in the same light in
which we view the order and halrmnony of nature, not
with praise to the creature, but with adoration to the Creator, Sustainer, and Preserver.  It is the mode in which
He holds the race together, that successive generations
may have the opportunity of moral choice, that the reilgn
of true virtue may be progressively established, that individual excellence may be multiplied and augmented from
age to age, and that in the yet distant era of universal
righteousness the earth may be inhabited by those who
shall do right, with the free purpose and full energy of
mind, heart, and soul.
As regards the subject now in hand, conscience, in its
K
0
161 
162     CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
rectitude, purity, and holiness, is our witness of the rectitude, purity, and holiness of Him  who thus maintains
his'presence with our race, and builds the shrine of his
indwelling in every soul of man.
II. The Divine holiness is, secondly, manifested in the
structure and the course of the outward universe, so far as
they favor and execute the laws of right which conscience
recognizes. It was said by the Psalmist, "The saints
shall inherit the earth," and he need not have used the
fi-ture; the saints do inherit it, reap its revenue, enjoy
its benefits. Leaving the life to come out of the account,
the good man, however contracted his nominal possessions
may be, makes more and gets more out of this world than
any amplitude of wealth or loftiness of station can give
the bad man. From the minimum of outward means of
enjoyment he extracts the maximum of enjoyment.
All vice, all sin, is suicidal.  Sensuality in every form
detracts even firom the sum of merely physical gratification. At the outset of a course of sensual indulgence
the pleasure is intense; but at a very early period the
capacity of enjoyment wanes, and then utterly ceases,
while the morbid craving grows, even under the consciousness of added misery, with every new gratification.
I have repeatedly interrogated the self-consciousness ot
intemperate persons, reformed and unreformed, and I feel
warranted in saying that all enjoyment from strong drink
ceases before the stage of habitual drunkenness is reached,
and that thenceforth, between the craving and the satisfyilg of the tyrant appetite there is hardly a difference in
the degree, but only an alternation in the form of suffering.  Human cruelty never invented torture to be conmpared with that which the sensualist incurs.  His body
becomes the soul's dungeon,- its walls constantly thick
0 
THE HOLINESS OF GOD.
ening and closing up so as to shut all the wonted entrances
of joy. His senses, deadened on the side of pleasure, no
longer avenues of beauty or harmony, or even of gratifying perfumes or flavors, are left still open inlets of pain.
Equally fatal are all social vices to individual happiness.
Fraud reacts on the deceiver. Avarice impoverishes the
life faster than it increases the wealth. The resentful
and malevolent passions can harm no one so much as him
who harbors them. On the other hand, every generous
affection and noble act enlarges the domain of being,
enriches and gladdens the soul, and seldom fails to render the outward condition more ample as to the means
of happiness.
In like manner, reverence and devotion, loyalty to the
Divine will, the religious consecration of the life, in fine,
all the traits and habits that belong to personal piety, are
adapted to promote prosperity, honor, domestic peace,
social consideration, and the enjoyment of the whole outward world; while he who neglects or scorns his duty to
God forfeits unnumbered consolations, blessings, and hopes,
and incurs positive and unmixed suffering from experiences
which to the religious man are means of inward growth
and fountains of a purer joy than he knew before.
The dependence of happiness on character is fully verified in every lengthened life. Could you convene a senate
of old men of every style of character, from the hoary
profligate to the aged saint, and could each be compelled
to declare the convictions which had been forced upon
him by his life-experience, there would not be a shade of
discrepancy in their testimony as to the dependence of
what they had enjoyed or suffered on what they had been;
while their utterances would run through the whole diatonic scale, from the wailing minor key of the soul loathing
163 
164      CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
the past and dreading the fuiture, unfit to live and afraid
to die, to the jubilant swan-note of him who looks back
on a consecrated life, and reaches for the crown and palm
and harp of his transfiguration. The proverbs of all
nations, which are the condensed experience of mankind,
are full of this truth.  Earthly and earth-limited, - mere
prudential maxims as they seem, - they almost all recognize the identity of happiness with right living, and urge
motives of expediency in behalf of the very same virtues
to which revelation annexes the hope full of immortality.
Now if the world and the inevitable course of human
life are so adjusted by the Supreme Providence as thus
to favor goodness and to make the way of transgressors
hard, it must needs be that He who created the world
and who orders human affairs is himself the impersonation
of the law embodied in his works and their administration,
-the law of truth, purity, and love.  Thus the holiness
of God, affirmed by revelation, is verified equally by the
human conscience and by the whole economy of nature
and of life.
Christianity not only declares the Divine goodness and
holiness, which are verified, as we have seen, by the religion of nature.  It has for its central personage a being
who professes to be more than a revealer of truth,- who
claims to be received as standing in a peculiar relation to
God and to humanity, as the Mediator between God and
man, as the representative (;f the Divine person, as a faultless model for the imitation of the race. Let us see what
natural religion says to these claims.
1. Is the mediatorial office which the Scriptures attribute
to Jesus Christ intrinsically probable? IHere we encounter
the prevalent naturalism of our time, which asks, proudly 
GOD  IN  CHRIST.
and scornfully, "Why should I go to God through a mediator, and not rather avail myself of a child's right to
look directly into the Father's face, and cast myself; without pledge, promise, or intervention, upon his love?"
By parity of reason we might say, " Why, when I want
to feast my eyes on thie varied landscape, the ocean, the
distant hills, should I permit these intrusive sunbeams to
gleam over the fields, play on the hillsides, and flash from
the waves?  Let me rather go abroad in the moonless
and starless night, when there is nothing to intervene
between my vision and the objects it would rest upon."
Nothing, indeed, except dimness and distance. And
there has never been anything but dimness and distance
to obstruct the clear view of the Divine Being for the
nations and the men that have not looked to him through
Christ. From the very necessity of the case, the Divine
presence, power, and love diffused thlrough the universe
cannot be converged on the mental retina of a new-born,
limited, earth-bound mortal. A form in which those rays
that stream from and over all nature are converged and
made visible, in which love is pledged, pardon proffered,
protection guaranteed, the Father's arms folded about his
children, is an imperative demand of natural religion.
For souls born of God must yearn to know him. Souls
conscious of sin must crave forgiveness and reconciliation.
Souls needy and dependent must long for express assurance, sensible manifestation of the Supreme Providence.
This demand was urged by the greatest and wisest minds
of Pagan antiquity, and was the subject of their undoubting foresight no less than of Hebrew prophecy. In this
sense Jesus the Mediator was the desire of all nations.
2.- This manifestation of God needed to be made in
human form, and natural religion would anticipate the
165 
166      CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
manifestation in this form.  We can conceive in God of
no attributes of which we have not the capacity in ourselves. He may have other attributes; but if so, we
cannot attain to the knowledge of them in this life, and
can learn them in heaven only by the development of
new powers in our own natures. A; I have shown you
ill the earlier part of this course, miracles are adequate to
reveal the Divine personality. God becomes known as a
person by visibly detaching himself from his works and
from the order of nature; by presenting himself as a will
and a power supreme over the impersonal forces of the
universe; by those acts of sovereignty in which, in the
sublime language of Scripture, "l He bowed the heavens
and came down," -in which his voice was heard and his
arm beheld by the astonished nations. Thus far the
Hiebrews-  and they alone of all the  ancients-  had
just conceptions of the Supreme Being. But their idea
of God was imperfect, simply because it had not been
derived from a perfect incarnation,- because perfect
humanity had not been seen. Their God was the Sovereignll, but not the Universal Father. He was angry, and
needed to be appeased by sacrifice.  He was their friend,
but not the friend of the whole race of man. He partook of the narrowness and thie unlovely passions of a
bigoted, jealous, morose, and vindictive people.   The
imprecatory Psalms, while they represent the darker
aspects of the characters of the best men  among the
posterity of Jacob, as truly represent the limitations of
their knowledge of the Supreme Being, as the Psalms
of lofty trust and praise exhibit, along with the profound
and earnest piety of the writers, their just conceptions of
all of the Divine nature that could be revealed without
being incarnated. 
GOD  IN  CHRIST.
But in Jesus we behold all contrasts of goodness combined and harmonized,- the strong and the tender,'tlle
Judge and the Father, holiness and gentleness, freedom
from sin and sympathy with the sinner, - the traits which
by themselves would constrain profound and awe-stricken
reverence, and those which by themselves would draw
out the intimacy and warmth of fraternal affection. In
him  righteousness and mercy, justice and love, are made
one. WTe see in him not merely the massive elements
of character, but equally the delicate tracery of sentiment, the perfectness of spiritual beauty,- all that cani
bring him near to the common scenes of life, all that we
gladly associate with an omnipresent witness and an
unfailing friend.  When through him as a medium of
vision we look to God, while the Divine grandeur and
glory are presented up to and beyond our power of conception, we at the same time learn to attach to the Author of our being all that is lovely and beautiful in a
perfect human being, all of humanity except its follies
and its sins, all in which God's noblest creation can have
been the embodied thought of the Creator.
In point of fact, the largest, loftiest, most self-justifying
conception of the Deity that has ever been attained by
man is the Christian conception; and this extends just so
far as the individual thinker can take in the character of
Christ, and no farther. Thus, were Christ now on earth,
we could go to him for pardon, counsel, and help, without
question or misgiving, as we would go to a father, were
he no less able than willing to meet all our needs; and
just so far as Christ awakens in us this sentiment of famiiliar trust, do we discern in his person, as we can through
no other medium, how the Eternal Father clasps around
the needy, thle suffering, aSd tl-l siniling the embrace of
167 
168      CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
ineffable tenderness,- how for every want, in weariness
and in grief, under the burden of one's own heart, in the
intense agony of self-reproach, man's true recourse is to
the bosom of everlasting love.
Now the argument which I would urge is this. The
views of the Divine character of which I have spoken, those
which connect with God's infinite power, wisdom, and majesty an equal perfectness in the tender, genial, amiable
aspects of character, are exclusively Christian in their
source.  Even revelation does not give them,-they come
from manifestation alone, from a theoplany.  If I may
use the words in a sense in which they correspond not to
a limiting dogma, but to universal Christian consciousness,
they come from "God manifest in the flesh."  But thus
derived, they are, as I have said, self-justifying. Once
suggested, they form the only conception of God which
we can thenceforth deem tenable. They commend themselves as intrinsically probable. They are confirmed by
our growing knowledge of nature. They are verified
equally by our external experience, and by their benign
efficacy in moulding our characters and governing our
lives.  Received from Christ, they become to us in the
profoundest and most intimate-sense natural, so that, were
we forced to surrender them, nature would lose its identity, and become unnatural. From all this the legitimate
conclusion is, that the manifestation, the theophany, which
thus shows us what God is, is itself natural, and was to
have been anticipated. So far is it from standing in the
contrast to natural religion in which even Christians have
been wont to place it, that the religion of nature would
be incomplete without it.
3. I would next speak of Christ as the model for
human virtue.  The identity of Christianity with natural 
GOD IN CHRIST.
religion is seen in the unchanged and unchangeable
beauty, lustre, and glory of its Founder's character.
He  is the only luminary in the moral universe which
has no secular parallax,- which appears the same from
century to century, the same by the refined and exalted
standard of modern times that he did by the rude and
gross standard of his own day. While he was upon
earth, in a corrupt age and among a degenerate nation,
it might seem no wonder that he moved like a very god
among men. That the multitude strewed their garments
on his path; that the officials of the High-Priest, when
sent to arrest him, could not find it in their hearts to lay
hands on him; that the centurion who went to keep
guard, as at the execution of a malefactor beneath contempt, exclaimed, "Surely this man was a son of God,"
- these might have seemed the not unnatural testimonials of spontaneous reverence to the power of superior
excellence at a period when virtue was rare, and moral
heroism was seldom, in its passive forms never, witnessed.
But as from that low stand-point we ascend to the higher
planes of human goodness, we find the admiration for him
undiminished. None so revere him as they who are
themselves the most worthy of reverence. None feel so
humbled in comparison with him, as those who only gain
lustre by comparison with the best beside him.
May I not appeal to individual experience for the result
of prolonged familiarity with his character? Other historical personages we can study to excess, - we become
weary of them, and they are belittled to our apprehension.  We  can take in all that they were and all that
they accomplished, - we can go round them and over
them, and the greatest of them constitutes so small a
portion of the world's greatness, and shapes so small a
8
169 
170     CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
portion of the world's history, that he becomes dwarfed
in the very attempt to compass and comprehend his mag   nitude. The fame of some popular hero is often thus
injuriously affected by our having read and heard  too
much about him, though it be all to his praise. But who
gets tired of Christ, or feels that he has exhausted His
fulness? He occupies the lowest place with those who
know him least. He grows upon our study. New lines
and hues of spiritual beauty reveal themselves with every
fresh perusal of the evangelic record; there is new mean   ing in his acts, new force in his words. On intimate
conversance with his life, indifference passes into respect,
respect deepens into reverence, reverence glows into
adoration.   More  and more  does  the human become
divine, as we behold thle glory of God in the face of
Jesus Christ. None look so lovingly into his counte   nance as those whose wonted place is with John on the
bosom of their Lord. We can conceive of no change in
the picture which would not be for the worse. There is
no defect, no excess, no redundancy.
But if in the moral character of Jesus there is nothing
that belongs peculiarly to his age or nation, nothing con   ventional, nothing transient or capable of being outgrown,
in fine, if it is wholly unaffected by the time and space
element, then that character must be, not by hyperbole,
but literally, divine,- and if divine, then natural, - de   rived from and conformed to that nature which is abso   lute, unchangeable goodness and holiness. In revering
and following Christ, we are rendering honor to God and
imitating him, and the religion which consists in this is
pre-eminently natural; for what can be so natural as
for the creature to honor the Creator,- for the intelli    gent and self-determining creature to imitate Him from 
GOD IN CHRIST.
whom he derived the power of thought, will, and choice?
In the light in which I have now presented Christ as an
exemplar of human goodness, (though  I by no means
deny the more strictly dogmatic sense commonly attached
to such phraseology,) Christ was before Abrahlam, before
the worlds; he manifested that which  was  truth  and
right in the beginning, absolute goodness, eternal rectitude; and the religion based on his life belongs to the
organism of the spiritual universe, and is therefore, in the
strictest and most intimate sense, the religion of nature.
As the Mediator, as tlie image of God, as the model of
perfect humanity, we have thus seen thlat Christ, standing
though he does alone in history, heralded by prophecy,
authenticated by miracle, is still a natural personage,a being whose advent might have been anticipated on
grounds connected with the nature of God and of man.
We  may, I think, go still furtler, and inquire, without
irreverence, under what outward circumstances it was
antecedently probable that suchl a manifestation would
be made,
1. We  might, in the first place, expect that the birth
and parentage of this personage would be exempted from
all intrinsically or reputedly mean and vulgar associations,
-  from all that would of necessity make him the object
of contempt and scorn.,How far was this condition fuilfilled in Jesus?  His reputed parents, though poor, were
not paupers.  Though they were in humble condition, all
the notices we have of them authorize the assertion that
they and their kindred and associates were respectable
and respected, industrious, intelligent, and virtuous, bearing no brand that would exclude them from favored recognition in so democratic a state of society as then pre
171 
172     CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
vailed in Judea. The legal necessity of their going from
Nazareth to Bethlehem for registration shows that they
were not mere proletaries, but that they were possessed
of some slender freehold in the latter of these cities,
while the tradition runs that they owned a house in the
former. Their descent from the ancient royal line, though
so remote, and shared by so many, as to create no aristocratic prestige, yet enhanced their self-respect, and gave
them a certain degree of social consideration.
2. In the next place, it was equally fitting that the
being who  was to stand in this official relation between
God and man should have none of the ordinary claims to
distinction and eminence. Wealth, rank, place, or title,
so far as it had any prominence in his condition, would
tend to diminish the lustre of his character. Heaven's
purest gems need no setting, and shine brightest when
they shine alone. He who is to draw all men to himself
by the beauty and majesty of his spirit, should have nothing in his surroundings which will bring to him a spurious
homage, an interested clientship, adhlerents to his earthly
fortunes and not to his supra-mundane sovereignty.  Even
Jesus, in his want and careful abnegation of all that ordinarily draws parasites, was at one time harassed by men
who sought himn because they had been fed by him in
the desert. How constantly and annoyingly would this
experience have been repeated, had he had a mansion and
a table of his own!  The scanty funds contributed for his
wayfaring by grateful disciples tempted the cupidity of
one bad man, and that one was the most important and
serviceable member of the apostolic college; for his testimony is of priceless worth. Could he have charged his
Master with the shadow of wrong, he might have made
his thirty pieces of silver thirty thousand, and his employ 
GOD'IN CHRIST.
ers, if they had not had money enough, would have levied
contributions throughout Judaa for the deficit; but when
he turned traitor, there was absolutely nothing for him to
betray except the spot where the homeless Saviour was
going to pass the night. But had there been that in
Christ's outward condition which could be preyed upon,
his public appearance at a time when the expectations of
his people were so intensely raised, would have attracted
a horde of such miscreants. Then, too, any definite rank
which could be looked up to by the multitude would have
removed him from the sympathy of those beneath him,
while he would have stood on an arena, on which even
faultless excellence could not have exempted him from
paltry rivalries and jealousies. It was necessary that in
his worldly estate he should be at once above contempt
and beneath envy.
3. Above all, it was necessary that he who should bear
the Divine image, and stand forth as the world's exemplar, should be "a man of sorrows, and acquainted with
grief"; that he should tread the darkest passages of the
earthly pilgrimage, and the valley of the death-shadow.
It is the tendency of human thought to connect all painful experiences - penury, suffering, and death - with the
Divine displeasure, to regard afflictions as judgments of
Heaven, and even to brand the victims of signally heavy
calamities as sinners beyond all others. How numerous
are the traces of this habit of mind in the sacred writings! It forms, as you know, the burden of the harangues
of several among the interlocutors in the dramatic poem
of Job; it is referred to repeatedly in the Psalms, and
was on several occasions forced on the animadversion of
Christ. At the same time, we find it not infrequently
recognized in the ancient classics. Only through the
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174     CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
destitution, homelessness, agony, and cross of the Sinless
One did the world learn that him whom God loves He
chastens. Then, too, it is in these experiences that man
most needs both example and sympathy, - the example
of submission, trust, and hope, the sympathy of one who
has endured and overcome. The suffering now look to
Christ in his agony, and repeat his prayer, " Not my will,
but thine,, be done," till pain and grief are merged in
resignation, and turned to joy by the hope that is full of
immortality. The dying look to the grave as the place
where the Lord lay, and whence he rose, and calmly
and rejoicingly commit their departing spirits to their
Father. Grief is transfigured by his endurance; death is
swallowed up in victory by the might of his cross and the
power of his resurrection.
The influence of a suffering Redeemer has left its indelible traces in language, which often embodies in single
words whole chapters of human history. Before he suffered, the terms that denoted sad experiences were all
such as represented only the malignant aspect of what
man endured, or, at best, the single fact of endurance.
Take, for instance, the word calamitas (calamity), the
condition, some say, of the blighted stalk, which bears no
ear of grain; others, of the broken reed.1 To Tertullian,2
the earliest of the Latin Fathers, belongs, I believe, the
appropriation of the first word that tells the whole story,
expresses the divine side, the blessed ministry of sorrow,tribulatio (tribulation),- threshing, the process by which
1 Wedgwood regards calaenitas as not improbably derived from the root
which furnishes, in the Welsh, col, denoting loss or misfortune; a root which
he traces in the Latin incolumis, expressing the negation of loss or misfortune
If we admit this derivation, the word calamitas is still void of any spiritual
or hopeful significance.
2 Adversus Judaos, 11. 
GOD  IN CHRIST.
the elements of character are separated, the chaff given
to the winds, the wheat heaped up for the harvest of
which the angels are the reapers.
I have thus shown you that in the person and relations
of Christ as Mediator, as the image of God, as the exemplar of man, we have precisely the offices which on
a priori grounds we should anticipate friom the loving
providence of God; and that in his condition in life, his
sufferings, and his death, we have the very elements
which alone.could have met the needs of man, and thus
have satisfied the postulate of natural religion.
175 
LECTURE IX.
IMMORTALITY.
AMONG the contents of the Christian revelation, next
inii intrinsic importance to the Divine attributes is the
immortality of the soul. In my first Lecture I showed
you that in the nature of things immortality cannot be an
object of consciousness, or a necessary inference from
knilown premises; that there are in the external universe
analogies both for and against it; and that analogy, even
could it be urged on the affirmative side alone, proves
nothing, but is valid only as an answer to objections
against truths or beliefs that rest on independent grounds
of argument and evidence.   A  life beyond  death can
be made certain only by revelation direct or mediate,
verbal or phenomenal, -  by the authenticated testimony
of a divine messenger, or by the return to this world of
those whom we call dead, to teach us that death is a
name and not a fact. Yet if man is destined for a higher
sphere of being, we should expect to find some birthmarks of this destiny, and some features in his outward
condition here and in the structure and course of the
visible universe that harmonize with this hypothesis rather
than with the theory of annihilation. It is in this direction that I now propose to guide your inquiry.
In the first place, death, so far as we know, is a merely
physical change; its observed phenomena are solely material; and if there be an immaterial principle in mall, 
IMMORTALITY.
a soul that depends not on the bodily organism for its
existence and its capacity of perception, thought, and
emotion, it is at least possible that the soul may live on
when the body dies.  What evidence then have we of
the immateriality of the soul? Consciousness, it is commonly  maintained, affirms the soul to be immaterial.
The self-conscious ME does not identify itself with the
limbs and the organs. We habitually think of them
as not themselves perceiving, reflecting, judging, but as
instruments which we employ for these ends,- as not
themselves powers, but as the irresponsible agents of a
controlling power,- as belonging philosophically to the
same category with lenses, canes, and calculating-machines.  When we use the word I, we mean by it something more  than the whole  body, -  something which
imparts to the multiform body a oneness other than that
which belongs to it by virtue of its mere structure
(which latter oneness, we know, is literally dissolved in
death),-  something which owns the body as its property,
and commands it as its servant.
"The purple stream which through my vessels glides
Dull and unconscious flows, like common tides.
The pipes through which the circling juices play
Are not that thinking I no more than they.
This frame, compacted with transcendent skill
Of moving joints obedient to my will,
Nursed from the fruitful glebe, like yonder tree,
Waxes and wastes. I call it mine, not me."
If mind is the result of material organization, then
every mental action must be a material process and product. If a mere process, we might apply to it a theory
corresponding to the undulatory theory of light and heat,
and it is at least conceivable thlat vibrations of the brain,
or electric impulses sent along thiose magnetic wires, the
8*                               L
I
177 
178     CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
nerves, should cause the modes of being which we designate as ideas, judgments, and emotions. But the permanence of these modes of being is fatal to the undulatory
hypothesis. Every mental action is not only a process,
but a product. Something is inwrought which remains
in existence. Permanent modifications of the consciousness are made during every waking hour. In order to
render memory possible on the materialistic hypothesis,
every throb of a nerve, every vibration of the brain, must
leave its life-long traces in the material structure. But to
conceive of this carries us immeasurably beyond the marvellous disclosures of microscopic discovery. Myriads of
legible and enduring entries must be made within every
needle's point of the brain. If the unnumbered words,
dates, facts, and experiences that lie in the memory make
each some permanent notch, furrow, or mark, of whatever
kind, or however minute, the brain in very infancy would
be too fuill to admit of added mental growth. Physically,
it is as utterly impossible for a life-record to be kept within the walls of a human cranium, as it would be for a
year's accounts of the United States Treasury to be transcribed on half a sheet of note-paper.
It may, indeed, be objected to this reasoning, that in
point of fact mental action depends for its precision, vigor,
and brilliancy on the degree in which the bodily organization is symmetrical and healthful, and especially on the
shape and size of the cranium. I answer, that this would
of necessity be the case, equally on the materialistic and
on the immaterial hypothesis. The question is not as to
the means, but as to the seat and source, of mental action.
The immaterialist by no means denies the instrumentality
of the bodily organization, - its necessary instrumentality
during the present state of being. The body is the soul's 
IMMORTALITY.
case of tools, and the quality of the soul's action must
depend on the strength and temper of those tools. Unless they are in good order, the soul must work, either
not at all, as in idiocy, or languidly, as in imbecility, or
without reasonable purpose, as in insanity. But this liability to inferior execution here by no means proves that
the soul is incapable of surviving its present set of tools,
and, with better instruments, of doing ample justice to a
skill and power native, but unsuspected now. Give fithe
most accomplished artist dull or clumsy instruments, his
work will be vastly below a master's hand; but his taste
and genius, though hidden from human eye, remain unimpaired, nor will his present rough and ill-shapen productions prevent him from one day rivalling Canova,
should he be surrounded with the material aids through
which alone Canova could give form to his conceptions.
This temporary dependence, yet essential and ultimate
non-dependence, of the soul on the body is well illustrated
in these stanzas from Sir John Davies's poem on the Im mortality of the Soul:
"As a good harper, stricken far in years,
Into whose cunning hands the gout doth fall,
All his old crotchets in his brain he bears,
But on his harp plays ill, or not at all; -
"But if Apollo takes his gout away,
That he his nimble fingers may apply,
Apollo's self will envy at hisplay,
And all the world applaud his minstrelsy." 1
There is, then, no conclusive objection to the soul's
immateriality derived from the correlation between a well
or ill developed brain and a well or ill working mind;
while the affirmative argument fiom consciousness and
1 Original, Neature, andImmnnoztality of the &a,, Section xxxiii.
179 
180     CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
memory remains unimpeached. But if the soul be im material, it is a separate existence friom the body, and the
disorganization of the body cannot destroy it. If it dies
with the body, it must nevertheless die by a direct act of
annihilation, or by the reabsorption into the universal
soul affirmed by pantheism, which is simply a euphemism
for annihilation. But annihilation has never occurred
within human experience or observation. The death of
organized being is only a separation of particles, which
enter forthwith into new combinations, and generally into
new forms of life. The very phenomena of death, therefore, as they involve no destruction of any visible or
tangible portion of the being that dies, furnish a strong
presumptive argument against the destruction by death
of the immaterial portion of the being, of which the senses
cannot take cognizance.
But if the soul survive the body, how can it live on in
self-consciousness and activity? How, without a bodily
organization, can it retain its conversance with the physical universe? How can sights reach the soul without
the eye, or sounds without the ear?  How can locomotion take place without material organs, to overcome
material resistance? I reply, that, in point of fact, the
ideas of things seen, heard, and felt reach the consciousneSS, not only without the aid of the organs of sense, but
without the existence of corresponding objects in  the
outward universe. In insanity, sights which the eye sees
not, sounds which the ear hears not, are inwardly perceived with the utmost vividness. In dreams, too, we
seem to see, hear, and feel as distinctly as when the
senses are all awake, and conversant with their appropriate objects. Now if the soul can receive these several
classes of impressions wvithout enmployiag the organs of 
IMMORTALITY.
sense, why may it not without possessing them? Or if
it be capable of seeing, hearing, and feeling things that
are not, how can we affirm that it is incapable of perceiving things that are? Moreover, it is not the eye that
sees, or the ear that hears.1 Dissect these organs entire
from the human fiame, they are powerless.  Leave them
entire, and darken the soul by insanity, they carry it
false reports.  It is the soul that looks out through the
eyes and listens tluhrough the ears. And does not its
power of seeing and hearing by means of these instrumenlts imply and include a perceptive power which might
be exercised through other instrumentalities, or directly
and without medium? It is at least a tenable hypothesis,
that sight and hearing, and locomotion also, are fiunctions
inherent in the soul; and that the bodily organization is
less the means of their exercise, than a temporary limit
and hinderance to their extent and power. It may be that
we in our present state are spirits in prison, -that the
eye is the prison-window through which the soul enjoys
a little portion of its native range of vision, the ear an
aperture in the prison-wall through which we catch a few
of the sounds which, if set at large, we might take in
through a vast extent of space, while the feet, so far
firom being the means of motion, only measure the direction and length of the spirit's chain. If this be true,
when the duni.geon-walls decay, when we quit our house
of bondage, our disembodied souls may acquire at once a
keenness of vision of which we cannot now conceive,
hear the fifill diapason of nature's harmony, and move
1 " Nos enin ne nunc quidetn ocllis eernimus  ea, qum videmus; neque
enjin est ullus sensus in corpo)re, sed, ut non  solun   physici docent, vertim
etiam medici, qui ista,,pePta et pa,tefacta viderunt, vise quasi quiedam sunt
ad oculos, ad  aures, ad nares, a sede animi perforate." -Cicero, Tuso'.
Qust. I. 1.20.
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182     CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE
unchecked and free at every prompting of love or
duty.1
But this is not the only, nor to my mind the most
probable hypothesis. It is entirely conceivable that a
virtual resurrection of the body may be coincident with
its death; not, indeed, the recombination of the precise
material elements that were combined before death (which,
if it take place, can be realized only at some far-off resurrection epoch), but the re-embodiment of the soul in all
organism allied to and developed from that which has
here been its dwelling-place, so that it shall be, in apostolic language, "not unclothed, but clothed upon."  Some
1 " Nam nunc quidem, quanquam foramina illa, quse patent ad animum a
corpore, callidissimo artificio natura fabricata est, tamen terrenis concretisque
corporibus sunt intersepta quodam modo. Cum autem nihil erit proeter animum, nulla res objecta impediet, quo minus percipiat, quale quidque sit."Tusc. Qusest. I. 20.
This view of the (so-called) organs of sense as avenues rather than instruments of perception, and of the soul as endowed with the power of exercising
independently the functions which it exercises through these avenues, is well
expressed in these quaint stanzas of Henry More: -
"Like to a light fast lock'd in lanthorn dark,
Whereby by night our wary steps we guide
In shabby streets, and dirty chanels mark
Some weaker rayes from the black top do glide,
And flusher streams perhaps through th' horny side.
But when we've past the perill of the way,
Arrived at home, and laid that case aside,
The naked light how clearly doth it ray,
And spread its joyful beames as bright as summer's day!
" Even so, the soul in this contracted state,
Confined to these straight instruments of sense,
More dull and narrowly doth operate;
At this hole heares, the sight must ray from thence,
Here tasts, there smells. But when she's gone from hence,
Like naked lamp she is one shining spheare,
And round about has perfect cognoscence
What ere in her horizon doth appear;
She is one orb of sense, all eye, all airy ear." 
IMMORTALITY.
thing of this kind may be implied in those words of St.
Paul, "Thou sowest not that body that shall be,....
but God giveth it a body as it hath pleased him." Matter has all conceivable and inconceivable degrees of tenuity.  Science admits the existence, concurrently with the
atmosphere through its whole extent, and in the interstellar spaces where there is no atmosphere, of an impalpable and imponderable ether, which transmits thie calorific
waves of the sunlight and the undulations of the solar,
lunar, and stellar rays. Mind must be either infinite and
omnipresent, which but one mind can be, or else localized
and circumscribed by.some organism, which need not be
gross or dense, but may have as little of earthiness as this
ether in which the planets move, which yet shall give it a
place in the creation, and shall enable it to act on and to
be acted upon by other beings and objects in the universe.
And it is entirely conceivable that by means of some such
organism the soul in dying may retain its personality, nay,
more, may preserve all that constituted its individual identity, even what might recall wonted associations with form
and feature, voice and manner, and render it distinctly
recognizable by fellow-spirits.
I suggest these hypotheses, not as solving the mystery
which "' the great teacher, Death," alone can solve, but to
show that, if the soul be immaterial, there is nothing in
the dissolution of the body which should render its survivance of that event impossible or improbable.
I would next speak of the presumption in behalf of the
survival of the soul after death derived from the changes
during life which it survives. Organic life is perpetual
decomposition and reconstruction; in other words, constant death and birth. There is probably not a particle of
183 
184     CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
matter in one of our bodies which was there half a dozen
years ago; and, death excepted, there can hardly be a
more entire physical change than occurs between child hood and manhood, or between twenty and fourscore, the
change being not only one of size, shape, strength, and
voice, but often of the whole physical constitution,-  the
puny child that can hardly be kept alive growing into a
stalwart youth, the invalid outliving the infirmities of
many years and becoming a vigorous old man; or, on the
other hand, the fairest promise of health and strength un dermined by functional disease, of which there was not a
trace visible in the child or the young man. Death differs
from these changes, not in its entireness, but only in its
suddenness, and the capacity of the soul to retain its identity while the physical frame gradually loses its identity
certainly involves the same capacity in the more rapid and
paroxysmal loss of the physical identity in death.
Consider, too, the lesion of the bodily organs by sickness or accident, in which the soul retains its integrity.
Not only may the limbs be amputated, the eyes quenched,
the lungs almost consumed, but the nerves may be paralyzed, the brain wounded or diseased, and yet the mind
may remain unimpaired, the soul unclouded, nay, as if in
mockery of mere physical hinderances, the spirit may
wield a mightier power and wing a loftier flight than ever
before. And in cerebral disease attended by delirium,
there is no defect in the quantity and intensity of mental
action, but often a preternatural brilliancy and power,
though the consciousness ceases to take accurate cognizance of surrounding persons and objects.
M Most prophetic of immortality beyond all else in human
experience are the phenomena often witnessed up to the
very lmomllent of dissolutionr.  I have repeatedly stood by 
IMMORTALITY.
the death-bed of one attenuated by long infirmity, every
vital process clogged, the pulse intermittent, the blood
already becoming stagnant; and I have seen the dying
still in the full vigor of his intellect, master of his position,
clearer and stronger in thought and judgment than any
one of the by-standers, addressing appropriate counsel or
consolation to each of the afflicted circle, dictating messages of love to the absent, and leaving no person or interest forgotten that had the remotest right to a place in
his remembrance. I have heard, too, in the hour and
in the embrace of death, not the feverish ecstasies of
unreasoning fanaticism, but the serene utterances of a
mature religious wisdom, of undoubting faith, of quiet
trust, of a foreseeing hope that had already crossed the
separating stream, and passed within thie golden gates;
and in the eye kindled with a purer, holier light than ever
glows except in the Christian's ascension-room, in the
wan countenance radiant with the foreshining of the heavenily day, in the air of joyous expectancy with which the
parting moment is waited for and welcomed, the soul's
voice is: "Death, I am not thine, and I defy thy power.
I am mightier than thou art.  Thou art but the doorkeeper of my house not made with hands, my usher into
the blessed society of the unfallen and the redeemed."
From such a death-scene into annihilation how vast the
leap! between them how  inmmeasurable  the contrast!
while there seems not a step, not even a filmy cloud or
an unparted veil, between the scene and hleaven. From
such a presence unbelief is banished. The sceptical by stander ceases to doubt, always for the moment, often
forever; while to the Christian the hand that lifted the
widow's son from the bier becomes visible, the voice that
called Lazarus from the tomb pulses upon the inward ear
185
0 
8 CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
in tones that remain unforgotten till he hears them again
in his own dying hour.
From these phenomena of approaching death the argunent is obvious and strong. Did the soul die with the
body, we should certainly expect that it would betray
along with the body symptoms of impending tissolution,
that its light would be dimmed and flickering, its consciousness confused, its power of consecutive thought
impeded, its memory clouded, its hold on wonted beliefs
relaxed. But if at that last hour it manifests all and
rmore than all of vitality that was ever witnessed in the
prime and joy of its earthly being, there is a strong presumption that it is destined to survive the death-change,
and to put off its worn-out garment for its ascension-robe.
I now ask your attention to the arguments for immortality derived from the intellectual and moral nature of
man.  And first, though, as I showed you in a former
Lecture, we cannot be conscious of immortality, we are
conscious of an innate and indestructible desire for continued existence.  This desire belongs, with rare exceptions,
to all developed natures. It is something more than the
mere love of the earthly life, for it is often the strongest
where that love is the weakest. None have felt it more
than those who have offered themselves to death for their
country, their race, or their religion. It is a feeling allied
to all noble impulses and generous deeds. It has been
the fountain-head of all patriotism and philanthropy. It
inspires the longing for posthumous fame. It prompts the
appeal which the great and good, who have been scorned
and vilified by their contemporaries, have so often made
to the righteous verdict of posterity, as if they should see
themselves justified after their bodies had ceased to be.
186 
IMMORTALITY.
Now, if man wholly dies when the body dies, we can
hardly reconcile this sentiment, so almost universal in civilized and cultivated communities, with the Divine veracity
and integrity.
Another argument for inimortality may be drawn from
the unsuitableness of the present state of things to man's
mental faculties, his capacities of enjoyment, and his conceptions of happiness ad perfection.  Suppose that you
saw an egg for the first time, not knowing what it was,
and that you discovered ana opened it just as the infant
bird was ready to force his way out of the shell. You
would see a system of members and organs for which the
creature could have no use in that confined condition,wings and feet without space to fly or walk, a digestive
apparatus without the opportunity of procuring food, eyes
without a field of vision, in fine, a constitution entirely
unsuitable to its present state. Your inference would be,
that, though the egg-shell was the creature's birthplace,
it was not destined to be its home, - that it was designed
for a mode of life in which its organs and faculties could
all find their appropriate sphere and exercise their appropriate functions, -that it was created for the light andcl
the air, though now shut out from both.
Man's condition in this world is not unaptly typified by
the bird in the shell. He has wings which he cannot here
unfold, and eyes of the spirit which find no adequate field
of vision here. He has faculties, capacities, and desires,
which here seek in vain for free scope and full gratification.  He has powers which here are almost dormant, like
the cramped pinions of the yet imprisoned bird. He finds
the elements of the material universe often hostile, always
unsatisfying. He has hardly learned to adapt himself to
the world in which he is born, indeed is less adapted to it
18 t' 
188     CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
than the new-born bee or beaver, when he is summoned to
leave it. He lives and dies a stranger and a pilgrim here,
oftener in conflict than in harmony with his surroundings,
oftener yearning for a loftier than contented with a lower
sphere. Oure intellectual powers grasp at infinity. We
are conscious of a boundless capacity of research, knowledge, and progress, and our curiosity grows faster than its
gratification, our sense of ignorance faster than our knowledge. In no department of life do we ever reach our
aims or embody our conceptions.   The painter enshrines
in canvas, the sculptor hews from the marble, forms glowing with beauty, redolent of purity and loveliness, vividly
lifelike to every beholder; but he has floating before his
mind visions of artistical perfectness to which he has
hardly begun to give expression. The poet, whose inspiration thrills the universal heart, is tortured by unutterable
imaginings; glimpses of glory from the parted heavens,
which language cannot clothe, aspirations too lofty and
ardent to flow in the broken harmony of earthly song.
The man of science who transcends his fellows in his
sweeping generalizations is still unsatisfied; for he conceives of profounder depths, more perfect adaptations,
broader harmonies, more comprehensive laws, than he has
the means of verifying, and each new  discovery that
dawns on his own mind or is suggested by kindred spirits
only fills him with the more earnest desire to bathe forever
in exhaustless truth.  The pursuit of happiness, too, is
pursuit, but less and less attainment. Its fountains are
summer-dried or winter-friozen.  In the midst of all that
can feast the senses or minister to the pride of life, there
is still the inward craving for a higher, purer joy. So is
it, also, with the noblest of aims, that of moral excellence.
However exemplary the character may be, it falls short 
IMMORTALITY.
of its ideal.  The good man's goal recedes, his standard
grows higher. His endeavors reach out far beyond his attainments, -  the spirit willing, but the flesh weak.  This
disproportion between man and his condition, this constant
outreaching, upreaching, is certainly no faint indication of
a future state, where our conceptions will be realized and
our aspirations satisfied, where our endeavors will overtake our aims, and fruition will answer to desire. It is
intrinsically improbable that He, who must love all that
is noble in man far more than man  can love it, should
have implanted these tendencies in our being without providing for their ultimate consummation.
This argument is strengthened when we consider our
relations to the visible universe. We are placed within
sight of numberless worlds, and are endowed with the
capacity of learning something of their relations and laws,
but are left in invincible ignorance and intense curiosity
as to all else concerning them. Can it be that a good
God has opened this gorgeous immensity of creation to
our view, to close it forever to our knowledge? Had He
destined us to an eternal slumber in the grave, I cannot
but think that He would have enveloped us in a denser
atmosphere, and not have shown us other worlds  than
our own.
We might also infer a continuance of life beyond death
from the continued growth of the character in extreme
old age. The moral principles and habits become more
and more profoundly fixed with every added year of a
long life, and never appear more characteristically or
manifest themselves in fuller vigor than in its last days
and scenes. All those powers which are related to the
present state alone are liable to decline. The perceptive,
apprehensive, and active organs and faculties lose their
189 
190     CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
quickness and keenness. There remains the wonted capacity neither for business nor for enjoyment.  Yet there
may still be increase of virtue, a progressive refinement
and exaltation of character, nay, often a peculiar ripeness
and mellowness, as of fruit which grows luscious only as
it drinks in the sunbeams through the thinned leafage of
autumn. Above all, love, which, the Christian writers
tell us, is to outlast faith and hope, to constitute the
essence of the heavenly life, to supersede by its loyal affinities and infallible instincts the doubtful reasoning and
lame philosophy of this world, so that knowledge in its
wonted forms shall cease, to be its own interpreter frono
spirit to spirit, so that tongues shall fail,- love, both Godward and manward, grows under the lengthening shadows,
and is never so radiant and genial as in the latter days of
a devout and kind pilgrimage. I knew of an old man of a
hundred and five years, blind and deaf, roused only with
the utmost difficulty to take notice of the presence of persons and objects around him, whose lips were incessantly
moving during his waking hours in audible and fervent
praise and prayer; and I could number up (and so could
some of you, I doubt not) a goodly list of old men and
women who have seemed to belong more to the heavenly
society than to tire world in which they lingered, and with
whom our converse has been like that of Bunlyan's Pilgrim with the Shining Ones who walked at times in the
coiuntry of Beulah, on the hither side of the death-river.
In our domestic and social circles have we not a like experience in the tender sympathy, the persistent charity, the
forbearing, forgiving, exhaustless affection, the intense
kindliness of our aged kindred and fiiends, who never
seem so dear as when they are spared beyond the wonted
term of the earthly life?  Now this growth of that which 
IMMORTALITY.
constitutes all moral, spiritual vitality, after the law of
decrease has superseded that of increase in everything
else, this culminating as one declines, this nearing the
meridian of a higher sphere as one approaches the earthly
horizon, indicates, as seems to me, with clear and strong
emphasis, the survivance of the moral nature when dust
returns to dust.
A like inference may be obviously drawn from the
strength of our specific attachments to individuals. Is it
conceivable that God would have made natural affection
so intense and tender,    would have bound heart with
heart by such close-clinging filaments of common feeling,
-had he not intended that friendship and love should be
deathless?
A strong arguiment for immortality is derived from the
waste which we must suppose in God's spiritual universe,
if there be no higher life. You know how very large a
proportion of our race die in early infancy, and how many
more die before they have reached a maturity adequate to
any of the trusts or duties of active life. Nor do I believe
that it is a mere fancy that is implied in the classic saying,
Whom the gods love die young." The very delicacy
of organization which attends and cherishes the richest
developments of mind and heart, and the cerebral fulness
and activity which are often thle accompaniments and
tokens of the most beautifuil promise, with sad frequency
are morbid indications, and give presage of early death.
This is strange and inexplicable, if death be what it
seems. We cannot reconcile with God's perfect wisdom
or with his unchanging goodness this wanton destruction
of so large a part of the beauty and loveliness, the hope
and joy, of our race. But the mystery ceases when we
take the highler life into our view.  It is natural that the
191 
192     CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
fruit first ripe should be first gathered,- natural that the
most hopeful subjects of nurture and instruction should be
placed under conditions pre-eminently favorable to their
growth,- natural that some at least of the most delicate
and sensitive spirits should be spared the rude vicissitudes
and stern conflicts through which alone their earthly path
to heaven could lie.
A still stronger case of waste is presented in the lives,
not cut short in infancy, but developed and matured ill
strength and beauty, yet with no scope for earthly enjoyment, no adequate mode of self-expression or post of
service, no experience save of the obscure and shady side,
the trial and the bitterness of life.  HIere, for instance, is
a widow, alone and desolate, sustaining her needy age by
incessant and exhausting toil. Her sun was darkened in
its very morning, her midway walk was under gathering
clouds, and they have settled down upon her declining
years in a density which death alone can dissipate. In
every relation she has been bereaved, in every earthly
prospect disappointed. She has indeed in her spirit been
strengthened and exalted, and the flow of her thoughts is
serene and heavenly. She loves her Saviour, and his love
is the,igl-t of her darkness, the joy of her aesolafion.
But with a character richly trained by this arduous discipline, her influence is but little felt in a very contracted
circle. Spiritually capable of large usefulness, she has
neither the conventional culture, the position, the leisure,
nor the means for doing aught for the service of God and
man beyond the beautiful example of her patient waiting
and submissive trust. She has been educated worthily of
an extended and lofty sphere of duty; she has but the
narrowest and humblest. Yet God reigns. Is it possible
that her training is to no purpose? that she has been 
IMMORTALITY.
made a sport for calamity with no ulterior prospect of a
condition worthy of her capacity and  her character?
Can the extinction of being await her at death? Do not
such instances (and they are by no means rare) point with
unerring prophecy to a time when God will make up his
jewels, - when gems here unset shall grace the dialem
of the King of kings? Do they not indicate a field of
duty for which He is educating his most loyal servants,
a charge adequate to the capacity so painfully brought
forth and perfected, - a stewardship over many things for
those who have been found thus faithful il few things?
I pass to another argument. The strife among the disciples of Jesus for the chief places about their Master's
person when he should enter upon his kingdom is the
type of a strife perpetually waged in the world, and which
has its source in the native and indestructible instinct of
self-advancement. It is one of the tokens of the imperfection of this world, good as it is, and one of the natural
and perpetual prophecies of immortality, that there are
not great places enough here for all who have the capacity
and the desire to fill them, and, still more, that what great
places there are, are often not filled by great men, but
that there is a pretty general misplacing of people, the
small in great places, the great in small places, as if this
were a nursery of souls rather than their Anal home, —
the anteroom in which they are waiting to be sorted and
ranked, not the palace in which they are to assume their
several posts of service. The world has indeed its standard; but that standard is more likely to be shortened to
the measure of those below it, than to be stretched to the
stature of those above it. Some who are not worthy of
the world secure its favor, while those of whom the world
is not worthy almost always forfeit its favor. Thus who
193
11
9
m 
194     CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
would have recognized as the first man of his age St.
Paul, at the whipping-post, in the stocks, on board the
prison-ship, chained to two Roman soldiers, his severed
head held up for the mockery of a brutal populace?  Yet
there live many now who think that they see in him a
greater manhood than in any being, the Heaven-born
alone excepted, who ever trod the earth.  But even this
posthumous recognition is rare.   Of those who  have
borne all the marks of greatness, how many must there
have been for whom there was neither place in their lifetime, nor niche for their names in the memorial tablet of
posterity!  Most aptly does the Apostle compare this life,
with its rewards, to the Olympic games, in which, however
many competitors there might be, only one received the
prize. Yet all run. Distinction,- greatness of place,
relative if not absolute, - pre-eminence among one's fellows, is the universal ambition. Almost all who are not
sluggards or sensualists have this aim, and all other aims
resolve themselves into this. Thus the scholar seldom so
loves learning for its own sake that he does not covet its
reputation also. The artist, with all his love for the beautiful, wants to make for himself a name.  The strife of the
votaries of fashion is for leadership, for greatness in their
own small way. The pursuit of wealth is less for the substance that it' may purchase, than for the place that it may
give. Yet all these aims are, we know, more likely to
fail than to succeed, and unnumbered persons with vast
desires and large endeavors are kept in or below mediocrity. The effort, too, is one of rivalry, and therefore
has its bad side, its malignant aspect. The aim is to overtop and outdo one another. The strife to be the greatest
involves the endeavor to make others less; for there is no
high earthly platform on which there is room for more
than a few to stand. 
IMMORTALITY.
But God cannot have made this desire to excel an
indestructible element of our nature, without giving us
a field for its successful exercise without the passion of
emulation or rivalry. It cannot be pre-eminence, but
excellence by a positive standard, for which He would
have us strive. There must be somewhere an arena in
which all can so run that they may obtain. There must
be somewhere great places enough for all who seek them.
But there are not here. We are constrained, then, to
look to the life eternal, where alone there can be as many
prizes as there are competitors, as many great places as
there are great souls.
The arguments for immortality which I have cited are,
I know you will agree with me, strong, weighty, conclusive. They seem independent of revelation. Yet
they are all derived from Christian culture, many of
them fri-om Christian experience; and they seem the
most forcefuil to those who look primarily to Christ for
the hope fuill of immortality, and then hear his revelation
echoed from nature and experience. And, more than all,
they come to us most genially in our unburdened and
happy hours.  We rejoice in them: we are thankrftl for
them. But in our times of need and dread, in our depression and sorrow, in the hour of bereavement and
under the shadow of death, our cry is, -"  Lord, to whom
shall we go?  Thou hast the words of eternal life."
195 
LECTURE X.
CHRISTIAN MORALITY.
Two years ago, my colleague, Professor Peirce, who in
his own department has no superior among living men,
delivered from this platform a course of Lectures, in
which he constructed a theoretical universe.  He took
his stand outside of the visible creation, assumed merely
the existence of brute matter and certain fundamental
mathematical laws, and determined by a masterly line of
a priori reasoning what the proportions and relations of a
universe constructed in accordance with those laws must
have been. The result was the coincidence, point for
point, of this universe of theory with the actually existing
universe. Now imagine a being who could occupy with
regard to the entire realm of spiritual existence the position which our great mathematician holds as to the outward creation,- a being of perfect moral wisdom,- of
such clear perceptions of actions, their tendencies, and
their issues as might suit our conventional idea of a Gabriel,- and let there be propounded to him this problem:
" Given the existence of God and of a race of intelligent
moral beings, to construct on these data a moral system,
which shall insure and preserve harmony and beneficial
relations between God and his creatures, as they are
maintained by mathematical laws between God and his
worlds." The system which would satisfy the conditions
of this problem could be no other than the Gospel of 
CHRISTIAN MORALITY.
Christ, not a precept, prohibition, or sanction wanting.
Wipe out from the memory of earth and heaven every
vestige of Christ's life and teachings, let there be wholly
unoccupied ground for a new lawgiver, and let one arise
of supreme and comprehensive wisdom, he could do no
more than republish the moral system of the New Testament. Who can add to this system? or take from it?
What conceivable case of obligation is there which it does
not reach and meet? What conceivable case in which
departure from it is safe? It is not law for man alone,it must be law wherever being is. Range in thought
from planet to planet, - imagine the forms and aspects
of life in them all as various as are the combinations of
elements in their physical structure, or the celestial panoramas which make their night-seasons glorious,- still you
can imagine no other law. You can conceive of no possible condition in which the Sermon on the Mount would
not have the same validity which it has with us. Nor as
you look into the depths of eternity can you conceive of
a stage or degree of progress, at which that compend of
duty shall cease to be sole and sufficient law for angels
and just men made perfect.
But from some quarters there comes a counter-statement. Let us meet it. It is said by those who think that
they have outgrown  Christianity: -" There is noth ing cosmopolitan in the Gospel. It is all Hebrew, Jew ish, belonging to Christ's own age. He gave, indeed,
good advice for his time; but it is only by a pious sham,
by a well-meant but palpable fiction, that we apply it to
the nineteenth century. In the enhanced complications
and responsibilities of these modern times,'we virtually rec oglize many laws of Inty that have no counterpart in the
New Testament. What, for instance, do we find there
197 
198     CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
of the ethics of commerce, or of international relations?
What, that sha]l be our sufficient and infallible guide in
our relations to negro slavery? What, that shall strike
the just medium between religious toleration and religious
indifference, or between freedom of thought'and utterance, and dangerous and reprehensible license? Is not
ethical science in its nature progressive?  Have we  not
much clearer and larger views of duty than we find any
traces of in the Gospel? Is not this the fact, -that
Jesus was the greatest moral teacher of his own age, but
that we have outgrown him, and could not afford to go
back to him?"
I answer: -  By parity of reasoning, the world has outgrowul Eucl'd's Elements of Geometry; for in his day
there was only now and then a field to measure, or an
altitude to determine, or some very simple geometrical
calculation to make, while we are doing a thousand things
of which he never dreamed, such as grading railways,
constructing massive fortifications, triangulating the seacoast of entire continents. Yet in point of fact Euclid's
Elements are the geometry of our time no less than of his.
The processes now performed are simply the application
of the laws that have come down to us from him to the
enlarged and complicated demands of a higher civilization.
Without those laws the problems before us would be unmanageable. They are capable of a practical solution
only by methods involved in his treatise, and which he
would have indicated, hIad these problems been proposed
to him.
In like manner, though there is in the Gospel no statement of the concrete moral problems of the nineteenth
century, the only approach we make to their solution is
by means of the very principles which Jesus stated in 
CHRISTIAN MORALITY.
their applications to the problems of his day, and which
could have been understood when he promulgated them
only through their being thus applied.  Indeed, so far
are we from having outgrown the Gospel, that we still
fall very far short of its scope, and depth, and spirituality.
The most that we can say is, that the boasted progress of
moral science has been in the direction of Christian morality, - that there has been a growing tendency toward
the embodiment of the precepts of the Gospel. In government, in commerce, in political economy, there has
been what we term a constant moral progress ever since
the Protestant Reformation.  Principles at first the subjects of fierce controversy have surmounted opposition,
outlived dissent, and come to be regarded as axioms that
do not admit of dispute. But when we examine any such
axiom, - the vaunted discovery of the present or the last
generation, - we always find that it is as old as the Gospel, that it fell perfectly shaped from the lips of Jesus and
found explicit record from the pen of the Evangelists, and
that its modern form is but a translation of the words of
Christ into scientific language, or an application of some
broad principle of Christianity to some modern mode of
thought or action.  In all the departments of concrete
ethics, Christianity, so far from being outgrown, is slowly
but surely working its way into tie hearts of nations, into
the great heart of humanity, thus progressively fulfilling
the prediction, "Behold, I make all things new."
To verify this view of the Christian morality in all its
details, would transcend my present limits; I shall therefore confine my attention to thle two prime ethical discoveries or revelations of Christianity, which together cover
the whole of human  duty, and thus inclue the veryv
details which I have not time to treat separately.
199 
200      CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
I. Natural philosophy tells us that the orbits of the
heavenly bodies result firom the combining of two opposite
tendencies; -the centripetal, by which the satellite is at tracted to its primary, the planet to the sun, the system
to the centre of gravity of the cluster to which it belongs;
and the centrifugal, by virtue of which alone the sphere
would be hurled on its solitary andt darkening path into
unknown depths of space, and would be liable to the
perilous attraction or ruinous contact of its sister-worlds.
The human soul is, by the necessity of its being, subject
to these two opposite tendencies; -the centripetal, by
which it is drawn to its Source and Author; the centrifugal, by which it is made liable to every form of attraction
and influence from its fellow-beings.  Accordingly, to the
human conscience duty presents itself under these two
aspects,-  that of supreme devotion to God, and that of
paramount obligation to man. Each may be plausibly
represented as comprising the whole of duty. It may be
urged, on the one hand, that HIe who has made us all that
we are, and has given us all that we have, justly claims all
our thoughts, all our powers, all our affections; and that
even the charities of life, if they arrest our contemplation
of thle Infinite One, check the flow of prayer and praise,
and interest us in inferior beings and objects, are a robbery of God, a scanting of the incense due on his altar,
of the living, perpetual sacrifice by which alone we  can
be worthy of his love. On the other hand, it may be
maintained that we can neither enhance his wealth, nor
iencrease his happiness, nor add to his glory; that the
needs and claims of our fellow-men are constant and
imperative, demanding all of time and faculty we have;
and that the fervor and energy given to devotion are
uselessly, wrongfuilly, and injuriously abstracted from our
)brethren. 
CIIRISTIAN MORALITY.
The prime desideratum in a moral system is the just
balancing of these centripetal and centrifugal forces, the
reconciliation, the unifying, of piety and charity, so that
there shall be the maximum of both, and so that each
shall render the other more intense and fervent. This is
the first moral problem of natural religion, and if Christianity alone solves it, then in this respect Christianity is
pre-eminently natural religion. Let us trace these tendencies separately, and then see how they are combined
and harmonized in Christianity.
We will first trace the centripetal force unmodified,
the exclusively pietistic theory of duty, of which we have
an affluence of examples under both Pagan and Christian
auspices.  The pietistic impulse may be one of fear.  In
this case the devotee is haunted by a morbid consciousness
of impurity and sin, -morbid, I say, for the healthfil
consciousness of personal delinquency which we cannot
feel too profoundly is allayed by penitence, and finds recourse to the fountain of forgiveness opened in the cross
of the world's Redeemer. But the devotee's one idea is
propitiation by personal sacrifice and suffering, - the buying off of penalty in the world to come by gratuitous
torture sought and endured in the present life. Under
this impulse, the Hindoo has torn the living flesh from his
limbs, hung his quivering fi-ame on hooks of steel, flung
himself under the car of Juggernaut, or buried himself in
easier suicide under the saving waters of the sacred river.
The Christian ascetic, in the same spirit, has  abjured
all the ties of family and society, fed on street-offal, lived
in booths, huts, and caverns in which he could neither
stand nor sit, passed years of vigil on pillars, lacerated his
body with the hair-clothl and the scourge, courted insult
and outrage, gloried in rags, filth, and vermin.  Not only
9*
201 
202     CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
have such lives been wasted as regards all valuable human
ends. They have been worse than wasted as to the very
end of religious culture to which they might seem adapted.
The God thus worshipped has been the frightfiul chimera
of a disordered fancy. All imaginable dogmatic atrocities
have had their birth in these savage cells and dens.  Man
learns to conceive worthily of God only through human
relations. It is in terms borrowed from these relations
that thle Scriptures teach the fatherhood of God, and
image the soul's espousal to her Redeemer. It is he who
lives purely and dutifully in these relations that sees in
the human the constantly suggestive symbol of the Divine,
and drinks in perpetually a strengthening, gladdening
faith in his Father and Savioir. The ascetic, in forfeiting
the symbol, loses all sense of what it signifies, and finds
his types for the Divinity in the savage scenes, loathsome
endurances, and horrible self-tortures, which are his temple, his ritual, and his worship.
Another form of the pietistic impulse is engendered by
the action of superstitious belief on indolence and apathy.
Thilis has furnished the rank and file of Christian recluses
in all ages. The cloisters have been filled for the most
part by men  and women who might have been stimulated to useful industry by just views of duty, or would
have been driven to toil for their subsistence, had not
their laziness found sanction and support in a false and
harmfun charity.  The best thing that these religious recluses have been wont to do is to vegetate in an ever
nearer approach to idiocy, their faculties gradually rusting away by disuse. Probably from the very prayers and
litanies in which their days drag out their weary length,
the spiritual element is wholly exhaled at a very early
period, and the service of the'altar becomes as much a 
CHRISTIAN MORALITY.
mere bodily exercise as that of the refectory. Where,
however, the appetites are strong, they avenge themselves
for the violence done to human nature by subduing and
dishonoring it. Monasticism has been atrociously wronged
whenever it has been represented as the conscious and
willing nurse of sensuality. Its discipline has been, for
the most part, administered by and upon either honest
and fervent asceties or harmless drones; and I cannot
believe, without stronger evidence than the history of the
Church gives us, that the intent of evil has at any timne
mingled largely with the motives that have led men to
abjure the living world, which has always offered too
many facilities for every form of vice to make a retreat
from it tempting to the viciously disposed. Yet even
Montalembert, the most eloquent among the eulogists of
monastic institutions, admits that foul and horrible ex cesses of gluttony, drunkenness, and sensuality of every
kind, have been not infrequent among the cloistered.*
And we should expect this; for idleness and an unoc cupied mind always leave free scope and full sway for
all thie capacity that one has of low appetite and brutal
passion. Thus it is that many, who began by sincerely
consecrating a profitless life to God, have passed, almost
unconsciously, to the opposite camp.
There remains yet another, the mystic type of pietism,
of which we cannot speak without profound reverence
for thie pure and noble spirits which it has given to human
* See Montalembert, Les Moines d' Occident, Introduction, Chap. vii. After
speaking of th~ indignant utterances against monastic abuses put by Dante
into the mouth of St. Benedict (Paradiso, Canto xxii.), and of the coarse and
foul portraitures of depravity under the cowl which make up the substance
of Boccaccio's Decanzerone, Montalembert adds: "' La corruption monastique
devint le lieu commun de la satire, en mneme temps que la matibre constants
des dolances trop ldgitimes de toutes les ames pieuses comme des plus
hautes autoritds de l''glise."
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204     CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
ity. Yet even in their case we discern the need of an
outward sphere of duty to check the morbid reaction from
a too concentrated gaze upon spiritual realities, from a too
continuous direct communion with God.  There is very
apt to grow up in such souls an egotism, modest and huinble indeed, yet engrossing and exacting. They become
like the hypochondriac invalid, who is perpetually feeling
his own pulse. Painful and self-accusing introspection
alternates with devotion, and encroaches upon it more
and more. Groundless depression blends with the flow of
pious thought, and imparts to it a tinge of gloom. The
records of such lives leave a sad impression on the reader,
and make us feel that, even with the crowning grace of
sincere devotion Godward, there is much that contributes
to the strength and beauty of character left undeveloped.
The centripetal tendency cannot, then, in any of its
exclusive forms, commend itself to our entire approval,
even in its religious aspects.
Let us now mark the working of the centrifugal tendency when not balanced by the centripetal, -of social
virtue when not inspired and energized by piety.  This
inquiry is only too timely. It is one of the heresies of
our day to estimate the traits and gifts of mind and heart
by their immediate mechanical results; and piety, because
its direct acts are not earthward and manward, because it
does not visibly feed and clothe men, because it does not
in its express form go down into the arena of strife and
gain, is struck from the list of utilities, its services deemed
a waste, its joys a delusion. Yet I maintain that this,
and this alone, can give strength, permanence, and purity
to the social virtues, - that the life hidden with God is
identical with the life that diffuises blessings among men.
The fountain is fed fiom secret spriangs, and, wshen it leaps 
CHRISTIAN MORALITY.
and bubbles fresh and clear, indicates a source higher than
its level. The navigable river, the fall that turns the millwheel, is made deep and strong by forest-rills that carry
no freight, by mountain-torrents too wild and vagrant for
industrial uses. Stop the source, the fountain stagnates
and dries up. Cut off the rill, the boat is stranded on
the river's bed.  Arrest the torrent, the wheel stands
still.  Equally  do what  are called the useful virtues
depend on those which belong to the interior life.
There is in our day a great deal of professed philanthropy where religious faith and reverence are wanting.
But did you ever know all undevout philanthropist worthy
of the name?  These professed friends of their race who
neglect the peculiar duties of religion are either partial in
their charity, warm in some causes of philanthropy and
indifferent or hostile to others; or their zeal is flickering,
their torch a revolving, intermittent light; or else they
blend with much that is kind and generous a large infusion of bitterness and rancor, so that out of the same
mouth proceed blessing and cursing. Without love to
God, love to man grows languid. What was heart-work
at the outset soon lapses into tongue-work or hand-work;
and as tongue or hand for lack of heart grows weary, it
either sinks into utter inertness, or, if kept in motion by
habit or pressure from without, it pursues its routine
peevishly and fretfully, because reluctantly. There is no
more pitiable or noxious being than the godless philanthllropist. The men who forsake and scorn the altar are
the very men who make philanthropy a hissing and a byword, who cast reproach on the holiest causes, who thwart
the sincere benevolence of multitudes that would gladly
do all they can for their race, who by their denuncia tions and  anathemas  keep  back  the sober  and self
205 
206      CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
respecting from fields of effort in which they would rejoice to labor.
We  have thus seen that of these  two  tendencies
of character neither can be suffered to prevail to the
exclusion of the other, without injurious results, nay,
more, without failure of the very end pursued, - the
mere devotee being dwarfed or distorted in his religious development, the mere philanthropist losing his
capacity of usefulness. Yet before Jesus Christ none
knew that piety and charity were essential to each other,
inseparable allies, neither capable of subsisting apart.
Such was the law of nature, and truly good'men had
lived by this law, yet without knowing it, just as men
for several thousand years had experienced the phenomena of the earth's rotation and revolution without any
conception of them. Christianity is not peculiar in elnjoining piety, or in inculcating charity; for both had
formed a part of the better ethical systems of the ancient
world.  But it was and is peculiar in uniting the two, in
affirming the one to be dependent on and inseparable
from the other, and in placing that first which is first in
the nature and necessity of things, and without which the
second cannot be. When Jesus Christ announced as the
first and great commandment, "Thou shalt love the Lord
thy God with all thy heart," and declared the second,
" Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself," to be, not
separate from it, not independent of it, not the opposite
pole of duty, but "like unto it," he proclaimed the most
momentous discovery ever made in moral science, - a
discovery that bears the same relation to the spiritual
world which the discovery of universal gravitation bears
to the material universe.
You will remember how this union constitutes tl-e key 
CHRISTIAN MORALITY.
stone of the New Testament morality, how constantly
religious and social duty are united in the teachings of
Christ, and how their identity forms the entire burden
of that tender, loving epistle of St. John.
But, as Jesus says, the love of God must come first.
Without it, there may be a certain amount of good-doing,
under the impulse of transient enthusiasm, from the imitative instinct which makes certain modes of beneficence
fashionable, or from party spirit, which often confers material relief or comfort in an utterly malignant temper; but
there can be no broad, persistent, long-suffering love of
man. For of those who most need our love, how many
are there who present in themselves nothing on which it
can lay hold! Think you that the first missionaries to
the Malays, and Hottentots, and New-Zealanders, who
attested their love for them by untold sacrifices and sufferings, saw anything to love in those fierce and truculent
savages, in those grinning, ape-like negroes, in those cannibals hungering for their flesh,-  in those vile kennels
and rubbish-heaps of humanity?  No.  But as we Should
follow up with our kindest offices a degraded and seemingly worthless brother of a very dear friend, should look
on that brother with our friend's eyes, should believe that
there was in him worth or the capacity of it because our
friend thought so, and should for our friend's sake take a
sincere interest in him, so our love to God will reveal to
us the precious in man however degraded and imbruted,
will make us love him for God's image in him though it
be obscured and defaced, and will sustain us in every
effort and sacrifice that may help to repair the temple in
lruxins, and to cleanse the sacred image from its foul and
inoisome incrustations.
How perfect is the union of these two principles in the
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208     CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NTURE.
life of Clhrist, - a life literally in the bosom of thile Father,
a life consecrated in its entireness to loving offices among
the needy, the suffering, the guilty, the abandoned, the night-watches sequestered friom the repose of the toil worn body for the profounder rest of lonely prayer, the
days so crowded with words and works of mercy that
some of them of which we can trace the record might
seem to have been preternaturally lengthened! Since
his time, and in his spirit, all the great workers for humamity have been as fervent in their devotion as they
have been energetic in their labor of love.  No matter in
what department of philanthropic service,- whether it
is Howard so engrossed with the prisons that hlie has no
time to look at the palaces and cathedrals of Continental
Europe, or Judson coining his whole noble being into
labors and sacrifices for benighted Burmahl, or Cheverus,
with refinement and culture that would have graced a
court, building the fire and making the gruel for the sick
poor in loathsome Broad-Street cellars, or Charles Wesley
pouring forth those sweet redemptioni-songs whose Sabbath strains echo round the world, or Arnold inaugurating a new era of Christian education, and imparting
impulses that will be felt longer than his name will be
spoken among men, -wherever there is an energy of
love that thrills through all hearts, and commands universal reverence and sympathy, there too is an equal
energy of piety. Not a throb of kindly feeling pulses for
a fellow-man, that mounts not first to God, and through
him descends in blessing. Not a wave of sympathy rolls
in upon the stricken heart, that flows not first to the
Majesty on high, thence refluent earthward. Not a cord
of benign influence is thrown around the degraded and
the guilty, that has not its attachment and its purchase on
the eternal throne. 
CHRISTIAN MORALITY.
II. There is another moral problem, to which I would
invite your attention, and which will occupy the remainder of the present Lecture. There is at first view an
irreconcilable antagonism between self-love and beneficence. Self-love is inevitable; beneficence is a manifest
duty. But if we love ourselves, how can we rob ourselves of time, reputation, ease, or money for the good of
others? If we are beneficent, how can we be otherwise
than false to that law of our very natures which urges
upon Lus a primary reference to our own happiness?  I
cannot find that this problem was solved by any moralist
before Christ. Beneficence was indeed inculcated before
Christ, but as a form of self-renunciation, not as returning
a revenue to the kind heart and the generous hand.
Yet here Christ plays a bold stroke. His precepts are
full of philanthropy. They prescribe the utmost measure
of toil and sacrifice for humanity. They constrain the
disciple to call nothing his own which others really need,
-to hold all that he has subject to perpetual drafts from
those who can claim his sympathy.  Yet Christ is so far
from dishonoring and denouncing self-love, that he chlierislies it without imposing or suggesting a limit to it, nay,
makes the cherishing of it a duty and a measure of the
seemingly antagonistic duty, implyigr that, the more we
love ourselves, the greater will be the amount of the good
we do to others.  His fundamental law for the social life
stretches the uniting wire between these opposite poles,
and transmits fiom each to the other the current of personal and social obligation, making  duty interest, and
interest duty.  The precept, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself," is simply absurd, if the imagined antagonism is real. But if these two principles, in form mutually hostile, are in fact kindred and mutually convertible,
N
209 
210     CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
so that each does the other's work, it must be by means
of springs and wheels which underlie them both and the
whole fabric of society, and which are kept in perpetual tension and motion by an omnipresent providence.
Either this coincidence of self-love and beneficence is a
law of nature, or it is a contradiction in terms and an impossibility in action. Let us consider how far it is a law
of nature.
Look, first, at international relations. Unenlightened
national self-love dictates war on the most trivial pretexts,
quick resentment, prompt revenge,.bold aggression, the
preying of the strong upon the feeble. But if history
has taught any lesson, it has taught the inexpediency and
folly of needless war, even when most successful, and the
expediency of peace at all sacrifices, and of mutual good
offices among the nations. Nor has the lesson failed of
reception. Though peculiar circumstances have led, within
the lifetime of the present generation, to two of the greatest international wars on record, and though the grand
police-movement of our government for the suppression
and punishment of treason has assumed the form of a
gigantic war, a change has already taken place in the
policy of the civilized world. There have been numerous
instances, of late years, in which controversies that half
a century ago could have been settled only by armies
have been adjusted by peaceful negotiation or arbitration;
and it is distinctly seen on all hands that a generous, forbearing, long-suffering course  in cases of international
controversy is alone consistent with the welfare and progress of a state.
A similar change has taken place in the commercial
relations of the civilized world. In the ignorant infancy
of modern commerce the reigning doctrine was, that the 
CHRISTIAN MORALITY.
surplus of the specie imported over that exported determined the balance of trade in favor of a nation, so that by
any specific commercial arrangement one party must be
the gainer, the other the loser. Thus the sole effort of
diplomatists was to outwit one another, and to throw dust
into one another's eyes; and as to mercantile matters,
nations occupied a position of mutual antagonism, each
looking for gain only at the expense of the other. This
notion is now entirely exploded, and the principle is fully
established, that between two nations no commercial
arrangement can be. advantageous to one party which is
not so to both, thativirtual reciprocity (which often differs
widely, as in some instances our country has learned to
its cost, from literal reciprocity) is the true basis of treaties, and that the enhanced prosperity of any one of the
family of nations only offers an enlarged market for the
industry and an expanded scope for the commerce of every
other. Thus, though commerce seems an intensely selfish
transaction, it is now girdling the earth with the zone of
common interest, mutual good-will, and reciprocal helpfilness.
Among members of the same community I know of
nothing that illustrates the concurrent tendency and harmonious working of self-love and mutual benevolence so
strongly and beautifully as the system of insurance. At
first thought, the appeal to the self-love of the uninjured
as a resource against calamity might seem the height.of
absurdity, and the inscription, "Bear ye one another's
burdens," placed over the office of a joint-stock company,
might look like bitter irony.'Yet what but such an
appeal is the advertisement of an insurance company?
What more fitting motto could an insurance office bear?
This method of selfish benevolence, of philanthropic self
211 
212      CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
love, is already applied to the risks of fire, storm, and
shipwreck, of sickness and death, and the extension of it
to debts, contracts, suretyships, and other transactions in
which a crushingly heavy burden is often thrown upon an
individual, has been hopefully projected, so that in due
time every calamity which can have its force broken by
division will be thus dispersed by the beneficent working
of pure self-love,- by a system into which no man enters
except for his own benefit, yet into which no man can
enter without becoming a public benefactor.   This kindly
agency, by which disasters that would overwhelm and
ruin the individual are drawn off and scattered over a
whole community with a pressure which none can seriously feel, might remind one of what takes place in a
thunder-storm, when every twig of every tree and every
angle of every moistened roof helps to lead harmlessly
to the ground the electric force which, discharged at any
one point, would deal desolation and death.
We may trace this same harmony between self-love
and benevolence in the relations and intercourse of ordinary life.  We  hlave heard a great deal at times- I
think that the phraseology has grown obsolete now, but it
was rife when the Carlylese patois used to be spoken in
cultivated circles- about whole men, and the necessity
of every man's being a whole man, in himself complete,
self-sufficing, and independent. There never was such a
man, and nrever will be; and were there such a man, he
would be as fair a specimen of humanity as one would be
as to his physical nature who lacked hands, or feet, or
even head.  We are by nature the complements of one
another. We cannot help leaning and depending on one
another.  We are like trees in a forest, each sheltered
and fostered by its neighbor-trees, and liable to speedy 
CHRISTIAN MORALITY.
blighting when transplanted to a solitary exposure. Our
social natures are as truly a part of themselves as our
physical natures; our affections, as our appetites; our
domestic and civil relations, as our subjection to thelaws
of matter and of mind. The man whom we term selfish
consults the needs of only an insignificant fraction of himself. The self-seeker (so called) leads a life of perpetual
self-sacrifice and self-denial.  He alone who benefits his
neighbor does well for himself.  He alone who does good
gets good.  He alone who makes the world the happier
and the better by his living in it, becomes happier and
better by living in it.
Thus we see that in the essential constitution of nations,
communities, and tije individual soul, self-love and mutual
benevolence, so far from being antagonistic principles, are
in perfect harmony, verifying the words of St. Paul,
"The members, being many, are one body; and whether
one member suffer, all the members suffer with it, or one
member be honored, all the members rejoice with it."
You will not misunderstand me with reference to this
matter. I by no means represent selfishness as a motive
to benevolence; nor are. those outwardly kind acts which
are performed at the bidding of selfishness to be regarded
as benevolent. Yet the highest benevolence is the highest self-love. Let me take a case familiar no doubt to
some of my hearers, that of the missionary Boardman,
and let me trace rapidly his career. He leaves the most
flattering prospects near his native home. He crosses
more than half the globe to toil for a race which proffers
no hold on his esthetic sensibilities, but whose only claim
is its ignorance and wretchedness.  He seeks out scattered
hamlets in the almost impenetrable jungles and mouatainclefts of Burmah,  and crosses  swollen  torrents, arid
i)
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214      CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
wastes, and rocky passes hardly trodden but by beasts of
prey. His vigorous frame yields to perpetual and unrest ing labor.  The hectic flush of approaching death deepens
day by day, but hle pauses not on his errands of mercy.
Ihis limbs refiuse their office; still, "borne of four," like
the paralytic in the Gospel, he carries from village to village the message of redeeming love.' With the last sands
of his life there is still a distant group of converted savages
waiting to be baptized into the Christian fold, and through
incredible fatigue he presses on to meet them, He presides at the service, welcomes the proselytes to his own
blessed faith, pours forth for them his fervent exhortations
and the prayers so soon to be merged in the worship of
the heavenly temple. He dies conqueror on the bloodless field, the laurels of man's noblest victory crowning
his fevered brow, and encircling his memory with a glory
that time can never efface. Now in all this there was no
self-renunciation, but an enlarged and enlightened selflove,- the love of a self complete and perfect, - of a
self in those relations with universal humanity for which
we are all created and destined, - of the immortal self
which seizes its heavenly birthright, which knows the
steps by which it is to mount on high, which cannot be
content with any inferior and transient good while the
supreme and everlasting good is within its reach.
My argument is this: I am attempting to illustrate the
identity of Christianity with the religion of nature, and
thus to prove that Christiamnity can have had no other authlor than the Author of nature. Nations, communities,
individual men, only in these latter days are beginning
to perceive the coincidence of self-love with benevolence,
of the individual good with the general good. So far as
observation and reasoning are concerned, it is wholly a 
CHRISTIAN MORALITY.
discovery of modern times; but it is a discovery of what
always was and must ever be, - of what lies in the essential constitution of human nature and society. Far back
in barbarous antiquity this coincidence is dimly and partially shadowed in the Pentateuch.  In the teachings of
Jesus Christ it is made the basis of social morality, and
underlies his entire code of duty between man and man.
So many centuries before human philosophy and conscious
experience began to verify this truth, it can have been
derived ornly by revelation from Him who knew from the
beginning what is in man.
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LECTURE XI.
THE NATURAL RELIGION OF THE STATE.
As my course approaches its termination, I am oppressed by the multitude of topics that claim our attention, or would reward our inquiry.  Among these I have
chosen for the present Lecture the Natural Religion of
the State,- of government, of man's political relations.
In pursuance of the plan which I announced in my first
Lecture, and have kept steadily in view, I shall attempt
to legitimate on grounds of natural right the foundationprinciples of political society propounded by revelation.
In announcing the subject of this evening, I can hardly
need to say that I am among those who find in the Bible
not only the way out of this world, but the way in it, -
not only preparation for a higher sphere of being, but the
principles on which alone individual, domestic, social, and
national life can be so ordered upon the earth as to secure
the maximum of benefit and happiness.
It is among the discoveries of modern botanists, that the
plant is built up solely by the multiplication of primitive
cells, which contain in their microscopic proportions tfie
characteristic properties of the completed organism.  With
reference to human society a similar discovery was announced  in the  Decalogue,  and  confirmed  by Jesus
Christ.  I refer to the precept, "Honor thy father and
thy mother, that thy days may be long in the land which
the Lord thy God givethli thee." This last clause, a
0 
THE NATURAL RELIGION OF THE STATE.
moment's examination will show you, is not the promise
of a long life to a good son, but of long national life to a
nation of good sons. The Decalogue is addressed to the
people taken collectively, -" HIear, 0 Israel "; and this
precept denotes, "Do  you, as a people, cultivate filial
reverence and piety, that you may long live in prosperity
in your land." The command in itself is not strange;
but the announcement in connection with it of so recondite, yet so essential a maxim of political philosophy,a truth fundamental indeed, yet hardly recognized even
now,-  indicates a wisdom far beyond that rude age and
people, and certainly gives no slight color of probability to
the belief that God spake those words which have come
down to us as the law given on Mount Sinai.  Hlere then
is the foundation-truth of the politico-religious system of
the Bible.  Let us see how far it is verified in the experience of mankind.
The state is but an aggregation of smaller communities; and they are but aggregations of the little groups of
human beings that dwell in separate homes. The true
organization of the state is analogous to that of the family.
The administration of both is in theory alike paternal; its
ends are protection and order. The duties of the citizen
correspond to those of the child.  They are submission
and obedience, with no other limits than those which
should restrain the child, namely, the carefully considered
voice of conscience and the express law of God.  The
child may not commit theft or utter falsehood at the
parent's command; but within the entire range of things
not absolutely wrong he is bound to obedience, however
unpalatable or irksome.  In like manner, the citizen may
not commit what he knows to be morally wrong at the
bidding of the state; but there is no extent to which,
10
217 
218      CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
within the limits of the right, he is not bound to act in
opposition to his own wish, judgment, and interest, for the
sake of loyalty to the government and order in the state.
Nay, more, as the child, if his conscience will not let him
obey his parent, is bound to yield to the penalty of disobedience, and to honor by his submission and suffering
the parental authority whose command conflicts for the
moment with a higher obligation, so the only safe rule for
the citizen inhibited by an enlightened conscience from
complying with the requisition of the state is for him to
accept its penalty, - a rule commended to us by apostolic
example, and by the sacrifice and suffering of the all-perfect Saviour.
Nor is our strictly filial relation to government modified
by republican institutions, under which each man holds
a portion of the sovereignty. The free citizen's acts of
sovereignty are few, simple, and definite. They are confined to his exercise of the right of suffrage, his appropriation of the means requisite to enable him to exercise that
right intelligently, and his free expression of opinion as to
public men and measures. In everything else he is as
much a subject bound to implicit obedience as if he were
under a despotism.  True, it demands a peculiarly clear
moral discernment and active moral sense for one to be
alternately sovereign and subject,- parent and child in
the great national family.  Therefore, for the citizens of a
republic is the filial piety enjoined in the commandment
I have cited pre-eminently the natural religion of the
state; for citizens will be for the most part what they
have been trained to be as children.  You probably never
knew a demagogue, a factious, brawling politician, one
who despised laws and loved to defame rulers, who was
not a stubborn son, a weariness to his father, and a perpetual grief to his mother. 
THE NATURAL RELIGION OF THE STATE.
Our Puritan ancestors and the colonists from the Old
World in general brought to our shores fthie ancient notions of rigid family discipline.  Unquestioning obedience
was the law and the habit of their households. Wayward children fared worse with the early magistrates of
Now England than the majority of thieves and murderers
fare now; for filial contumacy or irreverence was then
regarded as "an iniquity to be punished by the judges."
Thence sprang that pervading spirit of order, which in
the last century survived the breaking up of old institutions, which for the most part quietly awaited the forlmation of our State and national governments, and then
peacefully transferred its former allegiance to the newly
constituted authorities. It was home-born habits alone
.that kept the nation out of the whirlpool of anarchy during the Revolutionary conflict, when the State governments really had very little power, nay, an existence so
precarious that any extensive outbreaking of the mobspirit would have crushed them. And had not the soldiers of the Revolution been for the most part trained in
well-ordered families, they never would have laid down
their arms, unpaid except in what they deemed worthless paper, but would have levied their hard-earned wages
on the goods of the unarmed, and, not suffering themselves to be foiled by the impregnable virtue of their commander-in-chief, would have elevated some unscrupulous
soldier of fortune to thle headship of a military despotism.
The condition of things has sadly changed within the
lifetime of the present generation. Laws have been perpetually nullified.  Our legislative halls have often witnessed outrages that would disgrace an arena of prizefighliters. Mobs have not infrequently taken the law
into their own hands, and have been abetted in their
g19 
220      CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
violence by men of conspicuous social and political standing. And am I not justified in saying that such disorders
have sprung from lax domestic discipline,- from homes
where children have borne sway, and their parents have
served them? It was homes organized and governed after
the divinely prescribed pattern that alone made a repuLblic possible on this Western Continent; and if the old
domestic regime is to be permanently reversed, if the
elder are to serve the younger, if the whims of childhood
and the caprices of.youth, instead of the wisdom of mature
experience, are to govern our families, the days of our
republic are numbered, and are drawing to a close.  Undisciplined homes will throw the state into anarchy; and
the world will have to wait for a'successful republican
experiment till there shall be a nation that obeys the
precept, and can claim the promise, of the fifth commandment of the Decalogue.
In this connection permit me to say a word of the
present rebellion. The conflict is not between government and government, but between anarchy and order.
Slavery, its salient cause, inflicts no evil so great as in
subverting the natural order of the family,- in making
children despots at the very age when they should be
learning lessons of submission and obedience. A slaveholding population cannot be the nursery of good subjects. The present outbreak had its preparation and
prophecy, first, in domestic insubordination, then and
thence in those habits of private revenge and lawnless
violence which were sapping the foundations of society,
and which have only reached their necessary and legitimate issue in a war aimed nominally against the authority
of the United States, but virtually against the fiundamental prhiciples of all government and all social order. 
THL NATURAL RELIGION OF THE STATE.
To recapitulate what has been said, government and
social order are a necessity of communities and nations.
God has provided for the existence of government and
order in the essential and natural duties, in the primal
and natural law, of the filial relation, under which every
child that obeys the very instinct of a child's nature
becomes of necessity a loyal and orderly subject. Far
back in the very rudest antiquity,- long before men
could have begun to philosophize on their relations or on
the analogy between the family and the state, - we find
this fundamental, vital law of the state promulgated in a
commandment that purports to have come directly from
God.  Can we resist the belief, that the announcement of
a truth so manifestly beyond the age and people in which
we find it was actually made by Him?
But while filial obedience alone call train worthy subjects for the state, there are yet other aspects in which
government depends on the home-life, and is sustained by
the family relation, so that, for a homeless community,
anarchy or despotism would be the alternative. To an
incalculable degree the home-instinct supplies the place
of law, supersedes the harsher ministries of government,
prevents crime, anticipates want, divides and lightens
burdens which else no public organization could bear.
The gravitation toward home is in every nation a stronger
force than its police and armies are or can be, and accomplishes many purposes of prime importance which they
could in no way fulfil.  The few homeless members of a
community are of immeasurably more charge, burden,
and peril to its constituted authorities, than the overwhelming majority that have homes.
I called the tendency to domestic life the home-instinct;
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222      CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
for it is not the result of reason, or a choice from interested motives, and it has the same kind of power over the
human will that the migratory instinct exerts upon the
wings of a bird. When we look at the matter abstractly,
homes are not necessary. We can conceive of life as
existing independently of them.  The conjugal and parental relations might be owned and kept sacred in the
gregarious life which the socialists would have us lead.
It has been, also, plausibly - though, I think, not without
a latent sophistry - maintained, and is pretty generally
believed, that, under a socialistic re'ime, there would be
not only a more equable distribution, but a more profuise
creation, of the elements of material comfort and erjoyment than under the institution of separate families. Yet
under all forms and degrees of culture there is this irresistible tendency to a separate abode for each several
family,- a latent consciousness, almost universal, that
home can be surrendered only at an inconceivable sacrifice of all fthiat is most loved and enjoyed.
By this instinct man is broughlt into analogy with the
entire system of the muniverse. In the outward creation
every object is at once a centre and a satellite. The sun,
with circling worlds revolving around it, itself revolves
around a centre of unnumbered systems. The planets,
secondaries to the sun, are primaries to their moons.
Every existence, every particle of matter, itself drawn by
mighty attractions, is equally a centre of attractive force
to surrounding objects. In human society almost all are
moving in circumferences around distant centres, - all
are so when compared in importance and dignity with
the Supreme Being. But in his home every human being is himself a centre,- the parent, of reverence; the
child, of lbve; the dependent, of tender care.   Here the
a 
THE NATURAL RELIGION OF THE STATE.
little become great, the obscure are clothed with honor.
Those made to feel their insignificance everywhere else
are important here. Those whose out-of-door life seems
a blank have here a life on which others hang with
interest. Each is here looked upon, in some measure,
with a distinguishing regard, and all that there is in him
or of him is held at its fuill value.
Cast your eye over a miscellaneous street group in
some portion of your city not considered as peculiarly
genteel. You see there many of no note in the world's
esteem, cumberers of the ground, burdens on reluctant
charity, drones in the great hive, pestilential elements iin
the lower strata of society. Yet there is one spotmean and rude it may be - where the most squalid of
that group is held in regard, perhaps in the same devoted
affection that renders our homes happy. There is a wife,
who has made her slender preparations for his evening
comfort.  There are children, who greet him by the most
endearing of names, and who would not forsake his guardianship for the most affluent abode. He is a prince in
his little empire, and its security and love make large
amends to him for the toil and buffeting of his despised
walk among men.  Is he vicious, nay, a very Ishmael in
his vices, his hand against every man and every man's
hand against him? Still there are those here who will
cover his failings temporize with his infirmities, remember
fondly his better days, and never yield up the longdeferred hope of better days to come. Is the dwelling
the abode of common vices and of mutual strife?  Still
it is not always so. There are seasons of reconciliation,
confidence, enjoyment, hope. Their journey through the
desert brings them now and then to an oasis, though it be
of scanty green and brief blossoming..
223 
224     CHRISTIANITY THIE RELIGION OF NATURE.
Look, again, at a cluster of children in some poor
neighborhood.  You will see those in whom, with the
kindest heart, you cannot feel an individual interest,
the stupid, the ill-mannered, the squalidly apparelled, the
misshapen. Yet among them all you may not mark a
single unhappy face, and the most ragged and uncouth
may have no more in look or manner to excite your pity
than the best-conditioned. And why? Each of them
has a home, and to him it has all the elements of a home.
Each of them has a close and dear place in the hearts
of one little circle. On that coarse and patched garment
the mother has toiled lovingly, and has appended to it
some hoarded remnant of obsolete finery, and to her eye
it is not uncomnely. The stupidity of this child is regarded
at home as a prematurely meek and quiet spirit; the boisterous rudeness of that child as the exuberance of innocent
mirthfulness.  The deformed boy has a little sister who
thinks him beautiful, and in all domestic arrangements and
festivities his is the sunny side, the Benljamin's portion.
I have said enough for my purpose, which is to illustrate, not the blessedness of home, but its connection with
the security and permanence of political institutions, -its
agency in extending protection, care, and comfort to whole
classes of persons, who else would be an unmanageable
burden on the institutions of society, an intolerable, turbulent, and pestilential mass of pauperism and crime.
The malign action of whatever impairs the sacredness
of home may be seen in the history of the decline and
fall of the Roman empire.  In the best days of tie Republic the standard of domestic virtue was singularly pure
and high for a heathen nation,1 and the state drew health,
1 a Repudium inter uxorem et virum, a condita urbe usque ad vicesimum
et quingentesimum annum nullum intercessit."'-Valerius Maximnus, II. 1, ~ 4.
*.''-:.-     *'
** d i ~ant*e 
THE NATURAL RELIGION OF THE STATE.
vigor, and culminating power from frugal and wellordered homes. In the time of the earlier Emperors the
home-life of Rome in its profligacy distances description,
and but for accumulated evidence would transcend belief.
The facility of divorce left the wife not a day's security
in her own dwelling,1 and abandoned her children to a
succession of step-mothers, whose very name became hatefill from its identification with all fiendish forms of malice
and cruelty. The father oftener bequeathed his estate to
the last intriguing woman who had gained ascendency
over his dotage, or to some sycophantic legacy-hunter,
1 It will not be forgotten here that Cicero, whose standard of morality was
by no means low for his time, repudiated his wife Terentia to marry a rich
heiress, his own ward, and this, as his confidential and devotedly attached
freedman Tiro asserted, in order to obtain means to pay his debts; and that
he shortly afterward repudiated this new wife because she did not sympathize with him in grief for the death of his daughter. In like manner, Paulus
Emilinus - certainly a man of rare merit- repudiated his young and virtuous wife for no assigned or known cause, simply saying, "My shoes are new,
and well made, yet I must change them; but none of you can tell where they
pinch me."  Divorces bona gratia, sine ulla querela, and sine causa are referred
to familiarly, as of every-day occurrence; and the divortiumn bona goatia is recognized as legal in the Pandect. Wives in process of time assumed, by general consent, and without legal hinderance, the same freedom from permanlent
matrimonial bonds which had been conceded to husbands. In attestation of
this, it may be sufficient to cite the following well-known passage from Seneca: "Numquid jam ulla repudio erubescit, postquam illustres quoedam ac
nobiles feminse, non consulum numero, sed maritorum, annos suos computant?
et exeunt matrimonii causa, nubunt repudii? Tam din illud timebatur, quam
din rarum erat; quia vero nulla sine divortio acta sunt, quod ssepe audiebant,
facere didicerunt." - De Beneficiis, III. 16.
This subject is ably treated by Troplong, De l'In.fluence du Christianisme
sur le Droit Civil des Remains. Troplong's treatise, otherwise admirable,
evinces an occasional carelessness in the use of citations from classical authorities.  Thus he writes (p. 206), "Mecbne dtait celebre par ses mille
mariages et ses divorces quotidienis," and quotes, concerning Msecenas, two
passages from  Seneca, " Qti uxoreni- millies duxit," and " Quotidiana repudia," but neglects to add to the first of these citations, "quum unarn
habuerit."  Msecenas, though a gross sensualist, had but one wife, and Seneca refers to the daily quarrels and reconciliations between him and his wife.
10*                                         0
225 
226      CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
than to his rightful heirs, who inherited nothing but his
depravity. The foulest of now nameless vices ran riot in
the dwellings of the rich, while the poor were fed mainly
by largesses bestowed for their complicity in public crime,
and were trained to ferocity by gladiatorial shows and by
the conflicts of men with savage beasts. All manly attributes died out of the heart of the nation, which had as
little capacity of being fitly governed as its worst tyrants
had of discreet and virtuous rule. The bonds of society
became, like those of the family, a rope of sand. The
hordes of Northern barbarians, whose strength had been
compacted by those very domestic virtues-rude, yet
genuine- which the corrupt civilization of the Empire
had destroyed, found a people already hopelessly disintegrated, and thus their easy prey.
Similar lessons come to us from the modern history of
France. From the age of Louis XIV. to the fall of the
monarchy, gross licentiousness, brutalizing the court of
every sovereign but the last, had descended through all
grades of society, had obliterated the sanctity and dissolved
the bonds of domestic life, and produced a condition which
might remind us of St. Paul's words in describing the
Gentiles of his day,   " without natural affection."  The
atheistical philosophy of the eighteenth century struck the
axe at the root of whatever lingering belief or principle
remonstrated against abounding corruption. Thus were
trained, energized, maddened, the high-priests of the guillotine, - the men at whose bidding murder became law,
innocence crime, religion felony, the rivers torrents of
blood.
In more recent times the atheistical element, still intolerant of the divine order of the household, has largely
crystallized into socialism, has had the phalanstery for its 
THlE NATURAL RELIGION OF THE STATE.
seminary, and the phalanx for its army of propagandism;
and in the later French revolutions every one knows how
prominent and decisive a part has been borne by socialism,
which has repeatedly heaved society from its base, and
threatened to whelm the nation in formless anarchy. In
England and in our own country,- thanks to the AngloSaxon element of common sense, and, still more, thanks
to the large infusion of Christian faith and principle, -
the great experiments of socialism have been made chiefly
on paper, and have cost only the printing; while the
overt attempts to realize them have been too brief and
of too limited extent to make their failure, or even their
ephemeral existence, a matter of general notoriety.
Christianity attests its claim to be regarded as the religion of nature by cherishing, educating, and elevating
the home-instinct. Alone of all religious systems, it
fences the conjugal relation with inviolable sanctity. Its
Founder recognized and honored the ties of kindred and
of a common home. His presence blessed the marriage
festival; his tears fell in sympathy with the bereaved
household; and in his miracles he reunited broken families, and gave back the dead to the embrace of parents
and of sisters. Wherever his religion is in the ascendant,
in each little republic dwelling under the same roof are
shaped in strength and beauty pillars of the state, on
which the fabric of the public weal may rest securely, and
may be built up into an ever closer conformity to the
divine order of the heavenly commonwealth.
But the state needs more than stabilitv. Stable as
against misrule and anarchy, it should be so organized,
governed, and energized, as to promote the progressive
civilization of its members. To this progressive civiliza
22T 
228      CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
tion, its hinderances from the sources usually regarded
as its fountains, and its dependence for ultimate realization on certain principles of natural religion revealed
and embodied in Christianity, I ask your attention in the
remainder of this Lecture.
To civilize a man literally denotes to make him a citizen; that is, not merely to make him a voter who can be
bribed, cajoled, or threatened to give a suffiage which has
from his hand no more significance than it would have
from the mouth of a dog, but to endow him with such
traits of character and to environ him with such surroundings as shall enable him to enjoy all the privileges and to
discharge all the duties of a citizen.  The civilization of a
people implies the multiplication of such citizens, - the
extension of such traits of character and such privileges
to the greatest possible number.   Now in this sense there
is no civilized nation upon the earth. In our own State,
which approaches as nearly to that standard as any portion of the world, there is probably cast every year as
large a number of unintelligent and irresponsible votes,
as of votes proceedling from men who know the importance and feel the solemnity of the act; and what multitudes have we, who stand in no relation of mutual benefit
to surrounding society, who neither receive nor impart
other than harmful influences, and who, though not ostracized by the law, are as veritable pariahs as if they were
recognized as an inferior and unprivileged caste!
Among the reputed criteria and means of civilization
I would first name the increase of national wealth. This,
if not connected with a diffusion equally rapid, is detrimental to the progress of civilization. It is, however, the
natural tendency of wealth to increase without diffusion.
Accessions of Wealth necessarily come first into the hands 
THE NATURAL RELIGION OF THE STATE.
of capitalists, and chiefly into those of large capitalists;
and if there be no active moral principle to produce a different result, capital by its increase and concentration gets
a more absolute control over the labor-market, and can
dictate its own terms to the laborer. Moreover, experience has shown (and there are intrinsic reasons for it
which it would require more time than I have now at my
command to state in full) that with the growth of national wealth the rate of profits declines; and this decline
is fatal to smaller capitalists, distances them in the competition for gain, impoverishes them, and throws them back
into the ranks of labor. Great Britain has become the
richest country in the world, but has declined in whatever
the general diffusion of wealth can contribute to civilization, in proportion as it has grown rich. The landed property of England and Scotland is owned by hardly more
than one third of the number of proprietors that possessed
the soil at the beginning of the present century. Small estates are fast becoming extinct, and tenancies are merged
in sheep-walks that sustain and employ not a tithe of their
former inhabitants, and in immense farms, oi. which the
children of the former owners or occupants have sunk in
part into serfdom, while still larger numbers of them have
been driven to the manufacturing towns, where their la bor is often compensated just above the starvation-point.
Cottage fires have been extinguished by thousands, and
the ejected peasantry are thrown into the labor-market, to
reduce still lower, if possible, the pittance of the toiling
masses, or to swell the constantly growing multitudes
dependent on public alms, who have constituted in some
years no less than one sixth part of the entire population.
Now wealth must and will increase, and its growth is in
itself an object of desire; for it is thie potential means of
229 
230     CHPISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
added comfort and privilege to all classes and every mem ber of society. Yet in order to make it the actual means
of the general good, there must be a law of distribution,
- a law which can never be arbitrarily enacted, but
must be imposed, if imposed at all, by moral, spiritual
forces.
Another alleged criterion and agent of civilization is
industrial development by means of machinery and the
division of labor. As'I showed you in a former Lecture,
this must ultimately redound  to the benefit -  to  the
improvement and elevation - of the laborer; but not
in and of itself. Its immediate tendency is in the opposite direction.  With the same amount of early culture
and the same hours of labor, a man is less of a man in
intelligence, range of ideas, and scope of activity, when
he makes a twentieth part of a pin, than if he made the
whole pin, -when he merely watches a set of spindles or
mends a web, than if he took the wool or cotton home
and brought the finished cloth to market. Improvements
in machinery tend of themselves to make the operative
less and less a discretionaly agent, more and more a mere
mechanical force; and from authentic testimony before
the English Parliament we might hesitate whether to
prefer the civilization of the Malays and Hottentots, or
that of which some dark vestiges yet remain in the factories and collieries of Great Britain. Now these improvements are inevitable, and are destined to be of immeasurable value to all classes and conditions of people; yet
not without a moral, spiritual direction, which shall secure
the universal di-usion, not only of the comforts of life
which they multiply and cheapen, but equally of the time
which they save, of the leisure for nobler purposes than
handeraft which God proffers to the whole race through 
THE NATURAL RELIGION OF THE STATE.
thle mechanical powers and scientific resources placed by
his providence at their command.
National strength, in the common and belligerent acceptation of the term, is also a false criterion of civilization.
Of nations considered as physical forces, that is the strongest in which the individual will has the least scope,    in
which authority is centralized, and the people can be
moved in masses. Armies represent a nation's brute
strength, and, except in a cause that vitally concerns the
whole people, armies can be best sustained and recruited
where the people have the least self-respect, the scantiest
means of livelihood, and the lowest standard of home-comfort. In our present rebellion, even with the strongest array of patriotic feeling on the side of the Constitution and
the Union, the South, with its much smaller population,
was long able to cope with the Northlern States on nearly
equal terms, and has yielded to our superior resources with
a slowness which we could not have anticipated, solely
because slavery, by impoverishing and degrading the immense majority of the white inhabitants, has furnished a
preponderantly large supply of the materials of which
armies are best constituted,- men whose nature it is to
yield to strong wills, and to make of themselves a mere
physical force in the hands of their leaders.  The diffusion
of political power undoubtedly impairs a nation's strength,
whether for aggression or for defence; but it tends of necessity to raise a people equally above the purpose of aggression and the need of defence. This diffused power, -
the power of general intelligence, civic and personal virtue, and enlightened public opinion,- which is the result
of moral causes alone, is at once the effect, the cause, and
the criterion of progressive civilization.
Knowledge claims to be, but is not necessarily, a civiiz
231 
232      CHIIRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
ing agent. When increased and not diffused, it only ag gravates social inequality, and puts into the hands of the
few advantages which they can employ against the many.
Thus the Egyptian priests at a very early epoch had the
monopoly of nearly all the science and knowledge of
the world, and they were thereby enabled to play at will
on the credulity of the people, and to extort wealth,
power, and hinfluence from their superstitious fears. In
all modern history, there have been no institutions of
learning so exclusive as the two great English Univer sities.  Sustained by the accumulated gifts of many gen erations, yet till within the last six or eight years closed
against all Dissenters, - virtually closed, too, against all
except the sons or proteiges of the rich and the noble (for
their eleemosynary foundations receive beneficiaries chiefly
tlhrough aristocratic nomination or influence),-  they have
cast a shadow broader than their light, have thrust back
from the heights of knowledge more than they have
helped to scale them, have widened the distance between
those of patrician and those of plebeian birth, and thus
have tended to perpetuate those glaring contrasts in
society, the reduction of which is a prime aim and criterion of civilization. Knowledge is too vast a power, and
too prolific a source of power, to be safely centralized or
made exclusive property. It becomes a social blessing
only when its avenues are freely opened, its facilities multiplied, its attainments placed within the,reach of every
determined, vigorous and persevering seeker.
This review of the reputed sources and means of civilization authorizes the assertion, that the process of civilization consists, not in the accumulation of any good or
of all goods, but in the placing of all or of any within the
reach of the great body of citizens.  We now ask, What 
THE NATURAL RELIGION OF THE STATE.
is the principle of diffuision on which the hope of the race
must rely? Whence springs the desire to diffuse, the
forethought of members of the body politic for one another, the will and effort to throw into a common stock
any and every class of advantages, material, intellectual,
and moral? It springs from the sentiment and spirit of
universal  brotherhood, -  from the philanthropy which
cannot have without imparting, which deems the unshared
gift unblessed.  Still more, this sentiment and spirit must
have a religious basis in the great truths of the fatherhood
of God and the immortality of man. These alone authenticate rights on the one hand, and establish duties on the
other.  There is no earthly claim which the straitened and
depressed can proffer.  There is no earthly force that can
unclench the grasp of monopoly, dissolve the close corporation of exclusive privilege, and throw wide  the avenues of competition for all who will enter the lists.
Equality of right and privilege is utterly impossible on
anti-religious or non-religious ground. No matter how
liberal the institutions of government may be in name,
they are liberal in their working, and in the intent of their
workers, only when they are pervaded and energized by
a religious faith in God and heaven.  On no other ground
is there any reason why they should be liberal. Take
away men's common parentage and common destiny,lop off from the column of human existence its base and its
capital,- you leave men with nothing in common, with
no points of union or of sympathy. They diverge widely
fi-on very birth; they differ greatly from one another in
the outside of existence; they come together only beyond
the grave. If they are not traced from a common Father
and to a common destiny, then these earthly differences
are all in all, and they lay a fair and just foundation
2 I'D' 3 
234     CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
for the encroachments and extortions of the richer and
stronger, antd for the abject, brute-like submission of the
poorer and weaker. Unless mankind be one family in
origin and destiny, might is right, selfishness is duty;
society has no bond, imposes no mutual obligations; and
the whole community naturally and necessarily divides
itself into the two great classes of the preying and the
preyed upon.
The unbeliever, then, though he style himself a republican, is such a friend to republican institutions as Samson was to the congregated nobles of Philistia.  His hands
grasp the pillars of Freedom's temple, but it is to tear
them from their base, and to bury the structure and
its inmates in common ruin.  France tried the experiment; and never in the history of the race were human
rights so outrageously violated, fi-eedom so utterly subverted, man so trampled upon by man, as in thile name of
liberty and equality during the first French Revolution.
Those self-styled champions of popular rights, Danton,
Marat, Robespierre, and their colleagues, so far transcended the tyranny and cruelty of earlier times, that,
placed at their side, the most relentless tyrants (except
those who were idiots or madmen, as some of the Roman
Emperors seem to have been) might appear in the comparison with clean hands and with honest and generous
hearts. Thus was France tossed in the whirlpool of
democratic tyranny, till she deemed  herself only  too
happy to escape from her hydra-headed despot to the
unbounded power and sole mastery of a single absolute
sovereign.
It was this same absence of the religious element that
vitiated the ancient republics, commonly so called, which
were in fact, and without exception, oppressive oligarchies, 
THE NATURAL RELIGION OF THE STATE.
in which the caste-system was established as rigorously as
it is now in Hiindostan, with the exception that there was
no indelible taint of blood to prevent members of a lower
caste from rising by extraordinary genius or some rare
conjuncture of favoring circumstances.
We have thus seen that the diffisive principle and the
entire system of equal rights and mutual obligations rest
on the Divine paternity and the immortality of man, which
appertain most emphatically to the natural religion of the
state. But these are truths of natural religion which are
clearly discerned only in the light of revelation, or, rather,
only in the person of Him who could say, " He that hath
seen me, hath seen the Father," and in whose resurrection the eternal life is made manifest. In the precise
proportion in which his words are not only repeated in the
creeds, but incorporated into the life of nations, must
there be the progressive realization of those truths pronounced in our Declaration of Independence to be selfevident, yet never self-evident except at a high stage of
Christian culture; -"that all men  are created equal;
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness;  that to secure these  rights
governments are established, deriving their just powers
from the consent of the governed."
If Christianity be thus identical with the natmual religion of the state, and if its advancement must inevitably
result in the progressive civilization of the race, we have
an affirmative answer to the question of the permanence
of modern civilization.  Egypt, Persia, Greece, and Rome
successively attained a very high degree of civilization
and refinement, and were subsequently overswept by barbarism, leaving only records and ruins of their former
235 
236     CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
renown; and the story of their decline was told by a
crafty old Roman, who, walking in his garden with the
treason-plotting magistrate of a rival city, struck off with
his staff the heads of the tallest flowers in a bed of poppies,- thus hinting that, if a few chief heads of the people
could be laid low, the state would topple and fall.  What
is miscalled ancient civilization shone only on the tallest
heads, and in any civil comimotionl or barbarian inroad
they fell at once; and thie mass left behind, not having
partaken in  the civilization, could  not perpetuate it.
Modern civilization must escape this fate by its universal
diffusion, - by its having its shrine in the workshop no less
than in the drawing-roomn, in the hamlet no less than in
the metropolis.  It must have for its defenders, not a chosen host, fit champions though few, but a national guard,
a militia in which there are no exempts, in which every
name is enrolled, and every laborer does battle for his
soil.  Such a civilization can die out only with the race.
It must live, because Christianity, its mother, will ever
live. It must grow, because her star will culminate. It
must become universal; for the word of the Eternal has
gone fortll that her sceptre shall rule over all. 
LECTURE XII.
TIHE SABBATH A LAW OF NATURAL RELIGION. - CONCLUSION,
IN previous Lectures I have attempted to show the
identity of the doctrines and ethics of Christianity with
the religion of nature. Christianity has, also, its institutions, -positive institutions, as they are sometimes called,
and so called from the general belief that there is no intrinsic reason for them, that they are wholly of arbitrary
appointment, and that they might have had a different
form and yet have equally answered their purpose. There
is so little of formal institution or ritual belonging exclusively to Christianity, and what there is, though sacred
and important, holds so secondary a place, that we might
admit it to be arbitrary, and yet the admission would
hardly modify our general view of the religion.   But
its few forms are not rigid and arbitrary. Its ceremonial
hardly merits the name, so simple is it, so flexible, and
so capable of variation in its details; while it is so significafit, and so natural in its significance, that it easily
ranges itself with doctrine and duty under the religion of
nature, -  and the more so, as it does not even draw its
meaning from the historical facts of the Gospel, but rather
from the fiundamental and eternal laws which the Gospel
reveals. Baptism, the initiatory rite, avails itself of the
universally accepted symbol of purity; and even had it
not been appointed by the authority of Christ, it might
easily have come into use for the infant, whose native
0 
238     CHRISTIAXITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
purity it typifies, while it prefigures the cleanness of heart
and life which is our first hope and prayer for him in a
world of temptation, and equally for the penitent, whose
washing friom sin is the one patent fact of his present
state, and whose continued purity is at once his own fervent desire and the foremost wish of all who seek his true
good.  And were we left, without the request of Him
whose redemption sacrifice this day1 commemorates, to
choose a rite which should express at once our thankfuilness for the Divine benignity and our fellowship with our
brethren still on the earth, with those who have passed on
before us, and with the Lord of the living and the dead
in whom the whole family in heaven and on earth is made
one, what could we elect so natural, so appropriate, so
fraught with associations at once of gratitude and communion, as the likeness of the social meal, crowned with
the bounties of Providence, and in all times and lands
refined and spiritualized by domestic love, friendly converse, and hospitable kindness? It was in the very
simplicity of nature that He whose loving regards on the
eve of his crucifixion passed down the vista of ages and
comprehended unborn generations, sought for his commemorative rite no elaborate ceremony, but took bread
and wine, the staff and the refreshment of daily life, and
converted them into symbols of the deathless union of
his spiritual family, - typifying still further the common
duties, unostentatious sacrifices, daily wayside charities,
whlich are the perpetual token, seal, and pledge of the
communion of his disciples with one another and with
their Lord and Master.
As regards the organization of the Church, it would ill
become me to enter here on disputed ground; yet I
1 This Lecttre was delivered on the evening of Good Friday. 
THE SABBATH A LAW OF NATURAL RELIGION.  239
would beg leave to express my entire accordance with
Archbishop VWhately in the belief that no unvarying type
of church-organization is expressly enjoined in the New
Testament, or virtually prescribed by Christ or his Apostles, and that the absence of such a type shows it to have
been the design of the Founder of our religion that each
portion of the Church should adopt such interior arrangements as may best suit its needs, insure its stability, promote its edification, and extend its usefulness.
Omitting, for lack of time, the further treatment of the
specifically Christian ritual, I pass to the consideration of
the Sabbath,-  an institution older than Christianity, yet
so emphatically sanctioned by Jesus Christ, and so generally observed in his Church, as to be closely identified
with his religion. The position which the Sabbath holds
in the Decalogue claims our special attention.   Of the
ten commandments said to have been given on Mount
Sinai, nine are confessedly not Hebrew, nor temporary,
nor ritual, but of essential duty and universal obligation;
presenting, in fine, an epitome of practical religion and
ethics, from which you can take nothing without leaving
a lacuna to be deprecated, to which you can add nothing
that would not hold a secondary place as compared with
either of the nine. With these, fourth in the series, preceded by the law which interdicts blasphemy, the most
audacious of sins against the Majesty of heaven, and followed by the law which enjoins filial piety, the first and
most sacred in the catalogue of relative duties and the
foLuntainhead of all social virtues, stands  the precept,
"PRemember the Sabbath day to keep it holy."  If this be
a mere provision of the Jewish ritual, why is it here, and
not rather in Leviticus, along with the feast-days? Its 
240     CHRISTIAXITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
place seems to indicate that it was regarded, at least by
the author of the Pentateuch, as, like the rest, a law of
natural right, intrinsic fitness, and universal obligation.
Our Saviour and his Apostles evidently take this ground.
They never represent the Hebrew ritual as binding on
any but the posterity of Jacob, or as permanently binding
on them; but they repeatedly cite the Decalogue as of
universal and perpetual obligation, and Jesus quotes it in
answer to the question, "What shall I do that I may
inherit eternal life "? He also says, without limitation or
qualification, "The  Sabbath was made for man,"-  not
for the Hebrews, but for all men; and in claiming as appropriate for its observance works of love and charity, he
implies that there are other works, in themselves innocent
and right, from which it is a duty to abstain on the Sabbath. Yet more, he cites God's beneficent activity during
thie age-long Sabbath of creation, whose seconds are centuries, as the precedent for his own beneficent activity on
the weekly Sabbath, - " My  Father worketh hitherto,"
that is, during the Sabbath that has supervened upon the
successive epochs of creative energy, "and I work," that
is, I in like manner do his work on the Sabbath that succeeds every six days of secular toil.
I cannot but regard the law of the Sabbath as a law of
natural religion, revealed because it is natural, written on
the tablet of stone because it had been first written on
human, animal, and inanimate nature.  It is as old as the
creation, and the author of the Pentateuch did not antedate it when he made it coeval with the birth of man.
We find repeated traces of it in Genesis,- in the division
of time into weeks, and in the sacredness attached to the
number  seven in the lives of the ancient patriarchs.
When mention is first made of the Sabbath in the history 
THE SABBATH A LAW OF NATURAL RELIGION.  241
of tile Israelites, prior to the giving of the law from
M]ount Sinai, it is named, not as a new institution, with
the detailed exposition of reasons and motives which in
the sacred books always accompanies important enactments made for the first time, but in precisely the way
in which we shiould expect to read tihe re-enactment of an
observance old, traditional, well known, yet partially disused during the season of Egyptian bondage;  " Tomorrow is tireI  [a] rest of tte1 [a] holy Sabbath unto
thie Lord.  Bake that which ye will bake, and seethe thlat
wlich ye will seethe; and that which remaineth over, lay
up for you to be kept until the morning."  The septenary
division of time firom the earliest ages was uniformly observed all over the Eastern world.   We find vestiges of
it among the Egyptians, Assyrians, Persians, atid;rabs,
nations severed from the common ancestral tree long
before the birth of the LHebrew commonwealth.  The
Greeks evidently broughlt with them from thie Ea.st the
septenary institutions, associations, and habits conmen to
the Oriental nations; for both Hlesiod and Homer speak
of "the seventh, the sacred day."
The primeval origin of the Sabbathi becomes the more
probable when we consider thlat thie week is not an astronomical division, but that it is precisely adapted to confuse
and derange the month, -the most obvious astro —eo:ical
period longer tlanl the day.  The epochls of the new and
the full moon were prominently marked by all ancient nations.  The average length of the month is twenty-nine
and a half days, so that each successive festival of the new
or the futl moon must have recumred later in the week
1 The article [the] is wanting in the Hebrew.  Its presence would strengthen
our argument; yet it is so often omitted by the Hebrew writers in positions in
which mlodern nesege would require the definite article, that no adverse inference can be bfounded on its absen.ce.
p
11 
242     CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
than the preceding,- a fact which shows that the week is
more likely to have been a prnimeval institution, than to
have resulted from an awkward attempt to divide the,
month by a divisor which leaves with regard to the month
an annoying and embarrassing remainder.
The law of the Sabbath is a law of the human body.
Man's physical strength will not bear a perpetual strain.
It has always been found necessary to give periods of relaxation to the toil-driven.  Where the weekly Sabbath
has not been so appropriated, its place has been supplied,
though imperfectly, by festivals, public games, satulmnalia,
whenl the axe, the hammer, and the distaff have been laid
aside, and the slave has been as free as his master.  Regarding man simply as a mechanical agent, and consideriing the question how in a series of years he may be
enabled to accomplish the most labor, ample experience
has shown that six working-days in the week are worth
more than seven.  Where there are no regular intervals
of repose, the laborer is soon broken down, and becomes
a spiritless slave, incapable of half the effort and endurance whlich sit lightly on him who has one day of rest in
seven.  The farmer in hay-time and harvest-time, the
merchlant in a busy season, the hard-worlking mechanic,
feels on Saturday night that he has used all his strength
and energy, and can toil no longer.  Did lie rise the next
morning to pursue his task, it would be with a heavy
heart and a listless hand.  But the day of rest passes
over him, and he is renovated, and goes back to his labor
with fiesh vigor and an elastic spirit. The commandment, " Remember the Sabbath day," is written on every
muscle and sinew in man's frame, and he who remembers
not the Sabbath for its benign uses must remember it in
lassitude and unprofitablenless. 
THE SABBATH A LAW OF NATURAL RELIGION.  243
Moreover, experience has shown, not only that the
weekly day of rest is needed, but that it suffices for industrial purposes.  The maximum of health, strengtl, and
working capacity is attained in those nations and communities where the weekly Sabbath is best observed, and the
residue of the time devoted to the pursuits of active life,
and firom this maximum there is a falling off, equally, on
the one hand, in communities and kinds of labor on which
Sunday shines no Sabbath day," and, on the other, in
those countries in which numerous holy days have been
converted into holidays,- a system which uniformly engenders idleness and unthrift.
The law of the Sabbath is written also on the constitution of the beasts that aid man in his labor; and the
extension of its immunities to cattle in the Decalogue, in
an age when neither humanity nor far-sighted selfislness
could have had much place in their treatment, is one of
the many internal evidences that this sublimest conimpend
of practical ethics emanated from the careful Provildence
of Him who despises nothing that he has made.  Before
stage-coaches on our long routes of travel became historical, there was, in the economy of brute life, a contrast,
the statistics of which, if not substantiated by the records
of many years, would be almost incredible, between the
lines on which coaches ran but six days in the week, and
those on which the weekly Sabbath was not recognized.
Chateaubriand says, that during the reign of atheism in
France, when the National Assembly substituted for the
week and the Sabbath the decimnal division of time, with a
holiday every tenth day, the peasantry in the rural districts found that their cattle would not forsake the law of
God for th-e ordinance of'nan.  The strength and aninal spirits of thie beasts declined under tle new re'qime. 
244.    CHRISTIAiNITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
"Our cattle," said the rustics, "know the Sabbathl, and
will have it; 1 and the one day's rest in seven was resumed in many quarters on economical grounds, before
the nation shook off the nighltmare of infidelity.
The law of the Sabbath is written even on inanimate
nature.  The artificial aids and multipliers of human industry, the fixtures of steam and water-power, locomotive
engines, the strongest and best-adjusted machinery, need
periodical rest and refitting, no less than tile limbs and
sinews of the operative; and though we cannot assign to
tie repairing of water-courses and the cleansing of boilers
an important office among the means of religious edification in a manufacturing city or village, yet the notorious
fact that Sunday is thus employed, often from midnight to
nidnight, shows that cupidity driven to desperation can
never obliterate the Sabbath.
In a former Lecture I illustrated the tendency that
there is in the civilized world to over-production, leading
to ~glut in thie markets, and necessitating the occasional
suspension of many departments of industry, withi loss of
income to the capitalists and of subsistence to the laborers.
It is obvious that six days' work in each community wvill
more than suffice for the needs of the seven days; and
the effect of tie weekly Sabbath, supposing that seven
days' labor would really produce more than six, (which I
more than doubt,) is therefore not to deprive the community of the needfiul fruits of labor, but to check the injurious excess of production.
I have thus far spoken only of the physical necessity
for the Sabbath.  It is, if possible, even more absolutely
essential to the human intellect.  When the mind pursues
1 "Nos bceufs connaissent le dimanche, et ne veulent pas travailler ce
jour-la." - Genie du Chriistianismne, Partie 4ieme, Livre ler, Chlap. IV. 
THE SABBATH A LAW OF NATURAL RELIGION.  245
thie same track from day to day without repose, either the
mind itself loses its elasticity and its full working power,
thus winning for itself unsought and unwelcome relief, or
else the overtasking of the brain induces bodily disease
and infirmity. But, with the weekly rest, or the change
of occupation which is the most desinable mode of rest to
the vigorous intellect, tie most arduous pursuits of learnimg, science, or professional duty may be sustained through
a long life with unflagging and unwearied energy. Should
any one doubt the necessity of which I speak, I could
onlly ask him to assume for a whlile the else easy and
happy charge of the clerical profession, in whichl one is
tempted, nay, often compelled, to devote all his days to
the same class of duties,-  the noblest, the most delightfill, the most engrossing that can be devolved on man,
and then see how surely his mental vigor and animal
spirits will droop after a few months of continuous toil, so
that he must either replace his lost Sabbaths by a prolonged season of recreation, or bear the penalty in chronic
illness and disablement.  I doubt whether any clergyman
can be found so hardy as not to have ascertained that the
law of the Sabbath is a natural, constitutional law, and in
that respect, if in no other, as old as the creation.  The
testimony of the greatest minds of mnodern times in this
behalf is clear, fiNll, and strong.  I might easily fill my
Lecture with citations from men whose names alone are
solid arguments.  But, not to multiply witnesses on a
point so obvious and self-evident, I will barely quote a
testimony uttered in my own hearing. The venerable
Nathban Dane, to whom the country is indebted for the
Ordinance of 1787 for the Government of the Northwest Territory, was deemed the most erudite lawyer of
his time. lie lived to the age of eighty-three, and for 
246 CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
many years, and till within a few weeks of his death, he
spent fourteen hours a day in his library. He seemed
incapable of light labor or of literary recreation, and
eighty-four hours of every week were given to the driest
details of law, political science, and recondite history.
Not long before his death, he told me that he attributed
his prolonged and undiminished capacity of study to his
having for a fill half-century devoted the Sabbath to an
entirely different class of studies from those which occupied him during the week, - not to easy religious reading
(for he lacked the ability of even such relaxation), but to
the Hebrew Scriptures in the original, to ecclesiastical
Iristory, and to the profounder themes of inquiry connected
with the Christian revelation.  "' From  Sundays  thus
spent," said he, "I have always returned on Monday
morning to my week's work, refreshed and strengthened."
The Sabbath is also of incalculable worth as a civilizing
agent. How little opportunity would there be for reflection, for the growth of meditative wisdom, for plans that
look beyond the passing moment, in a community, where
from the beginning to the end of the year there was an
unbroken round of grovelling toil! It is this periodical
change in the routine of life, this diversion of the thoughts
into purer channels, that gives freshness and vigor to the
general mind, imparts the impulse to itnprovemenlt, and
creates the leisure and cherishes the reflective habits which
alone can make the experience of the past availing. It is
the Sabbath that calls men's thoughts off from the working-day world to the region of the intellect and the imagination, to unearthly questionings and musings, to philosophy and poetry.  Hence alone the popular taste and
demand for literature. Hence the existence of an intellectual department of society, - of classes of men whose 
THE SABBATH A LAW OF NATURAL RELIGION.  247
business it is to instruct, edift, and enrich the public mind.
Were there no Sabbath, there would still be a literature;
for thie few master-spirits of the race would shline out with
a radiance which surrounding darkness would be unable
equally to comprehend and to quench. But these greater
lights would beam as solitary stars. There could not be
the galaxy of pure taste, refined sentiment, and elevated
thought, in which Christendom now rejoices.  The literature that sprang into being would be the property of the
few, not of the many.  The great mass of the people
would never find leisure to grow conversant with it,
except as it might assume the lyric form, and ally itself to
music.
The distinction here suggested may be clearly traced
between Hebrew and classic literature and civilization.
The Old Testament constituted in the strictest sense a
national literature, and all sorts and conditions of people
were famiiliar with it.. Hebrew civilization, too, though
its culminating point was far below that of tie Periclean
or the Augustan age, yet penetrated the whole community, permeated every vein and artery of the body politic.
The civilization of Greece and Rome, on the other hand,
as I showed you in my last Lecture, was confined chiefly
to the circles of rank and wealth, leaving the great body
of the people unbenefited.  In producing this contrast,
the student of history must, I think, ascribe more influenice than to all other causes combined to the fact that in
Judaea the whole population had one day in seven sequlestered from the dusty arena for calmer thoughts and more
elevating duties, while upon Athens and Rome there rose
no stated day of rest and devotion.
The Sabbath vindicates for itself still further a place
ill the religion of nature, on the ground of its domestic 
248     CHRISTIANITY TI-HE RELIGION OF NATURE.
inrfluences. The rust of the world would corrode the
chain of home sympathy and love, were it not burnished
in these frequent intervals of holy rest.  Think of the
lives which the great majority of men -  the rich often
more than the poor -lead during the six working-days,
-so engrossed  by labor or harassed by business  as
hardly to snatch a hasty meal with their families, fre quently not even that, forth before the day has fairly
opened, returning perhaps not till a late evening  hour,
rarely getting sight of the younger members of the household, and meeting the elder only at hurried moments or
in extreme weariness.  Were  this the routine of the
whiole year's life, how could the members of a falmily become acquainted with one another's minds and characters? The same persons might for half a century call
tle same house their home, yet there would be no comnmu'cn  of soul with soul, no growth of common tastes
and s nti:ents.  The father would be the mere steward
of his fariily, and the dwellers beneath his roof would be
little more to him than pleasant fellow-lodgers at an inn.
But the Sabbath has attached to home an interest and a
worth which can be derived from no other source, has
cherished and refined those invaluable departments of art
and taste which have the comfort and adornment of homelife >r their object, and stands second to none of the
agencies by which are shed upon us the holy and benignant in1_uences of Him in whom all the families of the
eart' are blessed.
The Sabbath is equally essential to man's political wellbeiong, and especially to the permanence of free institutions.  It is the day of equal rights.  It levels all factitious distinctions.  It owns no differences of wealth, or
caste, or race, or color; but proffers its benediction to all 
THE SABBATH A LAW OF NATURAL RELIGION.   249
alike. It recognizes man as he is in the counsels and
providence of Him who is no respecter of persons. It at
once humbles pride, and relieves depression. It promotes
a healthful sympathy and a mutual interest among all
classes of society. It commends the poor to the charity
of the more prosperous, and numberless are the sources
of succor for the burdened and the indigent which flow
from the Sabbath assembly. There no privileged order
steps before the rest, - no lordly pontiff distances and
repels the humble worshipper; but as high and low; rich
and poor, are brought into a community of relation with
their Creator and Preserver, and through him with one
another, they cease to be infatuated on the one hand, and
disheartened on thile other, by the various lots which
Providence has assigned to them. Thus the spirit of
exclusive aristocracy is repressed, while the tendency to
agrarianism and communism is equally checked.  The
haughty separatist and the factious  leveller are both
rebuked, and the foundations of republicanism are laid
in that essential equality before God which needs no
outward addition to make itself perfect.
It is a striking confirmation of these views, that the
friends of tyranny and of anarchy have manifested equal
fear of the Sabbath, and in numerous instances  have
sought to undermine its obligation and to violate its sanc_
tity, as a step of prime importance toward the subversion
of fi-eedom or of law. Thus, when the British crown was
most active in its encroachments on the liberties of the
people, the Sabbath was a chief point of attack, and edicts
were issued from thie court, and published from the desecrated pulpits of an Erastian and sycophantic church,
instituting for the day of worship noisy, riotous, and
brutalizing sports.  W\e have seen that the same hostility
11 *
0 
CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
to the Sabbath was manifested by the destructives of the
French Revolution. In our own land and day, the radicals,
levellers, and no-governmenlt men who from time to time
have lifted their voices against law, wholesome subordination, and salutary restraint, have uniformly cast the first
stone at the Sabbath, its institutions and their guardians.
The Sabbath proffers peculiar claims to be regarded in
its political uses, in connection with the eager enterprise
of a young and growing people. Our nation is, no doubt,
characterized beyond all others by earnestness and haste
in the pursuit of wealth and preferment. And if, in the
midst of this breathless competition, everything sacred is
not trampled under foot; if the character of our merchants is marked, with rare exceptions, by sterling integrity; if there be a surviving seed of true patriots, -
all this is owing, not to Christianity, (for where would
its counsels find entrance among the closely crowded
cares and conflicts of daily life?) but to the Sabbath,
which has called the merchant and the statesman to their
homes and to their own hearts, has checked their ardor of
pursuit, let in the solemn light of eternity on transient
gain and honor, uttered words of duty and accountableness, and held up the infallible mirror of Divine revelation to the conscience and the life.
Then, again, in our frequently recurring seasons of
fierce political excitement, who can say to what a height
the embittered passions of partisans might mount, and inl
what desolating floods of uproar and violence they might
discharge themselves, were it not for these merciful
breathing-spells, when He who once held the pulse-beat
of the Galilean sea calms the billows of human strife, and
calls the stormy wrath of man to praise Him?  On the
six days men remember their grounds of animosity and
250 
THE SABBATH A LAW OF NATURAL RELIGION.  251
conflict; on the seventh, those who have garrisoned opposite camps through the week meet face to face, kneel side
by side, and thoughts of toleration and kindness break in
upon their opimionativfeiss and mutual repugnancy.  Tlhe
voice comes to them, and forces itself upon their hearts,
"All ye are brethren, - why fall ye out by the way?
Why wrong ye one another?"  And though the morrow
renew the strife, they return to it with slackened interest,
and with the hope, awakened by the period of hallowed
calm, for thie speedy close of the controversy, and the
quiet reunion of the distracted body politic.
The Sabbath is the law of man's religious nature, being
absolutely essential to the social expression, the diffusion,
and the transmission of the religious sentiment.  Public
worship grows naturally and spontaneously from the great
foundation-truths of a common paternity and a common
destiny.  These, once admitted and felt, imply and crave
religious communion.  But public worship and enlarged
communion demand a Sabbath.  The assembly cannot be
convened unless the time be appointed and known beforehand, nor frequently gathered unless at stated intervals.
For so solemn an act as Divine worship, it seems fitting
that the same day be observed throughout a whole commiunity, in order that business and amusement may not
interfere with devotion, and that the worshippers may
find nothing going on around them which shall call off
their attention from their religious duties, or disturb and
wound  their sensibilities in performing them.  Hence
natural piety would prescribe for the stated days of wor ship such a degree of rest and such an air of solemnity in
the community as may comport with the dignity of the
service in which its devout members are engaged.
Yet again, were there no Sabbath, it is to be feared 
252      CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
that for the great mass of every commuility, nay, for many
who through the form of worship have been suffused by
its spirit and energized by its power, there would be no
holy time.  The Sabbath, by suspending worldly engagements, creates a void which there is always hope that
devotion may come in and fill. How else could we get
the ear of the indifferent for religious truth and duty?
How could we induce them to pause long enough in the
chase of present pleasure or gain, to think of the enduring wealth and honor of the Christian calling?   You
go to a man in the rush of business or the spring-tide of
gayety, and he puts you off till "a more convenient
season." On the Sabbath the convenient season has
come. The world is still; the congregation is gathered, and he joins the- multitude that keep holy time.
He may go to scoff, hlie may go to criticise, he may go
merely because others go; - still he is there, and the
arrow of conviction may be driven home, and send him
forth to repent and pray. These blessed days are
"Wakeners of prayer in man; -his resting-bowers,
As on he journeys in the narrow way,
Where, Eden-like, Jehovah's walkiig-hours
Are waited for as in the cool of day; -
Days fixed by God for intercourse with dust,
To raise our thoughts and purify our powers; Periods appointed to renew our trust;- -
A gleam of glory after six days' showers."
I have thus, I trust, vindicated the claim of the Sabbath to its place in the religion of nature.  Permit me,
in closing, to commend this primeval institution to your
sacred reverence and your loyal observance. It has nurtured -and nowhere more than in our own New Enlglandd-great and holy men, elect spirits in every walk in 
THE SABBATH A LAW OF NATURAL RELIGION.  253
life,- those who have become chief by being servants of
all, thlose who have irradiated the lowest stations by virtues that would have adorned the highest.  The  vast
themes of religious contemplation to which the Sabbath
invites us enlarge the matrices of thought, expand the
framework of the soul, stretch the extensor muscles of
the intellect, nerve and sharpen the apprehensive powers,
feed and exalt the imagination, and re-create the soul in
an ever-closer likeness to the all-creative Spirit. He who,
like Jacob with the angel, wrestles in these hallowed
hours with truths vast as the universe and boundless as
eternity, gets the reward of the athlete in comprehensive
grasp and cogent force of intellect, and can thus become
adequate in every field to cope ivith the noblest minds, to
wrest her secrets from Nature, its hoarded wealth of
beauty from poetry, its power to enlighten, guide, and
gladden from every form of literature and art.
- Above all, let the Sabbath be prized and honored for
the sake of the spiritual nature.  The religious life may,
indeed, derive light and warmth from tile few moments of
daily devotion, -from holy thoughts that rise in the
midst of toil and care. But these need their prolonged
kindling seasons, and I have yet to learn that daily devotion or the prayer without ceasing can be well sustained
without the agency of the consecrated Sabbath. On
other days there are numerous influences unfavorable to
the spirit of piety, and the altar-flame must often be like
a fire built on ice, the fuel brought from afar; and whence
but from the Sabbath-pile? But if the soul gives itself
up on that one day to religious thoughts, humane sympathlies, peaceful contemplations, spiritual desires and affections, it takes with itself a treasury for the draft and waste
of the working-day world, -bread of heaven that may 
254     CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
nourish it for its six days' journey. "Make all days alike,"
is a maxim not unfrequently urged by those who hold the
Sabbath in low esteem. I would echo it. Make all days
alike,- the nearer alike the better. But level upward,
not downward.  Keep the delectable mountains, which
God made when he made the world, which tower above
the waters of the Deluge, and fill in the intervening
valleys as high as you can. Let Sabbath thoughts and
feelings flow  down continually into the week-days, and
leave their rich deposit there, to render the whole life
purer, nobler, more faithful, more heavenly. Let the
valleys rise hilgher and higher as the weeks roll on, till
you have made all days alike, the ground all table-land,till the life is a perpetual Sabbath, a prototype of the
New Jerusalem Sabbath, whose sun goes not down, whose
worship never dies upon the ear, of which it is written,
"The glory of God doth lighten it, and the Lamb ismthe
light thereof."
I have thus completed my assigned course of Lectures;
but I feel tl-hat'I have barely marked for you here and
there a station of thought, and made with you fragmentary surveys which it remains for you to connect and
extend by your own reflection and research. I commenced by showing you the necessary identity of natural
and revealed religion, which differ, not in their substance,
but in their sources. I set forth the insufficiency and
inadequacy of our own  powers  for thie attainment of
religious truth. I exhibited revelation, miracles, and
authoritative scriptures as postulates of natural religion,
and therefore in themselves antecedently probable.  I
presented the evidence of the Divine paternity in nature
and in human experience, and considered the more patent 
CONCLUSION.
objections to it derived from suffering, from moral evil,
and from the condition of the unprivileged portion of our
race. I illustrated the Divine providence in human art,
and in the distribution of capacities and endowments
among men.   I demonstrated the Divine holiness from
the human conscience, and from the inevitable law of
moral retribution-. I exhibited the accordance of the
official relations of Jesus Christ to mankind with natural
religion. I adduced the extra-Scriptural arguments for
the immortality brought to light in the Gospel. I illustrated the accordance of Christian morality with natural,
universal, and eternal law, and the foundation in nature
for the fundamental precepts of love to God and to man,
and of personal and social duty. I considered the politico-religious basis of government and social order. Finally, in the present Lecture, I have shown that Christian
institutions - the Sabbath especially -are not arbitrary,
but legitimated on grounds of natural fitness.
I have endeavored, without transcending the theme assigned to me, -natural religion,-  to present what seems
to me the most important portion of the evidence for Christianity. But because I have laid emphatic stress on its
coincidence with nature, I would not have you infer thak
I hold the external evidences on which also it relies in
light esteem. On the other hand, they seem to me
impregnable, and they have gained new strength with
the researches of the present age in geography, in archaeology, and especially in the disinterred monuments  and
deciphered records of Egypt and of Nineveh. But a
first-hand acquaintance with these evidences requires
time, which indeed cannot be more worthily spent, but
which all have not at their command, and an extended
familiarity with books to which few except those who
devote themselves to theological study have easy access.
255 
256      CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF NATURE.
On the other hand, the proof of the Divine origin of
Christianity derived from its accordance with man's nature and needs, and with the essential laws of the outward
and the spiritual universe, can be appreciated by every
serious mind, and to me it seems complete, demonstrative,
unanswerable. In these two classes of evidences, God
has given us in behalf of his revelation, as it were, two
independent and amply competent witnesses, either worthy
of entire credence, and both together creating an assurance beyond the reach of cavil or the shadow of doubt.
But the argument firom nature has one prerogative.  External evidence and testimony prove that Christianity is a
Divine revelation, but not that it is final and sufficient for
all time. Its coincidence with nature demonstrates its
eternity and its universal adaptation, and proves Chlrist
not only the accredited Author, but equally the Finisher
of the faith which alone can renovate, sanctify, and save
our race.
If Christianity has its foundation in man's nature and
needs, it can never be outgrown, nor can its records
become obsolete.  It is the sole Sun of righteousness, and
must forever be the central orb of the spiritual universe.
But it may or may not be our luminary and guide. As
the earth in its annual circuit throws our northern zone
where only the oblique rays of the winter solstice reach
it, and vital warmth almost deserts it, so may we make
for our souls a winter solstice by our worldliness, our contented sensualism, our voluntary guilt.  And we may,
too, create for ourselves a perpetual summer solstice by
our earnest aspirations, by our docility of spirit, by hearts
ever open to the influence of the Divine truth and love.
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