-^■'-■'■,^ 
 
 GIFT or 
 
 Professor G.R.Noyes 
 

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 *■•••'..•.,;:••...• 
 

THE 
 
 FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 a Btxits of ©iscourses 
 
 ON 
 
 THE LEADING TOPICS OF RELIGION. 
 
 By JOHN W. CHADWICK, 
 
 AUTHOR OF "the BIBLE OF JO-DAY." 
 
 BOSTON: 
 
 ROBERTS BROTHERS. 
 
 1879. 
 
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 >, Copyright,, 1^7^^,", \ 
 
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 University prhss : 
 John Wilson and son, Cambridge. 
 
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 My darling boy, kissed but a moment since^ 
 
 And laid away all rosy in the dark 
 
 Is talking to himself. What does he say ? 
 
 Not much, in truth, that I can understand; 
 
 But now and then, among the pretty sounds 
 
 That he is making, falls upon my ear 
 
 My name. And then the sand-man softly comes 
 
 Upon him and he sleeps. 
 
 And what am I ^ 
 Here in my book, but as a little child 
 Trying to cheer the big and silent dark 
 With foolish words? But listen, O, my God, 
 My Father, and among them thou shalt hear 
 Thy name. And soon I too shall sleep. 
 When I awake I shall be still with thee. 
 
 884194 
 
Digitized by tine Internet Arciiive 
 
 in 2007 with fundrng from 
 
 IVIicrosoft Corporation 
 
 littp://www.arcliive.org/details/cliristinmodernliOObroorich 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 'TPHIS volume is made up of a series of 
 discourses preached in rapid succession 
 to my own people in the months of January 
 and February, 1879. It may be that some 
 apology is due to the general reader for the 
 directness of their form, and for some passages 
 that make him a party to the confidential talk 
 of a minister to his congregation. But the fact 
 that the volume is printed in accordance with 
 the expressed desire of my habitual hearers, 
 and is intended primarily for their perusal, is 
 my excuse for retaining the original form of 
 its constituent parts. If reason as well as 
 excuse is needed, let it be that the directness 
 of their method is so deeply implicated in the 
 various discourses, that to eliminate it wholly 
 
8 PREFACE. 
 
 would be to change their character so much 
 that with less trouble I could re-write the entire 
 series. I am persuaded that the form will 
 prove no serious embarrassment to the general 
 reader. Besides I have no desire to make the 
 volume appear other than it is, — a collection 
 of discourses on the leading topics of religion, 
 written with reference to current discussions, and 
 in answer to questions put to me by the more 
 earnest and thoughtful members of my con- 
 gregation. 
 
 Brooklyn, October 25, 1879. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 Introtiuctorg ©iscourgcs, 
 
 PACE 
 
 I. Agnostic Religion 13 
 
 II. The Nature of Religion 41 
 
 STfie JFaitb of iSeason. 
 
 III. Concerning God 72 
 
 IV. Concerning Immortality 113 
 
 V. Concerning Prayer 161 
 
 VI. Concerning Morals 209 
 
INTRODUCTORY DISCOURSES. 
 
 I THINK man's soul dwells nearer to the East, 
 Nearer to morning's fountains than the sun ; 
 Herself the source whence all tradition sprang, 
 Herself at once both labyrinth and clew. 
 The miracle fades out of history, 
 But faith and wonder and the primal earth 
 Are born into the world with every child. 
 
 Lowell. 
 
 That one Face does not vanish, rather grows ; 
 Or decomposes but to recompose; 
 Becomes my Universe that feels and knows. 
 
 Robert Browning. 
 
 Power, more near my life than life itself, 
 
 1 fear not thy withdrawal ; more I fear, 
 
 Seeing, to know thee not, hoodwinked with dreams 
 Of signs and wonders, while, unnoticed, thou 
 Walking thy garden still, commun'st with men, 
 Missed in the commonplace of miracle. 
 
 Lowell. 
 
AGNOSTIC RELIGION. 
 
 " f^NE can begin so many things with a new 
 person," says George Eliot, " even to be 
 a better man." Why not with a new year as 
 well as with a new person ? Somehow the aspect 
 of the season seems to lend itself to thoughts of 
 hope and cheer. The outward aspect of the 
 days is hardly any different from those immedi- 
 ately preceding. The sun rises a few minutes 
 later than it did, and lengthens out each day a 
 little at the end; a lazy way of lengthening 
 his days, at first, as if it came a little hard to 
 him. But the inward aspect somehow is not 
 the same. A week ago, the backward look was 
 natural, but now the forward look is so. Even 
 those of you who have fared the worst of late 
 are beginning to see light ahead. The fresh 
 new year shall see you on your feet again be- 
 fore it die, and marching on to victory. 
 
14 Tt^E :fait^,6jF' 'reason. 
 
 What I, propose to ao this moniiiig is to avail 
 myself of this courageous attitude in which you 
 find yourselves, and invite your attention to a 
 subject which would not perhaps have been 
 appropriate to the more sombre mood which 
 was engendered by your old-year meditations. 
 I am aware that such a course is open to the 
 objection that it is a sort of death's-head at the 
 feast ; but I remember that the purpose of that 
 same death's-head was not to chill the merri- 
 ment, but rather to encourage it with a some- 
 what grim and yet good-natured carpe diem — 
 Seize on to-day. What I wish to do is to con- 
 sider certain tendencies of modern thought; also 
 the goal to which they seem to tend ; and then 
 to ask as fearlessly and answer as frankly as 
 possible the question, Supposing that these 
 tendencies go on and ultimate, will there be 
 any thing left to mankind that can properly be 
 called religion ; and, if so, will it be any thing 
 that will be worth the sympathy and loyalty of 
 earnest and true-hearted men and women? 
 
 The tendencies to which I refer are far less 
 
AGNOSTIC RELIGION. 1 5 
 
 noticeable here in America than they are in 
 England and upon the Continent. Or perhaps 
 a truer statement would be that here they attain 
 to much less frequent and important literary ex- 
 pression. But, before going further, I am in duty 
 bound to state what tendencies I have in mind. 
 They are not such as have for their o^bjective point 
 the denial of the dogmas of our popular theology, 
 nor. even such as contravene its fundamental 
 assumption of the supernatural origin of Chris- 
 tianity. Those tendencies are ubiquitous and 
 positive enough, but their significance is slight 
 in comparison with other tendencies, hardly less 
 ubiquitous and hardly less positive. But these 
 attain to much less frequent and expansive and 
 well-ordered literary expression. They have no 
 respectable organ here in America, so far as I 
 am able to discover. "The Index," which is 
 edited by my noble friend Francis EUingwood 
 Abbot, is certainly respectable ; but it is not the 
 organ of agnosticism, of nescience, much less 
 of dogmatic denial. Mr. Abbot himself is not 
 an atheist, but a rational theist, able he thinks 
 
1 6 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 to give a reason for the faith that is in him. 
 Nevertheless, the tendencies which I have in 
 mind find more conspicuous expression in his 
 paper than in any other of equal intellectual 
 force and general refinement. 
 
 These tendencies, as I have now sufficiently 
 implied, are those whose ultimate goal is the 
 denial of any positive reality corresponding to 
 the terms, God, Immortality, Prayer. Of private 
 expression of these tendencies here in America, 
 there is certainly no lack. And, judging from 
 my personal experience, for every person affected 
 by these tendencies a dozen years ago, there are 
 a score affected by them now. Notably scien- 
 tific men, albeit professors in the mosjt orthodox 
 colleges, and regular attendants upon such 
 " means of grace " as are provided by the col- 
 lege authorities for the benefit of the rising gen- 
 eration, confess to you when they are off duty 
 that, corresponding to the words which I have 
 named above, they are aware of no substantial 
 meanings. Even the late Professor Agassiz, 
 who, in default of better, publicly attacked Dar- 
 
AGNOSTIC RELIGION. ^ 1/ 
 
 win with the ad captandum argument, " We are 
 not the children of monkeys : we are the chil- 
 dren of God," said to me privately in just so 
 many words, " Mr. Chadwick, the scientific man 
 knows nothing about God." But the tendencies 
 which I have named are not confined to scien- 
 tific men. I find them everywhere where there 
 are thoughtful men and women ; not such as are 
 hilariously happy in their discovery that there is 
 no God, no immortality, and that every spoken 
 prayer is so much wasted breath, though many 
 such there are ; but there are also those to whom 
 the loss of these copvictions and ideas out of 
 their anxious lives is an immeasurable sorrow, 
 who yet, because they cannot or think they can- 
 not honestly retain them, with moistened eye and 
 trembling lip bid them a sad farewell. There 
 is one man here in America, who, better perhaps 
 than any other, publicly represents the tenden- 
 cies I have in mind ; in whom indeed, if I am 
 not mistaken, they have reached their ultimate 
 goal of absolute nescience. I refer to Mr. Felix 
 Adler. Refined, scholarly, reverent, intensely 
 
1 8 THE FAITH OF REASON, 
 
 moral, ardently benevolent, with a genuine en- 
 thusiasm for humanity, he does not say. There 
 is no God, There is no immortality, but he does 
 say. If there be a God or immortality, we have 
 no knowledge of the one or of the other, and 
 he says that prayer is a survival of beliefs which 
 we no longer entertain, with which it ought to 
 be discarded. 
 
 In some respects, England is a much freer 
 country than the United States. The tyranny of 
 public opinion is much more repressive here than 
 there. It is quite possible that there is much less 
 of Mr. Adler's style of thought here than in Eng- 
 land. But what there is, is much more timid in 
 its expression here than there. There, there is so 
 much of it, and it has grown so much of late, that, 
 they have made a new word to express it, — agnos- 
 ticism (a is the negative, and gnosticism means 
 knowing or knowledge; and so agnosticism is 
 literally not knowings and an agnostic is one who 
 does not know). The creation of these words, 
 and the frequent use of them of late, — you must 
 all of you have come upon them many times, — 
 
AGNOSTIC RELIGION. 1 9 
 
 are signs of the increasing prevalence of the 
 things which they denote. The increasing use 
 of the word nescience, the negative opposite of 
 science in its primitive sense, knowledge, is 
 another finger pointing in the same direction. 
 Those of our periodicals which reprint the most 
 striking English articles introduce to the Ameri- 
 can public many of the agnostic articles that ap- 
 pear in England, but only a small proportion of 
 them all. To one who follows up the course of 
 English thought in the reviews and magazines 
 pretty closely, nothing is more impressive than 
 the extent to which the agnostic element pre- 
 vails in such literature, as well as in scores of 
 books, and the rapidity with which it has in- 
 creased within a dozen years. The " Fort- 
 nighily Review" is virtually the organ of 
 agnostic thought, and its editor, John Morley, 
 is a man whose culture and ability are second 
 to no man's in Great Britain. But his re- 
 view does not monopolize all the agnosticism. 
 It appears in the " Contemporary " and the 
 *' Nineteenth Century," side by side with the 
 
20 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 pretentious vaporings of cardinals and bishops. 
 It appears almost everywhere. Men of the high- 
 est social, scientific, and literary rank make no 
 concealment of their utter lack of faith in any 
 God or immortality. And what is so obvious in 
 Great Britain will shortly be so in America. If 
 you and I were cowards, we should try perhaps 
 to blink these facts, to make believe that no 
 such facts exist. But they would exist just the 
 same for all our cowardliness and lying. How- 
 ever it may be with others, whatever faith / have 
 must be in spite of all that I can hear or read . 
 against it. If I should catch myself wilfully try- 
 ing to believe one thing or another, not seeking 
 for the truth, but seeking for arguments to bol- 
 ster up some preconceived opinion, I should be 
 ashamed ever to face you in this place again. 
 Very likely, if I had avoided all the way along 
 every book of less conservative aspect than my 
 own thought, I might have remained just where 
 I was a dozen years ago, or even have gone the 
 way of various others, back to the flesh-pots of 
 the popular theology. And it may be that I 
 
AGNOSTIC RELIGION. 21 
 
 have read too exclusively the most iconoclastic 
 writers who have challenged my behefs. If it 
 has been so, you may at least congratulate your- 
 selves that the opinions which I have presented 
 to you have not been drifted to my feet by any 
 tide of mere conventionality, but have been 
 plucked out of the teeth of danger, and fought 
 for upon many a painfully contested fiqjd. 
 
 From twelve to twenty years ago, when the 
 supernatural theory of Christianity, the special 
 inspiration of the Bible, and so on, were being 
 summoned sharply to the bar of reason, there 
 were those who said that the process of negation 
 would not end with any of these things. It 
 would go on, they said, till it involved the faiths 
 of natural religion in a common ruin with super- 
 natural Christianity. But those who said these 
 things were, like Cassandra, doomed to have 
 their prophecies habitually disbelieved and dis- 
 regarded. I know that I for one did not be- 
 lieve them or regard them. The supernatural, 
 I thought, was but a parasitic growth, which 
 had sucked, was sucking, and would suck. 
 
22 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 the life out of natural religion. Destroy this 
 parasitic growth, thought I, — and I was one 
 of many who thought so, — and natural re- 
 ligion would at once renew its youth, bourgeon 
 and .blossom out as it had never done before, 
 and bear such fruit of joy and blessing as 
 had never gladdened the eyes and fed the hun- 
 gry hearts of men since time began. But the 
 Cassandras were right. Supernatural religion 
 has everywhere lost its hold on the. intelligence 
 of the civilized world, and so has natural re- 
 ligion, too, in any such concrete shape as men 
 imagined its triumphant future. If Theodore 
 Parker, for example, could come back to us, he 
 would confess that things had taken quite a dif- 
 ferent turn from that which he anticipated and 
 predicted. He would find a thousand ready to 
 accept his anti-supernaturalism where he found 
 a score when he was in the flesh. But would he 
 find them all as confident as he was of a perfect 
 God, a glorious immortality ; all of them ready 
 to sanction his old-time prayers, wherein he 
 talked with God as naturally and simply as a boy 
 
AGNOSTIC religion: 23 
 
 with his own mother? No, he would not. He 
 would find in many instances that these things 
 which were more dear to him than his own life 
 had gone the way of others which were to him 
 hateful and intolerable to the last degree. I am 
 sure that Mr. Froude does not exaggerate when 
 he says that there is silently transpiring in our 
 midst a more important change in thought than 
 any which the world has undergone since the 
 downfall of Paganism and the conversion of the 
 Roman Empire. I doubt if he would have ex- 
 aggerated if he had said that even this was less 
 important than the change which is at present 
 going on. 
 
 Now it is no part of my scheme this morning 
 to state the arguments for or against one or the 
 other of those great doctrines which have here- 
 tofore been deemed essential to' religion. I will 
 only say that, because the tendency of late has 
 been so strong either to dogmatic denial of these 
 doctrines or to agnostic inability to assent to 
 them, it does not follow that this tendency is 
 absolutely just, and that we should all at once 
 
24 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 and all together abandon ourselves to it without 
 reserve, as if its ultimate must be the final good. 
 The tendency of thought at any given time may 
 be in quite the opposite direction from that "' final 
 philosophy" which a Princeton Professor im- 
 agines he has discovered and condensed into one 
 bulky volume, but which is still, I fancy, far, far 
 ahead of us. There are those who speak as if 
 the tendency of thought at any given time being 
 discovered, there was nothing else for us to do, 
 but drop our oars and let it bear us as it will 
 upon its bosom. But sometimes there is nothing 
 else for us to do, so we be men not things, than 
 to contend against it with all our strength. And 
 there is sometimes nothing else than this for us 
 to do when the tendency of thought for the time 
 being is towards the perfect. If it does not seem 
 so to us, then we must go the other way. The 
 band of Arctic explorers who patiently and pain- 
 fully walked towards the North day after day, 
 and then discovered they had been walking on 
 an immense ice-floe all the time, which had taken 
 them hundreds of miles southward, nevertheless 
 
AGNOSTIC religion: 
 
 25 
 
 did well to do just as they did. They knew the 
 waCy their feet were going; they did not know 
 there was a mighty current sweeping them at its 
 own will. And so it often is with us. The 
 mighty sweep of things-, the ultimate tendency 
 which gathers up into itself all aberrations and 
 divergences, — just as a ship's course to her desti- 
 nation all of her tackings on and off, — of this we 
 cannot be aware. We are on an ice-floe of such 
 vast extent that, with strained eye or telescope, 
 we have never seen its utmost bound. What we 
 can know is whether our own feet are keeping on, 
 however wearily and painfully, towards that which 
 seems to us to be the true and good. If they are 
 doing this, then we may look the whole world in 
 the face without one blush of shame. It is here, 
 I think, that rationalists are often quite as narrow, 
 quite as unjust, as the most bigoted supernatu- 
 ralists. They blame this or that person for not 
 going with them, when he does not go with them 
 simply and only because they do not seem to 
 him to be going towards the truth. Instead of 
 blaming him for his refusal to accept their guid- 
 
26 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 ance, they should admire him for his steadfastness 
 to personal convictions, — a nobler thing in any 
 man than following, if this were possible, the ab- 
 solute truth without such steadfastness. 
 
 On the other hand, it is no less certain that if 
 the facts which come within our ken seem hostile 
 to those doctrines and ideas which we regard as 
 most essential to religion, seem wholly subver- 
 sive of them, then there is nothing else for us to 
 do but to accept this conclusion manfully and 
 adjust our lives to it as best we can. Whatever 
 is doubtful, one thing is certain, — that no real 
 good can come to us except along the line of 
 our own personal integrity of thought and deed. 
 It may well be that the negations of the present 
 time are but so many steps in a progress to some 
 higher affirmation than the world has ever yet 
 received. I believe this. In hours of higher 
 sanity, of deeper thought, I seem to catch some 
 glimpses of a far-off time when man shall have a 
 thought of God, of immortality, of prayer, more 
 grand and beautiful than any thought of these 
 which has so far appealed to the intelligence of 
 
AGNOSTIC RELIGION. 27 
 
 men. But, however this may be, nothing remains 
 for us but to accept that which we are convinced 
 is true, to give up every thing which does not 
 seem so any longer. It may be hard, but if it is 
 our duty, then there is no more to say. And, 
 however some of us may conscientiously abide 
 in a more positive order of ideas, let us beware 
 lest we should ev^r cast the faintest shadow of 
 reproach on those who have been inwardly com- 
 pelled to surrender every most distinctive article 
 of natural religion as it has so far been conceived. 
 If they are as narrow and bitter in their icono- 
 clasm as others are in their conservatism, then 
 we may blame their narrowness and bigotry. But 
 you and I have many a friend whose agnosticism 
 is complete, but whose fidelity to personal con- 
 viction puts to shame our own and that of our 
 most orthodox acquaintances. For such we 
 have no words of blame, and even our pity seems 
 to find no joint in their self-poise and self-respect 
 which it can penetrate. 
 
 The aim of my discourse is not to question the 
 validity of any ofthe leading doctrines of religion, 
 
28 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 or to analyze the processes by which these doc- 
 trines have lost their hold upon so many minds, 
 but simply, facing, for the time, the fact that 
 there are many minds on which their hold is 
 broken, to ask, What then? Does any thing 
 remain to such that can with any justness or 
 propriety be spoken of as religion; and, if so, 
 what is the nature and the good of it? 
 
 I find the question stated in a recent number 
 of the " London Spectator " in a bit of verse : — 
 
 " What is the good and what is the bad ? 
 
 What is the perfectly true ? 
 What is the end you live for, my lad, 
 
 And what may I ask are you ? 
 Unproven I fear is your heaven above ; 
 
 Life is but labor and sorrow ; 
 Then why should we hope, and why should we love, 
 
 And why should we care for the morrow ? " 
 
 And not only is the question put, but also 
 the following answer : — 
 
 " There may be a fight worth fighting, my friend, 
 
 Though victory there be none ; 
 And though no haven be ours at the end, 
 
 Still we may steer straight on. 
 And though nothing be good and nothing be bad 
 
 And nothing be true to the letter, 
 Yet a good many things are worse, my lad, 
 
 And one or two things are better." 
 
AGNOSTIC RELIGION. 29 
 
 The scope of this question and answer is 
 indeed somewhat wider than that of my own 
 question as I have stated it above. These in- 
 troduce the ethical problem from which so far 
 I have kept myself clear. The average assump- 
 tion of the agnostic thinker is that, when we 
 come to ethics, we come to terra firma. But re- 
 cently various writers have been arguing, very 
 laboriously, to prove that morals are dependent 
 on religion, and that with the dogmatic denial 
 of God and immortality, or the agnostic refusal 
 to make either of these affirmations, the ground 
 of all morality is cut away under its feet. Into 
 the merits of this controversy, I have been with 
 you already. Suffice it now to say that we 
 arrived at the conclusion that, whatever inspira- 
 tion or incitement for ethical action resides in the 
 convictions corresponding to the terms God and 
 Immortality, the basis of morals is in the social 
 life of man, — in the absolute necessity for men 
 who are to live together in harmonious rela- 
 tions to accept certain limits to their conduct, 
 to forego certain acts, however pleasant, because 
 
30 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 they are anti-social in their nature, and to per- 
 form certain others, however painful, because the 
 social good demands them. The importance 
 of moral actions does not lie in their determina- 
 tion of the happiness or misery of individual 
 men beyond the grave, but in their determina- 
 tion of the happiness or misery of the agent and 
 of society here in this present world. Instead 
 of saying, therefore, *' Let us eat and drink, for 
 to-morrow we die," if we have no longer any 
 faith in an immortal life beyond the grave, we 
 should say. Let us eat and drink, temperately 
 and wisely, for to-day we live, and shall live well 
 or ill in part according as we manage well or ill 
 this bodily structure which is so closely impli- 
 cated with the fortunes of our intellect and will. 
 And as morality is not dependent on any theory 
 of a future life, so is it not dependent upon any 
 theory of God. That it is not dependent upon 
 God, I do by no means say. For to my mind, 
 in the last analysis, he is *' the power not our- 
 selves that makes for righteousness." But 
 whether a man conceives him so or not, he can- 
 
AGNOSTIC RELIGION. 31 
 
 not but admit that there is such a power, and he 
 may still be moral, intensely so, whatever theory 
 he may have of it. Ay, though, with or without 
 the adjunct of a God, a man should hold with 
 Schopenhauer and Hartmann that this is the 
 worst possible world, I do not see that the 
 foundations of morality would even then be 
 shaken. On the contrary, I have often won- 
 dered if pessimism be not a better working 
 creed than optimism. If this is the best possi- 
 ble world, as Leibnitz taught, to endeavor to 
 improve it would appear to be an idle task. 
 But if this is the worst possible world, it still 
 remains for us to better it a little if we can. 
 So much then, at least, remains for the agnostic, 
 — " mere morality." Of God and immortality 
 he may not presume to speak, and prayer may 
 seem to him an idle form of words. But duty 
 still remains. He is still living in a social 
 world where his own actions do not end in 
 themselves, but affect the welfare of others in 
 ever-widening circles and to the remotest gen- 
 erations. The experience of innumerable gen- 
 
32 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 erations has wrought out for him a moral code, 
 which, although still capable of further emenda- 
 tion, is not to be lightly set aside. So much 
 remains to the agnostic thinker. All arguments 
 to the contrary are so many brilliant tours de 
 force by which it is attempted to terrify men 
 back into the behefs they have discarded, — a 
 process morally akin to threats of pincers, rack, 
 and wheel. Let the a priori reasoner prove 
 ever so conclusively that the unbelieving man 
 cannot be moral, and lo, his next-door neighbor 
 is an unbeliever, the whiteness of whose moral 
 nature, the courage of whose moral action, puts 
 his own to shame. Ah ! but, says Mr. Mallock, 
 his morality is only a survival of the beliefs his 
 ancestors once held. It is a convenient subter- 
 fuge. An unbelieving community, we are as- 
 sured, or one which had worked out the entire 
 stock of its hereditary faith, would not be moral. 
 Such a contingency is so remote that it is very 
 safe to prophesy. Meantime what we are cer- 
 tain of is, that men whose faith is of the smallest 
 in those doctrines of religion which are consid- 
 
AGNOSTIC RELIGION. 33 
 
 ered most essential are moral peers of the most 
 enthusiastic believers of their own or any other 
 time. Of this we are entirely certain; about 
 the other it remains to be seen. 
 
 But there are those who think that, properly 
 speaking, morality is no part of religion. For 
 better or for worse, the two have been asso- 
 ciated from the earliest times; but if nothing 
 more remains to the agnostic, they would say, 
 than " mere morality," albeit there is nothing 
 else in the whole world so good as this, they do 
 not think he can be justly said to have any 
 thing which is really of the nature of religion. 
 Does there, then, remain to the agnostic any 
 thing but mere morality, any thing which has 
 either the form or essence of religion over and 
 above its moral elements? There certainly does, 
 if those who accept Comte in his entirety have 
 any right to answer. These, answering for 
 themselves, insist that they have a religion 
 which is just as truly a religion as the Roman- 
 ist's or Calvinist's. It has no God ; it has no 
 immortality; though it has a kind of prayer. 
 
34 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 But it has a substitute for God, namely, Le 
 Grand Eire, the Great Being, Humanity, past, 
 present, and future. It has a substitute for 
 immortality, — the perpetuity of social influ- 
 ence ; and that it is no ignoble one let George 
 Eliot's poem testify, the grandest poem of these 
 latter days : — 
 
 •' Oh, may I join the choir invisible ! " 
 
 It has a substitute for prayer, — ascriptions of 
 reverence and adoration to the spirits of great 
 men and saintly women who have been incorpo- 
 rated into the Great Being. And yet, although 
 the religion of humanity, as this is called, is 
 capable of very grand expression, and though it 
 corresponds to a circle of ideas which is full 
 of goodly inspiration, is it not, after all, a sort 
 of make-believe religion? Its god, its immor- 
 tality, its prayer, are substitutes for the God and 
 immortality and prayer of bond fide rehgion, and 
 excellent as substitutes; and if my question 
 were, What substitutes are there for God and 
 immortality with the agnostic who has com- 
 
AGNOSTIC RELIGION. 35 
 
 pletely lost his faith in these? I might assign to 
 them a very honorable place. 
 
 Setting aside, then, the so-called religion of 
 humanity, does there remain to the agnostic 
 any thing of the essence of religion after he 
 feels himself compelled to say, " If there is any 
 God, I cannot find him ; if there is any immor- 
 tality, I cannot prove it : and that God interferes 
 to answer any human prayer I cannot find a 
 particle of warrant." I do not think that I am 
 anxious to make oiit a case in the affirmative, 
 but only to find out the truth; but I will not 
 deny that I am very happy when the truth 
 appears to be that the most vital essence of 
 religion may remain to one who finds himself 
 compelled to make the above disclaimers. For 
 the most vital essence of religion is not involved 
 in any theory of God or of the world, nor in any 
 theory of human destiny, nor in any form of 
 prayer which needs an interfering deity. The 
 most vital essence of religion is not involved in 
 any of these distinctions of personal and im- 
 personal. Least of all are those to be ac- 
 
36 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 counted atheists who cannot speak of God as 
 personal. Spinoza could not so speak of him, 
 and yet Novalis rightly said of him, " He was 
 a God-intoxicated man," and Schleiermacher, 
 *' Spinoza not believe in God ! My friends, he 
 did not beheve in any thing else." Mind you 
 that here I am not pleading for myself; for, if 
 I cared to be dogmatic about the mysteries of 
 the Godhead, I should say. To predicate per- 
 sonality of the Infinite is to express the in- 
 expressible a little better than to predicate 
 impersonality. But may we not go one step 
 further, and declare that the most vital essence 
 of religion is not involved in any theory of 
 God whatever, or even in any affirmation of a 
 being who is the moving force of all phenom- 
 ena? To affirm God is to affirm a theory of the 
 universe; to me a theory of all-sufficing ex- 
 cellence and absolutely indispensable. I can 
 conceive that all the harmonious order of the 
 universe was potential in that vaporous cloud 
 which was the primordial substance of the 
 world, but only if there was potential in it an- 
 
AGNOSTIC RELIGION. 37 
 
 tecedent to the lowest term of the ascending 
 series, a higher than the highest. Evolution of 
 a higher /r^;;^ a lower is comprehensible enough. 
 But evolution of a higher by a lower is abso- 
 lutely incomprehensible. To affirm God, then, 
 is to affirm a theory of the universe ; most in- 
 dispensable, but still a theory. And the most 
 vital essence of religion is not involved in 
 man's relation to any theory of the universe, 
 but in his relation to the universe itself. It is 
 to be impressed with its majestic order, to thrill 
 with recognition of the tender grace and awful 
 sweep of things, and to convert this passive 
 recognition into a voluntary energy of devotion 
 to the eternal order in which we find ourselves 
 embosomed. And even for the complete agnos- 
 tic there may remain this vital essence of re- 
 ligion. He may discard all theories, but he 
 cannot discard the universe. Evermore his 
 little life is set in the midst of this abounding 
 order, mystery, and law. And the question. Is 
 he a religious man ? is answered, not by discov- 
 ering what theory he has of God or of the uni- 
 
38 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 verse, but by discovering in what attitude he 
 stands before the everlasting fact. If in an 
 attitude of easy indifference or unawed gar- 
 rulity, then truly he is not a religious man. 
 But if the morning and the evening hush, the 
 glow at night of multitudinous stars, the 
 " spring's delicious trouble in the ground," 
 the summer's beautiful effulgence, the im- 
 perial splendor of autumnal days, and, more 
 than all, the mystery of human hfe and thought 
 and love, — if all these things gladden his 
 heart so much that he cannot express his joy, 
 and yet soften it so that suddenly it overflows 
 with unforbidden tears, then he may well be 
 more religious than one who has a theory of 
 God or of the universe which he can rattle off 
 to you as glibly as a boy his morning lesson. 
 And though such a man may never pray in any 
 form of words, and least of all may ever wish to 
 coax the Infinite to interfere to turn his mill or 
 sell his merchandise, or even to make him a 
 better man, which he can do at any time him- 
 self by simply availing himself of the normal 
 
AGNOSTIC RELIGION. 39 
 
 structure of the universe, — nevertheless when 
 this man looks up to heaven at night, or out 
 upon the sea, or into faces that respond to him 
 with eye-beams full of love, or into the im- 
 measurable deeps of his own moral nature, the 
 awe that falls upon his heart, the joy with which 
 it leaps, the peace that passes understanding 
 and subdues him utterly, is just as truly prayer 
 as any form of words that ever trembled with 
 the fervor of a saint's most passionate entreaty. 
 
 You may think, perhaps, that I have been a 
 long way round, and taken a great deal of 
 trouble to show that men and women who de- 
 clare that they have no religion may neverthe- 
 less have a religion of the most genuine sort. 
 You may think they will not thank me for my 
 trouble. Well, what I have written has not 
 been written with a view to getting their thanks. 
 It has been written to express my gratitude and 
 joy that religion, equally with morality, is so 
 independent of all special theories, so deeply 
 implicated in the total make of things, that 
 where there is intelligence and earnestness there 
 
40 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 must be religion. Hundreds are busy in our time 
 in trying to convince their neighbors that unless 
 they believe thus and so they are religious or 
 moral under false pretences; that unless they 
 believe thus and so they have no right to be 
 moral or religious. But mine has been a far 
 more gracious task: to show that morals have 
 their basis in no theological conceptions, but in 
 the natural relationships 9f human life ; to show 
 that even religion in its divinest essence is not 
 man's sense of his relation to any theory of the 
 universe, however pure and high, but is rather 
 his sense, tender and awful, sweet and strong 
 and sane, of his relation to the universe itself. 
 I do not know what better New- Year's greeting 
 I could give you than this assurance, that wher- 
 ever there is intelligence and earnestness, there 
 religion is as inevitable as to a living man the 
 beating of his heart. Religion may be vastly 
 more than this inevitable relation between the 
 finite and the infinite, but this must ever be the 
 brightest jewel in its crown. 
 
 January 5, 1879. 
 
11. 
 
 THE NATURE OF RELIGION. 
 
 T AST Sunday morning, it was my happy 
 privilege to invite you, each and all, to 
 come and rejoice with me that religion is so 
 deeply implicated in the make of things, the 
 structure of mankind, that where there is ear- 
 nestness and intelligence there must be religion. 
 The most of you accepted my invitation joyfully. 
 From time to time, you had been troubled by 
 your apparent obligation to deny the possession 
 of religion to certain of your friends and neigh- 
 bors, whose apparent irreligiousness, or, rather, 
 unreligion, seemed to suggest a doubt whether 
 religion after all is of any great importance. If 
 some of the best men you know have no religion, 
 religion cannot, it would seem, be quite that in- 
 dispensable thing which we have heretofore 
 imagined it to be. All those among you who 
 have had some such experience as this were very 
 
42 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 glad, I think, that, without any forcing of the 
 facts, I could so easily make it appear that the 
 essential virtue of religion is not involved in any 
 theory or definition, but in man's attitude of 
 reverence and loyalty before this Everlasting 
 Fact we call the Universe. Others among you 
 were, perhaps, somewhat differently affected. 
 Certain religious beHefs are to you so important, 
 that you have come to regard them as absolutely 
 essential to religion ; to feel that a man is re- 
 ligious under false pretences, that a man has no 
 right to be religious, who does not very con- 
 sciously and definitely believe in God and Im- 
 mortality and Prayer. And some of you were so 
 unfortunate as to identify my own position with 
 that of the persons I was speaking of, though I 
 took particular pains to avoid any such misunder- 
 standing. I sometimes think that preachers are 
 the victims of a horrible fatality, in virtue of which 
 their hearers are seized with a sudden anxiety 
 about the temperature of the church, or whether 
 somebody else will not object to what the 
 preacher is saying, just at the moment when he 
 
THE NATURE OF RELIGION. 43 
 
 is saying something which he is particularly 
 anxious they should hear. And so it happens, 
 when he has dipped his pen in the ink thirty or 
 forty times without writing a word, debating with 
 himself whether he shall call a thing invisible 
 blue or invisible green, they go away with the 
 idea that he said it was as black as a coal, or 
 holding him responsible for an opinion which he 
 has stated only with a view to expressing his 
 partial or entire dissent. 
 
 The leading thought of my discourse ^ last 
 Sunday morning was one which has long been 
 exceedingly precious and consoling to my mind, 
 but it was not one in which I have any special 
 and exclusive property. It has been carefully 
 elaborated and eloquently enforced by J. Allan- 
 son Picton, an English Trinitarian clergyman, 
 whose book, ** The Mystery of Matter," is the 
 most helpful and instructive volume I have read 
 for the last dozen years. But it was not original 
 with him. " The Nation," of some recent date, 
 speaking of the poet Shelley, says that he ** re- 
 
 1 On " Agnostic Religion," p. 13. 
 
44 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 jected all that is properly known as Christianity, 
 and that it is impossible to deny his atheism ; " 
 and yet, '* in all that constituted a religious 
 mind, in natural piety, in purity of life and 
 motive, Shelley was exceptionally conspicuous." 
 But of this seeming paradox " The Nation " 
 finds abundant confirmation in the statement of 
 the late Frederick Robertson, that " with all his 
 scepticism, Shelley's disposition was any thing 
 but irreligious." ** A person of much eminence 
 for piety in our times," says Robertson, "has 
 well observed that the greatest want of religious 
 feeling is not to be found among the greatest in- 
 fidels, but among those who never think of 
 religion except as a matter of course." " The 
 leading feature of Shelley's character," he con- 
 tinues, " may be said to have been a natural 
 piety." It is not uncommon for Christian people 
 to allow that such or such a person, however 
 sceptical, is *' a good man ; " but you will notice 
 that what Robertson claims for Shelley, who was 
 no mere agnostic, but a dogmatic atheist, if there 
 ever was one, is *' a natural piety," — a sentiment 
 
THE NATURE OF RELIGION. 45 
 
 which preachers who have not a thousandth 
 part of Robertson's spirituaHty, are apt to think 
 impossible save in connection with a very defi- 
 nite idea of God, and a very frank and posi- 
 tive behef in him. You will see, then, that for 
 the doctrine of my discourse I did not lack the 
 enthusiastic support of two at least (Picton 
 and Robertson) of the most gifted evangelical 
 Christians of these modern times. Without their 
 support, I should feel equally certain, not only 
 of the truth, but of the joy and satisfaction in- 
 herent in my view ; but if any of you sigh to 
 have the truth I hold indorsed by orthodox 
 authorities, you are entirely welcome to the facts 
 as I have stated them. 
 
 After so much of a prelude to my discourse, 
 let me proceed at once to the discussion of the 
 question, What is religion? — a question which 
 I wish to answer in a general way before taking 
 up some of the leading doctrines of religion, and 
 making them the subjects of a series of dis- 
 courses. My purpose is not now, as last Sunday 
 morning, to discover the most vital essence of 
 
46 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 religion, but to discover, first, its relative sig- 
 nificance, then the course of its development, and, 
 finally, the highest form it can assume consist- 
 ently with the idea which I have already set 
 forth of its most vital essence. 
 
 What is religion? It is the most significant 
 factor in the history of mankind. I know that 
 there are those who think, or think they think, 
 that religion is a matter of the past ; that it has 
 seen its best days, and is now seeing its worst, — 
 the days of its humiliation and decay; unless 
 they should prefer to call the days of its power 
 and triumph its worst days, — worst for mankind, 
 — and these its best, because well-nigh its last. 
 But even they would not be able to deny that 
 in the past the religious life has been the most 
 conspicuous and important interest. Religion 
 has been the most engrossing theme of the his- 
 torian ; it has built the grandest buildings, writ- 
 ten the most precious books, painted the most 
 beautiful pictures, suggested the most glorious 
 music, inspired the most illustrious men, in- 
 augurated the most important changes of society. 
 
THE NATURE OF RELIGION. 47 
 
 controlled the most far-reaching movements of 
 mankind.* Religion was the fountain-head of all 
 the ancient arts. Literature was invented to im- 
 mortalize her ethics and her prayers; astron- 
 omy, to ferret out the secrets of her starry gods ; 
 sculpture, to make visible her deities ; * architec- 
 ture, to enshrine the sculptor's work; mathe- 
 matics, to mark out her festivals, the song and 
 dance to gladden them. It is a notable fact that 
 even those who are at present most convinced 
 that religion has had its day, do not find any 
 other problems so fascinating and engrossing as 
 those furnished by her vicissitudes. Dead she 
 may be, yet they are never tired of groping in 
 her tomb, of studying out the footprints she has 
 made across the centuries. Even her childhood, 
 feeble and stammering, as all childhood is, 
 has kept hundreds of scholars busy day and 
 night during the present century, until at length, 
 in his " Principles of Sociology," the indefatiga- 
 ble and faithful Spencer has been able to gather 
 up into a graphic and consistent whole the story 
 of her birth and infant ways, — so charming 
 
48 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 some of them in their absurdity, — in a way that 
 leaves almost nothing for his successors to do but 
 to add comment and illustration to his compre- 
 hensive and convincing argument. In all of this, 
 I am aware there is no argument for the continu- 
 ance of any special form of religion. But there 
 is an argument for the belief that there must be 
 something essential to humanity in that which has 
 been so vast, so multiform, so universal, so far- 
 dating in its manifestations. Modern opponents 
 of religion are, for the most part, great believers 
 in the power and dignity of human nature. But 
 could human nature be convicted of hopeless 
 idiocy in any other way more forcibly than by the 
 assurance that all its interest in religion, from 
 first to last, has been a grand mistake? Banish 
 the religions, each and all, but only that religion 
 may the more remain ! That which has been so 
 long in coming to maturity will never perish in 
 a night. The mushroom may do that, but not 
 the oak, whose roots have sucked its life-blood 
 from the soil, whose strength has matched itself 
 against a century of storms. 
 
THE NATURE OF RELIGION. 49 
 
 At the same time, it would be almost criminal 
 for us to overlook the fact that such a vast 
 amount of evil has been associated with religion 
 in the past, that it is no wonder that many have 
 sincerely doubted whether the good associated 
 with it has been of equal weight. 
 
 " We cannot forget," says Dr. Hedge, " that 
 " religion has been a worker of evil, — one of the 
 '* greatest of the workers of evil. No agent that 
 " has wrought in earthly scenes has been more pro- 
 ** lific of ruin and wrong. The wildest aberrations 
 " of human nature, crimes the most portentous, 
 " the most desolating wars, persecutions, hatred 
 " and wrath and bloodshed, more than have 
 " flowed from all sources beside, — have been its 
 " fruits. The victims of fanaticism outnumber 
 " those of every other and all other passions that 
 ** have wasted the earth. Pining in dungeons, 
 " hunted like beasts of prey, stretched on the 
 *' rack, affixed to the cross, — their sufferings are 
 " the horror of history. No high-wrought fiction, 
 " recounting imaginary woes, can match the 
 " colors of their authentic tragedy. A corrup- 
 
50 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 " tion of the text of the Vedas has cast thousands 
 " of Hindu widows ahve on the funeral-pile. An 
 ** interpolation of two words in the service of the 
 " Eastern Church has driven whole villages in 
 " Russia into fiery death. A sentence in the 
 " Book of Exodus has been a death-sentence to 
 ** miUions of hapless women. And who shall 
 " compute the sum of the lives that have fur- 
 " nished the holocausts of the Inquisition? 
 
 • Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum.' 
 
 " In this tale of sorrows we must reckon, more- 
 " over, the melancholy and madness religion so 
 ''often engenders, — religious mania, — which, 
 *' where it does not impel to self-slaughter, op- 
 " presses the soul with dull despair, or pierces 
 " it with mortal anguish. It is fearful to think 
 "that man, in addition to the necessary bur- 
 " dens of Hfe and all inevitable ills, should 
 " be subject to these ideal woes ; that so many 
 " fine spirits should suffer blight through their 
 " own diseased imaginations ; that to so many 
 " noble minds the light that is in them should be 
 
THE NATURE OF RELIGION. 5 I 
 
 " made darkness through superstitious doubts 
 " and fears ; that so many innocent hearts should 
 " bear the burden of self-imputed guilt and 
 " doom ! No region of the earth, and no plane 
 " of life, is secure from this plague. Bayard 
 ** Taylor found in the track of the missionaries 
 " beyond the Arctic circle the same spiritual ails 
 ** that have desolated polished lands. * The 
 ** soul,' says Novalis, * is the most active of 
 " poisons.' Religion is the soul of mortal life ; 
 ** when mis-directed or over-urged it becomes, in- 
 ** stead of an animating force, a consuming fire." 
 This is, indeed, a serious indictment of reli- 
 gion, but, coming as it does from one of its most 
 thoughtful advocates, it cannot be suspected 
 of over-statement. But there has been a great 
 waste of abuse of religion on account of this 
 dark side of its development, which hundreds of 
 would-be evolutionists still keep up, though in 
 strict accordance with the terms of their phi- 
 losophy, they have no right to do so. All such 
 abuse presupposes the supernatural standpoint. 
 Your ardent evolutionist, in nine cases out of 
 
52 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 ten, speaks of religion as if it had been made 
 complete outside of human nature, and imposed 
 upon it, when, in fact, human nature itself has 
 made it, and it has been good or bad just in pro- 
 portion as human nature has been the one or 
 the other. ''Imposed by priests?" Ay, but 
 the priests are self-imposed, legitimate children 
 of humanity. Religion has kept pace with hu- 
 man culture. At every stage, it has been the 
 best religion possible. Nothing, seen from our 
 standpoint, can be more puerile than the ear- 
 liest ideas of religion ; but, with the data which 
 men had at their command, they were the most 
 reasonable possible, and did as much credit to 
 their inventors as the ideas of Martineau and 
 Tyndall and Spencer do to them. It is high 
 time for men to stop blaming religion for her 
 debasing treatment of humanity, seeing that she 
 is humanity's own child, and ever bears her 
 parent's image in her face. 
 
 What is religion? It is an order of ideas and 
 beliefs and practices which includes, upon the 
 one hand, the humblest worship of ancestral 
 
THE NATURE OF RELIGION. 53 
 
 ghosts, — a stage antecedent to fetichism, — and 
 on the other hand, the silence of a Carlyle or 
 Spencer before the Infinities and^ Immensities, 
 and all that lies between this zenith and that 
 nadir. And nowhere, along the course of this 
 development, is there a break at which a super- 
 natural element can be intruded, while the wild 
 growth of supernatural theories can easily be ac- 
 counted for without recourse to any supernatural 
 facts. Religion is often spoken of as if it were 
 coextensive with humanity. But investigation 
 seems to show that there are tribes still extant 
 which have stopped short- of religion in their de- 
 velopment. Antecedent to religion there must 
 be a regular development of ideas concerning 
 sleep and dreams and swoon and epilepsy, of 
 death and resurrection, of souls and ghosts, spirits, 
 and demons. Religion does not properly begin 
 before the supernatural agent has, as it were, 
 forgotten his human origin, or at least ceased to 
 be regarded as the special ancestor or friend. 
 The realm of ghosts develops into a realm of 
 supernatural agents, who have lost their ances- 
 
54 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 tral traits and special relationships, before religion 
 can properly be said to have begun. Whether 
 or not, then, '' we are such stuff as dreams are 
 made of," our religion is, most clearly, in the 
 last analysis. It was the hush of consciousness 
 in sleep that suggested to primeval men an 
 inner-self who could go wandering off, leaving 
 the body dull and silent, and come back to re- 
 vive it. The analogy of sleep and death was 
 too conspicuous to admit a moment's doubt that 
 death was but a sleep, during which the other 
 self might, must still be alive and stirring. It is 
 hardly to be wondered at that ideas of a future 
 life have engrossed so much attention in the re- 
 ligious sphere when we consider that the gen- 
 esis of these ideas was actually antecedent to the 
 genesis of religion. The ghosts were the pro- 
 genitors of the gods. There was a doctrine of 
 immortality before there was a doctrine of re- 
 ligion. And it may well be, also, that the moral 
 idea was other-worldly in its earliest form ; that 
 the rights of ghostly ancestors took chronologi- 
 cal as well as logical precedence of the rights of 
 
THE NATURE OF RELIGION. 55 
 
 living men and women. Given the conviction 
 of a world of ghosts, and every subsequent step 
 in the development from ancestor-worship to 
 fetichism, from fetichism to nature-worship, from 
 nature-worship to polytheism, from polytheism 
 to monotheism, from monotheism as anthropo- 
 morphic as possible, — that is, representing the 
 god as much like a man as possible, — to mono- 
 theism as little anthropomorphic as possible, — 
 given the starting-point, and every subsequent 
 stage of this process of evolution is inevitable. 
 Strangely enough, — but in the strangeness is 
 there not a hint that the evolution of religion has 
 at length come full circle? — strangely enough, 
 religion ends where it began, — with the affir- 
 mation, God is a Spirit. But did ever formal 
 likeness include such utterly divergent thought? 
 The " spirit " of the primeval worshipper was an 
 ancestral ghost. And there were as many gods 
 as there were ghosts. For us there is One God. 
 A spirit ?. Say rather, dropping the article, who 
 is spirit^ one, and yet far more omnipresent than 
 all the multitudes of the primeval worshipper. 
 
56 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 " A presence far more deeply interfused, 
 ■^ Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns. 
 And the round ocean and the living air, 
 And the blue sky, and in the mind of man, — 
 A motion and a spirit that impels 
 All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
 And rolls through all things." 
 
 There are those who seem to think rehgion 
 wholly discredited, through all its course, by- 
 such an account of its genesis as this which I 
 have given. It began in dreams, they say, and 
 it is still a dream. The last spirit like the first 
 is a film of the imagination. But no beginning, 
 however small and weak, can utterly discredit 
 the consummate fruit of any process of evolu- 
 tion if it so be that the consummate fruit is fair 
 and sweet. Because all apples are descended 
 from the common crab, shall I despise my 
 golden sweets upon yon "' holy hill," and shall 
 the Baldwins only blush for shame, and not, as 
 maidens do, • for greater loveliness? Is the 
 great ocean steamer any less wonderful and 
 beautiful because her first progenitor was not 
 even a " dug-out," but a charred log in which 
 some savage made his first brief voyage? Does 
 
THE NATURE OF RELIGION. 57 
 
 it detract any thing from Brunelleschi's dome, 
 or Milan's miracle of countless spires, that the 
 first essay in architecture was probably the 
 tying together of the top-branches of several 
 trees with some stout twig or vine? Are cer- 
 tain special architectural forms any less beauti- 
 ful, because in their inception they symbolized 
 men's wonder at the mystery of reproduction? 
 Could they have symbolized any thing more 
 mysterious, any thing more wonderful? And 
 does **the marriage of true minds" admit of 
 any impediment or get any shadow of dis- 
 honor on account of any thing that Lubbock 
 and McLennan have written about wife-seizure 
 as the universal form of primitive marriage? 
 The evolutionist is a traitor to his own philoso- 
 phy when, from the humble origin of any order 
 of ideas, he infers their present worthlessness or 
 any thing to their discredit. For it is essential 
 to the theory of evolution to maintain that 
 every order of ideas is suitable to the time of 
 its appearance and to the grade of mind that 
 gives it birth. But the genesis of religion was 
 
58 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 not unworthy or ignoble. Primitive religion 
 was the expression of man's awe and wonder 
 in the presence of his own mysterious life. Its 
 genesis, therefore, was not material but spiritual. 
 Thus, in its dawning hour, there was a hint of its 
 noontide magnificence. 
 
 So much for the relative importance of re- 
 ligion, and so much for the order of its develop- 
 ment. It now remains to ask. What is religion 
 in this fourth quarter of the nineteenth century? 
 Evidently it is no one thing, or if one thing, then 
 e pluribus unum-^ one made up of many. It is 
 an order of ideas and beliefs and practices 
 almost or quite as comprehensive as the entire 
 process of religious evolution from the remotest 
 down to the present time. There is hardly any 
 stage of religious evolution in the past which is 
 not represented by the different religions of to- 
 day which make up the sum of universal reli- 
 gion. And, indeed, just as the present earth is 
 the best book in which Jto study the geological 
 history of the planet; just as its processes, at 
 present going on, tell pretty much the whole 
 
THE NATURE OF RELIGION. 59 
 
 story, explain almost every thing that ever 
 has taken place, — so the present phenomena 
 of religion, the processes at present going on 
 in the religious world, admit us into almost every 
 secret of the ancient world of thought and as- 
 piration. As a high mountain in the tropics 
 reproduces every zone with its appropriate vege- 
 tation, so present religion reproduces every zone 
 of man's religious evolution with its appropri- 
 ate ideas. Around the base, the savage growths 
 of fetichism, and still lower forms, flourish with 
 tropical luxuriance; higher up, the more tem- 
 perate forms of polytheism and a monotheism 
 still anthropomorphic; and, higher still, the 
 Edelweiss's noble purity ; nay, but my figure fails 
 me utterly; the mountain's top blossoms as 
 never did the vales below, and heaven is more 
 near, although its stars into more awful spaces 
 seem withdrawn. 
 
 The sympathy of religions ought to follow 
 from the apprehension of their natural develop- 
 ment, all from the same farroff and poor be- 
 ginnings. No one can toss its head, elate with 
 
6o THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 the assurance of a supernatural origin, quite 
 different from that of all the rest. No one, not 
 even the highest, can look contemptuously on 
 the lowest in the scale ; for in that lowest, as in 
 a mirror, it can see the image of its own rude 
 beginning. As the old gravestones used to 
 phrase it : — 
 
 " As you are now, so once was I." 
 
 But from an order so inclusive, how select the 
 only true religion? Included in this order is 
 the lowest fetichism on the one hand, and on the 
 other the most spiritual ideas. What if we say 
 there is no absolute best; the religion must be 
 proportioned to the general character and cul- 
 ture? The converted cannibal eats his super- 
 fluous wife, because she is an obstacle to his 
 Christian baptism. It is not as if we were all 
 obliged to turn eclectics and go about search- 
 ing for the best religion. What is best for one 
 man is not best for another. Sitting Bull's own 
 religion is probably better for him than James 
 Martineau's would be. As for the higher thought, 
 
THE NATURE OF RELIGION. 6 1 
 
 as Jesus said, ** He that is able to receive it, let 
 him receive it." Those that have it need not 
 fear to publish it lest all these Romanists and 
 Evangelical Protestants should suddenly accept 
 it, and find it incompatible with their general 
 character. They will not accept it. What they 
 want is something concrete, tangible. Only with 
 the general enlargement of their minds do men 
 get rid of small ideas. Till then, the new beliefs 
 are mere receptacles which hold the substance of 
 the former creeds and dogmas. 
 
 What is best for one man is not best for 
 another. What is best for you and me is that 
 which we now have, amended by the clearer 
 vision of each succeeding day. Whatever joy 
 and blessing of the religious life may be in store 
 for us, one thing is sure, our way to it must be 
 along the path of our own personal conviction. 
 
 " The hell from which a lie will keep a man," 
 says George Macdonald, " is doubtless the best 
 place that he can go to ; " and may we not add 
 that the god for whose glory we must shun the 
 guidance of the truth is, by this sign, a god 
 
62 THE FAITH OF REASON, 
 
 whose glory ought to be with us a matter of 
 supreme indifference ? 
 
 What a great many persons seem to want is 
 some excuse for keeping up the old names, no 
 matter how little of the old meaning is kept 
 along with them. Mr. Joseph Cook's theology 
 is so different from Calvin's, that Calvin would 
 have roasted him with less compunction than 
 Servetus; but modern orthodoxy cannot suffi- 
 ciently applaud him, because he gives it a lot 
 of lame excuses for still keeping up a show of 
 belief in the old doctrine, though perfectly aware 
 that his trinity is not the old trinity, nor his 
 atonement the old atonement, nor his depravity 
 the old depravity, and so on through all the 
 creeds and articles. And so, I grieve to say, there 
 is some disposition here and there among radical 
 thinkers, who honestly believe that religion is a 
 thing of the past, to make-believe that this or that 
 thing is religion which in reality they do not con- 
 sider to be soj Here it is the worship of collec- 
 tive humanity, and there the worship of the moral 
 ideal. Again, knowing what prestige the name 
 
THE NATURE OF RELIGION. 6% 
 
 of religion carries, some endeavor to make out 
 that morality is identical with religion, and co- 
 extensive; while, on the other hand, there are 
 not a few in the community who contend that 
 religion is entirely independent of morality, and 
 that, while morality is an ever-greatening reality, 
 rehgion is a survival of the past. To neither of 
 these positions can we commit ourselves after a 
 careful study of the facts. To identify morality 
 with religion, to declare that beyond morality 
 religion has no significance, is to go counter to 
 the entire history of religion since it has been 
 historical, and to all the archaeologists have raked 
 together beyond the utmost bound of history. 
 The association of morality with religion has 
 always been so close — or if not always, gener- 
 ally — that to call morality an essential part of 
 religion is certainly legitimate. Last Sunday 
 morning I assumed for the moment the negation 
 of this position in order to ask," If morality is 
 not essential to religion, does any thing remain to 
 the agnostic thinker that can properly be called 
 religion ? " But the next moment, spite of my- 
 
64 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 self, I brought it back again, when I said that 
 the most vital essence of religion was to be im- 
 pressed with the majestic order of the universe, 
 to thrill with recognition of the tender grace and 
 awful sweep of things, and (here the morality 
 came back) to convert this passive recogfiition 
 into a voluntary energy of devotion to the eternal 
 order in which we find ourselves embosomed. And 
 if morality is a part of religion, it must be a 
 great part ; if conduct be indeed, as Matthew Ar- 
 nold has insisted, three-fourths of human life. 
 He has not, I fancy, overrated its importance. 
 But so long as morality responds to purely social 
 inspirations, so long as duty is simply and only 
 a man's contribution to the social order, a man's 
 expression of his gratitude for the fidelity of 
 former generations, it may be said that it is 
 not consciously religious. It is unconsciously 
 religious, because " the power, not ourselves, 
 that makes for righteousness" is ultimately 
 the power which doth 
 
 " preserve the stars from wrong, 
 And the most ancient heavens through it are fresh and strong." 
 
THE NATURE OF RELIGION. 65 
 
 Morality becomes consciously religious only 
 when it becomes a voluntary energy of devotion 
 to the eternal order of the universe. Let a man's 
 heart really quicken with those sentiments of 
 awe and wonder, gratitude and trust — which are 
 so deeply implicated, not only in the scientific 
 apprehension of the universe, but, indeed, in any 
 simply human or poetic vision of its infinite per- 
 fections — and how can he help desiring, longing, 
 steadfastly resolving to give himself in earnest 
 service of that infinite power whose manifesta- 
 tions have awakened in him all these sentiments ? 
 So piety becomes enthusiasm for humanity. 
 The one life is in every thing. There is nothing 
 without it. And all things are for every one. 
 Just as the heavens globe themselves in every 
 drop of dew, so does the universe in every indi- 
 vidual life. All that has ever been was prepara- 
 tion for this infinitesimal life of yours and mine. 
 All the pasts help us ; all the futures beckon us. 
 And now what is the natural, the inevitable re- 
 sponse of any heart that feels all this : that all is 
 so for each ; that one, the Infinite, is so for all. 
 
66 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 What can it be but Each for all ; each for the 
 Infinite One? And this is morality with a 
 divine emphasis. Such morality, so crowned 
 and glorified, no one can doubt, is a true part of 
 religion. 
 
 Whatever substitutes for religion have been, 
 or may yet be invented, that only has a perfect 
 right to be considered a factor of religion which 
 has been vitally associated with it from the ear- 
 liest times. Evolution may exalt and purify the 
 contents of religion, but the contents thus ex- 
 alted and purified must not be dissipated into 
 viewless air. And as morality has always been 
 so vitally associated with religion that the scope 
 of evolution must continue to embrace its sacred 
 trusts, so has the idea of another life been so 
 vitally associated with it that the scope of evolu- 
 tion in the future cannot be exclusive of its ten- 
 der radiance or solemn beauty. Certainly there 
 have been great developments of religion of 
 which the conviction of another life has been no 
 part (Judaism, for example), or upon which the 
 thought (as in the case of Buddhism), so far 
 
THE NATURE OF RELIGION. 67 
 
 from being joyful and inspiring, lay like the 
 weight of mountains. But special circumstances 
 induced both of these exceptions to the rule, 
 which is, that the idea of a future Hfe has been 
 included in the data of religion, as one of the 
 most prominent, from the beginning of religion 
 until now. The doctrine of immortality is older 
 than the doctrine of the gods, — was its progeni- 
 tor, as we have seen. And so I cannot help 
 thinking that the scope of religious evolution in 
 the future must be inclusive of this idea. With 
 the decay of proofs once thought to be sufficient, 
 there may be less of confident assertion, less of 
 unwavering faith ; but the idea need not be the 
 less religious upon this account. A tender 
 hope, deepening into serene assurance in great 
 hours of thought, or in moments of unutterable 
 love, — a perfect confidence that only that which 
 is best for us as ** members one of another " 
 awaits us at the end ; so long as these remain, 
 the line of evolution cannot be said to be broken, 
 and these may well be more religious in their 
 implications than the most absolute dogmatism 
 
68 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 that deals in pocket-maps and vital statistics of 
 the New Jerusalem. 
 
 However this may be, one thing is certain: 
 this, that the future of religious evolution must 
 include the element of worship, and the object 
 of this worship must be no substitute for the 
 Eternal, be it collective humanity or the moral 
 ideal, but still the Eternal, the Infinite, " in whom 
 we live and move and have our being." More 
 silent than their fathers concerning him whom 
 they call God, not speaking of him " as if he 
 were a man on the next street," not parcelling 
 out his attributes, not chattering about what he 
 determined in the most secret counsels of the 
 Trinity before the beginning of time, a tenderer 
 awe, a holier reverence, shall be awakened by 
 men's thought of him in coming times than ever 
 in the past. 
 
 It may be that some of you will think me in- 
 consistent here with what I said last Sunday 
 morning. Then I insisted that the most vital 
 essence of religion is not involved in a man's 
 theory of God or Immortality, but in the awe 
 
THE NATURE OF RELIGION. 69 
 
 which falls upon his mind as he confronts the 
 universal order, and in the voluntary energy of 
 self-surrender to this order which this awe inspires. 
 If I had said or thought that the most vital es- 
 sence of religion was merely some pleasant titil- 
 lation consequent on seeing a glorious sunset or 
 a pretty face, then there would be some incon- 
 sistency between what I said then and the em- 
 phasis which I now place upon the sense of a 
 relation to the Infinite Power. But what I had 
 in mind, and what I endeavored to express, was 
 that no mere satisfaction or delight in isolated 
 objects is vitally religious, but the awe and glad- 
 ness which are quickened in us when this or that 
 isolated experience suddenly opens out into all 
 the infinities and immensities and eternities. 
 Though it were Biichner himself, the boldest of 
 materialists, who thrilled with this emotion, in 
 spite of his philosophy he would then and there 
 commune with an infinite spirit ; his " tendency 
 of matter to combine " would flash upon him as 
 the Power, called by whatever name, adequate 
 to produce the length and breadth and height 
 
70 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 and depth and beauty and sublimity and joy and 
 love of this illimitable universe, and he would 
 stand abashed and silent, if he did not like won- 
 dering Linnaeus fall upon his knees. The most 
 vital essence of religion does inhere in man's rela- 
 tion to the universe, but, however unconsciously, 
 this relation, when it is at its best, implies a re- 
 lation to a power which manifests itself in the 
 totality of universal life and law. It is no mere 
 aggregation of phenomena that inspires our awe. 
 No, but the blending of their various chords into 
 that harmony which we affirm as often as we say 
 the. universe, — the turned-into-one. To have 
 this vision and the attendant consecration is in- 
 deed the most essential thing, but happiest of all 
 are they who, consciously, can lift their hearts 
 above all outward things to One who is the un- 
 seen Power, whose flowing garment the time- 
 spirit is for ever weaving, the inmost thought and 
 life and love, for ever baffling our comprehension, 
 whom still our very ignorance affirms, for whom 
 no name is adequate ; whom, therefore, because 
 we must still somehow speak of him, we call by 
 
THE NATURE OF RELIGION. 71 
 
 the most simple name of all, a name which is no 
 definition, but a continent for all the awe and 
 reverence and adoration with which our hearts 
 expand, — a name which we have spoken thou- 
 sands of times, but which, now that we pause 
 and think of it we hardly dare to speak at all, — 
 and yet will speak, I with my lips, you in your 
 silent hearts, — now let us speak it, — God. 
 
 January 12, 1879. 
 
THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 Him who dare name, 
 And yet proclaim, 
 Yes, I believe ? 
 Who that can feel 
 His heart can steel 
 To say, I disbelieve ? 
 
 Goethe. 
 
 What were the God who sat outside to scan 
 The spheres that 'neath his finger circling ran ? 
 God dwells within, and moves the world and moulds. 
 Himself and Nature in one form enfolds. 
 
 Goethe. 
 
 Mother of man's time-travelling generations, 
 Breath of his nostrils, heart-blood of his heart, 
 
 God above all gods worshipped of all nations. 
 Light above light, law beyond law. Thou art. 
 
 Swinburne. 
 
III. 
 
 CONCERNING GOD. 
 
 /^^ERTAINLY, it is not with any expectation 
 of satisfying you or myself with what I 
 have to say this morning concerning the highest 
 of all themes that I venture to approach it, and 
 invite your company. My treatment of this 
 theme, as every man's, must be inadequate. The 
 wisest here, however satisfactory they may be to 
 others, will not be so to themselves. They will 
 be less so in the future than they have been in 
 the past. As knowledge widens with the lapse 
 of time, less and less satisfactory will be men's 
 speech concerning God. Language does not 
 keep pace with thought and feeling. Two or 
 three thousand, and even two or three hundred, 
 years ago men had but little difficulty in finding 
 words to express all they knew, or thought they 
 knew, about God. Now it is different. The 
 wisest lay a hushing finger on their lips. 
 
76 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 " Thought is deeper than all speech, 
 Feeling deeper than all thought; 
 Souls to souls can never teach 
 What unto themselves is taught." 
 
 Meantime the air is thick with talk of atheism, 
 with doleful prophecies and dreadful warnings. 
 With the spread of atheism we are assured there 
 will be a fearful moral revolution. Men will seek 
 evil and pursue it. They have done right so far, 
 because they have felt God's eye to be upon 
 them, or because they have expected to give an 
 account of their actions in another world. Such 
 is the doctrine ; and, if it is true to any great ex- 
 tent, it would seem that there must follow some 
 enfeeblement of the moral life. But it may be 
 doubted whether the efficacy of the fear of hell 
 as " a hangman's whip to hold the wretch in 
 order," has not of late been overrated, and 
 equally the dread of God's omniscience. It may 
 also be doubted whether there is as much real 
 atheism in the community 'as our terrorists 
 insist. Men are silent or speak little, be- 
 cause any thing they can say seems so inade- 
 quate to express the sense of mystery which 
 
CONCERNING GOD. y/ 
 
 presses on their hearts. Many who are consid- 
 ered atheists do not consider themselves so, 
 although they may prefer being considered so to 
 having their attitude confounded with that of the 
 majority. What they object to is not so much 
 belief as definition. When Joubert says, '' It is 
 not a difficult matter to believe in God, if we are 
 not asked to define him," it is not that he would 
 be at liberty to believe in him as little as pos- 
 sible, but because he would be left free to ex- 
 pand his thought and feeling without bound ; 
 because defined is con^ntd. So, too, when Mat- 
 thew Arnold says : ** We, too, would say God il* 
 the moment we said God you would not pretend 
 that you know all about him." The majority of 
 atheists are men whose thought and feeling about 
 God transcend all ordinary statements, all popu- 
 lar definitions. Henry Thoreau said, " It would 
 seem as if Atheism must be comparatively popu- 
 lar with God." Why, but because the so-called 
 atheists are often men who reverence God too 
 much to waste much time with any of the theo- 
 logians. It is not to be denied, however, that 
 there are those who not only consider themselves 
 
78 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 atheists, but wish to be considered so by others, 
 insisting that they have no right to claim immu- 
 nity from any odium which properly attaches to 
 this designation. But this, in many cases, is 
 only a concession of the right of the majority 
 to determine the significance of words. In 
 others it is a sort of vanity. In perfect frank- 
 ness, it must be allowed that there are those in 
 every community who consider atheism some- 
 thing smart. The satisfaction which such per- 
 sons take in their atheism implies the God whom 
 they deny. He must exist in order that they 
 may have the distinction of saying to him, " Don't 
 flatter yourself: we do not believe in you." Their 
 imagination affirms him in order that their vanity 
 may have the satisfaction of denying him to his 
 face. But among earnest, thoughtful men real 
 atheism is so rare a bird, that few have ever seen 
 its raven plumage or heard the utter melancholy 
 of its cry. 
 
 " Man cannot be God's outlaw if he -would ; 
 Nor so abscond him in the caves of sense 
 But nature shall still search some crevice out 
 With messages of splendor from that source 
 Which soar he, dive he, baffles still and lures." 
 
CONCERNING GOD. 79 
 
 Even the would-be materialist, of the most un- 
 qualified stamp, who insists that there is but one 
 substance in the world, and that this one sub- 
 stance is matter, only succeeds in spelling the 
 name of his deity with six letters instead of three : 
 M-a-t-t-e-r, instead of G-o-d. For, as Tyndall 
 long ago declared, " If life and thought are the 
 very flower of matter, any definition of matter 
 which omits life and thought must be inadequate 
 if not untrue." " No man has seen God at any 
 time," says the New Testament. And this is 
 just as true of him if you spell his name with 
 six letters as if you spell it with three. No man 
 has seen Matter at any time. Emerson is hardly 
 less God-intoxicated than Spinoza, and yet his 
 saying, " The divinity is in the atoms," is only a 
 more poetic and impressive form of Biichner's 
 suicidal confession that matter as such has ** a 
 tendency to combine." 
 
 The silence of some men concerning God 
 seems to me vastly more reverent than the gar- 
 rulity of others. Here a nameless thought, and 
 there a multitude of words. Thoreau's idea, 
 
80 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 about atheism being comparatively popular with 
 God, was also Plutarch's, who expressed it with 
 greater fulness. " I, for my own part," he said, 
 " had much rather men should say that there is 
 not, and never was, any such person as Plutarch, 
 than that they should say Plutarch is an un- 
 steady, fickle, froward, vindictive, and touchy 
 fellow." And so he inferred that God would 
 rather have men deny his existence, than speak 
 of him as unsteady, fickle, and so on. But then 
 Plutarch was a pagan, and had pagan deities in 
 mind. Christians would not, perhaps, be open 
 to such criticism. They never represent their 
 God as unsteady, fickle, or vindictive. Certainly 
 not! But Plutarch's simile assumes that God is 
 not the actual of the popular ideal. Were he 
 the actual of Calvin's, I can fancy he would still 
 appreciate the refusal of a man to believe him to 
 be this, at its just value, even as a mortal man, 
 although a conscious knave, would still appreci- 
 ate a neighbor's misplaced confidence in his 
 veracity and honor.' Meantime, in my humble 
 judgment, there is more of real reverence in 
 
* CONCERNING GOD. 8 1 
 
 six lines of Goethe than in all the creeds of all 
 
 the sects : — 
 
 " Him who dare name 
 And yet proclaim, 
 Yes, I believe ? 
 Who that can feel 
 His heart can steel 
 To say, I disbelieve ? " 
 
 ** Can man by searching find out God?" asks 
 the Old Testament ; and the New Testament of 
 modern science repeats the question with an 
 accent of yet deeper sadness. But our case is 
 not so pitiful as it would be if God did not find 
 us out whether we search for him or no. The 
 most that all our searching does is generally 
 to find, not God, but some excuse or reason 
 for the ineradicable faith in him which is im- 
 planted in the most of us so deeply that I do 
 not wonder that many have mistaken it for a 
 primitive datum of consciousness. I doubt if 
 any man ever consciously argued himself, or was 
 argued into any real faith in God, — into aught 
 more than some skin-deep belief in him. Faith 
 in God is literally " the faith that is in us." How 
 came it there? By supernatural revelation, says 
 
82 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 the supernaturalist. But revelation presupposes 
 a revealer. Faith in a revelation presupposes 
 faith in God. For the message to be sent, there 
 must be a sender. For the message to be com- 
 pletely trusted, it must be impossible for God to 
 lie. Moreover, with the advance of knowledge 
 it becomes more and more unlikely that there has 
 ever been any such thing as supernatural reve- 
 lation. The genesis of the belief, common to all 
 religions, is easily accounted for without the inter- 
 vention of a single supernatural fact. The argu- 
 ment of Hume : " It is more likely that evidence 
 should be false than that a miracle should be 
 true," has never yet been proved fallacious, and 
 grows in strength as men more clearly recognize 
 that evidence, in order to be false, need not be 
 consciously so. To evade the force of this argu- 
 ment by admitting that the miracle is natural, is 
 to discharge the miracle of all authoritative sig- 
 nificance. It must be supernatural in order to 
 be invested with a divine authority. But if *' the 
 faith which is in us " — in the most of us, surely 
 — did not come by revelation, how does it 
 
CONCERNING GOD. 83 
 
 come? Theodore Parker used to say by con- 
 sciousness. But the philosophers assure us that 
 we can be conscious only of the affections of our 
 mind. We cannot be conscious of that by which 
 they are affected. Consciousness of God is 
 then impossible. Again, it is affirmed, that " the 
 faith which is in us " is an intuition. But what 
 is an intuition? A necessary truth, answers the 
 transcendentalist, — a necessary truth perceived 
 by the reason without any assistance from the 
 understanding. But intuitions of this sort do 
 not enjoy the high repute to-day which they did 
 formerly. It begins to be doubted whether there 
 are any such intuitions ; whether the mind can 
 be split up into reason and understanding, or, at 
 least, whether — to parody a saying of Herbert 
 Spencer's — " expression is feature in the mak- 
 ing " — the understanding is not reason in the 
 making. The philosophy of experience inclines 
 to the opinion that even '* necessary truths " are 
 discovered to be such by observation and experi- 
 ment and reflection, that they do not inhere in 
 mind as such. This philosophy also talks of 
 
84 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 intuitions, but its intuitions are not like those of 
 the transcendentaHst, — a kind of super-ratio7ial 
 revelation privately communicated to each indi- 
 vidual soul. They are the products of ances- 
 tral and race-experience organized in us. Our 
 faith in God, then, is an intuition, — the flower 
 of an hereditary experience, whose roots are 
 buried in an immemorial past. Thanks for its 
 beauty and its fragrance, as it opens in the 
 hushed seclusions of our hearts ! But evidently 
 an intuition of this sort, a product of experience, 
 can have no such authority as would the intu- 
 ition of the transcendentaHst if this were all 
 which it was formerly conceived to be. Some, 
 indeed, may be so constituted that they can 
 enjoy the great inheritance on which they enter 
 here, without ever thinking or wondering how it 
 came to them, and whether it is lawfully theirs. 
 The majority are, in fact, so constituted. But 
 there are not a few who, once they know that the 
 faith which is in them is no supernatural gift, no 
 organic necessity, but an inheritance from the 
 past, must set about to find the title-deeds, must 
 
CONCERNING GOD. 85 
 
 know, if possible, how the estate was earned; 
 what work was done, what battles fought, before 
 it was entailed to them. This is the meaning of 
 a world of patient study in these latter days into 
 the origin and development of men's religious 
 ideas. Tylor, and Spencer, and Coulange, and 
 Lubbock, and the rest, what are they but patient 
 searchers of our title-deeds, in order that we 
 may know whether our right is indefeasible in 
 this estate of faith in God which has come down to 
 us from immemorial times ? Honor to those who, 
 finding themselves unable to make out their title 
 to their own satisfaction, vacate the premises ; 
 albeit for them to do so is to go forth like Abra- 
 ham, not knowing whither ! For such also, believe 
 me, there is " a city that hath foundations." But 
 happy they who dare believe that their inherit- 
 ance, however dubious the title of their remotest 
 ancestors, has in the course of centuries been 
 fairly earned ; and that, when superstition's every 
 lien upon it has been discharged, it will still be 
 ample for the free soul to revel and rejoice in, 
 without fear of any interdict of science or any 
 
86 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 challenge that the lords of reason can oppose 
 to her possession ! 
 
 It cannot be denied that an element of un- 
 reality enters very largely into the primitive idea 
 of God, if the genesis of this idea has been cor- 
 rectly made out by the most learned anthro- 
 pologists and sociologists. There are those who 
 think that when the genesis of this idea has been 
 shown to be involved in misconceptions almost 
 innumerable, the idea has itself been relegated 
 to the sphere of childish superstition. If the 
 phenomena of sleep and trance first suggested to 
 mankind the idea of '* an inner man" — a soul; 
 if the analogy of sleep and death suggested that 
 the soul was still alive when its '' last sleep " had 
 settled on the body ; if the ancestral ghosts thus 
 arrived at, from being at first regarded as mere 
 human ghosts to be invoked, placated, and so 
 on, came at length to be regarded as gods, the 
 ghost-food passing over into sacrifice, the invo- 
 cations into prayers; if, further on, stones and 
 trees, then clouds, and heat and cold, and wind, 
 and sun and moon and stars, — all came to be 
 
CONCERNING GOD. 8/ 
 
 regarded as the seats of ghostly power ; if this is 
 a correct interpretation of the phenomena of 
 primitive reHgion, does not the idea of God en- 
 gendered in this ghostly atmosphere become 
 itself as "thin as a ghost"? How from the 
 midst of so much unreality could ever come by 
 any legitimate process the idea of that Supreme 
 Reality which we of modern times mean to sug- 
 gest as often as we speak of God? 
 
 My answer is that, if the beginning of the God- 
 idea was such as I have tried to indicate, — and 
 I believe that it was so, — we ought not to con- 
 found the essence of the feeling out of which it 
 came with their rational psychology with which it 
 was associated. The essence of the feeling was 
 a sense of the mysteriousness of human life. 
 That which oppressed the primitive man with 
 awe and wonder was essentially the same fact 
 before which our latest science stands abashed, 
 — the connection between mind and body. It 
 was the mystery attaching to the thought of 
 ghostly ancestors, peopling the forest-haunts with 
 shadowy denizens, that made it possible for the 
 
88 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 sentiment of worship to go out to them from the 
 poor savage heart ; and, however trivial the psy- 
 chology, the mystery was real enough ; so that to 
 say that the first step in the evolution of the 
 God-idea was unreal is to mistake its formal ac- 
 cident for its essential character. And so, fur- 
 ther along, grant that the indwelling life ascribed 
 to tree or stone, which constituted these objects 
 fetiches, or to sun and moon and stars in 
 the next stage, which we call nature-worship ; 
 grant that this indwelling life was made up, to the 
 imagination of the savage, of one or more of the 
 great company of ghosts which, by this time had 
 quite forgotten, as it were, their human relations, 
 — the fact remains that, antecedent to this theory 
 of ghostly life, there must have been the sense 
 of life to be accounted for. What the savage 
 did was to account for it by the only life with 
 which he felt himself to be acquainted. His 
 intentions were excellent. He thought he was 
 proceeding from the known to the unknown. In 
 the strictest sense, it may be said that the God- 
 idea was not fairly born until the world of ghosts 
 
CONCERNING GOD. 89 
 
 had gradually become a vast mysterious realm 
 of life, an incalculable store of energy on which 
 the savage mind could draw in order to account 
 for any natural phenomenon that appealed to it 
 for a solution of the mystery of its seeming life. 
 The key of his position, meanwhile, was his sense 
 of seeming life to be accounted for. The god he 
 really worshipped was this seeming life. His 
 ghostly explanation was, no doubt, entirely in- 
 sufficient. But it was not his explanation that 
 he worshipped. It was the seeming life which 
 he endeavored to explain. 
 
 The next step beyond nature-worship in the 
 development of the God-idea was polytheism; 
 the worship of many gods, not in objective forms 
 as in fetichism and nature-worship, but as imagi- 
 nary beings, whose genesis is to be accounted 
 for in various ways. As the phenomena of nat- 
 ure and society were rudely classified, a single 
 spirit was imagined as the controlling deity of 
 each separate class. The choice of this deity was 
 variously determined. '* To him that hath shall be 
 given," was a controlling principle. As the big 
 
90 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 fish eat up the little ones, so the big gods de- 
 voured their smaller rivals. The favorite gods 
 of nature-worship became the gods of poly- 
 theism, to the exclusion of their less significant 
 companions. Another source of income to the 
 polytheistic pantheon was the apotheosis of dis- 
 tinguished chiefs, warriors, medicine-men, and 
 so on, for whom the attributes of the nature- 
 myths had a remarkable affinity. But in this 
 polytheistic stage of the God-idea the noticeable 
 thing is this, that what was really worshipped 
 was the hidden life which was the background 
 of phenomenal existence. The gods of poly- 
 theism were but so many explanations of this 
 life, then the most reasonable that could be had. 
 But the real object of worship was the hidden 
 life; the. Power that made the trees wave and 
 the waters flow, the sun and moon and stars to 
 shine, the earth to rise out of her wintry grave 
 clad in the spring-time beauty. The only unre- 
 ality was in the explanation. The mystery which 
 polytheism endeavored to explain was a bond 
 fide mystery. It might well make men's hearts 
 
CONCERNING GOD. 9 1 
 
 tremble with fear, or swell with rapture, or dilate 
 with joy. 
 
 From polytheism, the worship of many gods, 
 to monotheism, the worship of one, was the next 
 step in the development of the God-idea. Here 
 also the principle, " To him that hath shall be 
 given," had, no doubt, great influence. The 
 favorite god tended to be the only one, little by 
 little crowding the others from their thrones. 
 Different tribes had different favorites, and the 
 strongest tribe demanded exclusive worship for 
 its deity, and was able to enforce the claim. 
 Natural selection operated here as in the physi- 
 cal world. There was a struggle for existence, 
 and a preservation of the fittest; the fittest 
 here not meaning the best, but, as often in the 
 physical world, only the strongest, the ablest to 
 survive. Midway between polytheism and mon- 
 otheism we have monolatry, the exclusive wor- 
 ship of one deity without denying the existence 
 of others. But gods not worshipped cease to 
 be regarded as realities. The god exclusively 
 worshipped tends to be the only god to whom 
 
92 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 existence is allowed. And hence a monotheistic 
 God-idea. 
 
 At this stage of development, as at every earlier, 
 it must be admitted that there are elements of 
 unreality involved in every step of the advance. 
 But here again, as at every previous stage, the 
 unreality was in the explanation, not in the thing 
 explained. The real object of worship here, as 
 before, was the mystery of Hfe behind phe- 
 nomena. The dawning sense of unity in these, 
 the beginning of all science and philosophy, sug- 
 gested the unity of the underlying mystery. I 
 grant you that the monotheistic god was at first 
 dreadfully anthropomorphic : " a non-natural 
 man," " a man of war ; " to the Semite a Be- 
 douin sheik at first, and then a king, — the 
 earthly monarchy always tending to produce a 
 heavenly counterpart in human thought. But, 
 again, the noticeable thing is that the real object 
 of awe and wonder and worship was not the 
 man-like deity, — that he was not reverenced and 
 worshipped for his man-likeness, but as the 
 mysterious Power adequate to produce the world 
 
CONCERNING GOD. 93 
 
 of nature and humanity. The man-Hkeness was 
 a necessity of childish thought, of undevelop- 
 ment, of survival in culture; but it could not 
 successfully impeach the reality of the Mysterious 
 Power of which it was the concrete symbol, nor 
 the reality of the worship honestly accorded to 
 this Power. 
 
 With the development of monotheism, the 
 God-idea reaches its highest point of evolution, 
 except as this idea once generated is capable of 
 indefinite purification. And the most notable 
 feature in this process is the transference of man's 
 awe and wonder from the exceptional in his ex- 
 perience to the regular and orderly. From the 
 lowest fetich-worshipper up to the average Chris- 
 tian monotheist of this nineteenth century, the 
 most potent suggestions of deity have come 
 from the apparently exceptional and abnor- 
 mal. The disposition of the untutored savage 
 to choose for his fetich the most grotesque ob- 
 ject — tree or stone — that he can find, is abso- 
 lutely identical with the disposition of the 
 cultured modern Christian to seek for God in 
 
94 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 some miraculous interposition rather than in the 
 invariable order of the world, *' staring with won- 
 der to see water turned into wine, and heedless 
 of the stupendous fact of his own personality." 
 So pertinacious has been the resolution of the 
 religious world to find God only in the appar- 
 ently abnormal and inconsequent, that, by force 
 of association, it came at length to be regarded 
 as an axiom that, if God is not a sort of " prince 
 of misrule," then he is nothing. Parallel with the 
 development of religion for hundreds of years, 
 there has been a development of science. But 
 the tendency of science has been to everywhere 
 dissipate the wonder inhering in the apparently 
 abnormal and inconsequent by including them 
 in its generalizations of law and order. Sure 
 of his axiom, *' The more law the less God ; " 
 the religionist has contemplated this process 
 with unqualified dismay. Province after prov- 
 ince has been wrested from the domain of per- 
 sonal agency and annexed to the domain of law, 
 till it has seemed only a question of time whether 
 every vestige of the Deity would not finally be 
 
CONCERNING GOD. 95 
 
 expelled from the universe. But while, little by- 
 little, the old sense of mystery, inhering in the 
 apparently exceptional and abnormal, has been 
 going out, a new sense of mystery, slowly but 
 surely has been coming in, — a sense of mystery 
 inhering in the uniformities of natural phenom- 
 ena. The more law, the more God — the more 
 mystery, wonder, awe, and trust — has been 
 the growing conviction which has kept pace with 
 this development. ** As fast as science transfers 
 more and more things from the category of 
 irregularities to the category of regularities, the 
 mystery that once attached to the superstitious 
 explanation of them becomes a mystery attach- 
 ing to the scientific explanation of them ; there 
 is a merging of many special mysteries in one 
 general mystery." ^ " So that," says Herbert 
 Spencer, " beginning with the germinal idea of 
 mystery which the savage gets from a display 
 of [anomalous] power, . . . and the germinal 
 sentiment of awe accompanying it, the progress 
 is towards an ultimate recognition of a mystery 
 
 1 Spencer's Study of Sociology, p. 310. 
 
g6 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 behind every act and appearance, and a transfer 
 of the awe from something special and oc- 
 casional to something universal and unceasing ; " 
 which something is the infinite God of scientific 
 faith. 
 
 If now I have accomplished my purpose, I 
 have made it plain that no unreality attaching 
 to the earliest development of religion, or to 
 any subsequent stage, has prejudiced the value 
 of the God-idea in its present form or indeed in 
 any form it has assumed from the beginning 
 of its long and painful march from puerile 
 animism up to the glorious consciousness of 
 One who, 
 
 " be he what he may, 
 Is yet the fountain light of all our day, 
 Is yet the master-light of all our seeing." 
 
 This has been proved by showing that, at every 
 stage, a bond fide mystery has been involved in 
 the idea ; and that the real object of awe and rev- 
 erence and worship has been this mystery, and not 
 the explanation of it, varying with every stage 
 of culture. 
 
CONCERNING GOD. 97 
 
 How then? Do I erect an altar "to the un- 
 known God," and bid you come and worship? 
 I answer Yes and No. " Unknown and yet 
 well known " is a Pauline phrase with which we 
 may complement the inscription which the 
 apostle found on the Athenian altar. Unknown 
 and yet well known I A friend suggests to me, 
 " The Sum of the Unknown " as the best possi- 
 ble definition of God, a definition which neither 
 defines nor confines. Such a definition would 
 indefinitely postpone the advent of atheism ; for, 
 though "the sum of the unknown" is being 
 steadily abridged by the discoveries of science, 
 there is no immediate danger of its being wholly 
 conquered and annexed to the domain of knowl- 
 edge. And then, too, while " the sum of the 
 unknown " is always growing * smaller, it is 
 always growing larger to our apprehension. 
 The more we know, the better do we realize 
 what realms of mystery, still unexplored, chal- 
 lenge our patience and our courage. But, 
 remote as is the possibility, I do not relish the 
 idea that, if we could know every thing, we could 
 
98 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 write God's epitaph ; that the increase of knowl- 
 edge is a gradual elimination of the unknown 
 quantity, God, from the equation of our thought 
 and feeling. Moreover, the unknown which has 
 elicited the awe and reverence of men's hearts 
 has never been a simple negative. It has been 
 wonderful to them and awful and reverend 
 as the mysterious background of something 
 known or felt to be so. And, with the advance 
 of science, what makes the ever vaster ampli- 
 tude of the unknown so quickening to our awe, 
 our gladness, and our trust, is that the little we 
 do know is so wonderful, so marvellous ; and we 
 proceed to people all the vast unknown with 
 the benignant forms and forces which have 
 been openly revealed to us. It is as when I 
 stand upon the rocky headlands of my native 
 shore, and look out upon that " glorious mirror 
 where the Almighty's form glasses itself in 
 tempests." 
 
 " Eastward as far as the eye can see. 
 Eastward, eastward, endlessly, 
 The sparkle and tremor of purple sea." 
 
CONCERNING GOD. 99 
 
 Surely what fills me with a joy so keen that it 
 is almost pain is not alone the flashing tumult 
 of the great expanse of waters ; it is also that, 
 beyond where sky and water meet, with my 
 mind's eye I see the mighty ocean reaching on 
 and on, and beautiful with the same unspeaka- 
 ble beauty as the little space that lies within my 
 field of vision. It is the beauty of the known 
 that makes the beauty of the unknown so sure 
 and so entrancing. And just as surely my soul's 
 ** normal delight in the infinite Goji " is not 
 produced by any purely negative unknown. 
 No more is it by any positive known. No, but 
 by my warrantable conviction that all the in- 
 finite unknown is equally with the little territory 
 which I know the haunt of nameless beauty, 
 order, symmetry, and law. And so to those 
 among us, and they are not few, who are en- 
 deavoring to convince us that a purely negative 
 mystery, an absolute unknown, is adequate to 
 all the functions of a God whom we may rever- 
 ence and adore, I answer in the words of Eng- 
 land's greatest living theologian: ''Far be it 
 
lOO THE FAITH OF REASON. .; 
 
 " from us to deal lightly with the sense of mys- \ 
 " tery. It mingles largely with all devout appre- I 
 " hension, and is the great redeeming power that j 
 " purifies the intellect of its egotism and the heart \ 
 " of its pride. But you cannot constitute a reli- 
 '* gion out of mystery alone, any more than out of 
 '' knowledge alone, nor can you measure the re- ■ 
 - ' latipn of doctrines to humility and piety by the ; 
 " mere amount of conscious darkness that they i 
 " leave. All worship, being directed to what is j 
 ** above us and transcends our comprehension, <! 
 " stands in the presence of a mystery. But not i 
 '* all that stands before a mystery is worship, i 
 " The abyss must not be one of total gloom — ; 
 "of neutral possibilities — of hidden glories or ' 
 " hidden horrors, we know not which. . . . Such ■ 
 ** a pit of indeterminate contingencies will bend 
 " no head, and melt no eye that may turn to it. l 
 " Some rays of clear light must escape from j 
 *' it, some visions of solemn beauty gleam within i 
 *' it, ere the darkness itself can be ' visible ' | 
 " enough to deliver its awfulness upon the I 
 " soul. ... To fling us into bottomless nega- \ 
 
" tlon is to drown us in mystery and leave us 
 " dead. True reverence can breathe and see, 
 " only on condition of some alternation of light 
 " and darkness, of inner silence and a stir of 
 " upper air." 
 
 Nor is there any thing in the necessities of 
 the most rigid scientific thought which violates 
 this condition; which precludes this happy al- 
 ternation. " Though unknown, yet well known." 
 Is he not this, — the God of scientific apprehen- 
 sion? In any scientific sense, it must be granted 
 that in himself he is unknown, unknowable; 
 and must remain so always. But until I can 
 know some one thing in the universe in itself ^ 
 be that thing clod of earth or soul of man, I 
 will not fret because I cannot know in itself 
 the Infinite and Everlasting One. For what 
 does my ignorance signify but that an unmani- 
 fested infinite can never be found out; that an 
 everlasting silence would be totally inaudible? 
 ** Vapid words," we say with Martineau, " in a 
 universe full of visions and of voices ! " 
 
 Meanwhile, though I acknowledge, unre- 
 
•10^; '/ \'.} f^E MlTH OF REASON. 
 
 servedly, that the unspeakable majesty is in 
 itself unknown, I insist that our ignorance should, 
 not, cannot be interpreted as describing absolute 
 nonentity of perception and apprehension. Our 
 very ignorance affirms the existence of an in- 
 comprehensible substance of which the phe- 
 nomenal universe is the perpetual manifestation. 
 Our knowledge of God is of exactly the same 
 nature as our knowledge of our neighbors and 
 ourselves. We know him by the manifestations 
 of his inscrutable life. If we are not so garru- 
 lous as men were formerly about his attributes, 
 we know a great deal more about his laws, the 
 habits of his infinite life. What he determined 
 in the most secret counsels of the Trinity before 
 the beginning of time, the Calvins and the Ed- 
 wardses have sufficiently discussed ; and all who 
 care for their results are welcome to embrace 
 them. What we are sure of is, that the Unseen 
 Power was adequate to the production of this 
 universe, such as it is. He has put himself into 
 his world as painters sometimes put themselves 
 into their pictures ; not by painting himself, like 
 
CONCERNING GOD, 103 
 
 Raphael, in a corner, but by expressing his 
 stupendous energy in every part. As much as 
 we know of the universe, so much we know of 
 God. Truly it is not much in comparison with 
 what we do not know. " Lo, these are parts of 
 his ways, but how little is yet known of him." 
 And yet, though relatively little, absolutely 
 much, and more with every new discovery of 
 any fact or law. Now, indeed, for the first time 
 Theology makes good her boast, Scientia sci- 
 entiarurn^ the science of sciences ; but not in the 
 old sense of being superior to all others, rather 
 in the sense of including all others. Henceforth 
 all other sciences are fragments of theology; 
 for all of them are busy with the manifestations 
 of the one eternal substance in which all phe- 
 nomena inhere. 
 
 Modern science is unitarian, monotheistic, 
 as never was the creed of Moses or Mohammed. 
 She teaches us that all these nerves whose play 
 upon the surface of the universe irradiate it 
 with such various expression go back into one 
 central ganglion, and ever more report its per- 
 
104 ^^^ FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 feet sanity. From all the peaks, from all the 
 depths and heights, the different forms and forces 
 of the world are signalling across to one another 
 with fraternal salutations. A thousand and ten 
 thousand various lines of force run back into 
 one central stream whose ceaseless energy sup- 
 plies them all. What was the wonder of that 
 old homdousioHy — 07ie substance of the Son and 
 Father, a barren abstraction, — to this homoiou- 
 sion, like substance of all worlds, which modern 
 astronomy has proved? From every quarter 
 comes the news of this same unity and sym- 
 pathy and harmony in the make of things. " It 
 thunders all around." A universal solidarity 
 bespeaks a central and abiding Oneness at the 
 heart of things. 
 
 Whether the infinite power, the infinite life, is 
 personal or impersonal, is one of the questions 
 about which those who are least qualified to 
 speak are the most voluble. Can any one of 
 them tell us what personality is? And till they 
 can what right have they to say, *' A god who 
 is not personal is no god at all." The first use 
 
CONCERNING GOD. 105 
 
 of this word person, which is from per and sono 
 and means to sound through, was to designate 
 one sounding through a mask the dramatic 
 situations of some poet's verse. And as in the 
 the great amphitheatre at Athens, the person and 
 poet were sometimes the same, — even Sopho- 
 cles speaking from behind the mask his own 
 majestic words, — so always in this amphitheatre 
 whose circle is the circle of the universe, the 
 person and the poet are one : it is his own poem, 
 neither tragedy nor comedy, but an epic which 
 includes them both, and many a lyric passage 
 of sweetness unimaginable till heard, that the 
 Infinite recites, less, it may be, for our delight 
 than because irresistibly self-stirred to self- 
 expression. But, I am well aware, the sticklers 
 for personality will not be put off with any such 
 metaphor as this. If only we could all agree 
 upon the meaning of personality, there might 
 be less divergence in our thought than there is 
 now. With some a person is an individual, a 
 local deity. Such expect to see God when they 
 die, and to recognize him by his resemblance to 
 
I06 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 the conventional portraiture of Jesus, unaware 
 that this is based upon an antique bust of Plato, 
 which for a long time was supposed to be a 
 bust of Christ. Many who declare that they do 
 not believe in a personal god mean little more 
 than that they do not believe in any such individ- 
 ual god as this in any localized deity. But many 
 who insist that God is personal are far enough 
 from this pathetic puerility. What they mean 
 by personality is conscious mind, or simply 
 mind. The new psychology is making it a 
 little easier for us to conceive of personality in 
 this sense, as universally diffused. It refuses to 
 locate the thinking apparatus solely in the brain. 
 Rather e^very part of us seems to think or at 
 least to be concerned in thinking. 
 
 " Her pure and eloquent blood 
 Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought 
 That one might almost say her body thought." 
 
 So it becomes a little easier to conceive of 
 infinite mind, of infinite thought and will, not 
 here or there, but all-pervading. In this sense, 
 shall we then say that God is personal? Or 
 
CONCERNING GOD. 10/ 
 
 shall we rather say that mind and thought and 
 will and love, all personal words, are the least 
 inadequate symbols that we have, or can have, 
 of the Infinite Power, and try, always, to remem- 
 ber that they are symbols, not exact expressions 
 for that which cannot be expressed ? " God's 
 thoughts are not our thoughts ; neither are his 
 ways our ways." This is a real prophetic word, 
 — prophetic of our wisest modern thought. 
 Only let us not forget what follows : ** For as 
 the heavens are higher than the earth, so are 
 his thoughts higher than our thoughts and his 
 ways than our ways." There are those who 
 seem to think that to deny personality to God is 
 to assert that he is something less than personal. 
 And with the materialist, if there be any such, 
 who really imagines that out of mere dead mat- 
 ter without any God-like energy behind it came 
 this sublime and awful universe, the denial of 
 personality to God may be to affirm that he is 
 something less than personal. But this sort of 
 a materialist is hard to find. He has only a 
 verbal existence. My friend assures me we are 
 
I08 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 looking up over our heads for an explanation 
 which we should look for down under our feet. 
 But no. If matter is the ultimate reality, then 
 matter is not down under our feet, but up over 
 our heads. The less does not produce the 
 greater. There is an infinite element involved 
 in every step of evolution. The ascending series 
 can be accounted for only by supposing a higher 
 than its highest, antecedent to its lowest term. 
 But to deny personality to God is not necessarily 
 to affirm that he is something less than personal. 
 It may be to affirm that he is infinitely more. 
 There are those who think the Infinite altogether 
 such an one as themselves, as Caliban his *' dam's 
 god, Setebos," and such regard with pity and 
 contempt, because they cannot say that God is 
 personal, men who have each one of them reli- 
 gion enough to set up a whole army of their assail- 
 ants. But there are those who cannot say that 
 God is personal, because they dare not apply to 
 the Eternal the limitations of our human per- 
 sonality. Not because they conceive of God as 
 less than personal, but because they conceive of 
 
CONCERNING GOD. 109 
 
 him as infinitely more, do they decline to call 
 him so. If they were sure their words would be 
 accepted as symbolical, then they might say, as I 
 do, that personality is a far better symbol than 
 impersonality of the inexpressible fact. 
 
 But I should do injustice to those who con- 
 tend most wisely and acutely for the idea of 
 infinite personality, if I did not make haste to 
 say that it is possible for these, as well as for 
 their opponents, to afiirm that God is more 
 than personal. To affirm personality is not 
 necessarily to affirm that this designation is 
 exhaustive of the fulness of the infinite life. 
 It is only to affirm that there are manifestations 
 of this Hfe which compel this designation in the 
 absence of a better. There may, at the same 
 time, be other manifestations, incalculably vast, 
 which demand either a different designation, or 
 that silence which is golden. This should not 
 be forgotten. It is, too often, by those who re- 
 fuse to speak of God as personal because he is 
 to them more than personal. He may be more 
 than personal to those who affirm his person- 
 ality with the utmost confidence. 
 
I lO THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 The idea of consciousness, as included in 
 the idea of personahty, is often felt, on the one 
 hand, to be the greatest stumbling-block, and, 
 on the other, to be the most absolute desidera- 
 tum. In the latter case is not the tendency- 
 conspicuous to make the Infinite " altogether 
 such an one as ourselves " ? Yet, though I do 
 not see that the alternative of consciousness is 
 " a blind force," that bugbear of the popular 
 theology, one thing, at least, is certain, — that 
 the non-ability to scientifically discover con- 
 sciousness in the universe is no sign it is not 
 there, nor even a hint that it is not. We are so 
 sure of nothing else as of our own consciousness, 
 and yet what scientific evidence have we of 
 its existence? Not a particle. The saying of 
 Lawrence that his scalpel found no soul in the 
 brain has been thought by would-be atheists a 
 confirmation of La Place's saying that his tele- 
 scope, scanning the whole heavens, found no 
 trace of God. In fact it negatives it altogether. 
 If the scalpel had found a soul, we might perhaps 
 expect the telescope to find a God. The fact 
 
CONCERNING GOD. Ill 
 
 that it has not, while still we know that it exists, 
 establishes a vast presumption in favor of a uni- 
 versal mind. But if an infinite mind, says Du 
 Bois Reymond, then too an infinite brain. Well, 
 one of the atomic philosophers has said that, if 
 we could see the dance of atoms, it would be not 
 unlike the dance of constellations. Whereupon, 
 Mr. Martineau turns round upon Reymond, and 
 says : " If the structure and movement of atoms 
 " do but repeat in little those of the heavens, what 
 " hinders us from inverting the analogy, and say- 
 ** ing that the ordered heavens repeat the rhythm 
 " of the cerebral particles? You need an em- 
 " bodied mind ? Lift up your eyes and look upon 
 " the arch of night as the brow of the Eternal, its 
 '* constellations as the molecules of the universal 
 " consciousness and its ethereal waves as media 
 " of omniscient thought." As an argumentum ad 
 hominem this could not be better, but Mr. Mar- 
 tineau knows as well as anybody that once sure 
 of such a cosmic brain the philosophers would 
 immediately attribute it to " some cosmic mega- 
 therium," not to the great first cause. Doubtless 
 
112 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 if this is conscious, its consciousness like gravi- 
 tation reports itself at every point, and is not 
 central but ubiquitous. Enough that infinite 
 consciousness can never be disproved, and that, 
 if there be no such consciousness, then there is 
 something better, else could it never be in us. 
 
 If it could be generally understood that the 
 language of religion is not scientific but poetical, 
 we might freely make use of various expressions 
 which now it seems almost our duty to avoid ; 
 we might, for example, speak of the creation of 
 the world and of God as the Creator, as naturally 
 as we now speak of the sun's rising and setting, 
 although we know our words entirely fail to rep- 
 resent the fact. " In the beginning God created 
 the heavens and the earth?" Then the begin- 
 ning is not over yet, for he is still at work upon 
 his world. The old doctrine of creation pictured 
 an eternal being, dwelling in loneliness until about 
 six thousand years ago, when suddenly he awoke 
 and became active, created matter out of nothing, 
 and the universe out of matter, and then relapsed 
 again into quiescence. Harried by geologist and 
 
CONCERNING GOD. II3 
 
 astronomer, the expounders of this scheme agreed 
 to interpret liberally the six days of creation, and 
 put back the beginning to some infinitely dis- 
 tant past. But no such concession can relieve 
 the scheme of its essential incoherence and 
 absurdity. Philosophy opposes its incorrigible 
 ex nihilo nihil — nothing from nothing — and 
 science brings a thousand arguments to prove 
 the indestructibility and consequent eternity 
 of matter. The conception of matter as a 
 ** datum objective to God," a finite substance 
 lying over against his infinite, is inconceivably 
 absurd. It but remains for us to consider the 
 material universe as in no sense foreign to God. 
 
 " All are but parts of one stupendous whole, 
 Whose body Nature is, and God the soul." 
 
 If this is Pantheism, it is no worse for being so. 
 For in one form or another Pantheism has always 
 been the doctrine of the most religious souls. 
 The idea of a mechanical Creator coalesces at 
 no single point with this conception. He was 
 supposed to be outside the universe working 
 upon it like a watchmaker at work upon a watch. 
 
114 ^^^ FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 But the watch proves to be so big that there is 
 no room outside of it, no outer darkness. " This 
 thing was not done in a corner." 
 
 " God dwells in all, and moves the world, and moulds, 
 Himself and Nature in one form enfolds." 
 
 This is the new doctrine of creation. Only it 
 is not creation. It is evolution. God is no 
 builder, no architect, no infinite mechanician. A 
 rose upon its stem in June is a more adequate 
 symbol of his unfolding life than any Christopher 
 Wren or Michael Angelo. From within outwards, 
 not from without inwards, is the procession of 
 the Holy Spirit. 
 
 " The flower horizons open, 
 
 The blossom vaster shows, 
 
 We hear the wide worlds echo, 
 * See how the lily grows ! ' " 
 
 Friends, I have kept you long ; and still I have a 
 hundred things to say. But they will keep against 
 another time. The one thing I have tried to do 
 this morning is to clear the god-idea of that ap- 
 pearance of unreality which attaches to its earliest 
 forms ; to show you that at every step the un- 
 
• CONCERNING GOD. II5 
 
 reality inhered not in the essence, but in the ac- 
 cidents of the idea; to show you that, as it has 
 come down to us, it is no mere survival of an 
 ancient superstition, but the legitimate product 
 of men's enraptured recognition of the mysterious 
 Power which manifests itself in all the marvellous 
 uniformities of universal nature and life. Further 
 than this, I have endeavored to turn a ray of light 
 on some of the more prominent questions which 
 are engaging the attention of the more thoughtful 
 persons of our time ; to show you that a purely 
 negative mystery is by no means equal to the 
 proper function of the God-idea, that it can right- 
 fully demand no reverence, inspire no sacred 
 awe, beget no holy trust ; and, finally, to suggest 
 that even such shibboleths as " personality " and 
 *' creation " can be pronounced sibboleth, or re- 
 main quite unspoken, and the protesting mind 
 still entertain the God-idea in a more worthy 
 form than that of its conventional exponents. 
 But, after all that has been said, how infinitesimal 
 it seems in contrast with the supreme idea it has 
 sought to honor ! O God, we thank thee that 
 
Il6 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 our joy and peace and satisfaction and delight 
 in thee are not dependent on our abiHty to speak 
 of thee aright; that deeper than all speech, all 
 thought, the sense abides in us of thy ineffable 
 mystery, thy glorious power, thy steadfast law, 
 thine everlasting faithfulness, thy constant pres- 
 ence, and thy perfect love ! 
 
 " Thy voice is on the rolling air, 
 I hear thee where the waters run, 
 Thou standest in the rising sun, 
 And in the setting thou art fair. 
 
 " What art thou then ? I cannot guess ; 
 But though I seem in star and flower 
 To feel thee, some diffusive power, 
 I do not therefore love thee less. 
 
 « Far off thou art, but ever nigh ; 
 I have thee still and I rejoice : 
 I prosper circled by thy voice ; 
 I shall not lose thee though I die." 
 
 January 19, 1879. 
 
IV. 
 
 CONCERNING IMMORTALITY. 
 
 ^THHE subject of my discourse this mornings 
 has been always and everywhere, almost 
 without exception, one of engrossing interest. 
 The literature of the subject is one of the most 
 convincing evidences of this that can be shown. 
 Some fifteen years ago Professor Ezra Abbot 
 made a list of authors who had treated of the 
 future life, and of their books. It contained 
 between five and six thousand names and titles. 
 The list was necessarily imperfect. Then, too, 
 it was a list of books which still exist. As 
 many more no doubt have sunk into an oblivion 
 deeper than any bibliographer or bibliomaniac 
 can go down. If more had done so. Professor 
 Abbot's list would have been shorter, but the 
 world would not have sufifered by the loss. 
 Again, if Professor Abbot's list had come down 
 
Il8 THE FAITH OF REASON, 
 
 to 1879, it would have contained, perhaps, the 
 names of twice as many authors and books. 
 For never, I imagine, has the subject of Immor- 
 tality been so fruitful of printed discussion as 
 during the last dozen years. And yet, if we 
 could have all the books that have ever been 
 printed on this subject, and all that have not 
 been printed, — doubtless a greater host, — and 
 all the sermons that have been written upon it, 
 and all the poems, like the stars in heaven for 
 multitude, we should still have no adequate ex- 
 ponent of the interest humanity has taken in 
 this theme. For this interest antedates the 
 earliest literary expression by hundreds and 
 thousands of years. Before the invention of the 
 first rude alphabet, a ruder faith in immortality 
 had stirred the savage heart alike with hope 
 and fear. And, since the beginning of man's 
 literary life, hundreds of millions who have 
 never written sermon, or book, or poem, or 
 even one poor word, have through their per- 
 sonal experience of loss and death, been led to 
 wonder what could be the meaning of it all. 
 
CONCERNING IMMORTALITY. 1 19 
 
 One of our modern sculptors has made an Eve 
 and Abel, the ideal mother of humanity con- 
 fronting for the first time the mysterious fact of 
 death embodied in her child. What is the sleep 
 from which no voice can waken ? Science for- 
 bids us to conceive any such newness and sur- 
 prise of death as that. But art has never had a 
 more suggestive theme. The genius of Michael 
 Angelo could not have exhausted it. Yet the 
 last mother would afford him a far better subject 
 than the first. For death is not less wonderful 
 to us than it was to our remotest ancestors. 
 Nay, it is far more wonderful. Even the objec- 
 tive fact is different. That death should be the 
 " end-all " of the primeval savage is conceivable. 
 That it should be the end-all of Shakspere, of 
 Socrates, of Jesus, — that is another matter. 
 But the subjective power of wonder has under- 
 gone an equal if not greater change. And, 
 taking subject and object together, surely never, 
 since thought and death began their great career, 
 has thought confronted death with such a look, 
 — so full of earnest questioning — as that which 
 
I20 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 now half shadows, half irradiates, the solemn 
 beauty of her face. 
 
 But the subject is so closely implicated with 
 men's personal experience, their sorrow for 
 their dead, their individual hopes of a hereafter, 
 in which love shall reunite its broken chain, 
 that there is hardly any task from which the 
 preacher would more willingly be exempt than 
 the subjection of this matter to the impartial 
 tests of reason and science. The multiplication 
 of railroads in China is said to be hopelessly 
 impeded by the veneration of the people for 
 their graves. The engineer cannot cut through 
 them; he must go round them, — a difficult 
 matter in a land so full of graves. A similar 
 difficulty meets the scientific thinker when he 
 would deal with immortality. Somebody's 
 grave is always in the way. Not to go straight 
 ahead is to spoil his science, as for the engi- 
 neer it is to spoil his road. But has he the 
 heart to do it ? Not often, it must be confessed. 
 I have read hundreds of sermons and essays 
 which set out to do so bravely enough, not one 
 
CONCERNING IMMORTALITY. I2I 
 
 of which held straight on to the goal. As Mi- 
 lanion's golden apples arrested Atalanta's flying 
 feet, so here the heart of some poor stricken 
 one, lying there bleeding 'in the way, that must 
 be taken up and stanched and soothed. But 
 they are few who even propose to themselves to 
 apply reason and science to this theme. The 
 majority imagine that it does not come within 
 their sphere, and some who are not of this 
 majority are satisfied with presenting to their 
 hearers a set of reasons for believing in a future 
 life, not one of which has any weight with them^ 
 but which many of their hearers think entirely 
 conclusive, simply because they have never had 
 a doubt. I could do this this morning, and I 
 could do it so adroitly that without committing 
 myself I could give you the impression that to 
 my own mind my set of reasons left nothing to 
 be desired. But some of you would think me 
 easily convinced, and I should think myself one 
 of many who in these latter days defile the 
 preacher's office with their appalling insin- 
 cerity; "liars for God," not all of whom are 
 " orthodox." 
 
122 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 To speak one's frankest word concerning God 
 may be less difficult than to speak it conceriiing 
 immortality. For there are people who if they 
 told you true would rather give up their belief 
 in God than their belief in immortality. It is 
 not that their dread of self-extinction is so 
 great ; but that some one has gone away from 
 them whom they would climb to meet again, if 
 need be, on the ruins of the universe. It is this 
 fact which must make the doctrine ever vener- 
 able. It is the apotheosis of love. Whatever 
 may have been the stronghold of this doctrine 
 in times past, to-day it is the passionate tender- 
 ness of human hearts. It gives back the object 
 of affection. A few may cling to it for other 
 reasons. The majority cling to it for this alone. 
 I know that there are those who allow that this 
 is so, and therefore condemn the doctrine as 
 utterly selfish. Ah, but the good desired, and 
 which this faith assures, is not so much love- 
 getting as love-giving ! It is those who have 
 given the most whose longing after immortality 
 is most intense. Grant that there is nothing 
 
CONCERNING IMMORTALITY. 1 23 
 
 specially religious in such a longing. But there 
 is something eternally beautiful; something 
 which should speak to the most sceptical as 
 they approach it, saying as the god said to 
 Moses in the grand old Hebrew fable, " Take 
 off thy shoes from off thy feet; for the spot 
 whereon thou standest is holy ground.'* 
 
 It is not uncommon in these latter days to 
 hear men speak of immortality as if the doc- 
 trine were essentially ignoble. But, to my 
 mind, even if this doctrine could be shown to 
 have no reasonableness whatever, it would still 
 be, after the thought of God, the brightest 
 crown which has adorned the brows of our 
 humanity in all the past. Whatever else it has 
 been, this doctrine has been the glorious symbol 
 of man's self-respect; presumptuous perhaps, 
 but better this than self-despising. I know 
 well enough that the doctrine is not necessarily 
 noble. A minister of the Established Church of 
 Scotland has recently written, " However differ- 
 ent the representations of heaven, they all agree 
 in representing it as a state of gratified and glori- 
 
124 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 fied selfishness; of blessedness which appeals 
 above all to selfish desire and selfish hope." A 
 sweeping statement this ; too sweeping to be true, 
 and yet with an amount of truth in it that is terri- 
 ble to think of. But let the worst that can be said 
 with truth be said. Let all the meanness, all the 
 superstition, and all the selfishness that have in- 
 hered in this doctrine, be charged against it. 
 What an indictment it would be, and yet how 
 far from exhausting the capacity or the historic 
 significance of this doctrine ! For what has 
 kept the doctrine alive in spite of so much base 
 interpretation is, that it has been the symbol of 
 man's self-respect, self-reverence ; the measure 
 of his awe in the presence of his own intellectual 
 and moral nature ; and of his assurance that love 
 is stronger than death. To represent this doc- 
 trine as necessarily or always selfish and ignoble, 
 is to ignore some of the grandest chapters in 
 the history of human nature. Taken at its 
 worst, in ancient or in modern times, and there 
 is nothing more contemptible than this same 
 doctrine, of selfishness and meanness all com- 
 
CONCERNING IMMORTALITY. 1 25 
 
 pact. But, taken at its best, there is nothing 
 more exalted and exalting. Prove it has no 
 validity whatever, and it is still the peer of any- 
 star that ever sparkled in the firmament of 
 thought. Prove it the grand mistake^ and it is a 
 mistake which reflects more honor on humanity 
 than hundreds of its verifiable truths. 
 
 We are indebted to Frances Power Cobbe, I 
 believe, for the phrase " magnanimous atheism." 
 Corresponding to this phrase, there is a possible 
 reality which may not be ignored. And as 
 there is " magnanimous atheism," so there may 
 be magnanimous doubt and even dogmatic 
 denial of immortahty, whose motto is, 
 
 " Is there no second life ; pitch this one high." 
 
 But as all atheism is not magnanimous, so is 
 not all doubt of immortality or all denial. 
 There are those who plume themselves upon 
 their disbelief, as if it were something very grand 
 and fine to say, ** I do not care to be immortal." 
 But not to care to be immortal argues not great- 
 ness but littleness of mind. The magnanimous 
 
126 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 doubter or denier is the man who does care for 
 it mightily, who resents with all the energy of 
 his mind and heart the indignity of absolute 
 annihilation, but who accepts his fate with 
 courage, because it seems to him a neces- 
 sary part of the beneficent order of the uni- 
 verse. Not care to be immortal? Have you 
 ever thought, have you ever loved, have you 
 ever worshipped, and can yet say this? I do 
 care for it. Prove to me that I have no reason 
 to believe in it or hope for it, and I will bear 
 my fate as best I can. But I can never cease to 
 care for it. 
 
 To give the reasons which men assign for 
 their belief in immortality, is not to account 
 for their belief, — its strength and permanence. 
 Their reasons, for the most part, are not rea- 
 sons, only excuses for an instinctive faith. That 
 there is this instinctive faith is with some minds 
 an argument for it that precludes the need of 
 any other. And so long as this instinctive faith 
 was regarded as a component part of the mind 
 as such, not something acquired, and God was 
 
CONCERNING IMMORTALITY. 12/ 
 
 thought to be the maker of the mind, just as a 
 man is the maker of a watch ; so long it might 
 very naturally be regarded as a proof of the 
 objective reality of the immortal life. But what 
 if the instinctive faith is but the last result of 
 the faith of innumerable ancestors, a faith based 
 upon reasons more or less fanciful? Such is 
 the latest diagnosis of the psychologists. We 
 organically inherit the faiths of the past, but 
 not the reasons of the men of the past for hold- 
 ing these faiths. And not inheriting the reasons, 
 we infer that the instinctive faiths are super- 
 rational; ineradicable factors of the mind as 
 such. Psychology dissipating, this idea, and 
 showing that present instinct is the product of 
 past reason, it becomes the duty of every person 
 who desires to live a rational, not merely an 
 instinctive life, to bring his inherited instincts to 
 the bar of present reason and see what they are 
 worth. If the verdict is unfavorable, the in- 
 stincts may still triumphantly assert themselves, 
 and hence the contradiction of the head and 
 heart noticeable in so many lives. The ma- 
 
128 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 jority are satisfied with an instinctive life. That 
 you are not is evident from your being here. 
 If you are believing yourselves immortal because 
 of some remote ancestor's childish philosophy 
 of sleep and dreams, you want to know it. To 
 wilfully cherish an illusion, known to be such, 
 ^or even suspected of being such, may do for 
 cowards. It will not do for honest and cour- 
 ageous men and women. 
 
 Consider, then, with me some of the reasons 
 which have resulted in the instinctive faith of 
 modern men in immortality. Apparently it was 
 the analogy of sleep and death which first sug- 
 gested to mankind the survival of the soul upon 
 the cessation of the body from its ordinary 
 functions. During the stillness of sleep, the soul 
 was thought to be absent from the body and to 
 waken it on its return. So when death's deeper 
 stillness supervened, the soul was only thought 
 to be away upon a longer journey, and all the 
 care with which the lifeless form was cherished 
 was inspired by the idea that it would some day 
 be occupied again by its former tenant. For so 
 
CONCERNING IMMORTALITY. 1 29 
 
 many thousands of years did men live con- 
 tentedly in this order of ideas that to this day 
 the thought and speech of cultivated men is 
 often a survival of this order in various par- 
 ticulars. But, in view of such an order of ideas, 
 shall we say that the primeval man's conception 
 of himself as having a soul was a pitiful miscon- 
 ception which has been perpetuated to the 
 present time ? Yes his conception of himself as 
 having a soul. This was a misconception. But 
 this misconception was his puerile explanation 
 of the fact that he was a soul : the fact I say, 
 for, if it be not a fact, its not being so yet re- 
 mains to be shown. In his latest utterance, 
 Professor Tyndall has confessed his inability to 
 make any such showing. What the primeval 
 man could not account for — the mystery of 
 consciousness — no more can he. "We have 
 made no step," he says, ** towards its solution." 
 And again, " A mighty mystery still looms, be- 
 fore us, and thus it will ever loom." " It is no 
 " explanation," he continues, ** to say that the 
 " subjective and objective are two sides of one 
 
I30 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 " and the same phenomena. Why should phe- 
 "nomena have two sides? There are plenty of 
 ** molecular motions which do not exhibit this 
 " two-sidedness. Does water think or feel 
 " when it runs into frost ferns upon a window- 
 -pane? If not, why should the molecular mo- 
 ** tions of the brain be yoked to this mysterious 
 " companion consciousness? " 
 
 It was to account for " this mysterious com- 
 panion consciousness " that the primeval man 
 resorted to his crude philosophy of sleep and 
 dreams. It was the analogy of sleep and death 
 which first suggested to him that " this myste- 
 rious companion consciousness" was still ex- 
 istent when it came back no more into its former 
 tenement, looked out no more from the poor 
 sightless eyes. But it is not as if this primitive 
 idea of immortality had not been revised a 
 thousand times since its original genesis. At 
 this remove, it is in vain to try to bring dis- 
 credit on the doctrine by taunting it with the 
 provisional form it first assumed. The deepen- 
 ing of man's self-consciousness insured its con- 
 
CONCERNING IMMORTALITY. 131 
 
 tinuity. What wonder that uncultivated men 
 distinguished sharply between that mystic / and 
 its bodily environment, when even the most 
 searching scrutiny of modern science is totally 
 unable to express consciousness in physical 
 terms ! And certainly, till science can do this, 
 the hope of immortality is indefeasible for those 
 who care to cherish it. 
 
 But a hope is one thing and a dogma is 
 another. The dogma of immortality, as a 
 Christian dogma, rests, with conscious security, 
 upon the fact, or supposed fact, of the resurrec- 
 tion of Jesus from the dead. It has been the 
 habit of the Christian preacher, in the great 
 majority of instances, to insist upon the abso- 
 lute futility of all other evidence, the absolute 
 sufficiency of this. To this day there are Uni- 
 tarian ministers who assure their congregations 
 that if this fails, "The pillared firmament is 
 rottenness and earth's base built on stubble ; " 
 that elsewhere there is not a hint of consolation. 
 If this be s6, the sooner we abandon every hope 
 of immortality the better. Better expect the 
 
132 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 worst, and then, perhaps, be gloriously dis- 
 appointed, than hang our hope upon so fine a 
 thread as Jesus' resurrection. For even if this 
 were an incontestable fact, what would it prove ? 
 Says a Unitarian minister, *' If the body of 
 Jesus should now be found in some Jewish 
 sepulchre, my faith in immortaHty would be 
 gone." The meaning is that then he would be 
 sure it did not ascend up into heaven. But 
 how does the ascension of Jesus into heaven, 
 ** with his flesh and bones," as the Prayer Book 
 of the Church of England boldly but honestly 
 phrases it, argue our bodiless ascent, immedi- 
 ately on the event of death or at some distant 
 resurrection in our rehabilitated flesh? But 
 Jesus was a supernatural being, a god or demi- 
 god or super-angelic or angelic being. How 
 then does his resurrection prove any thing 
 for us? What man has done man may do, but 
 not necessarily what some super-human being 
 may do in virtue of his supernatural power. 
 But even if the fact of Jesus' resurrection were 
 a sufficient proof o/ universal immortality, who 
 
CONCERNING IMMORTALITY. 133 
 
 shall assure us of the fact. The principal docu- 
 ments relating it, the four gospels, made their 
 appearance from seventy-five to one hundred 
 years after the death of Jesus. The different 
 narratives abound in contradictions which no 
 ingenuity can harmonize. Agreeing in such 
 particulars as are natural and easy to believe, 
 they differ in all others. The nearest approach 
 we make to the event is in Paul's account of it 
 in his Epistle to the Corinthians. He relates 
 the different appearances of the risen Jesus, and 
 winds up his testimony, ** And last of all he was 
 seen of me also." So then he did not regard 
 any of the previous appearances as different 
 from that which he had himself enjoyed, which 
 was a manifest hallucination. His vision was 
 unshared by his companions. Such testimony 
 is the ruin of the argument. And yet the 
 resurrection of Jesus has for eighteen centuries 
 been the foundation of the Christian's hope 
 of immortality! Was ever so much believed 
 upon such paltry evidence? Did ever pyra- 
 mid so huge rest on so frail an apex? 
 
134 '^^^ FAITH VF REASON. 
 
 Whatever the resurrection of Jesus might 
 prove, it cannot itself be proved ; and, if proved 
 ever so conclusively, it would only prove that 
 Jesus rose again, not that one other ordinary 
 mortal could do that which he accomplished 
 only in virtue of his supernatural power. 
 Equally inefficacious are the teachings of Jesus 
 on this head, however authoritative they are 
 allowed, to be. There are many passages in the 
 New Testament which assert the immortality of 
 the believer. There is hardly one which asserts 
 the natural and universal immortality of man. 
 The nearest approach to such an assertion as- 
 cribed to Jesus is the merest verbal quibble 
 which, let us hope, he never uttered. The Sad- 
 ducees denied the resurrection, and Jesus is rep- 
 resented as confounding them with the Old 
 Testament phrase *' the God of Abraham and 
 Isaac and Jacob." If he is the God of these, 
 they must be still alive or destined to revive, 
 " for God is not the God of the dead, but the 
 God of the living." Thjs is the sort of argu- 
 ment that was convincing eighteen hundred 
 
CONCERNING IMMORTALITY. 1 35 
 
 years ago ! But even if Jesus had affirmed the 
 natural and universal immortality of man a 
 hundred times in unmistakable language, his 
 affirmation would not prove any thing but his 
 belief. If we can trust the record, he believed 
 in demoniacal possession, in a personal devil, 
 in a literal, fiery hell. The genius of Jesus was 
 not intellectual, but moral. He accepted the 
 doctrines current in his time, and made them 
 the vehicles of his enthusiasm for righteousness. 
 We are not called on to believe any thing upon 
 his ipse dixit. And, if we were, we cannot be 
 certain that he said one single thing that is as- 
 cribed to him in the New Testament. 
 
 The instinctive or intuitive belief of men in 
 immortality, inside of Christendom, has rested 
 almost entirely on the resurrection of Jesus and 
 the assumption of his authoritative teaching. 
 To the extent that it has done so, the intuition 
 is discharged of all validity. It makes no differ- 
 ence that the modern intuition is not consciously 
 based on these foundations. If a child is not 
 legitimately born, his ignorance of his parentage 
 
136 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 does not make him any more legitimate. The 
 intuition being thus discredited by the explana- 
 tion of its genesis and growth, and the direct 
 argument from the resurrection or the teachings 
 of Jesus proving, at the same time, worthless, 
 what other arguments are there to take the 
 place of this? Christian theology has for the 
 most part denied that there are any, in order 
 thus to enhance the reverence of men for its 
 peculiar dogma. But there have always been 
 some Christian theologians who have been 
 pleased to think of Christianity as a republica- 
 tion of natural religion. Such have been glad 
 to fortify their supernatural position with out- 
 works of natural reason. And there have 
 always been still wiser men than these, whom the 
 apparent insufficiency of the supernatural has 
 compelled to seek for other and more satisfac- 
 tory arguments. Let us consider some of these. 
 One is that the soul is immaterial, and there- 
 fore cannot perish. In such an argument, there 
 is nothing worth considering. Who told you that 
 no immaterial thing can perish? And are you 
 
CONCERNING IMMORTALITY. l^y 
 
 absolutely certain that the soul is immaterial? 
 An astonishing syllogism this, in which the 
 major and the minor premises are equally as- 
 sumptions pure and simple. If only we were 
 certain that the soul is a material substance, 
 then indeed we might be certain of its in- 
 destructibility. But if it is a material substance, 
 as some have ingeniously argued, this substance 
 has so far eluded all investigation. 
 
 Another argument for immortality is based 
 on the universality of the belief in it. But the 
 behef in it is not universal, and the only un- 
 believers are not, as was once assumed, the 
 idiots. Huxley and Tyndall and Morley are 
 several removes from idiocy. And there are 
 hundreds who have nearly as much intellect as 
 these and quite as little faith. And there are 
 other breaks in the chain of universality much 
 more significant than these, involving the ab- 
 sence of this belief, at least in any vital form, 
 from mighty populations. But even if there 
 were not a single break in it, even if the belief 
 were absolutely universal, I do not see that it 
 
138 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 would prove the fact. Did not men universally 
 believe for thousands of years that the sun went 
 round the earth, while all the time the earth 
 was going round the sun? "Whom God de- 
 ceives are well deceived," said Goethe; which 
 I interpret that the universal misconceptions of 
 humanity are necessary steps in the evolution 
 of intelligence, and so do not impeach the san- 
 ity or integrity of the universal order. 
 
 Another argument for immortality closely 
 allied with this from universal belief is that 
 from universal desire. 
 
 " Whatever crazy sorrow saith, 
 No life that breathes with human breath 
 Has ever truly longed for death. 
 
 " Tis life whereof our nerves are scant, 
 O life, not death, for which we pant, 
 More life, and fuller, that I want." 
 
 It may be so, although the Buddhist longing for 
 Nirvana is a remarkable chapter in the book 
 of universal desire for immortality. But the 
 Buddhist longing for Nirvana, which was as 
 near as might be to annihilation, was no doubt 
 
CONCERNING IMMORTALITY, 139 
 
 the outcome of intolerable social conditions. 
 Such have often resulted in a passionate desire 
 for immortality. Apparently the conditions of 
 Hindu life were so intolerable that the victim 
 could not conceive of any life that would be 
 worth the having. But even if the desire for 
 immortality were universal, I do not see that 
 this would prove the fact anymore than would 
 a universal belief. It is easy enough to say with 
 Fourier, "The attractions are proportioned to 
 the destinies." But every man of us has proved 
 the falsity of this in his own personal experi- 
 ence. The desire for immortality, if universal, 
 might still be only the ideal exponent of the 
 universal instinct of self-preservation, — here 
 rendered more intense by the satisfactions, and 
 there by the disabilities of the present life. 
 
 Another argument is from the need of immor- 
 tality, not the felt need^ which is equivalent to 
 the desire which we have just considered. 
 Light for the eye because it needs it, air for the 
 lungs because they need it, and so immortality 
 for the soul because it needs it. But in our 
 
140 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 new philosophy it is the Hght that builds the 
 eye; the air that builds the lungs. Is it the 
 immortality that builds the soul? Sure of the 
 need of immortality, and it would indeed imply 
 a radical defect in the divine order for there to 
 be no provision for such a need. But if you 
 are going to prove the need of immortality, you 
 must go much deeper than these analogies of 
 light and air. 
 
 Men say that it is needed for the reward and 
 punishment of deeds done in the body. But, 
 to my thinking, all such deeds are adequately 
 punished and rewarded here and now. Still 
 there are times when there appears to be no 
 outward retribution, when evil courses do not 
 seem to mar the body's strength; when the 
 dishonest man goes unsuspected, and the honest 
 man is unjustly suspected and condemned. 
 Why but because the reward of every good or 
 evil action is immediate. *' Blessed are they who 
 are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs 
 is the kingdom of heaven." Is now, not will 
 be by and by. So far is this assigned relation 
 
CONCERNING IMMORTALITY. 141 
 
 between immortality and virtue from being an 
 argument for the former, that it is the greatest 
 evil which it has to answer for. It has de- 
 moralized morality. It has prevented men's 
 
 * pursuing virtue virtuously.* It has infected 
 goodness with ulterior greed. It is a monstrous 
 thing to say that, if there is no other life, then 
 this can be degraded without blame. 
 
 " Hath man no second life ? pitch this one higV 
 
 • The purest sanction and the grandest inspira- 
 tion of morality is the necessity which is laid 
 upon us by our innumerable benefactors, in 
 the past and present, of doing what we can to 
 make life sane and sweet for those around us 
 and those who will come after us. 
 
 Another argument for immortality is the in- 
 equality of human conditions. Scriptural say- 
 ings are not wanting in support of such an 
 argument, " Go to, ye rich men, weep and howl, 
 for you have received your consolation." " Now 
 Lazarus is comforted, and you. Dives, are tor- 
 mented." The New Testament idea is that. 
 
142 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 under the new regime, the poor of this world 
 are going to be rich, and vice versa. Hence 
 voluntary poverty with a view to being a celes- 
 tial millionnaire. This formerly, but latterly 
 voluntary poverty is infrequent. Men prefer 
 being millionnaires now, and risking " the sweet 
 by and by." Is the equality of human fortunes 
 in another life any more desirable than their 
 reversal? Is the inequality here so great as is 
 imagined ? I would not change with any living 
 Vanderbilt or Stewart. It may be yonder scav- 
 enger would not if he could get inside their 
 inner consciousness. Again, of human ine- 
 quality how much is the result of strenuous 
 well-doing on the one hand; of neglect upon 
 the other? But there is real inequality for 
 which the victim is not consciously or actually 
 responsible. Yes ; but it is no proof of immor- 
 tality. If the unseen power is such a power 
 that it can permit inequality here, why not else- 
 where? It may be the defect of his excellence. 
 It may be, it is, an incident of social evolution, 
 a temporary maladjustment, which, so far as 
 
CONCERNING IMMORTALITY. 1 43 
 
 need be, the wisdom of the coming genera- 
 tions will correct. 
 
 I am aware that a complete survey of the 
 arguments by which the modern mind sustains 
 its faith in immortality ought to include the 
 remarkable development called Spiritualism, 
 which has been so conspicuous within the last 
 five and twenty years. Within the boundaries 
 of Christendom, it can be safely said there is no 
 faith in immortality so strong and glad as that 
 of the Spiritualist. His other life is an extension 
 of the present, with its attendant occupations 
 and delights. While the average Christian faith 
 is conventional, the Spiritualist's is thoughtful. 
 His thought may not be always logical ; but it is 
 thought, and not mere acquiescence. He means 
 it shall be scientific. And if he has been treated 
 scornfully by many scientific men, he has con- 
 verted others, — not a few ; among them, Alfred 
 Wallace, the co-discoverer with Darwin of the 
 principle of natural selection, the peer of any 
 scientist now living. Of such a development as 
 this, the epithets of Carlyle, ** ultra-materialism, 
 
144 ^^^ FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 ultra-brutalism," are not exhaustive, whatever 
 elements inhere in it to which these epithets 
 belong. 
 
 I do not speak from personal experience, but 
 I believe that Spiritualism has developed certain 
 wonderful phenomena, for which the evidence 
 is a thousand times as strong as for any New 
 Testament wonder. But between these phe- 
 nomena and the affirmation that they are caused 
 hy disembodied spirits, the gulf is one I cannot 
 leap, for it is simply infinite. In the absence of 
 other known causes of phenomena, to predicate 
 spiritual intervention seems to me precisely on 
 a par with the proceedings of the prehistoric 
 man, who posited a ghost as the efficient cause 
 of every thing he could not otherwise explain. 
 Until we have sounded the abyss of man's in- 
 telligence, and mapped out all the possible 
 relations of mind with mind, we have no right 
 to predicate an unknown agent. So much is 
 evidently the mere reflection of the seeker's 
 mind upon the medium's, or the discoloration of 
 the medium's own, that the anticipation that all 
 
CONCERNING IMMORTALITY, 1 45 
 
 may be one of these things or the other is not 
 irrational. Messages claiming to be from my 
 departed friends have frequently been brought 
 to me. I know they never came from them. 
 They have not the accent of their individuality. 
 If they have fallen so from their original estate, 
 I could desire their death had been complete 
 annihilation. ** If these reports are true," says 
 Mr. Emerson, " we must invent a more definite 
 suicide," something that will be equally fatal to 
 mind and body. I would give as much as any 
 one to really hear from my lost friends, but I 
 must not fool myself into mistaking the echo of 
 my voice, or any go-between's, for their celestial 
 talk. 
 
 The Swedenborgian doctrine is the oligarchic, 
 autocratic counterpart of Spiritualism, which is 
 essentially democratic. The Swedenborgians 
 hate the Spiritualists more than they do the 
 sceptics, because they have questioned their 
 monopoly. But there is as good evidence that 
 a thousand spiritualist mediums have been mtro- 
 mitted into the spiritual world, as that Sweden- 
 
146 THE FAITH OF REASON, 
 
 borgwas so intromitted. And so the evidence 
 of the spiritualist revelation is a thousand times 
 as good as that of the Swedenborgian. On the 
 other hand, the ethical wisdom of Swedenborg 
 is much superior to any which Spiritualism has 
 yet developed, to my knowledge. It is here that 
 Swedenborg cannot be too highly praised. But 
 when he talks of heaven, all is so stupid and 
 mechanical that to invent a method of annihi- 
 lation would be the sole enthusiasm and relief 
 of its unhappy population. 
 
 The Spiritualist and Swedenborgian frequently 
 plead the comfort of their views as a ground of 
 their validity. Here is no argument ; rather a 
 bribe. If I were sure that comfort is the chief 
 end of man, then it would be an argument. 
 But I am not sure of this ; no one is sure of it. 
 Nor do I want a world with so much comfort in 
 it that there is no room for courage, none for 
 simple endurance, since without the opportunity 
 for these humanity would shrivel to a fraction 
 of its present amplitude. That a doctrine is 
 comforting cannot prove that it is true in such 
 
CONCERNING IMMORTALITY. 1 47 
 
 a world as this, where the unseen power is not al- 
 ways soft with us, but sometimes stern enough. 
 As with special forms, so with the general doc- 
 trine : its truth has been inferred from its com- 
 fortable aspect. I find a better argument for it 
 in the fact that men have clung to it in spite of 
 any lack of comfort. For, taken all the way 
 through, not comfort, but lack of comfort, has 
 been its most conspicuous quality. Than the 
 assumption that the doctrine of immortality has 
 always been pre-eminently comforting, nothing 
 could be more unwarranted. Taken through 
 all its course, its terrors have a thousand times 
 outweighed its charms. . It is only within the 
 present century that it has assumed that senti- 
 mental form which makes it seem so comforting. 
 But to this day, for the deeply thoughtful, it has 
 certain aspects so painful that it sometimes 
 appears to them a doubtful good, and more 
 desirable the lot 
 
 " Of happy men that have the power to die." 
 
 So far I have had a most ungracious office 
 
148 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 laid upon me : to convict one after another of 
 the popular arguments for immortality of insuffi- 
 ciency. It would have been vastly pleasanter 
 to find each one of them sufficient by itself, and 
 all of them together overwhelmingly so. Was 
 never assurance of immortality more strong, 
 was never dream of it more beautiful, than the 
 assurance and the dream I would have built for 
 you out of these popular arguments, if they 
 would have borne their own weight, and lent 
 each other a little mutual support. And it may 
 be that I have undervalued them. The temp- 
 tation to overvalue them is so strong that, in 
 attempting to resist this, I may have erred upon 
 the other side. But better so than give you 
 doubtful reasons. If we suspect a leak in our 
 ship's hold, let us not walk her sunny deck in 
 feigned security. Let us go down into her hold, 
 and rummage there, and see what is the matter. 
 First, last, and always, let us know the facts. 
 Once known, we can, I am persuaded, adjust 
 ourselves to them in some creditable manner. 
 But to cherish an illusion is to forfeit that self- 
 
CONCERNING IMMORTALITY. 149 
 
 respect which is the good man's best estate, the 
 fountain of his purest consolation. 
 
 Let us know the facts. But there are other 
 facts than those involved in our destructive 
 criticism of the popular intuition and its argu- 
 mentative supports. First of all, there is this 
 stupendous fact of consciousness, of personality. 
 This I have said already is the indefeasible basis 
 of our hope of immortality. Here it is; and 
 science, in the person of her most '* vigorous 
 and rigorous " hierophant, declares that she has 
 made no step towards the solution of its mys- 
 tery. That this consciousness has somehow 
 emerged from matter, science is confident; but 
 of the manner of this emergence she does not 
 presume to speak. It is as inconceivable in the 
 brain as it would be in a grape-vine or a piece 
 of granite. But here it is; of all things the 
 most indubitable. What a stupendous marvel is 
 here: matter becoming conscious of itself; in- 
 terpreting the universe, thinking God's thoughts 
 after him ! What does it show if not that life 
 and thought were somehow resident in matter 
 
I50 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 from the first? Else how emerged ? It is super- 
 fluous to say that science cannot predicate the 
 destruction of " this mysterious companion " 
 with the dissolution of the body. That which 
 she cannot express in any physical term, that 
 which she cannot connect with any function of 
 the body or the brain, is absolutely safe from 
 her destroying^ hand. If she cannot affirm its 
 superiority to the accident of death, no more 
 can she deny it. And in this inability we have 
 the negative condition of a boundless hope for 
 all who wish to cherish it. 
 
 To this negative condition let us see what can 
 be added. This positive condition first of all: 
 the persistency in some form of this force of 
 personality. It may be dissipated, but it cannot 
 be destroyed. Whether it is matter or force, 
 this is equally certain. Now then, suppose a 
 Shakspere, tired of the life of the metropolis, 
 having made a snug fortune, which he is pleas- 
 antly conscious of, and a fame world-wide and 
 century-enduring, which he is hardly conscious 
 of at all, goes back to Stratford with the hope 
 
CONCERNING IMMORTALITY. 151 
 
 of living there a quiet, comfortable life, when 
 suddenly some malady swoops down upon him : 
 he dies, and his dust is stored away under the 
 little church in which he meant to be a decent 
 worshipper. Shall we follow the fortunes of the 
 body with the eye of the imagination, hoping 
 to find in any intimation what became of that, 
 in certain gases, certain growths of vegetable 
 and animal life, a sufficient conservation of the 
 energy that could produce the mirth of Falstaff, 
 the tenderness of Cordelia, the fascinating love- 
 liness of Juliet, the graver charm of the much- 
 suffering Desdemona, the doubt of Hamlet, and 
 the awful tragedy of Lear? To think of such a 
 thing is to confute it. But, if the conservation 
 of energy be indeed a law, if it runs all the way 
 through the world of matter and of spirit, the 
 force which constituted Shakspere's soul must 
 somehow be conserved. And for such conser- 
 vation we cannot be put off with any immortality 
 of fame, or influence, or affection, or social per- 
 petuity. There is nowhere here any sufficient 
 conservation of the energy that was still vital in 
 
152 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 the poet when disease and death arrived. All 
 this had been provided for, and still the mighty- 
 intellect remained. And, in one form or another, 
 it must remain unto this day; else is there no 
 law of the conservation of energy. 
 
 But the conservation of energy does not sig- 
 nify its continuous identity. The energy is 
 oftenest conserved by transmutation. The heat 
 becomes motion or the motion heat. To our 
 indefeasible negative ground of hope we have 
 then added only so much of a positive element 
 as is suggestive of the persistency of the force 
 embodied in our consciousness. But if this 
 force should suffer such a transmutation as 
 that of heat into motion, there would be no 
 resumption of our conscious, individual life 
 beyond the grave. Is there, then, any positive 
 element suggestive of the continuous identity 
 and self-consciousness of the individual soul? 
 There is; and it inheres in the perception 
 of the fact that in man, the highest product 
 of natural selection, begins a process of vol- 
 untary selection, of conscious self-improvement, 
 
CONCERNING IMMORTALITY. 153 
 
 and of conscious devotion to the progressive 
 tendency of the universal order. Can you 
 conceive that when the eternal Power has, as 
 the last result of millions of years of patient 
 evolution, fashioned a being, who can echo 
 his own wonderful I AM, who can be a con- 
 scious fellow-laborer with him in carrying on 
 the sweep of evolution to still grander heights, 
 he should be so unthrifty as to resolve this 
 being back again into unconsciousness? The 
 words are anthropomorphic, but the thought is 
 not necessarily so. I am reminded of those 
 wonderful words of the apostle, " The earnest 
 e>^pectation of the creation longeth for the mani- 
 festation of the sons of God." Good science 
 that ! Good evolution ! And when this mani- 
 festation has at length been consummated, I dare 
 believe that Nature will somehow secure her 
 work, henceforth her conscious workman, against 
 any loss of that which is the crown of her re- 
 joicing. " The mighty energy that is enwrapped 
 ** in the human will, the indomitable sense of 
 " duty that tramples down tempting pleasures, 
 
154 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 " and impels man to conflict and self-sacrifice 
 " for the right, the wealth of love that he lavishes 
 " and that no limit of years exhausts, the un- 
 ** satisfied spirit within him, for ever peering 
 " over the barriers of knowledge in search of 
 " new realms of truth : — as these testify to a 
 " past eternity which has been used in producing 
 " them, so do they point forward to a future 
 " eternity, which they are to use as conscious 
 " creative forces in the universe of God." ^ 
 
 Another positive element in support and 
 confirmation of our indefeasible hope inheres 
 in the concomitance of such a hope with all that 
 is most beautiful and noble in our intellectual 
 and moral life. For in the natural order of 
 events I hold that nothing is more certain than 
 that the hope of immortality is organized in us 
 more definitely by every higher thought, or 
 nobler act, or purer purpose of our lives. It is 
 not as if we went about deliberately to make 
 our hope more eager, but it is made more eager 
 in the natural order of our lives, just in pro- 
 
 1 Rev. William J. Potter. 
 
CONCERNING IMMORTALITY. 155 
 
 portion as we seek great ends, live for the im- 
 perishable things of truth and righteousness. 
 Can it be possible that there is "such a contra- 
 diction at the inmost heart of things, that every 
 higher thought, or nobler act, or purer purpose, 
 tends to immerse us deeper in a terrible illusion? 
 Are not a thousand and ten thousand voices of 
 science blending to assert the solidarity of 
 universal nature and life? Can there be con- 
 tradiction and confusion only here where life 
 reaches its highest level, or must there be some 
 " pre-established harmony " between our hope 
 and some sublime reality? If the almost in- 
 variable concomitant of the noblest living is 
 this glorious hope, then unless Nature is divided 
 against herself, does not this almost invariable 
 concomitance suggest with overwhelming seri- 
 ousness that the same power which organizes 
 in us the purest splendors of our thought and 
 love organizes in us the hope of an immortal 
 life, in which these splendors shall go on and 
 on from glory to glory. Here is an element 
 so positive in confirmation of our hope that at 
 
156 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 times it seems to me to have the force of scien- 
 tific demonstration. 
 
 But let us keep clearly within bounds. " No 
 demonstration, but a hope/' says Dr. Bartol. It 
 is best so. It must be if God is good, or, as 
 the agnostic might prefer to phrase it, if the 
 universe is sane. If demonstration had been 
 best, then demonstration woyld have been the 
 order of the day. **No demonstration, but a 
 hope." But once sure of our hope, once sure 
 that it is indefeasible, as we can be negatively 
 from the total inability of science to express our 
 consciousness in physical terms, and positively, 
 because all force is indestructible, because nat- 
 ural selection becomes voluntary in us, and 
 because this hope is the almost invariable con- 
 comitant of our highest spiritual life, — once sure 
 of our hope and we can leave it free to be ex- 
 panded, purified, ennobled by all our various 
 intellectual and moral and affectional life. The 
 more wonderful the realization of this hope 
 appears to us, the more reasonable will it appear 
 at the same time ; such being the average make 
 
CONCERNING IMMORTALITY. 1 57 
 
 of things, that the more wonderful any thing is, 
 so it be truly wonderful, the more likely is it to 
 be true. We need not go about to nurse the 
 fibre of our hope with wilful energy. We have 
 only to live a rich and full and loving and har- 
 monious life, and every stream from every 
 height will swell this rushing river, and fertilize 
 its banks with tenderer and more fragrant 
 flowers. Reading great books, hearing great 
 music, seeing great pictures, it will seem quite 
 impossible to us that the creators of these things 
 should not outlast their works. But these 
 achieve a sort of immortality, as members of 
 " the choir invisible, whose music is the glad- 
 ness of the world." Shakspere and Homer are 
 more alive and regnant now than when they 
 were in the body, thanks to their literary monu- 
 ments. But you and I have known men and 
 women, the latchets of whose sandals Homer 
 and Shakspere were not worthy to unloose: 
 they were so pure and true. They leave behind 
 them neither books nor paintings, but none the 
 less our hope of immortality is nourished at 
 the stainless fount of their immeasurable con- 
 
158 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 secration. We cannot make them dead. We 
 stand beside their silent forms and look upon 
 their faces. How like our friends, and yet how 
 infinitely different ! Where is that " mysterious 
 companion " whose absence makes this infinite 
 difference? We cannot say, but standing there, 
 our hope that somehow, somewhere, it survives, 
 a conscious individual life, receives immense 
 acceleration. I say not that at such times I am 
 certain of immortality. But what I say is, that 
 at such times \feel as certain of it as of my own 
 existence. I have known men and women whose 
 real death was an unthinkable proposition; as 
 much so as a square circle or the meeting of 
 two parallel lines. Might not our own be so to 
 us, if we should live the truest and divinest life 
 we know? 
 
 Doubtless to some of you the hope for which 
 I plead will seem a thin and colorless abstrac- 
 tion. But so that you do not forget that you 
 are hoping, not affirming, you can fill out my 
 meagre outline as completely as you choose, 
 and your hope will have the same validity that 
 any imaginative presentation of the other world 
 
CONCERNING IMMORTALITY. 1 59 
 
 has ever had. For every such presentation has 
 been without authority. Shall we meet our 
 friends? Shall we know them? Shall we be 
 with them? Religious sentiment has answered 
 all these questions according to our heart's 
 desire. But the answers are without any war- 
 rant of the Bible or the creeds. Not a syllable 
 did Jesus lisp concerning any of these things. 
 Only remember that you are hoping, not 
 affirming, and you may hope as bravely as you 
 like; ay, even as I do, that 
 
 " sudden the worst turns the best to the brave ; 
 
 The black minute's at end, 
 And the elements' rage, and the voices that rave, 
 
 Shall dwindle, shall blend. 
 Shall change, shall become first a peace, then a joy, 
 
 Then a light, then thy breast, 
 O thou soul of my soul ! I shall clasp thee again, 
 
 And with God be the rest ! " 
 
 And yet I would that all of us might hold 
 our hope of immortality in strict subordination 
 to our faith in the eternal Power who worketh 
 all things well. The ideal attitude is reached 
 when we can say in our Gethsemanes of lone- 
 liness and grief, when we have hoped our hope 
 
l60 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 of immortality with the utmost tenderness and 
 passion of our souls, " Nevertheless not as I 
 will, but as Thou wilt." Our relation to the 
 idea of immortality reaches its highest form, 
 its purest possible religiousness, when it arrives 
 at this. This is the supreme self-sacrifice. 
 The depth of our desire measures the height 
 of our self-abnegation. Well may our barks 
 sink, if to this deeper sea ! When, hope as you 
 will, you can trust every thing to the Eternal, 
 then does the peace that passes understanding 
 overflow your heart with its ineffable serenity. 
 And can you not trust every thing to him when 
 you consider all the ordered beauty and benefi- 
 cence of his manifest life? Hope then, dear 
 friends, as grandly as you will, but still more 
 grandly trust. 
 
 " We men, who in our morn of youth defied 
 The elements, must vanish. Be it so ! 
 Enough if something from our hands have power 
 To live and act and serve the future hour ; 
 And if, as toward the silent tomb we go, 
 Through love, through hope, and faith's transcendent dower. 
 We feel that we are greater than we knew.''' 
 
 January 26, 1879. 
 
CONCERNING PRAYER. - 
 
 TT 7HETHER the function of prayer is an 
 obsolete superstition, or still adequate 
 in one form or another to the demands of sci- 
 entific truth and rational religion, is a question 
 of such serious and almost painful import that 
 one does not approach it without hesitation and 
 anxiety, lest he should think or speak of it mis- 
 leadingly. But it is a question which is en- 
 grossing so largely the attention of the more 
 thoughtful part of every civilized community, 
 that the teacher of religion is hardly permitted 
 to excuse himself from speaking of it to his 
 habitual congregation in such fashion as he 
 may. Meantime the great majority of religious 
 people. Christian and others, are not afflicted 
 with any doubt or hesitation in regard to this 
 important matter. A perfect confidence in the 
 
1 62 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 efficacy of prayer is the prevailing mood; aiid 
 between objects for which it is admissible to 
 pray and objects for which it is not, the average 
 mind makes no distinction. Material commodi- 
 ties and spiritual benefits jostle each other in 
 the petitions of the devout believer ; the former 
 coming in for their full share of urgency, es- 
 pecially if we reckon under this head, as in 
 strict propriety we should, the comforts and 
 felicities of a prospective state of being. And 
 if the ultimate test of any form of creed or con- 
 duct is the warrant of antiquity, and particularly 
 of that segment of antiquity which is reported 
 in the Jewish and early Christian scriptures 
 included in the Bible, then it must be confessed 
 that all the argument is on the side not only of 
 prayer, but of prayer in every possible form, for 
 every conceivable object. There is no selfish- 
 ness or crudity or indelicacy or mechanism or 
 audacity of modern prayer which cannot find 
 some prototype in the most ancient times, in 
 the Bible or out of it, and in the theory and 
 practice of the most conspicuous teachers of 
 
CONCERNING PRAYER. 1 63 
 
 religion. The earliest prayers of which we have 
 any knowledge are frank requests for grain and 
 cattle, for a numerous progeny, — now seldom 
 prayed for* or desired, — for success in war and 
 rapine, for defence against disease and poverty 
 and death. Oftenest the prayer was a propitia- 
 tion of a malicious or offended deity, or an 
 attempt to bribe one deity to interfere and 
 thwart the malevolent intentions of another. 
 In Homer and Virgil, the suppliants are on the 
 alert to get the strongest god upon their side. 
 To this end, they coax him and flatter him, 
 appeal to his pride, threaten him, and so on. 
 In the same way, the gods pray to each other. 
 We see Jupiter and his ox-eyed Juno arrayed 
 on different sides, haggling with and plotting 
 against each other. Where, as among the 
 Hebrews, polytheism had a tribal root, there 
 was the same endeavor to engage the help of 
 the most potent deity. And Jacob vowed a 
 vow saying, " If Jehovah will be with me and 
 will keep me in this way that I go, and will give 
 me bread to eat and raiment to put on, then 
 
l64 THE FAITH OF REASON, 
 
 shall Jehovah be my God." The spirit here 
 evinced is that of the free and independent 
 voter determined to cast his vote for that can- 
 didate who will pay the most for it. The 
 worshipper is resolved to put his prayer, as 
 the congressman his money, where it will do 
 the most good. We find Moses sayiilg to Je- 
 hovah substantially, " Shame on you ! what will 
 the gods of the other nations and their retainers 
 think of you, if you do thus and so?" There 
 was once a New England farmer who affirmed 
 that he had prayed in the corner of every lot 
 upon his many-acred farm, — prayed that the 
 Lord would punish his enemies. A great many 
 of the Old Testament prayers are of this sort. 
 The psalms especially abound in them. " Elias 
 prayed earnestly that it might not rain, and it 
 did not rain for the space of three years and six 
 months." The prayer of Elijah brought down 
 fire from heaven to burn wood and to lick up 
 water. In the New Testament it is written, 
 "All things whatsoever ye ask in prayer, be- 
 lieving, ye shall receive." That is very com- 
 
CONCERNING PRAYER. 1 65 
 
 prehensive. Of course the word " believing " 
 furnishes a convenient loop-hole for the modern 
 pietist to back out of. When the prayer is not 
 answered, we are assured it is because of un- 
 belief. So with James's assertion, " The prayer 
 of faith shall, save the sick, and the Lord shall 
 raise him up." Within a few years, there have 
 been legal proceedings against a sect in Eng- 
 land called the Peculiar People, who practised 
 this method as a substitute for medical treat- 
 ment. Again, it is promised in the New Testa- 
 ment, " If two of you shall agree on earth, as 
 touching any thing they shall ask, it shall be 
 done for them by my father who is in heaven." 
 Hence the concentric fire of prayers at stated 
 seasons. Hence the suggestion, a few years 
 ago, that all the churches should pray for the 
 appearance of a fiery cross in heaven on a cer- 
 tain night, in attestation of the truth of certain 
 dogmas of religion. The longer-headed has- 
 tened to prevent such an arrangement. But the 
 logic of the situation entirely justified it. Prayer 
 and the dogma being what men claim, the deity 
 
1 66 THE FAITH OF REASON, 
 
 would have been in honor bound to make the 
 cruciform display. Once more, we have in the 
 New Testament the parable of the unjust judge, 
 who, though he would not hear the woman 
 because of the justice of her cause, did finally 
 hear her '' because of her importunity." Here 
 is the Biblical excuse for the persistent praying 
 of the modern pietist, for the idea that God can 
 be tired out and compelled to give in if the 
 petitioner does not give out. • 
 
 Said I not truly, then, that if the ultimate test 
 of any form of creed or conduct is the warrant 
 of antiquity, and particularly the warrant of the 
 Bible, there is no boldness or crudity or mech- 
 anism or audacity of modern prayer that can- 
 not find this warrant? Let us say it frankly: 
 The man who does not go behind the Bible, who 
 does not feel at liberty to question any state- 
 ment it contains, to whom it is the final court 
 of appeal, who regards its every verse and 
 chapter as the direct inspiration of the Al- 
 mighty, — such a man is perfectly consistent in 
 praying for any temporal commodity, for the 
 
CONCERNING PRAYER. 16/ 
 
 suspension of any physical law, in arranging 
 such a concentric fire against the stony heart of 
 God as shall break down its walls of adamant, 
 and enable the besieging army to rush in and 
 rifle all the treasure of its love, and drench itself 
 with all the wine of its dear pity. Such a man 
 has not only Bible warrant for these modes of 
 prayer, he has the warrant of the universal 
 Christian tradition. Montalembert, a most learned 
 and pious Roman Catholic, says that prayer is 
 stronger than omnipotence. It can compel 
 God. He cannot resist the entreaties of his 
 saints. There is a remarkable passage in the 
 writings of Martin Luther, in which his prayers 
 and their successful outcome are described in 
 the terms of a tremendous physical encounter, 
 in which, having got uppermost, he, Luther, 
 pummels his antagonist until he cries for mercy, 
 and promises to concede every thing that is 
 asked for. Of late, the air has rung with blas- 
 phemies ; but no approach has yet been made to 
 this appalling illustration of the invincibility of 
 prayer. 
 
1 68 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 But it win be allowed, at least by all Protes- 
 tants, that, were the Bible, warrant wanting, these 
 later manifestations would not be of much ac- 
 count. The Bible warrant is the stronghold of 
 the .popular philosophy of prayer. If we cannot 
 go behind the Bible, if there is no higher court 
 of reason to which we may appeal from its posi- 
 tions, if it is proper to regard it as literally and 
 infallibly the word of God, — then is the popular 
 philosophy of prayer worthy of all acceptance 
 and of the freest application. 
 
 But these ifs are tremendous. You all know 
 very well -that the Bible has a natural history, 
 and that this natural history is such as to bring 
 every doctrine it contains to the bar of reason 
 and discredit it if a verdict of " not true " is 
 rendered there. It is no longer permissible for 
 any intelligent person to engage in any line of 
 conduct or belief simply and only because it 
 has Biblical warrant, seeing that for the most 
 part we are ignorant as to when the different 
 parts of the Bible were written, and by whom 
 they were written. Manifestly, it is a gratuitous 
 
CONCERNING PRAYER, 169 
 
 Stultification of one's self to accord to writings 
 of this description any other authority than they 
 possess in virtue of their intrinsic rationality. 
 For the same reason, we should let no reverence 
 for the personal character of Jesus, or zeal for 
 his infallibility, affect our judgment of beliefs 
 that bear his superscription in the record, see- 
 ing that there is not a sentence in the Bible of 
 which we can be absolutely sure that Jesus 
 uttered it. Paint the result of criticism an inch 
 thick with subterfuges, and to this favor it must 
 come. 
 
 The question then arises, to be answered 
 upon purely rational grounds. What functions 
 of prayer, if any, are still valid ? It is of no use 
 to say that this fruit of prayer is so fine that it 
 disdains the handling of argument, that by such 
 handling all its delicate bloom is worn away and 
 all its beauty marred. The question has been 
 forced upon us by the development of scientific 
 thought. It is of no use to pretend indiffer- 
 ence. We cannot feel it. " He that doubteth 
 is damned, if he eat!' 
 
I JO THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 " The doubt that saps the life 
 Is doubt half-crushed, half-veiled ; the lip-assent 
 Which finds no echo in the heart of hearts." 
 
 But, first of all, I must insist that the validity 
 of prayer is not involved in the validity of the 
 popular conception of the nature of prayer. If 
 it were, there would be no more praying possi- 
 ble for me. For the popular conception of prayer, 
 the average theological conception, involves a 
 miracle in every answered prayer. Prayer thus 
 conceived is the human side of special provi- 
 dence. In every instance of successful prayer, 
 the deity is supposed to interfere with, to sus- 
 pend, the orderly procedure of the universe. 
 The rational religionist contends that no suffi- 
 cient evidence has yet been produced of any 
 such suspension, of any such interference. The 
 popular religionist, the conservative theologian, 
 in dealing with this matter, habitually confounds 
 the fact, sometimes indubitable, that prayers are 
 answered with the inference that God interferes 
 to answer them. But that a prayer is answered, 
 or, to speak more strictly, that the thing prayed 
 
CONCERNING PRAYER. 171 
 
 for comes to pass, is no sufficient evidence that 
 God has suspended the orderly procedure of 
 the universe on our behalf Let us suppose 
 that there are instances where, if we could be 
 certain that the thing which comes to pass 
 would not have come to pass but for our prayer, 
 to infer divine interference would be inevitable. 
 Such instances are prayers involving a wide 
 circle of phenomena, as, for example, prayers 
 for rain, or for abundant harvests, or for immu- 
 nity from storms at sea, or for the cessation of a 
 pestilence. To be certain in such instances that 
 prayer was answered — that is, that it had pro- 
 duced the desired effect — would, let us suppose, 
 be equivalent to a certainty that God had inter- 
 posed to bring about the state of things desired. 
 For though in some of these instances a certain 
 reflex influence of prayer is possible, as in the 
 matter of the harvest or the pestilence, it could 
 not be to any great extent. The conditions of 
 the problem would remain comparatively undis- 
 turbed. In the case of rain or storms at sea, the 
 possibility of reflex action is eliminated alto- 
 
1/2 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 gether. Here, then, absolute certainty that but 
 for the prayer the thing desired would not have 
 come to pass, would be, let us suppose, absolute 
 certainty that God had interposed to answer it. 
 But absolute certainty in' a matter of this sort is 
 something that can never be attained. Suppose 
 it should not rain from now till next September, 
 and that then one great concentric prayer for 
 rain, rain, should go up from millions of parched 
 lips, storming the ear of heaven with wildly 
 passionate entreaty, and even while the prayers 
 were straining up, the blessed moisture should 
 begin to fall upon the thirsty fields and the im- 
 ploring hands of agonized devotion. If the rain 
 came because of the prayer, we would allow that 
 God had interposed to answer it. We would 
 waive all consideration of '' the chemico-vital 
 forces set loose by an earnest prayer." We 
 would give God the glory. But how could we 
 feel absolutely certain, even in such a case, that 
 the blessing came in answer to the prayer ; that 
 it might not have come if there had been no 
 prayer at all ? And if we could not feel certain 
 
CONCERNING PRAYER. 1 73 
 
 in such a case, what certainty is possible, when 
 no instance is on record a thousandth part so 
 crucial in its character as this? And so with 
 every similar experiment. How be sure that 
 the storm would have engulfed our loved ones 
 but for our prayer, that " the iceberg moving 
 slowly down into the path of traffic " would not 
 have kept " her fatal appointment with the 
 ship " if we had prayed more ardently, that the 
 crop is bountiful or that the pestilence is stayed 
 because of our entreaty? Because we can never 
 be sure of these things, because there may be 
 coincidence instead of cause and effect, we 
 can never be sure of an interfering deity or in 
 other words (those of Professor Tyndall) of " a 
 disturbance of natural law quite as serious as 
 the stoppage of an eclipse, or the rolling of the 
 St. Lawrence up the falls of Niagara." 
 
 The great majority of " answers to prayer '* 
 are of such a character that even if we allow 
 their claim, — that the thing obtained would not 
 have been but for the prayer, — it does not 
 follow that there has been any suspension of the 
 
174 ^-^-^ FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 orderly procedure of the universe. We must 
 not forget that .the imagination is a potent 
 factor in the human organism, and that the 
 attitude of expectant attention has immense 
 subjective influence. We are hardly permitted 
 to doubt that '' king's-evil," or scrofula, was 
 really affected by the king's touch, or that the 
 bones of the saints have made rheumatic limbs 
 more pliable. But was the virtue in the ob- 
 jective touch or relic, or in the subjective 
 imagination. A German savant discovered the 
 long-venerated bones of a saint to be those 
 of a donkey, but on this account they had not 
 been a whit less remedial. " Any state of the 
 body earnestly expected," says a learned physi- 
 ologist, "■ is very likely to ensue." There is a 
 man in Belgium whose hands and feet bleed 
 every Friday, as it were from nails driven into 
 them. The priests say it is a miracle like unto 
 the famous stigmata of St. Francis of Assisi. 
 A commission of medical men, appointed by the 
 government, say it is the result of morbid ex- 
 pectation, the whole energy of the victim's 
 
CONCERNING PRAYER. 1 75 
 
 nature being directed to this end, so flattering 
 to his ecclesiastical pretensions. But this prin- 
 ciple of expectant attention is not now responsi- 
 ble for as many answers to prayer as formerly. 
 There are, however, two celebrated institutions in 
 Germany where patients are treated for various 
 mental and some bodily diseases by prayer, and 
 it is said the cures are many. But as the pa- 
 tients are also treated by fresh air and out-of- 
 door life and pleasant scenery, and have much 
 quiet and no medicine, it may be that the 
 prayers are not the secret of recovery. " It is 
 beyond all question or dispute," said Voltaire, 
 " that magic words and ceremonies are quite 
 capable of destroying a whole flock of sheep, 
 if the words be accompanied by a sufficient 
 quantity of arsenic." 
 
 How many prayers are answered, too, because 
 men overA\^dx them, not because God hears them. 
 At any rate the over-hedLring is sufficient to ac- 
 count for the result. George Muller's famous 
 charity in England is, according to his represen- 
 tations, which maybe perfectly sincere, supported 
 
1/6 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 entirely by prayer. But by such an avowal, on 
 his part, people who believe in prayer are put 
 upon their honor not to let the institution lan- 
 guish. It is prayer that is at stake, not merely 
 the institution. If Miiller had kept his method 
 a profound secret, his receipts might not have 
 been so large, but the test of prayer-alone would 
 have been more effectual. There is a consump- 
 tives' home in Boston supported entirely by 
 prayer. It has its contribution boxes in scores 
 of public places, conspicuously labelled with the 
 name and policy of the institution. When a 
 people are wasted with famine, it is not even 
 necessary to overAx^'^x their prayers for succor. 
 It is sufficient for those who can help them to 
 hear of the fact. This is a quite sufficient 
 prayer to them^ which they will answer speedily 
 with ship-loads of food seasoned with the tears 
 of a divine compassion. So, too, the need of 
 cities wrapped in flames, or scourged by -pesti- 
 lence, need not be telegraphed to us by way of 
 heaven. It can come direct. The god in us 
 hears the afflicting story, and responds to it with 
 
CONCERNING PRAYER. 1 77 
 
 needful sustenance. Oh, there is many a prayer 
 that now goes all unanswered that would be 
 answered speedily if but some man or woman 
 could overhear it! But so many prayers are^ 
 overheard that this element must never be 
 omitted from the problem, Whether the orderly 
 procedure of the universe is ever temporarily 
 suspended in response to our entreaties. 
 
 Volumes have been written, full of instances 
 which are supposed to favor the affirmative 
 solution of this problem, not one of which is 
 verifiable, but no volume has so far been written, 
 by the advocates of heavenly interference or 
 by anybody else, enumerating the instances in 
 which the prayer has never had the faintest 
 semblance of an answer. The million volumes 
 in the National Library at Paris would not be 
 sufficient to contain such an enumeration. But 
 is it fair that every instance favorable to the 
 doctrine of interference should be counted and 
 every other instance go for naught? I know 
 the posterns by which men escape from this 
 dilemma. They say that the unanswered pray- 
 
178 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 ers were not ardent enough, or persistent enough, 
 or something of that sort. But any one must 
 be stone-bHnd not to perceive that here we 
 have an arbitrary excuse for a foregone con- 
 clusion. 
 
 I must confess that there is something horri- 
 ble to me in men's assurance that God has 
 interfered to save their lives, their property, 
 their friends, but has not interfered to save the 
 lives, the property, the friends of other people. 
 It was a special providence that they did not 
 sail upon the missing steamer. What was it, 
 then, for all who did sail, and came back no 
 more? Might God have interfered to save 
 that freight of precious lives, and did not, per- 
 haps because the requisite amount of prayers 
 was not forthcoming. No, no ! God does not 
 interfere : the comfortable, the blessed thought 
 is that he cannot interfere. He cannot or he 
 would. I stake my faith in him on this asser- 
 tion. He suffers no restraint but that of his 
 own infinite perfection. But, thanks to this, 
 one shattered train, one sinking wreck offsets 
 
CONCERNING PRAYER. 1 79 
 
 all the "imaginary interferences that have ever 
 been recorded, and remands them at once and 
 for ever to the province of coincidence or over- 
 hearing or exaggeration. Of what avail the 
 baby-house suggestion, that God, anticipating 
 human prayer, left certain openings in the net- 
 work of his laws through which he can reach 
 out handfuls of benefits and immunities, — winds 
 out of some iEolian cave, or showers of needed 
 rain, and quiet of the sea or of the heart? Law 
 is an armor so compact that there is not a joint 
 which any interfering touch can penetrate. In 
 the material universe, there is not a space as big 
 as a pin-head for an interfering god to stand 
 upon. The ground is everywhere preoccupied 
 by those persistent habits of the deity which we 
 call laws, — habits which are not a second nature, 
 as we say of ours, but his first and only nature, 
 his essential quality. To pray for so much in- 
 terference as would quell one coming storm, or 
 squeeze one rain-drop out of a reluctant cloud, 
 is to pray that the entire history of the universe 
 up to date may be revised, and that God may 
 
l80 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 change the essence of his nature with a view to 
 our imaginary comfort or advantage. 
 
 There are those who say, in answer to all this, 
 that the so-called laws of nature are only our 
 subjective formulas; that is to say only our 
 classification of such facts as have already 
 come within our ken. It does not follow that 
 there are not other facts. No, it does not. But 
 never was any attempt to find a foot-hold for the 
 supernatural more unfortunate than this. If the 
 laws of nature were not subjective classifications 
 of the observed facts of nature, if they were so 
 many unalterable formulas known to be inclu- 
 sive of all natural facts, then any fact that did 
 not come within their scope would at once 
 declare itself supernatural. But what makes 
 a miracle impossible, in the sense of a super- 
 natural event, is that the laws of nature, as we 
 call them, are subjective classifications of the 
 observed facts of nature; and the moment we 
 come upon a fact not included in them, we are 
 simply obliged to modify our hitherto unduly 
 narrow conception of the laws of nature, so that 
 
CONCERNING PRAYER. l8l 
 
 they will include the latest fact. " The day-fly," 
 says Professor Huxley, ** has better grounds for 
 calling a thunder-storm supernatural, than has 
 man, with his experience of an infinitesimal 
 fraction of duration, to say that the most as- 
 tonishing event that can be imagined is beyond 
 the scope of natural causes." • And thus the 
 subjective character of the so-called laws of 
 nature, so far from being a back-door through 
 which the supernatural may find its way into 
 "'the house of life," is a mountain-wall which it 
 can never pass. Whatever happens, no matter 
 how wonderful, no matter how unexampled, can 
 only serve to broaden our subjective generaliza- 
 tion of law. It cannot possibly transcend it. 
 
 And hence it follows that we have been too 
 ready to allow or to suppose that, if it could be 
 proved that but for the prayer A the event B 
 would not have happened, we should have a 
 genuine case of interference. Prove that but 
 for the prayer the drought would not have 
 ceased, and what follows ? That there has been 
 an interference of the deity? Certainly not; 
 
1 82 THE FAITH OF REASON, 
 
 but only that our formulas of natural law must 
 be extended so as to include prayer, henceforth, 
 among the data of meteorology, an additional 
 element of uncertainty in all our weather 
 calculations. 
 
 Things being as they are, it is impossible to 
 predicate an interfering deity at any point in 
 the illimitable sweep of prayer, from the early 
 Aryan's frank petition " that we may prosper in 
 getting and keeping" to the most spiritual 
 prayer a Robertson or Channing ever breathed. 
 There are many people who do not demur at 
 this result, so long as it is understood to cover 
 only the material side of prayer, — petition for 
 objective benefits, health, wealth, and safety, and 
 so on, — who, nevertheless, are hurt and troubled, 
 when it is proposed to extend the application to 
 prayer for spiritual benefits, — for peace of mind, 
 for strength of will, for purity of heart. Men 
 pray for purer purposes, for better dispositions, 
 for broader charity, for faithfulness to their 
 ideals of truth and righteousness. That it must 
 be ennobling and exalting to proffer such peti- 
 
CONCERNING PRAYER. 1 83 
 
 tions no one is likely to deny. If we fall to work 
 and help the deity to answer our petitions, the 
 benefit accruing may be beyond all estimate. 
 But if, refusing to deceive ourselves, we put the 
 question squarely. Does God interfere to answer 
 these petitions any more than those for health, 
 or rain, or victory in battle? we are obliged to 
 answer. He does not. For, in the first place, 
 that reflex action which in prayers for material 
 blessings is sometimes a very doubtful factor, is 
 here an obvious and very potent energy. Such 
 prayers avail not for ourselves alone, but for our 
 friends. I have heard such, and as I listened 
 to their words of tender pleading, all that was 
 worst in me seemed suddenly to lose its power, 
 all that was best to assert a calm superiority. 
 How could I ever sin against those beautiful 
 ideals of truth and holiness which in that mo- 
 ment I had seen ! And I have gone for days 
 in the strength of some such momentary reve^ 
 lation. But there was no need to assume any 
 heavenly interference to account for my access 
 of strength and peace. Is there ever any such 
 
1 84 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 need ? If roughly, still is it not truly, said, ** You 
 will get a virtue no sooner than a salad for the 
 asking." And if, just for the asking, or for any 
 amount of asking, God does not make us more 
 charitable or just or honest or sincere or pure 
 or kind, ought we to keep on asking him to 
 make us this or that, whatever incidental benefit 
 accrues? We must hot be Hars in our devo- 
 tions. We must not make a show of asking 
 God for this or that, in order that we may econo- 
 mize some reflex influence of our petition. 
 
 No miracle, no prayer, insists the popular 
 religionist. But it is just as impossible to prove 
 a miracle in the sense of a* suspension of the 
 ordinary course of nature on the spiritual as on 
 the material plane. Prove that the spiritual 
 blessing would not have come without the 
 prayer, and you have proved a relation of co- 
 existence or sequence, of cause and efl'ect ; but 
 you have proved no interference. It never can 
 be proved. Establish any fact, and. immediately 
 Nature adopts it into her universal order, 
 
 " And gives to it an equal date 
 With Andes or with Ararat." 
 
CONCERNING PRAYER. 185 
 
 How then? Seeing that no supernatural in- 
 terference ever has been or ever can be proved, 
 on the material or on the spiritual plane, shall 
 we deny in toto the legitimacy of any and of 
 every prayer? Yes, if we accept the would-be 
 axiom of popular religion, — No miracle, no 
 prayer. No, if we do not accept this would-be 
 axiom. And we do not accept it. We deny all 
 miracle, all interference, and* at the same time 
 we affirm the legitimacy and dignity and glory 
 and sufficiency of prayer. 
 
 But then we do this because we do not define 
 prayer by the inferior- limit. If you insist that 
 pr^er shall be defined by the inferior limit, 
 that it^ shall be begging for favors or immunities 
 or miraculous benefits and nothing else, then, 
 verily, for you there is no legitimate, no rational 
 prayer. But, taken all the ages down, prayer 
 has a million times been something over and 
 above all this. Thousands of prayers which 
 have contained this element of selfishness, 
 this beggar cry, this plea for miracle, have 
 contained something else, and something very 
 
1 86 THE FAITH OF REASON, 
 
 different. Those of you who have ever studied 
 the development of prayer from the stand- 
 point of evolution know that our modern prayer 
 is the Hneal descendant of ancient sacrifice. 
 Hosea, the prophet, indicates the point of tran- 
 sition, when he calls the spoken praise of God 
 " the calves (that is, the sacrificial calves) of the 
 lips." The psalms of the Old Testament rep- 
 resent prayer in its first remove from sacrifice. 
 And they are not so much an asking as a giving. 
 So with the sacrifices that preceded them and 
 kept thfim company. There were thank-offer- 
 ings as well as peace-offerings among them. 
 Go back still further, b^ck to the genesis^ of 
 prayer, to its pre-natal condition. The earliest 
 form of prayer (or rather of its anticipatory 
 phenomena) was the offering of food to the 
 ancestral ghosts. " Come to your home ! " 
 chaunted the mourners. " It is swept for you 
 and clean; and we are there who loved you 
 ever. And there is rice put for you and water ; 
 come home, come home, come to us again ! " 
 In this pre-natal germ of prayer, there is a hint 
 
CONCERNING PRAYER. 1 8/ 
 
 of its sublimest possibility. There is a rebuke 
 of those who insist that if it is not beggary it 
 is nothing. In this pre-natal germ, it was no 
 asking, but a giving. And it is still no asking, 
 but a giving, at its highest point of evolution; 
 a giving certainly, and if an asking, such an 
 asking as implies no interference of the deity 
 with the orderly procedure of the universe. 
 
 Prayer is a gift of man to the Eternal. A gift 
 of awe and wonder, reverence, adoration. This 
 is a gift which is appropriate at all times and 
 in all places where it is natural and spontaneous. 
 " That perfect disenthralment which is God '* 
 eludes the trap deliberately set for it, but through 
 " the soul's east window of divine surprise '* 
 flies in without an invitation. 
 
 " No man can think, nor in himself perceive, 
 Sometimes at waking, in the street sometimes, 
 Or on the hill-side, always unforewarned, 
 , A grace of being finer than himself 
 
 That beckons and is gone, a larger life 
 Upon his own impinging," — 
 
 no man can have such an experience as this, 
 — and soon or late it comes to each . and 
 
1 88 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 all, — without bringing his gift to the altar ; 
 without that thrill of awe, of reverence, of 
 adoration, which is more truly prayer than 
 thousands of petitions which are proffered in 
 the conventional postures of devotion. And I 
 would have you note, that science, which is the 
 inveterate negation of all prayer Jihat looks for 
 heavenly interference, is to the prayer of adora- 
 tion a freshet that inundates all its banks with 
 new occasions for its joy. With Lockyer and Dar- 
 win and Lyell, we cannot think God's thoughts 
 after him, and not rejoice in the eternal order, 
 as men never could in some imaginary rent in 
 its resplendent folds. The prayer which looks 
 for interference in the eternal order is an im- 
 putation of defect. What is this wonderful 
 universe which we inhabit but, as it were, a 
 mighty symphony, into whose melodies and 
 harmonies the Infinite Being has put his whole 
 self, all there is of him ; every part, every atom, 
 every law is drenched with deity, — so full of 
 him that not another particle can be obtruded ? 
 The prayer that looks for interference is a 
 
CONCERNING PRAYER, 1 89 
 
 prayer for more of God. A universe brimful of 
 him is not enough. Dissipate this pitiful illusion, 
 and every particle that is lost upon the side of 
 interference is saved upon the side of that 
 exquisite rapture which ** accepts the universe " 
 as an unspeakable good. No longer seeking 
 for benefits or immunities from beyond the 
 circle of the immutable law, it finds this law it- 
 self instinct with deity, — better than any possible 
 immunity, of all benefits the best. To see, to 
 accept, to glory in the method and result of 
 universal law, — this is the gift of man's adoring 
 heart to the Eternal. When prayer arrives at 
 such an altitude as this, its words are generally 
 few. When prayer is at its best, it cannot find 
 a voice. 
 
 " I also am a child, and I 
 
 Am ignorant and weak ; 
 I look upon the starry sky, 
 
 And then I must not speak. 
 For all behind the starry sky, 
 
 Behind the world so broad, 
 Behind men's hearts and souls doth lie 
 
 The Infinite of God." 
 
190 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 There is a power not ourselves which makes 
 for order and beauty, as well as a power not 
 ourselves that makes for righteousness. The 
 hearts of those old Hebrew men thrilled at the 
 touch of both. What men's have not in any 
 age or land since man emerged from his 
 primeval brutishness ! There is no danger that 
 the prayer of adoration will ever flicker and go 
 out upon the altar of devotion. The world 
 might be just as wonderful, just as beautiful as 
 it is, and, if man's mind were different, it might 
 stir in him no sense of mystery, it might awaken 
 in him no delight, no transport of enthusiasm, 
 no rapture of thanksgiving. But so long as 
 the world and humanity remain as they are, 
 made for each other, the mind of man, the 
 natural and genetic complement of the material 
 universe, so long will there be that response 
 of the human spirit to the divine which is of 
 the finest essence of prayer. Certainly, the 
 depth and earnestness of the response is largely 
 proportioned to our thoughtfulness ; but, in a 
 universe that is ^ull of visions and of voices, 
 
CONCERNING PRAYER. 191 
 
 few can so blind or deafen themselves as not 
 to catch some beauty of the one, some music 
 of the other. When the spring comes, as it 
 will so soon, working its blessed transformation, 
 when all the stars in heaven seem out together, 
 when the moon is so white and large that all 
 the stars are dim, when children are born into 
 your homes, when the ineffable mysteries of 
 thought and love entrance your mind and heart, 
 at all such times, and at other times innumer- 
 able, we pray as naturally as we breathe. Our 
 prayer is no task-work, but the spontaneous^ 
 irrepressible, Godward movement of our hearts, 
 their tidal swell obedient to an infinite attractive 
 power. 
 
 Should anybody ask me what is the use of 
 praying in this way, I might find it very difficult 
 to answer them. But that would not be my 
 fault so much as theirs. If a man asks me 
 why he should enjoy the vision of the moun- 
 tains or the sea, how can I answer him? or if 
 he asks me what is the use -of enjoying these 
 things? As with the parts, so also with the 
 
192 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 whole. In one sense, there is no use of feeling 
 that rapture in the presence of the All which 
 is the essence of our adoration. Nobody is 
 any. richer for it in gold or land. It pays no 
 dividends. Only the man who kindles with 
 this rapture is infinitely more of a man than 
 one who does not. And what is the use of 
 ever putting this rapture into words, of express- 
 ing it, or trying to express it, though we never 
 can, in hymns and spoken prayers? This also 
 pays no dividends. But then no more does 
 lovers* happy talk. • It is just telling, each the 
 other, over and over again, that which is known 
 already. It is no use, and yet those who, 
 grown to manhood and womanhood, have not 
 done something in this line at one time or 
 another are greatly to be pitied. " I am a 
 man," said Terence, " and nothing human is 
 indifferent to me." In the best sense of the 
 word, that is the most useful which helps me 
 to be most a man, to bring my experience level 
 with my highest possibility of quickened and 
 multiplied consciousness of life's various good. 
 
CONCERNING PRAYER. 1 93 
 
 And in this sense the glow of adoration, and 
 the poor stammering words in which it tries to 
 body itself forth in hymn or prayer, are second 
 to no other thing in point of use. 
 
 To the function of adoration let us add the 
 function of thanksgiving. If this could live 
 upon no other food than the sense of a pe- 
 culiar and exclusive care for us by the Omnipo- 
 tent Power, then it might well hunger so for 
 lack of meat as to exhale into the merest ghost 
 of a dead dogma. 
 
 " Yes, for me, for me He careth," 
 
 we may still sing, but not as imagining that 
 he is any respecter of j5ersons, that he has any 
 chosen people, any favored child, in all his 
 spacious world. What we are thankful for is, 
 that we are sharers of the universal joy and 
 sorrow of the world. What we are thankful 
 for is, that for all our sorrow and our burden 
 others may be glad and free. The thankful- 
 ness of rational prayer does not inhere in any 
 particular blessings, but in the general make 
 
194 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 and the great sweep of things, the laws so 
 stern and so inflexible, obedience to which can 
 bring to us such peace and joy. When we 
 think of the beauty of the world, of the work 
 we have to do, of our friendships and our 
 homes, of our thought and the great thinkers 
 who assist it, and of the yearnings and the 
 satisfactions of the moral life, and then of how 
 this little life of ours is only one of many 
 millions which the great central life upholds 
 and cherishes, though we may not " pray reg- 
 ular," any oftener than poor Job Leigh in 
 *' Mary Barton," yet we shall catch ourselves 
 like him speaking a word with God, and thank- 
 ing him at odd hours, simply because we cannot 
 help it, any more than Job could when he had had 
 " a fine day for an out." But words are not 
 the only means of self-expression. Murder 
 will out, and so will thankfulness. Sometimes 
 it makes us literally leap for joy. Sometimes its 
 omen is a sudden rush of tears. Sometimes 
 it makes our wives and children wonder what 
 has happened to us that we are so unusually 
 
CONCERNING PRAYER. 1 95 
 
 considerate and kind. Sometimes it overflows 
 in little acts of kindness to people we have 
 never seen before and may never see again. 
 To bow the head, to bend the knees, is not a 
 necessary sign of thankfulness. " His port is 
 erect, his face towards heaven," is a more apt 
 description of the man whose heart is full of 
 gratitude to God. No importunity, no prayer? 
 There is a tribe of South Americans who know 
 better than this. They believe their gods are 
 so beneficent that they need ask them for 
 nothing. Nevertheless, they try to express 
 their gratitude to them by simple offerings. 
 As we are of their simple faith, shall we not 
 make their simple habit also ours? 
 
 Another function of this rational, non-mirac- 
 ulous prayer, which we are endeavoring to 
 understand aright, is aspiration; which is not 
 asking to be made better by any stroke of 
 heavenly interference, but striving to make 
 ourselves better by the slow and patient culture 
 of our every gift. It is the worship of ideal 
 excellence. It declares itself in every effort 
 
196 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 to secure a body free from weakness or defect, 
 ruddy with health, ahve in every sense to its 
 appropriate impressions ; in every effort to en- 
 large the mind with fuller measures of the 
 truth ; in every practical resolve to make the 
 reign of conscience more intelligent, and our 
 obedience to its mandates more complete. I 
 would not underrate the value of the faintest 
 impulse in the direction of a purer or a better 
 life. But the aspiration which is equivalent to 
 the highest possible capacity of rational prayer 
 must not be confounded with any such impulse, 
 with any momentary wish that we might live 
 more nearly level with our highest possible 
 attainment. Welcome the mountain height 
 or forest depth, the face of man or woman, 
 the poet's thought or mystery of science, that 
 for one moment gives to our horizon infinite 
 expansion ! But there is a function of prayer 
 which is more than any thrill of gladness, any 
 rapture of thanksgiving, any momentary im- 
 pulse of the heart towards what is purest, truest, 
 best. And what is more, unless the worship 
 
CONCERNING PRAYER. 1 97 
 
 that is all of these goes forth to seek embodi- 
 ment in voluntary act, in habitual life, it cannot 
 be expected often to return and animate our dust. 
 Gladness and thanks and trust and adoration 
 are not for idlers, but for men who work. And 
 so the definition of worship as " divine service," 
 familiar to you all, disappears upon one side 
 only to reappear upon the other. The singing 
 of hymns, the reading of a liturgy, the burning 
 of incense, the making of genuflections, the 
 wearing of one ecclesiastical over-garment rather 
 than another, — there is no divine service in all 
 this, no service of God, unless there is some 
 help for man. Prayer is a life, says Zoroaster ; 
 a persistent habit of the soul. And we must 
 not be satisfied with any lower definition. Our 
 aspiration must not be fitful and inconstant, 
 here and there in some better moment a feeble 
 wish, a make-believe resolve, so flattering to 
 our moral consciousness. Such aspiration is 
 of small account. 
 
 But when aspiration is a constant and un- 
 wearied habit of the soul; when year in and 
 
198 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 year out, we seek for the harmonious perfection 
 of our bodies, minds, and hearts, — then doth the 
 Eternal give to his beloved while they sleep: 
 below the deep of consciousness streams into 
 us the divine power. You have heard of the 
 Thibetan praying-machine, a cylinder on which 
 a famous prayer is pasted, kept revolving in a 
 stream of running water. Hardly less mechani- 
 cal, I think, are some of the devices of the 
 modern Christian pietist. " Pray for these 
 thirty-five," said the evangelist to a subordinate, 
 on the morning of my visit to his meeting, and 
 Dr. Deems informs us that one day he prays for 
 all his friends whose names begin with A ; the 
 next day for all whose names begin with B ; and 
 so on through the alphabet. But the Thibetan 
 praying-machine suggests not only the false 
 mechanism of our Christian praying, but also 
 the highest possibility of the most rational 
 prayer that can be offered, for this is realized 
 when the wonderful mechanism of this total 
 life of ours, set in the rushing stream of time 
 and circumstance, the awful current of events, 
 
CONCERNING PRAYER. 1 99 
 
 revolving there with marvellous rapidity, be- 
 comes itself a prayer inclusive of all others 
 that are worth the making. " The spirit of the 
 living creature is in the midst of the wheels." 
 A prayer' is written upon every tissue of the 
 body, upon every fibre of the brain, upon every 
 drop of red arterial blood, upon every thought 
 and feeling and desire ; and the answer of this 
 prayer of prayers is the response of the total 
 sanity of the universe to the sanity of our total 
 organism. ** Continuing instant in prayer," this 
 is what every true man of us is doing. " Pray 
 without ceasing," this is an injunction which a 
 sound mind in a sound body must perforce 
 obey. Truly there is a God who answers such 
 a prayer as this persistent aspiration, this claim 
 upon the universe of our continuous and total 
 life. But his answer comes to us along no path 
 of interference, but along the grooves of the 
 eternal laws, and so comes very quickly. In 
 town and field, he waits for us in every atom 
 and event, and with rarer gifts than we could 
 ask for, or could even think, responds to our 
 fidelity. 
 
200 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 I know that there are some of you to whom 
 the most of what I have said thus far, appears 
 quite reasonable and true; but you conceive 
 there is some incongruity between a theory of 
 prayer so transcendental as this of mine, and 
 almost any possible /<?r;;2 of public or of private 
 prayer. And certainly I have no disposition 
 to deny that between such prayer as I have 
 been trying to indicate and the majority of 
 spoken prayers, public or private, there is a 
 decided incongruity. I will go further, and will 
 say that there is an incongruity between such 
 prayer and every possible form. But then 
 it is the incongruity which always has existed, 
 and always will exist, between the spirit and 
 the letter, the actual and the ideal. It is the 
 incongruity which exists between the artist's 
 conception and his work. Think you that 
 Michael Angelo ever embodied to the full, in 
 any painting or sculpture, the vision to which 
 he was not disobedient? But how much poorer 
 the world of art would be if he had withheld 
 his hand entirely because he could not, and 
 
CONCERNING PRAYER. 201 
 
 knew he could not, embody his conception to 
 the full ! And how much poorer the world of 
 religion would be if men had never tried to 
 embody in the forms of worship their ideal 
 religiousness ! Sometimes, no doubt, the words 
 of prayer shame the reality. But when prayer 
 is at its best, then any words that we can utter, 
 or that the genius of prayer has ever framed, 
 seem all inadequate. The reality of prayer 
 does not necessitate the regularity of private 
 speech with God. I must confess that for 
 myself such regularity of speech or silence is 
 barren of all good. But I do not infer that it 
 is so with all. Let each be his own judge. If 
 the regularity always, or in the majority of in- 
 stances, brings with it the appropriate emotion, 
 then for you such regularity is best. But others 
 may be no less prayerful whose prayers are 
 spoken, not at noon or eve, but whenever the 
 strong impulse comes upon them. The words 
 are not the prayer. The fewer these, I some- 
 times think, the better. The saying is that 
 when a god would ride, any thing serves him 
 
202 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 for a chariot. So when a genuine prayer of 
 adoration, gratitude, and trust would speed to 
 heaven, a single word may bear it up and on. 
 
 " Feeling is all in all ; words are but sound and smoke, 
 Veiling the glow of heaven." 
 
 Happy the man who is so sure of this that he 
 can often make his childhood's earliest prayer 
 the vehicle of his maturest aspiration ! Happier 
 if the old words bring back to him his mother's 
 face, his mother's arms, so that, world-worn and 
 weary, for a moment he may know how sweet 
 it is, 
 
 *' To lie within the light of God, like a babe upon the breast, 
 Where the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are 
 at rest." 
 
 But some of you to whom it seems legitimate 
 for private prayer to clothe itself in words, at 
 regular or irregular intervals, consider public 
 prayer a very doubtful matter. The individual 
 in the secrecy of his chamber and his heart 
 need not be choice of words. He may deter- 
 mine once for all that they are all symbolical ; 
 
CONCERNING PRAYER. 203 
 
 that they are not scientific, but poetical. And 
 after that, if they do not agree with his ration- 
 ahzed philosophy of prayer, no one is deceived. 
 
 He does not pray because he would ; 
 
 He prays because he must, 
 There is no meaning in his prayer, 
 
 But thankfulness and trust. 
 
 But it is different, men say, with public prayer. 
 Yes, it is different. The public prayer is over- 
 heard, and so the symbol must be chosen with 
 much greater care. But it can hardly be chosen 
 so carefully but that it will still be a symbol, 
 not an exact expression ; and therefore the first 
 necessity of all public prayer is that the con- 
 gregation understand that it is a symbol, not 
 an exact expression. Its language is not sci- 
 entific, but poetic. Let this be understood, and 
 henceforth all criticism of particular words and 
 phrases is beside the mark; though certainly 
 the congregation have good reason to expect that 
 there shall be some general conformity between 
 the language of devotion and their minister's 
 avowed philosophy. 
 
204 "^^^ FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 Once rightly understood, it seems to me that 
 public prayer is wholly natural and beautiful 
 in its idea, whatever it may be in actual ex- 
 perience. Sometimes it is no doubt 
 
 " That drony vacuum of compulsory prayer, 
 Still pumping phrases for the ineffable, 
 Though all the valves of memory gasp and wheeze." 
 
 But Theodore Parker said that never did he 
 stand before his congregation in the attitude 
 of prayer, however dull of heart he had been 
 just before, but that suddenly he felt all the 
 joys and sorrows of his people surging up 
 through his heart and clamoring for expression 
 at his lips. I doubt if those most sceptical of 
 public prayer would not have made an excep- 
 tion in favor of those idyls of devotion. But 
 then they were exceptional. The '* drony vac- 
 uum" is the rule. Yes, but sometimes the 
 channel, so often muddy when it is not wholly 
 dry, receives such glorious access from all the 
 heights of a man's nature, from all the hidden 
 springs of his experience, that it is not deep 
 enough or wide enough to hold the generous 
 
CONCERNING PRAYER. 205 
 
 flood. Its banks are broken down and growths 
 of character and endurance that were perishing 
 of droiight in other men feel a refreshing cool- 
 ness at their roots, and throughout every part the 
 promise and the potency of new and better life. 
 It was said of Edward Everett that his 
 prayers were the most eloquent ever addressed 
 to a Boston audience. But if they were ad- 
 dressed, not to the taste or fancy of his people, 
 but to their conscience, to their justice, truth, 
 and love, the sarcasm is not so very biting. Let 
 us acknowledge frankly that, from one point 
 of view, the public prayer is addressed to the 
 assembled congregation. But none the less is 
 it addressed to God. For it is not as if God 
 were in some "hallowed part" of the wide 
 universe. It is not as if he were not in you 
 and me. And as it is God who is addressed, 
 so is it God who addresses. ''As if God did 
 beseech you," said St. Paul. Dr. Hedge writes 
 me, there is but one party in prayer ; namely, 
 God. This lofty mysticism is made good most 
 obviously in public prayer, when what is best 
 in me appeals to what is best in you. But is 
 
206 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 it not equally made good whenever we ** sum- 
 mon the good in the depths of ourselves " ? Nay 
 in a world where God is all in all, must not all 
 prayer be a divine soliloquy, the sacred converse 
 of the Infinite Being with himself ? 
 
 The objection to public prayer that it is 
 prayer for others is well taken when it is this. 
 To pray for others : this I must confess, until 
 prayer passes over into action, seems to me 
 quite impossible. But to pray with others, 
 having first identified one's self with them, this 
 is legitimate enough. Father Taylor was not 
 much of a philosopher, but his rationale of 
 public prayer was simply perfect when he said, 
 ** O God, we are a widow with six children ! " 
 So, always, when the preacher truly prays, he 
 is his congregation, the mouth-piece of their 
 gladness and their sorrow, of their peace and 
 pain. As much sympathy, so much true pub- 
 lic prayer; no more. Given the sympathy, and 
 it is no longer I that speak, but your spirit that 
 speaketh in me. Then I am yonder mother, 
 busy and anxious with her household cares. 
 Then I am yonder father, troubled, like Martha, 
 
CONCERNING PRAYER, 20/ 
 
 about many things, and finding it so hard to 
 keep from being fretful and impatient. Then 
 I am yonder young man, or yonder " happiest 
 girl in the world," so busy with her thoughts of 
 this and that, that she has not the least idea 
 what I say; then I am those among you who 
 are aging, and whose " finest hope is finest 
 memory " projected into dim futurity. Then I 
 am the sorrowing and bereft among you who 
 are trying to take sides with God against your- 
 selves, because you are so sure that your afflic- 
 tions are but the shadows of his perfectness. 
 Then I am those among you who are seeking 
 that forgiveness for wrong-doing which is in- 
 herent in the recuperative forces of the universe. 
 This is the feeling although, it does not always 
 find its way into the fittest words. And some- 
 times when the feeling is strongest, the words 
 will somehow altogether fail, and the minister 
 will take the Lord's Prayer,^ or a moment's 
 
 1 The best of all symbols, because it is composed of 
 
 " Words that have drunk transcendent meaning up 
 From the best passion of all by-gone times." 
 
208 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 silence, and put all his feeling into that, at the 
 risk, perhaps, of having others think he is not 
 in a prayerful mood, when he was never in a 
 deeper. 
 
 But let us not take leave of one another in 
 this outer court of our great theme. Let us 
 return again, just for a moment, into its inner 
 shrine, its holy of holies, where never any 
 breath of aspiration, thankfulness, or trust, 
 breaks up the silence, or stirs the veil which 
 hangs before the secret place of the Most High ; 
 where every wish and hope and aspiration is 
 resolved into a voiceless peace, a trust ineffable. 
 
 " Ask and receive : ' tis sweetly said, 
 
 But what to ask for know I not, 
 For wish is worsted, hope o'ersped, 
 
 And aye to thanks returns my thought. 
 If I would pray, I've nought to say 
 
 But this, that God may be God still. 
 For him to live is still to give, 
 
 And sweeter than my wish his will." 
 
 February 9, 1879. 
 
VI. 
 
 CONCERNING MORALS. 
 
 'THHE subject of my discourse was never 
 more appropriate than at this moment, 
 when so recently the soil of Massachusetts has 
 been made more sacred than ever by receiving 
 to itself all that could die of one who was, to a 
 degree unparalleled in his day and generation, an 
 incarnation of the Moral Sentiment. Breathing 
 the name of Garrison, we pledge ourselves to 
 the utmost seriousness of thought and speech. 
 It was said of him in 1835 that he had "no 
 visible auxiliary but a negro boy." But he had 
 an invisible auxiliary, — the moral nature of 
 man. Of that invisible auxiliary I am to speak 
 to you this morning.^ 
 
 1 These introductory sentences, though not a part of this 
 discourse when it was first delivered, are retained, because the 
 name of Garrison is of itself a moral inspiration. They were 
 affixed when the discourse was read before the Free Religious 
 Association, a few days after Mr. Garrison's death. 
 
2IO THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 Wherever human nature is, there is the Moral 
 Sentiment. Can we as certainly affirm, Wher- 
 ever human nature has been, there has been 
 the Moral Sentiment also? I should say Yes, 
 on any theory of • human origins. Assuming 
 man to be developed from some lower organism, 
 the dawning of the Moral Sentiment would seem 
 to be essential to the idea of human nature. 
 Until this has arrived, the prospective man is 
 something less than human. This is the fairy 
 prince who wakes the sleeping beauty with the 
 kiss so long delayed. If any choose to draw 
 the line which separates humanity from the 
 lower species below this point, they are at liberty 
 to do so. The fact remains, that, wherever we 
 now come in contact with beings whom we 
 agree to call human, there is the Moral Senti- 
 ment, there are the antithetic poles of right 
 and wrong, there are the voices saying, Thoic 
 shalty and Thozi shalt not ; there are the words 
 and attitudes of praise and blame. In different 
 communities there is a difference in the objects 
 which are regarded as praiseworthy or blame- 
 
CONCERNING MORALS, 211 
 
 worthy. The savage and barbarian feel morally 
 obliged to engage in certain actions that would 
 be morally impossible for the civilized man, 
 but everywhere appear the opposite poles, the 
 antithetic ideas of right and wrong. This is 
 the most salient feature of the life of man. 
 Eliminate this feature, and you destroy the 
 identity of human nature and of human history, 
 They become something radically different. It 
 is the part of Hamlet in the play, the theme 
 which underlies the symphony, the Niobe who 
 unifies the group, the voice of the chief singer 
 in the choir. Modern critics and devotees of 
 beauty are not wanting who insist that art must 
 never moralize, and that it is wholly independent 
 of morality. And, no doubt, there has been 
 great art devoid of any moral purpose, art that 
 has contented itself with reproducing the beauty 
 of the human face and form, or the beauty of 
 external nature. But the highest form of art 
 is tragedy, epical or dramatic ; and the supreme 
 tragedy is the good man suffering calamity. 
 Eliminate the moral element from literature, 
 
212 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 and you rob Homer and Sophocles, Dante and 
 Shakspere and Goethe, of the most fruitful sub- 
 ject-matter of their art. 
 
 Listening to the average pulpiteer, the aver- 
 age moralist, you would suppose that the nature 
 of morality was just as patent as the fact, and 
 that the moral law was "the same yesterday, 
 to-day, and forever ; " that conscience always 
 and every\vhere dictated one and the same 
 thing. But, in fact, there has *been much con- 
 flict not only between men unequally developed, 
 but between equally good men, as to what is 
 right and what is wrong; and there has been 
 still more conflict in regard to the essential 
 nature of these opposing facts. But never since 
 the moral life of men began have thought and 
 discussion been so active as they are to-day, 
 concerning the essential nature of morality, its 
 origin, its ground, its sanctions, and so on. 
 This activity results in a considerable degree 
 from the break-down of supernatural religion, 
 but in a more considerable degree from the 
 aggressive energy of the evolutionary theory 
 
CONCERNING MORALS. 213 
 
 of human nature. Once let this theory pre- 
 vail, urge its opponents, and there must be a 
 ruinous catastrophe in the moral order of 
 society. Ay, more: they say that this would 
 already be upon us were not the Darwins and 
 Spencers and Huxleys men of the most lofty 
 personal character. And we are given to un- 
 derstand that it is very mean of them to be 
 so honorable and just. They have no right 
 to be, consistently with their philosophy. But 
 so long as they are so, either from force of 
 habit, or to spite Mr. Mallock and his set, it 
 will be much harder for them to excite the 
 apprehensions of the community than it would 
 be if the evolutionists were a pack of thieves, 
 adulterers, and murderers. 
 
 Somehow, — and in the discussion of the 
 moral problem this is a crucial fact, — individ- 
 ual morality is not exclusively dependent on 
 the individual's theory of moral origins or 
 sanctions. It is still possible for a man to live 
 a moral life whether he is an intuitionalist or 
 a utilitarian, a believer in necessity or in the 
 
214 ^^^ FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 freedom of the will, an advocate of the evolution 
 or of the special creation of the human species. 
 Mr. Mallock insists that Professor Tyndall 
 ought to have a dirty mind ; but what is true so 
 far is, that he has such a mind himself, while 
 Professor Tyndall gives no sign, as yet, of 
 following his example. But Professor Tyndall 
 has other opponents whose wit is just as keen 
 as Mr. Mallock's, without being as salacious. 
 Best of all, it is quite as possible for a man to 
 live a moral life without any general theory of 
 morality, as to have his blood circulate in the 
 most perfect manner without knowing any thing 
 about Harvey's theory of its circulation, or any 
 other. Of some of the best men who have 
 lived it may be doubted whether they had a 
 special theory of morals any more than Homer 
 had a theory of the epic poem, or Shakspere 
 a theory of the drama, or Burns a theory of the 
 true genesis and composition of an immortal 
 lyric. 
 
 But while morality is possible, and this, too, 
 of a high degree of excellence, without a definite 
 
CONCERNING MORALS. 215 
 
 theory of morals, it may be doubted whether 
 any man was ever worse for trying to develop 
 such a theory, however poorly he succeeded, 
 so that his aim was simply to arrive at truth. 
 If a man seeks a theory of morals that will 
 afford an intellectual basis to a sensual or a 
 selfish life, this is another matter. And while 
 it is quite possible for a man to live nobly and 
 grandly without any definite theory of morality, 
 there are theories abroad which cannot be vitally 
 appropriated without damage to the individual 
 appropriating them. The man who strives 
 persistently to educate his moral judgment, and 
 who steadily endeavors to obey his moral 
 impulses, can hardly miss the attainment of 
 a lofty moral character; he cannot help going 
 on and on to ever higher places. But even this 
 man may be retarded in his motion by an 
 atmosphere of thought or sentiment which he 
 unconsciously inhales and against which he 
 should be on his guard. Moreover, thought, 
 the intellect, has its own rights, which ask for 
 no ulterior sanction. Knowledge is an abso- 
 
2l6 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 lute good. Comte did not believe this, and 
 would have had men abjure the study of side- 
 real astronomy because such study was not 
 apparently useful. Enough for us th&t its 
 revelations thrill us through and through with 
 awe and adoration. So with the moral nature. 
 We should want to fathom it, if the attempt 
 left our moral vision exactly where it found it, 
 clearing it no whit, nor adding one iota to the 
 vigor of our wills. But the result is likely to 
 be much more ample when the attempt is an 
 unbiassed search for truth. 
 
 The subject of our discussion presents a 
 great variety of phases, but the most import- 
 ant will, if I mistake not, fall under one or 
 two general heads; namely, the origin and 
 ground of moral distinctions, and the relation 
 of our theoretic apprehensions of such origin 
 and ground to the individual and social moral- 
 ity of the present time. 
 
 First, then, let us consider the origin and 
 ground of moral distinctions. "Duty!" ex- 
 claims Immanuel Kant, " wondrous thought 
 
CONCERNING MORALS. 21 J 
 
 that workest neither by fond insinuation, flat- 
 tery, nor any threat, but merely by upholding 
 thy naked law to the soul, and so extorting 
 for thyself always reverence, if not always 
 obedience, — before whom all appetites are dumb, 
 however secretly • they rebel, — whence thy 
 original?" Jonathan Dymond, a Quaker linen- 
 draper, wrote a book in his back-shop, im- 
 proving the intervals between his infrequent 
 customers, which book, " Essays on the Prin- 
 ciples of Morality," gives an unhesitating answer 
 to Kant's passionate question, an answer mainly 
 notable because it coincides with a very common 
 opinion. Incidentally the book contains a great 
 deal of excellent teaching; but I shall never 
 forget the shock of disgust with which my 
 mind revolted from its fundamental proposition, 
 which is that the origin of moral distinctions 
 is the will of God. God willed that some things 
 should be right and others wrong, and therefore 
 some things are right and others wrong. Here 
 is a proposition in comparison with which 
 John Stuart Mill's idea, that on some other 
 
2l8 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 planet two and two may possibly make five, 
 seems truly admirable. If God had willed 
 that murder, theft, adultery, and so on, should 
 be right, they would have been. If he had 
 willed that honesty, life-saving, chastity, and 
 so on, should be wrong, they would have been 
 forever. Did ever the assurance that might 
 makes right receive a more significant illus- 
 tration? But, as I have said, this conception 
 of the Quaker moralist is far from being his 
 peculiar property. It finds thousands of ad- 
 mirers. And it is not an isolated conception. 
 It is of a piece with a great multitude of con- 
 ceptions which regard the laws and properties 
 of matter as having been arbitrarily imposed 
 by the Almighty. Thus God imposed on 
 minerals their hardness, on water or gases their 
 mobility, on lead its malleable quality, on mer- 
 cury its exceeding instability. The word " law " 
 has been the occasion of so much mischief in 
 these matters that it is no wonder some scien- 
 tific men have wished it might be banished for- 
 ever from the realm of science. This word 
 
. CONCERNING MORALS. 219 
 
 has been interpreted by analogy with the laws 
 which kings and parliaments impose upon their 
 subjects. Just as these kings and parliaments 
 impose laws upon their people, the Almighty 
 is supposed to have imposed laws upon matter. 
 But the truth is that there is no analogy between 
 the laws of nature and the laws of kings and 
 states. The laws of matter are resident in its 
 fundamental properties; and its properties are 
 fundamental. It is simply impossible to con- 
 ceive of matter without properties or of nature 
 without laws. It is sheer nonsense to talk 
 about God's imposing properties on matter, and 
 laws upon nature. Matter without properties 
 and nature without laws are figments of the 
 metaphysical and theological brain. 
 
 Now, as I have said, the notion that moral 
 distinctions originate in the will of God is of 
 a piece with these conceptions of natural prop- 
 erties and natural laws. It is a notion of sheer 
 arbitrariness. It makes the distinction between 
 right and wrong a purely arbitrary distinction. 
 The distinction may still be regarded as eternal 
 
220 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 by supposing it to have been " decreed from 
 all eternity," but if '* the eternal difference be- 
 tween right and wrong" of which we hear so 
 much means nothing more than this, it might 
 date from yesterday as well. What we want 
 is that the distinction should be genuine, that 
 it should be real, that it should inhere in the 
 natural relationships of actions, that it should be 
 no veneer or varnish, but in the grain of things. 
 Convince me that the distinction between good 
 and evil actions is a purely arbitrary distinction, 
 and fear of God may lead me to prefer the good 
 and shun the evil; but there would be as little 
 virtue in the former course as in the latter. 
 
 There have not, at any time, been wanting 
 those who have clearly perceived the arbitrary 
 nature of morality which has no other basis 
 than the will of God, and these have endeavored 
 to relieve it of its arbitrary character by imput- 
 ing to the Almighty an ulterior motive. Our 
 present life, they say, is a probation for another 
 and a higher state of existence. The day of 
 judgment is a competitive examination for ad- 
 
CONCERNING MORALS. 221 
 
 mission to this higher state. We are fitting all 
 our lives long for this examination. Morality 
 is the curriculum arranged with reference to 
 our probationary'- condition. The distinctions of 
 right and wrong and the difference in actions 
 have been created in order to furnish this cur- 
 riculum. But by this subterfuge the arbitrary 
 character of moral distinctions is in no wise 
 affected. They remain as arbitrary as ever. 
 They are still imposed; not necessary and 
 essential. There is no more divinity in the 
 atoms than there was before. In fact, to the 
 first arbitrary distinction is now added a second. 
 The relation of this probationary condition to 
 a future state is purely arbitrary. No reason 
 is given why the probation for a life of infinite 
 duration should be limited to an average of 
 some five and thirty years. All the reasons 
 are opposed to any such arrangement. All 
 the reasons are in favor of some natural and 
 genetic relation between the life which now is 
 and that which is to come. In short, we have 
 here no rational account of moral distinctions. 
 
222 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 It is the old, old story of the earth, the elephant, 
 the tortoises. We want to know what the four 
 tortoises are resting on; why actions are dis- 
 tinguished as good or bad; why some things 
 are right and others wrong. 
 
 The transcendental moralist holds a position 
 antipodal to that which I have been exhibiting. 
 He contends that there is actually as well as 
 formally an eternal difference between right 
 and wrong. These are not mere names to 
 him; they are things. God does not make 
 certain actions right and others wrong by his 
 divine decree. Rightness and wrongness inhere 
 in actions, — in their most secret essence. Some 
 things are right and other things are wrong in 
 themselves. The first breath of this transcen- 
 dental air is very inspiring if one enters it from 
 the side of those arbitrary distinctions, which 
 are not really differences, which we have been 
 considering. But after a little while it proves 
 as much too thin as that was too thick and 
 heavy. We have escaped from mere arbitra- 
 riness into mere logomachy. To assert that 
 
CONCERNING MORALS. 223 
 
 the moral difference in actions is an essential 
 difference, a difference in themselves, is to assert 
 nothing. It is to fool ourselves with words. 
 To call this difference an eternal difference is 
 high-sounding and imposing, but it is absurd. 
 There were no actions in the original fire-mist 
 out of which all things have been evolved. 
 Actions imply men. There must be men 
 before there can be actions. But suppose — a 
 reasonable supposition — there have been men 
 here on the earth five hundred thousand years. 
 This is a practical eternity. If certain actions 
 have differed all this time as right and wrong, 
 is it not allowable to say that the difference 
 between them is an eternal difference ? It might 
 be if they had differed so. But they have not. 
 Actions that are not right in one age or con- 
 dition of society are right in another. The 
 moral difference of actions is not a difference 
 which can be estimated apart from the social 
 order for the time being. Plants and animals 
 can be assigned to this class or that, according 
 as they have certain definite characteristics. 
 
224 ^^^ FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 But it is not so with moral actions. Actions 
 as nearly similar as may be are sometimes right 
 and sometimes wrong. 
 
 And, mind you, what I mean is not that they 
 are subjectively so. This is, no doubt, a truth, 
 but it is a truth which has been tremendously 
 over-emphasized, and the result has been that 
 the objective rightness and wrongness have been 
 overlooked. The inward disposition is much, 
 but it is not every thing. And the presumption 
 that it is every thing has been the fruitful 
 mother of innumerable ills. It has prevented 
 men's considering the consequences of their 
 actions, as well as the purity of their intentions. 
 It has blinded men to the New Testament prin- 
 ciple, " No man liveth to himself, and no man 
 dieth to himself." Jesus said that " Whosoever 
 looketh on a woman to lust after her hath 
 committed adultery already in his heart." But 
 it makes a mighty difference to the social order 
 whether a man stops at this point, or goes on 
 to actualize his wicked thought. It makes a 
 mighty difference to him. And this difference 
 
CONCERNING MORALS. 22$ 
 
 IS one which cannot be too much insisted on. 
 It is not enough that a man should do what 
 he thinks is right. He must do what is right. 
 For the wrong action ignorantly done brings 
 in its train hardly less ruin of the social order 
 than the most wilful sin. George Eliot has 
 done no better service than in her showing of 
 the remorseless penalties that wait on the good- 
 natured weakness and mistaken virtue of man- 
 kind. " Danton, no weakness," said that giant 
 of the revolution, as he drew near the guillotine. 
 " No weakness ! " That will be every man's 
 motto who is persuaded that the motives do 
 not trammel up the consequences of the act, 
 and that the objective force of actions can in 
 no wise be measured by their subjective crim- 
 inality. 
 
 But this is episodical. It was suggested by 
 the assertion that actions as nearly similar as 
 possible are sometimes right and sometimes 
 wrong. Why are they so over and above all 
 reference to their subjective character? Because 
 the greatest good of the greatest Clumber of actual 
 
226 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 or prospective individuals in the community, at 
 any giveft time, is the ejtd of all morality, and 
 this end requires at certain stages in the evolu- 
 tion of society a line of action which at certain 
 other stages would be prejudicial. It does this 
 because human nature and its environment are 
 not constants but variable quantities, and con- 
 sequently that relative harmony between the 
 two which is essential to the best condition of 
 society is secured by different actions at differ- 
 ent stages of development. 
 
 This, then, is the ground of moral difference. 
 The most useful action, this is the most right; 
 the most useless or anti-useful, this is the most 
 wrong. That the greatest good of the greatest 
 number possible is the summum bonum, the 
 highest possible good of society considered as 
 a whole, would be a self-evident proposition if 
 any thing could be. The highest possible good 
 of any individual is certainly his greatest good. 
 So then of every individual, and therefore of 
 society at large. There are those who seem to 
 think "the greatest good of the greatest num- 
 
CONCERNING MORALS. 22/ 
 
 ber " a selfish proposition. Why not, they say, 
 the greatest good of all? But here the part is 
 greater than the whole. The greatest number 
 includes all if possible. If the greatest good 
 is not possible for all, then, evidently, the great- 
 est good of the greatest number is the next 
 best thing. 
 
 Such being the highest good — the fullest life, 
 the most and purest pleasure and the least 
 possible pain for the greatest number possible 
 — and every action being right or wrong just in 
 proportion as it contributes towards this highest 
 good, how do we come to the conclusion that 
 it is the duty of the individual to seek this 
 highest good? To ask this question is to pass 
 from the objective to the subjective side of our 
 great theme. Duty and Ought are the great 
 words of morality. They have exactly the same 
 meaning. Duty is that which is due. The 
 ought is that which is owed. Indeed the word 
 '* ought " is but an obsolete form of the word 
 " owed." In Tyndale's version of the Gospels 
 we read, " There was a certain lender which 
 
228 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 ought him five hundred pence." Now, if the 
 true morality were simply the seeking of one's 
 private happiness, as some Utilitarians have 
 contended, I do not see that there would be any 
 place in such morality for these great words. 
 When George Eliot says of Captain Wybrow 
 that he " did what was pleasant and agreeable 
 to him from a sense of duty," she writes one 
 of the most biting sarcasms ever written. So 
 long as a man is doing merely what is pleasant 
 and agreeable to him, and making this the end 
 of his morality, the sense of duty has no fellow- 
 ship with him. When we speak of a man's 
 owing such and such things to himself, we are 
 generally excusing his selfishness, or justifying 
 his extravagance, or implying that he owes some- 
 thing to other people. The words "ought" 
 and " duty " have no place in the scheme of 
 mdividtml hedonism^ the pursuit of individual 
 happiness as the highest good. Their only 
 rightful place is in that universal hedonism 
 which seeks the greatest good of the greatest 
 number. But why ought the individual to seek 
 
CONCERNING MORALS. 229 
 
 the greatest good of all? Because it is self- 
 evident that every other individual has an equal 
 right with him to the highest possible good. 
 But right and duty are but different sides of 
 one stupendous fact. Every man's right is all 
 men's duty; and, conversely, all men's right 
 is every individual's duty. The right of all 
 men to the greatest possible good, the fullest 
 possible life, demonstrates the duty of each 
 individual to seek the highest good of all. 
 
 And is this the Utilitarianism which is so 
 often spoken of in terms of pity and contempt? 
 No, this is the Utilitarianism which is so miscon- 
 ceived that men speak of their misconception 
 in such terms, as well they may. If the only 
 Utilitarianism were that which prizes all things 
 at their money value, then, indeed, it might 
 well merit all the scorn that men could heap 
 upon it. Or if the only Utilitarianism were 
 that which leads the individual to seek his 
 individual happiness, then would the word 
 " Utilitarianism " be one of the largest words 
 for one of the smallest things under the cope 
 
230 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 of heaven. But because Utilitarianism, as con- 
 ceived by all its best expositors, is that system 
 of morality which makes the greatest good of 
 the greatest number the necessary goal of 
 individual effort, those who call . themselves 
 Utilitarians have no need to apologize for their 
 creed. Rather they ought to hesitate before 
 they dare count themselves worthy to be mar- 
 shalled under such a flag. There is no taint 
 of selfishness or sordidness in such a creed. 
 There is no possible splendor of self-sacrifice 
 which cannot find full room to exercise itself 
 within its ample scope. 
 
 Compare the Utilitarian ground of moral 
 distinctions, as thus conceived, with that of 
 Jonathan Dymond and his school, — the will of 
 God. It may not sound so fine to ears attuned 
 to theological phrases and to these alone, but 
 it differs from it as reality differs from a hollow 
 show. One says that might makes right, the 
 other that use makes right, the highest use, the 
 fullest possible life of the greatest number of 
 mankind. Compare this Utilitarian ground of 
 
CONCERNING MORALS. 23 1 
 
 moral distinctions with the high-sounding tran- 
 scendental dictum, We should do right because 
 it is right. There is a meaning of these words 
 which God forbid we should not honor with 
 our deepest admiration, a meaning which every 
 true man can cordially agree to, for it is that 
 we are not to do right from ulterior, selfish 
 motives. We are not to do right through any 
 hope of heaven, or any fear of hell, — through 
 any zeal sectarian or partisan, or with any view 
 of increasing our own reputation, popularity, or 
 wealth. But in all strictness, this expression, 
 ** We should do right because it is right," is 
 an identical proposition; that is, it predicates 
 nothing. The predicate is but a repetition of 
 the subject, as if one should say, " A horse is 
 a horse." As a formula of moral philosophy, 
 as expressive of the ground of right action, this 
 identical proposition is of no account. There 
 would be no special virtue in doing a thing 
 because it is right, if this word " right " did not 
 have a definite meaning. The right is that 
 which is most useful to humanity. What is 
 
232 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 the most useful, mankind has been trying to 
 discover these half-milHon years, and it has 
 got a little way, but it has a long, long way 
 to go. 
 
 It is suggested that the transcendental dictum, 
 "We should do right because it is right," has 
 about it an air of mystery which is indispensable 
 to ethical authority. But mystery, which is 
 the outcome of mere ignorance and negation, 
 does not appeal to rational men with any ges- 
 ture of authority. The mystery which has this 
 gesture, and a voice to match, is the mystery 
 of an order of development so vast that we 
 can only apprehend some little segment of it 
 here and there; we cannot trace its infinite 
 parabola. If in its practical working* the out- 
 come of Utilitarianism were that every individ- 
 ual should begin de novo, and elaborate for 
 himself a scheme of uses and look up to his 
 scheme as his authority, I grant you that 
 there would be something petty in his attitude. 
 There would be a lack of noble mystery per- 
 taining to his sense of duty. It would not be 
 
CONCERNING MORALS, 233 
 
 natural for such a man to respond very deeply 
 to Wordsworth's " Ode to Duty," to say to 
 her, — 
 
 " Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong, 
 And the most ancient heavens through thee are fresh and 
 strong." 
 
 " But," as one of your own prophets hath said, 
 " let us take into account the great principle 
 " of heredity ; let the sense of utility, of the 
 " needs of society, of the demands which the 
 ** whole makes upon each part, have gathered 
 " strength through innumerable generations ; let 
 " all irregularities of time and place be elimi- 
 " nated from the result, because such irregu- 
 " larities will go for nothing in the great mass ; 
 ** and let the combined, intensified, and puri- 
 ** fied result enter into the constitution of the 
 " individual ; let it be born with him, and 
 " twined with every fibre of his brain," and 
 we should then have "the elements of a 
 ** mysterious authority, whose decisions are not 
 " to be questioned or explained, which acts 
 ** from the depth of nature, and which thus 
 
234 ^-^^ FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 " represents the categorical imperative that we 
 " seek." 1 
 
 And if, in its latest stages, Utilitarian mo- 
 rality does not imply that every moral act is 
 based upon an individual calculation of the 
 relation of such an act to the greatest good of 
 the greatest number, still less does it imply 
 this in its earliest stages. No wonder that 
 Utilitarianism seems absurd when it is conceived 
 as picturing the primeval savage debating with 
 himself whether the act to which he is impelled 
 has in it the quality of universal usefulness. 
 No wonder that it still seems absurd when our 
 present moral intuitions are regarded as the 
 outcome of innumerable conscious generaliza- 
 tions in the past, transmitted to us along the 
 lines of our hereditary qualities. But these 
 are men of straw, set up by stealth with a view 
 to being demolished with great public distinc- 
 tion. The true Utilitarian does not imagine 
 
 1 The New Ethics, by Professor C. C. Everett, of the 
 Divinity School, Harvard University ; — an exceedingly sugges- 
 tive and comprehensive article in the Unitarian Review, Octo- 
 ber, 1878. 
 
CONCERNING MORALS. 235 
 
 that the primeval savage consciously presented 
 to himself either the idea of general or individ- 
 ual use. Given that " stream of tendency in 
 virtue of which every thing tends to fulfil the 
 law of its being," — given this stream, not in 
 an isolated individual, but in a multitude of 
 individuals living together and forming a so- 
 ciety, — and immediately the desires begin to 
 clash. Two men want the same thing. They 
 cannot both have it. On every side man finds 
 his impulses checked and thwarted by his fellow- 
 man. So long as men attempt to act out these 
 impulses freely, without regard to each other, 
 life is intolerable, full of violence and robbery 
 and domestic anarchy. Instead of fulfilling 
 the law of their being, men find that they are 
 standing in each other's way; that, so long as 
 it is every man for himself, the devil takes, 
 not merdy the hindmost, but almost everybody. 
 And hence arises the perception — a perception 
 instinctive and unconscious — that, in a world 
 where much is wanted, much must be re- 
 signed; that men need each other; that there 
 
236 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 is a " law of liberty." This law of liberty is 
 the moral law, the perception of which, with 
 the corresponding sense that it must be obeyed, 
 is conscience, — con-sciejice^ that which men 
 know together. How many confluents, from 
 first to last, flow into this before the tiny stream 
 becomes a mighty river, fertilizing history for 
 ages down with its unfailing flood ! Darwin's 
 gregariousness is no doubt its fountain-head. 
 If man were not a social animal, if he could 
 live apart from all his kind, the stress of cir- 
 cumstances would not develop the law of liberty 
 and the corresponding moral sense. It is only 
 when men live together, and begin to suffer 
 inconvenience from the free and unrestrained 
 exercise of each other's wills, that the sense 
 of mutual obligation is developed. 
 
 What more natural than that sympathy, sun- 
 pathos^ common feeling, should be immensely 
 productive of conscience, con-science^ common 
 knowledge, men's knowledge of the principles 
 which ought to regulate their common life? 
 Sympathy, the power of ideally presenting to 
 
CONCERNING MORALS. 27,7 
 
 one's self the feelings of another person, was 
 never better indicated than in that pathetic sen- 
 tence of Eugdnie de Guerin, " I feel a pain in 
 my brother's side." Many such pains went to 
 the shaping of the moral sense of the primeval 
 man. In his dealings with others he found him- 
 self avoiding those things which gave him pain, 
 doing the things which would allay its smart, 
 praising those persons who avoided hurtful 
 things, and blaming those who did not avoid 
 them, and so on. Thus praise and blame be- 
 gan to play their part, a mighty one it has 
 since proved, in strengthening in men's minds 
 the sense of mutual obligation. 
 
 Well said the Psalmist, " Out of the mouths 
 of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained 
 praise," for to the feebleness of human infancy 
 more than to any other cause are we apparently 
 indebted for the placing of "the solitary in 
 families," the strengthening of domestic ties. 
 If it had been possible to " cast the bantling 
 on the rocks," the genesis of the family would 
 seemingly have been impossible. But, as it 
 
238 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 was, those tiny hands, "with love's invisible 
 sceptre laden," held father and mother together 
 till, through force of habit, they became neces- 
 sary to each other's happiness, and permanent 
 family relations were thus engendered. So out 
 of the physical weakness and consequent pro- 
 longation of human infancy, as distinguished 
 from that of other primates, was perfected the 
 moral strength of " the first families " of prim- 
 itive civilization, developing in time into that 
 of the clan and tribe, and then, with ever- 
 widening sympathy, at last into " the enthusiasm 
 for humanity." 
 
 Do not imagine that in this process of evo- 
 lution from mere gregariousness to universal 
 philanthropy there has been no admixture of 
 unreal and superstitious elements. The senti- 
 ment of Duty, of the Ought, — that which is 
 owed, — has received immense accession from 
 the apotheosis of the chief and king, henceforth 
 conceived as the legislator and executor of 
 those moral laws which are the expressions 
 of the average sense of the community as to 
 
CONCERNING MORALS. 239 
 
 what lines of conduct are most conducive to 
 the general good. If this were the whole story, 
 how different the history of humanity would 
 have been ! But, alas ! the imaginary gods 
 have also been conceived as claiming for them- 
 selves hundreds of duties over and above the 
 claims of men upon each other. To this day 
 men conceive that they have innumerable duties 
 to God which are in no sense duties which 
 they owe each other. Indeed, now, as always, 
 the imaginary duty to God is often in direct 
 conflict with the obvious duty to mankind. If 
 all the strength which, from the beginning, has 
 gone to men's imaginary duties to God, could 
 have gone to their obvious and acknowledged 
 duties to each other, how different would be 
 the aspect of our race to-day ! 
 
 Professor Everett says, " If the new morality 
 " would in any sense replace the old, it must be 
 " shown to have at least the authority of an 
 " instinct." Such an authority is claimed for 
 it by its most competent expositors, and I 
 have given you an inkling of the method of 
 
240 THE FAITH OF REASON, 
 
 their proof. It disposes for ever of the imagi- 
 nary Utihtarian, debating, on the threshold of 
 each separate action, its probable effect upon 
 the greatest good of the greatest number. It 
 disposes for ever of the conception of Utilitarian 
 morality as the hereditary sum-total of the 
 reasoned results of by-gone generations in re- 
 gard to what constitutes the greatest good of 
 the greatest number. But what is true is, that 
 our modern conscience is the product of in- 
 numerable instinctive efforts of past generations 
 to adjust the units of society in such relative 
 positions as should give rise to the least possible 
 friction, the utmost fulness of life. *' The expe- 
 " riences of utility organized and consolidated 
 ** through all past generations of the human 
 ** race have been producing corresponding mod- 
 " ifications, which by transmission and accu- 
 '* mulation have become in us certain faculties 
 " of moral intuition." ^ 
 
 So much for the origin and ground of the 
 distinctions between right and wrong. These 
 1 Herbert Spencer. 
 
CONCERNING MORALS, 24I 
 
 distinctions are not merely nominal. They are 
 real; they are inseparable from the social life 
 of man. Given men living in society, and 
 there must be such distinctions. Nor are we 
 put off any longer with identical propositions. 
 To do right because it is right, has still a 
 glorious meaning, but it gives no reason why 
 we should do right, nor any intimation in what 
 the right consists. The ethics of evolution do 
 give such a reason, — do furnish such an inti- 
 mation. The intimation is, that right is the 
 science necessary to the art of living together ; 
 the reason is, that, as all owe us the practice 
 of this art, so we owe it to all. 
 
 And now, very briefly, let us consider the re- 
 lation of this theory of morals to the individual 
 and social morality of the present time. Where 
 shall men go to find the separate precepts of 
 this Utilitarian morality? The happy people 
 who believe that moral distinctions originate ^ 
 in the will of God generally believe, at the 
 same time, that the Bible is a revelation of the 
 will of God. Here is their moral code. Here, 
 
242 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 but where? In the Old Testament or the New? 
 In the Proverbs or the Psalms ? In the Gospels 
 or Epistles? Where the injunctions are easiest, 
 or where they are the hardest? As a rule, 
 where they are easiest. Men never tire of 
 talking very sweetly about the Sermon on the 
 Mount. They never think of realizing its 
 injunctions in their personal concerns. But 
 even if we believed the will of God to be the 
 source of moral distinctions, we could not 
 accept the Bible as a revelation of his will. We 
 do not know who wrote the most of it, or when 
 it was written, and the writers seldom claim, 
 and never show, a supernatural inspiration. 
 Where then shall the Utilitarian moralist go 
 to find the separate precepts of the code he is 
 to follow? To Herbert Spencer or John Stuart 
 Mill? They have not deigned to furnish us 
 with such a code. And there was little need 
 for them to do so. The word is very near us, 
 even in our hearts. The experience of the ages 
 is organized in us. And it is also organized 
 in other men and women everywhere about 
 
CONCERNING MORALS. 243 
 
 US, in some* much more perfectly than in 
 others, and in hundreds of great poems and 
 noble books. Therefore it is that in the great 
 majority of cases we have no doubt whatever 
 what we ought to do. If we should stop to 
 analyze the moral laws which, at every turn, 
 claim our obedience, we should find that every 
 one of them is a rough expression of Utilitarian 
 considerations. But these laws appeal to us, 
 not as- useful, but as right. Only when the 
 element of doubt comes in, and any law that 
 claims obedience has to be tested, do we per- 
 ceive that utility is the basis of right, the widest 
 possible utility. All do not pursue this method. 
 Some appeal to the Bible, — now for some right- 
 eous cause, and anon for an excuse to take 
 a little wine for their stomach's sake, or to 
 gag a woman with a text, or to send back a 
 fugitive slave ; and all do not apply the standard 
 of the widest possible utility. They would 
 have their party or their country flourish at 
 the expense of those beyond ; and so they 
 institute protective tariffs and prohibit foreign 
 immigration. This is the morality of the clan. 
 
244 ^^^ FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 Jesus said, " Unless your righteousness ex- 
 ceed that of the Scribes and Pharisees, you 
 shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of 
 God." And yet the Scribes and Pharisees 
 were the most righteous people of his time. 
 There is a suggestion here, that a much higher 
 morality is still possible for mankind than that 
 demanded by our present intuitions. The 
 inter-adjustments of society are still far enough 
 from being perfect. But the more perfect 
 adjustment will not come from the side of 
 rampant individualism. The passion for free- 
 dom has done a great and glorious work, and 
 it has still much to do. But there is less hope 
 for humanity in this passion than in the willing- 
 ness to be greatly bound, — the willingness to 
 subordinate individual comfort and desire to 
 an extended common good. 
 
 Because the measure of morality is the 
 greatest good of the greatest number, there 
 are those who seem to think that a Utilitarian 
 must try to spread himself in the thinnest 
 possible layer over the surface of humanity, or 
 
CONCERNING MORALS. 245 
 
 that he must neglect his morning errands for 
 the claims of Borroboolagha. But no: the 
 best expositors of our creed assure us that we 
 can best assist the good of all by doing our 
 most obvious duty in the sphere of our im- 
 mediate relationships of love and labor. 
 
 A great deal is said of sanctions of morality, 
 a great deal more than would be if men were 
 deeply impressed with the Utilitarian idea. 
 This seeking for sanctions, — what is it for the 
 most part but an unconscious confession that 
 the law of right contains no reason in itself 
 why it should be obeyed? To the trained 
 Utilitarian it is a sufficient sanction of morality 
 that it is the bond of social order, the means 
 of realizing the fullest possible life of the com- 
 munity. Of those who have much to say about 
 moral sanctions, that is, reasons why we should 
 obey the moral law, many are continually 
 assuring us that morality acquires all its value 
 and sacredness from the idea of immortality, 
 the relation of this life to another. Take 
 away immortality, they say, and there is no 
 
246 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 reason why a man should try to do his duty; 
 and yet the very men who talk in this manner 
 accuse Utilitarian morality of selfishness. Was 
 ever a more flagrant instance of the pot calling 
 the kettle black? Only the kettle in this 
 instance is an imaginary kettle. The real one 
 is not black. The real Utilitarian, the universal 
 hedonist^ is not selfish in his theory of life. To 
 live for all is surely not the creed of selfishness. 
 But what shall we say to this idea that without 
 immortality there is no reason why a man should 
 do his duty? This: that such an idea is a 
 degradation of both immortality and morality. 
 This also : that the idea is absurd. If I were 
 a day-fly I would get as much as possible into 
 my day. Though we should have our be-all 
 and our end-all here, morality would still be 
 the means of assuring the greatest good of the 
 greatest number. I have heard of a child who 
 had an apple in each hand, to whom a third 
 was offered. Whereupon, unable to grasp it, 
 he threw down the two he had, and burst into 
 a flood of tears. Was it a true story, or only 
 
CONCERNING MORALS. 247 
 
 a witty parable of the popular religionist, who, 
 with his hands full of benefits, throws them 
 away, and bursts into a baby's cry because he 
 cannot grasp the fruit of immortality ? 
 
 ''Is there no second life? Pitch this one 
 high." Is this a familiar quotation? It cannot 
 be too familiar. A man does not deserve the 
 hope of immortality who cannot put it to a bet- 
 ter use than this of a mere bribe to human self- 
 ishness ; and what is more, when morality is so 
 degraded, the noblest argument for immortality 
 is gone. For what is this but the inconceiv- 
 ability of the extinction of an unselfish soul? 
 But the extinction of such worms and flies as 
 men would be who could not keep the moral 
 law but for the prize of immortality, is by no 
 means inconceivable. 
 
 Again, it is insisted that without a dogmatic 
 belief in a personal God morality is impossible. 
 But Benedict Spinoza, the God of whose belief 
 was certainly not personal, in any ordinary 
 meaning of the word, had such a genius for 
 morality as few other men have had in all the 
 
248 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 history of thought. I yield to no man in the 
 depth and joy of my assurance of an Infinite 
 Life which men call God, as good a name as 
 any for the Unnamable. But I rejoice to see 
 that the moral law is so deeply implicated in 
 the structure of society that it does not depend 
 for its authority or sanction upon any theory 
 of the Infinite, or even upon any conscious 
 theistic affirmation. 
 
 " Sits there no judge in heaven our sin to see ? 
 More strictly then the inward judge obey." 
 
 Here is this world, — this human world, — and, 
 God or no God, morality is the art of life, the 
 necessary condition of the greatest good of the 
 greatest number. Is it, as pessimism thinks, 
 the worst 'possible world? If so, without a 
 God, then let us make the best of it we can, 
 and better it a little for the men and women 
 who will live when we are dead and gone. If 
 with a God, then, in all reverence, as Hartmann 
 thinks, we must pity him, poor God ! and do 
 our best to take a little from his pain. 
 
CONCERNING MORALS. 249 
 
 " Forgive these wild and wandering cries." 
 
 They do but hide under their seeming blas- 
 phemy the strength of our inalienable con- 
 viction that morality is too deeply implicated 
 in the life of man to be at the mercy of any 
 theory or no-theory of God or the immortal 
 life. Whenever two or three or more are 
 gathered together, there is the Holy Spirit, 
 conscience, in the midst of them. 
 
 And is there, then, no point of contact 
 between morality and worship, the sense of 
 duty and the sense of God? I have not said 
 this, and I do. not believe it. I believe with 
 Matthew Arnold, that there is a power, not 
 ourselves, that makes for righteousness. And 
 by " ourselves " I do not mean just our 
 immediate selves. I mean all men and women 
 that ever lived. I believe there is an eternal 
 power not ourselves that makes for righteous- 
 ness, eternal in no metaphorical sense, but 
 absolutely eternal. I believe that this power 
 not ourselves is the Infinite Being, God. I 
 believe that Wordsworth wrote, not merely 
 
250 THE FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 poetry, but truth when he wrote, as I have 
 quoted once already, apostrophizing duty, — 
 
 " Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong, 
 And the most ancient heavens through thee are fresh and 
 strong." 
 
 Why, but because it is the same infinite power 
 " whose pulses wave-like beat on shore of sun 
 and star and still flow on from heaven to heaven 
 everlastingly," whose genius is more grandly 
 evident in the out-goings of the moral life of 
 man? There is no break in the long line of 
 evolution. 
 
 " The world was once a fluid haze of light, 
 Till toward the centre set the starry tides 
 And eddied into suns, that wheeling cast 
 The planets ; then the monster ; then the man." 
 
 And man discovered in himself an impulse to 
 morality. He discovered it. He did not in- 
 vent it. 
 
 " God kindly gave his blood a moral flow." 
 
 And so morality becomes religious. Without 
 consciously affirming God, a man may still be 
 moral. But without the God whom some 
 
CONCERNING MORALS. 25 I 
 
 cannot affirm, there could be no morality, no 
 man, no universe. 
 
 Men have conceived themselves as having 
 duties to God which are in no wise duties to 
 man. But the new ethics recognize no such 
 duties. The catalogue is exhausted by our 
 duties to each other and our poor relations, 
 the dumb animals as we call them, because 
 we do not understand their speech any better 
 than they do ours. I sometimes wonder if they 
 think us also dumb. But though our Utilitarian 
 morality recognizes no separate duty to God, 
 it recognizes joyfully that all our duties to each 
 other are equally duties to him, his dues, that 
 which we owe to him. For see, the All is for 
 each one of us. And what is the inevitable 
 response of any earnest heart that knows and 
 feels the truth of this, — that all is so for each, 
 that One, the Infinite, is so for all? What can 
 it be but. Each for all, Each for the Infinite 
 One. So grandly helped, we long to help in 
 turn. But how? We cannot make the sun any 
 brighter, or the sky any bluer, or the ocean or 
 
252 THE FAITH OF. REASON. 
 
 the mountains any more sublime. Here and 
 there we can make the earth a Httle greener, 
 fairer; perhaps make such a flower to bloom 
 as God has never seen before in all the eternal 
 years. But this is not enough. We must do 
 more than this; and the way is always clear; 
 the gate is always open. It is to lend a handy — 
 to do what in us lies to make life happier, 
 sweeter, cleaner, brighter, holier, diviner, for 
 those with whom we mingle in the various 
 activities of life and love, and those who will 
 succeed to our inheritance of beauty, truth, and 
 good. Thus worship at its best becomes 
 morality, while, at the same time, morality 
 becomes religion, all duties to our fellow-men 
 becoming duties to Him who, 
 
 * be he what he may, 
 Is yet the fountain light of all our day, 
 Is yet the master light of all our seeing.' 
 
 And this is " mere morality." Oh, long 
 despised, the day is drawing nigh when men 
 shall see that thou art the most beautiful and 
 strong and grandly dowered of all the masters 
 
CONCERNING MORALS. 253 
 
 of the world! Thou art the builder and pre- 
 server of all families and states. Thou art the 
 joy and confidence of all the earth. There is 
 no happiness like thine, albeit it is ** a sort of 
 ** happiness which often brings so much pain with 
 " it that we can only tell it from pain by its 
 " being that which we would choose before every 
 " thing else, because our souls see it to be good." 
 
 Thou whose name is blazoned forth 
 
 On our banner's gleaming fold, 
 Freedom ! thou whose sacred worth 
 
 Never yet has half been told ! 
 Often have we sung of thee. 
 Dear to us as dear can be. 
 
 But to-day we sing of one 
 
 Older, graver far than thou ; 
 With the seal of time begun 
 
 Stamped upon her awful brow. 
 Freedom, latest born of time, 
 Knowest thou her form sublime ? 
 
 She is Duty ; in her hand 
 
 Is a sceptre, heaven-wrought ; 
 Hers the accent of command ; 
 
 Hers the dreadful, mystic Ought ; 
 Hers upon us all to lay 
 Heavier burdens every day. 
 
254 ^^^ FAITH OF REASON. 
 
 But her bondage is so sweet ! 
 
 And her burdens make us strong ; 
 Wings they seem to weary feet, 
 
 Laughter to our lips and song. 
 Freedom, make us free to speed 
 Wheresoever she may lead ! 
 
 February 23, 1879. 
 
 University Press : John Wilson & Son, Cambridge. 
 
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