LIBRARY 
 
 OF THE 
 
 University of California. 
 
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 Received jl^ OJvcJl.. . > ^ J ^00 
 
 Accession No. /^^SSCdo ' Class No. 
 
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RELIGION FOR TO-DAY 
 
 BY 
 
 MINOT J. SAVAGE, D.D. 
 
 The first heaven a?id the first earth are passed away; and^ 
 behold, I inake all things new " 
 
 BOSTON 
 
 Geo. H. Ellis, 272 Congress Street 
 
 1900 
 
3 -a^S^ 
 
 COPYRIGHT 
 
 X897 
 
 (;fo. h. elms 
 
 eEO. H. ELLIS, PRIHTtU, J72 CONGf8? ST., BOSTON, 
 
DEDICATION 
 
 It* GRATITUDE FOR THE LOVE WHICH HAS DONE EVERYTHING TO 
 
 KEEP ME FROM BEING HOMESICK IN A NEW CITY, AND 
 
 FOR THE WELCOME AND SYMPATHETIC LISTENING 
 
 GIVEN TO MY WORDS, I DEDICATE THIS 
 
 BOOK, THE FIRST-FRUITS OK 
 
 MY NF.W YORK WORK, 
 
 Cburcb ot tbe IS^ceemb 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 The chapters in this volume are only some of the sermons 
 preached in the Church of the Messiah during the early months- 
 of this year, 1897. As no word of any one of them was ever 
 written, they have the faults and, it is hoped, some of the virtues 
 of free speaking. 
 
 Those who are familiar with my work during the past twenty- 
 two years in Boston will note many repetitions of thought. In- 
 deed, I have not cared to avoid it. I have tried to meet the 
 wants of this new field as though I had never occupied any other.. 
 A man should not allow his own shadow to intimidate him. So> 
 the book will help those whom it will help, and others will not 
 read it. 
 
 New York, May, 1897. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Present Religious Conditioxs i 
 
 Causes of Present Religious Unrest i8 
 
 Is Religion Dying? 33 
 
 What is Christianity? 50 
 
 God as Inside the Universe, not Outside 66 
 
 Religion Natural, not Statutory 83 
 
 Standing Ground for Trust loi 
 
 Man not Fallen, but Rising 119 
 
 Revelation Natural and Progkkssivi; 136 
 
 Is God Incarnate in One Man only or in Humanity? . 154 
 
 The Divine Fatherhood and our Human Childhood. . 175 
 Immortality from the Point of View of the Modern 
 
 World 191 
 
 Hell and Heaven 211 
 
 The Church of Yesterday, To-day, and To-morrow , . 232 
 
PRESENT RELIGIOUS CONDITIONS. 
 
 It is not an uncommon thing to find people discussing 
 the question as to which is the more important element of 
 religion, the head or the heart, the emotional side or the 
 thought side, the power or the intelligence. It has always 
 seemed to me a very strange question. As though there 
 could be any possibility of doubt on the subject! And 
 yet you find whole denominations distinguished for the 
 manifestation of emotion in religion, and feeling that this 
 is the one thing of chiefest importance of all. 
 
 On the other hand, you will find certain denominations 
 and we Unitarians are accused of it very commonly 
 where there is supposed to be an undue development of the 
 intellectual side, which are spoken of as critical and cold. 
 It is possible that the one side should be over-developed 
 at the expense of the other ; and yet it seems to me that 
 there is no sort of question that the two are of equal impor- 
 tance, and neither one of them can be slighted without seri- 
 ous detriment to the total result. 
 
 Suppose you should find the people on board a great 
 steamer in mid-ocean discussing the question as to which 
 was the more important, the engine down in the hold or the 
 man at the wheel with the compass and chart. Would you 
 consider it a sensible discussion for anybody to engage in ? 
 Without the engine in the hold there is no movement ; with- 
 out the man at the wheel, with his compass and his chart, 
 
2 Religion for To-day 
 
 there may be movement, but there is no intelligent, there is 
 no safe movement. 
 
 Power alone, whether it be the wind or whether it be the 
 power of religious emotion, may drive people, but whither ? 
 The wind or the engine may drive a ship towards port, if 
 it does it is purely an accident, but unless there is a man 
 at the wheel, it may just as readily drive the ship wildly 
 in this direction or that, against an iceberg or upon the 
 rocks. While, if you do not have the engine in the hold 
 that is capable of generating steam that can be turned into 
 motion of the ship, if you do not have that, the man at 
 the wheel is powerless. He may look over the wide waste 
 of waters about him, and know in which direction he ought 
 to move, but he has no power ; so he stands intelligent but 
 helpless. 
 
 Which, then, is the more important, the emotional or the 
 intellectual side of religion ? Each is equally important 
 with the other ; and both are needed, if religion, like a ship 
 at sea, is ever to pursue an intelligent course and arrive at 
 any desirable haven. 
 
 A hundred and fifty years ago the people of this country 
 were substantially at peace in their religious ideas. The 
 surface of the popular belief was unruffled ; there was 
 substantial agreement in regard to the religious and theo- 
 logical ideas which were held. And there are some people 
 to-day who are at peace, enjoying a very desirable quiet. 
 
 Fortunate are you, friends, if any of you are here to-day 
 who have inherited a belief that gives you satisfaction and 
 comfort, w^hich satisfies your intellectual demands upon 
 it, if you make any, which gives you peace. Fortunate 
 are you to have been sheltered from the influx of new 
 thoughts and restless questionings which have invaded the 
 
Present Religious Conditions 3 
 
 larger part of the modem world. Fortunate, I say, are you 
 if you are still possessed of this kind of peace. But, as you 
 look out over the world, you must recognize the fact that the 
 great majority of the people of this modern time of ours are 
 not in possession of this peace ; and perhaps, if you think 
 about it a little carefully, you will question whether this kind 
 of peace, which is simply quiescence, is, after all, the most 
 desirable possession. 
 
 There is the peace of a pool that reflects the sun by day 
 and the stars by night, the grasses and the trees upon its 
 borders, and which has a certain amount of life in it for its 
 surroundings ; but it goes nowhere. There is another kind 
 of peace, the peace of the brook or of the mighty river, 
 the peace of orderly movement, that carries boats, ships, 
 the world's commerce, upon its bosom, and sails out towards 
 the mighty ocean of God, that flows round and grasps the 
 world. 
 
 There is the peace of a bird poised in the air with 
 motionless pinion. There is the peace of the kingly eagle 
 sweeping on his way in spite of storms and mighty winds, 
 rejoicing in them in his power. 
 
 There is the peace of a ship at sea which, as Coleridge 
 says in his '' Ancient Mariner," floats 
 
 " As idle as a painted ship 
 Upon a painted ocean." 
 
 There is that more magnificent peace of one of our great 
 liners, freighted, full of passengers, of life, of meaning, that 
 laughs at the puny waves along its sides, and that treads its 
 pathway across the ocean, laughing in the face of all the 
 winds that buffet it. It seems to me that this life-peace, 
 peace with motion, peace that goes somewhere, that has 
 
4 Religion for To-day 
 
 some magnificent object, end, in view, is a grander peace 
 than that of mere quiescence, that accepts things as they 
 are and demands nothing more than that. 
 
 Fortunate, I say, are those of you who are at peace ; for 
 some of us who are not do at times become so weary of 
 thinking ! Now and then, some man, through shear weari- 
 ness, just because he is tired out, drifts to some church 
 where thinking is a sin, and finds the greatest intellectual 
 rest. Fortunate, I say, in one way, are you who are at 
 peace. 
 
 But you must remember, friends, that there are thousands 
 on thousands of men and women in the modern world who 
 neither do nor can share this quiescent peace with you, for 
 better or worse, and we must simply face the facts which we 
 cannot help. These people are adrift; they do not share 
 the old ideas. They have outgrown them, shall I say ? If 
 that is intimating too much, at this stage of my discussion, 
 let us simply say that they have drifted away from them, or 
 gone back from them. At any rate they do not possess the 
 old-time belief which gave their fathers peace and quiet in 
 their religious ideas. They are filled with doubt and ques- 
 tion, not in regard to trifling matters, but concerning the 
 deep-down problems of life. 
 
 I have had questions asked me since I have been with 
 you these few weeks to answer which would keep me busy 
 for two years, questions that take hold of the very foun- 
 dations of things, questions that people need to have 
 answered in order hopefully and manfully and womanly to 
 live. 
 
 These questions then, I say, are in all the air, and they 
 have disturbed and troubled thousands on thousands of 
 people in this modern world. And who are these people ? 
 
Present Religious Conditions 5 
 
 They are not the bad people, they are not the people that 
 anybody would call wicked people, they are not the ignorant 
 people. You will find the great majority of the ignorant 
 people not much disturbed by these questions. It is the 
 people who read and think who doubt and ask questions ; 
 and among these people are some of the mightiest and 
 noblest of men, the leaders of the world. You would not 
 call Herbert Spencer a bad man nor an ignorant man. No 
 one would think of accusing Mr. Tyndall or Mr. Huxley of 
 undervaluing moral laws or disregarding truth. They are 
 not the people who are careless about these things. 
 
 There never was such an earnest truth-seeking, such a 
 feverish desire for truth in the history of this world as char- 
 acterizes the leaders of the world's thought and life in this 
 nineteenth century of ours. It is the best people, it is the 
 most intelligent people, who above all things desire truth, 
 who are asking these questions. 
 
 This is simply a statement of fact which we must recog- 
 nize for better or worse, whatever its meaning may be. 
 And let us face another point right here. 
 
 Those people who never have any doubts, and those 
 people who have doubts and feel guilty on account of them, 
 might as well recognize the fact that doubt is sometimes 
 just as much of a religious duty as is belief. It is just as 
 much a man's business to doubt that which cannot produce 
 its credentials as it is to accept that which can. How else 
 shall we sift the false from the true ? Doubt is just as true 
 a virtue as is faith ; and all of us doubt. The person who 
 thinks he or she has never had a doubt in the world, if you 
 ask a few questions, will reveal the fact that all that which 
 is not accepted is doubted or denied, whatever it may be. 
 
 The fact that we believe one thing means that we do not 
 
6 Religion for To-day 
 
 believe that which is excluded by this. And let us remem- 
 ber that doubt may have reverence and regard for God and 
 the tenderest religious qualities about it. As Tennyson, 
 one of the most profoundly religious natures of this genera- 
 tion, has sung, 
 
 " There lives more faith in honest doubt, 
 Believe me, than in half the creeds." 
 
 The man who is doubting merely as a preliminary to find- 
 ing out what is true is facing Godward and only anxious for 
 light. 
 
 In order to answer the great questions on which a happy 
 and successful life depend, we must use these intellects of 
 ours which God has given us. It seems to me one of the 
 greatest misfortunes of the world to have intelligence and 
 then to find out that it is wicked to use it. Why are we so 
 weighted and hampered with this incessant demand to ques- 
 tion and think and discover and know, if we are told that 
 it is only a temptation of the devil after all, and we must 
 shut our eyes and blindly accept something, what t 
 
 Note here, friends, that, if you ever give any reason for 
 the position you hold, then you assume, in spite of your- 
 selves, the absolute supremacy of reason in the last resort. 
 Why are you a Christian ? Why are not you a Moham- 
 medan ? Why not a Buddhist .<* Why are you a member 
 of this denomination or that? The moment you attempt 
 to give an intelligent answer to that, you give a reason, as 
 Paul says you ought, for the faith that is in you. And the 
 moment you give a reason, you appeal to reason as the court 
 of last resort. In other words, though you may think ration- 
 alism is a dreadful thing, you are rationalistic in spite of 
 yourselves. 
 
Present Religious Conditions J 
 
 Why do you accept this Bible, and not the Koran ? The 
 moment you give a reason, you mean that reason is compe- 
 tent to pronounce on problems connected with this Bible. 
 If you deny the function of reason, then think, there is no 
 reason left why you should be even a Christian, no reason 
 left why you should believe one thing more than another, 
 and you are all afloat in a vast and unsettled sea of doubt ! 
 
 We must use the reason which God has given us to light 
 us on our way. Even Jesus appealed to this rationalism 
 as the supreme thing in regard to matters of duty, and said, 
 " Why even of your own selves judge ye not what is right ? " 
 
 We take, then, the authority of Jesus for placing reason 
 as the supreme court in which these great problems are 
 finally to be settled. 
 
 A sea captain in mid-ocean takes the sun, as we say, at 
 noon, and then he examines his chart, and knowing the 
 port from which he sailed, he finds out where he is ; and 
 having found out where he is, he has no practical question 
 as to the next step, as to which way he is to sail in order to 
 reach the harbor for which he originally set out. 
 
 It seems to me that in order to comprehend some of 
 these problems with which we are to deal in some of these 
 following Sundays, we need, in the first place, if possible, 
 to find out where we are. We need to comprehend in gen- 
 eral outline the present religious conditions of the world. 
 How shall we do it t I have given it a great deal of thought 
 during the past week. I do not wish to dwell on it at so 
 great length as to give it disproportionate place or time; 
 and it has seemed to me that perhaps, by presenting the 
 matter through an illustration like that upon which I am 
 about to enter, I could do it as satisfactorily as in any 
 other way. 
 
8 Religion for To-day 
 
 Suppose a full grown and intelligent man were placed 
 suddenly upon this planet for the first time. He wishes to 
 find out what is true in regard to matters of religion. What 
 will he do ? He will naturally start out on a tour of investi- 
 gation ; he will wish to ask those who claim to have author- 
 ity in such matters and find out where they stand. Now let 
 us follow this supposed man on this tour of investigation for 
 a little, and in that way find out what are the present relig- 
 ious conditions of the world. 
 
 And note, friends, one thing : I beg you, if I use any de- 
 nominational name, or if I refer to any man prominent in 
 the religious life of the modern world, never for a moment 
 think I am going to attack any denomination or any man, or 
 that I am going to criticise them in any unkind way. My 
 purpose is simply to know facts, to see where we are. That 
 is, instead of criticising, I wish to define things. 
 
 Now this man who wishes to find out the present religious 
 condition of the world, if he begins by asking some of the 
 great general questions, will find himself face to face with a 
 strange fact like this: he will discover that Christendom, 
 the great majority of Christian people, claim that God has 
 given a miraculous, supernatural, infallible revelation of his 
 will to the world. But fronting that claim he will find an- 
 other fact : that it was not given until the world had been 
 wandering on its dark and hopeless way for a hundred or 
 two hundred thousand years, and that, on this theory, all 
 these people, countless billions on billions of souls, had 
 gone to eternal loss without having had the slightest oppor- 
 tunity to know that there was any God or that he had any 
 will to reveal to them. 
 
 And then he will be confronted with another fact quite as 
 Strange and startling, that, since this supposed revelation 
 
Present Religious Conditions g 
 
 was given to the world, less than a third of all the people 
 that live on the planet have heard of it. Not a third of the 
 inhabitants of the world to-day know that there is any such 
 thing in existence as our Bible, or any Christian claim of 
 revelation ; and yet we are asked to believe that all these 
 people are plunging ceaselessly into the seething abyss of 
 eternal woe. 
 
 If he asks a little further he will find that the majority 
 of the people in Christendom do not accept the Church's- 
 claim in regard to this book. That is, that God, omnipotent- 
 and all-wise, and wishing to reveal himself, yet has not 
 made the matter so clear that all honest people are com- 
 pelled to accept the claim as made. 
 
 Then he will inquire further, as he looks over Christen- 
 dom itself, and he will find the Greek Church claiming to be 
 the original one, looking upon the Catholic Church and all 
 Protestant Churches as parvenues and upstarts, and wilful 
 perverters of the truth. He will find the Catholic Church 
 making the same claim, and looking upon the Greek Church 
 and all Protestant Churches as perverters of God's truth. 
 He will find the Protestant Church divided up into no end 
 of denominations, each claiming that its own interpreta- 
 tion of the infallible truth is the correct one. How would 
 the man inquiring after some Scriptural authority for relig- 
 ious truth be baffled and bewildered ! If he still went to 
 the Catholic Church, and investigated its claims still more, 
 he would find that it asserts that it, and it alone, is the 
 organized infallible body of God on earth, and that, if a 
 person is sacramentally connected with that body, he par- 
 takes of its life as the limb does of the trunk of a tree, 
 and so has his final safety assured. 
 
 But he will find that this same Catholic Church, as the 
 
lO Religion for To-day 
 
 ages go by, is losing its hold on the intelligence of men; 
 that is, the more intelligent people become the less they 
 are ready to accept its claims to be the one representative 
 of God on earth. 
 
 Go back two or three hundred years and you will find all 
 Europe in the grasp of the Catholic Church. To-day there 
 is only one country that it holds with the same old-time 
 power, and that is a country that is off the track of modern 
 civilization and plays no part in the policy of the modem 
 world, that is Spain. 
 
 You will find that education, you will find that politics, 
 you will find that philosophy, you will find that science, you 
 will find that art, all these great branches of human life 
 that used to be absorbed by and utterly subservient to the 
 Church, have now thrown off its claim and are free. You 
 will find that the late pope has therefore solemnly banned 
 modern civilization as godless. 
 
 We can hardly accept the claim of a church that, assert- 
 ing that it has God behind it and in it, is losing its grip 
 on the modern intelligent world, and, as the world grows 
 more intelligent, is waning in power. We cannot believe, 
 friends, whatever else we do, that God is losing his control 
 over this little planet, and that it is going all wrong, against 
 his will and in spite of his omnipotence. 
 
 Suppose this same investigator turned to the Protestant 
 Churches, what would he find ? He would find that at the 
 time of the Reformation an infallible book was set up. He 
 would note that the claim of absolute infallibility for this 
 book was never made in the history of the Church until this 
 sixteenth century. Do you know that the canon of the 
 Bible was never authoritatively declared until the sixteenth 
 century? and are you aware of the fact that Luther and 
 
Present Religious Conditions ii 
 
 Calvin considered themselves perfectly at liberty to criticise 
 the Bible as they would any other book, and even to reject 
 certain of its books as unworthy of a place in the canon ? 
 This claim was never made by the Bible itself ; it was never 
 made by the Church until the necessity arose to pit one 
 infallibility against another. You will find that great An- 
 glican teachers to-day queen's chaplains and leading 
 scholars of the English Church will tell you the Bible is 
 simply the record of the teachings of the early Church and 
 of no more authority than the utterances of the Church 
 to-day. 
 
 This, I say, is what this earnest investigator of truth would 
 discover. He would find a certain world-scheme including 
 the fall, the loss of the race, supernatural redemption, and 
 endless rewards and punishments ; and he would find this 
 general scheme, which is familiar to you all as the old Prot- 
 estant belief, held as authoritatively revealed divine truth. 
 
 He would find, however, that at the present time only a 
 very few of the Church, those who claim that they have 
 not changed, any longer accept this belief. That is, that 
 which Protestantism declares to be the clear teaching of the 
 infallible book in the sixteenth century is to-day regarded 
 in its entirety as the clear reading of that book by almost 
 none of the Orthodox Protestant Churches themselves. You 
 will find now and then a man like Dr. Gardner Spring 
 formerly of the old Brick Church in this city who, when 
 asked why God did not save more souls, said, quietly and 
 complacently, he supposed that God saved just as many 
 souls as he wanted to. 
 
 You will find now and then a man like Mr. Moody, I 
 am not going to criticise him ; Mr. Moody is earnest, Mr. 
 Moody is in dead earnest, he is consistent with his belief, 
 
12 Religion for To-day 
 
 as the great majority of those who claim to share that be- 
 lief with him are not ; I have only words of praise for him, 
 occupying the position that he does; he is doing what 
 thousands of other men in this country ought to be doing if 
 they half believe what they say they do, but Mr. Moody 
 says that we must accept the story of Jonah and the whale 
 or else we must give up God ; he said this within a week or 
 two. Why.? Because, according to his idea, we have no 
 reason for believing either in God or Jonah except this 
 book. He has turned the matter right around from the 
 way I put it. I think it is religion that creates Bibles, and 
 not Bibles that create religion. 
 
 Now he would find a few persons holding these beliefs 
 unchanged. But if he looked into the great, grave, earnest 
 Orthodox Churches he would find that there modern thought 
 and modern question are creeping in ; he would find Dr. 
 Briggs of the Union Theological Seminary discussing the 
 higher criticism, which means, plainly stated, that the Bible 
 in all its parts and verses is not infallible. That is what it 
 comes to, whether you call it higher criticism or any other 
 kind of criticism. 
 
 He would find that heresy is a matter of geographical 
 distribution : that one man is prosecuted for heresy in one 
 part of the country and another goes undisturbed in another 
 part, though each holds the same beliefs. 
 
 The point I wish to bring out is simply that there is no 
 fixed standard on the part of any branch of the Church. 
 He would find not only these men to whom I have referred, 
 but other men like Dr. Lyman Abbott, like Dr. Heber New- 
 ton, like Dr. Washington Gladden, of Columbus, Ohio, like 
 the leading men in New Haven, like nearly all the profes- 
 sors at Andover, he would find these gladly accepting the 
 
Present Religiotis Conditions 13 
 
 designation of " Liberal Orthodox." And what does that 
 mean? It means, when you interpret it and put it in 
 straight clear English, that they have given up the old-time 
 belief in almost every single one of the points that used to 
 be regarded as absolutely essential ; that is what it means. 
 
 Dr. Gordon of the Old South Church in Boston no 
 longer believes in the old-time Trinity ; he freely criticises 
 the Bible and treats it as literature, as he would any other 
 book. He declares that the old Calvinism leads to atheism 
 and says it has got to be given up in order to save Chris- 
 tianity. He is frankly Universalist in his outlook over the 
 next world. 
 
 These men our seeker would find, indicating how wide- 
 spread these different varieties of belief are. 
 
 And then he would find the great mass of people, where .?. 
 Outside of the churches he would find Secularists, noble, 
 true, honorable men. I have been acquainted with hun- 
 dreds of them, some of the finest men who ever lived, who 
 believe religiously, if we may use the Hibernicism, that 
 religion is a thing of the past ; they say that religion is 
 superstition, and it is being outgrown, and that humanity is 
 coming to take its place. You find noble men like Felix 
 Adler and his followers here, and those of a similar name 
 in other cities, who are engaged in the moral training and 
 uplifting of the world, but who voluntarily turn their backs 
 on what we call religion. 
 
 He would find a noble body of agnostics. I am not an 
 agnostic, I believe it is false science and bad philosophy; 
 but I cannot treat it with contempt when men like Huxley 
 feel that since this great infinite universe has been revealed 
 they are overwhelmed with the magnitude of it and must 
 bow their heads in simple humility and say " I do not know." 
 
14 Religion for To-day 
 
 Ask him about God : " I do not know." About the soul : " I 
 do not know." About the future life : '' I do not know." He 
 says, "These are such great problems I have given them 
 up ; I am going to live as well as I can and help the world 
 as well as I can, but I postpone what from my point of view 
 is a needless discussion." 
 
 Then he would find a great body of men, thousands on 
 thousands of them here in this city of New York, bankers, 
 lawyers, merchants, physicians, who are where ? They say. 
 Since all the scientific and philosophic doctors disagree and 
 are at swords' points, what is the use of my wearying my 
 brain about it at all.? They will help the ministers, they 
 will help the churches in their philanthropic work and 
 think, " Let them believe what they will about the next world, 
 I do not know and do not care; I am going to do as well 
 as I know, I am going to live a clean life and an honest, 
 because that is the only sensible one for a man to live. I 
 am going to do what I can to relieve the burden of human 
 sorrow ; but the churches can go their own way, they do 
 not interest me, they do not feed me, they do not help me, 
 and it seems to me they are spending most of the time in 
 discussing matters which are not practical, and which the 
 world up to this time has never been able to settle." 
 
 This is the way great masses of men in the modern world 
 are coming to feel. 
 
 Now, friends, where are we t What claim do we, these 
 few Unitarian Churches, make? what claim do I make, on 
 behalf of one of them ? 
 
 My claim may seem to you an unreal one, an unreason- 
 able one, may seem to you a very presumptuous one ; but I 
 believe, friends, with my whole soul, that we stand for the 
 principles which are to rule the world in the coming thou- 
 
Present Religious Conditions i 5 
 
 sands of years. For why? We believe in and respect the 
 heart, the emotional, the feeling side of religion. We be- 
 lieve also in and respect the intellectual side, and demand for 
 it its rights ; and we believe that these great thousands of 
 people have gone out of the churches because there was not 
 room enough in the churches for the intellectual develop- 
 ment and freedom that the modern world demands. 
 
 The dome of the coming temple of God must be as 
 wide as the sky. Suppose you grant freedom ; is there 
 any danger that we are going to fall out of the keeping 
 of or wander beyond the reach of the Almighty? The 
 old Psalmist believes more than that, " If I ascend into 
 heaven Thou art there ; if I descend into the abyss Thou art 
 there ; if I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the 
 uttermost parts of the sea, even there Thy hand shall lead 
 me and Thy right hand shall hold me." 
 
 This universe, friends, is infinite. God's truth is infinite 
 as the universe. Draw a circle, and however large it may 
 be in circumference, however wide in its diameter, if you set 
 any limits you fence out more of God and truth than you 
 fence in ; for God is infinite and his truth is as wide as his 
 universe, which he thrills and permeates in every part. 
 
 I believe, then, in preserving all the reverences, all the 
 worships, all the loves, all the aspirations, all the emotions, 
 all the impulses of the past and of the human heart to-day ; 
 and I believe that the calm, clear, trained intellect should sit 
 on high and in view of the wide range of things, looking 
 before and after, should guide all these mighty forces to their 
 beneficent and magnificent ends. 
 
 I believe in God as I never believed in him before, I 
 shall have occasion before I am through with this series of 
 sermons to tell you how and why. I believe in religion as 
 
1 6 Religion for To-day 
 
 I never believed in it before. I shall also tell you concern- 
 ing this, how and why. I believe in revelation, an infallible 
 revelation of divine truth, so infallible that no intelligent man 
 can doubt or deny. I believe in incarnation, the coming of 
 God into the human in a more magnificent and grander way 
 than I ever believed in all the days when I held to the 
 theology of the past. I believe in the human soul, its son- 
 ship to God, the eternal spiritual Father. I believe in 
 communion between the child-soul and the Infinite soul 
 that ever folds us in his arms. As Tennyson says, 
 
 " Speak to him, thou, for He hears, 
 And spirit with spirit may meet. 
 Closer is He than breathing 
 And nearer than hands and feet." 
 
 I believe, not in the resurrection of the body, for we 
 have left behind us, those of us who have fifty years, several 
 bodies already which we would not care to have resurrected. 
 We do not believe that the soul goes down, and so it does 
 not need to come up again. We believe in the ascent of 
 the soul at death. I do not believe in death, friends. I 
 believe in life ; for death is nothing more than going to 
 sleep at night to wake up again in the morning; and I am 
 not afraid of it any longer. 
 
 I believe, then, in the eternal life, in the eternal opportu- 
 nity and the eternal advance. These are some hints as to 
 the position occupied by this little group of churches, that 
 claim to represent and speak for the new Word of God to 
 the modern world. We are in the minority. And we would 
 say, with humility and not in boasting, that all leadership is 
 always in the minority. Notice an army on the march ; the 
 vanguard is always few, then comes the main body, and then 
 
Present Religious Conditions ly 
 
 the stragglers and camp followers in the rear. The leaders 
 of the world in any department, education, government, 
 science, art, philosophy, ethics, religion, the leaders of the 
 world are always few. When the main body of the army 
 gets to where the vanguard is to-day, the vanguard will still 
 be ahead and in the minority forever. 
 
 I believe, then, that we represent the living God, the 
 newer and truer and deeper revelation, the higher and 
 broader incarnation, the soul and the eternal hope. If you 
 choose to follow me as I take up some of these great prob- 
 lems one after another, you will find that there is little that 
 is negative, much that is positive, and that we stand for the 
 larger and grander hope of the larger and grander Church 
 that is to be. 
 
CAUSES OF PRESENT RELIGIOUS UNREST. 
 
 Our fathers knew very little about this world, but they 
 assumed that they knew all about the next. 
 
 Last Sunday morning I touched on the present conditions 
 of uncertainty, confusion, and contradiction as manifested in 
 the religious thought and condition of the world. It is my 
 purpose this morning to point out certain things that have 
 happened in recent times to make this confusion, contradic- 
 tion, necessary, perfectly natural. In order to do this, I 
 shall need to go back for a little and outline that which you 
 are so familiar with that you very rarely estimate its signifi- 
 cance ; that is, the conditions of human thought two or three 
 hundred years ago concerning the universe and man and 
 destiny. 
 
 You find these pictured graphically, with poetic power and 
 beauty, in the *' Divina Commedia " of Dante, so far as the 
 spirit world is concerned. You find a completer conception 
 still in the " Paradise Lost " and the " Paradise Regained " 
 of Milton ; and Milton's great epic, or his two epics, rather, 
 have the advantage for our purpose over the work of Dante, 
 of covering the entire scheme of this life as well as of the 
 other, that is, taking in what people then believed they 
 knew to be God's eternal plan and purpose in human crea- 
 tion and in human redemption. 
 
 Let us notice for a moment the barest, simplest outlines 
 of that scheme. 
 
Causes of Present Religious Unrest 19 
 
 Our fathers thought they knew what God was doing in the 
 eternity that preceded the creation of the world. They tell 
 us, in their theological creeds and schemes, how the three 
 persons of the Trinity consulted together, entered into cove- 
 nant with each other, and made out the general plan of 
 human history. 
 
 There was war in heaven. A third part of the angels, 
 following Satan in revolt against divine authority, was cast 
 out into the abyss. To fill this vacancy in heaven so that 
 the number of those who should see, rejoice in, and utter 
 the divine glory might not suffer by diminution, God deter- 
 mined to create this world and humanity. 
 
 Scarcely was his work completed before it was invaded by 
 the leader of those who had been in revolt on high. Sin 
 blighted God's plan and purpose. Our first parents fell; 
 they were cast out of Paradise. All their descendants were 
 doomed through all time not only, but all eternity. 
 
 God then decided that he would choose certain ones out 
 of this vast mass to be saved, to be taken to heaven. He 
 sent his angels with his messages. He selected one man, 
 then his children, then the nation that was born of them, to 
 be the recipients of his favor, to be taught and trained. He 
 sent prophets. In the fulness of time He came himself in 
 the second person of the Trinity, lived here in the world, 
 was crucified, descended into hell, suffered in hell all the 
 pangs that those who were to be saved would have suf- 
 fered, had they been lost, through all eternity. This suf- 
 fering was concentrated into three days and nights. Then 
 he broke from the bounds of hell, escaped, and ascended 
 on high. 
 
 This gospel was to be preached among all nations. 
 Those who were elected were to be saved ; the rest were to 
 
20 Religion for To-day 
 
 be passed by and permitted to illustrate the glory of God's 
 justice, as the saved would illustrate the glory of his grace. 
 Then the world was to be burned up ; that which had been 
 created was to be destroyed, and the saved and the lost 
 were to inhabit their fixed places and conditions throughout 
 eternity. 
 
 This is the general scheme which our fathers believed 
 they knew. It is the scheme outlined, as clear cut as an 
 intaglio, in the great work of Milton. And Milton's work 
 was not poetry only, it crystallized popular thought and 
 what was practically universal Protestant belief. 
 
 The people rested in this for several hundred years. 
 This was the peace, the quiescent condition of things, to 
 which I referred last Sunday; but that peace no longer 
 remains. You and I are not responsible for the breaking 
 up of that peace : we simply observe, study, try to find out 
 what it means so that we may comprehend our present duty. 
 
 Now I wish you to note some few things that have 
 happened in this modern world to account for the break-up 
 of common belief in this once generally accepted scheme 
 of things. 
 
 What has happened t I wish, before I point out specifi- 
 cally the things that have taken place, to call your atten- 
 tion to one or two facts and principles, and make them as 
 emphatic as I can. 
 
 You are to note, if you will, and I beg that you will, 
 because, if you do not, you will misunderstand, and then, if 
 you speak of it, you will misrepresent me, I beg you to 
 note that religion, as the word is popularly used, includes 
 two quite distinct things : First it means the spirit, the life. 
 Then it means a body of thought, of intellectual conception, 
 of dogmatic statement. And I beg you to notice that the 
 
Causes of Present Religions Unrest 21 
 
 body may grow, may change, may be completely outgrown, 
 and the spirit not only not die, but only become grander 
 and finer through the process. 
 
 Take an illustration. My personal identity has remained 
 unchanged from the time when I was a little babe in my 
 mother's arms, through childhood, through youth, through 
 young manhood, through mature manhood ; and if I live 
 long enough it will remain unchanged through old age and 
 even to the time when I discard this body altogether. 
 
 And I beg you to note another fact. During this time, 
 while my soul has maintained its personal identity, 
 though I trust it has grown and deepened and heightened 
 and become a little sweeter and nobler, I have not only 
 modified my body, but I have successively discarded at 
 least ten or fifteen entire bodies. 
 
 The identity then and the growth of the soul do not 
 depend upon keeping the body unchanged, or even upon 
 maintaining the same body. 
 
 I wish now that you shall note carefully, before I pro- 
 ceed any farther, one more fact. I have heard it said a 
 great many times that the minister makes a mistake when 
 he introduces anything touching science into the pulpit; 
 that the lecture-room is the place for science ; that it is 
 irrelevant in the pulpit, which ought to be devoted to 
 religion. 
 
 Remember, however, friends, what I have just said : that 
 religion is made up of two parts, a soul and a body ; and 
 the body of every religion that ever existed on the face of 
 the earth from the beginning of human history until now 
 is pure and simple science, must be in the nature of 
 things. 
 
 Did you never notice that this Bible begins with science ? 
 
22 Religion for To-day 
 
 The first thing in it is science. Is not the old Hebrew 
 conception of the creation of the universe and man, the 
 method of creation, just as much science as Darwinism is 
 science, or chemistry is science, or geology is science ? It 
 is all science, and nothing else. Only it is crude, tradi- 
 tional, childish science, the science of the childhood world, 
 not even Hebrew in its origin, but borrowed from the Per- 
 sians or the Babylonians. It is simply what came to be 
 the Hebrew traditional stojy such as every nation on the 
 face of the earth has had and told. 
 
 Let us remember, then, that all our theologies, however 
 old they may be, though we may have forgotten all about 
 it, all our theologies spring out of scientific conceptions 
 of things, of necessity must. So that a minister to-day is 
 only doing what ministers in all ages have done if he 
 appeals to the scientific conception of things. It is simply 
 a question as to whether he is to deal with that which is 
 true and demonstrated science or whether he is to deal with 
 the exploded scientific conceptions of the past which the 
 world, at least outside of the churches, has long ago out- 
 grown. 
 
 Now what has happened ? In the first place, since this 
 scheme of theology which I have outlined took shape in 
 the minds of men, we have discovered a new universe. 
 
 Let me indicate what it means. We are a part of it, we 
 are in the drift and swim so that we do not notice its signifi- 
 cance, the natural and necessary result of the great facts 
 involved. We do not half appreciate how wonderful the 
 universe is. We talk about the sun's rising and setting, 
 though we know it does neither. We constantly find our- 
 selves holding Ptolemaic conceptions from which we are not 
 yet free. How young is the Copernican universe in which 
 
Causes of Present Religions Unrest 23 
 
 we are living, and how great is it compared with the 
 Ptolemaic conceptions in which our theology grew up, of 
 which it is a part and to which it fitted ! 
 
 Let me indicate. It was thirty-six years after the town 
 of Boston was settled when Milton in London took out a 
 license permitting him to publish '' Paradise Lost." " Para- 
 dise Lost" has as its frame- work the Ptolemaic universe. 
 Milton had heard about the Copernican universe just as 
 thousands of people to-day have heard about Darwinism. 
 We are not sure as to whether he accepted it. At least 
 he did not regard it as best fitted for his purpose ; so he 
 adapted his epic to the Ptolemaic universe, which was the 
 commonly accepted one of the time. 
 
 What was that universe ? I cannot go into an elaborate de- 
 scription of it now. I simply wish to tell you that the earth 
 was fixed at the centre, that there were concentric spheres, 
 as real as a series of glass globes inside of each other, and 
 to these spheres were fixed the moon, then the sun and the 
 planets ; and then to a sphere outside of these were attached 
 the fixed stars, all of them in the same plane. 
 
 And how large was this universe ? It was not nearly so 
 large, friends, as we know to-day the orbit of the moon 
 to be. The entire world of Milton was smaller than the 
 orbit of the moon ; for he tells us that when the angels were 
 cast out of heaven it took them only nine days and nights to 
 fall clear to the bottom of the universe. 
 
 How large is the universe to-day? Can I give you an 
 illustration that shall set your thought free 1 
 
 Let us start with our solar system. Look up at night to 
 the sky. As we survey the scene, this solar system of ours, 
 the sun and its attending planets, looks as if packed in 
 thick in a mass of other stars. And yet a little fleet of 
 
24 Religion for To-day 
 
 yachts in the middle of the Atlantic, with not a living thing 
 between it and all its shores, would be crowded in compari- 
 son with the isolation and loneliness of our sun with its 
 attendant planets. 
 
 It takes light, they tell us, about eight minutes and a half 
 to travel from the sun to the earth, something like ninety- 
 two and a half millions of miles. Let this same light leave 
 the outermost member of our solar system and travel 
 towards the nearest star, and it will have to speed on 
 its lightning-like flight for three years and a half before 
 it reaches our next-door neighbor. And when you are 
 there, after that journey of three years and a half, you are 
 only standing on the threshold and looking out in every 
 direction along star-lighted pathways that reach on, and on, 
 and on to infinity. 
 
 This is the universe that has taken the place of the one 
 in which our little, petty, crude, ignorant, man-made theo- 
 logical schemes have grown. The old theology was a part 
 of the Ptolemaic universe, fitted as a picture in a frame, 
 belonging to it. But it is utterly impossible that it should 
 continue to live in this Copernican universe that has taken 
 its place. 
 
 There is no room in this universe for any single one of 
 the conceptions that made up the old-time scheme. 
 
 Another thing has happened. Although Luther and his 
 compeers, as well as the great Catholic authorities of his 
 day, attacked the teachings of Copernicus with the utmost 
 bitterness, claiming that they were atheistic, and that in 
 them was the seed of destruction to the theology which he 
 believed to be true, still, in the main, people did not com- 
 prehend what was going on any more than they do to-day, 
 and the old belief continued in the popular mind. But the 
 
Causes of Present Religions Unrest 25 
 
 process of its disintegration was begun, and it is going o 
 to-day. 
 
 When Newton discovered the law of gravity, he again wasJ' 
 attacked, because it was said he was taking the management 
 of the universe out of the hands of God and putting it into 
 the keeping of a law. And there is a great deal of such 
 shallow talk going on in the modern world, as though 
 people had not thought deeply enough to know that law is^ 
 only a name for an eternal process ; and that that process 
 can be nothing else than one of the manifestations of the 
 present, living, tireless God. 
 
 Another thing happened, the science of geology. And 
 let me ask right here, Is it not strange that people do not 
 stop long enough to think with a little reverence and a 
 little care } If we can read accurately what has been writ- 
 ten on the rock record under our feet, we can say as the 
 old astronomer Kepler said when he discovered the law of 
 planetary motion, " O God, I think over again thy thoughts 
 after thee," 
 
 If, I say, we can read the rock record under our feet, 
 we are reading what God has written in very truth, as if 
 by his own immediate finger. It is God's work and God's 
 record of his work ; and, if it does not happen to agree with 
 what some unknown man imagined to be the truth two or 
 three or five thousand years ago, which shall we accept, 
 the present God speaking to us, or what somebody thought 
 about it thousands of years ago in the days of the world's 
 ignorance, when all the while we do not know who that 
 somebody was, or what his source of information might be ? 
 
 As a matter of fact, there grew up this science of geology 
 based on the facts as to God's method of making his world. 
 It was a part of the old scheme that God made the world 
 
26 Religion for To-day 
 
 suddenly out of nothing in six days and then rested. Geol- 
 ogy discovered that the process of creation has been going 
 on for millions of years, and that it is going on to-day in 
 precisely the same way that it has always been going on. 
 That is, that creation is a continuous process, always begun 
 'and never finished. 
 
 We discovered that the order of the creative world was 
 not the order of the first chapters of Genesis. We discov- 
 ered that there was a mistake in the popular theological 
 conception both as to the method and the time ; and there 
 is no question, friends, as to which is true. There have 
 been many and many vain attempts made to reconcile be- 
 tween the Book and the rocks, but they have all crumbled 
 to pieces at the touch of anything like honest and open- 
 eyed investigation, until at last the scholarship of the world 
 knows that God has told the truth in his rocks, whatever 
 may become of certain old-time traditions. 
 
 Another science has grown up, the science of archaeol- 
 ogy. And what has that taught us ? As geology taught us 
 the antiquity of the earth, this has taught us the antiquity 
 of man. We know now it is no question for intelligent 
 people to discuss that man was not created six thousand 
 years ago, nor ten thousand years ago. We know that he 
 has been on this planet for two or three hundred thousand 
 years at least. 
 
 So this part of the old theological scheme has also had to 
 be given up. 
 
 Another thing has happened. There has sprung up the 
 great universal philosophy and science that goes by the 
 name of *' evolution." The first propounder of this in 
 the modern world was Herbert Spencer. His work in- 
 cludes the worlds as well as man. Then, occupying a 
 
Causes of Present Religions Unrest 27 
 
 province of this universal dominion, came the work of 
 Mr. Darwin, published in 1859. Mr. Darwin wrought out 
 his great truths in the domain of what is called the science 
 of biology, the method of the development of life. 
 
 And now, friends, here again it is no longer a question ; 
 it is not something that intelligent and educated people 
 debate. Now and then, indeed, prominent theologians, 
 I will not name any names, because I do not wish to mar 
 what I am saying by a ripple of laughter over anything, 
 prominent theologians, who show by the first words they 
 utter that they do not know what they are talking about, 
 undertake to discuss it ; but there is not a competent and 
 free-minded intelligence to-day on the face of the earth that 
 does not know that the general theory of evolution is as much 
 established science as is the Copernican theory of the uni- 
 verse. There may be any number of questions about sub- 
 sidiary matters, matters of detail; but the great general 
 truth is at last accepted. 
 
 What does this mean ? It means that man was not cre- 
 ated suddenly, outright, in a Garden of Eden or anywheres 
 else. It means that man belongs to the great order of life- 
 development, which began on the far-off shores of primeval 
 seas, and has developed through fishes, through reptiles, 
 through birds, through mammals, up to man, who leads the 
 march of life in its so-far advance. 
 
 Let me interject one thing right here. There are thou- 
 sands of people in the modern world who still suppose 
 that Mr. Darwin teaches that we are descended from the 
 ape. He teaches nothing of the sort ; and no inteUigent 
 man ever supposed he did, at least, no one who has taken 
 the trouble to find out. 
 
 Mr. Darwin teaches that we are descended, or ascended, 
 
28 Religion for To-day 
 
 from the animal ; and it is true, too, established over and 
 over again, so that no competent thinker to-day ventures to 
 doubt the general fact. 
 
 What does this mean ? I have no time to enter fully 
 into it to-day ; it means, however, that there never has been 
 any fall of man, but that there has been ascent from the 
 beginning. I shall go into this more at length, and make 
 it, I trust, perfectly clear before I am through with this 
 course of sermons. 
 
 But let me say right here that this one fact alone, 
 logically carried out, compels a complete reconstruction of 
 all the theological theories of the past ; for there is not a 
 single one of the doctrines that enter into and make up the 
 schemes that have been taught by the churches for hundreds 
 of years that did not come into being as part of a plan to 
 save man from the fall. If there has been no fall, if evil 
 is to be explained, as I believe it is, in entirely another way, 
 then all these doctrines which are logically a necessary part 
 of this " plan of salvation " must be reconsidered. 
 
 I have no time to go into that any further to-day, for I 
 must mention one or two other things that have happened. 
 
 When England first made conquest of India, I suppose 
 there were very few people in the world who had any idea 
 that any important intellectual and religious results were to 
 follow. It was a purely commercial venture at the outset; 
 but what did it mean ? 
 
 It meant the discovery of the Rig- Veda, the old Sanscrit 
 Bible ; and it was the beginning of a series of discoveries, 
 until to-day we have come into intelligent contact with all 
 the great religions of the world, and we have studied and 
 translated and read all the great Bibles of the world. Do 
 you know that the Buddhists have their Bibles which they 
 
Causes of Present Religious Unrest 29 
 
 believe are as thoroughly inspired and as completely in- 
 fallible as our own ? And this same thing is true of nearly 
 all the great religions. And let us frankly admit that they 
 have precisely the same reason for holding their belief con- 
 cerning their Bibles that we have for holding ours concern- 
 ing our Bible. 
 
 We have thus seen religions in the making, we have 
 discovered Bibles in process of growth, and we have learned 
 what I hinted last Sunday, or a Sunday before, that Bibles 
 do not create religion, but that religions create Bibles, as 
 they do priesthoods and all the thousand things that mani- 
 fest and express the religious life. 
 
 What is the result of this discovery and study of the 
 world religions and the Bibles of the world ? 
 
 When I was a boy I was taught that the religions of the 
 world were divided into two classes. In one was Chris- 
 tianity alone, called the "true" religion. In the other class 
 were all the other religions of the world, labelled "false." 
 I was taught to believe that they were the invention of 
 devils, or the perverted and evil work of priesthoods and 
 wicked men. 
 
 But what does the intelligent man hold to-day? We 
 believe, as Emerson has sung so beautifully, that 
 
 * Out of the heart of nature rolled 
 The burdens of the Bible old," 
 
 and the burdens of all the Bibles ; and we believe that all the 
 religions of the world are simply the earnest attempts on 
 the part of ignorant and foolish people, if you like, but 
 earnest attempts, the best they were capable of making at 
 the time to find God, "feeling after him who is not far 
 from every one of us." 
 
30 Religion for To-day 
 
 If they have not been able to speak in clear language, 
 they have lisped ; they may not have said the words that we 
 say to-day, but they have said the best words they knew. 
 My friend and fellow-worker, Mr. Collyer, said in his 
 prayer this morning that the sweetest, the concentrated 
 essence of all religions was in the words, " our Father." 
 How many of you know that the oldest name in the relig- 
 ious literature of the world, in this old Sanscrit Bible 
 to which I referred a moment ago, is " Heaven-Father " } 
 How many of you know that the Greek Zeus pater is sim- 
 ply the Greek equivalant of the Sanscrit Dyaus pitarl How 
 many of you know that the word Jupiter is only the Roman 
 equivalent of Dyaus pitar, Heaven-Father, the old name 
 that the race tried to lisp in its childhood? 
 
 We no longer look, then, to these other religions from 
 our height of superiority, treating them with contempt or 
 regarding them as utterly evil and wicked. We believe that 
 God hears the man in China, the man in India, in Central 
 Africa, in the Islands of the Southern Seas, no matter what 
 word he uses when he tries to give utterance to the name 
 of the invisible Father that he thinks of as his creator and 
 the maker of all this wonderful universe of ours. 
 
 There is another thing that has happened. I hinted at 
 this in another connection not a great while ago. Men and 
 women have become civilized in some parts of the world ; 
 and civilization means not only truer thinking, it means a 
 more humane feeling, it means justice, it means something 
 of tenderness and pity; and, as the result of this, many 
 parts of the old creeds have been put one side, though 
 there has been no formal abandonment of them, because 
 the civilized, tender, just, loving, helpful man no longer 
 could hold them. 
 
Causes of Present Religious Unrest 31 
 
 I was talking with an orthodox lady during the past week. 
 I did not introduce the subject, I never presume to intro- 
 duce these things in private houses unless I am asked, 
 and she spoke of one of the very fundamental points of the 
 old creed which is still taught, and the foundation stone of 
 the church which she attends, as something "horrible" 
 which she no longer believed. I raised the question, which 
 she frankly admitted she had never considered, as to whether 
 she could give that up and still keep all the rest which de- 
 pended on it, and would never have been heard of if it had 
 not been there. 
 
 There are many of these points, and many of them are 
 given up ; but people do not carry out the lesson logically, 
 of which this case just cited is a sample. But quietly, 
 perhaps unconsciously, one inherited opinion after another 
 is dropped, without thought or care as to whether the rest 
 can be consistently held or not. 
 
 And so the process goes on, that process which has 
 caused all this uncertainty, confusion, and contradiction. 
 Some people in some churches think a little way and surren- 
 der certain points; other people in other churches think a 
 little further and surrender a little more, grasp grander 
 things in place of them. And hence we see all these con- 
 fused and irresponsible beliefs which we find held by the 
 people of the present day. 
 
 Now, friends, a word at the end. What does all this 
 mean .? Does it mean that religion is in danger 1 So far 
 from that, friends, I believe that religion is simply struggling 
 to-day to free itself from these encumbrances which hold it 
 down and hinder its growth towards the light, sunshine, and 
 free air, up towards God's magnificent heaven. 
 
 It means simply a change of the theological conception 
 
32 Religion for To-day 
 
 and framework of things. It means that the world of to-day, 
 wiser in every other respect than was the universe of the 
 past, is daring to let in the light, daring to think and accept 
 the grander truth which God is revealing to his children. 
 
 As I have already said in other connections, I believe 
 that, instead of religion passing away, we are in the time 
 of its re-birth. There is to be a more magnificent religion, 
 a grander Church than the past has ever dreamed of. We 
 simply outgrow that which is crude, which is ignorant, 
 which is cruel, which is untenable in broad, clear thinking. 
 We are getting ready to build the new temple in which God 
 shall manifest himself as he has not in the past, and that 
 shall be full of light and love and peace for all mankind. 
 
IS RELIGION DYING? 
 
 Any one whose studies include in their range the whole 
 line of human progress from the beginning until to-day 
 will become familiar with the fact that religions are not 
 immortal. Hundreds of religions have been born, have 
 grown old, have died. The entire pathway of human ad- 
 vance is strewn with the images of dead gods, of temples in 
 ruins, of altars crumbling to decay, with books once held 
 sacred as containing the very infallible word of life, but 
 now looked upon only as curiosities of ancient thought. 
 
 One needs, of course, to take a long survey of human 
 history to note how true this is. Two thousand years 
 seem a great while ; but when we remember that man has 
 been on this earth at least three hundred thousand years, 
 and has been thinking, feeling; fearing, hoping, through all 
 those years, two thousand seem only a little while. 
 
 If you wish to note how religions that once towered on 
 high and seemed impregnable from all assault, even the 
 assault of time, have fallen, you may stand amid the ruins 
 of Karnac or Baalbec, you may wander through India and 
 note the remains of temples that once represented religions 
 that were followed reverently by millions of worshippers. 
 
 Religions then are not immortal. But it is very different 
 with the word when you drop the final "s." Religions die; 
 religion is simply reborn and goes on forever. It is in the 
 spiritual realm only what it is fabled to be in earthly 
 
34 Religiofi for To-day 
 
 empire : " The king is dead ! " cries the herald ; and then 
 before the sound of that call has ceased, he cries again, 
 " Long live the king ! " The persons die, the king never. 
 So it is true of religions that they die, but rehgion never. 
 Religion, out of what is called death, or thought to be 
 death by the friends or the enemies of any particular 
 religion, religion finds in this experience only a renais- 
 sance. 
 
 In order that I may make this clear, that we may answer 
 our question as to whether religion is dying, and may be 
 perfectly certain of our ground, I need only to give you 
 something approaching an adequate definition of religion. 
 People who think that religion is dying, good people who 
 are afraid religion is dying, have simply not thought deeply 
 enough or carefully enough to know what it is that is really 
 taking place. Let us then, if we may, try to get a definition 
 of religion, and then we can easily comprehend what it is 
 that is going on. 
 
 I wish first to give a definition, as a scientist or a philos- 
 opher would, in abstract terms. I ask your patience for 
 a moment while I do that ; and then I shall try to translate 
 it into the concrete, so that it will be very easily apprehen- 
 sible by anybody. 
 
 Religion and now let me say I am not defining my 
 religion or your religion ; I am not defining the religion of 
 the Episcopalian or the religion of the Presbyterian; I am 
 not defining Christianity, I am not defining any particular 
 religion. I wish to create, if I may, a general definition 
 that will cover and include any religion that ever existed or 
 can exist ; just as a scientist, for example, when he wishes 
 to define the vertebrate, does not select any particular type 
 of vertebrates but gives the characteristics which are com- 
 
Is Religion Dying? 35 
 
 mon to all vertebrates. So I wish to give you those charac- 
 teristics which you will see in a moment are common to all 
 religions. 
 
 In the first place then, religion is man's thought concern- 
 ing the relation which exists between himself and the power 
 that is manifested in the universe, whatever his interpreta- 
 tion of that power may be. First, the thought. 
 
 Secondly, religion is emotion, the feeling which accom- 
 panies this thought and which takes its characteristics from 
 it. That is, if the thought is high and noble the feeling 
 will correspond ; if the thought is poor and mean the feeling 
 will be petty, fearful, grovelling. 
 
 In the third place, the thought and the feeling always 
 incarnate themselves in outward forms, manifest them- 
 selves in things, customs, practices. 
 
 There is my abstract definition. Now let me translate it 
 for you into the concrete. 
 
 Take one typical illustration, for it is one of the grand- 
 est religions of the world, and not being our own we can 
 look upon it without any prejudice, take the religion of 
 the Hebrews ; and let us go back to the time of Solomon and 
 the magnificence of his temple. Suppose we could visit 
 Jerusalem and see it in the condition in which it was at that 
 time. We should be struck by the glory of its great temple, 
 crowning the top of Mount Moriah ; we should see the 
 people thronging the gates, coming up for some one of the 
 great festivals from all over the country. When we joined 
 that throng and entered the precincts of the temple we should 
 find its courts full of priests engaged in their various offices. 
 We should find the blood of bulls and of goats and birds 
 sacrificed running down from the altar. We should hear the 
 chanting of some one of the old Psalms by the temple choir. 
 
3^ Religio7i for To-day 
 
 We should first see the High Priest enter the Holy of Holies, 
 and then come out and sprinkle the blood of the sacrifice 
 upon the people and pronounce absolution from their sins. 
 We should see this whole external manifestation of the 
 Hebrew religion. It would include such Scriptures as up 
 to that period had become sacred in the popular mind. 
 
 Here is the external incarnation that I referred to of the 
 thought and the feeling of the Hebrew people. 
 
 Now let us analyse a little deeper. Beyond this incarna- 
 tion we should find that there were certain theories which 
 were held by the priests and taught to the people as the 
 truth, the intellectual side of their religion. And what 
 and how much does this include ? It includes a theory of 
 the universe. And note right here, friends, that there never 
 has been a religion, from the beginning of the world up to 
 to-day, that did not have as a frame-work a cosmology, that 
 is, a scientific theory of things. That is where all religions 
 start. 
 
 The Hebrew people had certain beliefs as to how the 
 world was created, what kind of a world it was. They had 
 a picture of it in their minds. They had certain ideas 
 of the origin and nature of man, ideas as to the relation 
 in which men stood to their God, what their God wanted 
 them to do, and why he wanted them to do it. Here was 
 the intellectual side, you will see, what we to-day call the 
 "theology" of it. 
 
 Then the third element I spoke of, emotion, fear, the awe, 
 the reverence, the worship, the love, the delight in their 
 God that the Psalmist so frequently sings ; all this is the 
 feeling side of religion. 
 
 Now note, friends, every religion that ever existed was 
 made up of these three elements, the thought side, the 
 
Is Religion Dying? 37 
 
 theoretical ; the feeling side, the emotional ; and the cult, 
 or the ceremonial side. 
 
 The ceremonial side includes altars, temples, priesthoods, 
 rituals, Bibles, hymns, prayers, all the external manifesta- 
 tion of the religious life. 
 
 Now, all of these three parts exist in and make up every 
 religion that the world ever saw. If you should go down 
 and examine the worship of him who stands in fear and 
 trembling before some fetish, you would find that he 
 had his thought about his fetish, about the world, his 
 theory of his own nature, his idea as to the relation in 
 which he stood to this mysterious and unseen power. And 
 you would find that all these three elements, the thought 
 side, the feeling side, the cult or theoretical side, exist down 
 there. 
 
 If I should take you to Rome and ask you to examine 
 with me all the magnificent display of the Romish ritual 
 service, and you should look a little beneath the surface, 
 you would find there the theoretical side, the feeling side, 
 and the ceremonial side. 
 
 Come home and examine ours, our simpler, Puritan form 
 of worship : we have our theology, our theory of the uni- 
 verse, and of God ; we have our feeling, the emotional side, 
 corresponding to our theoretical side ; and then we have our 
 ritual side, simple as it may be. Our cult is plain, not 
 gorgeous, not beautiful, not extended ; but go through our 
 service and you will find it, the same as all other religions, 
 made up of these three parts. 
 
 What are the people after ? Why do they have any reli- 
 gion at all ? What is the essence of religion .? What is the 
 purpose, the meaning, the endeavor of it all ? 
 
 Note, friends, from the very beginning of the world until 
 
38 Religion for To-day 
 
 now it has been an endeavor on the part of men to find and 
 get into better relations with the Unseen Power, with God. 
 It has been an endeavor, and here comes in my text, it 
 has been an endeavor, as Paul said, to be " reconciled to 
 God." People have been conscious of evil, of wrong, of 
 suffering, in the world ; and they have felt, and rightly 
 felt, that these did not belong to an ideal condition of 
 things. They had their interpretation of these, their 
 explanation as to how they came about. Generally they 
 believed that God was angry with them and that these were 
 punishments inflicted. So they have been trying to find out 
 what God wanted them to do, and to do it. 
 
 Every religion, then, that ever existed has been an effort 
 on the part of man to get into better relations with God. 
 People have felt that they stood vitally connected in some 
 way with this infinite, eternal Power. They have been con- 
 scious of the fact, which we recognize to-day more clearly 
 than it was possible to recognize it in the past, that life, 
 welfare, happiness, all depend upon our knowing some- 
 thing about the laws of this infinite Power, and obeying 
 those laws. 
 
 The degree of our physical health depends upon our knowl- 
 edge of these laws, as embodied in our physical structure, 
 and our obedience to them. Mental health, true moral and 
 spiritual health and prosperity, all depend in their spheres 
 upon precisely this same thing, a knowledge of the laws 
 of God and obedience to those laws. 
 
 This, then, has been what humanity has been seeking in 
 all ages. They have felt that they were not in the ideal re- 
 lations that ought to exist towards God, and the one thing 
 that they have been after in all their religions has been to 
 create these ideal relations. In other words, they have 
 
Is Religion Dying? 39 
 
 had their thought about God and their thought about them- 
 selves, and then they have tried to get into better relations 
 with God. " Be reconciled to God ! " is the cry of every relig- 
 ion that ever existed. 
 
 And, friends, if anybody supposes that the modern world 
 is going to outgrow religion, and so outgrow this necessity, 
 I would only ask him to notice that "be reconciled to God," 
 stated in other terms, is the last and highest word of sci- 
 ence just as well as it is of religion. Herbert Spencer does 
 not use the phrase of Paul in talking about being recon- 
 ciled to God, but he does use "adjustment to our envi- 
 ronment," and tells you if you wish to be well, or wish hap- 
 piness or prosperity of any kind, you must become adjusted 
 to your environment. And to the theist, who believes that 
 God is our environment, that it is his power, his life, his law 
 everywhere throughout the universe, being "reconciled to 
 God " and being " adjusted to your environment " are only 
 two ways of saying the same thing. 
 
 Suppose for a moment that you are an agnostic, and you 
 think you are going to escape religion by wearing that name. 
 Do you escape it ? Think a moment. You say, " I do not 
 know anything about the nature of the infinite Power mani- 
 fested in this universe." Granted. This Power is here. 
 As Herbert Spencer says. The existence of this infinite 
 and eternal Power is the one item of knowledge of which 
 we are more certain than of any other. This Power is here. 
 It was here before you were born ; it will be here after you 
 have died. Meantime, as you are passing through this 
 world, your health, your welfare, your prosperity, depend on 
 knowing something about the laws of this Power and obey- 
 ing them. You do not escape this relation which is the 
 essence, the very soul, of the religious life. 
 
40 Religion for To-day 
 
 Suppose you say, " I am an atheist," go farther than the 
 agnostic. What of it ? Do you escape this relation any 
 the more ? Whether you say that this Power is God, or 
 Spirit, or Nature, or Force, or It, it makes no difference ; 
 the Power is here and you are the child of that Power. 
 
 If you say there is nothing in all the wide range of the 
 universe but dirt, then you are the child of dirt. You are 
 the product of this universe ; not only your body, but your 
 brain, your thought, your conscience, your hopes, your fears, 
 your loves. 
 
 Whatever theory you hold about the universe you are the 
 child of it. It was here before you, it will be here after 
 you disappear ; and meantime, as I said before, all your 
 life, your welfare, your happiness, depend upon so much of 
 the knowledge of the laws of this universe as you possess 
 and the degree of your obedience to those laws. 
 
 So, no matter what your theory, friends, you must deal 
 with religion whether you will or no. You can no more 
 escape it than an eagle can outfly the limits of the atmos- 
 phere in which he finds leverage for his wings. You can no 
 more escape it than a ship captain can outsail the horizon 
 which closes him round on every sea, on every shore. 
 
 The essence, then, the soul, of religion, is the sense of 
 this relationship between the individual soul and his God, 
 and the one purpose and aim of it is to better this relation, 
 to get into right relations with God. So that religion, 
 friends, though you may find some manifestations of it 
 among barbaric people to be crude and cruel and unclean 
 and low, religion in every nation and in every age has been 
 the best endeavor the people of the time could make to find 
 what? The secret of life ^ which lies in being rightly re- 
 lated to this infinite and eternal Power. 
 
Is Religion Dying? 41 
 
 The moment, then, you get a clear and right definition of 
 religion in your minds, you see beyond the possibility of 
 question that religion is immortal, it cannot possibly pass 
 away. 
 
 But something has been happening in all these ages ; for^ 
 as I said at the outset, religions, hundreds of them, have- 
 been born, have grown to their maturity, have grown old, 
 have died and faded out of the life of men. What is it that 
 has been happening ? My friends, it is the simplest thing' 
 in the world that has been happening, and it is the most 
 hopeful thing in the world that has been happening: hu- 
 manity, very slowly, so slow that it is discouraging to 
 watch the process, humanity has been getting civilized; 
 has been learning something ; has been getting better ideas, 
 clearer thoughts, more nearly correct theories of the world 
 it is living in. That is the first thing that has been hap- 
 pening. 
 
 You examine any one of the crude cosmologies of some 
 barbaric people, and you smile over them to-day. You say, 
 " How ignorant those people were ! " But they did the very 
 best they knew at the time. They had their theory as to 
 how the world was made, and why it was made, and who 
 made it and what it was for ; and that has become the creed 
 side always of their religion. But, as the world has gone 
 on, as man has developed in intellectual power, been able 
 to think more broadly, accurately, as he has investigated and 
 studied more widely, of course he has outgrown his childish 
 conception of the universe, of how and when God made it, 
 and what for, and has attained to ideas which are more 
 nearly commensurate with the facts. 
 
 I would not for a moment assume that we to-day are 
 through ! The curse of all the theorizers of the past has 
 
42 Religion for To-day 
 
 been just this assumption that they were through. As though 
 anybody ever could get through, in an infinite universe ! It 
 has been the pettiest, the most conceited, most fallacious 
 assumption that the world has ever known. But it has been 
 made, as I shall have occasion to show a little later. 
 
 That which has been going on, then, has been a readjust- 
 ment of men's thinking to bring it into accord with the facts 
 of God. 
 
 Let me interject right there, friends, I wish you would 
 remember all the time that these facts are God's ; for, if 
 we discover a fact, it is a divine fact. I hear people talking 
 sometimes as though they thought scientific men were dis- 
 covering these facts in order to perplex and disturb people. 
 
 When Galileo discovered the moons of Jupiter he upset 
 all the theories of his time. He was not responsible for 
 their being there ; he simply happened to see them. So, 
 when scientific men discover some new magnificent fact that 
 compels a reconstruction of the theories that men have been 
 holding, are they to blame? Who is to blame? If any- 
 body is to blame is it not He who made it ? Is it not well 
 for us reverently to stop and consider that all facts are 
 God's facts, and that when we presumptuously choose to 
 deny or turn our backs on facts, we are turning our backs 
 on God and his revelation ? 
 
 If humanity, then, is to grow any, of course the partial, 
 crude, the ignorant theories of the universe have to be out- 
 grown. Just as when a child grows from being a child up 
 to a man, he outgrows the little childhood world in which 
 he lived, and enters his man's world or woman's world, 
 finer, grander in every conceivable way. 
 
 Not only, then, does the creed change, the creed must 
 change if we grow wiser. 
 
Is Religion Dying? 43 
 
 And right in here, friends, is the reason and the only 
 reason why we Unitarians hold the position we do in re- 
 gard to creeds, and which is sometimes thrown up to us 
 by the question, ''Why do you have no fixed creed?" Be- 
 cause a man who is climbing a mountain cannot have a 
 fixed and final statement of what he sees. He may make 
 one to-day ; but, if he climbs another mile, he gets another 
 view of things and has to reconstruct it. I am perfectly 
 willing to make you a creed of any length if you will only 
 give me time, stating what I believe to-day. But I will not 
 promise not to learn something between to-day and to- 
 morrow ; and if I do, and it is true, I shall have to change 
 my creed. And I would rather change my creed by taking 
 from it something which I find is not true than keep it when 
 I know it is not. The only alternative to this is to stop 
 learning or else lie about it and play the hypocrite. 
 
 This is what it means on the intellectual side. 
 
 Now what does it mean on the cult side, the ceremonial 
 side ? And here let us note one fact that is instructive. 
 There have been periods in the past, and we have not out- 
 grown them yet, except in certain parts of the world, when 
 the creed or the cult, either the one or the other, vv^as re- 
 garded as more important than anything else. You go 
 back to ancient Rome, for example, and witness some re- 
 ligious ceremony, and you will find out it has never entered 
 into the heads of the people that the gods cared anything 
 about a man's character or conduct. A man by being re- 
 ligious does not profess even to tell the truth, or to be kind 
 and faithful in his family, or to be honest with his neigh- 
 bors. The gods cared nothing about that. The gods were 
 not very good people themselves. All that they wanted was 
 that the sacrifice should be brought and the rituals be gone 
 
44 Religion for To-day 
 
 through with the right external ceremony. Scrupulously at- 
 tended to in this respect, they asked no questions about 
 character and conduct, they cared nothing about your be- 
 lief; you could believe whatever you liked, so long as the 
 sacrifices were brought. 
 
 Then you find other religions where the creed side is 
 everything. If you believe, no careful inquisition is made 
 as to your conduct ; you can live about as you please if you 
 are not disobedient to your creed ; the cult is not so im- 
 portant, the ritual, the ceremonial. The one chief thing 
 dwelt on is the belief, soundness of doctrine. 
 
 But, friends, these are changing, as I said. As the world 
 gets more civilized we are getting finer, broader, truer ideas 
 about the universe, about God, about human nature, about 
 our relation to God. And the cult, the ceremony, what are 
 these, what are they coming to ? There is no reason why 
 Vv-e as Unitarians should not have all the stately ritual of the 
 most elaborately conducted service on the face of the earth, 
 if we want it. The only important thing is that the cere- 
 mony shall be living, that it shall adequately express the 
 thought and feeling. But as the thought and the feeling 
 change, of course the ceremony changes, if people are 
 careful about these things and do not keep on going 
 through what become mere mummeries because the life has 
 gone out of them. 
 
 These are the processes, friends, that have been going 
 on, perfectly simple, perfectly natural ; inevitable, if 
 humanity is to grow any. 
 
 But let us now raise the question most important of all. 
 In the midst of this process is that which is most vital to 
 religion decaying any } Is there any period in the history 
 of the past when people cared more for truth than they do 
 
Is Religion Dying? 45 
 
 to-day ? Is there any period in the history of the past when 
 there was more widely spread in the hearts of the people a 
 sense of justice and a demand for it? Was there ever a 
 time when there was a broader spirit of charity, of humanity, 
 when people cared more for the condition of the inhabitants 
 of other lands ? for righteousness between nation and 
 nation ? when they cared more for the slave, for the down- 
 trodden, for those who were suffering any form of evil ? 
 
 Matthew Arnold has said somewhere that *' conduct is at 
 least three-fourths of life." Was there ever a time in the 
 history of the world when there was a higher standard of 
 conduct, when people cared more for personal righteous- 
 ness ? Have we lost any of the reverences, any of the 
 tendernesses, any of the sentiments out of religion ? 
 
 You misread the past, friends, if you think so for one 
 passing moment. 
 
 Emerson has concentrated the beautiful truth into two 
 lines as clear as crystal when he says, 
 
 " One accent of the Holy Ghost 
 The heedless world hath never lost." 
 
 There never was a time when men cared so much for 
 these things which are the essence and the soul of religion, 
 these things that sweeten the world and make human life 
 divine. It shows only a superficial thought, it shows an 
 ignorant misreading of facts, when anybody supposes that 
 there ever was a time in the history of the world which was 
 more religious than to-day. 
 
 Take up any phase you please of human life and I will 
 prove to you, beyond the possibility of question, that the 
 world is unspeakably better to-day than it ever was before. 
 Does this mean the decay of religion.? Religion has over- 
 
 OF THK 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 CALIFO^ 
 
46 Religion for To-day 
 
 run the churches, it has got beyond the limits of the creeds, 
 it is outside of all ceremonial forms ; religion is taking 
 possession of the sense of justice between man and man. 
 
 Why, friends, go back five hundred years ago. Did other 
 nations then presume to raise a question as to whether any 
 particular nation had a right to engage in any particular 
 war 1 They would have been laughed at for the thought ! 
 But to-day not a civilized nation on the face of the earth 
 dares to go to war in defiance of the moral sentiment of 
 other civilized peoples. They have got to claim, and try 
 to make out their case, that it is a matter of justice and 
 right, something that has to be done. And so in any de- 
 partment of human life that you choose to investigate you 
 will find a similar thing to be true. 
 
 Religion is more than creed, it is more than ceremony; 
 it is coming to be life, righteousness, truth, justice, love, 
 human helpfulness, service; all these things that brighten 
 and glorify this struggling and rising humanity of ours. 
 
 Now one point more I must ask your attention to before 
 we are done. 
 
 Every little while along the line of this progress that I 
 have been speaking of, as natural and inevitable, you find 
 the remains of old-time tragedies, the prophets persecuted, 
 saviours slain, reformers burned. Why is it ? As Jesus 
 said to the people of his time : You admit that the fathers 
 were wrong ; the fathers burned the prophets, and you build 
 their sepulchres. That is what the world has been doing 
 from the beginning. Oh, the pity of it ! Out of what sort 
 of curious, cruel misconception of things does it spring .? 
 
 Go back and trace the men who have been martyrs to a 
 new truth, from the far-off prophets in the dim ages of the 
 past down to men like William Lloyd Garrison, dragged by 
 
Is Religio?i Dymg? 47 
 
 a mob of the best citizens through the streets of our modern 
 Athens. What did it mean when in ancient Athens, Anax- 
 agoras, one of the finest figures of his age, is condemned to 
 death because he declared that the sun was a burning ball 
 of fire ? His sentence is commuted at the request of Peri- 
 cles to banishment for life. What is it for.? He had in- 
 sulted their religion ; because their religion had been saying 
 all the time that the sun was Apollo, the sun-god, driving a 
 chariot across the pathway of the heavens ; and it was 
 impious and atheistic to say it was a ball of fire. 
 
 But you will find at every single stage of the world's ad- 
 vance somebody has discovered a new, deeper, higher truth, 
 and he is crucified for it. Why? Because, just as I said 
 in an earlier part of my discourse, every religion that 
 ever existed has started the absolutely baseless, unwar- 
 rantable assumption that it was infallible ; that it had all 
 the truth that God was ever going to give the world ; and 
 that, therefore, if you dared to find out a new truth you 
 were insulting God and injuring humanity. I say there has 
 not been a religion, from the miserable, ignorant fetish wor- 
 ships at the beginning clear up to the great churches of 
 to-day, that has not made, and does not still make, this un- 
 warrantable claim. And I say again and I defy contra- 
 diction on the part of the scholarship of the world that 
 there is absolutely no authority in heaven or earth for doing 
 anything of the sort. There is no authority for it in this 
 Bible ; there is no authority that will bear the light in the 
 history of any church ; it is simply a pure, unwarrantable 
 assumption. 
 
 "I," and the gigantic conceit of it! "I am the de- 
 positary of God's eternal truth, and all there is of it that he 
 is ever going to give the world ; if you v.'ant a little fragment 
 
48 Religion for To-day 
 
 o\ it come to me. If you dare to doubt, then the curse, 
 clear to the eternal hell, shall be upon you. If you dare 
 to find out something that does not agree with this truth, 
 why, then, so much the worse for your new discovery." 
 
 The Church has put itself on record almost from the 
 beginning, I refer now to the organized " authorities " 
 that have claimed to represent the Church and speak for it, 
 as opposed to almost every new discovery for the last 
 two thousand years ; and every single time they have been 
 wrong. I should think they would get tired of it after a 
 while. They assume that they are infallible ; that they have 
 all God's truth. And there is no bitter hatred quite like 
 that of the man who thinks he speaks for God and whose 
 infallibility is questioned. 
 
 And so you will find that the men who have discovered 
 some new truth have inevitably and always been persecuted 
 and cast out, until by and by the world has found itself com- 
 pelled to accept it and has gathered itself up again and gone 
 forward as best it could. 
 
 The time will come, I hope, when people will learn that 
 this is an infinite universe, and that any theories which 
 they can frame are only partial, and that a new truth 
 that is vouchsafed to men is as sacred as any old truth. 
 There is no new truth except as related to our discovery. I 
 find out something new to-day which I did not know yester- 
 day. It has been true from the beginning, as true as it is 
 now, only I have not found it out, that is all. There is 
 no new truth, there is no old truth, except as related to the 
 period of our discovery. 
 
 The time will come, I hope, when the world will learn 
 this ; and then, instead of these cataclysms, upheavals, per- 
 secutions, there will be a recognized and assented-to grad- 
 
Is Religion Dying f 49 
 
 ual advance, the world growing wiser, sweeter, and better 
 day by day. Then the man who has discovered a new 
 truth will not be branded as an infidel. 
 
 The only infidel in the world is the man who is faithless to 
 God's truth. A man who has discovered a new truth which 
 does nat agree with beliefs, ideas, that have been established 
 in the past is not an infidel. It is the man who refuses to 
 accept the new truth that is the infidel ; for he is false to 
 God's last spoken word. 
 
 The time will come, then, when the world will evenly and 
 broadly advance step by step, when the day of God will 
 come as comes one of our natural days, first a streak of 
 light in the east, expanding, flooding the heavens, catch- 
 ing with glory the tops of the highest mountain, then run- 
 ning down their sides over the plains, until the gorges and 
 the deepest valleys of the earth are full of light. 
 
WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 
 
 It happens somewhat curiously though of course in 
 laying out the present series of sermons it was as far as 
 possible from my mind that my theme chimes in with 
 a great controversy which is at present disturbing the 
 churches and the newspapers of this city and Brooklyn. 
 
 The Rev. Lyman Abbott, D.D., minister of Plymouth 
 Church, in Brooklyn, has been giving some sermons in 
 which he has been dealing with questions of Revelation, 
 The Bible, The Higher Criticism. He has raised a storm 
 of protest on the part of many of his brother ministers and 
 on the part of some of the newspapers of the time. The 
 Sun^ for example, had, the other morning, a long, clear, 
 strong editorial discussing the problem as to whether Mr. 
 Abbott himself was a Christian ; and it decided that instead 
 of being a Christian he is an infidel. 
 
 From the old point of view, from the hard and fast ortho- 
 doxy of the creeds, the judgment is an accurate one. If it 
 be necessary to believe in the infallibility of the Bible, the 
 infallibility of the old creeds the Westminster Confession 
 and others in order to be a Christian, then Dr. Abbott is 
 an infidel. The decision of the Sun is perfectly logical if 
 you grant the premises. 
 
 Others are rejoicing in the work which Dr. Abbott is 
 doing, and are taking the ground that it is not at all neces- 
 sary to believe these things in order to be a Christian. 
 
What is Christianity f 51 
 
 I say then, that, curiously enough, my theme this morn- 
 ing falls into the midst of this disputatious time. And 
 to-day, in a good many other pulpits of Brooklyn and New 
 York, substantially this theme will be discussed. 
 
 It ought, then, to be not only of interest, but of a good 
 deal of practical importance, for us to settle, if we can, what 
 are the essential things in Christianity. 
 
 If one were to judge by the claims of ministers, of 
 ecclesiastical associations, denominational newspapers and 
 reviews, if one were to judge from the creeds, he would 
 suppose that Christianity came suddenly and full-grown into 
 the world, that it leaped from the thought of God as 
 Minerva was fabled to have leaped, fully developed and in 
 complete armor, from the forehead of Jupiter. 
 
 You would suppose that, in the time of Jesus and his 
 Apostles, the creed, the ceremony, the practice, the entire 
 Christian system, was developed. You would suppose that 
 it had been recognized that the world was in a special con- 
 dition of loss, and that this plan of salvation, definitely and 
 fully outlined, was suddenly revealed to men. And yet we 
 are face to face with a curious fact if that be true. 
 
 The Church of Rome claims to be the only and original 
 Church, and regards the Greek Church and all Protestants 
 as so absolutely astray as to have no right to the name of 
 Christian. The Greek Church regards the Church of Rome 
 and all Protestants as in a similar hopeless condition. 
 While all the Protestant churches regard the Church of 
 Rome and the Greek Church as departures from the primi- 
 tive simplicity of Christianity and as being mixed up with, 
 and overloaded by, forms and ceremonies and doctrines 
 which have been borrowed from pagan sources. 
 
 If there was a clear, a consistent, a definite revelation of 
 
52 Religion for To-day 
 
 those things that are essential to Christianity at the very 
 outset, is not this confusion and contradiction a little 
 strange and hard to understand ? 
 
 Let us inquire, then, this morning for a little as to what 
 are the facts, the historic facts, the facts which are not 
 questioned by anybody who is simply looking to find what 
 is true. 
 
 We shall discover, then, that Christianity is in line with 
 evolution, is an illustration of evolution. Instead of its 
 coming into the world fully developed, full-grown, we shall 
 recognize the fact that a seed was planted and that it grew 
 year after year, century after century, gathering material on 
 every hand from pagan and Christian sources, and that, 
 instead of its having reached a fixed and final form during 
 the first century or the fifth or the tenth or the eighteenth, 
 it has never reached a fixed and final form, never will reach 
 it, never can reach it, in the nature of things. For every- 
 thing in this universe is undergoing either one of two 
 processes : it is growing or it is decaying ; and in either 
 case it is not standing still, it is changing. 
 
 In spite, however, of these obvious facts and principles, 
 you will find the most extravagant claims made in certain 
 directions. 
 
 For example, the Roman Catholic Church says that it 
 believes that which has always been believed by all men 
 everywhere. So it claims to be catholic, or general, or 
 universal in its belief. All Protestants make a similar 
 claim, so far as the completeness and finality of revelation 
 are concerned. The Rev. Dr. Richard S. Storrs, the famous 
 Congregationalist preacher of Brooklyn, is reported to have 
 said not many years ago that the idea of progress in 
 theology was absurd, meaning, of course, that since, as 
 
What is Christianity ? 53 
 
 he believes, it had been completely and finally revealed once 
 for all, there could be no growth or change in it. 
 
 But let us now look for a little, glancing along the line 
 of historic advance and see what we really discover ; and 
 then at the end we will try to see, if we may, what are the 
 essential things in Christianity. 
 
 And first, I wish you to note the growth of belief concern- 
 ing the nature and the authority of Jesus himself. 
 
 " The disciples were called Christians first in Antioch." 
 This, of course, was a good many years after the death of 
 Jesus. It was applied to them, undoubtedly, as a nickname, 
 a name of opprobrium, contempt. A great many of the 
 grandest names of the world have been gained in a similar 
 way, so that we need not be ashamed of it on that account. 
 But what did it mean ? What was a Christian, for example, 
 in the time of Paul ? 
 
 And here let me suggest to you, if you wish to read the 
 New Testament in its order, so as to get the growth of 
 thought, read Paul's epistles first, beginning with Galatians. 
 For these were the first parts of the New Testament and 
 were written years and years before either of the Gospels 
 came into its present shape. 
 
 Now what was a Christian during the time that Paul was 
 writing these epistles? Only one single thing was neces- 
 sary to convert a Jew into a Christian. The Jew believed 
 that a Messiah was to come ; the Christian believed that 
 the Messiah the Jews had been looking for had come and 
 that Jesus was he. 
 
 That is all that constituted a Christian during the first 
 century, and you will find that it is the burden of Paul's 
 preaching. He went up and down the world proclaiming 
 what? Even if you have a superficial knowledge of the 
 
54 Religio7i for To-day 
 
 writings of the New Testament you will recognize the echo 
 of this verse. The one thing that Paul drove home by- 
 argument and appeal to the understanding, the consciences, 
 the hearts, of his hearers was that "this Jesus" who had 
 been crucified ''was the Christ," and "Christ," you know, 
 is only the Greek Christos, the Greek translation of the 
 Hebrew word Messiah. 
 
 Paul preached, then, that Jesus was the Messiah ; and 
 accepting this was what constituted a Christian. But the 
 process of development in regard to the Christian thought 
 about Jesus had only then begun. 
 
 And let me ask you to remember, if you think it strange 
 that such a process should have gone on, remember that 
 Christianity was born in the midst of a time and conditions 
 when it was the commonest thing in the world to deify men. 
 Greek and Roman hero after hero had been deified by the 
 popular imagination and lifted up into the heavens. There 
 was no god in all the Roman Empire so widely worshipped 
 during the reign of Augustus, and for a hundred or two 
 years after his time, as was the Emperor Augustus himself. 
 His image, his shrine, lined all the roads and highways and 
 was found in the peasants' cottages throughout the Roman 
 Empire. 
 
 So that it was not a strange thing among the Greeks and 
 among the Romans that this process of deifying should take 
 place. It was, or would have been, a very strange thing 
 among the Jews. They held such a spiritual conception of 
 God, and regarded him as withdrawn by nature and dis- 
 tance so far from his world that it would have seemed to 
 them nothing short of outright blasphemy to compare with 
 him any creature born of woman. So that this doctrine 
 never could have sprung up among the Jews. And as you 
 
What is Christianity ? 55 
 
 know, it never found any lodgment among the Jews ; the 
 Jews never became Christians. 
 
 It grew up among the Greeks and the Romans, where, as 
 I have said to you, this process was one of the common- 
 places of the time. But it was not in the first century. 
 First was the thought that he was the Messiah. The next 
 step was the belief that he was the second Adam. You will 
 find Paul teaching this. The first Adam was the head of 
 this fallen humanity of ours. Christ, Paul believed, was 
 divinely appointed to be the head of a new and spiritual 
 order of humanity that was to supersede the old and carnal 
 order of the past. 
 
 Then, after that, came another step. Jesus came to be 
 regarded as a pre-existent being, the Lord or Master from 
 heaven, the first-born of every creature, but, remember, 
 creature still, infinitely removed from the divine source of all. 
 
 Then at last the final step was taken, and Jesus was ele- 
 vated to the position of sharing with the Father his own 
 divine nature. But how long did it take for this process 
 to culminate? 
 
 As you look back down the ages, facts and movements get 
 massed together in such a way that you do not notice how 
 far they are apart. Just as, for example, if you are stand- 
 ing looking along lengthwise of a row of trees, those trees 
 might be half a mile apart, but they would look to you as 
 if they were close together ; so, as you look down the ages 
 towards the beginning of things, events seem to crowd each 
 other, though there were centuries between. 
 
 So, as a matter of fact, it was more than three hundred 
 years before the belief in the deity of Jesus became a test 
 of orthodoxy. 
 
 If it became necessary then to believe in the deity of 
 
56 Religion for To-day 
 
 Jesus in order to be a Christian, in order to be saved, then 
 there were no Christians in the world for three hundred 
 years, and none of the church members of all that time had 
 any chance of being saved. For the doctrine of the deity 
 of Jesus was not promulgated as an orthodox doctrine until 
 the year 325 at the Council of Nice, at the time that the 
 Nicene Creed was formed. 
 
 And how was the decision reached at that time.? We 
 ought to know some of these primary facts. Was it reached 
 because the people had any new evidence on the subject 
 that they did not have while Jesus was walking in the fields 
 of Galilee ? Was it reached because the people were wiser ? 
 Was it built out of evidence ? 
 
 Nothing of the kind. It was simply the result of philo- 
 sophical speculation ; it was the attempt to bridge over an 
 imaginary gulf supposed to exist between God and his 
 world. And the bishops fought over it not in a very Chris- 
 tian temper. There never was a bitterer factional fight in 
 Tammany Hall than that which finally decided the doc- 
 trines of the Nicene Creed. And they were not decided 
 until the Emperor Constantine threw in the weight of his 
 imperial decision against Arius and in favor of Athanasius. 
 
 And why did he do it ? Did Constantine know anything 
 about it? Was he an example of Christian piety? He 
 was one of the most treacherous, murderous emperors that 
 ever lived. He cared nothing for the principles involved 
 one way or the other ; it was simply a matter of govern- 
 mental policy with him. 
 
 Thus the Nicene Creed was born, born after the struggle 
 of three hundred years and more. 
 
 Now as to the other two great creeds of Christendom, let 
 me say a word or two concerning them. 
 
W/iat is Christianity f 57 
 
 The chancellor of the University of New York, two or 
 three weeks ago, published in one of our great Sunday news- 
 papers the statement that the Apostles' Creed was written^ 
 eighteen hundred years ago. I do not know whether the 
 chancellor was napping at the time he wrote it. I cannot 
 think that he was ignorant. I cannot think that he would 
 purposely take advantage of the supposed ignorance of his- 
 readers. You would suppose, to hear people talk, there 
 are twelve clauses in the Apostles' Creed, that the Apostles- 
 stood up in a row and one of them recited one clause and- 
 another another until they finished the Creed, and that so it 
 dates back to their time. 
 
 As a matter of fact, the Apostles' Creed was never heard 
 of for five hundred years after the birth of Jesus. Nobody 
 knows who wrote it or whether there is any authority con- 
 nected with it or not. We know that the people of that time 
 were very ignorant about this world, and I for one do not 
 know why I should suppose they knew everything about the 
 other. It is a purely anonymous production, of absolutely 
 no authority whatsoever. 
 
 If, however, let me say, it be necessary in order to be a 
 Christian that one should accept the Apostles' Creed, then 
 what becomes of the people who lived after the birth of 
 Christ for five hundred years before there was any Apostles' 
 Creed .? 
 
 Now for the other great Christian symbol, as it is called, 
 the Athanasian Creed. And let me remind you here, 
 friends, for it is a matter of a good deal of importance, 
 that the doctrine of the Trinity is not fully developed in 
 either the Apostles' Creed or the Nicene Creed. It does 
 not come to its last explicit statement until the promulga- 
 tion of the Athanasian Creed. 
 
58 Religion for To-day 
 
 I do not know why it should be called the Athanasian 
 Creed. Athanasius lived in the fourth century and was the 
 great adversary of Arius in the struggle out of which 
 came the Nicene Creed. Yet this creed is named for him. 
 As I say, I do not know why unless it is supposed that it 
 represents what Athanasius would have believed if he had 
 lived at the time the creed was formed. 
 
 This Athanasian Creed has been dropped out of the 
 Prayer Book of the American churches, but it is still bind- 
 ing on every Anglican and must be subscribed to by all 
 the clergy of the Anglican Church. It is very long, meta- 
 physical, and goes into a particular definition of the Trinity. 
 But when was it promulgated ? 
 
 Not until the ninth century. More than eight hundred 
 years had gone by in the history of the church before the 
 Athanasian Creed appeared. And this creed has attached 
 to it what is called the " damnatory clause," very famous in 
 theological discussion. 
 
 What is that clause } It declares that unless a man be- 
 lieve every part of this Athanasian Creed, he shall no doubt 
 perish everlastingly. 
 
 Again let me ask, if it be absolutely necessary to believe 
 the Athanasian Creed in order to be a Christian ; if it be 
 necessary to believe it in order to be saved, what becomes 
 of not only the world for several hundreds of thousands of 
 years, but what becomes of the first eight hundred years 
 of the Christian Church before the Athanasian Creed was 
 heard of t 
 
 Such strange claims and such strange alternatives ! 
 
 Now I want to ask you to note a few facts concerning the 
 real teaching of Jesus and his Apostles. 
 
 If it be necessary to believe the Athanasian Creed to be 
 
What is Christianity f 59 
 
 a Christian, or the Nicene Creed to be a Christian, or even 
 the Apostles' Creed to be a Christian, then we are fronted 
 with the somewhat startling fact that not one single one of 
 the Apostles was a Christian according to any record we 
 have of them ; and Jesus himself was not a Christian ! 
 
 Study if you will, read with a little care, the first three 
 Gospels. I omit the fourth because every competent 
 scholar knows that the fourth Gospel is not so much a life 
 of Jesus as it is a theological treatise. He knows that it 
 was written, not by John, but by some unknown hand some- 
 where during the first half of the second century. Nobody 
 knows who wrote it, and it carries not the authority of an 
 eye-witness or a hearer at all. 
 
 But let me note that even in the Gospel of John there is 
 no teaching of the doctrine of the Trinity. In it and I 
 have had the text quoted to me hundreds of times as 
 though it settled the question, and that is the reason I quote 
 it now Jesus is represented as saying, "I and my father 
 are one." But, unfortunately for the argument, he is repre- 
 sented as praying in the immediate context that the dis- 
 ciples may be one with him precisely as he is one with the 
 Father. 
 
 So, if the first text proves the deity of Jesus, the other 
 one, also reported from the lips of Jesus, proves the deity of 
 all the disciples. 
 
 But, as you read the first three Gospels, there is a conspic- 
 uous absence of almost every single doctrine that is regarded 
 as essential. 
 
 If Jesus, as the second person in the Trinity, came into 
 this Vv'orld on purpose to save people from the fall, does it 
 not seem a little strange that he does not anywhere make 
 the slightest allusion to it .? 
 
6o Religio7t for To-day 
 
 Jesus never said anything about the fall of man, or Adam, 
 or Eve, or the serpent, or anything of the kind, apparently 
 knows nothing about them. He says nothing about the doc- 
 trine of the atonement ; he says nothing about the Trinity. 
 
 There is hardly anything which according to these popu- 
 lar creeds is essential to Christianity which Jesus anywhere 
 touches or appears to care about in any way whatever. 
 
 There has been then, I say, this progress, this growth, 
 from generation to generation and from century to century, 
 of what has come to be called Christian belief. And that 
 belief has never been absolutely fixed concerning any one of 
 these great doctrines. 
 
 If I had time this morning to enter into a discussion of 
 the doctrine of the atonement, I could show you that con- 
 cerning it a similar thing is true. 
 
 For the first thousand years of Christian history the 
 Church Universal believed in some form that the sufferings 
 and death of Jesus were a price paid to the devil for the 
 redemption of mankind. That is, they believed that by 
 right of conquest Satan had come to be the ruler of man- 
 kind, the king of this world. And God agreed with the 
 devil to let him have, to torture and put to death, his old 
 adversary, the leader of the angels before he was cast out, 
 as the price of the redemption of men. This was the doc- 
 trine for a thousand years. God is represented as having 
 cheated or outwitted the devil. The devil supposed he was 
 going to keep Christ forever. He did not know there was 
 anything divine about his nature ; and so, even after he had 
 entered into the bargain, he lost the price on which he had 
 agreed. 
 
 I am not caricaturing the doctrine : I am simply stating 
 what was written about and preached for a thousand years. 
 
What is Christianity f 6 1 
 
 And this doctrine of the atonement has passed through 
 ten or fifteen or twenty transformations since that day. 
 
 So in regard to any one of the great doctrines. Instead 
 of there having been an original and clear and defined reve- 
 lation of divine truth at the first, held throughout the Church 
 the entire length of its history, there has been change from 
 age to age ; and there is nothing that all those who wish to 
 call themselves Christians are agreed upon to-day as to what 
 is essential to Christianity. Still the Greek Church and the 
 Reman Church and the Protestant churches are pitted 
 against each other, and the different denominations of the 
 Protestant churches against themselves, and all of them 
 against us poor liberals, who claim the right to be free and 
 accept the results of modern study and investigation. 
 
 Now, let us raise the question from the point of view of 
 the modern world as to what is essential in Christianity. 
 
 The ceremonies, are they? The cult.? Do you know, 
 friends, there is nothing original in the cult 1 Almost every 
 single one of the ceremonies in the Church are pagan in 
 origin and hundreds of years older than Christianity. For 
 example, the eucharist, holy water, baptism, all this cere- 
 monial can be traced to Egypt and other parts of the pagan 
 world long before Christianity was heard of. 
 
 Is it the doctrines ? We have already seen that there is 
 no consensus of opinion in regard to the acceptance of the 
 doctrines. But hardly a single one of the doctrines is origi- 
 nal with Christianity. 
 
 You find the Trinity in Egypt, in India, all over the antique 
 world. You find the virgin-birth in almost every one of the 
 great pagan religions. A dozen, twenty, twenty-five heroes 
 and demigods have been virgin-born. Almost every one of 
 these doctrines can be paralleled in the history of Buddhism. 
 
62 Religion for To-day 
 
 There is, today, in one of the churches in Europe a statue 
 of Isis and Horus, the virgin mother and her child, from 
 ancient Egypt, rechristened, and doing duty for Mary and 
 Jesus. 
 
 So little, then, are these doctrines original. 
 
 What is it, then, that Christianity brought to the world, 
 which we cling to with passionate love to-day and are not 
 willing to let go ? 
 
 The great contribution to the world which Christianity 
 has made, which is original, which is unique, which is 
 precious to every loving and tender heart, is the ideal of the 
 life, the character, the spirit, the teaching of the Nazarene; 
 Jesus, his spiritual attitude, his love, his human sympathy, 
 his tenderness, his sacrifice, his willingness to help. 
 
 These are the essential things in Christianity, and these 
 alone. 
 
 The doctrines as they have been held in the past are all 
 of them destined to pass away. The thing that we cling to 
 in this modern world and are going to cling to more and 
 more is simply the ascertained truth of the universe as fast 
 and far as it can be discovered. This is to be the external 
 form and framework of things here, is the material out of 
 which we are to construct our theological theories, for 
 theological theories we shall construct in the future as men 
 have constructed them in the past. 
 
 But the one thing that grows brighter, and fairer, and 
 sweeter, age after age, is this, the Christ ideal, that lumi- 
 nous, leading star of human hope and of divine helpfulness. 
 There is nothing to match it in any other religion, nothing 
 so sweet, nothing so fair, nothing so tender. 
 
 The spiritual attitude of Jesus seems to me simply per- 
 fect. I cannot understand how in any age in the future it 
 
What is Christianity ? 63 
 
 can be outgrown. I am not referring to the limited thought 
 of Jesus, Jesus shared with his age many of the intellect- 
 ual theories which the world has already outgrown, I am 
 referring now to his spiritual attitude. Was there ever any- 
 thing diviner in the history of man than that simple, child- 
 like, perfect trust in the Father ? Trust for every day, trust 
 for every night ; a trust when he was hungry, a trust when 
 he was lonely and sorrowful ; a trust when the great hopes 
 of his life had been dashed and seemed to be passing away. 
 
 I think there is nothing so sublime in the history of all 
 the past as that figure of Jesus on the cross that Friday 
 afternoon outside the walls of the city, surrounded by the 
 Roman soldiers and the mob, he, the gentle teacher, he 
 who loved his friends, and who so loved his enemies that, as 
 he was swooning into death, he said, " Father, forgive them, 
 they know not what they do." Hanging there with all of 
 his hopes an apparent failure, wondering whether God him- 
 self had not forgotten and let go his hand, and yet with a 
 trust that still clung in the darkness and the weakness, so 
 that he fainted through death into immortal triumph. The 
 victory over the thought, the love, the reverence, the wor- 
 ship of mankind, such as has never been won by any other 
 historic figure in all the world ! This perfect trust in the 
 Father ! 
 
 I know of nothing finer than this spiritual attitude of 
 Jesus. 
 
 And then that other side of his nature, his relation 
 towards his fellow-men. A service unstinted ! Nothing 
 grander was ever said about any man that ever lived than 
 was said about Jesus : " he made himself of no reputation " ; 
 he cared nothing for fame or human greatness ; "he went 
 about doing good " ; he sacrificed time, strength, love, gave 
 
64 Religio7i for To-day 
 
 himself utterly that he might help one of the least of these 
 his brethren. 
 
 I say, then, that the Christianity of the future is to be 
 made up of these two elements : all truth for the theological 
 side, however gained and through whatever source ; then 
 the spiritual attitude towards God and towards man of 
 Jesus. 
 
 Now if the churches, friends, can ever prove that these 
 two are not Christian, then it will be the saddest day that 
 Christianity has ever seen. For they will have proved that 
 there is something in the world that is better than Chris- 
 tianity. For there can be nothing finer than this: truth 
 for the thought side ; the spirit and temper of Jesus for the 
 feeling, the aspiration side. 
 
 There can be nothing finer than that, nobler than a com- 
 bination like that. 
 
 Now let us at the end, just one moment, notice the one 
 solemn utterance of Jesus on this subject. If he be cor- 
 rectly reported in the lesson which I read this morning,* he 
 is setting forth for all time what in his judgment are the 
 conditions of entrance into heaven. Here is this solemn 
 scene of judgment, the sheep on his right hand, the goats 
 on his left. He sends one of them into outer darkness, and 
 the other into eternal felicity. 
 
 I am not discussing the question of future punishment 
 now ; I simply wish you to fix your attention on the condi- 
 tions of admission to heaven as Jesus sets them forth. 
 
 Now, when he speaks to these on his right hand, that he 
 calls the blessed of his Father and who are to inherit the 
 kingdom prepared for them from the foundation of the 
 world, what does he say .? 
 
 * The last part of the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew. 
 
What is Christianity f 65 
 
 Does he catechise them as to what they believed ? Not 
 one single syllable of belief in any doctrine whatsoever. 
 Nothing about foreordination ; nothing about the Bible ; 
 nothing about the Trinity ; nothing about his own character 
 or authority. Simply as to whether they have been good. 
 Good, that is all. Have they helped, have they tried to 
 lessen the sum of human misery? Have they cared for 
 their fellow-man ? Not a word about ceremony, about mem- 
 bership in a church ; not a word about any priesthood ; 
 not one single thing that all the churches to-day are de- 
 claring to be absolutely essential to Christian character and 
 Christian life, not one word about any of them ! 
 
 Those who have tried to be good and help their fellow- 
 men are the ones before whose feet the door of eternal felic- 
 ity opens with welcome. And the others are condemned, not 
 for lack of belief, but simply for lack of character and con- 
 duct, nothing else. 
 
 Now, then, let me say here as my final word, according 
 to the standards of the popular churches to-day, not a single 
 one of the Apostles was a Christian, and Jesus was not a 
 Christian ; and if Jesus should come here to New York in 
 this year 1897, and should go before a board of examiners, 
 petitioning for admission into any one of the churches, there 
 is not a single one that could take him in, provided they 
 asked of him the same questions which they ask other can- 
 didates. 
 
 And, though they all say that we Unitarians are not Chris- 
 tians, I verily believe that if Jesus were here he would find 
 himself at home in the midst of our simple service that 
 teaches just what he taught, the love of God and the ser- 
 vice of man as the great essentials of all true religion. 
 
GOD AS INSIDE THE UNIVERSE, 
 NOT OUTSIDE. 
 
 God is spirit. Before coming to consider the problem 
 of belief in God as it faces us to-day, I wish to indicate to 
 you some of the steps of thought that humanity has nat- 
 urally, inevitably taken. 
 
 When I was a boy I was brought up to believe that men 
 originally knew the true and only God, and that they wil- 
 fully and wickedly departed from him and took up the 
 worship of strange deities, of idols. 
 
 Milton, you will remember, teaches in his ''Paradise 
 Lost" that all the other religions outside of Christianity are 
 inventions of the fallen angels ; that they thus did what 
 they could to divert mankind from paying the worship to 
 God which they owed to him, and induced them, under 
 these false pretences, to pay that worship to themselves. 
 And yet we know very well to-day that polytheism, the 
 worship of many gods, was one of the most natural steps 
 in thinking, in living, that mankind could take. We know, 
 indeed, that in a certain stage of human development it is 
 simply inevitable. Polytheism represents one phase of the 
 belief of these far-away childlike men. Awaking to con- 
 sciousness, they are able to say, "I am I," to recognize 
 their own individuality ; and then they begin to look around 
 them, in their crude and ignorant way to ask questions, 
 and as best they can to answer those questions. They 
 
God Inside the Universe 6/ 
 
 neither have nor can have any conception of the unity of 
 things. 
 
 Why should we expect man two or three hundred thou- 
 sand years ago, or even ten thousand years ago, to know 
 concerning this universe what we have only discovered and 
 demonstrated during our own lifetime ? As they then 
 looked abroad, it was inevitable that they should suppose 
 that the universe or the world, as they saw it and felt it, was 
 the manifestation, not of one power, but of many powers, 
 powers irreconcilable with each other; powers which con- 
 flicted ; powers good on the one hand, evil on the other. 
 
 Why should we expect them to understand that the 
 same being that made light made darkness also, which 
 seemed to them its antithesis ? 
 
 Why should we expect them to trace heat and cold to 
 the same source ? 
 
 Why should we suppose that they would be able to 
 worship the sun as the source and giver of life, and at the 
 same time to recognize that it was this power that brought 
 devastation and destruction ? As then they looked over the 
 face of things it was inevitable that they should suppose 
 that there were many powers at work in the world and out- 
 side of it. 
 
 And note another thing. Men in all ages have naturally 
 personified these forces. Naturally, did I say ? Inevitably. 
 Men have never been able to conceive power except as 
 will-power. We cannot understand it any other w^ay to-day. 
 Down to the time of Kepler, the famous astronomer who 
 discovered the laws of planetary motion, even he was able 
 to understand the orderly movements of these planets only 
 by supposing that an angel divinely appointed to that 
 mission resided in and guided each one of them. 
 
68 Religion for To-day 
 
 And our immediate ancestors here in the New World 
 attributed blight and frost and storm and lightning and pes- 
 tilence and all sorts of evil things to the agency of one evil 
 spirit or a million. It did not occur to them to trace them 
 all to the one divine hand and source. 
 
 I say, then, that polytheism was an inevitable step in the 
 growth of the human mind. 
 
 And, though translators have disguised it for us, poly- 
 theism is in the very first words of the Bible. The Hebrews 
 were not monotheists from the time of Abraham down : 
 they began as polytheists and nature worshippers, the same 
 as all other people. The first words of the Bible, if they 
 were correctly translated, would read, " In the beginning the 
 strong ones (plural) created the heavens and the earth." 
 The word is a plural word, the same word which in the 
 Psalms is translated in one case "angels." 
 
 The Hebrews, then, at the outset were polytheists like 
 their neighbors. They passed over the road that every part 
 of humanity has been obliged to traverse ; and to-day there 
 are very few people on the face of the earth who are not 
 polytheistic still. I will touch on that a little more at length 
 when I have taken my second step. 
 
 After polytheism comes what Max Miiller calls henothe- 
 ism, a condition of mind in which people, while they be- 
 lieve in the real existence of many gods, believe that they 
 owe allegiance to one, and that it is wrong for them to 
 worship any other. Precisely the state of mind of people 
 who recognize the existence of the President- of France, the 
 Kaiser of Germany, the Czar of all the Russias, and a 
 hundred other rulers over the face of the earth, but con- 
 sider themselves in loyalty bound to only their own ruler. 
 
 The Hebrews, through a large part of their history, were 
 
God Inside the Universe 69 
 
 not monotheists ; they were henotheists. But they believed 
 that Jehovah was their God and that they had no right to 
 worship any other. Traces of this are perfectly plain to 
 any one who reads the Old Testament intelligently, from the 
 beginning almost to the end. 
 
 The next step is the attainment of monotheism, the be- 
 lief not only in loyalty and allegiance to one God, but that 
 there is only one God, the father of all men and the ruler 
 of all the earth. 
 
 I said a moment ago that very few people have attained 
 that stage of thinking even yet. I suppose not one-third 
 of the people on the face of the earth are in any proper 
 sense monotheists even to-day. Throughout almost the en- 
 tire history of Christendom itself the people have not been, 
 in any proper sense of the word, monotheists in their 
 worship. 
 
 Even if you omit the claim that might reasonably be made 
 that the God of the Christians has been a man, the greater 
 part of Christendom has not even worshipped this man exclu- 
 sively or commonly, but has worshipped a woman, Mary. 
 The man had become so highly exalted, so far removed 
 from their needs and their sympathies, that their minds 
 naturally turned to the mother, Mary, in the expectation 
 that she would plead with her son and so gain for them, 
 through him, the divine favor. 
 
 Then, too, they have worshipped in all ages, saints, patron 
 saints, just as the Greek and Romans worshipped their tute- 
 lar deities. So that Christendom has not, in the strict sense 
 of the word, been monotheistic. 
 
 But, not to dwell on this step which the world has taken 
 in its way up to the lofty height of monotheism, let us face 
 the difficulty which fronts men, thoughtful men and women, 
 
70 Religion for To-day 
 
 to-day. We care very little, except as a matter of history, 
 for all these old-time theories of polytheism or henotheism 
 or monotheism. 
 
 The great thing that faces the earnest men of the 
 world now is the question as to whether they can believe 
 in God at all. He seems lost in the infinite spaces of the 
 limitless universe. Where is he? How shall we come to 
 his seat ? Can we speak to him, and will he answer ? 
 Can we cry with the thought that he will hear t Does he 
 exist? Or shall we accept the dictum of some scientists 
 who tell us that all there is is Nature or Force, and that we 
 puny creatures stand here watching the play of mighty, 
 irresponsible, unmoral, careless, if not cruel, forces. May 
 we believe in God at all ? 
 
 My friends, I wish you to note one thing this morning : 
 I speak to you as though you were all these questioning 
 scientists. 
 
 I do not propose for the next fifteen minutes to assume 
 anything. I propose to keep myself on the solid ground of 
 absolutely demonstrated fact, and ask you to see where we 
 are. 
 
 As we wake up, then, to self-consciousness we recognize 
 the fact not only that we exist, but that there is what 
 Matthew Arnold calls a *' Power not ourselves," a Power 
 outside of us, separated from us, over which we have no 
 control. 
 
 Let us consider this Power now for a little while. You 
 may call it Force, you may call it Nature, you may speak of it 
 as Law, you may call it the Universe, you may say it is It, 
 and not He ; I care not. Use any term you please. This 
 Power has produced you and me. We are its children. As 
 one outcome of this Power here exists life, foot and hand 
 
God Inside the Universe 7 1 
 
 not only, but brain ; the brain of a Shakspere that dreams 
 Hamlet, the brain of a Goethe that dreams Faust, the brain 
 of a Jesus that dreams Our Father, the brain of an engineer 
 that dreams the Brooklyn Bridge, the brain that has dreamed 
 a train of cars, the brain that has dreamed a steamship that 
 ploughs the waves and brushes them one side as though 
 they were playthings. All this, and all that these things 
 merely suggest, countless wonders and marvels, are the 
 products of this Power that is not ourselves. 
 
 Now note ; this Power is eternal. I want to see how many 
 of the attributes that are ordinarily attributed to God we are 
 rationally justified in attributing to this Power. This Power 
 is eternal. We can conceive no beginning, we can dream 
 no end. It was here before we were born ; it will be here 
 when we have passed away. It is that which has made us, 
 and not we ourselves. It is eternal, then. 
 
 Note another thing. It is infinite, boundless in its reach. 
 Can you think any limit to the universe ? Let me give you 
 one or two poor hints by which you may climb up into the 
 beginning of a conception of what it all means. 
 
 Suppose we were able to start to-day on a train of cars 
 that should go at the rate of sixty miles an hour for twenty- 
 four hours in the day and three hundred and sixty-five days 
 in the year, and so should start out on a journey to the sun. 
 It would take us, travelling every day and every week and 
 every month and every year, more than one hundred and 
 seventy years on that train of cars to reach the sun. 
 
 Light travels it in about eight minutes and a half. But 
 there are suns so far away that it has taken light twenty-five 
 or thirty millions of years to reach us, how many more we 
 know not. 
 
 Suppose you try to think the limit of the worlds. Suppose 
 
72 Religion for To-day 
 
 you could go to the edge, dream of an edge for a moment, 
 and look over. There is space, infinite space, still beyond. 
 Suppose you could build walls from the zenith to the nadir, 
 fencing it in. Infinite reaches of space beyond all the walls. 
 
 This Being, then, is not only an eternal being, but it is an 
 infinite being. It is not only eternal and infinite, this Being 
 is almighty. 
 
 Let me give you here again one or two suggestions of 
 power, for " almighty " means practically nothing to us. How 
 can I suggest to you the power of gravity which holds our 
 little moon in its place in relation to the earth ? Conceive, 
 if you will, a bar of steel a mile square. Lay it down 
 beside the Catskills and it will dwarf their highest peaks. 
 Stretch that bar of steel if you can from the earth to the 
 moon. Would that represent the power that is needed to 
 hold the moon in its place ? It would take eighty-seven 
 thousand bars of steel a mile square to match the power of 
 gravity that keeps that little worn-out asteroid in its place. 
 If you should take threads of steel a quarter of an inch in 
 diameter you would need to cover the earth with them so 
 that they would be no more than six inches apart in order to 
 represent the force of gravity that holds the moon in its 
 place in the sky. Then remember that the moon is a little 
 out-worn planet, and this whole solar system of ours is only 
 a little tiny flake of light on the borders of the blazing glory 
 of the infinite. 
 
 Does it mean anything to you, then, to say that this Power 
 is omnipotent which keeps all these planets in their places in 
 all their orbits, singing their songs, and moving through the 
 mazes of their tireless dance ? 
 
 Not only is this Being eternal, almighty, and infinite ; we 
 know to-day that it is one ; we have demonstrated that the 
 
God Inside the Universe 73 
 
 power which is at the heart of this universe is not a thou- 
 sand, not a hundred, not three ; we have demonstrated that 
 it is one, one law, one power. 
 
 We have found out now that the stuff which makes up 
 the substance of the sun is precisely the same kind of stuff 
 that we tread underneath our feet in walking over this little 
 planet. We have found out now that the forces in the sun 
 are the same forces that we are dealing with here every- 
 day. 
 
 Chemistry has reduced the infinite variety of the forms of 
 matter to some sixty or seventy elements ; and the philo- 
 sophical chemists, those who can predict and forecast what 
 is coming, are beginning to tell us that they shall undoubt- 
 edly be able, by and by, to reduce all these elements to one ; 
 and this element, this one, what is it ? Matter ? Do you 
 know what matter means ? Nobody ever saw an atom ; it 
 is even inconceivable. They are beginning to dream 
 with some of the philosophical men of the time that they 
 shall find this atom to be a little whirl of movement, a 
 vortex-motion ; in what ? An element of which we at 
 present have no experience under any name that we can 
 properly call matter. We know also that never since the uni- 
 verse came into being has there been one slightest particle 
 of matter that has passed out of being, never one unit of 
 force that has been lost. 
 
 Passing through infinite changes, they still are forever in 
 existence, forever but modifications of the one eternal real- 
 ity, which, as we have already seen, is eternal, not only, but 
 infinite, almighty, and one. 
 
 Now let us take a step further, and note another signifi- 
 cant fact. As we look out upon this apparent confusion 
 and contradiction of forces and movements, we find that 
 
74 Religion for To-day 
 
 the universe is everywhere intelligible. It is an intelligible 
 order. What does that mean ? It means, if inference ever 
 means anything, that it is the expression, the manifestation 
 of an intelligent Power. There is nothing anywhere that 
 intelligence cannot trace and comprehend. So that the 
 wisest and most devout men say, as did this same Kepler, 
 to whom I referred a moment ago, in the time of his 
 wonderful discovery, " O God, I think over again thy 
 thoughts after thee." It is an intelligible order. 
 
 One other thing of most remarkable significance. There 
 are signs everywhere of an intelligible progress, from the 
 beginning, so far as we can trace it, until to-day : the uni- 
 verse manifests not only order, but orderly growth, orderly 
 advance ; until we can add to those great words of Tennyson, 
 and say not only 
 
 ** One law, one element," 
 but 
 
 ** One far-off divine event, 
 To which the whole creation moves." 
 
 What do we know then ? We know that there is a Being 
 not ourselves, capable of producing life, producing all that 
 is. We know that it is an eternal being, an infinite being, 
 an almighty being, one being, intelligent, who is leading 
 the march of the worlds. 
 
 So much, friends, is demonstrated scientific truth. What 
 next ? Let me raise another question, perhaps the most 
 crucial one of all. Is this Being matter or spirit ? Let us 
 stop and think for a moment. On any theory you choose 
 to hold, this Being has produced matter, not only, it has 
 produced what we mean by spirit. I do not know what 
 matter is. I do not know of any man on the face of the 
 earth' wise enough to tell me. I do know, however, that 
 
God Inside the Universe 75 
 
 life is, for I live ; I know that feeling is, for I feel ; I know 
 that thought is, for I think ; I know that love is, for I love ; 
 I know that hope is, for I hope ; I know that aspiration is, 
 for I aspire ; I know that worship is, for I worship ; I know 
 the existence of what we mean by soul, because I am self- 
 conscious. 
 
 What do we mean by matter ? All that anybody knows 
 about the existence of matter is purely an inference. I 
 touch this desk. Do I know what is there ? I only know 
 there is something there that reports itself to my conscious- 
 ness as hard and as of a certain shape ; that is, it resists my 
 touch. But do I know what it is out there ? The sense 
 of resistance which I interpret as meaning that there is 
 something there at the end of my fingers that sense is it) 
 here, in consciousness. I look at this book and say its 
 cover is green or blue. What do I mean.? I know that 
 there is no such thing as color down there connected with 
 that book. All I know is that the light, as it is reflected 
 from that to my eye, starts a sensation in my nerves which 
 up here in the brain is translated into what I call blue or 
 green. It is here, not there. I look at those flowers ; I 
 smell their fragrance. What does it mean ? It means again 
 that something there starts a sensation in my nerves which 
 up here in the brain is translated into color and fragrance. 
 During the service this morning I heard what I call music 
 upon the organ. Again, what does that mean ? It means 
 only that the touching of what we call the keys starts move- 
 ments of the air which strike the drum of my ear, causing 
 sensations in my nerves, which again up here in the brain 
 are translated into' what I call music. 
 
 The world lives in my brain, in my consciousness ; and, 
 though I do not doubt for one instant the reality of this 
 
'J 6 Religion for To-day 
 
 external world, I merely mean to impress upon you that I 
 know directly the internal world, and know the other only 
 as a matter of inference. I know spirit, soul, thought, 
 feeling, love, hope ; I know these. And if you attempt to 
 tell me that they are produced merely by piles or aggre- 
 gations of particles of dead matter, you are talking to me 
 nonsense. 
 
 Huxley, Tyndall, the greatest thinkers that have ever 
 lived, have said that there is no possible way of bridging 
 the gulf between the motion of dead material particles 
 and a feeling or thought. The gulf is impassable. It is 
 simply impossible for me to think soul if I start with mat- 
 ter ; but I can start with soul and think matter. 
 
 Mr. Herbert Spencer, in some conversation I had with 
 him some years ago, said, what he has since published in 
 his books, that this force which is manifested in the uni- 
 verse around us is precisely the same force which wells 
 up in us under the form of consciousness. He said, also, 
 that whatever we may be doubtful about, there is one thing 
 that is more certain than any other conceivable item of 
 knowledge, and that is the existence of this infinite and 
 eternal Power of which all material and phenomenal move- 
 ments are simply manifestations. 
 
 We can think matter, then, if we start with mind ; but we 
 cannot think mind if we start with matter. For what we 
 mean by matter is only so much of the manifestation of 
 this infinite power as is beyond the limits of our individual 
 consciousness. 
 
 Now is this Being personal } Is he conscious ? Do I 
 believe in the personality and consciousness of God "i Not 
 in the sense in which we use those words of ourselves. 
 What do we mean when we speak of our own personality? 
 
God Inside the Universe yj 
 
 We mean to refer to a being who was born, who is limited, 
 enclosed in a body, and who will die. 
 
 God is not a person in that sense. But personality is 
 one of the manifestations of this infinite Power. The Power, 
 then, which has produced countless persons must be as 
 much as person, must it not ? That which is evolved must 
 first have been involved. The stream does not rise higher 
 than its source. We must suppose a cause adequate to all 
 effects. 
 
 Is God conscious? He may not be conscious in the 
 sense that I am, but my consciousness is a part of the 
 manifestation of God, and he must be as much as con- 
 scious. 
 
 Herbert Spencer said again (and I beg you to note the 
 profoundness of the thought), " This infinite and eternal 
 Being may, for all I can see, be as much above and beyond 
 what we mean by personality and consciousness as we are 
 above and beyond vegetable growths." 
 
 The Infinite God, then, having produced personality and 
 consciousness, if he be not personal and conscious in our 
 sense of those terms, is something infinitely and unspeakably 
 more, grander, higher, better than these. 
 
 And now, friends, I come to the question (for the clock 
 warns me that I must leave many things one side) as to ^ 
 where this God is. Let me suggest to you, before I answer 
 that, the wonder of some of these sentiments that haunt us 
 and appeal to us, if we imagine ourselves in a purely ma- 
 terial universe. 
 
 Byron says in one of his lines, 
 
 " To me 
 High mountains are a feeling," 
 
yS Religion for To-day 
 
 and he speaks of the presence that he finds on the shore 
 and in the wonder of the woods. 
 
 Did it ever occur to you that it is a little bit strange, if 
 this universe is all material, that one lump of matter should 
 ever think of such a thing as going down on its knees to 
 another lump of matter, however big it might be ? If it is 
 simply matter, where do suggestions like that come from? 
 Why do we feel the sensation of the sublime in the presence 
 of mountains, or under the night sky of stars ? What does 
 Wordsworth mean when he says, 
 
 " And I have felt 
 A Presence that disturbs me with the joy 
 Of elevated thought ; a sense sublime 
 Of something 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 living things, all objects of all thought, 
 And rolls through all things." 
 
 Whence spring such sentiments, if all is only matter? 
 And sentiment, remember, friends, is as real a thing as 
 a bowlder, and demands to be accounted for quite as 
 much. 
 
 Now for the question. Where is this God ? Where is 
 this Being that is eternal, infinite, almighty, one, personal, 
 conscious, loving, our Father? Where is he? We have 
 lost him, friends, because the universe has grown to us to 
 be so great. We are much in the condition of the little 
 child whose father should take him in his arms into the 
 cathedral of St. Peter's, carrying him until his face was 
 within two inches of one of the great pillars, and ask him 
 
God Inside the Universe 79 
 
 to look at St. Peter's. We have lost God not because he is 
 so far away, but because he is so nigh. He is infinitely 
 nearer to us than he used to be in the old theology that 
 placed him above the dome of blue. It took at least a 
 little time for us to get to him then. But where is he now .-* 
 He is nearer to me than my pulse beat ; he is nearer than 
 the throb of my heart ; he is nearer than the thought of my 
 brain ; he is nearer than the aspiration of my soul. For he 
 is the power by which the pulse beats, heart throbs, brain 
 thinks, and soul aspires. 
 
 I am his child, and it is his personal thrilling power in 
 and through me that constitutes my life. I bend over a tiny 
 blade of grass coming up through the ground in the spring, 
 and note how it aspires to get up into the air and the light; 
 and it is God present, pushing it up, and painting it. I 
 look at the flower, I smell its fragrance : it is God unfolding 
 the wonder of that flower. God is its beauty, God its odor. 
 I look into the faces of my friends, or down deep into the 
 eyes of my little child, and thrill with the thought that I 
 have shared with God his creative power, and I see in these 
 deeps the divineness of a soul that is a spark of the Infinite 
 One looking back into mine. 
 
 Where is God ? He is here, all here, and all at the far- 
 thest bound of space. 
 
 You think this is a strange statement 1 Let me give you 
 a simple illustration that, perhaps, will help you to think its 
 reasonableness. 
 
 Where am I ? You think you see me. You do not. You 
 never saw me. You never will see me. They used to talk 
 about men as having souls. I do not believe any of us 
 have souls. I am a soul. I have a body. You have never 
 seen the most intimate friend you have on the face of 
 
8o Religion for To-day 
 
 the earth, and you never will, any more than you see God 
 every time you open your eyes. 
 
 What do you see ? You see clothes, the exposed parts 
 of the body. You look into the eyes, you hear the sounds 
 of speech, but do you see, do you hear me t I am invisi- 
 ble as much as God is invisible. I am intangible as much 
 as God is intangible. I am omnipresent throughout my 
 body just as much as God is omnipresent throughout his 
 universe. When I am writing I am all at the tips of 
 my fingers, putting myself into expression ; when I am 
 speaking, I am at the tip of my tongue ; when I am think- 
 ing, I am here in my brain ; when I am walking, I am in 
 my feet. I am at any point or part of the body which calls 
 for me in order that it may execute its functions. I am 
 omnipresent throughout my body ; but can you locate me 
 anywhere 1 
 
 A French scientist, astronomer, thinking he was going to 
 say a profound thing, once gave utterance to this saying : " I 
 have swept the universe with my telescope, and I find no 
 trace of God." Strange ! Why should not an anatomist, 
 with a body on the dissecting table, think he was saying a 
 wise thing to give expression to this sentence, ** I have ex- 
 amined this body from head to foot with my microscope, 
 and I have not found a single thought ? " Would you consider 
 it a wise saying ? I regard it as a very silly saying ; but 
 it is just as wise for the anatomist as it is for the astrono- 
 mer. When you can see me with a microscope, that is, 
 the soul, the I, that thinks, feels, hopes, loves, then hunt 
 for God with a telescope ! 
 
 God is the life, the thought, the soul of the universe, as I 
 am the life, the thought, the soul of this body. 
 
 Where is God, then ? So near to you that you lose him. 
 
God Inside the Universe 8 1 
 
 Let me read you, as giving expression to this thought, a 
 couple of verses : 
 
 * Oh, where is the sea ? " the fishes cried, 
 As they swam the crystal clearness through. 
 
 " We've heard from of old of the ocean's tide, 
 And we long to look on the waters blue. 
 
 The wise ones speak of the infinite sea : 
 
 Oh, who can tell us if such there be "i " 
 
 The lark flew up in the morning bright. 
 And sung and balanced on sunny wings ; 
 
 And this was its song : " I see the light, 
 I look o'er a world of beautiful things ; 
 
 But, flying and singing everywhere, 
 
 In vain I have searched to find the air." 
 
 We look for God as though we could see him with these 
 external eyes, as though he were dwelling in a palace, like 
 earth's petty kings, in some bright star in space ; and God 
 all the time folds us around in his arms, is closer to us 
 than mother or father ever were. Every whisper of our 
 hearts finds echo in his infinite sympathy, every pang of 
 pain thrills him through. Every up-reach of the hand 
 clasps his for leadership. He is nearer to us than the life 
 we live or the sympathies we feel. God is he in whom we 
 live and move and have our being. 
 
 In the rest of the sermons of this series, then, I shall try 
 to give you some of the results of this great thought that 
 God, to clear-thinking people in the modern world, must be 
 conceived of as inside his universe instead of outside. In 
 all the old religions, in Christendom, almost from the be- 
 ginning, God has been thought of as living away off some- 
 
82 Religion for To-day 
 
 where in space, and arbitrarily ruling this world. God can 
 no longer be intelligently thought of in that way. It is God 
 inside the universe or nowhere, for there cannot be two 
 infinites. We can no longer think of God as a great 
 magnified unnatural man sitting on a throne. God is the 
 heart, the life, the soul of things. And the laws of this 
 universe, the forces of this universe, are only the manifes- 
 tations of the personal order and power of Him who is 
 all, and in all. 
 
RELIGION NATURAL, NOT STATUTORY. 
 
 As I look into your faces and consider my theme, I am 
 troubled just a little over the question as to whether I shall 
 be able to make it as clear, as tangible, as easily apprehen- 
 sible as I wish. It is indeed one of the crucial subjects of 
 my whole series of sermons, one of which I am specially anx- 
 ious that you should note the complete significance. I shall 
 try to make it luminous, easy to understand ; but may I 
 venture to beg of you to supplement any defects on my part 
 by a careful and earnest attention ? 
 
 I am to attempt to set forth two distinct, separate, op- 
 posed theories of religion ; and, in doing so, I must also set 
 forth two distinct and opposed theories of the universe, 
 for I had occasion to tell you, as some of you at any rate 
 will remember, several Sundays ago, that every religion that 
 the world has ever known has sprung out of a cosmology, a 
 theory of things. Every religion is rooted in a scheme of 
 the universe, and takes shape from it. 
 
 As you study the characteristics of all the old-time relig- 
 ions of the world, historic and dogmatic Christianity not 
 excepted, you will find that they are characterized by certain 
 peculiarities which they have in common, which set them 
 apart in a class by themselves ; and the declaration with 
 which I begin this morning is that we have reached that 
 time in the history of the world when all these conceptions 
 are becoming antiquated. The old heaven and the old 
 
84 Religion for To-day 
 
 earth are passed away ; and I see a new heaven and a new 
 earth, a new universe, a new thought about God, man, 
 nature, destiny. 
 
 I wish, then, this morning, to set in contrast these two con- 
 ceptions, if I may, helping you to understand the old, helping 
 you to comprehend and be ready to welcome the new. 
 
 In all these old religions, Christianity, as I said, historic 
 Christianity until this generation included, the world has 
 been something separate and apart from God. This is the 
 first point I wish to make clear. 
 
 God existed before there was any visible universe, accord- 
 ing to this theory. Suddenly he determined to create the 
 world. He did this as a mechanic, as a carpenter might 
 make something outside of himself. He did it by fiat. 
 He said. Let light be, and it was ; Let the earth be, and 
 suddenly it appeared ; Let the stars appear to give light by 
 night, and the sun to give light by day, and it was so. 
 
 He created this universe, then, as something entirely 
 apart from himself, while he sat off somewhere in space and 
 ruled this new kingdom like a king. That is, he ruled it 
 from outside : he ruled it as the czar rules his empire. 
 
 Nature, natural forces, natural laws, were something 
 apart from God. They indeed manifested God's glory, 
 they indeed were the results of his skill ; but they were 
 something external to, outside of, himself. 
 
 Now, in the next place, for I must not dwell on these 
 points too long, in the next place, in this world men and 
 women are primarily God's subjects. He is king : they are 
 people to be governed. They can rebel against him, as 
 subjects can initiate a revolution. 
 
 And right in here, friends, is the significance of a very 
 famous saying of Mr. Moody, a reference to which will 
 
Religio7i Natural^ not StaUttory 85 
 
 illustrate what I mean. Some years ago, discussing the 
 relative importance of morality, or character, and religion, 
 Mr. Moody said very tersely and from his point of view 
 with perfect consistency and truth that morality did not 
 touch the question of salvation. A man might be as moral 
 as he would ; but he was not, therefore, at all certain of 
 getting to heaven. Note, I say, from this point of view, 
 Mr. Moody was accurate and consistent. 
 
 To illustrate, suppose one of the czar's subjects is a 
 Nihilist: he has broken the laws of the empire, and is a 
 traitor. If he is allowed to go on, the empire itself may be 
 in danger. Now suppose somebody comes to the czar, and 
 pleads that this man's forfeited life be granted him on the 
 ground that he is an honest man and pays his debts, that 
 he is kind in his family, that he is good to his children, 
 that he is a pleasant neighbor. Do you not see that this 
 would have nothing whatever to do with the fact that he 
 was a traitor and had forfeited his life ? The czar m.ight 
 say his morality, let him be as moral as he will, does not 
 touch the question of his relation to my empire and its 
 safety, as a citizen. 
 
 I speak of this simply to illustrate the point that in the 
 old theology man is a citizen of God's kingdom, to be ruled 
 and governed as a king governs his realm. 
 
 Now, in the third place, God's commandments, according 
 to this old theory, are purely arbitrary affairs. God issues 
 any command he pleases, as a king issues any command he 
 pleases to his subjects. There is no natural, no necessary 
 reason why the command should be this rather than that : 
 it is purely a matter of God's will. 
 
 Take as an illustration the command supposed to have 
 been issued to Adam and Eve in the garden. Do you not 
 
86 Religion for To-day 
 
 see that it was purely an arbitrary thing? God did not 
 say that the fruit of this tree of life was unhealthy, would 
 injure Adam and Eve if they ate it. There was no natural 
 reason why they should not have eaten it, so far as the 
 narrative goes. God simply told them they must not, 
 making this an arbitrary test of their obedience to him; 
 and he threatened an arbitrary punishment, if they dis- 
 obeyed. 
 
 On the old theory of religion, then, this is the point I wish 
 to make clear, and drop as soon as possible : God's com- 
 mands are purely arbitrary ; they do not exist in the nature 
 of things. Men have no natural way of finding out what 
 they are ; and this is why in all the old religions the sup- 
 posed commands of the gods are sent by angels, by special 
 messengers, or else have to be written down in a book. 
 There is no other way by which anybody should ever dream 
 as to what God wants him to do. Natural knowledge, a 
 perfect understanding of the constitution and laws of the 
 universe, would be of no assistance whatever. So they have 
 invented the idea of a supernatural revelation containing 
 these supernatural and purely arbitrary commandments of 
 God. 
 
 Now, in the next place. What about the credentials ? If 
 a messenger appears in some distant part of an empire 
 with some command of the king, the people say, " But how 
 do we know that this comes from the king ? " There is 
 nothing in the command itself that would help the people 
 any to settle that question. So the messenger must bring 
 his credentials. 
 
 And here, friends, is the origin of all the signs and 
 wonders and miracles of the world. The messenger has 
 revealed some sign, wrought some wonder, performed some 
 
Religion Natural^ not Statutory ^y 
 
 miracle, and astonished the people into believing that he had 
 come with a word from the celestial court. 
 
 Do you not remember how the people came around Jesus, 
 when he was here on earth, and said, " Give us a sign ! " 
 which he refused. " Give us a sign, so that we may know 
 that you are a messenger of the Divine." 
 
 All the old religions of the world are full of these signs 
 and wonders. This is, note, what I shall have to refer to 
 by and by with an added emphasis. 
 
 People believe in the presence of God in these old 
 religions, not on account of the beautiful, perfect, natural 
 order of things, but because of disorder, because of inter- 
 ference of some sort, because suddenly the universe has 
 ceased to work perfectly. And they take that as a signal 
 that God is present. 
 
 I shall have occasion, a little later, as I said, to refer to 
 this again. 
 
 In the next place, I wish you to notice that the rewards 
 and punishments in all these old religions are just as 
 arbitrary as are the commandments. In other words, if 
 you did not know from some supernatural source, it would 
 never occur to you to attach the particular penalty to any 
 particular action. 
 
 Take the case of Job as an illustration. God commands 
 Job to be true and faithful, and rewards him how, for his 
 goodness ? After his long trial and his constancy he is 
 rewarded for being good by having thousands of cattle and 
 sheep given him, by being made honorable among his 
 people, by having new children given him in the place of 
 those that have been taken away. 
 
 All through the Old Testament you will find this idea. 
 You find it also in the New. Recall to mind for a moment 
 
88 Religion for To-day 
 
 the case where the disciples came to Jesus in the presence 
 of the blind man, and said, " Master, who was it that 
 sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind ? " 
 
 It never occurred to them that a man could be born blind 
 except as the punishment for a sin. That is the old idea in 
 all the old religions. The Bible is full of it from one end to 
 the other. Disease, punishment, the blighting of the crops, 
 the loss of a friend, any calamity is a punishment for sin. 
 Thousands of people to-day have no conception of any 
 natural order or of results as necessarily following certain 
 natural causes. 
 
 What does religion come to then, friends, all this being 
 so ? Religion is an external affair. It is the coming into 
 the presence of God with set and ordered forms and cere- 
 monies and praises, or it is the bringing of cattle or birds to 
 be slain and burnt as offerings, or it is bringing oil or wine 
 to be poured out as an oblation. 
 
 The thing I wish you to note is that it is something 
 entirely apart from the natural, every-day life of the peo- 
 ple. Religion is something extra, something over beyond 
 good living. 
 
 We make that distinction still, very foolishly, very shal- 
 lowly. A man is ever so good, he tells the truth, he loves 
 his fellow-men, he is honest in business, he is frank and free 
 in his attitude towards all truth, he is an ideal man ; but you 
 will find people superciliously looking upon a man like that, 
 and piously regretting that he is not religious. 
 
 And here is a man who is anything but what he ought to 
 be in his personal character and relations to his fellow-men. 
 He may be very religious, indeed. 
 
 On this old theory religion is a matter, as I said, of 
 praises, of offerings, of oblations, of ceremonies, of services. 
 
Religion Natural, not Statutory 89 
 
 And salvation, what is that ? It is getting somewhere after 
 death, and it is escaping another somewhere. 
 
 Do you think this is antique ? The modern thought of 
 Christendom is saturated with it. One of our New York 
 newspapers within the last week has been sending around 
 to ministers the question, as though it were a crucial one 
 and touched something vital, as to whether a man who did 
 not believe in the virgin birth could what ? Could go 
 to heaven ! Not whether he would be a good man, but 
 whether he would find the gate shut in his face when he 
 attempted to enter at the last day ! 
 
 Salvation, then, I say, on all these antiquated theories of 
 the universe and religion, is something external, arbitrary : 
 it is escaping hell and getting into heaven. 
 
 Of course, incidentally, they tell you that you must be 
 good ; but the essence of it is not there. 
 
 Now, friends, I have not attempted to argue so far. I 
 have tried to set forth as clearly as possible a theory of the 
 universe, of religion. I wish it merely as a background for 
 that which I believe with my whole soul. I wish that you 
 may simply note it so clearly as to set it distinctly apart 
 from the other, which now I shall outline as simply and 
 clearly as I may. 
 
 In the new theory of the universe it is not speculation, 
 but ascertained and demonstrated truth, that the universe is 
 not external, apart from God. 
 
 This phenomenal manifestation that is all around us, that 
 makes up the magnificent scene of heaven and earth, the 
 sun by day, the starry sky by night, all the multiplied 
 worlds of space, this fair earth with its carpet of green or 
 its cloak of snow, the ocean, rivers, the mountains, the 
 meadows, all this phenomenal universe is merely the flow- 
 
90 Religion for To-day 
 
 ing garment of God, forever woven in the ringing loom of 
 time, a garment which, while it conceals him, at the same 
 time is the only means by which God is revealed to his chil- 
 dren. The universe is the visible mantle of the Divine. 
 
 It is not God's kingdom apart from himself that he arbi- 
 trarily rules. The laws, the forces, the life, the beauty, the 
 glory of this universe are simply the present eternal activity 
 of God. 
 
 Now note, in the second place, that men and women on 
 this theory of religion are not so much God's subjects as 
 they are his children. They are not to be arbitrarily gov- 
 erned and rewarded or punished forever according to what 
 they do, as to whether they obey his arbitrary commands or 
 not. They are his children, to be loved, to be punished it 
 may be, but punished, not in anger, but in love, and for the 
 sake of their reformation ; to be trained, taught, educated, 
 developed ; to be unfolded into the likeness of the Divine. 
 
 This is the relation in which men and women stand to 
 God in the new universe and in the new thought of the 
 religious life. 
 
 And now note that God's commands, since he is related 
 to the universe in this way, are inherent : they are natural, 
 they are necessary, they are simply an expression of the 
 laws of the universe. 
 
 This theory of things abolishes the distinction, which I 
 believe to be totally unreal, between the natural and the 
 supernatural. There is no supernatural, because all, from 
 centre to circumference, is the natural expression of the 
 life and the wisdom and the love and the thought of God. 
 All is a part of this eternal constitution of things. 
 
 Do you not see, friends, then, that the old idea of God's 
 will being sent to us by special messengers or written down 
 
Religion Natural^ not Statutory 91 
 
 in a book is not disproved, but simply outgrown ? No mod- 
 ern man attempts to prove that a miracle never happened. 
 He simply finds himself in a universe where the whole 
 thought of miracle is an impertinence, because there is no 
 place for it in the midst of God's eternal order. 
 
 Messengers, preachers, or prophets, or whatever they may 
 be, proclaim God's truth, utter God's law, just in so far as 
 they are able to discern and express the eternal nature of 
 things ; and books, however holy, are transcripts of God's 
 laws only in so far as they are correct copies of the eternal, 
 natural, necessary right and wrong of the universe, no 
 more, no less. 
 
 Now what are the credentials of God's truth in this mod- 
 ern universe in accordance with this theory of things ? 
 
 Friends, just stop and think for a moment. It is very 
 easy for us to believe, because we have inherited it tradi- 
 tionally, that something might have happened two thousand 
 years ago on the other side of the ocean that we should 
 never think of believing if it should be reported as happen- 
 ing in the State of Connecticut yesterday. 
 
 The religious sphere, according to the old theory of 
 things, is a sort of fairy country, "Jack and the Beanstalk'* 
 land, in which any conceivable thing might have happened ; 
 but we are never ready to believe that such things happen 
 in any country that we have ever seen and known or of 
 which we have had any experience. 
 
 Think for a moment what it means. People have talked 
 for ages as if the ongoing of this magnificent procession of 
 natural forces and glories was no sign of the presence of 
 God at all ; no God needed to keep the worlds in their per- 
 fect and glorious round ; no God needed to make the sun 
 rise to the fraction of a second every morning, tireless, age 
 
92 Religion for To-day 
 
 after age ; no God needed to account for the endless circle 
 of the seasons, the resurrections of the spring; no God 
 needed to paint the glory of the burning leaves and bushes 
 of the autumn ! But God apparently present when there is 
 a disturbance, an interference, of this order ! 
 
 Friends, do you know what it means ? We read without 
 a pulse beating even the tiniest bit faster about a bar- 
 barian general ordering the sun to stand still until he gets 
 through slaughtering his enemies. We read without a 
 tremor how the prophet pleases one of the kings by making 
 the shadow on the sun-dial of Ahaz turn back fifteen 
 degrees. Did you ever wake up to think that that means 
 the earth stopping suddenly on its axis and going backward, 
 and then starting on its forward movement again ? 
 
 If the shadow on a dial to-day should go back by half a 
 degree, all intelligent people of the world would stand 
 aghast ; and they would not take it as an indication of the 
 presence and power of God. They would say, The Almighty 
 has lost his grasp of things ; and the wreck of the universe, 
 the twilight of the gods, is upon us. It would appall man- 
 kind if the slightest miracle should ever occur. 
 
 Do you ever stop to think, friends, that it would mean 
 that henceforth we could never know anything, if to-morrow 
 morning we should wake up and find that water did not 
 freeze at thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit, that gases in the 
 laboratory behaved in a way that they were never known 
 to have behaved before ? We should say knowledge is 
 henceforth at an end. For knowledge means that you can 
 trust the universe, and know that the eternal wisdom and 
 the eternal order can always be counted on. 
 
 In this modern universe of ours, and with this new and 
 grander theory of religion, it is not interference that we look 
 
Religio7i Naturaly not Statutory 93 
 
 to as a token of the presence of God. It is this eternal, 
 matchless, glorious order, speaking to us of the tireless 
 power, speaking to us of the flawless wisdom, speaking to 
 us of the eternal love of Him who is at the heart of things. 
 
 Note as the next point, that in this new universe of ours 
 there is no such thing as an arbitrary reward or an arbitrary 
 punishment. Nobody is ever rewarded, nobody is ever 
 punished, in the old sense of the words. 
 
 Instead of rewards and punishments, every rational man 
 to-day recognizes simply results. If you obey the laws of 
 the universe, such and such things will happen : if you dis- 
 obey, such other and unpleasant things will happen. But 
 these are simply natural and necessary results ; and, let me 
 say it reverently, it is inconceivable that God himself should 
 ever help it or change it. For we do not believe to-day that 
 we can count on God as interfering with his left hand with 
 what he is all the time doing with his right hand. God does 
 not contradict himself. 
 
 If a man does right, he will get paid for it. How ? Let 
 me enter here for a moment on the suggestion of a very 
 important thought, because I have come in contact with it 
 almost every day of my life. 
 
 I have had people say to me : Why was my child taken 
 ill ? I have loved my child. I have tried to take good care 
 of my child. I have trained my child ; I have tried to be a 
 good mother. Why was I punished in this way } Men come 
 to me, and say : I have tried to be an honest man. There is 
 not a dollar in my pocket that I have not a right to. I have 
 been a kind father, a true husband, and a faithful friend. 
 Why do I not get along in the world any better ? In other 
 words, Why does not my business prosper ? 
 
 Do you not see, friends, that all these questions presup- 
 
94 Religion for To-day 
 
 pose an entirely arbitrary and unreasonable government of 
 the world? 
 
 The man who has financial ability and who is able to 
 take advantage of the markets, able to obey the financial 
 conditions and laws of his time, will make money; and it 
 makes no sort of difference, so far as that is concerned, as 
 to whether he is a good man or a bad man, does it ? 
 
 The theory of Job, the theory of the Old Testament all 
 the way through, was that prosperity in this world was a 
 sign of God's paying people for being good. You remem- 
 ber the Psalmist : he must have had a curious experience, 
 certainly very unlike mine, when he says, " I have been 
 young, and now am old ; yet have I never seen the righteous 
 forsaken nor his seed begging bread." He must have had 
 a very strange experience. I have been young, and am not 
 very old ; and I have seen the righteous forsaken and his 
 seed begging bread a hundred times. 
 
 And remember, friends, it is not written in His universe 
 anywhere that God has promised to pay cash for good 
 behavior. 
 
 Jesus said, JBlessed are the pure in heart ; for Why t 
 For they shall have a hundred thousand dollars? No, they 
 shall see God. Blessed are the peace-makers. Why ? Be- 
 cause they shall have good health ? No, they shall be 
 called the children of their Father who is in heaven. 
 Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness ; 
 for they shall have what? Have their galleries full of 
 beautiful pictures ? No, they shall be filled with what ? 
 With righteousness ! 
 
 In the realm of right and wrong the law of cause and 
 effect holds just as it does anywhere else. If a man ploughs 
 his field and plants his crops and attends them carefully, 
 
Religion Natural^ fiot Statutory 95 
 
 other things being equal, he will be rewarded, or attain the 
 result of having a good crop ; but, if he neglects that for the 
 sake of going to church, even if he sits up every night in 
 the week and engages in earnest prayer, it will have no 
 eifect whatever on his crops. 
 
 A man may cultivate his own character ; and he will reap 
 rewards of character. If he wants rewards out of his field, 
 he must cultivate not his character, but his field. This is 
 the law of God both in field and in character ; but you get 
 your results in the realm where you start in action your 
 causes. 
 
 In the real universe, then, you are "never rewarded, you 
 are never punished : you reap what you sow. 
 
 I wish to note here, in passing, one grand distinction that 
 you ought to keep in mind between two uses of the word 
 "law," which are perpetually confounded. When a lawyer 
 or a judge or a member of Congress or Parliament is talk- 
 ing about law, he refers to an arbitrary enactment which 
 has been passed by a majority, and imposed upon the 
 people from without. When the scientist talks about a law 
 or when we talk about a law of God, we do not mean any- 
 thing of the kind. We are referring simply to the orderly 
 procession of phenomenal events. We say that it is a law 
 of water that it shall freeze at thirty-two degrees Fahren- 
 heit. We say it is a law of gases that they shall do thus 
 and so. We talk about the law which governs the planets 
 so that they move after a definite and ascertained order. 
 
 We mean simply, then, in the natural and universal realm, 
 when we use the word " law," to refer to a perfect and un- 
 varying order of events, not to a statute law at all. 
 
 Now what does worship come to on this theory of relig- 
 ion? Worship on the old theory, as v.e have seen, is the 
 
g6 Religion for To-day 
 
 bringing offerings, or it means certain ceremonies, it is pray- 
 ing, it is singing psalms, it is uttering words of praise. 
 
 Worship on the real theory, in the real universe, and as 
 a part of God's real religion, is simply, when we analyze it 
 to its roots, admiration. He who admires that which is 
 true, that which is beautiful, that which is good, worships ; 
 and he worships God whether he knows it or not, simply 
 because everything that is true and everything that is beau- 
 tiful and everything that is good is simply so far a manifes- 
 tation of God. 
 
 He who admires, then, worships, and he who serves God 
 serves him by being good; and that means, when it is 
 wrought out into activity, into practical life, being of service 
 to one's fellow-men. There is no other way. 
 
 Does God want me to bring animals and kill them and 
 burn them for him, so that he can smell the sweet savor of 
 them, as it is said in the Old Testament he liked to do.-* 
 We do not hold that childish idea of God any more. Does 
 God care whether we sing psalms to him ? I do not believe 
 he does. Does God like to sit up on a throne, and have us 
 come and prostrate ourselves in the dust before him, mak- 
 ing him glad by just so much as we abjectly humiliate our- 
 selves t I do not believe he does. Does God care to have 
 us spend time in telling what a great and wonderful being 
 he is ? I do not believe it. 
 
 Think, friends ! Here is a man who gets up on a throne, 
 and actually likes to have people come and bow down in 
 the dust before him, sing hymns to him, burn offerings in 
 his presence, and tell him what a wonderful man he is. 
 Would you have any respect for him ? I should not. You 
 would say a man who likes that sort of flattery is by just the 
 degree of his liking for it contemptible. 
 
Religion Natural, not Statutory 97 
 
 Now I think that God is fully as grand as my ideal man 
 is; and I do not believe he likes that kind of thing any 
 better than a decent man would like it. I am not saying 
 that these things are not good ; but, if we think that we are 
 flattering God, buying the special favor of God with them, 
 or purchasing cessation of his anger on account of it, we 
 are very shallow in our thinking, that is all. 
 
 These things that is, the expression of our admiration 
 for that which is above us thrill and help and lift us. If 
 an artist stands in the presence of one of the masterpieces 
 of the older time, admires it critically, studies it, praises it, 
 it lifts and helps him. If we give expression to our ad- 
 miration for some noble, some heroic deed, we are the 
 better men on account of it. 
 
 What does God want of us in the way of worship } He 
 wants us to admire all that is admirable ; and he wants us 
 to give him what.'' Not the cattle: he has told us two 
 thousand years ago that they are his already. He does not 
 want your rivers of oil nor your burnt-offerings, nor any of 
 these things. He wants you to do justly and to love mercy. 
 He wants you to be a true man. Can you be anything 
 better than that ? 
 
 Suppose, for example, that I were able to place here in 
 your presence a man of perfect physique, as beautiful as 
 Apollo, in perfect health, and that man should have a 
 mind that was like a pair of scales in weighing truth, as 
 clear as an electric light in detecting error or fraud, a mind 
 that should be a perfect machine for the discovery of intel- 
 lectual truth. Suppose he should be simply ideal, loving all 
 that is admirable and hating all that is evil, a child of the 
 Infinite Spirit, linked with him by that tie that is closer than 
 the ties of blood. You would say, There is a perfect man. 
 
9^ Religion /br To-day 
 
 Could you make him any more perfect by making him 
 religious ? 
 
 The point I wish you to note is that this man, ideally 
 related to all the laws of God in heart and mind and soul, is 
 already religious just because he is that. 
 
 When I have obeyed all the laws of God and have come 
 into right relations with God in every part of my being, re- 
 ligion has exhausted itself in me, and can do no more for 
 me ; and I am no better for any ceremonies or external 
 forms whatsoever. 
 
 Mark you, I am not saying anything about these external 
 ceremonies. If they help you to be a better man, that is 
 the test by which you are to try them. 
 
 All this, then, leads me to the last point, the summing 
 up, the conclusion of the whole matter, which is that relig- 
 ion, on this theory of the universe and of the religious life 
 which I have been discussing, religion is a life. Religion 
 is a life. Let me illustrate the difference between what 
 I mean and what people are thinking, it seems to me two- 
 thirds of them, to-day. 
 
 You find most people, if they stay away from church 
 a particular Sunday, no matter how good a reason they have 
 for doing so, will feel that they have neglected their relig- 
 ious duties for that week. If you have gone to church 
 every Sunday in the year, and that is all you have done, 
 you have neglected your religious duties very sadly, neg- 
 lected the most important of them. Why "i 
 
 Here is a regiment that has an armory. At stated times 
 it meets in the armory to drill, to study, to go through the 
 exercises, to get ready for what? To get ready to do it 
 again ? Not quite. To get ready, if the time ever should 
 come when they are needed to fight for the country. That 
 is what it is for. 
 
Religion Natural, not Statutory 99 
 
 Would you say, then, that in time of war the regiment that 
 met regularly at the drill hall and went through the manual 
 of arms, and then disbanded and went home again, had per- 
 formed its duty by the country, had performed its patriotic 
 duty? However badly it may be needed at the front, 
 though the capitol be in danger for the matter of that, 
 every regiment is doing its patriotic duty in that very way, 
 just as faithfully as you are doing your religious duty by 
 merely going to church. But what about religion during 
 the week ? 
 
 The drill hall is for practice, to get ready to fight in the 
 field. The church is simply a drill hall, a place where you 
 are to come to learn what you are to do, to get inspired to 
 do it ; but the field for your religion is Monday and Tues- 
 day and Wednesday and Thursday and Friday and Satur- 
 day. It is in the home, it is on the sidewalk, it is in your 
 bank, your ofiice, your manufactory, wherever you may be. 
 
 Suppose you cheat in your business. Will the elaborate 
 knowledge of your Prayer Book make up for it ? Suppose 
 you slander your neighbor, ruin his reputation, and injure 
 his chances for a decent living in the world : can you make 
 up for it by attending church regularly ? 
 
 Do these things touch each other, friends 1 People are 
 always talking about religion in business and business in 
 religion, politics in religion, and religion in politics. And I 
 have heard ever since I was a boy about mixing up religion 
 and politics, and religion and business. If you mean by 
 religion clericalism, ecclesiasticism, priestcraft, then I agree 
 with you ; but, if you mean by religion the only thing that 
 God can mean by it, a religious life, then you have no 
 business to do anything except to mix it up most thoroughly 
 with your politics, to mix it up completely with your business. 
 
I oo Religion for To-day 
 
 It is the man who is a true and noble man in his business 
 who is a religious man, the man who is a true and noble 
 man in his family who is a religious man. It is the man who 
 obeys the real, vital, eternal laws of God, inherent in the 
 nature of things, who is a religious man. And this is sal- 
 vation. 
 
 None of these external things have any necessary connec- 
 tion with any place in this world or any other world that you 
 want to get out of or get into. I have no fears of going to 
 hell : I have no care about going to heaven. I am anxious 
 to keep hell out of me and to get heaven into me. Then I 
 care very little what planet I am on after I have left this 
 one. I will take care of my relations to God ; and I will 
 risk the kind of association that I shall fall into, in this 
 world or any other world. 
 
STANDING GROUND FOR TRUST. 
 
 It is said that Prince Alphonso of Castile, considering 
 one day with some friends the intricacies and difficulties 
 of the Ptolemaic theory of the universe, that being at the 
 time the generally accepted one, declared that, if he had 
 been present at the creation of the world, he could easily 
 have suggested a good many important improvements, 
 which was undoubtedly true. But his objections have 
 been answered by the discovery of the Copernican theory, 
 which has shown that the difficulties of the Ptolemaic were 
 only imaginary. 
 
 The witty Colonel Ingersoll is reported to have said 
 some years ago, when some one asked him he was criti- 
 cising the order of the world whether he could suggest 
 any improvements if he had his way, that he could at least 
 suggest one, he would have good health catching instead 
 of disease. 
 
 It seems to me, however, that he overlooked what I 
 regard as undeniably true, that not only good health, but 
 good of every kind, is catching. Good health is contagious ; 
 and the man who walks down the street smiling and cheer- 
 ful and happy carries inspiration and power with him as he 
 goes. And good of every kind is catching ; and it is not 
 only contagious, but it is so much more wide-spread and so 
 much more effectual than the opposite that the evil is 
 destined by and by to be outgrown in the race and left 
 entirelv behind. 
 
I02 Religion for To-day 
 
 John Stuart Mill made a criticism which at the time he 
 made it seemed to be unanswerable. Regarding the world, 
 in its then present order and condition, as a final and 
 finished product, Mill said : God cannot be almighty and 
 all-wise and all-good. If he is almighty and all-wise, 
 then he cannot have desired to make a very good world ; for 
 he has not done it. If he be almighty and all-good, then 
 he cannot have known how to make a perfect world ; for 
 he has not done it. If he be all-good and all-wise, then he 
 cannot have had power to make a perfect world ; for he has 
 not done it. I quote the thought, not the words. 
 
 This criticism, I say, from the point of view of a world 
 supposed to be finished, is entirely valid ; but only a little 
 while after this criticism was formulated the science of 
 evolution was born, and the world was brought face to face 
 with entirely another problem. 
 
 The world as we know it is only in process. It is not to 
 be judged as a finished and final product. Would you go 
 into an apple orchard, and, biting into an apple in late June, 
 
 an apple that is to be ripe only in the last of September, 
 
 would you judge it as a bad apple because it was bitter? 
 You would expect it to be bitter while it was in the process 
 of growth. If you wish to judge anything, wait until it is 
 finished, wait until you can see the outcome, what it is for. 
 
 And so I say of this world. In the light of the science of 
 evolution it is to-day only ir process ; and, unless you can 
 foresee the outcome so as to be quite sure as to whether it 
 is to be bad, as an honest man and a clear-headed one, you 
 must at least suspend judgment, and wait. 
 
 I do not wish to doubt or to blink any of the great 
 facts of suffering or evil. They exist, open to every eye 
 and appealing to every heart, whichever way we turn ; and 
 
Standing Ground for Trust 1 03 
 
 I do not wonder that people are perpetually brought to 
 a stand-still as they face some new illustration of the 
 world's wrong or pain, and wonder as to the government 
 of the universe. 
 
 I have been asked so many times since I have been in 
 this city as to what right we have, in the face of these facts, 
 to trust in God. The matter has been brought to me, and 
 forced upon my attention so frequently that it seemed to me 
 that the best thing I could do was to attempt, at any rate, 
 an answer. You will not expect a detailed treatment of a 
 theme that might profitably be drawn out to the length of 
 volumes. 
 
 And another thing let me say : You have no right to ask 
 of me that in forty minutes I should answer all the objec- 
 tions you can bring against human life or the universe as it 
 looks to you. You have no right to expect that I should 
 explain all these difficulties. I can only attempt what? 
 This, to discover, if I may, standing ground for trust. If I 
 can find a place where we may stand on something like solid 
 ground, and rationally believe in the goodness of God, that is 
 enough to answer the practical ends of living. 
 
 I do not expect to answer many questions. Millions have 
 been asked, only a very few answered. Mystery faces us on 
 every hand. If some one of you will explain to me a grass- 
 blade a finger length high, I will explain for you all the rest 
 of the universe. We face infinite mystery on every hand. 
 It is fortunate for us that we do ; for, if we could read the 
 riddle of this universe, we should be reading our death war- 
 rants. There would be nothing else left for us to do. 
 Hope of anything like immortality would be absurd, not 
 only absurd, but a curse, if we knew everything, and 
 nothing more was left for us to investigate. 
 
104 Religion for To-day 
 
 So, I say, I am not going to attempt to answer all your 
 questions. I am merely going to see if I can find standing 
 ground for reasonable trust. 
 
 Now what are the chief objections that are brought 
 against this world? 
 
 I think I can classify them for the purpose of the morn- 
 ing under three or four main heads. 
 
 In the first place is the fact of pain, suffering; next 
 is what we call moral evil ; then comes the unsatisf actori- 
 ness of human life, the fact that we never succeed in 
 getting all we want, in doing all we want, in becoming all 
 we want, that all human life, even at the best, is frag- 
 mentary ; and, finally, the last and supposed overwhelming 
 evil of death. 
 
 I wish to refer briefly to these four, and to the evils that 
 are classified under them. 
 
 In the first place, then, let us look for a moment at this 
 great problem of pain. Is it possible, if a good God is in 
 the universe or rules the universe, that he should permit so 
 much suffering ? 
 
 Now, as a preliminary step to such brief consideration of 
 this great theme as I shall have time for this morning, I 
 wish to eliminate from the problem two things. In the 
 first place let us get rid of the exaggeration that I believe is 
 in the minds of most people in regard to the amount of 
 suffering which exists. 
 
 Do not for a moment suppose that I would take any posi- 
 tion or suggest any thought that would harden any man's 
 heart or make him less tender towards the sufferings of the 
 world ; but, if we are going to bring an indictment against 
 the government of the universe, let us do the best we can to 
 have it a true indictment, not an exaggerated one. 
 
Standing Ground for Trust 105 
 
 I wish, therefore, to suggest to you that I believe with my 
 whole soul that there is not anything like the quantity of 
 suffering in this world that thousands and thousands of sen- 
 sitive people have come to believe there is. 
 
 One of the characteristics of this modern world is almost, 
 a morbid sensitiveness to suffering. In the first place look 
 upon the beasts of the field, the animals of the forests., 
 and the fishes of the sea. Take the whole lower life of^ 
 the world, and in spite of the stories of pursuit and slaying- 
 and blood that we imagine, as we study it, it is almost en- 
 tirely a scene of limitless joy, delight in being. 
 
 If I had time this morning to go into detail, I could show 
 you, I think, in the case of the pursuit of one animal by 
 another, and the violent death that follows, that there 
 is almost no pain in it at all. Livingstone tells us that 
 once, in Africa, he was pursued and struck down by a lion ; 
 and the minute the lion's paw was upon him he was, as it 
 were, hypnotized, no suffering, no pain, simply looking 
 up at the ferocious monster and wondering what was going 
 to happen next. 
 
 Scientific men will tell you that in the lower life of the 
 world there is not the nervous susceptibility to pain that 
 there is on the part of its highly and sensitively developed 
 men and women. 
 
 Then take the barbarous races, the wild Indians of the 
 plains. It would be a horrible thing for one of us to go and 
 be compelled to live as they do or as the wild men of Cen- 
 tral Africa live. But it is not a horrible thing from their 
 point of view : they are having a very good time indeed ; 
 and we simply exaggerate unnecessarily the problem of pain 
 when we suppose them to be feeling about it as we should if 
 we were now thrust down to their place. They have come 
 
I06 Religion for To-day 
 
 to this low level, not by being hurled down to it from above, 
 but by climbing up to it from underneath. 
 
 If a man is living on five thousand dollars a year, and 
 you reduce it to four thousand, he is the poorest man in the 
 city. If he is living on five hundred, and you increase his 
 income to six hundred a year, he is rich. 
 
 All this shows us, then, that these barbarous people who 
 have climbed up from a lower level to a higher do not go 
 through the suffering we should if we were to take their 
 places. They are on the up grade : we should be on the 
 down grade. 
 
 Let me suggest, merely as another point for you to con- 
 sider, that in your own cases those of you who think you 
 have the hardest time in the world you have not been one- 
 half as miserable as you like to believe. There gets to be 
 a sort of satisfaction in being the most miserable person 
 in the world, if we cannot be distinguished in any other 
 way. You will find people looking over their lives, and 
 complaining, forgetting to look at the bright days, the sun- 
 shiny days, until their whole heaven is one mass of cloud. 
 But it is false. I have had my share of suffering. I do 
 not believe that there are many of you here to-day who 
 have had much more, there may be some ; but I know, 
 if I should take the dark and sad days of my life and put 
 them in one place, and the bright days and put them in 
 another, the darkness would be no more than as a spot on 
 the sun. 
 
 We easily forget a week of bright, sunshiny weather ; but 
 we are very likely to grumble if it rains, and we are caught 
 without an umbrella. Let us not exaggerate, then, the 
 amount of the world's suffering. 
 
 There is, too, another class of suffering that I wish you 
 
Standing Ground for Trust 107 
 
 to leave out of the account, because you have no right to 
 bring it against God as an impeachment of his government 
 of the universe ; and that is the needless suffering, the suf- 
 fering that we passionately, purposely, wilfully inflict on 
 each other. And how large a part is this ! How much of 
 the world's suffering is made up in this way ! 
 
 Leave out of account, then, the imagined sufferings of 
 the world and the sufferings we ourselves cause, and then 
 you have left simply the necessary pain, that pain which we 
 may reasonably regard as a part of the divine order and 
 plan. Now what about that ? 
 
 In the first place, if you stop and think of it one moment, 
 you will see that it is an absurdity, an impossibility, to im- 
 agine the existence of a being who can feel the sensation of 
 pleasure who cannot also equally feel the sensation of 
 pain. Sensitiveness must be sensitiveness in both direc- 
 tions. There can be no possibility of pleasure, then, with- 
 out the possibility of pain. 
 
 Then, in the next place, suppose that the world that is, 
 the whole human race had been perfectly, blissfully happy 
 from the first moment of the world's creation until now. It 
 never would have known it. If the world were all one color, 
 it would be as though it were no color : we should be prac- 
 tically blind. The only way we can see things is by defini- 
 tion, separation, distinction, separating things from each 
 other. If they were all alike, it would be as though we 
 could not see at all. 
 
 So, if we had never known anything of pain, we never 
 should know we were happy. Happiness would be abso- 
 lutely without meaning. That is a scientific truth for you 
 to keep hold of, if you can, when you are discussing the 
 difficulties of this problem. 
 
Io8 Religion for To-day 
 
 In the third place consider another poinL If you could 
 conceive as living here on this planet a race of creatures, 
 no matter what their grade, from the lowest up to man, 
 which was incapable of feeling pain, you would be dealing 
 with a race that would not continue in existence for six 
 months. 
 
 Suppose nre did not hun ; suppose a blow did not hurt, 
 a stioke of an axe did not hurt falling off a precipice did 
 not hurt; suppose nothing hurt. Why, we should be 
 bioken to pieces and ground to powder inside of six months, 
 tbe whole o os. Pain is simply God's danger signal set up, 
 telling us to keep away from that which threatens us with 
 liarm, that is alL 
 
 So the necessary pain of the universe, that which we 
 have any right to bring as an indictment against the govern- 
 ment of this universe, it is clearly to be demonstrated, is 
 cofy and ahvajs beneficent There is nothing in human life 
 that is more clearly a token of the fact that " God is good 
 to all, and his tender mercies are over all his works," than is 
 just this existence of pain, which we so frequently and so 
 foolishly bring as an indictment against the government of 
 this worid. 
 
 Let ns come now for a moment to consider the next of 
 *l^ these great indictments, the existence of moral evil. Right 
 here, friends, I am going to take a position that may sur- 
 prise you a little. I ask you to look over the world, and see 
 if I am not correct about it. We have been taught by the 
 tiieokjgj in which we were trained I have to think of 
 the wodd as bsui, totally defHaved and vile. We have been 
 tai^;ht that God likes to have tis humble ourselves in the 
 dust, and talk about what poor, miserable, sinful worms we 
 are. We go into the churches, and declare, in the words of 
 
Standing Ground for Trust 1 09 
 
 the Prayer Book, that "we have done the things we ought 
 not to have done and have not done the things we ought to 
 have done, and there is no health in us," when, if a single 
 one of our neighbors looked us in the face and made that 
 statement, we would not speak to him afterwards. You 
 don't believe a word of it ! 
 
 We have been taught to look upon human natiure as 
 something vile. One of the grandest points in the new 
 gospel which is being preached in this regenerate nine- 
 teenth century is the precise opposite of that : man is not 
 vile. There is infinitely more good in this city of New 
 York than there is evil. If the evil in this city were in the 
 majority, there would be no city. It is as absolutely certain 
 as the multiplication table. 
 
 For what do we mean by evil ? Evil is that which hurts, 
 which injures, which tears to pieces, which disintegrates. 
 Evil is that which separates between man and man. The 
 simple fact, then, that there is such a thing as society, that 
 people exist together on terms of friendliness and coHDpera- 
 tion and mutual help, proves that the disintegrating forces 
 are in the minority. 
 
 Our newspapers, without intending it, are responsible for 
 a great deal of the pessimism of the present time. 
 
 Consider a moment. A man committed a burglary last 
 night; the cashier of a bank defaulted yesterday; in some 
 back alley a man struck his wife or perhaps one of his 
 children ; and what is the result ? The whole thing, illus- 
 trated in all its nauseous details, is spread before us on om- 
 bre akfast table ; and people read and look up, and say, 
 "WTiom can we trust?" as if they expected the next man 
 they met to be a burglar or a defaulter or to be abusing his 
 wife or children. 
 
no Religion for To-day 
 
 As matter of fact, however, the percentage of the people 
 in New York who are doing any of these things is practi- 
 cally infinitesimal. Note the significance of this statement, 
 behaving one's self is not news/ The newspapers are 
 looking after sensations. Thousands of people yesterday 
 behaved themselves ; but nobody thought of reporting it. 
 The great majority of people yesterday went about their 
 business, patiently doing their work. Men with thousands 
 of dollars that they might have stolen, and they never took 
 a penny ; men who needed it ; men who could not pay their 
 debts; men whose wives needed clothing, whose children 
 wanted bread, they had opportunities to steal ; and they 
 never took one cent. Men and women thrown together in 
 all sorts of relations, tempted in every conceivable way ; and 
 yet, out of the three and a half millions of Greater New 
 York, hardly enough persons to be worth speaking of com- 
 mitted a crime yesterday. 
 
 That is the clear, cold, simple fact of the statistics. 
 
 Men are not half so bad, then, as we give them credit for 
 being. I have been over this world a good deal in my 
 time. I think I know what is taking place in it from the 
 top to the bottom of society; and, the older I get, the 
 greater, the grander is my trust in men and women, the 
 greater grows my wonder, not that they sometimes go 
 astray, but that they do not go astray more frequently than 
 they do. I have a great loving belief in the essential good- 
 ness of men and women ; and it is justified by fact. 
 
 Remember, then, that we have not got such a tremendous 
 problem on our hands as we sometimes imagine, in the pes- 
 simism of the time and in the light of the old theology 
 When we come to deal with this problem of evil, we must 
 turn it around. The old philosophy dealt with the origin of 
 
Standing Ground for Trust ill 
 
 evil : we start, in the light of the evolution of the universe, 
 with the origin of goodness. 
 
 Consider first a world alive with animals and birds, strug- 
 gling, fighting, killing, all these things here, but no moral 
 evil yet. Why ? Because there is no conscience, no intelli- 
 gence that perceives the distinction between good and evil. 
 When the conscience is born at last, it is out of an unmoral 
 universe that comes a moral race of beings ; it is good that 
 is born, not evil ; it is the distinction between right and 
 wrong. And from that far-off day to this men and women 
 have been climbing up out of the animal and towards the 
 angel, have been sloughing off the characteristics of the 
 tiger, the bear, the snake, all the evil of the outgrown life, 
 and climbing up into tenderness and goodness and pity and 
 human help, all that is divine. 
 
 The problem, then, is not as to how evil came into the 
 world or how to account for it. Remember that this expe- 
 rience with what we call evil is absolutely necessary to the 
 culture and development of a moral being. There could be 
 no noble men and women to graduate from this school of 
 earth if it were not for this contest with the lower in our 
 natures and the struggle against the seductiveness of the evil 
 outside of us and around us. 
 
 It is out of this fight with the evil of the world, as we call 
 it, that the sweetest and noblest and best things are born. 
 
 The next great count against the universe is that life is so 
 unsatisfactory. Wordsworth draws a very beautiful but senti- 
 mental picture of the child born with all heaven around it in 
 its infancy, and of how the world grows very commonplace 
 as he gets into middle life, under the hard sky, and his feet 
 tramp the dusty ways of the world. But I tell you, friends, 
 it is only as you lose your higher faculty of vision, your own 
 
112 Religion for To-day 
 
 finer ideals, that you listen to the stories that tell you of 
 only the harder and worse side of things. 
 
 The man who sees no more poetry in the world is not the 
 one who has discovered the real secret of life : he is the one 
 who has lost it, and so says nothing is there. The man who 
 loses the ideal and beauty out of his married life is not the 
 man who has sounded the world, and found it hollow : he is 
 the man whose own capacity for finding sweet things has 
 become blunted or weakened. They are all there. 
 
 So this fact that we cannot find complete satisfaction 
 in this world, that we are all Alexanders crying for more 
 worlds to conquer ; that no one can get rich enough, no one 
 can get famous enough, no one can get good enough, or 
 attain anything he wants to completely or become anything 
 he wants to completely, this fact, instead of being an 
 indictment against life, is one of its grandest qualities and 
 characteristics. 
 
 Suppose this world could feed us and bestow upon us all 
 we desired : would it not prove that there was nothing in 
 us fitting us for anything finer and greater beyond this 
 world ? If a man puts a plant into a flower-pot and stands 
 it on a shelf in his hot-house, and then the plant develops 
 so that it breaks the pot that encloses it, and it demands 
 that even the roof be lifted so it can get outdoors, he has 
 discovered that his plant was adapted for something larger 
 and grander than his little hot-house, however beautiful and 
 fine it may have been. 
 
 So, when you find a creature, call him commonplace, if 
 you will, a man who finds this world not big enough to 
 satisfy him, who demands more room, who asks to be set 
 free, who wants to know more than this earth can teach 
 him, who w^ants to become greater than the possibility of 
 
Standing Ground for Trust 113 
 
 being here, is not the inference, whether you expect it or 
 not, that you are deaUng with a sort of nature that may 
 have in it the necessity of demanding a higher and larger 
 place for its perfect unfolding? That, at any rate, is the 
 way I read a suggestion like this. 
 
 Now let us come to the great fact of death. Is that an 
 adequate impeachment of the wisdom or goodness of God .-* 
 
 Right here let me say, as I did of pain and of evil, that 
 there are any number of things that we associate with 
 death that do not necessarily belong there at all : they are 
 no part of the great fact of passing out of this world into 
 what I believe to be another. 
 
 Consider in the first place that a large part of the horror 
 that we associate with the word " death " is born of the 
 superstitious religion, the hideous theology, that we have in- 
 herited from our barbarous ancestors. They are no part 
 of the fact of dying at all. They are the imagined terrors 
 that men fear may follow after death, those things which in 
 Hamlet's famous soliloquy gave him "pause." 
 
 Then we associate with death the pains of disease. But 
 this is what we suffer all our lives long, and which comes 
 nine-tenths of it from the breaking of laws that we have no 
 need to break. We associate this needless pain with dying. 
 Besides, I have found hundreds of persons who have 
 been accustomed to attach to this one experience all sorts 
 of imaginary horrors. They talked as though they were 
 going to be buried ; and they shrank from the thought of a 
 grave. The grave should have no terrors for any one. 
 
 You remember, when Socrates's disciples asked him what 
 they should do with him after he drank the hemlock, he 
 said humorously, " You may do whatever you please with 
 me, if you can catch me." He did not expect to be there; 
 he did not expect to be buried. 
 
114 Religion for To-day 
 
 The dread in the minds of many people is as if they were 
 going to be buried. But these are imaginary horrors we 
 associate with death. Let us leave them one side. Death 
 stripped of these unreal terrors is merely a passage, at 
 the worst, from this world to sleep ; at the best, from this 
 world to another and grander world. 
 
 Now let us look at death with this thought simply in 
 mind. What are the alternatives to dying ? If God would 
 confer upon me the gift of immortality, and not give it to my 
 friends, do you suppose I would take it ? It seems to me 
 it would be simply horrible to live here year after year, 
 century after century, with those I had learned to love and 
 care for somewhere else. I can imagine that I might even 
 frantically knock at the door, and beg if I might be let 
 through to see if I could find some of those who had gone 
 before. 
 
 Suppose God should confer an earthly immortality on 
 everybody : what would happen ? Why, it would not take 
 a great while for the world to be packed full. There would 
 be just as many people here as the earth could possibly 
 maintain. Then what ? No more childhood ! That alone 
 would be enough to make me want to die, and wish that 
 I might go to some place where they had some children. 
 All grown-up people, looking in each other's faces for thou- 
 sands of years ! I fancy we should be tired to death of 
 it, or wish we might be " tired to death." We should learn 
 all that the world had to teach us after a while, we should 
 explore every continent and every sea ; and the world would 
 become to us like an open book. Should we not long to 
 see if there was anything else in the universe? It seems 
 to me that at night we should look at those radiant spheres 
 that swing and sing above us, and long with the longing of 
 
Standiftg Ground for Trust 115 
 
 heartache and tears to launch off into space, to get free of 
 this cramped and crowded earth, and find out if there were 
 not something else, something grander, something better. 
 
 This dreaded death, when we have stripped it of the 
 things that do not belong to it as a part of God's ordaining, 
 is simply the divine gate-opener to let us out, to help us 
 escape from the prison-house of one little planet, and give 
 us the freedom, the citizenship, of the universe. Death is 
 not something to be apologized for. I believe it to be one 
 of the divinest, noblest, sweetest, grandest gifts of the 
 Father to his children. 
 
 There is only one thing left about death that ever 
 troubles me in the slightest degree ; and that is the tem- 
 porary separation from those I love. I have no fear of it : 
 I do not expect to suffer any. In ninety-nine cases in a 
 hundred, death is only sleep ; and the person passing 
 through the experience knows no more of it than you can 
 tell me the exact moment when you lost consciousness last 
 night. We look on, and see the muscular and nervous 
 movements, and imagine suffering of which the person 
 himself is not at all conscious. 
 
 I believe, then, that death is one of the very best of 
 God's gifts to men. Surely, friends, if I believe that it is 
 only an experience through which we pass out into a larger 
 and grander life, then it does not need to be apologized for. 
 And, if there is anybody that challenges me to prove that 
 death is a good, I will turn, and say that it is a good, and 
 that he has no right to impeach it until he can prove to me, 
 what nobody can prove, that it is the end. 
 
 I believe, then, that, rightly considered, neither pain nor 
 moral evil, nor dissatisfaction with life, nor even death itself, 
 has anything to say against the magnificent assertion of the 
 
1 1 6 Religion for To-day 
 
 old Hebrew singer, "The Lord is good to all, and his 
 tender mercies are over all his works." 
 
 I must ask you now, as hurriedly as possible, to think of 
 one thing more. I have studied it for years. Recognizing 
 the difficulties connected with the present world, I have 
 been trying to think out a better one ; and I cannot do it. 
 Will some of you help me ? What kinds of worlds can we 
 imagine ? We might imagine a world in which there was no 
 feeling at all, but of course we should not be there, so 
 we pass that by. 
 
 We might imagine a world in which the inhabitants 
 should be automatons, bits of curious mechanism. God 
 might make us as a Frenchman makes a mechanical toy, 
 wind us up, so that we should go accurately. But all 
 growth, all study, all achievement, all advance, all doing 
 anything or becoming anything, would have to be left out. 
 Would you be willing to exchange the present world for 
 that ? I would not. 
 
 We might imagine that God could create a world in 
 which all the people would be perfectly wise and perfectly 
 good, so that they should never make a mistake and never 
 do wrong. But that, on the face of it, is an absurdity, an 
 impossibility. 
 
 We fool ourselves sometimes in discussing these great 
 questions, by thinking that God can do everything that we 
 happen to imagine simply because he is almighty. Do you 
 never stop to think that there are limits to almightiness ? 
 Almighty power could not have two and two make five. 
 Almighty power could not make two mountains without a 
 valley between them. 
 
 There are some things that are impossible because they 
 are absurd. 
 
Standing Ground for Trust 117 
 
 Now consider a moment. What do we mean by knowl- 
 edge ? The only meaning it has or can have, we being 
 constituted as we are, is this : the summed up results of 
 human experience in the intellectual realm. So God himself 
 cannot create knowledge except through the process of ex- 
 perience by which it is arrived at. 
 
 God cannot make people, then, perfectly wise in a minute. 
 It is a contradiction in terms. Can he make them perfectly 
 good in a minute ? What do we mean by goodness, by 
 morality, by virtue.-* We mean the summed up results of 
 human experience, striving against and putting evil under 
 our feet. Morality, virtue, goodness, have no meaning 
 apart from this struggle of ours in conquering evil. 
 
 So this theory of the universe is an impossibility and an 
 absurdity. 
 
 What next ? We can imagine that life might be a scene 
 of perpetually repeated miracles, that every little child 
 from the time it began to walk should be watched over by 
 an angel ; that, if it stubbed its toe, the angel should snatch 
 it, and hold it up on its feet. And, then, you might think of 
 moral falls guarded against in the same way. Every time a 
 person was going to do wrong an angel should interpose 
 and prevent it. 
 
 We could imagine a world like that ; but think of it ! 
 Anything like the natural development of anybody would 
 be impossible. There would be no knowing anything in 
 a world like that. You would never know what was going 
 to happen next. Intellectually, men and women would be 
 only babies in a nursery, watched over so that it would 
 be impossible for them to experience and so learn anything. 
 Anything like moral development would be out of the ques- 
 tion in a world where people were shielded and guarded 
 
1 1 8 Religio7i for To-day 
 
 like that. It would be a perpetual nursery or a mad-house : 
 men and women would be grown-up children or imbeciles. 
 
 Now the only other kind of world I can think of is that 
 which we are living in, where men and women begin by 
 making mistakes, then correcting their mistakes and leav- 
 ing them behind; where people start morally feeble, and 
 learn the distinction between right and wrong by trying 
 them, and learn that right is best by trying it. So they be- 
 come tender-hearted and true. They learn that it is best to 
 keep God's laws ; and in such keeping is the happiness and 
 welfare of the world. Thus the sad song of pain and igno- 
 rance and evil that has been chanted by a wandering and 
 sinning world so long shall at last sink out of hearing, and 
 become only a memory. 
 
 I believe, then, that, if we look the problem squarely in 
 the face, and try to deal with the facts as they are, we shall 
 conclude that this is the best kind of a world of which we 
 are capable of dreaming. If it is simply a world in which we 
 are at school, learning how to live ; if we are doing the only 
 thing which Browning says is worth doing, that is, cultivat- 
 ing and developing a soul ; if the end and aim of this life is 
 learning to be men and women, so that, when death comes, 
 we are only graduating into a fitness for another higher field 
 of experience, of life, of labor, of hope, of joy, then I cannot 
 conceive a better school than the one we are really in. 
 
 Let us learn, therefore, that the best thing we can do is 
 not to increase the sum of animal or human pain, not to add 
 to the amount of injury and wrong, but see to it that we do 
 what we can, in living nobly and truly ourselves, to help 
 others to live nobly and truly. Then we shall find that the 
 darkness of the problem shall grow lighter, and that cheer 
 and hope shall lead on and animate the hearts of the world. 
 
MAN NOT FALLEN, BUT RISING. 
 
 The doctrine of the fall of man in Adam, his having been 
 originally created perfect and having lost the divine likeness 
 by voluntary transgression, is the corner-stone, the main 
 foundation, of all the historic churches of Christendom, 
 Catholic, Greek, Protestant. 
 
 In other words, if you will think the matter out with clear- 
 ness, you will see that all the other chief doctrines are de- 
 pendent on this. So true is this that, if men had never 
 believed in any fall, the other essentials of the historic 
 creeds would probably never have come into existence. 
 
 It is, then, of the first importance for us, in the light 
 of our modern knowledge, reverently, earnestly, clearly, to 
 examine this foundation stone, and see whether it is secure. 
 
 At the very outset, it is most interesting and of great im- 
 portance for us to notice that the Hebrews are not the only 
 ones who have traditions of an earlier condition of humanity 
 that is better than that which followed it. We find not only 
 the one tradition in other nations than the Jewish, but we 
 find, curiously enough, both among the Jews and among 
 other peoples, parallel and contradictory traditions, showing, 
 as we shall see in a moment, that there are two types of 
 human mind, one the backward-looking, the other the 
 forward-looking, and that they both have had their repre- 
 sentatives in every age. 
 
 I wish, to make this matter clear, to call your brief atten- 
 
I20 Religion for To-day 
 
 tion to the parallel traditions, to which I have referred, as 
 they appear among the Greeks and the Romans. 
 
 In the first place there is the Prometheus myth. Accord- 
 ing to this, men began their history on this earth in the most 
 helpless, weak, ignorant, abject condition. They were with- 
 out fire, without any of the means by which they might 
 create around themselves a condition approaching civiliza- 
 tion. They were despised and hated by the Olympian gods. 
 Zeus looks upon them with contempt, and, it was thought, 
 also with antagonism. Prometheus, the old Titan, perhaps 
 having something more of a feeling of kinship with these 
 abject and despised creatures than the deities who sat on 
 the cloudless summits of Olympus, steals the celestial fire, 
 and brings it down in a reed, and makes a gift of it to men. 
 Thus he confers upon them the possibility of advance, 
 growth, civilization. But the god who had hated humanity 
 is angry ; and he chains the old Titan on the rocks in the 
 Caucasus, where he lies, age after age, while the eagles 
 devour his vitals during the daytime, which grow again, to 
 be consumed once more, during the following night. 
 
 Here is the Prometheus myth in outline. The point I wish 
 you to notice is, that among the ancient classical people 
 there was a belief concerning the original condition of this 
 world of ours which falls in remarkably with the modern 
 science of evolution. This story teaches that men began 
 away down close on the borders of the animal world ; and it 
 places the golden age in the future, as something to be at- 
 tained, not something away from which the race has fallen. 
 
 On the other hand, having found its completest develop- 
 ment among the Latin races, you will find the Saturnian 
 myth. According to this the earlier condition of the world 
 was its golden age. The god Saturn, father of the rest of 
 
Man not Fallen^ but Rising 12 1 
 
 the gods as well as of men, lived on the earth among his 
 blessed and happy children, men and women. There was 
 no death, no sickness, no pain, no hatred, no wars, no evils 
 of any kind. This was the blessed condition of things that 
 was dreamed of as having existed at the beginning of: 
 human history. But evil times came upon them. Saturn, 
 departed; could no more bear or countenance the conduct,, 
 the evils, the sins and the wrongs of his children. 
 
 Then came the age of brass. This was followed by the^ 
 age of iron. And so the poor old world, according to this, 
 theory, has been on the down grade from the beginning,, 
 getting worse and worse age after age. 
 
 Here you see are these two parallel and yet contradictory- 
 traditions. Before commenting upon them, I wish to call 
 your attention to the fact that precisely such parallel and 
 contradictory traditions are found in the Old Testament. 
 
 If the books of the Old Testament were printed in the 
 chronological order in which they were written, the earliest 
 one would be the Prophet Amos. The prophetic books 
 would go before the Pentateuch, then those we call histor- 
 ical, like Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles. The older prophets 
 take us back to a period about eight hundred years before 
 the birth of Jesus. 
 
 Now I wish you to take notice that in the prophets this is, 
 without exception, true : in the prophets, the earliest 
 writers of the Hebrew people, there is no fall of man. 
 There is no reference to the doctrine anywhere among them. 
 They make no comment on it whatever. So far as any 
 word of theirs is concerned, they have never heard of it. 
 An apparent exception may be found in Ezekiel, who lived 
 during the captivity. He refers to Eden in a poetical way 
 as being a beautiful garden. 
 
122 Religion for To-day 
 
 According to the prophets, then, there never was any fall 
 of man. He began in a condition of weakness and 
 ignorance ; and the golden age, the period of the Messianic 
 hope, is with them always in the future. They look for- 
 ward to the coming of this Messianic period, when men 
 shall have outgrown the evils of the past, and have come 
 up into the likeness of the Divine. 
 
 But along with that tradition we find this story of Eden, 
 Adam and Eve, the forbidden tree, its eating, the serpent, 
 the being cast out, and all the train of evils that are sup- 
 posed to have followed. 
 
 Now where did this come from ? For I wish you to note, 
 as it is of great importance, that it was not an original tradi- 
 tion of the Jewish race at all. It was never heard of on 
 the part of the Hebrew people until they came in contact 
 with the Babylonians and the Persians during the times of 
 their captivity. 
 
 It is an old pagan myth borrowed by the Hebrews, at 
 least six, perhaps eight, hundred years after the time of 
 Moses, no part of the original story, something that came 
 later, observe, into the life of the Hebrew people, not earlier 
 than five or six hundred years before the birth of Chris- 
 tianity. 
 
 Here, then, you see are these two parallel and contradic- 
 tory stories among the Hebrews, as we find them among the 
 classical peoples. 
 
 And now I wish you to note that these parallel and con- 
 tradictory traditions represent two states of mind on the 
 part of humanity. You find them in every age. There are 
 to-day certain people who are always looking back. They 
 talk of the good old times when they were boys, of their 
 father's or their grandfather's day, or of the early days of the 
 
Man not Falleiiy but Rising 123 
 
 republic. They are always looking back for better things 
 than they can discover in their immediate vicinity to-day, and 
 holding the idea that the world is coming to be worse and 
 worse from generation to generation. You find them the 
 prophets of evil and degeneracy in our political life. You 
 find them in our industrial life, the rich are getting richer, 
 and the poor are getting poorer, and the business condition of 
 the world is worse now than it ever was before, and there is 
 no prospect of its improving. You find them dealing with 
 our social problems. The world, according to them, used to 
 be socially pure and high. In those old days there were 
 gentlemen and ladies such as the world has never seen since. 
 In every department of life it is the same : the good old 
 times are hopelessly gone, according to them. 
 
 On the other hand, you will find the type of mind repre- 
 sented by those who have the forward look. Who are these ? 
 They are the workers, hopeful and strong. They are the 
 seers, they are the prophets, they are the great poets of the 
 world. 
 
 Note one magnificent and significant truth : there is not 
 a great poet with whose works I am familiar who is a pessi- 
 mist. They are all prophets, filled and inspired with hope, 
 with the possibilities of the race. 
 
 I must not stop to deal with this problem far enough to 
 say which of these is true ; or, at any rate, to go into a long, 
 loving defence of the one that you must be aware that I be- 
 lieve in. I have studied carefully the history of man from 
 the beginning ; and I believe the statement will hold, politi- 
 cally, industrially, socially, so far as the family is con- 
 cerned, so far as business is concerned, in any department 
 of human life the statement will hold, that the world is un- 
 speakably better to-day than it ever has been in any fifty 
 years of the past history of the race. 
 
1 24 Religion for To-day 
 
 But that is not the subject of my sermon this morning. 
 I wish now to recall you to this Eden story, and consider 
 with you as to why and how such a tale should have come 
 into existence. 
 
 Right here let me ask you to note how true it is that there 
 is a tendency in the human mind to tell itself stories as 
 means of explaining strange facts the reason of which they 
 do not scientifically understand. 
 
 As an illustration of what I mean. In different parts of 
 this country, in different parts of the Old World, you will 
 find rocks, bowlders of huge size, miles and miles away from 
 the places from which they must have come. That is, these 
 bowlders are not at all like the rock formations in the places 
 where they are found to-day. The aboriginal peoples in 
 Europe and America knew nothing of the glacial epoch, 
 and how science to-day explains with perfect ease the fact 
 that these rocks, worn and shaped as they are, have been 
 dropped in the places where they are found ; and so you 
 will find stories of battles of the gods and of the Titans, 
 and how these huge bowlders have been flung, as they piled 
 mountains on top of each other for their defence. And in 
 this way the pictorial faculty of the childhood of the race 
 explains for itself these otherwise inexplicable facts. 
 
 All over the world you will find places where there is a 
 depression on some mountain top, or some valley that has 
 a shape in some general fashion of the human foot, very 
 large, perhaps; and stories spring up of how giants have 
 left their tracks there. You will find in Asia, perhaps in 
 China and Japan, footprints of the Buddha, or of the other 
 deities who have from time to time visited the earth. On 
 the northern coast of Ireland there is a most extraordinary 
 formation called the Giant's Causeway. It looks as though 
 
Ma7i not Fallen^ but Rising 1 25 
 
 some marvellous prehistoric people of gigantic size had 
 started to build a wonderful paved way out into the waters 
 of the Irish Channel. So, indeed, myths have sprung 
 up, it is the Giant's Causeway. In the old days the giants 
 started to build a road over to the neighboring coast of 
 Scotland. 
 
 In this way you will find that men are perpetually telling 
 themselves curious stories to explain things which otherwise 
 are inexplicable to them. Thus, I suppose beyond ques- 
 tion, the Eden myth has grown up as a philosophical ex- 
 planation of the existence of evil, of pain, of death, in the 
 world. The early peoples looked out over the face of 
 the earth ; and they saw thorns and thistles, briers and 
 weeds, growing in the natural world. They saw that there 
 was death, moral evil, suffering of every kind ; and, as 
 they began to believe in the goodness of God, they said to 
 themselves, and with perfectly clear logic from their point 
 of view, God could not have made the world after this 
 fashion in the first place. He must have made it good, and 
 something must have happened that he did not intend. 
 
 At first it does not appear to them that they are thinking 
 out a God of limited wisdom or limited power. They have 
 not got as far as that yet. So they teach that the world 
 was created perfect : it was a garden of only fruits and 
 flowers, no briers, no thorns, no ugly, no worthless 
 weeds. All fair and lovely ; and the first man and the first 
 woman were put into this garden, not to know anjrthing 
 about sin or evil of any kind, never to feel a pang of pain, 
 never to die. The beautiful Hebrew tradition was that, if 
 they had not committed this sin, not eaten this fruit which 
 theologians allude to, they would have been transported to 
 heaven without dying. 
 
126 Religion for To-day 
 
 Of course, we know that a dream like that to-day is child- 
 ish, absurd, impossible, by reason of the nature of the uni- 
 verse in which we live. But this was the old tradition. This 
 was their way of explaining how death and sin and sorrow 
 and everything wrong came into the world. God not only 
 drove them out of the garden, but he cursed the soil for 
 their sake ; and he cursed the serpent, and made him, from 
 walking upright, a fact which scientists cannot under- 
 stand, crawl in the dust, and eat dust another curious 
 error for his food. 
 
 This, then, was the story which grew up, and which the 
 Jews borrowed from their neighbors. 
 
 Now let us note two or three points. I say this tale 
 came into existence as a philosophical attempt at explaining 
 the existence of evil in the world. But mark you, in the 
 first place, it does not explain. The Hebrews tell us in 
 their old-time traditions, as recorded in this book, that this 
 occurred about four thousand and four years before the 
 birth of Jesus. We know to-day that thorns and thistles 
 and briers have been on this planet hundreds of thousands 
 of years. We know that death has been on this planet as 
 long as life has. We know that pain has been here from 
 the very beginning of the organization of a nervous system 
 capable of sentiency of any kind. 
 
 So, as I said, this story, even if we could believe it to be 
 true, does not explain. 
 
 Note in the second place, if it were true, we should be 
 compelled to-day, from the higher point of moral advance 
 which we have reached, to declare it unworthy of God and 
 hopeless for man. It is unjust, it is cruel. We could not 
 accept it as being worthy of any just conception of the 
 government of this world. 
 
Ma7i not Fallen^ but Rising 12 J 
 
 Consider for a moment. Here God is represented as 
 having created a man and a woman, perfect indeed, but 
 absolutely without experience, children, so far as knowl- 
 edge is concerned. He does not tell them anything beyond 
 the fact that they themselves shall die if they touch this 
 forbidden fruit. And yet, according to the theology of 
 Christendom, on the action of these two infantile, inexperi- 
 enced, ignorant, weak people, one man and one woman, 
 your immortal destiny hung, and mine. On the choice of 
 these two, utterly unfit to choose, hung the destiny of the 
 countless millions of men and women to be born to the 
 farthest epoch of time ! The eternal horror of it ! 
 
 My friends, were it not treated earnestly by grave and 
 reverend divines as a part of the theological scheme of the 
 world's salvation, it would seem too childish for considera- 
 tion, too childish on the intellectual side, too grotesquely 
 hideous on the moral side, to be regarded with seriousness 
 even for a moment. 
 
 In the third place, note another thing. Whether it be true 
 or just or not, I wish to emphasize the point, so you will not 
 forget it, that there does not exist on the face of the earth 
 the slightest reason for thinking that such a thing ever hap- 
 pened. There is no more reason for regarding it as historic 
 than there is for treating as historic the labors of Hercules 
 or the descent of Ulysses into the underworld. It is not 
 even Hebrew in its origin. It is pagan, a pagan myth, with- 
 out the slightest shadow of a shade of evidence in favor of 
 its being historic. 
 
 You will find a great many persons, theologians, doctors 
 of divinity, teachers in our seminaries and colleges, who, 
 when they are treating some matter that is hard to believe 
 that is found in the Old Testament, will say. We might 
 
128 Religion for To-day 
 
 give this up if it stood on its own foundation alone ; but 
 as in the case of the Jonah story that has been cited a hun- 
 dred times this winter Jesus referred to it, and indorsed it 
 as true. 
 
 But note the significance of the fact : so far as the story 
 of the fall of man is concerned, Jesus did not refer to it. 
 So far as any word of his is concerned, he had never heard 
 of it ; or, if he had, he did not consider it of sufficient impor- 
 tance to speak of it. 
 
 Then note right here for I think it is of immense sig- 
 nificance, even decisive significance, if there was nothing else 
 to be said this silence of Jesus. Take for a moment the 
 orthodox point of view. Jesus then was God. He had 
 come to this earth, fallen and ruined, on purpose to save 
 men. He knew that the fall of man was the beginning of 
 all the evil and suffering, the beginning of that endless tor- 
 ment into which the great majority of people had entered 
 and were to enter to the end of time. 
 
 Does it not seem a little strange that God, coming down 
 to the world on purpose to save men from the fall, should 
 never have said anything about it ? Does it not seem a little 
 peculiar that he should not at least have referred to it? 
 No, not one slightest indication that he knew or cared any- 
 thing about it whatever ! 
 
 Now, in the fourth place, I wish to remark concerning this 
 fall of man story, as an explanation of the condition of the 
 race, that God has revealed to the modern world by the 
 hand of his messenger, clear-eyed, truth-loving Science, 
 God has revealed to the modern world an explanation of the 
 existence of briers and thorns and thistles, of pain, of moral 
 evil, and of death. And the explanation that he has thus 
 given us is one worthy of himself, one honorable to our 
 Father, one full of hope for his children. 
 
Man not Fallen, hut Rising 129 
 
 For what is this explanation of science ? It is that all 
 these growths are natural products of the soil. The thorn, 
 the brier, the thistle, the weeds, are simply the parents, the 
 ancestors of the flowers and fruits. The new began in the 
 bitter and the sharp and the rough ; and out of them have 
 evolved all the sweet, all the beautiful, all the helpful things 
 that we discover on the face of the earth. 
 
 As to pain, as I had occasion to tell you last Sunday, 
 science tells us that it is inseparable from sentient existence, 
 and not only that, but that it is absolutely essential as a 
 guard and a guide to this sentient existence. 
 
 Then, so far as moral evil is concerned, as again I told 
 you last Sunday, science has taught us to know, not to guess, 
 that we have been developed from the lower forms of life 
 here on the earth, and that, instead of evil having originated 
 at the start, it was good which originated at the start ; and 
 man has been climbing ever higher and higher, sloughing off 
 the evil and reaching on towards the attainment of the 
 good. 
 
 Then, too, death is absolutely essential to an organiza- 
 tion like ours, essential to the further growth, deliverance, 
 and advance of man as a spiritual being in another higher 
 and finer world. Death is no after-thought, then. God 
 did not create a world intending to leave death out, and 
 then find that he had been outwitted by his adversary 
 and ours, and that so death was the invasion of an evil 
 power from without, devastating his fair world. Death is 
 part of the intention of God, part of the original universal 
 divine order. 
 
 God, then, I say, has revealed to us in this better day 
 not only that the old borrowed mythical pagan story is not 
 true, but he has revealed to us the magnificent and entirely 
 
130 Religion for To-day 
 
 satisfactory explanation of what that fairy story utterly failed 
 to explain. 
 
 Now I wish for a little further to dwell upon this doctrine 
 of the fall of man as it is related to the theological schemes 
 of Christendom. 
 
 I was talking with a friend within forty-eight hours ; and 
 this friend raised an objection to certain parts of the sermon 
 which I am preaching this morning, based on the supposed 
 conditions and needs of you who I am addressing. I wish 
 to speak of this objection, and appeal to you as to whether 
 it be valid or not. 
 
 This friend said that, possibly, making so much of this 
 story of the fall of man was not needed ; that people did not 
 believe it now; that perhaps it was threshing old straw 
 which had been sufficiently threshed before. My answer 
 was a twofold one. In the first place, that it seemed to me 
 that we Unitarians need to be educated as to the thought of 
 the past not only, but as to why we hold it no longer, why 
 we are compelled, religiously and in deference to our love 
 and reverence for God, to leave it behind and go on to 
 something which seems to us unspeakably better; that we 
 ought to be able to give others, who inquire what we mean 
 by being Unitarians, an adequate and intelligible reason for 
 the faith that is in us. 
 
 Again, in the second place, another reason, I said, is 
 this : people are all the time saying these old doctrines are 
 outgrown, they are not held any longer. And this friend 
 asked, How many ministers in New York do you suppose 
 really believe in the fall of man ? My answer was : I do 
 not know. I presume there are some a very large num- 
 ber of them who do not believe it. But I added this 
 statement or this question : How many of the ministers in 
 
Man not Fallen, but Rising 131 
 
 the city of New York to-day would dare to say in their 
 pulpits that they did not believe it ? How many of them 
 would thus risk their standing as ministers ? 
 
 Why, New York and Brooklyn are in an uproar now, over 
 what ? Over the mildest kind of heresy on the part of Dr. 
 Abbott, heresy that has been commonplace to us for a 
 quarter of a century. Ministers are attacking him ; minis- 
 terial associations are calling him to account ; newspapers 
 are saying he is an infidel. And, if Dr. Abbott were a 
 weaker, smaller man, he might not hold his position for a 
 month. 
 
 So long, then, as a childish, utterly absurd pagan story 
 is seriously regarded as part of the divine and infallible 
 revelation of God, and the ministers, whether they believe 
 it or not, dare not say they do not believe it, it seems to me 
 that the time has not passed for speaking on the subject. 
 
 I wish now to ask your attention for a little while to 
 the vital relation existing between the doctrine of the fall of 
 man and the creeds. 
 
 Let me say again, for emphasis and clearness, that there 
 is, so far as I know, so far as I can imagine, not a single 
 doctrine in the great creeds of Christendom that would be 
 there at all, if the fall of man being given up, the creed- 
 makers were logical, and followed that step to its necessary 
 logical conclusion. 
 
 Take, for example, the doctrine of the total depravity of 
 the race ; that is, that man is in the condition that the 
 churches say he is, so that he needs what they have to offer. 
 Of course, that is supposed to be the result of the fall. 
 
 Take again the supposed necessity of having an abso- 
 lutely infallible book of revelation. If man is in a condi- 
 tion the nature of which he cannot possibly discover by 
 
132 Religion for To-day 
 
 his own reason and experience, and if on account of that 
 condition he needs to do something which he is not wise 
 enough to find out, why, then, perhaps he does need an 
 infallible book of revelation to tell him these things. 
 
 Then it has been the story of theologians for thousands of 
 years that not only was the moral nature of man depraved 
 by the fall, but his intellectual nature broken and disabled, 
 so that he was incompetent to find out truth. Of course, 
 if the fall of man is given up, that doctrine goes, too. And 
 the competency of man, so far as his brain is concerned, to 
 find out what kind of a world he lives in and what kind of 
 a being he is, is conceded. 
 
 Then, again, why the necessity for that terrible, stupen- 
 dous tragedy, the death of God himself at the hands of his 
 enraged and blinded creatures.-* The blood atonement 
 supposed thus to be wrought out, they tell us, is needed 
 because man is a fallen, ruined, sinful creature. If the fall 
 is given up, then no need of such a terrific imagining as 
 that. 
 
 The old doctrine of conversion, that man must be miracu- 
 lously changed, his old heart taken away and another one 
 put in its place, that also naturally goes, if man is not a 
 hater of God, but only a weak and blinded seeker after the 
 right way. So, too, the old doctrine of salvation in the 
 other world is no longer needed, if the fall be not an historic 
 fact. 
 
 The point I wish to emphasize therefore is that, if the 
 fall be given up, these things go with it. The old earth and 
 the old heaven have passed away. 
 
 O friends, having been born as I was in that old uni- 
 verse, having struggled and wept and prayed through a 
 boyhood overshadowed by the smoke of the pit as it as- 
 
Man not Fallen, hit Rising 133 
 
 cended and blotted out the stars, it seems to me that, in 
 coming out into this new universe, as though I had escaped 
 from the underground caverns in which the barbaric 
 ancestors of the race began, and had come out breathless, 
 panting, but so glad and so thankful, into God's sunlight, 
 where his winds of reviving blow upon my cheeks, and 
 where I can look into the clear, serene heaven without 
 seeing the scowling face of hate looking down upon a hope- 
 less world. 
 
 Can you dream what it means to me to have found God's 
 real world, to have found, in the place of the old conception 
 of the Divine, my Father and the Father of my elder brother, 
 Jesus of Nazareth, who teaches and helps me to love him ? 
 Can you imagine what it means ? 
 
 All this, then, if the fall of man be not true, fades like a 
 hideous dream of the night when the sun is up. We are 
 not in that kind of world. We have not fallen. God does 
 not hate us. God did not need to die and himself suffer 
 torments in hell before he could forgive us for our mistakes 
 and errors. Jesus teaches another doctrine than that in 
 that marvellous parable of the prodigal son. All the son 
 there needed was simply to come to the father, and tell him 
 he was wrong ; and the arms of the father were about him, 
 and the tears of gladness falling on his neck. 
 
 That is the God of Jesus. That is the salvation of Jesus, 
 which has been displaced and hidden away by the barbaric 
 conceptions of the pagan world, that had no place in the 
 thought of the loving, gentle, great prophet of Nazareth. 
 
 The world does not need to be saved in the technical, 
 theological sense of the word ; for it has never been lost. 
 We do not need an atonement to make it possible for God 
 to clasp in his arms his own children. We do not need any 
 
1 34 Religion for To-day 
 
 arrogant, conceited priesthood standing door-keeper between 
 us and the welcome of our Father, which is extended to the 
 poorest and meanest of all his children. We do not need 
 this whole elaborate scheme and framework that has been 
 dreamed out and built into cathedrals and churches and 
 institutions and creeds, built into a power that over- 
 shadows the world and tyrannizes the brains and the souls 
 of men. It is an impertinence, it is worse than a crime : 
 it has no justification in the history of the world or in the 
 justice or the loving thought of God. 
 
 What does man need? Consider the fact that he started 
 close on the borders of the animal world, and along a path- 
 way of dust and tears and blood has been climbing, striving, 
 slipping, falling, struggling on his feet again, but climbing, 
 ascending, from that far-off beginning until to-day. He has 
 been making mistakes, and trying to rectify them ; has been 
 struggling ever to attain some fairer, finer, better thing than 
 he has known. What does he need t 
 
 He needs first, friends, intellectual cultivation and train- 
 ing. He needs to see. He needs to understand. He 
 needs to comprehend something at least, of the kind of 
 universe in which he lives and of the kind of creature he is, 
 the relations in which he stands, and ought to stand, to his 
 fellow-men. He needs to be educated, not educated in 
 the mere sense of having facts given him, but by being 
 evolved, unfolded, led out and up, until he gains mastery 
 of himself and his surroundings. He needs to be 
 morally educated, taught the distinctions between right and 
 wrong ; and taught that right, how many times ever it may 
 be crucified, is always success, and that wrong, however 
 much enthroned, is always failure. He needs to be taught 
 that this universe is a moral universe to its core. He needs 
 
Man not Fallen^ but Rising 135 
 
 to be taught that righteousness is life and peace and joy, 
 that all good is along that line. He needs to have the wor- 
 shipful, the aspirational side of his nature developed. He 
 needs to be taught to look up, to look up with reverence, to 
 look up with admiration ; to be filled with the sense of the 
 fineness and the beauty of those things not yet attained, so 
 that he shall naturally and necessarily struggle after their 
 attainment. 
 
 You know perfectly well that men gradually become 
 wrought over into the likeness of the things they admire. 
 
 Man, then, needs to be cultivated as a worshipper; and 
 then he needs to be trained in his spiritual nature, to have 
 that wrought upon, developed, until there dawns upon his 
 upward-looking vision a sense of kinship with Him who is our 
 Father, our Mother in heaven and on earth. He needs to 
 know that now are we all, whether we realize it or not, chil- 
 dren of God, and that, as we look forward to some destiny so 
 magnificent, so much beyond anything we can at present 
 dream, it doth not yet appear, is not yet apparent, what we 
 shall be. He needs to be thrilled with that divine longing 
 out of which comes all the advance of the world. 
 
 This is what religion from the modern point of view 
 proposes to do for the race; and that means creating the 
 kingdom of God here on earth, until among men the will 
 of God shall be done as it is in the starry heavens over 
 our heads. 
 
REVELATION NATURAL AND 
 PROGRESSIVE. 
 
 The contest which, among the critics, the theologians, 
 the preachers, the newspaper writers, and the people on 
 the streets, is at present raging around the Bible, is not at 
 all as I understand it, at any rate the question as to 
 whether God has revealed himself to his children; it is 
 only a question as to how he has done it. Is revelation 
 supernatural, partial, confined to only a part of the people 
 of the world and a limited portion of its time and history ? 
 and is it finished once for all and written in a book ? Is 
 revelation natural, universal, reaching all God's children, 
 progressive, never finished, but having some new word to 
 speak to us with every new epoch, with every new day ? 
 
 The question, then, I beseech you to notice, is right in 
 here. The critics, those who do not accept the view of 
 revelation which is crystallized into the old creeds, are has- 
 tily, ignorantly, maliciously, called destructives. It is said 
 they are enemies of God, and willing to take away his 
 truth and hope from the world. 
 
 I beg you, therefore, to notice just the nature of this con- 
 test. Not, as I have said, a question as to whether God 
 has revealed himself, but as to how, and as to whether that 
 revelation is worthy of God and full of hope and comfort, 
 not for some little chosen body of the elect, but for all 
 God's children. 
 
Rei>elation Natural and Progressive 137 
 
 There is more than one way of revealing God. Placing 
 a new fact or a new book before us in which is contained 
 something that the world never thought of before is one 
 way ; but God is equally revealed to us afresh when we gain 
 some new insight, when through experience we have discov- 
 ered something unknown before, but which has always been 
 a part of God's truth. By means of the telescope, one of 
 man's most magnificent discoveries, new suns are revealed 
 and new worlds laid bare to the thought and imagination of 
 man. By means of the microscope the infinitely little as 
 marvellous to those who think as the infinitely great is 
 also revealed. If the eyes gain new insight and are able to 
 interpret afresh any of the old truths, then God reveals him- 
 self anew to his children. 
 
 It is a question, then, not of taking away hope from men, 
 it is a question of giving hope to men : it is a question 
 dealing, I believe, with the very thought of our Father, 
 a question as to whether we can cherish a conception of 
 him that we can love and reverence and adore. 
 
 Do not, then, be led astray by any one who tells you that 
 he who dares to open his eyes and see the new light with 
 which God is flooding the modern world is an enemy of 
 man. Do not let any one persuade you that he is anything 
 else than the only consistent friend of man, and the only 
 one ready to do real honor to our Father in heaven. 
 
 With so much of preliminary, let us then reverently, but 
 fearlessly and earnestly, confront our theme. 
 
 An old psalm-writer we do not know who he was, and 
 we do not know just the year in the history of the world 
 in which he lived says, "Thy word is a lamp unto my 
 feet and a light unto my path." 
 
 It has been assumed, I was taught as a boy to believe, 
 
138 Religion for To-day 
 
 it is taken for granted in nearly all the pulpits of Christen- 
 dom, that, when the Psalmist wrote these words, he was 
 referring to the Bible, and that the Bible, and only the 
 Bible, is that word of God which is a light to the feet and 
 a lamp to the path. But consider, friends, for one moment. 
 When this psalm was written, there was not one single word 
 of the New Testament in existence, and only a part of the 
 Old. And that part of the Old Testament which had been 
 written was not gathered into a book : it was not spoken of 
 as one book. Each separate book that up to this time had 
 been composed and had come to be regarded as sacred was 
 made into a separate roll and had its own place in the 
 synagogue. That part of the Old Testament that was in 
 existence then at this time was simply a little library, not 
 one book at all. So that any one referring to it would 
 never speak of it as a book. And it was not in any exclu- 
 sive sense called the word of God. 
 
 So, of course, the Psalmist, when he said, " Thy word is 
 a lamp unto my feet," meant more than the truth which is 
 contained in any book. He did not have in mind a book 
 at all. Any word of God, no matter how uttered, no matter 
 by what method spoken, no matter by what ear heard, 
 whether it come from the stars over our heads or spoken 
 to us by the unfolding beauty of a flower, all, whether 
 it be the utterance of some heroic deed in the character 
 of one of our fellow-men, whatever is an utterance of 
 the divine truth, is a part of the word of God. 
 
 Then let us remember that, even if we should call this 
 Bible the word of God, which in any exclusive sense we 
 have no warrant for doing ; if we should believe that at the 
 beginning God did inspire certain men to write just these 
 particular books, and to give them to the world without 
 
Revelation Natural and Progressive 139 
 
 error or flaw of any kind ; if that was the nature of the 
 book in the first place, we have no such infallible, no such 
 inspired copy to-day. For, remember, the oldest manu- 
 script of any part of the New Testament, for example, 
 which exists anywhere in the world at the present time, 
 does not take us much nearer to Jesus than we are to-day 
 to Chaucer. 
 
 In other words, the oldest manuscript we have takes us 
 back to the fourth century only. What lies back of that 
 copy.** We have no assurance that the copyists were 
 infallible or inspired ; and we know to-day that there is 
 hardly one man in ten thousand who can copy six pages of 
 manuscript and do it with precise accuracy. We know, for 
 example, that the manuscripts which we have of the New 
 Testament contain thousands of various readings. These 
 differences extend in some cases to half a chapter ; in 
 others, to three or four separate verses; in thousands of 
 places, to phrases or words. 
 
 Suppose, then, we could know that in the first place the 
 Bible was infallible and inspired, we know now that we 
 have no such book. I grant you we can be about as cer- 
 tain of the accuracy of the wording of the New Testament 
 as we can of the works of Cicero or Xenophon. But, 
 mark you, that is not enough in the face of the claim that 
 is made on behalf of this book. The destiny of our im- 
 mortal souls does not hang on the accuracy of a phrase in 
 Cicero or Xenophon. If it did, or were supposed to, then 
 you would find the critics as exercised and anxious over 
 these as they are over the New Testament manuscripts 
 themselves. 
 
 Think of it, friends ! Does any one, can any one, believe 
 that the all-loving Father in heaven makes the matter of 
 
140 Religion for To-day 
 
 eternal salvation of the soul hang on the accuracy of a 
 text which is four hundred years away from the speaker's 
 time, in an age when there was no such thing as short- 
 hand writing heard of, no reporting, no printing ; and when 
 we know that theological bias and passion and prejudice 
 have handled and played with these manuscripts ; and 
 when we know that the ignorance and carelessness of 
 copyists have filled them with errors of a hundred differ- 
 ent kinds? 
 
 I wish now, friends, I say I wish : I do not wish, but 
 I am under compulsion, to consider a little the nature of 
 this wonderful book. 
 
 I beg you to notice, and do not go astray here any of 
 you, that I am not going to say one word against the 
 Bible. Note, if you please, the Bible does not claim any- 
 where to be inspired. Some of the writers, the speakers, 
 claim that they are proclaiming God's truth in some particu- 
 lar message ; but they did it naturally, earnestly, as I claim 
 this morning that I am delivering to you God's truth, that 
 I am speaking to you some of God's words. 
 
 You will perhaps, or, if you do not, some critic of what 
 I am saying will, ask me if I have overlooked a passage 
 in the Second Epistle of Timothy, which in the old version 
 of the New Testament reads, "All scripture is given by 
 inspiration of God." I have not overlooked it. In the 
 first place, if you will read it in the Revised Version, read 
 it as every scholar knows it ought to be read and has known 
 it for years, you will find it runs in this way : " Every script- 
 ure which is given by inspiration of God is profitable." It 
 does not say what scripture ; and, as I said before, the 
 New Testament was not gathered into a book at the time 
 when this Epistle to Timothy was written. There was no 
 
Revelation Natural afid Progressive 141 
 
 book, New Testament or Old, which the writer had in mind 
 when he used the word "scripture." 
 
 Perhaps some other critic will remind me that the writer 
 of the last book in the New Testament issues a malediction, 
 a curse, upon any one who has the temerity to add any- 
 thing to or take anything away from this book. Remember, 
 however, he is referring only to the book which he is writ- 
 ing, not to the New Testament, not to the Old Bible, 
 which I need to say to you over and over again was not 
 then in existence, in the sense in which we speak of it 
 to-day. And this book, the writer of which dares to curse 
 his fellows who have the presumption to question anything 
 which he said, is the one book which for hundreds of years 
 was regarded as not fit to be in the Canon by the fathers 
 themselves ; and it is the book which Luther and which 
 Calvin as late as the sixteenth century declared had no 
 business to be there at all. 
 
 This simply means that that saying does not apply to the 
 Bible as we have it to-day ; and, if it did, instead of being 
 frightened at the malediction, I should question the Chris- 
 tian character and courtesy of him who uttered it. 
 
 The Bible, then, does not claim to be infallible, does 
 not claim to be exceptionally inspired. No claims are 
 made for it except such as are made for the scriptures 
 of other people. The Chinese, the Hindus, the Brah- 
 mins, the Buddhists, the Mohammedans, the Egyptians, 
 the Greeks, and Romans, almost all of the ancient 
 nations of the world, the Norse people, have had their 
 infallible Scriptures. And let me tell you, friends, they 
 have precisely the same and as much reason for regarding 
 their Scriptures as infallibly inspired as we have for so 
 looking upon ours. 
 
142 Religion for To-day 
 
 What reason is that ? Nothing save the reverence which 
 has gathered about that which is old, nothing ! 
 
 Now will you be patient with me while I consider for a 
 little some of the characteristics of this Book ? And do not 
 think I am finding fault with it. I love it so much, friends, 
 that it is a pain to me sometimes even to tell the truth 
 about it, lest I be misunderstood. And pardon me for say- 
 ing, as you may misjudge my attitude towards it, I never 
 loved it as I love it to-day. When I was trained to believe 
 that every single word in it was absolutely infallible, when 
 I dared not use my reason about it, dared not ask any 
 questions, bowed myself in its presence ; even then I did not 
 love it as I love it to-day. Grand, inspiring, magnificent, 
 one of the most wonderful books of the world ! Some of us 
 are compelled into an attitude that is misunderstood as an- 
 tagonistic merely because we are anxious that the world 
 should know the truth, and should read freely and fearlessly 
 that larger book of God which includes the truth of the 
 Bible, but which runs over it on every side, and which has 
 always been being written, and is being written to-day, and 
 will be being written forevermore. 
 
 What have we here then, friends? Take the Bible in 
 your hand, and look at it. Why is it bound in one volume .-* 
 For no reason in the world except a bookmaker's reason 
 and the reason of public convenience. It is not one book: 
 it is sixty-six little books or pamphlets ; and they were writ- 
 ten during a period covering something like a thousand 
 years. 
 
 And who wrote them } Concerning three-fourths I 
 speak roughly, without having counted of these books, we 
 have to notice that they are purely anonymous. No one in 
 the world is wise enough to know who wrote them. 
 
Revelation Natural and Progressive 143 
 
 Concerning the most of them, no one knows with any 
 particular accuracy when they were written. 
 
 Concerning the most of them, nobody knows where they 
 were written. 
 
 Now, friends, let me give you an illustration. 
 
 Suppose a book should be made up of the choicest culling 
 of English literature. Begin with "Piers Ploughman"; 
 include in it the old English ideas as to the origin of the 
 world ; include in it scraps of lore, bits of verse, fragments 
 of the sayings of the sages ; let there be history, let there 
 be poetry, let there be all kinds of literary productions 
 in it; and let it extend from *' Piers Ploughman," down to 
 Kipling. And then bind these all in one book; and you 
 would have a book made up very like the Old Testament, 
 very like the New, a large number of little pamphlets 
 bound in one, covering a long period of time, representing 
 different ideas. 
 
 Read with your eyes open, friends ; and you will see that 
 the Hebrews started as a polytheistic, man-sacrificing race, 
 where all barbaric people started, with the crudest ideas of 
 the world and of God and of man. And they grew and de- 
 veloped as other people have grown and developed; and 
 their morals and their religion climbed as their civilization 
 climbed, until from these ignorant barbarians you have the 
 magnificent still barbaric, however kingdom of Solo- 
 mon. You have the utterances of the second Isaiah, some 
 of the grandest utterances of the world; you have the 
 magnificent mountain summit of the Nazarene ; you have 
 all the spiritual teachings of the New Testament. But 
 perfectly natural, human growth that can be traced along 
 every step, from the beginning to the last point that it 
 has reached. 
 
144 Religion for To-day 
 
 This is what we have when we face this wonderful old 
 book. And is it unnatural, is it strange, that we should find 
 in it the traces of its origin, the finger-marks of the people 
 who composed it and for whom it was composed ? Ought 
 we to expect to find it infallible ? Ought we to expect to find 
 it historically or scientifically accurate? Ought we to be 
 surprised that one writer contradicts the teaching of another ? 
 For only the most violent and blinded partisanship of the 
 men who hold briefs for particular cases which they are 
 bound to defend can question for an instant that there are 
 different theories of morals, different theories of history, 
 different theories of science, different theories of ethics and 
 religion in the Book. 
 
 The Book of Ecclesiastes, for instance, was written by an 
 atheist and an infidel, an infidel, at any rate, if not an 
 atheist, who teaches in the most forcible way that there is 
 no future life, and that the best we can do is to get all we 
 can out of this one and not worry about anything else. 
 This is not entirely in accord with the New Testament! 
 Precisely similar things hold good in every department of 
 the Bible's teaching. 
 
 Now I wish you to note one or two points a little further. 
 
 In the first place the Bible is full of historical inaccuracy. 
 I cannot go into details this morning or point them out and 
 explain them : it is not meet. Nobody doubts it except 
 those who are blindly determined to uphold a particular 
 theory concerning the Book. You need only to read it with 
 a little care to find it out. And it is just what we should 
 expect. Not only that, but take it in the domain of natural 
 knowledge. There is no scientific knowledge of this uni- 
 verse displayed by any of the Bible writers. Why should 
 there be ? There was no such knowledge then in the world. 
 
Revelation Natural and Progressive 145 
 
 The order of creation as outlined in the first chapters of 
 Genesis has been proved over and over and over again not 
 to be the order in which the world was created and not the 
 story which science tells to-day. 
 
 And, friends, do remember that when you are reading the 
 record that God himself has left on the earth, that he has 
 made, you are reading God's word. When you are reading 
 what some very ignorant people two or three thousand years 
 ago thought of it, anonymous people, too, people concerning 
 whose opportunities for knowledge we know nothing what- 
 ever, are you going to place those opinions in competition 
 with that which God is saying to us right here to-day in 
 language absolutely unmistakable ? 
 
 The old Hebrews had no better ideas about God, not 
 much better ideas about the heavens and the earth, the 
 stars and the moons, than many other people of their 
 time. They teach us distinctly and definitely that the 
 earth is a flat surface fixed in the midst of surrounding 
 waters, that the sky is a dome overhead as real and as 
 solid as the metallic cover of a dining platter. There is 
 not a point where they commit themselves to any opin- 
 ion about the heavens or the earth, not one where they 
 are not wrong. 
 
 Then let us note the ethical teachings of the Old Testa- 
 ment. I shrink from speaking here ; but I must. My task 
 demands it of me. The Old Testament upholds polygamy; 
 it defends human slavery ; it teaches the doctrine of retalia- 
 tion ; it teaches and indorses moral ideas which I shrink 
 from speaking of here. It calls David a man after God's 
 own heart. And this David all his life long was a man of 
 treachery and blood ; and the very last word he spoke was to 
 command his son and successor to see to it that one of his 
 
146 Religion for To-day 
 
 old generals did not die a natural death, but went down with 
 bloody hairs to the grave. 
 
 Is that the ethics of Jesus, of him who said, " Father, for- 
 give them, they know not what they do ? " Can you get the 
 two ethical ideas into any sort of vital relationship to 
 each other ? 
 
 Do you know that there is a place in the Old Testament 
 where God directly commands the indiscriminate slaughter 
 of all the men, all the married women, and all the children 
 of a particular city, and directs that the young women shall 
 be distributed among the brutal soldiers ? Is that the ethics 
 of him who stooped down and wrote on the ground, while 
 the woman who was a sinner was brought into his presence, 
 and at whose rebuke those who had accused her silently 
 slunk away and said no more? 
 
 Friends, the ethics of many parts of the Old Testa- 
 ment are simply barbarian ethics, such as you would 
 expect to find among barbarians, but not the ethics of the 
 civilized world to-day. I have not time to go into any 
 longer detail. 
 
 Then the religion of the Old Testament, the first part of the 
 Old Testament, the conception of God, God's nature, God's 
 character, is it the same, friends, as the religion of the New 
 Testament or the highest and grandest religion of the world 
 to-day ? God comes down in human body, as they tell such 
 tales of Jupiter, walks around in the garden : he comes to 
 Abraham, sits down and eats with him ; and yet the Bible 
 tells us "no man hath seen God at any time." Note the 
 naive, beautiful, child-world fairy story, but grotesque 
 for an infallible book, of that scripture which tells of God 
 hearing one day in heaven a rumor that men were really 
 building a tower in the plain of Shinar which was to reach 
 
Revelation Natural and Progressive 147 
 
 up to his sky ; and he says, Let us go down, and see 
 if it is so. 
 
 Is that the God who knows the secrets of every heart? 
 Can we believe that this is our God who is represented as 
 being pleased when he smelled the smoke of burning flesh, 
 the sacrifice of Noah after the flood ? Can we believe that 
 he is the God of Jesus, a Spirit to be worshipped in spirit 
 and in truth ? 
 
 Why, friends, it is so plain that an intelligent scholar is 
 almost ashamed to argue about it, that the Bible out- 
 lines the pilgrimage of man from his lowest barbaric 
 condition clear on and up to Jesus, a course that it took 
 thousands of years to travel. And the Bible is marked 
 with the characteristics of every step of the way. Why 
 should it not be? 
 
 And note, friends, that the Bible never says one word to 
 contradict anything which I am saying. It rather proclaims 
 it on every page. 
 
 What is it that I am antagonizing ? What is it that I am 
 criticising ? It is the utterly baseless claims of the most falli- 
 ble, prejudiced, ignorant kind of men, that is all. I cannot 
 accept a theory which certain people used to hold concerning 
 the Book ; but I accept the Book with all my heart, and love 
 it, and thank God for it every day I live. 
 
 Do not dare, then, any of you, to misunderstand me ! Do 
 not dare to misrepresent me, and say that I am criticising 
 or opposing the Bible ! I am only criticising and opposing 
 men's claims concerning the Bible which have no founda- 
 tion in history, no foundation in reason, are simply baseless 
 traditions, nothing else and nothing more. 
 
 Another thing let me say. Some day, friends, I am going 
 to preach you a positive sermon about the Bible, why I love 
 
148 Religion for To-day 
 
 it, and what it means and what it is. I cannot preach two 
 sermons this morning ; and so I must pass that by. 
 
 I wish now to ask your careful, reverent consideration of 
 two points vital to this whole discussion. 
 
 The Bible, the oldest book in it, takes us back only to 
 about eight hundred years before Christ. Up to that time 
 there were traditions and fragments, parts of books perhaps, 
 which reached back possibly five hundred years earlier. 
 But now note, according to the teaching of all the great 
 popular churches, the people who have lived on this earth, 
 and have never had any revelation from God, have been 
 pouring a ceaseless, hissing stream of souls into the pit of 
 eternal torture. 
 
 Can you believe, do you dare, looking God in the face, to 
 believe that he created his children and made them live 
 here, wandering over this little planet of ours for two or 
 three hundred thousand years, and the minute they died 
 sent them to eternal torture, and had never sent to them one 
 single word of guidance or warning ? Dare you believe it ? 
 And they will say in the next breath that God is good and 
 a Father ! 
 
 That is what I was taught as a child, is what is taught in 
 every one of the great authoritative creeds of Christendom 
 to-day ; and I challenge the clergy of the United States, if 
 they do not believe these things, to be men, and stand up 
 and demand that they be taken out of the creeds. 
 
 Not only that, but according to the common theory, God 
 gave his word only to Abraham and his descendants, a little 
 people inhabiting a country on the eastern coast of the 
 Mediterranean, the whole of which is not larger than the 
 State of Massachusetts. Until about two thousand years 
 ago God had never sent any word of revelation except to 
 
Revelation Natural and Progressive 149 
 
 that little narrow strip on the Mediterranean shore. And 
 though he is almighty and all-wise and all-good, and has 
 been presumably trying for the last two thousand years to 
 get this revelation known to the rest of the world, there is 
 not more than a third part of the population of the earth 
 that have ever heard of it. 
 
 Can you believe that ? Can you believe it, and then say 
 " Our Father who art in heaven " ? 
 
 friends, let us turn now at the end, and note what a 
 conception of the word of God, of the revelation of his 
 truth, so much more magnificent, so much more honorable 
 to God, so much more hopeful to man than this, as much 
 so as the dawn of the morning is beyond the light of flitting 
 fireflies in a field at night, we hold. God the Father of all 
 his children from the very earliest time, away back and 
 down for hundreds of thousands of years when the first 
 barbaric man, half-animal, half-human, climbed upon his 
 feet, and looked up with a dawning wonder in his eyes at 
 the stars, and said, " Who made all these \ " 
 
 From that time do you not think that God, who made 
 him, was with him, holding him by the hand and leading 
 him ? If we have a child sick, crippled, incompetent, men- 
 tally inferior, do we not spend the larger part of our care 
 upon him, and leave the others to look after themselves ? 
 
 Do we not believe that God is somewhere near a thou- 
 sandth part as good as we are ? Do you believe that God 
 had left his children wandering, stumbling, without any 
 light, radiating his truth on one little tiny people, radiating 
 darkness everywhere else from the beginning of the world 
 until now ? 
 
 1 believe, friends, that man has been spelling out some 
 little letter or word or message of the divine revelation. 
 
150 Religion for To-day 
 
 making out some word of God from the very beginning of 
 the world until to-day, and that each one in any nation any- 
 where has been able to read enough to help him take the 
 next step in 1;hat eternal search of the human soul for the 
 Father soul which is the essence of all true religion. 
 
 The universe is only the living expression of God's life, 
 God's thought, God's power. Whether we know it or not, 
 we face him, whichever way we turn. It is God's word that 
 we are studying, God's revelation we are reading, when we 
 find out about these wonderful bodies of ours, and learn 
 some, at least, of the secrets of health. It needed no divine 
 revelation to teach man the difference between food and 
 poison. He could find out by trying; and he did. It is 
 experience that has taught us in this direction ; and we 
 have read only a small part of this marvellous book of the 
 human body as yet, made so cunningly. And, as we read 
 each new word, it is a new word of God. 
 
 We are following his footsteps : we are learning the les- 
 sons of how to live. For, note, the only thing we need in 
 this world is to know how to live, how to come into right 
 relations with God. 
 
 So you take it in the industrial world. Read that mar- 
 vellous history of man's discoveries, of man's inventions, 
 and note that every step man has taken there has been 
 simply reading some new word of God. We talk about this 
 "nature" as though it had no God in it and as though we 
 did our great things ourselves. 
 
 Note what a ship-master does when he wants to sail 
 across the Atlantic. How much can he do without God.? 
 He goes into the woods with metal which he has discovered, 
 which God made, all the conditions and powers and forces 
 of which are divine, and cuts down trees which he brings 
 
Revelation Natural and Progressive 151 
 
 into his ship-yard. He raises the hull, builds it upon ways 
 that slope down into the sea. When it is finished, he asks 
 God's power of gravity to push it out into the ocean for 
 him. There God's waters take it in their arms. They hold 
 it up. He lifts the masts, spreads his sails upon them ; and 
 then he puts himself into right relation with God's eternal 
 forces, and God's winds blow the ship across the sea. Or 
 God's steam down in the hold, used so as to work upon a 
 cunning machine which he has invented by observing the 
 system of God's law in that respect, pushes his ship over 
 the sea. 
 
 Whatever way we turn, we are dealing first hand with 
 God : we are, as Kepler said, reading over his thoughts 
 after him. And every advance step is only through reading 
 a little more of this eternal, universal, progressive revelation 
 of the Divine. 
 
 And, when you come into the moral sphere, did man need 
 any supernatural, unnatural revelation to teach him the Ten 
 Commandments, to teach him the law of ethics ? Do you 
 know, if I had time this morning, I could trace you the 
 very beginning and birth of morals down into the love of 
 man and woman, into the birth of the child, into the begin- 
 ning of human society. 
 
 Men learned, easily enough, that, if they were to live to- 
 gether in society at all, murder must be prohibited ; if they 
 were to own anything, theft must not be allowed. So you 
 may trace every similar conception of the world as plainly, 
 as naturally, necessarily, sprung out of human experience, 
 born of these social relations of ours, none the less God's 
 truth, more God's truth, assuredly, because truth is more 
 than speculation written in a book. 
 
 Concerning the birth of moral ideas : you travel all over 
 
152 Religion for To-day 
 
 this world, you go one mile above the sea anywhere or at 
 any particular level, and you do not find precisely the same 
 growths of tree and shrub and flower. But you do find 
 similar growths. So you come to any definite level of the 
 advance of human society. You do not find the same 
 moral ideas ; but you find similar moral ideas. There is 
 hardly an ethical idea in the New Testament that is original 
 with the New Testament. The Sermon on the Mount was 
 hundreds of years older than Jesus. Before Jesus was born, 
 Hillel had said all the law is summed up in these two com- 
 mandments : Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy 
 heart, and thy neighbor as thyself. 
 
 All these ethical ideas sprung up out of human expe- 
 rience as the result of the growth of human society. And 
 so men's ideas about God in every nation began in barbar- 
 ism, men making God in their own image ; and they are 
 not through with that process yet. Higher, finer, nobler 
 conceptions of God, as men have grown higher and finer 
 with nobler ability to think and feel ! 
 
 And so, friends, I present you, in contrast with this lim- 
 ited, this partial, this supernatural conception of revelation, 
 this other one, natural, universal, unlimited, embracing 
 every child of the Father ; and progressive, advancing step 
 by step with the eternal progress of man. 
 
 What has been the result of these fallible human concep- 
 tions that have been held about the Bible ? These theories 
 have kindled martyr fires : they have riveted chains upon 
 the wrists of men and upon brain and heart. These the- 
 ories have given birth to bigotry, to hatred, to animosities, 
 to self-conceit, to self-righteousness. 
 
 The other makes us able to say, indeed, the one God, 
 Father of all his children. It makes us humble, it makes 
 
Revelatiojt Natural and Progressive 153 
 
 us glad, it makes us hopeful. It thrills us, it lifts us up 
 and leads us on. 
 
 And so, friends, I bid you, sucking as the bee does from 
 the flower all the honey, the sweetness, the truth, the 
 beauty, there is in this wonderful old book, not neglecting 
 it, not leaving it one side, to remember that there are other 
 flowers, and that God's world, and, yes, God's universe, is 
 his garden, and that sweetness and truth and light may be 
 found everywhere. 
 
 Do not look back to find your God. Look up to find him. 
 Look on for him. I thank him for every word he spoke 
 a thousand years, two thousand, ten thousand years ago. 
 I thank him for the word he spoke to me this morning out 
 of the gray sky. I thank him for the brighter word which 
 he speaks out of the sunlight. And I look with wide-open 
 eyes, expecting to see some new word of his revelation : I 
 listen to catch the latest whisper that comes down out of 
 his loving heart, out of his brooding sky ; and so I wait and 
 watch and reverence and love him to-day and evermore. 
 
IS GOD INCARNATE IN ONE MAN ONLY 
 OR IN HUMANITY? 
 
 I SHRINK from the treatment of my theme this morning 
 more than I have from that of any other in this entire series. 
 Not because I have any hesitancy in expressing my opin- 
 ion or because I feel any doubt concerning the magnificent 
 truths involved, but because, considering the state of the 
 public mind, it is so easy to be misunderstood, so easy to 
 be misrepresented, so easy to find some one who thinks that, 
 in attempting to state the real truth, or what I believe to 
 be the real truth, about Jesus, I am criticising him or dero- 
 gating somewhat from the dignity of his position or the 
 beauty of his character. 
 
 I beseech you, therefore, give me impartial and patient 
 hearing, and make up your mind as to what my position is 
 only when I am completely through. 
 
 Perhaps I may be pardoned for recalling to your minds 
 the fact that I preached as a minister of Trinitarian 
 churches for eight years. I was trained, lovingly, rever- 
 ently, worshipfully, in the old thought about Jesus ; and 
 yet never, even in those days, did I occupy such a position 
 of loving reverence towards the Nazarene as I occupy now. 
 I never reverenced him so, I never found him such inspira- 
 tion, such uplifting, such guidance, such help. He is closer 
 to me a thousand-fold now than he was in the days of old. 
 
 So much as to the point of view from which I am to speak. 
 
Is God incarnate in One Ma7i only f 155 
 
 Now, at the outset, I wish to put clearly before you, if I 
 may, the precise question which we are to discuss. It is 
 not as to whether God incarnates himself in man, but as 
 to whether he did incarnate himself once, and once only, 
 in one man belonging to one race at one period in the his- 
 tory of the world, and as to whether his divine incarnation 
 is limited to that. Or, on the other hand, has he always 
 incarnated himself t Is incarnation a universal, a progres- 
 sive fact? Did he really make men and women in his 
 own image, so like him that he is always at home in their 
 brains, in their hearts, in their lives ? Is humanity God's 
 child, his real divinely begotten child? and is he progres- 
 sively incarnating himself in the race ? 
 
 I wish now to ask your attention for a moment to the 
 actual state of thought of the people in whose minds the 
 ordinary old doctrine of the incarnation sprang up, so that 
 you may see the world for a moment, if possible, as they 
 saw it, comprehend the problem as it presented itself to 
 them. 
 
 You must forget, then, all modern discoveries ; you must 
 forget all the magnificent reach of our knowledge of this 
 great universe ; you must picture this earth as a little flat 
 affair, heaven just above the blue dome, God an outlined 
 being sitting there on a throne. You must think of this 
 world as something apart from God, something that he 
 made, as a carpenter builds a house. Put it before you so 
 that nature and natural law and the working of natural 
 forces are something entirely external to God, that he con- 
 trols the world from a distance, that he can interfere with 
 the working of it if he pleases, and so produce what is called 
 a miracle. 
 
 You must think of God as a being apart, quite re- 
 
156 Religion f 07^ To-day 
 
 moved from his world, what Carlyle used to refer to as 
 an " absentee God." You must think, then, of this gulf be- 
 tween humanity and God, and of the necessity that lay in 
 the minds of the people who first dreamed out this special 
 form of the doctrine of incarnation that somehow the gulf 
 between humanity and God must be bridged. And there 
 was only one way in that kind of universe to bridge it, by 
 miracle, by creating a being who should be neither man nor 
 God, but partly both, or wholly both, if you choose ; an in- 
 comprehensible being that should bridge over and so unite 
 these separate lives, God on the one hand, the world of men 
 on the other. 
 
 This was the problem that was in the minds of the people 
 when this doctrine of incarnation sprang up. 
 
 Now I wish to note for a little while the beliefs of the 
 disciples, the belief of Jesus himself as to his own nature, 
 so far as it is recorded, and then note how naturally, how 
 inevitably, the ordinary doctrine of the incarnation grew. 
 Then I shall ask you to note what seems to me so unspeak- 
 ably grander than that, a doctrine that does not deny that, 
 mind you, a doctrine that affirms a thousand-fold more 
 than it denies, that includes all the divinity there was in 
 the Son of Mary, and includes unspeakably more. 
 
 Suppose this were entirely a new idea to us, and we were 
 seeking to find what ground there is for holding it. Of 
 course, we should say, There is no ground whatever except 
 what we can find in this book. And of course we must say, 
 to be perfectly fair and honest with ourselves, that, whatever 
 we may find to be the beliefs of the writers of these books, 
 we are not absolutely obliged to agree with them. 
 
 Does it seem strange to you, for example, to say this ? I 
 am intensely interested, if I may, to find out what Paul 
 
Is God incarnate in One Man, only f 157 
 
 thought ; but the world is nearly two thousand years older 
 than it was then, and there has been an expanding of knowl- 
 edge and discovery in every direction so great as to be 
 almost immeasurable. Is it strange, then, that I should not 
 feel obliged to agree with Paul in his opinions on every sub- 
 ject ? I know he was wrong in any number of directions. 
 I know at the same time that he was one of the grandest 
 and most heroic men, and one to whom we owe an unspeak- 
 able debt. 
 
 But let us see what doctrine is really taught concerning 
 the person, the character, the office, of Jesus. 
 
 Who is our first witness ? Paul. For you must note 
 and it will throw a great deal of light on the teaching of the 
 New Testament, if you remember it that the first writer 
 in.the New Testament, the one that stands nearest to Jesus 
 in point of time, is the apostle Paul. His Epistles were 
 written before either of the Gospels came into its present 
 shape. 
 
 Now does Paul teach that Jesus is identical with the God 
 who created the universe ? Nothing of the sort. So far as 
 any record appears, Paul has never heard anything about the 
 miraculous conception : he nowhere refers to it. It would 
 have given him tremendous power in his preaching if he had 
 known it and believed it, and could have proclaimed it; but 
 he nowhere alludes to it. 
 
 But note right here, in passing, for I shall not have time 
 to go into it at any length, suppose Paul had believed that 
 Jesus was miraculously born. There are thousands of peo- 
 ple who take it for granted that that is the same thing as 
 proving that Jesus is divine. If God is to work a miracle, 
 and a child is to be born without a human father, would 
 that prove that the child is anything more than human ? 
 
158 Religion for To-day 
 
 Suppose he had wrought a similar miracle in the animal 
 realm, a miracle anywhere, so that there should be special 
 and miraculous generation and birth : it would prove noth- 
 ing as to the nature and character of the creature so born. 
 This simply in passing. 
 
 Paul teaches that Jesus was the second Adam, the head 
 of the new order of a spiritual humanity. He teaches, if 
 you please, that he was supernatural, that he was pre-exist- 
 ent ; that he was sent into this world to perform a special 
 mission, to save mankind. But that does not prove at all 
 that he was the equal of the Father. 
 
 Suppose he was " the first-born of every creature." Note 
 the word "creature." Suppose he was created before an 
 angel had ever lived. Suppose he had spent what is practi- 
 cally an eternity in close communion with the Father. Sup- 
 pose he had been the head and leader of all the angels. 
 That does not make him God. 
 
 Mathematicians tell us that you may pile up numbers year 
 after year, and make the largest statement you can in fig- 
 ures, and that, when you are done, you have not even begun 
 to approach infinity. There is an infinite remove between 
 the infinite itself and anything finite. 
 
 Paul does not teach any doctrine, then, of the Godhead 
 of Jesus, nothing of the kind to be found in him. 
 
 Then he says that, at the end Jesus is to deliver up the 
 kingdom to God, even the Father, and God is to be all and 
 in all. 
 
 Now let us turn and see what Jesus is reported to have 
 said about himself. Of course, friends, you must under- 
 stand I cannot quote passage after passage. I will make 
 these general statements ; and you can take up your New 
 Testament when you are at home, and study it, read it over 
 and see if what I say is not true. 
 
Is God incarnate in One Man only? 159 
 
 Jesus is nowhere even reported to have claimed to be 
 God, in any word which the scholarship of the world is 
 agreed in regarding as his authentic utterance. Always it 
 is " the Father." He prays to the Father, he depends on 
 the Father. When he claims to exercise any special power, 
 he says, This power is conferred on me by the Father. 
 Then, when it comes to the matter of being able to lay 
 down his life and take it up again, he says. This is the 
 gift of the Father. Everything, all the way through, is a 
 recognition of the fact that he is the son of the Father, 
 comes as the Father's messenger to declare the Father's 
 word and execute the Father's will. That which he speaks, 
 he says, he speaks not of himself : he speaks that which the 
 Father has commissioned him to say. He does not claim 
 even anything approaching superhuman knowledge. When 
 the disciples asked him a certain question, he says, I do 
 not know : only the Father knows that. And, when some 
 of them ascribe to him special goodness, he says. Why do 
 you call me good ? there is none good but one, that is God. 
 His goodness was derived, reflected from the Father. 
 
 In that passage which I referred to, I think, once before 
 this winter, that is frequently quoted, where Jesus is repre- 
 sented as saying, " I and my Father are one," he says in 
 the immediate context that the disciples are capable of 
 being one with him and the Father as he is one with the 
 Father. So you see it proves too much if we depend upon 
 that passage. You can find none anywhere in which Jesus 
 does not frankly recognize the fact that he is the son of the 
 Father, having committed to him a special work, engaged in 
 this divine service for his fellow-men. And, when you turn 
 from the words that are put into the lips of the Nazarene 
 himself to the testimony of the other disciples, what do you 
 find? 
 
i6o Religion for To-day 
 
 I have already referred to Paul for the simple reason that 
 his testimony comes first. What do the other disciples say ? 
 Nowhere, friends, is there any clear testimony even to their 
 belief that Jesus was other than a nature derived from God 
 and having committed to him a special service to be ren- 
 dered here among men. 
 
 Let me hasten to speak of one case because it is the ex- 
 tremest that any one can suggest. I am aware of the word 
 in the prologue in the Gospel that is called "According to 
 John," where it says, "The Word was made flesh, and dwelt 
 among us," and this Word was with God, etc. 
 
 Now let me suggest to you one thing. We do not know 
 who the author of this Gospel may be, we do not know the 
 value of his opinion if we could cross-question his testimony 
 to-day; but we do know this, that at about the time this 
 Gospel appeared there was in vogue throughout the early 
 Church a system of philosophy called " Gnosticism," from a 
 Greek word which means " to know." They were the people 
 who claimed to know the opposites of the agnostics of 
 our time. These people say they do not know : the gnostics 
 said they did. 
 
 The Gospel of John bears many traces of this gnostic 
 philosophy. It has in it some of the technical terms of this 
 philosophy, which show that the writer was familiar with it ; 
 as the use of the phrase " survival of the fittest " in any 
 book would show to future ages that the writer was familiar 
 with the philosophy of Evolution. 
 
 Now what did these gnostics believe ? They believed that 
 God was a spirit, of an infinite remove from matter. They 
 believed that all matter was evil, essentially and necessarily. 
 They believed, therefore, that the infinite God could not, 
 being perfect purity, have anything to do with matter. So, 
 
Is God incarnate in One Man only f i6l 
 
 when the gnostics would have the world created, they de- 
 clared that it was not the work of the primal, infinite Deity, 
 but the work of a demiurge, a sort of deputy, sub-deity, 
 somebody appointed by him as his agent to create the world. 
 
 So, if you should find in a gnostic fragment of writing the 
 statement that Jesus was the creator of the world, that 
 would be proof beyond question that the man who wrote 
 it did not believe that he was God, because, as I said, it 
 was a cardinal doctrine of the gnostics that God was not the 
 world creator. 
 
 So, when you find this doctrine in the early part of the 
 Gospel of John, along with gnostic phrases in a book sub- 
 ject to gnostic influences, you are to interpret it in the light 
 of the prevailing ideas of the time. 
 
 You find nowhere, then, I must content myself with 
 this general statement, nowhere in the New Testament 
 any doctrine of the absolute deity of Jesus. 
 
 Neander, the famous German historian of the Church, 
 may be presumed to know what he was saying, and his 
 testimony is without bias in this direction, for he was 
 thoroughly orthodox in his belief ; but he makes the frank 
 admission that the doctrine of the Trinity was not one of 
 the fundamental doctrines of the Christian Church, as is 
 plainly evidenced, he said, from the fact that it is nowhere 
 explicitly taught in any part of the New Testament. 
 
 This is the testimony of the orthodox and scholarly 
 historian, Neander. 
 
 Now, then, let us pass to the belief of the Fathers of the 
 Church. We find ourselves in the second century, between 
 the years loo and 200. What do we find there? Lac- 
 tantius, Tertullian, Origen, man after man of those whose 
 names are familiar as the representative Fathers of the 
 
1 62 Religion for To-day 
 
 second century of the Church, you find them, without 
 exception, teaching the doctrine of the derived and sub- 
 ordinate nature of Jesus. Justin Martyr, one of the most 
 famous of them all, goes so far as explicitly to say that 
 our Lord Jesus had his own Lord, God the Father, who had 
 created him, and to whom he was subordinate. 
 
 TertuUian, a man passionate, fiery, not specially scholarly, 
 is the first one of the Fathers who suggested the doctrine of 
 the Trinity ; and he himself testifies that it was a surprise 
 and a shock to everybody at that time. 
 
 The doctrine of the Trinity in such form as to declare 
 that Jesus was of the same nature as God did not take 
 shape, as I had occasion to tell you a few Sundays ago, 
 until the year 325, at the Council at Nice, where it was pro- 
 pounded and championed by Athanasius. It was only in 
 the year 381 that the Emperor Theodosius packed a coun- 
 cil, only one hundred and fifty bishops, chiefly selected 
 by himself, to declare what has come to be recognized 
 now as the doctrine of the Trinity. He had violently 
 driven all the bishops and ecclesiastics who did not hold 
 this doctrine out of the Eastern Church, and then he 
 called this council, selected by himself, to legalize what he 
 had already done. 
 
 Saint Augustine is the first one of the Fathers who teaches 
 in perfectly clear fashion, and consistently, the doctrine 
 concerning the person of Jesus which is now held in the 
 Westminster Confession of Faith and the ordinary Prot- 
 estant formulas. And he himself says that he had not seen 
 the matter clearly until he had discovered the doctrine of 
 the Logos in some Platonic writing. 
 
 It can be traced, the growth of this idea, as a pagan idea, 
 and not as one that was taught in the Gospels, or the New 
 
Is God incarnate in One Man only ? 163 
 
 Testament, or that was natural to the disciples or to Jesus 
 himself. For the Jewish mind always looked upon this 
 idea with abhorrence as blasphemy ; and the gospel has 
 never found any acceptance among the Jewish people, and 
 for that very reason. 
 
 Now, friends, if, and I wish you to note the importance 
 of this suggestion, if nowhere else in the history of the 
 world had there been any claim made that any human being 
 was supernaturally born or was an incarnation of God, then 
 it would indeed be very, very striking that such a claim 
 should have been made on the part of the Church, and for 
 the person of Jesus of Nazareth. But what are the facts "i 
 
 Why, when I study early church history, the only thing 
 that surprises me is that it took three hundred and twenty- 
 five years for the doctrine to grow. I wonder that it did not 
 appear earlier. For, as we look back and trace the thoughts 
 of men concerning questions like these, what do we find ? 
 
 We find that among barbaric people in nearly all the 
 pagan nations of the world the idea of God appearing in 
 flesh has been one of the very commonest from the first. 
 And he has not confined himself to men. He has appeared 
 in fishes ; he has appeared in the form of birds ; he has 
 appeared in the form of almost every kind of animal, if we 
 are to believe the testimony of those who claim to represent 
 this type of religion or that. Note, for example, that the 
 number of incarnations of God have been almost countless ; 
 and some of the stories told in regard to the supernatural 
 birth, the marvels of the infancy, of the childhood, are so 
 strikingly similar to those that are told about Jesus that it is 
 almost impossible for us to believe that they had a separate 
 origin. 
 
 There have been no end of appearances of the Buddha ; 
 
164 Religion for To-day 
 
 and still they are to come. Whenever the world goes very 
 wrong, degenerates, plunging down into evil, then, according 
 to the belief of the Oriental nations, God is to come and 
 rescue and lift up his world again, and bring it back to 
 himself. 
 
 And, as I had occasion to tell you the other day, among 
 the Roman people as well as among the Greeks, the doctrine 
 of apotheosis, of either the gods coming down in the form of 
 men or men being lifted up to share the conditions of the 
 gods, was the commonest of all beliefs. 
 
 Read the poems of Homer, the great poem of the Latin 
 race, the JEneid of Virgil, and you will find that the 
 gods were forever appearing in the form of men, having 
 human passions, engaging in human conflicts, and deciding 
 human battles. And these ideas, I say, are as natural as 
 the growth of a blade of grass in the park in the month of 
 May. 
 
 Shall we wonder, then, that the loving admiration that 
 gathered around the person and work of Jesus should take 
 this form ? Shall we wonder that philosophical speculation 
 should at last result in this doctrine in its attempt to bridge 
 over the gulf between God and his human world.? I say the 
 marvel of it is not that the doctrine grew up, but that it was 
 so long in growing. 
 
 Now then, friends, I wish to suggest one or two thoughts 
 concerning the implications of this old doctrine, not the 
 doctrine that I am going to present to you in a moment. 
 
 You know the doctrine of the exclusive incarnation of 
 God in Jesus is a part of a hopeless and a terribly unjust 
 scheme of the world. The pity, the love, the tenderness, of 
 Jesus, have been dwelt upon in all ages. And, if he were a 
 man, a divine man, then the pity and the tenderness and 
 the love are something superb and grand. 
 
Is God incarnate in One Man only? 165 
 
 But think a moment, friends. I can only hint it, turn a 
 flash-light on the darkness for a moment. Let us look at 
 this matter of the divine mercy. What is the doctrine ? 
 God created a world that did not ask to be created. He, 
 omnipotent and all-wise, created the world ; and he launched 
 it forth in space, and then either did not wish to or was not 
 able to prevent its falling into the hands of the Devil almost 
 immediately. And then he left that world swinging on its 
 darkened way for two or three hundred thousand years, 
 and all the people dropping off of it one after another into 
 the abyss, with no light, not a word of hope, no sign of pity, 
 no salvation, until by and by, late, after thousands on 
 thousands of years, he comes and gives a whisper of his 
 revelation to one little people, and then four thousand 
 years later comes down in his own person to save the world, 
 save a few people, save the elect. 
 
 Is that to be held up to us as typical of divine mercy ? 
 
 Let me give you an illustration. Suppose a shipmaster 
 here in New York should send, starting for Liverpool across 
 the Atlantic, a ship freighted and filled with passengers 
 that he knew would go down before it was half-way over. 
 And then, after it was out of sight of land, he should send a 
 ship to the rescue, that should get there just in time to save 
 one in fifty of the passengers while the rest were hopelessly 
 engulfed. 
 
 Which would you do ? Would you praise a man like that 
 for his mercy, or would you think of what would be the un- 
 speakable infamy of the first launching of the ship for such 
 a doom ? 
 
 Mind you, I am not attacking the work of God. I am 
 attacking unjust, infamous representations of what God is 
 said to have done, but which he never did. 
 
1 66 Religion for To-day 
 
 That doctrine of Jesus is not a part of a scheme of divine 
 and tender mercy, if you judge it from the point of view of 
 the Westminster Confession. It is something unspeakably 
 horrible, too cruel to be put into words. Then, if that be 
 true, the coming of Jesus as God into the world has been 
 the most lamentable failure that human history has ever 
 known. God himself trying to save the world, omnipotent, 
 all-wise ! and, since he came down two thousand years ago, 
 he has been at work as hard as he could, presumably, to 
 save men ! And, as I told you the other day, not a third 
 part of the people on this little planet have ever heard any- 
 thing of it. And the most of those, the most intelligent of 
 those who have heard it, do not believe a word of it. If he 
 did it, he has not given enough evidence of it, so that the 
 people who are seeking earnestly for the truth can find it. 
 If that be true, it is the most lamentable failure that the 
 history of the world has ever known. 
 
 But, on the other theory, Jesus a man, a divine man, our 
 brother, born like us, to die like us, to search and seek and 
 trust and pray to God like us, and give himself to the 
 service of his kind like us, then it is one of the unpar- 
 alleled successes of the world, infinitely full of its story of 
 divine tenderness and mercy, as I shall show you in a 
 moment. 
 
 One other point I wish to call your attention to before I 
 come to my own positive statement. 
 
 Consider the problem for a moment. Suppose God, 
 and I am talking in this free way now from the point of 
 view of the old ideas, a God that works outside of things, 
 and rules them as he pleases, suppose God should attempt 
 to put as much as he could of himself into a man. What 
 would be the result? Consider carefully, think earnestly 1 
 
Is God incarnate in One Man only f 167 
 
 Could he produce, as the result of an effort like that, any- 
 thing else, anything other, anything more than a perfect 
 man? If he broke over the limits anywhere, this being 
 would cease to be human, would he not ? 
 
 If God should fill a man with himself, the result would be 
 simply a perfect man. He could do no more : he could do 
 no other. How, for example, would anybody be able to 
 prove that a man walking this aisle was God? Suppose 
 John, the beloved disciple, should appear to us to-day, and 
 should make affidavit, signed with his own name before a 
 notary, that he believed that Jesus was God. How could he 
 prove it ? What evidence could he give that he was any- 
 thing more than a man, or that this opinion of his was 
 anything other than his personal opinion ? 
 
 If somebody should come to us to-day, and say that he 
 really believed that such and such a person was God, 
 incarnate in any supernatural and miraculous sense, is 
 there one of us who could believe it or pay any attention 
 to such a statement? Why, then, should we pay any 
 attention to similar statements, because they are two 
 thousand years old, and were made by people we know 
 nothing about? 
 
 Think of it, friends, for a moment, and see where you are, 
 on the basis of an honest, reasonable attempt to find the 
 truth. 
 
 Now, friends, let me come and state what I believe to be 
 the magnificent, inclusive, universal, progressive reality. 
 And I need here now at the outset of this part of my theme 
 to call your attention to the universe as we know it to-day. 
 I pictured the old universe out of the old doctrine of the 
 world. I want you to note the new universe which is the 
 field and scene of the new revelation of God. I want you to 
 
1 68 Religion for To-day 
 
 think how modern it is. We are apt, without thinking much 
 about it, to project our ideas away back into an indefinite 
 past. Why, it is only within two or three hundred years 
 that we have begun to have gUmpses of this wonderful uni- 
 verse in which is now our home, only two or three hundred 
 years ! And a large part of the revelation of God has come 
 to us during your lifetime and mine. Do you know how 
 modern it is, and what is this modern thought ? 
 
 The universe is no longer a piece of mechanism away from 
 God nature governed by natural forces and in accordance 
 with natural law, while over here somewhere is a supernatu- 
 ral and divine world entirely separated from it ! That idea, 
 friends, is utterly gone from the minds of intelligent men 
 and women. 
 
 What is the universe ? Note first the significance of the 
 word I am using. In ancient times they believed in any 
 number of antagonistic forces, confused and working against 
 each other. Now, we know, from the dust under our feet 
 to the light just starting from some star on its thirty millions 
 of years of journey we know that this is a uniYQVse, not a 
 multitudinous manifestation of antagonistic forces, no dual 
 thing, a universe. One law, one life ! 
 
 And we know that the old antagonism between matter and 
 spirit is fading away. Pursue a particle of matter, and you 
 find yourself lost in invisible and intangible force, which is 
 what we call spirit. No one can tell where one leaves off 
 and the other begins. It is one manifestation of the divine, 
 matter and spirit, too. 
 
 And matter is no longer something impure. It is some- 
 thing perfect, divine in all its parts and fragments. It is a 
 universe, then. It is one substance. We know now that 
 this which we call matter is seen in the glittering stars over 
 
Is God ijicarnate in One Man only? 169 
 
 our head and the roadway that we trample under our feet. 
 It is one substance; and we know that all these various 
 elements that we talk about are coming to be considered by 
 the deepest thinkers as modifications of one substance. We 
 know that all the forces about which we speak have been 
 demonstrated to be only modifications of one force. And 
 we know that life is one life, only one life in the universe, 
 and that life God ; and there is one humanity. Not variety 
 of races, one humanity, one family, one child of God. So 
 we have found out at last. And this is unquestioned revela- 
 tion, the word of God spoken to us in demonstrably clear and 
 unmistakable tones. 
 
 Herbert Spencer says, and I wish you to note the 
 mighty significance of it, he says it is the last and deep- 
 est and highest word of science that the power, the force, 
 which is manifested in the universe outside of us, is the 
 same force precisely as that which wells up in ourselves 
 under the form of consciousness, one God, one life, one 
 substance, one God and Father of us all ! 
 
 This is the kind of universe we are in to-day. And note, 
 friends, that gulf between a spiritual God and an unspiritual 
 matter that the early Church tried to bridge, and the old 
 unused and unusable bridge is left still in the creeds, 
 that gulf is not there, there is no such gulf. There is no 
 separation by so much as a millionth part of the width of 
 a hair between God and his children. 
 
 You know what I believe, friends, I believe it has been 
 demonstrated beyond question, by scientific revelations of 
 the modern world : I believe in the divinity of man and 
 the humanity of God. I do not believe there is any differ- 
 ence in kind between our souls and the world's soul. 
 
 Even Dr. Lyman Abbott has dared to say that he be- 
 
.170 Religion for To-day 
 
 lieves there is no difference in kind between God and 
 Jesus and man. He says that God is man plus infinity, 
 and man is God minus infinity. I believe this is magnifi- 
 cently true. 
 
 Now see what the upshot of it is, a grand doctrine of 
 incarnation that we are compelled to hold to-day and in the 
 coming time. Let us look, if you will, at a pebble stone 
 in the street. That could not exist one instant but for the 
 present vital life of God. And God is incarnate in that 
 stone; that is, that stone contains just as much of the 
 divine life and power and wisdom as, being a stone, it is 
 capable of holding. 
 
 Take a crystal. Here you have a beautiful organization 
 which you do not find in the pebble. The crystal, again, is 
 an incarnation of God, holding just as much of the divine 
 wisdom and force and love and beauty as, being a crystal, 
 it is capable of holding. 
 
 Come next to vegetable life, the first form, a grass-blade, 
 that you will notice on your walk home after service this 
 morning. That grass-blade is God incarnate : there is 
 just as much of God in the blade of grass as the blade of 
 grass is capable of holding and expressing. More of it in 
 the rose, merely because the rose is capable of holding 
 more, the fragrance, the poetry of God. 
 
 Then, when you come higher yet, to the amoeba, one of 
 the lowest forms of animal life, there is sensation and 
 movement, the germ of that which is in us. There again 
 is God incarnate, just as much of God as the amoeba is 
 capable of holding and expressing. 
 
 And, as you climb up, following through the fishes, the 
 reptiles, the birds, the animals, and up to man, each in its 
 degree is a divine incarnation, holding and manifesting 
 
Is God incarnate in One Maii only f lyi 
 
 just as much of God as it is capable of containing and 
 showing forth. 
 
 Now let us note, if you will, a few illustrations to em- 
 phasize this magnificent truth, from the different depart- 
 ments of our human life. 
 
 We look at Jesus ; and we see in him the glory of God, the 
 divine speaking on his lips, ministering with his hands, 
 going on errands of goodness in his feet, shining out of his 
 eyes. We say that is divine. But are we to follow the ex- 
 ample of the creed-makers, and draw a distinction without a 
 difference, and say that precisely similar things in other 
 lives, in other nations, in other ages, are only natural, only 
 human, not divine ? 
 
 For example, we say the golden rule is divine as it fell 
 from the lips of Jesus. What was it, pray, when it fell from 
 the lips of Confucius four hundred years before ? Was it 
 only human, was it wicked, was it wrong, was it just natural ? 
 Is the same idea, the same thought, the same love, in China 
 undivine, and only divine in Palestine ? 
 
 Jesus said, " Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all 
 thy heart, and thy neighbor as thyself : on these two com- 
 mandments hang all the law and the prophets." We say, 
 Divine, wonderful, glorious ! Was it less divine when 
 Hillel said it before Jesus was bom, in almost precisely 
 the same words ? 
 
 We read in the New Testament; and our hearts are 
 touched, and they grow tender with the thought of the com- 
 forting, heavenly Father who shall " wipe away all tears from 
 their eyes." Divine, surpassingly beautiful ! But was it 
 not divine in ancient Egypt before Moses was born, the 
 identical thought and saying, and almost the identical words, 
 dreamed by some noble Egyptian and put into the lips of 
 his God, who shall wipe away all tears from their eyes ? 
 
1 72 Religio7i fo7' To-day 
 
 Was it divine to see Jesus hang upon the cross, and say, 
 " Father, forgive them, they know not what they do," and 
 then bravely, with however much of human shrinking, to 
 meet death for his truth ? Divine ! I say, friends, one of 
 the divinest, grandest scenes in all the history of the world. 
 But, mark you, if Jesus was consciously God, the God of 
 this universe, then that scene is theatrical, spectacular, un- 
 real. Could God, who came on purpose to do it, shrink like 
 man from a little pain ? Should we think it less wonderful 
 that he was great and wise if he was a man, believing in 
 his great truth, consecrating himself to his Father and our 
 Father and for our sakes, if he was ready to stand by that 
 truth through scourging, being outcast, maltreated in every 
 way, if he stood to it before the judgment-seat of Pilate, and 
 when he was spit upon and the thorns placed on his head ; 
 and, if a man fainting under his cross, he went out to that 
 hill outside of the city, faithful unto death, trusting in God 
 even when the doubt swept over him for a moment as to 
 whether he had been deserted ? Then I say it was one of 
 the divinest, most magnificent scenes in all the history of 
 this world. 
 
 But, if he was not a man, this pity, this glory, this wonder, 
 all change into tinsel and unreality. Could such things be 
 difficult and marvellous for a God ? 
 
 Thousands of men, for the sake of their love for and be- 
 lief in a cause, have met death as bravely as he did ; have 
 met more cruel deaths, deaths prolonged through unspeak- 
 ably greater torture ; met it gladly, met it bravely, without 
 flinching or fearing. 
 
 Is it divine in him, not divine in them ? 
 
 I can only catch at illustrations here and there in dealing 
 with so wide a theme. 
 
Is God i7icarnate in One Man 07ily? 173 
 
 Take the matter of what we call sacred and profane his- 
 tory. The history of the Jews, they tell us, is sacred his- 
 tory. The history of America, which has done unspeakably 
 more for the deliverance of man from bondage than did the 
 history of the Jews, this perforce is profane! Why, is 
 there no God in the history of America from the time the 
 Pilgrims, under the inspiration of that grand old John Rob- 
 inson, sailed for Massachusetts, down through the heroes of 
 the Revolution to our Lincoln and the thousands of men 
 that gave themselves for the land ? 
 
 Is this sacrifice, this devotion to God, is this all nartural 
 or human, no God in it, nothing divine about it ? 
 
 Take Lincoln, a magnanimity not surpassed by the ten- 
 derness and forgiveness of Jesus himself; a consecration 
 not matched, I can almost say, in the history of the world ; 
 tenderness, love, devotion to truth, faithfulness unto death ! 
 Is there no God in Lincoln, nothing divine in Lincoln ? 
 
 I believe, friends, I do not brush it one side, I be- 
 lieve God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto him- 
 self. I believe God was in Socrates, reconciling the world ; 
 in the Buddha. I believe he was in Confucius, reconcil- 
 ing the world unto himself. I believe he has been in all 
 the great line of witnesses and martyrs, the true, faithful 
 men in every age of the world, in any religion, under every 
 sky, who have consecrated themselves to the truth and 
 given themselves to the love and service of their fellow-men. 
 I believe that God has been progressively incarnating him- 
 self in his child, man, from the very beginning; and that 
 to-day, wherever you look upon honesty, wherever you look 
 upon faithfulness, wherever you look upon pity, human help 
 and human kindness and human care, there you are stand- 
 ing face to face with God himself. 
 
1 74 Religion for To-day 
 
 Humanity is divine. God is living in humanity, unfold- 
 ing himself in the growing and expanding life of this won- 
 derful race of ours. 
 
 And I believe that we are entitled to look forward ; and, 
 as we dream of the coming time when the beauty and the 
 glory of the world shall appear, we can say, in the words of 
 Tennyson : 
 
 " For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see, 
 Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be ; 
 
 " Till the war-drum throbbed no longer, and the battle-flags were furled 
 In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world." 
 
 And, seeing God in that future, we can add : 
 
 " Not in vain the distance beacons. Forward, forward let us range. 
 Let the great world spin forever " up " the ringing grooves of change ! " 
 
 So we will look for the time when the light and the love and 
 the goodness of God shall be in all the earth, and evil shall 
 have been outgrown, and men shall live here, looking trust- 
 ingly to the sweet heavens above them, and drinking in the 
 divine air around them, and looking upon death only as 
 another birth by which they enter into a grander and higher 
 life. Then we shall be on the road towards the complete 
 incarnation of God in his one child, man. 
 
THE DIVINE FATHERHOOD AND OUR 
 HUMAN CHILDHOOD. 
 
 If you study the lines of human advance from the begin- 
 ning until to-day, you will note that one of the most difficult 
 things if we are to judge by the results has been the 
 attainment of any worthy thought of God, the attainment 
 and the keeping of any noble idea of the Deity. 
 
 This is natural when you remember that God is infinite, 
 and that we can think him only according to the degree of 
 our development. We cannot comprehend infinity : we can 
 think God only as we are able to think him, and he is to us, 
 in his influence upon us, what we think him. 
 
 The barbaric man had, of necessity, a barbaric God ; for 
 men have always created God, or their thought of him, in 
 their own likeness. So, as man has become more civilized, 
 tender, noble, the ideal of God that has been worshipped 
 has grown more elevated, been purified from earthly and 
 human elements of passion and change. 
 
 But you will note that it is a necessity growing out of 
 these facts which I have stated that the organized thoughts 
 of God, so to speak, those which have become crystal- 
 lized in creeds and institutions are always no better than 
 the average thought of the time. They are more likely to 
 be the thought of the past : they are never the highest and 
 finest thoughts of the noblest representatives of the age. 
 You cannot get organized into an institution anything above, 
 
I ^6 Religion for To-day 
 
 beyond, better, than the average ; and generally, as I said, 
 all organizations and institutions represent phases of 
 thought that are being outgrown. 
 
 In other words, the best things in any department of 
 human life are always in the air, the highest, finest intu- 
 itions of the noblest and most developed souls ; so that the 
 thoughts of God which have become crystallized in creeds, 
 and around which organizations have been formed, are 
 rarely the worthiest and noblest ideals of the Divine. 
 
 Read the Old Testament, if you will, or the New as well, 
 and you will find that there is a progression in the ideas of 
 God. He becomes spiritualized, ennobled, purified, less 
 like the old-time men who first began to talk and think about 
 him. Difficult, then, let us remember, is it for us to frame 
 and keep worthy thoughts of God. 
 
 Among the earliest of those that have ever entered into 
 the dreams of the race is figured forth by the word 
 " Father." I would not have you to understand that Jesus 
 originated the idea or first taught the doctrine of the 
 Fatherhood of God. It is one of the oldest in the history 
 of the world. As I had occasion a few Sundays ago to 
 intimate to you, one of the first names given to God in 
 India, before perhaps any part of our Bible was written, was 
 Heaven- Father. Because God is called Father in any 
 particular age in the history of the world, you are not of 
 necessity to suppose that they had the same conception 
 of him that Jesus had when he uttered the word " Father " ; 
 for we put into words what we are capable of thinking and 
 making them contain. 
 
 The word " God " in different parts of the world does not 
 of necessity mean the same thing. It means something 
 barbaric, jealous, revengeful, cruel in one age or among one 
 
Divine Fatherhood and Human Childhood I'J'J 
 
 people. It means all that Jesus could dream of the divine 
 Fatherhood in another age and among another people. 
 
 The Father, then, is the highest and finest thought, it 
 seems to me, that we can frame of God. But at the present 
 time, perhaps as never before in the history of the world, 
 there are certain difficulties that stand in the way of our 
 making the Fatherhood of God mean anything real to us. 
 
 There are three special difficulties which I wish to note 
 and put one side, so far as I may be able to in a word. 
 
 Modern science has revealed to us such a conception of 
 nature as the world has never known before. This is no 
 little world, with God close by, in the old sense of the term. 
 We are in the presence of what seems to us material infinity. 
 We can think neither beginning nor end, neither length nor 
 breadth nor height nor depth nor limit anywhere. And this 
 nature, they tell us, is without heart, without any feeling. 
 It is a great machine, rolling on like a Juggernaut, crushing 
 whoever and whatever gets under its wheels. It is simply 
 an infinite power, but with no thought in it, no care, no 
 tenderness, no love. 
 
 This is the conception of nature which many hold as the 
 result of the scientific studies which they have pursued. 
 
 Not only that. They say that the existence of evil, of 
 pain and of cruelty, that these things demonstrate that 
 there is no Fatherhood to be found, at any rate in the 
 natural world. 
 
 Tennyson sings sadly to us of " Nature, red in tooth and 
 claw with ravine." They tell us that pain is everywhere, 
 heart-ache and heart-break and sorrow of every kind. 
 
 How, then, in the face of these facts can we believe in any 
 Fatherhood? And, then, the Church, to which we ought 
 to be able, if anywhere, to fly for relief, has only made the 
 
I yS Religion for To-day 
 
 difficulty more for us ; for will you note this fact : that, 
 though the ministers, the priests, the ecclesiastics, talk to us 
 constantly about God as our Father, the emphasis is 
 never laid on the Fatherhood. There is not a theological 
 scheme in existence, the centre of which is Fatherhood, 
 which has been developed from the idea of Fatherhood. 
 
 It is always God as king, despot, governor, and we his 
 subjects. We are under his law, which must be maintained. 
 There is a justice that has to be appeased. There are 
 always those standing between us and God. They say we 
 must believe this doctrine which they have invented before 
 we can come to him ; we must perform certain rites before 
 we can be accepted ; we must come through some mediator 
 or another. They tell us there is no direct and immediate 
 access of the child-soul to the Father-soul, either in heaven 
 or on earth. 
 
 Here, then, are these three difficulties. What shall we do 
 with them ? The sermon might be devoted to either one of 
 them alone. I can, however, devote only a fragment of it to 
 them altogether, because simply to establish the idea that 
 we have a right to call God our Father is not the purpose 
 I have in mind, but to treat some phases of belief in the 
 light thrown on them by the ideal of Fatherhood 
 
 So let me note these objections in just a few brief words, 
 not answering all your questions concerning them, but 
 merely hinting the direction in which I believe we could 
 find an answer if I had the time and this was the place. 
 
 Take this great fact of nature, a machine. Is it a 
 machine? Is there any God in it? When they talk about 
 nature, and say there is no heart, no life, no feeling in it, 
 they have left out you and me. Humanity is a part of 
 nature 5 and it is the crown, the outcome, the highest, finest 
 
Divme Fatherhood a7td Human Childhood 179 
 
 part, in which, if anywhere, we may expect nature to find its 
 fruitage and its purpose. And here in humanity is person- 
 ality, thought, love, tenderness, pity, fatherhood, mother- 
 hood, all the sweetest and highest things we can dream. 
 
 These are a part of nature ; and no one has any right to 
 speak of nature with these left out. 
 
 And, then, they talk of the uniformity of nature, as though 
 it militated against the ideal of the divine Fatherhood. If 
 there were not uniformity, it would be disastrous to the 
 thought of Fatherhood ; for there could be no study, there 
 could be no learning anything, there could be no human 
 experience, there could be no building up of character, 
 unless we knew the forces and the methods with which 
 we have to deal. 
 
 And, then, note, in a word, the uniformity of natural law 
 does not necessarily mean mechanism at all. It only means 
 what the old seer said, that " God is without variableness 
 or shadow of turning." If God does the wisest and best 
 thing in certain conditions, then, when those conditions 
 repeat themselves, he must do the same, or else a poorer 
 and less wise thing. 
 
 The uniformity of natural law, then, does not mean a 
 force that God cannot or does not choose to break through : 
 it means simply the wise and perfect and loving method of 
 God's constant working. 
 
 Then, as I had occasion some Sundays ago to tell you, in 
 regard to pain, suffering, evil, death : these do not militate 
 against the loving Fatherhood of God. Pain is a token of 
 his goodness and his care, all the necessary pain. Moral 
 evil is a condition of moral growth and development. 
 Death is simply an open gateway by which we enter into 
 a larger and higher life ; and the dissatisfactions of this 
 
1 80 Religion for To-day 
 
 present period of our growth are only a prophecy and 
 promise of a grander, an unfolding capacity, meaning only 
 that we are not yet all that we are capable of being. 
 
 Along these lines, if I had time, I think I could demon- 
 strate that none of these things are inconsistent with the 
 pity, the tenderness, and the love of God. 
 
 Let us put them one side, then, this morning, while we 
 consider for a little while two or three phases of this sonship 
 as it works itself out in our practical attitude towards God 
 as our Father. 
 
 And, in the first place, what is our access to God t Can 
 we come to him directly, without the intervention of any 
 church, any priesthood, any ceremony, any mediator of any 
 kind ? Is that true, is God just our Father and we his chil- 
 dren, folded close in his arms, whispering into his ear, and 
 a way to him always open to our wandering feet ? What 
 shall we say of this phase of the divine Fatherhood as re- 
 lated to us, his children ? 
 
 There have been in the history of the growth of religion, 
 not only among us, but among other peoples as well, two 
 tendencies, diverse, antagonistic. There is always what 
 I will call for clearness the priestly type of thought, and 
 there is always the prophetic type of thought; and the 
 priestly and the prophetic are almost always in antagonism 
 to each other. 
 
 The priest is he who loves the laws, the forms, the cere- 
 monies, the organizations. And he emphasizes these, and 
 often makes them, not means of approach to God, but 
 barriers in the way of that approach, unless we make our 
 terms with the priest who controls these things. 
 
 There are always these tendencies in the religions of the 
 world. If you go back, for example, to the Greeks and 
 
Divine Fatherhood and Human Childhood i8l 
 
 Romans, you learn that the cult for a long period of time, 
 the ceremony, was everything. It made no matter what the 
 character of the worshipper was, no one asked whether 
 he was a good man. It made no matter what he thought 
 or believed. He might believe anything he pleased ; but he 
 must come to the priest in the prescribed way, bring the 
 offerings and perform the ceremonies, or else there was no 
 way by which he could find access to his God. It was 
 specified in the most minute way. The priest must wear a 
 particular gown, he must use a particular kind of knife in 
 slaying the sacrifice. The sacrifice must be just this partic- 
 ular thing, and nothing else. The altar must be built in a 
 peculiar way. The priest must stand facing a certain point 
 of the compass ; and a part of the time he must stand on 
 one foot. He must turn around in a certain order ; he 
 must pronounce the formulas and perform the ceremony 
 with accuracy. He must go through all this ritual before the 
 worshipper could approach the Deity. And, if he made a 
 mistake in it, however inadvertent, the whole thing was 
 vitiated, the God was angry, and there was no acceptance. 
 
 This is only an exaggerated illustration of what has been 
 true in the whole history of the world. Study the growth 
 of the old Hebrew religion. There you must bring your sac- 
 rifices in a particular way, at a particular time. You must 
 go through the whole ceremony and ritual law, or else there 
 was no possibility of acceptance on the part of Jehovah. 
 These from the priestly point of view. 
 
 But ever and anon there came the voice of the prophet, 
 speaking the authorized word, as he claimed, from the 
 Father, and denouncing this whole type of religious life and 
 supposed religious service, saying: If I were hungry, I 
 would not tell Thee. The cattle on a thousand hills are 
 
1 82 Religion for To-day 
 
 mine. What do I care for your pouring out your rivers of 
 blood and your barrels of oil ? Instead of all this what I 
 want is the child heart. I want love, I want truth in the 
 inward parts, I want sincerity of life. 
 
 This, the intimate, immediate relationship of the child 
 with the Father, is what was asserted by all the old prophets. 
 Then, when we come to the new era, was it not this, and this 
 alone, which was taught us by every authentic word of our 
 elder brother, the Nazarene ? Nowhere in any authentic 
 teaching of his is there any doctrine of mediation, none, 
 not even with him as mediator. 
 
 Look at that parable of the Prodigal Son, which I read 
 this morning, as throwing light on this problem. Does God 
 ask the prodigal to come to him in the name of or through 
 the merits of the son who had stayed at home.'' Is there 
 any priestly intervention t Is there any ceremony required, 
 any sacrifice, anything ? 
 
 Nothing, absolutely nothing, between the infinite tender- 
 ness of the father heart and the yearning of the needy heart 
 of the child. 
 
 And yet, when the Church that claimed to stand in the 
 name of the Nazarene had organized itself, it had placed a 
 hundred barriers between the immediate contact of the 
 child-soul and the Father-soul, ceremony, ritual, money, 
 prayers, priestly intervention, all sorts of things it put in 
 the way. And for the larger part of the last seventeen hun- 
 dred years the great popular churches that have claimed to 
 speak for God and for his Son, Jesus, have taught another 
 doctrine than that which Jesus himself taught, a different 
 doctrine from that which helps us to believe in the immedi- 
 ate love and guidance of the Father who is in heaven and 
 on earth. 
 
Divine FatJierhood and Human Childhood 183 
 
 And to-day let me give you one single illustration 
 there is going on a prolonged and scholarly controversy be- 
 tween the archbishops and the bishops of the Anglican 
 Church and the pope of the Church at Rome over what? 
 Over the validity of orders, over the question as to whether 
 the Anglican bishops and archbishops and priests have any 
 power for what ? Why, they have arrogated to them- 
 selves the power of God himself. They are discussing the 
 question while we are expected to wait until their dialec- 
 tics have settled the dispute as to which church, Rome or 
 England, has the right to tell us whether we can come to 
 God or enter heaven or not. 
 
 Unless God has been transmitted by the physical contact 
 of ordained priests from the time of Jesus himself without 
 a break anywhere ; unless they have power magically to 
 change the bread and wine into the body and blood 
 of God ; unless they have power to forgive sins ; unless they 
 have power by touching with their moistened fingers the 
 brow of a child to convert the babe born of the devil, as 
 they believe and give it a new nature ; unless they have 
 power to work miracles, there is no salvation for any of us. 
 For they are the only ones who are authorized to save men ; 
 and they are now fighting over the question as to which one 
 it is. 
 
 And we are to wait and find out. We cannot come to 
 God unless either an Anglican or a Roman priest takes our 
 toll at the gate, and shows us the way. And we do not 
 know which of them has the right 1 They are not agreed 
 themselves as to the matter ! 
 
 This is an illustration, I say, of how the Church has 
 thrust itself between the child-soul and the Father-soul in 
 heaven, and presumes to arrogate to itself the power, the 
 tenderness, the love, the forgiveness, of our Father. 
 
1 84 Religion for To-day 
 
 I tell you, friends, there is no more dangerous thing in 
 the religious life of the world to-day than that which, pre- 
 suming to speak for God, tells the world, and makes thou- 
 sands believe it, that we cannot come to the Father except 
 by a creed, by a ceremony, by a ritual, by a sacrament, by 
 the permission of a priest. False, impious in every part is 
 such a claim ! 
 
 No church has any rights or powers except humbly to 
 point the way, open all gates, throw down all barriers, and 
 proclaim the universal and eternal truth that God is ready 
 ever to fold every one of his children close to his Father's 
 heart, readier, Jesus tells us, than we are to be folded ; 
 readier to give us all the good things his life, his spirit, 
 his eternal love and care than we are to take them. 
 
 That is the doctrine of the Fatherhood as touching this 
 matter of our access to God. 
 
 One other phase of belief needs to be looked at in the 
 light of this great truth. That is the doctrine of forgive- 
 ness. I have been speaking of merely the matter of open 
 access to God, as to whether we can come to him freely and 
 personally on our own account and simply because we are 
 his needy children. 
 
 Now what shall we believe of his forgiveness ? It is pop- 
 ularly said of us liberals that we preach a loose doctrine of 
 forgiveness ; that, just because we believe in the eternal, lov- 
 ing Fatherhood of God, we think it does not make any differ- 
 ence what a man does, he is doomed anyway to be saved, 
 it is only a little time, more or less, that must elapse ; that 
 is all. 
 
 This, I say, is what is said of us. But, friends, we are 
 the only ones, I believe, who teach the hard doctrine, the 
 severe doctrine. If I may sin as much as I please until I 
 
Divine Fatherhood and Hitman Childhood 185 
 
 am sixty or seventy years old, and then by the touch of the 
 priestly hands and the administration of consecrated oil I 
 may be forgiven, the past wiped out, and the gate of para- 
 dise flung wide open for me ; if I may live as I please, and 
 then on my death-bed repent by feeling badly, and by tears 
 and prayer wipe out the past and start afresh on an equality 
 with the best in heaven itself ; if I may secure all this by 
 committing my soul to the care of a priest as a guide, claim- 
 ing a fee for his services, these are the easy ways of being 
 saved. 
 
 But no ; while with one breath I proclaim to you the 
 infinite, tender, eternal Fatherhood of God, I proclaim to 
 you, in the next, that there is no such thing as forgiveness 
 in this universe, in the sense of suddenly or miraculously 
 wiping out the past. 
 
 One of the most dangerous doctrines, one of the most 
 immoral doctrines, that can possibly be proclaimed, is that 
 which deludes people with the idea that they can live any 
 life they please, sensual, cruel, dishonest, unkind, deceit- 
 ful, and then, by any process, suddenly wipe the soul clean 
 again. It cannot be done ! 
 
 I break one of God's laws ; and the result remains. God 
 cannot help it unless he can contradict himself ; for these 
 forces that determine the results of action are God in opera- 
 tion, God working, the changeless, the eternal God. God 
 does not need to forgive us in the sense of feeling like 
 a loving father towards us. He always forgives us in that 
 sense ; but, if I break a physical law, the penalty follows, 
 not arbitrary punishment, but the natural and necessary 
 result. If I break a moral law, the penalty follows, the 
 result just the same. 
 
 I stamp my foot on this platform, and it is felt in the sun. 
 
1 86 Religion for To-day 
 
 I think, I feel, I speak, I act, and I have set into activity 
 causes that make the life of the world other than they 
 would have been; and I can never trace those forces or 
 obliterate those results. 
 
 Every law that you break, friends, entails its natural and 
 necessary result of evil. You may, indeed, work out your 
 redemption, your deliverance. You may make your mis- 
 takes and faults stepping-stones on which to climb to 
 higher things ; but that which you have done is done, the 
 record is forever and forever, and the results, until they are 
 worked out into good, continue and remain irretrievably as 
 evil. 
 
 If you injure another, that injury remains until you make 
 restitution. If you have been the means of another person's 
 going astray, and that person causes a third to go astray, 
 and so a long line of evil is started, you may never be able 
 to reach to the end of it or to discover how far it has gone. 
 Forgiving you, taking you in arms of love and mercy, does 
 not stop that process. 
 
 Do not be careless, then, in dealing with these problems 
 of right and wrong under the idea that you can be forgiven 
 in that sense, merely because God is a loving Father. God 
 is a loving Father ; and, because he is a loving Father, he 
 will compel you to work out your own salvation through the 
 suiTering of the natural and necessary result of every word 
 you speak, every thought you think, every act you perform. 
 
 That is the only way by which you can build yourself up 
 into noble and fine and high character again. 
 
 Now, what time there is left, I must dwell, altogether too 
 inadequately, on another phase of this question of Father- 
 hood, of approach to God, that which might well take an en- 
 tire discourse, the problem of prayer. Is there any use 
 
Divine Fatherhood and Human Childhood 187 
 
 in this great universe, of which we are a part to-day, in our 
 praying ? Can we pray ? Is it reasonable to pray ? Can 
 we produce any effects by our prayer ? 
 
 I must only suggest a few things ; and perhaps you will 
 be able to think them out along the line suggested for 
 yourselves. 
 
 There are several phases of prayer which are absolutely 
 gone and can never be recovered again. Our forefathers 
 believed that they could produce rain for their thirsty crops 
 as the result of prayer. They believed that they could cure 
 disease by prayer. They believed that they could work all 
 sorts of miracles, changes in the order of the world, by 
 prayer. 
 
 If I believed I could interfere with the order of this uni- 
 verse by praying, I should never dare to open my lips in 
 prayer again. It is because I believe in the perfect order 
 of the universe of God that I do pray, and that I believe in 
 prayer, not only as much as, but more than, I ever did in 
 my life. Only, mark you, certain discriminating definitions ! 
 
 To illustrate one phase of this matter, let me refer to a 
 conversation I had some years ago with a lady in the West. 
 She was troubled over this question of prayer. I was be- 
 ginning to be troubled over certain phases of it myself. 
 But that which troubled me was my belief in the wisdom 
 and goodness of God, not the opposite. I said to her as 
 we were discussing the matter, " What would you think of 
 me if I should come to you, and plead with you, and beg you 
 to be kind to your own children, to give them something to 
 eat, to give them clothes to wear, to treat them kindly and 
 lovingly ? " I said, " What should you think of me if I 
 should beg you and plead with you to be a good mother ? " 
 She said, '* I should feel insulted." I said, " Of course, you 
 would." And then I asked: " Don't you think God is almost 
 
1 88 Religion for To-day 
 
 as good as you are ? Do you think we need to tell him 
 over and over again what he knows a good deal better than 
 we do ? Do you think we need to argue and plead with him, 
 as though, if we could only influence him to do something, 
 we might have our will ? Do you think it is wise for us to 
 beg God to be good, to talk as though, if we could only 
 rouse him to activity, something might be done ?" 
 
 I have been in prayer-meetings in the old days a hundred 
 times when the praying seemed to me impious and profane, 
 only they did not mean it so. They were talking as though, 
 if God were only as much interested in the welfare of souls 
 as they were, they could get him started to do something 
 about it. 
 
 Does that kind of prayer seem to you right and wise 
 to-day 1 
 
 Nay, friends, I do not believe there is any use in teasing 
 God, in begging God. I do not believe I can change his 
 purposes or plans. I do not believe I can make him wiser 
 than he is already, kinder than he is already. 
 
 Is there any use of praying, then? Sometimes it is said 
 that, if you leave all that element of prayer out, that it 
 becomes only a sort of spiritual gymnastics, producing a 
 certain effect on us, but nothing that might not be accom- 
 plished in another way. 
 
 Let me illustrate, if I may, in a word, one phase of my 
 belief on this great subject. I believe, in the first place, 
 that the more we love God and the more we trust him, the 
 less we shall ask for things, the more we shall simply com- 
 mune with him. Communion of the child-soul with the 
 Father-soul is the essence and most important thing, as I 
 believe, in prayer. 
 
 But do we accomplish anything in the spiritual realm by 
 prayer.? I believe we do. And let me hint by an illus- 
 
Divine Fatherhood and Human Childhood 189 
 
 tration what I mean and how it may be possible : I have a 
 plant, say, that seems to need something to make it grow. 
 It is pining as if it lacked air or sunshine. I am keeping it 
 in my room. Now I wish to produce certain definite and 
 very vital results in that plant. I take the plant out into 
 the sunshine. I take it where it will have the dews and the 
 rain, and where the free airs of heaven will blow around it. 
 I do not change the dew or the rain, or the air or the sun- 
 shine ; but I make my plant live, which would have died 
 otherwise. I change the vital relationship between my 
 plant and the sun and these eternal forces that are con- 
 cerned in its life and unfolding. 
 
 And so, by my prayer, I do not change God any, I do 
 not wish to change him any ; but I may vitally change the 
 relation between my soul and his changeless and eternal 
 love. And so I find life, I find health, where there was 
 weakness and decay. I find strength, I find comfort, be- 
 cause I have changed the relation between my soul and the 
 soul of my Father. 
 
 It seems to me that right in here is the essence, the one 
 most important thing touching the meaning and import 
 of prayer. As we get more spiritual, as we trust our 
 Father more, we shall grow less and less to ask for things ; 
 and at the same time, perhaps, we shall grow less and less 
 critical in our use of words. 
 
 I sometimes wonder whether in public prayer I am not 
 giving utterance to phrases which I should not approve of 
 if I looked at them critically. I try not to do it; but yet, 
 the older I get, the less care I have on this subject. 
 
 My little boy comes and climbs up over my knees, and 
 pours out his child nature in my ears, tells me all sorts of 
 extravagant and foolish things he would like to have and 
 do. Do I criticise him as to the use of his English.? Do 
 
1 90 Religion for To-day 
 
 I care very much what words he uses ? I am not going 
 to give him, even if he cries for it, what I believe would be 
 to his harm. I am going to love him against his will and 
 against his wish and wisdom, if need be ; but I am going 
 to let him tell me his stories, and let him pour out his soul 
 into mine, and I will clasp him close to my heart, whether 
 he is wise or whether he is good, or whether he is the 
 opposite. 
 
 This is the essence, it seems to me, of Fatherhood. Let 
 us, then, not make much of public prayer. Did you ever 
 notice that, if you followed strictly the teaching of Jesus, you 
 would never pray in public at all ? If people were as care- 
 ful to obey his words in these directions as they tell us they 
 ought to in others, public prayer would cease, once for all. 
 Jesus says, " Go into your closet, and shut the door, when 
 you pray, and pray to the Father which is in secret." 
 
 Learn to feel and act as though he were close beside you, 
 watching over you, guiding you. This is the essence of 
 prayer. 
 
 Let us, then, friends, as we study the theological teach- 
 ings of the world, the conceptions of God that are given us 
 to worship and follow, let us bring them to the test of 
 this idea of Fatherhood. If they will not stand that test, 
 you may be sure they are wrong. And remember that God 
 is not only Father, but he is as good and tender and sweet 
 in his Fatherhood at least as we are. 
 
 Remember those words of Jesus where he appeals to the 
 fatherhood of the people who are listening to him. Would 
 you treat your children so t If a child asks bread, will you 
 give him a stone? If he asks fish, will you give him a 
 serpent? If ye, then, being evil, know how to give good 
 things to your children, how much more shall the Father 
 give good things to them that ask him ! 
 
IMMORTALITY FROM THE POINT OF VIEW 
 OF THE MODERN WORLD. 
 
 It seems to me a matter of immense importance to prove, 
 if we can, to demonstrate, that death is not the end of 
 personal conscious existence. We may hope, we may- 
 dream, we may cling to this faith lovingly, tenderly ; but it is 
 something else for us to be able to say we know. 
 
 Why is it important ? Does it change anything > It 
 seems to me that it changes certain things in the most 
 important of all conceivable ways. 
 
 If I am going to live fifty years, I would certainly lay out 
 my life on a different scale than might be perfectly appro- 
 priate if I were to live only six months or one year. ( If, when 
 I get through with this little scene of affairs on this visible 
 earth and under this visible sky, I get through for good and 
 all, then there are a thousand things that it would not seem 
 to me at any rate worth while to attempt to do or to become. 
 ( If a man with his friends is going out on an excursion to 
 camp in the woods for a few weeks, he does not consider 
 it of any great importance that he build himself a sub-^. 
 stantial house that would stand for five hundred years) ^ If a 
 young man is going through Columbia University, and if he 
 knows that he is to die and that is to be the end of it on 
 the day that he graduates, will he feel stimulated to study, 
 to make himself master of all those things that otherwise he 
 might strive to acquire ? Would you blame him any if he 
 
1 92 Religion for To-day 
 
 / tried simply to have a pleasant time during those four years ? 
 f He need not injure any one, he need not lead what we would 
 call an immoral life;- but, certainly, you would not think him 
 culpable for not bending all his energies to the acquirement 
 of knowledge that was to be of no practical use to him 
 whatever ! 
 
 But, if the graduation day is not the end, but only the 
 beginning of a long career, then would he not feel that it 
 was worth while to brace himself physically, mentally, 
 morally, to acquire self-mastery, to learn all those things 
 which will make him mighty in shaping his future life among 
 his fellow-men ? 
 
 So, if I have before me an immortal career, that is one 
 thing. 
 
 I wish you to note, friends, that, whether we have or 
 not, the essential principles of morality, of right and wrong, 
 are not changed. If we should wake up on a floating raft 
 at sea, knowing that our lives were to extend no more than 
 twenty-four hours, even then it would not be right for us to 
 injure each other, and make our position more uncomfortable 
 than it need to be. But, if men are not to live in the future, 
 I do not believe that your grandest moral ideals are going 
 to have leverage power enough to lift them out of their 
 selfishness, and make them lead grand, magnificent, conse- 
 crated lives. 
 
 I know that George Eliot sings her wondrous song of the 
 choir invisible, and tells us how grand a thing it is to live 
 for the coming generations here on earth, though she 
 herself held and cherished no belief in an immortal career 
 beyond. But tell me why, friends ! If a man says to me, 
 looking me straight in the face, Why should I sacrifice 
 myself for the sake of another man whose happiness is no 
 
Immortality 193 
 
 more important to the universe than my own, what can 
 I say to him ? 
 
 It seems to me that if I believed that when I died that 
 was the end, I should try not to injure anybody. I should 
 indeed work hard, perhaps, to make the lives of my fellow- 
 men a little easier, to lessen the amount of pain and suffer- 
 ing in the world. But I should certainly not think it worth 
 while strenuously to endeavor to build up in me a spiritual 
 nature that can find scant room for exercise here. I do 
 not see how any one could find fault with me so long as I 
 injured no one, but tried to help on the common happiness, 
 if I made the aim of my life the seeking of happiness, 
 happiness in innocence, harmlessness to others. 
 
 But, if I believe that the day of my death is the day of 
 my graduation, that I am just beginning to live then, that 
 this life is only a college course by way of preparation for 
 the next, if I believe that with my whole soul, then nothing 
 else becomes of any great importance. 
 
 \^ You remember that significant word of Browning's in the 
 introduction to his poem of " Sordello," where he says, " The 
 culture of a soul; little else is of any value." If I am a 
 soul, and if my soul begins its career at death, then indeed 
 it is true, and I can look the world in the face and preach 
 it with all my power, it is indeed true that little else is of 
 value. 
 
 What difference does it make whether you are very rich 
 in this world or not.? Vv^hat difference does it make 
 whether you live on one of the finest avenues or on a more 
 common street ? What difference does it make what kind 
 of clothing you wear ? What difference does it make what 
 office you hold or what social position you enjoy ? These 
 things are all well in their places ; but, if you really believe 
 
1 94 Religiofi for To-day 
 
 the other thing with your whole soul, then the main purpose 
 of your life and it is the only rational thing will be 
 devoted to what you can become and to what you can^ 
 athieve for others. Then indeed those words of Jesus 
 gain magnificent significance : He that saveth his life 
 shall lose it ; and he that loseth his life for the truth, for 
 God, is the only one who saves it. / 
 
 I You see, then, that kncjwledge on this subject has a tre- 
 f mendous bearing on the kind of life we should lead here. 
 !i I believe indeed I suggest this in passing -^that there is 
 nothing like demonstrated knowledge here so well fitted to 
 help us solve the great social and industrial problems of the 
 world. The masses of men in Europe and America are 
 saying. You have been trying through all the ages to put 
 us off by telling us that we ought to be content in that 
 position in which Providence has placed us, and look for 
 our reward in another world. And they are beginning to 
 say: We doubt about that other world: it looks like a 
 device on the part of the comfortable, with the assistance 
 of the priests, to keep us quiet ; and we do not propose to 
 be fooled by it any longer. We wish our share of the only 
 good about which we really know anything. 
 And can you blame them ? I cannot. 
 But, if I can look these men in the faces, and say, I know 
 and you know that you are souls, that you are to live forever, 
 then I can say to them also : Do you not see that it is only 
 reasonable that you should go through this world in such a 
 way as to start with all the advantage possible over there ? 
 Do you not see that these men who have the money and the 
 social position have what is relatively of no importance 
 whatever ? You have God and the immortal life, all that 
 is capable of making wealthy a soul, a child of the Infinite. 
 
Immortality 195 
 
 So I say, look at it however I will, it seems to me of im-l 
 mense importance that we should be able, if we may, to 
 demonstrate continued existence. 
 
 (^ I ask you now to look over the face of the world with me 
 for a little, and see where we are as touching this matter of 
 belief concerning a future life. 
 
 I use the word "future " in connection with this life. Let 
 us remember, however, that it is not future except as related 
 to us who are speaking. If our friends who have passed 
 over are alive at all, they are alive now in the same natural 
 sense as we are, and under the same universe and beneath 
 the guidance of the same Father that we are. 
 
 What is the condition, then, of the modern world as to this \ 
 matter of belief in continued existence ? There are, I know, 
 vast numbers of people( in all the churche^ who have taken | 
 this belief for granted. It has come to them from the pa3t % 
 as a tradition. I They have said. There must have been ade- ? 
 quate reason for the belief when it first took possession 'of I 
 the hearts of men ; and they have not been troubled by any i 
 manner of doubt.") i 
 
 \ Blessed, in one way, at least, are these souls that are un- 
 troubled. I would not speak one word that should touch 
 the beautiful fabric of their belief. I would not undermine 
 their trust : I would help them to maintain it as long as they 
 ma;^ But I am compelled to recognize the fact that only a ' 
 small part of the people to-day are thus contented and satis- \ 
 fied. There are those in our old churches and this is 
 another class from the one I have just been speaking of 
 who have accepted this belief as a tradition, who have not 
 questioned it, but who, when the great strain of sorrow 
 comes, find that the cables which are attached to the an- 
 chors of their hope down in the deep sea give way ; and they 
 find themselves adrift and in doubt. "5 
 
196 Religion for To-day 
 
 I had, for example, not a great while ago a letter from a 
 lady only two or three years married, looking with hope and 
 joy towards the future, whose husband suddenly was snatched 
 out of her arms by death. And she wrote me I had never 
 seen her and said : " I have for years been a member of 
 one of the old churches. I supposed I believed ; but now, 
 when this great trial comes, everything is gone." As I read 
 the letter, I could hear the tears drip from the first word to 
 the last. And she wrote : Tell me, do you believe, is there 
 any reason for trust in God ? May I hope for a future life t 
 I have written you, and not gone to my own minister, be- 
 cause from the position which you occupy I know you would 
 tell me just what you think, not what you think you ought to 
 think. If I go to my own minister, I am afraid he will tell 
 me what he thinks the Church will expect him to say. 
 
 So, when these great tests come, so frequently the faith 
 gives way. 
 
 I attended the funeral of the wife of one of my old friends 
 in Boston this last week. The wife's father was there from 
 a distant city. The relation between the daughter and 
 father had been peculiarly close and strong. He whispered 
 in my ear just as soon as the service was over that he 
 wished he could believe. He said, " I have been trained in 
 the old church ; but I find my faith growing very dim as I 
 get older." 
 
 And it seems to me that most men, as they get on into 
 middle life, find this trust getting unreal to them ; and they 
 wish they knew. 
 
 Only a little while ago a novel was published and widely 
 read. One of its characters was an Episcopal rector and 
 another an old gentleman, his long-time friend, with whom 
 and others he had been accustomed to play a quiet game 
 
Immortality 197 
 
 of whist of an evening. The old gentleman is dying, and 
 he sends for his rector ; and, when he comes, he looks into 
 his face, and says : Now I want to ask you a question ; and 
 I want you to answer me as man to man. Do not give me 
 your official opinion. As a man and a friend, do you know 
 anything about it 1 And, so adjured, he says, No, I do not. 
 
 I instance these cases simply to show that so many times, 
 when this traditionally and generally accepted faith is put to 
 the test, it gives way. 
 
 You find, on the other hand, some who have given it up. 
 Harriet Martineau used to say, as she grew older, that she 
 did not care for any future life : I am tired. All I want is 
 rest. I do not desire any future life. She did not care to 
 have it proved to her. I have had the same thing said to 
 me in the course of my life a great many times. But I have 
 replied : 
 
 You are mistaken, if you say this, in interpreting your 
 own state of mind. You are not tired of living. You are 
 tired of carrying burdens. You are tired of certain condi- 
 tions that are hard, and from which you have not been able 
 to escape. You are heart-hungry, you are weary : you are 
 not tired of living. And so I say concerning this state of 
 mind, as Tennyson says in " The Two Voices " : 
 
 " 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 ; v 
 More life, and fuller, that I want." ) 
 
 Another class of thinkers at the present time are those 
 that call themselves agnostics. If you go back a little ways, 
 
198 Religion for To-day 
 
 two or three hundred years, you come to a time when the 
 people thought that they knew more about the other world 
 than they did about this one even. Read Dante. He maps 
 out the Inferno and the Paradiso as no geographer could 
 map this planet; and they all believed that it was real, 
 they lived in the other world. The strongest men of the 
 age believed so thoroughly that everything else gave way in 
 view of preparation for that which was to come after death. 
 
 But there came the Renaissance, which was a sort of re- 
 awakening to the life of this present world. Out of that 
 sprung the scientific spirit ; and out of that has grown the 
 agnostic. 
 
 What is the scientific spirit ? Is there any evil about it ? 
 No. It is nothing more nor less than the reasonable de- 
 mand on the part of reasonable men and women that they 
 should have proof for that which is presented to them for 
 acceptance. 
 
 Mr. Huxley went so far as to say that he believed it was 
 immoral for people to believe without any proof. A doubt \ 
 is as sacred as faith, and the only object of either of them is 
 to lead to the discovery of truth. 
 
 The scientific man, then, is no enemy to the future life : 
 he simply wishes what I wish, to know. 
 
 They used to sing, you know, about making their "title 
 clear to mansions in the skies " ; and it was lovely, so long 
 as people could believe that the titles were clear. But, 
 when the scientific investigators asked leave to look into 
 these titles and see if they were valid, the most of them 
 were found not to bear a very close or careful investigation. 
 
 So people woke up, and were obliged to confess that they 
 did not know so much about the other world as they had 
 supposed. So here is this agnostic position. 
 
 o 
 
Immortality 1 99 
 
 I have never met an agnostic who was glad to be one, 
 not if he was a sensible man at the same time. He simply 
 says : I must confine myself to that which is true. I must 
 know: I cannot rest in simply what is called "faith," which 
 is shutting the eyes and believing in the dark. I wish evi- 
 dence for these great things that we are told are founded 
 in the eternal nature of the universe. 
 
 Now let us look for a moment at still another class. We 
 come to those that are ready to argue with us to-day that 
 we have adequate reason for believing in continued exist- 
 ence simply on the basis of the story that Jesus, after being 
 crucified, was raised again from the grave, in the same 
 body which he wore when he was on the cross. This is 
 offered to the world to-day. I have seen two or three times, 
 several times within the last week or two, the argument 
 made that here is the Gibraltar of Christianity, here is the 
 one reason for our believing in continued existence. 
 
 I wish, as carefully as I may, to look at this for a little, 
 and see how much it means. You are not to suppose that 
 I am done with it when I have treated this point with which 
 I am immediately concerned. I shall wish to refer to it a 
 little later on. 
 
 I say then, friends, frankly to you that, even if I believed 
 that the physical body of Jesus was raised from the tomb, I 
 should fail utterly to see how it carried any hope or ade- 
 quate comfort for me. 
 
 Take it on the old theory that Jesus was God. If God 
 continues to live through what is ordinarily called the fact 
 of death, how does it prove that I am to continue to live, 
 when I am not God ? If a physical body is raised from the 
 grave, how does that prove that I am to continue to live 
 when I have no sort of expectation that my physical body 
 
200 Religion for To-day 
 
 is ever to be raised ? I cannot see the vital link of connec- 
 tion that is supposed to make this belief valid. 
 
 And, then, I must say to you with perfect frankness that I 
 do not regard the evidence that is offered to us in behalf of 
 the contention that the physical body of Jesus was raised 
 from the dead as valid in any way whatsoever. We have 
 not even one first-hand witness of such an occurrence. Paul 
 tells us that he saw Jesus ; but he does not claim to have 
 seen him in the body, it was a vision after his supposed 
 ascension. We have no jfirst-hand testimony. 
 
 And, then, I wish you to note another thing. A story 
 like that never could have grown up in the modern world. 
 When heaven was supposed to be just above this arch of 
 blue, and when an atmosphere that any man could breathe 
 was supposed to fill the space between where the throne of 
 God is and this earth, then it is conceivable that a body 
 might pass up through this atmosphere, and enter into that 
 abode. But, when we know now that anything constituted 
 as we are cannot possibly live for five minutes after it ha? 
 passed beyond a certain distance in the sky; and, when we 
 know that there is no heaven with the throne of God, on 
 the right hand of which any one could sit down, just above 
 this dome of blue ; when we know it would take light thou- 
 sands of years to reach the centre of the universe, if there 
 be any centre, which no man knows, do you not see 
 that a conception like that cannot reasonably live for five 
 minutes in this universe where we find our home .-* 
 
 We must dismiss that, then, it seems to me, as the basis 
 for our belief in continued existence after the experience of 
 death.) 
 
 And yet, in spite of agnostics, in spite of all the clear- 
 headed and earnest-hearted criticism of the modern world, 
 
Immortality 201 
 
 in spite of the doubt that is everywhere in the air, the 
 human heart still pleads for its dead, still longs for some 
 hope that those that have been loved shall not be forever 
 lostA And, in the face of these critics, we find men like 
 Oliver Wendell Holmes uttering his passionate remon- 
 strance : 
 
 " Is this the whole sad story of creation, 
 
 Lived by its breathing myriads o'er and o'er, 
 One glimpse of day, then black annihilation, 
 A sunlit passage to a sunless shore ? 
 
 " Give back our faith, ye mystery-solving lynxes I 
 Robe us once more in heaven-aspiring creeds I 
 Happier was dreaming Egypt with her Sphinxes, 
 The stony convent with its cross and beads ! " 
 
 I sympathize with and my whole heart leaps in response 
 to this plea of our beloved poet Holmes, all but the last 
 part of it, which I utterly repudiate. Would it be better to 
 have faith in a future life with the Sphinxes and the civiliza- 
 tion of ancient Egypt ? Would it be better to have faith in 
 a future life with the convents of the Middle Ages and the 
 cold and hard creeds ? Nay, friends ! 
 
 I do not know whether you will say Amen to this utter- 
 ance of mine or not, but I must say it with all the fervor of 
 my soul: If I could have an immortal heaven, with all I 
 love, ever have loved, ever shall love, grouped around me 
 there, and have it at the price of the eternal loss and wail 
 of the poorest, meanest soul that ever lived, I would turn 
 my back on it, and go gladly to sleep in eternal night. 
 
 I have no respect for that man who is willing to take 
 heaven for himself at the price of hell for anything that 
 ever lived. I do not say, then, better the dreaming Egypt 
 
202 Religion for To-day 
 
 of the Sphinxes, better the stony convent with its cross and 
 beads. No belief at all is better than a belief that God is 
 Jieartless and cruel, and that the smoke of the torment of 
 the great majority is to ascend and cloud the fair heavens 
 "for ever and ever. 
 
 But that is not the alternative, as I believe. 
 
 ,et us see, then, where we are. j Now I do not propose 
 at first to offer you what I regard as proof. I only propose 
 to outline for you two or three considerations which seem 
 to me to establish a tremendous, a magnificent probability 
 in that direction. 
 
 And, first, it seems to me one of the most striking facts in 
 the history of this world that practically all men everywhere 
 have believed. No matter what their reason for believing, 
 the simple fact that they have cherished a belief, is it not 
 wonderful ? 
 
 f Here is a body from which the life has departed. It 
 looks, friends, does it not, as though it were all over? 
 Whence, then, springs that audacious, that magnificent 
 trust that there was something in this body, or connected 
 with it, that is able to overleap that black and apparently 
 bottomless abyss, and start on its endless career of light on 
 the other side? ') 
 
 If you should see a dog bent pensively over the body of 
 one of his fellow-dogs, and you could know he was asking 
 the question: If a dog die, shall he live again? you would 
 think you were in the presence of something unspeakably 
 strange, wonderful. 
 
 The simple fact, then, that men have dared to dream of a 
 future life seems to me marvellous in its significance ; and I 
 am inclined to beUeve that trust everywhere connected with 
 love and hope in human souls comes from a whisper of our 
 
Immortality 203 
 
 Father in heaven. I believe that it means something very 
 grand and full of cheer and peace. 
 
 Another thought. When modern science first began to 
 gain its wondrous development in the world, there was for 
 a long time the feeling and fear that some theory of mate- 
 rialism would ultimately gain dominance, and control the 
 beliefs of men. 
 
 But, note, it is not the Church, it is not religion, that 
 
 has killed materialism : it is fearless study that has killed it. 
 
 { Materialism, as philosophy and science to-day, is antiquated 
 
 and dead. It has no standing among the finest and most 
 
 scholarly thinkers of the world. 
 
 There is no possibility out of any combination you please 
 of dead matter of producing a thought, feeling, love, or 
 hope. And the simple fact, then, that we place man, soul, 
 first, and matter afterwards, seems to me to have a tre- 
 mendous significance in this direction. 
 
 Spenser, the old poet, the author of the " Faery Queen," 
 is the author also of two lines suggestive in this direction. 
 
 He says, 
 
 " For of the soul the body form doth take ; 
 For soul is form, and doth the body make." 
 
 I believe life is first. Life creates and shapes what we 
 call matter, without knowing anything about what matter 
 really is. ) 
 
 One other consideration : This universe, just as far as we 
 are able to trace it, we find to be a reasonable universe. So 
 we are compelled to believe that rationality runs through 
 I and characterizes all that which to us at present is still un- 
 known. It is a reasonable universe. Now think! I, for 
 one, cannot believe that it is reasonable to suppose that the 
 universe takes such pains through millions of years to ac- 
 
204 Religion for To-day 
 
 complish magnificent results for nothing at all ! From the 
 fire-mist, millions of years, until this little earth of ours 
 swings, a globe, around the sun ; thousands on thousands 
 of years while it cools, and until it becomes the abode of 
 sense and life; thousands on thousands of years while 
 the lower forms of life dominate it, while it is climbing 
 up through fish and bird and mammal to man ; then thou- 
 sands on thousands of years while man is going through the 
 process of preparation ; thousands on thousands of years 
 while humanity climbs up at last to the height of Homer, 
 Pericles, Virgil, Goethe, Shakspere, to the more magnificent 
 heights of Confucius, Gautama, Mohammed,^'^ST ; climb- 
 ing up to these magnificent peaks of intellectual and spirit- 
 ual light and power. 
 
 Now, friends, I find it almost impossible to believe that 
 .A^<> through millions of years of preparation the universe should 
 have reached on and on up to the production of these marvel- 
 lous results for the sake of what? Nothing! To snuff 
 out all that it has taken such pains to produce, to end in a 
 blank after such elaborate and careful preparation ! 
 
 It seems to me absurd. And so, if I had no other reason 
 than this, I should still trust in continued existence after 
 death, trust that this magnificent work which the universe 
 has been at such pains to perfect would continue, and mean 
 something in the ages that are to come. 
 
 But I frankly say to you that these things are not what 
 i scientists would call demonstration, they are not absolute 
 ' proof : they are simply magnificent probabilities. 
 
 Then is there anything else ? I wish now to call your 
 
 attention to a class of facts that have only recently come to 
 
 be recognized seriously by the earnest and competent stu- 
 
 f dents of the world. A few years ago a man appeared in 
 
Immortality 205 
 
 France who claimed to have discovered a power that after 
 him came to be called " Mesmerism." Now the same thing 
 is called hypnotism, the name only being changed. 
 ( A biassed scientific commission was appointed to investi- 
 gate the matter while Mesmer still lived; and they pro- 
 nounced it all delusion and fraud. J To-day there is not a 
 competent thinker on the face of the earth who does not 
 know that a hundred times more than Mesmer claimed is 
 true. 
 
 What does this mean? It means simply that we are 
 beginning to study these wonderful minds of ours. The 
 mind of man is the last continent on earth to be explored. 
 Until these very modern years it has been more unknown 
 than the wilds of darkest Africa itself. We are, however, 
 beginning to study the mind of man. We have found not 
 only that these marvellous things are true; but we have 
 found that clairvoyance, clairaudience, and telepathy are 
 real. I mean by this, be sure you understand me, not 
 that all that is said by those who claim to be clairvoyant 
 and clairaudient is so. No. I simply mean that these 
 powers exist. 
 
 What does this mean.? It means that these wondrous 
 minds of ours, these souls, ourselves, can, under certain 
 conditions, see without any eyes and hear without any ears, 
 and communicate half-way round the globe, without any 
 of the ordinary means of communication. What does that 
 mean t Does it prove a future life ? Not at all. But I 
 suggest to you as to whether it does not take a significant 
 step in that direction. 
 f It is said that Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore 
 Parker were one day taking a walk in Concord when a 
 believer in the Second Advent rushed wildly up to them, 
 
2o6 Religion for To-day 
 
 and told them that the world was very near its end. I omit 
 Theodore Parker's reply, which was very witty, but irrele- 
 vant here, and call your attention only to that of Emerson. 
 Emerson said : " Well, my friend, suppose the world is com- 
 ing to an end ! I think I can get along without it ! " 
 
 Now the point I wish you to note as the suggestion of this 
 reply of Emerson's is this : If a mind can see without eyes, 
 if it can hear without ears, if it can communicate without 
 a tongue, and that without much regard to distance in 
 space, in other words, if I can get along for awhile with- 
 out so many of these faculties and powers of the body, 
 may it not be reasonable for me to believe that I can get 
 along without it entirely ? 
 
 There is another whole class of facts which I must 
 suggest to you. I shall not go into them to-day in the way 
 of giving specific and detailed experiences. I now simply 
 make certain assertions, which I am ready to prove when- 
 ever called upon to do so.) 
 
 There is in existence, as most of you are aware, in Eng- 
 land and this country, a Society for Psychical Research. It 
 is a society that investigates that whole class of alleged 
 facts and happenings which have been believed in from the 
 beginning of the world, but which, by educated people in our 
 modern life, have been brushed one side and treated with 
 contempt. 
 
 I have been studying these matters now for over twenty 
 years, with no personal bias, with no personal wish, why 
 should any one have a wish of that sort t to believe what is 
 not true, but simply with a desire to find out what sort of 
 being I am, and whether there is any scientific reason for 
 trusting that I may overleap the fact of death. 
 
 Now I wish you to note, friends, one fact. The things 
 
Immortality 207 
 
 that are asserted to be taking place in the modern world are 
 precisely similar to the happenings of which the Bible, Old 
 Testament and New, is full, precisely similar facts. 
 There is not a religion on the face of the earth that has not 
 had its birth in the midst of alleged facts of a similar kind. 
 There is not a nation on the face of the earth that has not 
 been telling these stories from the beginning. 
 
 ( What are they ? They are visions, they are voices, they 
 are messages coming from across the border. They are 
 based on the idea that the other world is as real as this, 
 and that at times the partition is so thin that we can gain 
 glimpses through and hear words that are uttered, that 
 sometimes even the denizens of that world on special mis- 
 sions do appear in this. ) 
 
 If you are not ready to investigate facts like these in the 
 modern world, why should you believe precisely similar 
 tales two thousand, three thousand, four thousand years 
 old, on the testimony of nobody knows whom, when you 
 cannot possibly investigate them to find out whether they 
 are creditable witnesses or not or whether they really saw 
 what they asserted took place ? 
 
 I leave you face to face with that dilemma. 
 There is not a belief in a future life on the face of the 
 earth to-day that does not reach back to some asserted hap- 
 pening of this particular kind. 
 
 ( Now a word in regard to the reappearance of Jesus after 
 death. I told you that I did not believe that the body, the 
 physical body, of /esus, was raised from the dead. I do be- 
 lieve, however, that his disciples saw him and talked with 
 him. I do not consider that the evidence that has come 
 down to us, two thousand years old, is sufficient to establish 
 that belief. But I believe that similar things have happened 
 
2o8 Religion for To-day 
 
 in the modern world. Therefore, I can believe that they 
 may have happened then. 
 
 I believe that Jesus was seen. 1 believe that this mag- 
 nificent fact is that which inspired the early Church and 
 gave us our Easter morn. I believe that the story which 
 grew up years and years afterwards (that his physical body 
 disappeared from the tomb of Joseph) is not supported by 
 adequate proof ; and, if it were, it would only be a difficulty 
 to my faith. 
 
 Jesus did not want his physical body any more than I 
 shall want mine ; and what the early disciples needed was 
 not the belief that his physical body was raised from the 
 dead, for that must die again if it were, but that Jesus 
 lived right through death. 
 
 I do not believe in death any more. I believe in life. I 
 believe I am to go through that process that they call death 
 no more disturbed or troubled or changed than I am by the 
 fact that I went through the sleep of last night and waked up 
 this morning. 
 
 This is my belief : I believe that Jesus lived, that all live 
 unto God. " He is not a God of the dead, but of the living." 
 
 Now at the end. I should be ready, friends, at the proper 
 time and place to adduce what I call good evidence in a 
 court of justice for all that I have said. I cannot go into it 
 this morning ; but here at the close I wish to suggest one 
 thought for our comfort, and give you two or three quota- 
 tions, because they are such beautiful expressions of what is 
 my real belief. 
 
 You know there are certain high mountains which catch 
 the first rays of the morning's sun ; and it is hours and hours 
 after that before the plains and the valleys are light. So 
 there are mountainous men, seers, taller men intellectually 
 
Immortality 209 
 
 and spiritually than you and I, who can see away over our 
 heads. The divine sunrise smites them first ; they look away 
 down the future ; they see things which are not yet visible 
 to us. So we call them seers. Their vision is not scientific 
 proof ; but the experience of the world has justified our trust 
 in them so many times that I find it easy to believe them. 
 
 Now I wish to read you the expression of the trust of two 
 or three of these seers. 
 
 First, a few lines from Edward Rowland Sill, a young 
 American poet who died of consumption at about the age 
 of thirty, but who had the promise in him of wonderful 
 things, could he have lived : 
 
 What if, some morning when the stars were paling 
 And the dawn whitened and the East was clear, 
 Strange peace and rest fell on me from the presence 
 Of a benignant Spirit standing near : 
 
 And I should tell him, as he stood beside me, 
 " This is our earth, most friendly earth and fair ; 
 Daily its sea and shore through sun and shadow 
 Faithful it turns, robed in its azure air : 
 
 " There is blest living here, loving and serving 
 And quest of truth and serene friendship dear ; 
 But stay not, Spirit! Earth has one destroyer 
 His name is Death : flee, lest he find thee here ! " 
 
 And what if then, while the still morning brightened 
 And freshened in the elm the summer's breath. 
 Should gravely smile on me the gentle angel, ^ 
 
 And take my hand and say, '* My name is Death " ? ] 
 
 Then just those sweet words of Tennyson, the last that 
 appear in his volume of completed poems, " Crossing 
 the Bar": 
 
2IO Religion for To-day 
 
 Sunset and evening star, 
 
 And one clear call for me ! 
 And may there be no moaning of the bar 
 
 When I put out to sea. 
 
 But such a tide as moving seems asleep, 
 
 Too full for sound and foam, 
 "When that which drew from out the boundless deep 
 
 Turns again home. 
 
 Twilight and evening bell, 
 
 And after that the dark ! 
 And may there be no sadness of farewell 
 
 When I embark ; 
 
 For though from out our bourne of Time and Place 
 
 The flood may bear me far, 
 I hope to see my Pilot face to face, 
 
 When I have crost the bar. 
 
 And now one more word, and this time the last thing in 
 the volume of Walt Whitman's poems : 
 
 Joy! Shipmate joy! 
 { Pleased to my soul at death I cry) 
 Our life is closed our life begins ; 
 The long, long anchorage we leave, 
 The ship is clear at last she leaps ! 
 She swiftly courses from the shore ; 
 Joy! Shipmate joy! 
 
HELL AND HEAVEN. 
 
 Paul says : " Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he 
 also reap." 
 
 This figure, borrowed from the experiences of the farmer, 
 chimes in perfectly with the law of the universe which has 
 only been clearly discovered and scientifically demonstrated 
 in our own day. We are under the reign of law. What we 
 are, what we have been, what we shall be, is determined in 
 accordance with it. And this reign of law is not confined 
 to this life or to this planet. It is universal, one God, one 
 law, throughout the universe. 
 
 I leave this, then, simply as the underlying principle 
 which is to determine the course of our discussion con- 
 cerning the essential things which make up hell, which 
 constitute heaven in this world, in all worlds. 
 
 In order that the matter may be made very clear to us, I 
 shall be obliged this morning, in che first place, to touch on 
 the doctrines of hell and heaven as they are set forth in the 
 Old and New Testaments and in the traditions and creeds 
 of the popular churches. Then I shall consider the ques- 
 tion as to who are to inhabit these hells or heavens, as to 
 what reason we have if we have any for holding to the 
 traditional views, and then outline for you what seem to 
 me to be the eternal and necessary truths connected with 
 character, and which therefore must determine the matter 
 of happiness or suffering in any part of the universe. 
 
212 Religion for To-day 
 
 If any one supposes that I might omit the earlier part of 
 my theme, I simply say in reply that we cannot know any- 
 thing alone, anything as set apart and separated from every- 
 thing else. In order to understand the present conditions 
 of theological thought in regard to these matters and what 
 I believe to be the thought of the future, we need to under- 
 stand, at least in outline, the thought of the past out of 
 which present conditions have sprung. 
 
 And we must remember here the principle which I have 
 enunciated possibly more than once during the course of 
 this past winter ; and that is that theologies, religious the- 
 ories, are necessarily and intimately associated with geo- 
 graphical and scientific ideas, always a cosmology inti- 
 mately linked with every theological scheme. 
 
 In order, then, that you may know where hell and heaven 
 have been conceived to be in the past, you need to have in 
 your mind again a clear conception of the world or universe 
 as it was held in the past. 
 
 I have already told you I simply remind you of it 
 that the old universe was very small. Until within a few 
 hundred years, in the thought of mankind, the entire uni- 
 verse was not so large as we know the orbit of the moon to 
 be to-day. Here was the little, flat, stationary earth. A few 
 miles only above the blue dome was heaven, as material 
 and real in that sense as the earth itself. 
 
 Visit the Plains of Shinar, for a hint of Hebrew thought, 
 and see the builders starting their tower with which they 
 verily believed they would be able to climb up into heaven. 
 This indicates how small the world was to their thought, 
 and how short a distance away heaven was supposed 
 to be. 
 
 It was not confined to the Hebrews. Go back among the 
 
Hell and Heaven 2 1 3 
 
 Greeks and Romans, and you will find the Titans piling 
 mountains on top of each other, so that they may be able 
 to scale heaven, and attack the gods in their very seats. 
 This lets you into the child-world thought about the uni- 
 verse. 
 
 Now in that universe where was heaven and where was 
 hell ? and what kind of places were they ? 
 
 Heaven, as I said, was just above the blue dome ; and, 
 when they came to believe in hell at all, it was a cavern 
 just a little ways underground. And you need only to 
 study mediaeval literature, the traditions and stories of the 
 saints, to study Dante, to go back and read Virgil and 
 Homer, in order to come face to face with the real belief of 
 the common people that there was a cave, if they could 
 only find it, through which they could descend into the 
 underworld. And they believed that the inhabitants of this 
 underworld frequently emerged from this cave, and in- 
 terfered in all sorts of ways with what was going on here 
 among men. 
 
 This, then, is the general picture that you must have in 
 your mind. 
 
 Now I wish to bring you face to face with something 
 that seems to me strange, and which I have never been able 
 to explain. Moses, it is said, being the reputed son of 
 Pharaoh's daughter, was brought up and trained in all the 
 learning of the Egyptians ; and we know that the Egyptians 
 believed so vividly in the other life that it was as real to 
 them as this was. They had their hells and their heavens, 
 their places of punishment and their places of reward ; and 
 they pictured in their " Book of the Dead " the souls just 
 freed from the body as going before the judges, their gods, 
 and their thoughts, their whole course of life, being esti- 
 
214 Religion for To-day 
 
 mated and weighed before they were assigned their places 
 in the other world. 
 
 And yet, when we come to Moses as dealing with the 
 children of Israel, we find no belief in any future life, in 
 heaven or hell either, for the ordinary inhabitants of the 
 earth. 
 
 Did it ever occur to you that throughout the entire Old 
 Testament history there were only two persons ever repre- 
 sented as having gone to heaven ? They were Enoch and 
 Elijah, both of whom were translated and taken up into 
 the presence of the angels, where God held his court. 
 Throughout the entire Old Testament history nobody else 
 was ever thought of as having gone to heaven, in the mod- 
 ern sense of that word. 
 
 And what, perhaps, will surprise you even more, there is 
 nobody throughout the Old Testament history who is ever 
 represented as having gone to hell at all, in the modern 
 sense of that word. 
 
 It is partly the fault of the translators, and it is partly 
 the fact that words change their meaning ; but I wish you 
 to note what is true, that there is not one single instance 
 in the Old Testament, from its first word to its last, where 
 the term "hell" means hell in the ordinary orthodox signifi- 
 cance of that term. 
 
 What the Jews believed was something like this : At first, 
 as I said, in the early part of their history, they had little 
 belief in angels or spirits at all. And let me postpone 
 what I was going to say for a moment, while I enlarge 
 upon this idea to make it a little clearer. 
 
 You are familiar with the fact that in the New Testament 
 the Sadducees are represented as the great typical doubters. 
 They were the ones who had no belief in angels or spirits. 
 
Hell and Heave, 
 
 What it means was that the Sadducees were really the old- 
 fashioned conservatives among the Jews : they held to what 
 was the old-time Mosaic belief, the belief of the Pentateuch. 
 They rejected the later, new-fangled traditions that had 
 sprung up, as they held, without any Scriptural authority 
 or warrant. This means that towards the latter part of the 
 history of the Jews they began to have a growing belief 
 in a real and active life after death. There is no trace of 
 any commonly-accepted ideas about angels or spirits until 
 the time of the captivity, when they came into contact with 
 the Persians and Babylonians, who had these beliefs fully 
 developed. 
 
 Sheol, the old word sometimes translated " hell," sometimes 
 " the grave," Sheol was simply an underground cavern in 
 general, a place where people went when they died; but 
 it was not a place of conscious, active existence. The 
 souls, if they really had souls, were supposed to be inhabit- 
 ing this underground cavern in a sort of sleep, semi-con- 
 scious or unconscious condition. There was no real active 
 life. 
 
 Read, as bearing on this subject, certain passages in 
 the Old Testament, which I have not time to go into 
 an explanation of in full. The Old Testament says there 
 is no work, there is no joy, there is no anything in 
 Sheol. The inhabitants of Sheol do not praise God any 
 more. This is the Old Testament idea in regard to the 
 underworld. 
 
 By and by, as I said, at the time of Jesus, continued 
 existence and places for the good and the bad were quite 
 developed in the popular mind ; but they had not got them- 
 selves written into those books which became a part of the 
 Canonical Scriptures. So the statement I made as to the 
 
2 1 6 Religioii for To-day 
 
 teaching of the Old Testament on this subject is literally 
 true. 
 
 What was the belief at the time^of Christ? Nobody 
 then went to heaven, however good they might be. They 
 believed that the souls of the dead continued to exist and 
 were conscious ; but they all went down into Hades. Hades 
 is simply the Greek term for Sheol, meaning substantially 
 the same thing, a cavern under the surface of the earth. 
 
 When Jesus, for example, on the cross is represented as 
 saying to the penitent thief, " This day shalt thou be with 
 me in Paradise," he did not mean thou shalt be with me 
 in heaven ; for it was not supposed that Jesus himself was 
 going to heaven. He was going down to Hades, this under- 
 world. 
 
 But by this time the underworld had been divided into 
 two parts. On the one side was the place where the happy 
 were supposed to abide, the good; the other, the bad. 
 One was called Paradise : the other was called Gehenna. 
 But both of them were in this underground cavern. 
 
 When Jesus was raised from the dead, I am now setting 
 forth the popular belief, it was supposed that he broke 
 through this prison-house where all souls had been hidden 
 away from the beginning of the world. And in the New 
 Testament you remember the passage where it says, "He 
 led captivity captive." This is simply a Hebraic expression, 
 meaning only that he led up with him, when he went into 
 heaven, a multitude of the good who had been held captive 
 in the underworld until that time. So that here is the first 
 time in the history of the Hebrew or Christian thought when 
 any of the souls of the good went to heaven. When Jesus 
 ascended on high, he led with him these spirits that had been 
 in prison. 
 
Hell and Heaven 217 
 
 Now, when we come to consider early Christian thought 
 on this subject, we must keep this constantly in mind. 
 Although Jesus went to heaven and took these specially 
 selected souls, supposed to be Abraham and other saints 
 and noble ones of the ancient time, when he took them 
 with him, it did not mean at all that from that time to this 
 all the people the minute they died were to follow him. 
 Still, in early Christian thought, the dead went down to this 
 underworld; and here, in accordance with the popular 
 beliefs, they were to stay until the day of the resurrection 
 and the last judgment. 
 
 It has been a popular teaching that, since the body has 
 shared on the part of the sinner with his sins, and on the 
 part of the saint with his self-denials and sufferings for truth, 
 at death that body should share in the final suffering or the 
 final joy. 
 
 You must remember, of course, that people, when this 
 doctrine grew up, had no conception of the truth that each 
 man during the course of his life wears half a dozen or 
 ten or fifteen different bodies, and that it would be a little 
 inconvenient to have all of them raised. They forgot all 
 this, or they did not know it, rather. So they taught that 
 there could be no complete misery, no complete happiness, 
 until the soul was joined to this body again, which has 
 shared with it the good or the evil of this present life here 
 on earth. 
 
 So the soul was to lie quiescent in "The Intermediate 
 State." I think most of you remember that phrase, 
 whether you have ever stopped to find out what it meant or 
 not. At the resurrection these souls were to be joined again 
 to the body, and the evil were to be sent to their final abode, 
 and the good were to be received into eternal felicity. 
 
2 1 8 Religion for To-day 
 
 This has been a popular doctrine of the Church, varied 
 of course by different beliefs here and different beliefs 
 there throughout the larger part of Christian history. 
 
 The idea that most of us hold to-day, or that most people 
 jhold to-day, let me say rather, that the minute a man dies 
 his soul goes either to hell or to heaven, is really a very 
 modern idea, not the one which has been held generally in 
 the history of the Church. 
 
 Now that you may see how real this other world has 
 been in the thought of men, let me call your attention for a 
 moment to that marvellous poem of Dante. I presume the 
 most of you have read his " Inferno." It lets you into the 
 secret of the thought of Christendom in the Middle Ages. 
 Dante, wandering through the woods, finds a place where 
 the mouth of the Infernal Regions may be entered. He 
 goes through. He finds Virgil there. Virgil was one of 
 the noblest men of the old pagan era, as he conceived 
 him. But Virgil could not go to heaven, he was not a 
 Christian : the atoning blood did not apply to him ; and 
 Dante could not find it in his heart to put him in the tortures 
 of the Inferno ; and so he lives in a sort of medium kind of 
 place, neither suffering very much nor capable of the high- 
 est and finest joys. The beatific vision, the reward of the 
 saints, could never be open to him, although he did not 
 share the torments of those who consciously sinned against 
 the light. 
 
 This reveals the thought of Dante concerning the heroes 
 of the extra-Christian world. 
 
 He discovers Hades or the Inferno under the ground, its 
 descending circles the scene of different degrees of punish- 
 ment and sin, reaching down like a tunnel. At the centre, 
 instead of the intense heat, the lake of fire, that we have 
 
Hell and Heaven 219 
 
 been accustomed to associate with that world, he finds 
 Satan frozen in everlasting ice. This is the culmination, 
 and the worst thing that Dante was able to conceive. Dur- 
 ing his strange journey, the poet finds the spot where the 
 stones of the walls had been misplaced, when Jesus broke 
 through and escaped. 
 
 It was all so real to his imagination as this. 
 
 But, in ordinary Protestant thought, for two hundred years 
 the belief has sometimes been that souls went directly to 
 hell or to heaven, and then came back again to be re- 
 united with their bodies at the time of the resurrection just 
 preceding the general judgment, or else that they lay in 
 this quiescent state, this intermediate condition, waiting for 
 the resurrection of the body, one or the other. But after 
 that all the bad went to this place of eternal torture, 
 hopeless, and without any end, and all the good went 
 straight to heaven, there to be happy in the presence of 
 God forevermore. 
 
 Let us note now a little in detail who were to be the in- 
 habitants of these two places. 
 
 According to the Catholic creeds there is no chance 
 for anybody to be saved who is not a Catholic. The 
 Athanasian Creed says you must believe everything that 
 is contained in that or, no doubt, you must perish ever- 
 lastingly. 
 
 I am well aware that, if you were to talk with any intelli- 
 gent priest to-day, he would tell you that possible leniency 
 might be shown towards some who had been specially noble 
 in the olden times, and that the mercy of God might extend 
 to those that had been ignorant without their fault, but who 
 had tried to do the best which they knew. 
 
 But there has been little chance of salvation from the 
 
220 Religion fo7' To-day 
 
 point of view of any particular Church for any except those 
 who belonged to that Church. 
 
 The Greek Church will tell you that you must be ortho- 
 dox, which means belong to their Church, in order to be 
 certain of salvation. And so most of the Protestant denom- 
 inations have told us that only the elect, those chosen be- 
 fore the foundation of the world, chosen without any regard 
 to their character or what their course of life should be, 
 chosen from the mere good pleasure of God, chosen not 
 because they were worth saving, but simply to illustrate 
 the grace, the mercy, the pity, the salvation of God, 
 that these were the only ones who had any chance of going 
 to heaven ; and that, no matter how good people might be, 
 unless they have been chosen, elected, they were simply to 
 be passed by, to illustrate the justice and the wrath of God 
 through all eternity. 
 
 Now I wish to suggest to you one or two things, because, 
 so far as my experience goes, in talking with people, there 
 are very few who ever do any thinking on these matters. I 
 am amazed as I talk with people, intelligent in every other 
 direction, to see how they read their Bibles merely as a re- 
 ligious exercise, without any use of reason, any attempt to 
 understand, comprehend, really what it is that they read. I 
 talk with people almost every week, and ask them if they 
 know that such and such things are in the creeds of the 
 churches to which they belong ; and they have never thought 
 of it, perhaps never have read the creeds. I ask them if 
 they know that the New Testament teaches such and such 
 a thing : they never thought of it, they never read the New 
 Testament to find out what it really teaches. 
 
 How many loving, tender mother hearts are there in this 
 city of New York to-day who know that the printed and 
 
Hell and Heaven 221 
 
 published creeds of the Presbyterian Church, for example, 
 the Prayer Book of the Episcopal, the Anglican Church, 
 how many know that these both teach to-day the damnation 
 of non-elect and unbaptized infants ? 
 
 And yet this is true. And how terribly real this belief is 
 on the part of Catholics ! I can give you a personal illustra- 
 tion. When I was living in California, there was a man, my 
 neighbor, one of the roughest, most profane men I ever 
 knew, but a devout Catholic. And his little baby-girl was 
 very ill, and he thought she was going to die ; and he came 
 to me, a Protestant, because he had no time to find a priest, 
 frantic with anxiety, to ask that I should come and baptize 
 his child, so that, if it died before morning, it would not go to 
 an eternal hell. The Catholic Church allows that kind of 
 baptism, if no other can be obtained. It will allow a nurse, 
 anybody, to baptize an infant, if a priest cannot be found. 
 
 Why 1 To save that tiny infant from the flaming eter- 
 nal wrath of the Almighty. Think of it ! 
 
 Just consider I The father of a child like this meets with 
 an accident on the way to a priest, or on the way to me, if 
 he is not able to find a priest, or he is not able to find me or 
 anybody else to act as a substitute. And this little child, if 
 the priest had got there in time or I had arrived in time 
 to place a little water on its forehead and say a few words 
 over it, would have gone to heaven, and God would have 
 loved it and cared for it forever. But, just because I am a 
 little late in getting there, God hates and curses and tor- 
 ments it forever ! 
 
 Friends, think of it ! In this nineteenth century after 
 Jesus, in the midst of our boasted intelligence and civiliza- 
 tion, the prayer-books and the creeds of the greatest and 
 most popular churches in the world still teaching an un- 
 
222 Religion for To-day 
 
 speakably infernal character like that, and attributing it to 
 our Father in heaven ! And intelligent, cultivated, tender- 
 hearted, loving fathers and mothers supporting such churches, 
 and not demanding that the infamous lie be stricken out of 
 the books ! 
 
 Who is to go to hell, then ? 
 
 If you trace the history of Christendom for the last eigh- 
 teen hundred years, half of the noblest men of Europe have 
 gone there, half of the noblest men of America. Every man 
 with manhood enough in him to do any thinking, to ask any 
 questions, puts himself in danger of hell. Every man clear- 
 headed enough to have a nobler idea of God than the 
 popular creeds taught him and brave enough to speak his 
 thoughts has gone hopelessly to hell. The great liberators 
 and leaders go to hell. Men like Tyndall, Huxley, Darwin 
 go to hell. Those who help the world out of its ignorance 
 and superstition, and up into the light, go to hell. 
 
 I said once, where Mr. Moody was conducting a revival 
 service, that, if he would pick out the people that he was 
 going to take with him to his particular kind of heaven, I 
 would gladly go with the rest, wherever it might be. 
 
 Consider, friends, now for a moment, what reason is there 
 to-day why we should believe this horrible doctrine of hell, 
 that, unless a person is saved according to the particular 
 method of a particular Church, he is to go there ? 
 
 How is anybody to know ? The Catholic Church has one 
 way of saving, the Greek Church another. Different Prot- 
 estant denominations all have their different ways. How 
 is a poor bewildered seeker to know which one is the real 
 way? 
 
 But what reason is there why we should believe that God 
 has ever created any such place, or that he sends any one 
 
Hell and Heaven 223 
 
 there, hopelessly to inhabit a prison of darkness and torture 
 world without end? Is there any reason why you and I 
 or any intelligent person should believe anything of the 
 kind to-day ? If there is, I for one have never been able to 
 discover it. 
 
 What are these hells ? They are simply the reflections 
 in the other world of the cruel, ignorant, revengeful, bar- 
 baric, torturing kind of people who invented them. Visit 
 the Bastile before it was pulled down by the indignant 
 people of Paris, and see there a man, for no crime except 
 that he won the enmity perhaps because of his nobility 
 of some lord or king. Behold him in some loathsome dun- 
 geon, dripping with foul water, full of toads and snakes and 
 vermin of every conceivable kind. Think of him rotting 
 year after year, so long as life could remain in his body, in 
 a dungeon like that, for no crime at all ; and think of the 
 persons who put him there, dancing their butterfly existence 
 away, utterly untroubled in their pleasures or their sleep by 
 the memory of what he is passing through. And then you 
 can understand how people in that stage of barbarism 
 could invent hells in the other world, too, only the natural 
 expression of the kind of barbarism with which they visited 
 those whom they regarded as their enemies in this life. 
 
 Is there any reason for our believing theological concep- 
 tions of men like that? That is two hundred years ago 
 perhaps. Go back to the Middle Ages, come to the time of 
 the Borgias, visit the ancient time when it was part of the 
 pleasure of the people to see gladiatorial shows, men 
 killed for the delectation of gentlemen and ladies who 
 wished for a sensation ! You need not go back very far. 
 Look at Spain to-day, the most orthodox nation of Europe, 
 with its delectation for the lady and little child and priest 
 
224 Religion for To-day 
 
 in its bull fight. Go back until you come to the time of a 
 Nero, back and down, and take their imaginings of God 
 and of the other life, and crystallize them into creeds, and 
 tell us that we must be bound hand and foot, brain, heart, 
 forever, to believe their crude and cruel and horrible dreams 
 about God and the other life ! 
 
 Right in there is the birthplace of all the hells that the 
 hideous and cruel imaginings of the world have ever 
 invented. 
 
 Let any one point to me a text in the Bible, and say that 
 I must accept it as teaching a doctrine of eternal torment. 
 Friends, let me say deliberately, and I mean every word 
 that I speak, if the doctrine of eternal hell was taught in 
 large and plain letters on every page of that book from 
 beginning to end, if every writer had signed his belief in 
 such a doctrine in the presence of a notary of his time, I 
 would reject it indignantly and with all my soul! No 
 amount of human belief, no quantity of human testimony, 
 can make me believe that the God of this universe is a devil. 
 No writings and no men, however numerous or great, shall 
 make me doubt the eternal and universal Fatherhood of him 
 who tells us to think of him as our tender Father, and of 
 ourselves as his poor, weak, and troubled children. 
 
 There is no possible way of proving such a hideous be- 
 lief as this. I brand it as a slander on God, and will trust 
 my soul to the issue. 
 
 Now, then, let us come to the modern world. If there 
 be no place called hell that is eternal in its nature, if 
 there be no place called heaven that is changeless in its 
 nature, what are we to believe concerning the destiny of 
 souls after they leave this world ? 
 
 Are all to be treated alike ? Does everybody go to 
 
Hell and Heaven 225 
 
 heaven? Does it 'make no difference what a man thinks 
 or speaks, or how he conducts himself, or what kind of 
 character he develops here ? 
 
 It seems to me clear that it makes all the difference 
 in the world. I do not claim to know in detail about that 
 other life. I never expect to know in detail about it until I 
 get there and study its conditions for myself ; for let me ask 
 you to note carefully one special thing. We may be able, 
 and I believe we shall be, as I intimated to you last Sun- 
 day, to demonstrate continued existence. That, however, is 
 entirely another thing from our being able to investigate the 
 details of that other life. Just in so far as that other life 
 transcends the present and is unlike it, just in so far it must 
 remain unknown to us until we come into contact with it by 
 our own personal experience. 
 
 Let me illustrate what I mean. You talk with a boy four 
 years old, and you have got to keep down to the four-year- 
 old level. You cannot put ten-year-old ideas into the four- 
 year-old head. I am referring now, of course, to normal 
 children. You cannot put into the ten-year-old head fifteen- 
 year-old ideas and thoughts and comprehensions. You are 
 limited by the person's conception and ability to think with 
 whom you are speaking. 
 
 A boy asks you what it means to be a man. You cannot 
 tell him. A little girl asks her mother what it means to be 
 a woman. She cannot tell her. We know we can interpret 
 to the child only what the child can understand. 
 
 Suppose I visit Central Africa, and come back and tell 
 you I have made a wonderful discovery there, and you say. 
 What is it ? And I say. It is unlike anything you ever saw. 
 What color ? It is a new color. What shape ? you say. 
 Well, not the shape of anything you ever saw. How can I 
 
226 Religion for To-day 
 
 describe it? The only way I can describe anything to a 
 person who has never seen it is to compare it with some- 
 thing which he has seen. 
 
 So that, if this life is above and beyond and entirely un- 
 like what we have become accustomed to by experience, 
 then it must remain in that sense unknown, because all our 
 knowledge is limited by our experience. 
 
 I may then be able to demonstrate the fact, though I may 
 not be able to answer any of your questions as to details, 
 the kind of life, the kind of country, the kind of bodies we 
 shall possess, the kind of occupations in which we shall 
 engage. 
 
 Where are hell and heaven in the modern and rational 
 thought of the universe ? 
 
 In the first place let me call your attention to the 
 changed conceptions which astronomy has made us familiar 
 with. There is no heaven just over this dome of blue. 
 There is no dome of blue, except to our eyes. There is no 
 hell underground; for we have found that the world is a 
 globe, and is spinning forever through space. 
 
 Where is hell ? where is heaven ? 
 
 I remember sermons of Spurgeon and Dr. Talmage in 
 which they have indulged in flights of imagination in this 
 direction. One, I remember, located heaven on the sup- 
 posed central star of the universe, around which everything 
 else revolved. Now there may be such a central star ; but 
 nobody knows anything about it. If there is, how far 
 away is it? So far away that it takes light perhaps 
 millions of years to traverse the space. How long would 
 it take a soul to go to heaven if it were located there ? It 
 would take a train of cars somewhere between one and two 
 hundred years, travelling at the rate of sixty miles an hour 
 
Hell and Heaven 227 
 
 and twenty-four hours a day, to reach the sun of our 
 little system. 
 
 It is idle, then, for us to speculate about heaven's being 
 the centre of the universe. 
 
 I incline to believe that the spirit world is all about us. I 
 do not know any reason in the world for placing it away off 
 somewhere else, except the impulse resulting from our in- 
 herited ideas. I believe that the spirit world may coexist 
 with this planetary system of ours, and the good and the 
 bad be kept no further away, some of them, than people are 
 who live in the next street or in the next State. 
 
 I have had a great many people ask me this question: 
 Are the good and the bad going to be all together in the 
 next world t Would it not be necessary for the happiness of 
 the good that they should be fenced away somewhere by 
 themselves, and the bad fenced away and kept somewhere 
 else.? And, then, I have asked them a question which 
 never seems to occur to them, as to whether the good and 
 the bad are any more together in this world than they want 
 to be. 
 
 No bad people except those I wanted have ever troubled 
 me or haunted me very much. People do not thrust them- 
 selves on the society of other people, generally, unless they 
 find some encouragement. People in this world may pass 
 each other on the sidewalk, one of them in hell, and the 
 other in heaven. They may touch elbows, and yet be 
 further apart in their thoughts, their mental states, their 
 characters, their careers, their destinies, than the stars in 
 space are from each other. 
 
 These spiritual facts, spiritual conditions, solve a good 
 many of these problems for us, if we give them a little 
 reasonable attention. 
 
228 Religion for To-day 
 
 I do not see any reason for fencing the good people and 
 the bad people away from each other. I would not like to 
 be fenced in anywhere, if I had my way, even in heaven. 
 
 And, in the next place, I beUeve that one of the charac- 
 teristics of heaven the heavenly state of mind and heart 
 will be the eternal opportunity to help people less developed 
 and less well off than yourself. I do not want to be fenced 
 away from hell. I have a good deal of sympathy with that 
 old New England deacon who had a grand Christian char- 
 acteristic in his heart. When he was asked if, at the last 
 day, he should find he had made a mistake and was not 
 going to be saved, but was going to hell, and in that case 
 what he should do, he said he thought he should start a 
 little prayer-meeting. 
 
 According to his ideas, he was going to help the people 
 there. That was Christianity. This idea of going off into 
 a selfish heaven, and letting the rest of the universe take 
 care of itself, is a libel on the deepest and most Christian 
 traits of humanity. It would be a libel on paganism even. 
 For any decent man is better than that. 
 
 Let me read you here one little word from the Buddh- 
 ist literature of China, one of the sweetest things I 
 ever saw, and with which we may contrast some of our Puri- 
 tan literature : " Never will I seek or receive private indi- 
 vidual salvation ; never will I enter into final peace alone ; 
 but forever and ever and everywhere I will live and strive 
 for the universal redemption of every creature throughout 
 all the worlds." 
 
 I do not wish to be shut away from bad people, then. I 
 believe one of the grandest things in the other life will be 
 what has been to me, at any rate, one of the grandest things 
 in this, the endeavor to help somebody who does not know 
 
Hell and Heaven 229 
 
 quite as much as I have had an opportunity to know ; to lift 
 somebody, to lead somebody, to do something to make his 
 life a little sweeter, a little easier for him. 
 
 Heaven, then, and hell are not essentially places any- 
 where : they are conditions, states of heart, character. Take 
 that verse of Omar Khayyam, the old Persian poet of the 
 twelfth century : 
 
 " I sent my soul into the invisible, 
 Some letter of that after life to spell ; 
 
 And by and by my soul returned to me, 
 And answered, ' I myself am heaven and hell, 
 
 " Heaven but the vision of fulfilled desire, 
 And hell the shadow of a soul on fire.' " 
 
 That is heaven, there is hell. 
 
 What shall be our occupations in another life ? It seems 
 to me eminently reasonable, though I do not claim to know, 
 that I should suggest something along these lines. If a 
 man who has been living in Northern New England moves 
 to Southern California, there will be a good many things 
 that he was accustomed to do in that cold and barren win- 
 try climate that there will be no need for his doing in his 
 new home. Changed conditions suggest a change of occu- 
 pation within certain limits. 
 
 There will be a good many things that we have to do 
 here that we shall not need to continue doing in the other 
 life. I believe, mark you, that we shall have bodies there 
 as real, intensely more real and alive, than our present 
 bodies. I have not time to go into that this morning. 
 
 I see no reason why we should not continue our scientific 
 investigations. 
 
 Socrates, while he was talking with his disciples, just 
 
230 Religion for To-day 
 
 before he drank the hemlock, said he thought he should 
 be able to continue his studies in that new life on which 
 he was entering. I do not see why scientific investigation 
 should not be carried on there as it is not possible to carry 
 it on here. 
 
 Old ex-President Hill, the grand Unitarian preacher 
 and famous mathematician, when somebody asked him 
 what he expected to do in heaven, answered that there 
 were enough mathematical questions connected with the arc 
 of a circle to keep him busy for several thousands of years. 
 
 Why should we not carry on our studies t Why should 
 not art, in all its departments, and literature be developed 
 there? Will Shakspere care no more for the drama, for 
 the magnificent creations of character that have made him 
 famous here? Will Liszt, Mozart, Mendelssohn, care no 
 more for music ? The great masters be no more interested 
 in painting ? 
 
 Why should not all these things that pertain to the mind, 
 the soul, heart, find room not only, but unspeakable expan- 
 sion, limitless growth beyond anything that we can compre- 
 hend here ? 
 
 Such, then, it seems to me, may be our dream of the 
 future. Not far away, not separated from the ignorant 
 and the bad, whom we may be permitted to help. For 
 mind you, the ignorant and the bad, those who break the 
 laws of this universe, knowingly or unknowingly, must work 
 out their deliverance from their conditions, whether it takes 
 six months or a year, or a thousand years or a milHon. 
 Broken law, the result of broken law, must follow us as a 
 shadow follows the sun. 
 
 May we not, then, look forward to the fact that, when we 
 pass through that gate, on the other side we are just what 
 
Hell and Heaven 231 
 
 we were when we entered ? There is opportunity for us to 
 go up or down, opportunity for us to help, to study, to grow, 
 to be all that is possible for us to achieve. There in that 
 future, under the guidance of our Father, in that realm of 
 spirit we may pursue the pathway that we have begun here, 
 thinking out after him God's thoughts, rising to higher and 
 nobler views of him, and so finding an increasing joy and 
 peace forever and ever. 
 
THE CHURCH OF YESTERDAY, TO-DAY, 
 AND TO-MORROW. 
 
 Jesus founded no church. He gave no directions as to 
 any organization whatsoever, he specified no officers or 
 rulers, he ieft on record no directions as to any creed bond 
 intended to bind his disciples together. And yet the 
 Church, as you will see, as I go on, was a natural and 
 necessary outgrowth of that which Jesus did. I wish, how- 
 ever, to begin by this perfectly outright and downright 
 statement, because so many persons claim to trace back 
 to the words of Jesus himself an authority, a method of 
 organization, a system of rites or ceremonies, a creed, for 
 which he is in no sense responsible. 
 
 Indeed, if you consider the conditions for the first twenty- 
 five years after Jesus' death, you will see that the idea of 
 anybody's expecting a church to be formed which should 
 continue for the next eighteen hundred years is absurd. 
 
 If Jesus taught anything with perfect explicitness, that 
 is, on the supposition that he is correctly reported, it is 
 that he should return in the clouds of heaven, and bring the 
 present order of affairs to an end, and set up, miraculously 
 and suddenly, the heavenly kingdom within twenty-five 
 years of the time when he spoke. He says explicitly, when 
 they asked him the time for this great change to come, 
 "Before this generation passes away," this was the time. 
 
 If, then, the present order of affairs was to cease within 
 
The Church 233 
 
 a generation, do you not see that neither Jesus nor the 
 disciples could have expected the organization of any- 
 church that should extend its influence over the world 
 and reach up the ages ? Do you not see that such an idea 
 could never have entered into their minds ? 
 
 Jesus, then, founded no church, made no provision for 
 its future here on earth. But, as years passed by and the 
 expected appearance in the heavens did not take place, the 
 disciples naturally grouped themselves together into little 
 bodies, at first not organized at all, a mere meeting of 
 brethren and sisters in sympathy with each other and trying 
 to help each other, and then becoming loosely organized, in 
 the most natural way in the world. They would wish some 
 officers, some one to look after affairs ; and so an " elder," 
 some person who was looked upon with reverence, some 
 one who possessed special efficiency for managing the busi- 
 ness side of affairs, would be selected, and the church 
 would be modelled at first very much on the synagogue, 
 which existed all over the world wherever there were any 
 Hebrews living. 
 
 It has been said that, if there had been no synagogue, 
 there would have been no church. In a certain sense, this 
 is true ; but the church naturally organized itself. The 
 people who revered Jesus and loved his memory and be- 
 lieved in his mission would come together on Sunday 
 morning, the morning when they believed he reappeared 
 after his death, and hold their religious and memorial 
 services. 
 
 But these churches claimed no authority at first, and no 
 one claimed any authority over them ; and they had no fixed 
 ritual, they had no definite ceremonies, they had no deter- 
 mined creed. The only condition of membership was a 
 
234 Religion for To-day 
 
 desire on the part of any one to do honor to their waited 
 leader and to enter into the fellowship of this new spirit 
 ^vhich had come into the hearts of men. 
 
 But by and by, as churches grew in influence, as they 
 -were organized in the great centres of civilization, 
 Ephesus, Corinth, Antioch, Rome, as the churches grew 
 strong, and at last were recognized as a political power even 
 throughout the Empire, do you not see how naturally the 
 organization would grow ? They would have their officers, 
 elders, called presbyters, a word which we have retained 
 until the present day ; and by and by there would be some 
 man of commanding influence, and he would obtain the 
 office of bishop. 
 
 But let us note how simple an office that was at the out- 
 set : the word " bishop " means merely an overseer, a super- 
 intendent, some one who has an oversight of affairs, that 
 is all. 
 
 By and by, just as the Methodists organized themselves 
 in this country, there would be a group of churches each 
 having its own officers, and then some one superintendent 
 of this group, some one having the charge of church 
 extension beyond the limits of organization at that time. 
 
 And by and by, modelling themselves after the earthly 
 governments with which they were familiar, we find men 
 of eminence and power claiming to exercise authority over 
 not only the individual church, but groups of churches, made 
 up of those that existed in some one particular province 
 or geographical locality. And, in a perfectly natural way, 
 it came to pass at last that the bishop at Rome asserted 
 supreme authority over other bishops and other churches. 
 
 Why ? I wish you to note the naturalness of the steps by 
 which this condition of things came about. As I said, there 
 
The Church 235 
 
 was no settled order of worship, there was no settled creed, 
 there were no settled forms or ceremonies of any kind. So 
 churches differed from each other in their methods or ideas. 
 But by and by it would occur to somebody that there ought 
 to be some concerted uniformity ; that the churches ought 
 to have a service of similar character in different parts of 
 the Empire ; that they ought to be united in their methods 
 and ways ; that there ought to be some one type of govern- 
 ment. It was thus, perhaps, that the church of Ephesus 
 and the church of Corinth would get into a dispute as to 
 which should have its way: Ephesus would think the 
 Corinthian church ought to adopt its method ; and the 
 church at Corinth would think the church at Ephesus ought 
 to adopt its method. A case like this is suggested only by 
 way of illustration. 
 
 And by and by, perhaps, they would leave it out to be 
 arbitrated by some man looked up to with reverence, sup- 
 posed to have the interests of the whole at heart, and 
 to have some special wisdom in settling affairs ; and he 
 would be looked up to as the one to decide these matters. 
 Naturally, a metropolitan minister that is, a minister who 
 was the servant of some great church in some great city 
 would almost inevitably be called upon to settle such 
 differences. And, therefore, the overseer of the church at 
 Rome, which was the centre and capital of the Empire, 
 would almost inevitably be chosen. He was chosen, chosen 
 over and over again, until by and by that which had been 
 extended to him as a matter of courtesy he began to claim 
 as a matter of right. And the idea grew up that the first 
 overseer of the first church in Rome had had the keys of the 
 kingdom of heaven and of hell committed to his keeping, 
 and that he had a right of lordship over the Church. 
 
236 Religion for To-day 
 
 I feel perfectly certain I cannot enter into the dis- 
 cussion this morning, giving you my reasons that those 
 words, conferring the keys upon Peter, are an interpolation 
 and an after-thought, an invention of that same Church 
 which invented the fraudulent decretals on which it based 
 its claim to exercise temporal power ; for Jesus himself 
 says explicitly and I do not believe he would contradict 
 himself on a central point like this that the kings of the 
 earth exercise lordship and they that are great assert 
 authority over their fellows, but "it shall not be so among 
 you " : he that is great is simply to be servant. 
 
 But by and by, as I said, the Bishop of Rome began to 
 assert the right to dictate to all the other churches as to 
 how they should conduct their affairs, as to matters of belief, 
 as to matters of conduct, ceremony, whatsoever concerned 
 the organization and welfare of the Church. But Constan- 
 tine removed the capital of the Empire to Constantinople, 
 and so there was another great bishop there ; and for a long 
 time the conflict was intense and bitter between these two 
 bishops as to which should be recognized as the head of 
 the Church. 
 
 There were, of course, doctrinal disputes also ; but the 
 reason why we have a Greek church to-day and a Roman 
 church is to be found in the fact that neither the Bishop of 
 Rome nor the Bishop of Constantinople would bow to the 
 other, and so they split the Church in two. And from that 
 day to this each has claimed original authority and power 
 and headship conferred by Jesus himself. 
 
 This, then, is the way and you see how purely natural 
 it is that the Church grew from the first simple begin- 
 nings until it claimed lordship over, not only this world, but 
 the other. 
 
The Church 237 
 
 I wish you to note now a few points touching the claims 
 that the Church has made in the past. 
 
 In the first place, you know that until within a very short 
 time the Church has claimed and some different parts of 
 the Church make the claim still that it, and it alone, stood 
 here on earth as the mouthpiece and the arm of God. The 
 Church has claimed that it held in its hands the destiny of 
 human souls ; that it had divine authority to shut up heaven 
 or to open it, to shut up hell or to open it, to shut up 
 purgatory or to open it. The Church claimed to stand and 
 speak and act for the Almighty. It not only made this 
 claim concerning the other world, but it claimed to hold all 
 the affairs of this world in its hands as well. The Church 
 has claimed to be able to work miracles, to control natural 
 law, to govern all the affairs of human life. 
 
 The Church has stood by the cradle, and by its magic 
 touch has claimed to change the new-born child from a 
 child of the devil to a child of God. It has claimed to 
 direct the education of the child from the very first until it 
 had come to be a man. 
 
 The Church has claimed the power of turning the un- 
 healthy and as it claimed the unholy fires of human 
 passion into the pure white flame of sacred love. It has 
 claimed the power to speed the weak and faltering footsteps 
 of the old man, as he crossed the threshold at the other 
 confine of life, and to give him safe passage through the 
 dark shadow and entrance into eternal felicity. 
 
 The Church has claimed and exercised the power to set 
 up kings and overturn them. It has claimed the power to 
 send an army out with the blessing of God upon it and 
 the assurance of victory or to threaten it for dis- 
 obedience with defeat. The Church has claimed to con- 
 
238 Religion for To-day 
 
 trol the winds and the seas, so that, when the mariner 
 started out upon his voyage, the priest behind with cere- 
 mony and prayer assured him safety upon the great deep. 
 
 The Church has claimed to control the prosperity of the 
 agriculturist, the farmer; to be able to send drought or 
 the needed rains ; to give fertility or to blight all the 
 promise of the crops. The Church has held the prosperity 
 of the merchant in its hands. 
 
 There is not a single department of human life that the 
 Church has not claimed to touch with magic, miraculous 
 power, and to control. Not only that, it has set the limits 
 to thought; it has absorbed music and art; it has told 
 philosophy what subjects it might investigate, what airs 
 might be fanned by its ambitious wings, to what safe 
 perch it must come after its audacious flights. 
 
 The Church has claimed the right to tell people what 
 they must think about this universe, as to when it was 
 created, and why and how. It has claimed the right to 
 tell men that they must accept its ideas as to the origin and 
 the nature as well as the destiny of man. It has set the 
 limits to all scientific investigation, saying. You may study 
 as much as you please and as widely as you please ; but, 
 if you do not come back at last, and settle down contentedly 
 within the boundaries of the creeds which I have fixed 
 forever, then you must be looked upon in heaven and earth 
 as anathema. 
 
 This has been the Church's claim over this world. 
 
 But the Church has not been all evil. I frankly say to 
 you, friends, that, as I study carefully the history of the 
 last fifteen hundred years, I find myself wondering some- 
 times as to whether the world would not have been better 
 if the Church had not existed. For the Church, note this. 
 
The Church 239 
 
 please, the Church has originated and taught no ethical 
 ideas that did not exist before, nothing higher, finer, 
 sweeter, diviner, more human, than can be found in India, 
 in Egypt, in China, in ancient Greece, in Rome. While the 
 Church has asserted its sovereignty over man, it has done all 
 it could to prevent the free growth and development of 
 intellect. It has made it a sin to think ; and those nations 
 that have submitted to the dictation of the Church most 
 completely have been crushed down intellectually to a level 
 below mediocrity. 
 
 The Church has the effrontery sometimes to claim that 
 everything in the way of modern civilization, intelligence, 
 freedom, hope for man, is its gift. And yet I defy any man 
 on the face of the earth to point out a single step in ad- 
 vance in the way of the world's thinking that has not been 
 banned and cursed by some representative of the Church. 
 The Church has stood in the way of every invention, every 
 discovery. All the great names from Copernicus to Darwin 
 have been pointed at as those who were to be avoided by 
 those who have officially represented the Church. 
 
 And, then, the Church has done another great evil to the 
 world: it has placed the emphasis always on belief and 
 loyalty to its own organization, on something else than char- 
 acter. For, while the Church has claimed to have the keys 
 of the kingdom of heaven, it has never proposed to let any 
 man in merely because he was good, never because he was 
 Christ-like. It is the man who believes what she says he 
 must believe ; it is the man who performs her rites and 
 ceremonies, who partakes of her sacraments ; it is the man 
 who is loyal to her authority. And these she has always 
 found a way to admit, however black and infamous their 
 characters might be. 
 
240 Religion for To-day 
 
 These are strong statements, I know ; but I believe that 
 history will bear me out in making them. 
 
 What then ? Is the Church to pass away ? No, friends, 
 the evil of the Church is right here. Do not misunderstand 
 me. The evil of the Church is not in its aim, its intent, its 
 spirit : it is in certain intellectual assumptions and certain 
 political ambitions on the part of those who control its or- 
 ganization. The evil of the Church in the past lies in its 
 claim to be infallible, to put limits to human growth. It 
 has dared to imitate the fabled king who brought his chair 
 out upon the seashore, and forbade the tides to advance be- 
 yond the limits set by his will. 
 
 So far as the Church has been able to do it, it has kept 
 the world from growing and coming of age. There is the 
 evil of it. 
 
 But the Church is not going to die, it is not going to pass 
 away. A church may : this particular church, that particular 
 church, may. Government does not die out of the world 
 because a monarchy falls or is transformed. Literature does 
 not perish because a school of writers which has dictated 
 the style of an age changes or passes away. Health and 
 the care of health do not cease because schools of medical 
 treatment die out and become antiquated. 
 
 So religion does not pass away because a particular 
 church becomes antiquated and outgrown. 
 
 The Church, then, is not to die out, is not to pass away. 
 It is to remain, I believe, the grandest institution on the 
 face of the earth. 
 
 I want to indicate the condition of the Church of to-day 
 and what I believe it is to be in the to-morrow that awaits 
 the future of the world. 
 
 The Church to-day is passing through a transformation 
 
The Church 241 
 
 compelled by the growing freedom of thinking and the 
 grand advances of human knowledge. This is the reason 
 why you find cries of heresy north and south and east and 
 west. Ministers and people sitting in the pews both are 
 gradually outgrowing the old statements ; and they are 
 either compelling their change or showing such a practical 
 indifference to them that they lie unused and almost for- 
 gotten. This is the condition of things through which we 
 are passing. 
 
 I wish to indicate now my theme is too large to admit 
 of going deeply into the matter a few of the things I 
 think the Church is to stand for to-morrow. 
 
 I say the Church is not to die out and pass away. Why ? 
 Because man is essentially, necessarily, eternally, a religious 
 being. The religious hunger of the world has been on the 
 whole, I believe, its mightiest hunger. Hunger for bread, 
 that hunger which we call love, and the hunger for God are 
 the three great hungers of the world. And neither of them 
 by any possibility can ever pass away. 
 
 Man, then, is necessarily and eternally a religious being; 
 and religion, like art, like science, like anything else that is 
 a permanent thought and care of man, comes of necessity to 
 organize itself, and so you have the Church. It makes no 
 difference what you call it. The Greek word ekklesia^ which, 
 translated, becomes our " church," means simply a company 
 called together, a meeting, a voluntary association. 
 
 The Church, then, is based on the permanently religious 
 nature of man, a foundation more enduring than the 
 eternal hills, because the earth and the visible heaven may 
 pass away, but this will not. 
 
 Now, then, what shall this Church stand for in future ? I 
 said that the old Church stood for human salvation. It 
 
242 Religion for To-day 
 
 claimed to be the power that could assure man of salvation. 
 I believe that the Church of to-morrow is to hold in its 
 hands, in a certain modern, free, purely rational sense, the 
 secret and conditions of human salvation, not salvation 
 from the wrath of God, not salvation from any evil power in 
 this world or the next, any evil personal power, I mean, 
 not salvation in the sense of escape out of one place and 
 admission to another. But the Church is to stand in the 
 coming time for the highest spiritual nature of man, 
 for truth, for love, for mercy, pity, sympathy, human help, 
 for these great spiritual verities which bind society together, 
 which make men and women what they are, and which as- 
 sure their happiness in this world or any other world. 
 
 I think that there is a certain class of men who, when 
 they give up their old ideas, get it into their heads that it 
 does not make any special difference how they live or what 
 they do, that they are all to be equally well off in another 
 world. But, if you stop and think of it a moment, you will 
 remember that salvation is not escaping one place and gain- 
 ing entrance to another, but is what you become ; and that 
 you cannot be saved until you have become what you ought 
 to be, for that is being saved ; that you cannot enter heaven 
 until you gain heaven in yourself, for that is what heaven 
 means. 
 
 When you get this clearly in mind, you will see that it 
 does make all the difference in the world what kind of lives 
 you live, what kind of thoughts you think, what kind of 
 words you speak, whether you are selfish or unselfish, 
 whether you devote yourselves to one pursuit here on earth or 
 to another. 
 
 If salvation meant simply voyaging from this world to 
 another planet, and there entering into some beautiful land 
 
The Church 243 
 
 the outer conditions of which were desirably fine, and if it 
 meant you were to be happy just because you were there, 
 that would be one thing. But you may wander through 
 this universe from planet to planet, one century after 
 another, but you will never find heaven except as the spirit- 
 ual nature in you is cultivated and developed, until you have 
 learned to enter into and live in those ranges of your being 
 which are heaven. 
 
 If you give yourselves throughout this life to the things 
 that perish with the using, and that you cannot take with 
 you, where will your heaven be, then ? 
 
 The Church, then, stands for salvation to-day: it will 
 stand for it to-morrow, because it insists upon this cultiva- 
 tion of the eternal elements in us, the spiritual nature of 
 man, those things that link us to God and make us his 
 children, and so of necessity heirs of eternal life. 
 
 I said that the old Church claimed to hold in its hand all 
 human welfare and prosperity here. I believe that there is 
 to be no agent in the future which is to render such a ser- 
 vice in the way of solving social and industrial and mone- 
 tary problems as is the Church. What other agencies are 
 there engaged in solving these? 
 
 I do not believe that it is possible to reorganize society 
 in such a way that everybody will be satisfied and at peace 
 so far as their external conditions are concerned. Some- 
 times I hear people asking, What is to be the solution of 
 our industrial and social problems ? Why, there is to be no 
 solution. There is never coming a time when we shall have 
 got everything nicely arranged and fixed, and everybody is 
 satisfied, and we are done. We are in a universe the char- 
 acteristic of which is growth. We cannot fix things, and 
 stay anywhere. We must be forever on the march. 
 
244 Religion for To-day 
 
 And you never will get these things arranged by a divi- 
 sion of property, by a reorganization of society. There are 
 not offices enough for everybody, there are not enough high 
 social positions for everybody, there is not money enough 
 for everybody. The solution does not lie in that di- 
 rection. 
 
 We cannot all be the head, we cannot all be the eye, we 
 cannot all be the feet, we cannot all be this organ or that. 
 What we need to learn is that we each solve the problem 
 of life for ourselves by being first noble men and women, 
 and then filling the place where we are finely and sweetly 
 and truly as we may. 
 
 Here is the only solution of the problem that will ever be 
 found ; and for this the Church, the true Church, the ideal 
 Church of the future, is to stand, and no other organization 
 on the face of the earth does stand for it. 
 
 The Church is to stand for character, to stand for right- 
 eousness ; and it is to insist forever that the rich and the 
 high shall be first just, then tender, kindly, loving, helpful. 
 And it is to insist that the poor and the lowly shall forever 
 be first men and women, basing themselves on character, 
 and filling the place where they are, not cringing to the 
 great, not envying the great, not cursing, not hating the 
 great. 
 
 I have never seen anybody high in office yet, or very rich 
 yet, whose happiness and contentment I felt so sure of that 
 I knew it was perfectly safe to envy him. 
 
 Let me take the next step right here, then, and say it is 
 a continuation of this idea that the Church of the future is 
 to stand for the only tenable idea of human equality. Learn- 
 ing is not for everybody, knowledge of music is not for every- 
 body, aptness in art is not for everybody, scientific investi- 
 
The Church 245 
 
 gation is not for everybody, high social positions or political 
 offices are not for everybody. There is no such thing as 
 equality of ability, of character, of condition, of possession, 
 on the face of the earth ; and there never will be. 
 
 The Declaration of Independence speaks of men being 
 born free and equal. They are not born free, and they are 
 not born equal. Freedom, if any one ever attains it, is the 
 result of struggle, of growth, not something conferred by 
 birth; and equality, except of rights, is never attained. 
 There is no such thing on the face of the earth; and I 
 question as to whether any such thing is desirable. 
 
 Suppose all the people in the world were equally rich, 
 suppose they were all equally great, that they all if you 
 can imagine such an absurdity held equally high official 
 positions, that they all occupied similar social stations, 
 that there were no differences, no divergencies, in human 
 society. In the first place, for the sake of having a little 
 change, I would be the first one to volunteer to take a lower 
 position. It would be insufferably monotonous. 
 
 And, then, if all the people are writing books, who are 
 to read them ? If all the people are painting pictures, who 
 are to admire them ? If all are building houses, who are to 
 live in them ? If all are to rule, who is to be governed t 
 
 You see the idea, the moment you attempt to analyze it, 
 is absurd. There is no such thing as this kind of equality : 
 it is impossible, it is undesirable. The only thing we have 
 a right to demand is that we shall have an equal oppor- 
 tunity to become the highest and best that we may. This, 
 I believe, God will assure to us some when and some where, 
 if not here and now. 
 
 But the Church stands, I said, for the only obtainable 
 idea of equality. It stands for the thought that we are 
 
246 Religion for To-day 
 
 God's children. You have come in here this morning, all 
 divergencies of character, all sorts of differences in social 
 standing and position, all sorts of diversities as to means, 
 as to outward possessions, different in every sort of way. 
 
 But the moment you cross that threshold you are in a 
 house consecrated to the thought of the one God and Father 
 of us all; and here we are brothers, here we are sisters, 
 here we are common children of the one blessed Father in 
 heaven, and all these earthly distinctions fade away. And, if 
 we can let our imagination take flight for a moment, we shall 
 find that just a few years will pass and these things that 
 we pride ourselves on, that are creating these distinctions of 
 high and low and rich and poor here will all be gone, and he 
 that is first up there may be one of those who is the lowliest 
 here, and he who is first here may find himself at the foot 
 of the class over there ; for the Church teaches that be- 
 neath all these superficial distinctions is the question of 
 likeness to God, the question of love. 
 
 Paul teaches and it is one of the finest teachings in that 
 great book that, when you have sought all sorts of distinc- 
 tions and powers and possessions of every kind, you come 
 at last to face the fact that the best gift is one that cannot 
 be the exclusive possession of anybody, that which is open 
 to us all, love. Love is God, and God is love, and he 
 that loveth is born of God and knoweth God ; and he that 
 loveth stands high over there. Not he who is rich, not he 
 who is intellectual, not he who is mighty over his fellows, 
 but he who is likest God. 
 
 Again, the Church stands, the ideal Church it has 
 been already hinted in what I have said for that which 
 is highest and most distinguished in manhood and woman- 
 hood. 
 
The Chtirch 247 
 
 There are those who have an idea that to be interested in 
 church affairs is not quite manly. But stop and think a 
 moment, I can only suggest the idea, the Church bases 
 itself on that which is peculiarly, characteristically, almost 
 exclusively manly. 
 
 We are all animals : we share that with the denizens of 
 the woods and the fields. But come up higher. The lower 
 animals think : we distance them in thought. They share 
 with us that. What is there that we have that makes us 
 exclusively men ? What is it that takes us up out of the 
 animal world and sets us at the head, and declares that we 
 are not only sharers in the earthly nature, but in the 
 divine } Before you find that which sets us apart from the 
 lower life around us and crowns us as human, you must 
 come up into the realm that religion concerns itself with, 
 the spirit, love, the thought of God, and the possibility of 
 our relation with God. 
 
 This is that, and this is that alone, which makes us men. 
 
 Religion, then, the Church, appeals to you as men, 
 and bases itself on that which is peculiarly human. 
 
 One other thing the Church stands for, worship. And 
 here, again, I have met men who thought that worship was 
 undignified, that it was somehow beneath them. They 
 looked upon it as cringing, crawling. They perhaps had in 
 their mind a picture of a man who bends himself in the 
 dust before a king. 
 
 But note, friends, that worship, the possibility of worship, 
 is the most divine thing in us all. What does it mean 1 It 
 means that we are capable of cherishing an ideal ; and the 
 fact that we are capable of cherishing an ideal means that 
 we are capable of growth. There could be no advance, no 
 possibility of progress, on the part of creatures that do not 
 
248 Religio7i for To-day 
 
 dream. An animal will build his lair the same way year after 
 year : he will make it a little better this year if he discovers 
 a better place or better material or you show him a better 
 place and better material ; but no animal ever dreams out 
 a new style of architecture for his home, no animal is ever 
 worried over his social position and wonders as to how he 
 can better himself. No bird ever dreams out a higher moral 
 ideal, condemns itself for its sin, or wonders how it can be- 
 come a nobler kind of creature. Man is the only one who 
 is restlessly haunted by dreams of something better than 
 he ever saw or knew. 
 
 And right in here let me hint at one fact, that sin, which 
 people tell us is a sign of our degradation, is that which 
 characterizes us as possible children of God. If we had 
 no sense of sin, we should have no sense of imperfection; 
 and that would mean that we had never dreamed of being 
 anything better. 
 
 The consciousness of sin is not a sign of degradation, 
 then : it is a sign of uplift, of assent, of possible aspiration 
 towards the highest. 
 
 Man, then, is forever haunted by the idea that he ought 
 to be a better man and can be ; by the idea that he ought 
 to be surrounded by a better and higher type of civilization, 
 that he ought to build himself a better house, that he ought 
 to create better industrial and social positions. And he 
 always will be haunted by this ideal forever; and that 
 means that he will always advance, that he has in him the 
 possibility of endless evolution and growth. And this 
 means the point that I spoke of at the outset that 
 man is a worshipper : he does not worship that which he 
 has attained. Man always worships something that eludes 
 him, that haunts him, that he has not yet attained; and 
 
The Church 249 
 
 so he reaches on, reaching for it until as soon as he has 
 grasped it in his hands another dream dawns upon his 
 soul, and so he goes on and on forever. 
 
 The Church, then, is to be in the future, as it has 
 been in the past, the mightiest, the most interesting, the 
 most magnificent organization on the face of the earth. 
 All we need is that there should be freedom of thought, 
 and that the open road should never be blockaded or barred, 
 but should stretch on, inviting our feet to advance towards 
 something higher and finer, year after year, and age after 
 age. 
 
 What shall be the sacraments, what shall be the rituals, 
 what shall be the method of government, of the Church of 
 to-morrow ? 
 
 I know not, I care not. We are free to express our be- 
 liefs in any terms we choose, only we must not bind our- 
 selves by any. We are free to arrange our music as we 
 will, to organize our rituals and services, and make them 
 grand and imposing as we will. We are free to organize our 
 ecclesiastical governments according to any idea which 
 suits us. These do not touch the essential things for which 
 the Church stands. 
 
 I would like only to suggest one thing here that seems 
 to me too often forgotten. Whenever the Church has set up 
 officials over it in the past who have attained high position, 
 ambition has been appealed to ; and it has always put itself 
 in the hands of tyrants. I wonder that in this country, where 
 we pride ourselves upon our republicanism and democracy, 
 it does not appeal to us more to have a church in accord- 
 ance with our governmental idea, 
 
 " A church without a bishop 
 And a State without a king." 
 
250 Religion for To-day 
 
 This is the old idea that was sung years ago in the beginning 
 of our republic. 
 
 It seems to me that we ought to attain a free and flexible 
 organization, that shall not be tied by any power above 
 it that shall interfere with its free growth towards all that 
 is highest and best. Within these limits we can make the 
 external order of the Church what we will. 
 
 And then, living with God and for God, organizing our- 
 selves around these spiritual ideas, trying to help each other 
 to live the spiritual life, we shall gain glimpses of that eter 
 nal destiny for which the Church has always stood and 
 spoken, the idea that death is only a name, and that the 
 career on which we have started is endless in its reach, and 
 glowing with increasing glory day by day. 
 
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