LIBRARY 
 
 OF THE 
 
 University of California, 
 
 Class 
 
PEOPLE'S EDITION 
 
 6d. 
 
 Ine Passing and 
 the Permanent 
 in Religion 
 
 BY 
 
 MINOT JUDSON SAVAGE, D.D. 
 
 XonDon 
 
 BRITISH AND FOREIGN UNITARIAN ASSOCIATION 
 
 ESSEX HALL, ESSEX STREET, STRAND, W.C. 
 
 1905 
 
THE PASSING AND THE PERMANENT 
 IN RELIGION 
 
NOTE. 
 
 This English edition, published with the 
 consent and approval of dr. savage, con- 
 sists of seven chapters of the american 
 EDITION (g. p. Putnam's sons), the omitted 
 
 CHAPTERS are: — RELIGION AND RELIGIONS; 
 
 theology and theologies; the church; 
 hells; heavens; the resurrection life. 
 — London, March, 1905 
 
The Passing and the 
 Permanent in Religion 
 
 BY 
 
 MINOT JUDSON SAVAGE, D.D. 
 
 or THF ^ A 
 
 UNSVERSITY | 
 
 OF / 
 
 people's fibition 
 
 LONDON 
 
 BRITISH AND FOREIGN UNITARIAN ASSOCIATION 
 
 ESSEX HALL, ESSEX STREET, STRAND 
 
 1905 
 
vBY K^/ 
 
 ""*%■ 
 
 Ji 
 
 PRINTED BV ELSOM AND CO., 
 MARKET PLACE, HULL. 
 
 O 
 
PREFACE 
 
 Religions die, while religion is universal, per- 
 manent and progressive : theologies change and pass, 
 but so long as man thinks, he will think and theorise, 
 though imperfectly, about the greatest of all themes : 
 man has always speculated about the universe and, 
 in later times, has studied it, and his theories about 
 it always have been and always must be intimately 
 associated with both his religion and his theology : 
 man at first regarded himself as made suddenly by 
 fiat power, but he has learned that he has evolved 
 from lower forms of life, while his religions and his 
 theologies have kept step with his own advance : 
 bibles have been the natural expression of man's 
 hopes, fears and aspirations at the different stages 
 of his advance, not creating religion, but being 
 created by it : gods have been the best ideals which 
 man has been able to imagine, at different steps of 
 his advance, of the one Eternal, of whose life all 
 things are only the changing and passing expression : 
 saviours have taken shape in accord with man's 
 thoughts of the evils from which he supposed he 
 needed to be delivered, and all are entitled to that 
 name who have helped to deliver the race from any 
 of its evils, though this may not interfere with the 
 supremacy of one : worship has taken shape accord- 
 ing to man's changing theories of the powers he has 
 thought of as being able to help or hurt him, and 
 
6 Preface 
 
 it is essentially admiration for that which man thinks 
 of as above him, and so is the condition of all growth 
 and i^rogiess : prayer is the universal instinct which 
 leads man to try to get into helpful relations with the 
 powers thought of as able to control his destiny, and 
 since the conditions out of which it springs are 
 permanent, it cannot pass away, though it must 
 slough off its superstitions and become rational : 
 the church is the voluntary and natural organisation 
 of men as religious beings, and it seeks the highest 
 spiritual ends of which those who constitute it can 
 dream : hells are the more or less horrible dreams 
 which have haunted the imaginations of men as the 
 outcome of evil in another life, and they have gener- 
 ally been crude and libellous parodies on the truth 
 that in all worlds men reap what they have sowed : 
 heavens have taken shape in accordance with the 
 same human fancy which has created its hells, and, 
 in essence, they are the kernels of all the fair and 
 good things which are to blossom and bear fruit for 
 the good : men pass into the resurrection-life the 
 kind of beings which they have become here, and 
 while there will be opportunity for moral advance, 
 there will also be field for the activity and develop- 
 ment of all the great powers and faculties and tastes 
 which pertain to the essential nature of man in this 
 life : — to set forth, develop, and establish, so far as 
 possible, the positions above suggested, is that 
 which is attempted in this book. 
 
 MJ.S. 
 New York, 1901. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 I.— The Universe 
 
 PAGE 
 9 
 
 II.— Man .... 
 
 . 28 
 
 III.— Bibles 
 
 . 49 
 
 IV. — Gods and God . 
 
 . 72 
 
 v.— Saviours 
 
 • 93 
 
 VI. — Worship 
 
 . 118 
 
 VII.— Prayer 
 
 . 140 
 

 THE PASSING AND THE PERMANENT 
 IN RELIGION, 
 
 THE UNIVERSE 
 
 Every religion has started in a cosmology ; 
 that is, the thought side, the theoretical side, of 
 every religion is always bound up with a theory 
 of things, — the nature, the origin of the world. 
 It is no accident, therefore, that the first word 
 in the Bible is a scientific word, — as scientific 
 as the knowledge of that time would allow. ' In 
 the beginning the Elohim created the heavens 
 and the earth.' 
 
 It would be interesting to note the theories 
 of things that have been held by different peoples 
 in different parts of the world ; but for our 
 present purpose we will go no farther afield than 
 to trace the growth of these theories, from the 
 beginning in Hebrew thought, through Christian 
 
10 THE UNIVERSE 
 
 speculation, up to the present time. Trace the 
 growth, do I say ? What I really mean is that 
 we are to note one or two phases of thought on 
 this subject, so that we can see the immense 
 advance that has been made. 
 
 To the writer of Genesis the universe was a 
 very small affair. It was a sort of two-storey 
 structure at first. There was the fiat earth, 
 either anchored in the midst of the surrounding 
 ocean, or fixed in some way in its place. It was 
 roofed over by a firmament as solid as if beaten 
 out by the smith from some malleable metal. In 
 this firmament were windows for the rains to 
 come through, — the waters that were stored 
 above the firmament, — and to it were attached 
 the sun, the moon, and the stars, to give light to 
 the inhabitants of the earth. Above this firma- 
 ment was the abode of God and his angels. 
 This was the first thought of the universe. 
 
 As Hebrew imagination and experience grew, 
 there at last came to be believed in a sort of 
 basement, — shall I call it ? — making it, instead 
 of a two-storey, a three-storey structure. Beneath 
 the surface of the earth there was an under- 
 ground world, the abode of the spirits of the 
 dead. This may stand as fairly representing 
 the belief in the universe on the part of the 
 Hebrews throughout almost their entire history 
 as a nation. 
 
THE PTOLEMAIC THEORY II 
 
 It was a modification of this which was held 
 in the time of Jesus. In the early half of the 
 second century there lived in Alexandria a 
 famous mathematician and astronomer by the 
 name of Ptolemy, who gave his name to what 
 has come to be called the Ptolemaic theory of 
 the universe. This held the minds of men until 
 sometime in the fifteenth century. This Ptole- 
 maic theory is the one that furnishes the framework 
 of Dante's great poem and of Milton's epic. In 
 this — to be brief — the earth was at the centre ; 
 and this was surrounded by and enclosed in a 
 series of concentric crystal, transparent spheres, — 
 to compare large things with small, very much 
 like a nest of glass globes inside each other. To 
 the first of these, and therefore the smallest, 
 was attached the moon ; to the next the sun, 
 and to the rest in their order the then known 
 planets. Outside of these was one to the surface 
 of which were attached all the fixed stars. 
 Beyond this was still another, close to heaven 
 itself, and which was supposed in some mysterious 
 way to be moved by divine power, and in its 
 motion to carry around with it all the others. 
 
 In this way the movements of the heavenly 
 bodies were explained in the Ptolemaic system ; 
 and these spheres are the ones we speak and 
 sing of still, though most of us have forgotten 
 what we mean when we talk about the ' music 
 
12 THE UNIVERSE 
 
 of the spheres ' or when we refer to a star as 
 * starting from its sphere.* These were real, 
 substantial things in this Ptolemaic theory, 
 carrying the heavenly bodies around with them 
 in their circling motions. 
 
 Those who believed in this theory had a good 
 deal of difficulty as time went on in explaining 
 astronomical facts ; and they had to invent a 
 great many additions to and modifications of 
 their theory, because one after another it was 
 noticed that the heavenly bodies did not behave 
 as they ought, if this theory were true ; until at 
 last the difficulties grew so great that Prince 
 Alphonso of Castile, an amateur astronomer and 
 famous mathematician, said that if he had been 
 present at the creation, he could have suggested 
 a good many valuable improvements on the 
 theory. The inconsistencies were so great that 
 it was very difficult for a scholarly man any 
 longer to accept the old ideas. 
 
 About the time that Columbus was discovering 
 a new continent, Copernicus was discovering a 
 new universe. He was a devout Catholic. He 
 would not, if he could help it, affront, or disturb 
 the authorities of his Church ; and yet his know- 
 ledge of the universe grew to be such that he 
 felt he must write it down in a book. Governed 
 by considerations regarding his own safety, 
 undoubtedly, his book was published — though 
 
SCIENCE AND THE CHURCH I3 
 
 I think it was dedicated to the Pope — as a tenta- 
 tive theory, and during the very last year of his 
 life. The first copy which the author ever saw 
 was brought to him as he lay on his sick-bed, 
 from which he never rose again. Had he lived 
 he would undoubtedly have been persecuted for 
 his teaching, as the book was placed on the Index, 
 and all good Catholics were forbidden to read it. 
 
 But here was the beginning of what is now 
 the universally accepted theory of the universe. 
 One after another facts began to round out this 
 theory. Galileo, Kepler, Newton, have added 
 to our knowledge in these directions, until at 
 last we are in the midst of this tremendous fact 
 that surrounds us on every hand. Science, 
 dreaded always by the Church, fought at every 
 step by theology, by the ecclesiastics, the churchly 
 authorities, — science at last has done for us 
 what the Church was never able to do. It has 
 given us a universe fit to be the garment, the 
 home, the phenomenal manifestation of the 
 infinite God. 
 
 We are all familiar with the facts that make 
 this universe so overwhelming to us ; and yet, 
 to freshen your thought, perhaps I may be 
 pardoned if I suggest one or two illustrations 
 to help us to feel its vastness. 
 
 We say glibly, * This earth is twenty-five 
 thousand miles in circumference ' ; and we have 
 
14 THE UNIVERSE 
 
 learned to adjust ourselves to the thought that 
 I used to repeat as a little couplet in my child's 
 geography,— 
 
 ' This world is round, wise men declare, 
 And hung on nothing in the air.' 
 
 These are familiar facts to us. But we do not 
 think of them enough to appreciate how tremen- 
 dous they are. We say the moon is two hundred 
 thousand miles away. Do we stop to appreciate 
 that, as we rejoice in the beauty of it on some 
 summer night ? How large is the sun ? Large 
 enough so that, if it were a hollow sphere with 
 the earth at its centre, the moon, two hundred 
 thousand miles away, would have free room to 
 swing in her orbit inside the sun. 
 
 To hint another illustration : if all the planets, 
 all the moons, all the comets, asteroids, all the 
 bodies that make up this solar system of ours, 
 except the sun, were fused into one globe, and 
 that were hurled against the face of the sun, it 
 would be so small a spot that it would hardly 
 show, being less than three per cent, of the sun 
 itself in bulk. 
 
 This sun, we say, is between ninety- two and 
 ninety-three millions of miles away ; and the 
 light, which seems to cross the space between 
 the moon and the earth instantaneously, takes 
 a little over eight minutes to reach us from the 
 
INFINITE SPACE 15 
 
 sun. But this same light, travelHng with this 
 incredible velocity, — or inconceivable, shall I say ? 
 — ^has to journey for three years and a half 
 before it reaches our next-door neighbour beyond 
 our little solar system. The nearest body to our 
 little group is so far away that it takes light about 
 three years and a half to reach us. If I 
 remember accurately, the next friend beyond 
 that is about seven years away, as light travels. 
 When I was a boy, and looked up to the skies, I 
 wondered that there were not frequent collisions 
 there, the blue seemed so crowded ; but when 
 we remember the inconceivable distances, we 
 wonder, rather, that they can have any influence 
 whatever over each other. But when we have 
 reached these, our next-door neighbours, we 
 are only standing on the threshold of star-lighted 
 avenues that reach on and on and on until 
 imagination faints, though we know that we have 
 only begun an endless journey. 
 
 The universe, then, overwhelms us by its 
 vastness, as we try to think of it ; and if we 
 suppose that God is still beyond the stars, as 
 they used to think him to be, why, then, he is 
 put at almost an infinite remove from us. And 
 if we think that heaven is away beyond these 
 luminous orbs, then the souls of our friends that 
 have left us have started on an infinite journey. 
 
 There are those who tell us that all the facts 
 
l6 THE UNIVERSE 
 
 of this universe can be accounted for simply by 
 supposing the existence of matter and force, 
 without any intelligence or any life except that 
 which is the product of matter and force, thrown 
 up as the waves of the sea are thrown up for a 
 little while into the light and the air, to go back 
 and be re-absorbed once more. 
 
 Let us contemplate this universe, then, for a 
 few moments, and see in the light of the best 
 science of the modern world what we are to think 
 about it. There is a large body of people who 
 fancy themselves thinkers at the present time 
 who have made the word * metaphysics ' a 
 weariness to all those who try to keep themselves 
 level-headed and sane. They tell us that our 
 senses misreport all the facts, that we cannot 
 know anything by means of our senses, that 
 matter is an illusion, not real at all, and that the 
 only thing that is real is mind. 
 
 There are certain apparent facts which seem 
 to justify this shallow conclusion. I look at the 
 sun and the moon ; and they seem very small 
 to me and not very far away, so that it is easy 
 for one to say that his sight has deluded him. 
 But except for my sight I should not know that 
 there exists any sun or moon at all, either near 
 or far. We talk about the sun's rising and 
 setting. It appears to rise and set, but we have 
 found out that this is not true. The sun is 
 
ILLUSION AND REALITY I7 
 
 substantially still, so far as this system of ours 
 is concerned, though we believe it to be itself 
 travelling with unspeakable velocity around 
 some more distant sun. We look at a flower, at 
 a rose, and we talk about the beautiful colour. 
 We have learned that the colour is not in the 
 rose. We listen to the sound of the waves on 
 the sea-shore. We have learned that apart from 
 our ears and our consciousness there is no sound 
 on the sea-shore. We have learned that all these 
 phenomenal manifestations, light, and heat, and 
 electricity, and magnetism, and colour, and 
 sound, are modes of motion, touching us, our 
 senses, and then transformed in our consciousness 
 in some at present unknown way into what they 
 seem to us to be. 
 
 Is the universe therefore illusion ? Nay, but 
 there is an outside reality there, an eternal 
 reality which appeals to us, and becomes these 
 things in our consciousness. We know now that, 
 whether man is immortal or not, what we call 
 matter is. We can demonstrate over and over 
 again that both force and matter are indestruc- 
 tible. What they are in themselves is another 
 problem ; and I venture to say that it is a problem 
 which does not concern us, except as a matter 
 of intellectual curiosity. 
 
 So far as we can think, nothing is anything 
 ' in itself.* Everything is what it is as related 
 
l8 THE UNIVERSE ' 
 
 to the perceiving intelligence. Sound, light, 
 colour, — all these things are what they are to 
 us who perceive and use them. What they 
 might conceivably be to some other kind of 
 being may be a matter of interest ; but it is 
 of no practical importance to us. What they 
 are to us, being what we are, is that which 
 concerns us, and is the only thing which we need 
 to know. 
 
 This universe, then, that surrounds us on 
 every hand is a reality : it is an indestructible 
 and eternal reality ; and it is to us all these fair 
 and beautiful things translated into terms of 
 our consciousness and become ministers to our 
 use and to our joy. 
 
 Now, if we turn in another direction, it is 
 interesting for us to try to find out what this 
 thing that we call ' matter ' is. For we must 
 outgrow the childishness of supposing that we 
 know a thing merely because we have named 
 and labelled it. What is this which we call 
 ' matter ' ? 
 
 The man who knows very little, indeed, is 
 the one who thinks, perhaps, that he knows the 
 most on this subject. Matter is something hard ; 
 it is something solid ; it is something he can 
 spurn with his foot or kick with his boot, — some- 
 thing very substantial. So he thinks. But the 
 most substantial thing that we can find we can 
 
* DEAD MATTER ' ig 
 
 turn into invisible vapour ; and, if we leave it 
 free, it disappears beyond the reach of any of 
 our senses. What is this hard and solid thing, 
 then, that We call matter ? 
 
 We have learned, for example, that there is 
 no such thing as a solid bit of matter, meaning 
 by that that the particles are in contact with each 
 other. The most solid thing in the world can 
 be compressed until it is smaller than it was. 
 That means that the particles do not really touch 
 each other : they can be pressed nearer and 
 nearer together. For the particles, even of a 
 bit of marble, are not in contact and they are not 
 stilL They are in a perpetual dance, as much 
 as are the bodies in the sky over our heads. 
 They have their own marvellous orbit ; and the 
 ' solid ' thing is all athrill with motion. 
 
 They used to talk about a something called 
 ' dead matter ' which the Creator originally 
 impressed with certain qualities. He made one 
 substance hard and another soft, one red and 
 another green, one metaUic and another of a 
 woody fibre. He impressed these qualities on 
 these hard substances, they said ; but we go in 
 pursuit of this hard matter, and it is impossible 
 for us to discover it anywhere. There used to be, 
 and there is now, in the theories of chemistry 
 for practical purposes, something called an 
 ' atom,' an atom supposed to be the ultimate 
 
20 THE UNIVERSE 
 
 hard substance through a combination of which 
 all other substances were made. But, when we 
 thought about an atom as a real substance, a 
 real solid bit of something that we could deal 
 with through our senses, we were plunged into 
 a sea of absurdities. Then we pursued this atom 
 with the microscope, with every instrument of 
 research that we could discover, until we found 
 at last that we were in the presence of what 
 Faraday called a ' point of force,' or what others 
 have named ' a vibratory thrill,' or others still 
 ' a vortex in the ether.' 
 
 We hunt for matter, then, as some solid, hard 
 thing ; and we cannot find it. We do find, 
 however, everywhere, this infinite, tireless move- 
 ment and life. We find that the universe is 
 athrill from the lowest depths that the microscope 
 can discover to the farthest range of the telescope 
 over our heads, — everything, everywhere, appar- 
 ently alive. And these little particles of matter, 
 so far as they can be discovered, have behaved 
 in such a strange way that the materialistic 
 philosophers themselves have been compelled 
 to reconstruct their theories about them. Clifford, 
 one of the most brilliant materialists that England 
 has produced during the last fifty years, — it is 
 a pity that he died so young, — used to tell us 
 about a little * mind-stuff ' in every particle of 
 matter. He could not account for the behaviour 
 
MATERIALISM 21 
 
 of matter in any other way. Haeckel, the 
 German scientist, talks about ' atom souls.' He 
 cannot account for the action of atoms in crystals, 
 in growing plants, and in man without supposing 
 that they have connected with them soul or mind 
 substance, out of which ultimately our own souls 
 are built. 
 
 So the materialists themselves have had to 
 give up what is called the materialistic theory 
 of things, — the idea that the universe is made 
 out of any substance called dead matter that 
 has been wrought upon from the outside by a 
 creative power, and that it has had these forces 
 and these qualities impressed upon it by some 
 divine artificer. 
 
 We find, then, so far as we can trace it, that 
 this universe is athrill with such mysterious and 
 subtle forces that we are beginning to wonder if 
 it is not a living creature. Take such a fact as 
 wireless telegraphy, and a thousand others that 
 are given us by modern science, and which are 
 becoming so familiar to us that we are apt to 
 overlook the marvel and significance of it all. 
 
 Then consider thought-transference. We have 
 not yet mastered the law of it, we cannot yet use 
 this power at will ; but it is demonstrated 
 beyond all rational question that minds can 
 communicate without any regard to distance, 
 ^nd practically without any regard to time, clear 
 
22 THE UNIVERSE 
 
 round the world. I know cases of this thought- 
 transference from the Indian Ocean to the 
 Atlantic. I know a case recently from Manilla 
 to New York. Thousands of them have been 
 demonstrated to be true. The world is a 
 whispering-gallery ; and it is all alive in response 
 to our thoughts, our feelings, our hopes, our fears, 
 our human activities. 
 
 What kind of strange thing, then, is this 
 universe ? If I remember rightly, Swedenborg 
 told us that the universe was in the form of a 
 man. What if we should come to the conclusion 
 at last that the universe is a living organism 
 instead of a mechanism ? — that it is a living 
 being, thrilling with life in every particle ? We 
 are being driven, scientifically driven, to that 
 conclusion. Because certain things, different 
 parts of the universe, are outside of our con- 
 sciousness, does not prove that they are outside 
 of some consciousness. To take an illustration 
 suggested by a book of Flammarion's (in English 
 entitled The Unknown). We know that these 
 bodies of ours are full of thousands, perhaps 
 millions, of microbes, and they are not enemies 
 of ours, the most of them : in health they are 
 our friends. But suppose one of these microbes 
 given conscious power of thought similar to our 
 own ; and, as he sailed down the Amazon or 
 Mississippi, to him, of one of our veins, or as he 
 
A LIVING ORGANISM 23 
 
 bored or tunnelled his way through the immense 
 rocky strata of one of our bones, or as he watched 
 some part of our heart, not conscious of it as an 
 organ by itself and fulfilling its own peculiar 
 function, — suppose he should try to speculate 
 as to a consciousness that could give life and the 
 sense of personal identity to this structure, as 
 large and incomprehensible to him as the universe 
 itself is to us. 
 
 I think it is Martineau who said that, for all 
 any scientific person knew to the contrary, the 
 dance of the planetary systems over our heads 
 might be the dance of the brain molecules of 
 some cosmic consciousness. These thoughts 
 overwhelm us, and seem incredible at first. But 
 there is nothing incredible about them. It is 
 simply a question of fact ; and, as already said, 
 we are being driven more and more to the belief 
 that this universe is a living organism. And I 
 incline strongly to the belief that God is the 
 intellect, the heart, the soul of it, as I am the 
 intellect, the heart, the soul of this organism 
 called my body. 
 
 And, if we may think of it in this way, then 
 God is not away off in any heaven. He is 
 everywhere ; and he is all everywhere at any 
 instant of time, as I am all, for any practical 
 purpose, in every part of my body at any par- 
 ticular inoment of time, 
 
24 THE UNIVERSE 
 
 This is the conception of the universe that we 
 are coming more and more in some form to hold. 
 The universe is a Hving being, and that which is 
 the Hfe of that universe is close by us ; and we 
 are a part of this infinite life. 
 
 We need here to guard ourselves against one 
 serious error. Because of what has been said, 
 we are not to confuse or confound the distinction 
 between mind and matter. It is common j ust now 
 for certain people, who think they are thinkers, 
 to say ' all is mind.' But what we call matter — 
 whatever its ultimate origin may be — is a distinct 
 and definite fact, governed in accordance with 
 its own laws, as ascertained by the senses and 
 experience of man. This material order, of which 
 our bodies are a part, is as divine and holy as the 
 mental or spiritual order. To deny it or dis- 
 regard it is not piety but the contrary. For one 
 is of God as truly as is the other. It is not 
 spirituality, but only mental confusion which 
 blurs this distinction. 
 
 It is worth while to note one or two points 
 briefly as indicating the moral and spiritual 
 significance of this view of the universe. 
 
 The universe is an intelligent being, whichever 
 way we turn. Wherever we pursue our investi- 
 gations, we find an intelligible order, perfect of its 
 kind. That which matches our intelligence, and 
 that which is inteUigible, we can only interpret as 
 
THE EMBODIMENT OF PURPOSE 25 
 
 the manifestation of intelligence. I believe, then, 
 that this universe is a living organism, and that 
 it is intelligible and intelligent from circumference 
 to centre. 
 
 Not only that. In the second place it is 
 beneficent. In spite of all the evils, in spite of 
 all the sufferings, the pains, and the sorrow, the 
 universe is a beneficent organism. In the nature 
 of things, if we stop and think of it a moment, 
 it cannot be anything else. Life and joy are the 
 result always of keeping the laws of this universe. 
 Pain, sorrow, what we call evil, premature death, 
 — these are always the result of law-breaking. 
 The universe is in favour of the keeping of its 
 own laws. It is in favour of life, of joy, of good, 
 which are the result of the keeping of these laws. 
 It seems to me that this is demonstrable truth. 
 
 Then the universe is the embodiment of a 
 purpose. We can trace an intelligent advance, 
 from the first beginning of our investigation up 
 the ages, until to-day ; and we can see that the 
 universe is still on the march, — it is not through. 
 To quote again, words already quoted till they 
 are trite, it is reaching toward some 
 
 * far-off divine event,' 
 
 as Tennyson has sung. 
 
 We cannot escape the conclusion that the 
 yniverse is rnoving with a purpose towar4s aa 
 
26 THE UNIVERSE 
 
 outcome : living, intelligent, beneficent, ad- 
 vancing, progressing. Such is our modern 
 thought of this marvellous universe of which we 
 are a part. 
 
 Now ethics in a universe like this, the laws of 
 right and wrong, cannot be something imported 
 from outside, cannot be external legislation, 
 cannot be arbitrary enactments, with arbitrary 
 rewards and punishments attached. Right and 
 wrong are in the nature of things. Law-keeping 
 is right, — that is, living in accord with this infinite 
 and eternal life ; and law-breaking is wrong, 
 living out of accord with this eternal and bene- 
 ficent life. 
 
 And religion cannot be something imported 
 from without. It cannot be a thing of ceremonies 
 or creeds. I say nothing against ceremonies. If 
 ceremonies express a real feeling, or help cultivate 
 a real feeling, well and good. They may be of 
 service. I say nothing against creeds. If a man 
 believe rightly, it will help him to act rightly. 
 For this reason, and to this extent, his creed is 
 important. But the idea of a creed, or believing 
 such and such a thing, as a vital matter in the 
 sense that somebody is going to be offended if 
 we do not, — that is all wrong. These things are 
 not important in that sense. 
 
 The one thing that is essential and vital in 
 religion is life, — living in uccord vvitU the infinite 
 
RELIGION IS LIFE 27 
 
 life of the Infinite Power manifested in the 
 universe. Whatever helps that hfe helps our 
 religious culture and development. Whatever 
 stands in the way of these stands in the way of 
 our religious life. But the life itself — the feeling, 
 the love, the consecration, the service — these are 
 the religion. 
 
II 
 
 MAN 
 
 In the early part of the sixth century before 
 Christ there lived in Sparta a man by the 
 name of Chilon. He was one of the reputed 
 Seven Sages of Greece ; and to him is attributed 
 one of the most famous sayings of the world. — 
 ' Know thyself.* He taught that the most 
 important object of human knowledge was human 
 nature. 
 
 And, as we think of it, we are compelled to 
 recognise that our theories and systems of religion 
 depend very largely upon our conception of the 
 origin and nature of man. Our ethical schemes 
 are determined by what we think about ourselves. 
 The origin of man is intimately, inextricably 
 associated with our thought as to the kind of 
 being he is ; and dependent on this thought — 
 as to the kind of being he is — are our dreams of 
 his destiny, both in this world and any possible 
 world in the future. It ought to be, then, the 
 most interesting, as it is the most important, 
 thing for us to study, — the origin and nature of 
 man. 
 
 Fro|B the beginning of the world until withi^ 
 
THE GENESIS STORY 2g 
 
 the last half-century, substantially the same 
 ideas have been held concerning human origins. 
 In other words, all religions, all races, have 
 believed that man was, at some time in the 
 history of the past, made, — made by a being 
 working on material from without, as a sculptor 
 might fashion and shape his clay. You are 
 familiar with the story which lies at the found- 
 ation of our religion, and which I need to note 
 merely for the sake of refreshing your memory 
 with what you already know. 
 
 The early chapters of Genesis, though they 
 were not put into their present form until late 
 in the history of the Hebrew people, tell us that 
 God created man in His own image — that He 
 took the dust of the earth and shaped the human 
 body. Then He breathed into the nostrils the 
 breath of life, and this body became a living 
 creature. The use of the word ' soul ' there does 
 not determine anything as to what we mean when 
 we discuss the question of the nature of the soul 
 and its possible immortahty : it means simply 
 that this man, created out of the dust, became 
 alive when God breathed into his nostrils. 
 
 Then it is said that God formed a garden east- 
 ward in Eden, and in it planted all trees that 
 were goodly to look at and good for food. And 
 He placed the man and the woman — whom He 
 created afterward — as the keepers of this garden, 
 
30 MAN 
 
 forbidding only one thing, — that they should 
 taste of the fruit of one particular tree. They 
 disobeyed this explicit order after they were 
 tempted by the serpent, who in later time came 
 to be regarded as the same as the devil. And, 
 as the result of this disobedience, they were cast 
 out of the garden. And all the evils that have 
 been known from the beginning of creation until 
 now have followed that act of disobedience and 
 that expulsion. 
 
 Moral evil came, so that man has been regarded 
 in all the great theologies of Christendom as 
 incapable of any moral good. This is the familiar 
 doctrine of total depravity ; and it is a perfectly 
 logical doctrine. It means simply that man is a 
 rebel against his rightful Ruler ; and, so long as 
 he continues in this attitude of rebellion, he can- 
 not do any good thing, — anything which his 
 Ruler wiU accept as good. This rebeUious 
 attitude vitiates all his actions and his nature, — 
 a perfectly logical outcome. 
 
 As the result of this, sin, pain, and sorrow came 
 into the world. And, finally, man was doomed 
 to death, — not simply a death which means the 
 dissolution of this physical body ; but, as we 
 have all been taught, no matter in what Christian 
 denomination we may have been trained, there 
 waits those who are not saved a second death 
 which is eternal. 
 
ORIGIN AND NATURE 31 
 
 This is the ordinary story as to the origin and 
 nature of man which was taught by the Jews 
 after it was borrowed, during the time of their 
 captivity, and which has been held from that 
 day to this in Christendom, and accepted with 
 practical universaUty. Man created then perfect, 
 voluntarily rebelling against God, and moral 
 evil, suffering, death, — the penalties inflicted 
 by the Divine Power, — these make up the tale 
 of human history. 
 
 It is very strange that until within the last 
 fifty years there has practically been no rational 
 study whatever anywhere in the world that has 
 attempted to investigate the problems of the 
 origin and the nature of man. This seems hke 
 a startling statement ; but you will see how 
 reasonable it is when I remind you of the fact 
 that among early, ignorant peoples there were 
 no means of study or investigation. The mind 
 of man had not sufficiently developed to make 
 him capable of undertaking so gigantic a task. 
 And then there were religious prejudice and 
 tradition — among the most powerful influences 
 in the world — standing in the way. The credulous 
 early tribes easily accepted without question any 
 statement made to them by their leaders and 
 their priests, and did not think of studying the 
 matter, even if they had been able to study it, 
 which they were not. 
 
32 MAN 
 
 There was then no rational investigation in 
 this direction until the two or three centuries 
 of the last part of the history of Greece preceding 
 the birth of Christ. Science in some true sense 
 had been born and was beginning to develop 
 among the later Greeks. But, unfortunately, 
 young Christianity adopted a Persian or Baby- 
 lonian legend which the Jews had borrowed, — 
 adopted it as an infallible, divine revelation 
 explaining the origin and nature of man. For 
 this story of the creation, the Garden of Eden, 
 the serpent, and the fall, was not even original 
 with the Jews. It was Persian or Babylonian 
 tradition, which, as has already been said, was 
 borrowed during the time of the captivity. 
 
 Early Christianity accepted this story as infallib- 
 ly revealing divine truth. So, do you not see, for 
 the first fifteen hundred years of Christian history 
 scientific investigation was practically impossible ? 
 It was forbidden as heresy ; it was daring to 
 doubt the word of God. So, when the mind of 
 man did wake up after the long sleep of the 
 early centuries and the Middle Ages, and began 
 to question, the questioning had to be done by 
 stealth. Men investigated in hidden corners, in 
 out-of-the-way places ; they involved their 
 theories of truth in allegories ; they would put 
 forth tentatively a statement which, to the modern 
 reader, clearly shows what they were really 
 
THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION 33 
 
 believing, and then, on the basis of revelation, 
 apparently deny and repudiate it, because they 
 dared not do otherwise. 
 
 There was, then, say for fifteen hundred years, 
 no science, no investigation, as to these great 
 problems. Then men began to dare to think ; 
 began to win intellectual freedom, so that it was 
 safe to think ; achieved at last thinking inde- 
 pendence ; and then for the first time since the 
 world began were we in a condition to attack a 
 problem like this with any hope of its solution. 
 
 In the modern world there were foregleams 
 and precursors of what in all future ages will 
 be regarded as the most distinguishing feature 
 of the nineteenth century, the great Doctrine 
 of Evolution. Who framed it ? Buffon, Goethe, 
 Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Lamarck, and the elder 
 Darwin — men like these speculated, felt their 
 way, wondered, asked questions, but came to no 
 solution. Herbert Spencer, in 1852, published 
 an article called ' The Development Hypothesis,' 
 in which he outlined the entire scheme of evolu- 
 tion, including the universe as we know it to-day. 
 But this was philosophy, and not science. Her- 
 bert Spencer no more than his predecessors had 
 put his finger on the key-point of the situation. 
 That is, he did not point out a real cause which 
 could account for supposed changes. In 1859, 
 seven years later, Darwin published The Origin 
 
34 MAN 
 
 of species. Alfred Russel Wallace, still living, 
 and then at work in the Malay Archipelago, had 
 hit upon an independent discovery of the same 
 great natural truth. 
 
 Never since the world began has a book met 
 with such a tempest and storm of obloquy, abuse 
 and ridicule, as did this book of Darwin's. The 
 religious world was aghast. Here was flat and 
 outright denial of revelation. Here was blas- 
 phemy. Here was the degradation of man, 
 making him akin to the lower orders of life on 
 the earth. And the witty paragraphists of the 
 newspapers have found in the supposed monkey- 
 origin of the race infinite fund for ridicule, from 
 that day to this, developing many varieties of 
 wit, and exposing the fact either that they were 
 too ignorant to know what they were talking 
 about, or else that they were willing to accept the 
 charge of ignorance because it gave them an 
 opportunity to appear smart. 
 
 Never, I say, has any book been so abused as 
 this ; but it rapidly made its way among the 
 competent, the minds of those who had been 
 seeking for some light on the origin and nature 
 of man, until to-day there is not a thinker on 
 the face of the earth who is aware of the facts 
 who dares to question the substantial truth of 
 the great discovery which Darwin made. 
 
 What is this discovery ? It is a discovery 
 
THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION 35 
 
 that all the forms of life we see on the globe are 
 growths, not outright creations. It had been 
 believed, taught by all naturalists until very 
 recent years, that God created outright, in a 
 moment, certain types and forms of life. Then 
 there was some great catastrophe which destroyed 
 them all and then he created another and higher 
 type ; and so on step by step, as the forms of 
 life have advanced. God has made the new 
 conditions and then matched these by new and 
 special creations of new and higher types of 
 organism. This had been the belief until the 
 epoch-making book of Darwin in 1859. Since 
 that day all the world has come to think of the 
 universe itself as a growth, an unfolding. 
 
 As a part of the evolution of the universe this 
 earth appeared. Then the lower types of life. 
 From these low beginnings the forms of life have' 
 climbed by natural gradation, one type of life 
 growing out of, evolving from, the preceding. 
 So there is genetic, vital connection between the 
 lowest form of life on the earth and the highest 
 and noblest type of man. We arc all akin, one 
 life. But note, if you please, that this doctrine 
 does not degrade and brutalise man : it lifts the 
 level of all life, and teaches us to think of the 
 lowest and highest as equally divine. It is one 
 life everywhere, and that one life God. This is 
 the outcome of the evolution teaching, and not 
 
36 MAN 
 
 that which was rashly regarded as its logical 
 conclusion at the first. 
 
 I cannot go into an elaborate argument, if it 
 were needed at this late day, to prove that man 
 is evolved or developed from lower types of Hfe ; 
 but I can give you briefly two or three facts 
 which carry the argument with them irresistibly 
 to any thoughtful man. 
 
 There are just three thinkable ways by which 
 man could have appeared on this planet. We 
 know that there was a time when he was not 
 here : we know that now he is here. How did 
 he get here — by what process ? That is the 
 problem which naturalists set themselves to 
 study. You can think that the story in Genesis 
 is literal fact, that the Almighty God of this 
 universe took clay, as a sculptor does, and 
 shaped it into the image of a man, then breathed 
 into the nostrils and conferred hfe upon what 
 was dead. That is a possible, thinkable theory. 
 A ' theory,' I say, by way of courtesy ; for it 
 is not a scientific theory. A scientific theory 
 must have some facts on which to base it, and 
 out of which to construct it ; but there are no 
 facts in this connection. So it is not a scientific 
 theory. 
 
 The second way by which man might possibly 
 have come here is this. We may think that he 
 might have been born of parents very much 
 
THEORY OF CREATION 37 
 
 unlike himself ; as though, for example, a dog 
 were born of a horse. 
 
 A third way is this, — he might have been born 
 of parents slightly unlike himself. He might 
 have appeared as an advance in certain directions 
 on this parent ; and this may have been the 
 method all the way down the line of the ages 
 to the beginning. 
 
 Now here are three thinkable ways. If you 
 were confronted with two or three possibilities, 
 and one of them had a little evidence in its 
 favour and the others had none at all, as a rational 
 being you would feel compelled to accept that 
 which had even the slightest amount of evidence, 
 though you might not regard it as being nearly 
 all you would like. 
 
 Now in regard to this theory of outright 
 creation, in the nature of things there is no 
 possibility of one slightest particle of evidence 
 whatever. Proof is out of the question. In 
 regard to the second theory, that man might 
 have been born of parents very much unlike 
 himself, there is no evidence, there is no possi- 
 bility of proof of anything of the sort ever 
 having occurred. For the third possible theory, 
 that he might have been born of parents slightly 
 unlike himself, and so have advanced beyond 
 them, there is a good deal of evidence. In other 
 words, all the evidence there is in the world is in 
 
38 MAN 
 
 favour of this theory, which is the theory of 
 evolution, — that man has been developed grad- 
 ually, slowly, from lower types of life. 
 
 Now what does this mean ? I should be 
 ashamed to presume that I needed to explain 
 this point, did I not constantly see references to 
 it in the great newspapers and hear it on every 
 side in conversation. The popular opinion seems 
 to be that Darwinism, or evolution, teaches that 
 man has been developed from the ape ; and this 
 is the material for all the witty paragraphs which 
 have enlivened the newspapers for the last 
 forty years. Darwinism teaches nothing of 
 the sort. 
 
 What does it teach? If I could draw a 
 diagram on a blackboard, I could make the 
 meaning very plain. Suppose you think of the 
 evolution of life under the figure of a vine. Take 
 an enormous grape-vine, if you please ; picture 
 it in your mind for a moment. As you come up 
 the central stem, a branch goes off on one side : 
 here is one type and kind of life, one species, we 
 will say, of creature. A little farther up another 
 branch starts off, and develops into another type 
 of life ; still higher, another branch ; still higher, 
 another branch, — and so on, branching out into 
 one kind of life after another. But evolution 
 does not teach that one species ever directly 
 developed into another species. 
 
DARWINISM 39 
 
 In other words, we find the fishes , then above 
 them are the reptiles ; but no full-grown and 
 developed fish ever changed into a reptile. After 
 the reptiles, you have the birds ; but no com> 
 pleted reptile ever became a bird. After the 
 birds you have the mammals ; but no bird ever 
 developed into a mammal. This is not evolution, 
 this is not Darwinism. 
 
 What does it teach ? We know that there 
 are creatures, we find their remains in the earth's 
 strata, who are half-bird and half-reptile : they 
 have the characteristics of both, so that it is 
 difficult for the naturalist to tell which they 
 really are. What does this mean ? It means 
 that before the birds and the reptiles had become 
 completely separated from each other there 
 were these creatures with the characteristics of 
 the two, and that then one branch of life shot 
 off in one direction and developed all the reptiles, 
 completed reptilian life in its widely various 
 forms y and above this juncture where you 
 find the characteristics of both, another branch 
 shot off, and developed into all the bird-like 
 forms. 
 
 So there was a point down below man, and 
 below the ape, where there were creatures 
 manifesting the characteristics of both the ape 
 and the man, and where it would be very difficult, 
 indeed, for a naturalist to tell whether the 
 
40 MAN 
 
 creature was ape or man. But by and by the 
 ape-like forms go their own way ; and above, 
 from this trunk of hfe, there shoots out a branch, 
 and the lowest manifestation of it is the lowest 
 type of the human. This is what evolution 
 teaches, that there has been this gradual develop- 
 ment of all these various forms of life, until on 
 the topmost bough there comes as fruitage this 
 wonderful human nature of ours, summing up 
 in itself the characteristics of all the forms of 
 life that have preceded it, keeping whatever is 
 useful to it, and yet developing something 
 higher and finer. 
 
 Man, then, originated in this purely natural 
 way ; not without the help and guidance of 
 God, but under God's guidance. In other 
 words, it is not a question as to whether God 
 created us or made us, whatever word you 
 choose to use, or as to whether he is our Father. 
 It is simply a question of process, of method, 
 as to how we came to be what we are. 
 
 I have been asked a great many times whether 
 this theory of the origin of man does not make 
 it difficult for us to believe in the soul. Where 
 does the soul come in ? There is no more 
 difficulty about it on this theory than there is 
 on the other. It has always been a matter of 
 speculation among philosophers as to where the 
 soul comes from. In the old days, in the Middle 
 
THE SOUL 41 
 
 Ages, among the school-men, you will find, if 
 you care to look into the matter, that there 
 were three speculative theories. A certain set 
 of men taught that all souls were pre-existent, 
 and that, when a new babe was born, he was 
 furnished with a soul that may have been as 
 old as the angels or as old almost as God himself. 
 For a previous immortality has been believed 
 in by some, as well as an immortality of the 
 future. 
 
 Then there was the theory called Traducianism. 
 It was believed that man inherited his soul 
 from his father and mother, as he inherited his 
 other faculties and qualities. Then there was 
 Creationism, which taught that God created a 
 new soul for every baby born into the world. 
 So this question as to where the soul comes 
 from is not necessarily connected with evolution. 
 It is as old as human thought. 
 
 I believe that the soul began when man 
 began. We know that the animals below us 
 are conscious ; but they are not self-conscious. 
 No animal ever thinks 'I.' No horse or dog 
 ever thinks, I am a horse, I am a dog, or wonders 
 at 1 the difference between itself and some other 
 animal. But, when man appeared, the * I,' 
 the ' ego,' the self-conscious entity was bom. 
 In other words, I believe that the divine life 
 which was in the grass-blade and which climbed 
 
42 MAN 
 
 up through the infinite ages, manifesting itself 
 in every type and form of Ufe until man appeared, 
 with man became integrated into the ego, so 
 that man felt he was a self, and could speak of 
 God as his Father, and could reasonably expect 
 to go on, starting out upon an infinite pathway 
 that leads into the future. 
 
 Darwinism, it seems to me (and I must take 
 your time long enough to dwell for a moment 
 on this), gives us an entirely rational and a 
 much more hopeful account of the origin, or 
 existence, rather, of evil, of pain, of sorrow, of 
 death, than does the old theory. It seems to me 
 a hopeless way of looking at human history to 
 suppose that we began in perfection, that we 
 immediately fell, and that God was angry with 
 us and has been punishing the world ever since 
 with moral evil and pain and infinite suffering 
 after death. If we accept evolution, which has 
 been demonstrated as true, where do we land ? 
 Note I say, demonstrated as true. It is no 
 theory in the sense that you are at liberty to 
 accept or reject it, as you please. It is proved 
 to be true. 
 
 What is the outcome of it ? In the first 
 place, we are confronted with this significant 
 and wonderful fact. The world has puzzled 
 itself always over the origin of evil, — why God 
 permitted evil. But, now that we think of man 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 43 
 
 in the light of this new and magnificent truth, 
 we have no origin of evil to contend with or 
 account for. It is the origin of goodness that 
 we are to think of. For in this lower animal 
 world all that we think of as evil, — jealousy, 
 hatred, selfishness, greed, horrors, wars, murders, 
 death, — all these things existed from the first. 
 They existed before man appeared ; but they 
 were not evil, because there was no conscience, 
 there was no standard of right and wrong. It 
 was not an immoral world : it was an unmoral 
 world. So that, when man appeared, instead 
 of its being the origin of evil, it was the origin of 
 goodness. When the conscience first became 
 developed and man was able to recognise himself 
 as capable of doing either right or wrong, then 
 he took an immense step in advance. It was 
 not a fall : it was an ascent. So this greater 
 truth for ever does away with all possibility of 
 belief in the Fall of Man. 
 
 The recognition of the distinction between 
 right and wrong was an immense step in advance. 
 Man became a moral being, capable of improve- 
 ment, looking down upon his lower self, seeing 
 the imperfections of his nature, and striving to 
 outgrow them and leave them behind. So there is 
 no doctrine of the introduction of evil into a good 
 universe, on this theory : it is the coming of good, 
 the recognition of good in an unmoral universe. 
 
44 MAN 
 
 Again, we have not to think of God's inflicting 
 pain as a punishment. People have been asking 
 from the beginning of the world until to-day : 
 What have I done that God inflicts this punish- 
 ment upon me ? Why does he make me suffer ? 
 Why must my nerves thrill and tingle with 
 pain ? Think for a moment. In the light of 
 this theory, pain as an argument against the 
 goodness of God utterly disappears. There are 
 two kinds of pain in the universe. There is the 
 necessary pain, and the needless pain, — the pain 
 that we bring upon ourselves without our being 
 obliged to do it and that which we volimtarily 
 inflict on other people. These things are evil, 
 but God is not responsible for them : they are 
 not a charge against his goodness. 
 
 Now, all the necessary pain of the world is 
 seen to be infinitely beneficent. Instead of its 
 being something that we must account for, 
 apologise for, it is something to be grateful for. 
 You cannot conceive of the existence of nerves 
 which can thrill with pleasure without their also 
 being capable of thrilling with pain. Then, if a 
 race of creatures could be created and placed 
 upon the earth incapable of feeling pain, they 
 would be wiped out of existence in six months. 
 The necessary pain of the world is simply the 
 signal set up marked * Danger,' ' No thorough- 
 fare,' warning us against things that would do 
 
THE FALL 45 
 
 US harm. All the needful pain of the world is a 
 token of the love, the beneficence, the kindliness, 
 and the care of our Father. 
 
 Then, too, death, instead of being the last 
 great evil, the one final curse of God, the mark 
 of his disapprobation of a ruined and fallen 
 race — death is found to be as natural as life, a 
 part of the divine order, not something to be 
 accounted for ; as natural as the sunset after a 
 sunrise, that which rounds out human life. 
 Death is not an evil — I mean natural death, 
 death after a well-ordered life : it is only 
 premature death, which God, again, is not 
 generally responsible for, which is an evil. If 
 there be another life, then death is the greatest 
 blessing that God has conferred in love and 
 tenderness upon his children ; for it is the gate- 
 way of immortality. 
 
 You see, then, in the light of this theory of 
 evolution, this way of looking at the origin and 
 nature of man, the old difficulties fade away, 
 the problems are changed, and, though they 
 were thought to be insoluble, are found to be 
 capable of solution. 
 
 And now at the last I wish to call your 
 attention to the fact that the disproof of the 
 doctrine of the Fall of Man has in it the seed of 
 the universal dissolution of the theologies of 
 Christendom. Every one of the theologies of 
 
46 MAN 
 
 Christendom has been based on the doctrine of the 
 Fall of Man : their scheme of theology has been a 
 plan for the saving of man from the results of the 
 supposed fall. Within the last fifty years, as I have 
 said, — and inevitably then because it could not 
 have come before, — it has been demonstrated that 
 what was supposed to be a fall is an ascent ; 
 and every one of the great and towering the- 
 ologies of Christendom are crumbling at their 
 foundations, and of necessity must fall. 
 
 It is a new problem which is presented to 
 the world ; and the churches are beginning 
 to readjust themselves to it instinctively and 
 gradually. Less and less do they talk about 
 the wrath of God, less and less about the fall 
 of man : it has become poetry, an allegory. 
 Less and less do they frighten men and women 
 with lurid pictures of the coming horrors of 
 another life. More and more do they tell us 
 that it is possible for men naturally to be good, 
 and that the one great end and object of all 
 churches and all preaching and all human effort 
 is to help men to be good. Less and less do we 
 hear of salvation, in the technical sense of that 
 word. More and more do we hear of education, 
 of training, of helping to set the human race in 
 better conditions, of cleansing and purifying 
 our environments, of making it possible for 
 people to live sweet and simple and wholesome 
 
EDUCATION NOT SALVATION 47 
 
 lives. More and more talk do we hear of improv- 
 ing the conditions that surround us. These are 
 taking the place of the old ideas of a supernatural 
 salvation from an eternal woe. 
 
 It is education that the race needs, not salva- 
 tion. I am using the words in the technical 
 sense. Not education in the sense of teaching 
 people things, — that is not education, —education 
 in the sense of unfolding, evolving, developing 
 what is in man, his capacities and possibilities. 
 What the race needs is a chance to live and 
 become its best self. 
 
 I do not for a moment think that the life and 
 teaching, the lovely figure, of the Nazarene are 
 to pass away or lessen in their influence. I 
 believe that Jesus in the ages to come will be 
 more and more ; for Jesus did not teach what 
 have become the fundamental principles and 
 ideas of the theology that has worn his name. 
 Jesus is the ideal man, the son of God, the 
 embodiment of love and tenderness and pity 
 and human help. So he will march on, radiant 
 as the morning, leading the advance of mankind, 
 an ideal, unapproachable because we shall lift 
 him and make him more and more beautiful in 
 our thought as the world advances. He will 
 influence and stimulate and lift up the race. 
 
 But henceforth the problem of religion is not 
 to save us from the wrath of a God which does 
 
48 MAN 
 
 not exist, is not to deliver us from a hell which 
 is a figment of the barbaric imaginations of the 
 ancient world : it is to develop man more and 
 more, to carry on the work of evolution ; for 
 evolution is done, practically, with our physical 
 form, so far as man is concerned. 
 
 Note one very interesting thing. The lowest 
 forms of life are horizontal. As life lifts, creatures 
 begin to rise, until, when you come to man, he is 
 perpendicular. You can carry the process no 
 further unless you reverse it and revert to the 
 original form. The body is complete except 
 that it may be made finer and finer. Evolution 
 has transferred its working to the mind, the 
 heart, the moral nature, the soul ; and so the 
 ages that are to come shall find man ever growing 
 more and more into the likeness of his ideal, 
 which is the likeness of his Father, God. 
 
Ill 
 
 BIBLES 
 
 Has God ever spoken to men ? If so, has 
 he got through speaking, or does he speak 
 to-day ? Assuming that God exists, and that 
 we are his children, we should certainly suppose 
 that he would have something to say to us. 
 We should expect, at least, that he would give 
 us adequate guidance in the most important 
 affairs of Ufe. Has he spoken, then ? Does 
 he speak ? 
 
 So far as we can trace the beliefs of the ancient 
 world, men have always supposed that they 
 received messages from the Unseen, from their 
 gods, or, when they came to be monotheists, 
 from God. It may be well for us to note 
 some of the many and various ways by which 
 they have supposed these words of God to come. 
 
 Stepping outside our line of Christian tradi- 
 tion, we find the ancient priests believed that 
 they could divine concerning the purposes of the 
 gods by watching^the flight of birds, or by studying 
 the entrails of animals as they were being 
 sacrificed. There were certain sacred trees in 
 
 D 
 
50 BIBLES 
 
 different parts of the world. It was supposed 
 that the divine will could be learned by listening 
 to the noise of the winds in the leaves of these 
 trees, and interpreting the message. 
 
 In other parts of the world there were mys- 
 terious and sacred caverns, from which issued 
 what wc should call to-day natural gases. These 
 gases had the power to produce certain effects 
 which were called inspiration on the part of the 
 priests who inhaled them, and what they said 
 in these conditions were taken to be messages 
 from the Unseen. Then revelations came by 
 means of visions or voices. Those who were 
 insane were supposed to be taken possession of, 
 and to be speaking words of mysterious import. 
 In all these many ways, and in others which need 
 not be enumerated, people outside the line of our 
 Christian history have believed that they received 
 messages from the gods. 
 
 When we come to trace the beliefs of the 
 people from whom we have inherited our religion, 
 we find that they held similar beliefs. There 
 were other ways besides these, also, in which 
 they trusted. Wc do not know just how they 
 were used, but in the old days the high priests 
 were believed to be able to communicate with 
 the divine by using the Urim and the Thummim. 
 These were sacred stones. In what way they 
 were supposed to communicate the divine will 
 
MESSAGES FROM THE UNSEEN 51 
 
 we are now not certain. They also expected to 
 find out the hidden things by means of the ephod, 
 a holy girdle worn by the high priest. It was 
 not uncommon for them to cast lots, expecting 
 God to direct how the lots should fall. We find 
 the eleven apostles adopting this method in the 
 sacred work of electing a twelfth man to take 
 the place of Judas after the betrayal. 
 
 Not only among these were there visions, 
 messages, voices, men sent, books written, but 
 there were also dreams, there were ecstasies. 
 St. Paul, for example, tells us how he was carried 
 away in an ecstasy and visited the third heaven, 
 hearing words and seeing things which it was 
 not lawful for him at present to disclose. 
 
 In all these ways, then, and in many others, 
 men have supposed that they received messages 
 from God. Of course, the most important way 
 in the thought of Christendom to-day is that of 
 being inspired to write certain parts of a book 
 which has come to be called the Bible. Before 
 considering that, however, let us raise a pre- 
 liminary question. 
 
 Is there any way that we can think of by 
 which God could speak an infallible message to 
 men ? For, of course, the pivot on which the 
 whole question turns is this matter of infallibility. 
 Suppose a man has a vision, whether in the 
 night or in the day. It may be an authentic 
 
52 BIBLES 
 
 thing to him. But can he convey it in any 
 infallible way to others ? We must trust him, 
 — both for the accuracy of his statements and 
 for his interpretation of the meaning of that 
 which he has seen. Can we be sure that he is 
 accurate always in his statements ? 
 
 Suppose a man claims that the Holy Spirit 
 has taken possession of him, and that he speaks 
 by inspiration. He may be ever so thoroughly 
 convinced of this ; but how is he going to con- 
 vince the world ? We cannot help wondering 
 as to whether he is mistaken ; and when we 
 find people claiming to be inspired, as we do, 
 contradicting each other and giving inconsistent 
 messages, then we feel sure that at least some 
 of them must be mistaken, and it may be im- 
 practicable for us to decide which. 
 
 Take any message that you can imagine ; 
 and by the time it has become a second or a 
 third-hand message, an element of uncertainty 
 has entered in which makes it impossible for a 
 rational man to have any trust in its infallibility. 
 
 Suppose a book be written ; and let us concede 
 for a moment that in the first instance it is 
 absolutely infallible, — that is, it is a direct and 
 precise expression of the thought and the will of 
 God. But no words have ever yet been framed 
 which conveyed precisely the same ideas to 
 every class of mind and every grade of 
 
INFALLIBLE MESSAGES 53 
 
 intelligence. So even this may not give the 
 same message to everybody. 
 
 But by and by this original writing is lost. 
 It has been copied : who knows whether the 
 copyist was infallible ? It has been copied 
 over and over and over again, has passed through 
 a hundred hands. It has been translated into 
 other languages. Who knows whether the trans- 
 lator was infallible ? So, if the original writer 
 received the infallible word of God, by the next 
 generation, by the time it was transmitted to 
 some other people, an element of inevitable 
 uncertainty has entered in. So I, for one, can- 
 not conceive of any way but one — which, perhaps, 
 I shall refer to by and by — through which we 
 can get an infallible message from the Divine. 
 
 Suppose, for example, that the stars were 
 arranged so as to read across the face of the 
 night heavens, ' There is a God,' and to give us 
 his name. Who could say but what they were 
 accidentally arranged in that order ? The words 
 would necessarily, at any rate, be in some par- 
 ticular language. Who would be sure of the 
 translation ? You see, even in a thing like this, 
 there would inevitably arise a question in the 
 minds of after generations ; for the arrangement 
 of the constellations to-day is certainly as 
 wonderful as though they spelled out words in 
 some tongue which is no longer a living language. 
 
54 BIBLES 
 
 There seems to me, then, no way by which 
 we can escape a certain element of question as 
 to the infalHbiHty of any word that claims to 
 come to us from God. 
 
 But now another question : Do we need an 
 infallible revelation ? If we do, why ? If it 
 indeed be true that the race is in a moral and 
 spiritual condition such as it could not discover 
 and find out for itself, and if it be further true 
 that God has arbitrarily doomed the world to 
 an endless hell in the future on account of this 
 condition concerning which we are ignorant and 
 are not wise enough to discover, why, then, of 
 course, God would have to tell us about it, and 
 tell us very plainly. But a supposition like this 
 would presuppose God to be an unjust and 
 immoral being whose word «^ven would not be 
 worthy of our trust. 
 
 It does not seem to me, then, that we need 
 an infallible revelation in religion any more than 
 we need one in agriculture, any more than we 
 need one in chemistry or geology or astrology 
 or engineering or mechanics of any kind, any 
 more than the financier needs one in Wall Street. 
 
 I suppose all of us would be glad to have 
 infallible guidance in the particular matter in 
 which we happen to be interested ; but I do not 
 believe that it would be well for us. And let me 
 tell you why. If the world had had, years ago, 
 
INFALLIBLE REVELATIONS 55 
 
 an infallible revelation made in regard to any 
 department of human endeavour, do you not 
 see that it would have interfered with the 
 development of the human mind itself ? Every 
 teacher knows that it is not wise to put in the 
 hands of his pupil in mathematics a book 
 containing the answer to all the problems. He 
 knows, if he does, that the mathematical ability 
 of the boy will never be developed as it must be 
 by his own working out of those problems ; and 
 it is much more important that the pupil be 
 educated mathematically, to evolve, to develop 
 in the process of study, than it is that he get the 
 right answer. The right answer is entirely a 
 secondary consideration. It is the growth and 
 development of the pupil that is all-important. 
 
 Suppose God, a thousand years ago, had 
 revealed to the world all that is known to-day 
 about steam and its application to the many 
 industries of life. The world would not have 
 been ready for it in the first place — it would 
 only partially have comprehended what it was 
 all about ; and it would have interfered with 
 the education of the race out of which have 
 come the invention, the discovery, and the 
 mastery of this tremendous force. 
 
 I believe, then, that an infallible revelation 
 in any department of human life would not be 
 a good thing for us : it would be an evil thing. 
 
56 BIBLES 
 
 And now let me appeal for a moment to history 
 to justify my statement. There have been a 
 great many infallible revelations given to the 
 world ; that is, if we are to trust the word of 
 those who have received them. They have had 
 them in India, two or three of them ; in China, 
 the teachings of Confucius : in Arabia, the 
 Koran, the Bible of the Mohammedans. They 
 had them in Old Testament times, in New Testa- 
 ment times. We have had one or two in the 
 modern world. The Book of Mormon is precisely 
 as infallible as any other Bible that the world has 
 ever received, if we are to take the opinions of 
 its believers as settling the matter. And now 
 the latest of them all, Mrs. Eddy, has made a 
 deliberate and definite statement to the world 
 that her book, Science and Healthy is inspired ; 
 that she did not write it. So we have a large 
 number of infallible books in the world. The 
 only trouble with them for the student is that 
 they do not at all agree with one another ; and 
 we cannot believe that God is the author of 
 contradiction and confusion. 
 
 Go a little closer, and note another fact. 
 Suppose you visit India or China or Arabia — 
 any of the countries where they have an infallible 
 book, it does not make a particle of difference 
 which. Does the book which is an infallible 
 revelation carry the same message to everybody ? 
 
DO ALL RECEIVE THE SAME MESSAGE ? 57 
 
 Not at all. You have schools, different philoso- 
 phies, sects, divisions, in all these countries, each 
 one of them claiming the authority of the one 
 infallible revelation on behalf of its peculiar 
 teaching. So, however infallible it may be, it 
 does not carry infallible guidance to the people 
 who devoutly believe in it. 
 
 Not only, then, do the different Bibles of the 
 world contradict each other, but they do not 
 carry the same message to those that accept 
 them. 
 
 Come now to our own Bible for the moment. 
 Do all the people who accept the Old and New 
 Testaments as an infallible revelation from God 
 get the same message from and through them ? 
 We know they do not. Doctrinally, with regard 
 to practical matters, in all sorts of ways they 
 differ. Here are the Baptists, for example, 
 insisting that the Bible teaches one authoritative 
 method of baptism ; and nobody else at all 
 agrees with them. Here are the Presbyterians 
 and the Congregationalists and the Episco- 
 palians, each one claiming that a certain church 
 order is clearly revealed in the New Testament ; 
 and each one of them feels sure that he has got 
 it and the rest have not. 
 
 Then as to matters of doctrine, in regard to 
 the nature of man, the fall of man, the nature 
 of Jesus, atonement, future punishment, — aU 
 
58 BIBLES 
 
 sorts of problems : as many different opinions 
 are held as there are different sects and denomi- 
 nations, and each one of them appeals to the one 
 infaUible message as its authority. Something 
 wrong somewhere. It cannot be perfectly clear. 
 
 And then another thing. Those persons who 
 have believed — and this is true not of our Bible 
 only, but of all Bibles — that they had an abso- 
 lutely infallible book have stood square in the 
 way of human progress, always, everywhere, 
 and of necessity. Infallibility cannot posr 
 sibly consist with free inquiry, with discovery 
 and advance. 
 
 You remember the old Mohammedan, who 
 said concerning the famous Alexandrian library : 
 * If it agrees with the Koran, then we do not 
 need it. If it does not, it is wrong, and ought to 
 be destroyed.* So he burned the thousands of 
 vohimes. This is the spirit of infallibility : 
 nothing can be permitted that is not consistent 
 with the book, with ' my ' interpretation of the 
 book ; for that, of course, is the only one that 
 is correct. So the world must stand still where 
 the writer of the book had stopped thinking. 
 
 Infallibility stands, then, and of necessity, 
 in the way of all growth. It produces certain 
 other results which are evil, and only evil, and 
 evil continually. It cultivates spiritual conceit, 
 superciliousness and pride. Remember the word 
 
THE SPIRIT OF ROMAN CATHOLICISM 59 
 
 of the Psalmist, and see how out of it have come 
 bitterness, hatred, and persecution in every age. 
 The Psahnist says : ' Do not I hate them that 
 hate thee ? I hate them with perfect hatred.' 
 
 Queen Mary of England, popularly called the 
 Bloody, said, ' Since God is going to burn for 
 ever the heretics in another life, it is fitting that 
 I should imitate him and burn them in this.' 
 
 Out of this belief in ' my ' infallibility comes 
 the fact that ' I ' cannot tolerate anybody who 
 differs from me. And, if it is believed that I 
 stand as sponsor for and representative of God, 
 then I have no right to tolerate. I stand as 
 voicing the wrath of the Almighty ; and you 
 know what that means always, always has 
 meant, when a man has arrogated to himself 
 that supreme position. 
 
 The spirit of the Romish Church, we say, is 
 changed, is becoming broader and more liberal. 
 It is— under compulsion. What did the Pope 
 say the other day ? The Duke of Norfolk, the 
 titled leader of the Roman Catholics in England, 
 led six or eight hundred pilgrims to Rome ; and 
 the Pope, when he received them, complained, 
 whiningly, of the fact that he was kept a captive 
 by the secular power and had no longer any 
 temporal rule, and that therefore he and the 
 Church and the truth and God were being insulted 
 by Protestant worship springing up right there 
 
6o BIBLES 
 
 in Rome. That is the spirit of Popery to-day 
 — if it only had the power. 
 
 It is the spirit of all infallibilities, and of 
 necessity must be. InfalHbihty has hated, has 
 persecuted, has kindled fires, has turned the 
 thumb-screw, has manipulated the rack, has 
 invented all tortures, has driven believers into 
 the wilderness, has cast them over the edge of 
 precipices, has pursued them with the sword, has 
 watered the streets of the Old World with blood, 
 has lighted up the darkness of the ages with fires 
 that would seem to have been kindled from the 
 lower regions. This has been the result of infallible 
 revelations. We do not need them. We thank 
 God that in this modem world we are getting 
 free from the superstitious belief that we have 
 them. 
 
 Now, then, where are we in regard . to this 
 matter of God's speaking to the world ? Does 
 he not speak ? Has he not spoken ? I said 
 near the beginning of this chapter that I might 
 refer to the possibility of certain utterances of 
 the divine as being fixed and final. To what 
 did I refer ? I referred to such things as these : 
 human experience, for example, during the 
 progress of ages, has wrought out certain results 
 as bearing on the treatment of the body, on 
 moral problems, the relations of men and women 
 to each other, on civilization, that are practically 
 
THE OPEN MIND 6t 
 
 infallible. No sane man doubts them, no lover 
 of his kind questions their binding force. There 
 are certain words of the divine spoken through 
 human experience, which are fixed and settled 
 words. In the realms of science there are utter- 
 ances of the divine that we may consider as clear 
 and unmistakable. Whatever is demonstrated 
 as truth in geology, in chemistry, in astronomy, 
 in any department of scientific study, this is 
 infallible as far as it goes. But none of these are 
 matters about which envy and jealousy and hatred 
 between man and man can ever be raised. 
 
 Infallibility, then, we may find within very 
 narrow limits, and in certain directions in these 
 departments of human study. I may get a 
 message from God which is practically clear and 
 unmistakable for me, sufficient for my guidance ; 
 and yet I may not impose it on another. I am 
 bound by my own conscience, my own conviction 
 of what is true and right ; but I have no authority 
 to exact unquestioning obedience to my dictum 
 from any other human soul. 
 
 And I am under the highest of all obligations 
 to keep my own convictions always ready for 
 revision in the light of higher and grander truths, 
 or the results of wider human experience. But, 
 so long as I believe that a certain thing is right, 
 that thing I must do on peril of being false to 
 my God and to my soul* 
 
62 BIBLES 
 
 How does God speak, if not in an infallible 
 way ? I believe that God has spoken to men — 
 perhaps in all the ways to which I have referred — 
 sometime, somewhere, in the history of the world. 
 I believe that there is many a word of God in the 
 Bible, which I never loved so much, in which I 
 never was so interested, as I am at this hour. I 
 believe that God speaks to us in a thousand ways, 
 from the heavens over our head to the earth 
 under our feet, — that he speaks in the experi- 
 ences of human lives. 
 
 Let us note a little more particularly some 
 ways by which we may believe that he sends 
 his messages to us even in tliis later day. Men 
 have believed always that all the things that 
 they saw, felt, did, have not originated simply 
 in themselves. They have believed that they 
 have been played upon like instruments, some- 
 times by the skillful lingers of unseen person- 
 alities. They have believed that all their 
 thoughts were not their own, all their words 
 not their own, all their actions not their own ; 
 and these have not always been ignorant people, 
 enthusiasts, persons not to be trusted. 
 
 Take, for example, a woman like George Eliot. 
 She was a hard-headed woman, if ever there was 
 one, — a woman who exacted proof. She was an 
 agnostic, a woman not to be swept by fancy ; 
 and yet she has left it on record that she always 
 
NATURAL INSPIRATION 63 
 
 had the feehng that the best things she wrote 
 were somehow not entirely her own. She does 
 not attempt to tell us where they came from. 
 
 One of the most famous preachers of the 
 modern world — I have this on perfectly reliable 
 authority — ^was sometimes known practically to 
 fall into a trance after he had begun his sermon, 
 and to speak without clear intellectual con- 
 sciousness of what he was saying. He himself 
 has said that, when a parishioner came to him at 
 the close of the sermon and asked him just what 
 he meant by this saying or that, he would be 
 compelled to wait until after he had seen the 
 report of his stenographer before he answered, 
 because he was not quite sure what he had said. 
 And these were the days when the people clutched 
 the seats in front of them and listened with 
 breathless eagerness to his words. 
 
 All men who speak in public, 1 take it, have 
 times when they feel as though they were some- 
 how rapt out of and above themselves ; and if 
 you should interrupt them in the midst of their 
 discourse, they would open their eyes, and feel 
 as though they were dropped suddenly to a lower 
 level. Men who speak and men who write are 
 sometimes conscious of being lifted as if on wings, 
 into higher ranges of atmosphere, up to heights 
 whence they gain wider views of humanity and 
 t)ie universe. 
 
64 BIBLES 
 
 The elder Dumas used frequently to be found, 
 by a friend who called upon him, sitting at his 
 desk, laughing with abandon at the keen or witty 
 remarks of some of his own characters, as though 
 he were hearing them and had nothing whatever 
 to do with them himself, except to listen. In all 
 ages of the world there has been a class of men 
 whom we call Mystics, who have felt that they 
 were in touch with unseen realities about them, 
 and that they voiced wisdom and aspirations 
 higher than they were familiar with in their 
 normal hours. 
 
 The great men of the world have been men 
 who, like Jesus, now and then climbed to 
 mountain tops, and had their hours of trans- 
 figuration ; and then they came down into the 
 confusion and me/eg of ordinary human life, and 
 appeared like other people. 
 
 These are undeniable experiences. What do 
 they mean ? I do not for one moment suppose 
 that the utterances of people at these times are 
 necessarily infallible. For you must remember 
 that, if a wind-harp be played upon by the 
 breeze, the music will be determined, not entirely 
 by the character of the wind, but by the range 
 and capacity and condition of the harp itself. 
 So divine influences may play upon the human 
 mind and heart ; and the resulting echo will be 
 determined, not entirely by the divine influence, 
 
WHISPERS FROM THE UNSEEN 65 
 
 but by the condition of the instrument that is 
 touched and played upon. 
 
 Just what do I beheve ? For possibly I am 
 not making myself very clear. I believe that 
 this world of ours is immersed in a world invis- 
 ible, a world as real as this, infinitely more real, 
 if there is to be any grade and degree of reality 
 recognized. We have learned enough about 
 this old material universe of ours to know that 
 the mightiest forces in it are the invisible and 
 intangible forces. Paul talked about running 
 his life-race in an arena, while rising about him 
 tier on tier was a great crowd of witnesses. 
 
 I believe we fight our battle here in the 
 presence of people we do not see. I believe, as 
 Milton said, that 
 
 ' Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth 
 Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep.' 
 
 We play our part here on our little stage, in 
 the midst of a spiritual universe. It is one 
 house, with different rooms in that house. 
 
 I believe that now and then there come to 
 those prepared for them whispers out of this 
 Unseen, — touches, voices, glimpses, influences. 
 They are not infallible ; but they lift us, and 
 they make us stronger, braver, better. Here is 
 one source of possible inspiration, though not 
 of infallibility. For, if I can influence a friend 
 
66 BIBLES 
 
 here, I may conceivably influence that friend 
 after I have passed into the Invisible. But, if 
 I am not infallible now, there is no reason in the 
 wide world why I should suppose I shall be 
 infallible five minutes or five years after I have 
 passed into the Unseen. Influences, inspiration 
 then possibly, but not infallibility. 
 
 There is another source of inspiration, — the 
 direct influence of God. What do I mean by 
 that ? I do not mean at all, for I do not believe 
 at all, that God ever used any man since the 
 world began as an amanuensis in the work of 
 writing a book for him. I do not believe that 
 God arbitrarily selects this man or that man to 
 be inspired ; that he says, * Now here is Isaiah, 
 and here is Paul ; they two shall be inspired ; 
 and Mohammed and other people shall not.* I 
 believe nothing of the kind. 
 
 Wliat do I believe ? I believe that God is 
 spirit, infinite, universal, and that we live and 
 move and breathe in him ; that he is life, 
 thought, feeling, love ; that he surrounds our 
 lives, as the air surrounds the world. But I 
 believe that he is changeless, not arbitrary in 
 his selection. He surrounds humanity, then, 
 in a certain sense, if I may suggest something by 
 a figure, as the ocean surrounds its shores. The 
 ocean does not change its nature, but it sweeps 
 into the Bay of Fundy, into the Mediterranean, 
 
GOD IN HUMANITY 67 
 
 up the mouth of a river, into a httle creek or 
 inlet, according to the capacity, the receptive 
 power of bay, river-mouth, creek, inlet. It fills 
 every opening full. 
 
 I believe that from the beginning of the world 
 God has been flowing into humanity, — yea, into 
 all lives before there was any humanity, — 
 filling life full of himself, just according to tlie 
 capacity of that life to receive him. God is in 
 a grass-blade. How much of him ? All that a 
 grass-blade will hold. God is in a pebble-stone. 
 How much of him ? All that a pebble will hold. 
 God is in Mont Blanc. How much ? All that 
 Mont Blanc can hold and manifest of his majesty 
 and might and his beauty and his glory. God 
 is in a constellation. How much ? All that a 
 constellation can hold and reflect. And God ^s 
 in a horse and a dog. How much ? All that 
 the horse or dog is capable of receiving. God is 
 in the Fiji. Islander. How much? All that a 
 Fiji Islander can think and feel and express. 
 God was in an ancient Roman as truly as in an 
 ancient Hebrew. How much ? As much as 
 he could express. 
 
 And so, as the world has climbed up, as man 
 has advanced in intellectual, in moral, in affec- 
 tional capacity, in spiritual ability, God has come 
 in and filled him full. Or, to put it another way, 
 God has been the power that has developed and 
 
68 BIBLES 
 
 unfolded from within, expressing himself just 
 as fast and as far as humanity has developed 
 into capacity for divine expression. 
 
 That is what inspiration means, that is 
 what the coming into us of God means. God 
 was in Confucius, God was in Gautama, God 
 was in Mohammed. He was in all these 
 great men, leaders, witnesses of their ages, 
 expressing himself just as fully as they were 
 capable of receiving him and understanding 
 him. 
 
 Why do we to-day cling to the supreme leader- 
 ship in morals and religion of the Nazarene ? 
 Because here was a soul so developed, so rounded, 
 so clarified, that God could put more of himself 
 into him than perhaps into any other man that 
 ever lived ; so that we say that God shines in 
 the face of Jesus. Nothing unnatural about it ; 
 nothing supernatural, any more than there is 
 something supernatural in a raindrop catching 
 as much of the sun as it can hold or the wide 
 ocean catching a million-fold more. So God 
 inspires and comes into us just as fast and as 
 far as we are ready to receive him. 
 
 And he speaks to us. As Whitman says : 
 
 ' Why should I wish to sec God better than this day ? 
 1 see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, 
 
 each moment then ; 
 In the faces of men and women I sec God, and in my 
 own face in the glass ; 
 
REVELATIONS OF GOD 69 
 
 * I find letters from God dropt in the street — and every 
 
 one is signed by God's name, 
 And I leave them where they are, for I know that 
 
 wheresoe'er I go, 
 Others will punctually come for ever and for ever.' 
 
 To the person who can see, God shows him- 
 self ; to the person who can feel, he is manifested, 
 as you reach out and touch the hem of his 
 garment ; to the one who can appreciate beauty, 
 God comes in all his beauty ; to one who can 
 appreciate the exactness of mathematics and 
 their relation to the order of the universe, 
 God is apprehended mathematically. As Kepler 
 said, ' O God, I think over again thy thoughts 
 after thee.' Not infallible ; but he saw 
 that God had been there, and he traced his 
 footsteps. 
 
 And so in every direction, whatever our 
 peculiar capacity may be, we see and feel and 
 hear and touch God. It would be a pity, indeed, 
 if the modern world were poorer in revelation 
 than the ancient. I do not know whether I 
 shall shock you when I say that a large part of 
 our Bible, except for critical and historical 
 purposes, is not worth a great deal to-day. We 
 have other books that are more the word of God 
 than the most of Kings and Chronicles and Esther 
 and Ezekiel and Jeremiah and the Epistles of 
 Peter and Jude. Wordsworth, Tennyson, Brown- 
 ing, Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, Whitman, 
 
70 BIBLES 
 
 Ruskin, Carlyle, Emerson, Thoreau, — a dozen 
 writers of the last century have larger, higher, 
 deeper, wider inspirations of God than half of 
 the Bible contains ; and why not ? 
 
 Has God been hiding himself since two or 
 three thousand years ago ? Has he had nothing 
 to say to the modern world ? Has he entered 
 into no brain, no heart, no life, since the time of 
 Paul ? What, then, has Christianity meant, — 
 the Christianity which is the blossoming, unfold- 
 ing of a divine life, ever growing wider and finer 
 and sweeter as the centuries go by ? I believe 
 that there never was a time since the old world 
 swung in the blue when there was so much of 
 God in humanity, so much of love, of tenderness, 
 of pity, helpfulness, care, and devotion, so much 
 of everything divine as there is here, this moment, 
 in London, in New York. 
 
 This means an ever- widening revelation, the 
 evolution, the unfolding, of the divine within 
 the sphere of the human. So remember that, if 
 you listen, you can hear. If you do not hear, 
 never dare to think that there is not a voice. 
 If you reach out your hand and it is sensitive, 
 you can feel. If you do not, never dare to say 
 God is not there. If you love, you will thrill to 
 the pulse-throb of the infinite love. If hate is 
 in your heart, do not dare to say there is no love 
 in the universe. If is full of God : only listen, 
 
THE BIBLE OF HUMANITY 71 
 
 only feel, only look, only ask that a glimpse may 
 be vouchsafed to you. 
 
 Let Lowell tell us this deep spiritual truth : 
 
 ' God is not dumb, that he should speak no more ; 
 If thou hast wanderings in the wilderness 
 And find'st not Sinai, 'tis thy soul is poor ; 
 There towers the mountain of the Voice no less. 
 Which whoso seeks shall find ; but he who bends, 
 Intent on manna still and mortal ends. 
 Sees it not, neither hears its thundered lore. '* 
 
 Slowly the Bible of the race is writ. 
 
 And not on paper leaves nor leaves of stone ; 
 
 Each age, each kindred, adds a verse to it. 
 
 Texts of despair or hope, of joy or moan. 
 
 While swings the sea, while mists the mountains 
 
 shroud, 
 While thunder's surges burst on cliffs of cloud. 
 Still at the prophets' feet the nations sit.' 
 
IV 
 GODS AND GOD 
 
 As the world grows, idols are for ever passing 
 away ; but God abides, and becomes ever more 
 and more. It is not always true that idols have 
 been made of wood, of stone, of some kind of 
 metal. More commonly they have been made 
 of thoughts, imaginings, wrought out by the 
 hands of ignorance and fear ; and these have 
 been the most hideous and cruel of them all. 
 
 The boy who lives in the home with his father, 
 and sees him every day, does not have, when 
 he is a boy, any adequate, any complete idea of 
 his father. His conception of him is determined, 
 not by what the father is so much as by what 
 the boy is. He thinks as well as he can ; but 
 his thinking is determined by his intellectual, 
 his moral, his affectional nature ; and the thinking 
 will change as the months and the years go by, 
 though the father may remain substantially the 
 same. 
 
 And the boy frequently estimates his father 
 by something which the father cares least about, 
 something which does not at all essentially touch 
 
DEVELOPMENT IN RELIGION 73 
 
 what he is in the commvinity or as a part of the 
 great world. As, for example, the boy may be 
 proud of his father chiefly because he is tall or 
 is an athlete — not at all appreciating his qualities 
 of heart or head. And not only do these thoughts 
 of the boy change concerning his father, but, if 
 there are three or four or a half-dozen boys in 
 the same family, they may all have widely 
 divergent conceptions of the same one father, 
 the man whom they see and touch and love. 
 
 Is it strange, then, that the world, as it has 
 grown from childhood towards a manhood not 
 even yet attained, should have divergent, con- 
 tradictory conceptions concerning the one Father 
 in heaven, whom, in one sense, no man hath 
 seen or can see ? Is it strange that different 
 nations, differently born, trained, surrounded, 
 leading different kinds of lives, should have 
 differing ideals of the divine ? And is it strange 
 that, as the world grows, the old conceptions of 
 God are outgrown and left behind ? Would we 
 have it otherwise if we could ? 
 
 We need to run over for a moment what all 
 intelligent people are, in the main, very familiar 
 with, — some of the steps of the world's growth 
 in its thought concerning God. 
 
 At the beginning, or as near the beginning as 
 we are able to penetrate by our studies, poly- 
 theism existed all over the face of the earth, of 
 
74 GODS AND GOD 
 
 necessity. There was no possibility of anything 
 like monotheism in that stage of human culture. 
 As men looked abroad over what they knew of 
 the heavens and the earth, they had no con- 
 ception, and at that time could have had no 
 conception, of any unity in it at all. And they 
 had no conception, and could have had no 
 conception, of any force except such as they 
 were conscious of, — ^will force. So that the 
 powers manifested in the heavens above and on 
 the earth around them seemed to them separate 
 individualities, and seemed to them alive. 
 
 Why not ? How could it have been other- 
 wise ? We need not stop to note at any length 
 a discussion still going on as to whether early 
 man's belief in the gods sprang from ghost 
 worship, ancestor worship, or whether man, 
 apart from this, exercised his power of person- 
 ifying natural objects and forces, and thinking 
 them living and distinct beings. It may be 
 there is a measure of truth in both these theories. 
 At any rate, it is not specially important for us ; 
 and we may leave it to be settled by the persons 
 engaged in research in that department of human 
 study. 
 
 At any rate man believed in a multiplicity of 
 gods ; the sun, the moon, the stars, the winds, the 
 clouds, the lightning, the mountains, the rivers, 
 the brooks, — all these different manifestations of 
 
WORSHIP OF ONE GOD 75 
 
 what we think of to-day as the one Hfe were then 
 so many distinct living individuals. Or, if you 
 choose to put it another way, there were distinct, 
 individual spirits in all these. 
 
 There was no difficulty at that time in the 
 history of the world in accounting for either 
 good or evil. The things that people liked, and 
 which, therefore, they thought of as good, were 
 the result of the activities of the friendly — and, 
 therefore, good — deities. The things which they 
 did not like, which hurt, which produced un- 
 happiness, they thought of as the result of the 
 hostility of evil deities, — deities, at any rate, 
 hostile in their attitude towards them. 
 
 But by and by this stage of thought— not 
 being in its nature permanent, because it was 
 not true — began to pass away ; and men in 
 certain parts of the world became henotheists, 
 — that is, they believed still in many gods, but 
 believed that they must worship one god, their 
 god. The Jews, for example, worshipped 
 Jehovah. They did not doubt the existence of 
 Dagon, the god of the Philistines ; but they 
 must worship and be loyal to their god. Just 
 as to-day a German in Europe does not doubt 
 the existence of the Czar or of King Edward VII, 
 of the King of Italy or of Austria ; but he must 
 be loyal to the Kaiser, The Kaiser is his king or 
 emperor. 
 
76 GODS AND GOD 
 
 This was the state of thought in regard to the 
 unseen powers that were supposed to govern the 
 world. But by and by another step in advance 
 was taken ; and we find some of the old prophets 
 declaring with emphasis that there is only one 
 living and real God, and that all the gods of the 
 nations are idols, created either out of thoughts 
 or some material. 
 
 But, when this stage of growth was reached, 
 it was only on the part of the Jews, of the 
 Arabians, of a few people ; and the classic 
 nations of antiquity still believed in a multi- 
 plicity of deities or they believed in none at all. 
 For Greece and Rome at last came to this point : 
 the gods were outgrown, and no new ones came 
 to take their places. Intellectually, Caesar could 
 not believe in Jupiter and the gods of the poets. 
 He was too wise, too sensible a man. Cicero could 
 not. Socrates could not believe in the gods of 
 Greece. So they became, according to the popular 
 ideals of the time, atheists ; and they had to be, 
 because they were sensible and thoughtful. 
 
 Not only that, but they outgrew the gods 
 morally. The time came when in Greece and 
 Rome the average citizen of Athens or of Rome 
 was better than the gods. They could not believe 
 in them ; they could not worship such ideals. 
 
 What was the result ? We find Lucretius, just 
 before the birth of Christ, the philosophical poet. 
 
MONOTHEISM AND TRITHElSM 77 
 
 trying to get along in the universe without any 
 god, trying to frame a theory of things that did 
 not need any god. This is a stage of human 
 growth, I suppose, that almost every great, 
 thoughtful nation has passed through. And you 
 will note how necessary it is. The old concep- 
 tions of the gods are consecrated in the popular 
 religion, and it is irreligious and atheistic to 
 doubt them ; and yet men become too wise and 
 too good to believe in them any longer. And so 
 this conflict arises. And, until the old gods are 
 superseded by better, there is a period of inter- 
 regnum, when there is no god at all for the clear- 
 sighted, earnest, honest man. 
 
 The Jews were monotheists. From them we 
 inherited our Christian monotheism ; and, as we 
 have already seen, having adopted the old 
 Hebrew Scriptures as an infallible revelation 
 from God, there is no science in early Christianity. 
 For a thousand years we accepted substantially 
 the Old Testament monotheism, wrought over 
 as the result of Greek speculation into the 
 Christian Trinity. They told us that it did not 
 destroy the monotheism, this making a Trinity 
 out of the nature of God ; and they tried hard 
 in their definitions to avoid tritheism. 
 
 But the time came when the intellectual 
 advance of man outgrew the Christian con- 
 ception of God that had been dominant during 
 
yS GODS AND GOD 
 
 the first thousand years of Christian history. 
 For we must remember that the thought of God 
 goes along with the thought of the universe. 
 God to the Christians of the first millennium was 
 not at all the God that we have in our minds 
 to-day. He was an outlined, individualised 
 being, sitting on a throne in a heaven just a 
 little way above the blue. He could be found 
 and seen with such eyes as we possess if we could 
 only attain to that heaven. The universe was 
 small and contracted as compared with our 
 modern conception of it. God ruled the world 
 arbitrarily. He was not in the universe in the 
 sense in which we think of him to-day. 
 
 But by and by, at the time of the Renais- 
 sance, other thoughts were bom, new conceptions 
 of the universe began to take possession of the 
 human mind. New conceptions of God of neces- 
 sity followed these new conceptions of the 
 universe, and men began to occupy the position 
 in modern times that Lucretius did in ancient 
 Rome. Atheism, or at least agnosticism, came 
 to be popular on the part of some of the clearest- 
 headed thinkers of the world. 
 
 Why ? Is it strange ? The old conception 
 of the universe had been outgrown; and yet 
 it was consecrated as a part of , the religion. 
 The intellectual conception of God had been 
 outgrown ; and yet it was. consecrated as a part 
 
DIFFICULTIES OF UNBELIEF 79 
 
 of the religion. Not only the intellectual thought 
 of the universe, and of God : man morally out- 
 grew his God. So that the people who revolted 
 at the time of the Renaissance were not only 
 clearer-headed than those who had thought out 
 the old conceptions, but they were nobler-hearted ; 
 and they could not worship the conception of 
 God which was embodied and enshrined in all 
 the creeds, and set up as the object of adoration 
 over all the altars. And so for a time many of 
 the nobler spirits of the world passed through a 
 phase of unbelief, many of them dying in that 
 unbelief, because they could not clearly see 
 their way to any higher or finer conception of 
 things. 
 
 So in the modern world. We have had 
 attempts, many on the part of noble men, to 
 frame a conception of the universe that requires 
 no god. Men have said speaking as scientists : 
 ' God is an unnecessary hypothesis : we can get 
 along in our theories without him.' But, 
 though for a time the head may get along without 
 any god, the heart finds it more difficult : it does 
 not rest content m unbelief ; it cannot look 
 abroad over the wide spaces of the universe and 
 contentedly feel that all is blank and empty air. 
 Being appalled, it longs for a father, some one to 
 trust, some one to love. - 
 
 Let us frankly admit that it is just as easy 
 
8o GODS AND GOD 
 
 to imagine the material universe self-existent 
 and eternal as it is to imagine God self-existent 
 and eternal. The difficulty is not there. The 
 problem arises when we look this universe in the 
 face, and try to find its essential ^meaning. 
 And I believe that, as the result of the deepest 
 search and scrutiny, we are coming to find 
 more and more that the meaning of it is 
 divine. 
 
 Let me ask you to think for a moment. 
 Suppose we wake up as for the first time, and 
 look abroad over the earth and into the heavens. 
 If the knowledge that has come to the modern 
 world could be ours, we should find what ? 
 First, that here is not only myself, but here is 
 a power not myself, outside of myself, a power 
 that was here before I was born, a power that 
 will be here after I have died, a power that has 
 produced me, — therefore, my Father, on any 
 theory I choose to hold of it or Him. Here, 
 then, first, is a power, a power unlimited, so far 
 as we can imagine or dream. It is practically 
 omnipotent. 
 
 What else ? This power manifests itself as a 
 universal order. There is no chaos. Neither the 
 microscope nor the telescope has yet been able 
 to find any part of the universe that is in disorder. 
 Order everywhere. 
 
 What next ? Intelligence. For we cannot 
 
THE ETERNAL POWER 8l 
 
 imagine that which is intelHgible to be other 
 than the manifestation of inteUigence. 
 
 What next ? Is this power personal, — that 
 is, the power outside of us ? It is, at least, by 
 the most rigid scientific reasoning, as much as a 
 person. I am a person. You are a person. 
 Millions of personalities exist ; and there cannot 
 be evolved anything which was not at first 
 involved. A stream cannot rise higher than its 
 source. The cause must at least be equal to 
 and adequate to the result. That which has 
 produced and which manifests itself in person- 
 alities must be at least as much as personal. 
 
 Is this power conscious ? We are conscious. 
 That which has produced us must be then as 
 much as conscious. As Herbert Spencer said to 
 me one day in conversation on this matter, 
 ' There is no reason why we should not think 
 of the Eternal Power as being as much above 
 and beyond what we mean by personality and 
 consciousness as we are above and beyond 
 vegetable growths.' This is not, as you see, a 
 negative, but a grandly positive statement. This 
 Eternal Power may be above and beyond what 
 we mean by personality and consciousness ; 
 that is, personal and conscious in some grander 
 way than we can now or as yet imagine. 
 
 Is this power good ? Did you ever stop to 
 think of one thing ? There is no necessary, no 
 
82 GODS AND GOD 
 
 essential evil in all the world. There are only 
 two ways by which evil was ever wrought, or 
 ever can be wrought. Evil is either the per- 
 verted use of some power which is in itself good, 
 or it is the excessive use of some power which in 
 itself is good. There is no conceivable way of 
 working evil, except by one of these two ; and 
 this means that the things, the persons, which 
 do evil are not essentially evil. So there is no 
 essential evil in the universe ; and that means 
 that at the heart of it the universe is good. 
 
 I had occasion in a previous chapter to make 
 a statement which I wish to recall to you, — 
 that, analysing it with care and in the light of 
 what science has taught us of the nature of 
 things, necessary pain is good, not evil. What 
 we call evil, as I have just said, does not really 
 exist as an entity. Sorrow, separation, those 
 things that trouble us here, even death itself are 
 not essentially, not necessarily evil at all. It 
 is very easy to prove, I think, that this is the 
 best conceivable of all worlds. Ignorance is 
 only the natural and necessary process through 
 which we pass in becoming learned. Evil is 
 only the natural and necessary stage through 
 which we pass in coming into conscious personal 
 goodness. Pain and sorrow are bound up of 
 necessity with the lives of sentient beings, — are 
 no permanent, no eternal part of things. 
 
rttE ETERNAL l^OVVEU S3 
 
 So, I believe, we are ready to say, on the 
 basis of the clearest thought and the most 
 cogent scientific reasoning, that this power 
 outside of ourselves is not only power, but 
 personality, intelligence, consciousness, good- 
 ness, and love. 
 
 Is it one power ? Herbert Spencer again has 
 said — I speak of him simply because he is as 
 competent a spokesman for modern science as 
 any man living — that the existence of an Eternal 
 Power back of all phenomena is the one most 
 certain item of all our knowledge. If we do not 
 know anything else, we know this, — that there 
 is an Eternal Power back of all that is manifested, 
 and that this power is that in which all the 
 divergent manifestations of the universe find 
 their unity. 
 
 Modern science has proved that all the forces 
 of the world are only varieties and manifestations 
 of one force. Now, then, are we not ready to 
 say we believe, and we have a right to believe, 
 in God, and that God is love ? By this I would 
 not have you think of God as an outhned being 
 away off somewhere on some distant planet or 
 world, a being that we could get nearer to than 
 we are already if we could only travel fast enough 
 or in the right direction. For this thought of 
 God is one of the idols which is destined of 
 necessity to pass away 
 
84 GODS AND GOD 
 
 Where is God ? They used to think of him 
 as just above the blue dome ; but that blue dome 
 has faded into space, as the result of modern 
 investigation. The nearest star to us after we 
 leave our solar system is so far away that it takes 
 light between three and four years to come to us 
 from it : that is our next-door neighbour. The 
 next one, I think, is so far away that it takes 
 six or seven years. Where shall we look for the 
 centre of the universe on which to erect the 
 throne of God ? If we seek for the centre of a 
 universe that seems to us, so far as we know, 
 infinite in extent, we must put God in that sense 
 so far away that we should be practically lost in 
 the deeps of space. 
 
 Where is God ? God is nearer to us than he 
 ever was in all the thought of the world before. 
 God is here, always here, always all here. 
 Does that seem incomprehensible mystery ? Let 
 me, in the use of an illustration which I may have 
 used before, try to suggest that it is no more 
 mysterious than anything else is mysterious. We 
 sometimes delude ourselves by imagining that, 
 when we have labelled a thing which we have 
 seen a great many times, we know it, and have 
 divested it of its mystery. We have seen flowers, 
 grass-blades, and pebble-stones ever since we were 
 children. Can you explain either one of them 
 for me ? Whichever one you look at, if you 
 
HUMAN PERSONALITY 85 
 
 ask a few questions about it and try to trace its 
 meaning, you find yourself face to face with the 
 Infinite ; as Tennyson has expressed it in that 
 beautiful little fragment of his about the ' flower 
 in the crannied wall.' Explain that to me, and 
 I will explain to you what God is, what man is. 
 
 Let us take, then, a familiar illustration, that 
 I may suggest to you that the mystery of God's 
 omnipresence is not more mysterious than some- 
 thing we are daily familiar with. Where are 
 you ? Did anybody ever see you ? You are 
 not your body. What has anybody seen when 
 he has looked at you ? Seen a face, clothes, 
 certain outlines of a figure ; but, if he had seen 
 the whole body, would he have seen you ? You 
 are not the body. You inhabit the body for a 
 time ; you wear it, you use it ; but you are 
 something else than the body. 
 
 Where are you ? In the body, voii say 
 Though this mysterious somethmg we call our 
 thought can circle the earth quicker than the 
 electric forces can do it, and commune with the 
 stars at the same time that it is here. But where 
 are you ? Did anybody ever see you ? No. 
 Nobody ever will see you ; you are as invisible 
 as God is. In what part of your body are you ? 
 You are omnipresent in your body as much as 
 God is omnipresent in the universe. When you 
 are looking, for all practical purposes you are in 
 
86 GODS AND GOD 
 
 the eyes ; when you are clasping the hand of a 
 friend, you are in that hand-clasp ; when you 
 are running on some errand of mercy or business, 
 you are, for all practical purposes, in the feet. 
 You are wherever a special activity of your 
 personality is called for. Wlien you speak, you 
 are in this invisible air, being shaped to words 
 on the tip of your tongue and by your teeth. 
 You are omnipresent in your body ; you are 
 invisible. 
 
 Let that figure of speech suggest to us a mystery 
 indeed, but no profounder mystery concerning 
 God. The modern thought of God is that he 
 is in and through the universe, which is no longer 
 a mechanism, but has become an organism. The 
 universe was not made : it grew, just as you were 
 not made, but grew ; and God is the mind, the 
 heart, the life, the love that makes the universe 
 the body of the living divinity. 
 
 God, then, is omnipresent. He is in the flower 
 when that flower is unfolding. He is in a nebula 
 when it is cohering to an orb and is in the process 
 of creating a sun. He is wherever there is 
 activity going on ; and all of him that is needed 
 is wherever the special activity is going on. And 
 as we know, from the farthest electric throb of 
 the most distant star to the tiniest movement of a 
 grain of sand in the street, that all is thrilling and 
 moving with tireless ancj eternal life, so we know 
 
THE GOD WE WORSHIP 87 
 
 that God is everywhere, is omnipresent. Thus 
 this great, this overwhelming conception, is be- 
 coming real to the modern world, is being seen 
 to be rational, something we can gain at least a 
 glimpse of and partly comprehend. 
 
 This, then, is our modern thought of God ; 
 and the old ideas concerning him are passing 
 away. I wish to suggest to you now that this 
 process of passing away is all round us, in all 
 the churches, and is as yet very far from being 
 complete. In one sense, — and, I beg you to 
 understand the sense in which I mean it, — we 
 do not to-day worship the God of Abraham, of 
 Isaac, or of Jacob. We do not worship the God 
 of Samuel or of Elijah, or of any of the prophets. 
 We do not worship the God of Paul. We do not 
 worship the God of Leo X or of Pope Sixtus IV, 
 after whom the Sis tine Chapel was named. We 
 do not worship the God of the reformers, Luther 
 or Calvin. We do not worship the God of White- 
 field or of Wesley, or of Edwards, or of Spurgeon, 
 or of Moody. 
 
 Note, I believe that all these men, — and truer, 
 nobler souls than some of them, in spite of certain 
 things I am going to say, have never lived on 
 the face of the earth, — these men saw God the 
 best they knew. And in one sense, in the real 
 and true sense, they were feeling after the real 
 God as much as are we ; but they suffered the 
 
88 GODS AND GOD 
 
 limitations of their time, their traditions, and 
 their training, — the intellectual limitations, the 
 moral limitations, — and they could not think 
 clearly and nobly of him who is the God and 
 Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. The God of 
 the Methodist Book of Discipline, the God of the 
 Presbyterian Confession of Faith, the God of 
 most of the old creeds, the God of the Episcopal 
 Prayer Book, the intellectual conception of God, 
 I mean, which is outlined in these, is not the 
 God that the best men and women, even in those 
 churches to-day, are worshipping. 
 
 Just as the old conception of the universe has 
 been outgrown and is passing away, so the old 
 intellectual conceptions of God are being in- 
 tellectually outgrown, and are passing away. 
 We do not think of him any more under the 
 concepts that we used to hold. 
 
 But not only that : we are outgrowing the 
 elder ideals morally. I said above that the 
 average citizen of ancient Athens and ancient 
 Rome was better than the gods whose worship 
 he had inherited. So I say now, simply, directly, 
 dehberately, that the average man in New York 
 to-day is better than the conception of God, as 
 outlined by either of the great men to whom I 
 have referred. The God of the great creeds is 
 morally outgrown. They said he was good, 
 but he was not. For, as they went on to define 
 
THE IDEAL OF JESUS 89 
 
 him, they contradicted the assertion of the good- 
 ness, and inserted into their creeds statements 
 about him which the hearts of his children are 
 coming to regard as hbels and to protest against for 
 the sake of the love and honour that are borne him. 
 
 When in early Christianity they deified Jesus, 
 in one sense they did something sweeter and finer 
 than they knew ; for what has been the result 
 of it ? There was a movement for a time, and 
 it partially succeeded, to make over the noble, 
 sweet, tender Nazarene into the repulsive image of 
 the God they worshipped and whom they referred 
 to as his Father. But the result of it has been 
 that Jesus, the tender, loving, gentle Nazarene, 
 has transformed and made over the conception 
 of the God. And men have come to feel and to 
 say, God must be, at least, as good as Jesus was. 
 
 The Jehovah of the Old Testament was not 
 as good : he was jealous ; he was partial ; he 
 was cruel ; he endorsed all sorts of things that 
 we morally repudiate and hate to-day. The God 
 of Elijah, the God of Paul, was not as good as 
 Jesus. The God of Pope Leo X, the God of 
 Luther and Calvin, was not as good. The God 
 of Moody and the great modern revivalists was 
 not nearly as good as Jesus. 
 
 Run over in your mind the ideal of Jesus, — 
 the gentle, the tender, forgiving his enemies, 
 saying, ' They know not what they do ' ; tolerant 
 
90 GODS AND GOD 
 
 of the ignorant and weak ; eating with publicans 
 and sinners ; forgiving the woman who had gone 
 astray, and teUing those who were without sin 
 to cast the first stone. He was ideal in his sweet- 
 ness and his love, and yet unflinching in his 
 adhesion to the truth. This was the historic 
 reality of Jesus. But, as the years went by, 
 they tried to make of him a judge, and to represent 
 him as casting all his enemies into an eternal hell. 
 But from before his gentle face all those barbaric 
 horrors are fleeing away, as the clouds and the 
 mists flee at the coming up of the sun. 
 
 So Jesus, the tender, ideal, perfect humanity, 
 is coming to give us our conception of God. We 
 must think of God, if he is worthy of our worship 
 at all, as being utterly flawless. He must be 
 perfect, or we cannot believe in him. So he is 
 coming to be, at last, all these things which we 
 can dream. The old partial conceptions of him 
 are passing away ; they are being quietly laid on 
 one side, so far as practical use is concerned, even 
 though they still remain imbedded, like old-time 
 fossils, in the creeds. So God is coming to be 
 perfect, to be love. The divided universe, half 
 of which belonged to the devil, we can no longer 
 tolerate. As Tennyson says : 
 
 * The God of love and of hell together — He cannot be 
 thought ! 
 If there be such a god, may the great God curse him 
 and bring him to naught,' 
 
THE EVER-PRESENT GOD QI 
 
 Now, then, as we go out over the world, engaged 
 in our business or our pleasure, we are not orphans, 
 we are not alone. Our God is not even away off 
 somewhere in space : he is here. It was God 
 who held the worlds in their orbits last night 
 while we slept. It was God who turned our old 
 planet until by and by the part of it where we 
 were came into the light of the morning sun ; 
 and it was dawn. It was God who waked us out 
 of our sleep ; it was God whose loving and 
 universal care fed us ; it was God who was 
 watching us, who folded us in his arms and 
 guarded us. 
 
 And now, as we turn and go about our occu- 
 pations, no matter what business we are engaged 
 in, it is God's power we are using to carry that 
 business on, — God in our minds, bodies, hearts, 
 consciousnesses, leading us in the ways that are 
 right ; God moving our machinery for us, whether 
 it is electricity, steam, or water power. What- 
 ever it is, it is the manifestation of the tireless 
 life and force of God, our Father. If there is any 
 beauty, of a flower, in a child's face, wonder in 
 the eyes of some one we love, there is God. 
 Wherever there is light, it is God, the power ; 
 wherever there is order, it is God, the law ; 
 wherever there is majesty, as in the mountains, 
 it is God, thrilling and lifting us ; God in the 
 infinite variety, the rhythm, and movement, the 
 
gZ GODS AND GOD 
 
 tireless uplift and sink of the sea ; God in the 
 air, cooling, disinfecting, cleansing, healing, — 
 God everywhere. 
 
 Duty, truth, love, power, care, helpfulness, 
 pity, inspiration, aspiration, — * in him we live 
 and move and have our being.' The world is 
 no longer secular for six days and sacred the 
 seventh. If we understand it, it is all sacred. 
 We are always in the presence of God, and, wherever 
 we are, we may kneel and be in the innermost 
 sanctuary of his temple. God is our Father, and 
 God is love. 
 
V 
 SAVIOURS 
 
 All nations, all religions, have had their 
 saviours. But as we study them, we find that 
 the beliefs concerning what men need to be saved 
 from, and how this salvation is to be accom- 
 plished, have been widely divergent. We find 
 still further that, even in the same religion con- 
 cerning the same supposed saviour, the same 
 ideal has not continued. The thought of the 
 people has changed concerning the nature, the 
 office, the work of the saviour, in accordance 
 with the intellectual, moral, and spiritual develop- 
 ment of the people. We shall find this point 
 clearly illustrated when a little later we come to 
 consider what people have believed concerning 
 Jesus. 
 
 From the beginning of the world, as men have 
 looked over human life, the evils that afflict us 
 have been patent and observable. Men have 
 suffered from physical pain ; they have had 
 mental sorrows. There have been hunger and 
 want of every kind, — disease, vice, crime, death. 
 These have always existed ; and men have always 
 
94 SAVIOURS 
 
 of necessity had some theory in the Hght of which 
 they have tried to account for them. 
 
 It is inevitable that men should have asked : 
 ' Why do I suffer ? Why do pain and sorrow 
 and moral evil, want and vice and crime, exist ? ' 
 And, when we consider the mental condition of 
 early men, the answer which they gave to their 
 own questions was the most natural one in the 
 world ; and yet it was a magical, a supernatural 
 answer. Men believed, and they could not have 
 believed otherwise, that they were surrounded 
 on every hand by invisible beings who were able 
 to help or hurt them as they pleased. And they 
 have supposed that these beings were some of 
 them friendly, some of them hostile, some of 
 them perhaps fickle and changeable, now on good 
 terms with them and now opposed, according to 
 conditions. And they have believed that all 
 these evils were brought upon them by these 
 invisible powers. 
 
 A study of early man, for example, shows us 
 what we should not have supposed before that 
 study, — that death itself even has never been 
 regarded as a natural thing. It has been hard 
 for men to believe that they must die. And, 
 when a man has died, instead of supposing that 
 it was the necessary result of some inevitable, 
 natural cause, they have always believed that 
 some enemy has killed him. If that enemy was 
 
BELIEF IN THE SUPERNATURAL g5 
 
 not visible, then invisible, — some spiritual being. 
 This in illustration of the universal fact that they 
 have attributed the existence of all these evils 
 to hostile spirits in the Unseen. 
 
 Now you will readily see that the method by 
 which they would attempt to be free from these 
 evils would naturally be determined by their 
 theory as to the cause of them. They were 
 caused by the enmity of invisible beings. The 
 thing to do then, of course, is to win the friendship, 
 the good-will, of these invisible people. 
 
 No other method would even occur to them ; 
 for they knew nothing of what we mean by 
 nature, natural forces, natural laws. How, then, 
 would they proceed ? Naturally, they would 
 proceed as we know they did. They attempted 
 to bring to these invisible beings such offerings as 
 they supposed they would desire, that they might 
 win their regard. And the first great want of 
 man — pressing upon him with a force in those 
 early times that it is impossible for us now to 
 conceive — was the satisfaction of hunger. And 
 we know that they believed that these invisible 
 spirits needed food. They ate the spiritual 
 counterpart of the visible thing which was the 
 supply of their own needs. And so modern re* 
 search has revealed to us — what has been known 
 but for a little while — that the earliest idea of 
 sacrifice was that of a common meal partaken of 
 
96 SAVIOURS 
 
 by the god and his worshippers together. They 
 brought some animal, sacrificed it, poured out 
 the blood upon the altar ; and it was believed 
 that the god communed with them as a partaker 
 in this common meal. 
 
 And just as you find among the Arabs, for 
 example, to-day, that, if they have eaten with 
 even an enemy, they feel held in bonds of amity 
 for at least a time, so it was supposed by these 
 early ancestors of ours that when they ate with 
 the god, it was a sacrament by which they were 
 bound to obedience and service ; and the god 
 was equally bound to friendship and protection. 
 This was the early idea of sacrifice. 
 
 But change comes over all these ideas as men 
 themselves change and develop. So by and by, 
 instead of its being simply a common meal, it 
 was a gift to the god ; and they came not only 
 to bring him food, but anything else which they 
 supposed he might desire. And then there 
 entered in at last, not simply the offering of a 
 gift, but the sacrificial idea. It was a victim, 
 offered to please or placate the supposed anger 
 of the invisible Being ; and, naturally, this under- 
 went a transformation until people came to feel 
 that the finer, the more precious the victim, the 
 more power over the invisible deities. And so 
 there arose not only the offering of food, gifts of 
 one kind and another, not only the slaying of 
 
SACRIFICED SAVIOURS 97 
 
 animals, but human sacrifice, — not originating, 
 as you might suppose, in human cruelty, but 
 simply in the desire of the worshipper to bring 
 to his god the most precious victim that he could 
 imagine, supposing thus that he would obtain 
 special favour from the deity. 
 
 We find this illustrated in that wonderful poem 
 of Tennyson's. ' The Victim.' There is an effort 
 on the part of the priests to find out which is 
 dearer to the king, the wife or their son ; for the 
 dearest must be slain. And at last he shows 
 such devoted love for his wife that the priests 
 make up their mind that she is the more precious 
 offering, and seize upon her and offer her to the 
 gods. So the idea of human sacrifice arose out 
 of this thought that, the more precious the victim, 
 the more power over the god. So in every nation 
 all over the world you will find sacrificed saviours. 
 Our own Christ is not by any means the only one. 
 In ancient India, Krishna and Vishnu ; in ancient 
 Greece, Prometheus ; in Egypt, Osiris ; in 
 countries of this world, among the primitive 
 peoples here on this new continent, everywhere, 
 out of the same natural ideas have sprung this 
 natural growth. 
 
 Not only human sacrifices, but by and by, 
 in the case of Prometheus, Osiris, and Vishnu, 
 divine or semi-divine beings offered, sometimes 
 to appease the wrath of the gods, sometimes a 
 
98 SAVIOURS 
 
 willing victim, testifying to the love of him who 
 was thus devoted to humanity. 
 
 But by and by, as civilization advances, ideas 
 of this sort are more or less outgrown ; and we 
 see the great religions of the world develop. 
 Among the people, in the popular religions, we 
 see all these ideas which I have spoken of still 
 holding the imaginations of the heart, but at 
 the same time philosophical schemes as to the 
 meaning of the universe, the origin, and condition 
 of man, and his needs, growing up. As, for 
 instance, — merely to point them out as I pass, — 
 in China we find the work of Confucius. Con- 
 fucius does not claim to know anything about 
 the gods or any other world. He says frankly : 
 ' Why, when I do not know the meaning of this, 
 should I try to explain any other ? * But he 
 teaches that men are naturally good, and that it 
 is only conditions, environments, that call out 
 and develop evil in them. So, he says, if we 
 only have before us fine models, if we keep alive 
 the traditions of the heroes and noble ones of the 
 past, and imitate them, the ills of the world will 
 be done away. 
 
 We find Gautama, the Buddha, reforming, 
 or attempting to reform the pre-existing condi- 
 tions of India ; and he teaches that these evils 
 are incidental, and necessarily incidental, to any 
 human, finite Ufe. We are doomed to be reborn 
 
MOHAMMED AND THE BAB 99 
 
 over and over and over again, — committed to 
 this endless circle of births, and, consequently, 
 suffering. And the cause of it is human desire. 
 So the way to escape is to quench desire. Thus 
 he advises putting people through a discipline 
 of moral goodness and of ascetic development, 
 so that by and by they will outgrow the 
 necessity of being born again, and will enter 
 Nirvana. This is Gautama's salvation. 
 
 Mohammed originates his great religion, — 
 which is making conquests to-day in some parts 
 of the earth quite as rapidly as Christianity, — 
 and he teaches that, if we only believe the short 
 creed, ' Allah is Allah, and Mohammed is his 
 prophet ' and go through the routine and services, 
 — committing to memory certain parts of the 
 Scriptures regarded as so sacred that that alone 
 is sometimes enough to constitute salvation, — 
 then humanity will outgrow all its suffering and 
 sorrows. 
 
 So we see over the earth men speculating as 
 to what shall be done to overcome the evils of 
 the world. And religions are not done being 
 born yet, if we can judge by the recent cults. 
 In Syria to-day, one has assumed the title of the 
 Bab, the Gate, the Opening, the Entrance ; and 
 some Americans have become believers in this 
 new religion, and are trying to propagate it in 
 the city of New York. 
 
100 SAVIOURS 
 
 Mormonism and Christian Science show that 
 out of this seething heart and imagination and 
 hope and fear and love of man may be expected 
 to come still new religions in the future. They 
 all have for their one object to save men from 
 suffering, from disease, from evil of every kind. 
 
 Let us turn and consider for a little our own 
 Christian Saviour, — the evolution and change 
 of the thoughts which have been held concerning 
 him. In order to understand it, we must go back 
 to Hebrew times. The early Hebrews held 
 substantially the same ideas of the gods and of 
 sacrifice, even human sacrifice, that prevailed 
 among other peoples. But, as they came to 
 devote themselves more and more to the worship 
 of their own peculiar god, they entertained the 
 idea that they were the chosen people of this 
 god. They believed this before they became 
 monotheists. And since he was the mightiest 
 god that there was in existence, they, as his 
 chosen people, would ultimately be set on high 
 among the nations of the earth. 
 
 You see the inevitable logic : Our god is 
 greater than any other god. He has chosen us, 
 and our prosperity comes from the patronage 
 and care of this invisible being. Therefore, 
 success, conquest, power over all the nations, 
 must be ours. That was the logic. 
 
 Out of this idea, as the years went by, sprung 
 
MESSIANIC EXPECTATIONS lOI 
 
 their anticipation of a Messiah. Their monarchy 
 was short-Hved ; but David and the glory of his 
 reign came to be the type of all that was grand 
 in the way of earthly rule. So they could not 
 believe that their god was to desert them per- 
 manently. Thus, when they were carried off 
 into captivity, it was only as punishment for 
 their sins, and, when they became good enough, 
 when they kept the law carefully enough, then 
 the deliverer, the Saviour, was to appear. So 
 grew up their anticipation of a Messiah, some one 
 bom as a descendant of David, who was to come 
 and rule the world, and set them on high among 
 the peoples. 
 
 But this kingdom as it was to be held by them 
 was an earthly kingdom. They did not put it 
 off in the skies. It was to be here, among men. 
 Its capital was to be Jerusalem, which was to 
 them the centre of the earth. , 
 
 But he did not come. In the period just 
 preceding the birth of Jesus the air was full of 
 expectation. There were Christs many, ' Christ,' 
 as you know, being only the Greek form of the 
 Hebrew ' Messiah * ; and anticipation was rife, 
 and they were looking on every hand. Then 
 came the gentle Nazarene who did not claim to 
 be the Messiah. He did claim to teach a reform 
 in the national religion. He did claim to speak 
 for the universal Fatherhood of God and the 
 
102 SAVIOURS 
 
 universal brotherhood of man. He did speak of 
 God's readiness, his willingness, to forgive and 
 fold to his loving heart all the erring children of 
 the world. And he taught that love for God and 
 love for man was the one cure for all the evils of 
 the world ; and he is the first great teacher in 
 history who did put forth these ideals as the 
 sufficient means by which the world might be 
 saved. This was the life-work of Jesus. 
 
 But the people were not ready for him ; and, 
 when he spoke against the temple, when he 
 touched the self-love and pride of the popular 
 party, when he discredited their sacrifices, when 
 he said that the publican who truly repented of 
 his sin and proposed to do right was better than 
 the most exact keeper of the law, he cut across 
 all their prejudices ; and they would have none 
 of him. And when they understood that he 
 preached against the temple, and when they saw 
 that the people followed after him, so that there 
 might be danger of complications with the 
 dominant power of Rome, they cried, * Away 
 with him ! ' And he was taken out to the little 
 hill beyond the walls of the city, and hung upon 
 a tree, and crucified. This was Jesus. 
 
 I do not believe that Jesus claimed ever to be 
 the Messiah that the Jewish people expected. 
 I cannot go into this in detail at this time ; but 
 we know, — we do not guess, — we know that the 
 
JESUS AS MESSIAH IO3 
 
 New Testament has been changed in many places 
 and ways, as the popular belief concerning the 
 nature and work of Jesus changed, until many a 
 word is put upon his lips which there is no good 
 reason to suppose he ever uttered. 
 
 Jesus, then, after he went away or during the 
 latter part of his ministry before he died, came to 
 be looked upon by a party as the possible Messiah 
 they had been expecting. He did not, indeed, do 
 what they supposed the Messiah was to accom- 
 plish ; but they thought perhaps it was only 
 postponed, that he was going to do it, and so they 
 clung to the belief that he was the Messiah who 
 was to come. But it was no part of their creed 
 that the Messiah should be put to an ignominious 
 death ; and we know from the records that the 
 disciples, after the crucifixion, were disheartened 
 and scattered. The two on the way to Emmaus, 
 say : ' We trusted that this had been he who was 
 to have redeemed Israel.' But that trust is 
 broken and destroyed. 
 
 But the love and reverence for him had entered 
 into the hearts of those who stood closest to him ; 
 and, as they thought the matter over, they 
 perhaps quite unconsciously began to reinterpret 
 the Messianic hope. The idea sprung up that he 
 had simply gone into the heavens for a little 
 while and that he was coming back again to 
 establish the Messianic kingdom here on the 
 
104 SAVIOURS 
 
 earth. It you will read the New Testament with 
 that thought in mind, you will find it all on 
 tiptoe with expectation of what is called the 
 second coming of Jesus : and the words are put 
 upon the lips of Jesus himself, the definite state- 
 ment that he was to return before that generation 
 had passed away. 
 
 And then they began to wonder why he was 
 allowed to be put to death ; and the old paganism 
 of their past — the paganism of the Old World — 
 swept over their thoughts, and the idea took 
 possession of them that he was a sacrificial victim, 
 not merely a natural human martyr, the Son of 
 God and the Son of Man, dying as thousands have 
 died for his great truth, but that he was a victim, 
 a divinely appointed victim, and that he suffered 
 and died — not lived and taught — to save the 
 world. 
 
 And what did they suppose he was to save 
 men from, and how was it to be explained ? 
 Now here is the point I referred to near the 
 beginning, when I said I should indicate the 
 changes which pass over the minds of people 
 concerning the same one savioiir. For hundreds 
 of years — to answer the question I have just 
 raised — it was popularly believed that Jesus 
 was the price that God paid to the devil, who had 
 become the rightful owner and ruler of men. He 
 paid him to the devil's vindictiveness and 
 
THEORIES OF ATONEMENT I05. 
 
 vengeance, that he might redeem those who 
 were in the infernal keeping in the lower regions. 
 This was the popular belief. 
 
 Then it was believed that he died to appease 
 the anger of God. God was angry with men on 
 account of Adam's sin and fall. That idea, 
 heathenish, pagan, abominable beyond all words 
 to express, has been held by modern theologians. 
 The idea was that on account of the one trans- 
 gression of Adam, men became tainted, corrupted 
 sinners the moment they breathe, and that God 
 is angry with them, and that that anger burns 
 with unquenchable flames down into hell and 
 into an eternity of torture. Dr. W. G. T. Shedd 
 who died not long ago, has a sermon, the title ol 
 which carries the whole idea, — ' Sin a Nature, 
 and that Nature Guilt.' Thus the new-born 
 babe is a guilty sinner, deserving eternal hell. 
 So Christ died as a victim to appease the wrath 
 of the Father. 
 
 Then about the tenth century Anselm wrote 
 a book in which he put forth what is known as 
 the governmental theory. Christ died not as a 
 price paid to the devil, not to appease God, but 
 to meet a governmental exigency. God wanted 
 to be just, but could not unless somebody suffered. 
 So Jesus was offered as a divine victim to satisfy 
 the supposed justice of God, and make it possible 
 for the Father to forgive. 
 
I06 SAVIOURS 
 
 Then there was another theory ,^-that he died 
 and went down into hell so as to suffer the exact 
 amount of agony that all the souls that were to 
 be saved would have had to suffer throughout 
 all eternity. So he became a substitute for. 
 human sufferings ; and those who believed on 
 him and accepted him as such might possibly be 
 saved and go to heaven. These theories have 
 been followed in the modem world by the 
 doctrine which is most popular now among the 
 liberal orthodox, — the belief that Jesus suffered 
 and died to manifest the love of God, not to 
 change him, but to teach men how much God 
 loved them and how ready he was to forgive. 
 
 So you see that the theories held in any one 
 religion concerning the same saviour change as 
 men grow and become more civilized. The old 
 barbaric conceptions die hard, but they have to 
 die when men get so that they can endure them 
 no longer. 
 
 Now I wish you to carefully note what Jesus 
 himself said. He says nothing about his death 
 as a price paid to the devil ; nothing about it 
 as appeasing the wrath of God ; nothing about 
 any governmental exigency that needed to be 
 met ; nothing about any substitutional theory ; 
 not even anything about any moral theory such 
 as Dr. Bushnell advocated. He simis up his 
 attitude, officially, once and for ever, in that 
 
THE TEACHING OF JESUS I07 
 
 marvellous parable of the Prodigal Son. He 
 does not think there is any gulf between God and 
 his children, no wrath that needs to be appeased, 
 no devil lurking in the background to be paid 
 his price, no substitution. The father yearns 
 for and loves his boy, no matter how sinful he 
 is, away off in the far country ; and when the 
 boy rises and says, ' I will go home to my father,' 
 the father does not say : ' Well, what offering 
 are you going to bring ? How are you going to 
 appease my wrath ? ' He does not say, ' the 
 family government will go all to pieces if I forgive 
 you without somebody suffering.* He does not 
 say anything. Only the moment he sees him a 
 great way off, he runs to him, and falls on his 
 neck and kisses him, and then makes a feast in 
 the gladness of his heart, because he is come back 
 again. 
 
 That is the official teaching of Jesus as to the 
 attitude of God towards his erring, sinful 
 children. 
 
 If Jesus had known anything about these 
 theological schemes, if he had known they were 
 true, then was the place and then was the time 
 for him to tell us of it ; for, if he did not tell us, 
 he was misleading us, misrepresenting God in 
 what was the one most vital thing in human Hfe. 
 This then is the theory of Jesus concerning 
 salvation. 
 
I08 SAVIOURS 
 
 Now we are ready to note that this evolution 
 of human thought and feeling is perfectly natural, 
 when we consider how man starts in this world, 
 inexperienced, and having to learn the facts 
 about the imiverse and human nature by cen- 
 turies of study and discovery. But we have 
 made discoveries in this modem world which 
 account simply, adequately, naturally, justly, 
 for the facts of human life, and for our modem 
 interpretation of those facts in the way of what 
 is needed for human salvation. 
 
 What do we know ? We know that man has 
 never fallen. We know that this world has 
 never been invaded by any malign spiritual 
 power from outside. We know that the devil 
 and all his hosts are the creation of the barbaric 
 imagination. We know that there is no gulf 
 between God and his world — ^his children — 
 that needs to be supematurally bridged. We 
 know there is no divine wrath against his 
 children. We know that this world, in the 
 main, is just what God intended it to be in 
 process of development towards something else. 
 All these things we know. 
 
 Now what are the facts conceming man's 
 condition, — theTevils from which he needs to 
 be delivered ? Man is ignorant, of necessity. 
 God could not suddenly create a wise man if he 
 tried ; because what we mean by wisdom, by 
 
HUMAN NATURE IO9 
 
 knowledge, is the summed up results of human 
 experience, to be obtained in no other way. 
 Infinite power has nothing to do with creating 
 an absurdity, with doing that which, in the 
 nature of things, cannot be done. Man is 
 ignorant, then ; and he needs to know. 
 
 Another thing, man starts in life with all the 
 inheritance of the animal world — the snake, the 
 tiger, the hyena, all the lower animal forces and 
 forms — surging up in his lower nature and 
 aspiring to take command of him. He is 
 dowered with a divine power that, in the process 
 of ages, sloughs off and leaves behind the animal, 
 and climbs up into heart and brain and soul. 
 Man, then, has this animal nature which he needs 
 to master and control ; for there is nothing, 
 mark you, in the animal part of man that is not 
 in its nature and essence right. It simply needs 
 to be dominated and used, and not abused. 
 
 Man, then, is selfish, filled with greed and 
 desire to obtain things ; and it is perfectly right 
 he should be. All growth comes from the fact 
 that man hungers for things, and seeks to obtain 
 them, — for bread, for love, for truth, for beauty, 
 for all sorts of things, — and reaches out to grasp 
 them ; and selfishness, in the evil sense, is only 
 the willingness of a man to get these desirable 
 things at the expense of the welfare of somebody 
 else. There is no evil in selfishness anywhere, except 
 
no SAVIOURS 
 
 right in there. Man, then needs to be developed. 
 
 He needs also intellectual development, so 
 as to widen his conception of the universe, and 
 give room and range for his powers as a limitless, 
 thinking being. All truth he needs to know. 
 He needs also the conquest of the beautiful, to 
 make life fair. So art is one of the ministers and 
 saviours of man. He needs discovery, the 
 inventions, so that he may obtain control of all 
 the natural forces of the universe. He needs 
 the power to create a limitless supply for his 
 limitless needs. He needs then to be able to 
 create wealth in all its multitudinous forms. 
 
 What is a perfect man ? What would we 
 regard as a saved man ? A man who is a 
 splendid, perfect animal, to start with, in perfect 
 physical condition ; a man with a grand brain, 
 so that he may unlock all the doorways to the 
 truth of things ; a man loving all lovable things ; 
 a man looking up to and aspiring towards all fine 
 things that are beyond him ; a man with moral 
 perfection, standing in perfect loving — and so 
 just and helpful — relations to all other things 
 that live ; a man spiritually adjusted, recognizing 
 himself as a child of God, and seeking to come 
 into more intimate and personal relations with 
 God. A man like this would be saved. There 
 is nothing you could give him which would add 
 to his perfection or his glory. 
 
THE SAVIOURS OF THE WORLD III 
 
 Who, then, are the saviours of the world ? In 
 some lower and preliminary sense let me note 
 what I have been saying by implication. Those 
 men that teach us the development of the body, 
 that help us to find the secrets of health, are 
 some of the saviours of mankind. So are those 
 who have helped us to eliminate pain from the 
 world, those who teach us the secret of outgrowing 
 mental sorrows, those who help us to discover 
 the secrets of nature around us, and so to control 
 the forces by which wealth is created and want is 
 done away. They know little of what they are 
 doing who fight against the accumulation of 
 wealth. Humanity as yet, in spite of what we 
 call the tremendous gains of the last century, 
 is poor, suffering for want of a million things 
 that can never be attained until we can control 
 the forces of production more completely than we 
 have been able to do yet. 
 
 So the creators of wealth must take their 
 places among the saviours of man. Those who 
 have delved into the secrets of the earth and 
 explored the heavens and fed this infinite hunger 
 of man for truth, — these, if they have done 
 nothing else, if they have forgotten rehgion, 
 philanthropy, no matter what else they have 
 done, or not done, if they have helped man to 
 grasp and discover truth, so far thev are among 
 the world's saviours. 
 
112 SAVIOURS 
 
 Those who have helped us discover and master 
 the secrets of beauty, the artists, the sculptors, 
 the painters, the creators of beautiful buildings ; 
 those who have wrought the earth over under the 
 form of landscape gardening, — all those who 
 have been ministers of beauty are among the 
 saviours of mankind. Those who have discovered 
 new truths in any direction ; those who have 
 helped the world, have helped unfold and develop 
 complete manhood and womanhood, — these in 
 their degree have been saviours. 
 
 But, to come back again to that which is the 
 most important thing of all, we find ourselves 
 bowing once more in the presence of the gentle* 
 Nazarene, the Saviour, our Saviour, in the 
 supreme, the universal sense ; and why ? Jesus 
 taught us — what ?' He said, — and note the 
 significance of it, — ' Seek ye first the kingdom of 
 God and his righteousness.' He put his finger 
 on the one central, essential thing in human life. 
 A man may miss other things, — ^he may miss 
 extensive knowledge, he may be ignorant, he 
 may be poor, he may have little artistic sense 
 or appreciation of beauty, he may know nothing 
 of music, all the wonderful world in other 
 directions may be closed to him ; but if he loves, 
 if he has learned the secret that God is love and 
 the divine life among men is love, then he has a 
 key to that which is the most important of all 
 
jESttS As SAVIOUR 113 
 
 in these human hves of ours. The loving soul, 
 the gentle spirit, the one who wishes to help God, 
 to serve, will find this one thing alone guiding 
 him in the midst of his ignorance. He may make 
 mistakes ; but will make no vital mistakes. He 
 may miss much else ; but, so long as he loves, 
 he is in heaven even here among men, though in 
 the midst of trouble and trial ; for God is love, 
 and love is God, and love is heaven. 
 
 Jesus, then, is our Saviour here. So far as 
 the authentic teaching of Jesus goes, he does 
 not seem to have cared for what we call intel- 
 lectual truth. He gave us no philosophy, not 
 a word of science. He seemed to care little for 
 the aesthetic side of things. We have no intima- 
 tion that he knew anything about music. He 
 recognized the beauty of the flowers by the way- 
 side, and saw in them intimations of the love and 
 kindliness of the Father in heaven ; but as for 
 philosophy, for science, for art, for literature, — 
 all these things he seemed to care nothing for. 
 At any rate, there is no authentic testimony that 
 he cared for them much ; but the one thing he 
 did care for was that men should know that God 
 was their Father, that they were his children, 
 and that the way to get rid of human evils was to 
 love men, love even your enemies, love the un- 
 lovely- — that is, love the possibilities in the 
 unlovely ; love the invisible soul that might be 
 
il4 SAVIOURS 
 
 evolved and developed ; love the child of God 
 in the tramp, in the criminal, in the outcast ; 
 surround them with this atmosphere of warmth 
 and love, so as to make these beautiful things 
 grow. This was the teaching of Jesus ; and this 
 is the secret of that which is most important in 
 human life. 
 
 I do, indeed, beUeve that it is immensely im- 
 portant that we know the truth of things, that 
 we develop wealth, that we be able to eliminate 
 human pain, physical suffering from the world, 
 that we develop art and beauty of every kind, 
 that we make human life rounded and complete. 
 But if we have got to give up everything else, 
 we must keep that which was the secret and 
 teaching of the Nazarene ; for that is more 
 important than all the others combined. 
 
 So Jesus remains, in the supreme sense of the 
 word, after all the analysis and scepticism, after 
 all philosophy and science have done their work, 
 — ^he remains for us the supreme ideal of divine 
 manhood. So in that direction he is our Saviour. 
 And he is the more touching to us, appeals the 
 more directly and strongly to the heart, because 
 he teaches another deep secret of life. He is the 
 suffering Saviour, not simply the loving Saviour. 
 But he is love, willing to suffer even to the death 
 for the objects of his love ; and that is the 
 supreme thing in all the universe. 
 
CONSECRATED LOVE II5 
 
 And let me note that the Hfe of Jesus simply 
 illustrates supremely that which is of the very 
 warp and woof of things, that which we can 
 read in the very beginnings of life on earth. 
 Go down as far as you please ; and, if we can 
 interpret the life that is there, we find this vicarious 
 suffering love. Birds will sit upon their nests in 
 the face of danger, and die in the attempt to 
 protect their eggs. Let their young be attacked, 
 and they will face any monster in the attempt to 
 lure the invader away from the place where the 
 young are secreted, — suffering, consecrated love, 
 love even willing to die. Among dogs, horses, 
 the higher animals everywhere, if you choose to 
 study it, you will find the illustration of this 
 secret and central thing in all life. Life is bound 
 together into one. No individual is anything 
 more than an individual cell in an organism ; and, 
 if one member rejoices, all the members rejoice 
 with it ; if one suffers, all suffer alike. We are 
 under that law and necessity ; and we cannot 
 escape. If our friends go wrong, our hearts are 
 wrung. If they succeed, we enter into their joy. 
 And the ideal, true life is that which is willing 
 voluntarily to endure this suffering, that the loved 
 one may be benefited by it. 
 
 And so, as man has climbed up the ages, read 
 it everywhere. What else is taught by the lives 
 of the martyrs, the confessors, the teachers, the 
 
Il6 SAVIOURS 
 
 witnesses, those who have stood for truth ? 
 Socrates taught it in ancient Greece. The 
 Buddha taught it in far-off India hundreds of 
 years before Christianity was known. All over 
 the world and in all ages, you find, however mis- 
 interpreted the fact may be in the lurid light of 
 prevailing barbarism, the vicarious suffering 
 saviours. 
 
 In our own country we have just passed the 
 birthday of him who perhaps is the greatest 
 American that ever lived — Lincoln, the martyr 
 Lincoln, whose power over his nation, and over 
 the world, and over all the future, lies largely in 
 this : that he suffered, that he carried the bur- 
 dens, the sins, the wrongs, of the American people 
 on his wearied brain and burdened, bleeding 
 heart, and that he died because he was faithful, 
 Gs was the Nazarene, to the last extreme. Faith- 
 ful to what ? To an intellectual truth, to art, to 
 beauty ? No. Faithful to the moral ideal, 
 faithful to God, faithful to man, living and dying 
 to deliver the world from a burden of sorrow and 
 wrong. 
 
 It is the same principle ; and the supremacy 
 of Jesus lies in this — that he is not an isolated 
 case, that he is not an interpolated fact thrust 
 into the human order from without, but that he 
 was bom in that human order, and sums up in 
 himself that which is finest and sweetest and 
 
THE HUMANITY OF JESUS II7 
 
 noblest in it all — the suffering love of a saviour, 
 willing to suffer for the sake of love, and in order 
 to deliver the object of that love from suffering 
 and from evil of every kind. 
 
 /^' or THf 
 
VI 
 WORSHIP 
 
 We have found, as the result of our studies 
 so far, that rehgion is an essential and permanent 
 part of human nature and human life ; and, since 
 worship has always been regarded as an essential 
 part of religion, we might think it safe to assume 
 that worship also is to be permanent. But 
 ' worship ' has covered a large variety of things 
 in the evolution of the religious life of the race. 
 And some of these things, which were once 
 regarded as absolutely essential to any true 
 worship, have already passed away. Nor this 
 alone ; they are regarded from the point of view 
 of our present civilization as not only unreason- 
 able, but as barbaric or even immoral. 
 
 It seems wise, therefore, that we should trace 
 the growth for a little of man's ideas concerning 
 worship, and see, if we may, what parts of worship 
 are to pass away, and what are to be permanent ; 
 i.e., what is the essential thing in worship. 
 
 We have already seen that by a necessity of 
 human nature man's early thoughts about God 
 were ignorant, crude, barbaric. We have §een 
 
RELATION TO THE UNSEEN II9 
 
 that men, of necessity, worshipped not simply- 
 one God, but many gods. And these gods have 
 been very much hke their worshippers. We 
 find this to be true in any stage of human develop- 
 ment. It is very difficult for us to think of God 
 as anything more than the reflex of the best and 
 highest, the noblest, the sweetest, the truest things 
 in ourselves. And men on the barbaric level, of 
 necessity, have barbaric thoughts about these 
 invisible powers that they think of as on every 
 hand. These beings, then, are somewhat like 
 themselves — having the same dispositions, the 
 same wants, pleased after the same general 
 fashion. 
 
 Religion in all ages has, of necessity, been 
 the attempt on the part of men to get into right 
 relations with these unseen powers, if they have 
 been polytheists, or with the unseen Power, 
 since we have come to believe that there is only 
 one. The object of all worship has been to get 
 into right, into helpful relations with these in- 
 visible beings. And since men have of necessity 
 thought of the gods as substantially made in their 
 own image, as men, only invisible,larger,mightier, 
 but endowed with substantially the same tastes and 
 feeling, the same wants, it has been natural that, 
 in their worship, they should try to please them, 
 as they tried to please the visible potentates, 
 chiefs aiid kings under whose power they lived. 
 
120 WORSHIP 
 
 And what are the great needs of early man ? 
 the great needs, for that matter, of man in any 
 stage of his career ? What are the few chief 
 things that men have cared for ? Food, drink, 
 gifts, the gratification of their physical desires-, 
 praise, honour. And early worship always at- 
 tempted to satisfy these supposed needs and 
 desires of the invisible powers. 
 
 The first forms of worship, then, were bringing 
 to the gods gifts of food, no matter what the par- 
 ticular kind of food may have been that was 
 accessible to the particular tribe engaged in this 
 worship — grains, fish, flesh, anything that the 
 people were accustomed themselves to feed upon ; 
 drink, poured out as a libation or as an offering. 
 You must remember that they supposed that 
 always these invisible spiritual beings partook of 
 the spiritual or invisible parts of the food or the 
 drink. Then there were offerings of all sorts, 
 gifts of whatever the tribe or the tribesmen might 
 value. Articles of clothing, weapons of war, 
 decorations, ornaments, works of crude barbaric 
 art, — all these things were brought, and by the 
 grateful hearts piled up as gifts to the objects of 
 their worship. 
 
 Sacrifice, as we have already seen, came to be 
 an important part of this worship ; and the more 
 valuable the thing sacrificed, the more it was 
 believed that the divine beings were pleased. So 
 
ANCIENT ELEMENTS IN WORSHIP 121 
 
 there came to be human sacrifices. There came 
 to be beUeved in the sacrifices of beings who were 
 half-human and half-divine — Titans, demigods, 
 incarnations of the invisible powers. So the ages 
 went by, and men climbed ever up to higher and 
 higher levels of civilization, attained the ability 
 to think finer, nobler thoughts of the invisible 
 ones, came themselves to admire sweeter and 
 nobler things. And so the form of service, the 
 attempts at worship, gradually tended to clarify 
 themselves, and to come nearer and nearer to that 
 ideal of spiritual worship for which Jesus stands, 
 and which he taught as the first great duty of man. 
 I need, before passing from this part of my 
 theme, however, to note certain other things 
 which in the early world were regarded as im- 
 portant elements of worship. We find in Greece, 
 in Rome — indeed, in nearly all of the ancient 
 nations — that such things as now have generally 
 passed out of civilized thought as connected with 
 these matters were considered of even chief 
 importance. The robe that the priest wore ; 
 the attitude in which he stood during his service ; 
 whether he faced to one quarter of the heaven or 
 another ; the implements to be used in the 
 sacrifices ; the forms of speech which he uttered ; 
 the tones of voice in which the words were spoken ; 
 — all these things have in some part of the world 
 and at some stage in the history of humanity been 
 
122 WORSHIP 
 
 regarded as of the very chief est importance. 
 Then there have been whole ages during which 
 it has been beheved that men could not acceptably 
 approach God unless they had certain definite 
 intellectual ideas concerning him, unless they 
 held to certain articles of belief as essentials of 
 their creed. 
 
 We find as the Hebrew nation developed, that 
 it gradually outgrew the older and cruder ideas 
 concerning worship. It would be revolting if I 
 should describe to you the actual ceremonies 
 of the service in Solomon's time. The temple on 
 these great occasions was one vast slaughter- 
 house, hundreds of birds and animals being slain, 
 and their blood poured out, the service requiring 
 great numbers of men in order to carry it on. 
 The day came, however, when the people could no 
 longer believe that the great God sitting up in 
 heaven cared for these things ; and the prophets 
 made God say : ' Away with all these sacrifices ! 
 They are a weariness and an abomination unto 
 me. I care not for your burnt-offerings, for your 
 rivers of oil that you pour out. What I want is a 
 humble and contrite heart.' 
 
 We come at last to the time when the prophet 
 could say : ' To do justly, to love mercy, and to 
 walk humbly with God,' is the one great essential 
 on the part of him who would come as a worship- 
 per ipto his presence. And then, at last, we find 
 
SPIRITUAL WORSHIP 123 
 
 Jesus talking with the woman of Samaria by the 
 well, and putting away one after another the old 
 conceptions of worship, saying that sacrifices 
 were not essential ; it was not necessary that the 
 worship should be offered on Mount Gerizim, 
 neither in Jerusalem, in the temple ; none of these 
 things were important ; God was Spirit, and the 
 true worshipper henceforth must be he who could 
 worship God in spirit and in truth. These were 
 the ways by which God was, gradually, by the 
 process of civilization, sifting out the nations all 
 over the world, gathering to himself the band of 
 true worshippers, who cared not for the outward 
 elements, but only for the inner condition of the 
 heart. 
 
 As we look back over these things that have 
 been regarded as essential elements of worship 
 in the past, may we not rightly measure them 
 in the light of our loftiest conception of the 
 infinite and eternal Spirit, who is the life and 
 the heart and the soul of this universe that over- 
 whelms us by its immensity ? Can we think of 
 God as caring to have an animal killed and burned 
 to please him ? Can we any longer believe with 
 the writer of Genesis as he describes Noah making 
 a sacrifice after the flood, and the great God up in 
 heaven smelling the savour of the burnt flesh and 
 being gratified and pleased by it ? Can we think 
 of God any longer as needing to be fed ? Did he 
 
124 WORSHIP 
 
 not say by the mouth of his old prophets, * If I 
 were hungry, I would not tell thee ; the cattle 
 on a thousand hills are mine ? * Can we think 
 of him any longer as needing drink ? 
 
 And yet so enduring are these traditions and 
 customs that they seem to become ingrained as a 
 part of human nature. When we launch a ship 
 here, in free America, even to-day, we must go 
 through the last attenuated, worn-out remnant 
 of that old, once universal custom of giving the 
 gods drink, by breaking a bottle over its prow. 
 So much is left of the once universal office of 
 libation — pouring out drink to the invisible 
 beings. 
 
 Can we think of God as pleased with a gift ? 
 Even Plato had reached the point where he 
 said it was degrading for us to suppose any longer 
 that the gods could be bought, could be pleased 
 with offerings of that sort. And yet men all over 
 the world, if they wished to gain a favour of their 
 king, their chief, their ruler, came with a gift in 
 their hands, not expecting to be received other- 
 wise. Almost universally they carried over this 
 conception into their worship, the invisible one 
 from their point of view being like a chieftain who 
 needed to be bought, placated, who cared for an 
 offering, or who needed to have some one, a friend, 
 a bosom companion, a favourite, intercede with 
 him, plead with him on behalf of the petitioner. 
 
FALSE IDEAS OF GOD 125 
 
 These ideas have been ingrained as parts of almost 
 all the great religions of the world. 
 
 I remember some years ago, when I was in 
 Rome, visiting one of the three or four hundred 
 churches dedicated to the different Marys, and 
 finding a statue of Mary before the altar almost 
 buried under gifts — rings, bracelets, jewels, rich 
 clothes, valuables of every kind, brought on the 
 supposition that she would care, and that she 
 would plead, perhaps, with Jesus, and that Jesus 
 would plead with the Father, and so the worship- 
 per might win at last by this roundabout way the 
 favour of Heaven. 
 
 . Can we believe that the infinite God of this 
 universe cares about our personal adornments, 
 the robes we wear ? that he cares about the 
 arrangement of the altar ? that he cares 
 whether we occupy an eastward position or look 
 west or north or south ? Is there any point of the 
 compass to which we can look, and not be face to 
 face with God ? The Jew thought he must pray 
 looking towards Jerusalem ; the Mohammedan 
 worshipped looking towards Mecca; and almost 
 throughout Christendom to-day — as a relic of pagan 
 sun-worship — emphasis is still laid upon the east- 
 ward position in prayer, looking towards the point 
 from which the sun is to appear in the morning. 
 
 Can we believe to-day that the infinite God 
 of this universe — who knows how we in our 
 
126 WORSHIP 
 
 childhood and ignorance seek gropingly after 
 truth and so many times fail to find it — will reject 
 us and cast us out on account of some intellectual 
 conviction to which, after long struggle, we 
 attain ? Does he care so much for the words on 
 our lips or the thoughts in our brains, or does he 
 really care for the attitude and love and tender 
 feeling of the heart ? 
 
 What is it that the great God in heaven wants 
 of his children ? We wish to-day, just as much 
 as did primitive man, to get into right relations 
 with God. It is the one eternal search of the 
 religious effort of the race — to get into right 
 relations with God ; and we wish, if we may, to 
 find out what God wants us to do in our worship, 
 in order that we may come into right relations 
 with him. What is it that he chiefly cares for 
 as the essential element of worship ? Is it any of 
 these things that we have been dealing with ? 
 Can we believe that the real God of the real 
 universe, infinite and eternal, cares for these 
 little, petty, childish affairs ? 
 
 There are two or three things still held — at 
 least in some sections of the Church — which are 
 old relics of paganism, and which are so impor- 
 tant that it seems to me worth while for a moment 
 just to point them out. I do not desire to culti- 
 vate in your minds — which have rejected these 
 things — a sense of superiority over your brethren. 
 
FALSE IDEAS OF WORSHIP I27 
 
 1 would not have you look down upon somebody 
 who still holds — for he may be noble in heart — 
 a barbaric idea of worship. For God, I believe, 
 accepts the sincere soul, whatever the form of 
 his service may be — however irrational, however 
 barbaric — more readily than he accepts the 
 clearest-headed thinker of the modern world who 
 is not deep down in his heart a true and noble 
 worshipper. 
 
 One of these ideas is that a thing is sacred 
 merely because it is old. If you should go back 
 and converse with an old-time Greek, when he 
 wished to say that a certain thing was sacred in 
 his estimation, he would use this phrase, ' Such 
 a thing is old to me.' ' Old ' and ' sacred ' were 
 identical. There are thousands of people in the 
 churches of Christendom to-day, who unthink- 
 ingly, are inclined to worship and bow down to 
 whatever is old. It may be true and be old : it 
 cannot be true because it is old. It is not 
 necessarily true because it is new ; but it is the 
 true and the real, the expression of the divine 
 in the universe and in life, which we wish to find : 
 neither the old nor the new. 
 
 There is another thing already referred to, 
 — the conception that we need somebody to 
 intercede for us with the Father, that we need 
 a favourite in heaven who can get God by his 
 persuasion to be kind to us. This is barbarism 
 
128 WORSHIP 
 
 pure and simple. It sprung out of the universal 
 experience of the ancient world with their chief- 
 tains. You go to Turkey to-day ; and if you can 
 get the ear of the vizier, the prime favourite of the 
 Sultan, you may win almost any favour. You 
 may get almost anything of any king in Christen- 
 dom if you can get the ear of the court favourite ► 
 And so people have applied this idea to God, and 
 said, ' If we can only get somebody to plead with 
 him for us, then he will be kind.' 
 
 Jesus teaches another idea. God is the 
 universal Father of us all, and loves us and will 
 help us. God will do right because he is God 
 and we are his children. There need be no 
 other reason. 
 
 Then there remains in one of the greatest 
 churches in Christendom a relic of barbarism 
 that it seems to me would be revolting to the 
 worshippers themselves if they should stop to 
 think of its origin and meaning. I refer to the 
 thought that people are to be saved by eating 
 and drinking the body and blood of God. The 
 old barbarians believed that if they could tear 
 out the heart of a tiger after they killed him 
 and eat it, they would partake of his qualities 
 of ferocity and power. If they could eat the 
 heart of an enemy who was very brave and 
 strong, they believed they would come into 
 possession of the qualities he possessed. And 
 
SURVIVALS OF PAGANISM I29 
 
 here, intruding itself on the very altars of our 
 worship of the Supreme, is this barbarism, not 
 yet outgrown by the civilization of the world, 
 — that we may come to God through the material 
 eating of something and drinking something 
 with these human fleshly bodies. Is that the 
 way to become partakers of the divine nature ? 
 This is ' materialism ' of the grossest sort. 
 
 And so there are many elements, if I had 
 time to go over them, that are survivals of the 
 old paganism still remaining imbedded in the 
 strata that human custom has laid down as the 
 ages have gone by. 
 
 There is a certain class of mind that revolts 
 as it makes a study of the old ideas that have 
 prevailed in worship, and comes to wonder 
 whether worship itself is an ennobling thing, 
 whether it be not humiliating to bend and bow 
 and kneel in the presence of any one. And, 
 then, in this modern world, on the part of those 
 who have studied modern science, and have 
 become overwhelmed with the thought of the 
 magnificence of the material universe and the 
 unchangeableness of the laws according to which 
 it is governed, there are those who wonder 
 whether there is left any place for worship. 
 
 Let us turn now, and consider what is essential 
 in worship and what are the implications of 
 worship as bearing on the nature of the 
 
130 WORSHIP 
 
 worshipper. Do we degrade ourselves in bending 
 in the presence of the Supreme ? As Browning 
 expresses it in that wonderful poem ' Saul,' 
 
 * With that stoop of the soul which, in bending, up- 
 raises it too,' 
 
 are we not higher and nobler when we are bent 
 in the presence of the Divine ? 
 
 We decide the rank of any being by the 
 question whether there is in that being the 
 possibility of worship. For what is worship ? 
 If we analyse it carefully, we shall find that it is 
 not of necessity in any of these things which I 
 have been dealing with so far, though it may 
 be in any or all of them. It is an attitude of 
 the soul ; it is an exercise of mind and heart 
 and spirit. When you analyse worship, you 
 find that the essence of it is in the one word 
 * admiration.' The man who admires, the 
 being who admires, — that is, wonders, — looks 
 up with adoration towards something which he 
 thinks of as above him, — that man or being is a 
 worshipper. 
 
 Why is it that in our ordinary, every-day life 
 we think of the dog as perhaps in some ways 
 the noblest of animals, the nearest to ourselves ? 
 Because there is in the dog this capacity to 
 come into personal relationship with a being above 
 himself, to look up to that being with at least 
 the instinctive movements of reverence, of 
 
TPIE MARVELS OF CIVILIZATION 13I 
 
 wonder, of admiration, of love, so that the 
 nature of the dog becomes hfted through this 
 worshipping attitude towards his master. 
 
 Some years ago an Indian chief came on to 
 Washington to plead with the great father 
 there for something which he desired ; and 
 while he was talking with a gentleman, one 
 day, he was asked what it was that he had 
 seen in his visit which impressed him the 
 most. And he said at once, ' The bridge across 
 the Mississippi at St Louis.' He had not seen 
 the Brooklyn Bridge. Perhaps he would have 
 chosen that if he had. And the man said, ' Are 
 you not surprised at the great buildings at 
 Washington, the Capitol, the Treasury, the 
 monuments ? ' And he said, ' Yes, but my 
 people can pile stones on top of each other ; but 
 they cannot make a cobweb of steel hang in the 
 air ' Here was a recognition on the part of 
 this Indian, of the mystery, the marvel and 
 wonder of a civihzation that was above and 
 beyond anything that his people had attained. 
 
 But right in that fact, that he could be touched 
 with mystery and wonder and admiration, the 
 student of human progress recognizes the 
 possibility of his doing like deeds by and by. 
 There was in him the ability to be developed 
 into the creator of these great wonders that 
 could touch him thus with admiration. 
 
132 WORSHIP 
 
 If you find a being anywhere on the face of 
 the earth, who has no curiosity, no capacity for 
 wonder, who never expresses surprise, who does 
 not admire anything, — I care not whether he 
 be a wealthy, worn-out modern or an undeveloped 
 barbarian — you will find a very low grade of 
 civilization. He will be without the possibility 
 of coming to anything noble or high. 
 
 The next quality that I need to notice in 
 this matter of worship, and that makes it so 
 important for us to cultivate, is that the wor- 
 shipper always tends to become transformed 
 into the likeness of that which he admires. It 
 is said that Alexander the Great carried with 
 him always a copy of Homer's Iliad, and that 
 the one great admiration of his life was the 
 famous old Greek warrior of Troy, Achilles. 
 And this admiration tended perpetually to 
 transform the character of Alexander into the 
 likeness of the old Greek hero. We inevitably 
 absorb the qualities that we love and admire. 
 We inevitably become made over into the 
 likeness of those beings whom we chiefly care for. 
 
 You have friends that you love and worship. 
 You have memories of the dead that you carry 
 ever enshrined in your hearts. They are the 
 noblest people, perhaps, that you have ever 
 known. They are enthroned in your admira- 
 tion ; and, gradually, you are being transformed 
 
THE INSPIRATION OF WORSHIP I33 
 
 into the likeness of these. This power works 
 according to this law, inevitably. You may go 
 through all the outward forms of worship ; you 
 may bend your head or your knees in church 
 service ever so many times during the week ; 
 you may engage in rituals or services of any 
 kind, no matter what ; but you are really being 
 made over by your admirations. If you go 
 through formal services, and you love and 
 admire something else, you are being transformed 
 into the object that you admire. You may 
 have the word of divine worship upon your 
 lips ; but the power is in that which you love 
 in your heart. 
 
 Another point. Only the worshippers of the 
 world have in them the power of growth. It 
 is the people who are haunted by this unattain- 
 able ideal who make advances. When they 
 climb to one level, the ideal still leads them on, 
 and they strive after its attainment. And so it 
 is the worshipper, and the worshipper alone, 
 who has in him the power and potency of 
 unfolding all that is highest and finest and 
 noblest in human nature. 
 
 This is the reason why we have hope for those 
 who have chosen as their heroic characters the 
 noblest and greatest men of the world. So 
 long as France, for example, chiefly admires 
 Napoleon, so long there is no hope for the 
 
134 WORSHIP 
 
 redemption, the uplifting, the deliverance of 
 France. So long as we admire men like Wash- 
 ington, like Lincoln, counting them the chief est 
 heroes of our national history, so long there 
 is in us the potency and power of developing 
 into the likeness of these heroic, these noble 
 characters. 
 
 If you find an artist who thinks he can paint 
 perfectly, there is no possibility of his becoming 
 a great painter. If he can bend himself, his 
 soul, in reverence before the Sistine Madonna, 
 before the creations of the masters, new or old, 
 and feel that they transcend all the power of 
 his exertions so far, and be lifted to seek after 
 those qualities that make them supreme, then 
 there is a chance for him to become a great 
 artist. If men admire the truth-seekers, the 
 leaders, the lovers, the servants of the race ; 
 if women admire such characters as Florence 
 Nightingale, Dorothea Dix, — the women who 
 have rendered the greatest services in the past, — 
 this worship has in it the power to lift them up 
 and lead them on to the accomplishment of 
 similar deeds. Admiration is the condition of 
 all that is highest and best in human Hfe. 
 
 We need to consider now for a moment the 
 hopeful fact that there are more worshippers, 
 and more worshippers of God, than we are 
 commonly apt to imagine, particularly if we 
 
NATURAL BEAUTY I35 
 
 limit our conception of God and our conception 
 of worship to the creeds and customs of our own 
 churches. Let us see, then, who are the real 
 worshippers of the world. 
 
 They are those, as we have already said, who 
 admire ; and, if they admire anything that is 
 noble, they are of necessity worshippers of God, 
 whether they think it themselves or not ; for 
 God is the one and only source of all that is 
 noble and fair and supreme. Take the wor- 
 shippers of natural beauty, for example, — 
 Wordsworth, or even Byron. We are not 
 accustomed to think of the latter as having a 
 religious nature; but some of the finest bursts 
 of admiration for. the beauty of the world to 
 be found in the poetry of England are in his 
 works. Any one who admires natural beauty, 
 who is touched by a flower, whose tears start 
 when he listens to the music of the wind in the 
 trees, who is awed and thrilled by the stars in 
 the night heavens, who is uplifted in the presence 
 of mountains, who is stirred by the music of the 
 waves upon the seashore, any man who thus loves 
 and admires natural beauty is a worshipper of 
 God ; for that, as far as it goes, is an expression 
 of the thought and the life and the beauty of 
 God. 
 
 I Then, if you are a worshipper of artistic 
 beauty, — pictures, sculpture ; if you are touched 
 
136 WORSHIP 
 
 and thrilled by music, — you are worshippers to 
 this extent ; for these, again, are, so far as they 
 go, manifestations of that which is divine ^ 
 
 Suppose you are a worshipper of truth. This 
 worship of truth is one of the most modem of 
 all characteristics, — care for truth, truth as such, 
 truth wherever it leads, belief in truth as from 
 God, as supremely from him, and only from him. 
 This is a very modem characteristic. So I love 
 to believe that Huxley, though not a worshipper 
 of God in the popular sense, though he would 
 not say really that he believed in God, counting 
 himself an agnostic, was one of the devoutest of 
 the modern worshippers of God ; for there has 
 never lived a man with a supremer care for truth, 
 as he, according to his methods, was able to 
 discern and demonstrate it. He cared so much 
 for truth that in the presence of death itself he 
 would not allow himself to be comforted with 
 any consolation for which he could not bring 
 the defence of his reason, as he was accustomed 
 to use it. He said : ' I may not have comfort,' 
 — of course I am only quoting the idea, — * I 
 may walk in darkness, I may go out into the 
 unknown, not knowing whither I go. I may 
 not feel at all certain that God is guiding me 
 or that he cares for me. But I will be true to 
 myself : I will not lie.' He was grandly true, 
 then, to what he regarded as the tmth. And, 
 
DEVOUT WORSHIPPERS I37 
 
 since God is truth, and truth is one great 
 manifestation of God, he was nobly faithful to 
 so much as he could see of God. So far as he 
 went, therefore, Huxley was a devout worshipper 
 of God. 
 
 Take an illustration in another direction, — 
 Charles Sumner. We all grant that he was 
 one of the noblest men that ever lived. When 
 some one asked him about the two command- 
 ments of love to God and love to men, he frankly 
 said : ' I am not sure that I know anything 
 about the first ; but I have tried to keep the 
 second.* 
 
 These, then, who are devoted to the service 
 of man, who care for human welfare, human 
 progress, human advance, who try to lift off 
 human burdens, break human bonds and set the 
 world free, — these men, whatever their theolo- 
 gical ideas, are worshippers of God.^ 
 
 So we may say of those who nave had a 
 supreme care for righteousness, that the world 
 should be right at any cost, though the heavens 
 might fall, — these men, whatever their theological 
 ideas, have been worshippers of God. It is said 
 that Wilberforce, who was the master leader in 
 the aboHtion of slavery in the English colonies, 
 was so absorbed in his work that, when some 
 zealous religionist asked him one day if his soul 
 was saved, he said he had been so interested in 
 
138 WORSHIP 
 
 carrying on this great life-work of benefiting the 
 world that he had not stopped to find out whether 
 he had a soul. Truly, a man like that was a 
 worshipper of God. 
 
 And so in every nation, in all ages, under 
 every sky, men have worshipped beauty or truth 
 or the ideals of human service, of human good- 
 ness ; and loving thus the high and fine things 
 which are the manifestations of God, they are 
 then worshippers. And whether they are in the 
 woods with Bryant, who says that the woods 
 were God's first temples ; whether they are in 
 some pagan temple and have never heard of our 
 religion ; whether they are in Rome in St. 
 Peter's ; whether they are in a Quaker meeting- 
 house, where the form of worship is so simple 
 that often it consists of sitting and waiting for 
 the moving of the Spirit, — wherever they are, if 
 they admire whatever is lovely, true, and noble, 
 and are lifted and moved by a desire to help on 
 and benefit the world, — these are the true wor- 
 shippers of him who is Spirit, and who desires 
 to be worshipped in spirit and in truth, j 
 
 But, while they who admire beauty or truth, 
 they who are awed by mystery or lifted by 
 music, they who admire heroic deeds or con- 
 secrate themselves to human service, — ^while 
 these are true worshippers of God, and far above 
 those who are punctihous in ceremonial while 
 
THE INNER HOLY OF HOLIES I39 
 
 lacking the love which is the great essential, 
 there is one thing which is better yet. These 
 admirers of the external manifestations of the 
 Divine may be only in the outer courts of the 
 temple. There is an inner holy of holies, into 
 which the great spiritual leaders of the race have 
 shown a way. Blessed are they who find the 
 door, and are admitted to the presence chamber 
 of the king, — better yet, who are folded close to 
 the loving heart of the Father, 
 
VII 
 PRAYER 
 
 The change in thought and theory which is 
 compelled by the moral and intellectual 
 advancement of the world finds one of its best 
 illustrations in the matter of prayer. In the 
 childhood of the race, prayer was the most 
 natural and simple thing in the world. There 
 were in the thought of the people many gods 
 with different dispositions and different degrees 
 of power ; but, so far as they were able to 
 accomplish the things which their worshippers 
 desired, prayer to them for these things was 
 common and unquestioned. 
 
 They were looked upon — these invisible 
 potentates — very much as were the visible 
 chiefs and kings. They could not do every- 
 thing, and opposing chiefs and kings might 
 stand in the way of the things they really desired 
 to do ; but they could be approached, they 
 could be petitioned. If you brought an accept- 
 able gift in your hand, if you happened to find 
 the tribal god in a favourable mood of mind, if 
 you could approach him tlirough some favourite, 
 
APPROACHING GOD T4I 
 
 some mediator who had always access to him, 
 if you could come in the right way and at the 
 right time, it was the most natural thing in the 
 world that your petitions should be answered, 
 and the gifts you desired bestowed upon you. 
 
 And when, in the course of human civilization, 
 the most advanced races came to be believers 
 in only one God, the conditions were not very 
 much changed. God was a being not very far 
 away, sitting on a throne surrounded by a court, 
 attended by a retinue of angels ready to go on 
 any mission on which he might choose to send 
 them ; and it was very easy to ask him for 
 whatever you might desire. 
 
 But here again, as in the case of the old-time 
 polytheists, you could not always be sure of 
 having your petition heard or of having your 
 request granted. You must come to God in 
 the definitely appointed way. You must bring 
 an acceptable gift ; for this idea was not out- 
 grown in the old Hebrew days when the prophets 
 told the people that their prayers were not 
 answered because they had not brought the 
 tithes into the storehouse. There were ways of 
 appealing to him that were more likely to succeed 
 than others. You must approach him in a 
 definite frame of mind. You must have faith. 
 You must be earnest enough. You must con- 
 tinue tireless in your petition. You must come 
 
142 PRAYER 
 
 by way of some mediator, — some favourite who 
 was supposed to have the ear of God at all times. 
 If you did this, you might expect an answer to 
 your prayer. And if, as was too frequently the 
 case, the prayers were not answered in the way 
 in which the petitioner desired, it was easy 
 enough to find for it a reason without discrediting 
 the efficacy of prayer itself. 
 
 There was not a great deal of change in the 
 theories of men in regard to this matter from 
 the old days of polytheism, even after the belief 
 in one God came to be the practically universal 
 one among civilized nations. Among our own 
 ancestors here in this country, within two 
 hundred — may we not say within one hundred — 
 years, practically the same ideas prevailed. 
 God could be petitioned for rain with the ex- 
 pectation that the rain would come. We could 
 ask him to give us prosperous seasons, — that the 
 crops in the fields might grow, that they might 
 come to their harvest. If a friend was going 
 to sea, it was believed that prayer would have 
 some definite effect upon his safety as he went 
 in his ship down into the great waters. If a 
 friend started off on a land journey, prayer in 
 some mysterious way might touch the question 
 of his safety there. If a friend was sick, prayer 
 was believed to have power to cure disease ; 
 or, at any rate, prayer could touch the one 
 
IGNORANCE OF NATURAL LAW I43 
 
 Power who held in his hand all the issues of life. 
 And if we prayed in the right way, with the 
 right spirit, and persistently enough, it was 
 supposed that almost anything might be 
 accomplished. 
 
 And why not ? The universe for hundreds 
 of years after Christianity began its career of 
 conquest over the civilized world was a very 
 small affair. Up to within four hundred years 
 it was no larger than what we think of our solar 
 system as being to-day. It was only a little 
 way above the blue that the heavenly court was 
 situated. And there was no reason, that the 
 people were acquainted with, why God, at the 
 request of one of his children, should not make 
 almost anything come to pass that might be 
 desired. 
 
 God was outside the universe and stood in 
 such a relation to it as that in which a king stands 
 to his kingdom. He could issue an edict, and 
 have his will carried out. There was no popular 
 knowledge of nature and natural law that made 
 this seem difficult or unreasonable. This was 
 the condition of things, practically, till within 
 a hundred years. 
 
 It is true that the old Ptolemaic system passed 
 away, and the Copernican slowly took its place 
 in the thoughts and imaginations of men ; and 
 it is true that the priests of the Catholic Church, 
 
144 PRAYER 
 
 and the ministers in the Protestant, began to be 
 troubled by the beginnings of scientific thought. 
 When Kepler discovered the laws of planetary 
 motion, when Newton discovered the laws of 
 gravit}?', there were those who raised the alarm 
 and said that these scientific men were taking 
 the world out of the hands of God and putting 
 it into the keeping of a law. They had the 
 feeling that somehow or other barriers were 
 being raised between them and their heavenly 
 Father, and that henceforth communication and 
 the answer to prayer might be more difficult 
 than it had previously been. But until within 
 comparatively recent years, any and all difficul- 
 ties of this sort were very few and troubled not 
 many minds. 
 
 But two great things have happened within 
 a hundred years. The world has waked up to 
 such moral and spiritual and humane thoughts 
 about God as have not previously prevailed ; and 
 then a new scientific revolution in our thought 
 about the universe has taken place. These two 
 things have raised a host of difficulties in the 
 popular mind concerning the possible efficacy- 
 of prayer. 
 
 Let us first deal with the moral difficulties for 
 a moment. Perhaps I shall be speaking for 
 others if I speak of experiences I have passed 
 through myself. The first difficulties I ever had 
 
DIFFICULTIES 1 45 
 
 with prayer were not scientific ones. I began to 
 raise questions like this. I said, * What is the 
 use of my elaborately telling God a thousand 
 things which he knows better than I do ? ' 
 That was one difficulty. Then I said : * God is 
 at least as good as the best men that we know. 
 He must be infinitely good if he is God. Why, 
 then, should I plead with him, beg of him to be 
 good, try to persuade him to be kind to me, to 
 give me the things that I need ? ' This difficulty 
 became almost insurmountable to me. 
 
 And then as I looked over the world and 
 thought of praying for the world's salvation, I 
 was taught, on the one hand, that the number 
 of those who were going to be saved was definitely 
 fixed before the foundation of the world ; and I 
 wondered, if that were true, how my prayer was 
 going to affect the matter any. On the other 
 hand, I was told that all men were perfectly free 
 to accept the salvation if they would. I was 
 told that this freedom of the will was such that 
 a man might defy the Omnipotent if he chose, 
 for ever. So I said to myself, ' If he can and if 
 he chooses to, and if God even cannot move him, 
 why should I pray to God to move him ? * 
 
 Difficulties like these were the ones that pressed 
 upon me first and most heavily. I began to feel 
 that the kind of prayer-meeting in which I had 
 been trained as a young man presented more 
 
146 PRAYER 
 
 difficulties to the religious life than it did help. 
 I used to go as a boy to one of these meetings, 
 and have it proved to me conclusively from 
 Scripture that thousands and millions of souls 
 were going every year to perdition because people 
 in small country towns here in America — on 
 another continent — did not pray to God hard 
 enough to save them. It seemed unjust to me 
 that salvation should hang on such a condition. 
 
 I used to hear a man in the prayer-meeting, 
 when I was young, say over and over again in his 
 prayers, ' It is time for thee, O Lord, to work.* — 
 the impression being made in my youthful mind 
 that if God could only be roused and got to be 
 interested in it as we were, something might be 
 accomplished. I came to feel that those prayer- 
 meetings bordered closely on irreverence instead 
 of piety, and that this besieging God, begging 
 him to be good, begging him to save the souls 
 of his own children, was not the highest kind of 
 trust and piety. That kind of prayer, that way 
 of looking at prayer, troubled me ; and I confess 
 I have never been able to see a solution of that 
 difficulty except the beUef that God, the perfect, 
 loving, tender, true Father, will do somehow, 
 somewhen, somewhere, all that is best and 
 noblest for all his children. 
 
 Then there sprung up no end of scientific 
 difficulties. We have come to hold a new 
 
Law An£) order in nature 147 
 
 conception of the universe. We have found that 
 nature is a* perfect order, that everything works 
 in accordance with — so far as we can see — 
 unchanging law. 
 
 And so the rehgious world has been perplexed 
 by the difficulties that spring out of this great 
 discovery. There is no question as to the fact, 
 it seems to me, any longer. The greatest 
 scientific minds of the world tell us that they find 
 no tiniest corner of this infinite universe where 
 there is chaos or disorder. Everything is working 
 in accordance with unchanging methods which 
 we call laws. 
 
 Now, then, let us face this fact for a moment. 
 Do not be troubled by the negative side. Wait 
 till I get through with it. Let us face this fact 
 for a moment, and see where we are. Suppose 
 I pray for rain. Do I appreciate what it means ? 
 To add to or take away from the atmospheric 
 condition overhanging the city of New York 
 to-day by one tiniest particle of moisture would 
 be as much a miracle as though I expected by a 
 prayer to hurl the Catskills into the middle of 
 the Atlantic Ocean. A chain of cause and effect 
 runs back to the very beginning of time and on 
 to the very end ; and these atmospheric condi- 
 tions are links in that chain. 
 
 Suppose I ask God to guard the safety of a 
 friend who is in mid-Atlantic on an ocean 
 
148 PRAYER 
 
 steamer. Is there any conceivable relation — 
 I ask you to think carefully — between a verbal 
 request of that sort and the weather on the 
 Atlantic, or the condition of the ship, the way 
 in which it was built, the competence of the 
 commander, the order of the crew, the conditions 
 on which safety depends ? Would my prayer 
 move an iceberg out of its course or change 
 the sailing of the ship ? Do we to-day, any 
 of us, conceive a possible causal relation of 
 that sort ? 
 
 ";; Suppose that I should, being a farmer, wish 
 my potatoes or wheat to grow. Now what is 
 it that makes potatoes and wheat grow ? In 
 the first place, good seed ; next, good soil, 
 fertilisers, a proper quantity of rain, sunshine, — 
 all these conditions. Is there any conceivable 
 relation between a prayer and a change of these 
 physical conditions of earth and air ? Do we 
 not, all of us, feel that we cannot find anywhere 
 in these a place to put a petition as a causative 
 force ? 
 
 So in any department of nature — it makes 
 no difference where we turn — are we not con- 
 fronted by similar facts ? Suppose a friend 
 has started across the continent on a railway 
 train ; and somewhere there is a bridge which 
 the engineer did not build as he ought to have 
 done. He put in poor material, or some of the 
 
SCnCNCE AND MIRACLE I49 
 
 timbers have decayed since the bridge was built. 
 It has not been properly inspected. The desire of 
 the corporation to make as much money as 
 possible has kept it from making needed repairs. 
 Now is there any relation between my prayer and 
 a rotten timber or a cracked bit of steel or iron ? 
 So in case of illness. My friend is sick. I stand 
 by his bedside, and see him suffer. Perhaps the 
 last few moments have come ; and I watch the 
 lessening breath, and my heart cries out for help. 
 I would give my life if he might live ; but are 
 not these physical bodies of ours under the 
 inexorable law of cause and effect, exactly like 
 railway bridges, ocean steamers, and crops of 
 wheat ? Is there any relation between the 
 utterance of my wish and the course of the 
 disease ? 
 
 These will do as hints of the difficulties that 
 confront us on account of our new conception of 
 the scientific order of the world. But so long 
 as God was conceived of as being outside the 
 universe, as one who had made it as a man makes 
 a machine, it was easy to say a miracle might be 
 wrought. God could increase the speed with 
 which the machine should run, presumably, 
 or he might slow it up, or he could break through 
 and cause these forces that are at work to 
 accomplish results that they would not but for 
 his interference. This is the old theory of 
 
150 PRAYER 
 
 miracle, which was beheved in and defended for 
 generations. 
 
 They said, ' This is God's universe ; and, 
 suppose it is a great mechanism, cannot He 
 interfere with it, and make it do things that 
 otherwise would not have been done ? ' Presum- 
 ably, he might do it ; and yet there always 
 remained the great question of fact. As we 
 studied and observed, was there any reason to 
 suppose that he did do it ? Had any one seen 
 cases in which it had been done ? And so the 
 human heart with its wishes and hopes, was 
 thrown back upon itself, and people began to 
 feel that they were shut away from the Father in 
 heaven, could not any longer approach him and 
 receive his help and care. 
 
 But now we are gaining a new thought about 
 the universe and about God's relation to it. 
 The best thinkers of the modern world no longer 
 conceive of God as outside the universe, which 
 is a mechanism which he has made and set 
 going, and with which presumably he might 
 interfere if he chose. We have come rather to 
 regard it as an organism, as alive from centre 
 to circumference, and God as its life. And so 
 this order, that we call changeless law, is only 
 the method of working of the God who is ' the 
 same yesterday, to-day, and lor ever, with whom 
 is no variableness^ neither shadow of turning ' ; 
 
NATURAL FORCES AND LAWS 15I 
 
 and we trust him, and we love him, and we are 
 able to live hopefully and successfully because 
 there is no change, no shadow of turning with 
 him. 
 
 Suppose, for a moment, that this order were 
 liable to be interfered with. Do you not see, 
 will you not look into it far enough to observe, 
 that it would turn the whole world into a mad- 
 house ? We should not be able to count on 
 anything. Suppose water did freeze to-day at 
 32 degrees Fahrenheit, how could we know it 
 would freeze at the same temperature to- 
 morrow, — God being liable to interfere ? The 
 only way by which we can learn anything, and 
 lay out plans for the future, and live our lives 
 in peace and trust and hope, is because we rest 
 for ever on the certainty that God does not 
 change. 
 
 Now all these movements and methods around 
 us which we call natural forces and natural laws, 
 are only the present life and activity of God, 
 our Father, not alone in heaven, but here upon 
 earth. This is the modern conception of the 
 relation in which God stands to the universe. 
 
 But this only intensifies our difficulty in one 
 way. We cannot conceive of God as undoing 
 with one hand what he is all the time doing 
 with the other. For the world-order is God's 
 method, not a machine that he has made and 
 
152 PRAYER 
 
 put away from himself. It is God, right here 
 in eternal activity ; and it is changeless — why ? 
 Because the first time — if we could conceive a 
 first time that God did anything — he would do 
 the right thing ; and with precisely the same 
 conditions he could not do a different, that is, 
 a wrong thing. Changelessness is an inevitable 
 inference from the wisdom and goodness of God. 
 
 But now let us take a view of the whole matter 
 that goes deeper than we have hitherto been ; 
 and, if you will follow me, I think we may find 
 that all our difficulties in regard to prayer fade 
 away, being due to partial conceptions of God's 
 truth and his methods of working. 
 
 Let us take an illustration as a hint of the 
 great truth that I wish to make clear, if I can. 
 Suppose my father had built me a wonderful 
 house, and then he had hidden himself, — you 
 may suppose that he might be in some room 
 of the house inaccessible to me, or somewhere 
 else. He has built me a wonderful house, and 
 has so arranged it that, as I make my home in 
 it, I can touch an electric button, and straight- 
 way food, whatever I may desire, is furnished 
 to me. I touch another electric button, and I 
 have drink of any kind I may wish. I touch 
 another, and clothing is furnished me. I touch 
 still a fourth, and I have books. I touch another 
 and music delights my ear. I touch another, 
 
THE ESSENCE OF PRAYER I53 
 
 and beautiful pictures are unfolded before me. 
 So, whatever I desire I have, by complying with 
 this pre-established and changeless order, this 
 condition of things. 
 
 Now, though my father is not visible, and 
 though I gain all I wish only by means of this 
 pre-established order, is my father any the less 
 the one who gives them to me ? And do I get 
 them in any other way than by asking for them 
 by prayer ? Do you not see ? We all pray as 
 much as did primitive man. Every man alive 
 prays every day of the year and every hour of 
 every day that he is conscious. He cannot 
 escape praying if he would ; for what is the 
 essence of prayer ? If I wish a thing, I am pray- 
 ing. If I aspire towards something higher and 
 better and hope for it ; if I reach out my hand 
 to grasp what I want, — I pray for that thing, no 
 matter how long continued my search, whatever 
 methods I may use. Anything that I strive to 
 attain I pray for, and I pray to God for it ; for 
 God is the one centre and source of all the riches 
 that this universe contains of every kind, and I 
 am his child. So, no matter through what 
 means or by what methods, it is prayer in 
 essence just the same ; only, when I am 
 dealing with this lower order that I call the 
 material, I must comply with the conditions 
 that control that order. 
 
154 PRAYER 
 
 If I wish my potatoes to grow, God has 
 ordained this universe in such a way that I must 
 comply with his conditions for having them 
 grow ; and those conditions are not a verbal 
 request, — that is all. But, in raising my crop 
 of potatoes, I am dealing first-hand with God 
 just as really as when I am on my knees and en- 
 gaged in what is technically called ' prayer.' We 
 must redeem our thought of this universe from secu- 
 larism, and realize that it is sacred all through, 
 from zenith to nadir, — sacred all through. 
 
 Suppose I wish to cross the Atlantic by a ship. 
 Oh, how we petty, puny human beings do boast 
 about our power over nature ! What power 
 over nature do we possess ? We talk about 
 wielding the lightnings, compelling the winds 
 to be our servants. What do we do when we 
 wish to cross the Atlantic ? We construct a 
 ship as nearly as we can, after ages of the most 
 careful experience, in conformity with the laws 
 that control the movement of a ship at sea ; and 
 just in so far as we are able to study those laws 
 carefully and comprehend them and obey them, 
 just in so far God's forces work for us, God's winds 
 blow us from port to port. We do not control 
 the winds ; we obey the winds, which are God's 
 present power in action. 
 
 So, if it be a steamship ; we have studied for 
 a century to comprehend in some small degree 
 
THE LAWS OF GOD 155 
 
 the laws that control the contraction and 
 expansion of steam, and we have adapted our 
 machinery to this force ; and by as much as 
 we have comprehended, and by as much as we 
 humbly and reverently obey, by so much God 
 in the steam propels our engines and drives our 
 ship in the face of wind and tide from port to 
 port. It is God doing it all the time ; and our 
 adapting ourselves to the laws of God, humbly 
 and reverently and patiently and persistently 
 asking God to do it, — that is prayer in the realm 
 where steam rules or where the winds control. 
 
 Suppose we wish to build a factory by some 
 mountain stream. Do we compel the water 
 to serve us ? What do we do ? We study the 
 power of the water ; and after years of experience 
 we have learned that the man's mill will be the 
 most successful one that is built most perfectly 
 to accord with the force of the water as it runs 
 from a higher level to a lower. So, if we ask God 
 aright, if we comply with the changeless, eternal 
 conditions, he does it ; if not, he does not 
 doit. 
 
 So in every department of human life ; we 
 may call it ever so material, we stand face to 
 face with the eternal God of this universe ; and 
 he turns every wheel for us, he does all the 
 things that we boastfully speak of as our 
 f^ccomplishnient?, We talk of electricity anci 
 
156 PRAYER 
 
 of illuminating our streets. We illuminate our 
 streets if we obey God absolutely. If there is 
 a flaw in that obedience, suddenly we are plunged 
 in darkness ; and the light does not come again 
 until we have found the mistake and remedied 
 it, — obeyed God in that department of his 
 working. So everywhere the one eternal fact of 
 prayer faces us, and rules us in every department 
 of human life, in every department of human 
 activity and achievement. 
 
 Every invention is a prayer, every discovery 
 is a prayer, every achievement of every kind is 
 a prayer. We send our trains across the plains, 
 our ships across the sea. Our machinery hums 
 under the influence of water or steam or electric 
 power. Our streets are illuminated. All these 
 things are accomplished in answer to prayer, — 
 prayer to the universal God, according to the 
 changeless method of that department of his 
 universe in which we wish our result. 
 
 Is prayer, then, something likely to be out- 
 grown ? Rather, as we come to appreciate it, 
 do we find that we are unconsciously obeying 
 the apostolic command, * Pray without ceasing ' ; 
 and by as much as we pray, and pray wisely, do 
 we succeed in every department of human life. 
 
 But now, to go a step higher. We have 
 found that tliis is prayer in the material ranges 
 of the universe ; but we wish moral and spiritual 
 
THE NECESSITY OF NATURAL LAW I57 
 
 advantages. How shall we prosper here ? If 
 we wish to develop ourselves as moral beings, 
 to transform ourselves until we become made 
 over into the likeness of that which is noble and 
 true and high and holy, we must obey here also 
 the inexorable laws. It will not do simply to ask 
 God to make us good, and make no effort ourselves 
 in that direction. If we wish to become good, 
 we study the great characters of the world ; and 
 we must be strenuous in our efforts to overcome 
 temptation, to climb ever from higher heights to 
 higher heights of moral and spiritual achievement. 
 Simply words, asking God are of no avail. 
 
 And here let me say, in general, that if we 
 could accomplish results we desire merely by 
 the shaping of breath into words, it would result 
 in the demoralization of the world. It would 
 be a premium on laziness and incapacity. 
 
 Suppose a farmer should say : * I will not 
 cultivate my crops ; I will lean comfortably over 
 the fence, and ask God to do it.* Suppose an 
 engineer should not take pains to build his bridge 
 properly, trusting the train would pass over it in 
 safety, because the friends of some of the passen- 
 gers were praying. Suppose we should not send 
 proper officers to command our ships, or driU 
 properly the men who have charge of them at 
 sea, and trust to prayer to avert the inevitable 
 catastrophe that would result. Do you not see 
 
158 PRAVER 
 
 how this idea of prayer is shallow, and does not 
 reach the heart of the difficulty ? 
 
 When we come up into the higher ranges of 
 thought and life, to our spiritual relationship to 
 God, do we change him there any more than we 
 affect that result in what we call the material 
 ranges of the universe ? Is God changeable up 
 here, who is the changeless One in the lower 
 realms of life ? I do not believe it. When I 
 pray to God, I do not expect to change him. 
 If I thought I could change him, I would never 
 dare to open my lips in petition. It is because 
 I know I cannot change him that I pray, and 
 pray with my whole heart and soul, — pray 
 trustingly, lovingly, confidently, that grand 
 things may result ; and why ? 
 
 Let me use another illustration, possibly 
 throwing some light upon this matter. I have 
 a plant that does not grow. The leaves are 
 fading and dropping off. Something is the 
 matter with it. What shall I do ? It occurs to 
 me that, perhaps, if I take it outdoors, give it 
 better air, let it be where the winds can blow 
 upon it, Adhere the rains will refresh it, where 
 the sun will shine upon it, it will take a new 
 lease of life. I do that ; and the result is that, 
 as a consequence of my effort, the plant does 
 live and grow. 
 
 Have I changed — what ? Have I changed 
 
CHANGE OF RELATION TO GOD l^q 
 
 the sun any, the rain or the dew ? No. I have 
 simply changed the relation between my plant 
 and these forces that have in them the power of 
 life. I have accomplished my purpose, however, 
 just the same. 
 
 So I believe that, when I pray to God, when 
 I come into this spiritual sympathy with him, 
 this personal attitude towards him, I change 
 the relation between my soul and God. I do 
 not change him ; but I get a result in answer to 
 my prayer that is just as effective as though I 
 changed him, — more effective. I change my 
 relation to God, and the drooping life in me 
 revives ; and I have new power, new joy, a new 
 sense of peace in his presence. 
 
 So it seems to me that from the lowest order 
 of nature clear up to the very presence-chamber 
 of the invisible One the same law holds. God 
 does not change ; but my prayer — prayer of one 
 kind on one level of life, of another kind on 
 another level — complies with the inevitable and 
 eternal conditions of life and peace. And so I 
 gain the answer to my lifelong desire. 
 
 Even the prayers that have been most common 
 in the past, defective as they have been, have 
 not been all astray. That which I have been 
 dealing with, as you will recognize, has mostly 
 been one element only of prayer : begging, asking 
 for things. But the better part of prayer is not 
 
t6o prayer 
 
 begging ; it is thanksgiving, it is aspiration, it 
 is trust, it is communion. I come into the 
 presence of a friend. I sit and talk ; we exchange 
 ideas ; this is sympathy, the touch of the hand, 
 and both of us are refreshed and hfted up ; but 
 we have not either of us begged anything from 
 the other, and we have not either of us expected 
 the other to change or to become something 
 different from what he was before. 
 
 Here, then, in trust and communion, in 
 gratitude, are the great secret places of prayer. 
 And these remain, as they always have been, 
 sources of strength and consolation beyond the 
 power of words to express. A child wakes up 
 in the night, looks up, perhaps, from some bad 
 dream, and finds mother bending over the cradle. 
 He does not ask for anything ; he does not need 
 anything except the consciousness that she is 
 there. 
 
 How many times, when a person has been 
 going through some dangerous surgical operation, 
 has he found power simply by clasping the hand 
 of a friend ! The pain was not abated, the 
 danger of the operation remained just what it 
 was before ; but there came an increment of 
 strength, a feeling of peace, because of the 
 presence of love and S5anpathy. 
 
 It is the sense of the presence of some one you 
 love which you care for. So I believe that right 
 
GOD THE FATHER l6l 
 
 in here is the grandest, noblest part of prayer^ 
 
 that no scientific difficulties can ever touch. 
 
 God is my Father. I do not want him to 
 
 change. I would not, if I might, ask him to 
 
 take a stumbling-block out of my road. Perhaps 
 
 the stumbling-block ought to be there. Suffering,. 
 
 as I have, so keenly, so intensely, so constantly, 
 
 for two years past, I am not sure that I would 
 
 dare to ask this burden to be removed if I might. 
 
 I should hesitate. Perhaps it is better that it 
 
 should not. 
 
 Suffering of all sorts faces us in this world, — 
 
 loss, death, trouble ; but if we can believe that 
 
 this is God's house, and we are his children living 
 
 in it, and that we are here for a purpose, that we 
 
 can touch his hand or feel that we clasp the edge 
 
 of his robe, even in the dark, and know somehow 
 
 that it is all right, there is the power and the 
 
 potency of the noblest thing we can conceive of 
 
 in prayer. If we can only hear that song of 
 
 Browning's in ' Pippa Passes ' : 
 
 ' God 's in his heaven — 
 All 's right with the world ! ' 
 
 do we need to pray for anything else ? 
 
 To my mind there is something superb in the 
 authentic teaching of Jesus on this subject. He 
 discourages public prayer. He tells us to go 
 into our closet and talk with the Father ; and, if 
 we follow his example, he did not ask for things 
 
l62 PRAYER ( 
 
 much. He shrunk, as we all shrink, from pain. 
 He said : * Father, if it be possible, let this cup 
 pass. Nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou 
 wilt.* He did not ask for a great many things. 
 His prayer was gratitude and trust. So it seems 
 to me that as we get older, as we think more 
 deeply, as we get closer to God, we leave behincb 
 us that old attitude of begging for selfish advan-r* 
 tages. We find that the grandest and sweetest 
 things for ourselves do not come along those 
 <:hannels. Science, in its latest word, is in that 
 utterance of Tennyson, where he says : 
 
 ^ Speak to him thou for he hears ; and spirit with 
 spirit can meet — 
 Closer is he than breathing, and nearer than hanc^" 
 and feet.' 
 
 We can speak to him ; and so I trust mys' 
 to speak to him without caring whether r 
 words are always overwise and carefully select i 
 ■or not. When my little boy, playing on the flo 
 at my feet, at last tired out, climbs up on mv 
 knees and prattles and talks to me, and tells i^ 
 what he wishes, do I care whether he is wise 
 not or whether he asks me for things tha . 
 philosopher would ask for ? I do not want him 
 to be a philosopher. I want him to be my boy. 
 
 And so, if (iod be our Father, I think he 
 would get tired of us if we were always posing as 
 philosophers in his presence. Let us pour out our 
 
LIFE AND PEACE 163 
 
 hearts, and love him and believe he loves us, and 
 learn to trust him, so that we may be patient 
 if the burden does crush us. Only let us get hold 
 of his hand ; then we will bear the pain ; we will 
 walk, if it is ever so dark. We will not trouble. 
 We will wait until the light breaks. Only let us 
 ,;et hold of his hand and feel his touch, which 
 IS life and peace 
 
 • Of THF 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF C 
 
 THE END, 
 
'^ 
 
 BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 
 
 Crown 8vo, 236 pp. price 3/6 net. 
 
 PILLARS OF THE TEMPLE 
 
 BY 
 
 MINOT J. SAVAGE, D.D. 
 
 PRKFACK BT ROBERT COIXYER. 
 
 Coirrunrs : — L The God we worship ; II. The Christ we love ; III. The 
 Heaven we hope for ; IV. The Hell we fear ; V. The Bible we accept ; 
 VI. The Divine Inspiration; VII. The Salvation we believe in; 
 VIII. The Church we belong to. 
 
 Dr. Savage is acknowledged to be one of the foremost preachers of 
 liberal religion in America. In this volume each chapter deals with 
 cardinal points of religious belief from the author's Unitarian point 
 of view. The pillars upon which this temple is reared are stxirdy 
 colimms of rational religious conceptions which concern the 
 development of the higher life. The Rev. Robert Collyer contiibates 
 a brief introduction. 
 
 PHILIP GREEN, 5, ESSEX STREET, STRAND, W.C 
 
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
 
 This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. 
 
 NOV 11 1947 
 
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