CENTRAL CIRCULATION BOOKSTACKS 
 
 The person charging this material is re¬ 
 sponsible for its renewal or its return to 
 the library from which it was borrowed 
 on or before the Latest Date stamped 
 below. You may be charged a minimum 
 fee of $75.00 for each lost book. 
 
 Theft, mutilation, and underlining of books are reasons 
 for disciplinary action and may result in dismissal from 
 the University. 
 
 TO RENEW CALL TELEPHONE CENTER, 333-8400 
 UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LIBRARY AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN 
 
 OCT 0^1997 
 
 When renewing by phone, write new due date below 
 previous due date. L162 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2017 with funding from 
 
 University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Alternates 
 
 https://archive.org/details/biblicalecclesiaOOpark 
 
r 
 
 £Ije biblical, % fcelesiasiital, anb % IJfjHnsopIjital Jfalum of*#ob, 
 anb % SJcaT* formal JBe%|jt in pirn* 
 
 ; 
 
 - '■'* " ’.♦ 
 
 FOUR SERMONS, 
 
 PREACHED IN THE 
 
 |earjg Sleeting of fragressito Jtunfrs, 
 
 # • 
 
 AT 
 
 LONGWOOD, PA., MAY 30th AND 31st, 1858. 
 
 i 
 
 BY 
 
 THEODORE PARKER, 
 
 Minister of the XXVIIIth Congregational Society in Boston. 
 
 N... 
 
 NEW YORK: 
 
 JOHN F. TROW, PRINTER, 377 & 379 BROADWAY, 
 
 OF WHITE STREET. 
 
 1858. 
 
 v 
 
 
Some years ago I spoke to you “ Of the Relation between the Eccle¬ 
 siastical Institutions and the Religious Consciousness of the American 
 People.” I am now here again to speak on great and kindred themes. 
 You have no authoritative Scriptures; your Bible is the Universe, the 
 World of Matter your Old Testament, the World of Man the Mew. In 
 both there are' revelations every day, for that canon is not closed, nor ever 
 will be. With the catholic spirit of Universal Religion one of your Clerks 
 has just read from the Scriptures of the Chinese, the Hindoos, the Persians, 
 the Mohammedans, the Hebrews, and the Christians. There is one Mate¬ 
 rial Mature about us all, one Human Mature in us all, one Divine Mature, 
 one Infinite God above us all, immanent in each, and equally near to the 
 Buddhist and the Christian, equally loving to all. He is no respecter r 
 sects more than of persons. I wish to speak of the notions men have 
 God, and of the effect thereof. So, if your business allow and your patiem 
 will endure so much, I will preach four Sermons: 
 
 I. Of the Peogeessive Development of the Conception of God ij 
 the Books of the Bible. 
 
 II. Of the Ecclesiastical Conception of God, and its Relation i 
 the Scientific and Religious Wants of this Age. 
 
 III. Of the Matueal oe Philosophical Idea of God, and its R 
 
 LATION TO THE SCIENTIFIC AND RELIGIOUS WANTS OF THE AGE. 
 
 IV. Of the Soul’s Moemal Delight in the Infinite God. 
 
 These are all great themes, of interest to mankind—not least, Jx think , 
 to Progressive Friends. 
 

 SERMONS 
 
 SERMON I. 
 
 THE PROGRESSIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE CONCEPTION OF GOD 
 IN THE BOOKS OF THE BIBLE. 
 
 For the Lord thy God is a consuming fire.— Deut. iv. 24. 
 
 God is love.—1 John iv. 16. 
 
 This morning I ask your attention to some Thoughts on the Progressive 
 >evelopment of the Conception of God in the various Books of the Bible. 
 
 6 
 
 J 
 
 In the human race nothing is ever still; the stream of humanity rolls 
 continually forward, change following change; nation succeeds to nation, 
 theology to theology, thought to thought. Taken as a whole, this change 
 s a Progress, an ascent from the lower and ruder to the higher and more 
 comprehensive. Individuals die, special families pass off, nations go under ; 
 rad a whole race, like the American Indians, may perisk, and their very 
 >lood he dried up from the ground; yet still mankind survives, and all the 
 naterial or spiritual good achieved by any race, nation, family, individual, 
 •everts at last to mankind, who not only has eminent domain over the 
 earth, but is likewise heir at history of Moses, of the Heraclides, of Egypt, 
 Uid of the American Indians. So of much that slips out from the decaying 
 land of the individual or the race, nothing is ever lost to humanitymuch 
 is outgrown, nought wasted. The milk-teeth of the baby are as necessary 
 \s the meat-teeth, the biters and grinders of the adult man. Little Ikie 
 Newton had a top and a hoop; spinning and trundling, were as needful to 
 the boy as mathematical rules of calculation to the great and world- 
 renowned Sir Isaac. The Progress of Mankind is continuous and onward, 
 «‘is much subject to a natural law of development as our growth from baby- 
 liood to adult life. 
 
 You see this change and progress in all departments of human activity, 
 in Religion and Theology, as distinct as in spinning and weaving. Theolog¬ 
 ical ideas are instruments for making character, as carpenters’ tools for 
 inaking houses. Take the long sweep of four thousand years that history 
 
 -p 35717 
 
4 
 
 runs over, and the improvement in theological ideas is as remarkable as t® 
 change in carpenters’ tools. You see this progress especially in the Co" 
 ception of God, and in the Worship that is paid to him conformable to th t 
 conception. Here the change is continuous, and the progress is full 
 encouragement for the future. 
 
 What unlikeness in the conceptions of God which Christian men ha 
 to-day! The notion of God set forth in certain churches differs froi' 
 yours and mine more than Moloch differs from Jehovah. Certainly t 
 God which some ministers scare their congregations withal, is to me only 
 a Devil—a Devil who has no existence, and never appears out of the theo-| 
 logical graveyard, where this ghost of buried superstitions “ walks ” fro 
 time to time to frighten men into the momentary panic of a revival. 
 
 The Bible has become the Sacred Book of all Christendom. It is no 
 only valued for its worth, which is certainly very great, but still more fo: 
 its fancied authority—because it is thought to be a Revelation, made dij 
 rectly and miraculously by God, to certain men whom he inspired wit' 
 the doctrine it contains. Now, God must know himself, and that perfect! 
 and if he make a revelation thereof, he must portray himself exactly 
 he is. So it is maintained in all Christendom, that to learn the charact 
 of God, you are not to go to the World of Matter, or to the World of Ma 
 but only to Revelation, which mirrors back to you his exact image a 
 likeness; giving you God, the whole of God, and nothing but God. Aj 
 cordingly, it is said that the conception of God is the same in all parts 
 the Bible, howsoever old or new, without variableness or shadow 
 turning. 
 
 But when you- come to look at the Bible itself, and study it part b^ 
 part, and then put the results of your study into a whole, you find a re 
 markable difference in regard to the character of God himself, that de 
 pends on the ge^ral civilization and enlightenment of the times and th 
 writers; the further you go back, the ruder all things become. Take th 
 whole of Greek Literature, from Homer, eleven hundred years befon 
 Christ, to Anna Comnena, eleven hundred years after him, and there is 
 great change in the poetic representations of God. The same thing hap 
 pens in the books of the Bible. They extend over twelve or thirteen hun 
 dred years; it may be, perhaps, fourteen hundred. Perhaps Genesis is th 
 oldest book, and the Fourth Gospel the newest. What a difference be 
 tween the God in Genesis and that in the Fourth Gospel! Can any thought 
 ful man conceive that these two conflicting and various notions of God 
 could ever have come from the same source ? Let any one of you rea< 
 through the book of Genesis, and then the Fourth Gospel, and you will b 
 astonished at the diversity, nay, the hostility even, between the God ii 
 the old book and the new one. Then, and at some subsequent time, loo! 
 at the various books between the two, and you see what different notion 
 of the Divine Being there are in this “ infallible miraculous revelation 
 God.” 
 
5 
 
 Let us look at this great matter in some details, and to see just what the 
 facts are, and make the whole matter as clear as noonday light, divide the 
 Bible into its three great parts, the Old Testament, the Apocrypha, and 
 the New Testament. In the Old Testament, Genesis may perhaps have 
 been written in its present form, about a thousand years before Christ, 
 though some scholars put it a few hundreds of years nearer our own time; 
 at any rate it seems to have been compiled from ancient documents, some of 
 them, perhaps, existing thirteen or fourteen hundred years before the birth 
 of Christ, though others are clearly later. The book of Daniel, a spurious 
 work, was evidently written between 170 and 160 years before Christ. In 
 the Apocrypha, the book of Ecclesiasticus is, perhaps, the oldest work, 
 and seems to have been written about 180 years before the birth of Jesus. 
 The latest book is the Wisdom of Solomon, of uncertain date. In the New 
 Testament, Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians is the oldest, and was perhaps 
 written 58 or 60 years after Christ; the Fourth Gospel, I think, is the 
 last, and was written, perhaps, 120 or 140 years after Christ. There are 
 seventy books in the canonical and apocryphal Bible. With the exception 
 of fourteen prophets, Ezra, Nehemiali, David and Asaph—the two authors 
 of some thirty or forty, perhaps fifty of the Psalms,—we know the name 
 of no writer of the nine-and-thirty books of the Old Testament. Of the 
 Ajfbcrypha we know the name of the writer of the book of Ecclesiasticus, 
 of him no more; of others not even that. In the New Testament it seems 
 clear that Paul wrote the Epistle to the Galatians, that to the Romans, the 
 two to the Corinthians; but I doubt if we are certain who wrote any other 
 of its twenty-seven books! Here, then, out of seventy biblical books, con¬ 
 taining the writings of more than one hundred authors, we know the 
 names of fourteen Hebrew Prophets, two Psalmists, two other writers in 
 the Old Testament, one in the Apocrypha, one in the New Testament— 
 twenty men! This fact that we know so little of the authorship of the 
 biblical books is fatal to their authority as a standard of faith, but it does 
 not in the smallest degree affect their value as religious documents, or as 
 signs of the times when they were written. I don’t care who made the 
 vane on the steeple, if it tell which way the wind blows—that is all I 
 want: I don’t know who reared these handsome flowers; it matters not; 
 their beauty and fragrance tell their own story. We know the time the 
 documents came from, and they are monuments of the various ages, 
 though we know not who made or put them together. 
 
 Now look at the conception of God in the first and last of these 
 three divisions. Of course, in the brevity of a morning’s sermon I can only 
 select the most remarkable and characteristic things. I shall begin with 
 the oldest part of the Old Testament, and end with the latest part of the 
 New. 
 
 I. At first, it seems, the Hebrews believed in many gods, and no effort 
 of the wisest and best men could keep the nation from falling back to idol¬ 
 atry for centuries. It was not until after the Babylonian Captivity, which 
 
6 
 
 began in 586 B. 0., and ended about eighty years later, that the Israelite p 
 renounced their idolatry; then contact with monotheistic and civilize 1 
 people corrected this vice. , 
 
 At first, in the Bible, Jehovah appears as one God amongst others, an j 
 seems to have his council of gods about him. Next he is the special Go ' 
 of the descendants of Jacob, and called the God of Israel. By and by h e 
 is represented as stronger than any of the other gods; he can beat them ? \ 
 battle, though sometimes he gets worsted. Finally he is the only God, 
 and has regard for all nations, though he still takes special care of the 
 Hebrews, who are his chosen people. The book of Job, I think, is the 
 only one in the Old Testament which makes it appear that God cares 
 for all men alike, and this seems to be the only book in the Old Testa¬ 
 ment which was not written by a Jew. I think it is one of the latest 
 books in that collection. 
 
 Now see what character is ascribed to God in the earliest documents 
 of the Bible. The first five books of Moses are the oldest; they contain 
 the most rude and unspiritual ideas of God. He is represented as a very 
 limited and imperfect being. He makes the world in six days, part by part, 
 one thing at a time, as a mechanic does his work. He makes man out of 
 dust, in “ his own image and likeness,” breathes into him, and he becomes 
 a living soul. God looks on the world, when he has finished it, and ijs 
 pleased with his work, “ and behold it was very good.” But he is tired 
 with his week’s work, rests on the seventh day, and “was refreshed.” Thje 
 next week he looks at his work, to see how it goes on, and he finds that 
 he must mend it a little. All animals rejoice in their mates, but thought¬ 
 ful Adam wanders lone ; he must have his Eve. So God puts him into a 
 deep sleep, takes one of his ribs, makes a woman of it, and the next morn ¬ 
 ing there is a help meet for him. But the new man and woman behav e 
 rather badly. God comes down and walks in the garden in the cool of the 
 day, calls Adam and Eve, inquires into their behavior, chides them for theiir 
 misconduct, and, in consequence of their wrong deed, he is very angry with 
 all things, and curses the serpent, curses Eve, curses Adam, and even th e 
 ground. The man and woman have tasted of the Tree of Knowledge, an d 
 he turns them out of the garden of Eden lest they should also eat of th e 
 Tree of Life, and thereby live forever. By and by God repents that 1 le 
 made man, and “it grieved him at his heart,” they behave so badly; so 
 in his wrath he sweeps off all mankind, except eight persons; but aftt3r 
 the flood is over, Noah offers a burnt offering, and God smells the swet 3t 
 savor and is pacified, and says he will not again curse the ground; ar id 
 he will never destroy the human race a second time. 
 
 To know what happens, he must go from place to place : thus he unde - r- 
 stands that the people are building a tower, and comes near enough to loo k 
 at it, and, not liking the undertaking, he says, “ Go to jaow, let us go doV 'n 
 and confound their language, that they may not understand one anothei ’s 
 speech he scatters them abroad, and they cannot build the tower, whi( h 
 was to reach up to heaven. Afterwards he hears bad news from Sodo tn 
 
< 
 
 and Gomorrah, that “ their sin is grievous.” He does not quite credit the 
 tidings, and says, “ I will go down now, and see whether they have done 
 altogether according to the cry of it, which is come unto me, and if not, I 
 will know.” He talks with Abraham, who pleads for sparing the wicked 
 city, heats Abraham in argument, and, “ as soon as he had left communing 
 with Abraham,” “ the Lord went his way.” 
 
 God appears to men visibly—to Adam, Noah, Abraham, Jacob, and to 
 Moses. He talks with all those persons in the most familiar way, in the 
 Hebrew tongue: “ The Lord talked to Moses face to face, as a man speak- 
 eth with his brother.” He makes a bargain with Abraham, then with 
 Jacob and his children. It is solemnly ratified, for good and sufficient 
 consideration on both sides. It is for value received: God conveys a great 
 quantity of land to Abraham and his posterity, and guarantees the title; 
 they are to circumcise all their male children eight days after birth ; that 
 is the jocular tenure by which they hold Palestine. God swears that he 
 will keep his covenant, and though sometimes sorely tempted to break it, 
 he yet adheres to the oath : 
 
 “ And though he promise to his loss, 
 
 He makes the promise good.” 
 
 He dines with Abraham, coming in unexpected one day. Abraham 
 kills a calf, “ tender and good.” Sarah makes cakes of fine meal, extem¬ 
 poraneously baked on the hearth. Butter and milk are set forth, and God, 
 with two attendants, makes his dinner ! 
 
 While Moses was travelling from Midian to Egypt, the Lord met him 
 at a tavern, and “ sought to kill him,” but Moses’s wife circumcised her son 
 before God’s eyes—so God let the “bloody husband” go. 
 
 He is partial, hates the heathen,, takes good care of the Jews, not be¬ 
 cause they deserve it, but because he will not break his covenant. He is 
 jealous ; he writes it with his own finger in the ten commandments : “ I, 
 the Lord thy God, am a jealous God;” and again, “ Jehovah , his name is 
 jealous.” He is vain also, and longs for the admiration of the heathen, 
 and is dissuaded by Moses from destroying the Israelites when they had 
 provoked him, lest the Egyptians should hear of it, and his fame should 
 suffer. 
 
 Look at this account of one of God’s transactions in Numb. xiv. “ And 
 the Lord said unto Moses, How long will this people provoke me ? And 
 how long will it be ere they believe me, for all the signs which I have 
 showed among them ? I will smite them with the pestilence, and disin¬ 
 herit them, and will make of thee a greater nation, and mightier than 
 they.” And Moses replied : “ Then the Egyptians shall hear it, and they 
 will tell it to the inhabitants of the landthey will say, “ Because the 
 Lord was not able to bring the people into the land which he sware unto 
 them, therefore he hath slain them in the wilderness“ Pardon, I beseech 
 thee, the iniquity of this people!” So, lest the Gentiles should think him 
 weak, Jehovah lets the Hebrews off for a time, and instead of destroying 
 
8 
 
 millions of men at once, he spreads their ruin over several years. “ In 
 this wilderness they shall be consumed, and there they shall die!” 
 
 He is capricious, revengeful, exceedingly ill-tempered ; he has fierce 
 wrath and cruelty; he is angry even with the Hebrews, and one day says 
 to Moses, “ Take all the heads of the people (that is the leading men, the 
 citizens of eminent gravity), and hang them up before the Lord against the 
 sun.” 
 
 Once God is angry with the people who murmur against Moses, and 
 says to him, “ Get you up from among this congregation, that I may con¬ 
 sume them as in a moment !” Moses is more merciful than his God ; he 
 must appease this Deity, who is “aconsuming fire.” So he tells Aaron, 
 
 “ Take a censer, and put fire therein from off the altar, and put on incense, 
 and go quickly unto the congregation, and make an atonement for them : 
 for there is wrath gone out from the Lord ; the plague is begun !” Aaron 
 does so, and the plague was stayed, though not till the fufy of the Lord 
 had killed fourteen thousand and seven hundred men! (Numb. xvi. 
 41-50). God hates some of the nations with relentless wrath; Abraham 
 interferes, pleading for Sodom and Gomorrah, Moses for the Israelites, but 
 nobody cares for the rest of the people, or burns incense for them, and so 
 God says, “I will utterly put out the remembrance of Amalek from 
 under heaven.” All the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Hivites, the Periz- 
 zites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, and the Jebusites, are to be rooted out— 
 seven nations, each of which was more numerous than the Hebrews: u Thou 
 shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant 
 with them, nor show mercy unto them,” saith the Lord. The Canaanites 
 and Moabites were kindred of the Hebrews, of the same ethnologic tribe, 
 but they could not enter into the congregation of the Lord unto the tenth 
 generation! 
 
 'This God—powerful, terrible, partial, jealous, often ill-tempered, wrath¬ 
 ful, cruel, bloody—is to be worshipped with sacrifice, the blood of bulls 
 and goats, with costly spectacles by the priesthood, who sacrifice to him in a 
 special place, at particular times; and God gives the most minute directions 
 how all this shall be done, hut he is not to be served in any other way, 
 at any other place. 
 
 Such seems to have been the conception of God with the leading minds . 
 of the Hebrews at the beginning of their national existence, or at the 
 later day when the early books were deceitfully compiled. How see how 
 much they outgrew it at a later day. 
 
 The highest Old Testament idea of God you find in the Proverbs and 
 the later Psalms, which were written only four or five hundred years after 
 the promulgation of those extraordinary documents which I have just 
 quoted. In these God is represented as all-wise, and always present every¬ 
 where. You all remember that exquisite Psalm, the cxxxixth, “ Whither 
 shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence?” 
 There God is unchangeable ; his eyes are in every place, beholding the 
 evil and the good; no thought can be withheld from him. What grand 
 and beautiful conceptions of God are there in Psalms ciii., civ., cvii. ! So in 
 
 *4 
 
9 
 
 almost the whole of that admirable collection, which is the prayer-book 
 of Christendom to-day, and will be till some man with greater poetic 
 genius, united with the tenderest piety, such as poets seldom feel, shall 
 come, and, in the language of earth, sing the songs of the Infinite God. 
 
 There is a great change also in the manner of worship. At first it was 
 a mere external act—offering sacrifice, a bull, a goat, a lamb; nay, God 
 commands Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, and the father is about to comply, 
 but the Deity changes his own mind and prevents the killing of the boy. 
 Listen to this from Psalm li.‘, and see what a change there is: ‘‘Have 
 mercy upon me, 0 God, according to thy loving-kindness, according unto 
 the multitude of thy tender mercies, blot out my transgressions. Wash me 
 thoroughly from mine iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin. Create in me 
 a clean heart, 0 God; and renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not 
 away from thy presence; and take not thy Holy Spirit from me. For 
 thou desirest not sacrifice; else would I give it: thou delightest not in 
 burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken and a 
 contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.” 
 
 Look at this from Hosea: “ I desire mercy and not sacrifice, and the 
 knowledge of God more than burnt-offering.” Or this of Micah : “ What 
 doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly and love mercy, and walk 
 humbly with thy God?” What a progress from the early times! But 
 even to the last book of the Old Testament there is the same wrath of 
 God. The world has seen no such cursing as that of the Jews in the name 
 of Jehovah. Take the cixth Psalm, and I will defy the hardest of you to 
 wish worse and crueller things than the author imprecates against his 
 enemies:—“ Set thou a wicked man over him : and let Satan stand at his 
 right hand. When he shall be judged, let him be condemned: and let his 
 prayer become sin. Let his days be few; and let another take his office. 
 Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow. Let his children be 
 continually vagabonds, and beg: let them seek their bread also out of 
 their desolate places. Let the extortioner catch all that he hath; and let 
 the stranger spoil his labor. Let there be none to extend mercy unto him; 
 neither let there be any to favor his fatherless children. Let his posterity 
 be cut off; and in the generation following let their name be blotted, out. 
 Let the iniquity of his fathers be remembered with the Lord; and let not 
 the sin of his mother be blotted out. Let them be before the Lord contin¬ 
 ually, that he may cut off the memory of them from the earth.As 
 
 he clothed himself with cursing like as with a garment, so let it come 
 into his bowels like water, and like oil into his bones,” vs. 6-^.5, 18. I 
 quote these because they are seldom read, while the devout and holy por¬ 
 tions of the Psalms are familiar to all men. In Bibles which have laid on 
 the pulpit for fifty years, and those read in private from generation to gen¬ 
 eration, the best parts are worn out with continuous use, while the evil 
 passages are still fresh and new. 
 
 I think no Old Testament Jew ever got beyond this: “Was not Esau 
 Jacob’s brother ? saith the Lord: yet I loved Jacob and hated Esau,” (Mai. 
 i. 2, 3.) A Psalmist speaks of God as pursuing his enemies with wrath 
 
10 
 
 “like a mighty man that shouteth by reason of wine.” The Lord God of 
 Israel says to his people, “ I myself will fight against you with an out¬ 
 stretched hand, and with a strong arm, even in anger, and in fury, and in 
 great wrath.” “ I have set my face against this city for evil and not for 
 good.” If they do not repent, his “ fury will go forth like fire, and burn 
 that none can quench it;” and “ this house shall become a desolation.” 
 
 Here is a terrible picture of the Hebrew God, sketched by the hand of 
 a great master some time after the Babylonian Captivity. There had been 
 a great battle between the Edomites and Hebrews; God comes back as a 
 conqueror, the people see him, and the following dialogue takes place: 
 
 People: —Who is this that cometh from Edom ? 
 
 In scarlet garments from Bozrah ? 
 
 This that is glorious in his apparel, 
 
 Proud in the greatness of his strength? 
 
 Jehovah: —I that proclaim deliverance, 
 
 And am mighty to save, j 
 
 People: —Wherefore is thine apparel red, 
 
 And thy garments like those of one that treadeth the wine-vat ? 
 
 Jehovah: —I have trodden the wine-vat alone, 
 
 And of the nations there was none with me. 
 
 And I trod them in mine anger, 
 
 And I trampled them in my fury, 
 
 So that their life-blood was sprinkled upon my garments, 
 
 And I have stained all my apparel. 
 
 For the day of vengeance was in my heart— 
 
 /I trod down the nations in my anger; 
 
 I crushed them in my fury, 
 
 And spilled their blood upon the ground.” * 
 
 “ Home-keeping youths have ever homely wits,” says the proverb; it 
 is not less true of nations than of men. The religious, but idolatrous Jews 
 met a monotheistic people in their captivity in Babylon, and came back 
 with better ideas. Yet much of the old theological evil lingered still. 
 Ezra, Nehemiah, and the author of the book of Daniel, devout men, in¬ 
 tensely bigoted, knew only “ the great and dreadful God; ” that is the 
 name the last of them calls Jehovah. But from the first five books of the 
 Old Testament to the Proverbs and later Psalms there is great progress. 
 
 II. You come to the New Testament, and here you do not find much 
 literary excellence in the writers. Wild flowers of exquisite beauty spring 
 up around v the feet of Jesus; only in the Kevelation do you find any thing 
 which indicates a large talent for literature, neither the nature which is born 
 in the man cf genius, nor the art which comes from exquisite culture. The 
 Fourth Gospel was writ, apparently, by some Alexandrian Greek, a man of 
 nice philosophic culture and fancy. Paul had great power of deductive logic. 
 A grand poetic imagination appears in that remarkable book, the Apoca- 
 v lypse. But, taken as a whole, in respect to literary art, the New Testament 
 
 Dr. Noyes’s Translation. 
 
11 
 
 is greatly inferior to the best parts of the Apocrypha and Old Testament. 
 It compares with Job, the Psalms, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ecclesiasticns, and the 
 "Wisdom of Solomon, as the works of the early Quakers compare with 
 Hooker, Taylor, Herbert, Cudworth and Milton ; and yet, spite of the lack 
 fo culture, literary art, and poetic genius, in the Hew Testament as in Fox, 
 Nayler, Penn, and other early Quakers, there is a' spirit not to be found 
 in the well-born and learned writers who went before. 
 
 1. In the New Testament, look first at the conception which Jesus has 
 of God. I shall take it only from the first three Gospels. In that accord¬ 
 ing to Matthew I think we have his early notion of God. He calls him 
 Father. The same word is now and then applied to God in the Old Tes¬ 
 tament, but there I think it means only Father to the Jews, not to other 
 nations. But it seems that some of the Greeks and Jews in Jesus’s own 
 time applied it to him, as if he were the father of all men. As Jesus 
 makes the Lord’s Prayer out of the litanies which were current in his 
 time, so he uses the common name for the Deity in the common sense. 
 With him God alone is good, and our Father which is in heaven is per¬ 
 fect. “ He maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and 
 sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.” He pities and forgives the 
 penitent, as in that remarkable story of the Prodigal Son. With what 
 tender love does Jesus say, u There is joy in heaven over one sinner that 
 repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, who need no re¬ 
 pentance.” Such noble thoughts come out in that time as “ shines a good 
 deed in a naughty world.” But what becomes of the impenitent wicked? 
 God has no love for them; they shall go into everlasting punishment. So 
 alongside of God there is a Devil, and to the left hand of heaven, there is 
 a dreadful, fiery, endless hell, whither a broad way leads down, and the 
 wide gates stand ever open, and many there be who go in thereat. 
 
 At first Jesus limited his teachings to the Jews; he would not take the 
 children’s bread and give it unto the dogs; he declared that not a jot or 
 tittle of the Mosaic ceremonial law should ever fail; he told his disciples 
 to keep all that the Scribes and Pharisees commanded, because they sat in 
 Moses’s seat. But by-and-by he nobly breaks with Judaism, violates the 
 ritual law, puts his new wine into new bottles. With admirable depth of 
 intuitive sight he sums up religion in one word, Love —love to God with 
 all the heart, and to one’s neighbor as himself. Fear of God seldom ap¬ 
 pears in the words of Jesus. Fear is the religion of the Old Testament, 
 Mercy is better than sacrifice. Men go up to heaven for righteousness and 
 philanthropy, and no question is asked about creed or form. Other men 
 go down to hell for ungodliness; and no straining at a gnat would ever 
 save him who would swallow down a whole camel of iniquity. Human 
 literature cannot show a dearer example of tenderness to a penitent wicked 
 man than you see in the story of the Prodigal Son, which yet the first 
 Evangelist rejected, and two others left without mention. 
 
 All nationality disappears before Jesus. His model man is a Samaritan. 
 We hear, that word commonly used, and do not understand that the Jews 
 hated a Samaritan as the old New England Federalists hated a Jacobin, as 
 
12 
 
 the British used to hate a Frenchman, or as a Southern slaveholder hates 
 a Black Republican to-day. Depend upon it, it created as much sensation 
 amongst men who heard it when Jesus told this story of the Good 
 Samaritan, as it would in Virginia to have some one represent a Negro as 
 superior to all the “first families” of the State, on account of some great 
 charity that he had done. 
 
 I do not find that Jesus altered the common idea of God which he 
 found. He was too intent on practical righteousness to attend to that. 
 Besides, he was cut off when but about thirty years of age; had he lived 
 longer, it may be that he would have reformed the popular notion of 
 God; for there are some things in the words that drop like honey from 
 his lips which to me indicate a religious feeling far beyond his thought. 
 
 2. In the writings of Paul you find more speculation about God than 
 with Jesus; for Paul was mainly a theological man, as Jesus was mainly 
 a pious and philanthropic man. Jesus could start a great religious move¬ 
 ment; Paul could make a theology out of his hints, and found a sect. But 
 the most important characteristic of Paul’s idea of God is this: God’s 
 wrath was against all ungodliness in Jew or Gentile, and he was as ac¬ 
 cessible to Gentile as to Jew. Nationality vanishes; all men are one in 
 Christ Jesus; God is God to all, to punish the wicked and reward the 
 righteous who have faith in Christ; the Jews are as wicked as the rest 
 of mankind, and are to be equally saved by faith in Christ, and by that 
 alone. Paul’s Christ is not the Jesus of History, but a mythological 
 being he conjured up from his own fancy. He says that the invisible God 
 is clearly made known by the visible material world, and conscience an¬ 
 nounces God’s law to the Gentiles as effectually as revelation declares it to 
 the Jews. That is a, great improvement on the Old Testament idea of 
 God, as presented even in the Psalms. 
 
 3. In the Fourth Gospel and the First Epistle attributed to John—both 
 incorrectly attributed to him—the idea of God goes higher than elsewhere 
 in the New Testament. God is mainly love. He dwells in the souls 
 of men who love each other and love him, and is to be worshipped in 
 spirit and in truth, not only in Jerusalem, but anywhere and everywhere. 
 Perfect love casteth out fear. 
 
 This God has an Only-begotten Son, to whom he has given the Spirit 
 without measure, put all things under his hand; he who believes on the 
 Son shall have everlasting life, but he who does not believe on the Son 
 shall not see life. Christ’s commandment is that they love one another, 
 and to those God will give another Comforter, the Spirit of Truth, who 
 shall abide with believers forever; nay, Christ will manifest himself to 
 them. 
 
 But this God has created a Devil, who will send alUunbelievers into 
 endless torment. 
 
 Thus ends the last book of the New Testament. What a change from 
 Genesis to the Fourth Gospel! What a difference between the God who 
 eats veal and fresh bread with Abraham, and commands him t q make a 
 burnt offering of his own son, who conveys all Palestine on such a jocular 
 
13 
 
 tenure, and the God whom no man hath seen at any time; who is Spirit 
 and is to be worshipped in spirit and in truth; who is love, and who 
 dwells with all loving and believing souls! There are I know not how 
 many hundred years between the two—what a series of revolutions! what 
 vast progress of mankind had filled up that brief period of time! 
 
 But the idea of God which you gather from the Bible is quite unsatis¬ 
 factory to a thoughtful and deeply religious man to-day. In the Old Testa¬ 
 ment there is no God who loves the Gentiles; he made the world for the 
 Jews ; all others are only servants—means, not ends. This being so, the 
 Hebrew thought himself the only favorite of God; his patriotism became 
 intense contempt for all other nations—was a part of his religion. In the * 
 Hew Testament, the God whom even Jesus sets before mankind has no 
 love for the wicked; there is no Providence for them; at the last judg¬ 
 ment he sends them all to hell, bottomless, endless, without hope; their 
 worm dieth not, their fire is not quenched; no Lazarus from Abraham’s 
 bosom will ever give Dives a single drop of water to cool his tongue, 
 tormented in that flame. Jesus tells of God, also of the Devil; of hea¬ 
 ven, with its eternal blessedness awaiting every righteous man, and of the 
 eternal torment not less open and waiting for every one who dies impeni¬ 
 tent. Paul narrows still more this love of God towards men; it includes 
 only such as have faith in Christ; no man is to be saved who does not be¬ 
 lieve in Paul’s idea of Christ. The author of the Apocalypse constricts it 
 still further yet; he would cast out Paul from heaven; Paul is called a 
 “ liar,” “ of the Synagogue of Satan,” and other similar names. The 
 Fourth Gospel limits salvation to such as believe the author’s theory of 
 Christ, that he was a God, and the only-begotten Son of God, an idea 
 which none of the three Evangelists, nor Paul, nor James, nor Simon 
 Peter, seems ever to have entertained. I think that Jesus never held 
 such a doctrine as what Paul and the writer of the Fourth Gospel makes 
 indispensable to salvation. 
 
 To the Jews every Gentile seemed an outcast from God’s providence. 
 To the early followers of Jesus all unbelievers were also outcasts; “ he that 
 believeth and is baptized shall be saved, but he that believeth not shall be 
 damned.” I find no adequate reason for thinking Jesus ever spoke these* 
 words, found only in the doubtful addition to the second canonical Gos¬ 
 pel. Yet there seems evidence enough to show that Jesus himself really 
 taught that ghastly doctrine, that a great wickedness unrepented of entailed 
 eternal damnation on an immortal soul! Paul says human love never fails; 
 it suffers long and is kind, and yet both he and the man whom he half 
 worshipped, teach that God has no love for the wicked man who dies in 
 his impenitence; endless misery is his only destination. Neither in the 
 Old Testament nor in the New do you find the God of infinite perfection, 
 infinite power, wisdom, justice, love; it is always a limited God, a Deity 
 with imperfect wisdom, justice, love; God with a Devil beside him, the 
 created fiend getting the victory over his Creator! The Bible does not 
 know that Infinite God, who is immanent in the World of Matter and Man, 
 
14 
 
 and also lives in these flowers, in yonder stars, in every drop of blood in 
 our veins; who works everywhere by law, a constant mode of operation 
 of natural power in Matter and in Man. It is never the dear God who is 
 responsible for the welfare of all and each, a Father so tender that he loves 
 the wickedest of men as no mortal mother can love her only child. 
 Does this surprise you? When mankind was a child, he thought as a child, 
 and understood as a child; when he. becomes a man he will put away 
 childish things. 
 
 How full of encouragement is the fact of such a growth in man’s con¬ 
 ception of God, and his mode of serving him! In the beginning of He- 
 • brew history, great power, great self-esteem, and great destructiveness, are 
 the chief qualities that men ascribe to God. Abraham would serve him 
 by sacrificing Isaac; Joshua, a great Hebrew filibuster, by the butchery of 
 whole nations of men, sparing the cattle, which he might keep as property, 
 but not the women and children. This was counted service of God, and 
 imputed to such marauders for righteousness. In the notion of God set 
 forth in the Fourth. Gospel and the First Epistle ascribed to John, it is 
 love which preponderates, and by love only are men to serve God. With 
 Jesus it is only goodness which admits men to the kingdom of heaven, and 
 there is no question asked about the nation, creed, or form ; but this sweet 
 benediction is pronounced: “Inasmuch as ye did it unto the least of these 
 my brethren, ye did it unto me;” “ Come, ye blessed, inherit the kingdom 
 prepared for you from the foundation of the world! ” 
 
 Shall you and I stop where the New Testament did? We cannot, if 
 we would, and it is impious to try. What if Moses had been content with 
 the Egyptian chaos of a Deity, “ where every clove of garlic was a god ; ” 
 what if Jesus had never broke with the narrow bounds of Judaism; what 
 if Paul had been content with “ such as were Apostles before him,” and 
 had stuck at new moons, full moons, circumcision and other abominations, 
 which neither he nor his fathers were able to bear; where would have 
 been the Christian Church, and where the progress of mankind ? No, we 
 shall not stop ! It would be contrary to the spirit of Moses, and still more 
 contrary to the spirit of Jesus, to attempt to arrest the theological and re- 
 'ligious progress of mankind. 
 
 God in Genesis represents the conception of the babyhood of humanity. 
 Manhood demands a different conception. All round us lies the World of 
 Matter, this vast world above us and about us and beneath; it proclaims 
 the God of Nature; flower speaking unto flower, star quiring unto star; 
 a G<>d who is resident therein, his law never broke. In us is a World 
 of Consciousness, and as that mirror is made clearer by civilization, I look 
 down andJjehold the Natural Idea of God, Infinite Cause and Providence, 
 Father and Mother to all that are. Into our reverent souls God will come 
 as the morning light into the bosom of the opening rose. Just in propor¬ 
 tion as we are faithful, we shall be inspired therewith, and shall frame 
 “ conceptions equal to the soul’s desires,” and then in our practice keep 
 those “ heights which the soul is competent to win.” 
 
SERMON II. 
 
 THE ECCLESIASTICAL CONCEPTION, OF GOD, AND ITS RELATION 
 TO THE SCIENTIFIC AND RELIGIOUS WANTS OF MAN. 
 
 The great and dreadful God.— Daniel ix. 4. 
 
 Our Father which art in heaven.— Matthew vi. 9. 
 
 In the Religion of civilized man there are three things:—Piety— 
 the love of God, the Sentimental part; Morality—obedience to God’s 
 natural laws, the Practical part; and Theology—thoughts about God 
 and Man and their relation, the Intellectual part. The Theology will 
 have great influence on the Piety and the Morality, a true Theology help¬ 
 ing the normal development of Religion, which a false Theology hinders. 
 There are two methods of creating a Theology,—a scheme of doctrines 
 about God and Man, and the relation between them, viz.: the Ecclesiasti¬ 
 cal and the Philosophical.* 
 
 The various sects which make up the Christian Church pursue the Ec¬ 
 clesiastical method. They take the Bible for a miraculous and infallible 
 revelation from God—in all matters containing the truth, the whole truth, 
 and nothing but the truth—and thence derive their doctrines, Catholic, 
 Protestant, Trinitarian, Unitarian, Damnationist or Salvationist. Of 
 course they follow that method in forming the Ecclesiastical Conception 
 of God, in which the Christian sects mainly agree. They take the 
 whole of the Bible, from Genesis to the Fourth Gospel, as God’s miracu¬ 
 lous affidavit; they gather together all which it says about God, and 
 from that make up the Ecclesiastical Conception as a finality. The 
 Biblical sayings are taken for God’s deposition as to the facts of his nature, 
 character, plan, modes ©f operation—God’s word, his last word ; they are 
 a finality—all the evidence in the case; nothing is to be added thereto, and 
 naught taken thence away. Accordingly the statement of a writer in the 
 half-savage age of a ferocious people is just as valuable, true, and obligatory 
 for all time, as that of a refined, enlightened, religious man in a civilized 
 age and nation; for they are all equally God’s testimony in the case, his 
 miraculous deposition ; God puts himself on his voir dire , and it is of no 
 consequence which justice of revelation records the affidavit of the Divine 
 Deponent. The deposition is alike perfect and complete, whether attested 
 by an anonymous and half-civilized Hebrew fillibuster, or by a refined and 
 religious Christian philosopher. The statement that God ate veal at 
 Abraham’s, or that he sought to kill Moses in a tavern, is just as true and 
 
 * See Mr. Parker’s Sermon of “ False and True Theology.”— February, 1858. 
 
16 
 
 important as this, that “ God is love.” It is said in the Old Testament 
 that the Lord is a “ consuming fire; ” he is “ angry with the wicked every 
 day,” and keeps his anger for ever; that he hates Esau; that he gives cruel 
 commands, like that in the thirteenth chapter of Deuteronomy, forbidding 
 all religious progress; that he orders the butchery of millions of innocent 
 men, including women and children; that he comes back from the de¬ 
 struction of Edom red with blood, as described*in the sixty-third chapter of 
 Isaiah. In the New Testament he is called Father; it is said that he is 
 Love, that he goes out and meets the returning prodigal a great ways off, 
 and welcomes him with large rejoicing. 
 
 Now, say the Churches, all these statements are true, and the Christian 
 believer must accept them all. Eeason is not to sift and cross-examine 
 the Biblical testimony, rejecting this as false and including that as true ; 
 for the whole of this evidence and each part of it is God’s affidavit, and 
 does not require a cross-examining, sifting, amending. We are not to 
 reconcile it to us, but us to it; and if it conflict with reason and conscience, 
 we should give them up. All the Bible, says this theory, is the inspired 
 Word of God, and one part is just as much inspired as another, for there 
 are no degrees of inspiration therein; each statement by itself is perfect, 
 and the whole complete. The test of inspiration is pot in man; it is not 
 Truth for things reasonable, nor Justice for things moral, nor Love for 
 things aflfectional. The test is wholly outside of man; it is a Miracle— 
 that is, the report of a miracle ; and so what contradicts the universal hu¬ 
 man conscience is to be accepted just as readily as what agrees with the 
 moral instinct and reflection of all human kind. In the third century Ter- 
 tullian, a hot-headed African Bishop, said, “I believe, because it is impos¬ 
 sible ; ” that is, the thing cannot be, and therefore I believe it is! It has 
 been a maxim in ecclesiastical theology ever since; without it both Transub- 
 stantiation and the Trinity would fall to the ground, with many a doctrine 
 more. I think Lord Bacon was an unbeliever in the popular ecclesiastical 
 doctrines of his time; he would derive all science from the observation 
 of nature and reflection thereon; but he left this maxim to have Eminent 
 Domain in Theology! It was enough for him to break utterly with the 
 Philosophy of the Schools; he would not also quarrel against the Theology 
 of the Churches: thereby he lost his scientific character, but kept his eccle¬ 
 siastical reputation. 
 
 Joshua, the son of Nun, was a Hebrew fillibuster, with a half-civilized 
 troop of ferocious men following him; he conquered a country, butchered 
 the men, women, and children; and he gives us such a picture of God as 
 you might expect from a Pequot Indian in the days of our fathers. It is 
 taught in the Churches that Joshua’s statement about God is just as trust¬ 
 worthy as the sublime words in the New Testament, ascribed to John or 
 Jesus, and far more valuable than the deepest intuitions, and the grandest 
 generalizations of the most cultivated, best educated, and most religious 
 of men to-day ! The Christian Churches do not derive their conception 
 of God from the World of Observation about us, or the World of Con- 
 
17 
 
 sciousness within us, but from the “ Book of Revelation,” as they call that 
 collection from the works of some hundred writers, mostly anonymous, 
 and all from remote ages; and they tell us that the teachings of Joshua are 
 of as much value as the teachings of Jesus himself, far more than those of 
 Fenelon or Channing. 
 
 Now from such facts, and by such a method, the Christian sects have 
 formed their notion of God, which is common to the Greek, the Latin, and 
 the Teutonic Churches; only a few sects have departed therefrom, and as 
 they are but insignificant in numbers, and have had scarcely any influence 
 in forming the ecclesiastical conception of God, so I shall omit all reference 
 to them and their opinions. 
 
 To-day I shall not speak of the ecclesiastical Arithmetic of God, onl^r 
 of the Ethics thereof; not of God according to the category of number— 
 the quantitative distribution of Deity into personalities; only of the char¬ 
 acter of God by the category of substance—the qualitative kind of Deity, 
 for that is still the same, whether conceived of in one person, in three, or 
 in three million, just as the qualitative force of an army of three hundred 
 thousand soldiers is still the same, whether you count it as one corps or as 
 three. 
 
 Look beneath the mere words of theology, at the things which they 
 mean, and you find in general that the ecclesiastical conception of God 
 does not include Infinite Perfection. It embraces all the true and good 
 things from the most religious and enlightened writers of the Bible, but it 
 also contains all the ill and false things which were uttered by the most 
 rude and ferocious ; one is counted just as true and valuable as the other. 
 Accordingly God is really represented as a limited being, exceedingly im¬ 
 perfect, having all the contradictions which you find between Genesis and 
 the Fourth Gospel; he is not infinite in any one attribute. I know the 
 theological language predicates infinite perfection, but the theological facts 
 affirm exceeding imperfection. Look at this in several details. 
 
 1. God is not represented as Omnipresent. When the theologian says, 
 “God is everywhere,” he does not mean that God is everywhere always, 
 as-ie is anywhere sometimes; not that he is at this minute present in this 
 meeting-house, and in the air which my hand clasps, as he was in the 
 Hebrew Holy of Holies when Solomon ended his inauguration prayer, as 
 he always is in some place called the Heaven of Heavens. There are degrees 
 of the Divine Presence; he is more there and less here. Some spots he 
 occupies by his essence, others only potentially. He was creationally 
 present with all his personal essence at the making of the world, but only 
 providentially present with his instrumental power, not his personal 
 essence, at the governing of the world. Thus the Queen of England, by 
 her power, is present in all Great Britain and the British possessions, while 
 by her person she occupies only a single apartment of the Palace of St. 
 James in London, sitting in only one chair at a time. So it is taught that 
 2 
 
18 
 
 God must intervene miraculously to do his work : must come into a place 
 where he was not before, and which he will vacate soon. So the actual, 
 personal, essential and complete presence of God is the very rarest excep¬ 
 tion in all places save Heaven. He is instantial only in Heaven, excep¬ 
 tional everywhere else. He is not universally immanent, residing in all 
 matter, all spirit, at every time, working according to law, by a constant 
 mode of operation and in all the powers Qf matter and man, which are de¬ 
 rived from him and are not possible without him; but he comes in occa¬ 
 sionally and works by miracle. He is a non-resident God, who is present 
 in a certain place vicariously, by attorney, and only on great occasions 
 comes there in his proper person. That is the ecclesiastical notion of Om¬ 
 nipresence. 
 
 2. He is not All-Powerful, except in the ideal Heaven which he perma¬ 
 nently occupies by his complete and personal presence. On earth he is 
 restricted by Man, who thwarts his plans every day and grieves his heart, 
 and still more by the Devil, who continually thwarts his Creator. I know 
 the ecclesiastical doctrine says that God is omnipotent, but ecclesiastical 
 history represents him as trying to make the Hebrews an obedient people, 
 and never effecting it; as continually worrying over that little fraction of 
 mankind, “ rising up early and speaking ” to them, but the crooked would 
 not be made straight. Hay, he is unable to keep the Christian Church with¬ 
 out spot or wrinkle for a single generation, charm he never so wisely; but 
 Paul fell out with such as were apostles before him, and the seamless ec¬ 
 clesiastical coat is roughly rent in twain betwixt the two ! 
 
 3. He is not All-Wise. He does not know how his own creation will 
 work. He finished the world, and found that his one man, running alone, 
 did not prosper; it was necessary to make a woman, to help him ; she was 
 an afterthought. Her first step ruins the man she was meant to serve; and 
 God is surprised at the disobedience. He must alter things to meet this 
 unexpected emergency; he grows wiser and wiser by continual experi¬ 
 ment. 
 
 4. He is not All-Righteous. He does great wrong to the Egyptians, 
 for he hardens Pharaoh’s heart, so that he may have an excuse for putting 
 the king and people to death. He does injustice to the Canaauites, whom 
 he butchers by Joshua; he provides a punishment altogether dispropor¬ 
 tionate to the offences of men, and will make them suffer forever for the sin 
 committed by their mythological ancestor, six thousand years before you 
 and I were born ; he creates souls by the million, only to make them perish 
 everlastingly. In the whole course of human history, you cannot find a 
 tyrant, murderer, kidnapper, who is so unjust as God is represented by the 
 ecclesiastical theology. 
 
 5. He is not All-Loving. Of the people before Christ, he loved none 
 but Jews ; he gave no other any revelation, and without that, they must 
 perish everlastingly! Since Jesus he loves none but Christians, and will 
 save no more; the present heathen are to die the second death; and of 
 Christians he loves none but Church-members. Nay, the Catholics will 
 
19 
 
 have it, that he hates everybody out of the Roman Church, while the 
 stricter Protestants retaliate this favor upon the Catholics themselves. 
 Kay, they deny salvation to all Unitarians and Universalists, to the one 
 because they declare that the man Jesus was not God the Creator; and to 
 the other because they say that God the Father is not bad enough to damn 
 any man forever and ever. You remember that scarcely was Dr. Channing 
 cold in his coffin, before orthodox newspapers rung with the intelligence 
 that he was doubtless then suffering the pangs of eternal damnation, because 
 he had “denied the Lord that bought him.” You know the damnation 
 pronounced on old Dr. Ballou, simply because he said men were brethren, 
 and the God of earth and heaven is too good-hearted to create anybody 
 for the purpose of crunching him into hell forever and ever. According 
 to some strict sectarians, God loves none but the elect—an exceedingly small 
 number. It has been the doctrine of the Christian Church for fifteen or 
 sixteen hundred years that God will reject from heaven all babies newly- 
 born who die without baptism; the sprinkling of infants was designed to 
 save these little ones, who, as Jesus thought, needed no salvation, but 
 were already of the kingdom of heaven. Accordingly, to save the souls of 
 children ready to perish without ecclesiastical baptism, the Catholic 
 Church mercifully allows doctors, nurses, mid wives, servants, anybody, to 
 baptize a child newly born, by throwing water in its face, in the name of 
 the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and that saves the little thing. But the 
 doctrine of infant damnation follows logically from the first principles of 
 the ecclesiastical theology. “ He that believeth and is baptized shall be . 
 saved, and he that believeth not shall be damned!” 
 
 6. He is not All-Holy, perfectly faithful to himself. He is capricious 
 and variable; men can wheedle him into their favorite plans; now by 
 penitence or a certain belief, they can induce God to remove the con¬ 
 sequences of their wicked deeds; and the effects of a long life of wicked¬ 
 ness will all at once be miraculously wiped clean off from the man’s char¬ 
 acter ; he will take the blackest of sinners and wash him white in the blood 
 of the Lamb, and “in five minutes he shall be made as good a Christian as 
 he could become by fifty years of the most perfect piety and morality.” 
 Since God is thus changeable, men think they can alter his plan by their 
 words, can induce him to send rain when they want it, or to “ stay the 
 bottles of heaven ” at their request, to check disease, to curse a bad man, 
 or to pervert and confound the intellect of a thinking man. Hence comes 
 the strange phenomenon which you sometimes see of a nation assembling in 
 the churches, and asking God to crush to the ground another people at war 
 with them; two years ago you saw Englishmen bending their knees in the 
 name of Christ, to ask God to blast the Russians at Sebastopol, and the Rus¬ 
 sians bending their knees and in the same name asking God to sink the 
 British ships in the depths of the Black Sea! 
 
 Put all these things together—God is not represented as a perfect Creat¬ 
 ing Cause, who makes all things right at first; nor a perfect Preserving 
 Providence, who administers all things well, and will bring all out right at 
 
20 
 
 last. Even his essential presence is only an exception in the world, here 
 for a moment, and then long withdrawn. According to the ecclesiastical 
 conception, God transcends man in power and wisdom, but is im¬ 
 mensely inferior to the average of men in justice and benevolence; nay, 
 in hate and malignity he transcends the very worst man that the very 
 worst man could conceive of in his heart! 
 
 I. Now, this idea of God is not adequate to the purposes of Science. 
 To explain the World of Matter, the naturalist wants a sufficient power 
 which is always there, acting by a constant mode of operation; not irreg¬ 
 ular, vanishing, acting by fits and starts; but continuous, certain, reliable; 
 an intelligent power which acts by law, not caprice and miracle. No 
 other God is adequate Cause of the Universe, or of its action for a single 
 hour. 
 
 But the Christian Church knows no such God, for all the Biblical 
 depositions concerning him, all the pretended affidavits whence it has 
 made its conception of God, came from men who had no thought of a 
 general law of matter or of mind, and no notion of a God who acted by a 
 constant mode of operation, and who was the indwelling Cause and Pro¬ 
 vidence of all things that are. Just so far as any scientific thinker departs 
 from that limited idea of God, who comes and goes and works by miracle, 
 so far does he depart from the ecclesiastical theology of Christendom. 
 The actual facts of the Universe are not reconcilable with what the eccle¬ 
 siastical theology teaches about God. This has become apparent, step by 
 step, in the last three centuries. 
 
 Galileo reported the facts of astronomic nature just as they were. The 
 Roman Church must silence her philosopher, or else revolutionize her 
 notion of God. Had not she God’s own affidavit that he stopped the sun 
 and moon a whole day, to give Joshua time for butchery of men, women, 
 and children? would she allow a philosopher to contradict her with 
 nothing but the Universe on his side ? He must swear the earth stands 
 still. “And yet it does move though! ” 
 
 Geologists relate the facts of the universe as they find them in the 
 crust of the earth. The Churches complain that these facts are inconsist¬ 
 ent with the story in Genesis. “We have,” say they, “ God’s deposition 
 that he made the Universe in six days, rested on the seventh, and was re¬ 
 freshed ! What is the testimony of the rocks and the stars, to the anony¬ 
 mous record on parchment, or the printed English Bible ? ” So the geolo¬ 
 gist also has a bad name in the Churches, many equivocate, and some lie. 
 
 For the history of the heavens and earth, theologians would rely on the 
 word of a man whose name even they know nothing of, and reject the 
 testimony of the Universe itself, where the footprints of the Creator are 
 yet so plain and deeply set. Zoologists find evidence, as they think, that 
 the human race has had several distinct centres .of origination ; that men 
 were created in many places: and a great outcry is at once raised. Such 
 facts are inconsistent with the ecclesiastical idea of God! So, to learn the 
 
21 
 
 structure of the heavens, the earth, or of mankind, you must not go to the 
 heavens, the earth, or mankind; you must go to the Book of Genesis, and 
 if the facts of the Universe contradict the anonymous record therein, then 
 you must break with the Universe and agree with the minister, for the ac¬ 
 tual testimony of things is worth nothing in comparison with the words of a 
 Hebrew writer whom nobody knows! 
 
 The great obstacle to the advancement of science, nay, to the diffusion 
 of knowledge, is not the poverty of mankind, not the lack of industry, tal¬ 
 ent, genius amongst men of science; but it is the ecclesiastical conception 
 of God. Hot a step can be taken in astronomy, geology, zoology, but it 
 separates a man from that notion. The ecclesiastical conception of God 
 being thus utterly inadequate to the purposes of science, philosophic men 
 turn off from the theology of Christendomand some, it is said, become 
 atheists. Look at the scientific men of England, France, and Germany, 
 for proof of this. In America there is no considerable class of scientific 
 and learned men, who stand close together, write books for each other, 
 and so make a little public of their own; so here the scientific man does 
 not stand in a little green-house of philosophy as in Europe, where he is 
 sheltered from public opinion, lives freely, and expands his flowers in an 
 atmosphere congenial to his natural growth, but he is exposed to all the 
 rude blasts of the press, the parlor, and the meeting-house; so is he more 
 cautious than his congeners and equivalents in Europe, and does not com¬ 
 monly tell what he thinks; nay, sometimes tells what he does not think, 
 lest he should lose his public reputation amongst bigoted men! To this 
 there are some very honorable exceptions; scientific men who do not' 
 count it a part of their business to prop up a popular error,, but who 
 know society has a right to demand that they tell the truth, the whole 
 truth, and nothing but the truth. But if you will take the hundred fore¬ 
 most men of science in all Christendom who are not ministers, I do not 
 think that ten of them have any belief in the common ecclesiastical con¬ 
 ception of God. Some have better—nay, a true idea of God, but dare not 
 divulge it; and some, alas! seem to have no notion at all. Accordingly, 
 men of science turn from theology; some become atheists, and all lose 
 much from lack of a satisfactory idea of God. You all know what clerical 
 complaints are made of the infidelity and atheism of scientific men. Three 
 hundred years ago the Church suspected doctors, and invented this pro¬ 
 verb:—“As many doctors, so many atheists;” because the doctors knew 
 facts irreconcilable with the ecclesiastical theology. I think the charge 
 of atheism grossly unjust, when it is brought against the great body of 
 scientific men ; but where it is true, it ought to be remembered that in the 
 last two hundred and fifty years the Christian Church has had no idea of 
 God adequate to the purposes of science, and fit for a philosopher to ac¬ 
 cept; and if it be so, will you blame the philosopher for rejecting what 
 would only disturb his processes ? The cause of the philosopher’s atheism 
 often lies at the Church’s door, and not in the scholar’s study. 
 
22 
 
 II. But this ecclesiastical conception of God is as inadequate to the 
 purposes of Beligion, as of Science. In religious consciousness we all 
 want a God whom we can absolutely rely upon ; who is always at hand, 
 not merely separate and one side from the World of Matter or the World 
 of Man. We want a deity who acts now, and is the Infinite God, who 
 desires the best of possible things for each man, who knows the best of pos¬ 
 sible things, and has will and power to bring about the best of possible 
 things, and that for all persons. We want a God all-powerful, all-wise, 
 all-just, all-loving, all-faithful; a perfect Creator; a perfect Provider, who 
 will be just to each of his children. I put it to each one of you—thought- 
 fulest or least-thinking—is there one of you who will be content with a God 
 who does not come up to your highest conception of power, wisdom, jus¬ 
 tice, love, and holiness? Not one of you will be content to rely on less ! 
 You must falsify your nature before you can do it. But according to the 
 ecclesiastical conception, God is the most capricious, unjust, unreliable of 
 all possible beings. Look at this old and venerable doctrine of eternal 
 damnation, believed by all the Christian sects, save the Universalists, 
 Unitarians, and Spiritualists—not yet a sect— 1 who make at the most some 
 four or five millions out of the two hundred and fifty or sixty millions of 
 Christendom. This is the doctrine:—God is angry with mankind, and 
 will burn the greater part of them in hell, forever and ever. Why is 
 “ his wrath so hot against us ?” 
 
 1. The Jews are God’s ancient covenant people; with them he made 
 a bargain, sworn to on both sides : it was for a good and sufficient consider¬ 
 ation, value received by each party; he commanded them to observe the 
 Mosaic form of religion forever ; if any prophet shall come, working never 
 so many miracles, and teach them a different conception of God, they 
 must put him to death, and all his followers, with their wives, their chil¬ 
 dren, and their cattle. (Deut. xiii.) But now all these “chosen people” are 
 to be damned forever because they do not believe the theology of Paul 
 and Jesus, whom the Divine law commands the Jews to slay with the edge 
 of the sword for teaching that theology. So God commands the Jews to 
 kill every man among them who shall teach the Christian doctrine, and yet 
 will damn them for not believing it. 
 
 2. The Heathen also are to be damned because they have no faith in 
 
 Christ, no belief in the popular theology of the Catholic or Protestant 
 sects. But that theology is unreasonable, and thoughtful, unprejudiced 
 men cannot believe it; besides that, the greater part of the Heathens never 
 heard of such doctrines, or of Christ; still God will damn them, millions 
 by millions, to eternal torment, because they have not believed what was 
 never preached to them, what they never heard they must believe. Three 
 hundred years ago Spanish Jesuits preached the doctrine of eternal dam¬ 
 nation to the heathen at Japan, who asked of the missionaries, “Is it pos¬ 
 sible that God will damn men forever ? ” “ Certainly, without doubt,” 
 
 was the reply. “ And if a man dies who has not heard of these things be¬ 
 fore, will God damn him forever? ” “ Yes,” was the answer. The whole 
 
23 
 
 multitude fell on their faces and wept bitterly and long, and would not be¬ 
 lieve it. Do you blame them for casting ithose priests from the island, 
 and saying, “ Let the salt sea separate us from the Christian world for¬ 
 ever.” 
 
 3. Then the Christians themselves are not certain of their salvation. 
 The Catholics are the majority, and they say God will damn all the Prot¬ 
 estants ; the Protestants say the same of tlie Catholics. The ecclesiastical 
 idea of God in both represents him as ready enough to damn either; and if 
 the first principle of the Catholic Church be true, no Protestant can be 
 saved; and if the first principle of the Protestant Church be true, then 
 every Catholic is sure of damnation and nought besides. 
 
 See how the Protestants dispose of one another. 
 
 (1.) All “unconverted” and positively wicked men are to he damned ; 
 God has no love for them, only hate. 
 
 (2.) All “unconverted” men, not positively wicked; they have no sal¬ 
 vation in them; they may be the most pious men in the world, the most 
 moral men, but their own religion cannot save them. They must have 
 “ faith,”—that is belief in the ecclesiastical theology—and be Church-mem¬ 
 bers ; that is, they must believe as Dr. Banbaby believes, and be voted 
 into some little company called a Church, at the Old South or the New 
 North, or some other conventicle. 
 
 (3.) New-born babies not baptized must be shut out from the kingdom 
 of heaven, if not included in the kingdom of hell; such has been the 
 doctrine of the Christian Church from the time of Justin Martyr, who I 
 think first broached it seventeen hundred years ago, and it follows with un¬ 
 avoidable logic from the ecclesiastical notion of God and the ecclesiastical 
 method of salvation. So Jesus must have made a great mistake when he 
 took babies in his arms, and blessed them, and said, “ Suffer little children 
 to come unto me, and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of 
 heaven; ”—he ought to have said, “ Suffer baptized children to come unto 
 me,” &c. 
 
 Now what confidence can you have in such a God, so unjust, so un¬ 
 loving, so cruel, and so malignant ? I just now said that God is represented 
 as transcending men in hate and malignity. Look at the matter carefully, 
 narrowing the thing down to the smallest point. Suppose there are now a 
 thousand million persons on the e^rth, and that only one shall be damned; 
 and suppose that some day a hundred years hence, all the nine hundred and 
 ninety-nine million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred 
 and ninety-nine of us are gathered in the kingdom of heaven, enjoying all 
 the blessedness that Divine love can bestow on tho vast faculties of man, 
 still further enhanced by the first taste of immortal life; suppose that in¬ 
 telligence is brought to all and each of us that one man is miserable, lan¬ 
 guishing in eternal fire, to be there forever; suppose we are told that a 
 globe of sand, big as this earth, hangs there before his comprehensive eye, 
 and once in a thousand years a single atom is loosened and falls off, and he 
 
24 
 
 shall suffer the cruelest torment till, grain by grain, millennium after mil¬ 
 lennium, that whole globe is consumed and passed away; and yet then he 
 shall be no nearer the end of his agony than when he first felt the smart. 
 Suppose we are told it was the worst man of all the earth, that it was a mur¬ 
 derer, a violator of virgins, a pirate, a kidnapper, a traitorous wretch, who, 
 in the name of Democracy, sought to establish a despotism in America, to 
 crush out the fairest hopes of political freedom which the sun ever sbonf 1 
 upon; or even it was an ecclesiastical hypocrite, with an atheistic heart, 
 believing in no God, and loving no man, who, for the sake of powqr and 
 ambition, sought to make men tremble at the ugly phantom of a wrathful 
 Deity, and laid his unclean hands on the soul of man, and made that a 
 source of terrible agony to mankind ! When you are told that this man 
 is plunged into hell for all time, is there a man who would not cry out 
 against the hideous wrong, and scorn heaven offered by such a Deity ? 
 No! there is no murderer, no pirate, no violator of virgins, no New Eng¬ 
 land kidnapper, no betrayer of his nation, no ecclesiastical hypocrite even, 
 who would not reject it with scorn, and revolt against the injustice. But 
 the ecclesiastical doctrine represents God as thus damning not one man, 
 but millions of millions of men, the great majority of mankind, nine hun¬ 
 dred and ninety-nine out of every thousand, and those, too, often the best, 
 certainly the wisest and most loving and pious men! Do you wonder 
 then, that thoughtful men, moral men, affectional men, and religious men 
 turn off with scorn from this conception of God ? I wonder not at all. The 
 fact that the majority have not done so only shows how immensely pow¬ 
 erful is this great religious instinct, which God meant should be Queen 
 within us. 
 
 Let me do no injustice. I admit the many excellent qualities ascribed 
 to God in the popular theology ; but remember this, that as much as the 
 noblest words of the New Testament add to the conception of God in the 
 worst parts of the Old Testament, just so much also do the savage notions 
 from Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, from the 
 baser Psalms, and the Prophets, take away from the Father who is in 
 Heaven, the Spirit who is to be worshipped in spirit and in truth! In 
 this “ alligation alternate ” one chapter of the Old Testament can adulterate 
 and spoil all the blessed oracles of the New. Jesus is set off against Joshua; 
 the whole of the Fourth Gospel, the Sermon on the Mount, and many a 
 blessed Parable, is nullified by a scrap from some ancient Jew who thought 
 God was a consuming fire ! 
 
 The Form of Religion demanded of men, in accordance with the 
 ecclesiastical conception of God, certainly has many good things, but it is 
 not natural Piety for its emotional part, the aboriginal love of God; nor 
 natural Theology for its intellectual part, the natural Idea of God; nor 
 natural Morality for its practical part, the normal use of every human fa¬ 
 culty; but it is just the opposite'of these; it has a sentiment against 
 nature, thought against nature, practice against nature. In place of 
 
25 
 
 Love to God, with trust and hope, the most joyous of all emotions 
 possible to man, it puts Fear of God, with doubt, and dread, and de¬ 
 spair, the most miserable of all emotions; and in place of love to men, 
 to all men, according as they need and we are able, it puts love only for 
 your own little household of faith, and hate for all who cannot accept 
 your opinions; for out of the ecclesiastical conception of God comes not 
 only the superstition which darkens man’s face, clouds his mind, obscures 
 his conscience, and brutalizes his heart, but also the persecution which red¬ 
 dens his hand with a brother’s blood. The same spirit is in Boston to-day 
 that in the middle ages was in Italy and Spain. Why does not it burn men 
 now, as once it did in Italy, in Spain, and in Oxford ? It only lacks the 
 power; the wish and will are still the same. It lacks the axe and faggot, 
 not the malignant will to smite and burn. Once it had the headsman at 
 its command, who smote and silenced men; now it can only pray, not kill. 
 
 Such being the Ecclesiastical Conception of God, such the Ecclesiastical 
 Beligion, I do not wonder it has so small good influence on mankind. Men 
 of science, not clerical, turn off from such a God, and such a form of reli¬ 
 gion. They are less wise and less happy ; their science is the more imper¬ 
 fect, because they do not know the Infinite God of the Universe, the 
 Absolute Religion. With reverence for a great mind, do I turn the grand 
 studious pages of La Place and Yon Humboldt, but not without mourning 
 the absence of that religious knowledge of God, and that intimate trust in 
 Him, which else would have planted their scientific garden with still 
 grander beauty. I do not wonder that men of politics turn off from eccle¬ 
 siastical religion, and are not warned from wickedness by its admonition, 
 nor guided to justice and philanthropy by its counsels. Look at the pol¬ 
 iticians of America, England, France, all Christendom, and can you show 
 me a single man of them in a high place who believes in the ecclesiastical 
 conception of God, and in public ever dares appeal to the religious 
 nature of man, and there expect to find justification of a great thought or 
 a noble plan ? No ! when such politicians evoke the religious spirit, it is 
 only to make men believe that it is a religious duty to obey any tyrant who 
 seeks to plunder a nation, to silence the Press of France, to crush out the 
 life from prostrate Italy and Spain, to send Americans kidnapping in Penn¬ 
 sylvania or New England. The great men of science have broke with the 
 ecclesiastical notion of God; men of great moral sense will have nothing to 
 do with a Deity so unjust; while the affectional and religious men, whose 
 “primal virtues shine aloft as stars,” whose deeds are “charities that 
 heal, and soothe, and bless” the weary sons of men, they turn off with dis¬ 
 gust from the ecclesiastical God, whose chief qualities are self-esteem, van¬ 
 ity, and destructiveness. One of the most enlightened writers of the New 
 Testament says, “ God is love.” “ Yes,” says the ecclesiastical theologian, 
 “but he is also a consuming fire; he gives all his love to | the Chris¬ 
 tians who have faith in Christ, and turns all his wrath against, the non- 
 
26 
 
 Christians who have no faith in Christ. He that believeth and is baptized 
 shall he saved; he that believeth not shall be damned.” 
 
 If a man accepts this notion of God, he can never be certain of his own 
 welfare hereafter; he may hope, he cannot be sure, for salvation does not 
 depend on a faithful use of talents or opportunities; but on right belief 
 and right ritual. And when neither the intuitive nor the reflective facul¬ 
 ties afford any test, who knows if his belief is right? The Jews are to be 
 rejected for their faith in Moses and the Prophets. The Fourth Gospel 
 makes Jesus say that all before him “ were thieves and robbers; ”—I think 
 he never said it. Paul repudiated Peter, if not also James and John; 
 he was a dissembler, and they only “ seemed tb be somewhat; ” while the 
 author of the Book of Revelation thrusts Paul out of heaven, consigning 
 him to the synagogue of Satan. How if Paul and Peter and James and 
 John did not know what faith in Christ meant, and could not agree to live 
 in the same Church, and sit in the same heaven, can you and I be sure of 
 admittance there ? 
 
 While the ecclesiastical conception of God is thus inadequate to a 
 thoughtful man’s religion, we are yet told that'we must never reform this 
 notion! There is a manifest progress in the conception of God in the 
 Biblical books; but in the Christian Church we are told that there must 
 # be no further step; we must stop with Joshua. “ Fear hath torment,” 
 says that anonymous, deep-hearted religious writer of the Hew Testament, 
 seventeen hundred years ago; but “ perfect love casts out fear.” We are 
 told we must not cast it out, but must have a notion of God, which we 
 must fear! Shame on us! Mankind has made a mistake. We took a 
 false step at the beginning. The dream which a lialf-savage Jew had of 
 God we take for God’s affidavit of his own character. We do not look 
 on the World of Matter and Mind, to gather thence a natural idea of God, 
 only at the statements of certain men who wrote seventeen hundred or 
 three thousand years ago, men who did well enough for their time, not 
 ours. ' 
 
 All round us lie the evidences against the ecclesiastical conception of 
 God, within us are they yet more distinct. The great mistake of the 
 Christian Church is its conception of God. Once it was the best the 
 nations could either form or accept. To-day it is not worth while to try 
 to receive it. It is inadequate for Science, either the philosophy of 
 matter or man, explaining neither the condition, the history, nor yet the 
 origin of one or the other. It is unfit for Religion ; for Piety, its senti¬ 
 mental part—Theology, its intellectual part—Morality, its practical part. 
 I cannot love an imperfect God, I cannot serve an imperfect God with 
 perfect morality. 
 
 There will be no great and sufficient revival of religion till this concep¬ 
 tion be corrected. Atheism is no relief; indifference cannot afford any 
 comfort; and belief makes the matter worse. The Churches complain of 
 the atheism of Science; their false notion of God made it atheistic. You 
 
27 
 
 and I mourn at the wickedness of men in power; is there any thing in the 
 ecclesiastical religion to scare a tyrant or a traitor ? In high American 
 office mean men live low and wicked lives, abusing the people’s trust, 
 and then at last, when the instincts of lust, of passion, and of ambition fail 
 them, they whine out a few penitent words to a priest, on their death 
 beds, with their last breath making investment for their future reputation 
 on earth, and also in the Christian Church! For this mouthful of wind 
 do they pass for better Christians than a whole life of eighty years of 
 philanthropy gave Franklin the reputation for. Thus selfish and deceitful 
 men are counted for saints by the Christian clergy, while the magnificent 
 integrity of Franklin and Washington never gave them a high place in 
 any Christian Church! You weep at the poverty of life in the American 
 Church—thirty thousand ministers with right of visitation and search on 
 all mankind, and no more to show for it! A revival of religion going on 
 over the whole land—and a revival of the slave trade at the same time, 
 and neither hindering the other! You mourn at the poverty of life in the 
 Churches of America, but the Church of Christendom is no better—nay, 
 I think the Church in the Free States of America is its better part; the 
 Christian Church abroad strikes hands with every tyrant, it treads down 
 mankind, nor will it be ever checked, while it has such a false conception 
 of God. 
 
 Under us is the Earth, every particle of it immanent with God; over 
 us are the Heavens, where every star sparkles with Deity ; within us are the 
 Heavens and the Earth of human Consciousness, a grander revelation of 
 Deity in yet higher form. These are all of them a two-fold testimony 
 against the Ecclesiastical Conception of God. Hot one of them has a 
 whisper of testimony in favor of atheism; all are crowded with evidence of 
 the Infinite God,—First Good, First Perfect, and First Fair, Father and 
 Mother to you and me, to all that were, that are, that shall be, leading us 
 to life everlasting. 
 
28 
 
 SERMON III. 
 
 THE PHILOSOPHICAL IDEA OF COD AND ITS RELATION TO THE 
 SCIENTIFIC AND RELIGIOUS WANTS OF MANKIND NOW. 
 
 Perfect love casteth out fear.—1 John iv. 18. 
 
 The religions element is so strong that it always will act both in its in¬ 
 stinctive and its reflective form, for though here and there an eccentric 
 man neglect or treat it with scorn, no race of men ever does so; nay, 
 no nation, no little tribe, no considerable company of men. There are a 
 thousand devotees who give up all to the religious faculty where there is 
 not a single atheist who sacrifices that to something besides. Like the 
 two other great Primal Instincts—the hunger for bread, which keeps the 
 individual alive, and the hunger for posterity, which perpetuates mankind— 
 this hunger for God is not to be put down. Here and there an individual 
 man neglects the one or the other, the instinct of food, of kind, of religion; 
 but the human race nor does, nor can. In Mankind instinctive nature is 
 stronger than capricious will. Whimsy alters the cut of Ahab’s beard, or 
 the shape of Jezebel’s ringlets; but the beard itself grows on Ahab’s cheek 
 and chin, will he or nill he, and Jezebel’s head is herbaged all over with 
 curls, growing while she sleeps. 
 
 Soon as Man outgrows the wild state of infancy, where he first ap¬ 
 peared, in his primitive sense of dependence he has always felt his need 
 of God, as in his instinctive perception he has always felt the Being of 
 God reflected therein, and formed some Notion of God, better or worse. 
 Go where you will, you find that men know God. The notions they form 
 of him vary from land to land, from age to age. They are the test of the 
 people’s civilization; how rude with the savage ! how comprehensive with 
 the enlightened, thoughtful, religious man! But no nation is without 
 them, or without a sense of obligation towards God or the practice of some 
 form of service of him. 
 
 The notion men form of God, and the corresponding service they pay, 
 are both proportionate to the people’s civilization. The Indian Massasoit’s 
 conception of God, two hundred and fifty years ago, fitted him as well as 
 ours fits us. Let us never forget this, nor think that we are proportion¬ 
 ately more favored than our fathers were. Little baby Jimmy in Penn¬ 
 sylvania, some seventy years ago, was as much pleased with a penny 
 trumpet, which worried his aunts and uncles, as President Buchanan now 
 is with the Presidency of the United States and power to scare all Dem¬ 
 ocrats into obedience. To us our fathers in 858 are barbarians, and we 
 wonder how they stood it in the world, so poorly furnished and provisioned 
 
29 
 
 as they were. You will be barbarians to your sons and daughters in 
 2858, and they will wonder how you continued to live and have a good 
 time of it. Yet you and I think life is decent and worth having. Milk 
 and a cradle are as good for babies as meat and railroad engines for men. 
 Small things suit little folks. So is it in religion as all else besides. I love 
 to read the religious stories of rude nations—the Hebrews, the Philistines, 
 the New England Indians. The Iroquois thought there were three Spirits, 
 the Spirit of Beans, of Squashes, and of Indian Corn, and these made an 
 Agricultural Trinity, three beneficent persons' in one rude conception of a 
 Mohawk God. Such a notion served their souls as well as the stone toma¬ 
 hawk and snow-shoe their hands and feet. Let us never forget that each 
 age is as sufficient to itself as any other age, the first as the last. The im¬ 
 mense progress between the two is also the law of God, who has so fur¬ 
 nished men that they shall find satisfaction for their wants, when they are 
 babies of savage wildness and when they are grown men of civilization. 
 
 From the beginning of human history there has been a continual pro¬ 
 gress of man’s conception of God. It did not begin with Jacob, Isaac and 
 Abraham ; it will not end with you and me. Yesterday I mentioned some 
 of the facts of this progress in the Bible, and pointed out the Jehovah of 
 the Pentateuch eating veal with Abraham and Sarah, wrestling with 
 Jacob, trying to kill Moses and not bringing it to pass; I showed the 
 odds between that conception of God and “ Our Father who art in hea¬ 
 ven,” which filled up the consciousness of Jesus, and the God who is Per¬ 
 fect Love, which abode in the consciousness of another great man. This 
 progress is observable in all other people, in the literature of every 
 nation. 
 
 Beligious progress cannot be wholly prevented ; it may be hindered and 
 kept back for a time. This is the mischief;—men form an ecclesiastical 
 organization, and take such a conception of God as satisfies them at the time, 
 stereotype it, and declare all men shall believe that forever. They say 
 This is a finality; there shall never be any other idea of God but this 
 same, no progress hereafter.” Then priests are made in the image of that 
 Deity, and they misshape whole communities of men and women ; and es¬ 
 pecially do they lay their plastic hand on the pliant matter of the child, 
 and inismould him into deformed and unnatural shapes. What an absurd¬ 
 ity ! In 1780, in a little town of Connecticut, Blacksmith Beecher, grim 
 all over with soot, leather-aproned, his sleeves rolled above his elbows, 
 with great, bare, hairy arms, was forging axes “ dull as a hoe,” and hoes 
 “ blunt as a beetle,” yet the best that men had in Connecticut in those 
 days. What if the Connecticut lumberers and farmers had come together, 
 and put it into their Saybrook Platform, that to the end of time all men 
 should chop with Beecher’s axes and dig with Beecher’s hoes, and he who 
 took an imperfection therefrom, his name should be taken from the Lamb’s 
 Book of Life, and he who should add an improvement thereto, the seven 
 last plagues should be added unto him! We all see the absurdity of such 
 a thing. In 1830, in Boston, Minister Beecher, grim with Calvinism, sur- 
 
30 
 
 pliced from his shoulders to his feet, Geneva-banded, white-choked, a 
 stalwart and valiant-minded son of the old blacksmith, was making a 
 theology—notions of Man, of God, and of the Relation between them. His 
 theological forge was in full blast in Hanover Street, then in Bowdoin Street, 
 and he wrought stoutly thereat, he striking while his parish blew. But 
 his opinions were no more a finality than his father’s axes and hoes. Let 
 Blacksmith Beecher, grim with soot, and Minister Beecher, grim with 
 theology, hammer out the best tools they can make, axes, hoes, doctrines, 
 sermons, and thank God if their work be of any service at that time; but 
 let neither the blacksmith over his forge, his triphammer going, nor the 
 minister over his pulpit, his Bible getting qftoted, ever say .to mankind, 
 “ Stop, gentlemen! thus far and no farther! I am the end of human history, 
 the last milestone on the Lord’s highway of progress ; stop here, use my 
 weapon, and die with it in your hand, or your soul.” Depend upon it, 
 mankind will not heed such men ; they will pass them by; whoso ob¬ 
 structs the path will be trodden down. Progress is the law of God. 
 
 At an early age the Christian Church accepted the Ecclesiastical Method 
 of theology, namely—that every word between the lids of the Bible is 
 given by God’s miraculous and infallible inspiration, which contains the 
 religious truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and to get 
 doctrines, men must make a decoction of Bible, and only of Bible, for that 
 is the unique herb out of which wholesome doctrines can be brewed. By 
 that method it formed its conception of God. First, it fixed the Ethical 
 Substance of God’s character, the quality of God, with all the contradictions 
 which you find in the Old Testament and the New. Next it fixed the 
 Arithmetical Form of God’s character, the quantitative distribution into 
 three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, alike in their Godhead, diverse 
 in their function. Thus the capability to produce was in the Father; the 
 capacity of being produced was in the Son; the capacity of being pro¬ 
 ceeded from was in the Father and the Son, and the capability of proceed¬ 
 ing was in the Holy Ghost. These are the differentia of the total Godhe'ad. 
 All that was fixed well-nigh fifteen hundred years ago. 
 
 Since that time there have been three great movements within the 
 Christian Church. First, an attempt to centralize ecclesiastical power in 
 the Bishop of Rome ; that was the Papal movement. Next was the at¬ 
 tempt to explain the ecclesiastical doctrines by human reason, not to alter 
 but expound and demonstrate by intellect what was accepted by faith ; 
 that was the Scholastic movement. Then came at last the attempt to de¬ 
 centralize ecclesiastical power, and bring back from the Roman Bishop to 
 the common people what he had filched thence away; that was the-Prot¬ 
 estant movement. It split the Western world in twain, following the 
 ethnological line of cleavage; and since that there is a Roman Church 
 with a Pope, and a Teutonic Church with a People. But the Papists and 
 their opponents the Laists, the Scholastics and their enemies the Dog¬ 
 matists, the Protestants and Catholics, all accepted the Ecclesiastical 
 
31 
 
 Melhod of theology, and so the Ecclesiastical Notion of God. So within 
 the borders of the Christian Church, from the Council at Nice in 325 to 
 the Council at North Woburn in 1857, there has been no revision of the 
 Conception of God, no improvement thereof. Protestant and Catholic, 
 Scholastic and Dogmatist, Laist and Papist, agree in the ethical subtances 
 of God and in the arithmetical form. The Athanasian creed set forth 
 both; in the fourth century it was appointed to be read in the churches. 
 What is called the “Apostles’ Creed” has little apostolic in it save 
 its name; yet it has been held orthodox for sixteen hundred and fifty 
 years. All this time there has been no progress in the ecclesiastical con¬ 
 ception of God, as set forth in the great sects of the Christian Church ; the 
 same creed which answered for the third century suffices the Church to¬ 
 day. So long as the Church holds to this ecclesiastical method of theology 
 there can be no progress in the notion of God, for only Biblical plants may 
 be put into the ecclesiastical caldron, and from them all only that concep¬ 
 tion can be distilled, though it may be flavored a little, diversely here and 
 there, to suit the taste of special persons. 
 
 But shall Mankind stop ? We cannot if we would. We can stereotype 
 a creed and hire men to read it, or scare, or coax them ; but a new Truth 
 from God shines straight down through creed and congregation, as that 
 sunlight through the sky. In the last four hundred years what a mighty 
 development has there been of human knowledge! In three hundred and 
 sixty years the geographic world has doubled; and what a development 
 in astronomy, chemistry, botany, zoology; in mathematics, metaphysics, 
 ethics, history! Hqw comprehensive is science now! But there has 
 been no development in the Church’s conception of God. The ecclesias¬ 
 tical God knows nothing of modern science—chemistry, geology, astron¬ 
 omy ; even the geographic extent of the earth is foreign thereto ; neither 
 Jehovah nor the ecclesiastical Trinity ever heard of Australia, of the 
 Friendly Islands, nor even of the Continent of America. The ecclesiastical 
 conception of God was formed before the discovery of America, before 
 modern science was possible. The two are not to be reconciled. Which 
 shall yield, the Fact of Science, or the Fiction of Theology? 
 
 Outside of the orthodox Christian Church there has been a great de¬ 
 velopment of the conception of God, a revision of it more or less complete, 
 certainly a great improvement. Thus the Unitarians rejected the Trinita¬ 
 rian arithmetic, and said, “ God is one nature in one person.” The Univer- 
 salists rejected the devilish element and said, “ God is love all over, and 
 is not hate anywhere.” Once it seemed as if these two sects would make 
 a revolution in the Church’s notion of God: but alas ! the Unitarians and 
 Universalists both accept the ecclesiastical method of theology, and when 
 they appeal to the miraculous and infallible Bible in support of their more 
 reasonable and religious notion of God, they are always beaten in that 
 court where Genesis is of as much value as the four Gospels, and murder¬ 
 ous Joshua as great a theological authority as beneficent Jesus. So when 
 they rely on the Bible, these sects are defeated, and draw back toward the 
 
32 
 
 old Church with its belief of a ferocious Deity ; this explains the condition 
 and character of these two valuable sects.. Accordingly, little good has come 
 from their movement, once so hopeful. They would change Measures and 
 Doctrines, but they would not alter the Principle which controls the mea¬ 
 sure, nor the Method whereby the doctrines are made ; and so these sects 
 leaven only a little of the whole lump; they do not create that great fer¬ 
 mentation which is necessary to make the whole Church take a new form. 
 How much depends on the first Principle, and the right Method! 
 
 How, by the Philosophic Method, a man takes the Facts of instinctive and 
 reflective Consciousness within him, and the Facts of Observation without, 
 and thence forms his Idea of God. He will be helped by the labors of such 
 as have gone before him, and will refuse to be hindered by the errors of 
 the greatest men. He will take the good things about God in this blessed 
 Bible, because they are good, but not a single ill thing will he take be¬ 
 cause it is in the Bible. “ God is love,” says a writer in the Hew Testament, 
 and our thoughtful man will accept that; but he will not feel obliged to 
 accept that other statement, in the Old Testament, that “ God is a con¬ 
 suming fire; ” or yet a kindred one in the Hew Testament, “ These shall 
 go away into everlasting punishment,” “ prepared for the devil and his 
 angels.” He will understand and believe that “ He that loveth is born of 
 God, and knoweth God; ” but he will not assent to this, which the Christian 
 Church teaches, “ He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved, but 
 he that believeth not shall be damned.” Because he accepts the 
 good and true of the Bible, he will not fall down and accept the false 
 and ill; for the ultimate standard of appeal will not be to a Book writ 
 with pens, as a minister interprets it, but to the Facts of the Universe, as 
 the human mind interprets them. 
 
 In philosophic men the reflective element prevails; but I do not think 
 the} 7, often have much intuitive power to perceive religious truths directly, 
 by the primal human instinct; nor do I think that they in the wisest way 
 observe the innermost activities of the human soul. Poets like Shakespeare 
 observe the play of human passion and ambition better than metaphysi¬ 
 cians like Berkeley and Hume, better than moralists like *Butler and Paley. 
 Commonly, I think, men and women of simple religious feeling furnish 
 the facts which men of great thoughtful genius work up into philosophic 
 theology. It is but rarely that any man has a genius for instinctive in¬ 
 tuition, and also for philosophic generalization therefrom. Such a man, 
 when he comes, fills the whole sky, from the nadir of special primitive 
 religious emotion up to the zenith of universal philosophic thought. You 
 and I need not wait for such men, but thankfully take the Truth, part by 
 part, here a little and there a little, and accept the service of whoso can 
 help, but taking no man for master—neither Calvin, nor Luther, nor Paul, 
 nor John, nor Moses, nor Jesus—open our soul to the Infinite God, who 
 is sure to come in without bell, book, or candle. 
 
33 
 
 When a man pursues this natural, philosophic method of theology, takes 
 his facts from consciousness in his own world, and observation in the 
 world of matter, then he arrives at the Philosophical Idea of the God of 
 Infinite Perfection. That God has all the qualities of complete and per¬ 
 fect being; He has Infinite Power to do, Infinite Mind to know, Infinite 
 Conscience to will the right, Infinite Affection to love, Infinite Holiness to 
 be faithful to his affections, conscience, mind, power. He has Being with¬ 
 out limitation, Absolute Being; he is present in all space, at all times; 
 everywhere always, as much as sometimes anywhere. He fills all spirit, 
 not less than all matter, yet is not limited by either, transcending both, 
 being alike the materiality of matter, and the spirituality of spirit—that 
 is, the substantiality which is the ground of each, and which surpasses 
 and comprehends all. He is Perfect Cause and Perfect Providence, cre¬ 
 ating all things from a perfect motive, of a perfect material, for a perfect 
 purpose, and as a perfect means, and to a perfect end. So, of all conceiv¬ 
 able worlds he makes the best possible, of all conceivable degrees of wel¬ 
 fare he provides the best in kind and the greatest in bulk, not only for all 
 as a whole, but for each as an individual, for Jesus of Hazareth who is 
 faithful, for Judas Iscariot who turns traitor. There is no Absolute Evil 
 in the world, either for the whole as all, nor for any one as part. 
 
 That is the Philosophic Idea of God and of his relation to the Universe. 
 To-day I state it short, for I have dwelt on it often before, and perhaps at 
 some other time I shall take up the idea part by part, and speak of God as 
 Infinite Power, then as Infinite Wisdom, then as Infinite Justice, as Infi¬ 
 nite Love, Infinite Integrity, and so on. 
 
 I think this Idea of God as Infinite Perfection, Perfect Power, Wisdom, 
 Justice, Love, Holiness, is the grandest thought which has ever come into 
 mortal mind. It is the highest result of human civilization. Let no man 
 claim it as his original thought; it is the result of all mankind’s religious 
 experience. It lay latent in human nature once, a mere instinctive reli¬ 
 gious feeling. At length it becomes a bright particular thought in some 
 j*reat mind; and one day will be the universal thought in all minds, and 
 will displace all other notions of God—Hindoo, Egyptian, Hebrew, Classic, 
 Christian, Mohammedan, just as the true theory of astronomy, which act¬ 
 ually explains the stars, displaced the Ptolemaic and all the other theories 
 whhic were only approximate; just as the iron axe displaced the toma¬ 
 hawk of stone. 
 
 The Evidence of this God is in man’s Consciousness and in the World of 
 Matter likewise outside of him. When the idea is presented to a thought¬ 
 ful man, he at once says, “ Yes, God is Infinite Perfection, Power, Wis¬ 
 dom, Justice, Holiness, Love,” for human nature is too strong for his the- 
 ologic prejudice. To prove there is'such a being as Jehovah, who met 
 Moses in a tavern between Midian and Egypt some thirty-three hundred 
 , years ago, and vainly tried to kill him, you must know Hebrew, and un¬ 
 derstand the antiquities of the Jews, know who wrote the Book of Exo¬ 
 dus, where he got his facts, what he meant by his words, what authority 
 3 
 
34 
 
 he rested on; and when you have made that investigation, the story will 
 turn out to be wind, and none the better because Hebrew wind thirty- 
 three hundred years old ; and after all that, you do not come to a fact 
 of the Universe, but only the fiction of a story-teller. But to prove the 
 Infinite Perfection of God, you have the facts in your own nature; 
 you are to sit down beside that primeval well and draw for yourself, 
 and drinking thence, you shall thirst no longer for heathen Abana and 
 Pharpar, the rivers of Gentile Damascus, nor for the Hebrew Jordan 
 itself, for you shall find there is a well of living water within you, spring¬ 
 ing up to everlasting life ; and as you drink, the scales of theologic leprosy 
 fall off from your eyes, and you stand there a clean man, full of the primi¬ 
 tive, aboriginal vigor of Humanity. As you look down into that depth of 
 consciousness do you behold the eternal and immutable Idea of the Infi¬ 
 nitely Perfect God forever mirrored there. This depends on no subjective 
 peculiarities of the individual, but on the objective forces of the Universe. 
 So, by its name to distinguish it from all other notions of God, I will call 
 this the Philosophical or Natural Idea of God; it seems to me a fact given 
 in Humanity itself, a self-evident truth of spiritual consciousness, some¬ 
 thing we discover in the Universe, not something we invent and project 
 thereon. So, while I name the others Conceptions of God, I call this the 
 Idea of God—the Philosophical Idea, because derived by that Method— 
 the Natural, because it corresponds to Nature. To this men will also add 
 conceptions of their own invention, which partake of the subjective pecu¬ 
 liarity of John or Jane. 
 
 I. This Idea of God is adequate to the Purposes of Science. First of 
 all things the philosopher wants an Adequate Cause for the Facts of the 
 Universe, both the World of Matter out of him, and the World of Spirit in 
 him. He is to explain facts by showing their mode of operation, and 
 tracing them back to the cause—to the proximate cause first, to the ulti¬ 
 mate cause at last. Now, as I showed before, the Ecclesiastical Conception 
 of God furnishes no adequate cause for the Facts of the Universe. To the 
 theologian it is cause sufficient for Noah’s flood, for the ark, for the down¬ 
 fall of Jericho when the rams’-horns blew, for the standiug still of the sun 
 and moon while a Hebrew army slew their victims;—it explains such 
 things as are not authenticated facts of history, but only anonymous fic¬ 
 tions of mythology. It is no adequate cause for the earth under our feet, 
 for the heavens over our head, and, least of all, for this earth and heaven 
 of human consciousness within us. The ecclesiastical God is sufficient 
 cause for the Westminster Catechism, for baptism, by sprinkling or plunging, 
 for belief in eternal damnation, for admission to Dr. Banbaby’s Church— 
 but it does not explain a mother’s love for her wicked, profligate girl; nor 
 David’s wailing over his worthless, handsome boy : u O Absalom, my son! 
 my son Absalom ! would God that I had died for thee!”—there is no fact in 
 the ecclesiastical God’s consciousness which corresponds to that. It is not 
 
35 
 
 cause for such a man as Socrates, or Franklin, nor such women as Miss 
 Dix and Miss Nightingale, and others not less noble, only less known. It 
 explains Pharaoh’s dream about fat and leankine; the story of Elisha’s 
 cursing the children who cried after him, “Go up, thou bald head, go,” 
 and of the two she-bears out of the woods who tore two and forty ot those 
 children to atoms in Divine and bearish wrath—but it does not explain 
 the life of such a man as Jesus of Nazareth, nor his lament, “ 0 Jerusalem, 
 Jerusalem!” It does not account for that grandest of human triumphs, 
 
 “ Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”' To explain 
 such characters the ecclesiastical conception of God is no more adequate 
 cause than the penny-trumpet in a little boy’s' mouth is sufficient to ex¬ 
 plain the world of music which Beethoven dreamed into thought and then 
 poured forth, gladdening the earth with such sweet melody. Read the 
 Book of Genesis, then read Newton’s Principia, Humboldt’s Kosmos, nay, 
 any college manual of chemistry, and ask if the theologic God is cause 
 adequate to the chemic composition of a single flower! Nay, read the 
 stories in Genesis, or the sermons in Jonathan Edwards, and then in some 
 starry night look up to the sky, and ask if that form of Deity could have 
 conceived the heavens ? You see at once how insufficient it is. 
 
 But the God of Infinite Perfection is Adequate Cause for all the facts 
 in the Universe. In the world of matter you find Power resident on the 
 spot; Mind resident on the spot, a Plan everywhere, things working to¬ 
 gether in order. The world of matter is a “ team of little atomies,” thing 
 yoked to thing, and skilfully are they drove afield by that Almighty One 
 whose thoughtful road is everywhere. All is orderly—never a break in 
 the line of continuity. In the fossil animals which perished a million of 
 years ago you find proximate formations which point to man; nay, }et 
 further back in the structure of the earth, the fashion of the solar system 
 itself, do we find finger-posts which indicate the road to humanity—dis-, 
 tinctly pointing unto man. There is Law always, a constant mode of ope¬ 
 ration, never a miracle ; no chemist, geologist, astronomer, can show proof 
 of the “ intervention of God,” but the Power, Mind, Law, constant mode 
 of operation, these show the presence of God always, everywhere, ordering 
 all things “ by number and measure and weight.” The chemist analyzes 
 matter into some sixty primitive substances, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, 
 carbon, and the rest; but of all that “ team of atomies ” not a single brute 
 creature ever thinks a thought; it is in God that the Mind resides, in 
 him is the Power and the Plan. Mr. Whewell, a theological man indeed, 
 but yet also, I think, certainly one of the ablest and most dispassionate 
 men of science in these days, writes a book against the Plurality of Worlds, 
 and declares there is no conscious life analogous to man’s in any planet, in 
 sun, or moon, or star: it is a dead world up there ; the sun is a dead sun, 
 the moon is dead as brass, and there is no life in any star. Why so? It 
 is not consistent with the Ecclesiastical Notion of God; the Book of Mira¬ 
 culous Revelation never gives us a hint of a living thing in sun or moon 
 or star ; the Plan of Atonement applies only to the earth, it cannot reach 
 
36 
 
 an inch beyond the atmosphere, which extends about fifty-two miles from 
 the surface! Mr. Whewell is right—a plurality of worlds is wholly in¬ 
 consistent with the ecclesiastical God; there is no record that such a 
 thought ever crossed the mind of Moses, Jesus, Paul or John, that it ever 
 occurred to Hebrew Jehovah or Christian Trinity. But it is not incon¬ 
 sistent with the Infinite God, and the philosopher who believes in him will 
 not correct the facts of Nature by the fictions of Genesis. To him, how 
 different the World of Matter appears, one grand act of creative power, 
 which is everywhere active at all times. 
 
 Then when this Idea is accepted no philosopher will be bid to look for 
 a miracle, and called an “ infidel ” because he finds only Law—law in 
 the botanic growth of plants, law in the chemic composition of minerals, 
 law in the mechanic structure of the earth, the sun, the solar system, the 
 Universe itself. Then there will be no atheistic Lagranges and La Places 
 to deny all God, because they do not find the phantom which theolo¬ 
 gians bid them seek, and because their telescope bores through the spot 
 where the New Jerusalem was said to be, and finds but blank celes¬ 
 tial space! From the scheme of matter and of mind no brilliant Schelling, 
 no cautious, erudite Yon Buch, no comprehensive, magnificent, generous, 
 and thousand-minded Yon Humboldt shall ever omit the Cause and Provi¬ 
 dence of matter and of mind! 
 
 Then, too, how different will the great complex world of Human His¬ 
 tory appear ! Men will study it without hindrance, asking only for facts, 
 for the law of the facts, and the human meaning of the law. They will 
 find no miracle in man’s religious history, but a continual development of 
 a faculty common to all mankind, a gradual progress in religious feeling, 
 religious thought, religious act; no savage nation without consciousness 
 of God, a sense of dependence, obligation, gratitude—aye, and trust in 
 him, and something of love for him “even in savage bosoms”—all this 
 proportionate to the people’s civilization. The philosopher will find God 
 in all human history, in the gradual elevation of mankind from the low 
 state of the wild man, to higher and higher types of excellence. 
 
 Jehovah is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; he inspires only 
 Jews, them not much. He hates Esau, and butchers the Canaanites. To 
 the Gentiles he is not a loving God, but a hating Devil. The ecclesiastical 
 God is a Redeemer only to the redeemed—a handful of men, rather mean 
 men too, I fear, most of them. What is he to babies dying unbaptized ? 
 What to the wicked whom death cuts down in their unrepented naugh¬ 
 tiness ? He is not God, but a “ consuming fire; ” he is “ the Devil and his 
 angels ” to such; not the God of love, but a “ great and dreadful God,” 
 who laughs when their fear cometh, and crushes Sodom and Gomorrah 
 under his fiery hail; and, all bloody with battle, tramples populous Idumea 
 under foot, as a Bacchanalian treads the wine-press full of purple-blooded 
 grapes! 
 
 With the philosophical Idea, there is a God for all nations, for all men, 
 inspiring liberal Greece and prudent Rome not less than pious Judea—a 
 
37 
 
 God for babies sprinkled, and for babies all unsmooched by priestly hands; 
 a God for Jacob and Esau, Jew and Gentile; a God to whom mankind is 
 dear, Father and Mother to the human race ! Then you can explain hu¬ 
 man history: the diverse talents of Egyptian, Hindoo, Persian, Hebrew, 
 Greek, Teuton, Celt, American, these are various gifts, which imply no 
 partial love on the part of him who makes yon oak a summer green, yon 
 pine a winter green. You find the Infinite God in human history, as in 
 the world of matter; for as the plan of material combination, mineral, 
 vegetable, animal, did not reside in any one of the sixty primitive sub¬ 
 stances, nor in the world of minerals, plants, animals, but in God, who is 
 the thoughtful substance to these unthinking forms—so the plan of human 
 history is not in Abraham, Isaac, Jacob; it is not in the whole world of 
 men, but in the Infinite God, who is the Providence that shapes our ends 
 to some grand purpose which we know not of. Thus the true idea of 
 God is adequate to the Purposes of Science both of matter and man. 
 
 II. This Idea of God is also adequate to the Purposes of Religion. 
 For that I want not merely a cause sufficient to my intellect, but much 
 more. I want a God I can trust and have absolute confidence in, so that I 
 am sure of him. Now the savage may confide in a God of blood, a partial 
 God, who loves Jacob and hates Esau; an inconstant and irregular God, 
 who works by fits and starts, who is absent now for a long time, and then 
 comes in with miraculous pomp, signs, and wonders. A malignant man 
 may be content for a moment with his vengeful Deity, who hates the wicked 
 and will torment them forever ; but soon as a man is considerably enlight¬ 
 ened in his mind, conscience, heart and soul, soon as he comprehends the 
 Power that is everywhere always, active and acting for good, then that 
 savage deity is not enough for him. He wants not only infinite Ability,— 
 power of Force to do, power of Mind to plan, and Will to execute, but 
 also power of Conscience to will right, and the Infinite power of Affec¬ 
 tion to love all men and all things, using this energy of will, mind, 
 force, for the welfare of each man—nay, of every mote that peoples this 
 little leaf. That quality is not in the ecclesiastical God; here it is in 
 the true God of earth and heaven and human consciousness. He is 
 perfect creating Cause, making all things of the best possible material, 
 from the best possible motives, for the best possible purpose, and as the 
 best possible means to achieve that purpose. He is perfect conserving 
 Providence, who is as perfectly, completely and essentially present in this 
 little rosebud which I hold in my hand, as he was when^as the Biblical 
 poet has it, “ the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God 
 shouted for joy,” at the creation of the earth, just springing into new-born 
 stellar life. He administers all things by the perfect method, with the 
 best of means, and will secure the best of ends for you and me, for each 
 man, saint and sinner, for the poor widow who supplicates and the unjust 
 judge who fears not God, neither regards man. 
 
 By the ecclesiastical notion there is Absolute Evil in God, a dark deep 
 
38 
 
 background, out of which comes evil in the nature of things; and hence 
 comes the total depravity of man, hence the wrath of God, enlivening for¬ 
 ever the fire of hell, which no deluge of human tears and blood can ever 
 quench. So the Evil in the world is eternal, not reconciled, not atoned for; 
 it cannot be removed, neither in this life nor that to come, because it is an 
 essential part of God. Nine hundred and ninety-nine men out of a thou¬ 
 sand are sinners, and their sin is eternal, not to be removed; so their agony 
 has no end. Trace it back logically to its ultimate cause, and it is all 
 God’s fault. So every sin not repented of that you and I commit, is not 
 only perpetual wretchedness for us, but likewise an eternal blot on the 
 character of the ecclesiastical God. Under the parlor windows of his 
 little Heaven, where the elect loll on their couches and look out, indolently 
 touching their harps of gold, there lies the immeasurable Sink of Hell, 
 where the Devils, those unclean beasts of the infernal world, wallow con¬ 
 tinual, rending the souls of men, while the reek of their agony ascends up 
 forever and ever! 
 
 But by the true and philosophic or natural Idea of God, all the Evil of 
 the world is something incident to man’s development, and no more per¬ 
 manent than the stumbling of a child who learns to walk, or his scrawling 
 letters when he first essays to write. It will be outgrown, and not a par¬ 
 ticle of it or its consequences shall cleave permanent to mankind. This is 
 true of the individual wrongs which you and I commit; and likewise of 
 such vast wickedness as war, political oppression, and the hypocrisy of 
 priesthoods. These are blots in mankind’s writing-book, which we make 
 in learning to copy out God’s Eternal Rule of Right in fair round let¬ 
 ters, so clear that he may read who runs. The very pain the error gives 
 is remedial, not revengeful; it is medicine to cure and save and bless, not 
 poison to kill and torture with eternal smart. Here then is a God you can 
 trust—Power, Wisdom, Will, Justice also, and likewise Love. What quality 
 is there a man can ask for that is not in the Infinite, Perfect God ? 
 
 Then there will be a Form of Religion adapted to represent such an idea 
 of God. It will conform to Man’s Nature, his body and soul, doing justice 
 to every part, for as God made man with such faculties as would best 
 serve his own great end, so it is clear that ft is man’s duty to use these 
 faculties in their natural way, for their normal purpose. God did not 
 make man with something redundant to be cut off, or lacking something 
 to be sought elsewhere and tied on; he gave us such faculties as are fit for 
 our work. 
 
 1. See the effect this idea has on Piety. A natural religious instinct 
 inclines us to love God. If we have an Idea of him which suits that faculty, 
 then the soul loves God as the eye loves light, the ear sound, as the mind 
 loves truth, use and beauty, the conscience justice, and the affections men 
 and women. The hungry religious faculty seeks for itself bread, finds it, and 
 is filled with strength and delight. If it find it not, then we are tortured 
 by Fear, that ugly raven which preys on the dissatisfied heart of man. 
 
Now the Infinite God is the object of entire and complete satisfaction to 
 the Soul. You want perfect power for your reverence, perfect wisdom 
 for your intellect, perfect justice for your conscience, perfect love for your 
 affections, perfect integrity for your soul: and here they all are in the in¬ 
 finitely perfect God. So piety will be complete in all its parts, and perfect 
 too in each. I cannot love a Wicked man as a good man, nor a foolish and 
 unjust man as one wise and just; no more can I love a foolish God, nor an 
 unjust God, nor a hating God. In proportion as I am wise, just, humane, 
 shall I hate such a God, and repudiate the shameful thought. But the 
 perfect God—I cannot help loving him just in proportion to my excellence. 
 He made me so. I put it to the consciousness of every one of you, is it not 
 so ? When God is thus presented as infinitely perfect, can you refrain 
 from loving him with your intellect, your conscience, heart and soul? 
 No more than the healthy eye can fail to enjoy the light; no more than 
 the hungry, healthy appetite can help rejoicing in its natural food, the 
 maiden in her lover, or the bridegroom in his bride! 
 
 2. Not less does this Idea of God affect Morality, the other part of 
 religion. I find certain ideal rules of conduct writ on my body and in 
 my spirit. By inward and outward experience gradually I learn these 
 rules—the laws of God, enacted by him into my flesh and soul. I shall 
 try to keep these laws; I know they are his commandment. I sjiall turn 
 every faculty to its special work. My general piety, the love of God, shall 
 come out in my normal daily work, in temperance and chastity, the piety 
 of the body ; in knowledge of the true, the useful, the beautiful, the piety 
 of the intellect; in justice for all men, the piety of the conscience; in 
 affection for all in their various relations to me, in love for my friend, kin¬ 
 dred, wife and child, which is the piety of the heart; yes, it will appear 
 in continual trust, in absolute reliance on the Infinite God, which is the 
 great total generic piety of the soul. 
 
 Then Religion will not be away off, one side of my life, separate from 
 my daily duty as brother, sister, son, father, mother; not apart from my 
 work as blacksmith, governor, shoemaker, minister, nurse, seamstress, 
 baby-tender, cook, editor, judge, or whatever I may be; but the soul of 
 piety will make religion in all these things. It will not be an exception 
 in my life, condensed into a single moment of morning or of evening 
 prayer; it will be the instance of my life, spread as daylight over all my 
 work. 
 
 One day this Idea of God will shine in human consciousness, and all 
 the rude conceptions which now prevail will vanish as Moloch, Baal, Zeus, 
 Jupiter, Odin, and Thor have faded out from the religion of all live man¬ 
 kind. To-day nobody prays to, nor swears by these names, whereunto mil¬ 
 lions of men once fell prostrate and poured out such sacrificial blood. One 
 day the God of Infinite Perfection shall be felt and known by all mankind! 
 Then no bigot, ignorant as a beast, shall essay to rebuke thoughtful men 
 
40 
 
 where he knows nothing and they know much. No longer shall priests—ill- 
 born to little talent, ill-bred to superstition, ignorance and bad manners— 
 thrust their anointed stupidity in between man and God; no longer shall 
 fanaticism pinch the forehead of the people; no longer shall it mutilate 
 the fair body of man, nor practise yet more odious emasculation on the 
 soul. Religion shall not mildew and rot the fruit of manhood ; nor blast 
 the bloom of youth; nor nip the baby bud: but the strongest force in our 
 nature shall warm and electrify the whole plant of humanity, helping the 
 baby bud swell into youthful bloom, and ripen into manly fruit, golden and 
 glorious amid the sheltering leaves of human life. To youth, religion shall 
 give a rosier flush of healthy joy ; to maid and man shall it bring strength, 
 more stalwart and a lovelier beauty, cheering them through their single 
 or their married toilsome life ; and it shall set its kingliest diadem, a crown 
 of heavenly stars, on the experienced brow of age. 
 
 To-day “all Christendom is Christian.” Why? It has the ecclesias¬ 
 tical method, the ecclesiastical conception of God, a mode of salvation by 
 another man’s religion, not our own. Let me do no injustice. It has the 
 best form of religion the world has devised yet on any large scale, which 
 has done great service ; but in all Christendom ecclesiastical Christianity 
 hinders no war, it breaks no tyrant’s rod, it never liberates a slave, eman¬ 
 cipates no woman, shuts up no drunkery, removes no cause of ignorance, 
 poverty, or crime, cherishes the gallows; it is no bar to the politician’s 
 ambition, all reckless of the natural rights of man; it never checks a 
 pope or priest in his hypocrisy. Every monster is sure to have this eccle¬ 
 siastical form of religion on his side, and when Napoleon or President 
 Buchanan wishes to do a special wicked deed, he bends his public knees 
 and supplicates his ecclesiastic God, the name in which all evil begins. 
 
 But the true Idea of God, the Religion which is to come of it, which-is 
 love of that God and keeping all his commandments, will work such a rev¬ 
 olution in man’s affairs as Luther, nor Moses, nor yet mightiest Jesus 
 ever wrought. God everywhere, Infinite Wisdom, Justice, Love, and In¬ 
 tegrity, Religion in all life, over the anvil, in the pulpit, beside the cradle, 
 on the throne—what a new world shall that make, when the great river 
 of God runs in the channel he made for it, singing melodies as it runs, 
 and sending the spray up from its bosom to fertilize whole continents, 
 which shall break out into flowers, that ripen into fruit, the very leaves for 
 the healing of the nations ! 
 
41 
 
 SERMON IV. 
 
 OF THE SOUL’S NORMAL DELIGHT IN THE INFINITE GOD. 
 
 “ I will behold thy face in righteousness: I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with thy like¬ 
 ness.”—Ps. xvii. 15. 
 
 If a man be sure of the Infinite Perfection of God, the natural object 
 of desire for all his nobler faculties, what tranquillity and delight is there for 
 him; not spasmodic and violent, but equable and continuous! Then the 
 strongest of all the human powers finds what most of all it needs; and the 
 highest, the greatest of all human delights peoples the consciousness with 
 this Holy Family of Love. I do not wonder that all men are not rich—it 
 is not possible ; nor famous—that, too, is beyond the reach of all save one 
 in a million, even if each were so foolish as to wish he had a great name 
 always rattling behind him, filling his ears with dust and silly noise. It is 
 not to be supposed that all men will pre-eminently be wise, or witty; nay, 
 not even learned. It does not astonish me that no more try for such 
 things, though feeling yet their charm. But I am amazed that any one 
 should be content to trudge along through life without a good culture of 
 the religious faculty. I should of all things hate to be poor in Piety and 
 Morality. Above all things I would know God and live in tranquil glad¬ 
 someness with him. 
 
 When a little boy, I used to hear ministers preach that the natural man 
 did not love God ; but I was sure the natural Boy did. They said that 
 Religion was something man naturally turned off from and avoided, and 
 only the Holy Ghost could catch and bring him painful back. I con¬ 
 fess I was filled with wonder, for to my young experience it seemed as 
 natural for a man, at least a boy, to worship God, to love God, to trust in 
 him, and feel a delight in him, as it was for my father’s bees to get wax 
 and honey from the yellow blossoms of the willow or the elm—the first 
 flowers of the late Northern Spring—or to revel in the lilacs which hung 
 over the bee-house, or rejoice in the white clover of New England, that, 
 beautifying the fields all around, wooed those little bridegrooms to its 
 fragrant and sweet breast. No theological education and gray-bearded 
 experience with mankind makes me now wonder less when I hear the old 
 calumny repeated for the thousandth time. 
 
 Look all the world over, and see how man delights in God. These 
 roses do not unveil and disclose their fair bosoms to the sun more naturally 
 than spontaneous man opens his soul to God and welcomes the great Star, 
 shedding infinite daylight therein. Men with fire sacrificing their sons 
 unto Moloch, or Jehovah, men crushed before the car of Juggernaut, men 
 
42 
 
 in convents, women emaciated to nuns, crowds of men in Philadelphia, 
 New York, Berlin, and London, thrilled with bristling horror at the ter¬ 
 rible phantom which some bony Calvinist calls out of his dark imagination 
 to scare them withal, these testify of the necessity man feels to' turn his 
 face towards God; and if he find not the true, then will he fasten on some 
 cheating substitute. If there be no God that he can love, then he crouches 
 down beneath the conception of some God of Damnation, and is horrified 
 with fear. The Soul, like the mouth, goes ever, and must be fed, if not on 
 what it would, then at least on the best it finds. 
 
 Mankind takes great delight in its religious consciousness. With what 
 joy did Egypt build up its pyramids, and from a mountain Brahmanic In¬ 
 dians hew their rock-cut temples out! The wondrous architecture of the 
 Ionian Greeks in many a marble town, the fantastic mosques of the Mo- 
 hammedaus, the arabesques of Moslem piety, the amazing churches of the 
 mediaeval Christians—all these were built with solemn joy ! Not without 
 delight did laborious men express the nation’s gloomy religious conscious¬ 
 ness in these things. Phoenicians worshipping Melkartha, Siamese pros¬ 
 trate before their great idol of a silver Buddha, Nootka Sound Indians alia 
 rainy day sitting on the eaves of their god-house and drumming with the 
 naked feet, Catholics on Easter Sunday, kneeling by thousands before St. 
 Peter’s that the Pope may say “Peace be with you! ” Protestants crowding 
 to a camp-meeting or a revival—all these are witnesses to this great re¬ 
 ligious instinct, stronger than all outward force, which moves them toward 
 the Divine. 
 
 I think my own life has not been lacking in happiness of a high charac¬ 
 ter. I have swam in clear sweet waters all my days ; and if sometimes 
 they were a little cold, and the stream ran adverse and something rough, 
 it was never too strong to be breasted and swam through. From the days 
 of earliest boyhood, when I went “ stumbling through the grass,” “ as merry 
 as a May bee,” up to the gray-bearded manhood of this time, there is none 
 but has left me honey in the hive of memory, that I now feed on for pres¬ 
 ent delight. When I recall the years of boyhood, youth, early manhood, 
 I am filled with a sense of sweetness, and wonder that such little things 
 can make a mortal so exceeding rich! But I must confess that the 
 chiefest of all my delights is still the religious. This is the lowest down, 
 the inwardest of all—it is likewise highest up. What delight have I in 
 my consciousness of God, the certainty of his protection, of his Infinite 
 Love! There is an Infinite Father—nay, Infinite Mother is the dearer and 
 more precious name—who takes a special care of me, and has made this 
 world, with its vast forces, to serve and bless me, an Elias chariot on 
 which I shall ride to heaven—nay, am riding that way all the time! God 
 loves me as my natural mother never did, nor could, nor can even now 
 with the added beatitudes of well-nigh two score years in heaven. I stand 
 on the top of the world—all the stars shine for me. But he loves just as 
 well the little boy, black as my coat, born this hour in some wigwam of 
 South Africa, and will take just as special care thereof, and has made the 
 
43 
 
 Universe a chariot of fire to translate that little black Elias to heaven with¬ 
 al ; he also stands on the top of the world and has a life-estate in the sun 
 and moon and every star. Nay, God takes just as good care of the mouse 
 which gnaws the grocer’s cheese to-day, nor never for a moment neglects 
 the little aphis now sucking this leaf; nor the parasitic animalcule which 
 feeds on the aphis, the atomy of an atomy. They also stand on the top 
 of the world, this great Celestial Sphere whereof God is both centre and 
 circumference. Consciousness of that God, the Cause and Providence of all 
 the world, it fills me with such delight as all the world besides can never 
 give! I wonder any one who ever opened half an eye inwardly, could 
 dream that Religion is unnatural to man, that Piety is not welcome to our 
 innermost as are these roses welcome to the Spring. For what I say of 
 me is also true of you, if not of each, why, certainly, of most—’tis true of 
 Man, if not of men. 
 
 In great Italian towns, all winter long, you shall see men and women, 
 too old, perhaps, for work, yet not quite poor enough for professional beg¬ 
 gary, wrinkled as Egyptian mummies ; they crawl out of their hovels and 
 creep through the cold darkness of the lanes they live in, and, screened 
 from the wind under the wall of some great church, palace, or monastery, 
 they nestle all day in the yellow sunshine of the sky, so happy in that 
 light which gives them also necessary warmth do those venerable babies 
 seem, blest by that great star which shines forever on them, though six 
 and ninety million miles away! In New England or Pennsylvania, when 
 the spring thaws out the farm-house, and, speck by speck, the dry earth 
 appears green with healthy grass, and the fresh smell of the ground, such 
 as you find it at no other time, cotnes up a wholesome breath, some pale, 
 little tall girl, toddling about the narrow kitchen all winter long, looking 
 thin and peaked, comes out to revel in the sunshine and the new grass. 
 The breath of the ground is the inspiration of health to her; the eye, dim 
 and sunken just now, ere long glows like the morning star in that young 
 heaven, and the pale cheek has the bloom of the ruddy clover in it too. 
 By-and-bye, the mother, careful and troubled about many things, tells the 
 neighbors at meeting on Sunday, “ O, Jinnie’s quite another girl now the 
 spring’s come from what she was in February and March. The winter 
 went hard with her, poor thing; I and her father begun to think she’d 
 melt away before the snow did! I think she’ll get along nicely now! ” 
 What the sun is to the sickly girl whom winter pent up in the narrow 
 house, and to the lazzaroni at Naples, whose poverty allows him no nearer 
 fire and light, that is the Religious Consciousness to you and me; yes, to 
 all men in all lands, in every age save the rudest of all. 
 
 I do not see how any one can live without it; I think none ever does. 
 As the body on the material world, so the soul must live on God, that uni¬ 
 versal motherly bosom to warm and feed mankind. All over the world 
 do you find the sweet and holy flower of Piety springing out of the ground 
 of humanity, common as grass on the earth, or stars above it. Early 
 literature is full of religion. Man’s first psalm is of God; so little babies 
 
44 
 
 first of all things say Mamma, Papa. Theology is the oldest of all science 
 —this queen mother of many knowledges. Amid all the babble of shrewd, 
 noisy tongues, this language of heaven, spoken in a still small voice, is yet 
 understood of all mankind. Civilized people have their Bibles, Chinese, 
 Indian, Persian, Hebrew, Christian, Mohammedan, writ with pens, but 
 yet thought inspired of God. The savage also has his Bible, far older, 
 yet not writ with pens. Mr. Cartier, who went among the North 
 American Indians in the sixteenth century, says : “ A day seldom passes 
 with an elderly Indian, or others who are esteemed wise and good, in 
 which a blessing is not asked or thanks returned to the Giver of all life, 
 sometimes audibly, but most generally in the devotional language of the 
 heart.” Another missionary amongst them says, when the Indian party 
 broke up their winter encampment, they went to the spring which had 
 furnished them water, and thanked the Great Spirit who had preserved 
 them in health and safety, and supplied their wants. “ You then witness 
 the silent but deeply impressive communion which the unsophisticated 
 native of the forest holds with his Creator.” 
 
 “ Every human heart is human, 
 
 And even in savage bosoms 
 
 There are longings, yearnings, strivings, 
 
 For the good they comprehend not; 
 
 And the feeble hands and helpless, 
 
 Groping blindly in the darkness, 
 
 Touch God’s right hand in that darkness, 
 
 And are lifted up and strengthened.” 
 
 Do not think that God knows only such as u know Christ,” or Moses. 
 He is no respecter of persons. The footsteps of religion, you see them in 
 the dew of the world’s early morning; they are deeply set in the primeval 
 rock of human history. How multitudinous are the conceptions of God, 
 all meant to satisfy the soul which longs for Him! The appetite for food, 
 the instinct for dress, how many experiments they make! Humanity could 
 not dispense with one of them. 
 
 “ The lively Grecian in a land of hills, 
 
 Rivers and fertile plains and sounding shores,” 
 
 “ Could find commodious place for every God.” 
 
 “In despite 
 
 Of the gross fictions chanted in the streets 
 By wandering rhapsodists, and in contempt. 
 
 Of doubt and blind denial, hourly urged 
 Amid the wrangling schools, a spirit hung, 
 
 Beautiful vision, o’er thy towns and farms, 
 
 Statues and temples and memorial tombs'; 
 
 And emanations were perceived ; and acts 
 Of immortality, in Nature’s course, 
 
 Exemplified by mysteries that were felt 
 As bonds on grave Philosopher imposed 
 And armed warrior; and in every grove 
 A gay or pensive tenderness prevailed, 
 
 When Piety more awful had relaxed.” 
 
45 
 
 “ And doubtless sometimes a thought arose 
 Of Life continuous, Being unimpaired: 
 
 That hath been, is, and where it was and is, 
 Then shall endure—existence unexposed 
 To the blind walk of mortal accident; 
 
 From diminution safe, and weakening age, 
 While man grows old and dwindles and decays; 
 And countless generations of Mankind 
 Depart, and leave no vestige where they trod.” 
 
 Trust me, none is wholly without God in the world. Even in the wick¬ 
 edest of men there must be yet some line of light lying along their horizon, 
 where the great Heavenly Sun, ur^een, unknown, refracts his rays in the 
 dense air, and, stooping down, touches with fire the edge of their little 
 kingdom of earth; at least some little Northern Light of superstition, 
 which is also a dawn, flickers in their cold, cloudy sky: else in their Arctic 
 winter, even piratical murderers or manstealing, dogs would go mad at 
 feeling such Egyptian darkness, and would die outright. 
 
 But yet there are, certainly, great differences among men in respect to 
 their internal Consciousness of Religion. In our great towns there are mil- 
 lionnaires; also are there paupers, beggars there. What an odds between 
 these devotees of money! So are there likewise paupers of religious con¬ 
 sciousness, clad with but a few rags of pious experience, rudely stitched 
 with an oath or a momentary aspiration, pasted together here and 
 there with religious fear—a covering all too scant—and through the 
 loops and rents of this spiritual raiment the hitter winds of life blow in 
 upon the smarting soul. There are also great Capitalists of Religion, Mil- 
 lionnaires of Piety and Morality, whose long life industriously spent in holy 
 feeling, holy thinking, holy work, has given them a great real and personal 
 Estate of Religion, whence they have now a daily income of spiritual de¬ 
 light. This triumph of the soul you often find in men of no outward dis¬ 
 tinction, sometimes furnished with but little learning—the religious their 
 only spiritual wealth. But the highest religious delight is not found in 
 these monsters of piety, only in well-proportioned characters, when all the 
 faculties are fully grown and trained up well. For the religious is a mix¬ 
 ture likewise of all other joys, and, like manna, “hath the taste of all in it.” 
 
 It is not fair to expect much religious experience in the Child. Rever¬ 
 ence for the All-in-All, gratitude for his genial providence, the disposition 
 to trust this Divine Mother, and to keep the laws of conscience, that is all 
 we should commonly look for at an early age. The fair fruits of religion 
 come only at a later day, not in April or May, but only in September and 
 October. Nay, there are winter-fruits of religion, which are not fully 
 ripe till the trees bloom again, and the grandfather of fourscore years, sees 
 the little plants flowering under his shadow ; not till then, perhaps, are the 
 great rich winter pears of religion fully perfect in their luscious ripeness. 
 
 Yet the religious disposition is a blessed thing, even in childhood. 
 How it inclines the little boy or girl to veneration and gratitude—virtues, 
 
46 
 
 which in the child are what good breeding is in the full-grown gentleman, 
 giving a certain air of noble birth and well-bred superiority. There is a 
 Jacob’s ladder for our young pilgrim, whereon he goes up from his earthly 
 mother, who manages the little room he sleeps in, to the dear Heavenly 
 Mother, who never slumbers nor sleeps, who is never careful and troubled 
 about any thing, but yet cares continually for the great housekeeping of 
 all the world, giving likewise to her beloved even in their sleep. In the 
 child it is only the faint twilight, the beginnings of religion which you take 
 notice of, like the voice of the bluebird, and the Phoebe, coming early in 
 March, but only as a prelude to that whole summer of joyous song, which, 
 when the air is delicate, will ere long gladden and beautify the procreant 
 nest. 
 
 Painful is it to see a child whose religious culture has been neglected; 
 the heavenly germ attempting growth, but checked by weeds, which no 
 motherly hand plucks up or turns away. More painful to see it forced to 
 unnatural hot-bed growth, to be succeeded by helpless imbecility at last. 
 Worse still to find the young soul cursed with false doctrines, which film 
 over the eye till it cannot see the Sun of Righteousness rising with such 
 healing in his beams, and make life a Great Dark Day, hideous with fear 
 and devils, and amazed with the roar of greedy hell! Such ill-entreated 
 souls often grow idiotic in their religious sense, or else, therein stark mad 
 and penned up in churches and other asylums, mope and gibber in their 
 hideous bereavement, thinking “ man is totally depraved,” and God a great 
 ugly devil, an almighty cat, who worries his living prey, tormenting them 
 before their time, and will forever tear them to pieces in the never-ending 
 agony of hell! It is terrible to hear the sermons, hymns, and prayers, 
 which these unfortunates wail out in their religious folly or delirium. To 
 cause one of these little ones to offend in that way, it were better that a 
 millstone were hanged about the father or the mother’s neck, and they 
 were drowned in the depths of the sea. I say it is but the beginning of 
 religion that we find in the tender age; twilight or sunrise, seldom more. 
 The time of piety is not yet. Blame not the little tree; in due season it 
 will litter the ground with purple figs. 
 
 In later years you see the flowers of religion, you taste the fruit of its 
 gladdening consciousness of God. In early manhood there are temptations 
 of instinctive passion, which clamors for its object, and cares but little 
 with what its hungry maw is fed. In later manhood, there are tempta¬ 
 tions of ambition, a subtler and more deceitful peril. I know nothing but 
 religion that is commonly able to defend us from either'; this is strong 
 enough for each, for both together. 
 
 Young Esau is hungry; the pottage is savory. Desire from within 
 leagues with Occasion from without. “No other eye is on me,” quoth 
 he. His pulses throb ; the lightning, the earthquake, the fire of passion, 
 pass with swift tumultuous roar along his consciousness. But the nice 
 ear of Conscience listens to the still small voice of Duty, “Remember 
 

 47 
 
 now thy Creator in the clays of thy youth.” He turns him off from 
 her snare, charm she never so wisely, and if he fail of the pottage, 
 he is not poisoned with the wild-gourds stirred therein; with chaste 
 hand he keeps his birthright of integrity. “ Wherewith shall a young man 
 cleanse his ways ? ” asks young Esau, but from his religious soul the an¬ 
 swer straightway comes: u By taking heed to the law of Duty, clearly 
 writ and plain to read.” He drinks clean water out of his own sweet 
 spring, and thirsts no more for the tepid tanks of vice, dirty and defiling. 
 His natural passion is directed by its natural master, and what is so often 
 the foe of youth becomes his ally and invigorating friend. 
 
 In a later day more dangerous lusts invade the maturer man. Jonas is 
 alone in his place of business now. It is late; all the clerks have gone 
 home, the shutters are closed, the fire smoulders low in the grate. The 
 gas is thriftily turned down; by the dim light I cannot see whether the 
 counting-room opens into factory, grocery, haberdashery, warehouse, or 
 bank. I but distinctly see the desk—symbolic furniture for all the five, 
 with many more—and an anxious man heavy with long-continued doubt. 
 It is the man of business in his temptation—nay, his Agony and Bloody 
 Sweat. Hot Jesus in the Hew Testament legend was more sorely tempted 
 of another Devil. “ Shall I attempt this plan ? ” quoth he. What it is 
 appears not—importing Coolies, or African slaves, cheating the govern¬ 
 ment or the people—this only is clear, he intends some great wrong to 
 other men. “ I can do it—’twill certainly succeed—no man shall find it 
 out. Then wealth is mine—that is Nobility in a Democracy: with it 
 comes the Power, the Respectability and the Honor it bestows.” They 
 flit before him—a great city house wheels into line ; a great country house 
 follows, flanked with wide lav/ns and costly gardens—a whole world of 
 beauty. He sees such visionary entertainments, new flocks of wealthy 
 friends, obsequious clergymen, communing at any table where Success 
 breaks the bread and fills the cup, no matter if but shewbread and wine of 
 iniquity. He tastes the admiration of men who worship any coin, and 
 care not if it bear the laureled head of Liberty, a Northern fair-faced 
 maid, or only a Southern Vulture swooping down upon its human prey. 
 He anticipates the wealthy marriage of his modest girls. He sees posts of 
 ambition close at hand, and all so easy for mounting up to if he be but 
 winged with gold. “ All this will I give thee, yea, and much more,” says 
 the tempter, “ for they are mine, and where I will I bestow them. I, 
 Mammon, dwell with honor; Glory is mine, and Respectability; my fruit 
 is better than virtue. The love of riches is the beginning of wisdom. 
 Money crieth without, she uttereth her voice in the streets, How long, ye 
 honest ones, will ye love simplicity ? Whoso hearkeneth unto me shall 
 dwell safely, and shali be quiet from fear of evil. Did any ever trust in 
 wealth and was confounded ? Look about you: how did Mr. Short- 
 weight gain his millions? Yet what honor he lived in! Colleges named 
 him Doctor of Laws, and not Banker. In funeral sermons ministers put 
 him among the saints. Come thou and do likewise. Money answereth 
 all things, and is imputed unto men for righteousness! ” 
 
48 
 
 “ Shall I also climb that popular ladder ? ” asks tortured Jonas. But 
 presently it seems as if his mother’s form bent over him. It is the same 
 sweet face which was once so often pressed to his, as she stilled his aching 
 flesh and kissed his little griefs away. His ear tingles warm again, as if 
 that mouth, long silent now, breathed into it her oft-repeated word, 
 “ Only the Right is acceptable with GodJ’ “ Get you behind me, 
 Devils all,” cries he. They vanish into the cold ashes of his grate, while 
 the fair angel that we name Religion, disguised in his mother’s saintly 
 shape, comes back and ministers to him. He goes home a strong man; 
 but dreams that night that he was shipwrecked, and in the wildest storm 
 his mother came and trod the waters under her, and brought him safe to 
 land. Then turns he, and dreams again that he was falling, falling, falling 
 through the dark, never so long and far away, and that same strong-winged 
 angel swept between him and the ground, and bore him off unhurt, repeat¬ 
 ing with its sweet motherly voice : 
 
 “ Only the Right is acceptable with God ! ” 
 
 He wakes for honest toil and manly duty, with its dear and tranquil 
 joys; and all day long that holy Psalm keeps quiring in his heart: 
 
 “ Only the Right is acceptable with God ! ” 
 
 How soothing is Religion in sprrow! It is her only boy: Rachel 
 could not save him. The girls were thinned out one by one. Sickness 
 made them only dearer. Death plucked them, flower after flower. When 
 he shook the family bush, how sadly did those white roses cast their petals 
 on the wind! The corner of the village grave-yard seems snowed all over 
 with mementoes of what has been. The father, too, is gone now. In 
 sleep her arms fold together, but only on emptiness, as Love calls up the 
 dear figure to cheat and avoid her grasp. Poor Rachel! all alone now! 
 and dreams add their visionary woe to the live sorrows of the waking day. 
 Now the last one lies there, straightened after death, a red rose put in his 
 hand. It is the room he was born in. Her bridal chamber once is his 
 funeral chamber now—the beginning of her hopes, the end of her disap¬ 
 pointments—a porch only to so many graves. How fair he looks, the 
 brown hair clustered round his brow. Since death, in the dead boy she 
 sees the father’s face come out more fair, just as he looked when she was 
 eight and Robert ten, and they gathered chestnuts in the woods, he alone 
 with her and she alone with him; he bearing the little sack their mutual 
 hands had filled, when neither knew nor dreamed those little' trodden paths 
 would lead to marriage, and their mutual hand fill many a sack of joys and 
 sorrows too. In the same face she sees her lover and her child—both dead 
 now. That handsome bud will never be a flower. No maiden shall 
 salute those cheeks with the first stealthy modest kiss of heavenly love. 
 The real present and the ideal future meet there, and Rachel sits between, 
 the point common to both; a wife without a husband, a mother with no 
 child. Poor Rachel! Is there any consolation ? She feels the Infinite 
 Rather is with her: he loves her husband better than she loved him, when 
 
49 
 
 passion melted the twain to one; loves the child better than she loved her 
 lost one, her only one—her Boy. The Infinite Father is with her. In her 
 -early love she looked to him and was not ashamed. That day-star of Piety 
 gleamed white in the roseate flush of her maiden love; through the throb¬ 
 bing joy of her bridal she looked up to the Infinite One, Father of bride¬ 
 groom and of bride. When one by one those little sprigs pushed out 
 'from the married boughs, Bachel remembered him who never forgets us 
 in our heedlessness, thankful for the old life continued, the new life lent. 
 Does she now forget the Bock whence our earthly houses be hewed out 
 and builded up? 
 
 The neighbors look on the surface of her life—how disturbed it is, the 
 great deep all broken up! But underneath it all, below the troubled depth 
 of her sorrow, there is a deeper deep whereto she goes down. It is all still 
 there, and. face to face, she communes with Him who will be with us in 
 deep waters. In the ecstasy of grief she finds that settled joy of heart 
 which transcends all other joys. She looks into another world and sees 
 her white rosebuds, and the last, the red, open in the light of heaven and 
 ^flower out to fairer maiden and manly beauty than earth knows of in tem¬ 
 perate or in tropic lands! while amid those dear ones the mortal father, im¬ 
 mortal now, who went before his boy, walks like a gardener among his 
 plants, and makes ready also a place for her! “ Thy will, not mine be 
 done ; it is well with the child.” She needs no other prayer. The Com¬ 
 forter has come, that same Comforter who was in the beginning and 
 ^cheered the hearts of millions before the name of Jesus was ever spoke 
 •on land or sea. Poor Bachel, is it ? Then who, I ask, is rich ? Hence¬ 
 forth she has a charmed life, her smiles fewer but serener and more 
 heartfelt. The air is cool and delicate about her; the endemics of the 
 ground can stir no fever in that tranquil blood. Her great sorrow has 
 seemed a great religion, which fills her with stillness. A wife without a 
 husband, a mother without a living child, is she alone, think you ? The 
 Infinite Father is with her, in her, and she also in him. Call not that 
 lonely which is so densely populate with God. 
 
 How the winds blow on the surface, at the human level; with what 
 wrathful sweep tread those posters of the sea and land! Go a few furlongs 
 up, and you have left the whirlwind behind you; you are above the 
 ^thunder, and beneath your feet the harmless lightnings flash unheard 
 away ; all the noises of Sebastopol and Waterloo roll by and leave no mark 
 on the most delicate ear. Even the earthquake is not felt in that calm 
 deep of the upper air! On the sea, go down not many rods, 
 
 “ The water ia calm and still below, 
 
 For the winds and waves are noiseless there, 
 
 And the sands are bright as the stars that glow 
 In the motionless field of upper air. 
 
 And life, in rare and beautiful forms, 
 
 Is sporting amid those bowers of stone, 
 
 And ia safe when the wrathful spirit of storms 
 Has made the top of the wave his own.” j 
 
 4 
 
50 
 
 How old and gray-headed Mi'. Grandfather is. At Boston, in 1783,. 
 he heard the bells ring for Peace, which meant also Independence. His 
 thoughtful mother, not without prayers, watched his cradle at the begin¬ 
 ning of the storm of Revolution. Now he is old, very old. He has been 
 out on the sea of life and done business in its great waters. Many a proud 
 wave has gone over him. But he got through. Children and children’s 
 children are the crown of triumph for his old age. Yet he is more reli¬ 
 gious than old. He stoops a little now, and sometimes slumbers in his chair. 
 The mists of the valley which all must tread lie spread out before him,, 
 white with the moonlight of old age. Of a pleasant day he sallies forth, 
 staff in hand, this (Edipus, who has met the Sphynx of time and solved 
 the great riddle of life, and he wonders li where the old people are?’* 
 How young the world looks to his experienced eyes! He lifts his hat to 
 some venerable man whom he saw christened in the meeting-house so 
 long ago that the ink has turned brown on the yellow paper in the parish 
 book. There is a funeral to-day of a white-haired woman, old, very old. 
 Mr. Grandfather remembers her as a chubby little rosy-cheeked maiden, 
 with black hair, and eyes so full of fun, just getting into her teens when he 
 was but half-way there. Now he reads on the silver plate, u Aged XCIV.” 
 “ Ninety-four ? ” quoth he, u a great age. Yes, I knew she was about 
 that! A great age. Fourscore and fourteen! Six more, and it is a hun¬ 
 dred.” He remembers the green-gages she used to give him out of her 
 father’s great garden; now it is built all over with huge granite stores, 
 four stories high, and the pear trees and plums which Mr. Blackstone 
 brought over from England have followed their planter long since. He 
 remembers her wedding—seventy-six years ago last July, boy of twelve 
 that he was. On the plain table of those “ good old times ” he set a china 
 bowl of white lilies, which he swam for in Hammond’s Pond that morn¬ 
 ing, to honor his pretty cousin’s marriage with. It was the first time they 
 ever had such flowers at a Puritan wedding; but the minister liked it, so 
 did cousin Lucy, but the new cousin thought only of her who made him 
 so happy. u Now she is clad for another change,” quoth Mr. Grandfather, 
 as he lays his last gift of blossoms on her coffin; “ always a little before me, 
 never long; born seven years first, wed twelve years before me. We shall 
 meet again before long. This is the last of earth for you ; soon it will be 
 for me. Well, I am content. ‘ Shock, of corn fully ripe ’—let the dear 
 Father come and take of his planting, at the great Harvest Home. To 
 die is also gain.” 
 
 That night Mr. Grandfather tarries late in his sitting-room, when tho 
 rest are gone to bed. He slept a little after supper in his great arm chair, 
 and is quite wakeful now. The old clock stands there ; it tells the hours 
 of human time; nay, with delicate hand it marks even the seconds, just 
 as life itself will always do. It reports likewise the days of the month and 
 of the week, the shape of the moon; on the top of all is a ship at sea, 
 rising and falling by wheel work, as if driven by the wind and tossed. 
 Mr. Grandfather looks into his wood fire,, and then all the long voyage of 
 
51 
 
 his past life comes pictured to him from his cradle to cousin Lucy’s fune¬ 
 ral. There are sad things to look on, which bring back a tear; he did not 
 know it tilll it fell hot on his hand and made him start. There are joyous 
 things als o, which set his heart throbbing as when he was a bridegroom. 
 Nay, tliere are wrong things which he did, repented of, and outgrew so 
 long , ago that they seem merely historical, like the sins of Abraham, 
 Isa:ac, and Jacob; yet he remembers the lesson they taught. His boyish 
 hoves return—father and mother, children—nay, children’s children. The 
 wife of his heart, reverently buried years ago, comes back in bridal gar¬ 
 ments, then sits at the new cradle. Then another funeral rushes on his 
 sight: “Loverand friend thou puttest far from me, and mine acquaintance 
 into darkness,” quoth he. “ Nay, nay, not into darkness ; say rather into 
 marvellous light! My time is not far off. How long, O Lord ? How 
 soon? Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth.” The old clock strikes 
 twelve ; the first day of another month comes into its place, and the new 
 moon lifts its silver rim to tell below what heavenly life goes on above. 
 “ Soon shall I behold thy face in righteousness, and I shall be satisfied, 
 when I awake, with thy likeness.” 
 
 I wonder any man can be content to live without the joyous conscious¬ 
 ness of God; without this how any one can bear the griefs of time, I 
 know not, nor cannot even dream. I would be certain that my little ven¬ 
 ture is insured at the Provident office of the Infinite God; then shall I 
 fear no shipwreck, but steer my personal craft as best I may, certain of 
 a harbor; and though it be at the bottom of the sea, I am safe landed 
 in heaven. If I have well done my part, and where or when it may, I 
 am sure the voyage will turn out fortunate. 
 
 O young men and young women; men and Avomen no longer 
 young! It is not enough to be brave and thoughtful; not enough to be 
 moral also, and friendly each to each. You have a Faculty which makes 
 another World for you, the World of God. There is a joy which is not in 
 Avisdom, with all its science and its art of beauty and of use ; nor yet in 
 Morality, with its grand works of justice ; nay, nor yet even in the sweet 
 felicity of loving men and being loved in turn by them; there is a life 
 within the Veil of the Temple ; it is the Life with God, the Innermost De¬ 
 light of human Consciousness. Animated by that your Wisdom shall be 
 greater, more true your Science, and more fair your Art; your Morality 
 more firm and sure, your Love to men more joyous and abiding, your 
 whole Character made useful, and beautiful exceed ingty. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ' . M 
 
 . ■>‘ ! *» 1 ' i ■ 
 
 1 
 
 ' 
 
 * «. . • 
 
 .» • v. 
 
 j *. 
 
 ■ 
 
 ' 
 
 - - 
 
 ' 
 
 
 
 • , 
 
 • ■ 
 
 „ 
 
 . 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 . 
 
 ■ 
 
 
 
 
 
3 0 
 
 12 037697783