THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF ILLINOIS 
 LIBRARY 
 
 250 
 
 C77H 
 

 
 
 I 
 
 
 
 

TWELVE • 
 
 MONDAY LECTURES 
 
 IN 
 
 S vm n of i Umis 
 
 EMERSON'S VIE TV OF IMMORTALITY. 
 
 THEOEORE EARNER'S ABSOLUTE RELIGION 
 THEODORE PARKER ON THE GUILT OF SIN (Two Lectures). 
 
 THEODORE PARKER ON THE PERFEGTLON OF THE DIVINE HERA 1D. 
 THEODORE PARKER ON THE PERFECTION OF THE DIVINE NATURE. 
 THEODORE PARKER ON ADORATION. 
 
 TRIUNITY A IS I) TR1 THEISM. 
 
 POPULAR AND SCHOLARLY THEOLOGY. 
 
 COMMUNION WITH GOD AS PERSONAL. 
 
 THE TRLNITY A PRACTICAL TRUTH. 
 
 THE TRINLTY THE MARTYR'S FAITH. 
 
 By REV. JOSEPH COOK. 
 
 SECOND EDITION. 
 
 BY PERMISSION OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 LONDON: 
 
 11. D. DICKINSON, FAERINGDON STREET, E.C. 
 
 1877 . 
 
4 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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2-3 0 
 
 cilit 
 
 EMERSON'S VIEWS ON IMMORTALITY. 
 
 By the Rev. JOSEPH COOK. 
 
 As light fills and yet transcends the rainbow, so God fills and yet 
 transcends all natural law. According to scientific Theism, we are 
 equally sure of the Divine Immanency in all Nature, and of the Divine 
 Transcendency beyond it. Pantheism, however, with immeasurably 
 narrower horizons, asserts that natural law and God are one; and thus, 
 at its best, it teaches but one-half the truth—namely, the Divine 
 Immanency, and not the Divine Transcendency. Christian Theism, in 
 the name of the Scientific Method, teaches both. While you are 
 ready to admit that every pulsation of the colours even in the rainbow 
 is light, you yet remember well that all the pulsations taken together 
 do not constitute the whole of light. Solar radiance billows away to 
 all points of the compass. Your bow is bent above only one quarter 
 of the horizon. So scientific Theism supposes that the whole universe, 
 or finite existence in its widest range, is filled by the Infinite Omni¬ 
 present Will, as the bow is filled with light, and this in such a sense 
 that we may say that natural law is God, who was, who is, and who 
 is to come. In the incontrovertible scientific certainty of the Divine 
 Immanency, we may feel ourselves transfigured, as truly as any poetic 
 Pantheist ever felt himself to be when lifted to his highest possible 
 mount of vision. But, beyond all that, Christian Theism affirms that 
 God, knowable, but unfathomable—incomprehensible, but not inappre¬ 
 hensible—billows away beyond all that we call infinities and eternities, 
 as light beyond the rainbow. While He is in all finite mind and 
 matter as light is in the colours seven, He is as different from finite 
 mind and matter as is the noon from a narrow band of colour on the 
 azure. Asserting the Divine Transcendency side by side with the 
 Divine Immanency, religious science escapes on the one hand the self- 
 contradictions and narrowness of Pantheism, and attains by the cold 
 precision of exact research a plane of thought as much higher than 
 that of materialism as the seventh heaven is loftier than the platform 
 of the insect or the worm. 
 
 It would be very Emersonian to differ from Emerson. His mission, 
 according to his own statement, is to unsettle all things. It is 
 common to hear the acutest readers assert that his writings have no 
 mental unity. The poet Lowell thinks that sometimes Emerson’s 
 paragraphs are arranged by being shuffled in manuscript; and the 
 
 1 
 
EMERSON'S VIEWS ON IMMORTALITY. 
 
 best British criticism* says “they are tossed out at random like the 
 contents of a conjuror’s hat.” But is there no point of view from 
 which the Emersonian sky 
 
 “ With cycles, and with epicycles 
 
 Scribbled o’er,” 
 
 may be seen to have within it a comprehensible law ? Before Hegel, 
 Emerson’s master, became obsolete or obsolescent in Germany, no 
 doubt Emerson was a pantheist; but I cannot explain by any form of 
 pantheism the later motions of some stars in his pure - soft azure. 
 You may prove that he is more poet than philosopher, more seer than 
 poet, more mystic than seer; and yet the surety in the last analysis is 
 that he is more Emerson than either. Individualism held firmly , 
 pantheism held waveringly , are to me the explanation of the 
 bewildering and yet gorgeous motions of the constellations in his 
 sky. Mr. Erothingham acutely says that Mr. Emerson’s place is 
 among poetic, not among philosophic minds.| It is not Emersonian 
 to wince under philosophical self-contradiction ; but it is Emersonian 
 to writhe under the remotest attempt to cast on individualism so much 
 as the fetter of a shadow. 
 
 Loyalty to the Over-Soul is Emerson’s supreme mood. Whether it 
 lead to philosophic consistency or not is to his scheme of thought an 
 empty question. Whatever shooting star streams at this instant 
 across the inner sky of personal inspiration is to be observed, and its 
 course mapped down, even if it move in a direction opposite to that of 
 the last flaming track of light noted there. What if the map at last 
 show a thousand tracks crossing each other ? Are they not all Divine 
 paths ? Are they not to be all included and explained in a sufficiently 
 wise philosophy ? The point of departure of all the shooting stars in 
 Emerson’s sky is the constellation Leo. All his metaphysics he is 
 ready to abandon at any moment if the loftier movements of the Soul 
 as it exists in himself come into conflict with his philosophy. He 
 utters whatever the Over-Soul seems to him to say, whether 
 in harmony with previous deliverances or not. He is a pantheist, 
 but not a consistent pantheist; he is an idealist, but not a consistent 
 idealist; he is a religious mystic, but not a consistent mystic. He is an 
 individualist , mapping his own highest inner self — or, as he ivould say in 
 pantheistic phrase, mapping God. The Over-Soul comes to conscious¬ 
 ness only in man. In the transfigured work of tracing on the page 
 of literature all gleams of light in the Over-Soul in Emerson, he is 
 consistent with himself, and in this only. A maker of maps of the 
 
 * Encyc. Brit., 1875, art. on American Literature! 
 
 t Transcendentalism in New England, 1876, p. 236. 
 
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EMERSON'S VIEJFS ON IMM0R1ALITY. 
 
 paths of shooting stars is Emerson, and he is more devout than any 
 astronomer intoxicated with the azure. Sit in the constellation Leo 
 if you would understand the Emersonian sky. 
 
 A brilliant and learned volume by a reverend preacher of this city* 4 
 contains the most luminous analytical proof that a pantheistic trend sets 
 through Emerson’s writings, as the gulf current through the Atlantic. 
 But Emerson often proclaims his readiness to abandon pantheism 
 itself if the Over-Soul seems to command him to do so. In the 
 whole range of his often self-destructive apothegms I find no single 
 sentence so descriptive of his position as a fixed individualist and a 
 wavering pantheist as this :— 
 
 “In your metaphysics you have denied personality to the Deity; 
 yet, when the devout motions of the soul come, yield to them heart 
 and life, though they should clothe God with shape and colour. Leave 
 your theory, as Joseph his coat, in the hand of the harlot, and flee.”f 
 
 "Whoever would come to the point of view from which all Emerson’s 
 self-contradictions are reconciled must take his position upon the 
 summit of individualism, and transfigure that height by the thought 
 that there billows around it, what we call God in conscience, and 
 what Emerson calls the Over-Soul. In the loftiest zones of human 
 experience there are influences from a somewhat and someone that 
 is in us, but not of us, and Emerson is so far pantheistic as to hold 
 that this highest in man is not only a manifestation of God, but God 
 and the only God. Therefore he is always in the mount. His 
 supreme tenet is the primacy of mind in the universe, and I had 
 almost said the identity of the human mind with the Divine mind. 
 As the waves are many and yet one with the sea, so to pantheism 
 finite minds and the events of the universe are many and yet one with 
 God. As the green billows that dash at this moment on Boston 
 Harbour Bar, and cap themselves with foam, are one with the 
 Atlantic, so you, and 1, and Shakespeare, and Charlemagne, and Caesar, 
 and the Seven Stars, and Orion, are but so many waves in the Divine 
 AH. The ages, like the soft hissing spray, may take this shape or 
 that, but they all come from one sea. “ There is,” says Emerson, 
 
 “ one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to 
 the same, and to all of the same.”| “ The simplest person who in his 
 integrity worships God , becomes God.” Eight generations of clerical 
 dissent are behind Emerson’s unwavering reverence for the still small 
 voice; one generation of now almost outgrown German thinkers is 
 behind his wavering reverence for pantheism. Would he only assert, 
 
 * Rev. Dr. Manning, “Half Truths and the Truth,”, 1872. 
 
 + Emerson, “ Essays,” vol. i. p. 50. 
 
 } Essay on History. 
 
EMERSON'S VIEWS ON IMMORTALITY. 
 
 side by side with the Divine Immanence, the Divine Transcendency, 
 we might call him a Christian mystic, where now we can only call 
 him a teacher of transfigured pantheistic individualism. 
 
 Pantheism denies the personal immortality of the soul. To 
 pantheism death is the sinking of a wave back into the sea. We 
 shall find, however, that Emerson, true to his central tenet of 
 hallowed individualism, has again and again asserted the personal 
 immortality of the soul, and never denied it in reality, though he has 
 often done so in appearance. 
 
 When, in 1832, Mr. Emerson bade adieu to his parish in this city, 
 he used, as on every occasion he is accustomed to use, memorable 
 words. “ I commend you,” the last sentences of his letter to that 
 parish read, 11 to the Divine Providence; may He multiply to your 
 families and to your persons early genuine blessing; and whatever 
 discipline may be appointed to you in this world, may the blessed 
 hope of the resurrection, which He has planted in the constitution of 
 the human soul, and confirmed and manifested by Jesus Christ, be 
 made good to you beyond the grave. In this faith and hope I bid 
 you farewell.”* 
 
 These are wholly unambiguous words. You say that Emerson never 
 has asserted, since 1832, the personal immortality of the soul; but 
 what do you make of certain almost sacredly private statements of his 
 to Erederika Bremer ? That authoress, whose works Germany 
 gathers up in thirty-four volumes, came out of the snows of Northern 
 Europe, and one day found Mr. Emerson walking down the avenue of 
 pines in front of his house, through the falling snow, to greet her. 
 Day after day they conversed on the highest themes; months passed 
 while Erederika Bremer was the guest of Boston; and toward the 
 end of the lofty interchanges of thought between these two elect souls 
 there occurred what Erederika Bremer calls a most serious season. 
 One afternoon in Boston, with all the depth of her passionate and 
 poetic temperament, she endeavoured to convince Emerson that God 
 is not only in all natural law, but that he transcends it all; that He 
 demands of us perfection, and that, therefore, as Kant used to say, we 
 must expect personal immortality or opportunity to fulfil the demand; 
 that religion is the marriage of the soul with God; and that the idea 
 that God is objective to us, and that our souls may come into harmony 
 with His, a Person meeting a person, is vastly superior, as an inspira¬ 
 tion, to any pantheistic theory that all there is of God is what is 
 revealed to us in the insignificant scope of our faculties. She 
 endeavoured, in the name of lofty thought, to show the narrowness of 
 
 * Emerson, R. W. Letter dated Boston, December 22, 1832, quoted inFrotkingham’s Trans¬ 
 cendentalism in New England, 1876, p. 235. 
 
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EMERSON'S VIEWS ON IMMORTALITY. 
 
 pantheism at its best. The interview was serious in the last degree, 
 and Erederika Bremer says that Emerson closed it with these words: 
 “I do not wish that people should pretend to know or believe more 
 than they really do know and believe. The resurrection, the continu¬ 
 ance of our being, is granted ; we carry the pledge of this in our own 
 breast. I maintain merely that we cannot say in what form or in 
 what manner our existence will be continued.* * 4 
 
 Transcendentalism in New England was marked by a bold assertion 
 of the personal continuance of the soul after death. The Dial always 
 assumed the fact of immortality. “ The transcendentalist was an 
 enthusiast on this article,” Mr. Erothingham says; and Mr. Emerson’s 
 writings, he adds, were “ redolent of the faith.” Theodore Parker j 
 thought personal immortality is known to us by intuition, or as a self- 
 evident truth, as surely as we know that a whole is greater than a j 
 part. It must be admitted that New England Transcendentalism 
 caused in many parts of our nation a revival of interest and of faith 
 in personal immortality.f Mr. Emerson was the leader of New England 
 Transcendentalism. 
 
 But you say that since 1850 Emerson has changed his opinion; and 
 yet, if you open the last Essay he has given to the world, that on 
 “Immortality,” you will read:—“Everything is prospective, and 
 man is to live hereafter. That the world is for his education is the 
 only sane solution of the enigma. . . . The implanting of a 
 
 desire indicates that the gratification of that desire is in the constitu¬ 
 tion of the creature that feels it. . . . The Creator keeps His 
 
 word with us. . . . All I have seen teaches me to trust the 
 
 Creator for all I have not seen. Will you, with vast cost and pain, 
 educate your children to produce a master-piece, and then shoot them 
 down ?” What do these phrases amount to taken in connection with 
 the two earlier passages which I have cited, and which assuredly 
 assert personal immortality ? “ All sound minds rest on a certain 
 
 preliminary conviction—namely, that if it be best that conscious 
 personal life shall continue, it will continue; if not best, then it will 
 not; and we, if we saw the whole, should of course see that it was 
 better so. ... I admit that you shall find a good deal of 
 scepticism in the street, and hotels, and places of coarse amusement. 
 But that is only to say that the practical faculties are faster developed 
 than the spiritual. Where there is depravity, there is a slaughter¬ 
 house style of thinking. One argument of future life is the recoil of 
 the mind in such company—our pain at every sceptical statement.” 
 
 The “ conscious personal ” continuance of the soul, Emerson no more 
 
 * Emerson, Conversation with Erederika Bremer. “ Homes of the New World,” vol. i. p. 223. 
 
 * See Erothingham, Transcendentalism, pp. 195-19S. 
 
 5 
 
EMERSON'S VIEWS ON IMMORTALITY . 
 
 than Goethe denies. In this very essay, however, we must expect to 
 find apparent self-contradiction, and accordingly we can read here these 
 sentences, written from the point of view of a wavering Pantheism : 
 “ Jesus never preaches the personal immortality. . . . I confess 
 
 that everything connected with our personality fails. The moral and 
 intellectual reality to which we aspire is immortal, and we only through 
 that.” 
 
 Allow me on this occasion to contrast arguments with ipse dixits, and 
 to use only the considerations which are implied in Emerson’s teachings 
 on immortality. * You will he your own judges whether the conclusion 
 that there is a personal existence after death must follow from his 
 premises. I shall, of course, unbraid the reasoning and show its 
 strands, hut its braided form is Emerson’s axiom: “ The Creator keeps 
 His word with us.” The argument is old; and, for that reason, 
 probably, Emerson values it. It has borne the tooth of time and the 
 1 buffetings of acutest controversy age after age. In our century it 
 stands firmer than ever, because we know now through the microscope, 
 better than before, that there is that behind living tissues which blind 
 mechanical laws cannot explain. 
 
 1. An organic or constitutional instinct is an impulse or propensity 
 existing prior to experience and independent of instruction. 
 
 This definition is a very fundamental one; and is substantially 
 JPaley’s.*' 
 
 2. The expectation of existence after death is an organic or consti¬ 
 tutional instinct. 
 
 3. The existence of this instinct in man is as demonstratable as the 
 existence of the constitutional instincts of admiration for the beautiful, 
 or of curiosity as to the relations of cause and effect. 
 
 What automatic action is you know; and an instinct is based upon 
 the automatic action of the nervous mechanism. Who doubts that 
 certain postures in anger, certain attitudes in fear, certain others in 
 reverence, certain others in surprise, are instinctive ? These postures 
 are taken up by us without reflection on our part; they are organic 
 in origin. It is instinct for us to rest when we are fatigued, and to 
 take the recumbent position; and we do not reason about this. The 
 babe does it. Instinctive actions appear early in the progress of life, 
 and are substantially the same in all men and in all times. An edu¬ 
 cated impulse does not appear early, and is not the same among all 
 men in all times. Of course it would avail nothing if I were to prove 
 that the belief in immortality has come to us from education. If that 
 belief result from an organic instinct, however—if it be constitutional— 
 then it means much, and more than much. 
 
 * Nat. TheoL, ch. IS. 
 6 
 
EMERSON'S VIEWS ON IMMORTALITY. 
 
 4. The dulness of these instincts in a few low races or in poorly- 
 developed individuals does not disprove the proposition that admiration 
 for the beautiful and curiosity as to the relations of cause and effect 
 are constitutional in man. 
 
 5. So the occasional feebleness of the expectation of existence after 
 death does not show that it is not an organic or constitutional instinct. 
 
 6. This instinct appears in the natural operations of conscience, 
 which anticipates personal punishment or reward in an existence 
 beyond death. 
 
 You desire incisive proof that we have a constitutional anticipation 
 of something beyond the veil; but can you look into Shakespeare’s 
 mirror of the inner man and not see case after case of the action of 
 that constitutional expectation ? Shakespeare’s delineations are 
 philosophically as unpartisan and as exact as those of a mirror. Is it 
 not the immemorial proverb of all great poetry, as well as of all pro¬ 
 found philosophy, that there is something that makes cowards of us 
 all as we draw near to death, and that this something is not physical 
 pain, but a somewhat behind the veil ? Death would have little terror 
 if its pains were physical and intellectual only. There is an instinc¬ 
 tive action of the moral sense by which we anticipate that there are 
 events to come after death, and that these will concern us most closely. 
 
 Archbishop Butler, in his famous sermons on Conscience, has no 
 more incisive passage than that in which he declares that “ Con¬ 
 science, unless forcibly stopped, magisterially exerts itself, and always 
 goes on to anticipate a higher and more effectual sentence which shall 
 hereafter second and confirm its own.” This prophetic action of 
 conscience I call the chief proof that man has an instinctive expecta¬ 
 tion of existence after death. We are so made that we touch some¬ 
 what behind the veil. As an insect throws out its antennae, and 
 by their sensitive fibres touches what is near it, so the human soul 
 throws out the vast arms of conscience to touch eternity, and Some¬ 
 what, not ourselves, in the spaces beyond this life. All there is in 
 literature, all there is in heathen sacrifice, continued age after age, to 
 propitiate the powers beyond death—all there is in the persistency of 
 human endeavour, grotesque and cruel at times, to secure the peace 
 of the soul behind the veil—are proclamations of this prophetic action 
 of conscience; yet conscience itself is only one thread in the web o 
 the pervasive organic instinct which anticipates existence after death. 
 
 7. This instinct appears in a sense of obligation to meet the require¬ 
 ments of an infinitely perfect moral law. We know that the moral 
 law is perfect, and therefore that the Moral Lawgiver is perfect. But *- 
 the moral law demands our perfection. “ Therefore,” said Immanuel 
 Kant, “the moral law contains in it a postulate of immortality.” Its 
 
 7 
 
EMERSON'S VIEWS ON IMMORTALITY. 
 
 requirement is a part of our constitution, and cannot be met in this 
 stage of existence. It is not met here, and therefore the moral law 
 requires us to believe in an existence after death. That is Kant’s 
 very celebrated proof ; but I am pointing to it only as one thread in 
 this organic web which we call instinctive anticipation of existence 
 after death. Put your Shakespeare on the fear of what is behind the 
 veil, side by side with your Kant on this anticipation of the time 
 when we can approximate to perfection, and you will find these broad- 
 shouldered men in the name of both poetry and philosophy, affirming, 
 as the postulate of organic instinct in man, that existence after death 
 is a reality. 
 
 8. It appears in the universality of the belief in existence after death. 
 All widely-extended beliefs result much more from organic instinct 
 than from tradition. 
 
 9. It appears in the human delight in permanence. 
 
 10. It appears in the unoccupied capacities of man in his present 
 state of being. 
 
 11. It appears in the convictions natural to the highest moods of 
 the soul. 
 
 “ There shine through all our earthly dresse, 
 
 Bright shootes of everlastingnesse.’’ 
 
 12. It appears in the longing for personal immortality characteristic 
 of all high states of culture. 
 
 13. It appears conspicuously in Paganism itself, in the persistence 
 of all the ages of the world, in the efforts to propitiate Supreme 
 powers, and to secure the peace of the soul beyond the grave. 
 
 How is the force of any impulse to be measured unless by the work 
 it will do ? "What work has not this desire of man, to be sure that 
 all will be well with him beyond the veil, not done ? "What force 
 has maintained the bloody sacrifices of the heathen world through all 
 the dolorous ages of the career of Paganism on the planet ? "What force 
 has given intensity to the inquiries of philosophy as to immortality ? 
 "What has been the inspiration of the loftiest literature in every nation 
 and in all time, whenever it has spoken of avenging Deities that will 
 see that all is made right at last ? IIow are we to explain the per¬ 
 sistency of every age in the attempt to propitiate the powers beyond 
 the veil, and to secure the peace of the soul after death, if not by 
 this impulse arising organically and existing as a part of the human 
 constitution ? 
 
 14. Nature makes no half hinges. God does not create a desire to 
 mock it. The universe is not unskilfully made. There are no dis¬ 
 sonances in the Divine works. Our constitutional instincts raise no 
 
 8 
 
EMERSON'S VIEWS ON IMMORTALITY. 
 
 false expectations. Conscience tells no Munchausen tales. The 
 structure of the human constitution is not an organised lie. “The 
 •Creator keeps His word with us.” 
 
 15. But if there is no existence after death, conscience does tell 
 Munchausen tales; man is bunglingly made; his constitution raises 
 false expectations ; his structure is an organized lie. 
 
 Our age has many in it who wander as lost babes in the woods, not 
 asking whether there is any way out of uncertainties on the highest of 
 all themes, and in suppressed sadness beyond that of tears. Small 
 philosophers are great characters in democratic centuries when every 
 man thinks for himself; but lost babes are greater. There is a feeling 
 that we can know nothing of what we most desire to know. I hold 
 first of all to the truth that man may know, not everything, but 
 enough for practical purposes. If I have a Father in heaven, if I am 
 created by an intelligent and benevolent Being, then it is worth while 
 to ask the way out of these woods. I will not be a questionless lost 
 babe, for I believe there is a way, and that, although we may not 
 know the map of all the forest, we can find the path home. 
 
 There are four stages of culture, and they are all represented 
 to-day in every highly civilised quarter of the globe. There 
 is the first stage, in which we usually think we know everything. 
 Then comes the second stage, in which, as our knowledge grows, we 
 are confronted with so many questions which we can ask and cannot 
 answer, that we say, in our sophmorical, despairing mood, that we 
 can know nothing. A little above that we say we can know some¬ 
 thing, but only what is just before our senses. Then, lastly, we come 
 to the stage in which we say, not that we can know everything; not 
 that we can know much, indeed; but in which we are sure we can 
 know enough for practical purposes. 
 
 Everything, nothing , something, enough! There are the infantine, 
 adolescent, juvenile, and mature stages of culture. 
 
 16. But so far as human observation extends, we know inductively 
 that there is no exception to the law that every constitutional instinct 
 has its correlate to match it. 
 
 17. Wherever we find a wing, we find air to match it; a fin, water 
 to match it; an eye, light to match it; an ear, sound to match it; 
 perception of the beautiful, beauty to match it; reasoning power, 
 cause and effect to match it; and so through all the myriads of known 
 cases. 
 
 18. From our possession of a constitutional or organic instinct by 
 which we expect existence after death, we must therefore infer the 
 fact of such existence, as the migrating bird might infer the existence 
 of a South from its instinct of migration. 
 
 9 
 
EMERSON'S VIEWS ON IMMORTALITY. 
 
 19. This inference proceeds strictly upon the scientific principle of 
 the universality of law. 
 
 20. It everywhere implies, not the absorption of the soul into the 
 mass of general being, but its personal continuance. 
 
 Your poet, William Cullen Byrant, once sat in the sweet country 
 side, and heard the bugle of the wild migrating swan as the bird passed 
 over him southward in the twilight. Looking up into the assenting 
 azure, this seer uttered reposefully the deepest words of his 
 philosophy:— 
 
 “Whither, midst falling dew, 
 
 While glow the heavens with the last steps of day, 
 
 Far through their rosy depths dost thou pursue 
 Thy solitary way ? 
 
 “ There is a Power whose care 
 Teaches thy way along that pathless coast, 
 
 The desert and illimitable air, 
 
 Lone wandering, but not lost. 
 
 “ He who, from zone to zone, 
 
 Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight, 
 
 In the long way that I must tread alone, 
 
 Will lead my steps aright.” 
 
 
 10 
 
THEODORE PARKERS ABSOLUTE RELIGION. 
 
 Br the Key. JOSEPH COOK. 
 
 Whew Daniel Webster was asked bow he obtained his clear ideas, 
 ne replied: “Bv attention to definitions.” Dr. Johnson, whose 
 business it was to explain words, was once riding on a rural road in 
 Scotland, and as he paused to water his horse at a wayside spring, he 
 was requested by a woman of advanced age to tell her how he, the 
 great Dr. Johnson, author of a renowned dictionary, could possibly 
 have defined the word pastern the knee of a horse. “ Ignorance, 
 madam,” was the reply; “pure ignorance.” For one, if I am 
 forced to make a confession as to my personal difficulties with 
 Orthodoxy of the scholarly type, I must use, as perhaps many another 
 student might, both Webster’s and Johnson’s phrases as the outlines 
 of the story. Before I attended to definitions I had difficulties. After 
 I attended to them in the spirit of the scientific method, my own 
 serious account to myself of the origin of my perplexities was in most 
 cases given in Johnson’s words—“ Ignorance ; pure ignorance.” 
 
 Theodore Parker’s chief intellectural fault was inadequate attention 
 to definitions. As a consequence, his caricatures or misconceptions of 
 Christian truth were many and ghastly. I cannot discuss them all; 
 but, in addition to his failure to distinguish between intuition and 
 instinct , and between inspiration and illumination , it must be said, in 
 continuance of the list of his chief errors, he did not carefully 
 distinguish from each other inspiration and dictation. 
 
 When Benjamin Franklin was a young man, one of his hungriest 
 desires was to acquire a perfect style of writing; and as he admired 
 Addison more than any other author, he was accustomed to take an 
 essay of The Spectator and make very full notes of all its thoughts, 
 images, sentiments, and of some few of the phrases. lie then would 
 place his manuscript in his drawer, wait several weeks, or until lie 
 had forgotten the language of the original, and then would take his 
 memoranda and write out an essay, including every idea, every pulse 
 of emotion, every flash of imagination, that he had transferred from 
 Addison to his notes. Then he would compare his work with the 
 original, and humiliate himself by the contrast of his own uncouth 
 rhetorical garment with Addison’s perfect robe of flowing silk. He 
 studied how to improve his crabbed, cold, or obscure phrases by the 
 light of Addison’s noon of luminousness and imaginative and moral 
 
 11 
 
THEODORE DARKER'S ABSOLUTE RELIGION, 
 
 heat. low Franklin’s essay was, you would say in such a case, not 
 dictated, by Addison, but was inspired by Addison. 
 
 Plainly, there is a difference between inspiration and dictation. 
 Orthodoxy believes the Bible to be inspired, and her definition of in¬ 
 spiration is the gift of infallibility in teaching moral and religious 
 truth. But by inspiration , thus defined, Orthodoxy does not mean 
 dictation. She means that the Bible is as full of God as Franklin’s 
 echoed essay was of Addison. As in his essay there were both an 
 Addisonian and a Franklinian element, so, speaking roundly, there are 
 in the Bible a divine and a human element. But the former is 
 swallowed up in the latter even more completely than the Franklinian 
 was in the Addisonian. All the thought in Franklin’s essay is, by 
 supposition, Addison’s, and some of the phrases are his; but Franklin’s 
 words are there. All the moral and religious thought of the Bible is, 
 according to the definition of inspiration, divine, and so are some of the 
 phrases ; but human words are there. 
 
 The chief proof, after all, that the Bible is good food is the eating 
 of it. The healing efficacy of a medicine when it is used is the 
 demonstration that it is good. ISTow, the world has been eating the 
 Bible as it never ate any other book, and the Bible has been 
 saturating the veins of the ages as they were never saturated by the 
 food derived from any other volume ; but there is no spiritual disease 
 that you can point to that is the outcome of biblical inculcation. We 
 all feel sure that it would be better than well for the world if all the 
 precepts of this volume were absorbed and transmuted into the actions 
 of men. The astounding fact is that the Bible is the only booh in the 
 world that will bear full and permanent translation into life. The care¬ 
 less and superficial sometimes do not distinguish from each other the 
 biblical record and the biblical inculcation. I know that fearful 
 things are recorded in the Bible concerning men who, in some 
 respects, were approved of God; but it is the biblical inculcation 
 which I pronounce free from adulterate elements, not the biblical 
 record. Of course, in a mirror held up before the human heart, there 
 will be reflected blotches; but the inculcation of the Scriptures, from 
 the beginning to the end of the sixty-six pamphlets, is knowm by 
 experience to be free from adulterate elements, and I defy the world 
 to show any disease that ever has come from the absorption into the 
 veins of the ages of the biblical inculcation. And, moreover, I defy 
 the ages to show any other book that could be absorbed thus in its in¬ 
 culcations and not produce dizziness of the head, pimples on the skin, 
 staggering at last, and the sowing of dragons’ teeth. 
 
 There is something very peculiar about this one book, in the incon¬ 
 trovertible fact that its inculcations are preserved from such error as 
 
 12 
 
THEODORE PARKERS ABSOLUTE RELIGION. 
 
 would work out, in experience, moral disease in the world. Plato 
 taught such doctrines that, if the world had followed him as it has the 
 Bible, and had absorbed not his account of men’s vices, hut his positive 
 inculcation, we to-day should be living in barracks, and we could not 
 know who are our brothers and who are our sisters/ 1 ' There was in 
 Plato, you say, inspiration. Very well; his inculcation under what you 
 call inspiration and I call illumination would, as every scholar knows, 
 have turned this fat world into a pasturage-ground for the intellectual 
 and powerful on the one side; but the poor, on the other side, it would 
 have ground down into the position of unaspiring and hopeless hewers 
 of wood and drawers of water. And, worse than that, it would 
 have quenched the divinest spark in natural religion—family life. 
 
 Dictation and plenary inspiration are not the same. I avoid 
 technical terms here ; but you must allow me, since Theodore Parker 
 so often spoke against the plenary inspiration of the Bible, to say that 
 by plenary inspiration Orthodoxy does not mean verbal inspiration. 
 Franklin’s essay was plenarily, but not always verbally, inspired by 
 Addison. If the Bible is written by dictation or verbal inspiration, as 
 Theodore Parker often taught that Orthodox scholarship supposes that 
 it is, even then it would not be at all clear that any translation of the 
 Bible is verbally inspired. If anything was dictated, of course only 
 the original was dictated. 
 
 In places I believe we have in the Bible absolute dictation; and 
 yet inspiration and dictation are two things, and the difference 
 between them is worth pointing out when Orthodoxy is held 
 responsible for a caricature of her definition, and when men are 
 thrown into unrest on this point, as if they were called on to believe 
 self-contradiction. The fact that all portions of the Bible are inspired 
 does not imply at all that King James’s version, or the German, 
 or the French, or the Hindustanee, or any other, is dictated 
 by the Holy Ghost. Even these versions, however, are full of God, as 
 Franklin’s essay was of Addison, and fuller. They , too, will bear 
 translation into life. Sometimes, as in the Decalogue and the 
 Sermon on the Mount, and in transfigured Psalm and Prophecy, it 
 well may be that we have in the original words which came not by 
 the will of man. 
 
 There are three degrees of inspiration, and the distinctions between 
 them are not manufactured by me, here and now, to meet the 
 exigency of this discussion. They are as old as John Locke. It is 
 commonplace in religious science to speak of the inspiration of 
 superintendence, as in Acts or Chronicles; the inspiration of eleva¬ 
 tion, as in the Psalms; and the inspiration of suggestion, as in the 
 
 * Grote’s Plato, The Republic ; social laws. 
 
 13 
 
THEODORE PARKER'S ABSOLUTE RELIGION. 
 
 prophecies. The historical hooks of the Scriptures have been so 
 superintended that they are winnowed completely of error in moral 
 inculcation. But the inspiration of superintendence is the lowest 
 degree of inspiration. "We come to the great Psalms, which assuredly 
 have no equals in literature, and which are palpably rained out of a 
 higher sky than unassisted human genius has dropped its productions 
 from. These Psalms, we say, are examples of the inspiration of 
 elevation. But we have a yet higher range of the action of inspira¬ 
 tion in passages like the distinct predictions that the Jews should he 
 scattered among all nations, and nevertheless preserved as a separate 
 people, as they have been ; or that Jerusalem should be destroyed, as 
 it was ; or that there should come a Supreme Teacher of the race, as 
 he has come. We find in the biblical record unmistakably prophetic 
 passages ; and these are the seals of the inspiration of suggestion, for 
 they could have been written only by suggestion. Infidelity never 
 yet has made it clear that the Old Testament predictions concerning 
 the Jews have not been fulfilled. Rationalism, in Germany, when¬ 
 ever it takes up that topic, drops it like hot iron. 11 What is a short 
 proof of inspiration ? ” said Prederic the Great to his chaplain. 11 The 
 Jews, your majesty,” was the answer. If there be in the Bible a 
 single passage that is plainly prophetic, there is in that passage a very 
 peculiar proof of its own divine origin. We have our Lord pointing 
 out the prophecies concerning himself, and he makes it a reason why 
 we should turn to the Old Testament, that they are they which testify 
 of him. Now, if there be some passages of the Bible that contain these 
 prophetic announcements, then the Teacher thus announced is divinely 
 attested, and we are to listen to him. 
 
 If, however, we stand simply on the amazing fact of the moral and 
 religious winnowedness of Scripture, we have also a divine attestation. 
 That winnowedness is providential. What God does, he means to do. 
 He has done this for the Bible; he has kept it free from moral and 
 religious error in its inculcations; he has done that for no other book ; 
 and what he has done, ho from the first intended to do. Therefore, 
 the very fact of the winnowedness of the Bible is proof of a divine 
 superintendence over it. 
 
 Superintendence, elevation, suggestion, are different degrees of 
 inspiration, which is of one kind. But inspiration and illumination, 
 according to established definitions, differ in kind, and not merely in 
 degree; for inspiration, as a term in religious science—I am not 
 talking of popular literature—always carries with it the idea of 
 winnowedness as to moral and religious truth. 
 
 There is nothing in the intuitive ranges of truth that comes into collision 
 with hihlical inculcation; hut there is no other sacred hook on the glohe 
 
 14 
 
THEODORE PARKERS ABSOLUTE RELIGION. 
 
 which those same ranges of axiomatic moral truth do not pierce through and 
 through in more places than ever knight's sword went through an opponent's 
 shield. A few "brilliants plucked out of much mire are the texts some¬ 
 times cited to us from the sacred literature of India, China, Arabia, 
 Greece, and Rome. I defy those who seem to be dazzled by these 
 fragments to read before any mixed company of cultivated men and 
 women the complete inculcations of the Vedas, Shasters, and the 
 Koran. Those books have been absorbed into the veins of nations, 
 and we know what diseases have been the result. They must be tried 
 by the stern test which the Bible endures—that is, by intuition, instinct, 
 experiment, and syllogism. All the sacred literatures of the world come 
 into collision with the intuitions of conscience, or with the dictates of 
 long experience, except that one strange volume, coming from a 
 remoter antiquity than any other sacred book, and read to-day in two 
 hundred languages of the globe, and kept so pure, in spite of all the 
 tempests of time that have swept through its sky, that above the 
 highest heavens opened to us by genius, and beyond all our latest and 
 loftiest ideals, the biblical azure spreads out as noon risen on mid-noon. 
 
 Theodore Parker was not careful enough to distinguish between 
 inspiration and revelation. By revelation I mean all self-manifesta¬ 
 tion of God in his words and his works both. Inspiration is his 
 self-manifestation in the Scriptures alone. Allow me to assert, face 
 to face with the learning of this audience, in the presence of which I 
 speak with sincere deference, that Christianity would stand on the 
 basis of revelation—that is, on the self-manifestation of God in his 
 works, including the facts of the New Testament history—even if 
 the doctrine of inspiration were all thrown to the winds. You have 
 been taught too often by rationalism that Christianity stands or falls 
 on the truth of the doctrine of inspiration; whereas, the nature and 
 the degree of inspiration are questions between Christians themselves. 
 Christianity as a redemptive system might stand on the great facts of 
 the New Testament if they were known as historic only, and the New 
 Testament literature were not inspired at all. Religion based on 
 axiomatic moral truth would stand on revelation thus defined, even if 
 inspiration were given up as a dream. 
 
 Will you remember that the configuration of New England is the 
 same at midnight and at noon ? It is my fortune to be a flying scout, 
 or a kind of outlook committee for my learned brethren here, and I 
 carry a guide-book to this delicious nook of the round world. But 
 what if I should lose that volume? Would not the Merrimack con¬ 
 tinue to be the most industrious river within your borders, the 
 Connecticut the most majestic, the White Hills and the Green Moun¬ 
 tains the most stately of your elevations? Would there be any 
 
 15 
 
THEODORE PARKER'S ABSOLUTE RELIGION. 
 
 gleaming shore on your coast, -where the Atlantic surge plays through 
 the reeds, that would change its outline at all by day or by night, 
 because of the loss of my guide-book ? Would not north and south, 
 east and west, be just the same ? Inspiration gives us a guide-bool:. 
 It does not create the landscape. Our human reason, compared with 
 inspiration, is as starlight contrasted with the sunlight; hut the land¬ 
 scape of our relations to God is just the same whether it be illumined 
 or left in obscurity. We might trace out by starlight much of the 
 map. The sun of inspiration arises, and we know the Merrimack and 
 Connecticut as never before; hut the sun did not create the Merrimack 
 or the Connecticut. On all our shores the orb of day shows to the 
 eye the distinction between rock and wave; but it does not create 
 that distinction, which we not dimly knew before by the noises in the 
 dark and by the wrecks ! 
 
 There is a soul, there is a God; and, since law is universal, there 
 must be conditions of harmony between the soul and God. Since the 
 soul is made on a plan, there must be natural conditions of its peace, both 
 loitli itself and with God; and these conditions arc not altered by being 
 revealed. Newton did not make the law of gravitation by discovering 
 it—did he? The Bible does not create, it reveals the nature of 
 things. As long as it remains true that there is a best way to live, 
 it will be best to live the best way; and religion is very evidently 
 safe, whether the Bible stands or falls. 
 
 Theodore Parker did not carefully distinguish from each other the 
 supernatural and the unnatural. 
 
 There are three kinds of natural laws: physical, organic, and 
 moral. It is very important to distinguish these three from each 
 other, for penalty under the one class of laws does not always carry 
 with it penalty under the others. A pirate may enjoy good health, 
 and yet lose his desire to be holy, and thus be blessed under the 
 organic, but cursed under the moral natural laws. A Christian, if he 
 is thrown into the sea, will sink in spite of his being a saint; that 
 is, he will be condemned under the physical law of gravitation, 
 although blessed under the moral. We are stupid creatures ; and so- 
 we ask, naturally, whether those on whom the Tower of Siloam fell 
 were sinners above all others? Were those who perished in the 
 Ashtabula horror sinners above all others ? A sweet singer—one 
 whose words of melody will, I hope, for some centuries yet prolong 
 his usefulness on this and every other continent—may have been rapt 
 away to heaven in a bliss which his own best poems express only as 
 the spark expresses the noon; but there was somewhere and some¬ 
 how a violation of physical law, and the penalty was paid. While 
 that penalty was in process of execution, the bliss of obedience to 
 
 16 
 
THEODORE PARKER'S ABSOLUTE RELIGION. 
 
 the moral law may have been descending also; and thus, out of the 
 fire, and the ice, and the jaws of unimaginable physical agony, this 
 man may have been caught up into eternal peace. 
 
 The distinction between the physical, organic, and moral natural 
 laws, however, is not as important as that between the higher and the 
 lower natural laws. Do you not admit that gravitation, a physical 
 law, is lower than the organic force that builds animal and vegetable 
 tissues ? In the growth of the elms on the Boston Mall yonder, is 
 not gravitation seized upon by some power superior to itself, and is 
 not matter made to act as gravitation does not wish ? 
 
 Is it not a common assertion of science that chemical forces are 
 counteracted by the organic forces which build up living tissues? 
 Has not my will power to counteract the law of gravitation ? A 
 higher may anywhere counteract a lower natural law. Scientific 
 Theism does not admit that all there is of God is in natural law. He 
 transcends Nature. Therefore he may reach down into it, as I, with 
 the force of my will, reach into the law of gravitation. If he 
 counteracts Nature, his action is supernatural, hut it is not unnatural. 
 
 Mr. Furness, of Philadelphia, says that a marvellous character, 
 such as our Lord was, must be expected to do marvellous works. We 
 know that when men are illumed by the poetic trance they have 
 capacities that no other mood gives them. There are lofty zones 
 in human experience, and when we are in them we can do much 
 which we do in none of our lower zones. What if a man should 
 appear filled with a life that leaves him in constant communication 
 with God ? What if there should come with existence a stainless 
 soul? What if it should remain stainless? What if there should 
 appear in history a being in this sense above Nature ? Is it not to 
 be expected that he will have power over Nature, and perform works 
 above Nature? Endowed as the Author of Christianity was, we 
 should naturally expect from that supernatural endowment works 
 not unnatural, but supernatural. 
 
 Theodore Parker said the resurrection has “no evidence in its 
 favour.” De Wette, whose book he translated, said, in his, latest 
 volume, that the fact of the resurrection, although a mystery that 
 cannot be dissipated hangs over the way and manner of it, cannot 
 be brought into doubt, any more than the assassination of Caesar. 
 
 Theodore Parker, in his middle life, stood vigorously for the 
 propositions which he reached at the Divinity School at Cambridge 
 and in West Boxbury. He was attacked too early. He says himself 
 that he had not completed his system of thought. But he was 
 attacked vigorously, and, with the spirit of his grandfather, who led 
 the first charge on the British troops, he stood up and vehemently 
 
 17 c 
 
THEODORE DARKER'S ABSOLUTE RELIGION. 
 
 defended himself. But that early attack caused some of his crudities 
 to crystallize speedily. He was afterwards too much absorbed in 
 vast philanthropic enterprises to he an exact philosopher in meta¬ 
 physics or ethics. He never made himself quite clear in these 
 sciences, or even in the latest biblical research. His own master, 
 De Wette, went far beyond him, and admitted, in the face of German 
 scholarship, that the resurrection can be proved to be an historic 
 certitude. Theodore Parker, although De Wette did not make that 
 admission till 1846, lived ten years longer, and never made it. 
 
 Attacked early, and defending his unformed opinions vigorously, 
 Parker’s scheme of thought crystallized in its crude condition. 
 Theodore Parker’s Absolute Religion is not a Boston, but a West 
 Roxbury creed. It is the speculation of a very young man. besides. 
 
 Theodore Parker seemed to understand little of the distinction 
 between belief and faith. 
 
 He never misconceived orthodoxy more monstrously than when he 
 said: “ It is this false theology, with its vicarious atonement, salvation 
 without morality or piety, only by belief in absurd doctrines, which has be¬ 
 witched the leading nations of the earth with such practical mischief.”* 5. 
 Is that orthodoxy? I shall undertake to call it a caricature. 
 It is omnipresent in Parker’s works. Whether it was a dishonest 
 representation I care not to determine. My general feeling is that 
 Theodore Parker was honest. He rarely came into companionship 
 with orthodox scholars of the first rank. When he did he seemed to 
 be pleased and softened, and was in many respects another man. 
 Attacked, he always stood up with the spirit of the early martyr of 
 Lexington under his waistcoat. 
 
 What is saving faith ? What is the difference between belief and 
 faith ? I venture much, but I shall be corrected swiftly here if I 
 am wrong. Saving faith, rightly defined is—1. A conviction of the 
 intellect that God, or God in Christ, is; and, 2. An affectionate 
 choice of the heart that God, or God in Christ, should be both our 
 Saviour and our Lord. 
 
 The. first half of this definition is belief. The whole is faith. All 
 of it without the last two words would be merely religiosity, and not 
 religion. There is nothing in that definition which teaches that a 
 man is saved by opinion, irrespective of character. Belief is assent. 
 Paith is consent to God as both Saviour and Lord. 
 
 On April 19th, 1775, a rider on a horse flecked with blood and 
 foam brought to the city of Worcester the news of the battle of 
 Lexington, in which Theodore Parker’s grandfather captured the first 
 
 * Weiss, “ Life of Theodore Parker,” vol. ii. p. 497. 
 
 18 
 
THEODORE PARKER'S ABSOLUTE RELIGION. 
 
 British, gun. The horse fell dead on the main street of the city, and, 
 on another steed, the rider passed westward with his news. Some of 
 those who heard the intelligence were loyal, and some were disloyal. 
 They all heard that there had been a victory of the American troops 
 over the British, and they all believed the report. Now, was there 
 any political virtue or vice in the belief by the Tory in Worcester that 
 there had been a victory over the British? Was there any political 
 virtue or vice in the belief by the patriot yonder that there had been a 
 victory over the British ? Neither the one nor the other. Where, then, 
 did the political virtue or political vice come in ? Why, when your 
 Tory at Worcester heard of the victory, he believed the report and was 
 sorry, and was so sorry that he took up arms against his own people. 
 When the patriot heard the report, he believed it and was glad, and 
 was so glad that he took up arms and put himself side by side with 
 the stalwart shoulders of Parker’s grandfather. In that attitude of 
 the heart lay the political virtue or political vice. Just so, in the 
 government of the universe, we all hear that God is our Saviour and 
 Lord; and we all believe this, and so do all the devils, and tremble. 
 Is there any virtue or vice in that belief, taken alone ? None what¬ 
 ever. But some of us believe this and are sorry. We turn aside; 
 and, although we have assent, we have no consent to God, and we 
 take up arms against the fact that he is our Saviour and Lord. Others 
 of us believe this, and by Divine grace are glad. We have assent and 
 consent both. We come into the mood of total, affectionate, irreversible 
 self-surrender to God, not merely as a Saviour, but also as Lord. 
 When we are in that mood of rejoicing loyalty to God we have saving 
 faith, and never till then. How can salvation be obtained by assent 
 alone—that is, by opinion merely ? What is salvation ? It is 
 permanent deliverance from both the love of sin and the guilt of sin. 
 Accepting God gladly as Saviour, we are delivered from the guilt of 
 sin; and, accepting him gladly as Lord, we are delivered from the 
 love of sin. Only when we accept God as both Saviour and Lord are 
 we loyal. Only when we are affectionately glad to take him as both 
 are we or can we be at peace. When we believe the news that he is 
 Saviour and Lord, and are glad, and so glad as to face the foe, we are 
 in safety. 
 
 19 
 
THEODORE PARKER ON THE GJJILT OF SIN. 
 
 Br the Bey. JOSEPH COOK. 
 
 Keep, my friends, the hush of what Hegel calls the highest 
 act of the human spirit, prayer, while we ask whether there is 
 such a thing in man as enmity of the heart against God. Theodore 
 Parker said there is not. When the unclean in thought and life a 
 dissipated man, comes into the presence of a pure and queenly woman, 
 he understands his leprosy, perhaps for the first time, simply because 
 it is brought into contrast with that virtue of which Milton said: 
 
 “So dear to Heaven is saintly Chastity, 
 
 That when a soul is found sincerely so, 
 
 Ten thousand liveried angels lackey her, 
 
 And in clear dream and solemn vision 
 Tell her of things that no gross ear can hear.’' 
 
 It is only when a hush produced by the sense of the Divine Omni¬ 
 presence fills the chambers of philosophy that they are fit places in 
 which to discuss the fact of sin. Hot always in Paris has that 
 condition been fulfilled; not always at Berlin or London; not always 
 in Boston. Our ears are too gross to hear the innermost truths of 
 conscience until we feel the breath of eternity on our cheeks. But 
 what a man sees only in his best moments as truth is truth in all 
 moments. As now there falls a hushed sense of the Unseen Holy upon 
 this city of scholarship, it is a fit time to raise the question whether 
 sin is a self-evident fact in human experience. Theodore Parker 
 affirmed that it is not. 
 
 James Freeman Clarke, when Theodore Parker was in Italy, in 
 1859, went into the pulpit of the latter, and was so faithful, both to 
 science and to friendship, as to criticise Parker’s scheme of thought for 
 not adequately recognizing the significance of the fact of sin. In reply 
 to that criticism, there came to Mr. Clarke from Italy a letter, which 
 he gave to Theodore Parker’s biographer, who has given it to the world. 
 It is a painful duty of mine to-day to cite this latest and frankest 
 expression of Theodore Parker’s views. In his youth Parker had 
 written: “ I think no sin can make an indelible mark on what I call 
 the soul. I think sin makes little mark on the soul; for much of it is 
 to be referred to causes exterior even to the physical man, and much to 
 the man’s organization. Hincty-nine hundredths of sin are thus 
 explicable. I am sure that sin, the result of man’s circumstances or 
 of his organization, can make no permanent mark on the soul.”* 
 
 * Weiss’s “ Life of Parker,” vol. i. p. 149. 
 20 
 
THEODORE DARKER ON THE GUILT OF SIN. 
 
 Were these not the crude opinions of a beginner in philosophy? 
 Did he hold these opinions through life? Substantially. From his 
 death-bed, Theodore Parker wrote from Italy, in 1860, to James 
 Freeman Clarke: 
 
 “ Many thanks for standing in my pulpit and preaching about me and mine. All 
 the more thanks for the criticisms. Of course, I don’t agree with your criticisms. 
 If I had, I should not have given you occasion to make them. 
 
 ****** * * 
 
 “Now a word about sin. It is a theological word, and is commonly pro¬ 
 nounced ngsin-n-n-n. But I think the thing which ministers mean by ngsin-n-n-n 
 has no more existence than phlogiston , which was once adopted to explain combus¬ 
 tion. I find sins — i.e., conscious violations of natural right ; but no sin — i.e ., no 
 conscious and intentional preference of wrong (as such) to right (as such)—no condi¬ 
 tion of ‘ enmity against God.’ I seldom use the word sin ; it is damaged 
 phraseology, tainted by contact with infamous notions of man and God. I have 
 some sermons of sin and of sins , which I may live long enough to prepare for print¬ 
 ing, but also may not. 
 
 “ Deacon Wryface, of the Hellfire Church, says: ‘ Oh ! I am a great sinner. I 
 am one mass of sin all over. The whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint. 
 In me there dwelleth no good thing. There is no health in me.’ ‘Well,’ you 
 say to him, ‘ tor once, Deacon, I think you pretty near right; but you are not yet 
 quite so bad as you talk. What are the special sins you do commit ? ’ 
 
 “ ‘ Oh! there ain’t any. I hain’t got a bad habit in the world; no, not one.’ 
 
 “ ‘ Then what did you mean by saying just now that you were such a sinner ? ’ 
 
 “ ‘Oh! I referred to my natur\ It is all ngsin-n-n-n .’ 
 
 “ That is the short of it. All men are created equal in ngsin-n-n-n. 
 
 “ Oh, James ! 1 think the Christian (!) doctrine of sin is the Devil’s own ; and I 
 hate it—hate it bitterly. Orthodox scholars say: ‘ In the heathen classics you 
 
 find no consciousness of sin.’ It is very true. God be thanked for it! 
 
 * * * * #*### 
 
 “I would rather have a good, plump, hearty heathen like Aristotle, or 
 Demosthenes, or Fabius Maximus, than all the saints from Peter, James, and John 
 (dohountes stuloi einai [‘ who seemed to be pillars’] down to the last one 
 manufactured by the Roman Church. I mean as those creatures are represented 
 in art. For the actual men I have a reasonable respect. They had some force 
 in them, while the statues even of Paul represent him ‘ as mean as a y alter dog.’ 
 But let ngsin-n-n-n go.”— {Ibid, p. 151). 
 
 That is an amazing letter. The tone of it is unworthy of a 
 cultured man, and is astounding in a dying man. Never would 
 such words have been chosen by Channing, never by Emerson, and 
 never by Parker himself, if there had been behind his phrases a 
 ■calm, scientific conviction that on this majestic theme he was philo¬ 
 sophically right. There is in that letter an irritability, I had almost 
 said a vulgarity, of tone, proceeding not from Theodore Parker’s better 
 nature, but largely, I think, from his fear that his positions as to sin 
 would not bear the test of scientific criticism, and yet could not be 
 
 21 
 
THEODORE DARKER ON THE GUILT OF SIN. 
 
 wholly given np without giving up the very Malakoff and Eedan of 
 his Absolute Eeligion. 
 
 Why, if you should adopt as an established truth the proposition 
 that there is not to he found in man any intentional preference of wrong 
 to right, or no enmity against God, and if you should carefully expur¬ 
 gate literature by that rule, how would Shakespeare look ? There is 
 no such thing as preference of wrong to right, Theodore Parker 
 says. If there were to be produced an edition of Shakespeare according 
 to this principle, how much would be left of the naturalness of that 
 mirror of humanity ? We now have character after character in 
 Shakespeare represented as making evil a delight, and as knowing the 
 right and approving it, and as abhorring the wrong and yet pursuing 
 it. Your Shakespeare edited after the Parker principle—that there 
 never is in man a preference of wrong to right—would be a limp, 
 boneless, flaccid, lavender thing. You would scorn to call such a 
 Shakespeare a fair mirror of human life. You would find such an 
 expurgated edition plentifully misleading in the study of man’s nature. 
 In the case supposed, you could not admit that Shakespeare is the 
 prince of philosophers, as well as the prince of poets, and that he 
 becomes both the one and the other simply by holding up his mirror 
 to all that is. 
 
 Were you to expurgate the laws of the civil governments of the 
 world according to Parker’s rule, where would justice be ? Ask the 
 gentlemen who every day stand in courts of justice, and administer in 
 God’s name the eternal law of right, and they will tell you that the 
 expurgation of our courts by the principle that there is no intentional 
 preference of wrong to right would reduce legal equity to moral chaos, 
 and that everything in law proceeds upon the supposition that man 
 does choose the wrong when he knows it to be wrong. 
 
 Where would philosophy be if it were expurgated by the Parkerian 
 principle ? We have in the last twenty-five years studied more 
 deeply than ever before the subjective experiences of the human 
 heart in the moral region. It is coming now to be one of the 
 highest offices of philosophy to explore the deepest inmost of 
 conscience, and to reveal to man the extent of that disturbance which 
 must arise in his nature when he loves what God hates, and hates what 
 God loves. It is now the highest office of philosophy to show man not 
 only that he has conscience, but that conscience has him. 
 
 I affirm that, as men who love clear ideas, we do not want either 
 philosophy or law or literature expurgated according to Parker’s 
 principle. But do you want theology expurgated by it ? Do you 
 want this delicate little shoot you call religious science shut away from 
 the healthy winds of criticism ? Is it to be kept behind the walls of 
 
 22 
 
THEODORE PARKER OK THE GUILT OF SIN. 
 
 some colossal authority, and not allowed to battle its way to its full 
 size in all the tempests that strike it out of the north, south, east, or 
 west? How is religious science ever to become a stalwart oak, 
 throwing out its boughs in every direction, vigorously and graciously, 
 and in no fear of tempests, unless it contend with all the shocks of 
 criticism that beat on philosophy, and law, and literature ? Religious 
 Science must take her chances according to the law of the survival of 
 the fittest. I maintain that, if you will not expurgate literature, law, 
 and your philosophy according to the principle that a man never has 
 enmity against God, you must not expurgate your theology according 
 to that principle. We must not play fast and loose with the scientific 
 tests of truth. 
 
 Having already shown that Theodore Parker did not carefully 
 distinguish intuition from instinct, or inspiration from illumination, or 
 inspiration from dictation, or the supernatural from the unnatural, or 
 belief from faith, I must further affirm that— 
 
 He made no adequate distinction between human infirmity and 
 human iniquity. 
 
 "What are the chief points established by self-evident truths as to 
 the fact of sin ? 
 
 1. Good is what ought to be. 
 
 2. Evil is what ought not to be. 
 
 3. Conscience intuitively perceives the difference between what 
 ought to be and what ought not to be in the soul’s choices among 
 motives. 
 
 These are standard definitions, and apprehensible, I hope. Re¬ 
 member that I do not say that conscience knows what ought to be in 
 any matter of expediency outside of the soul. Strictly speaking, 
 there is no right or wrong in external action, taken wholly apart from 
 its motives. There is in such action only expediency or inexpediency. 
 There may be physical evil outside the field of motives; but moral 
 evil is to be found only in the acts of choice. Conscience intuitively 
 perceives motives to be either good or bad. Here stands on one side 
 of the will a motive, and on the other is another motive; and, looking- 
 on what we mean to do, we decide whether we will do the best we 
 know, or not. Right and wrong in motives are pointed out by con¬ 
 science, and not in merely external action. 
 
 There is in conscience the power of tasting motives, just as in the 
 tongue there is the power of tasting flavours. I know by the tongue 
 whether a given fruit is bitter or sweet. Ho doubt we bring up the 
 pomegranate to the lips by the hands; no doubt we look at the 
 pomegranate ; no doubt we smell the pomegranate; but only by the 
 tongue do we taste it. So, no doubt, the intellect is concerned in 
 
 23 
 
THEODORE DARKER ON THE GUILT OF SIN. 
 
 bringing up considerations before the inner tribunal; but, after all, 
 the moral character of our motives is tasted by a special power which 
 we call conscience. This perceives intuitively the difference between 
 a good motive and a bad. But the good motive is one which con¬ 
 science not only pronounces right, but one which conscience says 
 ought to rule the will. Two things are thus pointed out by conscience 
 in motives—rightness and oughtness. The former is perceived 
 intuitively; the latter is perceived and felt both. The oughtness is 
 a mysterious, powerful constraint cast upon us by some force outside 
 of ourselves, and operating through all our instincts. I am willing 
 to define conscience as that which perceives and feels rightness and 
 oughtness in motives. 
 
 You cannot go behind that rightness and oughtness which con¬ 
 science points out. "Why is this fruit bitter to the human taste ? 
 Why is this other sweet ? We are so made that the tongue tastes 
 here bitterness, and there sweetness, and you cannot go behind that 
 ultimate fact. You are so made that if you do what you know has 
 behind it a wrong intention, there is a constraint brought upon you. 
 You have violated the supreme law of things in the universe. You 
 are in dissonance with your own nature, and there springs up in you, 
 under the inflexible law of conscience, a sense of guilt. 
 
 4. Conscience reveals, therefore, a moral law. 
 
 5. That law is above the human will, and acts without, and even 
 against, the consent of the will. 
 
 6. There cannot be a thought without a being who thinks ; nor a 
 law without a being who wills; nor a moral law without a moral 
 lawgiver. 
 
 There must have been the thought of the right and of the good 
 before there could have been a law promulgated in the universe sup¬ 
 porting the right and the good. That thought of the right and the 
 good, which must have gone before the law, could have existed only 
 in a thinker. The choice of that thinker to promulgate a law 
 eternally supporting the right and the good could have proceeded 
 only from a righteous thinker. There cannot be a law without a 
 being who wills, for law is only the method of the operation of a will. 
 That is Darwin, if you please. That is not Haeckel, nor Huxley; 
 but it is Charles Darwin and ninety-five out of a hundred of all 
 the foremost men of physical science. It is the great Butler, too, 
 and Julius Muller; and none the worse for that. There cannot be a 
 moral law without a moral lawgiver. 
 
 7. When, therefore, the will chooses to act from a motive which 
 conscience pronounces evil, that act of the will is disobedience—not 
 to abstract law only, but to God. 
 
 24 
 
THEODORE PARKER ON THE GUILT OF SIN. 
 
 8. Thus evil becomes sin. 
 
 I have defined evil as that which ought not to he, or as that which 
 is condemned by the moral law revealed by conscience. Sin is dis¬ 
 obedience to the moral law considered as the revelation of a personal 
 lawgiver. Sin is a choice of wrong motives. Personal disloyalty to 
 the Infinite Oughtness—that is sin. All agree to this latter defini¬ 
 tion ; but the somewhat which I call the Infinite Oughtness is to all 
 men who think clearly not merely a somewhat, but a some one. 
 
 Let us now proceed cautiously, step by step, and convince ourselves 
 that on this theme much may be placed beyond controversy by a 
 simple statement of the acknowledged laws of the operation of 
 conscience. 
 
 9. It is incontrovertible that man often hears a still, small voice 
 within him saying, “I ought.” 
 
 Does anybody deny this ? I wish to be very elementary, and to 
 carry the assent of your minds point by point, and I forewarn you 
 here and now that immense consequences hang on your admission of 
 these fundamental, simple principles. Be on your guard. Do you 
 deny that sometimes we all hear a still, small voice within us saying, 
 * c I ought” ? If a man is conscious of any great defect in his organi¬ 
 zation—intellectual, moral, or physical—he does not blame himself 
 for it; but the instant a man violates a command of conscience, 
 uttered in this whispered “ I ought,” he blames himself. 
 
 I may have limitations of my faculties, such that I never can 
 
 amount to much; but I do not blame myself. But the instant I do 
 
 what conscience pronounces ivrong, that moment I know that I am 
 
 to blame. That is human nature, and Edmund Burke used to say: 
 
 “ I cannot alter the constitution of man.” It is in every sane man to 
 
 «/ 
 
 say “ I ought.” 
 
 10. It is incontrovertible that man often answers the voice which 
 says “I ought,” by saying “I will not.” 
 
 You doubt that ? Is it not a fact certified to you by any narrative 
 of your own experience that you have multitudes of times replied to 
 this still, small voice “ I ought ” by a soft or vehement “ I will not ” ? 
 
 11. It is incontrovertible that instantly and invariably after saying 
 to “I ought” “ I will not,” a man must say “I am not at peace 
 with myself.” 
 
 12. It is incontrovertible that he must say also: “I am not in 
 fellowship with the nature of things.” 
 
 Why, this is only tautology. If a man has a powerful faculty 
 within him that says one thing, and another powerful faculty which 
 says another thing, there is within him civil war. Peace ends. He 
 recognises the condition of the republic of his faculties by his wails of 
 
 25 
 
THEODORE PARKER ON THE GUILT OF SIN 
 
 unrest. He knows that the disturbance of his nature resulted from 
 his saying “ I will not” to the still, small voice “ I ought.” 
 
 13. It is incontrovertible also that he must say also: “I have lost 
 fellowship with God.” 
 
 What is there in sin more mysterious than the sense which always 
 comes with it that the stars in their courses fight against us when we 
 do not say “I will” in response to “ I ought” ? There is in the inner 
 heavens a voice saying “Thou shalt,” “Thou oughtest,” and we 
 reply to that celestial summons “I will not,” and instantly out of the 
 inner heavens falls on us a thunderbolt. It is by irreversible natural 
 law that every man who says “I will not,” when the inner voice says 
 “ I ought,” falls into dissonance with himself, and into a feeling that 
 the stars in their courses fight against him. There is nowhere a heart 
 given at all to sensitive self-study that does not understand perfectly 
 how the sun behind the sun may be put out by saying “ I will not ” 
 to the still, small voice which says “I ought.” God causes the 
 natural sun to rise on loth the just and the unjust; hit not the sun be¬ 
 hind the sun. We are so made that the only light of our inner 
 sky is peace with ourselves. In the nature of things, the sun behind 
 the sun comes not, and cannot come forth for us from the east, if we 
 say “I will not” when conscience says “I ought.” The simple 
 refusal to follow that still, small voice leaves a drought in the soul, 
 for it dries up the sweetest rains from the sky behind the sky. It is 
 terrific, scientific, penetratingly human truth that the sun behind the 
 sun does not rise equally upon the just and the unjust; and that the 
 rains from the sky behind the sky do not fall, never have fallen, and, 
 in the nature of things, never will or can fall, in this world or the next, 
 equally upon the righteous and the unrighteous. 
 
 14. It is incontrovertible that he who is disloyal to the voice which 
 says “I ought,” must also say: “I ought to satisfy the injured 
 majesty of the law I have violated.” Sin creates an obligation to 
 satisfy the injured majesty of the moral law.* 
 
 15. It is incontrovertible that, in the absence of expiation, man 
 forbodes punishment. 
 
 That sounds like a theological and biblical proposition. It is simply 
 an ethical and purely scientific one. It is what is taught everywhere 
 in Shakespeare and the Greek poets. It is what is illustrated by all 
 the history of pagan sacrifices since the world began. If we are to 
 estimate the strength of any human impulse by the work it will do, 
 then this perception that sin creates an obligation to satisfy the injured 
 majesty of the moral law must be presumed to have behind it a most 
 
 * -Jnlius Muller, “ Doctrine of Sin,” vol. i. pp. 1-200. 
 
 26 
 
THEODORE DARKER ON THE GUILT OF SIN. 
 
 powerful force. Again and again, age after age, it has shown itself 
 to be stronger than love or death. There is nothing clearer than that 
 a man is so made that, after he has been disloyal, after he has looked 
 into the face of God and said “ I will not, ” he feels that this act has 
 created an obligation, which must in some way he discharged, to satisfy 
 the majesty and the moral right of the moral law. 
 
 It is not a pleasant thing to say that that is the way a man is made; 
 hut that is the way he is made. A liberal theology is one that looks 
 at all the facts. “ Instead of fashioning with great labour a theory 
 that would account for all the facts, Theodore Parker,” his biographer, 
 Mr. Weiss, says, “ overcame doubt by a humane and tender optimism.”* 
 
 There must be a philosophy that will account for all the facts 
 of human nature, if we are ever to have a religious science; for, 
 whether you will or not think boldly, north, south, east, and west, 
 men by-and-bye will do so, and they will look into all these astounding 
 certainties of human nature. When a man says “ I ought,” and then 
 says “ I will not,” he must say “ I am not at peace with myself; ” 
 “ I am dropped out of fellowship with the nature of things ;” “I am 
 not in fellowship with God ; ” “ The stars fight against me;” “ Nature 
 is against me; ” “ I ought, I ought to render satisfaction.” That is 
 the way Nature acts. Shakespeare was philosopher enough to make 
 one of his characters say, when one complained that he was a man 
 whom fortune had most cruelly scratched, that it was “too late to 
 pare her nails now,” and that “Fortune is a worthy lady, and will 
 not have knaves prosper long in her kingdom.” Even Shakespeare 
 speaks of a “primrose path to the eternal bonfire,” and of “the 
 flowery path that leads to the broad gate and the great fire.” 
 
 Too late! Probably Shakespeare meant something by that phrase, 
 and knew what he meant. Eor one, I think he meant that it is 
 possible for a man to fall into a final permanency of character, 
 hating what God loves, and loving what God hates. 
 
 16. It is incontrovertible that, even after a man disloyal to 
 conscience has reformed, he has behind him an irreversible record of 
 sin in the past. 
 
 It will always remain true that he has been a deserter; and, there¬ 
 fore, conscience will always leave him at far lower heights than those 
 of peace, if he be not sure that some power beyond his own has 
 satisfied the moral law. 
 
 17. It is incontrovertible that when man is free from the love of 
 sin he is not free from constitutional apprehension as to the effect of 
 the guilt of past sin on his personal future in this world and the next. 
 
 * Life of Parker, vol.i. p. 150. 
 
 27 
 
THEODORE DARKER ON THE GUILT OF SIN. 
 
 18. It is incontrovertible that the desire to be sure that the guilt of 
 sin will be overlooked is one of the most powerful forces in human 
 nature. 
 
 19. It is incontrovertible that an Atonement may thus in the 
 solitudes of conscience be scientifically known to be the desire of all 
 nations—that is, of all who have fallen into that disturbance of the 
 moral nature which is called sin. 
 
 20. The atonement which Reason can prove is needed, Revelation 
 declares has been made. 
 
 I do not affirm that by reason I can prove the fact of the 
 Atonement. I believe, as assuredly as that I exist, that by reason I 
 can prove our need of the Atonement. I do not assert the sufficiency 
 of natural religion. I assert merely its efficiency. I believe that 
 Julius Muller, building on the same axiomatic truths which Parker 
 relied upon, and forming his system with entire freedom, and at last 
 finding it correspondent with Christian truth, has been far more loyal 
 to the scientific method than he who asserted that there is in man no 
 enmity against God. That an Atonement has been made you must 
 learn from Revelation. That an Atonement is needed you can learn 
 from human reason. 
 
 Old man and blind, Michael Angelo, in the Yatican, used to stand 
 before the Torso, the famous fragment of a statue, made, possibly, by 
 one of the most skilled chisels of antiquity, and, with his fingers 
 upon the mutilated lines, he would tell his pupils how the entire 
 figure must have been formed when it was whole. He would trace 
 out the fragmentary plan, and say that the head must have had this 
 posture and the limbs that posture, and that the complete work could 
 have been only what the fragments indicated. Religious science, 
 with the dim torch of reason, and not illuminated by revelation, is a 
 blind Michael Angelo, standing before Torso of the religious universe, 
 and feeling blindly along fragmentary lines. Although the head of 
 this statue is infinitely beyond our touch or sight in the infinities and 
 the eternities above us, and although its feet stand on adamant, lower 
 than thought can reach with its plummet, we do know, in the name of 
 the universality of law, that the lines we touch in our blindness in 
 natural religion would, if completed according to the plan which is 
 tangible to us, be revealed religion, and nothing less. 
 
 28 
 
THEODORE DARKER ON TEE GUILT OF SIN. 
 
 By the Kev. JOSEPH COOK. 
 
 When Charles IX. of France was importuned to kill Coligny, he for 
 a long time refused to do so publicly, or secretly; hut at last he gave 
 way, and consented in these memorable words : “ Assassinate Admiral 
 Coligny, but leave not a Huguenot alive in France to reproach 
 me.” So came the massacre of St. Bartholomew. When the soul 
 resolves to assassinate some holy motive; when the spirit determines 
 to kill, in the inner realm, Admiral Coligny, it, too, delays for a while, 
 and, when it gives way, usually says: “Assassinate this accuser of 
 mine; but leave not an accusing accomplice of his in all my kingdom 
 alive to reproach me.” So comes the massacre of the desire to be holy. 
 
 Emerson quotes the Welch Triad as saying: “God himself cannot 
 procure good for the wicked.” Julius Miiller, Dorner, Bothe, 
 Schleiermacher, no less than Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates, assert that, 
 in the nature of things, there can be no blessedness without holiness. 
 Confucius said : “ Heaven means principle.” But what if a soul per¬ 
 manently loses principle ? Si vis fugere a Deo, fuge acl Deum, is the 
 Latin proverb. If you wish to flee from God, flee to him. The soul 
 cannot escape from God; and can two walk together unless they are 
 agreed? Surely, there are a few certainties in religion, or several 
 points clear to exact ethical science in relation to the natural condi¬ 
 tions of the peace of the soul. 
 
 It is plainly possible that a man may lose not all subsidiary, but all 
 predominant, desire to be holy. 
 
 If he does lose that, it remains scientifically certain that even 
 omnipotence and omniscience cannot force upon such a character 
 blessedness. There can be no blessedness without holiness; and there 
 can be no holiness without a supreme love of what God loves, and a 
 supreme hate of what God hates. It is possible that a man may so 
 disarrange his nature as to fall into a permanent loss of the pre¬ 
 dominant desire to be holy. 
 
 Theodore Parker, as his biographers admit, must be called a great 
 reader, rather than a great scholar. But De Wette, his German 
 master, although most of his works have ceased to be authorities in 
 biblical research, ought to have prevented Theodore Parker from 
 asserting that the Founder of Christianity did not teach that there 
 may be a permanent loss of a predominant desire to be holy. 
 Theodore Parker himself ought to have prevented himself from that 
 assertion. In his earlier career he held that our Lord did teach a 
 
 29 
 
THEODORE PARKER ON THE GUILT OF SIN. 
 
 possibility of the lapse of some for ever and for ever from the supreme 
 love of what God loves, and the supreme hate of what God hates. He 
 thought that the New Testament, properly interpreted, does contain 
 in it a statement that it is possible for a man to lose permanently the 
 predominant desire to be holy, and this was one of Parker’s reasons for 
 rejecting the authority of the New Testament. But toward the end 
 of his career he tried to persuade Frances Power Cobbe that the 
 Founder of Christianity did not teach that any will be lost. Parker’s 
 writings are self-contradictory on this supreme topic, most of the real 
 difficulties of which he skipped. 
 
 It is the wisdom of all science, however, never to skip difficulties. 
 In addition to the other chief errors of Parker’s theology already 
 mentioned, it is important to notice that— 
 
 He failed to distinguish properly between arbitrary penalties 
 and natural wages of sin. 
 
 I know how widely intellectual unrest on the topic I am now 
 introducing fills minds that never have been much troubled by 
 Theodore Parker. I know that many conscientious and learned 
 persons have asked themselves the question the disciples once asked 
 our Lord: “Are there few that be saved?” He answered that 
 inquiry very distinctly : “Yes, there are few.” Does science answer 
 in the same way ? 
 
 It would not follow, even if you were to take our Lord’s answer as 
 supreme authority, as I do, that this universe is a failure. All ages 
 to come are to be kept in view—all other worlds. Our Lord’s word 
 referred to our present evil generation; and, if you ask the central 
 question in the best modern form, you must answer it in his way. 
 How many, in the present state of our earth, love predominantly what 
 God loves, and hate predominantly what God hates ? How many 
 have acquired predominant similarity of feeling with God ? Only 
 those who have, can be at peace in his presence, either here or here¬ 
 after. That is as certain as any deduction from our intuitions 
 concerning the nature of things. As sure as that a thing cannot be 
 and not be at the same time in the same sense, so sure is it that a man 
 cannot be at peace with God when he loves what he hates and hates 
 what he loves. There must be harmony or dissonance between them. 
 Dissonance is its own punishment. Dissimilarity of feeling with 
 God carries with it immense wages in the nature of things. In the 
 name of science, ask : Are there few that have acquired a predominant 
 love of what God loves, and a predominant hate of what God hates ? 
 ~We must answer, in the name of science, that broad is the way and 
 wide is the gate which, in our evil generation, leads to dissimilarity of 
 feeling with God, and many there be who go in thereat; but straight 
 
 30 
 
THEODORE PARKER ON THE GUILT OF SIN. 
 
 is the way and narrow is the gate which leads to similarity of feeling 
 with God, and few are they in our time that find it. But there are 
 other worlds; there are other ages. “ Save yourselves from this unto¬ 
 ward generation.” Who knows that in the final summing up the 
 number of the lost may be greater than that of the saved ? Or, as 
 Lyman Beecher used to say in this city, “ Greater than the number of 
 our criminals in penal institutions is in contrast with the whole of the 
 population.” But I talk of the galaxies, I talk of the infinities, and 
 of the eternities, and not merely of this world, in which you and I are 
 to work out our deliverance from the love of sin and the guilt of sin, 
 and have reason to do so with fear and trembling. 
 
 I ask no man to take my opinions. You are requested to notice 
 whether discussion is clear ; not whether it is orthodox. Let us put 
 aside all ecclesiastical and denominational tests. This Lectureship 
 has for its purpose simply the discussion of the clear, the true, the 
 new, and the strategic in the relations between science and religion. 
 
 What are some of the more important natural laws which enable us to 
 estimate scientifically the possible extent of the natural penalties of sin ? 
 
 1. Under irreversible natural law sin produces judicial blindness. 
 
 Kill Admiral Coligny, drive out the Huguenots, permit the 
 massacre of St. Bartholomew, and you have made a new Trance. 
 Carlyle says that it pleased Trance to slit her own veins and let out 
 the best blood she had; and that she did this on the night of the 
 Massacre of St. Bartholomew, and that after that she was historically 
 another creature. Having killed Coligny, you cannot look his friends 
 in the face. You kill them, and your kingdom is a new one. When 
 a man sins against light, there comes upon him an unwillingness to 
 look into the accusing illumination, and the consequence is that he 
 turns away from it. But that effect itself becomes a cause. Keep 
 your eyes upon your Shakespeare, upon your Greek poets, or upon 
 whatever is a good mirror of human nature, and tell me whether 
 these six propositions are not all scientifically demonstrable :— 
 
 1. Truth possessed, but not obeyed, becomes unwelcome. 
 
 2. It is, therefore, shut out of the voluntary activities of memory 
 and reflection, as it gives pain. 
 
 3. The passions it should check grow, therefore, stronger. 
 
 4. The moral emotions it should feed grow weaker. 
 
 5. An ill-balanced state of the soul thus arises, and tends to 
 become habitual. 
 
 6. That ill-balanced state renders the soul blind to the truths 
 most needed to rectify its condition. 
 
 “ On the temperate man,” said Aristotle,* 4 u are attendant, perhaps 
 
 * “Rhetoric,” Bohn’s edition, p. 70. 
 
 31 
 
THEODORE DARKER ON THE GUILT OF SIN. 
 
 forthwith, by motion of his temperance, good opinions, and appetites 
 as to pleasures; but on the intemperate the opposite.” 
 
 A man sins against light boldly. To the divine “ I ought,” he 
 answers “I will not;” to the divine “ Thou shalt,” or “ Thou 
 oughtest,” he replies “I will not.” The consequence instantly is, 
 that he ceases to be at peace with himself; and light, instead of 
 becoming a blessing, is to him an accusation. The slant javelin 
 of truth, that was intended to penetrate him with rapture, fills 
 him now with torture. If we give ourselves to an exact study of the 
 soul’s pains and pleasures, there is in man no greater bliss than con¬ 
 science can afford, and no greater pain than it can inflict. In this 
 stage of existence the highest bliss comes from the similarity of feeling 
 with God, and the highest pain from dissimilarity of feeling 
 with him. The greatest pains and pleasures, therefore, are set over 
 against our greatest duties; and so God’s desire that we should agree 
 with him is shown by our living under the points of all these penal¬ 
 ties and blisses. But light having become an accuser, man turns 
 away from it. Then the virtues which that light ought to quicken 
 are allowed to languish. The vices which that light ought to repress 
 grow more vigorous. Repeated acts of sin result in a continued 
 state of dissimilarity of feeling with God. That state is an effect ; 
 but it becomes a cause. According to New England theology, sin 
 exists only in acts of choice; but the newest school of that theology 
 need have no war with the oldest, for the former recognises, as fully 
 as the latter can, that the state of dissimilarity of feeling with God is 
 the source of the evil acts of choice. 
 
 That state of the dispositions is the copious fountain of sin, and as 
 such is properly called depravity. 
 
 This state, continuing, becomes a habit; then that habit, con¬ 
 tinuing long, becomes chronic; and so the result is an ill-balanced 
 growth of the character. 
 
 When I hung my hammock up last summer on the shores of Lake 
 George, I noticed that the trees nearest the light at the edge of the 
 forest had larger branches than those in the interior of the wood; and 
 the same tree would throw out a long branch toward the light, and a 
 short one toward obscurity in the interior of the forest. Just so a 
 man grows toward the light to which he turns. According to the 
 direction in which he turns with his supreme affection he grows; and 
 as he grows he balances; and, under the irreversible natural law of 
 moral gravitation—as fixed as scientific a certainty in the universe as 
 the law of physical gravitation—as he balances so he falls; and, 
 according to science, after a tree has fallen under that law, the pros¬ 
 trate trunk continues to be under the law, and, therefore, as it falls so 
 
 32 
 
THEODORE DARKER OH THE GUILT OF S'IK 
 
 it lies. Under moral gravitation, no less, surely, than under physical, 
 every free object that falls out of the skies strikes on its heavier 
 side. 
 
 They showed me at Amherst, the other day, a meteorite that 
 dropped out of the azure, and it struck—on which side ? Of course, 
 on its heavier. As the stream runs, so it wears its channel; as it 
 wears its channel, so it runs. 
 
 Al l the mythologies of the globe recognize this fearful law of 
 judicial blindness. 
 
 Go yonder into Greenland with Dr. Eanke, and you will find a story 
 among the men of the lonely North to the effect that if a sorcerer will 
 make a stirrup out of a strip of sealskin, and wind it around his limbs, 
 three times about his heart, and thrice about his neck, and seven times 
 about his forehead, and then knot it before his eyes, that sorcerer, 
 when the lamps are put out at night, may rise into space and fly 
 whithersoever his leading passion dictates. So we put ourselves into 
 the stirrup of predominant love of what God hates, and predominant 
 hate of what God loves, and we coil the strands about our souls. 
 They are thrice wound about our heart, three times around our neck, 
 seven times around our foreheads, and knotted before our eyes. If the 
 poor savages yonder, where the stars look down four months in the 
 year without interruption, are right in their sublime theory as to the 
 solemnities of the universe, we, too, when the lamps are out, shall 
 rise into the Unseen Holy, and fly whithersoever our leading passion 
 dictates. 
 
 Greenland says that hunters once went out and found a revolving 
 mountain, and that, attempting to cross the chasm between it and the 
 firm land, some of these men were crushed as the mountain revolved. 
 But they finally noticed that the gnarled, wheeling mass had a red 
 side and a white side. They waited till the white side came opposite 
 them, and then, ascending the mountain, found that a king lived on 
 its summit, made themselves loyal to him, surrendered themselves to 
 him affectionately and irreversibly, and afterwards found themselves 
 able to go and come safely. But the mountain had a red side, and it 
 turned and turned, and there was no safety on it except on the white 
 side, and in loyalty to the king at the summit in the clouds. That 
 mythology of the ISTorth, lately read for us by scholars, has in it 
 eternal verity and a kind of solemnity like that of the long shining of 
 the Arctic stars, and the tumbling icebergs, and the peaceable gurgle 
 of the slow-heaving Polar Ocean, far gleaming under the boreal lights 
 of the midnight Arctic sun. Stunted, you think, the men of that zone ? 
 Why, on the banks of the Charles, yonder, your Longfellow, taking 
 
 33 d 
 
THEODORE DARKER ON THE GUILT OF SIN. 
 
 up a German poet, finds the same idea in far less sublime and subtle 
 imagery, and translates it for its majesty and truth :— 
 
 “ The mills of God grind slowly; 
 
 But they grind exceeding small.” 
 
 To me, there is in Macbeth nothing so terrible as Lady Macbeth’s 
 invocation of the spirits which produce moral callousness in the soul. 
 There is no passage in that sublime treatise on conscience which we 
 call Macbeth, so sublime to me as this, on the law of judicial 
 blindness: 
 
 “ The raven himself is hoarse 
 That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan 
 Under my battlements. Come, you spirits 
 
 “ Unsex me here ; 
 
 And fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-full 
 Of direst cruelty ! Make thick my blood ! 
 
 Stop up the access and passage to remorse ! 
 
 “ Come, thick night, 
 
 And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell! 
 
 That my keen knife see not the wound it makes, 
 
 Nor Heaven peep through the blanket of the dark, 
 
 To cry ‘Hold! ‘Hold !’” 
 
 That invocation is likely to be uttered by every soul which has said 
 “I will not” to the divine “ I ought.” It is as sure to be answered 
 as natural law is to be irreversible. Macbeth himself, in a similar 
 mood, says: 
 
 “ Come, seeling night, 
 
 Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day ; 
 
 Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond 
 
 Which keeps me pale ! Light thickens; and the crow 
 
 Makes wing to the rooky wood.” 
 
 Have you ever offered in the rooky wood of sorcerous temptation a 
 prayer for blindness ? In the nature of things every sin against light 
 draws blood on the spiritual retina. 
 
 You say that after death you. are to have more illumination; and 
 that, therefore, you will reform beyond the grave ! How do you know 
 that you will see greater illumination, even if you are in the presence 
 of it ? How do you know that you will love it, even if you do see it ? 
 There can be no blessedness without holiness ; there can be no holiness 
 without a free, affectionate acknowledgment of God as King, or a 
 supreme love of what he loves, and hate of what he hates. Are you 
 likely to obtain these soon under the law of judicial blindness ? You 
 will have what you like ; but do you like the light ? You have more 
 and more illumination now, as the years pass. Do you see it ? Do 
 
 34 
 
THEODORE DARKER ON THE GUILT OF SIN. 
 
 you love it ? There are two questions about this greater light beyond 
 the grave. First—Will you see it ? Second—Will you like it ? Un¬ 
 less you have authority in the name of science for answering both these 
 questions in the affirmative, you have no right in the name of science 
 to rely on a mere possibility, on a guess, and take your leap into the 
 Unseen, depending on a riddle. I, for one, will not do this for myself ; 
 and I will not teach others to do so. 
 
 Shakespeare has not left us in doubt at all on this theme; for in 
 another place he says: 
 
 “ But when we in our viciousness 
 Grow hard, the wise gods seal our eyes, 
 
 In our own slime drop our clear judgments, 
 
 Make us adore our errors, and thus 
 We strut to our destruction.” 
 
 Carlyle quotes out of the Koran a story of the dwellers by the Dead 
 Sea, to whom "Moses was sent. They sniffed and sneered at Moses; 
 saw no comeliness in Moses; and so he withdrew. But Nature and 
 her rigorous veracities did not withdraw. When next we find the 
 dwellers by the Dead Sea, they, according to the Koran, are all 
 changed into apes. “ By not using their souls, they lost them.” “ And 
 now,” continues Carlyle, “ their only employment is to sit there and 
 look out into the smokiest, dreariest, most undecipherable sort of 
 universe. Only once in seven days they do remember that they once 
 had souls. Hast thou never, 0 traveller ! fallen in with parties of this 
 tribe ? Methinks they have grown somewhat numerous in our day.” 
 
 The old Greek proverb was that the avenging deities are shod with 
 wool; but the wool grows on the eyelids that refuse the light. 
 “ Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad; ” but the 
 insanity arises from judicial blindness. 
 
 Jeremy Taylor says that whoever sins against light kisses the lips 
 of a blazing cannon. 
 
 I never saw a dare-devil face that had not in it something of both 
 the sneak and the fool. The sorcery of sin is that it changes a man 
 into a sneak and a fool; but the fool does not know that he is a sneak, 
 and the sneak does not know that he is a fool. If I were a sculptor, 
 I should represent sin with two faces, like those of Janus, looking in 
 opposite directions. One should be idiotic, the other Machiavellian. 
 But the one face could not see the other. The idiot would not know 
 he was Machiavellian ; the Machiavellian would not know that he is 
 idiotic. The sneak would not know that he is a fool; nor the fool 
 that he is a sneak. 
 
 2. Under irreversible natural law there is a self-propagating power 
 
 m sin. 
 
 35 
 
THEODORE PARKER OH THE GUILT OF SIH. 
 
 Of course, this self-propagating power depends upon the law of 
 judicial blindness very largely; but by no means exclusively. So are 
 we made that every effect in the growth of our characters becomes a 
 cause—and every good effect no less than every bad one. 
 
 The laws of the self-propagating power of habit bless the righteous 
 as much as they curse the wicked. The laws by which we attain 
 supreme bliss are the laws by which we descend to supreme woe. In 
 the ladder up and the ladder down in the universe the rungs are in the 
 same side-pieces. The self-propagating power of sin and the self- 
 propagating power of holiness are one law. The law. of judicial 
 blindness is one with that by which the pure in heart see God, and 
 they who walk toward the east find the morning brighter and brighter 
 to the perfect day. 
 
 Of course I shall offend many if I assert that there may be penalty 
 that has no remedial tendency. But I ask you to be clear, and to 
 remember that an unwelcome truth is really not destroyed by shutting 
 the eyes to it. There are three kinds of natural laws: the physical, 
 the organic, and the moral. I affirm that “ Never too late to mend ” is 
 not a doctrine of science, in the domain of the physical laws, nor is it in 
 that of the organic. 
 
 Under the physical laws of gravitation a ship may careen to the 
 right or left, and only a remedial effect be produced. The danger 
 may teach the crew seamanship ; it makes men bold and wise. Thus 
 the penalty of violating up to a certain point the physical law is 
 remedial in its tendency. But let the ship careen beyond a certain 
 line, and it capsizes. If it be of iron, it remains at the bottom of the 
 sea, and hundreds and hundreds of years of suffering of that penalty 
 has no tendency to bring it back. Under the physical natural laws, 
 plainly, there is such a thing as its being too late to mend. In their 
 immeasurable domain there is a distinction between penalty that has a 
 remedial tendency, and penalty that has no remedial tendency at all. 
 So, under the organic law, your tropical tree, gashed at a certain 
 point, may throw forth its gums, and even have greater strength than 
 before ; but gashed beyond the centre, cut through, the organic law is 
 so far violated that the tree falls. And after a thousand years you do 
 not expect to see the tree escape from the dominion of the law which 
 is enforcing its penalty—do you? There is no tendency in that 
 penalty toward remedial effect; none at all; and you know it. 
 Therefore, under the organic laws, there is such a thing as its being 
 too late to mend. 
 
 Now keep your eyes fastened upon the great principle of analogy, 
 which Newton and Butler call the supreme rule in science, and ask 
 yourselves whether, if you were to find some strange animal in a 
 
 36 
 
THEODORE DARKER OK THE GUILT OF SIN. 
 
 geological stratum, and if you were to know, by having one of its 
 hands free, that it had three fingers, and if you were to find two 
 fingers on the other hand free from the rock, and both shutting toward 
 the palm, would you not infer that the third finger, if you could 
 loosen it from the rock, would also be found closing toward the palm ? 
 Just so I ask whether, if we find that under two sets of natural laws 
 which are all included under three classes, there is incontrovertibly 
 such a thing as penalty without remedial effect, may there not be the 
 same under the third set ? Two fingers shut toward the palm. 
 I cannot quite trace the whole range of the moral law ; but I know 
 by analogy that, if two fingers shut toward the palm, the third 
 probably does. If there is such a thing as its being for ever too late to 
 mend under the organic and the physical natural law , probably , and more 
 than probably , there is such a thing under the moral natural law. 
 
 Yes, but you say the will is free, and, therefore, that it cannot 
 be supposed that a man will fall into final dissimilarity of feeling with 
 God, or can so lose the desire to be holy, that he will not choose the 
 right when greater light comes. You affirm that the self-propagating 
 power of sin may place necessity upon the disordered nature. You 
 say that the denial that all moral penalty is remedial requires us to 
 deny that the will of lost souls continues free. I beg your pardon 
 again, and that in the name of science. There may be certainty 
 where there is no necessity. 
 
 Is John Milton putting together a self-contradiction when he pictures 
 Satan as making evil his good, and as yet retaining a free will ? Is he 
 uttering self-contradiction when he shows us a fiendish character which 
 retains yet some elements of its original brightness ? Has Milton’s 
 Satan lost free will ? 
 
 Origen used to teach that the prince of fiends might return to a glad 
 allegiance to God; and so did Robert Burns, whom Emerson commends 
 for using these words—originally written to attack the proposition I 
 am now defending, but, after all, containing most subtle confirmation 
 
 of it: 
 
 “ Auld Nickie Ben, 
 
 O wad ye tak a thought and men*, 
 Ye aiblins might— 
 
 I dinna ken— 
 
 Still hae a stake.” 
 
 Ho ; the self-propagating power of sin may produce a state of soul 
 in which evil is chosen as good, and in which it is for ever too late to 
 mend, and yet not destroy free will. 
 
 3. Under irreversible natural law character tends to a final perma- 
 
 37 
 
THEODORE PARKER OK THE GUILT OF SIN. 
 
 nence , good or lad. In the nature of the case , a final permanence is 
 attained but once. 
 
 If asked whether final permanence of character is a natural law, 
 what should you say if we were to speak without reference to conclu¬ 
 sions in religious science ? How have men in all ages expressed them¬ 
 selves in literature and philosophy on this theme? Is it not perfectly 
 certain that all the great writers of the world justify the proposition 
 that character tends to a final permanence, good or had ? 
 
 This universe up to the edge of the tomb is not a joke. There 
 are, in this life, serious differences between the right hand and 
 the left. Nevertheless, in our present career a man has but one 
 chance. Even if you come weighted into the world, as Sinbad was with 
 the Old Man of the Mountain, you have but one chance. Time does 
 not fly in a circle, but forth and right on. The wandering, squander¬ 
 ing, desiccated moral leper is gifted with no second set of early years. 
 There is no fountain in Elorida that gives perpetual youth, and the 
 universe might be searched, probably, in vain far such a spring. Waste 
 your youth; you shall have but one chance. Waste your middle life ; 
 you shall have but one chance. Waste you old age ; you shall have but 
 one chance. It is an irreversible natural law that character attains 
 final permanence, and in the nature of things final permanence can come 
 but once. The world is fearfully and wonderfully made, and so are 
 we ; and we shall escape neither ourselves nor these stupendous laws. 
 It is not to me a pleasant thing to exhibit these truths from the side of 
 terror. But, on the other side, these are the truths of bliss; for by 
 this very law, through which all character tends to become unchang¬ 
 ing, a soul that attains a final permanence of good character runs but 
 one risk, and is delivered once for all from its torture and unrest. It 
 has passed the bourne from behind which no man is caught out of the 
 fold. He who is the force behind all natural law is the keeper of his 
 sheep, and no one is able to pluck them out of his hand. Himself 
 without variableness or shadow of turning, he maintains the irreversi¬ 
 bleness of all natural forces, one of which is the insufferably majestic 
 law by which character tends to assume final permanence—good as 
 well as bad. 
 
 4. Under irreversible natural law there may be in the soul a per¬ 
 manent loss of the predominant desire to be holy. Therefore, 
 
 5. Under irreversible natural law there may exist in the universe 
 eternal sin. 
 
 It is not my duty here, as it is on the Sabbaths, to expound the 
 Scriptures; but you will allow me to say that “eternal sin” 
 is a scriptural phrase. As all scholars know, we must read in the 
 twenty-ninth verse of the third chapter of Mark auaprfi/xaTos , and not 
 
 38 
 
THEODORE PARKER ON THE GUILT OF SIN. 
 
 KpLaeus. He who sinneth against the Holy Ghost is in clanger of 
 11 eternal sin” 
 
 Theodore Parker used to say that the profoundest expressions in the 
 Hew Testament are those which are most likely to have been correctly 
 reported. "What phrase on this theme is profounder than “ eternal 
 sin ” ? Dean Alford well says that “ it is to the critical treatment of 
 the sacred text that we owe the restoration of such important and 
 deep-reaching expressions as this.” Lange calls it “a strong and 
 pregnant expression.” 
 
 It is not the best way in which to teach the truth of future punish¬ 
 ment to say that a man is punished for ever and for ever for the sins of 
 that hand’s-breadth of duration we call time. If the soul does not 
 repent of these with contrition, and not merely with attrition, the 
 nature of things forbids its peace. But the biblical and the natural 
 truth is that prolonged dissimilarity of feeling with God may end in 
 eternal sin. If there is eternal sin, there will be eternal punishment. 
 Pinal permanence of character under the laws of judicial blindness and 
 the self-propagating power of sin, is the truth emphasized by both 
 God’s word and His works. 
 
 6. Under irreversible natural law there can be no blessedness with¬ 
 out holiness. 
 
 Here I leave you, face to face with the nature of things, the 
 authority which dazzled Socrates. God’s omnipotence cannot force 
 blessedness on a soul that has lost the predominate desire to be holy. 
 Omniscience cannot make happy a man who loves what God hates, and 
 hates what God loves. If you fall into predominant dissimilarity of 
 feeling with God, it is out of his power to give you blessedness. Un¬ 
 doubtedly we are, of all men, most misemble unless with our 
 deliverance from the guilt of sin there comes to us also deliverance 
 from the love of it. Without holiness there can be no blessedness ; 
 but there can be no holiness without a predominant love of what God 
 loves, and hate of what God hates. We grow wrong; we allow 
 ourselves to crystallize in habits that imply a loss of a desire to bo 
 holy; and, at last, having made up our minds not to love predomi¬ 
 nantly what God loves, and hate what he hates, we are amazed that 
 we have not blessedness. But the universe is not amazed. The 
 nature of things is but another name for the Divine Nature. God 
 would not be God if there could be blessedness without holiness. 
 
 39 
 
TEEOD ORE PARKER ON TEE PERFECTION OF TEE 
 
 DIVINE EERALD. 
 
 By the Rev. JOSEPH COOK. 
 
 In the Singalese books of Gotama Buddha, written under the shadow 
 of the Himalayas, we find the statement that ‘ 1 as surely as the pebble 
 east heavenward abides not there, but returns to the earth, so, propor¬ 
 tionate to thy deed, good or ill, will the desire of thy heart be meted 
 out to thee, in whatever form or world thou shalt enter.” It was the 
 opinion of Socrates, recorded with favour by Plato, that “ the wicked 
 would be too well off if their evil deeds came to an end. 1 * 4 All 
 disloyalty to the still, small voice which declares what ought to be 
 is followed by pain. What if it were not ? Is God God, if, with 
 unscientific liberalism, we in our philosophy put the throne of the 
 universe upon rockers, and make of it an easy chair from which 
 lullabys are sung, both to the evil and to the good ? 
 
 “ Whatever we do, God is on our side.” So say many who would 
 not dare to affirm that, whatever we do, the nature of things is on our 
 side. But the nature of things is only the total outcome of the require¬ 
 ments, the perfections of the Divine Nature. God is behind the 
 nature of things, and you and I cannot trifle with him any more than 
 with it. He was; he is; he is to come. It was; it is; it is to come. 
 It is he. 
 
 Great literature always recognises the law of moral gravitation. 
 Seeking the deepest modern words, I open, for instance, Thomas 
 Carlyle, and read: 
 
 “ ‘ Penalties: ’ Quarrel not with the old phraseology, good reader: attend rather 
 to the thing it means. The word was heard of old, with a right solemn meaning 
 attached to it, from theological pulpits and such places; and may still be heard 
 there with a half-meaning, or with no meaning, though it has rather become 
 obsolete to modern ears. But the thing should not have fallen obsolete. The 
 thing is a grand and solemn truth, expressive of a silent law of Heaven which 
 continues for ever valid. The most untheological of men may still assert the thing, 
 and invite all men to notice it as a silent monition and prophecy in this universe; 
 to take it, with more of awe than they are wont, as a correct reading of the will of 
 the Eternal in respect of such matters, and in their modem sphere to bear the same 
 well in mind. 
 
 “ The want of loyalty to the Maker of this universe—he who wants that, what 
 else has he or can he have ? If you do not, you man or nation, love the Truth 
 enough, but try to make a chapman-bargain with Truth, instead of giving yourself 
 wholly, soul and body and life, to her, Truth will not live with you, Truth will 
 
 * Jowett’s Plato, Introduction to Phsedo. 
 
 40 
 
TEE PERFECTION OF TEE DIVINE EERALD 
 
 depart from you, and only Logic, ‘ Wit ’—for example, c London Wit ’—Sophistry, 
 Virtue, the iEsthetic Arts, and perhaps (for a short while) Book-keeping by Double 
 Entry, will abide with you. You will follow falsity and think it truth, you 
 unfortunate man or nation! You will, right surely, you for one, stumble to 
 the Devil; and are every day and hour, little as you imagine it, making progress 
 thither.”* 
 
 This majestic key-note of scientific, ethical truth is the deep tone 
 that leads the anthem of all great thought since the world began. 
 Open now Theodore Parker, and how harshly his words clash with 
 Carlyle’s! 
 
 “The infinite perfection of God is the corner-stone of all my theological and 
 religious teaching—the foundation, perhaps, of all that is peculiar in my system. 
 It is not known to the Old Testament or the New ; it has never been accepted by 
 any sect in the Christian world. The idea of God’s imperfection has been carried 
 out with dreadful logic in the Christian scheme. In the ecclesiastical conception of 
 the Deity there is a fourth person in the Godhead—namely, the Devil: an outlying 
 member, unacknowledged, indeed, the complex of all evil, hut as much a part of 
 Deity as either Son or Holy Ghost, and far more powerful than all the rest, who 
 seem hut jackals to provide for this roaring lion.”f 
 
 What is in the lines here in Parker is not so painful as what is 
 between the lines. “ God is a perfect Creator,” writes Parker, 
 “making all from a perfect motive, for a perfect purpose. The 
 motive must be love; the purpose welfare. The perfect Creator is 
 a perfect providence; love becoming a universe of perfect welfare. 
 
 “ Optimism is the religion of science.” “ Every fall is a fall 
 upward .” 
 
 One feels , in reading Theodore Parker, that, whatever ive do, God is 
 on our side. Carlyle is of a very different opinion, and is moved by no 
 faith deeper than that the distinction between duty and its opposite is 
 u quite infinite.” Place side by side this free-thinker, Carlyle, and 
 that free-thinker, Parker, and ask which is the truer of the two to 
 the deep intuitions of the soul ? Contrast the seriousness of Buddha 
 and the tone of this man of IMassachusett’s Bay. Compare Socrates 
 and Plato, under the shade of the Acropolis, with this modern man, 
 under the shade of what? Of a stunted mental philosophy; rooted 
 well, indeed, in our soil at his time, but only a very imperfect 
 growth as yet, and hardly risen above the ground when the attempt 
 was made here to deny the existence of sin, and of its natural wages 
 in the universe, in the name of an intuitive philosophy which asserts 
 precisely the opposite in both cases. 
 
 * Carlyle, “Frederick the Great,” vol. i. pp. 270, 271. 
 t Weiss, “Life of Parker,” vol. ii. p. 470. $ Ibid, p. 471. 
 
 i “ Discourse on Religion.” 
 
 41 
 
TEE PERFECTION OF TEE DIVINE EEPAID. 
 
 Of course you expect me not to skip the topic of the 
 origin of evil, for, after all, the question which touches that theme, 
 quite as often as any other, drives men into intellectual unrest, 
 throwing some into atheism, some into a denial of the authority of 
 Scripture, some into various forms of a false, loose, unscholarly 
 liberalism. 
 
 What are the more important points which the use of the scientific 
 method can make clear on this multiplex, fathomless theme of the 
 origin of evil ? 
 
 1. There cannot he thought without a thinker. 
 
 2. There is thought in the universe. 
 
 3. Therefore there is a Thinker in the universe. 
 
 4. But a thinker is a person. 
 
 5. Therefore there is a Personal Thinker in the universe. 
 
 You will grant me, at least, what Descartes made the basis of his 
 philospohy: “ Cogito; ergo sum ”—“ I think; therefore I am.” I know 
 that I think; and, therefore, I know that I am, and that I am a person.” 
 Agassiz says, in his “ Essay on Classification,” that the universe 
 11 exhibits thought,” and that is not a very heterodox opinion ! You 
 know with what magnificent logical, rhetorical, and moral power the 
 massive Agassiz, in that best of his books, gathers up range after 
 range of the operations of the natural laws, and closes every paragraph 
 with this language: “These facts exhibit thought;” “ these facts 
 exhibit mind; ” and so on and on through a mass of intellectual 
 scenery gigantic as his own Alps, and as little likely to be pul¬ 
 verized ! When that man, in presence of the scientific world, 
 bowed his head in silent prayer in the face of the audience at Penikese, 
 he did it before a Person! What cared he for the lonely few sciolists 
 who assume that there is no reason for holding their heads otherwise 
 than erect in this universe ? As I contrast his mood and theirs, I 
 think always of the old apologue of the heavy heads of wheat and 
 light heads : the heavy heads always bend. 
 
 You say that you are sure you are a thinker, because you know there 
 is thought in you. I know there is a Thinker in the universe, because 
 there is Thought in it, and there cannot he thought without a thinker . 
 There cannot be a here without a there. There cannot be a before 
 without an after. Just so, in the nature of things, there cannot be a 
 thought without a thinker. If we know there is thought in the 
 universe, let us quit all doubt about a Divine Thinker. 
 
 What! falling into anthropomorphism, are you ? That is a long 
 word, but it means making God too much like man. Stern Ethan 
 Allen, who made a speech once near Lake George, in a fort, the ruins 
 of which were part of my playground in earliest years, said in a book 
 
 42 
 
THE PERFECTION OF THE DIVINE HERALD . 
 
 written to attack Christianity: “ There mnst he some resemblance 
 between the divine nature and the human nature. I do know some 
 things, and God knows all things; and, therefore, in a few particulars 
 there is resemblance between man and God.” Ai Anthropomorphism, 
 or the likening of God to man, is not quite as bad as likening 
 God to mere blind physical force—is it ? Most of those who 
 are shyest of what is called anthropomorphism are advocates of a 
 theory which likens God to what ? To the highest we know ? Not 
 at all. To the next to the highest? No. They liken him to one 
 of the lowest things we know—to mere physical force, which has in 
 itself no thought or will. Force, the unknown God, forsooth? No 
 doubt He whom we dare not name is behind all force. But to take 
 one of the lower manifestations of his power as that according to which 
 we will describe his whole nature is far more scandalous than to take 
 the loftiest we know, and to say that God, at least, is equal to that; 
 and how much better, neither man nor angel knows, or ever will. 
 Descartes wrote, in a passage closely following his famous aphorism, 
 and which ought to be as famous as that: “I must have been brought 
 into existence by a Being at least as perfect as myself.” The Maker 
 must be better than his work. “ He must transcend in excellence my 
 highest imagination of perfection.” 
 
 Is it anthropomorphism to say that there cannot be thought without 
 a thinker, and that there is Thought, and that, therefore, there must 
 be a Thinker in the universe ? That is a necessary conclusion from 
 self-evident, intuitive, axiomatic truth. It is an inference as tremor¬ 
 less as the necessary conclusion that if there is a here there is a there. 
 So are we made that we cannot deny that if there is Thought in the 
 universe there must be a Thinker. Let us rejoice with a glad¬ 
 ness fathomless as this noon above our heads. Let us occupy our 
 privileges. Let our souls go out to Him who holds the infinities and 
 eternities in his palm as the small dust of the balance. Let our 
 thoughts, if possible, not faint as they pass from the planet which He 
 governs by his will, called gravitation, down to the winking of our 
 eyelids, which the Asiatic proverb says are numbered, and who makes 
 no mistake. This Thinker, with omnipotence and omniscience revealed 
 by his works, ought to be holy. His unfathomable greatness raises 
 the presumption of his holiness. 
 
 But we are not left in doubt upon this theme, for special light is 
 given in the universe wherever doubt would be the most dangerous. 
 
 6. Every law is the method of action of some will. 
 
 Having presented to you the proof of that proposition which 
 
 * “ Oracles of Reason.” 
 
THE PERFECTION OF THE DIVINE HERALD. 
 
 ninety-five out of a hundred of the foremost names in physical 
 science assert-, I need do now no more than recite the names of Dana, 
 Agassiz, Carpenter, Faraday, Helmholfz, Wunt, and Lotze, in support 
 of a truth which transfigures the universe.* 
 
 7. There is in the universe an eternal law which makes for 
 righteousness. 
 
 Matthew Arnold is authority for that, although his outlook on 
 religious science and philosophy is much like a woman’s outlook on 
 politics. 
 
 8. The existence of that law is revealed in all outer experience or 
 history. 
 
 Even Matthew Arnold says, that if you wish to know that fire will 
 burn, you can put your hand in it and obtain proof; and that you can 
 in the same experimental way convince yourself that there is in 
 history a power, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness. 
 
 9. This law is revealed with vividness in the inner experience in 
 all the natural operations of conscience. 
 
 10. There is, therefore, in the universe a Holy Will. 
 
 11. But a Holy Will can belong only to a Holy Person. 
 
 12. But we know that the moral law is perfect, for it requires 
 invariably and unconditionally what ought to be. 
 
 A fathomless deep that word ought! An intuition of rightness and 
 fitness lies at the centre of it. In every individual moral good is 
 simply tvhcit ought to be, and moral evil ivhat ought not to be, in the 
 choicest of the soul among motives. 
 
 13. The Maker must be more glorious than the thing made. 
 
 14. The perfection of the moral law inhering in the nature of things 
 proves the perfection of the Divine Nature. 
 
 15. The perfection of the moral law is a self-evident , axiomatic, intui¬ 
 tive truth. 
 
 16. All objections to the belief that God is perfect are, therefore, shat¬ 
 tered upon the incontrovertible fact of the perfection of the moral law. 
 
 17. The perfection of the Divine Hature having been proved on the 
 basis of axiomatic truth, it follows that the present system of the 
 universe is the best possible system, and that the present moral 
 government of the world is the best possible moral government of the 
 world. 
 
 18. In all investigations concerning the origin of evil we must keep in 
 the foreground the axiomatically demonstrated fact of the perfection of the 
 Divine Nature. 
 
 There is no one deeply impressed with the duty of using 
 intuition, instinct, syllogism, and experiment as tests of truth 
 
 * See closing chapters of Carpenter’s Mental Physiology.” 
 
 44 
 
TEE PERFECTION OF TEE DIVINE EERALD. 
 
 who will not grant me the proposition that there is a perfect moral 
 law in the universe. There is no man who grants me that propo¬ 
 sition who can analyze it in the light of self-evident truth, and not 
 find himself obliged to admit that, as there is a perfect moral law, 
 there must he a perfect moral lawgiver. You will allow me, in view 
 of discussions which have preceded the present one in this lectureship, 
 to use from this point onward the incontrovertible deliverance of the 
 intuitional philosophy, that the existence in the nature of things of a 
 perfect moral law implies the existence in the universe of a Holy Will , 
 which will can belong only to a Perfect Person. 
 
 The perfection of the Divine Nature having been proved from the 
 perfection of the moral law, what inferences follow as to the origin 
 of evil ? 
 
 1. It is a self-evident or intuitive truth that sin exists in this 
 world. 
 
 2. God is perfect. 
 
 3. Why did God permit sin to exist ? 
 
 4. Of the many answers to this question all are, perhaps , conjectures. 
 
 Take up Kant and read his discussion of “ Religion Inside the 
 
 Range of Mere Reason,” and you will find him concluding that the 
 moral law itself, which he regarded as the sublimest thing known 
 to man, cannot be quite explained to the human understanding. We 
 know that this law has unconditioned authority; and, yet, if we try 
 to go behind its unconditional “ categorical imperative” “Thou 
 oughtest ” and “ Thou shalt,” we find ourselves stopped by something 
 beyond our comprehension, although not beyond our apprehension. 
 Just so Julius Muller, discussing the topic of the origin of evil, quotes 
 this language of Kant’s, and says that the student of religious science 
 need not be ashamed to say that the origin of evil is involved in much 
 mystery .* Although we can know some things, we do not pretend 
 to know all things concerning it. We may make many conjectures 
 concerning it. We may say that it arises in the abuse of the free 
 will. But what led to that abuse of free will ? The very arbitrari¬ 
 ness of will when it chooses evil—was that the cause of the abuse of 
 free will by itself? Muller, you will remember, teaches explicitly, as 
 Kant did implicitly, that the origin of evil is to be referred back to an 
 extra-temporal existence, where conditions unknown to man brought 
 about the first sin. He would account for the origin of evil not by what 
 we see in this world, but by what may have occurred in some state of 
 existence before this, and in which man was implicated as a personality. 
 I am not adopting that portion of Julius Muller’s scheme of thought. 
 
 * Muller, “Doctrine of Sin,” vol. ii. p. 172. 
 
 45 
 
TEE PERFECTION OF TEE BIVINE HER ALB. 
 
 Many of the deepest students of this theme affirm that we cannot 
 explain the origin of evil without going back to a state of existence 
 previous to this. 
 
 5. Even among conjectures there may be a great choice. 
 
 6. Is sin permitted as a dragooning process, to eventuate in good at 
 last ? 
 
 No ; for then sin ought to be, and conscience affirms that it ought 
 not to be. 
 
 Is sin the necessary means of the greatest good ? 
 
 No ; for the same reason. 
 
 Has all sin an ultimately beneficial effect, or is every fall a fall 
 upward ? 
 
 No ; for, if this be the case, there is reason to doubt whether God 
 is perfectly benevolent. 
 
 Let us suppose that there stands on the right here in the universe a 
 marble staircase, and on the left a staircase of red hot iron. Let both 
 ascend to the same height—namely, to a universe from which all sin 
 shall be eliminated. You go up by the marble staircase ; you reach that 
 stage—a universe in which there is no sin. You go up by the red-hot 
 iron staircase; you reach the same stage—a universe in which there is 
 no sin. I beg you to be cautious now and here, lest you be misled. 
 I warn you that just here is the place where you will think I was too 
 rapid, and that you did not quite know what you admitted. You say 
 that all penalty for sin has a remedial tendency, and that ultimately 
 we shall reach a state in which there will be no evil in the universe. 
 Men are going up the red-hot iron staircase. This represents the 
 path of their suffering for sin. Ultimately, however, this staircase, 
 you say, will bring all who go up it into freedom from all sin. 
 
 Le mercilessly clear. Could not God take men up the marble 
 staircase to that same height ? “ Yes,” you say. “ He is omni¬ 
 
 potent, omniscient.” Do you admit that? Immense consequences 
 turn on your being clear just here. God might take men up the 
 marble staircase, which represents the path of holy free choice and 
 freedom from the penalties of sin. A universe free from sin is what 
 you wish to reach. Men may be taken up this marble staircase to 
 that height; or they may be taken up the red-hot iron staircase of 
 suffering to the same height. 
 
 I affirm that your theory of evil is dishonourable to God ; for we 
 do know that men are going up on the fiery staircase. They are 
 suffering remorse ; they are filled with anguish ; and the outcome of 
 all that suffering is to be only the attaining of a height to which God, 
 according to your theory, might have raised them without any 
 suffering at all. Therefore , here are useless pains. He who mjlicts 
 
 46 
 
THE PERFECTION OF THE DIVINE HERALD. 
 
 them cannot be supremely benevolent. You might attain the platform, 
 which represents the absence of sin from the universe by that marble 
 staircase. You are attaining it by the red-hot iron staircase. "Why 
 does he permit men to ascend to that height by pain, when they 
 might ascend to the same height without pain? If he has no motive in 
 that red-hot iron staircase except to take men up, ivhy does he not take 
 men up by the cold marble ? He is not taking men up by the cold 
 marble ; he is taking them up the other way. Dut if, as you say, he 
 has no motive but to take men up; if, as Theodore Parker said, every 
 fall is a fall upward, how are you to prove the Divine benevolence 
 face to face with his preference for that staircase when he might have 
 chosen the other ? 
 
 Assuredly the theory that all evil is a dragooning process, and that 
 evil is the necessary means to the greatest good, not only is false to 
 the intuitions which declare that evil ought not to be, but is in 
 conflict with the truth that God is perfect. You cannot make it clear 
 that God is perfect if every fall is a fall upward, for men might go 
 up the marble staircase, whereas they do go up by the red-hot iron. 
 There is some other reason for the red-hot iron than to take men up. 
 
 The theory that every fall is a fall upward dishonours God. I 
 know not but that billions of times more spirits go up the marble 
 staircase than up the red-hot staircase ; but if billions and billions do 
 go that way, why could not you or I go that way ? 
 
 It is inadmissible to assert that a benevolent Being chooses to subject his 
 creatures to extreme pain, and attains by that means nothing that he might 
 not attain ivithout pain. 
 
 What answer does religious science give to the question as to the 
 origin of evil ? On this theme there are two strategic questions:— 
 
 1. Can God prevent sin in a moral system ? 
 
 2. Can God prevent sin in the best moral system? 
 
 Go to Hew Haven, and from the pupils of one of the profoundest 
 and most original of Hew England theologians, Dr. H. W. Taylor, you 
 will find authority for answering these questions in this way : 
 
 1. “ Can God prevent sin in a moral system ?” 1 ‘ We do not know 
 
 that he can.” 
 
 2. “ Can God prevent sin in the best moral system?” “Ho.” 
 
 “ How do you know ?” “ Decause he has not prevented it.”* 
 
 Go to Andover, and ask these questions, and you will find them 
 answered in this way : 
 
 1. “ Can God prevent sin in a moral system?” “Yes.” How do 
 you know ?” “Decause he that can create can do anything that is an 
 
 * Taylor’s “ Moral Government.’* 
 
 47 
 
THE PERFECTION OF TEE DIVINE HERALD. 
 
 object of power. God can do anything that does not involve self- 
 contradiction. He cannot deny himself; but we must suppose that a 
 system of living beings, all with free wills, might be so influenced by 
 motives as to retain their free will and yet not sin. God can prevent 
 sin in a moral system.” 
 
 << Can God prevent sin in the best moral system ?” “ Perhaps not.” 
 
 “ How do yon know ?” “ Because he has not prevented it.” 
 
 The Divine Perfection is proved by the perfection of the moved law. 
 Sin exists. There is no conclusion possible except that sin cannot be pre¬ 
 vented wisely. 
 
 What are some of the reasons why, possibly, a perfect God cannot 
 wisely prevent sin in the best moral system ? 
 
 1. In the nature of things, there cannot be an upper without am 
 under, a right without a left, a before without an after, a good without 
 at least the possibility of evil. 
 
 2. In the nature of things, the gift of free agency carries with it the 
 possibility that the wrong , as well as the right, may be chosen. 
 
 3. In the nature of things, a created being must be a finite being. 
 
 In the nature of things, a finite is an imperfect being. In the nature 
 
 of things, there will be the possibility of less than absolutely perfect action 
 in every less than absolutely perfect agent. Man is such an agent. 
 
 Julius Muller and Tholuck, in their earlier years, were wont to fall 
 into long conversations upon the origin of evil; and they at last 
 fastened upon Leibnitz’s great thought—that the necessary limitations 
 of power and wisdom in all finite beings leave open a possibility to 
 evil. Ho not think Leibnitz asserted that the limitation of the finite 
 creature makes evil necessary. He asserts only that it makes evil 
 possible. I know that I am here not following the authority of Dr. 
 Hodge, of Princeton, who asserts that Leibnitz makes evil a necessity 
 in the universe. He does not, if Julius Muller understands him ; and 
 if some readings of the “Theodicee” prove anything to me, Leibnitz 
 means to assert only that the possibility of evil inheres in the very 
 nature of things. If there is to be a created being brought into 
 existence, that created being must be finite, and, as such, must be to 
 a certain extent an imperfect being, and so may, not must, fall into 
 sin. While the possibility of sin arises thus from the necessary limita¬ 
 tion of the wisdom and power of created beings, the fact of sin, 
 according to Leibnitz, comes from abuse of free will.* 
 
 4. It may be that God cannot prevent sin if he deals with finite 
 creatures according to what is due to himself. 
 
 5. It may be better to allow free agents to struggle with sin, and 
 
 * Muller, “ Doctrine of Sin,” yol. i. p. 276. 
 
 48 
 
TEE PERFECTION OF TEE BIVINE EERALB. 
 
 thus grow in the vigour of virtue, than to preserve them from such 
 struggle, and thus allow them to remain weak. 
 
 But, my friends, let us rejoice that, after proving the divine perfec¬ 
 tion, we know enough for our peace as to the origin of evil. It is not 
 at all necessary to establish the soundness of any of these conjectures, 
 for none of them are needed to prove that God is perfect. 
 
 In the heavens of the soul there rise unquenchable constellations, 
 which show that we alone are to blame if we do what conscience says 
 we ought not to do. We are just as sure of the fact that we, and only 
 we, are to blame when we do what conscience pronounces wrong , as we 
 are of our own existence. Our demerit is a self-evident fact. All 
 men take such guilt for granted. "We know that we are responsible, 
 as surely as we all know that we have the power of choice. We know 
 both facts from intuition. Our existence we know only by intuition, 
 and by that same axiomatic evidence we know our freedom. How 
 does sin originate in us ? By bad free choice. Just so it originated 
 in the universe. But God brought us into existence. Yes, and he 
 maintains us in existence. Very well; but the axioms of self-evident 
 truth prove that he has given to us free will. The ocean floats the 
 piratical vessels, the sea-breeze fills the sails of the pirate; but neither 
 the ocean nor the sea-breeze is to blame for piracies. 
 
 49 
 
 S 
 
THEODORE PARKER OK THE PERFECTION OF THE 
 
 DIVINE NATURE. 
 
 By the Rev. JOSEPH COOK. 
 
 "When Ulysses sailed past the isle of the Sirens, who had the power 
 of charming by their songs all who listened to them, he heard the 
 sorcerers’ music on the shore, and, to prevent himself and crew from 
 landing, he filled their ears with wax, and bound himself to the mast 
 with knotted thongs. Thus, according to the subtile Grecian story, he 
 passed safely the fatal strand. But when Orpheus, in search of the 
 Golden Fleece, went by this island, he—being, as you remember, a 
 great musician—set up better music than that of the Sirens, enchanted 
 his crew with a melody superior to the alluring song of the sea-nymphs, 
 and so, without needing to fill the Argonauts’ ears with wax, or to 
 bind himself to the mast with knotted thongs, he passed the sorcerous 
 shore not only safely, but with disdain. 
 
 The ancients, it is clear from this legend, understood the distinction 
 between morality and religion. He who, sailing past the island of 
 temptation, has enlightened selfishness enough not to land, although 
 he wants to ; he who, therefore, binds himself to the mast with knotted 
 thongs, and fills the ears of his crew with wax; he who does this 
 without hearing a better music, is the man of mere morality. Heaven 
 forbid that I should underrate the value of this form of cold prudence, 
 for wax is not useless in giddy ears, and Aristotle says youth is a per¬ 
 petual intoxication. Face to face with Sirens, thongs are good, though 
 songs are better. 
 
 ‘When a man of tempestuous, untrained spirit must swirl over amber 
 and azure and purple seas, past the isle of the Sirens, and knots himself 
 to the mast of outwardly-right conduct by the thongs of safe resolutions, 
 although as yet duty is not his delight, he is near to virtue. He who 
 spake as never mortal spoke saw such a young man once, and, look¬ 
 ing on him, loved him; and yet said, as the nature of things says 
 also, “ One thing thou lackest.” Evidently he to whom duty is not 
 a delight does not possess the supreme pre-requisite of peace. In 
 presence of the Siren shore we can never be at rest while we rather 
 wish to land, although we resolve not to do so. Only he who has 
 heard a better music than that of the Sirens, and who is affection¬ 
 ately glad to prefer the higher to the lower good, is, or in the nature 
 of things can be, at peace. Morality is Ulysses bound to the mast. 
 Beligion is Orpheus listening to a better melody, and passing with 
 disdain the sorcerous shore. 
 
 50 
 
TEE PERFECTION OF TEE DIVINE NATURE. 
 
 Aristotle was asked once what the decisive proof is that a man has 
 acquired a good habit. His answer was, “ The fact that the practice 
 of the habit involves no self-denial of predominant force among the 
 faculties.” Assuredly that is keen, but Aristotle is rightly called the 
 surgeon. Until we do love virtue so that the practice of it involves 
 no self-denial of that sort, it is scientifically incontrovertible that we 
 cannot at be peace. In the very nature of things, while Ulysses wants 
 to land, wax and thongs cannot give him rest. In the very nature of 
 things, only a better music, only a more ravishing melody, can pre¬ 
 serve Orpheus in peace. This truth may be stern and unwelcome, but 
 the Greek mythology and the Greek philosophy which thus unite to 
 affirm it are as luminous as the noon. What is the distinction between 
 morality and religion, and how can the latter be shown by the 
 scientific method to be a necessity to the peace of the soul ? 
 
 1. Conscience demands that what ought to he should be chosen by 
 the will. 
 
 2. In relation to persons, what we choose we love. 
 
 3. Conscience reveals a Holy Person, the Author of the moral law. 
 
 4. Conscience, therefore, demands that rightness and oughtness in 
 motives should not only be obeyed, but loved. 
 
 5. It demands that the Ineffable Holy Person revealed by the 
 moral law should not only be obeyed, but loved. 
 
 6. This is an unalterable demand of an unalterable portion of our 
 nature. 
 
 7. As personalities, therefore, we must keep company with this 
 part of our nature and with its demand, while we exist in this world 
 and the next. 
 
 8. The love of God by man is, therefore, inflexibly required by the 
 nature of things. Of all the commandments of exact science this is 
 the first,—Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy mind, and 
 might, and heart, and strength. 
 
 9. Conscience draws an unalterable distinction between loyalty and 
 disloyalty to the Ineffable Holy Person the moral law reveals, and 
 between the obedience of slavishness and that of delight. 
 
 10. Only the latter is obedience to conscience. 
 
 11. But morality is the obedience of selfish slavishness. 
 
 That sounds harsh, but by it I mean only that a man of mere 
 morality is Ulysses bound with thongs. He intelligently chooses not 
 to land, but he wishes to do so. He loves what conscience declares 
 ought not to be. His chief motive is selfishness acting under the spur 
 of fear. In the nature of things, the fear of the Lord is the beginning 
 of wisdom, but the end of wisdom is the perfect love that casteth out 
 fear. You say that I have been appealing to fear. Yery well, that is 
 
 51 
 
TEE PERFECTION OF TEE DIVINE NATURE. 
 
 the beginning of wisdom, and I do not revere highly any love of God 
 that has never known any fear of God. Show me that kind of love of 
 God which has not felt what the fear of God is, and I will show you 
 not principle, but sentiment; not religion, but religiosity. Of neces¬ 
 sity, loyalty fears disloyalty. But loyalty is love for the Holy Person 
 the moral law reveals, and such love conscience inexorably demands 
 as what ought to be. 
 
 12. Religion, as contrasted with morality, is the obedience of affec¬ 
 tionate gladness. It is the proud, rejoicing, unselfish, adoring love 
 which conscience demands of man for the Ineffable Holy Person which 
 conscience reveals. 
 
 13. As such, only religion, and not morality, can harmonize the 
 soul with the nature of things. So much may be clearly demon¬ 
 strated by exact research. Shakespeare says of two characters who 
 conceived for each other a supreme affection as soon as they saw each 
 other:— 
 
 “ At the first glance they have changed eyes.” 
 
 The Christian is a man who has changed eyes with God. In the un¬ 
 alterable nature of things, lie who has not changed eyes ivith God cannot 
 look into his face in peace. What is that love which conscience says 
 ought to be given by the soul to the Ineffable Holy Person which the 
 Moral Law reveals? Is it a love for a fragment of that Person’s 
 character, or for the whole ? for a few, or for the whole list of his 
 perfect attributes ? 
 
 14. In the nature of things a delight in not only a part, but in all 
 of God’s attributes, is necessary to peace in his presence. 
 
 15. A religion consisting in the obedience of affectionate gladness, or a 
 delight in all God’s attributes, is, therefore, scientifically known to be a 
 demand of the nature of things. It will not be to-morrow or the day 
 after that these fifteen propositions will cease to be scientifically 
 certain. Out of them multitudinous inferences flow as Niagaras from 
 the eternal fountains. In a better age, Philosophy will often pause 
 to listen to these deluging certainties poured from the Infinite Heights 
 of the nature of things. The roar and spray of them almost deafen 
 and blind whoever stands where we do now; but they are there, 
 although we are deaf; they are there, although we are blind. Three 
 inferences from these fifteen propositions are of supreme importance :—- 
 
 1. It is a sufficient condemnation of any scheme of religious thought 
 to show that it presents for worship not all, but only a fragment, of 
 the list of the Divine attributes. 
 
 2. A religion that is true to the nature of things in theory will, 
 of course, be found to work well in practice. The true in speculation 
 
 52 
 
THE PERFECTION OF THE PI VINE NATURE. 
 
 Is that which is harmonious with the nature of things. The fortunate 
 in experience is that which is in harmony with the nature of things. 
 The true in speculation, therefore, will turn out to be the fortunate 
 in experience when applied to practice. If a scheme of thought does 
 not work well in the long ranges of experience, if it will not bear 
 translation into life age after age, that scheme of thought is sufficiently 
 shown to be in collision with the nature of things. 
 
 3. By all the tests of intuition, instinct, experiment, and syllogism, 
 religious science must endeavour to obtain the fullest view possible to 
 man of the whole list of the Divine attributes. What scheme of 
 religious thought will bear these three tests best ? All religious 
 teaching that in a wide and multiplex trial does not bear good fruits, 
 is presumably out of accord with the nature of things. Does 
 the doctrine that every fall is a fall upward bear good fruits? 
 Does the assertion that sin is a necessary, and, for the most part, an 
 inculpable stage in human progress, improve society ? Does the 
 proposition that character does not tend to a final permanence, bad as 
 well as good, and good as well as bad, work well when translated 
 into life, age after age ? 
 
 The supreme question, then, if you are convinced that man cannot 
 have peace unless he has a delight in all attributes of the Holy Person 
 revealed by the moral law, is to know what the full list is. 
 
 « a- ■i:- x * ir x 
 
 1. In the nature of things, to work for good is to work against evil. 
 Does anybody doubt this ? Is not that a proposition just as clearly 
 true as that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points, 
 or that a thing cannot be, and not be at the same time and in the 
 same sense or, as any other intuitive deliverance of our faculties ? 
 
 2. In the nature of things God cannot work for good without 
 working against evil. I am assuming only that God cannot deny 
 himself. That cannot is to me at once the most terrible and the most 
 alluring certainty in the universe. He cannot deny the demands of 
 his own perfections. These are another name for the nature of things. 
 We feel sure that in the nature of things there cannot be a here 
 without a there, an upper without an under, or any working of God 
 for good without working by him against evil. The nature of things 
 is not fate, but the unchangeable free choice of infinite perfection in 
 God. 
 
 Allow no one to mislead you by overlooking the distinctions 
 between certainty and necessity , will and shall, occasioning and neces¬ 
 sitating, infallibly certain and inevitably certain. Let no one assert 
 that faithfulness to self-evident truths as to the nature of things leads 
 to a system of thought consisting of adamantine fatalism. There can 
 
 53 
 
TEE PERFECTION OF TEE DIVINE NATURE. 
 
 be but one best way in which to conduct the universe. Omniscience 
 will "know that way. Omnipotence will choose and adhere to that way. 
 There will be no deviation from that way in the course of the 
 government of the universe. There will thus appear to be fate in the 
 infinities and eternities; but there is there, in reality, only the infi¬ 
 nitely wise and holy, and therefore unchanging, free choice of 
 Almighty God. Even man’s free-will may illustrate the law of 
 certainty without falling at all under that necessity. 
 
 3. In the nature of things, God is not God unless he works for good. 
 
 4. Therefore, in the nature of things, he is not God unless he works 
 against evil. 
 
 5. He is perfect, and therefore with all his attributes he works for 
 good. 
 
 6. He is perfect, and therefore with all his attributes he works 
 against evil. 
 
 7. Sin exists in the universe by the abuse of free will. 
 
 Of course I keep in mind the distinction between an error and sin, 
 or between a mistake of the moral kind and a wrong of the moral 
 kind. When I speak of sin, I mean a free choice of motives which 
 conscience pronounces to be bad. In every bad free choice there 
 comes upon the soul after the act a sense of personal demerit. 
 If you deny the intuition which proves the will is free, you cannot 
 prove your own existence ; for you know your own existence only by 
 intuition. How do I know there is an external world ? By intuition. 
 How do I know that I am in existence ? By intuition. How do I 
 know that I am personally to blame when I do what conscience 
 pronounces wrong? By intuition. We are not to play fast and loose 
 «r with this supreme test of truth. Intuition is the soul’s direct vision 
 of all truths which to men have these three characteristics— self¬ 
 evidence, necessity , universality. An intuition may mean a truth , 
 self-evident , necessary, and universal; or it may mean the act of the 
 mind in beholding such a truth. We know we are to blame when we 
 choose the wrong, and there is an end of that. What you take for 
 granted in business, and in law, and in literature, you must allow me 
 to take as proved in religious science. Does anybody doubt that he 
 is free in business? Yery well; will anybody doubt, then, that he 
 is free in religion? Does anybody doubt that God gives the harvest, 
 but that, nevertheless, man must sow and plant? Just so in the 
 spiritual realm, a man must go forth and sow good seed, and God will 
 give the increase. Predestination does not mean destiny. In religious 
 science the predestination does not mean necessity, but only certainty. 
 
 8. While sin continues God cannot forgive it without making tho 
 
 sinner worse . 
 
 54 
 
TEE PERFECTION OF TEE DIVINE NATURE. 
 
 In this city six thousand people were told the other evening, with 
 great depth of thought, that if a child deliberately lies, and you forgive 
 the child before he has exhibited any sorrow for the act, you make the 
 child worse. That is, indeed, a very simple instance of the moral law, 
 but in scientific minds there is no doubt that the moral law is equally 
 universal with the physical. If you will measure a little arc of the 
 physical law, you can measure the whole circle. 
 
 9. The self-propagating power of habit acting in the sphere of holy 
 affections places the nature of things on the side of righteousness. 
 
 10. The same self-propagating power of habit acting in the sphere of 
 evil affections arranges the nature of things against evil. 
 
 11. Good has but one enemy, the evil; but the evil has two enemies, 
 the good and itself. 
 
 12. Judicial blindness increases the self-propagating power of evil; 
 remunerative vision increases the self-propagating power of holiness. 
 
 “Every man,” says the Spanish proverb, “is the son of his own 
 deeds.” “Every action,” says Richter, “becomes more certainly an 
 eternal mother than it is an eternal daughter.” These are the irrever¬ 
 sible laws according to which all character tends to a final permanence, 
 good or bad. 
 
 13. God cannot give the wicked two chances without subjecting the 
 good to two risks. 
 
 14. Self-evident truth shows that man is free. 
 
 15. Self-evident truth proves that man may attain a final perman¬ 
 ence of character, good or bad, and in that state not lose freedom of 
 
 will. 
 
 16. This may occur in the best possible universe, in ivhich all things 
 will of course ivorlc together for good to the good , and, therefore, of neces¬ 
 sity, for evil to the evil. Adhere to the proposition that there cannot 
 be an upper without an under. Can God arrange the universe so that 
 all things in it shall work together for the good of the good without 
 arranging it so - that all things shall work together for the evil of 
 the evil ? Can God be God, and not arrange the universe so that all 
 things in it shall work together for the good of the good ? Can God 
 be God and not so arrange the universe that all things shall work to¬ 
 gether for the evil of the evil ? Eollow the deliverance of your 
 intuitional philosophy, that the soul is free. I know how a 
 man is tempted here, and how a silly sciolism will overturn 
 the testimony of the intuitions themselves, rather than admit 
 that man is responsible for all action that conscience pronounces 
 wrong. But if you overturn the deliverance of the intuitions 
 there, please overturn it elsewhere. You will not play fast and loose 
 much longer; for our age is coming to be, thank God, unwilling to 
 
 55 
 
THE PERFECTION OF THE DIVINE NATURE. 
 
 take anything for granted, and more and more loyal to clear ideas. 
 Our greatest philosophies, metaphysical and physical, all stand on the 
 basis of self-evident truths, or intuition ; and although your physicist, 
 who never has studied metaphysics, does not know who sharpened his 
 tools, or, sometimes, what his tools are; he every day is using self- 
 evident truth, and stands on the intuitions at which he scoffs. On 
 self-evidence you stand, and on self-evidence I stand, and if you and I 
 can shake hands on this point we shall never, part. If we are true to 
 the deliverance of all the intuitions, and not merely to a portion of 
 them, we shall see God in not merely a few of his attributes, but in 
 that whole range of them which the nature of things exposes to human 
 vision ; and we shall find it a thing just as glorious to be reconciled 
 with God as it is to be reconciled with the nature of things, and just 
 as little likely to occur in a man asleep, or by accident and haphazard, 
 and dreaming and poetizing. 
 
 We shall find it a thing at least as terrible to fall under the power of 
 God as it is to fall under the power of the nature of things. Assuredly 
 the nature of things will not break the bruised reed, nor quench the 
 smoking flax of loyalty to itself. The nature of things assuredly, too, 
 may be a consuming fire to all disloyalty to itself. It may be an 
 omnipresent kiss or an omnipresent flame. The savages in Peru used 
 to kiss the air as their profoundest sign of adoration to the collective 
 divinities. The nature of things is above and around and beneath us, 
 and our sign of adoration to it must be not slavish self-surrender, but 
 affectionate, glad preference of what this unbending perfection requires. 
 You say the permanent existence of sin would be an impeachment of 
 the Divine benevolence. Why is not the beginning of it an im¬ 
 peachment ? The mystery is not that under the law of judicial 
 blindness and the self-propagating power of habit sin may continue; 
 the mystery is that sin ever was allowed to begin. It has begun. 
 There is no doubt on that subject, and when you will explain to me 
 the consistency of your philosophy with the beginning of sin, I will 
 explain to you the consistency of a final permanence of free evil 
 character with that same philosophy. What we do know is, that the 
 more a man sins against light, the less sensitive he is to it. What we 
 do know is, that over against judicial blindness stands remunerative 
 vision, and we cannot change one law without changing the other. 
 The nature of things is the flame; the nature of things k the kiss; 
 God is God by being both. What God does is successfully done. 
 What God does is well done. 
 
 S 
 
 56 
 
THEODORE PARKER ON ADORATION. 
 
 By the Rev. JOSEPH COOK. 
 
 The Russian poet, Derzhavin, has the honour of having written an 
 ode to the rhythm of which all cultivated circles have bowed down from 
 the Yellow Sea westward to the Pacific. The stanzas of it you may 
 see to-day embroidered on silk in the palaces of the emperors of Japan 
 and China. Yon will find the poem translated into Persian, into 
 Arabic, into Greek, into Italian, into German; and, when I open the 
 most popular of our American anthologies, I find that the book closes 
 with this Russian anthem: 
 
 “ 0 Thou Eternal One, whose presence bright 
 All space doth occupy, all motion guide— 
 
 Unchanged through Time’s all-devastating flight! 
 
 Thou only God—there is no God beside! 
 
 Being above all beings ! Mighty one 
 Whom none can comprehend and none explore! 
 
 Who fill’st existence with Thyself alone— 
 
 Embracing all, supporting, ruling o’er— 
 
 Being whom we call God, and know no more! 
 #**##**# 
 
 God! thus alone my lowly thoughts can soar, 
 
 ’Midst Thy vast works admire, obey, adore : 
 
 And when the tongue is eloquent no more, 
 
 The soul shall speak in tears of gratitude.” 
 
 "When a poem has the majestic fortune to be adopted as the house¬ 
 hold word of culture in twenty nations, we are scientifically justified 
 in the conclusion that the deep instincts of the human heart from the 
 rising to the setting sun assert what the poem expresses. Thus we 
 judge in the case of the songs of love ; and so, I insist, we must judge 
 in relation to the anthems of religion. Indeed, these latter sink more 
 penetratingly into history than the former. Nothing is treasured by 
 the best part of the world so painstakingly, from the epic we call the 
 Rook of Job, to Derzhavin’s poem on the Divine Nature, as the litera¬ 
 ture that is struck worthily to the key-note of adoration of the Infinite 
 Perfection of a Personal God. This is a literary fact which the 
 Matthew Arnolds and Herbert Spencers would do well to fathom. 
 The native human instincts are ascertainable by the reception all races 
 and tribes and tongues give to the literature of communion with God 
 as personal. Such instincts are a scientific proof of the existence of their 
 
 57 
 
THEODORE PARKER ON ADORATION. 
 
 correlate. There can be no thought without a Thinker. There is 
 Thought in the universe. Therefore, there is a Thinker in the uni¬ 
 verse. But a thinker is a person. Therefore, there is a Personal 
 Thinker in the universe. There can be no such organic hungering as 
 all nations have for communion with God as personal without the 
 possibility of such communion. Men who revere the natural will not 
 scorn theism, for it is as natural as anything else in nature. The 
 veracity of our theistic instincts is proved by their naturalness. Julius 
 Muller gives as one definition of religion the communion of the soul 
 with God as personal. 
 
 1. Men as they are can be made holy only by loving a holy person. 
 
 2. Nothing so effectually purifies the heart as love, for nothing so 
 effectually woos us from selfishness. 
 
 3. There can be no love without trust, and no trust without purity. 
 
 4. Love produces in the lover the mood of the object loved. 
 
 5. Souls grow more by contact with souls than by all other means. 
 
 6. Growth, strength, bliss, arise naturally from spiritual love. 
 
 7. All these laws of the higher affections apply to the communion 
 of the human spirit with the Ineffable Holy Person whom the moral 
 law reveals. 
 
 8. Under these irreversible natural laws religion is affectionate 
 communion with God as personal. 
 
 In “ Locksley Hall,” Tennyson, speaking merely as an observer of 
 human nature in its social zone, utters one of the profoundest of all 
 the truths of its religious zone when he says : 
 
 “ Love took up the harp of life ; smote on all the chords with might, 
 
 Smote the chord of self, which, trembling, passed in music out of sight.” 
 
 Is there any hand but that of Love that can produce this effect r 
 Under nattered law , can man be made unselfish or holy in any other way 
 than by loving a holy person ? Tennyson knows of no other way; 
 religious science knows of no other. 
 
 The truth is, my friends, we are acquainted with no furnace which 
 will burn selfishness out of a man except this fiery bliss we call a 
 supreme spiritual affection. There is admiration of men by each 
 other; but there is no burning the selfishness out of men until they 
 come to trust and to love, and to that intersphering of soul by soul 
 which is always the result of trust of the transfigured sort, one of the 
 rarest things on earth! Do not think that I am putting before you 
 a low ideal of trust, for I speak of those forms of love—conjugal, 
 filial, paternal—which the poets love to glorify. 
 
 I read, the other day, two Boston sonnets entitled “Trust,” and 
 
 58 
 
THEODORE PARKER ON ADORATION. 
 
 making of the crystalline window of one of the deepest human experi¬ 
 ences an opening through which to look into the sky behind the sky:— 
 
 “ I know that thou art true, and strong and pure ; 
 
 My forehead on thy palm I fall asleep, 
 
 My sentinels with thee no vigils keep, 
 
 Though elsewhere never without watch secure. 
 
 How restful is thy palm! I life endure, 
 
 These stranger souls whose veils I shyly sweep, 
 
 These doubts what secrets hide within the deep 
 Because aglow within the vast obscure. 
 
 Thy hand is whitest light! My Peace art thou. 
 
 My firm green isle within a troubled sea; 
 
 And lying here and looking upward now 
 I ask, if thou art this, w r hat God must be— 
 
 If thus I rest within thy goodness, how 
 In goodness of the Infinite degree ? ” 
 
 But there are lightnings wherever there is love, for character can¬ 
 not have one side without having two sides—we cannot love good 
 and not abhor evil; and so the second sonnet, equally true to trust, 
 contrasts with the first:— 
 
 “ This crystal soul of thine, were it outspread, 
 
 Until the drop should fill the universe, 
 
 How in it might the angels’ wings immerse, 
 
 And wake and sleep the living and the dead ; 
 
 Bereaved eyes bathe ; rest Doubt its tossing head ; 
 
 Swdm the vast worlds ; dissolve Guilt’s icy curse ; 
 
 And sightless, if but loyal, each disperse 
 Fear by full trusty and, by devotion, dread. 
 
 And yet these perfect eyes in which mine sleep 
 Would not be sweet were not their lightning deep ; 
 
 In softest skies the swiftest firebolts dwell; 
 
 Thine eyes mix dew and flame, and both are well. 
 
 If thus I fear this soul, 0 God, how Thee, 
 
 Both Love’s and Lightning’s full Infinity ? ” 
 
 In the Portuguese Sonnets, the most subtle and tender and sublime 
 expressions of affection ever written by woman, it is not so much 
 Mrs. Browning who sings as Bobert Browning, the future husband. 
 "When Tennyson, in the “In Memoriam,” commemorates the young 
 Hallam, it is not Tennyson who sings so much as Hallam. "When 
 Bobert Hall and Canning form a friendship for each other at Eton, it 
 is Canning who appears in Hall and Hall who appears in Canning. 
 When Thomas Carlyle, John Sterling, and Edward Irving are friends, 
 it is Irving that appears in Carlyle at times and Carlyle that appears 
 in Irving; and when Sterling lies dying it is Carlyle that makes up 
 more than half his soul. Always when two human personalities are- 
 
 59 
 
THEODORE PARKER OK ADORATION. 
 
 united by a supreme spiritual affection they intersphere each other, 
 and produce the moods of one in the other; and when there is a 
 transfiguration in personal affection, there is thus a smiting of the 
 chord of self till it passes in music out of sight. Of course, therefore, 
 there is no method to produce growth, strength, and bliss in the soul 
 like the pure contact of spirit with spirit. Carlyle says we grow 
 more by contact of soul with soul than by all other means united; 
 and literature, if possessed of power, is the mirror of soul, and we 
 grow by contact with the pulsating, reflected depths of genius. 
 
 But a Persian proverb says : “Look into the sky to find the moon, 
 and not into the pool.” Look into the faces of your elect living 
 friends and into the souls of those whom you trust most. Make much 
 of your giant friendships of all kinds, and be thankful if you have one 
 genuine friendship of any kind, and let unforced trust enswathe you, 
 if you would be transfigured. You grow more in these high moments 
 of personal affection when you look at the moon in the sky than by 
 much meditating on the moon in the pool. Friendships with authors 
 and heroes in a far past are undoubtedly honourable to us and trans¬ 
 figuring, and in loneliness are, perhaps, the highest human solace. 
 But they are not the highest possible to man. They are not the moon 
 in the sky. 
 
 You foresee that I am to affirm that a human spirit may 
 commune with the Infinite Spirit, and that all these laws of 
 transfiguration are to be kept in view when we would explain the 
 renovating power on man of the communion of the soul with God as 
 personal. You anticipate that in a moment I shall be asking, in the 
 name of the scientific method, that you, face to face with the holy Per¬ 
 son the conscience reveals, should give free course to all those majestic 
 natural laws by which soul transfigures soul through personal 
 affection. I do ask this, and in the stern name of the scientific 
 method. Is any one thinking that, as a benighted soul, brought up in 
 the mossy mediaevalism of our latest theology, I cannot worship one 
 God, because I believe in three Gods ? Do not pity medicevalism too 
 much. It knows the difference between Trinity and Tritheism. I 
 wish just now to thank God if you can worship one God as Derzhavin 
 does. I rejoice with you if you can go as far as scientific theism does, 
 and worship one God, who was, who is, who is to come. Let us to¬ 
 day not go further than with Derzhavin, to admire, obey, adore one 
 King eternal, immortal, invisible, and in conscience spiritually tangible. 
 
 Samuel Johnson, when he had finished his great dictionary, 
 received a note from his publisher to this effect:—“Andrew Miller 
 sends his compliments to Samuel Johnson, with the money in pay¬ 
 ment for the last sheet of his dictionary, and thanks God he has done 
 
 60 
 
THEODORE DARKER OH AD ORATION. 
 
 with him.” To this rude note Johnson replied:—“ Samuel Johnson 
 sends his compliments to Andrew Miller, and is very glad to notice, 
 as he does by his note, that Andrew Miller has the grace to thank 
 God for anything.” You call yourselves Deists, you call yourselves 
 Thoists, you hold that in the name of science we can worship one 
 God, who must he behind all natural law. I thank God that you 
 believe as much as that. Perhaps more lies wrapped up and capsu- 
 late in your belief than you think. Here are a few slight notes from a 
 Boston marching song, on which my eyes fell the other day, when I 
 was alone. They are sung in the name of exact science, and surely 
 we can sing together anything attuned to that key-note:— 
 
 “Bounds of sun-groups none can see, 
 
 Worlds God droppeth on his knee : 
 
 Galaxies that loftiest swarm, 
 
 Float before a loftier Form. 
 
 “ Mighty the speed of suns and worlds, 
 
 Mightier who these onward hurls ; 
 
 Pure the Conscience’s fiery bath, 
 
 Purer fire God’s lightning hath. 
 
 “ Brighter He who maketli bright 
 Jasper, beryl, chrysolite; 
 
 Lucent more than they whose hands 
 Girded up Orion’s bands. 
 
 “ Sweet the Spring, but sweeter still 
 He who doth its censers fill; 
 
 Good is love, but better who 
 Giveth love its power to woo. 
 
 “ Lo! the Maker, greater he, 
 
 Better than his works must be ; 
 
 Of the works the lowest stair 
 Thought can scale, but fainteth there. 
 
 11 Thee, with all our strength and heart, 
 
 God, we love, for what thou art. 
 
 Kavished we, obedient now, 
 
 Only, only Perfect Thou! ” 
 
 Will you sing that tremorless song of science, and keep entranced, 
 stalwart step to your singing, and then turn to me, and say that these 
 sublime natural principles by which human affection transfigures the 
 soul do not apply in the sphere of man’s relations to the Ineffable Holy 
 Person the moral law reveals ? There is such a law. There is such 
 a Person. It follows that there are relations between that Holy Per¬ 
 son and ourselves. Therefore, in the name of natural law, I affirm 
 that men as they are can be made holy only by loving a Holy Person. 
 
 61 
 
THEODORE PARKER ON AD0RA1I0N. 
 
 In the religious, as well as in the social zone of our faculties, only love 
 can smite all the chords with might, or smite the chord of self into 
 invisibility and music. But the love which can do this is not admiration 
 only — it is adoration . 
 
 In addition to other errors already discussed, it must be noticed 
 that— 
 
 11. Theodore Barker's Absolute Religion fails to distinguish properly 
 between the admiration and the adoration of the Ineffable Holy Person 
 which Parker admits that the moral law reveals. 
 
 1. Admiration does not always imply a full and vivid view of the 
 Infinite Holiness,of the Infinite Oughtness revealed by the moral law. 
 Adoration always does imply this. 
 
 2. Admiration does not always imply a glad self-commitment of the 
 soul to the Infinite Holiness. Adoration always does. 
 
 3. Admiration usually has but a fragmentary view of the divine 
 attributes as revealed in the nature of things. Adoration, has, or is 
 willing to have, a full view. 
 
 4. Admiration may give pleasure for a time. Adoration gives bliss. 
 
 5. Admiration may have delight in only a few of God’s attributes. 
 Adoration is supreme delight in all God’s attributes. 
 
 6. Admiration of God is often all that is found or all that it is thought 
 necessary to require in the distinctively literary or poetic schemes of 
 sceptical religious thought. Adoration, however, and not merely ad¬ 
 miration, of an infinitely Holy Person revealed by the moral law, is 
 scientifically known to be necessary to the peace of the soul with the 
 nature of things. 
 
 What are the signs of this error in Parker’s writings? 
 
 1. Theodore Parker made only a fragmentary use of the intuitions 
 or self-evident truths of the soul. 
 
 2. Hence, his view of that portion of the divine nature which may 
 be known to man was fragmentary. 
 
 3. The inadequate emphasis he laid on the fact of sin shows how 
 fragmentary this view was. 
 
 4. Parker’s fragmentary view of the Divine Nature is shown in his 
 constant undervaluing of the nature of things as it is faithfully repre¬ 
 sented in the Old Testament. 
 
 The Old Testament is not sterner than the nature of things. 
 
 Goethe’s literary insight, you will probably think, was quite as keen 
 as Matthew Arnold’s is, and he, long before Arnold, applied purely 
 literary tests to the Hebrew Scriptures, as religious science herself has 
 been doing for a hundred years. It is amazing that Matthew Arnold 
 believes his famous literary test to be a new one. Goethe said, and 
 Parker used, in his earlier career, to quote the words admiringly: 
 
 62 
 
THEODORE DARKER OK ADORATION. 
 
 <‘The Hebrew Scriptures stand so happily combined together that, 
 even out of the most diverse elements, the feeling of a whole still rises 
 before us. They are complete enough to satisfy, fragmentary enough 
 to excite, barbarous enough to arouse, tender enough to appease.”* 
 The Old Testament Scriptures out of date ? Hot till the nature of 
 things is. I rode once from a noon on the Dead Sea, through moon¬ 
 light on the Mar Saba gorges, to Bethlehem in the morning light. I 
 passed through the scenes in which many of David’s psalms had their 
 origin, so far as human causes brought them into existence. On 
 horseback, I climbed slowly and painfully out of that scorched, ghastly 
 hollow in which the salt lake lies. I found myself, as I ascended, 
 passing through a gnarled, smitten, volcanic region, and often at the 
 edge or in the depths of ravines deeper than that eloquent shaft yonder 
 on Bunker’s Hill is high. At a place where, no doubt, David had 
 often searched for his flocks, I found the famous Convent of Mar Saba, 
 clinging to the side of its stupendous ravine; and I lay down there 
 and slept until the same sun rose which .David saw. I looked north¬ 
 ward from above Mar Saba, and saw Jerusalem above me yet to the 
 north, for I had been ascending from a spot greatly below the level of 
 the Mediterranean. As 1 drew near Bethlehem, through brown 
 wheatfields, in which a woman called Ruth once gleaned, I opened 
 and read the book which will bear her name yet to thousands of years 
 to come. Johnson, you remember, once read that book in London, 
 and moved a parlourful of people to tears by it, and to curiosity enough to 
 ask who was the author of that beautiful pastoral. In my saddle, there, 
 in Syria, I was moved as Johnson’s hearers were in London; but when 
 I opened the Psalms, one by one, and looked back over the ravines 
 toward the Dead Sea, and northward toward Jerusalem and upon the 
 hill of Bethlehem, to which all nations, after a gaze of nineteen hundred 
 years in duration, were looking yet, and, at that season, sending pilgrims; 
 when I remembered how that terraced hill of olive gardens had in¬ 
 fluenced human history as no other spot on the globe has done, and 
 that in God’s government of this planet there are no accidents; when 
 I took up the astounding harp of Isaiah, and turned through the list 
 of the prophets to find mysterious passage after passage predicting 
 what would come, and what has come; and when I thought of those 
 critics under the western sky who would saw asunder the Old Testa¬ 
 ment and the Hew, and put into the shade those Scriptures which 
 Goethe calls a unit in themselves, and which are doubly a unit when 
 united with the Hew Testament, I remembered Him who, on the 
 way to Emmaus, opened the Old Testament Scriptures, and with them 
 made men’s hearts burn. 
 
 * Sec Frothingham’s “ Parker,” p. 56. 
 
 63 
 
THEODORE DARKER OK ADORATION,. 
 
 God and the nature of things have no cross-purposes. Truth works 
 well, and what works well is truth. 
 
 If we are out of harmony with the nature of things, we may he 
 scientifically certain that we are out of harmony with God. 
 
 Only a religion consisting of delight in all God’s attributes, or 
 adoration of the whole nature of things as representative of the Divine 
 Nature, can satisfy the demands of self-evident truth. 
 
 With multitudes of other careless students of the nature of things, 
 Theodore Parker taught the admiration rather than the adoration of 
 God. 
 
 I do not forget those prayers of this man, which seem to ascend 
 always as into a dateless noon of mercy, and I do not deny the existence 
 of that dateless noon. But, even if I were to forget, uncounted ages 
 would yet remember that the prayers which caused great drops of 
 blood to fall down to the ground were not quite in that mood, and 
 that no doubt He who offered them knew the full reach of the Divine 
 Mercy, and that it would go as far as the Divine Justice can, hut that 
 there are moral impossibilities to a holy being. 
 
 You may do as you please; hut I, for one, will not take my leap into 
 the unseen holy without looking for the truth around the whole 
 horizon of inquiry. And I find that the most sceptical of you are 
 agreed that there is a stern and an infinitely tender nature of things, and 
 that, even if God exists not, you must be reconciled with the nature of 
 things; and that if God exists, you must yet he reconciled with it, for 
 God himself has no cross-purposes with it. 
 
 If a vivid view of the nature of things produced this bloody sweat, 
 perhaps you and 1 ought not to dream through life, thinking that 
 every fall is a fall upward, and that it is never too late to mend. All 
 history proves that that faith does not work well. What does not work 
 well is scientifically known to he out of harmony with natural law. 
 
 Go to India. Open the Bhagvat Gheta—a Hindu hook your 
 Emerson greatly reveres; look into the subtlest thought of the Hindu 
 philosophy, and you will find these two searching sentences, which are 
 all I need in reply to any criticisms I have heard : 
 
 1. “Bepeated sin impairs the judgment.” 
 
 2. “ He whose judgment is impaired sins repeatedly.”^ 
 
 With equal scientific clearness Julius Muller says : 11 Such is the 
 
 constitution of things, that unwillingness to goodness may ripen into eternal 
 voluntary opposition to it A] By irreversible natural law all character 
 tends to a final permanence, good or bad. In the nature of things a 
 final permanence can come but once. 
 
 * Professor Monier Williams, “ Indian Wisdom,” Cambridge, England, 1876. 
 
 + “ Doctrine of Sin,” yol. ii. 
 
 64 
 
THEODORE PARKER OH AD ORATION. 
 
 The inveteracy of sin! Have you ever heard of that ? Out of it3 
 acknowledged inveteracy will not easily arise its evanescence* Out of 
 its prolongation comes its inveteracy, and out of its inveteracy may 
 come its permanence. 
 
 Here and now I do not touch the topic of the annihilation of those 
 who fall into permanent dissimilarity of feeling with God, for I do 
 not see that this cause produces any tendency to annihilation in 
 this world when a man becomes incorrigibly bad. Villains do not 
 commonly lack force. Your Hero, with his murders and leprosies 
 has put his nature out of order ; but look at his evil face in marble on 
 the Capitoline Hill, and you start as if gazing into a demon’s eyes. 
 He is as little weak as a volcano. "What do men mean when they 
 talk of vice annihilating souls ? It disarranges them ; but disarrange¬ 
 ment is not annihilation. Tacitus says that Hero heard the sound of 
 a trumpet and the groans from the grave of his mother, Agrippina, 
 whom he had murdered. His disarrangement was not derangement. 
 Acting fitfully, all the wheels of the faculties continued to exist in 
 Hero, and they are none of them without movement. They grind on 
 each other, no doubt; but I do not find that spiritual wheels can be 
 pulverized. Do you know how they can be ? This idea that evil is to 
 annihilate us ought to have some distinct scientific support in the 
 experience of this life. 
 
 I affirm that you know that John Milton’s Satan is not an 
 impossible character. You say you do not care what Milton says; 
 but I am not asking you to take his theology. Let me not be mis¬ 
 understood in my citations of the poets as witnesses to what man is. 
 “Paradise Lost” is a great classic, and no poem attains that rank if 
 it is full of manifest absurdities. How, Milton’s Satan is a character 
 in which the disarrangement of the soul is supposed to have become 
 permanent—he has fallen into final permanence of evil character— 
 and yet he is represented as absolutely free, and not very near anni¬ 
 hilation ! Burns says, if Satan had the predominant wish to do so, he 
 might mend. I appeal to classical literature to show that a permanent 
 evil character, with a free will, is not a psychological self-contradic¬ 
 tion. You admit this readily, age after age, in your great classics.; 
 but the instant I, here, standing face to face with natural religion, 
 assert that there may be a final permanence of free character, bad as 
 well as good, and good as well as bad, you stand aghast at your own 
 proceeding. You and I must have no cross-purposes with the nature 
 of things. If Milton’s description is not a psychological self-contra¬ 
 diction, there may be a person of permanently bad character, absolutely 
 free, and therefore responsible. 
 
 What effect arises by natural law in the sold when a man is brought to 
 
 65 f 
 
THEODORE PARKER ON ADORATION. 
 
 a vivid sense of the nearness of the Holy Person the moral law reveals ? 
 This question I, for one, am anxious should he investigated in the light 
 of exact research, for the use of the scientific method in answering 
 this enquiry opens the door to the proof that Christianity is the religion 
 of science. 
 
 1. The more a man has of the religion demanded by the nature of 
 things—that is, the more adoration he has of the Infinite Holiness,of the 
 Infinite Oughtness revealed by the moral law—the more he is thrown 
 into silence as to his own righteousness, into self-condemnation, and into 
 unrest and fear as to the future effect of his past sins. 
 
 I affirm that this is a fair rendering of the history of the human 
 heart age after age. "When a man comes near to God, his mood is not 
 that of self-justification. Wait till eternity breathes on your cheek, 
 wait till you come face to face with somewhat in conscience that 
 Shakespeare says makes cowards of us all, and then ask whether the 
 Infinite Holiness of the moral law will be altogether satisfactory to you. 
 Put the question here and now whether we, in our characters as they 
 stand at this moment, should be happy if we were in Heaven with 
 our characters unchanged ? Whitfield asked that question on 
 Boston Common in 1740. It has been asked in every century for 
 eighteen hundred years, and now is asked by Science ; and every man 
 in his senses, when he has listened to the still, small voice, has said: 
 “As for me, I am the son of a man of unclean lips, and 
 I am of unclean lips, and in my own righteousness I cannot 
 stand alone before God.” What are we to make of this action 
 of human nature ? It is a fact, and it is an immeasurably signi¬ 
 ficant fact. That is the way of history, and I defy any man to 
 show that I am not true to the unforced outcome of human nature, 
 outside of all the creeds, when I say that a view of all God’s attributes 
 humiliates man, puts him out of conceit with his own righteousness, 
 and brings him more and more, even after he has reformed, into fear 
 lest it may not be well with him, because there is a past behind him 
 which ought to be covered. We are made so; and when a religion 
 will not work well in those deep hours in which we see The structure 
 of our own souls, I am afraid to take it in my lighter nours. Addison 
 said that a religion should work well in three places, if it is good for 
 anything: on death-beds, in our highest moments of emotional 
 illumination, and when we are keenest rationally. A religion does 
 not work well anywhere unless in all these three places. Take your 
 scheme of thought that assumes that it is never too late to mend, or 
 that every fall is a fall upward, and bring it face to face with these 
 deepest expressions of human nature age after age. Hoes it work 
 well there, in these deepest moments ? If I find that, age after age, 
 
 36 
 
THEODORE DARKER OH ADORATIOH. 
 
 a scheme of thought is not likely to make men better, is not improving 
 society, is not taking hold of bad lives and making them good—that 
 is for me a sufficient proof that it is out of harmony with natural law. 
 If, in the long course of experience, a scheme of thought does not 
 make me better, does not put a bridle upon passion, does not lift me 
 into harmony with all the divine attributes, I know from that fact 
 scientifically that it is out of harmony with the Infinite Oughtness 
 which stands behind the moral law. 
 
 2. The only conception of God’s character given under heaven or 
 among men by which a man who worships all God’s attributes can be 
 at peace is Christ’s conception. 
 
 3. The superiority of Christianity to all schemes of natural religion 
 is that it presents the idea of God as an incarnate God and as an 
 atoning God, and of personal love to that Person as the means of 
 the mirification of the world. 
 
 -M- 
 
 Christianity does not teach that personal demerit is taken off from 
 us and put upon our Lord. Such transference is an impossibility in 
 the nature of things. But I hold that Christianity, with the atonement 
 as its central truth, matches the nature of things and turns exactly in 
 the wards of the human soul. It has, as a theory of religious truth, a 
 scientific beauty absolutely beyond all comment. The returned 
 deserter, knowing his own permanent and unremovable personal 
 demerit, may yet be allowed to escape the penalty of the law by the 
 substitution of the King’s chastisement for the deserter’s punishment; 
 and then that deserter, looking on his king as both his Saviour and Lord, 
 needs no other motive to loyalty than the memory of his unspeakable 
 condescension, justice, and love. That memory gives rise to adoration. 
 Whether or not this scheme of thought be the correct one I am not asking 
 you now to determine, but certainly it is the most moving, the most 
 natural, and the most qualified to regenerate human nature of all the 
 schemes the world has seen. I speak of it here and now only as an 
 intellectual system, and affirm, in the name of the cool precision of 
 the scientific method, that Christianity, and it only, as a scheme of 
 thought, shows hoiv man may look on all God's attributes and be at peace. 
 It, and it only, provides for our deliverance from both the love of sin and 
 the guilt of sin. Merely as a school of ideas adapted to the soul’s 
 inmost wants, Christianity is as much above all other philosophy in 
 merit as the noon is more radiant than a rushlight. u The Cross,” 
 said a successor to Theodore Parker to me, the other day, c ‘ is full of 
 the nature of things.” God be praised that this incisively scientific 
 sentence has come from the lips of a successor of Theodore Parker. 
 
 “ The Cross is not an after-thought.” We are to love a God who, 
 from eternity to eternity, is our Redeemer; and, looking on him as 
 
 67 
 
THEODORE PARKER OK ADORATION. 
 
 such, we are to take him affectionately as both Saviour and Lord. 
 Christianity includes all ethics; it teaches adoration before all the 
 divine attributes; it is a philosophy; it is an art; it is a growth; 
 and it is also a revelation of the nature of things which has no 
 variableness nor shadow of turning. But its central thought is that 
 of a holy person revealed by the moral law, and at once Redeemer 
 and Lord, and of love for that person as the means, and the only 
 possible effective means, for the purification of the world. God as an 
 atoning God, God as revealed in history, the Cross full of the nature 
 of things, the personal love of infinite perfection as a regenerating 
 bath, this is the beautiful and awful which has triumphed, and will 
 continue to triumph. 
 
 68 
 
TRIUNITY AND TRITEJEISM. 
 
 By the Bey. JOSEPH COOK. 
 
 There is a dim twilight of religious experience in which the soul 
 easily mistakes Ossa and Parnassus for Sinai and Calvary. My 
 feeling is that orthodoxy itself lives much of the time in this undis¬ 
 persed twilight; and that the unscientific and lawless liberalism of 
 many half-educated people who have lost the Master’s whip of small 
 cords, believe in aesthetic but not in moral law, and proclaim that in 
 the last analysis there is in this universe nothing to be feared— 
 Dr. Bartol says so—and, therefore, we must add, nothing to be loved! 
 is always in an earlier and deeper shadow of that misleading haze. 
 The gray, brindled dawn is better than night; but the risen sun is 
 better than the gray, brindled dawn. We must startle mere 
 aesthetics and literary religiosity out of its dream that it is religion, 
 by exhibiting before it the difference between the admiration and the 
 adoration of the attributes of the Holy Person the moral law reveals. 
 If any who are orthodox in their thoughts worship in their imagina¬ 
 tion three different beings, they, too, must be startled from this 
 remnant of paganism by a stern use of the scientific method. 
 
 As Carlyle says of America, so I of this hushed, reverent discussion : 
 Ho not judge of the structure while the scaffolding is up. A glimpse 
 only of the opening of the unfathomaole theme which the distinction 
 between the Triunity of the Divine Nature and Tritheism suggests can 
 be given here and now; and more than this will be expected by no 
 scholar. Deserving qualifications for later occasions, I purposely 
 present only an outline, unobscured by detail. I know what I venture 
 in definition and illustration; but I am asking no one to take my 
 opinions. Nevertheless, in order yet further to save time, I am to 
 cast myself abruptly into the heart of this topic, and to give you 
 personal conviction. After all, that is what serious men want from 
 each other, and the utterance of it is not egotism in you or in me. 
 It is the shortest way of coming at men’s hearts, and it is sometimes the 
 shortest way in which to come at men’s heads, to tell what you^person- 
 ally # are willing to take the leap into the Unseen depending upon. 
 
 What is the definition of the Trinity ? 
 
 1. The Pather, the Son, and the Holy Ghost are one God. 
 
 2. Each has a peculiarity incommunicable to the others. 
 
 3. Neither is God without the others. 
 
 4. Each, with the others, is God. 
 
 69 
 
TRIUNITY AND TRITHEISM. 
 
 That I suppose to he the standard definition: and if you will 
 examine it you will find it describing neither three separate indivi¬ 
 dualities nor yet three mere modes of manifestation; that is, neither 
 tritheism nor modalism. In God are not three wills, three consciences, 
 three intellects, three sets of affections. The first of all the religious 
 truth of exact research is that the Lord our God is one God. It 
 is the immemorial doctrine of the Christian ages that there are not 
 three gods, but only one God.* He is one substance; and in 
 that one substance are three subsistences. But the subsistences' 
 are not individualities. All the great symbols teach decisively 
 that we must not unify the subsistences; but, with equal 
 decisiveness, they affirm that we must not divide the substance. In 
 our present low estate as human we find, by the experience of centuries 
 that we do well to heed both these injunctions, and to look on the 
 Divine Nature on all the sides on which it has revealed itself, if we 
 would not fall into the narrowness of materialism on the one hand, or 
 into the vague ways of tritheism or pantheism on the other. 
 
 How shall we make clear in our intellectual and emotional experi¬ 
 ences the truth of the Trinity, and at the same time keep ourselves in 
 the attitude of those who worship one God, and who, therefore, do not 
 break or wish to break with science, and yet in the position of those 
 who in the one substance worship three subsistences, and therefore 
 do not break or wish to break with the very significant record of the 
 most fruitful portion of the Church through eighteen hundred years ? 
 Dor one, accepting the definition of the Trinity which I have now given 
 as neither tritheistic nor modalistic, I, personally, find no difficulty in 
 this doctrine in the shape of self-contradiction in either thought or 
 terms; and I find infinite advantages in it when I wish to conjoin 
 biblical and scientific truth as a transfiguration for life. 
 
 It is sometimes despairingly said that the doctrine of the Trinity 
 cannot be illustrated. And this is true. It is the proverb of philoso¬ 
 phy that no comparison walks on four feet; and what I am about to 
 say you will take as intended by me to exhibit only the parallelisms 
 which I point out. I am responsible for no unmentioned point in a 
 comparison. No doubt you can find as many places where the illus¬ 
 tration 1 am to use will not agree with the definition as I can places 
 where it does agree. Nevertheless, after dwelling on perhaps a 
 hundred other illustrations, my own thoughts oftenest and with most 
 of reverence come back to this. 
 
 Take the mysterious, palpitating radiance which at this instant 
 streams through the solar windows of this temple, and mny we not 
 
 * Athanasian Creed. 
 
 70 
 
TRIUNITY AND TRITHEISM. 
 
 say, for the sake of illustration, that it is one substance ? Can you 
 not affirm, however, that there are in it three subsistences ? It would 
 be possible for me by a prism to produce the colours seven on a 
 screen. I should have colour there, and heat here, and there 
 would be luminousness everywhere. But in colour is a property incom¬ 
 municable to mere luminousness or to heat. In luminousness is a 
 property incommunicable to mere heat or to '/colour. In heat is a 
 property incommunicable to mere colour or to luminousness. These 
 three—luminousness, colour, heat—are, however, one solar radiance. 
 Heat subsists in the solar radiance; and colour subsists in the solar 
 radiance ; and light subsists in the solar radiance. The three are one; 
 but they are not one in the same sense in which they are three. 
 
 It is one of the inexcusable mistakes of a silly kind of scepticism 
 that there are in the Trinity three persons, in the literal or colloquial 
 sense of that word. Sometimes with tears and sometimes with 
 laughter, one pauses over this astounding passage, printed in his 
 manhood by Thomas Paine, in his “ Age of Reason ” ; and yet what 
 he heard read was, I presume, an atrociously careless orthodox 
 discussion. 
 
 “I well remember, when about seven or eight years ago, hearing a sermon read 
 by a relation of mine, who was a great devotee of the Church, upon the subject of 
 what is called redemption by the death of the Son of God. After the sermon was 
 ended I went into the garden, and as I was going down the garden-steps (for I 
 perfectly recollect the spot), I revolted at the recollection of what I had heard, and 
 thought to myself that it was making God Almighty act like a passionate man that 
 killed his son, when he could not revenge himself any other way ; and, as 1 was sure 
 a man would be hanged that did such a thing, I could not see for what purpose they 
 preached such sermons. This was not one of those kind of thoughts that had any¬ 
 thing in it of childish levity ; it was to me a serious reflection, arising 
 from the idea I had that God was too good to do such an action, and 
 also too almighty to be under any necessity of doing it. I believe in 
 the same manner at this moment. . . . The Christian mythology has five 
 
 deities: there is God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, the 
 God Providence, and the Goddess Nature. But the Christian story of God the 
 Father putting his Son to death, or employing people to do it (for that is the plain 
 language of the story), cannot be told by a parent to a child ; and to tell him that 
 it was done to make mankind happier and better is making the story still worse, as 
 if mankind could be improved by the example of murder.”* 
 
 There is nothing in Paine’s “Age of Reason” worth glancing at 
 now except this curious paragraph in which he details the circum¬ 
 stances of the life-long unconscious obtuseness and ignorance out of 
 which arose his opposition to Christianity. Possibly, if he had under¬ 
 stood the distinction between the Trinity in God’s nature and tritheism, 
 
 * “Age of Reason,” Part I. 
 
 71 
 
TRIUNITY AND TRITHEISM. 
 
 this sharp and crackling pamphleteer for freedom, in spite of his 
 narrow brow and coarse fibre, would not have fallen into this amazing 
 error, which, according to his own account, underlay all his subse¬ 
 quent career as an infidel. Three separate beings, he thought, Chris¬ 
 tianity teaches us to believe exist in one God; and one enraged 
 person of these three had murdered another person. 
 
 But scholars, as a mass, following St. Augustine centuries before 
 poor Paine’s day, copiously affirmed that the word “person” in the 
 discussion of the Trinity does not mean what it does in colloquial 
 speech. The word in its technical use is one thousand five hundred 
 years old, and it means in that use now what it meant at first. 
 
 How commonplace is St. Augustine’s remark, repeated by Calvin, 
 that this term was adopted because of the poverty of the Latin 
 tongue!- Everybody of authority tells us, if you care for scholarly 
 statement, that three persons never meant, in the standard discussions 
 of this truth, three personalities , for these would be three gods. This 
 Latin term persons is incalculably misleading in popular use on this 
 theme. Eor one, I never employ it, although willing to use it if it is 
 understood as it was by those who invented the term. Let us use 
 Archbishop Whateley’s word “ subsistence,” for that is the equivalent 
 of the carefully-chosen, sharply-cut Greek term 11 hypostasis.”* 4 "We 
 had better say there are in one substance three subsistences, and not 
 mislead our generation, with its heads in newspapers and ledgers, by 
 using a phrase that was meant to be current only among scholars. 
 All these scholars will tell you that it is no evasion of the diffi culties 
 of this theme for me to throw out of this discussion at once the word 
 “persons,” as misleading; for that word had originally no such 
 meaning in the Latin tongue as the word person has in our own. 
 Cicero says, “ Ego unus, sustineo tres personas: I being one, sustain 
 three characters—my own, that of my client, and that of the judge.” 
 Our English language at this point is, as the Latin was not, rich 
 enough to match the old Greek. With Liddon’s “Bampton Lectures 
 on the Divinity of our Lord”—the best English book on this theme, 
 though not exhaustive of it—let us say “ One substance and three 
 subsistences,” and thus go back to the Greek phrase, and be clear. 
 
 Can the four propositions of the definition I have given be para- 
 lelled by an illustration ? 
 
 1. Sunlight, the rainbow, and the heat of sunlight, are one solar 
 radiance. 
 
 2. Each has a peculiarity incommunicable to the others. 
 
 3. Neither is full solar radiance without the others. 
 
 * Note to Wliateley’s “ Treatise on Logic.' 
 
 72 
 
TUI UNITY AND TRITHEISM. 
 
 4. Each with the others is such solar radiance. 
 
 Sunlight, rainbow, heat—one solar radiance. Eather, Son, Holy 
 Ghost—one God. 
 
 1. As the rainbow shows what light is when unfolded, so Christ 
 reveals the nature of God. 
 
 2. As all of the rainbow is sunlight, so all of Christ’s divine soul 
 is God. 
 
 3. As the rainbow was when the light was, or from eternity, so 
 Christ was when the Eather was, or from eternity. 
 
 4. As the bow may be on the earth and the sun in the sky, and 
 yet the solar radiance remain undivided, so God may remain in 
 Heaven and appear on earth as Christ, and his oneness not be divided. 
 
 5. As the perishable raindrop is used in the revelation of the 
 rainbow, so was Christ’s body in the revelation to men of God in 
 Christ. 
 
 6. As at the same instant the sunlight is itself and also the rainbow 
 and heat, so at the same moment Christ is both himself and the 
 Eather, and both the Eather and the Holy Ghost. 
 
 7. As solar heat has a property incommunicable to solar colour, 
 and solar colour a property incommunicable to solar light, and solar 
 light a property incommunicable to either solar colour or solar heat, 
 so each of the three, the Eather, Son, and Holy Ghost, has a property 
 incommunicable to either of the others. 
 
 8. But as solar light, heat, and colour are one solar radiance, so the 
 Eather, Son, and Holy Ghost are one God. 
 
 9. As neither solar heat, light, or colour is itself without the aid 
 of the others, so neither Eather, Son, nor Holy Ghost is God without 
 the others. 
 
 10. As solar heat, light, and colour are each solar radiance, so 
 Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are each God. 
 
 11. As the solar rainbow fades from sight and its light continues 
 to exist, so Christ ceases to be manifest and yet is present. 
 
 12. As the rainbow issues from sunlight and returns to the general 
 bosom of the radiance of the sky, so Christ comes from the Eather, 
 appears for awhile, and returns, and yet is not absent from the earth. 
 
 13. As the influence of the heat is that of the light of the sun, 
 so are the operations of the Holy Spirit Christ’s continued life. 
 
 14. As is the relation of all vegetable growths to solar light and 
 heat, so is the relation of all religious growths in general history, in 
 the Church, and in the individual, to the Holy Spirit, a present 
 Christ. 
 
 It was my fortune once, on an October Sabbath evening, to stand 
 alone at the grave of Wordsworth, in green Grassmere, in the English 
 
 73 
 
TRIUNITY AND TRITHEISM. 
 
 lake district, and read there the “ Ode on Immortality,” which your 
 Emerson calls the highest water-mark of modern poetry and philosophy. 
 "While my eyes were fastened on the page the sun was setting behind 
 the gnarled, inaccessible English cliffs, not far away to the west, and 
 a colossal rainbow was spread over the azure of the sky and the glow¬ 
 ing purple and brown of the heathered hills in the east. A light rain 
 fell on me, and, with my own tears, wet the pages of the poet. What 
 now, if some one, as I worshipped there, had come to me, in a holy of 
 holies in my life, and had said, roughly, in Thomas Paine’s way, “ You 
 believe in five Gods—you are not scientific”? Or what if some one 
 had said, in Parker’s way, “The perfection of God has never been 
 accepted by any sect in the Christian world. In the ecclesiastic con¬ 
 ception of Deity there is a fourth person, the Devil, as much a part 
 of Deity as either Son or Holy Ghost ” ?* “ Vicarious atonement 
 
 teaches salvation without morality only by belief in absurd teaching.”! 
 
 “ According to the popular theology, there are three acknowledged persons in 
 the Godhead. God the Father is made to appear remarkable for three things— great 
 power, great selfishness, and great destructiveness. The Father is the grimmest 
 object in the universe.”:): “He, the Draco of the universe—more cruel than Odin 
 or Baal—the author of sin, but its unforgiving avenger. Men rush from the Father; 
 they flee to the Son.” “The popular theology makes Jesus a God, and does not 
 t e ll us of God now near at hand. Science must lay his kingly head in the dust; 
 Reason veil her majestic countenance ; Conscience bow him to the earth; Affection 
 keep silence, when the priest uplifts the Bible.Ӥ 
 
 How would all that speech of the Parkers and the Paines have jarred 
 upon my soul if, standing there alone in a strange land and at the 
 grave of Wordsworth, I had heard the profane collision of their accusa¬ 
 tions with the holy sentences of this seer, fed from the cradle to the 
 tomb upon Christian truth! What—if at Wordsworth’s grave, dis¬ 
 turbed by such ghoulish attack, I had needed a spell to disperse the 
 accusations—what better Procul , procul, este profani, could I have 
 chosen than these words, once uttered in this city by a renowned 
 teacher of this accused theology—a man of whom it might be said, as 
 he once said of Jonathan Edwards, that he might have been the first 
 poet of his nation if he had not chosen to be its first theologian ? 
 A majestic discourse delivered at the installation of the revered 
 pastor of the Old South Church says : “ Other men maybe alone; 
 
 but the Christian, wherever he moves, is near to his Master. Every 
 effect is the result of some free will. Put many effects within and 
 without us are not produced by a created will. Therefore, they are 
 produced by an uncreated. On the deep sea, under the venerable 
 
 * Weiss’s “ Life of Parker,” vol. ii. p. 470. + Ibid, p. 497. 
 
 J “Sermons on Theism,” p. 101. i “Discourses on Religion,” pp. 425-427. 
 
 74 
 
TRIUNITY AND TRITHEISM. 
 
 oak, in the pure air of the mountain top, the Christian communes 
 with the Father of Spirits, who is the Saviour of men. All ethical 
 axioms are his revelation of himself to his children. Their innocent 
 joys are his words of good cheer. Their deserved sorrows are his 
 loud rebukes.” 
 
 In these words of Professor Park, a benighted believer in three 
 Gods, as you say, is God afar off ? Are there three Gods here ? Does 
 science bow her head, affection grow dumb, reason muffle her face, as 
 this priest lifts up the Bible ? 
 
 As the rainbow shows the inner structure of the light, so the 
 character of our Lord shows the inner moral nature of God, so far as 
 that can be known to man. A rainbow is unravelled light—is it not ? 
 It was assuredly better for me at Wordsworth’s grave to look on the 
 bow I saw in the east than to gaze on the white radiance that fell on 
 the poet’s page, when I wished to behold the fullest glory of the light. 
 So assuredly it is better for us to gaze on God’s character as revealed 
 in Christ, than on God’s character as revealed in his works merely, if 
 we would understand God’s nature. As the rainbow is unravelled 
 light, so Christ is unravelled God. At Wordsworth’s grave I heard 
 these hoarse voices from the Paines and the Parkers, and these softer, 
 and, I think, more penetratingly human ones from the Wordsworths 
 and the Parks, and, in the name of the scientific method, it was 
 impossible not to assert in my soul that the God who was revealed in 
 Christ was, and is, and is to come; for there is but one God, and he 
 was and is and is to come. Therefore, when the bow faded from the 
 east, I did not think that it had ceased to be. It had not been 
 annihilated; it had been revealed for awhile, and, disappearing, it 
 was received back into the bosom cf the general radiance, and yet 
 continued to fall upon the earth. In every beam of white light there 
 is potentially all the colour which we find unravelled in the rainbow; 
 and so in all the pulsations in the will of God the Father in his works 
 exist the pulsations of the heart of him who wept over Jerusalem, and 
 on whose bosom once the beloved disciple leaned ; for there is but one 
 God, who was,and island is to come; and on that same bosom we bow 
 our heads whenever we bow our foreheads upon that Sinai within us 
 which we call the moral law. The Holy Spirit to me is Christ’s 
 continued life. 
 
 But you say that this may be philosophical, but that it is not 
 biblical truth. You affirm that I teach myself this by science, 
 rather than by Scripture. I ask you to decide for yourselves 
 what the Scriptures really teach as to the unity of the three subsist¬ 
 ences in that Divine Nature which was, and is, and is to come. 
 Assuredly, you will be ready in the name of literary science to cast at 
 
 75 
 
TRITJNITY AND TRITHEISM. 
 
 least one searching glance upon this whole theme from the point of 
 view of exclusively biblical statement. 
 
 “ It is expedient for you that I go away. I have yet many things 
 to say unto you. I will not leave you orphans. I am coming to you. 
 A little while and ye shall not see me, and again a little while and ye 
 shall see me, because I go to the Father.” They who heard these 
 sentences said: “ A little while and ye shall not see me, and again a 
 little while and ye shall see me, and because I go to the Father. 
 What is this that he saith? ” But there came a later day, when he 
 who had made that promise breathed upon them and said : “ Receive 
 
 ye the gift of the Holy Ghost.” We shall not be here—all of us 
 will be mute and most of us forgotten—when, in a better age, the 
 meaning of that symbolic act of the Author of Christianity is 
 fathomed. 
 
 Next there came a day when there was a sound as of a rushing, 
 mighty wind, and this filled all the house where they who had wit¬ 
 nessed that act were sitting. This is but the experience of many 
 nations since then—the rushing sound of a new influence in human 
 history, quickening human consciences, transforming bad lives into 
 good, but until that time never felt in the world in deluges, although 
 it had appeared in streams. When that influence came, what was the 
 interpretation put upon it by the scriptural writers ? Peter, standing 
 up, said: “ We heard from him whom we know that God has raised 
 from the dead the promise of the Holy Ghost. He hath shed forth 
 this; therefore, let Jerusalem know assuredly that God hath made 
 him Lord.” I call that Peter’s colossal “ therefore.” It is the 
 strongest word in the first oration delivered in the defence of Christi¬ 
 anity. The Holy Spirit was promised; it has been poured out; 
 therefore, let those who receive it know that the power behind natural 
 law—our Lord, who was and is and is to come—is now breathing upon 
 the centuries as he breathed upon us symbolically. He hath shed 
 forth this; therefore, let all men know assuredly that God hath made 
 him Lord. When they who were assembled in Jerusalem at that time 
 heard this “ therefore ” they were pricked in the heart. 
 
 I affirm that it is incontrovertible that the New Testament writers 
 everywhere, with Stephen, gaze steadfastly into Heaven and behold 
 our Lord—not in Galilee, noton the Mount of Olives, but at the right 
 hand of the Father. Our imagination always looks eastward through 
 space, as through the east window of a cathedral; and so we look 
 out through vapour sometimes, through literalness, or through materi¬ 
 alistic haze, thicker than vapor occasionally, and we have not strength 
 of imagination or fervour of spirit enough to understand this literature 
 of the east, on the face of which the world has gazed eighteen hundred 
 
 76 
 
TRIUNITY AND TRITHEISM. 
 
 years, and seen its face to be like that of Stephen, as the face of an angel, 
 and from the same cause. The whole IN; ew Testament, being full of the 
 Holy Ghost, gazes, not as England and America do, into Gethsemane 
 or upon any sacred mount; but into Heaven, and beholds our Lord at 
 the right hand of the Eather. I have bowed down upon the Mount of 
 Olives; I have had unreportable experiences in the garden of Gethse¬ 
 mane, and on the banks of Jordan, and on the white, sounding shore of 
 Galilee, and on Lebanon, and on Carmel, and on Tabor; and God for¬ 
 bid that I should underrate at all a religion that reverences sacred 
 places; but of these sacred places the Hew Testament proclaims: “ He 
 is not here. He has arisen and is ascended. ” It nowhere exhibits 
 our narrowness of outlook. 
 
 "What if under the dome of St. Peter’s there were but four windows ? 
 What if children were brought up to look out yonder upon the 
 Appennines, and here upon the Mediterranean, and there upon the 
 Coliseum, and here upon St. Onofrio’s oak, under which Tasso sung ? 
 If children were brought up before these windows, and did not pass 
 from one to the other, they might possibly think the outlook from 
 each one was Italy. And so it is; but it is only a part of Italy. 
 We are poor children brought up, some of us, before the window of 
 science; some of us before the window of art; some of us before the 
 window of politics; some of us before the window of biblical incul¬ 
 cation; and we say in petulant tones to each other, each at his 
 accustomed outlook, “This is Italy.” What is Italy? Sweep off 
 the dome and answer, “There is but one sky.” And that and all 
 beneath it is Italy ! 
 
 As a fact in literature, it must be affirmed that this is the central 
 thought of the Hew Testament Scriptures. 
 
 We find that when one called Saul of Tarsus journeyed to Damascus 
 (this is trite, because eighteen hundred years have heard it, and the 
 trite is the important thing in history), he heard from a light^ above 
 the brightness of noon, the words, “I am Jesus!” And so, later 
 on, Paul wrote that, “We, beholding as in a glass the glory of the 
 Lord, are changed into the same image from Glory to Glory, as by 
 the Lord the Spirit.” “ The Spirit is the Lord,” was St. Augustine’s 
 reading of Paul’s words. 
 
 So, in the last pages of Itovelation, I find that he who was the 
 beloved disciple was in the Spirit on the Lord’s-day, and that he 
 beheld “One whose voice was like unto the sound of many waters, 
 and whose countenance was as the sun shineth in his strength.” 
 “ When I saw him,” says this great poet, and prophet, and apostle, 
 “I who have been called a Son of Thunder; I who, when Cerinthus 
 was in the same bath with me, cried out, Away, thou heretic! I, 
 
 77 
 
TRIUNITY AND TRITHEISM. 
 
 who have been ready at any time to suffer martyrdom—I fell at his 
 feet as dead. He laid his right hand on me, saying unto me, ( Fear 
 not^ I am the first and the last: I am he that liveth,and was dead; 
 and behold I am alive for evermore, and have the keys of hell and 
 of death.” 
 
 It is significant beyond comment that our Lord was often called 
 “ The Spirit,” and “ The Spirit of God,” by the early Christian 
 writers. “ The Son is the Holy Spirit,” is a common expression. 
 Ignatius said: “ Christ is the Immaculate Spirit.”* Tertullian 
 wrote: “ The Spirit of God and the Eeason of God—Word of Eeason 
 and Eeason and Spirit of Word—Jesus Christ our Lord, who is both 
 the one and the other.”f Cyprian and Irseneus said: “He is the 
 Holy Spirit. 
 
 Heander, in paraphrase of Peter’s oration, says, in summarizing the 
 Hew Testament literature: “From the extraordinary appearances 
 which have filled you with astonishment you perceive that in his 
 glorified state he is now operating with divine energy among those 
 who believe in him. The Heavenly Father has promised that the 
 Messiah shall fill all who believe on him with the power of the Divine 
 Spirit, and this promise is now being fulfilled. Learn, then, from 
 these events, in which you behold the prophecies of the Old Testa¬ 
 ment fulfilled, the nothingness of all that you have attempted against 
 him; and know that God has exalted him whom you crucified to be 
 Messiah, the ruler of God’s kingdom, and that, through divine power, 
 he will overawe all his enemies.Ӥ 
 
 So Alford writes : “ Christ is the Spirit, is identical with the Holy 
 Spirit; not personally nor essentially (but, as is shown by the Spirit 
 of the Lord following) in this department of his divine working. 
 Christ, here, is the Spirit of Christ. ”|| 
 
 Lange, writing on the same passage of this literature, adds: “We 
 find here such an identification of Christ and the Holy Spirit that the 
 Lord to whom the heart turns is in no practical respect different from 
 the Holy Spirit received in conversion. Christ is virtually the Spirit. 
 The Holy Spirit is his Spirit. 
 
 What if Peter, at Antioch, had beheld the earliest triumphs of 
 Christianity under persecution, and had heard the story of the martyr¬ 
 doms which became the seed of the Church and caused Christians to be 
 called by that name, and that shot through with hope the unspeakable 
 
 * Ad. Smym. init. + De Orat. init. 
 
 t See Delitzsch’s “ System of Bib. Psychology.” 
 
 3 Neander, “ Planting of Christianity,” Bohn’s ed. i. 19. Summary of Peter’s Speech in 
 Acts ii. 
 
 II “Bemarlcs on 2 Cor. iii. 17.” 
 
 78 
 
 Lange, 2 Cor. iii. 17,18. 
 
TRIUNITY AND TRITHEISM. 
 
 despair of Roman paganism, as by the first rays of the dawn—could 
 be not, looking on Lebanon and Tabor, on Jerusalem and Galilee, 
 have said: "He hath shed forth this advance of Christianity in 
 human affairs. God has a plan, and he thus reveals it. God is giving 
 triumph to Christianity; therefore, let Lebanon and Tabor, let Jeru¬ 
 salem and Galilee, know assuredly that God hath made our Lord 
 the Lord of the Roman earth, indeed, and that the influence of the 
 Holy Ghost is Christ’s continued life”? 
 
 "What if, later, when Christianity had ascended the throne of the 
 Ca3sars, Peter had stood on the Tiber, and had beheld philosophy, little 
 by little, permeated by Christianity ? What if he had looked back on 
 the persecutions and martyrdoms which gave purity and power to early 
 Christianity, and which make her record, even to your infidel Gibbon, 
 venerable beyond comment ? Could not Peter, there on the Tiber, 
 have said, looking on the Appennines, and Vesuvius, and the Mediter- 
 rannean, and on Egypt: “ Let Rome and the Tiber, let Alexandria 
 and the Nile, know assuredly, since our Lord who was, and is, and 
 is to come hath shed forth this, that he is Lord ” ? 
 
 What if, later, Peter, standing on the Bosphorus, when Rome had 
 lost her footing on the Tiber, had beheld the rushing in of the Turks 
 to pulverize the sunrise foot of Old Rome; what if he had remembered 
 the day when, standing on two feet, Rome, planting herself on both 
 the Tiber and the Bosphorus, folded her arms and looked at the North 
 Star, and proclaimed herself likely to be as eternal as that stellar light; 
 what if, remembering all that had come and all that had gone, 
 he had beheld that colossus topple toward the west, smite itself into 
 pieces on the Alps, and fall in fragments on the Rhine, on the Elbe, on 
 the Oder, some pieces scattered across the howling North Sea to the 
 Thames, and to the sites of Oxford and Cambridge—these fragments of 
 old Rome built up in these places into universities which caused at 
 last the illumination which brought the Reformation; what if Peter, 
 beholding thus the Greeks driven toward the sunset, and old Rome be¬ 
 coming seed for the Reformation, had stood on the Seine, on the Elbe, 
 on the Oder, and had witnessed the varied progress of the ideas of Him 
 who affirmed once that he had many things yet to say—might not 
 Peter there, side by side by Luther, have said once more: “ He hath 
 shed forth this; therefore, let the Alps, and the Rhine, and the Seine, 
 and the Elbe, the Thames, and the German Sea, know assuredly that 
 this gulf-current in human history, now two thousand years old, is 
 not an accident—that it means all it expresses, for what God does, he 
 from the first intends to do. He who has thus watched over the cause 
 of Christain truth, and has been breathing the Holy Ghost upon the 
 nations, hath shed forth this j and therefore let Berlin, and Paris, 
 
 79 
 
TRIUNITY AND TRITHEISM. 
 
 and London, and Oxford, and Cambridge, know assuredly that God 
 hath made him Lord ? 
 
 What if, later, when the tempest of persecution, rising out of 
 the sunrise, smote upon those universities, and blew the “ Mayflower ” 
 across the sea, Peter had taken position in that vessel, as its 
 billowing, bellying, bellowing sails fled across the great deep in the 
 icy breath of that time ; and what if he had seen on the deck of 
 that “ Mayflower” a few rushlights taking their gleam from those 
 universities, themselves illumined by the fire that fell at Pentecost ?' 
 What if Peter, afterwards standing on Plymouth Bock, had seen 
 these rushlights kindling others, and a line of rushlights, representing 
 the same illumination of the Ploly Spirit, go out into our wilderness 
 until they glass themselves in the Connecticut, and in the Hudson, 
 and in the eyes of the wild beasts, on the murmuring pines and 
 hemlocks, and in the eternal roar of Niagara, and in the Great Lakes, 
 and in the Mississippi, and in the springs of the Sierras, and at last 
 in the soft, hissing foam of the Pacific seas ? What if, beholding 
 these rushlights, thus carried across a continent by Divine guidance, 
 Peter had stood here, would not the force of his word “therefore” 
 have had new emphasis, as he should have said: “ He hath shed forth 
 this; therefore, let Boston, let New York, let Chicago, let San 
 Prancisco, let the surf of the Bay of Pundy, let the waterfalls of the 
 Yosemite know assuredly that God hath made him Lord ” ? 
 
 But what if, when a tempest sprung out of the south, and these 
 rushlights were, I will not say extinguished, but all bent to the 
 earth, and painfully tried, some of them blown out; he had beheld 
 the lights, little by little, after the tempest had gone down, begin to 
 be carried southward, and at last glass themselves in the steaming- 
 bayous and the Gulf; what if, although some had been extinguished 
 for ever, he had seen others shining on the breaking of the fetters of 
 three million slaves; what if the churches, when the tempest ceased, 
 grew brighter in their assertion of the value of their light, and are 
 filling the land with its influence, and, if God continues to illumine 
 them, will make the rushlights glass themselves yet in all the 
 streams, in all springs, and in all the sprays on all the shores of all 
 the land—could not he, looking on such results, in a territory greater 
 than Borne ever ruled over, have said: “ He hath shed forth this; 
 therefore, let America know assuredly that God hath made him 
 Lord ” ? 
 
 But what if, lastly, Peter had beheld a rushlight taken across the 
 Pacific to the Sandwich Islands, and one to Japan, and one to China, 
 and one to India, and had seen the soft-rolling globe enswathed in all 
 its zones by rushlights, bearing the very flames which fell at Pentecost, 
 
 80 
 
TRIUNITY AND TRITHEISM. 
 
 and beaten on, indeed, by persecution here and there, blit not likely 
 to be beaten on ever again as fiercely as they have been already ; not 
 likely to be blown out everywhere, even if they are in some places ,* 
 and thus ensphering the globe, so that it is not probable at all, under 
 the law of the survival of the fittest, that they will be put out; 
 could not Peter, then, looking on what God has done, and what he 
 therefore intended to do, looking on the incontrovertible fact that 
 the islands of the sea and the continents havm been coming to'prefer 
 Christian thought, and seem likely to remain under its influence; could 
 not he, while standing on scientific and biblical ground, at once have 
 affirmed, in the name both of science and of Scripture, the trans¬ 
 figuring truth : “He hath shed forth this ; therefore, let Asia on the 
 Himalaya tops, let Europe in the Parthenon and Coliseum, let London’s 
 millions, let the New World in her youthful vigour, let all the 
 islands of the sea, know assuredly that the fittest has survived, and 
 that the fittest will survive, and that God hath made him Lord who is 
 fittest to be so ” ? All the seas, in all their waves on all their shores, 
 would answer to such an assertion: Hallelujah! So be it! The 
 influences of the Holy Spirit are Christ’s continued life. 
 
 81 
 
TORULAR AND SCHOLARLY THEOLOGY . 
 
 By the Rev. JOSEPH COOK. 
 
 God punishes sin no longer than it endures. Many of the evils of 
 disloyalty to the nature of things may continue even after the soul 
 becomes loyal, as many of the evils of secession persist even after a 
 state has returned to allegiance. But, so far as is possible, the forces 
 which were punitive to the disloyal commonwealth become healing to 
 the loyal; and those that are healing to the loyal become punitive to 
 the disloyal. A personal will has proclaimed an unbending enact¬ 
 ment, which we call the law of causation; and out of that free, holy 
 law arise all the blessings and all the pains of the universe. Sin’s 
 punishment is sin’s effect. It is far more wise, therefore, to ask how 
 long sin may endure, than to inquire how long its punishment may 
 last. Of the two methods, the scientific and the biblical, by which an 
 answerto this momentous question may besought, I am here shut up to 
 neither the one nor the other; but I prefer always to put the scientific 
 method in the foreground. Let me say, once for all, that 1 do so not 
 because I undervalue the biblical, but because in our time the wants 
 of many minds are best met by combining scientific and biblical 
 evidence, and by making now the scientific the edge, and the biblical 
 the weight of the weapon behind the edge; and now the biblical the 
 edge, and the scientific the weight of the weapon behind the edge. 
 
 According to my view of the Unity of the Divine Nature, God is 
 one, as we meet him in the Old Testament and the Oldest, in the 
 New and the Newest. There are four Testaments—an Oldest and 
 an Old, a New and a Newest. The Oldest Testament is the Nature 
 of Things; the Newest is Christ’s continued life in the present 
 influences of the Holy Spirit. The Oldest and Newest are unwritten; 
 the Old and the New are written. But the voices of the four are one. 
 Singularly enough, too, the scenery of the four Testaments is one and 
 the same Holy Land, and he who does not feel at home in them all 
 may well suspect the thoroughness of his knowledge of either. 
 Carlyle calls Luther what the future will call Carlyle : “ Great, not 
 as a hewn obelisk, but as an Alpine mountain ; unsubduable granite, 
 piercing far and wide into the heavens, yet in the clefts of it foun¬ 
 tains, green, beautiful valleys, with flowers.” This is a good map of 
 the human conscience as we know it scientifically. This, too, fairly 
 understood, is a good map of the Old Testament, and of the New and 
 
 82 
 
POPULAR AND SCHOLARLY THEOLOGY. 
 
 of the Newest. If the Old Testament Scripture is at once severe and 
 tender; if in all its gnarled, nnsubduable heights there hurst out springs 
 of crystalline water; if in the dreadful ruggedness of its peaks we 
 find green places, soft with celestial visitation of showers and of dew; 
 if there is in the Written Word a combination of the Alpine and of 
 the Paradisaical, unfathomable justice, matched by unfathomable 
 tenderness; so in the Newest Testament and in the Oldest—that is to 
 say, in History and in the Nature of Things —we find in the deepest 
 clefits the springs that do most to quench our thirst! I, therefore, shall 
 dare to ask you to hang over the great chasms in the nature of things, 
 because at the bottom of these spring up the waters which are the 
 healing of the nations. 
 
 Agassiz, wishing to study the glittering interior of an Alpine 
 chasm, allowed himself on one occasion to be lowered into a crevice m 
 a glacier, and remained for some hours at midday at a point hundreds 
 of feet below the surface of the ice. After gratifying his enthusiastic 
 curiosity, he gave the signal to be drawn up. I heard him tell this 
 himself, and he said: “In our haste, we had forgotten the weight of 
 the rope. We had calculated the weight of my person, of the basket 
 in which I rode, and of the tackling that was around the basket; but 
 we had forgotten the weight of the rope that sank with me into the 
 chasm. The three men at the summit were not strong enough to 
 draw me back. I had to remain there until one of the party went 
 five miles—two and a half out, and two and a half back—to the 
 nearest tree to get wood enough to make a lever, and draw me up.” 
 When habit lowers a man into the jaws of the nature of things, it is 
 common, but it is not scientific, to forget the weight of the rope. 
 That weight is a fact in the universe, and the importance of not for¬ 
 getting it is one of the most haughty and unanswerable teachings of 
 science. 
 
 Character does not tend to final permanence! You have a large 
 task on your hands, if you are going to prove that. You have all the 
 great literatures of the globe against you, to commence with. All the 
 deep proverbs of all nations, and kindreds, and tribes, and tongues are 
 against you. All the established truths relating to habit are against 
 you. All the instincts in man, which forebode terrible things when 
 we let ourselves sink far down in the practice of sin, are against you. 
 All subtlest sorcery, by which we forget the weight of the rope, is 
 against you. The Oldest Scripture and the Old, the Newest and the 
 New, are against you. The law of judicial blindness, not one proposi¬ 
 tion or illustration about which do I take back, the world will understand 
 by-and-bye as well as Shakespeare understood it. In that day your 
 proposition that character does not tend to a final permanence will 
 
 83 
 
POPULAR AND SCHOLARLY THEOLOGY. 
 
 find no scientific believers. The results of evil choice in character are 
 effects; but they become causes, and so every act in itself is an eternal 
 mother, more surely than it is an eternal daughter. The weight of 
 the rope ! It is as unscientific to forget that in religious science as it 
 was for Agassiz to forget it among the glaciers of the Alps—and not 
 a little more dangerous ! 
 
 You wish me to look fairly at all the facts of the case. That, and 
 only that, is what I am trying to do. The question is, whether, while 
 I am doing this, or while I am true to the scientific method, I can 
 agree with Theodore Parker in these propositions : 
 
 1. “ There is nothing in God to fear.”* 
 
 Really this language is here. 
 
 2. “ If God does not care as much for Iscariot as for Christ, as much 
 desiring and insuring the ultimate triumph of the one as the other, 
 then he is not the Infinite Father, whose ways are equal to all his 
 children, but partial, unjust, cruel, wicked, and oppressive.”! 
 
 3. “ Every fall is a fall upward.”! 
 
 Turn over to the last and most emphatic passage in this best book 
 Parker ever wrote—except, always, his attacks on slavery—and we 
 find this for the concluding sentence : 
 
 “ Suppose I am the blackest of sinners—that, as Cain, I slew my brother, as 
 Iscariot, I betrayed him (and such a brother), or, as a New England kidnapper, I 
 sold him to be a slave—and, blackened with such a sin, I come to die. Still I am 
 a child of God, of the Infinite God. He foresaw the consequences of my faculties, 
 of the freedom he gave me, of the circumstances which girt me round ; and do you 
 think he knows not how to bring me back—that he has not other circumstances in 
 store to waken other faculties and lead me home, compensating my variable hate 
 with his own constant love ? Ӥ 
 
 “Come, then, expressive silence, muse his praise.” 
 
 Theodore Parker’s practice throttled kidnappers. Theodore Parker’s 
 theory nursed kidnappers. 
 
 1. The theory that a man may die a kidnapper or murderer of the 
 blackest criminality, and yet be sure to come out right in the end, 
 and that God as much desires and insures the ultimate triumph of 
 Iscariot as of Christ, does not work well in this world. 
 
 You say that one fact does not mean much; and I am not asking 
 anybody to put the emphasis on it which it seems to me to deserve. 
 But I have four tests of truth: intuition, instinct, experiment in the 
 large range, and syllogism. Row, to test Parker’s explicit teaching 
 that a man may die a kidnapper, or a Cain, or an Iscariot, and yet 
 be sure of coming out safe in the end, take the test of plain common 
 sense, and suppose society saturated with that belief for thousands of 
 
 * Parker, “ Sermons on Theism,” p. 210. t P. 290. i P. 40S. 3 P. 417. 
 
 84 
 
POPULAR AND SCHOLARLY THEOLOGY. 
 
 years. Ask how it operates in this life, in long, and wide, and multi¬ 
 plex trial, to make that the ruling opinion behind law and literature, 
 politics and commerce, peace and war. Does not every man know 
 that the theory that “ it is never too late to mend ” relaxes the moral 
 fibres, loosens the strenuous curb which mere prudence puts upou 
 greed and fraud, and, even with the most thoughtful and conscientious, 
 inevitably diminishes the imperativeness of the reasons in favour of 
 good morals? Theodore Parker’s preciously loved Iscariot theory 
 hampers—to be perfectly frank I must say I think it hamstrings— 
 society! If a theory does not work well, I hold that it is scienti¬ 
 fically proved to be out of harmony with the nature of things. Any 
 proposition which, in a long course of absorption into the veins of the 
 world, produces pimples, and dizziness, and ugly ulcers, is not good 
 food. It is not made for us. The theory that a man may die a Cain, 
 an Iscariot, or a kidnapper, and yet come out right, is one which I 
 will never take the responsibility of proclaiming, for I know it will 
 do harm; and because I know it will not work well, I, for one, am 
 convinced that it is out of accord with the nature of things, and so is 
 wholly unscientific. 
 
 2. A style of teaching that does not ivorlc well in this world is ade¬ 
 quately discredited as a guide to 'practical truth as to the next ivorld. 
 
 Law is a unit throughout the universe; and, therefore, a vivid 
 sight of an arc of experience in the seen and temporal exposes, by more 
 than a glimpse, the course of the whole circle in the unseen and eternal. 
 Even in this life we are not outside of the range of the irreversibly 
 just and the irreversibly tender laws of the nature of things; and, 
 therefore, when age after age puts its seal of condemnation on any 
 proposition because it does not work well in this world, I have the 
 right, in the name of the unity and universality of law, and of the 
 principles that truth works well, and that what works well is truth, 
 to brand that proposition as unscientific, and as, therefore, not to be 
 trusted in its relations to the next world. 
 
 3. Erom our present point of view look fairly and with your own 
 eyes at the central objection to the theory that there may be punish¬ 
 ment in the universe for ever. 
 
 Do you admit that the past is irreversible ? I hope you do. 
 Certainly I do. Yery well; if the past is irreversible, there are some 
 six thousand years at least duriug which not a few men have done 
 what conscience proclaims ought not to have been done. That 
 record is to last—is it not ? u Oh, no! Oh, no ! It would be against 
 the deepest of the liberal instincts to suppose that anything that can 
 cause regret and pain will be in existence when the great plan of the 
 universe has at last been executed.” What! a record having in it all 
 
 85 
 
POPULAR AND SCEOLARL THEOLOGY. 
 
 the Heros and Caligulas, all the perjuries and villainies and butcheries 
 of all time, and existing there as a thing that ought not to have been— 
 a record irreversible and inerasible—and yet this give no regret to 
 consciences looking back upon it, even if they are purified ones ? 
 There will be for ever in the universe a regret on the part 
 of all consciences in the universe, including God’s, that that sin was 
 committed. If regret is pain, there will be pain in the universe for 
 ever! "What are we to do with these provincial, unscientific, lawless 
 whippers of syllabub in thought, who will not look north, south, east, 
 and west, and who proclaim constantly that there is nothing in God to 
 fear ? There is much in the nature of things to fear ! “ In the last 
 
 analysis there will be a painless universe ! It cannot but be that all 
 things will come out as they ought to come out!” Indeed, I think they 
 will, and that is why, for one, I am afraid. I am not quite a full- 
 grown man; but I am afraid of the tendency of sin to benumb the 
 moral sense, and of the tendency of human nature to sin repeatedly 
 when the moral sense is once benumbed. 
 
 I am afraid of the weight of the rope when I lower myself into 
 the j aws of Gehenna; and I believe solemnly that I never shall cease 
 to regret any sin which I outgrow. It always will be to me a thing 
 that ought not to have been; and my future will have rays of bliss 
 taken off it by every sin I have committed. And that will be true, 
 no matter what God does for me. He is not likely to change to¬ 
 morrow, or the day after, the natural laws according to which I and all 
 consciences in the universe must for ever and for ever condemn what¬ 
 ever ought not to have been. 
 
 Look at the fact, the mathematical certainty, that if you deduct 
 from the experience of a man’s holiness for a while you have deducted 
 something of absolutely measureless value. You have poisoned him 
 for once. How this positive evil of diminishing the possible bliss of 
 that man is to last some time! It never will stop its course—will 
 it ? “ There will be no final pain or permanent loss in the universe ? 
 
 Oh, no! ” I affirm that you cannot take out of human history six 
 thousand years, and give them over to your blackest sins, or to your 
 least black, without subtracting from the bliss of the universe; and 
 that this gap is a part of the record of the past, and that you never 
 can fill it up. That gap will exist 
 
 “ Till the sun is old, 
 
 And the stars are cold, 
 
 And the leaves of the judgment-book unfold.* 
 
 If you please, my friends, this universe is more serious than poet 
 
 * Bayard Taylor’s Translation of a Persian Hymn. 
 
 86 
 
POPULAR AND SCHOLARLY THEOLOGY. 
 
 has ever dreamed or prophet proclaimed. Any love of ours for what 
 the nature of things condemns is dissonance with Almighty God. If 
 we are not glad to have the nature of things take its course, we are 
 not glad to have God do his will. "Whoever reveres the scientific 
 method will never for an instant forget the stern facts that all the 
 past is irreversible; that a record of sin, once written, will endure 
 for ever; that a deduction from the bliss of the universe, if made at 
 all, is of necessity made for eternity. So has God arranged all 
 things that no tears, no infinities of the Divine tenderness, will ever 
 cause that which once has been, but which ought not to have been, to 
 cease to be a part of the record of the past, on which you and I and 
 he must gaze for ever and for ever. 
 
 Carlyle is as free from partisanship as the north wind is from a yoke, 
 and Boston ought to hear him when he speaks of Cromwell’s inner 
 sky. Hampden and Cromwell, Macaulay says, were once on shipboard 
 in England, with the intention of coming to America for life. Mil- 
 ton, Cromwell, and Hampden, were the first Americans. 11 It is very 
 interesting, very natural, this conversion, as they well name it,” says 
 Carlyle of Cromwell; ‘ £ this awakening of a great, true soul from the 
 worldly slough, to see into the awful ^truth of things; to see that 
 Time and its shows all rested on Eternity, and this poor earth of ours 
 was the threshold either of Heaven or Hell.”* 1 “ The world is alive, 
 instinct with Godhead, beautiful and awful, even as in the beginning 
 of days; one life , a little gleam of time between two eternities; no 
 second chance to us for evermore.”! 
 
 The force that moves men to deny that character tends to a final 
 permanence, bad as well as good, is sentiment, and not science. It is 
 a form of sentiment peculiar to luxurious ages, and not to the great 
 and strenuous ones. Let the tone of an age change, and this sentiment 
 changes. It is what the Germans call a Zeit-geist, and by no means 
 an Ewigleit-geist —a spirit of the day, and not a spirit of eternity. 
 Even self-evident truth has sometimes very little power to exorcise 
 what reasoning did not inculcate. But it is the business of Science to 
 make all ages great and strenuous. "When Science has done her per¬ 
 fect work in the world, the lawless liberalism, characteristic of luxu¬ 
 rious and relaxed ages, will have no authority. 
 
 It is scientifically incontrovertible that the past cannot be changed; 
 and, therefore, it is sure that, if regret for what ought not to have 
 been is pain, there will be pain in the universe for ever ; and part of it 
 will be God’s own. / 
 
 This planet moves through space, enswathed with light. The 
 
 * Od Heroes, Leot. vi. 
 
 t Leet. v. 
 
POPULAR AND SCHOLARLY THEOLOGY. 
 
 radiance of the snn billows away to all quarters of infinity. Behind 
 the globe a shadow is projecting, diminishing—indeed, lost at last in 
 the immeasurable vastness of the illuminations of the scene. The stars 
 sing there. The suns are all glad. ISo doubt, if Richter was right 
 in saying that the interstellar spaces are the homes of souls, there is 
 unfathomable bliss in all these pulsating, unfathomable spaces, so far 
 as they are regions of loyalty to God. There can be no blessedness 
 without holiness; and so there cannot be bliss where loyalty does not 
 exist. Behind every planet there will be that shadow. And as surely 
 as there cannot be illumination on one side without shadow on the 
 other, so surely a record of sin will cast a shadow for ever, and some 
 part of that shadow will sweep over the sea of glass, and not be invisible 
 from the Great "White Throne. 
 
 You would be true to self-evident propositions. Be true to the 
 certainty that the past is irreversible, and you will break the spell of 
 the unscientific sentiment that there cannot be pain or loss in the uni¬ 
 verse for ever. So many worlds are around us, so many better ages 
 arc ahead of us, that there will be, for aught I know, as much more 
 light than shadow in the moral as there is in the physical universe. 
 Let no man proclaim that the human race thus far has been a failure. 
 Let no man exhibit as Christianity the pandemonium caricature which 
 regards the white lives that come into the world and go out of it before 
 they are stained with responsible evil, as lost ones! A majority of 
 the human beings who have appeared in the world have gone hence 
 before they were responsible for their actions. I believe the majority 
 of all who have been born into the world thus far are in Heaven. 
 But you and I are forced by the precision of the scientific method to 
 admit that the majority of those who live now have not learned 
 similarity of feeling with G-od. And you and I know incontrovertibly 
 that without similarity of feeling with God salvation is a natural im¬ 
 possibility. 
 
 Why, Universalism itself teaches glad allegiance to God as the 
 natural and inexorable condition of the peace of the soul. Go to your 
 Dr. Ryder (who misunderstands so thoroughly an American evangelist 
 whom Gladstone understood), and that serious teacher will tell you 
 that he everywhere proclaims the necessity of the new birth. Where 
 is there, among the more sober—that is, the later TJniversalists— a 
 man who really possesses scholarship who does not teach the necessity 
 of -similarity of feeling with God ? Dr. Ryder, however, at a late 
 national convention at Lynn, said that the XTniversalist churches 
 have not, on the whole, a good name for spiritual efficiency, and that 
 the Tlniversalist ministry does not seem to feel itself charged with the 
 duty of bringing society into this mood, which science pronounces to 
 
 88 
 
POPULAR AN SCHOLARLY THEOLOGY. 
 
 "be a necessity to the welfare of the soul.'" He criticised that ministiy 
 for lack of earnestness in the work of leading men into similarity of 
 feeling with God. That convention, although it came near censuring 
 this formidable frankness by a formal vote, did not cut its own throat 
 by doing so. Even TJniversalism, if scholarly at all, will admit that 
 without similarity of feeling with God salvation is a natural impossi¬ 
 bility. It knows that it cannot deny that the majority of those now 
 in the world are not living in the love of what God loves, and the 
 hate of what God hates. 
 
 We are agreed, therefore, up to this point; and the question is, 
 whether, as Parker affirms, a man who passes out of life as incorrigibly 
 bad as the blackest crimes can make him, can be assured in the name 
 of natural law that he will attain bliss at last, and that character does 
 not tend to a final permanence. 
 
 Your chief objection to the idea that evil may last for ever is drawn 
 not from Science, nor from Scripture, but from this characteristic 
 of luxurious ages—an unscientific sentiment. You affirm that there 
 cannot be pain in a perfect universe—that is, in a moral system where 
 all are free, and where what ought to be done is done by the Euler. 
 I wish to fracture this boulder which lies upon the necks of many. 
 This vague, easy sentiment has behind it nothing strenuous or clear in 
 thought. I have done enough to throw logical discredit upon that 
 sentiment by simply pointing to the irreversibleness of the past, and 
 the certainty that conscience, as transfigured by the salvation which 
 you say all men will attain, must regret for ever and for ever a record 
 of sin. I have shown that there will be loss for ever and for ever on 
 account of all the sin that has occurred or that is yet to occur. 
 
 Having thus, in the name of the scientific method, thrown across 
 this misty chasm of sentimentality a single thread, will you allow me 
 to carry over on that one strand a cable ? When the bridge at Niagara 
 was built, a single wire was carried over by a kite, and on that wire was 
 taken over a cable, and finally a bridge. I wish to span this chasm; 
 and beyond all controversy, we see that a single wire is carried across 
 it. Sin having once entered the world, there is a form of loss or evil; 
 and there is one form of pain which we assuredly know will exist 
 for ever. If, then, some pain and some evil may exist for ever, and God 
 yet be good , do you know enough to say how much evil may exist for ever , 
 and God yet be good ? 
 
 Who is there here who dares say that he is wise enough to 
 authorize Theodore Parker to hiss at the Scripture upon this theme ? 
 
 When you know scientifically that one thread is carried over, how 
 
 * See The Universalist, of date of tlie Convention, IS75. 
 
 89 
 
POPULAR AND SCHOLARLY THEOLOGY. 
 
 do you know but that the cable which the Scriptures carry across 
 may absolutely be the scientific bridge ? 
 
 We are all agreed that some evil may last for ever; we are all 
 agreed that God is good; and now, in the name of the fact that God 
 is good, you want me to say, with Theodore Parker, that a man may 
 die a kidnapper and yet be saved. You have no reason at the bottom 
 for your demand on that point except this sentiment or the feeling of 
 the luxurious hours, and not of the most illumined days of the world, 
 that it cannot be that any pain can last for ever. I say some pain will, 
 and you know it will; some loss and evil will, and you know it will. 
 Is it not high time, therefore, for us to consult some other authority 
 than that of this scientifically discredited sentiment ? The question 
 is whether you are wise enough to estimate the amount of pain or 
 loss or evil which may last for ever ? 
 
 Apply to this misleading sentiment another and yet sterner test. 
 Suppose that the world were not yet created, and that you were asked : 
 “ What will there be in this moral system which God is about to call 
 into existence? Will there be evil in it?” “I do not think there 
 will be, because God is good.” “ Will there be any one in it allowed 
 to lose peace of soul by falling into love of what God hates, and the 
 hate of what God loves ?” “ My sentiments assure me that there will 
 
 not be. God is good and perfect. There will be no imperfection in 
 his work.” “ Will there be in this universe which is about to come 
 into existence any free and responsible agent, weighted from birth to 
 death with inherited bad tendencies, which, although not sin, are the 
 copious fountain of evil choices ?” “ Will there be a law of hereditary 
 
 descent by which beings innocent, so far as their own acts are con¬ 
 cerned, will be brought into the world to suffer to the third and fourth 
 generation, as a consequence of the evil choices of their ancestors ?” 
 “ Ho; that cannot be. A Perfect Being, with a perfect motive, creating 
 with a perfect purpose, never will call such a law into existence.” 
 “How do you know he will not?” “My cultured sentiment is all 
 against it. It is almost a violation of taste to suppose that God will 
 do anything of that sort. Advanced thought cannot admit that any 
 such imperfection will exist in a universe created by a perfect being. 
 God is good. Evil will not be allowed to begin. I am sure nothing 
 of the kind will be found in the world. It is not to be supposed for 
 a moment that an Infinite Being will permit sin to exist in a moral 
 system. I am willing to stake my eternity on the veracity of this 
 sentiment.” 
 
 Turn now to the actual facts of life, and what is here ? What 
 Infinite Wisdom and Power and Goodness have permitted, and nothing 
 else. What God does not do cannot be done wisely. He has not pre- 
 
 90 
 
POPULAR AND SCHOLARLY THEOLOGY. 
 
 vented sin; he has given to evil, as well as to good, a power of self¬ 
 propagation ; he has made it a rule that children shall suffer, as well 
 as be blessed, for the evils of their ancestors, and this to the third and 
 the fourth generation. It is a fact beyond all comment amazing that sin 
 has such self-propagating power as to spread itself from birth beyond 
 what we should say is the range of responsibility for it, and that men 
 should come burdened into the world with the offences of those who 
 went before them. But virtue has equally great and even greater 
 power of self-diffusion. Why could not there have been an upper 
 without an actual under in this free world ? Perfectly innocent is 
 many a maniac; perfectly innocent is many a cripple. But not 
 innocent some ancestor whose mischiefs spread by hereditary descent! 
 God allows such things to be, and yet we believe God is perfect. 
 
 Archbishop Whately has shown elaborately that all the reasoning 
 which proclaims that sin cannot endure for ever proceeds on principles 
 which prove that sin would never be allowed to begin. 
 
 Will your unreasoning sentiment stand in this light of science ? 
 Or is the universe, perhaps, more complex and serious than you 
 dreamed ? I affirm, that all this unscientific sentimentality is best 
 tested by taking it over to a point previous to the commencement of 
 our present moral system, and applying the reasoning there fully and 
 fairly. If a sentiment indicates the truth, it will work well there. 
 Well, I go enswathedrn this sentiment into the councils which pre¬ 
 ceded the formation of this world, and I really find myself a minority 
 there. Incontrovertihly , there is in the universe a different plan than I 
 should thinlc there ivould he , if I were to follow the lead of this sentiment , 
 which is the secret source of the denial that all character tends to a final 
 permanence. 
 
 Therefore, my friends, as this sentiment fails us when we apply it 
 to this course of facts which we can test, I affirm that it is not safe to 
 take it and apply it to this course of facts which lie beyond the touch 
 of the human spiritual finger tips. We can reduce this sentiment to 
 absurdity by applying it to the time before the world was; and, 
 therefore, I fear it will turn out an absurdity if we apply it to the 
 time after the world shall cease to exist. 
 
 Yes; but ultimately more good will come if evil is permitted. 
 What! I thought you did not believe that evil is a necessary means of 
 the greatest good ! I assumed that you adhered to Theodore Parker’s 
 position that conscience pronounces that evil ought not to be. If evil 
 is the necessary means of the greatest good, then it ought to be. 
 
 In any case you will obtain only a painless universe; so we come 
 hack precisely to the point where we stood before public criticism 
 was cast on our lines of thought—and that was that your marble 
 
 91 
 
POPULAR AND SCHOLARLY THEOLOGY. 
 
 staircase takes men up no higher than yonr red-hot iron ; and your 
 red-hot iron no higher than they can ascend on your marble. And 
 so, if the only object of evil in the universe is to take men up, God 
 is not benevolent, for he could take men up painlessly to the same 
 height, and he does not do so. There is where you come out at last. 
 It is the stern scientific truth on this theme that you have no ground 
 in this sentiment for denying that character tends to a final 
 permanence. 
 
 4. Fill the ages with the certainty that all character tends to a free 
 final permanence, which can come but once, and you encourage all 
 virtue and repress all vice—as the nature of things does. That belief 
 works well, and so deserves coronation. It puts beneath every man 
 who is loyal to duty the Everlasting Arms. It makes him glad, with 
 the unbounded confidence that all things work together for good to 
 those who love God ; and serious in an equally measureless confidence 
 that all things do not work together for good to those who do not. 
 
 Theodore Parker once proclaimed, in a stray passage, that violation 
 of moral law may be so bold and persistent as to bring with it penalties 
 that have no remedy. He wrote explicitly : “ From my own experi¬ 
 ence I know the remorse which comes from conscious violation of my 
 own integrity, from treason to myself and my God. It transcends all 
 bodily pain, all grief at disappointed schemes, all anguish which comes 
 from sickness, age, from the death of dear ones prematurely taken away. 
 To these afflictions I can bow with a ‘ Thy will, not mine, be done.’ 
 But remorse, the pain of sin—that is my work. This comes, obviously, 
 to warn us of the ruin which lies before us; for, as the violation of the 
 natural material conditions of bodily life leads to dissolution of the body, 
 so the wilful, constant violation of the natural conditions of spiritual 
 well-being leads to the destruction thereof.”*' 
 
 This is clear and straightforward ; but it is immediately explained 
 away and repudiated by its own author. 
 
 If lost souls repent, they in that act cease to be lost. "Will Iago re¬ 
 pent? Will Mephistopheles repent ? Will Milton’s Satan repent? 
 What is the definition of perdition ? Permanent dissimilarity of feel¬ 
 ing with God. That definition does not imply that a man has lost all 
 tendency to respect what is reasonable ; but that he never attains pre¬ 
 dominant love of what God loves. The failure to attain predominant 
 love of what God loves, and hate of what God hates, is perdition. In 
 the name of the law by which all character tends to final permanence, 
 all science proclaims that Iago and Mephistopheles may fall into per¬ 
 manence of dissimilarity of feeling with God. Salvation in that con- 
 
 * “Sermons on Theism,” p. 404. 
 
 92 
 
POPULAR AND SCHOLARLY THEOLOGY. 
 
 dition is a natural impossibility, for salvation includes similarity of 
 feeling with God. 
 
 We want truth winnowed by being held up in the breezes that blow 
 out of all quarters of the shy. I take this proposition that it is safe to 
 die as an Iscariot, and I hold it up in the winds that blow out of the 
 centuries of Koman degradation. It suffers a winnowing even then, 
 for the winds whisper to me : “ This teaching would not have cleansed 
 Home.” I hold up the proposition in the winds that blow out of 
 American greed and fraud. The answer is yet more decisive. Safe to 
 die an Iscariot ? Safe to die a kidnapper ? Safe to die a Cain, with 
 the blood of your brother on your forehead ? The scheme does not 
 work well, and it is to be known scientifically and finally by its inevit¬ 
 able fruits. 
 
 Thread and cable across the chasm—what is the bridge? And this 
 in one word ? It is written in Scripture that there will come a time 
 when, in the name of the nature of things, it will be proclaimed : “ He 
 that is unjust, let him be unjust still; and he that is holy, let him be 
 holy still.” There is to be a day, of which no man or angel knoweth 
 the time, after which the unholy will continue to be unholy, and the 
 holy will continue to be holy. On the last page of the Hew, as in 
 many another page of the Hew and Old, and of the Hewest and 
 Oldest Testament, the law is proclaimed that all character tends to 
 a final permanence, good as well as bad, and bad as well as good. 
 The written Scriptures end with this explicit declaration, and in it 
 reach their most awful and their most alluring height. In the 
 great words “Let him that is unjust be unjust still,” the Greek 
 verb implies that the agent in this eternal sin is wholly free, and 
 can blame only himself.' 1 ' 
 
 The last verity proclaimed in Scripture is thus the natural perman¬ 
 ence of moral character, and the certainty that all crystallization of 
 the soul into final permanence will bring with it its natural wages. 
 The truth that I am afraid of is what all science, what all Scripture, 
 what all human experience affirm—that he who is unholy long enough 
 will be unholy longer; he who is filthy long enough will be filthy 
 longer ; and that inveteracy will lead to permanence of voluntary moral 
 remoteness from God; and that this will be its own punishment, in 
 the nature of things. 
 
 You are at war with the nature of things. "Which shall change, 
 you or it ? God cannot be an enswathing kiss without being also a 
 consuming fire. 
 
 * Alford, Rev. xxii. 11. 
 
 93 
 
COMMUNION WITH GOD AS PERSONAL. 
 
 By the Rev. JOSEPH COOK. 
 
 The river Rhine is a majestic stream until in the Netherlands of 
 the North Sea shore it divides into shallows, and swamps, and 
 steaming oozes. Man’s adoration of God is a majestic stream until 
 in the Netherlands of religious experience it divides among three 
 gods or among many gods, and so becomes a collection of shallows, 
 and swamps, and steaming oozes. Out of these North Sea hollow 
 lands, wherever they have existed in any age of the moral experience 
 of the race, there has invariably arisen a vapour obscuring the 
 wide, undivided azure, and even the near landscapes, of natural 
 truth. Give me the Christian and the scientific surety of the Unity 
 of the Divine Nature, and let my whole soul flow toward one God; 
 let me not worship three separate wills, three separate consciences, 
 three separate sets of affections; but one Will, one Conscience, one 
 Heart, which was, and is, and is to come; and so long as the Alps 
 of thought feed me with their cool, impetuous, crystalline streams, 
 I shall be like the Rhine, deep enough in the current of my adoring 
 affections to drive out the driftwood and boulders in the stream, and 
 not permit them to accumulate and form islands, to divide the river 
 into shallows and oozes. Let me move toward God, one in nature 
 outside of the soul, one in Christ revealed in history, one as tangible 
 to the conscience in the intuitions; let me feel that all these subsist¬ 
 ences are one substance; and it may be that the Rhine of the human 
 affections, turned thus toward God as one will, one heart, and one 
 conscience, will be majestic enough to float fleets, both for peace and 
 for war, and will go out into the ocean at last not as a set of befogged 
 shallows and oozes, but as the Amazon goes out—an undivided river 
 into an undivided ocean, a thousand flashing leagues caught up into 
 infinite times ten thousand flashing leagues, the intersphering of wave 
 with wave, in every case the interspersing of a portion of the finite 
 personality with the Infinite Personality, one, invisible, omnipotent, 
 omnipresent, eternal; the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever; lily 
 holy, holy; Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. 
 
 For one, I had rather go back to the Bosphorus, where I stood 
 a few months ago, and worship with that Sultan who lately 
 slit his veins and went hence by suicide, than to be in name only an 
 orthodox believer, or in theory to hold that there is but one God, but 
 
 94 
 
COMMUNION WITH GOB AS PERSONAL. 
 
 in imagination to worship three gods. I am orthodox, I hope, but 
 my first concern is to be straightforward. I purpose to be straight¬ 
 forward, even if I must be orthodox. Revere the orthodoxy of 
 straightforwardness; and when that justifies you in doing so, but 
 only then, revere the straightforwardness of orthodoxy. Moham¬ 
 medan paganism contains one great truth—the divine unity. And I 
 never touch this majestic theme of the divine triunity without 
 remembering what that single truth, as I heard it uttered on the 
 Bosphorus, did for me when I knelt there once in a mosque with the 
 Sultan and with the peasants, with the highest officers of state and 
 with the artisans, and saw them all bow down and bring their fore¬ 
 heads to the mats of the temple, and heard them call out, from the 
 highest to the lowest, as they prostrated themselves: “ Allah el alcbar! ” 
 —“ God is one, and God is great.” So prostrating themselves, they 
 three times called out, “ Allah el alcbar /” and then remained silent, 
 antil I felt that this one truth had in it a transfiguration. I affirm 
 that I had rather go back to that shore of the azure water which 
 connects the Black Sea with the Mediterranean, and, omitting the 
 leprosy of Mohammedanism, take for my religion pure theism, than 
 to hold that there are three gods, with three wills, three sets of 
 affections, three intellects, three consciences, and thus to deny the 
 assurances of both scriptural and scientific truth, and make of myself 
 the beginning of a polytheist, although calling myself orthodox. 
 
 At what should we arrive, however, if we should adopt the bare 
 idea of the divine unity without taking also that of the triunity ? 
 Should we thus be faithful to the scientific method ? Should we thus 
 be looking at all the facts? Should we obtain by this method the 
 richest conception of God, or should we see from such a point of 
 view only a fragment of that portion of his nature which man may 
 apprehend ? 
 
 Theodore Parker taught God’s immanence in mind and matter, and 
 it is amazing that he thought this truth a new one. If you are of 
 my opinion, you will reverence that one portion of his far from 
 original teaching; for it is at once a scientific and a Christian 
 certainty that wherever God acts, there he is. The Bridgewater 
 treatises affirm this truth with more emphasis than Parker ever laid 
 upon it. The one chord which he struck in theology to which all 
 hearts vibrate was the certainty of the Divine Immanence in matter 
 and mind. And this one certainty was the secret of any power he 
 had in distinctively religious endeavour. Men, he said, have a con¬ 
 science ; and in that conscience the moral law is revealed; and that 
 moral law reveals a Holy Person. 
 
 95 
 
COMMUNION WITH GOD AS PERSONAL. 
 
 Your Helmholtz, and Wundt, and Beale, and Carpenter, and 
 Herschel, and Faraday, and Darwin, and Agassiz, as well as your 
 Lotze, and Kant, and Leibnitz, and your St. Chrysostom, and Jeremy 
 Taylor, and Bishop Butler, all unite with Plato, and Aristotle, 
 and David, and Isaiah in asserting the Divine Personal Immanence 
 in matter and mind. There is no cloud at this moment, shot through 
 by the sun, so completely saturated by light, as all mind and matter 
 are by the Divine Immanence—that is to say, by this invisible, in¬ 
 comprehensible Personality which the moral law reveals. 
 
 But , granting the fact of the Divine Personal Immanence in matter 
 and mind , to what results must a rigid use of the scientific method bring 
 us on the theme of the Triunity of the Divine Nature ? I know of no 
 question on this topic fairer or more fruitful than this. 
 
 1. Since a personal God is immanent in all matter and mind, it 
 follows that in all Nature outside the soul we look into God’s face. 
 
 2. For the same reason it is incontrovertible that in the Soul we 
 call Christ, and in his influence in history, we look into God’s 
 face. 
 
 3. For the same reason, it is certain that in the intuitions of 
 conscience we look into God’s face. 
 
 4. These three spheres of his self-manifestation embrace all of God 
 that can be known to man, 
 
 5. In each of these spheres of the self-manifestation of the Divine 
 Nature something is shown which is not shown ivith equal clearness in 
 either of the other spheres. In each of them the Ineffable Immanent 
 Person says something new. 
 
 0. In external Nature he appears chiefly as Creator; in Christ 
 chiefly as Redeemer; in conscience chiefly as Sanctifler. 
 
 7. These are all facts scientifically known. 
 
 8. A scientific scheme of religious thought must look at cdl the facts. 
 
 9. When cdl the facts known to man are taken into vieiv, a Trinity of 
 Divine Manifestations is , therefore, scientifically demonstrable. 
 
 10. But , according to the admitted proposition that a Personal God is 
 immanent in all matter and mind, he reveals himself in each of these 
 manifestations as a Person and yet as one. 
 
 11. A Personal Triunity , of which Creator , "Redeemer , and Sanctifier 
 are but the other names, is, therefore, scientifically known to exist. 
 
 12. This is the Trinity which Christianity calls Father, Son, and 
 Holy Ghost, and of all parts of whose undivided glory it inculcates 
 adoration in the name of what God is, and of wliat he has done, and 
 of what man needs. 
 
 All these propositions you ivill grant me except the second; but you 
 
COMMUNION WITH GOD AS PERSONAL. 
 
 cannot deny that without throwing away your own admission that a 
 Personal God is immanent in all matter and mind. 
 
 Even Rousseau could say that Socrates died like a man, but the 
 Founder of Christianity like a God. Carlyle affirms that Voltaire’s 
 attacks on Christianity are as batteriug-rams driving in the wrong 
 direction. Who doubts that at the head of the effect we call 
 Christianity there was an adequate cause, or a Person? and who 
 can deny that in the soul of that Person God spake to man as never 
 before or since ? Scholarship has outgrown the old forms of historical 
 doubt; and historical science now admits that, whether we say 
 Christ possessed proper Deity or not, he assuredly has been the chief 
 religious teacher of the race. But that fact means more than much, 
 if looked at on all sides. 
 
 Napoleon, at St. Helena, said that something mysterious exists in 
 universal history in its relation to Christianity. “ Can you tell me 
 who Jesus Christ was?” said this Italian, greater than Csesar, and as 
 free from partisan religious prejudices. The question was declined 
 by Bertrand, and Napoleon proceeded : u Well, then, I will tell you.” 
 I am reading now from a passage authorized by three of Napoleon’s 
 biographers, and freely accepted by European scholars as an authori¬ 
 tative statement of his conversation in exile.*' “Alexander, Caesar, 
 Charlemagne, and I myself have founded great empires; but upon what 
 did these creations of our genius depend ? Upon force. Jesus alone 
 founded his empire upon love, and to this very day millions would die 
 for him. . . I think I understand something of human nature; and 
 
 I tell you all these were men, and I am a man. No other is like him. 
 Jesus Christ was more than a man. I have inspired multitudes with 
 such an enthusiastic devotion that they would have died for me; but 
 to do this it was necessary that I should be visibly present, with the 
 electric influence of my looks, of my words, of my voice. When I 
 saw men and spoke with them I lighted up the flame of self-devotion 
 in their hearts. . . . Christ alone has succeeded in so raising 
 
 the mind of man toward the Unseen that it becomes insensible to the 
 barriers of time and space. Across a chasm of eighteen hundred 
 years Jesus Christ makes a demand which is beyond all others 
 difficult to satisfy. He asks for that which a philosopher may often 
 seek in vain at the hands of his friends, or a father of his children, 
 or a bride of her spouse, or a man of his brother. He asks for the 
 human heart; he will have it entirely to himself; he demands it 
 
 • See Liddon’s “Bampton Lectures,” Eng. ed., p. 14S, for a full list of authorities for this 
 
 xtract. 
 
 97 
 
 n 
 
COMMUNION WITH GOD AS PERSONAL. 
 
 unconditionally, and forthwith his demand is granted. Wonderful ! 
 In defiance of time and space, the soul of man, with all its powers 
 and faculties, becomes an annexation to the empire of Christ. All 
 who sincerely believe in him experience that remarkable supernatural 
 love toward him. This phenomenon is unaccountable; it is altogether 
 beyond the scope of man’s creative powers. Time, the great destroyer, 
 is powerless to extinguish the sacred flame ; Time can neither exhaust 
 its strength nor put a limit to its range. This is that which strikes 
 me most. I have often thought of it. This it is which proves to me 
 quite convincingly the divinity of Jesus Christ.” 
 
 It is beyond all controversy that precisely this central thought of 
 Christianity which convinced Napoleon was what most struck the 
 ancient Roman philosophers. Christ’s continued life in the Holy 
 Spirit—was that heard of in the first centuries ? Why, I open an 
 ancient book, written in opposition to Christianity, by Arnobius, and 
 I read: “ Our Gods are not displeased with you Christians for 
 worshipping the Almighty God; but you maintain the deity of one 
 who was put to death on the cross. You believe him to be yet alive 
 (et superesse adhuc creditis) and you adore him with daily supplica¬ 
 tions.”* 4 Pliny’s letter to Trajan implies all this, but is so celebrated 
 that I need not recite its majestic facts here. 
 
 Men showed me at Rome, in the Kircherian Museum, a square foot 
 of the plaster of a wall of a palace not many years ago uncovered on 
 the Palatine Hill. On the poor clay was traced a cross bearing a 
 human figure with a brute’s head. The figure was nailed to the cross, 
 and before it a soldier was represented kneeling and extending his 
 hands in the Greek posture of devotion. Underneath all w r as scratched 
 in rude lettering in Greek : “ Alexcimenos adores his GodP That 
 representation of the central thought of Christianity was made in a 
 jeering moment by some rude soldier in the days of Caracalla; but it 
 blazes there now in Rome, the most majestic monument of its age in 
 the world. 
 
 You believe your Lord is yet alive? You adore him? Listen to 
 the last words of the martyrs through all the first five centuries of 
 Christianity. They are these and such as these: “ 0 Lord God, who 
 didst make heaven and earth; Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, one God, 
 be near us ! Save the Church !” 
 
 Poor Blandina, there at Lyons, in the year 177—you remember 
 how they roasted her, frail girl, on the red-hot iron chair; put her 
 in a net and exposed her to the horns of the wildest oxen; whirled 
 
 * Arnobius, “ Adv. Gentes,” i. 36. 
 
 98 
 
COMMUNION WITH GOD AS PERSONAL. 
 
 her in instruments of torture till her senses were lost, and then plunged 
 her into flames; and day after day did that, while she apparently 
 experienced little pain, calling out at every interval when her strength 
 came back : “I am a believer in the Father, the Son, and the Holy 
 Ghost, one God, who is with me. There is no evil done among us. 
 I am a Christian.” And so she passed hence, but speaks to us as one 
 yet living! * Multitudes and multitudes, a great army of martyrs, 
 passed out of the world believing that the influence of the Holy 
 Spirit was Christ’s continued life; and if there is anything 
 mysterious in history, Napoleon had liis eye upon it when he 
 asked what it is that makes the martyrs in every age painless when 
 on the bosom of their Spouse. 
 
 There was a God in Christ, whether you regard him as divine or 
 not; and that was one revelation of God which was made and is now 
 making, in this incontrovertible fact of his earthly influence, which 
 Napoleon thought utterly inexplicable on merely human lines of cause 
 and effect. But in conscience there is a God. In the moral intuitions 
 of the soul we look into God’s face. Assuredly, even if you and I 
 were not to have, a better age will have, a religious science that will 
 take into view all these facts. There is a God in external nature ; 
 there is a God in Christ; there is a God in the intuitions of the 
 human spirit; and, if I could not have any other Trinity than that, 
 although I do not believe that to be the best, I would have that, for 
 I want all the truth I can reach. I, therefore, will look on God as 
 manifesting himself in external nature and in our intuitions, and in 
 history as influenced by his Spirit; and my God will be thus revealed 
 to me with more fulness than he could be if I had only one of these 
 three personal revelations of himself. In each of them he says what 
 he does not say elsewhere. Science must be hungry to hear all that 
 all facts say. 
 
 God is a person in each one of these revelations. He is a person in the 
 strict sense, as seen in external nature. As seen in our Lord he is a 
 person in the strict sense. As revealed in the moral law he is a 
 person in the strict sense. But there are not three persons. He is one 
 Person in the strict sense , for natural laic is a unit in the universe , and 
 reveals but one will. Three revelations of God are all one Person, 
 although in each revelation he is a person. Now, is that mystical? 
 or does that straightforward use of the scientific method give a richer 
 view of human history, a richer view of the human soul, a richer 
 
 * See Eusebius, v. 1—3, for a contemporary account of Blandina, in a letter written from 
 the churches of Lyons and Vienne to those of Asia Minor. 
 
 99 
 
COMMUNION WITH GOD AS PERSONAL. 
 
 view of external nature than mere deism, or theism, or materialism, 
 or pantheism, however fortified by modern science, can present tc 
 you ? v 
 
 Thus far I have asked you to notice only what is in¬ 
 volved in Theodore Parker’s admission that a Personal God is 
 immanent in all matter and mind. On this point, as on so many 
 others, Theodore Parker failed to carry out consistently his own 
 principles, and fell into error not so much through a wrong 
 direction as through haste and incompleteness of research. If 
 I must at this point drop analytical discussion and give personal 
 conviction, let me say that Theodore Parker’s scheme of thought, 
 melodious as that one feebly-struck note of the Divine Immanence 
 in mind and matter is, compares to me with Christianity as water 
 compares with wine. Tennyson makes one of his characters say to 
 another: 
 
 “ All my passions, matched with thine, 
 
 Are as moonlight unto sunlight, 
 
 Or as water unto wine.” 
 
 So I aver, in the name of the precision of the scientific method, that 
 any scheme of thought not Christian, as matched with Christianity 
 and tested fairly by intuition, instinct, syllogism, and ages of experi¬ 
 ment, is as moonlight matched with sunlight, or as water matched 
 with wine. 
 
 I want supremely such a view of religious truth as shall set me at 
 rest about my irreversible record of sin. I want such a view of God 
 as shall present him as an atoning God, on whom I cannot look 
 without the regeneration of my own nature through gratitude, and 
 on whom I can look, and yet for his sake be at peace. 
 
 Why do the ages cling to the doctrine of the Trinity ? Perhaps 
 their -wants have been much like yours and mine ! Is the truth of 
 the Divine Trinity dear to us because it is a fine piece of philosophical 
 speculation ? Ah ! you know life too well to think that eighteen centu¬ 
 ries have offered up their martyrdoms, and the personal careers which, 
 not ending at the stake, have been bound to the stake perhaps through 
 the better part of the time from birth to death, and that these ages have 
 had nothing more than philosophy behind them ! Great human organic 
 wants are revealed by the reception the ivorld has given to the deepest 
 religious truths. We know we are going hence. We ivish to go hence 
 in peace. We want a religion that can wash Lady Macbeth’s red right hand. 
 We want to know that an atonement has been provided such that 
 we may look on all God’s attributes, and then in His merit, not in 
 
 100 
 
COMMUNION WITH GOD AS PERSONAL. 
 
 our own, be at peace here and in that Unseen Holy into which it is 
 scientifically sure that all men haste. 
 
 Religious science never teaches that personal demerit is or can be 
 transferred from an individual, finite personality to God. That is a 
 ghastly error, which has been charged to Christianity in every age. 
 It is one of the most monstrous of misconceptions, one of the most un- 
 philosopliical of all the hideous caricatures set up by Theodore Parker 
 before the public gaze, that Christianity teaches that personal demerit 
 or blame-worthiness may be taken off one soul and put upon another, 
 and that one an innocent being. We hold nothing of the sort; but we 
 have been taught that there is revealed in Christianity a view of God 
 which represents him as substituting chastisement for punishment, 
 and as thus making possible the peace of all who are loyal to him. 
 And this has been the regenerating influence which has brought the 
 human spirit to the highest summits it has ever attained; so that, 
 both by ages of experience and by philosophy, we know that this 
 central portion of the Christian scheme of thought is adapted to man’s 
 deepest wants. 
 
 If you deny the doctrine of the Trinity, you must deny the whole 
 central portion of this crowned system of truth, in all its philoso¬ 
 phical glory and in all its prolonged and multiplex breadth of power 
 in human experience. There was nothing so touching when Professor 
 Huntington, of Haaward University, turned toward the doctrine 
 of the Trinity as his proclamation of the u life comfort and salva¬ 
 tion ” which burst upon his vastly-enlarged horizon as he attained at 
 
 once the scientific, the biblical, and the only historically radiant 
 point of view.* 
 
 Only an undiluted Christianity gives such a view of God that we 
 can be true to the scientific method, and yet at peace with all his 
 attributes. 
 
 You will not soon drive out of human nature the desire to go hence 
 in peace. You will not soon remove from human nature the feeling 
 it has exhibited in every age that peace does not come even when we 
 reform. You will not soon change the natural operations of con¬ 
 science. You will not soon cause the past to be reversible. You 
 therefore, will not soon make the atonement anything other than a 
 desire of all nations. But until you have done all these things there 
 will be life, there will be a wholly natural and abounding vitality in 
 that exhibition of God’s nature to man which represents him as an 
 atoning God, and as a Person who was and is and is to be with us 
 
 See Huntington, Bishop, “ Christian Believing and Living.” 
 
 101 
 
COMMUNION WITH GOB AS PERSONAL. 
 
 because one with him who made Heaven and earth, and with him who 
 speaks in conscience at this hour, and who, from eternity to eternity, 
 is our Saviour and our Lord. 
 
 But next I want in my view of religion something that will bring 
 me into harmony with all exact research. I want no mysticism ; no 
 medievalism; no doctrine supported simply by the schools, or of 
 doubtful worth under the microscope and the scalpel. I find it be¬ 
 yond controversy, as Theodore Parker held, that a Personal God is 
 immanent in matter and mind. It is beyond all debate that there is 
 a Holy Person revealed by the moral law. I want a God who shall 
 be one in history, in external nature, and in my intuitions ; and I 
 turn to Christianity, and I find a breadth of outlook more than 
 equal to the loftiest philosophical demand. I read that he who is 
 the light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world—that is, 
 the Personal God who is revealed in conscience—is also he whose 
 light shone in the darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not; 
 and who was in the world which was made by him, and the world knew 
 him not. He whospeaketh in the still small voice is he who spoke, and 
 who yet speaks, as never man spoke. If we do not force upon the 
 Scriptures our own narrowness of thought, we find that Science and 
 Scripture are agreed, for both make God perfect and one; and, 
 according to the Scriptures, the Holy Spirit is Christ’s continued life. 
 
 What are the great proofs in Scripture that God is presented to us 
 as Trinity in Unity ? What are the great biblical proofs that God is 
 triune? What are a few of the tremorless bases of conviction that 
 the Trinity is taught in the New Testament ? I hold that it is a 
 cheap reply to the assertion that the Trinity is taught in the New 
 Testament to say that the word is not there. The word “ Christi¬ 
 anity ” is not there ; the word “ Deity ” is not there; the word 
 “humanity ” is not there. The question is, whether it is not taught 
 in the New Testament that God is one. You say yes. If it be 
 taught in the New Testament that God is one, and that each of the 
 three subsistences is God, the Trinity is taught there as implicitly, 
 though not explicitly. After ages of debate, you know what nine 
 out of ten of the devoutest and acutest think the New Testament 
 teaches in the baptismal formula and the apostolical benediction— 
 two incisive biblical summaries of Christian truth. The direction to 
 the apostles as to baptism was : “ Baptise all nations in the name of the 
 Father, Son, and Holy Ghost ”—a triune name, no distinction being 
 made between these three. So, too, the benediction was pronounced 
 in the triune name: “ May the love of God, the grace of the Lord 
 Jesus Christ, and the communion of the Holy Ghost be with you.” 
 You have been told that Neander says that there is not a passage in 
 the New Testament which asserts the doctrine of the Trinity expli¬ 
 citly ; and Neander does say so. But he says a great deal more— 
 namely, that the whole New Testament contains the doctrine 
 implicitly! 
 
 “ In the doctrine of the Trinity,” he writes, “ God becomes known 
 as Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier, in which threefold relation the 
 
 102 
 
COMMUNION WITH GOD AS PERSONAL. 
 
 whole Christian knowledge of God is completely announced. Ac¬ 
 cordingly, all is herein embraced by the Apostle Paul when, in pro¬ 
 nouncing the benediction, he sums up all in the formula:The grace 
 of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the 
 Holy Spirit. God, as the living God, the God of mankind, and the 
 God of the Church, can be truly known in this way only. This shape 
 of theism presents the perfect mean between the wholly extra-mun¬ 
 dane God of deism and the God brought down into and confounded 
 with the world of pantheism. This mode of the knowledge of God 
 belongs to the peculiar science of theism and the theocracy.”*' 
 
 As many windows as there are facts let us use when we gaze on 
 religious truths. Your mere theism shuts me -up to one window. 
 You will not let me look on all quarters of the sky. You shut your 
 eyes to the light when you will not recognize what Napoleon saw in 
 history. I want no pulpit that is not built on rendered reasons ; hut I 
 must he allowed to find reasons wherever they exist , ivlietlier the heavens 
 stand or fall. 
 
 Let research, with the four tests of intuition, instinct, experiment, 
 and syllogism, have free course, and I am content. For fear that your 
 conclusions may be a little broader than you like, you will not fail to 
 gaze on the evidence which convinces Neander that the outcome of 
 all looking into the Scriptures and into mere reason must be a belief 
 in a Creator, in a Redeemer, and in a Sanctifier, the three one God, 
 personal, omnipresent, and in conscience tangible. 
 
 When I thus use all my light, I am delivered from materialism; 
 when I thus look on God, I am delivered from pantheism. 
 
 Whoever searches the Bible as a Christian believer will be de¬ 
 livered from some narrowness that belongs to half-educated Christian 
 circles. We are not abreast of our privileges when we live always in 
 Judea. The Scriptures are a map of the universe, and not of Palestine 
 merely. If we are full of their spirit, the wings of philosophy will tire 
 us only by their tardiness and narrow range of flight. 
 
 There are in all ages, and particularly in this age of special studies, 
 the most terrific dangers in a fragmentary view of God. I want 
 this doctrine of the Trinity to save me from fragmentariness of out¬ 
 look upon the Divine Nature. I will not allow myself to see God 
 merely in my intuitions, and shut up the windows of external nature 
 and of history; for thus I may easily drop down into pantheistic 
 individualism, which, with supreme felicity of speech, your brave, 
 broad, and massive Thomas Hill calls egotheism.f 
 
 Neander says that the doctrine of the Trinity implies that of the 
 theocracy, or of a government of God in the universe and in 
 national history. Remember that our fathers came here avowedly 
 to found a theocracy. What did that mean % A state of which 
 natural law and revelation together, shining under, in, and about 
 legislation, should be the masters; a state where what can be known 
 
 * I ir eande>‘, “Hist, of the Chr. Bel. and Ch.,” Torrey’s trans., i. 572. 
 
 + See Hill, ex-president of Harvard University, “The Theology of the Sciences,” 1877. 
 
 103 
 
COMMUNION WITH GOD AS PERSONAL . 
 
 of God by reason, on the one side, and revelation, on the other, 
 should lock its two hands around the neck of all vice, and throttle 
 whatever would throttle the Christian well-being of the poorest or 
 the highest; and should thus build up in history a state fit to 
 be called at once natural and God’s own! When the Jesuits came 
 to the mouth of the St. Lawrence, they intended to found a theocracy. 
 The great dream that lay behind Milton’s, and Cromwell’s, and 
 Hampden’s thoughts and deeds, was that human legislation should 
 be a close copy of the Divine and natural law. At the point of view 
 to which exact research has now brought us we must assert that the 
 fact of the Divine Immanence in matter and mind makes the world 
 and nations a theocracy, and that politics and social life, no less than 
 philosophy, must beware of fragmentary outlooks on the Divine 
 Nature. Richter said : “ He. who was the Holiest among the Mighty, 
 and the Mightiest among the Holy, lias, with his pierced hand, lifted 
 heathenism off its hinges, and turned the dolorous and accursed 
 centuries into new channels, and now governs the ages.” History, 
 the illuminated garment of God! The church, Christ’s temple! 
 Did you ever hear of the former in the name of science, or of the 
 latter in the name of Christianity ? But to your Titanic Richter the 
 two are one. De Tocqueville affirms anxiously that men never so 
 much need to be theocratic as when they are the most democratic. 
 Democracy will save itself by turning into a theocracy, or ruin itself 
 by not doing so. 
 
 Transfigure society with Richter’s thought. Saturate the centuries 
 with the certainty of the Divine Personal Immanence in matter and 
 mind. Do this, and in the name of Science itself the labouring ages 
 will slowly learn not merely admiration, but adoration, of one God 
 incontrovertibly known in external nature, history, and conscience 
 as Creator, as Redeemer, as Sanctifier. When they touch the hem 
 of the garment of a Personal God thus apprehended, and never till 
 then, will they be healed of the measureless evils arising from 
 fragmentariness of outlook upon the Divine Nature. Let the fore¬ 
 head of Science, in the name of Christianity, bow down upon the 
 moral law, as the beloved disciple did upon our Lord’s bosom. Let 
 Richter lead, and a time will come when all clear thought, all 
 political action, all individual growth will call out: “ Glory be to 
 God revealed in external nature ; Glory be to God revealed in Christ 
 and the Church; Glory be to God revealed in conscience.” To this 
 secular voice the Church will answer, in words which have already 
 led eighteen centuries, and Science will add at last her momentous 
 acclaim : “ Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy 
 Ghost; as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world 
 without end.” 
 
 101 
 
TEE TRINITY A PRACTICAL TRUTH. 
 
 By the Rev. JOSEPH COOK. 
 
 Chables Kingsley, poet and philanthropist, friend of the working- 
 man, and chaplain to the Queen of the British Empire, a stalwart and 
 intense soul, not easily cheated, wrote from St. Leonard’s, in 1857:— 
 
 “ My heart demands the Trinity as much as my reason. I want to be sure that 
 God cares for us, that God is our Father, that God has interfered, stooped, sacrificed 
 himself for us. 1 do not merely want to love Christ— a Christ, some creation or 
 . emanation of God’s, whose will and character, for aught I know, may be different 
 from God’s. I want to love and honour the abysmal God himself, and none other 
 will satisfy me. No puzzling texts shall rob me of this rest for my heart, that 
 Christ is the exact counterpart of him in whom we live and move and have our 
 being. I say, boldly, if the doctrine of the Trinity be not in the Bible, it ought to 
 be, for the whole spiritual nature of man cries out for it. Have you read Maurice’s 
 essay on the Trinity, in his theological essays addressed to Unitarians ?* If not, you 
 must read it.”f 
 
 In 1865 Kingsley wrote to Maurice :— 
 
 “ As to the Trinity, I do understand you. You first taught me that the doctrine 
 was a live thing, and not a mere formula to be swallowed by the undigesting 
 reason ; and from the time that I learnt from you that a Father meant a real Father, 
 a Son a real Son, a Holy Spirit a real Spirit, who was really good and holy, I have 
 been able to draw all sorts of practical lessons from it in the pulpit , and ground all 
 my morality and a great deal of my natural philosophy upon it } and shall do so morel % 
 
 In 1875 Charles Kingsley, having bidden adieu to Westminster 
 Abbey and Windsor Castle, lay dying; and, with the breath of eternity 
 on his cheeks, the central thought of this modern man was that ‘ i only 
 in faith and love to the Incarnate God our Saviour can the cleverest, 
 as well as the simplest, find the peace of God which passes understand¬ 
 ing.” “ In this faith,” says his wife, “he had lived; and as he had 
 lived, so he died—humble, confident, unbewildered.” In the night 
 he was heard murmuring: “No more fighting; no more fighting.” 
 Then followed intense, earnest prayers, which were his habit when 
 alone. His warfare was accomplished ; he had fought the good fight; 
 and on one of his last nights on earth his daughter heard him exclaim: 
 “How beautiful God is!” The last morning, at five o’clock, just 
 after his eldest daughter and his physician, who had sat up all night, 
 had left him, and he thought himself alone, he was heard, in a clear 
 yoice, repeating the words of the Burial Service: “ Thou knowest, 0 Lord, 
 
 * “ Theological EssaysJ’pp. 410—441.” 
 
 t Charles Kingsley, “ Letters and Memories of his Life,” 1877. 
 
 105 
 
 $ Ibid, p. 357. 
 
TEE TRINITY A PRACTICAL TRUTH. 
 
 the secrets of our hearts; shut not thy merciful ears to our prayer; but 
 spare us, 0 Lord most holy, 0 God most mighty, O holy merciful 
 Saviour, thou most worthy Judge Eternal, suffer us not, at our last 
 hour, for any pains of death, to fall from thee.” He turned on his 
 side after this, and never spoke again.*' 
 
 This modern martyr, who passed hence at the age of fifty-five, died 
 as martyrs have died ever since the apostolic age; and I ask you to 
 gaze with proper awe upon this recently unveiled holy of holies of a 
 brave, late, and adequately cultured life, as a vivid type of what has 
 been happening in the world for eighteen centuries. If you have historic 
 sense, or any other kind of sense, you will not be easily persuaded 
 that teaching which has survived the buffetings of eighteen hundred 
 years, and has been to such crowned multitudes of the acutest and 
 saintliest of the race a source of strength in life and of peace in death, 
 has behind it only philosophical speculation, metaphysical nicety, cold 
 analysis, scholarly precision, without practical application. I affirm 
 in the name of all accredited history : 
 
 1. That the doctrine of the Trinity has always been held by Ortho¬ 
 doxy for its practical value. 
 
 2. That it was the doctrine of the Trinity which excluded from 
 power in human cultured beliefs the thought of God as fate, and 
 brought in the organizing and redemptive idea of God’s fatherhood, 
 and especially of the possibility of the communion of men with God 
 as personal. 
 
 The scholarship of the Eoman Empire shook off its belief in the 
 fatalism of Paganism by learning the doctrine of the Trinity. Incon- 
 trovertibly, the divine aroma of communion with God as personal was 
 breathed into history from the lips of that philosophy which speaks of 
 God under a Triune name. Historically, this teaching has borne these 
 fruits; and the law of the survival of the fittest makes me, for one, 
 reverent toward a proposition which, in so many ages, in so many moods 
 of the world’s culture, in such different circumstances of individual 
 growth, has exhibited a power ever fresh, and has yet been the same, 
 from the time when the apostolic benediction was pronounced in that 
 Triune Name, to the last anthem that rolled around the world in that same 
 Name.f With the goodly company of the prophets and the apostles; with 
 the martyrs of the earliest Christian ages ; with the earlier and the later 
 Fathers; with the strong scholars who, differing on much else, are on this 
 truth essentially and persistently at one; with the Continental and English 
 reformers, and the Anglican and Puritan and American divines ; with 
 
 * Charles Kingsley, “Letters and Memories of his Life,” 1877, pp. 481, 482. 
 
 + See Huntington, Archbishop, “Christian Believing and Living,” pp. 359—361. 
 
 106 
 
THE TRINITY A TRAC TICAL TRUTH. 
 
 Athanasius and Tholuck; with Eenelon and Knox; with Augustine 
 and Anselm; with Calvin and Wesley ; with Luther and Bossuet; 
 with Bull and Baxter, Horsley and Howe, Pearson, Hewman, Pascal, 
 Cudworth, Wolf, Butler, Tauler, and Hopkins, Waterland, Edwards, 
 Sherlock, and Dwight, Park and Heander; with Hice, Trent, Augs¬ 
 burg, Westminster, Edinburg, Leipzig, Berlin, Princeton, Kew Haven, 
 and Andover, shall not Boston say, “ Let the anthem roll on”? 
 
 It is amazing to me that any one can have considered my definition 
 of the Trinity as Unitarian. A man whom I honour, and whose can¬ 
 dour every one honours, is reported to have said publicly that the view 
 presented here two weeks ago is “almost identical” with his own, 
 and is such a view as “any Unitarian may readily receive.”*' I am 
 very glad if it is; but, as I understand Mr. Clarke’s view, the one 
 presented here and his differ by celestial diameters. What is the 
 definition which this lectureship has presented ? 
 
 1. The Eather, Son, and Holy Ghost are one God. 
 
 2. Each has a peculiarity incommunicable to the others. 
 
 3. Neither is God without the others. 
 
 4. Each with the others is God. 
 
 On the street I met, a few days ago, a man whom I suppose to be 
 the best scholar in America in early ecclesiastical history. It is not 
 permitted to me to mention his name; but he has a public position that 
 commands respect from all scholars. Before I had introduced the topic 
 at all, he said to me, with much emphasis: “I have documentary 
 evidence in my possession to prove that your doctrine of the Trinity 
 is the view held in the first four centuries.” I also met a theologian 
 whose knowledge of the relations of Christian truth to philosophy seems 
 to me to be unequalled in this country ; and he said to me, without 
 any introduction of the topic on my part: “ That definition of the 
 Trinity which you have given will stand.” He said this twice or 
 thrice over ; and, in order to be sure that he had really paid attention 
 enough to this poor lectureship to know what the definition was, I 
 recited the four propositions. And again he said, in effect: “The 
 storm in the past has been borne by that definition, or its equivalent; 
 and you will find that the storm of the future will be.” 
 
 It is not by authority that I de‘sire to buttress up any definition. It 
 is not a definition that I wish to give , but a life. In the midst of a 
 hushed atmosphere, where an Unseen Power is revealing itself in the 
 conversion of men, this very Temple, filled not long ago with the 
 commercial business soul of Boston, and Massachusetts likely to be 
 
 * Daily Advertiser, March. 26th, “Outline of the Rev. James Freeman Clarke’s Discourse. 
 March 25th. 
 
 107 
 
THE TRINITY A PRACTICAL TRUTH. 
 
 reverent if she sees that the executive talent of this city is on its 
 knees before Almighty God, we want not merely analysis and discus¬ 
 sion. AVe want no breath of the unsanctified north wind which has 
 too often blighted Eastern Massachusetts on holy themes. Let a 
 fascinating devoutness lock hands with a fascinating clearness, or no 
 discussion can transmute truth into life. Let luminousness of thought 
 and the whole clustered growth of the divine emotions twine around 
 our lives, as the vines wreathed themselves around the thyrsis of 
 Mercury of old ; and even then we shall not he ready to study religious 
 science unless we have, as Mercury had, on feet and shoulders, the 
 wings of the Spirit, to enable us to fly whithersoever the Spirit calls. 
 
 There are seven tests which any definition of the Trinity must meet. 
 It must not be modalistic or unintelligible ; it must not be tri-theistic 
 or Unitarian; it must not be a contradiction in terms or unhistorical; 
 and, above all, it must not be unscriptural. 
 
 The definition given here is not modalistic —that is, it does not 
 represent God as simply three manifestations, nor yet as three modes 
 of being, considered merely as modes. How can it be proved that the 
 definition is not modalistic ? 
 
 1. It teaches that each subsistence has a peculiarity incommunicable 
 to the others. 
 
 2. It asserts that each subsistence, with the others, is God, and that 
 neither, without the others, is God. 
 
 3. Therefore, it asserts in strict terms the Deity of our Lord. 
 
 4. What is said of Christ in this definition can be said of no 
 human being. If Socrates had never existed, God would yet be 
 God. 
 
 But if the Holy Spirit had never existed, God would not be God. 
 
 If Christ had never existed, God would not be God. 
 
 If the Eather had never existed, God would not be God. 
 
 So, too, Socrates, with the Eather and Son, or with the Son and 
 Holy Spirit, or with the Eather and Holy Spirit, is not God. 
 
 But Christ, with the other two subsistences, is God. 
 
 Is it thought that, according to this definition, God was in Socrates, 
 and in Moses, and in Plato, and in every great, devout soul; and that, 
 therefore, there is a sense in which divinity or deity may be attributed 
 to these loftiest of the human sort ? I do not see that; for, according 
 to this definition, Socrates, with the Eather and Son, or with the Son 
 and Holy Spirit, or with the Eather and Holy Spirit, is not God. Let 
 us perfectly understand ourselves here, once for all. Is Socrates, with 
 any two subsistences which we suppose exist in the Trinity, God ? If 
 so, you may say that, according to this definition, as God was in 
 Christ, so he was in Socrates. But in the name of clear thought you 
 
 108 
 
THE TRINITY A TRAC TICAL TRUTH. 
 
 will never say that; for Christ with the other two subsistences is here 
 affirmed to be God; and each of the subsistences with the others is 
 God; but no human spirit has such qualities that you may make asser¬ 
 tion of it parallel to these. 
 
 5. "What is affirmed of Christ in the definition can be said of no 
 created being, however high in rank. 
 
 If the highest of the archangels had never existed, God would 
 
 yet be God. 
 
 But if either of the three subsistences in the Trinity had never 
 existed, God would not be God; for, according to this definition, 
 neither subsistence is God without the others. 
 
 So, too, the highest of the archangels, with the Father and Son, or 
 with the Son and Holy Spirit, or with the Father and Holy Spirit, is 
 not God. 
 
 Eut Christ, with the other two subsistences, is God. 
 
 It is, therefore, futile to charge this definition with being modal- 
 istic. There is no clearness of thought on any theme if it be not clear 
 that our Lord, according to this definition, displayed a degree of being 
 that was deific. How can a man who holds that definition be charged 
 with holding that Socrates, and Isaiah, and Plato are to be named in 
 the same list with our Lord ? Is it not unspeakably shocking merely 
 to the historic, to say nothing of the religious, sense of man ? Is it 
 not a silly disloyalty to all the incontrovertible facts which reveal 
 Christ’s present influence in the world to run up, in the light style of 
 literary aesthetics, a list from Socrates to Christ, and so on, until when 
 the vexed catalogue of merely human beings becomes confessedly 
 ather unimportant, you read in the discussions of some that the future 
 is to be drawn on? “We have not yet quite equalled Him who spake 
 as never man spoke. But we shall. Better things are coming! ” How 
 shocking that is to sobriety of all kinds, intellectual and emotional! 
 Historic, to say nothing of religious, devoutness stands aghast at any 
 such contravention of the straightforward reasoning of Napoleon at St. 
 Helena. Admit, however , as the scientific method requires you to do, 
 that Christ was so exceptional a soul that God ivas in him in a 
 thoroughly exceptional manner ; admit, with Rousseau, that he lived a 
 sinless life ; admit , with the most scholarly of modern infidels, that God 
 was in him in such a sense as he never was in any other created being ; 
 admit this, and you have conceded enough to prove that you logically ought 
 to regard this exceptionally holy and wise Being as veracious; and, there - 
 fore, that you, in consistency with your own admissions, ought to accept 
 Christ's testimony concerning himself. Tahe that, as re-enforced by the 
 testimony of the ages to his work in the world, and perhaps you ivill not 
 be at a loss for reasons for changing your word “ divinity ” into “deity," 
 
 109 
 
THE TRINITY A PRACTICAL TRUTH. 
 
 if you are logical. Liebnitz said that those who deny the deity of om 
 Lord and yet pray to him may be good men, but that surely they are 
 not good logicians. 
 
 The definition is not unintelligible, for the incommunicable peculia¬ 
 rity is defined by several very distinct traits. 
 
 Ages of close discussion lie behind the assertions I am making, and 
 you will not think it the temerity of extemporaneous speech for me 
 to recite these propositions rapidly. The ages of discussion make it 
 necessary that I should be cautious ; they make it unnecessary that I 
 should be prolix. 
 
 1. The peculiarity of each subsistence is incommunicable. 
 
 2. It is such that neither subsistence, taken alone, wholly without 
 the other subsistence, is God. 
 
 3. It is such that each subsistence is of the same dignity as the 
 others. 
 
 4. It is such that each subsistence is of the same substance with the 
 others. 
 
 5. It is such that the chief office of one subsistence is best expressed 
 by the words Creator and Father; of a second subsistence, by the 
 words Eedeemer and Son; and of a third, by the words Sanctifier and 
 Comforter. 
 
 6. It is such that each subsistence, with the others, is God. 
 
 Beyond these six traits it is neither necessary nor possible to define 
 
 the subsistences. 
 
 'Will you explain to me everything in connection of mind and 
 matter ? Will you so illustrate the structure of the human spirit 
 that there shall be no mystery hanging over the border-land between 
 the immaterial and the material ? Can you in philosophy obviate all 
 the difficulties arising from the limitations of the human faculties ? 
 Bead your Mansel, your Hamilton, your Kant, and your Lotze on the 
 relations of attribute to substance. Would substance exist aside from 
 attribute ? Has any one a perfectly distinct idea of what substance is 
 wholly apart from its attributes ? Until you get rid of all mystery in 
 the fields of thought purely philosophical, do not say, when we come 
 to realms of existence immeasurably higher above our own than the 
 noon is above the brightness of the transient gleam of the firefly in 
 the summer’s meadow, that we shall not find some things inexplicable 
 to our present capacities. If God were perfectly explicable to a finite 
 being, he would not be God. 
 
 Merely on account of any mystery left in this portion of the 
 doctrine of the Trinity after these six specifications have been made, 
 you cannot reject a truth which stands here to-day guaranteed by 
 eighteen centuries of good fruits. We know some things, although we do 
 
 110 
 
THE TRINI1Y A PRACTICAL TRUTH. 
 
 not know all things, about the character of the subsistences. Nobody 
 •ever pretended to know all the facts about either of them. Moses 
 Stewart used to refuse with emphasis all appeals to him to define the 
 words “ person,” “ distinction,” “ subsistence.” He held the doc¬ 
 trine of the Trinity most emphatically; but beyond the truth now 
 enumerated, it is un-scriptural, it is clearly unphilosophical, for a man 
 to pretend to be wise above the range of the human faculties. 
 
 What is the difference between a mystery and a contradiction ? A 
 mystery is something of which we know that it is, although we do not 
 know/wu# it is. A self-contradiction is the inconsistency of a propo¬ 
 sition with itself or with its own implications. Now, if there is in 
 the Trinity a self-contradiction, we must throw its propositions over¬ 
 board, in the name of learning and of clear thought. But if there be 
 in it only a mystery, that maybe no objection, for a mystery is merely 
 something of which we know that it is, although we do not know how 
 it is. I know that the grass grows, I do not know hoio it grows. I 
 I know that my will lifts my arm, I do not know how it does this. 
 There is mystery in each of these cases, but the mystery does not 
 hinder my believing the facts, although I do not know how they are 
 to be explained. Mystery belongs to physical almost more than to 
 religious truth. We should expect it to appear oftener in religious 
 science than in physical, as the topics of the former are incalculably 
 vaster and more complex than those of the latter; and yet it is a 
 question whether your Tyndalls and your Huxleys do not call on you 
 to believe more mysteries than your Butlers, your Edwardses, and 
 your Channings. 
 
 The definition is not tri-theistic , for 
 
 1. It asserts that the Eather, Son, and Holy Ghost are one, and only 
 one, God. 
 
 2. It denies that either, taken wholly without the others, is God. 
 
 Therefore, according to this definition, there are not three Gods. 
 
 This definition does not in terms assert, but it does imply, that there 
 are not in God three wills, three sets of affections, three consciences, 
 three intellects. According to the Scriptures, are there not in God 
 such subsistences that when it is said that the Eather sends the Son, 
 and that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Eather and the Son, somt 
 portion of the action involved in these events may not he common to all 
 the three subsistences? I think so. If you will be careful in your 
 phraseology, and not say that there are literally three wills, three 
 sets of affections, three intellects—if you will simply say some portion 
 of the action involved in the sending of the Son, or in the shedding 
 forth of the Holy Spirit, may not be common to all the three sub¬ 
 sistences, you will be asserting only what is affirmed in the second 
 
 111 
 
THE TRINITY A PRACTICAL TRUTH. 
 
 proposition of this definition—namely, that each subsistence has a 
 peculiarity incommunicable to the others. 
 
 But I will resist, in the name of the mass of scholarship for the last 
 one thousand five hundred years, the proposition that there are in God 
 three persons, in a strict, colloquial, literal, modern, English, American, 
 Boston sense. Why do I resist that ? Because the word person, in 
 our colloquial speech, implies a species. What is a species ? When 
 you say a man is a person, you imply that he belongs to a class of 
 beings called men. If you say there are three persons in God, and 
 mean by that word just what you mean by it on the street and in the 
 parlour, you assume that these persons are individuals in a species; 
 and my reply is that there is no species of gods outside of pantheism or 
 polytheism. There is nothing of the sort known to either Scriptural 
 or scientific truth. jSTo doubt Orthodoxy has often been careless in 
 her phrases. Under the rubric of idle words many a stupid and many 
 an incautious expression used in religious and philosophical discussion 
 will, no doubt, be judged at the last day. But it is not stupidity, it 
 is not incautiousness, which causes Orthodoxy to use the word “per¬ 
 son” sometimes. She is always speaking in Latin when she uses 
 that word intelligently. She employs it as a technical term, because 
 it has been in the creeds of the church one thousand five hundred 
 years. Adopted in the days of the poverty of the Latin language, it 
 has come down to the days of the richness of the English tongue. 
 Calvin himself said he would be willing that the word person should 
 be dropped for ever out of the discussions of the doctrine of the 
 Trinity, if only the truth could be retained that there are in God 
 three distinctions, each with a peculiarity of a property incommunic¬ 
 able to the others, and each, with the others, God. Eor three hundred 
 years the definition I have been putting before you, or its equivalent, 
 has been generally regarded as the standard. But if by persons you 
 understand individuals, you must admit that you cannot make three 
 persons—John, William, and James—one. There is a sense in which 
 each individual which we describe by the word person, in its ordinary 
 sense, is incommunicable, as a whole, to any other individual. This 
 idea of personality, as the word is understood on the street and in the 
 parlour, does not belong to the idea of the Trinity. Scholarship has 
 always taught that God is one, and has never taught that William, 
 and John, and James are one. God is one essence or substance. 
 Three persons, in the usual sense of the word, are not of one sub¬ 
 stance. It is the immemorial teaching of religious science that we 
 must not divide the substance of God; and we do this whenever we 
 say that there are in God three persons in the literal, modern, collo¬ 
 quial sense of that word. When the popular is substituted for the 
 
 112 
 
TIIE TRINITY A PRACTICAL TRUTH. 
 
 technical meaning’ of this term, and men who have little time for 
 thought on the subject are confused and led to suppose that you are 
 teaching self-contradictions, or that God is three and that he is only 
 one; and that he is one in the same sense in which he is three ; why, 
 here in Eastern Massachusetts, on the battle-fields of IJnitarianism 
 and Trinitarianism, it is high time that this misapprehension should 
 cease to have any excuse for itself in the carelessness of the phrases 
 used in Orthodox quarters. Say three subsistences; three distinc¬ 
 tions, each with a peculiarity incommunicable to the others; but not 
 three wills, three sets of affections, three intellects. Such, however, 
 is the force of the proposition that each subsistence has a peculiarity 
 incommunicable to the others, that I am not unwilling to say that in 
 the whole range of activities involved in God’s connection with men 
 there are influences which are not common to all the subsistences. 
 This is biblical truth; and this truth is in this definition, which, 
 therefore, as scholars will allow me to say, avoids patripassianism, as 
 well as modalism. 
 
 There are four expressions that can be used : “ all the attributes ” ; 
 “ some of the attributes ” ; “ property ” ; “ peculiarity.” Some men 
 say: “All the attributes of one subsistence maybe, for aught we 
 know, different from those belonging to either of the other subsist¬ 
 ences.” Others say: “ Some attributes differ.” Yet others affirm : 
 “Properties differ.” Put the word which has been used here is 
 “peculiarity.” Why clo I adopt that word? Because, if I use 
 “property,” instantly arise all the celebrated forms of speculation 
 about the connection of “ substance ” and “ property,” and you may 
 find yourselves befogged by merely philosophical difficulties. “ All 
 attributes,” “some attributes,” “property,” “peculiarity ”—that last 
 is the word employed in the definition used here, and the word which 
 I believe will bear not only the microscope and the scalpel of philo¬ 
 sophy, but the blaze of the infinity of biblical truth. 
 
 You ask whether there have not been teachers who have held that 
 there are three wills in God? Yes. Have there not been in Yew 
 England intelligent Christians who have worshipped three beings in 
 imagination, although in their thoughts they have asserted that God is 
 one ? I fear there have been, and that there are yet. Is this, 
 however, the standard doctrine of Christianity, or the more general 
 teaching of the Church ? By no means. Is that divided mood which 
 you find among some of looking into Judea for our Lord, and into 
 Heaven for the Eather, and into the space between the earth and 
 Heaven for the vague somewhat which we call the Holy Spirit, 
 biblical ? Not as I read the Scriptures. Are we to regard those as 
 well-educated Christians who, in thoughts of God, are constantly 
 
 113 i 
 
THE TRINITY A PRACTICAL TRUTH 
 
 thinking of our Lord as if he were now ia Gethsemane, or on the 
 Mount of Olives, or walking on the shore of Galilee; and of the 
 Lather as among the constellations; and of the Holy Spirit as shed 
 down on us from the infinite spaces—three wills, three intellects, 
 three sets of affections ? You may regard such Christians tenderly ; 
 but, for one, I regard them tenderly enough to wish they might he 
 both more biblical and more scientific. It is not pleasant to me to 
 dwell on topics that require us to walk over embers hardly cold; but 
 I belong to a generation that had nothing to do with the discussions 
 that divided God’s house in Eastern Massachusetts. Has not the time 
 come for us to attend to each other’s definitions, and not to each 
 other’s defamations ? Seriousness in speech or print usually spends its 
 time more profitably than in gymnastic boxing. Shall we not, in the 
 transfigured mood of Boston at this hour, call ourselves into Christ’s 
 presence, as he was visible to Stephen, and to Paul, and to John, not 
 on the Mount of Olives, not on the shore of Galilee, but at the right 
 hand of the Lather ? Let us grasp the transfiguring biblical certainty 
 that the influences of the Holy Spirit are Christ’s continued life. 
 You will not understand me to deny for an instant that our Lord’s 
 earthly life and sufferings are a better revelation to us of God’s moral 
 attributes than external nature is or can be. Christ is the rainbow, or 
 unravelled light, and the Lather is the white light; and we must look 
 on the seven colours , if we would know what is always in the white beam. 
 Thus our Lord’s life and sufferings on earth are to be constantly before 
 as as a picture of the Divine Nature. But the influences of the Holy 
 Spirit are a present Christ; and God is not three, but one. Our Lord 
 himself is now in Heaven and here ; and, though we look to Judea for 
 one part of his life, we must beware how we look there, as Stephen 
 and Paul did not, for him. Though the rainbow has ceased to appear, 
 it has not ceased to exist. It has been taken back into the bosom of 
 the general radiance, and yet falls on the earth. Wherever zohite light 
 falls, the rainbow falls potentially; and the luminousness, the colour, and 
 the heat—Lather, Son, and Holy Spirit, three subsistences in one 
 substance—all enswathe us here and now, and make the present hour 
 sacred as the beginning of days, for there is but one God, who was ; 
 and island is to come. 
 
 Mr. Clarke is reported as saying that “If God is seen and shown in 
 Christ as he is seen and shown in Nature, there is no reason for con¬ 
 sidering one as more divine than the other. God is in Christ, and we 
 may worship God as shown to us in Christ. But so is God also in 
 Nature, and we may worship God as shown to us in Nature. God is 
 in Christ and God is in Natnre ; but that does not make Nature or 
 Christ God, but only manifestations of him.’ , 
 
 114 
 
THE TRINITY A PRACTICAL TRUTH. 
 
 Here are two meanings in the one word Nature, a term that has 
 behind it the most mischievous ambiguity, and is the greatest fog 
 in the whole range of philosophical discussion. By Nature what do you 
 mean ? The sun and the moon ? Of course we do not worship these. 
 We are not Persians. But if by Nature you mean that Power of In¬ 
 telligence and Choice which is behind all natural law, we do worship 
 the God revealed by the Oldest Testament, or the nature of things. 
 But this we understand to be the very God revealed by the New 
 Testament and the Newest. “ All things were made by Him, and 
 without Him was nothing made that is made.” “ He is before all 
 things, and by Him all things consist.” These are words written 
 rather earlier than the year 325, and you say* that there was no 
 doctrine of the Trinity till after this date. 
 
 Is it affirmed that we must worship God in conscience ? "What do 
 you mean by conscience ? The human part of the intuitive moral 
 sense, or that divine Somewhat or Someone who is revealed by the 
 moral law, and is in us, but not of ns ? If you mean the latter, we 
 do, in the name of every text in the Oldest and the Old, the Newest 
 and the New Testament, worship it as “ the light that lighteth every 
 man that cometh into the world.” But of that light we read that in 
 the beginning it was with God and was God. 
 
 It is reported that I am called a Buddhist, because I set natural 
 law above God. What is natural law? The method of action of 
 God’s will. Can God’s will be above God’s will? Even your Maurice 
 says that the Greek from the Thessalian Hill heard the voice of God, 
 but mistook it for that of Eate. 
 
 The old polytheists made necessity the highest God. If you please, 
 fixed law is, from one point of view, the highest force in the universe; 
 and it becomes us, as stern cultivators of science, to reverence this 
 quite measurelessly-important Pact. But what the old Greek at Delphi 
 regarded as fate we have come to regard as the unchanging, because 
 perfectly holy and wise choice of Almighty God. It must be that an 
 Infinite Being knows what the one best way is in which to manage the 
 universe, and that he will choose and adhere to that way. There can 
 be but one best way to manage the universe—can there ? If that 
 self-evident truth is not a part of the nature of things, what is ? This 
 Oldest Testament is fearfully orthodox. We know that there can be 
 but one best way, for best is a superlative word, and admits no com¬ 
 parison ; and that one best way Omnipotence and Omniscience will 
 choose and adhere to. Therefore, as I said before, and repeat now 
 because I was misunderstood, in the eternities and infinities governep 
 by a Perfect Will there will appear to be fate; but there will be there 
 
 * See Clarke, “ Orthodoxy, 1 ” p. 503. 
 
 115 
 
THE TRINITY A PRACTICAL TRUTH. 
 
 in reality only the completely wise and holy and, therefore, unchanging 
 choice of Almighty God. Your Oldest Testament says the nature of 
 things is without variableness or shadow of turning. But when your 
 Yew and your Newest Testament speak of the Bather of Lights, from 
 whom cometh down every good and perfect gift, they affirm also that 
 although he is Father, he is without variableness or shadow of turning. 
 We worship one God; but a God free and above all things—except 
 what ? The requirements of his own perfections. Theodore Parker 
 used to stand on a platform not five hundred feet from this and say, 
 God cannot make two and two one thousand. Such is God that he 
 cannot choose to do what ought not to be done. He cannot deny 
 himself. A moral impossibility inheres in the nature of a perfect 
 being. The cans and cannots of all science spring out of the impossi¬ 
 bilities existing in a perfect nature. 
 
 Mr. Clarke says that “ Christianity teaches not the sovereignty of 
 the nature of things, but the sovereignty of divine love.’ 5 And another 
 liberal critic has said that “ If God be such a Being as the Yew Testa¬ 
 ment represents him to be, he will make short work of the nature of 
 things.” What astounding confusion of thought is this, and what 
 misunderstanding of the Oldest Testament and the Old, the Newest 
 and the Yew ! God make short work of the nature of things ! What 
 is the nature of things ? By definition it is the total outcome of the 
 divine perfections. God make short work of his own infinite justice 
 and holiness ; his own intellectual excellence ; and of all that is im¬ 
 plied in the infinitude of the Divine Nature ! What we call the nature 
 of things is but another name for all the requirements of the Divine 
 free choice. And is an infinitely perfect being to make short work 
 of that ? God himself making short work with the nature of things ! 
 God a suicide ! These phrases mean the same thing. It will be of 
 importance for you and for me to have no war with the nature of 
 things until the dav when God ceases to be God. 
 
 The definition is in no sense Unitarian , for 
 
 1. It asserts the Deitv of our Lord. There is no form of TJnitarianism 
 that asserts this. 
 
 2. We have seen that what is said of Christ in the definition can be 
 said of no created being'. 
 
 It is not a contradiction in terms, for it does not assert that God is 
 one in the same sense in which he is three, or three in the same sense 
 in which he is one. 
 
 It is not unhistorical, for it presents a view of the Trinity con¬ 
 sistent with all the greatest symbols in use in the Church for fifteen 
 hundred years. 
 
 It is not unscriptural. 
 
 116 
 
TEE TRINITY A PRACTICAL TRUTE. 
 
 In the celebrated discussions between Unitarianism and Trini- 
 tarianism in Eastern Massachusetts the proof-texts of the Deity of our 
 Lord adduced by Moses Stuart in his letters to Channing have never 
 been answered. Andrews Norton made many philosophical objections 
 to the Trinity, which do not apply at all to the best definition of it- 
 No one has ever shown that the scriptural passages Moses Stuart 
 adduced do not have the meaning he attributed to them.* 1 
 
 We are assured by the scientific method that in no page of that 
 portion of the volume of the universe which is open to us is there any 
 light we can spare. Science and practical life alike require that we 
 should be loyal to all the facts within our view. It is incontrovertible 
 that, when we look into all our light, a Trinity is within view. Ex¬ 
 ternal Nature, History, and Conscience reveal God as Creator, Re¬ 
 deemer, Sanctifier, and yet as one. But Science and Scripture affirm 
 that there is but one God; and, contemplated more closely, as we have 
 seen, a Trinity is found to be the Trinity. Therefore, we open all the 
 windows of the outer and inner azure by the truth of the Trinity of 
 the Divine Nature. This is the historic force which changed the sky 
 of brass and iron which bent above the Thessalian Hill into soft azure, 
 all soul, and not sky. The inaccessible Heaven which stood above 
 Olympus comes near now and enswathes all the round world in its 
 bosom. But some would build negations of fact above our heads as 
 an obstructing dome, and confine us to a fragmentary view of the 
 Divine Nature. There are two kinds of TJuitarianism. One looks 
 through but a single window vividly, and sees from it well only God 
 the Eather. In this view there is a simplicity which is pleasing to 
 many. For a time it may be a devout view, especially in modern days, 
 with full Christianity behind them and pouring through them, and in 
 these yet early New England years, with Plymouth Rock and all the 
 generations since our fathers landed, to give moods of devoutness to 
 the generation now passing off the stage. There are wants of life, 
 however, which no one quarter of the sky, taken alone, can meet. 
 History teaches that in the growth of the flowers which blossom 
 against that one window there is apt to be, in the third or fourth 
 generation, a want of vigour, and a subtle loss of plainly celestial 
 aromas. But there is another and wider belief in the Divine Unity, a 
 window that has the sun all the day. Sweep off the whole dome, and 
 you open God’s window—behold Eather, Son, and Holy Ghost, as one 
 undivided Heaven, of equal height at every point of its pulsating, 
 fathomless azure, whose light, and colour, and heat, although three 
 subsistences, are one substance, and you have God’s Unitarianism. 
 
 See Stuart, Professor, ‘‘Letters to Charming.” 
 
 117 
 
THE TRINITY TEE MARTYR'S FAITH. 
 
 By the Rev. JOSEPH COOK. 
 
 Preliminary Address. 
 
 In the city of Edinburgh the American evangelists who are now 
 in Boston never had a hall that would seat over one thousand 
 five hundred. They reached the Scottish metropolis November 
 22nd, 1873, and left it January 21st, 1874. They have now been 
 here as long as they were in Edinburgh. It will always be incontro¬ 
 vertible that a structure which holds from six thousand to seven 
 thousand people has been opened in Boston for religious audi¬ 
 ences, and that week after week, ior two months, on every fair 
 day and often twice or thrice a day, when an undiluted Christianity 
 has been proclaimed there, this Boston building has been filled to 
 copious overflowing. What other cause would have filled it as often and 
 as long ? This is the large question which Edinburgh, and London, 
 Chicago, and San Erancisco will ask. As a help to an interior view 
 of Massachusetts and its capital, it is not improper for me to state, 
 what the evangelists themselves could not, perhaps, with proprietv 
 say publicly, that their opinion is that in Boston the average result of 
 their work has been better than it was in Edinburgh. Both the evan¬ 
 gelists have expressed, with detailed reasons and emphasis, that opinion 
 to me, and neither of them has asked me to state the opinion publiclv. 
 
 Harvard and Yale both strenuously opposed George Whitefield, and 
 now both regret their opposition. Did you notice that the revered 
 president of Boston University was reported as having silenced a group 
 of critics at the obsolescent Chestnut Street Club, the other day, by 
 an invulnerable endorsement of the general character of the religious 
 work now being performed in this city ? This endorsement came from 
 a scholar of whom it can be said, as I think it cannot be of any other 
 New England president of a college, that before he finished his yet 
 recent German studies he had written in German an elaborate work on 
 religious science, abreast of the latest thought. Boston University, 
 led by this incomparable scholar of the freshest and severest German 
 training, is as cordial toward the American evangelists as the great 
 University of Edinburgh was. "When Phillips Brooks appears in the 
 Tabernacle, the culture of Boston and the students of Harvard are 
 there. Of course, Harvard University differs from Edinburgh Uni¬ 
 versity in its religious attitude; and for that fact there are reasons, 
 prolonged, historic, adequate, but, thank God! of waning force. 
 When James VI. was sixteen years of age, in 1582, Edinburgh Uni¬ 
 versity was founded; and it was fed from the Scottish Universities of 
 St. Andrews and Glasgow, which began their stalwart career before 
 America was discovered. University life in Scotland had venerable¬ 
 ness when Harvard was yet in the gristle. It has had a longer time 
 than Harvard in which to judge creeds by the law of the survival of 
 the fittest. It is wiser, therefore; but Harvard one day will be wiser 
 under the law. 
 
 Are there any points of superiority in this religious awakening to 
 
 118 
 
THE TRINITY THE MARTYR'S FAITH. 
 
 that which occurred in Boston in the days of White field ? It must he 
 admitted that there are some points of inferiority; but are there any 
 of superiority ? We are a larger and more heterogeneous community 
 now than we were then. We are fuller of commercial activity ; our 
 heads are in newspapers and ledgers, and not, as the heads and hearts 
 of the early New England fathers were, in the Holy Scriptures. 
 Nevertheless, it was a temporarily demoralized community which 
 Whitefield and Edwards addressed. A practical union of Church and 
 State had so secularized religious society that it had sunk further 
 away from scriptural and scientific ideals than the present religious 
 society of New England has done. We all hold now that the ministry 
 ought to be made up of converted men, and that no one should become 
 a member of the Church unless he can give credible evidence of 
 having entered upon a religious life. But in Whitefield’s day it was 
 necessary for him to insist upon what is now a commonplace truth— 
 that conversion should precede entrance upon the ministry and 
 church-membership. In Edwards’ day many circles of the New 
 England population had forgotten the necessity of the new birth, or 
 did not believe that it is an ascertainable change; and so there was a 
 hush in the revival when Whitefield was here—a sense of sin, which 
 ought to exist now, but which probably does not for a great variety 
 of reasons, not all of them to be classed as proofs of the shallowness 
 of the present effort. Would that we had such loyalty to the scientific 
 method as to have an adequate sense of our dissonance with the nature 
 of things ! It were good for us and for America if we had in Boston 
 to-day just that far-penetrating gaze which filled the eyes of New 
 England one hundred years ago, as Whitefield and Edwards turned 
 our fathers’ countenances toward the Unseen Holy. 
 
 In one particular, however, this revival certainly surpasses that 
 under Whitefield in this city in 1740—namely, in the extent to which 
 types have been consecrated to the work of sending religious truths 
 abroad through the newspaper press. All the leading and all the 
 
 respectable newspapers of Boston have favoured the revival. 
 
 It is easier for the platform than for the press to speak for to-morrow 
 against the dissent of to-day. But the best part of our press not only 
 mirrors, but leads public sentiment, and speaks for to-morrow against 
 the rivalry of the poorer part of both platform and press, which speak 
 only for to-day. Encourage all speakers for to-morrow. 
 
 In the next place, it deserves to be mentioned that religious visita¬ 
 tion from house to house, and especially among the perishing and 
 degraded, is now going forward in a hopefully thorough manner in 
 Boston. I am able to assure you that two thousand persons are now 
 devoting a large part of their time in this city to religious visitation 
 among the poor. In no other population has there been a more effec¬ 
 tive arrangement for visitation than here. God be thanked that every 
 lane is to be seen, and that superfluity and squalor are to look into 
 each other’s eyes! Of one hundred and ten evangelical churches in 
 this city, ninety have already signified their intention to co-operate in 
 this work. Each pastor of these ninety has appointed gentlemen to 
 oversee the work undertaken by his particular church. Is there any 
 
 119 
 
TEE TRINITY TEE MARTYR'S FAITE. 
 
 one shallow enough to sneer at such proceedings ? You will sneer, then, 
 at the best executive talent of Boston. There are seventy thousand 
 families within the limits of Boston, ami there have been workers 
 appointed to cover sixty-five thousand of these families. In Boston 
 I include Charlestown, East Boston, South Boston, Dorchester, Rox- 
 bury, and Brighton. We are to look on this work as performed by 
 picked men and women. There is no quarter of this city so degraded 
 by unreportable vice that it is not being visited by women, lineal 
 descendants, no doubt, of those whom Tacitus says our German fore¬ 
 fathers honoured as recipients of special illumination from Heaven. 
 The saloons are being visited, and the report now coming in is that 
 the visitors are kindly received, and you will find every now and then 
 a visitor saying : “ There are in my district fifteen cases of interest, 
 or persons seriously inquiring how they can get rid of vice and enter 
 upon a manly or womanly life ; and I am to follow these cases up.” 
 Remember that this work of visitation is intended not merely for those 
 who are outside of the circle of glad loyalty to religious truth, but 
 for those who are nominally inside of that circle and are yet inefficient. 
 Nothing quickens a man like trying to quicken another. If there is 
 one measure in which our American evangelist has shown his general¬ 
 ship more effectively than anywhere else, it is in setting men to work, 
 and in so setting them to work as to set them on fire. 
 
 But what are we to say of the prayer-meetings among business men, 
 which have not yet attained their height, and yet are already visible 
 at a distance ? It is my privilege and joy to be a flying scout in New 
 England. One morning, I woke up to the sound of the swollen and 
 impetuous Androscoggin, and in the course of the day passed through 
 Portland, and Portsmouth, and Newbury port, and Salem, and Boston, 
 and "Worcester, and Springfield, to Hartford; and all along I had 
 evidence, by conversation, and by looking at the local papers, that 
 these business men’s meetings are visible on the Androscoggin and 
 on the Connecticut. You have in this Temple a very interesting 
 meeting, which was never matched for weight in Edinburgh. There 
 are crowded prayer-meetings at high noon for men engaged in the 
 dry goods business, for men in the furniture trade, for men in the 
 market, for men in the fish trade, for newspaper men, for all classes, 
 indeed, of our throbbing, tumultuous, breathless, business commu¬ 
 nity. This, if you will notice the fact, is Boston. When I stated 
 a few weeks ago that you would see Boston visited as you had seen 
 other cities visited, you did not receive the affirmation with a smile of 
 incredulity, but the public did. That poor prophecy has been fulfilled, 
 and we have a month more for work. 
 
 If you please, the times are serious, and light sneers will do 
 no good nov r , and ought not to be noticed by me except in pity. It 
 was my fortune professionally to walk down to a church near the 
 Tabernacle to give an Easter discourse. As I passed up the street, I 
 met a crowd of people emerging from, I did not at first think where, 
 until I remembered that the Tabernacle service had just closed. They 
 covered acres, and came on in thousands, like the crowds of a gala day. 
 I noticed their faces; for the best test of what has been done in a reli- 
 
 120 
 
THE TRINITY THE MARTYR'S FAITH. 
 
 gious address, in any assembly, is to study the countenances of the 
 audience as it disperses. If you see a softened, an ennobled, a “ solar 
 look,” to use one of the phrases of Bronson Alcott, one may be sure that 
 religious truth has done good. I saw the solar look yesterday on the 
 street in hundreds and thousands of faces. I saw it sometimes in the 
 gaze of shop-girls, perhaps. 
 
 Yes ; but high culture in Boston does not care much for shop-girls. 
 Well, it is time it should. There is a low-bred, loaferish liberalism 
 uttering itself occasionally in sneers because the poor have the Gospel 
 preached to them. That sneer has been heard ever since the days of 
 Celsus and the games in the old Coliseum, and it has a peculiarly 
 reptilian ring. There are many kinds of liberalism. Christian 
 liberalism I honour ; literary and aesthetic liberalism is to be spoken 
 of with respect in most cases ; but below what I have called a limp 
 and lavender and unscientific liberalism there is a low-bred and 
 loaferish liberalism. This, in Boston, has impudence, but no scholar¬ 
 ship ; rattles, but no fangs. In the great multitude the solar look is 
 the best prophecy that can be had for the American future. It is a 
 radiance that is like the rising of the sun to any man who is anxious 
 about what is to come in America. 
 
 After noticing that look, and thanking God for it, I walked on, and 
 happened to pass a lonely Boston corner, where the Paine Hall and 
 the Parker Memorial Hall stand near each other —“par nolile 
 frcitrum .” On a bulletin on the Paine Hall, the street in front of 
 which looked deserted, I read: “Children’s Progressive Lyceum 
 Entertainment this evening.” “ The Origin and Amusements of the 
 Orthodox Hell.” “ Twenty-ninth Anniversary of Modern Spirit¬ 
 ualism, April 1st.” Passing by the Parker Memorial Hall, where, 
 no doubt, words of good sense have been uttered occasionally, I found 
 in the window this statement: “To-night, a Lecture on the Arctic 
 Legions, with a Stereopticon and Seventy Views.” 
 
 All over the world, the equivalent of the scene I saw on that 
 Easter morn may be looked upon almost everywhere within the whole 
 domain of Christendom. Infidelity in Germany is no stronger than 
 it is in Boston. Out of the thirty universities of that most learned 
 land of the globe, only one is called rationalistic to-day. 
 
 When the sun stands above Bunker Hill at noon it has just set on 
 the Parthenon, and is rising on the volcanoes of the Sandwich 
 Isles. As Easter day passed about the globe, the contrasted scenes 
 which the sun saw here—a multitude fed with God’s Word, and a few 
 erratics striving to solace themselves without God—were not unlike the 
 scenes which the resplendent orb looked down upon in the whole range 
 of civilization. In two hundred languages of the world the Scriptures 
 were read yesterday; in two hundred languages of the world hymns 
 were lifted to the Triune ISTame yesterday; in two hundred languages 
 of the world the Gospel was preached to the poor yesterday. 
 
 What is our impecunious scepticism doing here ? Has it ever printed 
 a book that has gone into a second edition ? Theodore Parker’s works 
 never went into many editions. I do not know of a single infidel book 
 over a hundred years old that has not been put on the upper neglected 
 
 121 
 
TEE TRINITY TEE MARTYR'S EAITE. 
 
 shelf by scholars. Boston must compare her achievements with those 
 of cities outside of America, and take her chances under the butfetings 
 of time. Where is there in Boston anything in the shape of scepticism 
 that will bear the microscope ? Bor one, I solemnly aver that I do 
 not know where, and I have nothing else to do but search. Theodore 
 Parker is the best sceptic you ever had; but to me he is honey-combed 
 through and through with disloyalty to the very nature of things— 
 his supreme authority. It was asserted not long ago, in an obscure 
 sceptical newspaper here, that Parker’s works ought to be forced into 
 notoriety by his friends ; it was admitted that there was not much 
 demand for the books; but it was thought that if now there was an 
 effort made strategically, one might be put upon the market. You have 
 no better books than these, and there has been no marked demand in 
 Boston for these, and the attentive portion of the world knows the 
 facts. Why am I proclaiming this ? Because outside of Boston it 
 is often carelessly supposed that the facts are the reverse, and that this 
 city is represented only by a few people who, deficient in religious 
 activity, and forgetting the law of the survival of the fittest, are dis¬ 
 tinguished far more by audacity than by scholarship, and are members 
 of a long line in history, of which Gfallio stood at the head. 
 
 Let me mention, as a fourth prominent trait in this revival, the 
 great effort made for temperance. We have done more in that parti¬ 
 cular than was done in Boston in Whitefield’s day; for in his time 
 men were not awake on that theme. It is a good sign to see the 
 Church and secular effort join hands. It is a good sign when our 
 American evangelist himself can say, “ I have been a professing 
 Christian twenty-two years, and I have been in Boston and other 
 cities for most of that time, and I never saw such a day as this is. I 
 stand in wonder and amazement at what is being done. It seems as if 
 God were taking this work out of our hands. Prayer-meetings are- 
 springing up in all parts of the city. If you were asked two months 
 ago if these things were possible, you would have said : ‘ Yes, if God 
 will open the windows of Heaven and do them.’” 
 
 Let us admit that we could all wish for greater blessings. Macau¬ 
 lay said concerning literary excellence that we were to measure- 
 success not by absolute, but by relative standards. Matching his own 
 history against the seventh book of Thucydides, he was always 
 humble; but matching his history against current productions, 
 Macaulay felt encouraged. Matching this day in Boston against some 
 things in Whitefield’s day; matching it against the dateless noon of 
 Pentecost; matching it against our opportunities, we are humble; we 
 have no reason for elation ; ours is a day of small things. But 
 compare what has been done here by God’s Word and religious effort 
 with all that has been done since Boston was founded by the opponents 
 of God’s Word, and we are encouraged. 
 
 Our opportunity in the second Hew England is greater than that of 
 our fathers was in the first Hew England. Let us act as the memory 
 of our fathers dictates. Hew England, the Mississippi Yalley, the 
 Pacific coast, Scotland, England, always knows whether or not Boston 
 does her duty. A power not of man is in this hushed air. Who will 
 
 122 
 
THE TRINITY THE MARTYR'S FAITH. 
 
 lock hands with him whom we dare not name, and go forward to 
 triumph in the cause that cares equally for the rich and the poor, and 
 for to-day and to-morrow ? 
 
 The Lecture. 
 
 When the Christian martyr Pionius was asked by his judges,. 
 “ What God dost thou worship ? ” he replied : “ I worship him who 
 made the heavens and who beautified them with stars, and who lias 
 enriched the earth with flowers and trees .’ 1 “ Dost thou mean,” 
 
 asked the magistrates, “Him who was crucified ( ilium dicis qui cruci- 
 fixus estj ? “ Certainly,” replied Pionius, “Him whom the Father 
 
 sent for the salvation of the world.” % 
 
 As Pionius died, so died Blandina and the whole host of those who, 
 in the first three centuries, without knowing anything of the Hicene 
 Creed, held it implicitly, if not explicitly, and proclaimed it in flames 
 and in dungeons, in famine and in nakedness, under the rack and 
 under the sword. 
 
 On the iEgean Sea, under the shadow of the Acropolis, there were 
 undoubtedly sung yesterday, in the Greek cathedrals, words which 
 were written in the second century : 
 
 “ Hail ! gladdening Light, of his pure glory poured, 
 
 Who is the Immortal Father, heavenly, blest, 
 
 Holiest of Holies, Jesus Christ our Lord ! 
 
 Now we are come to the sun’s hour of rest, 
 
 The lights of evening around us shine, 
 
 We hymn the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit divine ! 
 
 Worthiest art Thou at all times to be sung 
 With undefiled tongue, 
 
 Son of our God, Giver of life alone, 
 
 Therefore, in all the world, Thy glories. Lord, they own.”t 
 
 This poem is yet a vesper hymn in the Greek Church, and St. Basil 
 quotes it in the third century. It,and the “ Gloria in JExcelsis>” and 
 the “ Ter Sanctus ,” which yesterday rolled around the world, were 
 written in the second century, to pay absolutely divine honours to our 
 Lord. 
 
 When I open the best book which unevangelical Christianity ever 
 printed in Boston—James Freeman Clarke’s “ Truths and Errors about 
 Orthodoxy ”? Ho ! “ Truths and Errors of Orthodoxy ”—but the 
 
 first would have been a better title—I read : “Down to the time of 
 the Synod of Hice, Anno Domini 325, no doctrine of Trinity existed 
 in the Church.”’ 5,4 Will that statement bear the microscope of historical 
 science? If it will, I wish to believe it and to reject everything in¬ 
 consistent with it. 
 
 But I hold in my hands this Greek vesper hymn, and this “ Ter 
 Sanctusf and this “ Gloria in Excelsisf written in the second century. 
 What do they mean ? Here, too, are the dying words of martyrs for 
 three centuries, and all in harmony with the present faith of the 
 Christian world. 
 
 * Ruinart, “Acta,” p. 125. See Liddon’s “Bampton Lectures,” p. 409. 
 t See original in Routh’s “ JReliquce Sacra;,” iii. p. 515. % p. ->08 
 
 123 
 
THE TRINITY THE MARTYR'S FAITH. 
 
 Here is this statement of the Emperor Adrian, who, when writing to 
 Servian, described the population of Alexandria as divided between 
 the worship of Christ and the worship of Serapis.* 
 
 About a.d. 165 Lucian says :—“ The Christians are still worshipping 
 that great man who was crucificed in Palestine.”f 
 
 Eemember Pliny’s explicit official letter to Trajan, P affirming that 
 ■cross-examination and torture had elicited from the martyrs only the 
 statement that “ they were accustomed to meet on a stated day and 
 sing a hymn to Christ as God,” and to pledge themselves by a sacra¬ 
 ment to crush out evil of every kind.;}; 
 
 Calyisianus said to the martyr Euplius: “Pay worship to Mars, 
 Apollo, and Esculapius.” Euplius replied: “I worship the Father, 
 and the Son, and the Holy Ghost. I adore the Holy Trinity, besides 
 whom there is no God. Perish the gods who did not make Heaven 
 and earth and all that is in them. I am a Christian.Ӥ 
 
 The followers of Artemon maintained that the doctrine of the 
 Trinity was brought into the Church at a late day. A writer quoted 
 by Eusebius observed, in reply, that the psalms and hymns of the 
 brethren, which from the earliest days of Christianity had been written 
 by the faithful, all celebrate Christ, the Word of God, proclaiming 
 his Divinity.|| 
 
 Is it true that there was no doctrine of the Triune Name before 
 the year 325 ? Or, if you admit there was a Triune Name before 
 that date, do you deny that these martyrs, who died with prayers to 
 Christ as God, knew what they were about ? 
 
 Eollow up the unimpeached record, and you will find it beyond 
 controversy that the first three centuries taught explicitly the doctrine 
 of the Triune Name. Was that a practical truth ? 
 
 To be analytical—in order that, if possible, I may be clear—let me 
 say that I wish to show by detailed documentary evidence that the 
 Ante-Nicene Christian literature proves that in the first three 
 centuries the church held the doctrine of the Trinity. 
 
 1. This literature copiously asserts that Christ possessed proper Deity. 
 
 2. It teaches copiously that believers are saved by the atonement 
 made by our Lord. 
 
 3. It affirms abundantly that the Holy Spirit is a present Christ. 
 
 4. It everywhere proclaims that God, as three and one, is omni¬ 
 present in natural law. 
 
 5. These must be regarded as the most practical of all religious 
 truths, if judged by the work they have done. They were the 
 inspiration of martyrs’ lives and the solace of martyrs’ deaths. 
 
 6. These truths contain the doctrine of the Trinity implicitly, and 
 the doctrine of the Trinity contains them implicitly and explicitly. 
 
 7. That doctrine, therefore, is the teaching of the first three 
 Christian centuries. 
 
 We are to-day to breathe the spring-time of Christianity. The 
 sights and the sounds of that period may well move us, for they have 
 conquered the world. We are to gaze upon an age which is renowned 
 
 * Ab aliis Serapidem, ab aliis adorari Christum. Apud Lamprid., in Vita Alex. Scveri. 
 t He Morte Peregrini, c. 11. + Pliny. Ep., Lib. x. Ep. 97. 
 
 § Euinart, “Acta,” p. 362. || Eusebius, “Hist. Eccl.,” y. 28. 
 
 124 
 
THE TRINITY TEE MARTYR'S FAITH . 
 
 now, and is to be more and more renowned as the centuries roll on, as 
 that of the Apostolic Fathers. I hold in my hand the first volume of 
 a celebrated series of books (published by T. & T. Clark, of Edin¬ 
 burgh) called the “Ante-Hicene Library”—that is, Christian docu¬ 
 ments existing before the Nicene Council was called together in 325. 
 
 I am to read you nothing upon which I have not put elaborate study; 
 but that fact is not assurance that I am right. The world has boxed 
 about these documents in close controversy for one thousand five hun¬ 
 dred years; and if anything is known about history, it is known that 
 the select passages I am to present to you are genuine records of the 
 first three centuries. Do not think that I forget, although I cannot 
 mention here in detail, how much is interpolated here and spurious. 
 But scholarship has been walking over this record till it has found 
 every boggy spot in it; and I am to have you put your feet now only 
 on a few stepping-stones which infidelity itself considers firm as ada¬ 
 mant, so far as their historical genuineness is concerned. 
 
 There is a marvellous Church of St. Clement, near the Coliseum, in 
 Dome. You remember the words “ Rejoice always ; and again I say, 
 rejoice.”* In the verse preceding that St. Paul mentions a certain 
 Clement of Rome, and that Clement is supposed to be the author of this 
 letter, which now, in the year 1877, in Boston, you may hold in your 
 hands, and which was sent from Rome to Corinth by one church to 
 admonish another, in a majestic age of the world. Clement, the author 
 of this epistle, is known to have written it about the year 97. By 
 common consent he is regarded as one of the pupils of St. Paul. This 
 epistle Eusebius calls “great and admirable,” and says that it was 
 very often read in the churches before and during his day.f 
 
 Purposely I avoid following analytically the order of the propositions 
 I am defending ; but at hap-hazard almost I take passages out of this 
 unspeakably electric record, and you shall judge whether or not all that 
 my propositions assert is here implied : 
 
 “ Content with the provision which God had made for yon, and carefully attend¬ 
 ing to his words, ye were inwardly filled with his doctrine, and his sufferings [whose 
 sufferings? God’s sufferings] were before your eyes. Thus a profound and 
 abundant peace was given to you all ; and ye had an insatiable desire for doing 
 good, while a full outpouring of the Holy Spirit was upon you all. Fall of holy 
 designs ye did, with true earnestness of mind and a godly confidence, stretch forth 
 your hands to God Almighty, beseeching him to be merciful unto you, if ye had 
 been guilty of any involuntary transgression. Day and night ye were anxious for 
 the whole brotherhood, that the number of the elect might be saved with mercy and 
 good conscience.”—P. 8. 
 
 How fresh is this breeze, as from spring hill sides—the bursting 
 April of Christianity ! It is written in the record of a day which 
 dawned on the world eighteen hundred and forty-eight years ago 
 yesterdaythat while it was yet dark Mary Magdalen came to the 
 sepulchre, and the beloved disciple and Peter also; and that, although 
 the beloved disciple outran his companion, Peter went first into the 
 sepulchre. It was yet dark then; but is it not getting to be, in the 
 history of the world, when this letter was written, gray-brindled 
 
 * Phil. iv. 4. 
 
 •t Eusebius, iii. 16. 
 
 125 
 
 X Lewes, “ Fausti Sacri .” 
 
THE TRINITY THE MARTYR'S FAITH. 
 
 •dawn ? Remember what persecution surged around the Church out of 
 which came these words, with a tone that belongs only to sniritua 
 greatness of the first rank :— 
 
 “ Let us set before our eyes the illustrious apostles. Peter, through unrighteous 
 envy, endured not one or two, but numerous labours; and when he had at length 
 suffered marytrdom, departed to the place of glory due to him. Paul also obtained 
 the reward of patient endurance, after being seven times thrown into captivity, 
 compelled to flee, and stoned. After preaching both in the east and west, he gained 
 the illustrious reputation due to his faith, having taught righteousness to the whole 
 world; and, come to the extreme limit of the west, he suffered martyrdom under 
 the prefects.”—P. 11. 
 
 “We are struggling in the same arena, and the same conflict is assigned to us.” 
 — P. 12. 
 
 "What historic majesty there is in this language! 
 
 “Wherefore [what? Here is revealed the martyr’s inner sky] let us give up 
 vain and fruitless cares, and approach to the glorious and venerable rule of our holy 
 calling. Let us attend to what is good, pleasing, and acceptable in the sight of 
 Him who formed us. Let us look steadfastly to the blood of Christ , and see hoiv 
 precious that blood is to God , which , having been shed for our salvation , has set the 
 grace of repentance before the whole world." —P. 12. 
 
 "Will Boston in this far clay listen to Clement of Rome, speaking in 
 the year 97 ? 
 
 When I turn to that really sublime document, the epistle of 
 Diognetus, which scholars here will thank me for citing, I come upon 
 this passage, written in the second century :— 
 
 “ Truly, God himself, who is almighty, the Creator of all things and invisible 
 has sent from Heaven and placed among men [him who is] the truth, and the holy 
 and incomprehensible Word, and has firmly established him in their hearts. He did not, 
 as one might have imagined, send to men any servant or angel; but the very Creator 
 and Fashioner of all things, by whom he made the heavens, by whom he enclosed 
 the sea within its proper bounds, whose ordinances all the stars faithfully ooserve, 
 from whom the sun has received the measure of his daily course to be observed, 
 whom the moon obeys, being commanded to shine in the night, and whom the stars 
 also obey, following the moon in her course; by whom all things have been arranged 
 and placed within their proper limits, and to whom all are subject—the heavens 
 and the things that are therein, the earth and the things that are therein, the sea 
 and the things that are therein—fire, air, and the abyss—the things that are in the 
 heights, the things which are in the depths, and the things which lie between. This 
 [messenger] he sent to them. As a king sends his son, who is also a king, so sent 
 he him; as God, he sent him; as to men, he sent him; as a Saviour, he sent 
 him.”—Pp. 309, 310. 
 
 If this amazing passage asserts tlie Deity of our Lord, does not the 
 next copiously teach the atonement ? 
 
 “ He himself took on him the burden of our iniquities. He gave his own Son as 
 a ransom for us—the Holy One for transgressors, the Blameless One for the wicked, 
 the Righteous One for the unrighteous, the Incorruptible One for the corruptible, 
 the Immortal One for them that are mortal. For what other thing was capable of 
 covering our sins than his righteousness ? By what other one was it possible that 
 w r e, the wicked and ungodly, could be justified, than by the only Son of God? 0 
 sweet exchange! 0 unsearchable operation ! 0 benefits surpassing all expecta¬ 
 
 tion ! That the wickedness of many should be hid in a single righteous One ; and 
 that the righteousness of one should justify many transgressors! Having, therefore, 
 convinced us in the former time that our nature was unable to attain to life, and 
 having now revealed the Saviour who is able to save even those things which it 
 was, formerly, impossible to save, by both these facts he desired to lead us to trust 
 
 126 
 
TIIE TRINITY THE MARTYR'S FAITH. 
 
 in his kindness, to esteem him our Nourisher, Father, Teacher, Counsellor, Healer, 
 our Wisdom, Light, Honour, Glory, Power, and Life.”—Pp. 312, 313. 
 
 “ This is He who was from the beginning, who appeared as if new, and was 
 found old, and yet who is ever born afresh in the hearts of the Saints. This is He 
 who, being from everlasting, is to -day called the Son ; through whom the Church 
 is enriched, and grace, widely spread, increases in the saints, furnishing under¬ 
 standing, revealing mysteries, announcing times, rejoicing over the faithful, giving 
 to those that seek, by whom the limits of faith are not broken through, nor the 
 boundaries set by the fathers passed over. Then the fear of the law is chanted, and 
 the grace of the prophets is known, and the faith of the Gospels is established, and the 
 tradition of the apostles is preserved, and the grace of the Church exults.”—P. 315. 
 
 But now I open another document of equal interest, and read in the 
 epistle of Polycarp, written about the middle of the second century: 
 
 “ Our Lord Jesus Christ, to him all things in heaven and on earth are subject. 
 Him every spirit serves. He comes as the judge of the living and the dead. But 
 he who raised him up from the dead will raise up us also, if we do his will, and 
 walk in his commandments, and love what he loved.”—P. 70. 
 
 I turn on, my friends, and find in the shorter recension of the 
 epistles of Ignatius—notice, I say the shorter—this statement: 
 
 “He who possesses the word of Jesus is truly able to hear even his very silence, 
 that he may be perfect, and may both act as he speaks, and be recognized by his 
 silence. There is nothing which is hid from God ; but our very secrets are near 
 to him. Let us, therefore, do all things as those who have him dwelling in us, that we 
 may be his temples, and he may be in us as our God, which indeed he is.”—P. 163. 
 
 Is there nothing in this early religion at which modern culture may 
 sneer ? In all my readings of antiquity outside the Scriptures, I never 
 met a chapter in prose equal for poetic power to the one I am about 
 to pronounce before yon, nor one that is half as worthy as this to be 
 held up in the light of modern science : 
 
 “ The heavens, revolving under his government, are subject to Him in peace. 
 Day and night run the course appointed by him, in no wise hindering each other. 
 The sun and moon, with the companies of the stars, roll on in harmony according 
 to his command, within their prescribed limits, and without any deviation. The 
 fruitful earth, according to his will, brings forth food in abundance at the proper 
 seasons, for man and beast, and all the living beings upon it, never hesitating, nor 
 changing any of the ordinances which he has fixed. The unsearchable places of 
 the abysses and the indescribable arrangements of the lower world are restrained by 
 the same laws. The vast immeasurable sea, gathered together by his working into 
 various basins, never passes beyond the bounds placed around it, but does as He has 
 commanded. The ocean, impassable to man, and the worlds beyond it, are regulated 
 by the same enactments of the Lord. The seasons of spring, summer, autumn, 
 and winter peacefully give place to one another. The winds, in their several 
 quarters, fulfil, at the proper time, their service without hindrance. The ever- 
 flowing fountains, formed both for enjoyment and health, furnish without fail their 
 breasts for the life of men. Take heed, beloved, lest his many kindnesses lead to 
 the condemnation of us all.”—Pp. 21, 22. 
 
 “ The Creator and Lord of all himself rejoices in his works. For by his infinitely 
 great power he established the heavens, and by his incomprehensible wisdom he 
 adorned them. He also divided the earth from the water which surrounds it, and 
 fixed it upon the immovable foundation of his own will. The animals, also which 
 are upon it, he commanded by his own word into existence. So, likewise, when he 
 had formed the sea, and the living creatures which are in it, he enclosed them 
 within their proper bounds by his own power. Above all, with his holy and 
 undefiled hands he formed man.”—P. 30. 
 
 “ How blessed and wonderful, beloved, are the gifts of God ! Life in immortality, 
 splendour in righteousness, truth in perfect confidence, faith in assurance, self-control 
 
 127 
 
THE TRINITY TIIE MARTYR'S FAITH . 
 
 in holiness! And all these fall under the cognizance of understanding [nowl. 
 What then shall those things be which are prepared for such as wait for Him ? The- 
 Creator and Father of all worlds, the Most Holy, alone knows their amount and 
 their beauty.”—Pp. 31, 32. 
 
 Hoes Concord furnish anything better than that ? It is Pantheism, 
 you say. It is Christian theism in the first century, uttering itself in 
 majestic tones fit to be matched with the anthems of the last 
 investigation. 
 
 So spoke Clement, and he is a pupil of Paul, and is to be interpreted 
 in part by his master ; and, if you put Paul and Clement together, the 
 meaning of one and of the other is doubly clear, as is the light in two 
 mirrors when they face each other. 
 
 Old Pome is alive. When I entered for the first time the Eternal 
 City, I purposely came in by the last light of day and under the earliest 
 stars. I took pains not to meet at first with anything inartistic or 
 trivial. I put myself in a carriage, and kept my eyes inside of it until 
 I reached my rooms, and next morning kept my eyes inside a carriage 
 until I was in presence of the Coliseum. That was the first object I 
 saw in Eome. Mrs. Browning’s words were constantly in my thoughts: 
 
 “ And the mountains in disdain 
 Gather back their lights of opal, 
 
 From the dumb despondent plain, 
 
 Heaped with jaw-bones of a people.” 
 
 Caesar and Antony were near, and Cicero, and Sallust, and Horace, 
 and Virgil, and Cato, and Seneca, and Hero, and the rest. After days 
 and weeks of trance, I obtained a better historic sense. Suddenly, 
 among the marbles in St. Clement’s Church, I remembered Mrs. 
 Browning’s other words: 
 
 “ Caesar’s work is all undone.” 
 
 But Clement’s is not; Peter’s not; Paul’s not. The feet of these men, 
 too, fell on the seven hills, and their work endures. In the Catacombs 
 the gray crypts of volcanic stone seemed to be the nursery of America, 
 because the cradle of Christianity when it was preparing to ascend that 
 throne of the Caesars from which it has not yet come down. When 
 in the Coliseum at midnight and in the Eorum at noon, the tallest of 
 the historic forms that filled the living air seemed to be those of the 
 Christian martyrs, for they have ruled the world as Caesar has not. 
 In the Coliseum I came at last to understand Bichter’s words : “ Here 
 coiled the giant snake five times about Christianity. But the Serpent 
 and the bear crouch. Broken asunder are the gigantic spokes of the 
 wheel which once the stream of the ages drove.”* In the azure lights 
 of the outer and inner sky the wheel of the universe moves on 
 without variableness in its motion or shadow of change. 
 
 Was the Holy Spirit to the Early Christians present Christ? 
 
 To them was God as three and one, omnipresent in natural law ? 
 
 All history since the Ascension proclaims that the Holy Spirit 
 breathed out to-day is one with that which eighteen hundred and a 
 few years ago was breathed upon the disciples with the words “ Receive 
 
 ye the Holy Ghost.” 
 
 It "A if i f? D E v jftf* “fff *» 
 
 
 * Titan. 
 
 128 MAR 4 193? 
 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS,