YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY boston Monday lectures. By JOSEPH COOK. THIRTEENTH EDITION. BIOLOGY. With Preludes on Current Events. Three Colored Illustrations. i2mo .... $1.50 " The attempt of sundry critics to depreciate Mr. Cook's science, because he is a minis ter, is very ill judged. These Lectures are crowded so full of knowledge, of thought, of argument, illumined with such passages of eloquence and power, spiced so frequently with deep-cutting though good-natured irony, that I could make no abstract from them, without utterly mutilating them." — Rev. Dr. Thomas JIM, ex- 11 resident of Harvard University., in the Christian Register. " Joseph Cook ia a phenomenon to be accounted for. No other American orator has done what he lias done, or any thing like it; and, prior to the experiment, no voice would have been bold enough to predict ita success." — Rev. Professor A. I*, Peabody of Harvard University. "Mr. Cook is a specialist. His work, aa it now stands, represents fairly the very latest and best researches." — Ceorge SI. Beard, M D., of Aew York. " The book well presents to outsiders a certain little-known stage of conservative scien tific thought, which they cannot reach anywhere else in so accessible and compact a form" — Professor John McCrad j/, University of the South. "By far tho most satisfactory of recent discussions in this field, both in method and execution." — Professor Borden P. Bourne of Boston University. *" TENTH EDITION. TRANSCENDENTALISM. With Preludes on Cur rent Events. i2mo $1-50 " Mr. Cook ia a great master_ of analysis. lie shows singular justness of view in bis manner of treating the most difficult and perplexing themes." — Princeton Review. "The Lectures arc remarkably eloquent, vigorous, and powerful." — R. Payne Smith, Dean of Canterbury. "They arc wonderful specimens of shrewd, clear, and vigorous thinking." — Reo. Dr. Angus, the College, Regent's Park. " These arc very wonderful Lectures." — Rev. C. 27. Spwgeon, " The Lectures are in every way of a high order. They are profound and yet clear." — Rev. Alex. Raleigh. D.D., London. " These wonderful Lectures stand forth alone amidst their contemporaries of the class to which they belong." — London Quarterly Review. JUST READ Y: ORTHODOXY. With Preludes on Current Events. $1.50 JAMES R. OSGOOD & CO., Publishers. Boston Monday Lectures. ORTHODOXY, PRELUDES ON CURRENT EVENTS. By JOSEPH COOK. " Es ist gar nicht zweifelhaft, sondem das Gewisseste, was es gibt, ja der Grund aller andem Gewissheit, das einzig absolut gultige Objective, dass es eine moralische Weltordnung gibt. Was du liebst, das lebst du." — Fichte. BOSTON: JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY. (Late Ticknor & Fields, and Fields, Osgood, & Co.) 1878. Copyright, 1878, Bv JOSEPH COOK. Franklin Press: Stereotyped and Printed by Rand, A very, &> Co., Boston. INTRODUCTION, The object of the Boston Monday Lectures is to present the results of the freshest German, English, and American scholar ship on the more important and difficult topics concerning the relation of Religion and Science. They were begun in the Meionaon in 1875 ; and the audiences, gathered at noon on Mondays, were of such size as to heed to be transferred to Park-street Church in October, 1876, and thence to Tremont Temple, which was often more than full during the winter of 1876-77. The audiences contained large numbers of ministers, teachers, and other educated men. The thirty-five lectures of the last season were reported in the Boston Daily Advertiser, by Mr. J. E. Bacon, stenographer, and most of them were republished in full in New York and London. The lectures on Biology oppose the materialistic, and not the theistic, theory of Evolution. The lectures on Transcendentalism and Orthodoxy contain a discussion of the views of Theodore Parker. The Committee having charge of the Boston Monday Lectures for the coming year consists of the following gentlemen: — His Excellency A. H. Rice, Prof. Edwards A. Pake, LL.D., Governor of Massachusetts. Andover Theological Seminary. Hon. Alpheus Hardy. Right Rev. Bishop Fosteb. Hon. William Claflin, Ex- Prof. L. T. Townsend, Boston Governor of Massachusetts. University. Prof. E. P. Gould, Newton The- Robert Gilchrist. ological Institute. Samuel Johnson. Rev. J. L. Withbow, D.D. Rev. Z. Gbat, D.D., Episcopal Reuben Ceooke. Theological School, Cambridge. Rev. William M. Bakeb, D.D. William B. Merrill. Russell Sturgis, Jr. ' M. H. Sabgent. E. M. McPhebson. M. R. Demtng, Secretary. Boston, January, 1878. Henry F. Dtjbant, Chairman. PUBLISHERS' NOTE. In the careful reports of Mr. Cook's Lectures printed in the Boston Daily Advertiser, were included by the stenographer sundry expressions (applause, &c.) indicat ing the immediate and varying impressions with which the Lectures were received. Though these reports .have been thoroughly revised by the author, the publishers have thought it advisable to retain these expressions. Mr. Cook's audiences included, in large numbers, representa tives of the broadest scholarship, the profoundest philoso phy, the acutest scientific research, and generally of the finest intellectual culture, of Boston and New England ; and it has seemed admissible to allow the larger assembly, to which these Lectures are now addressed to know how they were received by such audiences as those to which they were originally delivered. CONTENTS. LECTURES. paqb I. Is there Nothing in God to Feab ? 3 n. The Teinity,a Peactical Teuth 35 UT. The Trinity, the Maetye's Faith 71 IV. Theodoee Paekee's Self-Conteadictions . . 99 V. The Atonement ln the Light of Self-Evi dent Tetjth 133 VI. The Harmonization of the Soul with its En- VTBONMENT 169 VLT. Tetje and False Optimism 197 VIII. A CONSIDEEATION OF MB. ClAEKE'S AND ME. Hale's Ceiticisms 225 IX. Scepticism in New England 257 X. Theodoee Pabkeb as an Antislaveby Re- foemeb 287 XI. The Soueces of Theodoee Paekee's Eeeoes . 317 PRELUDES. I. The Thtn End of the Romish Wedge .... 3 II. Sectarian Division of State Funds .... 35 HE. Aggeessive Religion in Boston 71 IV. The Transmutation of Reading into Conduct 99 V. The Five Paets of Peayee 133 VI. Modebate Delnking and Diseeputable Thea- tbes 169 \ 7 O CONTENTS. PAGE VH. The Possible Uses of Conveesation Meetings, 197 VUI. Cubeent Misconceptions of Oethodoxy . . . 225 IX. Use and Abuse of Chubch-Membeeshxp . . . 257 X. Gbeece since heb Libeeation feom Tuekey . 287 XI. Lessing's Test of the Wobth of Sects . . . 317 I. IS THERE NOTHING IN GOD TO EEAR? THE SEVENTIETH LECTURE IN THE BOSTON MONDAY LEC TURESHIP, DELIVERED IN TREMONT TEMPLE MARCH la " Se judice nemo nocens absolvitor." — Juvenal: Sat., xiii. 3. " Magna vis est conscientue et magna in utramqne partem, ut neque timeant, qui nihil commiserint et pcenam semper ante oculoa versari putent, qui peccarint." — Ciceso: Milo, 23. ORTHODOXY. IS THEEE NOTHING IN GOD TO FEAR? PRELUDE ON CURRENT EVENTS. Henry IV., in smock and barefoot, stood three days in the snow before the palace of Pope Hilde brand at Canossa, imploring pardon in vain, until his penance had been sufficiently protracted to become a symbol of the subjection of his nation. Bismarck said in 1872, "Germany is not going to Canossa physically or spiritually." Nevertheless, Bismarck seems to have had what even he would call tolerably serious trouble with the Jesuits of the latest day ; and Gladstone assures the British Empire that the time has not yet arrived when free nations can profitably forget the schemes of the power behind the Papacy. That power will not disappear when the present Pope dies. You say that the form which carries the scythe and the hour-glass will pass through the Vatican soon, and change much on the Tiber. But the power 4 ORTHODOXY. behind the Pope made the present Pope, and it will make the new one. Pius IX. began as a reformer. He was taken in hand by a power greater than his own, and he ceased to advocate reforms in the Romish Church. Jesuit Ultramontanism has spoken through him ever since the first quarter of his possession of the papal chair. As the power behind the power of the Papacy will not change, perhaps it is worth while for us to ask what that power thinks concerning its prospects in the United States. It would be entirely in order for me to read a passage out of the famous Syllabus of Pius IX., to show that he wishes to do in the New World what he endeavors to do in the Old. But we have more definite information as to the American plans of the Pope. I hold in my hand an interesting volume just issued from the press, and written by a distinguished lawyer who is now a member of the cabinet at Washington, — R. W. Thompson, — on " The Papacy and the Civil Power." In it (p. 119) is quoted a highly significant document, which ought to be better known ; namely, a letter written by Pius IX. to Maximilian, when it seemed probable, in 1864, that this prince would become emperor of Mexico. What did the Pope say to him ? " Your Majesty is well aware that in order effect ually to repair the evils occasioned by the revolu tion, and to bring back as soon as possible happy days for the Church, the Catholic religion must, above all things, continue to be the glory and the mainstay of the Mexican nation, to the exclusion of IS THERE NOTHING IN GOD TO FEAR? 5 every other dissenting worship ; that the bishops must be perfectly free in the exercise of their pastoral min istry; that the religious orders should be re-estab lished or re-organized, conformably with the instruc tions and the powers which we have given ; that the patrimony of the Church, and the rights which attach to it, may be maintained and protected ; that no per son may obtain the faculty of teaching and publishing false and subversive tenets ; that instruction, whether public or private, should be directed and watched over by the ecclesiastical authority; and that, in short, the chains may be broken which, up to the present time, have held down the Church in a state of depend ence, and subject to the arbitrary rule of the civil government" (Appletoris Annual Cyclopaedia, 1865, p. 749). Two things concerning the conflict of papal ideas with American institutions are very clear : first, that we cannot resist the introduction here of the thin edge of the wedge which has troubled other peoples ; secondly, that in some way we must resist the intro duction of the thick end of the wedge. [Applause.] You say that I am about to be narrow ; and that I am to launch myself upon a theme so vexed and blaz ing that it cannot be touched here and now without rashness. What I assert is, that somewhere between the thin and the thick end of the Romish wedge, public opinion in America will by and by call "Hold!" — I do not know where, but somewhere. What is the thin end of the wedge ? Yonder in Charlestown there is a prison, in which the majority 6 ORTHODOXY. of the convicts are Romish. All who are there are wards of the State. They are not under the care of any denomination. Massachusetts is the preacher to those convicts. Massachusetts directs their moral culture. Massachusetts is not denominational. It has been the opinion of Massachusetts, that she had the right to manage the instruction of those convicts according to her own ideas. Massachusetts was so narrow, so benighted, so sectarian, as to suppose that she" possessed the right to appoint a chaplain over there, and to instruct him to teach nothing denomi national, but to put the Bible into the hands of the convicts; to organize a Sunday religious school, not sectarian at all, but in the hands of all denomi nations ; to hold devotional meetings, and thus train these convicts into preparation for a life of freedom, treating them in all ways as a wise parent would treat an erring child. Massachusetts thought she had a right to do that ; and that is what she did. Within the last ten months there has arisen in that institution, under the shadow of Bunker Hill, a con flict between Catholic canon law and Massachusetts State law. It has been asserted there, in the name of Romanism, that Romish convicts must not attend the Sabbath schools managed by the State chaplain ; must not, under pain of excommunication, go to the devotional meetings authorized by Massachusetts; and strenuous objection has been made to the circu lation of Protestant Bibles among the convicts. I am now reciting facts from the very significant, in cisive, manly report (Massachusetts Pub. Doc, No. IS THERE NOTHING LN GOD TO FEAR? 7 13, October, 1876) of the able and eloquent chaplain, Mr. Speare, who, I hope, will soon have a hearing before a committee at the State House and before Massachusetts. [Applause.] The thin edge of the wedge is being driven with a muffled hammer. What are you to do about this ? Berlin has deter mined, but has Boston decided how she will treat Ultramontanism ? My impression is, that Massachusetts law ought to be made in Massachusetts, and not on the Tiber. [Applause.] If I had a drop of sectarian blood in my veins, I should wish to open the dull flesh, and let out the muddy compound. [Applause.] I want peace with all members of society ; but I want first purity. It cannot be, it never will be, that the American people will submit to have canon law en forced over American law. [Applause.] In Salem yonder, a learned ecclesiastic came into the school board not long ago, and brought with him a number of volumes to show what the canon law is about instruction such as can be permitted to Romish children. The other gentlemen on that board listened to him for a while, and finally said, " My dear sir, we do not care what the canon law is. We know it is against our proceedings. You are aside from the point in showing us that the ecclesias tical provisions of the Romish Church will not permit the sending of your children to schools in which the Bible is read." Influences public and private, of such a kind, were brought into action in Salem, that the effect, and probably the intended effect, was that 8 ORTHODOXY. when the Bible was read the next time in one of the most prominent of the schools in question, all the Romish children put on their hats, and began to shuffle their feet, and make other signs of irreverence. Those scholars remained members of that school about fifteen minutes. [Applause.] The signifi cant thing, however, was, that after being drawn into ecclesiastical Romish schools for a fortnight or a month, the children were found to be making very unsatisfactory progress; and the parents came to the school board in many cases, and. said, " Take our children back : they will behave themselves now. If they do not, treat them as you treat other children. We desire to have this matter settled by fair vote, after full discussion. Until it is so settled, we hope you will manage on the American plan. We know that objections are made in ecclesiastical quar ters. But your schools are better than ours, and our children must have the best schools." [Applause.] And then in a whisper they added, " We do not care as much for canon law as for American law." [Ap plause.] Now, I am not here to cast the slightest odium upon that body of citizens which is in many respects worthy of the fame of Edmund Burke, and Welling ton, and O'Connell, and Charlotte Bronte, and John C. Calhoun, and of the best part of Horace Greeley. [Applause.] I do not think that the more intelli gent members of the great processions, which on St. Patrick's Day passed through the streets of our chief cities, are inclined to put canon law above American IS THERE NOTHLNG IN GOD TO FEAR? 9 law. I believe I am uttering the secret sentiments of many such men in this Commonwealth, when I say that they want the laws of Massachusetts made on the Merrimack and the Connecticut, and not on the Tiber. [Applause.] I have their support, I doubt not, when I say America must resist the thick end, that is the Maximilian end, of the papal wedge. She cannot resist the thin end. Every thing here must go by count of heads and clack of tongues. I am glad this should be so, if only the heads are heavy with the results of fair discussion, and the tongues wise. There must be not a little discussion of this topic before our legislators will understand that there are quite as many Presbyterian sittings in the United States as Romish. You have two million Romish sittings in the United States. You have also two million Presbyterian, three million Baptist, and six million Methodist sittings ; and my little denomi nation, the Congregational, has a million and a half. [Applause.] There are votes for America as well as for Rome [applause] ; and, therefore, let politi cians who are afraid [applause] remember that some where, between the thin end and the thick end of the wedge, it will be policy to pause. [Applause.] THE LECTURE. 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 10 ORTHODOXY. 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 puni tive to the disloyal. A Personal will has proclaimed an unbending enactment, 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, there fore, 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 answer to this majestic question may be sought, 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 I 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. According to my view of the Unity of the Divine nature, God is one, as we meet him in the Old Testa ment 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 Contin ued Life in the Present Influences of the Holy Spirit. The Oldest and Newest are unwritten ; the Old and New are written. But the voices of the four are one. IS THERE NOTHLNG IN GOD TO FEAR? 11 Singularly enough, too, the scenery of the four Testa ments 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. Car ry le 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 of the Newest. If the Old Testament Scripture is at once severe and tender ; if, in all its gnarled, unsub duable heights, there burst out springs of crystalline water ; if, in the inaccessible 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 Paradisiacal, unfathomable justice matched by unfathomable ten derness ; 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 clefts, 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 in, a glacier, and remained 12 ORTHODOXY. for some hours at mid-day, 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 forgetting 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, gentlemen, if you are to prove that. You have all the great litera tures 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 IS THERE NOTHING IN GOD TO FEAR? 13 you. The Oldest Scripture and the Old, the Newest and the New, are against you. The law of judicial blindness, the world will understand by and by as well as Shakspeare understood it. In that day your proposition that character does not tend to a final permanence will 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 unsci entific 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 endeavoring 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 " (Parker, Sermons on Theism, p. 210). 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 chil dren ; but partial, unjust, cruel, wicked, and oppres sive" (p. 299). 3. " Every fall is a fall upward " (p. 408). 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 as the con cluding sentence : — 14 ORTHODOXY. 4. " 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 kid napper, 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 conse quences 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 ! " ' Come, then, expressive silence, muse His praise.' " (P. 417.) Gentlemen, Theodore Parker's practice throttled kidnappers. Theodore Parker's theory nursed kid nappers. [Applause.] 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. [Ap plause.] 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. Now, to test Par ker's explicit teaching, that a man may die a kidnap per, or a Cain, or an Iscariot, and yet be sure of IS THERE NOTHING IN GOD TO FEAR? 15 coming out safe in the end, take the test of plain common sense, and suppose society saturated with that belief for thousands of years. Ask how it oper ates in this life, in long and wide and multiplex 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 upon greed and fraud, and, even with the most thoughtful and conscientious, inevitably diminishes the imperativeness of the reasons in favor 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 scientifically proved to be out of harmony with the nature of things. Any proposition, which, in a long course of absorp tion 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 never will take the responsibili ty of proclaiming, for I. know it will do harm (ap plause) ; 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 work well in this world is adequately discredited as a guide to practical truth as to the next world. Law is a unit throughout the universe ; and there- 16 ORTHODOXY. fore 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 prop osition because it does not work well in this world, I have the right, in the name of the unity and uni versality 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 there fore not to be trusted in its relations to the next world. [Applause.] —" 3. From our present point of view, look fairly and with your own eyes at the central objection to the theory that there may be punishment in the uni verse forever. Do you admit that the past is irreversible? I hope you do; certainly I do. Very well: if the past is irreversible, there are some six thousand years at least during which not a few men have done what conscience proclaims ought not to have been done. Gentlemen, that record is to last, is it not? "Oh, no ! Oh, no ! It would be against the deepest of the liberal instincts to suppose that any thing that can cause regret and pain will be in existence when the great plan of the universe has been fully executed." What ! a record having in it all the Neros and Cali- gulas, all the perjuries and leprosies and butcheries of all time, and existing there as a thing that ought IS THERE NOTHLNG LN GOD TO FEAR? 17 not to have been, — a record irreversible and inerasa- ble, — and yet this give no regret to consciences look ing back upon it, even if they are purified ones? Gentlemen, there will be forever in the universe a record of every sin that has been committed in it. There will be forever in the universe regret on the part of all consciences in the universe that that sin was committed. If regret is pain, there will be pain in the universe forever! What are we to do with these provincial, unscientific, lawless whippers of syllabub in thought [applause], who will not look north, south, east, and west, and who proclaim con stantly 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 [applause] ; and that is why, for one, I stand in fear before the nature of things. [Applause.] I am not quite a full-grown man; but I am afraid of the power 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 jaws of Gehenna ; and I be lieve solemnly that I shall never 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-mor- 18 ORTHODOXY. row, or the day after, the natural laws according to which I and all consciences in the universe must for ever and forever condemn whatever ought not to have been. Look at the fact, the mathematical certainty, that if you deduct from the experience of a man's holi ness for a while, you have deducted something of absolutely measureless value. You have poisoned him for once. Now, 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." (Bayard Taylor's translation of a Persian hymn.) If you please, my friends, this universe is more serious than poet has ever dreamed, or prophet pro claimed. 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 glacl 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 IS THERE NOTHING IN GOD TO FEAR? 19 irreversible ; that a record of sin, once written, will endure forever ; and 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 forever and forever ! Caiiyle 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 ship board in England, with the intention of coming to America for life. Milton, Cromwell, and Hampden were the first Americans. "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" (Ora Heroes, Lect. VI.). "The world is alive, in stinct 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 forevermore " (Lect. V.). 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 senti ment peculiar to luxurious ages, and not to the great 20 ORTHODOXY. 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 Ewigkefogeist, — 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 perfect work in the world, the lawless liberalism^ characteristic of luxurious 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 forever. This planet moves through space enswathed with light. The radiance of the sun 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. No doubt, if Richter was right in saying that the interstellar spaces are the homes of souls, there is un fathomable 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 forever, and some part of that IS THERE NOTHLNG LN GOD TO FEAR? 21 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 senti ment that there cannot be pain or loss in the uni verse forever. So many worlds are around us, so many better ages are 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 Christian ity 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 God ; and you and I know incontrovertibly that without similarity of feeling with God, "salvation is a natural impossi-j bility. ) Erratic opinion itself teaches glad allegiance to God as the natural and inexorable condition of the peace of the soul. Go to your Ryder at Chicago, or your Chapin at New York, and these serious teachers will tell you that they everywhere proclaim the 22 ORTHODOXY. necessity of the new birth. Where is there among the more sober, that is the later, Universalists* a man who really possesses scholarship, who does not teach the necessity of similarity of feeling with God7 Dr. Ryder, however, at a late national convention here at Lynn, said that the Universalist churches have not, on the whole, a good name for spiritual efficiency, and that the Universalist ministry does not seem to feel itself charged with the duty of bringing society into the mood which science pro nounces to be a necessity to the welfare of the soul. (See " The Universalist " of date of the convention, 1875.) He criticised this ministry for lack of ear nestness 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 Universalism, if scholarly at all, will admit that without similarity of feeling with God, salvation is a natural impossibility. 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 perma nence ! Your chief objection to the idea that evil may last IS THERE NOTHLNG LN GOD TO FEAR? 23 forever is drawn, not from Science, nor from Scrip ture, but from the characteristic of luxurious ages, an unscientific laxness of 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 Ruler. I wish to fracture this bowlder, 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 forever and forever a record of sin. I have shown that there will be loss forever and forever 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 Niag ara 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 forever. If, then, some pain and some evil may exist forever, and God yet be good, do you know enough to say how much evil may exist forever, and Q-od yet be good ? [Ap plause.] 24 ORTHODOXY. Who is there here who dares to say that he is wise enough to authorize Theodore Parker to hiss at the Scripture on this theme ? When you know scientifically that one thread is carried over, how do you know but that the cable which the Scriptures carry across may be absolutely the scientific bridge ? We are all agreed that some evil may last forever; we are all agreed that God is good : and now, in the name of the fact that God is good, you desire me to* say with Theodore Parker, that a man may die a kid napper, and yet be saved. You have no reason at I the bottom of 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 forever. I say some pain will, and you know it will ; some loss or evil will, and you know it will. Is it not high time, therefore, for us to consult some other author ity than that of this scientifically discredited senti ment? The question is, whether you are wise enough to estimate the amount of pain, or loss, or evil, which may last forever ? 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 IS THERE NOTHING IN GOD TO FEAR? 25 the hate of what God loves ? " — " My sentiments as sure me that there will not be : God is good and per fect ; 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 ten dencies, 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 concerned, will be brought into the world to suffer to the third or fourth genera tion, as a consequence of the evil choices of their an cestors ? " — " No, that cannot be : a perfect being, with a perfeet„motive, creating with a perfect pur pose, never will call such a law into existence." — " How do you know he will not ? " — " My cultured sentiment is all against it. I was born in the city of Boston. It is almost a violation of taste to suppose that God will do any thing of that sort. ; It is too late to teach in the nineteenth century, that Infinite Wisdom and Power, bringing into existence a moral system, will allow to exist in it any thing which the spirit of our time would not anticipate ! [Applause.] Advanced thought cannot admit that any such im perfection 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." 26 ORTHODOXY. Turn now to the actual facts of life, and what is here ? What Infinite Wisdom and Power and Good ness have permitted, and nothing else. What God does not do cannot be done wisely. He has not pre 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 deeds of their ancestors, and this to the third and the fourth generation. It is a fact beyond all com ment 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 inno cent is many a cripple. But not innocent some an cestor whose mischiefs spread by hereditary descent. God allows such things to be, and yet we beheve God is perfect. Archbishop Whately has shown elaborately that all the reasoning which proclaims that' sin cannot en dure forever 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, gentlemen, that all this unscientific sentimentality is best tested by taking it over to a point previous IS THERE NOTHING IN GOD TO FEAR? 27 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. When I go enswathed in this sentiment into the councils which preceded the formation of this world, I really find myself in a minority there. Incontrovertibly there is in the universe a different plan than I should think there would be, 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 a course of facts which we can test, I affirm that it is not safe to take it and apply it to a 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 that it will turn out an absurdity, if we apply it to the time after the world shall cease to exist. [Applause.] Yes; but ultimately more good will come if evil is permitted. What ! I thought you did not be lieve 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. [Applause.] In any case you will obtain only a painless uni verse : so we come back precisely to the point where we stood at first, or to the certainty that your marble staircase takes men up no higher than your red-hot iron, and your red-hot iron no higher than they can 28 ORTHODOXY. 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. That is the position you must reach at last. It is the stern scien tific truth on this theme, that you have no ground in this sentiment for denying that character tends to a final permanence. Fill the ages with the certainty that all char acter 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 un bounded 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 pas sage, that violation of a moral law may be so bold and persistent as to bring with it penalties that have no remedy. He wrote explicitly: "From my own experience, I know the remorse which comes from conscious violation of my own integrity; from trea son to myself and my God. It transcends all bodily pain, all grief at disappointed schemes, all anguish which comes from sickness, ay, from the death of dear ones prematurely taken away. To these afflic tions I can bow with a ' Thy will, not mine, be done.' But remorse, the pain of sin, that is my work. This IS THERE NOTHLNG LN GOD TO FEAR? 29 comes, obviously, to warn us of the ruin which lies before us ; for, as the violation of the natural mate rial conditions of bodily life leads to dissolution of the body, so the wilful, constant violation of the na tural conditions of spiritual well-being leads to the destruction thereof" (Sermons on Theism, p. 404). This is clear and straightforward ; but it is imme diately explained away and repudiated by its own author. If lost souls repent, they in that act cease to be lost. Will lago repent? Will Mephistopheles re pent? Will Milton's Satan repent? What is the definition of perdition ? Permanent dissimilarity of feeling with God. That definition does not imply that a man has lost all tendency to respect what is reasonable, but that he never attains predominant love of what God loves. The failure to attain pre dominant 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 lago and Mephistopheles may fall into permanence of dissimilarity of feeling with God. Salvation in that condition is a natural impos sibility, for salvation includes similarity of feeling with God. Gentlemen, we want truth winnowed by being held up in the breezes that blow out of all quarters of the sky. 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 Roman degradation. It suffers a winnowing even then, for the winds whisper 30 ORTHODOXY. to me, "This teaching would not have cleansed Rome." I hold up the proposition in the winds that blow out of American greed and frand: 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 inevitable 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 New, as in many another page of the New and Old, and of the Newest and Oldest Testa ment, 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 (Alford, Rev. xxii. 11). The last verity proclaimed in Scripture is thus the natural permanence of moral character, and the cer tainty that all crystallization of the soul into final IS THERE NOTHLNG LN GOD TO FEAR? 31 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 en- swathing kiss, without being also a consuming fire. [Applause.J II. THE TRINITY A PRACTICAL TRUTH. A CONSIDERATION OF THE REV. JAMES FREEMAN CLARKE'S CRITICISMS. THE SEVENTY-FIRST LECTURE IN THE BOSTON MONDAY LECTURESHIP, DELIVERED IN TREMONT TEMPLE MARCH 26. " Adfirmabant autem, hano fuisse summam vel culpse suae vel erroris, quod essent soliti stato die ante lucem convenire, earmenque Christo, quasi Deo, dicere secum invicem, seque sacramento non in scelus aliquod obstringere, sed ne furta, ne latrocinia, ne adulteria committerent." — Pliny, Epistles, Lib. x. Ep. 97. "Quid verb sentis de Hs hominibus, qui Christum non invocant, nee adorandum censent ? Resp. Prorsus non esse Christianos sentio, cum Christum non habeant. Et licet verbis id negare non audeant, reips& negant tamen." — Racovian Catechism, Ques. 246. n. THE TRINITY A PRACTICAL TRUTH. PRELUDE ON CURRENT EVENTS. One day Prince Bismarck, rolling in triumph toward Paris, had leisure to visit a country school- house ; and it was there that he found what he called the saddest sight he saw in France. What was that sight ? Some widow with a starving family ? Some maimed soldier, the only support of a distant home, about to be left in destitution ? Some human form riddled with bullets ? None of these, but a set of school-books filled with lies! "I took up the vol umes," says this statesman, "and found that the tritest facts as to the religious history of Europe were falsified by Romish editors. Scholarship would stand aghast on every third or fourth page, at the mon strosity of the misrepresentations of acknowledged historical truth." To feed the rising generation with falsehood, Bismarck thought a sadder thing than battle-fields. My friends, I hold in my hands a book, copies of which were lately distributed in quantities at Deer Island, in Massachusetts Bay yonder, by Romish priests. It is important for me, as an out- 35 36 ORTHODOXY. look committee, to observe what passes underneath the surface of society; and I know what a formidable frankness I am exercising now. But it is not a bit ter frankness : it is in the interest of straightforward discussion, and even of peace ; for certainly it is in the interest of peace to let it be known that there are some things which cannot be done in America, and which therefore had better not be attempted! [Applause.] Opening this volume I find not only the boldest violations of historical veracity, but pas sages plainly intended to inflame uneducated read ers: — " In 1619 a small pool in Cambridge became as red as blood: the water being taken up into basins still kept the same color; and many signs were seen in the air, such as armies fighting one against another. In 1666 many Protestants prophesied the downfall of the Pope on the 2d of September; and, on that very day, a dreadful fire broke out in London, and continued burning three days and three nights" (p. 73). " It was not unusual to tear the nails from the fingers of the Catholic prisoners, or to batter the heads of the clergy with •Sticks and stones till their brains were open to view " (p. 38). "Have not the Protestants holiness of doctrine? By no means; for it is well known that their first preachers taught these wicked and abominable doctrines: 'That God is the author of sin; ' ' That man has no free will to enable him to avoid sin; ' ' That it is impossible to observe the command ments ; ' ' That the most enormous crimes do not injure a per son in the sight of God ' " (p. 19). " Must not, then, the Protestant Church, instead of leading men to heaven, infallibly lead them to hell? We certainly have too great reason to apprehend it " (p. 100). " All the saints who are gone to heaven lived and died Ro man Catholics " (p. 55). THE TRINITY A PRACTICAL TRUTH. 37 " Having taken the Devil for his leader, Luther immediately goes to work to pull down the Catholic faith, and build up the Protestant religion. He declares that all the Catholics must be murdered. What! can a man who was mad with lust; who lived in adultery, and caused others to do the same ; who wrote most horrid blasphemy, and corrupted the Bible; who was a notorious drunkard, and companion of devils; who was as proud as Satan himself, a preacher of sedition and murder, — what! can this wretch be compared with Christ and Paul? If this man is a Protestant saint, pray what are their sinners? " (pp. 63, 64.) " Miracles are wrought in the Catholic Church. We know for certain that she comes from God; for no church can do the miracles which she doth, except God be with her. John iii. 2 " (p. 81). If you please, gentlemen, this delicious food for the young has been distributed upon Deer Island in plentiful meals. The book is entitled " A Sure Way to find out the True Religion," 'and is published by Patrick Donahoe of Boston. You will not be sur prised to learn, that, after the character of this volume was found out, it was expelled from Deer Island by order of the chairman of the Board of Directors in charge there. [Applause.] Ought an American prison to have two chaplains, one Romish and one Protestant, both paid by the State ? A law has been passed in Massachusetts by which it is provided that freedom of conscience shall be guaranteed to all inmates of penal institutions. This is a very ambiguous law, and one that was in tended, I suppose, to be ambiguous ; at least, it was engineered through the State House by E. D. Wins- low, a very ambiguous man. [Applause.] There is 38 ORTHODOXY. in that uewest legislation no abrogating clause. I am assured by legal authority that the old law stands; and the old law provided in a very sensible way that there should be but. one chaplain in one institution. Ask men who have had experience in this matter, and they will tell you that two chaplains under one roof make trouble. The practice of Massachusetts for generations has been to put but one chaplain under one roof; and there is no marked popular demand for the change of that practice. The old law was such that you could appoint a man of any sect chaplain in a penal institution. The demand often is secretly made, and in a letter lately published by a representative Romanist . (" Daily Advertiser," March 22, 1877) it is publicly made in Boston, as it frequently has been in New York and Cincinnati, that in each penal institution there should be two chaplains, after the manner of Austria or France ; and of course the implication is, that in America, as in Europe, both should be paid by the State. Yield to that demand, and you will have a division of your public criminal fund. What will come after that ? The proposed change means a demand for the division of your school fund. It means a demand for the division of your church fund. It means a demand for the division of your eleemosynary fund. Depart from the American prin ciple, that all sects shall pay their own bills, and you will be obliged to face all these questions that have given so much trouble in those countries where there are State churches. THE TRINITY A PRACTICAL TRUTH. 39 Of what value is it to tell Americans that two chaplains, each paid by the State, are commonly found in each penal institution in Austria, and France, and Germany, and England? There are State churches in thos"e countries. We have no State church here. There is not the slightest finan cial connection between State and Church here. We aid no denomination by funds out of the public treasury. Romish ecclesiastics want their chaplains paid by the State. They must learn that they are not in Austria, France, Prussia, or England. America means that all religious sects, Romanists in cluded, shall pay their own bills. To demand that a sectarian chaplain or schoolmaster be paid by the State, is to act against the whole spirit of American law. Ought American policy on this point to be aban doned for European, for the sake of improving prison discipline ? Let us be assured that there are several things in America besides prison discipline which the Romish power desires to improve. What will be the result of granting to one sect State aid ? Has the sect which asks such exceptional assistance been exceptionally efficient in preventing ignorance, pauperism, and crime ? Are a majority of our con victs Romish? If that fact at first sight seems to favor the appointment of Romish chaplains paid by the State, has it not at second sight a look which hints at a truth pointing in quite an opposite direc tion ? We must face all the facts, and I see the force of the few vastly outweighed considerations that may be urged in favor of the European plan. Of 40 ORTHODOXY. course, prisoners like best the religious instruction to which they have been accustomed ; but all infelici ties on that point can be removed from prison disci pline without sectarian legislation. I am not making objection to Romish priests at Charlestown appearing there, and being of solace to Romish convicts. My proposition is, that we had better not depart from the American principle that all religious sects, Roma nists included, must pay their own bills. [Applause.] I object to a division of State funds among secta rian State chaplains, and this because the precedent would be the entering wedge for a sectarian division of the school fund. Of course I expect no credit for advocating that proposition until about fifty years hence. I speak for to-morrow, and not for to-day. Are Romish children in Romish schools, and Rom ish convicts under Romish chaplains, to have books of this sort put into their hands by State money? It is perfectly pertinent for Massachusetts to ask whether Bismarck was right in saying that the saddest sight he saw was this misleading of the uneducated by the monstrous claim that all history is against Protestantism and in favor of Romanism, and by in citing the prejudices and inflaming the passions of the uneducated. Is it not a thing to be punctured as a bubble not of a glittering sort, — the claim made by Romish leaders that the Protestant Bible is no Bible at all ? The scholarship of the world has ridiculed this claim for the last three hundred years. It is admitted that strenuous objection had been made THE TRINITY A PRACTICAL TRUTH. 41 to the circulation of Protestant Bibles among the Catholic convicts yonder under the shadow of Bun ker Hill ; and the astounding assertion is put forward that the Protestant Bible is no Bible at all. (See " Advertiser," letter of Mr. Tuckerman, March 22.) Such a statement as that is for the uneducated, and not for the intelligent masses. What, then, is the outcome of this question? American policy and papal policy differ. It is sus ceptible of the most exact documentary proof, that the troubles we are on the edge of about our public schools and penal institutions are substantially the result of the conflict between Romish canon law and American national law. When a bishop in the Romish Church takes the oath of his office, the act, as Bismarck and Gladstone understand well, is by no means a mere form, but it makes Romish ecclesiasti- cism — I do not speak of the Catholic masses — a compact organization indisputably owing its first allegiance to a power on the banks of the Tiber. The following is the oath of allegiance to the Pope, taken by every archbishop and bishop, and by all who are elevated to positions of official dignity by the Pope : — "I, N., elect of the Church of N., from henceforward will be faithful and obedient to St. Peter the Apostle, and to the Holy Roman Church, and to our Lord, the Lord N., Pope N., and to his successors canonically entering. ... I will help them to defend and keep the Roman Papacy, and the royalties of St. Peter, saving my order against all men. . . . The rights, honors, privileges, and authority of the Holy Roman Church, of 42 ORTHODOXY. our Lord the Pope, and his aforesaid successors, I will endeavor to preserve, defend, increase, and advance. . . . Heretics, schis matics, and rebels to our said Lord, or his aforesaid successors, I will to my utmost persecute and oppose. ... I will, by myself in person, visit the threshold of the Apostles every three years, and give an account to our Lord and his aforesaid successors of aU my pastoral office, and of all things anywise belonging to the state of my church, to the discipline of my clergy and people, and lastly to the salvation of souls committed to my trust; and will in like manner humbly receive and diligently execute the apostolic commands" (Dowling's History of Romanism, pp. 615, 616. See also Thompson, E. W., The Papacy and the Civil Power, p. 717). Gentlemen, the order of the Romish priesthood is an historical body of which it is trite to say that its organization is astonishingly perfect, and that its power in the cities of America is not likely to dimin ish speedily if left without check from enlightened public sentiment. These swarming ecclesiastics do not carry weight in the race of life; they are bachelors, and bachelors are dangerous men in the world. They have nothing to do but to attend to their public duties. It is therefore something. worth remembering, that all these detached priests among the nations, or the fingers on every continent, are attached to one palm and one wrist ; and that this is the power on the Tiber. I wish to draw a wide distinction between Romish citizens and Romish ecclesiastics. There is nothing sure, if it is not cer tain that the allegiance of the Romish ecclesiastics is not first national, but first papal. First a Catholic, next a German: that has been the secret watch- THE TRINITY A PRACTICAL TRUTH. 43 wor»d of the Ultramontane party in Germany in the last ten years. That has been the political creed which Bismarck has been ready to contradict at the cannon's mouth. First an Englishman, or first a Catholic ? First a Romanist, or first an American ? That is the old question which has been debated ever since the time of Philip the Fair. Pope Boniface wrote to Philip the Fair of France, when France was really more Protestant than now, this letter : " Pope Boniface to Philip the Fair, sends greeting: O Supreme Pontiff, know that thou art subject to us in temporal as well as spiritual tilings." Philip the Fair replied, " Philip to Boniface, little or no greeting: Know thou, O supreme fool, that in temporal things we are not subject to any one." [Applause.] France echoed the scorn of Philip the Fair to the claim to universal temporal power on the part of the Pope, but to-day she is under the control of the Ultramontane party. Germany^ stands now where Philip the Fair stood ; but it was by a vote of only one, that great, rich Romish Bavaria decided to help Prussia in the war of 1871 against France. One hundred and ninety millions of the human race are yet pacing to and fro in the snows of Canossa. On this distant shore sometimes, when we make ourselves not unduly sensitive, and watch all that passes in cities, the air is chill. Let the schools never be made sectarian. Let the school fund not be divided. Let there be no State Church. [Ap plause.] But give us two State chaplains, and pay each out of the State fund, and soon we shall 44 ORTHODOXY. have a demand for two State schoolmasters to be paid out of the State fund. After that precedent, there will be a clamor for State eleemosynary institu tions. Will not the pauper as well as the criminal be better off under the direction of his own religious denomination? Will not the pupil improve faster when directed by a teacher of his own religious faith? We must face the whole question of the division of the school fund if we are to face that of the division of the criminal fund among chaplains of various faiths in penal institutions. It is perfectly futile to affirm that there is no line to be drawn, because at the moment you cannot put your finger down, and say precisely where the line ought to be drawn. Somewhere between the thin end of the papal American wedge and the thick or Maximihan end, the line ought to be drawn, and will be drawn. My impression is, that we never shall divide the school fund. [Applause.] THE LECTURE. Charles 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 rea son. I want to be sure that God cares for us, that God is our Father, that God has interfered, stooped, sacrificed himself for us. I do not merely want to love Christ, — a Christ, some creation or emanation of God's, whose will and character, for aught I know, THE TRINITY A PRACTICAL TRUTH. 45 may be different from God's. I want to love and honor 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 counter part of Him in whom we live and move and have our being. I say boldly, if the doctrine of the Trin ity 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 theologi cal essays ; addressed to Unitarians ? (See Maurice, F. D., Professor of Moral Philosophy in the Univer sity of Cambridge, Theological Essays, pp. 410-441.) If not, you must read it " (Charles Kjngsley, Let ters and Memories of his Life, 1877, Am. ed., p. 198). 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 more " (Ibid., p. 357). 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 " only in faith and love to the Incarnate God our Saviour, can the cleverest, as well as the simplest, find the 46 ORTHODOXY. peace of God, which passes understanding." " 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 aH night, had left him, and he thought himself alone, he was heard, in a clear voice, ^repeating the Burial Service : " Thou knowest, O Lord, the secrets of our hearts; shut not Thy merciful ears to our prayer, but spare us, O Lord most holy, O God most mighty, O holy, merciful Saviour, Thou most worthy Judge Eternal, suffer us not, at our. last hour, from any pains of death, to fall from Thee." He turned on his side after this, and never spoke again (Ibid., pp. 481, 482). This modern martyr, who passed hence at the age of fifty-five, died as martys 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 per suaded that teaching which has survived the buffet- ings of eighteen hundred years, and has been to such THE TRINITY A PRACTICAL TRUTH. 47 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 Orthodoxy 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 organiz ing 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 Roman Empire shook off its belief in the fatalism of Paganism by learning the doctrine of the Trinity. Incontrovertibly, 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. Histori cally, 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 dif ferent circumstances of individual growth, has exhib ited a power ever fresh, and has yet been the same from the time when the apostolic benediction was pronounced in the Triune name to the last anthem that rolled around the world in that same name. (See Huntington, Bishop, " Christian Believing and Living," pp. 359-361.) With the goodly company 48 ORTHODOXY. 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 Athanasius and Tholuck, with Fenelon and Knox, with Augustine and An- selm, with Calvin and Wesley, with Luther and Bos- suet, with Bull and Baxter, Horsley and Howe, Pearson, Newman, Pascal, Cudworth, Wolf, Butler, Tauler and Hopkins, Waterland, Edwards, Sherlock and Dwight, Park and Neander ; with Nice, Trent, Augsburg, Westminster, Edinburgh, Leipzig, Berlin, Princeton, New Haven, and Andover, shall not Bos ton say, Let the anthem roll on ? [Applause.] It is amazing to me that any one can have con sidered my definition of the Trinity as Unitarian. A man whom I honor, and whose candor every one honors, is reported ("Daily Advertiser," March 26, outline of the Rev. James Freeman Clarke's discourse, March 25) to ' have said publicly, that the view presented here two weeks ago is "almost identical" with his own ; and is such 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. [Applause.] What is the definition which this Lectureship has presented ? 1. The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are one and only one God. THE TRINITY A PRACTICAL TRUTH. 49 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 in this city I met, a few days ago, a scholar whom I suppose to be the best authority in America in early ecclesiastical history. 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." Two days ago, on the street, I met a theologian whose knowledge of the relations of Christian truth to phi losophy seems to me to be unequalled in this country. 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 made this affirmation twice or thrice ; 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 defi nition or its equivalent, and you will find that the storm of the future will be." But, gentlemen, it is not by authority that I desire to buttress up any definition. It is not a definition that I wish to give, but a life. In the hushed atmosphere of religious science, we invite hither no breath of the unsanctified north wind which has too often blighted Eastern Massachusetts on holy themes. Let a fasci nating devoutness lock hands with a fascinating 50 ORTHODOXY. 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 eaduceus of Mercury of old ; and even then we shall not be ready to study religious scienoe, unless we have, as Mercury had, on feet and shoulders, the wings of the Spirit to enable us to fly whithersoever the Spirit calls. [Applause.] There are seven .tests which any definition of the Trinity must meet. It must not be modalistic nor unintelligible ; it must not be tritheistic nor Unita rian , it must not be a contradiction in terms nor un- historical ; and, above all, it must not be unscriptural. [Applause.] The definition given here is not modalistic; that is, it does not represent God as simply three mani festations, nor yet as three modes of being, consid ered 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. Does Mr. Clarke assert that ? I hope he does. [Applause.] 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. THE TRINITY A PRACTICAL TRUTH. 51 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 Father had never existed, God would not be God. So, too, Socrates, with tthe Father and Son, or with the Son and Holy Spirit, or with the Father and Holy Spirit, is not God. But Christ, with the other two subsistencesj 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 attrib uted to these loftiest of the human sort? Mr. Clarke, I have been told, thinks all that is in my definition. I do not see that there ; for, according to this definition, Socrates with the Father and • Son, or with the Son and Holy Spirit, or with the Father and Holy Spirit, is not God. Let us perfectly un derstand 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, ac cording to this definition, as God was in Christ, so he was in Socrates. But in the name of clear thought you 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 concerning it assertions parallel io these. 52 ORTHODOXY. 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. But Christ, with the other two subsistences, is God. It is therefore futile to charge this definition with being modalistic. 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 gesthetics, a list from Socrates to Christ, and so on, until, when the vexed catalogue of merely human beings becomes confessedly rather unimpor tant, you read in the discussions of some that the future is to be drawn on? "We have not quite THE TRINITY A PRACTICAL TRUTH. 53 equalled Him who spake as never man spoke ; but we shall ! Better things are coining ! " How shock ing 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 was in him in a thoroughly exceptional man ner ; 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 ex ceptionally 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. Take that, as re-enforced by the testimony of the ages to His work in the world, and perhaps you will not be at a loss for reasons for changing your word " divinity " into " deity X if you are logical. [Applause.] Leib nitz said that those who deny the Deity of our Lord, and yet pray to him, may be good men, but that surely they are not good logicians. [Applause.] - The definition is not unintelligible, for the incom municable peculiarity is defined by several very dis tinct 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 propo sitions rapidly. The ages of discussion make it 54 ORTHODOXY. necessary that I should be cautious; they make it unnecessary that I should be prolix. 1. The peculiarity of each subsistence is incommu nicable. 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 Redeemer 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 every thing 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? Read your Mansel, your Hamilton, your Kant, and your Lotze, on the rela tions of attribute to substance. Can 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 TRINITY A PRACTICAL TRUTH. 55 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 I If God were perfectly explicable to a finite being, he would not be God. Merely on account of any mystery left in this por tion 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 eigh teen centuries of good fruits. We know some things, although we do not know all things, about the char acter of the subsistences. Nobody ever pretended to know all the facts about either of them. Moses Stuart used to refuse with emphasis all appeals to him to define the words "person," "distinction," " subsistence." He held the doctrine of the Trinity most emphatically ; but, beyond the truths now enu merated, it is unscriptural, and it is clearly unphilo- sophical, 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 how it is. A self-contradiction is the inconsistency of a proposi tion with itself or with its own implications. If there is in the doctrine of the Trinity a self-contradiction, we must throw its propositions overboard in the name of learning and of clear thought. But, if there 56 ORTHODOXY. 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 how it grows. 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 ap pear 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. i [Applause.] — The definition is not tritheistic; for, 1. It asserts that the Father, 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. The 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 Father sends the Son, and that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, some portion of the action involved in these events may THE TRINITY A PRACTICAL TRUTH. 57 not be 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 that 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 subsistences, — you will be asserting only what is affirmed in the second 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 schol arship for the last fifteen hundred years, the proposi tion that there are in God three persons in a strict, colloquial, literal, modern, English, American, Boston sense. [Applause.] 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 parlor, you assume that these persons are individuals in a species ; and my reply is that there is no species of Gods outside of polytheism. There is nothing of the sort known to either scriptural or scientific truth. No 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. [Applause.] But it is 58 ORTHODOXY. not stupidity, it is not incautiousness, which causes Orthodoxy to use the word person sometimes. She is always speaking Latin when she uses that word intelligently. She employs it as a technical term, because it has been in the creeds of the Church fifteen 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 forever 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 or a prop erty incommunicable to the others, and each, with the others, God. For three hundred years the defi nition I have been putting before you, or its equiva lent, 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 per sonality, as the word is understood on the street and in the parlor, does not belong to the idea of the three subsistencies in 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 substance. It is the immemorial teaching of religious science, THE TRINITY A PRACTICAL TRUTH. 59 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, colloquial sense of that word. When the popular is substituted for the technical meaning of this term, men who have little time for thought on the subject are eonfused, and led to suppose that you are teaching self-con tradictions, 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. Here in Eastern Massachusetts, on the battle-fields of Unitarianism 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 sub stances; three distinctions, each with a peculiarity incommunicable to the others; but not three wills, not three sets of affections, not three intellects. Such, however, is the force of the proposition that each substance has a peculiarity incommunicable to the others, that I am not unwilling to affirm that in the whole range of activities involved in God's con nection 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 may be, for aught we know, different from those belonging to either of the 60 ORTHODOXY. other subsistences." Others say, ""Some attributes differ." Yet others affirm, " Properties differ." But the word which has been used here is "peculiarity." Why do 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 be fogged by merely philosophical difficulties. "All attributes," "some attributes," "property," "pecul iarity," — that last is the word employed in the defi nition used here, and the word which I believe will bear not only the microscope and the scalpel of phi losophy, but the blaze of the infinity of Biblical truth. [Applause.] Have there not been teachers who have held that there are three wills in God ? Yes. Have there not been in New 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 Judasa for our Lord, and into heaven for the Father, and into the space between the earth and heaven for the vague some what 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 thinking of our Lord as if he were at this hour in Gethsemane, or on the Mount of THE TRINITY A PRACTICAL TRUTH. 61 Olives, or walking on the shore of Galilee; and of the Father as among the constellations; and of the Holy Spirit as shed down on us from the in finite spaces : three wills, three intellects, three sets of affections? You may regard such Christians ten derly ; but, for one, I regard them tenderly enough to wish that they might be both more Biblical and more scientific. [Applause.] Notice the mood of , this audience, which is made up of men in whose ' presence I speak with bated breath, and which I has assembled in a city that has heard, I suppose, more on this theme than any other _pne" city on_the I globe, except old Rome or Alexandria. 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 discus sions that divided God's house in Eastern Massachu- ] setts. The time has come for antagonistic beliefs to attend to each other's definitions, and not to each other's defamations. [Applause.] Seriousness in speech or print usually spends its time more profit ably than in gymnastic boxing. Shall we not in the transfigured mood of Boston at this hour call our selves into God'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 Father ? Let us- grasp the trans figuring 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 62 ORTHODOXY. us of God's moral attributes than external nature is or can be. Christ is the rainbow, or unravelled light. and the Father is the white light ; and we must look on the seven colors 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 us 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 Judaea for one part of His life, we must beware how we look there, as Stephen and Paul did not, for the whole of it or 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 white light falls, the rainbow falls potentially. The luminousness, the color, and the heat, Father, 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 is, and 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 considering 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 Nature ; but that does not make Nature or Christ God, but only manifestations of him." THE TRINITY A PRACTICAL TRUTH. 63 Here are two meanings in the one word " nature," a term that has behind it the most mischievous ambi guity, and is perhaps the least innocent bewildering 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 Intelligence and Choice which is behind all natural law, we do worship the God revealed by the Oldest Testament, or the Nature of Things. [Applause.] 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 (see Clarke, Orthodoxy, p. 508) that there was no doctrine of the Trinity until after this date. Is it affirmed that we must worship God in con science ? What do you mean by conscience ? The human part of the intuitive moral sense, or that divine Somewhat pr Some One who is revealed by the moral law, and is in us, but not of us ? If you mean the latter, we do, in the name of every text in the Oldest and the Old, the Newest and the New Tes tament, worship it as " the light that Hghteth every man that cometh into the world." [Applause.] But of that' light we read that in the beginning it was with God, and was God. To worship God as in all natural law is not to) 64 ORTHODOXY. 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 Fate. The old polytheists made Necessity the highest God. Un doubtedly, fixed law is, from one point of view, a revelation of the highest force in the universe ; and it becomes us, as stern cultivators of science, to reve rence this quite measurelessly important fact. But what the old Greek at Delphi regarded as fate, we have come to regard as the unchanging, because per fectly 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. If that self-evident truth is not a part of the nature of things, what is ? [Applause.] The Oldest Testa ment is fearfully orthodox. [Applause.] We know that there can be but one best way, for best is a superlative word, and admits no comparison; and that this one best way Omnipotence and Omniscience will choose and adhere to. Therefore, in the eterni ties and infinities governed by a perfect Will, there will appear to be fate; but there will be there in reality only the completely wise and holy, and there fore unchanging, ehoice of Almighty God. Your Oldest Testament says the nature of things is with out variableness or shadow of turning. But when your New and your Newest Testament speak of the THE TRINITY A PRACTICAL TRUTH. 65 Father 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 impossibilities existing in a Perfect Nature. Mr. Clarke says that " Christianity teaches not the sovereignty of the nature of things, but the sove reignty of the divine love ; " and another liberal critic has affirmed, that, if God be such a Being as the New Testament represents him to be, he will make short work with the nature of things. What astounding confusion of thought is this, and what misunderstand ing of the Oldest Testament and the Old, the Newest and the New ! God make short work with the nature of things ! What is the nature of things ? By defi nition it is the total outcome of the Divine perfec tions. God make short work with his own infinite justice and holiness, his own intellectual excellence, and with all that is implied 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 66 ORTHODOXY. short work with the nature of things ? God a suicide? These phrases mean the same thing. It will be of importance for you and me to have no war with the nature of things until the day when God ceases to be God. The definition is in no sense Unitarian ; for 1. It asserts the Deity of our Lord. There is no form of Unitarianism which 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 as sert that God is one in the same sense in which he is three, nor three in the same sense in which he is one. It is not unhistorical ; for it presents a view of the Trinity consistent with all the greatest symbols in use in the Church for fifteen hundred years. It is not unscriptural. In the celebrated discus sions between Unitarianism and Trinitarianism 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 defini tion of it. No one has ever shown that the Scrip tural passages Moses Stuart adduced do not have the meaning he attributed to them. (See Stuart, Professor, Letters to Channing.') We are assured by the scientific method, that in no page of that portion of the volume of the uni verse which is open to us, is there any light we can THE TRINITY A PRACTICAL TRUTH. 67 spare. Science and practical life alike require that j 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. Contemplated closely, a Trinity is found to be the Trinity. Ex ternal Nature, History, and Conscience reveal God as Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier, and yet as one. 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 worlds in its bosom. But some would build negations above our heads into an obstructing dome, and confine us to a fragmentary view of the Divine Nature. There are two kinds of Unitarian ism. One looks through but a single window vividly, and sees from it well only God the Father. In this view there is a simplicity which is pleasing to many. For a time it may be a devout view, especially in mod ern days with full Christianity behind them and pour ing through them, and in these yet early New Eng land years, with Plymouth Rock and all the genera tions since our fathers landed, to give moods of de- voutness to the generation now passing off the stage. There are wants of life, however, which no one quar ter 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 68 ORTHODOXY. fourth generation, a want of vigor, 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 Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, as one undivided heaven of equal height at every point of its pulsating, fathomless azure, whose light and color and heat, although three subsistences, are one substance, and you have God's Unitarianism. [Applause.] [After a doxology had been rendered by the organ, the audience rose, and Mr. Cook said,] A question has been put into my hands, which I will answer on the spot : " How do you reply to Mr. Clarke's objection that the ' peculiarity ' of each ' subsistence ' is either something imperfect, or something perfect? If the latter, then each ' subsistence ' lacks a perfec tion: if the former, the consequence is obvious." The reply is, that the definition asserts that neither subsistence taken alone is God. Each subsistence taken by itself, and wholly without the others, is imperfect in that sense. The three taken together are God; and to the idea of Unity thus defined such an objection is not applicable at all. m. THE TEINITY, THE lAETYE'S FAITH. the seventy-second lecture in the boston monda y lectureship, delivered in tremont temple april 2. Cum ictibus ungularum concussa fortius latera sulcarentur pro- fluensque sanguinis unda violentis tractibus emanaret, Proconsulem sibi dicentem audivit : Incipies sentire quae vos pati oporteat. Et adjecit : Adgloriam. Gratias ago Deo regnorum. Apparet regnum seternum, regnum incorxuptum. Domine Jesu Christe, Christiani sumus ; Tibi servimus ; Tu es spes nostra ; Tu es spes Christia- norum ; . Deus sanctissime ; Deua altissime ; Deus omnipotens." — Rdxnaet, Acta, p. 340. " Christianorum est etiam deum mortuum credere, et tamen vi- ventum in sbvo sevorum." — TKBTtrmAir, Adv. Marc, 11, 16. m. THE TRINITY, THE MARTYR'S FAITH PRELUDE ON CURRENT EVENTS. In the city of Edinburgh the American evangelists who are now in Boston never had a hall that would seat over fifteen hundred. They reached the Scot tish metropolis Nov. 22, 1873, and left it Jan. 21, 1874. They have now been here as long as they were in Edinburgh. It will always be incontrovert ible, that a structure which holds from six thou sand to seven thousand people has been opened in Boston for religious audiences, and that week after week for 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 Francisco, 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 propriety .say publicly, that their opinion is that in n 72 ORTHODOXY. Boston the average result of their work has been better than it was in Edinburgh. Both the evangel ists have expressed, with detailed reasons and empha sis, that opinion to me; and neither of them has asked me to state the opinion publicly. Harvard and Yale each strenuously opposed George Whitefield, and each now regrets its 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 indorsement of the general character of the religious work now being performed in this city ? This indorsement 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 reli gious 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 Univer sity of Edinburgh was. When Phillips Brooks ap pears in the Tabernacle, the culture of Boston and the students of Harvard are there. Of course Harvard University differs from Edinburgh University in its religious attitude; and for that fact there are rea sons, prolonged, historic, adequate, but, thank God, of waning force ! When James VI. was sixteen years of age, in 1582, Edinburgh University was founded ; and it was fed from the Scottish universi ties of St. Andrews and Glasgow, which began their THE TRINITY, THE MARTYR'S FAITH. 73 stalwart career before America was discovered. Uni versity life in Scotland had venerableness when Har vard 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, there fore ; but Harvard one day will be wise under that law. [Applause.] Are there any points of superiority in this religious awakening to that which occurred in Boston in the days of Whitefield ? It must be admitted that there are some points of inferiority, but are there any of superiority ? We are a larger and more heterogene ous community now than we were then ; we are fuller of commercial activity ; our heads are io newspapers and ledgers, and not as the heads and hearts of the early New England fathers were, in the Holy Scrip tures. Nevertheless it was a temporarily demoral ized community which Whitefield and Edwards addressed. A practical union of Church and State had so secularized religious society, that it had sunk farther away from Scriptural and scientific ideals than such society in New England has since 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 reli gious 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's day, many circles of the New England population 74 ORTHODOXY. 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 hun dred 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 con secrated to the work of sending religious truths abroad through the newspaper press. All the lead ing and all the respectable newspapers of Boston have favored the revival. [Applause.] It is well, my friends, that you should give encouragement to the hardest-worked class in your community, the reporters. Not only day and night, but day inside of day, and night inside of night, making two hours out of every one, these men are obliged to follow with lightning speed the demands of the press for copy — of what? Of the dullest of all things on earth to report, — sermons. [Applause.] English, German, and French travellers say very suggestively, that the characteristic of American newspaper man- THE TRINITY, THE MARTYR'S FAITH. 75 agement, as distinguished from European, is that we are willing to print sermons copiously on Monday mornings. No doubt it pays to publish such dis courses ; but I am not one of those who think that the critics are right who judge acutely that Mr. Sankey's chief motive in life is to sell a great number of his song-books and organs. Neither am I of the opinion that all the space the daily newspaper press gives to religious truth is the result of a whisper from the counting-room. Let us be just to the cor porations that manage our newspapers, and not accuse them of being altogether mercenary. No doubt counting-rooms are sometimes hung around the necks of editors, as millstones around the necks of babes in the waves ; and it takes a giant like Horace Greeley to be at once a reformer and an editor. It is easier for the platform than for the press to speak for to morrow against the dissent of to-day. The best part of our press, however, not only mirrors but leads public sentiment, and speaks for to-morrow against the rivalry of the poorer part of both plat form and press, which speak only for to-day. En courage all speakers for to-morrow. [Applause.] In the next place, it deserves to be mentioned, that religious visitation from house to house, and espe cially among the perishing and degraded, is now going forward in a hopefully thorough manner in Boston. Gentlemen, I hold in my hands a statement commu nicated to me officially ; and 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 76 ORTHODOXY. among the poor. The list of streets and lanes given to these workers was made out by Sampson and Dav enport, the publishers of the city Directory. In no other population has there been a more effective ar rangement 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 churches has appointed gentlemen to oversee the work undertaken by his particular church; for instance, on Beacon Hill, in the Mount Vernon Church, where our American evangelist heard the truth effectively for the first time from the lips of the now sainted Kirk, men like Nazro and Merriam are appointed on this business. Is there any one with head or heart shallow enough to sneer at such proceedings ? You will sneer, then, at the best ex ecutive talent of Boston. [Applause.] There are seventy thousand families within the limits of Bos ton, and there have been workers appointed to cover sixty-five thousand of these families. In Boston I include Charlestown, East Boston, South Boston, Dorchester, Roxbury, and Brighton. We are to look on this work as performed by picked men and women. There is no quarter of this city so de graded by unreportable vice that it is not being vis ited by women ; lineal descendants, no doubt, of those whom Tacitus says our German forefathers honored as recipients of special illumination from heaven. THE TRINITY, THE MARTYR'S FAITH. -77 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 re ligious truth, but for those who are nominally inside of that circle, and are yet inefficient. Nothing quick ens a man like trying to quicken another. If there is one measure in which our American evangelist has. shown his generalship more effectively than any where else, it is in setting men to work, and in so setting them to work as to set them on fire. [Ap plause.] But, gentlemen, 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 last week, 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 Newburyport, and Salem, and Boston, and Worcester, and Spring field, to Hartford ; and all along I had evidence by conversation, and by looking at the local papers, that these business-men's meetings in Boston are visible from the Androscoggin, and from the Connecti cut. You- have in this Temple a very interesting 78 ORTHODOXY. 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 mar ket, for men in the fish trade, for newspaper men, for all classes, indeed, of our throbbing, tumultuous, breathless, business community. This, if you will notice the fact, is Boston. When I stated on this platform 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 incre dulity ; but the public did. That poor prophecy has been fulfilled, and we have a month more for work. [Applause.] If you please, the times are serious; and light sneers will do no good now, 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 yesterday morning, to give an Easter discourse. As I passed up the street, I met a deluge, not of rain, such as has diminished the audiences in the Tabernacle occasionally, — the month of March is a great enemy to large assemblies, — but a crowd of people emerging from I did not at first think where, until I remembered that the Tabernacle ser vice had just closed. They covered acres, and came on in thousands, like the crowds of a gala-day. - noticed their faces ; for the best test of what has been done in a religious address, in any assembly, is to study the countenances of the audience as it dis perses. If you see a softened, an ennobled, a " solar THE TRINITY, THE MARTYR'S FAITH. 79 look," to use one of the phrases of Bronson Alcott [turning to Mr. Alcott, who sat at the speaker's right], 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 some times 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. [Applause.] There is a low-bred, loaferish liberal ism, 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. [Applause.] There are many kinds of liberalism. Christian liberalism I honor ; literary and aesthetic liberalism is to be spoken of with re spect, 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 scholarship; rattles, but no fangs. [Applause.] 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 Memo rial Hall stand near each other, "par nobile fra- trum." On a bulletin on the Paine Hall, the street in front of which looked deserted, I read : " Chil- 80 ORTHODOXY. dren's Progressive Lyceum Entertainment this even ing ; " " The Origin and Amusements of the Ortho dox Hell ; " " Twenty-ninth Anniversary of Modern Spiritualism, April 1." [Laughter and applause.] Passing by the Parker Memorial Hall, where, no doubt, words of good sense have been uttered occa sionally, I found in the window this statement : " To-night, a lecture on the Arctic Regions, with a stereopticon and seventy views." Gentlemen, 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 with out 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 name yesterday ; in two hundred languages of the world, the gospel was preached to the poor yesterday. | What is our impecunious scepticism doing here? THE TRINITY, THE MARTYR'S FAITH. 81 Has it ever printed a book that has commanded permanent intellectual respect? Theodore Parker's collected works never went into a second edition. I do not know of a single infidel book over a hundred years old that has not been put on the upper neglected shelf by scholars. Boston must compare her achieve ments with those of cities outside of America, and take her chances under the bufferings of time. Where is there in Boston any thing in the shape of scepticism I that will bear the microscope ? For one, I solemnly aver that I do not know where, and I have nothing j else to do but search. Theodore Parker is the best sceptic you ever had ; but, to me, he is honeycombed through and through with disloyalty to the very na ture of things, — his supreme authority. [Applause.] It was asserted not long ago, in an obscure sceptical newspaper here, that Parker's works ought to be forced into a second edition by his friends. It was admitted that there was no demand for a second edition ; but it was thought, that, if now there was an effort made strategetically, 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 repre sented only by a few people, who, deficient in religious activity, and forgetting the law of the survival of the fittest, are distinguished far more by audacity than by scholarship, and are members of a long line in history, of which Gallio stood at the head. 82 ORTHODOXY. Let me mention as a fourth prominent trait in this revival, the great effort made for temperance. We have done more in that particular than was done 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, as he said yesterday, "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 amaze ment 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. Macaulay said, concerning literary excel lence,- that we were to measure success hot by abso lute, but by relative standards. Matching his own history against the seventh book of Thucydides, he was always humble; but, matching it 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 opportu nities, 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 THE TRINITY, THE MARTYR'S FAITH. 83 founded by the opponents of God's word, and we are encouraged. [Applause.] Our opportunity in the second New England is greater than that of our fathers was in the first New England. Let us act as the memory of our fathers dictates. New England, the Mississippi Valley, the Pacific coast, Scotland, England, always know whether or not Boston does her duty. A power not of man is in this hushed air. Who will 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 ? [Applause.] 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 has enriched the earth with flowers and trees." — " Dost thou mean," asked the magistrates, "Him who was crucified?" (ilium dicis qui crucifixus est.) " Certainly," replied Pionius ; " Him whom the Father sent for the salva tion of the world." (Ruinart, Acta, p. 125. See Liddon's Bampton Lectures, p. 409.) As Pionius died, so died Blandina and the whole host of those who in the first three centuries, without knowing any thing of the Nicene Creed, held it implicitly, if not explicitly, and proclaimed it in flames and in dun geons, in famine and in nakedness, under the rack and under the sword. On the ^Egean Sea, under the shadow of the Acrop- 84 ORTHODOXY. olis, 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, we own." (See original in Routh's Reliqum Sacrm, iii. , p. 515.) 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 Excelsis and the Ter Sanc- tus, which yesterday rolled around the world, were written in the second century, to pay absolutely di vine honors to our Lord. When I open the best book which unevangelical Christianity ever printed in Boston, — James Free- Iman Clarke's Truths and Errors about Orthodoxy — no ! " Truths and Errors of Orthodoxy," but the first would have been a better title [applause], — I read: "Down to the time of the Synod of Nice, Anno Domini 325, no doctrine of Trinity existed in the Church" (p. 508). Will that statement bear the microscope of historical science? If it will, I wish to believe it, and to reject every thing inconsistent with it. THE TRINITY, THE MARTYR'S FAITH. 85 But I hold in my hands this Greek vesper-hymn and this Ter Sanctus and this Gloria in Excel- sis, written in the second century. What do they mean? The dying words* of martyrs for three cen turies are all in harmony with the present faith of the Christian world. . 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 : Ab aliis Serapidem, ab aliis adorari Christum. (Apud Lamprld, in Vita Alex. Severi). About A.D. 165 Lucian says : " The Christians are still worshipping that great man who was crucified in Palestine" (Be Morte Perigrini, c. 11). Remember Pliny's explicit official letter to Tra jan, 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 them selves by a sacrament to abstain from evil of every kind (Pliny, Ep., lib. x. Ep. 97). The Ter Sanctus and the Gloria in Excelsis show us what meaning to put upon Pliny's words, Carmenque Christo, quasi Beo. Calvisianus said to the martyr Euplius, "Pay wor ship to Mars, Apollo, and Esculapius." Euplius re plied, " 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 " (Rulnart, Acta, p. 362). 86 ORTHODOXY. The followers of Artemon maintained that the doc trine of the Trinity was brought into the Church at a late day. A writer quoted by Eusebius observed in reply, that the psalms and the 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 (Eusebius, Hist. Eccl., v. 28). Is it true, my friends, 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 ? Follow up the unimpeached record, and you will find it beyond controversy that the first three cen turies 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 pos sessed 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 omnipresent in natural law. 5. These must be regarded as the most practical THE TRINITY, THE MARTYR'S FAITH. 87 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. Gentlemen, 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 re nowned now, and is to be more and more renowned as the centuries roll on, as that of the Apostolic Fa thers. I hold in my hand the first volume of a cele brated series of books (published by T. and T. Clark of Edinburgh), called the " Ante-Nicene Library ; " that is, Christian documents existing before the Nicene Council was called together in 325. I am to read to 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 fifteen hundred years ; and, if any thing 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 de tail, how much is interpolated here, and spurious; but scholarship has been walking over this record until it has found every boggy spot in it ; and I am to have you put your feet now only on a few stepping- 88 ORTHODOXY. stones which infidelity itself considers firm as ada mant, so far as their historical genuineness is con cerned. There is a marvellous church of St. Clement, near the Coliseum, in Rome. You remember the words, "Rejoice always; and again I say, Rejoice" (Phil. iv. 4). In the verse preceding this, St. Paul men tions 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 Cor inth, by one church to admonish another in a majestic age of the world. Clement, the author of this epis tle, 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 (Euse bius, iii. 16). 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 elec tric 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 you, and carefully attending 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 abun dant 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. Full of holy designs, ye did, with true earnest ness of mind, and a godly confidence, stretch forth your hands THE TRINITY, THE MARTYR'S FAITH. 89 to God Almighty, beseeching hi™ 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 num ber of God's elect might be saved with mercy and a good con science" (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 yester day (Lewes, Fausti Scarf), that while it was yet dark Mary Magdalen came to the sepulchre, and the be loved 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 dawn ? Remember what persecution surged around the Church, out of which came these words with a tone that belongs only to spiritual greatness of the first rank: — " Let us set before our eyes the illustrious apostles. Peter, through unrighteous envy, endured not one or two, but numer ous labors ; and, when he had at length suffered martyrdom, de parted 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). 90 ORTHODOXY. 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 glo rious 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 how 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 day 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 ob serve, 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 sub ject, — 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 which 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 THE TRINITY, THE MARTYR'S FAITH. 91 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 the Deity of our Lord, does not the next copiously teach the atone ment? " He himself took on bim the burden of our iniquities: he gave his own Son as a ransom for us, — the holy One for trans gressors, 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 we, the wicked and un godly, could be justified, than by the only Son of God? O sweet exchange! O unsearchable operation! O benefits surpassing all expectation ! 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 in his kindness, to esteem him our Nourisher, Father, Teacher, Counsellor, Healer, our Wisdom, Light, Honor, 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 everlast ing, is to-day called the Son; through whom the Church is en riched, and grace, widely spread, increases in the saints, fur nishing understanding, 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 92 ORTHODOXY. 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 inter est, 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 re cension 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 noth ing 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 reading of antiquity outside the Scriptures, I have never met a passage in prose equal for poetic power to the one I am about to pronounce before you, 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 THE TRINITY, THE MARTYR'S FAITH. 93 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 ar rangements 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, impas sable 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 hinderance. The ever-flowing fountains , formed both for enjoyment and health, furnish without fail their breasts for the Ufe of men. Take heed, beloved, lest his many kind nesses 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 estabUshed 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 wiU. 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 Uving creatures which axe in it, he enclosed them within their proper bounds by his own power. Above aU, with his holy and undefiled hands he formed man " (pp. 30). " How blessed and wonderful, beloved, are the gifts of God! — Ufe in immortaUty, splendor in righteousness, truth in perfect confidence, faith in assurance, self-control in holiness! And aU these faU under the cognizance of understandings (now) ; what, then, shaU those things be which are prepared for such as wait for him? The Creator and Father of aU worlds, the Most Holy alone, knows their amount and their beauty " (pp. 31, 32). 94 ORTHODOXY. Does Concord furnish any thing 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 latest investigation. [Applause.] 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 Rome 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 with any thing inartistic or trivial. I put myself in a carriage, and did not look outside 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 Rome. 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 Sal lust, and Horace and Virgil, and Cato and Seneca, and Nero 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 re membered Mrs. Browning's other words : — " Csesar's work is aU undone; " THE TRINITY, THE MARTYR'S FAITH. 95 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 Forum 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 Richter'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" (Titan). In the azure heights 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 a pres ent 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 more years ago last evening, was breathed upon the disciples with the words, "Receive ye the Holy Ghost." [Ap plause.] IV. THEODOEE PAEKEE'S SELF-CONTEADICTIONS. THE SEVEKTT-THIBD LECTURE IN THE BOSTON MONDAY LEC TURESHIP, DELIVERED IN TBEMONT TEMPLE APRIL 9. " The law of contradiction vindicates itself. It cannot be denied without being assented to." — Feebieb: Ins. of Met. p. 21. " Suht et belli, sicut pacis jura." — Lrvr. IV. THEODORE PARKER'S SELF-CONTRADIC TIONS. PRELUDE ON CURRENT EVENTS. The Spaniards have a proverb which says, "An ounce of mother is worth a pound of clergy." An ounce of conduct is worth a ton of reading. An ounce of self-surrender to truth already possessed is worth a planet's weight of truth not transmuted into deeds. Nevertheless, it is so important to give attention to select reading in the hushed mood of spiritual sensi tiveness, which is the only interpreter of souls in print, that perhaps it is timely in Boston now to recite a list of illumined, cheerful, incisive, stalwart books which may be useful to those who lately have entered a Christian life, and some of which may be come not only food, but muscle. Let us always remember that mental and spiritual food, without work, are not transformed into nerve and muscle; and it is these you want, and not merely food. Work after food makes strength ; and food without work makes — what shall we say? A plethoric, overfed, luxurious, uneasy Christianity, an object of pity to 99 100 ORTHODOXY. gods and men, and, perhaps, found in as great quan tity to the square mile in Eastern Massachusetts as anywhere else on the globe. What you want, of course, is first the Bible really understood ; that is, acted out. How much do you know of Shakspeare until after you are forty years of age? Until a man has surrendered himself to God, he cannot be said to appreciate the Bible or any great merely human production. Let a poet like Milton, or Shakspeare, or Dante, make a painting of the inner sky in man, and he will put into it light and shade almost as strongly contrasted as the light and shade of Christianity. If there is not the sun of the Atonement in it, there will be there the chariot of that sun, — a fathomless desire for peace with God and with the irreversible record of the past. But how can you understand great poetry of the secular sort until you have lived it, and multitudinous rifting experiences have opened your heart ? Nevertheless, even with a heart untutored by fulness of life, it is better for you to read great poetry than third-rate poetry, — the light fiddling of the charlatans, who sing the anthem of the stars as if it were a dancing-tune, or make a painting of the sky without the sun in it, or moon, or light, or shade, or much of any thing else. It is best for you, in studying what is greatest in the results of human imagination, to avoid mercilessly all second-rate matter, however good. So, too, in feeding your devo tional life, it is best for you to avoid Bunyan and Jeremy Taylor, and Baxter and Martineau and Pas- THEODORE PARKER'S SELF-CONTRADICTIONS. 101 cal, and Bushnell and Thomas a Kempis himself, if these books shut out the Bible from daily and almost hourly use. The Germans have a proverb, that " the better is a great enemy of the best." Even the rich est of the devotional works are a mischief, if they hinder you from taking the Bible as your supreme inspirer in life, as it will undoubtedly be your su preme solace in death. Bo you know a book that you are willing to put under your head for a pillow when you lie dying ? Very well: that is the best volume for you to study while living. There is but one such book in the world. For one, I have not made up my mind to put under my head; when I lie dying, any thing written by Voltaire, or Strauss, or Parker. We are to be scientifically care ful when we choose . a book for a dying-pillow. If you can tell me what you want for a dying-pillow, I will tell you what you want for a pillar of fire in life; that is, the Bible, spiritually and scientifically understood by being transmuted into deeds. - Senti ment is worth nothing until it becomes principle, and principle nothing until it becomes action. - I hold in my hand a publication entitled " Hints on Bible Marking," by an English authoress, Mrs. Menzies, and issued by the renowned firm of Samuel Bagster and Sons in London. Undoubtedly it is known by all scholars here ; and I am not speaking to-day, or any day, to gentlemen in whose presence I ought to be dumb. But there are younger persons here and elsewhere who may be benefited by this sumptuous pamphlet, approved by our American evangelist, who, 102 ORTHODOXY. perhaps, has not referred to this best production on this topic, because his own name is connected with it. It is delightfully printed in the best London style, and with illustrations of the method of marking a Bible, which you will probably find better than any you can invent. I would not have even this method adopted by any one to the hinderance of originality in the invention of your own method of marking. You ought to mark a Bible every five years so thoroughly, that you cannot use it any more. May I whisper that I have a Bible, marked when I was about fourteen or seventeen years of age, and had but just united with the church ; and that to-day it is the most unspeak able record on which I can put my hand in my little past? If, every five years, you can mark a Bible thoroughly, and memorize what is marked, it will be yo'ur best diary. You can do little better in reading than to fill the margins of a copy of the Scriptures, once every five years, full of the records of the deep est inmost in your souls, to be intelligible to your self, and to no one else. Shut the door on that record. Enter into your closet, and keep your secrets with Almighty God. At a trial in Salem, Webster said of the argu ment of his opponent, " Gentlemen of the jury, this man neither alights, nor flies forward: he hovers. v Why does he not meet the case ? " Our age is full of readers and students who are mere hoverers, who neither fly forward, nor alight, and who think the highest philosophical glory is in never coming to a conclusion. Have you not seen these winged, unrest- THEODORE PARKER'S SELF-CONTRADICTIONS. 103 ing spiritual creatures ? Reading is of small account unless it is thought to be of no account in comparison with that style of action which makes obedience to truth an organ of spiritual knowledge. Among devotional works, if you could have but six authors, which would you take ? 1. Jeremy Taylor's "Holy Living and Holy Dy ing." There you have a great imagination, a flam ing heart, a wonderful analytical power, undoubted soundness of thought, and tropical sympathy with all ranges of religious emotion. Outside of Shakspeare and Milton, perhaps there is not a greater imagina tion in English literature than Jeremy Taylor's. It is good to be acquainted with him, although but a little ; and, if you once fall in love with this single book of his, renowed now for several generations, all his works will become to you as a temple full of incense, and you will pace up and down in it as men walk up and down in the Cathedral at Cologne, glorious for its architecture, glorious for its atmosphere, glorious for the music in it, but more glorious than for any thing else for the light of the East that streams through its many-colored windows. [Applause.] 2. Thomas a Kempis : " Imitation of Christ." This is a book of which one cannot speak without a hush of tone. A sweet aroma breathes from it as from the earliest and most modest of the spring blossoms. A Romish work, if you please, but none the worse for that, so far as its devotional side is concerned. It is adopted everywhere by Protestant ism, and linked, therefore, to all the ages, Romish 104 ORTHODOXY. and Protestant, back to the day when there was neither Romanist nor Protestant. 3. Bunyan, and not only the "Pilgrim's Prog ress," but the " Holy War." Take all his devotional works, and read the best of them in some adequately illustrated edition, with Maculay's Essay on Bunyan as a preface. 4. Pascal : " Thoughts on Religion." But now, among American writers, whom shall I mention, when I can name but two ? 5. Horace Bushnell's " Sermons for the New Life." You have heard me criticise portions of his writings ; but what can be better than his discussions of this and all similar themes? [Applause.] Bushnell's "Nature and the Supernatural " is a prose epic, some strains in which seem likely to be heard many cen turies. 6. Huntington's " Christian Believing and Living." He knew Boston: he knew the mind of this city on two sides. His literary equipment was very com plete. In the commanding position of preacher to the great university yonder, he passed through a struggle in changing Ins views from those which he had preached to those which he now preaches; and this book with such an origin has thoughts timely for all culture in a similar state of transi tion. I do not forget " St. Augustine's Confessions," nor the " Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius," nor " Plato." "What works of Baxter shall I read?" said Bos- well to Johnson. " Read all of them," was the reply ; THEODORE PARKER'S SELF-CONTRADICTIONS. 105 "for they are all good." Are Doddridge and Fuller not to be named ? Who will not refuse to part with F. W. Robertson, and twenty biographies, some of which are the best devotional works ? Shall I omit Dora Greenwell, and Gouiburn, and Hare, and Mar- tineau ? All of these writers are to be commended; but you will be able to master more than about one hundred books in your short life. It is best that you should not let third-rates crowd out first-rates. Spend time on Milton, Carlyle, Shakspeare, Mrs. Browning, and all great poems, of which there are not a thousand in the world. On the Deity of our Lord what books deserve to named, if we can mention only six ? 1. Liddon: "Bampton Lectures on the Divinity of our Lord," — a very frequently attacked book, but one which, on the whole, is to be regarded as the best in English on the subject. It is not an exhaust ive volume ; but you will find it very valuable if you will master its learned references. The footnotes mean something, and you must not skip them. 2. Dorner, professor in the University at Berlin : " History of the Person of Christ." This is a book in four or five volumes, and is to be recommended as, perhaps, the best which has been transplanted out of the German language on this topic. Dorner and Liddon have never been answered, and they are as fresh as the risen sun. 3. Clarke, James Freeman : " Orthodoxy." Of course you will read both sides. 106 ORTHODOXY. 4. Stuart, Professor Moses : Miscellanies, including Letters to Dr. Channing. The proof-texts here are the most incisive portion. 5. Seeley, Professor : " Ecce Homo." 6. Neander : " Life of Christ." On the Christian evidences let me mention : — 1. Butler's " Analogy." This is the book Edmund Burke always recommended as unanswerable, and it is not outgrown. 2. Paley's " Evidences," but always in connection with later works. 3. Farrar's "Critical History of Free Thought." Bampton Lectures at the University of Oxford, 1862. The references in that work are the best I have seen. 4. Fisher's " Essays on the Supernatural Origin of Christianity." 5. Christlieb : " Modern Doubt," 1864. 6. "Aids to Faith," by distinguished writers of the Church of England, in reply to Essays and Reviews. 7. Whately : " Peculiarities of the Christian Reli gion ; " his proof that " Napoleon " never existed if our Lord never did ; and, lastly, his " Christian Evi dences." 7. Home's " Introduction to the New Testament," new edition. You say I am partisan ; and so I take up one of the best of the popular guides, " The Best Reading ; " and I find this statement from a man who is no theologian and no partisan : — " To keep your balance against the often denounced innu- THEODORE PARKER'S SELF-CONTRADICTIONS. 107 endoes of Mr. Gibbon, don't quiddle with the goody little notes to Gibbon, by Milman and others, but having let Gibbon poison you as much as he can, — he won't hurt you if you have much intellect of your own, — turn away, and master at once the right side of the main question of Christ in history, by a thorough study and mental appropriation of Home's ' Introduction to the Study of the Sacred Scriptures.' I mean not the obsolete old edition, still obstinately and improperly kept in the American market to the exclusion of the proper one, but the last edition, with Home's own latest revisions, and with the addition, by first-class evangelical English scholars, of all the recent learning on the subject. No man of sound mind, having mastered Home, will ever be materially troubled by such little snips and sneers as Gibbon's, or by any other attempt to destroy the historical argument for the substantial truth of the Bible." [Applause.] 9. Weseott's "Introduction to the Study of the Gospels." 10. Midler, Julius : " The Doctrine of Sin." 11. Hagenbach : " The Decline of German Ration alism." This book Professor Thbluck told me re peatedly he put first into the hands of any student who came to Germany, and wished to know the history of German rationalism. 12. Dorner: "The History of Protestant Theology." There are many little jeers and quips which are admirably answered by Haley, a late scholarly writer, on the "Alleged Discrepancies of the Bible," — a book which every one who frequents a (Paine) full hall ought to have. Read sometimes on your knees. Let us have no debate merely for the sake of debate. Let us have manly transmutation of our conviction into action ; and whenever we are loyal to the truth we know we 108 ORTHODOXY. shall have more, and more, and more, until our east window breaks, and the east window of the Unseen Holy receives us into its perfect day. [Applause.] THE LECTURE. Dean Stanley of Westminster Abbey, in that already famous address of his, delivered but a few days ago at the University of St. Andrew's in Scot land, speaks of Thomas Carlyle as the most famous of living Scotchmen, " who, though winding up the threads of his long and honorable life at Chelsea, has never disdained the traditions -of the Scottish church and nation, still warms at the recollection of his na tive Annandale, and still is fired with poetic ardor when he speaks of the glories of St. Andrew's " (London Times, March 17, 1877). Has Boston any literary name on the whole superior to that of Thomas Carlyle ? Did Transcendentalism thirty years ago in this city, does American literature in its yet unended April, owe any thing to the author of " Sartor Resar- tus " and " The French Revolution " ? We have in this Scottish author perhaps the greatest imagination Europe has seen since Richter, and, if the German be omitted, the greatest since Milton. A will free as ever was Boreas horsed on the North Wind, and yet a man who, Dean Stanley says, has never broken with the traditions of the Scottish church! That portion of the world which has been too busy or too obtuse to read what is between the lines in Carlyle's writings has wished for information as to Carlyle's religion. This information is given by the lord rector of St. Andrew's University. THEODORE PARKER'S SELF-CONTRADICTIONS. 109 It is pointedly understood by scholars that Dean Stanley is not a bigot ; but he is a representative of Westminster Abbey, and as such he says in this same address, " I am not here to criticise or dispar age the venerable document, which, born under my own roof at Westminster, alone of all such confes sions for a short time represented the whole national faith of Great Britain. If the Westminster Cate chism has some defects or exaggerations from which our own Thirty-nine Articles are free, yet, on the other hand, it has soared to higher heights, and struck down to deeper depths." When New England was in the gristle, she was fed on what? On the West minster Catechism, which, in spite of its defects, soared, according to Dean Stanley, to heights farther aloft, and struck down to depths nearer the centre of thought, than had been reached by any other En glish symbol of religious faith. Theodore Parker is perpetually assailing what he calls the popular theology ; and it is to be admitted, that if, by this phrase, you mean the misconceptions of the half-educated, fault enough can be found effectively with New England. But what did Parker mean by the popular theology ? Although a man of courage, he was usually so prudent as not to give references when he attacked this giant. "I have been careful," he often said, " not to cite authorities, lest individual churches or writers should be deemed responsible for the sin of the mass" (Biscourse on Religion, p. 429). In the plentiful absence of schol arly references, there is a vagueness in Parker's 110 ORTHODOXY. charges against the popular theology, that is not at all scientific. Surely, if we are to have a definition of the popular theology, we cannot with fairness go lower down than the Thirty-nine Articles. If we are to have any creed brought forward for scientific de bate, we must have something to represent it at least as definite and authoritative as that set of symbols which Great Britain and her empire throughout the world, and the renowned Church which adopts those articles, regard as a standard summary of faith. Dean Stanley says the Westminster Catechism is, in some respects, better than the Thirty-nine Articles. But I will not use the catechism to-day : I will take the Thirty-nine Articles, in spite of this affirmation that they do not dive as deep, nor soar as high, as the Scottish and New-England symbol. I will take the overt services which have grown out of, and express the faith of, these articles ; I will employ the Book of Common Prayer, in the pages most used by the people, as the fittest representation of popular theology. Let us enter Westminster Abbey ; let us examine the popular theology there ; and while the anthems roll, while the incense of the sublime service rises above the tombs of poets and martyrs and kings, and orators and statesmen, let us listen to the con trasted voices of the worshipping assemblies as. repre senting popular theology, and of a Boston critic as representing scientific attack on that theology. On the one hand, Carlyle and Stanley intone majestic words, which have the assent, in what I shall cite, of THEODORE PARKER'S SELF-CONTRADICTIONS. Ill all the evangelical communions of the world. On the other hand, let Theodore Parker utter in Westmin ster Abbey what he uttered in Boston. Gather up now all your historic senses, and forget not the vision of martyrs in the air as you listen ; for perhaps the contrasts and echoes here may be more than slightly suggestive. You are standing on the hal lowed floor which covers the irradiated tomb of Sir Isaac Newton, and this is what you hear : — 1. Carlyle and Stanley. — Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Sabaoth ; Heaven and Earth are full of the Majesty of thy Glory. The glorious company of the Apostles praise thee. The goodly fellowship of the Prophets praise thee. The noble army of Martyrs praise thee. The holy Church throughout all the world doth acknowledge thee; The Father, of an Infinite Majesty; Thine adorable, true, and only Son; Also the Holy Ghost and Comforter. Theodore Parker. — The popular theology regards God as eminently malignant (Parker, Sermons on Theism, p. 101). Its God is diabolical (Discourse on Religion, p. 427). 2. Carlyle and Stanley. — From all blindness of heart; from pride, vain-glory, and hypocrisy; from envy, hatred, and malice, and all uncharitableness, good Lord, deliver us. Parker. — This system can justify any thing out of the Bible. . . .It makes men do nothing from the love of what is good. Its divine life is but a good bargain (Discourse on Religion, pp. 426, 428). All the popular vices are sure to have the churches on their side (Theism, p. 162). The Ameri can churches launch their feeble thunders in defence of every popular wickedness (Ibid., p. 141). 3. Carlyle and Stanley. — O God, the King of glory, we 112 ORTHODOXY. beseech thee leave us not comfortless, but send to us thy Holy Ghost to comfort us ; and in thee may we continually dwell, one God, world without end. Parker. — The popular theology does not tell of God now, near at hand (Discourse on Religion, p. 426). 4. Carlyle and Stanley. — We beseech thee to hear us, good Lord: that it may please thee to give to all thy people increase of grace to hear meekly thy Word, and to receive it with pure affection, and to bring forth the fruits of the Spirit. Endue us with the grace of thy Holy Spirit to amend our lives. Parker. — The Holy Ghost of theology has nothing to do with schemes for making the world better (Theism, p. 117). The Holy Ghost is not represented as loving wicked men; and no one of the three persons of the Godhead has any love for the soul of the lost (Ibid., p. 102). 5. Carlyle and Stanley. — O ye Sun and Moon, O ye Stars of Heaven, bless ye the Lord; praise him and magnify him forever. Parker. — The universe is not thought to be the word of God at all (Theism, p. 110). 6. Carlyle and Stanley. — O ye Showers and Dew, O ye Winds of God, O ye Fire and Heat, O ye Winter and Summer, O ye Dews and Frosts, O ye Frost and Cold, O ye Ice and Snow, bless ye the Lord; praise him and magnify him for ever. Parker. — It is tacitly taken for granted in the popular theology that God is sometimes taken by surprise, and has to mend his work. 7. Carlyle and Stanley. — O ye Nights and Days, O ye Light and Darkness, O ye Lightnings and Clouds, O ye Mountains and Hills, O all ye green Things upon the Earth, O ye Seas and Floods, bless ye the Lord; praise him, and magnify him for ever. Parker. — Pantheism and the popular theology agree in the negation of the Infinite, and the affirmation of a variable God (Theism, p. 302). 8. Carlyle and Stanley. — O God, without whom nothing is THEODORE PARKER'S SELF-CONTRADICTIONS. 113 strong, nothing is holy, thou being our Ruler and Guide, may we so pass through things temporal that we finally lose not the things eternal. . . . From all evil and mischief and sin, good Lord, deliver us. Parker. — Piety and morality, natural religion, is no condition of salvation : good works are bad things for that (Theism, p. 115). Those that are saved are not saved by their character. Virtue has no virtue to save your soul (Ibid., p. 114). 9. Carlyle and Stanley. — We ought at all times humbly to acknowledge our sins before God. We have done the things we ought not to have done. There is no health in us. Parker. — According to the popular theology, sin does not consist in sinning, but in being born of Adam after the fall (Theism, p. 107). To take a step toward heaven, man must deny his nature. He is born totally depraved (Discourse on Religion, p. 425). Tou are born of the first sinner, and got as much hurt by the fall as he (Theism, p. 111). 10. Carlyle and Stanley. — Fulfil now, O Lord, the desires and petitions of thy servants, as may be most expedient for them, granting us in this world knowledge of thy truth, and in the world to come life everlasting. Parker. — Down with reason, cries the popular theology; down with human nature (Theism, p. 110). Enough. If Westminster Abbey listens longer to this serene anthem and to these dissonant accusa tions, the dead here wall rise. Pardon me, gentle men; but Westminster Abbey is the world in our century. The names and voices contrasted here I use only as symbols of the great classes they repre sent in the conflicts of thought in the ages. Do the accusations need any other answers in the Abbey than those of the historic worship and the associations of the place ? None at all. Still less do these accu sations need answer in the historic temple of the world and the ages. 114 ORTHODOXY. Indirectly I contrast here Theodore Parker's father with Theodore Parker's mother. You have accused me of forgetting the better traits in Parker. It was his mother who was singing this anthem, and in Parker there were moods in which he sang it. But when he uttered these accusations, which are cari catures needing no answer, the spirit of the drum- major of Lexington stood up under his waistcoat, and he was addressing opponents. In much of Parker's severest speech he is not thinking, he is fretting and chafing. These accusations are the language of in tellectual irritation. You say I have contrasted Dean Stanley and Carlyle with Parker, and London with Boston. So I did ; but I contrasted them in order that I might say emphatically at the last, that the mother of Theodore Parker would have sung that anthem with Carlyle and with Stanley ; but the father in Theodore Parker, standing up to do a giant's work against slavery, had fallen into irritation of such a kind, that these ghastly statements of his undoubtedly seemed to him true, although you and I know that they are so false as to need no reply. [Applause.] Total depravity, what is it? That clock yonder is made on a plan : so is my soul. The clock may be out of order : so may my soul. When that clock is in order, it keeps time : when my soul is in order, it obeys conscience. If the clock is so out of order as not to keep time, it is good for nothing as a clock: if my soul is so out of order as not to obey con science, if I answer " I will not," when the Divine Voice says " I ought," I am not keeping time. Every THEODORE PARKER'S SELF-CONTRADICTIONS. 115 choice is wrong when I reply by the negative to the infinite affirmative ; and as the moral character of all action comes from choice, and as my choice is wrong, I violate the plan of my being: I no longer keep time : I am good for nothing as a clock. But when I say that clock will not keep time, do I mean to say that the wheels in it cannot be put in order ? No. Perhaps the wheels are of gold and silver. Disar- rangedness in the clock implies its arrangeability. Disarrangedness in the soul implies its arrangeability. That clock will not keep time, however, and so I say it is totally depraved as a clock. Does that mean that the wheels are all slime, and the face of it a concrete mass of leprosy, or that there is noth ing useful in it ? Let us be clear on this topic once for all ; for Boston loves clear thought, and supposes that there can be none on this subject. Make a distinction between total depravity and total corrup tion. That is a distinction as old as St. Augustine, and ought to be tolerably well understood here, where the doctrine of total depravity has so long been attacked mercilessly. If that clock were a con crete mass of unspeakable slime, I should say it is totally corrupt : when it is so out of order that it will not keep time, I s<".y it is totally depraved. If there were nothing in a man capable of arrangement ; if, when the soul is out of order, it could not, by fol lowing conscience and by God's good grace, be put again into order, — I should say it is totally corrupt. But the wheels yonder may be of pearl, the pivots may be of diamonds, and yet the clock not keep time 116 ORTHODOXY. at all. It is not totally corrupt : it is totally depraved. So the human faculties may be wheels of far-flashing silver and gold and pearl: the pivots may roll on diamonds, and yet the man not keep time. He says "I will not" when the still small voice says "I ought ; " and you know it is a deliverance of self- evident truth, that, when a man says this, he has a sense of ill-desert, and feels that the nature of things 'is aeainst him. You cannot convince him that he is right with the universe. He is out of order with the universe whenever he does not keep time to the divine "I ought." But is that man incapable of being arranged ? Not at all. Total depravity means the moral disarrangedness of man and the evil char acter of his choices : it implies man's arrangeability. It does not mean total corruption: that has no arrangeability. [Applause.] Now, as to inherited vice and original sin, what amazing superficiality we have heard on that theme ! You cut through knot after knot on this topic, if you will take a strong phrase of our American evangelist, and expand it into scientific shape. Indeed, it needs very little expanding. It was meant to be seen at a distance, as the figures of the prophets in the dome of St. Peter's are meant to be looked on at a dis tance. The pen of Isaiah in that dome is seven feet long ; and his eyes, when you are close upon them, are really only bits of stone, rather rough mosaic: but, looked on as they were meant to be, he is the sublime prophet, and awes you as he gazes down from the height. Just so, many of our American THEODORE PARKER'S SELF-CONTRADICTIONS. 117 evangelist's expressions, when taken by piecemeal, and looked on with the eye of a fly critic, are under stood about as well as the buzzing insect in that dome of St. Peter's understands the prophet Isaiah. [Applause.] They were meant to be seen at a dis tance ; and this phrase I for one am willing to adopt, if you will understand it: "Man is born with his back toward God." That is original sin. [Ap plause.] Will your Shakspeare bear you out in your assertion that a man is born with his face toward God, and ready to say " I will " when the Divine Voice says "I ought"? Will your Milton and Richter, and your Carlyle, carry you through, if you under take to maintain that man is born with his face toward God? Accredited New-England theology does not assert that inherited evil disposition is sin ; for it teaches always that responsibility cannot exist without free dom of the will, and that sin consists in evil choice. Sin is sinning, as Theodore Parker says that New England affirms it is not. There have been schools of theology using the word " sin " in a peculiar sense ; but, if you will notice how they define the word, they mean at the last analysis only what our evangelist means when he says that a man is born with his face turned away from that Being who says " I ought," and to whom we say " I will not." But this moral condition is not total corruption : it is dis- arrangedness, it is not unarrangeability. Man is noble : the wheels in him are of gold, of silver, and of pearl, of an unmeasured preciousness. They are 118 ORTHODOXY. so disarranged, however, as not to keep time; and that condition we call total depravity. If they were concrete slime, as they are not, we should call that condition total corruption. But for want of making that simple distinction, — one of the commonplaces of religious science, so familiar that I am almost ashamed to take up time with it here, even when we stand face to face with Theodore Parker's rough caricatures, — men fall into the most ghastly miscon ceptions of religious truth at this point, as if it were an impeachment of God's own work, or as if there were in it the spirit of some ghoulish depredator at the tomb of all that is noble in man. Your Shakspeare asserts total depravity as much as New-England theology, and I think rather more. _ There is not on the globe a deep writer of the merely secular sort, who does not affirm that man is inclined at birth, by hereditary descent, to say " I will not " when the Divine Voice says " I ought." All ethical science asserts, that until you come into a predomi nant mood, in which you love what the Divine Voice that says " I ought " commands, you do not keep time ; you are worth nothing as a clock. Neverthe less you can be arranged so as to follow the unchan ging plan of your soul. That clock out of order needs a hand from outside of it to put it in order. Man can obey his conscience ; I believe man can do all that God requires of him : nevertheless, when a man is put in order, after having been so disarranged as not to keep time, he incontrovertibly has to thank the original plan of the mechanism, and he did not THEODORE PARKER'S SELF-CONTRADICTIONS. 119 invent that. He has to thank Divine Providence for bringing truth to bear upon him in such a way as to seize his reason and emotion, and woo him at last freely to do what he ought. While God rules in him by the plan of the clock, man also, by his own free choice, acts within himself; and, since very evidently both powers are conjoined in arranging the clock, we do well to work out our own orderliness with fear and trembling. [Applause.] Theodore Parker's chief error was a confusion of popular and scholarly theology. This series of cari catures illustrates that confusion, and so does a series of self-contradictions which must now be outlined. The deepest desire of man is for final satisfaction, intellectual and moral, concerning religious truth and his personal relations to it. Tossed about, however wearily, and without a place where to lay the head, no past age has made, and no future age will make, a pillow of self-contradiction. There never will come a time when transcendentalism will meet with suc cessful opposition to its assertion that a thing cannot be and not be at the same time and in the same sense. If there is a self-evident truth, that is one, transcending, if you please, not only the experience of the individual, but also that of the race. Only very slowly can I get forward here with the immense theme of the intuitional philosophy ; but I am not forgetting that some of you think that these royal intuitive beliefs in self-evident truths are the result of inherited experience of both the individual and the race. I know that in Orion a thing cannot be 120 ORTHODOXY. and not be at the same time and in the, same sense, andth at the same is true in the North Star. But I never had any experience in the North Star ; the race never had any experience in Orion. Our con viction, however, is perfect that the whole must be greater than a part in the Pleiades, or in the Swan, or where Sagittarius draws his bow in the south. We have never flown through the zenith with the Swan ; mankind never drew bow with Sagittarius in the southern heavens. Axiomatic certainties have a range immeasurably transcending all possible experi ence of the individual or of the race. They are cer tainties everywhere and always. Therefore, accord ing to all just philosophy, self-contradiction is a com petent condemnation of any proposition, not only for this world, but for all worlds ; not only for time, but for eternity. In Theodore Parker's collected writings, self-con tradictions are far more easily noticed than in any of his volumes taken singly. It is significant that there never has been an American edition of his works ; that is, of his collected writings. Of course individual volumes of his have been several times republished ; but there is in this country no edition of his collected works. There is such an edition in England ; but when I asked one of his publishers here, if the English edition had prevented the appear ance of the collected works in this country, he he replied, " Not at all. The books will not sell." What are some. of the more important self-contra dictions in Theodore Parker's productions taken as a whole ? THEODORE PARKER'S SELF-CONTRADICTIONS. 121 There is in Parker's scheme of thought a multi plex self-contradiction as to the intuitions of con science. • 1. The intuitions of conscience declare man's ill- desert when he says " I will not " to the Divine " I ought." 2. The ill-desert of man is therefore, a self-evident fact. 3. The intuitions were Parker's authority. 4. The life and correspondence and public words of Theodore Parker yield almost no proof that he was accustomed to confess sin to the Supreme Being. The nearest he comes to confession is in a prayer offered in Music Hall the day after the unveiling of Beethoven's statue : " May we chastise ourselves for every mean and wicked thing " (Weiss, Life, vol. i. p. 411). 5. To James Freeman Clarke he writes from his dying-chamber that there is in man no condition of enmity against God (Life, vol. i. p. 151). " No sin," he said, '• can make an indelible mark on what I call the soul" (Ibid., p. 149). 6. Self-evident truth does, and Theodore Parker did not, carefully distinguish human infirmity from human iniquity. He held, that, at the last analysis, sin is a defect of judgment, or a necessary incident in our moral development, and that therefore " every fall is a fall upward." That phrase, I find, has been often cited by scholars as typical of Parker's thought. It is a clause out of a whole page to which I printed a reference the other day (Sermons on Theism, p. 408) ; 1 22 ORTHODOXY. and, when I put a reference into a published report, I mean, of course, to invite all gentlemen to look at the original (see also pp. 417, 299, of the same book). When a man painstakingly gives a refer ence, he must be accused of pedantry, if he has not a desire to have people make use of the reference. I cannot say every thing here in an hour ; but I give the references to bear myself out ; and it is an essential.part of the reading of any man's argument to examine the authorities to which he refers. There is in Parker nothing more fundamental than the doctrine implied by assertions like these : " To the wickedest, life is no absolute failure ; " " Optimism is the piety of science ; " " Sin is the provocation to virtue" (Frothlngham, Life, p. 353). " Every fall is a fall upward ; " " Sure of my immortality and sure of God, I fear nothing." Expressions like these are scattered all through his writings; and these are perfectly consistent with the theory which he held, that, by many a long and winding slope, Iscariot comes out right at last, and that it is safe to die a kidnapper or a murderer. (See last page of Sermons on Theism.) There were shrewd men fleeced in Boston the other day by a swindler who fled to Europe. New York was fleeced lately by a conscienceless cormo rant, who opened his beak wide enough to swallow the Hudson, and was afterward found back of the Palisades and at Vigo. At Meudon, in the French Revolution, gloves were made of human skins. What, now, if you were to say to the fleeced tax- THEODORE PARKER'S «ELF-CONTRADICTIONS. 123 payers, and to the relatives of the flayed Frenchmen, Why, have you not heard that sin is a necessary step in the development of virtue? Do you not know that liberal thought asserts that every fall is a fall upward? Do you not understand that these acts of which you complain are merely the efforts of the human soul to get possession of its faculties? The Winslows and the Tweeds will come out right. God cares as much for them as he does for the Law rences and Peabodys : if he does not, he is a malig nant being. By many a long and winding slope every thief and leper and perjurer and murderer will come up at last to a height as lofty as he could have reached if he had gone up without sin. lago falls ; but he falls upward. He is getting possession of his faculties. We understand moral truth best in a common-place example. Socrates preferred facts from the street to illustrate the curve of the moral law. On the gray mall on Boston Common yonder, under the elms beneath which Adams and Washington walked with Lafayette, you may see a seller of candies, an aged woman, in the biting wind, in the tatters of her poverty and in the trembling of her unsupported, declining strength. (See Bib. Sac., vol. 26, p. 296.) With gladness she shows you a large bill, and says, " A very finely-dressed gentleman, with great kind ness to me, took more of my stock than I have sold in a week before. He took, indeed, all I had ; and, when I could not change his bill, he took my little collection of coppers, and filled his pocket with them, 124 ORTHODOXY. and gave me this large bill. Am I not blessed to-day ? " — " Madam, that is a counterfeit bill." — " What, what ! The wretch ! " — " Yes. But, madam, have you not heard that the great Theodore Parker says that every fall is a fall upward? Philosophy teaches that all evil is evanescent. By many a long and winding slope every man shall attain at last supreme felicity. This man has perhaps heard, as you have not, that sin is needful to our development. He is getting command of his faculties." [Ap plause.] Will you conduct law and business and politics on the principles of a lax, unscientific, lawless liberal ism? Not while men are men. Do not ask me, then, to adopt fundamental principles in religious theorj'- and practice which you will not adopt in any secular theory or practice. The scientific method asser-ts the unity and the universality of law. Dis sonances with the nature of things are the mothers of whirlwinds. Next I find in Theodore Parker a self-contradiction concerning the penalties of sin. In his early manhood he said, " Punishment may' be eternal " (Weiss, Life, vol. i. p. 66). And all through his life he held the intuitional philosophy, which proves that there may be free, final perma nence in moral character: therefore all his life he held principles which would undermine his certainty as to optimism being the piety of science. While he was consistent with his philosophy, he could not deny that a man may fall into free, final permanence THEODORE PARKER'S SELF-CONTRADICTIONS. 125 of character : therefore he never had authorization from the scientific method to assert, that, to the wick edest, life is no absolute failure, or that Judas Iscariot, Cain, and the kidnapper may die in their crimes, and yet be sure of final felicity. Gentlemen, I beg you to fasten searching attention on the last door through which, I will not say eva sive, but insufficiently clear and serious thought re treats, when brought face to face with the scientific method on the topic of eternal permanence of charac ter. Will you tell me whether this height of bliss to which God is to lift man through suffering is finite or infinite? Finite, of course you would say. Finite beings are capable of being lifted only to a finite degree of happiness. Very well, then; sup pose that all punishment, here and hereafter, pro duces increased bliss at last: when the highest ascending slope has been reached, that bliss will yet be a finite quantity, will it not? Let us here be straightforward as sunbeams. A finite being can have only a finite bliss: therefore, even God can lift a finite being only to a finite degree of bliss. The highest bliss, then, which you will attain by your method of managing the universe will be a finite degree of bliss. Now, could not Omnipotence have lifted finite beings to a finite degree of bliss without any suffering on their part as a penalty of sin, or without their sinning, and thus incurring punishment? Yes; you know it could. Omnipo tence can do any thing that is an object of power ; that is, any thing not involving a self-contradiction. 126 ORTHODOXY. There is no self-contradiction in supposing that God could lift finite beings to the highest bliss of which they are capable, and yet not use as his instrumen tality the suffering induced by sin. Assuredly he could do this. Why has he not done it? You say that all suffering of punishment for sin is intended to make men more happy at the last. But it will not ; for it cannot make them more happy than God might have made them without it. To the highest bliss of which they are capable, God could lift men up with out their suffering any of the pains induced by sin. Why does he not do this ? Penal pain and innocent pain are to be distinguished from each other as remedial agents. Suffering which is the result of sin, and suffering which is not the result of sin, are two very different things. It is not denied here that the latter form of suffering may be necessary to the highest good of the universe, but only that suffering as the result of sin is thus necessary. Are sin and the suffering it induces necessary to the highest good of the universe, as your theory implies? If so, then the sin is necessary. Who, then, is responsible for sin? That is the inexorable question which comes at last before every man who cares for clear thought, and faces the fact that sin and its penalties, with self-propagating powers, now exist ; and when you have gazed long enough into that quarter of the heavens, you will be apt to make up your minds that yours is the theory, and not mine, that calls in ques tion the Divine benevolence. As Dean Mansel and Whately and many others THEODORE PARKER'S SELF-CONTRADICTIONS. 127 have said, " God is an infinite God now. God is an infinitely powerful God now ; God is infinitely good now ; God has been infinitely powerful and good for the last six thousand years : but now sin exists ; now the earth groans under what ought not to be ; and for six thousand years sin and its suffering have been in progress." Yes ; but you explain all that by say- ing that every thing is coming out by and by — into what ? Into a finite degree of bliss. God could have reached that without the existence of the suffering caused by sin. Why did he not ? If you please, the universe is more serious than is dreamed by men who solace sin by affirming that it can never be too late to mend, and that character does not tend to a free, final permanence, bad as well as good. That senti ment is a web woven in the looms of luxury, and gilded there, but one that will not bear the weight of absolute seriousness, conducting research by the scientific method. Whatever outrages science will be found to solace sinT In Theodore Jfarker's writings, as in nearly all productions of a like school in thought, there are abundant self-contradictions as to the character of our Lord and the authority of the New- Testament litera ture. 1. At twenty-four years of age Parker believed that Christ was miraculously born. "Christ was the Son of God born in a miraculous manner " (i.66). 2. At twenty-six he wrote a sonnet in praise of the .Son of man as perfect. 128 ORTHODOXY. 3. At thirty-four he thought that possibly Jesus may have taught errors. 4. At thirty-six he thinks there may one day be a greater man than Christ. "God has yet greater men in store, I doubt not " (i. 429). 5. At forty-two he thinks Christ certainly made mistakes in his teaching. 6. At forty-nine he says the negro washerwoman who keeps the wolf from her unfathered babes, all fugitives from slavery, is not less glorious than Jesus of Nazareth on the mountain uttering his Beatitudes. Now thus far there is no self-contradiction, only change of opinion. Do not suppose I mistake mere change of opinion for self-contradiction, although vacillation is a trait of crudeness of thought. What was Parker's final thought ? 7. In his latest years he says that " our Lord's theology contained a considerable admixture of error." 8. But the Christianity of Christ, he thinks, was a perfect religion. " To me the name of Christian ity," he says, " is most exceeding dear." Goethe would have reproved Parker ; for Goethe used to say, " Tear out of the New Testament faith in the veracity of Christ as to the fact of the super natural, and there is not enough left to build faith on in regard to any other particular." Parker did the former, and then attempted to eulogize the trust worthiness of one who, as Parker affirmed, was yet to be surpassed, and had taught many errors. Thus Theodore Parker plays fast and loose with the his- THEODORE PARKER'S SELF-CONTRADICTIONS. 129 toric evidence of the supernatural in Christianity, and then calls in as aid to his scheme of thought a mass of historic refuse, good for nothing, according to his own testimony, as evidence. This self-contra diction has so often been pointed out in the argu ments of outgrown sceptics, that Strauss was consist-; ent enough in his lonely, last years, as some of Parker's followers now are, to drop the name Christian. No one, even among Theodore Parker's friends, has built heavily on his foundations ; and how can you expect me to build on them? Where is the man that is constructing a temple to-day with Theo dore Parker's characteristic propositions as corner stones? He is not in Boston: he is not in New York. Mr. Frothingham says that Theodore Par ker will have no immortality as a religious philoso pher. Let us grant him immortality as a crowned hero and martyr in the conflict with slavery ; let us say that he was too busy, as he faced the foe, to think out a system in philosophy on this yet crude shore. America is young in all that pertains to deep metaphysical research. My main motive in criticis ing this antislavery hero is to show that Boston, as yet, has not hewn out any stone in philosophy that is fit to be put down as a corner of a temple of reli gious science. You have cut out from the mountains of research many a strong piece of marble for other structures; and some of you think that Theodore Parker hewed out what must lie at the corner of a philosophical religion. Julius Miiller, and not Theo- 130 ORTHODOXY. dore Parker, is the best teacher of the Absolute Re ligion. Our transcendentalism in New England has not uttered a final word. We are not as far ad vanced in philosophy as we suppose. Germany thinks so little of New England in this particular, that you can find all she says of our philosophy in five or ten pages of any history on the course of metaphysical thought in these last decades. We overrate ourselves. Frothingham, who is nearest to being Parker's successor, will not bear his own weight on that stone which Theodore Parker hewed out. There is not a church of the liberal sort that to-day bears its weight on that stone, considered merely as the basis of a philosophy. Can you ex pect me to build on it, when Plymouth Rock lies here to be the corner-stone of philosophy, of politics, of society, of church, of factory, of school, and to be blessed in the future as it has been in the past? [Applause.] THE ATONEMENT IN THE LIGHT OF SELF- EVIDENT TEUTH. THE SEVENTY-FOURTH LECTURE IN THE BOSTON MONDAY LECTURESHIP, DELIVERED IN TREMONT TEMPLE APRIL 16. " QmD ref ert igitur, quantis jumenta fatiget Porticibus 7 quanta nemorum vectetur in umbra 7 Jugera quot vicina foro, quas emerit aedes 7 Nemo malus Helix." Juvenal: Sat. iv. 5. " Non sumus nostri, sed pretio empti, et quali pretio 7 Sanguine Dei." — Tebtullian: Ad Uxor., ii. 3. THE ATONEMENT IN THE LIGHT OF SELF-EVIDENT TRUTH. PRELUDE ON CURRENT EVENTS. It is recorded by Tacitus, with some surprise, that in the marshes of the Rhine there lived a tribe of Finns, who were so degraded as not to believe in the efficacy of prayer. An obscure infidel sheet in Bos ton has lately said, "The whole teaching of Free Religion concerning prayer is concentrated in this short maxim, Never pray, if you can help it." In a straightforward course of thought it is necessary to admit that sometimes we cannot help praying. From the point of view of science this conceded fact means more than much. "At their wits' ends all men pray," Shakspeare says. But what all men do, and cannot help doing, is instinctive. The existence of an organic or constitutional instinct is adequate scien tific proof of the existence of its correlate. Wher ever we find a fin, there has been provided water to match it ; a wing, air to match it ; an eye, light to match it ; a migrating instinct, a climate to match it. The instinct of petition is no exception to the rule 133 134 ORTHODOXY. that God creates no hunger to mock it. Hegel and Emerson call prayer the highest act of the human spirit. The proof of the efficacy of prayer is its naturalness. Nothing subdues will bike already subdued will. Decision for one's self is the best teacher of decision to others. All prayer is vain repetition unless it include the petition, Thy will be done in me as in heaven. It means, among other things, a subdued will ; and so, when a Christian worthy of the name offers prayer with one who is not yet religiously resolute, great natural laws show their force. The contagion of a religiously subdued and rejoicing will is brought to bear upon a will as yet unsubdued. Boston, Eastern Massachusetts, New England, are witnessing at this moment, in many lives, that mys tery which for eighteen centuries has been called the new birth. It is not heresy nor navelty to teach that God converts the soul according to the natural laws of the soul. What are some of the spiritual laws which are now in such subtle operation close around us, and undoubtedly are at all times capable of doing what we see them effecting now ? , Prayer, it has commonly been taught, has four ele ments, — adoration, confession, thanksgiving, petition. I hold that we must always add a fifth part, namely, total self-surrender. The four parts without the fifth are what the Scriptures call vain repetition, and not prayer. Whoever offers prayer in all its five parts may be assured, in the name of natural law, that he will obtain religious aid of a kind that he can THE ATONEMENT AND SELF-EVIDENT TRUTH. 135 receive from no other source. Men who revere the scientific method will admit that experiment is the crucial test of truth. Who dares try the experiment of prayer in the sense of total and affectionate self-sur render to God? A Boston scholar has lately told the public that a somewhat rough man of affairs in this city, in the presence of the American evangelist, thought he would be manly enough to try the experi ment of offering, prayer. "But," said the latter, " you must be sincere." — "I know very little of this thing," the man replied; "but I am willing to be sin cere in one prayer at least." — "Very well," said the evangelist, "let us kneel down, here and now, to gether ; and do you say from the depths of your heart, ' God be merciful to me a sinner.'" The merchant did that ; and I suppose, from what followed, that he did it in a genuine way. Certain it is that there struck across that man's countenance a beam of light from the sun behind the sun, a peace and an illumina tion unknown to him before. He rose up, saying, " This is a singular experience. My partner, do you do as I have done, and perhaps there will be similar results." The partner was a sceptic ; but he knelt and offered the prayer, "God be merciful to me a sinner ; " and he, too, rose up, smitten across the fore head with the light that falls out of those ancestral spaces from which all souls come, and into which all men haste. Facts like these are the chief news of this serious day. Boston loves clear ideas. You say, " All this is mystery." It is fact, however, as age after age can witness. But analyze this greatly sug gestive scene a little. 136 ORTHODOXY. What is implied in the words, God be merciful to me a sinner ? 1. That there is a God. 2. That there is a moral law. 3. That the moral law represents the will of a person. 4. That the law and the person have unconditional authority. 5. That I ought to obey that authority. 6. That I could have done what I ought. 7. That my will is free. 8. That I freely refused to do what I ought. 9. That the ill-desert of this refusal is wholly mine. 10. That I cannot remove this ill-desert from my self. 11. That there is obligation existing on my part to satisfy the violated majesty of the law. 12. That my own future good works cannot meet this obligation. 13. That God's mercy must meet it for me, if it is to be met at all. 14. That I implore God's mercy so to meet it. 15. That I trust myself implicitly to his mercy. 16. That I do so with entire freedom from the spirit of self-righteousness. 17. That I do so in the spirit of rejoicing loyalty to a personal Father, Redeemer, and Sanctifier; one God, who was, and is, and is to come. 18. That in all these beliefs I hold propositions, which, in my business and my family, in public and in secret, I mean to transmute into action. THE ATONEMENT AND SELF-EVIDENT TRUTH. 137 This prayer, " God be merciful to me a sinner," is the articulate voice of an organic instinct. But it contains these eighteen and more propositions, which are thus not slightly emphasized by the structure of human nature. Transmute these beliefs into deeds, saturate society with these propositions, and have they any force? Is it any mystery that men who offer this prayer sincerely are smitten through and through by a redemptive illumination ? These rays are javelins out of the light of the Great White Throne. Let them permeate business, politics, edu cation, the newspaper press, literature, and all pri vate life. The mystery of conversion! — if there were not conversion when a man seriously and gladly submits himself to the practical application of all these propositions, that would be a mystery. I am not denying at all that there is supernatural action in every case of conversion ; but I defy any form of clear thought to show that these propositions are not all in the prayer, " God be merciful to me a sinner." I defy any man to justify in the name of science the Finns of Flanders or of Boston for not offering that prayer. Two hundred churches in New England are uniting with Boston in. special services. Your newspaper press affirms that thirty thousand people were at the Tabernacle yesterday. Business-men's prayer-meet ings crowd their places of assembly. The hush of i God's work, through natural and supernatural laws, is in Boston. Some simpleton in clerical garb said lately to that 138 ORTHODOXY. theologian of Andover who has done more for reli gious science in this country than any other man since Jonathan Edwards, "Is it not singular that Providence should effect so much through inferior laborers ? It must be admitted that the Lord has done much in Boston through weak instruments." — "I wish," said Professor Park in reply, " to be reverent in speaking of the work of the Lord ; hut Mr. Moody is a great man." [Applause.] A great man ! " There are no great men," Profes sor Park would, with Massillon, have said in another mood : " God only is great." A smaller Frenchman than Massillon — Renan — wrote not long ago, " We never shall keep the world in order until science has learned how to explode the globe. Then we shall say to the Philistinish masses, Peace under penalty! The power of natural law is behind us." But there are natural laws, which, instead of exploding the globe, will explode all its icebergs, " Unlock the zone, the ice-fields clothe with wheat, And make God's pathway round the world complete." It is scientifically certain that Christianity is in pos session of the theory of those laws ; and if she were only in the practice of them ! Take your rough bit of glass, and hew it here and there, and you have not made a prism ; but, as soon as you have produced a prism, that instant the hght striking through it is unravelled, and you have by natural laws a revelation not to be imagined before you see. the colors. Let a man surrender to God ; THE ATONEMENT AND SELF-EVIDENT TRUTH. 139 let him hew himself into a religious prism which has reason, conscience, and self-surrender to God, " as re vealed in his word and works, for its three sides, — and the instant that posture of total, affectionate, irreversible self-surrender, is reached, God will flash through the human faculties : the seven colors will fall on your face, on your families, on public Ufe, on all the greed and fraud of American civilization, and give you as a people that coat of many colors which shall prove you to be the beloved son of the Father as a nation. [Applause.] THE LECTURE. When a man has wilfully violated the radiant moral law, it is instinctive, if the eyes are kept open to its Hght, to feel that something ought to be done to bring about satisfactory relations between the rebellious spirit and the Author of that insufferably resplendent moral enactment. What ought to be done? The soul should acquire similarity of feel ing with God. Without that its peace is scientifi cally known to bp a natural impossibility. But is that enough ? Face to face with self-evident truths, can an unfettered human spirit which has behind it a record of disloyalty find intelligent and wholly trem- orless peace, even after it is delivered from the love of what ought not to be ? When an evil man has reformed, does he have a scientifically justifiable right to feel that his own excellence, taken wholly alone, ought to secure his entire harmony with the nature 140 ORTHODOXY. of things? What do the organic and ineradicable human instincts, scientifically interpreted, say on this point ? Lady Macbeth, Shakspeare tells us, could not wash her hands white, although she had learned to hate her crime so as to be made insane by the mem ory of it. Doctor. — Look how she rubs her hands ! Gentleman. — It is an accustomed action with her to seem thus washing her hands. I have known her to continue in this a quarter of an hour. Lady Macbeth. — Yet here's the spot. Doctor. — Hark ! she speaks. I will set down what comes from her. Lady Macbeth. — Out, damned spot! out, I say! . . . Here's the smell of the blood still. All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. Doctor. — More needs she the divine than the physician. God, God, forgive us all! Macbeth, act v. sc. 1. Is your Shakspeare a partisan, when, describing in Macbeth the laws of human nature, he makes him say,— " Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood Clean from my hand? No: this my hand will rather The multitudinous seas incarnadine, Making the green — one red." " Methought I heard a voice cry, ' Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep,' — the innocent sleep, Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care, The death of each day's life, sore labor's bath, Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course, Chief nourisher in life's feast. THE ATONEMENT AND SELF-EVIDENT TRUTH. 141 Still it cried, ' Sleep no more ! ' to all the house : ' Glamis hath murdered sleep; and therefore Cawdor Shall sleep no more, Macbeth shall sleep no more.' " " I could not say ' Amen ' When they did say ' God bless us.' " t> Lady Macbeth.. — Consider it not so deeply. Macbeth.^- But wherefore could I not pronounce "Amen"? I had most need of blessing, and " Amen" Stuck in my throat. Lady Macbeth. — These deeds must not be thought After these ways: so, it will make us mad. Ibid., act ii. sc. 2. These deeds must be thought of after these ways ; so, it will make us wise. Not Plato, not Aristotle, not Voltaire, not Strauss, not Renan, not Parker, can wash Lady Macbeth's red right hand. Shakspeare describes the laws of your sleep and mine. Instead of great literature, do you prefer actual life, to illustrate the laws of human nature? A schoolmate of mine lately committed murder. He was a foremost man in a church. He was nearly fifty years of age. Through thirty years he had suffered from an unhappy marriage. God knows what his trials had been. But the man was sane. He was in health. Not a whisper has been raised in his defence, although he is to be tried for his life in a few weeks. Coming home from an evening gathering, his wife and he passed into their house together, apparently at peace with each other. Half 142 ORTHODOXY. an hour later, when she was asleep, the monster with an axe took Ms wife's life. Do not avert your gaze, my friends, from this lurid point of light. The narrative is of a piece with much else that has actually happened in the nights and days of our softly rolling globe ; and yet you say it is not philosophy. I affirm that events like these are facts, and that philosophy must face facts of every description, or once for all cease to call itself scien tific. This piercing gleam out of experience is blue fire, indeed ; but not a little radiance of that sort has crept before now through the volcanic crevices of the world. When by this ominous but actual lamp you gaze intently upon the glitter of this axe, and upon the flashing of the afterward dripping blood, you will find that many problems as to the peace of the soul are here exposed to view, under a flame in tense enough to permit their scientific examination. Both these persons were my schoolmates. I knew each of them well, and think I have some reason to say that I understand what, probably, the whole interior sky was in this man. One of the things that proved his guilt, aside from his confession, which he made at the end of a week, was a remark which he curiously enough repeated to his neighbors months before his crime : " Can I not repent, even if I do a great wrong, and so repent as to go to heaven ? Is it not taught that a man may repent and be saved, although he does something very bad?" The man was not well educated. He had in his mind the query, whether one might not commit some atrocity, and THE ATONEMENT AND SELF-EVIDENT TRUTH. 143 yet repent, and by the good grace of Almighty God, who is of too pure eyes to behold iniquity, be saved through the Atonement. Perhaps he thought heaven was a place rather than a state. Confucius said on the Yellow Sea, "Heaven means principle." What if a man permanently loses principle? must he or must he not lose heaven? Under the law of judicial blindness, is it possible for a man to lose principle permanently? This man, befogged but not insane, took up the theory — this was proved before the jury — that he might commit murder, and yet afterward repent, and go to heaven. And he committed murder; and I think his chief temptation, aside from vexatious mar ried life, was that lie whispered to him out of the very bowels of Gehenna, that the Atonement is enough to save a man who makes a bargain of it, and tries to cheat God. That man did on a large scale what it is possible you and I have been trying to do on a small scale. We do not commit murder; but we would, if we had our own way, very gladly cheat God of half our ufe at least, because we remember that we can repent at last, and all will come out well. Some men think, that, if they repent after they go out of this life, all will be well : that is rather a large appli cation of this principle. Pardon me, gentlemen ; but you must be shocked into due attention to the monstrous caricatures of religious truth which often exist in half-educated minds, and which underlie a large part of the infidel attack on Christianity in this latest age, as they have underlaid every attack in every past age. 144 ORTHODOXY. In this kind of analysis of the actual and typical experiences of men, I find more philosophy than I can put into an hour's declamation. Here is a gleam right out of human nature, and from our day ; and I wish you to look at it while we ask how far self-evi dent truth can teach us what the Atonement can do. I affirm that the Atonement must be something that does not bargain with God for a piece of life or the whole of it. It must not undermine principle. We are assured by self-evident truth, that the Atonement, if it is to be effectual, must in some way provide for similarity of feeling with God. Conscience, with all its great operations, exists in us, and is going on into the Unseen Holy with us ; and we must be at peace with all its multiplex lines of activity. This man committed murder deliberately. Per haps he now has had grace given bim to loathe his crime. In his cell he sings hymns, it is said ; is glad to receive religious solace ; hopes that his execution may be the gateway to heaven ; and his reliance is all in the Atonement. He really has come to hate, let us suppose, all that God hates, and to love all that God loves. . He has, let us grant, what is called the new birth. Boes that erase or cover the record of the mur derer? Let us be mercilessly straightforward in our answer to this question ; for it touches your case and mine. I am approaching a fundamental self-con tradiction of the lawless and sharply mischievous dreaming of many, as to the nature and sequences of our refusal to say " I will " when the Divine Voice says "I ought." This' man has learned to loathe the THE ATONEMENT AND SELF-EVIDENT TRUTH. 145 murder ; but the record of his crime is behind him. Do you think that he is, or ought to be, at peace, simply because he really loathes every thing that' leads to murder? Here is a question which I put before you in the name of the scientific method, begging you to look on it with a love of clear ideas, and wholly apart from any conclusions in religious science. Do you think that human nature, with the great operations of conscience in it, and es pecially with that prophetic office which anticipates the continuance of the approval and disapproval which we know inevitably follow our acts, good and bad ; that sense that this approval or disapproval is not only from ourselves, but from a Somewhat and Some One who is in us, but not of us, is likely to allow this man, in the name of his own excellence alone, to be wholly at peace about this record of murder, even after he has reformed? Let us fasten our thoughts on this one phase of human experience, typical of range after range of human crime, and let us, if possible, attain clearness on the subject, whatever theory stands or falls. " Was Mar ist, wahr ist," the Germans say, — " What is clear is true." There is a whole range of liberal thinking which asserts, that, when a man re forms, he has done enough ; and that style of thought I wish to test — by what? By the street; by the axioms of self-evident truth applied by the scientific method. My schoolmate who has murdered his wife has repented, let us say ; and he is at the edge of death itself. It may be that the first spirit he will meet in tbe Unseen Holy will be that which he sent 146 ORTHODOXY. thither before its time. No, not the first spirit : he will meet God there. He meets God now. In con science, the still small voice is God's voice. He listens to that ; he remembers the past ; he knows he has learned to loathe his crime: but is that enough? Was it enough for Macbeth? Was it enough for Lady Macbeth ? When a great question concerning the organiza tion of human nature comes up, the best way to decide it is to notice not only the deepest literatures of the world, but a long range of experience in history, and see how man has acted age after age. Have the nations acted as if they thought reform was enough to give peace after a great crime has been committed? We know that the heathen religions of the world have given large space to penance and sacrifice. I do not wish to exaggerate the amazing record ; but there is enough to show that more than much has been done age after age, in history, by this desire to be at peace with conscience and with what is to be met behind the veil. These heathen religions have indicated in unspeakable ways that peace is not attained even after reformation. The devotees of those religions have desired to be calm before God; and many deep teachers have taught, with more or less distinctness, the necessity of loving what God loves, and hating what God hates. But how has the human heart acted? The whole history of the race, I claim, has proved that men in general have not felt ready to go before God in their own righteousness even after they have reformed. My THE ATONEMENT AND SELF-E VTDENT TRUTH. 147 schoolmate here has learned to hate his murder ; and now he must go before God. He has the righteous ness, let us hope, of loving and hating what God loves and hates ; but there is that past behind him. Conscience is in him; and now, when the operations of conscience have their free course, is that man, as he steps into the Unseen Holy, ready to depend on nothing but his own righteousness? Gentlemen, the greatest question in religious science is before you, and, I hope, in such a concrete form as to be intelligible. Keeping now your unpartisan and fathomless Shakspeare open, and not removing your thoughts from this concrete case of to-day, will you allow me to recite analytically a few self-evident truths concerning the Atonement ? 1. It is self-evident that a thing cannot be and not be at the same time and in the same sense. If transcendentalism has a corner-stone of ada mant, it is this axiom, — that a thing cannot be and not be at the same instant and in the same significa tion. When will a philosophy arise that will under mine a certainty without which philosophy itself cannot exist ? 2. It is, therefore, self-evident that we cannot be at once at peace and at variance with conscience ; 3. That we cannot be at once at peace and at vari ance with the record of our past; 4. That we cannot be at once at peace and at vari ance with God. The supremely terrific and supremely alluring cans and cannots of the nature of things are all implied in 148 ORTHODOXY. the words, "God cannot deny himself." Here we put our feet upon adamant which Thor's hammer cannot pulverize, without, at the same time, reducing itself to powder. The nature of things has in it no fate at all, but is the total outcome of God's free choice ; and his free choice is the total outcome of his infinite perfection. He cannot deny himself; and so forever and forever it will be true that the axioms of the nature of things are adamant, not only for this world, but also for the next. 5. It is self-evident, that, while we continue to exist as personalities of the same plan we now exhibit in our natures, conscience will be something we cannot escape from. " The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven." 6. It is self-evident that our past is irreversible. Do you say that when I assert in the name of the nature of conscience, and of the irreversibleness of the past, that there will be regret in the universe forever and forever on account of the losses sin has occasioned, and when I affirm that some part of that shadow will fall on the sea of glass, and will not be invisible from the Great White Throne, I come near uttering blasphemy ? Does the Bible utter blas phemy when it says there is a Lamb slain from the foundation of the world? My proposition is only that biblical proposition in scientific shape. No doubt all the losses sin has caused were foreseen ; and no doubt the plan for the rescue of men existed THE ATONEMENT AND SELF-EVIDENT TRUTH. 149 in the councils of Omnipotence from eternity. No doubt there was, therefore, as the unsearchable depth of that metaphor asserts, a Lamb slain from the foun dation of the world. He whom we dare not name had sympathy from the first for the distress he fore saw would result from the abuse of that gift of free will, without which there can be no virtue. Forever and forever the losses caused by what ought not to have been will continue. The Scriptures, therefore, speak of a Lamb slain from the foundation of the world, or of a shadow that is not invisible, and never has been mvisible, and never will be invisible, from the Great White Throne. Before you accuse scien tific speech of blasphemy instead of biblical depth of metaphor on this theme, remember that the Atone ment is not an afterthought. The plan of redemp tion is no insertion into the universe to correct mis takes. It is a part of the perfect purpose of Him who was, and is, and is to come, who, in all eternities past and in all eternities future, will be faithful to the plan which was, and is, and is to come. [Applause.] 7. It is self-evident that we cannot escape from our record; 8. That we cannot escape from God; 9. That harmonization with our environment is the indispensable condition of peace of soul; 10. That our environment in this world and the next consists unalterably of God, conscience, and our record; 11. That we must be free from the love of what ought not to be before we can be at peace with the moral law which requires what ought to be. 150 ORTHODOXY. "Si vis fugere a Deo; fuge ad Deum," says the Latin proverb. " If you wish to flee from God, flee to God ; " for the only way to flee from him is to flee to him. 12. It is scientifically incontrovertible that con science produces in us a sense of ill-desert whenever we say " I will not " to the Divine " I ought ; " 13. That conscience produces in us this sense of ill-desert, whenever we accurately remember the record of our intelligent refusal to say " I will " to the Divine " I ought ; " 14. That no lapse of time lessens this sense of ill- desert, if the memory of such refusal is vivid and thoughtful. Forty-eight hours ago we were passing through the anniversary of the assassination of President Lincoln. Some years have elapsed since that atro city ; but have our opinions changed as to the blame worthiness of the principal actor in it ? If the assas sination in 1865 ought not to have been, it will be true forever that it ought not to have been. It is a long time since the world had fixed' opinions about Nero and Caligula ; but we do not think of changing our opinions simply because of the passage of time. Do we not disapprove all that ought to be disapproved, and do so once for all ? It is a terrible certainty that Judas Iscariot, if he ever blamed himself once justly, must continue to blame himself forever and forever. There is a noose that a man may put about his own neck and tie, but which he cannot untie. There is ir reversibility in the past ; and the action which ought THE ATONEMENT AND SELF-EVIDENT TRUTH. 151 not to have been will always be regarded as such when we vividly and faithfully remember its character. It will be impossible for us not to disapprove such an action ; for conscience is a part of our nature, and its natural operation is to disapprove all that ought not to be. Murder ought not to have been ; and Macbeth will never think that it ought to have been, or make it not to have been. You were born in Boston : can Omnipotence make it true you were not born in Bos ton ? You have done what ought not to have been : can Omnipotence make it true that what ought not to have been ought to have been ? Conscience is so fearfully and wonderfully made, that you must for ever and forever disapprove what ought not to have been. When a man has had an arm amputated, it cannot be put back : it is gone once for all. How evident it is, that, under natural law, a man may drift on in careless aesthetic ways till he loses the perception of the beautiful ! He learns to love that which aesthetically ought not to be ; and he blunts his aesthetic sense until you say he could, by a long process of culture, be brought back perhaps, but never will be. You say his probation is over aesthetically. On every conceivable side, except the moral and religious, character is subject to probations, and at tains permanence ; but on theee sides a whim of the luxurious ages forbids you to hear the truth which all great and strenuous ages have asserted, namely, that probations of course exist there as they do else where. Undeniably there are aesthetical probations, physical probations, and intellectual probations. But 152 ORTHODOXY. now you affirm, you who assert the unity of law, that there are no moral probations. Do you per ceive any self contradiction in that intellectual pro ceeding ? 14. It is a scientifically verifiable fact of expe rience, that conscience, when we keep our eyes open to light, produces in us, besides the sense of ill-de sert, a feeling that something ought to be done to satisfy the rightly resplendent majesty and the plainly unconditional and eternal authority of the violated law which says " I ought." If we have agreed up to this proposition, we shall not part here. Will you remember who committed the murder? What were you thinking a few min utes ago, when I outlined before you a typical human atrocity ? The man has learned to loathe his crime. Were you ready to say that he had done enough ? Something ought to be done besides his learning to be sorry that he had murdered his wife. You were very sure of this face to face with the concrete case. You say that this piece of current history is a fact, but that I am now leading you into vapor. Well, go back to that scrap of red-hot iron out of the pit, and touch it. It is not a fog. It burns up fog. It is, although blue flame, destructive of all vapor. And you, face to face with the concrete example, are not likely, in that man's case, to beheve that the per fumes of Arabia will sweeten the hand that has driven the axe through the skull of the nearest and dearest. That man is not authorized to be at peace, even after he has reformed, if he depends only on his own excel- THE ATONEMENT AND SELF-EVIDENT TRUTH. 153 lence. That alone cannot give him peace of soul ; and the question is, whether any thing else can. One of the sceptical late schools of thought asserts that science knows nothing of Atonement for sin. All causes that are once put in action produce effects which become causes, and which must take their course. If we bring into existence evil causes, they will produce their natural effects ; and we cannot erase or cover the past. The idea of a man being relieved from the natural results of his sin is in conflict with clear thought. These are propositions which just now are receiving indorsement from infidelity itself. Your old style of doubt is slowly undermined by the newer, I had almost said by that more Christian style, which is prepared to be amazed if it can be shown clearly that any great arrangement can deliver us from the terrors of the past. " Plato, Plato," said Socrates, "perhaps God can forgive deliberate sin; but I do not see how." 15. It is scientifically clear from the facts of per sonal and general experience, that, in the absence of satisfaction, conscience forebodes punishment ; 16. It forebodes this with such pertinacity and force, that the prophetic action of conscience, or pre sentiment of penalty, according to the confession of all great literature and philosophy, makes cowards of us all ; 17. That it forbodes punishment, not only in this life, but in time to come beyond death. To and fro behind the veil, conscience, in anticipation, paces up and down, of tener than over any path in this 154 ORTHODOXY. life. It would not thus by organic instinct pace up and down behind the veil, if there were nothing there. Did we anticipate nothing behind the veil, conscience could not make cowards of us all; for death would be release. 18. This foreboding has done as much work in the history of religion among men as any other instinct, and thus has proved its strength. 19. The foreboding does not cease when we become free from the love of sin. Remember Lady Macbeth's fruitless use of water : look back to my schoolmate. When the hoofs of the horses of his pursuers were rattling after him on the old Roman pavements, Nero caused himself to be put to death : he passed out of the world by virtual suicide ; and history says that his look was not a look, but a glare. He had not been misled by a Christian .education. A distin guished infidel had troubles of conscience; but he attributed them to a nervous shock he received in his youth. Nero did not receive any nervous shock in his youth ; Caligula did not. Boston may probably have men in it who never had a nervous shock in . youth, but who have illustrated all the great laws of conscience, and who have been made afraid before a Somewhat or a Some @ne in whom it has been said there is nothing to fearl " Since I was seven years old," Parker affirmed, " I have, had no fear of God." 20. It is a scientifically verifiable fact of expe rience, therefore, that the absence of the love of sin in the present does not bring us to peace when we THE ATONEMENT AND SELF-EVIDENT TRUTH. 155 vividly and thoughtfully recall our record of sin in the past, and allow our native instincts free course. 21. It is self-evident that personal ill-desert cannot be removed from person to person. What ! — sin not taken off us, and put upon our Lord ? our guilt not borne by our Saviour ? No ; not in the sense in which you understand guilt. Blame worthiness is not transferred from us to him, and can not be. We know that our Lord had no sin, and that there can be no removing of personal ill-desert from one personality, and putting it upon another. That word "guilt" is a fog, unless you remember that behind it lie two meanings. 22. Guilt signifies, first, personal blameworthiness ; second, liableness to suffer in order to preserve the honor of a violated law. In the former sense guilt cannot be transferred from person to person : in the latter it can be. Our Lord is no murderer, no perjurer. There is no diver gence of theological opinion from self-evident truth when self-evident truth declares that personal de merit is not transferable from personality to person ality. Ghastliest of all misconceptions ever put be fore this city or any other is the assertion that the doctrine of the Atonement implies, — first, that an innocent being is made guilty in the sense of being personally blameworthy ; and, secondly, that that in nocent being is punished in the 'sense of suffering pain for personal ill-desert. Both these propositions all clear thought discards, all reUgious science con demns. We have no doctrine of the Atonement 156 ORTHODOXY. which declares that personal demerit is laid upon our Lord, or that, in the strict sense of the word, he suf fered punishment ; that is, pain inflicted for personal blameworthiness. He had no personal blameworthi ness : he was an innocent being, as he always will be, and never did, can, or will suffer punishment in the strict sense of the word. 23. Guilt in the second sense, or liability to suffer ing in order to preserve the honor of a violated law, may be removed when the author of the law sub stitutes his own voluntary sacrificial chastisement for our punishment. 24. When such a substitution is made, the highest possible motives to loyalty to that Ruler are brought to bear upon the rebellious subject. 25. If any great arrangement on this principle has been made by the Father, Redeemer, and Sanctifier of the universe, that arrangement meets with exactness the deepest wants of man. It is the highest possible dissuasive from the love of sin : it is the only possi ble deliverance from the guilt of sin, in the sense, not of personal blameworthiness, but of liability to suffering in order to preserve the honor of the vio lated law, which says " I ought." 26. Siich a great arrangement may, therefore, with scientific exactness, be known to be needed, and so needed as to be called properly the desire of all nations. 27. The Atonement which reason can prove is needed Revelation declares has been made. On the slope of Beacon Hill, a New-England author, who ought always to be named side by side with THE ATONEMENT AND SELF-EVIDENT TRUTH. 157 Pestalozzi, once made it a rule, in a school full of subtile thought, that, if a pupil violated its regula tions, the master should substitute his own voluntary sacrificial chastisement for that pupil's punishment. Bronson Alcott will allow me to say here and now, in his presence, that he has told me that this one reg ulation almost Christianized his school. The pupils were quite young, and for that reason the measure was effective among them. He was no dreamer. He would never have adopted this measure except with the sensitive. Nevertheless, the operation of these untutored, hardly unfolded, and therefore spontane ously natural hearts, indicates what man is. " One day," says Bronson Alcott, " I called up before me a pupil eight or ten years of age, who had violated an important regulation of the school. All the pupils were looking on, and they knew what the rule of the school was. I put the ruler into the hand of that offending pupil; I extended my hand; I. told him to strike. The instant the boy saw my extended hand, and heard my command to strike, I saw a struggle begin in his face. A new hght sprang up in his countenance. A new set of shuttles seemed to be weaving a new nature within him. I kept my hand extended, and the school was in tears. The boy struck once, and he himself burst into tears ; and I constantly watched his face, and he seemed in a bath of fire, which was giving him a new nature. He had a different mood toward the school and toward the violated law. The boy seemed trans formed by the idea that I should take chastisement 158 ORTHODOXY. in place of his punishment. He went back to his seat, and ever after was one of the most docile of all the pupils in that school, although he had been at first one of the rudest." My friends, you know that I believe that law is a unit throughout the whole extent of time and space, and that, if you can measure a little arc of the moral law as exhibited in this school of the Concord philosopher, you will obtain some glimpse of the principle on which the I Atonement operates. 28. The definition of the Atonement is, the substi tution of the voluntary sacrificial chastisement of Christ for man's punishment. Why do I make a distinction between chastisement and punishment? Because facts require me to do so. In this example was Bronson Alcott punished? Not at all. Was Bronson Alcott guilty ? Not at all. Was the personal demerit of that pupil transferred to Bronson Alcott ? Not at all. Such transference of personal demerit is an impossibility in the nature of things. Nevertheless, we have in Boston a school of theology and preaching, and a wide range of pop ular sentiment, which regards Christianity as teaching, in the doctrine of the Atonement, a self-contradiction, an absurdity ; namely, the idea that personal demerit is transferred from one individual to another. James Martineau says that the idea of a vicarious Atonement is abhorrent to him, because it includes the idea that Christ, an innocent being, was punished. I wish to admit that Orthodoxy has been careless in her phrases again and again. I do not know how THE ATONEMENT AND SELF-EVIDENT TRUTH. 159 many have been thrown into the lawless license of liberalism by that misconception of the Atonement which asserts that in it an innocent being was pun ished, and personal demerit was transferred. But law is one through the universe ; and I have a perfect right to stand on this example of Alcott's school. I affirm that you know perfectly well that Bronson Alcott, in the strict sense, did not suffer punishment. He was innocent. What did happen ? Bronson Alcott voluntarily accepted chastisement, not punishment. What is the definition of punishment? Pain inflict ed for personal blameworthiness. What is chastise ment? Pain suffered for the improvement of the one who suffers it, or for the benefit of those who witness it. Does the latter imply guilt ? Not at all. A mother has a vicious son, and she has done her duty by him, let us suppose. She has no remorse ; for I assume she is free from all guilt for her son's bad habits ; but she suffers terribly. Is that pain punish ment ? No, chastisement. We must make this dis tinction, in Boston at least, where so long the carica ture has been placarded on the highest walls, assert ing, that, in the Atonement, punishment is inflicted on an innocent being, and personal demerit transferred. I never was taught that Christ suffered punishment. I had to learn out of books that any one made it an objection to Christianity that an innocent being was punished. If religious science will begin the fashion, and never use a term of importance without defining it, I for one will, try to keep step with that fashion as one of the most blessed of all modern improvements, 160 ORTHODOXY. and one I should like, by the contagion of general ac ceptance, to force upon all who differ from Chris tian views. In defining saving faith we must dis tinguish chastisement from punishment : the chas tisement of our offences was laid upon our Lord. It is nowhere presumed in the Scriptures that personal demerit can be transferred from individuality to in dividuality. What happened further in the school? Suppose that boy had been called up and punished a second time, after the master had been chastised, would that have been right ? Would the school have said that was right? The master has accepted chastisement voluntarily ; and now you cannot call that boy up, and punish him a second time. The school would say that is wrong. It is against all human nature to do that. Why ? Because justice is satisfied ? No ; but because it has been sufficiently honored. Dis tributive justice is waived, while general justice is satisfied. What has the master done? He has so substituted his own chastisement for the pupil's pun ishment as to remove the liableness of the pupil to suffer in order to preserve the honor of the law of the school. But the master is not to blame ? No. The master has not been punished ? No. Assuredly this case, on the human side, looks intelligible: I think I can understand that side. But do you mean to say that in the arc of that little example are in volved principles that sweep the whole curve of the Atonement, or show in part how God's chastisement was substituted for our punishment ? Yes, by more than a glimpse ; for law is the same everywhere. - THE ATONEMENT AND SELF-EVIDENT TRUTH. 161 The master paid the debt of that boy, you say. He did not pay it in the sense of removing the pupil's ill-desert, but only in that of removing his liableness to suffer to preserve the honor of the law of the school. The illustration is, of course, imperfect on many points ; but on a few it is serviceable, and I present it only to throw light on these. It is perfectly clear that the pupil by his own act made himself liable to suffer in order to preserve the honor of the law he violated. If that liableness was to be removed, it was necessary something should be done; and the school would have gone to ruin if nothing had been done to preserve the honor of its law. I understand perfectly, too, that, when this boy goes back, a motive has been brought to bear on him that will transform him, if any thing can. Nothing can take hold of human nature like such condescension, justice, and love. Would the boy have acted so if he had been a Greek boy? Any sensitive free being, man or angel, would have been affected as that boy was by the command to substitute the chastisement of the master for his own punishment. A new set of shuttles would have sprung into action in an Esquimau or a Greek boy in a similar case. I have seen a Greek boy whirl his top among the ruins of the Parthenon, and the Roman boy his top upon the old pavements that the chariot-wheels of Caesar had scarred ; and I think that any boy from any quarter of the globe would have felt, in the case supposed, that the master had not lowered the dignity of the 162 ORTHODOXY. law of the- school at all ; that the law which had been violated had not been treated lightly ; and that, if this boy wanted motives for loyalty, what he would need to do would be to remember vividly the chastise ment of his master in place of his own punishment. In the case of that scholar, guilt meant two things, — first, his own personal blameworthiness ; second, his liability to suffer to preserve the honor and vindicate the authority of the law of the school. Now, guilt in the first sense never is removed (Hodge's Theology, passim). It is not the doctrine of the Atonement that personal demerit is taken off a man by saving faith. It was always true of that scholar that he violated the law. His personal demerit had not been transferred to Bronson Alcott at all. The record of rebellion is always behind that boy. Only his liableness to suf fering for the preservation of the honor of the law of the school has been removed. That latter sense of guilt is the meaning of the word when we say the Atonement removes man's guilt. It is scientifically certain that, in the sense of removing this liableness, Bronson Alcott had power to pay the debt which that boy owed, and that he paid it by substituting his own chastisement for that boy's punishment. . That is a straightforward, plain case, and you can teach any honest man to see that distinction. Hereafter, when scepticism with its long-eared hallelujahs comes to you, and says that the Atonement is a doctrine out grown by all clear thought, because it teaches that an innocent being was punished, and that personal demerit was transferred from one individual to THE ATONEMENT AND SELF-EVIDENT TRUTH. 163 another, and that therefore advanced thought must abandon the central idea of Christian culture as plainly barbaric, the result of some Platonic inter fusion of thought in the early centuries, or some heathenish inheritance from Judaism, in short, that this scheme is self-contradictory, or at war with axiomatic truth, please ask that singer of empty anthems to be clear himself; to state what he would say in a human case such as I have supposed ; and then whether he dare affirm, in the name of the unity of law, which he proclaims as the first truth of science, that, if there has been any such Atonement made in the universe, it is not what we infinitely need. My friends, exact and cool science knows with pre cision that we want just this more than unspeakably, if any thing like this has been done for us. We want it first, to pay our debt to the school of the universe, in the sense of removing liableness to suffering to preserve the honor of violated law ; and, next, to give us immeasurable motives to loyalty. There is surely nothing that really changes the heart so quick ly as a sight of this substitution of chastisement for punishment, whether it be in the human case of a school, or in the revealed case of the school of the universe. Lift this feeling of the poor boy into all the dignity it naturally assumes when you take it as a type of the moral law, a unit throughout the universe ; lift that law until the arc we can measure has become the segment of a circle large enough to reach from here to the galaxies ; and then let all the constellations shine on the circle as you carry 164 ORTHODOXY. its line far past the spot over which Bootes is driv ing his hunting-dogs in their leash of sidereal fire; carry on that arc until stars fade out, and galaxies, and all the infinities and eternities of time past and time to come are embraced within it, and then what have you ? One little point of light — the whole of it is no more — to hold up before the noon of Christ's chastisement substituted for man's punishment. You wish to be born anew ? Look on the Cross. You wish to take God gladly as your Lord ? Look on him as your Saviour. You wish to drop all the heart-burdens of slavishness, and you desire to come into the obedience of delight ? Look on the Cross. You want glad allegiance to God as King ? Look on the Cross. There is nothing that frees us from the love of sin like looking on Him who has delivered us from the guilt of it. Speaking philosophically, addressing you in the mood of cool precision, I affirm, that if the great things man wants are riddance from the love of sin, and deliverance from the guilt of it, we can obtain the first best, and the latter only, by looking on the Cross. Those old words have unfathomable depth ; and he who is to be born anew must sit beside that pupil in Bronson Alcott's school, must imagine the benches to be the galaxies, and his hu man companions the angels and archangels who bow down on the golden floor, and on the shore of the sea of glass, and in presence of the Great White Throne, and cry out, "Holy, holy, holy Lord God Almighty; thou art worthy, for thou didst so love THE ATONEMENT AND SELF-EVIDENT TRUTH. 165 the world that thou gavest thine only-begotten Son, that whosoever beheveth on him should not perish, but have everlasting life." May I summarize the scientific truths contained in this discussion by asserting, in the name of the axioms of the nature of things, that it is clear ? — 1. That the master of that school was not guilty. 2. That he suffered, in the strict sense, not pun ishment, but chastisement. 3. That he had power to remove from the pupil the hability to suffer to preserve the honor of the law of the school. 4. That the pupil's peace before i the law of the school is the result not of his own work, but of the master's work; and not of the master's moral influence and general character merely, but of his substitution of chastisement for punishment. 5. That, nevertheless, the pupil must be loyal to the master, and thus, though not saved by works, cannot be saved without works. 6. That it is not simply the moral influence, or character and general example, of the master which transforms the boy into the mood of loyalty. 7. But that this substitution of voluntary sacrifi cial chastisement for punishment is the force which throws the shuttles that weave a new character in the soul thus delivered from punishment; and that although the record of disobedience cannot be changed, and must be remembered with regret, such memory, when loyalty is once made so perfect in love and trust as to cast out fear, will be but a spur to 166 ORTHODOXY. adoration of the condescension shown to the released soul ; and, in the multitudinous anthem of its grati tude, this shadow on the sea of glass will, for that spirit only, be by contrast an enchantment of the glory of the light on the sea of glass. [Applause.] On a summer evening, it has often been to me, on" both sides of the Atlantic, a solemn joy to he down alone at a grove's edge by the side of the ocean, and look into the infinite azure until the stars appear. In the rustle of the grove, one may hear thus all the forests of all the zones of the thrifty, jubilant, wheel ing world; the soul may touch all shores with the howling, salt, uneasy sea. As the stars come out, I love to lift above my thoughts Richter's apologue, which represents an angel as onee catching a man up into the infinite of space, and moving with him from galaxy to galaxy, until the human heart fainted, and called out, "End is there none of the universe of God ? " And the constellations answered, " End is there none that ever yet we heard of." Again the angel flew on with the man past immeasurable archi traves, and immensity after immensity, sown with rushing worlds ; and the human heart fainted again, and cried out, "End is there none of the universe of God?" And the angel answered; "End is there none of the universe of God : lo ! also, there is no beginning." But if, while I, thus entranced, look into the sky, you bring above my gaze the page of the gospel recording the fact of the Atonement, all other revelations of the divine glory appear in con trast but chaff and dust. VI. THE HAEIONIZATION OF THE SOUL WITH ITS ENYIEONIENT. THE SEVENTY-FIFTH LECTURE IN THE BOSTON MONDAY LEC TURESHIP, DELIVERED IN TREMONT TEMPLE APRIL 23. "Inter bonos viros ac Deum amicitia est, conciliante virtute: amicitiam dico? immo etiam necessitudo et simUitudo. — Seneca: De Provid., 1. "Et metus ille foras praeceps Acheruntis agendus, Funditus humanam qui vitam turbat ab imo, Omnia sufifundens mortis nigrore, neque ullam Esse voluptatem liquidam puramque relinquit." Lucretius: lib. iii. 37. VI. THE HARMONIZATION OF THE SOUL WITH ITS ENVIRONMENT. PRELUDE ON CURRENT EVENTS. Suppose that I have here in one hand a goblet filled with alcohol, and in the other a spoon containing the white of an egg, and that I turn the egg out into the alcohol. What has science to say about moderate drinking? Precisely what this experiment proves. The albuminous substance in the white of the egg is hardened by the action of the liquid, and so hardened, that, if I could have put the egg in round, it would have been fixed in that shape, with such a degree of firmness as to permit me to roll it across this platform. All glue-like or colloid substances, as your books say, are hardened by alcohol, because they contain a large percentage of water; and we know that alcohol is as thirsty for water as ever an inebriate is for alco hol. But the brain and the nerves contain a great amount of this same colloidal or glue-like substance. Drench the blood with alcohol, and you harden the brain, as I have hardened this egg in the goblet. The very latest investigation begins to speak in tones 169 170 ORTHODOXY. of great emphasis against moderate drinking, and this in the name of the natural effect of alcohol in hardening all the glue-like substances of the body. We say that the heart beats faster when we in dulge moderately in the use of intoxicating bever ages, and that" a cheerful flush comes to the face. But perpetual health is a perpetual intoxication. I had rather have the flush that our Anglo-Saxon ancestry gave us, and that we should keep if we loved the open sky as they did, or even open win dows, as Charles Kingsley or Victor Hugo advise us to do, than any flush which comes, as alcohol brings it, by relaxing the nerve-fibres in the circulatory ves sels. The quickening of the circulation of the blood by alcoholic stimulants was never quite understood until within the last twenty years, and perhaps not fully until within ten years. What makes the heart beat faster after moderate drinking? Is this has tened action a good effect or a bad? Is it disease, or is it the invigoration of the normal activity of the system? Suppose that I have here a steam-engine with India-rubber pipes. Around the pipes are deli cate fibres constricting them, but liable to melt when ever the temperature of the room rises above a certain point. It is very evident, that, if I were to raise the temperature of the room to such a degree as to melt all these little constricting fibres from the India-rubber pipes of this steam-engine, the moment they were melted, or relaxed, the engine, without any more fire in its furnaces, would begin to move faster. Why? Because, by the meltmg THE SOUL AND ITS ENVIRONMENT. 171 of the delicate fibres around the India-rubber pipes, the latter have themselves become relaxed, and so there is evidently less friction for the rushing steam to meet ; and therefore, without any increased force or fire, you would have a quickening of the ac tion of the engine. Would that result be an im provement of the normal conditions of the machin ery? Not at all. It would be an indication of a disarrangement. Just so in the human system. We have now learned that even moderate drinking, in ninety cases out of a hundred, temporarily paralyzes the nerves that govern the minute muscles that hold the arteries and the veins in proper tension. This injury of the finest nerves allows the circulatory system to become relaxed, and so the heart beats faster ; but there is no more force in the heart. The whole effect is like the acceleration produced in the motions of a watch when you take the pallets off the machinery. Dr. Richardson, fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, has lately told us in his " Can tor Lectures on Alcohol," a work introduced to Amer ica by Dr. Willard Parker, that " alcohol paralyzes the minute blood-vessels, and allows them to become dilated. The dilatation follows on the reduction of nervous control, which reduction has been induced by alcohol " (Lecture hi.). Therefore there is a flush in the face ; and not only there, but the flush pervades the entire system, and especially the brain, for which everybody knows that alcohol has a pecu liar local affinity. Go to the Hunterian Museum in London, and men 172 ORTHODOXY. will show you skeletons of two lions, both poisoned and with the same kind of poison. There is a mark on these skeletons at the point where that poison ex pended its chief force. All physicians know that poisons have a local action within the system, and that sometimes a rifle-ball has no more definite point of impingement upon whatever it is aimed at than a poison has in relation to the object against the wel fare of which it is directed. We must remember that the special local affinity of alcohol is for the brain ; that the relaxing of the fibres which allows the heart to beat faster is not a sign of health, but of disease ; and that the moderate drinker, in ninety cases out of a hundred, is thus honeycombed through and through by this relaxation. Its ef fects are seen first in a lack of moral feeling. But when fever strikes him down, when cholera attacks him, when sun's heat and life's struggle come to gether, he breaks more easily than he otherwise would. In your remaining ten cases, perhaps, there may be apparent immunity for a while : but in old age a man is more brittle than he would be other wise; and in the next generation what do you get? Why, when there is a confirmed and inveterate habit of wine-drinking, or other habitual and prolonged although moderate alcoholic stimulation, the succes sion of generations differs in character usually not very far from what it was in Webster's family, — colossal strength in the father of Webster, colossal strength in Webster, erratic strength in the son, lack of control in the grandson, — a boy who made THE SOUL AND ITS ENVIRONMENT. 173 of his grandfather's amusements his whole occupa tion; and what the next generation would have been, the law of hereditary descent will tell you. Inex haustible strength, eccentricity, moral weakness, and then the condition which your " Atlantic Monthly," choice about its language, describes by the adjective "spooney." Even giants may deteriorate to this stage in four generations. Mr. Gough, who used to be paid nine dollars for three lectures, has lately made us all his debtors by a plea, in Christ's name, against moderate drinking. The Light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world is shining now more intensely than in any previous century on the physical deteriorations that come from coarse bodily habits. On all the physical vices God is throwing the progress of the sciences, as we throw spadesful of earth on a coffin. " Apples of Sodom," " Circe's Enchantment," was the ancient lan guage about all the physical vices ; but the microscope and the scalpel are revealing to us, in characters of fire, the depth of those old metaphors. Physical vices are overrated, and, if exact science had her way, would be outgrown by all but the dissipated, who are always the dizzy-pated. Christianity so values the body, that a Holy Sep ulchre, where once an angel sat at the head, and another angel at the feet, not of a body, but of a place where a body had lain, drew to it all Europe in crusade after crusade, making the Italian cities rich, founding the Hanse towns, wrenching liberty for the municipal classes out of the gripe of- nobles, 174 ORTHODOXY. and so, in ultimate result, writing Magna Charta and the American Constitution. It is historically true to say that the crusades put the ballot in the poor man's hand, or began liberty; and they were in great measure the outcome of the reverence of Chris tianity for the incontrovertible fact that a physical frame had been the supreme human temple of the Holy Ghost. In a similar spirit she and she only has for ages effectively taught what science at last proclaims, that, if any man defile the temple of God, him shall God destroy ; for the temple of God is holy, which temple ye are. It is a small sneer of scepticism that Christianity cares nothing for the flesh. Only she glorifies it. Only Christianity makes the home possible. Mr. Seward came back from a tour around the world ; and the shrewdest thing he said about Asia was, " In all the East there is not a home." In Athens, one night, walking to the south-east cor ner of the Acropolis, I looked down upon the great Dionysic Theatre, uncovered in 1862 by Hof baurath Strack's German shovels. Some of the marble chairs, a few of the statues, half the seats, a multitude of the inscriptions,, are still in their places. On one of the white thrones there is a lion's foot, with the tip of the claw yet savagely sharp, sculptured, perhaps, in Hadrian's time. Socrates once ironically commended Agathon, a poet, for having exhibited his wisdom in this theatre, or, at least, at this place, before thirty thousand spectators. Fully twenty thousand or thirty thousand people were accustomed to assem- THE SOUL AND ITS ENVIRONMENT. 175 ble at dawn here, in a semicircle cut in the slope of the Acropolis, and to listen to tragedies, the voice of which even now, as we read them, is to the ear of thought a majestic philosophical or theological anthem, ^schylus and Sophocles and Euripides so taught ethics and religion, that the stage in the ancient Athenian democracy must be compared to the pulpit in modern times. Never was it the frivolous and sometimes filthy thing which is to-day called a theatre. Beneath the shadow of the Parthe non, and of Minerva herself, the free people sat down, as JSschylus says, "under the wings of gods." Along the beach at Phalerum, where Demosthenes declaimed to the waves, and beneath the sharp hills of JSgina and Salamis, the blue sea palpitated before the spectators. The chief part of the Ilissus plain, Mount Hymettus, the ancient Agora and Pnyx, and numberless temples, were in view : above the unroofed amphitheatre hung the infinite depth of the mysteri ously soft and bright sky of Greece. Subtle allusions to this outlook, abounding in Euripides, JEschylus, and Sophocles, prove curiously in detail, that here Greek poetry, in the early spring mornings, found earth, sea, sky, and historic monuments a most organ izing inspiration, and fit to match an audience com posed of all that was then the most brilliant in the world. Such was the theatre in ancient Athens. Would Euripides think it better than this in the modern Athens ? Does the classic drama flourish here, or in New York, or in Chicago ? Is not the low always .176 ORTHODOXY. the slow aesthetically ? But is the low always the slow financially ? The abler portion of your secular press, thinks it time to speak incisively of swindling theatrical amusements, as ^schylus would do were he here. When I findr the less reputable local press keeping up full descriptions of what you want no sister or brother of yours to see, I am reminded that sometimes in a great palace in the city, if you keep open the bottom of a marble wash-bowl, there is in the untrapped lead-pipe a connection with the gutter, and diphtheria may assail you in the midst of luxury. Is it quite profitable for us to keep open the gilded pipe from the marble basin to the gutter? You remember the French proverb, as true in practice as in theory: "Where virtue ends, there vice begins." The slavehound is not to be more detested than the actress of a loathsome play. A loaferish woman can amuse only loaferish men. A scandal which woman meets with just indignation deserves abhorrence every where. We men are to blame, we men are to take excoriation, if, not imitating ancient Athens, we make a portion of the theatre such a scene, that had it been exhibited in the classic age of Greece, on that slope of the Acropolis where -33schylus, Euripides, and Sophocles taught, it would have been met there with loathing and all denunciation of it with Athenian acclaim. [Applause.] THE LECTURE. Mr. Gladstone is living now under a rapidly wes tering sun ; and with the reverence of an empire, THE SOUL AND ITS ENVIRONMENT. 177 whose morning drum-beat encircles the world, attend ing on every serious word he utters, he lately pro claimed that the centre of all preaching must be the Cross. At a conference held at the City Temple, Holburn Viaduct, March 22, after speeches by Eng lishmen and Americans, there were loud cries for Mr. Gladstone ; and, among other memorable words, this adviser of that queen who governs one-sixth of the population of the world used these expressions, to which his whole career adds emphasis : — "We are here with a great and mighty function, belonging from the first especially, almost exclusively, to revealed religion , — a function, the efficacy of which must undoubtedly depend, in the main, upon the matter which is preached. We are here as Christians ; and it is the preaching of Christ our Lord, which is the secret and substance and centre and heart of all preaching, not merely of facts about him and notions about him, but of his person, his work, his character, his simple yet unfathomable sayings: here lies the secret" (London Times, March 23, 1877). The two ablest Englishmen of our day are Scotch men. When Thomas Carlyle and William Glad stone — under the light of a west almost cloudless, but not measureless in the visible stretch of azure yet ¦ to be rolled through by the chariots of their lives, — lean backward as they look forward, and from be tween the wheels that bear them on, and which never pause, speak to us out of the sunset, is it quite scien tific, is it quite manly, is it quite womanly, for us whose chariots are yet at the zenith, or ascending the eastern slope of the azure, to forget that the sun moves towards the west as fast at noon as in the last 178 ORTHODOXY. moment before that in which he fires the western pines ? Gladstone and Carlyle, and our century, are westering and gazing on us with the solemnity of the hour into which all men haste. In the radiance which streams out of the morning, noon, and evening jyatch of the wheeling skies in which we rise and set but once, let us be willing to open any theme of religious science, and take all the results clear ideas require us to hold, whatever doctrine stands, or whatever doctrine falls. [Applause.] God looks through the morning, unstained radiance of life, those dewy, upstretching, far-penetrating, star-lit auroras, which reveal the intuitions, and primal, untutored human instincts. As once he looked through the pillar of fire in the morning watch, so yet, gazing through those auroras, he troubles the hosts of unscientific, irreligious thought. He looks also through the evening cloud, and troubles the hosts of Iscariotism, and takes off their chariot- wheels. Thor's hammer is engaged in that business. In the light of previous discussions of the atone ment, you must allow me to say that the following propositions — which are almost omnipresent in James Martineau's references to this topic, and in many discussions conducted by honored men here in New England, whom I need not name — are only a multiplex rustle of misconceptions. I do not call these statements misrepresentations ; but they are mis apprehensions which have done and are yet doing immortal mischief. 1. That Christ, although innocent, was punished. THE SOUL AND ITS ENVIRONMENT. 179 2. That God punishes by substitution. 3. That, if a penalty for the violation of moral law be inflicted so as to maintain the honor of that law, God is indifferent on whom that punishment falla. 4. That God was at first disposed to show mercy, and was made placable by the death of Christ. 5. That the Atonement involves a transfer of moral qualities from person to person. 6. That pardon, and not merely the conditional offer of it, precedes the soul's self-surrender to God. 7. That the Atonement involves the injustice of liberating the guilty. 8. That it saves, irrespective of character, who ever has faith. 9. That it is inconsistent with the immutability of the Divine attributes. 10. That it represents the law of the nature of things as supreme over the Divine Will itself. 11. That, as the Atonement is provided for all, it secures the salvation of all. 12. That, if pardon can be obtained on the condi tion of faith merely, morality is unimportant. These propositions evangelical scholarship not only does not teach, but abhors. [Applause.] Gentle men, what you say here goes very much further than any thing I can present. Beware of approving state ments of mine, for your indorsement makes language important. You have said, however, that all these propositions are caricatures ; and yet, if you are right, there is hardly a professor's chair in any school of 180 ORTHODOXY. unevangelical theology in New England that is not wrong in its fundamental representations of evangel ical thought. [Applause.] Opening only by glimpses the greatest theme which human, unassisted reason can touch, I must proceed analytically, and with what scholars, to whom I am not speaking, may perhaps think is un necessary slowness. I desire to accompany you, this morning, in your ascent along one of the most mod ern pathways of thought to a mountain summit from which I hope the outlook will cause us to fall on our knees, and send us away with strength for many days. I am discussing the Atonement in the hght of self-evident truth ; and, if I am not using proof- texts, it is not because I undervalue them. On other occasions it is my duty to expound the Scrip tures ; but here the object is to show the connec tion between religious and other science. Ando- ver Seminary yonder has just asked for funds to found a professorship with this title, " On the Con nections between Theology and the other Sciences." May she obtain money in abundance for a purpose so timely and sublime, and may something better than wealth come to America out of such a foun dation ! In the field of the relations between reli gion and science, this Lecturesliip has for its object simply the discussion of the clear, the true, the new, the strategic. The best posture of mind is that which seeks first, not orthodoxy, but clear ness. Of course, truth is immeasurably the high est object of consideration; but, when we say we THE SOUL AND ITS ENVIRONMENT. 181 must seek truth first, such is the subtle action of prejudice, that truth is commonly understood to mean my truth, not your truth. Therefore let us first seek clearness, and not your truth or my truth. Clearness will not mislead us if we set it up as a I goal ; but our prejudgments as to what truth is may easily do so. Let us be true to the scientific method, and truth will take care of itself. Let us seek pri marily to be distinct and straightforward, and only secondarily tu be orthodox or heterodox. Let us not confuse ourselves with the slightest partisan prejudice. Let us keep all creeds out of our minds | as much as possible, and seek first, midst, last, all that Intuition, Instinct, Experiment, and Syllo gism can teach us, or perfect loyalty to the scientific method. [Applause.] 1. God wills man's perfection. 2. Man cannot be perfect without a perfect reli gion. 3. God, therefore, will give man a perfect religion. In democratic ages small philosophers, whose rule of procedure is to guess at the half, and multiply by two, are great characters ; but lost babes are greater, — those who think it the supreme philosophical glory never, to come to a conclusion, and, on the whole, are of the opinion that the best thing we can do in the forest of human investigation is to lie down, after the ancient and not honorable example narrated in child hood's primers, and let the robins cover us with leaves. Unmanly, despairing bewilderment, and unconfessed, desponding, intellectual unrest thrive in more edu- 182 ORTHODOXY. cated minds than we think, and this simply because we have masses of highly-cultured people who have never looked into religious thought as a science. Nearly all investigation of theology as a system of exact research has, little by little, been crowded into the distinctively theological schools. Almost nothing is taught on this theme in our colleges at present, because so much more matter is forced into their courses now than was there eighty or one hundred years ago. It is not because Harvard undervalues ethics or the Christian evidences, that she gives little time to them. Yale gives almost as little time. For my examination in ethics in Harvard University, I prepared in two days; and the examination ran through twenty-seven minutes. How much could I learn in that time on topics that have convulsed all highly-cultured thought on both sides of the Atlan tic ? If I had gone out from the University, and en tered immediately upon the professional studies, and afterward, in regular course, upon the duties of a lawyer, how much time should I have had to have looked into religious science elaborately ? It is said that no successful lawyer, in the full tide of the work of his profession, ever reads a book through. He ex amines, perhaps, as Carlyle does, or as Macaulay did, a dozen books a day, year after year ; but he gets through them swiftly, as Macaulay did, by skipping. If I had taken the profession of medicine, it is prob able I should have become absorbed, as I ought in duty to do, in that ; and so religious truth as a sci ence might never have come before me. Cultivated THE SOUL AND ITS ENVIRONMENT. 183 minds, with wide gaps in their culture, are character istic of an age of specialists ; and ours is such an age. College-courses are intended to sharpen sickles, and not to reap the harvest. But the prepared reaping- hooks are, in nine cases out of ten, cast heedfully into ripe rusthng grain only on the field of thought a man's profession or business compels him to enter. Even for the humble but indispensable purpose of sharpen ing dull sickles, four years are too few ; and yet no more work can profitably be crowded into those years. The time occupied by the studies pursued at Harvard and Yale is already packed as full as an egg is with meat, and so full, that sometimes the egg will not hatch. One of the intellectual dangers of our time , is the almost necessary existence of a wide circle of ' cultured minds well educated only on one side.! In that class you find most of those who lie down in ' the tropical forests of modern thought, and say, " We cannot find the way home." I affirm that if there is a God, and if he is not a malevolent being, he not only has made a best way to live, but has made it sure that it is best to live the best way. He wills our perfection ; and, if he is a benevolent being, he will not only give us a religion that will carry us to perfection, but he will make it so plain, that he who runs may read, if he will. Wherever in the forest a man wishes you to drop down in despair, there recall and recite the great Credo: That God wills man's perfection; that man cannot be perfect without a perfect religion; and that therefore God will give man a perfect religion, so clear that it will be the 184 ORTHODOXY. light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world. While I hold to a belief in God's goodness, I must believe, although I cannot know the map of all the forest, that there is a way home, and that I can find the path back to my Father's house ! [Applause.] — 'Our surprising friends who believe that the uni verse is without a path home are the worst of the class of lost babes ; but for five centuries to come probably theirs will be one of the most misleading of the temporary influences in the circles of merely pro fessional or special culture. If this is the condition of many who have been liberally educated, what shall be said of the masses of average men of strong minds and inextensive studies, whose heads are buried in their ledgers and newspapers, and who have not time to look at religious truth as a science, until clearness is reached concerning it, and do not know by their own investigation what to think, and in a democratic and scientific age are little likely to take any thing for granted or on authority? Democratic ages can never be taught ex cathedra. All men must think for themselves ; and so all men must be taught how to think. It is, therefore, worth while for public educated discussion to put in the foreground axioms, self-evident truths, intuitions, instincts, or the nature of things, and to let men see, that, after all, the great truths we cannot help believing are the things of most importance to us. We know we are dependent beings. We know we did not create ourselves. We are here ; and once we were not here. Our coming into existence was a change. Every change must THE SOUL AND ITS ENVIRONMENT. 185 have an adequate cause. There is a Power above us. If we are dependent beings, there must be an inde pendent Being. Just as there cannot be a here with out a there, an upper without an under, so there can not be a dependent being without an independent, that is, a self-existent Being. If we can induce men to attend to the scientific certainty, that, without similarity of feeling with that Being, their peace is a natural impossibility ; if we can cause them to feel that their consciences are the touch of God within them, or of a Somewhat and Some One in, but not of us, we shall slowly bring them to believe that these axioms, these constitutional instincts, these ineradica ble moral beliefs, are, and were meant to be, a clew to the path that leads into the King's Highway, and brings men into the land on which the sun never sets. Whoever will read with reverence, clearness, and fulness the Oldest Testament, or the Nature of Things, will have such convictions as he reads the Old Testament, and the New and the Newest, that he will find his cheeks growing pale if he is disloyal to the truth he meets ; or, if he is loyal, his forehead becoming white, and his eyes like stars. 4. A perfect religion will secure for all who accept it blessedness. 5. But there can be no blessedness without holi ness. 6. For a free moral agent who has sinned, there can be no blessedness without holiness and pardon. 7. A perfect religion, therefore, will secure for all who accept it holiness and pardon. 186 ORTHODOXY. 8. A perfect religion will harmonize us with our environment. 9. But our environment here and hereafter con victs unalterably of God, conscience, and our record of sin. 10. A perfect God who wills man's perfection will teach man the methods of harmonizing himself with his environment. 11. In the nature of things we cannot be harmonized with that environment unless religion provides for us both holiness and pardon. Why, if we are loyal to the scientific method, we ought to sleep on propositions like these ; for they will not fall into tremor until the pillars of the uni- "verse fall. It is affirmed, I am told, that I never have had any conflict with doctrinal unrest ; but it was my fortune to quit for three years a college- course at its central part, that I might find time to give myself information on certain majestic topics, the investigation of which I longed for more than vexed Sahara, with its deadly thunderous simooms and dervish dance of sand-pillars, ever longed for the dew or rain. It is of little consequence to you, but it is of consequence to me, that a certain desert Carlyle speaks of has been under my feet. You know he says we must not sit down in that howling waste, but keep on ; and that beyond it we shall find the green fields, and the waters that quench all thirst. All those springs burst out of axioms ; that is, out of ranges of living rock, whose roots take hold of JJje core of the world. THE SOUL AND ITS ENVIRONMENT. 187 12. After six thousand years of experience, man's philosophical and moral restlessness proves, that, without violence to self-evident truth, he has found no way of harmonizing himself by his own excellence, or solely by his own good works, with his entire environment, including conscience, God, and a record of deliberate sin in an irreversible past. Some men ask how, if the past is irreversible, we can be happy, even in heaven ? Was the past of the prodigal who returned to his father's house not irreversible? Forever and forever it could not be changed. But was he happy after his return ? As suredly. Is the house not made with hands so very different from the present dwelling-place of men, that we cannot reason from the experience of a prodigal here to experience there ? Moral as well as physical law has unity and universality. In some respects a prodigal's record enhances his bliss on his return: in other respects it diminishes bliss, as it must always be remembered with regret. Is the balance so much in favor of bliss, that we may conclude, in the name of science, that we shall add to our happiness by living a while in the strange country, under famine and with the swine ? No serious man asks this question ; but, to my amazement, I have been seriously asked by an unscientific liberalism to deny that the past is irreversible. Alas that the soft whims of luxury and superficiality are in conflict with Eternal Enact ments ! Is all science asleep, that we do not see that the nature of things is — He whom we dare not name! If I deny that the past is irreversible, I 188 ORTHODOXY. must deny a very large number of truths guaranteed to us by the same evidence ; that is, by self-evident truth. I must deny that the whole is greater than a part, or that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points, or that every change must have a cause. It is just as evident that what has once been cannot be made not to have been, as that every change must have a cause. If you play fast and loose with axioms, you have a task larger than that of Sisyphus on your hands to prove that you know any thing. You know that you know that nothing can be known. How do you know that you know ? The time has come when we must teach the outlines of the philosophy of axioms, or self-evident truths, to John and James, and Patrick and Michael, and the Monthly Rocket and the Daily Blunderbuss. A little philosophy is in all men's minds, and it is a dangerous thing. The Castilian spring must be imade to run through democratic ages in streams large enough to quench the thirst of multitudes, ^otherwise there will be trouble. [Applause.] I affirm, that, by experience, the proposition is guaranteed to us as fully as any other inference from history, that man has not invented a religion wholly out of reason, that would harmonize his nature with his whole environment. Where is that invented scheme of thought ? How many attempts have been made to harmonize man with his entire environment, and to use in the attempt only reason ! and how, age after age, the law of the survival of the fittest has forced to the wall human inventions on that theme ! THE SOUL AND ITS ENVIRONMENT. 189 If there were a great philosophy that could provide for man's harmonization with his entire environment, we should know its name ; we should be following it. Plato's philosophy ! — well, it is twenty-two hundred years old ; but, if some of its fundamental proposi tions were carried out, you and I to-day would be living in barracks, and could not tell who our broth ers are, or our sisters, or who our parents were. I know how glorious portions of Plato's teaching are ; but the truth is that the central ideas in his system are not able to satisfy man. They have not been adopted as the rule of life : they have had fair hearing. You know what is governing the world to-day. After twenty-two hundred years of conflict, it is not philosophy that governs social life. Some reverence is to be had for a cause that has seen battle, age after age, but never yet Sefeat. " God is on the side of the heaviest battalions," Napoleon used to say; and it looks as if Christianity were not a very weak battalion. The test of scholarship is that it should contend with scholarship, not once or twice, but century after century, and come out crowned. 13. Man's need of an Atonement not made by him self, and assuring him of pardon has, therefore, been proved by human experience. 14. This need is also an incontrovertible inference from the natural operations of conscience and the unchan- geableness of the past. Of that central proposition I have offered here detailed proof; and so, without expanding this dis- 190 ORTHODOXY. cussion, I put now our previous conclusion into its natural connections of thought. It is held here that whoever will be loyal to the scientific method, or to axiomatic truth in its relation to the conscience and an irreversible past, will come out with the scientific certainty that such arrangements as may harmonize us with our entire environment, man's own excellence of character cannot make. We have concluded once for all here, in the name of self-evident truth, that Lady Macbeth' s use of water will be fruitless forever. But she must have her hand made wliite, or the record in her past covered; for, in the nature of things, she cannot be at peace with her entire en vironment until her foreboding is taken away. 15. So far forth as any religion provides for man's holiness and pardon, it has the marks of being a perfect religion. 16. Alone among all religions yet known to men, Christianity, without coming into conflict with self- evident truth, provides both for man's holiness arid his pardon. 17. Alone among all religions known to men, Christianity, therefore, has the marks of being a per fect religion ; for it, and it only, provides for both man's holiness and his pardon. 18. It does the latter by the revealed truths of the Incarnation and the Atonement. 19. So far forth as Christianity could not, in the nature of things, provide for man's blessedness and per fection, or his holiness and pardon, without the Incar nation and the Atonement^ so far forth the Incarnation THE SOUL AND ITS ENVIRONMENT. 191 and Atonement had an eternal and abiding necessity in the wise and free love of God, since this love wills the perfection of man who cannot be perfect without a per fect religion, and cannot attain blessedness without both holiness and pardon. [Applause.] 20. So far forth as this necessity inheres in the nature of things, the Bivine idea relative to the completion of the world first arrives at perfection, or at realization, through the Incarnation and the Atonement. 21. The religion of Christ, including the truths of the Incarnation and the Atonement, is the only religion, that, without violence to self-evident truth, brings man to peace with his entire environment. 22. It is, therefore, scientifically known to be a perfect or absolute religion. Gentlemen, we are drawing nigh one of the highest summits of the loftiest range of ethical thought. I open the best book on the Deity of our Lord which has been produced in the last century, Dorner's " History of the Doctrine of the Person of Christ ; " and, although you cannot find these propositions analytically stated anywhere in the volume, you may find them everywhere implied in it, and scattered through the freshest portions of the world's best ethical and theological scientific research on this theme. You want a twig off the German tree, and I give you one in order that you may judge whether the sap in it is not of precisely the same quality with that of the circulating fluid of thought in these analytical propositions. Off this stalwart tree, which I chose as a confessedly crowned specimen of the 192 ORTHODOXY. " growths of modern thought on this theme, I will pluck this spray of foliage, assured, that, if you hold it up in the wind of self-evident truth, it will have a harp -like tone. What anthem, then, might you not hear, if you were to walk into a whole forest of such growths ? " The world of humanity and spirits constitutes a real unity solely in virtue of the circumstance that over its essence, which consists in free susceptibility to God, there stands the per sonal and universal Divine principle; and that this principle, whilst standing over, is also turned towards, nay more, belongs ' to it, so far as it is the true kosmos; so that without it, the world cannot at all be conceived as a completed and filled unity. " The idea of the world as it stands eternally before God is not terminated 'and completed with susceptibility to God, but, according to his unfathomable gracious will, includes also that this susceptibility be absolutely filled in itself; and at the point where the central fulfilment corresponding to this central sus ceptibility takes place, the world, too, — which, as merely sus ceptible to God, or even sinful, was outside of God, — entered into the circle of the Divine Life, into the life of the triune God himself, even as the immanent Divine Life explicated itself here. " The Son is not the world, but its Divine principle, which brought a world to pass, not by a necessity of nature, but ac cording to the inner law of love, which is at the same time the law of freedom. He is also not the ideal world, nor the image of the world in God, but primarily its principle. Still we are compelled to say that the world — both according to its idea, and according to the idea of the will of the Logos, in other words, the Divine idea relative to the completion of the world — first arrives at perfection, at realization, through the incarna tion. " This leads to a further point, which is of decisive impor tance both in itself and in a systematical respect, — a point by THE SOUL AND ITS ENVIRONMENT. 193 which the historical in Christ is raised to absolute significance, and is removed from the sphere of contingency. This is the truth, that the incarnation of God in Christ had not its sole ground in sin, but, besides sin, had a deeper, to wit, an eternal and abiding necessity in the wise and free love of God, so far as this love willed, in general, the existence of a world which should be the scene of its perfect revelation, and so far as, consequently, the world is marked by susceptibility to and need of this revelation." (Dorner, Professor J. A., on the Person of Christ, div. ii. vol. iii. pp. 235, 236.) This is the successor of Schleiermacher in the Uni versity at Berlin, speaking in the best university of the world, and at the end of age after age of the acutest scholarly discussion of this theme. I might put before you volumes of such discussion ; but they would point only to the sublime creed, that God wills man's perfection ; that he cannot be perfect without a perfect religion ; that he will give man, therefore, a perfect religion ; and that Christianity is the only religion that has the two marks of perfection, — ability to harmonize man with his entire environ ment by providing for both his holiness and his pardon. / 23. But there cannot be two perfect or absolute religions, or one with Christ, and one without Christ. 24. The religion of Christ, including the truths of the Incarnation and the Atonement, is, therefore, the only absolute religion. 25. A body of thought, of which an outline has now been given, is taught implicitly in New England, England, and Scotland to-day, and in Germany is explicitly adopted by theologians such as Dorner, 194 ORTHODOXY. Niztsch, Martensen, Ebrard, Schmid, Petersen, Kling, Nagelsbach, Schoberlein, Ehrenfeuchter, Chalybaeus, Fischer, Liebner, Lange, and Rothe. (See Dorner, Person of Christ, div. ii. vol. iii. p. 237.) Theodore Parker's Absolute Religion was a reli gion without the Incarnation, a religion without the Atonement, a religion, therefore, adequately discredit ed by scientific thought and human experience, as unable on the one hand to provide for man's pardon without violating self-evident truth, and therefore unable on the other to give him that transfiguration of his entire nature, that deliverance from the last ache of Pharisaic pride, that eternal cessation of the unrest of forced deistic repose, that similarity of feeling with a Saviour who is gladly taken as Lord, that peace unsearchable and eternal, which springs up only in the light of the Cross. [Ap plause.] Revelation is a king unmarried ; science is a queen unmarried ; but from eternity and for eternity these two have changed eyes. " He is the half part of a blessed man, Left to be finished by such as she ; And she a fair divided excellence Whose fulness of perfection lies in him." King John, act ii. [Applause.] vn. TEUE AND FALSE OPTIMISM. THE SEVENTY-SIXTH LECTURE LN THE BOSTON MONDAY LEC TURESHIP, DELIVERED IN TREMONT TEMPLE APRIL 30. " Die, Epicure, Quse res faciat fceatum? Responde, Voluptas cor poris. Die, Stoice: Virtus animi. Die, Christiane: DonumDei." St. Augustine. " Arrisit infans, nee moratus retulit: Est quidquid illud, quod ferunt homines Deum, Unum esse opportet, et quod uni est unicum. Cum Christus hoc sit, Christus est verus Deus. Genera deorum multa nee pueri putant." Pekisteph: Hymn. vn. TRUE AND FALSE OPTIMISM. PRELUDE ON CURRENT EVENTS. Washington Irving was once invited to Boston by the historian Prescott to spend a week of leisure, but refused to do so on the ground that hard work was a greater delight than rest. Only those who have had experience in the deepest secrets of life understand that our best blisses come from the per formance of our most odious duties. " It would give me the greatest pleasure to enjoy companionship with a few choice spirits like yourself," Irving wrote to Prescott; "but I dread the vortex of gay society. Habits of literary occupation have almost unfitted me for idle, gentlemanly life. Relaxation and repose begin to be insupportable to me. I feel a disposition to relapse into hard writing" (Ticknor's Prescott, illus. ed., pp. 422, 423). We think that conversation with the religiously irresolute is a very difficult duty ; and yet those who perform it know that it is the source of one of the highest blisses of this life, and find such reward, that their hallowed endeavor will be prolonged from the love of it. They will re- 197 198 ORTHODOXY. lapse, as Washington Irving did, into hard work at what may have been, in its earlier stages, not a little distasteful. Those are the happiest persons in Boston to-day, who have done most face to face with the religiously irresolute during the past three months. Those will remember the winter with the greatest delight who have plunged themselves into this cold sea of personal conversation with the religiously indifferent, and have beaten back all its surges, in stead of sinking ; and, when they have beaten them, have found the waters buoying them up, until now stalwart swimming is a bliss. Christians do not know their privileges until they learn to like these most difficult parts of a Christian's duty. Not far from fifty years ago in this city, Lyman Beecher called one morning on a respectable family, and asked if the children of the household could not be sent to a Bible school. Dr. Chalmers had done something in such schools in Scotland ; and it was the purpose of Lyman Beecher to introduce Chalmers' scheme of effort here. " My own children are going," said he to the head of the household, " can you not send yours ? Let us have that nucleus to begin with." In Boston, the Sabbath school as an instrumentality for the education of society was hardly more than a germ fifty years ago. It was a hope ; it was an im pulse ; it had no assured position. To-day, in the International Sabbath-school Lessons, that style of instruction encircles the globe. In this last yet unrolhng chapter of the Acts of the Apostles there is, I beheve, not a Divine inspiration, such as fills our TRUE AND FALSE OPTIMISM. 199 Scriptures, but a Divine illumination from the Light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world. Now, there is one other religious instrumentality, almost in the germ yet, but which might have a field as wide as that which the Sabbath school has entered, and become even more fruitful, would Christians but learn Washington Irving's secret, that hard work at an odious duty transmutes into bliss. This is a large hope, I know ; but I refer to the conversa tion-meeting, which has had such power in this city in the last three months, and ought to continue to have the same power in the four hundred churches which are now uniting their services with those of Boston. If there could be in these four hundred churches the right use of what is called in England an " after- meeting," or what we call a " conversation-meeting," or what is called in older phraseology an " inquiry- meeting," and if there could be a full and prolonged development of that religious instrumentality, how soon might we not find the church gladly doing all the while what it now does in its lucid intervals only ! The Church now is sometimes zealous, and sometimes cold. It is amphibious in the sense in which those timbers on the mud-flat in the harbor yonder are : when the tide is in, they are up and floating ; when the tide is out, they are on the earth. Amphibious in the style of drift-wood! What if we were trained to be amphibious in the style of those to whom God has given power to meet diffi culty? In the seasons when no great effort is re quired face to face with the religiously irresolute, 200 ORTHODOXY. the Christian has the right to cultivate his own inner life, to solace himself with the St. Augustines, and the Fenelons, and the Jeremy Taylors, and the Pas cals. But when the trumpet calls, when the fallen and perishing and degraded are to be met face to face ; when there is effort going on by which the courses of hundreds of lives may be determined; and when, if every one will mend one, all will be amended, then your Christian is to be amphibious in the better sense ; he should be ready for the sternest duty, and love it even better than the soft swathing of himself in the luxuries of spiritual repose. He knows that stalwart action on the field of battle is rather oraver than any military movement practised on the drill-field. Let him stand face to face with the enemy, if he would become a soldier, and not merely face to face with painted or printed enemies. How shall a meeting be managed so as to make the rule of courtesy that of Christian endeavor in conversation between the religiously resolute and the religiously irresolute ? Go to these four hundred churches, — it is my fortune to pass up and down New England, — and you will find them disagreed sometimes as to just what to do. But there is com ing to be a very well-established custom as to conver sation-meetings. Not long ago we had a hundred and fifty meetings in the Established Church inside the city of London, all of them closed on each night with a conversation-meeting. In that effort, arch bishops and bishops led ; and men from some of the highest ranks in culture made it too late to say that TRUE AND FALSE OPTIMISM. 201 this conversation is not fashionable. People who will not touch a pearl until somebody has handled it with lavender gloves may know very well, if they will study the history of what the English Church calls "missions," — only another name for "revivals," — that the conversation-meeting has been sprinkled with holy water, and therefore, perhaps, deserves christening here. In London and in many other places the common habit has been to make a request that any who are willing to enter into religious con versation will remain at the close of the meeting. All who do not care to enter into such an exercise go out while a hymn is sung : those who remain, by doing so, say that they are willing to converse on religion ; and so there is no discourtesy in your speaking to them under such circumstances. Now, let it be the rule among the churches of New Eng land in the winter season, when large gatherings can be held in the evenings, for every devotional meeting to be closed by a request that any religiously irreso lute person who is present, and who wishes to remain for a quarter or half an hour for religious conversa tion, should do so. Let that be the custom, as much observed as holding devotional meetings, or as the gath ering of sabbath schools ; and very soon, instead of a church that is a mere hook in place of an amputated hand, I will show you a church that has fingers, that can reach into the wants of society, and can make supply match demand. [Applause.] In no other way, so well as by bringing the uncon verted face to face with the converted, can you nur- 202 ORTHODOXY. ture an inefficient church-member into a Christian of the stalwart type. For lack of this work, we are feeble ; for lack of this work, some of us are asleep ; for lack of just this style of effort, or its equivalent, some of us are portly, indeed, but placid and flaccid. Let us begin, during the illumined time which is now passing over our heads, a large reform on this theme. Let us make it a rule, under the vol untary system in the free churches of America, which state churches of Europe watch closely, that a conversation-meeting shall follow every large devo tional gathering in the central seasons of the year. We need many styles of meetings: the reform gathering once a month, at least, to attend to temper ance, and perhaps oftener in many places. To-day I wish to emphasize one point only ; and that is, that if, in the next fifty years, you will develop the conversa tion-meeting as you have developed the Sabbath school in the last fifty, you will find more blessed results from the conversation-meeting than you have from the Sabbath school. This I believe solemnly, in the name of the influence of such conversations not only upon the unconverted, but upon the con verted. I know personally one church to which it was my fortune to minister, in days which, like those T am now passing through, were unfit to be used to teach anybody; but that church was led into con versation with the religiously irresolute as a -stand ard measure. It was a church where those invited to do this work could be trusted to do right in such conversations. General public instruction for such TRUE AND FALSE OPTIMISM. 203 labor had been given. A pasW may feel that he cannot trust everybody in his church to converse with everybody; but he can give such public in struction, that the influence of injudicious advice given in conversation will soon be counteracted. Let there be right instruction from the pulpit, and you can trust church-members, with proper oversight, to converse with those who remain. This church, of which I have positive knowledge, employed that measure of conversation for three months, and then was without a pastor for many months ; but the con versations and conversions went on. Men learned to love that style of effort. Instead of Sabbath clubs listening to sermons and music, and going away talk ing about the oratory and the fashions, the scent of the minister's handkerchief, and the divine aroma of wardrobes, white or black, let us have churches such as those which conquered the Csesars. Let us be sure that the most difficult duties are the most blissful ; let all the churches be filled with this cer tainty, and the hard work will soon be so done as to be deadly. [Applause.] THE LECTURE. One. of the kings who were prominent in the cru sades was taken prisoner, and confined for many months in a castle standing in that territory which Turkey and Russia may soon deluge in blood. A musician, who had been a member of the household of this prince, sought long to find the spot in which his lord was immured, but could obtain no entrance 204 ORTHODOXY. behind any castle's b'ars. In place after place he wea rily gave up the search, because he could procure no sight of his lord. At last it occurred to him, that in his childhood, and when the king was young, a deli cious strain of music had been greatly admired by them both ; and therefore this wanderer, whenever he appeared before a prison, would produce on his flute that strain of music, in the hope that possibly his lord might hear it, and know that the musician with whom he had been acquainted was beneath his window. One day this searching singer, having been refused entrance to the wards of a castle, sat down under its windows, and hour by hour lifted up that en trancing melody which the king he sought had known in his youth ; and at last a token was thrown to him | out of a tower, indicating that his lord was there. I go up and down in search of scientific theology. I am a poor musician, looking for my Lord. I am not ad mitted to the inner vaults of all castles. I know not where he may be confined among the mysteries of the universe. Science knows, however, that some where he remembers a delicious strain of music, which both Revelation and Science heard in their youth. Religion and Science both have the nature of things as their earliest memory. Self-evident truth is the delicious strain of music which I will lift up under the barred windows of castle after castle, until from some tower I have a token indicating to me that my Lord is there. I know he heard that melody of self-evident truth when he was young ; for the Old Testament was preceded by the Oldest, and TRUE AND FALSE OPTIMISM. 205 it is only self-evident truth. Among the perplexities of the universe I will lift up the melody of axioms, self-evident propositions, intuitive truths, until out of the bars of mystery shall be thrown down a token of my Lord, and he and I are together once more. / [Applause.] Theodore Parker held that the Divine Perfection is the first of all theological truths ; and so did David when he struck his harp at the edge of Siloa's Brook ; so did JSschylus when he smote his under the shadow of the Acropolis ; so have all lofty and clear souls taught that God is the fulness of all excellence ; and every just inference we can draw from that fact is scientific. Contrast, however, a false with a true optimism, or Parkers inferences from the fact of God's perfection with Christian inferences from the same fact. The perfection of the moral law, inhering in the nature of things, proves the perfection of the Divine Nature. The perfection of the moral law is a self-evident, axiomatic, intuitive truth. It is an axiom of con science that the voice which says " I ought " utters a mandate absolutely perfect: therefore the law re vealed by that mandate is perfect. There cannot be a here without a there, or a before without an after, or a thought without a thinker, or a law without a lawgiver, or a perfect law without a perfect lawgiver. (See, for detailed discussion of these propositions, Lecture of Feb 12.) Say what you will about the origin of evil, talk 206 ORTHODOXY. as blandly or as complainingly, as blindly or as searchingly, as you please concerning the problem, not of error merely and of infirmity, but of deliber ate sin and of absolute iniquity in the world, it yet remains true scientifically, that all objection to the belief that God is perfect is shattered on the axiomat ic certainty of the perfection of the moral law. Who will dare to say that the nature of things is not perfect? But it is He I If, now, I am to recite my own personal creed, so far as I can gain one from a philosophical point of view, it consists of these two propositions : — 1. God will do what he can for us. 2. What God cannot do for us, he has given us power to do for ourselves. That is my optimism ; but it is optimism with an if. 1. God will do what he can for us. 2. What he can do for us is measured in part by our susceptibility. You admit, do you, that God will do what he can for us? You think God is perfect? You are all agreed on that, are you? Very well. Do not be frightened if I ask you to be consistent with your selves. He will do what he can for us ? Yes. 3. God's creation of our free- susceptibility is a promise from him that he will fill it, if he can do so without destroying our freedom. 4. Man has a susceptibility of oneness with God in conscience. 5. He is, therefore, susceptible of sinlessness. TRUE AND FALSE OPTIMISM. 207 6. Unless man's free susceptibility of sinlessness is somewhere filled in the history of the race, God's ideal as to man as a type fails of realization. 7. But God's ideal and promise never fail. 8. Therefore the most perfect possible type of man will be brought into existence ; that is, somewhere in history a sinless character will appear. 9. Christ, a sinless character, has appeared in history. If we are to take as a test Christian conviction, victorious through ages, this last proposition will stand, and I had almost said, if we are to take infi del criticism as a test ; for it is not the tendency of any form of modern research to cast supreme doubt on the sinlessness of Christ. Scepticism finds itself more and more exclaiming with Rousseau : " Socrates died like a man ; the founder of Christianity, like a God." Carlyle says of Voltaire, that his central fault is, that " he meddles with religion, without being in any profound sense religious." But modern scep ticism is far more reverent than Voltaire was, and often has insight enough not to deny the sinlessness of the Author of Christianity. It denies the sound ness of his judgment in many particulars, talks in a hght way about mistakes greater or less ; but, when it comes to character, it is very nearly dumb before the challenge of Christianity to show any evil there. It is not necessary for my present purpose, however, speaking of scientific optimism, to show that this point is conceded by infidehty. It has been a general consent of many ages, that a Being who had oneness 208 ORTHODOXY. with conscience, and with God in conscience, has appeared in the world. All I need to emphasize is the certainty, that, unless the sinless character appears in history, man's susceptibility is not filled; the di vine ideal for the species has not been realized, and God has not done what he can for us. How much can God do for us ?' As much as we are susceptible of. How much are we susceptible of? Obedience to conscience, uninterrupted oneness with the moral law. If our Lord was a sinless character, he was the first perfect man. He was what every man should have been from the beginning. He was the first creature exhibiting the full susceptibility of the human kind. God will do what he can for us ? Yes ; but, if he does that, he will bring into existence somewhere a sinless character. That is to be expected. Such is in the susceptibility of man as a race ; and such, therefore, is within the power of God without destroying our free will. " It is not an arbitrary procedure," writes Dorner (" Person of Christ," div. 11, vol. iii. p, 224), " but simply the necessity of the case, to see in Christ, so far as sinlessness is attributed to him, a divine revelation of God, which, by realizing, discloses the archetype of holiness; which revelation could only be brought to pass through the medium of an unique distinctive being of God in him, by which the image of God attained to actual representation in the world." 10. The possibilities of human nature are exhibited in the human nature of our Lord. 11. Any religion that is without such a sinless TRUE AND FALSE OPTIMISM. 209 character is defective in its exhibition of the capa bilities of man, and cannot, therefore, be a perfect religion. 12. Every religion, except Christianity, is defective in this supreme part. Plainly we reach high issues here. But assuredly all this is in your behef that God will do what he can for us. Propositions like these underlie the very latest schools in German thought. We have book after book on the sinlessness of our Lord. The philo sophical significance of the numerous attempts to write the life of the Christ hes in the fact of his sin lessness. It is often said among German cultivators of religious science, that the character of God is the Alpha and Omega; but that the imperfection of human nature, or the effect of sin, is the Beta and Upsilon of philosophy. .One is the A and the Z, and the other is the B and the Y. When we listen to only these four letters of the alphabet, we are convinced that God will do what he can for us ; that what he can do is measured in part by our own free susceptibility ; that we have a free susceptibility of oneness with con science; and that somewhere in the history of the race a sinless character is to be expected. We can not fix dates for God's work. We do not know when he will do this ; but a perfect religion will look forward to such a character, or backward to such a character: otherwise it does not believe in God's optimism; it does not believe that he will fill the susceptibilities he has created. Science must hold that the creation of a free susceptibility in man is 210 ORTHODOXY. the promise of God to fill it, if he can do so without our loss of freedom. There cannot be a great instinct without its correlate ; and every great susceptibility of man is a divine promise that it will be filled, if we yield to him. One test of perfection in a religion, therefore, is its power to bring out man into sinless ness ; and its power to do that must be tested by what it has done. We must look on every scheme of religious thought from the point of view of man's susceptibility ; and if any system of ideas limits God's activities, will not allow that he in six thousand years has ever produced a sinless character, denies that he has filled the susceptibility he created, and which was his promise, — in that narrowness of its horizon we find something very repulsive to the breadth of view which Christ and Christian philosophy cultivate. [Applause.] 1. God will do what he can for us. 2. What he can do for us is measured in part by our need. 3. We need holiness and pardon. 4. It has been shown that we can obtain holiness best, and pardon only, through an Atonement not our own. (See Lecture of April 16.) There is always in modern communities a great difficulty laid upon public discussion, when the at tempt is made to prove that we really need some other assurance than that derived from general views of God's goodness, if we are to know that we have had pardon. New England is filled with Christianity. We have all heard unspeakable revealed truths, until TRUE AND FALSE OPTIMISM. 211 our philosophical thought is saturated with Christian ideas of God's goodness and condescension, more per fectly than morning twilight ever was by the coming sun. If a man stands up here to say that he needs some other assurance than a general view of God's goodness, in order to know he is pardoned, the reply sometimes is, that , God's goodness is enough. The Prodigal Son came back ; and in his case there was no Atonement. Yes ; but he who taught the parable of the Prodigal Son taught also that " he came to give his life a ransom for many." [Applause.] " This is my blood shed for many for the remission of sins," was the teaching of the same lips which taught that parable of the Prodigal Son, in which, of course, all the other teaching of the same author is presupposed. We are not to shut up the Bible except at one opening, or sew a portion of its leaves together, and take an isolated page of it, and read the fragment as if it were the whole. The parable of the Prodigal Son a complete statement ? Why, the Sermon on the Mount is not ! We are to study the view north, south, east, and west, in the scriptural landscape, if we are to be liberal at all. But, even in the parable of the Prodigal Son, it is God's mercy, it is God's condescension, it is his merit, and not ours, that takes us back in peace. Everywhere it is presupposed in the New Testament that the Atonement is a fact. To leave that out is to take the sun from the noon, and then to judge -the sky by a patch of the twilight. We must be fair with the record, and interpret it at least as honestly as we would 212 ORTHODOXY. a friend's written will or a legal document, by looking at all there is in it. Coleridge was accustomed to say — I beg pardon for quoting the remark in Boston — that if men were to interpret wills and legal docu ments, as some who deny the fact of the vicarious atonement and the Deity of our Lord are forced to interpret the New Testament, lawyers would stand aghast. " I have not fallen into these ways of inter pretation," said Coleridge (Table Talk, p. 327), "for I went much beyond those who hold them : I went so far west, that I came into the east." [Applause.] You doubt whether the New Testament teaches the Deity of our Lord ? What do these words mean ? " Ye shall see the Son of man ascend up to where he was before." " In the beginning the Word was with God and was God." " Before Abraham was, I am." Is man's pre-existence taught in the New Testament ? The pre-existence of our Lord is taught there. The truth is, that if you will take up the best discussions from either side of the Atlantic, and look at the present condition of exegetical contests, you will find, that, more and more, objection to the Deity of our Lord is put upon philosophical grounds, and not on exegetical. Some of the old pieces of un fairness are being given up on both sides; for no doubt Orthodoxy has strained many a text : but the general trend of scholarship both sides of the North Sea, as you may learn well enough by reading either side in the discussion, is to carry the debate over to the philosophical field, because it is tacitly under stood that the Bible does teach the fact of the TRUE AND FALSE OPTIMISM. 213 vicariousness of the Atonement and the Deity of our Lord. To-day, when the field is widened to philo sophical considerations, these thoughts that I am now presenting are among the most blazing of philo sophical themes. I open here Dorner, and I find him willing, face to face with Germany, to stand on prop ositions like these : " We cannot conceive that God, in willing a world, should not also have willed it for perfection; nor will it be necessary to consult a necessity for the Incarnation on the side of man, in the fact of sin, because we find its necessity also in the need of perfection ; or because we affirm it to have been a necessity for God, in so far as, if he willed a perfect world, he could not omit to will the God-man, who is its honor and crown." (Person of Christ, div. 11, vol. iii. pp. 238, 239.) [Applause.] America has not fought enough on this philosoph ical ground to know its importance ; but Germany has. You have been accustomed to use proof-texts to establish all this ; and you have been logically vic torious, as Germany has been, in that contest. For one student, I think that you have driven into chaos, horse, foot, and dragoons, all exegetical opponents, and that Moses Stuart, Dorner, and Liddon have done this. I asserted on this platform weeks ago, that Moses Stuart's proof-texts never have "been an swered ; and the curious and the only reply that has been offered is, that I make no reference to proof- texts. But this philosophical outline of scientific optimism is in place in Boston, 'if it is in place in Ber lin and in Edinburgh, and assuredly it has had a place in the best discussions of Germany for fifty years. 214 ORTHODOXY. Any religion that comes to me with a demand that I surrender to it my life, and does not give me assurance as to my pardon before God, or exhibit to me the way of peace with my whole environment, is marked by a lack of intellectual seriousness. The central thought with me is, that no scheme of religious science can give a man peace before his demand for pardon, unless it have in it the idea of an Atonement not our own, and revealing God's mercy, condescension, and justice in the biblical way. I wish peace for myself as well as for others, and, in the search for it, must demand that self-evident truth be not ignored. When I, in com pany with my conscience, go hence, or when I with untutored but fully awakened moral instincts stand now face to face with the insufferably resplendent moral law, I desire harmonization with my environ ment. This I do not, this my conviction is I can not, obtain from any scheme of thought not Christian. Christianity itself has difficulty enough in washing Lady Macbeth's red right hand ; but it is scientifically known that diluted Christianity never can do that business. [Applause.] Gentlemen, that business must be done. Philosophy every day is growing more serious. The literature of the world is deepen ing in its earnestness. Woman is coming into modern literature ; and it is therefore being purified, and with its purification we have a, great increase of literary sensitiveness concerning moral ideas. Philosophy partakes in this increase of keenness of moral insight ; and the time is coming when it will be asked in the name of exact research, how Lady Macbeth's hand TRUE AND FALSE OPTIMISM. 215 can be washed, and when it will be ascertained in the name of self-evident truth that a diluted form of Christianity cannot wash Lady Macbeth's hand ! A lack of intellectual — yes, a lack of moral — serious ness belongs to every philosophy, and even more to every religion, that plays fast and loose with self- evident truth, when the problem is to give peace to man face to face with his entire environment. Show me a philosophy that can wash Lady Mac beth's red right hand, and I will show you undiluted Christianity in other terms. [Applause.] So far as what God will do for us is measured by our need, we are not true to Christian optimism if we do not beheve that God will provide for our peace, if our wills permit. But is it not known that he can, by a great arrangement, which we call the Atone ment, make possible our harmony with our environ ment, even after we have sinned? Germany says that incontrovertibly the Incarnation and Atonement are so far necessary as they are indispensable to man's pardon and holiness. Not only can we not reach perfection without them, but, after having once fallen into disloyalty to the moral law, we cannot have pardon without them. If God will do what he can for us, he will secure for us blessedness by secur ing both holiness and pardon, if we will accept them. 5. If the Incarnation and Atonement are facts, they satisfy man's highest needs. This has been proved philosophically in the last fifty years, with a fulness of detail beyond a reply. 6. If we admit, therefore, that God will do what 216 ORTHODOXY. he can for us, we must say that it is antecedently probable that a great arrangement will be made by which pardon will be possible, without violation of self-evident truth. This is only Michael Angelo again, old man in the Vatican, and blind, feeling along that Torso in many places fragmentary, and estimating what the plan of the whole must be. This is only the French astrono mer, Leverrier, asking where the unknown planet is that produced the perturbations of an orb that has been observed for years. This is only science, in the name of the unity of the moral as well as the physi cal law, walking out into the infinities and the eter nities with as much courage as to the moral side of God's nature as concerning that side of his will which produces physical arrangements. As we know there is a unity in the physical law of the universe, we know there is in the moral; and, therefore, as we go out from here to Orion, knowing that gravitation is one thing here, and one thing there, we go out on the moral law from here to the Great White Throne itself, and bend a curve around the infinities till we feel sure that God's heart beats in response to man's wants of holiness and pardon, and beats in such a way that because he is God, he will do what he can for us, from an eternal necessity of love. 1. God will do what he can for ifc. 2. What he can do for us is measured in part by his own perfections. 3. He cannot deny himself. 4. He therefore cannot give pardon previous to repentance. TRUE AND FALSE OPTIMISM. 217 What! A limit of God's power? He loves us; and he is as a father in this world, who will not par don a child until the child has repented. A deliber ate he has been told you by a child of yours, and brazen impudence stands upon the boy's face. With entire inteUigence as to the character of his act, he denies that he has told a lie, and exhibits no sorrow for it. " Come now," it is said to you, " be liberal ; pardon that child before he has repented." — "Of course I cannot," you reply. " I love the child. If I pardon him before he repents, I injure him. He is old enough to know what he is about; he under stands the evil of falsehood ; he knows perfectly that he has done a thing that should not have been done, and knows that I know this : and now, if I pardon him before he repents at all, I injure him." — " Well, but be advanced in your thought ; have enlightened views of the universe; do look a little into the difference between new equipments and the old, blunt weapons of warfare ; do not employ bows and arrows any more ; use columbiads." — " Why, it is a columbiad in my own soul, that I will not pardon that boy until he repents ; for I shall injure him if I do. I love him." The columbiad is directed at your bosom ! " Advanced thought ! I am advanced enough to take care of my child ; and I cannot in love pardon him until I can do so without injuring him." A very fathomless cannot, that is ! This unwavering curve of the moral law, I beheve. sweeps around all the constellations of the inner sky ; and, although God will do what he can for us, he can- 218 ORTHODOXY. not, without denying himself, pardon us until we repent. [Applause.] 5. God cannot, without denying himself, give blessedness where there is no holiness. Self-evident truth does not always sing elysian melodies. It sings very stern battle-anthems; but when you have fought the battle, then it sings trum pet-tones of bliss indeed. The central he of an unscientific optimism is the song of the sirens : " Let us do what we will ; we shall by and by will to do what we ought." 6. With God is no liberty to do what is not fitting. 7. It is not fitting that sin be forgiven without an Atonement. This was Anselm's position (Cur Beus Homo?) and for eight hundred years that thought has been tossed about in the seas of debate, and swims to-day probably at the very top of all philosophical dis cussion on this theme. God has no liberty to do what is not fit. Julius Miiller faces this thought, and calls pause to all thinkers of our day before that one idea. God has no Uberty to do what is not fitting. It is not fitting that sin be forgiven without an Atonement. Your Dorner bows there ; your Nitzch and Rothe bow there ; your New England, your Scottish, and your EngUsh theologians bow there; and infidehty itself, when asked to face that proposition, evades it, and has done so for eight hundred years. I do not know where there is a fair philosophical discussion TRUE AND FALSE OPTIMISM. 219 from the point of view of scepticism on self-evident truth as apphed to the Atonement. What am I doing here ? I am discussing transcendentalism in its rela tions to religious science. What is it to do that? It is to apply self-evident truth to the innermost hohest of Christianity itself. It is to lift up before the bars of mystery, and under the window of our Lord, the anthem which he heard in his youth, and which he gave us the capacity to sing, and which he wiU recognize by coming forth as Conqueror. [Applause.] 1. God wiU do what he can for us. 2. What he can do for us is to be measured by what he has done for us. 3. He has not destroyed the freedom of the wiU. 4. He has not prevented evU. 5. What he has not done cannot be done wisely. 6. The Incarnation and Atonement may be proved by historical evidence to be facts of history. 7. If they are such, they reveal what God has done. 8. What God has done is well done. 9. What he cannot do for us, he wiU give us pow er to do for ourselves. 10. The origin of evil in the universe is in the fail ure of free agents to do the best they can for them selves. Gentlemen, I am not bound in partisan wraps and withes. If I know myself, I have no desire other than to be clear and straightforward. But I know that a Uttle while ago I was not in the world, and 220 ORTHODOXY. that a little while hence I shaU be here no longer. I know that I cannot escape from myself, God, and my record. I know that I wish to go hence in peace with myself and God, and that irreversible past. I look about in this dim stir of existence for a scheme of thought that wiU harmonize me with any whole environment. I want it. I am not ashamed of self- love, though I am of selfishness. What is the differ ence between self-love and selfishness ? Selfishness is a disproportionate love of self: self-love is a pro portionate love of self. We have a right to seU-love, and it is not without a proper place if it urges us to inteUectual seriousness. Selfishness is always wrong; for it is the disproportionate love of self. I have a right to love myself as well as anybody else whose being is of the same worth ; but I must love God in proportion to his being; that is, infinitely, and my neighbor as myself, because he has as much being as I. Self-love leads me to ask how I can be harmon ized with my past, and my conscience, and my God. I assure you solemnly that I cannot place any thing except full Christianity under my head, and be at peace. I have been in the jaws of death. I hope I have seen enough of Ufe to be a Uttle above caring what men say for or against any position I may take up, for I am not to be here long at the longest. You are not to be here long. We are to be gathered home, as our fathers were, and we wish to go hence in peace. In the name of cool precision, in the name of the philosophy that dares not beheve a lie, or call any thing that is obscure clear, it must TRUE AND FALSE OPTIMISM. 221 be declared that Christianity, and it alone, can har monize us with an irreversible record of deUberate sin, with a God who is a thousand consciences, and with a conscience that is a thousand swords. [Ap plause.] vm. A CONSIDEEATION OF ME. CLARKE'S AND IE. HALE'S CELTICISMS. THE SEVENTY-SEVENTH LECTURE IN THE BOSTON MONDAY LECTURESHIP, DELIVERED LN TREMONT TEMPLE MAY 7. " Qualis gemma micat, fulvum quse dividit aurum Aut collo decus, aut capiti; vel quale per artem Inclusam buxo, aut Oricia terebintho Lucet ebur." Virgil: jEn. x. 134. " Es ist Nichts schrecklicher als eine thatige Unwissenheit." Goethe: Maxims, iii. 191. vm. A CONSIDERATION OF MR. CLARKE'S AND MR. HALE'S CRITICISMS. PRELUDE ON CURRENT EVENTS. The River Ilissus in Athens is a deUcious crystal line stream, fuU of wliite and brown pebbles, which no doubt the feet of Phocion, and Socrates and De mosthenes, and Plato and Aristotle, have touched. Its ripples, therefore, are more musical than ApoUo's lute ; and you wiU not blame me for stating that I brought home from Athens a broad, fair pebble out of that stream, and from that portion of its bed, which, scholars say, was once crossed by the gardens and walks and marble colonnades of Aristotle's Ly ceum. I keep this white stone now as a paper-weight on a heap of excerpts and newspaper cuttings in tended to represent current misconceptions of Chris tian truth. Quite a number of sUps have been accumulating in that heap of late, some of them from Music HaU ; and, since I am as proud of the specimens I gather into my cabinet as ever a col lector of crystals was of his captured gems, I wish 225 226 ORTHODOXY. to make you sharers of my bUss, according to Shak- speare's maxim : — " When thou haply seest Some rare noteworthy object in thy travel, Make me partaker of thy happiness." i Two Gentlemen of Verona, 1. From this cabinet of misconception — notice, I do not say of misrepresentation — I must choose at least one specimen concerning the measureless theme of free final permanence of character, or the natural wages of habitual evil choice. I hold in my hand a book written by a man whom we aU honor for his candor and learning, and whose vigorous hon esty in the poUtical affairs of this Commonwealth has more than once been a pUlar of fire in a dark place. I mean Mr. Clarke, who lately has presented to the public an almost semi-official answer to the question "What is a Christian?" I read in this volume, which is also almost semi-official, and, in my opinion, the best book ever pubUshed in Boston by unevangelical Christianity, the foUowing very amaz ing words : " The Orthodox doctrine of future pun ishment is exceedingly simple. . . . The purest and best of men, who does not beheve the precise Ortho dox theory concerning the Trinity, sits in heU side by side with Zingis Khan, who murdered in cold blood hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children, marking his bloody route by pyramids of skulls " (Clarke, Orthodoxy, p. 357). Gentlemen, that is a very interesting specimen in this cabinet. It is almost flawless. I hardly know mr. clarke's and mr. bale's criticisms. 227 how it could be better. That misconception is funda mental, colossal, ghastly, inexcusable. [Applause.] 2. But take another flaming, favorite gem of mine from the same cabinet, and broken off the same ledge of crystalline Boston rock : — " The unbaptized chUd, who goes to heU because of the original sin derived from Adam, is exposed to God's wrath no less than Pope Alexander VI., who outraged every law of God and man, and who, says MachiaveUi, ' was foUowed to the tomb by the heavy feet of his three dear companions, — Luxury, Simony, and Cruelty.' This is the doctrine which every de nomination and sect in Christendom, except the Uni tarians and Universalists, maintain as essential to Orthodoxy " (pp. 357, 358). Gentlemen, is that a correct statement? This serious assertion is just about as correct as it would be to say that Charles River flows into the Mississippi. It is quite as correct as to affirm that Massachusetts is a province of China. 3. You wiU aUow me, therefore, to say that I was not greatly surprised, when, a few weeks ago, I ob tained a third specimen off this same fruitful ledge of crystals; or, the assertion that my view of the Trinity, or the view of the New-England theology as understood by this Lectureship, is "one which any Unitarian can accept " (Mr. Clarke, Baily Adver tiser, March 26). That statement was made, how ever, before a fuU discussion had been presented here, although warning had been given not to judge the house whUe the scaffolding was up ; and I be heve the statement is not reiterated at present. 228 ORTHODOXY. 4. In an account of semi-official discussions at Music HaU, I read that Mr. Cook has given up the doctrine of substitution. The language of the report is, that Mr. Cook comes forward, belonging to the same school of thought with a certain evangelist, and teUs us " that we must accept the Orthodox doctrine on this subject ; and he says that no Orthodox man of any sense or any knowledge beUeves to-day in substitution" (Report of Mr. Clarke's Sermon, " DaUy Advertiser," April 30). Another authority says that Mr. Cook " defends the doctrine of substi tution by giving it up " ( Unitarian Tract, by Mr. Kimball). Now, what are the facts ? New-England theology makes a distinction between chastisement and pun ishment. Even the UniversaUst theology insists that there is a difference between suffering and punish ment. I know careless phrases have been used by Orthodox scholars ; but when I open a series of arti cles pubUshed in " The BibUotheca Sacra," by writers of all denominations, within the last fifteen years, and constituting the best statement of the new Orthodoxy that New England has yet made, — fifteen or eighteen elaborate communications prepared by Episcopalians, Methodists, Presbyterians, Baptists, and Congrega- tionalists of the first rank in scholarship, — I find such a representative writer, for instance, as the re vered Dr. Whedon, editor of " The Methodist Quar terly Review," a man probably not given to Calvinism, saying this, — *' The imputation of the sin of man, or his punishment, to mr. clarke's 'and mr. h ale's criticisms. 229 Christ, is but a popular conception, justifiable if understood as only conceptual; just as we might say that the crime of Pythias was imputed to Damon in order that we also might be able to say that Damon was punished instead of Pythias. In strictness of language and thought, neither crime, guilt, nor punishment is personally transf erable " (Whedon, Rev. D.D., Bib. Sac, April, 1862, pp. 260, 261). Why, it is amazing to me that gentlemen wiU quote phrases from Mr. Spurgeon, saying that our Lord was punished, and then come forward in Bos ton, and affirm that Orthodoxy holds that our Lord was not innocent, and meet us with the charge of self-contradiction when we exhibit the truths of the Atonement in detaU. Ask Mr. Spurgeon, or any other man who uses that word " punished," whether our Lord was a murderer, a perjurer, a leper, or a thief. Ask whether he does not beheve, as the Church has always beUeved, whatever its language may have been, that our Lord was innocent. We are now more careful in our phraseology than we once were; but the Church has always had the idea of Christ's innocence, and never has asserted that he. was punished, in the sense of suffering pain for per sonal blameworthiness ; for he never had any per sonal blameworthiness. Let us distinguish ideas from vocabularies. I admit that the latter have been care- ' less ; and it is one part of the joy of my life to con tribute a Uttle toward more caution in the expression of truths which we cannot touch properly, unless in that spirit which Uzzah did not have when he touched the ark, and for lack of reverence was struck dead ! 230 ORTHODOXY. Andrew Fuller the Baptist scholar, who has been caUed the Benjamin Franklin of theology, was very careful of his language on this supreme point; and as long ago as 1800 drew in substance the distinction between chastisement and punishment. "Real and proper punishment," he wrote, "is not only the inflic tion of natural evU for the commission of moral evil, but the infliction of the one upon the person who committed the other, and in displeasure against him : it not only supposes criminaUty, but that the party punished was literally the criminal " (Fuller, An drew, Works, chap. 10, p. 34, quoted with approval by Professor Park, Bib. Sac, January, 1865, p. 174). Modern theological science is substantiaUy a unit on this topic, not in its vocabularies, but in its. ideas. I disUke to take time on a point which needs to be elaborated nowhere out of Boston; but, if you will allow me to cite a school on which you may probably have looked with considerable arro gance, — the East Windsor Theological Institution, where the old school in New-England theology is re presented, — you wUl find Professor Lawrence there, in his official article in the " BibUotheca Sacra," say ing of that school of theology, "The old school theology speaks freely of Christ as 'suffering the penalty of the law,' and as ' paying our debts.' But it never implies that he was a sinner, suffering demerits. ' Our guilt and punishment being, as it were, trans ferred to him,' says Calvin. Edwards says, ' He suf- ferred as though guUty.'" (Lawrence, Reverend Professor, of East Windsor Theol. Inst., on "The Old MR. CLARKE'S AND MR. HALE's CRITICISMS. 231 School in N. E. Theol., " Bib. Sac, April, 1863, p. 333. See also pp. 338, 339.) The distinction between chastisement and punish ment is very familiar in the instruction given at Andover in reUgious science. If now, for using phraseology which recognizes this distinction between chastisement and punish ment, I may be accused of giving up the doctrine of substitution, then aU New-England theology is to be thus accused ; then aU schools, old and new, are to be supposed to have changed their ideas, because they have become more cautious in their language. The doctrine of the Atonement is such to me, that, without it, phUosophy would lead by self-evident truth only to the conclusion that we of aU men are most miserable, since we have sinned, and do not know a way of escape. There is to me such clear ness in the demonstration of our need of an Atone ment, that, if you say no Atonement ever has been made, phUosophy to me is not glad tidings ; for it is clear tidings of a necessity not met : therefore, to philosophy itself, the denial of the doctrine of substi tution makes a desert of life. 5. But it is said that I have put forward Dean Stanley as a representative of Orthodoxy, and that he is a Unitarian (Mr. Clarke, Dooly Advertiser, April 30). Not many months ago, Lady Augusta Stanley lay in her coffin in Westminster Abbey, and there at her side sat Thomas Carlyle. Who had been her chap lain? T^e Americaa. ftvajngpilist who has but just 232 ORTHODOXY. left this city. On whose invitation? On her own. 'By whose consent ? By her husband's. Who told you that ? The American evangeUst himself. What did he do? He conducted devotional exercises in Lady Stanley's sick-chamber. You talk about the breadth of Dean Stanley's Broad Church views! You must look at the upper part of the breadth as well as the lower. By the way, speaking of Carlyle, let me say that Mr. Ruskin has lately affirmed that Carlyle's opinion of Darwin, which I stated to you some months since, " wiU probably be remembered as long as any thing else that Carlyle ever said." That is reported, I beg you notice I say, as coming from Ruskin. According to written assur ances sent to me by a literary gentleman of high rank who knows the person who heard Carlyle ex press his opinion of Darwin, there is every reason to trust that extract as Carlyle's own. Professor Tho- luck of Halle in Germany told me that once he was invited to spend the winter in the south of Italy, with Thomas Carlyle, and doubted at first whether he had better accept the invitation, for fear there would be social dissonance on account of divergences of views. "I sought information," said Professor Tholuck ; " and from England, on the highest authority, I was told there would be no disso nance ; for Carlyle is a good Christian man." Have I not read what Carlyle says about the Thirty-nine Articles ? Yes ; and rejoice in it. Have I not read what he says about threshing mere straw in formulas of belief without soul behind them? Yes; and MR. CLARKE'S AND MR. HALE'S CRITICISMS. 233 thank God for every syUable the Prophet of Chelsea has written on that theme. I have heard also from the Ups of your own Emerson, that Carlyle likes to quote his own father's expressions at famUy wor ship in old Scotland. I do not forget what Carlyle thought of Sterling, or what he said of the death of Edward Irving. "To Frederic, as to aU of us," says Carlyle, " it was flatly inconceivable that intel lect, moral emotion, could have been put into him by an Entity that had none of its own " (Life of Fred eric the Great, last chapter). This language asserts the PersonaUty of the Supreme Being, and proves, therefore, that Carlyle is no pantheist. There is even more between than in the lines of hundreds of pages that he has given to the world. I remember that Essay on Voltaire in which he writes exphcitly : — " We understand ourselves to be risking no new assertion, but simply reporting what is already the conviction of the greatest in our age, when we say, that cheerfully recognizing, gratefully appropriating, whatever Voltaire has proved, or any other man has proved, or shall prove, the Christian religion, once here, cannot again pass away; that, in one or the other form, it will endure through all time; that as in Scripture, so also in the heart of man, is written, ' The gates of hell shall not prevail against it.' Were the memory of this faith never so obscured, as, indeed, in all times, the coarse passions and perceptions of the world do all but obliterate it in the hearts of most, yet in every pure soul, in every poet and wise man, it finds a new mis sionary, a new martyr, till the great volume of universal history is finally closed, and man's destinies are fulfilled in this earth. 'It is a height to which the human species were fated and en abled to attain; and from which, having once attained it, they can never retrograde.' " 234 ORTHODOXY. Distinguish between ideas and vocabularies, and you will find that Carlyle deserved what he received the other day from Dean Stanley, a certificate that "he never disdained the traditions of the Scottish church and nation." When I put in his Ups the Litany, I took what aU are obUged to subscribe who are in the renowned English Church. The prayer- book, as weU as the articles, is subscribed, is it not? Of course I had a right to quote the flower as weU as the root: out of the latter grows the former. I wished to indicate what popular theology is ; and it was evidently necessary for me to take that which is most before the people, — the haUelujahs and the praises, the indication of the popular mind in wor ship. I took the most overt pubUc part of the Church-of-England service to indicate what the popu lar theology is. Some scribblers have complained be cause I put the words of the Litany into the mouths of Carlyle and Stanley, and have thought the lan guage of the Thirty-nine Articles could not have been used with the same effect. The words I cited from your Boston critic would have sounded weak and wicked, had I quoted them alone in Westminster Abbey, in presence only of God. But now, as to Dean Stanley, three things are to be noticed : — First, we must make a distinction between his breadth as an ecclesiastical poUtician and his breadth as a theologian. He is a representative of a national church such as we know nothing of in America. Any gentleman here, directly or indirectly connected MR. CLARKE'S AND MR. HALE'S CRITICISMS. 235 with that church, wUl aUow me to say that the High Church and Low Church and Broad Church are quite as sharply antagonistic to each other as any of our Protestant denominations outside of the EngUsh Es tabUshment. Dean Stanley is the representative of this national church, which must hold aU kinds of culture together ; and his great principle is a political one. He wishes to keep these warring elements from seceding until their real merits can be distinguished by time. His supreme principle is one of comprehen sion and trial. Let these conflicting ideas be kept inside the Church, says Dean Stanley ; aUow every man to hold any fairly reasonable opinion ; let every such opinion have a place until its value is tested by time. This is a breadth of ecclesiastical poUcy rather than of theology. Dean Stanley as a theologian is far less broad than Dean Stanley as an ecclesiastical politician. I am not discussing whether or not he is to be justified in taking that attitude as to a national church. Many of Dean Stanley's best friends de clare that he ought to be more severe in excluding from the EngUsh Church some sections of" sentiment, perhaps so broad that they hardly come within the range even of general tolerant Christianity. They say he ought to think more of the Christian Church than of the national church, and that he does not. But into that question^ I need not enter. In the next place, it is to be remembered that Dean Stanley is by no means careless in his state ments as to the doctrines of the Trinity and of the 236 ORTHODOXY. Atonement. He holds such views as Charles Kings- ley did; and what Kingsley's views of the Trinity were, I showed to you in detaU the other morning. No doubt Charles Kingsley held erratic views on one or two points; but he was substantiaUy sound on what the Church of England regards as the essen tials of Christian truth, and so surely Stanley is, or he would not be where he is. Dean Stanley said not long ago in the chapel at Rugby, — I have his lan guage before me, — "Thomas Arnold's words con stantly come back to me as expressing better than any thing else my hopes and fears for this Ufe and for the life to come." Everybody knows Stanley is the biographer of Thomas Arnold, and that Thomas Arnold was a man of a large, generous, Ulumined nature, and of great symmetry of character, but by no means what one would caU a loose dreamer as to the highest of aU truths. No doubt he was in the best sense of the word a Uberal beUever; but that word "Uberal" I use as infrequently- as possible, it has such an amazing resemblance to caoutchouc. Toward the bottom of the elastic scale of Uberalism you may often find those who are ready to answer, if you ask what is a Christian, " He is man who is always learning, but never able to come to a knowl edge of the truth ; " and that comes pretty near to being the definition given in Music HaU the other evening. And, if you ask what does a Christian beheve, "Why, any thing that means nothing in particular; " and that comes so fearfuUy near to being the definition given in Music HaU, that I do not dare MR. CLARKE'S AND MR. HALE'S CRITICISMS. 237 talk about the lower ranges of Uberalism, lest I seem to slander the upper. [Applause.] Now, Thomas Arnold beUeved something in partic ular; and Dean Stanley is a pupU, and professes him- seU to be theologicaUy an enlarged copy, of Thomas Arnold. He is to be ranked with Kingsley and Robertson and Milman as a foUower of Hooker, and an opponent of the influences of Laud. It is per fectly amazing to find the Broad-church party spoken of as carrying England over to that style of unscien tific liberalism which I have just ridiculed. Why, only yesterday I opened a periodical not given to the theological discussion, and found the statement, that when Emerson came first to England many years ago, and C&rlyle sounded his glories to such an extent that almost every circle in the country was anxious to obtain a glimpse of the Boston poet and philosopher, the current feeling was one of sorrow, that so brilliant a man as Emerson, so lovable, and so talented, should nevertheless be afflicted with a repugnant something, spoken of in whispers, Uke the small-pox, or the practice of cannibalism: this was his Unitarianism, Transcendentalism, Theodore- Parkerism. " But then he cannot be altogether sane," was the frequent comment. It is true that many Enghsh people of position are Unitarians. There is a brilliant man who is on the point of making an effort to get a seat in Parliament now, who has long been a disciple of Theodore Parker. " I feel bound to add," my EngUsh authority says, " that all with whom I have conversed say that his reUgious senti- 238 ORTHODOXY. ments are the only drawbacks to his success; but the repugnance toward them felt by the majority of voters wUl prevent his getting the seat." The objection most offered in England to such views is the demoralizing effect they are considered to have on the average mass of society. Much of the polit ical sentiment here described I abhor. But, when it is assumed that aU England is turning over to Parker's views, it is important to notice straws like this, which show which way the wind blows. But, in the third place, Dean Stanley is regarded in England and by scholars generaUy as a church his torian rather than a theologian. He is the Macaulay of church historians. But, as to his ability as a theo logian or phUosopher, the London Times hints well a general opinion in its criticism on Dean Stanley's recent address at St. Andrew's University. It finds reason in that production for saying, that, if Dean Stanley's hopes are fulfilled, Christendom wUl have unity by and by, — " the unity of a landscape covered with mist " (London Times, March 17). The growing power of the scientific method does not prophesy for that style of unity a victorious future. But the Lon don Times has usuaUy faUed, as many other authori ties have done, to distinguish between Stanley's breadth as a church politician and his breadth as a theologian. 6. There is one more glittering specimen in my cabinet of misconception to be noticed ; and then I must hasten to the conclusion of this exhibition of curiosities, many of them fossils, I hope. A man of mr. clarke's and mr. hale's criticisms. 239 letters, a philanthropist, a citizen whom we all honor for his own deeds and for those of his fathers, said last night in Music Hall : " They tell you that God the Father eatered into councU with God the Son and God the Holy Spirit, and that in their infinite wisdom they devised a plan by which God the Son might meet the justice of God the Father, and that by this means the race of men should be saved, not from their sins, but from the punishment which their sins have justly deserved. Mr. Cook says I must not say that this is the substitution of an innocent Christ for guUty men. Mr. Boyd says I must ; and Dr. Chalmers says I must." [Whatever his lan guage, Dr. Chalmers does not mean that our Lord was personally blameworthy.] " But I do not care for the words. I never use any of them unless I am forced to, and that is not often. The point I would im press on you is, that all this middle-age theology turns on the assumption that Jesus Christ saves men from their punishment simply. But aU the simpler theolo gies, aU Uberal theology, turn on the truth that God, because he is God, chooses to save his people from , aU sins." (Boston Baily Advertiser, May 7.) So speaks Mr. Hale. But what definition of sal vation has been given from time immemorial in idea, and what definition has been given here especially? " Salvation is permanent deUverance from both the love and the guUt of sin." Without deUverance from both these, peace with our whole environment is a natural impossibility. To assume that what is caUed evangeUcal theology is not careful to dehver 240 ORTHODOXY. men from sin, as well as from the guut of it, is as accurate as to say that Plymouth Rock wUl float, or that Bunker-hUl Monument is the North Pole. I am patriotically pained by these astounding stretches of vapor in Boston. If these are the clear heights of the landscape which contains the population opposed to evangelical truth, what are the lower portions? If these are the sunlit peaks, what are the marshes ? I have heard of a miraculous London fog so dense that you could not see a street-lamp when standing under it, though I never saw such a fog. I have seen one, however, in which you could not see one street-lamp from another ; and I have heard of one which could be cut into slices with any dehcate edge of steel. But I need all these styles of fogs to give me a perfect symbol for that style of vapor which must brood over the lower lands, if these amazing statements are the vapor brooding over the sunlit peaks. To be perfectly frank, and to speak kindly, evangeUcal scholars do regard these representations as astounding; and we think, if people beheve them, — which we hope they do not, — those people who do believe them are a heavily befogged popula tion. 7. But, my friends, aU the peaks in this landscape in which I have been showing you a few heights are not thus wreathed in vapor. Go to Harvard Univer sity, which has had reason to think on this subject as no other coUege in the land has done. I turn to the words of the present preacher to the university; and I find him saying that he "remembers in his mr. Clarke's and mr. hale's criticisms. 241 boyhood a type of Calvinism as cold as it was bitter, in which spirit was wholly congealed into dogma." I should not admit quite that Jonathan Edwards, who spoke of " the soul of a true Christian as such a httle white flower as we see in the spring of the year, low and humble on the ground, opening its bosom to receive the pleasant beams of the sun's glory, rejoi cing, as it were, in a calm rapture, diffusing around a sweet fragrance, standing peacefully and lovingly in the midst of other flowers round about, all in like manner opening their bosoms to drink in the light of the sun " (President Edwards's works, vol. i. pp. 61, 62), — I should hardly concede that this Edwards, who might have been the first poet of his nation, if he had not chosen to be its first theologian, and who, if a man ever was a saint, was one, had wholly congealed his religion into a dogma. There is a law of devel opment somewhere in religious history : so we heard yesterday from Professor Peirce himseU. If there is a better Orthodoxy, it has been developed out of something behind it. It was the old school Ortho doxy that took Charles I. by the throat, and broke his neck. It was the old school Orthodoxy that fled from England in times of the icy breath of persecution, and that planted the common-school system in the rocky soil of New England. We had stern work to do ; and it is perhaps natural that some stern things were said in stern days. But this very preacher of the renowned university yonder goes on to say, — and here we rise out of the vapor ; here, thank God ! is a sunlit peak : — 242 ORTHODOXY. " What now terms itself Calvinism is a free, generous, earnest, philanthropic development of the religious life, with which I for one feel the most hearty and loving sympathy [applause]; nor do I believe that, under its auspices, New- England Congregationalism would have been rent in twain, as it was early in the present century." [Applause.] Remember that these are not my words, but those of the Plummer Professor of Morals, and Preacher to Harvard University : — " Lowest of all in the scale, yet the very thing we need most to shun, is the dogmatism of mere negations. As a Trinitarian, I should, as I desire to do now, worship the Father, love the Son, and pray for the Holy Spirit. But mere anti-Trinitarian- ism cannot by any possibility make me reverent or devout; and a ministry of negations, even though the negatives be all justi fiable, is utterly fruitless, nay, worse, harmful, demoralizing, contemptible. A church which lays intense emphasis on what it does not believe, and whose members know not how to ex press any article of faith without a negative particle, is a nur sery of scepticism and infidelity, and nothing better. At the same time there is no intolerance so bitter and scornful as that of the so-called churches whose faith consists in not believing." [Applause.] So bravely spoke symmetry, strength, and devout- ness of soul, in Professor Peabody, and so bravely were these words published ( Unitarian Review, Janu ary, 1877, pp. 72-74). 8. Not far from Bunker HUl there is another sun lit peak ; and, now that I am on this theme, I must point out how noticeable that summit yonder is, crowned with light. mr. Clarke's and mr. bale's criticisms. 243 " Professef*P*a5b7^rites the Rev. Dr. George E. Ellis, in his HaU-Ce^SJ^oIUnitarian Controversy, "tried the whole resources of his amazingly acute and skilful mind upon these problems. We trust all our readers have perused that Conven tion Discourse of the Andover professor, to which we have more than once referred. We regard it, on the score of what it bold ly affirms, and of what it so significantly implies, when taken in connection with its wonderful beauty of style, and its marvellous subtilty of analysis, as the most noteworthy contribution which Orthodoxy has made to the literature of New England for the last half-century. That single discourse would win fame for any preacher" (pp. 385, 386). " It may be, that something will be offered to us as Ortho doxy which we shall pronounce to be better far than Unitarian ism, — something which we can receive with the same sympathy of soul and cordiality of heart with which we read the writ ings of those who are constructing the new theology from the ruins of the old. " We look with sincere and unprejudiced interest to the spec ulative and scholarly labors of the advanced minds in Orthodox communions. May God's blessing be on their labors, to keep them loyal to him, to Christ, and to the everlasting gospel of grace and redemption. If the new theology shall prove to be so much truer and better than ' Unitarianism ' as to obliterate the sect whose visible increase it does withstand, we are ready to welcome it " (pp. 391 , 402) . Gentlemen, that is sunlight; and these fogs Ue far below this sky-kissed peak. 9. Open history as it stands recorded in the latest book written on the first century of our republic, — a set of essays by such men as Presidents Woolsey and Barnard, Francis A. Walker, Professor T. Sterry Hunt, Professor Sumner, E. P. Whipple, and others; and turn to Mr. Whipple's Essay on American Litera- 244 ORTHODOXY. ture, and you wiU read, — this is not written for a partisan purpose, — " The theological protest against Unitarianism was made by some of the most power ful minds and learned scholars in the country, — by Stuart, Park, Edwards, Barnes, Robinson, Lyman Beecher, and the Alexanders, not to mention fifty others. The thought of these men stiU controls the theological opinion of the country ; and their works are much more extensively circulated, and exert a greater practical influence, than the writings of such men as Channing, Norton, Dewey, Emerson, and Parker" (The First Century of the Republic, p. 372). What is the summary of aU this ? 1. That there is manhood left, and clear thought, on both sides, and that, when the great peaks are seen, they do not scold each other, or the azure above them, but are reverently looking into each other's faces, asking how brotherhood under one sky can be brought about in consistency with clearness of thought. 2. That the vapors of misconception, the dense fogs which have made so many of us shy of each other, are unworthy of scholarship of the first rank. [Applause.] 3. That if such presentations of religious truth as are now regarded, and as in substance always have been regarded, as evangelical, had been in explicit as weU as implicit use fifty or eighty years ago, God's house would not have been divided in Eastern Massachusetts. 4. That, if there was no reason for the division of mr. Clarke's and mr. bale's criticisms. 245 the house on the ground of such presentations as are now called evangeUcal, there is no longer any ground, in view of such presentations, for the house continuing to be, divided against itself. [Applause.] THE LECTURE. It is a famous story concerning the Greek general Brasidas, that he looked out one morning upon the host that was attacking the city he was set to defend, and said, " Victory is ours ; for I see that the spears in the files of the enemy are not in line. The ranks yonder are so Uly trained, that their weapons wUl become sources of suicide before the sun shall set." Fasten your attention, gentlemen, on the quivering spears of the host who attack self-evident truth in its relations to that central Christian doctrine which we call the Atonement. My purpose is not controver- ' sial, but practical. I speak in the name of axioms only, and I have labored up to our present point of view with the hbpe of convincing you that the converging admissions of aU who are good ethical scholars prove the necessity of a great . arrangement, not made by man, to secure his harmonization with his entire environment. It was an occasion on which history will look back with interest in this city, when James Freeman Clarke stood on the platform of Theodore Parker, in the absence of the latter in Italy, and criticised -the system of Parker, as Dorner the great German theo logian does, for underrating the significance of the 246 ORTHODOXY. fact of sin. James Freeman Clarke took up his posi tion on the ground of self-evident truth. He planted himself upon axioms. Like a scholar, he made his first appeal to self-evident propositions. Now, I am this morning to put under the lenses of ethical sci ence a few of the admissions of Mr. Clarke, which are not very unlike the propositions I have been defending here in the name of axioms, and show you just whither these self-evident propositions lead. In order that I may not be accused of misrepresenting Mr. Clarke, you will aUow me to read an extract here of the length of a page, — "We think that if we analyze the feeling which the con science gives us concerning the consequences of wrong-doing, it is this : first, conscience demands reparation to the injured party ; second, it demands punishment as a satisfaction to be made to the law of right, and this suffering to be accepted aa just by the guilty party ; and, thirdly, it declares that guilt should produce an alienation or separation between the guilty party and those who are not guilty. A man hitherto respected and trusted by society commits some great breach of trust, and robs the community. Conscience requires that he should make atonement to those he has injured, by restitution ; to the law of right which he has offended, by suffering some punishment ; and to honorable men by keeping out of their way. " This, which the conscience teaches of an injury done to man, it also teaches of an injury done to God. The offence against man is a crime ; the offence against God is a sin. For a crime the conscience requires restitution, punishment with confession, and alienation from the good, which is shame: for a sin the conscience requires, in like manner, restitution, pun ishment, and alienation. It merely transfers to God's justice the ideas of atonement which human justice has given to it. ... mr. clarke's and mr. hale's criticisms. 247 " There is, however, a difficulty in believing that we can be forgiven. This difficulty is in the conscience ; and, — " (a) To say there is no difficulty will not remove it. "(b) To say that repentance and good works are enough will not remove it. " (c) To say that God is merciful will not remove it ; for the difficulty lies in the conscience, which declares that every sin is, — " 1. An injury done to God. " 2. An injury to the moral universe ; inasmuch as it is an example of evil, and a defiance of right. " 3. An injury to ourselves, by putting us away from God, the source of Ufe, and alienating us from him. " The inward voice of - conscience is always saying that God ought not to forgive us without some reparation made for the injury done to himself, to the universe, and to ourselves." (Clakhe, Orthodoxy, pp. 246-248.) This is not an evangeUcal author. Here is straightforward adherence, thus far, to the plain inferences from the great natural operations of con science. Up to this point, there is no parting com pany in linked scholarship aU through the world; and Mr. Clarke knows there is not. " Conscience is always saying that God ought not to forgive us." God always does what he ought to do. Conscience does not teU Munchausen tales. These laws, by which we know how to harmonize ourselves with our environment, so far forth it is merely human, are one and the same with the moral laws which sweep through the universe, and reveal to us, therefore, how we are to obtain harmonization with that wider environment. But now, having gone thus far, how does Mr. Clarke escape from the conclusion which foUows very 248 orthodoxy. naturaUy from these propositions of ethical science ? Why, by denying the unity of the moral law ! This is his language : " God's justice is not like man's." Now, there is a sense in which that is true ; but when you interrogate conscience, and find it always pro claiming that something ought to be, that is an exhi bition, not of man's justice, but of God's justice. I put this to any scholar, — to Mr. Clarke himself, — whether Bishop Butler, the best student of conscience in modern times, would justify him in saying that what the inward voice of conscience " always " says has not in it a revelation of God. Why, it is one of Mr. Clarke's teachings, that conscience has in it a something in us, but not of us, — something really Divine. It is held by the acutest scholarship that the Light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world is one with the Holy Ghost, shed forth from our ascended Lord. Go to your Dorner and Marten- sen and Rothe, and all the best students of religious science, from the side of ethics and evangelical truth, and you wUl find them rejoicing to illustrate in all detaU, and with the full radiance of philosophy as weU as of evangelical learning, the truth that the Holy Spirit is the present Christ ; and they identify it with the innermost hoUest of conscience. [Ap plause.] Now, I affirm, that the moral law is a part of the natural law, and that law is a unit throughout the universe; and that therefore we cannot escape from the consequences of such an admission as this, that the inward voice of conscience always says that God " ought not " to forgive us, except on a threefold mr. Clarke's and mr. hale's criticisms. 249 condition, by simply saying " God's justice is not Uke man's." The ideas of the Atonement drawn from our human experience, Mr. Clarke says, " are essentially false " (p. 247). But, if the ideas that come to us from the moral natural law are essentially false, how is it that we do not fall into scepticism about the physical natural laws ? We know that law is a unit ; and that therefore this earth, although an atom in immensity, is immensity itself in the revelation of truth. We beheve in the unity of law. The law of gravitation is the same here, and in Orion, and the Seven Stars. TeU me what the moral law is here, and I wUl teU you what it is in the Unseen Holy. It is disloyalty of the most extreme sort to the scientific method, to endeavor to escape from any proposition by denying the unity of the moral law ; for the unity and universaUty of law are among the most haughty and irrefutable teachings of aU science. [Applause.] It is admitted, then, by Mr. Clarke : — 1. That conscience demands reparation to the in jured party. 2. That it demands punishment as a satisfaction to the law of right. 3. That this suffering is to be accepted as just by the guilty party. 4. That guilt should produce a separation between the guilty and those who are not guUty. 5. That what the conscience teaches of an injury done to man, it also teaches of an injury done to God. 250 orthodoxy. 6. That offence against man is a crime, and that against God is a sin. 7. That conscience transfers to God's justice the ideas of Atonement which human justice has given to it. 8. That, without other light than that of con science, there is a difficulty in believing that we can be forgiven. 9. That to say there is no difficulty wiU not re move it. 10. That to say repentance and good works are enough wUl not remove it. 11. That to say that God is merciful will not re move it. 12. That the difficulty is in the conscience, and that the inward voice is always saying that God ought not to forgive us without some reparation made for the injury done to himself, to the universe, and to ourselves. 13. Theodore Parker admitted this supreme fact as to the natural operations of conscience (Theism, last discourse). 14. All established ethical science asserts this fact as an inevitable inference from intuition, instinctive behef, and the experience of man age after age. With the emphasis of his hand upon his heart, a scholar whom I suppose to be the best representative of the learning of unevangelical Christianity in this country, a professor who lives not a hundred mUes from Boston, said to me in the Athenaeum Library lately, without any cross-questioning from me, " There MR. Clarke's and mr. bale's criticisms. 251 is a difficulty in conscience as to our peace, when we once have sinned ; and that difficulty in the struc ture of human nature has sustained the doctrine of the vicarious Atonement, befora the attacks of phi losophy, century after century." He seemed to think that he was pointing to a proof-text of not much consequence ; but to me this human nature, the seri ous volume he thus put aside in order to read some more authoritative proof-text out of the Scriptures, was itself the oldest scripture ; was that scripture in harmony with which aU other scripture must be interpreted ; was, in short, the supreme although not aU-sufficing revelation of God by being a revela tion of the unity of the moral law, — the same yester day, to-day, and forever. 15. AU these admissions point to the necessity of an Atonement. 16. But Clarke and Parker, and the schools of thought they represent, deny this necessity. 17. They do this, and they can do this, only by denying expUcitly or impUcitly the universaUty of law. 18. The affirmation is made, that the ideas we draw from what conscience is saying constantly are essentially false. We must give aU the intuitions supreme authority in our reUgious science. The intuitions of con science, which prove the plulosophical accuracy of distinctively bibUcal evangeUcal ideas must have no authority in our reUgious science ! Here is the supreme setf-contradiction in Theodore. 252 ORTHODOXY. Parker's system and in every similar scheme of thought. Such systems evade the challenge which JuUus MiiUer and Dorner accept, to foUow up this inner voice of conscience, and receive the testimony of aU intuition, instinctive beUef, and experiment, whithersoever they lead. It is admitted that con science affirms that God ought not to harmonize us with our entire environment without a great arrange ment which exhibits at once his love and his justice, What ought to be wUl be. By and by it wiU be seen that we ought not to deny the unity of the moral law, and so we shaU not. The philosophy is coming that wiU be true to aU self-evident truth, north, south, east, and west, and wiU be Uberal enough to look into the thirty-two points of the azure before it decides on any proposition, great or smaU. [Applause.] When that day comes, this inner voice wiU be left to its proper authority ; and the necessity of the Atonement wUl be an inference from exact ethical science. Mr. Clarke says implicit ly that the ideas we draw from what conscience is always saying to us ought to be, are essentiaUy false. I affirm that this denial of the authority of conscience in its innermost voice is unscientific on Mr. Clarke's part, and on the part of all that school of theology which will not harmonize itself with the supreme fact of the Atonement. [Applause.] I maintain that to say that the ideas we draw from the inmost holiest of conscience mislead us in religious research is to deny the unity and the universaUty of law, and to shut the eyes to a part of the Light that lighteth mr. clarke's and mr. bale's criticisms. 253 every man that cometh into the world, and so is at once unscientific and irreligious. Here Orthodoxy and the Scripture part company with loose thought, and keep company with conscience and science. [Applause.] LX. SCEPTICISM IN NEW ENGLAND. TEE SEVENTY-EIGHTH LECTURE IN THE BOSTON MONDAY LECTURESHIP, DELIVERED IN TREMONT TEMPLE MAY 14. "Nescire autem, quid antea, quam natus sis, acciderit, id est semper esse puerum." — Cicero: Or. 34. " Ich bin der Geist der stets verneint." Goethe: Faust. LX. SCEPTICISM IN NEW ENGLAND. PRELUDE ON CURRENT EVENTS. Emerson says that the poorest poem is better than the best criticism upon it ; and so we may say that the poorest reaUy conscientious Ufe is incalcu lably better than the acutest worldly sneer concern ing it. Men outside the Church, when asked to unite with it, sometimes complain that there are many stunted, fruitless growths in the Church. Poor native spiritual endowments in Christians are the result of poor soil in which they grow ; and the world that sneers is itseK the soU. It wiU be noticed, that, as I am not in charge of any church, I have not the slightest personal interest at stake in any thing I may say of the value of church-membership. But if , in a free church in a free state, I utter a single word on that now timely and always greatly sugges tive theme, I shaU of course be met in some enlight ened quarters with the profound remark, that aU the effort that has been made in Boston this winter has been incited by a desire to pay church-debts. WeU, that is a good object. " Owe no man any thing "is a 257 258 ORTHODOXY. divine maxim. An obscure infidel paper in this city shrewdly judges that the entire effort has been in tended to fill up the membership of the evangeUcal churches. The Springfield RepubUcan said the other day that the Boston Index would find something mean and atrocious in the proposition that two and two make four, if that statement were a part of the Apostles' Creed. Every true church is a contract, not between two parties only, but three. It is not only an agreement of men with men, but of men with God. In dis banding a church, men alone cannot annul the con tract. This is the scholarly idea of the bond of Christians in feUowship with each other and with an invisible Head. Thus the Christians of the world are really and confessedly members of a theocracy. You think CromweU's and Milton's dream of a the ocracy faded. Many an archangel pities you ; and aU the deep students of science among men snule, if you say this seriously. God governs ; and his kingship is no pretence. Our best hope for America is, that Uke every other part of the universe, it is a theocracy. A true church is the outward form among men of God's kingdom in human history ; and it illustrates his kingdom in aU worlds. We must look on every true church as reaUy a divine institution ; for it is a contract with the unseen Power that is filling the world, just as the magnetic currents of the globe fill aU the needles on it. Our Lord was, and is, and is to come ; and in aU true beUevers he is as much present as the magnetic cur- SCEPTICISM IN NEW ENGLAND. 259 rents of the globe are in the balancing needles that point out the north pole rightly, if they are true to the currents that are in them, but not of them. The Church is our Lord's body ; the Church is our Lord's temple ; the Church brings every true beUever into contact with the deepest inmost of our Lord's pres ent life in the world ; and this is the supreme reason for uniting with it. It is painfully evident here, I hope, that lam speaking of a true church, and not of a Sunday club. Experience has shown that most men who do not unite with the Church drop away from their early religious life. The two great reasons for uniting with a true Church are, that you are likely to grow more inside the Church than out of it, and that you can probably do more good in it than out of it. To which church do I ask you to join yourselves ? I wish you could find out. Am I making a party plea ? I wish you would ascertain on which side it is made. I know, perhaps, five hundred young men who are members of churches ; but I do not know of twenty of them to which evangeUcal church they belong, nor do I care. It is not a partisan plea I am making in asking you to become a member of the visible church ; and, if you are a member of the true invisible church, you wiU assuredly wish to aid in making some part of the visible church a true church. But you say that creeds are long. They are quite short in some places, although they are deep. Not a few newspapers have lately cited a portion of the Andover creed, which the professors there sign. 260 ORTHODOXY. That is m form a very different creed from the one that belongs to the Andover Chapel Church. The public does not seem to know that the detailed state ment or confession which the professors may very well be called on to subscribe is a different thing from that statement of essentials which Andover puts into a church creed. The Andover Chapel Church creed is hardly longer than my hand is broad ; but it is as deep as any rift in the granite that goes I to the core of the world. The best church creeds include great essentials, and no more. I think now especiaUy of the short creed in the Yale College Church, written by President Dwight, not very wide, but fathomlessly deep. These are simply the creeds which you wish to make the basis of your action, and therefore may weU make the basis of your pro fession. I hold in my hand the creed which the American evangelist, who wUl soon lead our devotions, sub scribed twenty-one years ago in Boston. That con fession of faith has by the Divine blessing amounted to something in the world. As a ray of keen hght for others, our evangeUst will allow me, in his pres ence, to read, what perhaps he never has seen, the record on the church books, of his examination in that house of God yonder in which he first resolved to do his duty : — " No. 1079. Dwight L. Moody. Boards 43 Court Street. Has been baptzied. First awakened on the 16th of May. Became anxious about himself. Saw himself a sinner; and fiin now seems hateful, and holiness desirable. Thinks he has SCEPTICISM LN NEW ENGLAND. 261 repented. Has purposed to give up sin. Feels dependent upon Christ for forgiveness. Loves the Scriptures. Prays. Desires to be useful. Religiously educated. Been in the city a year. From Northfield, this State. Is not ashamed to be known as a Christian. Eighteen years old. " No. 1131. March 12, 1856. Thinks he has made some progress since he was here before, — at least in knowledge. Has maintained his habits of prayer, and reading the Bible. Believes (Jod will hear his prayers. Is fully determined to adhere to the cause of Christ always. Feels that it would be very bad if he should join the church, and then turn. Must repent of sin, and ask forgiveness for Christ's sake. Will never give up his hope, or love Christ less, whether admitted to the church or not. His prevailing intention is to give up his will to God. " Admitted May 4, 1856." That is a most moving record. Gentlemen, I hold that this is an examination that no church need feel ashamed of; and the results of it are of the same character. The Christian ordinances of baptism and the Lord's Supper you do not approach closely unless you come into the Church. In close contact with illumined soids there is a power which will come to you nowhere outside of God's house. Why is it that there is such strange influence exerted upon itself by a great assembly aU of one mind ? Go to the Uttle gatherings where some men of the class that neglect God's house spend their Sundays, — fire-engine rooms and the secret clubs for drinking, — and all the senti ment runs one way there. Such men are like eels in pools of the muddy sort, and often come to think that their pool is the whole ocean. You are easUy trans- 262 ORTHODOXY. fused with the spirit of any company that moves all one way. Put yourselves into the crystalline springs and streams. Somewhere in the Church you wiU find crystalline waters. There is a church inside the Church. Move in that; live enswathed in that. Let that be the transfusing bath of your inmost life; and very soon you will find in the power of that interfusion of soul with soul that assuredly God is yet in his holy temple. Yes ; but there are hypocrites in the Church. I know it. Let Tennyson describe one : — " With all his conscience and one eye askew, So false, he partly took himself for true; Whose pious talk, when most his heart was dry, Made wet the crafty crow's-foot round his eye; Who never naming God except for gain, So never took that useful name in vain; Made him his cat's-paw, and the Cross his tool, And Christ the bait to trap his dupe and fool ; Nor deeds of gift, but gifts of grace, he forged, And, snake-like, slimed his victim ere he gorged; And oft at Bible-meetings, o'er the rest Arising, did his holy, oily best." Tennyson's Sea-Dreams. The black angels look through pUlars of blue fire of that sort. Do you want the Church better ? Unite with it, and turn out such men; or, rather, unite with it, and keep such men from getting in. [Ap plause.] Perhaps some of our churches are too ambitious to be large in numbers. Let us be reasonably shy SCEPTICISM LN NEW ENGLAND. 263 of that church ambition which cares more for quan tity than quality. Our evangelist has said that he once in Chicago was ambitious to have a big church. He obtained one. Then he became ambitious to get a smaU one. A recognition of the necessity of spirit ual church-membership is the crowning glory of the churches of America of all denominations ; and it is almost a distinctively American idea. Think of the host in the air behind me, as I invite you to become members of God's house ! Here is a visible audience which might be enlarged to fill the city, or the nation, or the continent, or the world ; but even then the audience before me would be as a ripple compared with the sea, in contrast with this audience in the air behind me, — aU the sainted of our New-England shore, aU who have gone hence from foreign lands, and are now in the Unseen Holy I The Church is one on earth and in heaven. Think of the martyrs of the Reformation, those who, on the Continent of Europe, prepared the way for this modern rising of the sun, and of aU those who in the eighteen Christian centuries have labored, and into whose labors we have entered. The goodly company of the martyrs and apostles and prophets is before you. With aU that company I urge you to join hands, when I ask you to pass your brief career in this world in organized, aggressive com panionship with those who have a zeal for good works. 264 ORTHODOXY. THE LECTURE. New-England scepticism of the last fifty years is the upheaved, foaming, temporary crest of two inter fused waves, slowly rising from the historic deep, moving toward each other, meeting with loud shock, and throwing themselves aloft, — one American, and one German. Theodore Parker and much else floated in Boston at the summit of this glittering, uncertain crest, when each wave was at its height, and when in New England each increased the height of the other. In Germany the watery swell of rationalism is going down. (See Dorner, Schwartz, Kahnis, Christlieb, Hagenbach, Tholuck, and other writers on the decline of rationalism in the German univer sities. On that topic see an article in the Biblio- theca Sacra for October, 1875.) In New England the vexed billow which upheaved Theodore Parker is going down also. Both waves have already broken into foam, passed their climax, and are slowly sinking now into the thoughtful, abiding level of the sea. Under what compulsion of winds and tides did these waves rise ? Answer me that question, or do not attempt to explain to me Boston and New Eng land. Make some fairly adequate response to that inquiry, or do not try to tell me how Theodore Parker's errors, and those of the school of thought he represents, arose. In order to understand the sources of his mistakes, it is necessary for me to cast what I hope wUl not be a wholly useless glance SCEPTICISM LN NEW ENGLAND. 265 over the causes of New-England scepticism at large. Long enough has this city had the name, long enough has Harvard University yonder had the reputation, it does not now deserve, of leading erratic thought in regard to the highest of aU possible themes. A very curious past is behind us. When Timothy Dwight, soldier, poet, and theo logian, magnum atque venerabile nomen, began his presidency at Yale CoUege in 1795, the students there were accustomed to name each other after the French atheists. Jefferson, suspected of French principles in both religion and politics, was soon to become the chief magistrate of the nation. The enthusiasm for Lafayette and for GaUican Uberty had inclined the heart of our whole people toward France. The atro'ciously shallow and unclean, but brilliant and audacious Parisian infidelity of the period looked attractive, even to the most talented and scholarly undergraduates. " That was the day," Lyman Beecher writes in his " Autobiography " (vol. i. p. 43), "when boys that dressed flax in the barn read Tom Paine, and beUeved him. The coUege church was almost extinct. Most of the students were sceptical, and rowdies were plenty. Wines and liquors were kept in many rooms. Intemperance, pro fanity, gambling, and Ucentiousness were common." Lyman Beecher was in Yale College as a student in his third year, when Timothy Dwight came there as president ; and now these two men Ue not far from each other in the unspeakably precious dust of the New Haven cemetery, at rest until the heavens axe 266 ORTHODOXY. no more. At the first communion season after Pres ident Dwight's instaUation, only a single student from the whole membership of the coUege remained to participate in the service of the eucharist. In all the history of the American Church there has hardly been an hour of greater disaster. The senior class brought before the president a list of questions for discussion, one of them on the inspiration of the Scriptures (Dwight's Theology, Memoir, vol. i. See also Sparks's Life of Dwight). He chose that theme for a written debate, asked the young men to be as thorough as possible on the infidel side, treated them courteously, answered them fairly, dehvered for six months from the college pulpit massive courses of thought against infidelity ; and from that day it ran into hiding-holes in Yale College. If Harvard University had had a President Dwight, 1 say not what might have been its subsequent history and that of portions of Cambridge and Boston ; but it would have been different. Among the eloquent memorials of the fathers, Mr. Emerson, in the Old South church, lately told us that Providence has granted to Boston thus far the guidance of the intel lectual destiny of this continent. Boston is a sea- blown city of amusingly self-blown trumpets. It is safe to affirm, that, in the geography of American culture, Boston is as yet,, in the opinion of many, and especially in her own, the highest summit. But Harvard University is Boston's summit. Religious diseases, originated chiefly by contagion from France in her revolutionary period, and by many years of SCEPTICISM LN NEW ENGLAND. 267 war on our own soU, filled the veins of Harvard, as well as those of Yale, at the opening of our national life. At the close of the last century, Harvard, as weU as Yale, was in a vicious state, induced chiefly by the very same causes which had produced demor alization at Yale. Under the elms yonder, as well as under those at New Haven, sceptical students caUed each other in honor by infidel names, — Voltaire, Eousseau, D'Alembert. In that Parisian period, un- reportable vices were as common at Harvard as at Yale. We have just had a pleasant book written, describing student Ufe in Harvard as it unrolls itself at present, and as many of you and as I remember it; but a volume describing Ufe there ninety years ago, and as frankly written as this new description, we should not care to have generaUy circulated. In several works of historic fiction the average undergraduate of that time is represented as a low character. You know what pictures the world received from Hogarth ; but some of the scenes he has put on immortal can vas to illustrate "The Rake's Progress" might be matched out of the fairly representative Ufe of Yale and Harvard in that French period. The aver age undergraduate of the last years of the last century, at both Yale and Harvard, was far less of a gentle man, and immensely less of a Christian, than he is to day. Why, at Harvard at this moment a great body of the students are members of churches, and, other things being equal, are not thought the less of on that account. I hold in my hand here elaborate statistics as to recent classes in Harvard University. Take 268 ORTHODOXY. one of the very last, and in it there were, of men about to graduate, of Unitarians, 39 ; Episcopalians, 35 ; Congregationalists, 23 ; Baptists, 11 ; Presbyte rians, 6 ; Liberals, 4 ; Methodists, 2 ; Roman Catho lics, 2. Accordmg to that table, there is really more reason for calling Harvard an orthodox college than a heterodox. The coUege is not denominational in any sense. It would not like to be called Unitarian, or Congregational, or Episcopal. Among the stu dents there are well organized and vigorous religious societies, and the conditions of admission to them are more severe than to most churches. I find reason, therefore, for contrasting the present with the past of Harvard favorably. But this change has come about within the last fifty years. At Yale, in my class, we had more than two-thirds on entrance, members of Christian churches. I know that we hear of scan dalous things in these large companies of students at Yale and at Harvard. You cannot bring together a thousand young men, without finding a few among them of the shaUow and riotous sort ; but they do not give the tone to the whole coUege. Perhaps they do to a few secret societies, — breathing-holes of fri volity, and often of what is far worse. The mass of students are honorable men, and come from honora ble families, although at the present day it can be said that a few are what the most were in the last twenty years of the last century, at Yale and Har vard. Certain it is that these diseases of a greatly tempted time existed in Cambridge with as much in tensity as they did at New Haven. Certain it is that SCEPTICISM LN NEW ENGLAND. 269 at Harvard there was no President Dwight to drive them out, as there was at Yale. The atmosphere of Harvard as weU as of Yale at the opening of our national Ufe was heavily infected with Parisian infi dehty, but no adequate corrective was applied at Harvard; and, although the evU results are now largely outgrown, they have been very noteworthy to those who have minutely studied how the sick forehead of a certain kind of culture in Boston, laid in the palm of God to rest, has tossed there with doubt, as in Channing's and Parker's case, whether the hand was ever pierced for human sins ; and now lately with doubt, as with some of the Free-ReUgion- ists, whether there be any personal hand at all or not. Boston is asked to give an account of herself. She had excellent fathers; but she has of late had the name of being the apologist for much looseness of thought. We are wilUng to give an account of ourselves. We have had a trial such as no other Commonwealth on this continent ever had. We have had a State Church. How did this arise ? Yale and Harvard were founded by men of Christian zeal ; and how did it come about, that, in so short a time, these institutions lapsed into a condition that gave joy to the shallow infidel clubs of Paris ? All Frenchmen were not like Lafayette. These results arose from adequate causes, which ought not to be forgotten. If you wish to understand Boston doctrinal unrest, you must go back first to the period when Paris ruled us. You must recall the time when Lafay- 270 orthodoxy. ette and Jefferson had our heart, and we were not a little in awe or admiration of that very brittle sceptre, — Parisian thought about religion, a style of intellectual allegiance that no man is proud of now. The infidehty which flourished in 1795 in Yale and Harvard among young men, no scholar to-day cares to answer for : it is an unclean and degraded thing. We have grown far beyond all that. ' How did we sink so low as to foUow that piUar of ashes and blood which rose on the Seine, and led the nations not altogether celestially for a while — a little electricity in it, no doubt; some white-fire mingled with the blue in the whirlwind ; but Saharas of dust also, and hosts of hissing, flying scraps of white-hot volcanic stone ? Our fathers did not beheve that a man might be a minister, although unconverted; but when George Whitefield was in this city, it was necessary for him to insist that a man should not be a minister unless converted. (See Whitefield's ]Vew England Jour nal, passim.) On Boston Common, with twenty thousand people in his audience, George Whitefield defended the proposition that a man does not become a saint in his sleep; that conversion is an ascertain able change, or will show itself by its effects ; and that if the results which will naturally follow from such a state of life are not visible, their absence is proof that a man should not be a member of God's house. Why did he need to oppose in New England, ideas which did not cross the Atlantic in the Mayflower ? How did New England wander so far away from SCEPTICISM LN NEW ENGLAND. 271 Plymouth Rock, and find herself in this low marsh, where many of the State churches of Europe are strugghng to-day? Why, she fell into that marsh by having herself a State Church. The marshes of the State churches of Europe, — you understand them very weU. We had the oozy acres of a State Church to walk over in Massachusetts for more than fifty years; and the smutch is not off our feet yet that we received in those bogs. In 1631 the General Court of Massachusetts Bay passed an order that " for time to come none shall be admitted to the freedom of the body poUtic but church-members." What is the .effect of making a rule that nobody can vote unless he is a church- member ? Why, everybody wiU want to be a church- member, and there wiU be large churches, and you wiU admit men into the church whom it wUl be very hard to get out. Now, it was a public law of this Commonwealth, passed early, with all due form, that only church-members could vote. That was eleven years after the landing on Plymouth Rock. Remem ber, however, that the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay, rather than the Pilgrims of ' Plymouth Bay, are responsible for the secularization of the holiest por tion of New-England life. Where did that law come from ? It was a thrifty scion from the far-spreading European bough. Our fathers had seen children baptized and confirmed in State churches ; and it was thought, that, in some sense, all baptized persons were members of the church. That was and is the predominating opinion of Europe. This idea the 272 orthodoxy. Puritans of England — who were not separatists, as the PUgrims were — did not leave behind them when they crossed the sea. So we had here in my denomi nation — the most aristocratic on this continent, if you please, and the most split, and, in some particu lars, the most harmful — a State Church. The Puritans who landed in Boston brought to America the theory that every child should be made, as far as possible, a member of the church; and, therefore, it was a part of their anxiety in founding a new civilization to have all children baptized. Those of our fathers who were not separatists had State Church ideas concerning the baptism of chil dren. The secularization of Orthodoxy in New Eng land arose primarily from the desire of the Puritans to secure the religious culture of the whole popula tion. The law of 1631 was passed with the best of intentions, but it had the most mischievous effects. What happened next? In 1635 we turned Roger WiUiams away from the Massachusetts Colony, chiefly for political reasons, as the highest authority on this vexed theme, the learned editor of " The Boston Con- gregationalist," says and proves, in spite of the dis sent of Rhode Island and of Brown University. (See Dexter, Rev. Dr. H. M., As to Roger Williams, p. 79.) The reasons why Roger WUliams was sent away were no doubt fundamentally political : never theless, one source of irritation with him was that he objected to the baptizing of infants. Why did he do that ? Among many other reasons, because he saw that to regard aU baptized persons as, in an important SCEPTICISM LN NEW ENGLAND. 273 sense, members of the church, led to the seculariza tion of church-membership. I remember where I am speaking ; I know what prejudices I am crossing : but I know that in this assembly, assuredly, nobody will have objection to my advocacy, even at a little expense of consistency with my own supposed prin ciples, of the necessity of a spiritual church-member ship. [Applause.] If I say that a certain denomi nation, represented by that man who was driven from Massachusetts to Rhode Island, has, in spite of all we hear of criticism about one of its beliefs, been of foremost service in bringing into the world, among aU Protestant denominations, an adequate idea of the importance of a spiritual church-membership, I know that no generous heart or searching intellect will object to that statement. [Applause.] In 1653 no less a man than Henry Dunster, presi dent of Harvard University, announced himself as an opponent to the doctrine that infants should be baptized. He refused to aUow an infant of his own family to be baptized, and deUvered several sermons against the baptism of infants. Baptist authorities assert that Henry Dunster became a Baptist. (See an address delivered in Philadelphia, before the American Baptist Historical Society at its eleventh anniversary, by Rev. Daniel C. Eddy. Philadelphia: Historical Society Press, 1864.) But he continued to be president of Harvard University. His pastor, the Rev. Jonathan Mitchell, in 1657, on account of collisions of debate of the kindest sort between himself and this revered man, who had been his 274 Orthodoxy. teacher, caused a synod to be caUed, in which action was taken of which we feel the mischief yet. Ques tions raised as to the baptism of children had " come to some figure first in the colony of Connecticut." (Mather's Magnolia, vol. ii. p. 238. Hartford ed.). A comparison of all . the authorities, however, shows that both Mitchell of Cambridge and Stone of Hart ford were leading forces among the influences which brought together the Massachusetts councU of 1657. (See McKenzie, Rev. Dr. A., History of the Shepard Church, Cambridge.) This Jonathan Mitchell would have been quite a figure in that sky of culture which some think too soft, too transcendental, for any thing in the stern days of our fathers to have risen into. The recent structure of the Shepard Church in Cam bridge stands yonder under the Washington Elm, — it is my fortune to be a member of it, — Mr. Mc- Kenzie's ; and of that church, successor to Shepard, this Jonathan MitcheU was pastor. Cotton Mather says of him, — " His Sermons. . . . were admirably Well-Studied. . . . He ordinarily medled with no Point, but what he managed with such an extraordinary Invention, Curious Disposition, and Copi ous Application, as if he would leave no material Thing to be said of it, by any that should come after him. And when he came to Utter what he had Prepared, his Utterance had such a becoming Tunedbleness, andVivacity, to set it off, as was indeed Inimitable. . . . Tho' he were all along in his Preaching, as a very lovely Song of one that hath a pleasant Voice, yet as he drew near to the Close of his Exercises, his Comely Fervency would rise to a marvellous Measure of Energy ; He would speak with such a Transcendent Majesty and Liveliness, that the Peo- SCEPTICISM IN NEW ENGLAND. 275 pie (more Thunderstruck than they that heard Cicero's Oration for Ligarius) would often Shake under his Dispensations, as if they had Heard the Sound of the Trumpets from the Burning Mountain, and yet they would Mourn to think, that they were going presently to be dismissed from such an Heaven upon Earth." (See Sibley, John Langdon, librarian of Harvard University, Lives of Harvard Graduates, pp. 148-150.) Richard Baxter said that "if there could be convened a Council of the whole Christian World, that man would be worthy to be the moderator of it." Now that man came very near ppposing himself to infant baptism. On the twenty-fourth day of Decem ber, 1653, with arguments elaborately prepared, he went to the study of Henry Dunster to convince the president of Harvard University that opposition to infant baptism was wrong; but Jonathan Mitchell came away almost converted to Henry Dunster's views. He found, that, in his secret thoughts, it was injected into his mind now and then, that infant bap tism had certain mischievous tendencies in the State. But these suggestions came oftenest on Saturday, when he was very busy writing his address for the next day ; and he thought, therefore, that they were from the evU spirits. It could not be good angels that sent these suggestions ; for no good spirit would interrupt the writing of a sermon. Besides, although " these thoughts were darted in with some impression, and left a strange confusion and sickliness on his spirits," they were " injected, hurrying suggestions, rather than deUberate thoughts." On these grounds chiefly, Jonathan MitcheU, in the days of Salem witchcraft, concluded that aU arguments against in- 276 orthodoxy. fant baptism must be put aside. The question was settled in his own mind ; but the importance of these interruptions turned out to be really considerable to New England to this hour. Ho insisted on debating the matter in public over and over ; and his influence, says Cotton Mather, was something of which the centre was at Cambridge, and the circumference out side New England. Largely by the effort of this eloquent man, Mitchell, there Was brought together at Boston, in 1657, by invitation of the General Court, an assem bly of the principal ministers of Massachusetts ; and by that body of grave men it was ordained that the half-way covenant be adopted. By that covenant those parents who were baptized in infancy were, if living respectable lives, allowed to have their children baptized. Church-members became eligible to civil offices. (See Mather's Magnalia, vol. ii. pp. 238-270. Hartford ed.) Notice how the political strain was on Massachu setts all the way through. That decision gave great umbrage to the churches. President Chauncy of Harvard opposed it ; and in 1662 another synod was called, and it was affirmed again that the half-way covenant should be the rule of the land. That changed one or two thousand things. It is an inadequate account of the origin of secu larization of New-England orthodoxy, to attribute the half-way covenant exclusively to religious causes. If we look beneath the surface of this deterioration in its middle stages, we shall find political causes at SCEPTICISM IN NEW ENGLAND. 277 work. Palfrey well says (History of New England, vol. ii. p. 492) that "the degree of irritation that prevailed " concerning the half-way covenant " is scarcely to be explained by a consideration! of only the ostensible grounds of dispute. 'From the fire of the altar,' says Mather (Magnolia, Book iii. 117) ' there issued thunderings and lightnings and earth quakes.' The truth is, that political regards brought their explosive fuel to the flame." The fashion had been set that only church-mem bers could be eligible to public office. I know that in 1688, on the accession of William and Mary, the law that required church-membership as a condition to citizenship was repealed ; but you cannot raise a great wave Uke this, and stop it by changing rulers in England. We had had it from 1631 to 1688. It was the rule that only church-members should be ehgible to office, and partly, as a result of that, we had had a half-way covenant. Long after 1688, that rule of fashion and the haU-way covenant kept on in spite of the changes of laws under William and Mary. It is, therefore, not surprising that in 1704 we find men like Stoddard of Northampton maintaining that unregenerate persons might come to the Lord's Sup per. Whitefield wrote in 1740, "Mr. Stoddard is much to be blamed for endeavoring to prove that un converted men might be admitted into the ministry." To close this astounding story of the secularization of New-England Congregationalism, we find at last Jonathan Edwards and Whitefield making objection 278 orthodoxy. seriously to the prolonged abuses of the church-mem bership. When Jonathan Edwards at Northampton, finding out that some moral evUs greatly needing crit icism were appearing in the younger lives he was set to guide, taught that unconverted persons should not be members of God's house, opposed his predecessor's evU plea that church ordinances are or may be sav ing, and insisted that a man should experience the new birth before coming to the communion service, his hearers rose, and drove him into the wilderness for ascetic heresy. I know where in Massachusetts I can put my hand on little irregular scraps of brown paper, stitched together as note-books, and closely covered all over with Jonathan Edwards's handwriting. Why did he use such coarse material in his studies ? Why was he within sight of starvation ? Because he had opposed the secularization of the Church. Why did that man need to accept from Scotland funds with which to maintain his family ? Because he insisted upon a spiritual church-membership. Why did his wife and daughters make fans, and seU them to buy bread? Because he opposed the spirit of the half-way covenant. Because he defended with vigor, as Whitefield did, the idea that a man should not be a minister unless converted, nor a church-mem ber unless converted, and so set himself against the whole trend of this huge, turbid, hungry, haughty wave of secularization that had been rising ever since 1631. Of course he was abandoned by the fashion able. Of course his life was in some sense a martyr dom. His note-books were made from the refuse of SCEPTICISM IN NEW ENGLAND. 279 brown paper left from the fans. There is nothing Massachusetts so little likes to be fanned with as those fans Jonathan Edwards's wife and daughters made, and sold for bread. Yes, you starved him ; but Scotland fed him, thank God ! [Applause.] When Edwards was dismissed, it was proposed that there be a councU of ten pastors ; and he of course claimed the right of choosing five ; but he was obliged to go be- yond the broad bounds of old Hampshire County in order to find five who agreed with him. He went to Mount Holyoke, a marked spot then, apparently, as it is now, in the spiritual history of New England, and obtained Woodbridge of South Hadley as one of the councU, because Woodbridge agreed with him in op position to this secularization of the church. PoUtical pressure and social arrogance led to the half-way covenant. That led to an unconverted church-membership. That aUowed the existence of an unconverted ministry. That ministry filled the land with the hue and cry against Whitefield and Edwards. I hold in my hand a copy of a record made as late as 1728 on the official books of a church in Westfield ; and it is a specimen of the records you may find all over Eastern Massachusetts. I go up and down from the Merrimack to the Connecticut as a flying scout, and every now and then I chance to meet a talkative document Uke this : — " At a church-meeting holden in Westfield Feb. 25, 1728, Voted, that those who enter full communion may have liberty to give an account of a work of saving conversion, or not. It shall be regarded by the church as a matter of indifference" 280 ORTHODOXY. Gentlemen, out of the fashion of the English State Church, the care of our fathers for their children, and the political pressure which preceded the acces sion of WUliam and Mary, came the half-way cov enant. Out of the half-way covenant came the secularization of the church-membership of the Congregational body in New England. Out of our connection with the State came marshes of stag nant church-life here, similar to the marshes of much of State Church life in Europe to-day. There is hardly a breeze that sweeps over Boston that does not come from those marshes, not yet dry, and that never had any salt in them to keep them sweet. You know that I am speaking here more frankly than I could have spoken fifty years ago ; for it has not been the fashion, in my portion of New England, denomi nationally to admit the evil of this half-way covenant as fully as I have now done, until within twenty-five or thirty years ; but these are the facts. A law by which only church-members could vote was in operation in Massachusetts from 1631 to 1688, in form, and much longer in spirit. The political and social pressure arising from that law led to the adoption of the half-way covenant, by which persons not professing to have entered on a new life at all were allowe'd to enter the Church. Out of that pressure arose Stoddard's evU plea, that unconverted persons should be brought to the com munion service. Out of all these causes came an unconverted church- membership. SCEPTICISM LN NEW ENGLAND. 281 Out of that came gradually an unconverted ministry. Out of that came a broad departure from many points of the lofty and scientificaUy severe ideals of Plymouth Rock. Out of that departure arose, in experience, a wide and deep secularization of the more fashionable of the churches of Eastern Massachusetts. Out of this secularization of the churches of Eastern Massachusetts came their chief weakness in their resistance to the irreUgious influences arising from the French war and the Revolution, and to the accession of the French infidelity at the moment when Lafayette and French liberty had bent the national soul toward France. What does Joseph Tracy say in his "History of the Great Awakening " ? I open that most cautious book on the whole topic ; and I read, " Every Con gregational Church in New England, probably, has either adopted Edwards's and Whitefield's doctrine concerning church-membership, or become Unita rian." (See pp. 411 - 413, 418.) Americans have aU sorts of sense, except historic sense. We have had a State Church ; we have had a secularized church-membership in one of our denom inations, the ruling one ; and Uttle by Uttle that sec ularization so lowered our standards, that it is not amazing at aU, and it is a thing we ought to have expected, that out of the combination of causes in cluded in the older Arminianism, the haK-way cov enant, the disturbances of the French war and the Revolution, French infidehty, the popular misconcep- 282 ORTHODOXY. tions of scholarly Orthodox doctrine, and some crude and rash statements in Orthodoxy itself, came Uni tarianism. Out of Unitarianism, and the brilliancy of its early literary and secular successes, came Harvard Univer sity in its largely unevangeUcal attitude, — an attitude now greatly changed. Out of Harvard University, in its unevangelical attitude, came the occasionally sceptical or doetrinaUy indifferent Uterary circles of Eastern Massachusetts. Out of the sceptical Uterary circles of Eastern Massachusetts came one part of the influences that set a portion, though only a portion, of the Boston fashions of thought. Here we are face to face with an age when anti- slavery was taken up by your eloquent Parker, and the Church lagged behind. This was its own fault. Time has criticised that slowness on the part of Or thodoxy to foUow Providence, that tardiness which left between the Church and God a chasm which is filled up, in great part, with the corpses of my own generation. You wUl allow me, as a member of a decimated generation, to be frank concerning the slowness of Orthodoxyto foUow God, until he whom we dare hot name plainly became abolitionist. Parker foUowed him, and obtained a foUowing. This ,is the outcome of a single historical glance ; but if I could have -gone into detaU, if I could have shown you how link has followed link, you would be amazed to find Boston to-day not wreathed round and round with misconceptions of the highest truth; and that SCEPTICISM IN NEW ENGLAND. 283 reUgion here, which has aUowed itself to be corrupted so much in the past, is to-day so little corrupted. Omitting fractions, the statistics show, that, in 1816, there was one unevangehcal church in Boston to every three thousand of the population. Now there is only one to every six thousand. In 1816 there was only one evangelical church in Boston to every four thou sand inhabitants. Now there is one to every two thousand. In the experience of half a century, a period long, enough to constitute a very fair test of the tendencies of thought, and exhibiting the results of no mere temporary swirl of opinion, evangeUcal churches in Boston have risen from the proportion of one to four thousand to that of one to two thou sand, and the unevangehcal of all kinds have faUen off from the proportion of one to three thousand to that of one to six thousand. Very significant on the dial of Boston, with this past behind us, is the de clining shadow of that phUosophy, which, in a dim morning of reUgious experience, sees Olympus and Parnassus, and mistakes them for Sinai and Calvary. Orthodoxy has not always followed God ; but only so far as it foUows him wUl it ultimately have any following. Deum sequi, to follpw God, was Seneca's supreme rule for poUtical action. Our painful past summarizes its eager councUs by writing these Roman words over aU doors of church and school, social Ufe, literature, and reform. THEODORE PARKER AS AN ANTISLAVERY REFORMER. BEVENTY-NINTH LECTURE IN THE BOSTON MONDAY LEC TURESHIP, DELIVERED IN TBEMONT TEMPLE MAY 21. " Wdtdes Rauschen, Gottes Fliigel, Tlef in kiihler Waldesnacht, Wie der Held in Rosses Biigel, Schwingt sich des Gedankens Macht. Wle die alten Tannen sausen; Hort man Geistes Wogen brausen." Schxegel. " When a deed is done for freedom, through the broad earth's aching breast Runs a thrill of joy prophetic, trembling on from east to west; And the slave, where'er he cowers, feels the soul within him climb To the awful verge of manhood, as the energy sublime Of a century bursts, fuU-blossomed, on the thorny stem of Time." Lowell. X. THEODORE PARKER'S MERIT AS AN ANTISLAVERY REFORMER. PRELUDE ON CURRENT EVENTS. Will it not be weU for the fertUe lands on the Danube to escape from under the Ught of the Cres cent? In four hundred years, beneath that peculiar radiance, have they grown fatter, or leaner ? Where are the great fruits of Turkish finance, politics, liter ature, law, philosophy, reUgion, and social Ufe? It was weU for Servia, it was advantageous for Egypt, it was fortunate for Greece, to break or loosen the Turkish yoke. Our stern world, up to this miracu lous hour, is governed by the law of the survival of the fittest. There are renowned Mussulman pro verbs, which assert that the Turkish hoof always leaves behind it barrenness. These ancient sayings are not contradicted by the Turkish bankruptcy of to-day. Which ought we to fear the more for the Danube, — the tread of the bUghting Turkish hoof, or that of the relentless icy paw of the Russian bear ? Each of these feet deserves a tether. On which side ought American sympathies to Ue in the Eastern war ? 287 288 ORTHODOXY. British sympathies are divided ; but American sym pathies ought to be cooler at this distance than the British can be. Nevertheless, since American mis sionaries, whom Lord Shaftsbury caUs the most re markable men in the East, have planted the Cross on the Bosphorus, we have an interest, as Christian citizens of the world, in the question whether Russia, or Turkey, or the Great Powers of Europe, shaU rule these fair borders of the Black Sea. What has polygamy done for Turkish society ?- I looked once five days through Constantinople, to find among polyamists, a single fresh face over forty years of age, and looked in vain. The unre- portable vices of the East not infrequently have to be guarded against in Roberts College. The son of an English physician who followed Lord Byron to Greece, and who became one of the foremost medical advisers of the court at Constantinople, told me, that his father would never let him go to the public baths alone. You would drive me out at that door, if I were to tell you what more he said. Which is the worse, — Russian absolutism, or Mohammedan polyg amy and its attendant vices? What Carlyle calls the unspeakable Turk is not seen in Constantinople as well as he can be in the interior of Turkey or Syria. I remember how Uke a CorUss Engine Russian ab solutism is, and what Russia did in 1846 in driving all missionaries from her borders. I know, also, that 1846 is not 1876; and that, even if Russia should have right of way through the Bosphorus, it is PARKER AS AN ANTISLAVERY REFORMER. 289 not. altogether certain that our missions are to be put down there. One of the leading statesmen who helped settle the treaty of peace after the Cri mean war told one of the most honored merchants of this city, in the gallery of the House of Commons, that, in the conference preceding the making of that treaty, Russia explicitly and uniformly, and with great detail, promised to give all the guaranties that the Christian powers of the West should desire, if only she could have the right of way through the Bospho rus. We have exaggerated, I fear, the danger to missionaries, in case Russia should drive the Turks out of Europe. Right of way through the Bospho rus is not possession of Constantinople. Entire con trol of that city, Russia wiU not obtain as easily as she burned Moscow. It is affirmed that Turkey is now making reforms which she cannot carry through, without violating the Koran. The subtlest thing said in favor of sym pathy with Turkey is, " Let Islam be allowed to com mit suicide. Let Turkey stand, that Islam may fall." Her reforms in the past have been chiefly on paper. Her promises of reform are worth nothing among bankers or statesmen. But what if she be driven back to her deserts ? What if she lose Constantino-, pie, as she has practically lost Cairo ? WUl this not be a more effective lessening of the powers and pres tige of Mohammedanism in the world than could come from her reforms, which may never come? But, even if Turkey could glorify herself on the Dan ube politically and industrially, would she not aid 290 ORTHODOXY. Mohammedanism far more by her commercial impor tance and political weight than she wUl injure it by violating a few tenets of her creed in her poUtical changes ? It is my purpose, however, to insist simply on the fact of experience, that it has been well for some por tion of the glowing East to escape from under the Turkish yoke ; and that, therefore, if we are to be guided by the light of experience, we must hope that Providence means to limit more and more the power of Mohammedanism, and, indeed, so to Umit it, that by and by it shall itself see its own natural tendencies to decay, and in its deserts and its wUdernesses be healed of its sickness by a rebound from its own leprosies. God grant that this may be the result of driving Islam back to her fastnesses ! What has happened in Greece since she was liber ated from Turkey ? Forty years ago, not a book could be bought at Athens. To-day one in eighteen of the whole popula tion of Greece is in school. Fifty years of independ ence, and the HeUenic spirit has doubled the popu lation of Greece, increased her revenues five hundred per cent, extended telegraphic communication over the kingdom, enlarged the fleet from four hundred and forty to five thousand vessels, opened eight ports, founded eleven new cities, restored forty ruined towns, changed Athens from a hamlet of hovels to a city of sixty thousand inhabitants, and planted there a royal palace, a legislative chamber, six type-foun deries, forty printing-estabUshments, twenty news- PARKER AS AN ANTISLAVERY REFORMER. 291 papers, an astronomical observatory, and a university with fifty professors and twelve hundred students. [Applause.] King Otho's German court, when he came from NaupUa to Athens, in 1835, Uved at first in a shed that kept out neither the rain nor the north wind. On Constitution Place in Athens, in 1843, the Hellenic spirit, without violence, and by the dis play of force for but a few hours, substituted for per sonal power in Greece a constitutional government as free as that of England. George Finlay, the his torian of the Greek Revolution, and who fought in it, affirms, that even before that event, degraded as the people were politically, a larger proportion could read and write than among any other Christian race in Europe. Undoubtedly long bondage, acting on the native adroitness of the race, taught the Greeks disingenuousness. The old blood produced an Alci biades as well as a Socrates, a Cleon as weU as a Pho cion. .There was in it, as in American veins to-day, a tendency to social, commercial, and poUtical sharp- dealing. But, after fifty years of independence, the HeUenic spirit devotes a larger percentage of public revenue to purposes of instruction than France, Italy, England, Germany, or even the United States. Mod ern Greece, fifty years ago a slave and a beggar, to day, by the confession of the most merciless statisti cians, its enemies, stands at the head of the list of self-educated nations. Railways, as even the less sanguine at Athens now hope, must, at no very distant period, cut the Isthmus of Corinth, and the green, fat Boeotian Plain. 292 ORTHODOXY. They wiU bring the Western Patras and the Northern Larissa into communication with Athens. Possibly the Pirasus, or Cape Sunium, and not Brindisi, may one day become the point of departure from Europe, of mails to the East from London, Berlin, and St. Petersburg. Greece desires to connect a Larissa rail way with a Turkish railway, soon to pierce the iron gates of the Danube. If there is to be a reconstruction of the Turkish territory, shall not Greece recover her Macedonian provinces? Ten thousand people assembled lately in the Pnyx at Athens, before the Bema of Demos thenes, to consider that question. (See Gladstone, " The Hellenic Factor in the Eastern Question," Contemporary. Review, December, 1876.) William Pitt said, in 1792, that the true doctrine of the balance of power in the east of Europe was, that the influence of Russia should not be allowed to increase, nor that of Turkey to decline. Wellington called the confirmation of Greek independence by the victory of Navarino an untoward event. Daniel Webster and Henry Clay, however, whose deaths were as sincerely mourned in Greece as in America, hailed that battle as the triumph of a sister-people in a struggle which the United States were the first among nations to encourage officially. George Canning hoped, and Athens has not ceased to dream, that a regenerated Greece might, from Athens and Constantinople, regenerate all the now subject Greek races on both shores of the ^Egean. Of the fifteen million of the population of European PARKER AS AN ANTISLAVERY REFORMER. 293 Turkey, less than four millions are Ottomans. The rest — Slavonians, Greeks, WaUachians, Albanians — profess the Greek religion, or speak the Greek dialect. Demosthenes, Miltiades, Themistocles, it may be pre sumed, would adopt the Hellenic idea, were they now in Greece. But, as a late American ambassador at Athens affirms, these men are remembered by the modern Greek as if they were yesterday on the Acropolis. In polyglot Turkey there are peoples, but no people. To-day it is calculated, that, count ing by individuals, the Greeks in European Turkey are to the Turks as six to one ; but, estimating them by their wealth, they are as thirty to one. In view of these facts, and with the clash of Russian arms on the Danube, shaU we not renew our enthusiasm for Greece ? [Applause.] THE LECTURE. In the first century of its existence our nation has twice been washed in blood ; and to-day we draw nigh to that anniversary on which, through an extent of territory broader than Csesar ever ruled over, you will decorate uncounted graves, a great proportion of which are fiUed by men of my generation. Look on the marbles, which, before this month closes, you will cover with spring flowers, and you wUl find that a very large part of those who laid down their lives in the civil war were men between twenty-five and thirty-five years of age. My generation in America is and always will be a remnant. Such of us as are left must be excused if we remember that it is not 294 ORTHODOXY. long, at the longest, from now to the roll-call after the battle ; and that very soon we shaU see those who have already laid down their lives that the dolorous and accursed ages might a little change their course. Assembled at the very tombstones we are about to decorate, wUl you not allow me to say, that, if the Church had done its whole duty in the fifty years preceding the time in which our land was bathed in blood, my generation might not have been a fragment? for that moral apathy in the North which aUowed the South to hope for a divided North would not have existed ; and, had the South not had that hope, who knows that she would have dared to have as sailed the Union in arms ? Had every pulpit in the land done what a few pulpits did, — and what all would have done, had they not lost the Master's whip of small cords," twice knotted up in the temple of old, but almost forgotten in a luxurious age, — there might have, been no need at last for Almighty Providence to seize the North by the nape of the neck, and throw it across a chasm filled with corpses to the firm land of justice. [Applause.] It was Almighty God who aboUshed slavery. The Church to-day, at the edge of these martyrs' graves, must beware of two things, — pride in what God has accomplished, and a tendency to self-excuse for not having used her Master's whip of small cords. That whip will be needed yet in America. It must not go out of fashion on this continent. There is a long, crowded, seething future before us in this land. Having twice been washed in blood against our PARKER AS AN ANTISLAVERY REFORMER. 295 anticipation, is it fit for us, now that we are at peace again, and now that the subtle sorcery qf luxury has come to us once more out of the death of our mar tyrs, to forget them, and to forget God, and make unfashionable even yet our Lord's example of pur ging the temple ? Why, you could excuse me better for being too severe to-day than for being an apol ogist for pubUc immoraUty. We want as our lead er not some soft person brought up in king's pal aces, and afraid of the shaking of a reed. We want Him who twice, with indignation upon which men dared not look, purged the temple, saying, — as he said lately to America, in accents with which the awe-struck air ought to be made permanently alive, and as he wiU have occasion to say again and again before another thousand years shaU have wheeled and burned above our good and evU, — " Take these things hence ! " On the side of that Eternal Power not ourselves, which makes for righteousness, Amer ica was not a unit ; and therefore she feU for a whUe beneath those high and flaming chariot-wheels which move evermore in universal history whithersoever Justice wills. There is a prospect that America may not be a unit in time to come in loving what that Power loves, and in hating what it hates ; and there fore there is reason for remembering our past, and sowing in the fat, ploughed field of our bitter days, and in all the great and yet smoking furrows of our chastisement, abundant seed of conscience. This is a good time to speak a solemn word, that may take root, and bring forth fruit in poUtics, in trade and in every man's secret moral sense. [Applause.] 296 ORTHODOXY. What could the Church have done against slavery that it did not do ? 1. It could have made slaveholding a bar to church-membership. One great denomination did that, — great in qual ity, not in quantity — the Quakers. It was their good-fortune to have established a right precedent as to slavery before the Cave of iEolus was opened, and the winds of aU division began to blow upon us from unoccupied territory coveted by the slave-power. Eli Whitney, in 1794, invented the cotton-gin. The British fleet, in 1803, hovered off the mouth of the Mississippi, and Napoleon Bonaparte sold to us Louisiana. With that purchase the Cave of ^Eolus, who imprisons tempests within his beUowing moun tains, was opened. When the winds had blown out of it untU it was substantiaUy vacant, unexpectedly in the depths of the cave opened another JEolus Cave, — Texas. After the winds blowing out of that had tossed our whole ocean into yeasting, yeUow foam, suddenly, in the rear of that JEolus Cave, opened another, — California and the Mexican war. Then came a yet more huge enlargement of the cave, in the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, and the Kansas* and Nebraska struggle. We saw the gleam ing of the western sea through the last opening of the cavern. God be thanked that the bowels of the mountains were exhausted at last, and that we had no more unoccupied territory ! To this fully opened colossal prison-house of winds we found no door that could be bolted, except one made of corpses. We PARKER AS AN ANTISLAVERY REFORMER. 297 had to block it up at last, the whole mouth of our unmeasured JEolus Cavern, by the dead bodies of North and South. It is blocked to this day by that immovable and costly mound. Now, before this JSolus Cave was opened, before the cotton-gin had lifted the value of a slave-hand to a thousand doUars, and of a black infant at birth to one hundred dollars, we find the Quaker sect putting itself right by assuming that a man can not be a church-member of the genuine kind, if he owns slaves. George Fox visited the Barbadoes in 1671, and thereafter bore earnest testimony against slavery. In 1776 the Philadelphia meeting of Quak ers took a decisive step by directing — this was their language — "that the owners of slaves who refuse to execute the proper instruments for giving them their freedom be disowned," that is, disfeUowshipped in the Church. In 1783 it was officiaUy ascertained that no slaves were owned by Quakers inside the domain of the Philadelphia Assembly. But the New-York and Rhode-Island and Virginia Yearly Meetings of the Friends attained slowly the same results. In 1800, before we purchased Louisiana, slavery and Quakerism were fully divided. What cut them asunder ? Simply the righteous rule of a spiritual church-membership, — the rule to which we have been drifting, I hope, more and more in Ameri ca, in aU our sad experience since 1631. Wordsworth, in spite of the intensity of his early sympathy with republicanism, was accustomed to say that America never can have a class pure enough and 298 ORTHODOXY. weighty enough to keep up a high standard of man ners and morals ; for here we have no aristocracy. Stuart Mill thought it our great fault that' we have no leisured and propertied class. God forbid that we should have a law of primogeniture, giving aU the lands in a famUy to the eldest-born ! God forbid that we should have an aristocracy built on heredita ry descent merely, or on artificial rather than a natu ral rank ! But unless there is in this land a spiritual church-membership, or an aristocracy appointed of Almighty God, who knows but that Wordsworth was right in saying that our standard of morals and manners may become of the earth, earthy, and lead to the Pit ? " Men never so much need to be theo cratic," said De Tocqueville, " as when they are the most democratic." I hold that it is more impor tant to maintain a spiritual church-membership than to maintain the written constitution. [Applause.] The unwritten constitution of America is more im portant than its written ; and the first article in the unwritten ought to be one that makes a distinction between a true church and its opposite. What is the average type of a counterfeit church? A ham mock, attached on one side to the Cross, and, on the other, held and swung to and fro by the forefingers of Mammon, its freight of nominal Christians ele gantly moaning meanwhile over the evils of the times, and not at ease, unless fanned by eloquence and music, and sprinkled by social adulations into perfumed, unheroic slumber. There is a distinction between a church and a PARKER AS AN ANTISLAVERY REFORMER. 299 Sunday club, — the distinction which Whitefield and Edwards drew on the mind of New England, and which the remissness of many churches, and the faithfulness of others, in our civU war, ought to en grave yet deeper on the slowly soUdifying rock of American social custom. Let that distinction stand as the first article of your unwritten constitution, if you would make sure that a day wUl not come when an average population of two hundred to the square mile may take your written constitution, and chop it in pieces in, the name of greed and fraud, and of great cities. You do not in any case anticipate that ? Your trouble is that you are Anglo-Saxon, and always think there is no danger, until you are burned to the bone. We said there was no danger in the war-cloud of slavery; but reaUy it amounted to more than a shower. • The Quaker sect put itself right by honoring the first article of the unwritten American Constitution. They executed it. They made a distinction between church- membership that held slaves, and church-membership that did not. If you ask me what the Church at large could have done, I affirm that it could, Uttle by little, have done everywhere what it did in several places. Toward the close of the last century, England, under distinctively Christian leadership, determined unalter ably her position as to slavery. It was the supreme misfortune of America, that she did not keep step with Wilberforce and Clarkson and the father of Macau lay. When the Quakers estabUshed their suggestive precedent, we might have done the same, had not 300 ORTHODOXY. many of our fathers been asleep. Why they were off their guard, you wiU understand by a glance at what the demoralizations of war and of French infi delity were doing for us in 1795. The cotton-gin came when we were weak from Parisian poison. The iEolus Cave of coveted territory was opened when we were feeble from a long course of unfor tunate experiences, beginning in 1631. But, even after temptation grew fierce, who, with the history of subsequent American heroism before him, can say that we could not have taken up our cross, instead of trampling upon it ? We could have stood on the proposition that clmrch-membership is inconsistent with man-stealing; and, indeed, there is where the Presbyterian Assembly stood in 1793. 2. We could have acted on the fixed plan, not of adapting Christianity to slavery, but of adapting slavery to Christianity. Say that the rule adopted by the Friends was too radical a measure ; say that we could not have strained up the North to this point: one hardly knows what prolonged, multiplex, conscientious dis cussion can do in a free nation. My feeling is, that the Quaker ideal was not too high for most of us to have reached by effort in 1800. It is farther back to 1850 than it is to 1800 in the history of slavery. Even in the era of compromises, we could at least have settled on the principle, that, when Christianity comes into collision with wrong, evil, and not Christianity, is to compromise. There will be a time in America when the expedients of our fathers in regard to PARKER AS AN ANTISLAVERY REFORMER. 301 slavery will not look well. It will not be remem bered with pleasure that the Presbyterian General Assembly, although in 1794 it denounced slavehold- ing as man-stealing, erased that denunciation in the General Assembly of 1816. I know that Methodist disciphne could with great difficulty be reconciled with slavery, and that it was never made clear to any Methodist scholar that bishops could be permitted to hold slaves. Macaulay said that John Wesley's genius for government was not inferior to that of Richelieu. But, in spite of the excellence of the Methodist organization, slavery produced the seces sion of the Methodist Church South, — a great evil, and yet an honor to the North. But the Church South was part of the Church ; and when I speak of the delinquency of the Church, of course I have an outlook extending to the Gulf. I am not here to-day to blame the Northern Church exclusively. The Southern Church was a part of God's house ; and its action before and during the war has helped to make sceptics. It is a cruel and terrible thing to force edu cated young men to raise the question, whether the manliness inside of the Church is of a purer quality than that outside. There are forms of scepticism concerning the First and Second Epistles of Clement, and the Letter by Diognetus to the Pamphylians. I do not care greatly about this kind of mental unrest. But when the question arises, whether manliness is to be found inside or outside of God's house, remem ber that the first duty of the' Church is to be despised by no man ! [Applause.] And if we so acted, that 302 ORTHODOXY. many a young man, full of that enthusiasm which afterwards led him to the front at Gettysburg and Richmond, did not know by any Ught on our counte nances whether we were more manly than our critics or not ; if we' so acted that some were sickened, and turned aside, — it was because we compromised. It was my fortune but a few days ago to hear the poet Whittier say, in that sea-blown city of Newbury- port yonder, where the roof yet stands under which William Lloyd Garrison was born, that Mr. Garrison himself, in his earlier career, was a friend of ministers, and, indeed, might have been called, perhaps, a Cal- vinist of the strict type. He believed too much in ministers ; he made them idols ; and when his sympa thies were penetratingly enlisted in one of the great est of modern reforms, and he found that many ministers were not on his side, the instant and sur prised recoU was of that intense sort which comes when we fall into anger with those we love. Again and again a simUar amazement was the source of the vigor and the breadth of the recoU from accredited Christianity in many of the antislavery men. Henry C. Wright was a Congregational minister. There were subsidiary men ; and some of them, I think, were deformers as well as reformers, — Parker Pillsbury, and S. S. Foster, and others. Within the circle of a hundred miles' radius from Boston you can find hundreds of influential citizens, and at least a score of divided or weakened churches, whose difficulties with the ministers began, as Garrison's did, by the operation of that principle which Coleridge describes in his " Christabel : " — PARKER AS AN ANTISLAVERY REFORMER. 303 " Alas ! they had been friends in youth ; But whispering tongues can poison truth, And constancy lives in realms above ; And life is thorny, and youth is vain ; And to be wroth with one we love Doth work like madness on the brain." 3. In the South the Church coidd have refused to justify, and in the North to apologize for, slavery. 4. In the South it could have refused to uphold secession and the attempt to found an empire on human chattelhood. 5. In the North, by discussion and united action, it could have prevented that moral and political apathy which encouraged the South to hope for a divided North in the event of war. 6. It could have taken away power from deformers by putting itseU on the side of Teformers. So much, my friends, must we not and do we not aU admit, when we say that the Northern Church, as well as the Southern Church, or the American Church at large, did not do its whole duty in the conflict with slavery ? Are there any excuses for the crime of the North ? I will make none for that of the South ; and. I am not at ease in mentioning any for the North. [Ap plause.] These are no excuses; they are hardly explanations : 1. Daniel Webster was the archbishop of the Northern Church. [Applause.] 2.- Among antislavery men deformers were sadly mingled with reformers. About 1839 Mr. Garrison, 304 ORTHODOXY. for a considerable period, united anti-Church and anti-Sabbath with his antislavery discussions. Some of the more radical abolitionists were avowedly seces sionists; but it was political abolition which tri umphed. 3. Political aboUtion the North had no right to apply to slavery in the States, except as an extreme measure. Almost unanimously the Northern Church resisted the extension of slavery into the Territories. 4. A conflict of political and commercial interests and duties on the one hand, with religious interests and duties on the other, strained the voluntary sys tem of the American churches across its weakest part. EvU exceedingly, my friends, is that day in any nation when political and religious interests run in opposite channels. These opposing currents make the Whirlpool that impales faith on the tusks of the sea. When Chevalier Bunsen lay dying, he said, " God be thanked that Italy is free. Now thirty millions of people can believe that God governs the world." The average German peasant, twenty years ago, regarded his minister as merely an agent of the government, and spoke contemptuously of police Christianity, because the State Church in the father land was, untU within a few years, very frequently an ally of absolutism. In the United States, while the compromise measures were under debate, political ideas ran in one direction, and religious duties in another. The immense interests of commerce often held the pulpit, as well as the press, in bondage. PARKER AS AN ANTISLAVERY REFORMER. 305 The payment of Southern debts — have you ever heard that theme discussed in whispers? Webster had his eyes constantly on Wall Street. Wendell Phillips would stand here in Boston, with his eyes on the conscience of the nation, a very different barom eter ; and he would say, " There is a storm singing already in aU the winds. We shall escape from slavery only by civU war." Webster would reply, looking at the citations in WaU Street, " There has not yet been any large fluctuation in prices. Gentle men are not serious when they talk of secession. Let us repress agitation, and tide through the crisis without war." Both the moral and the financial barometer must be kept in view by any eyes that would read the signs of modern times. In the rising price of slave-property we had a thermometer of threatening aspect, on which the North cast a too careless gaze. A hundred dollars for a black infant, ten dollars a pound for a black boy, a thousand or fifteen hundred doUars for a good field-hand, — and stiU this thermometer and the waUing breeze rose, and the winds out of the JEolus Cave resounded more and more loudly ; the murky threat of coming war hung above aU business and bosoms; and yet so were we filled with Anglo-Saxon pride, so little foresight did we have, that Wall Street was hardly troubled up to the very hour when we could no longer doubt that there was to be a deluge of blood. Webster hoped we should pass through the crisis without civU war, and could hardly have made more gigantic efforts to have averted the contest, had he 306 ORTHODOXY. foreseen what was to come, as probably he did, far better than some have thought. I know with what silence I should sit in this assembly, were any one of five hundred scholars here the speaker ; I should be quiet in this presence. But it is my good or Ul for tune here to be responsible to nobody, as no one is to me ; and therefore let me say, that my personal feel ing is, that Webster, from first to last, was honest, and that he ventured much, because he had great foresight. I beheve that man anticipated, with a ful ness we can but poorly understand from any of his public expressions, the terrors of our civU war. Judge Nesmyth, on the Merrimack yonder, at FrankUn, who conversed over and over with Webster in his last years, on his Speech of March 7, and who is often quoted in Curtis's Life of Webster, as final authority, said to me the other day, " Once at Elms Farm I was returning home in the sunset with Webster ; and he turned upon me suddenly, and, in his deepest supernatural voice, said, ' You may regard me as ex travagant; but I have had some experience with both Northern and Southern men. I probably shall not live to see the Potomac run red with blood; but I think you wiU.' " That was within six months of the time when, on the shore of the sea at Marsh- field yonder, that man went hence. No doubt he was ambitious ; but he was too great a man to be supremely ambitious. In secret, as well as in public, he prayed, that, when his eyes should be turned to behold for the last time the sun in heaven, they might not see him shining on the broken and dis- PARKER AS AN ANTISLAVERY REFORMER. 307 honored fragments of a once glorious Union, on States dissevered, discordant, belligerent. He fore saw what this land would look like, drenched in Get- tysburgs and Richmonds. But he was taken hence before he had time to right himself in the public estimation. No doubt he went to extremes. He was a statesman. He probably had not a sufficiently active perception of the moral issues in the whole discussion of his time. Who was it that wrote to Andover to ask Moses Stuart to publish a pamphlet to befog the conscience of the North ? Daniel Web ster. (See Stuart, Conscience and the Constitution, p. 18.) Did Moses Stuart do this ? He did it so far as to defend vigorously the Speech of March 7. He wrote some other things, however, which we hope will counteract the Hi-effect of this pamphlet. To whom else did Webster afford an opportunity to befog the conscience of the North? To that "other pro fessor, who to-day is perhaps the first theologian visible in America when scholars in Europe look toward us from the other side of the Atlantic. Did he agree to do what Webster asked ? He refused with foresight. Professor Park had opportunity to do what Moses Stuart did, and at that time was ready to defy the archbishop of the Northern Church. [Applause.] That fact never has been made pubUc until this hour ; but it lies here before me in writing, not from any professor, but from a man whose authority is equal on that point to any professor's. (Letter from Rev. Dr. C. Cushing of Boston.) Professor Ed- ww&s at Andover had opportunity to do what Moses Stuart did, and refused. 308 ORTHODOXY. But how did Boston stand in that hour ? Why, in Music Hall yonder was the tallest antislavery pul pit this side of Brooklyn. What made that pulpit tall, — anti-Christianity, or antislavery ? Let Charles Sumner answer. Here is a short, strategic corre spondence which throws light upon the inmost history of Boston. In 1854 Theodore Parker was arrested for resisting the Fugitive-slave Law, and came near being thrown into jail, as did ' WendeU PhiUips. Charles Sumner wrote to Mr. Parker Dec. 12, 1854 : " Upon the whole, I regard your indictment as a call to a new parish, with B. R. Curtis and B. F. Hallet as deacons, and a pulpit higher than the Strasburg steeple." Theodore Parker replied, Dec. 15: "In 1845 my friends passed a resolution that Theodore Parker should have a chance to be heard in Boston. The two brothers-in-law, Benjamin C. and Benjamin H., now second the resolution, — a chance to be heard! (Weiss, Life of Parker, vol. U. p. 144.) You say I have not given Theodore Parker all the credit he deserves as a religious reformer? You think I have underrated him as a philosopher? If you please, I give you his own estimate of himself. " Last year," he wrote in 1851, " I laid out much ; but how little of it I did ! The wicked Fugitive-slave Law came, and hindered all my work. It may be so again. Suppose I could have given all the attention to theology that I have been forced to pay to politics and slavery, how much I might have done ! I was meant for a philosopher; but the times call for a stump orator " (Weiss, Life of Parker, vol. ii. p. 115). PARKER AS AN ANTISLAVERY REFORMER. 309 What made that pulpit busy, — antislavery, or anti-Christianity? In the year 1851 a publishing firm to whom Theodore Parker had offered two vol umes of speeches asked him if they would contain any discussions relating to slavery. He replied, " By all means : they are the principal things. I wish to go down to posterity, as far as I shall go at all, with the antislavery sermons and speeches in my right hand." [Applause.] (Ibid., p. 115.) Boston sends Theodore Parker to posterity with his anti- slavery speeches in his right hand, and no hurricane of criticism shaU ever blow them out of his manly grasp: but in his left hand anti-Christianity was clutched loosely; and already the winds have torn these leaves away, and the hand is nearly empty, and will yet be emptier. [Applause.] This biography says that Mr. Parker thought, in the early stage of his discussions of religious science, that he could complete in ten years a projected book on that theme. Compared with average German work in the same field, the outlines of this volume (Ibid., pp. 49-67) are fragmentary and careless, and are plainly what Parker caUed them, only a "pro visional scheme." Did he ever fill up these out lines ? Mr. Weiss admits that he was too pre-occupied to do so. "Time," says this candid biographer, "diminished rapidly; and all literary and scientific pursuits were rudely thrust aside by the domination of slavery in the thoughts and affairs of the nation" (Ibid., p. 67). It needs to be frequently stated, that Theodore Parker's Absolute Religion was a system 310 ORTHODOXY. of thought which he arranged before he came to Boston. It was a West Roxbury creed. Boston need not be so proud of it. It was not buUt here. If it had been, no doubt it would have lasted. What was happening when Theodore Parker came to Boston, and in the twelve years he passed here ? Why, he reached this city in 1846 ; and what year was that ? The year after Texas had been acquired, and the winds were howling for the Mexican war. We remember these great events so poorly, that it is necessary to call your attention to the fact, that, in 1845, Henry Clay was defeated ; and his competitor, Mr. Polk — whose name I had almost forgotten: I have it written here, but I could not see it well, it is so smaU — began to defend Texas against Mexico. In 1846 came the Mexican war. How could a man think of any thing but public affairs ? In 1846 Fre-- mont captured California. In 1848 the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo gave New Mexico and CaUfornia to the United States. In 1850 came the compromise measures, including the law for the rendition of fugi tive slaves. In 1852 Mrs. Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin appears in March ; and the Duchess of Suther land in November sends to the women of America an address signed by 576,000 EngUsh women. In 1854 Anthony Burns is kidnapped in Boston. In" 1855 election riots are occurring in Kansas. In 1856, on the 2d of May, Charles Sumner is smitten down in the Senate of the nation for speaking against slavery. In 1856 Fremont is nominated, and Bucha nan elected. In 1857 we are Ustening to the Dred PARKER AS AN ANTISLAVERY REFORMER. 311 Scott decision. In 1858 John Brown is plotting the deeds which brought him to the scaffold in Virginia. During aU these years the grandson of that soldier who captured the first British gun at Lexington stood in a pulpit which antislavery, rather than anti- Christianity, had made higher than the Strasburg steeple. Who agreed with him? Except a few harsh expressions, almost everybody that had con science, so far as his antislavery opinions were con cerned. Did every one who agreed with Theodore Parker in his antislavery career agree with him in his anti-Christian discussions? Here is an answer in a letter to Mr. Parker from him who afterwards was our great chief justice, — Salmon P. Chase. [Ap plause.] " ShaU I not say to you frankly how much I regret, that, on the great question of the Divine origin of the Bible and the Divine nature of Christ, your views are so Uttle in harmony with the views of almost all who labor with you in the great cause of human enfranchisement and progress ; and that I could not help wishing, that, in this sermon on the Nebraska Question, your distinctive opinions had not been brought forward?" (Weiss, Life of Parker, vol. ii. p. 517.) This is very interesting and unim peachable historic testimony. What made this antisl&very pulpit high? The lowness of other pulpits. [Applause.] Why were not other pulpits high in Boston? Some of them faced the South. Let me not be unjust to any man ; but I suppose the undistorted truth to be, that Or thodoxy lacked antislavery leaders. Its ranks and 312 ORTHODOXY. files, at least so far as the ministry was concerned, were substantially right in their feeling toward slav ery. Do you doubt that ? I have been at great pains to examine facts and contemporary evidence ; and I find it incontrovertible, though I cannot here go into detail, that, in the year 1837, nearly one-half of the evangelical ministers in Massachusetts were members of antislavery societies. Of the Orthodox Congre gational ministry of Massachusetts, more than one- third were members of anti-slavery societies in 1837. It was true in this year that only one in eight of the unevangelical ministers in Massachusetts were in such societies. Such was the elaborate calculation made and published at the time by Amos A. Phelps, whom, as the foremost Christian abolitionist of that vexed day, Massachusetts does well to honor. (See Phelps, Rev. A. A., j.he True History of the Late Division in the Antislavery Societies. Compare the careful statistics given by Dr. Cushing in the Con gregational Quarterly, October, 1876, pp. 550, 554.) I do not forget that the crowned martyrs Lovejoy and Torrey, the latter of whom was buried from this Temple, were Congregational ministers. Under Nathaniel Colver the Baptist, whose church met in this hall, slaveholding was made a bar to church- membership. But during the larger part of that period, when, in the pulpits of Eastern Massachu setts, Channing and Parker, and one or two other very able men, represented prominently the anti- slavery thought of the time, there was here no evan gelical antislavery pulpit of equal prominence. PARKER AS AN ANTISLAVERY REFORMER. 313 Nevertheless, I do not admit, that, even with Dan iel Webster and Moses Stuart for our archbishops, the mass of the Orthodox ministry went astray fur ther than others ; for in 1837 nearly one-half of them were members of antislavery societies. What, then, was the trouble? Simply the weak spot in our voluntary system. You cannot feed a man, unless he is popular with the people to whom he preaches. FamUies must be supported. Opportu nity of usefulness must not be thrown away. Many lost their places. "I began between 1830 and 1840," says the poet Whittier, "the business of interview ing. I went to minister after minister, and was dis appointed in case after case ; but the general feehng," he affirms, "was right. It was only a regard for families, and a desire not to produce schism in the Church, that held back many a good man." That sound heart in Amesbury yonder, in sight of the sea, that soul which often led us in our dark days as a pillar of Hebrew fire, that entranced poet and re former, never broke with the Church, because he was in a part of it that had adopted God's rule of exclud ing from church-membership those who held slaves. His testimony to-day is other than sour. It has in it no sub-acidity in any sense. He says calmly, " The trouble was usuaUy, that men feared they would lose their places." Who brought that fear upon public teachers ? I am a layman ; and my feehng is, that laymen had some responsibUity in this matter. Our reluctance to aUow free discussion arose from com mercial causes. More than one merchant here in 314 ORTHODOXY. Boston may have heard something about Southern debts that might never be paid, and of churches which laymen would surely rend asunder, if slavery were discussed from the pulpit too much. As to slavery, what prevented the full education of the average public heart ? The average public heart it self. Some ministers here may have looked from their pulpits, and remembered what merchants were in the congregation, and been sUent against their choice. It is possible that industrial, commercial, and social considerations were so powerfully discussed among our laymen as to gag the pulpit not a httle. Were we one in three in antislavery societies? The pulpit behind the times! Where were the pews? [Applause.] But, gentlemen, I beheve that even that arch bishop of the North, had he Uved as long as Everett did, would have taken as easUy as Everett took a new position as to slavery and the Union. Had Daniel Webster lived to hear the first gun fired agamst Fort Sumter, and its echoes rolling across belligerent commonwealths, and reverberated from the AUeghanies to the Rocky Mountains, he would have stamped his foot down in behalf of the Consti tution with an emphasis that would have shaken both those ridges ; and to have caUed forth mUlions of armed men in defence of the Union there would have been needed no other drum-beat. [Applause.] XI. THE SOURCES OE THEODORE PARKER'S ERRORS. THE EIGHTIETH LECTURE LN THE BOSTON MONDAY LEC TURESHIP, DELIVERED IN TREMONT TEMPLE MAY 28. " Inoidis in ScyUam, cupiens vitare Charybdim." Phtupfe Gatjltier. " In necessariis unitas, in dubiis libertas, in omnibus caritas." Melancthon. XI. THE SOURCES OF THEODORE PARKER'S ERRORS. PRELUDE ON CURRENT EVENTS. Go back to the time when Sir Henry Vane was governor of the Massachusetts Colony, in 1636, and you wUl find that friend of John Milton advocating at once both toleration and aggressiveness in religion. If his foresight could have been turned into fact, or if his ideas had been transmuted into custom, we might have had at that date just what Berlin saw not long ago, on the grounds where Voltaire and Frederick the Great cried out, " Ecrasez, l'infame ! " On those historical terraces of San Souci an Evan gelical Alliance came together from the Indus, the Rhine, the Tiber, the Hudson, and the Mississippi. So, too, we saw yonder, at the mouth of the Hudson, in 1873, a simUar AUiance, gathered from the five zones, and filled with one enthusiasm. Who knows but that soon at Geneva, or at Rome, a like gathering wUl occur, representing the ideas of religious union and activity which were current in Boston, so far forth as its governor had influence, in 1636 ? The 317 318 ORTHODOXY. increasing concentration of the strength of the reU gious bodies of the world is a large, fair sign of hope for civilization. The great mass of evangeUcal schol arship and Ufe is an unbroken chain extending from the Ural Mountains to our sunset seas, and from our Western shores, through the Pacific Islands, and many a gem of the ocean redeemed to Christianity, far on to the new Ught that is dawning on Japan and China and India. When I was on the great pyramid, I looked toward the vaUey of the NUe, and saw many square brown fields of ripe wheat, many square green fields of growing wheat, many square black fields of ploughed land, many square white fields of blossoming pome granates. But aU the fenceless and hedgeless fields were a part of Egypt; the division between them went no deeper down than a furrow; underneath that, this rich soU was a unit. And so, when I look across the world from any commanding height of scholarship, I find that aU these evangelical sects differ from each other only by the depth of a furrow. They are one Egypt, only different squares. [Ap plause.] Undoubtedly, however, there is a distinction be tween the green fat river-bottom of the NUe and the rustling sand of Sahara that Ues at its side. It is unsafe to overlook that distinction. Between belief and unbeUef, between that style of thought which does, and that which does not, assert man's need of a physician not human, of a regeneration not aris ing whoUy from his own sweet and crooked wiU, SOURCES OF THEODORE PARKER'S ERRORS. 319 there must be a distinction made in phUosophy, and so there must be in practice. But in Egypt I found that aU the distinction that I needed to notice was that between the bed of the NUe and the drifts of Sahara. I will not say where Sahara ends, nor where the NUe vaUey begins. It is often a puzzUng prob lem to draw that line with justice. Now and then the vaUey encroaches on the desert; and now and then the desert on the vaUey. It is a ragged zigzag which separates green Egypt from brown Sahara, behef from unbeUef. Nevertheless, you do not doubt that there is a distinction between Sahara and the river-bottom. [Applause.] AU men of honesty and candor are glad to have that distinction pointed out. He whom we dare not name undertakes to point it out, and he does so only by the fruitlessness on the one side, and the fat harvest on the other. [Applause.] Let the map traced by his finger be ours. Lessing taught that the most useful reUgion wUl ultimately be considered the best. I have been tracing the history of New England, and showing how many causes for fifty, an hundred, or two hundred years, have made it important for us to insist on the distinction between the river-bottom and the desert, and to draw the line with an engi neer's precision. Is there not a danger, that our experience in this protracted period has fixed our thoughts too closely upon mere maps of Egypt ; that is, upon merely doctrinal, rather than upon practical Orthodoxy? It does not plough the NUe plain to map the line 320 ORTHODOXY. never so accurately between it and Sahara. Sand drifting in here, and the green running out there upon the sand ! Who wiU make Egypt more fruit ful by bending forever over the map, and finding just where the sand lies to-day, and where it will not Ue to-morrow; and where the green has con quered the sand this hour, and may, in the next, be covered with the drifting brown powder of Sahara ? You know that there is this distinction, and that God wUl take care of it by putting fruit on the one side, and sand on the other. There are locusts in Egypt; and on the fat lands the locusts fall, rather than on Sahara. Your fields are to be judged by their fruits. They are one : there is no distinction between these fat squares. They are all one soU; but we must adopt Lessing's test as to our merit, — fruitfulness, and nothing short of that. We are to attend to the locusts. We are to attend to the smoking furrows of opportunity. We are to attend to the great tides of inundation. We believe in evangeUcal principles. We believe in Orthodoxy. But religion is more than a map. We are proud of the record of scholarship in the last fifty years, conquering unbeUef in Ger many, and having to-day more than a promise of con quering aU unbelief around the whole globe. But we must plough, sow, and reap Egypt, as weU as map it. Our test must be Lessing's. Ultimately, as he said in " Nathan the Wise," aU religious societies and principles wUl be judged by their fruits. By and by, if the world can tell which denomination of re Ugious beUevers can do the most, if it can ascertain SOURCES OF THEODORE PARKER'S ERRORS. 321 which sets of ideas match best the deepest instincts of the human heart, and the wants of life and death, the world will know what to believe. [Applause.] Let us fasten our attention on the inundations of the NUe plain. There do come great opportuni ties. There do come times when the loss of oppor tunity is disloyalty to that Providence which yet brings forth a finger on the wall, and yet points out the way, almost miraculously at times, to our poor human sight. The rain does not fall every day ; the snow does not descend every hour in the winter. There are times of special refreshing from the Almighty Power, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness. Where are we, my friends, that we think of remit ting effort, when two thousand persons came forward lately to unite with the churches on a single Sabbath in this city and its vicinity ? Where are those who have lately united with the churches, if our effort is to stop ? They ought not to have entered the Church if they are to be idle ; and, if they are not to be idle, this movement wiU not pause. [Applause]. Thou sands of new souls, aflame with the first love of Him who is the fulness of aU exceUence, are coming before our communities; and they, too, wUl be judged by Lessing's rule. They, too, will be dissected by the scalpel and the microscope of their fruitfulness. If those who claim to have entered upon a new life are not fruitful, they have not yet found the new life; for whatever has life has growth. If there be Ufe and growth in all these scions, shall we not have 322 ORTHODOXY. other clusters here of peace, good-will to men, ab sence of aU narrow scepticism, and a fulness of de vout, thoughtful, aggressive, reUgious activity ? ShaU we not have a revival in business foUowing a revival in reUgion ? MUton was not prodigal of his praises ; but, of a governor of Massachusetts, he wrote : — " Vane, young in years, but in sage counsels old, Than whom a better senator ne'er held The helm of Rome, when gowns, not arms, repelled The fierce Epirot and the African bold, Both spiritual power and civil thou hast learned : Therefore on thy firm hand Religion leans In peace, and reckons thee her eldest son." Sonnet xvii. Charles II. is a great power in history yet. There are successors of him in many a circle of thought, and in many a drifting, sleepy, haughty portion of society. Charles II. took Harry Vane to the scaffold, and chopped off his head. On whose side are we, — that of Harry Vane, or that of Charles II. ? I am looking on the whole trend of the current of our his tory since Henry Vane was here, and on the trend of EngUsh history, and on the trend of scholarship throughout the world. We know what brilliant let ters there were to uphold Charles II. We know how CromweU, when he dissolved the Long Parliament, said, " God preserve me from Sir Harry Vane." " Why should we fear death ? " asked Vane, the day before his execution. "I find it rather shrinks from me than I from it." " The Lord wUl be a better father SOURCES OF THEODORE PARKER'S ERRORS. 323 to you," he said to his chUdren, as he stooped to embrace them. "Be not you troubled; for I am going home to my Father. Suffer any thing from men, rather than sin against God. Ten thousand deaths, rather than defile the chastity of conscience ! " From the windows and tops of houses, the people poured out prayers and sobs for him as he passed by to the scaffold ; and they shouted aloud, " God go with you ! " " Blessed be God," he exclaimed as he bared his neck for the axe, " I have kept a conscience void of offence to this day, and have not deserted the righteous cause for which I suffer ! " That cause was civil and reUgious Uberty. It has immeasurable interests yet at stake in the world. Let us take up the great enterprise of our fathers, which is now the hope of the whole planet, — the story of religion trans muted into politics, and not only that, but into litera ture and science. America is but half repubUcan untU she Christianizes not only poUtics and the schools, but literature and trade, greed and fraud, and even those twin Saharas, — an unscientific Liberalism and a dead Orthodoxy. [Applause.] America wiU not meet the wishes of its early martyrs until it is brought so close to God's bosom, that the beating of his pulses may be the marching song of aU our ages. [Applause.] THE LECTURE. There are great changes occurring in New England in the direction of increased individualism in the sentiments of men of moderate education. But the 324 ORTHODOXY. mass of New-Englanders are persons of moderate education. The healthful audacity of democracy in giving every man a right to act wholly for himself in poUtics induces the feeling that one man is as good as another at the bar of philosophy, as weU as before the courts. We are aU equal in the high matters decided by suffrage : why should not aU be equal in the high matters decided by scholarship? Man's rights are inalienable, are they not ? And do not his rights extend to his inteUectual as weU as to his political interests ? A gulf-current of democracy and individualism is beneath these latest ages ; and it is from its tepid breast that many of the vapors arise which temporarily obscure the popular philoso phic and religious sky. A very subtly correct picture of America, and, in some sense, of the middle classes of the England and Scotland of to-day, Alexis de TocquevUle drew in these incisive sentences : — "Individualism is of democratic origin, and threatens to spread in the same ratio as equality of condition. Aristocracy makes a chain of all the members of the community, from the peasant to the king: democracy breaks that chain, and severs every link of it. As social conditions become more equal, the number of persons increases, who, although they are neither rich nor powerful enough to exercise any great influence over their fellows, have, nevertheless, acquired or retained sufficient education and fortune to satisfy their own wants. They owe nothing to any man; they expect nothing from any man; they acquire the habit of considering themselves as standing alone. Democracy makes every man forget his ancestors, hides his de scendants, and separates his contemporaries from him: it throws him back forever upon himself. Individualism is a feeling SOURCES OF THEODORE PARKER'S ERRORS. 325 which disposes each member of the community to sever himself from the mass of his fellows, and to draw apart with his family and his friends ; so that, after he has thus formed a little circle of his own, he willingly leaves society at large to itself." (De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. ii. book ii. chap. 2.) We have in New England the most intense de mocracy on the globe; and, even in our highly cultured circles, a tendency exists to an exaggerated and unscientific individualism. Our Emerson him- seU is not so much pantheistic as he is individ ualistic, uttering, now excellent Christian truth, and now matter of a pantheistic look. Everywhere he is true to individualism, not everywhere to pan theism. This tendency of democracy wUl not be a permanent one ; but it wiU appear more and more in the democratic ages, and in the popular quarters of our civilization — until when ? UntU the day when popular education shaU have been elevated high enough to know that man's inteUectual rights, whUe belonging to aU individuals, are, perhaps, best defend ed by a few who have time to attend to the strategy of fortification. In England the political rights of the many have been best defended by the few. But America has learned, that, on the whole, it is best to let aU men defend their own poUtical rights. Never theless, even here, a few have done the most in that field. We must finaUy come, in the intellectual range of our Uves, to the same rule that we adopt in the political field and in the practical arts; aU men shaU be free to discuss; all men shall be free to decide ; but as, in the political field and in the prac- 326 ORTHODOXY. tical arts, we do pay attention to the few who can examine matters thoroughly, and have had long ex perience, so in the inteUectual field we wUl pay atten tion to a few, after deciding that they are leaders worthy of the name. [Applause.] Lift the standard of the mass of men high enough to cause them to choose the right kind of leadership in things inteUectual and moral, as they now often do in things political and mechanical, and I wUl show you a pubUc sentiment which wiU be a Vesuvian lava-front, to tear away and to burn up, once and forever, aU that is evU in our civilization. [Applause.] We must elevate public opinion until the masses of men are ripe enough to discern and foUow merit. You say I am making a plea for some party. I am making a plea only for scholarship. I am making a plea only against religious quacks. I am making a plea only against haughty sciolism. A Uttle knowledge is a dangerous thing ; and our heads are in newspapers and ledgers. The better specimens of our omnipres ent newspapers are not as weU patronized as the poorer. This wiU not always be so. When we shaU have learned the difference between the better and the best, and refuse to be guided by third-rate authorities in the press, on the platform, or even in the pulpit, we may lift pubUc sentiment at last to an overawing power which wiU give America her right position, and justify her democracy ; and, until we do lift popular opinion thus high by popular edu cation, we shall never justify ourselves before the bar of the nations, nor before the providence of Almighty God. [Applause.] ' SOURCES OF THEODORE PARKER'S ERRORS. 327 Theodore Parker appeared in New England at a time when we were all in the sophomore year. Large parts of New England are in their sophomore year and do not know the fact. Much of the rest of the country has not yet come to coUege. [Applause.] There never was on the globe as large a community of men as now exists in New England, all thinking for themselves, and pushed to a height of haughty sciolism by the law of individualism inhering in democracy. The sophomoric disease is mental un rest mingled with omniscience. We have not be gun to learn the evUs of such a state of things. We hardly know that it exists. If I were not a flying- scout and outlook committee — this is aU I am — for my learned brethren here, going up and down, and conversing with some wise men, I doubt whether I should feel, as I now do, that what threatens us, perhaps, more than any thing else, is precisely what De TocqueviUe pointed out in this pervasive individ ualism. Under democracy men think as they please. We may go to church or not; and, if we choose, we may found a church. Every man can stand alone, and so may, within certain very general bounds, walk as he wiU. SmaU circles of individuaUsts know Uttle of each other, and they need know little. Almost their only communication with each other's ideas and sympathies, it may be, is through poor newspapers, published weekly, and very weakly it oftentimes is. Thus we find more and more individualism growing up ; for it is yet the law, that to him that hath of American individuaUsm shaU be given more and more abundantly. 328 ORTHODOXY. This mood of the sophomore year dawned on New England at about the time when that great wave of secularization, beginning in 1631, and on the first ripples of which Harry Vane looked with no little concern, had risen to its haughty, turbulent height. About that same time, too, there struck us another wave, narrow, and now largely decadent,^ the ration alism of Germany. The two seething seas, in collis ion, shot aloft above this reef of New England indi vidualism. The reef is there, although the two waves have gone down. There wiU be more foam over that reef yet. How did Theodore Parker faU into his errors of speculation ? 1. He was in his course of education at a time when a now outgrown and discredited school of ra tionalism — that of DeWette, Strauss, and Baur — was possessed of great power in Germany. 2. His real teachers were DeWette, whom he trans lated, and Baur, whom he echoed. 3. His place of education was among Unitarians, themselves much divided by the results of their characteristic negations. 4. The system of thought which afterwards be came his absolute religion, he formed while he was yet in the Divinity School, and insufficiently equipped for independent metaphysical speculation. 5. When he was yet a yoking man his theologi cal opinions were vehemently attacked publicly : he was forced to defend them vehemently; and thus his early crudities became his creed. SOURCES OF THEODORE PARKER'S ERRORS. 329 6. Absorbed in political and social discussions after his advent to Boston, his distinctively theological and metaphysical scholarship was comparatively little advanced after that period. 7. His nature was impetuously independent by birth, and became more so by the struggles of his pubUc life. 8. He was deficient in the insight of reverence. 9. He was deficient in aesthetic perception. 10. Sympathy came to him in his antislavery . efforts only too slowly from the supporters of estab lished creeds. 11. He rarely came into contact with the best rep resentatives of Orthodox scholarship. 12. In a hundred points he misapprehended the nature of Orthodox teaching. He did not ade quately distinguish from each other the supernatural and the unnatural, inspiration and Ulumination, in spiration and dictation, chastisement and punishment, total depravity and total corruption, disarrangedness of soul and unarrangeabihty, certainty and necessity, behef and faith. 13. His phUosophical system was so loose, that he admitted into the list of self-evident truths or intuitions the Divine Existence and the fact of im- mortaUty, and made no distinction between intuition and instinct. 14. He died whUe his phUosophical and theological systems were, by his own confession, crude, fragmen tary, and provisional. 15. His scheme of thought underrates the signifi- '330 ORTHODOXY. cance of the fact of sin to such a degree as to deny several of the intuitions of conscience, and so by not attending to the whole list of seU-evident truths, but only to a part of them, violates the fundamental principle of the scientific method. When Theodore Parker was in the Divinity School at Cambridge, he one day made reference to " Old Paul." — " Why," said Henry Ware, one of the noblest and acutest men who ever taught in that institution, " you must be more reverent." — " Well," said Park er, "hereafter I wiU refer to the gentleman from Tarsus." AU through his Ufe, this capacity to be rough and ready was with him, and was a great popular power at times ; and yet it indicated a cer tain lack of insight ; and that deficiency his different biographers recognize. There was in him a noble perception of the glory of every thing that had conscience behind it. Theo dore Parker seems to me to have had in his nature a majestic chord out of the old Pilgrim harp. The iron strand of the Puritan lyre which MUton and Crom- weU, and Hampden and Vane, first struck, lifted up its stern, inspired sound in our civil war in the John Brown Marching Song. That Presbyterian captain I Parker wrote about him from Rome, that he would die " like a saint," and that " from Stephen who was stoned at Jerusalem, to Mary Dyer who was hung on the great tree on Boston Common, there have been few spirits more pure or devoted than this mar tyr " (Weiss, vol. ii. p. 178). The thrum of that chord we heard side by side with the John Brown SOURCES OF THEODORE PARKER'S ERRORS. 331 marching choral, and we found no dissonance in the tones. That one note in him we glorify, and desire to'have it heard long and far. WhUe the Presby terian captain stands there in history on the Virginia scaffold against the winter sky, let Theodore Parker's approval of him, and copartnership with him, be remembered. [Applause.] But this man lacked the deeper insights of aesthet ic perception, perhaps, as much as any one who has ever written as copiously as he in Boston. This lack, too, is recognized weU by bis biographers ; but it is only Mr. Frothingham who has been candid enough to admit that it unfitted him, in some par ticulars, for biblical criticism. When Theodore Par ker was in Rome in 1859, he wrote, " I take more interest in a cattle-show than in a picture-show." He then goes on to say, " I love beauty." But he had no sympathy with those who lamented the ab sence of art in America. " There is not a saw-miU in Rome." That was his principal trouble with the Eternal City. He did not care to read a second time the best poem ever written by Mrs. Browning, Shakspeare's daughter. Now, in some passages of the Scriptures, he found neither a cattle-show nor a saw-mUl ; and Mr. Frothingham says, " This absence from his mind of the one artistic quahty accounts for the something Uke crudeness that mars occasionaUy his treatment of the poetical side of ancient religions [Christianity among them, of course], their creeds and their documents. And this even helps to explain certain inaccuracies which sprang from a defect in 332 ORTHODOXY. aesthetic perception oftener than from infidelity to literal facts" (Frothingham, Life of Parker, pp. 576-578). Dr. Bartol, whose Uterary perceptions ^re certainly very sensitive, and often singularly revela tory of truth, wrote years ago of Theodore Parker, " Right or wrong, I could not recognize in him ge nius poetic " (Frothingham, Life of Parker, p. 579). Mr. Emerson stood up at the commemorative services held for Theodore Parker, and said, " We can hardly ascribe to his mind the poetic element. I found some harshness in his treatment both of Greek and Hebrew antiquity, and sympathized with the pain of many good people in his auditory, whilst I acquitted him, of course, of any wish to be flippant " (Ibid., p. 549). In Parker you meet sinewy English often, and phrases that are like drum-beats; but very frequently the ruggedness and haste degenerate into roughness and uncouthness. You can rarely read ten pages of his writings consecutively, without feeling that there is a lack of grace ; that smoothness is absent ; and that, on the whole, Lowell was right when he said about this man, that he had — " Sophroniscus's son's head o'er the features of Rabelais." Fable for Critics. Even in Theodore Parker's best analytical pas sages, there is often something of that combination, — forceful thought, but badly angular expression. On the topic of slavery we find rough, harsh words, which appear to be, at times, the result of the lack of aesthetic perception, rather than of moral. What SOURCES OF THEODORE PARKER'S ERRORS. 333 fearful doctrine this is, for instance ! — "A man held against his wiU as a slave has a natural right to kill every one who seeks to prevent his enjoyment of Ub- erty. It is the natural duty of the slave to develop this natural right in a practical manner, and actually kill aU who seek to prevent his enjoyment of Uberty. The freeman has a natural right to help the slaves recover that Uberty, and, in that enterprise, to do for them aU that they have a right to do for themselves " (" Letter from Rome," Nov. 24, 1859. Weiss, Life, vol. n. p. 170). He was a stern iconoclast indeed; and sometimes in his propositions, when great prin ciples were to be brought into the foreground in the analytical method, he cut such a rough wound, that it is hardly wonderful that his sword was hacked by opposition from his own camp, although drawn in a righteous cause. When he attacks Orthodoxy, his weakness is in his extravagance. Here he finds God eminently mahgnant. His standard accusations can not be read over a tombstone of any beUever, without seeming weak and wicked. In his best book, that on " Theism," he is so full of this irritated, fretted mood, that the only reply needed to his thinking is to point out the fact that it is not thinking, but fretting. On account of his lack of aesthetic perception, he hardly knew how ungraceful ail fretting is in a phUosopher. Nevertheless, on several sides of his nature, this icono clast was a copy of his gentle mother ; but the father in him predominated. It is to be remembered, however, that Theodore Parker's chief difficulty, after aU, came from his 334 ORTHODOXY. being brought into New England at a time when a culminating, secularized historic wave seized him, with aU his native independence, and of course lifted him to the height of the negations which then were popular. What was happening in Boston when Theo dore Parker was in Cambridge as a student ? Who were the great men in public life here ? What had just come to pass in New England ? Why, in 1834, we had the haughty mood of a local movement which regarded itself as embracing the world, because it embraced Beacon Hill and Bunker HUl. I beg everybody's pardon ; but it is simply historic accu racy, to notice that some victories have ceased to be victories, for any large extent of territory out of sight of the dome of the State House. Neverthe less, that dome was the centre of much, and more than much, and in Parker's time was recognized as such. It had just been crowned as the centre of New England culture ; and the drift of Unitarianism and Universalism was against not a little that deserved to be criticised in popular Orthodoxy, although against very little in scholarly discussions. Scholarly Orthodoxy has not changed greatly in the last fifty years. Partisan critics perhaps, think that I am not candid concerning Orthodoxy, simply because they forget the distinction between popular and scholarly Orthodoxy. I am not here to defend aU the loose phrases that have been used in the pul pits of Eastern Massachusetts in the last hundred years. It is no part of my poUcy to stand up here for any thing that is not, properly speaking, a por- SOURCES OF THEODORE PARKER'S ERRORS. 335 tion of scholarly New England theology. The ques tion whether I defend historical Orthodoxy, or ac credited Orthodoxy, is a very minor matter compared with the inquiry whether I defend truth. What do I care what historical Orthodoxy is, or what accredited Orthodoxy is ? We desire to know what the truth is. [Applause.] The latter question is here always put in the foreground. [Applause.] But I defy most indignantly, in the name of these scholars, who have by their presence done more a thousand times to carry any thought uttered here out on the wings of print than any thing I have done, — I defy indig- nantiyall who woiild assert that I am not in har- mony with accredited Orthodoxy in New England. An authority, than which there is no higher in this city in my denomination, has lately published these words : " The CongregationaUsts have seven semina ries in this country. When Mr. Cook is charged with deranging Orthodoxy, if it is meant that his teachings are essentiaUy different from those of the Congregational theological seminaries of the land, the charge only shows the ignorance of the one who makes it " (Cushing, Rev. Dr. C. of Boston, editor of " Congregational Quarterly," Letter in " Boston Globe," May 16). Where is there a man that can show dissonance on any -point of importance between what has been taught here and what is to-day called accredited Orthodoxy, and was implicitly if not explicitly ac credited Orthodoxy, fifty, eighty, or a hundred years ago? Various changes of phraseology have been 336 ORTHODOXY. made ; but remember, if you wUl, that in religious science, as in every other, we need a new vocabulary every hundred years. Distinguish vocabularies from ideas, and you will find that the rock on which New England has stood since Henry Vane's time crops out yet, here in Boston ; and that the emphases of scholarship are given now to substantiaUy the same eternal truths which brought our fathers to this Uon shore. [Applause.] Besides the biUows beating on us in their long roU from 1631, political influences were disaffecting some with Orthodoxy in 1834. Channing and Garrison were leading thought here on antislavery topics when Theodore Parker was yonder in Cambridge as a student, sensitively absorbing such influences as his day could send him. Horace Mann was just begin ning his great work for the education of the people. Pierpont, single handed, was fighting the battle against intemperance in the street and for righteous ness in the pulpit. " The briUiant genius of Emer son, rising in the winter nights," as Parker himself says, "hung over Boston, drawing the eyes of ingen uous youth and the masses of the people to look "up to that great new star, a beauty and a mystery, which charmed for the moment, while it gave also perennial inspiration as it led them forward along new paths and toward new hopes " (Weiss, Life of Parker, vol. U. pp. 458, 459). Spurzheim in 1832, and Combe in 1838, gave lectures here ; and we had phrenology on the brain. Brook Farms were in the air — and al most nowhere else ! The writings of Wordsworth SOURCES OF THEODORE PARKER'S ERRORS. 337 and Carlyle and Coleridge and Cousin were new. The German language began to be learned in Boston. In 1835 what was happening in Germany ? Strauss had just risen above the horizon, — a star that shook down terror on many scholarly circles, but which we have seen at last obscured before its setting. The last, and the most important work of Strauss (see Bibliotheca Sacra, 1874), was disowned by average German radicalism, as full of positions that cannot be defended. Did Theodore Parker lean on Strauss? Yes and no. He criticised Strauss. There were many things in that writer which Parker himself could not adopt when he began his career. But open here Parker's last account of himself; and he says, "Young Mr. Strauss, in whom genius for criticism was united with extraordinary learning, and rare facility of philosophic speech, wrote his ' LUe of Jesus,' where he rigidly scrutinized the genuineness of the Gospels and the authenticity of their contents, and with scientific calmness brought every statement to his steady scales, weighing it, not always justly, as I think, but impartially always, with philosophical coolness and deliberation " (Weiss, Life, vol. ii. p. 459). Strauss taught Parker to undervalue the his torical evidences of Christianity, and deUvered him to the now discredited school of DeWette and Baur, of whom he was a foUower, even after Germany ceased to give them any commanding following. Every scholar knows, that, " as a sect in biblical criti cism, the Tubingen school has perished, and that its history has been written in more than one tongue " 338 ORTHODOXY. (Thayer, Professor J. Henry, Criticism confir matory of the Gospels, Boston Lectures, pp. 363, 364, 371). But, from about 1835 to 1845, that school had great influence; and Theodore Parker mistook it for the Gulf Current of scholarship, and committed him- seU to it most enthusiasticaUy and most unfortunately. The sadly tortured and divided fatherland — Ger many is our fatherland, as England is our mother land — had been under the heel of Napoleonic wars. Scratch the Old World in the centre of Europe once, and you find the wars of the first Napoleon ; twice, and you find the Thirty-years' war ; thrice, and you find the middle ages. Napoleon said, "Scratch a Russian, and you find beneath the surface a Tartar." Scratch Central Germany in its peasant-life three times, and you come upon the age that preceded Charlemagne. Although writing for a sceptical sheet ("The Commonwealth," May 26), an observer dis- stinctly affirmed in Leipzig, lately, that " rationalism makes far less show" — that was the phrase — now in the universities than it did fifty or eighty years ago. That is what Dorner wiU teU you, and Tholuck and Kahnis, and Schwarz and ChristUeb, and aU the scholars on both sides in Germany. Little by Uttle Germany has been shaking off Parisian influences. Rationalism speaks to painfully empty benches in the universities, while evangelical lecture-rooms at Leip zig, Halle, and Berlin, are comparatively crowded. Nevertheless, what I affirm now is what I have affirmed everywhere (see Bibliotheea Sacra, October, 1875, p. 766), — that many of the less rehgiously SOURCES OF THEODORE PARKER'S ERRORS. 339 and inteUectuaUy cultivated parts of the German population, feel yet the inherited influence of the rationaUsm outgrown by German specialists in reU gious science. The average German yonder on the Elbe or Oder when he leaves his fatherland is what he is when he lands here. The decline of rational ism, however, among theological experts in Germany, is a fact as significant as it is indisputable. You wUl be told triumphantly that the number of theological students is less now in Germany than it was fifty or eighty years ago. That is true. Is this a good sign, or a bad one ? You may easUy be confused on this point, unless you cast a sharp glance on Germany. What is Germany doing tit this moment? She is swinging away from the State Church to the volun tary system in ecclesiastical affaUs. What is the result of that ? Why, Germany has no abundance of material fit to make deacons of now ; and Luther said, in lan guage which I have lying before me, that there was no material in Germany fit to make deacons of in his day. Why was there not ? Because Germany had no voluntary church system, and had never educated the mass of her citizens to activity in church affairs. She is doing this slowly now. But superb supporters of churches are not made in an hour. Deacons are poor institutions, you say; but the abUity to produce good deacons is a high test of civilization. By the] way, some say that I was brought up a narrow Baptist, because my father — whom God bless! — is a Baptist and open communionist. He united with the church when he was forty years of age, and I when I was 340 ORTHODOXY. fourteen. Who put on the sheU ? If you please, I was brought up, if any thing, a UniversaUst, but of the serious type, I hope. Some good seed, I trust, was sown ; and, if any good fruit has been produced, it has been the result of the fact that I was let alone, and came into my present position by the natural law of development and of the survival of the fit- \ test. [Applause.] Of course the stagnant marshes of German State Church life will not be drained in a day. The num ber of theological students has temporarily dimin ished ; but the number of evangelical students of theology in Germany has relatively increased. Little by little, men who teach reUgious truth are being put under the conditions of a voluntary system, and obliged to obtain their support largely from the peo ple. But even with rationalism among the peasants, even with rationalism in the middle class, the average rule is, that the ministers who are best paid in Ger many are those who preach an undiluted Christian ity. The churches are changing from the State Church system to a more free system. They are not accustomed to collect funds. They know almost nothing, by experience, of our voluntary plan. For a while, ministers of the poorer classes will starve in Germany; and you must not be surprised if the. number of students in theology diminishes. That is no proof that Germany is going over to scepticism. It is important to notice that Germany is in a period of transition in church affairs, and, of course, must walk staggeringly or weakly for a while, until she SOURCES OF THEODORE PARKER'S ERRORS. 341 walks erect in the voluntary system. Ministers may be fewer for a time, because some of them may more easily than under the State Church become poor. But this state of things is not likely to be perma nent. Heidelberg is the only decidedly rationalistic university among the twenty renowned universities of Germany. It has almost no theological students. Scholarship in support of rationalism is not easily found in the theological faculties. Germany follows her universities much more closely than we do ours. Let Harvard and Yale take what position they please, will not the mechanic on the Merrimack think what he pleases? What are Harvard and Yale to him? But your skUled operative knows here, and he knows a great deal better in Germany, that the specialist who has honestly won his rank is the authority to which he ought to listen, after a faU weighing of evi dence for himself; and, now that the speciaUsts in religious science in the universities have changed pos ture in Germany, we shaU ultimately find all German thought changing posture. That change wUl affect this shore also. Where the old wave of German rationahsm, smiting on the strand of individuaUsm in American democracy, lifted up Parker and much else, we shall have an in tuitional and physiological and bibUcal philosophy smiting the shore here, as weU as in Germany. Par ker looked far less deeply than Dorner and MiiUer have done into the axioms of the nature of things. Ultimately, when popular education has been lifted high enough, it is to be hoped, that, in the name of seU- 342 ORTHODOXY. evident truth, we shaU forget many negations, and take the great organizing religious propositions scien tifically estabUshed concerning the natural laws of conscience, into that inestimably precious body of scholarship, which age after age has considered sound ; and so we shaU found our philosophy and our reUgion on those reefs of axiomatic self-evident truths, which say to aU attacking surges, "Aha, thus far and no farther." [Applause.] As we use axioms in mathematical science and in physical, so we must employ axioms in reUgious sci ence. The axioms of religious science are no more in danger of going out of date than those of mathemati cal science. It is axiomatic theology which this Lec tureship has taught. It is a theology of axioms, it is a reUgious science based on the nature of things, it is self-evident truth, upon which I have endeavored to plant my small fortune. It is in the name of self- evident truth that I for one, on this reef of American individualism, and this stormy coast of Boston, sleep weU. But I do not always sleep. The moon is in the sky; and it heralds the coming sun. In the starry concave of axioms, the conscience, which has in it deep presentiments of the necessity, not only of a new birth, but of the Atonement, and which never yet has been adequately investigated by evan geUcal, and never outlined — I had almost said — by merely rationalistic thought, is the moon in the firmament of reason. When I gaze upon the orb of scientific, ethical knowledge, which in our age is no longer a crescent, I remember, not infrequently, that SOURCES OF THEODORE PARKER'S ERRORS. 343 the eagles in the tropics, so bright is the moon at the full, sometimes in the midnight ruffle their pinions, and make ready to move aloft, as they do occasion- aUy from -Etna's and Vesuvius' top, thinking that the day has come! Self-evident truths, axioms — they wUl not go out of date in mathematics. They wiU not go out of date in theology. We must teach all men to beUeve in reUgious axioms, as we have taught some to beUeve in mathematical. We must gaze on the stars and the moon, if we do not wait for the sun, or a knowledge of man's whole nature, to rise. But he who waiteth for the sun wUl not be disappointed. The Koran says, that when Abraham set out on his travels, he was insufficiently acquainted with religious truth. He saw the star of evening, and said to his foUowers, " This is my God." But the star went down, and Abraham exclaimed, "I care not for any gods which set." He waited untU the constellations ap peared, and then said, " These are my Gods." But the galaxies were carried beneath the west ; and he cried aloud, " I care not for gods which set." When the moon uprose, he said, " This is my God." But the moon, too, went down. When the sun uprose, he saluted it as divine ; but the wheeUng sky carried the king of day behind the flaming pines of the west. And Abraham in the holy twUight, turning his face toward the assenting azure, said to his people, " I give myself to Him who was, and is, and is to come, Father of the stars and moon and sun, and who never sets, because He is the Eternal Noon." [Applause.] 3 9002 08867 7407