Substance and show, and other lectures

Front matter

Uniform "with this Volume.

Christianity and Humanity.

A SERIES OF SERMONS.

Contents

Page

Introduction vii

I. Substance and Show ; or, Facts and

Introduction

THOSE who have read the biographical preface to Mr. King's sermons, published about a month ago under the general title of " Christianity and Humanity," do not need to be informed that his influence extended far beyond his parish and his denomination, and included that vast multitude of listeners who are more or less magnetically affected by the lyceum lecturer. Indeed, he was one of the foremost speakers who followed in the train of Ralph Waldo Emerson in erecting the lecture platform into a kind of free pulpit, from which the advanced ideas of spiritual thinkers, philanthropists, and reformers were diffused through the community. It is needless to speak of Emerson's supremacy in this line of thought and endeavor, for it is now universally acknowledged. By carefully avoiding all controversy with the good and learned men who were both shocked by his radicalism and charmed by his genius and character, he made his simple affirmations felt as forces wherever his voice was heard in our multitudinous lyceums. In the course of a few years he did much to emancipate the popular mind from its ingrained theological and politiviii Introduction.

cal prejudices, and he did this without severely wounding or insulting the feelings and opinions of the champions of the established order. In spite of his occasional indulgence in certain caprices and audacities of his individuality, he commonly confined himself to the glad work of shedding light on the questions he treated ; and the main object of his teaching was directed to disentangling the imperative ideas of truth and goodness, of beauty and justice, from the partial views of all forcible individualities, including his own. He aimed to purify his intellect and moral sentiment from all personal bias, and to make his reason and conscience worthy to receive and announce the inspirations of impersonal truth and morality. His constitution of mind and character instinctively led him to avoid controversy as something which would inevitably enfeeble his faculty of spiritual insight, and give him a cheap victory over opponents at the immense expense of interrupting his work of patient self-discipline as a seer. Then his friend, Theodore Parker, was always at hand to concentrate on himself every element of pugnacious opposition to the new ideas with a pugnacity that no controversies could appease, and who was incapable of feeling any persecution so keenly as the persecution of silence, especially when it came from the Unitarian brethren whom he criticised. Both of these men labored, each after his particular fashion, to make the lecture-room a place where both independence of

IntrodiictioJt. ix

opinion and peculiarity of character could be freely expressed ; and a third, Wendell Phillips, needed nothing but his incomparable power of eloquence, which was at once seductive and smiting, to recommend himself to any audience which he consented to address, whether he spoke on " The Lost Arts," or on subjects connected with the reform movements of the time.

Mr. King became a force in the lecture-room, as he became a force in the pulpit, by the happy union in his nature of brilliancy of talent with beneficence of character. Few persons will stand the test of that pitiless analysis which austerely probes down through intellect and conscience to the roots of individual disposition, regardless of all the "grafts" which culture or "grace " have added to the original stock ; but those who knew King intimately must admit that, in penetrating to the heart of his being, they found nothing there which contradicted the first impression that he was sound to the core, — that he was instinctively sympathetic, unselfish, and humane. This essential goodness made him loved and respected even by those who most violently disagreed with him in opinion ; for there was nothing of the sullen and arrogant self-sufiiciency of the dogmatist and egotist in his most confident, masculine, and joyous utterance of his own perceptions of truth. Only such persons as were under the slavery of fear, envy, and malignity could suspect that his intellect ever became the organ of such ignoble passions.

X Introduction.

As a result of this original felicity of nature, his eloquence was as persuasive as it was inspiring and instructive. It had that subtle element of influence which can only come frcm a humane disposition, underlying thought and style, and vitalizing both. What King said was excellent ; but the spirit in which he said it was felt by persons of all grades of culture as a precious something which abolished all distinctions of social " clanship," and, for the time, bound them together in the kinship of a common humanity. In short, his eloquence had that nameless charm which made it universally attractive. It will be observed, by the reader of the present volume, that this personal attractiveness was accompanied by knowledge, thought, wit, humor, fancy, and imagination ; that every faculty of the lecturer's mind and every feeling of his heart was engaged in the task of fastening the attention of his hearers to the subject he discussed ; but still, even in the reading, we feel that the great beauty of the performance str-eaming through all the minor beauties of detail, is the beautiful character of Starr King unconsciously impressed upon it.

There are many lecturers still living who will remember the effect of the lecture on " Substance and Show" by their experience in following King the week after its delivery. As soon as they arrived, the Lecture Committee inevitably began to talk about King's " Substance and Show" ; as soon as each had concluded his particular address.

Introduction. xi

the Lecture Committee, after the briefest of all polite pauses, recurred to the more pleasing topic of King and his " Substance and Show.'' The popularity of this admirable lecture was one of the finest of all tributes ever paid to the average taste and intelligence of the lecture audiences of the country. In a letter to a friend, in December 185 1, King says : " My lecture has become a fact and a show ; whether it is a substance and a force

is questionable You do not, I think, take

the antithesis I make, or exactly appreciate the drift of the plan. The aim of it is wholly practical, — to break down, in the popular mind, the inveterate association of strength and permanence with the visible side of the world and things we can ' sense.' The illustrations from science are taken to buttress faith in the invisible and intangible as being the causal and productive agencies. Substance is that which stands under, supports, moulds, etc. ; and the whole visible universe really leans upon secret impalpable energies, to which it owes shape, color, and its myriad varieties. I make no antithesis between material and immaterial forces, but show how all the glories and differences in nature are due to the secret working of electric, actinic, magnetic powers, and that the whole order and science of nature is in the last analysis the expression of Divine ideas. With this aid from nature, I go into the historic world and moral life, to show that ideas, sentiments, moral truth, are the most vigorous, despotic, unwasting substances, xii hitroduction.

since nations lean on them ; and character, the great reahty and most efficient force we know, is the organization of these. It is a Lyceum Sermon." As to his figurative style, he tells his correspondent that rhetoric, considered " as jewelry and rouge, is sufficiently contemptible," but that it is legitimate when it is the expression of what is in itself beautiful. *' You are not," he adds, " charitable enough to rhetoric. Equations, plus and minus, algebraic signs and diagrams, are not the ideals of the perfection of speech. God is a glorious rhetorician. How he hides his mathematics and bald geometry ! Does n't he ornament all the truth he states to us through nature, and when he teaches a chemical and vegetable science in the oak, the elm, and the palm, does n't he perorate in their bossy, waving canopy of leaves ? "

In the lectures on *' The Laws of Disorder," " Sight and Insight," and " Existence and Life," the same general tendency is observable which lends so much attractiveness to " Substance and Show." In reading them we are constantly witnessing the transformation of physical into spiritual laws, or, as Emerson would say, " the metamorphosis of natural into spiritual facts." The fertility of the writer's mind in illustrations, analogies, and images compels the reader to follow the course of the thinking with a pleased and everexpectant attention to the end. 'i'hese lectures, as originally delivered before lyceums, met the

Introduction. xiii

wants of all the classes huddled together in a lecture audience. The general strain was so high and noble that everybody who listened felt uplifted and ennobled. It was not merely, in the case of King's discourse, that

" Rustic life and poverty Grew beautiful beneath his touch,"

but that wealth and poverty were alike made to admit the superiority of mental and moral "good" over mere worldly "goods." The expressions of satisfaction varied with the grammatical rather than the human peculiarities of the persons who were addressed. " What a grand, inspiring, and instructive lecture ! " was the verdict of those clad in silk and broadcloth, after the speaker had concluded. " The7n 's idees," was the judgment of one hard-headed, horny-handed workman in homespun, as he came out of the hall by the side of King.

The lecture on " Socrates " attained a popularity nearly as great as that on " Substance and Show." This was the more remarkable because the subject might be supposed foreign to the sympathies of those who made up the bulk of the audience of a village or town lyceum. But King, though necessarily not a profound Greek scholar, was passionately attracted to Plato at an early age, and had so absorbed Cousin's French translation of that great master in p ilosophy that he ventured, when he had hardly attained legal manhood, to contribute a critical exposition of Plato's xiv Introduction.

doctrine of immortality to the " Universalist Review," and in the course of it to question the accuracy and the insight of so accomphshed a scholar as Professor Andrews Norton. The figure of Socrates, in the Platonic dialogues, had been impressed so vividly on his imagination, that Socrates at last became to him as actual a personage as any acquaintance he daily passed in the streets of Charlestown or Boston. He thought he could contrive to transfer to other minds the image of this heathen saint and sage as it existed, warm, glowing, and lifelike, in his own. His success was complete. Indeed, the lecture is a masterpiece of its kind. Scholarship can doubtless paint a finer portrait of Socrates ; but to naturalize him, morally and intellectually, so as to make him a sort of fellow-citizen of the honest inhabitants of ordinary American towns and villages, is a task which mere scholarship is incompetent to perform ; yet King succeeded in doing this difficult work. In English literature the most admirable exposition of the life, character, and method of Socrates is doubtlei-:s to be found in Grote's " History of Greece" ; but no Cape Cod fisherman or Western pioneer could have been induced to read Grote, whereas both heard King with delight. In the records of our American lyceums there is probably no other instance of such a subject being made universally popular by the attractive genius of the speaker.

The lecture on " Hildebrand " was written for a

Introduction. xv

special occasion, and its interest was not tested by being repeated before miscellaneous audiences. It is a favorable specimen of King's power of dealing with the great crises and characters of ecclesiastical history. The editor had intended to include in this volume a still more elaborate lecture on "Constantine and his Times"; but the publication of that, as well as of two addresses on the " Life and Writings of St. Paul," is reluctantly postponed for the present. Indeed, an editor who thoroughly explores the mass of manuscripts which Mr. King left behind him, for the purpose of selecting a few for publication, finds his ta.sk all the more difficult on account of the very richness of the materials. He knows what he would like to print, but his literary conscience is troubled by the thought of those which he is compelled to omit.

Mr. King was intensely sensitive to the influences of music, though he had no technical knowledge of it as a science, and could not read its language. One of the most eloquent discourses in his volume of sermons is that on "The Organ and its Symbolism"; and readers of the present volume cannot fail to be impressed by the address on " Music," recording, as it does, the ideas and emotions awakened in the writer by listening to the works of the great composers. It was a privilege to sit near him when a work of Handel, Mozart, or Beethoven was performed ; for the ecstasy which thrilled his own frame xvi Introduction.

became infectious, and one enjoj'ed the double delight of hearing the music and of participating in the rapture of a companion whose soul was in most delicious accord with it.

Five of the lectures in the present volume were written and delivered in California. That on "Books and Reading" speaks for itself as one of the best of all addresses ever delivered on a topic which has seemingly been worn threadbare by the efforts equally of genius and mediocrity, but which, in King's hands, comes out fresh and new, as though he were the first man who had ever discoursed about it. As far as advice on such a subject is ever an aid to intellectual education, it may be said that King succeeded in his aim ; for the lecture had not only a surprising popularity, but numbers of his hearers really adopted his plan of reading, and doubtless found it to be of much practical value. The other four lectures refer more or less to the Rebellion. King, while he was in California, could no more keep Jefferson Davis and the secessionists out of his sermons and addresses, than Dickens's Mr. Dick could keep Charles the First out of his " Memorial." The lecture on " Daniel Webster " was one of three which he delivered to immense audiences in California before the war broke out. It is now printed, not for its literary merit, but because it contains many felicitous touches of characterization, unfolds and forecasts the principles on which the impending struggle must be con-

Introduction. xvii

ducted, and was a cause of much irritation to those " conservatives " who could not openly oppose the doctrines of such an apostle of conservatism as Webster, but who were still doubtful whether, in the event of a war, they should cast their fortunes with the free or the slave States. The lecture was written in headlong haste, and some of the paragraphs are evidently mere notes of what the lecturer afterwards expanded in the delivery ; but it did its appointed work more effectually than if it had been a perfect specimen of rhetoric ; for it brought into the discussion the authoritative name of Webster, as the one statesman of the country who had not only crushed and trampled under foot all the sophisms of the most redoubtable logicians of disunion and of liberticide, but had made the preservation of the Union the one practical object and supreme ideal of American statesmanship. King's "Webster" was not only denouncedby politicians in newspapers, but gently rebuked by priests in the pulpit. As to the latter, they professed to have no objection to the eulogy of any prominent statesman of the past, but they thought it indecorous to apply Webster's principles in a satirical and offensive way to the problems of the present. When the war actually burst out, King plainly told his parishioners that his religion was identical with his patriotism ; and he referred, in a strain of bitter-sweet eloquence, to the theological rancor which had ostracized him as a disxviii Introduction.

turber of the public peace, because he had foreseen and stated those perversions of constitutional law which alone endangered it.

Up to the time of Mr. King's death it was generally believed that he, more than any other man, had prevented California and the whole Pacific coast from falling into the gulf of disunion. It is certain that Abraham Lincoln held this opinion ; and it was an opinion which the President shared with thousands of prominent men in all sections of the country, including those California sympathizers with the South who were most vexed by King's opposition to their schemes. The usual answer to this general impression of the effect of his work comes, of course, from patriots who maintain that California was sound for the Union from the first ; that King merely felt the pulse of the people, and gave eloquent expression to the general sentiment of the State. But in fact he did not merely feel the people's pulse ; he gave incessantly an /;;z-pulse to the vague Union feeling, and directed it to a definite object. Doubtless a large majority of the population were Unionists. Had it been otherwise, it would not have been necessary for some of the most unscrupulous politicians of the State to conceal their treasonable designs under patriotic professions of loyalty. Then there was a large body of honest men who insisted that the war should be conducted on principles which would insure the defeat of the Union armies. Miracles are now banished from authentic secular

Introduction. xix

history ; but still there is something almost miraculous in the triumph of the national cause against the wrong-headiness of those well-meaning patriots who contended that the war should be prosecuted on the constitutional principles which Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stephens laid down for the edification and guidance of Federal statesmen and generals. The leading opponents of the Constitution, armed to overturn both // and the government founded on it, still managed to steal some time from their conferences with foreign powers, and their direction of military operations, to instruct the loyal people as to the proper limitations of their power in putting down the most formidable of all rebellions; and there is something comical in the thought that these admonitions not to violate the provisions of the Constitution were keenly felt, not merely by secret traitors in the loyal States, but by a large body of Unionists who were eager and ready to sacrifice life and property to sustain the Union and the Constitution.

" Phased to the last they cropped the flowery food, And licked the hands just raised to shed their blood."

When therefore we say that King kept California strong for the Union, we do not mean that he simply was the eloquent voice through which the general Union sentiment found expression, but that he guided Union opinion ; that he both anticipated and defended the measures which eventually made the cause of the Union successful. He became a power in California, because he had the sagacity

XX Introduction.

to detect, and the intrepidity to denounce, the treason that skulked under loyal phrases and catchwords ; and his influence was measured, not by his bursts of declamatory eloquence on the blessings of union, but by the skill with which he took the people, as it were, out of the hands of disloyal politicians, and induced them to give their vigorous support to the administration of the national government.

It has not been the intention of the editor of this volume to publish any lecture which specially represents King's deadly animosity to the enemies of the country ; indeed, it has now become fashionable to speak of treason as an amiable weakness of generous and susceptible natures; but the reader will note that this animosity bursts forth here and there in the noble lecture on "The Earth and the Mechanic Arts," and even affords the occasion for a sublime image of " the earthquake wave," in the college address on " The Intellectual Duties of Students." The grand spirit which animates the oration on " The Privilege and Duties of Patriotism " will be felt, appreciated, and acknowledged by hundreds who may be irked by the relentless assault made in it on the old aristocracy of Southern slaveholders. But King, during the whole joeriod of his life in California, was so penetrated, through and through, with the sentiment of patriotism, that his hostility to the enemies of the Union and the Federal government broke out, hitrodiiction. xxi

not merely in such addresses as diis to Union soldiers, but in every form in which his moral and intellectual activity found expression.

Throughout the lectures in the present volume the reader can hardly fail to be impressed by King's broad humanity. He had a horror of all social arrangements which tended to confirm sterile and stunted natures in the self-satisfaction they derived from contemplating their own littleness of soul. He ranked men and women, not according to their social position, but according to their place in the ascending scale of intellect and virtue. " Think," he says, in speaking of the future life, — " think of the poor exclusives from this sphere carrying their petty measures, which limit their sympathies on earth, into the world of substance, setting up their little coteries to cut Gabriel if he did not belong to their set, or exclude some spirit whose brow is freighted with truth, if he was not born quite high enough to suit their fancy!" The one unmistakable mark of vulgarity was, in his view, narrowness of mind and insensibility of heart, — the stupid prejudice which rails at ideas, and the inhuman selfishness which scoffs at philanthropy.

In his lectures, as in his sermons, the largeness, liberalit}', and humanity of his disposition found their natural expression in genial breadth of thought and beneficence of feeling. Everything small and mean was as abhorrent to his soul as xxii IniroductioJt.

was everything base and cruel. His heart and brain agreed in instinctively rejecting whatever had a tendency to degrade humanity, and in instinctively admitting whatever was calculated to purify, enrich, elevate, and invigorate it. Throughout the present volume, on whatever subject he exercises his bright and joyous faculties, it will ever be found that he is a teacher of manliness as well as of godliness. " Circumstances," he says, " may determine how much show a man shall make. To be famous, depends on some fortuities ; to be a president, depends on the acute smellers of a few politicians and a mysterious set of wires ; to be rich, depends upon birth or luck ; to be intellectually eminent, may depend on the appointment of Providence ; but to be a man, in the sense of substance, depends solely qn one's own noble ambition and determination to live in contact with God's open atmosphere of truth and right, from which all true manliness is inspired and fed."

And again he says, in reference to the three methods of observing the material universe which are so prominent in all his lectures : " Out of three roots grows the great tree of nature, — truth, beauty, good. The man of science follows up its mighty stem, measures it, and sees its branches in the silver-leaved boughs of the firmament. The poet delights in the symmetry of its strength, the grace of its arches, the flush of its fruit. Only to the man with finer eye than both is the secret of its

Introduction. xxiii

glory unveiled ; for his vision discerns how it is fed and in what air it thrives. To him it is only an expansion of the burning bush on Horeb, seen by the solemn prophet, glowing continually with the presence of Infinite Law and Love, yet remaining forever unconsumed."

L

SUBSTANCE AND SHOW; OE, FACTS AND FORCES.

I PROPOSE to speak on the difference between substance and show, or the distinction we should make between the facts of the world and life, and the causal forces which lie behind and beneath them. No mind which comprehends the issues involved in the distinction will fail to see that the topic is vitally practical ; for scepticism, or mistaken conceptions of the truth upon this point, must degrade our whole theory of life, demoralize our reverence, and make the region with which our faith should be in constant contact thin, dreamy, and spectral.

ISIost persons, doubtless, if you place before them a paving-stone and a slip of paper with some writing on it, would not hesitate to say that there is as much more substance in the rock than in the paper as there is heaviness. Yet they might make a great mistake. Suppose that the slip of paper contains the sentence, " God is love" ; or, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself"; or, " All men have moral rights by reason of heavenly parentage," then the paper represents more

I A force and substance than the stone. Heaven and earth may pass away, but such words can never die out or become less real.

The word "substance" means that which stands under and supports anything else. Whatever then creates, upholds, classifies anything which our senses behold, though we cannot handle, see, taste, or smell it, is more substantial than the object itself. In this way the soul, which vivifies, moves, and supports the body, is a more potent substance than the hard bones and heavy flesh which it vitalizes. A ten-pound weight falling on your head affects you unpleasantly as substance, much more so than a leaf of the New Testament, if dropped in the same direction ; but there is a way in which a page of the New Testament may fall upon a nation and split it, or infuse itself into its bulk and give it strength and permanence. We should be careful, therefore, what test we adopt in order to decide the relative stability of things.

There is a very general tendency to deny that ideal forces have any practical power. But there have been several thinkers whose scepticism has an opposite direction. " We cannot," they say, " attribute external reality to the sensations we feel." We need not wonder that this theory has failed to convince the unmetaphysical common-sense of people that a stone post is merely a stubborn thought, and that the bite of a dog is nothing but an acquaintance with a pugnacious, fourfooted conception. When a man falls down stairs it is not easy to convince him that his thought simply tumbles along an inclined series of perceptions and comes to a conclusion that breaks his head ; least of all, can you induce a man to believe that the scolding of his wife is nothing but the buzzing of his own waspish thoughts, and her use of his purse only the loss of some golden fancies from his memory. We are all safe against such idealism as Bishop Berkeley reasoned out so logically. Byron's refutation of it is neat and witty : —

" When Bishop Berkplej' saj-s there is no matter, It is no matter what Bishop Berkeley says."

And yet, by more satisfactory evidence than that which the idealists propose, we are warned against confounding the conception of substance with matter, and confining it to things we can see and grasp. Science steps in and shows us that the physical system of things leans on spirit. We talk of the world of matter, but there is no such world. Everything about us is a mixture or marriage of matter and spirit. A world of matter simply would be a huge heap of sandy atoms or an infinite continent of stagnant vapor. There would be no motion, no force, no form, no order, no beauty, in the universe as it now is; organization meets us at every step and wherever we look ; organization implies spirit, — something that rules, disposes, penetrates, and vivifies matter.

See what a sermon Astronomy preaches as to

4 Substance and SJioiv ;

the substantial power of invisible things. If the visible universe is so stupendous, what shall we think of the unseen force and vitality in whose arms all its splendors rest? It is no gigantic Atlas, as the Greeks fancied, that upholds the celestial sphere ; all the constellations are kept from falling by an impalpable energy that uses no muscles and no masonry. The ancient mathematician, Archimedes, once said, "Give me a foot of ground outside the globe to stand upon, and I will make a lever that will lift the world." The invisible lever of gravitation, however, without any fulcrum or purchase, does lift the globe, and make it waltz too, with its blond lunar partner, twelve hundred miles a minute to the music of the sun, — ay, and heaves sun and systems and milky-way in majestic cotillons on its ethereal floor.

You grasp an iron ball, and call it hard ; it is not the iron that is hard, but cohesive force that packs the particles of metal into intense sociability. Let the force abate, and the same metal becomes like mush ; let it disappear, and the ball is a heap of powder which j'our breath scatters in the air. If the cohesive energy in nature should get tired and unclench its grasp of matter, our earth — to use an expressive New-England phrase — would instantly become " a great slump " ; so that what we tread on is not material substance, but matter braced up by a spiritual substance, for which it serves as the form and show.