Ways of the spirit, and other essays

Contents

Page

I. The Way of History 1

II. The Way of Religion 34

II. The Way Of Religion

T3 EL1GION, in the broadest sense, is the life of the sentiments as contra-distinguished from that of the understanding, — of the sentiments turned from self, and directed to objects sought and cherished for their own sake, with no reflex view to private advantage. It is losing oneself in ideas, persons, things, which attract or command by their own intrinsic, or supposed intrinsic, worth. It is the heart's response to the claims of beauty, duty, honor, man. All genuine enthusiasm ; all unselfish devotion, patriotism, philanthropy, art ; all self-sacrificing zeal, whatever its object, — partakes of the nature of religion. Its essence is, —

" Forget, forswear, disdain Thine own best hopes, thine utmost loss and gain, Until at last thou scarce rememberest now If on the earth be such a one as thou ; Nor hast one thought of self-surrender — no ! For self is none remaining to forego."

In the narrower and technical sense, religion may be roughly defined as homage paid to surperhuman power. And this definition holds good, albeit re-

TEE WAT OF RELIGION. 35

ligions exist in which the objects worshipped are not superhuman, but infra-human, — religions in which homage is paid to brute creatures and inanimate things. These objects are conceived as superhuman by the worshipper. When the Negro of South Africa prostrates himself before a block of wood, he confesses as sincerely a superior to himself as the Parse e when he bends in adoration before the rising sun, as the Christian when he worships the invisible Lord. He has not yet learned the greatness that is in him, and is therefore ready to acknowledge in any creature a greater than himself. The eternal Mystery which all souls reverence looks out upon him from the senseless block ; and that is what he really adores. And that is what we also adore, more worthily conceived, but can we say more exactly understood ? Must we not say, as incomprehensible to us as to him?

The motive which prompts this homage is one of the primary forces of the soul. There is nothing more radical in man than religion ; nothing more capable, more commanding. Stated or spasmodic, quiescent or flamboyant, in calm or storm, it builds by turns, and fires the world : in its pureness, the ornament and strength of society (decus et presidium nostrum) ; in its fall and perversion, the scandal and scourge of nations. Its scope is

36 THE WAY OF RE LI OWN.

the measure of history. It supplied the first rudiments of civil society; it forecasts the social destination of man. Wherever humanity is found at its highest, religion has been the motive-power, ■ — leader in all progress ; home-guard of all stability ; source of revolutions the most prevailing ; champion and prize of the boldest adventures ; pioneer more eager than commerce ; explorer more patient than science. Religion is acknowledged the mother of arts : she reared the temples that ' make Egypt venerable, and shaped the marbles that made Greece renowned. She lighted the eyes of the Sistine Virgin, and unrolled the " Divina Commedia," and inspired the strains of Handel and Bach. In private life she has been the authoritative teacher, comforter ; lifting the soul above the dust, purifying the heart by faith, eliciting the spirit of self-sacrifice by which society subsists, cheering the sufferer in mortal pains, redeeming and renewing the world.

While gratefully acknowledging this multifold service of the great benefactress, we Cannot forget the mischief and the woes that have often accompanied these gifts and goods. We cannot forget that religion has been a worker of evil, — one of the greatest of the workers of evil. No agent that has wrought in earthly scenes has been more prolific of ruin and wrong. The wildest aberrations of human nature, crimes the most portentous, the most desolating wars ; persecutions, hatred and wrath and bloodshed, more than have flowed from all sources beside, — have been its fruits. The victims of fanaticism outnumber those of every other and all other passions that have wasted the earth. Pining in dungeons, hunted like beasts of prey, stretched on the rack, affixed to the cross, — their sufferings are the horror of history. No highwrought fiction, recounting imaginary woes, can match the colors of their authentic tragedy. A corruption of the text of the Vedas has cast thousands of Hindu widows alive on the funeral pile. An interpolation of two words in the seryice of the Eastern Church has driven whole villages in Russia into fiery death. A sentence in the Book of Exodus has been a death-sentence to millions of hapless women. And who shall compute the sum of the lives that have furnished the holocausts of the Inquisition ?

In this tale of sorrows we must reckon, moreover, the melancholy and madness religion so often engenders, — religious mania, which, where it does not impel to self-slaughter, oppresses the soul with dull despair, or pierces it with mortal anguish. It is fearful to think that man, in addition to the necessary burdens of life and all inevitable ills, should be subject to these ideal woes ; that so many fine spirits should suffer blight through their own diseased imaginations ; that to so many noble minds the light that is in them should be made darkness through superstitious doubts and fears ; that so many innocent hearts should bear the burden of self-imputed guilt and doom ! No region of the earth, and no plane of life, is secure from this plague. Bayard Taylor found in the track of the missionaries beyond the Arctic circle the same spiritual ails that have desolated polished lands. " The soul," says Novalis, " is the most active of poisons." Religion is the soul of mortal life : when mis-directed or over-urged it becomes, instead of an animating force, a consuming fire.

Considering these harms, one is tempted to question if religion, on the whole, has been a blessing to mankind. To that question the answer must be sought in the infinite possibilities that lie in the idea of God, and the infinite dearth of spirit involved in the want of that idea, without which life would seem to be the sport of lawless power, — no reason in its origin, no meaning in its course, no hope in its end. Given that idea, all things desirable are possible.

Meanwhile, our business at present is not with the moral but with the historical aspects of the subject.

The history of religion is the history of man; not of nations, but of man. The chronicles of nations, made up as they are of wars and revolutions, political formations and decays, dynasties and parties, institutions affecting the temporal and material well-being of their subjects, — these and the like of these, which figure so largely in the volumes of historiographers, are properly no part (or a very subordinate part) of the history of man. They are accidents, not substance ; episodes, not method. The true history, the thread on which these are strung, is that progressive life of the spirit which binds the nations in one Providential order, and which alone gives meaning to man's being in time. Without this, what we call history is a mere compilation of anecdotes, which may entertain the curious, but which leads to no rational result. Reason demands, as the end and destination of man in society, a state in which the divine law shall organize itself in civil polity, and form the basis and determine the conduct of social life : in other words, a theocracy, or Kingdom of Heaven.

Such being the end, the history of man must be viewed in relation to that end ; so viewed, it assumes a sacred character. With all its contradictions and immoralities, which do but furnish the antagonism necessary to all development, the history of man is the history of religion : the main epochs in the one are identical with those of the other. Accordingly, it is no one-sided or bigoted view of hnman things which has led Christian nations to date the world's history with their religion. The chronology is true to the absolute fact as well as to Christian consciousness. Christianity dates, because it determined, the course of time. The supreme moment in the ever-proceeding revelation of God, it became the confluence of the two main streams of civilization, — the Semitic and Japhetic. Uniting these, it forms the one river of modern history. Christendom is no provincialism ; it is the world's highway.

In tracing the course of religious development, our first business is to ascertain the law and method by which that development proceeds. On this point theology and science are at variance. Where theology says " revelation, " science says " law ; " and each' supposes an antagonism between the two, as if one of these methods precluded the other. In the view of theology, the idea of a law of development militates with the supposition of the present immediate action of the spirit of God. And, on the other hand, science mistrusts the term revelation, as seemingly opposed to that constant order which it loves to find in all the succession of the ages of man. As usual in such controversies, both parties are right, and both are wrong. There is a law of development in the history of religion, and there is revelation. In the realm of spirit, as well as in the kingdoms of unconscious Nature, God acts by law. His revelation of himself is not spasmodic, but methodical, continuous. Christianity, the highest instance of that revelation, is no episode, but a necessary part of the Divine method. The old way of treating the subject regarded Christianity as an afterthought of Deity, an amendment of the programme of Providence, necessitated by the miscarriage of former methods, " an act supplementary to an act," instead of the original design provided for in the constitution of things. The Mohammedan poet was nearer the truth : —

" The world's end and beginning are the same, And Jesus entered it when Adam came."

All such views of all such subjects are fast disappearing in the light of modern thought, which postulates law instead of arbitrary will as the fundamental reason of things. It is the business of science to trace that law ; in all that exists to ascertain the normal principle by which it exists, and in virtue of which it could not be other than it is. Science knows nothing fortuitous and nothing arbitrary ; she finds necessity in the most exceptional as well as the most stated ; in a shower of meteoric stones as well as the precession of the equinoxes ; in spasms of wind and storm as well as the regular alternation of the tides ; in the flaming aurora as well as the motions of the planetary system. In the very madness of nature and of nations she sees or divines an overruling method, and knows that the wildest excesses of either must work in the traces of Omnipotent order, — as the caracoling steeds in Guido's great fresco are harnessed to the chariot of the constant sun, and lead the measured dance of the Hours.

We express in one word the characteristic difference between the ancient and the modern view of the universe, when we say Law. In every realm of human converse the scientific view has replaced the mythical. The world as viewed by the ancient mind was the product of caprice. Gods and demigods ruled it at will. Egyptian droughts were figured as the death of Osiris slain by the hand of Typhon. Returning fertility was ascribed to Horus, the immortal youth who conquers Typhon, — type of Nature's rejuvenating power. The disproportion of the lunar to the solar year was expressed by the threat of Sol to Rhea, that no month of the year should be allowed her for the birth of her child. The difficulty is adjusted by Hermes, who plays at dice with the Moon, and wins from her the five supplementary days with which the improved calendar eked out the three hundred and sixty of the original year. The term " Milky Way " in sidereal astronomy recalls the mythical explanation of the nebulous streak in the heavens so named ; the word " volcano " suggests the stithies of Vulcan and the Lemnian fires. History was handled in the same fashion : demonic caprice was its motive power; its processes were the freaks of Divinity. The progress of civilization from Asia to Europe was conducted by Zeus, who crosses the Hellespont in the form of a bull bearing the daughter of Agenor or Canaan. Semitic culture conducted by conscious intelligence is Bunsen's exposition of the myth. Where ancient philosophy allegorized, the modern intellect formulizes. Where the ancients saw will, the modern sees law, — law from whose dominion human agency is no more excluded than the kingdom of unconscious life. If there is any product of civilization which might be supposed to be irresponsible and accidental, it is language. But language is shown by modern glossologists to be subject to laws as inevitable as those which regulate all the processes of Nature. For this, too, is a process of Nature. It is not a human device, but a growth. The Roman Emperor might extend to whomsoever he pleased the right of citizenship, but he could not naturalize a vocable.

44 TEE WAY OF RELIGION.

If, then, history and language are necessary products, if the deeds and the speech of men in the gross are subject to law, it may be presumed that religion — the gravest and deepest of human concerns, the consummate product of humanity — is no exception to the general rule. We cannot suppose that the progress of religion, any more than the secular progress of human kind, is surrendered to accident ; that the mind acts less methodically in this than other manifestations ; or that Destiny is less concerned in this than in others. We must suppose a Providence in it ; that is, a Providential education of the human race in religion, and an ordained method or necessary order by which it proceeds. That necessary order, viewed on the human side, we term the law of religious development. That such a law exists as part of the reason of God, as a mode of the Divine wisdom, there can be no doubt ; the only question is whether it is discoverable by man. Can it be ascertained by philosophic inquiry? Our answer to this question at present must be an empirical one ; we cannot answer it dogmatically. We cannot assume to demonstrate the entire law of religious development ; we can only indicate, as facts observed, or as inferences from them, some of the principles involved in it.

I. In the first place, then, we observe three stages of religion answering to the ages of human life : childhood, youth, maturity, — a period of the senses, one of sentiment, and one of ideas. Each of these stages has its own appropriate faith and worship ; and so we distinguish three fundamental forms of religion : realism, personism, and spiritualism,— the worship of things, the worship of persons, the worship of spirit.

These stages are not sharply discriminated; but overlap one another like childhood and youth, or like youth and manhood, in the human individual. Accordingly, the several religions corresponding with them shade one into another by such nice gradations, and are so immixed in practice, that the lowest form of Nature -worship is not without some gleams of spiritual life, and the purest of historical religions is not without some taint of fetichism. All that can be fairly maintained is the prevalence of one or the other at different stages of human progress. There have even been cases of national religion in which the three forms co-existed, — as in Egypt under the Sesostrids, where the grossest fetichism alternated with Osiris-cult in the practice of the laity, while the finished epopt, under priestly training at Sais, was initiated in the truth of pure theism.

Under the heads which have been named, there are several subdivisions and many distinct phases of religious life. Realism includes fetishism, the worship of earthly creatures, and what is called " Sabaism," the worship of the heavenly bodies. Personism embraces the religions of Vedism, Brahmanism, Hellenism, and Odinism. Spiritualism comprehends the highest phases of all the revealed religions.

II. The threefold division which graduates the religious progress of the human race repeats itself in particular dispensations. Most historical religions have their sensuous, their sentimental, and their spiritual or spiritualizing period ; 1 they exhibit phases of realism, personism, and spiritualism. Either of these phases is more or less marked according to the general character of each religion, but in none are they wholly wanting. No religion is through all its periods entirely exempt from fetishism, and none is quite destitute of spiritual life.

Take an example from Judaism.

In the earlier history of the Hebrew people, before the establishment of the temple-worship,

1 Not always indeed in the chronological order corresponding with childhood, youth, and manhood. The origin and earliest childhood of revealed religion is spiritual. Christianity especially had such an origin, and preserved for a time its spiritual childhood. But in its decline and subsequent revival, Christianity also exhibits the three phases above named. We note in it sacramental realism, idolatrous personism, and restored spirituality.

we read in the national Scriptures of a certain consecrated chest, or " Ark of the Covenant." This structure was held to be the dwelling-place of Deity ; it was borne in solemn procession on great occasions, and formed, with the associations and traditions attending it, the prominent feature of Israeli tish worship. This institution the Tribes appear to have derived from the Egyptians, in whose religion kibotism, or ark- worship, was also a leading rite. We find traces of it in other ancient nations. They seem to be in some cases reminiscences of the preservation of a human pair, by means of a box or rude craft, from the waters of a deluge. There are Greek medals representing a chest in which two individuals are floating on the water, with a dove and an olive-branch and a sacrifice supposed to be offered by the rescued pair after the subsidence of the waters. The ark on one of these medals bears the Greek name of Noah (Noe). Whether or not the service of the ark in the countries in which it was practised had this origin, it appears to have prevailed not only among civilized peoples, but also to some extent among barbarous tribes. Sir Joseph Banks, who accompanied Captain Cook in one of his voyages, found on an island of the Pacific a chest resembling the Ark of the Covenant as described in the Old Testament, with rings and poles for carrying it.

It was called by the islanders, " The House of God."

Now the Ark of the Covenant was essentially fetish. It was supposed to be the medium of Divine power and blessing. When the Tribes crossed the Jordan, it was carried in advance, and miraculously divided the waters. It was borne in procession around the walls of Jericho, and caused their downfall. After temporary disuse, it was brought out again in the time of the Judges, on occasion of an engagement with the Philistines. "And the Philistines were afraid, for they said, God is come into the camp. Woe unto us ! for there hath not been such a thing heretofore." They rallied, however, and not only repulsed the Israelites, but even took the Ark of God, brought it to their city of Ashdod, and placed it in the Temple of Dagon. The consequence was that early on the morrow, " Behold, Dagon was fallen on his face before the Ark of the Lord." At the same time, and owing to the same cause, we are told that the city was visited with a sore epidemic. Altogether, the presence of the ark proved so disastrous that the Gentiles were fain to be rid of it ; and after some consultation brought it to Kirjathjearim, and deposited it in the house of Aminidab, where it lay for twenty years. When David ascended the throne, and established the seat of government at Jerusalem, he undertook the removal of the ark to that city. The first attempt was unsuccessful, resulting in the death of the man employed in its transportation ; whereat David was so disgusted that he abandoned the enterprise, until he learned that Obed-edom, in whose house the ark had been stored, was miraculously prospering through the influence of the charm. He then appointed a new commission, and the ark was brought into the city with great pomp, the king himself heading the procession with a dance, — which " excited some remark."

This is the last act of homage to the ark in Hebrew history. When Solomon's Temple was completed, it was deposited in the Holy of Holies, where it thenceforth remained an obsolete sanctity. It perished with that temple, and that is the last we hear of it. So completely had it dropped from the use and consciousness of Jewish worship, that, when after the Captivity a new temple was instituted, no attempt was made to restore it. Arkworship had died out: a new phase of Judaism had succeeded. The presence of Jehovah had disengaged itself from the " Mercy-seat between the Cherubim " which surmounted that time-honored box: it was no longer associated with any material thing. The devout imagination had outgrown that conception, and replaced it with the 4 notion of a potentate enthroned in the heavens. " It is He that sitteth above the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers." The God of this period, though far surpassing the divinities of Gentile worship, — distinguished from them by onliness, as sole governor of heaven and earth, and by holiness, as exercising a moral jurisdiction over moral agents, — was still conceived under human limitations. He is still a national God, the God of Israel, with a special affection for Mount Zion.

A third, and the supreme stage of Judaism, begins with the settlement of Jewish colonies in Alexandria and Asia Minor, where contact with Greek wisdom stimulated the action of the national mind, and gave the religious consciousness its final development. In this stage, the idea of God is entirely divested of local and national limitations. The Alexandrian translators soften down, as far as possible, the anthropomorphic expressions of the Hebrew text. Jesus, the son of Sirach, evades the theophanies. It is no longer the Lord himself whom Moses saw face to face, "as a man talketh with a friend," but only a part of his glory. And where the Book of Exodus speaks of the thick cloud in which was God, Ecclesiasticus mentions the cloud without affirming that God was in it.1

1 Nicolas, " Des Doctrines religieuses des Juifs."

The God of Ecclesiasticus is a God whose " spirit fills the earth."

III. The progress of religion, like all human development, proceeds by action of antagonistic powers. The antagonisms most noteworthy are those of Faith and Reason, and those of Sense and Conscience.

Religion, in its first manifestation, is an act of pure faith. The worshipper embraces without question the object on which it is directed, be it fetish or person. Whoever professes to represent that object is received as infallible authority. Where this principle is dominant, it begets a corresponding form of social polity, — hierarchy, or theocracy, such as we find in the earlier periods of Egyptian history, in Brahmanical India, and among the Druids. In this polity the priest is before the king, and the State a function of the hierarchy. The principle of theocratic or hierarchical government is implicit faith ; its consummation is the institution of an hereditary priestly caste, whom the people regard as not only mediators of Godhead, but as being themselves divine. This institution still survives in the Brahman of Hindostan. "The birth of the Brahman," says Menu, "is the eternal incarnation of justice. For the Brahman born for the execution of justice is destined to

52 TEE WAY OF RELIGION.

identify himself with Brahm." " The Brahman is sovereign Lord of all beings ; all that the world contains is his property. By his primogeniture, by his eminent birth, he has a right to all that exists." To this day, in Bengal, the lowly Sudra crawls on his knees to kiss the feet, or beg parings of the nails, of an individual of the priestly class nowise superior to himself except in the article of birth. The homage is not rendered to wealth or power — the object of it may be destitute of either — but to the portion of divinity supposed to reside in the favored caste, indicated by the bit of sacred cord which denotes the twice-born man. There is no servility in it, but simple reverence, — pure, unquestioning faith.

When, in the course of popular development or military reaction, faith becomes modified by never so little intellectual activity, the secular interest begins to assert itself. By-and-by it conquers a position beside, and co-ordinate with, the sacerdotal ; and finally obtains supreme command, subordinating the sacerdotal, and controlling its functions.

The first stage in this process of secularization is exemplified in the empire of Japan, where the secular and ecclesiastical powers act with parallel function. Also in Thibet, where, if the Dalai Lama is theoretically incarnate Deity, the particular incumbent of the office for the time being is appointed by the secular power; that is, he is one of three Khubilkans, or twice-born children, nominated by the Chinese Court, or accepted by plenipotentiaries of that government residing in Thibet.1

The next degree of secular encroachment is reached, when the temporal sovereign assumes the patronage and visible headship of the Church, — as does the English Crown of the ecclesiastical establishment of Great Britain, and as Peter the Great put himself at the head of the Orthodox Church of Russia.2

The third and last stage of secularism in civil society is entire separation of Church and State, and the irre cognition on the part of the ruling powers of any particular religion as divine or more obligatory than any other. This is the position of the Government of the United States, which knows no religion as possessing any other claim than that of the numerical majority of its disciples for the time being. It recognizes the present fact, nothing more. The Government appoints chaplains ; and the chaplains thus far have been Christian, for the reason that the subjects to whom they minister are Christian. But nothing in the Constitution

1 Koppen, " Die Laraaisclie Hierarchie und Kirche." ' 2 He is said to have thrown his hunting-knife on the table, saying to the assembled clergy, " There is your Patriarch."

of the United States forbids the appointment of Mohammedan chaplains ; on the contrary, the principles of the Constitution would seem to require the appointment of such, or of those of any other faith whose disciples should happen to constitute the majority of the population to whom the chaplain was to minister. Ours is, perhaps, the only Government in Christendom in which Christianity is not formally recognized ; the only one which absolutely discharges itself of all preference for, or interest in, any particular religion as possessing a supreme claim.

Beside the antagonism of faith and reason, parallel with it, is the conflict of sense and conscience, of the outer and the inner life. Hence the distribution of religion in two great classes, — polytheism and monotheism, or natural and revealed. The principle of polytheism is Deity in Nature ; — in Nature, not as God's handiwork, the witness of his skill, but as God's embodiment, as divine mediation. The principle of monotheism is God in the conscience, — moral obligation divinely imposed. Accordingly, Mosaism, the earliest historic embodiment of that principle, is termed " The Law ; " and Mohammedism, its later product, takes the name of Islam, " Righteousness." 1

1 So Emanuel Deutsch explains the term.

Religion begins with the worship of tilings ; from fetishism it advances to personification of natural forces, and proceeds in the direction of personism, until some quickened and reflective soul, — in the language of theology, some divinely-missioned individual, — through predominance in him of the moral sense, arrives to the truer conception of Deity as moral lawgiver, and adores the God of conscience above all gods. Then commences, for the age and people in which such prophet appears, the reaction of the inner life ; the soul asserts its supremacy over Nature ; religion becomes internal, reflective, moral, protestant. Christianity consummated that reaction, completely abolishing the Nature-worship and polytheism of the Greco-Roman world. The two main streams of ancient religion, Hellenism and Semitic monotheism, — themselves the debouchures respectively of other, elder, Phoenician, Egyptian, and Persian faiths, — found their confluence in the Christian dispensation. Hellenism was completely merged and lost in it. Semitic monotheism, after delivering its " tributewave," has preserved an independent existence, and still survives in the Judaism of the " Dispersion ; " still flourishes in Mohammedism, one of the most wide-spread of existing religions. This, and the elder religions of Central and Southern Asia, — Brahmanism and Buddhism, — still sway the major portion of the human race, but with such fixity, such incapacity of growth or effective reformation, as must needs neutralize their historic influence, if it does not abridge their duration. Extensive and prevailing as they seem when measured statistically, they are still but bounded provincialisms when viewed in relation to cosmopolitan humanity.