What I believe and why

Contents

PAGE

Introduction . . . 3

CHAPTER

Introduction

AS children we learn by being told. Our beliefs must be taken on the authority of parents and teachers. It is only with the access of years that reason develops far enough so that we seek the basis of accepted beliefs, that we confirm them or doubt or disbelieve. Many beliefs we have to take all our lives on the testimony of others. Travellers have told us of the city of Timbuktu, and we do not doubt its existence. We have seen it in the atlas, and that is enough. A hardy explorer has reached, or says he has, the South Pole, and we do not, or cannot, prove or disbelieve his claim, but we accept it. A multitude of other beliefs our own observation or reason confirms, and some it denies.

Not all our beliefs accepted from parents or teachers can we easily test in any concrete way with eyes and ears. They are beliefs or opinions relating to matters of political wisdom, of social welfare, of religious creed and duty. These we have inherited and are very likely to hold because inherited, without seeking to test them. We have a prejudice in their favor, and we do not care to examine the grounds of our prejudice, or we have not time or energy or opportunity to make the investigation. We still listen to those who assert what we have been taught, and do not think it worth while to hear the other side. We may even give study to the subject, but only by reading the arguments on our own side, that we may strengthen our own defenses. Thus a man's mind may in early life lose the power of expansion, may be anchylosed like the sutures of the skull, so that further growth is impossible.

Yet even if this is not the case, if the mind is kept open to new views of truth, it is a fact often observed that changes of view come gradually and insensibly. The bearings of facts that seemed at the time insignificant, or a number of them, only after a period of gestation demand attention. We find to our surprise that truths we thought certain become less certain, perhaps quite doubtful. Our attitude on living questions has insensibly changed. Socialism does not seem as impossible as it did, nor the devil quite as personal. And still, in the stress of daily work, we do not take the time, or have not the energy, to draw a fresh map of our beliefs; or we feel a certain hesitancy or fear about charting them, because we are comfortable as we are, or not uncomfortable, and the definite recognition of a change of belief would be disturbing.

Something like this has been my attitude toward the great questions of religion ; and yet for

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many years I have felt it my duty, when I could, or whether I could or not, to investigate so far as I might, the grounds of my beliefs as to God and Scripture and Christ and worship and duty. In my day, knowledge in science, in philosophy, in archaeology, in criticism has made it possible to recast the grounds of one's religious belief; and even one who, like myself, has not been able to give his time professionally to these studies will yet have caught the currents and been borne on the drift of them, and may be sufficiently informed generally, if not critically and at firsthand, to be at liberty to make his own judgments and draw his own conclusions. This is what I have long resolved to do, just for my own satisfaction, and, possibly, to bring useful suggestions to others who may feel the same desire to orient their faith and know what they believe.

May I be allowed to say that I was fortunate in having inherited an interest in religious questions? For three generations before me my lineal ancestors had been New England ministers. My father's library was rich in theological works, as well as works in philosophy, and these he encouraged me to read in my younger teens, Edwards, father and son, Hopkins, Bellamy, Emmons, and Dwight, while Calmet's "Dictionary of the Bible," and Home's "Introduction" were familiar to me. For his day, my father was a liberal in theology, not a Unitarian, although his library contained, and I read, on both sides the discussions of Woods and Ware and Stuart. My father was a disciple of the newer theology of Emmons and N. W. Taylor, and was an admirer of Park in his polemics with Hodge. I was thus taught early not to accept an old faith unless it was proved true, and yet to be hospitable to new truths that might break out of God's holy Word. In those days the inspiration of the Scriptures was not much questioned, except by "infidels," and yet we were beginning to doubt whether the Bible was written to teach us science. Hugh Miller and Edward Hitchcock were telling us that geology might bring us a fresh interpretation of the six days of creation.

I think my first unrecognized doubt as to the historical certitude of the Bible came in the three years between the ages of six and nine, during which my father required me to read the Bible through in Hebrew, he being my teacher. He believed, I am glad to say, that Hebrew was an easier language to learn than Greek or Latin, and with three years for each, and in this reverse order, he required me to read the whole Bible in the original tongues, with the Old Testament also in Greek and the New in Hebrew, and both in Latin. It was during those years given to Hebrew, certainly not much later, that I learned from my Gesenius's "Lexicon" that Babel in Arabic means the gate of God, Bab-Il, and not

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confusion, as the Genesis story tells us. I knew that Arabic was allied to Hebrew, and the derivation in the Arabic seemed more natural than one which came from baled, to confound. The doubt did not germinate very much, but it remained, and it was somewhat confirmed when I was required to read Stuart's "Commentary on Daniel," which discussed questions of historicity, not wholly after the conservative way. When my father taught his older children the Assembly's ' 'Shorter Catechism," he took great pains, in a sort of Sunday evening lectures, to show us why the answers were true, and at times why they were not true, In this very favorable atmosphere of instruction I was taught to keep the sutures of the mind open and free, not hastily to take new conjectures, but yet hospitable to their consideration, as was Jonathan Edwards, the great reformer of New England theology, one of whose resolutions, written in his boyhood, reads:

I observe that old men seldom have any advantage of new discoveries because these are apart from a way of thinking they have been so long used to: Resolved, if I ever live to years that I will be impartial to hear the reasons of all pretended discoveries, and receive them if rational, how long soever I have been used to another way of thinking.

In this way have I taken the liberty, for which perhaps I ought to ask pardon, to give a personal explanation of the occasion for this study, and for the personal character of its title, "What I Believe and Why," and for the personal element which may appear in the following discussions. I would not impose my conclusions on the reader, but I would suggest to him the reasons for my own more or less certain faith.

If one wishes to know definitely what he believes indefinitely, and why he should believe it, how shall he begin ? He should purge his mind of all prejudice, and even discharge it of all preconceptions and even beliefs, and begin at the beginning of his knowledge, at least on all religious and even ethical matters, much after the method of what is called the Cartesian Doubt, which, in philosophy, begins at the very beginning, with the recognition only of personal consciousness. That is, he should put behind him, for the nonce, any impression of belief, or disbelief, in God or gods or sacred books, and of obligations or distinctions of right and wrong. The first assumptions will be of one's own natural powers, and one's own consciousness and one's own perceptions as they take hold of the outside world; and he may then accept those results of science that are accepted by all men of science. Thus the facts of chemistry, the geological history of the earth, the nature of the solar system and the stars, and all the world of vegetable and animal life, with the working of human psychology, all these will be

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the basal data for one's conclusions as to religious faith.

For the first question that will come to us is: What is the basis for natural theology ? Do we believe in a God ? To be sure, theology is a very different thing from religion. Religion has to do with our duties toward God, or gods, if such there be; while theology is the philosophy which classifies and supports our beliefs, and beliefs only. Religion has to do with obedient service to a superior Power, and has its object in that Being; while theology has its end and object in one's self, in satisfying intellectually one's own craving for knowledge. Yet because one cannot experience obedience or reverence toward God until one has an intellectual and theologic belief in God, because belief in God so requires religious relations toward Him, therefore we somewhat loosely call our beliefs, our theology, religious, while in fact the mere correct belief in God is no more religious in itself than belief in a devil or a Chinese dragon or a sea serpent.

But this anticipates what must come later. For the present, we may dismiss Bible and God, and ask of nature about us the primary question in natural religion : Is there a God ? Later, if after going forward and backward we should find Him, the related duties will need consideration; and after that we may inquire what are the evidences of revelation, and what its contents, and whether death ends life. For the present we are concerned with the data which will give or suggest a conclusion on the great question of Theism. This is more than half the quest.

Chapter I The Data For Belief

I HAVE said that if I want to know truly what I ought to believe about religion I must first discharge myself of all prepossessions and begin at the beginning. That beginning is that I must trust the validity of my own consciousness of myself. I am, and I am conscious of myself in my moods of action and feeling. I, as nominative case, subject, objectify myself as objective case, object, and I declare me to exist — under these moods. I cannot doubt the fact. It is a real existence, even if it be called an illusion, a dream, for the dream, or illusion, exists, and so does whatever may be under that dream or illusion. I am, I am, I, the substantive I, and I cannot but believe in the substantial me.

Next comes the recognition of the moods under which I exist, the thinkings, feelings, doings; the sensations, the perceptions. I recognize that as a thinking, feeling being I am a continuous mind, and also f hat I am, or have a body. By my senses I cannot but be convinced that there is also something external even to my own body, other bodies, animate and inanimate. I apprehend them by five senses. I am convinced that they are not a subjective illusion. To be sure, I am familiar with what seem for a moment real objects seen, which are illusions, as in dreaming and in insanity; but through the concurrence of the senses, in the tests of my waking hours, I am compelled to believe these persons and things not me to be real existences, as real as I am myself. I conclude that I am not the mere spinner of unsubstantial dreams, solipsissimus amid the vacant spaces which I fill with empty shadows, fancying them solid realities. I live and move with actual objective persons and things, of which I am unus inter pares et impares permultos, one among multitudinous differing and separate realities. No sane person, not a philosopher, can believe everything to be subjective imagination.

My personal sensations give me the idea of time, learned through the succession of sensations; and my organs of feeling and sight give me the idea of space. I see myself existing in the moving current of time, and I see the world about me existing in space. My faculties give no limit, and they seem to deny any limit, to space and time. I cannot imagine a beginning to time or a boundary to space, while equally the conception of time and space as infinite is beyond my comprehension, but the fact is simple and easy to understand. Space and time are diverse quiddities. Space is universal and static, static because universal. It rests because there is nowhere to which it can move. It occupies the all. It is the great all-comprehensive Brahm in which all things exist. Matter may be in it here or there, and ether may be in it everywhere, while space is the condition of their existence. But time is present, passing, new. It was, it will be, it now is only in the flux of the moment, for it is of its essence to be impermanent. It moves us in its vast sweep of current, bearing all things with it. So out of that which no longer is time covers the whole of absolute space, and moves mightily in a great tidal ocean that knows no refluence. Space and time cannot be thought away as categories of imagination; they are facts, the conditions of all existence. Everything that is, has its limit in space, and is borne along by the stream of time.

I cannot admit any argument against the infinity of time and space, and so against any conclusions as to the existence from all eternity of included matter or mind, drawn from any assumption that beyond our possible knowledge there may be transcendent relations of time or space such as would vitiate any conclusions one might draw from them as we know them. Mathematicians and philosophers amuse themselves, for example, in talking of the Absolute, which has no limiting relations, or they fancy space of more than the three dimensions which we know as ineluding all its possible relations. They imagine an insect so far flattened down as to have no upper and under side, and which, given a mind, could have no suspicion that there was any other than the two dimensions of length and breadth in which it lived; and they then suggest that we may be such limited creatures knowing only the three dimensions familiar to us, while there may be others familiar to higher minds. They tell us that by adding a fourth or fifth dimension the present relations of space, as known to us, would be so changed that any present impossibility might become possible, and all knowledge and all conclusions annulled. So of time, they conceive a Higher Being who "views all things at one view," to whom there is no before or after, but only a present now, and who thus can know all things past and future, because all time is ever present to him; and they thus predicate as philosophy what the familiar hymn gives as poetry:

"Eternity, with all its years, Stands present in thy view; To thee there's nothing old appears. Great God, there's nothing new."

A legitimate figure of speech in poetry cannot so easily be transferred to philosophy. When we know that time and space are actualities we cannot blow them out with a whiff of fancy, as if a dream. To explain difficulties by denying the validity of reason is intellectual suicide — we might as well bury all philosophy and suppress at once all reason if we are to explain our ignorance by the denial of our knowledge. An Absolute which is limited neither by time nor space is unthinkable to us, and we must think of it as impossible to God. Any being however supreme who exists must exist in the categories of time and space, which are quite as necessary as he is himself. To assume and argue otherwise is to be, like Milton's devils, "in endless mazes lost."

Next I begin to examine the not-me. I find that about me is the world, and I discover that the earth is a part of the solar system, and that the sun with its satellites is but one in a vast congeries of stars which are numberless suns like our own; some of which we know have satellites like ours. I then begin to ask what is their history, their origin, and their future.

I see that this earth I live in is a round ball, made of less than a hundred elements, and then I ask if these discrete elements are really simple, indivisible, and essentially permanent, and I am informed that they are probably each composed of a definite number of subatoms, which may, or may not be the ultimate corpuscle or corpuscles. Beyond that I cannot go. I am not yet informed whether these subatoms are solid, impenetrable ultimates, or are movements, whorls, vortices in a primum mobile which physicists call ether. There I must leave the matter for the moment.

Then I study the earth I live in to learn its history. I find it has had a succession of ages, that it has possessed successive stages of continental development. It was once the scene of vast paroxysmal upheavals, under the influence of internal forces which have gradually diminished in activity. The earth was once much hotter than it now is; its oceans boiled, its crust was molten, but through numberless eons it has cooled and solidified until now it suffers only from occasional earthquakes ; and here and there spout out from below its volcanic fires. That is, there was a time when it was molten, but now it is cool and habitable, and this process of cooling is going on every day, and the time will come when the last internal fire will cease to burn, and the earth will be cooled solid to the centre. In the course of nature this must be in time, we know not how many billions of years hence.

But, equally, there was the time when it was a molten mass, and there must have been a time when this condition began to exist, for the sure process of refrigeration is not yet completed. The fact that at this time the process is not completed is proof that the earth has not existed as earth from infinite time. It began to exist in finite time.

I turn then to this earth's sister satellites and to the sun which is their centre. I find that the big planets, Jupiter and Saturn, have not yet cooled down. They are covered with clouds of steamy vapor. The small ones, from Mercury to Mars, have cooled down like the earth. But the sun has not cooled down. Its immense mass has not yet allowed it to become solid. But it is giving off heat all the time, and in time its supply of heat will be exhausted, whether it comes by contraction or by the falling into it of meteorites, or from some chemical source, like radium, which we know little or nothing of. It must follow the example of Jupiter and be surrounded by vapor, and later like the earth become solid, rigid, and cold. That will happen, under all known physical laws, after myriads of eons. But it has not happened yet. Therefore the sun has not existed as source of light and heat for an infinite series of years ; otherwise it would have finished its course and become a dead sun. It had its beginning.

Then I look beyond this solar system. I find that this world of ours, the sun with its retinue of planets, is but one in the midst of a vast multitude of similar suns. They are about us, in every direction, at vast distances from each other, and reaching out one beyond another, distance added fathomlessly beyond distance, immeasurable, inconceivable. But we see them crowded in a ring that divides our heavens, thickest in the ring, and more scattered elsewhere, so that it would seem that this our sun and this our earth are proximately, as spaces are measured by lightyears, somewhere near the centre of a vast ring of stars, forming in the total a huge system of suns and stars, all in movement, and all, it may possibly be, revolving about some common centre or centres. We do not know certainly, but we know of some that they are moving, and that our own system is in swift motion in space. We can only conclude that probably they are all in motion, even as the planets of our own solar system have their common motion. Our little system will then be the microcosm of the multitudinous macrocosm which astounds our vision with its immensity as we gaze at it on a clear night.

But again we ask : What is its history ? Had it a beginning ? Will it have an end ?

What is true of our sun is true of every sun which occupies its place in the starry universe, its little space as compared with the incomprehensible spaciousness of the entire circuit of stars whose multitude blurs the Milky Way, and whose tens of thousands blaze in the rest of the sky.

As the sun had its beginning and will cease to shine, so each star is giving out its portion of heat into space, losing its light, approaching its frigid death. Because it has not yet reached its grave, it has not existed as a sun from eternity; it had its beginning. The stellar universe, at least as we know it, is not infinite, it is finite, in time.

And it is not infinite — it is finite, in space. By very nice measured observations we discover that our sun is moving in space, very swiftly as we measure movements on the earth, very slowly as we measure stellar time and distance by the space through which light will move in a year. Many of the stars we know are thus moving, and we reasonably presume that they all are moving, and in their several paths or orbits, but which are yet as fixed and limited as is the circle in which the stone moves which a boy swings by a string about his head. So far as we can learn the entire universe of stars which we see is one system, or possibly two systems, limited within its own round of revolutions and attractions, and bounded by the emptiness of space, the same sort of space beyond it. Whether beyond this stellar complex of moving stars there exist yet other stellar systems like this which entrances our vision, we do not know. But, so far as we can learn, our universe, all, anywhere in total space that we know to exist, is not infinite; it is limited. It is just as truly limited as "the visual line that girts us round," and which the ignorant yokel deems "the world's extreme." The space about our system of stars we must think of as boundless, infinite. Within our limited universe we see enormous empty light-year spaces, and then outside this universe exists a further reach on every side of empty space, yet where there may exist, beyond our power to discover them, other distant systems occupying their space in the void where place is not, such systems as astronomers used to guess they had discovered in nebulae. They may be there, hidden by some failure of light to penetrate the distance. It is possible, but we have no evidence that such is the fact. At all events, our universe, and any other like it, is finite in space as in time.

The question whether the stellar universe had a beginning, and is thus finite in time, requires some further consideration. Our solar system has a brilliant central sun, and non-luminous planets which would be quite invisible from the nearest star. We know that some of the nearer stars have dark planets revolving around them; they are variable stars, hundreds of them. Can it be only the planets, no bigger than Jupiter, that have cooled down, so as to lose their visibility ; and are the visible stars all large, and are they all the large stars there are ? If so, they are all of about the same age, came into being at about the same time, in a vast yet limited backward view of time; and we can then have a conception of the beginning of our present-known universe. But we have no reason for believing that such is the case. There may equally as well be larger stars that have lost their heat, and are therefore invisible; and if so there may be multitudes of them. For aught we know, and it is quite probable, the number of dark, cold, invisible stars may be many times the number of the visible stars. If such is the case, it throws the time of the beginning of our stellar system uncounted eons back to the time when the oldest and deadest of all the dark stars began to emit light.

That there are such dark, invisible stars we have evidence in the sudden outbreak in the heavens of a new star, where no star, or a very faint star, was visible before. The only reasonable explanation of such a phenomenon yet given is that of a collision between two stars. Attraction has somehow brought them together, and the collision bursts them into intense heat. They will be blown into fragments, mostly into gaseous vapor, continue for a while in violent combustion, and gradually sink into a state of comparatively quiet heat, and lose much of their temporary splendor, and may even, if small enough, cease to be visible at all. Where they shone out for a few months or years there will again be a dark spot in the sky. They are there yet, but as dark stars.

Now of such stars invisible to us there may be millions in the heavens. We have no reason to believe there are not. There is room for them, as there is for the visible stars, to continue on their mighty orbits or along their common paths. How do we know that our sun was not the result of some such collision ? That would have been the beginning of the creation of our solar system out of the materials of two elder suns, forming at first a vast huge mist of fire, and gradually cooling and condensing into our system of sun, planets, satellites.

We have, then, no reason to believe with any certainty, or even probability, that the beginning of the visibility of the stars we now see in the heavens was the beginning of their absolute existence. They may have existed in other forms, as components out of which these present stars were made. Those previous components may also have passed through their cycle of change, the products of some previous collision; and this process may have continued on indefinitely in past time, for time which extends into a past eternity is long enough for any conclusion, no matter how slow the process. It would then seem that we do not find in the heavens themselves any evidence that limits certainly the date of its origin.

Yet there may possibly be one such evidence of limit. If in case of collision of stars one is made out of two, then the number of stars, living or dead, is being constantly, and no matter how slowly, reduced. So far as I can see there is likely to be some such reduction. To be sure, in not every case of a new star must the two that meet join to form a new larger one, for the angle of approach may be such that they will only brush against each other, and then pass on with changed motions. But this will not explain such a systern as this of ours; nor will it explain the spiral nebulae. These must be cases of an actual union of the two into one, and in that case a lessening of the number of stars until, we may well conceive, they shall all be combined into one common mass. But that has not yet occurred, and it looks as if our stellar system had a beginning.

That is, if there is any force which could prevent the stars moving indefinitely in their set courses so that they will not ever come into collision. But we know that some of them have come into collision. That might be because two orbits happen to cross each other, and the two stars happen to meet at the node. Then there would be sure to be a collision. Or we may imagine that there exists in space some retarding substance, lightly gaseous or meteoric dust, or larger meteoric objects which, meeting the moving star, are drawn to it and so, however insensibly, reduce its motion and so tend to bring it toward a common centre. No matter how infinitesimal this effect, yet in unlimited time the result would be sure at last to be reached. Every meteor that hits the earth somewhat changes its orbit and period of revolution. Yet we are not sure that these wandering masses or fragments of local matter exist in the stellar spaces. All we know is that they exist within our solar system and may have originated there. We do not certainly know that hyperbolic comets, or those that appear such, come from outside our system. The most we can say is, that, so far as we yet know, there is no limit that can be set to the beginning of our stellar universe, for the great bulk of stars may never come into collision, and their path may never be changed either by collision or by their permanent retention in a fixed orbit, nor their speed reduced by wandering free portions of matter so as to bring them into new colliding orbits. We only know that certain collisions have taken place. The stars give us no certain evidence in themselves as to whether in some form or other they have existed from eternity. But we do know that in their present condition their existence is within limits of time, for they have not yet ceased to expend their light and heat.