The religious feeling. A study for faith

Preface

Lsr the struggle for existence which is ever going on in literature, as in life, a new book should show some variation, however slight, from others of its kind, by means of which it may be better fitted to the surrounding conditions of thought, and hope to survive for a season.

The reason this little book has for its appearance is a slight departure from the usual forms in which the evidences of faith are presented, by which it is sought to adapt them more perfectly to the sceptical surroundings of thought in our day. The variation by which this new venture, among the great multitude of books, hopes to live and to be useful, may be said to be the result of a process of natural selection, in an American mind, from the German idealism, and the English positivism.

VI PREFACE.

The substance of it first formed itself in the author's mind during a season of quiet study of modern German thought, and he has since found the reasoning, which then enabled his own faith to survive, useful in conversation with friends whose scientific studies had both brought them into unwilling doubts concerning those spiritual truths which give to life its real value, and, at the same time, thrown the prevalent proofs of religion out of all relation to their habits of mind.

Though the principles unfolded in the following pages have long been fruitful in the German literature of faith, and are evidently at work leavening the whole body of our own theology, there is no one book in the English language, so far as I am aware, in which they are consecutively and thoroughly thought out ; and even among the Germans, unless possibly an exception be made in favor of the excellent, but voluminous, philosophical writings of Prof. Ulrici, they have not been developed with sufficient reference to modern scientific theories of man's origin and history.

PREFACE. Vll

Faith in spiritual and divine realities may in some of its older forms be passing into Herbert Spencer's favorite family of extinct beliefs, but it certainly has had a marvellously persistent life in human history, and in new forms may prove itself able to survive vigorously even in the midst of those theories of evolution which constitute, undoubtedly, the general environment of thought in our generation. That the following pages should contain a complete adjustment of faith to its new surroundings, would, of course, not be possible — the problem of life is ever greater than our last and largest thought concerning it ; but that they do contain a restatement of the evidence of things not seen somewhat more in harmony with the present condition of our knowledge, the author cherishes the belief ; that they may draw forth other and better statements, and help on the general movement towards a faith at once simpler, more rational, and more assured, is his hope and expectation.

Quincy, III., June, 1877.

Chapter I

THE QUESTION STATED. THE TRANSFORMATIONS

OF THE RELIGIOUS FEELING.

According to the Gospel of the Spirit, Adam is the Son of God; according to the Gospel of the Senses, man is the son of an atom. The two genealogies become contradictory only as either is regarded as the sole account of the descent of man.

The problem of problems upon which the thought of our times labors, inay be reduced, in the last analysis, to the simple alternative : Is man, through whatever intermediate forms he may have descended, the Son of God, or is he the unintended product of molecular forces ? If the former prove to be the true descent of man, then we are capable of religion, and we live in some personal relationship to a Being higher than ourselves, from whom we came. If the latter be the exclusive genealogy of man, we only deceive ourselves by cherishing 1*

IO THE RELIGIOUS FEELING.

sentiments religiously colored. Our spiritual emotions, the bright and evanescent forms which come and go in the higher zones of thought and aspiration, are to be looked upon only as emanations from our lower and altogether earthly selves — the unsubstantial clouds of our mental firmament. Our chief end of life, then, would be to adapt ourselves, as well as we may, to our surroundings, and to survive as best we can.

It is surely not a loss, but a great gain, that in the discussions of modern times the main religious question becomes more and more disentangled from the minor perplexities of theology. It is a sign of progress that the religious question upon which the printing presses in these days are most busy, is not a question of sect or school. Messengers of reconciliation to-day meet each other from almost every theological camp ; and few are the churches which continue to demand unconditional surrender to a system of bristling theological propositions, as a condition of admission to the household of faith. The question facing us to-day, which we can avoid only by retreating from the nineteenth century, is a question of the very life of religion itself, a question between any theology and no theology; between faith in the spirit and the Father of all spirits, and faith only in this visible order of things.

THE QUESTION STATED. II

The very attempts made by some writers at half-way solutions, or compromises, between these two antagonistic beliefs, serve to reveal more clearly the real matter at issue, and the inevitable line of conflict. Thus Matthew Arnold's " Literature and Dogma " is a proposed armistice between religion and scepticism, with which neither party could long be contented. The " stream of tendency which makes for righteousness," in the course of the Hebrew literature becomes too well defined, is determined by too many metes and bounds in the descriptions of the prophets, and called by names too familiar in the language of Hebrew shepherds, to satisfy those minds to whom the Deity must be, if God is at all, an unknown and unknowable Power. And as Mr. Arnold's " God of the Bible " is too well known for the worshipper upon the Mars' hill of modern nescience ; so, on the other hand, is this " not ourselves which makes for righteousness, 1 ' too vague and metaphysical an abstraction for the believer in the temple of Jehovah, and the Shekinah of its holy place. Mr. Arnold, after his own dexterous manner, has performed the feat of the very metaphysics which he ridicules as a jugglery of phrases; for he has thrown another bridge of words between the two spheres of human experience, the world within us — our subjective knowledge, and the eternal order without us and above us, in which, as it were, our self-consciousness lies ensphered — the outward reality of God. "Literature and Dogma " is a bridge of words over this fundamental antithesis skilfully put together — a finished piece of literary mechanics; but it only seems to unite opposites, and it will hardly bear the weight of either of the beliefs expected to meet upon it. But religion is the way from ourselves, and our own moralities, to God, and His righteousness ; or it is nothing. And the " Zeit Geist," the Spirit of the Times, however ruthless of old sanctities, and iconoclastic of established theologies it may be, is by no means a light and trifling spirit, content to play at hide and seek among the masked forms of things ; it is an earnest spirit, at heart reverent of truth, and searching for its Lord. Neither unbelief, nor faith, seems disposed, then, to catch at the new phrase which Mr. Arnold, so much to his own satisfaction, has spun out of the old Hebrew faith.

The power of Israel was a persistent faith in a law of objective reality ; in a Being whose word was a positive commandment ; and in a kingdom, unseen, but having foundations more enduring than the hills of Zion, and of whose sublime verities, altar and temple, and throne of David, were but types and shadows. And still the deepest currents of thought set to-

THE QUESTION STATED. 1 3

wards the reality which men believe to lie beyond their visible horizon ; and even our physical science pushes its discoveries towards the shores of the unknown land of faith.

As a timid armistice between faith and unbelief, a compromise, like Mr. Arnold's, between the lower and higher beliefs and forces of morality and religion, can, from the nature of the case, prove to be, at best, but a temporary reconciliation ; so, on the other hand, is it equally hopeless for believers in the Bible and the Holy Ghost to seek to subdue the questions uprising in many quarters against the traditional faith, by clinging to antiquated methods of thought, or by standing still, marking time, in lines of defence which have been already completely turned. The opponents of faith in revelation do not deploy their ranks now in front of Paley's formidable array of evidences, or within the range of Butler's weightier arguments. The issue is joined on other grounds, and must be settled upon a broader field of discussion, Whoever, therefore, would run in the course of modern thought, and win the goal, must throw aside every weight which encumbers theology, and press forward in the spirit of the apostle who could forget those things which are behind. Faith has ever a nobler task than- to build the sepulchres of the prophets, or to stand guard over defunct bodies of Divinity. To let the dead bury their dead, and to follow the living truth which ever goes before us, is the Divine commission of the disciple in every age. Burdens of human interpretation, therefore, too heavy to be borne, need not be carried by the champions of faith into the arena of modern controversy. Under clumsy and oppressive theories of God's method of creation, government, or revelation, he need not labor. To the main religious question of our times the Church may best go forth in light marching order. The believer may yield without controversy some once hotly contested points as now unessential. He should seize with his eye, and devote his energies to the few great strategic points of the Christian doctrine.

Neither, on the other hand, can unbelief win the day by storming abandoned lines; by showering its shafts of ridicule upon beliefs no longer held, if they ever were, by the Christian world ; or even by the defeat of detached doctrines, or capture of dogmas unduly advanced by theologians. He who would dispute 'the possession by the human spirit of its land of promise, must wage a better than Philistine warfare; mere raids upon exposed beliefs, the plunder, now and then, of an article of faith, will not prove

THE QUESTION STATED. 1 5

sufficient to disinherit the human heart of its birthright — the inheritance from the fathers to the children's children, with its fountains of refreshment and broad prospects — a land still flowing with milk and honey.

The main religious question of our times concerns, first of all, the reality of our spiritual perceptions. Are we capable of coming to a knowledge of God, even if there is a God ? Can He touch us, and we feel Him ? Do we, by any valid experience, become aware of His presence, of the presence of real spiritual being and goodness without and above ourselves ?

Our capacity, or want of capacity, for religion, it will be observed, is a question of fact, which must be determined, therefore, as other facts are, by observation and testimony. The same methods which are used for the discovery of other facts of the creation are to be employed in the investigation of man's religious nature. It would be in the last degree unscientific to shut out observed facts, or possibilities even of observation, by the necessities of any theory. A theory has served its purpose, and should be broken up, so soon as experience brings to the foreground a single form which cannot be drawn life-size within its frame. If man's moral stature should stubbornly refuse to find room for itself within the limits of a theory of natural selection, then science, unable to dwarf man, must simply enlarge her Darwinian conception. The Baconian method would become a felo de se, a philosophic suicide, should it dismiss the possibility of a religious nature, and the disclosure of truth to that organ of spiritual perception, on account of any theory of man s origin, or of the ultimate constitution of matter. The facts observed along any line of investigation must give the bounds to our generalizations, not previous generalization determine the facts. Science should be full of eyes, and travel slowly. The observer who spends days at the microscope may miss the grandest facts if he hurries at railway speed over the common moral experience of man, or across the uplands of the spirit. Yet we can hardly resist the impression, while reading, for example, Mr. Darwin's chapter on " The Moral Sense," that he has not devoted to the observation of the facts largely written in human history which determine man's moral nature and descent, the same patient, scientific eye that has followed with close scrutiny the minute particulars which determine man's physical origin and structure. Writers who make haste to decry the want of familiarity on the part of metaphysicians and clergymen with the facts in evidence concerning the uniform processes of nature, should, at least, admit that the moral

THE QUESTION STATED, I J

order of the world, and the continuity of moral forces, may have impressed their signs and evidences as strongly upon the minds of those who have made their distinctive phenomena the pursuit of their lives. Clouds may envelop the heights, and darkness be over the deep places of the human soul. Prof. Huxley,* with David Hume, may think it wise advice to commit to the flames any " volume of divinity which does not contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity and number, any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence;" but, nevertheless, there are heights and depths of being of which we cannot always be unaware, to whose mysterious influences, at times, even that stout-hearted positivist, Prof. Tyndail, confesses ; and surely it would be ignoble for human souls to live like the poor peasants among the Alps, who cultivate their few acres in the valleys in seeming indifference to the awful grandeur overshadowing them. And though we must climb of ttimes through the mists, we may have solid rock beneath our feet ; we may gain a larger horizon than we dreamed, and have moments, at least, of clear, sunny certainty in the vision of unseen and eternal things !

Our point of departure in the investigation

'Lay Sermons," p. 145.

of the religious nature, corresponds with the point from which physical science starts upon its voyage of discovery. In exploring either hemisphere of our double nature, we must begin with corresponding facts, and proceed by analogous methods ; and the experiences gained have similar claims upon rational credence. Our point of mental departure, both in science and religion, alike in physics and metaphysics, is feeling.

Our knowledge of the external world is given in and through sensation. Our consciousness is affected so and so ; these affections or sense-perceptions are grouped in our several conceptions of things; are combined, corrected, and held fast in various judgments and beliefs with regard to an external world. It is not to our purpose, at this point, to discuss the laws by which the mind advances from sensations, or sense-perceptions, to a reasoned knowledge of the world without, which presses in upon its consciousness ; it is not necessary to our argument to decide whether, as Mr. Mill would say, a perception is only a transformed sensation, or whether, as Sir Wm. Hamilton would hold, sensation is the condition, or necessary form, by which the mind becomes conscious of outward things. The fact here in point is simply this, that sensation is the condition and the beginning of that knowledge which our science takes

THE QUESTION STATED, 1 9

for granted. We know the world by touching it. To that touch, to that feeling, and to no origin less humble, science must trace back the lineage of its proudest demonstrations. Sensation is the first stage of knowledge. The genuineness of the knowledge gained through our sense-perceptions is admitted by all with whom it is worth while to argue. The validity of our sensations, the worth of the raw material of science now passes current at almost every centre of philosophic thought, and it is never questioned by the multitude. Our knowledge gained through the senses is valid knowledge ; genuine on the face of it, and good so far as it goes.

Is there, then, any corresponding basis for religion? Are there any religious ideas equally valid, worth all that they appear to be ? There has prevailed among men a general and persistent belief in an order of things 'other than that disclosed to the senses ; in a law, and purpose, and power, of which this visible framework of things is but the type and the semblance ; in an intelligence and goodness of which our minds, and all that our homes have taught us of love, are only image and reflection. As by the scientific use of the imagination Prof. Tyndall is led to believe in an ether, which he has never seen, or weighed, or touched, but which surrounds and pervades all objects, -as tlie necessary condition of material forces, the indispensable medium of light ; so, by an exercise of faith — is it any less scientific ? — the mass of men have believed in an Infinite and Omnipresent Intelligence, in whom we live, and move, and have our being — the necessary presupposition of all thought, without whom truth itself could not be, and light and darkness would be alike inconceivable. Does this general and persistent belief in the reality of God's Being rest upon foundations as firm as the grounds of our belief in matter, force, and ether? Does the use of the imagination by religion in the confession that there is an invisible and moral Reality, from whom came the heavens and the earth, and into whose spiritual dominions they are passing and shall be dissolved, proceed upon the same true principle, and justify itself to the reason as the only sufficient explanation of known results, in the same manner as the scientific use of the imagination makes good its interpretations of the visible world ? Or is faith only a dream of the restless heart ; but the sight of the soul's own shadow, — the projection, as it were, of its own vague shape, enlarging as it recedes, upon the limitless darkness ?

This alternative, to which we come, can be

ITS TRANSFORMATIONS. 21

rationally met only by a close scrutiny of tlie religious feeling, and by observing whether under examination it conducts itself similarly to the feeling of existence, or the feeling of an external world ; whether in it, as in those affections of our consciousness, perceptions are involved; whether, in fact, the religious feeling yields, under all available tests, the evidence of immediate contact with moral and spiritual reality; whether it is the inward sensation, and its accompanying intuition of the Divine Being and presence; as on the lower and outward side of human consciousness, sensation, and its involved perception, come directly from contact with the external world.

When we seek, for this purpose, to bring the religious feeling under investigation, we are perplexed by its constantly recurring forms, its evanescent character. But the variableness of the forms of any given force is now one of the first lessons of natural science. The sunshine, we are taught, not only lights the skies over our homes to-day, but also is stored up in the depths of the earth for our winter's use, not dead but sleeping ; for the glow upon our hearth is the resurrection of the light of other days. The great forces sweep through a vast range of effects ; all nature seems to lie open to the touch of a few master-powers !

The doctrine of the transformation and conservation of energy has a role to play, hardly less important, in moral philosophy, and in the history of religions. If religion is one of the original elements of man's being, one of the great forces of human life, we must expect to find it under most diversified appearances ; in unlooked-for quarters ; at work in many forces that go by other names ; disappearing in one mode of activity only to reappear in another ; always continued and conserved in the play of the forces which enter into human life, and make human history. We may find the religious feeling now glowing in the life of a saint ; now touching the lips of a prophet ; now making heavenly harmonies audible to poet's ear ; now opening the eye of a Raphael to beauty never seen on earth ; the religious feeling this moment may shine forth as truth, another moment burn as a consuming fire ; it may blaze in a fanatic's zeal, or be the steady light of a thinker's doctrine ; and again it may lie darkly and unperceived, a hidden power, in men who know not what is in them. We shall find it not always active, but often latent in human hearts. It may exist waiting to be called forth in men who, because they have not recognized

ITS TRANSFORMATIONS. 2$

its presence in themselves, fail also to understand its many mighty works in history. It has sent forth to do the will of God more than one Cyrus, who knew not by what power he was girded. If the religious feeling is a real motive power, an original element of human experience, from the very nature of force it is, and must be, a pervasive and manifold influence ; and though its ways of action be endlessly diversified, and its names be many, the science of religion may follow it, and recognize it, through a wide range of its transformations. We are not to assume, therefore, that it is not present in any soul, or among any people, because certain familiar marks of it may be absent. It was long before men learned to recognize the same force in the fall of an apple and the poise of a star. Not many years ago men would have laughed, had they been told to dig for the rays of the sun in the darkness of the earth. But we strike a match, and discover that the black heart of the coal is a treasury of sunbeams. We cannot say that the religious feeling is absent in any heart which has not been so heated as to set free its latent forces. We cannot say that a tribe is incapable of religion until, at least, a light has been struck among them, and their inherent capacities thoroughly tested. There may be hidden much of God's grace where we see only hardness and sin. The blackness may yet be made to glow and shine. When a tribe can be found incapable of being rekindled by religious zeal, and Christianized, then it might be regarded as a proof of the absence in the lowest races of the religious nature. But no missionary has ever found a tribe incapable of religious education.* Man has, therefore, the power at least to become religious. At the lowest stage of his development, upon the most unfavorable view of "the primeval man," there is in his soul " the promise and the potency " of the idea of God, and a distinctively religious faith.

We are not warranted, then, in giving up the inquiry as to the real and universal existence of the religious feeling, of the capacity of the human soul for religion, because instances may be found in which it does not appear in famr liar forms, or even in which it seems to fail altogether. The person who imagines he is desti tute of it may simply be ignorant of the real nature of his own motives. Or the seeming want of it, in any tribe of savages, may be but the inability of the traveller to observe the same forces under unaccustomed forms, or to notice the germs of an experience which he has learned to call religion only from its full-grown fruits. It is easy to test the nature of a tree,

* See Mivart, " Lessons from Nature," pp. 140-1, for instances in proof of this statement.

ITS TRANSFORMATIONS, 25

when its fruit appears ; but lie who says, there are no fruit trees in a grove, because he finds no fruit, may not know how to name the tender sapling, or the first green shoot.

One other caution should be observed in the pursuit of the religious feeling through its ever-varying transformations. It should be remembered that, like other feelings or forces, it may exist in different degrees of strength at different times, and even when it is recognized, it may make itself manifest in changing degrees of vividness. The religious feeling may vary in the same individual, like the feeling of personal existence, which is by no means a constant element; for it changes with health ; it runs low in sickness ; it is suspended in sleep, or stirs vaguely in the dreamer's consciousness ; or it is capable of sudden increase of intensity, and every nerve may thrill with it. It is the nature of everything living to be variable ; life is possible only in an unstable organism,* whose atoms are in perpetual motion; only death is stillness. If we would persuade, then, this sensitive witness to reveal its secret, and discover what is really in it, we must not be content to take it in its worst hours, or in its feeblest motion, but we must catch it, and study it, as

* Balfour Stewart's " Conservation of Energy," pp. 164, 188, we do any other feeling, as we do magnetism, not merely at its lowest, in its unexcited conditions, but also at its height, in its brightest glow. To observe the capacity for religion, to reason from the religious feeling in men, or among people, who manifest but a low degree of religious activity, would be as unscientific as it would be to study gravitation only in a body at rest, or the nature of light at midnight. We may learn something of gravitation from an inert stone, something of light from the shadows, something concerning religion even from worldlings and savages ; but we have to account for bodies in motion, as well as at rest ; for the noon, as well as the twilight ; for Judea as well as Philistia ; and from the highest moments and grandest hours of moral as well as of physical forces, we may learn to understand aright their nature and laws, and to infer their presence where we can see perhaps only equilibrium or indifference.

There is undoubtedly in the study of religion, as of every developed organism, much to be learned from inquiry into the germinant forces, the earliest traces of it, in the world's childhood. The value of embryology, indeed, to the right classification of organic forms every naturalist would emphasize, and the embryology of religious growth is equally

ITS TRANSFORMATIONS. 2 J

indispensable to comparative theology. But embryology is valuable in science, and in religion, chiefly as it throws light upon developed structural distinctions. Differences are 1 not accounted for simply by reducing them to their lowest terms. Life is not explained by reducing it to its minimum in an egg. The question is, what made two eggs of similar appearance develop into two unlike types? Differences must be accounted for at their points of greatest as well as of least divergence, in any scientific conception of species. So the religious feeling must be studied and explained not only in the rudimentary forms of it which approach most nearly other feelings, but also in the most perfect developments of it which differentiate it from all other feelings. What is there in it which causes it to develop into a peculiar species ? What is there in it which, after a short process of growth, makes it a feeling distinct by itself ?

The parabola, at the beginning of its curvature, may seem to coincide with the arc of a circle ; but there must be a difference in the impulses which generate the two curves, for soon the latter returns into itself, while the other has measureless sweep ; so the religious feeling may appear, in its first moments, to be identical with certain lines of experience which only take in the things of this world in their little circle, and soon return into themselves ; but it quickly shows itself to be of larger impulse, for the religious spirit cannot be satisfied with the possession of the things which are seen, and it reaches out tow r ards the Infinite.

Chapter II. The Feeling Of Dependence

Human progress is always the resultant of conflicting forces. Our age is moved by opposite tendencies, but the real line of advance will be found to be the resultant of them all. The present tendency of thought is strongly in the direction of the physical sciences, but there is also a constant impulse to return to metaphysical problems. Even our men of science cannot resist always the temptation to become metaphysicians, and to reason concerning causes never caught in their crucibles, or detected in their laboratories. In fact physics leads as directly to metaphysics as the shadow leads up to the substance ; and no thoughtful mind can pursue any path of investigation far without coming out in view of the great questions of theology. It is not surprising, therefore, that the century which has witnessed rapid advance in science, has also been alive with philosophical and theological energy.