American religion

Contents

1 . That Certain Artists should write

on Art.

2. Painting- from Nature.

I. Right Mental Method

SOME mental method must exist to control all the applications of Thought in morals and religion. Of course it is trite to say there must be method everywhere. The Oneida Community ran to waste year after year for want of method in its trade and farming, till a French Canadian came there with a mouse-trap of his invention, and caught prosperity. No trap had ever before so nicely corresponded to the cunning of surplus mice. Method is simply an adaptation to the facts. The sculptor discovers what form of tool will hollow a knee-joint, and he saves time for the face. Philosophers and theologians grow stiff in that joint because they refuse to walk in Nature's way. But the great discoveries of Newton and Kepler had nothing mysterious : they were the gestures of men without preconceptions to methodize, whose ways were so near to Nature that they kept the rare brains susceptible to organic laws ; so that their genius was their health.

Method rules the distinction between the literary man and the Bohemian, the scholar and the charlatan.

Mere mental and emotional ability works extravagantly, and falls poor at last, perhaps quite suddenly, unless it has the grace to ally itself with certain old necessities of the universe, either as horse in the traces or driver upon the seat. A great deal of American literary and religious striving runs to sentimentalism because the fatigue of discovering the order of the world is found to be too great.

There can be but one mental method, and that is when intelligence discerns and repeats the way in which natural and spiritual things develop. The idea of unity presides over this : an idea which starts in our own personal oneness ; the organic integrity that precedes good and bad, right and wrong, all dualism and dispute. The first assurance which this idea gives the mind, or struggles, amid the horde of theologies and preconceptions to give it, is, that all things have the consistency of being developed in one way. Has this idea come into our consciousness as a deduction from a long series of experimental observations, a century-plant composted by all the soils, and tended by all the races of mankind, or is it the original form of the mind that is kept constantly stirring by observation, lest an overdose of mythologizing should prove fatal? If we say it is only a late result of a long series of observations, carried on by different races of men, and transmitted in imperfect stages of deduction 'to the present, we do not account for the first step which the mind made towards the idea. However bunglingly made, the impulse to make it must have previously resided in the mind. Some character of the mental constitution must have decided that relation towards the observation of facts which we perceive to result in a law of unity. If, on the other hand, we say that it was at the earliest period innate in the mind — meaning that mind could not be born without having it expressed, not merely implied, in its structure — we cannot account for observation, nor explain the imperfect attempts it made on the road to the idea. If an idea be innate, it must preside over the whole process of experimental knowledge, prevent early misunderstandings, and impress every stage of observation with its own sense of the true method of the universe. It is plain, then, that two things run parallel with each other, and are capable of touching for mutual interaction : the universe and the mental structure ; and the observing faculty moves in the company of an explaining faculty, which is a developing tendency, and not an innate idea. There was a time when all facts lay latent in the universe, and all co-ordinating instincts lay latent in the mind. But the first material fact found a mental comrade, whose hand groped after it, and both began to feel their way together towards a principle of unity.

The idea of unity was once an inchoate form, laid *> helplessly upon the breast of the divine order : a capacity to imbibe, assimilate, reduce to function and organ, the teeming facts ; not innate, but inchoate, and not even now hardened into manhood nor proceeding through all persons ; but it has preserved, amid its fumbling and complaining, the power to drain the great Order into all its veins. It came from beneath the bosom at which it suckles, and the circuit is complete.

What is meant by saying that all things have the consistency of being developed in one way ? It means that all effects flow out of all causes in unbroken continuity of direction, thought and purpose ; that the forethought of the Creative Mind, present at every point of space in every moment of time, brings succession of ail phenomena without a break, without a spasm, without an after-thought or an interpolation ; that the divine ability eternally possessed this intention of gradualism and unbroken uniformity, both in matter and mind ; that the words genera, species, strata, epochs, transitions, races, and systems, only express our mental recognition of characters, but do not confirm the existence of breaks, faults, renewals or interpositions ; that in all cases the agencies which are found to be uniformly at work are those which preclude the idea of exceptional ones ; and that the idea of exceptional forces or periods belongs to a state of mind whose unity is not thoroughly set free. According as a man knows himself he knows the nature of the Cosmos. The more he knows himself the more obedient he becomes to a consciousness that the famous axiom of Hippocrates, u '0 Nopog navxa XQaxvvei" Law governs all things, must become the basis of his thought.

There have been developing periods of intelligence, during which the feeling of Law is feebler than the idea of caprice. All the natural elements favor at first a sentiment that phenomena occur by spasms, irruptions, determinations of personal agency. Persons themselves work in this intermittent way, and they impute it to Nature for ages, during which mythology is born. All mythologies are merely the emphasis which the want of intelligence puts upon facts and appearances : they are lifted and quiver in a mirage of heated fancy. But the crude intelligence has nothing else to start from ; and it begins in this way to develop itself with a simple and uninstructed perception that there are some very wonderful elements of nature and mind.

Now, although at first all method was mythological, yet the most scientific period of a race or of the world may still have its mythology, because all minds do not develop abreast of each other into the form of unity. The most religious people may be the most infested with the sentiment that God sometimes inserts parentheses into creation, because religion, in its limited sense, is only a tendency to acknowledge that there must be something invisible to man and superior to his knowledge. Religion in its widest sense is the same as mental unity, and it invests the invisible with its own overpowering consciousness that the invisible is a continuity of Law.

Mythology blossoms and exhales. Its pungent aroma is what men call the Supernatural. With a root in the ground, and leaves that imbibe the simple elements of nature, the moment it comes to perfume men pronounce it the true Invisible. But it is still only matter in a tenuous form.

How shall we distinguish ? We cannot call every thing Nature, or every thing Supernature. In the former we do not recognize the making of Nature : in the latter we lose the order of the things that are made. There must always be the Natural because , there is always the Supernatural. But our own menf) AMERICAN RELIGION;

tal form of unity reveals to us the nature of the Supernatural, whether we believe that this mental form is the net result of all human experience, or that it is a primitive constituent of mind. There can be no quarrel here, nor can there be any obscurity in defining the Supernatural, since the idea of unity which is actual at the end of one process is latent at the beginning of the other. What is chiefly important to note is that when Nature is best understood — and that is when Mind is most perfectly developed — the Supernatural appears as the ground and efficient cause of uniformity, gradual successiveness, perpetual invariability ; and irruptions from the invisible are crowded out by the sustenance of Law.

This has a reflex effect upon the past. Our growing conviction that Law sustains every thing, and holds a lineal, undislocated course through all provinces, interprets the past, and, in doing so, eliminates every trace of its mythologies. Nothing is left of mankind's views upon the Supernatural, unless the idea of natural sequence has been mixed up with them. Nothing is left, except a religious sense that there is something invisible. But one of the most important branches of Comparative Religion is that which we may call Essential Mythology, or the real, natural, moral, and spiritual ideas, which, in their struggle towards the light of unity, figured in the myths and legends of the past. The object of Essential Mythology is to show how logically the Divine assumed these phases in the human mind ; this relative incompleteness, these tentative efforts, like the succession of animals, from things that creep to things that fly ; this congruity and commanding forethought, always sufficient to itself, that takes the shortest line between two points, and never breaks it when expected by ignorance, or desired by passion, or pretended by marvellousness. A true science of mythology will pronounce marvellousness the forlorn resort of a mind not yet equipped with unity. When Hippocrates said that there was no divine disease,* he gave the first distinct contribution towards the scientific theory of development, which shows saucer-eyed fancy that the naturalness of every thing is its divinity, and that the invisible never plays tricks with its own eternal sequence, no matter what may be the stake, life or death, or the spiritual health of human souls. Any thing that is truly desirable is already profoundly supernatural, because it flows out of its own essence, or springs from its own seed.

The supernaturalists, who believe in miracles and the exceptional nature of Christ, cling to that theory of development which asserts a special intervention of the Creator at the commencement of fresh forms of animal life in those epochs known to Geology. This theory does not despise a logical order, but finds it in the thought upon which these forms are strung, and not in the gradual derivation of them by any principle of selection, or primitive tendency, or struggle for existence, from the forms just preceding. The supernaturalists prefer the theory of the intervention-

* This Greek superstition, which Hippocrates first discredited, was that the different kinds of insanity represented possession by different deities. Something in the style of the insane person was analogous to the characteristic of the god, and consequently was referred to him as its source.

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ists to that of the gradualists, not so much because the latter would derive man from some chimpanzee, as because the former break up creation into successive epochs, with a supernatural irruption at the head of each. This gives a color to their theology of intervention ; and Christ appears, not as a gradual blossom on the stem of human nature, but a new creation, and the first member of a new series. Then it is not difficult to suppose that the miracles came in with the miraculous conception of the new man. If the first man was built afresh and not slowly evolved from any thing, did such supernatural events cease then, or have there been subsequent incursions from a higher sphere, to add new forms of spiritual life to human society ?

Now the theory of intervention, which theology is lately disposed to press into its service, cannot be applied to the mental and spiritual growth of mankind. It may or may not be true through all the geological eras, and Darwinism may be shown to be a scheme without a constituency, by the facts serving more and more the theory of a sequence of thought with spasms *

* Mr. Huxley, who is a gradualist, does not think it is essential to deny that nature sometimes passes, by a leap, to her fresh varieties, since the leap itself marks only the method of the force that gathers to it, and not a divine impromptu, or thrusting in. He says : " We have always thought that Mr. Darwin has unnecessarily hampered himself by adhering so strictly to his favorite ' Natura non facit saltum? We greatly suspect that she does make considerable jumps in the way of variation, now and then, and that these saltations give rise to some of the gaps which appear to exist in the series of known forms."

in the application. But this is beyond our province : we confine ourselves to seeing that, since the creation of man, Comparative Religion does not furnish one fact to justify the idea of mental development by special intervention. Every race shows gradualism in all the provinces of its intelligence, a passage of embryotic thought through all its phases, without a single break or interpolation for which natural causes are not sufficient to account. The Divinity within the natural causes has assumed gradualism for its method. Every kind of truth has spread by the gradual contact of colonization, emigration, or conquest, from one race to another. Upon every meridian the same embryotic ideas of morals and religion are found, which develop with variations due to local influences alone. All religious souls and leaders have been substantially alike in the raw material of their thought. In East and West, in India, Judea and Greece, all of the sages and prophets have shared each others' essentials : beneath the hue of all their cheeks the composition of the blushing blood has been identical. The inchoate mind of the race has brought a correspondence to life and nature, and kept it everywhere and transmitted it. So that intervention, if it ever was the preadamitic plan, has been since changed to immanence : the even, perpetual, unbroken, unhasting, unresting Presence. Comparative Mythology and Religion find no supernatural distinction between the order and texture of the ideas of all the great teachers. Confucius develops towards disinterested morality and monotheism, in other words, towards mental unity; -and so do Zoroaster, Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Christ. The ethnological

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distinctions do not break the type, nor clamor for the supernatural. We find inequalities of growth, a surplus of one thought here, of another there, a variety of combinations ; but no point where there is an interpolation of an impulse or principle which the general soul might not have always been credited with in various embryotic stages. We find amplification, and the correction that is the result of an increase of intelligence, differences in degree but not in kind : neither in a man, nor in a race, nor an epoch, can you find a break in the linear development, and in the transmissibility, by the total of births on the planet, of all the essential substances of morals and religion. Shakspeare and Beethoven are rooted in the general imagination which they overshadow, and upon which they shower blossom and fruit. So do Socrates and Christ confirm the logic of the inchoate mind.

The history of thought or of religion is that of a great crescendo movement, that takes up the feebler chords and pronounces them more strongly as it proceeds, drops out the partial chords or overcomes them by the outbursting unity, and accentuates the great theme by developing and not by thrusting in. The composer has his whole orchestra upon the spot ; he neither invents nor interpolates an instrument, but wakes them to all combinations. If he gives a few bars rest to the reeds or the brass, the motive of the piece proceeds, and is just as immanent in a pause as in a climax. In the gradual growth of thought, we find that the first faint tendency to account for all things in some way, by connecting them with a mythical personage, or with moisture, with fire, with nurn-

RIGHT MENTAL METHOD. II

bers, with a First Cause, has been the self-sufficing seed of the rational method of modern science. The anticipations of the foremost minds have been early blossoms from it ; lucky divinings and intuitions were not intruded but evolved. The divine immanence has not been impatient at working in this way. Pythagoras differs from Thales by his position in time and history, and his superiority is that of subsequence. In the province of Religion, we detect a faint sense of the divine Fatherhood, long before Judea becomes fragrant with filial confidence. When we are astonished in spring to see a western prairie one rolling fire of flowers, we do not think of an irruption but of an evolution. And when the pine forest burns down, and oaks succeed, we are reminded of the natural latency of the germs in all the successions of mankind. The only supernatural condition is that of perpetual indwelling when Christ comes after Socrates.

No doubt there are periods in human history when the divine proceeding lifts itself in great enthusiasm, and some man or movement, collecting it into memorable expression, gives it a name that survives, to mark the highest point of thought or morals. The supernaturalist claims that such periods have something exceptional in them. I have heard them called nodes, and compared to the swelling of the smooth cane-plant into the joints that support its whole development ; but we must not forget that the joints are only gatherings of the elements already in the stem : the silex is not different, the carbon is the same. No intrusion has brought into the composition of the joint a quality which the stem is not competent to furnish.

Or we may compare these moments of the creative power to the high tides that wet all the coast-lines and leave behind, as they ebb, the sea-wrack to delineate the extreme they reached. Men visit the fresh heaps to collect tokens of the. distance whence the wave arrived. But we must be careful to explain that the tide which rises and then ebbs wets every square inch of its movement with identical elements : its highest point is not reached by means of the intrusion of a new constituent, and the force that lifts it is also at every point the same. The natural advantages of the inchoate mind of mankind have simply been expanded, but they have not been altered by the insertion of any elements ; so that you cannot expect such periods to be illustrated by any modification of natural laws : the functions of life and death remain untampered with ; no more men are raised from the dead than before ; no preternatural signs can emphasize what is intrinsically emphatic, or lend it any recommendation. The general mind, through which the tide came sweeping, will sooner or later recognize itself with wonder and gratitude, and find that not a law of nature has been meddled with. Stories will cluster around remarkable men and moments, as they do around remarkable features of a landscape. The savage will have his tradition about some natural gathering of forces in geological displacements ; in the growth and endurance of mighty trees ; in the encroachment of the ocean upon old districts that were peopled ; in the benefits that ancestors derived from the sagacity of some stranger who represented their own qualities enlarged. When he is gone they celebrate the high tide to which they came in him. This is only because the scientific method was not yet awake to refer phenomena of matter or mind to their own invariable constituents. The savage constructs a story as huge and nebulous as the impression which the eclipse or the subterranean shudder makes upon his imagination. A great man is a signal for an unmethodical generation to have an attack of mythology. It falls to marvelling where the man of science, who explores all structures with the tool of mental unity, is content to wonder and adore. We must be careful not to infer from the past effects of marvellousness the possibility of miracle. And we need not import into the period that excites the marvel, any more than into the joint of the cane-plant, a quality that did not build the average from which the period rose.

When the great men appear, perhaps upon some lowly stock, to spread a sudden blossom whose report fills all the world, and liberates a fragrance that is not exclusive but welcome and suitable to all mankind, at first we marvel, and the disposition is to ask, " Who can trace these miraculous conceptions ? " But we do not wish to trace a Shakspeare farther than to discover that the divine climax of his imagination was slowly gathered out of human nature. If we approach the fact without prejudice, the method of nature will convince us that w T hen God came to a high-tide in him, He came with the humanity furnished by a hundred ancestors, through all of whom He had been present, building and modifying brain-cells and dispositions in the ordinary way of inheritance, till, when He Shakspearized, it was not with incursion of fresh elements that were not previously in the poet's line. The patience of Nature selected that brain at length to condense her pathos and her laughter like a dew : but the common air and light hung upon its myriad points those lucid drops that sparkle as long as the generations which provide those elements can notice them.

Such moments that receive a great man's name only emphasize God's ordinary meanings, all of which receive their turn in religion, poetry and art ; and mankind climbs with these to clearer outlooks over their natural horizon. But, in the emphasis received by such a moment, what is there to disturb the order of nature? Things that lie in a different province, — such as the specific gravity of water, the condition of a dead body, the normal production of the vine, the laws of human embryology, the blossoming of a figtree, — cannot become modified, or put forth exceptional phenomena. As soon, and with as much reason, might the moments when Hamlet was composed have received superfluous attesting by quickened fermentation of all the beer in Stratford.

What place is there, then, in history, for any thing more supernatural than this incessant Presence ? Surely one would think that it would suffice the craving of the most inveterate thaumaturgist. Indeed, it is a wonder that there is any thing at all, or that there ever was any thing, including God himself! The vast fact feeds the imagination till it is too cloyed for the confectionery of miracles. Sometimes it seems inexplicable that there was never nothing at all. " But why then," urges the supernaturalist, " after being obliged to put at the beginning of your series a miracle, namely, the creation of something, whether out of fulness or of nothingness, should you shrink from repetitions of the first divine act that we can conceive? It was a first supernatural step : why may there not have been subsequent steps, making the same gesture of incursion? You strain at a gnat and swallow a camel." The universe proffers its own reply to this by furnishing us with the right mental method. The first step w r as no more supernatural than the God who stepped ; no more nor less. The gradualism of all subsequent creation refers us back to gradualism in the remotest original purpose of the divine mind. We cannot use the word " beginning," or say that there was ever such a thing or movement. The first term in the series of all phenomena was essential Eternity : there must then have been eternally a proceeding forth out of Eternity. There must eternally have been the simple forthcoming, of which all things are modes, gradually developed, but never aside from the continuous company of the divine developer. Is it too dogmatic to say that there was no such thing as intervention at first, nor interpolation : not a spasm, nor an alteration of essential condition ; not a jump from rest to motion, from nonentity to pleroma, from pleroma to primitive substance? The whole universe puts the stamp of its method upon the eternal proceeding of the universe. Eternal continuity precludes the possibility of a first act, a first flaking-off, a first motion. The phrase is " I am," but the deep, unbroken breathing that voices it has neither beginning nor end.

But suppose there was a first act, and admit the claim that it was a supernatural transfer of power, or passage from one state to another, or intrusion of spirit into matter, or waking from rest to motion, or quickening of passive germs, — just as you please to state it. If this act placed all the laws of nature upon their route of gradual development, the act itself is a proclamation of the impossibility of supernatural interference with the method which the act involved. Then it becomes a question of scientific observation of the method; and while the facts are coming in, and opinions differ, we must mark the tendency. And if you hear any noted man of science affirm that he finds nothing in nature incompatible with the idea of miracles, ask him if he finds any thing in nature compatible with it. That is the real point. He may say, particularly if he does not like to compromise his position in an orthodox community, that none of the facts he has ever collected deny the theory of special interventions, and that for all he knows there may be miracles to-day. Yet while he says it, the ground he stands on is consistency and continuity of law. A single break in that lets all his facts through into chaos ; and instead of a contriver and constructor he becomes a cJiiffonier or junkmerchant : naturalist and supernaturalist may stock his bag or buy his truck. If a man of science thinks that a thing lies out of his province, he will be very likely to say that he knows nothing against it. He w T ill not meddle with revivals, nor dispute on infant baptism. Politics he may ignore. If he is led to investigate the modern spiritualism, his scientific instinct detects the shadowy nature of the claim that spirits intrude into the organization of living persons to control them. For the breath of his intellect is the idea of non-intrusion, non-intervention, the inviolability of every province that is controlled by necessary laws. The moment that science consents to apply its principles to mooted questions, delusion vanishes before the steps of method : the forces that are sufficient now are declared to have been always sufficient to transact the business of nature ; their gradualism and their adamantine sequence tell the whole secret of the past.

A confusion arises from the use of the words Natural and Supernatural. If a man says he is a Naturalist he is accused of confining God to one original act of creation, which put blind forces on their developing way ; of supposing that first throb of divinity to widen into the undulations of all phenomena : as if the w r orld were like a cannon-ball that carries an impulse and leaves the cartridge behind, or the complicated motion which the stroke of a cue lends to the balls upon a billiard-table, without following them round. If a man says he is a Naturalist with the divine immanence added, he is accused of making the immanence just as blind a force as the forces it travels with, and it might as well have been left behind. If he says the immanence is a distinct Person and Volition, he is still accused of leaving out the attributes of Paternity and Love : the divine Person only wills the fatefulness of laws. If he says that it is an omnipresent Father of love, who cares for his children, he is accused of investing the logic of the universe with the phrases of religion, since logic is predestination, and that can have no care. If he says that the prel8 AMERICAN RELIGION.

destination was of that perfect kind which, in every instance, without sacrificing consistency, meeting selfish expectations, or deferring to human ignorance, secures true welfare to every form of life, the objector replies, " Very well, so I believe." But does he believe so ? Then he cannot perceive the legitimate results of such a statement. It sounds like something which he says in a lucid interval, when his brain is not congested with miracle, and he narrowly escapes becoming permanently rational. But this is what every supernaturalist must really believe : that the divine foresight must have arranged for intervention as a feature in its consistency, in order to adapt itself to exigencies by being something different from its own exigency ; a gracious coming in at the nick of time to obviate some previous doings of its own, to take back its words by saying something in another key that is not fateful but fatherly, to lie in wait for the critical moment that shall be a signal to fly in the face of the immutable order with signs and wonders, to get its spiritual excellence attested, by means of the little cursory indulgence of a higher law, which science will some day adopt.