Positive religion...

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

ESSAYS, FRAGMENTS, AND HINTS

Preface

T HAVE sometimes wished it were customary for persons quite unknown to fame, who, living quietly but thoughtfully in common ways, have sanely and happily passed the bourne of threescore years and ten, to mark that event by some word which might honestly tell the meaning of life as they have found it, and serve as their particular legacy to the general thought.

The motive is strengthened, and becomes even a sense of duty, when one's vocation has compelled him statedly, seriously, and often, to meet the real occasions of the inner life, and to interpret them as he may in their relation to the Supreme Order; especially if he has been forced by circumstances frequently to revise those judgments. There are certain crops which thrive best when they have been repeatedly and severely cut back in their early growth ; and it may happen, sometimes, that the harvest of the Word is one of these. The road

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one follows in life is not often so smooth as it looked at starting ; and the waymarks that seemed plain in the beginning call for many a correction before the journey is ended. He learns, not without a pang, to put away one thing after another that had seemed a part of his necessary outfit ; and he must take account, more soberly, but perhaps not less gratefully, of the things which remain. This world has not shaped itself by his hopes and dreams, but he has won a more even temper of serenity in his clearer acquaintance with the existing fact. And he finds, to his surprise perhaps, that life has not lost its . sacredness or its joy ; while its light is mellowed, and its horizon begins to grow grey with the dusk of evening.

The pages which follow are, so far as the writer is conscious, absolutely faithful transcriptions of those phases of experience, or of the judgments upon them, to which he has been led in the course of the fifty years since this general line of thought became the occupation of his life. During these years he has taken an active part by voice or pen in nearly every public discussion, or controversy, that seemed to touch on religious theory or social ethics. In these same years he has enjoyed the near companionship of very many who have been

PREFACE. IX

eminent teachers of their generation, or have given the testimony of obedient, humble, and consecrated lives. In whatever he has written, he has sought to do justice to what he has found highest and best in this compan) r of witnesses, and to interpret with his utmost ability those lessons of life which their word or example has shed light upon. So far as he is aware, he has not attempted to prove, still less to controvert, a single proposition open to dispute : he has sought only to utter, as plainly as might be, the testimony which was his to give. The personal convictions, meanwhile, which alone would make that testimony worth his giving, he has not in the least attempted to disguise, any more than to conceal those parts of it that may be thought to represent incidents of his private experience.

Respecting the significance of his title he may be allowed here to say a single word. The long habit of regarding Religion as a thing of opinion, of emotion, or of ceremony, has tended greatly to blind men to it as an element in their own experience, or as a Force, mighty and even passionate, in the world's affairs. And it appears to him that any word however feebly spoken, or any hint however imperfectly conveyed, which recog-

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nizes first of all that positive quality in it, — independent of party, race, age, or creed, — is a step towards the revival of it as a Power wholesome, invigorating, and inspiring, in the lives of men.

J. H. A.

Cambridge, Massachusetts, December 25, 1890.

Part I. — Essays. Page

I. How Religions Grow 3

II. Religion as Experience 23

III. What is a Revelation? ....... 40

IV. The Miracle of Life ........ 58

V. The Law of Justice 69

VI. The Law of Sacrifice 86

VII. A Religion of Fear 104

VIII. A Religion of Trust . . 117

IX. The Term "Agnostic" ........ 126

X. The Name "God" 138

XI. The Name "Christian" 151

XII. The World-Religions 1 72

PART II. — FRAGMENTS AND HINTS. Witness to the Truth 193

A Nineteenth-Century Religion 197

The Worship of Humanity . 203

The Unpardonable Sin 210

The Death of Jesus 212

The Mystery of Pain 216

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PAGE

At Sixty: A Xew-Year Letter 220

The Question of a Future Life 224

Hope, as an Anchor 230

The Divine Judgment 234

Pardon 237

Stepping-Stones 241

The Bright Side 244

Going Forward 248

PART I.

ESSAYS.

POSITIVE RELIGION.

HOW RELIGIONS GROW.

" The "Word is a live seed " (<rir6pos).

TTTHEN Professor Gray wrote that most charming of text-books, "How Plants Grow," he gave us a hint of the way we are to follow in our study of the law of life in everything that lives. I will take that hint, then, in what I have to say about the growth of Religion.

This we may here understand, without any further definition, to mean true religion, the higher life of the soul, apart from the rubbish of superstition or the morbid growths of passion that have been entangled with it.

The first point which I wish to note is this: That little book shows us how, when the seed of any common plant falls into the ground, it swells in time, with moisture and heat, and then begins to unfold, from the very start, in two opposite directions : it sends down the tiny fibres of the root to grasp at particles of the earth which it feeds upon ; and by the same effort it throws up a slender stem, with its pale-green rudiments of leaves, into the air and sunshine, which give it vigour, colour, and the capacity of continued growth. Now "the seed is the Word." And I shall ask you to observe the analogy in the law of life when we speak of Religion, which unfolds from its earliest germ in two directions, not in one only: it lays hold upon the earth below with the firm roots of love and duty; it flowers out in the upper atmosphere of our life, in hope, joy, trust, aspiration, and peace. In each of these two directions it appears as the soul's higher or ideal life; and both are equally essential to its completeness. Thus, in our study of its growth, we have to keep alike in view its two great departments, — Ethics, or duty, and Piety, or worship.

For one moment more I will call back your attention to the analogy we started with. When we come to look more closely or more broadly at the life of plants, we find that there are three points of view, or objects of study, which we must attend to, to make our plan complete, — several others, perhaps, but at any rate these three : first, the origin of that life ; second, its development, or unfolding; in the particular plant or kind; third, its grouping, or classification by genus and species, showing the relations, dependences, and conflicts, of many different kinds. To apply this to the topic before us, we find. then, that we have three questions to answer instead of one : namely, 1. How Religion grows ; 2. How a Religion grows ; 3. How Religions grow. Of these the first seems to me by far the most important and interesting, and by far the most neglected at the present day. So I need be the less troubled if I should seem to neglect, in comparison, either of the others.

To go back once more to the analogy of vegetable life. Of the origin of this, I do not know that any other account can be given than that it appears to be spontaneous and universal wherever there are conditions fit for it. Not only it is so, in amazing constancy and variety, on all parts of the earth's surface we know, but some astronomers have seen, or thought they saw, pale-green streaks on the face of the moon, from which they at once inferred a remnant of atmosphere, water, and vegetation.* Now we need not trouble ourselves in the least about any theories of its origin, — whether germtheories, or theories of chemical evolution, or theories of special creation. For our purpose, one is as good as another ; nay, for anything we know, they may all, in our higher philosophy, come to the same thing. All we have to do is to look at the fact, to understand it as well as we can, and to see what it may possibly lead to in our study of the higher life. For, as soon as we go far enough back, our definitions run into one another. All we can say is, that life flows immediately, by any open channel, from the Universal Source of life; and in saying this we are just where we were at the beginning, only with the advantage of seeing more clearly what our words mean.

To apply this now to our question, How Religion grows. You observe that I wish to keep it dis-

* See Langley's " New Astronomy/' p. 148.

tinctly in view that the Source of Life — no matter what we assume it to be — is here, now, and always, acting by direct contact or pressure, under laws always uniform and the same. This thought is what is called, religiously, the thought of "the Immanent God," and is very characteristic of the religious dialect of the day. I do not wish to define it, still less to defend it, but only to see what it leads to in the treatment of my subject.

That leading surely is that we should study the growth of religion on the spot, in the phenomena which are, or may be, familiar to us in the observation of human life in our own day and (as it were) at our very side, — nay, in the hints and experiences that may happen to any one of us to-day. Now I observe that this is very often not the way taken, even by those to whom it would seem to lie openest and nearest. They will speak, perhaps, of our being always in the presence of " an Eternal and Omnipresent Energy from which all things proceed," and say that religion is, at bottom, the emotion with which we contemplate that Energy; but, as soon as they come to speak of the origin of religion, and its phenomena, they take us ten thousand years back, or into the customs of some barbarous tribe ten thousand miles away, and give us some ghost-theory, or dream-theory, some talk of fetish-worship, or star-worship, at an enormous distance from anything that touches us in our own lives. This may be a very curious thing to know, and a very useful thing to do, but it is not at all the thing that concerns us now. If the belief in an " Immanent God " is good for anything, or if the theory of an " Eternal and Omnipresent Energy " is good for anything, it seems to me that it is good for exactly this : to help us understand the facts of the religious life just as they are, in us and about us, now ; not the supposed beliefs of savages, and not the real or imaginary notions and practices interpreted to us by painful antiquarian study. In the view of it that we are to take, Religion, where it exists at all, is full as fresh and original a thing, and quite as near to the Eternal Source of Life now and here, as it was in the days of the cave-dwellers, or the sun-worshippers, or those feeble folk whose imaginations ran on ghosts and dreams.

Again, I wish to keep clear as I can of theories, and look to facts. A hundred years ago there was a cheap and easy notion, very commonly professed, that religion was devised by the craft of priesthoods, with intent to deceive, and to serve their private ends; but we have got far beyond that now. The past century has been very fruitful in theories which explain some one feature, but do not begin to embrace the whole. We need not dwell long on any of them. If Schleiermacher says that the origin of religion in the soul is " the sense of our dependence," I reply, That may be very true, but it is not the whole truth ; for religion starts quite as often with a sentiment of enthusiasm, of courage, elation, gratitude, or hope. If Charming, or some disciple of Channing, says that its origin is in aspiration to the Divine and Holy, I reply that that may be; but it may equally begin from a sense of sympathy, contrition, or despondency. If I am told that it essentially consists in "the effort of man to perfect himself, " I reply that so it is no doubt in many an intelligent and generous soul ; but I remember too, as characteristic of it, a temper subdued to the most abject servility, a self-discipline carried to the austerest practice of ascetics, which degrades far more than it ennobles, yet by common consent is included in the name.

Then, too, we have been very much accustomed to hear religion described, or religions classified, as consisting of people's opinions or beliefs about the universe, duty, and destiny. Thus Dr. Martineau, at the beginning of his luminous and massive "Study of Religion," defines it as "belief in an ever-living God, that is, a Divine mind and will ruling the universe and holding moral relations with mankind, " — which last, as he afterwards explains, includes belief in personal immortality and a future state of rewards and punishments. This is an accurate account of the fundamental doctrines of that form of the Christian religion which he has in view ; but it gives us a definition not much more adequate for our present object than the sentiment or emotion religion is sometimes taken for, to explain how it enters as an actual experience into human life.

Still, I cannot get along with my argument any more than those authors whom I have quoted, without narrowing my topic down by some term or phrase that will hint to us the real nature of that experience we have to deal with. I will begin, then, not by attempting a new definition of my own, in which I might be no more fortunate than the others, but by putting into words, as best I can, what seems to me the real origin of religion, considered as a fact in the experience of life. You may find my words technical, and even a little strange, considering the poverty of the religious dialect which most of us employ ; but they are the only ones I can think of that appear accurately to describe the fact. I say, then, that religion enters as an element into the experience of a man's life when he finds himself, in whatever way, face to face with the Eternal; and in that same hour knows that the deepest law and highest welfare of his life are somehow enfolded in it. For the nature of the experience is such that both these impressions come together.

Here, you see, I have to use a figure of speech, instead of the accurate terms of science ; because our first business is to recognize the fact, and till we have done this we have no business to analyze or define it. Still, I think the general sense of what I mean will be plain enough. For you will observe that I offer no theories about it. I take nothing for granted as to the existence of an " eternal world " outside of us, but speak only of a par ticular element or phase of our own experience ; I say " face to face with the Eternal, " just as I would say "face to face with Love, or Pain, or Death,"

— phrases which you will admit are quite familiar and intelligible to us.

And we may all, too, probably agree in admitting that there is that which we name " the Eternal, " — even if it were no more than bleak, blind, Eternal Fate, — something beyond our grasp, beyond our conception, beyond our imagination, beyond our faculty of reason, which yet does enter as an element into the experience of our life ; nay, is that substance, or groundwork, without which our thought of life itself would be impossible. And I say that when — by direct contact, as it were, or by a certain mental shock, and not by a mere process of understanding — it is distinctly recognized as a factor in our own life, then and' then only that which we call Religion may be properly said to begin with us, as a part of our life's experience.

I wish to keep as clear as I possibly can of all professional or technical phraseology, which would only obscure the fact till we have the fact itself to read it by. I will begin, therefore, with the simplest possible appeal to your imagination of what you have seen a thousand times yourselves, — possibly (as I had done) without the interpreting hint. I was travelling many years ago in a railway train through the lovely scenery of western Connecticut, with the second volume of Ruskin's "Modern Painters " (then just out), which I used as a running comment on the phases of natural beauty we were passing by. It was as the glow of a clear sunset was beginning to fade that I came upon these words, which seemed to give the key to a feeling I had often had at this superb spectacle, without

understanding it : —

" There is yet a light which the eye invariably seeks with a deeper feeling of the beautiful, — the light of the declining or breaking day, and the flakes of scarlet cloud burning like watchfires in the green sky of the horizon. I am willing to let it rest on the determination of every reader whether the pleasure which he has received from these effects of calm and luminous distance be not the most singular and memorable of which he has been conscious ; whether all that is dazzling in colour, perfect in form, gladdening in expression, be not of evanescent and shallow appealing, when compared with the still, small voice of the level twilight behind purple hills, or the scarlet arch of dawn over the dark, troublous-edged sea. . . . It is not by nobler form, it is not by positiveness of hue, it is not by intensity of light, that this strange distant space possesses its attractive power. But there is one thing that it has, or suggests, which no other object of sight suggests in equal degree, and that is — Infinity. . . . The sky of night, though we may know it boundless, is dark ; it is a studded vault, a roof that seems to shut us in and down ; but the bright distance has no limit ; we feel its infinity, as we rejoice in its purity of light." — (pp. 39, 40.)

Now this direct appeal to the impression made on our own sense by the daily spectacle of dawn or twilight glow is better than to prove, by volumes of dissertation on dawn-myths and sun-myths, that precisely the same impression stirred the same sentiment of devotion in our Aryan ancestors thirty centuries ago. We have got hold of an original fact of our own experience, which gives, as I said, the simplest possible illustration of what we mean when we speak of coming "face to face with the Eternal." There are many and many ways of it which affect us far more profoundly, — which, if we think of it at all, stir in our minds a response to those words of Jacob : " Surely, the Eternal is in this place, and I knew it not!"

Observe that the next words hint that the first feeling is deep awe: "And he was afraid, and said, How dreadful is this place ! " I may compare this feeling, akin to terror, with what suddenly comes to a boy learning to swim, who for the first time finds himself beyond his depth with nothing to buoy him up : his life is committed to a new, strange element, which he has not yet learned to trust. Coleridge tells us that the sense of terror is what one naturally feels at first when he finds himself in direct presence of the spiritual realm ; and he illustrates it by a case which he seems to have known himself. I give it from a very distant memory. A young man, he says, professed a complete and scornful disbelief of what is commonly called the world of spirits, and some companions of his planned to put his scepticism to the proof by the very simple trick, that one of them should personate a ghost ; but as he was known to be resolute, and a dead shot with a pistol which he kept loaded by his bed, they took the precaution of drawing the ball first. When the ghost appeared, he at once challenged it and gave warning ; then, counting three, fired at it point blank. The ghostly form stood unmoved; and in another instant the young man fell back dead. The shock of finding — or of suddenly seeming to find — that real which he firmly believed to be only the shadow of a dream, had, said Coleridge, its natural effect. Many of our modern ghost-seers have had their reason quite unhinged when they too have been thus brought, as they supposed, into sight and touch of those things which are invisible.

But there are gentle and normal ways, as well as those that are violent and abnormal, which deeply affect the mind by the presence and touch of what I have called "The Eternal." Here, for instance, is a story which I find very touching, cut from a New York paper. It is of a young girl who had led a life of shame and misery, with increasing horror and repugnance, drowning her remorse from time to time in drink. "But one night, " says the narrator, " I was taking her home after she had been on a terrible spree, when all of a sudden, in a dark block, she sank right down on her knees on a flagstone in the pavement, and vowed to be a Christian, and to lead a good life ; and from that night she has [done it], and every year at the anniversary night she goes to that spot, and kneels on that flagstone and renews her vow. That poor girl," he goes on to say, "going on pilgrimage once a year to a flagstone on the east side, and there, in darkness and silence, renewing her vows to God on the spot where His grace smote her down as it did Paul on his way to Damascus, is just as real and literal as the dialogue of two witty people in a drawing-room ; and to many of us it seems to furnish a type of theme better worth a master's touch." I do not ask you to accept any theory whatever by which this experience is to be explained. Think as you will of sudden conversions, and interpositions of Divine Providence in human life. I only ask you to look at the fact ; and then you may put it in any phrases which you think describe it better than those that I have quoted. What you are to notice is that that is how religion grows in a certain class of minds, and under certain conditions. It was the case of an ignorant, poor, probably superstitious, and what most people would call a vicious girl, if not irredeemably lost. But at that one instant — to use the best phrase I can think of — she stood " face to face with the Eternal ; " and from that instant she was saved.

She was ignorant and superstitious, we say. But the same thing happened in another way to another woman, who, of all I have personally known, perhaps best represents to the world what in New England is most cultivated and enlightened. You read in the life of Margaret Fuller that, on the journey in Europe from which she never returned alive, she lost her way one misty evening, while coming down a mountain side in Wales. The party who were with her went to seek a guide, but they too were lost in the impenetrable mist ; and all night long she wandered alone, till in the morning she reached a place of safety.

So runs the account as nearly as I remember it. But what is not so generally known, says a friend of her earlier years, is that on that night (to use his expression) she found religion. She left behind from that hour the stage of experience in which she might seem to have shown only a type of mere literary culture, which is but vanity and vexation of spirit, and became that other woman who has gone into history transfigured and heroic because her later life was all given to service of others in the cause which seemed to her the most worthy and noble.

I might go on with other examples which show how that element in our life here called The Eternal cuts like a flash across the path of every-day experience, showing by that flash the real things of a higher life, which, if we embrace and cling to it, becomes our religion. For instance, a man is struck low by a sickness or an accident or a heavy grief, that makes him suddenly realize, as he never did before, how our human life is continually beset by " an Adversary still as Death, swift as Light, strong as Fate, " — an Adversary whom it is impossible to question or resist ; and it is in the sense of his utter helplessness at that emergency that he first comes to know what those great words "Absolute " and "Eternal " mean.

The first emotion, as I said, is apt to be one of terror; but the permanent impression, as I think, is more commonly that of peace. Before that which in comparison with any strength of ours is Infinite and Almighty we do not rebel, but submit ; and in the act of submission we find the calmness which is a test, and perhaps the final test, of that way of life properly called religion. Thus Death, which is absolutely certain and inevitable to all, is at first contemplated by most men with extreme terror ; but physicians tell us that, when it actually approaches, it is met by almost everybody with perfect quietness and content, and without any dread at all. When the great scholar and diplomatist Bunsen said on his death-bed to his noble English wife, " In thy face have I seen the Eternal," he testified to- another side of the same truth, — that a loving trust so constant as to hint neither measure nor change is a type of that which in its very nature is immeasurable and unchangeable, and brings with it a deep peace.

I come back, then, to my phrase, which I hope has by this time been relieved of anything that might seem vague or commonplace, and say again that " religion enters as a fact into the experience of a man's life when he finds himself, in whatever way, face to face with the Eternal." It would be proper now to go on and show how from this germ — that is, this moment of experience — it puts forth, stage after stage, its two-fold life, laying hold upon the earth below with the firm roots of love and duty, and flowering out in the upper atmosphere of our life in hope, joy, trust, aspiration, and peace. But in doing this I should be simply following out the lines of illustration and appeal which are familiar to us, or ought to be, in our own observation of life about us, or in the great body of religious thought accessible to everybody. I must pass all that by, in order that I may complete what I have to say by attending briefly to the two remaining departments of my subject.

And here we must go back to our study of the life of plants. Each seed that germinates grows " after its kind, " as the Bible says, — that is, by a pattern or model which we call the type of that particular plant. Thus the germ of a lily will always send down its roots in separate threads, and send up its leaves with parallel veins, and produce a flower modelled on a pattern of threes ; while the germ of a rose will always put forth branching roots, and leaves with branching veins, and flowers modelled on a pattern of fives. What we call the type of the plant appears also in every fibre of the wood, in the odour, colour, or taste of every drop of sap, in the build of the plant itself, and in the structure of the fruit; so that, if you cut an apple across in thin slices and hold them up to the light, you will see a pattern of the five petals just as they were in the blossom before the fruit was formed.