Future religious policy of America...

Preface

This volume is offered to the public without apology. It goes out in search of readers. Its pages discuss a variety of the greatest of living questions, concerning which there is a wide difference of sentiment, and, as yet, no adjustment. The reasonable reader will not look for a book of this kind to be an array of universally accepted opinions. Any class of inferences drawn from the related facts of secular and religious history is likely to be more or less contested. If the book helps to make better Christians and better patriots of the people of this country, the author's purpose is accomplished.

Terre Haute, April, 1877.

Table Of Contents

PAGE.

I. Correlations of Law and Providence, ... 9 II. Observations on the Religious Condition of the

World, 35

Chapter I. CORRELATIONS OF LAW AND PROVIDENCE

WHEN this age shall write itself in history, it will doubtless be seen, that our civilization has not yet reached the divine ideal, and is therefore hardly able to follow out its consequences. There are foreign currents running through our complex national life, which, for a period, may hold us in bondage to ancient errors. A great task is reserved until this time, that of using the past and the future of history to place in their just relations the physical wants and the spirit life of man.

There are principles of human foresight in the nature and connection of events, and in the human mind and heart, — principles in no way related to the superstitions of the fortune-teller, or the jugglings of the astrologer. An intimate knowledge of the past will enable the sagacious mind to foretell events with great precision. History has set up guideboards, showing the ways of prosperity and adversity. The world to-day is standing on a vantage ground of nearly six thousand years, from which it io Law and Providence.

is better able to see its surroundings and look further into the future. Whoever has undertaken to solve the vexed problem of American history may study his lesson by the beautiful and constant light of analogy which has been thrown over the annals of mankind.

The moral and civil convulsions of history have been preceded by signs too plain to be mistaken. Tacitus foretold the downfall of Rome, and the invasion of the Barbarians. Charlemagne, when he first saw the Normans invade his dominions, predicted the calamities which befell his empire for a century afterward. Sir Walter Raleigh foresaw what would come in consequence of the sectaries of the English Church. Bishop Butler, in his sermon before the House of Lords, uttered a grand and true prediction concerning the political disorders which would arise from the atheistical principles of the eighteenth century. The reflecting minds of England predicted the independence of the American colonies thirty years before it occurred. Coleridge and Mazarin and Marshall and Mansfield and Burke and Pitt and Rousseau were political predictors of great sagacity. Statesmen of our own country, for years preceding the great crisis which unmanacled the black man of the South, foresaw that the popular mind was becoming ripe for something tragical. Patriotism and dread, no doubt, time and again kept back the prophecy from many lips.

In spite of the political antagonisms of Clay and Webster and Calhoun, it often hung equally, like an impending shadow upon their brows. The time

Accident and Chance. ii

came nearer, and the political horizon gave signs that a storm of civil discord was gathering to drench our southern soil in blood. From its hurtlings in the atmosphere, we not only believed, we felt there would be war. So deep have been the presentiments of those turbulent convulsions which have swept nations to their graves, that in ancient times the sympathy of nature was supposed to have brought the warnings. On the other hand, those glimpses of prosperity and peace which the nations have been able to wrest from their favorable surroundings have awakened the highest energies of the race, and have led it with a throbbing life into the greatest glories. This is not the work of fatalism or chance. The world's progress and decline hinges forever on the operation of free and contingent causes. Every fiber of man's moral agency rises in rebellion against any thing like a blind and inexorable decree. There is no such thing as chance. Accidents never happen. These words are found in our language expressing ideas which appear on the surface of things, but which have no foundation in reality. If any thing could happen by chance, there would be no grounds of dependence anywhere; the most dreadful uncertainty would prevail, an irresponsible definition would be given to the occurrences of life, and that gladness which comes up out of the most unfortunate events would be subverted and destroyed.

Law. — All nature indicates the existence of controlling law. Proofs of its dominion are on every hand. In the physical world, and in the moral world as well, an order and a system is discovered, so extensive, so regular and uniform, that the shrewdest minds have been led into the belief that it is the sole governor of the universe. Nature, with its beauty and grandeur, the mote in the sunbeam, and the vast sweep of the planets, with the hushed music of their silence, all feel the tread of cosmic law. Atoms and systems are alike under its control. It quietly forges a chain of natural causes to engirdle the globe. Its giant forces, in their vast extent, have been toiling on for ages, with a profound order which baffles conception. A universe of law is the sublimest natural truth with which we are acquainted.

Certainty. — Law is invested with great certainty. The sun has made his appearance in the zones at known times, without a single variation for thousands of years. The inclined plane of the earth's axis to the plane of its orbit around the sun, invariably causes the change in the seasons.

Gravitation operates according to known and established principles through all space. With many misgivings the mind may accept and memorize the first statements in astronomy, but when it is led to the calculation of an eclipse of the sun, wherein so many data are used, so many sure principles are applied, the last shadows of incredulity take the wings of the morning. Even the proposition that two straight lines may forever approach each other yet never meet, is divested of all uncertainty in the application of mathematical laws. These are so many evidences that law in itself is absolutely reliable.

Nature of Law. 13

Relentless. — Law is stern and relentless in its operation. Fire burns. Cold freezes. A needle point penetrating to the seat of life will invariably produce death. The rifleman's bullet whistles through the air with death on its wing, and sinks as fatally into the heart of a comrade as if sent purposely in pursuit of an enemy. The waves of the sea have overwhelmed many a drowning saint. A solid stone wall will not tumble down simply to break the head of a villain when he crouches in its shadow. To leap from a precipice is to court known and fatal consequences. As certainly as the atmospheric forces gather, and the conditions are at hand, the whirlwind sweeps down upon the city, devastating palaces and hovels alike ; as regardless of the life of the child as the robber. Law goes ringing relentlessly down the changes of cause and effect like the car on its track; and woe betide men or nations if they cross its pathway. The only way to escape appalling disaster, or enjoy protection, is to know and obey. There is no concession, no compromise, no respect for moral ends, in all its great dominion. For this reason worshipers of law are generally fatalists and disbelievers in the Christian system.

The exclusive investigation of material forces tends to smother the emotions, to clip the wings of faith, and make the moral man cry out for anguish.

Law and History. — There are knowable certainties in the moral world. Ethical laws are as inexorable as the law of atoms. They operate almost with the certainty of an equation in geometry. In the world's economy, it is not only necessary that an orderly arrangement be imposed on nature, but should be manifested in the most intricate and mysterious relations of life. Hereon is reached the great high ground of security in the regulation of human conduct. History, in a secondary sense, is but a strife for man's ascendency over the material world. As the conflict proceeds, the sternest physical forces are subordinated, and as by the wand of the enchanter, they are transmuted into laws for the social compact. This is more especially true of the last thousand years. The first ages were comparative strangers to the economic sciences which have now become giant sources of wealth and progress. Hoary kingdoms grew up and passed away, in the fertile belts of the Nile and Euphrates, and on the plains of inland Asia, before the human race had learned to wrest from nature the eternal secrets of a nation's greatest power. We have inherited from antiquity her languages, her poetry, her fine arts, her philosophies, and her religions. These come to us with unequaled excellence. But the spirit of invention and discovery, the omnipotence of agriculture, and this international network of commerce, are all our own. Thus our legitimate pantheistic prayer is being answered in the appliance of laws to work out results, for which we have no examples in the past. And yet, while these new enterprises may bring luster to our name, while they may greatly modify and develop, they will never make any radical change in the ancient order of things. Draper's overdrawn parallel between the life of the individual and the

The Nation and the Individual. 15

nation has in it the elements of a great truth. Youth, manhood, old age — this is the order. A nation's virtue -may prolong this life ; a nation's infamy may cut it short, but can never change it.

The child lives under a succession of unreal appearances. He views the world through a telescope whose foundations are laid in the unsettled surfacegrounds of human experience, and* he gets a blurred image. Volition stirs the leaf. The birds of the air divine his intentions. He is fascinated by all that he can not comprehend. Whatever is strange, or powerful, or vast, impresses him with dread. Youth is the mythological age of individual life. Its vague fancies are characteristic. They are the scintillations of an immortal fire within, soon to be revealed in the steady blaze of manhood. The fruition of knowledge can not be enjoyed in childhood. The vigor of manhood can not be retained in the sunset of life. These laws of man's being are invariable, absolute. So with nations ; from rude beginnings development brings into the full tide of strength; time advances, and if history is any criterion, decrepitude and death ensue. Unless the Gospel triumphs, or unless some new and strange light is thrown over the annals of our time, the day is coming when our metropolitan centers will stand in ruins, and be visited by the curious, as men now marvel at the desolations of Jerusalem and Nimroud.

The Fetich worship of Egypt began in an age of myth. Her proud manhood begins with the building of the pyramids, and extends through the line of her Ptolemies. Her decrepitude may be dated from the destruction of Alexandria, and the burning of the Serapion.

The Hebrews were children in their bondage, and through the desert. A nucleus of strength begins with the Judges, and culminates with Solomon. Decrepitude is induced by the captivity, and the national mission, save what prophecy reveals, ends in Christ.

The age of mythology in Greece gave rise to the expedition of the Argonauts. It gave incident to the lives of its fabulous heroes. It furnished material for the songs of Homer. It developed those ridiculous tales concerning the gods, which, in after time, were polished into one of the most beautiful and fascinating philosophies the world has ever known. The Grecian age of reason was that of her poets and rhetoricians and statesmen. The decline of Grecian countries was contemporary with the rise of the Roman Empire.

We are all acquainted with the impossible tales of Romulus and Remus ; the romantic story of the Sabian women; the Vestal fires, and the heroism of Regulus. We read of fauns and nymphs and sirens without number; and how all Italy was filled with the mystic whisperings of a thousand sacred groves. While the youth were being educated, some skeptical Roman had climbed the heights of Olympus, without finding the dwelling-place of a single god. The discovery of the deception, with a thousand others in the ancient mythological worship, prepared the people to be lifted forever above paganism. The ingrafting of Christianity brought new r impulses into the empire, and Rome's glory is now known as the

Battle Ground of the Age. 17

theme of much eloquence and song. In course of time, the nation's energies were paralyzed by corruption. Then began her decline ; through a long line of events, extending over a period of nine hundred years — a splendid architecture; fields once a garden ; a grand civilization ; finally destroyed by the ruthless Goth and Vandal.

These illustrations, in themselves, only approximate, yet they impress the meaning, and show how the nations are being controlled by fixed and eternal principles ; and how the same great causes of growth and decay are operated all along, and are at work now. Who does not believe that Spain is dying, or. that France will never again become omnipotent among the nations ?

If we can possibly discover the great virus of death which has desolated countries in the past, we may be able to shun it, and. lay hold on surer principles, such as will always bring with them the greatest wealth of happiness.

Providence. — As all nature indicates the existence of law, so all intelligence and reason add their testimony to the existence of a superintending Providence over human affairs. We are now approaching disputed ground. If infidelity can get rid of a divine Providence, the stronghold of the Christian system is taken ; the fatalism of law will rule the world.

Over the fact of God's intelligent government of

the world, the hosts of the Lord and of Antichrist

are struggling. All subordinate conflicts ultimately

relate to this one.

The discussion upon which we are about to enter will be easy or difficult, according to the kind of proof expected. If a demonstration of the existence of the Divine Supervision is demanded, we surrender the task as hopeless. A moral truth can not be demonstrated. We have to do, at present, not with a conclusion, but a principle — one of the first of all principles. It is a priori in itself. The highest degree of probability should be satisfactory in its discussion. A satisfactory proof may perhaps be found in the accumulative argument of the ages ; in the general consent of the wisest and best of the nations. If an opinion is shown to be world wide ; if it is found on every page of sacred and profane history ; if the world has prospered in its belief; if it additionally bears the stamp of reason on its face ; and above all, if it appeals like an intuition to the soul, the evidence in its favor is very strong.

The natural theologies of the world have always given off about the same results. There is but very little difference in the great under-currents of native religious thought and feeling, the world over. The hungerings of the race have led it to the unfolding of about the same principles of truth every-where. A substratum of fact underlies all pagan and Christian systems alike ; in which have germinated ideas of the Divine Being, known at present as the common property of mankind. These ideas, so nearly the same among all peoples, are not likely to be far from right, unless there are contradictions in the human character. This being true, the opinions of men in all ages of the world concerning these universal

Testimony. 19

notions, are valuable. The notion of a divine supervision is not the fruit of Christianity. It is the natural product of man's spirit nature, seeking the relation it holds to its Author.

The classic ages are full of the recognitions of a Providence. The philosophical starting-point of Pythagoras was unity. Unity multiplies itself into all phenomena ; is universally diffused, is the universal harmonizer, the source of all being and truth. This essence of things was celebrated as Deity ; and was the foundation of a system intended to teach the orderly arrangement of things, leading to an end. Unity was necessary to the soul's immortality; and it placed man's whole life under the guidance of the gods. Pindar, the lyric poet of Greece, was so imbued with a divine superintendency that success in life was attributed to supernatural causes. Herodotus, the father of profane history, declared that the structure of the world gave evidence of an intelligent author. .He says, "Divine Providence appears to be, as one might expect beforehand, a wise contriver. " ^Eschylus, the Greek Milton, fought at Marathon, exulted with the victors, and ascribed the wonderful deliverances to the gods. Cicero, the prince of orators, says, "If we everyway examine the universe, it is apparent from the greatest reason, that the whole is admirably governed by a Providence for the safety and preservation of all beings.' '

Livy, Rome's historian, ascribes the greatness of the nation to the blessing of the gods, and the greatness of the city to the fates. The fates, in mythology, imply influences akin to the intelligent operations of Providence with law. They are certainly not blind necessities; as may be seen from the obvious connection in which the word is often used, especially in Virgil. Livy searches antiquity, and finds that his own spirit is in sympathy with that which the wisest should have cherished. Tacitus vibrates between skepticism and unbounded faith. When his prophecies of punishment fail, he despairs ; but when the lecherous corruption of his time meets its doom, he speaks of divine interposition, as if no shadow of a doubt had ever crossed his mind. In the lives of Plutarch this idea almost reaches the magnitude of a system. Seneca had a vivid conception of God's intelligent government. In praise of Jupiter, he says, " Will you call him providence, with justice, for he it is whose wisdom cares for the world, so that it moves on without confusion to fill its task?" Epictetus declares that any one thing in creation is sufficient to a grateful mind to convince of a Providence. Antoninus came to the conclusion that whatever was ordained of God was full of wisdom and mercy. To him, a God without benevolence, and intelligent care was inconceivable.

Plautus, the Stoic philosopher, advocated a selfsurrender to the divine will. Apuleius, an African by birth, and a lover of the Platonic philosophy, believed that an evil destiny might be averted, and that the eye of the All-wise was ever attentive to the distress and sufferings of an innocent soul, involving the necessity for events to be adapted according to merit and justice. Al Ghazzali, the Mohammedan philosopher, believed that human adversity was the

Undercurrents of Idolatry. 21

bridle of God's love to draw his followers into the paradise above. The vast aggregate of Oriental notions bearing on this point presents but few distinctions from Western conceptions before the Christian era. There are no prominent variations in the creeds of all peoples, even if traced back to the world's great Spring-time. King Cyrus simply uttered the religious belief of all Persia when he said, "The gods watch over my safety, and warn me beforehand of every danger." Eastern idolatrous belief, in theory, harmonized with the Bible. The book of Job is little more than a polished index of patriarchal belief from the Nile country to the banks of the Indus. Lactantius, though a Christian, was famed for his extensive knowledge of heathen philosophies. He vindicates the doctrine of a Providence with the argument that it was the accepted sentiment of the ages. St. Ambrose likewise contends that the notion was universal.

As idolatry, abstractly, enters as an element in the proof of the universal religious nature of man; as nearly all the more prominent pagan systems have been invested with the idea of a sacrifice ; which is, doubtless, a collateral truth in history, intended to be the handmaid of prophecy, and speed the inception of the atonement ; so this element of truth, like a vein of gold, has been found running through all ethnic religions. It is shadowed in the mother of the gods, in Vesta, in Minerva, in Diana, in the Egyptian Isis, and a thousand other forms. Athena was seen in the beauty of the morning dawn; Zeus was seen in the sublimity of the deep blue sky;

Hephaestos in the sun; Neptune in the sea; ^Eolus in the wind; Jupiter in the roaring thunder; Bacchus in the vine ; Ceres in the ripening corn. When ancient belief is pruned of its excrescence, nature becomes the living vesture of God ; the illuminated and resplendent background, upon which the lights and shadows of infinite thought are seen to play. In human concerns, it was the same. Mercury was recognized in the civilized arts. In music and in poetry, Apollo was invoked. In the mechanism of metals, Vulcan was the helper. In the sanguinary billows of Greek or Trojan war, red-handed Mars was always visible. These busy creations of the brain show it to be the heart's best friend. These are emblems of the divine, having a common origin with Grecian oracle and Roman sibyline. They are glimpses of the Infinite, coming up from the world's dim twilight; faint echoes from the mystic borderlands of the supernatural. The truth of a divine supervision stands out as a bold factor in all mythology, and proclaims itself to be as deep-seated as man's moral nature.

Hence, it appears that revealed religion has only taken this truth like it has taken the great moral laws of the human heart ; it has more definitely defined, has re-promulgated, has authoritatively announced it. It comes neither from reason nor experience. The gleamings of its light, just like the divine law God wrote on the heart of the heathen, shines out wherever souls have been born. It is as resplendent in the life of the American Indian as in the reasoning of Plato. It is often found like an unpol-

The God Sense — Instinctive. 23

ished diamond in the rudest fetich worship. It is not a matter of speculation; its most fitting and eloquent expressions are found in man's inner consciousness. The belief is inwoven in the very fabric of his being. It is one of those grand doctrines, in which the impulses of the soul are led to overleap its theories ; and which, in defiance of all opposing forces, continually asserts itself in human history and human life. There is one and the same reason for a Providence and the immortality of the soul. A thousand death-blows may be aimed at its existence, and yet, like the soul's thirsting for a higher and better being, it still lives, with the impulsive beatings of an immortal life that will never give over the ambition, that God is somewhere near enough to see and understand.

Such is the wonderful fitness of this belief in the human heart and mind that the most sanguinary and desperate men reflect its nativity in those unfortunate times when they cry out for help from a higher power, hardly knowing what they say. There is certainly in life an instinctive sense of dependence and relation with the infinite. The heart's natural aspirations for an infinite helper in the difficulties of life have given birth, under the warpings of depravity, to every false religious system of the globe. This is the meaning of man's religious nature. That all things work together for good to them that love God was felt in the natural heart long before it found expression in the Book of Inspiration.

Look out on the theater of struggling generations, where vast multitudes of men have been surging from the extreme grounds of barbarism and enlightenment, knowing little of the past, and living only in the shadows of the present, having only a possible conception of the great indefinite future; above and over all may be heard the voice of that universal prayer, "Qur Father," revealing in clearest outline what God ought to be, just as he has been shown to be in the Gospel of his Son.

As has been asserted, the doctrine of a Providence has not been relegated to the realms of barbarism and credulity ; it owes its highest development to minds of culture. Men of learning and refinement have investigated its claims, and found them just. Lord Bacon, that universal genius, who drove from the face of Europe the last long shadows of the mediaeval age, says, "I had rather believe all the fables in the Legend and the Talmud and the Alcoran than that this universal frame was without a mind." From Bacon's time, and the intellectual awakening which his philosophy produced, when a new era of thought took hold on the world, the vigorous reflection of two centuries of development and revolution has wrought a grand confirmation of the belief of antiquity.

Relation. — The religious history of the world shows very conclusively that there has been too great stress laid on its supernatural and miraculous phases. The remotest infractions of the natural order have been magnified, have been carefully garnered in the great storehouse of miracles, and have been used as accumulative evidence against any extensive influence of secondary causes. It may be

A Natural Administration. 25

stated as a principle and method of the divine economy that supernatural agencies are never called into requisition when natural agencies will answer the purpose. Many illustrations might be given of this truth. The most wonderful handiwork of the Almighty may be seen outside the blaze of miracle. Human instrumentalities, as they are ordinarily utilized through the ages to bring out the divine purposes, are indeed lever arms in the world's salvation. If this had always been remembered in ecclesiastical history, the widening realm of scientific research had not offered such a supposed paralyzing to religious thought.

Let us confess the blunder, and as soon as possible acknowledge God as the natural administrator of the material world, as the successful and intelligent manager of social, civil, and religious forces. The attempted shout of triumph with which the skeptic greets the sentiments of the Christian philosopher when he appeals to any natural system for his arguments is not consistent. Christianity vies with unbelief in the praise of nature's doings. All known laws are but stepping-stones, enabling faith to walk up and reach above them to the great Lawgiver. The sublimest deductions in material science may enter as an element in Christian devotion. They become the handmaids of religion because they give broader and more comprehensive views to human adoration.

A rocky mountain peak, thrown up by physical convulsions, presents a dark picture of terrible sublimity. If flowers are planted in the moss of its crevices, if it is spread over with sunbeams, its gloomy grandeur is dispelled. To establish the relation of things is to bring a soul of unclouded goodness from them. From certain quarters the utterance is being repeated over and over, This mountain of law is immovable; the activities of nature are never suspended; the relations of these activities are never changed by any external influence whatever. No mountain is to be removed, no law suspended, no radical change is proposed, but to change some of the unnatural relations of the race to these laws. The sun in heaven never changes, but shines on in the same eternal splendor. See him through all the year the same sun, whether in the heat of Summer or the frost of Winter, whether through the vapor or through the mist, in the clear sky or hid in the cloud, as rising in the morning or fading into night: these varied relations do not change the sun ; they add to human happiness, they change man. These activities hold in themselves a moral purpose ; they contain a dispensation of love to brook the malignity of the adversary, who, in the world's harvest-field, has been sowing tares ; they tend to make pure again the river of life, so foul from the taint of human history. The planets revolve on their axes, and are kept in motion. The orderly arrangement of the celestial orbs is their glory. A grand security is felt in that the ages have pledged that there shall be no clashing, no collision, no wandering worlds broken from their restraints and rushing blindly through space to bring chaos in the material world. But, after all, there must have been some master hand to inaugurate

Mystery no Objection. 27

these splendors; there must be some presiding intelligence to bring out creation's purposes, and set the coronet of glory on its brow. Law reveals continuity, providence reveals God. One needs intelligence and love, the other an underlying method. They are not mutually exclusive, because there have been no encroachments, no ancient feuds to be settled. There is no need of a reconciliation, for there have never been any variances.

There are objections to this intelligent control of things, because it is so uncertain, so checkered and mysterious. The same objection might be urged against the intelligent and independent operations of the human mind. It is not so hard to see the hand of God in great things, such as the prosperity of a nation, or in calamities, such as the burning of a Boston or a Chicago, as in minor affairs. The smaller and less important events of life and history often have no meaning when viewed separately. Put a hundred events of life or a hundred years of history together, and there are evidences of a wonderful design. The visions of the sheaves and the stars will not explain Joseph's incarceration, neither will the darkness of his Egyptian dungeon throw any light on the visions. It takes Pharaoh's dream and its results to drive away the mystery of a life. Moses in the bulrushes, with the eye of God on him as the future lawgiver of Israel, has no significance in the human understanding- until it becomes a link in the chain of his wonderful subsequent career. It is in this way that the most adverse circumstances of individual and national life find a place in the divine economy. All history is adorned with such deliverances, and in them God displays his infinitude. The Almighty vindicates his sleepless guardianship in that he brings moral discipline out of the world's disorders.