Natural religion in sermons: ...

Front matter

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

Contents

What is Religion v Eeligion and Ethics, Doing and Knowing I., " " " II., . .

«« IV., . .

Time in Religion I.,

I

"If any man willeth to do His will, he shall know of the teaching." —John vii, 17.

Long and often may we rejoice in this great saying of the Master. It is one of the two or three of his sayings which reach deepest down into the moral and spiritual life.

The scene of it is at Jerusalem at one of the festivals, the Feast of Tabernacles. Jesus stood in the temple and taught. Many persons who listened, wondered, and said, "How knoweth this man letters, having never learned?" Which is to say, " How is this man able to expound aught, never having been taught by the Eabbins, and having no warrant from them? Jesus answered " My teaching is not mine, but his that sent me. If any man willeth to do his will, he shall know of the teaching, whether it be of God or whether I speak from myself." Which is to say, "I have not been taught by learned men, it is true, but I have a voice or teaching in my soul, from God ; and any man may have the same ; for whoever will do the will of God, therewith knows the things of God." Or thus I may express it, " Whoso wills to do the will of God, shall know what is the will of God;" which is to say, "Whoso loves the right with singleness of heart, soon shall know the right."

This is a deep saying, nor ever has been said any deeper one concerning the moral center of the soul, that it is the abode of knowledge and the source of our ability to understand; in other words, that as the race is not to swift feet nor the battle to strong bodies, so knowledge is not to be obtained, like a stormed city, by mighty minds ; no, but he only whose heart and life is right shall know things as truly they are. By right heart aftd right life is meant this, a single-hearted love for the truth and desire for it, and a conforming of the behaviour to it so soon or so far as it be found.

This deep saying of the Master contains, then, the statement of the relation of morals to knowledge, and declares that knowledge rests on morals.

Now, knowledge may be taken in two kinds —

1. To know anything simply as a fact, that it is so and not otherwise. This I may call the religious form or manner of knowledge; for religion takes simply the fact as it is, and beholds the infinite power therein, and the eternal unfolding of it, with awe and faith.

2. To know anything in its principles, causes, relations, classifications, to comprehend, analyse and describe it. This I may call the intellectual form or manner of knowledge, wherein not merely the soul takes it with reverence but the intellect seizes on it to explore it.

Therefore, knowledge being of these two kinds, the Master's saying, which declares morals to be the root of knowledge, brings morals into relation with these two kinds of knowledge. This is to say that simple goodness (which the text calls the simple willing to do the will of God) underlies the religious apprehension of the facts which surround us, and also the intellectual comprehension of those facts. Or I may state it briefly thus — Simple faithfulness is the source of pure religious experience, and also of intellectual understanding.

In this sermon I shall speak only of the first part, pertaining to religious experience ; in another, of the second part, the intellectual.

Here then is my subject in this sermon, namely', the relation of morals, that is, of simple dutifulness of heart and life, to religious experience.

Of course this is a wide subject, and a philosophic or abstract and theoretical subject, if so one please to treat it. Starting from this point, I might set forth on any one of very many paths of thought. But my whole purpose now is to say one thing clearly, one very great and valuable truth, namely, that religious experience, whether in thinking or feeling, comes to naught, and often is worse than naught, an excitement, a gross deception or a more gross self-deception, unless it be founded deep in moral earnestness and a pure heart. But when the moral center is sound, the will earnest, desire noble, we shall find the earth very good soil for us, and the natural growth of it will be religion in the soul, — religious thought and religious feeling too, noble, beautiful, and sincere together.

Consider first the ease with which religious emotion may be excited. It is produced easily always. So easily indeed may a certain "religious emotion, even unto ecstasy or frenzy, be produced, that very often, and I know not but commonly in assemblies, it rather is made and concocted by putting together and stirring up the materials of it, and roused thus by art into a kind of combustion, — rather thus it is made, I say, than springs up by nature, with the gentle and lovely fervor of nature's works in the soul. This is the profanity of revivals; and indeed I hold the revival meetings held by many churches and sects to be very profane; for the aim should not be to have them, but to need them not; and they should not be called the fruit of the Holy Spirit now, but the dire fermentations of the fruits of an evil spirit in the past loose and unholy days. Sad or profane is it thereupon to stir public heats of religious exultation, which flame up and go out, instead of hidden quietudes of penitence and resolve, which remain. And oh ! how lightly then, and profanely, do they cast about from mouth to mouth the most hallowed thoughts, the most holy names, the most sacred experiences of the soul; which seems to me impious. We shall have indeed, as we must, our special seasons of feeling the love of God, says Theodore Parker, and "our several ways of expressing it." But "unhappy is the man or woman who tattles thereof, foaming at the mouth in some noisy conference, as in a village dog barks to dog; but blessed is he whose noiseless piety sweetens his daily toil, filling the house with the odor of that ointment; thrice blessed when it comes out in the character of the men whose holy lives, glistening with good deeds, adorn the land they also serve and heal and bless." Sometimes these sudden combustions of emotion as to religion do good, Parker avers, but commonly more evil. " Many thoughtful and moral men are disgusted with the folly and rant, and turn with contempt from everything that bears the name of religion; and the most painful forms of infidelity and atheism are sure to come, — a lack of confidence in any higher law, in a creating Cause and preserving Providence that guides the world." Heats and wrangling flames of religion, he says again, sometimes rebuke certain vices and passions; and it is well, lacking a nobler way, that "by the iron knout of fear these should be scourged into subjection." " But alas ! " he says, " worse vices — the lust of money, of power, of distinction, the vices of old men, men of hard heads and stony hearts, spiritual pride, self-conceit, arrogance, bigotry, hate, — these are left in full strength."

Keligious emotions, like all unpainful feelings, are pleasures, and these may become excessive luxury, indulgence, intoxication. They yield a passing excitation, or a soothing which too often is but a blunting of the moral judgment. There appear natures to whom religious contemplation becomes like the idle luxury of a dream, fanned, as in the old Grecian idea of heaven, with western zephyrs of soft feeling and a delicious waiting upon half-born aspirations which die at once. By such flushes of feeling a pleasurable glow is spread over the body and soul, but promoting no high thoughts, nor ending in noble deeds.

Moreover, our experience of nature and life, unless true moral earnestness unite therewith, tends subtly to arouse inefficient emotion in religion. Joys, prosperities, sorrows, pain, evil, helplessness, weariness, overwork, the beauty, benevolence, power and grandeur of the Universe, conspire to evoke emotion. These, indeed, are wise and loving appeals to our religious nature. But unless the sense of right be alive in us and duty be mighty, these attractions and influences will cradle us but not glorify us.

So easy is emotion in religion, so pleasurable, so feasible!

But it is just contrariwise with the moral nature. This is not enticed forth; this is not a play and lapping of glowing emotions; this is not an easy run-forth of pleasure and exultation. Morality is exercise and drill. The moral force is resisted continually, is fallen on, and not seldom overthrown, by passions, open or ambushed, by desires, ambitions, seductions, low standards in life, — a host of enemies and temptations; and never the moral nature prevails without energy, often not without battle, — not seldom a conflict long and severe. Eight living indeed has been called immemorially a battle. "Gird ye to the battle," " Quit ye like men, be strong," " Put on the whole armcr of God," these are the precepts of the prophets. It is no little hard thing even to do no evil; yet this is but a poor virtue. But to do good, to sacrifice ourselves for mankind, to constrain ourselves for the world's sake, to live a laige domain of our lives for others, to bear much and keep^ a sweet cheer in the face and faith in the heart, to be poor and not be envious, to be neglected and not grow suspicious or bitter, to stand against ridicule, to inquire what we ought to live for, and go about life with earnest purpose to make beauty and love of it, and do this day by day, steadily, un swerved, for long years while reward is deferred and difficulties multiply and the long pressing weight of them grows very heavy — this is very hard indeed, this is a great battle. Therefore it is that moral greatness is so very great, because it is achieved against so much resistance; for then strength is the price of victory and still more strength the fruit of it.

Even in the life of the body there seems to be somewhat like to this moral life which grows strong by resistance overcome. A great physician once grew very eloquent to me about the resistance which continually exercises the body and thereby makes it live. Observe, he said, that the forces of nature and our external conditions, when once life mysteriously springs in them, all seem hostile to life, and so foster it to lift and bear itself against resistance. How grows the power and compactness of the muscles of the arm? By no other way then by exercise, which is the tug of the muscle against a resistance. So grows all vital power whatever. A thousand destructive agents, mixed with the air and with food, compounded by the very processes of the body and by every appliance of social existence, continually exercise physical life. Life thereon gains its very energy from the effort put forth in throwing off poisons. Life, said the physician, is inconceivable if there were naught for it to do to maintain itself. It is like a strong warrior, possible only when there are enemies. So grows it and so enlarges, till its natural cycle and course be run, and it stands atop of its career and of its force. Then begin the foes gradually to prevail. They overcome the present shell of life, and wear it out. The soft death of old age results, and all is peace and passage. So is the moral life also. There are contesting poisons in its atmosphere by which it is exercised to grow. A moral life with naught to do to maintain itself, is inconceivable. But a host of appetites troop in to do it battle. Often the battle is hard; but the strength of every foe overcome passes into virtue of the will.

Now is it not plain that this noble acquisition, this victory which is true moral character, must underly religious feeling if that be to be lifted and sanctified ? Without the moral conquest, what else can emotion be but indulgence, pleasure, sensation ? What right have we, or what dignity, to enter joys and hopes and trust which have no moral endeavor, no noble war of will, under them? If there be no devoutness of will, no moral earnestness, religious feeling is dissipation.

Here, then, I find the first depth in the Master's words, "If ye will do the will of God, ye shall know of the teaching." The religious life rests, for its truthful uplift of feeling on the moral life ; because emotion in religion may come and go as easily as a chattering concourse of birds; but right living is a noble battle. The thought of God, and all the joy, hope, trust, faith, love, that therewith arise, are to be known as their true nature is, and entered into in very truth, only as we will to do the Holy and Eternal Will.

The glory of the Universe of God is a holy glory. It is truth and truthfulness, right and righteousness. Glorious and beautiful are the heavens and the earth, "like a flag unfurled,"

" The splendor of the niorning sky And all the stars in company ! "

But "my soul says, ' There is more than this! '" Beautiful are the shapes and colors of forest and field; but it is a holiness of beauty which " has pulled around itself the bark of every tree." God is seen in greatest glory in the faithfulness of his creatures. The love and obedience of a dog — that inextinguishable worship — has more glory in it than the Milky Way, and is a visibility of God more distinct than mountains. The murmurous invincible trust of a lion once gained by kindness, the appealing sorrow of a polar bear whose cub has been killed, are more sweet than the rhythm of the sea, and an audibility of God more distinct than "the music of the spheres." And one deed of pure self-sacrifice, of moral warfare, in a man, affords us a greater beholding and hearing of God than all the poems of Bibles and all the geological " scriptures writ in stone." Says Fichte in his " Way to the Blessed Life," " God appears in what a good man does, lives and loves. No longer then is the Eternal encompassed by shadows nor hidden by a garment, but is visible in his own immediate life. We ask ' What is God ? ' and the question is unanswerable from empty and imaginary conceptions; but in the life of a good man the answer is given, ' God is that which a devout creature of his, thereby inspired by him, does.' "

In a passage of singular beauty and elevation, John Weiss has the same great thought: "In a visit to scenes where grandeur is clothed with charm, and all the elements of a perfect landscape appeal to all the senses, I must confess that I have been impressed with some moral attributes of humble persons, notwithstanding the importunities of Nature. There is a place where the mountains escape directly from the ocean, to lift the eye into a wide horizon ; yet they bare their bosoms to the surf, and flatter out of it fine rhythm for the ear. The slopes of old forests send down their green to compete with the waves. The caverns that have been gnawed out of the coast-line by the patience of thousands of years, attract the step away from the glens, where the shadows fall from old birches and needles of the pine. The paths that the ships make upon their various errands do not seduce the fancy to follow, any more than the tracks which the woodcutter has hewed through the wilderness of green. By both roads your delight travels from point to point through spaces that are inhabited by constant surprises; and your heart learns to soar like the eagles that hint good omens to you from the heights on which their instinct launches them. You sail in their company, and are masters of the beauty of the land and sea. Their motion soothes your care, as the lapse of the mountain torrents that pass through you with murmur of forgetfulness of the heat of politics and all low things. Every nerve of your body learns in an instant to transmit such news as never flashes along the lines of the telegraph. And the gladness of your soul is worship. For when the day is built upon a large scale, as it can be in regions where material enough is at hand to make a dozen landscapes, and more beauty than the whole dozen could afford, short of bankruptcy, the first and most jubilant thought of the mind is that God 'is making the world afresh for you, and has taken one of his splendid mornings to do it in, and is pronouncing through you that he finds it good. If your eyes fall before this frankness, and for relief you begin to pick the ground berries, they do not allay but stimulate your thirst for the sweetness of being at home with God, and you lift your face again with the whole lifting of the sea and the solemn mountains up to the divine countenance, to receive its morning kiss. It would be contemptible to undervalue such pure moments. But there is no treason in confessing that if one moral attribute come athwart such scenes, it throws them into shadow, and you are conscious that an invisible presence, a messenger of the love in which earth's grandeur was conceived, is passing by.

So I thought, when a boy, who had never seen the inside of school or meeting-house, had never read Paley's or Wayland's ethics, and did not know how far he lived from Boston, described to me how the foxes and raccoons made a beaten path in the snow, from the winter- stricken mountains, directly through his father's garden down to the seaside, to go foraging for waifs and strays ; and that not one of the family ever thought of setting a trap in the way of their necessities, to make money out of their famine. What delicacy of the moral sense, nestled underneath that ragged jacket and that raggeder intelligence. The boy's father did not know enough to estimate the heights of the mountains where God's wild creatures lived, yet he had transmitted to his children the beauty of not taking advantage of a fox's hunger to stock his cottage with peltry. And my conscience rose to spring-tide with the conviction that the temple was not out of doors, but was underneath a jacket, and was not made with hands. Moral things are unobtrusive, and make as little noise as the light does in blushing on the mountain's forehead; but, like the light, they announce God's coming to take possession of the day."

DOING AND KNOWING.

II

"If any man willeth to do His will, he shall know of the teaching "—John, vii, 17.

I resume the subject of moral life in relation to religious feeling, treated in my last sermon.

I said, in that sermon, that emotion in religion is brought forth very easily; that therefore it runs the danger of being made by devices and excitements instead of being a natural slow and beautiful growth; that, contrariwise, moral worth, right living is difficult, a hard and long battle, a strenuous strife; and that therefore goodness of life must go with, and even fore-go, emotion in religion, — the base and ground of the edification, the rock; on which founded, the temple will out-stand all storms and the daily hammering of time. This, I said, was one of the deep reasons why he that doeth the will of God is he who shall know the things of God ; because a kind of revel or abandonment in the thought of God, (ah! impious! a mournful thing!) is easy, and often verily a seduction ; but to do His Will is hard — a watch, an undertaking, a travail ; and the strong discipline of morals is the condition and means of true apprehension of God and of health of feeling in religion. Without this, emotion is but vapors, even perhaps unholy fumes in riotous company.

I come now to another great depth of this deep teaching ©f the Master.

There is a great law of our constitutions which expresses the dependence of the religious on the moral. That law is the law governing all active exertion on the one hand, and all passive emotion on the other hand. I may call it the law of passivity and activity. The law is this, that in emotions we are passive, being merely acted on, subjected to impressions, affected by passing conditions or circumstances; that, contrariwise, in any exercise of the will we are active, acting on others or on conditions, producing impressions on others or on circumstances; that all emotions, because we are only passive objects of them, tend to decrease in power by repetition, so that the more they prevail the weaker they grow, and therefore the less tending to come vigorously into consciousness; that, contrariwise, all exercises of will, because in them we are not objects of impressions but active agents, tend to increase in power by repetition, so that the more they are transacted the stronger they grow, and tend the more to assert themselves in action and to be repeated. This is the law of passivity and activity. To state it briefly, emotions, as being passive impressions, fade and weaken by repetition ; but active exercise of will strengthens by repetition. Both passive affections and active efforts, emotion and volition, feeling and willing, become habits by repetition of them; but just in proportion as we drift into a feeling by habit, it is listless, flaccid, ceases to be a great and strong feeling; but, contrariwise, when acts of will become habits, it is because they have grown so strong by exercise that they run over oppositions like a tide and are put forth almost unconscious of any resistance, although at first the resistance taxed the strength. In brief, passive habits are weakness, but active habits are strength; in other words, emotions that become habits, do so because the emotion weakens ; but exercises that become habits, do so because the will strengthens.

This law pertaining to active effort and passive affections, takes a very benevolent part in Providence, preventing much pain. There are persons, like physicians, nurses, charity agents, who are called, by a sympathetic nature or by professional duty, to be familiar with scenes of suffering. The emotions of sympathy, pity, horror, aroused in such scenes may be exceeding painful. They may amount to a piercing distress, a torment of memory, a shock and horror which fill the mind, seize the imagination, and become harrowing sympathies continually arising. Very like such a person is prompted at first to seek out and relieve the sufferer by his own sympathetic distress. This distress may be so great that he has no harder task than to witness the suffering during his efforts to relieve it. What if these emotions of pity and horror relaxed never, never weakened, but always continued to be strong torments? Who then could endure a life passed in these benevolent professions or in works of mercy? Or if, by love and self-sacrifice, one clung to the work, what a terrible life-long martyrdom, in which so severe an anguish should be repeated with every act of duty ! But now comes this law of the passive affections and the active powers, to work a most merciful benefit. The pangs of sympathetic pity, horror, terror, are passive affections. Therefore the sympathetic suffering of those who minister to pain and wretchedness gradually extinguishes itself. With every repetition of the brave duty, the painful emotions attending it grow less.

But is this a hardening of heart? No. It would be so, and the whole nature become callous and dense, but for the other side of the law, which works in the active powers. When the fellow-feeling of pain, the sympathetic distress, which is a potent excitement to merciful occupations and hard labors, should grow weak by experience of it, what would become of the helpless sufferers and who would be moved to toil for their relief, if the active exertions of relief were not confirmed and established by repetition in proportion as the sympathetic pain is weakened ? But it is confirmed, and becomes a noble habit. Thus the law provides that human suffering shall be ministered to and relieved, but with less and less distress to the faithful workers among the wretched; so that a charitable or professional laborer amid diseases and distresses is eased of severe pangs of sympathetic misery, but is confirmed in his labor to relieve the wretchedness. With every new deed of merciful duty, the suffering of sympathy grows less, and more tolerable, but the habit and power of will to do the benefit grows more confirmed and imperious. Ever more and more the benevolent worker is spared suffering, and the active habit of succoring distress takes the place of painful pity in defending the sufferer from neglect. Now if this law of the passive affections and the active powers be understood, we will apply it to the relations of the moral nature and the religious nature. Religious feeling is a passive affection, a succession of emotions, perhaps excitements, fervencies, agitations, ecstasies, in which the soul puts forth no effort.

We have no part in these excited states or emotions but sufferance or consciousness of them. According to the law of passive affections, therefore, these feelings, fervors, desires, being unfollowed by action or labor, are weakened with every repetition of them, every self-surrender to them. But when they take outward shape in forms, expressive actions, attendance on assemblies, practice of observances, and many acts by which religious emotions seek to impart and enforce themselves, these are acts of will, of intention and decision, and therefore, according to the law of the active powers, are confirmed and compacted by every exercise of them. Every repetition, therefore, of emotions in religion, with accompanying actions or observances, tends to a weakening of the spirit and a confirming or solidifying of the form or observance, just as every instance of the physician's duty tends to a weakening of his feeling for the sufferer but a confirming of his exertions to relieve the suffering. But the desirableness of the effects in the two cases, is very different. It is well, and to be desired thankfully, that the physician should wane and attenuate in his inward sensitiveness to misery, while his outward tendency to relieve it is confirmed and enlarged in the same degree. But, all contrariwise, in religious experience, it is the force and purity of the feeling which is precious and to be preserved by every means, while the outward acts or forms in which the emotion utters itself are the unimportant, transient and changeable part which ought not to be emphasized in comparison. Yet it is just this external and unimportant part which is confirmed and set forward, by violence of emotions in religion and by frequent excitation of them, while the inward fact, the spirit, life, truth, earnest and deep feeling, wanes in the same measure. The law is very simple. By repetition, the emotion, which is the passive affection, is weakened, the form or expression, which is the active exercise, is confirmed.

Hence revivals, gotten up to act like stimulants on flagging and flaccid emotions. Hence also dead forms, which once were the expansion of living and truthful feeling, but now have become lifeless practices, like mummies, once bodies of life, now equally bodies, but embalmed in the preservatives and shrouds of habit.

Such is the sure tendency and fate of resort to emotion in religion by itself and as something to be sought in itself. The inefficient observances or forms will become habit, the life gradually wane and fade away, leaving behind it a dim memory which often becomes superstition.

But now look at this same law as it has effect in moral experience. We shall find that morality, by this law, fares otherwise than religious emotions and forms, indeed just contrariwise. The moral experience is like to the religious expression in this, that there are two parts to it, the part of feeling and the part of action. But they differ in the relative value of the parts which are confirmed by exercise; for in religious emotions and expression of them, it is the unimportant part, the form, which grows into consequence and power, but in moral experience, it is the important part. A moral experience includes an emotion or impulse or reverence unto the right; perhaps at the same moment there is also a strong desire unto the wrong; then there is inward struggle. That is the emotional part, the part of passive affection, in which the mind simply is conscious of emotions seizing on it. On that follows the deed, the coming of emotion into outward form and sensible existence, a right deed or a wrong deed, according to the nature of the inward emotion which has prevailed, whether the reverence for the right or the desire for the wrong. That is the active part, in which the will has exercise and domain. In every moral experience, these two parts, the passive part and the active part, are combined. Now, it is true that in every instance of moral experience, the passive affection, which is the conscious impulse or desire unto some especial righteousness, whatever it be, is weakened as an emotion, by the recurrence of it; but in the same moment and measure the outward moral act is confirmed and established by every repetition of it ; and when the moral act is one of faithfulness and right, the habit of that excellence grows in the same measure as the conscious emotion unto it declines.