The pillars of truth; a series of sermons on the decalogue

Preface

The following Discourses were delivered before the students of the University of Michigan, in the College Chapel, on Sabbath afternoons, and are now published without alteration. After the close of the series the Young Men's Christian Association of the University adopted the following resolution :

" Besolved, That we have listened with great interest and profit to the series of discourses on the Ten Commandments, delivered by Eev. Dr. Havek, President of the University, on Sabbath afternoons, and would respectfully suggest to him the propriety of having them published in the form of a book."

The thought of printing them had not previously been entertained by the author; and having concluded to assent to the sug. gestion, it has not been thought advisable to i

PREFACE.

give a more extended examination to the subject, though the Decalogue is practically inexhaustible, and a thorough treatise upon it would be a complete moral philosophy.

It will be seen that the author has not aimed at a florid style, but rather to express the most valuable truth in a few simple and direct words. In this way be has found that the careful attention of listeners is secured, and he trusts that those who have sufficient interest in the subject to read the discourses will find them promotive of that thought and faith essential to the best and highest life.

Aira Arbor, July, 1866.

Contents

The First Commandment. paqe

L Worship only God *7

II. Believe in G-od 24

II. The First Commandment

Believe in God,

Thou shalt hate no othee gods befoee me.— Exodus xx, 3.

This implies that we must have or believe in God. The Bible nowhere adduces any aronments to prove the existence of God, or of man, or of the earth, or stars, or the wind, or the sea, or of spirits good and evil, or even of a soul in man's body. Strange a^ it may appear to mere logicians and theoretical theologians, the Bible assumes the existence of all these, and proceeds to talk about them, and reason upon them, as though no man of good sense would call their existence in question.

Kow it is worthy of notice that no man ever learned of the existence of God by argumentation, nor of the existence of any of the leading beings or powers in the universe, We do not induct children into a belief in their own existence by a syllogism, or by a combination of premises ending with a therefore. How strange and amusing a sight it would be to see a mother endeavoring by a dialectical and scientific process to convince a child four years old of the

FIEST COMMANDMENT.

existence of the sun. She would first, I suppose, lay clown the proposition or axiom that "no effect takes place without a cause," and illustrate it at some length. She would then call the child's attention to the mists of the morning, the clouds of the afternoon, the budding of the trees, the shadows cast by opaque bodies, and a thousand other optical, and chemical, and perhaps vital phenomena ; and finally be prepared to arrive scientifically at the conclusion, " There is, there must be, therefore, a great source of light and heat, that we may call the sun." But probably by this time the child would be asleep, or very much puzzled by his mother's learned conversation ; and, even though he had his father's full understanding, his conviction of the existence of the sun would not be half so strong and vivid from all this logic, as he could obtain by just lifting his eyes up at once at the great luminary as he rises in the morning, and seeing it once for himself. As the people well say, " Seeing is believing." There is profound philosophy in that remark : " Seeing is believing."

Kow the existence of ourselves, of external nature, and of some of the prime qualities of both, we learn actually by " seeing." Perception and consciousness are both of them processes of seeing. By the one we see certain existences and facts without us, by the other certain existences

PILLARS OF TRUTH.

and facts within us, as a part of us ; and neither of them can we doubt without insanity, and neither of them can we prove or disprove by what is commonly called a process of argumentation, or by the logical process of arriving at truth and detecting error. If you undertake to prove logically the existence of the earth, you may possibly make a man doubt it ; you certainly cannot make him believe it any more strongly than before. Precisely so with the existence of himself, with the existence of the fact that there is a connection described by the words cause and effect, that there are such qualities as right and wrong, virtue and vice, unity and diversity, time and space, the finite and the infinite! These thoughts and beliefs come to us, or grow up in us, or are a part of us, so that, although we may not think of them for years, or perhaps may never think of them until some other person suggests them to us, when we do once learn of ^ them we cannot seriously doubt of their existence, and we can never forget them again.

These are the ultimate facts, primary truths, absolute existences, uncreated seeds of thought' all that we know or can know about which is, that they are, and must be, whether we think of them or not.

^Tow I class our belief imthe existence of God among these primary truths believed by the

FIRST COMMANDMENT.

human mind, according to its own constitution, without argument.

But there are objections to this statement.

1. It is often maintained, with a great show of learning, that the religion of man has gradually developed and increased from a thin stratum of fear, and a superstitious dread of the personified forces of nature, through fetichism, and the worship of beasts, to a coarser idolatry, embracing human sacrifices, and thus on to a refined mythology, like that of the Hindoos and the Greeks, till finally monotheism became the natural belief. In other words, there was a time when no man believed in one God ; but as men advance and become sufficiently enlightened, all men will believe in one God ; and perhaps the next step will be to deny his existence !

This is a very beautiful theory, that has often been encased in the choicest style of very elegant writers, and it seems a pity to disturb it ; but there is one objection to it that honesty compels me to present : it has no basis of fact to rest upon. The most careful scrutineer of the past has never yet been able to find one division of the human family, one race, one nation, one little tribe, one family, who were known once to have been idolaters, and afterward to have arisen to a conception of the one true God by their own mental growth, through the process of argumentation.

PILLARS OF TRUTH.

Not only is there no fact to support the theory, but unhappily for it there are many very striking facts against it. For instance, the oldest nations of the earth, according to all the written and traditional records of the times, beyond which exact history is silent, in their earliest days seem already to have believed in one God and worshiped him ; and as their history comes down, it is found that idolatry commences and is developed as a product of later times !

Kow, in these days of the Baconian philosophy, it is exceedingly offensive to be called upon to believe a theory because it is beautiful, when it is not confirmed by facts, and all the facts that do relate to it oppose it.

It is inexcusable for men to attempt to prove, by d priori or deductive reasoning, what must have been the origin of a practice or thing, when we have the history to show what its origin actually was. Men may with propriety invent hypotheses to account for the pyramids of Egypt, because we know nothing about their origin; but they must not invent a theory to account for the origin of St. Peter's Church in Eome, or St. Paul's in London, for the origin of these we know. They may dogmatize, if they will, about the mounds in North America ; but they must not dogmatize about Bunker Hill Monument or the Erie Canal, for their history

FIRST COMMANDMENT.

we know. Geologists may theorize about the origin of the Niagara Falls, but they must not endeavor to throw a mist about the origin of the Niagara Suspension Bridge.

We do not assume to have full daily or even annual and unbroken records to trace the history of a belief in one God, from this time backward to Adam or Noah ; but this we do assert : the earliest historical records contain the doctrine ; they contain it more plainly and abundantly than later records ; and no facts exist to indicate that the idea was a gradual indigenous growth in any age or among any people.

A modern writer, who is far more noted for his undigested learning than for his logic, Mr. Buckle, gives us one phase of the hypothesis, that religion is an effect of development and civilization rather than a superior controlling cause, as follows. Speaking of the Hebrews, he says :

" Thus it was that the doctrine of one God, taught to the Hebrews of old, remained for many centuries altogether * inoperative. The people to whom it was addressed had not yet emerged from barbarism ; they were, therefore, unable to raise their minds to so elevated a conception. Like all other barbarians, they craved after a religion which would feed their credulity with incessant wonders ; and which, instead of abstracting the Deity to a single essence, would

30 PILLARS OF TEUTH,

multiply their gods till they covered every field and swarmed in every forest. This is tWidolatry which is the natural fruit of ignorance ; and this it is to which the Hebrews were perpetually recurring. Notwithstanding the most severe and unremitting punishments, they at every opportunity abandoned that pure theism which their minds were too backward to receive, and relapsed into superstitions which thev could more easily understand, and into the worship of the golden calf and the adoration of the brazen serpent. Now and in this age of the world they have long ceased to do these things And why? . . . To what possible circumstance can this subsecpient change be ascribed, except to the simple fact that the Hebrews, like all other people, as they advanced in civilization, began to abstract and refine their religion, and, despising the old worship of many gods, thus, bv slow degress, elevated their minds to that steady perception of One Great Cause, which at an earlier period it had been vainly attempted to impress upon them." *

Here an ingenious effort is made to produce a conviction precisely opposite to the truth. Ine idea of God among the Hebrews was not a gradual growth. It was suddenly communi-

* History of Civilization in England. By Henry Thoma 3 Buckle. Volume I. Ep. 236. 237. London: John W. Parker & ton, West Strand, 1857.

FIRST COMMANDMENT.

cated to them through Abraham their father. There is no evidence that they lost it in Egypt, though slaves and ignorant. They relapsed into idolatry occasionally for several generations ; but the idolatry into which they relapsed did not imply the denial of the existence of one supreme God, They became idolaters, not because they were ignorant, but because they were surrounded by idolaters, and because by uniting with them they could throw off the restraints of the Ten Commandments, and indulge in immorality. Men are wicked now without being atheists. The two tribes never yielded to this temptation after their captivity, though they were still what Buckle would term ignorant and undeveloped. How was it during the history of the Maccabees ? Were they superior in mental culture to the Macedonians ? How in the time of Christ ? Was Josephus superior as a philosopher to Tacitus ? the Pharisees to the Stoics % He must indeed be blind, or must manufacture his own facts as well as theories, who does not see that the very central idea of the old Hebrew nation was one God ; and that though they were unfaithful to it for a time, afterward, through trials and discipline, without any perceptible advance in mental culture, and while still inferior in this to many heathen around them, they finally became profound believers in God, and performed their mission in that regard well.

PILLARS OF TRUTH.

Facts all seem to point to the conclusion that the world has never, since history began, been destitute of a belief in God — one uncreated, independent Creator and Kuler. Occasionally parts of nations have forgotten it ; the worship of demons, or of beings supposed to be superior to man, but inferior, of course, to God, has sometimes so degraded the mind as to cause the populace to forget God ; but there have always been some who have preserved the doctrine, and few indeed have been the adult human beings that have not in some form heard and thought of it. This idea is one of the common possessions of humanity. Every language has its word for it ; every human being has some idea of what that word means.

2. But still another practical objection may be urged to the proposition that a belief in God is one of those truths that the mind has without argument, and from its own nature believes.

It may be said that men who are not taught the doctrine do not believe it. The deaf and dumb are appealed to. Some of the most interesting questions relating to the mind may be investigated by observing the mental operations of those persons who are deprived of one or more of the senses. They are obliged to act more slowly than other men, and therefore we can see the process ; or we can learn how much and how little we acquire through the senses of which they are deprived. ISTow of all of the deaf and dumb that have been taught to think and communicate thought, from the days of the Abbe Sicard until now— and they number thousands — not one has been found who says that he was conscious of any idea of God, one or many, till after he had received the idea from his teacher. Hundreds have been directly asked the question, and the reply is always in substance the same : " I did not think of God." Some express their former fears and anxieties and strange feelings when they went to church and saw what they afterward learned was worship ; and some were amazed at attending funerals to see a person lying motionless and buried; but none of these things gave them an idea of God. Many of them had an idea of immortality, or rather no definite idea of death ; but none had ever thought of God.

This fact seems at first to be equally opposed both to the theory that we arrive at our knowledge of God from the observation of evidence of power, design, and intelligence in the works of nature, and also to the theory that we obtain our idea of God from our own souls, or that it is .born in us. If we obtain it from argument, why are not some of these deaf and dumb persons intelligent and acute enough to find out God by argument before they are taught the

PILLARS OF TRUTH.

language of signs ? If the idea is born within us, why is it not born in them ?

To this we can only say that the fact alone is not conclusive proof of any position on the question at issue. It does, however, indicate that all of us are indebted for our first thoughts about God to information received from others. This is undoubtedly as a matter of fact true. Probably all who listen to me now received their first ideas of God from their mother, or from some one who took the mother's place. It was while in your mother's lap, or just learning to walk, when that feeble intellect was just putting forth the tender buds of promise, and your limited vocabulary of words was almost constantly employed in asking questions, that you first heard the awful word, Gob. How blessed a thing it is that mothers frequently are pious, at least in the presence of their little children, for it evinces a fearful hardness of heart and insensibility to love, for a mother to fail to give all possible good influence to the tender mind of her child. And thus it comes to pass that nearly all children, at least in a Christian land, learn of God from their mothers. Often, too, the father aids, and he can only aid in this work. The holy instinct of a mother's love leads her to reject with scorn the cold and wicked philosophy of Eousseau, who would fain have all children, like the deaf and dumb, kept

FIRST COMMANDMENT.

entirely ignorant of God and Christ, and heaven and hell, and right and wrong, and everything religious, till they were adults, in order that they might not be prejudiced! This is like forbidding children to eat anything till they are adults, for fear they might violate the laws of health or injure their constitutions ! It is about as well to starve physically as spiritually ; the mind as well as body can be developed only by use.

This communication of the idea of God from parents to children corresponds exactly with the practical directions of the Bible. The Hebrews were positively commanded and required to teach their children about God. It is equally the duty of parents under the Christian dispensation. The Christian mother or father who does not see to it that his child has correct and full ideas of God is guilty of great neglect and sin.

But how does this fact bear on the proposition that the idea of God is an intuition of the mind, originated or sustained by the soul itself, and not dependent for its reception or its force upon argumentation? Simply thus far only. It is found that the child, when the idea is once presented, naturally grasps and holds upon it, and never forgets it. If it was the result of an argument, he might forget it ; many would certainly forget the logical process that leads to it, and

PILLARS OF TRUTH.

their belief in it would thus be weakened. But this is not the fact. Men never forget the idea of God. No man naturally disbelieves it. Every man, every child, naturally feels it to be true. Reason may by and by confirm it ; knowledge will modify it ; his idea of the Divine One will change very much, but his mind always tends to embrace and cling to it. We pronounce it thus an original product of the mind itself, though it needs the suggestion of some other mind, at least usually, to bring it into the range of consciousness.*

Now this is true of other intuitions, such as space, time, eternity. There are many adults, doubtless, who have never thought of space, boundless, empty space, in which all things that are or can be can exist, and yet have just as much of it as though there was not a single thing created. I say many have never thought of this mysterious infinite space, but after they

* This principle is recognized by all good mental philosophers. It is stated by nearly all. Perhaps a better statement of it cannot be found than that of Cicero in his De Oratore, lib. iii, cap. 3. "Nam neque tarn est acris acies in naturis hominum, et ingeniis, ut res tantas quisquam, nisi monstratns, passit videre; neque tanta tamen in rebus obseuritas, ut eas non penitus acri vir ingenio cernat, si modo adspexerit:" For there is not sufficient acuteness in the nature or intellect of man to perceive these truths unless they are told to Mm; nor yet is there such a kind of obscurity about these truths that any man of good sense can fail at once to perceive thera, if once his attention is called to them.

FIRST COMMANDMENT.

have once thought of it they never can forget it ; they never can deny its existence. This, therefore, we call an intuition. It is a thought revealed, not by argumentation, but by simple presentation. It grows out of our own soul, though few even think of it until it is suggested., If there are two violins near each other, and a string on one is made to vibrate and sound, the corresponding string on the other also vibrates in unison with it. Xow if that second violin only had a consciousness and a will, it might prolong and increase that sympathetic vibration into a loud, joyous life. This is precisely the way that souls act and react on each other in the awakening of these intuitions. They are silent till aroused; but when aroused they act spontaneously. The older one, having been stimulated into action by a predecessor, in turn stimulates another, and each has a self-sustaining, moving power of its own. Thus do we learn to think of God. I believe that it would be of great advantage to all well-educated men to understand thoroughly the basis on which true religious convictions rest, and therefore I propose to examine this subject a little more closely. If it was my object only to amuse, or even interest, I might choose a subject less abstruse and more rhetorical ; but, young men, you will hereafter be appealed to as liberally educated men ; you certainly ought to scrutinize carefully the foun-

PILLARS OF TRUTH.

dations of faith ; and if you have a faith and hope, be ready to give a reason for it; and if you • have not a faith and hope, be ready to give a satisactory reason for that fact if you can.

The doctrine that our idea of God is one of the primary convictions or knowledges of the human mind, needing only to be suggested to be at once spontaneously comprehended and felt, is confirmed by the fact that several other ideas are of precisely the same character. The idea of cause and effect, of right and wrong, of unity and diversity, are of this kind. Also there is in man's mind a spontaneous power of entertaining such views of the external world, and of himself, as requires the use of lauguage. Language, therefore, is not a gradual growth any more than religion. You are aware that precisely the same diverse theories on the origin of language have been entertained as on the origin of religion. Some have imagined that men once were so ignorant and brutal that they uttered only inarticulate cries, like the chatterings of monkeys, the brumming of oxen, the neighing of horses, and the barking of dogs. Finally some genius among these human dogs first blundered upon articulation, and began to assign names to things. Afterward another genius invented verbs, and then another prefixes and suffixes, another adjectives and adverbs, til]

FIRST COMMANDMENT.

finally the euphonious and flexible speech of a refined people was reached.

2s"ow the objection to this beautiful theory is that it has no known basis of fact, and what facts we have bear against it. The earliest known, languages are rich in vocabulary, complicated in structure, philosophical and refined in their laws of variation. Almost all savages have a language too good for themselves to understand, and which certainly could not have been invented by more savage predecessors. They indicate deterioration and not progress in the people.

Herodotus, in his gossiping account of his travels in Syria, relates an experiment which was tried there by a curious philosopher at least five hundred years before Christ. This relation, by the way, proves that the theory of inductive reasoning was understood not only before Bacon, but even before Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates. But though understood, it was not extensively and properly practiced, the great mistake of the ancients being a too great reliance upon the power of their own minds in deductive reasoning, and not giving a sufficient attention to known facts. The relation of Herodotus is as follows :

Before the reign of their king Psammetichus the Egyptians esteemed themselves the most ancient of the human race ; but that kino; in-

PILLARS OF TRUTH.

vestigated the matter, and decided that the Phrygians were older. His method was to select two infants and have them nursed by a shepherd without any opportunity of hearing a word uttered, and it was found that both of them when two years old first pronounced the word bekos, which in the Phrygian language meant bread.-

The prince philosopher did not observe that the word lekos might have been an imperfect imitation of the bleating of a sheep, which the little ones often had heard.

Eev. Dr. Horace Bushnell, in his chapter on language, introductory to the argument of his work entitled " God in Christ," gives us a description of a singular fact bearing on this subject that is said to have happened in Connecticut a few years ago. He says :

"A very distinguished artisan, whose name is familiar to the country at large, himself a scholar and a keen philosophic observer, had a pair of twin boys who were drawn to each other with such a mysterious and truly congenital fondness as to be totally occupied with each other, and thus to make little or no progress in learning the language of the family. Meantime they were constantly talking with each other in a language constructed between them, which no one but themselves could understand. In this' * See Herodotus, book ii, chap. 2, .

FIRST COMMANDMENT.

language they conversed at their plays as freely as men at their business, and in a manner that indicated the most perfect intelligence between them. At an early age one of them died ; and with him died, never to be spoken again, what, beyond any reason for doubt, was the root of a new original diversity of human speech, a new tongue." *

This is very strongly stated, but it is not sufficiently exact to be of any scientific value. Dr. Bushnell did not himself see or hear the two children speak their new language. The father may have been deceived by his parental fondness. Besides, it is strange that no other members of the family are represented as having learned a word of the new speech. Had the little ones spoken Chinese or Hebrew the other members of the family would have learned it. Though there may have been some foundation for the narrative, it is too isolated and unsupported and unnatural to base any reasoning upon it alone.

Dr. Bushnell adds :

" Indeed, tobelieve that any two human beings, shut up wholly to each other, to live together until they are of mature age, would not construct

* God in Christ. Three Discourses delivered at New Haven, Cambridge, and Andover, with a Preliminary Dissertation on Language. By Horace Bushnell. Pp. 17, 18. Hartford: Brown & Parsons. 1849.

PILLAES OF TRUTH.

a language, is equivalent, in my estimation, to a denial of their proper humanity."

That also is a strong statement, but it is simply an opinion. So to suppose that a single human being of good sense and intellect would grow up to adult age without an idea of a Creator, would seem at first to impugn his proper humanity, and yet many such human beings have grown up. We are little aware how much we owe to education, and especially education by example. The most complicated processes seem simple after they are once understood. How simple a process is writing, and yet the world of men lived centuries without an alphabet. Men, perhaps, will by and by wonder that the world could have stood six thousand years without a magnetic telegraph !

In process of time, perhaps, many of these questions may be tested by actual experiment, on a sufficiently large scale to ascertain the truth. In the mean time we should not too confidently theorize upon them.

How many of these central ideas of the human soul — ideas of the reason, as the transcendentalists call them — -were actually reached by man without any stimulus from a higher being or an instructor, cannot now be ascertained. If man was originally created by God by a direct fiat, as both reason and the Bible teach, he cannot have been thrust into this world as an adult

FIRST COMMAIOMEKT.

infant ; but lie must have had aroused in him those primitive energies of the soul which give him character, among which are an appreciation of cause and effect, a feeling of the difference between right and wrong, and an idea of God.

All facts seem to indicate that man when created was taught at once also to speak. The outward world, to be understood, requires the use of language. Subjectively in man there is a nature that is fitted to the use of language. This is no more true of the vocal apparatus than of the intellect and whole soul. And though it may be doubtful whether man, being wholly destitute of language, would not live even for centuries without originating one, yet it is evident that, once given to him, he is fitted to receive, appreciate, and use it, and that he can never forget to use speech. Man can degenerate from civilization to barbarism. He can lose the use of fire, the arts of metallurgy and of carpentry, the restraints of law and decency; but should he sink so low as to forget the use of language and the idea of God, he would not be far from death, and the race would soon become extinct. That some tribes have sunk into such savagism cannot be denied ; but that any have unaided risen from it to monotheism and refinement, cannot be shown.