THE CHIEF END OF MAN

BY

GEORGE S. MERRIAM

BOSTON AND NEW YORK

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY

The Riverside Press, Cambridge

1897

Copyright, 1897, BY GEORGE S. MERRIAM. 

_All rights reserved. _

_The chief end of man, --to define it anew, and cite the witness of theages, may seem an audacious attempt, likely to issue in failure or incommonplace. By the scholar this work must often be judged as crude, to the churchman it will sometimes seem mischievous, and to the man ofscience it may appear to lack solidity of demonstration. But itsessential purpose is to utter afresh, though it be with stammeringtongue, the message with which the universe has answered the soul ofman whenever he listened most closely and obeyed most faithfully. _

_It is the assurance that Fidelity, Truth-seeking, Courage, and Loveare the rightful lords of human life, and its sufficient guides andinterpreters. It is the knowledge that as man is true to his best selfhe finds the universe his friend. _

_That message the seeing eye reads in the face of earth, and thelistening ear hears it in the song of the morning stars. The willfinds it as answer to its loyal endeavor. The heart wins it throughrapture and through anguish. It is our dearest inheritance, it is ourmost arduous achievement. It is the sword with which each man mustconquer his destiny. It is the smile with which Beatrice welcomes herlover to Paradise. _

CONTENTS

 PROLOGUE

 I. OUR SPIRITUAL ANCESTRY

 II. THE IDEAL OF TO-DAY

 III. A TRAVELER'S NOTE-BOOK

 IV. GLIMPSES

 V. DAILY BREAD

THE CHIEF END OF MAN

PROLOGUE

It sometimes happens that a man is confronted by a perplexing crisis, before which he is quite at a loss how to direct his course. Hisfamiliar rules and habits seem to fail him, and his perplexityapproaches dismay. At such a time, if his previous life has beenguided by purpose and consideration, he may perhaps help himself bylooking attentively back at the steps by which he has hithertoadvanced. He recalls other crises, he sees how they were met, andlight, it may be, breaks on the path before him, or at least he takesfresh heart and hope. 

Some such crisis confronts the thoughtful mind of the world to-day, inthe disappearance of the old sanctions of religion. When the idea ofan authoritative revelation of divine truth has been finally dislodged, there are moments when moral chaos seems to impend. We are stillupheld by old habits and associations, we are borne along by forcesmightier than our creeds or negations, and the loyal spirit catches atmoments the "deeper voice across the storm, " even though the voice beinarticulate. But it is felt that we need to somehow define anew therule of life. By what road shall man attain his supreme desire, --howcan he be good, and how can he be happy?

As the individual seeks help in looking back over his course, so it mayhelp us if we look back a little over some of the significant passagesin the movement of mankind. History is to the race what memory is tothe individual. One's best treasure is the memory of his happy andheroic hours. The best treasure of humanity is the story of its happyand heroic souls. Let us call before us some of these, and see howthey answered the questions we ask. 

Following this clew, we run back along the line of what may be called"our spiritual ancestry. " Turning naturally to our own next of kin, achild of New England, going back from the teaching of his youth to hisfathers and to their fathers, soon finds before him the Puritan. Whenwe study the Puritan it appears that he was a most composite product, and that just behind him, and essential to the understanding of him, isthe great mediaeval church. Studying the church, there is nothing forit but to go back to its foundation, and ponder well the one from whoseperson and teaching it grew. And to know at all the mind of Jesus wemust know something of the mind of Judaism, of which he was the child. Indeed, the popular religion of to-day bases itself directly on the Oldand New Testaments; so that our lineage must clearly be traced fromthis as one of its origins. Another ancient line attracts us, by ahistory which blends with Judaism at the birth of Christianity, and bya literature which is rich in moral treasures. We must glance at someof the landmarks of the Greek and Roman story. 

And here our present study may define its bounds. We will not go backto the progress from the animal up to man, nor survey the prehistoricman; nor will we turn aside to the religions of Egypt, Arabia, and theEast; and we can but lightly glance at the early Teutonic people fromwhom we are descended after the flesh. It will sufficiently serve ourpurpose if we touch a few salient points among our more directprogenitors in the life of the spirit. And, after all, our richestsearch will be in the years nearest ourselves. 

But no version of history simply as history gives an adequate basis forthe higher life. That life must be worked out by each for himself, equipped as he finds himself by inheritance and circumstance, andguided largely by the sure and simple laws of conduct which he drew inwith his mother's milk. Study and thought may help a little, and sosuch essays as the present are offered for whatever they may afford. Of all human studies, history, at its best, --the knowledge of whateverof worthiest the past of mankind affords, --such history is of allstudies most delightful and inspiring, for it is the contact throughbooks with noble souls--and the touch of a great soul is a naturalsacrament. Such history has significance mainly as its events andcharacters find parallels in the mind that reads. The soul of to-day, catching from the past the voices of prophets and leaders, thrills witha sense of kinship. The story of American independence means most whenthe reader has fought his own Bunker Hill, and wintered at ValleyForge, and triumphed at Yorktown. The death of Socrates has smallsignificance unless something in the reader's heart answers to hisaffirmation that "nothing evil can happen to a good man, in living ordying. " The life of Jesus and the story of Christianity are most fullyunderstood when life's experience has brought the Mount of Vision andthe Garden of Gethsemane, the cross and passion, the resurrection, andthe coming of the Holy Spirit. 

The interest of the present study is in the illustration of certaingreat spiritual laws. These are laws of which every man may make prooffor himself. He may find instances of their working in any closeobservation of his nearest neighbor, or in reading his newspaper. Hemay find the clearest exemplification of them in studying the noblestmen and women he has known, or, if his life has been worth living, inrecalling the most critical and significant passages of his ownexperience. The reading of these laws is the latest and finest resultof the experience of the race. In their substance, they areacknowledged by all good men. No wholly new path to goodness andhappiness is likely to be suddenly discovered; certainly no essentiallynew ideal of what kind of goodness and happiness we are to seek. Thesaints and heroes are all of one fellowship, though they do not allspeak the same language. In a word, there are certain traits ofcharacter which all men whose opinion we value now recognize assupremely worthy of cultivation. To seek to know things as they reallyare; to fit our actions to our best knowledge; to conform in word andact to the truth as we see it; to seek the good of others as well asour own; to be sympathetic and responsive; to be open-eyed to beauty, open-hearted to our fellow creatures; to be reverent and aspiring; toresolutely subject the lower elements of our nature to the higher; totaste frankly and freely the innocent joys of life; to renounce thosejoys and accept privation, suffering, death, when duty calls, --suchpurposes and dispositions as these are unquestionably a true rule oflife. The main theme to be illustrated in these pages is that thisideal and rule is in itself an all-sufficient principle. Fidelity tothe best we know, and search always for the best, is the natural roadto peace and joy, the sure road to victory. It is the key which opensto man the treasury of the universe. 

To enforce and vivify this conception, --this interpretation of the keyof life as consisting in fidelity to certain ideals of character, --wego back to the memorable examples of the past. We use those examples, partly to show how the spiritual laws always worked, the sameyesterday, to-day, and forever; and partly to show how as time advancedthe laws have been understood with growing clearness, and applied withgrowing effectiveness. The same stars shone above the sages of Chaldeaas shine above us, but our astronomy is better than theirs. The sagesof Greece, the prophets of Palestine, the heroes of Rome, the saints ofthe Middle Ages, the philanthropists and the scientists of to-day, eachmade their special contribution to the spiritual astronomy. From ageto age men have read the heavens and the earth more clearly, and somade of them a more friendly home. Just as, too, there come times ofmomentous progress in the physical world; the establishment of theCopernican theory, the discovery of a new continent, the mastering ofelectricity, --so there are periods of swift advance and discovery inthe spiritual life, and such a birth-hour, of travail and of joy, comesin our own day. 

In this hasty panorama of the past, then, the effort has been to givereal history. But every student knows how transcendent and impossiblea thing it is to recall in its entirety and fullness any phase of thepast. Even the specialist can but partially open a limited province. So with what confidence can one with no pretensions to originalscholarship, however he may use the work of deeper students, expresshis opinion on any special point in a survey of thirty centuries? If, accordingly, any competent critic shall trouble himself to convict thepresent writer of error: "This view of Epictetus confuses the earlierand the later Stoics;" or "This account of the Hebrew prophets lacksthe latest fruit of research, "--or, other like defect, --acknowledgmentof such error as quite possible may be freely made in advance. But, inour bird's-eye view of many centuries, any fault of detail will not beso serious as it would be if there were here attempted a chain ofproofs, a formal induction, to establish from sure premises a safeconclusion. Only of a subordinate importance is the detail of thishistory. We say only: in this way, or some way like this, has been theascent. The contribution of the Stoic was about so and so; the Hebrewprophet helped somewhat thus and thus. But the ultimate, the essentialfact we reach in the Ideal of To-day. Here we are on firm ground. Thelaw we acknowledge, the light we follow, --these may be expressed withentire clearness and confidence. The test they invite is presentexperiment. Nothing vital shall be staked on far-away history ordebatable metaphysics. 

In the fivefold division of the book, "Our Spiritual Ancestry" is abird's-eye view of the main line of advance, which culminates in "TheIdeal of To-Day. " A more leisurely retrospect of certain historicalpassages is given in "A Traveler's Note-Book;" thoughts on the presentaspect are grouped under "Glimpses;" and "Daily Bread" introduces ahomely and familiar treatment. 

I

OUR SPIRITUAL ANCESTRY

The ideas and sentiments which underlie the higher life of our time maybe largely traced back to two roots, the one Greek-Roman, the otherHebrew. 

Each of these two races had originally a mythology made up partly of thepersonification and worship of the powers of nature, and partly of thedeification of human traits or individual heroes. 

The higher mind of the Greeks and Romans, in which the distinctive noteswere clear intelligence, love of beauty, and practical force, graduallybroke away altogether from the popular mythology, and sought to find inreason an explanation of the universe and a sufficient rule of life. 

The Greek-Roman mythology made only an indirect and slight contributionto modern religion. But the ethical philosophy and the higher poetry ofthe two peoples belong not only to our immediate lineage but to ourpresent possessions. 

A humanity common with our own brings us into closest sympathy withcertain great personalities of this antique world. Differences of time, race, civilization, are powerless to prevent our intimate friendship andreverence for Homer, Sophocles, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius, Epictetus. 

Homer shows the opening of eyes and heart to this whole wonderful worldof nature and of man. 

Sophocles sees human life in its depth of suffering and height ofachievement. He views mingled spectacle with profound reverence, surethat through it all is working some divine power. Goodness is dear tothe gods, wickedness is abhorrent to them. But the good man is oftenunhappy, --from strange inheritance of curse, or from complication ofevents which no wisdom can baffle. Yet from the discipline of sufferingemerges the noblest character, and over the grave itself play gleams ofhope, faint but celestial. 

In Socrates, we see the man who having in himself attained a solid andnoble goodness, addresses all his powers to finding a clear road by whichall men may be led into goodness. He first propounds in clearness themost important question of humanity, --how shall man by reason and by willbecome master of life?

Plato takes up the question after him, and follows it with an intellectunequaled in its imaginative flight. Plato lighted the fire which hasburned high in the enthusiasts of the spirit, --the mystics, the dreamers, the idealists. 

Aristotle confined himself to the homelier province where demonstrationis possible, and laid the foundation of logic and of natural science. 

Lucretius resolutely puts away from him the whole pageant of fictitiousreligion. He scouts its terrors, and scorns to depend on unrealconsolation. He addresses himself to the intellectual problem of theuniverse, and decides that all is ruled by material laws. 

In Epictetus man reverts from the problem of the universe to the problemof the soul. The beauty of the Greek world has faded, the stern Romanworld has trained its best spirits to live with resolute self-mastery. The mythologic gods are no longer worth talking about for serious men. But here is the great actual business of living, --it can be met in manlytemper, and be made a scene of lofty satisfaction and serene tranquillity. 

Epictetus was the consummate expression of that Stoic philosophy in whichwere blended the clearness of Greek thought and the austerity of the bestRoman life. Stoicism reverted from all universe-schemes, spiritual ormaterialist, to the conduct of human life which Socrates had propoundedas the essential theme. The Stoic affirmed that all good and evil residefor man in his own will, and that simply in always choosing the rightrather than the wrong he may find supreme satisfaction. Epictetusexpresses this in the constant tone of heroism and victory. In the morefeminine nature of Marcus Aurelius the same ideas yield a beautifulfidelity along with a habitual sadness. 

Stoicism was the noblest attainment of the Greek-Roman world. It was aclear and fearless application of reason to human life, with littleattempt to solve the mystery of the universe. It gave an ideal and ruleto thoughtful, robust, and masculine natures. It made small provisionfor the ignorant, the weak, or the feminine. Its watchwords were Reason, Nature, Will. 

The distinction of the Hebrew development was that the higher minds tookup the popular mythology, elevated and purified it. The Hebrew geniuswas not intellectual but ethical and emotional. The typical Hebrew guidewas not a philosopher but a prophet. Through a development of manycenturies the popular religion from polytheistic became monotheistic, andfrom worshiping the sun and fire came to worship an embodiment ofrighteousness and of supreme power. An ideal of character grew up--inclose association with religious worship and ceremonial--in which thecentral virtues were justice, benevolence, and chastity. The sentimentsof the family, the nation, and the church were fused in one. Its outwardexpression was an elaborate ceremonial. Its heart was a passion which inone direction dashed the little province against the whole power of Rome;in another channel, preserved a people intact and separate through twentycenturies of dispersal and subjection; while, in another aspect, it gavebirth to Jesus and to Christianity. 

Jesus was one of the great spiritual geniuses of the race, --so far as weknow, the greatest. The highest ideas of Judaism he sublimated, intensified, and expressed in universal forms. Indifferent to theceremonial of his people, he taught that the essence of religion lay inspirit and in conduct. 

The holy and awful Deity was to him a tender Father. The whole duty ofman to man was love. Chastity of the body was exalted to purity of theheart. He lived close to the common people; taught, helped, healed them;caressed their children, pitied their outcasts, laid hands on the lepers, and calmed the insane. He brooded on the expectation of some greatfuture which earlier seers had impressed on the popular thought, and sawas in prophetic vision the near approach of the perfect triumph ofholiness and love. Overshadowed by danger, his hope and faith menaced asby denying Fate, he rallied from the shock, trusted the unseen Power, andwent serenely to a martyr's death. 

Jesus had roused a passion of personal devotion among the poor, theignorant, the true-hearted whom he had taught and called. When he wasdead, that devotion flamed out in the assertion, He lives again! We haveseen him! He will speedily return! The Jewish belief in a bodilyresurrection and a Messianic kingdom gave form to this faith, andunbounded love and imagination gave intensity and vividness. That Jesuswas risen from the dead became the cardinal article of the new societywhich grew up around his grave. His moral precepts, his parables, hisacts, his personality, --the personality of one who was alike the child ofGod and the friend of sinners, --these were enshrined in a new mythology. A society, enthusiastic, aggressive; at first divided into factions; thenblending in a common creed and rule of life; a loyalty to an invisibleleader; a sanguine hope of speedy triumph, cooling into more remoteexpectation, and in the finer spirits transforming into a presentspiritual communion; a growing elaboration of organization, priesthood, ritual, mythology; a diffusion through vast masses of people of the newreligion, and a corresponding depreciation of its quality, --this was theearly stage of Christianity. It vanquished and destroyed the Greek-Romanmythology, already half dead. Philosophy strove with it in vain, --therewas no real meeting-ground between the two systems. The final appeal ofthe Stoic was to reason. The Christian theologians thought theyreasoned, but their argumentation was feeble save at one point. But thatwas the vital point, --experience. Christianity, in its mixture of ardor, credulity, and morality had somehow a power to give to common men andwomen a nobility and gladness of living which Stoicism could not inspirein them. So it was the worthier of the two antagonists that triumphed inthe strife. 

Ideally, there ought to have been no strife. Christianity and ethicalphilosophy ought to have worked side by side, until the religion ofReason and the religion of Love understood each other and blended in one. Destined they were to blend, but not for thousands of years. The newreligion brooked no rivalry and no rebellion. It swayed the worlddespotically, but the beginning and secret of its power was that it hadcaptured the world's heart. Its best watchwords were Faith, Hope, Love. 

In a word, civilized mankind, having outgrown the earlier nature-worship, and having found the philosophic reason inadequate to provide asatisfying way of life, accepted a new mythology, because it was inspiredby ideas which were powerful to guide, to inspire, and to console. Formany centuries we shall look in vain for any serious study of human lifeexcept in conformity to the Christian mythology. 

The Roman world was submerged by the invasion of the northern tribes. There was a violent collision of peoples, manners, sentiments, usages; asubversion of the luxurious, intelligent, refined, and effetecivilization; a rough infusion of barbaric vigor and barbaric ignorance. The marvelous conflict, commingling, and emergence of a thousand years, through which the classic society was replaced by the mediaeval society, cannot even be summarized in these brief paragraphs. The point on whichour theme requires attention is that the religion of this period had itsform and substance in the Catholic church; and of this church the twinaspects were an authoritative government administered by popes, councils, bishops, and priests, and a conception of the supernatural world equallydefinite and authoritative, which dominated the intellects andimaginations of man with its Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. The visiblechurch and the invisible world of which the church held theinterpretation and the key, --this concrete fact, and this faith thecounterpart of the fact, were the bases and pillars of the religion ofEurope for many centuries. 

We are not required to balance the merits and faults of this mediaevalreligion. It was a mighty power, so long as it commanded theunquestioning intellectual assent of the world, and so long as upon thewhole it exemplified and enforced, beyond any other human agency, thehighest moral and spiritual ideals men knew. 

Its supremacy was favored by the complete subordination of allintellectual life which was an incident of the barbaric conquest and thefeudal society which followed. Even before those events the humanintellect seemed to flag. The old classicism and the new Christianitynever so wedded as to produce either an adequate civic virtue or a greatintellectual movement. In the Dark Ages which followed, learning shrankinto the narrow channels of the cloister, and literature almost ceased asa creative force. For almost a thousand years--from Augustine toDante--Europe scarcely produced a book which has high intrinsic value forour time. When intellectual energy woke again in Italy and then in theNorth, the ecclesiastical conception had inwrought itself in humanthought. 

Along with authority and dogmas there developed an elaborate ceremonial, appealing through the senses to the imagination and the spiritual sense. For the multitude it involved a habitual confusion of the symbol with thesubstance of religion. In an age when the highest minds lived in anatmosphere of profound ignorance, and philosophy was childish, there waswrought out the full doctrine of the Mass and its accompaniments, --aliteral transformation of the bread and wine of the sacrament into thebody and blood of Christ, powerful to impart a saving grace. The powerto work this miracle was the supreme weapon of the priesthood. 

We may glance at the mediaeval religion in its culmination in the threefigures of Dante, Francis of Assisi, and Thomas à Kempis. À Kempis showsreligion fled from the active world with its strifes and temptations, sedulously cultivating a pure, devout, unworldly virtue; feeding on thecontemplation of heavenly splendors and infernal horrors; self-centredand inglorious. The opposite type is Frances, a joyful prophet of gladtidings to the poor; ardent, sympathetic, heroic; touched with the beautyof nature and the appeal of the animal creation; exalting simplicity andpoverty like an ancient philosopher; seeking the needy and sorrowful likeJesus of Nazareth; but with no spiritual originality like Jesus, no powerto create a new religion; strong only to revive the best elements of thetraditional faith, and to organize a society which erelong sank back tothe general level of the church. 

Dante is an embodiment of mediaeval belief in its most sublime andintense phase. He has much of the temper of the Hebrew psalmist, in histremendous love and hate, his patriotism, his sorrow, his quest for thehighest. This vast spiritual passion finds its expression andsatisfaction in an invisible world, which promises in a future existencethe supreme triumph and reign of a divine justice, wrath, and pity, andfor which the visible world is but antechamber and probation. Danteshows the culmination of supernatural Christianity, but he has somethingfurther. The guide of his pilgrimage, the star of his hope, theinspiration of his life, is a woman, --loved with sublimation andtenderness, loved better after her death, and felt as the living linkbetween the seen and unseen worlds. Thus at the heart of the oldsupernaturalism is the germ of a new conception, in which human lovesanctified by death becomes the revealer. 

In Dante we feel that the projection of human interest to an unseen andfuture world has reached its furthest limit. The mind of man must needsrevert to some nearer home and sphere. And closely following Dante wesee in England a group of figures who betoken the return. There isChaucer, displaying the various energy and joy and humor of earthly life. There is Piers Plowman, showing the grim obverse of the medal, thehardship and woe of the poor. Wyclif insists on a personal religion, whose austere edge turns against ecclesiastical pretense and socialwrong; and he applies reason so daringly that it cuts at the very centreof the church's dogma, in denying Transubstantiation. A little earlierwe see Roger Bacon making a fresh beginning in the experimentalphilosophy which had been slighted for centuries. These four are theprecursors respectively of the purely human view, as in Shakspere, of theelevation of the poor, of Protestantism, and of natural science. 

As pagan mythology, Stoicism, and Judaism all were superseded by earlyChristianity, as that in turn was succeeded by mediaeval Catholicism, soanother stage has brought us to the religion of to-day. The leadingfeatures of this last transition may be summarily sketched, we may thenglance at certain groups of figures illustrating the advance in itssuccessive periods, and so we shall come to the ideal of the present. 

The religious transition of the last four centuries is in one aspectmarked by the waning of authority and the growth of individual freedom;and in another aspect it is the substitution for a supernatural of anatural conception, or, we may say, in place of a divided and warringuniverse, a harmonious universe. 

In this double progress toward individual liberty and toward a new way ofthought, a conspicuous agency has been the advance of knowledge. Connected with the advance of knowledge has been an improvement of theactual conditions of human life. Meantime the ethical sense and thespiritual aspiration of mankind have asserted themselves, sometimes asslow-working, permanent forces, sometimes in revolutionary upheaval. With change both of material condition and of ways of thought, new formsof sentiment and aspiration have appeared, --a wider and tendererhumanity; a reverence for the order of nature and dependence upon thestudy of that order for human progress; a consciousness of the sublimityand beauty of nature as a divine revelation; a reliance upon the powersand intuitions of the human spirit as its only and sufficient guides; arediscovery under natural and universal forms of the faith and hope whichwere once supposed inseparably bound up with ritual, dogma, and miracle, but which now when given freer wing find firmer support and loftier scope. 

Along with these forces has gone the steady push of human nature forenjoyment, for ease, for power; the grasp of man for all he can get ofwhatever seems to him the highest good. There have been mutual injuries, degradations, retrogressions, such as darken all the pages of humanhistory; the manifest evil which often defies all interpretation, andwhich only a profound faith can regard as "good in the making. "

Together with these influences we must also reckon the special action ofstrong personalities. 

No sharp line can be drawn between these various powers, --their interplayis constant. The main argument of the drama, from the mediaeval to thepresent phase, may be briefly shown. 

Into the world as Dante knew it came Knowledge on three greatlines, --opening the material universe, rediscovering a lostinterpretation of life, and diffusing the secrets of the few among themany. The astronomers, voyagers, and geographers found out a new heavenand a new earth. The revival of Greek literature gave to the cultivatedclass a "renaissance, " a rebirth, of speculative thought, of intellectualbeauty, of delight in human activities for their own sake. It was a newbirth in some of the old pagan sensuality, skeptical of heaven or hell;worse than the old sensuality because it trampled down the finer puritywhich Christianity had bred. In others it was a new birth to the pursuitof moral and social good, inspired by the master spirits of Judaism andearly Christianity. Then came the invention of printing, and thearistocracy of intelligence widened rapidly toward democracy. 

The foremost men of the new knowledge supported the Catholic church, either as a covert for indulgence or as a spiritual agency to bemaintained and purified. The successful rebel against the church was apeasant-priest, who revolted because the moral unsoundness which long hadsapped the hierarchy ran at last into open countenance of vice. It wasoriginally a moral revolt, and it was led by a man who knew in his ownexperience that not only the ethical but the emotional life of the spiritwas possible without dependence on the church of Rome. But neitherLuther nor any of the reformers were men of spiritual originality. Driven to construct a new creed, they simply worked over the old dogmas, divesting them of the keys of priestly power--the Mass, the confessional, absolution, Purgatory, and the like; and giving infallible authority tothe Bible only. A war of creeds followed, mingled with a strife ofambitions and a struggle between the powers of the secular state and ofthe hierarchy. To men of piety and peace like Erasmus and Melanchthon itseemed as if religion were only a loser by the long period of bloodshedand bitterness that followed. The gain, as we see it, was that half ofEurope was wrested from the dominion of the Catholic church; that thatchurch was driven to purify its morals; and that in the Protestant statesthe liberty which at first was only a change of masters spread gradually, as one sect after another established its foothold, and as the seculartemper in the state rose above the ecclesiastical, until the religiousfreedom of the individual is at last becoming generally and securelyestablished. 

Only by this overthrow of ecclesiastical authority was rendered possiblethat unchecked freedom of intellectual inquiry which has been the greatpositive factor in modern advance. Step by step men have learned to knowthe condition, the history, the natural laws of the material world inwhich they live and the social world of which they are a part. Thebearing of this growing knowledge on the conception of the spiritual lifehas been various, --seeming for a while to lie wholly apart from it; thenat times menacing its existence or contracting its scope; again arming itwith powerful weapons and enlarging its ideals. Of the latest chaptersin the story of science, one has retold the origin of Christianity, divested it of miracle and revelation, and translated it into purelynatural and human terms. Another chapter has fixed the general trend ofthe universe known to man as an ever advancing and broadening movement, under the name of Evolution. 

Amid all these changes the Christian church has continued to present itsideals, precepts, incitements; partly affirming them in contradiction ofall denial, partly adapting them to the changes of time and thought. Themoral and spiritual interpretation of life has not been confined to thechurch, but has been voiced in each generation by poets, moralists, reformers, statesmen, each after his thought. Out of the conflict andconfusion a substantial agreement and harmonious ideal is at lastappearing. More clearly and confidently in our day than ever before theuniverse may be seen and felt by man as a Cosmos, --a beautiful order. 

This bird's-eye view will grow more distinct and vivid if we studycertain typical figures which group themselves as the representatives ofsucceeding generations. Our conventional division of centuries willserve as a convenient framework for four groups. 

In the sixteenth century we have Sir Thomas More, uniting the highestvirtue of the church with the clearest intelligence of the new thought, and setting forth in Utopia the ideal to be sought, --not mere individualsalvation, not an ecclesiastical fold, but a human commonwealth of free, happy, and virtuous citizens. 

Instead of the peaceful growth of such a society, --made impossible byselfishness, ignorance, and passion, --comes social upheaval and religiousrevolution, its central figure the burly, heroic, great-hearted Luther;by turns a rebel and a conservative; leading the successful revolt ofTeutonic Europe against Rome, but leaving reconstruction to other hands. 

Then we have Calvin, the builder of the creed of Protestantism; in itssubstance little but a symmetrical statement of mediaeval ideas, butresting its appeal not on authority, but logic; or, more exactly, on theauthority of a book, which, having no longer an infallible interpreter, must be judged by human reason as to its contents and at last as to itsnature and origin. Thus, unconsciously, Calvin initiated a religiousdemocracy and ultimately a religion of reason; while for the time heestablished a creed more austere and grim than the Catholic. Oppositehim stands Loyola, the reviver of Catholicism, infusing it with a newheroism and self-sacrifice; reaffirming and intensifying its authority;scornful of speculation, powerful in organization; zealot, missionary, educator; giving to ecclesiastical obedience an added emphasis, toorganization a new force. 

For a typical group in the next century, let us take Francis Bacon, leading the human intellect away from abstractions and from other worldsto the close, intelligent study of the material world in which men live. Beside him stands Shakspere, reading the world of humanity with eyesneither biased by creed nor sublimed by faith; portraying with marvelousrange the joys, sorrows, humors of mankind; showing on his impartialcanvas a true humanity, far different from the fictitious saint andfictitious sinner of the theologian; showing, as with the truth ofnature, "virtue in her shape how lovely;" but with no consolation besidethe grave, no satisfying ideal for man's pursuit nor rule for man'sguidance. Near him we see "the Shakspere of divines, " Jeremy Taylor; he, too, is close to the realities of life, but he is planted firm on thebelief in a supernatural revelation of God, Christ, and a hereafter, andfor those who so believe offers a simple, noble way of "Holy Living andDying. "

In Cromwell is embodied the attempt of extreme Protestantism to mouldsociety and the state by the authority of a supernatural religion. ThePuritan creed for which he stands is a mixture of Hebraic and Calvinisticelements; the Puritan temper is at its best heroic and austere, madedespotic by its confidence of divine authority, and by itssupernaturalism made indifferent to the new science and to the variouselements of human nature on which statesmanship must build. Itspolitical sway is brief, its effects on English and American characterare lasting. 

In the next century the master minds stand outside of Christianity. Voltaire assails the whole ecclesiastical and supernatural fabric withterrible weapons of hard sense and derision. For the target of hisarrows he has a church at once corrupt, tyrannical, and weak, and a creedwhich the best intelligence has outgrown. He heartily scouts the church, dogma, miracle; admits a vague Deity and a possible hereafter, but careslittle for them; is fearless, jovial, generous, --a rollicking, comfortable, formidable apostle of negations. 

Into the vacuum he creates comes Rousseau, and at his touch there well upagain deep fountains of feeling, belief, desire. Rousseau, too, has leftbehind him the church and its dogmas; but he craves love, joy, action, and finds scope for them. He delights in nature's beauty, and it is thesymbol to him of a God in whom there remains of the Christian Deity onlythe element of beneficence. He exhorts men to return to nature, but itis a somewhat unreal nature, a dream of primeval innocence andsimplicity. He idealizes the family relation, and brings wisdom andgentleness to the training of the child. He lacks the Hebraic andPuritan stress on conscience; the mild benevolence of his Deity issomewhat remote from the ethical need of man and from the actualprocedure or the universe; Rousseau himself is tainted withsensuality, --a diseased, suffering, pathetic nature, with "sweet stringsjangled, " worthy of pity and of gratitude. 

In France, the highest intelligence was at war with establishedinstitutions, --the Encyclopaedists, Voltaire, Rousseau, against theCatholic church and the reigning authorities: on the one sidepersecution, but growing feeble; on the other side derision or evasion orattack. In England, a large measure of civil and religious freedom gavethe intellectual combatants a fairer field and a milder temper. TheEnglish genius showed itself as practical, matter-of-fact, and moderate. Supernatural Christianity was attacked and defended; against the assaulton the miracles the defense was really a shifting of the ground, and aninsistence as by Butler on an ethical order in the observed workings ofthe world, which gives a sort of analogue and support to the Christianscheme of future retribution. In speculative thought the prevailingschool, as in Locke, approached reality from the side of sense-knowledge, till Hume showed how this road led to a denial of miracle and inphilosophy to a fundamental skepticism. Berkeley reverted to the idealphilosophy, and there seemed but a continuance of the eternal seesaw ofmetaphysics. 

In Germany, Kant sank his plummet deeper. He found indeed in the workingof the pure intellect an outcome of self-contradiction. But herecognized, as the most certain guide to reality which man's inner worldaffords, the commanding sense of duty, --the "moral imperative;" andthrough this he found the presence and the authoritative voice of a moraldeity. 

Goethe lived through a rich and various experience, of book-culture, emotion, conversance with men and affairs, in the attitude of an explorerand observer, unbound by creeds, but open to all teaching from pastrecords or present impressions. The projection of this experience was anideal of life which gave large scope to all human faculties, --toknowledge, pleasure, passion, service, --under a wise self-control, andwith theoretical allegiance to a moral law and a future hope not unlikethe law and the hope of Christianity. It was an ideal which appealedonly to the man of intellectual habit, and which lacked the note ofheroism and self-sacrifice. 

It was the opposite quality, the passion of self-forgetful service, whichwon for Christianity its most notable triumph in this century, in themovement led by John Wesley. In Wesley, Protestantism came back to therescue of the poor, as Catholicism came back in Francis of Assisi. Amongthe peasants and colliers of England, among the backwoodsmen of America, swept an uplifting wave of love, joy, and hope. 

Jonathan Edwards did Christianity the service of carrying Calvinism toits logical extreme, and showing what it really meant. He started inthe New England ministry a strenuous speculation, which was not torest till it destroyed the foundation from which he worked. The hellas to which comfortable churchmen were getting silent, he painted insuch lurid colors that reaction and ultimate revolt were necessitiesof human nature. The life of holiness and love--in himself a mostgenuine reality--he defined in such terms of introspection andself-consciousness, that there opened a wide gulf between the forms ofreligion and the most sturdy and natural virtue of the time. 

That sturdy and natural virtue was embodied in Benjamin Franklin, --in allthis eighteenth century the best type and herald of the comingdevelopment of man. Franklin inherited the characteristic virtue of theEnglishman and the Puritan; he started in ground which Puritan and Quakerhad fertilized, and when the fire of the early zeal had cooled; he workedout the problem of life for himself with great independence and entiregood sense. After a few vagaries and some wholesome buffeting, hedetermined that "moral perfection" was the only satisfying aim. Butinstead of proclaiming his discovery as a gospel, he quietly utilized itfor his personal guidance. He had a keen eye for all utility; he carvedout his own fortune; he early identified his own happiness with that ofthe people around him, and served the community with disinterestedfaithfulness through a long life. That unselfish beneficence, of whichGoethe thought a single instance was enough to save his hero from thefiend to whom he had fairly forfeited his selfish soul, was the habit ofFranklin's lifetime. He found the ample sanctions and rewards of virtuein the present world, though he held a cheerful hope of something beyond. In the study of this world's laws, he saw, lay the best road to humansuccess. He recognized the homely virtues of industry and thrift, onwhich the young American society had worked out its real strength, andassigned to them the fundamental place, instead of that mystic andintrospective piety which the Calvinist made his corner-stone. He tookthe lead in penetrating the secrets of nature, and not less in mouldingand guiding the infant nation. If his virtue was prudential rather thanheroic, his prudence was close to that large wisdom which is a rightapprehension of all the facts of life. Only the realm of the poet, themystic, the ardent lover, lay beyond his ken. He stands side by sidewith the grand and magnanimous figure of Washington, --the twin foundersof the American republic. 

The complexity and onrush of the nineteenth century may be in some degreemade clear if we fix our eyes on certain typical groups of men whom wemay classify under the aspects of Knowledge, Philosophy, Literature, Protestantism, Catholicism, Social Ideals, Personal Ideals. 

Regarding under Knowledge what may fairly be considered as solid andirreversible acquisition, --the general movement of humanity has receivedconspicuous interpretation by Darwin, who by most patient investigationdiscovered at least approximately the path by which man has beendeveloped out of the lower animal forms. Spencer has shown, by a vastgeneralization of facts, the working throughout all realms of existenceknown to man of certain common tendencies--of variation and new andspecialized formation. Apart from all debatable theories of psychologyand metaphysics, he and a host of other students in the same directionhave discovered clews by which the growth of human societies and theirindividual members can be in some degree traced under general laws. 

In another department of knowledge the sacred histories of Christianityhave been given a new reading by scholars, among whom Strauss, Baur, andRenan are conspicuous. The general result has been to show that thesescriptures are purely human documents, and the personages they describeare purely human. Through the gospel histories Strauss ran his criticaltheory like a plowshare through a field of daisies. He showed especiallythe genesis of many of these stories by imagination working creations outof Old Testament texts. Baur led the way in discovering by marvelousanalysis the composite influences which helped to shape the apostolichistories in the interest of party or of piety. Renan reillumined thescene which his predecessors seemed to convert into a dreary waste, byreconceiving, with erudition illumined by genius and sympathy, thepersonality of Jesus of Nazareth as a human character, nowise infallible, but a sublime leader of the race. While Christianity has thus beenbrought to the level of a natural religion, its old-time adversaries, theother world-religions such as Buddhism, Brahmanism, Islamism, have beenshown by sympathetic students to be vast upward essays of mankind towardtruth and goodness. That no religion is handed down complete fromheaven, and that all religions are expressions of human aspiration andeffort, is coming to be accepted as axiomatic. 

Turning from well-established knowledge to theoretical schemes of theuniverse, the three typical names in this century are Hegel, Comte, andSpencer. Hegel stood for the interpretation of all existence in terms ofman's inner world--thought and being are regarded as identical, and themovement of thought, expressed by a new kind of logic, becomesinterpreter of the development of the universe. In absolute revulsionfrom this tendency, Comte in his world-scheme rejected metaphysics andtheology alike as belonging to the infantile stage of man, and recognizedas legitimate only the "positive" knowledge which science affords. Forthe emotional and ethical needs of man, he offered "the religion ofhumanity, " with the service of mankind as its worship and woman as itspriestess. Spencer, equally discarding the supernatural as matter ofknowledge, relegates the distinctively religious emotion to awe before asupreme power wholly inscrutable to man. He sets himself to formulate sofar as possible the observed workings of the universe in which man is apart; he makes Evolution the central principle; he finds in Heredity andEnvironment the great formative influences upon the individual; and hereaffirms as of supreme importance the familiar ethical principles whichmankind has discovered in its experiences. 

In all these forms, the constructive philosophy of our century hasvisibly fallen short of the immense volume of old and new truths which ithas striven to mould and formulate. The characteristic genius of thetime is shown more powerfully on the one hand in the accumulation ofspecific knowledge, as science; and on the other hand in the imaginativeportrayal of human life. The favorite vehicle of imagination has beenthe novel. If our successors hereafter desire to know how man in thenineteenth century appeared to himself, their best guides will be such asScott, Hawthorne, Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Hugo, Balzac. It isthe children of Bacon and those of Shakspere who are most conspicuous inthe work of yesterday. To-day we seem to stand on the threshold of amore inclusive, more profound, more inspiring philosophy. 

The Christian church has, like all other institutions, been deeplyaffected by the time-spirit. In Protestantism, the great developmentshave been a modification of the creed, and a transfer of energy from thewinning of a future salvation to the working out of a present salvationfor the individual and for society. The creed has been changed, inspirit more widely than in form, partly under the influence of reason andpartly through a reawakening of spiritual and humane feeling. Schleiermacher interpreted Christianity as an emotional and ethicalexperience, rather than a dogmatic system. In the English church, whileone refluent wave swept toward a dogmatic authority and ritualisticsplendor like that of Rome, on another side the effort to reconcile thechurch with modern thought and fit it to modern society was carriedfarther and farther by Coleridge, Arnold, Robertson, Maurice, Kingsley, and Stanley; till the advance has met a sharp check at the point whererejection of miracle involves a collision with the formularies ofworship. In America, a like advance has had the advantage of that moreelastic polity which allows to churches of the Congregational order aneasier change of creed and worship. The leaders have been, in theUnitarian line, such as Channing, who purified Christianity of itsCalvinistic harshness and then of its Athanasian metaphysics; and Parker, who took the great step to simple theism, --Christian in ethics and piety, but purely naturalistic in theology. In the other great branch of theNew England church, --for in New England alone has America shown religiousoriginality, --Bushnell in a scholastic way, and Beecher with poetic andpopular power, resolved the dogmatic system into a supremacy in theuniverse of love and holiness, embodied in a deity who became actuallyincarnated as Christ. Phillips Brooks, exercising a spiritual power ofextraordinary purity and intensity, and so unspeculative that he felt nodifficulty in the formulae of the Episcopal church, taught a religion inwhich Christ represents a sublimed and perfect humanity, a realizedideal, the inspiration and helper of men who are his brothers. 

In the Catholic church, two Popes stand as representative, Plus IX. AndLeo XIII. Under the first, the monarchic system of the church was madecomplete, and the highest function of the Council, the definition ofreligious truth, was assigned to the Pope. By Leo XIII. This autocracyis administered in sympathy largely with modern ideas. The church alliesitself less with the temporal monarch than with the common people. Itthrows much of its force into ethical channels. Its characteristicinterest is in education, temperance, social reform; and along with theseit still ministers publicly and privately to that communion with God inwhich it places the foundation and secret of human life. Its limitationsare that it still claims not only to persuade but to rule--a usefulfunction toward some classes, but impossible toward other classes; thatits pretension to infallibility obliges it to misread history; and thatits foundation of dogma admits no frank and full reconciliation withmodern knowledge. 

But to know the full mind and heart of our age, we must again take asurvey beyond the church walls. The emotional forces which have movedthe world have been largely in the direction of certain socialaspirations. The first was for Liberty--freedom from the tyranny ofking's and priests. It won its first great victory in America, where theWar of Independence and the making of the Constitution marked by a bravestruggle and a masterpiece of good sense the consummation of many years'growth of an English shoot in virgin soil. England herself has followedwith more unequal steps to a similar result. In France, there wasvolcanic explosion which convulsed Europe. The other Continental stateshave variously followed, save Russia, which as yet lies impotent underdespotism. Following the substantial success of the effort for Liberty, or blending with it, came the aspiration for a better Social Order. Inone phase, this worked toward the consolidation of nations on naturallines of race and history, as in Germany and Italy. In America, the twoideas of universal Freedom and national Union, conflicting for a whilewith each other, blent at last and triumphed after a mighty struggle. The supreme figure in that struggle was Abraham Lincoln; who in hispublic capacity illustrated how the most complicated problems ofstatesmanship find their best solution through good-will, resolution, patience, and homely shrewdness; while in his own life he showed that aman may rise above misfortune and melancholy, unaided by creed or church, working only by absolute fidelity to the right as he sees the right, tillhe renders to his fellows a supreme service and wins their unbounded love. 

The aspiration for Social Order pauses not when it has won national unityand harmony. The principle and the result of the existing industrialsystem no longer content those who live under it. That system has beenstimulated by the enormous material acquisitions which have flowed frominvention. It has improved in some degree the condition of most membersof society, but with a marked inequality in the improvement, and at thecost of the mutual hostility which unchecked competition involves, andwhich is fruitful in moral mischief and material waste. The laborer hasgained in intelligence by the school and the newspaper; holding the vote, he feels himself one of the masters of the state; sympathy draws him tohis own class. The scholar sees that the system of unchecked competitionis an outgrowth of conditions which are changing, and which ought tochange. The idealist longs for a society which shall effectually seekthe highest good of every member, and supplement the hunger for personaladvantage with satisfaction in the good of all. The toiler and theidealist unite to seek a more generous and serviceable order in thecommunity, and the tendency is vaguely called Socialism. One conspicuousexponent is Karl Marx, who, with his followers, would make the highlycentralized German state the starting-point for a still moreauthoritative and minute regulation of the community, directed to theequal material benefit of all its members. By a different road a degreeof fraternal organization is being attained, through voluntaryassociations of workingmen, for mutual support as toward their employers, or for independent production or distribution. All definite and dogmaticschemes of social reform prove upon challenge to need adjustment andmodification, to fit the actual workings of a society already infinitelycomplex. It is as the sentiment which for want of a better word we callsocialistic works along with that broad and candid study of fact which wecall scientific, and toward an ideal in which the material is but aninstrument of the spiritual, --that there is solid promise of advance. 

With these sentiments of Liberty and Social Order may be named what issometimes called Philanthropy, or in a broader way of speaking may benamed Humanity, --the unselfish passion for the good of others, the ardorof service, to which early Christianity gave outlet in missions, andwhich now throws itself into reform, education, amelioration in everydirection of human need. 

More central to man than any social ideal is the personal ideal. Forsociety is but an aggregation of units; state, church, community, family, have their aim and outcome in the individual man; they are serviceableonly as through them he becomes good and happy. What new interpretationshas this century seen of the personal ideal? They may partly be read ina group of poets of the English-speaking people. Wordsworth, loyal tothe forms of the old Christianity, shows life as really sustained andgladdened by simple duty and by the sacramental beauty of nature--onegiving the rule of conduct, the other disclosing the divinity of theworld. Tennyson gives in "In Memoriam" that interpretation of human lifewhich comes when love is sublimed by death. Browning shows the soul faceto face with the doubt, the denial, the dismay, which are added to thefoes of human peace in an age which has lost the old faith, and shows thesoul victorious over all by its own energy, constancy, and joy. InWhittier, the dogmatic system of Christianity is transformed into aspirit of fidelity, brotherhood, and tender trust. Emerson gives thatdirect vision of divine reality, seen in nature, in humanity, in theheart's innermost recesses, which is possible to a soul purified by moralfidelity, reverent of natural law, and winged by holy desire. 

These have been the prophets of hope and of victory. The dark message ofdefeat and despair has also had its full expression. Satiety withmaterial good, disappointment of inward joy, the loss of the old objectsof adoration and trust, have inspired utterances in every key of gloom, impotence, despondency verging toward suicide. Schopenhauer hasformulated a philosophy of pessimism, and through a host of the minorstory-tellers and versifiers runs the note of discouragement andabandonment. The most dangerous alliance which besets man is thatbetween Sensuality and Unbelief, whispering together in his ear, "Let useat and drink, for to-morrow we die!" Sometimes unbelief is at thewidest remove from sensuality; it may go with pure devotion to truth andthirst for goodness. There are pathetic and noble voices of seekersafter God, which when they do not gladden yet strengthen and purify, andwhich catch at moments an exquisite tone of peace and joy. Such areClough and Matthew Arnold. We have one moralist of the Spencerianschool, George Eliot, who unites a strong ethical sense with a wonderfulreading of human nature. Her essential message, told again and again inevery book, is, "Life may be ruined by self-indulgence--beware!" If weask, "But may life be saved by fidelity?" her answer is uncertain. Andin her own life we read, with humbled eyes, the defect which marred thenote of triumph and deepened the note of warning. 

If, again, as to the Personal Ideal, we revert to the basal elements ofcharacter, --to the homely, every-day aspect, --to the life not only of thecultivated few but of the mass of humanity, --the new perception has beenreached, that Work is the basis of all personal and social virtue. Toil, said the old Scripture, is God's punishment for man's sin. Toil, saysthe religious enthusiast, is a necessary incident of an existence whosehigher exercise lies in spiritual emotion reaching toward a futureParadise. But toil, to modern eyes, is the root which binds man to hisnative earth, and transmits all the sap which creates flowers and fruit. Intelligent, arduous, thrifty toil is the mother of greatness. "Do thenext thing, --do the nearest duty, --labor rather than question, "--is themost articulate note in Carlyle's stormy message. The old charity was togive bread to the hungry; the new charity is to help the hungry to workfor their bread. A generation ago it seemed to American reformers thatthe nation's problem would be solved if once the slaves were freed. Theywere set free, and then it was seen that the whole question of theirfuture destiny was still to be met. Practical necessity, religious zeal, political schemes, all played their part; but the best answer camethrough the apostle Armstrong, "Character, wrought out through educationand labor. " The inherited devotion of Christian missionaries caught thelight of personal experience and observation, and a man in whom heroictemper blent with shrewdest wisdom laid the foundation of an educationtranscending in its aims and results the whole traditional system ofschool and university. It is an object-lesson of supreme significance. That way lies the future education of our children, --character its aim, nature its chief book, exercise of all the bodily and spiritual powersits method. 

Here, then, are the results of our century as they bear on man's higherlife. A religion through special revelation has been displaced by areligion which faces all the facts of existence and bases itself on them. Man has found new clews to read the story of his past, and new ways tomould his present and future. The old ethical ideals have beenreaffirmed, broadened, purified. The task of building personal life andof ordering society has been set before man in fresh clearness, underheavy penalties for failure and heart-filling rewards for success. It isseen that the humble path of moral obedience issues in celestial heightsof spiritual vision. Out of the noblest use of the Here and Now springsthe assurance of a Hereafter and the sense of a present eternity. Theway to the Highest is open, inviting, commanding. The simplest mayenter, and the strongest must give his full strength to the quest. 

II

THE IDEAL OF TO-DAY

The way of the highest life is clear and certain. Its first and lastprecept is fidelity to the best we know. Its constant process is thatfidelity wins moral growth and spiritual vision. 

All attempts to demonstrate the nature and attributes of God, alleffort to prove by argument that the universe is administered byrighteousness and benevolence, are aside from the main road. The realtask for man is to order his own life, as an individual and in society. To do that, he needs to understand his own life as a practical matter;he needs to study the procedure of the world in which he stands; heneeds to rally every force of knowledge, resolution, sympathy, reverence, aspiration, upon this high business of personal and socialliving. As he achieves such life, there develop in him the facultieswhich read sublime meanings in the universe of which he is a part. Ashe becomes divine, he finds divinity everywhere. 

The heart of religion is joy, peace, energy, support under suffering, inward harmony, true relation with fellow creatures, grateful sense ofthe past, full fruition of the present, glad out-reach to a beckoningfuture. The way to that life is wholly independent of doubtfulargumentation. It lies simply in a whole-hearted conformity to whatare known beyond all question as the worthy aims, the justrequirements, the righteous laws. 

Let us consider somewhat at large the unfolding of this philosophy oflife. Let us seek to sympathetically interpret the deepest, mostsignificant working of the human spirit in our time. 

Is it not the distinctive note of the thoughtful and honest mind ofto-day, as compared with a like mind some centuries ago, that itcontemplates more directly the actual procedure of the universe, isless concerned with supernatural personages and transactions, and moreattentive to what has happened and is happening in this mundane sphere?The piety of our ancestors contemplated the justice and mercy of God asmanifested in the counsels of eternity, --his righteous condemnation ofthe wicked, and the love-inspired sacrifice of Christ. The philosophyof our ancestors was largely an attempt to map out a world-scheme fromman's inner consciousness. The modern thinker, whether he callshimself Christian or not, is inclined to make his essay toward theSupreme Power by way of the observed workings of the universe. Andcertain general impressions which he thus receives we may distinguish. 

That aspect of things which now engages us with the fascination of anew and vast discovery is what we term "Evolution. " Its spectacle, onthe one hand, prompts a sure and soaring hope. In the sum of things wesee a movement upward and still upward, --from unorganized to organizedmatter, from unconscious to sentient existence, from beast to man, fromsavage to saint, --and who can say to what height in the coming ages?But on the other hand we see that thus far at least the progress of thefavored is at deadly cost to the losers. And we see that parallel withthe ascending white line of humanity runs an ascending black line, --thebad man of civilization is in some ways worse than the bad man ofsavagery. And this complexity of good and evil is recognized at a timewhen a higher sensibility has made the old familiar pain and sin ofhumanity seem more than ever intolerable. 

Yet the spectacle of creation and of the world, as we see and know it, makes upon us an impression far beyond that of mere perplexity ordismay. It produces a sentiment which we may best call _awe_. All thegreat aspects of nature wake in us this reverential emotion. Afamiliar instance is the effect upon us of the starry heavens. ThePsalmist thrilled at that sight, --how much more deeply are we moved, knowing what we know of the vastness and the order! Some like effecton us has the unfolding revelation of the whole process of nature. "Ithink the thoughts of God after him, " said Kepler. Let any man studyin some clear exposition the development of the human race from theanimal; and the wonder of the process, the unity of design, theunforeseen goals reached one by one, the irresistible impression thatthe harmony which man's little faculties can discern is but a fractionof some sublimer harmony, --these emotions have in them a surpassingpower to humble, purify, and exalt the spirit. 

The modern mind addresses itself to the highest reality through theactualities of existence, and of those actualities one most significantphase is the procedure and laws of nature. But there is another andmore impressive aspect: it is the inner life of humanity; it is man'sown conscious existence, with its struggles, victories, defeats, itsagonies and raptures, its mirth, its play, its sweetness andbitterness. This to us is the realm of real existence. In this we areat home. The march of the planets, the evolution of a world, the wholeprocess of nature, is like the view from a window; and, gazing upon it, sits feeling, thinking, aspiring man. His consciousness is environedand conditioned by the surrounding world, but is utterly unexplained byit, wholly untranslatable in its terms. Definite and precise is thelanguage of mathematics, of chemistry, of physical procedure. Mysteryof mysteries is the human spirit, --mystery of mysteries and holy ofholies. A new sense of the sacredness of human life has been born inthis later age. It is our most precious acquisition. Better could wehave waited for modern science than for modern humanity. Better couldwe spare the telegraph and the steam-engine and anaesthesia than thatquickened sense of the value of man as man which inspires the deepestpolitical and social movements of to-day. In all sober minds, in alllofty effort, --whatever there may be of despair of God or hopelessnessof a personal future, --we see a profound recognition of the solemnityand sacredness of human existence. Through the sad pages of GeorgeEliot, through Emerson's exultant psalm, through the reformer's battle, the socialist's scheme, runs this golden link, --the value of simplehumanity. 

This, then, we may say is the characteristic attitude of the man ofto-day, --before the processes of nature, awe and reverence; before thelife of humanity, sympathy and tenderness. 

But now rises a heart-moving question. The dearest article ofreligious faith has been a Divine Power, governing the universe andholding to man an intimate relation involving issues of supremesignificance to humanity. At this point modern thought falters. Thelong-familiar expression of that belief is the assertion of a personal, providential, all-just, and all-loving God. What reason have menassigned to themselves for belief in such a God, while confronted allthe time by the fearful spectacle of a world in which sin and miseryperpetually mingle with goodness and happiness? What has been theresource of the Christian intellect against that mystery of evil whichbaffled the questioner in the book of Job, and drove Lucretius tovirtual atheism, and left Marcus Aurelius in doubt whether there begods or not? The resource of the Christian thinker has been his beliefthat Jesus Christ was God incarnate. Here was a soul which was sinlessand holy, which loved sinners so as to die for them; and this was Godhimself. That belief has been the foundation of Christian theology. It left the mysteries of earth's sorrow and sin unexplained; but itoffered the assurance, under a most living figure, that the author andfinal disposer of the whole was one whose nature was love itself. 

When it ceases to be believed that Jesus was God, the corner-stone ofthis whole structure of belief, as an intellectual conception, is gone. The void is concealed for a while by intermediate theories, --that Jesuswas a kind of inferior deity, that he was at least a supernaturalmessenger. Frankly say that he was a man only, and we have reallygiven up that intellectual ground of confidence in a God on which formany centuries men have stood. And, in that involuntary and mostregretful surrender, and in the first impression following it, that theonly discernible order is a mechanical order, with no room for worship, no hope of immortality, lies the tragedy of the thinking world to-day. For a multitude of minds, God is eclipsed, and the earth lies inshadow. In shadow, but not in despair. For still there is

 "The prophetic soul Of the wide world, dreaming of things to come. "

Slowly emerges a new conception. In the lowest depth of his spirit manhas found that, in Robertson's words, "it is better to be true than tobe false, better to be pure than to be sensual, better to be brave thanto be a coward. " By that sure and simple creed man lives through hisdarkest day. When the tree seems dead, that root lives. And presentlythere grows from it a nobler tree. 

The turning-point from the old thought to the new is this: We see thatthe imperative task set to every man is not to understand the universeplan, but to live his own life successfully. It will quite suffice formost of us if we can each one do justice to the possibilities of hisown existence. Those possibilities are something more than breathingand eating, sleeping and waking, toil and rest. Among hispossibilities each man hopes are included contentment, joy, peace. Atleast there must be possible for him some right conformity to theconditions in which he is placed, some noble and spiritualsatisfaction, some imparting of good to his fellow creatures. There isfor him some best way of life, which it is his business to find and tofollow. 

And as he finds and follows it, --as he fills out the best possibilitiesof his own being, --so he must come into the truest relation possiblefor him with this whole mysterious frame of things we call theuniverse. As he is himself at his best, so he will get the best, thewidest, the truest impression of the whole in which he is a part. 

This, then, is the rational and hopeful way of addressing the supremeproblem, --the problem, for the individual and for mankind, of ahappiness and a success which shall be rooted in the true nature ofthings and the real order of the universe. We are not to start withany supposed comprehension of the general plan, whether as revealed bymiracle or thought out by wise men. We are simply to live our ownlives according to the best knowledge we have, the highest examples weknow, the most satisfying results of our own experience. And, withwhatever discipline and enrichment this process of right living maybring us, we are to hold our whole natures open, attentive, percipientto the world about us, and accept whatever shall disclose itself. 

The two processes--right living and clear vision--blend constantly andintimately. We may distinguish them in our thoughts, but there isconstant interplay between life and sight. 

The business of living, --how infinitely complex it is, how endlesslylaborious, yet how simple and how sure! Its central principle, we maysay, is the right fitting of one's self to his surroundings. Modernscience has learned that for every creature the condition of success isadaptation to its environment. We may use that way of speaking toexpress the prime necessity of man. His environment is a vastcomplexity of material, social, and spiritual realities. 

There is for him a true way of adapting himself to these surroundingfacts. He has somehow found it out in the long existence of the race;he has seen it more and more clearly. This true way is expressed bywhat we call right principles of conduct. It is such traits as we namecourage, truth, justice, purity, love, aspiration, reverence. Itincludes the study of natural laws and conformity to them. It includesthe search for knowledge, both for its use and for its own joy. Itincludes the delighted gaze upon beauty of every kind. 

Whoever follows this ideal--and just as far as he follows itintelligently and earnestly--finds certain results. Whenever he acts, he finds set before him a right way to follow rather than a wrong. Sofrom every situation he may draw strength. So he may continually findpeace, --often peace won through struggle, but the deeper for thestruggle. The love of beauty finds beauty everywhere. The love ofliving creatures finds objects everywhere, and love given brings lovein response. This higher life gives joy, --not constant, alternatingwith sorrow; but the joy is incomparably sweeter and purer and higherthan any other course of life yields, and the sorrow has such nobilitythat we dare not wish it absent from the mingled cup we drain. Andalways through joy or sorrow may come moral growth--development ofcharacter. 

There is no exemption to be won from suffering, none from fear. Pain, weakness, bereavement, death, --these things must come, and we mustsometimes tremble before them, --no divine hand will pluck them away. But in our fear we learn a deeper strength. 

These are the gifts with which Life answers our faithful service. Thebrave, the gentle, the peace-makers, the pure in heart, the forgiving, the patient, the heroic, are blessed, --incomparably enriched. 

This is what we know of the relation of the One Power toourselves, --that it asks the very highest and best we can give, andreturns our service with the best and highest we can receive. This iswhat that power we name God is to us. 

This is the same reality which has been apprehended under the figure ofa personal God, a Heavenly Father, or a Christ. To many, those figuresstill express it. But those to whom the Deity is not thus personifiedmay no less fully and vividly apprehend the divine Reality. 

And further, this whole conception stands no less in stead the personsand the hours when the conscious sense of Deity fails altogether. Thisconception makes the essence of religion to be conformity to the homelyfacts about us, in the relations of fidelity, sympathy, and service. When one has no conscious thought of God, or cannot reach such thoughtif he tries, he can always exercise love, sympathy, admiration, self-control, --and that is enough. 

The limitations of our knowledge imply everywhere a background ofmystery. But that mystery is at once a stimulus to our inquiry and aprize set before our longing. In some respects it is only a challengeto search, and the horizons of knowledge forever widen before theexplorer. At other points the veil never lifts, but all longing, aspiration, unsatisfied hunger, inarticulate yearning, "groanings whichcannot be uttered, " reach out to and lay hold on this realm of mystery. It is not an adamantine wall that encircles us, it is the tendermystery of the sunset or the starry heavens. 

So of the mystery of death. The veil is not lifted, but it stirsbefore the breath of our prayers and hopes. The deepest fear in man isthe fear of death, and that fear is conquered in him by somethinggreater than itself. Even on the natural plane man is seldom afraid ofdeath when it comes; it is rather the distant image that appalls him. Before the reality some instinct seems to bid him not to fear. Everynoble sentiment lifts men above the dread of death. For their countryon the battlefield, for other men in sudden accidents and perils, mengive their lives instinctively or deliberately. 

It is personal love to which death seems to menace irretrievable andfinal disaster. But it is personal love to which comes the divinestpresage. Some voice says to our yearning heart, "Fear nothing, doubtnothing, only _live_!"

From our birth to our death we are encompassed by mystery, but it is amystery which may, if we will have it so, grow warm, luminous, divine. 

So, by simple fidelity, man may find within himself harmony, victory, and peace. When now, from this standpoint, he looks out on theuniverse, --and from no other standpoint can he hope for any clearvision, --what does he most clearly discern? These threeaspects, --Order, Beauty, Life. 

As he opens himself to these three aspects and actively conformshimself to them, --as he studies, obeys, and reveres the Order, as heperceives and rejoices in the Beauty, as in sympathy and service hemerges his personal life in the multiform Life, --so he grows in theimpression of a divine harmony and unity pervading all things. So hebecomes aware of a Cosmos, --a universal order of beauty and of love. He becomes aware of it only as he becomes voluntarily and consciously apart of it. Only through the fidelity of his moral life does he feelbeneath his feet a sure foundation. Only as his soul glows a spark oflove does it recognize the celestial ether in which it is an atom. 

At every moment and on every side we are in touch with the realities ofbeing. 

We live and move in a world of orderly procedure, to which we may adaptourselves with growing intelligence and purpose. 

Both the animate and inanimate creation is clothed in forms whichminister to the sense of beauty; and the more that sense is cultivatedin us, the more universally do we recognize beauty, and the moreprofound is its appeal to our consciousness. 

In our social existence we come in touch with other souls, each withits actual or potential wealth of being, and each inviting oursympathetic response. 

These--order, beauty, conscious existence--are the impact on us of theuniverse. The right apprehension of these and the active response tothem constitute the true exercise of our own nature; and it is throughthat exercise that we know Life, --the one Life, --and know it to bedivine. 

These three aspects, --order, beauty, our fellow-lives, --let us dwellfor a moment on each in turn. 

An amazing stimulus to man's powers has come in the discovery that hemay penetrate and follow to an indefinite extent the actual procedureof the Universe. We are only on the threshold of our discoveries. Weare just beginning to see where they have their highest application. We have been harnessing the steeds of power to the service of ourphysical wants. We are just beginning to understand that they are tobe made the ministers of building up a complete manhood. Thetheologian has sought to demonstrate that all natural processes work inthe service of a divine righteousness. In place of any suchdemonstration, we are finding the true exercise of knowledge inapplying for ourselves the processes of nature to the fulfillment ofour noblest purposes. 

We are just now at the transition point between the old and the newconception of divine Power. The old conception was: "The Almighty is amerciful father. If his children ask anything, he will give it: theweapon of desire is prayer. " The new perception is: "The Almightymoves in lines which we can partly discern. By putting ourselves inline with that Power, we make it helpful: the weapon of desire isintelligent effort. Through our wills works the divine Will. "

 "With the great girdle of God, go and encompass the earth!"

It is moral fidelity which apprehends the true application andsignificance for man of that regular procedure of nature which environsand conditions him. And this Natural Order, in turn, requires themoral sense to humbly and obediently go to school to it. "You want tobe good?" says Nature. "You dare to believe that even I in mymightiness am set to help you to be good? Then study my processes, andconform to them!" A new set of commandments is being written in thesight of men, --commandments learned but slowly and often transgressed, even by those whose wills are pure and whose hearts are loving. _Thoushalt sufficiently rest_! How perpetually in these days is thatcommandment broken, and with what woeful penalty! The practical basisof all religion is the religion of the body. The body politic, too, the social organism, has its code of natural laws, intelligible, imperative. And every new discovery yields guidance and utterscommand. "Seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened!"

Only through moral fidelity is the higher meaning of Beauty won. It isthe pure in heart who see God. The beauty of the human form is, on theone side, uplifting to the soul, sacramental, as if it were the shrineof a divinity. On the other side, it blends with the instincts whichwhen unchecked in their play degrade humanity. Plato pictures the twomingled elements as two steeds yoked together, the one black, unruly, down-plunging, the other white, celestial, up-mounting, while Reason, the charioteer, strives to rule them. The nobler interpretation isslowly acquired by mankind. There are great, sometimes catastrophic, lapses; there are periods when art and literature become the servantsof the earthly instead of the heavenly Venus. We still look farforward to

 "The world's great bridals, chaste and calm. "

Yet, little by little, the ennobling aspect of human beauty becomes afamiliar perception, is wrought into a habit, is transmitted as aninheritance. Whoever achieves in himself the victory of personalpurity is helping to open the eyes of mankind. 

The material world becomes instinct with majesty and with sweetness tothe eyes that can see. It is a revelation of which Wordsworth andEmerson are the prophets in literature, but which is written no less inmany a heart quite untaught of books. The face of Mother Earth is thebook in which many a man and woman and child read lessons of delight, spelled in letters of rock and fern, of brook and cowslip, of mapleleaf and goldenrod. Such lessons mean little save to the pure andhumble. 

The distinctive voice of nature's gospel is a voice of joy. Mixingfreely with humanity, we encounter the almost perpetual presence oftrouble. But turning to forest and mountain and sea and sky, we areconfronted with gladness ineffable. Still "the morning stars singtogether and the sons of God shout for joy. " Can our religion find noother emblem than the cross, --the instrument of torture? Mankind haspondered long the lesson of sorrow: dare it enter the whole inheritanceof sonship, and taste the fullness of joy? Reality which thought andword cannot convey is bodied forth to us in music and in naturalbeauty. Music is the deepest voice of humanity, and beauty is theanswering smile of God. When the poet-philosopher has crowded intoverse all that he can express of life's meaning, --of the subservienceof evil to good, the "deep love lying under these pictures oftime, "--he invokes at the last the very look of earth and sea and skyas the best answer:--

 "Uprose the merry Sphinx, And crouched no more in stone; She melted, into purple cloud, She silvered in the moon; She spired into a yellow flame; She flowered in blossoms red; She flowed into a foaming wave; She stood Monadnoc's head. 

 "Thorough a thousand voices Spoke the universal dame, 'Who telleth one of my meanings Is master of all I am. '"

Yet is the chief exercise of our life through relation with ourfellow-lives. If the sublime joy of nature's companionship could bemade constant, at the price of isolation from our kind, the price werea thousand-fold too great. And it is through true and sympatheticrelation with other lives that we chiefly come into conscious harmonywith the universe. It is in a right interplay with mankind that we getclosest to the heart of things. 

"God is love. " So I am told: how shall I interpret it in myexperience? Is it a proposition to be believed about some beingthroned above my sight? If I exercise my mind in that direction, if Iweigh and balance and sift the intellectual evidence, I may toil to adoubtful conclusion. But let me, issuing forth from my ponderings, putmyself into kindly relations with my fellow beings, --let me so much aspat affectionately the head of the honest dog who meets me on thestreet, --and a thrill like the warmth of spring touches my chilledintellect. Let me, for a day only, make each human contact, though butof a passing moment, a true recognition of some other soul, and I feelmyself somehow in right relation with the world. "He that lovethknoweth God, and is born of God. "

At the heart of all love is an instinct of reciprocity. It may or maynot get a return from its immediate object, but somehow it opens thefountains of the universe. The heart that loves finds itself, itscarce knows how, beloved. 

Such, then, is the process, and such the revelation. The first step, the constant requirement, the unsparing hourly need, is obedience tothe known right. The sequence is an ever-widening sense of a sweet andcelestial encompassment. 

The man rightly practiced in all noble exercises of life--in moralfidelity, in reverence and sympathy, in observation and conformity tothe actual conditions of the world about him--will find pouring in uponhim a beauty, a love, a divinity, which fill the soul with a heavenlyvision. And that soul, in whatever of extremity may come to it, hasunder its feet the eternal rock. 

Through the serious literature of to-day runs a bitter wail, --the crythat life is sad and dark and cruel. Sad and dark and cruel it is, until one meets it sword in hand. The great Mother will have herchildren to be heroes. She tests them, frightens them, masks herselfsometimes in terror. Face the terror, drive straight at the danger, and the mask dissolves to show the celestial smile, the "all-repayingeyes. "

The road is an arduous one. The aged philosopher, you remember, wasasked by a youthful monarch, "Tell me if you please in a few words whatis the final fruit and outcome of philosophy?" The philosopheranswered him, "Cultivate yourself diligently in all virtue and wisdomfor thirty years, and then you may be able to partly understand theanswer to your question. "

It is an arduous road, but it leads to reality. All short and easyanswers to the supreme question dissatisfy after the first flush. Theconfidence of the dogmatic answer, we soon discover, has no sufficientauthority to back it. The glib theoretical answer leads us, after all, to a Balance of Probabilities. That is the best God that theoreticphilosophy can give us. It may be better than nothing. But who canlove a Balance of Probabilities? Who can feel the hand of such a deityas that when his hand gropes for support in face of temptation, disaster, heartbreak?

We are told, "It may suffice for the strong and saintly to bid them'Prove for yourself that the universe is good;' but what kind of gospelis this for the weak, for the child, for the average man and woman?"The answer is: The vast majority of mankind always have lived andalways will live largely by reliance on some person or some body ofpersons or some social atmosphere of opinion. That authority of thechurch which has availed so much is just the confidence of a crowd inthe leadership of certain men to whom they are accustomed to look up. In the order of nature, always the leaders will lead. What the strongand saintly receive with vivid impression and profound assurance, themass who feel their influence will accept a good deal on theirauthority. The child will catch the faith of its father and mother. But, further, in its very nature, that method of approach to thehighest reality which requires only goodness and open-heartedness andlove is available to the little child and to the simplest mind. WhenJesus said, "Blessed are the meek, the merciful, the peace-makers, thepure in heart, they that do hunger and thirst after righteousness, "every one understood him. 

But it may be asked, Does this attitude bring man face to face with apersonal God? Personal he will be to some: to many the only solid andadequate expression of a real being is a personal being. Nay, to manyonly a human personality means anything. A great preacher and poet ofour day once said that he never thought of God except under the figureof Christ, --a human figure in some human occupation and attitude. LetDivinity body itself as Christ to minds so constituted. Let othersinvoke "the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. " But impose noconstraint and lay no ban on those to whom, as Carlyle says, "theHighest cannot be spoken of in words. Personal! Impersonal! One!Three! What meaning can any mortal, after all, attach to them inreference to such an object?" It is not these forms of thought thatare essential. What is essential is a way of living access to theHighest. 

The adequate conception--the keynote--must be one that is sufficientalike for the every-day mood, for the exalted hours, and for theemergencies. That keynote is given in this truth: that there is nomoment so dull or so hard but one can ask himself, What is the best thesituation allows? and conform to that; can open his eyes to some beautyclose at hand; can enter sympathetically into some neighboring life. 

We prescribe to ourselves certain attitudes, and strive toward certainideals. But the supreme hours are those in which there flow in uponour consciousness the inshinings and the upholdings of some unfathomedPower. We are led, we are carried. We feel, we know not whence norhow, a peace that passeth understanding and a love that casteth outfear. 

This is the substance of that religious experience in which throughoutthe ages the heart of man has found its deepest support andencouragement. The experience has clothed itself to the imagination inthe garb of this or that creed or climate. It is liable to debasementsand counterfeits, but no more liable than all other noble emotions andexperiences. Sometimes there is the culmination of a moral struggle, and the whole course of life receives a new direction. Sometimes thereis an illumination and joy and peace. It is an exaltation of the soulin which gladness blends with moral energy. No chapter of human lifeis written in deeper letters than those which tell of victory overtemptation, strength out of weakness, radiance beside the grave, through this divine uplift. 

There is another experience, more common, less dependent on individualconstitution, which bears an inward message of soberer tone but of likeimport. It is the peace which attends the consciousness ofright-doing. Wordsworth personifies it as the approval of Duty, "sterndaughter of the voice of God:"--

 "Stern Lawgiver! Yet thou dost wear The Godhead's most benignant grace; Nor know we anything more fair Than is the smile upon thy face. "

The faithful child of duty, whatever his creed, whatever histemperament, is naturally the possessor of a steady, calm assurance. Somehow, he feels, it is well. 

Reasonings about immortality lead to little result. Convinced orunconvinced, we profit little by a mere opinion. We speculate, doubt, reject, or hope; and in either case the moral conduct of life is, perhaps, not much affected. But there come hours when to love andaspiration the heavenly vision opens, and the sense of its own eternitythrills the soul. 

The crying need of the heart is always a present need. No promise of afar-away satisfaction is sufficient for it. And answering to just thatneed is the experience, sometimes given, that the human love once oursis ours still in its fullness, --some richer fullness even than that ofdays gone by. There are hours in which the heart's voice is, "Though mixed with God and Nature thou, I seem to love thee more and more. "

The highest state of consciousness to which we attain is expressed bythe old phrase that man feels himself a child of God. His energy feelsback of it an infinite energy. His desires rest peacefully in someall-sufficing good. All that is highest and purest in him mingles withits divine source. He sees new and higher interpretations of his ownlife and other lives. All the human love he has ever experienced heholds as an abiding possession. There comes to him not so much thepremonition of a future state as the consciousness of some state inwhich past, present, and future blend. He is free from illusions, andserene. It does not disturb him even to know that the vision willpass, and he will return to earth's level. He sees the truth, he feelsthe divine reality; and the certainty and the gladness are such thatnot even the prevision of his own relapse into dimmer perception candepress him. The hour speaks with command to the hours that are tofollow; it bids them to fidelity, to love, to highest courage. 

When turning from contemplation we throw ourselves into the work andthe battle, a pulse of divine energy blends with our noblest effort, touches our joy with an ineffable sweetness, and hushes our sorrow likea child folded in its mother's arms. 

The key of the world is given into our hands when we throw ourselvesunreservedly into the service of the highest truth we know, "withfidelity to the right as God gives us to see the right. " So it is thatwe may find ourselves

 "Wedded to this goodly universe In love and holy passion. "

III

A TRAVELER'S NOTE-BOOK

A tourist who roams for a brief while through some great country likeEngland or Russia may jot down a few of the impressions which come hometo him, making no pretense at completeness or symmetry of description. So, one who has journeyed like a hasty traveler over some passages inthat vast tract of years which we describe as the classic and Christiancivilizations, notes down in the following pages a few of the salientfeatures that have impressed him. He has already prefaced this with asort of outline map, drawn largely from familiar authorities, under thetitle "Our Spiritual Ancestry;" and has further ventured to interpretsome phases of our own time, as "The Ideal of To-Day. " Now he goes on togroup a few observations on some special phases of the historical survey, disclaiming any attempt at exact proportion and perspective, butlingering where the prospect has pleased his fancy, or at points whichseemed to yield some necessary clew or fruitful suggestion. 

When, in the poems bearing the name of Homer, the curtain rises on thedrama of man as it was acted in Greece, after the immeasurableprehistoric space, we are amazed at the sudden brilliance. The men anddeeds brought before us are various in character and worth, --savage, heroic, repulsive, beautiful, by turns. But the ever-present charm isman seeing the world about him. It is the vividness with which everyobject is seen in its distinctive form and spirit, and conveyed by thefit word and phrase. So seen and spoken, the commonest object becomes athing of delight. The high-roofed house, the brazen threshold, thepolished chest, the silver-studded sword, the purple robes, --the tawnyoxen, the hollow ships, the tapering oars, --the wine-dark sea, therosy-fingered dawn, the gold-throned morning, --Hector of the noddingplume, the white-armed Nausicaa, --so in long procession moves thespectacle. A like distinctness invests all the actions and emotions ofthe story with charm. To us, as to the poet, the world becomes enchantedsimply in being seen. 

And presently we discover a strange transfiguration that is beingwrought. Experiences which were painful or grievous to the actors andsufferers become in the representation the source of keen pleasure to thehearers or readers. The Iliad is mainly a story of men destroying oneanother. The Odyssey depicts a long strife with hardship and danger. The men who heard those songs were themselves familiar with the fight, with the wounds and terrors mixed with its energies and elations; theyhad tasted the perils of shipwreck and of pirates. But as they listened, the rehearsal of trials the counterpart of their own filled them withexhilaration. We who read in modern days, if less experienced inbloodshed and bodily peril, yet in some fashion have had our share ofbattle and storm; and we, too, like the first listeners, drink in thetale with delight. The poet, in other words, has the secret not only ofseeing but of idealizing the actual world. We catch from him some subtleart by which, standing a little aloof from the pressure and turmoilaround us, often felt as painful or degrading, we see it through anatmosphere in which it becomes a splendid and heart-stirring scene. At alater stage we may perhaps in a degree analyze the change of view; we maypartly understand how through the struggle with evil man is strengthenedand ennobled; how in such strife courage and sympathy and tenderness areengendered. But long before we can thus philosophize, and to a degreewhich our philosophy can hardly explain, we are affected by this beautyand elevation imparted to the spectacle of human life by the true poets. 

We moderns read Homer with delight in the roll of the music, thevividness of the pictures, the humanity so near us in its essence and sounlike in its dress. When we inquire what are the moral ideals, we areoften uncertain how far the impressions made on us may differ from thoseof the original audience, or the intention of the singer. But often hiswork is like the painting of great Nature herself. We pass upon it as wepass upon the facts of life. 

The supernal features in the story are not here discussed. The deities, judged by our standards, have little of divinity. Beyond the grave liesa dim and dreamy realm. All this, with its great significance, we hereomit, to linger a little on the essential and permanent humanity. 

Achilles, the embodiment of power and passion, just touched with humanruth; Hector, the selfless, brave and gentle champion; Odysseus, victorin the long pilgrimage by fortitude and by wisdom, --these are the threeideal types of the early world, portrayed by its noblest genius. 

The Iliad culminates in the triumph of pity. The heart of Zeus ismelted, the harder heart of Achilles is melted, before the sorrows ofbereaved old age. An exquisite gentleness breathes through the closingscenes. All the wrath and terror and savagery of the story have led upto this height of pure compassion. A new light falls on all that hasgone before. Achilles, the fierce hero of the earlier story, is outshoneby his victim, Hector of the great and gentle heart. The crowning wordof praise, after father, mother, wife have uttered their lament, isspoken by the frail woman whose sin had brought ruin on Hector and hispeople: "If any other haply upbraided me in the palace halls, thenwouldst thou soothe such with words, and refrain them by the gentlenessof thy spirit and by thy gentle words. Therefore bewail I thee with painat heart, and my hapless self with thee, for no more is any left in wideTroy-land to be my friend and kind to me, but all men shudder at me. "

We see the sin of man and woman wrecking nations and leaving the sinnerin dreary isolation. We see unrelenting wrath, even when provoked bywrong, spreading woe upon the innocent, and at last smiting the wrathfulman through his dearest affections. We see the heroism which meets deathin defense of the beloved, yet has only tender pity for her who haswrought the ruin. 

The Iliad is mostly war, --men acting hell on earth, as Goethe said. Butin the Odyssey the goal of the hero is his home. The magnet is notHelen's beauty, but Penelope's faithfulness. Odysseus, mighty warrior, crafty leader, --who with his sword has smitten the Trojans, by his wilesdestroyed their city, --Odysseus is driven for ten years through hostileseas and men and gods by the compelling passion of home-sickness!

In the Odyssey, it is the battle with the sea which does most to toughenand supple and make indomitable. The soldier and sailor are the pioneersof the race. These and the tiller of the earth are the strong roots outof which are to grow the flower and fruit. 

In the Iliad, woman appears in Helen as the tempting prize and the gageof battle, and in Andromeda as the tender wife foredoomed to bereavementand captivity. In the Odyssey, woman plays a higher part--as Penelope, faithful and prudent and patient wife, fit spouse for Odysseus; asEurydice, the devoted old nurse; and as Nausicaa, loveliest of pristinemaidens. 

"The story of her worth shall never die; but for all humankind immortalones shall make a gladsome song in praise of steadfast Penelope. " It isa noble story: the fidelity of a wife, the undaunted courage of a man; along battle with adversity, crowned with the joy of love's reunion; themeeting with servant, nurse, dog, son, wife, father. 

Odysseus fights his battle as every hero must, --against hostile natureand man, --by courage and patience and craft, and a confidence that theheavenly power will somehow bring him through. 

So at the heart of the Iliad and the Odyssey is an austere and sweetmessage. The singers who embodied it in tales which stir every pulsewith delight were among the supreme teachers of mankind. The innermeaning of humanity's story which their songs display is still the lessonset us, --out of adversity man may win fortitude; through battle, shipwreck, and overthrow he scales the heights of manhood; and thefaithful pilgrimage ends in a home which is dearer for all troubles past. 

The Homeric poems show man in his first full awaking to beauty and tomusic. They show more. The fashioning of the supernal world in man'smind varies with people and with time. Here it is Zeus and Hades, againit will be Jehovah and Satan, and then Heaven and Hell. But in the Iliadand Odyssey the human heart recognizes its rightful lords as long as itshall endure, --Courage and Pity, Fortitude and Fidelity. 

Socrates is the man who has actually achieved goodness, and tries to makea science and art of goodness, to find a way in which it can be clearlyknown and rationally and effectively taught. "Can virtue be taught?" ishis characteristic question. The chief result of his keen scrutiny is tobring to light how little men really know of the higher life, --how littlehe knows of it himself. The effect of this revelation of ignorance isnot a despair of truth, but a humility which is the beginning of wisdom. The deepest thing in Socrates is his knowledge of the good life as areality, and of the joy and peace which it brings. Secure in this, hecan go on in the most fearless temper, and even with light-heartedjesting, to sift the questions. Intellectually, his main achievement isto bring out clearly the problems to be faced, and to give an immensestimulus to the higher class of minds. 

In the picture of Socrates by Xenophon in the Memorabilia, which bearsall the marks of true portraiture, goodness goes with happiness andknowledge. It is a most winning combination--beautiful as a Greekstatue. Xenophon lays stress on his happiness, but the basis isself-command. Among a people where even religion and philosophy weretolerant of sensuality, he was pure. He was hardy, trained to bear heatand cold, temperate, simple, faithful to civic duty, a reverent worshiperof the gods, watchful for the divine leading. 

Xenophon shows him absorbed in teaching, imparting the best he has found, never so happy as when he can win a young man to virtue. His idealsociety is the union of those who together are seeking goodness andknowledge. 

His patience is shown under the worst of domestic annoyances, a scoldingwife, --he says he thus learns to bear all other crosses. His admonitionto his son to bear with her shows genuine tenderness. 

He has the heroic quality. He resists the raging people, and refuses thepart assigned him in voting the death sentence on the generals whosedefeat had been a misfortune and not a fault. He calmly disobeys theThirty Tyrants, at the risk of his life. He dies at last, a tranquilmartyr to fearless truth-speaking. 

He teaches nobly of Providence, the Supreme, the guidance from above. Heconforms to the religion of his people, while planting a higher truth. When Athens, faithfully warned by him in vain, was sinking toward ruinand decay, he was sowing the seeds of spiritual harvests for futuregenerations, like Jesus when Judea was tottering to its fall. In theintellectual development of man's higher life he holds a place not unlikethat of Jesus in the emotional development. 

Socrates, as Xenophon describes him, goes no farther as a teacher than toimpress the principles of conduct as they were generally accepted by goodmen of the time, with peculiar persuasiveness. But Plato shows him as anoriginal investigator of the human mind and the universe. In this thereis an undoubted trait of true portraiture, but its limit is verydifficult to trace, because in Plato's dialogues the master is made themouthpiece of all the pupil's philosophy. The most distinctive featurewhich can be identified as that of Socrates himself is thecross-examination. Under this process, high-sounding generalities, --putin the mouths of speakers in the dialogues, the whole word-play set forthwith exquisite grace and charm, --are shown by a rigid sifting to resolvethemselves into nebulous and baseless figments, --the mere simulacra oftrue knowledge. 

The conversations glide from this destructive analysis into aconstructive philosophy, and then we soon feel that it is Plato ratherthan Socrates whom we are getting. The great contribution of Socrateshimself to philosophy is the attitude he impressed--of inquiry which isserious because seeking the foundations of virtue and happiness, and isinexorable in its insistence on nothing less than solid reality. Againstall allurements of indolence, comfort, and social convention he pressesthe question, What is _true_? His characteristic word is:

"Some things, Meno, I have said of which I am not altogether confident. But that we shall be better and braver and less helpless if we think thatwe ought to inquire than we should have been if we indulged in the idlefancy that there was no knowing and no use in searching after what weknow not; that is a theme upon which I am ready to fight, in word anddeed, to the utmost of my power. "

Plato took from Socrates not method but inspiration, and soared intospeculation. He wrote over the door of the Academy, "Let no one enterhere who does not know geometry. " That is, you are first to acquireabsolute confidence, by familiarity with the demonstrations ofmathematics, that real and certain knowledge is accessible to the humanmind. Thus planting his foot on firmest certainty, Plato leaps off intoa glorious sea of clouds. Flashes of insight and sublime allegory mixwith fantastic theory and word-play. 

The vast range of his thought we will touch only at two points. In theSymposium and the Phaedrus he discusses in his most brilliant vein theproblem of love. To the reader who has inherited the ethical ideal ofChristianity, Plato's love will seem like the image in Nebuchadnezzar'svision, --the head of gold, the feet of miry clay. He has a tolerationfor some aspects of sensuality of which Paul said, "it is a shame even tospeak;" and this tolerance, in the greatest of the classic philosophers, is the most pregnant suggestion of the cleansing work which it was leftfor Christianity to undertake. Yet Plato teaches most impressively thesubordination of sense to spirit in love, and the struggle of the two inman has seldom been set forth more powerfully than in his figure of thetwo yoked horses: the white, celestial steed struggling upward; theblack, unruly one plunging down, while Reason, the charioteer, strives toguide. In the description of Love which Socrates professes to quote fromthe wise woman of Mantineia, there is the very height of the Platonicphilosophy, --the gradual sublimation of human passion to the recognitionof all noble forms and ideas, and at last to the vision of the DivineBeauty which is one with Wisdom and with Love. 

"The true order of going or being led by another to the things of love isto use the beauties of earth as steps along which he mounts upwards forthe sake of that other beauty, going from one to two, and from two to allfair forms, and from fair forms to fair actions, and from fair actions tofair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion ofabsolute beauty, and at last knows what the essence of beauty is. 

"What if man had eyes to see the true beauty--the divine beauty, I mean, pure and clear and unalloyed, not clogged with the pollution ofmortality, and all the colors and vanities of human life--thither lookingand holding converse with the true beauty divine and simple, and bringinginto being and educating true creations of virtue, and not idols only?Do you not see that in that communion only, beholding beauty with the eyeof the mind, he will be enabled to bring forth, not images of beauty, butrealities; for he has hold not of an image but of a reality, --and will beenabled, bringing forth and educating true virtue, to become the friendof God and be immortal, if mortal man may. " [1]

It is largely to Plato that we owe the idea of immortality as it existsin the mind of the civilized world to-day. The belief in a continuedexistence beyond death is much older; it is seen in the Iliad, where theappearance of the dead Patroclus to Achilles in a dream is accepted asthe assurance of a shadowy and forlorn hereafter; and in the Odyssey thevisit of the hero to the land of shades is portrayed with a free andgloomy imagination. It was a belief which among the earlier Greeks hadlittle power either to console or to guide. In the age of Socrates, itseems to have signified little in the minds of the orthodox and pious. The great tragedians, who sublimate the popular mythology, for the mostpart regard the after-life as only a sad inevitable sequel; and to besnatched back from it for even a brief reprieve, like Alkestis, ismiraculous good fortune. The greatest of the tragedians in his highestreach, Sophocles in Oedipus at Colonus, invests the departure of thehero, who has been purified by suffering, with a mystic radiance, a"light that never was on sea or land, " the promise as it were of somefuture too sublime for mortal words. But the philosophy of Socrates wasdirected rather to the clear penetration of the method and secret ofearthly life, than to any vision of the hereafter. It is noticeable thatXenophon, the loyal disciple and biographer of Socrates, himself of thebest type of orthodox piety, and zealous to vindicate his master from thecharge of irreligion, --Xenophon, in all the story of the master's lifeand death, gives not a hint of any future hope. But Plato developed theidea that in man there resides an essential, indestructible principle, superior to the physical frame which is its home and may be either itsservant or master--a principle which manifests itself in thought, aspiration, virtue; which has existed before the body and will existafter it; which chooses for itself an upward or downward path; and whichrightly tends to a celestial and immortal destiny. The thought never wonuniversal acceptance even among philosophers; it had only an indirect andslight effect on the Stoicism which was the best religious product ofancient philosophy. But it wrought by degrees all effect on the thinkingof mankind. While the lofty faith of the Egyptian passed away leaving novisible fruit, the idea of Plato slowly suffused with its light andwarmth the current of human aspirations. Meantime, the later Jewishbelief in a hereafter--in its form a much cruder conception of a physicalrevival from the grave--flamed up in a passionate ardor, as the sequenceof the life and teaching of Jesus. The Platonic and the Christian beliefsprang from a like source. Each was born from the death of a man sogreat and so beloved as to give the impression of some imperishablequality. 

Socrates, with his noble character and aim, was put to death as acriminal. Was that the end of it all? Impossible--monstrous--never, ifthis world be indeed a cosmos. The one firm certainty which Socratesseems to have held, "No evil can happen to a good man in life ordeath, "--flashes in Plato's mind into a glorious hope of immortality, embodied in his loftiest passage, the picture of the dying Socrates. 

The soul when withdrawn from all outward objects and rapt incontemplation is nearest to the divine, --this is the central thought ofthe Phaedo. It is pursued with much subtle argumentation, of which theessential residuum is this: the soul's action is purest and most intensewhen farthest withdrawn from the visible and tangible world, --and hencewe guess that her true and eternal home is in that invisible realm ofwhich all this material universe is but the veil and symbol. 

But more impressive than the argument, more moving to the human heart, isthe picture which is given of Socrates himself as the hour of death comeson, --the exaltation of all his familiar traits, the playfulness soexquisitely blent with seriousness, the searching thought, the frankhuman desire to be convinced by his own argument, --the charm of hisfriendly ways, the hand playing with Phaedo's hair, the taking of the cup"in the easiest and gentlest manner, without the least fear or change ofcolor, looking at the man with all his eyes as his manner was, "--the lastword, of calm reminder of a trivial obligation, --the whole scene ofmajestic and tender peace, like a sunset. It is a scene which reconcilesus to life, and makes us no longer impatient even of our uncertainties. It speaks with a voice like that of Landor's verse:--

 "Death stands above me, whispering low, I know not what into my ear, Of his strange language all I know Is, --there is not a word of fear. "

To the modern reader there is a singular contradiction between thedoctrine of Lucretius and his temper. The denial of any divinesupervision of human life, or any hereafter for man; the dominion overall existence of purely material law, --this seems to us to destroy man'sdearest faith and hope. This is the teaching of Lucretius, yet on thisroad he marches with a step so firm and buoyant, an eye so awake to allbeauty and grandeur, a spirit so elate, that as we read we catch theenergy and elation. The reading of the riddle is this: the religionagainst which Lucretius made his attack was not the soaring idealism ofPlato, nor the inspiring and consolatory faith of Christianity, but anoutworn mythology in which this world was ruled by capricious andunworthy despots, and the next world was gloomy with terrors and almostunlighted by hopes. Such had become the popular mythology in its laterday, and as contrasted with this the view and temper of Lucretius arerational and manly. His message went far beyond a negation; he announcedone of the greatest discoveries of the human spirit--the uniformity ofnature. Well might the genius of poetry and the vigor of manhood uniteto make the message impressive and splendid. Not caprice, butorder, --not conflict, but harmony, --not deified partialities and spitesand lusts, but exalted and unchanging law, rules the universe!

When Lucretius essayed to define in what this law consists, he fellhopelessly short of the mark. In his revulsion from the chaos andpettiness of man-like divinities, he fixed on material forces, --clearlyto be seen and permanent in their operation, --as the only and sufficientcause and order. Those forces, by a brilliant guess, he resolved into aninterplay of atoms. From this basis he projected a physical theory, which we know now was quite inadequate even for material phenomena, whilethe application of it to human thought and will was hopelesslyinsufficient. Viewed from this standpoint, the spectacle of human lifetakes on a sadness which the poet's genius cannot dispel, and sometimesintensifies. To man's inner world Lucretius has no serviceable key. Buthe is to be judged not by what he missed but by what he gained. He aboveall others stands as the discoverer of one of the few cardinal truths bywhich to-day we interpret the universe, --the constancy of nature. 

The genius of Lucretius did for the realm of thought what Romanstatesmanship did for the nations, --it brought peace and order amongwarring elements, by the imposition of a rule which was often narrow andharsh, but which was firm, stable, and the foundation for fairer andfreer growths. 

Already in Lucretius, and now again in Epictetus, we have passed from theGreek into the Roman world. It is a change partly of race, partly oftime, and it is in close analogy with the successive phases of the humanspirit. The mythology which satisfied the youth of the world had grownunlovely and unreal. Plato's splendid imaginings had yielded neither asecure basis to the thinker nor a moral guidance to the common man. Lucretius's interpretation of all events as the product of material lawhad small power to sustain or cheer when the intellectual glow of thebold innovator had subsided. Thoughtful men sought as their one supremenecessity an adequate and worthy rule of life. So there was wrought out, or grew, the Stoic philosophy. Based on an intellectual theory, itsworking strength lay in its consonance with the best habits and aptitudesengendered in the world's actual experience. The Greek type was beauty, pleasure, thought, freedom; the Roman type was law, obedience, self-mastery. The legion was the school of discipline and fidelity. Theforum was the theatre where classes and parties, through rude jostling, worked out an efficient political order. A Greek thinker gave the mould, and Roman virtue gave the metal, of the Stoic type. 

We may best study that type in Epictetus, --once a slave, afterward ateacher; so careless of fame that he left no written work, and we haveonly the priceless notes taken down by a faithful scholar, making a bookwhose stamp of heroic manhood twenty centuries have not dimmed. 

"Man is master of his fate. " The true aim of life is goodness, andgoodness is within the command of the will. The lawgiver is Nature, andNature bids us to be just, strong, pure, and to seek the good of ourfellows. Such was the essence of Stoicism. As to deity, providence, ora hereafter, --belief and hope varied, according to the individual; but tothe true Stoic the all-important matter was, Act well your part, here andnow. 

In Epictetus is always the note of reality and of victory. Whileactually a slave, he has learned the secret of inward freedom. Hisessential doctrine is that good and evil reside wholly in the will, andthe will is free. As we choose, so we are. And by the right choice wefind ourselves in harmony with the universe. 

Though Epictetus continually appeals to reason, his basal word is to thewill. Be constant to duty--accept the order of things as good, and betrue to the highest law--revere "nature, " the established order; obey"nature, " the ideal law. Take all for the best, and you make all for thebest. 

Most practical and inspiring are his counsels. The war must be waged inthe inmost thoughts. The images that rise to seduce, the images thatrise to dismay, are to be fought down and driven away. "Be not hurriedaway by the rapidity of the appearance, but say, Appearances, wait for mea little; let me see who you are and what you are about; let me put youto the test. And then do not allow the appearance to lead you on anddraw lively pictures of the things which will follow, for if you do, itwill carry you off wherever it pleases. But rather bring to oppose itsome other beautiful and noble appearance, and cast out this baseappearance. And if you are accustomed to be exercised in this way, youwill see what shoulders, what sinews, what strength you have. " [2]

"Be willing at length to be approved by yourself, be willing to appearbeautiful to God, desire to be in purity with your own pure self and withGod. Then, when any such appearance visits you, Plato says, Haverecourse to expiations, go a suppliant to the temples of the avertingDeities. It is even sufficient if you resort to the society of noble andjust men, and compare yourself with them, whether you find one who isliving or dead. "

"This is the true athlete, the man who exercises himself against suchappearances. Stay, wretch, do not be carried away. Great is the combat, divine is the work; it is for kingship, for freedom, for happiness, forfreedom from perturbation. Remember God, call on him as a helper andprotector, as men at sea call on the Dioscuri in a storm. For what is agreater storm than that which comes from appearances which are violentand drive away the reason?"

Epictetus, compared with Plato, is the warrior philosopher beside theseeing philosopher. He is in closest grip with the foe, and his calm isthe calm of the victor holding down his enemy. 

His apparent unconcern as to the hereafter is in keeping with his wholeattitude, which is that of cheerful acquiescence in the divine order, whatever it be. "To be free, not hindered, not compelled, conformingyourself to the administration of Zeus, obeying it, well satisfied withthis, blaming no one, charging no one with fault, able from your wholesoul to utter these verses:--

 "Lead me, O Zeus, and thou, too, Destiny. "

He vindicates Providence against injustice. "The unjust man has theadvantage, --in what? In money. But the just man has the advantage inthat he is faithful and modest. "

"We ought to have these two principles in readiness, that except the willnothing is good nor bad; and that we ought not to lead events, but tofollow them. My brother ought not to have behaved thus to me. No, buthe will see to that; and, however he may behave, I will conduct myselftoward him as I ought. "

"As a mark is not set up for the purpose of missing the aim, so neitherdoes the nature of evil exist in the world. "

That is, it is inconceivable that the universe is a blunder. This is oneof the fundamental ideas of Epictetus. The inference is, that man hasonly to define his true end and pursue it, which is the right action ofthe will, or as we should say, right character. Pursuing this, he neverfinds himself thwarted or unfriended, never rebels or mistrusts the gods. 

The substance of his message is: "On the occasion of every accident(event) that befalls you, remember to turn to yourself and inquire whatpower you have for turning it to use. "

"God has delivered yourself to your own care, and says, 'I had no fitterone to intrust him to than yourself; keep him for me such as he is bynature, modest, faithful, erect, unterrified, free from passion andperturbation. '"

God, says Epictetus, has made me his witness to men. "For this purposehe leads me at one time hither, at another time sends me thither; showsme to men as poor, without authority and sick; sends me to Gyara, leadsme into prison, not because he hates me, --far from him be such a meaning, for who hates the best of his servants? nor yet because he cares not forme, for he does not neglect any, even of the smallest things; but he doesthis for the purpose of exercising me and making use of me as a witnessto others. Being appointed to such a service, do I still care about theplace in which I am, or with whom I am, or what men say about me? and doI not entirely direct my thoughts to God, and to his instructions andcommands?"

Thus he falls back on the life of the spirit, --simple, sure, victorious. To place all good in character is the secret. From virtue grows piety. It is desire set on externals, and so disappointed, that bringsdiscontent, repining, impiety. 

Yet Epictetus has distinct and serious limitations. He assumes that toavoid all perturbation is the aim of the wise man. This can beaccomplished only by the sacrifice of all objects of desire which lieoutside of the control of the will, and he advises this sacrifice. "Ifyou love an earthen vessel, say it is an earthen vessel which you love;for when it has been broken you will not be disturbed. If you arekissing your child or wife, say that it is a human being whom you arekissing, for when the wife or child dies you will not be disturbed. "

All joys but the purely moral are to be despised. In going to thetheatre one should be indifferent to who gains the prize. This attemptedindifference to all the great and little pleasures of life which have nodistinct moral character, if successful, makes an ascetic, and of mostmen is liable to make prigs. It is the vice of Puritanism. 

The modern world is riper and richer than the Roman world. We say now, the ideal man is not "unperturbed. " Perturbations are inevitable to theman normally and highly developed, with sensibilities and sympathieskeenly alive. The true aim is to include composure, but not as sole andsupreme. This is a more complex development than the Stoic, less capableperhaps of symmetrical completeness, but grander, as a Gothic church isgrander than a Greek temple. 

Again, the assumption of Epictetus and of all the Stoics that the will iswholly free, that man has only to choose and seek goodness and he canperfectly achieve it, misses the familiar and bitter experience ofhumanity, that too often man carries his prison and fetters withinhimself. A Roman poet voiced it: _Meliora video proboque, deteriorasequor_. Paul spoke it: "The good that I would, I do not; and the evil Iwould not, that I do. "

But Epictetus himself is one of the great souls who are not to bedescribed by the label of any creed. He has in himself the secret ofspiritual victory, and he has a peculiar power to impart it. Thelimitations of Stoicism as a creed are more plainly seen in MarcusAurelius. His character, revealed in the "fierce light that beats upon athrone, " is of rare nobility and beauty. To a man's strength he unites awoman's tenderness. Just because of that tenderness, and the deep heartof which it is the flower, the philosophy he so bravely practices giveshim but a bleak and chill abiding-place. Through his Meditations--manly, wise, and gracious--there runs a deep note of sadness. For this man'snature cried out for love, and not even faithfulest duty can take theplace of love. 

Stoicism was the most distinct embodiment of the virtues of the classicworld. Those virtues shone in many who did not profess themselves to beof the Stoic school. Plutarch's gallery of portraits is a part of theworld's best possession. His heroes belong not to their own time alone. They may be distinguished in some broad respects from the saints andsages of other lands and times; some advance of type may be traced in thehighest products of the successive ages; but while one turns the pages ofPlutarch, he scarcely asks for better company. 

Why, then, did Stoic philosophy fail of more wide or lasting successamong mankind? Because--we may perhaps answer--its chief weapon was thereasoning intellect, in which only a few could be proficient. Because, fixing its ideal in imperturbability, it denied sensibilities ofaffection, joy, and hope, which are a large part of normal humanity. Because, in its lack of natural science, and its revulsion from themythologic deities, it isolated man in the universe, claiming for theindividual will a sovereignty which ignored the ensphering play ofnatural forces, and denying to the heart any outreach beyond the earthlyand finite. If we may venture to summarize the defects of ancientphilosophy in two words--it lacked womanliness and it lacked knowledge. 

We are now to study the building up of another side of the ideal man. Philosophy had essayed a religion of the intellect and the will; now fromJudaism sprang Christianity, a religion of the imagination and the heart. 

The highest outcome of the classic civilization was the clear conceptionand strenuous practice of right for its own sake. The outcome of Judaismin Christianity was essentially the belief and feeling of an intimateunion between man and a higher power, with love and obedience on the oneside, love and providence on the other. 

In the vast tract of Greek-Roman history, we have looked at only a few ofthe highest mountain peaks--the noblest contributions. But since theChristian church still treats the Old Testament as one of its charterdocuments, we need to enlarge a little upon the general outline and colorof Jewish history, and we must recognize the shadows as well as thelights. 

The traditional interpretation of the Old Testament which is stillcurrent is based on successive misconceptions, overlaying and blendingwith each other like close-piled geologic strata. Pious intent of theoriginal writers, shaping their facts to suit their theories--laterassumptions of inspiration and infallibility in the records--theologicsystems quarried and built out of these materials--the supposeddependence of the most precious faiths of mankind upon these misreadingsof history, --all these influences, with the lapse of time, have buried sodeeply the original facts, that the exhuming and revivifying of the truestory, or at least a tolerable similitude of its main lines, has imposeda gigantic task upon modern scholarship. Of the results of thisscholarship, we may give here only a kind of shorthand memorandum. 

The Old Testament as a whole, with precious exceptions, can only by agreat stretch of imagination be claimed as an integral part of "_the_book of religion"--the title which Matthew Arnold asserts for the entireBible. The phrase can scarcely be applied to the Old Testament, unlessit be read through a medium surcharged with association andprepossession. Much of its morality has been outgrown; many of its earlystories are revolting to us: much, of which the inner meaning is at onewith our deepest life, is disguised under phraseology wholly alien to ourmodern thought and speech. As a manual of devotion, or as a textbook forthe young, the Old Testament can never again fill such a place as itfilled to our fathers. But we can still trace in it many of the upwardsteps of the race, and there are portions which still hold a deep placein the affections of the truly religious. 

The mind at certain stages personifies the Deity with the greatest easeand naturalness. The primitive man interprets the whole world about himby the analogy of his own activity. He sees in all the phenomena ofnature the presence of personal beings, --beings who act and suffer andenjoy and love and hate as he does himself. The sky, the sun, the wind, the ocean, represent each a separate deity. Next, each clan, or city, ornation, comes to regard itself as under the patronage of one of thesedeities. The national god of the Israelites, at the earliest time weknow them, bore the name of Yahveh, --a name more familiar to us under theform Jehovah. Originally he was probably the god of the sun and fire. His acts were seen everywhere, his motives guessed. The heat and lightof the sun--now illumining, now fructifying, now blasting--were hisimmediate manifestations. 

Later, he was conceived to favor certain kinds of human action. He wasat first appeased under the influences of analogies from the lower sideof human nature, --Give him a present, something to eat, or to smell, orto see. Then came the idea that he was the friend and favorer of therighteous, --of the merciful and just. The turning-point in the historyof Judaism--the birth-hour of religion as it has come down to us--ismarked by that great dimly-seen personality, Moses, who taught that theworship of Yahveh forbade murder, adultery, theft, false witness, covetousness. 

The Jews had neither science nor logic; they had no intelligent inductionas to nature, --hence they never got beyond the idea of supernaturalintervention. [3] Apparently they never challenged and sifted theirfundamental ideas, --never raised the question as to the actual existenceof Yahveh. They saw and felt the incongruities of the world as a moraladministration, and sometimes pressed the inquiry, as in Job, _Why_ doesYahveh thus? But the denial of any ruling personal Will, as byLucretius, was impossible to them. They were imaginative, intense, andtheir imagination got the saving ethical impress especially from theprophets. 

Judaism as a religion grew from "the Law and the Prophets. " From almostthe earliest historic time there existed some brief code ofprecepts, --probably an abbreviated form of what we know as the TenCommandments. Later came the impassioned preaching of the prophets. Still later, there was formulated that elaborate statute-book for whichby a pious fiction was claimed the authority of Moses. 

The prophets spoke out of an exaltation of which no other account wasgiven than it was the inspiration of Yahveh, --"Thus saith the Lord!"They did not argue, they asserted--with a passion that bred conviction, or at least fear and respect. 

It is here that the distinction between the Greek and the Hebrew methodis most marked. Socrates, for example, called himself the midwife ofmen's thoughts. His maxim was, "Know thyself. " His cross-examinationwas designed to make men see for themselves. That is, he taught byreason. But the prophet's claim was, "Thus saith the Lord!" He spokeout of his personal and passionate conviction, for which he believed hehad the highest supernatural sanction. 

The heart of the typical prophetic message was that the Ruler of theworld is a righteous ruler, and that the service he desires isrighteousness. The early prophets--such as Micah, Hosea, Amos--speakwith scorn of the worship by sacrifices, --whether the fruits of theearth, or slaughtered beasts, or the ghastly offering of human life. Hosea cries: "I desired mercy, and not sacrifice; and the knowledge ofGod more than burnt offerings. " So Micah speaks: "Shall I come beforehim with burnt offerings, with yearling calves? Will the Lord be pleasedwith thousands of rams or with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall Igive my first-born for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sinof my soul? He hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth theLord require of thee but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walkhumbly with thy God?"

Further, the prophets assumed to know and declare Yahveh's will on publicaffairs, especially on the government of the nation. They tried todictate the attitude of Judea toward other kingdoms--an attitudegenerally of proud defiance. Often their counsel ignored theactualities, and helped to precipitate Judah and Israel into hopelessconflicts with their mighty neighbors. When in these conflicts they wereworsted, the prophets laid the disaster to the idolatry or otherwickedness of the people. Finally came utter defeat and dispersal, andan exile for generations in a foreign land. Then the prophets rose to anintenser faith, --purer, tenderer, more spiritual. Some time and somehowthe Lord would surely be gracious to his people!

But when the captives, or a part of them, were restored to their ownland, --with lowered fortunes and humbled pride, half dependent still on aforeign master, --the prophetic enthusiasm no longer availed to give afresh message from the Lord. Instead, the leaders and founders of therestoration--Ezra, Nehemiah, and their associates and followers--built upa well-organized, well-enforced system of discipline. They reshaped theold traditions, enlarged and codified them; they shaped the Pentateuchand book of Joshua, as we know them now; they purified and beautified theTemple service; they instituted synagogues in every town, where religiousteaching should be regular and constant; they developed a class of"Scribes, " or expositors of the Law; they multiplied ceremonialobservances; they rewrote the national history, and invested their lawswith the sacredness of divine oracles, under the august name of Moses;they imposed deadly penalties and bitter hatred on all who deviated fromthe established religion. All this was the work of centuries, and itsimportant result was that by a manifold and perpetual drill certainreligious ideas were stamped upon the minds of the people, until beliefsand usages and sentiments ran in their very blood and were transmittedfrom father to son. 

As types of the Hebrew religion in its advancing stages we may note:first, Jacob, winning his way by craft and subtlety, gaining the favor ofhis god by a fidelity which expresses itself by vows and sacrifices andscarcely at all by morality; and hardly attractive except in thetenderness of his family relations. A mythical figure, he is a marvelousembodiment of the persistent race-traits of the Jew--tenacity, craft, devoutness--in the early phase. It is a very earthly phase, but with thegerms of a marvelous development. Later, we have David, the warriorking. Still later comes Elijah, the prophet of a Deity who now standsfor chastity and justice against gods of sensuality and cruelty, anddefying wicked kings in the name of that God. Then in the line ofprophets we may pass to their greatest, Isaiah, --both first and second ofthe name, --each of whom in the deepest adversity of the people isinspired by a hope, vague in its expectation, but so deep, so fervid, sosweet, that to this day it lends its language to hearts which in darknesslook for the morning. Next we may take Ezra, rebuilding the shatterednationality, not on a political basis, but by a law of personal conductin which a genuine morality is mixed with a ceremonial code. And herereally belongs the legislation ascribed to Moses and given in thePentateuch; the law-giver having an original in some great, dim, historicfigure, long treasured in the popular imagination, but rehabilitated bypriestly art as the author of a great volume of minute legislation, towhich dignity is lent by the legends of a personality sublime yet meek. We have then the flowering of the inner life, in the book of Psalms, --thesingle name of the Psalmist covering the products of many minds andsuccessive generations. In the course of affairs, the hero's placebelongs next to Judas Maccabaeus, the patriot leader against the heathenGreek; and we may take the books of the Maccabees and the book of Danielas giving the ideal thought of the period, --the matrix of belief and hopefrom which was to spring the crowning flower of Judaism. 

It will suffice for our purpose if from this series we touch upon David, the Psalms, the book of Job, Isaiah, and the literature of the Maccabeantime. 

The real place of David is that of the warrior-king who gaveindependence, unity, and victory to the people of Israel. It was he whobroke the yoke of the Philistines which Saul had weakened, and slew infight their gigantic champion. He conquered and subjected theneighboring tribes; he put down the rebellions headed by his own sons; hemade and kept Israel for a brief term a proud and victorious militarymonarchy. Within a single generation after his death it was divided intotwo hostile fragments, and both of these gradually fell under foreignconquerors. Very short was the period of Israel's warlike glory, and fora thousand years afterward the national heart turned in love andreverence to the hero of that time. As the Saxons remembered Alfred, asAmericans remember Washington, so the Israelites remembered David. Itwas in his image and under his name that they pictured a future whichshould outshine their past. Israel throughout the period when she ismost distinctly before us was a subject people. It was largely thepresence of a foreign oppressor which gave to the national voice thattone of intense entreaty toward a divine friend and deliverer which runsits pathos through psalm and history and prophecy. There had been abetter day for Israel, before Assyrian and Egyptian trampled her. Therehad been a day when Philistia and Edom quailed and fell before her, andthe Lord wrought victory by the hand of David. So it is David's historythat stands out fullest and clearest in the whole record, from Abrahamonward. How much is true history and how much is imaginative additionmust be largely guesswork. But we see in David the ideal hero and typeof that period of Jewish history as we see in Achilles and Odysseus theideal types of primitive Greece. 

And the story of David is as deeply colored with the primal passions ofhumanity as are the songs of Homer. There is the picture of theshepherd-boy, to which must be added the exquisite psalm which latertraditions put in his mouth; the victory over the giant; the mostpathetic story of the moody and wayward Saul--the power of music over hismelancholy, the alternations of jealous rage and compunction; thefriendship with Jonathan, more tender and pure than the friendships Platopictures; the dramatic fortunes of the outlaw; the family tragedies fullof crime and horror; the dark story of Amnon, Tamar, and Absalom; thepassion of fatherhood in fullest intensity, with the agonized prayers forthe sick child and the heartbroken lament over Absalom; the group ofvaliant captains and their chivalrous exploits; the risk of life to bringto their homesick chief a drink from the well of Bethlehem; the story ofBathsheba and Uriah--lust, treachery, and murder; the prophet's rebuke;the years declining under heavy shadows. How full of lifeblood it allis! Every chapter is an idyl, an epic, or a tragedy. 

It is largely this picturesque dramatic quality which made the EnglishBible in its early days the favorite book of the English people, and haskept for it always so high a place. But the attempt to reduce a storylike David's to terms of spiritual edification has been difficult abovemeasure, ever since mankind advanced beyond the half-barbaric age inwhich the story was told. Judged by our standards, the ethics of thestory are often low, and its religion is largely a superstition. Whatbrings the Almighty on the scene is most frequently some great calamity, which priest or soothsayer interprets as a divine judgment. Often thereis attributed to him the quality of a jealous Oriental despot. Thejustice he enforces is often injustice and savagery. Take the story ofthe Gibeonites. A three years' famine in Israel was explained byYahveh's oracle as a retribution for the breach of faith by Saul, manyyears before, with the Gibeonites, whom he had persecuted in defiance ofancient compact. David thereupon invited the Gibeonites to name therequital which would appease them, and they asked for the death of sevensons of Saul. So David delivered the seven innocent men into theirhands, "and they hanged them before the Lord. "

The Zeus of Homer is offensive to religious feeling because he fullyshares the sensuality which we account one of the great defects ofhumanity. From that blemish the Hebrew idea of God is always free. Thehostility between Yahveh and the heathen gods has its deep ethicalsignificance in the struggle of chastity against licentiousness, to whichthe religious sanction brings reinforcement. But the Hebrew God has asavage and vindictive quality, which only slowly and partiallydisappears. Originally, it is probable, the God of the sun and fire, beneficent to illumine, malevolent to burn, he remains always in somedegree a God of wrath. 

It was by one of the strange growths of the advancing popular thoughtthat David, the valiant, passionate soldier-king, came to be conceived ofas the writer of the book of Psalms. Historically a misconception, ityet lent a continuity and ideal unity to the nation's self-interpretation. 

The book of Psalms, says Dean Stanley, is the selected hymns of theJewish people, for a period as long as from Chaucer to Tennyson. Theservice-book of the Second Temple is Kuenen's description. Beyond anyother single book, it shows us the heart of Judaism in its ripest, mostcharacteristic development. Its language has become saturated with theassociations of many centuries. In these intense, direct, and fervidutterances we can see the form and lineaments of a faith which was theancestor of our own, yet is not the same. 

The religion of the Psalms has different phases. We have here theexperiences of many souls, with a certain kinship, yet with widedifferences. In many of these hymns one recognizes the religion in whichJesus was cradled. Imagination and feeling have full scope. Theconstant idea is of Yahveh, ruler of the world and its inhabitants, thejudge of the wicked and friend of the good. "Mark the perfect man andbehold the upright, for the end of that man is peace. " "How excellent isthy loving-kindness, O God! therefore the children of men put their trustunder the shadow of thy wings. " "Thy righteousness is like the greatmountains; thy judgments as a great deep. " "The Lord redeemeth the soulof his servants, and none of them that trust in him shall be desolate. ""Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good; blessed is the man thattrusteth in him. "

The depth and passion of the struggle against sin is shown in thefifty-first Psalm. "Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thyloving-kindness; according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies, blotout my transgressions. " "Against thee, thee only, have I sinned. " "Washme, and I shall be whiter than snow. " "Make me to hear joy andgladness. " "Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spiritwithin me. " "Thou desirest not sacrifice, else would I give it. Thesacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and a contrite heart, OGod, thou wilt not despise. "

This passion against sin--this cry for inward purity--is the root of thereligion of Jesus, the blessedness of the pure in heart; the warfare ofPaul, the spirit against the flesh. 

In other psalms, again, is a poignant cry for help and deliverance. Itis the expostulation of the soul with Fate, the cry to a Power who shouldbe a friend, but hides his face. There, is a pathetic sense of man'sfrailty and mortality. "Hear my prayer, O Lord, and give ear unto mycry; hold not thy peace at my tears, for I am a stranger with thee and asojourner, as all my fathers were. O spare me, that I may recoverstrength, before I go hence, and be no more. "

Praise for God's greatness and awe for his eternity are joined with thesad sense of man's mortality. "Wilt thou show wonders to the dead?Shall the dead arise and praise thee? Shall thy lovingkindness bedeclared in the grave? or thy faithfulness in destruction? Shall thywonders be known in the dark? and thy righteousness in the land offorgetfulness?"

Very often again the burden is the cry of the weak against the oppressor. Man, wronged by his fellow, cries to God, and can imagine no deliverancesave by the ruin of his enemies. The cursing is tremendous. "O daughterof Babylon, happy shall he be that taketh thy little ones and dasheththem against the stones!" At this point is the widest ethical differencebetween "them of old time" and our own religion. In them, abhorrence ofsin was not yet distinguished from hatred of the sinner, and the foes ofthe Psalmist or his nation were always identified with the foes of God. To hate thine enemy seemed as righteous as to love thy friend. 

In a sense we may say the Psalms are a cry to which Jesus is the answer:"Lord, save me, and destroy my enemies!" "Love your enemies, and inloving you are saved. "

In the book of Psalms there blends and alternates with the old theory ofreward and punishment a later idea, --that goodness carries its ownblessing with it, --that better than oil and wine, flocks and herds, health and friends, is the peace of well-doing, the joy of gratitude, yes, even the passionate contrition in which the soul revolts from itsown sin and finds again the sweetness of the upward effort and a responseto that effort like heaven's own smile. Not, goodness brings blessings, but goodness _is_ blessed; not, the wicked shall perish, but wickedness_is_ perdition; this is the deep undertone of the best of the Psalms. 

Among these hymns are some which are filled with a noble delight in theworks of nature, --a fresh, glad pleasure in the whole spectacle ofcreation, from sun and stars, sea and mountains, to the goats among thehills, and the conies of the rock. There is frank satisfaction in thebread which strengtheneth man's heart and the wine that makes him glad. And all this free human joy in the activities and splendors of naturenever so much as approaches the perilous slope towards sensuality. It iseverywhere sublimated by the all-pervading recognition of a holy andbeneficent God. 

What may be said of the Psalms generally is this: they express the mostvivid and various play of human emotions, --sorrow, wrath, repentance, joy, dread, hope, --always exercised as in the presence of an Almightybeing, holy, righteous, and the friend of righteous men. In this istheir abiding power, --this close reflection of the fluctuations in everysensitive heart under the play of life's experiences, --encompassed withan atmosphere of noble seriousness, and outreaching toward a higher Power. 

In the story of the Jewish mind, the book of Job stands by itself. It isnot so much a stage in the progressive development of a faith, as apowerful and unanswered challenge to the current assertions of thatfaith. The characteristic idea of Judaism was that God rules the worldin the interest of the good man. Not so, says Job, the facts are againstit. Hear the complaint of a good man to whom life has brought troubleand sorrow, without remedy and without hope! So stood first the boldarraignment, the earliest voice of truly religious skepticism. Job isskeptical, not from any want of goodness, --he has been strenuously good;even now in all his darkness, "my righteousness I hold fast and will notlet it go: my heart shall not reproach me so long as I live. " Hisgoodness is of no narrow sort; justice, protection of the oppressed, helpto the suffering, these have been his delight; from wantonness of sensehe has kept himself pure; not even against wrong-doers and enemies hashis hate gone out; he has not "rejoiced at the destruction of them thathated me, or lifted up myself when evil found him; neither have Isuffered my mouth to sin by wishing a curse to his soul. " Yet, after alife of this sort, he finds himself bereft, impoverished, tormented. Where is the righteousness of God? He turns to his friends for sympathy. "Have pity upon me, have pity upon me, O ye my friends; for the hand ofGod hath touched me. " His friends for reply justify God by blaming Job. Doubtless you deserve it all: you must have done all manner of wrong, andbeen a hypocrite to boot! That is all the comfort they give him. Drearyand desolate he stands, no good in the present, no hope in the future. "I cry unto thee, and thou dost not hear me: I stand up, and thouregardest me not. Thou art become cruel to me; with thy strong hand thouopposest thyself against me. I know that thou wilt bring me to death, and to the house appointed for all living. "

Upon that gloom the curtain falls. "The words of Job are ended. "

The later chapters of the book seem added by successive hands. Theyintroduce a fresh speaker, to help out the argument for God. They makethe Almighty speak in his own behalf. His answer is simply an appeal tothe wonders of physical nature. Look, vain man, at my works; considerthe war-horse, the behemoth, the leviathan; how can your petty mind judgethe creator of these? This strikes a note which is still heard in themusic of to-day, the awe and reverence before the grandeur of naturewhich can sometimes soothe the restlessness of man and hush hisanxieties, as the harp of David brought peace to the moody Saul. Yetsuch thoughts do not suffice for the man whose personal suffering iskeen. They silence rather than answer the question which presses uponJob. 

The story must be otherwise helped out, so some kindly champion oforthodoxy put in a fairy-story climax, --Job got well of his boils, hadmore sheep and oxen than ever, had other children born to him. And sothe difficulty is happily solved!

But the earlier and deeper words remain, with their unanswerablechallenge to the comfortable creed that God will always make the good manhappy. The book stands, the expression of a typical, a mournful butsublime attitude of the human mind. It is a facing of truth when truthlooks darkest, rather than to take refuge in comfortable make-believe. And it shows man falling back on his innermost stronghold of all. If Godhimself fail me, --if the power of the universe be cruel orindifferent, --yet "my righteousness I hold fast, and will not let it go;my heart shall not reproach me so long as I live. "

The habitual weapon of the Prophets is denunciation. They pour out ontheir opponents a wrath which is the hotter because it involves a moralcondemnation, and the heavier because it claims the sanction of Deity. Among their exemplars are Samuel deposing Saul, and scaring him from thetomb, and Elijah slaying the priests of Baal. Of the written propheciesthe characteristic word is "Woe unto you!" They are the prototypes ofJesus assailing the Pharisees and driving out the money-changers; of thebook of Revelation; of Tertullian proclaiming the torments of the damned;of the mediaeval ban on the heretic; of Puritan and Catholic hurlinganathemas at each other; of Carlyle, of Garrison. But in the greatest ofthe prophets the threat is almost hidden by the promise, and instead ofcursing there is benediction. 

Whoever would get at the heart of the Old Testament, and understand thespell which the religion first of Judaism and then of Christianity hascast upon the world for thousands of years, should ponder the book ofIsaiah. It blends the work of two authors, but their spirit is closelyakin. In each case the prophet is full of a conviction so intense thathe propounds it with perfect confidence as the word of God. By theboldest personification, he speaks continually in the name of God. Thiswas the characteristic method of Hebrew prophecy. The prophetic booksall stand as for the most part the direct word of God. This way ofthought and speech was possible only to men in an early stage ofintellectual development and under the highest pressure of conviction andemotion. 

The traditional repute of these Jewish prophets and the record of theirwords were accepted by both Jews and Christians. Their writings weretaken as the authoritative voice of God. The same credit came to beextended to all the ancient books of the Jewish religion, --psalms, histories, genealogies, ritual, and all. But it is mainly the propheciesto which this character originally belonged. The Psalms are, with fewexceptions, purely human in their standpoint. In them, it is avowedly a_man_ who mourns, rejoices, repents, prays, curses, or gives thanks. Butin the prophecies God himself is presented as the speaker. 

In both the earlier and later Isaiah, God appears as speaking to men inextreme need, in words of incomparable comfort, inspiration, and hope. To whatever special exigency of Israel they were first addressed, thelanguage, stripped of all local references, comes home to the universalhuman heart in its deepest experiences. To the divine favor thisteaching sets only one condition: "Cease to do evil, learn to do well. ""Seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead forthe widow. " "If ye be willing and obedient. " "Say ye to the righteousthat it shall be well with them, for they shall eat the fruit of theirdoings. Woe unto the wicked; it shall be ill with him, for the reward ofhis hands shall be given him. " On the one simple condition of turningfrom moral evil to good, the blessings of the inner life are promised inevery tone of assurance, consolation, promise. "Though your sins be asscarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool. " "Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith yourGod. Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her that herwarfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned. " "He shall feedhis flock like a shepherd; he shall gather the lambs with his arm andcarry them in his bosom, and shall gently lead those that are withyoung. " "Sing, O heavens, and be joyful, O earth, and break forth intosinging, O mountains, for the Lord hath comforted his people, and willhave mercy upon his afflicted. "

The most triumphant word in the New Testament, and its tenderest word, both are drawn from one verse in the elder Isaiah: "He will swallow updeath in victory, and the Lord God will wipe away tears from off allfaces. "

The distinctive word and thought of Jesus toward God is first found inthe later Isaiah, --"our Father. " "Doubtless thou art our father, thoughAbraham be ignorant of us, and Israel acknowledge us not; thou, O Lord, art our father, our redeemer; thy name is from everlasting. " The wordrecurs, together with an image which by a later than Jesus was made thesymbol of an arbitrary divine despotism, but which Isaiah first employedto blend the idea of omnipotent power with closest affection: "O Lord, thou art our father; we are the clay and thou the potter; and we are allthe work of thy hand. " A similitude is used even gentler than a father'scare: "As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you. " "Can awoman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion onthe son of her womb? Yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee. "

By the later Isaiah is shown the figure of an innocent sufferer, whosesorrows are to issue in the widest blessing. This sufferer has beeninterpreted sometimes as typifying the few heroic souls among the peopleof Israel, sometimes as a prophet in Isaiah's day, last and most fondlyas Christ. Whomever the prophet had in mind, the idea goes home to theheart; somehow, undeserved sorrow borne blamelessly, bravely, evengladly, since for love's sake, is to have a celestial fruitage. "Despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted withgrief;" "he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows, "--and at last"he shall see of the travail of his soul, and be satisfied. " Then thestrain breaks into an exultant tenderness, weaving into one chord thedeepest griefs and consolations of woman, the sublimities of nature, allthe passion and all the peace of the heart. "Sing, O barren, thou thatdidst not bear; break forth into singing and cry aloud, thou that didstnot travail with child, for more are the children of the desolate thanthe children of the married wife, saith the Lord. Fear not, for thoushalt not be ashamed. For thy Maker is thy husband, the Lord of hosts ishis name, and thy redeemer the Holy One of Israel. For a small momenthave I forsaken thee, but with great mercies will I gather thee. In alittle wrath I hid my face from thee for a moment, but with everlastingkindness will I have mercy on thee, saith the Lord thy Redeemer. Themountains shall depart and the hills be removed, but my kindness shallnot depart from thee, neither shall the covenant of my peace be removed, saith the Lord that hath mercy on thee. O thou afflicted, tossed withtempest, and not comforted! I will lay thy stones with fair colors, andlay thy foundations with sapphires; and all thy children shall be taughtof the Lord, and great shall be the peace of thy children. "

To such words men and women in all times have clung, and always willcling. For, so first spoke a voice in some soul which in the heart ofthe storm had found peace. He called it the voice of God. What bettername can we give it?

In the prophecies and the psalms we have seen the high-wrought poetry ofIsrael's religion. For the requirements of daily life there needs a moreprosaic, definite, and minute guidance. This the Jew found in the bodyof usages and precepts which gradually grew up under the care of thepriesthood. The prescriptive sanction of habit attached to theseobservances was at certain memorable epochs exchanged for a belief in thedirect communication of the code from heaven. One such occasion was thefinding of the "book of the Law" by the high priest, and its presentationand enforcement on king and people which is recorded in 2 Kings xxii. Andxxiii. The strong indications are that this was the book known to us asDeuteronomy, and that instead of the rediscovery of a forgotten bookthere was in truth a new book set forth, claiming the authority of Moses, and enlarging and enriching the traditional observances according to themost "advanced" ideas of the time. A similar occasion, at a laterperiod, is described at length in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. Thenew legislation there imposed in the name of Moses and the fathers--orrather of Yahveh himself, as he spoke to the men of old--was probably insubstance the regulations contained in Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers. 

By our standards of judgment, these acts were pious forgeries. Themental conditions under which they were done, the psychologic state whichprompted them, the ethical standards which sanctioned them, are matterfor curious study. It would be crude to class them as the deliberate andinexcusable crimes which they would be in our day. The claim of a divineauthority for human beliefs--the idea that what is morally beneficial maybe asserted as historically true--has worked in many strange forms. Wesee it here in its early phase, among a people in whom, as in mankind atlarge, the virtue and obligation of truthfulness was a late and slowdiscovery. The same instinct--to claim for what we wish to believe asanction of infallible revelation--works in subtle forms to-day. 

As to the contents of the Law which thus gradually took form, adistinction may easily be traced even by the cursory reader. The earliercode, Deuteronomy, is full of a generous and lofty temper. It is one ofthe most impressive documents of the Jewish scriptures. Here is thatwhich Jesus named as the first and great commandment: "Thou shalt lovethe Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with allthy might. " The teaching of the book is primarily the worship ofYahveh, --a holy, loving, and judging God, --who rewards his people withblessings or punishes them with disasters. Promises and threats areequally distinct and vivid: never were blessing and cursing moreemphatic. The morality enjoined is charitable and pure. With an equalinsistence is enjoined a certain method and form of worship, includingsacrifices at the temple, three yearly feasts, the observance of theSabbath, the due maintenance of the priesthood, and the utter rejectionof all other gods. 

When we turn to the other books of the Law, we come into an atmosphereless exalted, and with a multiplicity of ceremonial details. There isendless regulation as to varieties of sacrifice, cleansing from technicaluncleanness, and the like. Interwoven with these, as if on an equalfooting, are special applications of morality--inculcations of chastity, justice, and good neighborhood. The principles of the TenWords--themselves an inheritance from a very early day--are applied inmany particulars. Occasionally is a lofty sentiment, a clear advance. Thus we find in Leviticus the "second commandment" of Jesus, "Thou shaltlove thy neighbor as thyself. "

The general increase in rigidity of ceremonial in these books is to beread along with the stern decrees of Ezra as to separation from familyand friendly relations with non-Jewish neighbors. It was, in a word, aPuritan reformation. There was just the same combination of heightenedmoral conviction with urgency upon matters of form and detail, andhostility to all outside of one special church, which belonged to thePuritan. But the Jewish reformer, unlike the English, enlarged insteadof simplifying his ritual. It is this interblending of outwardobservance with moral and spiritual quality which stumbles the modernreader at every page. It was a confusion which needed the spiritualgenius of Jesus to dissolve, and the leadership of Paul to definitelyrenounce. 

By the side of the ceremonial element in the Law there ripened graduallyan expansion of its moral precepts. The sacred books were expounded bythe Scribes. The preacher in the synagogue came to touch the people'sheart often more closely and delicately than the priest with his bloodysacrifices and his imposing liturgies. Spontaneity, inspiration, prophetic power, was no longer present, but in the guise of comment andinterpretation there grew up a gentler, humaner morality. The moralvalue of labor and industry came into recognition. There were teacherslike Hillel and Gamaliel in whom devout piety and homely practice wenthand in hand. In the ethics of Judaism--under all these various forms of"the Law and the Prophets"--the distinctive note, compared with theethics of Greece and Rome, was chastity. The ideal Greece representedwisdom and beauty; the ideal Rome was valor and self-control; the idealIsrael was the subjugation of sense to spirit, the approach of man to Godby purity of life. 

The twofold service of Judaism was to impress this special note ofchastity on human virtue, and to give to virtue the wings of a greathope. The flowering of that hope was in Christianity; the preparationfor it comes now before us. 

Under the rule of Alexander's successors the Jewish system, with itsmixture of ethics and ritual, came in collision with the ideas andpractice of degenerate Greek culture, --pleasure-loving, nature-worshiping, sensual, with gymnastics and aesthetics, tolerant andtyrannical. The two systems were hostile alike in their virtues andvices. The Greek ruler put down with a strong hand the religious andpatriotic scruples of his Jewish subject. The Jew bore persecution withthe tough endurance of his race, then rose in revolt with the fiercecourage and religious fervor of his race. He won his last victory in thefield of arms. Brief was the independence, soon followed by ingloriousservitude; but its sufferings and triumphs had fused the nation once moreinto invincible devotion to the Law of their God, and had rooted in theirhearts a principle of hope which in varying forms and growing power wasto change the aspect of human life. 

It seems natural to man to ascribe some impressive origin, some dramaticbirth, to the beliefs that are dearest to him. But if we trace backthrough Christian and Jewish lineage the idea of immortality, we arequite unable to discover the time or place of its beginning. The earlyJew thought of death much as did the early Greek, --as the extinction ofall that was precious in life, and the transition to a shadowy andforlorn existence in the realm of shades. The Hades of Homer seems muchto resemble the Sheol of the Old Testament, though more vividlyconceived. The strong, ruddy, passionate life of the Hebrew found aslittle to cheer it in the outlook beyond death as did the energetic, graceful, joyful life of the Greek. Ancient Egypt had, at least for theinitiate, a noble teaching of retribution hereafter to crown the mortalcareer with fit consummation of joy or woe. Ancient Persia had in itsown form a like doctrine. The Hebrews in their servile period caught nota scintilla of the Egyptian faith. In their exile it is probable thatthey did get some unrecorded influence from their Persian neighbors. Unmistakably, their emigrants to Alexandria, meeting there the noblerform of Greek culture while the Palestinian Jews encountered its baserside, caught some inspiration from the philosophy which followed, thoughafar off, the noble visions of Plato. Whether Persia or Greece was moredirectly the source of the new hope which crept almost unperceived intothe stern bosom of Judaism is not certain. But the first clear voice ofthat hope comes from the time of the martyrs. In the second book of theMaccabees is told--probably by an Alexandrian Jew--the story of the menand women who faced a dreadful death rather than disobey the Law of theirGod. In that last extremity--that confrontal of the soul by thebitterest choice, and its acceptance of death rather thanwrong-doing--comes the sudden voice of a hope triumphant over the tyrant. "Thou like a fury takest us out of this present life, but the King of theworld shall raise us up, who have died for his laws, unto everlastinglife. " So in succession bear testimony the seven sons of one mother, herself the bravest of them all. "She exhorted every one of them in herown language, filled with courageous spirit; and stirring up her womanishthoughts with a manly courage, she said unto them: 'I cannot tell how yecame into my womb: for I neither gave you breath nor life, neither was itI that formed the members of every one of you. But doubtless the Creatorof the world who formed the generations of man, and found out thebeginning of all things, will also of his due mercy give you breath andlife again, as ye now regard not your own selves for his laws' sake. Fear not this tormentor, but, being worthy of thy brethren, take thydeath, that I may receive thee again in mercy with thy brethren. '"

Just as the death of Socrates inspired in Plato the out-reaching hope ofa hereafter, so these Jewish martyrdoms quickened the doubtful guess, thedim conjecture, into fervid conviction. From this period dates thesettled Jewish belief in immortality. 

The form which that belief assumed is seen in the book of Daniel. Thatbook was a creation of this period, inspired by its sufferings, aspirations, and hopes. The writer, assuming the name and authority of atraditional hero, --by that easy confusion of the ideal and the historicalwhich we have seen before, --blends with stories of unconquerable fidelityand divine deliverance his own interpretation of the world's recenthistory and probable future. It is an early essay in what we call thephilosophy of history, the first recorded conception of a world-drama. Median, Persian, Greek, and Roman monarchies move their appointed courseand pass away. God's plan is working itself out, and the culmination isyet to come. In vision the prophet beholds it: the "Ancient of days, "with garment white as snow and hair like pure wool, upon a throne likefiery flame, with wheels as burning fire. Thousands of thousandsminister before him: the judgment is set and the books are opened. Onelike the Son of Man comes with the clouds of heaven, and there is givento him dominion and glory and a kingdom which shall not pass away. Inhis kingdom shall be gathered the saints of the Most High. Many of themthat sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to ever-lastinglife and some to shame and everlasting contempt. 

This was the figure in which the Jewish imagination clothed the Jewishhope. The national and the individual future blent in one anticipation. The dead were to "sleep in the dust" until the day when the divinekingdom was established, and then were to rise again to life, andaccording to their deserts were to share the endless glory or shame. 

So philosophy makes its essay at the destiny of mankind. So imaginationfashions its pictures. And back of philosophy and imagination we tracethe elemental and highest forces of the soul. It is martyrdom andmotherhood that inspire the immortal hope. Man faces the worst that canbefall him--drinks the hemlock or suffers the torture--rather than befalse to duty. The mother broods over the life mysteriously sprung fromher own, and given back by her as a sacred trust to the service of theright and to an unseen keeping. And to martyr and mother comes thevoice, "All shall be well with thee and thine. "

Christianity, inheriting from Judaism the belief in immortality, gave ita more central place, and a more appealing force. Of the older religion, the special characteristic--compared with the Greek and Roman world--wasthe impressing upon a whole people of a law of conduct, in which with amultitude of external ceremonies were bound up the fundamental principlesof justice, benevolence, and chastity, enforced by the authority of apersonal and righteous God. We see the educational effect upon thereligious Hebrew of this clearly personal God. It constantly lifted himout of the littleness of self-consciousness, setting before hisimagination the loftiest object. It gave definiteness and impressivenessto his best ideals. And, further, this anthropomorphism, as we name itnow, was but the primitive expression of the principle which is centralin all forms of religious faith, that man and the universe are in somedeepest sense at one, and that man's closest approach to the secret ofthe universe lies through his own noblest development. That is one wayof saying what the Jew felt when his imagination gave to the sternestcommand and the highest promise the sanction, "Thus saith the Lord. "

The Hebrew religion was wrought out under constant pressure of disaster. It was the religion of a proud, brave people, who were constantly held insubjection to foreign conquerors. Hence came a quality of intensehostility to these tyrannical foes, and also a constant appeal to theDivine Power which seemed often to conceal itself. Hence--and from thatsorrowful lot of the individual which often matches this nationaltragedy--hence comes the passionate, pleading, poignant quality throughwhich the Old Testament has always spoken to the struggling andsuffering, --with gleams of hope, the more intense from the clouds throughwhich they shine. 

The note of the New Testament is exultant. There is keen sense ofpresent evil, endurance, struggle; but there is a deeper sense of a greatdeliverance already begun and to be perfected in the future. The heartof this new energy, joy, and hope is love for a human yet celestialfriend. This love was awakened by a personality of extraordinarynobility and attractiveness. The personal affection inspired imaginationand ideality to their highest flights. Its original object becameinvested with superhuman traits and elevated to a deity. To trace withcertainty and minuteness the historic lineaments of the real man is notaltogether possible; but the essential truth concerning him issufficiently plain. 

The biographies which we possess of Jesus were written from thirty to ahundred years after his death. In these records memory and imaginationare intimately blended. On the one hand, the power and loftiness of hischaracter and words stamped certain traits unmistakably and indelibly onthe minds of his followers. But on the other hand, he was so suggestiveand inspiring--there were among his disciples natures so susceptible, responsive, yet untrained, and their community was soon fused in such acontagion of passionate feeling unchecked by reason--that the seeds ofhis words and acts fruited in a rich growth of imagination, which blentclosely with the historic reality. And with the central inspiration ofhis life there mixed in his followers ideas more or less foreign to him, so that the result in the Gospels is a composite which often defiescertainty of analysis. 

If we read with open mind the Gospel narratives, the foremost, vividimpression we get is of a personage using superhuman power over naturalforces for the benefit of mankind. As he is described, Jesus is beforeall a worker of beneficent miracles. He is a teacher, too, and anunexampled one. But he enforces his teaching by means utterlytranscending the credentials of other teachers. He is a tender humanfriend, but he expresses his friendship by services such as no otherfriend can render. He allays tempests by a word. He creates bread andwine at will. He heals the fevered, the lunatic, the blind. He raisesthe dead. In a word, he constantly exercises superhuman power. It isthis, not less than the excellence of his teaching, which hasdistinguished him in the eyes of his worshipers. What is the wisest wordabout immortality worth--what do we care for what Socrates or Platosaid--when here is one who raised Lazarus from the dead and rose himself?What need for any argument or assurance about Providence, when here isone through whom the very order of nature is set aside at the impulse ofbeneficent love?

But the growing difficulty in really believing the miracles and thegrowing preference for the purely human elements of the story have led inour time to a different conception. 

The secret of Jesus was the idea and reality of a pure and ardent life. His genius lay in showing the possibilities of the human spirit, in itsinterior harmony and its relations with the world about it. _Love yourenemies_, --in that word he reached the hardest and highest achievement ofconduct. _The pure in heart shall see God_, --with that he put in thehands of the humblest man the key of the heavenly vision. 

The Hebrew idea was righteousness, in the sense of chastity, justice, andpiety. Jesus sublimated this, --in him chastity becomes purity; in placeof justice dawns brotherhood; and piety changes from personal homage to alove embracing earth and heaven. 

Jesus taught in parables. A story--an outward, objective fact, somethingwhich the imagination can body forth--often facilitates the impartationto another mind of a spiritual experience. The soul has no adequatelanguage of its own, --it must borrow from the senses and the imagination. 

The central idea of Jesus is expressed in the saying, "No man knoweth theSon but the Father, neither knoweth any man the Father save the Son. "That is, man is a mystery except to his Maker; he does not evenunderstand himself. And correspondingly, "No man knoweth the Father savethe Son:" only the obedient and loving heart recognizes the Divinity. God is not known by the intellect: he is felt through the moral nature. Peace, assurance, sense of inmost reality, comes through steadfastgoodness. 

Jesus impressed this idea by the figure of father and son. What symbolcould he have used more intelligible? more universally coming home? Likeall statements of highest truth, all symbols, it was imperfect; it didnot furnish an adequate explanation of the workings of the universe. But, under the homeliest figure, under the guise of the nearest humanrelation, it expressed the greatest truth of the inner life. 

Further, Jesus threw his emphasis where men need it thrown, --not onabstract ideas, but on action. His teaching was always as to conduct. Purity, forgiveness, rightness of heart were his themes. 

Above all, he lived what he taught. He left the memory of a life whichto his followers seemed faultless. And ever since, those who felt theirown inadequacy have laid closest hold on his success, his victory, assomehow the pledge of theirs. 

Jesus was a Jew, but in him there was born into the world a higherprinciple than Judaism. The historic lineage is not to be too muchinsisted on. When he said, "Love your enemies, " "Forgive that ye may beforgiven, " he brought into the traditional religion a revolutionary idea. Judaism was largely a religion of wrath. Jesus planted a religion oflove. 

The tender plant was soon half choked by the old coarse growth, and formany centuries the religion named after Christ had a vein of hate asfierce as the old Judaism. But blending with it, and struggling alwaysfor ascendency, was the religion of love, symbolized by the cradle ofBethlehem and the cross of Calvary. 

Of the Judaic traits in Jesus, conspicuous was the prophetic feeling andtone. He was possessed with an absolute fullness of conviction, andspoke in a tone of blended ardor and certitude. "He taught as one havingauthority. " He rarely gave reasons. If in his words we find appeal toprecedent or argument, it is really as little more than illustration orpicture to clothe his own intuition. His followers believed his words, either because of some conscious witness in their breasts, or becausetheir love and reverence for him won for his assertions an unquestioningacceptance. 

From Judaism he took the familiar idea of one all-powerful and holy God;a moral ideal which was chiefly distinguished from that of theGreek-Roman world by its greater emphasis on chastity; and also thebelief in a constant divine interposition in human affairs, which soonwas to culminate in the establishment of a divine kingdom on earth. 

Jesus woke in his followers an ardor for goodness, a tenderness for theirfellow men, and a supreme devotion to himself. His words went straightto the springs of character. He brushed aside religious ceremonial as ofno importance. He sent the searching light of purity into the recessesof the heart. He made love the law of life and the key of the universe. He interpreted love, as a principle of human conduct, by illustrationsthe most homely, real, and tender. Love is no mere delicious emotion: itis giving our bread to the hungry, ourselves to the needy. It is not amere felicity of kindred spirits, --love them that hate you, pray for themthat despitefully use you!

Jesus was the greatest of poets. To every fact, to every idea, he gaveits most beautiful and spiritual interpretation. When he speaks of God, his speech is the pure poetry of the soul. Yahveh becomes to him theAll-father. His providence is over the lilies and the sparrows. Hisrain and sunshine are shed on the unjust as on the just. His inmostnature is set forth by the human father meeting his returning prodigal agreat way off. His very life is shared with his children. It wells upin Jesus himself: the light in his eyes, the tenderness in his tones, theyearning in his heart, --it is _my Father_ ye know in me!

How does that Divine Power appear in the procedure of the universe? Whatreal providence is there for the slain sparrow? What is the actualdestiny of those human lives which show only frustration and failure?Jesus does not answer these questions. It does not appear that he triedto answer them. His words are filled with a glad, unquestioning trust. He is not the philosopher seeking to measure life. He is the loverliving it, the poet delighting in it. 

The secret of Jesus lay in his sense of the "kingdom of God" withinhim, --of obedience, peace, and joy, which was in itself sufficient. Simply to communicate and impart that was to spread the Kingdom among men. 

A teacher like John the Baptist--possessed by the idea of righteousness, and of the world's deficiency, but without tranquillity in his ownheart--could look only for a divine interposition, a catastrophe. Johnis a sort of Carlyle. But Jesus, hearing him, and brooding the deepertruth, goes about proclaiming a present heaven. 

The marks of this inner state defined themselves against the conditionsof life he saw about him. 

Thus, he shows his estimate of wealth in the story of the young ruler. "Sell all that thou hast and give to the poor!"

Toward the other prize which men most seek, reputation, his feeling isexpressed to the two brethren asking chief places: "He that will be chiefamong you, let him be your servant. "

As to learning, intellectual attainment, his characteristic word is, "Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealedthem unto babes. " "Be as little children. "

The prevalent forms of religious observance he quietly acquiesced in, except where they barred the free play of human charity. Then he set theform aside, as being only the servant of the spirit. "The Sabbath wasmade for man, not man for the Sabbath. "

Such was his attitude toward wealth, honor, intellectual wisdom, ceremonial. 

Toward the outcasts, the publican and harlots, his attitude was of purecompassion. Toward the Pharisees it was denunciatory. Wealth ofceremony and poverty of spirit, self-complacency mixed with scorn forothers and with hostility to new light and love, roused in him a wrathwhich broke in lightning-flashes. "Woe unto you! whited sepulchres fullof dead men's bones, children of hell!"

In the ethics of Jesus chastity has a high place, yet he has few wordsabout it. His is an exalted and ardent goodness, of which purity is analmost silent element. His effect is like that of a noble woman, whosepresence is felt as an atmosphere. When he speaks, his words set thehighest mark, --"Be pure in _heart_. "

We may contrast the scene between Jesus and Mary Magdalene with thatbetween Socrates and the courtesan Theodota. The philosopher is proofagainst allurement, and gives kindly advice, which clearly will have noeffect; Jesus, without conscious effort, wakes a passion of repentancewhich transforms the life. So again we may compare the check whichEpictetus prescribes against undue tenderness, "Say while you kiss yourchild, he is mortal, " with the habitual attitude of Jesus towardchildren, --taking them in his arms, and saying, "Of such is the kingdomof heaven. " It is in such scenes as these--in his relations especiallywith women and with children--that we best see the genius of the heart, the newness which came into the world with Jesus. 

While dwelling in an inner realm of joy, he had the keenest sense of thesin and sorrow in men's lives. "He was filled with compassion for themultitude, as sheep having no shepherd. " Their epilepsies, leprosies, --the hardness of heart, the insensibility to the higherlife, --these moved him with a great pity. Scarcely save in littlechildren did he see the heart-free joy, the natural freedom andhappiness, which was his own. The hard-heartedness of the rich, thescorn of the self-righteous for the outcasts, moved his indignation. Thus the holy happiness of his own life was mingled with a profound senseof the trouble of other lives. 

His reading of the trouble was very simple: there were but two forces inthe world, moral good and evil, God and Satan, and God was shortly togive an absolute triumph to the good. 

Among the chief impressions he made was that of commanding power. Hemust have been full of healthy and majestic manhood. Women and childrenwere attracted to him, as the weak are attracted by the strong. In thestorm on the lake, his spirit so rose above the elemental rage--as ifupborne with delight by the sublime scene--that his companions forgottheir fears, and in the remembrance it appeared to them that the sea andwind grew calm at his word. His strength seemed to impart itself to theweak, his health to the sick. The stories of marvel which richlyembroider the whole story are partly the halos of imagination investing apersonality which commanded, charmed, inspired. 

Sometimes evil was considered the work of wicked spirits, --so especiallyin cases of lunacy. Over some such cases Jesus had a peculiar power. Heeven imparted this power to some of the disciples, who caught hisinspiration. The disciples, and probably Jesus, believed that this powerextended to other sicknesses. Of the uniformity of nature there is norecognition in the New Testament. Man's power over events is believed tobe measured by his spiritual nearness to God. "If ye have faith as agrain of mustard seed, " ye can cast mountains into the sea. 

When the soul exchanges its solitary communing for the actual world, itneeds to see manifested there the divinity it has felt. Jesus found thismanifestation partly in his power through faith to do "mighty works, "partly in the expectation of the near coming of the Kingdom. 

These in one sense typify the forms in which the religious soul alwaysand everywhere finds the divine presence. Man himself masters the forcesof nature, and as he does so has the consciousness of some higher powerworking through him. And he looks for a better future for himself andfor mankind. 

But the peculiarity of Jesus--looked at from a modern standpoint--wasthat he combined the most ardent, pure, and tender feeling and conductwith a simple belief that in the course of events only moral andspiritual forces are to be reckoned with; that man has power over naturein proportion to the purity and intensity of his trust in God; and thatthe whole order of society is to be speedily transformed by a divineinterposition. These ideas were inwrought in Jesus, and blended with hisardor of goodness, his tenderness, his sense of a mission to seek andsave the lost. 

In his teaching, God feeds and clothes his children as he feeds the birdsand clothes the grass. There is no need that they should be anxiousabout their physical wants. Their troubles will be banished if they willpray in faith. Disease, lunacy, all devilish evil, will vanish beforethe presence of the trusting child of God. All the injustice and wrongof the world are speedily to vanish through the direct intervention ofGod. It is the old anthropomorphic idea of God--the idea of the Prophetand Psalmist, wholly untouched by the questioning of Job; become tender, through the mellowing growth of centuries; sublimated in a heart ofexquisite goodness and tenderness; and mixed with a visionaryinterpretation of the world. 

What the ruling power of the universe will do he infers from the mostattractive human analogy. If even an unjust human judge yields to theimportunity of a petitioner, much more will the divine judge listen tothe cry of the wronged and suffering. If a human father gives bread tohis children when they ask, much more will the divine father. 

We are to remember that Jesus shared the inheritance, the education, andthe beliefs of the Galilean peasantry of his time. The force in himwhich winnowed the ideas of his people, selecting and sublimating thehigher elements, was an exceptional moral and spiritual insight. Thisinsight guided him far upward in truths of conduct and of emotional life. But it could not suffice to disclose those broad facts as to theprocedure of the phenomena of nature which we call science. To the Jewof the New Testament period, --to Paul as much as to the fishermen ofGalilee, --the world was directly administered by a personal being whohabitually set aside for his own purposes the ordinary course of events. The higher minds of the Greek-Roman world had reached a differentconception. Thinkers like Aristotle had assumed the constancy of natureas the basis of their teaching, poets like Lucretius had proclaimed it. But the great mass of the Greek-Roman world still believed, as the entireJewish people believed, in the habitual intervention of some divinepersonality. What distinguished and dignified the Jewish belief was thatit attributed all such interventions to a single deity who embodied thehighest moral perfection, instead of to a mixed multitude representingevil as well as good impulses. All Jewish history was written on thishypothesis. The only records of the past which Jesus knew were the OldTestament and its Apocrypha, in which each crisis of the nation or theindividual displayed the decisive interference of the heavenly power. The occurrences which we name miracles were hardly distinguished by theJew as generically different from ordinary occurrences; they were onlymore marked and special instances of God's working. That a manespecially beloved of God for his goodness should be given power to healthe blind and the lunatic seemed as natural as it was that his lovingcompassion should win the outcast and his fiery rebuke appall thehypocrite. 

It seems clear that Jesus, not less than his disciples, regarded hispower over physical ills as just as truly an incident of his characterand mission as was the power to inspire conduct and reclaim the erring. What differentiated him from them was that he held the physical marvelsof far less relative account than they did. Obscure as the detailednarratives must remain to us, it seems unmistakable that he habituallydiscouraged all publicity and prominence for his works of healing. Hisspiritual genius showed him that the stimulation of curiosity andexpectation in this direction diverted men from the principal business oflife, and the essential purport of his message, --to love, obey, and trust. 

The point at which the idea of divine intervention most seriouslyaffected his work seems to have been in his growing expectation of aspeedy consummation which should in a day establish on earth the kingdomof truth and righteousness. His earlier teachings include strikingutterances upon the gradual development of character in man, the slowripening of society, as in the parables of the leaven and the sower. Here he was on the firm ground of his own observation and consciousness. But as the problem of his own mission pressed for an explicit solution;as the lofty passion of the idealist, the yearning tenderness of thelover of men, were thwarted and baffled by the prodigious inertia ofhumanity, --so he was thrown back more and more on that promise of someswift catastrophic judgment and triumph which was the closing word ofancient prophecy, and which seemed to answer the cry of his soul. 

The later chapters of the synoptic Gospels are intensely colored withthis anticipation of a divine judgment close at hand. The promise, thethreat, the tremendous imagery, were dear to the heart of the earlychurch. They fed the imagination of the mediaeval church. But thatmodern Christianity which finds in Christ the source and embodiment ofall its own refined and exalted conceptions is inclined to look away fromall this millennial prophecy; to weaken or ignore its significance, or toattribute it to the misconception of the disciples. This modernChristianity fastens its attention on those teachings of purely spiritualand universal truth in which Jesus indeed spoke as never other man spoke. This exclusive insistence on the ethical and spiritual element maysuffice for those to whom Christ is an ideal or a divinity. But if weare to study the historical development of our religion, and not merelyits present form, it seems necessary to recognize this belief in theJudgment and Advent as a very important factor in the story. 

Unless we attribute to his disciples and biographers a misunderstandingalmost inconceivable, he identified himself with the Son of Man whom theprophecy of Daniel and the popular belief expected to set up a divinekingdom on earth. The whole story in the later chapters of the Gospelsis pervaded by this idea. The powerful imagery of a Day of Judgment, thesplendid promises and lurid threatenings, the specific incidents ofteaching and event, the overstrained eagerness, --which will not suffer ason to wait to bury his father, or allow a fig-tree to refuse miraculousfruit, --all agree in the presentation of Jesus as absorbed with thistremendous expectation. 

That he was on the whole so little unsteadied by this anticipation seemsdue to his profound, sympathetic sense of the sad and sorrowful elementswhich somehow mingle with human destiny. He was not thinking chiefly ofhimself, --not even though he was to be God's vicegerent. What filled hisheart, was the destiny of men. He wept over Jerusalem, --he mourned forthose who would go away into darkness. The realities of humanexperience, widened by sympathy, came close home to him. 

It seems plain--so far as anything can be plain in the details of thestory--that as his mission went on his temper of a pure spiritualidealism changed into a controversy with the leaders of the establishedreligion. He went to Jerusalem, foreseeing that the controversy wouldthere take an acute form, with the gravest issues. At times the presagerose of his own defeat and death. Suppose that were to happen?Still--so spoke his victorious faith--God's cause would triumph. And itwould triumph speedily and visibly. So he heartened his followers forany event. "Be prepared--you who are to me brothers and sisters andmother--be prepared even for my death. All the same, my truth willvindicate itself, God will triumph, you shall be saved!"

Jerusalem, it is plain, struck him much as Rome did Luther. Gorgeousbuildings, splendid ceremonies, august authorities, and along with it amass of greed, formality, worldliness. 

A solemn sense comes over him that this cannot endure. The discipleschildishly marvel at the splendid Temple, but its gorgeousness strikeshim as earthly, sensuous, perishable, and he says, "There shall not onestone be left upon another. "

His indignation rises and seeks expression in some outward act whichshall blaze upon the dull multitude the sense of their sinful state. Hegoes into the courts of the Temple, drives out the money-changers andmerchants, overthrows their tables, scatters all the apparatus of trade. This is the turning-point in his career; he has given an effective handleagainst him to the formalists and bigots who already hated him, and theyspeedily bring about his ruin. 

The life of Jesus culminates in the scenes of the last night. At thesupper, sure now of his impending fate, his willing self-devotionexpresses himself in that poetry of humble objects which wascharacteristic of him, and with passionate intensity. "This bread is mybody. " "This wine is my blood. " "I give myself for you. "

The scene in Gethsemane shows the dismay and recoil of the hour when hisardent faith met full the stern actuality. God was not to interfere, defeat and death were before him. All was hidden, save a fate which roseupon his imagination in dark terror. "O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me!" Then comes the victory of absoluteself-surrender, "Not my will, but thine, be done. "

The birth-hour of the religion of Jesus was that in which he began todeclare forgiveness to the outcast and good tidings to the poor. But thebirth-hour of Christianity, as the worship of Jesus, was that in whichMary Magdalene saw her master as risen and eternally living. 

The impulse which caught up and gave wings to his work just when itseemed crushed came from the heart of Mary. In a spiritual sense themother of Christianity was a woman who had been a sinner, and wasforgiven because she loved much. The faith that sent the disciples forthto conquer the world was the faith that their Lord was not dead butliving, not a memory but a perpetual presence. That conviction firstflashed into the heart of Mary. It was born of a love stronger thandeath, the love of a rescued soul for its savior. It sprang up in a mindsimple as a child's, incapable of distinguishing between what it felt andwhat it saw, between its own yearning or instinct and the actualities ofthe outward world. It took bodily form under a glow of exaltation thatknew not itself, whether in the body or out of the body. It crystallizedinstantly into a story of outward fact. It communicated itself bysympathetic intensity to other loving and credulous hearts. They too sawthe heavenly vision. Its acceptance as a reality became the corner-stoneof the new society. About it grew up, in ever increasing fullness anddefiniteness of outline, a whole supernal world of celestialpersonalities. But the initial fact was the heart's conviction--Jesuslives! Our friend and master is not in the grave, nor in the coldunderworld; he is the child of the living God, and he draws us toward himin that divine and eternal life. 

To get some partial comprehension of how the belief in Jesus'resurrection took possession of the disciples' minds, we are to rememberthat during the last months of their master's life he was in a state oftense, high-wrought expectation, which communicated itself to them. Something wonderful was just about to happen. There was to be a suddenand amazing manifestation of divine power, by which the kingdom of Godwas to triumph and thenceforth to reign. But the way to thisconsummation might lead through the valley of the shadow of death. Inthe soul of Jesus a sublime hope and a dark presage alternated andmingled. It is not to be supposed that he held a definite and unchangingconception. Cloud-shadows and sunbursts played by turns across him, withthe intensity natural to a soul of vast emotions. Constant through itall was the fixed purpose to be true to his mission, and with victoriousrecurrence came his confidence in the divine issue. His sympatheticdisciples were vaguely, profoundly stirred by this elemental struggle andvictory. They too became intensely expectant of some great catastropheand triumph. After the first shock of the Master's death, all thisemotion surged up in them afresh, with their love heightened as deathalways heightens love, with the fresh and vivid memories of their leadersweeping them on in the current of his purpose and hope and faith. Hiswords were true, --he must, he will, conquer and reign. If he has gone tothe underworld, he will live again. "Will, "--nay, is he not here with usnow? Is he not more real to our thought and love than ever before? Andfirst in one mind, then in another, the conviction flashes into bodilyimage. Mary has seen the Master! Peter has seen him! And for a littletime--for "forty days"--the electric air seems often to body forth thatluminous shape. The story, as it grew with years, took on one detailafter another, became definite and coherent, was accepted as the charterand foundation of the little society. 

To rightly understand the faith of the disciples in the risen Christ, wemust look below the stories of sense-appearance in which that faithclothed itself. What they essentially felt--what distinguished theirfaith from a mere opinion or dogma--was not a mere expectation, "The dead_will_ rise;" not a mere fact of history, "Some one _did_ rise;" it wasthe conviction and consciousness, "Our friend _is living_. " It was anexperience--including and transcending memory and hope--of present love, present communion, present life. 

Sight and speech lent their forms to clothe the ineffable experience ofMary and the disciples. For us, the story of outward events--the visibleform, the eating of bread and fish, the conversations, the floating upinto the clouds--all this fades away as a mirage. The reality below thissymbol--the sense of the human friend's continued and higher life--thisabides and renews itself; not as an isolated historic fact, but as aninstance and counterpart of the message which in every age comes to thebereaved heart--of a love greater than loss, a life in which death isswallowed up. 

The religion of the followers of Jesus became a centring of everyaffection, obligation, and hope, in him. 

For the first few years all this was merged in the eager expectation ofhis return. While this lasted in its fullness, even memory was far lessto them than hope. They did not attempt any complete records of hisearthly life, --what need of that, when the life was so soon to beresumed? The bride on the eve of her marriage is not reading her oldlove-letters, --she is looking to the morrow. 

That first eager flush had already passed when the earliest gospels werewritten. By that time hope had begun to prop its wavering confidence, bylooks turned back even to a remote past. Hence the constant appeals tothe supposed predictions of the Old Testament; hence even the imaginingof special events in the life of Jesus to fulfill those predictions. 

The Old Testament as conceived by the writers of the New is fantasticallyunlike the original writings. The Evangelists found Messianic prophecieseverywhere. The writers of the Epistles, Paul and the rest, dealt withceremonies and histories as a quarry out of which to hew whateverallegory or argument suited their purpose. 

In Luke's Gospel we first see fully displayed the idea of Christ whichtook possession of the common mind, and has largely held it eversince, --a personal Savior, --a gracious, merciful, all-powerful deliverer. It is a gospel of the imagination and the heart--inspired by the actualJesus, but half-created by ardent, adoring imagination. 

This conception grew up side by side with Paul's. It is far closer tothe popular mind and heart than Paul's idea, --his was philosophic andmetaphysic; this is pictorial. Paul has been studied by theologians, butthe Gospels have given the Christ of the common people. 

The early church was divided into two parties, of which one was led byPaul, who stood for the free inclusion of all who would accept Jesus asthe Messiah, and would impose no further requirement of ceremony ordogma, trusting all to the guidance of "the Spirit"--the Spirit of whichthe sufficient fruit and evidence was "love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance. " The other party, ledby disciples who had known and followed Jesus himself, maintained thatthe entire Jewish law was still in force, and treated Paul as a dangerousheretic. To narrate the struggle and the final reconcilement is beyondthe purpose of this book, but we must pause a moment on the figure ofPaul. 

It marks the extraordinary force and vividness of Paul's character, thatin a few pages of letters, in which the autobiography is only brief andincidental, he has so displayed himself that few historical charactersare more familiar. 

We see him, --deep-hearted, vehement, irascible, tender, self-assertive;intensely bent on the higher life; thwarted in that aspiration by unrulypassion, --lust of the flesh and pride of the spirit; stumbling, stammering, conquering; a nature full of internal conflict, brought intoharmony by one sublime spiritual affection; thenceforth throwing itswhole energy into the diffusion of a like harmony throughout this worldof troubled conflict. 

We see a mind guided in its deepest workings by the realities of personalexperience, but wholly untrained in logic, unversed in accurateknowledge; acquainted with history only through the Old Testament;ignorant of the philosophy of Greece; taught by intimate association withmany men and women in their deepest personal experiences; familiar bytravel and observation with the broad life of the time, and judging itfrom a lofty ethical standpoint; wholly credulous as to miracle; whollyconfident in its own theories--theories gendered in the strangest weddingof fact and fancy; using constantly the form of argument, which often ispure fantasy; illumined by gleams of spiritual insight, which sometimesbroaden into pure radiance; striving always to express the conscious factof a great freedom of the soul which binds it fast to all duty; aiming ata human society dominated wholly and solely by the same spiritualprinciple; but often clothing both the personal and social ideal in formsof thought which have become obsolete, so that for us to-day his truthhas to be stated in other language, and broadened by other truths. 

Where Paul has always touched men closest is in the earnestness anddifficulty of his struggle for the good life, and in the sense of acelestial aid, --he calls it "the love of Christ, "--which somehow bringshabitual victory in the conflict, and sheds peace in its pauses, andgives assurance of ultimate triumph and perfect fruition. 

The main theme for which Paul contends in most of his epistles was vitalto the life of the early church, --that its members were not to be held toobservance of the Jewish ritual. In support of that theme, Paul developshis philosophy of the universe. The main lines of that philosophy areessentially these: that when God had created man, man's sin incurred thepenalty of death; that God chose the Jews as his peculiar people, andgave them the code of laws contained in the books of Moses; that the lawwas too difficult for weak human nature to perfectly obey, so that deathstill reigned on earth, with dire penalty impending in the afterworld;that God then had recourse to another plan. He sent his Son into theworld, who became a man, taking on him that fleshly nature which is theoccasion and the symbol of human transgression, but which he wore inperfect holiness. God then caused this fleshly nature of Jesus to dieupon the cross, while the spiritual nature outlived the perishing body, appeared in radiant form to men, and returned to the eternal realm. Bythis visible sign God made proclamation to mankind, "Die unto sin byforsaking sin, and I will give you holiness which issues in eternal life. The death and resurrection of my son, Jesus Christ, are the token andpromise of my free gift, which only asks your acceptance. Accept it, byturning from sin, and you shall receive the sense of companionship withChrist, and the consciousness of a divine power working in you and in theworld. Of set laws you have no longer need; rites and ceremonies werebut the type of the reality which now is freely given to you. Your soleobligation is to love; your fidelity to that shall constantly merge inthe sense of joyful freedom; the imperfect attainment of earth shallissue into the eternal felicity of heaven. "

In such language we try to restate Paul's philosophy. Thus, or somewhatthus, he thought. Just how he thought we can never be sure, nor does itmatter. The mould of his belief was so different from ours that allwhich closely concerns us is to discern if we can what was the kernel ofgenuine experience, the permanent reality and truth, which vivified thisworld-scheme. 

In Paul before his conversion we see the man who struggles to conform toa standard of conduct so high, exacting, and minute, that it touchesevery particular of life, and who yet is beset by a constant sense offailure and disappointment. From this slough of despond he islifted--how? By the sense of a love which extends to him from the unseenworld. It takes form to him as the personal love of one who has lived, has died, and in some inexpressible way still lives. This friendship inthe unseen world is the sufficient, the absolute pledge of a God wholoves and saves. No matter what be the theory about it, of incarnationor atonement, here is the reality as it comes home: the man Jesus, highest, noblest, dearest, makes himself real and present to me, thoughlong ago he died and was laid in the grave. This one fact carries answerenough for all the craving of heart and soul. That I shall at lasttriumph over all besetting evils, that the ruler of the universe is myfriend, that earth is the vestibule of heaven, --all this I can joyfullybelieve when once I have the sense of that single human friend stillbefriending me in the unseen world. 

This was what the risen Christ meant to the early church. This was thecommon belief that bound its two parties, the Jewish and the PaulineChristians, at last into one. This was what gave the full meaning to allthe stories of Jesus told over and over and at last written down. Thiswas what fired the common heart of mankind as not the wisdom of Plato northe nobility of Epictetus had touched it. 

Paul's experience is the more remarkable because he had never even seenJesus in the flesh. He had borne in a sense a personal relation to him, in the fact that he had hated and persecuted his followers. Theconviction that he had been in the wrong came to him with a tremendousrevulsion of feeling. The poignancy of remorse was followed by anexquisite sense of forgiveness, which shed its depth and tenderness onhis whole after-life. In him we first see the power of the personalityof Jesus to touch those who never had seen him. 

At such points we feel how shallow is the plummet-line with which ourso-called psychology measures the "soul" it deals with. The influence, the presence, the living love, of one who has died, --how paradoxical, howunintelligible, to our human science; how significant to our humanexperience!

What concerns us historically as to Paul is that he was the conspicuousagent in transforming this sentiment into a moral force. The belief thatJesus was risen had great emotional power, but that emotion might easilywaste itself, might even undermine the solid foundations of character. Paul held the belief in its literal form, but it had for him a furthersignificance, as the symbol and type of the soul's experience in itsevery-day walk. The death we are most concerned about is the extinctionof evil act and desire. Life--the only life worth thinking of, here orhereafter--is lofty, pure, and tender life. Die to sin, live toholiness, and present or future is safe with God. 

Paul's theology is in one sense a passage in a long chapter ofpseudo-science. It is one of a series of attempts to explain theuniverse from a starting-point of fable. These have been theaccompaniment--sometimes as help, sometimes as obstacle--of a spirituallife far deeper than the stammering language they found. And it is to benoted that Paul himself when at his best rises above his theology orforgets it. The words of his which have lodged deepest in the world'sheart are the vital precepts of conduct, and the utterances of love andhope. In one matchless passage, he celebrates "charity"--simple humanlove--as the one sufficient, supreme, and eternal good. 

Some misconceptions in his philosophy became the fruitful seeds ofmischievous harvests. One such seed was the ambiguous sense of"faith"--the confusing of intellectual credence with moral fidelity. This misconception--which underlies much of the New Testament--was analmost inevitable incident of a religion generated as this was. Christianity based itself, in its own theory, on the bodily resurrectionof Jesus from the dead. This was offered as a basis for the whole appealwhich the church made to the world. Thus Belief--or Credulity--usurpedthe place among the virtues which of right belongs to Truth. 

Another misconception lay in the use of "flesh, " the antithesis of"spirit, " as the name of the evil principle. Paul indeed uses "theflesh" in no restricted sense of merely sensual sin. With him it equallyincludes all other forms of wrong, like malevolence and pride andself-seeking. But the nomenclature and the way of thought which itreflected put a stigma on the whole physical nature of man. In thatstigma lay the germ of asceticism, hostility to marriage, depreciation ofsome vital elements of man's nature. 

Paul's conception of the church never was fully realized. He expected tosee the whole body of believers filled with a "holy spirit, " adivine-human inspiration, which should of itself guide them into alltruth and duty. Outward law or doctrine there needed none, beyond theacceptance of Christ as God's son who had lived and died and risen. Accept that, and the divine spirit would be given you. No need then ofcircumcision or sacrifice, of Sabbath or fast, of written code or humanruler. The saint is free from all law but that of love; the company ofsaints needs no control or guidance but that. 

The beautiful ideal shattered itself against a stubborn fact. Love ofChrist did not guide his followers into all truth, or into harmony witheach other. Paul's life was half spent in a bitter contest with men wholoved Christ as well as he did. His epistles are full of the strugglewith that great party of Christ's followers who called him a heretic andsought to win away his converts. Suppose any one had asked him: "You saythe spirit of Christ will guide his followers into all truth, --why doesit not guide these Christian Jews and you into so much of truth as willmake you friends instead of foes?"

Paul was hoping too much. The new impulse in the world--sublime, beautiful, full of power and promise--was by no means sufficient to leadthe world straight and sure to harmonious perfection. There was no suchgift of "the spirit" as to supersede all search, all struggle, all humanleadership and human groping. That hope was almost as exaggerated as theexpectation--with which in Paul's mind it mingled--of Christ's bodilyreturn. The road to be traveled by mankind was still long and arduous. 

Any complete history of the early church must deal largely with thestubborn and bitter contest between the Jewish and Pauline parties, --thechampions of the law and the champions of liberty. That contest gave itsstamp to the epistles of Paul, and was indeed their most frequentoccasion. At a later time the attempt to harmonize the two parties seemsto have given birth to the book of Acts, in which history mixes withfiction. But we are here concerned only with such features of thehistory as made the most vital and permanent contributions to religion, and for this purpose we need only specify the Epistle to the Ephesians. 

This epistle opens the heart of the early church. It assumes to bewritten by Paul, but there are some indications that this name wasborrowed by the real author. This assumption of a great name, so commonin this age, as in the books of Daniel, Wisdom of Solomon, Enoch, andothers, marks a timidity, a deference to authority of the past. Only thegreatest, like Jesus and Paul, dared to speak in their own name. 

Primarily the epistle is a plea for unity between Jewish and GentileChristians, --broadening into an appeal for unity between all classes andindividuals, an appeal for purity and holiness, in the name of Christ thehead. Occasional sentences and phrases will sufficiently show its tenorand spirit. 

"That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith, that ye, being rooted andgrounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all saints what is thebreadth and length and depth and height, and to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fullness ofGod. "

"There is one body and one spirit, even as ye are called in one hope ofyour calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of allwho is above all and through all and in you all. " "Endeavoring to keepthe unity of the spirit in the bond of peace. "

Each has his appointed place, some as apostles, some as prophets, somefor humbler service, --for "the building up of the body of Christ, " "tillwe all come into the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Sonof God unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of thefullness of Christ. "

"Putting away lying, speak every man truth with his neighbor, for we aremembers one of another. " "Let him that stole steal no more, but ratherlet him labor, working with his hands the thing which is good, that hemay have to give to him that needeth. "

The note of purity is far higher than in Stoic or Platonist. Uncleannessis spurned with the horror which pure love and holiness inspire. 

"Fornication, and all uncleanness or covetousness, let it not be oncenamed among you, as becometh saints. Neither filthiness, nor foolishtalking, nor jesting, which are not becoming, but rather giving ofthanks. For this ye know, that no whoremonger nor unclean person norcovetous man, who is an idolater, hath any inheritance in the kingdom ofChrist and of God. Let no man deceive you with vain words, for becauseof these things cometh the wrath of God upon the children ofdisobedience. " "Be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess, but be filledwith the spirit. "

There is a tender exhortation to husband and wife, based on the likenessof their union to Christ and his church. There is a special word tochildren, servants, masters. The sweetness is matched by the strength. "Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord, and in the power of hismight. "

The epistle is full of the spirit of a present heaven. There is scarcelyany thought of the future, no reference to the second coming, no dwellingon the hereafter. It is all-sufficient, all-uniting love, --Christ, aspiritual presence, as the head--God the Father of all. The love ofChrist is a pure spiritual passion. There is no theorizing about him, not even much personal distinctness, --only the consciousness as of somecelestial personality. The seen and unseen worlds seem to blend in acommon atmosphere. 

Even as an ideal, this transcends the philosophy of Epictetus, andoutshines the vision of Plato. As one of the charter documents of asociety which had come into an actual existence, --as the aim toward whichthousands of men and women were struggling, however imperfectly, --itmarks the coming of a new life into the world. 

The Pauline idea of Christ is shown as it worked itself out in the brainand heart of Paul himself. In the Fourth Gospel we have, not theexperience of an individual, but an idealized portrait of the Master. 

The germ may have lain in some genuine tradition of his words, as theywere caught and treasured by some disciple more susceptible than the restto the mystical and contemplative element in Jesus. These words, handeddown through congenial spirits, and deeply brooded; these ideas caught byminds schooled in the blending of Hebraic with Platonic thought, --mindsaccustomed to rely on the contemplative imagination as the discloser ofabsolute truth; the waning of the hope of Messiah's return in the clouds;the growth in its place of a personal and interior communion with thedivine beauty and glory as imaged in Jesus; a temper almost indifferentto outward event, too full of present emotion to strain anxiously towarda future, yet confident of a transcendent future in due season; anassumption that in this belief lay the sole good and hope of humanity, and that the rejection of this was an impulse of the evil principlewarring against God; the crystallization of these memories, hopes, andbeliefs into a dramatic portraiture of acts and words appropriate toChrist as so conceived; a temper in which a portraiture so inspired wasidentified with actual and absolute truth--some such genesis we maysuppose for the Gospel which bears the name of John. 

The writer shows no such close contact with the actual struggle of lifeas vivifies the other biographies of Jesus and the impassioned pleadingsof Paul. He is a pure and lofty soul, but he writes as if in seclusionfrom the world. His favorite words are abstract and general. Theparable and precept of the early gospels give place to polemic andmetaphysic disquisition. The Christian communities for which he writeshave left behind them the sharp antagonisms of the first generation, andhave drawn together into a harmonious society, strong in their mutualaffection, their inspiring faith, and their rule of life, and facingtogether the cruelty of the persecutor and the scorn of the philosopher. To this writer, all who are outside of the Christian fold and theChristian belief seem leagued together by the power of evil. The secretof their perversity and the seal of their doom is unbelief. Let themaccept the Christ he portrays, and good shall supplant evil in theirhearts. The ground of the acceptance is to be simply the self-evidentbeauty and therefore the self-evident truth of the Christ here set forth. 

And so we have a portrayal of Christ which at many points profoundlyappeals to the heart, yet which constantly dissipates into a metaphysicalmythology; together with the admonition that only a full belief can savethe soul and the world from ruin. The ethical and emotional elements ofthe new religion have thoroughly fused with the elements of dogma andexclusiveness. 

A kind of self-exaltation is by this writer imputed to Jesus, which is asmuch less attractive than his attitude in the Synoptics as it is lessgenuine. "All that ever came before me are thieves and robbers"--this isthe word of an idolatrous worshiper; far different from him whose onlysense of superiority was expressed in a longing to impart his owntreasure: "Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I willgive you rest. "

But the writer rises to a lofty plane where he conceives the partingwords of Jesus to his friends. Here he is on the ground of what we knowdid in some wise really happen--a last interview between the Master andhis disciples, when clouds of defeat and death lowered close before him, and his words deepened in their hearts the devotion which animated alltheir after-lives. That parting scene, preserved elsewhere indelineations brief and impressive, was now expanded by the brooding, creative thought of some one in closest sympathy with the occasion andwith the vital impulse it had given. Literal and historical fidelity thedescription may lack, but it is in close accord with the realities ofexperience. The tender assurances, the prophecies beyond hope, which theMaster is here supposed to speak, had indeed been fulfilled. The loss ofhis earthly presence had been more than made good to those in whose liveshe had been felt as a saving power. The Comforter had truly come. Themutual love of the disciples, and their loyalty to the Master as theyunderstood him, had planted a new social force in the world, and wasworking slowly to transform the world. Thoughts which had been thepossession of philosophers in the schools were become working forces inthe lives of common men and women and children. That deliverance fromthe fear of death which thinkers had vainly sought had been won even bythe poor and lowly. All this and more was set forth as in a psalm orprophecy, in the parting words ascribed to Christ. 

"Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you, not as the worldgiveth give I unto you. " "Ye shall see me again, and your hearts shallrejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you. "

The predominant notes of the New Testament are tenderness and ardor, butinwrought with these is a vein of terror and sometimes of fierce wrath. It is like the denunciation in the Old Testament, to which the vision ofa future world has added a more lurid hue. "Asia's rancor" has notdisappeared, even in the presence of "Bethlehem's heart. " Among thewords attributed to Jesus are the threat of that perdition where the wormdieth not and the fire is not quenched. To him is ascribed (whethertruly or not) the story of Dives in hell, and father Abraham in whosebosom Lazarus is reposing denies even his prayer for a drop of water tocool his tongue. Here is the germ of all the horrors of the mediaevalimagination. The germs bore an early fruitage in that book which bearsthe name of "Revelation. " It mirrors the passions which spring up amidthe heats of faction and of persecution. Fell hatred fills its pages forthe persecutor and for the heretic. The few gleams of Paradise for thesaved are pale in comparison with the ghastly terrors. It is the firstfull outbreak of that disease of the imagination, bred of disease of theheart, which was to be the curse of Christianity. 

We have dwelt upon the central facts and ideas in which Christianity tookits rise. We shall pass with a few brief glances over a tract of manycenturies. Our special concern in this work is with the birth-periods ofthe vital and lasting principles of man's higher life. One such phasewas the Greek-Roman philosophy of which the best outcome was Stoicism. Another critical era was the birth of Christianity from its immediatelineage of Judaism. The next great epoch is the marriage of rationalknowledge with the spiritual life--which is the story of these lastcenturies, in mid-action of which we are standing. 

Viewing man's higher life upon its intellectual side, the commoncharacteristic of the period between the time of the Apostles and ourimmediate forefathers is the prevalence of what may be called theChristian mythology. In other words, the moral rules and spiritualideals were almost inextricably bound up with and based upon theconception of a supernatural world, certainly and definitely known, anddisclosed to mankind through a series of revelations which centred in theincarnation of God in the man Jesus Christ. Upon this basis was reared avast intellectual and imaginative structure--embodied in many creeds, pictured in visions of Dante and Milton and Bunyan, enforced bymultitudinous appeals to emotion and reason, to love, hope, and terror. 

It is the dissolving of this elaborate supernaturalism, and the growth ofa different conception of the spiritual life, which is now going onbefore our eyes. To measure the essential significance of the change, weneed not linger long upon the successive steps by which the mythologyexpanded and solidified itself. We have seen its germs in the story ofJudaism, of Jesus and his immediate successors. The method and nature ofits growth may be briefly indicated. 

We are following only a single thread in the vast web of history. Allthe threads work in together, but we must be well content if we can tracethe general line of one or two. It is the history of the moral ideaswhich have most directly and closely influenced the life of men, that weare trying to pursue. There was a wonderful embodiment and outshining ofsuch ideas in the life and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. The truth hetaught and lived was in some ways made more applicable and transmissibleby his followers, and in some ways lowered. There grew up the society ofthe Christian church. Gradually it took its place among the importantforces of the Roman empire. It won at last the nominal allegiance of thecivilized world. Aiding or thwarting it, coloring and changing it, werea thousand influences, --side-currents from other religions andphilosophies, social changes, Roman law and tradition, the new life ofthe barbarians; old ingrained habits of blood and brain; the constantpush of primal instincts--hunger and sex; tides of war and trade andindustry; slavery and serfdom; strong human personalities, swaying alittle the tide that bore them; all the myriad forces that are always atwork in history. 

One can scarcely pass by a leap of thought from the age of Paul to theage of Dante without an instant's glance at the intervening tract. Thereare the early Christian communities, bound together by tender ties ofbrotherhood; storms of persecution fanning high the flame of courage andfaith; a new purity and sweetness of domestic life spreading itself likethe coming of the dawn. There are wild vagaries of the mind, takingshape in fantastic heresies. There is the degeneracy of a faith held inpureness and peril into a popular and fashionable religion. There areenthroned monsters like Nero and Commodus; "Christian" emperors, likeConstantine, ambitious, crafty, and blood-guilty; and noble "heathen"emperors like Trajan and Aurelius. There is the peace of the Empire inits best days, with some wide diffusion of prosperity and content. Thereare incursions of barbarians--the strange, little-known life of nomadictribes--with pristine virtues of valor and chastity, half-pictured, half-imagined, by Tacitus. There is conquest, rapine, subjugation, suffering. There are ages in which violence is master, and in thedisordered struggle of the violent among themselves the weak are trampledunder foot. There are scenes of humble happiness and content, the toilerin the fields, the family about the hearth-stone, which scarcely are seenby the chronicler busy with kings and popes. There are superstitions andmummeries; wild fears of spectres and devils; sentimental piety handedwith cruelty and debauchery. There are inward struggles, sorrows, achievements; rapturous glimpses, tender consolations; the ministry offaithful priests; the comforting of women and the purifying of men by thethought of the Virgin Mother and the saints. There are civilizers instate and church, --Alfred, Charlemagne, Hildebrand. There is theemergence of a social and ecclesiastical order; the ranking of kings, barons, and vassals; of priests, bishops, and popes; the establishment oflaws and charters; the growth of liturgies and cathedrals. 

The contrast is great between the simplicity of a high moral ideal, likethat of Jesus or Paul, which claims, and with such show of reason andright, the whole allegiance of man, and the vast complexity of good andevil in which the ideal works only as one obscure and partial element. How simple, how clear, how sweetly inviting sounds the call, --how strangeand discordant the response!

That inconsistency was explained by the church fathers, like Augustine, as due to the inherent badness of human nature. That universal badnessflowed from one sin of the common ancestor. That sin was induced by themachinations of Satan, arch-enemy of God, and practically dividing therule of the universe with him. A logical and symmetrical explanation inits day, but it no longer explains. 

Neither does it explain, but it may profit, if the wondering inquirerturns his thoughts for a moment on his personal history. He has had hishours of clear vision and high resolve, --why have they borne such poorfruit in his actual life? His own riddle is one with the riddle ofhistory. 

Again we may say, with no pretense of probing the mystery in its depths, but as gaining a touch of side-light, it is plain that what we look at asthe strictly moral forces of mankind--the clear thinking, the definitepurpose, the pure aspiration--must be reckoned with as only a part of thevolume of force that carries along the individual and the race. Otherelements of that force are the physical needs; the push and play ofpassions ingrained in human nature; the inherited bias; the strength ofhabits formed before childhood had begun to reflect, --the thousand forceswhich blend with reason and choice to make up our destiny. Man's noblestaim is to make reason and purpose the rulers in his little republic, butat the best those rulers must deal with a set of very vigorous and oftenmutinous subjects. 

Let us not at least wonder, though for the moment we sigh, that neitherdid the kingdom of God at once establish itself on earth, as Jesus hoped, nor did the Spirit guide mankind by a brief and sure path into fullfelicity and holiness, as Paul hoped. 

The disappointment is a blank contradiction only for those who assume asuperhuman revelation in Scripture or in church, and then have toreconcile this infallibility with that most fallible groping by whichalone mankind gets along. Unembarrassed at least by that difficulty, letus note one natural cause of the imperfect progress of Christianity, namely, the substitution of fancy for clear and sound knowledge of natureand man, which was inwrought from the beginning in its creed. 

We may recall the piercing question of Socrates, "Can virtue be taught?"Can the best life be so clearly shown and so skillfully inculcated, thatit may be transmitted from man to man and from generation to generationas surely and safely as the knowledge of a mechanical art or a physicalscience? Socrates owned that he knew of no such way to teachvirtue, --that while Pericles could teach his son to be a good horseman, he could not so guide him but that he became a bad man, --and Socrateshimself found no sure way to guide men into the heroic path he walkedhimself. 

Now Christianity offered a sort of knowledge as the proper training toproduce virtue. Its knowledge included certain genuine and preciouselements, such as the essential blessedness of purity and love; the trustand peace which flow from duty done; the hope which springs from thegrave of a holy man;--ideas not new in substance, but wonderfullyvivified and vitalized. But along with this genuine knowledge, Christianity blended in ever-growing volume a pseudo-knowledge. It had aprofessed explanation of the nature of Deity, the nature of humanity, andtheir mutual relation, which was so unreal that when applied to theconduct of human life its fruit was often as ashes and the east wind. 

To sum up the method by which Christianity wrought: its vital ideas ofcharacter were infolded in a triple crust of Authority, Ceremony, Dogma. Its ideas could scarcely have been propagated except under some suchincrustation. Pure gold must be mixed with alloy before it can beworked. The new society would have quickly dissolved into chaos if ithad not had established laws and usages and discipline and rulers. Thecraving of the average man for definite symbols fastened eagerly on thecleansing water of baptism and the bread and wine of the love-feast. Thethoughtful mind must needs seek to assign to the Master his true placeand relation as between God and man. Here were the germs of hierarchy, ceremonial, and dogma. Internal order, self-protection againstpersecuting emperors and then against barbarian invaders, led to agradual strengthening and perfecting of the organization. The cravingfor intellectual consistency and symmetry urged on the elaboration of thecreed. 

That development of the Christian creed, --in one view, how natural andinevitable a process; yet what enormous waste of intellect, whatdiversion from sound inquiry! The original hypothesis being pure fancy, all the ingenious deductions are mere excursions into cloudland. 

We need not follow in any detail these speculations. A certain purityand loftiness marks their early stages, in which the Greek theologianswere occupied in blending a sort of Platonic theory of deity with thehistoric fact of a noble human personality. With the emergence of thechurch from persecution to power, we see that the intellectual degeneracyhas set in along with the moral. The first great council, that ofNicaea, occupied itself in settling by a majority of votes whether Christwas of _like_ substance with the Father or of the _same_ substance withthe Father. The assertion of his full equality was in due time followedby a similar definition of the personality and equality of the HolySpirit, with the full doctrine of the Trinity; the double nature ofChrist; the rank of the Virgin Mary. The authoritative interpretation ofhuman nature had its source in the personal experience and latertheorizing of Augustine. Himself emergent after long struggles from thetyranny of evil desire, by a transcendent experience in which he saw thehand of God, --he in effect generalized from this to the inherent andutter depravity of all mankind, and its entire dependence on a divinegrace which might with equal justice be given or withheld. The luridhell which had always shared with a radiant heaven the imagination of thechurch took from Augustine a grimmer horror: in the fearful thought ofmen, its foundations were now deep sunk in eternal justice, man beinghimself from birth a wretch so abominable that hell was his naturaldestiny, save as mercy might by inscrutable selection deliver someportion of mankind. 

Later ages brought their own problems. What was the nature of theatonement, --a compact between God and the Devil, by which Christ was madea ransom for man, the Devil being unexpectedly cheated of his pay? Orwas Christ's death simply the transfer of a debt on the books of divinejustice? The sacraments, again, what was their precise nature? And sothe scheme was worked out in all its details. 

The triune God, Father, Son, and Spirit; a hierarchy of angels; thecreation of man, his seduction by a revolted and fallen angel, and theexposure of his entire posterity to the just retribution of everlastingmisery; an arrangement between the persons of the Trinity by which theincarnation and death of the Son became a ransom for mankind; theestablishment by Christ of a visible church, divinely guided to reveal tomen the truth, and impart to them the divine grace; the offer ofsalvation upon condition of faith, repentance, and obedience; sacramentswhich were channels of divine grace; an endless heaven of bliss for thesubmissive and obedient, an endless hell of torment for the negligent orrebellious, --this was the universe as it existed to the belief andimagination of the Christian world for many centuries. 

Thus Christianity, instead of following a true inquiry into the facts ofthe moral life, --in place of cultivating that sound knowledge of man inwhich Socrates led the way, or that knowledge of the natural world inwhich Aristotle and the Greek physicists had wrought, --instead of suchstudy, the church based its ideals, its appeals, its helps, on a purelyfanciful interpretation of the universe. Its refined and ingeniousspeculations were wasted upon a fantasy. 

This want of sound knowledge has for us here a twofold significance. Itpoints to one cause of the imperfect success of the ideals of Jesus andof Paul. And by its defect it points us forward to a fulfillment, whenat a later age Virtue and Knowledge should be wed. 

But we need to distinguish and to reverence the deep utterances of thehuman heart which spoke with stammering tongue in these crude symbols. 

The Catholic church was a second Roman empire in its extent and power, and with an inspiration loftier than that of the empire. For, judged bywhat was most essential to it, the Catholic church--human to the core, human in its errors and sins, human in its upward striving--was, at itsbest, a society for disciplining men in the higher life. And that creedwhich sounds so strange to our ears, we may best translate thus:_Eternity bids you to goodness_. However much there was of error, ofmisapplied force, of moral injury, there was a vast, multiform, mightyculture of men in chastity, in charity, in the victories and the joys ofthe spirit. The church set the Virgin Mother as a heavenly consoler, andshowed as the divinest thing a man who died for love of men. Before theimagination of the oppressor, the robber, the licentious, it set aflaming sword of retribution. To the poor, the sorrowful, thebroken-hearted, it offered the blessed assurance, _This world and thenext are God's_. It opened to them a communion in thought and feelingwith holy and blessed souls in the invisible realm. Life was hard andtroublous; priests and bishops sometimes made the trouble worse; butthere was the sense of a heavenly rule over all, the struggle toward aheavenly attainment. 

The whole moral appeal of the church rested on the superterrestrial worldwhich it asserted and pictured. It was a world whose existence wasvouched solely by an inward assent of the mind. For outward government, there were bishops and popes, kings and magistrates. But all moralauthority, all incitement to holiness, all spiritual joy and hope, restedon this unseen world as accepted by the mind. Disbelieve, and all waslost! And so, of necessity, _belief_ was the fundamental, the essentialthing. Obey the church, believe the creed, --that was the supreme doublerequirement. 

That imaginations when believed as these were believed exercised a mightypower is beyond question. That the power was in a degree for good isalso clear. But the vast dislocation between the supposed and the realworlds involved enormous failure and waste. 

On the one hand, the whole tremendous imagery of the supernal worldsimply slipped off altogether from a great proportion of the men andwomen whose time and thought were absorbed in the toils and sorrows andpleasures of the world about them. To make a future heaven and hell takeany hold of them at all, the church had to translate its mysteries andsublimities into a very material and crude ceremonial. It brought inpenalties of a substantial sort, --penance and excommunication, the rackand the stake. It constantly appealed to fear. And after all, thereremained always an enormous amount of stolid and mostly silentindifference and unbelief. The priest said these things were so, --thepriests all said so, --and the priest was backed by the bishop, and thebishop by the Pope. Well, perhaps they knew--and perhaps they did n't. The chance that they were right made it worth while to go to church onSunday, and to confession sometimes; to have one's children baptized; toavoid giving offense to the clergy; and to make sure of their goodoffices when one came to die. But the belief in their heaven and hellwas not strong enough to very much expel the greed, sloth, lust, avarice, pride to which men were prone. 

That same silent practical unbelief has been equally prevalent under allthe forms of Protestant supernaturalism. Part of it, no doubt, may bereferred to the difficulty with which human nature responds to any appealto look much beyond the immediate present. But in great part too itsprings from a suspicion of unreality in that supernatural world whichthe preacher so fluently and fervently declares. 

It may be said that in a more ignorant and credulous age the mass of mendid believe unquestioningly in the teachings of the church. But whathardly admits of debate is the misconception which the mediaeval church'sdoctrine involved as to some of the cardinal facts of life. 

This religion dealt with such primary facts of real life as the humanbody and its laws, the passion of sex, productive industry, theorganization of society, --in short, with all the impulses, instincts, andpowers of man, --through a cloud of misapprehension. 

The central misconception was the idea that this life is only significantas the antechamber to another. Hence its occupations, responsibilities, joys, and troubles are of little account except as they are directlyrelated to the other life. This naturally bred a false attitude towardmany of the subjects which both actually and of right do largely engagethe attention of men. 

The body was regarded as not the servant but the enemy of the spirit. The highest state was celibacy, and marriage was a concession to humanweakness. 

Study of nature was an unprofitable pursuit. The charter of divine truthwas the Bible, and its interpreter was the church. Since this world wasonly the scene of a brief discipline, and was itself to pass away, it wasidle to spend much study on it. 

Speculative thought was profitable only so long as it was a mereelucidation of the dogmas of the church. As soon as those dogmas wereeven remotely questioned, the thinker's soul was in peril. In repressingheretical suggestions by the sternest measures, the church wasdischarging a plain duty. 

Earthly pleasure was dangerous, but in suffering lay medicinal virtue. One mark of the saint was self-inflicted pain. The highest symbol ofreligion was the cross, emblem of torture and death. 

The belief in a hell of endless suffering was the parent of a monstrousand ghastly brood of imaginations. How far the dread thus inspired actedas a wholesome deterrent we can only guess. Too well we know the tortureit wrought in sensitive and apprehensive natures, the pangs of fear whichmothers suffered, the sense of a curse overhanging a part of mankind, which even in our own day darkens many a life, and which in a moreunquestioning age rested like a pall on countless hearts. 

Such were among the beliefs, the consistent and logical beliefs, of themediaeval churchmen. Thus the moral mischiefs which infested society hadtheir roots partly in that conception of religion which in otherdirections bore noble fruit. 

Dante shows the culmination of the Catholic idea; he shows emerging fromit a new idealization of human relations; and he stands as one of themaster-spirits of humanity, to whom all after-ages listen reverently. 

There is in Dante a boundless terror and a boundless hope. Compared withthe antique world there is a new tenderness and a new remorse. Hell, Purgatory, Heaven are the projections of man's fear, his purification, his hope. 

Dante shows the vision which had grown up and possessed the belief ofmen--a terror matched with a glory and tenderness. But in Dante is aforce beyond this theologic belief--the spiritual love of a man andwoman. It is personal, intense, pure, sacramental. Thirteen hundredyears of Christianity had inwrought a new purity. Out of chivalry, half-barbaric, had grown a new sentiment toward woman. If was truly a"new life. "

Through Dante's early story, --the vestibule by which we are led to the"Divina Commedia, "--through this "Vita Nuova, " there runs a poignancywhich has almost more of pain than pleasure. Under an earthly symbol itis the vision of the ideal--the unattainable--the passion of the soul forwhat lies beyond its full grasp. 

In form Dante reproduces the Catholic theology. In reality he lives bythe ideal relation with Beatrice. For him the true Purgatory is hisself-reproach in her presence. The boundless joy of reunion after alifelong separation is checked on the threshold, that the intense lightof that moment may illumine the soul's past unworthiness, and touch itwith a remorse deeper than all the horrors of hell could awaken. Theanguish purifies, and wins the boon of a Lethe in which the past wrong isabsolutely forgotten. Then comes the full fruition, and the mated soulstraverse a Paradise which still is dearest to Dante as he watches itsreflection in the eyes of Beatrice. 

Yet, what does Dante show as the actuality of the world after thirteencenturies of Christianity? He shows evil existing in its worst forms andin wide extent. The horrors of the Inferno are the retribution whichseemed to Dante appropriate for the crimes going on about him. The sinwhose punishment he depicts is not a figment of the theologians, animaginary participation in Adam's trespass, or the mere human shadowsagainst a dazzling ideal of purity. In the men of his own time and inhis own community he saw flagrant wrong of every sort, --lust, cruelty, treachery. The physical hell he imagines in another world is thecounterpart of the moral hell he sees about him in this world. In hisInferno, Hate and Horror hold high carnival. Much of it is to the modernreader like a frightful nightmare of the imagination. 

In the progress of the centuries, along with the growth of ethical andspiritual ideals has been the movement of coarser forces--often seemingto destroy the ethical, yet giving power for the upward movement. 

In the reconstruction of European society, the first power was that ofmilitary force. Out of this grew feudalism, --a kind of order, with itsown code of duties; and chivalry, with an atmosphere of noble sentimentrunning into fantasy. 

Next came the powers of wealth and of knowledge. Wealth grew first bythe association of craftsmen, --the guilds, the free cities. 

Then commerce spread, as in the trade of Italy and the Low Countries withthe East. 

A succession of discoveries and inventions in the physical world advancedsociety. 

Gunpowder helped to overthrow feudalism. 

Printing made the Reformation possible. 

The Copernican theory had its practical result in the stimulation ofdiscovery and commerce; its intellectual issue in the weakening of thechurch's cosmogony, and a discredit of the church's claim to realknowledge. 

The growing wealth of the middle class gave freedom to England, --themerchants and cities were the strength of the Puritan and Parliamentaryparty. 

A series of inventions has within the last century multiplied wealth--theuse of canals, textile machinery, steam, electricity. This has created anew class of rich. It has improved the condition of the laboring man, not enough to satisfy him, but enough to strengthen him to demand more. 

Thus, military force giving strength; its organization as feudalism, giving the chivalric virtues and training an upper class; commerce, discovery, invention, raising first the middle class and then thelower, --these forces, not on the surface ethical, have cooperated torealize the ideal. 

Luther led a revolt which in its issue freed half Europe from the Romancourt. He made the quarrel on a moral question. No man, he said, couldsell a license from God to commit sin. If the Pope said otherwise, thePope was a liar and no vicegerent of God. So he put in the forefront ofthe revolting forces a moral idea. 

He showed that the spiritual life, with all its aspirations, struggles, and victories, was open to man without help from Pope or priesthood. Hegave the German people the Bible in their own tongue. He taught by wordand example that marriage was the rightful accompaniment of a lifeconsecrated to God. 

He had many of the limitations of the peasant and the priest. He waswholly inadequate to any comprehensive conception of the higher life ofhumanity. His ideal of character was based on a mystical experience, under the forms of an antiquated theology. He was narrow; he confoundedthe friends with the foes of progress; he had no clear understanding ofthe social and political needs of the time; he was full of superstition, and saw the Devil present in every mischief; he was often violent andwrathful. But he had a great and tender heart; he had the soldierlytemper which prompted him to strike when more sensitive and reflectivemen held back; and he won the leadership of the new age when against allthe pomp and power of Emperor and Pope he planted himself on the truth ashe saw the truth: "Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise; God help me!"

Copernicus died in 1543--two years before Luther. For thirty-sixyears--all through the Reformation struggle--he was quietly working outhis theory. The book containing it he did not venture to publish, tillunder Paul III. There was a lull in the storm. He was a loyal Catholic, but his teaching was sure to conflict with the church. He kept alivejust long enough to see his book come from the printers--dying at the ageof seventy. Tycho Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo came later. 

The Protestants in the name of religion defied and set aside the Catholicchurch. They were impelled to do it because they saw that the church, claiming infallibility, was practically fallible and faulty in itsmorals, as in the matter of the indulgences. They found courage to doit, because men like Luther learned by experience that the sense ofpardoned sin, of a divine communion, of peace and joy, of which thechurch had claimed the exclusive possession, were possible to them whollywithout the church's intervention. That was one side of the revolt: theother side was that the civil society, as in England, had grown strongenough, and the monarchical and national temper bold enough, to beimpatient of any foreign control. 

But the Protestant reformers in an intellectual sense simply remoulded alittle the old creed, detaching so much only as was inextricably blendedwith the authority of the Roman priesthood. Theirs was in no sense anintellectually creative movement. Politically and socially it had greateffects. Intellectually it did hardly more than _to set the door open_. Even this it did unconsciously and unwillingly. The early Protestantsfound themselves face to face with elemental forces of humannature, --with misery, sin, and greed, with passions stimulated by thesense that authority was weakening. They saw no other resource, theirown minds prompted no other thought, their spiritual experience broughtno other suggestion, than to continue the old appeal to the supernaturalworld. The creed of Calvin is harsher than the creed of Rome; itsspiritual world no less definitely conceived and authoritatively taught;its insistence on _belief_ no less absolute. The traditional Protestantorthodoxy is only the Catholic theology a little shrunken and dwindled. Its appeal to the reason is hardly stronger, and its appeal to theimagination is less strong. 

But for more than three hundred years the whole conception of asupernatural universe has been growing weaker and weaker in its hold onthe minds of men. Shakspere paints the most various, active, andpassionate world of humanity, --a humanity brilliant with virtues, darkwith crimes, rich in tenderness, humor, loveliness, awe, yet almostunaffected by any consideration of the supernatural world. On Hamlet'sbrooding there breaks no ray from Christian revelation. No hope of ahereafter soothes Lear as he bends over dead Cordelia. Macbeth, hesitating on the verge of crime, throws out of the scale any dread offuture retribution, --assure him only of success _here_, and

 "We 'd jump the life to come. "

It is impossible to pass the exhaustless Shakspere without some furtherword of inadequate comment. Apparently no one in his day guessed thatamong the jostling throng of soldiers, statesmen, and philosophers thisobscure playwright was the intellectual king. But Time has more thanredressed the wrong, for now he is not only reverenced as a sovereign butsometimes worshiped as an oracle. The prime secret of his power, compared with the men before him and about him, is his return to reality. It is the actual world, the actual men and women in it, that he portrays, and not the puppets or shadows of a made-up world. It is a change ofstandpoint such as Bacon made when he recalled philosophy from abstractspeculation to the study of concrete facts, and calmly told men thattheir past achievements were as nothing compared to the truth they wereto attain with the new weapons. Shakspere has no thought of mankind'sadvance, no method or system to offer, but as seer and artist he beholdsand portrays the universe about him. We get some idea of what the changemeans when we compare the humanity which he depicts with the account ofmankind given by a logical theologian like Calvin; the simple, sharpdivision between saints and sinners, against the mixed, particolored, genuinely human people who touch our tears and laughter on thedramatist's page. Or again, contrast his world with Dante's, where theprofoundest imagination and sensibility project themselves into aphantasmagoria. In the change to Shakspere we are tempted to say that wehave lost heaven and escaped hell, but have taken fresh hold on earthlylife and found in it unmeasured richness and significance. 

In reading Shakspere we are never confused or weakened as between virtueand vice. In simply showing us this life as it is acted out by all kindsof people, he shows perpetually the beauty of courage, truth, tenderness, purity, and the ugliness of their opposites. Measure him at the mostcritical point, chastity. His plays have plenty of coarseness; they havetouches, though very rarely, of voluptuous description; but they alwaysleave us with the sense that purity is noble and impurity is evil. It isstriking to note the tone in this respect of his successive productions. His youthful poem, "Venus and Adonis, " is touched with the disease whichhad blighted the literature and the life of southern Europe, --theinfection of the imagination by sensuality, a sort of intellectualputrescence. In the frank daylight of the early dramas this nightmarehas disappeared, yet in the generally clean atmosphere there occurssometimes a touch of depraved Italian manners, as in "All's Well thatEnds Well, " the deliberate seduction attempted by Bertram, bringinglittle discredit and no punishment. Later in the great plays the note ofchastity is always clear and firm. In his women, purity is noblydepicted; in his men there appears no such attainment, but often apassionate abhorrence of vice. In only one play, "Antony and Cleopatra, "it might superficially appear that there is a glorification of lawlesslove; but in the action of the story their lawlessness ruins Antony's andCleopatra's fortunes; then, with the imminence of death, their passion, escaping from the thralldom of flesh, soars into a sublimation thatredeems Antony's error and half transforms Cleopatra. 

In Shakspere's world the supernatural sanctions have almost disappeared, but the moral law is still supreme. Yet in some ways it is a veryunsatisfying world. In its deeper aspects woe predominates over joy. All phases of suffering and anguish find their language here; but ofrapture there are only transient glimpses, of great and abiding happinessthere is almost none, and there is scarcely a suggestion of "the peacethat passeth understanding. " We sometimes feel the sharpest pressure ofthe problems to which Christianity had addressed itself, unlightened byany solution. There is the echo of Paul's cry, "O wretched man that Iam, who shall deliver me from this body of death!"--as in the king atprayer, in "Hamlet;" but nowhere is Paul's note of triumphantdeliverance. We see men overwhelmed by temptation, as Macbeth andAngelo; we nowhere see men rising over conquered temptation to highermanhood. Man in Shakspere is generally the creature of Fate. Man'sconfrontal by the mystery of existence is the real theme of "Hamlet. "The true unity of that drama is not in the action nor in the characters;it is the underlying and unanswered problem, --man, in his finestsensibilities and noblest aspirations, beset by a world of trouble, ofconfusion, of unfathomable mystery. The ghost from the other world is amere piece of stage scenery; to the real sentiment belongs the frankpaganism of Hamlet as he holds the skull, --_this_ is the end of Yorick, and that anything of Yorick may still live except these mouldering bonesdoes not even occur to Hamlet as a question. Yet when he is tempted totake refuge in suicide, the possibility of "something after death" issufficient to deter him. The thought suggests no hope, only a vaguerestraining fear. But to the guilty king there is a terrible reality inthe divine law which he has broken; he struggles to reconcile himselfwith heaven, but his will seems paralyzed to retrace the path ofwrong-doing. The incapable will, the baffled intellect, cast a gloomover the whole drama. 

It is not only a clew to man's relation with the unseen and eternal thatwe miss in Shakspere. He fails to show one trait which belongs to humannature as truly as Hotspur's courage or Falstaff's drollery. He nowheredepicts a life controlled by a moral ideal, deliberately chosen andresolutely pursued. His world is rich in passion, but deficient in clearand high purpose and soldierly resolve. The metal of mastery is lacking. He shows us life as a wonderful spectacle, but he does not directly aidus to live our own life. His amazing treasury of wisdom seldom lends aphrase that flashes comfort into our sorrow, hope into our dejection, orstrength to our wavering will. 

Yet when this has been said, it remains true that Shakspere's atmosphereis wholesome and even invigorating. We are helped in our higher life bymany influences besides direct moral teaching. One takes a twenty-miletramp over moor and mountain, and no word of admonition or guidance comesfrom rock or tree, but he comes back stronger and serener. So from anhour among Shakspere's people one may well emerge with a fuller, happierbeing. It is the inscrutable power of real life truly seen, even thoughseen but in part. 

The wish is as inevitable as it is hopeless that we might know thepersonality of Shakspere, the medium through which the light passing wasthus colored. We get but rare and slight glimpses; the boyhood in thesweet Avon country; the stumble on the threshold of manhood in hismarriage; the plunge into roaring London; the theatrical surroundings;the great encompassing drama of Elizabeth's England; the slow winning ofa competence; the quiet years at the end, a burgess of Stratford town. There is a rich, tantalizing disclosure of a phase of the inner life inthe Sonnets; what they seem to convey is a passion delicate and profound, striving to sublimate and satisfy itself, but baffled by unworthiness inthe object, and perhaps by some unworthiness in the lover. More distinctis the outward closing scene; the retirement to the native country town, the modest prosperity, the business-like making of the will. Prosaicenough it sounds, yet in substance it has this significance, that thisgreat genius and passionate soul bore himself among the materialities, where so many make shipwreck, with a practical sense and steadiness whichbrought him to the haven at least of a comfortable and honorable age. Somuch Shakspere certainly had in himself, --this homely yet vitalself-command. With this is to be taken that he had also thatintellectual mastery of himself of which the highest proof is thecreation of great works of art. Self-control, prudential andintellectual, was one element of Shakspere, one secret of his sanity andstrength. 

One loves to see in "The Tempest" the crowning utterance of his maturity. How wise, how noble it is, and the wisdom and nobility set forth in whatexquisite play of fancy and wealth of humor! As in Hamlet we seem to seeShakspere in his mid-life storm and stress, so in Prospero we think werecognize the ideal of his ripeness. There is the wise man torn frombooks and reverie, and rudely thrust upon treachery and the stormy sea;there is control gained over airy powers and ethereal beauties; strugglewith bestial evil; forgiveness of the wrong-doer; happiness in thehappiness of his child, and willing surrender of her to her lover; theadmonition that love perfect itself by the mastery of passion. So wise, so beneficent, so lofty is Shakspere's latest creation. A shadow flitsacross, in the thought of mortal transiency:--

 "We are such stuff As dreams are made of, and our little life Is rounded by a sleep. "

Yet instantly Prospero marks this as the utterance of a disturbed moment:"Bear with my weakness, my old brain is troubled;" the coming encounterwith Caliban has shaken him. Most Shaksperean, too, is this: alternatingimpulses of trust and doubt; now a sense of being led "by Providencedivine;" an instinct of a "divinity that shapes our ends;" and again, themood that sees beyond the present scene only blankness and the end. 

Those elements which in Shakspere are absent or dim, --the belief in adivine rule and celestial destiny, and a high and fixed moralpurpose, --these appear in full strength in men of Shakspere's time, themen of religion; but in their minds inextricably blent with a scheme ofthe universe which it is plain was to Shakspere as unreal as themythology of the Greeks, and which he treats in much the same way, merelyborrowing it for a dramatic purpose. The men of religion had no suchconsummate expression in literature as Shakspere, though they had theirTaylor and Herbert and Milton; but to appreciate them we must look atthem in action, and we may take the Puritan as their type. 

But first let us note that in Catholicism as early as in Protestantismappeared the sharp rift between intellect and belief. Montaigne, a manof the world, is outwardly a conformist, but a real skeptic. A nominalCatholic, he corresponds to Shakspere, a nominal Protestant. Montaignereveals the world of one personality as, frankly as Shakspere pictures aworld of humanity, and in each the purely religious element is almosttotally absent. 

Shakspere shows the widest reach of the mind apart from a definitereligious purpose or a strong religious faith. In contrast with him isthe Puritan effort to apprehend and follow a divine rule and achieve adivine destiny. The typical Puritan addressed himself to man'sfoes, --all griefs and sufferings culminating in Death; all wrong-doing, as Sin; and the retribution and woe hereafter, as Hell. To escape fromthese was his supreme object, and to win what he as firmly believedin--Holiness, Life, and Heaven. 

The creed was accepted as the form of this truth, but the earnest mensought to know its truths experimentally, --to take home the full sense ofthem. This was found in the consciousness of man's supreme need; and, responding to that, a divine command, an invitation, and a threat. Theresult of this was to set man upon a struggle so intense that it wasindeed a warfare, --first, against his own lusts, then against the evilsin the world around him. These evils were to him embodied--in the Pope, the head of a false religion, the oppressor of God's people; in theimitation and approach to Popery in the church of England; in all falsebelief and error, all wrong-doers, and Satan himself. 

The Puritan believed that the sublimest possibility was open to man, andpurposed at every cost to achieve it. "Man's chief end is to glorify Godand enjoy him forever. " There was also the most dreadful possibility tobe shunned. All earthly pleasure he held in suspicion, as a bait of thegreat adversary of souls. 

The belief of serious men in the seventeenth century was that theologywas the guide to heaven. They believed this as modern men believe thatscience is the guide to human life. Hence, an infinite diversity ofsects, and hence the attempts to enforce each by authority. 

The Bible fed the deeper substratum of the Puritan life. It touched andfired the imagination of the common people. The dominant idea on whichthe English Puritan laid hold was the Old Testament idea of God's chosenpeople, --separate from the rest of the world, given a code of writtenlaws, led by a divinely appointed priesthood and prophets, disciplined bya constant intervention of rewards and punishments. This conception theytransferred to the faithful of their own time; and against them wasAntichrist, in the Roman church, to which the English prelates seemedtraitorously to incline. They proposed to purify and maintain the churchin England, or, failing there, to transplant it to America. 

The typical Puritan character, as most fully worked out in Scotland andNew England, was a mixture of intense idealism and sternest practicality. The idealism aimed to control every action of life, and to base itself onthe ultimate reality. It renounced the aid of art and embodiedimagination; it renounced human authority; it had no aid from materialbeauty, none from knowledge of nature. 

This religion had an appalling side. Foremost among its teachings wasman's depravity and the terrible wrath of God. The worst cruelty of theIroquois was mercy compared to God's dealing with sinners. This was aninheritance from an older religion. But the condition of salvation inthe Catholic church--and in all high church religion--was practicallyobedience to the church. But the Puritan required a conscious change ofheart, which to many was impossible. The utmost pains were taken thatthe most laborious right-doing should count for nothing, unlessaccompanied by this mystic experience. 

Catholicism put man under guardianship through the hierarchy, theconfessional, the whole church system. Calvinism threw him on his ownresources, --set him face to face with God. It, too, set a church to helphim, but even the minister of the church exhorted him to make his ownpeace with God. This responsibility weighted men heavily, and made themsombre. It crushed the feeble, but made strong men stronger. 

The first half of the seventeenth century was full of religiousenthusiasms, which carried high expectations. Milton looked for awonderful advance in truth. The Puritan sought to build a church simplein forms, austere in morals and manners, exacting personal holiness ofits members, and subjecting the ungodly to a rule of the saints. Charlesthe First and Archbishop Laud believed in a religious monarchy; that theking should be chief in church and state; that beauty of ritual should goalong with the encouragement of festivity and joyousness; and that theultimate aim was a reunited Christendom. 

The wave passed, and these expectations had failed. But the force of thePuritan movement had accomplished certain things. It had turned the tideof the English civil war, it had leavened the more serious portion of thenation, and it had planted the New England colonies. 

In England the Puritan zeal gave force to overthrow despotism, but itthen plunged the nation into chaos; it could not rule or harmonize thecomposite forces of national life; constitutional monarchy wasestablished at last under William of Orange, by men of less fervent andlofty temper than the Puritans, but better conversant with the wants andpossibilities of the actual world. 

Milton was a man of heroic mould. He governed himself by a deliberateand lofty moral purpose. The thirst for "moral perfection" inspired andruled his life. He was far from the narrowness of the typical Puritan. He was open on all sides to the noblest influences. The heroic antiquetemper, the beauty and richness of the Greek, the religious seriousnessof the Puritan, the English love of freedom, all met in him. He was atheart a poet and scholar, but he threw himself into the active life ofhis time. 

Yet his genius was cramped by his theology. He could not fuse theconflicting elements of thought, --just as the heroes of the Revolution, Pym and Hampden and Cromwell and Falkland, could not blend the elementsof English political society. He is like his own lion "struggling to getfree. " His epic is a story of disaster. His deity is undivine. Thereis more that touches sympathy and admiration in his Satan than in hisJehovah or Adam. 

The best thing he gives us is his own noble personality, imbuing themajestic rhythm with a kind of moral power. Servant and friend ofCromwell, sacrificing all scholarly delight to his country's need, champion of freedom, worshiper of truth, building in neglected solitudehis epic, --his works are less than Shakspere's, but _he_ is greater thanthe imaginary Hamlet, Othello, or Brutus. 

Cromwell is in action the counterpart of Milton in thought, --a heroicnature struggling with irreconcilable elements. Each is confronted by asituation as difficult as Hamlet's; but though they cannot fully masterit, they deal with it like men. 

Here is the true advantage of the men of religion over Shakspere and hiscreations, --here is the greater world than Shakspere saw, --men grapplingwith their fate and in the struggle working out heroic lives. 

The finest type of the New England colonists is seen in the Winthrops, father and son. When the migration is determined on, the son writes:"For myself, I have seen so much of the variety of the world that Iesteem no more of the diversities of countries than as so many inns, whereof the traveler that hath lodged in the best or the worst findeth nodifference when he cometh to his journey's end; and I shall call that mycountry where I may most glorify God and enjoy the presence of my dearestfriends. Therefore herein I submit myself to God's will and yours, and, with your leave, do dedicate myself (laying by all desire of otheremployments whatsoever) to the service of God and the company herein, with the whole endeavors both of body and mind. "

The elder Winthrop is shown to us in the Journal or chronicle of theMassachusetts colony, a sombre record of seemingly petty events; in hisreligious diary of an earlier period; and in his domestic letters, whichare full of manly strength and sweetness. He combined some of the chiefelements of greatness, --loftiness of aim; a character disinterested, patient, modest, brave; deep religious experience; and personaltenderness. 

To a man like Winthrop, the heart of his creed was that man's true aim ismoral perfection and a living relation with a Divine Lover. The sense ofa Divine Presence--inspiring, ruling, gladdening--is what his religionmeans to him. In this quiet country gentleman, portrayed in his privatediary, is an intense play of feeling and imagination, concentrated on theattainment of a personal and social ideal. 

All this introspective fervor merged into a public enterprise, --thetransplanting of a church and colony to Massachusetts Bay. The last halfof his life was spent in the most assiduous, minute, exacting labors. The self-watchful diary gives place to a public chronicle, prosaic as aship's log-book--and, like the log-book, the shorthand record ofadventures, heroisms, and sublimities. 

In the Puritan of Winthrop's type the flame of spiritual emotion washarnessed and made to serve. The drudgery of founding New England wasdone by men whose hearts were touched with fire, --men such as Lowellsings of:--

 "Who, dowered with every gift of passion, In that fierce flame can forge and fashion Of self and sin the anchor strong; Can thence compel the driving force Of daily life's mechanic course. "

Winthrop set out with a great ideal--shown with statesmanlike breadth inthe "Considerations, " and with apostolic fervor in the "Model ofChristian Charity. " His conception was cramped into conformity with thefar narrower views of the ministers who were the leaders in the colony. Yet it was his ideal and his personality which gave most to success. 

The letters between Winthrop and his wife are an example of human loveperfected by a higher love. He writes to her: "Neither can the sea drownthy husband, nor enemies destroy, nor any adversity deprive thee of thyhusband. " Shakspere has no note like that. Margaret writes from hercountry home to her husband in London: "My good husband, cheer up thyheart in the expectation of God's goodness to us, and let nothing dismayor discourage thee; if the Lord be with us, who can be against us? Mygrief is the fear of staying behind thee, but I must leave all to thegood providence of God. " She was obliged to stay behind in England, awaiting the birth of a child. On the eve of sailing he writes her: "Ipurpose, if God will, to be with thee upon Thursday come sen'night, andthen I must take my leave of thee for a summer's day and a winter's day. The Lord our good God will (I hope) send us a happy meeting again in hisgood time. Amen! Being now ready to send away my letters, I receivedthine; the reading of it has dissolved my head into tears. Can write nomore. If I live, I will see thee ere I go. I shall part from thee withsorrow enough; be comfortable, my most sweet wife, our God will be withthee. Farewell. "

A few months later, across the pages of the Journal, full of the caresand anxieties of the struggling colony, shines a ray of pure joy. Margaret has come! And the whole community rejoices and makes cheer, with homely and hearty feasting, for the happiness of their good governor. 

The actual conditions nourished homely virtues, --industry, thrift, self-reliance, family affection, civic responsibility. The greatness ofearly New England is partly measured by the fact that there werecomparatively no dregs, no mass of ignorance and vice. It was not theindividuals who rise into sight at this distance who were superior to theprominent men of England or France, --it was the lower stratum which wasabove that elsewhere. Two prime causes worked to this elevation, --thespiritual estimate of man and the economic conditions which offeredindependence to every one on the condition "work and save. " The socialand political conditions were largely shaped by these underlying facts. 

The wrestle for a livelihood under stern material conditions was a primefactor in the making of New England. Whatever the creed might say, inpractice Work was the equal partner of Faith in building manhood and thestate. The soil was to their bodies what Calvinism was to theirsouls, --yielding nourishment, but only through a hard struggle. Itssterility drove them to the sea for a livelihood; they became fishermen;then, carrying their fish and lumber abroad, they grew into commerce. They traded along the coast, to the West Indies, to Europe, and so intotheir little province came the winds of the larger world. They learnedthe sailor's virtues, --his courage, his mingled awe and mastery ofelemental forces, his sense of lands beyond the horizon. Well mightWinthrop name the first ship he launched "The Blessing of the Bay. "

The austere land had small room for slaves, dependent and incapable. Oneof the first large companies included some scores of bondmen; they landedto face a fierce and hungry winter, and straightway the bondmen were setfree, --as slaves they would be an incumbrance; as freemen they could gettheir own living. The thrifty colonists of a later generation did adriving business in African slaves for their southern neighbors, but theyhad small use for them at home. 

Winthrop's constant effort, as shown in his Journal, is for reason andright. It is the arguments for and against any course that heelaborates. Scarce a word of their sufferings or of his ownfeelings--but to know and do the right was all-important. The greatnessof his own ideal is shown when he draws with a free hand, in the"Conclusions" or the "Model. " In the Journal, he is laboring toward thisunder the iron conditions of actualities. He and his associates had tobe strong-willed and stern; they were warring against tremendousdifficulties--more tremendous to them because interpreted as the work ofSatan, while even their God was an awful being. 

Superstition throws a dark shadow over the chronicle. Even Winthrop wasdeeply infected by it. Disasters small and great were interpreted, onthe Old Testament idea, as divine judgments. A boy seven years old fellthrough the ice and was drowned while his parents were at lecture, andhis sister was drowned in trying to save him. "The parents had no moresons, and confessed they had been too indulgent towards him, and had settheir hearts overmuch on him. " A man working on a milldam kept on for anhour after nightfall on Saturday to finish it, and next day his childfell into a well and was drowned. The father confessed it as a judgmentof God for his Sabbath-breaking. 

There is not unfrequent mention of some woman driven by religiousbrooding to frenzy, sometimes to murder. The awful possibilities of hellfor herself and her children wrought the mother-heart to madness. Thereligious guides of the people used unsparingly the appeal to fear. Thebelief in witchcraft, which long had scourged Europe, broke out in apanic of fear and cruelty. It was a tragic culmination of the worstelements, --superstition, malignity, ministerial tyranny. Then came thereaction, and with it a triumph of the wiser sense, the cooler temper, the layman's moderation, which thenceforth were to guide the commonwealthon a humbler but safer road. 

In a dramatic sense the turning-point of the story--and the revelation ofthe saving power at the heart of this grim people--was when, after thewitchcraft frenzy had subsided, Samuel Sewall, the chief justice of thecolony, rose in his place in the meeting-house and humbly confessedbefore God and man that he had erred and shed innocent blood. 

In the more prosaic temper of the next stage, a sturdy manhood sometimesflashes into poetry. So John Wise, a minister but the leader of thepopular party in church government, strikes the high note of courage: "Ifmen are trusted with duty, they must trust that, and not events. If menare placed at the helm to steer in all weather that blows, they must notbe afraid of the waves or a wet coat. "

In personal religion there was from the outset the intense struggle foran inward peace and joy, with tears and groanings, --the victory sometimesfound, sometimes missed. There was a resolute facing of what was held astruth. The ministers and laymen battled with the problems of theinfinite. The issue after two centuries was an open break from Calvinismin Channing, and the glad vision of Emerson. 

A feature in the story is the New Englander's relation with Nature as hefound her, --first like a terrible power of destruction, by cold andhunger; this he conquers by endurance. Then for generations he wrings ahard livelihood out of her. Then by his wits he makes her serve him morecompletely. At last her beauty is disclosed to him, --a beauty which hasits roots in the very struggles he has had, and the contrasts theyafford, --no child of the tropics loves Nature as he does. 

So of the sea: first he dares it as explorer and voyager; then he makesit his feeding-ground--catches the cod and chases the whale; in his shipshe does battle against pirate and public foe; he makes the deep thehighway of his commerce; and at last he feels its grandeur, into whichenters the reminiscence of all his combats. 

Elements which Puritanism had renounced came in later from other sources. The fresh contact with truth and reality was given by Franklin. The freejoy of religion, its aggressive love, came in Methodism. Beautifulritual returned in Episcopacy. The frank enjoyment of life developed inthe South, transmitted from the country life of the English squire andmellowed on American soil. 

At the outset of the story of America stands the Puritan, his heart seton subduing the infernal element and winning the celestial; regardingthis life as a stern warfare, but the possible pathway to an infinitehappiness beyond; fierce to beat down the emissaries of evil, --heretic, witch, or devil; yet tender at inmost heart, and valiant for the truth ashe sees it. After a century, behold the Yankee, --the shrewd, toilful, thrifty occupant of the homely earth; one side of his brain speculatingon the eternities, and the other side devising wealth, comfort, personaland social good. And to-day, successor of Puritan and Yankee, Cavalierand Quaker, stands the American, composite of a thousand elements, with adestiny which seems to hover between heights and abysses, but amid allwhose vicissitudes and faults we still see faith and courage and manlypurpose working toward a kingdom of God on earth and in heaven. 

The Protestant way of salvation was through "experimental religion. "This meant the appropriation as a personal experience of the truths ofhuman guilt and divine mercy. A man must not only believe but intenselyfeel that he was wholly guilty before God and in danger of everlastingdamnation. He must then have a vivid appreciation that Christ out ofpure love had died for him, and that on this ground alone God offered himpardon and salvation. This offer he must consciously accept, withemotions of profound remorse for his wrong-doing, gratitude for hisdeliverance, and absolute dependence upon divine grace for help againstfuture sin and for final reception to an endless heaven. 

To attain this experience was the aim and goal of the religious man, under all the more strenuous forms of Protestantism. Until it wasreached, all good actions, all fair traits of character, were worthless. Without it there was no escape from the unquenchable fire. If it came asa genuine experience, it was the passage from death unto life. But asthere was great possibility of self-deception in the matter, the mind wasconstantly thrown back on self-examination, and in sensitive naturesthere was often an alternation of terrors and transports. 

This experience of saving faith, of experimental religion, must betranslated for us into very different language and symbols from thosewhich our ancestors used before we can have any sympathy with it. Perhaps the truest account of the matter for us is something like this:the Christian theology was a system of myths, which had grown out offacts of human experience. The initial fact was a good man whose lovewent out to bad men, and woke in them a sense of their own wrong alongwith a new joy and hope. From this centre the influence spread inwidening circles, and was gradually transformed in the expression, --mixedtoo with earlier notions, with crudities, with sophistications, --untilJustice and Love and Punishment and Forgiveness were personified anddramatized and a whole cloud-world of fancy built up. Already in the ageof the Reformation the human intellect was sapping the foundations of thestructure. But the religious imagination was still intenselysusceptible, and when the moral sense was sharply awakened by thereformers both within and without the Catholic church, it fell back onthe imagination as its familiar ally, and clothed with new life theancient forms. The Catholic turned with fresh ardor to mass and miracleand holy church. The Protestant fell back on a more personal and inwardexperience; he conceived that in each heart and mind the whole drama fromEden to Calvary and on to the Judgment Day must be realized andappropriated as the working principle of life. 

To the mystical, the sentimental, the self-confident, it was a welcomeand uplifting exercise. To the timid and self-distrustful it was aterrible ordeal. To the intellectual it was a perpetual challenge toskepticism. Even Bunyan puts as his first and worst temptation, "toquestion the being of God and the truth of his gospel. " To the prosaicand practical minds it made the whole business of religion a dim andfar-away affair. 

Experimental religion was the core of Protestantism for more than threecenturies. It was blended with other elements in a series of greatmovements. In Puritanism it united with an ascetic and militant temper, a metaphysical theology, a stern rule of life, and a conception of thenation as under a divine law like that of ancient Israel. 

Then came Quakerism, a religion of the quiet, illumined heart, and thepeaceful life. Next, Methodism, a wave of aggressive love, seeking tosave others where Puritanism had been self-saving, appealing less to thehead and more to the heart. Following this, in England, cameEvangelicalism, a revival of self-conscious experience, but flowing outnow not only as in Methodism into a crusade to save souls, but intolabors for criminals, for slaves, for the poor, under such leaders asHoward and Wilberforce and Shaftesbury. 

These phases are from English and American history. They might largelybe paralleled elsewhere. And along with them, it is to be remembered, went always not only a party imbued with the Catholic or high churchidea, but also a moderate party, holding a more broadly and simplyreligious view. 

Perhaps the most effective type of Christianity has been the simpleacceptance of the familiar laws of goodness, having in the Bible theirexpress sanction, with a great promise and an awful warning for thefuture, and the embodiment of holiness, love, and help, in Christ. Thishas been the religion of a multitude of faithful souls, manly men andwomanly women, who did not concern themselves with any elaboratetheology, but went along their daily way, strong in obedience to duty, trustful in a divine guidance, and with serene hope for what may comeafter death. Their souls have been nurtured on whatever was most vitaland most tender in the words of Scripture and the services of the church, and whatever was unintelligible or innutritions they have quietly passedby. This is the essential religion of humanity, made definite and vividby accepted symbols and rules, and made warm by the sense of fellowshipwith a great company. 

Recurring to the successive phases of religious thought, the nextdevelopment of Protestantism, while in a sense world-wide, may be mostclearly seen in America. By Jonathan Edwards there was begun theapplication of a rationalizing process to the theology of Calvin and toexperimental religion. In Edwards almost the only result was a morelurid and tremendous affirmation of the old dogma and the oldrequirement. But the New England mind, speculative, practical, andintense, worked rapidly on. In Channing and his associates came therenunciation of Depravity, Atonement, and the Trinity. In the nextgeneration, Unitarianism expressed itself through Theodore Parker assimple theism. A little later than the Unitarian movement, the oldOrthodoxy itself became transformed into a new Orthodoxy. The foremostinterpreters of the transformation were Bushnell and Beecher; Bushnelltranslating the Atonement into terms of purely natural goodness, --not asa transaction, but an expression; and Beecher finding in Christ simplythe truth that Love is sovereign of the universe. To Bushnell andBeecher the historical Christ remained in a unique sense an incarnationof God. By later voices of the new Orthodoxy--for example, PhillipsBrooks--he is spoken of rather as the one actual instance of perfecthumanity, and in this sense a manifestation of God and the spiritualleader of mankind. 

But for three centuries men have been studying the facts of existencefrom an entirely different side from that whence the church takes itsoutlook. They have been finding out all kinds of curious facts, totallyunconnected with any supernatural sphere. First, they made suchdiscoveries as that the world is not flat, but round; not stationary, butdoubly revolving. And so they went on. The stars, the plants, theanimals, the human body, yielded all manner of curious knowledge. Newpowers came into men's hands through this knowledge; new avenues tohappiness were opened. Facts wove themselves together in wider and widercombinations. Orderly procedure was found where there had seemed suchconfusion as only capricious spirits could occasion. It is learned, too, that even as the individual man has grown up from babyhood, so the raceof man has grown up from the beast. The globe itself has grown from asimple origin into infinite diversity and complexity. There has been auniversal, orderly growth, --what we name "Evolution. " And it is learnedthat all mental phenomena, so far as we can explore them, stand in someclose relation to a physical basis in the brain, and to a train ofphysical antecedents. 

And now the men who have come up by the path of this knowledge stand faceto face with the men who have been climbing in the path whose signboardsare such as "Duty, " "Worship, " "Aspiration;" and the question arises, Doour paths lie henceforth together, or do they separate, and is the oneparty losing its travel?

Perhaps the best example of the union of the two pursuits in one man isgiven by Benjamin Franklin. 

Franklin worked out, through a very genuine, homely, and personalexperience, the conviction that _moral perfection_ is the only true aim. He reached this conviction while still a young man, and in the main tenorof his life he was faithful to it. He made no vaunt of his religion, founded no sect, gave his words and deeds chiefly to practical affairs;and perhaps few guessed, until at the close of his life he told his ownstory with consummate charm, that the secret motive and mainspring of hislife had been the same that animates the saints and saviors, --the thirstfor moral perfection. The motive and method had been hidden, but theresult had long been clear to the eyes of the whole world. Franklin'scharacter was reverenced alike in the court of France and the farmhousesof Pennsylvania and New England. To the Old World he seemed the heroicand coming man of the New World, side by side with Washington. TheVirginian embodied the highest traditional virtues of the race, self-mastery, patience, magnanimity, devotion to the common good; thePennsylvanian, if less called on for the heroic forms of antique virtue, added to its substance new traits of wisdom, progress, andhappiness, --signs of a better age to be. 

Moral perfection was Franklin's secret and ruling principle. But hislife was conspicuously engaged in the fields of science and ofstatesmanship. He was a leader in exploring the material world, skillfulto trace its secrets, fertile to apply them to human use. He was apioneer and founder of the new nation, projecting its union before othershad desired or dreamed of it; sharing in its first hazardous fortunes;winning by his personal weight and wisdom the foreign alliance whichturned the scale of victory; laying with the other master shipwrights thekeel and ribs of the new Constitution. Moral perfection for himself, and, as the outcome to the world, not a new church or a theology or amissionary enterprise, but a winning of the forces of nature to theservice of man, and a shaping of the social organism for the benefit ofall. That is the originality of Franklin, --that he carries the old moralpurpose into the new fields of science and of social ordering. Hisdesire for moral perfection and his confidence that the universe isordered rightly are not dependent on any visionary scheme of heaven andhell; they rest not on any doubtful argument; they bring sanction from notransport mixed of soul and sense. He walks firm on the solid earth. Hehas found for himself that goodness is the only thing that satisfies. That this is an ordered universe comes home to him with every step of hisstudy of actuality. What need of a supernatural religion to a man whofinds religion in his own nature and in the nature of the world?

Such confidence and such purpose are as old as Socrates. But come, now, let us go where Socrates did not go; let us put the ideas of Jesus andPaul to some further application; let us use our freedom from pope andtyrant for some solid good! And so he goes on, cheerfully anddelightedly, to question the thunder-cloud and make acquaintance with itswild steeds, --presently some one will put them in harness. He is alwaysinventing. Now it is a stove, now it is a fire-brigade, --a publiclibrary, --a post-office, --a Federal Union! And be his invention smalleror greater, he takes out no patent, but tenders it freely into the commonstock. 

The prophets introducing this age are Carlyle and Emerson. Carlyle seesthe disease--he convinces of sin. Emerson sees the solution. Carlylereflects in his own troubled nature the disorder he portrays. He isphysically unsound; his dyspepsia exaggerates to him the evils of theworld. Emerson's disciplined and noble character mirrors the present andeternal order, and forecasts its triumph. 

Carlyle and Emerson give two different phases of life as experienced. Carlyle gives the experience of good and evil, --the tremendous sanctionsof right against wrong, wisdom against folly. He is not triumphant, buthe is not hopeless. "Work, and despair not" is to him "the marchingmusic of the Teutonic race. " Emerson, from the height of personalvictory, sees all as harmonious. One shows the struggle up the mountainpath, the other the view from the summit. 

Carlyle's gospel is summed up in "_Work_, and despair not. " "Work" washis own addition to Goethe's line. "Do the duty that lies nearest thee;"action, as the escape from the puzzles of the intellect and the griefs ofthe heart, is his special message. 

Emerson is a precursor of the day when "No man shall say to hisneighbors, Know ye the Lord, for all shall know him, from the least untothe greatest. " He is the first of the prophets to rise above anxiety asto the success of his mission. He lives his life, says his word, shedshis light--concerned to be faithful, but wholly unanxious as to personalsuccess. 

As the tribes of ancient Israel stood arrayed, the one half on MountEbal, the other on Mount Gerizim, --the one to pronounce the blessing, theother to utter the curse, --so Emerson is like an embodied promise andCarlyle a perpetual warning. In Emerson we see the hero triumphant andserene. Carlyle shows him at close grips with the devil. "Pain, danger, difficulty, steady slaving toil, shall in no wise be shirked by anybrightest mortal that will approve himself loyal to his mission in thisworld; nay, precisely the higher he is the deeper will be thedisagreeableness, and the detestability to flesh and blood, of the taskslaid on him; and the heavier, too, and more tragic, his penalties if heneglect them. "

The background for Emerson is the life of early New England. The secretof New England's greatness was the combination from the first of theprofoundest interest in man's spiritual destiny with the closest grip onhomely facts. 

In Calvinism, and in Christianity, the universe was at eternal war withinitself; this was man's projection upon the world of his own moralconflict. Emerson sees the universe as a harmony. Many influences havecontributed to this idea; it becomes distinct and vivid in a man whoseown life is a moral harmony. Himself truly a cosmos, he recognizes theanswering tokens of the greater cosmos. 

The religious sentiment had become so inwoven with institutions, creeds, usages, conventionalisms, --each man believing because his neighbors do, or his father did, --that it was necessary to take a new observation. What says the heart of man at its highest? For this Emerson is singledout; for him an ancestry is trained through generations; he is drawnapart from the church, set aside from government and all institutionalwork; practical functions are denied him; he is made an eye, --an organ ofpure vision. 

To him God is not afar off but in himself. The heart in its own purity, tenderness, and strength recognizes the Divine Presence. "The soul givesitself, alone, original, and pure, to the Lonely, Original, and Pure, who, on that condition, gladly inhabits, leads, and speaks through it. "The order of physical nature is the symbol and the instrument of a moralorder. The beauty and sublimity of nature are the manifestation throughsense of the Divine Reality. 

So high a revelation can come at first only to souls which in theirgreatness are isolated, as the highest mountain peaks stand alone in theearliest sunbeams. It is for a later time to fit such truth to all theconditions of human life, to fully assimilate it with older lessons, toweave it into the warp and woof of society. 

It is Emerson, child of the Puritan and disciple of the new knowledge, inwhom joy is most abiding--its roots are in faithful living, brave andhigh thinking, the spirit of love, oneness with nature and humanity. 

Emerson dwells in an ideal yet real world. He cannot give the passwordthat will certainly admit; inheritance and temperament must contribute tothat. But he sees that one principle is the rightful sovereign in hisinner world and in the universe, --allegiance to highest known law. It isa sublimation of the idea familiar to the religious mind, but he gives ita new and larger interpretation; for, in place of the written Word, beyond the social and civic obligation, greater than the acceptedmoralities, superseding the ecclesiastical virtues, wider than theoverworked altruism of Christianity, is the complete ideal of Man, fromhis roughest force to his finest perception. 

Talk about duty had become wearisome. "Thou shalt not preach!" saysEmerson. So he discourses as the observer of man and nature, and bidsmen to look at realities. 

His imitators were beguiled into a theoretical exposition of theuniverse. A sense of thinness and unreality accompanies much of theirtalk, because it is not, like Emerson's, in constant touch with activeduty and fresh observation. 

His ideal includes worship, but to this he brings above all the qualityof sincerity. He will not observe a sacrament which has lost itssignificance to him. He will not use language of a personal God which isnot natural to him, nor affirm a certainty as to immortality when hisconviction is not always clear. But he has the profoundest sense and thesimplest expression of that reality which we call "the presence of God inman. " In him it is not involved with miracle or metaphysic; it is apersonal experience, the source of humility, energy, and peace. "Irecognize the distinction of the outer and inner self; the doubleconsciousness that within this erring, passionate, mortal self sits asupreme, calm, immortal mind, whose powers I do not know, but it isstronger than I; it is wiser than I; it never approved me in any wrong; Iseek counsel of it in my doubts; I repair to it in my dangers; I pray toit in my undertakings. It seems to me the face which the Creatoruncovers to his child. "

Emerson represents thought in its highest form--perception, vision. Theworld interpreted by such vision supplies motive, support, and rapture. He is essentially and above all a poet, and to whoever can follow him heopens a celestial world in which the homeliest earthly fact is irradiatedby indwelling divinity. 

Emerson's escape from evil is by rising to such a height of contemplationthat evil is seen as only an element of good. He sits like anastronomer, viewing the procession of the worlds in their sublimeharmony. For most men, the jar and dust of daily life largely shut outthat glorious view. They catch hope and strength from the voice of theseer upon his heights. But they need other help; they need some one bytheir side; they need the love of a stronger brother, who takes theirhand. This men found in Jesus the friend of sinners, who went aboutdoing good; they idealized it as Christ--a divinity who took upon him theform of a servant. The higher stooping to the lower is still the world'ssalvation. 

In teaching, Emerson generalized for all men from his own experience. Hesaid, "Be yourself! Follow the law of your own nature. Trust theall-moving Spirit. Be above convention and rule, above vulgarities andinsipidities. Give way to the God within you!"

Literally obeyed, it was insufficient advice for most men, for it ignoredwhat Emerson's modesty forbade him to recognize, --the vast differencebetween his own nature and bent and that of most men. When ordinary menand women tried to imitate him the result was sometimes a lamentablefailure. But _he_ was genuine and lofty always. He failed in no homelyduty. The great trial and discipline to him was the alternation inhimself of the commonplace with the high. In individuals he was foreverdisappointed, always looking for heroes, saints, and saviors, and seldomfinding them. His own work bore little visible fruit; his own teachingfell for a long time on scornful ears. This perpetual disappointment hetook with perpetual constancy, always serene under disappointment, gracious to the dull, indifferent to fame, careless of his own obscurity. The typical man of letters has his own besetting sins, --neglect of homelyduties, self-consciousness, vanity, --from all of which Emerson was free. 

The faults we allege against his philosophy--its scanty recognition ofsin and sorrow--were the natural incidents of his character and work. They do not debase, though they sometimes limit, his influence for good;his is always the speech of an angel; it strengthens, uplifts, gladdensus. There are other angels to whom we must listen, --others, perhaps, whospeak more nearly the speech of our own experience, --but his music alwayschords with theirs. 

In Emerson, a soul inheriting centuries of Catholic and Puritan training, until obedience was its instinct and purity its native atmosphere, --asoul endowed with genius, --spread its wings and flew with the suddennessand joy of a young bird's first flight. He saw good everywhere, beautyeverywhere, and was glad with the gladness of a seer and savior. He isone of those of whom he speaks, as belonging to a better world which isyet to come, and who touch us with a sense of a heaven on which we arejust beginning to enter. 

Though he professes an idealist philosophy, and that way of thinking canbe traced in all his writings, he never makes of it a creed or dogma. His children are welcome to worship in the church which has lost itsattraction for him. The skeptic may freely question immortality, --nay, Emerson himself sometimes feels uncertainty. The personal God, and man'spersonal immortality, which the idealist is wont to affirm as definitecertainties, Emerson will not explicitly avow or define. Universal good, beauty, order, --these he sees, feels, is sure of. What form belongs tothem, let each imagine as best he can. So free, so generous, so simplytrue is he that not only men of an idealist way of thinking, but allstrong and high souls own impulse from him, --the scientist, thepositivist, the churchman. 

His distinctive note is not self-abnegation, but it is the note whichwith that makes a perfect harmony. Joy in God and self-sacrificing loveare the two wings of the angelic life. Long have the preachers taughtself-sacrifice, --now let one child of God sing the joy of God!

The latest chapter in the story of the higher life is the conception ofman and the world which has grown up under the influence of modernscience. The most original and effective expression of this philosophyis given by Herbert Spencer. What new light does the evolutionaryphilosophy throw on man's chief problem, the right conduct of his ownlife?

First, it defines with clearness two great forces which bear on theindividual life, as Heredity and Environment. Next, it defines the idealto be sought, by reaffirming in substance the familiar conception ofhuman morality, showing its sanctions on purely natural grounds, andgiving new applications and extensions of its principles. And finally, compared with the traditional theology, it leads to a new conception ofthe relation between man and the higher power, and necessitates, whatSpencer does not supply, a new expression of the religious life. 

The discovery of Darwin, supplying the final link to the growing proofsof the evolutionary development of man, opened an amazing panorama of thepast history of the planet's inhabitants. The predecessors andsuccessors of Darwin added to the panorama one after another scene ofwonder. The standpoint of thought seemed wholly changed, and areadjustment necessary which threatened overthrow to all the old creedsand standards. Spencer, who has been the most successful in generalizingthe new knowledge, comes back to the inquiry, By what law shall man guidehis own conduct? His answer is substantially a reaffirmation of theprinciples which good men have acknowledged for many ages. Whatever elseis changed, it remains true that justice, fidelity, chastity, honor, regard for others, are man's safest guides and his lawful rulers. Altruism is only a new word for the golden rule. But the advance ofsociety has brought wider and finer applications: the claim of the wholecommunity comes closer home; the principles which have been recognizedwithin the church and the neighborhood must be carried on to reshapeinstitutions, industries, the whole social organism. 

The moral idea is thus reaffirmed and extended, but how can man attainthat ideal? By using his free will, said the Stoic. By the grace of Godobtained through prayer, said the Christian. Is man then free, or is hethe passive creature of a greater power, and of what nature is thatpower? Now, where theologians have sought to define the Deity, and toconceive his government of his creatures in terms of a personal affectionand will, scientists, contenting themselves with observation of facts, have shown that each man is what he is and does what he does partlybecause of what his parents and remoter ancestors were and did beforehim, and partly because of the forces of climate, institutions, education, companionship, event, which surround him from his birth to hisgrave. Heredity and Environment, these are

 "the hands That reach through Nature, moulding Man. "

It looks at first as if the old dispute between free will and necessitywere settled at last, and man were indeed a creature of inscrutable fate. Yet, in the very act of acknowledging certain ideals of character asdesirable, we become conscious of an impulse and initial effort--call itautomatic or call it voluntary--toward attaining those ideals. As amatter of practice, we speedily recognize that both Heredity andEnvironment are in a degree under human control. If they are deities, they are accessible to prayers, the prayers which are watchfulness andobedience. Man is always at work to better the environment of himselfand his fellows. As he sees more clearly that his true good is characterand the noble self, he shapes his environment more intelligently andresolutely to that end. As to heredity, while the individual ispowerless over his own lot, he is in a degree potential over those whoare to succeed him. The conception of duty is enlarged by theobligations of marriage and parenthood, in a wise selection andthoughtful care for the future offspring. 

Heredity and Environment, then, are partly the servants of man. Yetlargely they are his lords and masters. In a degree, but only in adegree, do we make ourselves what we are. And while the degree of thatself-determining power can never be known, we learn to be charitabletoward others and exacting toward ourselves. 

The new philosophy has its chief bearing on conduct, not in abstractconceptions about fate, free will, and responsibility, but in thestimulus it gives to find new tools and weapons of moral achievement. How shall we make men good? No longer by the mere appeal to reason; nolonger mainly by promise of heaven and threat of hell. Still appealingto reason, to hope and fear, to imagination, we must go on to put aboutmen all stimulating influences, all guiding appliances. We must begin inthe formative stage. The hope of the future is in the child; we musteducate the child by putting him in true touch with realities, --realitiesof form, color, and number; of plant and animal life; of play andpleasure; of imagination; of sympathetic companionship; of a miniaturesociety; of a firm yet gentle government. The education must go onthrough youth, and must introduce him to industry not as drudgery but asfine achievement. So of every phase of humanity. The criminal is to bemet not with mere penalty but with remedial treatment. In the sordidquarter must be planted a settlement which shall radiate trueneighborhood. The state must be so ordered as best to promote thematerial good and the essential manhood of its citizens. The church mustserve some distinct purpose--of ethical guidance, of emotional uplift, ofsocial service--in character-building. Such are the forces to which wenow are turning. Where ancient philosophy appealed through the lecturerat his desk, where Christianity sent its missionary to proclaim a faith, or set its priest to celebrate mass, or its minister to preach asermon, --in place of these partial resources we now realize that everynormal activity of humanity is to serve in building up man, and that "thetrue church of God is organized human society. "

The church of God, --but has man a God? There is, says Spencer, someinscrutable power from which all this vast procedure springs; its naturewe know not and cannot know. The thought of it moves us to wonder andawe, --and this is the legitimate satisfaction of the religious sense. And here it is that his philosophy utterly fails to satisfy. Yet itmarks the passing away of the attempt to interpret Deity in terms ofexact knowledge. Whatever form religion may hereafter wear, the oldprecision of statement must be abandoned; the intellect must be morehumble. And further, the Spencerian view is wholly different fromatheism. It leaves the door open. It recognizes that some supremereality exists beyond and above man. That reality is not intelligible tothe intellect which analyzes and generalizes. But may it not beapproachable through another side of man's nature, --accessible throughgates like those by which one human spirit recognizes another humanspirit? The evolutionary philosophy, in an enlarged construction, raisedno barrier against the access to divinity through the noblest exercise ofhumanity. 

Live the personal life toward the highest ideals, with the faithfulestendeavor, --and peace, trust, hope, spring up in the soul. So does manfind access to the supreme power; so does he find himself encompassed andupborne by it; so is he drawn into closest union with hisfellow-creatures and with the divine source of all. It is the old answerand the new; it is figured in the Hebrew's assurance that the Lord loveththe righteous; it gives strength and courage to Epictetus; it inspiresthe confidence of Jesus, the loving and holy soul finding its heavenlyFather; it speaks with glad voice in Emerson, --"contenting himself withobedience, man becomes divine. "

The essential truth is old, but in our day it is being disencumbered ofthe husk of myth and dogma which obscured it; while by the growth of newpowers and finer sensibilities in man his access to highest realitybecomes more intimate. 

As the evolutionary philosophy has already reaffirmed, clarified, andenriched the moral life, so, blending with the clearest interpretation ofman's deepest experience, it is to reaffirm, purify, and deepen thereligious life. 

One disciple of Spencer has applied herself with great genius and art tocreative fiction. George Eliot is a thorough Spencerian, and she isconstantly, effectively, almost with over-insistence, a moralist. Lifemay be ruined by self-indulgence, --that is her perpetual theme. Of widerange and variety, she is powerful above all in picturing the appeal oftemptation, the gradual surrender, the fatal consequence. Shakspere doesnot show the inner springs of the fall of Macbeth or Angelo so clearly asshe shows the catastrophe of Arthur Donnithorne, of Tito Melema, ofGwendolen Harleth. Readers from whom the threat of hell would fall offas an old wife's tale, feel the dark power of reality in the mischiefwhich dogs each of her wrong-doers. More scantly, and with growinginfrequence, there are scenes of a natural gospel of redemption andsalvation, --Hetty reached in her misery by the Christian love of Dinah, Silas Marner won back to happiness by the little child, Gwendolen savedfrom her selfishness through dire disaster and a strong man's help. 

The prevailing atmosphere of George Eliot's later books is sad, and thesadness deepens as they go on. A labored, over-strenuous tone increases;the style loses in simplicity and is overburdened with reflection. Thenote of struggle is everywhere present, and shuts out repose, freedom, joy. The sensitive reader can hardly escape an undertone ofsuggestion, --yes, life must be made the best of, but it seems scarcelyworth the cost. Is it the entire absence of any outlook beyond this lifewhich makes the gloom of the later works? Yet this seems only partiallyto explain. One seeks inevitably the clew to the writing in the life. George Eliot's story as a woman is an open one. She took as her lifecompanion a man who was legally united to another woman. Herjustification apparently was that they were suited to each other, andthat with the support of this mutual tie they could best do their work. Stated in plain terms, the moral question involved seems hardly to admitof any debate. There is no more vital point in social morality than therelation of the sexes, and George Eliot's own teaching reverts most oftento this topic, and always with its emphasis on restraint. Her actualcourse assumed that the established and accepted law of society may beset aside by a man and woman upon their own judgment that their need ofeach other is paramount to the social law. A position more contradictoryto her avowed principles could hardly be stated. It was no new claim ofimmunity; it had been professed and preached, especially on theContinent, with results patent to all, of the subversion of socialfoundations; it marks the especial danger-point of a time of swiftlychanging standards. It is impossible not to feel that her course was aprecedent and example in flat contradiction of the teaching she soassiduously gave. Doubtless she persuaded herself she was right, butsuch persuasion must have involved, the most dangerous sophisticationwhich besets man in his groping struggle, --a claim by a leader forexemption from the common obligation on the plea that his welfare (thatis, his comfort) is especially necessary for the good of mankind. As onereads George Eliot's pages with her own story in mind, the shadows areheavy. In the over-active, restless reflections, one feels the workingof a mind incessantly exercised by its own self-defense. The suggestioncomes to us of a nature which has lavished all its energies on thinking, and lacked strength for living, and so has failed of that vision whichcomes not from thought but from life. The cramping horizon, the low sky, the earthly limit within which love saddens and hope dies, --all seem tobespeak that loss of truest touch with the universe which comes when oneis not true in act to the law he acknowledges. The sense of a tragedy inherself, more pathetic than any she has depicted, touches us with awe, with tenderness, with compunctious thought of our own failures. We are"purified by terror and by pity. "

The largest wisdom and the finest insight of our age are blended inTennyson's "In Memoriam. " Written half a century ago, its truth not lessthan its beauty stands unshaken by the later thought and knowledge. Antedating the work of Darwin and Spencer, it accepts the principles ofEvolution. Its atmosphere is wholly modern. It is pervaded by thesentiment of Christian faith, but it does not lean for support on dogmaor miracle. The difficulties it encounters are neither the terror in theold view of the hereafter nor the problems incident to the supernaturaltheology. The poet stands before the amazing spectacle of nature as seenby science, beholding along with its prodigal beauty its appallingdestruction and its unswerving march. It is no longer hell, butextinction, which seems to threaten man. 

The intellectual problem of the universe is faced, but the medium throughwhich it is seen is the experience of a human heart filled by a sacredlove and then struck by bereavement. It is the old, typical, deepestexperience of man, --love confronted by death. 

The poem moves like a symphony, weaving together requiem, cradle-song, battle-march, and psalm, to a consummation of tender and majestic peace. As the recurrent theme which governs the whole may be taken this:---

 "How pure at heart and sound in head, With what divine affection bold, Should be the man whose thoughts would hold An hour's communion with the dead. "

These are the conditions, --fidelity, sanity, divinely bold affections;this is the fruition, the sense of a mystic communion with the unseenfriend. 

One passage gives the reconciliation between the evolutionary view of theuniverse and a divine possibility for the individual. The evolutionaryprocess of nature is regarded as the type of the development of thesoul:---

 "Contemplate all this work of Time, The giant laboring in his youth; Nor dream of human love and truth, As dying Nature's earth and lime;

 "But trust that those we call the dead Are breathers of an ampler day For ever nobler ends. They say, The solid earth whereon we tread

 "In tracts of fluent heat began, And grew to seeming-random forms, The seeming prey of cyclic storms, Till at the last arose the man;

 "Who throve and branched from clime to clime, The herald of a higher race, And of himself in higher place, If so he type this work of time

 "Within himself, from more to more; Or, crowned with attributes of woe Like glories, move his course, and show That life is not as idle ore, "But iron dug from central gloom, And heated hot with burning fears, And dipt in baths of hissing tears, And battered with the shocks of doom

 "To shape and use. Arise and fly The reeling Faun, the sensual feast; Move upward, working out the beast, And let the ape and tiger die. "

Thus do the moral purpose and the immortal hope define themselves in theterms of the new philosophy. How are they related to the terms of theold religion? The poet's attitude toward the historic Christ is whollyreverent. Incidents of the gospel story are vivified by a creativeimagination. But Christ is no longer an isolated historic fact; he isthe symbol of all divine influence and celestial presence, --"the Christthat is to be. " The resurrection story is reverently touched, but it isnot upon this as a proof or argument that the poet dwells in regaininghis lost friend under a higher relation. That experience is to himpersonal, at first hand. His comfort is not solely that in some futureheaven he shall rejoin his Arthur. The beloved one comes to him now inmoments of highest consciousness; associated profoundly, mysteriously, vitally, with the fairest aspects of nature, with the loftiest purposesof the will, with the most sympathetic regard of all fellow creatures. 

In the experience which is supremely voiced in "In Memoriam, " but whichis also recorded in many an utterance which the attentive ear maydiscern, we recognize this: that the sense of the risen Christ whichinspired his disciples and founded the church was in truth aninstance--clad in imaginative, pictorial form--of what proves to be anabiding law of human nature--the vivid realization of the continued andhigher existence of a noble and beloved life. 

We may believe that in the progress of the race this faculty is beingdeveloped. In its first emergence it was confused by crudemisinterpretations. A single instance of it was for two thousand yearsconstrued as a unique event, the reversal of ordinary procedure, and thebasis of a supernatural religion. Now at last we correlate it with otherexperiences, and interpret it as a part of the universal order. 

Tennyson expresses that present heaven which is sometimes revealed to thesoul:--

 "Strange friend, past, present, and to be; Loved deeplier, darklier understood; Behold, I dream a dream of good, And mingle all the world with thee. 

 "Thy voice is on the rolling air; I hear thee where the waters run; Thou standest in the rising sun, And in the setting thou art fair. 

 "What art thou, then? I cannot guess; But though I seem in star and flower To feel thee some diffusive power, I do not therefore love thee less:

 "My love involves the love before; My love is vaster passion now; Though mixed with God and Nature thou, I seem to love thee more and more. 

 "Far off thou art, but ever nigh; I have thee still, and I rejoice; I prosper, circled with thy voice; I shall not lose thee though I die. "

Two men beyond all others in America have interpreted the higher life. Emerson revealed it through the medium of thought, beauty, and joy. Lincoln showed it in action, sympathy, and suffering. 

Lincoln had the deepest cravings of love, of ambition, and of religion. His love brought him first to bereavement which shook his reason, then tothe daily tragedy of an unhappy marriage. His ambition--he said when heentered his contest with Douglas--had proved "a failure, a flat failure. "In his crude youth he exulted in the rejection of Christianity; then hefelt the pressure of life's problems, and was powerless before them. Hecould believe only what was proved, --all beyond was a sad mystery. Hebore himself for many years with honesty, kindness, humor, sadness, andinfinite patience. He did not for a while rise to the perception of thehighest truth in politics, but he was faithful to what he did see. Helived in closest contact with ordinary men and knew them thoroughly. Histraining was as a lawyer and a politician. This brought him in touchwith the every-day actuality and all its hard and mean facts. He wasdisciplined in that attempt to reach justice under a code of laws whichis the practical administration of society, distinct from the idealist'svision of perfection. 

The time came when in the new birth of politics he rose to the perceptionof a great moral principle, --the nation's duty toward slavery. At thesame time, his ambition again saw its opportunity. He had a strong man'slove of power, but he deliberately subordinated his personal success tohis convictions when he risked and lost the fight with Douglas for thesenatorship by the "house-divided-against-itself" speech. 

In the anxious interval between his election and inauguration, he wentthrough, as he said long afterward, "a process of crystallization, "--areligious consecration. He made no talk about it, but all his words andacts thenceforth show a selfless, devoted temper. 

He bore incalculable burdens and perplexities for the sake of the people. He met the vast complication of forces which mix in politics and war--theselfishness, hatred, meanness, triviality, along with the higherelements--with the rarest union of shrewdness, flexibility, andsteadfastness. His humor saved him from being crushed. The atmospherehe lived in permitted no illusions. "Politics, " said he, "is the art ofcombining individual meannesses for the general good. "

He came to the sense of a divine purpose in which he had a part. He grewin charity, in sympathy, in wisdom. His private griefs, such as thedeath of his boy, deepened his nature. He bore burdens beyondHamlet's, --a temperament prone to melancholy, the death of the woman heloved, a wife who was little comfort, an ambition which long found nofruition and no adequate field, a baffled gaze into life's mystery; thenthe responsibility of a nation in its supreme crisis, and the sense ofthe nation's woe. Through it all he held fast the clew of moral fidelity. 

A lover of peace, he was forced to be captain in a terrible war. "Youknow me, Voorhees, " he said to an old friend; "I can't bear to cut offthe head of a chicken, and here I stand among rivers of blood!"

Under overwhelming perplexities and responsibilities, amid a ceaselessdrain on his sympathies, he learned and practiced a higher fidelity anddeeper trust. At the outset was "the process of crystallization;" at theend came "malice toward none, charity for all, " "fidelity to the right asGod gives us to see the right. " At last the sunrise of the nation's newday shone full upon him. Then suddenly, painlessly, he passed into themystery beyond. He was loved by his people as they never loved any otherman. The world prizes its happy souls, but it takes to its inmost hearthim who is faithful in darkness. 

[1] Jowett's translation. 

[2] I have followed George Long's translation of Epictetus. 

[3] In the language of Renan: "By this word [supernatural] I always meanthe _special_ supernatural act, miracle, or the divine intervention for aparticular end; not the general supernatural force, the hidden Soul ofthe Universe, the ideal, source, and final cause of all movements in thesystem of things. "

IV

GLIMPSES

The virtue of truth-seeking is a modern growth. The love ofspeculative truth, indeed, shines far back in antiquity, in individualsor in little companies. But the truth-seeking quality has had itsspecial training through the pursuits of physical science. Theachievements of three centuries in this direction have been made underthe constant necessity of attention to reality, at whatever cost toprepossession or desire. Watchfulness, patience, self-correction arethe requisites. There is the discipline of what Huxley calls "theperpetual tragedy of science, --the slaying of a beautiful theory by anugly fact. " This courage, patience, humility of the intellect, longexercised on secondary problems, wrought into habitual and acceptedtraits of the explorer, are called on at last to face the direstordeal. The human mind confronts the question, "Are my dearest faithand love and hope based on reality?" To face that question, and faceit through; to yield to no despondency, however dark the answer; tohold sometimes the best attainable answer, whether of affirmation ordenial, as only provisional, and wait for further light, whether itcome now or in a remote future, whether it come to him or to someother, --this measures the greatness of the human spirit. 

It is in this respect that our moral standards, compared with those ofChristendom for eighteen hundred years, have in a sense undergone notmerely a development but reversal. In that passage upon charity inwhich the genius of early Christianity wings its highest flight, onenote alone wakes no response in us. "Charity beareth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. " Amen! But at "believeth allthings" we draw back. For us, the word must read "proveth all things. "

So long as moral obligation was based solely on the sanction of asupernatural world; so long as the condemnation of murder and theft andadultery was supposed to rest on the fact that God gave two tables ofstone to Moses; so long as brotherhood and hope and trust ascribedtheir charter to an incarnate Deity, --so long a _belief_ in the charterand its history seemed the first requirement, the necessary conditionof morality. But to the modern mind the first and great commandment isto see things as they are. The foundation of our morality, ourhappiness if we are to be happy, our trust and worship if we are tohave a trust and worship, --in any event, our rule of life, our guideand law, --must be, _follow the truth_. No sect monopolizes thatprinciple. It was orthodox old Nathaniel Taylor who used to bid hisstudents, "Go with the truth, if it takes you over Niagara!"

The question presents itself to man: "Is the Power that rules theuniverse friendly to me?" It certainly does not offer the kind offriendship which man instinctively asks. It does not give thefriendship which saves from pain, which insures ease, pleasure, unchecked delight. Not an indulgent mother, certainly. 

The starting-point for getting the question truly answered must be apractical acceptance of the highest rule and ideal known to man. Accepting that and following it, he rises higher and higher. He feelshimself in some inward accord with the moving forces of the universe. The prime requisite is for him to obey, to do the right, be the heavenskindly or hostile or indifferent. Just so, long before man knewanything of the general laws of nature, he planted and reaped, struggled for food and clothing, took care for himself, --he must dolong before he comprehends. So he must work righteousness and love, God or no God. And in the summoning voice within him, the play uponhim of powers forever urging him to choose the right, --powers to whichhe grows more and more sensitive as his effort is earnest, --in this hecomes to recognize some reality which has to him more significance andimpressiveness than any other thing in the world. 

The working principle of the modern mind is that the universe isorderly. Everything has its place and meaning. Man discerns in hispersonal life this much of clear meaning, that he is to strive towardthe noblest ideal. As he accepts that, the conviction comes home tohim that in the highest sense the universe is friendly, for it isattracting, urging, compelling him to the realization of his highestdreams. 

The highest intellect is always serene. Shakspere and Emerson stand atthe summit of human thought and vision; unlike as they are, both viewthe spectacle of life with an intense interest, and a great thoughsober cheer. If we analyze the elements which Shakspere portrays, wemight incline to judge that the sadness outweighs the joy. But theimpression left by his pages is somehow not sad. Some deeper spiritunderlies and penetrates. Back of Lear's heartbreak, Hamlet'sbewilderment, Othello's despair, we feel some presence which upholdsour courage. It is the mind of the writer, so lofty and wise that itis not daunted by all the terrors it beholds, and which conveys to usits own calm. 

In a like mood, we may often look for ourselves on the drama of reallife, profoundly stirred by its comedies and tragedies, but notoverwhelmed, --least overwhelmed when our sight is clearest. 

The sense of assurance--not of mere safety from special harm, but theuplift of some unspeakable divine reality--comes in presence of thegrandest scenes of nature, --mountain or ocean or sunset. They supplyan external image, answering to some faculty in the soul. And whenthrough failure of sense or spirit the vision is obscured, the soulbecomes conscious in itself of that to which mountain and ocean are butservants, --the reserve power to endure and to conquer which springs tolife at the stern challenge. 

The deepest assurance comes not as an intellectual view nor as animpression from the sublimities of nature. It is the outcome of theseverest conflicts and the heaviest trials. We cannot explain theprocess, but we see in others or feel in ourselves this: that out ofthe hardest struggle in which we have held our ground comes the deepestpeace. What serenity is to the intellectual life, that to the morallife is this "peace which passeth understanding, " this blending ofgladness and love. It is not a passive condition, but of the highestpotential energy, --the parent of all great achievements and patientfidelities. 

The soul learns to draw courage, trust, joy, and hope from its resoluteencounter with realities, without leaning on any explanation. It isthe onlooker only who despairs. Literature, so much the work ofon-lookers, exaggerates the depression. Men of action, toilers, helpers, fathers, mothers, saints, --these do not despair. The world asa whole, and the best part of the world, lives a life of action, feeling, exercise of every faculty, --which generates courage, strength, tenderness. Under all the confusion and wrong, there are still thedeep springs of that same experience, that "peace of God" which alwaysfed the highest life. 

There is an experience sometimes felt of perfect assurance, peace, andjoy. It is "love which casteth out fear, "--the sense of being "God'schild;" it is communion with the Highest. 

This is the heart of religion. It is known to "babes and sucklings, "unknown to many otherwise very learned people. It speaks with anabsolute authority the message of love and peace, of joy and hope. 

The mind is wont to clothe this message in some crude form, whichserves to convey it to others, but is like the alloy which makes thepure gold workable, yet debases it. 

This gladness of the spirit was the gospel of Jesus. He had it as noone ever had it before. His followers caught it. They debased, necessarily, but they spread it. They worshiped it in him, made himtheir leader, master, and finally their God. They loved him as apresent reality, while they treasured the record of his human words. In such exaltation, like the intoxication of a heavenly wine, theuntrained mind is creative in its ecstasy; hence the beautifullyconceived and easily believed stories of announcing angels, miracles ofhealing, bodily resurrection. 

Then came a long development of dogma and church, --much of obscuration, much of degeneracy. Through it all survived the truths that love issupreme, and that the law of life is goodness sublimed to holiness. 

The revivals of religions have been the rediscovery of the glad truth, freed each time from some accompanying error. 

The discovery of Luther was that the soul's life in God was possibleoutside of the Catholic church. Others had found this, too, but hemade it a militant truth, and successfully revolted. 

Calvinism was partly a reversion; its emphasis on sovereignty wastyrannical, but it trained the mind in exact and intense thought. 

Fox, after long searchings amid sects and parties, made the newdiscovery again, --God's spirit given directly, freely to man! Hence asort of intoxication in the early Quaker, sobering to a sweet religion. 

Always, in the various churches, --Roman, English, Genevan, Lutheran, --was something of the divine fire, though often hidden andchoked. 

In the Wesleys, the saving and seeking love of Christ was the form therevival took; and with this went "free grace, " as against fatalismwhich crushed the will. 

Edwards had something of the love-element, but it was fettered by hisCalvinism. His main service was to stimulate religious thought, which, from a Calvinistic basis, worked out through Hopkins to Channing. 

The revival in Liberal Orthodoxy is essentially a recognition of thetrue character of Jesus, and an idealization and enthronement of thisas the sovereign ideal, with a clinging as yet to the supernaturalbasis, which inevitably grows weaker. 

Meanwhile, new "ways into the Infinite" have been opened, --throughnature, as by Wordsworth; through humanity by Emerson. 

Science has swept away the whole supernatural machinery with which thisinner life of the soul has been connected in men's minds. It findseverywhere order, growth, a present rooted in the past and floweringinto the future. Opening immense vistas for the race, it sometimesseems to shrivel the individual to a transient atom. 

But still there wells up in the heart of man the mysterious, profound, irresistible gladness in its Divine source, --the love that casts outfear. We may look at it soberly, assign it place, limit it in a way;it can no longer give us a cosmogony, but unimpaired is its message, "Obey and rejoice!" We correlate its impulse with the sense of moralobligation and the code of ethics which has grown up in the world'ssober experience. We learn to cultivate the religious sense morewisely than of old. We make bodily health its minister. We administerand reorganize civil society, instead of confining ourselves to thechurch. We open our hearts to the revelation of nature and humanity. And we wait patiently the slow coming of the Kingdom; the slow growthof religion in our own character; the slow upbuilding of humansocieties. 

Side by side with this slow process lies always the present heaven intowhich at times the soul enters and finds perfect peace, --a peace whichembraces past, present, and future, time and eternity. We study andpractice obedience, diligence, patience; and at unforeseen moments, under shocks or in highest tranquillity, comes the divine revelation. 

The belief that the perfect life had actually been lived by Christ wasa help to men whose aspiration felt itself unsuccessful, --the veryheight of the aspiration deepening the sense of failure. The mindfastened on an actual and perfect goodness outside of itself. TheStoic ideal kept a man self-watchful, giving him no higher personalityto look up to. There was in Christianity the feeling that the perfectlife has been lived, and this somehow may help to save me. This wasthe core of the Atonement. All theories of it--ransom, substitution, and the like--were intellectual explanations of the fact of experience. 

Forgiveness is the soul's delighted sense that its sin is not mortal. It comes only after sin has been felt as a burden. Conscious ofwrong-doing, man feels helpless and even accursed, --imagines or creditsstories of a fall, of measureless guilt, and an endless hell. Whatgives poignancy to these ideas is the real sense of wrong-doing, whichprojects a monstrous and exaggerated shadow. 

The sense of duty, constantly worked, breeds in sensitive souls thedespair of an unattainable perfection. The outward ceremonial does nothelp or enrich, --the moral and spiritual ideal tantalizes by itsimpossibility. This happens even to the strenuously righteous. In thegross wrong-doer, especially if he falls under the ban of society, there is wrought a despair which probably expresses itself in ahardened recklessness. 

Among these "lost sheep" came Jesus as a friend. His love divined thedeeper soul within them, --its yearning for the good it had perhapsceased even to struggle for, --its untouched possibilities. He said, "Be of good cheer! Thy sins be forgiven thee! Go in peace!" At hisword and touch, a new life sprang up in them, --a new force liftedhumanity in its lowest depths. 

To this new sense of life out of death Jesus gave the name of _YourFather's love_. He typified it in the parable of the Prodigal Son. And as the appropriate attitude for this recovered sinner, he set, notmerely a glad and thankful acceptance of the gift, but the passing ofit on to others. He bound inseparably the receiving and the giving. "Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. "

Just the experience of the pardoned miser or harlot came to Paul whenhe saw that in his pride and willfulness he had been persecuting theholy and innocent, yet felt himself reached and loved and restored bythat same innocent and holy soul. 

The experience was constantly repeated in the early church. It was themost striking of all those genuine "miracles"--the wonders of spiritualcreation and growth--which were the wealth of the Christian society. 

At the most dark and depressing hour of that society; when in gainingdominion it had lowered its purity, and before the barbarian invasionthe whole social fabric shook, --that same miracle of a divine love, realized as a saving and transforming force, was wrought in the greatpersonality of Augustine, and inspired through him anew the life of thechurch. 

The intellectual vestment of this experience--the form under which thecrude thought of these men gave it body and substance--was theIncarnation and the Atonement. Those doctrines have lasted through allchanges, even until this day, because of the pearl of truth cased intheir rough shells. 

When now we try to express that truth in its simplicity--finding alwaysa great difficulty in putting in articulate words the deep things ofthe spirit--we say that the man who sees and sorrows for and seeks toescape from his wrong deed or habit may come into the consciousnessthat he will escape, --may feel with a profound assurance that he isupborne by some power of good which will save him and bless him. He isrecoverable; he is lovable; he is loved, and shall be saved. And theway in which that consciousness is awakened is oftenest by the contactof some soul which the sinner reverences as better than himself, whichknows his guilt and loves him in spite of it, and declares to him thathe shall live and recover. The minister of forgiveness may be a motheror a wife; it may be the sincere priest speaking to the sincerepenitent; it may be Christ or Madonna; it may be the unnamed Powerwhose token is the sunset, or the rainbow, or the voice within theheart. 

The especial limitation of Christianity at its birth was theexpectation of the speedy ending of the existing order. Hence anindifference to such subjects, belonging to permanent human society, asindustry, government, knowledge, the control of the forces of nature. 

As to all these, the limitations of Christianity hindered its progress;as to each, the natural and secular world exercised an influenceunconfessed or striven against; as to each, the perception was reachedthat it must be recognized by religion, until in our day the _Here_ and_Now_ takes the foreground in place of the _Hereafter_. The personallife in its present relations, the human society under earthlyconditions, --these give to us the main field and problem. Thehereafter of the individual gives background and atmosphere. 

For "holy living and dying" we put simply holy living. To givefullness and perfection to each day, each act, is all and is enough. The thought of death should not swerve or alter a particle. When thelast hour of life comes, what retrospect shall we wish? Only to havefilled life with the best. 

The religious emotion will often and freely personify, and must do so. The highest feeling takes on a quality of love, and love goes to apersonal object. It is sometimes as toward one divine friend and God, sometimes toward the one beloved human being, sometimes the Christ, sometimes a universe of living and loving beings. These aredistinctions of form rather than of substance, the expression bydifferent minds of the same reality. 

To the modern mind, the distinct personification of deity is lessnatural than formerly. The very vastness of the Infinite, as weconceive it, precludes this definite personalizing of it as a habitualmode of thought or basis of conduct. Yet under lofty and high-wroughtemotion, the yearning of the soul toward the Supreme Power often breaksspontaneously into the language of personality. In the exquisite senseof deliverance from sharp trouble, --when the trouble itself seems morethan justified by the heightened gladness, as in Titian's Assumptionthe face of the Virgin Mother shines in the welcome of that heaven towhich the way has led through all earthly and motherly sorrow, --in suchemergence, the heart utters again the very words of the Psalmist: "Ilove the Lord, because he hath heard my voice and my supplications. The sorrows of death compassed me, and the pains of hell gat hold uponme; I found trouble and sorrow. Then called I upon the name of theLord, O Lord, I beseech thee, deliver my soul! Gracious is the Lordand righteous; yea, our God is merciful. Return unto thy rest, O mysoul, for the Lord hath dealt bountifully with me. For thou hastdelivered my soul from death, mine eyes from tears, and my feet fromfalling. "

If we would weigh and measure the value of mankind, we have no scalesor measures. As much is to be said for the badness of men as for theirgoodness. Still more impossible is it to trace their individualresponsibility for what they are. But the determination of the valueof mankind, even the lowest, is by a different process from that of thespeculative intellect. Are men worthy of love? Love them, and youshall know! The attitude of love vindicates itself. No one who hasheartily given himself to the service of others turns back saying, "They are not worth it. "

Encompassing light creates in the developing creature an eye. Soencompassing love--human love--draws out response in its object, makesit lovable. 

One class of truths are certain for all and at all times. These aresuch as: the excellence and authority of the highest moral ideal; theobligations of purity, truth, and honesty; love as the true attitude;receptivity toward knowledge, beauty, and humor. 

There are other perceptions which vary greatly in their frequency andvividness. They are impulses of reassurance, joy, hope, victory. Theysurpass all other sources of strength and comfort. 

They cannot, in their clearness and fullness, be transferred orexpressed; they cannot even, by the mind experiencing them, be resolvedinto intellectual propositions. 

They are not peculiar to what we usually call religion. The experienceof love between man and woman opens a new world. So does music; so doall the finer forms of happiness. 

All these, when they come, are felt as gifts, --as revelations. Theyare not within our direct and immediate command. 

What relation do they bear to the life which is within our command, --toour deliberate, purposeful, self-ordered life? First, in that life wecultivate the two traits which fit us for the vision, though they donot command it, --sensitiveness and self-control. 

So no man or woman can foresee whether the love of wedlock shall cometo them, but each can render himself worthy of love, and no highexperience of love is possible except to one trained long beforehand inpurity and unselfishness. 

Next, these higher moods, when they come, should be accepted as givinglaw to the unillumined hours. They do not change, but they intensify, the aim at rightness of life, and they add to it the spirit of courage, of trust, of joy. 

The hope of immortality--the assurance of some good beyond, which weexpress by "immortality"--is born from a sense of the value of life. Life is felt to be precious as it is consecrated by the moral strugglein ourselves, and as it is viewed in others with sympathy. We give ourmoral effort and our sympathy, and these are encountered by thetremendous play of human joys and sorrows, and the result is a sense oflife as intensely significant. 

The feeling of communion with Christ, with angels and saints, --itsnatural basis is the reverence and love for great souls. As suchreverence and love is deep, and as death removes the objects, the senseof a continued communion arises spontaneously. No form of ourconsciousness is more vivid and profound than this. It has abackground of mystery, --mystery scarcely deeper or other than thatwhich envelops the earthly love. _What_ do I love in the friend whomhere I see? Is it the individuality, or that higher power of which ittransmits a ray?

The sense of this blending of the human and divine does not weaken orperplex our affection for the friend we see; it intensifies andsublimates it. So, in the sense of communion with the unseen friend, it disturbs us not that we cannot say how much is there of theremembered personality, how much of the one eternal deity. The essenceof what we loved and love is sure and undying. 

The creature succeeds as its functions and organs become fitted to itsenvironment. Man succeeds as he fits himself to a moral environment. To the undeveloped man the world is full of forces which are hostile orindifferent to his right action; a thousand things distract him fromdoing right; he is like a creature in a watery world withhalf-developed fins. But as a man becomes morally developed he findsmoral opportunity everywhere, --finds occasion for service, foradmiration, gratitude, reverence, hope. This moral developmentincludes the whole man: he needs a good body; he needs much that onlyinheritance can supply. His own effort is one factor, not the sum offactors. We must be patient with ourselves, --accept our inevitableimperfections as part of the grand plan, and find a joy in what isabove and beyond ourselves. 

Man first solves the problem of his own life, --finds the key indevotion to the highest ideal of character, --finds the answer in moralgrowth following his effort, forgiveness meeting his repentance, humanlove answering his love, beauty meeting his desire, truth opening tohis search, a support and assurance found in emergency. 

Then, and only then, he can rightly study the world. For he must firsthave the standard of values in human life; he must have, too, the utterdevotion to truth. 

Studying the universe, he learns that man has come into being throughthe processes of material law, --that the aeons of astronomy and geologyhave been working toward his production. He finds that man developsinto moral man, with the power of choice and of love; develops into abeing loyal and sensitive to duty and to his kind. This type of mantends to become the universal type. Human goodness tends to spreaditself. There is a society, living from age to age, of those devotedto the good of man: this sentiment grows purer, more enlightened, moreenthusiastic; it is the heart of all reforms, all social progress; noequal power opposes it. It is combated by selfishness, greed, ignorance, violence, but these forces have no spiritual cohesion amongthemselves, no inner unity; they are destined to fall before theadvance of the higher spirit. 

Hand in hand with this advancing goodness goes advancing knowledge, growing sense of beauty, greater powers of happiness. 

We see thus a power working for good through man, making him itsinstrument, absorbing him into itself. 

The movement is continuous, from the star-mist to the saint. 

This is one element in the sum of things. It is the element that manknows best. The lives of the gnat and the tiger he scarcely more thanguesses at. Other possible existences than his own there may be, evenwithin this mundane sphere, of which he knows nothing. Of humanity heknows something, and he sees that it is moved toward the goal ofperfection. 

The power which thus moves it he inevitably identifies with that whichhe has found urging himself toward goodness, touching him in his bestestate with a sense of harmony, and sustaining him in all emergencies. To this Power of Good he devotes himself and trusts himself. Hissupreme prayer is, "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done. " He seeks tobe used by this power for its own ends; better than any wish he canframe must be the end to which it works. 

The final product of the world-forces, the flower of the universe, thechild of God, is man, in his fidelity, tenderness, yearning. To himbelong the saint's aspiration, the poet's vision, the mother's love. And this highest type, by all its finest faculties, reaches toward ahereafter. 

The ruling power turns often a harsh face upon its creatures. There isunbounded suffering. There is the perpetual destruction of theindividual. Even the moral growth meets obstacles ofteninsurmountable; inheritance limits; circumstances betray; we see suddenfalls and slow deterioration; whole races wane. 

But we see that evil is somehow a stepping-stone to all our good. Heroism, piety, tenderness, have been born out of pain. Theexpectation of a hereafter gives hope that no individual moral germ islost. And we see that the crowning victory of life is the persistenceof man's good against the evil; as in the mother whose love theprodigal cannot exhaust; in the Siberian exile who will not despair; inJesus when before the cross he prays, "Thy will be done. " This isfaith, this is the soul's supreme act, --the allegiance to good, thetrust in good, in face of the very worst. Man, in that depth feelslifted by a power transcending himself. So, when the beloved is takenby death, the heart, in face of that loss, loves on; feels its lovegreater than that which has befallen; says, "O Death, where is thysting! O grave, where is thy victory!"

The best living unites us closely and mysteriously with some greaterwhole of which we are a part. The three great faculties are knowledge, conduct, love. Knowledge finds always new objects, new connections, amore perfect and wonderful whole. Right conduct brings a sense ofbeing in true relations, --of fulfilling some high destiny. Love blendsthe individual with the universal; its successive steps are the highestform of human education. 

Christianity was a feminine religion in its virtues, as purity andtenderness; and also in its attitude of pure dependence, submission, petition. The masculine elements have not been duly recognized asreligious, even when having a great place in the actual working ofthings, --self-reliance, physical hardihood, civic virtue, the pursuitof truth. 

In her subject state, woman has learned piety. She brings that as sheemerges into her free state, her gift to man, as his to her is strengthand self-reliance. 

The moral power of the dogmatic systems has been very limited. Theypretended to all knowledge and all power, but they have only gone alittle way to sweeten and purify human life. The "enthusiasm ofhumanity" advances society farther in a decade than the old religiondid in a century. 

We are taught by scientists the extreme slowness with which races haveimproved. But do we know how fast races or families can improve ifbrought in contact with the most helpful influences of other races orfamilies? Has that experiment ever been fairly tried? Do not resultswith hardened convicts, with Indian and negro pupils, suggest thatthere may be an immense acceleration of moral progress?

Different classes of minds require different religions. A multituderequire the pictorial faith and the absolute authority of the Catholicchurch. A great many require the divine-human figure of Christ. Acertain class of minds will be pantheistic. To some the wonders of thephysical world will be the most impressive revelation. Natures strongin spiritual insight will be transcendentalists. Those in whompersonal affection is profound will have the gospel of "In Memoriam"and Lucy Smith. Active, serviceable, unimaginative men will often becontent with a cheerful agnosticism. Some, after pushing their inquiryto the farthest, and keeping it united with right living, will rest in"devout and contented uncertainty. "

The advance of knowledge has been the great fact of the world'sintellectual life for the past century. 

The increase by this means of material good; the upward push of thepeople, strengthened by knowledge and by prosperity won throughknowledge; the widening and deepening of human sympathy, --these are thegreat social facts. 

The imminent situation is that knowledge has destroyed the oldreligious basis, and is only just beginning to construct a newreligious cultus. Socially, the common people seem on the point of agreat advance, while the too eager push for material good bringstemporarily a moral injury. 

Among the constructive forces are: a knowledge of man and the worldwhich enables us to build on broader foundations than Jesus or St. Francis; a vivified sense of humanity which gives the emotional forcewhich is always the strongest dynamic factor; and a new sense ofnatural beauty which feeds the religious life and imparts peace. 

The immediate future is uncertain, --the barbarian invasion and thereligious wars may have a parallel in another period of disasters. Butthe large onward movement is clear, and the personal ideal was never atonce so reasonable and so ardent as now. Though storms should risehigh, faith and hope may hold fast, remembering that

 "all the past of Time reveals A bridal dawn of thunder-peals Wherever Thought hath wedded Fact. "

Democracy is just a continuation of the upward push which out of themollusk has made man. Altruism is not the only nor the primary upwardforce. Before it and along with it goes the individual's struggle forhis own betterment, --the outreach, first, of hunger and sex; thentoward finer forms of pleasure; then of moral aspiration. Democracy, socialism are an effort for _common_ betterment; the egoistic mergeswith the altruistic impulse. 

The mind must be held open to the free winds of knowledge. If they canshake the foundations, let them. And just as one's personal couragemust often tremble before personal risks, so there must sometimes beintellectual tremors. 

If in the ardent temper and sweet spirit of the New Testament we try todiscriminate as to what phases of human conduct receive the chiefstress, we find the strongest emphasis is on brotherly love andchastity. The ethical service of the Christian church has beengreatest in the direction of these two qualities. What it has done forpurity is beyond our power to measure. And it is just at that pointthat even yet the struggle of humanity to emerge from the bestialcondition seems most difficult and doubtful. Some writer has remarkedthat Christianity apparently introduced no really new virtue into humansociety, with the exception of male chastity. Shakspere in one sonnetgives tremendous expression to the evil of lust, with this conclusion:--

 "This all the world doth know; yet none know well To shun the heaven, that leadeth to this hell. "

Christianity, in a way of its own, opened a gate out of that hell. Thegate was the power of a pure spiritual affection. Paul describes, inlanguage that strikes home to-day, the war of flesh and spirit. Forhim, its conclusion is: "O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliverme from the body of this death? I thank God through Jesus Christ ourLord!" At the crisis there rises in his spirit the consciousness, vivid as a personal presence, of that great, pure, loving soul; andtemptation falls dead. Augustine relates more fully a like experience. The turning-point of his life comes when, still bound after longstruggles by a sinful tie, there comes to him the message, "Put ye onthe Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh to fulfillthe lusts thereof. " The church has not confined itself to a singleform of influence. It has invested the command to purity with thesanction of a divine behest; has used threats and penalties; hasemployed asceticism, often with most disastrous results; has appealedvariously to the spiritual imagination with legend and story. Thefresh blood of the Northern peoples has come in to reënforce the spentand struggling morality of the South. A romantic conception of lovehas blended nature's two great forces--sense and spirit--instead ofsetting them in opposition, and has invested wedlock with its truesanctity, in place of the false exaltation of celibacy. And, undervarious influences, the relation of the sexes has upon the whole beenso far heightened that we see this at the end of two thousandyears, --that marriage, which Paul himself looked upon as a kind ofnecessary evil, is recognized as the best guardian and teacher ofpurity. 

The connection between the two most strongly marked phases of Christianmorality--between love and purity--is not an arbitrary or accidentalone. It is an ideal affection that best masters the sensuous nature. In the words of "Ecce Homo, " "No heart is pure that is not passionate;no virtue is safe that is not enthusiastic. "

The modern attitude has two broad differences from early Christianity. Man addresses all his energy to understanding and controlling theforces of nature, instead of regarding them as alien or hostile and hisown salvation as a matter of supernatural relation. 

And his relation with the Infinite and the Hereafter is far morevarious, subtle, intimate. 

Epictetus gives the heaven of the conscience, Jesus of the heart, Emerson of the intellect. 

Man's problems now are to find the physical and the social heaven, --torightly correlate the spirit with the body and the earth, and to moreperfectly organize society. 

The modern man, instead of appealing to Jehovah or Christ, grasps thepowers of nature and of life as they are put into his own hands. Walter Scott writes in his journal, in a sharp exigency: "God help--no, God _bless_--man must _help_ himself. "

"Love God and man; what higher rule can there be?" we are asked. Butthe actual work of the modern man is widely different from what Jesusor Paul perceived. To understand natural forces and ally himself withthem; to rightly order that vastly complex organism, the state; tofrankly enjoy the pleasures of the healthy body; to discern the beautyof the surrounding world; to reproduce beauty in art; to relish thehumor of the world, --these are aims which would have sounded strange toPaul, to Jesus, or to Epictetus. 

To seek the best, not for ourselves alone but for others, even at costto ourselves; to control our lower natures by our higher natures; tofeel a relation with the Supreme, --these were the aims and inspirationsof the earlier Christianity; and they remain, but with enlarged and newapplication. 

Science has not penetrated to the inner secret of life, which is bestreached by other approaches. But it has enormously affected allthinking by the discovery of Evolution. The recognition of growth--agradual, causal process--in mankind's whole advance, alters the entireface of history and prophecy. Just as it eliminates supernaturalismfrom the past, so it guides present progress and inspires while itmoderates anticipation of the future. 

There grows the sense of some unfathomable unity. Creator and creatureare not sharply separated, as by the theologians: they are even moreclosely united than the "father" and "son" of Jesus. So, too, theunity of humanity--of all souls--until the idea of personal immortalityblends with some dimly conceived but greater reality. 

It is impossible to portray under a single image the ideal of to-day, because many ideals coexist. There is infinite difference of moraldevelopment, as many characters as there are men; the variety of thespiritual world is like that of the material world, and the diversitygives richness and charm. And the forward movement of the ages isimmeasurably complex. Yet certain broad movements are traceable. 

"Do right and fear nothing, " was the word of Stoicism. 

"God is holy; be ye holy, " was the word of Hebraism, growing clearer, stamping itself by institutions and inheritance. 

"God is love; love ye, " was the word of Christianity. The life ofJesus was the symbol of that idea, and gave impulse and law to the newsociety. 

It was in keeping with the Stoic doctrine of Providence, but it camethrough the imagination to the heart, more powerful than the calmutterance of reason. 

The Christian sense of sin was the intense force to rouse the ancientworld from its easy-going content. It was necessary that purity shouldbecome a passion. The dogma of depravity was the intellectualexaggeration of this. A God who died to save men from sin and hell wasits natural counterpart. 

When the church had worked under the control of these ideas for fifteenhundred years, there woke again in mankind the sense of joy, beauty, knowledge, as good in themselves and God-given. Humanity was only halfripe for this truth, and again the austere impulse reasserted itself inCalvinism, in Puritanism, in the Jesuits. But knowledge, joy, naturalness, went on growing; they have changed the conception ofreligion itself, turning it to the sense of a present as well as afuture fruition. 

The sense of human suffering comes in our day to full realization. Thebest impulse of the time throws itself against that, as formerlyagainst sin. Just as the evil of sin was overstated and became anexaggeration and terror, so the sense of human suffering is oftenoverstretched and becomes pessimism. But, essentially, a fresh andpowerful enthusiasm assails the evils of mankind. It aims to educateand elevate the whole being, --to save men. It has in science a newinstrument. 

The old hope of some speedy millennium is gone. We see that thegeneral advance must be slow. But we also see that the imperfectcondition is not so terrible as it was once supposed: it does not incurhell; it does not imply total depravity; it may even serve asstepping-stone to higher things. 

All the higher phases of man's nature point together. The highestthought says, "All is well;" the deepest feeling, "God is love;" thehuman affection realizes its immortality; the seeing eye findsuniversal beauty; the profoundest yearning enfolds the promise, "Ishall be satisfied. "

We may follow the story by another thread. 

A human society inspired and bound together by the highest traits, consciously ensphered in a divine power and inspired by it, --this isthe ideal which has been reached toward and grown toward through allthe ages. 

Its primitive germ was Israel's hope of a splendid national future. 

In Jesus this expanded into the Kingdom of God among men, --that is, theperfect reign of goodness, love, and the human-divine relation of sonand father. He looked for its realization by miracle, and when thatfailed said, "Thy will be done, " and died, trusting all to the Father. 

His followers, at first under the dream of his second coming, settledinto a society bound together by common rules and ideals. The Catholicchurch was born and grew. Mixed with all human elements ofimperfection, it advanced a long way toward the goal, then divided itssway with new energies. 

In the political and social life of Europe, and especially of England, there slowly grew up a population fit for self-government in place ofgovernment by the few. 

Thomas More foresaw prophetically a community which should realize theloftiest vision, and whose bond should be human and social, nottheologic. 

The Puritan tried to enforce the will of God, as he understood it, byauthority, --to build a commonwealth on Hebrew lines. He failed, inEngland and America, but stamped his character on both peoples. 

Then came the essay of the Quaker toward a reign of peace. 

Next, the Wesleyan movement, quickening the English heart andconscience, and sending the wave which did in a degree for the West ofAmerica what Puritanism and Quakerism did for the East. 

Then the uprising in France, --the passionate aspiration for "liberty, equality, fraternity, "--at war with Christianity, instead of at onewith it like English freedom, and working great and mixed results. 

We see the American republic, founded by a blending of hard commonsense, experience, devotion, and widening purpose, and best typified inWashington. 

In Lincoln the problem of the American commonwealth--to maintain unity, yet purify itself--and the problem of a human life are both solved bythe old virtues, honesty, self-rule, self-devotion. 

The present movement of the world is toward a nobler social order. Itis to lift the common man upward, on material good as a stepping-stone, toward the height of the saint and seer. This is the better soul ofdemocracy, the noble element in politics, the reformation in thechurches, the bond of sympathy with Christ. 

Along with this goes a new personal ideal, exemplified inEmerson, --accepting the present world as the symbol and instrument of acelestial destiny. "Contenting himself with obedience, man becomesdivine. "

In the Gospel history, the figures of the woman and the child take ahigh place. In Jesus himself the feminine element blent with themasculine. Medieval religion and art found their best symbol in thefigure of the mother clasping her babe. Our modern time is givingfreedom to woman and recognizing her equality with man, and we arelearning that the secret of the world's advance lies in the righttraining of children under natural law. So the sentiment which growsup in the natural relations of life is elevated by religion, thendeveloped and perfected by freedom and by science. 

For us the practical problem is the cultivation of the religious naturealong with the other elements of a complete manhood. We are notobliged by intellectual process to create a religious sentiment inourselves. We inherit that sentiment. It is like the sense of purityor of beauty, --beyond demonstration, except the demonstration ofexperience. We need only to supply the right conditions for itseducation and application. 

The belief that the spiritual life was dependent on certaininstitutions and beliefs was the key to the ecclesiastical tyranny ofthe past. We have virtually escaped that tyranny. Now, in theatmosphere of freedom, we cultivate the spiritual life, and it provesdeeper and fairer than ever before. 

V

DAILY BREAD

When Charles Lyell addressed himself to the problems of geology, he foundthat his predecessors in the study had accounted for all the stupendousphenomena whose story is written in the earth's crust, on the suppositionof vast catastrophic disturbances in the remote past, because they heldthat these effects were too prodigious to have been wrought by theordinary slow processes of nature with which we are familiar. Lyell tookup the question by the near and homely end. He patiently watched theworkings of heat and cold, sunshine and rain and frost, summer andwinter, in the fields about his own house. He learned there what thesefamiliar forces are capable of, in what directions they operate, and inthem he found the clew to the story of the past aeons. Right about hisdoorstep were the magicians that had done it all. 

That illustrates the process of discovery in the spiritual universe. Weare not to soar up into infinity to find God. The only air that willsupport our wings is that which encircles closely this familiar planet. Let us look for a divine significance in homely things. 

Here is Goodness. It is right about us, in people whom we know and meetevery day, plainly visible to eyes that know how to see it. Here are allits forms. Innocence, --the very image of it looks upon you from many achild's face. Courage, firmness, self-control, --you may read them in thelines of many a manly countenance. Purity, --who has not felt itshallowing regard fall upon him from the eyes of maid and matron? Pity, tenderness, sympathy, --these angels move about us in human forms, and hethat hath eyes to see them sees. 

Fineness of character must be recognized by sympathetic observation. There must be the watchful attentiveness, like that of the sculptorstudying his subject, the hunter tracking his prey. And there must be inthe observer himself some quality akin to that he would detect. Only thegood see goodness, only the lover sees love. A mother would convey toher little daughter some full sense of the motherly feeling that yearnswithin her, but how can it be done? In just one way: let that daughtergrow up and have children of her own, _then_ she will know how her motherfelt. 

Would we know something of the Divine Mother-heart? We must first get inourselves something of the mother-feeling. "Every one that lovethknoweth God and is born of God. "

Perhaps there has been given to us some human friend, --parent or comrade, husband or wife, --in whom as nowhere else we see the beauty of the soul. Best, divinest gift of life is such a friend as that, --a friend who fillstoward us a place like that to which our poet so nobly aspires:--

 "You shall not love me for what daily spends, You shall not know me on the noisy street, Where I, as others, follow petty ends; Nor when in fair saloons we chance to meet; Nor when I 'm jaded, sick, anxious, or mean; But love me then and only, when you know Me for the channel of the rivers of God, From deep, ideal, fontal heavens that flow. "

Sometimes the friend whose goodness so touches us as with the verypresence of God is one whom we have never seen. To millions of heartsthat place has been filled by Christ. 

These lines of Emerson--heroic idealist that he was--ask to be loved onlywhen he is at his highest, and so is felt as a revelation of somethinghigher than himself. But our best friends--comrade, mother, orwife--love the ideal soul in us, and love us no less when we are "jaded, sick, anxious, or mean, " covering with exquisite pity our infirmities, and by their nobility lifting us out of our baseness. And in thataffection which embraces our best and our worst, those human friends arethe symbols--yes, and are part of the reality--of the Divine love. 

And what is all beauty, all grandeur, but the manifestation, through theeye to the soul, of the one Supreme Being? The mountains, the sea, thesunset, touch us with more than pleasure: they stir in us some awe, somemystic delight, some profound recognition of sacred reality. How can webetter frame the wonder in speech than by saying, "Just as my friend'sface manifests to me my friend, so Nature is as the very face of theliving God"?

In the processes of human life, --the life we live and the life wesee, --there is discernible a significance which grows more impressive, more solemn, more inspiring, just as we learn to read it intelligently. What a wonderful drama is this play of human lives, --this perpetualtragedy and comedy, of which some slight and faint transcript findsexpression in the pages of poet and novelist! We needs must continuallysee and feel something of it, but we are apt to miss its bestsignificance. What fastens our attention most in our experience, or inwhat we sympathetically watch in others, is the element of enjoyment orsuffering. Pain and pleasure are so very, very real! We ache, and weare sorry for another's ache; we are joyous, and glad in another's joy. And there it often stops with us. But all the while something is workingunder the pain and pleasure. Character is being made or marred. Yonderman bleeds, and you sigh for him, --ah! but a hero is being moulded there. And here one thrives and prospers, expands and radiates, --but a spiritualbankruptcy is approaching. 

When we look closely and deeply at the world about us, --whether at thisordered world of nature, moving steadily in its unbroken and majesticcourse, or at the external aspect of grandeur and loveliness, or at thedrama in which all men are actors, as it is disclosed to insight andsympathy, or at the inner world of each one's personal experience, --do wenot find ourselves in the perpetual presence of Goodness, Order, Beauty, Love? Are not these the very presence of Deity?

"But, " you say, "there is also confusion to be seen, --what does thatsignify?" Just so fast as human intelligence advances, it finds thatwhat seemed disorder is really governed by strictest order. You say, "Wesee ugliness as well as beauty, --what does that mean?" Ugliness servesits purpose in aiding by repulsion to train the sense of beauty. Beauty, and man's delight in it, is the end; ugliness, and our repulsion from it, is but an incident and means. You say, "We see wickedness, --what ofthat?" May we not hope that wickedness, in the broad survey of mankind'supward progress, is the stumbling of a child over its alphabet?

The instinct that the shadow is the servant of the light, that seemingdisorder, ugliness, sin are but veiled instruments of good, --this seemsone of the truths which flash upon mankind in gleams, and which as therace rises actually into nobler life tend to become clear and steadfastconviction. 

It is the vastness of the Divinity that overwhelms us. Suppose a man, simple-hearted and imaginative, who, in a distant country, has read ofAmerica, and has fashioned her in his thoughts as a heroic femalefigure, --a kind of goddess. He has taken as literal reality such poeticdescriptions as those in Lowell's "Commemoration Ode" and Emerson's"Boston Hymn, "--

 "Lo! I uncover the land Which I hid of old time in the West, As a sculptor uncovers the statue When he has wrought his best. "

And he comes to you and says, "Show me America!" And you show him alittle of this country, its mountains and lakes and rivers, its shops andfarms and people. He is interested and gratified. Yet this is not whathe expected; and he says, "But show me America, --that radiant, heroicform, that goddess to charm the eyes and the heart. " And you tell him:"But America is too great to be taken in so, at a glance. You have justbegun to see it. You have seen New England's hill-farms, but you havenot seen the prairies of the West. You have seen the Penobscot andKennebec, the Connecticut and Hudson; but you have yet to see theMississippi and Niagara. I have taken you to Katahdin and Monadnock andMount Washington, but you have yet to behold the Alleghanies and theRockies and Tacoma. Our people you have just begun to see: our armies offree toilers, our happy households, our strong men and lovelywomen, --these you are only beginning to know. " And he says, perhaps: "Butall this is so diffuse, so various, so difficult to comprehend! I hadfancied _America_ as some one beautiful, some one to love. How can onelove such a scattered, immense, diversified thing as this you describe tome?" Well, you tell him: "You may not understand it yet awhile; but thiscountry which you say is not a thing to love was in peril of its life afew years ago, and it was so loved that men by hundreds of thousands lefthome, and risked life and all for it, and their mothers and wives andsisters sent them forth. That is how America can be loved!"

In some such fashion as this do we grope after a God whom we cancomprehend at a glance; and, lo! his presence fills the universe. "Saynot, Who shall ascend into heaven to bring him down, or who shall descendinto hell to bring him up? for he is nigh thee, before thy eyes and inthy heart. "

The chief revelation we need is the education of our own perceptivepowers. Sir John Lubbock has pointed out, in a very striking passage, that the material world may convey itself through other senses than thefive which we possess, that there may be innumerable other senses, andthat some of these may perhaps be already developed in other creaturesthan man. Such a suggestion stirs our curiosity and desire; but how fewof us have learned to rightly use the five senses we have! And of themoral perceptions we have but a most rudimentary development. We areunconscious of most of the world we live in, unconscious even of whatmany of our fellow-men discern. Did you ever happen to be in thepresence of a sunset, flooding the heavens with glory, with a companionwho showed no sign of perceiving the splendor? Ah! perhaps he wasblinded to it by some secret grief or care, some trouble which you mighthave discovered in him and comforted, had your sympathy been as acute asyour sense of beauty. But did his blindness, whatever its cause, suggestto you that you perhaps were at that moment in the presence of sublimerealities, to which your consciousness was closed as his was to thesunset?

To recognize consciously the spiritual elements in the universe belongspartly to a right cultivation of character, and partly it is due tonatural endowment, to an intellectual faculty. It is not, after all, ofso much account that we _see_ the divine in life as that we have it inourselves. In this one sentence, "Blessed are the pure in heart, forthey shall see God, " Jesus puts spiritual vision as the result of a moralquality. But it is the moral quality itself on which, in one form andanother, his blessing is constantly pronounced. So, if you say, "Icannot see, --God is in no sense visible to me, " yet there remain stillmost precious gifts, if you will take them. Blessed are the gentle, thepeacemakers, the merciful, they that do hunger and thirst afterrighteousness; blessed are the sympathetic, the stout-hearted, theopen-eyed, the open-handed; plain and simple and sure are thesebenedictions. 

The presence of Divinity which it is most essential that we recognize isthe choice perpetually presented to us between a higher and a lowercourse of action. Whether one has the joyful, uplifting vision is ofsmall consequence in comparison with whether he steadily chooses andfollows the right. 

No one can be reasoned or persuaded into any living faith in God orimmortality, any more than reason and persuasion can draw from the coldApril furrow the field of waving wheat. The faith _grows_ in theindividual and in the race, under that culture to which the higher powerssubject us, --a culture in which the elements are experience and fidelity, thought and action, love and loss, aspiration and achievement. Love andLoss, the sweetest angel and the sternest one, join their hands to giveus that gift of the immortal hope. 

If one asks, How shall I gain faith in God and hope of immortality? whatbetter answer can we give him than this: Be faithful, live, and love!Work and love press their treasures on you with full hands. Open youreyes to the glory of the universe. Watch the world's new life quickeningin bud and bird-song. Get into sympathetic current with the heartsaround you. Be sincere; be a man. Keep open-minded to all knowledge, and keep humble in the sense of your ignorance. Seek the company thatennobles, the scenes that ennoble, the books that ennoble. In yourdarkest hour, set yourself to brighten another's life. Be patient. Ifan oak-tree takes a century to get its growth, shall a man expect to winhis crown in a day? Find what word of prayer you can sincerely say, andsay it with your heart. Look at the moral meanings of things. Learn tofeel through your own littleness that higher power out of which comes allthe good in you. Join yourself to men wherever you can find them in thatnoblest attitude, true worship of a living God. Know that to mankind areset two teachers of immortality, and see to it that you so faithfullylearn of Love that Sorrow when she comes shall perfect the lesson. 

Love in its simplest and most common forms is often strangely wise. Manya mother learns from the light of her baby's eyes more than all wisdom ofbooks can teach. When the little, unconscious thing is taken from herarms, there is given to her sometimes a feeling, "My baby is _mine_forever;" a feeling in whose presence we stand in reverent, tender awe. It is not every experience of bereavement which brings with it thisuplift of comfort. But to the noble love of a noble object there comesthe sense of something in the beloved that outlasts death. To the_noble_ love, for most of our affection has a selfish strain in it; theclinging to another for what of present enjoyment he yields to us bringssmall illumination or assurance. But as self loses itself in another'slife, there comes to us the deep instinct of something over which deathhas no power. Above all, when we unselfishly love one in whom dwellsmoral nobility, --when it is a great and vital and holy nature to which wejoin ourselves, --there comes to us a profound and pregnant sense of itsimmortality. It is when death's stroke has fallen that that sense risesinto full, triumphant bloom. 

No wonder the disciples felt that their Master lived! Theirs was theexperience that in substance repeats itself whenever from among those wholove it a noble soul goes home. It was because Jesus was supremelynoble, and they had loved him with consummate affection, that theirexperience was so intense and vivid. Its true significance lay in this, that it was not supernatural but natural. It is standing the pyramid onits apex to deduce all human goodness from the goodness of Jesus, and toargue a universal immortality solely from his rising. Let us place thepyramid four-square in the universal truth of human nature. Let usground our religion upon the moral fidelity, the human love, thespiritual aspiration, and the sober regard for fact, in which all loyalsouls can agree. Then at its summit we shall get that character of whichJesus is the type, a character in which self-sacrifice and joy divinelyblend, and which in its passage from earth imparts the irresistibleassurance of a higher life beyond. 

This morning the sun rose upon earth and trees encased in blazing jewelryof ice. Fast, fast the beauty melted and was gone, --and in its place, behold the brown earth touched with living green and teeming withpromise; the trees' strong limbs tipped with swelling buds; and over allthe tender, brooding sky of spring. Even so, the pageant of themiracle-story dissolves, to give place to the natural consciousness ofeternal beauty and eternal life. 

A group of Americans meet in a foreign city, and they talk fondly ofhome, and to each of them home has its special meaning. One says: "Iremember the green hill-pastures and the great elms and the whitefarmhouses; I know just how the autumn woods are looking, and the stockedcorn, and the pumpkins ripening in the sun; and I am homesick for a sightof it all. " Another says: "It is the nation that I think of. To meAmerica seems the home of the poor man, the common man. She is workingout great and difficult questions in government and society, and I havestrong faith that the outcome of it all is going to be a great good tothe world. I long to take part once more in that national life; and overhere among strangers I want at least to Le no discredit to the dear oldcountry, and if possible to pick up some bit of knowledge or experiencethat I can add to the common stock when I get home. " A third man says:"Yes, that's all true; but I don't often think of it in so big a way asthat. I want to see my old neighbors. And in these foreign Sundays Iget hungry for the old church I've been to ever since I was a boy, andthe prayers, and the old tunes. " Another, perhaps, is silent; but to hisheart all the while are present the faces of his wife and children. 

As they end their talk and go out together, up the harbor comes a gallantship, and at her peak float the stars and stripes; and at the sightthrough each heart runs a common thrill of love and devotion. One man'sthought of home is the broader, and another's is the tenderer; butAmerica is home to them all. 

So into each loyal soul there shines a ray from the divine Sun and Soulof the universe. Each, according to his individual capacity, receives ofthe fullness of Him that filleth all in all. 

To some minds the beauty of nature brings a deep and inspiring sense ofdivinity. As one who has this sensibility looks on the hills and woodsflushing in the tender radiance of autumn, there comes to him perhaps noarticulate and conscious thought. He may not name the name of God, orthink it. But the soul is uplifted. There flows in upon it some highserenity, some mysterious sense of ineffable good. If from such a sceneone returns to life's activities in braver, truer, and gentler mood, there has been to him a divine revelation. 

Some men are of a metaphysical turn of mind, and not only their thoughtsbut all their emotional experience, all that directs their purpose andanimates their feeling, is cast in the mould of highly abstract ideas. They express themselves in phrases which to most people seem cold ormeaningless, --an empty substitute for the warmth of religious life. Butto the thinker himself these phrases stand for profound realities. Itmay be that words which have to other ears the dryness of a mathematicalformula are to him the expression of moral purpose and sacred trust. Such an one may say: "I do not recognize a personal God, I do not knowthat I shall have any personal immortality; but I believe in the moralorder of the universe and seek to conform to it. I fearlessly trust mydestiny here and hereafter. " Perhaps on most of his hearers the wordsfall coldly; but if they see that the speaker's life bears fruit ofgoodness and heroism and service, they may be sure that, though in alanguage strange to them, God has spoken to his soul. 

There are a great many people, and some of the very best of people, whonever get any vivid or distinct apprehension of realities above thesphere of their personal activity. Often they conform to the usages andthe language of a religious faith in which they have been educated, and, very likely, feel some self-reproach that they know so little of thespiritual experiences which others speak of. There are men, too, whofrankly say, "I don't know much about God; I can't get hold of what folkscall religion; but I try to do my work honestly, and I want to help otherpeople just as much as I can. " Some of the most genuine religion in theworld exists in people who are almost unconscious that they have anyreligion. The simple desire to do right, and the constant readiness to"lend a hand, "--that is the revelation which such souls receive. 

Another very large class--a class which once included most of thedistinctively religious world--crave and find the warmth of a personalrelation with Christ as the only satisfying thing. It is one of thegreat and wonderful facts of human history, this personal devotion ofunnumbered souls throughout the ages to Jesus. In its intensest form itis affection to a living personality. Any attempt to explain it as anappreciation of beneficent influences of which Jesus was the historicaloriginator, or as the reproduction of a temper and purpose resemblingthat which was in Jesus, fails to satisfy those in whom love to Christ isthe ruling sentiment. It is a person, and a living person, that theylove. One may decline to accept the theories which are wont to accompanythe sentiment; one may not believe that Jesus was God, nor that personallove for him can be required as an essential part of religion; and, atthe same time, one may believe that when a noble soul passes from earth, it rises into yet nobler existence, and may be truly apprehended andprofoundly loved by those who are here. Certainly we see this: that tomany men and women the strongest and holiest sentiment of life isaffection for a personal embodiment of goodness and love, who once walkedin Galilee and Jerusalem, existing now in the invisible realm, sympathizing with all human aspiration, pitiful to all human weakness andsorrow, inspiring to all effort and hope and trust. That sentiment issurely a blessed revelation to those in whom it exists, --the warm andliving symbol of an eternal reality. 

To many, the disclosure of God is made in some way especially personal tothemselves. Very often some human friend is the best manifestation andassurance of divinity. Our faith leans on the faith of the best and mostloving person we have known. Sometimes the heart's natural language is"My father's God, " "my mother's God. " With some, the life beyond deathfirst becomes real to consciousness when the heart's treasure has beentaken there. Sometimes, in looking upon one's own life, one becomesdeeply conscious of the higher guidance that has led it. There are hoursin which past sorrows shine out as heavenly messengers of good. Theredawns upon us a sense of the blessedness that life has held; all itshighest experiences become instinct with the suggestion of a celestialmeaning that we as yet but half apprehend. We escape for the moment fromthe thralldom of self; personal happiness merges in something higher; weare glad and still in the sense of a divine Will working in us and in allthings. In such hours the soul says, "_My_ God. "

There is infinite variety of personal experience; "so many kinds ofvoices in the world, and none of them without signification. " One manhas been deep in drunkenness and debauchery, he has grown reckless andhopeless; but through some friendly voice there reaches him an impulse toa new and successful effort; there comes in upon him the sense of adivine love; a mighty forgiving and restoring force seems to seize himand draw him back to life. In his religion thereafter there may be theglowing emotion of one who has been forgiven much and loves much. Another man walks always in steady allegiance to conscience and right, and never has any rapturous emotions; is not he, too, the child of God?We dislike the prodigal's elder brother for his jealousy; but hisfather's word to him, despite that touch of unworthiness, was: "Son, thouart ever with me, and all that I have is thine. "

One whose life flows with smooth current may find the significance ofreligion in duty rather than in trust. To such a one God may appear asan ideal, inspiring conduct, but not as a power, controlling events. Butupon him, it may be, there breaks some great emergency of life and death;the heart cries out like a child waking frightened in the night, andthere answers it, from some depth far below its fear, a voice that says"Peace!" In that hour the soul finds its father. Thereafter passingdoubts and fears can but ruffle the surface for a moment. 

In our northern winter, how perfectly the trees blend with the sceneabout them! They seem wholly a part of winter's grand but lifelessworld, and with what beauty do they crown that world, --the columnartrunks, the mighty grip of the roots upon the firm earth, the archingsweep of stalwart boughs, the delicate tracery against the sky! Theyanswer to the season's mood, bending in patient grace beneath a load ofsnow, casing themselves in jewels, or springing up again in slenderstrength; silent, except when the deep voice of the wind speaks throughthem. Their shadows soften the sunlight glittering on the snow, or weavea black fretwork when the cold moon shines. Yet vital in their heartsthe trees hold summer's secret. A little while, and they will be clothedin the leafy glory of June. The robin and catbird and oriole will singhidden among their branches. Of that summer season the trees will be thedelight and crown, that now stand like true children of winter. Theystand now so strong and true because of that hidden life within themwhich summer will fully disclose. It is because it is alive that thetrunk bends to the storm but does not break, and the twigs hold up theirload of snow. So, there are lives that so fit themselves to this worldin which they stand that they become its finest part. Their sympathyfinds out the secret needs and possibilities of those about them. Theirinsight discerns the work which society most needs, and their fidelityaccomplishes that part of the work which falls to them. Their naturesstand open to all the glad influences of earth; their hearts rejoice withthem that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep. They make full proofof those experiences in which fortitude and silent endurance are the onlyresource. Sometimes they are happy, and sometimes they are sad; butalways other people are happier because of them. They are the childrenof a better country. For them the soul's full summer waits. Knowingthem, we do indeed know something of God and the eternal life. 

There is freedom to be achieved from the pettiness of our lives. Theynever, perhaps, look so pitiful as when they seem made up altogether oflittle, necessary details. Our planting and reaping, building andbuying, all the half-mechanical operations that absorb our thought andtime, seem sometimes little better than the bustle of a colony of ants. When we look down upon it all from the height of some quiet, meditativehour, are we not at times oppressed with a sense of its triviality andworthlessness? Trivial and worthless it is, except as amidst it all weare working out something higher. But to a man whose heart is set onnoble ends; one whose great aim is, not to get his bread and butter, butto be a man; one who wants, not just to make a profit out of hisneighbors, but to serve them and help them, these details are no moretrivial or degrading than the rough dress and homely tools of a sculptorare unworthy of the marble beauty that is growing under his hands. Thehigh purpose consecrates and transfigures all, the want of purposedegrades all. I have stood in Switzerland upon the Gorner Grat, lookingupon the grandest scene in Europe. On every side a circle of toweringheights look down; against the sky rise dazzling snowy summits, celestially pure, celestially tender; the Matterhorn frowns in awfulmajesty; vast ice-rivers sweep down toward the valley in solemn, silentmarch. If there be upon earth a spot that of itself has power to hushthe soul with noblest emotion, it should be that. Yet there I have seena company of travelers spend their half-hour in senseless gabble andbanter and the laughter of fools. Amid the squalid surroundings of a NewYork tenement-house, I have seen a poor Irish woman living with suchfortitude and faith and generosity that it was a comfort and inspirationto meet her. That brave soul ennobled its mean surroundings with a glorywhich not the Alps and the sky could flash in upon a heart made blind anddull by ignoble thoughts. 

If there dwells in us the spirit of life we shall be freed from thebondage of doubt. On how many earnest and aspiring lives does doubtthrow its chill shadow! The world is crossing the flood that divides theold form of faith from the new. The rising water strikes cold to many aheart. Here and there the waves sweep men off from all moral footing. Iknow not that for the resolute and thoughtful there is any escape fromsome suffering in the transition. Could we be always sure that it isonly a transition, --could we know always that a better country lieswaiting us, --all might be easily borne. The suffering we may notdecline; but safety, utter safety, we may keep through all. _Life_ isalways possible to us. Fidelity, purity, self-sacrifice, --these mayalways be ours. Are we baffled in our search for a divine plan in theuniverse? Let us look nearer home; can we not find the clew to a divineplan in our own lives? Yes, there need never fail to us an immediatetoken of divinity. There is always, at the lowest, a duty to be done. There is always, at the very lowest, a burden to be bravely borne. Thereis always some one to be helped. Do we say, But this does not comfortme, does not reassure me? Then let it guide me! It is not essentialthat I should be always in the sunshine. It is only essential that insunshine or in darkness my steering should be true. And I am neverwithout a compass while I see that there is for me a higher and a lower, a right and a wrong, to choose between. 

Does any sense of bondage weigh you down? Disappointment, it maybe, --failure, life's fair promise blighted. It may be the bitter slaveryof evil habit. It may be a dull and apathetic way of life, stirred witha vague yearning toward higher possibilities. It may be the darkness ofa lost faith. It may be a bereavement that has emptied life. Whateverit be, the angel of deliverance stands beside you. He is perhaps in veryhumble garb, unsuspected of you. Some lowly duty awaits you. Somesaddened life, unnoticed by your side, asks you to cheer it. Whateveropportunity of duty or of service lies in the path before you is God'sown messenger. Meet it like the messenger of a king! So meet everyduty, every opportunity. Find them, make them, for yourself. Live nolonger in solitude but in brotherhood. So shall the very spirit of Goddwell in you; so in his service shall you find perfect freedom. 

The end of February is near, and not a hint or whisper of spring doesNature give us yet. We are wont to have earlier than this a few days atleast that seem to start the sap in the trees and the blood in the veins, when the first bluebird is heard, and we get one swift, delicious glimpseof the good time coming. But this year the cold only takes a sharperclutch. At its average, our northern winter has a fierce and almostmerciless persistence. Those first days of spring are hardly more thanthe taste of freedom with which the cat tantalizes the mouse. It is thislingering close of winter that is hard to bear. The supplies begin togive out. The wood-pile that stood so high when the first snow came isgetting lowered to very near the ground. The poor man's little hoard, that was to bridge him over till the season of good work, is perilouslyshrunken. Vitality, too, begins to run low. The body pines for theout-door life from which it has too long been shut off. Winter is ahard-fisted churl who does n't give just measure. He drives off themellow and jolly Autumn before its mid-month October is fairly gone. Hebullies Spring so that the poor, gentle-hearted thing has to get almostunder the wing of Summer before she dares take possession of the remnantof her own. The great robber gets almost half the year. The very bears, curled up for their long nap, must in these days wake sometimes with anuneasy shiver and wonder whether their stock of fat will hold out. 

This last and worst onset of winter may stand for those experiences thatcome as the sharpest test of the stuff that is in men. The pressure ofadversity goes on and on, until we say it has reached the last point ofendurance, and then another turn is given to the screw! For three longdays the battle has raged around the heights of Gettysburg, and each sideseems to have done its utmost, when the word is given for Pickett'sdivision in solid column to throw itself straight against Cemetery Hill, that becomes a volcano to meet it. Those are the times that mark men forthe rest of their lives as heroes. Yet there are finer heroisms thanthis. The very splendor of such an hour, with a nation's fate at stakeand the world looking on, is enough to find out and kindle any spark ofmanhood in a man. With no such inspiration as that, there are in everycommunity men and women who are battling with poverty and adversity andall kinds of trouble with a finer courage than that of the battlefield. They cover an anxious heart with a cheerful face, for the sake of husbandor wife or children who are watching the face. No winter is long enough, no lifetime is long enough, to tire out their fortitude and patience andlove. There are resources in human nature that never are known untilthings are at their hardest. 

So at winter's worst--come it in one form or another--man summons up hiscourage, and though the winter be longer and sharper than he hadthought--though poverty pinches him or trouble weighs upon him--he setshimself stoutly to bear it. Alone and unhelped he seems, perhaps, --themarch of the seasons and the vast order of the universe taking no accountof him; yet manfully he will face whatever comes. Whatever comes? It isthe summer that is coming! As certain as to-day's snow and cold, theseason of all beauty and warmth and delight is on its way! Theapple-blossoms, the wild-flowers, the budding of every twig, thegreenness of the pastures, the rejoicing life of animals and birds andinsects, the sweet airs of May, the sunshine of June, --these, and allvaried loveliness beyond imagination's reach or heart's desire, lie justbefore us. So for every soul that patiently endures an unimagined summerwaits. Our patient endurance seems to us now a great matter, and indeedif we have it not we are little worth; but when the more genial seasoncomes--when there fully reveals itself to us that high meaning of ourlives and that divine destiny of which now we catch but a glimpse--weshall say, not "How well we endured the winter, " but "How glorious isGod's summer!"

Take the case of a man who, having engaged in the active business oflife, feeling himself amply capable of it and longing for it, findshimself by force of circumstances kept out of work. Perhaps he has hisliving to earn, perhaps he has a wife and children to support, and he canget nothing to do. Well, that is about as hard a place as a man can becalled to stand in. Idleness in itself is hard. It is a burden even tothose who have wealth and all the luxuries and amusements that can bedevised to while away their leisure. It is the very nature of a man whois good for anything to _do_. Idleness is as unnatural and trying to themind as sickness is to the body. But to see those you love in need, tosee them threatened with suffering, to know that you could amply providefor them if you had a chance, and not to find a chance, --what is so hardas that?

It is so hard, my friend, that, if you can bear it and not be conqueredby it, you are a hero. If under that load you can keep your patience andyour temper and your courage, you have won a victory such as makes lifeworth living. Just as in battle it is the post of danger that is mosthonorable, so always the hard place is the place of honor. "But, " yousay perhaps, "I don't care about being a hero; I want to see my wife andchildren taken care of. " That is the best of all reasons for keeping upheart. When a good wife sees her husband unfortunate and out of work, what is it that she most dreads? Not that they will starve, --starvationseldom happens in this country. Not that they will be poor, though ofthat she may be somewhat afraid. Her greatest fear is lest her husbandshould get discouraged and down-hearted; should take to drink, perhaps;at any rate, should become so despondent and embittered that the lightshall go out of their lives and their children's. Now it is his businessnot to let that happen. It is his part to keep up for her sake aresolute heart and a cheerful face. And if she is a true woman, howgladly will she do the same for him! Out of just such circumstancesthere come two opposite results, according as people meet them. Therecomes failure of effort and resolution, then despondency, thenrecklessness, drunkenness perhaps, and at last ruin, the break-up ofcharacter, the destruction of the children's prospects, or sometimessuicide. When a man, under pressure of such trouble, really gives up, even for an hour, the effort to be brave and make the best of things, hetakes a step on a road at the end of which is suicide. _That_ is theconsummate act of cowardice; that is the last logical result of refusingto face and conquer our troubles. Heaven have mercy on the man who seeksin death a refuge, and so multiplies the suffering of those he leavesbehind! And at the point where begins the wretched road of despondency, which if followed out leads to this or some other ruin, there branchesanother road--manly endurance of the worst, courage which is strongbecause it is loving, --a road which leads to heights beyond our sight. To bear trouble together, and for each other's sake to rise aboveit, --what knits hearts together like that?

Take, again, the case of a man who is by circumstances shut off from workthat he could do and longs to do for the large benefit of mankind, --theman who has a gift of teaching and is not allowed to teach, or who hasthe statesman's quality and finds no place in public affairs, or who, with any large executive and beneficent faculty, finds himself denied allopportunity of exercising it. For a faculty to be repressed is hard justin proportion as its quality is noble. A caged canary is hardly apainful sight, but a caged eagle stirs one with regret. And the worldhas such need of all noble talent; such exigent and hungry need of thetrue teacher, statesman, seer, --of the word of inspiration and the act ofleadership! How shall one who feels in him the power and sees the need;who grasps in his hand the keen sickle, yet is held back, while beforehis eyes the fields are white with the harvest which threatens, unreaped, to perish, --how shall he reconcile himself to his lot? How escape thethought that he and all mankind are but playthings in the grasp of crueland ironic fate?

What, then, does the world most need of us? Is it wisdom, orstatesmanship, or executive power? These things it greatly needs. Butmost of all it needs character. Most of all it needs that quality ofpersonality which is moulded by the interplay of loyal will with theshifting course of outward event. For our wisest thoughts the world canvery well wait, or do without them altogether; almost certainly some oneelse has thought them and said them. Our executive power to be added tothe world's work, --it is but a fly's strength contributed to asteam-engine. One thing the universe asks of us, which no one else cangive, --_ourselves_; our highest and fullest self. It is not what we doexternally, but what we are, that measures our worth. The real andlasting value of a word or an act depends largely on the weight ofcharacter behind it. And in character no higher effect is wrought outthan that which comes through endurance and heroic passivity. To standlong before closed doors of opportunity and keep serene; to see workwaiting, see others working, and in patience and self-control to bideone's time, --that is more than to do any work; it is to be a man. Thetime comes when manhood finds itself to be power. 

A brook goes singing on its way, marking its course through forest andfield with a track of beauty and freshened life. Men throw a dam acrossits path, and through many a long day its course is stopped and itswaters silently accumulate. And the brook says, "Alas for my lostfreedom and service! Alas for the rush and sparkle and joy of mycascades! Alas for the parched meadows, the unwatered ferns and mosses!"But the day comes when with a cataract leap it crosses its barrier;meadow and mosses and ferns revive; and now the stored power of thestream is turning great mills and grinding bread for men. 

Washington rode as a subordinate in Braddock's army; ignorance commandedand knowledge looked on powerless until the mischief was done. Twentyyears of quiet follow; great events are impending, eloquent men arerousing and leading; what is there for this silent Virginian? tillsuddenly he finds himself the chief commander. Then comes waiting towhich all before was easy; holding away from the stronger enemy, holdingsteady under the impatience and the doubts of friends; for one boldstroke, a year of waiting and watching; till, at last, victory! And notto Washington victorious at Yorktown do we turn for inspiration so muchas to Washington in the dead of winter at Valley Forge. 

There are a great many women whose capacities and desires seem muchbeyond their opportunities. This is especially true of our New England, who stimulates the brains of her children, and consigns many of herdaughters to a secluded life with small scope for action. There are manywomen who, being unmarried, or being married and childless, or left bythe flight of the young birds to brood an empty nest, have not the fullnatural outlet of a woman's activities and affections, and sufferconsciously or unconsciously from a partial emptiness and idleness ofwhat is best in them. The burden upon such lives is that of isolation. Isolation may be in the midst of a crowd as well as in solitude; it iswhen the heart is not filled that we are truly alone. And this realsolitude, this isolation of the affections from their proper objects, issomething so bad, so against the law of our nature, that, broadlyspeaking, it is a matter not so much for endurance as for speedy gettingrid of. Do you feel yourself alone and empty-hearted? Then you havenecessity indeed for fortitude and brave endurance, but above all andbefore all you are to get out of your solitude. You cannot command foryourself the love you would gladly receive; it is not in our power to dothat; but that noble love which is not asking but giving, --that you canalways have. 

Wherever your life touches another life, there you have opportunity. Thefinest, the most delicate, the most irresistible force lies in the mutualtouch of human lives. To mix with men and women in the ordinary forms ofsocial intercourse becomes a sacred function when one carries into it thetrue spirit. To give a close, sympathetic attention to every human beingwe touch; to try to get some sense of how he feels, what he is, what heneeds; to make in some degree his interest our own, --that disposition andhabit would deliver any one of us from isolation or emptiness. There isbut one sight more beautiful than the mother of a family ministeringhappiness and sunshine to them all; and that is a woman who, having nofamily of her own, finds her life in giving cheer and comfort to all whomshe reaches, and makes a home atmosphere wherever she goes. Though shehave not the joy of wife and mother, she has that which is most sacred inwifehood and motherhood. She shares the blessedness of that highest lifethe earth has seen, of him who, having no home nor where to lay his head, brought into other homes a new happiness, and who spoke the transformingword, "It is more blessed to give than to receive. "

Take, again, the case of an invalid, who is for a long period shut out byillness or weakness from all ordinary activities. There are many such towhom pain and physical endurance are less trying than the feeling ofbeing excluded from use and service, and having their moral life stuntedor disordered by this stoppage of the natural play of the faculties. There are kinds of illness, especially those of the nervous system, whichseem to invade the seat of the will and soul itself, to irritate thetemper and sap the resolve and foster a self-centring egotism, by a powerthat is literally irresistible. Before such experiences as this onethought rises: it is part of mankind's business to lessen, and so far aspossible to extirpate, these maladies. The individual sufferer must meetas best he can the conditions thrust upon him, but to prevent suchconditions from arising is the lesson for the rest of us. We are onlybeginning to appreciate how largely the salvation of mankind must beworked out through physical means. The pestilences, the transmitteddiseases, the insanities, the nervous disorders, bred of violatedlaw, --all these and the like curses, which not merely destroy human lifebut degrade it, are to be fought and extirpated. We must secure forsoul-life some fair room and chance as against these pests and tyrants. Here lies the noblest work of science; here, in prevention rather than incure, lies the best field of that unsurpassed profession, thephysician's. And, too, in this preventive work each man must learn to behis own physician, and minister to himself. 

But what, meantime, is our disabled and secluded invalid to do? He islike a man set to fight a battle with one arm tied behind him. Othersmay pity, but for him his disablement must be a motive to greaterexertion; he must supply by courage and skill the place of the lackingstrength. It is what man can do under limitations and disabilities thatshows his high-water mark of achievement. Any one can be cheerful inperfect health, but to be cheerful under weakness and pain, --_that_ isworth trying for! To be considerate and unselfish, when one is at easeand has all he wants, does not cost much; but to take thought for othersand to spare them, and to be sympathetic with their joys and troubles, when pain forces you to be self-conscious, and long endurance tempts youto become self-centred, --well, if you can do that, you are good forsomething. If you can do that, have no fear that you are useless. Suchfruit is rare enough to be precious. The lessons taught from many asick-bed of bravery and gentleness and love, --we get no other teaching sogood as that. There is many a family where it is the one who can do theleast who does the most, --where it is the invalid's room from which goesout the strongest influence of patience and sweet courage and that divinequality which transforms trouble. 

In one sick-room in a foreign land, for years a home-loving woman hasbeen an exile; a woman of active and eager disposition, with large, executive capacity and ripe experience, shut up almost to idleness; awoman of large benevolence, who had entered on work of peculiarexcellence and attractiveness, cut off from all such activities. This, with frequent pain, with fluctuation of hope and discouragement as to thefuture; and yet there is about her an atmosphere as serene as the Alpineheights that look down upon her, as cheerful as the sunny Alpine pastureswith their tinkle of sheep-bell and hum of mountain bee. Her constantthought goes out to distant friends and brings them near; her closeattention follows the march of the world's great interests, the fortunesof England and Russia and America, the course of freedom and reform; asense of nature's beauty, trained to fineness through years of enforcedquietude, brings exquisite ministrations; she shares the lives of thelittle circle of friends about her; heart and mind are at rest in thepeace of God. Patience has had her perfect work. 

Up, friend! leave your law case, your sermon, your accounts, and come outfor an hour into this delicious March day, bracing as winter and sweet asspring. The new life of the year is stirring in the trees whose topsbegin to redden, and in the brown pastures where watchful eyes canalready see the green. The joy of the season is singing in a millionbluebirds' and robins' throats; the cocks crow gayly; the caw of the bigblack crow flapping overhead with ragged wing has a cheery tone. Allliving creatures feel the tingle and throb of the great tide of life thatsweeps in with the returning sun. See yonder two dogs, how they frolic, how they crouch and wheel and charge and roll each other over and pretendto bite. "Pure mongrels, " both of them, and as happy as if they were themost aristocratic of Irish setters! See near by the tree full of flowersthat has lasted the winter through. That is a tulip-tree, holding up itsthousand delicate ghostly cups. Its grand trunk rises straight andunbroken full thirty feet, then branches in symmetry, and holds up as ifto catch the sunshine and the rain its fairy goblets. And here is an oakthat has not yet let go its grip on last year's dead leaves. How sharplythe snow rattled on them, as if clashing on the iron which naturalistssay the sturdy tree holds in its blood! Who ever sees these last oakleaves fall? And who knows where this dry, dead grass vanishes when thegreen blades fill all its room? Look at the horse-chestnut; already itsbuds are shiny. It must wait a good while before their

 "little hands unfold, Softer 'n a baby's be at three days old. "

Sharp whistles the wind to-day, but it is the breath of life that itbreathes into us. It comes down from yonder hills where the snow isshining yet. Grandly on the horizon lies Mount Tom, like a crouchinglion, guardian over the fair valley. Where the mountain line breaks, between him and his twin sentinel, Holyoke, we know that the broadConnecticut sweeps past Hockanum. The glorious river, --what an unfailingjoy it is to the eye as it curves and winds on its leisurely, steadfastcourse to the sea! Here at our feet is another river, a little brookflowing in clear stream over the roadside sand, born of the lastsnow-drift and living till the sun drinks it up. And beside it are halfa dozen happy boys, paddling with their bare feet, making mud dams, scraping new channels and short cuts for the stream. 

How black is the still water of this pond, smooth as a steel mirror! whatperfect pictures it gives back of its woody and snow-touched banks! Thewoods above are solemn as that grandest work of man, an Old Worldcathedral, and free as only the Lord's own works are free, with the musicof the wind in the great pine-tops; the gracious, infinite sky revealingitself through their tracery; the columnar trunks swaying now like aship's masts. How at evening the setting sun glows through their blackshafts; how ethereal the light that then fills the spaces of the wood;how the stars look down through the branches in the living stillness ofthe night! A few steps, and below us in the hollow we see the city, allits commonplaceness charmed away, the vulgar noises of the streetsblended in a soft murmur. Not one human life moves in those streets, commonplace and vulgar though it may seem, but has its own charm andbeauty, if we could find the right view-point, or if our sight went deepenough. 

Across a plowed field darts in swift zigzag a gleam of blue; then, perched on a fence-rail, sends a thrilling song. The bluebird is thetrue voice of early spring, as is the bobolink of later spring. Bobolinks and apple-blossoms come together in the prodigal time of May. Our Northern spring is the most arrant of coquettes, --the most deliciousin allurement, the swiftest in retreat. One day she seems to pour herwhole heart out to us, and we think she is ours once and for all; nextday she pelts us with sleet; buffets, freezes us; she--nay, she is gone, and we never shall see her again; it is the sourest shrew in the wholesisterhood of the year that has come in her stead! But the true loverthinks not so. He knows her woman's heart, --coying it a little, holdingback her treasure till she sees if her worshiper be faithful, to pour itout all unstinted at the last, when May's perfect bridal day shall usherin the full and fruitful marriage blessing of the year. 

On this June morning, place yourself here, under the shade of this noble, wide-spreading apple-tree on a garden lawn. Last night the earth waswashed by showers, and a thunder-storm cleared the air. This morning afresh northwest wind breaks the clouds, and opens pure, sweet depths ofsky. Around us the flowers of early summer are blooming. Over the grasstrip the young birds, mottle-breasted robins and bluebirds; the treesring with frequent song; from the barnyard comes cheery cackle and cluck, and the chickens stray forth to investigate the secrets and riches of theworld. A catbird pours out an opera in which he takes all the parts insuccession, and the voice of the wind rises and falls in mysterious, delicious cadence. 

"Oil and wine:" the oil poured on the wounds to soothe and heal, the winedrunk to revive and hearten with cordial life. The Hebrew symbolism hasits roots in strong material soil: its imagery is vigorous andruddy, --"wine of gladness, " "oil of joy, " "wine that maketh glad theheart of man, and oil to make his face to shine, and bread whichstrengtheneth man's heart. " A modern psalmist might add, "and coffeewhich uplifts his spirit, and tobacco which soothes his cares. "

Jesus chose, as the two symbols by which he would be remembered, breadand wine. Bread stands for nourishment and substantial support, wine forexhilaration and joy. When his disciples were full of the sorrow ofapproaching parting, he showed them that the loss was only in semblance:the reality was to be a higher energy, a purer joy, --bread to eat, wineto drink, --not death, but life. The sorrow attendant on death and lossis to be esteemed but the pangs that usher in life. "A woman when she isin travail hath sorrow, because her hour is come; but as soon as she isdelivered of the child, she remembereth no more the anguish, for joy thata man is born into the world. "

"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preachthe gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the broken-hearted, topreach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year ofthe Lord. " What a key-note is that, --how jubilant, tender, strong!

As the earth revolving passes alternately into light and shadow, so humanlife in its divine appointment moves by turns through sorrow and throughjoy. Each has its service for the soul, as for the earth has day andnight each its ministry and message. Of pain come hardihood and strengthand sympathy. What a sapless, fibreless thing is a man untrained byendurance and untaught by suffering! How flaccid in muscle, how narrowin intelligence, how shallow in affection!

Yet, as to an all-beholding eye the sun pours light through all theplanetary spaces, and the night, which to us on the world's darkened sideseems all-enfolding, is in truth but a shadowy fleck in the vastsun-steeped sphere: so, of the soul's universe, the native, all-pervasiveelement is conscious good. Gladness is man's proper atmosphere. It isby the impulse of his deepest nature that he seeks joy, it is by theforce of spiritual gravitation that he is drawn to it. But two hardlessons await him. One is, that to reach that goal he must trust himselfto a higher Power, his own effort and purpose being to obey that Power. The other is, that the goal is not for one alone, but for all; and he canreach it only as he shares the common lot, making himself partner in thevicissitudes of his comrades, rejoicing with them that rejoice andweeping with them that weep. On our long voyage the stars by which westeer must be Duty and Love. The stars guide us, the winds and currentsbear us, to the port of perfect good. The instinct of our journey's endwe call Hope; the instinct by which we cleave to our true course, evenwhen wholly doubtful of its end, and though false lights beckon usalluringly, --that instinct we call Faith. 

Open your eyes upon the world on such a morning as this. Forget your owncares long enough to really see, but for a moment, yonder spray of roseswaving in the breeze. Watch the play of light and shade in theflickering leaves overhead. Listen to the chorus of voices from bird, insect, and wind. The wine of gladness! Nature pours it in a sparklingflood, unceasing by day and night, for every one who will drink. 

Nature pours the wine of gladness, but only from the mingling of humanhearts comes the oil of tenderness. From sorrow it gets its sacredfragrance, from mutual service it draws its healing power, from thebitterness of parting it wins the sweetness of an inexpressible hope. 

It was under the stroke of a great bereavement, the death of his child, that Emerson, in the "Threnody, " gave utterance to highest consolationsoaring out of sorrow's darkness. It was under the shadow of that lossthat he heard the voice, --

 "Saying, What is excellent, As God lives, is permanent; Hearts are dust, hearts' loves remain, Heart's love will meet thee again. "

It is the same voice that speaks through all the ages. It speaks throughIsaiah, "to give beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, thegarment of praise for the spirit of heaviness. " It speaks in Paul, whenin one sentence he gives the relation with God and his fellows into whichman may come when out of darkness is born light. "Blessed be God, eventhe Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, and the Godof all comfort; who comforteth us in all our tribulation, that we may beable to comfort them which are in any trouble by the comfort wherewith weourselves are comforted of God. "

Where, asks the stricken heart, shall I find the God of comfort? Oheart, only God himself shall answer you! But know this, that the veryend and purpose of grief is that it shall be comforted. Comfort? Theword has no meaning except to those who have mourned; was never stampedwith its sacred significance except by those who had been through thedeep waters of grief. "As one whom his mother comforteth, so will Icomfort you. " A man child, a woman child, He trains you to fullness ofstature, to greatness of experience, to capacity for noble joy, forheart-sufficing love. To greatness and to joy he calls us, and draws usslowly by the changing years. The cross is the symbol of a passingexperience. The end, the attainment, is figured to us by that face ofNature which is the face of God, with the strength of the mountains, thegladness of the sunlight, the freedom of the sky, the infinitude of theocean. 

The ripe days of early autumn open their best joys only to the sturdywalker, who turns his back on the streets to seek the country roads, andleaves the roads behind him to explore the forest nooks, the ravines, andthe sheltered meadows, hidden deftly away from the incurious traveler, and keeping a wild sweetness for him who finds them out for himself. Ifone is in good tune, he may get the finest flavor of such a walk bytaking it alone, or with only rarely perfect companionship. The idealcompanion is one who can fully enjoy, who will help you to glimpsesthrough another pair of eyes, and who will never obtrude inopportunelybetween yourself and nature. If a satisfactory human comrade be not athand, one may find these qualities in no ordinary degree in--a good dog. But then to appreciate them one must be a true dog-lover, a gift whichis, alas! denied to some otherwise exemplary and worthy people. 

What does the dog think of it all? He has his own keen pleasures. Hisnose is an organ of intelligence and enjoyment which his master does notpossess. He explores woodchuck holes; he tracks real or imaginarysquirrels; one barks and scolds at him from a high limb, and throws himinto a delicious fever of excitement. As Fox said the greatest pleasurein life was to win at cards, and the next greatest to lose at cards, soapparently the dog finds even an unsuccessful chase to be the second bestjoy he knows. Look at him, tense and motionless with excitement, as hewatches the noisy chatterer overhead! No doubt the squirrel will brag toall his acquaintances of how he openly defied and triumphed over his hugeenemy. 

A chestnut bough swings low, and with hospitable hand proffers ahalf-open burr, out of which shine the glossy brown nuts. Sweet is thetaste of the nuts. Sweet is the crisp red apple into which we bite, andwith just a hint of the flavor of stolen fruit. 

What audacious pen will try to reproduce or even dryly catalogue theglories poured out for eye and ear, for heart and brain, upon a brightand cool September day? The deep-glowing sumacs, the asters purple andwhite mixed with flaming goldenrod, in a splendid audacity of color suchas only One artist dare venture on; the occasional dash of scarlet upon amaple, a first wave of the great tide that is sweeping up to cover thewhole north country; the masses of yet unbroken green left neither dimmednor dusty by the generous, moist summer; the oaks that will long holdtheir green flag in unchanging tint, as if "no surrender" were written onit, and then, last of all the trees, change to a hue of matchless depthand richness, like the life-blood of a noble heart that shows its fullintensity only just before death's translation falls upon it; theseparate tint of each leaf and vine, "good after its kind;" the softwhiteness of the everlastings in the hill-pastures; the reaped buckwheatfields heaped with their sheaves, stubble and sheaves alike drenched in afine wine of color; the solemn interior of the woods, with the latesunlight touching the shafts of the pines; the partridge-berry and thewhite mushroom growing beneath, as in a cathedral one sees bright-facedchildren kneeling to say their prayers at the foot of the solemn pillars;the masses of light and of shadow--one cannot say which is thetenderer--lying on the cool meadows as evening draws on; the voice ofunseen waters, the voice of the wind in the pines. 

And so, with song, with autumn colors, with sunset lights, the Mothercalls her children home.