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UNIV. ‘QF we 311903 N
THE
GREATNESS OP RELIGION
ADDRESS BY
THE REV. JOHN HENRY BARROWS, D.D.
Reprinted from THE QUARTERLY CALENDAR.
THE GREA TNE S 8
OF RELIGION *
ADDRESS BY
THE REV. JOHN HENRY BARROWS, D.D.
PROFESSORIAL LECTURER ON COMPARATIVE RELIGION,
THE UNIVERSITY or Crucaeo.
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN:
The address on the Greatness of Religion which I
offer today is introductory to the ﬁrst course of lec-
tures which I hope to deliver next April, on the Rela-
tions of Christianity to the other Historic Faiths. It
is an agreeable duty for me, at this time, to thank the
President and his associates for the kindness with
which I have been welcomed to the University. It is
also a delightful privilege to honor immediately the
name of the modest, generous, and wise-hearted Chris-
tian woman who has endowed this lectureship, and
who is to build the Oriental Museum for the depart-
ments of Comparative Religion and of Semitic and
kindred studies,-—Mrs. Caroline F. Haskell. It is ex-
pected that the Haskell Lectures will be published,
and, after the voice of the ﬁrst lecturer has ceased, it
may be more than probable that the volumes which
bear her name will rank with the Bampton, Gifford,
Hibbert, and Bohlen Lectures in the history of reli-
gious science and Christian apology. Already her
gifts are mentioned with gratitude in England, Hol-
land, and France,in Japan and India. Mr. Mozoom-
dar, referring to her “magniﬁcent endowment” of this
lectureship, writes, “How I wish something of the
sort could be done in India, but there is no one to lay
the foundation.” May not some friend of the Univer-
sity be moved to establish in Calcutta, the chief cen-
tre of college training in the Asiatic world, a lecture-
ship which shall carry on the good work of enlighten-
ment and fraternity begun by the recent Parliament
of Religions? This would be University Extension in
the widest sense.
Our university has already entered the main reli-
gious movement of our times by quickening a fruitful
interest in the study of the Scriptures. It has wel-
comed the light which comparative religion and
philology are throwing over the origin and develop-
ment of the Old Testament literature. The history of
Israel is not to be understood apart from Egypt, the
tribes of Canaan, and the empires of the Tigris and
Euphrates.
the highest intellectual pursuits is a hopeful sign of
the day. We cannot say of our generation, as Dean
Stanley complained of his, that ‘fit is plunged either
in dogmatism or agnosticism.” The spirit of a large
and eager faith is in the air we breathe, and the words
which the Emperor Charles the Fifth inscribed upon
his helmet, plus ultra, all learning, sacred learning
not excepted, bears upon its brow today.
This lectureship is the ﬁrst academic fruitage of
the recent Congress of the World’s Faiths. Dr. Ellin-
wood, the President of the American Society of Com-
parative Religion, and a secretary of one of our foreign
missionary boards, has written that “the Parliament
of Religions has come to stay.” By this he means
that these world-wide comparisons must continue.
Indeed the various faiths are on trial before tribunals,
human and divine. As Dr. Edward Braislin, of Brook—
lyn, has said, “\Ve have been weighing the heathen
in theological scales, while God has been weighing us
in ethical.” The progress of mankindzis bringing the
nations toward unity, and whatever withstands the
forces which, working through ages, culminated in the
Conference of the VVorld’s Religions, is ﬁghting the
intellectual and spiritual movements which make the
Gulf Stream of history. Many have felt that a tem-
porary forensic victory for some type of Christianity
is comparatively insigniﬁcant, matched with a sublime
setting forth of the unities of mankind. In his “So-
cial Evolution ”.Mr. Benjamin Kidd argues that altru-
istic feeling rather than intellect is the main force in
human progress. Such afeeling is also back of the hu-
maner attitude which Christian men are assuming to-
r .i
an e.
a.“ ‘fv ‘("13 I ' F.)
a a a
*Delivered in the University Quadrangle, October 1, 1894.
z.- "UT' .1 l1" ,‘
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J‘ at.
The wide and augmenting zeal for one of .
9
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*1.’
C‘.
u
2 THE QUARTERLY CALENDAR.
_ 1 and (Lira
ward other systems, and whatever develops the spirit
of a common fraternity may be as eﬁ'icient a help to
the practice of religion as the publication of the Sacred
Books of the East has been to the study of it.
I speak to those who believe that hierology or
sacred science should keep abreast of the times. This
university was founded with a Christian purpose, its
charter,—-freedom to all research, its faith,—that
the divine is everywhere and that no truth clashes
with other truth. It welcomes whatever facts have
been discovered by the pioneer students in Compara~
tive theology, although it may not receive their phi-
losophic theories. We all believe that Christian men
ought to be alert in exploring every department of
knowledge, that the Spirit of God is back of the ma-
terial creation, that he is the energy in all the evolu-
tions of the past, that he is present with the human
spirit today. We believe that the scientific knowledge
which omits the science of religion leaves out the most
lustrous domain of human thought. We have gone
far beyond the doctrine of absentee Gods and mechan-
ical theories of creation, and reverently accept the
divine immanence, working in every biological law,
active in the lowest forms of life and in the latest evo-
lutions of society. Religious development has not
proceeded along one line only. Environments have
been various and changing, and, in accordance with
phylogenetic laws, we behold in religion, as elsewhere,
multiform evolutions, fossil, extinct faiths, and degen-
erate descendants of higher spiritual types,~—for devel~
opment is not always progress. While science is
inspiring in us a tenderer feeling toward the animal
creation with which we have had so long a history in
7 common, it is also showing that even between types of
worship so far apart as fetichism and Christian theism
there is, as Dr. Fairbairn has said, the common bond
of faith in the supra-sensible.
What study should broaden the bounds of intel-
lectual and moral sympathy like the study of universal
religion? Should it not give to the heart an expan-
sion like that which astronomy has given to the brain?
We, ourselves, are heirs of all that has been; we feel
the touch of hands which became dust when Nineveh
was destroyed, and hear the sound of pathetic voices
that were stilled before the Argive keels grated on the
shores of Ilium. The sceptred spirits of the past
rule us from urns older than the Druidic circles of
Stonehenge, as ancient as the burial places of the
Egyptian dead.
You will not dissent from my conviction that there
is a religious side to all the departments of the Uni-
versity, whether of science, philosophy, or literature,
toiier each of them Oxford's “Do-minus illu-
O 0 ‘
minatio mea” might well be inscribed. All knowl-
edge is a lonely wanderer until it ﬁnds its way into the
shining temple of divine truth. Students of Nature,
however successful their search, must be restless
until they become lovers of God. Comparative reli-
gion may be an elective here, but religion itself is the
bright and wholesome atmosphere of the university
life. By religion I mean a form of belief which fur-
nishes what is deemed a divine sanction for righteous-
ness and love. Like the presence of God, it is every-
where, and is not to be excluded by wilful selfishness
from any region of thought and activity. It is an
inspiring and regulating force, the spirit of love, rev-
erence, hope, and trust, penetrating every moment-
and forbidding the old division of life into secular and
sacred. The laws of political and social economy are
laws of God. Sociology is a department of religion.
The new humanity for which many are pleading so
vigorously, is Christ translated into modern conduct.
The faith which is to save the world not only sends
out missionaries to Canton but it builds social settle-
ments in Chicago. The progress of religion, both in
its conceptions and activities, is from the individual to
the tribe, from the tribe to the nation, from the nation
to the world, from things isolated to things universal.
As the whole current of life is a search for the Inﬁnite
and Divine, as the temple wherein men today discover
their unity is the temple of religion, as the common
bond uniting races is a humanity marked by the same
aptness to recognize God, the same needs, the same
hunger for heavenly things, so the spirit in which our
lives are to be lived, whether within the University or
outside of it, is the spirit of the broadest and truest
human love, reaching out to all the children of our
Father in Heaven.
If our national life is not to pass through the stages
which lead to social and moral decadence, the forces
that will keep it strong and progressive must spring
out of religion. National blight invariably follows
he collapse of faith. “Fading as a leaf” is the
pathetic inscription written on the forehead of national
atheism. “What greater calamity,” wrote Emerson,
“can fall upon a nation than loss of worship? then all
things go to decay.” This university would never
have been built had it not been for the conviction that
it would prove a mighty spiritual force in the life of
the world, a part of that American Christianity whose
task it is to pour a celestial vitality both into cities
where civilization is being divorced from morality and
into the far-01f lands of the decrepit and despairing
East; to overcome by light and love the power of a
socialism which “attempts to solve the problem of suf-
fering without eliminating the factor of sin”; to infuse
THE CONVOCATION ADDRESS. 3
the spirit of Christ into the education of the young at
a time when mental training is often conducted along
false and perilous lines; to show the immeasurable
superiority of the forces of the Bible and the Spirit of
God over the various forms of mere ritualism, and by
making a Christianized manhood to bring forth a
Christianized nation.
But the greatness of religion becomes evident, not
only from what has been said in regard to its essential
importance in human life, but also from a considera-
tion of the magnitude and variety of the phenomena
which it brings before our thought. Like every other
division of knowledge it is becoming more and more
specialized, and the subdivisions are so numerous that
the ablest mind can accurately and successfully explore
only a few regions. His must be a supreme intelli-
gence that is able to survey comprehensively all the
realms, either of physics or geology, literature or
history, philosophy or religion. But heretofore the
opportunities have been meagre in America for the
study of the greatest of themes. Our theological
seminaries must be spoken of with gratitude. They
have helped to make great preachers and great mis-
sionaries; they have equipped the defenders and
expounders of Christianity. Their contributions to
biblical scholarship, to apologetics and to Christian
philosophy have been magniﬁcent. It is with reverence
that we mention the names of Hackett and Edward
Robinson, Henry B. Smith and Edwards A. Park, of
Philip Schaff, E. G. Robinson, and George P. Fisher.
But, until recently, theological training in America and
elsewhere has lacked scientiﬁc principles. The knowl-
edge furnished of the Christian system has been frag-
mentary, and has not been treated by the comparative
method. \Ve have had scantiest acquaintance with the
literature and thought and aspirations of three-fourths
of the inhabitants of the globe. As Macaulay, after
his return from India, used to assert his English
patriotism by claiming that “all the fruits of the
tropics were not worth one pottle of Covent Garden
strawberries,” so we have been excessively provincial in
our religious knowledge, and have called our pro-
vincialism piety. We have looked down with haughty
and ignorant contempt on faiths older than Christian
history, on philosophies which are among the stupen-
dous exploits of the human intelligence, on systems
which have furnished the most of our race what con-
solation they had in life and what hope in death, and
we have sometimes defended our narrowness and
ignorance with texts of Scripture. But a better day
has dawned. In six of the leading American institu-
tions, comparative religion has found a place. Im-
mense interest has been roused, and many will now
sympathize with the conviction, expressed by another,
that until our religious thoughts can claim to be uni-
versal “they will not satisfy a rational being.”
This department will, I hope, inspire in the genera-
tions of scholars who are to pass through these halls,
the joy of discovering the treasures of truth which are
hidden, with much of rubbish and error, in the sacred
books of the world. It will exercise diligent care in
keeping eager minds from superﬁcial and hasty
generalizations. It will beget a continual regard for
scientiﬁc methods and the indispensable work of the
specialists. Under wise generalship, such as may be
expected from the head of the University,‘ it will make
important contributions to human knowledge. In
order to do this there must be cooperation with the
scholars of other lands, and intelligent subdivision of
work among students here. There is required a great
library, not a few hundred, but many thousand books.
Numerous special fellowships, like that founded by
Dr. Hirsch, must be added. There is needed a Museum
of all Religions, illustrating by relics, altars, shrines,
and objects of worship, their character and history, a
museum like the Guimet of Paris, and like that which
President Warren of Boston has proposed for the
Puritan city, and which may ﬁnd its home in the
memorial structure which Mrs. Haskell is building.
And there is required, also, such an awakened enthusi-
asm as came to Bunsen and Max Miller in their young
manhood, inspiring inﬁnite patience for the toils of a
lifetime.
The history of Comparative Religion is not a long
one, but it is starred with great names and is ﬁnding
a foremost place in some of the universities of Holland,
England, France, and Germany. Religions have been
compared by their hostile adherents through many
centuries, from the days of the Apostle Paul on Mars
Hill. and of Elijah and the prophets of Baal at the foot
of Mount Carmel, but the scientiﬁc study of it is
recent. Yet it numbers illustrious philosophers and
splendid investigators. I only mention the names of
Sir William Jones, who opened up many of the literary
treasures-of the East, of Anquetil Duperron, who intro-
duced to Europe a knowledge of the Upanishads,
especially through the aid of Schopenhauer, who
anticipated “ that the inﬂuence of Sanskrit literature
would not be less profound on this century than .the
revival of Greek on the fourteenth ”; of Colebrooke, and
Muir, and Max Muller, and Monier Williams, and
Whitney, and Rhys Davids, and Oldenberg, who have
made possible to us a still wider knowledge of the world
in India; of Tiele of Leiden, Rénan and Albert Réville
of Paris, of Hardy of Freiburg; of such students of
China as Legge and Martin and Douglass; of Darm-
4 THE 'QUAR TERLY CALENDAR.
esteter, who has broadened our knowledge of Zoro-
astrianism. Not mentioning the names of the scores
of famous scholars who have devoted their lives to
Egypt, Assyria, and Islam, I may say that equally
important have been the contributions to primitive
history, archaeology, and the study of origins, which
have been furnished by Lenormant. de Quatrefages,
Tylor, Lubbock, and Herbert Spencer. All this indi-
cates what a vast work has been done for the infant
science. Primitive history has been ransacked; the
archaeologist has pried into the fragments of the
ancient world; mythologies, Hindu, Greek, Norse,
Mexican and the rest have been reinvestigated;
anthropology and ethnography have been questioned,
and, best of all, philology has thrown vivid light on
problems which history could not elucidate. Lecture-
courses have been inaugurated, a few learned reviews
have been established, and yet the science is scarcely
a century old. Kant, Hegel, and Schleiermacher have
furnished the philosophy of religion some of its
' valuable generalizations, and modern writers of emi~
nence, like Fairbairnand Pﬂeiderer and the Cairds,
have supplemented and corrected, where the earlier
thinkers may have gone astray.
This study, picturesque and interesting on its
artistic side, is the profoundest, most difficult, and
most important to which the human mind can address
itself. The Church of Christ should welcome it and
carry into the study of hierology a spirit different from
what has sometimes been shown. Above all it should
not be afraid of it. The early Greek fathers had
better ideas of God’s presence in human life than some
of the modern theologians. ' They were free from con-
tempt for natural religion. Clement of Alexandria
believed that Greek philosophy came from the same
God who gave us the Old Testament and the New.
Justin Martyr believed that the Logos or Reason is
universal, and did not scruple to apply the name
Christian to those who made this reason the rule of
their actions, while St. Augustine, the father of the
Latin Church, extended the domain of Christianity
beyond the historic and geographic bounds of Chris-
tendom. . .
One. of the inevitable effects of this study will be
the rewriting of Christian theology. It must have a
restatement. under the guiding principle of evolution,
and in thelight of these comparative studies. Here
are tasks for giants. We need not fear the results.
Christ will be exalted,_while our conceptions of his
activity are widened. When we remember the divi-
sions of Christendom, and recall how interest has been
centred on minor doctrinal and other differences, it is
well that ‘human thought should be enlarged to the
boundaries of the globe. Sixty years ago, in the most
cultivated parts of New England, men were ﬁghting
over the metaphysics of the divine decrees, and living
in spiritual isolation from Christian neighbors. But
larger and more practical problems have been forced
into view. The urgent needs of Christendom, endeavor-
ing with divided forces to conquer mankind, press on
themental vision. And now new and vast continents
of history and spiritual life and speculation loom
along the horizon. The American and the Englishman,
plentifully equipped with positive dogma and splendidly
eager for good deeds, require intellectual broadening
and spiritual emancipation. They need to escape
from provincialism of thought and sympathy. They
need religiousness in the Asiatic sense, contemplative-
ness, the upward and ennobling look, and the ear that
listens for “the divine voice that wanders earth with
spiritual summons.” Studies like these should give
us depth as well as breadth. They should add to our
self-knowledge by enlarging our knowledge of what is
without, for, as Professor Caird has said, “the inner
life of the individual is deep and full. just in propor-
tion to the width of his relations with other men and
things.” -
And the study of religion in its entirety should be
a mighty reinforcement to faith. The spiritual facts
and problems in their majesty and universality must
awe the careless mind into reverence, and rebuke the
shallow skepticism which dismisses the greatest fact
of man’s development as a baseless superstition. His-
tory itself is an unsolved problem without God, who is
the interpreter as well as the director of human pro-
gress. If we leave out the Divine Providence, what can
it be but an evolution with no eternal intelligence, no
inﬁnite energy, no all-wise and foreseeing purpose back
of it. And surely history reaches not its highest worth
until it rises to God. Some of its chief records must
be erased if we omit the names of Abraham and Moses,
of David, Isaiah, and Socrates, of Paul and John, of
Confucius, and Buddha and Mohammed, Constantine
and Athanasius, of Charlemagne and Bernard, of .
Luther and Cromwell, and. the mighty muster roll of
the sages, prophets and heroes of faith. If religion is
simply a fading superstition, how does it happen that
it maintains its hold and makes its swiftest progress in
an age of scientiﬁc knowledge like our own? Mr.
Kidd informs us that there is no tendency what-
ever to eliminate the super-rational element from
religions. One who was acquainted with the British
Association for the Advancement of Science under
forty-one different presidents, says of them, after
examining their religious positions, that, “the ﬁgures
indicate that religious faith rather than unbelief has
THE CONVOCA TION ADDRESS. 5
characterized the leading men of the Association.”
And a well-known expounder of evolution has written
that science “instead of robbing the world of God has
done more than all the philosophies and natural theolo-
gies of the past to sustain and enrich the theistic con-
ception.”
Can it be doubted that the highest thought of
mankind has found expression in its greatest poetry?
No chapter of study would have deeper signiﬁcance
than that which shows how the poet and the prophet,
the singer and the seer, have been closely identiﬁed.
Whether we read the hymns of the Vedas or the great
Indian epics, the Babylonian psalms, or the Hebrew
Psalter, the Orphic verses of Greece or the rhapsodies
of the Suﬁs, whether we open the pages of Dante or Mil-
ton, Shakespere or Goethe, Emerson or Victor Hugo,
Browning or Wordsworth, Matthew Arnold or Tenny-
son, we ﬁnd the soul of the singer looking lovingly, or
with the gaze of awe and worship, into the realms of the
Eternal Spirit, whose dwelling “is the light of setting
suns and the round ocean and the living air and the
blue sky and in the mind of man.” And it need not
be said that the greatest art, whether in music or
painting, sculpture or architecture, has been the
eiilorescence of faith. It is the thought of man’s
relations with supernal powers that built the temples
of the Ganges and the Nile, which ﬁlled the Syrian
vale with those columns which Baalbec still rears to
the God of Light, which crowned the Acropolis with
the Parthenon, which erected the cathedrals of the
Middle Ages, which found expression through the
pencil of Michael Angelo and of Raphael, and which,
in the masters of music has environed our modern
life and penetrated our daily thoughts with harmonies
which seem like echoes of the music of the spheres.
If it be said that religion has largely been a record
of intellectual and moral aberrations, we answer that
the same is true of every part of human knowledge
and effort. Politics has its Catilines and Caligulas.
Science has its astrology and its alchemy and its thou-
sand exploded theories; but even the mistakes of men
have been stepping-stones to better knowledge. Bun-
sen rightly believed that the temple of God in history
towers above all other temples. Religion is not
to be judged by its defects, is not to be estimated by
its failures, its Inquisitions, its heresy hunts and per-
versions, but by its highest manifestations. Human
love which binds hearts together in families is not to
be condemned on account of the misery which per-
verted love has engendered. Religion, having to do
with the highest objects of knowledge, a personal God,
gives the sanction of divine authority to the precepts
of ethics. The sense of the divine, its nearness and
awful power, and human responsibility and dependence
—these are elements which have entered from the
beginning into religion, and where some of them have
been temporarily left out, as with Buddhism, perhaps
in the revolt of the human spirit against sacerdotalism,
superstition or polytheism, they have been restored, in
whole or in part, by the very needs of human nature.
When we consider man after he has risen to the
dignity of thought, we ﬁnd him an inquirer gazing
into a mysterious world. He stands on an isthmus,
between the oceans of two eternities. Out of mystery
he came and into mystery he goes. He recognizes
himself; he recognizes the world outside of himself, '
and he recognizes also, that there is a connection
between the two, a something binding them together—
the great, all-surrounding unity which he calls the
universe. He cannot rationally divorce this creation
from the thought of creative powers, and though
he has believed in the presence of many super-
natural beings, he has generally, if often vaguely,
recognized a Supreme Divinityv behind all others, and
with the disclosure of recent science he has reached
the conclusion that there can be but one mind back of
phenomena. It has been truly said by Professor Drums
mond, “that the sun and stars have been found out.
No man can worship them any more. If science has
not by searching found out God, it has not found any
other God, or anything the least like a god, that might
continue to be even a conceivable object of worship in
a scientiﬁc age.”
As we study man even in his degradation, we ﬁnd
him to be a worshipful being. Prehistoric men have
their idols, their beliefs in the life beyond, indicated by
their burial customs. Thus religion is not something
imposed upon man, but something that springs up
within him. The doctrine of a God, immanent as well as
transcendent, simpliﬁes some of the questions regard-
ing the origin of religion. We trace its birth not to
the call of Abraham or to the hymns sung by the Vedic
man “ under the bright sky and beneath the burning
stars of India.” Its origin is not with the priests of the
Nile or the miracles of the New Testament. It is
older than history. We say that it is “instinctive ”
for men to recognize the supernatural origin and
environment of life. They may call God by a hundred
names. and the gods of the Hindu mythology by a
hundred thousand, but they cannot get permanently
away from the Inﬁnite Spirit. They learn, as one has
said, that “behind all the phenomena of nature there
is a cause, that behind the apparent is the real, that
behind the shadow there is the substance, that behind
the transitory there is the eternal.” Man discovers but
does not make the relations and laws which enter ‘into ‘
6 THE QUARTERLY CALENDAR.
the substance of religion; and hence it is true that,
if all the books that are deemed sacred were burned,
if the historic records were obliterated, if the temples
and rituals and elaborated creeds of today were swept
out of sight and out of mind, and if only the infant
children now living in the world were to continue to
live after this hour, though the loss would be unspeak-
able, Sinai gone, and Bethlehem, the Mount of Beati-
tudes, and Calvary sunk below the horizon, still the
young, new race would learn to recognize God and
build the altars of faith; “ the fair humanities of old
religion”. would return because the old heart-hunger
for God would not be destroyed, and the soul, the
mother of all traditions, would build its shining lad-
ders, behold the ascending and descending angels, and
listen once more to the songs of the Spirit.
Religions have died, but ‘the spirit of worship sur-
vives. Certain forms of faith, linked in fatal union
with the state, went down into the graves of ancient
empires, but the realm of faith was never so large and
luminous as today. Science is showing a deeper
regard for religion. It is far more reverent and in
closer sympathy with faith. The time has come
when scientific minds have undertaken the study of
these vital phenomena which constitute the main cur-
rent of human progress. The whole tendency today
is toward a worshipful and loving trust in the Eternal
Spirit. Agnosticism is not so unknowing as it was
twenty years ago. “Each act of scientiﬁc examina-
tion,” as John Fiske has said, “but reveals the opening
through which shines the glory of the Eternal Maj-
esty.” Environment includes God, the chief force
and factor in development. God, immortality, the
spiritual origin and direction of all things, these are
the truths that are most consonant with our present
state of knowledge. Evolution has enlarged thedo-
main of natural theology and changed its scope,
though not its results. Physical and metaphysical
science are not at war. They are not indifferent to
each other. Theyare pursuing similar ends. It is
not only true that science endeavors to think God’s
thoughts after him, while religion endeavors to feel
God’s emotions after him, but it is also true that
science is becoming religious, and religion scientiﬁc.
Who can take up any department of study, whether
he opens the Greek and Latin authors or reads the
older record of the rocks, whether he pursues the
path of linguistic or zoiilogic palmontology’ Without
ﬁnding himself in a road which leads directly or in-
directly to religion? The classic languages are the
keys of the ancient mythologies. The comparative
study of the Semitic tongues is increasing our knowl-
edge of prehistoric man, as the comparative study of
the Indo-Germanic languages has also done. Chris-
tianity was carried to many of the chief cities of the
Roman world by the language of Plato, and for centu-
ries its treasures were largely contained in the speech
of Cicero. The problems of philosophy are the prob-
lems of religion. And thus, in the realm of thought
as well as of life, religion is a principle, which “im'
poses itself upon man everywhere and always, and in
spite of himself comes back again violently into life at
the moment it was thought to be stifled.” .
It is through religion—in its highest forms — that
men have come to realize their unity, and perhaps
mankind never reached the consciousness of its one-
ness, its needs, its divine possibilities so completely as
in a Congress of all Faiths. Indeed religion is becom-
ing the uniﬁer of knowledge, and furnishes the spirit-
ual bond which holds together the departments of a
great university. Without it life would tend toward
the material and sensual; with it men come to value
the spiritual. Without it they crown the earthly, as
in the decadent age of the Roman Empire. With it
they perceive that Paul’s dusty sandal is more radiant
than N ero’s jeweled diadem. Religion is far more
than the pursuit of truth; it is far higher than intel-
lectual discipline.
spirit of God and by the ideals which Jesus more
than any other prophet has gloriﬁed. We yield
honor, great and lasting honor, to intellectual strength
and attainment. The statue of a noble mind is fairer
to our eyes than any sculptured Venus or antique
Hercules, but we refuse to deck with our brightest
laurels any brows of intellectual majesty, however
radiant and Olympian, which have not already been
girded by the imperial and enduring splendor of the
moral law.
All the paths of truth and research and duty lead
to the city of God, which is the metropolis of man,
the home of the soul, because the soul was made for
God—a city which is also a temple. We are learning,
in spite of the crimes which have been committed in the
name of religion, that spiritual forces, working often
outside the churches and the priesthoods, have been
the most powerful in human advancement, and that,
as Albert Réville has said, “morality gains in attract-
iveness and power by its alliance with faith.” Much
might be said to illustrate our theme, both positively
and negatively, from the wondrous life of India, where
the Vedas gave form and spirit to a development
which has lasted for through twenty-ﬁve centuries.
Hindu civilization—that immense and various life
which men have lived
“ Under the southward snows of Himalay —"
presents always a strange sacerdotal cast, and with its
It is character, moulded by the.
THE CONVOCA TION ADDRESS. 7
deviousness, its glooms, its storms, its vastness, and its
languors, may be well likened to the mystic and sin-
uous stream of Coleridge’s Kubla Kahn,
“ Meandering with a mazy motion,
Through wood and dale, the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to 1min,
Anti sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean.”
This theme might be illuminated from the records
of Egypt, Greece, and Assyria. But, limiting our
thoughts to western civilization, we discover that
religion has promoted humanity, and regard for the
individual has abolished European and American
slavery, under whose shadow science was impossible,
and has provided these conditions and motives by
which scientiﬁc progress has been so swift and beneﬁ-
cent. It has furnished the framework and the life-
blood of our modern world. It has given the strongest
sanctions for right conduct and taught an ethical sys-
tem under which the Western peoples have reached
“the highest state of social efﬁciency ever attained."
“ Religion, mother of Form and Fear,” is also, as \Vords-
worth says, “Mother of Love.”
Such a faith as we cherish has the elements of uni-
versality, and I am profoundly glad that this institu-
tion, sympathetic with that Christian missionary move-
ment which is the chief spiritual phenomenon of our
time, is ready to offer peculiar advantages to youthful
missionaries in the study of the faiths with which they
are to meet; that within these walls they may learn
the languages which they are to speak by the Orontes
and the Indus, and that here they are to become famil-
iar with those Oriental systems which Christianity,
with its purer ethics and purer theism and its incom-
parable Christ, will ultimately displace. It is now
understood that missionaries cannot do the best work
with educated Asiatics, or even with the uneducated,
without some knowledge of these commanding themes.
I might quote the opinions of a score of scholarly vet-
erans in the missionary ﬁeld, conﬁrmatory of this posi-
tion. A Buddhist priest in Tokyo said to a Scotch
Christian, “ You would better send us one ten thous-
and dollar missionary rather than ten one thousand
dollar missionaries.” Better preparations and a higher
class of minds are demanded. The time has passed
when our Christian work in other lands could be
symbolized “by a band of half-naked savages, listen-
ing to a missionary, seated under a palm tree, and
receiving his message with childlike and unques-
tioning faith.” “Do you tell us,” said a Hindu to a
missionary teacher, “that God is everywhere present
and pervades all things?” “ Yes.” “Is he in every
visible object, and even within us?” “Yes.” “Then
he is in that idol yonder, and that is what we have
always held.” Why should not this great University
duplicate the work of the Church Missionary Society
of England, where a lectureship given to the study of
the non-Christian systems is furnished as a prepara-
tion for the missionary life, and going one step further,
why should not some broad-minded believer endow a
lectureship on the basis of the recent Parliament and
invite scholarly representatives of the ethnic systems
to explain their own views and interpret the heart and
spirit of their venerable faiths. A timid attitude on
the part of Christians is half surrender, and utterly
unbecoming the possessors of such a revelation as
that which we cherish. Long familiar as we are with
the best which Greek and Roman heathenism could
teach us, and not abashed by it, why should we shrink
before the best which China and India can impart?
In my estimation the preparatory knowledge which
our candidates for the foreign work require, can be
furnished by no plan less comprehensive than that
which I have outlined.
And I believe there is demanded a wiser and hu-
maner method in dealing with these faiths, in which
truth and falsity, spiritual beauty and moral blemishes
are so amazingly intermingled. Comparative religion
has delivered the Christian mind from the error of
regarding all the ethnic systems and prophets as in-
spired only by the spirit of evil. To gain the non-
Christian populations, we must gain their hearts; we
must thankfully acknowledge whatever truth we ﬁnd
in their teachings; we must make them love us and
trust us before we can make them believe with us.
We need not speak contemptuously of the Eightfold
Path of Gautama Buddha while urging men to ﬁnd in
Jesus Christ the Way, the Truth, the Life.
The lectureship upon which I enter deals with
the relations of Christianity to the other religions.
Though the voices of God have been heard everywhere,
they have been more distinct and authoritative in con-
nection with the Hebrew prophets and the Christian
apostles. I shall endeavor to show that Christianity
is the one historic religion, interweaving its doctrines
with facts which spring from the stem of humanity’s
chief development. With fair-mindedness, with no spirit
of disdainful criticism, with veneration for the worship-
ing instinct wherever found, with hospitality to all
truths, I shall strive to show that Christianity is the
only truly redemptive and the only progressive reli-
gion. I shall labor also to make plain that Christianity
alone has in it the elements of a universal faith.
Other systems are stars of various lustre in the twi-
light of the race, while the religion of the Jewish and
Christian Scriptures is the sun of the world’s advanc-
ing enlightenment. I have no sympathy with the
8 THE QUARTERLY CALENDAR.
theory that religion may be best taught apart from its
intellectual foundations. Human nature is a unit and
it requires doctrine for the mind as well as love for
the soul. I do not believe in any electicism, propound-
ing a new faith mingled with elements from all the
others. While Parseeism, Buddhism, Hinduism and the
rest, like the ancient philosophies, have messages for
Christendom, and while, by the way of warning and
instruction, they may teach us priceless lessons, they
can make no contribution to the Christianity of the
Christ, “in whom are all the treasures of wisdom and
knowledge.” No wiser word was spoken at the Parlia-
ment than by Professor Goodspeed, when he said,
“The graves of the dead religions declare that not
selection but incorporation makes a religion strong,
not incorporation but reconciliation, not reconciliation
but the fulﬁllment of all these aspirations, these partial
truths in a higher thought, in a transcendent life.”
The ethnic faiths are not mere curiosities or moral
monstrosities on the one hand, and still less, on the
other, are they the ﬁnal faiths of the nations adopting
them. It is unscientiﬁc, now that men accept the
unity of mankind, to claim that no one religion can
ever hope to be universal. Since the social, industrial
and intellectual uniﬁcation of mankind is certain, and
since human needs are the same everywhere, why
should not the best religion be received ultimately by
all?
Our recent studies have added much to the spirit-
ual panorama of human history. The mild and toler-
ant Buddhist Emperor Asoka, the Hindu Constan-
tine. takes his place unabashed by the savage and
shrewd warrior who saw the cross in the sky. Akbar,
the Moslem, appears in company with Charlemagne,
the Christian. St. Peter’s looms before us on the
same horizon with the Temple of Heaven at Peking,
and the Milan Cathedral stands by the Mosque of
Omar. The waters from the well of Zemzem together
with those from Bethesda are brought to our lips.
The grotesque pictures of India startle the eyes
which have seen the canvasses of Fra Angelico
and Titian. Moses and Mohammed walk before
our vision; saints throng round us besides those in
the Acta Sanctorum of Catholic Europe; the monks
of the Nile and the monks of Thibet look out upon us,
while the sacred books of the Orient, an imposing
library in themselves, dwarf the modest volumes of
the Old and New Testaments. But we are not dis-
turbed or distracted :
“ For over all the crecds the face of Christ
“ Glows with white glory on the face of Man.”
We have seen Him who, in various measure, has en-
lightened all. He is the key to history and to religion,
because he is the Reconciler as well as the Redeemer.
Only his spirit penetrating to all the earth could
have secured such expressions of fraternity among
wide-sundered faiths as our ears have heard. In this
city of the West which the Columbian Fair “made
known to every crossroads in Asia,” and in which, and
not in London or Jerusalem, Rome or Benares, the
great divided religions of twelve hundred millions of
mankind met, one year ago, on their Mount of Trans-
ﬁguration, in this city toward which historic lines
have been drawn from every prophet and holy martyr-
dom and shrine and song and hope of humanity, by
all sacred mountains and rivers, through thousands of
years of strife and suffering and change, up to one su-
preme hour,——in this city, a magniﬁcent opportunity is
given to this university not only of promoting the knowl-
edge of religion, but also of winning the intellects and
hearts of God’s children everywhere, to those higher
truths which are centred in the Christ of the Gospels.
Christianity, tolerant, because cherishing an invinci-
ble faith in her spiritual victory, not “divorced from
the moral order of history,” but penetrating, explain-
ing and crowning that order,——Christianity, all lumi-
nous with Christ, is the religion of the coming man,
for Christ is the eternal Son of God in whom reason
and faith, the individual and society, man and woman,
morality and religion, heaven and earth are perfectly
conjoined and reconciled. He is and may be shown
to be the New Dispensation, which the saintly Chunder
Sen of India believed had dawned in his own heart;
He is the harmony of all scriptures, saints and sects,
of inspiration and of science, of Asiatic thought and
of Western activity, the reconciliation of apparent con-
tradictions, “the invisible Westminster Abbey”
wherein the enmities of more than a hundred genera-
tions are to lie buried and forgotten.
He came among men, not to make them religious
but to make them holy. The pagan is religious who
offers rice to the hideous idols of an Asiatic temple, or
beats a horrible drum to keep away the witches from
an African village, but the pagan, whether living here
or in Canton or Natal, needs a new heart. Loving sin,
he needs, ﬁrst of .all, the love of holiness. We who
know what the other faiths have wrought for the social
and moral elevation of mankind are not disposed to
deny them the possession of many truths, and of some
restraining and inspiring power. But it is not truth
alone which saves men; it is life which begets life.
The ethnic faiths are so imperfect and erroneous, and
so lacking in that divine energy which works through
the redeeming facts and forces of the Christian Gospel,
that they must give way before that which is supreme
and perfect. I magnify religion in the world that I
THE CONVOCA TION ADDRESS. Q 9
may exalt the Christ, the founder of the only world-
religion. I believe that He has been everywhere by
his spirit, and that all that is true, beautiful, and good
is a part of His manifested glory. But the work of his
church, made one in Him, is to reveal to all mankind
the Christ of the Gospels, to be witnesses of His truth
and love to the uttermost parts of the earth. He was
delivered unto death for the offenses of men ; He was
raised from the grave for the justiﬁcation of our faith
in Him, and, thus exalted, He has promised to draw all
men unto Him. And we have a moral and intellectual
right, with all brotherly kindness in our souls, to ask
kings and sages, poets and prophets, to crown Him the
Lord of all. In the olden days when the German
emperor was chosen, the three archbishops of Treves,
Mayence, and Cologne, girt him with the sword and
crowned him with the crown of Charlemagne. At the
banquet the Bohemian king was his cupbearer; the
Count Palatine plunged his knife into the roasted ox
940—300—10—94
and waited on his master; the Duke of Saxony
spurred his horse into heaps of golden grain and bore
off a full measure for his lord, while the Margrave of
Brandenburg rode to a fountain and ﬁlled the imperial
ewer with water. Standing this day, as in the presence
of the chief prophets and mightiest forces of the world,
let us expect a new coronation of the world’s Christ,
the rightful Emperor of mankind. Let the churches
girt with His sword of spiritual power, crown Him
with the royal diadem which is His due; let princes
and nobles be the servants of His gospel; let kings
and emperors wait on Him who is the Ancient of
Days; let cities bring great measure of gold to publish
His word, and let universities, loyal to the spirit which
has founded the chief seats of Occidental learning,
forsaking every unworthy and strange idolatry of
human leaders, ﬁll their imperial chalices from the
River of the Water of Life, and stand attendant on
their Lord. .
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