ï~~


ï~~


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ï~~A PAINTER'S CAMP.
BY PHILIP GILBERT HAMERTON.
In Three Books.      Book I., In England; Book II., In Scotland;
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ï~~THOUGHTS ABOUT ART.
BY PHILIP GILBERT HAMERTON,
Author of "A Painter's Camp."
FIRST AMERICAN EDITION. REVISED BY THE AUTHOR.
One Vol. i6mo. 4oo00 pages. Price $2.00oo.
CONTENTS.
1. That Certain Artists should write  so. The Reaction from Pre-Raphael.
on Art.                        itism.
2. Painting from Nature.       I1. The Painter in His Relation to
3. Painting from Memoranda.        Society.
4. The Place of Landscape Painting  12. Picture Buying.
amongst the Fine Arts.     13. The Housing of National Art
5. The Relation between Photog-    Treasures.
raphy and Painting.         14. Fame.
6. Wood Painting and Color Paint.  15. Art Criticism.
ing.                       16. Proudhon as a Writer on Art.
7. Transcendentalism in Painting.  17. Two Art Philosophers.
8. The Law of Progress in Art.  18. Furniture.
9. Analysis and Synthesis in Paint-  19. The Artistic Spirit.
iug.
Since the publication of that charming volume, "A Painter's
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ï~~GEORGE SAND'S NOVELS.
I. MAUPRAT.          Translated by VIRGINIA VAUGHAN.
II. ANTONIA.         Translated by VIRGINIA VAUGHAN.
III. MONSIEUR          SYLVESTRE.           Translated     by  FRANbIAs
GEORGE SHAW.
IV. THE MAN OF SNOW. Translated by VIRGINIA VAUGHAN.
V. THE MILLER OF ANGIBAULT. Translated by Miss
MARY E. DEWEY.
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(Mauprat) is subsequently transformed from a brute to a man; his sensual passion to a pure and holy love." - Harper's Monthly.
"The excellence of George Sand, as we understand it, lies in her comprehensn of the primitive elements of mankind. She has conquered her way into the
human heart, and whether it is at peace or at war, is the same to her; for she is
mistress of all its moods. No woman before ever painted the passions and the
emotions with such force and fidelity, and with such consummate art. Whatever
else she may be, she is always an artist.... Love is the key-note of I Mauprat,I
-love, and what it can accomplish in taming an otherwise untamable spirit.
The hero, Bernard Mauprat, grows up with his uncles, who are practically bandits, as was not uncommon witl men of their class, in the provinces, before the
breaking out of the French Revolution. He is a young savage, of whom the best
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somewhere within him a sense of generosity and honor, to which they are entire
strangers. To sting this sense into activity, to detect the makings of a man in this
brute, to make this brute into a man, is the difficult problem, which is worked
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in which the man is finally overcome by the unconquerable strength of womanhood. Only a great writer could have described such a struggle, and only a great
artist could have kept it within allowable limits. This George Sand has done, we
think; for her portrait of Bernard is vigorous without being coarse, and her situations are strong without being dangerous. Such, at least, is the impression we
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ï~~AMERICAN

RELIGION.

BY

JOHN WEISS.
BOSTON:
ROBERTS BROTHERS.
1871.




ï~~Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1871, by
JOHN WEISS,
In the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington.
CAMBRIDGE
PRESS OF JOHN WILSON AND SON.




ï~~CONTENTS.

I.
II.
III.
IV.
V.
VI.
VII.
VIII.
IX.
X.
XI.
XII.

RIGHT MENTAL METHOD......
AMERICA'S DEBT......
THE AMERICAN OPPORTUNITY...
THE DIVINE IMMANENCE.....
LAW OF THE DIVINE IMMANENCE.
A DIVINE PERSON.......
AN AMERICAN ATONEMENT...
FALSE AND TRUE PRAYING....
STRIFE AND SYMMETRY.....
A CONSCIENCE FOR TRUTH....
CONSTANCY TO AN IDEAL...
THE AMERICAN SOLDIER.......

PAGE...    I...  32.. * 56
S..  86
19..  9
S.. 139
S.. 166..   191
S. 220..     244
S.. 270
S.. 297




ï~~


ï~~AMERICAN            RELIGION.
I.
RIGHT MENTAL METHOD.
SOME mental method must exist to control all the
applications of Thought in morals and religion.
Of course it is trite to say there must be method
everywhere. The Oneida Community ran to waste
year after year for want of method in its trade and
farming, till a French Canadian came there with a
mouse-trap of his invention, and caught.prosperity.
No trap had ever before so nicely corresponded to the
cunning of surplus mice. Method is simply an adaptation to the facts. The sculptor discovers what form
of tool will hollow a knee-joint, and he saves time for
the face. Philosophers and theologians grow stiff in
that joint because they refuse to walk in Nature's way.
But the great discoveries of Newton and Kepler had
nothing mysterious: they were the gestures of men
without preconceptions to methodize, whose ways
were so near to Nature that they kept the rare brains
susceptible to organic laws; so that their genius was
their health.
Method rules the distinction between the literary
man and the Bohemian, the scholar and the charlatan.




ï~~AMERICAN RELIGION.

Mere mental and emotional ability works extravagantly, and falls poor at last, perhaps quite suddenly,
unless it has the grace to ally itself with certain old
necessities of the universe, either as horse in the traces
or driver upon the seat. A great deal of American
literary and religious striving runs to sentimentalism
because the fatigue of discovering the order of the
world is found to be too great.
There can be but one mental method, and that is
when intelligence discerns and repeats the way in
which natural and spiritual things develop. The idea
of unity presides over this: an idea which starts in
our own personal oneness; the organic integrity that
precedes good and bad, right and wrong, all dualism
and dispute. The first assurance which this idea gives
the mind, or struggles, amid the horde of theologies
and preconceptions to give it, is, that all things have
the consistency of being developed in one way. Has
this idea come into our consciousness as a deduction
from a long series of experimental observations, a
century-plant composted by all the soils, and tended
by all the races of mankind, or is it the original form
of the mind that is kept constantly stirring by observation, lest an overdose of mythologizing should prove
fatal? If we say it is only a late result of a long
series of observations, carried on by different races of
men, and transmitted in imperfect stages of deduction
to the present, we do not account for the first step
which the mind made towards the idea. However
bunglingly made, the impulse to make it must have
previously resided in the mind. Some character of
the mental constitution must have decided that relation




ï~~RIGHT MENTAL METHOD.

towards the observation of facts which we perceive to
result in a law of unity. If, on the other hand, we say
that it was at the earliest period innate in the mindmeaning that mind could not be born without having
it expressed, not merely implied, in its structure-we
cannot account for observation, nor explain the imperfect attempts it made on the road to the idea. If an
idea be innate, it must preside over the whole process
of experimental knowledge, prevent early misunderstandings, and impress every stage of observation with
its own sense of the true method of the universe. It
is plain, then, that two things run parallel with each
other, and are capable of touching for mutual interaction: the universe and the mental structure; and the
observing faculty moves in the company of an explaining faculty, which is a developing tendency, and not
an innate idea. There was a time when all facts lay
latent in the universe, and all co-ordinating instincts
lay latent in the mind. But the first material fact
found a mental comrade, whose hand groped after it,
and both began to feel their way together towards a
principle of unity.
The idea of unity was once an inchoate form, laid
helplessly upon the breast of the divine order: a
capacity to imbibe, assimilate, reduce to function and
organ, the teeming facts; not innate, but inchoate,
and not even now hardened into manhood nor proceeding through all persons; but it has preserved, amid its
fumbling and complaining, the power to drain the
great Order into all its veins. It came from beneath
the bosom at which it suckles, and the circuit is
complete.




ï~~AMERICAN RELIGION.

What is meant by saying that all things have the
consistency of being developed in one way? It means
that all effects flow out of all causes in unbroken continuity of direction, thought and purpose; that the
forethought of the Creative Mind, present at every point
of space in every moment of time, brings succession
of all phenomena without a break, without a spasm,
without an after-thought or an interpolation; that the
divine ability eternally possessed this intention of gradualism and unbroken uniformity, both in matter and
mind; that the words genera, species, strata, epochs,
transitions, races, and systems, only express our
mental recognition of characters, but do not confirm
the existence of breaks, faults, renewals or interpositions; that in all cases the agencies which are found
to be uniformly at work are those which preclude the
idea of exceptional ones; and that the idea of exceptional forces or periods belongs to a state of mind whose
unity is not thoroughly set free. According as a man
knows himself he knows the nature of the Cosmos.
The more he knows himself the more obedient he
becomes to a consciousness that the famous axiom of
Hippocrates, "'0 Npo nrrdza xean'st," Law governs
all things, must become the basis of his thought.
There have been developing periods of intelligence,
during which the feeling of Law is feebler than the
idea of caprice. All the natural elements favor at first
a sentiment that phenomena occur by spasms, irruptions, determinations of personal agency. Persons
themselves work in this intermittent way, and they
impute it to Nature for ages, during which mythology
is born. All mythologies are merely the emphasis




ï~~RIGHT MENTAL METHOD.

which the want of intelligence puts upon facts and
appearances: they are lifted and quiver in a mirage
of heated fancy. But the crude intelligence has nothing else to start from; and it begins in this way to
develop itself with a simple and uninstructed perception that there are some very wonderful elements of
nature and mind.
Now, although at first all method was mythological,
yet the most scientific period of a race or of the world
may still have its mythology, because all minds do not
develop abreast of each other into the form of unity.
The most religious people may be the most infested
with the sentiment that God sometimes inserts parentheses into creation, because religion, in its limited
sense, is only a tendency to acknowledge that there
must be something invisible to man and superior to
his knowledge. Religion in its widest sense is the
same as mental unity, and it invests the invisible with
its own overpowering consciousness that the invisible
is a continuity of Law.
Mythology blossoms and exhales. Its pungent aroma is what men call the Supernatural. With a root
in the ground, and leaves that imbibe the simple elements of nature, the moment it comes to perfume
men pronounce it the true Invisible. But it is still
only matter in a tenuous form.
How shall we distinguish? We cannot call every
thing Nature, or every thing Supernature. In the
former we do not recognize the making of Nature: in
the latter we lose the order of the things that are
made. There must always be the Natural because
there is always the Supernatural. But our own men



ï~~AMERICAN RELIGION.

tal form of unity reveals to us the nature of the Supernatural, whether we believe that this mental form is
the net result of all human experience, or that it is a
primitive constituent of mind. There can be no
quarrel here, nor can there be any obscurity in defining the Supernatural, since the idea of unity which is
actual at the end of one process is latent at the beginning of the other. What is chiefly important to note
is that when Nature is best understood- and that is
when Mind is most perfectly developed - the Supernatural appears as the ground and efficient cause of
uniformity, gradual successiveness, perpetual invariability; and irruptions from the invisible are crowded
out by the sustenance of Law.
This has a reflex effect upon the past. Our growing
conviction that Law sustains every thing, and holds
a lineal, undislocated course through all provinces,
interprets the past, and, in doing so, eliminates every
trace of its mythologies. Nothing is left of mankind's
views upon the Supernatural, unless the idea of natural
sequence has been mixed up with them. Nothing is
left, except a religious sense that there is something
invisible. But one of the most important branches of
Comparative Religion is that which we may call Essential Mythology, or the real, natural, moral, and spiritual ideas, which, in their struggle towards the light of
unity, figured in the myths and legends of the past.
The object of Essential Mythology is to show how
logically the Divine assumed these phases in the human
mind; this relative incompleteness, these tentative
efforts, like the succession of animals, from things that
creep to things that fly; this congruity and command



ï~~RIGHT MENTAL METHOD.

ing forethought, always sufficient to itself, that takes
the shortest line between two points, and never breaks
it when expected by ignorance, or desired by passion,
or pretended by niarvellousness. A true science of
mythology will pronounce marvellousness the forlorn
resort of a mind not yet equipped with unity. When
Hippocrates said that there was no divine disease,* he
gave the first distinct contribution towards the scientific
theory of development, which shows saucer-eyed fancy
that the naturalness of every thing is its divinity, and
that the invisible never plays tricks with its own eternal sequence, no matter what may be the stake, life
or death, or the spiritual health of human souls. Any
thing that is truly desirable is already profoundly
supernatural, because it flows out of its own essence,
or springs from its own seed.
The supernaturalists, who believe in miracles and
the exceptional nature of Christ, cling to that theory
of development which asserts a special intervention
of the Creator at the commencement of fresh forms
of animal life in those epochs known to Geology.
This theory does not despise a logical order, but finds
it in the thought upon which these forms are strung,
and not in the gradual derivation of them by any
principle of selection, or primitive tendency, or struggle for existence, from the forms just preceding. The
supernaturalists prefer the theory of the intervention* This Greek superstition, which Hippocrates first discredited, was that the different kinds of insanity represented
possession by different deities. Something in the style of the
insane person was analogous to the characteristic of the god,
and consequently was referred to him as its source.




ï~~AMERICAN RELIGION.

ists to that of the gradualists, not so much because
the latter would derive man from some chimpanzee, as because the former break up creation into successive epochs, with a supernatural irruption at the
head of each. This gives a color to their theology of
intervention; and Christ appears, not as a gradual
blossom on the stem of human nature, but a new creation, and the first member of a new series. Then it is
not difficult to suppose that the miracles came in with
the miraculous conception of the new man. If the
first man was built afresh and not slowly evolved from
any thing, did such supernatural events cease then, or
have there been subsequent incursions from a higher
sphere, to add new forms of spiritual life to human
society?
Now the theory of intervention, which theology is
lately disposed to press into its service, cannot be
applied to the mental and spiritual growth of mankind.
It may or may not be true through all the geological
eras, and Darwinism may be shown to be a scheme
without a constituency, by the facts serving more and
more the theory of a sequence of thought with spasms*
* Mr. Huxley, who is a gradualist, does not think it is essential to deny that nature sometimes passes, by a leap, to her
fresh varieties, since the leap itself marks only the method
of the force that gathers to it, and not a divine impromptu,
or thrusting in. He says: "We have always thought that
Mr. Darwin has unnecessarily hampered himself by adhering
so strictly to his favorite ' Natura non facit saltum.' We
greatly suspect that she does make considerable jumps in the
way of variation, now and then, and that these saltations
give rise to some of the gaps which appear to exist in the
series of known forms."




ï~~RIGHT MENTAL METHOD.

in the application. But this is beyond our province: we
confine ourselves to seeing that, since the creation of
man, Comparative Religion does not furnish one fact
to justify the idea of mental development by special
intervention. Every race shows gradualism in all the
provinces of its intelligence, a passage of embryotic
thought through all its phases, without a single break
or interpolation for which natural causes are not sufficient to account. The Divinity within the natural
causes has assumed gradualism for its method. Every
kind of truth has spread by the gradual contact of
colonization, emigration, or conquest, from ohe race
to another. Upon every meridian the same embryotic
ideas of morals and religion are found, which develop
with variations due to local influences alone. All
religious souls and leaders have been substantially
alike in the raw material of their thought. In East
and West, in India, Judea and Greece, all of the sages
and prophets have shared each others' essentials: beneath the hue of all their cheeks the composition of the
blushing blood has been identical. The inchoate
mind of the race has brought a correspondence to life
and nature, and kept it everywhere and transmitted it.
So that intervention, if it ever was the preadamitic
plan, has been since changed to immanence: the even,
perpetual, unbroken, unhasting, unresting Presence.
Comparative Mythology and Religion find no supernatural distinction between the order and texture of
the ideas of all the great teachers. Confucius develops
towards disinterested morality and monotheism, in other
words, towards mental unity; and so do Zoroaster,
Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Christ. The ethnological
1*




ï~~IO

AMERICAN RELIGION.

distinctions do not break the type, nor clamor for the
supernatural. We find inequalities of growth, a surplus of one thought here, of another there, a variety
of combinations; but no point where there is an interpolation of an impulse or principle which the general
soul might not have always been credited with in various embryotic stages. We find amplification, and the
correction that is the result of an increase of intelligence, differences in degree but not in kind: neither
in a man, nor in a race, nor an epoch, can you find a
break in the linear development, and in the transmissibility, by the total of births on the planet, of all the
essential substances of morals and religion. Shakspeare and Beethoven are rooted in the general imagination which they overshadow, and upon which they
shower blossom and fruit. So do Socrates and Christ
confirm the logic of the inchoate mind.
The history of thought or of religion is that of a
great crescendo movement, that takes up the feebler
chords and pronounces them more strongly as it proceeds, drops out the partial chords or overcomes them
by the outbursting unity, and accentuates the great
theme by developing and not by thrusting in. The
composer has his whole orchestra upon the spot; he
neither invents nor interpolates an instrument, but
wakes them to all combinations. If he gives a few
bars rest to the reeds or the brass, the motive of the
piece proceeds, and is just as immanent in a pause as
in a climax. In the gradual growth of thought, we
find that the first faint tendency to account for all
things in some way, by connecting them with a mythical personage, or with moisture, with fire, with num



ï~~RIGHT MENTAL METHOD.

II

bers, with a First Cause, has been the self-sufficing
seed of the rational method of modern science. The
anticipations of the foremost minds have been early
blossoms from it; lucky divinings and intuitions were
not intruded but evolved. The divine immanence has
not been impatient at working in this way. Pythagoras differs from Thales by his position in time and
history, and his superiority is that of subsequence.
In the province of Religion, we detect a faint sense
of the divine Fatherhood, long before Judea becomes
fragrant with filial confidence. When we are astonished in spring to see a western prairie one rolling
fire of flowers, we do not think of an irruption but of
an evolution. And when the pine forest burns down,
and oaks succeed, we are reminded of the natural
latency of the germs in all the successions of mankind.
The only supernatural condition is that of perpetual
indwelling when Christ comes after Socrates.
No doubt there are periods in human history when
the divine proceeding lifts itself in great enthusiasm,
and some man or movement, collecting it into memorable expression, gives it a name that survives, to
mark the highest point of thought or morals. The
supernaturalist claims that such periods have something exceptional in them. I have heard them called
nodes, and compared to the swelling of the smooth
cane-plant into the joints that support its whole development; but we must not forget that the joints are
only gatherings of the elements already in the stem:
the silex is not different, the carbon is the same. No
intrusion has brought into the composition of the joint
a quality which the stem is not competent to furnish.




ï~~I2

AMERICAN RELIGION.

Or we may compare these moments of the creative
power to the high tides that wet all the coast-lines
and leave behind, as they ebb, the sea-wrack to delineate the extreme they reached. Men visit the fresh
heaps to collect tokens of the distance whence the
wave arrived. But we must be careful to explain
that the tide which rises and then ebbs wets every
square inch of its movement with identical elements:
its highest point is not reached by means of the intrusion of a new constituent, and the force that lifts it is
also at every point the same. The natural advantages
of the inchoate mind of mankind have simply been expanded, but they have not been altered by the insertion
of any elements; so that you cannot expect such
periods to be illustrated by any modification of natural
laws: the functions of life and death remain untampered with; no more men are raised from the dead
than before; no preternatural signs can emphasize
what is intrinsically emphatic, or lend it any recommendation. The general mind, through which the
tide came sweeping, will sooner or later recognize
itself with wonder and gratitude, and find that not a
law of nature has been meddled with. Stories will
cluster" around remarkable men and moments, as
they do around remarkable features of a landscape.
The savage will have his tradition about some natural
gathering of forces in geological displacements; in
the growth and endurance of mighty trees; in the
encroachment of the ocean upon old districts that
were peopled; in the benefits that ancestors derived
from the sagacity of some stranger who represented
their own qualities enlarged. When he is gone they




ï~~RIGHT MENTAL METHOD.

13

celebrate the high tide to which they came in him.
This is only because the scientific method was not yet
awake to refer phenomena of matter or mind to their
own invariable constituents. The savage constructs a
story as huge and nebulous as the impression which
the eclipse or the subterranean shudder makes upon
his imagination. A great man is a signal for an unmethodical generation to have an attack of mythology.
It falls to marvelling where. the man of science, who
explores all structures with the tool of mental unity,
is content to wonder and adore. W e must be careful not to infer from the past effects of marvellousness the possibility of miracle. And we need not
import into the period that excites the- marvel, any
more than into the joint of the cane-plant, a quality
that did not build the average from which the period
rose.
When the great men appear, perhaps upon some
lowly stock, to spread a sudden blossom whose report
fills all the world, and liberates a fragrance that is not
exclusive but welcome and suitable to all mankind,
at first we marvel, and the disposition is to ask, " Who
can trace these miraculous conceptions? " But we do
not wish to trace a Shakspeare farther than to discover
that the divine climax of his imagination was slowly
gathered out of human nature. If we approach the
fact without prejudice, the method of nature will convi.nce us that when God came to a high-tide in him,
He came with the humanity furnished by a hundred
ancestors, through all of whom He had been present,
building and modifying brain-cells and dispositions in
the ordinary way of ipheritance, till, when He Shak



ï~~14

AMERICAN RELIGION.

spearized, it was not with incursion of fresh elements
that were not previously in the poet's line. The
patience of Nature selected that brain at length to condense her pathos and her laughter like a dew: but
the common air and light hung upon its myriad points
those lucid drops that sparkle as long as the generations which provide those elements can notice them.
Such moments that receive a great man's name
only emphasize God's ordinary meanings, all of which
receive their turn in religion, poetry and art; and
mankind climbs with these to clearer outlooks over
their natural horizon. But, in the emphasis received
by such a moment, what is there to disturb the order
of nature?.Things that lie in a different province, -
such as the specific gravity of water, the condition of
a dead body, the normal production of the vine, the
laws of human embryology, the blossoming of a figtree, - cannot become modified, or put forth exceptional phenomena. As soon, and with as much reason,
might the moments when Hamlet was composed have
received superfluous attesting by quickened fermentation of all the beer in Stratford.
What place is there, then, in history, for any thing
more supernatural than this incessant Presence? Surely one would think that it would suffice the craving
of the most inveterate thaumaturgist. Indeed, it is a
wonder that there is any thing at all, or that there ever
was any thing, including God himself! The vast fact
feeds the imagination till it is too cloyed for the confectionery of miracles. Sometimes it seems inexplicable
that there was never nothing at all. " But why then,"
urges the supernaturalist, " after being obliged to put




ï~~RIGHT MENTAL METHOD.

15

at the beginning of your series a miracle, namely, the
creation of something, whether out of fulness or of
nothingness, should you shrink from repetitions of the
first divine act that we can conceive? It was a first
supernatural step: why may there not have been subsequent steps, making the same gesture of incursion?
You strain at a gnat and swallow a camel." The
universe proffers its own-reply to this by furnishing us
with the right mental method. The first step was
no more supernatural than the God who stepped; no
more nor less. The gradualism of all subsequent
creation refers us back to gradualism in the remotest
original purpose of the divine mind. We cannot use
the word " beginning," or say that there was ever such
a thing or movement. The first term in the series of
all phenomena was essential Eternity: there must
then have been eternally a proceeding forth out of
Eternity. There must eternally have been the simple
forthcoming, of which all things are modes, gradually
developed, but never aside from the continuous company of the divine developer. Is it too dogmatic to
say that there was no such thing as intervention at
first, nor interpolation: not a spasm, nor an alteration
of essential condition; not a jump from rest to motion,
from nonentity to pleroma, from pleroma to primitive
substance? The whole universe puts the stamp of
its method upon the eternal proceeding of the universe.
Eternal continuity precludes the possibility of a first
act, a first flaking-off, a first motion. The phrase is
" I am," but the deep, unbroken breathing that voices
it has neither beginning nor end.
But suppose there was a first act, and admit the




ï~~16

AMERICAN RELIGION.

claim that it was a supernatural transfer of power, or
passage from one state to another, or intrusion of
spirit into matter, or waking from rest to motion, or
quickening of passive germs, -just as you please to
state it. If this act placed all the laws of nature upon
their route of gradual development, the act itself is
a proclamation of the impossibility of supernatural
interference with the method which the act involved.
Then it becomes a question of scientific observation of
the method; and while the facts are coming in2 and
opinions differ, we must mark the tendency. And if
you hear any noted man of science affirm that he
finds nothing in nature incompatible with the idea of
miracles, ask him if he finds any thing in nature compatible with it. That is the real point. He may
say, particularly if he does not like to compromise
his position in an orthodox community, that none
of the facts he has ever collected deny the theory
of special interventions, and that for all he knows
there may be miracles to-day. Yet while he says
it, the ground he stands on is consistency and continuity of law. A single break in that lets all his
facts through into chaos; and instead of a contriver
and constructor he becomes a chiffonier or junkmerchant: naturalist and supernaturalist may stock
his bag or buy his truck. If a man of science thinks
that a thing lies out of his province, he will be very
likely to say that he knows nothing against it. He
will not meddle with revivals, nor dispute on infant
baptism. Politics he may ignore. If he is led to investigate the modern spiritualism, his scientific instinct
detects the shadowy nature of the claim that spirits




ï~~RIGHT MENTAL METHOD.

I7

intrude into the organization of living persons to control them. For the breath of his intellect is the idea
of non-intrusion, non-intervention, the inviolability of
every province that is controlled by necessary laws.
The moment that science consents to apply its principles to mooted questions, delusion vanishes before the
steps of method: the forces that are sufficient now are
declared to have been always sufficient to transact the
business of nature; their gradualism and their adamantine sequence tell the whole secret of the past.
A  confusion arises from  the use of the words
Natural and Supernatural. If a man says he is a Naturalist he is accused of confining God to one original
act of creation, which put blind forces on their developing way; of supposing that first throb of divinity
to widen into the undulations of all phenomena: as
if the world were like a cannon-ball that carries an
impulse and leaves the cartridge behind, or the complicated motion which the stroke of a cue lends to the
balls upon a billiard-table, without following them
round. If a man says he is a Naturalist with the
divine immanence added, he is accused of making the
immanence just as blind a force as the forces it travels
with, and it might as well have been left behind. If
he says the immanence is a distinct Person and Volition, he is still accused of leaving out the attributes of
Paternity and Love: the divine Person only wills the
fatefulness of laws. If he says that it is an omnipresent Father of love, who cares for his children, he
is accused of investing the logic of the universe with
the phrases of religion, since logic is predestination,
and that can have no care. If he says that the pre



ï~~18

AMERICAN RELIGION.

destination was of that perfect kind which, in every
instance, without sacrificing consistency, meeting selfish expectations, or deferring to human ignorance,
secures true welfare to every form of life, the objector
replies, "Very well, so I believe."  But does he believe so? Then he cannot perceive the legitimate
results of such a statement. It sounds like something
which he says in a lucid interval, when his brain is
not congested with miracle, and he narrowly escapes
becoming permanently rational.  But this is what
every supernaturalist must really believe: that the
divine foresight must have arranged for intervention
as a feature in its consistency, in order to adapt itself
to exigencies by being something different from its
own exigency; a gracious coming in at the nick of
time to obviate some previous doings of its own, to
take back its words by.saying something in another
key that is not fateful but fatherly, to lie in wait for
the critical moment that shall be a signal to fly in the
face of the immutable order with signs and wonders,
to get its spiritual excellence attested, by means of the
little cursory indulgence of a higher law, which science
will some day adopt.
Against all this, we must have a mental method that
is not content with saying that the evidence for supernatural interventions is defective, or that if there were
evidence enough of the right kind they would be admissible. This is not having a mental method that is
the counterpart of the universe. The tendency of
science proclaims its belief that testimony against
itself is an impossibility: as much as if a number of
men should take their bible-oath that they felt the




ï~~RIGHT MENTAL METHOD.

19

earth roll westward. This is not testifying. We cannot collect evidence from an eye-witness; the method
of his mind must affirm the facts. The more an eyewitness swears he observed something, the more he
may convince you that his sight is skin-deep. Our
method must correspond to the accumulating testimony
of science, which is that the divine supernature is immutable procedure through simple facts of nature and
of mind; the miraculous is impossible and superfluous,
because the supernature is detected everywhere, both
in matter and spirit, doing the whole business of
Paganism and Christianity, and nourishing the fauna
and flora of the soul.
The order of Nature does not merely create an antecedent improbability that an exception should occur in
it, but an established order is fatal to the very notion
of an exception. This appears best on some plain,
indisputable lines of facts, such as that of the invariable
disappearance of the soul with the death of the body,
and its incapability of reviving that body. All human
bodies have kept dead so uniformly, and for so long a
time, that we have a right to say that what has occurred
nine hundred and ninety-nine times will happen on the
thousandth. We are as sure of it as that the sun will
rise to-morrow. To say that it is not impossible that
the sun may not rise to-morrow, is to put the safety of
a phrase against the salutary dependence wbch we
derive from experience. While science and e:
proclaim what is actual, it is childish to waste breath in
saying that nothing is impossible. The law by which
a dead body cannot be revived is an unalterable fate.
If any bodies, presumptively dead, revive, the presumption stands corrected.




ï~~20

AMERICAN RELIGION.

A favorite objection which has lately been made to
meet this view, is, that we arrogate a knowledge of
Nature which no man can possess. Who knows what
are the laws of Nature, it is said, and if she really had
always, and always will have, an invariable conformity
to our present experience? What do a thousand years'
observation amount to? They subtend too small an
arc. And in reality we possess hardly more than a
hundred or two years of true empirical observation
with precise deduction. Yet, before all the facts are
in, it is objected, we proclaim a system of the universe,
vote miracles out of it because we have not seen any,
and decide against every kind of supernaturalism, because science has not yet found and labelled it.
The answer to this is very simple. Thousands of
generations of dead men preceded scientific observation. Their graves built the firm continent of at least
one unalterable sequence. And with respect to other
facts which have entered into the field of scientific
observation, the arc subtended by them, though small,
shows drift and direction. Observation increases the
draft which that arc makes upon invariable sequence,
requires it in every province, cannot stir without it,
draws it more firmly with cumulative evidence of law,
and summons unity to keep it from straggling on either
hand.
"What is the history of every science but the history
of the elimination of the notion of creative or other
interferences, with the natural order of the phenomena
which are the subject-matter of that science?"
All past and present statements of supernatural occurrences have been surmised and pretended outside




ï~~RIGHT MENTAL METHOD.

2I

of the province of observation and experiment. Therefore there can be neither historical nor scientific proof
for them. The past cannot be examined, the present
eludes the scientific step, or surrenders at discretion;
the surmised facts disappear as soon as the cross-questioning begins.
And it is a fair assumption of science that the forces
which are seen to be at work at present, must have
been the forces always at work, and that their present
method must have been always the same. When,
therefore, we perceive no personal necessity, moral or
spiritual, for any thing beyond, or supplementary to,
that invariable sequence and recurring consistency
which is called the system of Nature, we have a right
to presume that it was always competent to transact
the business of the human race. If at present it supplies our most exacting wants, of physical health, of
conscience, of the observation of facts, and the intuition of divine truths, the presumption is in favor that
it always did and will. The arc is small, but it stretches
both ways with unrefracted suggestion; and scientific
observation proceeds powerfully now that it has found
this track, and is unfettered by abstract, theologic
notions, or the assumptions of supernaturalism.
But what if science should emerge some day upon a
higher law of supernatural intrusion? An advocate of
this says that " a tree, seeing a dog run to and fro, might
call that a miracle. The tree, unable to move from its
place, could not conceive of the possibility of voluntary
motion. But no law of nature is violated; only a
higher power comes in, - the power of animal life."
How irrelevant is this. A tree, incapable of astonish



ï~~22

AMERICAN RELIGION.

ment, cannot be imagined to be astonished. A man,
capable of rational and spiritual judgments, and of
perceiving facts, cannot be remanded into the supposed
attitude of the tree; he holds no such fictitious relation
to any real or supposed facts, for he is already similar
in mental and spiritual quality to any epoch which has
claimed the guarantee of miracle.
It is said that " we see such wonderful discoveries
made every day of latent powers in Nature, and secrets
hidden till now from all men, that we do not know
where to put limits to the possibility of the wonderful."
To receive a telegram, to have your portrait painted
by the sun, to catalogue the metals in the sun's atmosphere, - these things would have seemed miracles a
few years ago. Here is a confusion of terms. The
wonderful, the incredible, are words which we apply
to the normal developments of science. But the progress of science cannot legitimate an old reputed miracle till it repeats it. When the science that perfects
sun-pictures, or analyzes the stellar spectrum, can raise
another Lazarus, then the wonder it excites will be
of the same kind as that which the so-called miracle
supposes and propagates. Marvellousness itself, that
residue of Fetichism, is the real curiosity in human
nature, and not any story which it may invent. Its
mythologies are less worth noticing than the fact that
the unscientific mind tends constantly to produce them.
If marvellousness were an essential quality of human
nature, devised for the recognition of the supernatural, it
ought to be as strong with cultivated people, and the men
whose genius lies in discovery, as with children and barbarians. But it is a rudimentary condition. The child




ï~~RIGHT MENTAL METHOD.

23

will hanker for the exceptional, the man for uniformity.
Human nature, with all its over-haste, does not really
come across the supernatural till the best minds prove
that it is impossible unless it is in law. But this uniformity works with such materials that it is a perpetual
surprise and stimulus to the imagination. The man of
science is always wondering what next will yield to
him, so that he enriches his method with the spoils of
a universe.
Shakspeare, to give his ghost some plausibility, said
there were more things in heaven and earth than are
dreamt of in our philosophy. The theologian quotes
this with a fine disdain of the Naturalist, who is supposed not to allow any thing in heaven and earth but
himself and his lean theory. But if there be a Holy
Ghost commensurate with the universe, why need little
ghosts carry coals to Newcastle? There is One who
makes them scent the morning air. The Naturalist
sees everywhere through the continuity of law a God,
who says to him, " I Am." The supernaturalist jumps
in with his god from time to time, and, like the clown
in the circus, cheerily announces, " Here we are! "
But the expectation, that science will yet find a law
that may undertake the miraculous business of the past
and future, persists in alleging our imperfect knowl;
edge of facts. They'may betray a different tendency,
and interrupt the invariability Qf phenomena. Are
there not already some occult elements which occasionally displace the ordinary processes of the mind, and
connect it in an exceptional way with the invisible?
And although the majority of the facts of the natural
world seem to furnish to science the constancy it de



ï~~24

AMERICAN RELIGION.

lights in, may not the rest, grouped for the present
under the term Spiritualism, claim a place in the same
constant series, and keep a postern open towards the
invisible world?
There are, it is true, some occult facts connected with
the unconscious or automatic action of the brain, which
supply modern spiritualism with all the phenomena
that delude it into a belief that dead people communicate, that spirits read through sensitive people sealed
books, buried thoughts, remote contingencies, that an
ignorant person is more enlightened than Bacon and
Newton upon the constitution of the universe, that
personal immortality is as tangible as a pump-handle.
When these facts, which have been hitherto slurred
by scientific investigation, take their legitimate place
among the obscure and exceptional traits of the human
brain, they will be found to belong, as is already more
than suspected, to the great fact that a human brain is
a gallery of photographs of memory handed down
from the past and enlarged by the present; that they
may lie in latency, as in a family lumber-room, and be
overlooked or forgotten; that the ancestral brain-cells
are liable to revive, like a grain of mummy-wheat in the
soil of Ohio; that some sensitive persons can walk
through these galleries of another person as a somnambulist takes his unconscious tour on the ridge-pole of a
house; that the listeners can be astonished to find their
own buried latencies and memories recalled, with
appropriate names and sceneries, and striking coincidences; and that there is a subtle connection of the
brain with people and neighborhoods that sometimes
transcends geography, and receives from  distances




ï~~RIGHT MENTAL METHOD.

25

impressions that do not arrive by any ordinary express.
The witch of Endor may raise the phantom of Samuel
out of the brain which the doting Saul brings to the
interview. The solitary brain, without the witch, and
without the expense of a fee, has many a time raised
the dead into objectiveness and overwhelming prominence. When the cross-questioning begins, we discover that nothing but the brain is present and alive.
The general drift of all natural things towards a
theory of natural uniformity accumulates the probability against any fault or dislocation like this assumed
one of spiritual agency. The theory that can absorb
the greatest number of facts, and persist in doing so,
generation af tr generation, through all changes of
opinion and ct detail, is the one that must rule all
observation. The.occult facts do not like to meet this
theory, and hve lately slipped down a back alley,
expecting to meet there the ravishing Thisbe of the
preternatural, as they cry, " I see a voice; now will I
to the chink."  V hen the back-alley turns out to be a
blind lane, in spite of its obscure attractiveness, we
shall hear them objurgate, "0 wicked wall, through
whom I see no bliss! " The occult facts will helplessly
huddle there awhile, then, returning to the high-road,
be taken up by the natural order and restored to their
relatives.
The "more things in heaven and earth" are the very
things we need to have brought in as fast as possible,
to keep up a constant confirmation of the impossibility
of getting old miracles accredited or working new ones.
As fast and as far as we know any thing, the whole
drift sets against them.




ï~~26

AMERICAN RELIGION.

Piazzi Smith, the devout astronomer, is mad enough
to propose the divine inspiration to solve the mystery
of the Great Pyramid. He finds the dry and linear
measures of the Egyptians preserved within it, and is
astonished to notice how nearly they anticipated those
of England. The divine immanence, through the
natural processes of the mind, does not seem to him
competent to have invented the "sacred British inch,"
or the dry measure of the Nilotic people. God must
make a special incursion, and betimes too, before a
yard of tape or a bushel of malt can be delivered to
modern unbelievers.
The very channels which the astronomer explored
were long ago discovered by the Arabs, who put in at
a small hole of the rubbish a cat, which quickly
threaded the mystic interior after.her kittens at the
other aperture, and came to daylight at the true
entrance. Any common thing that runs about after
its own kind will betray the direction of the invisible.
For the greater number of natural facts must always
be the forerunners of the scientific mind.
Dr. Bushnell, searching among our mental operations for some element that corresponds to his idea of
the supernatural, finds it in every free act of ours, the
choice of truth, the preference for good against the
stronger motive that inclines to evil. When we act
from passion we are natural, when we act from choice
we are supernatural. He thinks this element of freedom comes into human nature like a new cause that
was not before in the world. Here is a confusion that
arises from the prestige attached to the scriptural contrast of the natural with the spiritual man. Paul's




ï~~RIGHT MENTAL METHOD.

27

antithesis points to a change in a man's quality, but
not necessarily in the natural laws which produce it.
When a man chooses the good, he is simply becoming
the man he was organized to be; and he does it by
means of the laws of his organization. In this sense
the natural and the spiritual cannot be distinct. There
is no intrusion of a new cause that was not before in
the world. The waking of his will is no more supernatural than the waking of his body in the morning.
If he burns off his underbrush, his oaks and maples
germinate. As well might fermentation and defecation
be termed supernatural.
The true mental method, then, is Antisupernaturalism. But this is decried as a negation. Let us rise
from this, it is said, into positive affirmation of spiritual things, and build them with what symmetry the
mind suggests. We are tired of disbelieving; our
souls feel as jaded as the one sailor in a gang who
should push his capstan bar against all the rest. Let
us take the real motion, and get under weigh. Some
radical thinkers are disposed to lend an ear to this
complaint about the destructive tendency of antisupernaturalism. They cry, Let us revert to central things;
let us collect all constructive truths and attributes.
Foremost of constructive truths is the method of the
divine n.mind, as it is seen in all orders, creatures,
knowledges.  Why say it is destructive? Here's a
whole forenoon travelling westward, and waking up
the scorn of every meridian at the slur upon its fidelity.
Method is organic, and it builds. It necessarily denies
all the miraculous mythologies of the past and present,
as the new astronomy denies the Ptolemaic epicycles,




ï~~28

AMERICAN RELIGION.

which were once the belief of all mankind. It has
taken the sun and moon, and the influences of all the
planets, to expunge them from the science of the world.
But what was it that denied them? The positive truth
of the natural order of the heavens. The epicycles
were the destructives; they upset all planetary order,
because they went into artificial combination against it;
they were at best a cumbersome expedient to represent
the apparent motions of the heavenly bodies, and as
long as men's minds followed the complicated round,
they did not walk with God. The radical thinker must
make the antisupernatural method the main-spring of
his whole activity. It must set in motion all his gifts,
from perception to the subtlest report of feeling and
imagination. It is the co-ordinating principle of his
whole intelligence, because it is the supernature of the
natural world.
What are some of the benefits of this mental method?
If it represents the divine harmony, we shall expect
to see truthful and desirable results in the whole moral
and spiritual constitution. We restore health to all our
faculties when we recur to the normal relations that
exist between the mind and the world; the very gesture is the first appeal of the sick man to those habits
of air, exercise and regularity, which refresh a jaded
system. The intellect pulls the stroke oar among the
divine crew whose forces mark the rhythm that spreads
on all sides into the obscurest inlets of nature.
It is a great benefit to emancipate a mind from the
habit of limping after its own truths on the crutch of
mythological authority, and to show its relation of respect to the past on the ground that it blossomed with




ï~~RIGHT MENTAL METHOD.

29

the same moral law that beautifies the present; to
teach the natural permanence, continuity and uniformity of all spiritual truths, whether they result from our
accumulated sensations, or from an intuitional ability,
or whether the latter derives them from the totality of
the former. A right mental method gives them all the
advantage of science. No theology can juggle with
them or trade in them, either with heaven or hell to boot.
The man sees that he is what he may expect. It puts
a stop to all superstitious aspirations for a marvellous
inburst of power to influence, convert or save. The
tide is always moulded by the configuration of the
shore; it reaches every man where he stands, as it does
all forms of things in the world that are fashioned
while they stay it. The right mental method keeps
every man cool and safe in the dark, like the healthy
child who goes up the dim winding staircase to its
slumber, having gone up so often in the noontime that
the night shineth like the day. Method does not
tremble on the verge of hysterics, dreading some
epiphany besides the day; nor will it hanker secretly
for assignations carried on mid the penumbra of Nature, where still some facts lie in half light: they will
become familiar enough in the gradual spreading of the
morn, whose broad laugh will expose their secret paramours. The whole moral system becomes toned by
regular and even expectation when the mind is content with the tendency of the greater number of phenomena, and expects that it will include them all.
The true method brings God to man through all the
legitimate channels of knowledge, deduction, emotion,
and human love. They are subject to a continuous




ï~~30

AMERICAN RELIGION.

agency, which cannot be stimulated to alter the nature
and number of its facts. All the real members of a
finite soul learn their exercise as God shall make the
competent gestures. There is honest bread for each.
The dragon which guarded golden apples is discovered
to be God's aversion to extraordinary expectations; and
the garden of the Hesperides is now well laid down to
fodder and esculents. Each human faculty is a household that must expect its providence by its own road,
as the butcher and milkman arrive by theirs, and not as
peculiar favor down the chimney into the pot by preternatural gymnastics. The laws of life, health, pain
and death, the consciousness of the avoidable and the
unavoidable, will be taken out of the region of theological surmising, and all men will grow hilarious with
the conviction that God continues to be sane. The
steadfast and sanguine frame, in which heaven is all the
time, will disconcert our conceited effort to force it into
special providences and means of extra grace. The
pulpit orator, ashamed to pray for them any longer,
will probably turn his attention to the fact that all men
have what they get, and he will stimulate their hopes
by the knowledge of the laws that prevail in the housekeeping of God. The sailor straining at the recusant
capstan bar, who keeps the anchor in the mud, is
Supernaturalism.
What recesses of the human soul cannot be reached
by the even tide of God? Its refreshment slides up
from gift to gift, and tosses its spray into the face of
imagination, and lies deep around the rooted senses on
which men stand to see their hope of immortality and
consciousness of the divine presence reflected in it. If




ï~~RIGHT MENTAL METHOD.              3I
it ebbs, we recollect the image and yearn for the diurnal freshness. It lifts us, with the rest of Nature, and
all things find themselves blithely afloat. Nice observation of an insect's embryo, warm enthusiasm for
the moral law, the tenderness that seeks its human
kind, and the ecstasy that claims kinship with the
invisible order,- the whole of the soul is carried round
with the planets, and rolls into the orderly influence of
all the heavenly lights: not one faculty can lag behind,
or be dropped out of this mental unity. Nothing truly
precious swims helplessly in the great wake of God's
clear method, but every part of the man can be, and,
therefore, strives to be, abreast of the other. The
mountains follow the earth, the air has clasped the
mountains, and daylight and starlight stream forward
entangled in the air. Clutching for dear life to each
other, all solid and tenuous things describe the great,
invariable motion, and God is in the manifoldness,
drenching it with uniformity.




ï~~II.

AMERICA'S DEBT.
F any person inclines to say that America may
receive the distinction of a Religion whose peculiarities will belong to the wants and characters of the
country, he is told that Religion is a fixed body of ideas,
or a tendency that is independent of time and place, is
at home in all climates and outlives them  all, and
remains essential, while worship and sacramental customs alone are modified. Then if you ask for a statement of this tendency, or what these fixed ideas are
which create Religion, you get as many answers as
there are denominations. But all these answers, the
most liberal as well as the most conservative, agree in
one point - to affirm that there can be no Religion
where there is not something to mediate between man
and God. Therefore, the assumption is, a religion for
America must conform to this universal necessity, and
nothing in mixture of race, in physical situation or in
social and political ideas can select her from mankind,
to recommend some peculiarity, or to detach religion
from its general dependence upon mediatorship.
And we are asked to notice that the human mind has
been occupied for several thousand years with this idea,




ï~~AMERICA'S DEBT.

33

which began in the cruellest forms of sacrifice, to reach
at length, through many stages of intellectual improvement, the feeling that men are united to God rationally
by the intervening agency of some sovereign person's
nature and character. God need no longer be flattered
nor deprecated; no human heart held dripping toward
the sky can do aught but confirm divine aversion, and
no substitution of one heart can satisfy infinite justice,
nor fill with its blood the interval between earth and
heaven. But the most liberal thinkers still try to save
something from this disintegrated doctrine of sacrifice.
They cling to this: that there is no way of getting over
from man to God till one great heart bridges the chasm,
and pulsates with the thronging of a myriad feet that
carry on commerce between the finite and the infinite.
It is said to be another case of American conceit and
crudeness, when the Atlantic is expected to interrupt
this development of humanity. Can three thousand
miles of salt water break this dyke of life, which so
many generations have builded with their thought and
feeling? It has its roots far down in the rubbish which
savages threw in to sprawl, dark and unsightly, on, the
bottom of life's mystery: their dread of Nature, their
suspicions of the invisible, their frantic bribes of innocent blood, their whole cowering barbarism. Upon
this chance heap went cleaner substitutes of offering
and property in every form; any thing to help get man's
head above water, towards that glimmer of the light
and air. Schemes, dogmas and ecclesiastical furniture
went next, the lighter rubbish of the mind; but the
whole pile is justified clear through from the base upward by the one feeling that man must get to God:
2*




ï~~34

AMERICAN RELIGION.

something must intervene to plant the feet upon, something must mediate. It was surmised that all this
work must be in the right direction, because the
downward pressure was diminishing, and more light
came to envelop the endeavor. At length the path
emerges, and the sun shines so clear, that men are
dazzled into presuming that God has been all the time
descending in exact deference to every stage of man's
upbuilding. This human struggle has been a divine
travail towards an incarnation. Let men see it as they
stand at length firmly above the waves. Here it is, the
great Person, both divine and human: he will answer
all questions, meet all wants. Without him man is not
a child and God is not a father. Both parties are nonplussed for want of a bridge. There can be no other
communication. The Atlantic cannot be austere
enough to deter the logic of history from colonizing a
new world. The American is not independent of it.
He must import it with the multiplication table and the
rule of three. Trading and Religion cannot migrate
out of the universal laws and exigencies. It is only
some destructive radical's conceit that a new country
offers to Yankee enterprise a chance to invent directer
and cheaper routes to God.
It is true that rapid prosperity has been surprised
into the indulgence of a flippant tone, which gratifies
any foreign observer whose object is to strengthen his
own patriotism by counting our defects. "He will have
no difficulty in deprecating a contemptuous sciolism
which infects our thinking, business, and amusements.
It seems that the most successful citizens rectify the
estimate of the earth's age by the date of their nativity.




ï~~AMERICA'S DEBT.

35

At least, they admit no chronological periods of importance previous to the settlement of the country.
This is partly a fault of position. Old ties, old languages, festivals and customs, were surrendered by a
few emigrants, whose successors undertake at a disadvantage the creation of new forms, while they betray
that the struggle for life has made them impatient.
There is a culture.of fine arts and letters, by no means
of the philological kind, that mitigates the attacks of
an untoward climate upon the nerves, and touches the
temper with mansuetude. The full pocket is slapped
less loudly, and nobler fashions of life and pleasure
levy toll upon it. Such an influence unfortunately does
not yet prevail where the people have been driven to
fight for a position in which the first necessities of
existence can be obtained. The effort has made them
curt in their depreciation of arts that seem to them
superfluous. And it even threatens to become a principle of the practical education which the town furnishes to native born and emigrant. At least one
singing-book that we have seen, used by some common
schools, expresses it with unshaken sincerity and confidence -
"Long ago, long ago
Under Grecian rule,
They could not raise one spelling-book,
To teach a boy at school.
Dark day! Iron age!
Better times we see:
And the youth of classic fame
Were not so blest as we.

Shout, Shout! all the boys,
Raise the song again, -




ï~~36

AMERICAN RELIGION.

We are stronger than the Greeks,
And we '11 be wiser men;" &c.*
That famous schoolmaster, Tyrtous, whose soul
set Grecian sinew to the key of freedom, taught men
to fight better than they knew, and with a longer
breath; for they served these American occasions
which we use for a license to forget with such hilarious
satisfaction. Let some one infuse into our primary
rhymes a sense of the benefit which battling civilizations have done to America, as they advanced to strains
of their moment's enthusiasm, to prepare her way.
There is a sweet proverb in the Talmud that " The
world is only saved by the breath of the school-children." But youth itself is lost when some reverence
for the old youth that fostered it is not felt coming from
its lips.
But when it is said, we inherit from the past a
human need of mediatorship, that anticipates the first
gesture which Religion can ever make here, and decides the sources and supply of spiritual truth for
America, an inference is drawn from the past which
converts it from a teacher into a tyrant, and repeats the
sorrowful mistake of all theologies.
I have yet to meet the man, however radical and
sceptical, who will deny that we depend upon the past.
It is a cheap device of the newspapers to represent a
radical thinker, axe in hand, furiously laying about
him in the underbrush, and levelling with indiscriminate stroke the weeds that spindled up in a week, and
* This stupendous pean is sung to the tune of "Nellie
Bly."




ï~~AMERICA'S DEBT.

37

the close-grained trees that envelop with their bark
a thousand years.  Any thing that has a root is
supposed to be predestined fuel for the radical's
crackling fire.  The popular fancy constructs him
toasting his thin extremities, and thawing out bloodless
veins, at a blaze of cedars of Lebanon and the product
of extensive clearings of the Mount of Olives. Into
this costly smoke, fed with cinnamon and sandal-wood,
perfumed with myrrh and frankincense that were tributes of Eastern wisdom to the eternal child of truth,
he throws the bonds which mankind has given to Life,
Death and Immortality, and is amused to watch the
bankruptcy curling up the chimney. / But if the public
chose, it might observe the modern thinker walking in
the shade of the primeval trees that still grapple with
the breasts of earth, and tasting gratefully their fruits,
Would it avail to insist upon this? Is it ever worth
while for a man formally to deny that he believes twice
two to be a minus quantity? It ought to be impossible to find anybody who suspects him of believing it.
The sower, who goes forth to sow his seed, looks
straight before him, and scatters his germs into the
centuries that lie beneath his feet.  Who, indeed,
denies the Past so effectively as the conservative who
twists his neck with ogling her over his shoulder, while
his feet, no longer vision-guided, stumble on their way
to the day's errand? The Past is not a mummy-pit
where a man rummaging for ornaments gets stifled
with the dust of countless dead people. But it is the
planet's made soil. The primeval oceans deliberated
over it, and left a deposit of their minute forms of life.
The mammoth rivers tore the hill-sides with white




ï~~38

AMERICAN RELIGION.

tusks, and ran down to estuaries with silt that tells
how long they had been browsing. The glacier slipped
over the whole scene, noiseless as thought, and as
well-freighted.  Its blue share both ploughed and
sowed. And on the surface gained by this extensive
labor of epochs, the skies shed their rain and successive races their blood. Now a man plants a slip of a
geranium bush in several million years of tillage and
top-dressing. Does he think he has got an inch or two
of yesterday in his trowel? It is so heavy that, if he
only knew it, he would drop it as if he saw it was a
mountain. That young man's laurel has the pink of
all the Caesars' cheeks glistening through its morning's
dew. A crown of thorns is woven for these foreheads
of ours out of more Gethsemanes than history had
time to reckon. A few turns of the spade anywhere
will refute the nervous hurry of these second-hands on
the face of our time, for there are places where a day
laborer can pitch a century into his cart in a forenoon,
and wheel it off to mend a hole in the highway.
During some explorations which were lately made
upon the coast of Crete, the recent tokens of the Turk
were first thrown aside, to uncover those of the Venetian, beneath which lay successively the forgotten years
of Greek,Phoenician and Pelasgic cities, till a few stone
relics of the cave-dwellers, tossed out undermost of
all, lay on the beach for the tide to wet. It once slid
up to flatter the feet of men who dropped their brine
into it before earth learned the fashion of counting
human tears. Upon what a concrete we stand: our
minute's opportunity secured by several oblivions!
But they are not in fact forgotten, for we recognize




ï~~AMERICA'S DEBT.

39

them whenever honor and truth ask for seats at our
fireside. These guests have been travelling to keep
their appointment with us ever since the world's surface had pathways. Now the conscience passes to and
fro by broad routes that were first nothing but the
channel of some barbarian's tear. When that little
furrow set out to mark some plain dictates of right
and wrong, that might reclaim the ferocious uncertainties and fence them with human security and comfort,
enclosed in which early smiles might spring to attract
heaven's sunshine, the colonization of six and thirty
States with liberty was begun.
When we mention the tears which have been extorted
by the conscience in its agonizing to set free Truth and
win Religion by it, we are reminded of a function of
the Past that is little understood. Perhaps we are too
young and prosperous to observe that mankind has
been shedding tears that we may taste our truth well
filtered. But it is so. The most cheerful action is as
pathetic as the most tragic: for its easy movement,
that charms the beholders, is a hint to them of generations of men and women put on the rack till the sweet
confession was gathered at their dying lips. All the
torture has been left behind in the distorted limbs. We
cannot be honest in our friendships and business, or
exchange these new amenities of living, and conspire
to put the rights of man in a safe place, at a less expense than the perils and longings of all the Past.
" For a tear is an intellectual thing,
And a sigh is the sword of an angel king,
And the bitter groan of a martyr's woe
Is an arrow from the Almighty bow."




ï~~40

AMERICAN RELIGION.

The best adorer that the-Past retains is not the conservative who thinks that an old truth must be a
seasoned one, but the liberal who perceives that the
new truth is a filtered one. The conservative esteems
the crudeness that has age upon it; the liberal prefers
the age that runs through crudeness to a limpid drbp.
He does not care to taste at the previous stages, not
even at the one before the last. But he venerates the
mighty ferment of Nature, and never forgets that
human blood and tears were thrown in to clarify the
bumpers of Godhood that he tosses down.
He claims and clings to every name that is expressive of past excellence: to the name of that great soul
who has been elected Mediator by Christendom, and
thrust into an office that only ill-conceived texts can
arrogate for him.. All the Jewish assumptions of this
kind that he ever made were contradicted by the
simplicity of his spiritual life, as it relied upon the
private instinct of each soul to find its God at hand.
Whatever is beautiful in the morals and piety which
make his character so impressive to the memory, only
serves to show how the page is disfigured by the doctrines of Christship; and we shrink from admitting
that he could have entertained them. We -perceive
that they are nothing but verbal gestures that strive in
vain to limit and direct his soul's great movement, by
which he anticipated all official station and lent his personal vitality to the cause of mankind. He permitted
God to become incarnate, and so he wins the supremacy of a place by the side of all other men, in whom
the same mystery is perpetually enacted.
At one time there were as many pieces of the true




ï~~AMERICA'S DEBT.

41

cross, well authenticated, as would suffice to build a
meeting house; but all crucified men have preferred
to touch the relic of his sympathy and brotherly love.
And that we have inherited, emphasized, enlarged,
organized, and translated into definite actions. Modern blood hastens to repair wounds and ghastly lacerations; to heal that thrust in the side of humanity,
from which a sacred stream continually flows. White
lips languish on crosses close at hand, but they do not
summon a distant redeemer. And the modern thinker
may wait at the foot of the old cross, with all the
heart of that cluster of women, till the head droops
in the kind swoon which takes that martyr off to rest,
like a nurse bearing an infant to its mother; but
instead of trying to save his soul by getting that death
imputed to him, he notes the last gesture, turns it to
confidence and leaves the place: he has no time to
linger around a dying moment, and no care to fancy
that it has a mysterious connection with his life. His
own head is alive with doubt, dismay, unsatisfied
desires, the crucial moments of existence. Has God
forsaken him? He lays his head directly upon the
bosom of God, with nothing intermediate, not the
most beloyed pulse, not the insinuation of the most
sacred memory to divide and distract the closeness of
heaven. He heard the mob of passions and problems
shouting, " Let him save himself"- and he does. If
the prophets and martyrs have left one legacy to
America, it is that (not so much legacy as privilege)
of prophesying and suffering by direct contact with
God. Nothing but that directness ever did or ever
can draw martyrdom down while rising to prophecy.




ï~~47,

AMERICAN RELIGION.

Ransack history to see if you can find any other mediatorship than the example of the great souls who
spurned mediators, and rushed into divineness all
alone. Out of the wine-press which they trod alone
drips for us the vintage of direct appeal to the immediate God. We catch it in the cup of our knowledge
and attainment, mere earthen-ware, perhaps, plain
to ugliness, or perhaps sumptuously embossed and
ornamented, and carved by lines that thousands of
years have fondly hung over, meditating and correcting; it is a relic of the past, but the drink is the
present inspiration: our own private and incessant
God fills it to the brim. Plato and Socrates are still
extant in the chiselling; our lips feel kindred rubies
from the East clustering to meet them; a world's
midnight thinking has gone into that least curve to
the greatest content, a world's noonday acting has fashioned its foot: shall we venture to say that the cross
of Jesus is with other crosses in the stem? Yes: but
the drink, the rapture that sends our veins heavenhigh, the mouthful, the soulful - that is God with us,
as He was with those before.
And see how America has inherited from the past
a material condition and a moral temper of self-help,
which provide all the circumstances that correspond
to this independent gesture of Religion. We still
have priests, bishops, and overseers of souls, with
functions which a mature person finds superfluous:
yet the colonizing of a new world meant that an experiment should be tried of a world without priestcraft, on a continent where every man could have religion like air, gratis, by lifting his window, or turning




ï~~AMERICA'S DEBT.

43

the handle of his door. As wealth makes our cities
impatient of frugality and simple ways, we begin to
recollect that there are cathedrals in the old world:
architects import the details of York, Westminster,
and Strasburg, and furnish them to building committees who want to run up a costly box of a plaything,
and a corresponding bill. Westminster's lines and
arches, which spring grandly to cover a space that a
small city might occupy, are pinched down to the
capacity of a thousand people; the great rose windows
shrink to knot-holes; the glass resents a plain, straightforward daylight, and, in short, the dim religiousness
sets in. Still, a cathedral would have swamped the
Mayflower, and they took great pains to keep it out
of the hold; and the grim, austere land was settled
and subdued without the aesthetic influences of stained
glass and ogive lines. The polity of Plymouth Rock
was anti-liturgical.  Everybody was in the open
weather in summer and winter. Now some of us are
getting catarrhal, and run to shelter out of the sincere
climate of the Republic. Nevertheless, our health is
promoted by ventilation and the outside of buildings;
and there is no country in the world where such a
broad sheet of sunshine lies over one political area.
It invites us to run to and fro to flowers and labor in
its robust actinic ray. Every brain comes into God's
weather furnished with its own roof. When souls
discover that vaulted aisles bleach instead of protecting them, they prefer to be dipped in a horizon full of
warmth, and drenched at every sense and pore with
divine virility.
Universal suffrage is not yet the symbol of each




ï~~44

AMERICAN RELIGION.

man's private worth, but only of his responsibility to
be worthy. It ought to notify that he has an income
not appraised by the assessor; namely, that he is a
moral and spiritual person, too costly for the purses
of cliques and oligarchies; never so much the ally
of truth as when he stands alone. He is set down
in these empires of states where nobody can jostle
him: he begins to be effective when he is not welded
in a crowd. It is true, parties have their whippers-in,
and we are threatened with the drill-master in the
best of causes; but a continent that is too large for
fencing suggests to the citizens constant sallies and
excursions, it being plainly the genius of the place
to preserve individualism. That asserts itself from
Boston, through Utah to the Golden Gate, in all the
excesses and virtues of an ambitious society. Shall
we tame it by lassoing and corraling all the individuals? No, but rather by leaving each man free to
catch himself. This is a work of time, but any theory of government, society or religion, that undertakes
to interfere with it in disgust or alarm, in high-bred
contempt for inconveniences, is out of date, and cannot, therefore, make the new movement of the spiritual nature which is to free religion from mediatorship.
But it is objected that no new movement can develop any thing new out of the religious elements of
human nature which have furnished belief and moral
behavior to all the countries of the earth. It is said
that religion is derived from primitive truths imbedded
in the substance of the soul; some of them are moral
truths, and some of them express the relation which
the creature sustains to the Creator. America must




ï~~AMERICA'S DEBT.

45

accept these universal necessities. She cannot improvise a new digestive apparatus, with food to correspond, such as no race of men has yet tasted. She
can emancipate mankind from every thing but its
organization. That she must accept, else emancipation itself has no continuance. And it is vitally dependent upon religious truths. Can America set up
housekeeping without a practice of the divine economy
of the Beatitudes? Can she afford to do without a
God, or to overlook the retributive agency of evil?
Certainly not. These are powerful objects towards
which the country must put forth its characteristic
strength. They can only be acquired by the entirely
original, unbiased efforts of each individual, independent of his memory of the past. Nothing is fit to
drink but the water which you draw from your own
well freshly every morning. The Beatitudes were
drawn in that way, and quenched one man's thirst.
Did the other people cease to be dry while they were
looking on to see him drink? It might be plain to
them that the draught was refreshing; they might
extol it with parched lips, and cry, " Give me to
drink!" But if a man who draws his own Beatitudes
makes a proposition to furnish other parties, he can
only be understood to say to them: " There is an everlasting well of water in you; don't try to let your
bucket down into me; besides, I go away; but men
will be thirsty everywhere, and there will be water
everywhere. Will it quench thirst for people to remember adoringly that I drew my own water, and
how good it was?" For a beatitude is not revealed
until it is personally experienced.




ï~~46

AMERICAN RELIGION.

There is a popular trick of remembering the impressive accounts of men in India, Greece and Judea,
who had an instinct for water, and knew where it lay
hid beneath those fervent skies. And this is called
Religion. Men collect in churches, and lay hold of
some kind of mediatorial tackle, and haul at it while
the preacher gives the time, encouraging them with
descriptions of what he knows they will bring up.
But what is it when it arrives at the surface? Why,
it is just what they let down, a mediating bucket full
of texts. The water is not there, not even the person is there whose soul was a well-mouth communicating with the water. But it lies underneath the
whole earth's crust; and these other living persons
who have rigged this derrick that cranes across to
Judea might hear it trickling under their feet, or be
apprised of its presence by the immediate divining of
their thirst.
The reason why so many moral battles have to be
fought afresh, and the new causes of righteousness are
slow to enlist their natural allies, is because the popular religion is so largely made up of recalling the
nature of Jesus; holding his words heaven-distant, at
the tongue's end; clinging for justification to the garment stained with his blood; trying to make a ladder
of his cross. Men climb to the top of that, and are
no nearer human rights and sanities than they were
before. It is just high enough to give the churches an
outlook over people's heads. They can " see Jerusalem and Madagascar;" entranced, they cry hush to
the pother that enslaving iniquities make beneath
them. Lately these true believers remained perched




ï~~AMERICA S DEBT.

47

up there so long, enjoying the beatific prospect, that
half a million men got nailed to as many fresh crosses
at the head of graves where slavery lies buried. Then
they come down and vote it magnificent. But they
are soon up again. It is a wasteful and slovenly kind
of religion, this pulling at the skirts of a mediator.
America has lost too much time in that way already,
and paid roundly for absence of mind.
Put it to common sense, then, if the proposition to
emancipate America from this hectoring stepmother of
tradition into the immediate liberty of the sons of God,
be not a constructive one. It is so, if the mission of
Truth be to organize and save by the divineness of the
instant and not of the memory. The book is not yet
printed that provides for the emergencies of our future.
There are hundreds of books, reverend with age, that
imply them, but nothing is so futile as implication. It
can only be read clearly by means of such a fresh
inspiration of duty and courage as makes the reading
superfluous.
America is an opportunity to make a Religion out
of the sacredness of the individual. She did not
invent the idea, for it has been implied through the
successive stages of knowledge and civilization. It
was implied when an old cave-dweller succeeded in
making a stone lance-head that would kill a mammoth.
When God invented the human race, and selected the
first men out of animalism and set them on precarious
legs, he implied the sacredness of the creature; and
the implication went groping into and through all
forms of religion and the books that chronicled them.
The old Buddhist implied America when he made a




ï~~48

AMERICAN RELIGION.

fight with the Brahman over the doctrine of Caste.
The Persian implied the superiority of the individual
over the dark forces of Nature when he called the
soul out of Ahriman, or the principle of evil, into the
light of the sun. The Greek framed the proud thought
in his story of Prometheus freeing man from his dependency upon the blind fatalities of life. Socrates
implied it every time he stopped at a carpenter's or
currier's door, and brought out the man's notions upon
politics and virtue, to show him how conventional they
were, and how far below his own sense of the handsome and proper. The Psalms of David imply citizenship and inalienable rights in every word about
walking uprightly, working righteousness, and speaking the truth in the heart; in all the objurgations of
the oppressor, the pleas to God to defend the poor
and fatherless, do justice to the afflicted and needy,
and deliver them out of the hand of the wicked. The
same insinuations prolong themselves into the speech
of Jesus, where they gather meaning from the command to stand fast in the truth that maketh free, and
from the golden rule, which Confucius had already
promulgated to a nation more liberal than the Jews.
This republican implication was made more notably
by Paul than by any other voice in the New Testament. Compared with the twelfth chapter of the First
of Corinthians, for instance, all the fraternal sayings
of Jesus appear abstract and colorless. They contain
the brotherhood of man, to be sure, but it is as the
nebula contains the planets. Paul gave the first rounding touch to that fire-mist of sentiment which has become solid ground beneath the nineteenth century.




ï~~AMERICA'S DEBT.

49

lie wrote merely to advise a Church to cooperate in
the display of its spiritual gifts, and he encumbers his
manly text with allusions to miracles, discerning of
spirits, and interpretation of tongues. But when he
says, "By one spirit are we all baptized into one
body, whether we be Jews or Gentiles, whether we
be bond or free, for the body is not one member but
many," he seems to be in conference with Jefferson
and Franklin, proposing his draught towards the basis
of the Declaration of Independence. Read in that
light the chapter might astonish Europe, who has had
it upon her pulpits for centuries, but has not even
yet introduced equality into the pews. So much for
the value of truths that are so vaguely implied that an
afterthought is necessary to liberate their meaning.
The afterthought is the genuine revelation.
The abolition of slavery was involved in the statement made to the disciples: " One is your Master,
even Christ, and all ye are brethren." But who were
included by that glittering generality, " all ye"? Only
at first the knot of disciples, and, by implication, all
future followers of the Master. But Onesimus was
not included so far as he continued to be the chattel
of a Christian; and when he was returned to his
owner, the late campaigns of the American people
were implied, and not emancipation. Nineteen centuries bleed to clarify that text, and precipitate its undetermined qualities into the rights of individuals.
That blood has been the really efficacious revelation
of fraternity, whose rubricated text finds no Bible large
enough to hold it.
It has been assumed that the modern regard for
3




ï~~50

AMERICAN RELIGION.

woman, which involves her gradual release from antique disabilities, may be directly traced to the golden
rule, since it enjoins that we must do to men what
we would prefer that they should do to us. But what
moral scope and intention were expressed by that
statement?  No more than were when Confucius
anticipated it. It is not a question of how much
human equality the present can gather and reflect
upon it, but of how much it really reflected at the
time it was uttered. If we can be permitted to aggrandize the old texts by modern experiences, we can
easily interpret the belief of Jesus in a personal devil,
and in the possession by demons, into a scientific acknowledgment of the malign influences of unfortunate
births, and hysteric, epileptic, and insane conditions.
Professor Maury, the distinguished observer of the
laws of winds and storms, discovered a forecasting of
his own theory of the rotatory movement of the cyclone, and of the circular sweep of the storm-bearing
currents, in the text of Ecclesiastes: "The wind goeth
toward the South, and turneth about unto the North;
it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth
again according to his circuits." It needed no church
weathercock to teach as much as that.
So we can undertake to manage the plain belief of
Scripture in a second visible coming of a Judge and
Savior, and let it down softly into the representation
that Jesus comes by development of spiritual truth.
But these are the fraudulent accommodations of occupants of modern pulpits, who try desperately to save
at once the old text and their common sense. One of
the two must be surrendered; for the point is, that the




ï~~AMERICA'S DEBT.

51

old texts meant another thing to the utterers and hearers, who never anticipated this modern jugglery which
undertakes to spiritualize their delusive statements;
they meant merely what they said, and clung to it till
reality outfaced them, and would not have felt indebted
to any one who should insist that they meant something different.
If we mean something different, let us express it in
texts of our own, and not attempt to procure spurious
authority for our meaning, by extorting it from the lips
of men who held obsolete views of nature, life, and
society.
When the world-old golden rule was reaffirmed by
Jesus, it carried only his feeling that men must always
offer the treatment that they prefer to receive. But, so
far as the political, legal, or social equality of women
is concerned, the word " men" expressed the ordinary
intention of the age, as the word " citizen" does in our
constitution; it never entered the mind of the reproducer of that primitive natural preference for fair-dealing, that it should include the emancipation of woman.
It nowhere appears that the idea had dawned upon
his moral consciousness.
There are traces, on the contrary, that Jesus shared
the ordinary oriental feeling upon the relation of women
to men. He treated his favorites with consideration,
perhaps with tenderness; and what man ever did less?
But he betrayed the same spirit which appears in the
Epistles of Paul, who derived it from his own position
in race and history, and needed not to catch it by infection. We detect, in the interview with Mary and
Martha, all the pleased absorption of a modern mysta



ï~~52

AMERICAN RELIGION.

gogue who has an adoring woman for a listener, while
the householder and elder sister overheats herself in
the kitchen that he and his retinue may be fitly entertained. The most inveterate vegetarian and ascetic
will confess that more than one thing is needful in
housekeeping. Even the New Testament represents
that the Son of Man came eating and drinking, as
probably did his disciples; and there are hints that they
were not averse from being entertained. If Mary had
been dismissed to help her sister, a lesson in the golden
rule would have been administered, and both of them
might then have passed precious hours at his feet.
The good part to choose must be found in manly and
womanly fidelity to all reasonable service. Christianity neither emphasizes the equality of woman within
her own sex, nor her right to all the opportunities she
may decide to claim.
It was not till Christianity found Greek refinement
on its way to the West, and met there the superior
reverence for woman among the Teutonic races, that
Europe began to entertain a better opinion. The literalist has been always right in maintaining that human slavery and the subjection of woman can be clearly
vindicated by the text and practice of the Bible.
The moral sense declares, " I have heard that it hath
been said by Paul of olden time, but I say a more
excellent thing." We reject his half-theological, halfanimal theory of marriage, and resist his contemptuous denial of woman's personal independence in the
church; and then how much else comes tumbling to
the ground! Woman recovers rights of person, of
property, of the widest education (such as the ancient




ï~~AMERICA'S DEBT.

53

Lesbian school anticipated), of independent livelihood,
and of careers in every direction corresponding to capacity. Where is all this implied in the New Testament?   Its spirit of humanity may claim direct
paternity for all these generous schemes of the modern conscience, when the doctrine of particles of matter, maintained by the Egyptians and by Democritus,
can prove to be the father of the atomistic theory of
Dalton. He reveals and organizes, gives law and numerical ratio, to the fumbling abstraction with which
the ancients inaugurated the career of this new science.
Centuries of housekeeping, of improving politics,
ameliorated races, the emergence of a middle class,
the development of labor, machinery, motive powers,
of popular reading and writing, at length make the
implication of equal rights, always latent in the conscience, emphatic, directly put, and formidable. It
was better conceived and handled by Buddhism than
by the texts of the New Testament. But there is no
revelation till an act takes the place of uncommitted
sentiment.
The moral sense has fashioned the coast-lines and
inlets that become the configuration of every age; but
it has an exacting and fastidious ear. It listens at its
work, and never appears to be content with the rote
of the shore it has made. It seems to be unreliable
and destructive, as it crumbles old cliffs and submerges
districts to encroach upon habitable soil; but it only
prepares fresh conveniences. It will not do for an
apostle to tie his boat at the old water-mark, if he
prefers to be afloat and in commerce with mankind.




ï~~54

AMERICAN RELIGION.

The advancing conscience stands deep above the spot
where he rocked lazily at the pier which he reached
with so much labor. The tide is only dangerous when
it becomes stagnant, and its waifs and strays rot upon
the beach, and spread through the neighborhood infection instead of hardiness.
The explicitness of old Scriptures is an imputation
of the modern sense. All of them latently presume
the honor of the human nature out of which they
flowed; but when the time is ripe for redeeming
these fine hints, and man waits to act amid concurring
circumstances, he need not go back to inspire himself
with implications. He is the sacred individual who
has been expected.
If he is, he cannot begin with the idea that Religion is a long-seasoned set of statements that comprise
the spiritual man. He cannot begin to conceive of
a spiritual man till his inspiration makes him forget his memory. Then he will know that religious
ideas are not a clique sitting in the mind apart, to
issue a programme of gestures and proper feelings,
either with the authority or by the help of some past
epoch; but he leaps into Religion with every pulse of
emotion, pries into it with all his mental curiosity, recognizes it in the latest law divulged, honors it by preserving his health, defends it across the bodies of the
prostrate poor and miserable, who see in him their
mediator before the infinite, as he deposits opportunity
for them with his vote. Six hours after daybreak in
Europe, the sun touches his eyelids with red borrowed
from all her battlefields; that fellow-blood purges his
visual ray from purblind histories of truths and poli



ï~~AMERICA'S DEBT.               55
ties not half worked out, of religious systems that only
contain America by implication, of ascriptions of
praise, through Jesus Christ, for the failures of a thousand years. He leaps out of bed, and touches the
world's opportunity with his feet. His superb disdain
of the old-fashioned style of dangling after mediators
rolls between him and the Old World like an Atlantic;
but through the depth of it hearts telegraph to him,
and the instantaneous message puts a girdle of promise round the earth. He asks heaven for the day's
business, worships when he transacts it nobly, and
binds his soul to eternity by the filaments of every
nerve he has. They are not transmitting the past sayings of great men; they are jumping with life to the
lips, hand, and brain. His soul is not feeding on old
honey, but the brain-cells receive and work over pollen
that his morning gathered, as he went about detecting
justice, charity, and the grace of life, in the act of
blooming over a whole continent.




ï~~III.
THE AMERICAN OPPORTUNITY.
THIS deposit of history which we are disposed to
call the American Opportunity, is homogeneous
throughout. Its religion and its polity came down
together, quite unsuspected by any temporary forms
or stages of either, and may be found lying together
on the site they have reached, wherever we penetrate
beneath sectarian and democratic drift. Individualism, extricating itself from the governmental jealousy
of the Old World, asserts itself here in favor of a
society that shall be more accordant with natural principles. The law of individualism is that human welfare is secured by the least amount of governing and
of theologizing: not the selfish welfare of single persons, but a codperation more disinterested than any
place has yet attained. The country must not contain
a horde of units without any unifying principle, nor
surrender every temper and grade of culture to a
quarrel with its neighbor, that would result in the oldfashioned interferences of the strongest and the canniest. But the individual finds himself thrown upon his
own resources of morals and religion, under circumstances that impel him to cultivate thrift, but also
fraternity. He is his own king and bishop, but his




ï~~THE AMERICAN OPPORTUNITY.

57

neighbor is one also. If they compete at first, they
will discover that it is an old centralizing folly, which
would eventually select some oligarchy of the adroitest competitors to set over their heads, to hamper
personal freedom instead of defining it. Where the
person is left most to himself he discovers soonest the
paths of natural affinity, following which he steps into
a crowd of men who do not dispute his passage, but
welcome him. The atoms fly to a natural magnet,
and cluster in groups, whose order and symmetry proclaim the only relationship that can cohere.
It is necessary to give some definition of the word
Individual, that its use may not imply a preference for
the traits which keep people separated from each
other, in attitudes of defiance or conceit. And it is
sometimes assumed by the critics who are hostile to
our theory of government, whose ink we generously
reinforce with the gall of our ill-natured habit of insisting upon private peculiarities and calling them our
rights, that the Republic is nothing but a vast forcing-bed of the defects which training and culture
ought to keep suppressed. Hereditary features become
exaggerated in a country whose egotism devotes itself
to securing them an opportunity. Here, it is said,
every thing that is characteristic finds free play and
use; and sects of one member each can attribute religiousness to the points in which men differ. " I am as
good as you" means that I am born with some darling
distinction which I will flatter and sustain; I am an
accented syllable which I shall proclaim all alone, and
its meaning is that I am emancipated from the servile
conformity of old societies: the country is large on




ï~~58

AMERICAN RELIGION.

purpose that crowds may fall apart into units, to perceive and cultivate their specialities.
But even this excess of private assertion unconsciously favors spiritual co6peration. When people
fall apart as far as possible, and every temperament
achieves the most violent emphasis, the triviality of
the result is most clearly discerned. It is one of the
prime advantages of voluntaryism, though transitional,
that it exhausts the human possibilities of dissent.
Let it be settled forever how minute and numerous
may be the verbal and accidental differences: let them
be phrased and stated. As men have come to a mutual understanding that no two people need look alike,
that even between twins there reigns some way of
distinguishing, so they will acquiesce in the identical
manhood beneath their various mental complexions,
which fills their veins with one blood of the Spirit, and
sends the same flush to all cheeks when beautiful and
noble things are seen. That mantling color of health
spreads over countless modifications of feature, and
men are to each other as mirrors, in which their essential unity appears, to surprise and ravish. They look
so handsome to each other that they wonder at their
past presumption of unlikenesses, and the reconciling
smile goes round. Then individualism rises to personality, and there is an incarnation of divine truth.
"Mark how one string, sweet husband to another,
Strikes each in each by mutual ordering:
Resembling sire and child and happy mother,
Who all in one, one pleasing note do sing;
Whose speechless song, being many, seeming one,
Sing this to thee -' thou single wilt prove none.'"




ï~~THE AMERICAN OPPORTUNITY.

59

The individual is sacred by virtue of this organic
fellow-feeling that moral and spiritual truth has for
itself wherever it can be found. It may go masquerading in all the costumes of all latitudes, with the intent
to enjoy clothing suitable to the physical meridian.
These and manners are disguises, but the real person
delights in the pursuit of himself, and recognizes his
essential being however clad. It will be vain for
denominations to establish tests of fellowship, as soon
as the individuals appreciate that they have been
holding each other at arm's-length only as friends do
who have been long separated, to study each other
with a jealous gaze, and recover through the alienations of time and place the old tokens of affinity.
The unit will perceive that he is sacred in the interest of unity, and not because he happens to be one of
many. Merely as one, he is oppressed by his private
pretension; his much lauded freedom of being singular becomes a cause of inconvenience to himself and
others. Everybody who thinks of fortifying his speciality as an individual, only succeeds in putting himself
into a state of siege, till, hunger and thirst growing
intolerable, he destroys his own outworks by a successful sortie, and effects a junction with his real self
in the open country.
Thus, when we say that the sacredness of the individual is the basis of American Religion, we accept a
definition which identifies the person with the elements
of religion as it is to be described. This religious
identity is the natural affinity which demands and
secures the service of each individual for the other,
and prompts the sacrifices of the republic.




ï~~6o

AMERICAN RELIGION.

Such is the law which will eventually rise superior
to demagoguism; to the vulgar ambitions of new rich
men, and the selfishness that finds its 6pportunity only
where it can be sure of permanent protection whenever it is organized. But here the individual incessantly opposes the selfishness of the few in order to
secure the codperation of all. For selfishness is a tendency to be regulated since it cannot be extinguished.
So each person says: "I want the minimum of
governing and the maximum of welfare; as little as
possible that is official in my politics and my religion.
Who shall make up my mind about either but myself?
As soon as interference passes the bound of codperation, I find luggage that belongs to other people fastened to my back. In religion, especially, I can carry
all that I have within, for nature has decided that
capacity, but not a rag or a scheme brought over from
old theological depots of cast off garments. If any
worshipping is to be done, let my person, in its integrity of mind and body, be anthem, liturgy, and offering."
We are far enough yet from such a simple adjustment of the soul with the sincerity of things. Voluntaryism is enjoying its fancies and crotchets; all the
sects are sitting apart to examine what the grab-bag
has yielded them. But these gifts are very trivial, for
theology is a mean provider at its fair; its object being
to raise a good deal of money at a little outlay. So
people play awhile with Orthodox, Baptist, and Unitarian dolls: make the eyes roll and the limbs gesticulate. The people who represent individualism soon
get tired, petulantly tear the dolls apart, smile at the




ï~~THE AMERICAN OPPORTUNITY.

6I

sawdust and watch-springs, and throw them into the
rubbish. Indeed, all the people suspect that their own
souls are contrivances superior to these; and when
they are not nursing a doll, you may catch them with
their arms full of the glorious babe of humanity,
pressing it close to the universal instinct to recognize
a Son of God. This rapture passes away; in fact,
that babe has heaven in it and weighs somewhat; for
daily carrying, a doll may be slung anywhere, while
the rest of the man attends to the concerns of his family and town. After all, despotism has a better time
in the meeting-houses than it can have along the
streets, where any street-organ that touches a heart's
tune gathers its crowd of Sunday dissidents, who drop
the current coin, and perhaps the tear.
But we ought to emphasize the characteristic into
which the effoirts of mankind at self-government have
been filtered. When it comes to the point in this
country, and justice applies her test, the sacredness of
the individual is sure to appear. There is not enough
tradition left over to smother it. The demagogue may
point after great numbers of individuals who are grotesquely clad and favored; as badly bred but not as
bitter as himself, - too miserable for that, - as stupid
but not as obstinate; as hungry but not as unscrupulous; with skin as dark but not as unwashed. He
can whistle a crowd down the street in pursuit of these
men, and perhaps persuade it to select some lamppost to make his Anti-Americanism conspicuous.
But the next time those despised and rejected people
are seen on the pavement, they are better clad and
furnished with ideas, and have a bit of paper in their




ï~~6a

AMERICAN RELIGION.

hand, the death-sentence of the demagogue. He had
sinned against the unwritten law of the land, and
now it flames in bright letters along every wall.
If a theologian, wishing to uncoil his paper-barricade of a creed, would have it safe, let him not do it
across the road while Liberty is passing to keep her
appointment with men. Put fences up in meetinghouses, turn every pew into a pound, but be careful
not to block the highway. If a question of the sacredness of the individual arises, the very pew-holders
fall into column, and breathe the air of pure and undefiled religion outside. What a pity it is that they
ever let themselves be impounded again! Do they
let their selves be impounded? How much of churchgoing is mere passing by the sexton of suits of clothes
to seats? Perhaps the souls exchange winks of recognition.
It will be strange if the popular mind, inheriting a
lively distaste for being over-governed and directed,
does not also gather from the past a salutary experience of the debilitating effect of mediatorial schemes
of religion. They have not only dragooned men into
conformity by methods known to despotic states, but
have inflicted an injury deeper than any that lurked
behind the walls of the inquisition, by teaching the
soul to walk vwith stilts and crutches instead of with
its own members. People outgrow Mariolatry, invocation of saints, cringing at the slits of the confessional,
but it is at the expense of growing into idolatry for
the Bible, and the superstition that a Redeemer assumes the function which his mother and the saints
have vacated. The soul is weakened by learning to




ï~~THE AMERICAN OPPORTUNITY.

63

lean upon a go-between. It is generally noised about
by leading minds that they have tried to obtain divine
truth by more independent methods, and have failed.
The result of this abject adherence to a single person,
or to the narrative of a single life, even in its most
liberal form, is to keep up a piety of reminiscence,
and throw discredit upon every original mental movement that is urged by modern circumstances. It is in
vain that a mediatorial scheme becomes enlightened,
as it is called: freed, that is, from notions of an atonement, of some mysterious influence of a sacrifice by
death, and of some supernatural element in the person's life and character. Even the miraculous coloring of the narrative is in vain toned down, and held
subordinate to its spiritual ideas. The most robust
and intelligent worshipper of a dead Master of religious life cannot avoid presuming that he was something exceptional; the solitary perfection and felicity
of human nature, who still exerts a mystic influence
upon the soul, and is capable of immediate personal
communion with the believer. Hearts that cherish
emotions of regret and admiration begin fancying
that he still suggests substantial moods, and communicates something from the infinite. Thus superfluous
sentiments encumber the nature, amuse and occupy
the mind, and finally become subjective habits which
are easily mistaken for objective facts, and are of the
same flaccid fibre with the dreams and raptures of the
medieval saint. Charity itself becomes an imitation
of a person who is supposed to have revealed for the
first time how divine it is. There is a soft and delightful playing at beneficence; it breaks out in vestries




ï~~64

AMERICAN RELIGION.

hung with mottoes, where people assemble to enjoy
tableaux of religious sociability. It rages at fairs
started to buy an organ, carpet the aisles of the Church
of the Nativity, stock the library of the Sunday School
with razeed novels. And when the brotherhood of
man is patronized, it is under the authority of some
fraternal sayings of the great-hearted man who was
despised by his generation. Every person who longs
to be moored and at rest fastens his cable backward
to those verbal buoys; every person who sees something to be accomplished runs his band around that
distant feeding-wheel of one man's character. The
waste of power is great; it is mainly absorbed by
holding up this enormous length of reminiscence.
The mind imagines that it is engaged in spontaneous
and freshly born virtue, when it is only recurring to
the tradition of it. This imitation may raise money
and produce various social and ecclesiastical effects,
but it leaves personal inspiration crippled: the soul is
no longer a pioneer but a dependent. The muscles
of the individual are deprived of their formidable
natural movements by learning this continuous backward gesture; it is finely and gracefully acquired, but
at the expense of some stunting to the whole manhood.
Only the best conditioned people can do their work
handsomely under this drawback.
But they do a very ill service to the average mind
of the country, or to those who from mixed motives
personally adhere to them, when they infer that their
successful struggle with a disadvantage is the natural
superiority of their mediating scheme. Even if their
morality never degenerated into mimicry, they would




ï~~THE AMERICAN OPPORTUNITY.

have no case. There is not one theology that is not
true to the extent of its ethical ability. Fetichism
could have made as large a boast, while preventing it
from growing larger. Bad mental method sometimes
makes an atheist of a man who can claim all neighborly and admirable qualities: they are the proof of
the God whom he imagines he is denying.
Plenty of manly people swear by the stiffest catechisms all life long, who put them into the cupboard
if any sudden peril knocks at their door to startle the
blood into heroism; and perhaps their dead leaves
may be rolled into cartridges for a living flame, as
they take the field with men who never saw a catechism, or imagined that they held spiritual life in
consequence of a man who died once. The heavy
and the light believers use the common cartridge to
some purpose before the affair is through. The only
mediator in such business is the God-given pluck that
forgets every thing but the defence of the new truth
that is in danger close at hand.
The most advanced mechanics of liberal religion,
observing how men have been retarded by their cumbrous attachments to that distant centre where motivepower is supposed to reside, have invented thinner and
lighter bands. Catholic paganism, Orthodox inconsequence, are laid aside. All the rude mediaeval methods
are discarded by these shifty liberals, who cry from
their stand, " Here is a new patent, the latest product
of American ingenuity, this flexible yet durable connection with a redeeming person; it only weighs an
ounce where the old fabrics iveighed a ton, almost
thin as gossamer yet tough as steel, this subtly spun




ï~~66

AMERICAN RELIGION.

web of intimacy with a great divine Brother, who
was no kind of a God at all, far from it, nor any
supernatural official; who worked miracles, to be sure,
because he could not help it any more than the birds
can help singing, but who never emphasized them
offensively, nor used them to sugar coat his truths;
the one divine man who so actually became what is
only possible with us, that his actuality introduces our
possibility to God: the way, the truth and the life:
alive to-day, a personality as large as Christendom,
and in close consultation with every point of the surface; so that men have a medium that was born out
of their own human nature, and something of identical texture all the way from earth to heaven is now
ready for delivery to parties. How marry will your
parish take? Hasten to connect your inner works
with this source of movement by slipping on a rational
mediator. Price? Ah - only a pew-tax apiece." It
may weigh an ounce where the other methods weighed
a ton; but, unfortunately, ounces in the long run
accumulate so frightfully that we begin to doubt the
need of deriving our power in this way from a source
beyond ourselves. We notice that our other functions
do not have to travel so far to be fed. Even if this
great Brother, who is alive to-day, be somewhere in
this neighborhood, what accommodation can I offer
him? His Father has hired my premises, and would
fain occupy all the rooms, from garret to cellar.
We are kept alive upon this spot where we now
stand, from this food at our feet and this ambient light
and air. There is a power with us, occupying the
actual interior of this body, commensurate with a




ï~~THE AMERICAN OPPORTUNITY.

67

thousand million similar bodies: there is not the distance of an inch between us and it. Sublimely economical, it makes the body its instantaneous link of
communication. Cannot the power which sustains,
without budging from the spot, my personal vitality,
sustain and nourish the immediate conscience of which
that vitality makes me aware?  I cannot hurt my
health, nor tell a lie, nor commit a fraud, nor strike my
brother, nor leave the beggar in the ditch, nor parade
my superiorities, without knowing it by direct intimation. My pains are its rebukes, my delights its sympathy, my hopes its suggestions, my sacrifices its
impost, my heavenly longings its apology for haunting
me forever. There is a Power in which I live and
move and have my being, in which I eat, drink, breathe,
sleep and wake, love and hate, marry and protect a
home. Is it incapable of sustaining all my functions
of direct religion on the spot, as well as these? Do I
have these without a mediator, and must I travel for
the rest? When I undertake to breathe by tradition it
will be time for me to get a sense of God in the same
way. For, look you, Jesus breathed where he stood.
If I cannot breathe where I stand, I cannot do it by
standing elsewhere. I am hardly conscious that I
draw this morning's air, and sweeten myself clear
through with it just where I stand on my two feet,
till you insist that I make a great mistake in drawing
this air, unmixed, as God brews it over Massachusetts.
My lungs have expanded to a calibre that corresponds,
and I can take it undiluted; stand up and take it
streaming to my nostrils and my lips.
No plan for furnishing mediatorial power can sur



ï~~68

AMERICAN RELIGION.

vive this test of private experience. The Nile is only
a geographical fact to the miller who finds a stream
upon his own grounds that is able to turn his wheel.
He delights more in that than in reports concerning
the freshet that makes the distant desert blossom.
And a stream may still roll on between the shattered
hints of its old civilization, without long moving the
regrets of men who build by new streams the monuments of Nature's unchangeable resources.
This private experience must be quite general, or it
fails in something that is important to its authority.
We would say, it must be universal, if ignorance and
passion had not taught us that there are misfortunes of
birth and bringing up; these distort and obscure the
original intention of conscience. A great many cases
are then commended to the prevailing sense for justice
and humanity. But if it prevails enough to secure a
country where the individual, notwithstanding moral
feebleness and a sluggish intuitive perception, is still
considered sacred, it is universal enough to show that
moral strength and intuition are born upon the spot,
for immediate consumption, and not derived through
the delay and wastage of importation from foreign
lands.
As soon as this general conscience is applied to the
cases of hereditary obliquity, to the victims of oppression and neglect, and to the dangerous people, they
also betray a relationship to the universal soul; so that,
at length, no sanitary method is safe or prosperous
which does not begin by assuming that God is healthy
just behind its subjects also, in spite of appearances,
and that their health, if gained at all, must be gained




ï~~THE AMERICAN OPPORTUNITY.

69

through their direct communion with Him. We may
appeal to them with traditional phrases, but our genuine appeal is in the instant's fraternity that startles a
slumbering family feeling; it is something in the
method that labors with them that takes their sonship
for granted; it is the latest common sense that consults
the latest knowledge in the interest of this sacredness,
puts science in the place of sentiment, and sets a living
Commonwealth to restore them to their spiritual rights.
And no name less venerable than the name of God
need be spoken during this vindication of God's presence: nor that either so long as it is vindicated.
In this way private experience discovers the organic
laws that sustain the human reason, or minister to its
restoration when it has become impaired.
Organic laws do not deal in superfluities. They
enlarge all things to their true nature by stripping
them of the incumbrances of methods that were generated by phrases. At first, when these mufflers are
taken off, the size of manhood seems diminished.
But it has laid aside the aspect that was only imposing
to childish eyes, to assume compact, clean and virile
proportions. Then men perceive that a well-trained
strength either threatens or invites them, as they
please.
When ancient investigation consented to put up with
phrases, the development of science was arrested, not
to be resumed till natural forces were substituted for
verbal ingenuity.  Thus, when Pythagoras said that
Number was the cause of all created things, he vaguely
implied the modern discoveries of the numerical ratios
that exist in astronomy, chemistry, harmony, indeed,




ï~~70

AMERICAN RELIGION.

wherever material elements betray the existence of
Force; but instead of becoming acquainted with force
or motion, he lingered speculating with the conception
of Number, and then his discoveries were mainly
accidents. So when Aristotle explained the weight
and the falling of bodies by the notion that some things
must be absolutely light, and some absolutely heavy,
gravitation had to wait for a Newton to discard the
empty phrases, and discover the natural energy which
held him bound to one spot as he went spinning with a
central force, in balanced harmony with all the worlds.
So theology has been working at the notion that the
individual conscience subsists in consequence of a Book,
and rotates around that, or is first stimulated into action
by it; that its authority is a page of print; that it is
developed, or redeemed, by the life or the death of one
person therein narrated. These phrases disappear as
soon as the individual discovers that his soul defers to
organic truth as his body defers to gravitation. Both
are on the spot; natural directions of forces which are
displayed through him. How he sheds doctrinal superfluities, as he does the despotic interferences with
politics, trade and family life, which assume his incapacity for self-government!
In this way, by long living upon the earth, Religion
has learned to divest itself of every thing that is not
essential to its life.  By successions of battles and
marches mankind has found out just what it ought to
carry: the minimum of weight with the maximum of
effectiveness. With less, there may be famine; with
more, weakness, confusion, fatal incumbrance at the
moment of attack. Religion finds that it can subsist




ï~~THE AMERICAN OPPORTUNITY.

7'

very well upon the spiritual reliances which are the
result of the organic laws of the individual. It asks
no more than the rest of the world: to know and
understand its reason for being. Every branch of
knowledge begins, simultaneously with the natural
gesture of the soul, to turn interlopers out of doors,
and write above, No admittance except on business.
Then Religion must rely, first, upon the individual,
who is the medium between knowledge and action,
between the finite and the infinite. The past reaches
the present in him: the present proceeds to a future,
the invisible becomes incarnated in him. There is in
fact nothing outside of the Individual. If any effect
of past living fails to extend as far as his own being, it
was really no effect at all. To be sure, he cannot be
conscious of the whole modification which has resulted
from the fact that other people lived previous to him;
but, so far as he is concerned, the past is the extent to
which he has been modified. And there is practically
as much God as he contains: he is an outline on the
infinite. What is beyond does not exist vitally for him,
but only as stellar spaces exist, which he may surmise
to be peopled or unpeopled, to be within or outside of
the solar system; but he is not consciously implicated.
He need not be aware of the extent to which he is
modified by the Divine presence, but, in reality, all the
rest of God is absent. The creative mind, in choosing
to occupy the organizations it has conceived, has limited
the knowledge of Himself to each and all. Also, the
individual limits the existence of the world by his perceptions of it. There is nothing beyond the phenomena
which he embraces and apprehends. It is true, he




ï~~72

AMERICAN RELIGION.

cannot detect many influences of nature which rush
to him as to a point of attraction; but while they
temper him they cannot surpass his extent of entertaining them. For him, there is no weather, nor landscape, nor revolving year beyond his physical and
mental range. He creates the world which he inhabits. All the rest is no concern of his.
There is a sense in which Religion appears to be coextensive with the contents of the individual; for he is
sacred. No peculiar sanctity invests any one part or
tendency. Nothing short of the whole of him can be
a divine image, an expression of the amount of Life
that is arrested by him. There is no schism in the
members: he is all honorable from crown to feet, and;whatever transpires beneath the roof which body and
soul build for mutual convenience, whatever is secreted
from the world by his minutest pore, becomes in him
an acknowledgment of God. As soon as beauty of
scenes and sounds are entangled in his network of
nerves they fall to his hunger for beauty that is yet to
be attained. The taste that trembles on his tongue in
a moment of satisfaction, the fact that conspires with
him to be accounted for, and the use hlie finds for every
thing, become his reception of divine revelation, even
if no phrases of adoration pass his lips.
But if they are sung by the harmony of all created
things, as they muster to his organs to find in them an
orchestra to express their joy, they too are a part of his
personal religion. This can only occur in fortunate
moments, when confluent streams of life announce
themselves, or natural gladness hurries up the stairs of
rhythm to an interview with God, or when terror and




ï~~THE AMERICAN OPPORTUNITY.

73

beauty break awe-stricken into the soul. But these
moments cannot be imitated, nor stereotyped for use in
meeting-houses. There is a singing-bird that would
pine in the cage of a liturgy, one that seldom alights
on the limed twig of stated prayer. Yet the hunt is
kept up the most vigorously in districts where the
game is scarcest. Is it worth while?
It is better to find that Religion performs her stateliest worship when she feels herself liberated in the
sacredness of the individual, and put to her uses.
She must rely, then, upon what he contains. It follows that there can be no test or basis of certitude outside of himself, in matters of the moral and spiritual
life. His attainment is the last court of appeal. It is
so wherever he attains to positive facts and information
in any department; but in every other one excepting
morals and his sense of God, he can rely upon external
authority. He is obliged to take the antipodes for
granted, and is willing to let Herschel tell him what
the nebula contains. If he cannot lead Darwin and
Agassiz, he follows gratefully, and gleans as much of
the universe as his mind can hold. He descends a shaft
with faith in the safety-lamp which some one puts into
his hand, and he borrows a telescope to set in order
those choirs of "young-eyed cherubim" who crowd
the night. Wherever he cannot go in person, he risks
going by proxy, even when his safety and health are
involved; and he has made so many experiments of
this kind that he finds trust to be an economy. The
bee hives honey more compactly than he can, and the
surgeon ties an artery so that the life is stayed.
But even of trust he is the sole criterion; for it is the




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AMERICAN RELIGION.

result of his personal experience. If he trusts another
person, it must be on some good ground discovered by
himself. Ile may or may not consider mere relationship a sufficient ground, but whatever gains his consideration becomes his sole criterion.
In moral and spiritual truth no relationship suffices,
no traveller can report any news. He meets all
the Marco Polos half way with a tale as sumptuous,
as strange and true. The plain Yea and Nay are both
hemispheres settled by him when he came into the
world. He took possession in the name of the original
proprietor, who sent him out to colonize and improve.
And now shall anybody undertake to sell him his own
food and spices, raised for home consumption on his
own farm, and the fabrics which he spins against the
weather?
He finds the wild crab of sincerity, and improves it
to a staple fruit. It is the tree of knowledge standing
in the middle of his garden. His eyes are opened.
The true and the false, the pure and the impure, the
straight and the crooked, the just and the unjust, the
tender and the harsh, all clean and unclean things are
named by him as they defile.
He can beg or borrow other kinds of knowledge, but
nothing short of the man himself can purchase a beatitude. How plain this ought to be to the emaciated
crowds who watch some pool's mouth to move for
them.   They cannot step into a text for healing.
Health is theirs for the choosing, but if they choose a
text, the virtue still remains outside.
It is plain that somebody has been so certain of truth
that a text transpired in consequence. But if another




ï~~THE AMERICAN OPPORTUNITY.

75

person thinks to pick up moral certitude with the text
that lies before him, he will vainly peel its shadow
from the ground.   He cannot even be certain that
another one was certain; but only certain that he
thought he was. For all texts are merely assumptions
of past certainties, till the moment when they become
superfluous; and that is when the eternal certitude
repeats itself in the individual. For it is the evolution
of personal life, and not the attainment of a fact, thought
or feeling.
Every individual inherits a certain amount of moral
culture, and if he comes into life by fortunate descent
he may begin where centuries leave off. But he does
not begin until the new circumstances force him into
independence, whither he betakes himself with all his
heir-looms.  Previous to that, perhaps, he nurses
himself in the family chair and reads over the
ancient will. That is not virtue, but a branch of
archaeology.
Boys and girls come to Sunday Schools prepared to
repeat chapters of holy writ, by which it is expected
that manhood and womanhood will be inculcated.
GCan they ever be in that way? There was a time when
the Republic grew heroic without such mechanism.
Names of superior dignity in all nations ought to suggest to us that virtue is extorted by the business of the
week. A vague sentiment of respect towards the
record of past greatness cannot convince a living soul
that it is criterion and source of greatness yet to come.
That secret lies in Monday, when fidelity is exacted,
and the invisible record picks up the homeliest blocks
to spell itself legibly all along the week, before the




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AMERICAN RELIGION.

impertinent catechism claims memory again, and puts
the living Gospel by.
Does anybody deny the existence of this invisible
record? Whence, then, came the written one? Truly
it seems as if we thought that earth achieved nothing
till it had been written down. Millions of divine
incarnations do not succeed in achieving so much as
an epitaph. But the family brain-cells frame some fit
acknowledgment.
"Do thy good in love of goodness purely!
That commit to every vein;
Through the children if it runneth poorly,
For some grandchild 'twill remain."
We suspect that we can be deluged with stories of
brave men who remembered appropriate texts in critical moments, out of Homer, from all poets to the Bible,
and thence to the latest lyric which some deed inspired.
Men are simple enough to declare sometimes that the
words which fitted like a rhyme to their action were
its parent and supporter. A more rational explanation
shifts the paternity to the action. The words came
thronging into the inspiration which  had already
approached and thrown wide open the doors of life.
The dull text glowed as the thrilling moment found
it in the way. Before one has time to remember " It
is written, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God,"
the temptation must have lost its power. Else how
abandoned to inexplicable wrath must the men and
women have been who had to find their way into brave
living before Moses was set adrift in the papyrus, or
any man had borrowed the reed to record one natural
commandment.




ï~~THE AMERICAN OPPORTUNITY.

77

"Let us consider," says Mr. Newman, the English
Catholic, "how differently young and old are affected
by the words of some classic author, such as Homer
or Horace. Passages, which to a boy are but rhetorical commonplaces, neither better nor worse than a
hundred others which any clever writer might supply,
which he gets by heart and thinks very fine, and imitates, as he thinks, successfully, in his own flowing
versification, at length come home to him, when long
years have passed, and he has had experience of life,
and pierce him, as if he had never before known them,
with their sad earnestness and vivid exactness. Then
he comes to understand how it is that lines, the birth
of some chance morning or evening at an Ionian festival, or among the Sabine hills, have lasted generation
after generation, for thousands of years, with a power
over the mind, and a charm, which the current literature of his own day, with all its obvious advantages, is
utterly unable to rival. Perhaps this is the reason of
the mediaeval opinion about Virgil, as if a prophet or
magician; his single words and phrases, his pathetic
half lines, giving utterance, as the voice of Nature herself, to that pain and weariness, yet hope of better
things, which is the experience of her children in every
time." *
This is an excellent statement of the reflex action of
personal experience upon sacred books. In the revelation of life men gather maturity of thought and depth
of emotion. Riveted to the spot of their destiny they
stand, while the day turns for them the pages of a

* Grammar of Assent: page 76, Am. Ed.




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AMERICAN RELIGION.

book, and lets the light fall upon the texts of joy,
terror and pity; the sudden claim of brotherhood, the
warning of a vitiated temper, the exigencies of love
and duty, flash out of moments of living, like electric
sparks, into the soul, and find their equilibrium in personal conviction. Then new sentences might replace
the old ones that sprung from the sincerity of similar
moments. But if the old ones are met by the soul, as
it travels with a fresh morning behind it, the light that
falls upon their faces thrills and surprises, and it runs
forward to greet them. Certainly, they must be members of its family, whose absence it had not noted;
kindred, at least, who left the old homestead before
they grew familiar.
When Scriptures glow, it is with the same life that
gave them birth: they are indebted to us, not we to
them. Virgil is not alone in profiting by the success of these magical moments; they promote all
their kindred apostles to the assumption of possessing
extraordinary qualities.
But Scriptures share this advantage with every
object of nature and art that receives the tardy investiture of our own beauty or grandeur. When we have
an eye for a landscape, there is one: previously, we
notice without emotion an assemblage of stones and
trees. If Orpheus sits in the midst, they come to
listen with attitudes and relations grouped around the
vibrations of his lyre.
Our sum of vitality creates the quality of terror as
well as of delight. The child walks unconsciously
as a somnambulist around the parapet, while the
mother clings to every movement, pale and speechless




ï~~THE AMERICAN OPPORTUNITY.

19

as Athens expecting the cry of Agamemnon's murder.
Our perception of the most trivial thing is just as deep
as we are.
Nature holds an open book, and invites us all to try
her sortes, and many a comforting coincidence is found.
But when the spider swings for the third time, and
fastens the thread of his little homily to the wall, the
bolder heart of a Bruce must be at hand to turn it into
songful deeds.
It is pertinent to ask if this private consciousness of
a criterion of truth has been waiting till America
furnished its social and political opportunity. The
theologian objects that an organic law of the individual ought always to have been as peremptory as
seeing and hearing, both of which men have done for
themselves from the beginning. Hardly: we still see
with others' eyes, and it is an American failing to
hear by one vast organ, called popular opinion, whose
tympanum is vigorously beaten by fetich-masters of
all creeds. But the objector forgets how much more
rapidly bodies have developed than souls; and Nature
has served the inner senses latest of all her guests.
Their scramble for food began at the mouth. Not till
that is fully occupied do higher cravings vex mankind
in moments of leisure from hunger.
Men will not seek and appropriate truths till they
are felt to be worth the while; especially if they have
not yet been brought within the daily necessities.
They may belong to the soul by inherent right and
constitution, still they will remain only a latent tendency, and seem as strange as foreign products, till a
demand for them springs up. While men can get




ï~~8o

AMERICAN RELIGION.

along pretty well without, no trouble will be taken
to seek and to procure them. But as soon as by
chance, or by the reiterated assurances of some soul
who makes the planet and the year adventurous, or by
the pressure exercised by accumulating knowledge and
perceptions of life, men begin to feel that they can
be enriched, greatly improved in comfort, simplified
in living, by these far things, they are discovered to be
near and accessible. The distance was nothing but
disuse.
In the beginning of this century, Humboldt carried
to Europe the first specimens of Peruvian guano, with
accounts of the profits derived from its use by the
natives of Peru and China. But the industrial world
waited thirty years, supinely indifferent; till at length
a few essays of the new fertilizer were made, followed
by another interim of neglect which lasted ten years.
Then suddenly 433 vessels carried it to every quarter
of the globe. In the next year twenty-six million
dollars worth of it was transported, and three hundred
million dollars worth of it during the first twenty
years of the traffic.
The so called "Mammoth-Coasts" of Siberia retain,
with a grasp of iron, deposits of ivory which were
known to Pliny and Theophrastus, but which came
into use only about two hundred years ago, and have
furnished, since that beginning, scarcely 40,000 pounds
of ivory a year: not enough to help the children of
a single country cut their teeth. Yet a fresh island,
or an unexplored stretch of coast, yields new quarries
of the durable material, and becomes an enamelled invitation to mankind to come and help itself, for it is




ï~~THE AMERICAN OPPORTUNITY.

81

inexhaustible. It is said that a solitary ivory hunter
can procure 20,000 pounds of it in a year.
Truths do not create new wants, but provide more
portable and exact methods of meeting the old ones.
Such a truth, for homeliness, practicality, daily convenience for use and beauty, is the absolute independence and authority of the conscience. One would
think it must have been self-evident from the beginning, if it were really embedded in the primitive
substance of the soul. But generations must develop it
into working consciousness. It is not enough that a
few explorers make it known. Their recommendation is not heeded, while the majority get along pretty
well upon the authority of books, texts and codes of
manners, results of successive stages of this very independence of moral and spiritual insight. The grand
gesture is not yet freed into the daily life. As soon as
men begin to use their new advantages, they wonder
how life was carried on without them, and cannot be
induced to recur to the old methods, because it is now
plain how much slaving and wasting they involved.
Coal, steam, the magnetic circuit, all primitive possibilities, are in the world and in the soul, lying all
ready to be used, disturbing men for centuries with
unquiet dreams in which they hear the vague, tumultuous cry, "Come, use me." By and by the souls
wake up, and say gladly, " Come, be used."
Propositions that are styled self-evident, like the
"blazing ubiquities" of the Declaration of Independence, are not so till they become evident to ourselves.
But then they exist nowhere else. Previous to that,
we may accede to them as abstractions, but they are
4*




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AMERICAN RELIGION.

not evident till they become essential to our life and
happiness. The beatitudes are as distant as the
guano islands, as superfluous as the whiteness of a
buried tusk, till the day's comfort calls for them.
Then we justify them, and become in person the only
authorization they can ever acquire.  Before that,
miracles could not annex them to our life, or be their
guarantee.
Bodies of the ancient Egyptians, that were dipped
in natron till they became mummified, are thrust by
modern stokers underneath the boilers that ply along
the Nile. The brains are out of these dead texts with
which the Copt gets up his steam. Our Scripture
compends and catechisms might also be of some use
upon the rail, if they made up in bitumen for their
lack of vitality.
This original position of the individual cannot exempt him from the advantages of being cultivated any
more than it can detach him from the past. His
soul had ancestors who were not of his family connection, and by enlarging his acquaintance with them he
restores them to the family line. But the characters
in Plutarch and in the Bible do not surrender to him
their trophies: at the most, they can only count upon
depriving him of sleep.
" Care not to strip the dead
Of his sad ornament, -
His myrrh, and wine, and rings,
His sheet of lead,
And trophies buried:
Go, get them where he earned them when alive;
As resolutely dig or dive."




ï~~THE AMERICAN OPPORTUNITY.

83

This is the lesson of every Bible. If any other is
forced upon it, the individual has to be defrauded for
this spurious aggrandizement of a book. It stands in
the line of every man's culture to surrender to him all
private claims of excellence as fast as he detects them:
they are jewels that belong to his modern housekeeping, and the servant cannot be above his lord to retain
them.
If the sacred books do not urge a man to instant
flight on pain of being enslaved, they do not serve
him. "Fly!" cries the beauty at the postern, " I hear
the steps at hand - I would not have even thee my
captive. In some distant land rescue thyself and find
me." He tears himself away from this celebrated
reality, and flies from the door that opens into the
unknown night, pursued by the garden perfumes that
cling and flatter, almost too persuasive against the
thrilling touch of obstacles and the stir of a coming
dawn, by whose light he finds his way into the arms
of his Ideal, and clasps life instead of narrative. He
generously acknowledges whatever means for prosecuting this journey he has borrowed from the past, be
it but a gourd of water and a crust in his pocket.
But no gratitude can make him stay; no refreshment
win him to dependence; no lingering, delightful memories unfasten his exploring gear, and soothe him in
the old lap beneath the palms. As he shoulders manfully through the dense undergrowth of new conditions, he takes up the old refrain of sacred independence, the only bit of the great song that stays by him:
"Ye have heard that it hath been said by them of
olden time- but Isay unto thee."  I! who is this I?




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AMERICAN RELIGION.

Not upstart John or James, but every man's Person,
old as God, and therefore young forever.
This I is the sacred individual who makes implied
truths explicit, and finds the virtues and politics of
the New Testament waiting for him on the spot. But
whether he becomes a great man, or is formidable only
within the concrete of insignificance, God cannot serve
him except with the old Spirit that served all sacred
men. So close is He, that there is nothing new.
Shall we hear conservatives and antiquarians prate of
the reverence due to age?
America shall yet learn to pay to great men the
purest reverence that the world has seen, by denying
their official mediatorship and restoring them to the
privileges of the human Ideal. Every pedestal will
become vacant, and a pavement of equal hearts will
vibrate with the steps of poetry, art, and conscience.
The great spiritual men of all times and races
differ as the water-sheds of earth do, in outline and
flora. Between the meadow's smile and the austere
summit, various contrasted meridians lie stretched along
the ample slopes and emerge from the many-fashioned
chasms. But the sky around and above holds in
solution one unchangeable vapor which they condense
and transmit. And people must learn to use the
water of their locality fdr their daily needs, just where
they live. The day passes while they run with pails
to various springs of hearsay. Abana and Pharpar
are as good as the Jordan to those who are not upon
the Jordan's banks, and quite as cleansing. It would
be very simple to waste time in venerating tourists,
and the specimens of sacred waters which they bring




ï~~THE AMERICAN OPPORTUNITY.           85
home. Even the charm of distance adheres to the
brook that skirts your field, for loudly as any traveller
it prattles of the far zone where the sun's ray drew
it into the wind's circuit to have it deposited upon
Wachusett or Meeting-House Hill.




ï~~IV.

THE DIVINE IMMANENCE.
HE word Immanence, equivalent to In-being, is
more convenient than Inspiration to express the
cobperation of a divine force with all the structures of
the universe, and with the conscience of the individual.
It is more exact, because it implies an unbroken continuity of Presence. First, we claim its universality in
man, as preliminary to a discussion of its law.
The Etstern Convent of Sittna receives, at a certain
season of the year, a stream of pilgrims, drawn from
all quarters by the attraction of a mysterious chamber.
It is a room, one wall of which is the outer wall of the
convent, with a high domed ceiling, and destitute of
windows. A single narrow slit admits a beam of light
which slants upon the ceiling, and faintly flickers there
with the movements of the people and things which
happen to be outside. The special religious observance for which this convent is famous consists in packing this room with successive relays of the pilgrims,
who do nothing but watch the ceiling. The darkness
is almost total, the heat prodigious, the fragrance hardly
worth speaking of. The unwashed devotees crowd
and hustle each other, and give vent to excited cries as




ï~~THE DIVINE IMMANENCE.

87

often as a shadow flits across the ceiling.  That is the
miracle for which they are waiting. The arigle that is
made by the slit is concealed by priestly ingenuity, and
the ignorant gazers have been taught for centuries to
suppose that the sudden and elusive movements on the
ceiling are supernatural gestures of a divine power.
All that they can learn about the invisible comes shifting through that slit: a small allowance, but perhaps
as much as any minds can receive which have not been
nurtured in the light. Wherever the theory of religion
is that God likes to creep into a dark room through a
crevice, the mental calibre will correspond. Substitute
for this the true theory that God is the light, the weather,
the sun and rain, the men and women, and all the animated open country, you need not expect to recruit
believers out of the dark chamber. When a man takes
a great deal of trouble and travels many miles in order
to suffocate in a close and fetid space, you must wait
till the effect becomes insupportable to human nature,
which by that time may be willing to use the eyes, the
ears and the lungs that God has given to it.
I presume that the most popular crevice, towards
which the greatest number of sincere human beings is
struggling to get a glimpse of God, is the doctrine that
He has moments of special inspiration, and has always
preferred to manifest himself at intervals, to speak
with isolated authority through a church, a tradition, a
book, an occasional prophet, an exceptional circumstance, a particular providence. What a mob of every
generation rushes out of the universe, where there is
free play for every limb and sense, and jams itself into
this close and covered passage, till the pressure becomes




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AMERICAN RELIGION.

so great that the whole mass of living beings stands
packed, and hardly one has a chance to break loose
and discover that the passage leads nowhere, in fact,
stops abruptly at a dead wall. The ingenuity that is
wasted, by guides and teachers, to make this doctrine
plausible, and to repair the damages done from time to
time by pure investigation, reminds me of the stratagems of the Africans when they meditate a grand battue of wild animals. Two lines are made, a mile or
more in length, frank and open enough at one end, but
gradually converging into a palisaded paddock with a
pit; these lines are fortified with interlacing branches,
fallen trees and brushwood, so that it would be difficult
to find or force a gap. When the whole arrangement
is as involved and bristling as a theological argument,
the driving begins. The natives, scattered over the
country, beat every grove and thicket, and slowly force
the roused animals towards the tunnel. There is a
howling native watching at every weak point of the
line, as the mingled horde comes trampling and rushing in. Cunning and strength will not avail, natural reluctance at being impounded yields to pressure.
The silly giraffe, the shy antelope, the doubling stag,
the sagacious elephant, all go over together into a promiscuous heap of misplaced confidence. By the time
the elephant has discovered that he would have consulted his welfare better by remaining in the open
country, it is too late to return there. So do many
excellent intelligences impress us as being victims of
well prepared doctrinal devices, and to be much larger
by nature than the place into which they have been
driven or insensibly beguiled.




ï~~THE DIVINE IMMANENCE.

89

Consider how it must narrow and hamper a mind to
grow up with, or to have forced upon it, the notion
that the Infinite Soul is listening, or waiting, or delivering himself, at a few crevices, before which humanity
must assemble. The common education of the people,
in all classes, lecture-rooms and pulpits, ought to throw
wide open the idea that God is equivalent to the whole
of Life, the whole of History, the whole of Science
and Religion; that he is an immeasurable Presence,
holding the roots of every sweet or noxious thing, with
a growth that has an immense range from the violet to
the Mariposa cedar, and an immediate purpose in the
nettle, the white-weed, the hay and corn, the orchard
and the vine; that men too, like his other growths,
exist from his immediate intentions, and that every
temper sounds a note in the swelling harmony, while
every soul is visited by the daily tides of his Moral
Lawf Mankind is like a coast, say the Atlantic, whose
beaches and indentations and shallow creeks, and Bays
of Fundy with deep and sudden influxes of ocean,
measure altogether many thousands of miles, every
inch of which is visited by the same element that rolls
and whitens at the foot of cliffs, and overruns the sand
bars; and there is not the smallest pebble which does
not chime with the hugest boulder in delivering that
sound, when waters reach them, which the sailors call
the rote of the shore. It makes an unbroken murmur,
in various keys, from the Grand Menan to the coral reefs
of Florida. And the history of mankind is like it, a
continuous sounding of the ripples of the divine presence, all of it sacred, none of it profane. When the
tide is out, there is still depth enough for the whaler




ï~~9o

AMERICAN RELIGION.

to pursue his prey, and for the whale to gather his; in
the meantime, the sand-piper goes balancing after the
worms in the low banks, the heron stands knee-deep
in the warm shallows, waiting for his fish, and the
eagle does not float so high that he cannot see the
turning of a fin in the sunlight. Boys and men on
the rocks throw baits to the great element, and gather
perhaps more by the eye and the soul than their slender hooks could ever land. Thus all is feeding and all
is fed: all is serviceable, and all performs its service.
And the heart of God beats in the slender pulsation of
the jelly-fish, and in the child's imagination who turns
it over with a stick and wonders why it was made.
Thus it has been from the beginning: Life itself an
unbroken book of Revelation, whose age may be
counted by millions of years, and cannot be forced into
the legs and arms of our short, threadbare chronology;
a Life of unceasing giving and receiving, wonder and
satisfaction, partial discomforts and complete delights,
secrets that remain inscrutable long enough to compel
solution, problems of human destiny and of the divine
will that are continually betraying the intellect into the
discovery that nothing is special, nothing exceptional,
nothing common or unclean. God himself, year in
and year out, is so religious in that infinite and complex appearance called the universe, so incessantly in
earnest, never absent, never nodding, always throbbing with a purpose, so consistent too, and uniform in
every action that he undertakes, always using the same
elements over and over again in nature, and always
appealing to man through the moral senses that are the
same yesterday, to-day and forever, that it is impossi



ï~~THE DIVINE IMMANENCE.

91

ble for us to put our finger on a moment of the whole
and say, Here was God manifest, and on another and
say, Here he was not so manifest, since it is all manifestation, a vesture woven without seam from top to
bottom, stretching from trilobite to prophet, farther
than that even, from the first movement that made a
separation into worlds and sky, to the last impulse
that some heavenly soul had to select a divine purpose, and live or die by it.
It is true that for convenience of reference we divide
the doings of a creative mind into different provinces
and studies. We try to observe what its method is in
making the soil, the diamond, the metal, the gas; what
relation exists between the elements and forces of nature; how history has been modified by the characteristics of different tribes of people, and by what law
human intelligence has become developed. We see
that the mind itself is capable of very dissimilar operations: one man invents a steam-plough, or a cotton-gin,
another composes a poem or a symphony. One writes
a lyric like the Marseillaise, that runs into the blood of
nations, like drum-beats, to climb in the flush of patriotism to the cheek; another soul breathes the Psalm
of filial confidence, and wakes our own if it sleeps, a
mother's hand to us in the morning. And another
pours out God's own indignation at superstitions, idolatries, wickedness in high places; he prophesies that a
better time is coming, and bids men clear the way.
Many men have had nothing but their blood to give, -
no song, no chapter, no invention. Nero caught some
'hristians, and, after swathing them in tarred cotton,
hem on fire to light his garden during a feast.




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AMERICAN RELIGION.

The illumination went farther than his garden. God
never yet kindled a fagot, and made a costly lamp of
a man, to prolong epochs of darkness. His purpose
is light, and that interprets all his acts. But when
Kepler travailed in the silent midnight to bring the law
of the planetary distances into the world, he was as
near to God as John Huss or John Brown. The
agonies of faithful souls are God's successes: all inventors who starved before their names became sweet
morsels in men's mouths, all unknown singers of dear
songs, all women who have played at Providence, all
deaths that have been births, all crosses that have lifted
up advantages and excellences, have beetn sacred, none
special and exceptional, none of them profane. God's
Eternal Power and Godhead are clearly understood
by all the things that ever have been made.
And we are discovering every day that the things
which are made or done, notwithstanding the diversity
that ranges through all natural appearances and human
action, have a closer relationship than we suspected. Is
light one definite thing, is heat another thing distinct
from light, is electricity another, and magnetism still one
more? We have already got far on the road to showing that all these are only modes or manifestations of
motion. How much more will be included? Will
the obscure processes that now figure under the phrases
" nervous fluid," " vital force," " cerebral action," be
included in this simplification? We cannot tell; but
the whole tendency is to trace all manifestations of
force towards some central agency, and to accumulate
the proofs of the divine unity.
So there does not appear, at first, to be any re1




ï~~THE DIVINE IMMANENCE.

93

ship between the mental process that utilizes filth of
cities or the waste of factories, to turn refuse into
wheat-fields, to get more heat out of coke, and color
out of coal-tar, and work out of the surplus steam, and
that which economizes a kingdom's expenditure of
time and money, teaches deaf-mutes to communicate
ideas, reforms a criminal and adds him to society, provides checks for infanticide, opens asylums to stop the
moral rot in outcast women, and gathers up, in short,
every fragment of virtue and labor that used to be carried off and wasted through the common sewer. The
moral sense is at the bottom of all these processes: a
reluctance to see either steam or human beings used
extravagantly; an instinct for saving, applied to different products. And this economy pays back to a country's vital unity what it drew in the shape of conscience
to carry on its operations.
There is, of course, a vast difference between a spinning-jenny and an overworked and underfed seamstress: the one is improved to save mechanical power,
the condition of the other is ameliorated to preserve
an immortal element. So a greater number of human
feelings become implicated in the efforts to save it:
personal sympathy is excited, indignation at the tyranny of low employers, and reverence for womanhood. But, after all, the root of both economies is in
the simple moral calculation, and the reluctance of the
conscience to see any thing run to waste. This moral
feeling may be very low in a number of people who,
by temperament, abound in sympathetic impulses:
their eyes will run to pity, but their hands will not
bestir themselves. So that a less impressible person,




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AMERICAN RELIGION.

with a clearer sense of justice and proportion, will be
coldly working at the generous tasks which they neglect. A moral fitness, therefore, is the ground of relationship between all improvements of the physical and
spiritual nature, and the reason, too, why so many
moral dangers are averted by providing, first, clothes
for the back, to keep out the weather, and bread for
the mouth, to create a genial zone within. All things
depend so strictly on each other, because they come
together in the unity of God.
How is it when we enter other provinces of human
thought and feeling in the company of poets, thinkers,
and artists? Here at first it seems as if we could recognize some essential traits of divine inspiration, that
set these men apart as special messengers to the race,
isolated by their gift from common humanity, and organized to be peculiar mouth-pieces of God. The
Scotch peasant who drives his plough through a tuft
of daisy, or dislodges the mouse from his meadownest, sees what Burns saw, but the seeing cannot become song. He can only go on ploughing, we say.
But he can do more than that: he can love the song;
his heart welcomed it as soon as it was sung, and
treasured it. It became a thing of joy forever. As
often as he ploughs up daisies, or disturbs the fieldmice, or wakes to new labor at morning, underneath
the "lingering star with lessening ray" that trembles
with the thoughts of Mary in Heaven, he vindicates
his companionship with the poet, and exercises an
essential element of genius. Conception itself has its
root in appreciation, and springs from the audience
which it addresses; the common earth contributes the




ï~~THE DIVINE IMMANENCE.

95

qualities that are transmuted into the graceful lily and
the stately tree. And human nature asserts the unity
of all divine immanence, when it pays the tribute of
the feelings which the poet claims. For the soul is
not merely a string that vibrates to the touch of the
musician, and would be mute until he came. But he
is latent in all souls, otherwise there would be no ears
to receive his revelation.
What is fame but a famous element recognizing itself:
the ordinary man pays homage to himself full-grown.
Nothing in this world would be produced, if there
were nothing that could receive. We have the habit
to call the creative element an active one, and the receptive element a passive one; but both, in fact, are
reproductive. Love sings the song which love appreciates and absorbs. One is not positive and one negative, but the concurrence of both gives birth to every
excellent and noble thing; and I think that the gift of
appreciation is as divine as the distinction of being
appreciated. When God's unity passes through the
atmosphere of Time and Space, it becomes separated
into these two attributes which are continually yearning for a perfect marriage, to return to the felicity of
their original condition. The audiences at the Globe
and Blackfriars' Theatres, of London, in the reign of
Elizabeth, were bone and muscle of Shakspeare.. They
twain became one flesh in the laughters that recognized
the human kind in Falstaff, and the tears that dropped
those precious ballots to elect the fidelity of Cordelia
and the woe of Constance.. Shakspeare was alive as
long as he fed upon the English nature; the same in
Athens, London, and Boston, yesterday and forever, the




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AMERICAN RELIGION.

perpetual emphasis and reiteration of a divine motive
in the hearts of men and women. God has only half
a rapture when his gifted children apprehend and set
forth the subtle analogies of wit and imagination; they
are barren till all his other children, who are gifted
to plight troth to them, love, honor, and obey. Then
the manifestation of genius is complete, and He knows
the ecstasy of Creativeness. The result declares plainly that the Infinite could not have remained alone, in
some aboriginal condition of unemanated Spirit. He
was solitary, he longed to set himself in families. And
we, by virtue of the same intention, are members of
the family of Shakspeare, Beethoven, Raphael, Dante,
Burns, to whom we give as much as we receive.
"Always when an art predominates," says Henri
Taine, " the contemporary mind contains its essential
elements; whether, as in the arts of poetry and music,
these consist of ideas or of sentiments; or, as in sculpture and painting, they consist of colors or of forms.
Everywhere art and intelligence encounter each other,
and this is why the first expresses the second, and the
second produces the first."
What an admirably pregnant little sentence is the
old Latin " Laus est publica," that is, glory is public
property: a famous man can only take stock with his
admirers, and the interest is paid to all.
Let this uniformity of creative elements be illustrated
from another quarter.
How Venus and Jupiter sparkle in the cloudless sky,
so remote, lifted out of the reach of every thing but
fancy, and set apart to be beautiful, in a kind of maidenly reserve that penetrates and surprises. They are




ï~~THE DIVINE IMMANENCE.

97

other worlds, but are they not also different ones?
We can hardly believe that they have any thing in
common with this clod of an earth, whose March mud
and July dust and January snow-drifts seem scarcely
capable of transmitting into space a ray serene. Yet
we have discovered, by the application of analysis to
the stellar spectrum, that every sparkle in the nightly
sky announces the existence of a ball of dirt, constituted, in all essential elements, like our own; that the
solar atmosphere itself yields the traces of metals that
are only lying cold and unfused at home here, and
that the most distant star in the constellation of Orion
sends down to us the report that it is made like all
the rest, whose splendors and whose tints are various,
while all their grounds are the same. The physical
elements exist in different combinations, as they flame
upon all these hearthstones of God; but the Sun has
no fuel that the earth cannot supply, and Sirius and
Jupiter cannot impose upon us with their airs of superiority. There are nickel, iron, and sulphur in the
dazzle of the meteor: it charms and then drops to the
bosom of an earth that is like itself. For the cause
of sameness throughout all diversities is the Unity of
God.
Thus it has been found that the sun's atmosphere
holds the vapors of copper, iron, zinc, nickel, sodium,
and some others, and certain dark lines are ascribed
to hydrogen. The fixed star Sirius, another sun, has
an atmosphere which betrays the presence of iron,
sodium, magnesium and hydrogen. Another fixed
star adds calcium and bismuth; another supplements
these metals with tellurium, antimony and mercury.




ï~~98

AMERICAN RELIGION.

So that there appears to be a variety in the physical
constitution of fixed stars and planets, but all of their
elements are already known to the Earth, and exist
only in different combinations at these different places
of the universe. The spectral analysis has not yet
penetrated far enough into the secrets of space to
reveal an element that is not already in the body of
the earth itself. Should it ever do so, it will be a hint
to subject our planet to a closer scrutiny. The varying colors of the stars are either due to these particular combinations, or to the varieties of stellar motions;
but color is the planet's masquerade. Analysis bids
them lift their hues, and numerous earths are discovered waltzing in the cosmic order.
And when we enter the region of ideas that are
reigned over by the Moral Law, we find the same
identity prevailing through all people, all periods of
history, all sacred books, and the whole body of spiritual literature. All Scripture is given by inspiration
of God, and is profitable, say some. Others prefer
to read the text thus: all Scripture that is given by
inspiration of God is profitable.  But what is the
difference?  There can be no profitable Scripture
without God: and all that is profitable, wherever you
may find it, under whatever strangeness of language,
guise and phrase, must have been inspired, if any such
trains of spiritual thinking are. When Socrates says,
" I pray thee, O God, that I may be beautiful within,"
and David says, "Create in me a clean heart, and
renew a right spirit within me," and Jesus says,
" Blessed are the pure in heart," what is the difference?   The essential element is the same in all.




ï~~TIHE DIVINE IMMANENCE.

99

When the old Hindoo declares, a thousand years before Christ, that he who gives alms goes and stands
on the highest place in heaven, and that the kind
mortal is greater than the great in heaven, we recognize the quarry out of which came Christian philanthropy. God is that quarry: how old it is; how long
it has supplied the world with spotless marbles! " Do
good, hoping for nothing in return, and ye shall be
the children of the highest." God found no difficulty
in transmitting the golden rule by monosyllables of the
Chinese sages: it was done through the same channel
of the moral sense that received it.
There was a Syrian slave whose life in Rome began
with the Christian era; and while Jesus was preaching love to man in the villages of Judea, the heart of
Publius Syrus was found large enough to contain the
same doctrine of the Father. " Ab alio expectes,"
said he, "alteri quod feceris." - You may expect the
treatment which you render. All the speeches of
mankind have breathed this expectation. One language enjoins us to do unto others as we would that
they should do to us; another warns us not to inflict
what we are not willing to experience, and another
teaches that men will give as good as they receive;
and Tsze Kung said, " What I do not wish men to do
to me, I also wish not to do to them." What is the
difference? Mutuality is the self-interest that inspires
them all; a Father's longing to appear through the
cooperation of his children.
While Publius Syrus was earning the title of Mimic
Poet, from the production of his famous Mimes that
exposed the foibles and passions of the Roman world,




ï~~IOO

AMERICAN RELIGION.

Jesus was treading with a kindred spirit a via dolorosa. Publius was no mimic of truth, but obeyed an
exigency as lofty as the Judean when he filled his
plays with texts of holiness. His characters were
" fools upon heavenly compulsion."  " Do you not
see," says Seneca, " how the benches echo whenever
things are said which we recognize to be true, as we
lend them the authority of our common consent?"
And he adds, recalling portions of the Scripture according to Publius, " We hear these things, curm ictu
quodam, as by a flash; doubt is made impossible, nor
can any man ask, Wherefore? For such truth is its
own reason." There can be no doubt of that.
"The why is plain as way to parish church."
So when Seneca sat not far from Caligula, and listened to the terrible rebuke, Exeritur opere nequitia,
non incipit, he was overhearing the Judean phrase,
"By their fruits ye shall know them;" for God can
speak all languages in the same day. And as the bold
speech swept over the theatre, drowning it in awe, to
break against imperial wickedness, perhaps the sage
remembered the kindred spirit of the Delphian oracle,
which said to Glaucus, " To have meditated such a
crime was your real crime against the god." There
is no more difference in spiritual truth than in the
waters which intercommunicate below the surface of
the earth, and rise in fountains far apart to manylipped mankind.
Here are some of the intuitions of Publius Syrus,
closely matched with their Christian analogues: -
Amor misceri cum timore non potest: Perfect love
casteth out fear.




ï~~THE DIVINE IMMANENCE.

IOI

Puras Deus non jlenas asficit manus: A man's
life consisteth not in the abundance of the things he
possesseth..Quid est beneficium dare? Imitari Deum: Who
maketh his sun to rise, &c.
Beneficia iura accehit, qui scit reddere: It is
more blessed to give than to receive.
"When you hear such lines," says Seneca, "you
need no advocate to plead for them; they touch the
corresponding affections, and bid nature exercise her
own authority."  Of course: " Why even of yourselves judge ye not what is right?"
All ancient literature is made so sacred by these
primeval texts of the natural conscience that our page
is too small to entertain them as they flock to the gates
of memory.*
When Jesus declared that his truth was permanent
because it was identical with the nature of God, in
such texts as "I and my Father are one," and
" Before Abraham was I am," he did not say a more
religious thing than Frederic Douglas, when, in the
depth of the hatred and enmity that almost overwhelmed the little minority of abolitionists, he said,
" One, with God, is a majority."  They took up
stones to cast at him, but he passed through the midst
of them, and is as safe as his truth to-day.
All fine living is derived from this consistency of
the moral sense, which can afford to neglect ethnic
peculiarities. We are sometimes told that though
* See an admirable paper on " The Sympathy of Religions," by T. W. Higginson, in the "Radical " for February,
1871.




ï~~I02

AMERICAN RELIGION.

identity of spiritual utterance can be traced across
every zone, stumbled upon in unexpected quarters,
and cradled out of many a moraine that marks past
time, it became expressive of a perfect life only in one
man. We might allege in reply, that one swallow
does not make a summer; for mankind must have
ripened by some noon of high living that transpired
in every year. Heroic texts are constructive evidence
of heroic behavior. Nothing shows the absence of
spiritual perception in a theologian so plainly as his
surmise that all the sages have only thrown light
upon the darkness of all the people, and that God
had nothing for the latter but fine words. On such
terms mankind would be still contemporary with the
mastodon. Traces of high thinking presume superior
living. The papyrus upon the breast of the mummy
testifies that immortality was brought to light before
the gospel; but it never tells the breast's secret of its
spotless life. The bandaged body that has turned to
a stick of bitumen thrilled with plain manhood and
womanhood, pined with the exigency of the golden
rule, bore the stigmata of its own Calvary. I see
the fossils of past virtue in a mummy-pit, because I
find there the same organization into which our virtue
flows. It was a temple of God: the brain has been
scooped out, but the hollow once echoed with the
invitation to be just and pure.
At the annual celebrations of the Eleusinian Mystery, the spectators were reminded of the innocence their
souls should crave, by a choir of little children clad
in white garments and bearing doves. So Jesus
" called a little child unto him and set him in the midst




ï~~THE DIVINE IMMANENCE.

IO3

of them." What is the difference? All symbols and
gestures have announced God's identity: and never
more so than on that December day, when John
Brown, on the way to crucifixion, laid his hand upon
the little child of the slave-mother, and blessed it.
The kingdom of heaven has been the Mystery-Play
of all countries and ages, and its unalterable text is
the soul of man.
When Jesus challenged his sectarian accusers by
offering his personal character as the test of his doctrine, he said: " Which of you convinceth me of sin?
and if I say the truth why do ye not believe me?"
They all replied, " Say we not well that thou art a
Samaritan and hast a devil?" For it always appears
to a sectarian that a man is an infidel as soon as he
proposes faithfulness to God instead of to doctrines.
But when Jesus answered: "I have not a devil, but I
honor my Father: if I honor myself, my honor is nothing: it is my Father that honoreth me; of whom ye
say that he is your God: and if I should say I know
him not, I shall be a liar like unto you," - his words
were no more sublime with confidence in the eternity
of divine truth, than those which Theodore Parker
uttered in the faces of his clerical enemies who supported the Fugitive Slave Bill: " You have called me
Infidel. Surely I differ widely enough from you in
my theology. But there is one thing I cannot fail to
trust: that is the Infinite God, Father of the white
man, Father also of the white man's slave. I should
not dare violate his laws, come what may come,
should you? Nay, I can love nothing so well as I
love my God." The men who hated him still live




ï~~zo4

AMERICAN RELIGION.

to see what his longing eyes could not see, how
greatly the Father has honored him by the destruction of all the enactments of slavery; and they bear
a grudging testimony, when it is safe to do it, to
the inspiration of his moral sense which, while he
lived among them, they always hurried to revile. No
flowers can bloom upon his grave in Florence so
handsome and fragrant as our grateful recollections
of the manliness that clung to God. While other
powerful intelligences went overboard, lashed for
safety to the frail spars of tradition, and drowned upon
their fragments of the wreck, to toss about for perpetual warning, he chose the principle of life, felt the
warm clasp of God's hand.through the whole stormy
period, and feels it warm to-day.
What a remarkable thing character has been in all
ages of the world. It is another kind of Revelation
by which God incarnates his sense of moral weight,
proportion and availability. It appears in men who
have compelled the instincts of society to attend to
them; to be moulded in politics, philanthropy, the science of living; who have reigned over tracts of moral
feeling, from a neighborhood to a State, by virtue of
some effluence that is not purely mental or spiritual,
artistic or affectionate, but is a personality rather than
a quality. Many of these men have been famous above
other men of more distinguished attributes. Gold and
diamonds are held in great repute, and always bring
the highest price in the market. But a well-tempered
bar of iron does all the work of mechanics, war and
social intercourse. The whole world runs smoothly
on it. Toughness, evenness of grain, uniformity of




ï~~THE DIVINE IMMANENCE.

IO5

structure, and a happy temper, have been the advantage of character to all leaders of cliques, parties,
founders of social and religious systems; to all who
have established codes and customs, and all men of
weight in ordinary affairs. Isolated gifts are articles
of luxury: this combination of mental and moral force
in a healthy individual is the daily bread. Every age
has people who are finer in some respects than its men
of character. Louis Kossuth was more eloquent than
all Hungary, eloquent as her wounds were. He seemed
to be the tongue in every one of them to plead for
liberty. What a touch of inspiration it was when he
said in Faneuil Hall: " Cradle of Liberty? I do not
like that phrase, - it savors too much of mortality "!
Liberty is indeed as old as God; but Kossuth, who
felt the truth, was not the man to give it to his country.
lIe was not merely unfortunate: a greater thing than
his ill-luck disabled him. He was only eloquent. If
Russia had not interfered, nor Gorgey betrayed, municipal usage and the rights of man would have left him
for some one as whole, as balanced, as composed as
Liberty itself is: one, perhaps, far inferior in sentiment, and destitute of imagination, rounded in every
part, towering in none, never politic but always sensible; whose earnestness could not lapse through the
silvery sluices of his speech, but could lie molten in an
ardent heart, alloyed with judgment and long-suffering:
mobile enough not to impair the toughness of fibre
that alone bears continual strains, and every part of
the nature strengthened with such homeliness of conviction and plain sense of right as Abraham Lincoln had.
We say that Kossuth was inspired. If we use that
5*




ï~~o6

AMERICAN RELIGION.

word to express a capacity to receive divine impressions, or to indicate by it only the felicity of an
organization that can absorb all nature, literature and
life, and persuasively reproduce them, why not apply
the same word to this commanding excellence of character, as we see it in Moses, Pythagoras, Phocion,
Washington, Lincoln, Toussaint L'Ouverture, whose
names represent a quality that is exercised with more
or less notoriety in every neighborhood? Character is
a plant of slow growth, because it draws from the soil
and air so many elements, and has to be so deliberate
in digesting them. A spire of asparagus will shoot
aloft in a night. The sugar-cane hurries up its coveted
sweetness through a frail pith that is nothing but a big
straw. But teak and lignum-vita, the oak and the
cedar have out so many roots and claim toll from so.
many quarters towards their staunchness, that it is
some time before they make a show. Then we go to
sea in them with confidence. Character is a wood of
dull grain, but capable of taking on a beautiful polish,
becanse its sap runs from conscience, intelligence, feeling, the higher reason and the common sense; from
passion too, from a reserve of mighty indignation, from
frankness and healthiness of all the impulses. If the
divine life is not in such a product, that is at once
compact and manifold, inflexible and workable, a rare
concurrence of so many attributes which we suppose to
belong to God, where can the divine life be found at
all.? Not more in the intuitive morals of Socrates and
Jesus, not more in those lines of Shakspeare that are
one hearth where wit, wisdom and fancy all warm
themselves together, not more when the orchestra of




ï~~THE DIVINE IMMANENCE.

IO7

Beethoven becomes a pinion that takes us up from the
dwindling earth to carry us off into a pervasive unity.
The doctrine of chance accounts for nothing: does the
doctrine of natural combination of elements, working
by their independent tendency, account for any thing?
Not for a single blade of grass. Elements cooperate,
and various effects in every province of human life are
observed. But what sustains codperation, what prescribes the laws of mutuality and keeps a soul in them,
what continually systematizes the system?  James
Watt, in his grimy workshop, poring over abortive
models of the steam-engine, is a less striking sight than
Michel Angelo on his back frescoing the ceiling of
the Sistine Chapel, or Columbus steering for the New
World through the mist of mutiny, or Paul on Mars'
Hill, or Jesus on the Mount of Olives, or Leonidas
blocking up Thermopyle. But what nourished the patience and conviction of all these, or of none of them?
The Presence whose invisible things are clearly seen,
being understood by the things that are made, even
his eternal power and Godhead.
Immanence is in all intuitive comprehension of all
principles, or it is in none. It exists in all characteristic excellencies, or it cannot be found in any. If you
use the word to account for a moral utterance, or a
prophetic feeling, you involve yourself in its use to
account for all human genius that constructs, restores,
beautifies, ennobles, comforts and restrains. The moral
law runs into all these products and makes them religious. They are all texts of the continual Scripture.
If a special excellence has attracted your attention, it
does not follow that it is an isolated and exceptional




ï~~108           AMERICAN RELIGION.
thing. It is part of the beaming of the day. You may
put up your hands at each side of your eyes to view
it better, but you cannot thus make a division in the
daylight: it is all around the fingers, and shows them,
too, ruddy with their blood.
Must not the Whole at every moment be God for that
moment? Is he present here and absent there, more
interested in Jerusalem than in Rome, with a partiality
for one man above another? His Moral Law makes all
men of one blood, and inspires the whole positiveness
of their life.
Let us escape from all ordinances and enclosures,
and fasten to the bosom of God instead of to the faucet
of a sect. Let us trust ourselves in the open weather
that makes our souls robust with the air and sunshine
of heaven.




ï~~V.

LAW OF THE DIVINE IMMANENCE.
HE individual applies directly to the source of all
power, but all the past which he contains is involved in this application and helps him make it,
whether the direction which he takes be science, art,
imagination, morals, or religion. He may become
a new inventor or prophet, but not the same as if he
had been one of the helpers of the reign of Menes, or
as if Egyptian civilization had not become extinct.
He begins where it left off, even if he only reproduces
one of its lost arts. He does it with a fresh advantage,
and his position is readily seen in some fineness of detail or added convenience. His monolith may be no
larger, but steam moves it for him, and dispenses with
thousands of hands and hours for other work. His
tools cleave no more exactly than the long row of
wooden pegs saturated with water; but the economy
to which he has attained is seen in the quantity of
manhood that is saved for innumerable kindred labors.
He supplements all the triumphs of culture with the
sacredness of the individual.
But what is meant by saying that the individual applies directly to the source of all power? The answer
to this question involves points that must be carefully




ï~~IIO

AMERICAN RELIGION.

stated and developed, with some attention to the value
of language, that no terms may be used which convey
only notions, those unballasted and pilotless sailors of
the air.
As scientific subjects were much hampered by the
predilection of the Greeks for phrases, so this subject
of Inspiration is obscured by notions derived from
Biblical language. The people of the Bible assume
to have received definite messages from the Lord. So
when the theologian finds distinct sentences thus labelled, whether the subject-matter be to extirpate a
race or to found one, to overreach a Philistine, or
whatsoever questionable proceeding may have furtherance for the chosen people in it, these, as well as
more manly and spiritual utterances, help him to construct a theory that the Lord declares himself by voice,
symbol or sign, dream, suggestion, prophetic message.
We have insensibly imbibed the habit of expecting
communication as a test of divine activity: definite
statements, or irruptions of thinking and feeling, must
announce that it is at hand. But in-breathing is simply continuous presence. It is the sustained evolution
of all natures and species by means of their appropriate
organization.
This is not a doctrine of mere pantheistic immanence, which leaves us irresponsible products of a
Force or a Life, or reduces us to be terms of predestination, incapable of independent activity. Our organization is the very thing that interferes to prevent this,
by announcing a conscience; that is, we become conscious of a sense that says to us, fought; fought not.
The in-breathing nourishes the sense of a responsible I.




ï~~LAW OF THE DIVINE IMMANENCE.

III

The immanence of the divine Person does not become
individualized till this sense of the Iis reached. Then
the I saves its freedom, and increases it by an act
which at first might seem to annihilate it; that is, by
admitting all of the divine in-being possible: and this
is an educable process, and may arrive at high perfection. The individual himself is the result of the conscious and unconscious cooperation of the past with
the divine presence, and when he appears he is a centre where this process meets to carry forward its career.
And he becomes free in proportion as he surrenders
himself to this divine in-being, which is the only perfect freedom because it is co6rdinated by the universal
laws.
The vegetable and animal kingdoms betray the forefeeling of this destiny. It can be detected on the frontier between both, where we are uncertain if an object
be a plant or an animal. The object solves the doubt
by a vague and distant hint of the quality that belongs
to human choice. Mr. Waterhouse Hawkins says that
a friend of his had for some years a sea-anemone in
an aquarium, which would receive its food from the
hands of its owner, but never from Hawkins's hands,
though he had a hundred times made the experiment
of endeavoring to feed it. Here is not merely perception for food, but a comparing, a distinguishing sensibility, a choice in the mode of taking it, belonging to
an object the least likely, in our estimation, to show it.
But the plants, also, accept the elements that favor
their individuality, and reject the unsuitable. Potatoes
in a cellar will put forth their bleached shoots towards
the single window that admits the light; the process




ï~~II2

AMERICAN RELIGION.

is dual: at one end a potato, at the other end a sun. A
Rhode-Island apple-tree became aware, by a subterranean inkling, that the body of Roger Williams,
though buried at a considerable distance in the orchard, might be reached with effort and patience. So
it put forth a root in that direction, ignoring every
other, and struck through the decaying coffin to the
skull of the great champion of religious liberty, as if
to absorb that advantage into New-England's symbolic
fruit. Thence it spread in a fine net-work of fibre over
every member of the body, and eventually transferred
its whole nutriment into successive crops of pippin or
russet, leaving a perfect cast of it, done in that silent
modelling, for the Historical Society.
How is such an instinct related to the universal Life?
Certainly Deity cannot be a ghoul, reduced to grubbing
up graves for a livelihood: nevertheless we can accept the facts to indicate that In-being appears in
plant life and physical life, as well as in mind and
conscience. But it is necessary to find some distinction between the two manifestations. The physical
functions of the plant and animal are taken up by the
human body and carried on: they include involuntary
vital acts and the whole economy of the organization.
They also take a prominent part in that condition of
our ordinary life which lies between physical functions
and the mental and intuitive forms of our individuality;
that stirring, choring, bustling, mimicing, gossiping,
and striving; that indifferent intercourse of people that
reproduces the habits of instinct, and swarms in the
basement over which the mind entertains illustrious
guests.




ï~~LAW OF THE DIVINE IMMANENCE.

II3

There is no point of the whole scale from which
the divine in-being has retreated; it nourishes all, but
the simpler the organization the less the freedom. The
relation of the lower forms of life to the immanence
is simple necessity. As the structure becomes complicated, and opens more gates to the creative energy,
the necessity, to our surprise, diminishes, just when
we should expect to find it confirmed and intensified
by this increase of absolute life. The object, instead
of being swamped by taking on board so much from
beyond itself, rides more freely. Dead weight is expanded into buoyancy. It is because it receives more
of the divine freedom. The object arrests, and gives
a hint of, this tendency of absolute life towards a liberation of itself into higher forms. We see that it is not
taking the direction of imprisonment for itself, or of
threatening abject servitude for individuals; and we
trace it by ever widening avenues of law as it escapes
from legal necessity into those human functions which
report the sense of an I. Its culminating in that place
or relation is an act that leaves both free: the one
remains God, the other becomes Man. The conscience
is the highest reach of this, and its ought justifies and
explains the whole advance in freedom.
What an earnest expectation of this topmost result
is announced by the first faint tokens of life in the development of created things. We know what purpose
animated every stage of creation by the consciousness
into which we have developed. The lapse of time
from the moment of the simplest cell and the minutest
motion to the present hour is rehearsed in us. We are
the sum of it, and are therefore capable of imagining




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the rapture which flew into every fresh form of life,
as the divine composer, summoning instrument after
instrument into his harmony, climbed with his theme
from those that offered but a single note to those that
exhaust the complexity of thought and feeling, to combine them into expression, kindling through hints,
phrases, sudden concords, mustering consents of many
wills, releases of each one's felicity into comradeship,
till the sweet tumult becomes his champion, and
bursts into the acclaim of a whole world: "I oughtso then I will." The toppling instruments concur, become the wave that touches that high moment, lifts
the whole deep and holds it there.
The intellect has its share in that unity of consciousness, and brings to the front of knowledge the method
of laws which have gradually set it apart from the
worlds beneath it to become a Person. Then science
is possible, and the mind becomes its own interpreter.
The right method of thinking is part of the divine continuity; it is sure to displace, eventually, all arbitrary
or superstitious methods, because these are only arrested stages of itself, or its imperfectly apprehended
drift, distorted rays through the prism which mankind
has not yet learned to hold.
It seems that the in-being of God has been observed
sooner in the conscience than in the intellect. This is
because the intellect has inherited so many complex
sensations, and is embarrassed by its own attempts at
knowing a world which does not instantly declare its
secrets. So there is a process of observation and deduction that is not identical with the process of creation. The infinite intelligence seems to have retreated




ï~~LAW OF TIHE DIVINE IMMANENCE.

ITI

from the confusion, or to appear not to care to be understood. At what point of direct contact dare we
maintain that the divine in-being is?
Intellect splits into manifold inventiveness, and gives
birth to the different kinds of intelligences. The divine
manifoldness appears as Gift. It is no objection that
isolated gifts may be exercised unconsciously. There
is a great range from automatic cerebral action to the
synthesis of the highest minds, as they consciously
gather from  all parts of creation the effects which
betray the mode of the divine operation, and how
every thing is correlated and coheres. The higher this
synthesis, or putting together, the greater is the inbeing of the mind that thus declares itself in a kindred
intelligence. It may mount into an intuitive feeling of
law, that is like, and coequal with, the sense of absolute Ought and Ought Not, and involves a consciousness of being part of an infinite Person. For it defers
to the order of the universe, to its intellectual method,
to its synthesis of forces. The more it bends thus to
the great centres that seek and draw it, the less individual it feels, because it no longer adheres to partial
and transitional shifts, and is not detained by conceit
for them. The I becomes freer with every abandonment to this organic closeness of God, till it can
exclaim with Kepler, " I think Thy thoughts after
Thee!"
This intuitive apprehension of the drift of facts and
of phenomena is immanence of the Mind that is nourishing the facts. Creating becomes interpreting, and
breaks into speech through things that are made.
For if the phenomena that are thus interpreted do




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AMERICAN RELIGION.

not result from any fortuitous concourse of atoms, but
rather betray mind by their regularity and persistence,
age after age, in every quarter of the universe where
observation can reach them, the interpretation must,
afortiori, betray the presence of mind. The finite
intelligence is then a fact or phenomenon with the
infinite mind in contact with it.
No matter if the finite mind is unconscious of this
vitalizing proximity, or denies it altogether in favor of
some theory of organic action of the individual as an
effect of forces. The denial only pushes the vitality
one step to the rear, and leaves it in a place where it
must apply to its real base for nourishment or perish.
And the unconsciousness of a scientific mind that it is
so sustained by the in-being of a divine mind cannot
be alleged against the real closeness of that Mind. As
well might the failure of a plant or animal to apprehend the great fact be held sufficient to deny it: for all
objects, including men, are recipients of more life than
they refer to its source. The organization becomes
the measure and tool of it without finding self-reflection and analysis essential, or without pushing it far
enough to discover a personal Will that belongs to a
divine intelligence.
A habit is quite prevalent among scientific men who
stand closest to the real order of the world, and who
are emancipating us from old phrases and methods, to
refer all phenomena to Force, or to hold the general
idea of Cause without caring to suppose it Person or
to attribute to it a direct and continuous contact with
all objects through the channels of their laws. This indifference of science may exist in minds which are the




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117f

most thoroughly inspired by the rational order of
Nature, the most conscientious and self-sacrificing to
pursue its results, the most courageous to combat superstitions, and without even mentioning the name of
God. Their fidelity is none the less divinely sustained
because they are not conscious that it is, or do not care
whether it is or not. Their experiments pursue a
phenomenon to its remotest coverts by the sure trail of
the natural scent it leaves: nothing turns them aside
or throws them off. Right mental method puts them
on the track of the law of the object, and that is enough
for them. They will devote a life to the noble worship
of pursuing, and deem it irrelevant or superfluous to
be called off to talk about the divine immanence, and
to set up the necessity of being supplied with a personal God. But their Truth is God, their Force is
him also, their invariable Law is the proclamation of
his nearness, and their subtle facts the hints he gives
of directions favorable to pursue.
This is the position of many foreign men of science,
who are doing such a noble work in importing the
real methods of the universe into every branch of
knowledge. Their language frequently presumes an
indifference which they do not feel; for they hold
it to be a sacred duty to confine phrases to the business they have in hand, which is that of detecting
and preserving specimens of the actual processes of
creation. Their rapture goes forth in that direction;
they point you to marks of a wonderful footstep, and
kindle with their whole nature full of intuition as they
see and declare to you how all feet fit into it, and how
all things must have passed that way. No more relig



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ious attitude can be conceived: for religion is recognition of central facts, the confinement of effects to the
lines of causality, the emancipation of mankind from
ignorance and false habits, and the reconciliation of
all knowledge to invisible Truth.
It is only when the scientific mind goes out of this
professional neutrality of expression to make its facts
deny Intelligence and Will that it becomes irreligious,
because then instead of conciliating facts with causes
it divorces them, and leaves all certitude at the mercy
of a phrase. They repeat the error of the theologians,
and land us, however correct their methods of experiment and observation may be, in a notion: it is either
Correlation, Protoplasm, or some other substitute for
the old metaphysics, but no improvement on them as
statements of final and efficient cause. So long as
these phrases are honestly held to represent the points
which the mind has reached, and the tentative process
which gathers and codrdinates the greatest number of
phenomena, with no pretence to impose a finality nor
to claim that there is nothing more beyond, the scientific man may be praised for his temperate and impartial speech. Many shall cry, Lord, Lord! out of mere
custom of causation, and be no more conscious of
In-being than the men who declare that they are conscious of nothing but method.
But, we repeat, this unconsciousness of the scientific
intellect is not damaging to the fact that God inheres
in its method, and is the breath of its suggestions.
Individual consciousness is not essential to this vitalizing presence: it need not be the continuous nor the
occasional result of it. This question has been much




ï~~LAW OF THE DIVINE IMMANENCE.

I19

embarrassed by two theological errors: that man must
live in a state of personal experience of Omnipresence, and that communication is its favorite way to be
announced and recognized. But the divine mind appears as Gift; its fulness becomes ultimated thus in
man, as all animate and inanimate things describe its
freshest expressions. If it communicates, it is by the
advantages of structure. Many degrees of this exist
with more or less accompaniment of consciousness.
Most commonly the consciousness is confined to those
rare moments when the gift blossoms into fruition,
when moments of success impend, when experiences
accumulate around a soul's point, and a thrill of recognition passes, a consent of receptivity, unspoken,
or vocal with all the praises that the imagination, as it
fills with the blood of the hour's great pulse, may
lavish on it.
The man who calls himself an atheist and derides
the sentimentalism of communion with God, honestly
declaring that no such fact ever entered into his consciousness, is a better testimony to an indwelling Deity
than the crowds of pietists who try to inflate themselves
with the wind of phrases into a state of continual distention with Omnipresence, because they are forcing
their structure beyond its organic ability, while he is
sincere enough to state exactly how far the structure in
his case repeats any such experience. For in-being,
though of a transcendent essence, does not choose to
transcend any structure which it brings down by inheritance and sustains; our authority for saying this is the
structure itself, which cannot give any other account
of its existence.  And one structure can transcend




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another only on the strength of the in-being that strictly
corresponds to both. After a shell has once been cast
and filled, there is no way of increasing the latent
capacity of the charge which it contains. It soars to
heights and drops at distances that chronicle its calibre.
So that if a man truly reports absence of any sense of
God, he does not report absence of God, but presence
of God in the sincerity which makes known a structural defect. His state of divineness is superior to that
of the religionists who assume a sense of God because
no respectable family can be without it. Great numbers of people attribute consciousness of God to conventional emotions which are warmed by religious
exercises into semblance of organic life. Nothing is
nearer to them than their spurious, sectarian self. At
best they only labor to reproduce or to imitate some
vanished moment of profound experience, when life or
death was surprised listening at the door. The common belief in a God is compounded of thought and
emotion, but a perception of God is generally only an
intellectual assent in the interest of causation. For
people differ considerably in the faculty to condense
the latent God into personal consciousness, just as they
differ in ability to state in prose or hymn the condition
itself when it arrives. With the great majority of people it never passes beyond the satisfaction which moral
triumphs bring. When the organization asserts itself
by normal acts in any direction, and a function is appeased, the light heart praises the moment and enjoys
its health. The mystics insist that all mankind shall
make pretence to more than this, and they encourage
cerebral exaltations by voting them to be influxes of




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121

the invisible. Like the alchemist and the astrologer,
they have fooled the world with fancies. An iron
kettle cannot be transmuted into gold, and the stars in
their courses never took the trouble to fight with or
against Sisera.
But it is none the less a mental necessity to accept
the in-being of Will and Intelligence. No assumptions
that consciousness and communication are or are not
vital experimental facts can affect this necessary attitude of derived intelligence. The scientific man may be
only calling it by other names, so long as he is unconscious of the reputed experiences of the theological
world. If a mind can see the drift of all the phenomena that are continuously nourished and put forth for
observation, it must account for its ability to see the
drift. How can it detect the law of the plant except
by means of the plant's law? As soon as the mind
perceives the absence of chance from the minutest turn
and stage of the development of species, it is aware
that it perceives this by means of intelligent purpose
imported into itself; it submits to this general intelligence, and lives with all other created things immediately from the Will which it embodies. But the mind
refuses to expect communication because itself is an
organized test of In-being.
Inventions and  discoveries which  increase our
knowledge are generally accumulations of a tendency
towards them that has controlled a number of minds,
perhaps for generations. Gifted persons contribute a
surmise, a detail, an imperfect experiment: their lives
are haunted with such a strong probability that they
put forth repeated efforts in its direction, abandon it,




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recur to it, and slowly educate the general thinking,
so that fresh minds take up the matter at an advantage,
furnish more probability, break through here and there
into the daylight, and bequeath at least encouragement to their successors. Not a hint is ever lost.
If separate families of cultivated men do not transmit
it, the republic of letters keeps it perpetually on file,
where a kindred mind, consulting the achievements of
the race, is sure to find it. The special thought is
rekindled, and at length all hearths are furnished with
its comfort. So Gift is slow in elaborating its preferences. Its growth is often checked, and the earth's
climate appears inclement. But the hardy fruit is
favored by these suspenses, and acquires firmness and
flavor. The In-being that allowed some millions of
years for making balls of sun-sand can be patient
while relays of minds are condensing the matter of
knowledge, to set fresh surprises rolling in our sky.
It consumes as much time to interpret a world as to
make it.
So all the laws which lead to science and invention
have a history. The discovery of the laws of motion
must correct the crude ideas of Aristotle, and prepare
for Newton, who supplements them with the five
truths of gravitation, and drives out of the heavens
the epicycles of Ptolemy and the vortices of Descartes.
That apple was two thousand years in falling. The
law of refraction precedes the law of polarization,
and there must be a theory of caloric to disappoint
men and pique them to discover that heat is but a
mode of motion. Linnaus classifies plants and describes the characters and functions of each part of




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123

them, before Goethe can perceive that all the parts
are metamorphoses of the same primitive member.
Humboldt and other travellers observe the variation of
the compass and the dip of the needle on so many
spots of the earth's surface, that the facts suggest to
several minds at once the theory of a magnetic equator
and of magnetic poles; but the right man has not yet
appeared to convert the conjecture into science. Before Dalton, seeking for a law of chemical combination, can speak of atomic weights, Wollaston must
treat atoms as chemical equivalents, and Davy must
investigate their proportions. After Dalton has finished a neglected life, Faraday finds himself well
equipped to give each elementary substance a number
which expresses the relative amount of its decomposition; he calls it " electro-chemical equivalent," and
the identity of electrical and chemical action is at last
attained.
Oken stumbles over a deer's skeleton, and picks up
the sudden suggestion that a skull is an expanded
vertebra; a frog's leg has a spasm when a Galvani
happens to be standing near; Franklin's knuckle draws
the first spark from the fact of an electrical equilibrium: but long periods of tentative experiment prepared all these and similar lucky moments. It seems
that the original plan to have pterodactylic and saurian forerunners of all compact and economical forms
reigns also in the domain of thought. But theories
sprawl towards symmetry, and the divine mind is
content with the direction., The results surprise ignoance, and seem to have arrived by legerdemain; but
all discoverers know best how gradually conjecture




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has reached their consciousness of Law through braincells modified for centuries. Man grows till his hand
can reach the latch; it is a simple motion, then, to
enter. And throughout the whole development, it
was In-being which made it impossible for a Newton to precede Pythagoras, Beethoven a Terpander,
Shakspeare a Homer. In-being, then, controlled each
point of the vast line.
When the growth ripens, Galileo invents a telescope, Watt a steam-engine, Goethe discovers Morphology; Alexander Braun could not earlier have drawn
up his first formula of Phyllotaxis, or the fractional
ratio of the spiral ascent of leaves around a stem;
and Prof. Peirce must wait to hear of that before his
brain can build into the suggestion that the same fractions are approximate expressions of the relative times
of rotation of the planets. The Mind that has so long
plotted and constructed on the scale of an infinite
fraction, which these approx.imately express, finally
lets out the secret. What other mind has shared it?
There is no technical communication, because the
mental structure touches the law with the felicity to
which it has attained.
God either is or is not immanent in this. Many
scientific men imply that the whole suite of phenomena lay packed in the first germs of life. The
theory is, that primitive matter was endowed with
everything that has since happened: all forms, all
creatures, all developments of thought, have been
evolutions, by regular stages and a discernible logic,
from points of matter that were also points of forces
chartered by Intelligence for this voyage of history,




ï~~LAW OF THE DIVINE IMMANENCE.

I25

to set down instalments at successive ports; opening
fresh instructions but receiving no fresh ones, everything having been anticipated and put on board before the start. Science appears to favor this theory
for two reasons: it obviates the necessity of importing
a Creator all along the route, to superintend modifications and contrive fresh species; for this trotting in
and out of a divine intervention, so dear to theology,
is very repugnant to the men of Law. Another reason is, that the uses to which theology has put the idea
of Omnipresence, to sustain miraculous irruptions,
special providences and communications, has also disgusted the scientific mind, which is impressed by the
spectacle of a providence that is continuity and uniformity of causation. It refuses, in short, to be guided
by the assumption of a meddlesome and capricious
incoming, as of some one who has afterthoughts, and
desires to change his mind or modify the results of
forces; who is constantly picking at his own works,
because he discovers that unless he is on the ground
there is no help to convert a scale into a feather, gills
into lungs, flippers into hands; that everything turns
out to have the fatal defect that it is unable to go
alone, and that man himself cannot add a pin-feather
to a pigeon's leg, or modify its throat, unless Allmightiness is on the spot.
The tendency to concede great results to the latency
of forces gathered at points of matter is a reaction
from the fetichism of theology. It is no wonder that
minds, which are drenched with the sense of an orderly
and gradual development of objects by minute changes
through vast periods, should not be able to contain a




ï~~x26

AMERICAN RELIGION.

drop of the dregs in the old cup of supernaturalism.
Let the savage vivify his calabash and necklace of
teeth with a god, if he pleases. Science prefers a
God large enough, and of intelligence comprehensive enough, to be remanded back into eternity,
where the first plastic germ and the last thinking
soul occupy, with all that transpires between, but
a breath or instant which is the everlasting Now.
To Him, whose watch-tick is our millions of years
just on the point of striking, what is the zeal of
the theologian to import Omnipresence into his petty
pulpit spasm; what the intent of the naturalist to
confine it to the origins of species, or of the historian to chain this watch-dog to the threshold of
epochs?
And we must concede that science makes out its
case in favor of potential forces that cluster at points
of matter, travel through their combinations, are correlated or opposed, and waltz in and out of each other
in endless masquerade. Definite physical conditions
draw after them invariable demonstrations of power
and vitality. When the brakes are applied to the
wheels of a train, and their motion disappears, where
is it?. It is liberated into the form of heat. What is
the philosophy of this simple transaction? Something
has taken place: there has been a manifestation of
elemental law. Did God shift from motion into heat,
and wait there to be brought round to motion-making
processes again? Was he watching the brakeman's
arm that he might be on time, and free his heat
from his motion? No, says Science: no God took
passage by that train. The most we can believe is




ï~~LAW OF THE DIVINE IMMANENCE.

I27

that the first infinite Fulness precontained the invariable correlation.
That is the least we can believe. No matter at
how many removes, interpose as many of them as
we please, the fact must at last be due to something.
A man may pick his teeth, a bird may preen its
feathers, an insect may acquire the protection of its
color, without the co-presence of Deity. We do not
know the extent to which the creative mind economizes its relation to things, and turns them over to its
practised menials. There must be dignity as well as
frugality of Omnipresence. But the trivial occurrence
between the brake and the wheel has range enough to
invite co-presence; and that is not intervention. Perhaps no other fact could so well indicate the vast
and incessant shifting of motion into other elemental
conditions, to keep up the interplay of laws upon the
scale of a universe. The slight local flitting of motion
into heat, under the turn of a brakeman's muscle, is
like the bent twig, or the pressed grass-blade, that
betrays to the trapper which way his game has passed
on its long route through apparently deserted forests.
It is a flicker of expression upon an infinite countenance, where all the moods of creation disport themselves: now and then a side-long glance detains our
conscious observation, but it is significant of spaces
over which all the eyes in all the planets could not
be concentrated to report one great occurrence, and
all intelligences could not overtake its manifoldness.
But show us a stick whose weather-side has been
turned under, or an abraded tree-bark, and we can
satisfy ourselves that a wildness takes to covert and
invites us to pursue.




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"Malo me Galatea petit -
Et fugit ad salices, et se cupit ante videri: "
towards me Galatea tosses an apple, then she flies to
the willow-clumps, wishing that my glance may follow. The apple is expressive enough, though we are
not detained by its flavor, because Galatea throws it
only to provoke us to leave it for herself.
To say that acts of correlation were precalculated,
precontained, is a mere phrase which accounts for
nothing but only relegates them to primordial germs.
If, to relieve this from being only a notion, one says
that the germs started to travel with the fulness in
every direction till there became a universe, he rightfully says that the Infinite passed into representation
by a universe: it accompanied its germs into action.
What else can it be doing, indeed, except being every
point of space in every moment of time? He says,
what he ought to say, that In-being is the immediate
cause of all phenomena, which occur to us in a series
of years, and in a logically graduated method, but occur to God in an eternal moment. For timte and space
form only a "provisional cuticle " for mind in its finite
condition.
"He glows above
With scarce an intervention, presses close
And palpitatingly, His soul o'er ours!
We feel Him, nor by painful reason know!
The everlasting minute of creation
Is felt there; Now it is, as it was Then;
All changes at His instantaneous will,
Not by the operation of a law
Whose maker is elsewhere at other work!
His soul is still engaged upon his world."




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129

But when Mr. Browning adds, -
"Man's praise can forward it, man's prayer suspend,
For is not God all-mighty?"
he fancies God not so mighty as to be independent of
the ejaculations into which man's joy or grief transpires. God's co-presence, with all finite structures,
might diminish the bulk of dictionaries, and ease
bodies of divinity of groaning on our shelves.
Man's deeds can forward it, but the bad ones seem
to have been in the long run quite as providential as
the good. How bad were they, then?
Now we say, Watt invents a steam-engine, Goethe
discovers Morphology. There either is or is not divine in-being in the structures which reach these results.
Why is there nQt, if there is in the plant? The plant
draws sap in this eternal moment of creation, not by
its own device, but in the stress of the moment. It
has not concluded to be a jonquil, a tulip, a violet.
Does a combination of earths and forces qualify its
name? Then what qualifies the combination? Is it
a primitive fancy of form and color, packed into a
monad of matter, left to burst out eventually in our
meadow, as a firework's changes blaze out and into
each other, and dispense with the original fusee clear
through its combinations? Then every thing has got
everywhere, and extruded, if not abolished, its own
Creator. At the least, he has stepped aside, as a man
who lights his firework, and he has attained through
all these millions of years to the function of being superfluous. The primordial germs emptied out all his
infinity, and his first creative act was fatal to him.
6*




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Perhaps this splendid moth of the Cosmos may yet
alight upon the deserted cocoon.
Immanence has not displaced Watt's mentality, and
dropped into him with the idea of Engine: for in that
case he would be himself an engine with the steam
turned on. How shall we save ourselves from this pantheistic absorption, and save the immanence that nourishes the individual structure? By recurring to the idea
previously expressed that the self-working I attains to
freedom through contact with the Immanence. We
may say that Watt is immersed in it, but as an individual with a definite habit of structure, that evolves
Immanence into special ideas and forms. His inventiveness is his special freedom in Immanence. And in
his freedom Immanence obeys and preserves its own.
It is continuous and not irruptional, and is related to
Watt in the universal character of designer and maintainer of structure. Watt is not a free person who is
occasionally controlled, enriched by a suggestion,
domineered by a divine moment, thrown into abeyance
by the intrusion of Immanence with its details of an
engine. But he is a person whose gift acquires its
freedom in compatibility with, as well as in consequence of, its contact with the Immanence; and it is
the law or natural disposition of this Immanence to
reach finite freedom in this way. Watt's speciality,
Goethe's deductive sense, is a hint or partial forthsetting of the absolute freedom that Immanence has
by virtue of containing absolute Law. And the freedom of each man is in proportion to the content of
his speciality.
If a doubt arises that mere phrasing and verbal




ï~~LAW OF THE DIVINE IMMANENCE.

I3I

jugglery is here engaged in holding off Immanence to
keep human freedom inviolate, and then in turning it
on to keep the freedom nourished, and so to balance
the terms as to create an abstract notion of such an
union or free interplay of structure and in-being, the
doubt is dispelled by recurring to the actions of the soul
that announce its highest sense of a conscience. Millions of the humblest men supply this important ratification. In that resort, where a feeling of dependence
and of individuality mingle and flow forth into a conception of a divine source of truth, we recover the
value of the phrases we have used, and renew our
belief that they represent a vital fact. We may be
unable to get any farther than this in attempting to
account for two freedoms in contact and yet compatible, for a finite structure that develops Gift out of
in-being, and yet remains an individual. There is a
point here that surpasses the kind of observation which
enjoys the benefit of being explained. Nevertheless, it
is none the less essential to the coherence of all human
knowledge and experience.
We say, then, that the broodings and developments
of genius result from the divine coltinuousness in the
partial freedoms of the men of genius. The whole
line of their inheritance represents the course of this
continuousness, freighted with the purport of the lyric,
the symphony, the intuition of a law, the cunning of
machines tocatch and utilize the elements. No point
of freedom in the long route was infringed with a view
to these results. And when the men arrive, the continuity has arrived also, to sustain and not to displace
the I of each, as it develops its peculiar felicity. Its




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trials, agonies, and private difficulties are not abrogated. There is no infinite arrogance of overcoming
and displacement, no infinite fussiness pulling at the
sleeve, no pressing of superfluous assistance. For
the structure of the individual stands built in the forethought of centuries. The I loses not one function,
nor one disability, by having its freedom out of the
absolute freedom that is immanent. For its functions
and disabilities are the result of both freedoms which
have been long at work up to this day of Immanence's
special mood to nourish, prolong, and transmit that
special case. And the more freely the man exercises
his function, to reduce his disabilities of birth and fortune, the greater becomes his share of the absolute
freedom. He is more Goethean, and less Goethe,
than ever. But he is not simply Immanence, because
he is Goethean. He is not a pipe for fluting. A pipe
has no freedom; it therefore has no relation to the
mood of fluting, and fluting merely adapts and adopts
it, blows it, lets it drop. It is dead all the time it is
not fluted on. Goethe entertains the divine mind in
Goethean fashion, and becomes thus a condition of its
immanence.
Does the whole of our special immanence, that by
which we live in our physical and spiritual entireness,
touch the whole of us at the same moment, as the
brine excites all the tentacles of the star-fish to lift
and feed? If so, what is its state or mood, when any
part of us suspends its function? does it treat us like
plants whose blossoms announce the climax of its
visits, and droop to mark its stages of retreating?
This would be a too mechanical representation of the




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133

interplay between structure and in-being. Our freedom is its opportunity, into whatever gift and with
whatever integrity of culture and exercise we invite it.
But this inviting does not bring on submersion. It is
only freedom conforming to the law which it derives
from absolute freedom. Immanence corresponds to
our spontaneousness, but the latter is not an arbitrary
dictate of the former; rather the success of the law
of immanence, whose condition is to reach success
through our law of freedom.
When the delicately organized brain of the great
thinker or poet receives the accumulating blood, and
details it to the cells that are appropriate to the thought
and emotion that gather and clamor at their portals to
be liberated into expression, and fixed in brain-fibre
and in speech at once and for ever, a sense of lifting,
of light and gladness, penetrates such moments of creativeness, to signalize that the soul's freedom has admitted the whole of its in-being. The piled-up experience does not report that some distant or exceptional
inspiration has invaded the individual, and turned him
into a mouth-piece for thought that would be otherwise
impossible to him. The flashes and sudden illuminations are often held to be the accompaniments of divine
influx; and a lofty style of egotism, which is only consciousness of power, has been deceived, during many
periods of the world's imperfect self-appreciation,
into accepting these popular marks of the coming of
God, and lending to the deceit all the intensity of personal emotion. The heavens are opened, the wings
rustle and descend, the eagle brings the electric pen
in its talons, the sun of noonday is obscured by the




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AMERICAN RELIGION.

lightning conviction, there is disparting, disspreading
overhead, thinner and thinner grows the vault, and
warmth and rapture rain through into a human ecstasy. Is a fact of influx of a divine Person thus
translated into the symbolic imagination of an individual, or is the latter simply set free into the amplitude and heat of his own structure's highest moment,
as it invites and entertains all the absolute freedom
that is normal to it? In this sense there is contact
with a divine Person, but it is conditioned by inherited
gifts of structure, advantages of culture, fineness of
native fibre, build of the brain's complexity. The experience of lifting and gladness is a moment of pure
health, when the man fulfils his function with a bold
and haughty ease; it is a culmination of animal and
mental spirits in the trains of thinking carried on by
the individual. At last the solution comes, and gates
swing open on hinges festally sounding, and the roof
vibrates with its harmony. The cerebral action passes
into emotion, light, and power, from a point that has
been bulging with its life-tide till it can no longer be
held there, but must pass to seek its equilibrium again.
These are the moments magnified by the childlike
surprise and egotistic humbleness of all the mystics,
vision-seers, and special communicationists, into a
supernaturalism that defies the laws of structure, and
substitutes a caprice of its own. Theology is infested
with its misleading phrases.
If the evolution of thought and feeling depends, on
the physical side, upon cerebral conditions, then, whatever we suppose the resultant thought to be, as to its
substance, may there not be a setting free of some



ï~~LAW OF THE DIVINE IMMANENCE.

135

thing, as the cerebral contribution passes into the form
of thinking? Why not, as in other modes of motion,
an actual experience of light and warmth? A smart
blow upon the skull will let through into it a sky-full
of stars: the concussion really imparts to the optic
nerve the sense of flashes of light. There is some
mode of physical activity whenever the gray matter of
the brain gets so far as to arrange itself into a thought,
and to fix it in a permanent form that is laid up for use
and remembrance. When some fresh idea or emotion
is secreted, and the personal experience receives it as
a contribution to its structure, the moment of activity
rust have some kind of physical correlation. Whether
thought be derived from the dual action of brain and
mind, or whether it be only the brain's effervescence,
we might expect in either case that the body's complicity would report itself in phenomena that correspond, in some kind of physical symbolism. It is not
a groundless caprice that associates light with thought,
warmth with emotion, obscurity and mist with mental
groping, and a floating, airy joy with the success of
every conviction. Nay; the brain rises into its native
health, even when there is no conscious interposition
of a train of thought to help it climb: it fills with
blood, and mantles into gladness. Suddenly, out of
a neutral condition of the whole inward nature,
something soars, like a lark from the meadow, and
carols a surprise from an open vista, where just previously we noticed nothing but a flat and opaque
surface.
And, certainly, the highest conscious moments of
the soul cannot be all impalpable spirituality; for the




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AMERICAN RELIGION.

soul's moment is fructification, and that is a proceeding that depends upon two, upon the consummation
of their marriage. The stigmas quiver to announce
the pollen's touch, We shall probably find that all
natural movements of the passing of one thing over
into another sets free some element.
When a blossom is unfolding, there is an increase
of temperature that sometimes amounts to fifty degrees; the botanist would say that its purpose is to
develop the seed. No doubt; but the act of unfolding
liberates this warmth that makes the act known to
observation.
Mr. Kingsley, writing from the tropics, says that,
so fast does the spadix of flowers of the Monstera expand, "an actual genial heat and fire of passion,
which may be tested by the thermometer, or even by
the hand, is given off during fructification." So, many
a soul, journeying out of its debatable land, through
passions of growth and self-conviction, is felled at
noonday by excess of light, and overhears the last
words of its perplexity and hesitation, as its own nature escapes from their persecution and assumes its
rights.
"Of a sudden it flashed through me," people say.
The physical effect which accompanies vivid thinking,
particularly where all the preliminary processes are
condensed into one rapid moment, is thus preserved by
language. It will yet be possible to measure this
light and heat, these auroral flittings of the firmament
of brain.
Thought yearns and expects, when it is approaching
its culmination, as feeling does. A solution, or a sug



ï~~LAW OF THE DIVINE IMMANENCE.

I37

gestion, is a direct answer from above only in the
sense that the immanence corresponds to the whole
process of freedom, and is fragrant in the flower
thereof. These exalted states of feeling, deduction,
revery, meditation, invention, and discovery, have
often been misinterpreted into voice, message, special
invasion of invisible agencies. Some temperaments
are peculiarly susceptible to this delicate conceit
of superior powers. There is a whole orchestral
scale of it. A tune on the oboe is less subtle, penetrating, soaring and personal, than the same tune
upon the violin. It puts to the lips its celebration of
meadow dainties, breathes the pensiveness of groves,
is haunted by the wood-note of escaping Syrinx. But
we hug the violin close to the human bosom that is a
hive full of joy, terror, pity, and despair; its seasoned
freedom is offered to the heart's freedom, one vibration
draws the line of immanence, thrills with fitness, but
says nothing of conquest nor invasion.
What shall prevent us from declaring that the divine
in-being enjoys the raptures of these moments, when
our partial freedom runs its flag up and reports successes: a field won, an advantage gained, an intrenchment stormed! Immanence must be in all liberations
of vital force. The broader the finite freedom is, the
more deeply the infinite is implicated. And as it is
the implication of a personal will, it cannot be impassive. Our own joy is a gamut on the infinity of God;
and what is he but the perfect health of the universe,
the only Being who does not fall sick with the evils
that infest mankind, since they do not pertain to his
absolute condition, but are mere contingents of devel



ï~~138            AMERICAN RELIGION.
oping structure. Such irrepressible robustness cannot
be conscious of defect. It is a divine impartiality that
must be always glad. And every pure joy announces
a mood of something that is prevalent in the vicinity:
not a joy superposed or interpolated, but June, that
6" climbs to a soul in grass and flowers."




ï~~VI.

A DIVINE PERSON.
WE have said that the tendency of American Religion should be to establish some necessary
truths that express real organic relations between the
finite and the infinite. To force or pretend a belief in
more than these would be to overload the soul with
superfluous baggage. But to abandon any one of these
would be to throw away a personal necessity. Whether
man advances or retreats, the day's march is a strict
commissary, and serves out exactly what he needs.
The march is, indeed, the stubborn experience that discovers the rule of the commissariat. Before people
start, they put up many a whimsey which they expect to
find comfortable on occasion; but a few peremptory
days make them abandon these one after the other with
sighs of regret which soon change to congratulations.
In the old rambling mansion of theology, even the
warming-pans and foot-stoves of shivering generations
are hoarded up: now and then they are brought out to
cosset some valetudinarian. But motion itself is the
improved warming apparatus to an army in the field.
The vital fiunctions of the individual are his body of
divinity; they comprise the articles of his faith, and
refer him to its objects.




ï~~140

AMERICAN RELIGION.

We are prepared to see that a divine Person is an
object that closely corresponds to necessities of the individual, notwithstanding a wide feeling which exists,
in circles where science or indifference disclaim them,
that the organic evolution of Force does everybody's
business with sufficient promptness, economy and advantage. This evolution of force has not been denied
by us; it has, on the contrary, been assumed as the
nerve-system that pervades the whole surface, but
gathers into ganglia deep towards the centre where
in-being touches and controls it. The law of in-being
depends upon its mediation through all the structures
of the universe.
But the in-being is not merely another force behind
a force; it must have essential Personality because all
its manifestations presume intelligence and will. When
the word Person is applied to the infinite being, it is
apt to carry over the idea of limitation from our experience of individuals. After we have called a man a
person, we shrink from using the word to convey the
conception that there is a vital consciousness in God,
until we learn that limitation is not essentially connoted
by it. The divine Being is sometimes said to be impersonal, in order to prevent the grandest of our conceptions from becoming impounded in a term that
belongs to our finite life. But when the word Person
is rightly defined we see that the epithet impersonal
denies its essential infinity, remands in-being back into
the category of force, and strips it of intelligence and
will. The epithet may be used by people who intend
to preserve these attributes, and are far from conceiving
that God is a mode of force, or a soul of the world;




ï~~A DIVINE PERSON.

141

both pantheism and anthropomorphism are out of
favor with them, and impersonal seems to assert neither.
In preserving the idea of infinity it releases God from
limitations.  But it imposes the fatal limitation of
emptying all consciousness out of this infinity.  It
secures vastness at the expense of qualities that make
the vastness worth having, and available for creative
objects. Common sense pays a tribute to the value of
the word person when it instinctively judges that the
epithet impersonal takes an object out of the domain
of volition.  So it is no matter what is sometimes
implied by people who use it: they cannot combine
their implication with the organic sense of the epithet,
for it will not bear the weight of any quality that belongs to Person.
We attribute Personality to the divine Being because
we cannot otherwise refer to any source the phenomena
that show Will and Intellect. Person is no more limiting than Being: but it is deeper by the whole contents of the idea of consciousness. None of our
abstract words for existence, continuance, immanence,
meet the exactions of this problem; which is, that if
we reach consciousness we must have started from
something conscious, if we rise to volition it must be
from the pressure of some source of Will, if we perceive and exercise intelligence the supply must have
been derived from Intellect. Find a word that shall be
a symbol of the vital coexistence of qualities whence
our personal experience is derived.
Person ought to be the greatest, most venerable word:
its equivalent in every language might supplant all the
synonyms of God. For it says, I Am.




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AMERICAN RELIGION.

Its Latin etymology betrays that it once denoted the
opposite of this, for persona was the mask used by
Greek and Roman actors, who voiced their feigned
emotions through it. It must be brought out of this
disguise, and accede to kingly senses; for nothing is
more real and positive, more legitimately heir to a
throne, than the freedom of a man's Conscience, Intellect and Will. Nowadays the mask is the individual,
through which the unfeigned person sounds.
When we say, an infinite Person, we do not suggest
infinity within limits, but volition and intelligence
without them. Neighbors have a trick of calling each
other persons, when they mean people or individuals
with Christian names; they are, therefore, unprepared
to discover that every one of these people touches
infinity with his least individual and limited qualities,
those immediately derived from the divine freedom,
and can furnish this freedom with its name. We need
not be prevented, then, by common usage, from lifting all limits away from the word Person, that it
may be competent to represent consciousness raised to
infinity. If in-being had not been always Personal, it
never would have been in any thing: or rather, nothing would have been. Each man's creative instinct is
the continuous explanation of the origins of things.
The theologians dread the epithet impersonal because they are interested to sustain the old theories of
special providences and interventions, and need an
individual who can step spryly out and into history,
and be on time to a second to modify the natural order
with whimsical fertility of afterthoughts and supplements. This is the Napoleon-Paul-Pry of the super



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143

naturalists. Such a God is not a Person, but a creature
as large as the scheme of supernatural dogmatics:
certainly no more extensive than the earth and its
chronology, and his chief use is to sustain the credit of
miraculous narratives, and to prevent chimpanzees
from aspiring to be men. Theology is right in saying
that if God be called impersonal he is emptied of vitality and put into a row of forces. But when we call
him a Person we do not share the anxiety of the
theologian to have a definite Life for the sake of the
plan of redemption. Miracles and irruptions have now
been superfluous for a long time, as long as an infinite
Person has existed. During that time he has imparted
his original Unity to the finite order, and saved us the
trouble and mortification of trying to eke out its uniformity.
In Goethe's poem, the gentle Margaret would fain
commit Faust to a statement of belief in a God; but
the poet's dread of limitations replies, that name is
but sound and smoke o'er-misting heaven's glow. But
when our highest integrity of life utters the name of its
kinship with the infinite, every verbal dexterity falls
off like manners of the individual in moments of profound sincerity, and the essence of the reality lets itself
be touched.
This is not naming, but rather indicating by a symbol, the direction where in-being may be found. The
old guide-board that insists only upon the name of the
next town will set the traveller around the world. We
are content with knowing what tendency opens at last
into the space where the original of our own consciousness awaits us.




ï~~I44

AMERICAN RELIGION.

When two friends in old Greece parted, for journeying or war, a ring was severed, and each took half of
it away with him. At their next meeting the first act,
before a word would be spoken, was to fit the two
halves together, and restore the symbol of their faithfulness. Our word symbol comes from that word,
sumballo, to put together; and the Greek ring encircles the friendship that all signs have for truths.
So mankind, parting long ago from the unnamed
Deity, went into the first turmoil and uncertainty of
living, and appeared overborne and indifferent to that
half of a pledge which had been exchanged, its latent
capacity to make a Person out of an individual. The
journey ends, the return is made, the affinity proclaimed with delight that absence sharpened, when
the finite person, discovering himself, rounds himself
against the infinite; the perfect faith is a perfect fit,
and no words that pass can lend it any quality.
Did my life indeed ascend,
Or some Life sink down to me?
All I know, it was my friend:
Name it, shape it? Let that be.
When the individual sets whatever gift he has into
personal freedom, recovering it from the whim and
manner by which he is known among men, and is
thought of by them as soon as his name is heard, he
begins to build a consciousness of Deity, and to perceive that it is necessary to his life. No argument
from nature, or from the marks of 'design in creation,
can reach so high. Scientific method can demonstrate the unity and constant presence of divine intelli



ï~~A DIVINE PERSON.

145

gence, but then has to wait for the individual to drop
the key-stone of his personal freedom into that arch
over which the finite and infinite pass to and fro.
A good deal of our time is spent in the ordinary life
which we inherit from physical conditions; we cannot
call it wasted time, for it piques us to recover our
freedom, hampers and teases us as if on purpose to
make us turn upon it and bid it respect the presence
of a superior. Our most individual and least independent instincts grow huffy and important in the
crowd that streams through the street, where each
must jostle each for its right of way. I am John, - I
am Peter: my time and interest are as valuable as
yours; let me pass. What a passage, as of some
migrating nomadic horde of conceits and assumptions, anxious to get into a fair pasture land to stake
out their claim! -past we go, dickering in town politics, outwitting in caucuses, and subscribing money
to buy up the floating vote; scrutinizing each other's
motives, garments, food, and drink, with ridiculous
phrases of mutual depreciation that are blown away
by the first real benefit; jealously cheapening each
other's goods, from a pound of spice. to a lyric's flavor;
dreading too much success, hawking at too high and
smooth a wing: a mob of voices getting hoarse over
the right to a cesspool, or the direction of a drain, or
a millennial text; disputing in vestries about the numbers in Daniel, the spokes in Ezekiel's wheels, mutual
goring with the horns of any apocalyptic beast; formidable scrupulousness about the cut of each other's
nails, and stealthy watching behind the door of decencies to catch some one betraying his weakness; gath7




ï~~146

AMERICAN RELIGION.

ering with cheap lanterns and brass to bid somebody's
shiftiness show itself at the windows, and neatly recommend others to be shifty; zeal to favor a few isolated
traits that express the soul's least estimable gifts, and
to get each other baptized or placarded with them, to
pass as such instead of upon our real, though remoter,
value; - these civic tricks and prejudices hurry individuals through the world, as if a rescue by the Person
were dreaded before the grave can be reached.
People live so close together that they spindle and
suffer in the general strength of their character. Sometimes the injury makes them appear very ragged and
unlovely; yet all the while they may be holding aloft
in clear air topmost features which solicit the sun and
rain of heaven. One who rides from South-West Harbor to Bar Harbor, in Mt. Desert, will see a grove in
which the pines stand so close that all the branches
have withered two-thirds of the way up the trunks,
and are nothing but dead sticks, broken and dangling.
But every tree bears close, each to each, its evergreen
crown; and they seem to make a floor for the day to
walk upon.
This pavement for the feet of heaven, more precious
than the fancied one of New Jerusalem, stretches all
around the world, above the thickets of our spiny egotism, where people run up into the only coherence upon
which it is safe for Deity to tread.
But our life has not been so dismantled by mortality
that we cannot find traces that Deity has dwelt here,
and plainly intends to again: perhaps it is in the next
room, and our hand has been so often on the latch, but
some stir below forbade us to enter. When a blazing




ï~~A DIVINE PERSON.

147

hour scorches these packthreads which we call Society, and our freed members recover natural movements, so that we turn towards each other, break the
armed truce of our conceits, and embrace in a fashion
before unheard of in our polished isolation, so closely
that all hearts transmit the one blood of which we are
made, and a flush of conviction outruns the planet's
dawn, - then we overtake the indwelling Freedom, set
free into it our personal power, and become a unity
that shares organic laws. It is an experience of that
wholeness of gift and feeling to which a divine presence corresponds.
When the powerful vibrations of music shake down
our bars, and we are released to each other, or the
upliftings of great speech take our feet from the
ground, and we can no longer stand braced in resistance, but conspire into the wave of the orator's persuasion, we are in the temper of Deity. It is never
strange at such moments to find all the petty individuals believing in God, unconsciously translating the occasion into the conviction that gathers and crushes all
the clusters of all souls. God is the cup that catches
that life's wine. We taste our own unadulterated
flavor.
A beautiful action wins a town's sympathy, and all
the people exchange congratulations, having been so
dazzled into forgetting surnames that they run together. The moral order of eternity is let through
into time, and never returns. Individuals hold the
door, but the stronger people get it open, and a Person
enters with the quality or eminence of the moment.
Moral routine that represses every individual trait for




ï~~148

AMERICAN RELIGION.

the sake of a household, a town, a commonwealth, is
not stunted by the narrowness and severity of the act,
but the universal advantage seems to repay it, by contributing extent to the nature of the actor, together
with all the symmetry which his sacrifice won from
the dull material. This obscure moral service creates
for the individual a personality as large as the neighborhood of souls who have been improved by him.
He cannot occupy so much space without including a
sense of Deity.
We are the persons who make this Person essential
to us by living divinely. It is a deduction which develops when moral and spiritual gifts are set free: they
pass into the certitude of a personal Will and Intelligence, because we have been living on that scale.
The alternative is to sink back into the individual, and
nurse its physical and animal predilections; the elements suffice for that, and the mind rises no higher
than the notion of a Force.
It is essential for Religion to have not only the abstract term, a First Cause, that will satisfy the mind
when it attempts to account for itself, its structure, its
mode of activity, its relation to the world, but a divine
Person, to be the mind's qualifying ground and substance, the personal unity that endows all the units
with a sense of being persons. He is not only the
cause of our being here, but He keeps us here, and
everywhere, the essence of our mental and moral
unity continually guaranteeing our structure, and
reaching through that to proof of Himself in our private freedom. So that it is the sacredness of the
individual that endows in-being with Personality. It




ï~~A DIVINE PERSON.

149

must become one of the organic truths of American
Religion.
At this point, if at any in the argument, a claim
might be admitted in favor of the instinct that the
death of the body does not suspend or destroy personal
continuance. It is objected, that no thought and feeling have ever yet been displayed independently of
cerebral condition; they must have brain, either to
originate or to announce them. If brain be source or
instrument of human consciousness, what preserves it
when the brain is dead? But there would have been
no universe on such terms as that. What supplied
infinite mind with its preliminary sine qua non of
brain-matter? All worlds and objects are the lobes
that waste and renew to express the moods of their
Creator. Surely matter did not convene and organize
for the production of a divine consciousness; and to
suppose the contemporaneous eternity of both does not
impair the advantage which our own will ascribes to
a Creator's will.
To the scientific dictum, " No Mind without Brain,"
we are disposed to respond with the universe itself,
that infinite equivalent to the phrase, " No Brain without Mind." And if the finite intellect shows marks of
identity with the divine, by admitting and interpreting
the laws of things and the unity of their development,
it must be an identity that shares the creative advantage of finding its own brains. The universe teaches
us that if one centre of force becomes dissipated, it is
only a movement which creates another, and reestablishes its advantage. As fast as elementary forces are
driven out of business, they set up afresh, and not one




ï~~ISO

AMERICAN RELIGION.

bankruptcy occurs. No man need trouble himself to
rise from the dead to tell us on a small scale what the
heavens declare with a mighty fugue and interplay of
voice. Through all its transformations the world
always weighs the same, and not a spark of vital
agency is filched. "To say that life is the result of
organization is to say that the builders of a house are
its results."
There is a great deal about an individual man that
is not worth saving, and he will rejoice to be well rid
of it at last, for it is a legacy from inferior structures,
which he will eventually make superfluous. Heaven
would be a menagerie if his tricks and gibberings
got into it, a blustering amplification of traits which
we already find intolerable. But they have not personal vitality enough to set up housekeeping in that
other place, dear to the mythological heart; mankind's meanness has not yet grown viciously virile
enough to start a hell, even had God a hankering for
one.
We say of some men that they dare not or cannot call
their souls their own. If it were true that they could
not, owing to a structure that declined the task of becoming a person, or to one that represented rudimentary and idiotic conditions, it would be also true that
God could not call them his. When we observe that
some elephants are more sagacious than some men,
the suspicion intrudes that they are more valuable
by so much ivory, and that even a divine mind could
not utilize the men. All the phenomena of trivial and
sordid living deceive our own conceit into presuming
that God has a preference for us. But what man is




ï~~A DIVINE PERSON.

151

good enough for God? Not one; but all the men are,
and their number at any time is the precise equivalent
of his preference, for the lowest unit of this collective
mankind must have a germ of personality that reports
his own failure to himself, in a very groping and forest
fashion, doubtless, yet not destitute of expectation.
Despair itself is an investment of the person.
The individual may become disintegrated without
damage to the personality which resides in him to
secure to the divine life some contact with him. Whatever apprehends or guesses that proximity must be at
least as permanent as the matter of the world which
shifts out and into physical conditions.
But we can leave this problem to take care of itself,
for nothing is so sure as death. Nothing is surer than
that either something or nothing succeeds death.
Everybody will therefore be conscious quite soon, or
be unconscious, that personal continuance is a vital
fact. It is a waste of time to be over-curious or
anxious about a solution which a few years will secure
for our experience. For it is no more essential to good
living to acquire some proof of life in the future than
it is to prove metaphysically that we are alive in the
present. If proofs or probabilities of immortality exist, they are so involved with truth of intellect and
character, that they become identical with the fact that
we are alive. What can enhance the reality of being
actually alive?
The bare belief in a continued existence ennobles
man less than the personality that secures the fact. It
is the amount of his moral and spiritual character, and
it is already possessed by crowds of disinterested peo



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AMERICAN RELIGION.

pie who most vehemently deny that they have any
corresponding instinct, and justly refuse to regulate
their behaviors by the popular sentiments of reward
and retribution that are connected with it. The most
important thing is to become such persons of the universe that it would stint the plan, and be wasteful, to
extinguish us.
Who does not become so? What arbiter will draw
the line? What odious aristocrat of virtue can embezzle the universal opportunity?
" Oh, that a man might know
The end of this day's business, ere it come!
But it sufficeth that the day will end,
And then the end is known."
Let us serenely resume the argument for the necessity of a divine Person.
Religion has always tried to endow the divine Personality with a consciousness that reaches through
Will and Intelligence into a mood that corresponds to
human sympathy.    It is worth while to see if this
be a permanent instinct of human nature which the
facts can justify and our own personal relations can
explain.
What becomes of the heart's old secret, that there is
something like paternal regard for us,, in this flood of
common-sense that is beginning to cover all intelligent
countries, to deposit facts and fruitful germs of truth
about the divine order? Does the flood run down into
the heart and drown out its secret, or is that left to brood
there in the darkness, still alive, but languishing and
growing bloodless every day for want of light and air?
In former times there was hardly a circumstance that




ï~~A DIVINE PERSON.             153
did not help to feign a personal sympathy of God for
man. Some divine agency had the contract to furnish
corn and wine, to keep the pestilence subdued, to blunt
the arrows of the elements, to provide antidotes to all
poisonous things. Men trusted to a fatherly interference. If, notwithstanding this, they continued to suffer,
the fact did not disturb their faith, because it was immediately interpreted to be a sign of the aversion and
anger of the ruling power; and they cast about to discover what could have been the cause of the aversion,
to remove it, if possible, and restore the ordinary comfort and immunity. Worship began in this effort to
propitiate the invisible, and to make atonement for
real or fancied sins. For men have always cherished
a fond notion that heaven takes regular and unremitting care of them; the more ignorant they are, the
more uncompromisingly is this interest attributed to a
God. Children confide, and give themselves right up
to the parent; sensible of their own inadequateness to
meet the wants of their organization, they make over
the whole business to superior intelligence, with a
sweetness and loyalty that always endow that intelligence with love, even where that attribute is very
scanty or does not exist at all.
Now the case is altering every day. Knowledge of
invariable causes and effects has gone on, dislodging
a divine person from one fact after another, driving it
to the rear, disenchanting everything, and substituting
consistent operation in the place of personal care. This
has made the art of living vastly more easy, but it has
made the problem of the Infinite Father more difficult
to solve. For with all our increase of comfort, superi7*




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AMERICAN RELIGION.

ority to physical influences, ability to detect and baffle
whatsoever is injurious to us, it is just as pathetic as
ever to be alive; we are just as likely to become actors
in some tragedy that tells how a body or a soul may be
discomfited, with no help for it, so far as we can see,
from any paternal interference, as the old Hebrew was
who thought his fathers had eaten sour grapes, or the
old Greek who believed the same doctrine and called
it Fate. We know enough about natural and moral
causes to perceive, very often when it is too late, that
our help would have been in avoiding something, or
accepting something. " If we had only known at the
time," we say. But how futile and irrational that is,
with all its show of reason. It is " a ship's stern-light
that illuminates nothing but the wake."
If the Algerines had only known, a few years ago,
that certain districts would be famine-stricken, they
might have decamped: but staying on where they were,
and expecting the annual average of rain, it happened
that mothers became cannibals, and served up their
children as the old Jewish mothers did during the siege
of Titus. Providence must seem to a great many miserable persons like a state of siege: they have eaten
every thing from meat to vermin and old leather,
gnawed themselves barefoot and swallowed the saddles
upon which they rode: yet the enemy still holds the
lines of hunger. The miserable people totter to their
battlements of belief, and scan the horizon for succor:
sometimes they see a cloud of dust no bigger than a
man's hand, and sometimes the landscape has the cruel
smile of emptiness. Which is the Heavenly Father, the
advancing cloud that does not always succeed in sweep



ï~~A DIVINE PERSON.

155

ing off the enemy, or the barren outlook that does not
even show a pretence of relief?
In reducing life to rule we have ruled out the personal sympathy of the Lord of Life. How many ages
went down on their knees before the cause of thunder,
to make interest in behalf of their effects and dwellings: but it blasted on every hand according to a will
of its own, and rolled deafening against all human
expostulations. Now comes along Poor Richard, the
apostle of Common Sense, puts his knuckle to a key
that dangles at the wire-end of a kite, and down comes
the mystery, hauled to earth by a plaything. Of what
use are prayers? God says virtually, "'A rod to conduct is more to the point - prayers at any rate are out
of fashion." But the rod will also play its tricks, so
that half mankind is undecided whether it invites or
disarms the fluid. When a rusty nail or an imperfect
connection is discovered, the survivors of a house that
has been struck exclaim, " Oh, if we had only known
it in time!" How inexorable, then, is the Infinite Care.
The weather that helps the crops to grow, and fills the
woods and fields with gladness for all flower-hunters
and those who linger hand in.hand with friendship,
has rotted away the rod at its connection, and the bolt
leaps into a cradle. What have we gained with all
our knowledge? It has made our life in some respects
more tragic than ever, for it has imported new elements
into the pursuit of comfort and intelligence. Steam
carries a hundred midnight sleepers, women and children, to a spot where a snake-head waits for them, and
over they go, with but a shriek between sleep and
death: then fire licks and swallows them. Is it not as




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AMERICAN RELIGION.

tragic as a day before the walls of Troy? Less noble,
because not caused by the daring to death of men who
are wide awake and measuring their dangers with
every glance: but far more piteous, far more accusing
to our faith in the divine order. We can stand a tragedy that steps forth in garments rolled in the blood of
our own self-surrender. When a thousand negroes are
willing to follow Shaw up the glacis of Fort Wagner,
to dig with bayonets their own glorious grave together
in the heat of that fraternal patriotism, we deliberately
prefer the absence of the divine interference; or we
hail the tragedy itself as the divine presence emphasizing itself and announcing its regard for the country's
future. But at any rate the thousand graves grow
green with our heart's spring-feeling, and not a house
in the republic now regrets the blood it furnished.
But when somebody invents the compound called
nitro-glycerine, and commercial greed ships it to a
populous port neglecting the cautiousness that is proclaimed and reiterated by all the freaks of the elements,
we call the result a massacre; the piteousness of it
recoils upon Providence: we forget all the tender texts,
and the next time we go to sea, or take passage by the
rails, we consider that we have taken shares in a great
consolidated lottery, quite aware that our number may
draw a blank.
This, however, we have settled: mankind has suffered enough to settle that there is an invariable effect
to every invariable cause, and that it is better to approximate as fast and far as possible to finding what it
is. But this very tendency has an effect, too, upon
the religious sensibility, to deaden its old-fashioned idea




ï~~A DIVINE PERSON.

157

that there is something personal just the other side of
all phenomena, something that manifests itself but is
distinct from the manifesting, - that does things glad
or grievous, but is not the same things itself, not swallowed up and lost in them, not laws and forces, but a
lawgiver and a fountain of force: an Infinite Will that
wills everything finite, but that does it all the time
with some sort of personal apprehension and feeling,
in a condition of being that corresponds in some way
to our words love, pity, oversight, sympathy, considerateness. We are on the road to discover that God's
most perfect considerateness was shown by him in
the original devising of the laws of the world; but the
knowledge that is showing this drifts in the direction
of emptying all personal feeling out of this original
devising, until the considerateness appears as hard as
a contract which a man takes to clothe and victual an
army, to run a machine to the greatest profit at the
least expense, to govern a school by system and not
by personal character. The heart recoils from this to
such an extent that a great many people, influenced by
reaction against the cold, mechanical theory of the
universe, refuse to know any thing more, do not care
to follow the steps of intelligence, cry out for love and
grasp at the straw of a church, at any thing that will
float them to the old shore where they are sure a
Heavenly Father is waiting to soothe them. When
sorrow thunders at the cliffs and the tide of pathos
steals in to cover all the meadows, they climb into the
highlands of an Infinite bosom; they are sure it will
not reach them there: it laps their feet - it will not
reach their waist: it is waist-deep - but it will not




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AMERICAN RELIGION.

overflow the lips. It does-it fights at the threshold
of the lips with psalms of confidence, and strangles the
last entreaty. What can a church do, or a creed that
is stuffed with the tenderest words in the language?.If there are moments when the Father is only inevitableness, what can religion do for us in this direction?
We attempt to free ourselves from this embarrassment by showing how the facts themselves are all
religious. Knit at the four corners, the order of God
descends, full of all manner of grand and creeping
things, and we wake up to declare that nothing is
common or unclean. We perceive how many evils
are only states of imperfect development that make the
perfect plan more clear: they are gospels that proclaim
the purpose. And all the sciences come to us loaded
with specimens of every sort that fit into a plan; the
gaps fill up so fast and the symmetry grows so evident
that we do not mind the other gaps: the soul rises into
a feeling of confidence, stretches forth its exploring
hand into the darkness and feels a warm hand everywhere. The more it knows the more it confides.
This is the very essence of Religion. That word must
not be used to represent nothing but our longing to
be pitied and comforted. It expresses the consolation
that confidence imparts. Is there any other kind?
You feel as a child does whose parents have called in
the old physician, whose lost cases have never shaken
the confidence that people pay to a perfect intention
and to the highest reach of skill. The suffering child
begins to rally in the happiness of that abject confidence born of the parents' deliberate experience. So
the progress of knowledge recruits Religion. And




ï~~A DIVINE PERSON.

159

from this to a faith in an infinite source of friendship
there is but a step.
The step into that faith is made by human nature
when it perceives that God befriends it through its
friends, of its own flesh and blood. If all other
proofs should fail to restore Personality to the Infinite
Intelligence, this private test of friendship does it: for
we say, If there is something above and distinct from
myself that comes blessing me in the shape of my
friendship, it must be an Infinite Friendliness. No
invariable natural processes are capable of that: they
are impersonal, they have neither praise nor blame,
sympathy nor aversion; the relation between a man
and the order of nature is the same as that between
heat and cookery, an engine and the power that drives
it. It would be just as impossible for caloric to indulge
fraternal warmth as for the inevitable and consistent
force of the world to have a partiality for its victims.
Where, then, do you get your human friend from:
must he not be derived from some primitive element
of friendliness, or is this most precious of all motives
self-generated? Is it merely the fondling among a
herd of brains that prowl and browse in the jungles
of life, or has atomic affinity mustered to our blood
to light these fire-signals upon mutual cheeks, and are
these graspings of hands the ultimate effect of cohesion, this attractiveness nothing but a surplus of the
magnet's spell? We are bold enough to suspect a
divine breath in the sweet clover and new hay; we
delight to pretend that the trees stand straight in a
life beneath, and the wild animals fill the forests with
suggested instincts and not their own. Let us be as




ï~~I60

AMERICAN RELIGION.

generous to our best emotions. Whenever the notion
of fatalism breaks out of the routine of nature, and
gets into the mind to set up there the image of an
indifferent and pantheistic God, the next friend who
does us a favor out of pure love, who opens a vein
and bids us hold a heart that he may drain away into
it, fills the heavens and earth with himself, and invents
friendship for God.
The moral actions that are inspired by love are the
correctives of the materialism which is undoubtedly
nourished by our knowledge of so many laws and
facts. When we put God into every thing, his personality becomes entangled: or when we put every thing
into God, it is a pure mental gesture that embarrasses
his distinctness from the effects that he produces.
Things are infinite, and yet we must contrive some
way of having God infinitely different from his things.
We might swathe him with his universe till he became
a mummy. We might crush out his personality with
the weight of his ornaments. Our conscience has
freedom enough of its own to be convinced that God
must be free also: and that idea includes his personal
distinctness from every thing that he felt free to make.
Our being is in Him: his being is in us-yet he is
One and we are others. It seems to me that Love is a
good solver of this problem, if we fail to find law for
it. Love sometimes threatens to make us more hopelessly pantheistic than ever, as we feel that love makes
us one with each other and one with God. All things
seem swallowed up in unity: landmarks are obliterated; all the fences are taken down, and rights of
property cannot be distinguished. At that very mo



ï~~A DIVINE PERSON.

16I

ment God's Person becomes more distinct than ever:
he is the source from which this unity flows and to
which it loves to return.
Whose idea was it that we should have friends and
lovers, believers in ourselves, protectors of the heart
against the ills of cause and effect, our champions for
better and worse, who stand up for us when God's
consistency appears to be trying to put us down, and so
inspire us with the sense of a higher consistency that
we cannot detect anywhere in nature, whose purpose
is to use us up in a perfectly legal but sometimes very
objectionable fashion? Where does the charity come
from that believeth, hopeth, and endureth all things?
" Do you say that God has abandoned my husband to
his habits? " said a wife to a professional comforter," then it is high time that I should stand up for him
and see him through. I will be God for him, if God
is of your mind." What a taste of a divine Person
who is distinct from the laws of habit! One might
say that God already had advantages enough in the
operations of his natural laws: how various and supreme they are, and how the good counterbalances
the evil! - but in the love of such a lover as that, God
first becomes richer than his universe, and steps out
of its complications into the reserve of Person. In
that reserve there is our supplement of love.
Will you not have a God at least as big as a man or
woman who loves you? Not as fine as your own
finest conception of pity, sympathy, championship,
relationship? The pantheist has inverted the telescope
with which he scours the heavens, and God comes out
at the little end: he becomes a vanishing God, a pigmy




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AMERICAN RELIGION.

in the diminishing perspective. Here is a brave, ample, determined, whole-souled friend standing at your
elbow on his two substantial feet, a man or a woman
who is all aflame for you with human nature, expressly
commissioned to atone for every disaster, and to make
you forget both man and Providence when they are
churlish. And here, through the telescope, is a dot
of a source of friendship, with no personal friendliness
in it!
Perhaps we object that we can have an actual experience of our friend, but we have no similar experience
of the proximity of any divine source of friendship,
and cannot pretend to have, however much we try to
lift ourselves into the mystical rapture of such a union.
That is because we have been taught unnatural ways
of approaching God, by prayers and phrases: a form
of worship, we are told, is the only ladder that will
take us up through the scuttle into the illimitable air.
But we find God by staying in the house that all our
natural gifts have built around us. He comes and
dwells with us in them. And if we would turn to
speak to him it must be through the channels of his
presence. When all our gifts conspire with God we
share an ecstasy of creativeness, compared with which
the raptures of the lean and yellow mystics are the
maunderings of typhus-fever. Try God by way of
your whole nature, and see if this age of intelligence
be not still capable of detecting something divine.
Do at least as much as you do towards your friend:
try a little mutuality.  For no man can have a
friend or lover gratis: he continues for us on the
strength of our own seeking, our own striving, our




ï~~A DIVINE PERSON.

163

faithfulness and sense of needing him. When we
pay out something towards the invisible Friendship,
through the fragrance of blossoming gifts, and not with
the counterfeits of liturgies and violent assertions of
homage, sneaking and importunate teasing for special
providences, we shall find that the principle of mutuality is most perfect, most captivating and soul-sufficing in the direction of the primitive source of all our
human mutualities. Friendship is spontaneous, magnetic, subject to the laws of affinity, no doubt: but in
all affinities there are two parties. Is God the only
party in the universe who is left out of this chance for
an affinity? We shall have an answer to that question when we have recovered from our theological
dyspepsia, and cease to make our bad breath an
offence in his nostrils. Let the whole nature turn
consciously towards Him, so that the sincerity of all
thoughts, passions, and emotions shall remind his
infinite friendship of itself, and earth be heaven's
comrade.
Does any suggestion come out of the infinite like
this? "You have got to like me whether you wish
to or not, for in me you live and move and have
your being. I am, if the personal pronoun may be
used, your great, immanent, pantheistic, No-otherness.
Come- or if coming be too strong a word in a case
where there is no Person to come to, stay, as we are,
together. I am like the juggler's bottle: draw what
tap you please. Call for pity, love, comfort, indignation: it is all the same to my indefinite sameness. Indeed, you must take something."
The cure for this is in the broad and positive living




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AMERICAN RELIGION.

that is carried on by human nature. The old prescription was to seek God by isolated piety; men were
told to lift their souls into personal communion by
some single gift of prayer, of meditation, of remote
abstraction. You might as well prescribe to a man
who is standing in a basket to lift himself by taking
hold of the handles. If the whole soul does not go
forth to its Creator, all the single gifts will lag behind,
and the fancy will be deceived by much straining and
mimicry of aspiration. When a man healthily fulfils
the uses to which God would put him he finds the
object of his worship, for God is coextensive with his
nature. The dancing Dervish spins around himself
to the point of vertigo, then sinks exhausted in a kind
of swoon which passes for assimilation with the
Deity. He comes out of it as light-headed as he went
in; and this is the usual result of isolated gestures
which pretend to unite the finite with the infinite.
Has not God already suggested the terms on which
he will yield himself? They are the nature in men
and women perfectly developed and harmonized by
health. If the whole of a man expresses God, then
nothing short of the whole can find Him.
Wherever a few neighbors live together within the
sound of each other's troubles, they do not need to
overhear each other when invoking the infinite compassion. The invocation is all wasted breath, for the
compassion is already with them in the opportunities
of human friendship. And there is no man so despised, whether justly or not, who is without a friend
who gives him a lift, picks him from the gutter, helps
him to regain his feet from some staggering disap



ï~~A DIVINE PERSON.

165

pointment. Some counsel rallies to some exigency,
some partisan to some defence. All the peopled
places of the earth are provided with this friendly
codperation, which is the most effective kind of divine
intervention, and an answer that never failed to the
outbursts of human anguish. God hears by all the
ears he has provided. And if a man's complaint, in
desert places, upon islands in desolate seas, or on the
famine-stricken raft, does not reach an ear it does not
reach the divine interference. Where there is no
friend the agony exhales in prayers: the sea swallows
it, the whirling sand-columns of the desert overtake
it, and leave bleaching bones to mark the absence of
God's opportunity. All shipwrecks and disasters that
prove fatal, notwithstanding agonized entreaties flung
heavenward, because no human help is near, only
prove the general intent of heaven to manifest its pity
by some friend. A man's distress converts an indifferent neighbor to a brother. Many a wilfiul soul that
has gone far astray, and earned the detestation of
society, becomes at length an embodied prayer, though
only curses may pass the lips; and some innocent
heart acknowledges the eloquent appeal, and, drawing
near to lift up the battered and distorted character,
hears its first religious confession, as it is surprised
into saying, " Oh, then I see God has still some pity
for me!" What promise of a Comforter is equal to
the performance of human compassion!




ï~~VII.

AN AMERICAN ATONEMENT.
IF we reject the ordinary inferences which theology
draws from the doctrine of a divine Person, all of
which can be defined as assumptions that His mode
of operation does not invariably follow the lines of His
own laws, let us see if the country can make any use
of the theory that reconciliation of man with God is
the central act of Religion. It supposes that man has
fallen away from a vital connection with the source
of spiritual health, and that he becomes religious by
reestablishing the relation, for damaging which he
alone is responsible. To give such a theory any reputation, it is necessary to impute feelings to God that
are purely human, and belong to the kitchen furniture
of the individual, - that he is exorable, or willing to
modify his intentions at human entreaty; that he is
placable, also that he is implacable; that he withdraws from people who offend or thwart him, and
returns when the offender relents and abandons his
posture; behaving generally like a human father of not
the most magnanimous and elevated type.
This gross anthropomorphism has been the result
of the mind's taking refuge in texts, whenever it is per



ï~~AN AMERICAN ATONEMENT.

167

plexed at the phenomena of physical and moral evil,
instead of in the information that science furnishes of
an immutable and consistent government of the world.
In this respect, the monotheism of the Old Testament is
far from being homogeneous. Sometimes the Lord has
the passions and caprices of a gigantic man: he repents
having made the other men; he crushes enemies, and
exacts the pound of flesh; he is jealous; he counts the
incense, and marks if its perfume be rare; he is open
to various inducements to condone offences. Sometimes the later page soars above this fetichistic smoke
of sacrificial fat, into the serene space where Cleanthes
sung his hymn to the Supreme. But the Scriptures
never forget to assume that man must be reconciled to
God, while God is reconciled to man by some vicarious project that preserves the self-respect of justice.
But phrases which are suggested by ancient texts
only perpetuate ancient misunderstandings. They are
no better than the abstract terms of philosophers who
try to account for things before science has equipped
their minds. A new country must let these drain
away, together with oligarchic dogmas, through the
great cloaca of the past.
We must find a practical sense in which Religion is
the act or state of man's reconciliation with God, because we are conscious that a variance is set on foot in
the world itself, which is full of things that cry aloud
to be reconciled. Left to themselves, they whimper
not one word of justification. They appear so contradictory to human ideas of help and providence, that
they would be considered impossible, if experience did
not personally report them to us. What is their ori



ï~~I68

AMERICAN RELIGION.

gin, we ask in some dismay, and how can a perfect
intelligence sustain them? When, for instance, we
perceive the fact of the inequality of human conditions,
and how irreconcilable it is with our fraternal ascription of impartiality to God, we say, Is the fault in our
ascription?
In Mr. Thackeray's novel of " The Newcomes,"
there is a scene where the noble but unfortunate hero
of his book sits in the pauper's gallery during divine
service, having come at last to that complexion, notwithstanding a disinterested life; and over his cowering, weather-beaten head rolls the grand assertion of
the liturgy, "I have been young, and now am old, yet
have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed
begging bread." The anthem reverberates against its
own refutation in the gallery, and can hardly retain
countenance in men's minds for its generous assumption that things ought to be, at least, as it declares
they are.
Vulgar opulence fills the street from wall to wall of
the houses, and begrudges all but the gutter to everybody whose sleeve is a little worn at the elbows.
Long careers of vice, that prosper even in their epitaphs, make cemeteries seem ridiculous, and death any
thing but a leveller. Some one ventures to allude to a
compensating hereafter, hinting that Dives will there
change places with Lazarus, to find Cerberus too. disdainful to lick his sores, and Lazarus not eager to overheat himself with running to fetch him water. We
should be surer of this future balancing of the books,
if we could reason from traces of analogy in a number
of cases of such exemplary compensation in the present




ï~~AN AMERICAN ATONEMENT.

I69

life; but if we could, our higher motives would refuse
to accept a justification that merely turned upon shifting the saddle from the beast to the rider. Misery
cannot long exult in opportunities to make other people miserable.  The theologians, who derive their
whole scheme of heaven from the petty spite that
sometimes crows and capers here, derive it from a
feeling that is more irreconcilable with God than all
the misery and all the vice; and it is one of which
mankind is heartily ashamed, though we have heard
of one venerable dame of orthodoxy who said, " Some
folks think that a good many people will be saved, but
we hope for better things." If all hunchbacks could
plant their humps between the shoulders of all their
deriders, the world would have one moment of a resounding Ha-ha! to see accounts so happily squared.
But the next moment would express the pity of a God,
and we should hear every man anxiously reclaiming
his hump, as an evil inferior to the mortification of
seeing it upon another. Flourishing vulgarity is more
unconscious than wicked; a destitute refinement is a
great deal more capable of bearing malice.
But what is vice itself but another mark of inequality of human conditions? One man is born of unhealthy parents, littered in some inclement corner, and
left to forage in the streets. His hunger is appeased
by a kind of diet that propagates the diseases of his
blood. When he is exasperated into committing offences against society, we lock him up; but this is not
a religious act that reconciles him with the moral
order. It only protects the neighborhood while he
nurses his destructive skill, and waits to be restored to




ï~~1 7O

AMERICAN RELIGION.

the opportunities of using it. There are born burglars
who cherish a professional pride, and long to earn the
approbation of distinguished cracksmen; they discuss
in prison their arts, as Cicero in his Tusculan villa
broached questions of divination with his stoic friends.
The congenital peculiarity becomes a fate to arrange
the whole checkered career of detection and impunity.
Who is responsible for this?
If a man is profligate enough to take advantage of
the lightheadedness which sometimes afflicts a starving and forsaken woman, both his profligacy and her
misfortune need to be reconciled with the purity of
God. The Social Evil is a double-headed clamor
against heaven. And we put another tongue into its
accusation, when we make an outcast of the woman,
and a tolerated nuisance of the man.
Not vice alone, but ignorance that is defenceless,
upbraids the divine impartiality. Early in the sixteenth century the continent of Africa was found to be
a prolific hot-bed of beings who wore the full shape
of manhood without its full intelligence; they instantly
piqued the necessities of commerce and labor, which
have ever since spun this helplessness into ties for
holding kingdoms together. The slaver dropped his
anchor off the fringe of that ignorance, and took it on
board as freight: the black heart hunted the black
skin, and infected a whole continent with delayed justice. No other tribes of men could have remained
abject long enough to force such retributions from
heaven. Did God construct this peculiar type of ignorance in order to extort at last peculiar vengeance; to
tempt sagacious cupidity, so that three centuries of




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171

oppression might be signalized by the miseries of the
weak and the degradations of the strong? When this
asks to be reconciled with our feeling of the divine
paternity, religion is frustrated by its own texts.
" Like as a father pitieth his children" sounds ironically, and "God hath made of one blood all men"
becomes degraded into a fact of physiology. " Come
unto me all ye that labor and are heavy-laden," on the
lips of priests in St. Domingo, and of bishops in Virginia, has had a queer touch of the auction-block in it,
as of a highest bidder collecting together the women
and children who have been knocked down to him.
Religion must perceive that its finest texts have only
furnished sedatives to mankind, which has come out
of each narcotic drowse to find its trouble aggravated.
Not to multiply the instances which make history
appear to be only a late afterthought and rectification
of divine justice, in its struggle to repair deficiencies
in the practical effect of nature and circumstance, it
is safe to say that the whole structure of society is an
indictment which religion must quash, or be put into
the bar to be judged by a moral sense that is superior to the evils which it has accused.
Religion has undertaken to reply by methods that
have only given emphasis to ignorance. Its explanations have been additional evils. Upon a man whose
blood is poisoned it has only conferred the sad consistency of showing that he could not help his vice, or
could not help incurring it. For if men have spoiled
themselves by their own fault, theology cannot make
it clear that they could have helped it, because a part
of the fault may be justly referred to the constitution




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AMERICAN RELIGION.

which gave men a fatal tendency towards spoiling
themselves. It is useless to struggle, by forms of
speech and elaborate systems of doctrine, against that
supposed error in the divine plan, by which men,
through ignorance and passion, have made free to
degrade themselves, and by doing this to force God to
resort to schemes of reconstruction and atonement.
What reply can theology make to the natural protest of mankind against the evils which have infested
it since men drew breath? No legends of the fall of
man by an act of his free will can satisfy man's instinct that. reconciliation with God means something
different from undoing God's own work and substituting for it a scheme of salvation. God undertakes a
piece of work that does not need undoing. He does
not spin a web by day, which, like Penelope, he must
unravel by night, to postpone the loss of his sovereignty.
If we try to think well of God by thinking ill of the
men he has made, we are irreligious. What is there
in the whole expanse of the universe that can compare with the different tribes and people he has made,
who, naturally enough, prefer light to darkness, tend
to rejoice in the warmth of the sun and the inbreathing of oxygen that repairs their blood as fast as it
deteriorates? This is a symbol of the atmosphere
their souls inhale. If it is still worth while to keep
the word Religion in the human family, to represent
a tendency that was strong enough to ennoble the past
in spite of its unnatural doctrines, and is the hope of
a wiser future, we must show that there is a better
way of binding men to God than by assuming that
they are not fit for it by nature. We tie them neck




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I73

and heels with the strands of that doctrinal fiction, and
then fasten them into a pew to listen to a service that
is only an apology for God's defects.
The theology that posits enmity between man and
God, no matter by whose fault, must assume that God
cannot be content until his sovereignty is acknowledged. He has been offended, he demands reparation;
his sense of justice cannot tolerate the wrongs he has
suffered at the hands of men. But as mankind itself
is not large enough to satisfy the claim of an infinite
justice, infinity itself must be the liquidation of its
own debt. In other words, reduced to plain absurdity,
God himself atones for the injuries which he has
received. He does not remit or condone them, still
less pass them over, but he is entangled in the awkwardness of paying a just bill which he knew could
not be paid when he brought it in: in fact, only
brought it in for the superfluous object of paying it
himself. William Blake said of the Atonement: " It
is a horrible doctrine: if another man pay your debt,
I do not forgive it."
Theology of the atoning kind is derived from a misinterpretation of the sacrificial history of the race.
As a victim has always bled to expiate or to propitiate,
the theologian concludes that a yearning forecast of
mankind quenches its thirst at length in the blood
of a Redeemer, to whose veins the whole logic of creation has been gathering, from its barest and most
distant members, till a divine heart lends it a pulse
of explanation and atonement. Then every offering
and victim that has testified to a human desire for
reconciliation becomes justified, but at the same time




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AMERICAN RELIGION.

superseded, by the Victor-Victim, and the course of
sacrifice is complete. In this way, a history, that is
really a succession of human escapes from the fetichistic idea that substitutes of all sorts can pay man's
debts and keep the invisible appeased, is interpreted
to be a succession of human anticipations of a genuine sacrifice that grow more and more emphatic, till
the time is ripe and the victim full grown. Just when
the "Lamb of God" became a harmless figure of
speech, in texts whose mediatorial rhetoric had no
idea of spilling blood, it was exaggerated into an
infinite fact and slaughtered, so far as phrases and
councils could do it, for a mankind that had outgrown
the need of it. And nothing is left of the ancient sacrificial error but the vague subjective sentiment which
is created by these phrases. Man is discovering his
own structural, personal, and immediate connection
with the infinite, and learns fast that the laws of his
own nature must take away his sins. If they do not,
then nothing else, though slain from the foundations
of the world, can accomplish it.
The notion that a primitive custom must indicate a
natural necessity, because it has been gradually developed and refined, might as well legitimate other obsolete manners of the human race. All old customs are
not the tide-guages of real latent tendencies that creep
towards their height; many of them are rather the
obstructions of an early coast-line, which the tide
would fain desert and overflow, as it extricates itself
and mounts to clearness. Thus the tendency to account for the world, to rationalize its phenomena, and
to reach a deduction of the relation between the creat



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175

ure and creator, carried barbarism on its bosom for
ages, and has not even now thrown off the perilous
stuff. We value the customs as marks of a mental
struggle, not as signs of intimate spiritual correlation.
As soon might we advocate some gymnastic method
of stealing our wives, by making matrimonial raids
on the next town and taking them from unwary relatives, because savages procured women by dragging
them off by the hair, amid the resistance of an outraged clan. It might be confirming to discover highly
evangelical traces of this primitive revelation among
people who still provoke a pitched battle to get women
away from their tribe or family. We might pursue the
gradual amelioration of this practice, through scenes
of mock combat, running-matches, bloodless surprises,
feigned reluctance of the women, symbolic substitutes,
till nothing is left of the aboriginal skirmish but an
old shoe to be tossed after the departing bride. " That,
indeed, is going too far," orthodoxy might say: " that
is the way liberalism has treated the Atonement by
running the serviceable truth down at the heel, and
then expending with immense demonstration of genuine sacrifice what is not worth being kept. But see,
in this matter of marriage, how development itself
justifies some recourse to violence. We have reached
an Altar-form of sacrifice, let us have the halter style
of wooing. By returning to the divine theory of rayishment, let us suppress altogether this increasing
infidelity of Christless people, who would win the
love of a whole family in order to win their too willing wives."
The old tendency to forcible marriage involves a




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necessity of human nature as much as the old dogmatic
forms of sacrifice.
In the famous letter which Pliny wrote to Trajan,
that describes his dealings with the Christians in Bythynia, he mentions that the superstition is widely
spread, but that he can report some improvement,
and says, "Victims are again on sale, purchasers having been very difficult to find." No doubt the early
Christians found it more economical, as well as Scriptural, to substitute Christ for the sacrifices of the
temple-services. For though the idea of an Atonement did not assume a dogmatic form till long after,
it was gathered from the apostolic epistles, and taken
for granted by the popular Christian feeling. So the
old pagan notion survived in this form, to be transferred to modern Europe. Purchasers have never
been difficult to find   all people who relish the idea
of offering up somebody, other than themselves, to
satisfy the infinite justice, will subscribe to the ecclesiastical system that preserves this reminiscence of
heathendom.
We must not, however, forget to notice that modern
atoning schemes resort to justifying themselves to
human nature, by appearing to reintroduce the divine
Love into a system impaired by sin, like air into an
ill-ventilated house. But the Love already pervades
all professions, arts, and labors, and is the ideal
against which the imperfections declare themselves
and appeal for remedy. The densest body has pores
which invite its ingress. If a man calls at my door
with a patent portable case of atmosphere, I have
only to open the window to bid him pack, to dis



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'77

cover and   inhale the blessing he pretended to
bring.
To be a finite being is no crime, and to be the
Infinite is not to be a creditor. As man was not consulted, he does not find himself a party in a bargain,
but a child in the household of Love. Reconciliation,
therefore, is not the consequence of paying a debt, or
procuring atonement for an injury, but an organic
process of the human life.
Man begins to be reconciled with God when he
learns the laws of things and accommodates himself
to them. Take a few simple cases for illustration.
A person finds it utterly irreconcilable with his idea
of a God that he should have inherited some vicious
propensity. Another person finds it equally irreconcilable that his structure leaves him able to originate a
vice, and transmit it to his children. But as soon as
these people feel so, their reconciliation with God has
begun: they have an ideal which makes them conscious of the discrepancy, and sets them to work to
reduce it, by using that law of their nature which expresses the full purpose of God. It is the same law
of the divine nature that subsidizes universal evil to
justify its mode of operation, in furtherance of a creating plan. Whether these persons succeed or not in
this redemption, does not affect the fact that they are
religious only when they substitute this method of
obedience to their own law for any verbal statements
or beliefs in schemes. They bind themselves to God
by a natural tie of likeness to Him; remorse is the
natural pain at the discovery that the tie is threatened
or enfeebled, spiritual joy is the natural mood of a
8*




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AMERICAN RELIGION.

return to harmony. The tendency feels contented
when it is gratified.
A person finds it irreconcilable with his instinct
concerning God, that he should have been born in
ignorance and wretchedness, a prey to poverty, the
victim of cunning or tyranny. Perhaps he is so little
able to help himself that his only spiritual life is resignation. He is doomed to that when he feels secretly
entitled to the satisfaction of all his human wants.
These compose his natural law. And they are claims
of his vested in more fortunate individuals, who are
thus instinctively brought to his side. Reconciliation
with God begins through the religious action of these
persons who perceive what is the natural law of every
human being. The true mediatorial scheme is the
interference of practical sympathy, which appears in
charitable, social and political influence. Thus his
own law is liberated, and he too can begin religion
by applying this ready-made element of reconciliation
to other souls.
The laws of things are the material of the right
thinking in which religion has its root. Right living
is derived from them alone. A part of this right
thinking consists of the active moral tendency that
emphasizes the health, sanity, and righteousness that
is in all things. What a reconciler of man with God
is Social Science, and what an atoner for every original taint! It directly attacks the evils which prevent
mankind from becoming truly religious, and proclaims
the right theology - that bad living of all kinds nourishes this hypochondria of a feud between earth and
heaven. Beginning at the very root, it shows that




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I79

imperfect ventilation is symbolical of all the rest of
the irreligiousness that keeps mankind disconsolate
by making so much corrupted blood. Whatever disturbs the proper aeration of the contents of the lungs
puts men in training for any kind of craze. For
poisoned blood infects the brain with poisoned thought
and feeling. Bad air, bad food, bad drink, alters the
blood-disks, and suborns for villainy the finest structures. Therefore Social Science begins a true vicarious mission by the expressive and beautiful action of
cutting windows in dead walls, to let the sky fall
through into Stygian apartments; of establishing
draughts that carry off noxious vapors and admit the
close pursuing air, well cooked by the sun's actinic ray.
Then its ban is put upon bad meats and unwholesome
tricks in the preparation of food. Thirty miles of tubing in the skin are cleared out, and the sewerage of the
human system established, so that every internal organ
sheds baseness by insensible transpiration. Light, air,
and water, that undoctrinal Trinity, threefold Unity
that makes and sustains the world, casts out from the
brains of its children their legion of devils: the very
swine flourish by cleanness enough to refuse to let
them enter. There is nothing with a love of impurity
so ingrained as to take them in. So that men and
women are seen glorifying God by sitting clothed and
in their right mind. What recorded triviality of miracle can match the vast power of this simple spell of
natural religion!
Reconciliation is the assumption or recovery by all
organs and tendencies of their proper action. What
a religious ecstasy is health! Its free step claims every




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AMERICAN RELIGION.

meadow that is glad with flowers; its bubbling spirits
fill the cup of wide horizons and drip down their
brims; its thankfulness is the prayer that takes possession of the sun by day, and the stars by night.
Every dancing member of the body whirls off the
soul to tread the measures of great feelings, and God
hears people saying, " How precious also are thy
thoughts, how great is the sum of them; when I
awake I am    still with thee."  Yes, - " when I
awake," but not before: not while the brain is saturated with venous blood, till it falls into comatose
doctrines and goes maundering with its attack of
mediatorial piety and grace; not while a stomach, depraved by fried food, apothecary's drugs, and ironclad pastry (that target impenetrable by digestion),
supplies the constitution with its vale of tears, ruin of
mankind, and better luck hereafter. When all my
veins flow unobstructed, and lift to the level of my
eyes the daily gladness that finds a gate at every pore;
when the roaming gifts come home from Nature to
turn the brain into a hive of cells full of yellow sunshine, the spoil of all the chalices of the earth beneath
and the heavens above, - then I am the subject of a
Revival of Religion: she wakes the brooding thought
to observe that the whole man, from the crown of the
head to the sole of the feet, and all the tender, bitter,
glorious things that transpire within that compass,
are reconciled to God.
Let the ideal impulse, which clothes itself in the
forms of art, rejoice to have left behind whole galleries
of pictures, which age is blackening for their libels
upon the divine nature. Mankind will be fortunate




ï~~AN AMERICAN ATONEMENT.

if Calvinistic gloom, and the " agohy of impotence"
of the Catholic ascetic, have fallen out of the moral
sense by the time those painted outrages have rotted
from their frames. What can a robust country do
with those hospital silhouettes of saints, save perhaps
to preserve them for warnings in museums of morbid
anatomy, as lusus nature, whose malformation is a
halo?
The country itself is a Consolator, colored too heartily for the thin-blooded palette of Scheffer, whose
central figure seems to say to the miserable groups:
" I'm sorry for you, but you see how melancholy I
look, and that must be your comfort." Liberty shores
up the bruised reed, binds up the broken hearts, and
summons every oppressed spirit into the natural deliverance of health, usefulness, and glad codperation.
On the freshly-stretched canvas of American landscapes plenty of Ecce Homos breathe and live, who
hide their wounds lest they fill the eyes of beholders
with a mediaeval pity, and blur the strong lines that
the muscles wrested from daylight and expectation.
The heads droop with the weight of smiles gathered
from new-mown fields.
And though Dantes are scarce, there are plenty of
Beatrices who draw manhood up to substantial paradises without flattening their womanhood into the lacklustre sanctity of the painter; such a Beatrice as he
has drawn would make us first ashamed of Dante,
that such a sexless tenuity could hold his paradise suspended. The fine art of healthy living must furnish
well-grown subjects to the Muses of America.
A great deal of anxious thought is given to the diffi



ï~~AMERICAN RELIGION.

cult problem of the Social Evil, which drains religion
out of men and women by the way of their life-blood,
and leaves them flaccid and corrupted. How can it be
reconciled with that artless intention of Nature's procreative force, which, as it reaches personality in the
reserve of woman, suggests the divine purity? The
question is no sooner asked than Social Science,
leaving to the police the pastime of arresting female
street-haunters and letting their male danglers go free,
undertakes the business of a real reconciliation, by advocating conditions that will make woman the mistress
of an honorable and unassailable position. When
she gains that, by finding avenues of labor open to her
that are now choked by men, so that she can show
she is deserving of a man's wages for doing a man's
work, as she already does in many a school-house
and counting-room, she will become the mistress
of her person. Her natural law revolts at her own
degradation, and agonizes to be reconciled with God.
What can she do for herself? Stand out of the way,
and let her see. Let every door aswing: she will approach it, look in, and enter if she sees that the work
inside corresponds to her temperament. And when
she does things so well, that men will cease saying
they are pretty well done for a woman, let her have
every cent that her work legitimately brings. If
woman undertakes to paint, to draw, to model, to write
verses, let her not enter the market of complaisance
with inferior articles and expect to draw pay on the
strength of her sex. But when she equals man in whatever trades are appropriate to her genius, - behind
all counters, in all counting-rooms, at the desk of the




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calculator or the writer, in the school-room and professor's chair, - let her draw, cent for cent with man,
the wages that reconcile them both with God. See
these spruce men monopolizing industries that her
nice tact and delicate taste could fill, at least, as well.
Stand aside; go into fields that are enriched by muscular and virile vigor; vacate those places: the honor
and self-respect of woman wait to fill them. Society
has fallen sick with the struggles and agonies of the
unemployed. Marriage itself is polluted by the exigency. Poverty must make a match, or make an
assignation, or make some bargain scandalous to the
man who drives it. More shillings conceded to the
making of a shirt would double the religion of mankind.
Political science also undertakes the task of reconciliation when it recurs to the natural law of mankind,
as the foundation for its organizing skill, to secure
every man's title to life, liberty, and happiness. It is
a favorite saying of some critics of our country, that
they would vastly prefer to be ruled by one man than
by a million; and that a man preserves his self-respect
better when he lets himself be used by one great intellect, than when he is tyrannized over by a vulgar,
passionate and unreflective popular opinion. This is
the sentiment that prolongs the vulgar vices of the
people. Wherever this creed of an oligarchy flourishes, the common people do not rise out of their
degradation; they will be " mean whites," "poor
trash," servile in peace, truculent in war. Put any
weapon in their hand but intelligence, and they will
parody the pride of their owners, and scrawl it in




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blood. Their limited ideas are the reverse of the
coin which is stamped with the limited sympathy of
their rulers. Read one side, and you need not turn it
to know what is written on the other. Mean, cramped,
superstitious, lazy, stolid minds exist side by side with
fine, fastidious, secluded, selfish intellects.  Like
master, like man; in one the narrowness borrows the
traits of culture, in the other it is stamped by the
barbarism which this culture maintains for its sole
neighborhood. There's a whole wood-full of spindling and awkward sticks to one big and shapely tree:
they protect it from the weather by their extent of
abortiveness. But a handsome wood for shade and
timber is the one where all the trees range pretty
evenly, and are banded together in mutual and permanent conspiracy against the storm.
But the doctrine that all men are equal may easily
be misunderstood to mean that no men are superior,
or that if they are it must be in consequence of some
fraud upon the whole. The equal right to enjoy an
opportunity is not derived from, or authorized by, an
identity of mental and ethical proficiency, any more
than the chance to be healthy results from a perfect
sanitary condition of all. When such an error infects
the minds of men who crave some share in the opportunities of their fellows, it postpones their own cause
by mixing with it crude and passionate schemes of
social promotion, unscientific theories upon the relation between capital and labor, and jealous dread of
the successes of talent. The markets of the world are
not controlled by equality, but by difference; and in
the whole range of differences a sense of justice is




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185

found in union with the mental superiority that is
essential to provide for men their opportunities. They
will inevitably enjoy more than their own attainment
can represent, provided they do not make their lack
of attainment a claim to something besides justice: to
encroachment, for instance, upon just superiority.
Wherever a theory of technical equality prevails, the
poor and miserable men become the victims of minds
which have neither nobility nor superiority; mere
knacks they are, that avail themselves of the theory
that spawns them.
If all men's proficiencies were absolutely equal, all
opportunities would disappear. All men would be
impartially cursed by the monotony of being facsimiles of each other. Motion and life cannot begin
till the mass settles into differing parts; then Nature
selects her moment and makes her first gesture. Thus
the nebula resolved itself into planets of varying bulk
and movement, to bestow a choiring coherence on the
sky. So men would be to-day a herd of mammoths
if their structure had not involved the first benefit of
inequality. When that pledges itself to generalize
all opportunities, the benefit is prolonged and refined;
the more brutal distinctions begin to disappear, and
no passion but that of emulation is fomented.
Natural inequalities, which occur through varieties of cerebral structure and chances for culture,
appeal to the Republic for a reconciling principle that
shall preserve a sense of divine love and justice, and
mediate between fatality of birth and the native title
to all opportunities. The country is the atoning incarnation that steps in between God and man, lifts all




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AMERICAN RELIGION.

maimed lives into consideration, and assumes their
liabilities. Its principle is this: the small and mean
men are valuable, and that is their relation to God.
Every man has by birth some function, place, and
service, and must have some opportunity. All the
persons are the country: the land is nothing except
for the persons to stand on while they are country;
the institutions are nothing but personal conveniences;
rails and telegraphs, states, governments, trades and
industries are only expressions of the personal consciousness. When you say, " all the persons, without
distinction of sex or color, are the country," you endow it with all the intelligence, and surrender to it the
only advantage it can ever have over all the ignorance.
You liberate all the latent superiority, and give it control over all the barbarous and all the refined inferiority. Either one or the other is a real evil until all
the persons are let loose to put it down. Three
hundred thousand highly intelligent and well-dressed
egotists will plunge a country into the vast embarrassments of blood and debt: thirty million ordinary
people will drag her out again. There is enough manhood and honesty permeating the mass to neutralize
its own follies. Cut down the mass by millions, in
order to cull the number that seem to you capable of
exercising the function of governing, and the follies
grow rampant that would be checked and counterbalanced by all the sense of all the persons. There
must be great masses of people for yielding the preponderance of moral feeling that you require in every
critical moment. Who are the best persons? The
best feeling is the best. You cannot select your per



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187

sons; but take them all, and nature will save you the
trouble of selection. Not a drop of perfume will you
get out of a thousand, or ten thousand rose-leaves.
Boil them down by acres, and the subtle diffusion is
distilled.
The Swiss city of Basle is connected with the opposite shore by a bridge that is famous as the scene of
mediaval encounters; they were animated by the
excessive mutual hatred of the people who lived at
either end of it. On the Basle side there stands a
tower upon which a huge face, with a tongue lolling
out, still reminds us of the standing contempt of the
inhabitants for their opposite neighbors. Color and
dialect, manners and customs, are the bridges whose
either end is pertinaciously fought for. They have
kept us apart when they might just as well be used
for bonds of union, since all feet travel in the same
way, although the faces look as if they were loath to
follow. These physical peculiarities of an original
diversity, or of varieties which have sprung up in the
struggles of races for existence, mask a deeper uniformity of the blood, which represents the universality
of the moral sense. Mental differences, also, there
are, which seem to have put forth these physical signs
in correspondence; and manners partake of the discrimination. But the moral sense is permanently the
same; and, as it binds all men together, it reconciles
all men to God. You cannot point to a vital difference between the conscience of the East and West.
Cunning and falseness can be found everywhere, but
also a prevailing sense of right and wrong. Men are
constantly breaking the golden rule, but the rule is an




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AMERICAN RELIGION.

original property of every race, and its infractions are
judged by its own cogency, in the same style, everywhere. Men vary in their habits of taking advantage
of each other, but they agree that advantages should
not be taken. Nations may be distinguished for the
prevalence of some vice or two, but they are all alike
in a general sense of what is vicious; and the best
spirits in all countries disclaim the evils and recommend the virtues of human nature.
How mischievous it will be if people continue to
allow their antipathies to influence their politics, especially when the whole world sends to us its representative complexions, as we stand midway between
the West of Europe and the East of Asia, like powerful youth, towards whose shoulders the father and the
mother stretch forth a hand. This gathering of manifold forces to stock a new cradle of mankind is determined by the instinct of humanity to be born again,
that it may at length enjoy its inalienable rights;
and every stranger contributes mental difference, but
spiritual identity. Which is the larger and more disinterested function of his nature, which the more regenerative, which yields the diviner element towards a
reconstruction of society? The conscience which accompanies this irresistible exodus towards a promised
land. Will conscience swamp the country? No: but
smartness will, and the brutality of mature exclusiveness. We ought to welcome all these illiterate and
unfashionable children, who cannot help bringing the
raw material of moral sense to repair our waste of it
at every pore.
The art of living is the art of bringing into use all




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189

the moral sense there is. And this requires a co6peration of all sexes and conditions, to set free unexpected
advantages. For the opportunity which Religion
seeks is simply a soul; when she has found one, its
emancipation from  ignorance and mean neighborhoods begins. The soul need not be gifted; can you
add a perfume to the violet of conscience?  Religion stoops to find the humility that makes her magnificent. All that she asks is, that some modest soul
shall be suffering for the touch of her hand, which
decomposes poverty and liberates it into great expansion of force and brightness. Take clear water, enough
to balance a single grain of weight, and notice how insipid and colorless it is, and not to be suspected of any
pretension to be an agent. But Professor Faraday lays
upon it the hand of decomposition, and forth leaps an
electrical force which he estimated at eight hundred
thousand discharges of his large Leyden battery. And
he declared that the chemical action of a single grain
of water on four grains of zinc would yield electricity
equal in quantity to a powerful thunder-storm. God's
will, that melts or shatters, is imprisoned in small
bulks. How it thunders and lightens when a moral
Yea leaps from a million nobodies into the reconciling
equilibrium of God!
The economies that are still hidden in the refuseheaps of civilization are destined to reenforce Religion.
Use and beauty are waiting to be raked out of the
rubbish to serve her turn. The London scavengers
remove the ash-heaps from all the houses of the metropolis. In them are waste pieces of coal, and the
"breeze," or coal-dust, and half-burnt ashes. After




ï~~I90

AMERICAN RELIGION.

selling the larger pieces of coal to the poor, the refuse
"breeze" is enough to bake all the bricks that are
used in rebuilding the city. What object is there
without a law of its own, waiting to be put to its appropriate use? In building the city of God, Religion
is not deceived by appearances. Give her just a soul,
and she is not too proud to utilize what God was
proud enough to make.
If it were not dangerous to use old phraseology,
which the sects have worn to rags and infected with
their whims, there is reason why we should say, " God
was in Christ reconciling man unto himself," because
he was one of God's natural opportunities, and all of
them are called to the work of redemption. Every
good thing liberates; it may be without comeliness,
despised and rejected, and its visage marred, but
Religion can derive firom it comfort and perpetuity.
We have this ministry of reconciliation. It is not
confided to a class, but is held in trust by all right
thinking and living. It enlists the whole of our intelligence, uses all the tools of science and civilization,
and when it restores virtue to our bodies is certain that
it will redeem our souls.




ï~~VIII.

FALSE AND TRUE PRAYING.
THERE can be no argument drawn from Scripture, if the purpose be to find whether praying
has any intrinsic authority in human nature; for
Scripture represents prayer as directed towards the
most heterogeneous objects, and has a bias towards
supposing all of them secured. Books and traditions
may record the ancient methods, but they neither impair nor explain the instinct which tends to personal
expressiveness towards divine powers. If we undertook to account for all the texts that put implicit confidence in praying, we should be involved in a dreary
exegesis, when we might make it all superfluous by
showing, and putting a strong accent upon, the pith
of the question. The pith always lies in the law: it
attracts, like amber, all light and groundless customs,
which cling to something that is essentially different
from themselves. It is a pity that man values them
because he sees that they are attracted; they are the
accidents of neighborhood, the fluff and feathers which
eddy about in the air of every age, shaken out of crude
intelligence, and drawn into the whirl of real forces.
They must be picked off and swept away. But they




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AMERICAN RELIGION.

are so strongly attracted, that perhaps what is their
pertinacity may appear to be rudeness in the hand that
ventures to detach them.
The prince, in the fairy tale, went hunting, and the
holla of the chase brought him out upon a mountainspur, whence he saw the growth of a hundred years
that hid and imprisoned the castle where Beauty slept.
His instinct shouldered a path through the matted undergrowth, till he penetrated into the court-yard where
all forms of life stood arrested in the acts of a century
ago. Through cobwebbed vestibules, sprawling scullions, frozen men-at-arms, slim serving-maids in mid
coquetry, and roysterers petrified in the moment of
their spurious inspiration, his quivering heart guided
him to the one breathing centre that gathered all this
motley life around it; the only pulse that was not
menial. Time-honored postures and venerable sleep
hardly raised his curiosity. Perhaps they suffered
from his disdain. But some things may be pardoned
to a man who cannot wait to be properly announced
by an obsolete chamberlain, on the threshold of the
kiss that rallies Beauty to his arms. All the hangerson rouse also, but go about their business. She only
is the law of all the scene.
Dr. Hooker, in his Himalayan Journals, describes
the praying-mill, used by the inhabitants of Thibet, as
a leathern cylinder placed upright in a frame; a projecting piece of iron strikes a little bell at each one of
the revolutions, which are caused by an elbowed axle
and a string. The written prayers are placed within




ï~~FALSE AND TRUE PRAYING.

193

the cylinder, and whoever pulls the string repeats his
prayers as often as the bell rings. There is also a
kind that is made to be turned by water; on the cylinder the words, " Om Mani Padmi Om,"- Hail to Him
of the Lotus and Jewel - are painted, and a spindle,
which terminates in a wheel, keeps these revolving.
When we consider how laborious is most of the public
praying in all countries, this is the greatest labor-saving
machine ever invented. And Baron Schilling must be
regarded as one of the principal benefactors of the
human race, for he presented the Mongol Llamaites in
China with two hundred and fifty million impressions
of this prayer.* He had it set up so as to go five
thousand times upon a large sheet, and sent them fifty
thousand copies of that sheet. One may calculate that
if a machine can be made to revolve five hundred
times in a minute with one of these sheets inside, the
effect is the same as if two and a half millions of
tongues pronounced the prayer; quite the same.
There is, indeed, in a private museum at St. Petersburg, a little ball, which is attested by a long document in the Thibetan language to have been produced
out of nothing by prayer that was kept up for forty
days. These balls, so originated, of course are rare;
but the Llamaites believe that, once procured, they can
propagate of themselves. However that may be, the
little precatory cylinder is a great convenience, for the
natives keep them spinning in their laps while they sit
and converse together. According to the doctrine of
the Mussulman it is the salvation of the world, for they

* J. G. Kohl's Russia, p. 91. Am. Ed.
9




ï~~194

AMERICAN RELIGION.

believe that if a moment should occur during which
the name of Allah was nowhere offered up, it would
be a chance for chaos. The Greeks and Russians have
a method that must be more trying to the individual:
it is that of saying Goshodi omilui twelve times in a
breath, - literally, then, without inspiration.
We smile at these attempts of the finite mind to
catch the infinite in a mill and extort the daily grist.
Perhaps we subscribe to missionary funds for opening
the slant eyes of Mongols and Tartars to the unsubstantial nature of machine-praying. But when the
worthy clergyman, in the course of his routine on Sunday morning, said, " 0 Lord, thou knowest not half
the wickedness there is in this place," and another, no
less worthy, and a model of learning and grace, ground
out a petition that the Lord would make " all the intemperate temperate, and all the industrious dustrious," we perceive that the string finds some adit
through the Himalayan range, and dangles here.
Baron Schilling's stereotyped contrivance cannot yield
a greater number of phrases; and Daniel Webster's
drum-beat of England, which follows the morning sun
around the world, is paralleled in continuous sonority
and emptiness one morning, at least, of every week.
For the public prayers of the civilized are watered
with phraseology which comes dripping from the well
of memory, and which, by this time, we should think
might be learned above by rote, if the invisible has
ears that tolerate. Do we not know the style of every
meeting-house, and the different contrivances to so
conclude a prayer as to splice it with the shore-end of
the invisible? A friend of mine, who was much puz



ï~~FALSE AND TRUE PRAYING.

195

zled to account for the genesis of a stocking, surmised,
at length, that the women must imagine the first round,
and then knit on to that. Is it improper to suggest
that more than one imaginary round of ascription fails
to start any thing that can weave the comfort of heaven
for the soul?
But our false praying is not limited to these tricks
of pulpit iteration, repeated from books, or dropped
into the mosaic of extemporaneous discourse; nor to
those parade-prayers which open festivals and townmeetings, and sometimes from the court-house bench
supplicate that the judge's decisions may be overruled
for good. But the whole modern theory of prayer is
vitiated by various suppositions, that heaven needs to
be informed upon our domestic and public matters,
that a natural law may be modified or suspended at
human entreaty, that certain gifts may be had for the
asking and not for the practising, that our whole vital
economy can let on the invisible as by the turning of
a faucet. The most mischievous of these suppositions
is the one that the laws of nature are not irreversible,
but lie open to irruptions of ardent longing, so that the
divine mind may be influenced to reconsider itself at
the importunity of its creatures. The notion of Pastor
Muiller, who founded the Rauhe Haus at Hamburg,
was that, whenever the funds for this undertaking fell
short, he could always induce heaven to impress some
person, unknown to him, to send the requisite amount.
If we had no alternative we might accept his conviction as the genuine interpretation of the fact that
money never failed him in the direst emergencies.
But as his project became known, its piety was a




ï~~196

AMERICAN RELIGION.

spontaneous and unspoken prayer to all like-minded
souls, and their instinct did not need the urgency of
heaven. It was already heavenly, and flowed towards
heaven's charity by that law of fraternal intercourse
which heaven seems to have framed especially to save
its time, and prevent incessant errand-going. Noble
people are God's labor-saving devices: they are responses to prayers before they are offered. They know
what we have need of before we ask them.
There are establishments in Germany for curing
disease by prayer, just as in Greece there used to be
temples of AEsculapius where the priests professed to
cure diseases by dreaming. The temples were built
in the midst of beautiful scenery, in spots where every
advantage of pure air and running water existed; and
the patient, removed from all annoyances, confined to
strict habits of diet and exercise, attributed his cure
to the regimen which might be hinted in his dreams.
The dreaming was a regular business, imposed with
religious observance, and it is not wonderful that the
patient had, during sleep, suggestions made from his
physical condition through a brain that expected and
put faith in them. Nature was not jealous when the
waking man referred her sanative influences to some
alterant that he dreamed would do him good. His
instinct was indeed a part of her process; and many
a lucky dream enriched the medical science of antiquity.
The Protestant Pastor Blumhardt is at the head of
an establishment at Boll Bad, in the Black Forest,
where he undertakes to cure disease by prayer. It is
a cheerful place, where patients who have no organic




ï~~FALSE AND TRUE PRAYING.

197

diseases, but are only in delicate health, get pure air
and good food, lead a natural life in the midst of quiet
and simple habits, with plenty of exercise, some Rhine
wine, and the Pastor's praying. He attributes their
improvement only to the praying, but admits that it
has no effect in surgical cases. The thread of his address to heaven cannot tie an artery, nor will its
stringency brace up the sagging aneurism. But the
patients enjoy, with all the advantages of nature, the
rare good fortune that the Pastor's praying consumes
the time that he might otherwise devote to doctoring,
so that his supplications are the only drug.
So Dorothea Trudel founded a praying establishment
for invalids in the village of Miinnedorf, on the left bank
of Lake Zurich, because St. James said the prayer of
faith should save the sick. She was greatly persecuted
by the doctors, who clung to their faith in those amulets called prescriptions, and preferred to send the
patient himself into the invisible rather than pretend
that it might intervene. But her establishment has
acquired great fame, for the reason that her patients,
drawn largely from the class of persons afflicted with
mental disorders, find every soothing and restoring influence of nature and good sense. The secret of both
systems is in the decisive chances secured to Nature
to knit up the sleave of care, which a restless or dissipated life had ravelled. If music could be substituted
for the praying, a true function of heaven would assist
in every case: for David's harp-strings vibrated with
intercession, and wove a law of God around the tumult of the kingly heart.
There is a multitude of disorders in which the




ï~~19S

AMERICAN RELIGION.

nerves seem shredded into fine torments, or the relation
and balance of the different brain-cells is dislocated,
ideas that should naturally cohere are torn apart, till
moodiness and mania are fed by every ascending drop
of blood. Nature's hospital has been already founded
for these by the divine sanity which anticipates the
prayers extorted by our sufferings. Her retreats are
full of simple remedies: as when the first step
towards"the restoration of an insane person has been
made by interesting him in an employment that seizes
the attention and leads to fresh codrdination of his
thoughts, - when, for instance, one who is violent and
impracticable sees people fishing and takes a fancy
to the task. He engages in it, becomes amused by
the action, begins to mingle harmlessly with his fellows, because God's law of continuity restores the
native associations of the mind.
Whenever it is observed that the outpourings of
tender minds, which have been attracted to the side of
sorrow and debility, can soothe and uplift the soul,
and divide, as lusty swimmers do, the tumult, the
error is apt to be made that this is because God is
exorable. But it is man who is exorable, and the
prayers play like the voices of instruments upon his
suffering. The comrade hastens to his side when he
sees him fall, puts the canteen to the white lips,
moves the struck form beneath the shade of trees, and
conjures up the expectation that the wound is not too
deep; but, if it be too deep, all the regimental chaplains cannot make it shallow. The divided artery
ebbs as their prayers flow; heaven cannot use them for
tourniquet: perhaps it counts every drop of the heroic




ï~~FALSE AND TRUE PRAYING.

199

blood with pity equal to that of the sad groups who
lean upon their arms, to watch it slip away. But its
intervention has already been conceded through their
pity, and heaven says, " The means you have upon
the spot, the help you can rally, is the aid which I
bestow: if I had more you should not see him die."
It is very strange that in speculating upon the efficacy of prayer, we should not perceive how every
event that is unavoidable is the test. Does any reason
exist why an event should be avoidable? The reason
must be either in the laws that are involved, or in
some special exception. The exception may be spontaneously bestowed, or in answer to human entreaty.
But if the reason why an event should be avoidable be
comprised within the law of the case, heaven need not
make an exception. If it be not in the law, and if
the impending event requires that a special interposition shall make up for the deficiency, then comes the
test question, Why does it not? Does heaven pick
its cases, or is the prayer not agonizing enough to take
God's will by violence? What kind of a theory of
efficacy is that which the facts force to prove that
prayer may be quite as ineffective as effective? The
terrible refutation ascends from every floating raft
where sailors lift a desire as deep as the ocean beneath
them to some pity farther than the sky. Heaven's
answer is, that whoso lives to eat his last comrade
may be wafted to land if a breeze springs up. The
real pity that is aboard another vessel heaves in sight
too late. Prayer should have filled the sails as taut
as marble, and held the tiller by the desperate sailors
afar off, and thrilled the needle with direction. Is




ï~~200

AMERICAN RELIGION.

heaven, then, fastidious? What quality in praying
is it that compels its intervention? Saints and sinners, well-balanced and distorted natures, fibre coarse
and fine, recklessness and fidelity, the whole of human
nature learns from the impartiality of every year that
God is not a respecter of persons; for the laws which
bring rescue are incompetent to decide upon character.. Sometimes you fling your heart so close to the
breast of heaven, that every angel there may count
your pulse, and interpret its tumults into drums that
beat to summon dear deliverance, to bid light rally to
some glazing eye, strength to the side of some slow
attenuation, if God will respond to the spotlessness
of a whole household, and spare its bliss. Is it spared,
and not by law? Is it not spared, and in spite of
entreaty? It is strange that men do not accept on
this question the test of the inevitable.
In the countries where rain abounds, official rainbeggars find their occupation gone. But in rainless
districts they still make a merit of the occasional
shower. This is not more inconsistent than our induction that an event may be ascribed to prayer which is
accounted for by law. During the great Irish famine,
the adjurations to the Holy Mother, and the invocation
of all the saints, - nay, what was far more moving to
infinite pity, the distress of millions of Irishmen, -
did not restore a single potato to soundness. And the
mothers who watched, out of eyes seared by famine,
their children also decaying, discovered after prayer
that the trouble was in the failure of a crop, and the
whole broad, fertile heaven would not extemporize




ï~~FALSE AND TRUE PRAYING.

201

another. As much of God's pity as could get on board
a few vessels laden with the wheat of Chicago, the
apples, corn, potatoes of New England, strove a feeble
intervention. God was not prevailed on to show us
the famine: we saw it, and saw how prayer whitened
on its lip; the gaunt whimpers borrowed the sea, as if
their tears had made it, that they might go voyaging for
pity westward, since the sky above was foodless. We
could not reach all mouths, but the test-event feeds
every mind with the religious truth, that all the providence there is nature and mankind create. Not a
sparrow falls without His care. Yes, but it falls.
Was the agony in Gethsemane official or natural?
The cross was natural, and stood rooted against
prayer. Or was all this only a dramatic tableau, in
which the prayer filled the role of incompetency
merely to round out the piece? Providence builds its
own test-theory upon its own impartiality.
The body-servant of Stonewall Jackson, issuing
sometimes from his master's tent, would confide to
others his opinion that there would be something
to pay soon, - an unmentionable locality would be to
pay, -" Massa Jackson had such a drefful fit o' prayin'." Misguided earnestness can concentrate its plans
and temper by the act of prayer. Jackson fought the
battle of the next day upon his knees, because it is an
involuntary gesture made by every strong mind that
heaps itself up towards the future enterprise. Something was to pay at Cedar Mountain: was it because
Jackson prayed, or because Banks blundered? or will
you create an escape from this dilemma by maintaining that Banks blundered because Jackson prayed?
9*




ï~~202

AMERICAN RELIGION.

The prayers of an earnest man like Stonewall Jackson are only signals to the neighborhood that his
plans are good, his temper high, his whole soul eager
to test its combination, and that nothing can be expected of heaven unless to-morrow's devotion brings
it. To-morrow is already mortgaged to the devotion;
the prayer is nothing but the deed that is signed and
sealed. At the very moment when the stern Cromwells of history break into prayer, it is a hint that
praying has become superfluous. The purpose is at
white-heat, and heaven can add nothing to it; for tomorrow's opportunity is already on the ground and
came there by the usual conveyances. It is worth all
such praying to see that the good or evil occasion has
come. Both sides will pray, but the toughest temper
wins. Each side will try to stimulate itself by acts
of devotion; but heaven makes a tour of inspection,
and discovers whose powder is the driest. Perhaps wet
powder will be suddenly kiln-dried by desperate circumstances in mid-tide of battle. Providence endowed
desperation with this talent long before it took to
devoutness, and has left at Marathon and elsewhere
the texts of its primeval purpose. All parties are
quite convinced that there is a Lord of Hosts, and
make no scruples to approach him with what they
have in hand or heart; but he is an unbribable director
of quality by the smooth curve of David's sling, and
lays bulk prostrate.
Critical moments give men opportunity to notice
that heaven has made provision that goodness shall
always exceed evil by a certain per cent. It needs
only to be hard pressed to discover this latent quality




ï~~FALSE AND TRUE PRAYING.

203

that secures the final superiority to heaven, and makes
the world possible, without exacting a single phrase
from man. Both good and evil indulge copiously in
phrases which claim the God of battles, before an encounter, and reward him with Te Deums after. But
God sings his own anthem in the event, however protracted through various fortunes of the fighters, all of
whom serve him to a turn; and whether they supplicate or imprecate, it must be all one to a power who
depends upon putting goodness into straits, and dotes
upon it that he may see it harassed into the superiority that throws at last the doubles of victory.
What a fine disdain there must be in heaven for all
the prayers that undertake to coax laws and qualities
into events! Jefferson Davis had recourse to appointing days of humiliation, because men who prayed as
well as they fought, and women who wept tears as
salt as any that channelled the New England bloom,
could not win the final per cent; for that had been
previously settled on the Rights of Man, before a shot
was heard, or a single aspiration struggled through
the powder-cloud of war. And the North appointed
Fasts, that all the clergymen might entreat heaven to
reflect if Bull-Runs and Ball's Bluffs were not mistakes, and to hurry up advantages in consideration of
the phrase that we were miserable sinners. So we
were, and had been through thirty years of compromising, all of which had been clerically bespoken, and
came to pass to the inward satisfaction of believers in
supplication. So we were, guilty as the South, to
such an extent that we must perceive how reconstruction blossoms from the feculence of both parties, and




ï~~204

AMERICAN RELIGION.

independently of the prayers of either. Both the
North and South had been educated to believe that
events depended practically to some extent upon entreaties. So were the Catholics and Huguenots of
France. We should say that the patriotism of the
Huguenot lifted to heaven prayers after its own heart,
and that they deserved to earn eventual supremacy for
religious liberty. We can even venture to speculate
that if the precious blood of St. Bartholomew had
won the cast, Robespierre and Danton would not
have been tormented with the thirst for more. But
one would say now that heaven only had the object
to scatter the fine quality of the Huguenot through
every land. He became a slaveholder in South Carolina, and prayed with as much faith and smouldering
earnestness as ever. But he lost his case, - in France
where he deserved it, in America where he did not.
Freedom has an architect who never mistakes human
breath for blocks of marble. Say what we will,
Catholicism must have had a quality as well as a
majority: otherwise David's stone would have gone
again crashing through Goliah's forehead. Is heaven
sometimes flattered by High Mass, and sometimes by
extemporaneous entreaty? Mankind is drawn upon
the track of a long-headed purpose, transacts business
of joy and sorrow at every station, and its energizing
into phrases can neither check the train nor put fuel
underneath its motive power. Conscience is on board;
intelligence is the meal furnished at all the stopping
places, where wells are dug and wood is hewn to
exhale into genuine momentum for this journey out of
fatalism into freedom.




ï~~FALSE AND TRUE PRAYING.

20e

If we can rid our religious feeling of this old claim
that the drift of history, the accidents of life, the fortunes of the individual cannot depend upon laws of
nature unless they are supplemented by our devotions,
we can stand in a clear place, with so much rubbish
that interrupted the view piled on either hand. As
soon as we are thus disencumbered, we move freely
to and fro with this question: How is it then that we
cannot help praying? Of all our instincts is this the
only one that turns into a vagabond, without a legal
permit to beg, left to forage on the unsuspecting
neighbors? What account is to be given of the universal tendency of man to pile up all his preferences
or his antipathies till they stand level with a threshold
over which words may carry them into the divine
consideration? Is this done because otherwise we
cannot arrive there, and cannot get commended to a
power that serves us? Though God knows what we
have need of before we ask him, must we still ask,
because his knowledge will not move towards us on
any other terms? We have freed our deck of the
litter of notions that partiality for special providences
scattered over it: as we float off the bar can we swing
round into confidence that moral and spiritual gifts
depend upon the asking? Or if they do not, whither
are we sailing with this instinct after God, that is the
compass on the wide waste, this ardor that streams
from every mast and spar, these moments that fill with
sudden breezes, we know not whence, and put underneath us the rapture of motion, and draw every shred
of us taut into a silence which declares that we career!
And what is to be said to the discovery that every




ï~~206

AMERICAN RELIGION.

kind of misguided moral sense shares the same raptures, and strains towards the same harbor, - the
possession of God; that a passion of entreaty has
ennobled all lost causes which have drawn the blood
and tears of men; that every zone exhales in fervid
preferences which Buddha, Allah, Jehovah, Jove or
Lord are supposed to respect and gratify? Perhaps
this discovery of a universal instinct is just what we
need to make before we can interpret it.
H. W. Beecher, in a Lecture-Room Talk upon
prayer, asks, " Ought we not to pray for direct spiritual
gifts? "- and answers thus: " Yes, I think we ought;
but I think that whenever a man asks God for any
spiritual gift, the next step should be to ask, ' Have I
not asked God for something that I can get myself?
Have I not asked God for something that he has made
provision to give me in an indirect way?"'
This may be good vestry-room logic, to hold a confiding audience together, but it vanishes in a wellventilated space. If there be something that a man
can get for himself, his first step should be not to ask
any thing in heaven or earth to give it to him. His
next step should be to procure it. " As the plough
follows words, so God rewards prayers." This proverb of William Blake reminds us of Hesiod's direction to the farmer to pray to Jove and Ceres, but with
his hand upon the plough-tail.
Is there no point, then, pursues Mr. Beecher, where
God, finding that something is inaccessible to a man
by the natural laws of his constitution, will intervene,
and give it to him in a special manner? Yes: he
thinks there is. He can understand how Peter, for




ï~~FALSE AND TRUE PRAYING.

2O7

want of a pass-key, should require an angel to let him
out of prison: and how, when Paul and Silas were
praying in prison, with no files and saws by which to
effect an escape, a lively earthquake should be detailed
to shake open the doors and set them free. So Mr.
Beecher pulls the string of the Llamaite cylinder to
summon a conventional deity. If something be inaccessible to a man by the laws of his natural constitution, what is it but a divine decree that it should
continue to be so? But if a man's nature breaks into
prayer, that is the instinctive response of all its gifts
toward the infinite giving.
Let us drop illustration into the depth of this subject, that perhaps some draught of it may be lifted to
the lip. Through flat and unprofitable moments, a
poet is waiting for the next consent of his imagination.
The bed of every gift, that lately sparkled or thundered as the freshlet of the hills sent its surprises down,
lies empty, waiting for the master passion to open the
sluice when it hears the steps of coming waves. The
poet's nature strains against the dumb gates of his
body and his mood. With power and longing he
heaves them open, and is brimfull again with the
rhythm that collects from the whole face of Nature:
the hill-side, the ravine, the drifting cloud, the vapors
just arrived from ocean, the drops that flowers nod
with to flavor the stream, the human smiles that colonize both banks of it, - all passions, all delights hurry
to possess his thought, crowd into the precincts of his
person, pain him with the tumult in which they offer
him obedience, remind him of his last joy in their
companionship, and will not let him go till he ennobles




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AMERICAN RELIGION.

them by bursting into expression. Relief flows down
with every perfect word: the congested soul bleeds
into the lyric and the canto; the poet's burden becomes light-hearted; and the supreme moment of his
travail, when it breaks in showers of his emotion,
cools and comforts him. He must die or express himself. All the blood in the earth's arteries is running
through his heart; all the stars in the sky are set in
his brain's dome: this life and light must be discharged into a word, and the poet restored to health
and peace again. Goethe used to say that when his
imagination accumulated thus, as it was fed by near
suggestions of his own life, or from the head-waters of
thought, he was nothing but disquiet, till it slipped
away through every line he wrote, and gave him an
answer of serenity. He might mistake it for a touch
of the infinite satisfaction. It was the olive-branch
brought home to him from the subsiding turbulence
of his emotion that covered the tops of every gift, and
had to cut a channel to release him.
This mental gesture has in it the essential quality of
praying. The poet asks for nothing, but receives the
gratification of a nature already framed to be sated
and soothed when its gifts toil up into a clear place.
Cortez and his men, possessed and heated by a wild
surmise, hewed their way through the dense chapporal, till a whole Pacific lay in the orbit of their eyes.
Enterprising manhood carries along its own answer
into every entreaty of its powers to be developed and
to reach their highest pitch. And when a man voices
the mood of tenderness, of confidence, of expectation
and of gladness that has risen within him, and breaks




ï~~FALSE AND TRUE PRAYING.

209

into God's open air with caressing epithets, his mood
reaches its answer in its own climax, and he is satisfled that God has given him just what he has
earned.
It cannot be different with the moods that culminate
into regret and confession of a maimed, unfaithful life.
They rush into consciousness, and see themselves;
the act of launching an entreaty floats them into the
salutary bitterness of being broad awake, thoroughly
live and aware. A man has been so organized that
all his moods, in which his average character finds
their poetic expression, shall discharge themselves into
a calmness that benefits him, because it was reached
through the personal disquiet which breaks up his
illusions. The sight of himself is a preordained
opportunity for amendment. These answers to prayer
lie latent in the constitution, where God patiently
awaits their germinating, confident that he need interfere no more than he does when the lyric soars, the
tragedy weeps and terrifies, the symphony mourns
towards its own deliverance, the picture flings its
beauties on the wall. His inspiration is previous and
constant: not subsequently recruited to the pitch of
an entreaty. Why should it be, if we are so framed
that a feeling cannot be profound that does not announce itself? A man may think he is the master of
a speculation, or that some province of knowledge is
familiar to him. But every thing lies in the condition
of a nebula, till its own stress lends motion to it, when
he can organize in the symmetry of expression what he
thinks he owns. Not till that moment does he own it.
Not till then does it reward him with its organic satis



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faction. So, difficult problems over which our gifts
brood and starve with waiting are no progeny of
ours till they chip the shell and run warm into our
content. When Kepler's soul wrestled with planet
after planet in the midnight, and threw them on the
floor of that silence where they lifted visor and confessed to him the law of their distances from each
other, his tumult of possession, his hour of acceding
to the throne of that idea, broke into the exclamation,
"I think thy thoughts after thee, 0 God!" Devoutness is the announcement that every success makes of
its superiority to prayer. It has thought heaven's
thoughts, and felt its emotions, before it can grow bold
and hot enough to importune. "God allows us the
epithet only after the fact."
The same organic felicity rises higher than smiles,
and unlocks from either eye the torrent that cuts the
smiles up and denudes their surfaces. We cast ourselves by the side of the children of our hope, or the
comrades of our friendship, and weep each access of
our sense of bereavement away into the quiet that
follows exhausted emotion. Sweetness mingles with
the equipoise which the nature purchases at this dear
rate. If our despair has besieged heaven with a claim
to be understood and comforted, its climax subsides
into its answer, till time brings the perfect consolation
of a scarcity of tears. We have thrown ourselves
upon the bosom of expression; long repressed feelings have sobbed themselves to sleep with their arms
around a recollection, and a dream that reality is still
possessed plays upon the quiet face. Reality is as
distant from us as the antipodes: but a tide reaches




ï~~FALSE AND TRUE PRAYING.

21I

our eyelid, propelled from that distance, and lifts it
open and drips there till thickening smiles absorb it.
God's answer is already in the love that refuses to be
comforted till it has been cloyed with its own emphasis.
Human expression varies, but the law remains the
same. Heaven is no more attracted into compassion
by the symbol of scarifying the flesh and maiming
the limbs, by the howls and rages of the Syrian or
Celtic temper, than by the suppressed composure of
the Quaker, whose face may be as impassive as a
grave, but whose dead lies buried in it. The formulas
of agony feed upon the flora of every meridian, and
draw their color from the leaf; so that the Esquimaux derives from his sensations an answer different
from the Polynesian in the terms of its comfort: but
the real response is in the expressiveness which exhausts the individual grief, and is as heavenly in the
howl of a Fijian as in the miserere of the Sistine
Chapel, or the Christian's claim that the Comforter
shall speedily arrive. It arrives, and has never yet
shown an imperfect knowledge of geography, and is
in a ratio to the population as direct as the deaths
are. I know some cases wh ere it does not seem to
arrive: but it is not for want of prayer. Rachel is a
constitutional temper that refuses to be comforted.
It must be that a divine mind foresaw to make
human nature adequate, on the whole, to every emergency, so that the surprises of sorrow should only liberate from their own bitterness a tonic to rectify the
disorder which they introduce: as Mithridates had so
inoculated his system with little doses of poison, that




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whatever kind was secretly administered became its
own antidote as soon as swallowed.
In South America, there is a tribe of Araucan
Indians, who maintain, says Mr. Helps, that prayer is
needless, because their gods are so beneficent that they
are sure to confer upon men all things that it is good
for them to have. Nevertheless the Araucans show
their gratitude for this goodness by humble offerings.
This tribe, which was never subdued and brought under
the control of the white man, yields to the true philosophy that justifies the universal instinct. Prayer is
the gratitude of every gift, and also its cogency. Gifts
excite feelings of hope, veneration, dependence, gratitude, and the whole instinct rises Godward. If we keep
out the notion of affecting God, how beautiful and
natural is the whole movement of a man to establish a
sincere friendship with the Mind who framed his gifts.
When it is entirely disinterested, without any reservation of expecting to alter one divine intention, because
it knows beforehand that such intentions, of divine
necessity, must always be the best whether we are on
friendly terms with God or not, then how ennobling
becomes this spontaneous proffer of our best things!
This unaffected homage puts us on a friendly footing
with the whole of Nature, and God's perfect purpose
in all things includes us too: we offer incense as
frankly as the fields, with no more afterthought, nor
pretence of a claim beyond the gift of growing and
producing. So that the Creator inhales at the same
moment his flowers, and the gladness which they
propagate when their pollen strays into human hearts.
As the world is continually offering up its beauty and




ï~~FALSE AND TRUE PRAYING.

213

its use, and God, seeing that it is good, takes satisfaction in His work, so mankind may exhale in the
prayers of natural desire: these rise up, the unforced
tribute of things that reach the felicity of fragrance.
And the rose is content with its own: it has no hankering to smell like a lily, nor to make its own scent more
penetrating; it vanishes heavenward through the
delight which it generates in us, and God knows
flowers by that means. We have a right to think
that he takes satisfaction in this reflex action of the
nature he has made.   The "golden vials, full of
odors, which are the prayers of the saints," are the
delights of our own symmetry; they cannot bear to
be enjoyed alone: they rush to some companion to
declare this discovery of something that is majestic,
comely, or tender; they say, "Share me - let a
friend's bosom feel the heart leap; 'tis only half a
rapture till it is all gone, all emptied into thy beauty
and holiness, thou friend of my gladness and partner
of my existence! See, I decant my heart into thy
hand - how precious it lies there in the place that
framed it; the nest has not grown cold." When I am
best, I must drive home and let my ecstasy rush over
the threshold into all the kindred arms, without a selfish thought - not even to claim shelter: least of all, to
beg for food when I am full already, and that is the
reason why I have arrived.
But when we say that God's sympathy with the
jubilee or discontent of man's desires sets him to
limit, to affect or modify his purposes, to correct what
he is persuaded bythe remarks we make to him must
have been wrong, -in short, to supplement what is




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already perfectly contrived, and to receive as advice
the prayers which nothing but that perfection ever
could have suggested, we turn the relation between
the finite and infinite into dickering. The Guinea
traders advance towards a group of natives, lay down
their heap of trinkets and merchandize, and then
retire: the natives advance, and put opposite to it a
heap which they esteem equivalent. If the trader's
estimate is the same, the exchange is made: otherwise
the heaps are modified till the balance is reached.
"How will you swap?" says man: "wilt thou be
pleased to approach and examine my heap, glittering
with gems or tears?"  Heaven approaches to say:
" Your heap was grown on my soil - I have nothing
better to offer - will you bring spices to the tropics?
I recognize them, and proffer the greeting of their
own nature."
A father and mother love the tender homage of
their children's feelings, but still ordain what is best,
because they perceive what imperfectness there would
be in yielding to ill-considered desires, however eager,
and winged with filial impetuosity. There is satisfaction when the desires harmonize with the parental
intent; but when they do not there is a serene regard
that is not affected by this state of filial unresponsiveness. The well-considered desire is but the reflection
of the well-premeditated purpose, whether it be for
evident good or seeming evil. There is no praying
possible to a man until he becomes again enough of a
child not to calculate his raptures and not to crave an
equivalent. As the child meets nobly the eyes of his
father, in which many winters have garnered their




ï~~FALSE AND TRUE PRAYING.

215

sorrows, many summers have expressed their fruit, so
the simple-minded man can exchange glances with
the God who is quartered on his dwelling, and return
smile for smile.
How often we lift ourselves heavenward with
almost a perfect and a pure desire, and almost find
ourselves standing on that sky-line which our highest
earth projects. But there is some indefinite sense of
being not yet quite in earnest, that is to say, not yet
well grown. We have not fearlessly cut all the cords
and let the gifts all loose. We almost reach, but
there is still somewhere an anchor in the depth that
forbids us to swing into perfect freedom. We linger
painfully with our real self not yet entirely buoyant
within us. Are we ready to cut loose for ever, and
trust ourselves up through that unexplored depth?
How it tempts and draws us, but how a single anchor
holds us moored! Just when we think that our desire
is whole-souled enough to carry us away to hear
heaven say, es, because we say it, a dull consciousness of flesh comes creeping up and clinging; we
settle back into immaturity. Perfect prayers without
a spot or blemish, though not one word be spoken,
and no phrases known to mankind be tampered with,
always pluck the heart out of the earth, and move
it softly, like a censer, to and fro beneath the face of
heaven.
But what is the use of this natural desiring? Set
aside the conventional prayers, mere useless gesticulating and cerebral trickery, the bales of rhetoric
which the churches dispatch to a country altogether
foreign; put aside every mannerism that denies the




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AMERICAN RELIGION.

perfect order of the physical and moral world, the
perfect prescience of that order, and that the best
thing must at any rate always happen, with or without human desiring, - what is the use of letting all the
gifts run into this conspiracy of feeling, to gather with
sword-clashing and acclaim around a door where the
invisible is listening? There is no use at all, on the
old theory that we can transact business with God,
chaffer with him, beat him down, work upon his
feelings. We can get a salad without growing it, just
for the asking, as soon as we can get sanctities. Mr.
Beecher well says that " prayer is often an argument
of laziness. A person finds that his temper is a source
of great trouble to him, so he says: 'Lord, my temper gives me a vast deal of inconvenience, and it
would not be so great a task for you to correct it as
for me. Will you please take it in hand through the
influences of your Holy Spirit?'" He that sitteth in the
heavens shall laugh. " Do as I do; grow your own
salads, in the sweat of your brow, and your own sanc-,
tities in the blood of your heart." There is not a
crevice along the line of this decree of labor, where
a man may pry with his pickaxe of begging.
What is the use, then, of natural desiring? That
is not the real question which the universal instinct
suggests to us. This is the question: How can
you help having the prayers of natural and spontaneous feeling?  Not a word need pass. Suppose
earnestness does not fall on its knees and break into
speech: if there be real earnestness, that is the
prayer, because it is the sincere human endeavor to
fulfil a gift, a task, a purpose, an inspiration. It is a




ï~~FALSE AND TRUE PRAYING.

217

religious tendency of the finite towards the infinite,
since it is by human earnestness that the work of God
goes on.
When a boy first sees the ocean at its orgy among
the shore-rocks, he careers more lustily than the whole
deep, more mobile than its waves, and shouts his
irrepressible sympathy with freedom. The sea waited
to be well fitted with that voice. It is ascription of
praise even if the boy bandys school-yard vernacular
with the solemn sky. When perfect music drives its
golden scythe-chariot up the fine nerves, across the
bridge of association, through the stern portcullis of
care, and alights in the heart of a man, there is adoration, whether he faints with excess of recognition
of one long absent, and lies prostrate in the arms
of rhythm, feeling that he is not worthy it should
come under his roof, or whether he mounts the seat
and grasps the thrilling reins; God's unity is riding
through his distraction, brought by that team of all
the instruments which shake their manes across the
pavement of his bosom, and strike out the sparks of
longing. He cannot help knowing that his visitor
anticipates a harmony to which he has not yet attained.
No matter whether he calls it perfect Beauty or perfect God, whether it prostrates or enraptures him;
his soul cannot avoid making some gesture; it is consent to heaven, and a declaration of love.
It is not different with any moment when our powers
are heaped up towards some attraction. Shall the
waters which follow the moon protest, "What is the
use of this?" Their movement declares, "We cannot
help it." The name of God, and a flash of recogniIO




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AMERICAN RELIGION.

tion that passes between earth and heaven, sums up
our sincerity, whether it reaches freedom in arts,
service, suffering, or simple natural joy. In Mrs.
Gaskell's novel of " Mary Barton," Job Legh says:
"It's not often I pray regular, though I often speak a
word to God, when I'm either very happy or very
sorry. I've catched myself thanking him at odd hours,
when I've found a rare insect, or had a fine day for
an out: but I cannot help it, no more than I can talking to a friend." And Jean Paul Richter, waking
from a hideous dream, in the sun and air of a genial
morning, says: "My soul wept for joy that I could
still pray to God; and the joy and the weeping and
the faith on him were my prayer." He had nothing
to ask for, but every thing to bestow. What is the
use of it? What is the use of thirds or fifths in harmony?   The vibrations do not undertake to have
commercial intercourse; their mutual benefit is in the
law of their affinity, and the air breathes the marriage
that consoles a world.
The young prince gets into a castle which he does
not know belongs to him already by the foreordination
of love. Having but one search to make, and the
search itself being the entreaty he has to frame, he
passes through the mercenary groups; scullions may
work for wages, and remain always scullions; the
men-at-arms for booty; the chaplain coins his prayers
into board and lodging, even Gold-Stick in Waiting is
not inaccessible to bribes. Everybody recommends
his knack, prays for it, craves consideration of the
supreme Beauty. But the youth has mounted at
length past all these landing-places, a suitor accepted




ï~~FALSE AND TRUE PRAYING.           219
before he reaches the chamber of avowal, where he
wakes the blandishment which is the counterpart of
his enterprise.
So when the instinct of human life struggles obscurely upward to its various achievements, it takes
divine nature along with it, comes into the light, sees
its face, and says, " Is it thou, my God?"




ï~~IX.

STRIFE AND SYMMETRY.
MR. Darwin's theory that all the varieties of animal and vegetable life have been due to some
principle of natural selection, working by means of a
struggle to maintain life, has lately been renforced
by him with a theory that every line of inheritance is
endowed with indestructible germs, some of which
lie latent while others become expressed in character,
but all of them are liable to come to the surface and
announce themselves. A human family is a vehicle
for these atoms, which assert themselves or retire into
privacy as time goes on; so that each generation not
only inherits directly from the one preceding it, but is
likely to reproduce some long forgotten traits of ancestors, even to peculiarities of birth-mark, features
and complexions.
This recurrence of family marks has been noticed
from the earliest times. Plutarch mentions them in
an essay of his Morals, and relates a contemporaneous
case of the youngest son of a certain Pytho, of an
ancient Spartan line, who was born with the mark of
a spear upon his body, which was the family mark,
but had not reappeared for several generations; it




ï~~STRIFE AND SYMMETRY.

221

came at length, as if to guarantee purity of descent.
So, says Plutarch, early generations of a family may
keep latent some qualities and affections, or hold
them slurred, which afterwards break forth and display the natural tendency to some vice or virtue.
This is Nature's entail. She brings a child into an
old gallery of family portraits and startles it with its
own identity upon the wall, of some one who is
reputed to be dead and buried for a hundred years,
but who acquires in this child a fresh lease of existence. This occurs because the family germs are carried along by all the members, and propagated for
years in silence and oblivion to bide their time. Vices
and virtues thus leap to the face and into action, by
this law of their own, and the individual is already
decided upon before his birth. In this shuffling and
cutting of the cards, the trumps that turn up are not
always honors. But no individual in the whole series
possessed any choice in this vitalizing of the family
germs. They wait for favoring conditions. "In the
thickest pine-wood," says Thoreau, " you will commonly detect many little oaks, birches, and other hard
woods, which are overshadowed and choked by the
pines. When the pines are cleared off, the oaks, having got just the start they want and secured favorable
conditions, immediately spring up to trees." Farmers
used to wonder, when they burnt off a tract, to see a
new growth without any planting take possession of
the soil. But we now understand that the old growth
merely discouraged the forms that were already on
the spot and languishing for chances. So, every
member of Mr. Darwin's family possesses all the




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AMERICAN RELIGION.

heir-looms: but no individual in the whole long series
can ever account for his fancy to furnish his new
house with them. The feudal brigands who called
themselves barons while they were levying toll on
their domains, appear afterward at the Old Bailey
under the style and title of highway-robber, and are
comfortably hung by proxy. Felony or piety may
skip a generation or two because the ground is occupied by some other alternation of germs, but they are
sure to reappear. All our senses are detectives; and
a dead ancestor is liable to arrest in the person of his
descendant.
The Chinese, in connection with their worship of
ancestors, have the practice of conferring rank and
dignity, not only upon the person who extorts it by
some great service, but upon the whole line of his dead
ancestors. The title does not pass to his descendants,
for they must also earn distinction. It works backwardly against the stream, for each ancestor has been
the parent of a man's excellence, by transmitting unconsciously the atoms of nobility; so the title puts
into each port and deposits a part of its return cargo.
The ancestor was like a bale of goods in which rare
seeds of the tropics get transported to new soil. Or,
he reminds us of the bird that flies with a crop-full
of cherry-stones, and enriches with them a pasture
where boulders were the previous sowing.
This theory of indestructible seeds lurking in everybody's physical frame, which serves Mr. Darwin to
favor his idea of natural transmissibility of traits,
threatens to do us a mischief in the moral direction.
We are obliged to accept it, or some modification of




ï~~STRIFE AND SYMMETRY.

223

it, if we would account for the facts of inheritance.
They are too plain to be missed. Lunacy lies dormant
and pacified through groups of charming children,
to creep at last from its burrow and climb to the eyes
of one: then, a look that has been dead for years
"revisits the glimpses of the moon." A mother cannot bear to knit, but she has a child who knits precisely in the style of its grandmother. Lady Frances
Howard had a mother who taught her to be " unspeakably venal and impure." The gifts of her person
were as rare as the deficiencies of her soul. She
married Robert Carr, an empty-headed favorite of
King James; but there was her previous husband to
get rid of; also a friend of his to murder. Divorce
and poison legitimated their secret profligacy with a
marriage. A blue-eyed girl was born to them while
they lay in the Tower, under the charge of murder.
Escaping justice, they buried themselves in the obscurity of the country, to rear, amid mutual reproaches
and a godless life, the daughter, who became one of
England's purest women, and the mother of Lord
William Russell, who died for resistance to royal privilege. Does God
-   "set such pure amens to hideous deeds?
Why not? He overblows an ugly grave
With violets which blossom in the spring."
Such daughters are really born long before their father
and mother come into the world.
It is not necessary for an old family to preserve the
law of primogeniture, or the habit of exclusive connections. There is another law that keeps record of




ï~~224

AMERICAN RELIGION.

virtues and vices though the page be scored with
intermarriages.  The manuscript is a palimpsest:
whatever writing went to it is underneath, and Nature's
sense finds means of being read.
But what effect does this begin to have upon our
feeling of moral accountability? In one direction it
has a good effect, to show us that Nature insists upon
better methods of dealing with criminals- and all the
exceptional victims of excesses. It would have a bad
effect if it encouraged average men and women to put
up too easily with their imperfections. If medical
jurisprudence should ever become scientific enough to
prevent a jury from procuring a man to be hung, who
had been expressly born to repeat the propensity and
the act of murder, it would not justify a juryman in
watering his sperm-oil or making a false invoice as
soon as the trial is over. If a single glass of liquor
can inflame the arson in a man who began burning as
soon as he knew enough to light a match, it ought to
stimulate a court to provide treatment more medicinal
and restorative than a perpetual prison; but the judge
would be none the less accountable if he took a bribe
or perverted judgment to soothe some popular opinion.
It is very clear that there are exceptional cases in
whom the sense of moral accountability is as low as
the capacity for resistance to temptation. One is the
measure of the other. The divine mind claims through
them that they shall be exempted from our contempt,
and treated with restoration instead of punishment.
Just as a case like Laura Bridgman's is a hint to Dr.
Howe that, if the blind, the deaf and dumb, would




ï~~STRIFE AND SYMMETRY.

225

eventually possess ideas and be put in communication
with mankind, a patience that cannot tire, and an invention that baffles the closest lock of the senses, and
picks them open, must be exercised. There is a
moral disability as deep as this that appeals to courts
for the justice of remedy instead of penalty. And it
is for science to instruct the bench, by putting into
every case of moral malformation testimony as to its
responsibility: for men who are not born to be hung
are actually hung for having been born. Nothing but
the strictest science can save us here from the two sins
of sentimentalism and cruelty.
But it is plain, in the mean time, that the exceptions
are candidates for asylums and not for cells: shut up,
already, in an organization that crowds in upon their
life, like the old dungeons whose moveable walls lessened the prisoner's air daily, to crush the body flat at
last. Do you think these moral prisoners are unconscious that they first saw the light in prison, first
knew their own brain as their gaoler, and pressed
their soul against the senses, like a piteous face that
clings to a grated window? God has not left these
without a taste for the liberty that streams into them
from every well-born face; they have glimpses of that
domain of smiles, good women, and stray breaths from
the boundless firmament of manhood. They know
best the woe of their inheritance: nothing but drink
ever does or can blunt their feeling of inferiority, and
lend flushes of mad triumph to their overt acts. To
believe otherwise would be to suspect God of indifference to his maimed and helpless children: their discouragement is his pity pleading at the bar of all our
IO*




ï~~226

AMERICAN RELIGION.

courts to have his own decree overruled, and his
poor prisoners remanded into love.
Does it follow, then, that clerks who have a salary
of $1500oo should manage to spend four times that sum,
upon pleasures that breed moral disability within
them, that the trustee shall exculpate himself for speculating in the stocks of widows and orphans, that the
gold gambler shall strip them to adorn his little game,
that the shopkeeper shall lie about his goods, that a
man who has congested his brain by habitual drinking,
till his judgment is impaired and his impulses brutalized, can take a shot at any man whom he imagines
to have wronged him, and be acquitted on the score of
his congestion, that every insolence shall pasture upon
the indiscretions and confidences of mankind? The
first move of your detected sharper would be to allege
irresistible circumstances, like those which commend
a starving mother to our pity, and bid us extenuate her
theft. Her hunger gnawed herself and children double,
till they looked over a grave's edge. Perhaps it was
dug by generations of poverty. His hunger was its
own ancestor. The Chinaman would execrate him
directly, and not look critically back into his line.
There are, then, exceptions created by birth, and
exceptions which spring from overpowering circumstances. All of them are appeals to us to discover the
sanitary method appropriate to every case: so that a
man who is congenitally mischievous need not be
punished because the court does not pronounce him
to be a malicious idiot, and consign him to a poorhouse. God has already made more delicate distinctions.




ï~~STRIFE AND SYMMETRY.

227

Exceptional cases must be put aside, however, when
we treat of the moral dignity of the average man.
How clear it is that they spontaneously refer themselves
to a class outside of the average accountability of mankind. We should shake bitter fruit from Mr. Darwin's
family-tree if it bore excuse and subterfuge. And
what are his constant germs, after all, but a device of
the Creator to propagate a moral strife and elect it to
be the parent of symmetry? If moral evil recurred
with every father and mother, the people would become
brothers of the gorilla without the trouble of descending from him. And if moral innocence had been
stereotyped in every heart, there would have been by
this time a nursery containing about 900,000,000 babes.
Science cannot prove all germs too constant for our
purpose, which is to maintain that personal freedom
and accountability have a definite per cent of advantage
over inheritance, so as to modify the character of the
majority.
Long before Mr. Darwin wrote, mankind tortured
itself with questions of the relation of its acts to the
power and foreknowledge of God. Its instinct that
some traits were invariable made it reason thus: " If
God foreknows all that I shall do, it must be because I
have a tendency to do those things, and no others: it
is intended or predestined that I shall do them; it was
seen in the very beginning how finite beings would
conduct themselves. The world and the soul were
both made in such a way that the things which have
been done must have been done, and all the things
which I shall do I must do, otherwise they would not
be done; how, then, can I appear to myself to be free




ï~~228

AMERICAN RELIGION.

to do as I please, to follow evil or to abstain from it,
as I please: if I do not abstain from evil, is it because
my evil was predestined, and if it was, how can I feel
that I am morally accountable,?"
When this question, with help from Scripture, comes
up to embarrass us, there is sometimes a disposition to
avoid it by supposing that many different things might
have happened in the world from those that did happen, that men might have been more virtuous and
have made greater progress. The object is to shift the
responsibility from the perfection of God to the imperfect volition of man. But we perceive that this shifting will not change the nature of the question: for we
must still refer to some cause the fact that man has
been so created that he acts imperfectly, no matter
whether from choice or necessity; his acts must have
motives and causes, and they must be in his organization, and that must be traced back to the organizer.
I have always thought that the various ways of discussing this interesting question have only been so many
ways for avoiding the point of it, either to clear God from
blame or man; that is, to make man supreme at the
expense of God's freedom and accountability, or God
supreme at the expense of man's. Whereas, if the answer to the question does not leave God supremely
foreknowing and foreplanning, and man sufficiently
free and accountable, the question has not been answered at all: because we know that we are called
upon to perform certain acts, and we know that the
divine mind must have foreseen whether we shall or
can perform them or not.
Without stopping to rake into the terrible dust-heap




ï~~STRIFE AND SYMMETRY.

229

of metaphysics which has accumulated around this
burrow where human speculation has been working,
let us try to find some plain and rational account of
our relation to God's foreplanning. Then, in the first
place, does it ever occur to us why we raise these
questions? Why do we desire to consider ourselves
free and accountable beings, and why do we shrink
from the idea that every good and evil act has been
precalculated and predetermined? A man has a great
advantage here, who does not believe in the originally
depraved condition of the human soul, but who believes, not only that man is designed to acquire goodness, but that his original tendency is good, that the
worst child of the worst parents, born and nurtured
under the most infamous circumstances, is not totally
depraved. If we believed that the evil in our nature
counterbalanced the good, we could not find any reason for desiring to be free and accountable beings.
We should no more be troubled with any ideas upon
that point, than a cotton-gin is troubled to account for
the fact that it is not an electro-magnetic battery. If
we tended by nature in the main towards evil, we should
be machines, and the question of our moral freedom
would be indeed settled beforehand, predetermined
against us, arranged from the beginning against virtue
and in the interest of vice. There would be no reluctance to believe that good and evil are both themechanical products of divine foreknowledge. But we
do shrink from that belief, and we prefer freedom: we
welcome responsibility for our errors; there is rejoicing in the dignity of remorse and shame; we greet the
accusations that convince us that our conscience is




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emancipating us when it tells us that we are bound.
What a proof of our moral freedom it is! We have a
voice that is capable of telling us that we are the slaves
of a bad habit. If this slavery were predestined it would
be unavoidable. What, then, would be the value of
the voice? It would be only insult added to the injury
of our depravity: an ever-rankling rebuke of something too mechanical to deserve rebuke.
How is the voice of conscience possible if it had not
been predetermined that we should act conscientiously
and purely? See, the very words we use, having the
flavor of righteousness in them, are. unaccountable if
we are not free to choose between the evil and the
good. Look at all the words which we use in speaking of moral action, and the feelings that belong to
them. - They grow out of the kindly soil of a nature
that is destined for goodness; like all other words,
representing truths and facts, they are invented by the
soul out of its own substance, and pass into circulation
without raising the least suspicion of their genuineness.
I would like to ask how a man who believes in any
orthodox scheme of depravity would account, on simple
terms of natural development, for the mere existence
of the beautiful moral words that express the holiness
of hearts, and of the other words by which we mark our
sense of its opposite. Where do the phrases "a hateful crime," "an ugly disposition," "a mean and
grovelling nature," come from? If we grovelled by
nature, we should not defame our nature by inventing
these disagreeable epithets. Would an implement
that is made to inflict pain and to spread destruction
all around vilify itself, find fault with its original in



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231

tention? Its acts are its words, and they simply express a calculated mechanism. But our words of
opprobrium find fault with ourselves and with our
neighbors; they arrest our course, they bring us up to
the bar of opinion and of judgment. They are suggested by a universal sense of what is beautiful and of
good report, and are the police of a soul that desires
to live in order and never to draw down upon itself
their bitter ministrations.
If it were not for the light of the sun, we should not
have the contrast and opposite of midnight. It is in
the very act of flooding the universe with sunshine
that the central orb marks its position by a multitude
of shadows. They are fleeting, but the light continues;
dense, obstinate, uncomfortable as they are, the mighty
parent of gladness and morning betrays its existence
and marks its motion by their dusky fringes. They
mark it but they cannot stay. Their quarters are continually beaten up by the advance of daylight, and
their existence is a continual decamping. So the
words of our moral aversion mark the supremacy of
an inner light.
But, on the other hand, the words of our moral approval must describe our real nature, as it was predetermined, for in this respect they are like all the words
representing the qualities that prevail in the natural
world. For instance, take the qualities of motion, as
they are illustrated by the stone that leaves the boy's
sling, or the planet that was hurled with a similar
force from the centre of divine origination. What is
the prevailing quality of motion? Not crookedness,
not stiffness, not a snarled irregularity. These are




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phrases which spring from our observation that the
great movements of the world are straight, or circular,
or spiral, or meandering, or descriptive of all the beautiful sections of a cone. These are gracious and acceptable words, pleasing to the inner sense of harmony
and proportion which we inherit from the Mind that
made the world. Whenever we observe a movement
in some limited space that is wanting in the beautiful
and easy sweep of all the great movements which
keep worlds turning, leaves springing from a stalk, and
gems from a centre, we apply language to it that
marks our sense of its discrepancy. When we say it
is crooked, we brand it with our feeling that crookedness does not prevail throughout the works of God.
The notion would not be possible if our mind were not
preoccupied by the idea that symmetry prevails. The
exceptions are the shadows that bound the light, and
are constantly decamping at its approach. A feeling
of this, which is kindred to a feeling of moral proportion, still exists among people whose intelligence is
sunk in barbarism. In the lines of their canoes and
the curves of their paddles they have to conform to the
motions of winds and waves; and they weave up with
the gestures of their dances the refined swayings of the
stars that perform their measures through the sky.
What a wonderful instrument to be invented by the
savages, that stand the lowest in the scale of human
intelligence, is the boomerang of the Australian. It is
based upon an instinctive sense of the beautiful and
accurate motions which all bodies must make when
they pass through a resisting medium. As it darts
afar, then glides upward like a bird, and turning back



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233

ward seeks the hand that threw it; or, dipping and
rising, stretches out by a long curve to pass the corner
of a wood or the brow of a hill to strike its object, it
imitates the ellipses of the sky. The air resists the
freedom of the weapon, which, in overcoming, in asserting itself, in carrying out its natural efficiency,
finds that what limits its freedom endows it with grace.
The savage teaches us that Nature is everywhere on
such good terms with Nature, that the apparent quarrel is only a healthy wrestling between two friends.
The man says to the angel: "I will not let thee go
except thou bless me." The sweep of the boomerang
brings back to us from the original design, that is just
out of sight, our positive and pleasant words.
Then our moral freedom must consist in our personal vindication of the original design against all the
exceptions and the apparent contradictions. Our finite
life is thrown directly into the midst of these, on purpose that our souls, by resisting them, may learn to
share the original freedom. It is put into us, with all
its seeds, to be developed into vital conformity with a
primitive intention. If we lived, upon the great scale,
an infinite life, that should comprehend all the real
motions and forces of the universe, we should not be
troubled with the exceptions, they would not be so
styled by us, and the word contradiction would be
as impossible to us as it is to God. But we live, upon
the little scale, a finite life: the moral freedom that is
destined for a wider life learns its first lesson close to
the earth and thrust into a body; on every hand
comes resistance to develop its free and beautiful
movements; the insignificant bit of road that we




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travel with so much fighting and privation seems a
stunted and a distorted bit, until we discover that it is
part of the long sweep of the freedom that makes our
souls a divine endowment.
It is resistance that decides the beginning of every
graceful line. If it were not for that, we should
neither know that we had freedom or were capable
of developing it. Put before every human being his
choice, perplexed as he is and often desperate among
the obstacles to his moral welfare, between responsibility for all his actions and irresponsibility, and
he will be eager to claim, before God, the privilege of
being held accountable for all his depravity. Before
man, he will extenuate and excuse, to win opinion, or
escape from it. But, notwithstanding his repeated
failures, and the sense of shame they kindle in him,
he is in no hurry to get any consolation or immunity
from any doctrine that destroys his moral freedom.
We all cling to that: it came down with the rest of
our birthright. And it is the common sense which
prevents all the theological jugglery about free-will
and foreknowledge from troubling our mind.
We are created with a preference for the perfection
which we have not reached. That is God's foreknowledge in our case. He knows that we will fall
into vices, but that we prefer goodness; and that will
eventually, either here or elsewhere, vindicate his
plan. He secured in advance the moral complexion
of every one of us for the remainder of this year. As
an astronomer will calculate to a second the arrival of
the earth's shadow upon the moon's disc, he might
calculate, if he cared for superfluous knowledge, the




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235

moment when a temptation will touch the soul to
overspread it. He might calculate, too, that with the
moment of its departure there will recur the preference of the soul for light. The eclipse is not the law
of the soul, but one of the circumstances of its career
that makes the light more precious and adorable than
ever. We should not feel the chill, nor be conscious
of the dusk, if the law of our soul were not a hunger
for light. We are free to hunger for it.
This hunger is the expression of the moral attainment possible to each individual, and cannot be the
same in all, because the structure is not the same.
But it announces the moral function that is possible to
each. And all freedom must of course be relative to
the amount of this latent possibility.
As exercise, however, develops this function, it
enables it to crave more satisfaction, just as the muscular system, trained by labor and expanded to the
limits of each one's capability of growing muscle,
demands a greater variety and amount of food. If it
receives this increase it is kept in its highest normal
condition. And as in this way impaired states and
defects of the muscular system can be overcome, so
moral exercise can do a great deal to obviate inherited
disinclination to perform much moral service, can
resist tricks, and modify the characters of the structure. But freedom is individual, and cannot transcend
the possibilities of the structure. It is none the less
absolute, so far as each man is concerned, and not
removed from   his private control.  He is free to
hunger for it. There is our answer to those heaps of
metaphysics, tons upon tons of dust, that have accu



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mulated about this question. It is the answer of God
through the voice of our human preference.
If any one is disposed to say that we might have
been created spotless, and incapable of spot, I answer, then we should have been incapable of moral
freedom. The very pith of freedom is, to choose if
you fail, and to choose till you succeed in modifying
the sources of failure. A perfectly regulated and
infallible human temper, clock-work skilfully adjusted
in the beginning, and warranted, to run upon being
wound up, is the nature of an automaton. Such a
human being would be devoid of every emotion, ignorant of the bliss, of working to save its personality from
the conflict of circumstances. We prefer to find cause
for laughter and for tears, to feel the heart leap when
the soul sounds its trumpet of warning, to have our
nerves swept like a harp by circumstances, even though
the strings bend to cracking. When, after many trials,
a manly character learns to draw sweet and firm vibrations from them, and every thing around us that has
waited for the right note to be sounded wakes up
responsive, and full-blooded harmony fills all the air,
we begin to see and to glory in the divine purpose.
For we are so framed that the repose and dead infallibility of a machine is hateful to us. If, by giving up
a portion of our moral freedom, we could be spared a
few tears of anguish, is there a man who would not
cling to his freedom, and prize the tears of his own
remorse as drops that heaven adopts with its iris, bid
them run, and bid his freedom see its own vindication? We long to wake up more fully to the glory of
finding ourselves in peril, compelled to fight for our




ï~~STRIFE AND SYMMETRY.

2j7

position, rallied, in the face of serious opposition, to
support our preference for God, to taste the sweet joy
of finding that we are equal to this warfare, and that
God has not set us growing like a shapely tree, or
bending heavily with unearned fragrance and fruit:
he has snatched our roots from an inanimate soil, and
here we are floating wide in the perils that force symmetry upon us.
In summer strolls upon the broad beaches where
the ocean runs by your side, the symbol of your moral
insecurity, you have picked up the symbol of your
moral symmetry. It is nothing but a shell: "frail,
but a work divine," because its delicate outline has
been forced upon it by the restless motions of the element in which it lived. That external curve, that
spiral of successive growths, has been built by the
curves of the brine itself: it represents the rhythm of
danger; the little tenant has unconsciously secreted its
house all around it in lines that correspond to the
lines that threaten its frailness; in hardening, they
express the very motions of the forces that are incessantly tossing and worrying about it, and they assume
the only shape that can shed these forces in safety. And
the curve grows solid while the waves remain fluid;
so that you pick up what reminds you of a beautiful
character, whose lines are moulded in correspondence
to its perils. The souls that are thrown into this
ocean of moral freedom grow in the grace which at
once describes and repels its uncertainties.
Your child puts his ear to the shell's smooth lips that
are purple with the speech of victory, and listens, fancying that the sound of the sea still lingers in its handi



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work. But the sound is in his own ear, and might
say to him that his heart is a deep not yet disturbed
enough to fashion and complete his beauty. How
long it will be, too, before he understands that he
secretes the walls of his building from a material that
is furnished by his apparent enemy!
What should we say would be the effect upon man's
character if the natural elements, such as electricity,
magnetism, vapor, had no difficulties for his management: if he could strangle them in his cradle; if God
made them over to us in traces and martingale, trained
not to shy nor kick, their uses understood by instinct,
their properties discovered without the expense of a
single accident, not a hurt to life or limb, no hazard
in applying them to the purposes of our material life;
if every flaw in a boiler were respected, every break
in the lightning-rod jumped by the deferential fluid,
every failure to make a weld in moulding shafts or
cannon let pass without an accident, every compression of vapor kept within a destructive expansibility, -
bad air at the bottom of a well, and gases that rush
out behind the miner's pickaxe, harmless as daylight;
a box of nitro-glycerine, by just throwing at another
person's head, turned into a poultice for his pimple!
Why should we not whine about the catastrophes that
arise in dealing with the elements as well as about
the perils of our moral freedom? The God who created the elements to be our ministers foreknew and
predestined all the tricks they play upon our ignorance. He might have made us impenetrable to their
blind furies, so that we could study them in safety,
harness them to our team, as a boy ties a string to his




ï~~STRIFE AND SYMMETRY.

239

rocking-horse and exults in the imagination of his
fiery gallop. Fortunately not: for instead of being
boys with rocking-horses, we desire to be men clothed
in the thunder we have tamed, and carrying weapons
which our own tears quenched and tempered into
steel. Dominion over Nature, discovery of her secrets,
application of her powers, is not done by babes who
smile in their fatuous sleep upon the mother's breast.
They are safe from harm there, but they are also far
removed from manhood, mere lumps of contingent
humanity, alive as long as they are held. Men are
not afraid to drive the team of physical catastrophes;
they are freighted with knowledge and power. You
cannot conceive of any other way to get control of
elements except by personal experience of their liabilities; no other way, unless you are the God who made
them. If they were a gift to us, and came by instinct,
we should not be the men who could use them. Virtue itself that comes by instinct uses the man who
inherits it, and is only the advertisement of a previous
freedom. The law of freedom is, that peril and advantage walk hand in hand. What sister-angels on
the threshold of earth! Defying each other in harmony, repelling each other's glances till they melt
into a look of concurrence, so that man is no sooner
alarmed than he is attracted, and he sees that it is God
himself who has divided himself thus that his will
may be done.
Experience seems to furnish us with the deduction
that His will partly is to create and to fund great
crowds of veteran souls, who have discovered what
justice is in conflict with injustice; who have not




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learned righteousness by rote, nor imbibed sincerity
as a flower draws sap or a babe takes milk: souls
who have not been content with an instinct for goodness, but have hazarded their life, and put their moral
freedom on the venture to make it positively known
and lived by them; souls covered with the scars that
victory healed but was too proud to obliterate. We
indulge an expectation that these souls, accountable
for every vice, but predestined to prefer the nature of
God, are recruited into other armies to maintain the
purpose of freedom upon other fields. As my glance
falls by night through the depths of a clear sky, where
the stars attract like virtues not yet reached, a suggestion comes to me that God has other fields, and beyond
the utmost verge of vision and imagination work still
for moral freedom to perform, glories for accountable
beings to gather, and new illustrations of foreplanning.
If so, the sky is not too deep for souls who learn to
swim, and the ocean of this earth's moral danger is
large enough for our training.
Does it seem to us that, after all, there might have
been a better way? Perhaps we hate evil so sincerely
that we shrink from deliberately showing that God
made it aft element of moral freedom. Perhaps our
lucky temperament never had to contest a single point,
and cannot imagine this style of optimism. But I ask,
Is it not so? - was it not foreknown that it would be
so? How then could there have been a better way?
We must believe that a perfect Mind takes the best
way to bring its children towards its own perfection.
When we begin to wonder if there might not have
been better ways, do we not see that we begin to cast




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241

imputations upon one of the best ideas we have,
namely, that the divine intelligence is all-perfect and
all-wise?  Every circumstance connected with our
physical and moral life must go to that idea for its
interpretation; because there is no other idea in the
soul, so centrally situated, so constantly prevailing, so
distinctly to be made out as latent in its primeval substance. One can hardly have patience to hear the
supposition that the power of God did not select the
shortest and the swiftest road to its purpose; that evil
is a mistake, a misfortune, an afterthought of fallen
man; that death and sin came by the weakness of
man instead of by the unshakable consistency of God;
that God is now trying to repair an oversight, or to
neutralize the unfortunate uses that man made of his
freedom; that the earth has got away from God farther than he expected that it would, farther than is
consistent with his absolute perfection. I see in all
things absolute perfection; that I see at all is proof
to me that I see in the best way, and that moral
freedom is not clear from vice is proof to me that
vice is essential to moral freedom. Else why is it
here, whence came it, whither does it tend? If I
cannot answer such questions so as to accept all the
facts, I deny God as flatly as the man does who denies
that God exists at all; because I set up some of the
facts as being inconsistent with the nature of a God.
It ought to be the aim of our intelligence to see
what facts there are in this universe, especially those
which touch our character most nearly, to call them
by their right names, and to hold all of them up to
the divine honor. All of them. There is a plant
II




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AMERICAN RELIGION.

called Hyosciamus falezlez, that grows in the Sahara.
It kills in a few hours the horse, the ass, the dog and
man, but will fatten camels, goats and sheep. Nothing can be without its uses: from the poison lurking
in the herb which a sheep can eat though it kills a
man, to that element which, by threatening man's
moral freedom, makes him so much better than a
sheep, and such a monument of the infinite foresight.
And here we are maintaining the great problem.
How can we account for a moral argument that could
not have been held by the man who was contemporary
with the mastodon, though he had wit enough to slay
the creature? Such strife as his rude weapons inaugurated has scattered hospitals and churches all over
the surfaces where primitive passions browsed and
raged in the shape of animals. One after another
huge blustering becomes extinct, or is huddled into
obscure places, just as the old animality still lurks in
each man's cerebellum. But when you count the centuries of culture, you mark the successive terraces
whence strife receded and left the land to symmetry.
It is like the effort of mankind to build a ship. The
first dwellers upon coasts ventured out to fish a little
in a vehicle like a feeding-trough, burned and hacked
without taste out of the trunk of a tree. Men began
in this way to learn what motions water makes, and
what form best answered to the exigencies of the
winds, currents and billows. It was a constant fight
to match peril with a cutwater: and the old, half
hollowed trunk, with both ends as blunt as the sense
of the builders, passed through all the stages of contest, represented by the Japanese junk, the Phenician




ï~~STRIFE AND SYMMETRY..243
galley, the Roman trireme, pirogue and catamaran of
the South-Seas, balsa of the Peruvians, caique of the
Turk, and kayak of the Esquimaux, till flocks of
ships hide it within their graceful lines, and are shepherded by willing winds into all the seas of ample
maintenance. In the deep hold of this symmetry which
has been extorted from centuries of foul weather, the
mild civilizations of mankind pass safely to and fro,
and traffic in ideas, charities, and beauties. The first
savage who struggled with nature is still inside the
last soul made; but he is so enveloped in buoyant and
sea-worthy curves that he rides on the bulk of dangerous problems, weathers the lee shores, and swings to
in the harbor of his moral freedom.




ï~~x.

A CONSCIENCE FOR TRUTH.
QOME of the Fakirs, or reputed saints of India,
make a point of standing upon one foot for such
a length of time that they succeed in being incapable
of putting the other foot to the ground. Or they sit
in some constrained posture until all natural gestures
and motions become impossible.   In other words,
they share that notion of religion which makes it consist in some isolated actions, some separation from
the general health and usefulness of human kind.
The result of it is always some kind of shrivelling and
maiming. A Dervish who occupies both his hands
with holding up one foot while he goes hopping on
the other, and repeats, " There is no God but God!"
is a very fair specimen of the sentimentalism that
takes God out of the powers he has created, and puts
him into excessive gifts or tendencies that earn our
phrases of commendation. Of what consequence is
the venerable nature of the phrase? One of the safest
things a man can say is, that there is no God but God;
but he cannot be understood to allude to that Person
who has created two feet for religion to stand upon, if,
while he says it, he struggles to make one foot suffice.




ï~~A CONSCIENCE FOR TRUTH.

245

And heaven must scorn the humility which we telegraph thither by genuflection; it must prefer the manliness that stands by all created gifts, and looks itself
in the face without pretence of worship. God is all
the time premeditating the hands and feet, the senses
of the body, the procreating and divining brain: in the
pleasure of each function he " renews his ancient
rapture."
Suppose we say that God was in divine men reconciling the world to himself. It is very true, until we
isolate the phrase from the rest of mankind, and break
off the continuous incoming of some force into all our
truth, our hopes, and our love. The infinite is in its
great men by virtue of its eternal longing towards
mankind, to become incarnate in them, and to acquire
some emphasis for the moral law. And whatever we
may think of separate men, it is certain that mankind
is full of grace and truth. The great names that stand
for the happy organizations along whose lips the
divine breath played its sweet and solemn harmonies,
stand also for the whole of organized humanity: all
lips are ranged conveniently, and the visiting breath
extorts their half and quarter notes. What harmony
the whole obedience of a generation must procure!
The Being who extends beyond its limits is alone in a
position to detect and enjoy its majestic fulness, as of
the music which Pythagoras said the planets made
by the ratio of their bulk and movements through the
vibrating ether: the inhabitants of the planets are part
of the movement, and cannot overhear it.
Yet, sometimes, when human affairs have accumulated into a moment of intense interest, there is a hush,




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AMERICAN RELIGION.

or mood of expectation, just before the crisis, during
which men become conscious of the exalted condition
of their powers: they hear the consent of many consciences, they feel that they are harmonizing with a
lofty will. After the wind has been blowing off shore
for some time there is a lull, just before a change of
the wind from seaward. In that lull, the mustering
waves lift up their innumerable voice. Careless strollers on the beach drop their spoil of sea-stray, and the
breath of the consenting anthem freshens them with
awe.
A few years ago the American people overheard
the thunder of their own awakening, as the moral law,
which had been beaten down so long by the hostility
of slavery, had gathered in too many hearts to be
repressed any longer. The States seemed clustered
in the sweet and firm gradation of the pipes for a Pan
to touch, with lips that gathered a great purpose, as a
note went up from each to frame the accord which at
the time we called our Patriotism, as we listened to
the unexpected sound; but it was the climax of an
inspiration, a possession of the conscience by its own
law, a rapture of the consent of millions to their own
likeness with divine indignation and justice. The
moral law had been painfully struggling to touch this
land for a generation: many bleeding hands had been
lifted from the surf to grapple with points of advantage; their efforts were God's own pertinacity; lashed
along by the stress of his presence, they were caught
by the undertow and swept backward all the time, till
suddenly, what seemed drowning became rescue and
safety, and we climbed from the iron-bound coast to




ï~~A CONSCIENCE FOR TRUTIH.

247

the meadows where the amaranths grew for our heroes. Foreign observers who were lounging curiously
up and down along the edge of our whitening purpose dropped their trifles, and hailed the " uprising of
a great people" as they termed it; our whole history
culminating to speak in the first rash gun that struck
all consciences with the same force, and set them
vibrating into unity.
But it makes a great difference whether we say that
God invented the moral sense, put it into a world of
good and evil, so organized as to be attracted by the
one and repelled by the other instinctively, without
any farther complicity of the divine mind, or whether
we make that Mind in some way the participant of
the sense thus invented, and therefore its perpetual
guarantee. A moral sense is not merely a contrivance
for detecting and holding on to goodness, like the machines which reject dirt and foreign objects and pass
the proper staple through. But personal sympathy is
the life of it. Approbation and disapprobation are the
personal feelings that justify and inspire its sense of
right and wrong. And as one human conscience
seeks the alliance of another, thus doubling the strength
which it shares by fraternity, can the infinite Conscience be content, after having made our moral sense
of such a temper, to forego the delights of personal
sympathy? And it cannot be only a delight, such as a
great artist takes in observing the exquisite and infallible adaptation to some result of something he has
made: must it not be codperation also, personal complicity, the longing of an infinite Person to enjoy his
own emphasis in the thing that he loved to make, to




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AMERICAN RELIGION.

continue its companion, to profit by its activity? The
very pith of the business of inventing consciences was
to secure a right of passage into all times and places
where spirit conflicts with matter, and good with evil.
Was there an intelligible purpose in ordaining such a
conflict, and was there love as well as wisdom in the
purpose?   Into what remoteness, then, has that love
vanished, into what a chilling and heartless withdrawal,
if mankind, after becoming compromised to suffer for
that purpose, is left discountenanced. Each generation, instead of being a column led to battle, and officered, cheered, organized clear through to victory, with
its inspiring soul in every movement, would be a
crowd of men abandoned by its general after he has
betrayed it into an ambush, where its instincts may
fight through or perish.
Of all our gifts, the conscience is the most sensible
to the divine immanence: it has such faith to welcome,
such faith to detest, such an instinct to set things right,
such sensitiveness to unhealthy influences, such joy in
plain-dealing, such pain when duplicity is near. What
witness is there, so perpetual, to the closeness of God?
It is heaven's challenging outpost, furnished with the
only countersign. Does it impair our belief in this to
remember that we have often been without any consciousness that something universal would fain conspire
with us, and that we have passed through flat and
dreary periods when a single kindling moment would
have been to us like the sight of a palm-tree to a
caravan. There is no gift of our intelligence that is
always full of blood; no channel to the soul that is
always spilling over. The divine force retreats from




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the yellow fields of autumn, and does not keep up a
perpetual harvesting: but the soil in which the faded
stubble is left disconsolately standing is filled with
the elements that make it liable to be visited. Constraint loosens its hold of every seed in the returning
sun. This appears to be the method of divine activity
in our structure; not an inflammation of all the faculties at once, nor a continual extolling of any one of
them. - They are the world's opportunities.
When you escape to the sea-side from the drowsy
August heats, the flat brown rocks tempt you down to
caress the lip of the retiring tide; it seems to offer
itself while it is really withdrawing. And the recesses
underneath the cliffs are left bare; the tawny bunches
of weed no longer sway and sparkle, they hang dry
and dispirited. All the sea-creatures have lost their
vivacity, and retreat out of sight into the darkest and
dampest places, underneath low ledges where you can
only surmise that they exist. They no -longer taste
the brine. But it soon creeps landward again, not
having forgotten its favorite inlets, nor the forms of life
that take toll of it to get through the day with. Inch
by inch, as if hardly effectual to slide up so far and
wet its old mark again, it gains upon you, freshens
pool after pool full of humble suitors, till at length
your heart feels every tentacle that is out of sight lifting
to breathe: you know that the anemone repaints its
orange, and the hermit-crab scuttles forth to surprise
another meal. So the nourishment of spiritual gifts is
constantly renewed: they cannot hide so as not to be
visited, they cannot languish so long as to become
impaired.




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But we must not be deceived by all the notable instances of the uprisings of a popular conscience, and
conclude that God reserves his high tides for these.
Our consciences are not merely his opportunities for
heaping up great critical moments of history, and concentrating moral virtue against disease and threatened
dissolution. Historical purposes rose in a great wave
that took Athens on its crest and dashed it against the
Persian barbarism, to keep that from violating a hearth
at which civilization and the arts might warm themselves. When the wave subsided, every conscience
was like the pools left between rocks, where life goes
on. And the subsequent development of morality,
which preserved all the common practical truths of
the conscience, till they rose to a high tide in Socrates,
was just as liable to be visited and freshened by the
diurnal presence, and just as dependent upon it, as the
great moments, when hearts by running together and
surprising each other's excellence take fire with enthusiasm. When this country lifted against slavery,
there were no more consciences in it than before, but
they suddenly conspired; if the ordinary life was inproved, it was from the contagion of this successful
feeling: it freshened all the gifts, and all the men and
women held a nobler and a purer tone with each other.
Charity became more self-forgetful, forlorn hopes were
recruited to victories; so regenerating is fraternity.
But the supreme Thought has not retreated from that
page of our history to meditate in some seclusion
another that shall shine as fair. Our sense of yea and
nay lies all open to it unprotected; the humblest soul
who strives to be honest in his dealings, and wakes in




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the morning to nothing more brilliant than care, nothing more hazardous than some temptation, quite out
of the way, never to be mentioned, hardly obtrusive
enough to secure an epitaph at last, belongs to the
history of his time because his conscience belongs to
God.
This keeps a country capable of inspiration, liable
to swell into great moments that are mentioned by the
voice of trumpets: this level of the divine presence
that is like the circulation of the blood. We are told
that when an orator has mounted into his best periods
with all his audience, his brain is filled with blood and
fits tight against the arches of the head. When it
shrinks again, it is with the loss of not a single drop,
and the heart's regular function maintains his opportunities. Let it seem a venerable and sacred thought
to us, that our structure preserves, as God pleases,
from day to day, our ordinary pity, love, and indignation, our sympathy with truths and causes, our disposition to defend the right, and stand by the oppressed,
our friendships and our genuine affinities. This is
our real citizenship of the republic, this preponderance
of health in the general conscience. What is it but a
desire to anticipate the depravities that make heroic
remedies necessary, - the loss of blood and tears, the
wear and tear of gentle sensibilities, the distrust that
puts on file the terrible expense and criticises Providence. It is the greatest efbfort of divine in-being that
keeps the general sentiment effective, and our ordinary
days void of offence. We cannot strike a more fatal
blow against religion than to favor a theory that great
moments, shining gifts, peculiar men, exclusive truths,




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uncommon feelings, announce that the Person has
drawn near, and selects some flesh for incarnation. All
the great elements of man, like air, light, magnetism,
are the most constant and the most diffused. Neighborhoods live upon the general pity, toleration, sense of
responsibility to laws. What do we gain by placing
so much emphasis on isolated things? We remove
them from the benefit of the common sunshine. There
are fish that have accommodated themselves to living
in the Mammoth Cave, and in the sublime recesses of
the Styrian Alps. But they have paid for their exclusiveness by the loss of sight. The same species
that live in waters visited by the unobtrusive bounty
of the daylight preserve the faculty of vision. And if
we ever think that it sharpens our eye to hold it against
an aperture where the light seems concentrated, we
shall discover too late that it has been dulled for the
great horizon of the sky. The focus is so bright that
the optic nerve is paralyzed. The very form of the
eye corresponds to the concave that is filled from brim
to brim with the even day.
A display of power may seem to be great because
it is all in one direction. The lightning cuts a narrow
channel of white heat, and with its whole resistless
force disappears through a small hole seldom bigger
than a pea. The diffused sunshine holds, as in solution, light and heat, and spills all over the rim of the
planet. It is hardly noticed because its great elements
are subdued into harmony with the eye, and but little
transcend its optic qualities. But that great harmony
feeds the broadness of a universe.
I supposed that the moral sense was not merely a




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contrivance for detecting and holding on to goodness,
but that the divine sympathy must repair to it. But
I suggest whether that does not follow some law, in
order not to oppress and displace our moral freedom.
Does God find it necessary to be minutely curious
about our private thoughts and actions? May it not
appear to Him that the health and development of
the conscience are best consulted by a regard for the
reserve in which all finite thought must have its birth?
The conscience can do its own watching, and chronicle its own condition. It is heaven's moral representative on earth, and is furnished with the eternal
prescriptions. Every time that a heavenly purpose
breathes across these laws of our nature, they are
reinvigorated. Something responds to our best moments; and there is refreshment, confidence, joy in
the response. No asking can bring it; nothing but
the excellence itself. All the sincere and burning
hours of the spirit seem to drop and be lost from this
effulgence. Thus He descends to us, thus He rests
upon our highest points; there the cloud breaks with
voice and lightning, and the drops collect in the old
channels, and hurry down towards the commonest
details and the earthliest places of our life. But
having thus drifted upon our mountain top, and parted
with this influence, He leaves the flooded conscience
to trickle into the street, the work-shop, the kitchen, the
wood-shed and factory, to deposit the precious xiashings of an inaccessible sphere.  Thus, long after
heaven has passed on above us our life is all saturated
with its gifts.
Do we consider seriously enough what it is that




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we carry about with us in this self-registering power
of conscience? Indeed, every faculty of the mind is a
cell where gradual increase is hived up, either from
sweet or poisonous flowers that are found as we range
over the whole expanse of life. Heaven loves the
human sweetness that is stored away for emergencies,
but is it curious about the little flights and circles
which we make in gathering it? So conscience, or
the instinct for the true, the healthy, and the heavenly,
guides our wanderings, calls every faculty off from
base pursuits, tries to reject what hurts us, and recommends what will make us, soul and body, a sweet
savor. And it records the results, without the intervention of higher powers; it is infallible, it can make
no mistakes, whether we are awake to this or not.
You have seen the tell-tales, which are furnished to
various machines for travelling, creating  motivepower, or elaborating products: all the operations
may proceed unconsciously from stage to stage, yet,
however complicated, at the end of the journey the
register yields infallible returns. Our own souls are
the final exhibit which we make to heaven. God
sees us, and sees the whole career, and comprehends
at once its most insignificant details, - thoughts the
most fleeting, motives the most private, desires that
were abandoned or pursued, - when we bring Him
our quality, the total result of living. All the drudgery
is in it, but sifted, as the miner sifts the silt of mountain streams: God knows where the gold came from
as it lies heavy in his hand. Sometimes the whole
soul swings loose from house-keeping, shopkeeping,
pleading, bargaining, ditching and draining, and goes




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straight off towards the invisible, as though the earth
should leave its orbit from love of the sun. Perhaps
not one of our petty gestures has attracted heaven's
attention, but it bends to the coming of a whole soul,
and kisses its kindred.
Consider what a dreadful power this is of self-accumulation. It lays up within us vileness as well as
grace. In moments of temptation we say, No eye sees
me. In the secrecy of our thinking we imagine that
the body is a screen. But although God must be indifferent to omniscience, in a minute and trivial sense,
we are the betrayers; we are recorders of every pulse
and breath. Can a single drop of blood evade the
heart? Can a single vibration help transmitting itself
to the atmosphere? Lift your hand with reverence
to your head, and say, Whatever transpires beneath
this roof is beyond annihilation, can never be recalled;
whatever flies through these windows flies not back
again. Shut out the moth and rust, and fling wide
open only to clear mornings and a perfect heaven.
This intuitive capacity of ordinary men, and its liability to be visited, is threatened with contempt in a
country where men estimate each other so largely by
their power to succeed in various undertakings. The
shrewdness might detect itself turning a cold shoulder
to the innocence. The savage is not dispossessed and
driven to the wall of the Rocky Mountains: he walks
in Broadway, daubs on the war-paint of caucuses and
delivers their whoop, and follows every trail that leads
from Wall Street into plunder. He is a man of business, and, if you do not excite him, he may be gathered
to his fathers guiltless of eating the hearts of his vic



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tims. But if the jaundice of the gold-room infect his
blood, and cast a sickly glare of yellowness over the
landscape, he will no longer distinguish the natural
hue of honor.
A German has written a fantastic story about a
whimsical old gentleman, who, in contempt for the
cutaneous virtue of fashionable life, palmed off in
society a highly-civilized chimpanzee as his son-in-law.
Every thing went well-enough, in spite of some minor
reminiscences of the jungle, till a little temptation, too
suggestive of the home of his youth and the fresh feelings of his unsophisticated years, tore off the skilfullyadjusted mask, and nothing of the man was left except
the properties that had been supplied by the tailor.
A whole street-full of gamblers have thus been noticed
suddenly to strip off twenty thousand years and become
naked vindications of Mr. Darwin's origin of Man.
When the spangles on a garment compensate for the
mire through which it was dragged; when success justifies its own cheating; when the blood wrung out of
somebody drips from a vulgar escutcheon, and is never
wi1 A away so long as the crest is high, its dragon
or its vulture rampant, and the whole emblazonment
fills the street, - the conscience slinks home by the
alleys, and frets because it has lost its right of way.
Its desertwas to succeed, as well as the shiftiness that
demoralizes everybody by its enormous gains. But
this smart social system will pass into anarchy without
an obscure sense of ours that integrity is the founder
and preserver of States. We are needed. There is
not a rill, wandering through quiet places, that does
not eventually temper the bitter, stormy sea with its




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sweet waters. And, when a number of people will
draw all the feeding-streams of their privacy from
plain conscience, it gathers like the rolling of a great
clear current down towards the ocean, into whose turbid brine it shoots with impetuosity, so that sea-faring
men shall detect with surprise the sweetness of the
hills, dividing and refusing to mingle with the tide. A
man's soul may make a very faint mark, the volume
which its activity propels may appear to be a ridiculous trickle, but, if it be clear and cool, the earth thirsts
for it, the heavy sea is waiting to be well tempered by
it,- all nature sighs for freshness, and lifts up its face
to the hills whence comes its help.
These blotches of half-barbarous society must be
touched and arrested by our plain yea and nay. The
aid we give is not measured by the insignificance of our
mind, but by its singleness. What constructs the broad
highway of solid light that paves ocean toward the
rising or the setting sun? The felicity of every single
drop of the water in which a whole sun lies mirrored:
minute, but illuminated, they lead towards the morning, or suggest its return. What a laurel of glory is the
thought that a very little person is so implicated in the
success of his country's real truth, to hold it in a pure
form, to keep it undisturbed by the passions that welter
all around it, to fix one firm spot of fidelity and to stick
by it; as if to say, "Though the whole earth go adrift,
though double-dealing prosper and scorn me, though
the darkness of barbarism invade all my neighborhood,
covering cities and people as waters cover the sea's
bottom, - here I stand, to hold my little trembling
jewel and permit its slight ray to escape me! ' So shines




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a good deed in a naughty world.' Come, friend and
neighbor, and hold your jewel next to mine till the
faint beam flashes; perhaps a word will go forth, Let
there be light! and these little spots of our fidelity
shall melt together into the irrepressible radiance of a
morning."
When we feel the successive shocks which the embezzlers, defaulters, gamblers, over-reachers, give to
the general confidence, they are hints to our neutrality
that nothing will restore faith, blunt the forger's pen,
break the tables where the dice of speculation play with
our prosperity,- nothing, but a fresh issue of the conscience that is minted in a million innocencies. That
is the true return to specie payment, and the arrest of
evils which, we pretend, are tolerated by necessity.
As a great action, performed by a few men under
grievous disadvantages, takes root somewhere upon
the soil of the planet, and after many generations vindicates the original trial, and illustrates the forlorn
faith by appearing in forms of generous polities, in
disfranchised conscience, in ameliorated conditions of
the oppressed, so shall our little candle throw its beams
as far as that. It is a great action to keep faith high
and aggressive in a period when the people wink to
each other applausively at hearing of an admirable
intrigue, and relish the stories whose point is some
successful artifice. It is a great struggle, - founders of
States never equalled it, explorers of new worlds never
went so fari-- to be simple when duplicity and coarseness meet with toleration; to preserve a few wants, a
few plain habits, a few rational and manly objects of
enterprise, when cities go mad with show and guilty




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259

satisfactions. If a few drops of the poison find their
way into a man's high vein. it is a great thing to resist,
to purge the blood, to thrust back the whole terrible
tendency, to wake, flinging the period off as a nightmare. This is the function of a Conscience for Truth.
But Tilith is not inclosed by the fragrant rose-hedges
of innocence. They are planted, rather, as retreats
for health upon its broad domain. Conscience is sensitive to the truths which decide a person's career,
direct him towards charities and causes, foster his taste
for being in a minority, reduce the articles of his theology till a pioneer's pack will lift them easily for a
day's march, at the end of which he divides with his
comrades rations of his love to man. Some critics
profess that Dante has put the young man whom
Jesus loved, but who turned away sorrowfully, into
his third canto, where he describes seeing the shade
of him who from cowardice made the great refusal.*
However that may be, it was a moment when conscience refused itself: the whole ardor of the Truth
hung about the youth's neck, rushed to his possible
attainment, loved its own generous implication of
identity in him, longed to own his unsullied heart and
turn more youth into the pure stream. Was ever a
man so flattered? There is no man who is not so
flattered.
This quality of being loved and chosen never dies
out of the most common or mercenary life. It is there,
if the soul is there: it is liable to be summoned, it can
* " E vidi l'ombra di colui
Che fece per viltate il gran rifluto."
INFERNO, III. 59, 60.




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be empanelled for the great trials of Truth. If the
soul is not there, - in other words, if we suppose that
habits can entirely eat away the columns of conscience
and hope, and bring down the personality which they
sustain into an irretrievable ruin, - then there may be
nothing left to love; but that is because there is nothing left to live. It is a sponging out of the thinking
and emotional characters. Truth never offers conscious love to the crystal or the clod. Whatever is
once desired by the Creator must be always liable
to desire, for it is the invitation of one who is not
afflicted by the caprices of earthly love. It is as essential that God's tendency to love us and desire us should
be infinite as that his power should be, or his skill, or
his justice. When animated nature, struggliig up
through its various degrees of intelligence, reaches a
point where God, not content with propagating all the
changeless types of animals, or with developing one
type from another, shows a desire to recreate, to develop freedom out of matter, to reform intelligence,
to lift it up to accountability, to bring out its latent
truths, to love and long for its obedience, Nature has
reached the point of a rational and personal man,
whom God will no more suffer to slip from his infinite
expectation of owning, of having the whole soul of,
sooner or later, than he will suffer the rose to slip from
his sense of beauty, the planet from his sense of order.
And to the man who turns away sorrowfully or defiantly, and makes the heart of his youth hard against
the arrowy smile, the law of his structure will dispense
as much pain, sooner or later, as will be salutary to
break up his reserve. Can a finite being, by sinning,




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ever make himself impenetrable to an infinite being?
The thought is inconceivable. We cannot use ordinary language, if we think so: all words that express
the relations of created things to creating power are
turned adrift, without a purpose. For such a theory
of the universe a new language must be invented;
but it must be one that man cannot speak. For the
breath of God in man gathers upon his lips in words
of spontaneous reply to God's desire.
What is the whole of our life but an appeal which
Heaven makes to us for our co6peration with its purpose? And what better way is there to discover what
the purpose is, than to take notice of the appeals?
Every being discovers his own object in life by taking
heed to the solicitations which are made for his time,
his gift, his influence, his physical or mental expenditure. Not by consulting bodies of divinity that pretend to explain God's objects in creating us, not by
reading a class of books that are devoted to the narrow
purpose of speaking well of God, making a catalogue
of his attributes, or showing how Jesus manifested
him, but by taking at first hand from God himself his
orders, expressed to us as they are so explicitly in the
next thing that we see must be done, whether we are
charmed with the thing or not. But, in depending
upon our codperation, heaven has not forgotten to make
something in its appeals to us attractive: if not the
thing itself, then the sense of sacrificing attractiveness
for its service; the very dislike to do the thing has its
attractions to a human soul. Its sorrowful turning
away is an intimation to itself that something truly
noble just looked at it in passing.




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We have not a season from youth to age that is not
filled with these expressive hints that we belong to a
spiritual order of creatures, and must do a spiritual
work. But in youth, especially, when the immature
mind is clamorous to find its proper growth in its
appropriate employment, the soul is besieged as
though it were the door at which some largess was
dispensing: there is the turmoil and pressure of a
crowd; there is annoyance, uncertainty of claim. It
is the greatness of the Infinite before these avenues
that communicate with human life. Conditions of the
body, temperaments, the disfavor of circumstances,
sometimes increase the embarrassment to the point of
mental distress, and worry of the conscience. But it
is not long before the prominent suitor emerges from
the crowd, and, pressing a claim that is well founded
in our own nature, urges upon us our own adaptation,
fixing us with a glance of personal love. Sometimes
the soul finds its kindred purpose without hesitation,
or a moment of internal pain, as in water face answers
to face, and the work of life is cheerfully begun. No
man is ever left so poor in opportunities of serving
God that he does not see the face of some truth as it
passes by his place of business and invites him out
upon God's highway. It is some occasion for private, family devotedness, some unpopular cause,
some scouted aspect of divine things, some call of
the country and of humanity, - it is sincerity and
personal surrender in some direction. It says, Take
up that sword - lift up that cross - wield that pen -
feed that mouth - close that wound - bind up that
broken heart - pour that love out of the window -




ï~~A CONSCIENCE FOR TRUTH.          263
let that uncomfortable message through the door;
behold, I stand and knock; the sound is harsh, but
open, and see my handsome face, and bid me in with
joy!
What claim have we to be selected by Truth? It is
because it sees something in us that is akin to itself.
It is the Infinite perceiving itself in the mirror of human intelligence. What a spotless depth youth is to
receive the reflection of that face! Before a single
gale of passion roughens and huddles all the features.
Before egotism begins to look for its own face there,
and is discontented at the intrusion of another and a
mightier countenance that must and will look also,
having no other surface upon which it can be seen.
We are called because we can listen and comprehend
the voice: we hear it as a straying child hears the
mother's voice, that goes round through the bewilderment, groping and searching for the ears so well
attuned by nature to thrill at the dear summons of
deliverance. When your nearest of kin comes calling, you fling the closed casement open, and lean out
with answering smile: and if fortunate vines cluster
and blossom round your life, you break off the rose
and throw it down, the gage of your fine challenge,
then descend to meet it and redeem your pledge.
Noble and uplifting moments of life, when imperishable love solicits you, and some truth or duty within
you breaks through all constraints and rushes into
God's open day to claim affinity with truth! Then is
the moment to return love and to be loved, and to
build the soul's life upon happiness for ever.
How large a part of human pathos turns upon the




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common circumstance that the soul will not recognize
its next of kin, rejects it, under the dominion of some
prepossession, prefers some passing fancy, shrinks
from the entire confidence and devotedness that it will
have before it wholly loves! This is history's continual replacing upon the stage of old tragedies, by new
ones drawn from the same old theme. To be a lost
leader is bad: to desert a cause once embraced, how
full of sorrow! But to refuse when you are tempted
by Truth, and to turn away sorrowfully, perhaps even
coweringly, when some majestic look falls on you, to
deny your own heart to the excellence of thinking or
doing that pleads with it, and seeks to swallow up all
its hesitation in avowal and plighted faith and blissful surrender, to be startled at the sight of your soul's
own blood mantling in the face of your soul's own
truth that was yours from the foundation of the world,
yours by divine fore-ordination, to be not brave enough
even to try to bid your own independence, your own
life's heroism welcome: afraid of it, and running to
shelter, into a neighbor's tenement, into the arms of
old opinions, into the comfortableness of old routines,
glad to get out of the sky into a frame-house, - surely,
there is sadness in this, and the scenes of your tragedy,
though no man is spectator, and no pen records them,
are burnt into your soul by the stamp of your sorrow,
and may there be read at any time by God.
And how different this tragedy is from that which the
sons of God perform at the bidding of earnest expectation! The whole creation groans and travails with
that: but the pain in it is that kind which belongs to
the waiting for some manifestation, not the kind which




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265

agonizes in dread of manifestation, in abject dislike
of the tears which Truth must shed. As different as
the tragedies of cowards are from the tragedies of
brave men; as different as the sneaking pallor of
murder is from the blush of battle. There is a moment in the career of every person when the choice is
clearly given to him between the pain which kills and
the pain which saves: he knows, once at least, that
something loves him, and he can choose between the
trial of following true love and the catastrophe of deserting it. Every boy must come to this, rude, indifferent, coarse-grained as he may seem to be, fit only for
giving and receiving blows of fate: the handsome face
of some occasion will transfix him. Every girl must
come to this, however fleeting, shallow, and trivial her
ways of life may be, herself prepossessed with unsubstantial motives, beset with vanities, launching her
hours, as one lets bubbles from a pipe, to mark the
frail iris that the sun will paint for her ere they flatten.
Manly, well-proportioned, exacting, thrilling Duty will
claim her heart at last; some face of Truth will point
to its crown of thorns and woo her pity; some bold
eye, like a heaven full of daylight, will challenge her
gaze till it droops in thankful acquiescence. There is
the God within us, and the God without: they twain
must become one flesh. Father and mother of the
old life must be continually deserted for the marriages
of' the soul.
How can we ever be really sure that something
divine invites us? It is important to consider if there be
any way of distinguishing between one's conceit, one's
prejudice, one's audacity, and a plain call to believe a
12




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thing, to act a thing; between one's timidity and a clear
hint to avoid a thing. Our preferences for our own
notions and habits may easily appear to us plain calls.
Our conservative tendency to hold on to a mode of life,
a style of faith, a way of thinking, is one of the most
common things which deceive us. We suppose we are
doing God's will when we do what we have done before.
The duty which unsettles that, cannot be of God, we
think. Nothing is easier than to mistake our dread
of society, our personal implication with dear friends
and relatives, for a spiritual call to remain where we
are, to think the old thoughts, to repeat the old phraseology of opinions into which we have grown comfortably, as into coats, to keep up the ordinary round that
we have so often proved to be excellent and pleasant.
And what disguises selfish calculation will borrow, so
that our hankering for something will appear like a
loving for something, particularly when all the grosser
part of our nature is suborned to give false testimony
on this point; so that, for instance, our desire for
admiration may appear like a real love for following
something that gets this admiration, and things, good
in themselves, may be bought by us, whole slavecoffles of them, and driven afield to raise for us consideration. How can the divine be distinguished from
the common and unclean!
Every person is provided with his own test of this
thing; he can go into the gold-bearing regions of God
and make his own assay. Can a miner go to Colorado and at once separate the ore from slag and refuse,
and cannot the soul discern and reject the low surroundings of Truth? Are the perishable senses more




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267

trustworthy than the immortal conscience? Has Truth
been made lovable by us, and are we yet at a loss to
know what truth to love? The soul settles this matter
for itself, sometimes with joy, sometimes with sorrow: both feelings testify that a competent judge is at
hand.
And see how simple the way is. Whatever looks
on us and loves us does so by virtue of the kindred
quality in ourselves. Then we may know that it is
genuine by the way it pleads to be brought to our
notice. And it is a pleading that offers disquiet rather
than content, and invites us into a transitional state,
where we often experience conflicting emotions, because it is a transforming, regenerating love. It does
not know what placidity is. It is a very exacting love,
and wails unless it can have a whole, unmortgaged
heart. It solicits us with the conscious pride of equality. Your dog may be fed with bones beneath your
table; if you had a slave he might give you pleasre
by his cringing: any common gratification may take
the toll you throw; but the sweet sternness of your
wife overpowers you to give the freedom of your person into the keeping of a perfect freedom. We may
know when it is the Truth that is waiting for us by
the feeling of high kinship, and we see how different
it is from a feeling of low acquaintanceship. The
soul knows it in a breath. It can never mistake the
irresistible attraction which comes to sweep our greater
will away in spite of our petty wills; for it is an
invitation to the soul to fall into line with all the other
worlds of God, and to sing the song of the morning
stars in that great procession.




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AMERICAN RELIGION.

We may distinguish reluctance to follow Truth from
a dread lest we follow Error, in this, that the Truth
draws while it seems to repel. The repulsion is only
our own tardiness. The Truth was punctual: we
were not quite up to time. If the thing that loves us
be truly lovable, it penetrates our first alarms with a
feeling of sublimity, such as arises in the presence of
danger, and that which is excited by heroism putting
itself in peril to serve some great purpose of rescue.
There is always an element that tries the nerves, that
takes away the breath, that bids the pulse bound wildly
as the new task is assumed. This enlarges the whole
organization; more blood is made, more morbid
muscle is repaired; the gifts of the soul repay all its
first tremors by expansion, and at last it serenely weds
the Truth that seemed to court so roughly. It was
only seeming: we were taken by surprise, we were
not expecting to be so frankly summoned. And yet it
is our own flesh and blood that opens this wooing
with the words that startle: Let the dead bury the
dead: leave all and follow me - the old house, the
old lands, the old estate - I settle a hundred fold portion upon your fidelity.
We may know that it is a truth which has got
audience of us, and not our own conceits and prejudices, when it dislodges us and sends us elsewhere,
when we are detailed for duties, when our easy quarters are beaten up, and we have to rough it in the
field, when we are selected for the forlorn hope,
when we are ordered to the front. Pride of opinion,
love of comfort, a desire to keep on good terms with
our circle, these are never haunted with the enterprise




ï~~A CONSCIENCE FOR TRUTH.          269
to colonize a virgin soil and plant a flag there. But
Truth, in every one of her stages, longs to leave some
things behind: the truth of morals inspires us to
abandon the old habitat of our vices, the truth of religion drags us out of our doctrinal burrows to explore,
to take possession. God cannot be exhausted. He
has ever new things for new spirits, who become the
most religious when they submit to this onward tendency, and break away in pursuit of the infinite mystery. It hails us in the van. Have you never heard
its voice, paying men that most exquisite of flatteries,
by asking for their hearts? We cannot conceal our
satisfaction, but break into smiles and adoring gestures, and bend towards that invitation as the Earth
towards its Sun.




ï~~XI.

CONSTANCY TO AN IDEAL.
HE Ideal is not a phrase in high repute among
practical people, who suspect it of excusing some
immediate incapacity, like that which would recommend clouds to the selectmen for a new style of pavement, or a balloon's aimless whirling instead of some
direct and planted way of locomotion. There may be an
upper westward current; but in the mean time the rail
gets over the ground by all the points of the compass.
The Ideal will possibly carry a person off by some
aerial route to Paris; but if he would return to Boston
he must alight. This shrewdness is furthered, too, by
the feeling that the phrase is chiefly the property of
poets, who are exercised only in expression, and cannot be counted on for work. The influence which
imaginative expression exerts upon a people is undervalued because it does not enrich the instant, but passes
into the temperament by slow absorption, and appears
at length in quality. Men cannot wait for that. There
is work on hand that is to be done with what quality
exists, or not at all. A man of business cannot see
that the poem which he read over night affected,
unless to perturb, his next day's operations. He will




ï~~CONSTANCY TO AN IDEAL.

271

do better with his leisure next time by getting well
posted from the commercial columns. He rises more
buoyantly upon stocks: the pathos that wrings his
heart is when they fall, and his streamers are no
longer gaily afloat. The expression of music and art
serves him only for enjoyment, and he has this advantage over the idealist that nobody can calculate the
subtile orbit of influence, nor show how the song and
symphony make blood. It is only by accident if one
or two men in a generation have their heart or stomach
so exposed that the physicians can observe its function. But if every brain were unroofed, there is no
Asmodeus skilled to detect tones and colors jostling its
atoms into more spiritual companionship. One must
be a part of the violin's grain to know how the vibrations of the strings record themselves in the dead
wood of the instrument: not dead, indeed, if it is
capable of assimilating rhythm.
But there are two kinds of the Ideal: one tends
toward expression, the other animates all kinds of
labor, and secures results. When a practical man
says that he can do without the Ideal, he does not
understand his own business. When a prosaic moralist says the same, and takes a contract to reform or to
establish, he throws up the material that he must work
in. It is intangible, but has a pressure of so many
pounds to the inch, and he stands drenched in it while
he pretends he does not breathe.
There is some ideal stimulus in every kind of work,
none the less definite because the worker appears to
be unconscious of it. A gang of men with sledgehammers go fastening ties westward toward a Golden




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AMERICAN RELIGION.

Gate. There is expectation in every stroke: not a
man of them but proposes to arrive somewhere by
that track on which he is hammering. Family bread,
affection, independence, enlargement: these invisible
yearnings give the gold-glimmer to his Sacramento.
He is an idealist while he is faithful to his work. And
the country which hires his labor, and affects only to
be wanting to reach the Pacific thereby, is stimulated
by more than all the spices of the Orient. There is
no such ideality on earth as that which compels a
nation to expand all its powers of intelligence, and to
reach eventually the Rights of Man.
Something is to be overcome, wherever the ideal
road is travelled. The effort may be stamped with
the coarsest realism; but the ideality is in the effort.
We do not know the outlets of every thing that we
perform, nor the subtile connection between our simplest acts and our loftiest attainments. It sometimes
seems a great way from the body to the soul; but a
very slight deed may bridge over the abyss of that
ocular deception. The soul is waiting close at hand
to receive the benefit of our least integrity. So that
very ordinary things may be the essentials to secure
our spiritual advance: begrimed and sturdy engineers
who rapidly pontoon for us a formidable-looking current, and let us transport our whole splendid equipment to the opposite shore. The Indian knows that a
buffalo trail will take him surest to water. The American condescends to follow the Indian, and his cities
rise opposite to ferries and at -the confluences of
streams. Then at length the buffalo pilots thither the
silent steps of Religion and Liberty.




ï~~CONSTANCY TO AN IDEAL.

273

When Frederick the Great said he always noticed
that Providence favored the heaviest battalion, he only
stated in a sarcasm what God in history states religiously: that he is on the side of valor, foresight, selfcontrol, wheresoever and on whatsoever objects these
great qualities of an overcoming man are exercised.
God, having no human pride, does not regard the
nature of the object, but its intrinsic difficulties and
its drift towards some beauty. An ideal object is one,
however material, that gives the world a whole-souled
man. And it is on this principle that natural forces
seem to have selected their men and nations through
the whole of history. It is the forecasting that moulds
and reconstructs a raw popular material, till it is able
to occupy, or to create, some important position, to
assert a truth, to breast a flood of tyranny, to be caught
in some way by the drift and amplitude of the divine
order. If people have settled in spots towards which
the streams of the past converge in order to find the
outlet of civil and religious liberty, or if their ethical
quality slowly selects spots that invite either the friendship or hostility of reigning ideas, and suggest rude
engineering to arrange a battle-field, they are certain
to be subjected to the training which shall best prepare them for their great effort. This training consists in overcoming something, no matter how physical,
or how remote in character from the future issue.
I know of nothing, for example, more striking,
than the way in which the Dutch people were prepared to maintain liberty of thought and worship.
A poor Frisian race was selected, and kept for centuries up to its knees in the marshes through which
12*




ï~~274

AMERICAN RELIGION.

the Rhine emptied and lost itself. Here it lived in
continual conflict with the Northern Ocean, forced
literally to hold the tide at arm's length, while a few
acres of dry land might yield a scanty subsistence.
Here circumstance kept them, half submerged, till,
instead of obeying a natural impulse to emigrate to
solid and more congenial land, they acquired a liking
for their amphibious position. The struggle piqued
them into staying and seeing it out. For centuries
they appeared to be doing nothing but building and
repairing dykes, when really they were constructing a
national will and persistency which was a dyke for
tyranny to lash in vain. By keeping out the water
they trained themselves to keep out the more insidious tide of bigotry and spiritual death. What a
homely and inglorious school for a great Republic,
that taught her how to watch patiently by tending
dykes and ditches, how to close a breach against ruin
by standing with succor in the mid-tide when the
sea-wall crumbled, how to convert almost continual
defeat into victory, by keeping hold of a drowned
position, cultivating acres that had just been drenched
with salt, flowing back again upon depopulated districts and holding the old line against the sea! All
these stubborn traits appeared afterward clothed in
noble forms of moral and mental life: still there was
the old breakwater running through the national
temper, and the Will of the people was like one of
the ancestral Frisians, who could stand in a flood all
day and not be chilled. The wisdom was vindicated
which compelled them first to make a soil for ideal
liberty to flourish in. And as nations are prepared




ï~~CONSTANCY TO AN IDEAL.

275

for great destinies, so are men: the constitution must
catch free and vigorous movements in some mode of
life fatal to indolence and vulgarity, the Will must be
roused and learn how to handle the helm, no matter
how rude the objects of the voyage are.
The law upon which this principle rests is a very
simple one. As you would never suspect the force
of water till it breaks against something, so human
volition and freedom never exist except in the act of
overcoming. Before that moment they only remain
as a condition of the mind which may be roused to
action. What a difference between the sluggish level
of a summer sea, with no more strength and depth,
apparently, than to run up and lap the land, and the
same surface when it seems to roll with a succession
of deliberate, overpowering purposes, betraying what
a depth it has to plough upon and yet not plough to
the bottom, as it lifts and towers against some barrier
put there to express its might! In the act of striking,
the graceful and voluptuous roll is changed to power.
Without an obstacle for the growing billow to tend
towards, it would pass unestimated across the surface.
After once seeing how it can strike and shatter, the
free wave has more weight to the observer. So a
man has a great, silent, heaving element of volition,
but it never develops energy till it touches something:
then, if it singles out an obstacle to overcome, it carries
the whole nature along against it. For the Will is the
directing-impulse of all the gifts and tendencies a man
possesses; every sweep of it is backed by the whole
deep behind: when it strikes, action and reaction are
developed, the whole nature is thrown into a healthy




ï~~276

AMERICAN RELIGION.

ferment, and every power is enlisted to make the
overcoming power available. A man cannot come
out of a real conflict without feeling an exhilaration
of his whole mind and heart. He leaps all over, like a
sea full of billows. He has asserted his individuality,
and has become a man among men. So the thrill of
exercise benefits the blood as well as the muscles, and
the nerves as well as the blood. And, above all, the
consciousness of one victory surprises all the powers
into making attempts of their own to taste the same
feeling of success.
There is no real difference in all the labor which
is performed between the moiling of the housedrudge up to the combining, choiring evolutions of
the poet's brain. Constancy, everywhere the same,
like the one nutritious principle in various kinds of
food, is the element which makes all work substantially the same. And, like food itself, how work
appears in an infinity of forms, on different surfaces,
on different soils in the same surface, growing up into
diverse colors. And yet in all the principle is identical. As by chemistry we resolve every edible thing,
from the root painfully torn up by the savage to the
wheat that falls gracefully before the reaper, and the
grape that is plucked with songs, into the same elements of nourishment suited to the unvarying economy
of the human frame: so we may suppose that all the
labor of human hands and brains, from the stitching of
the overworked and drooping seamstress up to the slow
threading of the logician's thought, from the monotonous crack of the teamster's whip up to the telling
succession of the orator's great periods, from the




ï~~CONSTANCY TO AN IDEAL.

277

ends of the fingers to the heads of the nerves, is resolved by the spiritual chemistry of the Creator into
simplicity and elemental identity.
The poets and men of expression have not, then,
monopolized the Ideal. We must be poetical enough
to detect it in the moral uses of the ordinary life we
lead, that is so pathetic with the struggles of constancy
against physical and mental circumstances.   No
matter how sensitive a young person's heart may be,
like a bare nerve in the weather, flattered by the soft
touch of music and colors, pared into gracious action
by the chisel that builds the statue's symmetry,
twitched by the finger of tragedy till the fount of tears
is opened, - his ideal life does not begin till he turns
away from these to take up his own instrument of
work, to chip a conscience out of school-keeping,
type-setting, engineering, cooking and house-work, to
quarry some vital activity of a free people. Because
he himself is to become a poem, fairer than any that
was ever written, by overcoming indolence and a bad
disposition, in favor of some immediate exigency.
That is the story of his siege of Troy, his wandering
of Ulysses, his Paradise regained. The ideal of his
constancy is the moral sense which some personal
deficiency or poverty inflames, till it becoms his pillar
of fire in the wilderness. It does not shape him so
much to remember the Odyssey, as it does to tie himself to his own mast and sail past the Sirens; or to go
through Circe's den not only unsullied but a liberator of
his comrades. When we see the course of Nature breeding in such schools its human genius, we may know
how closely allied are conscience and superior talents.




ï~~278

AMERICAN RELIGION.

Underneath the slow grinding suddenly a facet flashes.
It is true you may grind at a sea-shore pebble till
nothing comes of it but sand, but before you begin to
grind all stones appear of similar texture. The real
ideality is hid in this persevering against the most
humiliating and prosaic conditions, such as the Creator maintained through chaos and his scarcely less
chaotic creatures of the early epochs. A million or
two years of coarse persistency vanquish matter, and
Shakspeare supplants the Saurian. Why should he
not in every man and woman? for conscience can
become Shakspearian underneath a hod of mortar
that mounts round by round to top the house. Young
people must learn that their creative and inspiring
impulse is not derived from high Art, but from accommodation to low requirements in a high vein to
make them serve, to extort from them such exquisite
tones as the Russian did out of his bits of wood cut
from different trees, till he converted the forest into
a harmonicon; and that other obscure inventor, who
coaxed a heap of various stones to yield up its separate notes, and to fall into place in perfect octaves.
All the manifoldness of modern labor appears, to
the first superficial judgment, to be only setting the
rich rim of earth with the jewels of cities, embossing
it with the traits of human enterprise, and shaking
out the white sails of intercourse on every water, that
man's dexterity may pass from hand to hand, to equalize comfort and success. But these things are the
dead Scripture of a divine Ideal; they have no meaning until we perceive that human work is a means of
human ennoblement, and that all products thus pass




ï~~CONSTANCY TO AN IDEAL.

279

from hand to hand that souls may be equalized, and
divine Providence cease to be a monopoly.
It sometimes appears doubtful if we really appreciate this question. When I see the vulgar ambition
of men who strive to better their condition by using
labor of some kind merely to break their way into
stock-jobbing, note-shaving, cotton-broking; when the
healthy farm is left for the dry and sultry pavement,
where men's manhood goes up in steam and leaves their
sub-soil barren; when it appears to be the object to
do the minimum of work for the maximum of comfort,
and to join a well-clothed mob that goes wild with
speculating, jobbing, lobbying, contracting, living by
the wits, - a doubt comes over my mind if the young
men understand the name, America. This is the
meaning of that word which the rhetorician and the
demagogue admire: Whatsoever thy hands find to do,
do it with all thy might! Not with thy meanness,
nor with thy shiftiness, but with thy might, with thy
whole soul, as the winds blow, as the sun shines, as
the tide runs up a continent; with all the native elements of a free man, not with the adroitness of a
juggler, to play tricks, and outwit everybody with
such a superfluous appearance of sincerity. Find
something to do, not something in the city to save
the trouble of doing; find something that increases
the values of the world, not something that merely
plays with them a game of shuttlecock. To all this
strenuous idleness which has demoralized our great
cities, God repeats the ancient necessity: " Earn
thy bread in the sweat of thy brow." We have a
country while Liberty wears those glistening drops,




ï~~280

AMERICAN RELIGION.

seeing that earth is too poor to match, out of all her
crown jewels, the native tiara of a Republic. But
whoever lives in such a way as to make labor seem
degrading, which he cannot do without stealing the
labor of other men, prepares to betray Liberty, for he
has already parted with his own.
Why is it such a fatal thing when a country has
me,n who throw discredit upon labor? Wherever a
theory prevails that work is degrading, great mischief
ensues: not because a false ambition withdraws needfuil hands from employments, for there are many kinds
of work that demand diversities of gifts. If a man
lays down one tool to take up another, he may still
be faithful to the Commonwealth. And it is not because men work badly who work under the contempt
of their fellows, although there is no labor so ill done
as that which is so meanly requited. But some kind
of necessity - hunger, the climate, or the whip - will
compel men to work in spite of human scorn: and
the work will correspond to the necessity. In degrading labor the mischief is done to mankind by degrading Providence: it is a practical infidelity to the idea
that God is a Creator. See how it operates. Work
runs through the universe: it is the condition of permanence and growth. Mankind is not retarded so
much by inefficiency as by the arrogance that will not
imitate God, for a certain per cent of inefficiency must
always accompany so many births, being only another
accident of malformation. But God, in prosecuting
his divine schemes, allows for inefficiency but not for
infidelity; not for the arrogance that forgets it has
been born, not for the ignorance that calls it an honor




ï~~CONSTANCY TO AN IDEAL.

281

to do nothing. When one variety of work is thought
degrading, all the other varieties become impaired.
It is a revolt of the whole working organization against
the order of, the world. Intellect itself is betrayed
when it is anxious to make it appear that no vulgar
labors occupy it. It is trying to separate itself from
the natural religion of mankind, and to pass off for
something better than a laborer. What intellect God
puts into the strokes of every day, as he thinks it not
degrading to have his petroleum ready for the tap,
his veins of coal and granite ready for the blaster's
drill, his oak rimmed for keelsons with the hardness of
a thousand years! He puts slag into his iron, quartz
into his gold, wildness and peril into his nursling
whales, and rejoices to provoke our honest labor.
There is not a stroke made by pen or pickaxe that is
not in answer to the mind of God. He holds the
most precious things beyond our arm's length,- gems,
gold, beauty; he worketh hitherto to make them, and
we must work to win them, - diamonds in the river
channel, pearls in the duskiness of Indian seas, liberty
in every acre of the soil. How long His mind must
brood before he can bring forests to lignite, and lignite
to coal; before the element of carbon will bleach
and whiten into the Koh-i-noor, before the soil of a
Republic can be transmuted into the Rights of Man!
This is all the industry of God, who knows that idleness is chaos, and an idle man the soul's disorganizer.
Wherever this tendency to undervalue labor exists,
one service at least is performed, though no man may
lift his finger, for it puts into a rough, symbolic shape
the disease of reverie which infects smart people with




ï~~282

AMERICAN RELIGION.

the notion that their gift of sensibility, their claim to
attainment, or conceit of superiority, is a fine and
rather exclusive performance in the interest of an
ideal impulse.  Some people, thus afflicted, break
into verse, mistaking their mood for a touch of the
divine imagination, inflate their thin fabric, and look
down upon the flatness of the world. Thus crudity,
hysteria, and verbal facility sail airily over solid continents of struggling merit, never to return.  But
plenty of friends distend this self-satisfaction with a
belching flattery, so that continual relays of ft float
jauntily above the silence of faithful souls.  These
aerial contrivances bear easily the weight of their contrivers, and carry them into the endless circuit of the
winds.
It is worth considering how both self-satisfaction
and self-distrust damage our best ideas,'and let down
our constancy to them.
When Thorwaldsen had finished his remarkable
statue of Christ, he was observed to be very sad; and
to a friend who asked the reason, he said: "My genius
is decaying."  " How so?"  "My statue of Christ is
the first of all my works that has satisfied me. Hitherto my idea has always far outrun my execution. But
if now I am satisfied, I know I shall never have a
great idea again."
In the struggle for life and for moral promotion we
arrive at certain points where our greatest danger
threatens us. It is that of being content with arriving.
Contests that result in our favor, combinations that
humor us, moments when we baffle temperament and
snatch a moral life, have a chance still left in favor of




ï~~CONSTANCY TO AN IDEAL.

283

evil: that, namely, of demoralizing us by a feeling
of satisfaction. There was an old general who made
a successful landing of his troops upon a hostile shore:
his first act before advancing was to burn the ships
that brought him. A falling back was then no longer
to be thought of. That is the way we ought to treat
our attainments: sacrifice them to the necessity of
victory, otherwise they only become the opportunities
for declining the contest that impends. And a contest
is always waiting in the front. To whatever spot we
travel we find that we have only reached a place for
discovering a necessity for travelling again, or of losing
the advantages already gained. If a man could really
come up abreast of his ideal, he would be no better
off than the circumnavigators who reach the point
from which they started. For to have no longer an
ideal to pursue is the same as having never set out.
So, fortunately, the spiritual life is not a succession of
little horizons, whose surmises and expectations only
delude us around to the place where first we lifted
anchor. We shall never see that insipid calm again,
nor be fastened to its buoys.
We reach certain points of our spiritual development where the great danger threatens us of being
too conscious that we have got so far, too content with
it, less difficult to please than before, a little hurt by
the obvious advantages we have gained. Hannibal
overstaid his time after the battle of Cannae: his
quartermasters, instead of getting ready rations for a
march to Rome, were counting how many bushels of
knight's rings had been stripped from the bodies
of the slain; and the common soldiers lost their disci



ï~~284

AMERICAN RELIGION.

pline in months of high living. The best and most aspiring of people are apt to have their Plains of Capua,
where they linger to make a luxury of their successes.
Men who are in a condition to push on are the most
demoralized by waiting. Soldiers say that the hardest trial, next to that of continually falling back, is a
check given to their instinct that a prime advantage
has put them in prime order for an immediate advance. Napoleon used to risk something on the
strength of this instinctive confidence.
Some of our most noted reveries of satisfaction and
distrust look their worst when they are unflinchingly
translated into the vernacular. This is a task which
men sometimes undertake for themselves. But it is
the nature of reverie to resolve action and thinking
into mere nebulous possibility, to recur thus to a condition that precedes the formative and deciding Word.
It is well to precipitate into words some of these
vague moods of the best people. Here is one of
them: " How well I have done! I appear to have
got over this fault; I have checkmated my obtrusive
temperament: it is so long since I gave way to it -
so many weeks or months since the last fit of spleen,
ill-temper, impure thinking, grudge of other people,
envy of wealth, beauty or goodness. I have had a
whole year of high-minded feeling; it has been signalized by a good many hours which I will claim contained a consciousness of God. Yes, I have had
some beautiful hours: stop, my soul, let us remember
them, and recall together the dates and circumstances.
I feel myself sinking into a delicious recurrence of
past excellence: what summer afternoon ever brought




ï~~CONSTANCY TO AN IDEAL.

285

me such repose, or lulled the senses and the mind into
such harmony. It is midsummer's escape from elemental rages.  " Now, if ever, are perfect days."
Satisfied memory broods like a clear sky over my life.
It puts an ear to my earth and tries if it be in tune.
Whenever a man is fascinated by the coast on
which he has landed, it is fortunate for him if his
conscience, without hesitation, cries, "Burn your
ships!" The past is dead, all its actions have fallen
off; they did duty, like leaves, for the season. If a
man rakes his dead leaves together, it is a poor and
thin compost that he makes. Pass on, the ground
will soon be encumbered with them. Only boys like
to hear them rustling, as they scud through on purpose
to stir them up. Men are not made for such conceited
reveries. Burn your ships, and let the impassable
sea-line be your base. Plunge right into the ideal
future, pursuing after pomp finer than any that you
have overtaken, more sensibility for the divine presence, more knowledge of its laws and satisfaction
with them, more fraternity.for man, which is divinity
for God, - more prodigality of all the gifts, sending
them out right and left, cool and bold, to beat up the
thickets and forage for truth.
Sometimes a mortified and discouraged   person
might recognize this plain speaking: " I can't get
on. What force I have I bring to bear in the right
direction, but the rails seem to be ice-coated, and I do
not run. The bias towards a certain evil in me turns
out to be strong enough to set my purpose of overcoming it at defiance. My ancestors have been too
hard upon me: they lived first, and they lived fast.




ï~~286

AMERICAN RELIGION.

The emotions indulged by them gave a warp to the
brain, a generation at a time, - so small as never to
excite an active jealousy, and to leave a slim balance
of regrets, - till here I am, at the end of the process,
with a disposition slowly deposited, like a coral reef,
against whose concrete my will is weak-as water.
My forefathers only paid the interest as it accrued:
but they left the debt to me. Here I am, imprisoned
with my better ideal in an organization that is scored
by the fret of all the years. Who wonders when
rocks upon the coast begin to crumble? The first
billow found them as smooth as itself: but time,
though never in a hurry, is always patient, and feels
after its crack to work upon. By and by the cliff
stands waist-deep in its own debris, and every kind of
greediness can climb up and paste its impudent placard upon it. So that now I am read of all men to
mean sloth, gluttony, conceit, concupiscence. I stand
for something in the line of self-indulgence, and my
very face advertises what is to be had within."
This also may be recognized: " I cannot keep my
temper under slights and provocations that other men
shed; for I am boiled down and put up of several
hundred considerable tempers, that were all well
nourished in their day." May not this also find its
counterpart: "What is my love for drink but the
distillation of all the excellent liquor that my genial
ancestors consumed in hospitable exigencies? They
were slow to be affected: but I am at the end of the
feast, and the drunkenness has just set in. The few
years of my better tendencies have before them the
task of undoing the work of two or three convivial




ï~~CONSTANCY TO AN IDEAL.

287

generations. How shall I set to work? It seems to
me as if I am a trap for drink: I catch it by foreordination. I may as well carry out the unexpressed
wishes of those whose legatee and sole executor I am."
And here is some person who has moments of
awakening to the consciousness that his chief love is
avarice. But he comes of a money-making family,
and the bright round dollars have been the blooddisks that circulated to the heart and brain. Its
proverb, earliest whispered into youthful ears, has
been, " With all thy understanding get to getting." Is
it remorse, is it consolation, or is it despair when the
latest representative of these besotted exemplars might
be thus expressed: " They took care of the pennies,
and now-the pounds are taking a sarcastic care of me.
Their small profits are my great undoing. They
fastened this rag-picker's wallet to my back, and told
me that the world was my gutter for me to farm. I
rake it, and the heavier and more intolerable grows
my pack with the findings I jerk into it, the closer it
clings around my chest and heart. Will death itself
undo this accumulation of so many sordid minds?
Will the soul, that has been bent double by the stooping of so many upon it from the past, shoot up to its
true stature in the kingdom where the dollar does not
reign? Welcome the hour that may put me where a
man cannot take a dollar in exchange for a soul!"
We have all seen many persons who appear to us
quite ruined. Perhaps there is a better judge of that;
but, if it be true, the fact is not so revolting to us as
the shock is which it gives to our natural preferences.
The most deeply compromised person will prefer to




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AMERICAN RELIGION.

think that health has not become impossible for him;
he shares the instinct of nature which struggles desperately to make its growths shapely under gnarled
conditions. A  man clings to his share of a divine
ideal of recuperation. No number of damaged structures can vote down our feeling that supreme Good
aspires through man to become expressed and organized; it shakes its signals of direction through the
densest fog that we can exhale. We see the light
discolored, but do not mistake it for darkness; we
observe whence it comes, and trust to its hints regarding our safety.  On various principles of judgment
preachers declare these men and those women to be
abandoned. The epithet remands God back to chaos.
The poet grants us a better glimpse of the hold on
life that innocence possesses: -
"I helped a man to die, some few weeks since,
Warped even from his go-cart to one end -
The living on princes' smiles, reflected from
A mighty herd of favorites. No mean trick
He left untried; and truly well-nigh wormed
All traces of God's finger out of him.
Then died, grown old; and just an hour before -
Having lain long with blank and soulless eyes -
He sate up suddenly, and with natural voice
Said, that in spite of thick air and closed doors
God told him it was June; and he knew well,
Without such telling, hare-bells grew in June;
And all that kings could ever give or take
Would not be precious as those blooms to him."
Does not that precious cherishing snatch a new June
from the collapse of the body, as a wrecker disentangles a still living babe from the last freezing strain of




ï~~CONSTANCY TO AN IDEAL.

289

a drowned mother? We can only bid our imagination frame, in the interest of the universe, at least a
remonstrance against the destruction of the babe.
For we must always presume that the faintest pulse
is a possible chance for the heart to recover its full
beat.
The world could transact nothing, and no race could
ever develop its special felicity, if the ideal of goodness ever deserted its infelicitous men and women.
But in many a case its continuing becomes tedious as
a disease. Some of the most finely organized people,
advantaged by good fathers and mothers who have
been long dead, never forget that when a good past
culminates in a man it is the consecrating of a temple
that has been long building: still they fall into heartbroken moments of stupor, flatness, and inanity.
The body has its dull days and misrepresents the
weather to the spirit. A shadow makes no noise and
is never announced: people picking flowers in the
fields first know of it when the chill slides up to them.
The body is often the cloud that comes eating up the
landscape thus. But the mind also has its unhealthy
tricks: the worst of which among fine people is the
trick of letting society do all their living for them, the
defect of holding no great purpose, of having nothing
dependent upon self-sacrifice,- not one beggar of a
cause to feed, not one breast of a challenging truth in
which to flesh the sparkling sword of the ideal, that
it may draw the blood of heaven, and rejoice to have
its sparkle thus quenched. Then the noble soul declares its regrets, and does not scruple to paint deep
its shame in melancholy upon the cheeks: so deep,
13




ï~~290

AMERICAN RELIGION.

as if it would announce to all beholders, " It is too
late: it is over with me -I am dying of too much
purposeless purposing. Smattering of many tongues
has spoiled my mother-tongue. I stammer with petty
fluency. I have every thing to express and forty nothings to express it in: an active imagination clapped in
the social stocks; an ardent soul, tethered to a peg,
I eat all that's succulent within my range. Why do
I not pull up the peg, and exchange my paddock for a
landscape? Alas, it is too late: my trick of indolence,
of squeamishness, my one selfish streak, whatever it
may be, has been spared too long. -The peg has
taken root: so here I am, browsing around and looking through a rail-fence at the arrival and departure
of the gods."
I say to all persons who have these regrets, born of
vice, of self-indulgence, of physical despondency, or
of baffled minds: I say to all whose cry declares that
their ideal is not dead, Burn your ships! You have
arrived, but you have run your ships upon the shore
stern-foremost, and their radiant figure-heads are out
to sea: look out lest tide and wind float you off from
the firm feel of the land. This is your time, between
two tides: over with your freight, and dare to meet,
by this one resolute rejection of the past, all that you
dread, - the whole palpable, solid difficulty that lies
before you.
"Knowing ourselves, our world, our task so great,
Our time so brief, -'tis clear if we refuse
The means so limited, the tools so rude
To execute our purpose, life will fleet,
And we shall fade, and leave our task undone.




ï~~CONSTANCY TO AN IDEAL.

291

Rather, grow.wise in time: what though our work
Be fashioned in despite of their ill-service,
Be crippled every way? 'Twere little praise
Did full resources wait on our good-will
At every turn."
What accusations of the corrupt society in Europe
and America appeal to ears that are reluctant to believe the facts! Pamphlets are written to expose the
trickery of gold and whiskey rings, of railroad combinations and rivalries, of the lobbying that goes on
beneath historic panels where moments of abandonment to great ideas are recorded. Why do we suspect
the truth with such difficulty, and can hardly tolerate
the thought that man has lived so long, suffered so
much, and let the blood of such hearts run away, to
end in this knavery? Because we inherit a portion of
the divine imagination, and no society was ever corrupt enough to extinguish it. When Alaric, in the
year 408, appeared before Rome, and finally fixed the
ransom of the city at 6,ooo pounds of gold and 30,000
of silver, the patricians could not scrape enough together without melting down some of the statues of
the gods: among others that of Virtus     Valor.
That is generally melted away before an Alaric can
get near enough to demand a ransom. When our old
parties did it at the bidding of Slavery, it was called
" effecting a Compromise."  But Alaric appeared,
and the wicked epoch fell strangling in its own blood.
Sometimes God prefers to wear an uncouth and barbarian aspect rather than leave his Ideal to be gambled away by the sharpers of mankind. 'To a dissolute
society he seems a Goth; but there is fresh blood in




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those angry veins, and the light of eternity in those
intolerable eyes. For mankind is expressly built to
perpetuate God's pure intentions:.we dream of them
and aspire to reorganize them as fast as they give hints
to us of our own hostility. Something greater than
our greatest vice is shaken by a remembrance of divine
origin, and wakes up in time to pull back the world
from the brink. It threatens in the gestures of all
persons who are only half liberated from our selfishness: in the workman and the needlewoman it protests
and frames its piteous indictment; in the hands of
the social critic its rapier plays dangerously before
besotted eyes. Its dire necessity becomes so great
that it overcomes at length the sexton and the parishcommittee, elbows through all the sanctity, and
rushes up the pulpit stairs, imploring and reproachful,
as though its right had always been to have started
thence to carry divine nature down among the people.
No privilege is high enough to look down upon God's
imagination: for having once conceived his own right
mind, he devotes eternity to Virtue and the Rights
of Man.
The great resource that man first derived from God,
and all men from him and from each other ever since,
is this good-will that prolongs the act of creation, and
keeps us, in spite of failures, still capable to undertake
morality.  It survives the most eccentric periods of
private or public life, and is so competent, indeed,
that it seems to select the path to its object that
lies through evil, as if conscious that there it would
be tested and toughened, and driven to reality. It has
a tendency to youthful reverie which is broken up




ï~~CONSTANCY TO AN IDEAL.

293

by some extravagance of behavior. Evil cannot be
justified until God is detected sharpening upon it the
sword of the spirit: or, shall I say, it is a rude and
jangling sheath in which the sword blazes to itself
and bides its time.
In our first unchartered moments, when we discover that Nature can be a bit of a spend-thrift, we
have a companion better than all with whom we
sport, and the inner sense reaches for its hand: as
when a youth, blind-folded for a game, threads by
some glimmer of seeing or of mere attraction, the
whole romping scene, and pursues the beauty who
one day shall be his. Heaven is never in despair;
it has watched too many generations and profited
by their prevailing goodness not to perceive that if
dissoluteness be out of order, so is cynicism and a
sceptical temper about ordinary people, if not more
hostile to an ideal life. So the young persons launch
their divine gifts upon a stream that is fretted with
rapids near its head: some make the portages, others
try the shoot,- the stream more tranquil always lies
below. There are eddies that carry them into indulgences of social and  material pleasure.  The
parents generally dissuade with a great deal of wise
shaking of the head, as much as to say, " We've tried
all that, and seen the folly of it."  It is an ideal
instinct that prompts the children to reply, "Well,
we would* like to see the folly of it too." How lucky
it is that nobody can decant his old wine into the new
bottles! So the youth gets his promotion from the
nursery to school, to occupation, to love and marriage,
to the successive disciplines; and his knowledge of




ï~~294

AMERICAN RELIGION.

one period never makes him equal to the next one,
which always has some surprising element that tests
him on a new side. We have to go storming parallel
after parallel.  Up we run impetuously, with glad
acclaim, and plant our colors; before the wind takes
them, we perceive an inner line that we had not
suspected. Headlong we go at that too, only to find
that the busy antagonist has thrown up another; and
that also has to be assailed. It is plot and counterplot, mine and counter-mine: reality works, while
the ideal catches a nap leaning upon its weapon, till,
as we sink and the colors falter on the last breach,
we find that death is only a resource and desperate
ambush of a foe that is sullenly retreating; and tomorrow the Ideal, light-armed, with marching rations
and the packs all left behind, will buoyantly pursue.
What a hint of personal immortality is this relative imperfection of our experiences! They suggest
the absolute perfection which is the plan of every
soul, like the crumbled scale or bone that taught
the naturalist the structure, shape, and habits of an
extinct fish, whose fossil even no man had ever seen.
One day a fossil is found to justify, in the minutest particulars, the infallibility of the scientific imagination.
Our partial experiences contain the history of souls
not yet completed, and they are guarantees given to
us directly by the divine imagination, the earnest
of the spirit, that the whole plan must include all
the time and opportunity needed to fill out the spiritual form. Eternity is in pledge to our successive
disappointments. Every morning we go down to the
edge of it like the fishermen of rock-bound coasts, and




ï~~CONSTANCY TO AN IDEAL.

295

put off upon it as they do, to fight for their little gains,
and satisfy the hunger that is as prompt to return as
the morning. All day we trawl and hunt by various
devices for our shy sustenance; and the fruitful infinite
stretches all around us, so deep and coy that every
thing is hidden, so deep that every thing is contained.
Our day sinks into its storm or calm.  Over it our
day breaks with wants that never are appeased.
What do we care for the expense that this spendthrift, our good-will for God, subjects us to? If any
thing is to be melted for a beautiful casting, men
keep the flame up, and throw in all the fuel in the
neighborhood. There is nothing too precious to go
towards making a soul limpid and symmetrical.
Bernard Palissy, at the end of twenty years spent
in vain attempts to create a white enamel for his
pottery, found nothing left but the house he lived in,
and the fences around it.  Not a billet of wood, for
love or money, to keep up the furnace with. The
palings were ripped down and thrown in, - the
enamel had not melted. There was a crashing in the
house: the children were in dismay; the wife, assisted
doubtless by such female friends as had dropped in to
comfort her, became loud in her reproaches. Bernard
was breaking up the table.s and carrying them off, legs
and bodies, to the all-consuming fire. Still, the enamel
did not melt! There was more crashing and hammering in the house: Bernard was tearing up the floors
to use the planks as fire-wood. Frantic with despair
the wife rushes off to raise the town against him. She
was starved out by his pertinacity; he was fed by his
idea. And, while she was gone, the anxieties and




ï~~296            AMERICAN RELIGION.
poverty of twenty years flowed in the clear coating
that became the rage of kings and connoisseurs.
Throw every thing into the fire of the Ideal! - the
incumbrances of society and pleasure, the frivolous
amusements, the small talk and idling, the clique feelings and constraints, the conveniences that make our
life a curse, the ornaments that dress us in a weight to
crush us to the dust.  Throw fruitless regrets and
memories, and all the things we are most vain about,
into the devouring flame. We are clay in the hands
of the potter. Let all our rubbish melt to make it
impervious to the weather, not subject to decay, much
sought for by the King.




ï~~XII.
THE AMERICAN SOLDIER.
HE mid-winter of America, bringing her shortest
days, lights them up with gleams from Forefathers'-Day and Christmas, those anniversaries of two
births, - of a symbol of human capacity in an ethical
form, and of a country that offers such capacity the
largest opportunity it has yet enjoyed. The winter
solstice never bred so richly before: the midsummers
of other countries are less fertile. And every annual
recurrence of these events renews the impression that,
as the darkest hour is towards morning, and the shortest daylight is already turned sunward, so Truth is
born in a lowly and obscure manner, in out-of-the-way
places, under cheerless circumstances, amid the buffeting of men and weather, patient as a child, but
tenacious as a martyr, a giant nursed upon the breast
of womanly feebleness.  It reminds one of Paul's
paradox, " When I am weak then am I strong": and
the most invigorating reflection of the season is, that a
small and discouraging beginning is the best recommendation that a man or a principle can have. Human
Capacity waits eighteen centuries before it engenders
Human Rights, laid first in a manger, to be floated
hitherward like a waif of time, and cast away upon a
x13*




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AMERICAN RELIGION.

rock: now a Republic has bled and worshipped in its
name. We feel as if it were a dangerous thing for
Truth to blossom into ease and splendor. Paul is
more inspiring amid stripes, fasting, and imprisonment, fighting wild beasts, of body weak and insignificant, like a dull scabbard hiding a blade tempered
at Damascus. Peter is more convincing while he
works at his trade in Rome - that, namely, of tentmaker and apostle- than when he lives in the Vatican
and calls himself a Pope. Peter made tents four years
for us, and sent men to live in them for the sake of
Truth. It was the shelter of faith and determination,
put up and struck more easily than St. Peter's dome,
which, like a bell-glass, defends show-plants from
hardihood and usefulness. We welcomed the trials in
which we lived, and were pleased to see our most
precious thoughts abroad in that wild weather which
God summoned from the elements, for it was like all
Christian and Pilgrim beginnings. We would not have
had success dawn too soon: victory brings pomp and
self-laudation; fortunately for mankind it brings also
the necessity for a new adventure, a fresh exercise of
plain and heroic dealing. When a man or a nation
has done any thing, God seems to say: " What went
ye out into the wilderness to see? A man clothed in
soft raiment? They that wear soft clothing are in
king's houses. But what went ye out for to see? A
prophet? Yea!"
We cannot apply to America the saying which grew
out of a dislike to war: " Happy that nation whose




ï~~THE AMERICAN SOLDIER.

299

annals are tiresome." But that nation is certainly
happy which does not forget its annals, if they have
been written in the blood of its people.
How long it seems since the men of Lowell and
Lynn hurried to Baltimore to illustrate a famous date
in our history, and the men of Ohio and the West sent
their stiff retort to rebel diplomacy, in the message
that, for their part, they were continually prepared for
the "further effusion of blood" if the Republic demanded it, and were not in the habit of surrendering
much! The ploughshare, the shuttle, the lap-stone,
the flail, were converted by the instinct of the men
who handled them into the bayonets which have
defended and prolonged their use in the interest of a
peaceful freedom. Were it not too painful, memory
might be freshened by reading the report of the condition of our prisoners at Andersonville, by treading
again the wards of hospitals from east to west, following in the wake of rebel barbarity to pick up our desecrated dead, gleaning the smiles and noble glances of
our wounded who lay content upon fields which their
blood purchased. What a crucifix the common soldiers found and held up to the adoring gaze of a country, to convert it to manly and religious truths! The
spirit of the Lord had sent them to preach deliverance
to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to
set at liberty them that were bruised.
How it has faded from our mind, too, that while
our mechanics fought, their natural brethren of England, the Lancashire cotton-weavers, fought also with
the awful enginery of patience: for they understood
that though no cotton came through, yet liberty,




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AMERICAN RELIGION.

human rights, the true bread from heaven, were running the blockade daily, to bless them at last, and feed
both mouth and mind. When their employers explained to them that the cause of their suffering was
the American War, they answered, instead of getting
up Confederate sympathy, "We don't mind suffering
a bit, if we can only set the poor slaves free."  The
starving weaver saw through the war into a practical
sympathy with his own class and into liberty for all.
And surely if Jesus could have seen those poor women
at a certain mill weep over and kiss, and sing before,
the first bale of cotton that arrived there, he might
have said: "These love me better than the women
who ran after me in Judea, for these have taken up a
cross: they have refused to weave their sorrows into
a strand to put around the neck of slaves."
It was such a real epoch of a cross, that all the sects
which pretend to exclusive property of that symbol
forgot to quarrel about it, and ran together into fraternal worship at its foot. The soldier suggested to the
country its chance to establish a national religion:
and it is really true that for a time all specific notions
were swept away.
Now that the people have gone back again to their
churches, if there be one recollection capable to restrain the old dogmatic emphasis, and to soften the
features of differences, it must be that the soldier's
blood was an atonement for sin which liberal and
orthodox must alike accept, while they delight to
make the character of the men who shed it a part of
their scheme of religion. The country is covered with
its texts: they are the hillocks which you can still




ï~~THE AMERICAN SOLDIER.

3OI

count, though rain and weather have been gnawing at
them. They define certain thoughts as sharply as
ever: so that there is not a child's brain, that first
woke into attention during those campaigns, that is
not codrdinated by the story. It ought to be his first
lesson in theology, that manliness is the only sect, and
faith in natural ideas of justice, of God, and human
nature, the only body of divinity.
Just opposite my window rises the steeple of a meeting-house, and it stands out with great distinctness
when the rising moon slips behind it and is lost to
view. I see a special object, like a label or advertisement of certain commodities to be had within. But it
is far more cheering when the moon emerges into the
clear sky, and reflects to me the whole of the light
which it gathers in one great gaze from that sun beyond my horizon. Then that and all other steeples
retreat into indistinctness: no particular truth can be
obtrusive in a heaven that is large enough for all the
light that can be thrown upon our intelligence. How
it travels from meridian to meridian, casting scutcheons of silver upon all those honorable graves, where
lie the men who taught us that Character, emerging
from all the accidents of birth and education, is American Religion, - faith in God, in Human Nature, and
in the Moral Law.
Mr. Lincoln said at Gettysburg: "We here highly
resolve that the dead shall not have died in vain; that
the nation shall, under God, have a new birth of Freedom, and that government of the people, by the people
and for the people shall not perish from the earth."
But unless we embrace the religion which inspired




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AMERICAN RELIGION.

these dead men to illustrate more than discipline, more
than valor and resolution, and which went ranking all
creeds under one uniform, shoulder to shoulder, to
level their steel against injustice in the front, and
to move on its works incessantly, like a climate which
persists and cannot be abolished, - the dead will have
died in vain.
It is well to collect and preserve a few of the personal traits of the American soldier. They all seem
to me to be bone and muscle of his personal religion.
The soldiers of other nations are brave in the field,
subtile and adroit in strategy, patient in hardships,
competent to obey orders, vigilant at the outpost,
cheerful in all weathers, ready for the blanket around
the bivouac, or for the shroud of mist which folds
them in death's sleep upon the field. But the American combination is peculiar: the soldier's elements
are differently mixed in him, and dominated by a temperament that is as distinct from Europe's as our air is,
which excites more nerves and furnishes less flesh for
padding. The French soldier is more gay, and inventive of jests at scars; but there is a lightness in them
which the east wind forbids us to imitate. A young
Lyonnaise soldier wrote thus to his mother after the
battle of Solferino: "My dear mother, - I am yet
living, very living, and boh vivant. Only, I am not
complet, like an omnibus when it rains. [ Complet is
the sign put out by the conductor to notify that the
omnibus is full.] The regimental surgeon has just cut
off my leg. I was acctistomed to have it, and the
separation has been severe. My sergeant-major, to
console me, says that I shall now have a leg made




ï~~THE AMERICAN SOLDIER.

303

to put a stop to that. Rejoice, my dear mother, in
your luck, for my wooden leg will keep me at home,
your dear partner at Piquet. Hold! there's a tear on
the paper: it is not a tear of regret, but of gladness at
the thought of embracing you."
This is the Gallic vein of lightness, only possible
to the nation that at Fontenoy yielded precedence in
firing to the English Guards, but in Algiers could
smother hundreds of women and children at the command of Pelissier, and in the Crimea sent 50,000
loaves of bread daily to their English allies whose
ovens were clumsily set up.  Ever since Marshal
Saxe said that battles were not gained with the hands
but with the feet, they are the children who march,
bantering Providence on a full or empty stomach, but
requiring frequent rations of victory to sustain their
temper. Their camp songs are always gay, but those
of the Germans are pervaded with melancholy, and
seem to be set to the distant mutter of cannon which
retreat after strewing a field with fragments of love
and domestic longing. For no blaze of battle that
puts out the hearth-light is great enough to- compensate a German. The French are still first among
European nations  notwithstanding late events and
imperial demoralization - in shiftiness to meet and
overcome the contingencies of war: resource is on the
spot, and ekes out the sudden failure of camp material,
and bright repartee is wreaked upon the misfortune
while it is repairing. But the American mechanic,
reared in States where poverty has liberty to get abolished by all kinds of dexterity, and who picks up the
nearest stick to whittle out of it the school, the church,




ï~~304

AMERICAN RELIGION.

the daily table, can be matched nowhere on earth for
absolute superiority to circumstance. Self-respect has
enjoyed centuries of municipal training, and understands the advantage of working for a Commonwealth.
All its talents are nourished by a moral feeling of
indebtedness to the general prosperity which they are
so eager to enhance. Other nations hve traditions of
system that encumber their attempts to adjust themselves with unexpected exigencies. But we are not
hampered by an old chest of tools: if we cannot find
one of them that is competent to make just the stroke,
or sink the groove that we need, something is extemporized to solve the problem. Said Governor Andrew:
" The men we offer, besides fighting, can do any other
things for which there may be occasion, from digging
clams up to making pianofortes."
But these volunteers carried into the field high
thinking from their low living, and improvised with
it more bridges across the desperate breaks where
retreating treason had broken down the country's conscience than their hands ever repaired. The dislocated tracks of fidelity were tied to the soil again by
men whose village thrift had not impoverished the
soul.
It was the distinction of all the better class of volunteers, that they bore not only the brunt of fighting and
the lassitude of defeat, but all the infirmity and scepticism of their comrades. And their moral power alone
made them equal to it. Other men were as dexterous,
as brave and enduring. The soldiers of other countries, who obey the system that recruits them and
swallows up their individuality, know what the battle



ï~~THE AMERICAN SOLDIER.

305

ardor means, can improvise a meal or a shelter, can
transport equipments across swift currents, can rally
round a flag at a drum-tap that interrupts their pangs
of hunger and promises them the banquet of death.
Cases of desertion are less numerous than they were
with us, when the old home pulled the heart-strings,
or defeat demoralized.  Foreign regularity of discipline, and ubiquitous authority, preserve an army's
solidarity at the expense of every personal preference.
But our volunteers were substantial elements of the
authority which they obeyed: and they took the
field with something that no other soldier finds indispensable to his day's rations, - an independent
moral sense, that elected every situation, preferred
each drawback, deliberately proposed to' see the business out, kept its own sovereign will in command.
The best men were centres of conscience, planted
like flags that have received oaths that they shall
never touch the ground. The silent influence penetrated into every detail, and was the reinforcement
that came up in time, wherever defeat and unfaithfulness threatened.
Count Gurowski, living at Washington, kept a
diary that reflects every shift of the kaleidoscope
made by variegated policy and the childish worry
of circumstance. Its pages change from rage to pity
at the imbecility of leaders and the heroic patience
of the people. Defeats, mistakes, and absurdities,
epauletted ignorance, red-tape, and solemn trifling, all
at the expense of the "poor people," - the deluded,
the fleeced and patient people. But they were seeing all the time as much as their critic did: they




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AMERICAN RELIGION.

saw one thing more, - namely, that to persevere
with what they had was salvation, not to shriek and
declaim  about what they had not.  Could foreign
criticism generate great commanders for us?   In
the mean time the instinct of the soldier filled the
gaps where incompetency fell and vanished.   He
stepped into the place, and showed his commission
till a better one appeared.  That was the miracle,
that the greatness and the surprise to all the world.
Hlie secured to Nature time enough to grow her General, and fought it out on that line three years
before he came.
In other lands, "the nerve of standing armies,
that which alone makes them trust-worthy in war
and harmless" in peace, is an immovably true and
valorous body of officers." This advantage descended
probably from the spirit of medieval chivalry, and
is one of the military traditions of Europe. But the
trust-worthiness which volunteered for us was not
designated alone by shoulder-straps, it was a conspicuous distinction of the private. Our mechanic had
no middle-ages nourishing his blood with sentiments
of fidelity. The oldest venerable thing he could recall
was, perhaps, his mother's Bible. But whatever conscience went to make that book was shared by him,
and he could count his ancestors by centuries.
I knew a boy not fifteen years old, but of a man's
stature, who tormented his parents to let him enlist.
But his mother was reluctant. If I ever alluded to
the war in a sermon, he would go home and say:
" There, mother! Did you hear that? Can I stand
that? " On rainy nights he would get out of his win



ï~~THE AMERICAN SOLDIER.

307

dow and pace up and down before the house with an
old musket as if on picket duty, and was delighted
that he could not take cold. He was dull at school,
and his tall head gathered the magisterial thundercloud, which discharged harmlessly through him, and
protected the rest of the scholars.
One day he left the house, turning as he went, and
simply saying, " Good morning, mother." He was
gone to the war. Before this he had once enlisted at
a neighboring camp, but his father brought him back.
Now, under an assumed name, he found his way into
the Second Massachusetts Cavalry, and all trace of
him was lost for a long time. The mother's distress
was at last relieved by news of him, and they began
to correspond.  He was perfectly happy, but found
picket-duty rather more complicated than it was before the front-yard at home.
One day in the autumn he took cold and lay dangerously sick for several weeks. But recovering, he
went into a skirmish beyond Vienna, was under fire,
always behaved well, and was always supremely
happy. One day he took a rebel lieutenant prisoner,
and brought him into camp.
But in a few months, when the spring of 1864
opened, there came an ill-spelled and scarcely legible
letter from a comrade, announcing at once his sickness
and his death. He died at his post, for it was on
picket-duty that the heavy mud drew off both his boots.
He could not find them again in the darkness, but continued all the same to pace his round. He remained
chilled and drenched till the guard was relieved,
then, one step to the hospital; then, answering to his




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AMERICAN RELIGION.

name as it went on the roster of that army which the
Lord recruited from ours, he was ordered to the front
upon another service.
When he left home he took with him nothing but a
little Bible, a birthday present from his mother. I
asked to have this Bible to read from at his funeral.
On examining it I found that he had marked passages, which his sense appropriated, by putting flowers
between the leaves. There were the dry Virginian flowers, which had transferred to the texts their sap and fragrance. The old verses bloomed again in the dew of
his youth. Thus he reenforced Judea with America:
" Shall I go and smite these Philistines? And the Lord
said unto David, Go." This must have been selected
before he went, and while he pondered his act. There
was a flower against David's magnanimity, in I Sam.
Xxiv. 4, where David cut off Saul's skirt and left him
free to go. And there was one against Ps. cv. 42, 43,
44: " For he remembered his holy promise, and Abraham his servant. And he brought forth his people with
joy, and his chosen with gladness; and gave them the
lands of the heathen: and they inherited the labor
of the people," - which showed that he understood
the President, and had his own thoughts on the Contraband question. And on carefully lifting up a rebel
pansy, which stuck to Rev. xiii. 9, Io, as if to mark
it, there were words made so apposite by his moral
selection as almost to startle me: " If any man hath
an ear to hear, let him hear.  He that leadeth into
captivity shall go into captivity. He that killeth with
the sword must be killed with the sword. Here is
the patience and the faith of the saints."  So, in the




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309

fragrance of Scripture, which his own moral sense
enhanced, we laid him away.
But it was the plain honesty of such action and
suffering that extemporized a fresh page on which
the divine in-being wrote its latest word.  The boy
shared the instinct that withstood, and at last destroyed,
the moral border-stateism that was at first in favor.
The volunteer answered to every roll-call, because he
felt that the Republic held the list, pronounced his
name, and asked his life or death, and was the conscience that gave him God's alternative of being on
his side or against him.   This dull, unburnished
quality of duty staid in the camp and lighted its watchfires long after the first enthusiasm, that filled our
streets and fused all parties, had burnt down to the
brands of doubt and dismay.
Perhaps the disadvantages of the early situation
challenged this obscure moral power and drew it to
the front. It is not only when a crowd sees treachery
at work, but when it is expected also to stand still
and watch the fumblings of incapacity, that resolution is gradually singled out and interferes. It is
difficult now to recall the aid and comfort which treason borrowed from our own indifference and selfishness. One month after his first accession, President
Lincoln said " he wished he could get time to attend
to the Southern question; he thought he knew what
was wanted, and believed he could do something
toward quieting the rising discontent, but the officeseekers demanded all his time. 'I am like a man so
busy in letting rooms in one end of his house, that he
can't stop to put out the fire that is burning the other.'"




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AMERICAN RELIGION.

" Sitting here," he continued, " where all the avenues to public patronage seem to come together in a
knot, it does appear to me that our people are fast
approaching the point where it can be said that seveneighths of them are trying to find out how to live at
the expense of the other eighth."
And to his former law-partner, Mr. Herndon, he
said: "If ever this free people, if this government
itself, is ever utterly demoralized, it will come from
this human wriggle and struggle for office,- that is, a
way to live without work."
It will be remembered that Mr. Lincoln was at
one time taken suddenly ill with the varioloid. After
recovering, he remarked to a friend that there was
some satisfaction in it, after all. It was the first time
since he had been Presideit that he had had any thing
he could possibly give, that somebody did not want.
It puzzled him a good deal, at Washington, to
know and to get at the root of this dread desire, this
contagious disease of national robbery in the country's
death-struggle. - These servants of the people must
have appeared as infamous as the menials who sack
the house of a dying mistress, and greedily count the
rings upon her shrunken finger. But what must be
our reflection to perceive that the abominable greed
has not been buried in the graves of half a million men,
but stands upon them to scramble better into place.
The Assistant Treasurer lately (1869) discharged one
hundred and twenty-five clerks to economize the Treasury service; and out of the whole number there were
one hundred that had not even a desk or a chair, or
any business in the building. So many families in




ï~~THE AMERICAN SOLDIER.

3II

Washington are decayed, that in order to prevent the
members from being a tax in almshouses they are
made a tax in the different official bureaus.
Thus the first campaign went on, with treason and
ravin fastened to the throat of the country, incompetency and inexperience hugging every limb, unguarded
expenditure and waste the impudent camp-followers
of every regiment, and indefinite policy dampening
every cartridge. Into this border-land the common
soldier built his road: at one end of it a hearthstone
that flickered more tremulously than ever with endeared life-breaths, at the other - he could not see
the head-board at Andersonville and Salisbury at the
other end, with the road thither blazed by the edge
of battle. But he went on, after he had discovered
the piteous direction of his route, and had missed so
many comrades at the morning-call that he might
wonder at his exemption. He heard the drum ahead:
no fog of policy could stifle the crisp rolling that
voiced the peremptoriness of his plain purpose.
McClellan was held at telescopic range by the Quaker
guns at Manassas, went into burrows at Yorktown,
and at length drifted out of history by clinging to the
planks of a Chicago platform, torn apart by a railsplitter's hand. The drums grew fainter on his ear,
with every stroke of the pickaxe and shovel that intrenched him beyond their vibrations. He, and all
the other Napoleons of the epoch, went where there
was no chance to count delay by the dropping of
blood into hesitating palms, and no securing of policy
by selling out Liberty's marble to be converted into
grave stones. But the volunteer's well-fibred heart




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AMERICAN RELIGION.

still held together the ravelled line, and its pulse kept
time with the drum-beat that grew more- and more
expressive, more intelligent with the practice of liberty.
We have forgotten the weeks and months of popular depression, when the public officials who were
nearest to the seat of government, or who came back
from a visit to Washington, where the heavy details
of mistake and disaster told upon the temper, gave up
the cause for lost. At periods when voluntariness
was dying out of volunteers themselves, and depression or routine brought in moments of reaction, when
the mismanagement of the politicians bred disgust,
our fate lay in the hands of these men, who rallied
instantly at the approach of genuine danger, and were
disinfected of their doubts by the prospect of death.
One thing alone, presumably enough to demoralize
the firmest men, was the selfish persistence of the
Northern papers in reporting, as fast as their eager
and unscrupulous correspondents could gather the
facts, the number of our troops, their positions, their
probable movements, and the projects for a campaign.
This was done that the streets of our cities might be
filled with the cry of " Extras," fresh editions every
hour, to build up great newspaper establishments out
of the peril of thus imparting information to the
South. The Southern officers used to say that they
depended upon the North for cheap and accurate information- since our papers went into the rebel lines.
They were worth to the South half the number of
troops which they reported, and whose positions and
movements they unmasked.




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313

But the common soldier added the load of this
selfishness to his knapsack, where it hung with the
other errors and meannesses that found in war their
opportunity. The weight, however, did not overtax
him; and military writers will have to make a fresh
estimate of the number of pounds which a soldier can
carry into battle or upon a march. For although our
determination buoyed up his heart, our delaying and
distracted measures, our shoddy contracts, our superfluous expenditures, our bickering and political manceuvring, clung, like a ball and. chain, to every step
of his advance.
A day or two after the needless bloodshed of Ball's
Bluff, where some one had evidently blundered by
sending our men across the Potomac in a couple of
leaky flat-boats, to form in the presence of an enemy
that already exulted to see the advantage of fighting
soldiers who had the river in their rear, and the two
boats the only means for retreating, - a Massachusetts
corporal, picket-guard at the river, seeing a rebel preparing to bathe from the opposite bank, shouted out
to him, " Take your: feet out of my river, or I'll shoot
you!" When we doubted whether we should long
own the Schuylkill and Hudson, the common soldier's
geography never misgave him that all the streams,
from the lakes to the Gulf, ran to transact the commerce of Liberty. The sense of ownership was as
vivid after a defeat, and loss of ground, as when a
great victory suddenly put us in possession of a
State.
We used to mingle a good deal of exultation with
the surprise we felt to see how easily a government,
14




ï~~314

AMERICAN RELIGION.

without despotic measures, kept in the field armies
greater than any which have waged the battles of the
Old World, armed, victualled, clothed, recruited them,
tended their sick and wounded, held the regimental
deaths at a figure lower thanis confessed by the medical statistics of England, France and Russia, moved
the men from point to point rapidly and comfortably
by such transport-service as was never before organized for military operations, delivered an army by
express, set it down on time, with all its trains and
baggage, - the whole field-service developed from
that which corresponded to o10,000ooo men to that
which cared for 750,000, the naval arm at the same
time raised from 5,00ooo to 75,oo000, and vessels of novel
and superior construction added, to the number of
" 558 steamers, with an aggregate tonnage of 408,000
tons against the original a6 steamers and 49,700 tons."
But the country which sprang from a. positively supine
and dismantled condition into that attitude of vigor
owed it all to common talent and invention: and the
men we undertook to transport were not machines.
The intelligence we moved from point to point was a
part of the motive-power. The individuality which
flew apart to grumble and criticise - as Washington
made complaint was the vice of the New-England
men in his time - came together when the bugle cut
it short, and every private was Uncle Sam's head man.
So that when we saw an armed man in the street, we
only saw ourselves made emphatic: he was our deliberate purpose to have our rights respected. Our
moral indignation was uniformed, equipped, and received rations in him. When his steel glittered in the




ï~~TIHE AMERICAN SOLDIER.

3 15

front, it was the flash of our eyes in search of treason:
every cannon's flame was the tongue of our retort
against the owners and despisers of men, If you
would have measured the manly sincerity which those
years of trial brought out of the bosom of the pbople,
you would have had to sail with every steamer and
to march with every corps, computing your steps by
thousands of miles of sea and land, not to return till
you had visited every picket-guard and signal station.
Your journey would lie through the hearts of the men
before you had inspected all the posts of Liberty. You
should have been blood itself to travel through the
new America. Depth of conviction, tenderness of
feeling, trust in God, newness of life -. that was your
Country.
Hear a woman,* who was at the time superintendent of a hospital, describe how Burnside's men went into
battle. As they passed the Hospital, " they marched
at ease, laughing, singing, calling out now and then,
Good-by, ladies, good-by!' One tall fellow dipped
his tin cup in a little spring by the road-side and
drank our healths in passing. ' Ave Cacsar,' t said
the Surgeon in charge, ' morituri te salutant.' The
sod was thick with violets, and bunches of them were
stuck in many caps and coats. A soldier took the
cluster from his cap-band and gave it to me. G. unfastened a little gilded horse-shoe from her chain and
* I quote from an admirable pamphlet, privately printed,
entitled " Hospital Days."
+ The cry of the Roman gladiators to the emperor, as they
entered the arena: "Hail, Caesar! those about to die salute
thee! "




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AMERICAN RELIGION.

tied it, by the blue ribbon, in his coat. He lifted his
cap: ' This will keep me safe in the next battle; I did
not expect such good luck in Virginia.' One company was singing in parts, -
'Rally round the Flag, boys,
Rally once again!'
So they passed, marching and singing, the bayonets
disappearing at last southward in the spring sunshine,
in the dust of the Leesburg pike."
She also describes the passage of the Eighth N. Y.
Heavy Artillery, in May, 1864, through Fredericksburg, where our troops had previously received a far
different greeting. "In the headstall of Col. Peter
Porter's horse we fastened a knot of roses, and tossed
roses and snow-balls in showers over the men. They
were delighted.  ' In Fredericksburg!' they said.
'Oh, give me one: pray, give me one!' -' I will
carry it into the fight for you;' and another, who
was a lieutenant, cried, cheerily, 'I will bring it
back again.'
" Three days afterwards the ambulances came, and
in them came some of the same men, shattered, dying,
dead. We went out, but this time it was with pails
of soup and milk-punch. One and another recognized
us - all were cheery enough. 'A different coming
back, ma'am.' - ' No roses to-day?' - And one said,
pointing over his shoulder, 'The Lieutenant is there
on the stretcher, and he's brought back the flowers as
he promised.' I went to the side, hoping to help a
wounded man. The lieutenant lay dead, with a bunch
of dead roses in the breast of his coat."




ï~~THE AMERICAN SOLDIER.

3,7

The love of these rough men for roses blossomed even
in their dreams. A German called G. to his bedside
one morning to tell her his dream of her. "Last night
I dreamed," he said, " that I was walking by myself in
a great city and came to a bridge over a deep river.
As I crossed the bridge it broke and I fell into the
water, and was sinking, when you came and drew me
to land. I was all dripping, and you took me to your
own house and gave me a whole new suit of clothes,
all dry and warm. Then you said, 'You may go into
the garden and take a flower; take any flower you
like.' So I took a rose; but as I was picking it I died
and went to heaven. You called aloud to me, ' Don't
drop the rose; take it with you and plant it in heaven
for me.' So I went to heaven and planted it, and it
grew and blossomed. And when the blossoms came
I sent you down word, and you died and came to
heaven, and found there all ready a rose-tree blooming for you."
A friend of mine pillaged Mrs. Scott's garden in
Fredericksburg of its various flowers, and made the
tour of the hospitals, to lay one upon each pillow of
the wounded and dying. Those who were too far
gone to speak sent up to him such gratitude from their
eyes that they haunt him still with its precious quality.
Others said feebly, "Move it nearer to me, let it touch
my cheek - I want to feel it."
A nurse carries a bunch of the first lilacs to a very
sick New-England soldier. "Now I've got something
for you," I said, holding them behind me, "just like
what grows in your front door-yard at home: guess!"
" Lalocs," he whispered; and I laid them  on his




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AMERICAN RELIGION.

folded hands. " Oh, Lalocs! How did you know
that?'  The lilacs outlived him.
" J. D. was brought in, far gone in fever, and
speechless. In his pocket were found a red morocco
Testament, and a poor little note-book, half soaked
through with rain or swamp-damp, in which a few
wandering pencil-notes were still legible, and this little
couplet altered from an old song:"Not a sigh shall tell my story,
Silent death shall be my glory."
I will match that last line against the lines on whose
simple feeling great poets have been floated into fame.
And what tender trustfulness breathes through these
lines of an unknown man, S      S, a Massachusetts sergeant: -
"I lay me down to sleep,
With little thought or care,
Whether my waking find
Me here - or There!
A bowing, burdened head,
That only asks to rest,
Unquestioning, upon
A loving breast.
My good right hand forgets
Its cunning nowTo march the weary march
I know not how.
I am not eager, bold,
Nor strong -all that is past:
I am ready Not To Do
At last-at last!




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319

My half-day's work is done,
And this is all my part:
I give a patient God
My patient heart,
And grasp his banner still,
Though all its blue be dim;
These stripes, no less than stars,
Lead after Him."
But we must not forget the prison relics. "What
hospital nurse has not a bone-ring or trinket carved
by her men in the wards or in prison?"  One gave a
white cross, saying: "I thought of putting your
initials on it, but I could not bring myself to put even
yours on any thing of that shape." But the country
can bring itself to that. No form so appealing, with
all its associations, as the cross, that seems to crave
of us to chisel upon it the names of all those faithful
and comforting nurses, who bore God's pity to the
edge of the wrath of battle.
A soldier, just dying, felt the arms of his nurse
around him, and he feebly whispered, " Underneath
are the Everlasting Arms." Which did he mean,
God, or the " everlasting womanly" that exalts a line
of Goethe?  The one was the other. And a nurse
says that, as she ministered the last wants to a deathstruck man, he rallied, looked up at her, and exclaimed
with all the power he had left, " You are the Godblessedest woman I ever saw! " It was religion, like
that of the Chevalier Bunsen, who was not too cultivated in theology to confess to his wife in the moment
of death: "In thy face have I beheld the Eternal."
Not only America, but God was with Woman in the




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AMERICAN RELIGION.

camp, and the illiterate soldier recognized the face
of his redemption.
One of those mediating women said: " Let those
who have one of the prison rings with two clasped
hiands, that mean, True till Death, keep it as a sacred
relic. It is the prison sign. The fashion seemed to
travel underground. I have had it from Texas, Atlanta, Columbia, Belle-Isle, Andersonville. It is as
characteristic as the palm branch of the Catacombs."
This tender temper of flowers and of the cross belonged to our men who breasted Petersburg, walled
Vicksburg in with fire, cast off at Atlanta and felt their
way to the sea, took Mission Ridge at a single run
through scorching flame, and, as one of them said,
" saw God at Chattanooga." Flowers will never grow
next spring as generous with red as they were with
their blood, nor any so white as their honorable record.
But their humor matched their tenderness. Short rations, long delays, attacks repulsed, nothing quenched
it.  The humor was a kind of bunting run up by
the spirit to apprize the neighborhood that it still
lived, and to signal to the country that it was about
to move on the enemy.
This elastic vein threw off the weight of the most
threatening situations, and extemporized a climate in
the worst of weather. At one time, before Vicksburg,
our fortune touched its ebb: repeated assaults, drenching rains and failing commissariat, seemed to portend
that the soldier's hand would be too feeble to turn the
key of the Mississippi. It was just the time he selected
to have his lightest heart and most outrageous humor.
Nothing was too high to be its victim. A tall officer




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321

trotting by on a little mule, beneath an enormous
beaver, received the running fire of the whole line:
"Come down out of that hat! I know         you're
there - I see your boots." The bad rations gave
them exquisite advantage. One man, who had with
great labor consumed a very hard biscuit, said, in
reply to a question why he stood in the rain, " he had
just eaten a biscuit, and wanted to see if he couldn't
swell it."
And as the Confederate troops could not by rebelling
secede from the solidarity of food, I must confess that
they too found humor a substitute. For humor is a
brace which tightens around all empty stomachs alike,
till the laugh pretends to fill them. Gen. "Alleghany" Johnston, on the march to Bristow Station, in the
fall of 1863, saw one of his men upon a persimmon
tree. "What are you doing up there - why arn't
you with your regiment? "  "I am getting 'simmons,
I am," replied the soldier. " Persimmons! They're
not ripe yet - they're too bitter to eat." " Yes, but
general," persisted the Confederate, " I am trying to
draw my stomach up to suit the size of my rations.
If it stays like it is now, I shall starve."
During the forlorn circumstances around Vicksburg,
the time of the 17th Corps expired. 'Did it take the
opportunity to escape? It was entitled to thirty days
furlough if it would reenlist. It reenlisted to a man;
and then played upon the enemy the capital bit of
irony of taking the furlough in the State itself of Mississippi, which then belonged to the rebellion.
This gayety was not cynical and obdurate. When
at Atlanta, letters arrived from wives and sisters who
14*




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AMERICAN RELIGION.

were starving upon the neglected farms, and urged the
men to return. They, knowing in many cases the destitution of their relatives, turned aside to read, that no
eye might see what dropped from theirs: then slung
the knapsack again to help Sherman conquer daily
bread for 4,000,000 men.
The irrepressible humor spilled over into the sadness of hospital life, in spite of chaplains who apprized the men that death was waiting for them all,
and who would occasionally prolong the subject till
the usual afternoon funeral passed by, then bring it in
neatly, -" Even now one of your comrades is being
carried to the grave."
Hilarity was cerfainly pardonable if possible. Once,
at least, this vestry-vein was interrupted. A lady
writes: " I was present at a meeting when a Defender
rose and said he wished to confess to the brethren
some particulars of a sinful life. There was once, in
such a town, a godless youth, he said, and went on
to paint his career: how at the age of twelve he
smoked cigars and threw the Bible at his grandmother;
at fourteen he played tenpins and went sailing on Sunday; at sixteen he ran away from home, &c., &c.;
and when we expected the usual conclusion, ' And I
who address you to-night, my friends, am that forsaken
lad,' he surprised us by clapping his hand on the
shoulder of an innocent, blushing youth in front of
him, one of the steadiest boys in camp, and shouting
his climax, ' Which his name is Asy Allen, and here
he sets!' "
The nurses were not backward to encourage the
propriety of a jest. Mrs. Olnhausen, who added the




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323

practice of surgery to her admirable qualities as a
nurse, took off half a leg from an Irishman. He
asked her, " Nurse, d'ye think any young girl would
marry me now? "    She told him she did not think he
had quite so good a chance as if he had both legs off.
The pith of all these various characteristics of
talent, temper, and moral feeling, was religious; and
the true church of the country was detailed from all
the meeting-houses, went into the wilderness and lived
four years under tents, where each creed was allowed
but its minimum of baggage, and the soul, reduced
to marching rations, prophecied and prepared the
way of the Lord.
" For my part," said Napoleon I., " it is not the
mystery of the Incarnation which I discover in religion, but the mystery of Social Order, which connects with Heaven an idea of equality which prevents
the rich from destroying the poor."
How well this sentiment of a great soldier was
illustrated by the faith which lay hidden by the theology of Lieut.-Col. Wilder Dwight. He was mortally
wounded at Antietam, and the chaplain visits him for
the last time.*
* The brave and self-sacrificing Chaplain Quint, now of
New Bedford, cannot be classed with the mortuary ministers
who added a new terror to death. His visits were those of a
friend who remembered the home-keeping mothers. Here is
a different style, a specimen of Un-American religion: " Do
you believe in a future state? Yes: well, ah, then you hope
for better things, there; ah, yes: you will die happy- good
morning, brother." How many convalescents did this tainted
diet carry off? It is no less destructive at home, where its unwholesomeness is adroitly concealed by the bed-side rhetoric
of the practitioners.




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AMERICAN RELIGION.

"After looking me earnestly in the face, ' Chaplain,'
said he, 'I cannot distinguish your features: what
more you have to say to me, say now.'  (I had, of
course, remembered his dying condition, and conversed
accordingly.) I said, ' Colonel, do you trust in God?'
He answered, with ready firmness and cheerfulness,
'I do.' ' And in the Lord Jesus Christ, your Saviour?'
'I do.' 'Then,' said I, 'there is no need of saying
more."'
But what if he had said, "I do not!"  Could such
a technical denial expunge the record of a faithful man,
or alarm the Divine Being who had been the lifebreath of his whole devoted career?  There is One
who accepts the religion which obeys the orders for
the day; its voice drowns the phrases of all our mental methods, so that the Infinite must be glad that it
cannot overhear.
Doubtless his friendly chaplain would allege that
the soldier's service was the result of his belief in
a supernatural mediator, and that he could neither
have denied its source nor derived it by any other
method. If so, then there could have been no service
in the army save upon condition of this preliminary belief. The campaigns are themselves the contradiction of this narrow view; for the unbelievers
in an atoning sacrifice offered up themselves to be
a ransom for many, with a heartiness that the stiffest
churchmen never surpassed. Conscience and hardihood had reached the camp by no miraculous transportation, and bade the creeds stand aside to let Religion
reach the front.  Cowardice and shirking came too,
and illustrated their independence of theology. It is




ï~~THE AMERICAN SOLDIER.

325

strange the theologians cannot see that the war has been
a denial, of the most sublime and impressive kind, of
the necessity of their supernatural schemes. This lesson of the divine impartiality stands by the side of
emancipation to attract the regards of a grateful country, and to modify its future. Valor, and duty unto
death, have passed into the consciousness of America;
they survive there as perpetual witnesses against the
wretched obtrusiveness of miracle and dogma.
But Chaplain Quint reached the heart of the matter,
and doubtless of his own prevailing view in holding
this last conversation, when he said: "Now what
shall I say to your mother?  He answered, with his
whole face lighted up, 'My mother! Tell her I do
love my mother.'   (He emphasized every word.)
'Tell her I do trust in God, I do trust in the Lord
Jesus.'"
His mother was the divine life that -kindled that
dying flame, and blew it across the sinking face to
animate it into a last expression of immortal confidence. Such sons, if any,are born of an immaculate
conception. It is the constantly repeated miracle of
lives that are unselfishly devoted to the service of liberal and emancipating principles. He had previously
said, "He was ready to die.    As for the future,
there was but one hope: no putting forward of one's
own claims, but reliance on the merits of Another."
Thus spoke the traditionally nurtured intellect of one
whose practical life illustrated self-reliance in the
camp and on the field of battle, and the happiness
of being well-born into an inheritance of cheerfilness,
valor, and devotedness.  He was a model to officer




ï~~326

AMERICAN RELIGION.

and private, and in the blackest hour always prophea
cied that the dawn was breaking. One of his last
requests was that the flag might be brought to him,
and that the regimental band would play the " StarSpangled Banner." As the strains ceased, he repeated
the last line, and said fervently, " I hope that glorious old flag will wave over this whole country again.
So may it be! So shall it be!" And so it will be,
not through the effect of his technical religion, but
through the conquering power of such personal faith
and self-surrender. How the pet phrases of the different denominations crumble like moth-eaten paper away
from the touch, as we turn to slake our thirst with
the blood of his mortal wound and the tears of his
mother!
What shall we exact as the ransom of the glorious
bitterness of these recollections? That the flag shall
wave over a completed freedom, such as the natural
religion of the soldiers' hearts inspired them to expect.
They must not be balked of their expectation. "Wherever the army goes," said Dwight, "there springs up
emancipation." But that is a plant without a blossom,
and promise of no fruit, till every prejudice has been
drowned in the memory of soldiers' blood, that perfect
equality and opportunity may range the poorest and
most proscribed men in the country by the side of her
true interests, and we all step together, over the graves
of our heroes, to the strains of moral union, to take possession of that future when not one rebel shall be left
to think meanly of our dead.




ï~~ARTHUR HELPS'S WRITINGS.
I. REALMAH. A Story. Price $2.00oo.
2. CASIMIR MAREMMA. A Novel. Price $2.00oo.
3. COMPANIONS OF MY SOLITUDE. Price $i.5o.
4. ESSAYS WRITTEN IN THE INTERVALS OF BUS.
INESS. Price $1.50.
5. BREVIA      Short Essays and Aphorisms. Price $x.5o.
From the London Review.
" The tale (REALMAH) is a comparatively brief one, intersected by the
conversations of a variety of able personages, with most of whose names
and characters we are already familiar through ' Friends in Council.)
Looking at it in connection with the social and political lessons that are
wrapt up in it, we may fairly attribute to it a higher value than could possibly attach to a common piece of fiction."
From a Notice by Miss E. M. Converse.
"There are many reasons why we like this irregular book (Realmah), in
which we should find the dialogue tedious without the story; the story dull
vvithout the dialogue; and the whole unmeaning, unless we discerned the
purpose of the author underlying the lines, and interweaving, now here,
now there, a criticism, a suggestion, an aphorism, a quaint illustration, an
exhortation, a metaphysical deduction, or a moral inference.
" We like a book in which we are not bound to read consecutively, whose
leaves we can turn at pleasure and find on every page something to amuse,
interest, and instruct. It is like a charming walk in the woods in early
summer, where we are attracted now to a lowly flower half hidden under
soft moss; now to a shrub brilliant with showy blossoms; now to the grandeur of a spreading tree; now to a bit of fleecy cloud; and now to the blue
of the overarching sky.
"We gladly place 'Realmah' on the 'book-lined wall,' by the side of
other chosen friends, - the sharp, terse sayings of the ' Doctor '; the sugrestive utterances of the 'Noctes'; the sparkling and brilliant thoughts of
SMontaigne'; and the gentle teachings of the charming ' Ella."
SFrom a Notice by Miss H. W. Preston.
" It must be because the reading world is unregenerate that Arthur Helps
is not a general favorite. Somebody once said (was it Ruskin, at whose
imperious order so many of us read 'Friends in Council,' a dozen years
ago?) that appreciation of Helps is a sure test of culture. Not so much
that, one may suggest, as of a certain native fineness and excellerice of
mind. The impression prevails among some of those who do not read him,
that Helps is a hard writer. Nothing could be more erroneous. His manner is simplicity itself; his speech always winning, and of a silvery distinctness. There are hosts of ravenous readers, lively and capable, who,
if their vague prejudice were removed, would exceedingly enjoy the gentle
wit, the unassuming wisdom, and the refreshing originality of the author
in question. There are men and women, mostly young, with souls that
sometimes weary of the serials, who need nothing so much as a persuasive
guide to the study of worthier and more enduring literature. For most of
those who read novels with avidity are capable of reading something else
with avidity, if they only knew it. And such a guide, and pleasantest of all
such guides, is Arthur Helps. * * Yet 'Casimrir Maremma' is a charming
book and, better still, invigorating. Try it. You are going into the country
for the summer months that remain. Have ' Casimir with you, and have
' Realmah,' too. The former is the pleasanter book, the latter the more pow.
erful. But if you like one you will like the other. At the least you will rise
from their perusal with a grateful sense of having been received for a time
into a select and happy circle, where intellectual breeding is perfect, and the
struggle for brilliancy unknown.
Sold everywhere. Mailed, post-paid, on receipt of advertised price, by the Publishers,
ROBERTS BROTHERS, BosTozr.




ï~~THE HANDY VOLUME SERIES.
M1ESSRS. ROBERTS BROTHERS propose to issue, under the above
heading, a Series of Handy Volumes, which shall be at once various,
valuable, and popular,-their size a moat convenient one, their typography of the very best, and their price extremely low. They will entertain the reader with poetry as well as with prose; now with fiction, then
with fact; here with narration, there with inquiry; in some cases with
the works of living authors, in others with the works of those long since
dead. It is hoped that they will prove to be either amising or instructive, sometimes curious, often valuable, always handy. Each Volume
will, as a rule, form a work complete in itself.
---
THE HAND Y VOL UM1E SERIES.
1.
HAPPY     THOUGHTS. By F. C. BURNAND. Price in cloth,
$1.00; paper covers, 75 cents.
2.
DOCTOR     JACOB. A Novel. By Miss M. BETHAM EDWARDS.
Price in cloth, $1.00; paper covers, 75 cents.
8.
PLANCHETTE; or, The Despair of Science.            Being a full
account of Modemrn Spiritualism. Price in cloth, $1.25; paper
covers, $1.00.
4.
EDELWEISS.       A   Story. By BERTHOLD AUERBACH.         Price
in cloth, $1.00; paper covers, 75 cents.
5.
REALITIES      OF   IRISH   LIFE.    By W. STEUART FRENCH.
Price in cloth, $1.00; paper covers, 75 cents.
6.
POEMS OF RURAL LIFE.             By WILLIAM    BARNES.    With
12 superb illustrations. Price in cloth, $1 25.
7.
GERMAN TALES. By BERTHOLD AUERBACH. Price in cloth,
$1.00.
8.
A VISIT TO MY DISCONTENTED COUSIN. A Novelette.
Price in cloth, $1.00.
Other volumes will follow the above at convenient intervals.
ROBERTS BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, BOSTON.
14




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