# The Collected Works of Theodore Parker/Volume 02/Ten Sermons of Religion/Sermon 05

V.
OF CONSCIOUS RELIGION AND THE SOUL.
WORSHIP THE LORD IN THE BEAUTY OF HOLINESS. Ps. xxix. 2.
The mind converses with things indirectly, by means of the senses; with ideas directly, independent of the senses, by spiritual intuition, whereto the senses furnish only the occasion, not the power, of knowledge ; so the mind arrives at truth, in various forms or modes, rests contented therein, and has joy in the love thereof. Conscience is busied with rules of right, by direct intuition learns the moral law of the universe as it is writ in human nature,—outward experience furnishing only the occasion, not the power, of knowing right,—arrives at justice, rests contented therein, and has its joy in the love thereof. The affections deal ​ with persons, whom it is their function to love, travel ever on to wider and wider spheres, joying in the men they love, but always seeking the perfect object with which they may be contented and have the absolute joy of the heart. To think truth, to will justice, to feel love, is the highest act respectively of the intellectual, moral, and affectional powers of man, which seek the absolutely true, just, and lovely, as the object of their natural desire.
The soul has its own functions. God is the object thereof. As the mind and conscience by their normal activity bring truth and justice to human consciousness, so the soul makes us conscious of God.
We see what intellectual, moral, and affectional creations have come from the action of the mind, the conscience, and the heart of man ; we see the human use thereof and joy therein. But the religious faculty has been as creative and yet more powerful, overmastering all the other powers of man. The profoundest study of man's affairs, or the hastiest glance thereat, shows the power of the soul for good and ill. The phenomena of man's religious history are as varied and important as they are striking. The surface of the world is dotted all over with the temples which man has built in his acts of reverence; religious sentiments and ideas are deeply ploughed into the history of every tribe that has occupied time or peopled space. Consider mankind as one man, immortal and not growing old, universal history as his biography; study the formation of his religious consciousness, the gradual growth of piety in all its forms, normal or monstrous; note his stumblings in the right way, his wanderings in the wrong, his penitence, his alarm and anxiety, his remorse for sin, his successive attainments of new truth, new justice, and new love, the forms in which he expresses his inward experience,—and what a strange, attractive spectacle this panorama of man's religious history presents to the thoughtful man.
The religious action of a child begins early; but like all early activity it is unconscious. We cannot remember that; we can only recollect what we have known in the form of consciousness, or, at best, can only dimly remember what lay dimly and half conscious in us, though the effects ​ thereof may be as lasting as our mortal life. You see the tendency to the superhuman in quite little children asking, "But who made God?" the child's causality heedlessly leaping at the Infinite, he having a dim sentiment of the Maker of all itself unmade. You have seen little babies, early deprived of their mother, involuntarily and by instinct feeling with their ill-shapen mouths after what nature pro- vided for their nourishment. So in our childhood as in- voluntarily and instinctively do we feel with our souls after the Infinite God, often, alas ! to be beguiled by our nurses with some sop of a deity which fills our mouth for the time, and keeps us from perishing. Perhaps a few of you remember a time when you had a sentiment—it was more a feeling than a thought—of a vague, dim, mysterious some- what, which lay at the bottom of all things, was above all, about all, and in all, which you could not comprehend nor yet escape from. You seemed a part of it, or it of you ; you wondered that you could not see with your eyes, nor hear with your ears, nor touch with your hands, what you yet felt and longed after with such perplexity of indistinctness. Sometimes you loved it; sometimes you feared. You dared not name it, or if you did, no one word was name enough for so changeable a thing. Now you felt it in the sunshine, then in the storm; now it gave life, then it took life away. You connected it with all that was strange and uncommon; now it was a great loveliness, then an ugliness of indefinite deformity. In a new place you missed it at first; but it soon came back, travelling with the child, a constant companion at length.
All men do not remember this, I think; only a few, in whom religious consciousness began early. But we have all of us been through this nebulous period of religious history, when the soul had emotions for which the mind could not frame adequate ideas.
You see the same phenomena drawn on a large scale in the history of ancient nations, whose monuments still attest these facts of consciousness ; you find nations at this day still in this nebulous period of religion, the Divine not yet resolved to Deity. Sphinxes and pyramids are fossil remains of old facts of consciousness which you and I and every man have reproduced. Savages are baby nations, feeling after God, and trying to express with their re​ flective intellect the immediate emotions of the soul. When language is a clumsy instrument, men try to carve in stone what they fail to express in speech. Is the soul directly conscious of a superhuman power? they seek to legitimate the feeling in the mind, and so translate it to a thought; at least they legitimate it to the senses, and make it a thing. This vague, mysterious, superhuman something, before it is solidified into deity, let me call The Divine. Man does not know what it is. "It is not myself," says he. "What is it, then? Some outward thing?" He takes the outward thing which seems most wondrous to himself,—a reptile, beast, bird, insect; an element, the wind, the lightning, the sun, the moon, a planet, or a star. Outward things embody his inward feeling; but while there are so many elements of confusion within him, no one embodiment is enough; he must have many, each one a step beyond the other. His feeling becomes profounder, his thought more clear. At length he finds that man is more mighty than the elements, and seeks to consolidate the Divine in man, and has personifications thereof, instead of his primitive embodiments in Nature. Then his feeling of the Divine becomes an idea of Deity; he has his personal gods, with all the accidents of human personality,—the passions, feelings, thoughts, mistakes, and all the frailties of mortal men.
Age after age this work goes on; the human idea of God has its metempsychosis, and transmigrates through many a form, rising higher at every step until this day. In studying mathematics man has used for counters the material things of earth, has calculated by the help of pebbles from the beach, learned the decimal system from his ten fingers, and wonders of abstract science from the complicated diagrams of the sky. So he has used reptiles, beasts, and all the elements and orbs of nature, in studying his sentiment of God, transferring each excellence of Nature to the Divine, and then each excellence of man. Nature is the rosary of man's prayer. The successive embodiments and personifications of God in matter, animals, or men were in religion what the hypotheses of Thales and Ptolemy, Galileo and Kepler, were in science,—helps to attain a more general form of truth. Every idol-fetish, every embodiment of a conception of God in matter, every ​ personification thereof in man, has been a step forward in religious progress. The grossest fetichism is only the early shoot from the instinctive seed, one day to blossom into the idea of the Infinite God. The confusion of past and present mythologies is not only a witness to the confusion in the religious consciousness of men, but the outward expression helps me to understand the inward fact, and so to bring truth out of error.
The religious history of mankind could not have been much different from what it has been; the margin for human caprice is not a very wide one. All mankind had the same process to pass through. The instinct of development in the human race is immensely strong, even irrepressible; checked here, in another place it puts out a limb. The life of mankind is continual growth. There is a special progress of the intellectual, moral, affectional, and religious faculties; so a general progress of man; with that a progress in the ideas which men form of God. Each step seems to us unavoidable and not to be dispensed with. Once unconscious reverence of the Divine was all man had attained to; next he reached the worship of the Deity in the form of material or animal nature; then personified in man. Let us not libel the human race: we are babies before we are men. "Live and learn" applies to mankind, as to Joseph and Jane.
You and I are born as far from pure religion as the first men, and have passed over the same ground which the human race has painfully trod, only mankind has been be- fore us, and made a road to travel on ; so we journey more swiftly; and in twenty or thirty years an ordinary man accomplishes what it took the human race five or six hundred generations to achieve. But hitherto the majority of Christians have not attained unity, or even concord, in their conception of the Deity. There is a God, a Christ, a Holy Ghost, and a Devil, with angels and saints, demons and damned; it takes all these to represent the popular ecclesiastical conception of the Deity; and a most heterogeneous mixture of contradictions and impossibilities do they make. The Deil is part of the popular Godhead. Here and there is a man conscious of God as Infinite; but such are only exceptional men, and accordingly disowned as heretics, condemned, but no longer burnt, as of old time. ​ It is plain that the religious faculty is the strongest spiritual power in the constitution of man. Accordingly, what is called religion is always one of the mightiest forces in the world of men. It over-rides the body, mutilates every instinct, and hews off every limb; it masters the intellect, the conscience, and the affections. Lightning shows us the power of electricity, shattering that it may reach its end, and shattering what it reaches; the power of the religious faculty hitherto has been chiefly shown in this violent exhibition. A crusade is only a long thunderstorm of the religious forces.
In the greater part of the world, men who speak in the name of God are looked on with more reverence than any other. So every tyrant seeks to get the priesthood on his side. Hard Napoleon got the Pope to assist at the imperial coronation; even the cannons must yield to the Cross. All modern wickedness must be banked up with Christianity. If the State of the Philistines wishes to sow some eminently wicked seed, it ploughs with the heifer of the Church.
A nation always prepares itself for its great works with consecration and prayer; both the English and American revolutions are examples of this. The religious sentiment lies exceeding deep in the heart of mankind. Even to-day the nations look on men who die for their country as a sacrifice offered to God. No government is so lasting as that based on religious sentiments and ideas; with the mass of men the State is part of the Church, and politics a national sacrament. Nothing so holds a nation together as unity of religious conviction. Men love to think their rulers have a religious sanction. "Kings rule by divine right," says the monarchist; "Civil government is of God," quoth the Puritan. The mass of men love to spread acts of religion along their daily life, having the morning sacrament for birth, the evening sacrament for death, and the noonday sacrament of marriage for the mature beauty of maid and man. Thus in all the sects, the morning, the evening, and the noon of life are connected with sentiments and ideas of religion. In New England we open a town-meeting, a banquet, or a court with prayer to God.
You see the strength of the religious instinct in the power of the sacred class, which has existed in all nations, ​ while passing from the savage state to the highest civilization—a power which only passes away when the class which bears the name ceases to represent the religious feeling and thought of the nation, and merely keeps the traditions and ceremonies of old time. So long as the priests represent God to the people, they are the strongest class. What are the armies of Saul, if Samuel pleases to anoint a shepherd-lad for king? You see examples of this power of the sacred class in Egypt, in India, in Judea, in Greece and Rome, before the philosopher outgrew the priest. You see it in Europe during the Middle Ages; what monuments thereof are left, marking all the land from Byzantium to Upsala with convents, basilicas, minster, cathedral, dome, and spire! At this day the Mormons, on the borders of American civilization, gather together the rudest white men of the land, and revive the ancient priestly power of darker times, a hierarchic despotism under a republic. In such communities the ablest men and the most ambitious form a sacred class; the Church offers the fairest field for activity. There religion is obviously the most powerful form of power. Men who live in a city where the tavern is taller, costlier, more beautiful and permanent, than the temple, and the tavern-keeper thought a more important man than the minister of religion, who is only a temple-keeper now, can hardly understand the period when such works as the Cathedral at Milan or the Duomo at Venice got built: but a Mormon city reveals the same state of things; Nauvoo and Deseret explain Jerusalem and Carnak.
The religious faculty has overmastered all others; the mind is reckoned "profane" in comparison. Does the priest tell men in its name to accept what contradicts the evidence of the senses, and all human experience, millions bow down before the Grand Lama or the Pope. It is the faith of the Christian world, that a Galilean woman bore the Almighty God in her bosom, and nursed Him at her breast. Augustine and Aquinas stooped their proud intellects and accepted the absurdity. The priests have told the people that three persons are one God, or three Gods one person,—that the world was created in six days ; the people give up their intellect and try to believe the assertion, Grotius and Leibnitz assenting to the tale. Every ​ thing written in the Bible, the Koran, the Book of Mormon, is thus made to pass current with their respective worshippers. In the name of religion men sacrifice reason. St James says, "Is any sick among you? let him call for the elders of the Church; and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord, and the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up." Thousands of men, in the name of religion, believe that this medical advice of a Hebrew fisherman was given by the infallible inspiration of God; and it is clerically thought wicked and blasphemous to speak of it as I do this day. I only mention these facts to show the natural strength of the religious instinct, working in a perverted and unnatural form, and against the natural action of the mind.
In like manner religion is made to silence the moral faculties. The Hebrews will kill the Canaanites by thousands; Catholic Spaniards will build the Inquisition for their countrymen; English Protestants, under the bloody Elizabeth, will dip their hands in their Catholic brothers' blood; Puritan Boston has had her Autos da Fe, hanging Quakers for "non-resistance" and the "inner light," or witches for a "compact with the Devil." Do we not still hang murderers throughout all Christendom as an act of worship? This is not done as political economy, but as "Divine service;" not for the conversion of man, but in the name of God,—one of the few relics of human sacrifice. "Reason is carnal," says one priest,—men accept a palpable absurdity as a "revealed truth;" "Conscience must not be trusted," says another,—and human sacrifice is readily assented to. Nothing is so unjust, but men, meaning to be pious, will accept and perform it, if commanded in the name of religion. In such cases even interest is a feeble ally to conscience, and money is sometimes sacrificed in New England.
The religious instinct is thus made to trample on the affections. At the priest's command men renounce the dearest joys of the heart, degrading woman to a mere medium of posterity, or scoffing at nature, and vowing shameful oaths of celibacy. Puritan mothers feared lest they should "love their children too much." How many a man has made his son "pass through the fire unto ​ Moloch!" The Protestant thinks it was an act of religion in Abraham to sacrifice his only son unto Jehovah; the Catholic still justifies the St Bartholomew massacre. Mankind did not shrink at human sacrifice which was demanded in the name of religion terribly perverted. These facts are enough to show that the religious faculty is the strongest in human nature, and easily snaps all ties which bind us to the finite world, making the lover forswear his bride, and even the mother forget her child.
See what an array of means is provided for the nurture and development of the religious instinct,—provided by God in the constitution of men and of the universe. All these things about us, things magnificently great, things elegantly little, continually impress mankind. Even to the barbarian Nature reveals a mighty power and a wondrous wisdom, and continually points to God. I do not wonder that men worshipped the several things of the world, at first reverencing the Divine in the emmet or the crocodile. The world of matter is a revelation of fear to the savage in northern climes: he trembles at his deity throned in ice and snow. The lightning, the storm, the earthquake, startle the rude man, and he sees the Divine in the extraordinary.
The grand objects of Nature perpetually constrain men to think of their Author. The Alps are the great altar of Europe; the nocturnal sky has been to mankind the dome of a temple, starred all over with admonitions to reverence, trust, and love. The Scriptures for the human race are writ in earth and heaven. Even now we say, "An undevout astronomer is mad," What a religious mosaic is the surface of the earth,—green with vegetable beauty, animated with such swarms of life. No organ or Pope's Miserere touches my heart like the sonorous swell of the sea, and the ocean wave's immeasurable laugh. To me, the works of men who report the aspects of Nature, like Humboldt, and of such as Newton and Laplace, who melt away the facts, and leave only the laws, the forces of Nature, the ideas and ghosts of things, are like tales of a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, or poetical biographies of a saint; they stir religious feelings, and I commune with the Infinite. ​ This effect is not produced on scholarly men so much as on honest and laborious mankind, all the world over. Nature is man's religious book, with lessons for every day. In cities men tread on an artificial ground of brick or stone, breathe an unnatural air, see the heavens only a handful at a time, think the gas-lights better than the stars, and know little how the stars themselves keep the police of the sky. Ladies and gentlemen in towns see Nature only at second-hand. It is hard to deduce God from a brick pavement. Yet ever and anon the mould comes out green and natural on the walls, and through the chinks of the side-walks bursts up the life of the world in many a little plant, which to the microscopic eye of science speaks of the presence of the same Power that slowly elaborates a solar system and a universe. In the country men and women are always in the presence of Nature, and feel its impulse to reverence and trust. Every year the old world puts on new bridal beauty, and celebrates its Whitsunday,—each bush putting its glory on. Spring is our Dominica in Albis. Is not autumn a long All-Saints' day? The harvest is Hallowmass to mankind. How men have marked each annual crisis of the year, — the solstice and the equinox,—and celebrate religious festivals thereon! The material world is the element of communion between man and God. To heedful men God preaches on every mount, utters beatitudes in each little flower of spring.
Our own nature also reminds us of God. Thoughtful men are conscious of their dependence, their imperfection, their finiteness, and naturally turn to the Independent, the Perfect, the Infinite. The events of life, its joys and its sorrows, have a natural tendency to direct the thoughts to the good Father of us all. Religious emotions spring up spontaneously at each great event in the lives of earnest men. When I am sick I become conscious of the Infinite Mother in whose lap I lay my weary head. The lover's eyes see God beyond the maid he loves; Heaven speaks out of the helpless face which the young mother presses to her bosom; each new child connects its parents with the eternal duration of human kind. Who can wait on the ebb and flow of mortal life in a friend, and not return to Him who holds that ocean also in the hollow of his hand! The ​ old man looking for the last time upon the sun turns his children's face towards the Sun which never sets. Even in cities men do not pause at a funeral or look on a grave without a thought of the eternal life beyond the tomb, and the dependence of rich and poor on the God who is father of body and soul. The hearse obstructs the omnibus of commerce, and draws the eyes of even the silly and the vain and empty creatures who buzz out their ephemeral phenomena in wealthy towns, the butterflies of this garden of bricks, and forces them to confront one reality of life, and reverence, though only with a shudder, the Author of all. The undertaker is a priest to preach terror, if no more, to the poor flies of metropolitan frivolity, reminding them at least of the worm.
The outward material world forms a temple where all invites us to reverence the Soul which inspires it with life; the spiritual powers within are all instinctively astir with feelings infinite. Thus material nature joins with human nature in natural fellowship; outward occasions and in- ward means of piety are bountifully given, and man is led to develope his religious powers. The soul of man cannot well be still; religion has always had a powerful activity in the world, and a great influence upon the destiny of man- kind. The soul has been as active as the sense, and left its monuments.
An element thus powerful, thus well appointed with out- ward and with inward helps, must have a purpose for the individual and the race commensurate with its natural power. The affections tells me it is not good for man to be alone in the body without a friend; the soul as imperatively informs us that we cannot well be alone in the spirit without a consciousness of God. If the religious faculty has overpowered all others, and often trod them under-foot, its very power shows for what great good to mankind it was invested with this formidable force. It will act jointly or alone; if it have not its proper place in the mass of men, working harmoniously with the intellect, the conscience, and the affections, then it will tyrannize as a brute instinct, lusting after God, and, like a river that bursts its bounds, sweep off the holy joys of men before its desolating flood. ​ The mind may work without a corresponding action of the conscience or the heart. You can comprehend the worth of a man all head, with no sense of right, no love of men, with nothing but a demon-brain. Conscience may- act with no corresponding life of the affections and the mind. You can understand the value of a man all con- science and will,—nothing but an incarnate moral law, the "categorical Imperative" exhibited in the flesh, with no wisdom and no love. A life domineered over by con- science is unsatisfying, melancholy, and grim. The affections may also have a development without the moral and the mental powers. But what is a man domineered over by his heart; with no justice, no wisdom, nothing but a lump of good-nature, partial and silly ? It is only the rareness of such phenomena that makes them bearable. Truth, justice, love,—it is not good for them to be alone; each loses two-thirds of the human power when it expels the sister virtues from it. What God has joined must not be put asunder.
The religious faculty may be perverted, severed from the rest and made to act alone, with no corresponding action of the mind, the conscience, and the heart. Attempts are often made to produce this independent development of the soul. It is no new thing to seek to develop e piety while you omit its several elements, the intellectual love of truth, the moral love of justice, and the affectional love of men. But in such a case what is the value of the "piety" thus produced? The soul acting without the mind goes to superstition and bigotry. It has its conception of God, but of a God that is foolish and silly. Reason will be thought carnal, science dangerous, and a doubt an impiety; the greatest absurdities will be taught in the name of religion; the philosophy of some half-civilized, but God-fearing people, will be put upon the minds of men as the word of God; the priest will hate the philosopher, and the philosopher the priest; men of able intellect will flee off and loathe ecclesiastical piety. If the churches will have a religion without philosophy, scholars will have a philosophy without religion. The Roman Church forbid science, burnt Jordano Bruno, and reduced Galileo to silence and his knees. So much the worse for the Church. The French philosophy ​ of the last century, its Encyclopaedia of scoffs at religion, were the unavoidable counterpart. Voltaire and Diderot took vengeance for the injustice done to their philosophic forerunners. The fagots of the Middle Ages got repaid by the fiery press of the last generation.
You may try and develope the soul to the neglect of conscience:—your Antinomian will recognize no moral law: "All things are permissible to the elect; let them do what they will, they cannot sin, for they are born of God; the moral law is needless under the Gospel," says he. Religion will be made the pander of wrong, and priests will pimp for respectable iniquity. God is thus represented as unjust, partial, cruel, and full of vengeance. The most unjust things will be demanded in his name; the laws and practices of a barbarous nation will be ascribed to God, and men told to observe and keep them. Religion will aim to conserve the ritual barbarities of ruder times. Moral works will be thought hostile to piety,—goodness regarded as of no value, rather as proof that a man is not under the "covenant of grace," but only of works. Conscience will be declared an uncertain guide. No "higher law" will be allowed in religion,—only the interest of the politician and the calculation of the merchant must bear rule in the State. The whim of some priest, a new or an old traditionary whim, must be the rule in the Church. It will then be taught that religion is for the Sunday and "holy communion;" business for the week, and daily life. The "most respectable churches" will be such as do nothing to make the world a better place, and men and women fitter to live in it. The catechism will have nothing to do with the conduct, nor prayers with practice. But if the churches will have religion without morals, many a good and conscientious man will go to the opposite extreme, and have morals without religion,—will jeer and mock at all complete and conscious piety; eminently moral men will flee off from the churches, which will be left with their idle mummeries and vain conceits.
Men sometimes seek to develope the religious element while they depress the affectional. Then they promote fanaticism—hate before God, which so often has got organized in the world. Then God is represented as jea​ lous, partial, loving only a few, and of course Himself unlovely. He sits as a tyrant on the throne of the world, and with his rod of iron rules the nations whom he has created for his glory, to damn for his caprice. He is represented as having a little, narrow heaven, where he will gather a few of his children, whining and dawdling out a life of eternal indolence; and a great, wide hell, full of men, demons, and torments lasting for ever and ever. Then, in the name of God, men are bid to have no fellowship with unbelievers, no sympathy with sinners. Nay, you are bidden to hate your brethren of a different mode of religious belief. This fanaticism organizes itself, now into brief and temporary activity, to persecute a saint, or to stone a philanthropist; now into permanent institutions for the defence of heathenism, Judaism, Mohammedanism, or Christianity. The fires in which Catholics and Protestants have burnt their brother Christians, the dreadful tortures which savage heathens have inflicted on the followers of Jesus, have all been prepared by the same cause, hatred in the name of God. It is this which has made many a temporary hell on earth, and fancied and taught an eternal hell beneath it. Brief St Bartholomew massacres, long and lasting crusades against Albigenses or Saracens, permanent Inquisitions, laws against unbelievers, atheists, quakers, deists, and Christians, all spring from this same wantonness of the religious sentiment rioting with ungodly passions of the flesh. The malignant priest looks out of the storm of his hate, and smites men in the name of religion and of God. But then the affectionate man turns off from the God who is "a consuming fire," from the "religion" that scorches and burns up the noblest emotions of mankind, and, if others will have a worship without love in the worshippers or the worshipped, he will have love without religion, and philanthropy without God. So, in the desert, the Arab sees the whirlwind coming with its tornado of fiery sand, and hastens from its track, or lies down, he and his camels, till the horrid storm has spent its rage and passed away; then he rises and resumes his peaceful pilgrimage with thanks to God.
How strong is the family instinct! how beautiful is it when, passion and affection blending together, it joins ​ man and maid into one complete and perfect solidarity of human life, each finding wholeness and enjoyment while seeking only to delight! What beautiful homes are built on marriages like that! what families of love are born and bred therein! But take away the affection, the self-denial, the mutual surrender, aggravate the instinctive love to the unnatural selfishness of lust seeking its own enjoyment, heedless of its victim, and how hateful is the beastly conjunction of David, Solomon, Messallina, Mohammed, of Gallic Cassanova, or Moscovian Catharine. Religion bereft of love to men becomes more hateful yet,—a lusting after God. It has reddened with blood many a page of human history, and made the ideal torments of hell a flaming fact in every Christian land. The Catharines of such a religion, the Cassanovas of the soul, are to me more hideous than Bacchanalians of the flesh. Let us turn off our eyes from a sight so foul.
Piety of mind, the love of truth, is only a fragment of piety; piety of conscience, the love of right, is also fragmentary; so is love of men, piety of the heart. Each is a beautiful fragment, all three not a whole piety. We want to unite them all with the consciousness of God, into a complete, perfect, and total religion, the piety of mind and conscience, heart and soul,—to love God with all the faculties,—to love Him as truth, as justice, as love, as God, who unites in Himself infinite truth, infinite justice, infinite love, and is the Father of all. We need to do this consciously, to be so wonted to thus loving Him, that it is done spontaneously, without effort, and yet not merely by instinct; done personally, not against our own consent. Then we want to express this fourfold total piety by our outward morality, in its natural forms and various degrees.
I mentioned, that in human history the religious faculty had often tyrannized over the other powers of men; I think it should precede them in its development, should be the controlling power in every man, the universal force which sways the several parts. In the history of man the soul has done so, but in most perverse forms of action. In the mass of men the religious element is always a little in advance of all the rest. Last Sunday I said that the affec​ tions often performed an idealizing and poetizing function in men who found it not in the intellect or the moral sense. In the vast majority of men it is religion that thus idealizes and adorns their life, and gives the rude worshipper an intimate gladness and delight beyond the reach of art. The doctrine of Fate and Foreordination idealizes the life of the Mohammedan; he feels elevated to the rank of an instrument of God; he has an inflexible courage, and a patience which bears all that courage cannot overcome. The camel-driver of the Arabian prophet rejoiced in this intimate connection with God, a spoke in the wheel of the Unalterable. The thought that Jehovah watched over Israel with special love, consoled the Hebrews who hung their harps on the willows of Babylon, and sat down and wept; it brought out of their hearts stories like that of Jonah, Esther, and Daniel, and the sweet Psalms of comfort which the world will not forget to sing. How it has sustained the nation, wandering, exiled and hated, in all the corners of the world! The God of Jacob is their refuge and the Holy One of Israel the joy of their hearts. Faith in God sustained and comforted our fathers here in New England. Their affections went wandering over the waters to many a pleasant home in the dear old island of the sea, and a tear fell on the snow, at the thought that, far over the waters, the first violet was fragrant on a mother's grave; but the consciousness of God lit a smile in the Puritan's heart which chased the tear from his manly cheek.
The thought that God sees us, knows us, loves us, idealizes the life of all religious men. How it blunts the edge of pain, takes away the sting of disappointment, abates the bitterness of many a sorrowful cup which we are called to drink! If you are sure of God, is there anything which you cannot bear? The belief in immortality is so intimately connected with the development of religion, that no nation ever doubted of eternal life. How that idealizes and embellishes all our daily doing and suffering! What a power is there that hangs over me, within a day a march perhaps, nay, within an easy walk of an hour, or a minute it may be, certainly not far off, its gates wide open night and day! The weary soul flees thither right often. Poor, weary, worn-out millions, it is your heaven! No ​ king can shut you out. The tyrants, shooting their victim's body, shoot his soul into the commonwealth of heaven. The martyr knows it, and laughs at the bullets which make an involuntary subject of despotism an immortal republican, giving him citizenship in the democracy of everlasting life. There the slave is free from his master; the weary is at rest; the needy has no want of bread; all tears are wiped from every eye; justice is done; souls dear to ours are in our arms once more; the distractions of life are all over; no injustice, no sorrow, no fear. That is the great comfort with the mass of mankind,—the most powerful talisman which enchants them of their weary woe. Men sing Anacreontic odes, amid wine and women, and all the voluptuousness of art, buying a transient jollity of the flesh; but the Methodist finds poetry in his mystic hymn to take away the grief of a wound, and leave no poison in its place. The rudest Christian, with a real faith in immortal life, has a means of adorning the world which puts to shame the poor finery of Nicholas and Nebuchadnezzar. What are the prizes of wealth, of fame, of genius, nay, of affection, compared with what we all anticipate ere long? The worst man that ever lived may find delight overmastering terror here. "I am wicked," he may say; "God knows how I became so; his infinite love will one day save me out of my bitterness and my woe!" I once knew a man tormented with a partner, cruel and hard-hearted, ingenious only to afflict. In the midst of her torment he delighted to think of the goodness of God, and of the delights of heaven, and in the pauses of her tongue dropped to a heaven of lovely dreams unsullied by any memory of evil words.
Religion does not produce its fairest results in persons of small intellectual culture; yet there it often spreads a charm and a gladness which nothing else can give. I have known men, and still oftener women, nearly all of whose culture had come through their religious activity. Religion had helped their intellect, their conscience, even their affections; by warming the whole ground of their being, had quickened the growth of each specific plant thereof. Young observers are often amazed at this, not knowing then the greener growth and living power of a religious soul. In such persons, spite of lack of early in​ tellectual culture, and continual exclusion from the common means of refinement, you find piety without narrowness, zeal without bigotry, and trust in God with no cant. Their world of observation was not a wide world, not much varied, not rich; but their religious experience was deep, their consciousness of divine things extended high. They were full of love and trust in God. Religion was the joy of their heart, and their portion for ever. They felt that God was about them, immanent in matter, within not less, dwelling in their spirit, a present help in their hour of need, which was their every hour. Piety was their only poetry; out of ignorance, out of want, out of pain, which lay heavy about them,—a triple darkness that covered the people,—they looked up to heaven, and saw the star of everlasting life, which sent its mild beams into their responsive soul. Dark without, it was all-glorious within. Men with proud intellect go haughtily by these humble souls; but Mohammeds, Luthers, are born of such a stock, and it is from these little streams that the great ocean of religion is filled full.
Yet it is not in cases like these that you see the fairest effects of religion. The four prismatic rays of piety must be united into one natural and four-fold beam of light, to shine with all their beauty, all their power; then each is enhanced. I love truth the more for loving justice; both the more for loving love; all three the more, when I see them as forms of God; and in a totality of religion I worship the Father, who is truth, justice, and love, who is the Infinite God.
The affections want a person to cling to;—my soul reveals to me God, without the limitations of human personality; Him I can love, and not be narrowed by my affections. If I love a limited object, I grow up to the bigness thereof, then stop; it helps my growth no more. The finiteness of my friend admits no absolute affection. Partial love must not disturb the universal sweep of impersonal truth and justice. The object of the heart must not come between me and the object of mind or conscience, and enfeeble the man. But if you love the Infinite God, it is with all your faculties, which find their complete and perfect object, and you progressively grow up towards him, to be like him. The idea of God becomes continually ​ more, your achievement of the divine becomes more. You love with no divided love; there is no collision of faculties, the head forbidding what the soul commands, the heart working one way and the conscience another. The same Object corresponds to all these faculties, which love Him as truth, as justice, as love, as God who is all in all; one central sun balances and feeds with fire this system of harmonious orbs.
Consider the power of religion in a man whose mind and conscience, heart and soul, are all well developed. He has these four forms of piety; they all unite, each to all, and all to each. His mind gives him knowledge of truth, the necessary condition for the highest action of his conscience; that furnishes him with the idea of justice, which is the necessary condition for the highest action of the affections; they in their development extend to all in their wide love of men ; this affords the necessary condition for the highest action of the soul, which can then love God with absolute love, and, joining with all the other activity of the man, helps the use, development, and enjoyment of every faculty. Then truth has lost its coldness ; justice is not hard and severe ; love is not partial, as when limited to family, tribe, or nation; but, coextensive with justice, applies to all mankind; faith is not mystical or merely introversive and quietistic. This fourfold action joins in one unity of worship, in love of God,—love with the highest and conjoint action of all the faculties of man. Then love of the Infinite God is no mystical abstraction, no dreamy sentimentalism, but the normal action of the entire man, every faculty seeking its finite contentment, and finding also its infinite satisfaction by feeling the life of God in the soul of man.
In our time, as often before, attempts are making to cultivate the soul, in the narrowest way, without developing the other parts of man's spiritual nature. The intellect is called "carnal," conscience " dangerous," and the heart "deceitful." We are told to trust none of these in matters of religion. Accordingly, ecclesiastical men complain that "science is not religious," because it breaks down the "venerable doctrines" of the Church,—because geologists have swept away the flood, grammarians annihilated the ​tower of Babel, and physiologists brushed off the miracles of the Jews, the Greeks, the Hindoos, and Christians, to the same dust-hole of the ages and repository of rubbish. It is complained that "morality is not religious," because it refuses to be comforted with the forms of religious ceremony, and thinks "divine service" is not merely sitting in a church, or listening to even the wisest words. The churches complain also that "philanthropy is not religious," but love of men dissuades us from love of God. The philanthropist looks out on the evils of society,—on the slavery whose symbol is the lash, and the slavery whose symbol is the dollar; on the avarice, the intemperance, the licentiousness of men; and calls on mankind in the name of God to put away all this wickedness. The churches say: "Rather receive our sacraments. Religion has nothing to do with such matters."
This being the case, men of powerful character no longer betake themselves to the Church as their fortress whence to assail the evils of the age, or as their hermitage wherein to find rest to their souls. In all England there are few men, I think, of first-rate ability who speak from a pulpit. Let me do no injustice to minds like three great men honouring her pulpits now, but has England a clerical scholar to rival the intellectual affluence of Hooker, and Barrow, and Taylor, and Cudworth, and South? The great names of English literature at this day, Carlyle, Hallam, Macaulay, Mill, Grote, and the rest, seem far enough from the Church, or its modes of salvation. The counting-house sends out men to teach political economy, looking always to the kitchen of the nation, and thinking of the stomach of the people. Does the Church send out men of corresponding power to think of the soul of the nation, and teach the people political morality? Was Bishop Butler the last of the great men who essayed to teach Britain from her established pulpit? Even Priestley has few successors in the ranks of religious dissent. The same may be said of Church poets: they are often well-bred; what one of them is there that was well-born for his high vocation?
In the American Church there is the same famine of men. Edwards and Mayhew belonged to a race now extinct,—great men in pulpits. In our literature there ​ are names enough once clerical. The very fairest names on our little hill of the Muses are of men once clergymen. Channing is the only one in this country who continued thus to the end of life. A crowd of able men, with a mob of others, press into all departments of trade, into the profession of the law, and the headlong race of American politics,—where a reputation is gained without a virtue or lost without a crime,—but no men of first-rate powers and attainments continue in the pulpit. Hence we have strong-minded men in business, in politics, and law, who teach men the measures which seem to suit the evanescent interests of the day, but few in pulpits, to teach men the eternal principles of justice, which really suit the present and also the everlasting interests of mankind. Hence no popular and deadly sin of the nation gets well rebuked by the Church of the Times. The dwarfs of the pulpit hide their diminished heads before the Anakim of politics and trade. The almighty dollar hunts wisdom, justice, and philanthropy out of the American Church. It is only among the fanatical Mormons that the ablest men teach in the name of God.
The same is mainly true of all Christendom. The Church which in her productive period had an Origen, a Chrysostom, an Augustine, a Jerome, an Aquinas, its Gregories and its Basils, had real saints and willing martyrs, in the nineteenth century cannot show a single mind which is a guide of the age. The great philosophers of Europe are for enough from Christian.
It is, doubtless, a present misfortune that the positions most favourable to religious influence are filled with feeble men, or such as care little for the welfare of mankind,—who have all of religion except its truth, its justice, its philanthropy, and its faith. Still, such is the fact just now; a fact which shows plainly enough the position of what is popularly called " Christianity " in the world of men. The form of religion first proclaimed by the greatest religious genius that ever lit the world, and sealed by his martyrdom, is now officially represented by men of vulgar talents, of vulgar aspirations,—to be rich, respectable, and fat,—and of vulgar lives. Hunkers of the Church claim exclusively to represent the martyr of the Cross. A sad sight! ​ Yet still religion is a great power amongst men, spite of these disadvantages. It was never so great before; for in the progressive development of mankind the higher faculties acquire continually a greater and greater influence. If Christianity means what was true and good in the teaching and character of Jesus, then there was never so much of it in the world. Spite of the defalcation and opposition of the churches there is a continual growth in all those four forms of piety. Under the direction of able men all those fragments of religion are made ready in their several places. In the department of mind, see how much has been done in this last hundred years; man has nearly doubled the intellectual property of the seventeenth century. The early history of mankind is better understood now than by the nations who lived it. What discoveries of science in all that relates to the heavens, to the earth and its inhabitants, mineral, vegetable, animal, human! In the philosophy of man, how much has been done to understand his nature and his history ! In practical affairs, see what wonders have been wrought in a hundred years; look at England, France, Germany, and America, and see the power of the scientific head over the world of matter, the human power gained by better political organization of the tribes of men.
In the department of conscience, see what a love of justice developes itself in all Christendom; see the results of this for the last hundred years ; in the reform of laws, of constitutions, in the great political, social, and domestic revolutions of our time. Men have clearer ideas of justice; they would have a church without a bishop, a State without a king, society without a lord, and a family without a slave. From this troublesome conscience comes the uneasiness of the Christian world. A revolution is a nation's act of penitence, of resolution, and of prayer,—its agony and bloody sweat. See what a love of freedom there is shaking the institutions of the aged world. Tyrannies totter before the invisible hand of Justice, which, to the terror of the oppressors, writes, "Weighed, and found wanting." So the despot trembles for his guilty throne; the slave-driver begins to fear the God of the man he has kidnapped and enthralled. See the attempts making by the people to break down monopolies, to promote freedom ​ of intercourse between all nations of the earth. See woman assert her native rights, long held in abeyance by the superior vigour of the manly arm.
In all that pertains to the affections there has been a great advance. Love travels beyond the narrow bounds of England and of Christendom. See the efforts making to free the slave; to elevate the poor, — removing the causes of poverty by the charity that alleviates and the justice that cures; to heal the drunkard of his fiery thirst; to reform the criminals whom once we only hung. The gallows must come down, the dungeon be a school for piety, not the den of vengeance and of rage. Great pains begin to be taken with the deaf and dumb, the blind, the insane; even the idiot must be taught. Philanthropic men, who are freedom to the slave, feet to the lame, eyes to the blind, and hearing to the deaf, would be also understanding to the fool. In what is idly called "an age of faith," the town council of Grenoble set archers at the gates, to draw upon strange beggars and shoot them down before the city walls. Look, now, at the New England provision for the destitute,—for the support of their bodies and the culture of their minds.
No Church leads off in these movements; ecclesiastical men take small interest therein ; but they come from the three partial forms of piety, the intellectual, the moral, and the affectional. We need to have these all united with a conscious love of God. What hinders ? The old ecclesiastical idea of God, as finite, imperfect in wisdom, in justice, and in love, still blocks the way. The God wholly external to the world of matter, acting by fits and starts, is not God enough for science, which requires a uniform, infinite force, with constant modes of action. The capricious Deity, wholly external to the human spirit,—jealous, partial, loving Jacob and hating Esau, revengeful, blasting with endless hell all but a fraction of his family,—this is not God enough for the scientific moralist, and the philanthropist running over with love. They want a God immanent in matter, immanent in spirit, yet infinite, and so transcending both,—the God of infinite perfection, infinite power, wisdom, justice, love, and self-fidelity. This idea is a stranger to the Christian, as to the Hebrew and Mohammedan church ; and so stout men turn off therefrom, ​ or else are driven away with hated names. One day these men will welcome the true idea of God, and have a conscious trust and love of Him to match their science, their justice, and their love of men; will become the prophets and apostles of the Absolute Religion, finding it wide enough for all truth, all justice, and all love, yea, for an absolute faith in God, in his motives, means, and ends. Then all this science of the nineteenth century, all this practical energy, this wide command over Nature, this power to organize the world of matter and yoke it to the will of man, this love of freedom and power to combine vast masses in productive industry ; then all this wide literature of modern times, glittering with many-coloured riches, and spread abroad so swift; then all this morality which clamours for the native right of men, this wide philanthropy, laying down its life to bless mankind,—all this shall join with the natural emotions of the soul, welcoming the Infinite God. It shall all unite into one religion; each part thereof "may call the farthest brother." Then what a work will religion achieve in the affairs of men ! What institutions will it build, what welfare will it produce on earth, what men bring forth ! Even now the several means are working for this one great end, only not visibly, not with the consciousness of men.
I do not complain of the "decline of piety" I thank God for its increase. I see what has been done, but I look also to what remains to do. I am sure that mankind will do it. God is a master workman ; He made man well,—for an end worthy of God, provided with means quite adequate to that end. No man, not an Isaiah or a Jesus, ever dares prophesy so high but man fulfils the oracle, and then goes dreaming his prophecy anew, and fulfilling it as he goes on. If you have a true idea of justice, a true sentiment of philanthropy or of faith in God, which men have not yet welcomed, if you can state your idea in speech, then mankind will stop and realize your idea,—make your abstract thought their concrete thing. Kings are nothing, armies fall before you. The idea sways them in its flight as the wind of summer bows the unripe corn of June.
This religion will build temples, not of stone only, but temples of living stones, temples of men, families, communities, nations, and a world. We want no monarchies ​ in the name of God; we do want a democracy in that name, a democracy which rests on human nature, and, respecting that, re-enacts the natural laws of God, the Constitution of the Universe, in the common statutes and written laws of the land.
We need this religion for its general and its special purposes; need it as subjective piety in each of these fragmentary forms, as joined into a totality of religious consciousness; we need it as morality, keeping the natural laws of God for the body and the spirit, in the individual, domestic, social, national, and general human or cosmic form, the divine sentiment becoming the human act. We need this to heal the vices of modern society, to revolutionize this modern feudalism of gold, and join the rich and poor, the employer and the employed, in one bond of human fellowship; we need it to break down the wall between class and class, nation and nation, race and race,—to join all classes into one nation, all nations into one great human family. Science alone is not adequate to achieve this; calculations of interest cannot effect it; political economy will not check the iron hand of power, nor relax the grasp of the oppressor from his victim's throat. Only religion, deep, wide spread, and true, can achieve this work.
Already it is going forward, not under the guidance of one great man with ideas to direct the march, and mind to plan the structure of the future age, but under many men, who know each his little speciality, all their several parts, while the Infinite Architect foresees and so provides for all. Much has been done in this century, now only half spent; much more is a-doing. But the greatest of its works is one which men do not talk about, nor see: it is the silent development of the several parts of a complete piety, one day to be united into a consciousness of the Absolute Religion, and to be the parent of a new church and new State, with communities and families such as the world has hitherto not seen.
We notice the material works of our time, the industrial activity, the rapid increase of wealth in either England, Old or New. Foolish men deplore this, and would go back to the time when an ignorant peasantry, clad in sheep-skins, full of blind, instinctive faith in God, and fol​ lowing only as they were led by men, built up the cathedrals of Upsala and Strasburg. In the order of development, the material comes first; even the excessive lust of gain, now turning the heads of Old England and the New, is part of the cure of the former unnatural mistake. Gross poverty is on its way to the grave. The natural man is before the spiritual man. We are laying a basis for a spiritual structure which no man has genius yet to plan. Years ago there were crowds of men at work in Lebanon, cutting down the algum, the cedar, and the fir, squaring into ashlar, boring, chiselling, mortising, tenoning, all manner of beams some were rafting it along the coast to Joppa, and yet others teaming it up to Jerusalem. What sweat of horses was there, what lowing of oxen and complaint from the camels! Thousands of men were quarrying stone at Moriah for the foundation of the work. Yet only one man comprehended it all; the lumberers felling the cedar and sycamore, the carpenters and the muleteers, understood each their special work, no more. But the son of the Danite woman planned all this stone and timber into a temple, which, by the labour of many and the consciousness of a few, rose up on the mountain of Jerusalem, the wonder and the pride of all the land. So the great work, the humanization of man, is going forward. The girl that weaves muslins at Brussels, the captain of the emigrant ship sailing "past bleak Mozambique," hungry for Australian gold, the chemist who annihilates pain with a gas and teaches lightning to read and write, the philosopher who tells us the mighty faculties which lie hid in labyrinthine man, and the philanthropic maiden who in the dirt of a worldly city lives love which some theologians think is too much for God,—all of these, and thousands more, are getting together and preparing the materials for the great temple of man, whose builder and maker is God. You and I shall pass away, but mankind is the true son of God that abideth ever, to whom the Father says continually, "Come up higher."
I see the silent growth of religion in men. I see that the spiritual elements are a larger fraction of human consciousness than ever before; that there is more of truth, of justice, of love, and faith in God than was ever in the world. As we know and observe the natural laws of man, ​ the constitution of the universe, the more, so will this religion continue to increase, and the results thereof appear in common life, in the individual, domestic, social, national, and universal human form.
Some men say they cannot love, or even know, God, except in the form of man. God as the Infinite seems to them abstract, and they cannot lay hold on Him until a man fills their corporeal eye and arms, and the affections cling thereto and are blest. So they love Christ,—not the Jesus of history, but the Christ of the Christian mythology,—an imaginary being, an ideal incarnation of God in man. Let them help themselves with this crutch of the fancy, as boys use sticks to leap a ditch or spring a wall; yet let them remember that the real historical incarnation of God is in mankind, not in one person, but all, and human history is a continual transfiguration. As the Divine seems nearest when human, and men have loved to believe in the union of God and man, so religion is loveliest when it assumes the form of common life,—when daily work is a daily sacrament, and life itself a psalm of gratitude and prayer of aspiration.
It is Palm Sunday to-day, and men in churches remember what is written of the peasant from Galilee who rode into Jerusalem amid multitudes of earnest men not merely waiting for consolation, but going to meet it half-way, who yet knew not what they did, nor whom they welcomed. As that man went to the capital of a nation which knew him not, so in our time Religion rides her ass-colt into village and town, welcome to many a weary, toiling heart, but ignored and pelted by the successors of such as "took counsel against Jesus, to put him to death." How little do we know ! But he that keeps the integrity of his own consciousness, and is faithful to himself day by day, is also faithful to God for eternity, and helps to restore the integrity of the world of men.
The religious actions of old times it is now easy to understand. They left their monuments, their pyramids, and temples which they built, the memory of the wars they fought against their brothers in the dear name of Jesus, or of Allah the Only. But the religious action of this age, not in the old form,—it will take the next generation to understand that. ​My friends, this is a young nation, new as yet ; you and I can do something to mould its destiny. There are millions before us. They will fulfil our prophecy, the truer the fairer. Our sentiment of religion, our ideas thereof, if true, shall bless them in their deepest, dearest life. They will rejoice if we shall break the yokes from off their necks, and rend asunder the old traditionary veil which hides from them their Father's face. All of your piety, partial or total, shall go down to gladden the faces of your children, and to bless their souls for ever and for ever.