(J^arnell UttiuerBtty ffiibrary 
 
 3tl|ata. New gnrk 
 
 BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE 
 
 SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND 
 
 THE GIFT OF 
 
 HENRY W. SAGE 
 
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Cornell University Library 
 BR85 .R49 
 
 Poet of science and other addresses by 
 
 olin 
 
 3 1924 029 232 695 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
 THE RETUEN TO FAITH, AND OTHER 
 ADDRESSES 
 
 12mo. Net, 76 cents 
 
THE POET OF SCIENCE 
 
 AND 
 
 OTHER ADDRESSES 
 
 By 
 WILLIAM NORTH glCE 
 
 Profeiior of Geology (Emeritu*), WMlsyui University 
 
 p,yj^ 
 
 THE ABINGDON PRESS 
 NEW YORK CINCINNATI 
 
 I- M:U/\i-:V 
 
^5\Gt>&^ 
 
 Ck)pyright, 1919, by 
 WILLIAM NORTH RICE 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAOB 
 
 Preface 7 
 
 I. The Poet of Science 11 
 
 n. The Skeptical and the Dogmatic 
 
 Tendency in Religious Thought 49 
 
 III. Ethical and Religious Lessons of 
 
 Science 76 
 
 IV. The Sacredness of Human Pehson- 
 
 ALITT 99 
 
 V. The New Testament of To-day 123 
 
 VI. The Sabbath and the Lord's Day. . . 145 
 
 Vn. Methodism in New England 173 
 
 Vin. The Chbistun Era 203 
 
The original of tliis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924029232695 
 
PREFACE 
 
 In this little volume have been collected 
 a number of addresses prepared for various 
 occasions, mostly within the last few years. 
 I have had a sufficiently partial judgment 
 to fancy that they might be worthy of- the 
 limited immortality conferred by printer's 
 ink. They deal with a variety of topics, and 
 bear to each other no relation of mutual 
 dependence. There is, however, one general 
 thought upon which all of them in one way 
 or another have some bearing. That thought 
 is the adjustment of Christian faith and life 
 and institutions to the ever-changing con- 
 ditions which come with the lapse of time. 
 Underlying all of them is the conviction that 
 the great need of the moral Ufe of humanity 
 in oiu* own age and in every age is "not a 
 new Gospel, but the Gospel anew." 
 
 Most of the addresses have been pubhshed 
 substantially in the form in which they were 
 deUvered. A few of them have been con- 
 siderably altered in adaptation to present 
 conditions. I have chosen to preserve each 
 
 7 
 
PREFACE 
 
 of the addresses in a form complete in itself, 
 though an inevitable consequence is the oc- 
 cmrence of a certain amount of repetition. 
 
 Two of the addresses have already been 
 published, the second in The Independent, 
 and the eighth in Zion's Herald. Grateful 
 acknowledgments are made to the pubhshers 
 of these periodicals, who have permitted the 
 republication of the articles. The other ad- 
 dresses now appear in print for the first 
 time. 
 
 I desire also to acknowledge my obliga- 
 tion to my brother, the Rev. Charles Francis 
 Rice, D.D., for assistance in reading proofs 
 and for critical suggestions. 
 
 William Noeth Rice. 
 
 8 
 
I 
 
 THE POET OF SCIENCE 
 
THE POET OF SCIENCE 
 
 The subject announced for my lecture 
 may arouse in some minds the thought that 
 a devotee of the science which Hyxkylias 
 defined as the science of mijd-is decidedly out 
 of place when he attempts a literary criti- 
 cism. My answer to that objection would 
 be that I do not purpose to attempt a liter- 
 ary criticism. I am not going to discuss 
 poetry from a literary standpoint. The 
 question whether Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 
 considered as a poet, ranks first or only 
 second in that galaxy of poets on both sides 
 qf the Atlantic who made the Victorian era 
 illustrious, I shall leave literary critics to 
 consider. I shall speak of the poetry of 
 Tennyson as viewed from the standpoint of 
 a student of science. 
 
 In the first place, the claim of Tennyson 
 to the title of "the poet of science" rests 
 
 11 
 
THE POET OF SCIENCE 
 
 /'upon the fact that he was an observer of 
 nature at first hand and that his descrip- 
 \tions are always phenomenally true. This 
 is not by any means true of all literary men. 
 A popular novehst, I beheve, in painting an 
 evening scene, describes the thin crescent of 
 the new moon as rising in the east, which, 
 it is safe to say, the new moon never did. A 
 distinguished historian, wishing to empha- 
 size in his description the fierce tvmiult of a 
 Parisian mob in the French Revolution by 
 contrast with the solemn calm of the 
 heavens, says that on a certain evening, 
 when things in Paris were especially timiult- 
 uous, Orion and the Pleiades looked down 
 upon them. An astronomical friend tells 
 me that at that time in the year Orion and 
 the Pleiades did not rise until four o'clock in 
 the morning. Not aU poets are observers 
 of natvu-e. The ancient poets in general 
 were not in great degree observers of na- 
 ture, with the striking exception of the 
 Hebrew poets. The Hebrew psahnists and 
 prophet bards seem in this respect far more 
 modern than the classical poets. They write 
 of natiu-e from first-hand observation and 
 in ihe spirit of a genuine love of nature. 
 12 
 
THE POET OF SCIENCE 
 
 The Hebrew poets, of course, are guiltless 
 of any scientific interpretation of nature, 
 but their descriptions of natural phenomena 
 are true. The Latin and Greek poets deal 
 with man, and very little with nature. The 
 opening words of the -^neid, "Arma virum- 
 que cano" and the first line of the Ihad, 
 "M^wv oEide, ^eo, 'iiijAi/tddew, 'A;^'^^''?;" s^rc ex- 
 pressive of the spirit of classic poetry in 
 general. My honored colleague, the profes- 
 sor of Latin in Wesley an University, finds 
 in the poetry of TibuUus and Propertius 
 scarcely any references to nature which are 
 not merely conventional. Of the latter poet, 
 my friend says, "His nature was mostly 
 learned at second hand, and requires for its 
 interpretation not a botany, an astronomy, 
 or a physical geography, so much as a clas- 
 sical dictionary." 
 
 While, in general, modern poetry is char- 
 acterized by deep appreciation of the charm 
 of nature, it is |iot by any means true of all 
 modern versifiers. The writers of hymns 
 are a very useful class of people, but they 
 are not always ble^ed with very much 
 knowledge of nature or sympathy with 
 nature. In the immensely numerous hymns 
 13 
 
THE POET OF SCIENCE 
 
 of Charles Wesley we practically never find 
 any reference to natural phenomena which 
 / is not obviously taken from the/ Bible. In 
 so far as phrases in his hymns refer to any 
 aspects of nature, they do not refer to the 
 scenery of England, but to that of Palestine 
 or Egypt. The following is rather an ex- 
 ceptionally bad specimen of Charles Wes- 
 ley's figurative use of Supposed natural 
 phenomena: / 
 
 "Thou Rock of my salvation, haste; 
 Extend thine ainple shade; 
 And let it over me be cast. 
 To screen my naked head. 
 
 "0 set upon thyself my feet, 
 And make me surely stand; 
 From fierce temptation's rage and heat 
 Protect me with thy hand. 
 
 "Now let me in the cleft be placed, 
 Nor my defense remove; 
 Within thine arms of love embraced — 
 Thine arms of endless love." 
 
 In this chaotic jumble of mixed metaphors, 
 the basal idea is obviously an adaptation of 
 the phrase of Isaiah, "the shadow of a great 
 rock in a weary land." The picture which 
 that phrase presents is significant in the 
 14 
 
THE POET OF SCIENCE 
 
 Libyan or the Syrian desert, but in Eng- 
 land it is absolutely meaningless. 
 
 But phenomenal truth in the descrip-^ 
 tion of nature is found so generally in, 
 modern poets that it would not alone justify 
 the title which I have given to Tennyson. 
 Yet I think it is true that he does show that 
 characteristic in an eminent degree even as 
 compared with most modern poets. When 
 he tells us in "Maud," 
 
 "My mood is changed, for it fell at a time of year 
 When the face of night is fair on the dewy downs, 
 And the shining daffodil dies, and the Charioteer 
 And starry Gemini hang like golden crowns 
 Over Orion's grave low down in the west," 
 
 he gives us two phenomena whereby the time 
 of the year is dated ; one, the appearance of 
 certain constellations in the evening sky; 
 the other, the close of the season of bloom 
 of the daffodil. The astronomical date and/ 
 the botanical date correspond with each 
 other. The time of the year was the month) 
 of April. Tennyson occasionally employs 
 very imusual descriptive phrases, which- 
 startle the reader and suggest a doubt as to) 
 whether they can be true; and yet it will al-y 
 ways be found that tKey are truly descrip- 
 
 15 
 
THE POET OF SCIENCE 
 
 tive of actual aspects of nature, though it 
 may be somewhat exceptional ones. ^Vhen 
 he speaks in "Locksley Hall" of 
 
 "Summer isles of Eden lying in dark-purple 
 spheres of sea," 
 
 the color attributed to the water is not that 
 which we usually think of in connection with 
 the sea, and yet most people who are f amiUar 
 with the sea under varying conditions will re- 
 call instances where its aspect is best de- 
 
 \ scribed by the word "purple." The "scar- 
 let shafts" of sunrise and of sunset in 
 
 ' "Enoch Arden" certainly do not represent 
 the most common colors of the sunrise or 
 the sunset sky. Yet there are at times and 
 in places scarlet sunrises and sunsets. The 
 description of the sea as seen by an eagle at 
 a lofty height is wonderfully painted in the 
 line, 
 
 ("The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls." 
 
 To those who have ever had the opportimity 
 of looking down upon the waves of the sea 
 from any considerable altitude, the descrip- 
 tion of the surface as wrinkled and of the 
 sea as crawling appears" singularly accvu'ate. 
 16 
 
THE POET OF SCIENCE 
 
 II 
 
 I pass on to another characteristic of 
 Tennyson's poetry which marks him far 
 more distinctively as the poet of science; 
 and that is that he draws his material in/ 
 large degree from recondite facts of science) 
 and from scientific theories. Other poets 
 have sung the beauty of the 
 
 "Wee, modest, crimson-tippfed flow'r," 
 
 or have felt the "harmonious madness" which 
 ripples forth in the song of the skylark. In 
 the verse of other poets we catch echoes of 
 
 "The rhythm of autumn's forest dyes. 
 The hymn of sunset's painted skies." 
 
 Other poets in general deal with those phe- 
 nomena of nature which at least potentially 
 fall within the range of every man's obser- 
 vation. Tennyson deals with phenomena 
 that are only to be observed with the tele- 
 scope or the microscope, and with theoretical] 
 interpretations of phenomena. He writes j 
 poetry on the nebular theory, and on the 
 parallelism of ontogeny and phylogeny in 
 organic evolution. 
 
 I was talking once with a friend who is 
 an astronomer, and he told me that Tenny- 
 
 17 
 
THE POET OF SCIENCE 
 
 son's poetry was remarkable for the abun- 
 dance of allusions to astronomical facts and 
 theories. I told him that I had not observed 
 ! that Tennyson was an astronomer, but that 
 ; I knew that he was a geologist. The fact 
 is, each one of us had seen in Tennyson what 
 his own studies and habits of thought en- 
 abled him to see. From Tennyson's biog- 
 raphy we learn that the sciences of astron- 
 omy and geology kindled his imagination 
 very early, and that aU through life he was 
 profoundly impressed by the sublimity of 
 astronomical spaces and geological times. 
 
 I give a few illustrations of Tennyson's 
 astronomical allusions. From one of his 
 "Juvenile Poems": 
 
 /"The rays of many a rolling central star, 
 
 ^/ Aye flashing earthwards, have not reached us 
 
 - yet." 
 
 The almost inconceivable distances of the 
 stars are measured by the ages occupied in 
 the rapid transmission of hght. From "The 
 Palace of Art"^ 
 
 "Reign thou apart, a quiet king. 
 Still as, while Saturn whirls, his steadfast shade, 
 Sleeps on his luminous ring." 
 18 
 
THE POET OF SCIENCE 
 
 As we gaze upon Saturn through a tele- 
 scope, though the planet is rotating and the 
 ring is revolving around it, the shadow of 
 the planet upon the ring appears motionless. 
 The theory of the tides appears in a passage 
 from the same poem, in the significant word 
 "moon-led." 
 
 "A still salt pool, locked in with bars of sand. 
 Left on the shore ; that hears all night 
 The plunging seas draw backward from the land 
 Their moon-led waters white." 
 
 In the earliest edition of that poem one of 
 the striking featvu-es of the palace in which 
 the soul was supposed to enjoy the selfish 
 delight of intellectual isolation was an as- 
 tronomical observatory. In later editions 
 the description of the observatory was 
 omitted. The maturer judgment of the poet 
 recognized that, though the description of 
 the observatory was beautiful in itself, the 
 poem as a whole was better without it. The 
 general effect of the palace was better after 
 the observatory was pulled down. In those 
 stanzas in which we are told what was seen 
 from the observatory, the poet fairly revels 
 in the sublime conceptions of astronomy. 
 
 19 
 
 ! 
 
THE POET OF SCIENCE 
 
 "Hither, when all the deep unsounded skies 
 Shuddered with silent stars, she clomb. 
 And as with optic glasses her keen eyes 
 
 Pierced through the mystic dome, 
 
 "Regions of lucid matter taking forms, 
 Brushes of fire, hazy gleams, 
 Clusters and beds of worlds, and bee-like swarms 
 Of suns, and starry streams. 
 
 "She saw the snowy poles and moons of Mars, 
 That marvellous field of drifted light 
 In mid Orion, and the married stars." 
 
 The "regions of lucid matter taking forms" 
 are of course nebulae, which, according to 
 the nebular theory, were conceived to repre- 
 sent an earlier stage of evolution of plane- 
 tary systems similar to our own. The phrase 
 "married stars" is a singularly beautiful 
 description of stars which are physically 
 double, as forming one system revolving 
 arovmd their common center of gravity. In 
 contrast with these, there may be stars 
 which are optically double, in that they hap- 
 pen to be nearly in the same direction from 
 our point of view. The nebular theory ap- 
 pears again in a striking passage in "Locks- 
 ley Hall Sixty Years After." 
 20 
 
THE POET OF SCIENCE 
 
 "Warless? war will die out late then. Will it 
 ever? late or soon? 
 Can it, till this outworn earth be dead as yon 
 dead world, the moon? 
 
 Dead the new astronomy calls her — • . . , 
 
 Dead, but how her living glory lights the hall, 
 
 the dune, the grass ! 
 Yet the moonlight is the sunlight, and the sun 
 
 himself will pass." 
 
 According to the nebular theory in its 
 Laplacean form, the earth is undergoing 
 progressive refrigeration, and will sometime 
 be hke the moon, which is already cold and 
 dead; and even the blazing sun, whose light 
 is reflected in the moonlight, is destined 
 ultimately to the same refrigeration and 
 death. This was good science when Tenny- 
 son wrote it, though now the Laplacean 
 theory itself is dead, and we are not quite 
 as definite as formerly in our views of the 
 origin and destiny of the solar system. 
 From "In Memoriam": 
 
 "Sweet Hesper-Phosphor, double name 
 For what is one, the first, the last, 
 Thou, like my present and my past, 
 Thy place is changed; thou art the same." 
 21 
 
THE POET OF SCIENCE 
 
 Venus appears as morning star or evening 
 star, as in its revolution it changes its posi- 
 tion relative to the sun. 
 
 A few geological passages. From "In 
 Memoriam" : 
 
 "There rolls the deep where grew the tree. 
 earth, what changes thou hast seen! 
 There where the long street roars, hath been 
 The stillness of the central sea. 
 
 "The hills are shadows, and they flow 
 
 From form to form, and nothing stands ; 
 They melt like mist, the solid lands. 
 Like clouds they shape themselves and go." 
 
 In this stanza we have exactly the concep- 
 tion of the history of geographical change 
 which characterized the geology of Sir 
 Charles Lyell, and that was the best geology 
 there was in the days when "In Memoriam" 
 was written. It was not until later that our 
 American geologist Dana announced the 
 doctrine of the substantial permanence of 
 continent and ocean, and it was very much 
 later that that doctrine came into general 
 acceptance. Most of us now believe that 
 great areas of our continents have from 
 time to time been covered by the waters of 
 22 
 
THE POET OF SCIENCE 
 
 the sea, but, at least for the most part, by 
 shallow seas, not by oceanic depths. An- 
 other stanza of the same poem: 
 
 "The moanings of the homeless sea, 
 
 The sound of streams that swift or slow 
 Draw down asonian hills, and sow 
 The dust of continents to be." 
 
 Here we have the representation of the 
 gradual degradation of the contments by the 
 agencies of subaerial denudation. From the 
 same poem, again: 
 
 "The solid earth whereon we tread 
 
 In tracts of fluent heat began, 
 
 And grew to seeming-random forms. 
 The seeming prey of cyclic storms. 
 
 Till at the last arose the man." 
 
 Here we have, of course, the primitively 
 molten or gaseous earth /which was the neces- 
 sary geological coroUary of the nebular 
 theory of Laplace. That was good geology 
 as long as Tennyson lived; but in these later 
 years in which we have lost faith in the 
 Laplacean form of the nebular theory, we 
 have grown pretty skeptical about any mol- 
 ten stage in the history of the earth. From 
 "The Two Voices": 
 
 23 
 
THE POET OF SCIENCE 
 
 "... When first the world began. 
 Young nature through five cycles ran, 
 And in the sixth she molded nian." 
 
 In these lines, I suppose, the poet must refer 
 to the interpretation of the Mosaic days of 
 creation as symbols of indefinite periods of 
 time — a conception which served as a very 
 convenient half-way station, between the be- 
 lief in the literal truth of the narratives of 
 creation in Genesis, and our present belief 
 that the Mosaic days have no scientific 
 meaning whatever. How impressively the 
 truth of the appearance and extinction of 
 successive faimas in geological times, and 
 the awful question which those facts in- 
 evitably suggest to the thoughtful mind, are 
 presented in those lines from "In Me- 
 moriam" : 
 
 *' 'So careful of the type?' but no. 
 
 From scarped clifF and quarried stone 
 She cries, 'A thousand types are gone : 
 I care for nothing, all shall go. 
 
 " 'Thou makest thine appeal to me : 
 I bring to life, I bring to death : 
 The spirit does but mean the breath: 
 I know no more.' " 
 
 While I think it is probably true that 
 24 
 
THE POET OF SCIENCE 
 
 Tennyson's poetry is richer in astronomical 
 and geological material than in matter be- 
 longing to the other sciences, it is certainly 
 true that in considerable degree his writings 
 abound in references to facts and theories of 
 various other departments of science. How 
 beautiful is his description of the meta- 
 morphosis of the dragon-fly in "The Two 
 Voices"! 
 
 "To-day I saw the dragon-fly 
 Come from the wells where he did lie. 
 
 "An inner impulse rent the veil 
 Of his old husk: from head to tail 
 Came out clear plates of sapphire mail. 
 
 "He dried his wings : like gauze they grew ; 
 Through crofts and pastures wet with dew 
 A living flash of light he flew." 
 
 With what startling truth the parallelism 
 between the embryological development of 
 the iadividual and the succession of related 
 types is presented in those lines of "In 
 Memoriam" ! — / 
 
 "A soul shall draw from out the vast 
 And strike his being into bounds, j 
 
 "And, moved thro' life of lower phase, i 
 
 Result in man, be born and think." 
 23 
 
THE POET OF SCIENCE 
 
 How impressively the insoluble mystery of 
 life, alike in its highest and in its lowest 
 forms, is brought before us in that beautiful 
 fragment! — 
 
 "Flower in the crannied wall, 
 I pluck you out of the crannies, 
 I hold you here, root and aU, in my hand. 
 Little flower — but if I could understand 
 What you are, root and all, and all in all, 
 I should know what God and man is." 
 
 Of course a man with so comprehensive 
 and profound a knowledge and appreciation 
 of astronomical, geological, and biolog- 
 ical science was an early convert to evo- 
 lution. In fact, he hardly needed any con- 
 version. We learn that in a college debating 
 society he maintained that the "development 
 of the human body might possibly be traced 
 from the radiated, vermicular, molluscous, 
 and vertebrate organisms." It is needless 
 to say that the idea of one continuous line 
 of evolution from the lowest to the highest 
 form of life is very different from the con- 
 ception of evolution as held to-day. The 
 progress of evolution has been along many 
 radiating lines. Sea-urchins and cuttle- 
 26 
 
THE POET OF SCIENCE 
 
 fishes are certainly not in the line of human 
 pedigree. But no less interesting is the fact 
 that Tennyson in his college days was al- 
 ready speculating on evolutionary theories. 
 It was in pre-Darwinian days that he wrote 
 in "In Memoriam," 
 
 "... Arise and fly 
 
 The reeling Faun, the sensual feast ; 
 Move upward, working out the beast, 
 And let the ape and tiger die." 
 
 I do not pretend to know how definite an 
 evolutionary conception he intended to ex- 
 press in those words. Whether we are evo- 
 lutionists or not, we must recognize that 
 there are moods of hirnian feeling and pas- 
 sion that are ape-like and others that are 
 tiger-like; but, in view of what we know of 
 his early disposition to evolutionary specula- 
 tion, it seems to me probable that in this 
 passage of "In Memoriam" he did have a 
 more or less distinct reference to the idea of 
 man being descended from lower forms of 
 mammaha. Of course, if that was his con- 
 ception, it was a crude one ; for, though the 
 evolutionist of to-day traces the origin of 
 man to ape-like forms, it is perfectly certain! 
 27 ' 
 
THE POET OF SCIENCE 
 
 that the tiger could never have been in the 
 hne of human ancestry. The carnivora are 
 highly specialized in a totally different direc- 
 tion from that line of evolution which re- 
 sulted in man. 
 
 Whatever Tennyson's evolutionary con- 
 ceptions may have been in pre-Darwinian 
 days, it is very certain that he gave early 
 acceptance to the views of Darwin, and that 
 he clearly recognized the role of evolution, 
 even in the ethical development of humanity. 
 In his poem entitled, "By an Evolutionist," 
 we find a noble expression of ethical evolu- 
 tion in the individual. 
 
 "If my body come from brutes, though somewhat 
 finer than their own, 
 I am heir, and this my kingdom. Shall the 
 royal voice be mute? 
 No, but if the rebel subject seek to drag me from 
 the throne. 
 Hold the scepter, Human Soul, and rule thy 
 province of the brute. 
 
 "I have climbed to the snows of Age, and I gaze 
 at a field in the Past, 
 Where I sank with the body at times in the 
 sloughs of a low desire, 
 28 
 
THE POET OF SCIENCE 
 
 But I hear no yelp of the beast, and the Man is 
 quiet at last, 
 As he stands on the heights of his life with 
 a glimpse of a height that is higher." 
 
 In "The Making of Man," we have the 
 ethical evolution of the race. 
 
 "Where is one that, bom of woman, altogether , 
 can escape i 
 
 From the lower world within him, moods of tiger, / 
 or of ape? ! 
 
 Man as yet is being made, and ere the crown- 
 ing Age of ages, 
 Shall not aeon after ason pass and touch him intd^ 
 shape? 
 
 "All about him shadow still, but, while the races 
 flower and fade. 
 Prophet-eyes may catch a glory slowly gaining 
 on the shade. 
 Till the peoples all are one, and all their voices 
 blend in choric 
 Hallelujah to the Maker, 'It is finished. Man 
 is made.' " 
 
 Very curious is the persistence of the tiger 
 
 in the supposed roll of human ancestry ; but 
 
 the general conception of ethical evolution 
 
 is nobly expressed. 
 
 29 
 
THE POET OF SCIENCE 
 
 III 
 
 I call Tennyson the poet of science, 
 thirdly, on account of a certain characteris- 
 tic of his view of nature which I do not 
 know exactly how to name. I am tempted 
 to call it the materialism of his view of 
 nature. I am tempted again to call it the 
 , prosaic truthfulness of his view of nature. 
 I can, perhaps, best illustrate what I mean 
 by contrast. Tennyson has been censured 
 by some of the sesthetic critics for not find- 
 ing that imaginary personality in nature in 
 general or in particular objects of nature 
 which other poets have thought they found. 
 Stopford Brooke finds fault with Tennyson 
 for not seeing nature ahve as Wordsworth 
 did. I confess I do not exactly understand 
 what the critic means; and, as I do not un- 
 derstand him, I quote his words instead of 
 attempting to express his idea in any words 
 of my own. 
 
 Wordsworth "believed within his poetic self 
 that Nature was alive in every vein of her; 
 thought, loved, felt, and enjoyed in her own way, 
 not in a way the same as we, but in a similar way, 
 so. similar that we could communicate with her 
 and she with us, as one spirit can communicate 
 30 
 
THE POET OF SCIENCE 
 
 with another. Then, what is true of the whole 
 of nature is true of the parts. Every flower, 
 cloud, bird, and beast, every mountain, wood, 
 every tree, every stream, the great sky and the 
 mighty being of the ocean, shared in the life of 
 the whole, and made it, in themselves, a particu- 
 lar life. Each of them enjoyed, felt, loved, 
 thought in its own fashion." 
 
 Now we xinesthetic scientists like Tennyson 
 for precisely that characteristic which Stop- 
 ford Brooke alleges as a fault. We geol- 
 ogists think that a mountain range is usually 
 the result of the crushing of a geosyncline 
 by tangential pressure, and that a moun- 
 tain peak is generally a remnant left in the 
 erosion which has removed an immense mass 
 of rock around it. Consequently, we do not 
 beheve that the mountain has a spirit with 
 which we can enter into conversation. In 
 fact, we prefer the oreads and dryads and 
 naiads and nereids, and all the other "ads" 
 and "ids" of classical mythology, which are 
 at least time-hallowed, to the new mythology 
 of aesthetic critics. 
 
 There is, of course, a noble sense in which 
 there is a spirit in all nature. All nature is 
 instinct with immanent Deity, and no writer 
 
 31 
 
THE POET OF SCIENCE 
 
 has ever expressed that thought more nobly 
 than Tennyson in "The Higher Panthe- 
 ism"; but that, I take it, is not what the 
 critics mean. 
 
 While Tennyson does not give us any 
 revelation of imagined communion with the 
 indwelling spirits of natural objects, he does 
 ^sometimes show a marvelous power in the 
 ^symbolic use of natmral phenomena in the 
 ^Representation of human feeling. Some 
 analogy or some contrast between the as- 
 pects of nature and the moods of the human 
 soul vivifies the expression of human feeling. 
 Thus is represented in "Maud" the volup- 
 tuous ecstasy of love's self -surrender: 
 
 "For a breeze of morning moves, 
 
 And the planet of love is on high, 
 
 Beginning to faint in the light that she loves, 
 On a bed of daffodil sky. 
 
 To faint in the light of the sun she loves. 
 To faint in his light, and to die." 
 
 Or, for a very different mood, take the over- 
 whelming pathos of that fragment, 
 "Break, break, break. 
 
 On thy cold gray stones, O Sea ! 
 And I would that my tongue could utter 
 The thoughts that arise in me. 
 32 
 
THE POET OF SCIENCE 
 
 "0, well for the fisherman's boy, 
 
 That he shouts with his sister at play! 
 O, well for the sailor lad, 
 
 That he sings in his boat on the bay ! 
 
 "And the stately ships go on 
 
 To their haven under the hill ; 
 But for the touch of a vanished hand. 
 And the sound of a voice that is still ! 
 
 "Break, break, break. 
 
 At the foot of thy crags, O Sea ! 
 But the tender grace of a day that is dead 
 Will never come back to me." 
 
 IV 
 
 Lastly, and preeminently, I call Tenny- 
 son the poet of science because he, more than 
 any other, has given literary expression to 
 the philosophy and the religious hfe of a 
 scientific age. He is the prophet bard of 
 the age to which his manhood belonged. 
 
 The second half of the nineteenth cen- 
 tury was eminently a scientific age. It was 
 marked by extraordinary progress in the ap- 
 plications of science for the material wel- 
 fare of mankind. But of far greater sig- 
 nificance were the purely intellectual 
 achievements of the age. The distinctive 
 33 
 
THE POET OF SCIENCE 
 
 work of that age in the intellectual history 
 of mankind was to bring to f uU realization, 
 in the doctrine of the conservation of energy 
 and in the doctrine of evolution, that con- 
 ception of the unity of nature which had 
 dawned a century and a half before in New- 
 ton's discovery of gravitation. 
 
 That age of scientific achievement was an 
 age of religious skepticism. In one sense, 
 the spirit of science is essentially and always 
 skeptical. Science accepts no behef on au- 
 thority. Science recognizes the fallibility of 
 aU mental processes and the uncertainty of 
 all conclusions. The scientific man can 
 never feel sure that the last word has been 
 said on any subject. New facts may be 
 discovered, or old facts may be placed in 
 new relations, so as to unsettle behefs which 
 had seemed well established. 
 
 The popular religious beliefs of the 
 middle of the nineteenth century were ill- 
 adapted to resist the disintegrating tend- 
 encies of scientific thought. The popular 
 religious faith was founded on the supposed 
 inerrancy of the Bible, notwithstanding the 
 obvious contradictions contained within the 
 Bible, and the contradictions between the 
 34 
 
THE POET OF SCIENCE 
 
 Bible and beliefs rendered probable by the 
 study of science and history. The church 
 had lost sight of the great truth that the 
 foundation of its faith is not an inerrant 
 book, but a tinique Personality. Thfe pre- 
 vailing form of theistic belief had lost sight 
 of the great truth of the divine immanence 
 in the ordinary processes of nature, and 
 looked for God only in the supposed gaps in 
 the continuity of nature. To the popular 
 faith God was lost, if science could fill those 
 gaps. 
 
 The unification of physical and vital 
 forces, as formulated in the doctrine of con- 
 servation of energy, involves inevitably a 
 tendency to ignore all phenomena which can- 
 not be completely formulated in terms of 
 physics and chemistry. The doctrine of 
 evolution emphasizes the kinship between 
 man and the lower animals; and, in dwelling 
 upon that phase of truth, men were led to 
 ignore or to seek to explain away all ex- 
 periences which were peculiar to man. 
 
 It is no wonder that the tremendously 
 
 startling revelations of science which marked 
 
 the middle of the nineteenth century were 
 
 connected with a widespread skepticism in 
 
 35 
 
THE POET OF SCIENCE 
 
 religion. Yet that skepticism was very dif- 
 ferent from the flippant infidelity of the 
 eighteenth century. The skepticism of the 
 nineteenth century was not an amusement, 
 but an agony. That age of doubt was an 
 age of intense moral earnestness; and to 
 that intensely ethical spirit the loss of the 
 hallowed faith which had been associated 
 with the loftiest development of human 
 character was an experience of intense men- 
 tal anguish. There is a wondrous pathos 
 in the utterances of some of the scientific 
 men who in that period of storm and stress 
 lost their faith. So William Kiagdon Clif- 
 ford speaks of parting from the faith of his 
 childhood "with such searching trouble as 
 only cradle faiths can cause. We have seen," 
 he continues, "the spring sun shine out of an 
 empty heaven to light up a soulless earth; 
 we have felt with utter loneliness that the 
 Great Companion is dead." In the same 
 spirit George John Romanes expresses him- 
 self. "The vmiverse to me has lost its soul 
 of loveliness. . . . When at times I think, 
 as think at times I must, of the appalling 
 contrast between the hallowed glory of that 
 creed which once was mine and the lonely 
 36 
 
THE POET OF SCIENCE 
 
 mystery of existence as now I find it, at such 
 times I shall ever feel it impossible to avoid 
 the sharpest pang of which my nature is 
 susceptible." 
 
 In that moral earnestness was the prom- 
 ise of returning faith. There was light at 
 evening time for some whose lives had been 
 shrouded for a time in darkness; there was 
 light at evening time for the general life of 
 humanity; the dawn of the twentieth cen- 
 tury was bright with a new faith and hope. 
 
 Of all this experience of intellectual' 
 doubt, of moral earnestness, of faith at last 
 triimaphant, Tennyson's poetry is the su- 
 preme literary expression. In 1830 he pub- 
 lished a poem with the strange title, "Sup- 
 posed Confessions of a Second-rate Sensi- 
 tive Mind." After its first pubUcation, the 
 poem was suppressed for more than a half- 
 century, but has been included in the later 
 complete editions of Tennyson's works. It 
 was not such poetry as he wrote after he had 
 learned his art ; but it is interesting as show- 
 ing how early there fell over the faith of his 
 childhood the shadow of doubt. A few lines 
 of that poem reveal at once the experience 
 of doubt and the longing for faith: 
 37 
 
THE POET OF SCIENCE 
 
 "Would that my gloomed fancy were 
 As thine, my mother, when with brows 
 Propt on thy knees, my hands upheld 
 In thine, I listened to thy vows, 
 For me outpoured in holiest prayer — 
 For me unworthy ! — and beheld 
 Thy mild deep eyes upraised, that knew 
 The beauty and repose of faith, 
 And the clear spirit shining through." 
 
 His poetry as a whole breathes that intense 
 moral earnestness which led him to a tri- 
 umphant faith. The story of his own life 
 is told in the words which he wrote of his 
 beloved Hallam: 
 
 ". . . One indeed I knew. 
 
 In many a subtle question versed, 
 Who touched a jarring lyre at first. 
 But ever strove to make it true: 
 
 "Perplexed in faith, but pure in deeds. 
 At last he beat his music out. 
 There lives more faith in honest doubt. 
 Believe me, than in half the creeds." 
 
 But Tennyson's contribution to Chris- 
 tian thought lies not alone in the fact of his 
 personal experience of doubt and of faith 
 triumphant over doubt. We cannot claim 
 to have reached any complete solution of 
 38 
 
THE POET OF SCIENCE 
 
 the problems presented to faith by modern 
 scientific theories. The development of a 
 complete and consistent philosophy at once 
 evolutionary and theistic must wait for a 
 wiser generation than ours. We see in a 
 mirror enigmatically;^ we know in part. 
 But, though we have reached no complete 
 solution, we have reached certain provisional 
 adjustments which establish for us a modus 
 Vivendi while the surveys for the delimita- 
 tion of the territories of science and religion 
 are in progress. It is noteworthy that all 
 these partial and tentative solutions of the 
 problems of the age find poetic expression 
 in Tennyson. 
 
 We have learned not to expect or demand 
 demonstrations of reUgious faith, but to be 
 content with reasonable probabilities. We 
 have learned to base our life upon the great 
 hope which can never be proved or dis- 
 proved. And so Tennyson tells us: 
 
 "That we may lift from out of dust 
 A voice as imto him that hears, 
 A cry above the conquered years 
 To one that with us works, and trust, 
 
 ^B'Uroitev.yi.ptpTi Si iabntTpov iv alvlyiMTi. — 1 Cor. 13. 12. 
 39 
 
THE POET OF SCIENCE 
 
 "With faith that comes of self-control, 
 The truths that never can be proved 
 Until we close with all we loved 
 And all we flow from, soul in soul." 
 
 We have learned that the evidence of 
 theistic belief is to be found in man rather 
 than in inanimate nature or in the lower 
 orders of animate nature. The behef in 
 Divine Personality is easy for one who 
 truly believes in the personahty of man. 
 The God who is veiled in nature is revealed 
 in man. In those profoundly interesting 
 fragments of intellectual and religious auto- 
 biography which Romanes has left to us in 
 his "Thoughts on Religion," he tells us that 
 he lost his faith in God in the exclusive study 
 of the lower orders of creation, and found 
 God through the study of what is peculiar 
 and distinctive in the spiritual life of man. 
 This thought we find in "In Memoriam": 
 
 "I found Him not in world or sun. 
 Or eagle's wing, or insect's eye, 
 Nor through the questions men may try. 
 The petty cobwebs we have spun. 
 
 "If e'er when faith had fallen asleep, 
 I heard a voice, 'Believe no more,' 
 40 
 
THE POET OF SCIENCE 
 
 And heard an ever-breaking shore 
 That tumbled in the Godless deep, 
 
 "A warmth within the breast would melt 
 The freezing reason's colder part, 
 And like a man in wrath the heart 
 Stood up and answered, 'I have felt.' 
 
 "No, like a child in doubt and fear: 
 
 But that blind clamor made me wise; 
 Then was I as a child that cries; 
 But, crying, knows his father near." 
 
 We have learned to find the reconciliation 
 of the scientific conception of law and the 
 religious conception of personal will in the 
 doctrine of the divine immanence. Never 
 has that truth been more nobly expressed 
 than in Tennyson's "The Higher Panthe- 
 ism." 
 
 "The sun, the moon, the stars, the seas, the hills, 
 and the plains — 
 Are not these, O Soul, the Vision of Him who 
 reigns ? 
 
 "Is not the Vision He, though He be not that 
 which He seems? 
 Dreams are true while they last, and do we not 
 live in dreams? 
 
 41 
 
THE POET OF SCIENCE 
 
 "Glory about thee, without thee; and thou ful- 
 fillest thy doom, 
 Making Him broken gleams, and a stifled splen- 
 dor and gloom. 
 
 "Speak to Him thou, for He hears, and Spirit 
 with Spirit can meet — 
 Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than 
 hands and feet. 
 
 "God is law, say the wise; O Soul, and let us 
 rejoice. 
 For if He thunder by law, the thunder is yet 
 His voice." 
 
 We have learned that the Divine Per- 
 sonality finds its supreme revelation in 
 Christ. Jesus Christ himself thus becomes 
 to us the supreme evidence of Christianity. 
 We do not, like the great apologists of 
 the eighteenth century, attempt to derive 
 Christianity as a corollary from the doctrine 
 of theism. We have learned that the evi- 
 dence of Christianity is stronger than that of 
 simple theism. And in this view Tennyson 
 wrote: 
 
 "Though truths in manhood darkly join, 
 
 Deep-seated in our mystic frame. 
 
 We yield all blessing to the name 
 
 Of Him who made them current coin; 
 
 42 
 
THE POET OF SCIENCE 
 
 "For Wisdom dealt with mortal powers, 
 Where truth in closest words shall fail, 
 Where truth embodied in a tale 
 Shall enter in at lowly doors. 
 
 "And so the Word had breath, and wrought 
 With human hands the preed of creeds 
 In loveliness of perfect deeds, 
 More strong than all poetic thought; 
 
 "Which he may read that binds the sheaf, 
 Or builds the house, or digs the grave, 
 And those wild eyes that watch the wave 
 In roarings round the coral reef." 
 
 In the majestic proem of "In Memoriam" 
 is summed up the intellectual and religious 
 hfe of that half-century of which we have 
 been speaking. There we find the agony of 
 doubt, the invincible moral earnestness, the 
 light at evening time. 
 
 "Strong Son of God, immortal Love, 
 
 Whom we, that have not seen thy face. 
 By faith, and faith alone, embrace. 
 Believing where we cannot prove; 
 
 "Thou wilt not leave us in the dust: 
 Thou madest man, he knows not why, 
 He thinks he was not made to die ; 
 And thou hast made him: thou art just. 
 43 
 
THE POET OF SCIENCE 
 
 "Thou seemest human and divine, 
 
 The highest, holiest manhood, thou. 
 Our wills are ours, we know not how; 
 Our wills are ours, to make them thine. 
 
 "Our little systems have their day ; 
 They have their day and cease to he; 
 They are but broken lights of thee. 
 And thou, Lord, art more than they. 
 
 "We have but faith: we cannot know. 
 For knowledge is of things we see; 
 And yet we trust it comes from thee, 
 A beam in darkness: let it grow. 
 
 "Let knowledge grow from more to more, 
 But more of reverence in us dwell; 
 That mind and soul, according well. 
 May make one music as before, 
 
 "But vaster. We are fools and slight; 
 We mock thee when we do not fear; 
 But help thy foolish ones to bear ; 
 Help thy vain worlds to bear thy light." 
 
 No wonder that the poet who could chant 
 that mighty psahn of doubt and faith at the 
 beginning of the age of scientific skepti- 
 cism, should at the close of that age breathe 
 his serene trust in that sweetest of swan 
 songs : 
 
 U 
 
THE POET OF SCIENCE 
 
 "Sunset and evening star, 
 
 And one clear call for me! 
 And may there be no moaning of the bar. 
 When I put out to sea, 
 
 "But such a tide as moving seems asleep, 
 Too full for sound and foam. 
 When that which drew from out the boundless 
 deep 
 Turns again home. 
 
 "Twilight and evening bell. 
 And after that the dark ! 
 And may there be no sadness of farewell, 
 When I embark; 
 
 "For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place 
 The flood may bear me far, 
 I hope to see my Pilot face tp face 
 When I have crost the bar." 
 
 45 
 
II 
 
 THE SKEPTICAL AND THE DOG- 
 MATIC TENDENCY IN RELI- 
 GIOUS THOUGHT 
 
II 
 
 THE SKEPTICAL AND THE DOG- 
 MATIC TENDENCY IN RELI- 
 GIOUS THOUGHT 
 
 "Prove all things; hold fast that which is 
 good." — 1 Thessalonians 5. 21. 
 
 "It was needful for me to write unto you, and 
 exhort you that ye should earnestly contend for 
 the faith which was once delivered unto the saints." 
 — Jude 3. 
 
 I HAVE taken these two verses, without 
 regard to their connection, simply as mot- 
 toes, suggesting to us two different phases 
 of reUgious thought. 
 
 Every thoughtful man must recognize 
 that our religious beliefs (like aU other be- 
 hefs outside of the extremely narrow range 
 of truths which are known by intuition or 
 by demonstration) are supported by merely 
 probable evidence; and that the weight of 
 that evidence is capable of being differently 
 estimated by different persons, or by the 
 same person at different times. There is no 
 49 
 
THE SKEPTICAL AND THE 
 
 demonstration of the existence of God; no 
 demonstration of the historic facts relating 
 to the hfe, death, and resurrection of Jesus, 
 which are the basis of Christianity; no 
 demonstration of any particular doctrine of 
 religion. Moreover, every thoughtful man 
 must admit that, in subjects so vast as to 
 transcend human thought, all detailed and 
 precise statements of belief must be only ap- 
 proximations to the truth. No perfect defi- 
 nition or formulation of truths relating to 
 God and other themes transcending the 
 reach of the human intellect can be given. 
 As knowledge enlarges and habits of 
 thought change from age to age, the formu- 
 las which best expressed the faith of one 
 age must necessarily fail of expressing the 
 faith of another age. Our beliefs are prob- 
 able, not demonstrable; approximations to 
 the truth, not exact statements of the truth: 
 and with the progress of thought they may 
 be greatly changed. 
 
 On the other hand, men who act at all in 
 the ordinary affairs of life, are accustomed 
 to act upon beUefs which are only probable, 
 and upon formulas which are only approxi- 
 mations to the truth. When we build a 
 50 
 
DOGMATIC TENDENCY 
 
 bridge we can never be sure that it will bear 
 the strain that is to be imposed upon it. 
 When a ship starts on a voyage we can never 
 be sure that it will weather the storms of 
 the ocean. We can never be sure that a 
 medicine will exert a beneficial effect in any 
 particular sickness. We can never be sure 
 that any political measure will improve the 
 condition of the community. And yet men 
 engage, and rightly engage, with earnest- 
 ness and confidence in the varied businesses 
 of hfe, guiding their actions by beUefs 
 which are only probable. It is wise, there- 
 fore, to act, in religious matters, upon the 
 same principles on which we act in other 
 matters. It is reasonable and wise to assume 
 beliefs to be true which are only probable 
 approximations to the truth, and to act upon 
 them with earnestness and vigor propor- 
 tionate to the importance of the subject. 
 
 Thus, in the nature of the case, we have 
 a warrant for each of two complementary 
 phases of reUgious thought; on one hand, 
 for the admission that there is an element 
 of uncertainty in all our beliefs, and that 
 aU our beliefs can be only approximations 
 to the truth; on the other hand, for the as- 
 
 51 
 
THE SKEPTICAL AND THE 
 
 sumption that the nearest attainable ap- 
 proximations to the truth may and should 
 be acted upon as truth, and made the basis 
 of an earnest Christian life. We may call 
 these two phases or tendencies of Christian 
 thought, respectively, the skeptical and the 
 dogmatic phase or tendency. I am aware 
 that both of these terms may seem objec- 
 tionable, since the word "skeptical" is usu- 
 ally understood as implying a culpably ex- 
 cessive tendency to doubt, while the word 
 "dogmatic" is often understood as implying 
 an unreasonable positiveness in behef ; but 
 I use these terms because I do not know of 
 any other words which will express so well 
 the antithesis which I have in mind. 
 
 There is, as we have seen, a warrant for 
 both these phases of thought in the nature 
 of the case, and both gain an additional war- 
 rant from the history of religious thought in 
 the past. If we look at the history of reli- 
 gious opinions, we shall see that there has 
 been, in the past, a continual change, which 
 leads us to believe that there will be changes 
 in the future. The Christian belief of the 
 twentieth century is not the same as that 
 of the fifteenth or the fifth or the first cen- 
 52 
 
DOGMATIC TENDENCY 
 
 tury. It is not likely that the religious be- 
 lief of the twenty-fifth or of the thirtieth 
 century will be the same as that of the twen- 
 tieth. The biblical astronomy of three hun- 
 dred years. ago, and the biblical geology of 
 one hundred years ago, are well-nigh for- 
 gotten; and the majority of thoughtful men 
 have outgrown those views of the nature 
 and scope of inspiration which rendered a 
 bibhcal astronomy and geology necessary. 
 The angelology and demonology which were 
 considered formerly an essential part of reli- 
 gious belief have mostly passed from the 
 sphere of dogma into that of rhetoric. There 
 has been a change in the mode of conception 
 and formulation even of the central doc- 
 trines of Christianity. The controversies of 
 the first centuries of the church have so com- 
 pletely passed by that an intelligent Chris- 
 tian of our own day requires an explanation 
 of the terms which were once the watchwords 
 and shibboleths of sects and parties. The 
 barbarous subtleties of the Athanasian 
 Creed are not so much incredible as unin- 
 telligible. Few Lutherans or Calvinists or 
 Wesleyans profess to believe, and probably 
 none do believe, exactly what Luther or Cal- 
 53 
 
THE SKEPTICAL AND THE 
 
 vin or Wesley believed. The very forms of 
 language, in creed and liturgy, in hymn and 
 homily, which, in one age, form the fittest 
 garb for the most vital thought and feeling, 
 become, in a succeeding age, fit only for 
 mummy cloths to enwrap the dead. 
 
 But, notwithstanding this continual 
 change, there has been a unity of belief in 
 all ages of the Christian Church. There has 
 been a "faith once dehvered to the saints," 
 which has been ever the same. The great 
 conception of God as our Father has been 
 the same in all ages of the Christian Church. 
 The faith of the church in Christ as the Re- 
 vealer of God and the Saviour of men has 
 never been shaken. The solemn truth of sin, 
 and the promise of dehverance from sin 
 through faith in Christ, have been held fast 
 by the church in every age. The belief in 
 retribution, and in a future life in which a 
 man's condition wiU be in large degree de- 
 pendent upon his character in this life, has 
 been the faith of the church universal. The 
 great changes which have taken place in 
 Christian thought and Christian life illus- 
 trate, rather than disprove, this essential 
 unity. The preparation for each new stage 
 54 
 
DOGMATIC TENDENCY 
 
 of development of the Christian Church has 
 always existed in the stages before it. It 
 was the reading of the Epistles of Paul 
 which flashed the light into Luther's soul at 
 the beginning of the great German Refor- 
 mation. And it was in the reading of those 
 same epistles, enriched by Luther's com- 
 mentary upon them, that Wesley's heart 
 was "strangely warmed" at the beginning of 
 the Methodist Revival. Even the advent 
 of Christ himself was only a stage in a con- 
 tinuous development. He came, as he tells 
 us himself, not to destroy, but to fulfill. 
 Every truth which blossomed in the teach- 
 ing of our Lord Jesus, and which has fruited 
 in the blessings of a Christian civilization, 
 existed in germ in the Law and the 
 Prophets. The whole argument of the 
 Pauline Epistles and of the Epistle to the 
 Hebrews, against the superstitious and un- 
 progressive literalism of Jews and Juda- 
 izers, is a commentary on the Master's 
 words: "I came, not to destroy, but to ful- 
 fill." When, therefore, we contend for "the 
 faith once delivered to the saints," we are 
 contending not only for the faith of the 
 Christian ages, but for that which has been 
 55 
 
THE SKEPTICAL AND THE 
 
 the faith of pious souls in every age. There 
 is something wonderfully impressive, in this 
 unity of religious thought running all 
 through the ages. The God who walked 
 with Enoch is the same God that reveals 
 himself to the eye of penitence and faith to- 
 day. The princes of European intellect 
 have worshiped the God of Abraham, Isaac, 
 and Jacob. The civilization of the twentieth 
 century stands, with bowed head and un- 
 sandaled feet, before the burning bush of 
 Horeb. 
 
 "Like a mighty army 
 
 Moves the Church of God; 
 Brothers, we are treading 
 
 Where the saints have trod; 
 We are not divided, 
 
 All one body we. 
 One in hope and doctrine, 
 
 One in charity." 
 
 There is, then, a warrant, both a priori 
 and a posteriori, both in the natui*e of the 
 case and in the facts of history, for each 
 of the phases of thought which we are con- 
 sidering: on the one hand, for the admission 
 that all religious beliefs are only more or 
 56 
 
DOGMATIC TENDENCY 
 
 less probable approximations to the truth, 
 and may require modification in the light of 
 the future; on the other hand, for the as- 
 sumption that approximations to the truth 
 are attainable, which are so near to absolute 
 truth that we are justified in treating them 
 as true and making them the basis of vigor- 
 ous lives of Christian duty. 
 
 Each of these two phases of religious 
 thought has its value in the development of 
 the religious character of the individual and 
 of the chxirch at large. 
 
 It would seem that it ought to be unneces- 
 sary to assert the value of the dogmatic ele- 
 ment in individual character ; yet it is neces- 
 sary to assert it because the fashion now is 
 to deny it. It is the fashion to represent 
 that dogma is obsolescent and ought to be 
 obsolete; that the highest intellectual 
 achievement is to believe nothing; that to 
 believe anything earnestly and vigorously 
 is a sign of intellectual weakness. In op- 
 position to all such teaching we need to 
 recognize the value of the dogmatic phase 
 of religious thought. The very foimdation 
 of religion is to beheve something, and that 
 so earnestly as to be willing to fight for it, 
 57 
 
THE SKEPTICAL AND THE 
 
 suffer for it, die for it. A life of consecra- 
 tion is utterly meaningless unless there is 
 something to which life can be consecrated. 
 Something must be believed in order that 
 there may be any principle to underlie hu- 
 man life. I do not propose to define exactly 
 what that minimum of truth is which will 
 suffice for the development of a religious 
 life. Some minds may find a basis for a life 
 that is truly rehgious in a creed as short 
 and indefinite as Matthew Arnold's formula 
 of "The not ourselves which makes for right- 
 eousness." But whatever moral power there 
 may be in such a faith lies in what it afSrms, 
 not in what it denies or ignores. Only 
 as we beheve something with tremendous 
 earnestness are we able to act with moral 
 strength and nobleness. The men whose 
 names are traced on the roU of honor of 
 church history ; the men "who through faith 
 subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, 
 obtained promises, stopped the mouths of 
 hons, quenched the violence of fire, escaped 
 the edge of the sword, out of weakness were 
 made strong, waxed valiant in fight, turned 
 to flight the armies of the aUens"; the men 
 who "were stoned," "were sawn asunder," 
 58 
 
DOGMATIC TENDENCY 
 
 "were slain with the sword," who "wandered 
 about in sheep-skins and goat-skins," who 
 "wandered in deserts and in mountains and 
 in dens and caves of the earth"; "of whom 
 the world was not worthy" — ^these were the 
 heroes, not of skepticism, but of faith. 
 
 But, however valuable, indispensable, 
 fundamental, may be the dogmatic tend- 
 ency, we must recognize the fact that, per- 
 verted, it may lead to pernicious results in 
 the development of the hfe of the individual. 
 
 If a man comes to believe that his own 
 conceptions, instead of being more or less 
 probable approximations to truth, are abso- 
 lute truth, he will come to regard those who 
 differ with him in any particular as enemies 
 of the truth. This is the origin of bigotry, 
 the motive of persecution; and, though the 
 forms of persecution change, the spirit of 
 persecution is not altogether extinct in the 
 church to-day. The dogmatic tendency 
 needs to be restrained and tempered by a 
 fuU and frank recognition that we are not 
 the custodians of absolute truth; that our 
 best conceptions of truth are only approxi- 
 mations, and that wiser ages may make 
 closer approximations to truth than we have 
 59 
 
THE SKEt'TICAL AND THE 
 
 been able to make; that those who differ 
 from us may even now be wiser than we, 
 and their conceptions nearer approximations 
 to absolute truth than ours. The spirit of 
 skepticism, therefore, is necessary to temper 
 the spirit of dogmatism. 
 
 But, if the skeptical tendency of thought, 
 within limits, is so beneficial, so necessary 
 to the best development of Christian charac- 
 ter, it becomes utterly ruinous when it runs 
 to an extreme. I know of no character not 
 debased by dishonesty nor corrupted by 
 sensual vice more unworthy of our respect 
 than that of him who is given over to rmi- 
 versal skepticism, who sees so plainly the 
 errors of all creeds that he can have no 
 creed, who believes nothing, and conse- 
 quently has no aim, and spends his hfe in 
 idleness and uselessness and helplessness. 
 Such a character is truly and powerfully 
 depicted, under the name of Edward Lang- 
 ham, in Mrs. Ward's profoundly thought- 
 ful novel, "Robert Elsmere." Heartily 
 would I join in the petition of the litany, 
 "From all false doctrine, heresy, and schism, 
 good Lord deliver us I" But with yet more 
 earnestness would I pray, "From liberalism 
 60 
 
DOGMATIC TENDENCY 
 
 and indiflf erentism and universal skepticism, 
 good Lord deliver us!" Better error than 
 indifference to truth. Better the terrible 
 error of Saul, the persecutor, than the in- 
 difference to truth which expressed itself in 
 the scornful or despairing question of Pilate, 
 "What is truth?" For honest error, how- 
 ever dark and terrible that error may be, 
 there is a cvu:e; but for indifference to truth 
 there is no cure. The man who has given 
 up the search for truth has doomed himself 
 to intellectual stagnation and moral death. 
 
 We see, then, that the skeptical and the 
 dogmatic tendency are alike necessary for 
 the right development of individual Chris- 
 tian character, and that they are required 
 to exist in just coordination with each 
 other. In proper limit and measure each 
 has its oflSce. The exaggeration of either 
 may work ruinous consequences. 
 
 Nor is it alone in the life of the individual 
 that we may trace the influence of these two 
 phases of religious thought. For good and 
 for evil they have wrought in the history of 
 the church at large. 
 
 It is the dogmatic tendency in Christian 
 thought which has enabled individual Chris- 
 
 61 
 
THE SKEPTICAL AND THE 
 
 tians to unite in ecclesiastical organizations 
 and thus gain the power of vigorous collec- 
 tive action. Thus it has rendered possible 
 the great evangelistic, missionary, and phi- 
 lanthropic enterprises which are transform- 
 ing the life of himianity. And, while the 
 dogmatic tendency has been the power 
 which has given the church victory over 
 its foes, the skeptical tendency has ever 
 operated to keep the church in harmony with 
 the best forms of intellectual hfe. It has 
 reconciled again and again the incipient con- 
 flicts between traditional views of Chris- 
 tianity and the advancing thought of the 
 times. It has made Christianity flexible and 
 progressive, and enabled it to adapt itself 
 to all that was best in a growing civilization. 
 Most notably in the last few decades, the 
 skeptical tendency has been influential in 
 producing that mutual toleration which has 
 rendered possible the cooperation and fed- 
 eration of various denominations which re- 
 tain their characteristic beliefs and usages 
 and their administrative autonomy. So long 
 as any church feels sure that its creed and 
 poHty and ritual constitute the one perfect 
 manifestation of the truth of God on earth, 
 62 
 
DOGMATIC TENDENCY 
 
 for that church intolerance is a duty. When 
 each church recognizes that all creeds are 
 only approximations to the truth, mutual 
 toleration becomes easy and natural. 
 
 If we can so plainly see, in the history of 
 the church, the benefits of these two tend- 
 encies in rehgious thought, we can see no 
 less plainly the evil effects of their perver- 
 sion. For an example of the evils of un- 
 checked skepticism, behold the Catholic 
 Church in Italy, in the period immediately 
 preceding the Reformation — ^the period 
 when the heads of thinking men had been 
 turned by the sudden revival of classic let- 
 ters ; when half -pagan priests, more f amihar 
 with the mythology of Virgil and the elegant 
 Epicureanism of Horace than with the the- 
 ology of Paul and the ethics of the Sermon 
 on the Moimt, perfunctorily performed the 
 ceremonies of a worship which for them had 
 become only a mummery and a farce. Be- 
 hold the chvu-ch given over to the utter rot- 
 tenness of hypocrisy. And, for an example 
 of the evils of excessive dogmatism, behold 
 the Counter-Reformation which followed so 
 soon in the churches of southern Eiu-ope; 
 that terrible Counter-Reformation, at whose 
 
 63 
 
THE SKEPTICAL AND THE 
 
 crimes against humanity the world still 
 shudders, which estabhshed the Society of 
 Jesus, fulminated the anathemas of the 
 Council of Trent, decimated the population 
 of southern Europe with the terrors of the 
 Inquisition, and sought to stifle the himian 
 intellect beneath the Index Prohibitorius 
 and the Index Expurgatorius. 
 
 For the individual, then, and for the 
 church, the true ideal is the just coordina- 
 tion of these two complementary tendencies 
 of rehgious thought. "What I most crave 
 to see," said Thomas Arnold, "and what still 
 seems to me no impossible dream, is inquiry 
 and belief going together." That dream of 
 Arnold is to-day more nearly fulfilled than 
 he dared to hope. Far and wide in the 
 churches we behold the manifestation of a 
 spirit hospitable to new truth, ready to 
 change the form of its opinions and adapt 
 itself to the broadening thought of the age, 
 and yet, at the same time, earnestly and 
 reverently loyal to the best conceptions of 
 truth which we have received from the past 
 — a spirit ready to "prove all things" and 
 to adopt new views which are commended 
 by sound reason, while yet we "contend ear- 
 64 
 
DOGMATIC TENDENCY 
 
 nestly for the faith once delivered to the 
 saints," which, in essential unity, has come 
 down to us. In the manifold cooperative 
 movements and federations of the churches, 
 especially in the mission fields, in the har- 
 monious work of army and navy chaplains 
 of all names and creeds, in the Inter-Church 
 World Movement which seems destined to 
 imite aU Protestant Christians of this coun- 
 try in a world-wide missionary campaign of 
 imexampled efficiency, we behold the evi- 
 dence that the church is approaching more 
 nearly than ever before a just coordination 
 of the two complementary tendencies in reli- 
 gious thought. 
 
 These thoughts, it seems to me, have a 
 special value to those in the formative stage 
 of religious opinions. In a certain sense, 
 indeed, we ought never to outgrow the 
 formative stage of religious opinions. A 
 great thinker once said to me, "When a 
 man has grown too old to change his opin- 
 ions, he is ready to die; or, at least, he is not 
 fit to hve." Let us hope and pray that we 
 may never reach that condition of mental 
 petrifaction in which our beliefs will be 
 incapable of change. But, while we should 
 
 65 
 
THE SKEPTICAL AND THE 
 
 always remain accessible to new views of 
 truth, there is an appropriate sense in which 
 we may speak of early manhood as the 
 period of the formation of opinions. There 
 comes, sooner or later, to almost every 
 thoughtful young man, a time when he be- 
 gins to suspect that the traditional creed he 
 has received in childhood is not altogether 
 adapted to the thought of his manhood. He 
 comes to doubt more or fewer of the asser- 
 tions and implications of that creed; or, if 
 he does not doubt the creed itself, he begins 
 to doubt at least the soundness of some of 
 the arguments by which it has been sup- 
 ported, and to suspect that, if he continues 
 to believe the creed, it must be on other evi- 
 dence and in relation with other philo- 
 sophical principles than those with which it 
 has been traditionally associated. What is 
 the young man to do? 
 
 There are three courses he may take. 
 
 The spirit of dogmatism says: "What you 
 have received is the truth; it is 'the faith once 
 delivered to the saints.' To doubt or dis- 
 believe any part of that faith is to be dis- 
 loyal to God. It is your duty to trample 
 upon those doubts, and crush them by force 
 66 
 
DOGMATIC TENDENCY 
 
 of will, if you do not see how to refute them 
 by argument." Alas 1 too many young men 
 have yielded to this appeal, and attempted 
 to crush down doubt by force of will. The 
 attempt may succeed, or it may fail ; I know 
 not in which case the result is the more perni- 
 cious. If the attempt succeeds, it makes 
 the man a bigot and a persecutor ; if it fails, 
 it dooms him to a life-long conflict between 
 intellect and conscience. 
 
 Skepticism says to him: "You have been 
 led to doubt some parts of your creed ; there- 
 fore cast away the whole of it, and, in utter 
 intellectual nakedness, go about to seek for 
 new beliefs in which you can clothe your- 
 self." Alas! too many young men yield to 
 this counsel. Rejecting the faith of their 
 fathers, they reject also the practices which 
 depend on that faith. No longer believing 
 in God, they give up all forms of worship. 
 They withdraw themselves from the church 
 and from all its hallowed associations. No 
 longer acknowledging the claims of Chris- 
 tianity as a system of behef, they feel them- 
 selves no longer bound by the restraints of 
 Christianity as a rule of hfe. They expose 
 themselves at once, without any bulwark of 
 67 
 
THE SKEPTICAL AND THE 
 
 defense, to all the temptations of the world, 
 the flesh, and the devil; and too often they 
 make utter shipwreck, not only of Christian 
 faith, but also of moral character. 
 
 There is a more excellent way. There is 
 a golden mean between these two extremes. 
 History warrants us in the belief that the 
 main outlines of the faith which the chm-ch 
 has held throughout all ages are true. His- 
 tory also leads us to believe that the details 
 of creed and the philosophy associated with 
 Christian faith must be modified from age 
 to age. It is the young man's duty, then, 
 to meet the questions that come to him in a 
 spirit which is in accord with these teachings 
 of history. It is his right and duty to as- 
 sume that there is a basis of truth in the 
 faith which he has been taught, but that the 
 incidentals and details of that faith will 
 probably need, for him, some modification. 
 Recognizing these two principles, the path 
 is clear. We ought to hold our traditional 
 faith as the basis of action, and, at the same 
 time, keep ourselves ready with advancing 
 knowledge to modify any part of that faith. 
 The beliefs we already have we should hold 
 on to till we get something better to take 
 68 
 
DOGMATIC TENDENCY 
 
 their place. Whenever a new belief com- 
 mends itself to us as a new truth, we should 
 seek to make such modifications of previous 
 beliefs as are requisite for harmonious ad- 
 justment; and thus gradually form for ovu-- 
 selves the creed of our manhood and old 
 age. 
 
 And we need not wait till the creed of 
 our future is finished before commencing a 
 life of Christian duty. Let us act each day, 
 each hour, earnestly, vigorously, intensely, 
 in the light of the best conceptions of truth 
 we have thus far been able to gain. And, as 
 we advance in years, and progress in knowl- 
 edge and thought, we shall come to larger, 
 clearer views of truth. We cannot, in- 
 deed, come to a perfect knowledge of God's 
 truth here. Not by the sunlight or candle- 
 light of earth, but by the light of that world 
 where the sunlight and the candle-light ahke 
 are needless, we may expect to read God's 
 truth in its perfection. But it is our privi- 
 lege to be continually making progress in 
 the comprehension of divine things. We 
 may put ourselves in the path of God's own 
 guidance. We may work out oiu* own salva- 
 tion in intelligent accord with God's own 
 69 
 
THE SKEPTICAL AND THE 
 
 purposes. So in us shall be fulfilled the bene- 
 diction of the Master, "If ye continue in my 
 word, ye shall know the truth." And so for 
 us shall be answered the great high-priestly 
 prayer of Jesus, and through the truth we 
 shall be sanctified. And thus shall swell con- 
 tinually into a deeper, fuller harmony, the 
 sweet accord of faith and duty. So shall 
 we ever be in the path toward truth. I have 
 very little faith in the ability of the human 
 mind to find out the truth on any question 
 by a short process of cramming; but I have 
 great faith in the power of the human soul 
 that puts itself into alliance with truth and 
 duty to grow in comprehension of the truth. 
 And this progress of the individual will be in 
 harmony with the great progress of the 
 church universal; for both will be in the line 
 of God's own leading. Thus we think of 
 our religious opinions not as a suit of clothes 
 which we can take off and put on at pleas- 
 ure. Our religious opinions are a growth 
 — an organic, vital development in our 
 souls. They grow with our growth, and 
 strengthen with our strength. Our concep- 
 tions of truth grow as our bodies grow. 
 The gristly skeleton of childhood serves the 
 70 
 
DOGMATIC TENDENCY, 
 
 purpose of the child's life, but serves also 
 as the mold in which is developed the bony 
 skeleton of manhood. Every organ is at 
 once a machine for accomplishing the pur- 
 poses of the present life, and a matrix in 
 which is developed the corresponding organ 
 which shall be fitted for the larger work of 
 years to come. So our childhood's concep- 
 tions of truth, imperfect as they are, serve 
 to guide our child hfe, but serve also as the 
 matrix in which are developed the larger 
 conceptions of oiu- manhood. In this growth 
 of individual thought, as in the progress of 
 the church at large, there is the continuity 
 of organic development. Each stage, alike 
 of individual and of collective religious life, 
 is in vital connection with the past and the 
 future. And, when at last that great meta- 
 morphosis comes to us, and we pass from 
 this embryo state of existence to the fuller 
 life of that other world, there will still be 
 no break in the continuity of spiritual life. 
 We shall be born into the glories of that 
 heavenly world with eyes already prepared 
 for its beatific vision. 
 
 71 
 
Ill 
 
 ETHICAL AND RELIGIOUS LES- 
 SONS OF SCIENCE 
 
Ill 
 
 ETHICAL AND RELIGIOUS LES- 
 SONS OF SCIENCE^ 
 
 The study of the relations of science and 
 religion, which has seemed to me probably 
 the most important part of my life-work, has 
 required a division of my time and interest 
 between the two great territories of thought 
 whose relations to each other I have sought 
 in some degree to interpret. In a certain 
 sense, therefore, I have lived a double life, 
 functioning sometimes, so to speak, as the 
 Reverend Doctor Jekyll, and sometimes 
 as Professor Hyde. In the two different 
 capacities in which I have acted, I have been 
 associated with two classes of intellectual 
 workers whose habits of thought differ con- 
 siderably from each other. I have learned 
 to regard both groups of my associates with 
 profound respect and admiration for their 
 high intellectual and moral qualities, and to 
 
 * Address before the Mid-year Assembly of the New York 
 East Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1908. 
 
 75 
 
ETHICAL AND RELIGIOUS 
 
 feel a genial sympathy with both in what 
 seem to me their faults and limitations. 
 
 I wish to speak &st of one exceedingly 
 wholesome ethical effect of the habits of 
 mind involved in scientific study, altogether 
 irrespective of the particular opinions to 
 which that study may lead. Scientific men, 
 I think, exhibit the virtue of truthfulness in 
 a higher degree than any other class of peo- 
 ple. Of course, I do not mean that every 
 individual of the class is thoroughly truth- 
 ful. I have heard of a really able and justly 
 renowned paleontologist who is said to 
 have printed false dates on some of his pub- 
 lications, in order to secure a claim of 
 priority in the naming and description of 
 certain species of fossils. But, if now and 
 then a scientific man lies, it no more in- 
 validates the claim of truthfulness for scien- 
 tific men in general, than the fact that once 
 in a while a minister of the gospel embezzles 
 the funds of the church, or runs away with 
 a deaconess or with the leading soprano of 
 the choir, proves that the clergy as a class 
 are immoral. In general, it is easy for a 
 scientific man to be thoroughly truthful, for 
 the simple reason that he is dealing with 
 76 
 
LESSONS OF SCIENCE 
 
 questions detached from human interests, 
 the answer to which is therefore not likely 
 t6 be influenced by prejudice. If a geolo- 
 gist is studying the question whether the 
 cause of the climate of the Glacial period 
 was an impoverishment of the supply of 
 carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere, or 
 ah excessive degree of eccentricity in the 
 earth's orbit, he is not likely to feel any 
 strong personal interest inchning him to pre- 
 fer one answer of the question to the other. 
 A fondness for a pet hypothesis may, indeed, 
 create in the mind a certain amount of 
 prejudice, but it is not hkely to constitute 
 a very strong motive for a misconception or 
 misrepresentation of the facts involved. 
 
 On the other hand, in the case of minis- 
 ters of the gospel, temptations to insincerity 
 continually arise from the fact that we are 
 not dealing with abstract questions, but are 
 dealing with questions of practical duty. It 
 is not our business as preachers to teach 
 abstract truth, but to persuade men to a 
 right course of hfe. Precisely in that con- 
 dition lies a subtle temptation to be not quite 
 truthful. We are tempted to ask, in regard 
 to any assertion which we make, not is that 
 
 77 
 
ETHICAL AND RELIGIOUS 
 
 assertion exactly true, but, rather, will that 
 assertion tend to lead men to do right. Of 
 course the law of veracity does not require 
 a man to say all that he thinks about any 
 subject on every occasion and in every com- 
 pany. But when a man who has come to 
 regard a traditional opinion as very doubt- 
 ful and probably erroneous asserts from the 
 pulpit without quaUfication the truth of that 
 opinion, for fear that he may disturb the 
 faith of other people, he is certainly guilty 
 of a violation of the law of veracity. Some- 
 times this sort of insincerity is even explicitly 
 inculcated as a duty. In the recent decades 
 in which the controversies over evolution and 
 the higher criticism have been so violent, 
 men of high authority in the churches have 
 often explicitly affirmed that it is the duty 
 of a preacher who has come to have some 
 doubts in regard to the traditional views of 
 the church, to suppress those doubts for fear 
 he may injure the faith of others. Some of 
 the men who have given these counsels, par- 
 ticularly to young ministers, have seemed to 
 assume that there is no necessary connection 
 between a man's behefs and his utterances, 
 and that it is legitimate and praiseworthy 
 78 
 
LESSONS OF SCIENCE 
 
 for a man to announce opinions which he 
 does not believe to be true. 
 
 Of course the true pastor will never for- 
 get the essentially practical character of 
 genuine preaching. His business is to lead 
 the members of his congregation into a bet- 
 ter moral and religious life, not to lecture 
 on doubtful questions of criticism or science 
 or speculative philosophy or even theological 
 dogma. His habitual selection of themes 
 and his treatment of those themes will be 
 governed by the dominant pvirpose of his 
 work. He wiU emphasize the great truths 
 of religion which are the f oimdation of the 
 Christian life. I only insist that, when the 
 preacher does refer to doubtful matters, in 
 incidental allusions, or in occasional serious 
 discussions of questions which are disturb- 
 ing the faith of many Christians, he is bound 
 to say only what he can say sincerely. 
 
 The minister of the gospel is tempted to 
 insincerity in his utterances, not only in re- 
 gard to Christian dogma, but also in re- 
 gard to his personal feelings. How easily 
 one is tempted in a funeral address to try to 
 express in language and in tone and manner 
 an emotion of sympathetic grief which seems 
 
 79 
 
ETHICAL AND RELIGIOUS 
 
 appropriate but which as a matter of fact 
 the speaker does not feell How easy it is, 
 in speaking of the solemn truths of religion, 
 to try to exhibit to the audience a degree of 
 emotion which the speaker does not at the 
 moment feel, however fitting that emotion 
 might seem to be. It is worth while inci- 
 dentally to express the conviction that the 
 simulation of emotion is for the preacher as 
 bad rhetorically as it is ethically. Feelings 
 must fluctuate, with changes in our general 
 mental and physical condition and in our en- 
 vironment. The sincere, though it may be 
 unimpassioned, statement of profound con- 
 victions means more than any transient glow 
 of feeling, even if the feeling is genuine. 
 We have need, with all our hearts, to say 
 "Amen" to the prayer of the Master, "Sanc- 
 tify them in the truth." Only in the truth 
 can we be sanctified. Only through the 
 utterance of the truth can we be the means 
 of the sanctification of others. 
 
 I cannot help thinking that it would be 
 a distinct gain to the ethical as well as to 
 the intellectual standing of the clergy, if 
 every man who enters the ministry had done 
 some considerable amount of laboratory 
 80 
 
LESSONS OF SCIENCE 
 
 work in some department of science, so as 
 to acquire the power of exact observation 
 and absolutely truthful description, and had 
 associated with scientific workers sufficiently 
 to feel the influence of the scientific habit in 
 cultivating the sense of veracity. 
 
 I pass to another phase of the subject, 
 which will require more extended considera- 
 tion, namely, the bearing of scientific facts 
 and theories upon religious beliefs. 
 
 Theists of every age and of every variety 
 of opinion have believed that some evidence 
 of the existence of God could be found in 
 the phenomena of the material imiverse. As 
 Paul declares in the Epistle to the Romans, 
 "The invisible things of him since the crea- 
 tion of the world are clearly seen, being per- 
 ceived through the things that are made, 
 even his everlasting power and divinity." 
 On the one hand, every man has a conscious- 
 ness of his own personal acts of volition, and 
 an experience of movements, primarily of 
 his own body, secondarily of external ob- 
 jects, which seem to him to be the result of 
 his own volition. On the other hand, every 
 man has the experience of movements in 
 
 81 
 
ETHICAL AND RELIGIOUS 
 
 the external universe which produce im- 
 pressions upon himself. The suggestion is 
 a natural one that the movements of material 
 objects which produce an effect upon him 
 have their cause in the volition of a being or 
 beings more or less similar to himself. This 
 I take to be the origin of the belief in a per- 
 sonal God or in personal gods, which has 
 prevailed so widely in the human race. The 
 question arises, How far is that primitive 
 and naive assumption of volition as the 
 cause of all movements in nature justified by 
 a more exact and methodical study of 
 nature? 
 
 Even in my boyhood my thoughts were 
 already busy with questions bearing on the 
 relation of science and religion. Before I 
 entered college I had read Hitchcock's Reli- 
 gion of Geology and Miller's Testimony of 
 the Rocks. I was intensely interested in 
 those books, and my thinking was deeply im- 
 pressed by them. Through Miller I came 
 to know at second hand somewhat of the 
 contribution which Thomas Chalmers had 
 made to natural theology. In my student 
 days I believed that the science of geology, 
 which was then still looked upon with fear 
 82 
 
LESSONS OF SCIENCE 
 
 and aversion by many religious people, was 
 capable of affording almost demonstrative 
 evidence of the existence of God. 
 
 Since an uncaused beginning is unthink- 
 able, we must suppose that the universe was 
 either created or eternal. The metaphysi- 
 cal arguments against the eternity of the 
 universe probably never convinced anybody 
 with the exception of th^ir authors. But 
 Chalmers proposed to leave unanswered the 
 question of the eternity of matter, and base 
 the argument for the existence of God on 
 the collocations of matter, which certainly 
 are not eternal. From this point of de- 
 parture, the argument for the existence of 
 a Creator was based especially upon the 
 existence of plants and animals. Geology 
 proves beyond reasonable doubt that there 
 was a time when the earth was lifeless, and 
 that the present races of plants and animals 
 made their first appearance within a time 
 which is not only finite but very short in 
 comparison with the whole duration of the 
 earth. When Chalmers wrote, there was no 
 natural process known whereby a new 
 species of plant or animal could be origi- 
 nated. The theories of Lamarck and of the 
 
 83 
 
ETHICAL AND RELIGIOUS 
 
 anonymous author of "Vestiges of Creation" 
 were as utterly discredited as the evolution- 
 ary dreams of classical philosophers. Every- 
 body supposed that the dictum of Linnaeus 
 must be accepted as absolute truth, "Species 
 tot sunt quot diversas formas ah initio pro- 
 duacit Infinitum Ens." If, then, multitudes 
 of species of plants and animals originated 
 at a comparatively recent time, their origin 
 could be attributed only to the direct action 
 of creative will. The origin of new species 
 was naturally spoken of as miraculous, not 
 exactly in the theological sense, but in a sense 
 closely analogous. I entered upon my hfe- 
 work, therefore, with a confident behef that 
 the science which I was to teach afforded 
 something very near to a demonstration of 
 theistic doctrine. 
 
 While I was accepting those views of 
 Chahners and Miller as the final settlement 
 of the theistic problem, the epoch-making 
 work of Darwin had started the great in- 
 tellectual revolution which marked the 
 middle of the nineteenth century. Darwin's 
 theory was first announced in 1858, and The 
 Origin of Species was published in 1859. 
 During my college course, which ended in 
 84 
 
LESSONS OF SCIENCE 
 
 1865, I never heard Darwin or his theory 
 mentioned by any of my teachers. I read 
 his book with intense admiration in 1867, 
 but it took me several years more to digest 
 and assimilate the arguments of Darwin 
 sufficiently to become an evolutionist. 
 
 Darwin's discovery of natural selection 
 was not, indeed, a complete solution of the 
 problem of organic evolution. It did, how- 
 ever, show that there are processes actually 
 going on in natm-e such as would under 
 reasonably supposable conditions result in 
 so wide divergence of offspring from the 
 character of the parent stock as to con- 
 stitute a new species. In the light of that 
 principle, which showed how variation, in- 
 stead of being merely oscillatory, could at 
 times become progressive, naturahsts were 
 ready, as they had not been before, to read 
 and interpret the innumerable suggestions 
 of evolution in the structures of every organ- 
 ism and in the relations of organisms to 
 each other and to space and time. In a few 
 years the doctrine of evolution came to be 
 accepted with substantial unanimity by aU 
 classes of naturahsts, and after the lapse of 
 a somewhat longer time the beUef of scien- 
 
 85 
 
ETHICAL AND RELIGIOUS 
 
 tific specialists came to be adopted into the 
 general thought of humanity. 
 
 Darwin's epoch-making discovery was 
 concerned merely with the origin of a species 
 by descent with modification from a pre- 
 existent species. It had no bearing upon the 
 origin of life. But in scientific thought 
 analogy goes far beyond the conclusions 
 established by cogent induction. While we 
 have at most only the faintest gleams of 
 light in regard to the processes by which 
 non-living matter first came to be living, 
 scientists believe, on the force of general 
 analogy, that the transition was probably 
 made by some evolutionary process. We 
 cannot believe that the chain of evolutionary 
 progress from the nebula to man was broken 
 at the point of the origin of hfe. Nor can 
 we accept the nebula as an ultimate fact. 
 However vague may be our knowledge of 
 the nature of the nebula from which the 
 solar system was derived, or of the proc- 
 esses in which that nebula originated, we 
 are constrained by analogy to beheve that 
 the nebula itself was evolved. By that same 
 path of analogy, scientific men in general 
 were led to believe that the various kinds of 
 86 
 
LESSONS OF SCIENCE 
 
 chemical atoms were the result of some sort 
 of evolutionary process, instead of being 
 created once for all changeless and indis- 
 soluble; and the belief which was based on 
 analogy has found confirmation in the mar- 
 velous revelations of radioactivity, which 
 have shown the atom of uranium breaking 
 up into atoms of helimn and lead. There is 
 no rational stopping place this side of the 
 conception of creative power and intelHgence 
 eternally immanent in an eternal universe. 
 
 Of course the supposed demonstration of 
 Chalmers and MiUer has vanished. Nor 
 can we fail to recognize that the argimient 
 from design for the existence of God, in 
 the form in which it was presented by Paley 
 and his followers, has been seriously dam- 
 aged by the theory of evolution. Paley 
 found, as he supposed, the strongest evi- 
 dence of design in the mutual adaptation 
 of the parts of a complex organism. A 
 typical illustration of this line of argument 
 is seen in the eye, whose performance as an 
 organ of vision depends upon an approxi- 
 mately perfect adaptation of the curved sur- 
 faces and refractive indices of the series of 
 transparent media through which the ray of 
 
 87 
 
ETHICAL AND RELIGIOUS 
 
 light passes before it reaches the retina. 
 Moreover, in addition to the essential parts 
 of the eye, there are the various accessory 
 parts by which vision is directed to different 
 points, refractive power is changed in ac- 
 commodation to the different distances of 
 objects, and the delicate organ is protected 
 from the chances of injury. Certainly, the 
 Paleyan argimient is considerably shattered 
 when we have learned that the earliest form 
 of eye was simply a nerve-ending on the 
 surface of the body, covered by a fleck of 
 pigment more absorptive of radiant energy 
 than the general integimient; and that the 
 eyes of the higher forms of life have gradu- 
 ally been evolved from that simpler form, 
 in large part by the action of natural selec- 
 tion in preserving desirable variations and 
 causing the extinction of undesirable varia- 
 tions. A homely illustration may serve to 
 show how the Paleyan argument is affected 
 by evolution. If we find a vessel almost 
 perfectly filled with a variety of objects, the 
 salient angles of one object fitting into re- 
 entrant angles around it, so that the amount 
 of space left vacant is utterly insignificant, 
 the supposition would be a reasonable one 
 88 
 
LESSONS OF SCIENCE 
 
 that some one had intended the vessel to be 
 nearly fuU; but, if, in the method of the 
 Paleyan natural theology, we should argue 
 from the curious and complex form of a 
 single object that every angle and curve of 
 its surface had been designed for the pur- 
 pose of filling the space in which it was 
 foxmd, our conclusion wovdd be rather dis- 
 turbed if we learned that the vessel had been 
 shaken until the small objects had rattled 
 into the chinks between the large ones and 
 the hard objects had impressed their shape 
 upon the soft ones. The argument for the 
 existence of God from the material imiverse 
 must be based, not on the evidence afforded 
 by the approximately perfect adaptation of 
 minute details, but by the intellectuality of 
 nature as viewed in its larger relations. A 
 book which we can read is the work of an 
 intelligence in some sense kindred with our 
 own. The inteUigibiiity of nature to human 
 thought, is the evidence of the divine thought 
 which natm-e expresses. 
 
 There is a profound ethical impressive- 
 ness in the sublime idea of the divine im- 
 manence in an eternal universe. We no 
 longer have to conceive of the Deity spend- 
 
 89 
 
ETHICAL AND RELIGIOUS 
 
 ing a solitary eternity in the contemplation 
 of his own attributes like a Hindoo Brahm, 
 or, as some theologians have imagined, find- 
 ing his delight in the mutual affection of the 
 persons of the Trinity ; then creating a uni- 
 verse by a single fiat, and abandoning it to 
 run its own course by self-subsisting laws 
 and forces ; and subsequently only occasion- 
 ally interposing to produce some extraordi- 
 nary effect, as, for instance, in the origin of 
 life or in the origin of human intelligence. 
 The God we worship to-day is not the God 
 of supposed gaps in the continuity of nature, 
 but the God of the continuity of natiu-e. 
 Thus all nature becomes sacred with a divine 
 presence. 
 
 "We lack but open eye and ear 
 To find the Orient's marvels here; 
 The still small voice in autumn's hush, 
 Yon maple wood the burning bush." 
 
 We must recognize, indeed, that in large 
 degree the ethical impression of the divine 
 immanence is felt by some scientific men 
 who do not profess a theistic belief. In one 
 sense there is, indeed, very little difference 
 between some of the theism and some of 
 the atheism or pantheism of our time. The 
 90 
 
LESSONS OF SCIENCE 
 
 naive anthropomorphism of the Old Testa- 
 ment and the still grosser anthropomor- 
 phism of John Milton have vanished from 
 our theological thought. If we say we be- 
 lieve in the personality of God, we can, 
 strictly speaking, mean nothing more than 
 that, in the nature of Him who dwells "in 
 hght unapproachable, whom no man hath 
 seen nor can see," there is something of which 
 the fittest symbol our experience can offer is 
 found in hviman personahty; and there are 
 many thoughtful men who do not feel at 
 liberty formally to profess our creed of the 
 personality of God, who yet recognize with 
 as profound a reverence as ours the mys- 
 terious Power 
 
 "Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns. 
 And the round ocean and the living air. 
 And the blue sky, and in the mind of man." 
 
 Profoundly impressive is the idea which 
 modern science gives us of the progress of 
 nature to fuller and fuller expression of the 
 divine thought. The processes which are 
 common to all organic life are developed in 
 man into spiritual significance; first the 
 natural, after that the spiritual. The two 
 
 91 
 
ETHICAL AND- RELIGIOUS 
 
 characteristic processes of all organic life 
 are nutrition and reproduction. Each of 
 these in man takes on a spiritual significance. 
 When the Pithecanthropus or some other 
 ancestor of man gathered his mate and his 
 cubs around him to eat together the prey 
 which he had captured, instead of gnawing 
 the bones alone, a step had been taken in 
 the development of himian civihzation. The 
 social meal for the family, the group of 
 friends, or the society of persons of kindred 
 thought and purpose, has been an important 
 factor in the progress of human civilization. 
 Whether in the desert tent of the Bedouin 
 or in the banquet haU of an august society, 
 the social meal is the bond of union among 
 men. In the sacred symbolism of our reh- 
 gion, the form of a social meal celebrates the 
 vmion of the saints of all lands and of all 
 ages in holy fellowship with the Divine Mas- 
 ter. From the simplest form of organic re- 
 production, from the conjugation of two 
 unicellular organisms — cells to which imagi- 
 nation can hardly attribute a rudiment of 
 consciousness, and which present no differ- 
 ences from each other which we can recog- 
 nize as sexual — ^mutually blending their con- 
 92 
 
LESSONS OF SCIENCE 
 
 tents and developing a swarm of spores, — ^it 
 is a long journey to the sweet sanctities of 
 the Christian home. But no less real is the 
 unity of the process of reproduction through 
 all grades of hfe, vegetable and animal. A 
 striking illustration of the spu-itual signifi- 
 cance of reproduction is found in the sug- 
 gestion of which John Fiske was the author, 
 that the evolution of the moral and social 
 characteristics of man was largely the result 
 of the lengthened period of helpless infancy 
 in the human species. That thought, first 
 suggested by Fiske, has been developed with 
 marvelous beauty in Henry Drummond's 
 Ascent of Man, in the two chapters entitled, 
 respectively, "The Evolution of a Mother," 
 and "The Evolution of a Father." 
 
 The ethical and religious significance of 
 nature comes to revelation in man; only 
 when the prophecy of the ages finds its ful- 
 filment can we understand its meaning. 
 The doctrines of evolution and conservation 
 of energy, the characteristic ideas of the 
 second half of the nineteenth century, im- 
 pressed upon the mind of humanity the sub- 
 lime conception of the imity of nature. 
 That conception led naturally to an attempt 
 
 93 
 
ETHICAL AND RELIGIOUS 
 
 to interpret all phenomena in terms of mat- 
 ter and motion under the action of purely 
 physical and chemical forces. The reductio 
 ad absurdum of that tendency is shown in the 
 gross materialism of Karl Vogt's dictum: 
 that it is the function of the brain to produce 
 thought, as it is the function of muscles to 
 contract, and the function of the kidneys to 
 secrete urine. If that proposition means 
 anything, it means that thought is either a 
 form of matter or a form of motion, and 
 it is difficult to say which alternative is 
 the more absurd. In the frank recognition 
 of those facts of human experience which 
 cannot be formulated in terms of mass and 
 velocity, hes the supreme evidence of God. 
 The God who is veiled in nature is revealed 
 in man. The really fundamental doctrine 
 of religion is the personality of man. For 
 him who genuinely beheves in human per- 
 sonality, the conception of the personality 
 of God is a pretty easy corollary. 
 
 The ethical significance of nature is re- 
 vealed in man, the culmination of nature; 
 the ethical significance of man is revealed in 
 Christ, the ideal man. If I were to name 
 the peculiar quality which characterizes 
 94 
 
LESSONS OF SCIENCE 
 
 Christian character, as distinct from the 
 character which is morally clean but un- 
 touched by the influence of Christian revela- 
 tion, I should be disposed to use the old 
 Methodist phrase, "conviction of sin." 
 Ethical conceptions grow deeper and higher 
 in the light of the teaching and character of 
 Jesus. The soul that has learned in the 
 school of Jesus is not satisfied with right 
 conduct, but aspires after a harmony of soul 
 with God. When Job had the vision of 
 Jehovah and heard his voice out of the whirl- 
 wind, his boastful self-satisfaction vanished, 
 and he cried out, "I abhor myself, and re- 
 pent in dust and ashes." The vision of God 
 in Christ and the divine tenderness of his 
 voice lead us to the humiliation and peni- 
 tence out of which blooms 
 
 ". . . The white flower of a blameless life." 
 
 This intense conviction of sin expresses it- 
 self continually in the writings of Christian 
 poets, as, for instance, in Tennyson's words, 
 
 "Forgive what seemed my sin in me. 
 
 What seemed my worth since I began, 
 For merit lives from man to man. 
 And not from man, O Lord, to thee." 
 95 
 
LESSONS OF SCIENCE 
 
 It is to the poor in spirit, to those that 
 mourn, to the meek, to those who himger 
 and thirst after a righteousness not yet pos- 
 sessed, that Jesus gives his blessing. 
 
 Professor Hyde's friends are in many re- 
 spects as good as the Reverend Doctor 
 Jekyll's. They are clean in word and deed. 
 They are just and generous. I would trust 
 my money, my life, and my reputation, to 
 the protection of one of my sets of friends 
 as willingly as to that of the other. The 
 unselfish love of truth which I find in scien- 
 tific men commands my admiration. They 
 show a severer truthfulness, as I have al- 
 ready said frankly, but I trust not imkindly, 
 than I find in the average of ministers of 
 the gospel. They would make good martyrs. 
 Science has had its martyrs in the past, and 
 there is plenty of martyr stuff among the 
 devotees of science to-day. But still I feel 
 that there is something lacking. Integrity 
 is transfigured into holiness only when the 
 soul in penitence and self-abasement gazes 
 upon the divine radiance in the face of Jesus. 
 
 96 
 
IV 
 
 THE SACREDNESS OF HUMAN 
 PERSONALITY 
 
IV 
 
 THE SACREDNESS OF HUMAN 
 PERSONALITY 
 
 "And God said, Let us make man in our image, 
 after our likeness: and let them have dominion 
 over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the 
 air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, 
 and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon 
 the earth. 
 
 "So God created man in his own image, in the 
 image of God created he him; male and female 
 created he them." — Genesis 1. SS6, %7. 
 
 The editor who compiled our present 
 book of Genesis placed in the beginning of 
 his work two narratives of creation. The 
 first of them occupies the whole of the first 
 chapter and the first three verses of the 
 second chapter of Genesis. The second 
 narrative begins with the fourth verse of 
 the second chapter. The verses which have 
 been read as the text stand near the end of 
 the first of these narratives. 
 
 The first of these narratives is the work 
 of a much later time than the second, and 
 represents a much more advanced state of 
 
 99 
 
THE SACREDNESS OF 
 
 Hebrew religious thought. The interval be- 
 tween their dates of composition was prob- 
 ably about three and a half centuries. The 
 later narrative, which comes first in the ar- 
 rangement of our present book of Genesis, 
 is remarkably free from the naive and crass 
 anthropomorphism which characterizes the 
 earlier narrative. The image of clay molded 
 by the hands of Jehovah and vivified by the 
 divine breath breathed into its nostrils, the 
 rib taken from the man for the manufac- 
 ture of a woman, the garden planted by Je- 
 hovah, and Jehovah's evening walk in the 
 garden in the cool of the day, represent an 
 order of conceptions which religious thought 
 had outgrown before the date of the later 
 narrative. Anthropomorphic, indeed, is that 
 later narrative. All religious thought and 
 language is more or less anthropomorphic, 
 for every conception which the himian mind 
 can form of God is reached through the 
 symbolism of human experience and action. 
 But surely no anthropomorphic conception 
 could be more sublime than that of the crea- 
 tion of a universe in obedience to a progres- 
 sive series of divine commands. "Let light 
 be." "Let the waters bring forth." "Let 
 100 
 
HUMAN PERSONALITY 
 
 the earth bring forth." Thus is brought be- 
 fore our minds the sublime conception of 
 an orderly, progressive development of the 
 material vmiverse in fulfilment of the divine 
 will. In our modern language, such an 
 orderly, progressive manifestation of phe- 
 nomena in the universe we call evolution. 
 
 The final stage of this creative evolution 
 is the appearance of a being in the image of 
 God. We are told that God blessed these 
 highest and noblest of his earthly creatures, 
 and bade them to subdue the earth and to 
 have dominion. That dominion man, in- 
 deed, has exercised. Within limits, he domi- 
 nates natiu-e by his own thought, as all 
 nature is dominated by the divine thought. 
 He thinks* God's thoughts after him, gradu- 
 ally interpreting the riddles of nature. He 
 aspires after spiritual communion with God, 
 and claims an inheritance in God's im- 
 mortality. 
 
 The evidences of the evolutionary origin 
 of man are the same that have compelled be- 
 lief in the evolutionary origin of other 
 species of organisms. There are certainly 
 very few, if any, biologists or geologists 
 who do not believe that man was descended 
 101 
 
THE SACREDNESS OF 
 
 from some type of anthropoid ape. In 
 fact, we have at least a plausible conjec- 
 ture as to the precise conditions which led 
 to the evolution of man. As the climate 
 grew gradually colder, in the age immedi- 
 ately preceding the last great Glacial period, 
 the forests in which the simian ancestors of 
 man had lived an arboreal life, feeding upon 
 the fruits of the trees, became less luxiu-iant, 
 and the supply of food less abundant. 
 Some of the descendants of these ancestors 
 of man, it has been conjectured, adjusted 
 themselves to the changing conditions by 
 abandoning their arboreal life, living on the 
 surface of the earth, where they stood and 
 walked on two feet, changing their diet to 
 one in part, at least, carnivorous, and de- 
 veloping larger brains under the necessity 
 of obtaining food in ways that required the 
 exercise of a higher degree of intelligence. 
 There is, indeed, a mystery in the evolu- 
 tion from the brute creation of a being pos- 
 sessed of language, science, art, civilization, 
 ethics, and religion; as there is a mystery, 
 in an earlier stage of the history of creation, 
 in the evolution of vegetable and animal life 
 from inorganic matter. In each case, with 
 102 
 
HUMAN PERSONALITY 
 
 our present knowledge the mystery is in- 
 soluble. Yet there is one thought that 
 pierces the darkness with a gleam of light. 
 That illuminating principle is that the cause 
 of evolution is not matter but indwelling 
 Spirit. Matter, whether we conceive of it 
 as eternal or as created, is not a self -sub- 
 sisting entity. The material universe is only 
 the thin and perfectly flexible garment of 
 God. All material changes are only the ex- 
 pression of the will of immanent Deity. In 
 the light of that principle, though we can 
 give no explanation of the process of the 
 evolution of life or of the evolution of the 
 human soul, we can be reconciled to the 
 mystery, and can wait for fuller knowledge. 
 But there is an easy way of disposing of 
 a mystery, and that is to deny or ignore the 
 facts which it is impossible to explain. I 
 have heard of a man who saw a camel in 
 a menagerie, never having known anything 
 about the characteristics of the animal be- 
 fore. The proportions of the creature — ^his 
 long, ungainly legs, his clumsy, padded feet, 
 the shapeless hmnp on his back — did not cor- 
 respond at all with the man's conception of 
 the appropriate symmetry of an animal 
 103 
 
THE SACREDNESS OF 
 
 body. After walking around the beast and 
 "viewing him from different standpoints, he 
 simmied up his conclusion in the proposi- 
 tion, "There ain't no such animal." In a 
 somewhat similar spirit, the materialistic 
 philosophy of our time seeks to escape from 
 the mystery of human existence by denying 
 or ignoring everything in human experi- 
 ence which cannot be formulated in terms 
 of mass and velocity. So consciousness is 
 said to be a mode of motion, and thought 
 is said to be a secretion of the brain. All 
 ethical distinctions are regarded as fictitious. 
 Religion is only a dream. Man is only an 
 animal; and natm-al selection, to which he 
 owes his origin, is the only law which he is 
 bound to obey. 
 
 A most interesting exposition of this phi- 
 losophy as held by many scientific men in 
 Germany, and of its results in conduct, is 
 given in an article by Vernon Kellogg in 
 the Atlantic Monthly for August, 1917, 
 imder the title, "Headquarters Nights." 
 According to this philosophy, man is the 
 supreme product of animal evolution, and 
 the Teutonic race is the supreme product of 
 himian evolution. That race has come to 
 104 
 
HUMAN PERSONALITY 
 
 be what it is by the principle of the survival 
 of the fittest. The race need acknowledge 
 no allegiance to any other law than the law 
 to which it owes its origin. The world be- 
 longs to the races that can take it and hold 
 it. From that standpoint, our scientific 
 German friends can contemplate the mas- 
 sacre of Belgians and Poles with the same 
 equanimity with which we regard the slaugh- 
 ter of pigs and cows in the stock-yards of 
 Chicago. The prevalence of this material- 
 istic philosophy among the educated classes 
 is vmdoubtedly in part the explanation of 
 the horrible " schreckUchkeit" of which the 
 Germans have been guilty. 
 
 Surely, if we accept the implications of 
 the declaration that man was made in the 
 image of God, we cannot make the principle 
 of natural selection the ethical standard in 
 himaan relations. No "law of the jungle" 
 can govern the mutual relations of beings 
 who bear the divine image and count them- 
 selves heirs of God's immortality. That 
 conception invests every human personality 
 with an inviolable sacredness. No individ- 
 ual, no class, no sex, no nation, no race, has 
 a right to exploit another simply for the 
 105 
 
THE SACREDNESS OF 
 
 benefit of the stronger. To use any human 
 being as a toy or a tool is a crime. This 
 doctrine of the equal sacredness of every 
 human person is the foundation of democ- 
 racy. 
 
 But the religious life of no nation rises 
 to the level of the loftiest utterances of its 
 prophets. That Hebrew people whose an- 
 cient Scriptures enshrined this majestic 
 oracle of democracy, reveals too often in its 
 history a conception of God as a tutelary 
 tribal Deity. The lofty thought of Genesis 
 was like a seed that had failed to germinate 
 until it sprang into new life in the teaching 
 of Jesus. When Jesus taught his disciples 
 that prayer of all prayers, "Our Father who 
 art in heaven," he made vital and fruitful the 
 great truth that all men are brothers by vir- 
 tue of their common relation to the heavenly 
 Father. Jesus was the first true democrat. 
 Our hvmianitarian civilization, with its 
 emancipation of women, its abolition of 
 slavery, its constitutional systems of repre- 
 sentative government, its universal educa- 
 tion, its hospitals and reformatories, its mis- 
 sionary activities, is all the fruit of the con- 
 ception of the sacredness of every human 
 106 
 
HUMAN PERSONALITY 
 
 personality, in that all mankind, as children 
 of the heavenly Father, are made in the 
 image of God. Yuan Shi Kai said to Bishop 
 Bashford, "After you Christians came to 
 Chma and went about preaching the father- 
 hood of God and the brotherhood of man, 
 despotism became forever impossible." 
 
 Alas, that, within the pale of nominal 
 Christianity, the conception of God the 
 Father of aU mankind has too often degen- 
 erated into the old conception of a tutelary 
 tribal God! The "Gott mit vm" of our 
 German cousins has been rather below the 
 level of the war-god of Joshua. We can 
 hardly avoid the feeling that the "Gott mit 
 una" is in a considerable degree a renais- 
 sance of the thunder-god of the old Teutonic 
 mythology. Christian Germany has been 
 practically no better than atheistic Ger- 
 many, though it has formulated its conduct 
 in somewhat diflferent fashion. German 
 theologians and pastors have defied the 
 moral sense of mankind in their utterances 
 and publications in regard to the war about 
 as flagrantly as German scientists and phi- 
 losophers. 
 
 The pin-pose of our country in the war 
 107 
 
THE SACREDNESS OF 
 
 is formulated in the noble words of Presi- 
 dent Wilson, "The world must be made safe 
 for democracy." In great degree we have 
 succeeded in the task. In April, 1917, in 
 a report which was adopted by the New 
 York East Conference of the Methodist 
 Episcopal Church, I wrote these words: 
 "The Czar has gone; the Kaisers must go. 
 The only monarchs the new age can tolerate 
 are those whose crowns are only symbols of 
 national unity and whose decrees but regis- 
 ter a nation's will." I knew not then how 
 quickly or how completely those words 
 would find fulfillment. The HohenzoUern 
 dynasty, upon which rests the chief respon- 
 sibility for the war, is overthrown, and we 
 behold the United States of Germany rising 
 on the ruins of the empire. The Hapsburg 
 dynasty is gone, and the heterogeneous mass 
 of Austria-Hungary is broken up into a 
 group of independent republics. The 
 crowns of kinglings and princelings have 
 been falling hke withered leaves in an 
 autumn gale. Only nations which are re- 
 publican in spirit, if not in form, can enter 
 the great world confederacy beneath whose 
 sway we may hope for universal peace. In 
 108 
 
HUMAN PERSONALITY 
 
 the reconstruction of the map of Europe, 
 the rights, the feelings, the aspirations of 
 nations long subjected to alien tyranny will 
 be respected, and so far as possible those 
 rights will be maintained and those aspira- 
 tions wiU be fulfilled. We shall have, doubt- 
 less, the republics of Poland and Czecho- 
 slovakia and Jugo-Slavia; Alsace and 
 Lorraine will be restored to France, and 
 ItaUa Irredenta wiU find its redemption. 
 The problem, however, of the reconstruction 
 of national boundaries will not be an easy 
 one, though its solution be attempted in 
 the most altruistic spirit. There is an Ulster 
 in every Ireland. There is no territory 
 which can be circumscribed by any definite 
 and intelligible boundaries, which does not 
 include one or more districts the majority of 
 whose population differs, in race, language, 
 rehgion, traditions, and aspirations, from 
 the people of the larger area within which it 
 is included. So complex has been the result 
 of migration and intermixture of nations in 
 the centuries of European history, that the 
 solution of the problem of boundaries can 
 be at the best only approximate. But we 
 may trust that right principles will govern 
 109 
 
THE SACREDNESS OF 
 
 that reconstruction. The time is past for- 
 ever when human populations can be bought 
 and sold hke herds of cattle. 
 
 Yes, autocracy has been overthrown ; and 
 we and ovu- allies are proud of oiu" fimction 
 as the avenging angels who have overthrown 
 the enemies of mankind. But are we worthy 
 of that glorious mission to which we have 
 been called? Is it only the Central Powers 
 that have offended against the great princi- 
 ple of Christian democracy? Have the 
 rights of every individual and of every class 
 been carefully regarded in the political and 
 social and economic life of the nations that 
 are now triumphant? Is the sacredness of 
 every human personality practically recog- 
 nized in our own coimtry or in any of the 
 countries which share with us the glory of 
 the great triumph? I quote a striking pas- 
 sage from an article by Wilbin* Daniel 
 Steele in the Atlantic Monthly for May, 
 1918: 
 
 "This war began so long ago, so long before 
 Sarajevo, so long before 'balances of power' 
 were thought of, so long before the 'provinces' 
 were lost and won, before Bismarck and the lot 
 of them were begotten, or their fathers. So many, 
 110 
 
HUMAN PERSONALITY 
 
 many years of questions put, and half-answers 
 given in return. Questions, questions: questions 
 of a power-loom in the North Counties ; questions 
 of a mill-hand's lodging in one Manchester or 
 another, of the weight of a head-tax in India, of 
 a widow's mass for her dead in Spain; questions 
 of a black man in the Congo, of an eighth-black 
 man in New Orleans, of a Christian in Turkey, 
 an Irishman in Dublin, a Jew in Moscow, a French 
 cripple in the streets of Zabern; questions of an 
 idiot sitting on a throne; questions of a girl ask- 
 ing her vote on a Hyde Park rostrum, of a girl 
 asking her price in the dark of a Chicago door- 
 way : whole questions half-answered, hungry ques- 
 tions half-fed, mutilated fag-ends of questions 
 piling up and piling up year by year, decade 
 after decade. Listen! There came a time when 
 it wouldn't do, wouldn't do at all. There came a 
 time when the son of all those questions stood 
 up in the world, final, unequivocal, naked, devour- 
 ing, saying: 'Now you shall answer me. You 
 shall look me squarely in the face at last, and you 
 shall look at nothing else; you shall take your 
 hands out of your pockets and your tongues out 
 of your cheeks, and no matter how long, no mat- 
 ter what the blood and anguish of it, you shall 
 answer me now with a whole answer — or perish !' " 
 
 Let me suggest some of the problems 
 111 
 
THE SACREDNESS OF 
 
 which the spirit of a true democracy requires 
 us to consider in our own country. 
 
 One of the noblest fruits of Christianity 
 has been the emancipation of women, and 
 probably nowhere has that emancipation 
 been so nearly accomplished, in the most 
 important respects, as in our own country. 
 America has long been spoken of as the 
 paradise of women. But is our legislation 
 in regard to vice, are the ethical standards 
 maintained by public opinion, is our treat- 
 ment of the poor victims of man's lust and 
 greed, up to the requirement of the princi- 
 ple that the personality of a woman is as 
 sacred as that of a man? 
 
 Does that principle of the equal sacred- 
 ness of human personality require the ex- 
 tension of the right of suffrage to women? 
 The question of woman suffrage I do not 
 purpose to discuss. So far as I can see, 
 there is still some difference of opinion, not 
 only among the best men, but also among 
 the best women, on the question whether 
 woman suffrage would be on the whole an 
 advantage to the community. I only wish 
 to point out that the admission of equal 
 sacredness of rights does not logically re- 
 112 
 
HUMAN PERSONALITY 
 
 quire identity of function. Certainly, in 
 many respects, the functions of women in 
 society must be different from those of men. 
 However heartily we may applaud the 
 heroic patriotism which inspired those Rijs- 
 sian women in the "battaUon of death," and 
 which kept them faithful to their country 
 when men had betrayed it, no right-minded 
 person who thinks of what it means for a 
 woman to bear arms and to share the ex- 
 periences that must belong to the hfe of a 
 soldier, can contemplate the entrance of 
 women into an army with any other feeling 
 than that of utter horror. One of the great 
 anxieties which I feel in regard to the prob- 
 able incidental results of the war through 
 which we have passed, is precisely the fear 
 that the scarcity of labor and the consequent 
 forcing of women into a great many tasks 
 hitherto performed by men wiU result in the 
 permanent employment of women in oc- 
 cupations whidi are unfavorable for the 
 best development of womanhood. In the 
 countries of Europe, where the destruction 
 of manhood has been greater than in our 
 own country, the peril to womanhood is 
 greater. The principle of true democracy 
 113 
 
THE SACREDNESS OF 
 
 requires the recognition of the equal sacred- 
 ness of the rights of all classes. It does not 
 require identity of function of all classes. 
 The question of woman suffrage must be 
 decided on other grounds, and on that ques- 
 tion I express no opinion. 
 
 Take the problem of inferior races. That 
 problem appears as a national problem in 
 every country inhabited by two or more very 
 different races. It presents itself also as an 
 international problem. It is only a silly 
 sentimentalism that can deny that some 
 races are inferior to others. The race from 
 which have come inflected speech and alpha- 
 betic writing, the great classic literatures 
 ancient and modern, the great philosophies, 
 the revelations of science from Hipparchus 
 and Aristotle to Newton and Darwin, the 
 applications of science in the useful arts, the 
 system of constitutional representative gov- 
 ernment under which liberty is protected by 
 law, the great missionary religions — ^that 
 race can surely claim superiority to any 
 other. China and Japan have taken at 
 second hand a civilization which they had 
 little share in making. In fact, I have a 
 good deal of sympathy with the claim of our 
 114 
 
HUMAN PERSONALITY 
 
 Grerman cousins that the whitest of the 
 whites, the tall, long-headed, fair-skinned, 
 tow-haired, and blue-eyed race of Northern 
 Europe, the Teutonic or Nordic race, is the 
 race which exhibits in greatest purity the 
 highest stage of human development. 
 
 In the past the too frequent procedure 
 of the white race has been to exploit the 
 inferior races if it could use them, and to 
 destroy them if it did not see how to use 
 them. Certainly there is very much in the 
 conduct of the white race toward Indians, 
 Negroes, and Mongohans in our own coun- 
 try which no one can defend. 
 
 But, with the best intentions, the prob- 
 lem of the inferior races is one of tremen- 
 dous difficulty. Some very simple solutions 
 have been attempted. Our cousins in Aus- 
 traha have treated the aborigines of that 
 continent with an inhumanity several shades 
 worse than that which we have shown to- 
 ward the Indians. In Austraha, as in the 
 United States, the white race has taken pos- 
 session of the land; but in Austraha the proc- 
 ess has involved a good deal of systematic 
 massacre. Only a remnant of the aborigines 
 survives. In Tasmania the native popula- 
 115 
 
THE SACREDNESS OF 
 
 tion has become absolutely extinct. That 
 solution of the problem is certainly simple, 
 but simplicity is its only merit. Fifty 
 years ago our fathers attempted a solution 
 of one phase of the problem of inferior races 
 which was equally simple. At the close of 
 the Civil War our fathers gave manhood 
 suffrage to the Negroes, though very many 
 of them, under a thin veneer of Anglo- 
 Saxon civilization, were essentially barbar- 
 ians. Our fathers trusted that giving these 
 people poUtical equality would immediately 
 produce in them intellectual, moral, and 
 social equality. The shameful story of car- 
 pet-bagger rule in the Southern States 
 showed the worthlessness of that simple 
 solution. But how ought we to deal with a 
 population in w'hich two races of very differ- 
 ent capacities are mingled? Impartial suf- 
 frage for all races is all right in Connecticut. 
 Would it seem to us equally satisfactory if 
 we lived in South Carolina or Mississippi, 
 where people of Negro race and of mixed 
 race make up the majority? What would 
 we think of manhood suffrage for the in- 
 ferior race, if we hved in the South African 
 Republic, where the English and Dutch to- 
 116 
 
HUMAN PERSONALITY 
 
 gether are approximately one sixth of the 
 population, five sixths being Negro savages? 
 What ought we to do with the inferior races 
 in the PhiUppine Islands? It is not my pur- 
 pose to-day to answer these questions, but 
 only to point out the two guiding principles. 
 On the one hand the superior race must not 
 simply exploit the inferior race. Their 
 rights are as sacred as those of the stronger 
 and wiser. But equal sacredness of right 
 does not mean identity of function in society. 
 Take the economic problem. Is our in- 
 dustrial system truly democratic? Or do we 
 still find the laboring classes in large degree 
 exploited by the capitahsts? Of course so- 
 ciety must protect itself, and wfe cannot 
 tolerate the crimes of the I. W. W. We 
 must imprison many of them, and every now 
 and then we must hang a few of them; but 
 we must reform the conditions out of which 
 the I. W. W. has been evolved. At the 
 present time, skilled laborers, by organiza- 
 tion in trade-unions and by collective bar- 
 gaining, are able to secure for themselves 
 pretty good wages and pretty good condi- 
 tions of employment. In the last year the 
 extreme scarcity of laborers has raised to a 
 117 
 
THE SACREDNESS OF 
 
 high figure the wages even of the unskilled; 
 but in ordinary times the condition of un- 
 skilled laborers is little better than that of 
 slaves. In fact, in some ways the condition 
 of the unskilled laborer may be even worse 
 than if he were a slave. It is for the in- 
 terest of the owner to preserve the life of a 
 slave, for, if the slave dies, he must buy an- 
 other. When the supply of unskilled labor- 
 ers exceeds the demand, the death of a 
 laborer is no loss to the employer. He can 
 fill the place with no pecuniary loss and 
 with little inconvenience. It is obviously 
 true in general that the wage system is an 
 improvement upon the system of slavery, in 
 which the laborer was a piece of property, 
 or the system of serfdom, in which the peas- 
 ant was an appurtenance of the land. But 
 I cannot believe that a system which af- 
 fords occasion for so continuous antagonism 
 between employer and employee is the last 
 word of economic science in regard to in- 
 dustrial organization. 
 
 Not only in the industrial system of a 
 
 single country do we find problems which 
 
 must be treated in the light of the great 
 
 principle of democracy, but also in interna- 
 
 118 
 
HUMAN PERSONALITY 
 
 tional relations. Each country frames its 
 system of tariffs and its immigration laws 
 primarily with reference to its own interests. 
 But has our nation or any nation a right to 
 legislate to secure its own advantage at cost 
 of obvious injury to the populations of other 
 countries? While seeking primarily the im- 
 provement of social and economic conditions 
 in our own land, are we not bound to re- 
 gard the welfare of peoples beyond the 
 seas? 
 
 I have suggested questions which I have 
 not answered. Some of them will not be 
 answered satisfactorily in the immediate 
 future. Wiser men in years to come must 
 seek in the fear of God to find their full 
 solution. My present object is only to em- 
 phasize that fimdamental truth, that no an- 
 swer to these questions wiU be the right an- 
 swer, and no answer to these questions can 
 receive the permanent assent of humanity, 
 which is not based upon the principle of the 
 inviolable sacredness of every human per- 
 sonality. The full recognition of that prin- 
 ciple will require some sacrifice on the part 
 of the strong for the benefit of the weak. 
 We must be willing to yield somewhat of our 
 119 
 
HUMAN PERSONALITY 
 
 privileges and immunities. We must think 
 and speak less of our rights and more of 
 our duties. Only those who enter into the 
 spirit of the first true Democrat, the spirit 
 of Him who lived and died for all himianity, 
 male and female, Jew and Gentile, white, 
 yellow, red, brown, and black — only those 
 are fit to lead mankind, out of the horror 
 of war and the misery of oppression, into 
 the promised land of freedom and brother- 
 hood, into the "new earth wherein dwelleth 
 righteousness." 
 
 120 
 
V 
 
 THE NEW TESTAMENT OF 
 TO-DAY 
 
THE NEW TESTAMENT OF 
 TO-DAY^ 
 
 The theme to be considered at this time 
 is not the ultimate New Testament but the 
 New Testament of to-day. I know some- 
 thing of what the New Testament was five 
 and thirty years ago when I became a mem- 
 ber of this Conference. I know something 
 of what the New Testament is to-day. I 
 am neither a prophet nor a prophet's son, 
 and I know not what the New Testament 
 will be to the church of future centuries. 
 
 Our conception of the New Testament 
 has been changed by what we may call the 
 lower criticism. The Greek text has been 
 revised, and we know much more nearly than 
 we knew a few decades ago what the origi- 
 nal writers of the books of the New Testa- 
 ment intended to say. We have not only 
 a more trustworthy Greek text, but we have 
 a far better translation into Enghsh than 
 
 ' Address before the Mid-year Assembly of the New York 
 East Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1905. 
 
 123 
 
THE NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 we had a few decades ago. I doubt whether 
 there was ever so thoroughly accurate a 
 translation of an important work into any 
 language as we possess in the American Re- 
 vision of the New Testament. 
 
 Some changes which have been made by 
 correction either of the text or of the trans- 
 lation are surely very welcome. We are 
 quite willing to learn that the superstitious 
 story of the angel coming down and troub- 
 ling the water of the pool of Bethesda is 
 an interpolation. We are quite willing, in 
 Peter's speech reported in the third chapter 
 of Acts, to find him exhorting men to re- 
 pent, not "when the times of refreshing shall 
 come from the presence of the Lord," but 
 "that so there may come seasons of refresh- 
 ing from the presence of the Lord." Thus, 
 of two passages of Scripture with which men 
 have perhaps half sincerely quieted their 
 consciences in postponing the duty of a 
 Christian life until some time of revival, it 
 is interesting to find that one is an inter- 
 polation in the text and the other is a pal- 
 pable error of translation. A new depth 
 of insight into the principles of the divine 
 government is given us when, in Mark 3. 
 124 
 
OF TO-DAY 
 
 29, we read, "is guilty of an eternal sin," 
 instead of the old reading, "is in danger of 
 eternal damnation." Some changes re- 
 quired by critical scholarship are not quite 
 so welcome. The stoiy of the woman taken 
 in adultery gives a strangely beautiful reve- 
 lation of the character of Jesus, and we 
 would like to believe that the story is true. 
 Very likely, indeed, it is true, but I suppose 
 it is substantially certain that it is no part 
 of the Fourth Gospel. Some extreme trini- 
 tarians may regret the vanishing of the three 
 heavenly witnesses from the text of 1 John 
 5. 7 ; but a phrase which appears in no manu- 
 script earher than the sixteenth century we 
 may be sure is no part of the original text. 
 Many of us rather miss the doxology with 
 which the Lord's prayer closes; but the re- 
 moval of that doxology from the New Testa- 
 ment need do us no harm, for we can use in 
 our worship, so far as we see fit, the Uturgical 
 treasvu-es of aU ages. 
 
 The New Testament has been more 
 changed to our apprehension by the higher 
 criticism, the investigation of the date and 
 the authorship of the respective books. In 
 this respect there is, indeed, a very marked 
 125 
 
THE NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 difference between the Old and the New 
 Testament. Criticism has shown that the 
 traditional opinions in regard to the date 
 and authorship of the books of the Old 
 Testament are mostly erroneous, while in 
 regard to the New Testament a good share 
 of the traditional opinions are exactly or 
 approximately true. This difference we 
 might reasonably have expected. The books 
 of the New Testament, with one or two ex- 
 ceptions, were probably all written within 
 the space of a few decades, and that in an 
 age of comparatively high civilization. 
 Under those conditions we might reason- 
 ably suppose that to a considerable extent 
 tradition would hand down a true story as 
 to the date and authorship of the books. 
 Enough of the New Testament was pro- 
 duced within a few decades after the pubhc 
 ministry and teaching, the death and resur- 
 rection, of Jesus, to afford a material con- 
 firmation to our behef in the historic basis 
 of Christianity. George John Romanes 
 mentions as one of the causes of his loss of 
 faith in Christianity the notion that the date 
 and origin of its sacred books were so im- 
 certain as to deprive them of all evidential 
 126 
 
OF TO-DAY 
 
 value; and he gives as one of the grounds of 
 his return to faith the conviction which he 
 had reached that Paul's Epistles to the 
 Romans, Corinthians, and Galatians are 
 proved beyond reasonable doubt to be gen- 
 uine, and that the Synoptic Gospels were 
 certainly in possession of the churches be- 
 fore the close of the first century. The case 
 of Romanes is typical of the intellectual life 
 of the second half of the nineteenth cen- 
 tury, not only in the fact of loss and re- 
 covery of faith, but in large degree in the 
 reasons of that loss and recovery. If we 
 can accept the four great Epistles of Paul 
 as genuine, and the Synoptic Gospels as 
 somewhat nearly contemporaneous narra- 
 tives of the life and work of Jesus, that is 
 enough to show that our conception of the 
 hfe and character and teaching of Jesus is 
 substantially the same as that of the primi- 
 tive Christian Church. 
 
 While the acceptance of those seven books 
 would give us enough of the New Testament 
 for a basis of Christian faith, I believe that 
 we may reasonably accept considerably 
 more. I am not blind to the serious diffi- 
 culties whidh the hypothesis of the Johan- 
 127 
 
THE NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 nean authorship of the Fourth Gospel en- 
 counters; and yet each time I reexamine 
 the question my mind returns to the belief 
 that the Johannean authorship is, on the 
 whole, more probable than any alternative 
 theory. The resemblance in style of the dis- 
 courses of Jesus reported in that Gospel to 
 the writer's own style as shown in other 
 parts of the Gospel and in the First Epistle, 
 has rightly been attributed to the assimila- 
 tion of the words of Jesus to the author's 
 own habit of thought and expression. Yet I 
 beheve we must recognize an assimilation in 
 the opposite direction. If the Fourth Gos- 
 pel makes Jesus speak like John, it is no 
 less true that, in the half -century in which 
 John had been lovingly brooding over the 
 memory of the Master's words, he had come 
 unconsciously to think and to speak like 
 Jesus. The question of the authorship of 
 the Apocalypse is closely bound up with 
 the question of the date of the book. If we 
 can put it at the time of the Neronian per- 
 secution, it is not difficult to imagine the 
 mind of one author passing in a quarter of 
 a century through such changes as would 
 render possible the production of two books 
 128 
 
OF TO-DAY 
 
 so different, alike in type of thought and 
 in mode of expression, as the Fourth Gos- 
 pel and the Apocalypse. Especially might 
 such a transformation be possible if, within 
 that quarter-century, occurred the destruc- 
 tion of Jerusalem and the consequent eman- 
 cipation of the mind of the church from the 
 bonds of Judaism. It seems inconceivable 
 that the same man could have written both 
 books about the same time and in the same 
 stage of his intellectual and spiritual de- 
 velopment. I think we may reasonably re- 
 gard all the Epistles which commonly bear 
 the name of Paul as genuine, with, of course, 
 the exception of the Epistle to the He- 
 brews, in regard to whose authorship we 
 only know that the author was not Paul. 
 The one book of the New Testament in re- 
 gard to which it is substantially certain that 
 it does not belong to the apostolic age is the 
 so-called Second Epistle of Peter. 
 
 But there are still deeper questions than 
 those relating to the date and authorship of 
 the books. If there is a lower criticism and 
 a higher criticism, there is also, if we may 
 use the expression, a highest criticism. Our 
 views have changed in regard to the general 
 129 
 
THE NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 character of the books of the New Testa- 
 ment, the nature and scope of inspiration, 
 and the degree in which we can predicate 
 authority as inhering in the books. 
 
 Thirty-five years ago the New Testa- 
 ment and the Old ahke were habitually 
 treated by preachers and theologians as a 
 mosaic of proof -texts. I remember, when 
 I was admitted to this Conference, one of 
 the requirements for orders as a local dea- 
 con was that the candidate should be able 
 to state the doctrines of Christianity and to 
 support each doctrine by proof -texts. The 
 Discipline of those days advised the candi- 
 date to prepare for this examination by 
 reading the Bible through in course, and 
 marking the verses which could suitably be 
 quoted in favor of any particular doctrine. 
 Such a procedure, of course, was based upon 
 the assumption that a sentence from Joshua 
 or Esther was just as vahd proof of Chris- 
 tian doctrine as a sentence from the Ser- 
 mon on the Moimt or from the farewell ad- 
 dress of Jesus to his disciples. That non- 
 sense we have happily left behind us. We 
 have learned that the books of the Bible 
 are to be interpreted on literary principles. 
 130 
 
OF TO-DAY 
 
 To understand any book we must more or 
 less fully ensphere ourselves in the mental 
 atmosphere in which the book was produced. 
 We have learned that the writers of the 
 New Testament were not amanuenses. We 
 have learned to recognize the profound in- 
 dividuaUty of some of the leading writers, 
 manifesting itself not only in the literary 
 style, but also in the mode of thought. We 
 have learned that the theology of the New 
 Testament was a gradual development. 
 Not only are there differences in thought 
 as well as in expression between the differ- 
 ent writers, but, in those cases in which with 
 more or less probability we believe that we 
 have writings of the same author at different 
 periods, we find more or less indication of 
 changes in opinion and in habit of thought. 
 The most striking example of this is in the 
 case of John, if it be true, as some still be- 
 heve, that he was the author both of the 
 Apocalypse and of the Fourth Gospel. It 
 is no overstatement of the difference of tone 
 between these two books to say that the 
 Apocalypse is the most Jewish and the 
 Fourth Gospel the least Jewish of all the 
 books of the New Testament. The catas- 
 131 
 
THE NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 trophic ending of earthly things, which is 
 the dominant thought of the Apocalypse, 
 gives place in the Gospel to a progressive 
 spiritual judgment. The vindictive spirit 
 of the Apocalypse gives place to that sweet 
 spirit of love which glorifies every page of 
 the Gospel. Incidentally, it may be noted 
 that, in the interval between the composition 
 of these two books, if they were written by 
 the same author, he learned to write a Greek 
 style which was grammatically correct. In 
 1 Cor. 7. 8 Paul distinctly advises widows 
 not to remarry, while in 1 Timothy 5. 14 he 
 as explicitly advises the younger widows to 
 remarry. Obviously, the beKef in the near- 
 ness of the Parousia, on which much of the 
 advice in the seventh chapter of First Corin- 
 thians was based, Paul no longer held, 
 when in the last years of his life he wrote the 
 Pastoral Epistles. 
 
 We have learned that the inspiration of 
 the New Testament writers was not hke the 
 ecstasy which seized upon the Delphian 
 priestess when she seated herself on her 
 tripod. That seventh chapter of First 
 Corinthians affords a very instructive reve- 
 lation of Paul's own conception of the in- 
 132 
 
OF TO-DAY 
 
 spiration which he claimed. When he makes 
 a distinction between some counsels which 
 he gives, on his own responsibility and others 
 for which he claims the authority of the 
 Lord Jesus, the distinction is not, as has 
 sometimes been imagined, between the 
 things which he said or wrote in a non-in- 
 spirational condition, and other things which 
 he said or wrote in an inspirational condi- 
 tion. The things for which he claims the 
 authority of the Lord Jesus are precisely the 
 things in regard to which we have sayings 
 of Jesus recorded in the Gospels. And when 
 in the fortieth verse of that chapter he says, 
 "I think that I also have the Spirit of God," 
 he does not mean that he thinks he has the 
 corroboration of divine inspiration for his 
 opinions in addition to his own judgment, 
 but, rather, that he, as well as other apostles 
 and religious teachers, has the Spirit of God. 
 Two things are manifest from this chapter 
 in regard to Paul's conception of inspira- 
 tion. Inspiration was not a mysterious ex- 
 perience which seized upon him when he sat 
 down to write or dictate an epistle, but an 
 abiding presence of the Divine Spirit, which 
 guided all his conduct and ennobled his life; 
 133 
 
THE NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 but no inspiration with which he or any 
 other apostle might be endowed, raised its 
 possessor to an equality with the Master. 
 The contrast of less and greater authority in 
 regard to the counsels of the chapter is not 
 the contrast between Paul uninspired and 
 Paul inspired, but between Paul inspired 
 and the Lord Jesus. 
 
 Of course in this change in our general 
 conception of the inspiration of the New 
 Testament we have given up any idea of in- 
 errancy. It is a great rehef not to have to 
 harmonize conflicting statements in the New 
 Testament. If Matthew teUs us that Jesus 
 healed two blind men on leaving Jericho, 
 Mark that he healed one blind man on leav- 
 ing Jericho, and Luke that he healed one 
 blind man on entering Jericho, we no longer 
 feel bound to harmonize the three narratives 
 by the assumption that he healed one bhnd 
 man on entering and two on leaving Jericho. 
 We are perfectly content to say that we do 
 not care whether there was one blind man 
 or two, and whether the healing was done 
 on entering or on leaving Jericho. If the 
 Synoptic Gospels appear to put the Pass- 
 over on Thursday of the Passion Week, and 
 134 
 
OF TO-DAY 
 
 John appears to put it on Friday of that 
 week, we are perfectly at liberty to inquire 
 which arrangement of the chronology is 
 right, and which is wrong; and we do not feel 
 bound to beUeve that both chronological 
 schemes are infalhbly true. We are no 
 longer troubled by the very conspicuous 
 references in Paul's earUer Epistles to his 
 expectation of the Parousia as destined to 
 come in his own Ufetime. We do not feel 
 boimd to maintain the validity of Paul's 
 argument from the singular nimiber of the 
 noun translated "seed" in Gal. 3. 16, but we 
 feel ourselves perfectly at liberty to assent 
 to the suggestion of Saint Jerome that 
 Paul's argument was addressed to the "fool- 
 ish Galatians," and was worthy of the per- 
 sons to whom it was addressed. We are 
 very willing to be relieved from the obhga- 
 tion of following Paul, when he asserts that 
 women are to be in eternal subjection be- 
 cause, according to the Eden story, Adam 
 was first formed, then Eve, and the woman 
 was created for the man. 
 
 But we must recognize clearly that the 
 effect of the abandonment of the notion of 
 inerrancy cannot be limited to historical de- 
 135 
 
THE NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 tails and opinions outside of the realm of 
 theological dogma. We can predicate no 
 inerrancy for the theological opinions of the 
 New Testament writers. 
 
 The kenosis theory of the person of Christ 
 owes its name, and probably in considerable 
 part the conception which the name repre- 
 sents, to Paul's words in Phil. 2. 6, 7 : "Who, 
 existing in the form of God, coimted not 
 the being on an equality with God a thing 
 to be grasped, but emptied (kicEvoiaev) him- 
 self, taking the form of a servant, coming 
 to be in the Ekeness of men." Now, if Paul 
 was inerrant in his views of theological 
 dogma, we must accept as true whatever he 
 meant to teach by that word e/cevwoev, how- 
 ever diflficult it may be for us to enter into 
 his conception, and however difficult it 
 may be to harmonize that conception with 
 other New Testament representations of 
 the nature of Christ, as, for instance, with 
 the "reflection" (anavyaafia) of God's glory 
 and the "impress" (x'^goKT^p) of his substance 
 in Heb. 1. 3. But, if Paul's philosophy of 
 Christianity was only that of a man pos- 
 sessed of lofty spiritual insight, we are at 
 liberty, whatever Paul may have meant to 
 136 
 
OF TO-DAY 
 
 say, to have our own opinion as to the pos- 
 sibility of an omniscient Being divesting 
 himself of omniscience by an act of volition, 
 as is assvmied in the kenosis theory. 
 
 We must come to recognize that a theo- 
 logical science has no more been revealed by 
 inerrant inspiration than a geological or 
 astronomical science. Theology in every 
 age is a human attempt to formulate divine 
 truth. The theologies of Paul and John 
 and other New Testament writers are no ex- 
 ception. 
 
 Obviously, the chiu"ch must be content 
 with less definite creeds. With no inerrant 
 dogmatic theology, there is no place for 
 dogmatism. The truth will remain that 
 "God was in Christ, reconciling the world 
 imto himself," but the mystery of that 
 divine indwelling in Jesus has never been 
 formulated in any inerrant theology. And 
 we must recognize as merely tentative any 
 formulation which we can make to-day. 
 Whittier's hymn, "Our Master," speaks to 
 the heart of this age as the Athanasian Creed 
 fails to speak. 
 
 God's revelation has come, primarily, not 
 through a book, but through life — ^most of 
 137 
 
THE NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 all through the transcendent hfe of Jesus. 
 "God, having of old time spoken unto the 
 fathers in the prophets by divers portions 
 and in divers manners, hath at the end of 
 these days spoken unto us in his Son." The 
 church was living and growing for fifty 
 or sixty years before the greatest book 
 of the New Testament was written, and 
 much longer before the books supposed to 
 be of apostolic authority were gathered into 
 a canon. I suspect that Paul and John 
 would have been astonished to find letters 
 of personal friendship to Philemon and 
 Gains and the elect lady, whoever she may 
 have been, included in the canon of au- 
 thoritative Scripture. Even Paul's great 
 Epistles to the Galatians, Corinthians, and 
 Romans were written as tracts for the times, 
 with no thought of writing a message to the 
 church in distant centuries. Truly, he 
 builded better than he knew, for in those 
 epistles was the inspiration of a Lutheran 
 Reformation and a Wesleyan Revival. 
 
 The revelation of Christianity was in 
 
 Christ himself — ^his life and teaching, his 
 
 miracles, his death and resin-rection, his 
 
 character. No speech that he uttered may 
 
 138 
 
OF TO-DAY 
 
 have been reported with absolute accuracy. 
 As he probably spoke in Aramaic and our 
 record of his words is in Greek, the repre- 
 sentation of his thought which we possess 
 must be at the best imperfect. Legendary 
 elements have mingled undoubtedly in 
 greater or less degree in the traditions pre- 
 served to us in the Gospels. And not all 
 the opinions about Christ which were held 
 and taught by the apostles and their com- 
 panions may be true. Yet we can have a 
 reasonable confidence that the New Testa- 
 ment presents to us in its main outline a 
 veracious picture of the life and character 
 and teaching of Jesus. 
 
 When all extravagant claims based on 
 traditional doctrines of inspiration are 
 abandoned, is it not true that we know Jesus 
 to-day better than his contemporaries could 
 know him? Each Gospel and each Epistle 
 throws upon the theme some rays of colored 
 light. To-day, more fully than at any 
 former period, we can blend those colored 
 lights into the white light of truth. Ethical 
 and religious conceptions which were too 
 novel for the contemporaries of Jesus to 
 understand, are intelligible in that intellec- 
 139 
 
THE NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 tual atmosphere which he has created. 
 Nineteen centuries of Christendom form an 
 illuminating commentary on the life and 
 words of Jesus. 
 
 In the New Testament, then, we see and 
 hear Jesus. We know his sinless life. We 
 see him as he went about doing good. We 
 hear the oft-repeated motto in which he ex- 
 pressed the spirit of his own life, that life is 
 found only in losing hfe. In the supreme 
 glory of self-sacrifice he stands a unique 
 figure before the world. We hear from his 
 lips the expression of infinite hate of sin and 
 infinite love of the sinner, in tones in which 
 the thunder of divine wrath blends in sweet 
 accord with the wail of infinite pity. And 
 we behold his life re-incarnating itself in his 
 disciples. We behold the divine life con- 
 quering Jewish bigotry and heathen im- 
 morality, lifting men above the vices of 
 paganism and of slavery, working in them 
 the sacred hunger for righteousness, found- 
 ing in individual souls the kingdom of 
 heaven, till the individual Christian life 
 multiplies itself into the composite life of a 
 Christian civiUzation. 
 
 I have said I know not what will be the 
 140 
 
OF TO-DAY 
 
 ultimate New Testament. I do not know 
 what will be the last word on the question 
 whether John 1, 18 should read, "only-be- 
 gotten Son," or "only-begotten God." I 
 know not what will be the final conclusion 
 in regard to the authorship of Hebrews or 
 Second Peter, or of the Johannean writings 
 and some of the minor epistles commonly 
 attributed to Paul ; I know not what will be 
 the final form of opinion in regard to the 
 sources and development of the Synoptic 
 Gospels. I know not into what shape the 
 reverent thought of future ages will cast the 
 old doctrines of incarnation and atonement. 
 But of this I feel sure, that to all the ages 
 the New Testament will be the canvas on 
 which the world will behold the lineaments 
 of that face of Jesus, 
 
 "Most human and yet most divine, 
 The flower of man and God!" 
 
 And, so long as that face beams upon 
 humanity, the words to Philip will find per- 
 petual fulfillment, "He that hath seen me 
 hath seen the Father." 
 
 141 
 
VI 
 
 THE SABBATH AND THE LORD'S 
 DAY 
 
yi 
 
 THE SABBATH AND THE LORD'S 
 DAY 
 
 "In it thou shalt not do any work." — Exodus 
 20. 10. 
 
 "I was in the Spirit on the Lord's Day." — Reve- 
 lation 1. 10. 
 
 Of these two texts, one stands almost at 
 the beginning, the other very near the end, 
 in the traditional arrangement of the canon 
 of the Old and the New Testament. The 
 two texts are yet more remote in spirit than 
 in their places in the canon of Scriptm-e. 
 One speaks of an outward, the other of an 
 inward life. One is essentially Jewish, the 
 other is characteristically Christian. One 
 speaks of a shadow that was destined to 
 vanish away, the other tells us of the age- 
 long heritage of the Christian Church. 
 
 We have no clear evidence in Scripture 
 of the observance of a Sabbath before the 
 time of Moses. Very likely the observance 
 145 
 
THE SABBATH AND 
 
 of the Sabbath among the ancestors of the 
 Jewish people may go back to an earlier 
 date. There are indications that the Baby- 
 lonians had a Sabbath, and the possibility 
 is suggested that Hebrews and Babylonians 
 inherited the institution from a common 
 source. Human divisions of time are, in 
 general, founded upon the apparent move- 
 ments of the sun and the moon. For many 
 purposes it is convenient to recognize a 
 period of time longer than the solar day and 
 shorter than the lunar month. Nothing is so 
 natural or convenient for the fulfiUment of 
 that need as the division of the lunar month 
 into halves and quarters. The recognition 
 of a week as a division of time shows itself 
 very widely among the different races of 
 men. 
 
 It is probable that the Sabbath as set 
 forth in the Old Testament goes back at least 
 to the time of Moses. The Sabbath precept, 
 as given in Exod. 34. 21, is supposed to 
 belong to the earliest of the Pentateuchal 
 docimients, the Jahvistic narrative. The 
 Decalogue, as given in Exod. 20, is referred 
 to the Elohistic narrative, a century later. 
 It is, however, beheved that the earliest form 
 146 
 
THE LORD'S DAY 
 
 of the Decalogue was short and simple, the 
 reasons given for several of the precepts hav- 
 ing heen added by later editors. In the 
 Deuteronomic form of the Decalogue there 
 is no reference to the notion of a divine rest 
 at the close of the creative week, such as 
 appears in the form given in Exodus, but 
 the Sabbath rest is regarded as a celebration 
 of the deliverance wrought by God for the 
 Israelites from the bondage which they suf- 
 fered in Egypt. The noble psalm of crea- 
 tion which is preserved to us in the first chap- 
 ter of Genesis divides the creative work into 
 six stages followed by a period of rest. That 
 poetic arrangement of the creative work was 
 vmdoubtedly suggested by the existence of 
 the institution of the Sabbath prior to the 
 date of the psalm. In Exod. 31. 17 the 
 divine rest appears in a form more grossly 
 anthropomorphic, "He rested and was re- 
 freshed." The idea of God needing rest 
 hke a tired workman and finding refresh- 
 ment in it contrasts starthngly with the 
 majestic utterance of Jesus, "My Father 
 worketh hitherto." 
 
 The Jewish Sabbath was indeed a day of 
 restraint, and yet it was a day of joy. The 
 147 
 
THE SABBATH AND 
 
 characteristic idea of the day was freedom 
 from grinding toil, and consequently oppor- 
 tunity for social enjoyment. Jesus accepted 
 an invitation to a feast in a Pharisee's house 
 on the Sabbath ; and the idea of a social feast 
 was ahke in accord with the principles of the 
 Pharisees and with those of Jesus himself. 
 Even the fussiest and most ridiculous of 
 Pharisaic prohibitions in regard to the Sab- 
 bath, such as the exact prescription how 
 great a distance one might walk, and what 
 articles might be carried, on the Sabbath, 
 had for their real significance the require- 
 ment that nothing in the nature of servile 
 toil should enter into the employments of 
 the day. In contrast with the memory of 
 Egyptian bondage, and in contrast with the 
 severe toil which was then and always has 
 been the lot of the poor on working days, 
 the Sabbath was to be for every Israelite a 
 day of emancipation from the burden of 
 work. 
 
 While Jesus treated with fit contempt the 
 hedge of fussy traditions which Pharisaism 
 had planted around the Sabbath precept, as 
 around all other precepts of the law, it seems 
 to be the fact that Jesus observed the Sab- 
 148 
 
THE LORD'S DAY 
 
 bath in his own conduct according to its 
 true spirit. In the Codex Bezse, a manu- 
 script of the New Testament dating prob- 
 ably from the fifth or sixth century, there 
 is a strange interpolation in the sixth chap- 
 ter of Luke: "On the same day, seeing some 
 one working on the Sabbath, He said to 
 him, 'Man, if thou knowest what thou doest 
 thou art blessed, but if thou knowest not 
 what thou doest thou art cursed and a trans- 
 gressor of the law.' " The words certainly 
 have no claim to be considered an authentic 
 part of the Gospel of Luke. They may or 
 may not be founded upon the memory of 
 some actual utterance of Jesus, in which he 
 intimated that the form of Sabbath observ- 
 ance would pass away when the ancient law 
 should find in him its fulfillment. 
 
 After the ascension Jewish Christians re- 
 tained for a time the observance of the Sab- 
 bath, as they retained other Jewish observ- 
 ances. To some extent Gentile Christians 
 imitated their Jewish brethren in this as in 
 some other Jewish customs. The observ- 
 ance of the Sabbath on the part of Gentile 
 Christians is severely rebuked by Paul in 
 Gal. 4. 10: "Ye observe days, and months, 
 149 
 
THE SABBATH AND 
 
 and seasons, and years." In the preceding 
 verse he reproaches them for turning back 
 "to the weak and beggarly rudiments, 
 whereunto ye desire to be in bondage." In 
 Col. 2. 16, he says, "Let no man therefore 
 judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect 
 of a feast day or a new moon or a Sabbath 
 day: which are a shadow of the things to 
 come." The words clearly mean that the 
 Gentile Christian should observe the Sab- 
 bath no more than the whole program of 
 Jewish feasts and fasts. In writing to the 
 chiu-ch in Rome, which was composed in part 
 of Gentile and in part of Jewish Christians, 
 Paul says, "One man esteemeth one day 
 above another, another esteemeth every 
 day alike." He apparently expected that 
 the Jewish Christians would continue for 
 the time being to observe the Sabbath, but 
 that the Gentile Christians would not adopt 
 the observance. 
 
 Meanwhile, a new and distinctively Chris- 
 tian festival was growing up in the Christian 
 Church. We have no definite information 
 in regard to the origin of the new custom, 
 but the indications of its observance begin 
 to appear early in the apostolic age. It was 
 150 
 
THE LORD'S DAY 
 
 on the first day of the week that Paul spoke 
 to the Christians at Troas, assembled on the 
 eve of his departure for Jerusalem. He 
 exhorts the Corinthian Christians to make 
 contributions periodically on the first day of 
 the week to relieve the poverty of the church 
 at Jerusalem. We can hardly fail to recog- 
 nize the indication that the first day of the 
 week was already established as a time of 
 periodical meetings of the church. In the 
 second century we have abundant evidence 
 of the habitual observance of the first day 
 of the week as the time of periodical as- 
 semblies of the Christians for worship. Ap- 
 parently, the name, "the Lord's Day," 
 which is the designation used in the text that 
 we have taken from Revelation, becomes the 
 prevalent name. Justin Martyr refers to 
 the observance of that day by the Christians, 
 and associates it with the story of the crea- 
 tion of light on the first day according to 
 the first chapter of Genesis, and with the 
 resm-rection of Jesus; he makes no refer- 
 ence to the divine rest on the seventh day. 
 True to the spirit of the early church is the 
 expression of the significance of the Lord's 
 Day in one of the noblest of our hymns: 
 151 
 
THE SABBATH AND 
 
 "On thee, at the creation, 
 
 The light first had its birth; 
 On thee, for our salvation, 
 
 Christ rose from depths of earth; 
 On thee, our Lord, victorious, 
 
 The Spirit sent from heaven ; 
 And thus on thee, most glorious, 
 
 A triple light was given." 
 
 In Pliny's famous letter to Trajan, asking 
 for instructions how to deal with the Chris- 
 tians, he refers to their habit of meeting on 
 a stated day for worship. 
 
 We have no record of any action of the 
 apostles collectively or of any individual 
 apostle enjoining upon the brethren the ob- 
 servance of the Lord's Day. It seems to 
 have been a spontaneous movement of the 
 church thus to celebrate the day on which 
 the Lord Jesus by his own resurrection 
 "abolished death and brought hfe and im- 
 mortahty to hght." 
 
 The Lord's Day, then, in its original con- 
 ception, was essentially a day of worship. 
 It was the day in which the Christians pro- 
 posed to celebrate that great fact of the 
 resmrection upon which the chm-ch was 
 founded, and to draw perpetual inspiration 
 from that ever blessed memory. In the 
 152 
 
THE LORD'S DAY 
 
 early years the Lord's Day could not be a 
 day of rest. Many of the Christians were 
 slaves, and they had to work when they were 
 bidden by their masters. Living as they did 
 in Jewish or pagan communities, it was im- 
 possible for them so far to control their life 
 in relation to other people as to keep the day 
 free from the ordinary duties of life. When 
 Christianity became the dominant religion 
 of the Roman empire, the Christians showed 
 a disposition to have ordinary forms of duty 
 suspended so far as was practicable, in order 
 that they might have leisure for the worship 
 to which they wished to devote the day. One 
 of the first Sunday laws, promulgated in the 
 reign of Constantine, provided that the 
 courts of justice should be closed on the first 
 day of the week excepting for two items of 
 business; one was the manumission of the 
 slave from the power of his master, the other 
 was the emancipation of the son who had 
 become of age from the authority of his 
 father, and his investiture with the rights of 
 manhood. The exceptions are as significant 
 as the prohibition. For all other business 
 the courts must be closed, but no day was 
 too sacred to celebrate the investiture of a 
 153 
 
THE SABBATH AND 
 
 man with the rights and dignities of man- 
 hood. 
 
 The institution of the Lord's Day, then, 
 is no mere change of date of the Sabbath. 
 The whole spirit of the institution is abso- 
 lutely distinct. If the Sabbath was pri- 
 marily a day of rest, the Lord's Day is pri- 
 marily a day of worship. If the Sabbath 
 reminded the Israehte of his deliverance 
 from the bondage of Egypt, the Lord's Day 
 is to the Christian the perpetual memorial 
 of Ufe and immortality brought to light 
 through the resurrection of Jesus. For the 
 Christian, then, the obhgation of a Sabbath 
 in the spirit of the Old Testament is done 
 away forever. The Christian is no more 
 called upon to observe the Sabbath than to 
 practice sacrifice or circumcision. The 
 phrase, "Christian Sabbath," which has 
 often been applied to the Lord's Day in 
 recent times, originated in a misconception, 
 and is unknown in Christian literatiu-e be- 
 fore the twelfth centviry. 
 
 To the early Christians the Lord's Day 
 
 was the one great characteristic festival. 
 
 They met on that day for worship, and, so 
 
 far as was practicable, they kept the day 
 
 164 
 
THE LORD'S DAY 
 
 clear from ordinary occupations, that their 
 private and social worship, their grateful 
 commemoration of that day on which hope 
 was born, might be free from distraction. 
 In later Romanism the conception of the 
 Lord's Day underwent some changes. In 
 the multiplication of holy days which char- 
 acterized the elaborate ritual of later 
 Romanism, the Lord's Day lost somewhat of 
 its unique significance. Moreover, in the 
 general Judaizing tendency which developed 
 in later Romanism, it is not strange that the 
 Lord's Day came to be confounded with the 
 Jewish Sabbath. While there was an effort 
 to make the observance of the Lord's Day 
 in some respects more strict by importing 
 into it Jewish prohibitions, the general tend- 
 ency, in a church whose growing f ormaUty 
 was in large degree smothering the old fire 
 of Christian spirit, was to make the day a 
 holiday rather than a holy day. 
 
 In the beginning of the Reformation there 
 was naturally a tendency to restore the 
 Lord's Day to something hke its original 
 primacy as the one sacred day of Chris- 
 tianity. And the early reformers — Calvin 
 and Knox, no less than Luther — ^were true 
 165 
 
THE SABBATH AND 
 
 to the spirit of the early church in sharply 
 distinguishing the Lord's Day from the Sab- 
 bath, and recognizing the Sabbath as a Jew- 
 ish institution which had passed away. The 
 Lutheran reformation, however, failed to 
 redeem the church from the vicious practice 
 which had grown up under Romanism, of 
 making the Lord's Day a holiday rather 
 than a holy day. The characteristics which 
 we have been accustomed to associate with 
 the phrase, "Continental Svmday," are much 
 the same even to this day in countries pre- 
 dominantly Lutheran as in those which are 
 predominantly Catholic. 
 
 In contrast with Lutheranism, English 
 Puritanism made a most vigorous protest 
 against degrading the Lord's Day to the 
 character of a hohday. Unhappily, this 
 movement of the English Puritans, so com- 
 mendable in spirit, was vitiated by being 
 based on a false principle. The Lord's Day, 
 in Puritan thought, was identical with the 
 Sabbath, and was most commonly spoken of 
 by that name. The Westminster Confes- 
 sion declares that God "hath particularly ap- 
 pointed one day in seven for a Sabbath, to 
 be kept holy unto him; which, from the be- 
 156 
 
THE LORD'S DAY 
 
 ginning of the world to the Resurrection of 
 Christ, was the last day of the week; and 
 from the Resurrection of Christ was changed 
 into the first day of the week, which in 
 Scriptvu'e is called the Lord's Day, and is 
 to be continued to the end of the world as 
 the Christian Sabbath." It is noteworthy 
 that no other of the great historic creeds of 
 Christendom enunciates such a doctrine. 
 The prohibition of work was interpreted by 
 the Piu"itans as strictly as it had been by 
 the Jews. But while the Jewish Sabbath, 
 strict in prohibition of work, allowed freely 
 social enjoyment, the Puritan Sabbath of 
 England and Scotland and New England 
 forbade not only work but also all social 
 enjoyment. The Westminster Confession 
 declares that those who keep the Sabbath, 
 "do not only observe an holy rest all the day 
 from their own works, words, and thoughts 
 about their worldly employments and recrea- 
 tions; but are also taken up the whole time 
 in public and private exercises of his wor- 
 ship, and in the duties of necessity and 
 mercy." The Puritan Sabbath gained ac- 
 cordingly an austerity which was as unlike 
 the Jewish Sabbath as it was unlike the 
 157 
 
THE SABBATH AND 
 
 Lord's Day of the primitive Christians or 
 of the Lutheran Reformation. The Puri- 
 tan Sabbath was, in fact, one of the worst 
 expressions of the morbid solemnity of Pvu-i- 
 tan character. 
 
 For better or for worse, the Puritan Sab- 
 bath is dead. For that we may be thank- 
 ful. It was false in principle, and it so 
 utterly violated human nature as to make 
 inevitable a disastrous reaction. The Puri- 
 tan Sabbath is gone; what is to take its 
 place? Shall it be the Continental Sunday, 
 with churches empty and theaters and beer 
 gardens full, a day with rather less of work 
 than other days and with much more of up- 
 roarious amusement? 
 
 It is not easy to decide exactly what we 
 ought to do. The appUcation of ethical 
 principles in practice must always depend 
 largely upon questions of degree, questions 
 of less or more. All hmnan conduct must 
 be more or less of a compromise. But the 
 first step to right practice is a true principle. 
 What we wish to maintain is, not the Puri- 
 tan Sabbath nor the Jewish Sabbath, but 
 the Lord's Day; and we would maintain 
 that day in the spirit of those early Chris- 
 158 
 
THE LORD'S DAY 
 
 tians who rejoiced in the new life which had 
 come to them from the Lord's resurrection. 
 There is, indeed, a moral element beneath 
 the Jewish form of the fourth command- 
 ment. The moral element of the fourth 
 commandment is the principle of the neces- 
 sity of special times for worship, private and 
 social, which, but for specially consecrated 
 times, would be crowded out by the pressure 
 of work and amusement. And, while there 
 is a moral value in the suspension of ordinary 
 work to give opportunity for worship, I do 
 not fail to appreciate the hygienic value of 
 a day of rest or change of employment. 
 But, while there is an undeniable moral and 
 hygienic value in the suspension of all ordi- 
 nary work on Sunday, so far as practicable, 
 it is perfectly obvious that a formal and rigid 
 prohibition of all work on that day must be 
 recognized as obsolete. Is it a sin on Sim- 
 day to engage in physical or mental labor, 
 to buy and sell, to study, to travel? No! 
 But it is a sin on Sunday to do anything un- 
 necessary which will tend to forfeit for our- 
 selves or to impair for others the blessing 
 which the Lord's Day, rightly used, may 
 bring to the Christian world to-day as in 
 159 
 
THE SABBATH AND 
 
 all the Christian centuries. When we ask 
 if it is wrong to do this, that, or the other 
 particular thing on Sunday, we are asking a 
 question whose spirit is essentially Pharisaic 
 rather than Christian. The right question 
 for us to ask is. What conduct on our part 
 will make the most of the day in spiritual 
 blessing to ourselves and to others? 
 
 Starting from this principle, of course, 
 we cannot forbid all work. If we forbid all 
 works but those of necessity and mercy, we 
 must give the words "necessity" and "mercy" 
 a great deal broader meaning than they 
 had to the Puritan. All work which the 
 general welfare and convenience of society 
 requires, is right in Christian ethics, and 
 should be lawful in a Christian community. 
 The more comphcated organization of so- 
 ciety, and the more minute division of labor, 
 characteristic of our modern life, tend in 
 some ways to diminish the amoimt of Sim- 
 day labor which is necessary. But, vmhap- 
 pily, those conditions concentrate the ne- 
 cessity for Sunday labor in the case of 
 particular classes. In Puritan times the 
 Christian farmer hitched up his family horse 
 and drove his family to church. Few families 
 160 
 
THE LORD'S DAY 
 
 to-day possess a family horse. The horses of 
 the community are largely kept in livery 
 stables ; and to a large extent the horse as a 
 means of travel is superseded by the forces of 
 steam and electricity. The means of rapid 
 travel and communication bring us into in- 
 timate relation with people whose homes are 
 distant from our own. These changes illus- 
 trate the general principle that the necessity 
 of a large number of people doing a small 
 amoimt of work on Sunday, has in great 
 degree given place to the necessity of a small 
 number of people doing a large amount of 
 work on Sunday. Of course railroad trains 
 must run, mails must be carried, and the tele- 
 graph and telephone must afford oppor- 
 tunity for communication, on the Lord's 
 Day. The question whether pubhc libraries 
 and museimis should be open at certain 
 hours on Sunday, is not to be answered by 
 any prohibition of the Decalogue, but must 
 be answered by a conscientious endeavor to 
 estimate the effect of such opening upon the 
 general life of the commimity. 
 
 Of course it would be folly to seek to make 
 men religious by legislation. But a pre- 
 dominantly Christian community has the 
 161 
 
THE SABBATH AND 
 
 right to maintain legislation which will pro- 
 tect public worship from unnecessary inter- 
 ruption and interference. The day which 
 the dominant religious sentiment of the com- 
 munity holds sacred we have the right to 
 protect from unnecessary secularization. It 
 is reasonable, therefore, that public offices 
 should be closed. Shops and places of busi- 
 ness may reasonably be required to be closed 
 on Sunday, with the exception of places for 
 the sale of medicines, food, and various other 
 articles which it is necessary or convenient 
 to have accessible every day. Of course 
 amusements of pvu-ely amatem- character 
 should not be forbidden, but should be sub- 
 ject to such regulation as regards time and 
 place as to avoid any serious interference 
 with the quiet and order of pubhc worship. 
 The danger of transforming our Sunday 
 into a wide open Continental Sunday comes 
 from the pecuniary interests which can make 
 a gain by the complete secularization of the 
 day. I think we are justified in maintain- 
 ing a prohibition of public amusements of 
 every kind conducted for the purpose of 
 making money, whether by the collection of 
 an admission fee or by some other device. 
 162 
 
THE LORD'S DAY 
 
 The prohibition of commercialized amuse- 
 ments and the judicious regulation of 
 amateur recreations is probably the best 
 policy for the present.^ In most of the States 
 of this part of the country there are old Sun- 
 day laws on the statute books which have 
 come down with httle change from the days 
 of the Piu-itans. These laws are in general 
 more stringent than is justified by sound 
 principle or wise policy. But it is a difficult 
 problem to modify them without running 
 the risk of excessive license. The interests 
 that clamor for a wide open Sunday are not 
 in general those that are most beneficial to 
 the community. 
 
 As I have already remarked, an inevitable 
 consequence of the growing complexity of 
 society and the increasing division of labor 
 is that a large amount of Sunday work on 
 the part of certain classes of the conununity 
 is necessary. The conscientious employer 
 of labor of any of those kinds that must be 
 done on Simday will surely feel bound to 
 
 ' The laws which have been recently passed in New York 
 and Connecticut, and the similar legislation which is at present 
 advocated in other states, opening the door to commercialized 
 ainusements, seem to me unnecessary and unwise. Such legis- 
 lation, I fear, will prove to be a long step in the direction of 
 the Continental Sunday. 
 
 163 
 
THE SABBATH AND 
 
 arrange the program of work in such wise 
 that every employee will be free for some 
 considerable part of the Sunday or free on 
 some Sundays. 
 
 A question which for most of us is more 
 practical than the question of Sunday legis- 
 lation or the question of guarding the labor- 
 ing classes from the complete loss of the 
 privileges of Sunday, is the question of the 
 proper use of the day by Christian men 
 and women whose time is in a considerable 
 degree at their own disposal. What are we 
 to do with the Sunday if we have the good 
 fortune to be so situated that we can do 
 in general what we please? 
 
 Of course we shall go to church. The 
 Lord's Day was the day of social worship 
 from the time of its origin. It was the neces- 
 sity of a time consecrated to public worship 
 that developed the Lord's Day into an in- 
 stitution. Social worship is now as always 
 the characteristic feature of the day. A 
 half-century ago there was doubtless among 
 the more earnest members of the churches 
 an excessive amount of going to church. 
 There can be little doubt that the pendulum 
 has swung too far in the opposite direction. 
 164 
 
THE LORD'S DAY 
 
 Even church members in general take too 
 little time for attendance upon public wor- 
 ship. In all the ages of Christianity the 
 pubhc preaching of the word has been one 
 of the most important means of grace; and 
 the value of the sermon is not, as most peo- 
 ple in our time seem to think, in inverse 
 ratio to its length. It is worth while to take 
 time for public presentation, exposition, and 
 defense of the great truths of Christianity. 
 But we do not go to church simply to hear 
 a sermon. There is inspiration in prayer 
 and hymn. There is immense utility in the 
 cultivation of Christian fellowship. 
 
 We shall study the Bible in our homes and 
 in Sunday schools and other assembhes of 
 that sort. The lack of knowledge and ap- 
 preciation of the Bible is one of the weak- 
 nesses of the church to-day. Every Chris- 
 tian is bound to be in greater or less degree 
 a student of the Bible. I do not think, 
 however, that we shall make our read- 
 ing on Sunday exclusively religious in the 
 narrower and more technical sense of that 
 term. We shall read good literature which 
 is morally inspiring. We shall not spend 
 the Sunday hours over the yellow journals 
 165 
 
THE SABBATH AND 
 
 and the sporting columns of the Sunday 
 newspapers. The Christian student in 
 school or college will not take the Sunday 
 to learn the lessons which he ought to have 
 learned on Satiu:day. He wiU find an im- 
 mense benefit, not only in a strictly reli- 
 gious point of view but also in the mainte- 
 nance of mental freshness and physical 
 health, in taking the opportunity on Sunday 
 for reading which is considerably different 
 from that which engages his attention on 
 the other days of the week. In general, we 
 shall not make the Sunday a waste-basket, 
 into which we can throw all trivial odds and 
 ends of work which we have neglected dur- 
 ing the week. 
 
 The Sunday will be to us a home day. 
 Families will be able to be together and to 
 get acquainted with each other on Sunday 
 in a degree which is impossible in the rush 
 and turmoil of the business of the week. If 
 we are absent from home and kindred, one 
 of the fit employments of the day wiU be the 
 writing of letters to the home friends. The 
 cultivation of those domestic affections which 
 make a large part of the blessedness of hu- 
 man Uf e may well be one of the characteris- 
 166 
 
THE LORD'S DAY 
 
 tic employments of the day. We shall take 
 some time to visit the sick and those who are 
 shut in, and minister to them somewhat of 
 sympathy and comfort. 
 
 To some extent the Sunday will be for us 
 a day of recreation. We shall choose recrea- 
 tions of a quiet and unobtrusive sort. We 
 shall get out of doors, walking in the open 
 fields if we live in the country, walking in 
 parks and similar places if we are compelled 
 to live in the city, taking into our souls the 
 healing ministry of nature. But we shall 
 avoid those recreations which are obtrusive, 
 and those whose practice on our part would 
 tend to encourage others to make Sunday 
 merely a day of amusement. There is noth- 
 ing sinful per se in moving from place to 
 place on Simday in any kind of vehicle or 
 with any means of propulsion; but a bicycle 
 scorching along the highway with the cos- 
 tume of the wearer reduced to the lowest 
 terms consistent with the requirements of 
 decency, or an automobile rushing along at a 
 speed of sixty miles an hour and biuying 
 unhappy pedestrians beneath its clouds of 
 dust, is not suggestive of the holy calm and 
 peacefulness which befit the Lord's Day. I 
 167 
 
THE SABBATH AND 
 
 am disposed to be very charitable in regard 
 to the amusements which are used on Sunday 
 by those working people who are closely con- 
 fined all the week. For the ostentatious 
 amusements of the rich who can take leisure 
 whenever they choose, I have far less of 
 toleration. The demands of the managers 
 of commercialized amusements, which 
 threaten the complete secularization of the 
 Sunday, derive much of their plausibility 
 from the costly and conspicuous amusements 
 of the rich. 
 
 Of course we can lay down no hard and 
 fast regulations for the proper use of Sun- 
 day. There must be charity for wide differ- 
 ence of opinion and practice. Only in all 
 our thinking and all our acting let us hold 
 fast to the true principle. The purpose of 
 the day is to gain for ourselves and to help 
 others to gain all the inspiration that we can 
 from the blessed memory of life and immor- 
 tahty brought to light by Christ Jesus. Let 
 us make the most of the day for those holy 
 purposes. Business and other daily cares 
 will be kept, so far as may be, out of our 
 thoughts, not because those things are sin- 
 ful, but because we have no time for them. 
 168 
 
THE LORD'S DAY 
 
 We are too busy with the employments 
 which specially befit the day. 
 
 I have said that the Sabbath was a shadow 
 which has passed away, while the Lord's 
 Day abides. And yet, if we take a long 
 look into the future, the Lord's Day itself 
 becomes a shadow which wiU pass away. 
 The perfect life needs no set time of wor- 
 ship, for all activity is instinct with the 
 spirit of worship. John saw no temple in 
 the New Jerusalem. There is no need of 
 sacred places when all places are sacred, and 
 the soul is conscious of the divine presence 
 everywhere. There is no need of holy times 
 when aU time is holy. The church and the 
 Lord's Day will serve their purpose in our 
 earthly hfe, if they help to fit us for that 
 heavenly hfe in which the church and the 
 Lord's Day will no more be needed. 
 
 169 
 
VII 
 METHODISM IN NEW ENGLAND 
 
VII 
 METHODISM IN NEW ENGLAND^ 
 
 Thirty years ago the edifice in which we 
 meet to-day was erected. One hundred 
 years ago this church was organized. One 
 hundred and twenty-five years ago the Mid- 
 dlefield Circuit was organized, including ap- 
 pointments for preaching in Middletown 
 and other towns in the vicinity. One hun- 
 dred and fifty years ago the work of Meth- 
 odism in the northern colonies of England 
 in America had its beginning. I have been 
 asked to deliver a historical address ap- 
 propriate to this composite celebration. 
 What shall be my theme? 
 
 When the invitation came to me, my 
 thoughts turned first to this local church. 
 Fifty-five years ago I joined this church by 
 certificate from my home church, when I 
 entered college; and for all that time except- 
 ing three years I have been connected with 
 this church and more or less active in its 
 
 * Address at the Centennial Celebration of the First Meth- 
 odist Episcopal Church of Middletown, Connecticut, 191S. 
 
 173 
 
METHODISM IN NEW ENGLAND 
 
 work. My license to preach was signed by 
 Heman Bangs as presiding elder, who had 
 been pastor of this church in 1827. I have 
 been personally acquainted more or less in- 
 timately with every pastor that this church 
 has had since 1849. Amid the throng of 
 personal reminiscences which this anniver- 
 sary suggests I thought of speaking of this 
 local church and of the men and women that 
 I have known and loved. Altogether apart 
 from my personal feelings and experiences, 
 this local church is one whose history is full 
 of interest. It is one of the historic churches 
 of Methodism. Among those who have been 
 its pastors were four college professors and 
 three college presidents. One of its pastors 
 was the leading man on the committee that 
 prepared the Methodist hymnbook of 1849, 
 which was the first hymnal of the church 
 that possessed in some degree the character 
 of catholicity, instead of being mostly a col- 
 lection of the hymns of the Wesley brothers. 
 One of its pastors was a member of the 
 committee which prepared the much better 
 hymnal of 1878, the last hymnal adopted 
 by the chiu-ch before the one which we now 
 use. Two of the lay members of this church 
 174 
 
METHODISM IN NEW ENGLAND 
 
 bore a share in the preparation of the latest 
 and best of our hymnals. One of its pas- 
 tors was editor of The Christian Advocate; 
 one was, and one now is, editor of the Meth- 
 odist Review; one was, and one now is, a 
 missionary secretary; and one is now a 
 bishop. A goodly nmnber of the most emi- 
 nent men of Methodism have preached either 
 in the present church or in the one which 
 preceded it. In the former church were 
 often heard the voices of those two illus- 
 trious men, presidents of Wesleyan Uni- 
 versity in the early days, Willbur Fisk and 
 Stephen Olin. 
 
 However interesting might be the mem- 
 ories of this local church, on second thought 
 it seemed to me that the time of this service 
 could be used most profitably in bringing 
 before you the general theme of the work 
 of Methodism in New England. 
 
 The Wesleyan movement in England was 
 purely evangelistic. The last thing that 
 Wesley dreamed of was the foundation of 
 a new sect. He lived and died a presbyter 
 of the Church of England, and his mission 
 was chiefly to men who recognized some sort 
 of allegiance to that church. He sought to 
 175 
 
METHODISM IN NEW ENGLAND 
 
 awaken to a genuine Christian life men who 
 were abeady nominal adherents of the same 
 church to which he himself belonged. Com- 
 paratively little emphasis was placed on 
 dogma. The Wesleys were Arminian in 
 their theology: Whitefield was a Calvinist. 
 But the Wesleys and Whitefield were alike 
 orthodox ministers of the Anglican Church. 
 In that communion Arminianism and Cal- 
 vinism have always existed side by side, and 
 have been reckoned equally orthodox. 
 
 In the southern colonies of America the 
 role of Methodism was in the beginning very 
 much the same as in England. Before the 
 Revolution the Anglican Chiu-ch was the 
 dominant ecclesiastical organization in those 
 southern colonies. There, as in England, 
 Methodist preachers sought no change in the 
 ecclesiastical relation of the people to whom 
 they ministered. Anglicans themselves, 
 they appealed to Anglicans for a deeper 
 and more earnest religious life. 
 
 When Methodism entered New England, 
 the situation was entirely different. Then, 
 as always, the spirit of Methodism was evan- 
 gelistic; but the Christmas Conference in 
 1884 had brought into being a new religious 
 176 
 
METHODISM IN NEW ENGLAND 
 
 denomination, the Methodist Episcopal 
 Church. Methodism in America no longer 
 represented a revival in the Anglican 
 Church; Methodism in America had be- 
 come a distinct sect. When Jesse Lee in- 
 vaded New England he came into a country 
 where there was no lack of churches and 
 pastors, but those chiu-ches and pastors were 
 not AngUcan but Congregational. Congre- 
 gationalism was the estabhshed church of 
 New England. When people were awak- 
 ened and converted by the influence of 
 Methodist evangelists, the event generally 
 involved a change in their ecclesiastical re- 
 lations. The convert became generally a 
 proselyte. When, in 1791, Bishop Asbury 
 made his first visit to New England after 
 a tour through the comparatively sparsely 
 settled districts of the Carolinas and 
 Georgia, he wrote in his diary: 
 
 "We are now in Connecticut, and never out of 
 sight of a house; and sometimes we have a view 
 of many churches and steeples, built very neatly 
 of wood; either for use, ornament, piety, policy, 
 or interest — or it may be some of all these. I 
 do feel as if there had been religion in this coun- 
 try once ; and I apprehend there is a little in form 
 177 
 
METHODISM IN NEW ENGLAND 
 
 and theory left. There may have been a praying 
 ministry and people here; but I fear they are 
 now spiritually dead." 
 
 There was undoubtedly in New England a 
 great deal more of genuine religion than 
 Asbvu-y supposed. The churches in every 
 village were not only evidences of religion 
 in the past, but were the shrines of a reli- 
 gion which still survived. But while Asbury 
 was doubtless unjust to the New England 
 churches, there was altogether too much in 
 the condition of those churches which gave 
 coimtenance to his severe judgment. There 
 was in the Congregational churches of New 
 England much of the formalism which is 
 very apt to exist in an established church 
 of whatever name or creed. The great re- 
 vival of 1740 had long since spent its force. 
 Ministers and people ahke too often main- 
 tained the form of religious worship with 
 very Uttle of genuine spiritual life. The 
 stem and repellent creed of Calvinism had 
 provoked inevitable revolt, not only in the 
 mild form which had given rise to the Uni- 
 tarian and Universalist churches, but in the 
 more radical form of avowed rejection of 
 Christianity. Our country owes indeed very 
 178 
 
METHODISM IN NEW ENGLAND 
 
 much to the help of the French army in 
 the Revolutionary War; but the presence 
 of the French in America was in one re- 
 spect an evil influence. The free-thinking 
 oflScers who aboimded in the French army 
 had made infidelity respectable and popu- 
 lar. The estabhshed church of New Eng- 
 land had largely lost its influence on the 
 yoimg mind of the covmtry. In 1795 it is 
 said that only eleven students in Yale Col- 
 lege acknowledged themselves as Christians, 
 and four years later the mmiber was re- 
 duced to four or five. There was need of 
 a new preaching with evangeUstic power and 
 without the encumbrance of a Calvinistic 
 creed. I heard a friend and a brother 
 in the ministry declare in a Methodist as- 
 sembly only a few years ago, that he be- 
 lieved there was no village so small or al- 
 ready occupied by so many churches that 
 there was no room for a Methodist church. 
 I was astonished to hear an utterance that 
 seemed so anachronistic. But however un- 
 reasonable such a proposition may seem in 
 our time, it was the view which was held by 
 the Methodist invaders a century and a 
 quarter ago. They were doubtless some- 
 179 
 
METHODISM IN NEW ENGLAND 
 
 what uncharitable, but their belief was prob- 
 ably not very far from the truth. 
 
 Methodism in New England was, then, 
 from the beginning, a denominational move- 
 ment and a movement on definite theological 
 lines. In the Holy Club of Oxford there 
 were both Arminians and Calvinists, but 
 Methodism in America was always Armin- 
 ian. Calvinistic Methodism never made any 
 appreciable impression upon the rehgious 
 life of America. In New England the Meth- 
 odist invasion was the beginning of a con- 
 flict between Arminian Methodism and Cal- 
 vinistic CongregationaUsm. The contro- 
 versy which was once so intensely acrimon- 
 ious on both sides we can contemplate now 
 very calmly. We recognize to-day a truth in 
 Calvinism and a truth in Arminianism, 
 though we may frankly confess ourselves 
 unable to coordinate those two truths. We 
 are no nearer a settlement of the great 
 problem than Milton's fallen angels who 
 
 ". . . Apart sat on a hill retired, 
 In thoughts more elevate, and reasoned high 
 Of Providence, Foreknowledge, Will, and Fate — 
 Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute — 
 And found no end, in wandering mazes lost." 
 180 
 
METHODISM IN NEW ENGLAND 
 
 We all believe in the freedom of the will. 
 Our mental attitude is that expressed in the 
 saying of Doctor Samuel Johnson — "I 
 know I am free, and that is the end of it." 
 But we do not believe that God suddenly 
 found himself disappointed when Adam 
 ate the forbidden fruit, and considered what 
 scheme he could adopt to save as much as 
 possible out of the wreck of the moral imi- 
 verse. I think we are bound to recognize 
 to-day that the logical victory in the con- 
 troversy was with the Calvinists, but that 
 their opponents had the practical truth. 
 No theological system was ever so logical 
 as extreme supralapsarian Calvinism, but it 
 was the most abhorrent system of theology 
 ever invented. It was abominably logical. 
 I think the Calvinists had the advantage not 
 only in logic, but also in exegesis. Paul 
 the apostle inherited a good deal of his the- 
 ology from Saul the Pharisee, and I think 
 there is no reasonable doubt that the Epistle 
 to the Romans does teach the doctrine of 
 foreordination. But Arminianism is a good 
 working theology. The unsolvable prob- 
 lems are shoved into a dark corner where 
 ordinary common-sense people cannot see 
 181 
 
METHODISM IN NEW ENGLAND 
 
 them. To those Methodist preachers of a 
 hundred years ago, Arminianism appeared 
 to be a complete solution of the relations be- 
 tween the divine and the hvmian will. We 
 who know that the problems involved are 
 essentially insoluble, transcending the power 
 of human thought, accept the Arminian 
 creed as a pragmatic conception which 
 serves well as a basis for practical Christian 
 life. 
 
 New England Calvinism a hundred and 
 fifty years ago was not exactly the same as 
 the Calvinism of Calvin. Calvin, I suppose, 
 felt as sure of his own election as he was of 
 the reprobation of Servetus ; but New Eng- 
 land Calvinists held that the assm-ance of 
 faith was the privilege only of a few emi- 
 nently gifted saints. The attitude of New 
 England Calvinists in regard to personal 
 religious experience was not imfairly repre- 
 sented in the version of their creed which 
 passed current among their Methodist op- 
 ponents: "If you seek religion, you carmot 
 find it. If you get it, you cannot know 
 it. If you have it, you can never lose it. 
 If you lose it, you never had it." Such a 
 creed leads all too easUy to practical indif- 
 182 
 
METHODISM IN NEW ENGLAND 
 
 ference and formality. I yield to no one in 
 admiration for the splendid saints of New 
 England Calvinism — for the men who were 
 willing to be damned to eternal misery if 
 their damnation might be for the glory of 
 God, as brave soldiers are wiUing to fill 
 with their dead bodies the moat across which 
 their comrades must march to victory. But 
 comparatively few people are of suflBciently 
 heroic mold to find satisfaction in a reli- 
 gious life under those conditions. A gospel 
 that appealed far more powerfully to the 
 average man was that of the Methodists, 
 with their doggerel rhymes, 
 
 "But this I do find— 
 We two are so joined, 
 
 He'll not stay in heaven 
 And leave me behind." 
 
 Certainly the Arminian style of religious 
 experience, if it has less of sublime austerity, 
 appeals more strongly to the common sense 
 of the average man. 
 
 The Calvinistic controversy is now mat- 
 ter of history. The Congregational and 
 Methodist Churches of New England, work- 
 ing side by side, have experienced in large 
 degree a mutual conversion. There is prac- 
 183 
 
METHODISM IN NEW ENGLAND 
 
 tically now no difference in their theology. 
 Members, and even ministers, are trans- 
 ferred back and forth between those two de- 
 nominations without making or professing 
 any change whatever in their theological be- 
 liefs. There is practically no diflference in 
 the conduct of the ordinary church services. 
 A stranger who strayed into one of the 
 churches for a Sunday service would usu- 
 ally hear nothing whatever which would 
 show him whether it was a Methodist or a 
 Congregational church. In practice the 
 principal difference is that in the Methodist 
 church pastors are annually appointed by 
 the bishop, while the Congregationahst 
 churches make the arrangement for them- 
 selves. Our arrangement has the great 
 practical advantage that every church has 
 a pastor and every minister has a church. 
 There is no long interregnmn between suc- 
 cessive pastoral terms. In many cases, how- 
 ever, even this difference is only formal, the 
 bishop simply ratifying an arrangement 
 which has been already made. In Canada 
 a movement is in progress, and seems likely 
 at no distant date to be successful, to 
 unite the Methodist and Congregationahst 
 184 
 
METHODISM IN NEW ENGLAND 
 
 Churches in one organization. It would re- 
 quire very little change to unite the Meth- 
 odist and Congregationalist Churches in 
 New England. 
 
 The hundred years have brought in many 
 respects great changes to New England 
 Methodism. We no longer worship in 
 barns, or in obtrusively ugly churches dif- 
 ferentiated from barns chiefly by the rudi- 
 ment of a steeple. Many of our churches 
 are large and costly ; some of them are beau- 
 tiful. Our services have come to be more 
 elegantly arranged. With our present truly 
 catholic hymnal, we sing the best hynms of 
 the church universal, the hymns of all ages, 
 of all lands, and of all creeds. We sing those 
 hymns to tunes of more artistic character. 
 Our ministers, instead of being, like most of 
 the early Methodist preachers, taken from 
 the plow or the shoemaker's bench, are edu- 
 cated in college and theological school, and 
 in many cases have had the cosmopolitan cul- 
 ture of travel and study iff foreign lands. 
 Their preaching is far more scholarly than 
 that of the early days ; our spirit as a church 
 is more tolerant; our theology is more ra- 
 tional. 
 
 185 
 
METHODISM IN NEW ENGLAND 
 
 But what has become of the evangelism 
 which was the inspiration and the justifica- 
 tion of early Methodism? Jesse Lee and 
 others of the early Methodist preachers in 
 New England looked upon New England 
 as missionary ground. Every sermon was 
 evangelistic; every sermon was a definite 
 call to repentance from sin, and to the be- 
 ginning of a Christian life. While aU the 
 services were evangelistic, seasons of special 
 revival were frequent, and in those revivals 
 large niunbers of converts were added to 
 the churches. In the history of this church 
 from its beginning in 1816 to 1857, inclusive, 
 the Annual Minutes of the Conference 
 record eight times a net increase of fifty or 
 more in its membership. Only once since 
 1857 has a net increase of fifty members in 
 one year been recorded. In the section of the 
 Discipline specifying the tests by which the 
 fitness of a candidate for the ministry should 
 be judged, appears in the earher editions 
 the question, "Are any truly convinced of 
 sin and converted to God by their preach- 
 ing?" Not until 1880 was the clause in- 
 serted, "And are beUevers edified?" Of 
 course the change in the Discipline followed 
 186 
 
METHODISM IN NEW ENGLAND 
 
 a change in practice which had been in 
 progress for a long time. The church had 
 gradually come to recognize the edification 
 of believers as a legitimate and important 
 aim of the work of preaching. At present 
 there is plenty of edification in the preach- 
 ing; but sinners are not called to repentance, 
 and there are no sinners in the congregation 
 to be called. Our prayer meetings have \m- 
 dergone a corresponding change. Some of 
 us, whose scanty hair shows the frosts of 
 three-score winters or more, remember a 
 time when strangers used to come into a 
 Methodist prayer meeting out of curiosity 
 to see what those queer Methodists were 
 doing; and sometimes 
 
 ". . . Fools who came to scoff remained to 
 
 pray 
 
 »> 
 
 There was usually a series of "testimonies" 
 of personal experience, echoing the words 
 of the blind man in Jerusalem, "One thing 
 I know, that, whereas I was bhnd, now I 
 see." The meeting frequently, and in some 
 places almost uniformly, closed with an in- 
 vitation to the unconverted to rise for 
 prayers. In our prayer meetings now we 
 187 
 
METHODISM IN NEW ENGLAND 
 
 have an edifying exposition of a passage of 
 Scripture. No invitation to the unconverted 
 is given, for none of the unconverted are ex- 
 pected to be present. Our churches gen- 
 erally report at the end of the year a small 
 net addition to their membership, but the 
 addition to our church membership comes 
 almost exclusively from our Sunday schools. 
 Our own daughters, when they reach the 
 age of fifteen or thereabout, generally join 
 the church, and a much smaller proportion 
 of our sons do the same. The churches gain 
 very few additions excepting from the in- 
 crease of the families of their members or 
 adherents. A church which depends simply 
 on the natural increase of its families for 
 accessions to its membership is not rapidly 
 conquering the world. 
 
 Is there no need of evangelism to-day? 
 We do not, hke our Methodist fathers a him- 
 dred years ago, think of the membership of 
 other churches as a mission field from which 
 we are to secure converts. We recognize 
 to-day that the other churches are just as 
 good as we are. But what are we doing for 
 the unchurched multitudes of our popula- 
 tion? A hundred years ago the population 
 188 
 
METHODISM IN NEW ENGLAND 
 
 of New England was pretty nearly homo- 
 geneous. Not all the population, indeed, 
 could claim to be Uneal descendants of the 
 remarkably prolific company that came over 
 in the Mayflower; but even those who did 
 not belong to that order of hereditary 
 nobility were for the most part people of 
 the same race, the same language, the same 
 traditions. In our population to-day are 
 hordes of immigrants from all countries of 
 Evu-ope, who have lost their faith in the 
 national churches of their homelands, have 
 acquired no interest in any churches in this 
 country, and are living hves of practical 
 heathenism. With the change in the char- 
 acter of the population, and, in some degree, 
 as the cause of that change, has come a 
 change in the form of industrial organiza- 
 tion. Manufacture is no longer carried on 
 for the most part in little shops where the 
 proprietor and a few hired men worked to- 
 gether, all belonging substantially to the 
 same class in society. Now we have immense 
 impersonal aggregations of capital, and 
 huge armies of working-men and working- 
 women who have no social relations with 
 their employers. These people, to a very 
 189 
 
METHODISM IN NEW ENGLAND 
 
 large extent, look upon the church as be- 
 longing to the plutocracy which they regard 
 as their oppressor. They feel, therefore, a 
 hostility to the church which varies in in- 
 tensity and mahgnity from cynical distrust 
 to the brutal ferocity of the I. W. W. Our 
 churches are surrounded by immense masses 
 of a practically heathen population. What 
 are we doing for those masses? By proxy 
 we are doing some missionary work in 
 China. What missionary work are we doing 
 in Middletown? 
 
 We must have more of the true democracy 
 of Christianity. We miist recognize oiu: 
 brothers and sisters in Italians and Poles 
 and Himgarians, in Jews and Chinamen. 
 We must find some means of changing in- 
 dustrial strife to industrial cooperation. Oiu: 
 economists must find a more democratic — 
 a more Christian — ^industrial organization. 
 But that problem I will not now discuss. 
 
 We must try to get these heathen aroimd 
 us into our churches. When Bishop Tho- 
 bm-n returned to this coimtry after an 
 absence of a number of years in India, he 
 said: "I am impressed by these two things 
 in oiu" congregations — ^the absence of very 
 190 
 
METHODISM IN NEW ENGLAND 
 
 poor people, and the absence of bad people 
 except sinners of higher social position. 
 You must be willing to have a revival that 
 will bring the bad people to the church." 
 
 One obvious barrier which tends to keep 
 these people out of our churches is the sys- 
 tem of raising money by selling or renting 
 pews. In the mutual conversion of Meth- 
 odism and Congregationalism in New Eng- 
 land, Methodism has learned from its older 
 sister a great many good things and some 
 bad things, and the worst of the bad things 
 which it has learned from Congregationalism 
 is the private ownership of peWs in churches. 
 In the Methodist Chvu-ch the system first 
 became common in New England, where 
 Methodism first became Congregational- 
 ized. The Methodist Discipline of 1820 
 gave the following direction in regard to 
 the building of churches : 
 
 "Let all our churches be built plain and decent, 
 and with free seats ; but not more expensive than 
 is absolutely unavoidable; otherwise the necessity 
 of raising money will make rich men necessary to 
 us. But if so, we must be dependent on them, yea, 
 and governed by them. And then farewell to 
 Methodist discipline, if not doctrine too." 
 191 
 
METHODISM IN NEW ENGLAND 
 
 It is noteworthy that the phrase, "with free 
 seats," was first inserted in 1820. The rest 
 of the paragraph had been in the Discipline 
 from the beginning of the existence of the 
 Methodist Episcopal Church (except that 
 in the earliest edition the buildings were 
 called "chapels"). The specific direction 
 that the seats should be free was added in 
 1820, not because the sentiment in favor of 
 free seats first became dominant in the 
 councils of the church at that time, but, 
 rather, because the leaders of the church 
 recognized the evil of the departure from 
 the earlier practice which was already in 
 progress. In the barns and barnlike 
 churches of the older days the seats were 
 free of course. The further progress of the 
 new system of church finance was shown by 
 the fact that in 1852 the General Conference 
 felt itself bound to qualify the direction that 
 the seats should be free by the insertion of 
 the phrase, "wherever practicable." In the 
 second edifice which was occupied by this 
 church, built in 1828, not only were pews 
 rented, but many of the pews were sold, so 
 as to become permanently a part of the real 
 estate of their occupants. In this building 
 192 
 
METHODISM IN NEW ENGLAND 
 
 in which we worship to-day, never, thank 
 God, have the pews been sold or even for- 
 mally rented; though our system of assign- 
 ing seats to people who make subscriptions 
 for the support of the church is, after all, 
 only a disguised form of pew rental. In an 
 important sense a pew belongs to the man to 
 whom it is assigned, whether he formally 
 pays rent or not. I have very great sym- 
 pathy with the pride of a working-man who 
 wUl not obtrude himself as a perhaps im- 
 welcome guest into a seat which belongs to 
 somebody else, and who wiU not take a seat 
 which no one has cared to preempt, and in 
 which his presence would be a confession that 
 he could not or would not pay for a seat. 
 Never can we get the imchurched people to 
 come into our chin-ches until every vestige 
 of private property in seats is banished from 
 what we call the house of God, and the 
 seats are as free as they were in the barns 
 in which oiu* fathers worshiped. Never can 
 we get the vmchurched people to come 
 into our churches until we are willing 
 to have sitting beside us the poorest, the 
 dirtiest, the wickedest man or woman in 
 the town, 
 
 193 
 
METHODISM IN NEW ENGLAND 
 
 Another thing that we must do to make 
 our services more attractive to people who 
 are not church members is to make those 
 services more varied. In general, the Sun- 
 day evening service is simply a dilution of 
 the morning service. The sermon is usually 
 a little shorter and a good deal weaker. We 
 must make our services more varied. If 
 people will not come to hear a long talk 
 with a httle music, it is worth while on the 
 Simday evenings to make the experiment 
 of a short talk with a good deal of music. 
 We have already got away from the respect- 
 able uniformity of our services sufficiently 
 to introduce occasionally pictures projected 
 by the lantern. I think we must be up to 
 the times and bring in moving pictures. If 
 we cannot get the people to come to ovu" 
 churches to hear the gospel, we must, like 
 Wesley in the early days of Methodism, 
 carry the gospel to the people where they 
 are. So far as we can get permission to 
 do so, we must preach the gospel in the 
 parks, at the seaside resorts, in the shops. 
 
 But there are things which lie deeper 
 than mere external methods and which are 
 more important. If we are going to reach 
 194 
 
METHODISM IN NEW ENGLAND 
 
 the unchurched masses, we must have a 
 Christhke sympathy with simiers, with the 
 lost. We must have a new evangehsm — 
 new not simply in the sense of being a re- 
 vival of evangelism after an interval of 
 time, but in the sense of being different in 
 some degree in spirit and principle from the 
 old evangehsm. Christ said of himself that 
 he "came to seek and to save that which was 
 lost." He came not to save those who were 
 in danger of being lost at some time in the 
 future, but those who were lost. John 
 Wesley invited to join his societies people 
 who desired to "flee from the wrath to come," 
 and a great deal of the evangelism of the 
 past has been the expression of a desire to 
 save people from hell. The spirit of the 
 new evangelism must be a desire not to save 
 people from a heU about which we know 
 very little, but to save people from sin 
 which is appallingly real. 
 
 For this new evangelism we need a 
 deeper, more intense conviction of sin. The 
 early converts to Methodism had a profound 
 conviction of sin, and, when they found 
 peace in beheving, they felt, like the woman 
 who bathed the feet of Jesus with her tears, 
 195 
 
METHODISM IN NEW ENGLAND 
 
 that they were much forgiven, and they 
 loved much. They could sing, with genuine 
 feehng, 
 
 "Love I much? I've much forgiven ; 
 I'm a miracle of grace." 
 
 In the revivals of a century ago people who 
 were awakened to a sense of sin often had 
 an experience of almost despairing grief for 
 days or weeks before they found peace, won- 
 dering whether sinners as bad as they felt 
 that they were could be forgiven, imagining 
 that they had committed the unpardonable 
 sin and passed beyond the reach of hope. 
 We read of these agonies to-day with a kind 
 of contemptuous pity. There is no Slough 
 of Despond in the path of the modern pil- 
 grim, and no castle of Giant Despair near 
 his route. Alas! in the flat monotony of 
 our lives there are no Delectable Mountains 
 and no Land of Beulah. 
 
 Our Methodist fathers a century ago were 
 inclined to distrust the Christian character 
 of any man who could not tell of a violent 
 emotional experience of conviction and con- 
 version — a blackness of darkness, and a light 
 above the brightness of the sun. They had 
 196 
 
METHODISM IN NEW ENGLAND 
 
 no sympathy with the conception of a child 
 growing into a Christian life without any 
 definite epoch of conversion. The children 
 of the church were expected to wander into 
 sin and to be reclaimed in some revival 
 through the traditional emotional paroxysm. 
 Not until 1856 did the Discipline recognize 
 the baptized children of the church as pro- 
 bationary members. The pendulum has 
 swimg so far in the opposite direction that 
 there is a tendency now to distrust the Chris- 
 tian character of any man who has not main- 
 tained perfectly respectable conduct through 
 all his life. 
 
 Most of us in this generation joined the 
 church in childhood. Thank God that we 
 did. We cannot be too thankful for the 
 providence of God that saved us from the 
 curse of years of outbreaking immoraUty 
 or years of arrogant and aggressive irreli- 
 gion. But, in the nature of the case, those 
 who commence a Christian life in childhood 
 can have at the time no deep conviction of 
 sin. They have never committed any out- 
 ward acts which are very bad, and their 
 moral sense is too immature to appreciate 
 the profoimd spirituality of the ethical teach- 
 197 
 
METHODISM IN NEW ENGLAND 
 
 ings of Jesus. For those who grow in moral 
 thoughtfubiess as they grow in years, whose 
 consciences become more tender and sensi- 
 tive, who day by day and year by year gain 
 a deeper appreciation of the awful antith- 
 esis between sin and righteousness, a reli- 
 gious experience begiiming in the innocence 
 and thoughtlessness of chUdhood may ripen 
 into the noblest type of Christian character 
 which the world can know. But the weak- 
 ness of the church lies in the fact that a large 
 share of its membership consists of people 
 who joined the church in childhood simply to 
 please their parents, or because church mem- 
 bership was considered respectable; whose 
 physical growth has been accompanied 
 by httle of intellectual and less of moral 
 growth; who have remained in the church 
 simply because they have committed no 
 flagrant deed of immorality for which they 
 could be expelled; but who have never ac- 
 quired any sense of the heinousness of sin, 
 and have never felt any aspiration for any 
 goodness above the standard of social re- 
 spectabihty. 
 
 We must feel that intense conviction of 
 the exceeding sinfulness of sin which finds 
 198 
 
METHODISM IN NEW ENGLAND 
 
 noble expression in those lines from Whit- 
 tier's "Eternal Goodness": 
 
 "I bow my forehead to the dust, 
 
 I veil my eyes for shame, 
 And urge, in trembling self-distrust, 
 
 A prayer without a claim. 
 I see the wrong that round me lies, 
 
 I feel the guilt within ; 
 I hear, with groan and travail-cries, 
 
 The world confess its sin." 
 
 With such intense conviction of sin and 
 righteousness we shall feel, not alone our 
 own sin, but the sin of others. Like the 
 Master, we shall bear the sins of the world. 
 In that spirit we shall find means to reach 
 the masses aroimd us. Whatever obstacles 
 may lie in the path, they will give way to 
 the force of intense conviction. We shall 
 think of church membership, not as a policy 
 of insurance protecting us against the chance 
 of future loss, but, rather, as an enhstment 
 for service. The church has often been 
 thought of as an ark wherein a favored few 
 are floating over the waves of a deluge in 
 which the mass of himaanity is hopelessly en- 
 gulfed. If the church is to be symbolized 
 by any kind of floating craft, it must be by 
 199 
 
METHODISM IN NEW ENGLAND 
 
 a mighty battleship, in . which there is no 
 room for passengers and plenty of work for 
 all the crew. Let us greet the new centiny 
 in the spirit of a church that is truly militant. 
 
 200 
 
VIII 
 THE CHRISTIAN ERA 
 
VIII 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN ERA 
 
 No birthday has ever been celebrated as 
 has been the reputed birthday of Jesus of 
 Nazareth. The supposed year of his birth 
 is made by all civilized nations the starting 
 point of their chronology. The date of 
 every document is a memorial of his birth, 
 whether it be the letter of love or friendship, 
 the academic diploma, the memorandimi 
 which records a bargain between individuals, 
 or the solemn treaty concluded between na- 
 tions. What means the exceptional impor- 
 tance which the civilized world attaches to 
 that one man? One thing at least is certain: 
 the nineteen centuries which have passed 
 away since the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, 
 are marked as a period of history standing 
 by itseK, isolated broadly from everything 
 that had gone before. These centuries have 
 been marked by the development of a com- 
 monwealth of nations, and of a type of social 
 and public life, radically distinct from any- 
 203 
 
THE CHRISTIAN ERA 
 
 thing developed in the civilization of an- 
 tiquity. This commonwealth of nations we 
 call Christendom. This new type of social 
 and pubhc life we call Christian civilization. 
 Whatever views anyone may take in regard 
 to the character and work of Jesus himself, 
 or in regard to the supernatural claims of 
 Christianity as a rehgion, Christendom and 
 Christian civilization are unquestionable 
 facts of history, and facts of history whose 
 importance grows upon the mind the more 
 they are studied. 
 
 But every student of history knows well 
 that men's names sometimes come into a 
 sort of accidental association with events in 
 which they had comparatively little causal 
 agency. Is it so with the relations between 
 Christendom and Christian civilization, and 
 Jesus Christ? Is it a mere accident that this 
 commonwealth of nations, and this new type 
 of social and pubhc life, have developed 
 themselves in the centuries that have elapsed 
 since the birth of Jesus? We call George 
 Washington the father of our country; and 
 yet it is quite among the possibihties that 
 ovu* coimtry might have been very much the 
 same thing as it is now had George Wash- 
 204 
 
THE CHRISTIAN ERA 
 
 ington never lived. Greene was perhaps a 
 greater general than Washington; Hamil- 
 ton perhaps a greater statesman than Wash- 
 ington. Great and good as Washington 
 was, and influential as he was for good in 
 the history of our country, he was only one 
 of many influences which conspired to make 
 our coimtry what it has been; and it is pos- 
 sible that the history of our country might 
 not have been very different had that one 
 great and good influence been subtracted. 
 Is it so with the connection between Christ 
 and Christendom? Is Christ Jesus only one 
 of a multitude of influences that have de- 
 veloped the modern type of civilization, and 
 would it have been about the same without 
 that one influence? 
 
 This is a reasonable question for our con- 
 sideration. That we may gain some light 
 upon it, let us take a hasty glance at the con- 
 dition of the world at the time of the birth 
 of Christ. Let us consider what elements 
 there were in the constitution of society at 
 that time which were capable of developing 
 into that new and higher civilization which 
 has characterized these modern centiiries. 
 When we glance at the world at the time of 
 205 
 
THE CHRISTIAN ERA 
 
 Christ, our attention is at once arrested by 
 those three great cities whose names are the 
 symbols of all that is greatest and best in 
 the traditions of ancient history — all that is 
 most important in the never-to-be-forgotten 
 legacy which the past has left to the pres- 
 ent and to the future. We tiu-n instinc- 
 tively to Rome, Athens, and Jerusalem. 
 What was there in each of these — ^what was 
 there in all of these combined — ^that had in 
 it the seeds of the new and higher civiliza- 
 tion? 
 
 We turn first to Rome. It was in many 
 respects a grand epoch in the history of that 
 great city, and of the empire over which that 
 city ruled. The chaos of factions had been 
 subdued by the might of one strong hand. 
 The iron doors of Janus were closed. Peace 
 reigned from the Euphrates to the Pillars 
 of Hercules — peace and order and law. The 
 Eternal City was just undergoing its meta- 
 morphosis from brick to marble. Litera- 
 ture, which had been introduced from 
 Greece, and which had been nursed as a 
 tender exotic through the stormy times of 
 war, had at last become thoroughly natvwal- 
 ized, and was bursting into briUiant bloom. 
 206 
 
THE CHRISTIAN ERA 
 
 Surely, there was much of hope for the 
 world. 
 
 But look at the other side of the picture. 
 It was an age of unbelief. The stately cere- 
 monies of the old political religion of Rome 
 were still pimctihously performed, but per- 
 formed by men who had lost faith in the 
 rehgion whose rites they celebrated. The 
 mind of the age had drifted into atheism, or 
 had been carried into captivity by all sorts 
 of foreign superstitions. It was the time 
 when, according to the sneer of Gibbon, the 
 same man was a priest, an atheist, and a 
 god. It was a time of utter hypocrisy. It 
 was a time of shameless vice. The legend 
 of Lucretia, with its glorification of womanly 
 purity, belonged to a remote and well-nigh 
 forgotten past. At this time the Roman 
 matrons counted the years, not by the annual 
 succession of consuls, but by the succession 
 of husbands whom they had forsaken. 
 Divorce was so easy that marriage was al- 
 most abolished. Those verses of the first 
 chapter of the Epistle to the Romans which 
 are usually omitted when that chapter is 
 read in social or public worship, represent, as 
 every student of classic literature knows, 
 207 
 
THE CHRISTIAN ERA 
 
 the commonplace facts of Roman life. The 
 nation wallowed in filth indescribable. And, 
 if the legend of Lucretia belonged to a well- 
 nigh forgotten age, to that same remote past 
 belonged the story of Cincinnatus, with its 
 glorification of honest labor. The system of 
 slavery had perverted the industrial life of 
 society. All work was done by slaves, and 
 business had fallen into that partial paralysis 
 which slavery brings. The imjust steward 
 of our Saviour's parable could not dig, and 
 to beg he was ashamed. The mass of the 
 Roman people were ashamed to dig, but to 
 beg they were not ashamed ; and vast multi- 
 tudes were supported by various forms of 
 public and private mendicancy, and lived in 
 idleness and uselessness and in the practice 
 of every namable and nameless vice. The 
 patriotism of the little republic of the Tiber 
 had been a pretty savage sort of thing at 
 its best. It is far more than a fact of Latin 
 lexicography that the same word meant a 
 stranger and an enemy. It reveals a dark 
 side of the character of the Roman people. 
 The conquests by which the little repubhc 
 had grown into a world-wide empire, were 
 pretty savage conquests. The faith which 
 208 
 
THE CHRISTIAN ERA 
 
 the Romans had kept with other nations was 
 Uttle, if at all, better than the Punic faith of 
 which they complained in their enemies. 
 Now that the little republic had expanded 
 into a world-wide empire, patriotism had 
 grown rather thin in stretching over so wide 
 a territory. But, if patriotism had decUned, 
 there had been no decline in the savagery 
 with which the ancient patriotism had been 
 associated. With that world-wide empire 
 Hiere had come no recognition of universal 
 brotherhood. True, indeed, a Roman 
 audience might applaud when they heard on 
 the boards of the theater, "I am a man, and 
 nothing himian can be alien to me"; but 
 how far the Roman populace appreciated 
 that lofty sentiment was well shown by the 
 frantic eagerness with which they thronged 
 to gaze upon the perilous sports of the 
 circus and the brutal combats and massacres 
 of the amphitheater. It was an age of tm- 
 behef and hypocrisy, saturated in vice, 
 steeped in cruelty. 
 
 From Rome we turn to Athens, the center 
 
 and soul of Greek mythology — Athens, the 
 
 teacher of the beautiful to all future ages 
 
 — ^Athens, where the statues of the gods, 
 
 209 
 
THE CHRISTIAN ERA 
 
 carved with almost superhuman genius from 
 whitest marble, so thronged every street 
 that it was easier to find a god than a man. 
 What hope for the future was there at 
 Athens ? Alas I the fair humanities of Greek 
 religion had become the corrupter of man- 
 kind. The imagination of the Greek poets 
 had given to primitive nature myths a form 
 more intensely anthropomorphic than they 
 had elsewhere assumed. The gods of the 
 popular mythology were not vague symbols 
 of cosmic forces, but men and women of like 
 passions with the people who had once been 
 their worshipers. And in an age of unbelief 
 reverence had given place to ridicule. It 
 was about that time, according to the strange 
 story related by Plutarch, that a sailor, be- 
 calmed among the Ionian Islands, heard a 
 mysterious voice commanding him to pro- 
 claim, when he arrived at Palodes, that "Pan 
 is dead." Whatever you may think of the 
 queer story, it is very certain that Pan was 
 dead — very dead; and not only Pan, but all 
 his fellow divinities, great and little, from 
 the high council of Olympus, down to the 
 nymphs of forest and mountain, of river and 
 ocean. Nothing was left but a mass of im- 
 210 
 
THE CHRISTIAN ERA 
 
 moral legends, whose power for evil was 
 made only greater by the transcendent 
 beauty of the language in which the foul 
 stories were told. 
 
 But, if Greek rehgion had little in it that 
 was hopeful, what shall we say of Greek 
 philosophy? It had given to the world the 
 glorious example of the hfe and death of 
 Socrates — ^the inspiration of his faith in a 
 hfe immortal. It had given to the world 
 those writings of Plato, which approach, 
 perhaps, more nearly than anything else of 
 classic hterature, the purity and spirituaUty 
 of Christianity itself. But even the highest 
 forms of Greek philosophy were unfitted to 
 accomphsh for the masses of mankind any 
 purification of thought and elevation of hfe. 
 In the teachings of Plato, the idea of God 
 never altogether disengaged itself from 
 pantheism, and virtue was regarded as the 
 prerogative of an intellectual aristocracy. 
 The most popular form of Greek philosophy 
 was that of Epicurus, and the disciples of 
 Epicm^s had left far behind them the pure 
 and gentle hfe of their master. Recognizing 
 pleasure as the only good, they had plunged 
 with utter abandon into every form of self- 
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THE CHRISTIAN ERA 
 
 indulgence and vice. Their creed was that 
 which was expressed by the elders whom 
 Ezekiel saw in his vision, working all abomi- 
 nations in the chambers of their imagery — 
 "The Lord seeth us not, the Lord hath for- 
 saken the earth" ; and their hves were worthy 
 of their creed. What little virtue there was 
 in the world at that time was chiefly to be 
 found among the Stoics, and there is some- 
 thing grand in the stern resolution with 
 which some of them stood out against the 
 evil of their times. But it was a dark and 
 hopeless struggle — a struggle brightened 
 by no faith in a better future — a struggle 
 doomed to inevitable defeat with no escape 
 but suicide. Far and wide was unbelief, and 
 the hopelessness that unbelief brings. The 
 question of Pilate, "What is truth?" might 
 have been heard on every side, and in every 
 variety of tone from flippant indifference to 
 heart-broken despair; and truth there was 
 none — ^truth upon which the human soul 
 could lean and find strength for life's strug- 
 gles — ^truth which could brighten earthly 
 darkness with heavenly light. 
 
 Turn we then to Jerusalem. There at 
 least must be hope. There dwelt a people 
 212 
 
THE CHRISTIAN ERA 
 
 whose leader and lawgiver in the far-off 
 past was believed to have stood face to face 
 with Jehovah — a people who had learned 
 somehow those truths, never altogether for- 
 gotten, of the unity and the hohness of God. 
 They had indeed lapsed again and again into 
 idolatry, and at last been carried into cap- 
 tivity ; but a remnant had returned — a rem- 
 nant, the flower of the nation. They had 
 returned to the Land of Promise, never 
 again to doubt the grand doctrine of the 
 unity of God which was the corner-stone of 
 their religion. Their religious enthusiasm 
 had been fired by the glowing prophecies of 
 the yovmger Isaiah. They had rebuilt the 
 temple and reestablished its time-hallowed 
 ritual, under the inspiration of the tri- 
 umphant faith of Haggai and Zechariah. 
 Their zeal for the ancient law had been 
 strengthened by the stern puritanism of 
 Ezra and Nehemiah. And now, on the sum- 
 mit of Moriah, sanctified by holiest memo- 
 ries of the past, had arisen the new temple 
 of Herod, shining hke a colossal gem in its 
 snowy marble and dazzling gold. There, at 
 least, there must be hope. 
 
 But one who entered the precincts of that 
 213 
 
THE CHRISTIAN ERA 
 
 temple would have found there the same rot- 
 tenness of unbelief and hypocrisy that he 
 would have found in Rome and Athens. 
 There, too, were Sadducean priests perfunc- 
 torily performing the ritual that had come 
 down from their fathers, with no faith in the 
 rehgious meaning of the rites which they 
 celebrated, no faith in the grand prophetic 
 word of immortality. But, if there was no 
 hope in that clique of Sadducees who held 
 the high-priesthood and the high places of 
 society, was there not some hope in the sect 
 of the Pharisees? There, indeed, was rever- 
 ence for the ancient law, but reverence in 
 which there was more of superstition than 
 of rehgion. They had planted hedge after 
 hedge around the law, until its ethical mean- 
 ing was lost in a jungle of petty details. 
 They tithed mint and anise and cummin. 
 They devoured widows' houses, and thanked 
 God that they were not as other men. 
 
 True, the picture of those times was not 
 altogether black, for everywhere there were 
 gleams of brightness through the gloom. 
 Amid aU the foul corruption of Roman so- 
 ciety there were hearts and homes and loves 
 that were sweet and pure. Amid all the 
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THE CHRISTIAN ERA 
 
 unbelief and vice of Epicureanism, there 
 were men worthy of a better day, who stood 
 out in grand, though hopeless, conflict with 
 the evil of the times. Amid all the worldli- 
 ness of the Sadducees and the formality of 
 the Pharisees, there were Simeons waiting 
 for the consolation of Israel; there were 
 Nathanaels who were Israelites indeed in 
 whom there was no guile. There were treas- 
 ures which had come down from the past, 
 and which the world could never forget. 
 There were truths revealed, and truths dis- 
 covered. There were the Pentateuch, and 
 the prophecies of Isaiah, the Iliad, and the 
 Dialogues of Plato. Much there was which 
 might be made to form the material of a 
 new and higher civilization; but there was 
 need of something to vitalize — ^to render 
 growthf ul — ^the elements of truth and beauty 
 and goodness which were already in the 
 world. As we gaze on the civilization of that 
 age, we seem to stand with the prophet in 
 the valley of his vision, where the bones were 
 many and very dry, and spontaneously 
 bursts from our lips the cry, "Come from 
 the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon 
 these slain, that they may live." 
 215 
 
THE CHRISTIAN ERA 
 
 If that prayer of the ancient prophet had 
 been breathed over the dead bones of the 
 civilization of the Augustan age, it would 
 not have been breathed in vain; for it was at 
 this time that a Jewish peasant and his wife, 
 going up to Bethlehem, were crowded out 
 of the inn, and sought shelter in a stable, 
 and there that peasant woman brought forth 
 her first-born Son. Augustus on his throne 
 knew not that that peasant Boy was to 
 establish a world-wide empire. The phi- 
 losophers of the Porch and the Garden knew 
 not that that Galileean Peasant was to 
 utter words whose simple and majestic wis- 
 dom would echo through the ages, when their 
 labored speculations would be forgotten. 
 Sadducean priests, as with hypocritical 
 punctihousness they went through the per- 
 formance of their ritual, knew not that 
 that ritual would pass away like a shadow 
 before the universal and spiritual rehgion 
 which that Babe of Bethlehem was to pro- 
 claim. 
 
 The Babe of Bethlehem grew to be the 
 Child and the Man of Nazareth. He lived 
 in obscurity untU thirty years of age, work- 
 ing at the carpenter's trade. Then he ap- 
 216 
 
THE CHRISTIAN ERA 
 
 peared as a moral and religious teacher. His 
 theology was the fatherhood of God. His 
 ethics was the brotherhood of man. He 
 formulated nothing; he promulgated no 
 sys^ ji of philosophy; but he gave hints of 
 glorious truth in which the world has recog- 
 nized a grander philosophy than man had 
 ever known. He talked, not with the hesi- 
 tating utterance of sages who are groping 
 after the truth, but with the certainty that 
 belongs to the direct vision of God. Yet his 
 chief influence lay not in what he said, but 
 in what he was. In the utter blackness of 
 this world of sin, he lived, the one white spot 
 in human history, challenging even his bit- 
 terest foes to convict him of sin, and chal- 
 lenging them in vain. He uttered seemingly 
 contradictory things about himself, and yet 
 by the force of his mysterious personality 
 they were blended into unity. "I am meek 
 and lowly in heart," said he, and then — "He 
 that hath seen me hath seen the Father." 
 And the words which on any other lips 
 would have been so grotesquely incongruous, 
 when uttered by him formed a perfect unity, 
 like the seamless robe that he wore. He 
 died, and in his death he revealed the infinity 
 217 
 
THE CHRISTIAN ERA 
 
 of divine love to a sinning, suffering world. 
 He declared that in his death he would draw 
 aU men unto him, and all subsequent history 
 has been the fulfillment of that prophecy. 
 He rose again, and from the dark abode of 
 death he brought back life and immortality. 
 
 In Christ, tihen, was the new moral life 
 which the world needed to convert the dry 
 bones of a dead civilization into living forms 
 of power and beauty. The fatherhood of 
 God — ^the brotherhood of man — ^pardon re- 
 vealed to a sinning race — ^the hope of im- 
 mortality in a dying world — ^these were the 
 elements from which was to come the new 
 moral life to mankind. 
 
 The new influence made itseK felt first at 
 Jerusalem; and worldly-minded Sadducees 
 learned the sublime ideal of the kingdom of 
 heaven, and Pharisees performing in dull 
 formality their rehgious rites were delivered 
 from the bondage of the letter into the free- 
 dom of the spirit. The cumbrous ritual of 
 sacrifice passed away hke a shadow, when it 
 was fulfilled in that one great example of 
 self-sacrifice in which was the life of the 
 world. The religion of the Jews, other and 
 yet the same, became the religion of man- 
 218 
 
THE CHRISTIAN ERA 
 
 kind. The Jehovah of the Jews became the 
 God and Father of all. The revelation which 
 had been proclaimed by Moses and the 
 Prophets, now glorified by the teaching and 
 the life of Jesus, went forth conquering and 
 to conquer. 
 
 The new influence went to Athens. It 
 transformed the intellectual life of mankind. 
 To Epicureans seeking hfe's highest good 
 in gross and brutal self-indulgence, the new 
 religion revealed its spiritual and ennobling 
 joys. To Stoics struggling against inevi- 
 table iUs, the new rehgion presented the sub- 
 lime comfort of hope and faith in the un- 
 seen and the eternal. 
 
 Why is it, think you, that the philosophy 
 of these modern centuries has been predomi- 
 nantly theistic, while that of the ages that 
 preceded them was atheistic or pantheistic? 
 It is not that God is revealed in nature any 
 more clearly now than in the days of Plato. 
 It is no easier now to "look through nature 
 up to nature's God," than when Paul de- 
 clared that "the invisible things of him from 
 the creation of the world are clearly seen." 
 The influence that has transformed the 
 world's thinking, arid made it theistic in- 
 219 
 
THE CHRISTIAN ERA 
 
 stead of atheistic or pantheistic, is the influ- 
 ence which has come from the hf e and teach- 
 ings of Jesus. The world to-day beKeves in 
 God because it believes in Christ. 
 
 And the transformation has passed not 
 only over the world's philosophy, but over 
 its literature and art as well. True, indeed, 
 writers of modern times have not all been 
 saints, and not all of modern literature is 
 very edifying reading; yet there is a vast 
 contrast between the literature of to-day and 
 that of ancient times. Much of modern lit- 
 erature is pervaded and glorified by a de- 
 votion to truth and goodness which has been 
 inspired by the influence of Christ Jesus. 
 You remember that impressive autobio- 
 graphic passage in which Milton speaks of 
 his desire "to leave something so writ as 
 future ages shall not willingly let die," and 
 of his conviction that the inspiration for 
 such a work is to be sought, "not in the in- 
 vocation of Dame Memory and her siren 
 daughters, but in devout prayer to that 
 Spirit who can enrich with all utterance and 
 knowledge, and who sendeth forth his sera- 
 phim with fire from his altar to touch and 
 purify the lips of whom he pleaseth." 
 220 
 
THE CHRISTIAN ERA 
 
 "What is true and just and honest, 
 
 What is lovely, what is pure. 
 All of praise that hath admonisht, 
 
 AH of virtue, — shall endure ; 
 These are themes for poets' uses. 
 Stirring nobler than the Muses. 
 
 "0 brave poets, keep back nothing. 
 Nor mix falsehood with the whole ! 
 Look up Godward ; speak the truth in 
 
 Worthy song from earnest soul ! 
 Hold, in high poetic duty. 
 Truest Truth the fairest Beauty." 
 
 So sang Mrs. Browning, and in that spirit 
 many a poet has sung, many a worker in 
 literature and art has wrought, until the 
 world is glorified with the supreme beauty 
 of truth and goodness. 
 
 The new influence went to Rome. It 
 transformed the social and political life of 
 man. The great truths of the fatherhood 
 of God, the brotherhood of man, the infinite 
 dignity and worth of the human soul, could 
 not make themselves felt without transform- 
 ing aU social and political life. That truth 
 of the dignity of the himian soul, apart from 
 every incident and accident of human life, 
 brought with it of necessity the emancipa- 
 tion of woman. It gave her what she had 
 221 
 
THE CHRISTIAN ERA 
 
 never had before, save in exceptional in- 
 stances and under peculiar conditions — ^the 
 opportunity of being at once free and pure. 
 Those truths of the dignity of the human 
 soul and the brotherhood of man soon led 
 to the abolition of the bloody sports of the 
 arena, and in due time brought about the 
 abolition of slavery. They gave mankind 
 a new conception of the relation of the in- 
 dividual to the state. No longer could it 
 be supposed that the individual was to hve 
 only for the state. It came to be recognized 
 that the state fulfilled its office, that the in- 
 stitutions of government served their pur- 
 pose, only in so far as they contributed to 
 the highest and noblest development of in- 
 dividual human souls. The conception of 
 brotherhood, expanding beyond the pale of 
 nationality into the idea of universal brother- 
 hood, gradually transformed the interna- 
 tional hfe of man, and developed the idea of 
 the commonwealth of nations. And now, out 
 of the horror of these years of world war, 
 is coming, we trust, the sudden fulfillment of 
 the growing hope of the ages in the estab- 
 lishment of a League of Nations. 
 
 "The century's aloe flowers to-day." 
 222 
 
THE CHRISTIAN ERA 
 
 The religion which has accomplished all 
 these changes in the past is not exhausted. 
 The power that conquered Rome, Athens, 
 and Jerusalem, is vital with the pulses of 
 eternal youth. It is still going forth con- 
 quering and to conquer. What achieve- 
 ments await it in the future, only that Omni- 
 science in which it had its birth can tell. 
 Even now it is inspiring missionary activity 
 on a scale imparalleled in the past for the 
 enlightenment of lands darkened by pagan- 
 ism and barbarism, and revealing more fully 
 its power to cope with evils which still exist 
 in lands of civilization and nominal Chris- 
 tianity. The prejudices of race, the jealousy 
 between rich and poor, the antagonism of 
 capital and labor — all human problems and 
 all human miseries — must find their solu- 
 tion and belief in the religion of Jesus 
 Christ. 
 
 The new influence which created Christen- 
 dom and Christian civilization, made itself 
 felt first at Jerusalem, and afterward at 
 Athens and Rome ; and therein lies a para- 
 ble. Therein lies an intimation of the truth 
 that this influence is primarily a religious 
 influence, that the source of all that is char- 
 223 
 
THE CHRISTIAN ERA 
 
 acteristic of this modern civilization is in a 
 religious life — ^in the turning of individual 
 souls from sin to righteousness. The new 
 philosophy, the new literature, the new social 
 and pohtical organization, are secondary 
 effects whose real origin is in the influence 
 exerted on human character. In this thought 
 we may find inspiration for individual duty. 
 To accomplish great works of genius which 
 make themselves felt in philosophy or liter- 
 ature or social and pohtical organization, 
 falls to the lot of only a few. It falls not 
 to our lot to write a "Principia" or a "Para- 
 dise Lost," to break the fetters of a subject 
 race, or to give to a nation a new political 
 constitution. These are achievements for 
 which neither abihty nor opportunity has 
 been given to us. But it is the privilege of 
 every one of us to bear his share in that 
 moral and reUgious activity from which is 
 derived every other form of new and better 
 hfe which constitutes our modern civiliza- 
 tion. In the parable of the Master, the king- 
 dom of heaven is hkened to leaven hid in 
 three measures of meal, whose influence 
 spreads from particle to particle until the 
 whole is leavened. In that process of the 
 224 
 
THE CHRISTIAN ERA 
 
 moral transformation of himianity every one 
 of us may have his share. Each may catch 
 from some other soul that has been trans- 
 formed by the beneficent influence of Chris- 
 tianity its high moral ideals, its lofty in- 
 spiration; and each in turn may communi- 
 cate that transforming power to others. 
 And with this thought of privilege and op- 
 portunity comes the solemn thought of re- 
 sponsibility. In the eternal conflict between 
 good and evil — in the progress of the new 
 and higher civilization, ever resisted by the 
 powers of evil incarnated in evil hfe and evil 
 institutions — there is no neutrality. The 
 words of the Master are as true as when 
 uttered eighteen centiuies ago, "He that is 
 not with me is against me" ; and still those 
 solemn words, like an anticipation of the 
 final Judgment, part mankind on the right 
 and on the left, "as a shepherd divideth his 
 sheep from the goats." In that parting, in 
 comparison with which all earthly differ- 
 ences are trivial and accidental, may we each 
 and all be found on the right side. 
 
 225