THE SUPREME REALITY REV. SAMUEL R. CALTHROP, L.H.D. The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://archive.org/details/cu31924029477985 Jo /?Ct < ou?i Un^Ul fUuua~e*4f££L GU ~r,-^m tn^ . / BX9841 .C16" UniVerS ' ty Ubrary SUP Ki^II|S&ihY Samuel R - Calthrop olin 3 1924 029 477 985 THE SUPREME REALITY BY SAMUEL R. CALTHROP, L.H.D. MAY MEMORIAL CHURCH SYRACUSE, NEW YORK BOSTON AMERICAN UNITARIAN ASSOCIATION 1913 A.2.mv4 Copyright, 1913, by <* Samuel R. Calthrop, L.H.D. TO ALL WHO HAVE LONGED TO ADORE IN- FINITE LOVE AND RIGHT AND TRUTH; WHO HAVE SOUGHT AND HAVE NOT YET FOUND. THIS LITTLE BOOK IS DEDICATED BY ONE WHO ONCE SOUGHT IN GREAT DARKNESS, AND WHO, IN THE MIDST OF THAT DARKNESS, RESOLVED TO SHARE THE FATE OF ALL HIS BROTHERS, LIGHT OR NO LIGHT, HEAVEN OR NO HEAVEN. THE MOMENT THAT RESOLVE WAS MADE, THE HEAVENS WERE OPENED. AND THE LIGHT OF GOD SHONE ROUND ABOUT HIM. SIXTY YEARS HAVE PASSED AWAY, BUT THAT LIGHT SHINES ON. BELOVED FRIENDS, MAY YOU ALSO FIND THAT LIGHT. AND REJOICE IN ITS SHINING! S. R. Calthkop November 28, 1912 Thanksgiving Day PEEFACE Professor Jacks, of Oxford, Editor of the l Eibbert Journal, pleads eloquently on behalf of the Plain Man who really wants to know something about the Universe which sur- rounds him, and who goes in all earnestness and simplicity to the chosen Teachers of Phi- losophy, whom Oxford has appointed to in- struct him, and yet finds to his astonishment and almost despair, that he cannot understand one single word they say. In his trenchant article in the Hibbert Journal he quotes (I fear of malice prepense) half a page from the latest light Oxford has thrown on the Universe ; and confesses that he himself cannot understand one word of it ! I also am obliged to confess equal inability. If this is really the road to intellectual Salva- tion, I fear that only a very few can be saved. I invite plain men and women to read this book, which is mainly intended for them. I try to show them that with the aid of Science they can know much more about the Universe than they now think possible, provided al- PEEFACE ways that they are willing to trust their own common sense, when that speaks plainly and clearly. The Book of "Sermons on Evolution," pub- lished in 1905, is referred to in places where the subject treated is dealt with more fully than seems advisable in a volume like this. I refer especially to the two sermons on "God" and "God minus Man." "The Heaven of the Moon" must be read as Poetry, in which Imagination claims its Rights. The two sonnets are dedicated to the beloved memory of William James. CONTENTS PAGE I The Supreme Reality 3 II Mistakes 27 III The Concealment of God 33 IV God Inside His Woeld 61 V The Soul in Histoey, B. C 77 VI The Soul in History, A. D 95 VII Zoeoasteb 115 VIII Heaven and Hell 121 IX The Childeen's Ceusade 139 X Peayeb 145 XI The Peeacheb op To-day 165 XII Poems 185 I THE SUPKEME KEALITY THE SUPREME REALITY The Supreme Reality is the Universe itself, is the Sum Total of Things, things visible, and invisible, things material and things Spiritual. This august Presence is always with us. It surrounds us, it touches us on every side. It holds supreme relation to all within us, to body and mind, to brain and heart, to life and purpose, to hope and cour- age, to affection and thought. It is our en- vironment, and will be the environment of all lives forever. Surely, then, it is wise to learn all we can about it. Plain men and women, thanks to our new knowledge, can really learn a great deal about it ; and, most important of all, can learn their true relation to it. If we wish to study it, we must first rid ourselves of all pre- conceived notions about it. This is really very difficult; for the air of Human Thought is thick with great swelling Words which have claimed authority over us for centuries. Perhaps the most pompous, most dictatorial 3 4 THE STJPKEME EEALITY and most foolish has been the dictum, sup- posed by many to be the only true way to commence thinking about the Universe at all ; namely that we must evolve the Universe out of "Pure Reason," which means working our minds in a vacuum, means reasoning without anything to reason about, means raising our- selves into the air by vigorously pulling at our own straps! If we began in this way, we should be as foolish as the Mythic German Philosopher, who wishing to study sheep, did not go to a sheep-fold to use his eyes, but simply evolved a sheep from his own consciousness! No! we must begin by first looking steadfastly and long at the Universe itself, and try to listen to that which the Universe itself will tell us about itself! We find ourselves living on an Earth which is surrounded by Space, and on a starry night we see that in the far Galaxy, there are in- numerable Suns like our own, all surrounded by Space, and that Space seems to go on and on forever. Indeed we find ourselves unable to imagine any end to Space. The poet Gray sang of Milton that "He Passed the Flaming Walls of Space." Fine poetry, this; but a sure intuition informs us that if we arrived THE SUPEEME KEALITY 5 at those "Flaming Walls" we would find Space on the other side of the Walls ! Space, then, is Infinite; Space is omnipres- ent. There is nothing outside of Space. If we care to use certain words whose bad defi- nition has deluded thinkers for centuries, we can say that Space is "The Absolute"; for there is nothing outside of Space to which Space can be related: that Space is "The Un- conditioned"; for there is nothing outside of Space to condition Space. Truly defined, these two words contain a noble and most significant meaning. For fifty years Science has been studying the Nature of Space as never before ; and its discoveries are at the very foundation of Scientific Metaphysics ; a kind of Metaphysics unheard of before. Science declares that all Space is powerful Space. There is no Power- vacuum anywhere. Empty Space is an empty phrase and will delude thinkers no more. Every cubic inch in Space is filled with power inconceivable. 1 Space, then, is Omnipotent as well as Infinite and Omnipresent. Science then, has discovered these three "Attributes of the Divine." i See Sermon on God, pages 9 to 13, for a careful an- alysis of one cubic inch in space. 6 THE SUPEEME BEAUTY Thus far, we have been dealing with prob- lems purely intellectual, and any thoughtful person can follow the argument, whether he be a religious man or not. It would interest some persons just as a chess problem would. Others, who have been befogged and be- wildered by false metaphysics, might pos- sibly welcome it as an awakening light, which clears up some of their difficulties, and starts them on a course of clear thinking: while plain men and women might rejoice, with a little trembling, when asking themselves, "Can it really be as easy to think as this?" But mere thinking on the Universe only carries us a very little way. The all-important question has yet to be answered: What is our own vital, personal relation to this Mighty Scheme of Things ? What manner of men and women ought we to be to fit into all this? This wonderful World of ours keeps on pro- during Life — life of plant, of animal, of Man ; and the Life of Man keeps on increasing in volume, in power to wield and direct the forces of Nature, in power to rule the World. Our own Age is the most powerful, the most brilliant, the most resourceful, the most knowing the World has ever seen. It knows a thousand secrets of Nature never discovered THE SUPKEME KEALITY 7 before. It rushes across sea and land with the speed of the wind. It sends its messages round the globe in a moment of time. It has read the Secret of the Stars, but it has not yet found the Secret of Peace. It is restless, dissatisfied, hungry in the midst of boundless wealth. It travels through land after land, clime after clime; but it finds happiness in none. It has not yet learned how to live. It has not yet discovered the deepest laws of the Universe, is not yet in accord with its deeper Purpose, which assuredly must be the giving birth to men and women far nobler, far more worthy to possess and govern this wonderful Earth than the men and women who are now on it, and who do not even know how to live peaceably with each other! But how can we find the Secret our Age has lost? In all the centuries of Christianity plain men and women, simply by taking to heart the message of Jesus, so clearly told in his "Sermon on the Mount," and by steadfastly following the Path he trod, have learned his Secret, — the Secret our Age so sorely needs, — and have lived out the Beautiful Life all their days. Such as they have been, and still are, the Light of the World. But most of them have been unable to tell their Secret, 8 THE SUPEEME REALITY save by direct contact, to mankind at large. Only the great Leaders of Religious Thought have been able to do this at all adequately. They may be divided into three classes. First come the Idealists. They point to a truly noble road, which leads to vital Relation to God. They insist that all men have Ideals. We all have an Ideal of Truth. Expand that, and we have Infinite Truth. We all have an Ideal of Justice. Expand that, and we have Infinite Justice. We all have an Ideal of Love. Expand that, and we have Infinite Love. Those who walk on this Road are, or should be, filled with a lofty desire to realize these Ideals in their own characters. Truth, Justice, and Love are the three great names of God; and all who thirst after these thirst after God. In the second class are the men of Science. Science starts from below, studying common things and familiar objects; and from these steadily climbs toward Universal Law. Joule took a pound of Water, and on that small ladder climbed to the One Force that fills the Universe. God is the Supreme Truth. That infinite Attribute of God has been loved and sought by Scientists more than by any other class of men. No others have a love of THE SUPREME REALITY 9 Truth for its own sake as strong as they feel. None pursue it as ardently as they ; and there- fore they are the Leaders of the whole World in worshiping and serving the God of Truth. The third class are the Practical Teachers. They unite the Ideal and the Scientific meth- ods. They take the Ideal for granted; but adopt the Scientific method for its verifica- tion. This is the method of Jesus. Jesus in- sists that all men have Ideals ; and in his Ser- mon on the Mount urges all men to put into Practice those Ideals. "Take these words of mine, and try them. If you do, you will dis- cover that Hate leads to Death ; Love leads to Life; Wrong leads to Death; Right leads to Life;" Lies lead to Death, Truth to Life. This is the Road to God which we all must follow, and specially must plain and simple men and women walk upon it who cannot walk alone on the Roads of Idealism and Science. All three methods must he used, each in its turn. Each is indispensable in its place. Any one of the three becomes obnoxious and harmful, if it declares that it alone suffices, and that the other two are useless. Narrow- minded advocates of each have been found in 10 THE SUPREME REALITY abundance, and the mischief they have wrought is incalculable. Foremost of these is the Idealist mere. To him Matter, Space, and Time are "Forms of Thought." A dear friend, whose New England common sense kept him sane as well as good and beautiful, wrote to me that he could not follow me here, "because I am such an Idealist that, to me, Matter, Space, and Time are only Forms of Thought!" Well, I tried to follow his thought. I first thought of a large Illusion, usually called The Earth. It spun round illusively in the illusive time of twenty-four hours. Then I thought of an immense Illusion, called the Sun : round which the smaller Illusion circled in the illu- sive time of 365 days, 4 hours, 48 minutes, 46 seconds. Next I tackled a wonderful Illu- sion, commonly called Light, which the Large Illusion lent to the Smaller in the illusive time of eight minutes and a quarter ! Here I gave up, and returned to sanity, and the Mighty World of Space, Time and Matter! The true Idealist in his hour of vision is a Seer. He communes with The Eternal, The Infinite. But he must not assert that the highest Truth can only be found in his Way. No Idealist, as yet, has clearly seen that the THE STJPBEME REALITY 11 Astronomer, the Physicist, can also climb the Heights of Being, and stand with him on "The Shining Table-Lands, where God him- self is Moon and Sun." It is a mistake to suppose that the Science of to-day is free from like offenses. Pseudo- metaphysics can be found in pure mathemat- ics, and must be fought there also. Some- times we are gravely told that, after all, Space may be an immense Sphere; so paral- lel lines may curve in with incredible slow- ness, and may meet at the Poles! But, once more, our common sense assures us, that if we could stand on the outside of said Sphere, we should discover that there still was Space all round the Sphere! On a perfectly still and starry summer night, I have seen, in my boat on Skan- eateles Lake, all the visible constellations clearly reflected in the water, each star a tiny brilliant point. On such a night any one can try for himself a charming experiment. Take a table out on the lawn, and put upon it a single drop of pure, liquid Mercury. Then with a small telescope, or good opera glass, look at the drop, and you will see star after star mirrored in the drop, as you shift your glass from side to side. In imagination I 12 THE SUPKEME KEALITY have hung that little drop in the far Ether, and there the whole heavens would be mir- rored, from Zenith to Nadir. I have dreamed that our Souls, like that little silver drop, should receive the light of the Golden Heavens from all directions, below as well as above us. Not long ago I read a remarkable article by a professor of mathematics dealing with this conception from the standpoint of Euclid's definition of a Point. "A Point is without parts, and without magnitude." From this he went on to prove that an infinite number of straight lines could be drawn from an in- finite number of points in the tiny drop to every point in the infinite Golden Sphere of the Starry Heavens. Also, that from one small part of the Infinite Star-Sphere, an in- finite number of straight lines could be drawn to an infinite number of points in the silver drop; and also that an infinite number of straight lines could be drawn from the small part of the Star-Sphere to every point in the Infinite Golden Sphere of Heaven! This, we are assured, has a solemn, a religious significance ! Now Euclid's Definition is a useful and convenient Abstraction, and when an abstrac- THE SUPREME REALITY 13 tion leads to a manifest absurdity, we must confront it with the facts of the case. In the actual Universe in which we and all things exist, there is nothing which has abso- lutely no size. An Electron is, at present, the smallest particle fairly well known, say a thousand times smaller than a molecule of Hydrogen. But multiply an Electron by x n , where x n is very large, and you could fill up a space as vast as the original Solar Nebula ! 2 This the professor has overlooked. In the third method, the Practical, the Pragmatist has much to say; but he, too, is apt to trespass upon the rights of other think- ers. To-day we mourn the loss of William James, who has done so much for us all in so many directions. But James always had a tendency towards a queer use of words. In his house at Cambridge, I spoke to him freely about his Psychology, which I greatly admired. I quoted the passage which says that if it is necessary to anyone's peace of mind to use the word "Soul," he is free to do so; but "I" can assure him that the word "Soul" has no place in Psychology. "This passage," I said, "is jaunty, and no one should be jaunty in writing of serious subjects. But 2 This will hold good for any particle, however small. U THE SUPEEME EEALITY it is strange that 'Psyche' has no place in 'Psychology!' Has Hamlet, the person, no place in Hamlet the play?" But in his "Pragmatism" this tendency has gone to the limit. "Verity is the process of Verification." Consulting the Dictionary, I find that "Verifi- cation" is the process of discovering "Verity." It must be fun for a life-time to put new meanings on the hundred thousand words in the Century Dictionary! But the trouble is, that no argument is possible be- tween us, for we do not use words in the same sense! But we must never forget the great debt we all owe to William James, not only for his brave attitude towards all Truth, but for his splendid defense of the Right which we all have to live on the best hypothesis we have at any moment ; on exercising our "Will to Believe" that the most glorious views we are capable of forming about the Universe are grandly true; on his insistence that in all "Varieties of Religious Belief" there is some- thing of permanent value; that the Mystic has something very great that he tries to say, as well as the Scientist. 3 The Pragmatist, then, has a noble task. He applies the Practical Method of Jesus to a See Sonnet, "The Mystic's Prayer" at the end. THE SUPREME REALITY 15 the whole life of our day. But there are dangers ahead. "God becomes Conscious of Himself in Man/' is an old way of misstating, or, rather, caricaturing the glorious Truth, that Consciousness of God is, age after age, becoming organized in Man. There is a fatal facility in playing brilliant, and even start- ling, variations to this old tune. If the Pragmatist begins the habit of doing this, he is in danger. The Physicist will insist that we must go much further back. Before Man arrived, the Cow was the most powerful Force on the Planet. "God," then "became Conscious of Himself in the Cow." The Truth underlying this absurd statement is that Mother-Love, the Power of powers, is al- ready organized in the Cow. The early evo- lutionists thought that the Bull of the Spe- cies, with his big horns and his fighting quality, was the great factor in the develop- ment of Cattle. But the Cow's Mother-love, so intense, so pathetic, — w T as by far the most important factor. If all the Cows had had no Mother-Love, all the little calves would have been left to die, and Cows and Bulls alike would have only lasted for a single gen- eration. If an earnest Pragmatist feels in any danger of falling into this kind of craze, 16 THE SUPKEME EEALITY let him at once begin to study Infinite Space, with its Galaxies of Stars, and he will not need to ask himself whether a Cow's Con- sciousness would be adequate to fill, guide, and inspire all this Glory of Spaces and Worlds! Bernard Shaw is a strong and brave man, who sees, as yet, only a vast, blind Urge, which, unknowing, and unguided, carries along men, worlds, stars, galaxies in its resistless tide. He calls it "God," in default of a better name ! But no one can worship a blind Urge. If any one insists on living on this rather poor hy- pothesis, the only noble thing left for him is the Worship of Humanity, August Comte started this nearly 90 years ago. It has done some really great things. It has pro- duced fine characters. Frederick Harrison and Comte himself have done splendid work. But all alike have this in common. Each and all have a profound distrust in the power of Man's Mind to understand "The Supreme Re- ality," which is the Foundation of the Uni- verse. Comte insisted that Astronomers should confine their attention to the Solar Sys- tem alone ; for nothing could be really known about the stars. (Modern Astronomy owns the Galaxy for its estate!) Frederick Harri- son declared that "The Great Synthesis" can- THE SUPREME REALITY 17 not be grasped by the Human Mind : and so he felt that the best thing to do was to give up the attempt altogether. All alike confined themselves to a small area they called "the Knowable." We shall meet this Distrust all along the line we are about to travel, to the last Chapter in the Book, which analyzes it more thoroughly. Herbert Spencer takes the somewhat orig- inal attitude of criticising and sympathizing with both Religion and Science, proving, as he feels assured, that the First Principles of both are, at bottom, equally unthinkable. The Man of the Future will find it hard to believe that one of the leading minds of the Nineteenth Century really imagined that both the Men of Science and the Men of Religion would be consoled for their losses by the fact that the two were in the same boat, without chart or rudder, bound for the Land of the Un- knowable, and also by the assurance that no human being will ever pass over the Barrier of Nescience which Spencer himself had set up. Herbert Spencer published his "First Prin- ciples" in 1862; and this book was hailed as the philosophical manifesto of the new Scien- tific School in England, while Darwin and Huxley were its leading Scientists. As this 18 THE SUPREME REALITY School of thought influenced so powerfully the latter half of the Nineteenth Century, it must be examined with care. He begins by saying : "There are three verbally intelligible ac- counts of the Origin of the Universe : the Theis- tic, Atheistic, and Pantheistic;" and proceeds to show that each account is unthinkable. He is quite right, for the Universe has no Origin. Space has no Origin. Bon Gaultier, satiriz- ing Robert Montgomery's bombastic poem "Satan," writes some delightfully absurd lines on "The Death of Space !" But "The Birth of Space" is equally absurd. A Harvard grad- uate on a western ranch, who was steeped in Spencer, got hold of my essay on God, 4 and wrote to me, telling me how interested he was ; but added that the human mind was incapable of conceiving of anything unoriginated, I re- plied that Space has no Origin, and that the human mind could not think of space without seeing that Space is Unoriginated. At a given time, — say ten o'clock on a given morning, — there was not any Space at all, and at 10 :30 a.m. Space appeared! Where did it come from? It must have come from space! Time has no origin, for Time is the eternal proces- sion of endless Sequences in Space ! The re- 4 No 1 in the book of sermons. THE SUPREME REALITY 19 lations of a Circle to its Diameter, a Square to its Diagonal, have no Origin. Each comes from the Nature of Space. Spencer now sets out to prove that Ultimate Religious Concep- tions are quite unthinkable. This he does with the aid of Hamilton and Mansel, Hamil- ton's pupil and expounder. He takes Man- sel's argument, "because it cannot be bettered." But that argument rests on a false definition of "The Absolute" and "The Unconditioned." 5 The true definition, given above, is "Space is The Absolute; for there is nothing Outside of Space that can have any relation whatever to Space." Space is "The Unconditioned;" for there is Nothing Outside of Infinite Space, and therefore there is nothing outside of Space to condition Space. Again Mansel tries to prove that we cannot think of God — the Absolute, the Uncondi- tioned, — as the First Cause of All Things ; for "The Cause must always have a Relation to its Effect." Very true ; for the Eternal God, Who fills Infinite Space, Who Is Infinite Space, (for Space is the Fulness of His Presence, and Time the Ordered Sequence of His Will), is only Cause to all Forces, Things, Lives, Per- sons inside of Himself. This Being conditions o See Sermon, "God Minus Man." 20 THE SUPREME REALITY All Things Inside of Himself, is conditioned by All Things inside of Himself. Being sur- rounded by God's Power, Wisdom, Truth, Jus- tice, Love is the Condition of you and me and all Men. But Surrounding is also a Condi- tion, is also a Relation, is also a Limit. God minus Man is not God. That is only "God — Minus — Man." God minus the Galaxy is not God. That would only be "God — minus — the —Galaxy!" Spencer now proceeds to prove that the Ulti- mate Principles of Science are equally un- thinkable. He begins by taking for granted that an Ultimate Atom is surrounded by Empty Space : And yet Atom influences Atom through Empty Space; which, as he says, is unthinkable. But as there is no such thing as Empty Space : since Space is a Plenum, not a Vacuum, his whole argument falls to the ground. But we must not dismiss Herbert Spencer's "First Principles" without acknowledging gratefully his manifold contributions to Hu- man Knowledge. His denials are all dead and buried. His unthinkable things we now are thinking. The mind of Man has already crossed the line beyond which he declared Mankind could never pass. But his grand THE SUPREME REALITY 21 contributions to Knowledge are with us as a precious possession. With a lifelong effort he strove to carry the key-thought of Evolu- tion into every department of Human Knowl- edge. His name ranks next to those of Dar- win and Huxley, on the walls of England's Hall of Fame. My thought of this noble trio is best hinted at by a well-known Scandina- vian legend. Thor, "the Hammerer," the Thunder-God of our Scandinavian Ancestors, had never met his match in Asgard, Home of the Gods, and determined to go to Jotunheim, Home of the Jotuns, and challenge the strongest of those great Lords of magic might. He set out on his journey, and came to a place where a broad valley divided into two narrow ones, each running through high mountains. Not knowing which road to take, he was glad to see a Giant lying asleep on a mountain side. He went to him and asked his way. But there was no answer, for the Giant slept on. Then Thor lifted his hammer, and struck the Giant a smart blow on the forehead. But the Giant only whispered to himself, "Did a leaf fall?" Then Thor lifted his mighty Hammer high above his head, and dealt the Giant a blow that would have rent a Mountain. But 22 THE SUPREME REALITY the Giant only whispered to himself, "That must have been a sparrow !" So Thor had to find his way to Jotunheim as best he could. At last he came to Jotunheim, and at its mighty Gate he was met by the Lord of the Jotuns himself, who actually seemed to be ex- pecting him, and who welcomed him cordially. Learning his errand, The Lord of the Jotuns took him into a great Hall, where the Jotun chiefs were assembled, and then addressed Thor. "Noble Sir, you desire to contend with the strongest of all the Jotuns. But it is our custom, when welcoming a brave stranger, to ask him first to empty this Drinking Horn." Thor took the Horn, and drank and drank, till he could drink no more. But the Horn was nearly full. Abashed, Thor gave back the Horn. Then the polite Lord of the Jotuns said sorrowfully, "Since you failed to empty the Drinking Horn, no male Jotun will deign to fight you. But you may wrestle with this Old Woman!" Thor grasped her body to throw her away in disdain. But he could not move her from the ground, though he used all his god-like strength ! Then, ashamed, he started to go home, acknowledging his utter defeat. But the polite Lord of the Jotuns ac- companied him as he passed through the Gate, THE SUPREME REALITY 23 and courteously journeyed with him, as loth to leave an honored guest. When they came to the place where the two valleys joined, he paused, and said to Thor, "Brave Friend! be not so depressed. The Giant you struck here was the great Earth itself ! and, behold ! Your Hammer clove the whole Mountain, and see! Here is a noble River, flowing through the Gap your Hammer made ! bearing refreshment and fertility to the parched and barren lands be- yond. The old Woman, with whom you wrestled, is Time! and with Time who can wrestle? The Horn from which you drank was connected with the mighty Ocean itself; and, lo ! you have made a Low Tide all along its shores! Farewell!" These new Hammerers, these new Sons of Thunder, struck many a brave blow on the Mountains of the great Earth, and river after river of Knowledge flowed through at every stroke. Time they could not master, for Time is Eternal. But they opened up long Vistas of Time to our wondering eyes ; and now Im- measurable Time stretches back into the Past, giving hope and courage to the Present, and prophesying a grander and more glorious Fu- ture. The Horn they could not drain ; for that Horn draws its Water of Life from the Infinite 24 THE SUPREME REALITY Ocean of the Divine Love, which refreshes and restores the soul of Man forever and forever! But, alas! they made a Low Tide all along the Shores where Men and Women and Children dwell, and their Souls fainted for lack of that Celestial Water! That Low Tide continued for a whole generation, and now, at last, it is just beginning to rise! II MISTAKES MISTAKES The mistakes of really noble thinkers are innumerable. The History of Thought is strewn with these wrecks. The most frequent of all has been that of the genuine Idealist, who, though clinging fast to his Idealism, de- voutly believes that every chapter, verse, phrase, word, of the Bible is part of the in- fallible utterance of the Eternal God Himself. The ruthless cruelties of the early Hebrews have to be justified in every instance; for did not God Himself Command them? Even the infamous 31st chapter of Numbers, in which Moses orders the warriors, who had already killed every warrior of the Midianites without receiving even a single scratch, to kill in cold blood thousands of mothers, and thousands of their little boys, and to save 32,000 little girls for slaves and concubines, 1 has to be harmon- ized perfectly with Infinite Truth, Justice and Love. Imagine the strain on a noble soul, like Jonathan Edwards, when he tried to reconcile lit Is a very late priestly tale! 27 28 THE SUPREME REALITY all this shameful, devilish stuff with the glori- ous Ideal of the Divine Nature which he strove so hard to keep ! But there are many grave mistakes, which are not so tragic as this, but which hinder greatly any clear thought on these large ques- tions. Let us touch lightly a few of these. Some philosophers seem to consider that the word "Energetics" solves the World-Riddle completely. If you ask them, "In what Sub- stance does that Energy reside?" they have no answer, and look at you as if they wondered why you do not see as plainly as they do that "energetics" requires no substance that is the Source of all its Energy! Not long ago I read an Occult Novel, in- spired by I do not know how many Mahatmas. The beautiful Heroine gave up the love of a man she knew to be good and true to follow, with her mother, the glory of Occultism to the utmost limit. At last, having become Adepts, they were summoned with all the Adepts throughout the world, summoned by the Arch- Mage Himself, to meet him on a given day at the North Side of the great Pyramid of Cheops. When all were assembled, he led them through a secret Passage into a Vast Hall, unknown for six thousand years, which was lighted by MISTAKES 29 innumerable Cressets ! When all were as- sembled, and had taken their seats, in solemn silence, the Arch-Mage mounted a pulpit, and the great Secret burst from his lips: "Brothers and Sisters ! All is Vibration. We are Vibrations !" Beloved Mahatmas ! Vibration is not a Thing. Vibration is always and everywhere a State of a Thing. The thousand Vibrations of the E String of a Vio- lin are each and all so many different States of the B String. Nowhere, except in Alice's Wonderland, where, to her amazement, she saw the Cheshire Cat's Grin without the Cat, can you ever hear the Vibrations of the E String without the E String! "God Himself," says Stradivarius, in George Eliot's noble poem, "cannot make Antonio Stradivarius's violins without Antonio!" Spiritual vibrations without the human spirit to vibrate are equally impossible. The same error underlies the American edi- tions of the Buddhist Philosophy. We are as- sured in very learned phrase, full of Hindu words, which are really not any better than English ones, that there is no such entity as an immortal human soul. What survives through endless transformations is the Karma or Chain of Consequences. But Karma is really 30 THE SUPREME REALITY a very, very, very complex series of modes of motion ; the first motion propagating the next, and that the next, in an endless series. Once more, there cannot possibly be a mode of mo- tion of nothing! Any possible Karma, then, which continues on and on, unbroken and un- diminished, through countless ages, must re- side in an enduring and immortal Spirit Sub- stance, which carries with it its own Karma to all Eternity! You can neither have nor feel a spiritual vibration which thrills you with its glorious uplifting Force, unless you yourself are a spirit, the only thing that vibrates to Divine Thoughts ! But we must now try to tell of the Splendor of the Faith which is beginning to enter the Mind of Man : and must only do battle against the Errors which directly block our way. The first great trouble with many minds is the Con- cealment of God. "O, that I knew where I could find Him," is the cry of millions. Ill THE CONCEALMENT OF GOD THE CONCEALMENT OF GOD There is a most suggestive verse in the He- brew Book of Proverbs. "It is the glory of God to conceal a thing, it is the honor of Kings to search out a matter." x That is, there are two glories, one belonging to God, the other to Man ; the glory of God consisting in Conceal- ment, the glory of Man in Discovery. It is Man's Glory, then, to discover the Concealed God, and to understand why and how He is thus concealed. First, God conceals Himself in Nature. All nations have felt the presence of this smiling Mystery, which we call Nature, and have more or less dimly perceived that there was some- thing concealed behind it. The Egyptians ex- pressed this thought by the veiled figure of Isis, whose Veil no mortal hand might lift : by the weird Sphinx, whose calm, deep eyes look over the vast stretches of sand, beholding Something Man's eye can never see, and whose half-parted lips smile with the sense of some grand unuttered Secret. The Hebrew Scrip- i Proverbs xxv, 2. 33 34 THE SUPREME REALITY tures are full of this great Thought. "Clouds and Darkness are round about Him ;" "Truly Thou art a God that hidest Thyself!" In Nature God recedes as you strive to search Him out; — recedes, not into distance, but deeper and deeper into the very heart and core of things: — recedes as the atmosphere does, when you try to grasp it. Though your fingers are empty, clutch as you may, the air is still around your hand. Its subtle nature has escaped the coarse material grasp. It sometimes seems as if this world of ours were deliberately contrived in such a fashion that no one need believe in God unless he pleases! Certainly, no one need believe in Truth unless he pleases. I have heard of men who believed in lies, and felt that such a thing as Truth, in Man at least, did not exist. Certainly, no man need believe in Right unless he pleases. I have heard of men who laughed at the very idea of there being any awful Right which all men are bound to obey, and who despised as hypocrites those who held up the Law of Right. No one need believe in purity unless he pleases. You need not go very far to find men who will sneer at the very thought of purity in man or woman. No one need believe in Love unless he pleases. Many men THE CONCEALMENT OF GOD 35 believe in Hate, and how many know that Love is Omnipotent? I see no provision made in Earth or Sky to convince a self-satisfied Skeptic. This Mighty World of God's rolls on, and all the thousand ministrations of blessing go on, though he has no eye to see them, no heart to feel them, no gratitude to acknowledge them. The Hand that blesses refuses to quit its concealment for the poor purpose of making fools behold and confess. If the wheels of the World ground on mechanically, making a great deal of noise and dust in the grinding, then dull men would be forced to see that there must be a Power to work the Machine. It is the perfect equi- poise, the silent perfection of the adaptations of Nature, which makes the dull man's diffi- culty. If the changes of the Seasons were brought about by some gigantic lever that hoisted the World's Axis up and down with starts and jolts from time to time; or if the Earth was turned in its daily revolution by some stupendous crank, that stunned the ears of men with its steely jar, how would fools stand aghast with amazement, who now gaze stupidly, with no emotion whatever, on the mighty Planet floating through the starry spaces as noiselessly as the thistledown floats 36 THE SUPREME REALITY on the breeze. Think of it! The World has no foundation-stones. No bars of steel clamp the planet to her place. No props of adamant are needed to keep her from falling. Poised in free space she moves. As light as mote in sun-beam or bird in air the huge Earth-ship floats through the ether, how silently ! When Evening puts her quiet finger on the lips of men, and no leaf stirs in a million trees, you cannot catch one faintest sound made by the mighty Ship of the Skies, no ripple dashing in music on her prow, no murmur of waters underneath her keel. God is calm. His mightiest Works move noiseless on their way. The silent strength of their Maker is in them, is sufficient for them. Is it not strange, that it is the very perfec- tion of His work that blinds the eyes of com- mon men to its wonder and its mystery? Rob- ert Houdin, the celebrated French conjurer and mechanician, once made a wonderful au- tomaton figure of a man, which would answer in writing any question you chose to put to it. "I had taken the greatest pains," he writes in his Autobiography, "with the mechanism of my automaton, and had set great store on making the clock-work noiseless. In this I wished to imitate Nature, whose complicated THE CONCEALMENT OF GOD 37 instruments act so imperceptibly. Will it be believed that this very perfection, which I had worked so hard to attain, acted unfavorably to the reception of my automaton? I constantly heard people say, 'Very ingenious, but prob- ably very simple. It often requires a very slight thing to produce seemingly great re- sults.' Then I actually made the machinery a little less perfect, so that a whizzing sound could be heard, something like cotton-spinning. Then the worthy public formed a very different estimate of my work, and the admiration in- creased with the intensity of the noise. Such expressions as these were often heard, 'What talent, what ingenuity such a wonderful com- bination must require V To please my public, I had injured my machine. I was ashamed of myself, and restored it to its original perfec- tion." God never injures His perfect mechanism to win the applause of the fool. "In unbroken silence," says the wise man, "the old Bounty goes forward, uttering no word of explana- tion." Fools are free to suppose that they manufacture all their blessings for themselves, if they so please. The Koyal Giver disdains to plead for thanks, nor withholds the gift because thanks 38 THE SUPEEME REALITY are wanting. "He makes His Sun to shine on the evil and on the good, and sends His rain on the just and the unjust" alike. "He is kind to the unthankful and the evil." The only gift God cannot give to the unthankful man is a thankful heart, for that is the one gift the unthankful man deliberately refuses to receive. There are certain parts of the Providence of God that would seem palpable to the com- monest mind. The grateful sense of the cool stream that a thirsty horse displays; the joy- ous cry of the mother-bird, when laden with food, she comes back to her nest and her brood ; the delight of every young thing in the spring- time : — all these the commonest eye can see. But whoso would feel a deeper and more in- terior thankfulness must draw, even in the ordinary succession of Nature, far more deli- cate lines than these. It takes a still eye and a quiet heart to catch and interpret the evanes- cent tints of the Sunset, in which God writes His last Good-night to His earthly children. It takes a very delicate ear to know "what the waves are always saying;" what the wind whispers to the leaves, and what the rustling leaves reply. Only the child-like Poet-heart can quite understand all these things. But THE CONCEALMENT OF GOD 39 surely all of us can follow the sweet singers of Israel in their Psalms of praise. "Thou openest Thy Hand, and satisfiest the desire of every living thing." "Thou crownest the year with Thy goodness, and Thy paths drop fatness." "Thou waterest the Earth, and blessest it : Thou makest it soft with showers ;" "O give thanks unto the Lord; for His mercy endureth for ever !" "Who made great lights for His mercy endureth for ever. The sun to rule the day, the moon and the stars to govern the night, for His mercy endureth for ever!" "Young men and maidens, old men and chil- dren" praise ye the Lord, "who giveth food to all flesh, for His mercy endureth for ever!" If any one now asks, "Where is God con- cealed in things?" the answer always is "In- side the things." "You should look for a woodsman's bullet inside the gourd," cried Hawkeye to the Indians, who were vainly look- ing all round the tree on which the gourd hung. The great marksman had shot through the small hole cut in the gourd without touch- ing it, and his bullet had pierced the gourd in its very centre behind the hole. Keep on look- ing inside the things, and, if you look stead- fastly enough, keenly enough, you will dis- cover God inside of each thing. Search for the 40 THE SUPREME EEALITY Maker of the Stars inside the Stars : search for His Omnipotence and Omnipresence inside of all Space. "The Strength of the Hills is His," cries the Hebrew Seer. Search, then, mside of the Hills for the Force which makes them stand so strong. "Thy Way is in the Sea, and Thy path in the Mighty Waters!" he cries again. Search the waters, then, Analyse them, Reduce them to Hydrogen and Oxygen. Then search inside Hydrogen, inside Oxygen, to find His Way. Then at last you come upon a Force that existed before the Galaxy was, that was with God before ever the Morning Stars sang together. This is the way in which Science is seeking Him, and is fast finding Him. Soon Science and Religion will together sing one song. "All is of God; for of Him, and to Him, and through Him are all things." If anyone now asks, "How is this conceal- ment effected?" the answer is "By the limita- tions of the senses" The eye can only per- ceive the light that emanates from material objects; for this alone causes the optic nerve to vibrate and to convey sensations to the brain. All else is to it but empty space. The eye cannot see Force ; it only sees some of the results of Force. We do not even see each other. We only see the changing bodies THE CONCEALMENT OF GOD 41 through which we, the invisible ones, act on the outward world. This material eye of ours goes straight through the solid Universe to single out the objects akin to it, which are on its own material plane. From here to the Milky Way what vast abysses filled with God, — filled with glorious Life, therefore, — Life unimaginably grand and free! But our eye gives never a sign of recognition, save of its own. It sees only those starry palaces of se- clusion, whose shining turrets glisten upon us from afar. It does this, and this only, because eye and star are made of the same stuff. The method of this concealment suggests the Reason for it. It is in simple justice to Man's mortality that God has "shut down the door- ways of his head," so that he sees as through a glass, darkly. The Glory that shines through the Universe, if it did not destroy Man's body as he gazed, would utterly distract his attention from the needful work of Earth. He would feel so belittled by his amazing sur- roundings that human life would have no in- terest to him, and its all-important life-lessons would never be learned. As it is, we see just enough to suggest the Wonders behind all that we see, and no more. If the starlight that 42 THE SUPREME REALITY shines on my whole house in a winter night were concentrated on the pupil of my eye, it would dazzle me to blindness. I cannot bear more light than comes through a tiny circular window, one-fifteenth of an inch in diameter. The mere material light around me has to be fenced off from every other part of my body, that I may be able to bear it. If this be true of the material things that are so closely akin to my body and its senses, what would it be, if all God's Glory should suddenly burst upon my gaze? It is plain, then, that, if in our pres- ent stage of existence we were visibly con- fronted by the full Majesty of Being, our spontaneous life would be crushed. We would not dare to act freely and be ourselves. We ignorantly complain of the commonplace of everyday life, not knowing that the secret the Angels desire to look into is this, — how, in the midst of the Glory of the Omnipresent God, a little home-like, commonplace life like ours is possible. As we move about among our com- mon household and business cares, we are un- conscious that the place on which we stand is holy ground, made holy by the Presence of the Eternal. Let us learn to say of this very com- monplace what Milton said of his blindness. "This darkness is the Shadow of Thy Wing!" THE CONCEALMENT OF GOD 43 "This World I deem But a beautiful dream Of shadows that are not what they seem ; Where visions rise Giving dim surmise Of that which shall meet our waking eyes. Arm of the Lord, Creating Word! Whose glory the silent skies record! Where stands Thy Name In scrolls of flame 'Neath the Firmament's high-shadowing frame ; I gaze o'erhead, Where Thy hand hath spread For the waters of heaven their crystal bed ; And stored the Dew In its deeps of blue, Which the fires of the Sun come tempered through. Soft they shine Through that pure shrine, As beneath the veil of Christ's flesh divine Shines forth the Light That were else too bright For the feebleness of a sinner's sight. 44 THE SUPREME REALITY I gaze aloof On the tissued roof, Where Time and Space are the warp and woof, Which the King of Kings As a curtain flings O'er the dreadf ulness of Eternal things ; A tapestried tent To shade us meant From the bare Everlasting Firmament; Where the glow of the skies Comes soft to our eyes Through a veil of mystical imageries. But could I see As in truth they be The glories of Heaven that encompass me, I should lightly hold The tissued fold Of that marvelous Curtain of blue and gold. Soon the whole, Like a parted scroll, Shall before my amazed sight unroll ; And then be seen In unclouded sheen The Presence wherein I have ever been !" a 2 From a small book of poems (privately printed), by Rev. Thomas Whytehead, a dear friend of our family. THE CONCEALMENT OF GOD 45 II. God conceals Himself in Man. First God conceals Himself in the natural joy which, all young creatures feel in the mere fact of be- ing alive. The playfulness of young animals is an unconscious testimony to their sense of the worth of that life which has come to them so freshly from the Source of Life. The joy of our little children is God's own witness to us of what He means by life. Very specially, God conceals Himself within a child's first earnest thoughts. Never does the Divine Goodness appear more adorable to me than when I consider the ways of God towards a young child. When God speaks to a young child, the child's mind is lifted into a realm of joy, of wonder, and of love; but so delicately gentle, so full of reverence for the integrity and inviolability of a child's soul is the Eternal Father's Spirit, that the child him- self can detect nothing but the secret whisper of his own heart, the glow of his own feeling, the awe-stricken voice of his own conscience. Breathless, I listen at the door of the child's heart ; but ear of mortal is not fine enough to hear the Voice of God blessing His little one. He was in the First Class, Classics, and Chancellor's Medallist: and Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge. He went as a missionary to Australia, and died there. — S. R. C. I have changed one word. 46 THE SUPREME REALITY The most trained spiritual sense is too weak to trace the secret of that ineffable Guidance. "Here am I, for thou didst call me," said the child Samuel to Eli, the priest; "for Samuel did not yet know the Lord." Happy is that child whose teacher has sufficient divine in- sight to shew him when and how to say, "Speak, Lord ; for Thy servant heareth," Aye ! and blessed is that teacher; for through him the Spirit of God passes, as through an open door, to reach His beloved child beyond. Mature men and women are, again and again, unable to give the true genealogy of their best thought and feeling. We receive our Christianity from a million hands. God has so mingled Himself up with human lives, and the steps of man's recognition of this have been so multitudinous, that it has taken ages to make even the sacred words by means of which we give utterance to our highest aspirations. In nothing is the unity of Man's religious sense and the ubiquity of the Divine Presence with Man more clearly shown than in the fact that in every civilized language there are words all ready to express the deepest thought, the high- est emotion. God, duty, eternity, immortality, loving-kindness, right, truth, — such terms as these are found in every civilized tongue. THE CONCEALMENT OP GOD 47 God and Man, working together in most secret harmony of purpose, made these sacred words and freighted them with such an infinite load of meaning. A still more subtle and secret connection of God with Man, and of Man with Man is hinted at in the way sacred feelings have been passed on from heart to heart. Skill in the mechanic arts has been passed on through personal Contact from generation to generation. No blacksmith ever learned to shoe a horse from a book. The art of horse- shoeing has been passed on directly from per- son to person for thousands of years. In a precisely similar way the most sacred feelings of Mankind have been passed on by personal contact. This is the true Apostolic Succes- sion. Were a single hand wanting to a single head, the sacred chain of succession would be broken. I deem it simple prosaic fact to affirm that the way Jesus felt towards God and Man has been passed on from person to person, from heart to heart, until the sacred feeling has reached you and me. This, indeed, is the Procession of the Holy Spirit. It is God passing from breast to breast, God using one consecrated soul to influ- ence another, and that one another, and that 48 THE SUPEEMB EEALITY other yet another, in an endless series. If any one asks himself, "Whence come these longings for the better and the higher Life?" the wisest thing to say is : "All is of God. I cannot tell whence came this heavenly thought which gives me new hope and courage, which prompts me to nobler life and action ; whether it came from the direct, instant touch of God upon my soul, or whether it has descended from Heaven, down an angel-ladder of Souls, until it has reached me at last. Perhaps both are true. Both may always be true. I therefore bless God, and in Him bless all true, tender, loyal Souls in Earth and Heaven." Our best and highest experience may be summed up as our becoming aware of the sur- rounding God. "God comes to see us Avithout Bell," — that is, there is no signal of His ap- proach. The Blessed Life is with us. That is all we know. A moment ago, we were in the hard old world, whose vulgar lessons we had conned to weariness; but now we can scarce contain our joy; for once more the Life is manifest, — that Life which was first in The Father, then in Jesus, and is now beginning to manifest itself in us. In a moment, old things have passed away ; all things are become new. We are now "in Christ," that is, inside the THE CONCEALMENT OF GOD 49 spirit of sonship and brotherhood; and there- fore the whole Creation to us is new. The mingling then of God's Life with ours is in- comprehensibly subtle. It goes down to the very depths of our nature, "Draw, if thou canst, the mystic line Severing rightly His from thine, .Which is human, which Divine !" In a word, there is only One Life, and God and His children live that Life together. It is as hard to separate your life from God's as it is to separate a drop in mid-ocean from the rest of the Ocean. If, then, anyone says, "Oh! that I knew where I might find Him!" I would answer, if God has not already found you, then you alone are living outside of God's World, outside of Space and Time. Not only is "your very longing of itself an answering cry," but every decent impulse, every smallest piece of self-control, every kindly affection, every straight-forward piece of honesty you have got, is part of His Presence with you. You have received this and that good impulse from your parents, you say. But you must learn that the good in your parents is part of the Infinite Goodness. God is not jealous of 50 THE SUPREME REALITY your parents! Bless them for it. Let the good seed they sowed in your heart bear fruit a hundred-fold. "All is of God." Where does God conceal Himself? Inside the man, inside of his life, his thought, his feel- ing, his hope, his aspiration. Inside of all men? Yes! God conceals Himself inside the bad man's Soul, inside of the best that is in it, keeping that best from utter death. I read some time ago that a burglar had broken into a house at night, and had found no one in it, until he crept into a room where the wife was alone, watching by the cradle of a sleeping baby. When the mother saw him, she conquered her fear by a supreme effort; and rousing all her energies for the sake of her child, she quietly beckoned to him, gave him the keys, and whispered, "Take anything you wish ; but I beg you to be very quiet, as my child's life depends upon his continuing to sleep." "Then," whispered the burglar, "He shall sleep for all me;" and, giving back the keys, he slipped silently out of the house. The Eternal Goodness had not quite left that bur- glar's soul. God is inside the careless nature, inside of the little bit of earnestness it still possesses; inside the little bit of reluctance the tale- THE CONCEALMENT OF GOD 51 bearer still has left; inside the lying politi- cian, setting a limit beyond which even his ly- ing tongue will not go ; inside the brutal man, setting bounds his brutality cannot pass; in- side the seducer, inside of the little compunc- tion he feels at the misery of his victim ; inside the painted harlot's dreams of an innocent childhood. God, in a word, is inside the hells of all lost souls, seeking to heal, to bless, to bring back. God is inside of average people; inside the excuses we make for our own shortcomings; the Ideal, dimly seen by us, which makes those excuses necessary to our own self-respect; the Ideal which, more clearly seen in some hour of happy insight, makes those excuses appear dis- gusting to our awakened conscience; inside of poor performance, making that appear not only ignoble, but wearisome at last to our imagination; inside of poor weak hearts that would love the right, had they but strength to do so, holding up the beautiful image of that right, the love of which shall one day make those weak hearts strong. God conceals Himself, again, inside of our gradually increasing insight, our slowly de- veloping character : inside of the processes of intellectual, and spiritual growth. It is the 52 THE SUPREME EEALITY gentle, the imperceptible, the perfectly natural quality of this growth that is the hiding-place of His Power. There is no sudden &nd tre- mendous change from black midnight to high noon. Inch by inch the Dawn gains slowly on the Dark. Even when the great crisis comes, and the Sun rises at last, it has been so gently prepared for, that the eye has had time to read- just itself, moment by moment, to the broad- ening and deepening light. It is just as grad- ually that we come to our higher Thought. If my present thought of the Universe could have been suddenly poured in one immense flood upon my mind when I was a child, it would probably have caused insanity. The mind's eye slowly becomes adjusted to the in- creasing light. Even when some great crisis comes upon the Soul, and the mighty Sun of Righteousness arises suddenly upon its awak- ened sense, there has been a long preparation for the central Event. The slowly increasing light has slowly dissipated the darkness of the mind. Many and many a bright dawn-streak has heralded the Day. Lastly, God conceals Himself in great minds ; in the great inventor's mind, inside of his subtle ingenuity, his wonderful adaptation of old means to new ends; in the great scien- THE CONCEALMENT OF GOD 53 tist, inside of his patient arraying of all the facts, inside of his sudden intuition of the Key that unlocks the secret harmony that lies hid- den in ten thousand seemingly discordant facts ; in the mind of the great atheistic math- ematician, inside his gigantic calculations, which bring back the planets in their orbits true to time, and show the sublime safety of the Solar System; inside of the thought of Columbus, bidding him trust absolutely the logic of the Sphere; inside of the States- man's plans for the welfare of his country and the world ; inside the artist's imagination, eye, and hand, giving birth through them to new forms of truth and beauty; and highest of all, inside of the poet and prophet soul, bidding it sing and prophesy of all the Wonder that shall be ; inside of the royal heart of love, that dares all things for man's sake and God's. God conceals Himself inside of the great- ness of the saints of old, inside the greatness of the Saints of To-day. Time makes no dif- ference. There has, I know, for centuries been a rooted conviction that God was nearer to His children in the early morning of Time than He is to-day. Then He talked famil- iarly with His chosen ones. Now He has re- ceded into distance. But God is equally near 54 THE SUPKEME EEALITY to two souls equally open, be they as far apart in Space as the antipodes, as far apart in time as the first man and the last! If the Saints of old were nearer to God in simplicity and purity of heart, in sacred courage, in holy love of the true, the right, and the good, then and then only, did God commune with them more nearly and more immediately than with the Saints to-day. What was the reason for the strange mistake? The dull Western mind for centuries has insisted on taking literally the daring Orientalisms of the He- brew prophets, which represented God as speaking to man in the first person! as if an audible voice broke upon the prophet's ear. But the Sacred Silence of the Heavens has never been thus rudely broken. When God communes with man, then through the depths of man's soul an unutterable emotion has passed, forming itself into words, it may be, as it passes through the understanding and the senses; but the words themselves are not the inspiration, can at best but hint at the inspiration. When air passes through water, it forms bubbles. The bubbles are but the clinging of the water to the air, its ineffectual attempt to keep it as it is departing. The murmur of the waters is not the Wind. It is THE CONCEALMENT OF GOD 55 but a sign that the invisible element is press- ing upon the waters, so that they give forth their voices. The immature mind keeps on craving for some outward sign. "Oh! that Thou wouldst rend the Heavens, and come down !" is the nat- ural cry of the indignant prophet's heart, when the world is young, when faith is dead and love is cold, and the oppressor's might is strong. But the calm, deep Heaven gives no sign. No thunderbolt has blasted the oppres- sor, no earthquake has opened to swallow up the utterers of lies. The prophet was look- ing in the wrong place. The commencement of God's answer was his own indignant heart. The deepest answer God has yet given was concealed inside the infant smile of a little Baby, born amid the rugged hills of Palestine. God's answer to faithlessness is Faith ; to lies, truth; to cursing, blessing; to the force of the Spirit of hate, the force of the Spirit of Love. To sum up, then, God conceals Himself in man by becoming man. The more completely God is concealed in a noble nature, the more absolutely from his own inner impulse the noble soul acts, the greater the triumph, the completer the incarnation of the Divine. 56 THE SUPREME REALITY God within a strong warrior soul that aches to strike down all wrong is intensely mascu- line. "His was the soul wounded to be and ache If Truth, with error fighting, seemed to take Hurt in the battle, and he longed to shake All lies with scorn to pieces, and to make Falsehood, for sheer despair, her old heart break." God manifested in a serene and gracious woman's nature is all womanly. In a word, God conceals Himself in man by the intensely human aspect human truth and goodness, sweetness and courage wear. Why does God thus conceal Himself in man? That Man's may be the Kingdom, and the power, and the glory,; that our goodness may be ours, not merely His; that we may share His thought, not be merely receptive of His thought; that each step in our spiritual progress may be taken by ourselves, by our own desire, consent and will. Again, God conceals Himself in Man, that man may be blessed and helped by man. If by man comes Death, by man also comes the Resurrection of the dead. The Eternal Fa- THE CONCEALMENT OF GOD 57 ther refuses to be thanked and blessed alone. To each worshiper of His sole divinity He seems to insist that that very worshiper shall recognize and gratefully acknowledge the debt he owes to innumerable souls who have made that very worship possible to him. God conceals the Past from us that we may discover it afresh, and so make it our own. God conceals the Future from us, that it may come, — come through the efforts of thousands of millions of wills co-operating with His own. God conceals His Heaven from us, that we ourselves may build the ladder of high re- solves and noble living on the steps of which our souls shall ascend. Finally, God conceals Himself from us, that we may taste the su- preme joy of discovering that He is every- where and in everything : that "in Him we live and move and have our being." IV GOD INSIDE HIS WOELD GOD INSIDE HIS WOELD Israel was the nursing Mother of the Chris- tian Church. It was a great thing for all the Church's Future. Only thus could the inspi- ration of the Old Testament be added to the New. The two complement each other. What is lacking in one is found in fulness in the other. Protestant Christianity was largely developed from the writings of Paul. You may search the Pauline Epistles from end to end, and you will not find two pas- sages filled with a joyous, ecstatic sense of the glory, the beauty, the divineness of the world. 1 In the whole New Testament, indeed, only Jesus himself, in whom the two Testaments meet, and through whose face, hands, and lips they shine, has that true Poet's feeling of the Divineness of Nature, with which the Psalms are filled to overflowing. "The Earth is the Lord's, and the fulness thereof, the World and they that dwell therein," is the key-note of the noblest Psalms. "Thou coverest Thyself with Light — as with a lOnly 1st Corinthians xv, 41 can be quoted. 61 62 THE SUPREME REALITY garment. Thou spreadest out the Heavens like a Curtain!" And how grandly does all this culminate in the thought of Jesus, who sees God present in all His Creation, and feels His direct benediction in the glowing sunshine and the falling rain; who rejoices to see God's very touch clothing the lily with robes of beauty, and His answering care giv- ing their food to the fowls of the air that cry to Him. The Earth, then, is the Lord's. This is the true statement of a mighty fact. But a morbid pessimism has afflicted the thoughts of mankind from age to age, and has robbed them of the full glory of the World. The Gnostics of the first Christian Centur- ies, expanding a thought found in Plato's Timseus, elaborated a vast scheme of descend- ing orders of Intelligences, reaching from The Infinite down to this common Earth, who un- dertook the necessary, but dirty work of Crea- tion, and so kept the Hands of the Eternal God from dust and soil. Every conceivable solution, except the right and obvious one, has been tried and found wanting. The dreamy Hindoos solved the question, to their own complete satisfaction, by asserting that all we see and call the World is Maya, Illu- GOD INSIDE HIS WOELD 63 sion, which 1 has no existence except in the de- luded mind. To-day, they and their English- speaking followers feel a delightful sense of superiority over us of the West, because they know this, and we do not. Meanwhile, the World persists in staying with us. Part of the superior sanity of the West, indeed, con- sists in its steady grasp of this: and the su- perior power of the West lies wholly in its unrivaled capacity to deal wisely with the tremendous forces imprisoned in Matter. The time is fast approaching when the West, using a truer and deeper, because more scientific metaphysic than theirs, will include all that was true in their vast but vague and misty conceptions, and bring them back to that sense of the deep underlying Reality of Mat- ter which they have so sadly lost. Idealism is a noble word. The true Idealist is a man who cherishes lofty Ideals, one who knows the true relative values of things, one who clearly sees the Divine Reality beneath the show. But with many the Idealist seems to mean one who thinks and speaks moonshiny notions about Space and Time as forms of Thought only, thinks even of this mighty Earth as pure illusion, all ignorant that the Earth is the Lord's. 64 THE SUPREME REALITY The final attempt to protect God from any vulgarly direct contact with the World was made by the pious English Geologists in the second quarter of the 19th Century, who worked out the Theory of Secondary Causes. God, you see, first made the Air, and then made two pairs of human lungs to take air in, etc., etc., and now the whole breathing world of animals runs itself. God willed that atoms and Worlds should gravitate to- wards each other, and now Gravitation itself runs the whole affair. The death-knell of all this sounded when, in the middle of the Cen- tury, it was discovered that there is only One Force, and that all finite Forces are directly derived from that One Force. Now, at last, thoughtful men and women are steadily be- ing brought face to face with the God who is present and active in this, His World, here and now! For that unveiling of God which will come to each of us at Death, we may wait in rest- ful, trustful patience. For that unveiling of God which is perfectly possible here and now, we must watch with steadfast-set and eager expectancy. It may come suddenly, like a rushing, mighty wind ; and its million tongues of flame may light up at once with unimagin- GOD INSIDE HIS WOELD 65 able splendor this great House of the World in which we now are sitting; it may come, as more often, as the result of the slow, steady accumulation of clear thoughts, of high re- solves, of loving feelings, of noble deeds. But one sure note, one clear sign of its coming is that our Earth is now seen to be mystic, wonderful, divine; that the hidden meaning of Land and Sea becomes clearer; that Moun- tain and Valley begin to utter their voices; that the Secret which Day tells to Day, and Night whispers to Night begins to be heard and understood. That Secret is, that God is inside His World; that, age after age, His Spirit, present in each and every part of it, has been clothing Continents and Islands with beauty, and peopling Land and Sea with Life: has been impelling, by His inward im- pulse, flowers to blossom with sweeter fra- grance, trees to expand with statelier growth : animals to move on to larger life and loftier powers; till, at last, we, with human brains and hearts and hands, can not only wonder and adore, but understand and execute the Eternal Will! Here we pass naturally ?o the second and grandest Unveiling of God, in His World; the Presence of God in Man, His Earth-born 66 THE SUPEEME REALITY Child. God is in the World of Men, Women, and Children, inclining their hearts to Truth, Justice and Love. The Divine Spirit is close to every human being, bringing men and women together, bringing in through them the possibility of a better life, intermingling with the very heart-beats of His children. "In thy face I have seen The Eternal," said the dying Bunsen to his beloved wife. In all true, tender, helpful, natural, necessary hu- man relations we are to see The Eternal Spirit, present in all human actions, mingling with all human feelings, a Force of guidance in all human affairs, hindering the evil, en- couraging the good in all men, yet never sup- pressing the human will, never coercing that personality which is the very center and core of human life. It was most unfortunate, though perhaps inevitable, that after three Centuries had passed, the Church set about making a dogma concerning the Holy Spirit, and added it to the Nicene Creed of 325 A. D. The Early Church 1 had the Experience without the Dogma. Too often, since that time, men have had the Dogma without the Experience ! The first Christians had a triple Experience. The first was the Fatherhood of God. Instantly GOD INSIDE HIS WORLD 67 that swept away the Gods and Goddesses of the old Greek and Roman Pantheon. The ■second experience was the love of Jesus and his revealing of the Father's love. The third was the experience of the Holy Spirit. Again and again men and women, roused by the burning words of inspired speakers, felt a sudden divine contagion passing through their hearts, and they saw as never before the wonder of the New Life in God, "The Holy Spirit fell upon all those who heard the Word." They discovered that it was of the very essence of the Holy Spirit to proceed, to pass on through one prepared heart to an- other, and through that other to another, until countless millions feel the sacred impulse. The Holy Spirit is God: but not God in the far-distant Heavens, guiding the sweet in- fluence of the Pleiades, or strengthening the bands of Orion; but God near, God in and around the hearts of men and women and children ; God taking up his abode with men ; God inside the very life of commonplace, nar- row, prejudiced, one-sided people, doing all He can to make their life a little less com- monplace, less narrow, less prejudiced, less one-sided; God content to gain a single inch of progress, if a gain of two inches cannot be 68 THE SUPREME REALITY had ; God waiting in infinite patience for you and me, not even wondering why we are so slow of heart. This is the Power behind and within the Evolution of Man. This is the true process of Incarnation, — of God taking flesh and dwelling among us. The Holy Spirit is my very own, your very own ; for the Holy Spirit is God in direct, closest contact with you. That portion of the Eternal Truth and Righteousness and Love which you personally need is forever your very own. It surrounds you at all hours, and at all hours is at your beck and call. If you long to think a good thought in the middle of the night, there is your own Holy Spirit about your bed, ready to help you to think it. If you long to take the next step in the onward life, there is the Holy Spirit at your side, help- i n g y° u to take it, showing you the Path of Life, and leading you into the Way Everlast- ing. But now an earnest word to eager, youthful enthusiasts who are just beginning to fill the places which we of the swiftly passing genera- tion are leaving. We of the passing genera* tion have done some great things in our day. Born in a petty world that was made not six thousand years ago, and was doomed to GOD INSIDE HIS WORLD 69 perish utterly in a few short years, we hand down to you a Vast World with aeons of Time behind it and Time illimitable before it. There is Time enough to solve all problems, to dispel all ignorances, to cure all hurts, to heal all diseases, to reconcile all antagonisms, to put down all hatreds, to bring in all truth and right and love. Born into a world cursed by its Maker from the beginning, we hand down to you a World on which the smile of God rests, and which His benignant Presence fills. Born into a world the vast majority of whose inhabitants were doomed to Eternal Damnation, we were content to be damned, if our vision of the Love Eternal were untrue. Yea, rather, we insisted on being damned, if God were Devil. At bitter cost, we hand down to you a whole Human Race to work for and to love, a race of noble equals, a race of God's beloved Children. With a great sum we pur- chased this freedom. But you are free- born! Born under the yoke of an infallible Bible, whose worst texts were used to crush out the noblest hopes of men, and whose most glorious utterances were explained away so as to mean nothing at all, we hand to you a Bible whose grandest inspirations are your own, a Bible which you are to interpret in 70 THE SUPREME REALITY accordance with your highest thought and feeling. You are free to accept all in it that quickens, enlarges and ennobles; to reject all that seems to you poor, mean, unworthy. Born into a world where the oppression of man by man was around us everywhere, we dared to brave peril and wounds and death, that you, our beloved children, might be wholly free. I used to think that our great experiences could not be duplicated and that you, our own children, would be forced to live without the inspiration of our sublimest moments. I for- got that God, the Inspirer of all noble enthu- siasms, would be with you as He was with us, and would be ready to give you new tasks in a new World, new glories of achievement that shall outshine the old. Some may exclaim "How can this be?" Well! we had this Treasure in Earthen Ves- sels. Our tasks were large and noble, but too often our conception of them was vague and indistinct, and therefore our attempts to perform those tasks were feeble and ineffec- tual. It was tragic, for instance, that the Anti-Slavery Society disbanded the moment the War for Freedom was ended, just at the very moment when the real task of helping GOD INSIDE HIS WOULD 71 each black man to be really free had only just begun ! We loved the Slave at a distance ; we had never come into direct contact with him. The North in general knew nothing of the real, urgent needs of the ex-slave; and the tragic death of Lincoln, friend of North and South alike, of Lincoln, the only man in high places who did know, left the field open to ignorant and self-conceited doctrinaires, or selfish and stupid carpet-baggers. Such men have left a terrible mark in our History ; and the mischief they did is not yet undone. Such men as General Armstrong, in our genera- tion, and Booker Washington in yours, have only made a noble beginning in the work set to you to finish. What is to be the secret of your success? What is the secret of their success? They have helped the Black Man by getting into the closest possible contact with him, by touching his sore need with their own hands, by living in close touch with his present condition, by being with him night and day. In each case of human misery you must first find out the facts, and then come as near as possible to your poor brothers whose sad surroundings weigh them down. Knowledge of the actual conditions comes first, then 72 THE SUPREME REALITY comes nearness, and ever nearer nearness ; till their lives and jours meet and mingle ! A charming legend of the Middle Ages tells the whole story. The Monk Bernard was a noble, pious soul, who had learned from Jesus himself how to love his brother to the uttermost. But, alas! he wrote a book which the Church condemned as heretical, full of true Religion though it was. He died before he could be absolved, and so, of course, went at once to Hell. There Satan, somewhat perplexed, looked him over and put him into the very mildest Hell he had. But at once Reform began in that department of Satan's Dominions. Prayer and Thanksgiving began to rise from the poor wounded hearts around Trim . So Satan plunged him into Hells ever lower and lower, but always with the same effect, for uplifting set in wherever Bernard was. At last Satan plunged him into the very lowest Hell of all, where the fires of Hate burn unceasingly. But, lo! out of that bottomless Pit of Hate, and Rage, and Despair, arose the plaintive cry, "Out of the Depths have I cried unto Thee, O Lord! Lord, hear my voice!" And the awful Fires began to burn low, and Hate grew less, and black Despair began to hope! GOD INSIDE HIS WORLD 73 And so, says the legend, Satan took him to the Gates of Heaven, and declared to Peter, guardian of the blessed portals, "Take this man you must, for if I keep him there will not be any Hell at all very soon." What was Bernard's great secret? It was, in one word, Nearness. By being there with them, Ber- nard got as near as possible to those poor lost ruined Souls. They could feel his very heart beat for them. They could see his lov- ing eye, feel the touch of his kindly hand, and hear from his own lips the words of Eternal Life. Thus, and thus only, will you and your children redeem the World! V THE SOUL IN HISTORY, B. G. THE SOUL IN HISTORY, B. O. The Soul in History! The Record of the passage of the Soul of Man through all the byways and wildernesses and quagmires and gloomy forests and rocky passes and rough ascents of the World, till it comes at last to the "Shining Table-lands, Where God Himself for aye is Moon and Sun," this is our splendid theme. What poet of the Soul, though all entranced with his thought, could ever dare to feel that he could do aught but catch some few glimpses from afar of the pathos, the heart-break, the splendor, the final triumph of the Journey? The beginnings of the Kingdom of God on Earth must be looked for in the Animal World, ages before Man. In the first chap- ters of Genesis in the Bible of the World it is written that the first poor cockle that sheltered her children inside her own shell, and kept them safe folded from harm in her 77 78 THE SUPREME REALITY own soft tissues, bore within that shell the sacred germ of "Mother-love" (the strongest thing in the World) ; and when the first weak and timorous hen-bird forgot all her fears, and with splendid courage fought against the cruel hawk in defense of her young, then in- deed the Heart of God Himself had begun to descend into His World, conquering and to conquer. Science, poetry, and religion are just begin- ning to write the wonderful Chapters which tell of the Divine Impulse moving in the breasts of the Animal World, creating per- ception and feeling as it moves, evolving by slow degrees, through the consenting and co- operating wills of the animals themselves, organs fitted for the comprehension and re- ception of the forces that are forever acting through earth and heaven. Keen eyes, quick ears, sensitive nerves, powerful lungs, are al- ready organized, prepared for the Man that is to come. Of old the dark saying went forth that in the body of a Man the fulness of the Godhead would be pleased to dwell. Al- ready is the wondrous mammal body pre- pared for Man, with its amazing complexity, its astonishing adaptation to the Earth it is to govern, which Animal Life had slowly THE SOUL IN HISTORY, B. O. 79 builded. The simple truth is, that the grand lines of the Body were already laid down in the animal Ages. Savage man, barbaric man, civilized man, have all worked on those lines ; and even now the complete human body is not yet builded. We are still at work building this living temple of God, but long ages must elapse before its final dedication and consecration. But what a house for the Soul is already gained! Already the Creative Spirit, work- ing in and through and with the cooperation of trillions on trillions of animal and human organisms, has attuned every fiber of the hu- man body to the life of the World; has strictly correlated every sense to the sensible objects in the world ; has matched eyes to light and ears to air, has made ready the subtle brain-tissues, with their millions of sensi- tive molecules, to report the impressions made upon them by millions of objects ; and, above all, has attuned the whole bodily structure to the incredibly complex emotions of human so- ciety. It is wrong thinking, and wrong feel- ing also, to suppose that only the animal ap- petites and passions belong to the Body, and that all the higher manifestations of Life be- long exclusively to the Soul. A complete hu- 80 THE SUPREME REALITY man body clothes completely the developed human soul. The vocal cords can vibrate to the divinest emotions; who would not have loved to hear the embodied tenderness in the voice of Jesus as he uttered the Beatitudes? The healing touch in the hands of Jesus gave fit expression to the compassion he felt for all human suffering. The millions of changes in the convolutions of the brain are competent to translate into word-pictures the thoughts and feelings of the highest archangel. The book of Exodus in the Bible of the World contains the record of the passage from the animal to the human. This amazing journey was taken by primitive Man. The journey was long, and it took weary ages to complete it. Had it not been accomplished, Mankind could have had no future, and Man's Soul no history. Words cannot paint the un- fathomable ignorance and the thousand haunt- ing fears, born of ignorance, which beset and bewildered and sapped the courage of prime- val Man. He dreaded the lightning and the thunder; he dreaded the heat and the cold; he dreaded the gloom of the forest and the solemn stillness of the mountain. Above all, he dreaded the dark. Night to him was full of horrors. The wild beasts howled around his THE SOUL IN HISTORY, B. O. 81 cave, his human enemies stole noiselessly through the dark to leap upon him and his; while innumerable superstitious terrors made his heart tremble and his hair stand on end. How knowledge and light and leading ever began at all seems an almost insoluble mys- tery. Leave out the Divine Guidance, the Eternal Heart of Pity, the Everlasting Arms folded over, around, and underneath the prim- itive man, His unconscious child, and the mys- tery would be utterly unsolvable. What do we see, just as the long night is passing, and just as the early day is beginning to dawn upon that primeval world? First, Man has already discovered that he is a social being. That savage man who refused to share his tools, his spoils, his cave with others died and left no descendants. The first law of the Everlasting Gospel was pressed upon the early men with compelling force, "No man liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself." The first great school for social duty was the tribe. The unstinted praise of his fellows came to a man when he did some brave deed that helped or saved or glorified his tribe. To watch, to fight, to die in its de- fense was beautiful, was heroic. That hero- ism was the parent of all heroisms to come. 82 THE SUPREME REALITY Expand it, and it becomes patriotism. It is Leonidas and his three hundred smiling at death. Expand it yet further, and it becomes Man's duty to his race. It is Howard plung- ing into the filthy dungeons of the world in search of the souls of his brothers. Expand it to the uttermost, and it is Jesus on the Cross, tasting death for every man, past, pres- ent, and to be. The tap-root of the first great human sanctity goes down deep into the buried soil of the primitive ages. The second of the two great sanctities de- veloped by the primitive man was the sanctity of the Soul, and its continued life after death. The spirits of their ancestors kept watch and ward over the tribe, and it was a spur to every man to believe that a brave deed done for the tribe met their approval ; and it took away the fear of death to feel that, if worthy, he himself would be permitted to join their sacred company. It is wonderful to discover that no savage tribe exists that has not a forefeeling of the life beyond this life. Ages before the dawn of history, Man had discovered that he had a soul, or rather was a soul, and that when his body fell to dust his soul lived on. Student of primitive man ! Be sure that you are on the THE SOUL IN HISTORY, B. O. 83 wrong track, if you try to resolve into mist and dream the imperious yearning of his heart to feel and know that his beloved dead are not lost, "not spilt like water on the ground," but still live and love in the Land whither his own footsteps are surely tending. The environing facts of the Universe forever press upon all men, demanding recognition. This central fact pressed upon the brain and heart of the primitive man, and his simple faith in the abiding sanctity of the Soul was the result. The Eternal Goodness sur- rounded the bereaved hearts of our primitive fathers, and gave them peace. "Whoso is wise will consider these things; and he will understand the loving-kindness of the Lord." The evolution of the human race is abso^ lutely continuous, and goes on from genera- tion to generation without a break. The an- cient classic civilizations proceed on the lines the Primitive Man had laid down. The tribal organization is still distinctly seen, underly- ing the larger life now on its way. Israel, to the last, found the old tribal bond too strong. The genius of David made Israel a nation for a few brief years. But soon the tribes part, never to unite again. Greece, with all her genius, failed in nation-making 84 THE SUPEEME REALITY from the self-same cause. Rome alone suc- ceeded in the mighty task. To Rome, then, as its best and completest example, we must look for the next stage of development on primitive lines. Rome, by slow degrees, ex- panded the sanctity of the tribe, the grandest human unit of the primitive world, into the sanctity of the State, the vastest and the most complex human unit that even yet has power to move in united force and passion many millions of men together. Side by side with this, the Roman kept inviolate the sanctity of the Soul, the precious treasure which the Primitive World won for all Time. Upon the foundation of these two, he developed a third and kindred Sanctity, — the sanctity of the Home. Primitive man had made many at- tempts at this ; but in Rome the Home stands at last complete. The Roman owed it to the State to marry, for the State needed new de- fenders when he was gone. He owed it to the guardian spirits of his house, for the Altar sacred to them was the family hearth, and that altar needed a priestess as well as a priest. Ten witnesses were always present at a Roman marriage representing the State. The priest, after a solemn invocation, gave the bride and bridegroom a sacred cake to eat to- THE SOUL IN HISTORY, B. O. 85 getter, the sacramental pledge of their mutual fidelity; and then the bride pronounced the fateful words, "Where thou art Caius, there am I Caia!" It was the duty of the new husband to see that his bride was taught at once the secret rites by which his own household gods were worshiped ; for on the morning after the mar- riage it was her duty to pay them fitting hom- age. To illustrate, you are the daughter of a Marcellus. You therefore inherit the worship of the household deities of the house of Mar- cellus. But you marry a Claudius. You have now become the priestess of your hus- band's house; and it becomes his duty to in- struct you, without a moment's delay, in the secret rites by which the household gods of a Claudius are invoked. The one secret, which he never dares to ask, and you never dare to tell, is the secret worship of the Mar- celli. That goes with you to your grave. Whatever dowry your father gave you belongs to you and your husband. But he cannot give you his landed property; for that belongs to the house of Marcellus, and is made sacred and inviolable by the spirits of the ancestors of the house, whom you no longer worship. "The property goes with the worship." The 86 THE SUPREME REALITY rights of property were sacred, guarded by the spirits of those ancestors, whose tomb in the midst of the property made it sacred. The supreme importance attached to these private sacra can be judged by a few instances. When the Gauls had burned Rome (B. C. 390) and were besieging the Capitol, the day came when it was the duty of C. Fabius Dorso, one of its defenders, to worship the Gods of his house. 1 Olad in pure white, and all weaponless, bearing his offerings in his hands, he set forth alone. The hosts of Gaul won- dered as he came; but when they saw his errand, they stood aside, and he passed un- harmed between their serried ranks, and, his sacred office ended, returned unharmed as he came. The awe of the Spirit-world fell on the Gauls also. When, in Rome's greatest agony, Fabius Maximus, flower of that great house, who pre- served the Republic "by delay," was warily avoiding a battle against the invincible Han- nibal and enlisting Time on the side of Rome, the day came when he, too, had to give special honor to the gods of his house in Rome itself. He knew, and all knew, that he was risking the very existence of Rome in so doing. But itivy. v, 46. THE SOUL IN HISTORY, B. O. 87 he and all men knew that he was bound to act thus by the most sacred and awful of obliga- tions. When a great Etruscan war threatened them the Romans resolved to sacrifice to Hercules, the strongest of the Gods. But the secret of his worship was confined to two fam- ilies in Rome, the Potitii and the Pinarii, who, before Rome was, were present when Hercules himself sacrificed the oxen of the Sun on the Palatine Hill. The Pinarii, how- ever, came late on that occasion. Ever after, century after century, it became their duty to come late to the place of worship. (Their descendants are now as the sand on the sea- shore for multitude!) So the Potitii alone knew the whole ritual, and the Censor, Ap- pius Claudius, offered the thirty adult males of the Potitian gens a large sum of money for their secret. They accepted, and in one year those thirty men were all dead. Their sacri- lege killed them! The fourth great sanctity is the supreme sanctity of the Divine. The vague awe, the incipient worship of the Power manifested in and by the encircling Universe is now de- veloped into a complete and rounded whole, which includes all things visible and invisible. Heaven guards the State, and Heaven judges 88 THE SUPREME REALITY it. A treaty was a sacred act, performed in the sight of Heaven as witness, "If the Roman people, O Jupiter greatest and best," said the officiating priest, "fail to perform their part in this sacred treaty, then do Thou, with Thy thunderbolts, strike them as I strike this hog." And, at the word, with the sacred flint-stone he crushed the victim's skull. The word fas (divine right) was pregnant with meaning to a Roman. Fas guarded the rights of the poor man, the stranger, and the slave. "Tell the Senate," said Jupiter to a poor workman in a dream, "that the Great Games must be celebrated all over again ; for I saw a dancing I did not like." When the poor man tremblingly had told his story, awe fell on the Senate, when they discovered that, on the morning of the Day sacred to glad- ness and thanksgiving, a master had whipped his woman-slave across the Forum. That cruel act tainted the whole festival. If you say, "But he was a Polytheist!" I answer Yes! it was in that fashion our forefathers felt their way to the Divine. But they were grateful for Sun, Moon, and Stars ; for spring and summer, for vintage and for harvest; for the immense Bounty that crowned their days. If in all these things you are less grateful than THE SOUL IN HISTORY, B. O. 89 they were, then you yourself are farther from the Source of Blessing than they were. The Roman house-father in the best days of the Republic, — the days of Fabius and Scipio, — a citizen in the noblest sense, every fiber in his body, every thought in his mind belonging to his country, priest and lord of a well-ordered, dutiful, and happy home, his wife its honored priestess, his children its jewels ; filled with a loving awe of those guard- ian spirits of his house whose blood flowed in his own veins; filled with unutterable rever- ence for the Powers of Heaven, who guarded his fields and blessed his seed-time and har- vest, who guarded the State and gave strength and courage to its defenders, the Powers who punished the wrong and rewarded the Right in this world and the next: — this was the strongest man on the Planet, and therefore to him, by right divine, came power over men. But when the gathered wealth of the East, its soul-destroying luxury, its abandoned self- indulgence, were poured into Rome like a flood; and when the subtle Greek Skepticism, the deadly foe of all noble faiths and enthusi- asms, undermined and turned into ridicule the Roman's most sacred beliefs, then a sud- 90 THE SUPREME REALITY den and appalling decadence in the Roman character set in. For hundreds of years a divorce was a thing unheard of in the Roman Republic. But now an age of license began. Men and women absolutely refused to be married with the old sacred rites which made marriage indissolu- ble. The sanctity of the Family being gone, the sanctity of the State — the sacred duty to Rome — soon began to follow, and each selfish noble began to clutch all he could for himself, regardless of the general ruin. The belief in Man's Soul, and its continued life after death, to the cultivated Roman became a fable, and the presence and guardianship and justice of Heaven a myth; and the four great human sanctities, which bind men into communities, were gone. Under such conditions, a success- ful Republic was impossible, and a military despotism became a necessity. It is a warn- ing for all time, — a special warning to us of to-day. What saved society from utter wreck? It was in part the infusion of new and uncor- rupted blood that came through the Teutonic races. It was largely the reinforcement of the old sanctities from a higher standpoint, which was brought in by Christianity. The THE SOUL IN HISTOKY, B. O. 91 Stoic philosophy, the sworn foe of the shal- low Greek skepticism, saved a noble few. It was Christianity that brought in a truer, purer life for the many. Henceforth the Western World dates not from B. C. but from A.D. VI THE SOUL IN HISTORY, A. D. THE SOUL IN HISTOEY, A. D. The religion that sprang from the mind and heart of Jesus was the Religion of his own life. It was his Religion, — was the way he himself looked at things, the way he thought and felt about things. Looking upward, he saw that God is Our Father, looking around, he saw that Man is Our Brother. Feeling his own Sonship, he felt ours. Feeling his own brotherly tenderness, he laid the foundation of an universal Brotherhood. The Kingdom of God he preached was the property of every one who accepted and rejoiced in this sonship and this brotherhood. Whoso loved it entered at once into the Kingdom of love. At first, this religion was without a name. It existed nameless, but strong, tender, and true, — a hope, a joy, a Divine guidance, — in his own heart, and in the hearts of those who loved him and it ; but when it became increas- ingly evident that vast numbers of men and women longed to look at things as Jesus looked, and to feel about things in the way 95 96 THE SUPREME REALITY Jesus felt, his disciples began to call it The Way! the Way of Life. But in the outside world this new movement gave birth to a new and more definite name, which was finally adopted by its friends, — Christianity, or the Religion of Jesus, the Christ. To-day its sound has gone out to all lands, and its words to the ends of the World. It is of the various transformations which this Re- ligion of Jesus has undergone in its passage through the World that we are now to think. The Divine Spirit, of necessity, pours itself into the mold of the Times, takes the shape of the Times. If the mold is Greek Thought, the Spirit suffuses Greek Thought, ennobles Greek Thought; but its manifestation is al- ways modified by Greek Thought. In Me- dieval Times, the mold is Medieval. Medieval Catholicism is the legitimate outcome of Christianity in medieval times. The Religion of Jesus is pre-eminently a re- ligion of Conduct, of Character. Its main business is to teach you and me how to feel and to act towards God and our fellowmen. Its fundamental Law, in the space of a single century, went round the civilized Roman world. To-day we have its essential features THE SOUL IN HISTORY, A. D. 97 in the Sermon on the Mount; but if Matthew and Luke were lost to-day, sunk under the sea, it could be recovered from the pages of Jus- tin Martyr. Summed up in Twentieth Century language, the substance of the great Code is as follows : 1. The Author of the Universe is the Father of Men. 2. The Law of the Universe is the Law of the Life of its Author. 3. That Life is One, and has One Principle, and One only ; which is blessing, and blessing, and for evermore blessing. 4. All finite lives, living as they do in the midst of the Infinite Life, must make the Law of that Life the law of their own. Living thus, they themselves become part of the bless- ing. Theirs is the Blessed Life. Theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. 5. To all who live otherwise, and as long as they live otherwise, discord and misery will of necessity come. The Law of Blessing sur- rounding them can never alter, and will for- ever come into collision with the law of hate and cursing within them. 6. The conflict of Love and Hate, of cursing and blessing, will only cease when all men have learned to love and help their fellow- 98 THE SUPREME REALITY men. The Gospel of Good Tidings must first be preached to all the World, and then be obeyed by all the World. All true souls must enlist for life in the ever-increasing Army of the Kingdom of Good, which goes ever forward to put down all wrong, and bring in the reign of Right. This Jesus saw, preached, lived and loved; for this he died; and his sublime legacy to the whole World is this. Instantly the new Law began to produce new conduct. The thoughtful men of the Roman world were amazed to find suddenly appearing in their midst thousands of chaste, pure, tender Chris- tian matrons, and thousands of pure and high- minded Christian men. It was the wonderful charm of the New Conduct that won the world to its side. It was too good to last. Of it the world was not worthy, is not yet worthy. Too soon, alas ! we arrive at the first Transformation of Christianity, which is. I. From Conduct, from Character, to Be- lief. The keen-witted, subtle Greek mind found itself at home at once in making word-defini- tions of the new life; and very soon belief about the life began to usurp the place of the THE SOUL IN HISTORY, A. D. 99 life itself. Remember always that Conduct was never wholly banished from the Church, even in its worst days. The life and mind and character of Jesus were elements too potent to be juggled away by any form of words. Indeed, the change from conduct to belief took well-nigh three centuries; so stub- born a thing did the life-element prove to be. Certainly, it went on with increasing velocity when once Christianity cut loose from Israel, who had been drilled in conduct, taught to consider her ways for a thousand years, and fell into the hands of the Greek, — the intel- lectual, philosophical Greek; who, alas! in Conduct was all undrilled. It is a supremely significant fact, that for the great, epoch-making Laws of Conduct, — those Laws whose promulgation started the New Life, — we must go to the first three Gos- pels. The Fourth Gospel is already more than halfway to the great transformation. It is belief, belief about Jesus, belief that he is the only begotten Son, belief that God sent him into the world that those who believe on him should not perish, but have everlasting life, which is the very heart and core of the Fourth Gospel. In the Fourth Gospel, the Greek mind first 100 THE SUPREME REALITY distinctly influences Christianity for weal and for woe. That wonderful critical intelli- gence, which had to work, whether there was sufficient material to work upon or not, which was by nature scientific, in an age when scien- tific facts were all too few, found its most congenial work in systematizing and defining the new Faith. The work of two centuries culminated in the Nicene Creed, which is the masterpiece of ancient Christian thinking. In it are contained the germs of a true gene- alogy of the Immortal Soul of Man. Begot- ten, not made, of one substance with the Father, God out of God, Light out of Light, very God out of very God, — all this, which the sacred instinct of their highest thought af- firmed of Jesus is ideally true of Man. It was a great intellectual, spiritual achievement; but, — mark it well, — in all that Creed there is not one word about Conduct, not one life-di- rection to a single human Soul ! The Nicene Creed was formulated in A. D. 325 and Christianity, minus Conduct, minus Character, became the State Religion of the Roman Empire. The result was the most shameful, most humiliating, most degraded era of all Christian History. Now the Church had its grand opportunity for Uni- THE SOUL IN HISTORY, A. D. 101 versal Uplift ! But no Uplift came ! Not only did the Church show itself totally incap- able of bringing a higher standard of Social Morals into the Empire, but the morals of the Church itself became more and more corrupt. Year after year, more and more refined defini- tions of the Faith were invented; and the discoverers persecuted, imprisoned, assassin- ated those who refused to accept the last re- finement of definition ; and it seemed as if the Faith itself would be lost to the World through the crimes and follies of those who insisted that they were its chosen defenders. Vilest, perhaps, of all these Defenders of the Faith was Cyril of Alexandria, in whose time and in whose person the evil Age culminated. Cyril became Patriarch of Alexandria in A. D. 412. Alexandria, for centuries, had been the very center of the World's culture, renowned for her Astronomers, her Scholars, her great University, her magnificent and world-famous Library. She was equally famous for her great Christian Theologians, her brightest names being Clement and Origen, the great- est, most learned, most industrious, most in- spiring, most humane of all the Fathers of the Church. Cyril's title to fame is that he put an end to all this, made Alexandria a desola- 102 THE SUPREME EEALITY tion, and typed in his own person the most shameful Age of the Church. Cyril was a great Organizer. He organized an army of Ruffians, — not to defend the great Roman Empire in its sore need ; — Oh no ! but to defend the Faith ! He and his Army first expelled from Alexandria the Novatians, a set of pestilent heretics, who actually presumed to be more orthodox and more particular in receiving backsliders into the fold than the orthodox Cyril himself! He seized all their Churches and church property, and so stopped effectually their impudent conceit. Next he and his Army assailed the Jewish Synagogues, drove thousands of Jews from the city, pillaged their houses, and annexed their property, thus gaining "the sinews of war" for the Holy Cause. He won a mighty triumph for the Faith by egging on his follow- ers to murder Hypatia, — Hypatia pure and beautiful, the eloquent expounder of the Neo- Platonic philosophy. But perhaps the great- est of his triumphs was the excommunication, expulsion and exile of Nestorius, the Patriarch of Constantinople, because Nestorius refused to make use of the new title just invented for Mary, the mother of Jesus, "The Mother of God!" THE SOUL IN HISTORY, A. D. 103 Such was Cyril, Saint Cyril, famous for his immortal defense of the Holy Trinity! He died in the odor of sanctity A. D. 444, just when the Eoman Empire itself was dying. What saved the Church in this evil time from utter death? The sword of the Barbarians, the sword of such men as Alaric the Goth, and Attila the Hun. The destroyers of the Roman Empire were the deliverers of the Church. In the midst of the universal misery the Church became alive once more. The Spirit of Jesus came back' to her; for Conduct, Character came once more to the front. And now her wonderfully perfect organiza- tion was turned from a curse into a blessing. When the great flood of Barbarism overthrew all the towers of Roman Civilization, the Church, purified by affliction, rebaptized into the spirit of Jesus, stood erect. When the waters began to abate, she went to work at once, the guardian of order, the fearless pro- tector of the weak, the hope and promise of a better day. Then the monasteries poured forth an army of workers for the Good Cause, ready to fight for it, ready to die for it, if need- ful. We owe a mighty debt to the ascetic monks of the West. They rechristianized Europe. 104 THE SUPREME REALITY They went everywhere, and spread a true Life- Gospel wherever they went. Eastern asceti- cism fasted and wept, saw visions, prophesied, and worked miracles, until the day when the warriors of Islam swept it away. Western asceticism worked and built, turned the des- ert into a garden, dignified labor, uplifted the poor, and planted the seeds of the higher Civi- lizations yet to be. The mighty organization of the Church was the same in all the Western World. It built the Cathedrals. It founded the Universities. It taught the Scholars. It preserved for all time the precious remains of ancient thought. In the Middle Ages this wonderful system reached its acme of perfection. How strong it was is shown by the time it lasted. When Columbus had discovered America, the system remained unbroken. It gave the Pope, Alexander VI, — perhaps the most frankly dis- solute mortal that ever sat in the Papal Chair, — power enough to divide the heathen World into two hemispheres, by a line drawn through mid Atlantic from pole to pole, and to give away the Eastern half to Portugal, and the Western to Spain ! Three-fourths of Man- kind were thus given away by the lifting of one Man's hand! THE SOUL IN HISTORY, A. D. 105 But in a few years from this very act there came the second Transformation of Christian- ity — the Reformation. That brought to the front a great force in human nature which the Church had steadily kept in the hack- ground, — kept, rather, under lock and key, — the Right of Private Judgment in things con- cerning the Soul. The particular conclusions of the Reform- ers are not worth very much. Luther's con- ception of the World of Man and Nature is as far away from us as that of his Catholic opponents. In an antagonistic age, things will always be put in antagonistic fashion, — that is, in a one-sided fashion. But the Re- formers, one and all, began to exercise their private judgment. The first exercise of pri- vate judgment is sure to be crude, narrow, im- perfect; but use strengthens faculty, and the widely-spread use of private judgment starts a new epoch. Luther setting up himself as a private pope in matters of doctrine is a sorry sight enough; but Luther resolving to translate the Bible into his beloved German tongue, without ask- ing leave or license from any man under heaven, prompted only by the longings of his own great heart to open the gates of righteous- 106 THE SUPREME REALITY ness to his own dear countrymen, gives an epoch-making moment to the history of Man's Soul. From Luther's day till now the right of the individual to his own beliefs has won its way, step by step, until at last it stands ac- knowledged by all thinking men and women. Protestant historians seem to start with the assumption that the doctrines of the Reform- ers, taken as a whole, are vastly superior to the doctrines of the Roman Catholics. In most instances the reverse is the case. We may say, indeed, that, at first, private judg- ment is sure to give, as it gave then, much poorer and more one-sided results than the im- personal public judgment, which has grown imperceptibly for a thousand years. Most of the criticisms of the Reformers on that public judgment were captious and narrow. Justifi- cation by faith without works is a far nar- rower thought than Faith that works by Love. Eternal punishment, beginning at once and irrevocably after the moment of death, was a sorry substitute for that benef- icent Purgatory, whose pains and fires would at last make a much larger number fit for the bliss of Heaven. Why we ought never to pray for our loved ones on the other side of THE SOUL IN HISTORY, A. D. 107 the Great River, while we ought always to pray for our loved ones on this side, I am constitutionally unable to see. Oannot the swift Spirit of God convey the force of the one just as swiftly, as surely, as tenderly as the force of the other? The sudden desertion of Mariolatry was no unmixed good, if men saw less of divine and motherly tenderness en- throned in Heaven ! Nevertheless, the Reformation was an epoch-making event. Men, as individuals, had first to dare to think, then to learn to think, and then to learn to think better by thinking on the mistakes of their previous thinking. God always sends us our new blessings before we are fit to receive them. The possession of the new blessing is the only way to learn its use. No slave was ever fit for freedom. Only the possession of freedom can make the man fit to use it. The wonderful freedom of thought which we ourselves enjoy to-day is the lineal descendant of those very thoughts of the Reformers which would have consigned us and our freedom of thought to perdition. Century by century the thoughts of men have been widened by the process of thinking, until one more transfor- mation, and the last, is even now preparing. 108 THE SUPEEME REALITY ' The last Transformation of Christianity will be its transformation into the universal Religion of Mankind. This transformation is going on before our very eyes. Every cordial, outspoken recognition of a common Christian- ity felt and expressed by the leaders of once warring and hostile sects helps to bring to- gether all who love the Religion of Jesus, and makes it easier for us all to work together. Only a few years ago the Japanese converts sent a pitiful letter to the various Churches of the West, telling with what joy they had received the Religion of Jesus, and how they now found that each sect claimed to be its truest exponent. They asked, Which Chris- tianity are we to take? Catholic or Protes- tant? Episcopal, Baptist, Methodist, Pres- byterian, Unitarian? "Our poor little Church is being torn to pieces between you!" But what a different spirit is manifested in the missionary world to-day ! Not till we all can gladly proclaim a common Christianity, of which each sect is only a part, can we march together to Conquer the World. But this is only one side of our great task. We must cordially, lovingly, joyously recog- nize the divine side of religions not our own. If we count Judaism as the precursor, the THE SOUL IN HISTORY, A. D. 109 prophetic fore-runner, the nursing-mother of Christianity, there are three religions, and three only, which claim to be World-Religions, — the three "Missionary Religions," Bud- dhism, Christianity, Mohammedanism. Is any one of these destined to absorb the other two? Let us see. All religions are incomplete and therefore incapable of including all mankind, which do not include adoring recognition of the Infinite surrounding Life that fills the Universe, which do not reveal The Father, which do not give to Man the dignity of a divine Sonship. Here lies the fatal defect of Buddhism. It is tragic to think that Buddha in his glorious and persistent efforts to help and save Man- kind could never see that a Tenderness, a Love greater than his own kept coming in upon him, helping him to pity, to love, and to help. All religions are incomplete, and therefore incapable of including all Mankind, which do not include an ideal devotion to Man as Man, without any limitation of Creed. Herein lies the fatal defect of Mohammedanism. It is tragic to think that Mohammed, filled as he was with awestruck adoration of the One Su- preme, should have taught his followers to 110 THE SUPREME REALITY hate the unbelievers who refused to accept his religion. To sum up, all religions are incomplete which do not include Fatherhood, Sonship, and Brotherhood. Christianity alone proclaims all three; and these are the three essentials of a World-Religion. Will Christianity, then, absorb ltd two other great Religions? In one sense, yes! as one complete analysis includes and brings to an end two partial analyses, each of which contains a necessary part of the whole. In another, and much deeper sense, no! and again no ! A World-Christianity needs a whole World of men and women eager for a higher life. Millions of Buddhists and Mo- hammedans have been prepared by their re- ligion to feel this eagerness. If the Bud- dhists will contribute to the World-Religion more love-force than the Christians, theirs will be the dominant Love-Force in the World-Re- ligion. A Buddhist, if you tell him of in- finite compassion for all beings, will assent at once. He, — and he is many millions, — will add to this side of World-Religion the glorious contribution of a prepared heart, a compas- sion and a natural gift of sympathy j^hich it has taken more than two thousand years to THE SOUL IN HISTORY, A. D. Ill develop. Other things being equal, the num- ber of tender, compassionate souls, and the in<- tensity and force of that tenderness and com- passion, will measure the amount of this precious Life-Force contributed by the Bud- dhists to the great all inclusive World-Reli- gion. A Mohammedan, again, if you speak to him of God's Will, and of perfect submission to that Perfect Will, assents at once. He, — and he is many millions, — will add to the great World-Religion the positive contribution of a vast multitude of men who are already pre- pared to submit to the Will of God, when once that Will is known. Islam, indeed, means the religion of those who submit to God. If Islam will contribute to the World-Religion a mightier mass of will-force prepared to obey the perfect Divine Will than Christendom can give, then Islam will make the largest con- tribution of the much-needed Will-Force to World-Religion. But I hazard little in saying, that in spite of the innumerable follies, crimes, blind preju- dices, and yet blinder conceits that have af- flicted Christendom, there is to-day a great preponderance of capacity in Christendom to guide Mankind toward a nobler Future, a 112 THE SUPREME EEALITY much greater power to wisely, temperately, yet firmly criticise the sacred writings and in- stitutions of the Past, including their own, a vastly greater scientific knowledge of the Uni- verse and its forces, and, finally, a vastly greater comprehension of what the Will of God is, and what Man's duty to Man is. These three, then, — Buddha, Jesus, Moham- med, — are the three great religious leaders of the World, but Jesus stands in the midst. When Jesus says Blessed are the Merciful, the face of Buddha lights up with a heavenly smile. When Jesus prays, "Not my will, but Thine be done!" the stern face of Mohammed softens into awestruck adoration of the One Supreme Will. But Jesus alone unites the Two Great Commandments into One Heavenly Life, which shall one day be the Life of the all-inclusive World-Religion. VII ZOKOASTER ZOROASTER A few years ago, the cricketers of England received a delightful visit from the Parsee Eleven of Bombay. They rightly expected great things; for "Ranji," as cricketers loved to call him, otherwise Prince Ranjitsinhji, had there been developed into the finest batsman in the World, scoring, as he did, when a stu- dent of Trinity College, Cambridge, 2780 runs in a season, surpassing the record of W. G. Grace himself ! To-day we have to know him as "The Jam Sahib of Nawanagar!" But he keeps on scoring his Century just the same ! Now the Parsees of Bombay are well known as the most energetic, most trustworthy, most generous, most philanthropic of all the citi- zens of Bombay. Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy, whose whole career reads like a Romance, from a poor boy became the leading merchant of India and its greatest philanthropist. His life, so noble, and so powerful in its in- fluence, made him the head of all the Parsees in the World. This title is now hereditary. Now all the Parsees are disciples of Zoroaster. 115 116 THE SUPREME EEALITY I can frame an Imaginary Conversation be- tween a thoughtful member of the England Eleven, and one of the Parsee Eleven whom he is entertaining at his own house. They go to the Library after dinner, and the English- man says: "Have you any objection to telling me something about your Religion? Some of our men think you believe in two Gods, a good God and a bad one. Are they wrong?" "They are indeed. We believe in one In- finitely wise and good God. But we believe that there is an age-long struggle within the Soul of Man between Good and Evil. You personify the Evil Principle as Satan, the Devil; we, as Ahriman. But we know that the Fight is a very long one. To-day we have 300 millions of people in Hindustan, most of whom believe in some 30 millions of gods and goddesses, many of them of very question- able morals. The rule of England, of which all Parsees are loyal subjects, has given the first chance of better things for hundreds of years. But it will take us thousands of years to win the fight. We look over the wide world, and see that the Good Cause is losing in many countries. How about Russia? Can ZOROASTER 117 anyone say that conditions there are very cheerful? Persia is stricken down. Only a few nations seem to be progressing toward bet- ter things. In the United States, the condi- tions in the great centers are very sad ; noble souls are fighting hard, but only gain inch by inch. How is it with you in England? Strikes and Lock-outs abound. None of you seem greatly encouraged. When men asked Zoroaster, 'Is the Good Principle sure to win?' his answer always was, 'You yourself know full well that it ought to win. That tells you clearly that you ought to be on the side of the Good. That is guidance enough for you V We are taught, then, to fight on cheerily ; but we must never be foolish enough to ignore the terrible strength of the Evil Principle, when it is still incarnated in the lives of so many millions of powerful and determined men and women. The Vision is for many days!" This virile gospel of Zoroaster is just the tonic the World needs to-day. If we are searching for a Salvation which is truly fine and noble: — a Salvation which a true man can joy to find, — it must be the Salvation of Man, the Redemption of the whole World from Ignorance, Crime, Cruelty and Lust; and we must look at Human life as Zoroaster 118 THE SUPREME REALITY did, as a vast Battle-Ground, on which the Army of the Good must fight to a finish against the Hosts of Wrong, — Heaven against Hell. VIII HEAVEN AND HELL HEAVEN AND HELL Heaven and Hell alike are the results of one and the same great Law, — the Law of Consequences. This Law is already en- throned in our conception of Nature. It is the basis of all Science. Soon it will be un- derstood by men in general that it is also the basis of all knowledge of the Soul's World. Heaven is that special result of the Law of Consequences, whereby good causes produce good consequences. Heaven is Eternal, be- cause the Law that makes it is Eternal. Eternally Good Causes produce Good Conse- quences. A good tree cannot have evil fruit. Hell is that special result of the Law of Con- sequences, whereby evil causes produce evil consequences. Hell is Eternal, because the Law that makes it is Eternal. Eternally, evil causes produce evil consequences. An evil tree cannot have good fruit. It is the prerogative of inspired genius to anticipate, sometimes by centuries, the slow conclusions of the understanding. Evolution 121 122 THE SUPREME EEALITY was reached at last but yesterday. But Jesus saw that Growth is the Law of Life 2000 years ago. The Kingdom of Heaven is leaven, is seed, is the growing corn. The Reign of Law is a conception reached in my own life-time. But the great sayings of Jesus are based upon the Law of Consequences. The blessing grows out of the vital condition, yirtue is rewarded by growth, by more virtue. Blessed are the pure, for they shall see The All-pure. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall b6 filled with righteousness. Blessed are the merciful, for the Eternal Mercy shall be theirs. Forgive, and the Divine Forgiveness becomes your own ; show kindness, and kindness shall come to you. Ask, and you shall receive, seek and you shall find. Knock at Heaven's Door, and it shall open for you. Do good, and you shall be children of the All-Good. Love your ene- mies, and you shall be the dear children of Him who Loves His enemies. Judge not, and you shall not be judged; condemn not, and you shall not be condemned. With what measure you yourself make for others, in that self-same measure it shall be measured to you. According to Jesus, then, the rewards of Heaven grow out of the very life and essence HEAVEN AND HELL 123 of the nobleness rewarded. Innocence clothes herself in white, as does the lily, by simply growing. On the other hand, Hell is Evil cause, Evil consequence. He loved cursing; so cursing shall come to him. He hated blessing, so Blessing shall be far from him. Be not de- ceived, trod is not mocked. That which a man sows, that shall he also reap. He sowed the wind, he shall reap the whirlwind. This Law is Eternal; therefore Hell is Eternal. There never was a time when it existed not. There never will be a time when it shall cease to be. It is omnipresent, it is on the Earth, on every star, and in all the spaces between the stars. It is in this World, and in the Next. Speak- ing theologically — as God's Thought of truth, justice, and love eternally keeps on producing Heaven, so God's Thought of sin, discord, and hate eternally produces Hell. How long, then, will Hell exist? Potentially, as long as God exists ; that is, it will eternally manifest itself under certain conditions. Consider one mo- ment. Is it not absurd to suppose that God's judgment about a mean, selfish, cruel, treacher- ous, or malignant act will ever change? Will there ever come a time in the Days of Heaven, when meanness shall cease to be mean in 124 THE SUPREME REALITY God's sight? when, to Him, for very pity, a lie shall seem to be truthful, hate lovely, and oppression just? Nay, more, can you even im- agine that your own private opinion of such things can ever change? You cannot. And why? Because you yourself inherit into the Eternal Mind. Where is Hell? Potentially wherever God is; because, under certain conditions, God's Presence creates Hell, as under certain other conditions God's Presence creates Heaven- God is Everywhere, There is no inch of Infinite Space from which His Truth, Justice, and Love are absent, in which if they are received and welcomed, they will not bless; in which, if they are despised and set at naught, they will not punish. Nowhere does hate bring happiness; nowhere does self-seek- ing satisfy, or falsehood bless. Hell, then, is potentially everywhere; that is, it will mani- fest itself wherever wrong, sin, discord, self- ishness exist; will begin to shew itself at the exact moment when they begin to shew them- selves. If any one doubt this, let him go home, and there obey the fundamental law of Hell, which is blind, frantic self-seeking, and see if it does not start up at once from under- neath the floor ! There is no surer instinct in HEAVEN AND HELL 125 the heart of Man than his prophetic sense that Punishment eternally follows wrong. When- ever gross brutal wrong is committed, when- ever the weak are oppressed, whenever the fatherless and the widows are robbed of their inheritance, whenever crime brings seeming success, — no matter how high the offender, how surrounded by whole armies of guards, or how low and weak and unaided the Souls he tramples on, — the indignant, outraged heart of Man is sure, as if God spoke it from Heaven, that a Day of Reckoning is sure to come, and that the innocent blood will be avenged. All is well ; for if anything is not well, it is well that it should not be well! It is well that Oppression should not be well, that envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness should not be well. If these things were well, if human happiness came from them, then God would be no God at all, but an omnipotent Devil, the laws of whose world worked for the bad against the good, for Darkness against Light, The Presence of God is proved by the existence of Hell as much as by the exist- ence of Heaven. It is foolish and weak to keep hoping that Hell may be confined to this life and this 126 THE SUPREME REALITY Earth. God knows, we have enough of it here ; but a careful study of its phenomena here is enough to teach us that it stretches far on into the Hereafter. I have read a story of an able man at an English University, who possessed peculiarly fascinating manners, and had a strong mag- netic influence on all who came near him, — an influence which he used too often for purely selfish ends. He was a thorough man of pleasure, and seemed utterly careless of the misery which he brought upon others. This man was suddenly struck down with a seem- ingly fatal disease, — a disease, however, which left his head clear to think. In the long, weary hours of day and night, thoughts, which in health he had forced away, began to crowd upon his mind. What a mean, contemptible life his had been! How utterly purposeless, how small, how unworthy of his powers, — powers which had so often caused only misery, when they might have brought blessing! At last, the Eternal Judgment on such as he arose in his mind clear and strong, and from his burdened heart he put up a prayer for life, — not from any mean fear of death, but simply that he might have time to undo the dreadful evil he had done. The prayer HEAVEN AND HELL 127 seemed granted. He rose to life and health, again, and at once prepared to fulfill the Sacred promise he had made. Of all his past sins, the meanest and the blackest seemed to be one that he had committed against a simple, innocent, loving girl, who had trusted him. He resolved to search for that poor lost woman — lost through him. But such lost ones are hard to find. He went to live in London, and devoted himself to the task of lifting up such as he feared she had become. But day after day and night after night his search after the one lost one continued. At last, one dark midnight, he was standing by a lamp-post watching the stream of painted misery as it swept by him on the pavement, when the door of an evil house close by burst open, and two drunken women, fighting, scratching, tearing each other, staggered out. One gave the other a violent blow, which felled her, and her head struck against the curb-stone. It was over in a moment. The watcher sprang forward and bent down to help the fallen woman. Tenderly he took off her poor torn bonnet, and then, under the lamp-light he gazed at the dead face, for he saw at once that the blow had killed her. He gazed, and out of that sordid misery came the 128 THE SUPREME REALITY ghastly likeness of the face he had so long sought in vain. Then he understood that in one short earth-life there was not time enough to undo the evil he had done. Then he prayed once again that God might mercifully teach him to scorn the thought of rest in Heaven, till that poor lost Soul, cleansed from every stain, should enter with him the Blessed Gates. The vision is for many days. The devout Irish girl believes that she can pray her parents out of purgatory ; and so she can, if she prays the right kind of prayers. Get rid, my good friend, of every low and vul- gar taint that your father or your mother put into your constitution. That is the help which they sorely need from you. What self- respecting parent can dare to think of Heaven for himself, while low propensities of his own planting are alive in the breast of his son, or of his son's son? It is said that there are noble families in England, who are suffering still from the consequences of the pleasures of the reign of Charles the Second. How much Heaven can the pleasure-loving an- cestor enjoy, think you, though he may have repented never so sincerely at the eleventh hour, while seed of his sowing is still ripen- HEAVEN AND HELL 129 ing to bitter fruit? The vision is for many days. This is a terrible statement you will say. Yes! terrible, but true; and it needs the most powerful statement of its terror and its truth to rouse up the sleepers in our own too com- fortable Zion. The saddest thing is that some such prison as this holds many really fine spirits. "Great grief seized me," says Dante, in his Inferno, "for I knew that great souls were in that limbo." The most tragi- comic of the hells is the hell whither those go who do not believe in any Hell! When the mighty Theseus sought a bride for his friend, Pirithous, he grandly resolved to descend to Hades, and thence abduct the fair Proserpine herself, the one flower of Pluto's dreary realm. Down through the Darkness he went. The great three-headed Dog of Hell did not dare to attack him; the snakes of the Furies hissed not at him; the fires of Tartarus seemed to fear even to touch a hero so great. No one molested him; so after wandering awhile till he felt somewhat tired, he sat down on a great stone to rest. Till that moment, he himself had not even guessed how great he was ! What lordly 130 THE SUPKEME REALITY power must sit on his brow, that Hell itself should fear him! He sat and sat, "in full- browed contemplation." At last, thoroughly rested, he resolved to arise and resume his journey; but he found that he could not get up! Only this, and nothing more! No tor- ture, no scourge, no fire, no devouring beast; He merely was unable to get up or do any- thing but sit, and the story leaves him there! Theseus sits, and forever will sit ! Such vengeance did the irony of the Gods inflict upon him ! I myself have seen admirable liberals sitting in this very hell. And the tragedy is, that, like Theseus, they will never know it, till they try to get up and do some- thing. They sit; and human life and human misery with all its wild sorrow, its unsatisfied longings, its unanswered questions, its bur- dens of ignorance and wrong passes by them in sad procession; but still they sit. They sit and wait ; and justice also waits ; truth waits ; love waits ; Heaven waits ; while Hell enlarges its borders, and cries out, "There is room !" But someone may say, "These things being so, what hope is there, or can there be, for Mankind as a whole?" The first hope for Mankind is based on the fact that Hell is eternal ; for the moment it ceased to be, that HEAVEN AND HELL 131 moment it would hopelessly begin. It is the persistency of God in the natural World, where every natural cause is indissolubly linked to its consequence, which alone enables Man to learn the laws which govern Matter, and to obey them. And it is the persistency of God in the Spiritual World, where every Spiritual Cause is indissolubly linked to its consequence, which alone enables Man to learn the laws of Spirit and to obey them. If fire burned to-day, and did not burn to- morrow, no child would have any fingers left. Just because fire eternally burns, the stupid- est child learns at last not to put his fingers into it. Here is a white-hot poker, yonder is a barrel of gunpowder. Certain very sur- prising results eternally occur, if I plunge that poker into that gunpowder; but that is the very reason why I do not plunge that poker into that gunpowder. Just so, if Sin harmed to-day, and did not harm to-morrow, how could we know the Eternal connection be- tween Sin and Misery? Just because the fires of hate eternally burn, the most foolish of us can learn at last not to hate; just be- cause forever crime stabs itself with its own hands, men will learn at last not to commit crime. Ignorance will always err; but that 132 THE SUPREME REALITY will not harm us when knowledge is pleas- ant to our souls. Envy and malice will al- ways hurt; but that will not harm us when the Love of God is shed abroad in our hearts. We have looked for God's Mercy in the wrong place. We foolishly thought that we would find it in His reluctance to inflict pain, or at least in His refusal to inflict pain after a certain limited time; whereas it is just that pain, that anguish, that gnashing of teeth, which is the dread but loving Angel of His Presence, — which sternly, yet most merci- fully, refuses to allow one atom of hate to bring happiness, one atom of cursing to bring blessing, through all the Eternal years. The second hope is that Heaven is Eternal. The gates of Heaven are forever open. Who- soever wills can enter in freely. And the gates of Heaven are everywhere. "Hell is not two hand-breadths from Heaven." You can pass from one to the other by one single leap of the will. If God loved men to-day, and did not love them to-morrow, loved them in this life, and did not love them in the next, then Mankind would sink in despair. But just because God loves Mankind Eternally, the most foolish of men will find out God's Love at last. Ever let us remember that we HEAVEN AND HELL 133 all, — saint and sinner alike, — are now living and will forever live in the midst of God, bathed forever by the Waves of that unutter- able Deep of Love, that hath no Shore. The third hope is the Everlasting Gospel: the Good Tidings of the Love Eternal enter- ing the heart of Man, and from that essential vantage-ground working directly on Man's Destiny. It is God incarnate in Man: it is The Father's message of love spoken through the words, the deeds, the lips of Man, His Child. Without this, there would be no pos- sibility of Man performing his essential part in the Redemption of Man : without this, the good tidings would not be preached to the Spirits in prison: without this, the true light could never shine upon them. The mes- sage of Jesus was spoken to both Worlds; first in his short life here, so unduly broken ; then, in the long life of two thousand years in which he has never ceased to preach the Everlasting Gospel to all lost Souls, who through his blessed work are being found again ! But millions of helpers are required; and such must help all they can. There is here a point which any manly mind can see. You, my brother, may have been bewildered by the 134 THE SUPEEME REALITY Babel voices of narrow creeds and narrow dogmas. You may not know, as yet, that God is infinitely good, and therefore infinitely adorable, though for that knowledge you may have searched as for hid treasure. But this, I insist, you can already see, that it is a manly attitude for you to take, to resolve to stand by Mankind, your brothers, whatever comes of it, to share the Fate of Mankind, whatever that Fate may be. And you can also see that it is a cowardly attitude for you to take, to be prepared to leave your forlorn fellow-crea- tures in the lurch in order to keep a whole skin yourself! Act, then, on this golden gleam of insight, and already half the Gospel is your own; for you have resolved to love your neighbor as yourself. Man is Eternally bound to Man. Man's redemption is to be worked out by God working in Man, by Man, through Man. It is impossible for God to save mankind without Man's help, — without the Presence of God not only outside, but in- side of human consciousness. This is the true Incarnation of God. If we wait for God outside of Man to do what only God and Man together can do, we may wait forever, and wait in vain. God has no hands. When God needs hands he creates hands, and puts a keen HEAVEN AND HELL 135 brain above them and a brave and loving heart abreast of them, and bids them do His beau- tiful Will. God strikes a Wrong through a true man's hands. If the true man folds his arms up, then the proud, boastful Wrong walks unsmitten and defiant. There is such a brutal directness in the force of Wrong, that we are prone, in our foolish atheism, to believe that, in a certain way, Wrong is stronger than Eight And so it is, in a cer- tain way ! A fierce, proud, self-confident wrong is stronger than a timid, apologizing, mistrustful right. A milk-and-water angel is no match for a masterful devil. Only when Michael, the strong Archangel, God's valiant knight, sworn defender of His oppressed Truth, Justice, and Love, fights against Satan, then, and then only is that Old Ser- pent sure to bite the dust. Friends, we have this matter in our own hands. Under God, the human Will is the final arbiter of this vast question. Hell, for Mankind, will last just as long as we choose it to last. How long will Hell in New York, in San Francisco, in Syracuse last? Just as long as the men and women in New York, San Francisco, Syracuse choose it to last. Let us cease to ask, "Is Hell eternal?" 136 THE SUPREME EEALITY Thank God it is, in the sense that Evil Causes eternally produce evil effects. Let us rather ask, "How long, shall we, servants, friends, lovers of the Eternal Love, suffer the human Hell in our loved City to last? In the name of the Eternal Truth, Justice, Love, let us all rise up together, and cause our Hell here to cease. Hell fears such words as these, and everywhere vanishes before the deeds they prompt. Who loves Man, as God loves, forever and forever? Who has cast behind him, with noble scorn, all dream of a selfish bliss, — of a bliss which all mankind everywhere, in this world and the next, do not share? Who has resolved to share the Fate of Man, come what may, — Heaven or no Heaven? God waits for us to take this attitude, that He may give us His full blessing, which is the Fulness of His Spirit, which is the Gift of Himself! IX THE CHILDREN'S CRUSADE THE CHILDREN'S CRUSADE After the failure of the third Crusade, for which a vast preparation had been made, and where Richard the First of England had per- formed prodigies of valor, a powerful feeling arose in Europe that the repeated failures to rescue and hold Jerusalem were due to the unholy characters of the Crusaders. The leaders were greedy, sensual and quarrel- some, and most of the Knights were like them. God had rejected them because of their sins. Only Innocence would be allowed to possess and keep the Sacred Tomb where the Lord Jesus had lain. In 1212 this feeling became so intense that a "Children's Crusade" was actually started. Thirty thousand chil- dren started to take Jerusalem, led by the boy Stephen, and twenty thousand from Germany led by the boy Nicholas. Alas ! Innocence without Guidance is doomed to destruction. The children, wearied with their long march, would cry at the first sight of a town with its houses and Churches, 139 140 THE SUPREME REALITY "Is this Jerusalem ?" Some sank by the roadside, some died of hunger or disease. The rest of the poor boys and girls were stolen for slaves, and the Children's Crusade ended in Ruin! But there is a great, deep thought here left for all Time. The New Jerusalem will never be possessed, until a new Children's Crusade is organized, until Fathers and Mothers, in millions on millions of homes, re- ceive their babes directly from God's Hand, as His Angel Messengers sent to them, to show them the Way of Life. This Summer and Au- tumn, our home has been blessed by one such Baby Messenger; who has taught her old Grandpapa many a wonderful Lesson. Every morning Breakfast becomes an Event! Smiling, and so happy to see every one of us, she waves her hands to each, pointing to the chair where we are to sit (she will be two years old next March). When dinner is ready she calls for Gran'pa at the foot of the stairs to come down from his Study, claps her hands when she sees him, and when he has landed in the hall, she leads him in triumph to dinner. Out on the lawn she dances, tumbles down, and laughs as she picks herself up. Hour after hour, in the house, THE CHILDREN'S CRUSADE 141 she amuses herself with pictures, chess men and cards, contented to sit on the floor near Gran'nra, mother, or aunties. And day after day, she blesses us all. As yet she has few words to tell us all about it. She delivers her Message from God simply by loving us, and showing us her love in a thousand pretty ways. When millions on millions of Homes, in all lands and all climes, welcome their babes as gifts straight from the Hand of God, and learn from them and through them the Love Eternal, then, but not till then, will the New Jerusalem descend from God out of Heaven ! X PRAYER PRAYER One of the most persistent questions asked to-day is, "What is the use of Prayer?" Cal- vin was a thorough Fatalist, and yet he be- lieved that "Prayer moves the Arm that moves the Universe !" At first it may seem strange that any fatalist could have deeply believed this ; for it would seem to contradict his whole philosophy. But the Fatalist to-day disbe-i lieves wholly that prayer can be of any use whatever, but he calls his unbelief pure science, not Westminster Catechism. Let us give him a fair hearing. This is his importunate question, "How can this tremen- dous Necessity, with its hand of iron under its glove of silk, be turned from its grand, yet remorseless purpose by a mortal's prayer? What must be, must be. The Laws of the Universe are unalterable. Man can no more change the sweep of their tremendous orbit than he can bind or turn the path of the stars." This question shows that the idea of a Universal Reign of Law is getting a lodgment 145 146 THE SUPREME REALITY in many minds; and that the conception of an Universe governed by caprice, or arbitrary Will — which is the same thing — has gone for- ever. But the conception of a Universe governed by a perfectly wise, just, and loving Law; a Law divine, in the innermost Nature of one ever-living, ever-loving, Infinitely good, wise, just and loving God, in whose Infinite Life the Universe of Things and Souls forever lives, — is only just beginning to come into the mind of man ; and until that overwhelming Concep- tion gets into the minds of all men such ques- tions will continue to be asked, in all sin- cerity, and in earnest desire to find the truth. Let us try to answer him in the same spirit. First — "What is Prayer?" I answer: It is Communion, in all moods and hours, of the Finite with the Infinite Soul. The Infinite Life surrounds our lives, and intercourse with that which surrounds us is not only possible, but inevitable. The influence of Environ- ment is getting to be a truism of Science. It should not be difficult for any of us to hold communion with the grandest outward facts of our environment. Air and Sky, Sun and Star, Day and Night, are around us. All PRAYER 147 these "are parts of His Ways." The chang- ing Seasons, the hope and promise of the Spring, the glory of Summer, the wealth of Autumn, and the pure whiteness of Winter, when Nature sleeps to wake again, — the green grass, the rustling leaves, the quiet woods, the beauty of flowers, the bounty of the harvest field, — all these things are around us, and that mind is indeed defrauded of its inherit- ance, which does not hold communion with these. If the sunset clouds bring to you no message, if the Evening Star sheds no radi- ance on your spirit, if the still heavens of midnight bring no answering peace to your heart, then you are just so far cut off from communion with Him, whose "invisible things are clearly seen by the things that are made." There is no day in which you cannot say, "Standing upon my feet, I feel the mighty pull of the Earth. I draw in my breath, and the all-nourishing air comes in to refresh me. A thousand mighty forces, known and un- known, surround me as I stand here. The landscape and my eye are strangely fitted to each other. The Bounty that feeds the cat- tle on a thousand hills is at this moment sus- taining me also." If you say, "How can you call this Communion with God?" your ques- 148 THE SUPREME REALITY tion shows that you are not yet wholly inside the New Age. Complete Communion with God is communion with all that is. No mor- tal man or woman is as yet capable of this complete communion; but the more things you commune with, the greater is your com- munion with God. The more of the Creation that you love, the more like God you become. It goes without saying that this is only a small part of divine communion, but it is a part which greatly needs to be developed. To be in perfect touch with our whole environ- ment is the goal to be aimed at. The moral part of our environment is, of course, infi- nitely the most important. We are beset be- hind and before with the Infinite Truth, Right and Love, and to have truthful rela- tions with that is "the one thing most need- ful." Aspirations after purity and stainless honor, helpfulness and burden-bearing, rec- titude and tender sympathy, are immeasur- ably more important to us than the most poetic sense of nearness to God in Nature; are more important even than a most over- flowing gratitude for the Divine Bounty in Nature. But the perfect man, — that is, the Angel, — has both. We are not angels, yet, by any means. But PKAYER 149 I insist that you and I can always struggle to- wards right relations with things and people, . with Nature and Mankind. The more minds you sympathize with, the more like God you become. He who actively sympathizes with all men is at one with God, the lover and savior of all men. The effort to do this is always a prayer. Now the central question which the skepti- cal man keeps putting is this, "What is the use of Prayer? for how can prayer alter the Laws of the unalterable Universe?" Let us answer this question by asking an- other: "What is the use of Study? for how can Study alter the Laws of the Universe?" Now Study is the intending the mind on some department of human knowledge ; and the re- sult of study, wisely directed, is the compre- hending of that knowledge, the getting the possession of a new series of truths in Science, History, or what not. Does the triumphant result of Study alter the Laws of the Uni- verse? No. One of the Laws of the Uni- verse in its relation to man's mind is that prolonged intention of man's mind on any study tends to generate knowledge of that Study. "How did you make your discover- ies?" was the question put to Sir Isaac New- 150 THE SUPREME REALITY ton. "By always intending my mind" was the answer. All Educators know that the in- dispensable thing is to gain the pupil's atten- tion. The fact that study begets knowledge of the thing studied does not alter the Laws of the Universe. It illustrates the Laws of the Universe. This is shown on a grand scale in the history of Nations. Greece, for hun- dreds of years, persistently set herself the task of developing the mind; and the inevi- table result of that persistency was that thought at last became organized in Grecian brains; that perceptions of beauty, order, har- mony became hereditary. Rome, for hun- dreds of years, persistently set herself the task of studying the firm foundation on which to build the State, and the result was that Rome gave Law, as Greece gave thought, to the World. Israel, for centuries, gave her best energies to the discovery of Religion, to the Laws of the Soul of Man and its sublime relations to God. No persistency so grand, so fruitful as this. In all those centuries there were never wanting men of Israel who took up the splendid search where their fa- thers had laid it down. Nearer and nearer the shining Goal they came; till, at last, all the Splendors of God burst upon the eyes of PEAYER 151 the lonely Watcher on the mountains of Galilee ! This is not a contradiction ; it is a confirma- tion of the Laws of the Universe. Fasten your attention firmly on your hand, say the physiologists, and the blood will begin to flow towards that hand. The gymnast knows that by turning his attention to a given part of his body, he can develop the strength of that part. The scholar knows this of any part of the mind. If, then, prayer is a persistent intending of the whole mind and heart to- ward gaining strength for the living out of a true and noble life, the Laws of the Universe are not altered, but confirmed, if the result is Success. Here someone may say, "I grant that prayer, thus defined, has a good effect upon Man; but I cannot see how it possibly can have any effect upon God." Friend! I an- swer, do you not see that you have answered your own question by your admission? Strength, you admit, has come in upon the man through his prayer. Where has that strength come from? There is only one Force. From God, has it not? Well, then, the effect of the man's prayer on God was, that a portion of God's Spirit flowed into the 152 THE SUPREME REALITY man ; that is, the prayer of the man produced motion in God; caused his Spirit to move into the man. It is no alteration of the laws of the atmosphere that when I open my mouth and draw in my breath, that act of mine pro- duces motion in the air just outside of my mouth. It is part of the Law of the air. And it is no alteration in the Law of Life of God that, when I long after His Command- ments, that longing produces motion in his Spirit. It is part and parcel of the change- less Law of His Spirit's action. The un- changeableness of God does not consist in His being forever unmoved by prayer, but in His being ever moved by prayer. The first would be the unchangeableness of indifference. The second is the unchangeableness of Love ! The unchangeableness of a mother's love is shown, not by her indifference, but by her constant, ever-watchful listening, night and day, to the cry of her children. Imagine a lot of sensi- ble people actually arguing that a baby's cry cannot possibly move a mother's heart, that a baby's smile cannot possibly gladden it, simply because a mother's love is unchange- able ! That is the very reason why the cry of pain and the smile of joy meet instant re- sponse from the mother's heart! PRAYER 153 So God's unchangeableness does not mean immovableness, it means everlasting motion, — motion toward the objects of His Love. To the question, then, "Does prayer in any way change the relation of God to the soul?" the answer is always, "Yes;" just as opening the window of a hot, close room changes the relation of the outward air to the room. It simply gives it the opportunity of free en- trance. Before, it did what it could. It tried to enter under the door and through the chinks in the window-frames. It prevented, even by these inadequate means, the people in- side from being absolutely stifled. But when the window was opened from the inside, then it had an abundant entrance, and could ex- pand the laboring lungs, electrify the fever- ish blood, and brace up the whole system. Now was the law of the atmosphere altered one jot by the opening of the window? No. Its law is to strive to equalize all tempera- tures to its own. It obeyed that law per- fectly when it rushed through chink and cranny with all the force it could, though the space it found in which to act was so pitiably small. It obeyed that law equally, when it joyously entered the open window, and brought life and strength to the jaded bodies 154 THE SUPREME REALITY inside. Just so, prayer opens the windows of the Soul, so that God can enter in larger measure. His Spirit is around the prayer- less Soul, seeking an entrance, entering by every little crevice that can be found. But this is not enough to fill up the Soul's need of God. It is just enough to keep it from utter death, not enough to give it a free and joyous life. But prayer flings up the win- dows, opens every door, and God enters in all the fullness of Blessing. Does prayer, then, alter the Law of the action of God on the Soul? Not at all. The Law of that action is the perpetual attempt to raise the tempera- ture of all souls to His own warmth. That Law was kept perfectly when His Spirit was around the prayerless soul, entering through the smallest aperture in the walls of worldli- ness and sin, though the entrance gates were so small and inadequate. That Law was kept in equal perfection, when His Spirit entered right royally through the gates of prayer, flung wide open by the expectant soul, that the King of Glory might come in. But enough of theoretic difficulties. The time is close at hand when we shall no longer suffer ourselves to be kept out of the search after God by words and names, or by our prej- PRAYER 155 udice for or against this, that, or the other term by which the divine longing has been named by our fathers. Call it what you please, — prayer, meditation, self-examination, or simply facing the deeper Facts of our en* vironment, — the thing itself we must have. Communion with the Eternal, the Ever-pres- ent Reality, we all must have, if we desire any higher life at all. A long life has at last taught me the deep meaning of Wordsworth's warning : "Tis the most difficult of tasks to keep Heights that the Soul is competent to gain !" St. Paul gives the self-same warning : "We have this treasure in earthen vessels." I warn you, then, you who love the beautiful Life, you who intend to live it, to be always on God's side and on Man's, which is the same thing, that you may live days, months, aye, years, on a lower level, for lack of a few such grand hours as this divine Communion would have given. When somehow, no matter from what cause, a lower standpoint of living has been silently taken in any one of the many departments of your life, in your domestic, so- cial, business, or political relations, it matters 156 THE SUPREME KEALITY not which; when you have, perchance all un- consciously, suffered the house of your soul to be invaded and broken into through any one of its thousand gates, I warn you, I warn my- self, I warn all lovers of the Good and True, that slowly, but with fatal sureness, the auda- cious invader will begin to take possession of all other departments, marring, if not destroy- ing, the beauty and glory of all. You can establish coarse, vulgar relations between your- self and your wife, your husband, your chil- dren, your friends, your city, your political party, between yourself and any one of these, can you? You can lower your tone, your style of performance in one department of duty, and keep it high, generous, chivalrous, perfect in all the rest, can you? Yes! as easily as a gen- eral of an army can hold his position, when he has let the Enemy get into his rear through one weak point in his lines! Some years ago, I dreamed a very singular dream, which I will give you exactly as it occurred. I dreamed that I was in possession of an extraordinary Treasure, which I kept down in my cellar locked tight in a strong iron box. One morning, I saw some men come along with a quantity of heavy tools, hammers, cold chisels, and what not. They quietly PRAYER 157 walked down the steps of my cellar, whose door happened to be open, and I upstairs heard them working away. When it was about lunch time, I thought that they had been work- ing very hard for hours, so I sent them down something to eat. At last, the noise ceased, and as all was quiet, I thought I would go down and have a talk with them, and be a little neighborly. But they had all vanished, and to my horror and amazement, I found that my great iron box was broken open, and every vestige of my dearly loved treasure had disap- peared ! "It was nothing but a nightmare," you will say. "No sane person, if awake, would allow, a lot of burglars to walk down his open cellar in broad day, hear them working hour by hour, and even send them down a lunch, and this in- to the very place where his most valued treas- ures are deposited." Yet it all seemed per- fectly natural to me at the time. Only when my Treasure was gone, did I, in my dream, rail at my own unheard-of folly. And I fear, my friends, that you and I have been many and many a time just as inconceivably stupid in the affairs of the Soul. Our heart's Treasure is all safe, deposited in the most secret places of our spirit; and yet how often have we seen, 158 THE SUPREME REALITY in open day, the burglars go down with their tools of hate, suspicion, obstinacy, pride, un- charitableness, low desire, or sleepy indolence ! Aye, and we have heard them at work, and have actually fed them with their own coarse food ! Aye ! and we have not had the most dis- tant idea that they were after our sacred Treasures of love, and hope, and helpfulness, and high endeavor, till we wake up suddenly and find them gone ! There is no safety for us, friends and lovers of the Perfect Life, no sure providing against ignominious defeat, save the summoning up from time to time, in the Presence of the help- ful, pitying, tender, loving Father of us all, every thought, action, desire, passion, purpose, faculty, duty, temptation, and putting them all into captivity to the Law of Christ, which is the Law of the Life of God. Complete Con- version, or entire turning towards God, is the grandest act that man can perform, and has to be performed, not once, but many times in a life. It is a central moment in a man's life, when he summons up every thought, motive, and desire to the bar of judgment, and says, "In the presence and with the help of God, I will this day, at this moment, put everything that is in me into right relations with the PRAYER 159 Truth, Right, and Love which is the Law of the Life of God. Every high thing that exalts itself against that shall be put down. Each cherished selfishness shall be crushed. I will look searchingly into all the details of my do- mestic life, and set up the Beautiful Law as the Law of my home. It shall look out of my eyes into the eyes of my children. They and I shall learn to reverence it infinitely, and to set it up as the Law we all rejoice to obey. It shall be written up over the door of our house, so that any friend coming in shall understand that our home is dedicated to the Blessed Father of us all, is indeed a "Temple to His praise." The Faith and Hope of our fathers and mothers are coming back to us, enlarged and purified, but as strong and as simple as ever. The simple thanks for the daily bounty, the simple prayer for daily guidance, the simple trust, the simple going to the Strong for strength, the simple commending to His kind care and keeping "all for whom we are bound to pray," — all this is coming back to us, en- larged and ennobled. There will be a change in its methods. There will be a larger faith, a more manly daring, a complete absence of all adulation, a far greater simplicity and direct- 160 THE SUPEEME REALITY ness, a more sturdy inclusion of things called common, a resolute omission of all cant phrases, of all unreasonable petitions. We shall no longer remind God of things He might have forgotten ; but the sphere of Prayer will be widened, not narrowed. Our prayers for ourselves will be larger and nobler. Our prayers for others will be more worthy of God and of them. All our modern difficulties will be solved when we understand that there is only One Life, and that God and His Children live that Life together, and that Infinite and Finite Life act and react on each other in endless succession. The instant response of World to World across the starry Spaces, so that each and every Star feels not only the movement, but the exact direction of move- ment of every other Star, types exactly the in- conceivable sensitiveness of Life to the move- ments of Life. No matter what distance sepa- rates souls who love each other ; for, to Love, the Universe is one mighty telephone, which repeats the message of Heart to Heart across the Vast of Heaven! The response of World to World and Soul to Soul alike illustrate the omnipotence of the Divine Spirit, are impossible and unthinkable without that Spirit; but are natural and inev- PRAYER 161 itable results of the omnipresence of that Spirit. The Universe is One; for One Infi- nitely sensitive Life fills it! Now unto Him that is able to do "exceeding abundantly beyond all that we can either ask or think," by His mighty Life-power which is ever working within us, let us give thanks and ready obedience and willing service, now and forever! Amen. XI THE PREACHER OF TO-DAY THE PREACHER OF TODAY We no longer use the sayings of Jesus as talismans to conjure by, or as finalities to rest in, or as edicts to accept unquestioned. We are beginning to use them as keys to unlock doors. The test of a great saying is the num- ber of doors which it will unlock. Let us ap- ply this test to his great saying, "Have Faith" It was addressed specially to preachers, and to the preachers of our own century we pro- pose to apply it. But let us first see how true it is everywhere, in all directions, and in all callings. Faith is the indispensable condition of fine performance. Faith in a thing is the only way of coming into close contact with the thing, into fruitful relations with the thing. All dis- coverers, either in art, science, invention, liter- ature, or religion, are, and must be, in a be- lieving state of mind. All great discoveries are made by men or women who have an over- mastering conviction of the absolute, the all- round integrity of the Universe. Whether 165 166 THE SUPREME REALITY they are conscious of it or not, this is really a faith that Eternal Wisdom, Truth, and Right are in the very formation of the Universe. All the discoveries of Science have been made by Faith in two mighty principles. First, faith in the verdict of Man's bodily senses, — faith that that verdict, rightly inter- preted, will reveal the material Universe. Second, faith that the verdict of Man's mind, rightly interpreted, will reveal the Laws of the material Universe. In a word, the one foundation of all scientific discovery is Faith in the integrity of the human faculties. All the discoveries of Religion have been made by Faith in two mighty principles. First, faith in the verdict of Man's conscience, — faith that that verdict, rightly interpreted, will reveal the Moral Law of the Universe. Second, faith in the verdict of Man's heart, — faith that that verdict, rightly interpreted, will reveal the Infinite Heart of Love, whose pulses are the Life of Life to the Universe. In a word, the one foundation of religious dis- covery is faith in the integrity of the human faculties. On the other hand, no skeptic, as skeptic, ever discovered anything, or ever can discover anything. In all human history, no advance THE PREACHER OP TO-DAY 167 whatever, in any direction whatever, hag been made, or ever can be made, by the human mind in a skeptical mood. Faith has not only built all the cathedrals, written all the Bibles, sung all the hymns; it has crossed all the oceans, scaled all the mountains, dug all the mines, bridged all the rivers, constructed all the rail- ways, built all the steamships, made all the in- ventions, written all the poems, painted all the pictures, written all the music that people care to hear; thought out all the sciences, mapped all the Laws of Nature, constructed and advanced all the civilizations; for Faith only has the victorious tone without which no enduring achievement is possible. Skepticism is forever ruled out even as the corrective to the aberrations of Science, Liter- ature or Religion. For this we must have the true spirit of Criticism, which loves the best in all these great achievements of Man, and wounds only to heal, cuts out only the false, so that the true may shine in all its beauty. Let us now proceed to apply the truths we have gained to the preachers of the Twentieth Century. Great preachers have spoken for God in the Past. Through them the words of Eternal Life have entered millions of willing ears, and 168 THE SUPEEME REALITY found their way to millions of quickened hearts. In no age has God left Himself with- out witness. The uplift of great Thoughts has been felt throughout the Centuries. The apos- tolic succession of prophets and bards of the Soul has never been broken. We rekindle the fires of our own devotion anew by the grand inspirations holy souls in the Past have breathed out. But under what fettering, disheartening conditions the preacher for many centuries had to fulfill his office! What mountains of unreality he had to climb! What dreadful lies had he to uphold as God's Truth ! How his higher hopes were checked, thwarted, crushed down by his lower beliefs! How far out of touch with the facts of the Universe they all were in how many things! It is not true that the Earth was made in six days only six thousand years ago. Anyone who believes this falsity at once comes into false relations to the Earth, its past, its pres- ent, its future. He is shut in to a childishly narrow estimate of the origin and meaning of the World. And if, in addition to this, he devoutly believes that this short-lived Earth is coming to an end in a few short years, his conception becomes so absurd that it must THE PREACHER OF TODAY 169 inevitably make much of his thinking gro- tesquely false. It is not true that God has predestined the vast majority of mankind to a Hell of infinite torture. Any one who devoutly believes any- thing so abominably false as this thinks and feels and lives in a lurid glare of perpetual fire and smoke. It is not true that in order to escape this everlasting burning you must believe a given set of dogmas of any kind whatsoever. False relations of any kind can only be escaped by setting up true relations. If to-day you are in a false relation to God and to your fellow-men, the sole means of es- cape is to begin at once to put yourself into true relations to God and to your fellow-men. What was the taproot of all this miserable travesty of the preacher's office? A profound distrust in human Nature, a deep disbelief in the competence of the human faculties to give a true verdict upon things. This it was that stunted the growth and poisoned the very life of the preacher of Yesterday. What then of the preacher of To-day? He must be, as ever, the man of Faith. Without faith it is impos- sible to please God, or man either, in the pulpit. If the preacher is not a man of faith, instantly let him step down and out, for he 170 THE SUPREME REALITY has no message to give. The ground on which he stands is holy, and he profanes it. How can he dare to speak of heart and hope, who has them not? How can he sing the Song of the Blessed Life, who has neither lived nor loved it, nor even seen it from afar? This is just as true To-day, in the midst of our wonderful Twentieth Century, as it was in the Nineteenth or the first. The new thing will be that the faith of the preacher and the faith of the scientific thinker will, for the first time, be seen to rest upon one common foundation, — the integrity of human nature. In what, then, must the preacher, to be a preacher at all, have faith? Faith in the all- round integrity of human nature, in the ab- solute integrity of the Divine Universe from whose bosom human Nature sprang, and of which human Nature is alike interpreter, poet, prophet, and executive arm. To-day, the preacher is to carry in his single breast an impassioned love of all the glorious gains and glorious hopes of Man, is to be himself the inheritor of all that poetry and art, indus- try and social life, invention and discovery, philosophy and science, love and religion have "gathered in the cycled times." Above all, as the preacher of To-day, he must unite all the THE PREACHER OF TO-DAY 171 splendid gains, both of science and religion, in a single consciousness, — his own — and illus- trate them in a single life, — his own. By its grand trust in the integrity of body and mind Science has won all its magnificent victories. The starry Heavens are yielding up their secrets, hidden from ages and genera- tions. The deep-buried forces of the Earth are bared to Man's view, and given into Man's hand. Day by day, each man of science submits, in all thoroughness and all candor, his results to the world; and by in- viting the criticism of those competent to re- view, correct and supplement them, keeps pushing on the wheels of discovery, and en- larging the area of human knowledge. The preacher of To-day must be saturated with the Method of science. Above all, he must take Evolution as the Master-key in his own studies. In a World that grows, reli- gions also grow, and growing obey the laws of growth. Israel's religion is no exception. Christianity itself is the grandest illustration of the law. In the regions where Science is rightly su- preme, science and religion must move to- gether ; science ever in the lead, religion following as assessor and witness. The 172 THE SUPREME REALITY preacher of the New Age thanks God for all triumphs achieved, glories in the mental grasp that gained them all, marvels at the unguessed riches of the World so suddenly re- vealed, trusts joyfully to the guidance of those very insights which his predecessors so dreaded, and with thankful heart proceeds to discharge his special function, which is to fill each new discovery full of God. Not his to find some new star-glory in the heavens, but his to proclaim the glory of God which the Heavens declare. Not his to find some new wonder on the Earth, but his to thank God, who hath given such power to Man ! But now we approach the preacher's own field, the Conscience and the Heart, the Con- science which bows to the Eternal Right, the Heart, which longs after the Eternal Love. Look at the method of the Preacher of preachers. Note the immense Faith in Hu- man Nature which is at the core of the Ser- mon on the Mount. There Jesus makes his appeal directly to the conscience and the heart. Man can know God's Justice, and Man can know God's Love by the very feeling the father feels towards his own child. But more, Jesus insists that Man can become a partaker of the Nature of God; that Man can THE PREACHER OF TO-DAY 173 help, forgive, love just as God forgives, helps, loves. Man can see God the moment Man's heart is pure. Man can obtain God's mercy, as his very own, the moment he himself is merciful. It is the divine quality living in the Man that saves him, blesses him, and makes him God-like. The Preacher of To-day will take this won- derful estimate of human nature as his stand- point. In this he will be simply following the method of Science ; the method of trusting the faculties of Man. This is the method by which, in spite of a thousand difficulties, Science has won all her thousand victories. The last half of the Nineteenth Century saw a strange thing happen. The moment the men of Science began to cross the borders of the domain where Religion is rightly supreme, fully half of the long procession flatly refused to go one step further. They had faith in the integrity of human nature only as far as the bodily senses and the mind are concerned. They were thorough skeptics as to the value of the verdict of the conscience and the heart, however carefully corrected and interpreted. What was the inevitable consequence? If you stubbornly refuse to use those faculties which are the instruments of discovery, the penalty 174 THE SUPREME REALITY is simple, but severe. You will discover nothing, and in your conceited blindness will insist that nobody else can discover anything. O foolish man of Science ! Faithless to your own Genius, forgetful of the very ground of your own triumphs, are you so blind as not to see that skepticism cuts the very nerve of discovery? Do you not see that you are di- viding the one human nature into two, mak- ing one-half the product of Eternal law and the discoverer of law, and putting the other half into the realm of chance and chaos? The queer dilemma in which the majority of scientific men in Europe were placed was just this. They had gained all their wonder- ful triumphs by trusting one-half of human nature, and now they not only refused to trust the other half for themselves, but seemed resolved that nobody else should. They did their best to inoculate everyone they could with the virus of their own disease. Nobody objects to your having the measles, if you prefer to have them. But some per- sons, not unnaturally, object to your taking considerable pains to give them the measles. The really comic part was that the people that caught the measles from the scientific men were generally quite proud of the fact, THE PEEACHEE OF TO-DAY 175 and seemed to consider that it constituted them members of an intellectual aristocracy, privileged to be sole possessors of the luxury of despair ! The epidemic of mental sickness of this sort is not a matter of which the Nine- teenth Century need be very proud. Conscience is the Faculty in Man that rec- ognizes the Eight at the foundation of the Universe. It is very imperfect as yet, just as the senses and the understanding are still very imperfect. But just as no scientific dis- covery would be possible, unless the verdict of the senses and the mind, constantly cor- rected and recorrected, was trusted, as nearer and nearer approximation to the truth ; so no discovery of the Eternal Eight would be pos- sible, unless the verdict of the human con- science, or consciousness of Eight, constantly corrected and recorrected, was trusted as an ever nearer approximation to the absolute Eight. In the domain of Conscience Eeli- gion is incessantly in need of the aid of Science. Conscience ever urges "Do Eight," but in how many cases must Science discover what is right to be done! Eeligion says, "Care for the poor," but Science must build the bouses, drain the streets in which the poor live, and teach them the laws of healthful life, 176 THE SUPKEME KEALITY and must teach. Eeligion itself not to hurt, just when and where it tries to help. Scien- tific charity must take the place of indiscrim- inate giving, and scientific investigation of the fundamental laws which govern all Society must forever direct the sacred impulses of the conscience and the heart. The Heart is the very center of the preach- er's eminent domain, the Supreme Source of his power. "Out of the heart are the issues of life." His great text is, "God is love, and he who dwells in love dwells in God, and God in him." Love in man's heart is the child of the divine love, is the response in Man's heart to the call of the divine love. "Thou art my beloved Son," is ever the Voice heard in the depths of the awakened heart of Man. All men see that love is good. A few men and women are beginning to see that Love is All, is omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient; that love is the Cause of all life, the sustainer of all life, the developer of more and more abundant life; that Love is God, and God is Love. When the heart of Man knows this, it is at peace. It rests in God, trusts Him completely in all things, trusts Him for all that the heart loves, trusts Him forever and ever! This is the key that un- THE PEEACHEB OF TO-DAY 177 locks the doors of Death, and shows the Life Eternal beyond those doors. The sum and substance, then, the heart, pith and core of the whole matter is this: The Preacher is, "par excellence," the Man of Faith, Faith in the all-round integrity of the human faculties, Faith that Man has trust- worthy senses, that to the verdict of those senses, rightly interpreted, the material Uni- verse trustworthily corresponds, Faith that Man has a trustworthy mind, and that to the verdict of that mind, rightly interpreted, the laws of the Material Universe trustworthily correspond. Faith that Man has a trust- worthy conscience, and that to the verdict of that Conscience, rightly interpreted, the moral Law of the Universe trustworthily cor- responds, Faith that Man has a trustworthy heart, and to the verdict of that heart, rightly interpreted, the Heart of the Infinite Good- ness trustworthily corresponds. Millions of corrections, it is true, have to be applied to the verdict of body and mind, before their conclusions can be accepted as a first approximation to a true picture of the Material Universe; and Millions of correc- tions must be applied to the verdict of con- science and heart, before their conclusions 178 THE SUPEEME KEALITY can be accepted as a first approximation to the Law "that keeps the Stars from wrong," and to the Infinite- Love which, fills the Uni- verse with the warm glow of an endless Life. But every sane man will expect this, will al- low for it, will predict it. Body, mind, heart, conscience, — these are the four mighty powers of human nature. These four together can rule the world, can reveal all mysteries and all knowledge, can solve all problems, can conquer all the foes of "Man's beauty and power;" can put all things under Man's feet at last, can even de- stroy that last enemy, Death. The Vision is for many Days. Still the divided halves of human nature have not yet melted into one. Still joy and sanctity have not yet met together; still rea- son and righteousness, mercy and truth, have not yet kissed each other; and still, therefore, God's Earth is defrauded of the total Man- hood, total Science, and total Religion. Still, therefore, there is deep need, — need as never before, — of the Preacher in the pulpit as the man of Faith in the all-round integrity of the human faculties. It is our blest privilege, brothers in the Faith, to teach the man of Religion to see, THE PREACHEE OF TO-DAY 179 with a glad surprise, that his body was given to him for joy and health and happy use; that through his bodily organs and senses he is to take hold of the World, to come into touch with all its wonders of love and knowl- edge; to teach him that on this Earth of God's "Flesh helps Soul, as much as Soul helps Flesh." No longer, then, will the Man of religion try to serve God by thwarting or mutilating the body; but he will consecrate every limb, or- gan, and sense to the finest uses of life, and the finest service of truth. We are to teach him also to see, with a glad surprise, that his mind was given him to use freely, not to bind miserably; that Thought can never rise too high, or fly too far, "so long as it continues to be Thought, and to obey the laws of Thought," that it is his glorious duty to serve God and Man with all his mind. It is our blest privilege, also, to teach the man of science to see, with a glad surprise, that his own justice-loving conscience and his own yearning heart are instruments of pre- cision, which he has too long neglected to use, are telescopes to reveal the glories of things far, are microscopes to unlock the hidden wonders of things near. We are to invite 180 THE SUPREME REALITY him, a new Columbus, to sail over seas un- known, bidding him to hope on and go for- ward ever, for he is destined to discover a whole New World! Our Twentieth Century is destined to be the century of great discoveries and grand fulfillments, of gigantic struggles and splendid victories, the Century that is to complete what the Nineteenth began, to correct its errors, dispel its fears, enlarge its hopes, gather in its harvests, distill into choicest wine its grapes that hang ripening in a thousand vineyards. Ours is to be the great revealing, reconciling Century ! How our hearts should beat high with hope and joyous effort, as we have already seen its dawn, which to-day is growing brighter and brighter towards its perfect Day to be! Already I hear, in the great Cathedral of Immensity, the white-robed choirs of Science and Religion singing, in glad antiphony, their psalm of worship to the ear of God. First Science opens the solemn Chant: "Thy King- dom is an everlasting Kingdom, and Thy do- minion endureth through all generations." And Religion answers : "The Lord up- holdeth all that fall, and lifteth up all those that are bowed down !" THE PEEACHER OF TO-DAY 181 Then Science: "Of old Thou hast laid the foundations of the Earth, and the Heavens are the work of Thy hands. They shall per- ish, but Thou Shalt endure, and they all shall wax old, as doth a garment, and as a vesture shalt Thou fold them up, and they shall be changed. But Thou art the same forever and ever!" Then Religion: "Deep peace art Thou to all the Souls that know Thee, the melody of Heaven art Thou, whispered soft and low in the Chambers of bereaved men and women; succor art Thou to the tempted, help to the bruised and the fallen, deliverance art Thou to the captives, and opener of the prison to them that are bound." Then amid a sacred silence arises a single Voice, divinely sweet, wooing the very air to worship: "Love your enemies; Bless those who curse you; that you may be the sons of your Father in Heaven; For He makes His Sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sends His rain on the just and on the unjust. So shall ye be perfect, as your Father in Heaven is perfect!" Then the full choir joins with the vast Con- gregation in one rapturous outburst of love and Thanksgiving: "Thou, Lord, art in Thy 182 THE SUPREME REALITY holy Temple. Space is the fullness of Thy Presence, and Time the ordered sequence of Thy Will. Father! Thy Kingdom has come! For now Thou reignest supreme in the hearts of all Thy Children, and wilt reign for ever and ever!" XII POEMS THE HEAVEN OF THE MOON A DREAM They err, who dare to think that Sacrifice, Love's essence, lives on Earth alone, and dies When Heaven is reached; as if the lower World Surpassed the Higher in its crowning grace. God's Glory is to give Himself away ! Great depths of Space, where once His Spirit moved Alone, now sparkle with bright Stars — His Love Transformed to Flame ; — are thick with Worlds, — His Love Shaping Itself to air, and sea, and land, A Kingdom for His Sons, — His Love made Flesh! Life of His very Life! Since God is Love, His Children, Love-begotten, each and all, Must type God's highest Glory in themselves, And give themselves away ; for this I learned Summoned in Dreams to Heaven of the Moon. 185 186 THE SUPKEME REALITY As some Astronomer in far-off Orb, Seeing the Earth's light waning, might have said, "Poor little Star! its death comes on apace!" Though, just then, Life began ! the very goal, God's Keason for the Earth ; so men have said, "The Moon is a dead world, its seas have shrunk Within its bosom as the mother's milk Shrivels in breast of age! Its fair green fields, Its trees, its flowers, and whatsoe'er of life In beast, or man, or tribe, or nation, once Seemed grand, or beauteous as the life of Earth- All, all is gone! the very air entombed Deep in the soundless rocks, and all is still, Lifeless and barren!" Yet, just then, began The higher, heavenly Life for all that dwelt On our Companion-Star! All this I learned Summoned in Dreams to Heaven of the Moon ! The Moon, the Child from Earth's first birth-pangs born, Outran her Mother in the Starry Race, First knew the glory of awakening life Thrilling in all her veins, first felt the touch Of moss and lichen clinging to her breast, POEMS 187 First waved with forests, and first felt the tread Of million, million footsteps, marching on Toward Life, and more and more abundant Life; First heard the praises of the Eternal ring; First felt the touch of God's surrounding Love; First built a Human Heaven! All this I learned Summoned in Dream to Heaven of the Moon ! And yet no Temple saw I, no great Band Of loving worshipers ; no City Vast Eadiant in splendor. Only two I saw Sitting alone, with Evening all around. The Sun was slowly sinking, and the Earth, iVast as a Giant's buckler, gleamed afar, Her Seas and Continents aglow with light. With fixed eyes gating on the Earth they sat Silent, while all their Being spake to me. Husband and Wife they were. Never before Had I once dreamed of Union like this. Silent, and deep in grand, yet painful Thought They sat; yet, all the while, within her heart A thousand little waves of loving thought 188 THE SUPREME REALITY Rose toward him, and a thousand answering waves Rose in his heart toward her. A billowy crest Of thought sublime in him, arose in her Instantly, tinged with Love-light that she gave. While over, through, and under all, I saw One silent, vast, immeasurable Wave, On which their Being floated; and I knew That was the Love Divine, whose shoreless Sea Embosoms all the Worlds and Souls that are! At last, in her, I saw a Storm arise Of Joy, and Love, and Grief unspeakable, And then a fearful hush, as if the heart Of that great Tempest reached her ! Then he spoke : "Two Souls, God-destined to become as One, Must start, and climb together, round by round, That sacred Ladder, whose top reaches Heaven !" No tiniest germ forgotten as they climb. The Sacrament of Life, the Bread of Heaven, Is shared together with each poorest creature. Else is that Bread not eaten, and the Cup Of Blessing is scarce tasted. Souls that love Ascend together through all forms of life; POEMS 189 Now tiny insects, homing in the grass; Now butterflies that quiver in the Sun; Now live the bird-life, loving in the air. Till, gaining power by use, their Spirits pass Upward to higher forms, through beast to Man, First ignorant and low, with here and there, A glimpse, a touch, a dream of higher things ; But yet ascending still, from death to death, Till glorious Manhood bursts upon their view, And they know Heaven ! How our bosoms swelled That glorious day, when first to our twin Souls Came the amazing Memory of the Past ! How strange and sweet it was to trace the Road, By which we mounted into life, to see That each life-stage had glory of its own, A glory not another's, that the nest We built together, and the new-laid eggs, The patient brooding, and the search for food, The sweet maternal and paternal care Of our new fledglings, — that all this was i ours, Part of the mighty memories of the Past! 190 THE SUPREME REALITY Then, then we knew we summed up in our- selves Life of all creatures, and so learned to love Life, as God loves it, not one life left out! But, oh! what struggles ere the goal was reached, The goal of our desire. How martyrs died, Our brothers, with us, that our Truth might live! What pangs we suffered, — pangs that now shine fair, God's Stars, within our memories holiest Heaven ! What aspirations high! What fellowship With hearts that loved the tidings that we told! For now we knew the final goal must be One glorious Union of the All of Life Our beauteous World had borne, the life Divine One in all bosoms, and God All in All ! Now it has come to pass. Not one thing failed Of all that God had promised. Love and Truth POEMS 191 Reign here supreme. One song mounts up from all, An endless Heaven of Joy and Light and Life Is ever round us. We see eye to eye, And each new day brings grace and beauty new; Some noble thought to share, some splendid Task A thousand minds may join in; while in all Eises to God the heart-song that He loves. For ages we have lived thus, and have felt That mind could not contain of God and Heaven More than our minds were full of, could not dream Of aught beyond; for all of God was ours. But now an Inspiration, as we know, Out of God's inmost Being to our own, Has come, a Flash of Lightning, that reveals Vast depths concealed before, until we gaze Into the deep Abysses of His Love, Trembling to think that we must plunge therein ! We have been silent. Little need of speech, When thy Soul sees the thought of mine, be- fore 192 THE SUPREME REALITY It mounts up from the inmost depths. But now It is Thy will, and therefore mine and thine, That I should tell in words the mighty Thought, God-given, grand and terrible, that shakes The very rock on which our Being stands. Day after day, we watch the mighty Earth, The Star which Heaven itself bound up with ours; We see the struggles of its countless lives. We feel the pangs they suffer, and we see How close God is to all those weary hearts, His healing touching their disease, His Love Wreathing itself around their loneliness; And yet they see not, feel not> for the lack Just of a Voice to tell them, of a Life Bone of their bone, flesh of their flesh, a Life That sees as we see, and yet treads their soil, And bears their burdens with them. Then the thought Fell on us both like lightning, making clear All that was dark, and pointing to a path Concealed from Thought itself before; a path Of pain and sacrifice unspeakable, Which yet we mean to tread. God has not been POEMS 193 Our very Life to us so long in vain ! Now, when His Voice hath called us in the Dark, Forward we go and trust in Him again, — Yea! though He slay us! For that Voice hath said, "My Children ! ye have pitied my poor Earth, E'en with My Pity, and that Pity calls That ye yourselves, — leaving this glorious Light, This peace, this Heaven, that I in you have built, This glorious Commonwealth of heavenly lives, Where heart meets heart, soul answers unto Soul- Descend into that murk, that blindness there, And keeping only your unconscious selves, Take Flesh, be born, and slowly grow to power To tell your message high, — in earthly tones, Mingled with earthly ignorance, but yet Told, — that My Life may entrance gain at last To poor worn hearts that pine away for Me. For this, ye will agree to part, to plunge Into the black gulf of Forgetfulness, Trusting alone to My unpromised Love, 194 THE SUPREME REALITY That after struggling ages passed alone, The Glory of your mutual love forgot, Only dim memories of how fair Love is Abiding with you, I may bid you both In some far Heaven to know yourselves again." The Voice had ceased. Prostrate in prayer we lay, Striving to learn the Unfathomable Will. The God who knew the torture of our hearts, The vastness of the Sacrifice He asked, Who loved us with an Everlasting Love, The God of all our Life, of all our Joy, Had called to us for Help; — to give ourselves, To help Him save His loved unhappy World! We prayed unceasingly for Strength, until Pity and Love had won the Fight at last. God's Will and ours had melted into One! And so, beloved ! we go ; obey the Voice Obeyed in ages past — 'mid grief and tears, Obeyed 'mid life and light and joy, obeyed Lovingly ever, as we now obey ! Farewell, my heart! Soul of my Soul, fare- well! Once more, my very Being drinks in Thee ! Once more, thine eyes look upward into mine Sweet invitation, and once more, once more, POEMS 195 The Glory of thy Love is wrapped in mine! It is the end, Thy Will, O God! be done! So, in my dream, I saw them, hand in hand, Descend to our poor Earth. The bliss behind Called after them in vain. With steady step, At last they reached the boundaries of that air, Through which no Star can shine with light undimmed, Ray undistorted. With one long embrace, That told of endless memories of past love, Of separation's agony, of faith That God, in some vast far-off Time of His, Would make them one again, they sank to Earth, Hovering a while above a City's murk, Close to its ghastliest misery. Then a cry Burst from her lips at last, — a long, low cry, As if her spirit went forth with the cry ; "This, this is Death. Already I forget !" FEAR AND TRUST TO WILLIAM JAMES When last beneath, the Summer Stars I rode, An awe fell on me from those depths afar, Great Silent Spaces round each separate Star, Fathomless Distances filled full of God, Heaven beyond Heaven without bound or bar. And thus my lips. "Thy Love I dare not claim, Infinite Heart! whose pulses like a Sea, Strike shore of Sun or Star, yet onward flame, Unspent, unbroken, everlastingly!'' So spake I, by infinity oppressed. Yet ever, wrapt in peace for thought too deep, Like some small seabird on the waves asleep, My steadfast heart, all unaware, did rest, O Father! on the Ocean of Thy Breast! 196 THE MYSTIC'S PRAYER TO WILLIAM JAMES Upon God's Throne there is a seat for me! My coming forth from Him has left a space, Which none but I can fill! One sacred place Is vacant till I come! Father! from Thee When I descended, here to run my race, A void was left in Thy paternal Heart, Not to be filled while We are kept apart ! Yea ! though a million Worlds demand Thy care Though Heaven's vast Hosts Thy changeless Blessings own, Thy quick Love runs to meet my feeble prayer, As if amid Thy Worlds I lived alone, In endless Space but Thou and I were there ! And Thou embraced me with a love as wild As the young Mother bears toward her first- born Child! 197