FROM THE LIBRARY OF REV. LOUFS FITZGERALD BENSON, D. D. BEQUEATHED BY HIM TO THE LIBRARY OF PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY Division 3£jR Sectlo* HfflX Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2012 with funding from Princeton Theological Seminary Library http://archive.org/details/ourliberalOOalle OUR ^ 10FPW *^ (j APR 22 1032 ^ Liberal Movement IX THEOLOGY CHIEFLY AS SIIOUX IX RECOLLECTIOXS OF THE HISTORY OF LXITARIAXISM IX A CLOSING COURSE OF LECT1 IN THE HARVARD DIVINITY SCHOOL JOSEPH HENRY ALLEN Lecturer i H:r:\irJ University Honorary Membhr ok thk (Unitarian) Supremk I VANIA, AlTlK.K N AND TlVI TIAN History id Vt ruRiuLo,' THIRD EDITION BOSTON ROBERTS BROTHERS 1S92 Copyright, 1882, By Joseph Henry Allen. University Press: John Wilson and Son, Cambridge. PREFATORY NOTE. r I HIE following correspondence sufficiently explains the circumstances which have led to the publi- cation of this volume : — Divimiv s . i! \f.i» UnrooTr, 10, 1882. Dear Sir, — We, the undersigned, wishing to \ Lecturer on tin- "liberal Movement in Th- delivered before t li « - Divinity School of Harvard l in ft more permanent form, eipreni our earnest desire for the publication of the Mine. . truly TOUrs, II. Tuice Collier, lOHl A. Charles I'. Etui -f.i.i., Committee for the School. I 1, 1882- My Dear Friends, — Four very kind letter givei me tin- opportunity, which I am delighted to embrace, of l'-avi: you a memento of the four years I have passed, most agreeably, in connection with thii School. Trusting that you may all haw the privilege of doing share in that noble and most interesting work, of which I here attempted to trace some of the antecedents and condi: am, with the sincerest regard, Your friend, J. II. Ai i.kn. IV PREFATORY NOTE. These circumstances will explain, if they do not justify, a more personal tone in these Lectures than would belong to a purely historical or critical review. In fact, the value of the volume, if it has any, turns mainly on its being, in good part, made up of remi- niscences and personal testimony. It is, besides, in some sense the final link in a series, of which u He- brew Men and Times " makes the first, and the third, under the title " The Middle Age," is now in press. I will only add, that some passages may perhaps be recognized as having appeared here and there in print. In particular, most of the article on Unita- rianism in a pamphlet entitled "Three Phases of Modern Theology " has been included here ; and the Lecture on " The Gospel of Liberalism " is substan- tially the same with the Address to the Alumni of this School delivered in 1880. By the kindness of Dr. Hedge I am permitted to add in the form of an Appendix, with some revision and addition by his hand, his recent Memorial Ad- dress on Bellows and Emerson. Harvard Divinity School, Cambridge, June 10, 1882. CONTENTS. I. Antkckdknt.s II. New England Uhitabiamism . III. Chanmni; IV. Firn.KN Yi.\ V. Theodore Pabkbi VI A S. -ikmii [0 Thbolooi . . . VII. The Km Human VIII. Tin: < ."-N.1. oi Liberalism . . 1 — 90 114 n:> 17G AlM'KM'IX : Ml'.MOKlAL Al>I>KKSH BY Dll. HlilMiL: Henri W. Bellows Ralph Waldo l 211 OUR LIBERAL MOVEMENT IX THEOLOGY. i ANTECEDENTS TEERE are fcw< any form of religious thought that . ••-. One is, to see it u a fixed type of opinion] the ut: to see it m a j>lia<<*. in the development of relij truth. One sees it in : in creed or symbol, ba Bet forth by its recognized interpreters ; the other Bees it u <>:. ment that began long before ti. record of it, and will continue BO long as men think at all seriously on religious tilings. The former way ha- been much more common. It corresponds with the al temper in which i ious opinion 1 :i held, and with that aim at absolute truth, and the far.'. ent of it, which men have thought their highest duty. What is naturally fluent, and by the v.tv laws of thought must change continually M the bearings of all our knowledge change, men have continually endeavored to fix in rigid forms that could not lie altered or lo^t. 2 ANTECEDENTS. So we find the history of religious thought chiefly made up of the recital of creeds, with the story of the controversies that have grown out of them, or else have been reconciled in them. It is even taken for granted that every religious movement must perforce express itself in such a creed. To this day the ques- tion is asked, "What do Unitarians believe?" — just as if that question were at all relevant, as touching the movement which the various phases of Unitarian opinion represent. Unitarians themselves, in entire good faith, are trying to this day to find some state- ment or form of declaration broad enough to include them all, and precise enough to mean something when it has cancelled all they differ in; while in equal good faith they assure the world that no one is to be held responsible for that or any other statement that can be made. Now it is not quite satisfactory to say, as many do, that Unitarians simply guard, with more than com- mon jealousy, their right as Protestants to private judgment : in other words, that they are not only " Unitarian " Christians, but also " Liberal " Chris- tians. This has never been felt fairly to meet the case. Inquirers think they have a right to expect more ; believers feel they have a right to assume more. And many attempts have been made to state the Unitarian position with authority. But when we come to examine these attempts we are apt to be struck with two things : first, that they have a certain apologetic tone, as if the main point were not to say frankly just what the writer himself thinks, but rather to show that Unitarians are pretty good Christians I'MTAKIANISM: WHAT IS IT I 3 after all, — in short, to come as near the popular creed as may be without quite hitting it; and secondly, that they are mostly made up of details, or brief formulas of religious phiaa t points of Bible- interpretation, — notoriously wide apart from the opinions of many who rate themselves as Unitarians, and who stand in general esteem as well as anybody among them. I have spoken of one way of Looking at the matter, — that which we may call the && taiian or dogmatic way. The other is what, for distinction, we ma . the scientific way: that, namely, which we take as Btudente of the laws of thought, or of religion velopment in a broad In other words, it is the history of a Movement we study, not the attitude of a Not that dnitarianisni has generally been true in thought to what it is in fact It is much easier to figure itself a than as a movement away from all jed i t - - from a dogmatic toward- a purely scientific conception of religious truth. Hut this latter view is that which we shall have to tali would do any justice to its history. [n particular it is d many inconsistencies in that history. I do not say, to apologize for them. I have not the least intention of saying a word in apology. 1 may perhaps have to speak of B good many things as a critic, but certainly not as an apologist. In a very near and BpeciaJ sense I nitarianism is my birthright, which it would be dishonorable as well as painful to disown. As to that, I am entirely content with the position in which 4 ANTECEDENTS. Providence has placed us ; and I do not think we need to look far along the line of our history to find abundant matter of pride — if we choose to indulge it — in our antecedents and our record. That, among the rest, it will be my business to show if I can. The historical view which I propose to take is necessary, then, for justice to the Unitarian movement, whether as regards its opponents or its friends. On one hand, you would get from the written statements of Unitarians a notion that, however it may be with their opinions, their method differs from the Orthodox only by a hair's breadth, being just a little more pre- cise, rigid, and scrupulous in its exposition of partic- ular passages and texts, while avoiding mystery and bringing poetry down to the level of plain sense. On the other hand, a broad popular judgment, which it cannot conciliate or escape, holds Unitarian- ism responsible for a radical drift, thinly covered by conservative phrases, or hidden from itself, perhaps, by the mist of pious feeling. It is very important for our own honesty and self-respect that we should know how much of this is true. Unitarianism has educated, it has also enlisted, a great variety of opin- ion : is there any real unity behind this diversity ? It claims to be one form of religious doctrine ; namely, the Unity of the Godhead : but does its name after all mean anything more than "unity of spirit" among its adherents, — if, indeed, so much as that ? And these are questions to which it seems impossible to give any other answer than an historical answer. They must be met by the record, not of opinion, but of fact. WHAT IS ITS TASK \ Moreover, in no one thing has the independence claimed by Unitarians been more freely asserted than in their criticism of themselves and of one another. This, in fact, is one standing charge of weakn. them. Still, in matters of this sort, honesty is a good deal more important than strength, especially than a false show of strength. It is rather to their i that there is little factitious unity among them. Their efforts after unity have been not mnohinthe way of suppression and exclusion ; merging outspoken differences in a common sentiment or a common work. Their very title sonic of them have disowned in the name of a broader Christianity or a broader humanity, This breadth, this i has been inevitable, under the condition of things they stood in. But it is mere justice t<> acknowledge the fact of it, with whatever credit it may di least to recognise its value in attempting the B] problem that had to I For that problem will appear more radical and difficult in proportion SS we feel the fundamental change we undergo in passing bom a dogmatic to a scientific method in religious things. I will not anticipate lure what will appear more plainly as we get farther mi; except t<> sty that, far from accepting the methods of physical science, it is deliverance from them we seek, in establishing those of what we may rightly call religious science. The question of method is far deeper than that of any application or result of a given method ; and a e! of theological method means a great revolution of religious thought. That such a revolution — distantly 6 ANTECEDENTS. heralded by the controversies of the Eeformation — is in full sweep in the religious world, I must take for granted, not seek to prove. I have only to say further, by way of preface, that Unitarianism could hold no more honorable historical position than as consciously aiding in that larger movement, and do no more honorable task than to help, ever so little, towards that higher intellectual and spiritual life which it betokens. The name Unitarian, it is perhaps needless to say, has been given by general consent to that style of theology which is unable to see, or refuses to see, a distinction of persons in the Godhead, whatever that may be interpreted to mean. In this sense, Mahometans are called, and very justly called, a Unitarian sect, or rather a vast group of Unitarian sects. They have even been called a Christian sect, since they hold Jesus to have been one of the six great prophets, along with Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and Mahomet. And, in fact, their indignant and intolerant proclamation of the divine unity was aimed at the fantastic corruptions of Eastern Chris- tianity quite as much as at the multitude of Arabian idols. But that is simply a term of intellectual definition. As we understand the word, it defines those who belong within the broad circle of Christendom, and not to any of the outlying circles. Those who hold it generally insist very positively — even if somewhat dryly, and with a lack of Orthodox reverence and fervor — on the absolute supremacy, nay, the absolute perfection of Jesus as a divinely appointed teacher THE LIMITS OF UNITARIANISM. 7 and guide ; and those who do not state it quite so dogmatically nevertheless hold that the gospel pro- claimed by Jesus contains the key and the inspiration of that vast religious and moral force known as Christianity, and is in fact the solution, from the highest point of view, trf the knottiest problems that touch human character and conduct So that the bleak monotheism of Mahometanism does not into the account, any more than the philoso] monotheism of Plato and Cicero, in a fair his! view of what the name Unitarian im] I in, cot only the earliest Christian belief — that of the Brat disciples and of the v bament — was really BS we think; unitarian; but, after the doctrine of Christ's divinity became dominant, there were many lied heretical, which held various forma of unitariani-m, or near ap] to it, — S.iU-llian, Arian, Nestorian, and the restj — which there is n<» need to consider here, since they w< borne by the immense sweep of the current of church be- lief, or else suppressed by the heavy hand of church authority. Except for mere antiquarian curiosity, we have to do only with those forms of it which have arisen in modern times, — thai is, sinoe the contro- versies of the Reformation. It happens, too, that that form of it which bj during the Reformation period has had wry little elleet on later opinion; at least on that current of opinion which sets towards us. There were Unita- rians of the school of Socinus, learned, critical, hoi devout; hut a more scrupulous orthodoxy in turning their name into a byword of reproach. 8 ANTECEDENTS. The name Socinian has been often cast against mod- ern Unitarians ; and has always been disclaimed by them, as belonging to a phase of rationalism which they had nothing to do with, while they were quite free to profess honor and respect to the founders of that school. Again, there has been a distinct Uni- tarian tradition eastward in Europe, forming a current (it would seem) quite independent of western opinion, whose names of honor are the Polish brethren, and the careful scholars of Transylvania, only lately known to us by personal communication. With these, too, our inquiry has nothing practically to do. Still further, to narrow our field within easy com- pass, quite a number of religious bodies exist which are really unitarian in belief, though they do not take this as their recognized name, and stand outside this particular movement. Thus the Swedenborgians acknowledge only one Lord, and him only in the person of Christ. The Universalists are generally unitarian in theology ; but with a powerful denomi- national organization of their own, and starting, in their doctrinal history, with a view of the atonement, and of its universal efficacy, which parts them still more widely from Unitarians than from the Orthodox sects. The " Christian " sect is unitarian ; but on the basis of a rigid scripturalism, and with antecedents that separate it completely in spirit from what is historically known as such. And among the forms in which Orthodoxy is held by liberal and cultivated minds, there are some which can hardly be distin- guished, in any fair analysis, from a very common phase of the Unitarian belief. UNITAKIANISM IN ENGLAND. 9 Now I am not dealing with the matter philosophi- cally or dogmatically, but only historically ; and so it is necessary to set aside all these outlying forms, though some of them are extremely interesting and important I have to do only with that distinct series of antecedents which has determined the i ence of Unitariamsin as we know it. and has shaped the character of its belief. Ami these antecedents do not carry us, at present, beyond Rngland ana '. And besides, as [Jnitarianism lias had quite a differ- ent history in these two countri I briefly only, to a point <>r two of the hi-t<r qualified supernat- uralism, there was as much unanimity and heartiness of belief in it among the early Unitarians as can be found among any believers in any foundati m of any creed. The real chara I ofthemoven Out in the structure which was huilt upon it In the first place, it was characteristic of that movemenl to put \abL an interpretation on the language of the Bibl • as it would bear; and really broke ground in the direction of a rationalism which i\ honestly disowned. As a matter of course, it took thi ible explanation n{ such dogmas as the trinity, the deity of Christ, the atonement, and so on. It refused to accept any mysteries on these matters: "Where mystery begins religion endi was wont to say. It was always ready and glad to get scientific explanations of Genesis, long before it suspected thai I - might not be inspired truth. It pointed out with great satisfaction thai the famous text of the "three witi was undoubtedly spu- rious; and made something Out of the freedom g by various readings of other famous proof-texta The earliest critical edition of the New Testament of very high authority — Griesbach's — was first published. I believe, in England or here, at least first circulated 2 18 ANTECEDENTS. and studied with any zeal, by Unitarian scholars. Some of these were relieved to find that the first two chapters of Matthew do not stand on quite such firm ground as the rest, and that the narrative in Luke says nothing distinctly of a miraculous birth of Jesus ; and that so, without at all denying the truth of the gospel, they might well believe (as doubtless the first Christians did) that he was the son of Joseph as well as of Mary. Some found the account of the Tempta- tion easier to believe by supposing that the tempter was a Pharisee, or some emissary of the Jews, who wished, as it were, to feel beforehand the pulse of the new movement, or to break its force. Some found the Transfiguration best explained as an allegory or a dream. These and other like interpretations led to the charge of playing fast and loose with the sacred nar- rative, and of explaining things by explaining them away. But the attempt was made in entire good faith, by men who held quite seriously to what they received as the central fact of a real revelation, and who hon- estly supposed they were doing good service by com- mending it all the better to reasonable minds. They did not see that to other minds, more positive and ardent, there are no degrees of difficulty more or less, when once they are on the supernatural plane : take it as miracle or take it as poetry, to such minds it is the exercise of the understanding itself that is offen- sive on such matters. The half-way rationalism of the Unitarians did the good work of training several generations in a natural, sweet, reverent, and whole- some piety ; but it never has succeeded in making its ETHICAL CHARACTER. 19 own form of belief acceptable to the popular religious mind. In the second place, it was characteristic of that movement that the interpretation it put upon doctrine moral interpretation. Dogmatism was . allowed to dictate terms I \ nat- ural explanation was eagerly Bought for the Fall of man, which was explained away into hereditary ten- dency, corruption of example, or infirmity of will. Election, predestination, perseveran grace, jus- tification, were all reduced from the plane of d to that of metaphysics, and from this again to that of common-sense. Nbthii iffered to interfere with the consciousness of moral liberty, as tl round of moral judgment of right and wrong. The atone- meiit of human u r uilt by the sacrifice Of an in:. being was sheer horror and blasphemy in such a view. Eternal punishment, for any -in that could he com- mitted by a Bhort-lived mortal, was something to be thought <»f with amazement and awe The langui some ; mod quite plain, — it migl ilous to deny it outright ; but, if true, it must at any rate mean that moral guilt affects the BOul itself BO deeply that it can never quite recover, certainly not that that borror is arbitrarily inflicted by an inexorable God. And, as this rationalizing temper gained a lit- tle courage, it came t,» occupy pretty distinctly the ground of restoration in the dim future, and to bear it out with an anxious interpretation of the threaten- ing texts. Thus Christianity,. or the doctrines of revealed re- ligion, came to be interpreted as a system of divine 20 ANTECEDENTS. truth adapted to reason and common-sense, while resting on a foundation strictly miraculous and super- natural ; and as a system of human duty, or morality, testing on the same sanction, but wholly disengaged from metaphysical dogma. The actual duties of life were gravely, sincerely, and piously accepted, — its religious duties as well as its moral duties, whatever the enemies of the system may have supposed. I do not believe that the recognized offices of piety and worship, as well as those of honesty and charity, were ever more tenderly, seriously, and faithfully per- formed, than by the adherents of a system so unjustly represented as one of mere negation. The fervor, the passion, the stir of emotion, the warm enthusiasm that make religion a mighty power in the soul, to move whole multitudes at once, — these made no part of the Unitarian conception or experience of it. And a lack of genuine sympathy with the more popular forms of Christianity — most likely, of an adequate under- standing of them — was doubtless a creat weakness CD O in that system, as well as the source of suspicion and popular dislike. This weakness on the emotional side was the greater pity, because under a proud and powerful Establishment, like that of England, a dissenting sect is at best in a somewhat narrowed and depressed condition ; and, for its self-respect as well as its vital power, it can ill spare the strength which only reli- gious zeal or intellectual enthusiasm can give. We, whose early growth was sheltered by a modest Establishment of our own, may well honor that fear- less honesty, that sincerity of conviction, that clenomi- UNITAUIANISM IN ENGLAND. 21 national loyalty, which have been the life of English Unitarianisut It has, besides, its calendar of names which it delights to honor. And, in particular, we cannot overestimate its gain, in these later j from the great literary and philosopbJ nonce, the superb ethical ideal, and the high plane of reli- gious thought, of its best known intellectual 1< James Martineau. But I have not set out to criticise this earlier Unitarian movement, only I fairly what it 1 ems to me that the view now given of it — its ad its characteristics — may help show how and why it came to be what it was, and make OUT judgment of it more intelligent and just Without going into detail, I think we have now Been sufficiently what the doctrine really was, when first it found a oized name and place. We know somethii trong points and its weak points; and are pre- pared to understand the phase- it lias WOIU during the iods <'f its history in this country, la something over sixty y< II. NEW ENGLAND UNITAEIANISM. 11HE term Unitarian has been known in this - country as the name of a religious body since the year 1815. This period, again, may be divided into three, which, for convenience, we may call the time of its Growth, including its controversy with the Orthodox sects ; the time of Criticism, or of in- ternal controversy among the parties in its own body; and the time of Construction, — that is, of scientific criticism on one hand, and of denominational organ- ization on the other. Each of these periods, again, is best known by the name of some representative man : the first by that of Dr. Channing ; the second by that of Theodore Parker ; and the third by that of Dr. Hedge, if we take it on the speculative side, or by that of Dr. Bellows, if we take it on the emotional, denomi- national, or constructive side. It so happens, how- ever, that neither of these names, except the last, belongs very closely to the denomination as such. Dr. Channing never desired to be known as a Uni- tarian, and had a strong distrust of all denominational or sectarian names. Theodore Parker, while always asserting his right to rank with the Unitarian body, was for almost all the time of his public life in sharp THREE PERIODS. and personal controversy with the great majority of its members. Dr. Hedge, probably the ablest, deep- est, and most widely cultivated intellect that the denomination has embraced, is essentially a philo- sophical student and thinker ; and, while he has given as much impulse as any man to its thought, and direction to its higher culture, he cannot be said to have done anything towards shaping those definite opinions by which a religious body is more popularly known. And it is not so much for opinion as for in- spiration and organizing force thai the Unitarian body is indebted to I >r. Bellow s, whose Bplendid enthusiasm, generous range of sympathy, and magnificent work- ing force may almost be said to fa I the de- nomination alive for whatever tasks may lie I it in the future. The three dates which we m a as the ginning of these periods are the ; and I860. No dates like these can be quite accurate; as marking limits in the history of opinion, The thoughts of <>nc generation melt into those of another like the tints of the sky alter BUnset Still, each of them registers a definite fact, which may serve as well as another to start from. The first, • I lid, marks the >ear when the Unitarian body in this country be- gan to be known by this name, which till then had not been acknowledged or bestowed The year may be taken, as well as any, as the birth-year of the Transcendentalism which had BO much to do in shap- ing the form of liberal opinion we have known ni at least, for its emergence in the field of theology, for it was in that year that "the first gun of a long battle" 24 NEW ENGLAND UNITARIANISM. was discharged, in a review by Mr. George Ripley of Martineau's " Rationale of Religious Inquiry," pre- senting views which were at once keenly and publicly attacked by Mr. Andrews Norton. The year 1860, again, dates not only the death of Theodore Parker, which brought to a close the sharpest personal con- troversy within the Unitarian ranks, but the moment of time when the great moral debate of our era was brought victoriously into the field of politics, and events began visibly to lead to the merging of all lesser controversies in the one absorbing struggle for the nation's life. Since then, new bearings have been taken, other issues appear, and other methods are be- coming familiar in the field of speculative thought. I shall hope to make these periods and parties more distinct in the course of the sketch which I propose to draw of the denominational life during these sixty- seven years. For it is a sketch that I propose, not a history. I shall have very little to say of events, as such ; only of persons, with the opinions they repre- sent, and the circumstances that denned their position in the religious world, whether of thought or action. Again, I have not to do with the course of opinion in general, or the broader lines of the religious life, as would be proper if my aim were purely historical ; but with a limited period, a narrow locality mostly, and a single group of persons, or series of groups, all belonging within the same general range of ideas. If this is what is meant by speaking sometimes of Uni- tarianism as a " family affair " and a " Boston notion," I shall for the present admit the charge, at least not question it. Unitarianism is, in fact, to a great ex- UNITARIAN ENTERPR] 25 tent a local growth : it has had bat little ol of propagandism, and a rather scanty denominational history. I fa thought that it- comfort and pride in former day kk it honestly, were in it- narrow range, its family lilt to ab- sence of sectarian activity or ambition. There is next to nothing to tell of enterprise and adventure; Of rather, while there have been noble individual examples, then en comparatively little of certed, well-planned denominational action. The denomination — that is, the men composing it — have never been Btingy; none less so It would be within bounds to say that their gifts for religious, charitable, and other public object i .illy edu- cational), outside their very libera] scale of church expenses, could be reckoned by a good many millions of dollars in these last fifty years, By far the largest pari of this has been put quietly out of Bight in col- . in theological instruction or publication home missions and works of charity, in remote churches, and so on, and has never made a figure in denominational reports. In fact, there has been a great shyness, a very unnecessary modesty and reti- cence, if uot a positive dislike, among I the most generous Unitarians, of anything that looked lectarian glory: Mr. Am— Lawrence, for exam- pi'', one of the most intelligent and libera] of mer- chants, gave, it. is said, to orthodox institutions twice over what he did within the lines of his own de- nominational connection This peculiarity, if not eccentricity of character, has to be taken into ac- count, in Bumming up the p «ition of Unitarianism 26 NEW ENGLAND UNITAMANISM. in America, and in making any estimate of it as a working force. There is another point as to which one should speak with some reserve, which yet is really necessary to be taken into account in our review. It is implied in what I have already said of the Unitarian body being represented by a group of men quite independent of one another as thinkers, but standing personally in very near relations together. I should desire in this view to bring you, if I could, one step nearer to this group, nearer to a personal interest in the men who made it, and to a personal acquaintance with them. This is the more necessary, because Unitarian opinion has always been an individual thing. No one ever claimed to speak as responsible for the thoughts of other men, or as holding them responsible for his. Nothing, in fact, except a personal acquaintance which goes behind the spoken or published word, entitles one to speak with any confidence of the position of individuals in a group of men so entirely independent of one another, — independent, I mean, as to opinion ; independent, except it be in the way of a common sympathy and culture, and a mutual good- will and respect. This I may do with the more confidence here, because the lifetime of the denomination itself is easily embraced in the memory of many of its older members, and is not many years longer than my own. As a child I was brought up in the midst of all its influences, within hearing of all its earlier controver- sies, and with a child's natural interest and pride in the names which were considered then to do it honor ; SOME UNITARIAN PREACHERS. while my earlier university and professional lif just when the controversies of the second period be- gan to take shape and force, bringing me into relal more i with most of the men who gave its particular stamp and coloring to fcfc which 1 am trying to interpi I will recall here — not going ontaid that persona] acquaintance jnsl I i — a few of th I ron Bancroft, father of the historian, and pioneer of Liberal theology in i Dr. Ohanning, wli<» for more than tin. i was sly identified than any ol nominational thought and life tl B father and BOn, wt 1 with the foundation and earlier this School ; ( m, their kinsman by mar- . Long the most brilliant and admired pi the Boston circle, — whose clei commanded the i • »f trained lawyi i whose! use matched the worldly wisdom oi chant and financier, — the eloquent f homely morality and the religion of every-day Life, which his touch transfigured to poetry and Bplendor; Orville y, in whom thought is more intimately blended with emotion than in any other I d recall, — whom I have heard I >r. Putnam call I that probably ever had been or would be, — who I to make the pulpit a confessional, — v. large and brooding intelle< I If to interpret the ace of the < Shristian life, — whose mind >usly open, till long - 28 NEW ENGLAND UNITARIANISM. est methods or discoveries in the pursuit of truth ; President Walker, whose shrewd wisdom, generous tolerance, wide philosophic culture, and dignity of character were not more remarkable than the cordial and kindly sympathy he always had for younger men; those three most eminent theological scholars of their day, Norton, Palfrey, and Noyes, whose best work was given to theological education here ; John Pierpont, tender religious poet and high-tempered pulpit warrior, proud, irascible, always eagerly press- ing home some sharp point of his generous and hot conviction ; Ephraim Peabody, the beloved minister of King's Chapel, whose face was a benediction, — in whom gravity, sweetness, and a cautious wisdom were blended in a combination as rare as it was lovely ; Theodore Parker, the generous, dauntless, in- corrigible apostle of free thought, the heroic leader in social and political reform, pioneer of the many who in these latter years have forsaken the ancient ways ; Ezra Stiles Gannett, the eloquent and noble colleague of Channing, most fervent and devoted of men, whose conscience, morbidly acute, was burdened with every grief and sin of the city where he did his work, — whose burning speech almost inspired the cool temper of Boston Unitarianism with his own missionary zeal, — of whom it may well be said that ten such men would have carried Unitarianism like a prairie fire from border to border of our country ; Thomas Starr King, that bright electric light of liberal theology, whose flame went out, alas ! on the Pacific coast eighteen years ago, — whose memory is wonderfully fresh and near to any who knew him, as the most SOME UNITARIAN LAYMEN. 29 genial of friends, tlie most cheerful and instructive of companions, the most lucid, swift, and radiant intel- Q08 that it lit en our joy to know. To these I should add a few names of eminent lay- men beat known to the 1 public, and variously representing the Unitarian fellowship and idea: John Quincy Adams, notably the one most thoroughbred man that our conn I, put in by Washington in early manhood, an eloquent le in this University, <■>:; 1 in diplomat end European and after his presidency the veteran champion of the national honor in the II of Representatives; his cousin J I ranch, the noble, nprighl >ut Chief-Jus- tice of the District of Columbia t than forty I ' Quincy, last of the proud old B Federalists, who died at tl three, the most honored citizen of New England; Chief-J Shaw, one of the most learned of American jurists, and Bolidest in judgment on the bench, which he dignified for nearly thirty years ; Edward K the most cultivated intellect, probably, that has taken pari in our national counsels; Charles Sumner, chivalrous and fearless champion of the Higher Law in the darkest our histoi r Andrew, who more than any other man carried the heart of New England with him through the war; Ralph Waldo Emerson, too, in early life a Unitarian preacher, now everywhere recognised as first in the highest department of our native literature, so lately gone that it is as if he were -till among us, serene, eloquent, beloved, in the sphere he made and bright- 30 NEW ENGLAND UNITARIANISM. ened by his radiance ; these, with Bryant and Long- fellow, and a host of other names that have adorned the literature of our country, belong to the history of New England Unitarianism, and ought not to be spared from the briefest record that attempts to trace its character. When each of the names here noted recalls a dis- tinct personal reminiscence, and most of them a per- sonal relation more or less intimate and dear, you will not wonder that I find it difficult to say, out of hand, just what the Unitarian opinion is on any given matter, or what it is that Unitarians believe in general ; or that I am a little impatient that they should ever be judged by their theology, which was so small a fraction of either their religion or their life! Such men as most of those here named could not be — I may say, could not afford to be — dogmatists, enthusiasts, sectarians, propagandists of their own opinions. As for us others, it is simply a privilege and honor to count as the most obscure and undis- tinguished in such a company. Unitarians have not been united by fidelity to any creed, but by sharing, each in his own way, a common spirit and life. For myself, I have spoken to more than a hundred and fifty of their congregations, and have met groups or families of their communion in numerous other places, from Hungary to Oregon, everywhere and always finding myself equally at home. And thus the phrase " common spirit and life " has a very distinct meaning to my mind, quite different from what it would be if I only copied it out of a book. IT WAS HOT A Bl 31 I have said that the Unitarian body in this country, either in its origin or in its history, was not i 3 the common understanding of that term. It has had no creed, no platform, no policy, as ; and it is only of late, and rather feebly, that it has made any effort to prop ly within the lines of oth<-r sects and When I Bpeak of Beets in this tion, I do not mean bo mnch those bodies which had a i historical efore th< 1 1 ment of this country, and made part of its original religions or even political organization, — Buch tionalists, the Presbyterians, the Episcopalians, and (as in this List I think 1 ought to include the Metho- dists, Ti. limply forms of church government or organization, and may consist with any lax. opinion. Thus the main body <'i' American Unitari- ans are Congregational; those in England are or were r lyterian; the tii^t church in Boston to declare, itself unitarian was Episcopal, and remains BO in its forms <>\' worship; ami preachers have continued in the Methodist connection with avowed unitarian opinions, with the full understanding and by the strong urgency of their brethren. All these, if I understand the matter rightly, dealt originally with the whole populate h, in the -where they wen tively established, and were no( special or outside organizations, made up of uliar way of thinking. Ami last, or BOCts proper, I should especially rank the large, vigorous, Btrong, and aggressive bodies of the Baptists and (Jniversalists, which are founded each 32 NEW ENGLAND UNITARIANISM. upon an idea. Their organization, their policy, their definite and aggressive creed, but in particular their secession from other religious bodies in the name of that creed, are what makes them Sects, as distinct from the more general term religious body, church, or communion. Now the Unitarians do not belong to the former class, because their opinions distinctly exclude them. They do not belong to the latter class, because they have no distinct creed or policy of their own. Yet again, as claiming a church polity, or communion, and a recognized fellowship of their own, they are quite as far removed from the ranks, or rather from the scattered individualisms, of " free inquirers " or " free religionists," with whom they would hold it the most glaring misunderstanding to be confounded. I have tried to say what the Unitarian body is not. The question next comes, What is it ? To this the answer has been made, that it is like one of those unincorporated districts of land which are sometimes left out when the boundaries of towns and villages have been marked out all round them. 1 The soil may be as good, the farms may yield as large an increase, the families may be as contented, pros- perous, and happy; but they do not belong to any known political organization. That comparison will go a little way : it expresses the fact of independence, but it does not express the fact of unity. It leaves the look of the matter as if Unitarian churches were only chance and random gatherings, nuclei as it were of religious organization 1 The comparison was made, very felicitously, by Dr. Putnam. GATIONALISTJ and effort, in that large vague half of the community which is sometimes lumped together as " unchurched." Now this means too little, and it means too much, It means too much, I it turns our th upon that wide chaos of opinion, incoherent and un- formed, which, as "independent" oras "unchurched/ 1 already occupies full half our field of vision when we look that way, and which tantly enlarged by tin* shelling off or the undermining of elements which are aol well compacted among our twenty or more religious bodies. It means too little, b» au looks the one thing which ■ and unity to this particular body, and mak< to gather it- statistics, and in som direct action. That one thing is the first thing of all which should be made clear, if we would know either the hi baracter, or the present attitude of Unit ism. It is that, historically, it is tit, liberal w (he great Congregational body which founded the first colonies in New England, and gave the law to church and State for more than two hundred years. Of a : three hundred and sixty-six Unitarian churches, one hundred and twenty or more including a large majority of those in Massachusel riginal boa! parishes tonne, 1 under the I polity of the Puritan I ttionalists, 1 Of I again, thirty-eight were founded before the year 1700, including that first organized I den iii L620, a few months before the colony 1 u on Plymouth Rock; and eighty more — that u 1 Sac " Year Book of the Unitarian Congregational Chnn 3 34 NEW ENGLAND UNITARIANISM. hundred and eighteen in all, or more than one third of the entire number — were established before the war of the Revolution. Thus the church history of Unitarianism in this country runs back almost to the time of the colony at Jamestown, and about two hundred years before the name Unitarian was either given to or accepted by one of its congregations. I do not say the expression of unitarian opinion ; but the corporate history and the ecclesiastical traditions belong to the Congregational body at large, and not to that of a separate and peculiar sect. That is to say, again, that Unitarianism has received its full share of the original inheritance of that great Puritan body which made the English Commonwealth and the Pilgrim Colonies of America. I say this not at all to enter a claim w 7 hich some persons might be unwilling to allow, but simply to state the historical fact of the case. This one fact more than any other explains the nature and the seeming inconsistency of the Unitarian record. That is, w T hile Unitarians have been mostly known for their liberal opinion, for their defence of free inquiry, and for their tolerance of out-and-out scientific or phi- losophical radicalism, — at the same time the temper of the body at large has been mainly conservative. The large majority of Unitarians, truth to say, have been extremely annoyed and scandalized by the re- sults to which younger, more restless, more bold and positive minds have been led ; while these, again, have been full of angry wonder and reproach that any limits at all should be set to that free speculation and inquiry to which they felt themselves invited. IT> EARLY CHURCH HISTORY. The misunderstanding was inevitable. By their history and antecedents Unitarians make as ancient and conservative a religious body as any in this country. lopted, however, very early, liberal principles of interpretation; and th r the mi- nt shock of "' radicalism " 1. well over, will no doubt result in Larly, scientific, ;i- well aa ind m, noway ,1c t<» thi Ligious 1. real origin, then, of the Unitarian body in this country was, that a large proportion of the I tional body i. M includin the leading churches 1:1 !'•■ ' >n but one, had come, from radually to adopt libera] opinions— Arminian or free-will as oppoa Lvinistic, and afterwards Unitarian as opp sed to Trinitarian. 1 Just how and why this division of opinion had come about, it is not easy to say I: corresponds nearly enough with the natural division we always find among people of tin' smic genera] way of thinking, some rigid an or liberal In particular, it seemed to from the influence, and to follow the widening circle of culture, that went out from Harvard < "••11. . M think this was the cut in everj country town <■: population in eastern Massachus* Andover, and Ipswich, which wore kept from following the drift of liberal opinion by the personal weight and influence of their preachers: at least this is true of the sble sad rigid Dr. V. Charlestown. This drift of Liberal opinion reached back shout forty miles, its northerly half tin :. neoticut River, ami lapping over into southern New Hampshire, limits, sdding a lew of the lar_ pretty Dearly the geographical extent 1 .land Unkuriamain. 36 NEW ENGLAND UNITARIANISM. then as now a chief centre of secular learning in this country. The men who were most moved by this influence, or who were in advance of it, were often called — by a phrase borrowed, I believe, from Eobert Boyle — the " Latitude-men about Cambridge." The free-thinking of the Eevolutionary period may have had something to do, but I should think not much, with this latitude of opinion. The circumstance which more than any other brought it into public notice and recognition was the appointment of Henry Ware to the post of professor of Divinity in Harvard College, in 1805. This was strongly protested against at the time by the more orthodox party, as bad faith to the founder of that professorship, — the eminent and generous London puritan, Thomas Hollis; and it is deplored to this day, with indignant grief, by that party, who do not abandon their hope of seeing the University brought back to the faith of the fathers. This personal episode helps to explain a good deal of the sharp tone in the controversy that followed. Still there was no breach in the Congregational ranks for ten years after, nor a very open one for some years later still. The forward steps that led to forming a Unitarian party were in the way of literary and scholarly criticism. It happened that a very brilliant group of young men — cultivated, ardent, eloquent — graduated from the University in those days, of whom Edward Everett became best known to history ; but Joseph Stevens Buckminster — a preacher in Boston for some five years, until his death in 1812 — had far the strongest influence, by the singular grace of his ITS LirKUARY ANTECEDEti '■<. oratory, his wonderful social charm, his eager and at enthusiasm as a scholar. years after his death, I have lu-ard it told, t merchants who could not speak of him without I This bright circle of personal force and cultun rized in tlii- then famous " Anthology Club," which Btarted one of the first Literary and ci journals of the country, the M I thly Anthology," — lineal pre I c of the u < 'hristian 1 disciple,* 1 " Chri -* . an Examiner," and ' [Jnitarian Review," — which was really the harbinger and mouthpie early Unitarian theol I Bhall n<»t trouble you with any account <>f the contro liich followed It i- admirably told by Mr. William Gannett in his father's Biography, and need not be told again. The details of battles and skirmishes of opinion are apt to i dull part of the history "I any tin)'*, except where some Dal interest comes in. I wish, however, to il- lustrate from another point ire of the change which was going on; and this I shall find it easiest to do by a Bingle example. A- you know, by ecclesiastical law the Cong] tioual ( toder made part of the original constitution of England. Each town must maintain a church or parish organization, and every voter must !><' a church-member. This old constitution of thing not wholly done away in MaSSS husettfl till when the Voluntary system was fully adopted. Till then, every citizen's tax-hill included a reli and, till 1820, that tax must be paid for the BU] of a Congregational Church. 38 NEW ENGLAND UNITARIANISM. For example, my father was settled in 1816 as minister of a country town. The settlement was for life, and the salary was directly voted and paid by the Town from the same fund that made the town roads, supported the town schools, and paid for the petty town police of constable, fence-viewer, and local surveyor. Quite within my own recollection, his ordinary household expenses were paid by drafts on the town treasurer, exactly as they would be by cheques upon a bank. One rigid old-school puritan, Asaph Eice, had opposed and dissented from my father's settlement on the ground of his liberal theol- ogy ; and probably the majority would have been quite as well satisfied with a more orthodox preacher ; but that did not prevent them all, Asaph Eice in- cluded, from being good friends and contented parish- ioners. Nor did the same thing prevent, for a while at least, the common professional courtesies in neigh- boring towns, from orthodox and liberal alike. Sect- arian lines, since so sharply marked and so jealously guarded, were only beginning to be known. The charming simplicity of this arrangement only began to be disturbed in 1827 by the formation in the vil- lage of a little Baptist church, which was a great grief to my father, since the first steps in it were taken by near personal friends of his, who were conscientious enough to tax themselves at the start the extra cost of it, after paying their share to the support of the legal Parish. This, of course, they felt to be a great injustice, — as in fact it was ; and in six years more that hardship was removed by the law of complete ecclesiastical freedom, under which we are now living. THE OLD PABISH SYSTEM. 39 Now a legal establishment can never be a sect, properly speaking. It has got to meet not only the average mind, but a g] ty of minds. It must include a wide latitude of opinion, ami admit i of debate. It may be fairly doubted whether the conditions of a general, manly, healthy, .!. charitable growth of i - thought are ever so veil nut as in the breadth, the y, tin 1 broad tolerance of a religious establishment, when ined with rioua and in- telligent population V t religious earne it admit, I favor. The "great awakening n under Jonathan Edwai solitary phenomenon which in fact banished him from Northampton parish), ami the "revival" under Whitefield was by a force from abroad. Both, it may fairly be assumed, led to a reaction in the direction of liberalism! which they helped full as much as they opposed The sober common-sense view of rel which makes it in the broadest way religion for the people, ia nourished nowhere bo well, 1 think, an establishment like that of a century ago in England, which sheltered the growth ot manly 1. tarian thought, which nurtured a generous and growing scholar-hip, and which has left its mark on nothing more deep and distinct than on the entire Unitarian movement in this country, BO far as it can he traced to that sour In conclusion, 1 will speak very briefly of that movement at the period when it still i distinctly the features of its origin, and v. sented by that group of > '.lent men 40 NEW ENGLAND UNITARIANISM. whom I have spoken of before. This period may be taken, roughly, as from forty to fifty years ago. The general theory of Christianity as accepted at this stage, which is sometimes called " old-school Unitarianism," was (as President Walker was in the habit of describing it) especially adapted to the mind, shaped as it were to the demand, not of speculative theologians, but of serious and educated laymen. Such representative names as those of Judge White, Judge Story, and Judge Shaw at once occur, when we recall that period. These men clung to Christi- anity with the tenacious hold of an honest reverence and a strong conviction ; with a trained masculine understanding, also, which tolerated no affront to reason or good morals. Paley and Lardner had es- tablished the historical foundations : the structure to be built upon them was that of rational piety, per- sonal morality, and civic virtue. This was the manly, dignified, and sober type of " Boston Unitarianism," a name never to be named without gratitude and honor. Lawyer-like, too, it was impatient, perhaps intol- erant, of any questioning of the foundations. The Bible, these men held, was a minister's credentials. Make what abatement in the popular notion of it you may and must : then take it, or else leave it, for what it claims to be, — a revelation of absolute authority to declare the law of life, or to instruct the mind on the highest conceivable truth. To their strong and sober sense, Christianity, without a supernatural rev- elation of truth, without miracles, without the divine authority of Jesus, was a weak delusion, if not a CHARACTER OF EARLT UNITARIAN] 41 wicked and hypocritical pretence. The suhtilt: theologians, the refinements of criticism, were not for their style of mind. Christianity was holy and ven- erable to them, because it meant that virtue which regulates the life and saves the S In the words which I copy from the clear firm autograph of 1' dent Quincy, — the accurate and 1 of this mental man happirn I urity but freedom m none but i b virtue none hut knowledge: and neither freedom, vir- tue, nor knowledge has any vigor or immortal hope, except in the principles of the Christian faith, u of the < 'hristian religion." 1 wish i i, with all the emphasis of which I am capable, my veneration and gratitude for I QOble men, and for the ty] f rational, manly, and tender piety which they have left i 31 not in- sult their memory by a su 1 of apology; by arguing whether they, or those who ha. to follow their Lead, are to be vouchsafed the honor of the Christian name. Small honor to that name, if they disclaim it or are deprived of it I There are two Borts of people who do them and the movement they represent a great injustice: th< other : at a distance, who fancy something in II cold, haughty, and exclusive; and the liberals of a younger day, who think with a certain lofty disdain of its strict and austei rvatism. But to those of my own generation the life that was in its gave the very mother's milk on which we were nur- tured; and it is impossible to think of it without a certain filial tenderness. Nay, such is the fi i 42 NEW ENGLAND UNLTARIANISM. reverent habit, I am apt to think that Christianity, in all its ages of evolution, and in all its numberless forms, has never taken a type at once so free from ecclesiastical pressure, and in itself so manly, sweet, and noble. A faith which expressed itself in the ideal thought of Channing, the Consolations and Hymns of Greenwood, the tender wisdom of Ephraim Peabody ; a personal piety whose profession and aim were the " Formation of the Christian Character ; " a charity which created the Fraternity of Churches, and has made itself felt for fifty years in the tone and pattern of every good work done in that com- munity, — these may very well challenge comparison with anything its critics have to show ; and may very well make those of us who think we have out- grown it pause to consider whether, for a generation or two at any rate, we are likely to find anything so good to take its place. III. CHANNING IT was the great felicity of T'nitarinni>m in this country to 1"' represented for twenty-fii by the pure and eminent name of William EUery Channing. [f anything oonld possibly disarm the lity of sectarian prejudice, if anything could possiMy enlist th< mate pride and Loyalty of i\ i t which he was the acknowled it would be the elevated plane of thought, the ■ ; loquence, the piety, the transparent puri later life to an intrepid vigor, the oded de- votion to the highest order of truth, of this ler. I use these words with careful deliberation I bave not myself always felt in la I now in deliberate review, his real intellectual The holder temper, the ning, the scientific habit, the intense! political passion, the restless speculation, of the period that hafl | since his death, all serve to hide from us the grandeur ■ work he dill, and its indisp educating the very best qualities of mind and on which we have to rely for the work most needed in the future. 44 CHANNING. For his own personality was not aggressive and commanding, as that of most other men of equal eminence. It was by persuasion and not impression — by pressure (as Dr. Bellows once finely said of him) and not by blows — that he made his deep mark on his own generation and on ours. Each single quality of an intellectual leader, taken by itself, might seem to be wanting in him. In all his writ- ings it would be hard to find a daring thought or a brilliant phrase. His own small communion has produced or included much more learned scholars, men of much deeper and broader speculative grasp, preachers of far greater brilliancy, fervor, fancy, elo- quence, and popular pulpit power, bolder and more radical thinkers in the direction either of scientific criticism or moral reform. Of the many eminent names belonging, by nature or adoption, to the Uni- tarian pulpit of New England, several have made their mark in some one direction, and perhaps more, sharper and deeper than Channing did, but none of them near so broadly. Xone of them would be once thought of — with the single exception of Theodore Parker — as having left the distinct impression of his mind upon a religious or intellectual movement, to which he had given tone and character ; none of them, with that exception, would be once thought of as the recognized and unchallenged chief of such a movement. That distinction is allowed, in our religious history, unquestioned and ungrudged, to Channing alone. And, as I said, I think it is justified by the most critical and deliberate judgment of the case. But to HIS EARLY LIFE. 45 make it appear just to those who were strangers to the movement, in the absence of almost all those sa- lient points which most easily catch the distant eye, it is necessary to consider with some attention the man himself, and the circumstances of his time. The life of Dr. Channing extends just over sixty- two years, from L780 to L842. Bis childhood was spent at Newport, Rhode [aland, where his mind re- I a very serious bent from thi I and godly old Calvinist, Dr. II . '.: - wh ■ name is best known from his famous tenet, that the true i fitness to I"- Baved is willingness to be damned for the glory of God By thai e the name " Bopkinsian " has been i tarian tradition to this day. The boy Channing was little of pel Qtle and serious of temper ; vet one story is told, to his credit, of a time when that gentle temper flamed out into wrath, and into something of a Bchool-boy fight, I believe, in defi Bome younger comrade No one who saw him in man- hood would suspect that he had i n capable of wrath. That one flash of it was a symptom of mora] health. His walks by the beach, and the Fresh wind and rolling surge of the Atlantic, did a good deal, he to nurture a certain dreamy and devout sympathy with nature: his spiritual horizon, all through his life, kept always that level width. Excepting this, and a native sensitiveness of organization almost feminine, there was little to distinguish him at twenty — little, that is, of native genius or intellectual force — from a goodly number of serious, generous, and 46 CHANGING. cultivated young men who graduate year by year from our American colleges. With him it was, with them it is, a pure, high, consecrated aim. His first larger experience of life was had in Bichmond, Virginia, where, I imagine, his position as teacher helped to seclude him from any wide range of social intercourse, as well as his own temper of mind, and his moral repugnance to the state of society there, which came out long afterwards in his hostility to slavery. But, in particular, it was in the solitary reflection of these years that he quite outgrew, and firmly renounced, the narrow creed of his youth, — or what there was narrow in it, — and found himself, intelligently and consistently, in the ranks of liberal thinkers. I should say, however, that the process with him was not one of criticism, hardly of investigation, but an even, natural, and very devout religious growth. Every step of it was taken, not merely with anxious deliberation, but with a certain tender, solicitous, re- morseful, conscientious, pleading piety and religious discipline of soul, which make the record of those years like the record of old saints and pietists. The prospect was rather that of a morbid introspective pietism, than of a manly, courageous, cheerful, and healthy religious life, which it afterwards so largely became. To this somewhat hectic experience and temper of that time we have to add a great loss of bodily health and vigor from the exposures of his sea-voyage home. Physically he was never a robust man, never, I should suppose, well in health, after those years of his stay IIIS PERSONAL TRAITS. 47 in Richmond His stature was small, his frame at- tenuated, hifl face thin. The clear wide brow, the great, solemn, wistful eyes, the low, melodious, and flowing Bpeech, — these were native L r ifts potent to win through a Btrong and Bweet persuasion ; but they were united in him with a physical faulty thai might to forbid the hope of any serious life-work, and with a bodily frame thai seemed but enough to cite again the words of Dr, Bellows to anchor hia boo! to Lltll. II was never quite an invalid, but h<' was always a valetudinarian. In particular, he had a singular old : and the recollection of many Of his friends will recall his ]■! a the le corner of his warmly sheltered and softly fur- nished room Thai 90ft and warm shell always to crave and need as mnch a- a Bick child What to a in. pit vigorous man would be indolent indulgence, with him was a necessity of hie and the condition of any working 1 1 liicnmatancee him, through all his working and declining years, this lary shelter, and screened him from the wind of the world by the surroundings ami the com- forts of sufficient wealth. lli> virtue lay not in manly struggle with difficulty and hardship, hut in the consecration of life-long leisure and ample oppor- tunity to something very different from a selfish luxury. Be had as little of the Btorm and battle of 3 can fall to any Berious man to encounter; hut unrounded always by the respectful, affectionate, vigilant, and almost too obsequious homage and love of near friends. Ideally, his thought took in the 48 CHANNING. widest sweep of duty and every saored sympathy and homely obligation that bind man to his kind : personally, he was perplexed, shrinking, helpless, in the presence of any one of the rougher tasks that would bring him face to face with coarse suffering and want. The sensitive, womanly temperament, with the self-consideration that in an invalid becomes the necessary instinct of self-defence, made some per- sons quick and harsh to judge what seemed to cross his own serious pleadings and maxims of self-denial ; but no person was ever brought very near to him, who went for sympathy or counsel, or in simple friendship, that did not bear the same testimony to the infinite sweetness, elevation, serenity, the abso- lute freedom from personal passion and desire, which were the root of his extraordinary moral power. For a very genuine and great moral power this tenderly nurtured mind became, and is felt to this day — warm, life-generating, springlike — among all the more turbulent forces that play upon the world. The process, too, by which it grew to this great spirit- ual predominance and power was as gentle and patient as the spring growth in which its buds began to swell. Somewhere about the age of thirty his name began to win upon the public ear as a preacher of singular fervor and beauty of utterance, along with the more brilliant reputation of Buckminster, then at its height. It is not easy to describe, though it is perhaps not very difficult to imagine, the manner and gifts that won their way so surely. In his own place in the Federal Street pulpit I heard him only once, and saw him only once or twice besides, — barely AS A PREACHES. 4'.' enough to verity the impression which others have recorded. From the stilted and awkward height of that old-fashioned lofty mahogany pulpit, with it balu8traded flights of Btairs, his f ted down, it might be Baid without • /ion, like the of an angel, and his voice floated down like a voice from higher spheres. 1 cannot think of any other her of those who can fairly be called popular, to whom that distant altitude, bo Lifting him away from his congregation, might be called even a positive help, as it aeemi • with him. Dr. < Shanninj ' i and fcion, — clear, melodious, flowi ;ly plain- curiously to catch and win upon the hear- • mpathy : its melody and pathos in tl. of a hymn were alone a charm that might bring men to the listening, like the attraction ol music oft. Mi, too, when the Bigns of physical frailty were apparent, it might be Baid that 1. ; i was watched and waited for with that Bort of hush, as if one were waiting t<> catch hi- rthly worda All the Strength that was in the man went out from him in pure spiritual fervor and uplifting moral force Any b that could I.,- called eloquent, or any eloquence that could he called popular, could not possibly have depended less than his on what are commonly re- garded as oratorical gifts; rn U \,\ not possibly have more than hia in the qualities which make a pure, disembodied, spiritual radiance. It follow- directly from this, that that power could not have I >uld n<>i have been developed, in a resisting medium. It was 4 50 CHANNING. the great felicity of Dr. Charming's experience, that early in life he found his place in a sphere which offered no hindrance, but rather invited out and wel- comed just those qualities in which he was afterwards so distinguished. His people included what was very best of the serious, devout, conscientious, liberal- minded who made the finest type of early Unitarian- ism. As a sculptor would wish to work in marble of the purest waxen lustre, as a musician would wish to compose for instruments of the finest tone, so there were men and women in that company whom it would be such a preacher's highest joy and privilege to win towards the higher life. A spirit " is not finely touched but to fine issues." The inspiring, sympa- thetic touch may come first from the speaker, but it must go back to him from the hearer, warm and quick, before the speaker can become an orator, — which word means, not a declaimer, but one who pleads with power and effect. Such effective plead- ing, on the plane of high, pure, passionless, spiritual truth, made the rare pulpit power of Dr. Channing ; and it was a power which largely grew from the har- mony which he found, or made, in the atmosphere of the place where his voice was heard. It may be reckoned ten years of professional life before his name began to be known publicly as a leader in religious thought ; and again fifteen more, before it began to be heard in a wider sphere, — as it was for about ten years, — in the discussion of the gravest questions of morals and politics. So that his professional life has three stages, — as preacher, as theologian, and as reformer. STAGES OF HIS WORK. 51 It is no part of my purpose to criticise or di the work of these three periods. That of the in particular, would probably be found to be the I ment of the ordinary pulpit topics, — the nurture of Christian piety, and the religious discipline of life, — distinguished from other m ther by tone than ince. The work of the later periods I part to the general history oi i is thought Qominational annul-, and to that of the broader moral movements of the day, — education, peace, tem- perance, and antislavery. To turn rapidly the | of that noble half-century volume in which his dis- as of those matl gathered, along with a lit -r fruitage of his life, would give a fairer view than any critical summing up of the ran- measure of his power. There is, h ew to [en of his work which is quite necessary to un- aid tla- peculiar place it holds in our id.. development, and especially to Bhow how ii with what went before and after in the par- ticular movement of thought to which that work beloD Of his gifts purely personal I have Bpoken, perhaps ii, already. But there are two thin_~. that are wry < -hai his mind, and that in their combination seem b fine the natu the movement of which he was bo eminent a Leader. The first was a <■ /•'//'•■ n and aim moral evil. This "conviction of sin" was quite as genuine a fruit as any from the stern old Caivinistic stock out of which his own faith grew. It differed however in him, very widely, from the two forms in 52 CHANNING. which it is most commonly found, and which are ap- pealed to by religionists generally with most emphasis and effect. That sort of conversion, or religious crisis, of which Augustine's is the most famous and Bunyan's the most familiar type, could never have been the ex- perience of Channing. It was when he was still a child that he quite outgrew, on one side at least, his liability to that great shock and catastrophe of relig- ious fear. He had heard a sermon on the terrors of the Lord, which to his childish mind seemed to wrap life all around, and the bright world itself, in gloom and dread : surely, he thought, if this is true, none of us can ever smile again. But his father, who was a serious man, seemed to feel none of this alarm, and his cheerful unconcern, with his excellent appetite at dinner, gave the boy at first a shock like jesting at a funeral ; but soon convinced him, once for all, that the whole thing was unreal and untrue. The grave sense of evil, the real " conviction of sin," was not diminished ; but, happily for that clear con- science and sensitive organization, it never lay, to his thought, against that lurid background of a uni- verse of horror. It was impossible, too, that his dreamy, meditative boyhood, the simple purity of his country life, the high and devout temper of thought so early trained, should ever be made the groundwork of the keen self- reproach, the passionate remorse, the agonized inward struggle, which with so many men of saintly virtue have been the narrow gateway of the higher life. It must have been a calm ascent, and not a sharp con- HIS OF MORAL KVIL. flirt against spiritual foes that beset the climbing. That life was from the first a process, a culture, a growth, — not a warfare, a fighl step in advance is in - coiim'. something, the impression i. it, and the Lesson he would always method calm, even, and natural. I do oot rem< : that lie hints anywhere at a knowledge or an un- ritua] conflict, Bach as one \ to whom that conflict bad been ■• What k "f intensity, of 1 1 j * - deeper Bprii moral power, has been found in 1. r writings genuine expn of a religious nurture Bingularly passionless and and so the more chars and power. A: b iin, that convict! u was not intensi- fied, as it is with many, by the - or Buf unong men. His ex] life' was in the main placid, secluded, uneventful It me contrast it" we think of it in connec- tion with the .stern Calvinism Inflicted <>n I and sensitive temper of the poet i l>v John rlier life had been B] of a slave-ship. I H slavery, with and wrongs, Channing di I iew in Iroix ; and these lay always close and I upon his conscience. But even thea — and, i more, the inhumanity mine, hos- pital, or prison — lay in his mind not bo much as vivid pictures of wrong inflicted and dured, but rather as the shadow, intense and d< 54 CHANNING. quality but very dim in outline, which darkened his broad and generous idealizings of human life. He saw the particular fact, when his mind dwelt upon it at all, in its broad relations. The right thing was a spot of color, and the wrong thing a spot of gloom, in a wide landscape, which he looked at somewhat vaguely (as one might if a little near- sighted), more with a poet's emotion than with an artist's eye. That keen and troubled sense of a deep reality in what human life displays of evil was al- ways with him, — if nothing more, at least as a dim background to relieve his far more vivid conception of spiritual truth and right. But the action of his imagination upon the facts and forms that made up the picture was brooding and slow. So far as it af- fected his appeals and efforts in behalf of goodness, it was more in a vague, general way, to deepen the tone, quicken the motive, and give distinct sense of elevation to the religious life, than to intensify it by the passion and the dread of sin. So that here, too, a certain breadth and placidity, rather than vehe- mence and depth, mark the quality of his power. It is only against some opposing evil that any form of goodness can be felt, as motive or as fact. It is only as violation of the highest good our minds can know, that we really feel the dread and power of wrong. The Calvinistic scheme, which Channing was taught in his youth, gave a very keen sense of sin, in the soul or in the world, as enmity and rebel- lion against the sovereignty of God. To us that phrase has become a figure of speech, — a symbol, covering a relation of right and wrong which we can DIGNITY OF HUMAN ffATUBE. see better, or think we can, under a different sort of symbol. The religious terror, almost we might eve: religious awe, before God as sovereign and judgi greatly faded from the mind of a generation t: to think of him as Father rather than Comforter rather than Judgi S . other op] must be conceived, ovi tions, and wrongs of lit'"; • or religii slides towards a futile Optimism on the od, or a gloomy Fatalism on the other. Our iuf human nature. This topic more than any other made the burden of his preaching, and t he centra] point, from which lie reached out towards the Right he upheld on one side, or the Wrong he at- tacked on the other. It is to he observed that this idealizing view of Ids, this profound, lively, and - of the d ;. of human nature, is quite SS much 0] view which pessimists and cynics have made pain- fully familiar in our day, as it is to the austere and dreadful conviction of the divine judgments, which marked the theology of a former time. This new 56 CHANNING. gospel of Humanity — remote alike from religious terror and irreligious contempt — made the very spe- cial burden of Channing's message to his generation. The dignity of human nature he elevated into a reli- gious dogma, as with himself it was an inspiration and a creed. How far it consisted with the facts of human nature was no more his care, than how far the facts of human life consist with the moral provi- dence of God. " So much the worse for the facts." At any rate, those facts were screened from his eye — at least, greatly softened and dimmed in outline — by the peculiar seclusion which sheltered while it developed his religious life. The growth was healthy, not morbid ; vigorous, if not robust, — whether by virtue or in spite of that still seclusion. What I have called the "gospel of humanity," announced in the pure tone and with the earnest conviction native to him, made, more than any other word that has been spoken to this century, the religious creed of the finest, broadest, deepest minds. It retained from the first dispensation of Christianity all its fervor, its purity, its sweetness ; it caught from modern life its instinct of justice, its wider social sympathies, its warm and lively hope of a coming victory of natural and inalienable right. Above all, where the contrast shows strongest against the earlier creed, it was a generous faith. It was full of a noble confidence in man's nature and destiny, full of a noble sympathy with what is best in all forms of natural goodness, full of a noble aspir- ation towards a better earthly future for man and the redress of all evils in societv, as well as the victories RINEL of conscience in the soul And it was a form of modern piety all the more Btrongly marked in him, because relieved against that earnest and sincei dreadful and implacable, belief from which the reli- gions experience of his early yean bad set him I The thought has been made quite too familiar to part of the peculiar gospel of our time, to dwelling on here. But it may be worth while to notice, very briefly, how from this central position Dr. Channing met and did those tasks which have made his nam< mown, and given it the n influence. There are, first, three or four discourses of I toctrine, — the same which made him the unchallenged and even revered leader of his own religious body. The event which more than any other gave them the cour- age of their convictions and confidence in their future, was when in Baltimore, in L819, he took up one by one, in calm and deliberate attack, the Beries of opin- ions by which Orthodox is distinguished from Libera] Christianity. It was not in the way of learned, criti- cholarly discussion : that he left to men other- wise qualified and gifted It was simply in the of eloquent, fervent, elevated appeal against the wrong clone to the character of < rod, the blight put upon the lit'.' of man, by a scheme so full as he regarded i unreason, inhumanity, and gloom. The deliv this discourse was an event, because it publicly en- ; the most eloquent, best known, and mosl hon- ored minister of Boston on the one aide as against the other: because it did mow ^han any other one thing to crystallize the forces and convictions of the liberal 58 CHAXNING. party among New England Congregationalists, then only beginning to be known as Unitarians. To what might be called the speculative side of this movement Channing did not make any very dis- tinct contribution of thought. His sympathies were large and liberal ; his opinions in matters of theology were simply the common thought of the more serious, devout, conservative of those who had outgrown the ancient creed. His intellectual method w T as a firm but gentle dogmatism. Eeligious truth with him was more a matter of contemplation than of study or clear definition. Natural or critical science he knew very little about. He was content with great vague- ness of view, provided the religious want of his mind was fairly met. Thus he hovered always on the edge of an Arianism in which a soberer thinker would hardly find rest or satisfaction ; and was content to say that we know too little about the ultimate nature of matter to criticise the story of the Ascension. His strong points were not these; but those wide and generous views of the Fatherhood of God, the Brother- hood of Man, the Dignity of Human Nature, the Free Communion of the ideal Church, which made the theme of discourse in several volumes of eloquent and noble sermons, and constitute still the best body of practical divinity that the Unitarian movement in this country has produced. It was in the midst of these labors, and in the second period (as I have called it) of his public life, that he sounded the first distinct note of that prac- tical Christian philanthropy with which his name has been most widelv and honorably connected, in a CHRISTIAN PHILANTHROPY. sermon on that most sacred and beneficent mission among the poor began by his near friend, J Tuckerman This has been the most chara * the best organized, and by Car the m co-operative work that the Unitarian I attempted by way of Church action. P ning'a woid did as much as any man's to dignify and endear it in the heart of its munil; this day, a little less than fifty 1 :n this tli*- Btep Te in perance and Education which now began to themselves in ; and from tl in to those which lay upon the border line of m politics, — namely, War and S itand main line of argument with which he would approach such topics as these may easily en ugh be taken for gnu I know hi cast of thought Happily for him, the pub] had not become so roused and jealous regarding of them as it has been since; and though there some tment perhaps, yet tl not the angry hostility which ev< :i the gentlest word on some of these m would have been sure to provoke a fev But the subject which I have named last de& more special mention: partly I 'han- ning's day slavery has gone through its Stormy end ; and partly because without it, and the part he bore in it, though we might have known the beauty, fervor, and elevation of his charact- ■: we should not have known its moral manliness, de- termination, and strength. 60 CHANNING. It was slowly, and in a sense reluctantly, that one of his temper was drawn to take part in a dis- cussion of such wide public issues, and to identify himself — he, in his gentle seclusion, and well past the prime of his years — with a party whose methods he strongly dissented from, whose uncompromising creed he never adopted, and whose appeal to passion he deeply dreaded and condemned. For some six or eight years the antislavery movement had been under way. Its principle of abstract justice, its resolution, its intrepid courage he admired, and he had submitted to some mild censure because he did not openly take its ground. The event that brought him to the front, and made him afterwards the most intellectually eminent leader of that movement, was the death of Lovejoy, shot in defending his press at Alton, Illinois, in 1837. A citizens' meeting was called at Faneuil Hall, to speak the word and rally the courage of men alarmed at the character of the struggle, and especially at what so threatened the freedom of public debate. Public opinion set very strongly then, and was as strong in Boston as anywhere, against any discussion of the right and wrong of slavery. The Attorney- General of Massachusetts volunteered on the platform to at- tack the movement in very bitter and offensive terms. It was at this speech that Wendell Phillips, then with all his brilliant oratorical gifts a young man compara- tively unknown, sprang to the floor, where his speech gleamed like flashes of lightning across the stormy debate, and at one bound took his place at the very head of platform orators, which he has held, unchal- WRITINGS ON SLAVERY. Gl lenged, ever since. To those who were there (as I have heard it described), it was an apparition more splendid than any transformation scene upon the stage. On the same occasion Dr. Channing, with a plr. hardihood he had perhaps never shown before, stood side by side upon the platform with Garrison and other antdsla very leaders whose method lie had con- demned, but in whom he now saw the champii that freedom of speech which must be upheld, he thought, by all good men. This act identified him at once with the prim of that party, though not with its method or dor- trine. It enli peat amount of moral sympathy and support to the moi and it committed him to the discussion, which he followed up in Bix or eight of the most labored and & his life. A brief treatise on Slavery, dealing with it purely on grounds of moral argument ; a public of sympathy to Mr. Birney, then the standard-1 of the Abolition party in politics; a letter to Mr. ( 'lay on the annexation of Texas, which the writer thought cause enough to justify disunion : a letter on Mr. Clay's political position; a tract on Emancipation ; and an argument on the duty of the Free 81 I this was the Beries of writings which made Channing, in his later years, the best known exponent of the growing hostility to slavery. Something of popu- larity and something of comfort he doubtless for- feited; but to one of his temper that was a very small thing, and, sheltered as he was in a thousand ways, could not have touched him \ rly. The obloquy and the personal danger were for hardier 62 CHANNING. fighters in the field. His glory was, that he was content to share their reproach, and that with steady- fidelity he served an unpopular cause which he thought right. At least, if his sensitive nature felt keenly (as it did sometimes) the coldness and the unpardoning prejudice of former friends, the world at large was not allowed to know that he suffered ; and this, too, was more than made up by the honor widely paid to his integrity and courage. Years came upon him while his thought was still fresh and clear, and his temper unclouded by infirm- ity or pain. Some one asked him what he thought the pleasantest time of life. " About sixty-two," he answered, cheerily. A few weeks later, October 2, 1842, it was his great privilege to pass away, almost painlessly, from an attack of autumn fever, — the sunset of his life as calm and radiant as its sunshine had always been. His last public act was an address in memory of West India Emancipation, at Lenox, two months before his death. Its closing sentences are as fine an example as any, both of his style of religious eloquence, and of that fervent hopefulness of spirit which never left him: — " I began this subject in hope, and in hope I end. I have turned aside to speak of the great stain on our coun- try, which makes us the by-word and scorn of the nations ; but I do not despair. Mighty powers are at work in the world. Who can stay them 1 God's word has gone forth, and it cannot return to him void. A new comprehension of the Christian spirit, a new reverence for humanity, a new feeling of brotherhood and all men's relation to the common Father, — this is among the signs of our times. ADDRESS AT LENOX. 63 We see it : do we not feel it ] Before this, all oppressions are to fall. Society, silently pervaded by this, is to change its aspect of universal warfare for peace. The power of lelfishnees, all-grasping and seemingly invincible, is to yield to this divine energy. The song of angels, i On earth peace, 1 will not always sound as fiction. "0 come thou kingdom of heaven, for which we daily pray! Come, friend and saviour of the nee, who didst shed thy blood on the CI08B, to reconcile man to man and earth to heaven ! Come, ye predicted sgea of righteo . and love, tn which the faithful have so trned ! Come, Father almighty, and crown with thine omnipo- tence the homble stri I thy children to subvert op- ii and wrong; and joy, the truth and spirit of thy Son, through the whole earth ! " IV. FIFTEEN YEAES OF CONTROVERSY. WHAT we may call the second period in the history of Unitarianism in this country ex- tends from the year 1836, which showed the first open breach between the historical and the spiritual inter- pretation of Christianity, to 1860, when all minor controversies were suspended in the hush of waiting for the more terrible conflict just then about to begin. But a line may be drawn to define rather more precisely the period of interior conflict, which made these years so critical in the history of the Unitarian movement. It happened that two controversies, which made a great noise at the time, coincided almost ex- actly with the date of Channing's death, — the " Pier- pont controversy " (which in form was at first simply a personal dispute respecting the legal rights of a min- ister, under the old law of settlement, as against his parish), on the ground of Temperance and moral re- form ; and the " Parker controversy,'' on the ground of Rationalism and theological reform. It happened, again, that in 1857 some sort of reconciliation of the two hostile methods in theology was attempted in the way of scientific criticism, in the " Christian Exam- iner," then the leading journal of liberal thought, ret: - w under the editorial direction of Dr. Hedge. So that, • Bgardfl the interior history of Unitarianistn here, the controversial period may be taken ig about fifteen years. This, however, is far from the only, r >r even s applied to the . A in view. What has lied " tl. controv. the half-century on the political rights and mural wrongs of slavery in America, was just now at its height. The annexation of Texas in 1845, the Mexican war which quickly followed, the comprt the fugitive al ol •' uri ;. the K e in 18' ppalling conflict into which all passions and interests were drawn for tl. l i a moral, si . ane a national question. I: had frankly upon the field of politics early in the re conai ing» and so belonged no more in particular to the development of opinion in this or any other n body. It is quite accurate enough foi our purp then, to mark ofif these fifteen 18* within the Unitarian body. But I will go back for a moment, I began with, — about the time immediately be- fore the outbreak of ' gical task of old Unitarianism was done, and it had or - to have working faith. The shocking and appalling < i the old tl. v it had removed once for all. for us, by a criti ^ . 66 FIFTEEN YEARS OF CONTROVERSY. not very searching or profound, perhaps, but at least quite sufficient for its task. Things painful and in- credible in the Biblical record it had either explained away in good faith, or unsuspectingly ignored. The critical movement had gone just so far, that our the- ory of Christianity was thus absolutely divested of everything that shocked the conscience or common- sense ; while its hold on habitual reverence, and faith in its special sanction and authority were absolutely unimpaired. The immense advantage to peace of mind and strength of character was retained, which consists in clinging to a visible symbol honestly be- lieved to be divine, while any suspicion of weakness in the intellectual foundation was left for future find- ing out. For the present, there was the tranquil and grateful sense of intellectual rest. But the moment of intellectual rest is only a mo- ment ; then comes the next inevitable step of intel- lectual advance. I say, inevitable. For what we call rest, in living things, is like the dead-point of an engine, — a moment of balance, broken in a mo- ment by the same play of the machine that brought it on. What we call motion is the effort which the living creature makes to adjust itself to changes that come about not by its choice or will, — changes with- in, from the law of its structure ; changes without, which it must meet Or else perish. It is so with the simplest vital motions ; it is so, too, with those move- ments of thought which affect the deepest springs of character, belief, or hope, and which we call religious. But here the effort to meet the inevitable change is mqxe than a vital instinct : it is often a struggle to WARN IN 67 keep one's hold on a faith which he feels slipping from his grasp ; which, if he let it go, takes with it very largely the best comfort and blessing of his life. I shall not pretend to do again what has been done d times so well already, — to trace t of those inevitable B it it may be oba here, that the instinct, which know dreads the impending chan more clearly prophetic than that brave spirit, loyal to which goes blindfold, as it were, in the paths of Providence. The forebodings of both coward and patrii r outdone by the terrors ol tl Wilder- ness, and the horrors of Andersonvill I those who scouted the forebodinj dtheutl of them, it is the chief honor now to i\ the tenor when Happily they could oot know that their sanguine hope must I at bo sore with the warnings of Orthodox tors or timid friends in our theological domain ; so with the guine hop*' that hailed the fil of broadening light We were warned that we stood on the perilous : that a single step would take a id the recognized boundai hristian faith. There two directions in which that Step might be taken; and each, to those who took them, seemed vital and necessary, not simply innocent and sale. The trans- cendental free-thinker was sure that his new phi- losophy gave him a better ground of Christian faith than any external evidences ; the liberal critic would only relieve Christianity of a burden and an encum- 68 FIFTEEN YEARS OF CONTROVERSY. brance that still hindered its free course to victory. Both were conscious alike of the vast interval which separated their motive from that of the Deistical movement, of evil memory to them both. So both disdained the warning; both overstepped the limit which each had acknowledged as the boundary of Christianity and unbelief ; and, in a certain way, both have entered on a larger heritage. The first shock to the received liberal theology of the day, I should be inclined to say, was Professor Noyes's argument on the Messianic interpretation of the prophecies, in 1834; and the next, Professor Norton's rejection, on grounds part speculative and part critical, of the first two chapters of Matthew, in 1840. That is, these decisive first steps were taken by deliberate, conscientious, conservative scholars, — the best and soberest scholars we had to show. All the rest, we may say, followed as matter of course. But I well remember the mental distress felt by my beloved and honored relative, Henry Ware, Jr., at Mr. Emerson's superb address before the Divinity School in 1838, and the pain with which he listened to* his daughter's reading of that tender, reverent, thoughtful exposition of Dr. Furness touching the apparition of angels at the open sepulchre. These are waymarks and memories of the time when a new departure was set unmistakably before the faithful and grieved eyes of the good men who still abode in the former ways. As to the course that has been taken since, I am sure that I speak in the name of a good many who have followed it as far as anybody, when I say that it has been with no iconoclastic zeal I RAN S C K N I ) EN I A L I S M : ITS BBG1 N NING. 69 and with no sense of triumpli over a decaying .super- stition, but with deep reluctance and nd a great sense of personal loss, that they have felt the ancient supports give way which had BUStaic much integrity of life and vital piety, and have found themselves, as it were, in the case of pi with a weary track to cross before they could look again for so well-sheltered and fair a home. It u i iry now to go back for a moment and speak very briefly of those two intellectual move- ments just alluded to, which brought us, by their irresistible drift, into that period of controversy. The first was what is called New Englan oendentalism. Eta hii I d written in a graceful way by Mr. Frothingham, with warm appre- ciation of the chief actors in it, and I shall make no attempt to repeat it here. 1 A mere outline of beta 1 The ciitramatancei which led to the (tarnation «»f what afterwardi to be known m Um Transcendental Clab After the public I nurd Unil I - nni.il, Sept 8, 1836, it ehenoed th.it II. W. Ripley, P, II. Hedge, an I ' anaui net in conversation on tlie un- •ory condition of Unitarian theology, and parsed the noun in conference in a room at " Wlllard'a." The hum ting wai adjourned to meet at Mr. Ripley's in Boeton the following week ; ami thence again, in the eon: .mm- month, to Mr. Emenon'l in Concord, on this ftffiairiffn there waa a much larger gathering, including A. & Alcott, « . a. Bartoi, <:. l'. Bradford, »>. A. Brown, son, W. H. I 'hanning, .1. F. Clarke, .!. S. D : :.iin>, Caleb Stetson, Margaret Foliar, and lliai K. P. Peab i ly. The club thus formed, without rules or organization (sometimes called among iti members the '•]!• |gi ' iub "), continued to meet at lm intervals, according to peraonal convenience, — Mr. Hedge tiring at that time in Bangor, .Maine, — lor about ten years, or till the aban- donment of the Brook Farm experiment, aud the removal of Mr. 70 FIFTEEN YEARS OF CONTROVERSY. would tell next to nothing about it to those who did not know it already ; and a fair judgment of it would be too long and difficult a task, even if I were other- wise capable of it. The easiest way of describing it is as the sentimental, mystical, and poetic side of the liberal movement. It had its vagaries, its eccen- tricities, its unintelligible speculation, its fantastic poetry, its wonderful " Orphic Sayings," and its so- cialistic experiment at Brook Farm; and all these occasioned more or less bewilderment, scandal, or amusement to outsiders. Even the noble and sweet music of Emerson's discourse only made it palatable to the ear, without commending it to the intolerant common-sense of the day ; while the great moral sweep and energy of Carlyle, chief prophet of the new era, so full of bracing vigor to the younger generation, hardly began to be recognized under the clumsy hu- mor and unpardonable caprices of his style. Whatever else may be said of it, this at least may be fairly claimed for Transcendentalism : that it dis- solved away a good many hard boundaries of opin- ion ; it melted quite thoroughly the crust that was beginning to form on the somewhat chilly current of liberal theology. Eational criticism is indeed necessary, in order that the current shall move at all ; but rational criticism alone is shallow and ster- ile. If independent thinking is to be united with any fervor and flow of the religious life, it must find religion somewhere as a primary sentiment in human Ripley to New York. Theodore Parker had joined meanwhile, and Mr. Putnam ceased to attend after the first meeting in Concord. The publication of " The Dial " was begun in 1840. TRANSCENDENTALISM: ITS DOGMA. 71 nature, and not as a mere logical inference from cer- t.'iin facta of history. This is just what New England Transcendentalism did. It was fortunate that it came before the scientific development, and not after it. It is the great felicity of free religions thought in this country, in its later unfolding, that it had itfl birth iii a sentiment so poetic, 80 generous, so devout, BO open to all the humanities as well ai the widest sympathies of philosophy and the higher literature, as that. It is simple and easy justice to say this now, at tin- end of fnrtv years But at that time, and for many years later, Transcendentalism was not only a laugh- ing-stock It was also the great theological bu of the serious and devout As a system of opinion (if such it could be called), it was limply this. fundamental ideas which make the basis of the re- ligious life, — the idea of God, of duty, and of immor- tality. — the transoendentalists asserted, are given out- right in the nature and constitution of man, ami do not have t> be learned from any book or confirmed by any miracle. In one way, this followed, i enough, from what Channing had taught of the nity and the divine (dements of human nature. In another way, it was connected with a certain i vescence of interest and enthusiasm at the new ideas that came floating in, when German poetry and phi- losophy began to be familiar. It would he no doubt interesting to follow this up on its literary side, since it has deeply colored one large department of our literature, best represented by Emerson and Lowell; but at present we have to do only with its bearing 72 FIFTEEN YEARS OF CONTROVERSY. on theology, and, in fact, only with the negative side of that. For it follows, as soon as you state the principle which lies at the base of the transcendental doctrine, that you have cut away — like a balloon, as it were — not only from the ground of narrow common-sense, but from the moorings of religious tradition. Trans- cendentalism seemed to affect a certain aristocratic disdain of common ways of thinking, and to the sober- minded appeared full of vagary and peril. God, it said, is not a Being apart from the universe, but everywhere, as the life of all things, and especially in your own thought of the Infinite. That sounds well ; but, to the plain understanding of plain people, " everywhere " is much the same as nowhere, and a God who is merely infinite is much the same as no God at all. So much the worse for the understanding, replied the transcendentalist : you must learn to discard that, if you would deal with these high matters, and trust not reasoning, but only the absolute Eeason, " with a capital E." Eeason will teach you that God is not here or there, but everywhere ; there is neither Past nor Future with him, but only an eternal Now. Not this or that thing is a miracle, but everything or else nothing : at any rate (to borrow Parker's illustration), the real miracle is not turning a few gallons of water into wine at Cana, but turning hundreds of thousands of barrels of water into wine every year in France and Italy and along the Ehine. Duty is taught us by the voice within : what do we need of the Ten Com- mandments ? We know by our own consciousness TRANSCENDENTALISM: ITS ISSUE. ,3 that we are immortal : what need of any proof from the Resurrection ? All men are inspired more or less, every man as much as his nature is capable of being : we owe no particular respect to any sa ks, 01 prophets, or apostles, or to Christ himself, e: where our Reason allirms the same truth to us. In short, for all ci or inspiration or I mony offered from abroad, Transcendentalism substi- tuted an off-hand dogmatism of its own, whose only evidence was Sentiment, — I feel thai it u tr\ absolute Reason, — T know thai U is true. All this was very exhilarating to those young people, especially, who eraved religious satisfa yet found themselves dissatisfied with the ordinary proofs, which probably they had never ini or tried to understand. But, BS may well 1 !. it Bounded like blasphemous nonsense to the serious, intelligent, and excellent people who had been trained I ntdous a ■ of a revealed religion. As long as it kept in the region of poetry or sentiment or I eition it could he home with, though it looked a little hazy and rather suspicions. In fin I rene optimism was already making great havoc of men's plain, old-fashioned theories of right and wrong. But the innocent- Bounding, idyllic sentiment became quite another thing when it took shape in one of the mosl matie of thinkers, sturdiest of combatants, boldest of assailants, most widely informed of students and readers, and in his hands became a sharp weapon of attack. The war of words which had been long gathering 74 FIFTEEN YEARS OF CONTROVERSY. broke out early in the year 1841, over a thin pam- phlet called " The Transient and Permanent in Chris- tianity," — an ordination sermon by Theodore Parker, preached in May of that year. There was nothing in it new to intelligent readers then; nothing that would not seem harmless enough now, or even com- monplace, considering the turn discussions have taken since : nothing, that is, except the rare rhetorical beauty, the fervor of sentiment, and the fearless range of illustration, — those literary qualities in which Theodore Parker stood out at once far in ad- vance of Channing or any of the writers of his school, and created, it is not too much to say, a theological style of his own. That style had great qualities, and it had great faults. With a singular poetical sweet- ness, wealth, and fervor, it was vigorous, straightfor- ward, manly, never a word without definite purpose and aim; at the same time too self- asserting, too scornful of antagonists, utterly unmindful of the qual- ification which sober argument demands, passionate in conviction, unable to acknowledge truth or honesty on the other side. The " permanent " in Christianity was, of course, its moral doctrine and its religious life ; the " tran- sient " was the form, the creed, the fable and myth wrought about it. The assertions of the discourse might be borne with, but its illustrations were a deep offence. That Jesus as Son of God should be likened to Hercules, and his miracles to those of that errant spiritualist Apollonius of Tyana, was not easily to be pardoned by those who considered themselves to hold a positive system in Christianity. Nothing, in fact, THB PARKEB CONTROVERSY. 75 is so hard to reconcile with Theodore Parker's sa- gacity or else his good faith as a controversialist, as bis surprise at the scandal and dissent which fol- lowed Allowing for a little vacillation and general ignorance of modern criticism, th< theologians whom he attacked honestly supposed themselves to stand on ground strictly supernatural, and to maintain that ground by fair historical ment A- ;i rule, they did mpt to meet him in fair delate, — which, indeed, most of them were quite incapable of doing. His incredible wealth of reading and ready command of the weapons of debate, y nothing of his hot, aggr tyle of attack, Would disarm a platoon of at I at a breath. In on it was a pity that the contro- versy as it actually ensued was wordy, Btormy, effu- sive, sentimental, vituperative, angry, — anythin calm and scientific on either Bide Men of equal sincerity, equal goodness, equal intelligence, were arrayed on both sides; and to this day it appears t<> me that those took the better part who chose neither side, hut watched as patiently and modestly as they might, bo see the scientific hearings of the question, as they should en • dually from the noise and smoke of the, field. The waste of hard feeling and the waste of hard words seem a pity ; hut that was inevitable when the debate became popular and personal, — and it had to become popular and personal, to prepare that broader way which has been opened since. The must radical questions — not merely about the doctrinal interpre- tation of thfl Bihlfl hnt about the nature of inspirsv- 76 FIFTEEN YEARS OF CONTROVERSY. tion, the possibility of miracles, the very foundation of our belief in God, duty, or immortality — came directly into the open field. It was no longer a dis- cussion among metaphysicians, theologians, critics, and religionists; but men took sides on it as they do in politics, from temperament or else personal feeling. Theodore Parker's name, accordingly, from that of a retired student, a fervent, very practical, 1 and some- what sentimental preacher, at once became that of a party leader. His personal qualities enlisted the strongest feelings of attachment and hostility. His personal hits were as much enjoyed on one side as they were resented on the other. It was a great sol- ace to him and his friends to corner his opponents in some false position, where they would seem to deny on one side the freedom of opinion they had just been asserting on the other. It would have been fatuity in them, on the contrary, — if their own be- lief or defence of Christianity as they held it meant anything at all, — to take a different stand from what they did. It would have been far more to their dis- credit if, at his one challenge, they had suddenly aban- doned their old position, and, at a leap, passed from an honest though narrow supernaturalism into the thin air of Free Religion. It has never been quite clear to me whether he really felt the surprise he showed that they did not so stultify themselves, or whether he merely wished to put them into an un- comfortable place by pushing home their seeming 1 One of his sermons while at Spring Street was on the peculiar duties, trials, and temptations of Milk-men. TEMPER OF THE DI8CU88ION. 77 inconsistency, and so compel them to review their ground. So far as the controversy was personal, its story has been well told already, and need not be repeated. The correspondence that grew out of it on his part is sometimes sharply unjust, sometimes noble, generous, and very touching. Whatever his faults as a contro- versialist, — with all that exasperating of lip and style, of which he professed himself quite inno- cently unconscious, — he was not only one of the most genuine, but one of the most affectionate, erous, and warm-hearted of men. The control as he said, and probably felt, was none of his making or choice. So far as it was merely theological, it has greatly lost its in! m that Transcendentalism is out of date, and all discussion of that matter goes upon quite a different set of principles, and a scien- tific method which was as foreign to the one side as to the other. At bottom, his system was dogmatism resting on sentiment; that of his opponents was dog- matism (in a very mild form resting on revelation. Both have been taken up and absorbed in a far wider intellectual method, or else are submitted to quite other tests of scientific study. I at heretic and iconoclast of thirty v< has left a name held almost equally in honor by those on both sides of the old line. For he was something more than an assailant and a critic. He was a man of great warmth of affection; of rare, fervent, and genuine religious feeling ; of broad popular sympathies; capable of great and pas- sionate force of moral conviction. When some of 78 FIFTEEN YEARS OF CONTROVERSY. his friends, resenting the petty hindrances and jeal- ousies that blocked his speech, passed the curt and emphatic resolve, " That Theodore Parker shall have a chance to be heard in Boston," and so opened for him the way to a noble metropolitan audience, and a hearing through the press such as was given to no other man of his time, he went on in that open way, not to a futile and petty bickering of theological dis- pute, but to a work of vast moral sweep and power, which made his the most potent and commanding voice ill that larger, more momentous, and fateful controversy in which the main strength of his life was spent. But, to approach that controversy fairly, it is well to go back to its antecedents in a calmer time. The great debate of human rights and political justice, from forty to twenty years ago, narrowed more and more towards a life-and-death struggle with American slavery. It is impossible for a later generation to understand the sincere repugnance and horror with which that conflict was seen to be approaching ; or how what looks now like cowardly compromise and subterfuge seemed to many then their patriotic duty ; or how the very things that checked and delayed the antislavery movement were what made the bloody success of emancipation possible. Historically speaking, it is not nearly so important that all good men should take the view which ab- stractly seems truest and best, as it is that they should be honest in maintaining their own view, which with the majority of them is very likely, regarded ab- stractly, neither truest nor best. A party consisting CONSERVATIVE AND REFORMER. 79 of all good men on one side, as against a party sisting of all bad men on the other, would I only a monstrosity, but B great calamity to mankind. That slow process of thirl , by which a ma- jority of American mind- lucated to Bee the g and danger of >la\ I >w, it* we think of the conflicting interests and the conflict- ing forces that were to be plunged into the fight I ': course, the excited combatants do d tea II I partisanfl on either side clam terminate the leaden of the other. The had only when the op to striking heat: then the task is taken from the hands of Eti nd ren over to the ordeal of Battle While the debut* g on, two kinds of 1. minds are equally ry, — the bold, valiant, un- compromising, mi_ ted in devotion to an idea, who are the honest Reformers j the calm, reasonable, ible to trim the balance, to watch the ch and prevent the infinite hazard and mischief reckless move, who are the honest Conaervath But, besides these two, there is a third class, nobler and more necessary than either. I: men of large intellect and powerful understanding ; of knowledge broad and various; richly equipped by education and training; allied by natural gifts and culture to the elasses that incline _ly to conservatism ; yet compelled by elear intellectual conviction — as Milton was — to cast in their lot, when the critical moment comes, with the leaders of a radical reform. Such men distinctly set aside their 80 FIFTEEN YEARS OF CONTROVERSY. own calmer and perhaps better judgment of the cir- cumstances, in view of the one great overwhelming necessity that is upon them to act. Voluntarily they narrow the breadth of their understanding, as their sacrifice to the one idea that just then must be upheld at all hazards. If in the debate which follows they appear narrow-minded, unjust to opponents, violent, positive, self-asserting, it is against the generosity of their nature and the instincts of their breeding. It is, in short, their way of sacrifice to the higher law of necessity and the duty of the hour. Of such men, the nobler sort of leaders in the great battle of right and wrong, the most eminent among us were Charles Sumner and Theodore Parker. Of all our highly cultivated men of letters, they, I think, were the only ones who gave themselves heart and soul to the antislavery movement as the one chief thing; of all the antislavery leaders, they were the only ones who kept up their broad scholarship, and their interest in all topics, intellectual and moral, that make for the welfare of mankind. And in the period to which I especially refer, — coming down, that is, to some three years before the war, — the place of Theodore Parker was one that belonged to him alone. It is not, however, my intention to give here a sketch of his character, or of the very able, intense, and incessant labors which broke down his sturdy physical strength, and laid him in the grave before the age of fifty. His is quite too large and remark- able a personality to be discussed in this incidental way. My business now is with the controversy in CJXITA.RU] RVAT1SM. 81 its general drift, — not as it belongs to the history of the nation, bat as it connected itself with the tone of feeling and affected the fortunes of Unita- rian ism. We note that, here as elsewhere, there wen two exactly opposite tendencies brought into close con- tact. On the one hand, the Unitarian body, by po- sition and history, was mainly conscrvativ as it included scholars, professional men, merchants, politicians, aim ly 90. [ta theology might free in some regards, but in ai it fully shared the conservatism of all religions 1 then. It is hut timidly and awkwardly, in this coun- try at least, that a church deals with matters b ing to the State or to at large. And what w.i- a violent reproach then, in the month of those who thought everything must give way before this great question of humanity, and cried out loudly •gainst the Church as the "refuge of oppress because it did not lift up it 3 1 trumpet against negro >l.r. easily seen, in all ordinary affairs of State, to be the only right, safe, and possible thing. A very great stress of personal conviction alone can justify, in any man, tin- breaking of that safe rule which declares that "within his beat" lie may be useful and perhaps strong; outside of it, he may lly do mischief, and will at any rate be weak. All this is to say, in so many words, that the conservative attitude of many churches, during most of the anti- slavery debate, even it carried to a cowardly extreme, was probably conscientious in the main, and was at 82 FIFTEEN YEARS OF CONTROVERSY. any rate inevitable. Eight or wrong, that conserva- tive attitude in State affairs was held by most Unita- rian churches of any large name or influence ; and it made the hard rock against which more than one generous heart, bolder if not truer than the rest, broke itself in vain. This fact stirred more deep feeling at the time, and is to this day more blamed and wondered at, than anything else in the attitude of Unitarianism. It is, indeed, common to say that those who were not Abo- litionists then deeply deplore their mistake now, and wish they had been. But I do not think that this is at all the case, — certainly not with those who (like Dr. Gannett) took that conservative ground from strong and sincere conviction. Most of them, it is true, were strongly committed to the national cause in the war for the Union, and heartily sustained the policy which at last gave the death-blow to slavery. But those same men would have held it a horrible crime to declare war for the abolition of slavery, or to do anything, knowingly, to hasten such a war. War is a political, not a moral act ; and the motive for it, they held, should be political, not moral. Ab- stract justice, social right, belong to that kingdom which is " not of this world," for which it is not lawful to fight with the weapons of brute force. The unlawfulness of war, the gospel of peace, had been taken very much to heart by the earlier generation of liberal Christian thinkers. The only case that would justify war, in their view, — the only case that would seriously perplex the conscience of the more scrupu- lous, — was the case which really did happen, when OSPEL OF HUMANITY. 83 war was manifestly the one thing that could save the nation's life, and when the nation itself was on the right side in a fundamental question of humanity and justice. I do not think, therefore, that the more cona tivc of those 'lays havi pented their alarm and it at a course of action which seemed to them sore to bring oo a civil war,- — as, in fact, it did But, on the other hand, liberalism in theology was the natural ally of liberty and justice in national affairs. The authority of the Creed once shaken, Humanity becomes the jtron e I sanction of belief and conduct Political justice becomes i rily a pan of the free-thinker's religion, bo long as he has any. It was so with the liberal movement here. Political justice had made part of its history in the Old World, and had been eloquently expounded by a whole (•ration ul* the liberal preachers, Channing at their head. Thus a "gospel of humanity " — sanguine, hopeful, devout — had made a part of the liberal tradition. In seeking to state it to ourselves, we think first of Channing; — his fervent assertion of the dignil human nature, the glow of his Bteady hope in the spiritual and social destinies of mankind. And I think we have seen in the older men of that school — ohler than ourselves, hut his disciples — a certain glow of humanity which stayed with them through life, which the chill of old age or Ion- waiting had little effect to quench, as those who have lived in the tropic /one keep something "f its warmth through the lon< r frosts of a northern winter. In a certain child- 84 FIFTEEN YEARS OF CONTROVERSY. like way it was strikingly so with my father, who quite honestly felt that the years from seventy to eighty were his happiest years. In a still more marked way it was so with that brave saint of all the human- ities, Samuel Joseph May, of whom they that loved him may say that only to know him was a sort of sunshine in one nook, at least, of the most unfriended life. It is worth while to recall the halo which invested that phase of our mental life, that glow as of dawn which hung round the horizon, so as to relieve against it certain phases in which life has shown itself since. Daylight is better than dawn for most uses, particu- larly for seeing our way among things that bewilder and delude; but it can never have "the glory of the rising." That fair dawn was the opening of a stormy day. The abstract principle, the fervid sentiment that made it, had to be tried as by fire. A season of passionate conflict ensued before the season of calmer reason, of reconciling science. That time of contro- versy it has not been my purpose to narrate in its events; only to indicate the spirit out of which it grew, and the part had in it by those intellectual leaders who have left their mark deepest upon that time. Among those leaders, however, I wish to recall very briefly the memory of two marked men with whom I was thrown into rather close relation quite early in the period I have retraced ; whose paths crossed not far from then ; who both took a very conspicuous part in the movement we are looking back on ; who did their task with equal honesty and daring, with THEODORE PARKER. 85 temper not very unlike, hut with <'i difference in aim and result which went on widening to the end. Of of them I have spoken at some little length already, and shall have occasion to q an. Theodore Parker's inteUeetoa] self-assertion — re- markable in one who knew bo well the history of human opinion — might be plausibly associated with the much solitary reading of his youth, without the chance of conflict and comparison which college wealth of sympathy mad< who was honored by it feel as it* drawing on the on- claimed Btores of it hoarded in the heart of a child- less man, — which, to his frankly expressed grief, he was. Never did a strong nature show a deeper crav- ing for persona] affection, and the exercise of that power to guide which flows with it. Never did a strong and passionate conviction hold itself more patiently in abeyance in intercourse with a younger mind, lest it should even hint an opinion that might check its own free working. If not of the first order of speculative ability, few could be betl than he with the positive result eolation; yet of all men in that field I should think that none could have held his religious opinions more absolutely as postulates admitting no debate, and wholly outside of any process of argument which may have led to them. These opinions were implied throughout in the polemics that so swept him aside from the studi- ous, constructive work he had marked out. — for the ambition of his life was to be an historian of religious opinion, — and with great human passion 86 FIFTEEN YEARS OF CONTROVERSY. made him so genuine an iconoclast. Yet there was noticeable, in his later life, a desire to understand, and a leaning of sympathy towards, some materialistic forms of thought widely alien from his own : either because other men's bigotry offended him, or that he would free his soul from the last trace of theological prejudice. It was a temporary work, just then greatly needed, that his generous and large nature took upon itself ; and his name, it may be, is best recalled as that of a great personal force in the best life of our time rather than as the intellectual leader and guide he doubtless hoped to be. His temperament did not admit of justice towards those who honestly differed, as good men did, in theological opinion or public policy. With the most generous human feeling, he could not pardon the seeming want of it in other men ; yet he could bear patiently the argument or the rebuke that tried to convince him he was in the wrong. For high courage I hardly know where we should find his match among men of intellect. It was a moment in history to see him face, with taunt and defiance, an angry crowd in Faneuil Hall, where the Boston regiment mustered on its way to the war in Mexico. And when he went to rest, in 1860, just before the great political triumph of the cause he died for, we missed the clearest and boldest voice of all that read to unwilling ears the stern lesson of the time. The hard, restless, implacably honest, and domi- neering temper of Orestes Brownson had just been greatly softened, at the time I first knew him, by a sudden flow of religious feeling in channels which he ORESTES A. BROWNSON. Wl bad thought dried up. A mere accident, as it were, had turned him from a very positive d of the French Eclectics to an equally positive and unsparing critic <>t' them in the name of a aew teacher Pierre Leroux), whose phi presently took for the k*-v to a new rendering of the Christian revelation, — ;i reading of it which, with a certain pious and - ful fervor, he detailed in a letter to Dr.Channiii "The Mediatorial Life of J Beginning his expositions with a sweetness and pathos very marked jed a champion, it was then be uttered the bence of all he ever wrote, in which lie spoke of "that glorious inconsistency which due- honor to human nature, and makes nan BO mm . than their creeds.*' But it was not long before "the old man" in him had its way in vigOTOB . I. land and Pro- testantism With a curiously slender stock of erudi- tion, In- showed an equally extraordinary arrogance and fertility in abstract argument For example, having toiled with much ado as he told me thi some fourteen pages of Kant's " Introduction — having got the idea of it to his own satisfaction, — he proceeded to write more than fifty pages of what, 1 am told by those mure competent t«> judge than I, is really instructive exposition. On the 20th of October, 1844, as he told me, lie "became a Christian, - ' — that Is, a Catholic convert by profession, with all which that name might imply; so that, when I asked him, u But BUppose the pi that made you a Catholic had been Btopped Bhorl at a certain point: suppose, foT instance, that you 88 FIFTEEN YEARS OF CONTROVERSY. had died on the 19th of October?" — " I should have gone to hell" he replied, instantly and grimly, — a reply which left neither room for argument, nor, to tell the truth, for interest in any further argument he might have to offer, as soon as one distinctly saw- just what the brief was which he had taken in his new appearance before the Court. Absolute honesty of conviction, a complete cutting adrift from whatever may have been his religious moorings in early life, the weariness of a long war with ideas and customs embedded in modern society, and a religious need craving and imperious as in any zealot of any period, with almost as passionate con- tempt for the opinions of more knowing but weaker men, — these make it not very strange that a man so strong and arrogant should tire of incessant self-con- flict, and choose to enlist his splendid fighting qualities under a flag which at least made* him constructively sure of something. But the lesson of his life for us was all told above thirty years ago ; and the strong, stormful, rude, yet tender-hearted man passes away, leaving hardly a ripple in our memory to remind us what his influence had been. I recall these names not idly, but to reinforce the single thought with which I close. None of the topics and none of the questions I have been dealing with are topics or questions of speculative interest merely. It is human interests, the character, life, work, destinies of men, that come in play, and are touched by them. And perhaps we see this plainest when we remember that there are men who by genius and endowment are leaders of other men, to whom MEN OF THOUGHT. 80 these spiritual things are of incomparably more mo- ment than all personal and terrestrial things; men who willingly — nay, inevitably — renounce and cut adrift from everything else, that so they may their souls. Also, that whatever is honorable and of good report in the world, and whatever makes the irorlaa life worth living, depends on its having and cherishing that order of men, to whom ( 'ireuinstance is as nothing, and Thought is all. THEODOEE PARKEE. THE names of Charming and Parker stand for very different if not hostile types of religious feeling and belief. But they are constantly mentioned together as representative names. Eight or wrong, Unitarianism is everywhere held responsible for them both. One as distinctly recalls the later as the other does the earlier phase of the movement we are at- tempting to trace. I have hinted already at the atti- tude of the theologian. I should like, if I may, to bring you into a little nearer acquaintance with the man. Theodore Parker's biography gives us glimpses of a childhood and youth not greatly different from that of many an energetic and studious country boy in New England. Being the youngest of eleven children, and five years younger than the tenth, it is likely that he had more than his share of his parents' companionship and care. How tenderly and piously his conscience was instructed by his mother, he has narrated himself in the story of the " little spotted tortoise ; " and he told me once how his father, when he was eight years old, made him give his childish analysis of Plutarch's Cicero, before allowing him to read another of the Lives. In the charming story of KAKLV YEA: his early years, Mr. Weiss speaks of " the bloom in thf down of his young cheeks competing with the fruit as he down the road" to carry his lather's peaches to market ; and I how the sturdy youth, trained to all busy and helpful ways, when he left home to I bool or make a visit* won! I a man "to take hi nd work on the farm," till In- was twenty-one, As a student here in Cambridge, and in the of his ministry, la* w.i> not undei differ in opinion much, it' at all, Bnom those about him ; though I have heard him - - child the current supernaturalism n '. belief to him, B public indica- tion of any change was w hen he had been al five years, or nearly, in the public work of hi d ; and, when this proved to be th<- first step in Lical conta he went out for a »1 — ither, for busier study and ition — in Europe. So that there was oot baste, but rather deliberation, in his entering upon the that made him s<» Bpeedily and widely known. From his return in 1844 until the fatal att which forced him from hi o January, I was a term of almost exactly fifteen years, during which he did his most effective and chai work. Fifteen years are a term so short, that there were those old enough to take a share in that work from the first, and to go with him all the way, who yet might feel at the end of it that their own task was not much more than begun. His unusual bodily vigor and capacity of labor might promise at least 92 THEODORE PARKER. twice as long a term, and he probably expected to work on till seventy without much abatement. That he broke down as he did at forty-eight, means not merely that he was vulnerable to the disease fatal to so many of his kin. It means also an unsparing, even prodigal, spending of his strength. It means, too, that something of his strength was wasted needlessly. Seeing a sounding-board above the pulpit in a Swiss church during his last journey, he said, sadly, " If I had had that in Music Hall, I should not be here now ! " But, to tell the truth, his voice was used un- skilfully ; throat and lungs were rasped by the effort to speak too loud. This we may say now in pity and regret, honoring the motive of it all the more. For it was of a piece with the rest. His life was poured into his work wholly and at once. Not only the water was always moving, but the channel was always full. Prudence would say, Economize the power ; do not spend the wealth of life so fast; more will be done at last if done less prodigally at first. But a motive higher than prudence — what in certain cases we may call the Divine economy of life contrasted with the human — will decide otherwise. An effort of massed and concentrated strength is more than the same amount husbanded and diffused. There is no common measure between the force of a pressure and the force of a blow. The true value of a life is often in the intensity of the flame that is burning it away. The first impression received by one who came in contact with Mr. Parker in the prime of his years was of a nature at once sturdy and kindly. His frame was solid, square-set, hardy, and robust. On INDUSTRY. a long exhausting journey, on foot or otherwise, after the spirit of his companions flagged, and their gth was spent, late into the day or i would go on (it was said) just as cheerily, step, high in spirit, with argument* anecdote, and fun to keep up their failing courage by the way. On the farm, in the handling of scythe or plough, there were few day-laborers who could keep up with him. What would be >k for any ordinal] he would combine with wl rk he hid to da Thus, when he taught a country school and supped al five, he won] I study from six till two On I Lecturing tour he musl take his Batchel lull of I to be devoured at odd times upon the road As ■ member of this School, I do not ventui what his industries were; hut 1 have heard him t<-ll with relish of the '_ r ivat German theologian who Ian* to him that he himself was able to give no more than eighteen hours a day to hi- books I In finish of scholarship ho doul iked the accuracy which a more critical training would have given. But by patient accumulation ho 1. up a wealth of knowledge that was always a fresh surprise; so that, to one who went to consult him on almost any topic of remote investigation, it was al- most as if he had just booked up expressly on the very matter in hand. His mind was curiously in- formed in special and out-of-the-way fields of knowl- edge. Details of natural science, the history of law oases (which he had read in great abundance during a winter's leisure), the dry technicalities of the Civil Code, the gossip and minutiae of contemporary history, 94 THEODORE PARKER. the bleak abstractions of metaphysics, seemed to be about equally familiar. Even when suffering severe pain, and holding his head in both hands (as I have seen him), he would lay hold on some topic of thought or knowledge, with the fulness of learning and allu- sion, and the formal exactness of method he was so fond of, as if he were stating the outline of a treatise or essay. Still, it was not that singular wealth of erudition you thought of first. What you found in him was rather a powerful, rich, and greatly-gifted nature, to which the gathering and disbursing of its ample stores was only the generous play of its native strength. Accordingly, the capacious understanding was at least balanced by emotion and active energy. That large nature clung to personal friendships closer than to any abstractions of the brain. In the midst of his various lore, that heart so opened in love to natural things, that he thought even of an insect tenderly, and knew — as was said of him, with per- haps some friendly exaggeration — every bird and wild-flower in New England. Nay, he took the text so literally, as to say that not a sparrow can fall to the ground but for that sparrows good. In riper years, watching and nursing by a sick bed, or plans of active charity among the poor, or guarding with loaded weapons the liberty of a fugitive slave, or breasting the storm and tumult of an unfriendly crowd in tem- pestuous controversy, made to such a mind as natural a play of its forces, as easy an assertion of itself, as the gathering up of knowledge or the heat of strenu- ous debate. The personality was more and stronger TEMPER IN DI» than tlie intelligence. The thought wa iken What, historically, waa out- ph controversy that ia alv tinate tradition and fresh conviction wat Dally, the blending of thought and emotion, a warm human experience Bhaping Itself into words. It is ao that by is laid upon ev< ug and paseionate nature to Bpeak what in its day and houi it to Bpeak. live and imperious as that natup and imperative thedesii mp itself upon . eneral mind, — nay, unable, as I understand or allow fur the force <-f motives in men who disagreed with him in matters of opinion or conduct, — be was in private into alto- gether courteous, unobtrusive of his own opinion, generous t<> the view In- most gravely opp i I hi argument he might aeem uncompromising, intol< Bcornful. Impatient of contradiction, confident in •on, sharp in denouncing the policy or the man at war with his own view of right, the public COul 1 nut, very likely, BUBpect this mure intimate and human Bide of him. But to Ids friends the of it is even stronger than of the other Bidft In conversation or letter lie was apt t<> speak his mind in the same biting and sarcastic way as in public, Anything cowardly or false, or what Beemed - could • lily pardon, and perhaps \ quick to BUapect But when he knew that another | making up his mind honestly for himself, — studying any point of controversy, or debating a question of public morals, — it might be observed 96 THEODORE PARKER. that he was careful not to contradict, not to urge his own opinion, not even to present it. A sense of intellectual delicacy and honor would seem to hold him from forestalling, by a word or hint, the freest action of another's mind or conscience. And so his incidental expressions of his own opin- ion — more particularly his public ones, which were positive and intolerant — were often curiously at va- riance with the kindness and courtesy he showed in private to the opposite opinions. Freedom of per- sonal criticism he always said that he valued and wished to hear; and with exceeding patience and kindness, even with a humility which might seem strange to those who knew him less, he would re- ceive the very plain and candid expression of it from one who ventured to take him at his word. Friends of his were pained and disturbed, more than once, during the sharp word-battles of his last ten years, at hasty and unjust judgment publicly spoken of per- sons they held honorable and dear, and frankly told him so. It was so far a satisfaction and relief to them, that he took all such words kindly ; that he always expressed gratitude for any criticism or cor- rection ; that in some instances he even yielded as to a point of judgment or feeling, whether or not he gave any public expression of it. 1 1 Of this generosity in judgment, which has not generally been recognized in him, my own correspondence with him has several marked proofs. Almost the only exception was in a short letter of his in censure of Dr. Gaunett, which to my great regret was pub- lished in his biography. As to this, Dr. Gannett says, in a note to me, "I do not know to what information Mr. Parker refers ; but, I suppose, to a story which he must have believed, and which I re- HIS 0ONTHOVIB8IAL WORK. But, again, opinion in him was never wide apart from passion In private communication his language was always kind and generous, often affectionate, cvrii when dealing with opinions and things he did not love. But in the war of words, where sharp strok« ven and taken, t!. i ne whose judgmenl >re colored by personal feeling, no one who showed more temper in argument, or more identified the principles with the persons of hi tagonists; no one who made bittei or wanner : ried more of intense and breathing Life into the whole disputed realm of tech- nical theology or practical moi Still, it was with no hurry or impatience that he entered into the conflict which afterwards abf him so completely. Bather it was deliberal slowly, after Long study, with large training and equipment, after considers . Life lived quietly, and after thi • ■ was widened by travel and much acquaintance with men. Be was then at thi thirty-four. lie had measured his powers and clearly defined his work. Slowly, almost reluctantly, he was drawn on to that post in the front of the battle, which he held in an attitude so deter- mined, energetic, defiant. M He represented and pro- nember seeing in one or two English Unitarian papers (which I confess vexed me), to the effect that I had eaid something in the pulpit about the Fugitive Blare Law, which I did not say. Then, as now, they who differed were tuo eager to mi-: nd too prompt in misunderstanding one another. Contradiction seldom . end time is the bast oorrei tire of mistake." The publicity given to Mr. Parker's letter (Weias's "Life and Corre- spondenuc,'' vol. ii. p. llo) justifies this persona] reference. 98 THEODORE PARKER. claimed a revolution, and devoted all his powers of conscience and understanding to organize the great change by means of timely justice, that he might, if possible, prevent Freedom from stepping to her place through blood." These words of his biographer sufficiently express the position in which Theodore Parker now stood be- fore the world. But the first task of a reformer must always be with men's motives and their faith. It was inevitable that he should begin as a controver- sialist and a critic of religious opinion. In this he was unsparing, imperative, scornful in speech, as his nature compelled him to be in dealing with what to him was error. But his positiveness of temper and opinion, his hate of insincerity, his animosity towards views that seemed to him degradmg and wrong, grew out of a deep, warm, trustful belief. In a letter an- swering some inquiry I had made of him in behalf of a friend, in reference to a rumor that he failed to find comfort in his own belief, he gives his own position, as it looked to him, in these words : — " The great point in which I differ from most Chris- tians is this : I believe in the Infinite God, who is per- fectly wise, perfectly just, perfectly loving, and perfectly holy. Of course he must have a purpose in creation, a plan in creation, — both perfect and consistent with this infinite wisdom, justice, love, and holiness. This plan must he adapted to secure the ultimate welfare of each creature he has made, and must be perfect in detail as well as in the sum. How, then, can I fail to find comfort in sorrow, — even in the worst of sorrows, consciousness of sin ? I cannot. I have unspeakably more delight in re- RELIGIOUS VIEW. tigion, more consolation in any private griff, more b . lion in looking on the present or for the future, than ever . when I trembled ; L I oerei laid, never th :iment attribute. I to me. Quite the contrary." As with his religious, so with his moral convic- tions. If in his f public assault on public wrong he was dogmatic, imperative, scornful, — that grew out of a personal feeling deep and sincere, I emotion still more than intellectual < tion was at th.- heart of his argument on such things. The argum aerate, living, L It was lally endured by the slave, by the vic- tim of drunkenness or .profligacy, by the family of the drunkard, by the crowded and vicious the n. poor. In latex y< dally he con- nected his moral doctrine very much with theori ethnology, — that Lb, the facts of human nature seen on the broadest scale; and with statistics, — t!. the lifts of human Bociety gathered and arrangi as to let the underlying laws of them, the great and genera] facts, be seeu But even in stating them in the widest way historically, or in the pre scientifically, or in the most positive way dogmati- cally, he would ii' that they i tement or discussion would presently he relieved by some Hash of sympathy or tenderness or indignation; ami the philosoph< reasoner, at the heart and heat of his argument, was always lost in the man. If we now look back upon the period oi' time when his public labors began, we shall remember that it 100 THEODORE PARKER. was a time when the controversies that have vexed us since had only begun to take on the shape and acrimony we of a later day have found in them. Theological debate was lulled after the strifes of fifty years ago. The churches held each its own position pretty distinctly and quietly. The dispute about old doctrines was subsiding. The more radical questions that have stirred us since had not yet come up, ex- cept in the minds of a few who were studying and thinking by themselves. There was a truce in the war of sects and creeds. The question of Slavery had by no means taken the ominous and dread proportions which it assumed before Mr. Parker's death. Antislavery was an effort, a faith, a sentiment, a hope, with a party compara- tively few and unregarded. Emancipation was a new thing in the British West Indies, and we were rejoicing in the peaceable fruits of it so far, blind to the practical difficulties still to be met. At home, the Texas question was laid to rest, and only the more sagacious (like President Adams) knew the drift of party policy which soon opened up so rap- idly. Henry Clay had predicted that slavery would come to an end before the end of the century ; some sanguine persons thought that ten years more — the middle of the century — would see the question brought to its final issue, and universal liberty the law of the land. The cause of Temperance was just then entering on its most interesting, glowing, hopeful stage, in the " Washingtonian movement." It seemed now as if the decisive experiment had been made ; as if the QUESTIONS Of PUBLIC MORALS. 101 One needed lesson had been learned; aa it' the light and hop nought home, once for all, to those sunk lowest in the 1 irruption ; as if the way were now plain I p all the forms of at least one dreadful vice from the f the land. No suspicion aa yet of the long vain difficulties and mistalres, the license laws and penal laws, action and reaction of the pop- ular mind on all that touches a popular sin, tenacity of habit and depnu ity of will, variety and cunning of the disguises that cloak the infirmity and shame of a moral malady. How much of all this i wait- ing to learn from tin; ex] of the years that were to follow : And, again, it was a pretty common feeling then that tin- time had gone by for War — at an;. war on a ale — among civilized and chris- tian powers, it was really believed that th< of Christianity in ■. and the P movement in particular, had gone ao far as that I Among the more scrupulous and humane, the question whether any forcible resistance to anything i right, was a question pressing close upon the conscience, — as if that were likely to he the practical problem next brought forward for solution. But the revolutdoi 1848, beginning in an outburst of humanitarian sen- timent, opened an era Btrangely different To say noth- ing of Biz great European wars — in Hungary, in the Crimea, in Italy, in ( Icrmany, in Fiance, in Turkey — enlisting our sympathies so Btrongly on one .side or the other, the appalling disasters of our own Civil War have opened to us what deeps below deeps be- 102 THEODORE PARKER. neath that placid surface of mild emotion with which we then entertained the question of resistance or non- resistance, of peace and war ! Such was the generally buoyant and hopeful tone in which the moral questions of the day were then regarded. We may well confess to a little self-com- placency, a superficial self-confidence, — as if, after all, the time of martyrdom had been mostly lived through ; as if the great work of Eeform could be carried on with fine sentiments, and delicate hands, and hearts safe from the great storms of passion and fear that had beaten in the past ! Some of us well remember how completely that feeling was uppermost at the time referred to. The pure fervor of those words in which Channing closed his last public ad- dress did but echo the hopeful and sanguine strain ; did but reflect the aspect in which the gravest issues were regarded, not merely in the buoyancy of youth, but in the deliberate conviction of ripe years. But it is not the way of Providence that any ques- tion vitally touching the rights and welfare of hu- manity, or the progress of Divine truth, should be settled on such cheap and easy terms. If only that men may know what their principles are, what depths of character and experience they involve, it is neces- sary to hold them as possessions attacked and fought for. To know the preciousness of truth, it must be slowly and painfully disentangled from a mass of error. The battle cannot be won for us at second hand. Each generation has its own warfare to en- counter, and its own victories to win. What seemed to us then a hopeful, busy, and prosperous advance KATURE OF THE CONFLICT. 103 towards the easy achievement of truth and right ; what seems now to have been a somewhat superficial and deceitful mood of moral emotion, or even a lull and suspension of the . — had to I up. A generation must be In the phases of a conflict about truths which the heart holds d and principles which the <■■ holds holiest, — a conflict of which none r end, — that a grander work may be done, and a nobler faith may grow from the r life. It was joat this conflict which Theodon 1' sr publi ' : ' criti- cal moment in the whole stir and stress of the ] in which his voice was not one of ' rand decisive, and his word — bold, clear, ready, positive — was ii-: among the first * public mind. And yet he bo far aha] teling then, that he alw I let in the outset was a him. II«' appar- ently expected to find his words accepted and as» to at once, II" was only carrying <>nt the principles all liberal thinkers had proclaimed The <>ne further service he would render musl me to all who professed freedom of opinion in religious thin j In his earliest discourses addressed to the public we observe these two things : a positive, dogmatic, 104 THEODOKE PARKER. almost disdainful way of laying down the main lines of his argument, — and this as clearly and fully in his very first words as ever afterwards ; and, with this, a certain confiding, poetic, sentimental way of stating his ground of " absolute religion," as if the world had only to hear and forthwith accept the new gospel in all its simplicity. These two, strongly marked at first, continued together unabated to the end. Considering how much of a controversialist he was, how familiar with the history and criticism of every form of belief, how generally known as assailing other men's opinions, it is remarkable how self-confident he always was in asserting his own. It is as if he had never known a doubt. It is as if there were no shading-off in his mind between absolute belief and absolute disbelief, — as in the sky of the tropics there is no twilight, but night shuts down dark against the brightness of the day. As I understood him to say, he never knew that period of transition which most inquirers must pass through. The world of mingled truth and error, of right and wrong, lay before his eye with sharp contrasts of white light and black shadow, — like the surface of the moon, where there is no softening atmosphere, but every shade is a blot of ab- solute dark on a field of pure and shining white. It did not occur to him that where he and other men differed, he might possibly be mistaken ; that there might possibly be some truth — of experience, if not of fact or philosophy — in the doctrine he attacked. And so he hated what to him was error. He could not see any good in things evil, or any right in the fabric built on a foundation he failed to recognize. MODES Of RELIGIOUS THOUGHT. 105 With most men, the best part of their religion ia fur from being that which lies in the clear, glaring light of consciousness, or what they could give the best account of to themselves or others. '!'].• light atmosphere of mystery in which our liv. wrapped — from clear light shading off imperceptibly to obe rad gloom — most of oar pious thoughts and i lie. In Theodore Parker it was almost as if this shadowy lid not exist Where iny truth at all, It ; ive, dear, dogmatic, — do half-truth of the emo- tion merely, do mystery haunting the imagination ami secretly magnetizing the thought Where other men spoke of a hope reaching forth to the afterlife, a reverent looking forward, ■ trembling trust ardent oonfidei biva With him, he said, im- mortality was no wish or dream or hope, [t more than belief: it was knowledge. He knew he immortal: he felt it in every fibre of the Anything less than that was unwo rthy the nam.' of belief at all. Any demand of proof was an imper- tinence. Any offer of historical evidence was an affront to the living faith. So with tin' love of God for hi- creatures, and the ly II" i IT them in a future state. It was not a thing to he waited for and trusted in with aw.- and trembling, with dn-ad and sham.' l"^r we might do< be worthy to behold the Holiest and live. — lest the "d<.ri«'s of the life beyond might he ! than our aspirations or our d< He would em- 1 • without a shade of misgiving, for every man, the prospect of a world beyond the grave. lie knew 106 THEODORE PARKER. God must mean the best for every creature ; that not even guilt can long be a barrier from His love ; that not the wickedest of men should be ever afraid to die. Again, the presence and action of God in human life, — it is now, here, always, or else never and no- where. There is no middle ground between atheism and the sense of a present Deity. God's miracles, real miracles, are in the movements of the heavens and in the fresh growth of every spring-time. To set apart any class of events and acts, and call them miraculous, or any special evidence of God's power, is as much as to deny that power in other events and things. The revering and tender associations which make so many cling to the miracles of the New Tes- tament and believe in them — illogically, perhaps; at least, rather with heart than head — had no place with him at all. Thus his theory of Christianity was far from com- plete, and his judgments of other men were far from faultless. Nor was his theory quite consistent with itself. Especially where he stood most widely apart from the general sense of Christendom, and most gloried in the difference, — in his theory of sin in the soul, — it seems impossible to reconcile his eager op- timism with his godly hatred of all forms of evil in the concrete. But to no man is it given to compre- hend all truth, or to fulfil all righteousness. They have little ground to censure his rejection of the " Sa- tanic element " from his theology, who have not shared or excelled the ardor of his moral conviction. Out of a certain defect in his mind which I have HIS SERVICE TO RELIGION. 107 tried to indicate, he would often seem not in the to understand or do j i the minds of And so there was a vein of misunderstanding and injustice, on both rhich made bitter and false a large part of his controversy with the popuk ology. I do not remember a single statement hi made of the- doctrine of his opponents which they would be willing to accept, while he did make maoy statements of their doctrine which th< wilfully offensive misrepresentations and caricatures. II generosity to the persona] character of an oppo- nent whom he deemed Bincere mad.' the more remark- able tl -in and scorn whi.-h be visited upon things dear to their heart and cherished in their iaith. In two direction-, especially, his ought to be thankfully acknowledged even by those who think his fundamental opinions dangerous and wrong, It is in evidence that his words were the first to break ell of superstitious terror in many a mind that waited only for the trumpet-tone of Buch away the spectres of an evil dream, and turn religion from a slavish fear into the glad lil • child of God. An 1, again, there was a form of ticism, an undercurrent of hostility to the popular which was running fast to an open and mock- ing infidelity, taking more and moi usual and materialistic tone. The arm's-length and puny oppo- sition which such unbelief as this finds in the paid pulpit of an established creed is a very different thing from the clear, bold word of the independent thinker. 1C8 THEODORE PARKER. By sheer mental force and wealth of knowledge this man headed the column of insurrection against the Church. But, in doing it, he gave a new type and tone to that hostility. Under his lead heresy became more pious, more thoughtful, more humane than the orthodoxy it opposed. Hundreds were saved from a reckless and blank atheism, because they saw his in- dependent vigor of thought and his unsparing attacks on error joined to a positive faith in the Divine providence and law, an absolute loyalty to right, a confidence clear, ardent, and unwavering in the im- mortal life of every human soul. It was wonderful how wide his words spread and with what eagerness they were received, — the only words, teaching any free form of piety, that went as far as civilized men followed the narrowing track across forest and prairie, or wherever two or three were gathered together to grope their way out of the tangle and obscurity of the theological growths around them. In the field of moral and political debate there was one service he rendered which no other did, which perhaps no other could, render so well. He carried into that field all the wealth of a mind very richly stored, a great fund of various erudition, a breadth and masculine vigor of understanding, which re- deemed the debate from partisan littleness and lifted it upon the plane of the larger ethics. We know how apt such discussions are to degenerate into mere vaporing declamation, into vituperative wrangling, into pitiful sects and schisms. We know how hard it is even for a rich and highly cultivated intellect, that gives itself wholly to them, to avoid the mistake HIS and harm. Mr. Parker did not entirely tins danger. There was passion and there was injustice in his speech. But that was the honest flaming-ont of moral wrath ; and it is a glory to a man to be capable of I ; The great gain was, when a man whose profession and hent of thought turned him towards what IS high, abstract, infinite, — whose studies made him at home in the wide field of history, — whose professional walk led him into scholarly and refirn well as among the lowly and the poor, — when Buch a man Btood in tin; front rank as a champion of I reform It was do vague and theoretical moralizing he brought to the lebate, no mere polish of accomplished oratory, no mere denunciation of the evil, or eloquent vindication of the right [1 i .lint- judgment of men and things, BUch that in all records of the sort we have nei i the like. Industry like that of a blue-book diction like Burke's, moral passion like thai which flames in Milton, might he gathered in a si;: siona] discourse Thi re was the massing of materials for other men's independent judgment, and the mar- shalling of them so that their statement should 1"' an argument That self-ordained tribunal commanded the attention as much of those who hated and op- posed as of those who admired and applauded. 1' fore its terrible bar every event, every deed of evil policy and every prominent actor in it. had to he *ed, to abide something like the verdict ol terity, pronounced by that fearless voice from those unsparing lips. Unsparing of honest prejudice, of 110 THEODORE PARKER. gentler feeling — unjust, no doubt, often to the mo- tives of men, and too easily believing ill of them 1 — yet it was a tribunal which extorted hearing and commanded respect. Thus that breadth of vision, that wide sweep of knowledge, prevented the debate being ever narrowed to party bigotries and sectarian aims. To-day, the boldest words as to some affront from slavery upon the public conscience ; to-morrow, a plea for the ig- norant, the lowly, the degraded in our own city streets : now, vehement exposure and denunciation of some man's act, or verdict on some man's char- acter, unsparing in its bitterness; and again, some tender breathing of filial piety, some act of delicate sympathy and kindness for distress, some word of gentle consolation to those that mourn and labor and are heavy -laden. Large as was the field of action, rich and various as were the gifts he brought to labor in it, we find in his life a symmetry, a singleness of purpose, a persistency of aim, a consistency of motive, such as we rarely find in far lower and narrower ranges of men's lives. Such a life can well afford to acknowledge greater defects of opinion and graver errors of judgment than can be pointed out in him. I will return for a single word to the religious tone and motive of the life. Mr. Parker's creed has 1 For example, he persisted in believing the strange calumny (which would be insulting to a border ruffian) — impossible in what it charged, and promptly denied — that Dr. Dewey, a man of the tenderest filial piety, had said he would ' ' send his own mother back to slavery" to sustain the law ; and could not be induced to admit that Daniel Webster was honest in dreading a war of Disunion, which he was himself soon after incessantly predicting. Ills MOOD OK 1'IKTV. Ill been called "a humane and tender optimism, which strove to embrace all the facts with something like Divine impartiality." If this optimism was strongly contrasted by the intolerant tone he often took in public debate, then on the other hand it is borne out with singular harmony and i •■ i y by what re permitted to read of his private papera I of character needs the nurture of solituda The minutes of those many Lonely midnight fa ter with curious precision the that nurture. The one ehara in them, the one I which perhaps required just this testimony to make il quately known, is the incessant reverting to the mood of piety. Aspiration after moral purity, after i :nd true spirit in doing the work of life, is earnest and constant. If it were not for the i in : . visible result in the work done and the batt] the impression would be almost that of a | a devotee. \ i I this, too, is in strict consistency with his era! theory of religious things. Supplication for par- ticular blessings and special " provideii if the Unchangeable were to be moved by human entreaty, he shunned as idolatrous and profani I d the phrases of his devotion contain the formal den that doctrine of prayer which hat held and argued for so earnestly by many of the most pious men. But if prayer signifies the earnest seeking of the Holiest, "if haply we might feel after him and find him ;" if it implies absolute reliance, joyful con- fidence, the power both to find and to impart conso- 112 THEODORE PARKER. lation in human griefs from that heavenly source, — then the " gift of prayer " has been bestowed on few men in larger measure. Many, who were distant and strangers in his lifetime, sincerely thought him an enemy of Christian truth. But such may find in this record now, if not complete harmony of soul, at least a deeper life-current, which blended the warmest springs of devotion in the strength that battled as rudely against men's cherished beliefs as against their rooted wrongs. Perhaps it is not too much to say that in piety of just this type we find the living link which binds what is purest in past forms of religion with what is best in those that are to be. If an " age of reason " is to follow the " ages of faith," it was well that one brave pioneer should share so largely in the characteristic life of each. Theodore Parker broke down in the midst of his unfinished work, and died before the age of fifty. In his absolute confidence in the Wisdom and Love that govern all things, he could call to mind barely one thing — his childless lot — that he would have wished otherwise. Almost to the last, he was able to speak with cheerfulness, even pleasantry, of his passing strength. Of course, it must have been with one deep pang of keen sorrow and disappointment. He had identified his life so completely with his work ! and the task was but hardly begun, even then growing larger and harder upon his hands. It is the fallacy of a strong heart and living conscience that God cannot spare his laborers from their task; that the work is theirs, not His ; that they are responsible for the result as well as for the deed. In those fifteen THE KNJ». 113 years of strife, had the bondage of bigotry and error been much loosened 1 — had the chains of the grown any lighter? — had the curse of intemperance and licentiousness, the dishonesties and inhumanities le, the grief of hopeless poi • in the community he lived in and labored for? Might it not seem, possibly, as if the labor had been in vain, — at I if a few years more ought I given, to save it from being I Questions like these must com< — we cannot tell often or how keenly — when the over-w< laborer rests at night, and contrasts t!. .har- vests of tin: afternoon with the glow and confident promise of the morning But a man can live only once. If he has given his own meastu cgth, it be has brought bis own best gift, it is all thi I iked of him, <>r by him. Force, say the - is never lost, hut <>nly takes new forma tainly this is true, if anywhere, then of mural : lie has cast in his own life as on.- of tip—' innumer- able forces by which the life of Humanity is made complete One is taken, and many another L VI. A SCIENTIFIC THEOLOGY. THE Secession of 1860, and the Civil War which presently followed, introduced a period in sev- eral ways favorable to the liberal movement in the- ology. It was, in fact, as much a breaking up of old lines of sect, and a liberalizing of the public mind on religious questions, as it was the introduction of a new era in politics. There was a great shaking to- gether of all sorts of opinions in camp-life. In the readjusting of parties, sects as well as sections came to have quite a new understanding of one another. In the heat of the new enthusiasm, old prejudices were fast melted away. Persons before obnoxious for their radicalism now found themselves quite in the current of popular thought. It was no accident that the one great national work of organized charity — the Sanitary Commission — was due to the genius of the best recognized leader of the liberal forces ; or that the same week which saw the surrender of Eichmond saw also the carrying out of his scheme of a National Conference designed to give new coherence and exec- utive vigor to the loose and scattered ranks of Uni- tarian ism. There is, accordingly, a very special sense in which the period that has followed, with the wider scale and IIKNUY WHITNEY BBLLO¥ 115 greater variety of denominational activity, is best represented by the name of Dr, Bellows B is quite t ire the amount of loss the Unitarian body has Buffered by it. Bnt it may be said here, that he saw with singular distinct- ness both tlic opportunity offered and the conditions under which it had to be met Bis \ iew took in the field, as perhaps no one before him had conceived it, at once so widely and bo vividly : and lx- recognized with great decision, even it" he did not formulate, the terms of that larger alliance by which the libera] theology must henceforth be carried on. Bis was, besides, one of the few nam< Living links between the later and the earlier generation. The Unitarian body was greatly fortunate, that, while there were still others to bring it wealth of thought and sufficiency of scholarship, was this one leader, trusted and beloved, to help it towards a generous breadth of fellowship, and something like energy of concerted action But perhaps the period before us is still I characterized by a much young of men, who, with less of critical study or defined opinion than their predecessors, have a readiness in action, a \ of self-assertion, a directness of method, and a range of popular sympathy that set them quit from the older school, and give them a new and different hold upon the future. We have especially to i nize a group that are working with great spirit and independence at a distance from what was be- fore the only centre of our action; and another group who have come into the Unitarian body from 116 A SCIENTIFIC THEOLOGY. outside, seeking more liberty of thought, and bringing with them the tradition and the habit of greater re- ligious zeal. The position of the one and the new associations of the other are both favorable to freedom of opinion. Neither of them feels the strong conser- vative bond of the Congregationalist tradition, or is held so firmly by reverent and loyal memory of hon- ored names. In short, Unitarianism, so far as it is destined to survive at all, must understand that it has outgrown its old theological limits ; and, as it was once the lib- eral side of the old Congregational body, so now it must know itself as the Christian side of the broader scientific movement of our time. As a part of this broader movement, it may still retain its intellectual dignity and its interest for thinking men, whatever its denominational strength or weakness. Apart from that, it has but a feeble life of its own, and will be soon scattered to pieces, or else merged in the superior energy and the increasing liberality of the larger bodies around it. That result is freely predicted for it by eager sec- tarians who oppose it, and by radical thinkers who secede from it. If such a result is to be averted, it must be by maintaining a positive religious life of its own, with its foundation of deep conviction both in- tellectual and moral ; and at the same time by guard- ing that absolute liberty of opinion, that freedom from theological prejudice and restraint, which will entitle it to move in equal alliance with the science and literature of the time. Now how far liberty of opinion is consistent with THE LIBERAL POSITION. 117 religious sympathy and harmony of action, matter for the present of very donhtful experiment. Most persons, when they speak of Liberty of opinion, silently take for granted the limits they then. respect. Thus the "right of private judgment," with the Reformers of the sixteenth century, included also the " sufficiency of the Scriptures." The claimed by the early Unitarians assumed the whole apparatus of miracle and relation. The Reformers did not feel any inconsistency in demand- ing that freedom of conscience should be within the limits of an evangelical creed ; or the Unitarians, in assuming that it must accept the absolute authority of Christ Probably we Bhould demur, most of ;i religious fellowship which should include outright denial of God or immortality, or outright prol of communism or tree Love, however honest it might And when we speak of liberty of "pinion, or breadth of religious communion, it essary, at starting, to find out how much we really mean by those terms. It appears to me that the only answer we can give that question, is one which absolutely disclaims the drawing of all lines of religious fellowship at men's speculative opinions about anything. All hon- est opinions are matter of fair discussion, Bfl individual minds. 1 think they should make the lines of division among men only just so far as they correspond with the natural groups, spontaneous and unforced, into which men necessarily fall. Especially, it appears to me, it is quite too late in the day to draw these lines on points of theological doctrine, — 118 A SCIENTIFIC THEOLOGY. that is, on points which have and can have no sci- entific valne and no possibility of verification. To a certain extent, those lines will be drawn so naturally. It is not likely that a believer in the Pope's infal- libility will seek the sympathy of free religionists ; or that a scientific radical w T ould complain of exclu- sion from a Baptist conference. When the case comes, let it be provided for. But, in speaking of a communion nominally free, I wish to be understood as meaning all which that term can possibly imply. I take for granted that some serious purpose is meant by voluntarily joining any religious organization at all ; and where there is a serious purpose, — even no more than the desire to hear, and perhaps learn, what some new doctrine is, — I hold that no person should have it hinted, or in any way implied, that any difference of opinion from the rest puts him at all in the position of a stranger or outsider, so long as he chooses to stay and claim the sympathy due to a fellow-man. I do not know whether a church, or a religious body, can be built upon so broad a platform ; but as liberal men I do not think we have a right to do anything to narrow it, or that as liberal Christians we have a right to exclude, or seem to exclude, any who de- sire any sort of help, light, or comfort from that source. x I am stating that broad ground of fellowship which 1 This, evidently, has nothing to do with the question as to the choice or qualifications of a religious teacher, which must be set- tled not by abstract theory, but by personal considerations and the circumstances of the case. TERMS 01 CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP. 119 most Protestant bodies seem to be coming to, con- sciously or DOt In many which < all t: orthodox, all decent people are well mei mimmicants, and no questions But it is desirable that the principle should be distu stated and accepted, and Dot acted I ially it is desirable that it should l e itural working-out of opinion, not as it' we were driven to i' illogically by way of subterfuge, I it is the logical result <>f the scienti Ogy, Which COmeS in OUT day to take tl. dogmatic and controvi tdy. To I i, it is only necessary t<> 1<" b I must add a word i of the nam.' "Christian," as applied to so loose terms of communion a.- I have desa LI The name was at first, probably enough, i term of reproach, or at least Bimply as the di mail party or group of persons at Antioch. The early defenders of Christianity played a good upon the, word, for as pronounced in Greek it d< "the party of the good" as well as "the party of Christ." * And it has i I i have, tl meanings, either of which may be true in a particular connection. It is used in a broad way, historically, to distin- guish the Christian world in general from 1' Mahometan ; It is used by Catholics, eccl illy, to mean those who accept the government, creed, and discipline of the Roman Church; 1 A.a d( rived from xpvvtos or from xp i tact-, bit by bit. comparing, plaining, investigating, combining, but keeping dear aa may be from all theories whatever, ex they grow irresistibly out of the t. In this way it puts together its construction, — not to satisfy a preconceived notion of what must be, but :lv aa it can just what i- or a It knows that our knowledge is imperfect and fa mentary; that beyond the horizon which we can - are boundless regions which we cannot sec. Its work is never to deny what may be beyond, but, by patient exploring, to carry the horizon farther out; to enlarge the boundaries of accurate knowledge, and 126 A SCIENTIFIC THEOLOGY. within those boundaries to make what we do know more orderly and precise. In this its method is just the reverse of that which theology has more com- monly followed. Theology pleads as an advocate ; science listens to all the evidence, and holds the bal- ance like a judge. In saying this, I do not mean that the dogmatic method belongs to the orthodox party in theology, or the scientific to its opponents. I do not observe, for example, that the method of the deists or rationalists is at all more scientific than that it attacked. Hume's, for example, is less so than Lardner's, and Parker's less than Norton's. The difference I wish to point out is between the sober constructive temper on the one side, anxious only to get truth uncolored by prejudice or passion, and the partisan temper on the other side, chiefly anxious to establish a foregone conclusion. This last has been oftenest shown, no doubt, by theological dogmatists, but often, also, by anti-theo- logical dogmatists. These may be, and often are, generous, large-hearted men, and their work is neces- sary and noble. Only, they are what they are, and their work is what it is, because for them the day of science is not yet. Metaphysics, destructive dogma- tism, anti-theological partisanship, hot passion enlisted against bigotry and intolerance, are necessary to clear the ground. They are the indispensable forerunner, but they are no more what we call science than the theories they oppose. They are simply a protest in the name of intellectual freedom. The zeal and the learning they bring to bear give weight to the protest, and do an infinite service for those who are yet to NATURAL AND i: : 127 follow. But the partisan temper, the breeze of con- troversy, must lull before we can have a scientific theology in the proper meaning of that word In some : the present is mnch more I , able for this than the time that went The controversial tern] and the temper has had quite a new training in tl riona of these latter years. It would not I to say that interest has Lessened in the fundamental •us of religious thought It would corref y that a and more radical haps more anxious, del ing on as to the reli- gious bearings of natural science as it is now coming to be understood. Darwin, S] . . mlall. Huxley, are names of much more immediate moment to the theological world than the nan. - :hleierma Strauss, Baur, and Parker. In the field of debate n<»w open, the place of honor is held, not by the advocates of this or that opinion, but by those who, patiently, learnedly, and candidly are doing then to briB ;it to bear upon the : ., what do we moan by theolog and how do its method and aim differ from those of physical science '. For example, how (\ a scientific theology differ from a scientific physiolo The method of natural science is well iin which is the observation and comparison of tacts ; and its aim, which is to ascertain the "laws of similitude and succession" of those facts. Theories of the oi of life, or the general problem of Being, it dismisses as belonging altogether to the sphere of the L nknow- 128 A SCIENTIFIC THEOLOGY. able, or at least as coming under the province not of physics but of metaphysics. A scientific theology has, to begin with, precisely the same method and aim : it differs only in the data it assumes, and the class of facts with which it has to deal. It has (for example) nothing to do with cosmological theories, evolutionary or other, though many persons seem to suppose so. These, however fascinating or instructive, belong to the field of physi- cal or else metaphysical speculation. The facts it has to do with directly are these : facts of the religious consciousness, and facts of religious history. The laws it has to investigate are the laws of life as they bear on character and conduct. The phenomena it explores are distinctively religious phenomena; that is, ethical or emotional. These it is the business of a scientific theology to interpret with as keen an eye to fact, as physiology in interpreting the functions of any organ or tissue. Whether on the narrowest scale in the individual life, or more broadly in the interpretation of sacred literature, or on the largest scale in the great movements of human history, it is the first business of a scientific theology to interpret those facts, or alleged facts, of human life which are remotest from the range of physical necessity, most closely and essentially included in the field of char- acter and will. Of course, there is a province of pure learning which belongs especially to the theological domain. This includes the vast accumulated erudition in the way of literary criticism, exegesis, dogmatics, historical criticism, and a great proportion of what is commonly IAIN OF THE SU1 vl.. 129 elong to ecch I history. ttie.se topi Le8iology and textual criticism, for example — may 1 rid to constitute special or ancillary - in bhemselv< >f the religious life which ilationa with the infinite, the unseen, tin- incomprehensible; a view which in the language of religi I » kn<>v. '. but to faith. But for the | md for tl lion, it will be convenient to limit vince of scientific tfa to the intei ; facts of the religi' and fact gioug nisi very come upon a wide field of disputed I I — -the boh supernatural On the I principles of natural ••, what are we to do with these 1 Religious history is too full of them to let us pass them by. Our methods of historical criticism ai ied to their Bharpest test in dealing with them We i annot very well begin by assuming that our only wit:. in a given matter are retailing pure falsehood! d< " deceived The mere strangeness of a phenom- enon is no logical ground for denying it. Mil meet us on the threshold of our inquiry ; and one of our tii must be iriy before our minds as we can the princi] dealing with them intelligently. As this is quite the most perplexed and difficult part of our whole inquiry, we must give it a some- what patient and deliberate attention. Let us begin by noticing one or two contrasts that follow from the 130 A SCIENTIFIC THEOLOGY. difference in the subject-matter between theology and science, as that term is commonly applied. Science assumes as its postulate or ideal (which it has a perfect right to do), that every group of facts supposably may be, and in time probably will be, reduced within the domain of natural law, — that is, within that orderly succession of events whose ante- cedents or successions we can intelligently follow, and at length predict ; and its objective point will be to reduce as many of them as it can. Theology assumes as its postulate or ideal, that everything at bottom proceeds from living, intelligent, personal force, and sees in any given event an exhibition of that force. It deals, in short, with Persons, as the other deals with Things. Science has the advantage of showing how a great multitude of facts, once thought to be ultimate (that is to say, super-natural), have been reduced to regular order and succession, grouped and classified, so that the course of them can be predicted or intelligently controlled : storms and eclipses, for example, on one side, and mental maladies on the other, neither of which now seem to us supernatural in origin or sub- ject to miraculous control. Theology has the advan- tage, as soon as we come to deal with the motives and acts of intelligent beings, and with all the higher manifestations of life, that its theories come closer to our notion of originating force. Science, again, does not pretend to know anything about the origin of existing things ; and, if we at- tempt to account for that at all, an intelligent Will (as Comte said) is at least as rational and easy a way LAW AND WILL. 131 as any other. Neither has science ever succeeded in idling it to the common men. that our voluntary me within the uniform and necessary sequence of natural law: such woi virtue and crime, right ami wrong — belonging . culiarto the theological domain— always ne the osibility and moral freedom. In short, we have the ■• and Will, of i. ami Liberty, «-t natural event and human chara I Lutely irreducible either of them to the other trictly, a free ad is just as much amir.. >n of a world ; an act, — that is, an act of intelligent will, such as we are LOUS "I at any moment, — : no other miracle. 1 Now just how far the province of will, human Of divine, extends in the 6eld of action or history, it is m»t for any man to dogmatize V would admit that an intelligent act was required, at any rate, to start the human race <>n it- course, and to appoint the l.aw which has guided it- evolution. To some of us — and perhaps more and more, the moi reflect upon it — it will a]. pear not unlikely that a living influence, a pressure bo I ik] like that of the atmosphere, is felt in human a flairs, acting < where and always, but especially through mind- of certain peculiar capacities ami gifts; and that this influence (which must be allowed for jus! allow for the pressure of the atmosphere m median; 1 The point is farther developed in Dr. BuahnelTl " Nature and the Supernatural. " 132 A SCIENTIFIC THEOLOGY. from a sphere outside the will, or the conscious in- telligence of men. It is not a thing to dogmatize about ; and its laws, supposing it to work by law, do not seem very likely to come within the range of our mental science. Still, in speaking of it, we should bear in mind that we are speaking of nothing contra- natural or abnormal, but of what comes into the same order of fact as the evolution of a planet or the sim- plest act of volition. Here, then, is the point to which we are led. All that we call miraculous and supernatural, the whole province of revelation and inspiration, lies (as all his- tory does) in this field, which belongs alike to science and to theology : to one as the exponent of Law, and to the other as the asserter of Will. The question between them is simply how far the province of will, or personal force, can enter upon and control the domain of law, or natural sequence. If we say never and not at all, we assert a mere dogmatic fatalism, which is not only incapable of proof, but is in violent contradiction to our moral consciousness. If we say it may enter, ever so little way, by the original act of the Creator, or by the free lifting of a hand, then we waive all dogmatic a priori denial of the possibility of miracle and revelation ; l and it only remains to us to inquire, as accurately as we can, what is the real fact covered by those words. But that is not going to prove, as some theologians have imagined, a short and easy process. It will not do to take a single style of mental illumination, and 1 Obviously a different thing from the legitimate logical pre- sumption against marvels. Mil; I 133 jle group of acts, appearing at one given ] of history, and say that all revelation and mini included here. Stil] less will it do to accept oil- hand one class or school of • to these paiiirul.tr facts, and rule nut off-hand all other evi- dence as to similar facta appearing at other times and in other waya The records of history are full of alleged miracles, oracles, wonders, presumed t" be Bnpernatural. [f the Hebrew and Christian n make a class entirely by themselves, and an alone in all tin*, worl 1 latlon and miracle (which, with many, is the only point at issue , that fact itself cannot I Lished without exhaustive criticism and comparison, and a long and intricate pn itudy, which is hardly more than begun. ( irant that in thi ttds then characteristicfl quite unique, giving them a claim to he valued and studied quite peculiar to them, and shared by no other, — and there is a good deal in them to justify that claim, — still this by no means dls tin- duty, in the lace of the immense learn- ing and argument arrayed against u. of establishing it patiently and good temperedly, by fair reasoning; not asserting it violently, on peril of denunciation or worse, or «■■. aming it in advance to be defended afterwards. Suppose tbosi to be intrinsically and exceptionally divine, it will be some generations yet before that fact can be sufficiently establish serve for a valid theory of sacred history. The old proofs of it served for a time, but the whole process of proof has now to abide a different class of tests. 134 A SCIENTIFIC THEOLOGY. Two needless difficulties have been introduced here by modern defenders of miracles. The first is the view which sees in them manifes- tations, or invasions, of a higher realm of Law, over- riding and controlling those lower ranges of law with which we are familiar. This needless concession to the terminology of science is dispensed with, by tak- ing the simpler definition of a miracle, as an act of Will under conditions exceptional and imperfectly understood, particularly when those conditions have to do with man's nervous or psychical organization. The conditions, here as elsewhere, are defined by law ; but the act of will is in its nature (so far as it reaches) the overruling of law. What is Law, after all, ex- cept an observed sequence of phenomena ? If there is any force behind it, that is quite as likely to be intelligent and free as otherwise. The other difficulty is the assumption, often si- lently made, that the exception which makes the miracle is to be allowed in a single class of miracles only, — those of the Bible, which are involved in a particular theological scheme. Thus the hardest and most disputed point in the problem is put in front, to be met first. It is evident, on the contrary, that the true method w T ould be to take the easiest and nearest first, — to decide, if possible, on the alleged miracles of our own time ; to examine testimony from other parts of the historical field ; and thus to secure in advance the canons of evidence by which the miracles of Scripture may be brought under scientific tests. I w T ill not speak here of the great field that is TESTIMONY TO MIRA< U 135 opened by the study of comparative religions, but only of what belongs directly to the history and develop- ment of Christianity itself. h> earliest defenders (as Justin) admitted the realit . miracles, which they ascribed to evil daemons, while they laid no claim to supernatural powers of their own. Its later a; and we are not justified in ting it if the sam< corresponding would not convince us of the same thing happening in day or in America a hundred years ago. And at all events we need, to establish our canons of evidence or our I credibility, some well certified and generally ac judgment of scientific men, after sufficient inv< tion, of the alleged "miracles" of our own day. No other judgment appears I ther rational, ade- quate, Or candid. Accepting this as a general criterion, we shall not, probahly. be over hasty or confident in applying it to the record of particular facts. It', however! we may by the turn given to modern o ion of such thing8, it would appear that the, class of s.ripturc miracles, or what aerally re- garded as Buch, — chiefly the healing of nervous and mental disorders, — which we may accept with little hesitation, Bubject, ol course, to the criticism of an im- proved physiology. There are ethers — chiefly those concerning certain natural phenomena — which we should almost certainly reject as facts, without any hesitation at all. Some of them may be poetry, like 138 A SCIENTIFIC THEOLOGY. that of Joshua and the sun ; some allegory or myth, like that of Jonah and the whale, the ascension of Elijah, or the children in the fiery furnace ; some — like the feeding of the multitudes, stilling the tem- pest, walking on the waves, or blasting the fig-tree — a natural enough misunderstanding of the real fact (whatever that may have been), or perhaps a parable misconceived. Such expositions lie mostly in the region of pure hypothesis. There are others which have taken a deeper hold on the religious imagination, and which have become, so to speak, articles of religious faith in themselves. As to these, the judgment of candid and honest minds is likely to be greatly in suspense, and painfully. That we cannot help. We wish to see, if we are candid and honest, just where our principles of belief are likely to lead us. Of such events the typical one, and beyond com- parison the most momentous, is the resurrection of Jesus. To this our ordinary canons do not quite apply : first, because absolute belief in it, by those who claimed to be eye-witnesses, was the mainspring of a great and definite movement in human history ; and second, because belief in it not only qualifies men's view of the course of events in general (as all miracle does), but is apt to determine their whole view of human life and destiny. Not only as the demonstration of a life to come, but as symbol and proof of the victory of good over evil, the place which it holds in the religious mind is entirely unique. Criticism is therefore bound to approach it more deliberately, more anxiously, more tenderly, than THE RESURRECTION* OF JK it approaches any other which it is really seek understand. We Imit, at the out- whelming : imption which the modern mind finds against the literal interpretation of the narrative. It is prob- ably not too much to say that do i I mind — that is, no mind trained in modern methods - believes that a body of flesh and blood literally from the grave, and in plain sight of men i the clouds, — tin- view of it which n ly be- i maintained with great intrepidity. Tl. long with the dogma oft of the body, which it was held to ; The alternative which foi ern mind is plain : either I teal death, or was do d .1 revival of the dead evidence will outweigh the vast improbability. B il that alternative only brings as to the threshold of the interpretation It only pnl I ion in another form : Is it p r a human soul, death, to manifest its presence in a way of which the resurrection of Jesus is an example and a type I And to this question there i d affirmative an-- giving as many phases of belief,- — Done of them dis- proved, and Borne of them, it may be, not incapable of future proof. A valid an- in, would u r iv.- — or for it we should need — a far better knowledge than we have now of the exact relation between this and what, for want of better knowledge, we call the unseen world. Granting only that such a realm of conscious life ex- ists, it would be absurd to deny that it could be made 140 A SCIENTIFIC THEOLOGY. known to us ; and there would remain no difficulty either in the recorded appearances of Jesus, or in countless other manifestations of spirits that have passed into it before us. It becomes simply a ques- tion of the larger possibilities and destinies of human nature. It is perfectly easy to see what the first disciples understood by the resurrection of Jesus, and in what sense they believed in it. Paul, to be sure, the earliest Christian writer, speaks of it very vaguely, except as to the point of its reality, which he insists on in every possible way, as the very foundation of Christian faith. This reality, to his mind, is the glorified life in heaven of the living and exalted Messiah, who, in his new official station, is the direct source of inspiration and strength to his disciples. The particular event and way of " the resurrection from the dead " he says nothing about, except to insist that it is not a form of flesh and blood, but a " spiritual body," that dwells in the after-life. But the next generation have left us no room whatever to doubt of their meaning. They have explained and argued, in the most explicit terms, that it was a body of flesh and blood which rose from the grave. It was proved to be so by the act of eating and drinking; it was shown by wounds and scars to be the same that was actually mangled upon the cross ; and it was visibly taken up in plain daylight into the sky. It is saying nothing what- ever to criticise or condemn that belief, to say that it has passed wholly out of the educated mind of the present day, along with the kindred and de- EXPOSITIONS OF THK UBUlttCTION. 141 pendent doctrine of the resurrection of our own bodies. Of modern ezponti • I by Unitarians, may be mentioned the following: — Dr. Furnesa leti aside the whole accompaniment of angelic visions, an 1 re] using himself as if from a deep Bleep, — manifestly imply- ing that there had been no death in the ordinary or physiological sense. Mr. Edmund II -a mind rare and admi- rable, in whom piety and imagination were matched by equal literary vigor and charm — held that the risen bodyofJesus booami . during forty days, attenuated, spiritual:. i attaining the condition of wh al lied the "resurrection body," in which condition it was withdrawn from human sight 1 James Freeman Clarke regards the resurrection of as "an example of a universal law." and his visible appearances as illustrating the conditions under which the departed may manifest themselves in a "spiritual body," — his real body having been removed by priests or soldiers. 2 We have here, ap- parently, the same phenomenon as in the " materialis- ations " of modern Spiritism; >ince "a universal law" cannot, of course, be interred from disputed example. Pi sident Walker — one of the m adid, and honored of Unitarian thinkers — held, more simply, that the resurrection of Jesus was really the 1 Pongleama of Immortality. a Orthodoxy, its Truths and Errors, p. S3. 142 A SCIENTIFIC THEOLOGY. strong personal impression or conviction of his living presence, produced on the minds of his disciples by his own spiritual contact and influence while in the unseen world, which they interpreted as a visible appearance. To him the Ascension was decisive against a material resurrection. A view to which many of the most thoughtful and intelligent appear to incline — most strikingly set forth by the author of " Philochristus " — is, that the imagination and faith of the disciples created out- right those visions or appearings of their risen Lord which afterwards took shape in the gospel narratives, or in later legends, — hard to reconcile with one an- other, but easy to reconcile by that vivid and creative fancy, inspired by revering affection, and an absolute hope of his future return in celestial glory. These are interpretations suggested by believing, serious, religious minds. Mere scientific criticism, neutral or hostile, goes much further, so as to make the whole account sheer fabrication, imposture, myth, or hallucination. I have thus indicated what appears to me the true attitude of scientific thought towards the most dis- puted and difficult questions of theology, in which I do not include such properly philosophical or meta- physical questions as the being or attributes of God, freedom of the will, and the natural argument for immortality. For the profoundest thought on these questions of the higher philosophy, from the Uni- tarian point of view, I may refer to Dr. Hedge's u Reason in Religion," and " Ways of the Spirit," or THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT. 143 to tlit' superb and eloquent exposition that has been given of these and similar topics by Mr. J M irtineau I have been drawn into making this di more than I meant, a statement ol J opinion as far as it goes; because that seems fairer than a method purely impersonal and non-committal It appears to me that the chief Lesson we have to Learn . and patience 1 1 dogmatism is the demand of the impatient and the source of never-ending, bitter, fruit] troversy. What I have called a "scientific" method of dealing with the subject will tolerate no such thing. The Long experience of physical investigation, leading to the enormous enlargement of our positive knowledge and power, teaches always this one In — intellectual humility. - ence forbids partisanship and passion: it not fori. id an intense, deep, persona] interest in the wide held it exploit I world of man — of emotion, character, and act opened tons in Christian history and in the study of the human soul — is far nearer to our thought, and far more interesting, than the splen- did realm of outward phenomena taught in our cos- mology and our physics. Let it !*■ studied with equal patience, reverence, humility, with equal loyalty to the revelation of simple tact, and its fruit will not l>e less precious or abundant Again : Science involves Criticism ; and the results of criticism are often, for the time at least, negative, not positive. But while there is many a thing which in only have left behind with reluctance and 144 A SCIENTIFIC THEOLOGY. pain, yet as one is intellectually the " heir of all the ages," so the later he inherits, the richer his inheri- tance. The scientific spirit is likely to prove braver, manlier, honester, than the ecclesiastical spirit, even if less serious and tender ; and the tendency to a certain mental timidity, half-heartedness, and com- promise can never again, I should think, be quite as strong as some of us have felt it in the past. There is always a temptation to try our hand at some ideal theory of reconciliation and mental har- mony among the widely diverse elements of our ex- perience. But history makes very light of all such ideal theories. We are not responsible for the begin- ning of things, or for the end of things ; though by a sort of generous illusion we are apt to feel so. For us, the only answer of any value to any of the great questions respecting God, Life, Destiny, is the answer we find — very slowly and late in life perhaps — by doing our own best work in our own best way ; and in keeping mind and heart always open to the whisper of the Spirit of all Truth. And that is, after all, the best contribution we can make to the larger result, — perhaps the only one. VII. Tin: RELIGION OF HUMANITY. THAT very brilliant and striking ln.uk. I". II :.. .Miliar the phi :husi- asm of humanity," to describe the spirit which, mora than anything i was conceived in the minds iplea This may be justified, ; which ;:.■ v .. i. ment lays on the purely human qualities of justice, charity, and compassion, above all tradition, form, or doctrine. And the] t i in** when the l Jhurch a the heav- iks In the preservin instructing of by in a Long period of violence and That was. however, in the nam not man, and by the offices of a priest, not by appealing broadly to the human reason ; still less by the intelligent study of the causes that make for human welfare and virtue gainst misery and crime. Thus the p] enthusiasm of humanity "was never properly characteristic of the Chi hurch as such; and it never had a distinct meaning in any- body's mind till within the last hundred years. It really belongs not to the religion of the past, but to the religion of the future. And when we speak of any connection it may have with the liberal move- 10 146 THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY. merit in theology* we speak of the most important thing of all, in which that may have any hold upon, or any service of preparation for, or any hope in, that better life for man at which Eeligion aims. Here let me recall a single step of the ground over which we have already passed. Unitarianism, as it was at the end of the last century, had in it two ele- ments : the element of Eeason, in which it was an outgrowth of the realistic school of Locke ; and the element of Justice, in which it was allied with the revolutionary spirit and the political radicalism of a hundred years ago. In its later history in this country these two ele- ments have continually reappeared side by side. They have determined, on the one hand, the movement of free-thought against the old theology, and, on the other hand, they have defined the issues of later con- troversy. Let us see to what point they have already brought us. It may be fairly said that reason is now in the as- cendant in the field of theology. The old questions of history, criticism, and dogma are, it is true, far enough from being settled ; but at least they have all been brought under a scientific method of inquiry, which (so far as we can see) is their final stage. But thought is, at best, an inconsiderable part of the domain of life. If the next great development of religion is to be in the direction of intelligent service of humanity, — which, with all generous minds, is to take the place of ritual and dogma, — our most im- portant study must be the antecedents, principles, and conditions of that service. THE IfODERH SPIRIT. 147 The Christian Ideal of human a omed up in the phrase, "Kingdom of heaven upon earth." In its practdc . that ideal « part Lost Bight of by the early < Ihurch. The old i Catholic and Calvinist alike, had its root in ;r of human nature and earthly In strong contrasl to the New '1 to a future paradise and hell the solution of a riddle which as we Bee with Saint Augustine it felt incompetent to - >lve in this world The great reaction against that creed began with the deism and philosophism of the last century. -ins of Voltaire, the i.' .scan, agaii il faith and morals, arc more than atoned, in the view of our generation, by the intrepid humanity of the one and the sentimental pleadings of the other This new spirit, still fresh, vivid, and full of hope, inspired the era and dictated the max- ims of the Revolution. Ii ia jusl over a hundred years since the new gospel of humanity, the modern creed of liberty and equal right, was put in distinct expression to justify our declaration of national inde- pendence, to inspire enthusiasm in a doubtful strug- gle, and to assert the principles of a new political life. In France, what we Bhould call the modern Bill of Rights is still appealed to as the "idea of eighty- nine;" that is, it defines the doctrine and aim of the Revolution as against the old constitution of S and Church. This new gospel of humanity, the code of human rights, became a sort of religion in its way, and the ohject of as passionate devotion as any religious 148 THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY. dogma of the past. Theophilanthropy — as it was called in one of those fervid episodes — under the banner of " that good democrat Jesus," or of the new revolutionary u Supreme," was an attempt to enlist the impassioned enthusiasm of the religious sentiment in the war against privilege and wrong. Its doctrine was futile, its forms were melodramatic and ridiculous. But, as far as sentiment goes, nothing was ever more generous ; few things, I should think, have been more sincere. A humble but very touch- ing illustration of it struck my eye in visiting the great School of the Blind, in Paris, where the dates of charitable foundations and gifts were the dates of successive stages in the French Eevolution ; and re- called not the eras of prosperity and glory, not the splendors of aristocracy and court, but the time of terror, when the people felt the first sense of a blood- bought power, and France was in arms against the world. Now from that period of revolution our own has grown, and has received no small part of its spirit- ual inheritance. And especially among us here in America. Here, that sentiment of justice and equal right has been cultivated, for more than a century, as a sort of religion. It has been proclaimed in in- numerable patriotic addresses, and sung in all our national songs, and incorporated as a bill of rights in our State constitutions, and made the only basis of political power. Even now, the enormous incon- venience of irresponsible suffrage and sentimental legislation has hardly begun to check the fervor of that early faith. In the most formidable political i'HL OK TIIK INVOLUTION. 14'.' crisis wo have met, the sentiment of equal liberty, as much as the plain n- *ional union the condition and the II rv. What made the religion of our politics inspired also the reform of our religion. When the revoluti gospel of humanity ha : abroad, when the Te D$Um of the Holy Ai! been chanted over its downfall, then it becanu of the task of Christian Uheralisrn to givs what true in it -i), and baptize it am ime of the Son of Man. :i<- of t: Ini- tarianism than this: that, in proportion as it de- i from the <>M theology, and moral doctrini learly contrasted with the : of inherited depravity, it became oommitted to rons faith in human nature, and more and mOM mad.' ion consist in iea \ m a to mankind. Thus the doctrine of peace wi claimed, with kbhorrenofl of all war, — a part of the reaction which set in alter the tive-and-twenty yean of carnage that ceased at Water] I fcem- perance reform in its i :t of th- gener ml found nowhere else so forward ad\(M . in the ranks of the liberal theology. The l insion given to the prevalent id< (•duration, and the great improvements in its method which came in forty or fifty yi , had no more ■salons propagandists When public attention was turned to asylums for the Mind, and hospitals for the insane, ami reformatories for young offenders, and humane methods of prison discipline, — all these were 150 THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY. taken up, in an eager, hopeful way, and engrafted on the same humanitarian creed. That genial optimism, that faith of sentiment, that buoj^ant confidence in a golden future just opening, when all the harsher wrongs that afflict humanity should melt before the rising of that auspicious sun, — this made part of the atmosphere of liberal theology of forty years ago, and deeply tinged the light under which its younger dis- ciples then looked forward to their life-work as it lay before them. I must now speak of a certain reaction in the years that have followed since. For two distinct results may be traced as succeeding that era of fervid procla- mation and humanitarian faith. The first is, that the faith itself has been cheapened (as it were) by diffu- sion, and takes the form of that shallow sentiment- alism which is one definite source of mischief in the social theories of the day; the second is the shape which the reaction is apt to take with those who have outgrown its crude but ingenuous fervor. A weak humanitarianism on one side is matched against a sombre pessimism on the other. Those axioms of political justice, those maxims of social ethics, which make the human side of our re- ligious creed, are each a half-truth touching some fact of human nature : the bright or illuminated side, but not the whole of it. To state it as if it were the whole truth makes one of the most troublesome of those fallacies with w T hich morals or politics has to deal. A fallacy of this sort is sometimes a rudiment- ary or embryonic truth, sometimes a stranded or fossil truth. What is the inspiration of one age may be ■IIMENT AND SENTIMENTALIS.M. 151 the delusion of the next. What is the illumination of one period may he the ig u of auotlier. In a high flood-tide of sentiment, action be fa , which when the tad a im- | :." : witness the I — I genuine enthusiasm of pioua adventure, under • frey or St Bernard; a dreary and languid tra under Simon Montfort or the Louis. At the same flood-tide, a belief be donate and fervent, a hero's in rtyr's Btrength, which Cades on! • mbol, an opinion, a ere*''], with the divine life all - away. So it was with the trinity, with tramu' tiatinn, with the infallibility of the Bible; bo it is with that sentiment of a Divine II rmanity, which perpetually tends to fade into the thin cold ntimentaliam. There is something i as in appearu own thus the popular •_: • • - j • • • 1 of our tim roua in its sympathy, so gushing in its philanthropy, so zealous in its works of charity, so honorable t«» human nature itself as compared with the any former generation, genial to our own tradition and theory of Christianity. But we cannot fail to see that the wal ebbing away, on which it floated so fair and brave a generation or two Men's faith in human nature is underg revision, and collation with pitil What is al- ready part of our tradition — what is taken for granted jy assent, not fought out and won in the mind's own effort after truth and the soul's hunger after righte — is no longer the same tiling. It is 152 THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY. beginning already to be debased and alloyed. The same gospel of humanity which Channing made the most advanced interpretation of Christianity in his day, was greeted with eager welcome as the soul of a new thing in literature when Dickens took his heroes from the work-house and his heroines from the street. Even then there was something in it melodramatic and false. The same thing, at a later stage, becomes conscious satire thinly disguised, as in " Joshua Davidson " and " Ginx's Baby." Striking at very obvious social wrongs, it suggests no solution, unless it be socialism or a spurious Eomanism, — as in the wretched sophisms and travesties of Mr. Mallock. Meanwhile, since the Dickens period, — the period of a gushing and morbid sentimentalism, — litera- ture has taken quite another phase. It has become critical, cynic, weary. Just as theology becomes eru- dition, as philosophy turns into formula, and science into sterile nomenclature, so in the arts of culture mental analysis goes back on enthusiasm and faith. This tone, not lacking in George Eliot, strongly colors the atmosphere in which the facts of life and history are set before the sight of a younger generation. So far as we are conscious of it in our own mood, we might suspect it to be the loss of the natural glow of youth as years go by, an outgrowing of the emotions and aspirations of our own past. But it is more than that. In the generation that comes after ours it is still more marked than it is in us. The younger culture has already outgrown, or else has never shared, the generous illusions which made our own inheritance from the ^Revolutionary age. I speak THE REACTION. 153 here more especially of the cultured, the literary, the scientific class. In the popular mind, less touched by the critical temper of the time, then emo- , those generous maxims, retsin more force. Bat from the inspiration of a reforming seal they become dogmas of a sentimentalising policy. Prom glittering timet in front of battle they degenerate to mere falls* . oguid half-truths, whose tide of truth, even, is not ! nised by those who think thsy have outgrown them. For farts, alas ' hare not vaticinations. For tl time in the world, a whole people were trusted to exhibit the doctrine of equal rights in the government — to Issue in the present condition of our politics, W« fondly Impel, we fervently believed, that t!. ting away before the adva • M-ason ami humanity ; hut, behold I si within five and twenty - (to omit suoh tragic episodes as India ami ' ; iging the most advanced ami powerful Christian nation-, ami each in its way memorable new honor, on some vaster scale than all the tragedies of tl.' had quite prepared as for: Nations ami law said, are shaped more and more by the Spirit of Christian philanthropy. But, no! Blood and iron, says the foremost statesman of the age, — blood and iron make the strong cement in which the founda- tions of States must ho laid. And perhaps in all human history the set-ret dread of war was never so deeply felt as now, and the open preparations for war were never half so fnmiidal 154 THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY. Was, then, that faith in human nature which made the most choice and precious part of our religious inheritance, — that which seemed benign and sure as sunlight to our fathers, — was it a delusion and a dream ? Such questions many ask themselves in a sort of despair. The answer can come only in a working faith, too busy in act to speculate on result ; or else in an intellectual faith, which must grow up slowly among the new conditions of the time. It is quite too soon to do more than guess and hint what the new gospel of humanity shall be. Despair is for the idle and unfaithful, hope for the willing and strong. Let us now consider briefly the background which is given us for the new Religion of Humanity in the scientific conceptions of the day. First of all, I do not think we need trouble our- selves in the least about the effect of natural science upon our speculative theism. The God of scientific theory by no means appeals to devout feeling, like the Divine Father of the Christian gospel, but is at least as good as the subjective Absolute of meta- physics, and infinitely better than the avenging Sov- ereign of the popular theology. And by the God of scientific theory I mean simply the Force — personal or impersonal — behind all phenomena, with which science, as such, has nothing to do ; which it knows only as manifest in the primary qualities of matter and the laws of motion. The mystery of the uni- verse itself is so prodigious that it makes light of all our little differences in the attempt to state it. Consider, for example, what the most bigoted ma- THEISM AND NATURAL SCIENCE. 155 terialist must embrace in his summary He . es, — such is hia reliance on the veracity of things — with absolute conviction, that in B] immeasurably remote he h rl lined tin of vast nebulae of Bubstances having t! prop- erties of elements familiar to his experiments; that there i d temperature, a given pair of them sn and hydrogen will infallibly unite, always and everywhere in proporti with accuracy moi I than any ance could weigh them out; that the vapor thence resulting will just as infallibly, at a given lowei perature, crystallize in myriads of frosty stars, with every angle measured by a geometry m [uisite than any human draughtsman's, — the if not the act of perfect Intelligence, most literally pn in every Bpot, in every atom. And this, only one of the simplest of innumerable chemical chai known to us; a rude intermediate pn may even call it What mak; that, and y«»u have answered everything A single 01 Helmholtz's whirling rings winch make the ultimate form of molecule as now conceived by mi creation as astonishing ::i. A count for that, and you have, accounted for everything. When the same process of unfailing accuracy is traced through increasing complications of being, up to all forms of organic growth, without a single loop- hole left any where for chance or caprice. — absolute Intelligence seen everywhere in result, if not in act, — it seems a very harmless thing, after all, to say- that Matter, so regarded, hns m it "the potency and 156 THE KELIGION OF HUMANITY. the promise of all forms of life." And that " harp of three thousand strings," which Tyndall describes as existing in the structure of the human ear, shaped by the needs and cravings of the organization so as to respond to every tone or finest interval of musical sound, — well ! if these are the responses and the po- tencies existing among material things, I do not know where we could possibly go for a definition of Crea- tive Intelligence, infallible, omnipresent, absolute, so well as to the repertory in which a thorough-going materialist keeps his store of facts ; or to that curious summary of them in which Hartmann records the attributes of " The Unconscious." Special arguments of efficient or final cause seem dwarfed into nothing- ness beside the simple statement of the fact. They testify, at best, to the thoughtful and reverent habit of the mind which contemplates the fact. Scientific theory, then, I think, is absolutely neu- tral as to our speculative theism, serving only (as it necessarily must) to state the conditions under which it must be held. But it is a very different thing as it affects our religious theism. When we think of the overwhelming vastness, the appalling indifference to our interests and emotions, to all human pain and guilt, with which the circles of Being sweep their everlasting round, can we, — that is, under the ordi- nary limitations of the human mind, — can we think of any conscious sympathy between our own life and that stupendous Force? Can we conceive or retain a belief that events are intelligently ordered, to work out the designs of " the highest Wisdom and the pri- mal Love" ? Dante could dare to put those words on THK P0BITTV1 PHILOSOPHY. 157 the portal of bis Hell, because the system of things he knew of was BO small and near. Can we still hold thnii true, as a key to the inmost meaning of our 0108, so vast and with a horizon so remote? In trying to see how this question may possibly show itself to the modern mind, outside of then:, circles, one or two rations occur. I put that '.-n once to Luu:- a. :/. ; and while he very earnestly urged the proof of Intelligent Design in the creation, if seemed to me that be did not find in na- ture any very clear mark of the ckaarartm of th< -the only point Which lias any other than a purely speculative interest for us. And, on the ulatiw side, the answer given by most interpret! science is simply negative. The being and chai of God are topics with which, as such, it would ap- pear thai science has nothing whatever to da Now u is not easy for as, who are trained to i very keen interest in primal and final causes, to undei this attitude of absolute intellectual indifftren reserve. The Positive philosophy — or by whal oilier name we call the general view of things taken by the scientific mind — by no means attempt foolish and hopeless a task as to mecouni Ebf the exis- tence of anything by those laws of phenomena with which alone it professes to deal. Mr. Martintau's very eloquent and nobis essay dia hum- any purpose of arguing with any form of Materialism which does not show on its own principles a solution to the prob- lem of existence. Now no recognized form of Mate- rialism at the present day, surely, attempts any such thing. " But," said a friend to Professor Tyndall, 158 THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY. " surely you must have some theory of the Universe." " My dear sir," was the reply, " I have not even a theory of Magnetism." This mood of mind is not necessarily either irreli- gious or atheistical. We do not, as a general rule, experience an access of religious emotion when we light the gas with a match, although the process is as much more intricate and curious as it is more conve- nient than the spindle and stick which our ancestors held sacred for thousands of years, because that was the way the miracle of fire had come to them. Yet we do not hold ourselves more undevout than they. " I am no atheist," Comte protested vehemently : he said it to me about two years before his death. An atheistic theory of the universe lie held to be the mere dotage of metaphysical vanity. If you will have a theory of existence, he said, an Intelligent Will is the best you can have. 1 In his unique fash- ion, he held it the great work of his life to restore to Eeligion its supremacy in all matters of conduct ; the very phrase " religion of humanity " is claimed as his invention. But all theories of theology, cosmogony, metaphysics, and sidereal astronomy were ruled off with impartial rigor from his intellectual scheme, as they were from his notion of the service of Humanity in a working world. And, again, it is not easy for us, dealing as we do with human life very much on its emotional side, in view of its deeper consolations and nobler hopes, to 1 "However imperfect the natural order, its origin would agree far better with the supposition of an Intelligent Will than with that of blind Mechanism." — Paliiiqw Positive, vol. i p. 51. Till: SCIENTIFIC TEMPER. 159 conceive the condition of mental calm with which it may be looked on by those who think of these as of the dreams of children. What consolation, we think, for those who do not accept life as the discipline of a Father ? What hope to those who anticipate nothing beyond the sensible horizon that bounds our daj Questions Buch as these we are apt to argue with a certain sense of persona] responsibility for the result, — as if the reality of a life beyond turned on our own power to make it real to our own thought ; as if one forfeited his immortality by being unable to believe in it; as if it were impossible for another to win calmness of mind on any other terms than ours. Yet, as matter of history, we know that Spinoza was singularly calm and pure in his subn of the Universal Order; as matter of fact, we know that life does nut Lose its keen interest, intellectual or Other, for those who deliberately rule out from their Bcheme of things all "thoughts that wander through eternity." 1 have heard that, in a convention of - hundred European scientists, not one admitted the thought of personal immortality as possible. Vet the daily work of science, done by a thousand hands, is as diligent, aa devoted, in its way quite as contented with itself, as the daily work of i and devi ' But there i-< a certain spirit and temper, not e- tially connected with natural science, and making no part of its creed, which yet claims close affinity with it. And this spirit or temper tends more and more to show itself not simply neutral, not merely con- temptuously indifferent, but definitely hostile — not to this or that creed or form of Christianity, not to the 160 THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY. mere name of it, but to ideas and emotions that have always been held to belong to its inmost life. Thus that circle of Christian ideas included in the words sin, repentance, pardon, atonement, salvation, holiness — which we have ourselves been at so much pains to interpret in our reading of the religious life — is, as I understand it, radically opposed by the general view of life widely coming to prevail. As far as it does prevail, those words will have not merely to be explained, but to be explained away. This hostility, in so far as it does exist, we ought — as theologians, still more as religious men — to look in the face, and understand it if we can. At the outset, the theory of Evolution itself is a great shock to the feeling of the sacredness of human life, so carefully cherished by Christianity; and to the sense of the dignity of human nature, which marked our earlier interpretation of Christianity. The shock will pass away in time, and the religious feeling will get adjusted to the new surroundings. But let us do justice to the deep repugnance with which that theory has been resented. That the mythical first human pair — with its halo of marvel and reverence, with the schemes of history and the- ology grouped about it — should be displaced by the chance coupling of a superior breed of " anthropoid apes" stronger and cunninger than the rest, with lower forms of bestiality in the background; or, if not this, yet the wild and brutish savagery of the primitive man, out of which the race has fought its way to something better, through perhaps a thousand centuries' struggle for existence, — all this may be Till: rHBOBY 161 the best way we have at present of stating the facts; but, after all, the facts are not it to look and we have not got used to looking at then j that shape, from the religious point of view. Our to the Humanity that has Buffered and toiled • us is even enhanced by that statement, , U said; but somehow the Divine guiding Hand is not, to the common eye, so plain to And I - tin, when we iii V the doom thai all forma of life upon this planet; when we learned that we could no longer look forward to an indefinil of p* r the human race upon earth, but* at the wave of life has i. il must inevitably sub- lide; when we saw, I >, that civilisation itself is a ~ and that the we thought exhau >nomixed, but must i I with a aort of chill. What >ur or five thousand years, what are two hundred land plausibly enough reckoned as the limit of .ml future duration to the human race . in com- u with eternity nd of all a and systems visible to us is announoi Science with a certain pitiless precision ; and no compensation . for the « a pre- sumption that is asserted to lie against our hope of personal immortality. If human life in its origin looks ignoble, under the light of modem th- more depressing is the aspect, so regarded, of its des- tiny and end. Now this, unwelcome as it may be to our religious feeling, is distinctly the order of conceptions and ideas 11 162 THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY. which the religious thinker of our time has got to meet. For the present, apart from religious feeling, it appears to have had two distinct effects on men's imagination. The first is a certain hard, unsympa- thetic way of regarding human life on a large scale, — history merging into anthropology, and that more and more into natural history, especially when it deals with the lower races or classes of mankind, and so emerging in great disdain and race or class pride among the superior. " We will not be missionaries any more," it says, " and sacrifice ourselves for the barbarian. Let the perishing classes go. It is the law of the struggle for existence that they should perish and make place for those worthier to live than they," — that is, ourselves. The other effect is a certain dreary and sad way of seeing things, as if the vast tragedy of human life were vulgarized, from the terror and the pity (which make it human tragedy) being taken out of it, seen from the austere height of modern speculation. This double tendency, to aristocratic pride on the one side and a sombre pessimism on the other, I do not think can be denied to be a very common and formidable symptom in the educated mind of the day. If any one were to doubt it, I should ask him to con- sider the tone of Strauss's retrospect, the pyramid- like ethnology of Kenan, the dreary view of nature and life that impressed itself on the keen suscepti- bility of John Stuart Mill, the deepening gloom that settled upon the mind of Carlyle in his contempt of the humaner sentiment of his day, the way in which questions of practical philanthropy are dealt with by A TENDENCY Of Sell.: L63 the school of Herbert Spencer, or what is said of the philosophy of Hartniiinn. in the domi- bhought of Germany. Involuntarily, when we apeak of "the fair humanities of old religion,' think not of the poetic paganism which Coleridge had in mind when he wrote the phrase, but of our own younger days, aa compared with much of what we hear now. What attacks only the name and creed of Christianity may not alarm us much; but i lit now i cially symptoms of it which may fa u the generation that is advancing to take our pis But of this two things remain to be said The first is, that Science itself is really neutral, and not hostile. The representative minds of science are found on both Bides of the line that marks the most radical difference of spiritual theory. And that, not only m the I those who hold the two halves of their thought quite independent and distinct, — as it was said of Faraday, that when he went into his oratory he tinned the key of his laboratory, — but with those like Carpenter, men of Christian habit and nurture, who with their best intelligence adjust and harmonize the two. We do not know what shape this adjustment may take in time to come; but we may be very sure that the higher nature of man will always claim its own right somehow. 4 ' Thai mind and boh] according well May make one mi. but vaster" — is the very meaning and motive of all sound religious thinking. 164 THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY. The other point is this : that, as Science affects to give no explanation or account of things, so these must always be suggested from another source. To say that we cannot discover or conceive the antece- dents of the visible Universe is not to say that there are no such antecedents : it would weary us even to recount the postulates that must be assumed, to make the laws of heredity and natural selection intelligible or the process of them possible. To say that we can see nothing beyond the sensible horizon which bounds our life is not to say that there is nothing there : it is merely to leave the thought of the Unseen where it properly belongs, — to the heart or the imagination, as a celestial hope. Physical science accounts for nothing. It must involve in its premises all it can possibly evolve in its results. Mere evolution from below — mechani- cal force working up into vital, mental, spiritual, without forethought or guidance anywhere — is as abhorrent to intellectual theory as it is to the moral sense, which postulates moral freedom. Somehow and somewhere — it would be truer to say, always and everywhere — Mind acts back on Things. The Cos- mos itself is blank and unintelligible, except for some equivalent to the Christian faith in a Living God. Turning now from the theoretical, let us consider next the practical side of the matter. I do not think that, as a working faith, the reli- gion of humanity is likely ever to show itself in a form more heroic, more devoted, more generous and tender, than what we have been familiar with under the older types of Christianity. From the very first, IIT/MANITIKS Of THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 165 the Christian faith iry faith. Its with such understanding as men could Lave of it, has been not to a select class or race, but to all mankind. No w enthusiasm of humanity w is likely iter to do more than rival the devotion of the first martyr age, when the world lay under a horri- ble threefold yoke of superstition, corruption, and >tism, and when the Christian salvation d deliverance from all three ; or the heroism of the great missionary age, when the Church found servants as SI Ifiarl in B 8 Si Pati i Boniface, and St Anschar to fight its battle with bar- bariem, and when its calendar was crowded with the names of those who fought and fell io thai warfare for humanity of all history; or the sacrificing compassion of such more modern saints as Francis Xavier and Charl \ B n >meo, who fulfilled their mission of charily amid the miseries Of famine and pestilence that afflicted the sixteenth century; or those missionaries of our day, who have carried their message of divine compassion or their ready hand to help, and have willingly laid down their lives among the squalors of savagery! in the loneli- ness of exile, in the reeking infection of plftgUftft and prisons and military hospitals, — from the resolute and sober tiopof John lb »uard to those brave women who have worn the red cross or tb- cent through the horrors of thi ' Eastern war: N i form of piety or humanity in coming da] likely to do more honor to the large Bympatfa which human nature is capable. It will be the noblest of triumphs, if the world is able to keep 166 THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY. undiminished the splendid inheritance it has received in the record of these saintly Christian charities ! Why not, then, we may ask, simply keep that in- heritance as we have received it, and so hand it down to posterity along with an improved theology ? That is just what we desire to do, but just where the difficulty lies. For the Christian charity of the past was not simply a sentiment ; it was a convic- tion. It rested distinctly, though often unconsciously, on a notion of human nature and the Divine govern- ment, which necessarily passes away in the decay of the old theology. That theology put vividly before the imagination these three things : first, the lost and miserable con- dition of mankind in its present state ; second, the inexorable justice of God, along with his infinite but contingent mercy ; third, the absolutely inestimable value of eacli single soul, in view of the eternity of glory or horror that certainly lay before it. These three, intensely conceived as the most appall- ing, the most inspiring of realities, not only stirred every generous nature to rescue perishing men from their impending doom, but acted very powerfully on the springs of character and emotion in the soul itself, infinitely deepening and quickening the sentiment of compassion for human misery in every form. The brutal inhumanity of the ancients, the tender senti- mentality so frequent in the modern world, hardly seem to belong to the same race of beings at anything like a similar stage of civilization. Part of the change is due to race, circumstance, mental refinement, or the mere softness of amiable ease ; but a great part, DECAY OF SENTIMENT. 167 and far the noblest part, in the modern sentiment of humanity is due to the eighteen centuries' assiduous culture of the Christian Chun : _ distinctly on a theological basis, which as distinctly | -lowly and inevitably away. Now while that sentiment in its integrity is the fairest and noblest thing our nature has to show, it becomes, when crippled and decayed, one of the serious dangers, ami offers one of the most serious difficulties, of the problem with which we have | tically to da Sentiment cut away from its intell imentalism. What was wholi and Btrong becomes morbid and enfeebling. What ion! of a vigorou 1. re- mains a thin, restless ghost, a misleading phantom, a lying spirit Thus love is better than faith or hope, Paul ; lmt do< t' love " of the n. evangel, — M fi suae detached from faith or hope. And so with the forms of active charity. If this life is necessarily a highway of misery and pain, leading to an eternity <»t" bliss or woe, it is of small quence that yen show mere alm us own justification. What multiplies, indirectly, the number of souls, candidates for eternal joys, and keeps them in that state of hu- miliation and dependence which is the best prelude rnal joys, has in it the promise and the reward of ecclesiastical faith. Imt suppose the faith is gone, while the sentiment remains: then the same form of 1G8 THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY. charity becomes half-hearted, weak, and mischievous. Suppose this life is not looked on as the inevitably painful and miserable highway to another. Suppose the faith in that other life to grow dim, and the fear of unending misery for a single human soul to be utterly passed away, — as the science and the com- passionate temper of the modern world manifestly tend : what have we left but a sentimentalism, so to speak, without body and bones, — a direct hindrance instead of help to any wise, firm, lasting service we can hope to render to mankind ? The sentiment, then, assiduously nurtured for so many centuries by the Christian Church, gropes and pines for an intellectual foundation to take the place of that so deeply undermined. It is one of the dan- gers of a transition time like ours, that tenderness, sympathy, compassion, on the one side, and reason, intelligence, practical good sense, on the other, get alienated and divorced. The tender-hearted would inflict no pain ; would take no man's life, even the guiltiest ; would have all the suffering and dependent — the criminal, pauper, insane, idiotic, idle, or un- employed — share the comforts and luxuries which Nature makes the hard-earned reward of prudent toil. The cool reason er sees that pain is often a part of the needful social surgery ; that the choice must often be made between the life of the guilty and the safety of the innocent ; that luxury and comfort, to those who have not earned or inherited them, mean a ruin- ous tax on industry and an enormous multiplication of the distresses it is sought to relieve. Thus sentimentalism, from an inspiration of social A RELIGIOUS THEORY OF LIFE. \ becomes a disturbing element in social ad- ministration. Unless guided by a cool and even severe practical judgment, it B PSCtiy to call out that cynic temper, bi t terest enemy of humanity, which says : " Let the race, then, be to the swift, and the battle to the strong] Let the may in the struggle of existence, where no quar- ter is given to the helpless and weak! Abolish all your charities: the experience of them only shows that they make more misery than they CUTel 1 man for himself, and the weakest t<> the wall : "' Now with Sentimentalism on one side and Cyni- cism "11 the other, tie reconciliation. It i- a theory 0/ human sound enough t" satisfy bi ,. broad enough to admit all the sympathies and affections that brighten, COmfoit, purify, and hl<^>. Such a tli. -nry men have found in the past, in an understanding of the Chris- tian revelation which offered an object of our worship in a glorified Divine Humanity, and mad.- the whole thought of this life solemn by the radiance or the shadow casl upon it from another sphere. And many of the best and bravest lovers of humanity in our day see no other solution to that grave question of the time than to go back, in humility and contrition, upon the path which the critical understanding followed bo farj t.> accept that yoke of doctrine and ordinance which, from being easy and light, had be- come too burdensome to be borne; and to restore — purified, no doubt, and enlightened — that spiritual supremacy which once made the Church the sovereign of all mens thoughts and lives. 170 THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY. This means, if we are consistent in our logic, to bring back, under modern conditions, the empire- church of the Middle Age. And I do not hesitate in the least to say, that, if our method in this thing is to be ecclesiastical at all, a Catholic Church such as we might easily conceive, under a spiritual head such as the present Pope appears to be, — grave, dignified, austere, cultivated, liberal of temper, — is by far the best and likeliest solution. It needs only a little of the wisdom of which that Church has shown itself capable in the past, to make it likely that very great multitudes of this and the coming generation will choose that way. But I shall not speak here of the arguments for or against that consummation, or of anything that may be said of any form of compromise in the creeds of Protestantism. As I honestly think — though here I do not undertake to dogmatize — the ecclesiastical root out of which they all grow alike is withered, and will put forth no more new growth. At any rate, the order of thought with which we have most to do is absolutely detached from that root, and is growing in other soil. The intellectual foundation which we have to assume is laid not in Theology, but in Science. And, in dealing with any of the questions that touch the condition, the destinies, the religion of humanity, we must take in hand, first, the conceptions given us by Science. For the motive which Theology made strong and victorious in other days, we must substi- tute a motive, if we can, in keeping with the knowl- edge, thought, experience, and opinion of our own time. A CHANGE OF VIEW. 171 I dislike to use in this connection the word "evo- lution," which lias come to be a sort of catch- 1 Implying as sharp on one supplant- od the other. Bnt the a v of our time m the solutinn we seek We shall find it when v. find it at all), aa that magnificent conception bo familiar to in the modern d evolution, — that our g mfolding of kunu This, in its nan _ ion of humanity"' make it tlf f his own I in its broad . La the "religion of humanity" as the object of acientii . and an exalted lith. I >1 i on • into the details which a full illus- tration of this matter would demand [( that it contaii bint of what must supply the place of the form dism at almost every point 1 blem of Physical Evil I asking it the work of Qod's greal Adversary ("an enemy hath done this"), modern thought makes it simply one phase of the inevitable "stl which La the law of the animal creation ; nay, wider, of the whole or- ganic world. The problem of Moral Evil : insfc making it, as Milton does, "the ruin of OUT first par- — a Fall, to be r I by sacrifice and pain of expiation. — the modern view Bhows it to reside in that realm of passion and appetite which we share 172 THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY. with all living creatures, by which they and we are equipped for that struggle of animal existence, — which is more and more put in the background and trampled under foot, in proportion as our human ca- pacity and quality become developed. The theory of Moral Duty : it is made to depend no longer on the arbitrary edict of a Divine Sovereign, and the reward or penalty imposed by an Eternal Judge, but on those conditions of happiness and advancement, on the un- folding of the affections, sympathy, and sense of right, which are ascertained to be a part of the law of our being here. I might continue this list through the whole cata- logue of moral and religious obligations, or points of faith. But the obvious thing in them all is the very thing which I wish to emphasize. It is that, step by step, the theological is supplanted by the scientific, the divine by the human view. It is, in other words, a " religion of humanity," taking the place, in our generation, of a religion of theosophy. Its founda- tion is Law, not Dogma. Speculative theology has no longer any place in it, as defining arbitrarily the nature and character of our obligations, any more than it has in shaping our views of history and cosmogony. The thought of a Divine existence, of an infinite Will, remains, — but only to give lift to imagination, gravity to reflection, reverence to the temper of the soul, and a foundation of gratitude and trust. Its value is less speculative than emotional. It is to be known not in dogmatic assertion, but through such symbol as we may imperfectly apprehend it by, — THE PROVINCE OF RELIGION. 173 the Life of the Universe, the Source of all Being, the Object of our adoration as we aspire more and more to the higher life I Jut when it conns to the task of interpretation and instruction and guidance, then it is the lesson of experience and the word of Bcience that we need History, politics, economy, Bocia] tics and dynamics, the laws of wealth, th< charity, the laws of character and heredity, the laws of population, the laws of crime, — tin- a- must make the subject-matter of our study, when we seek I low out any line of practical duty and morals, It is with these, and not with any theological schen duty and opinion, that <>ur nobler sentiment sweet and charitable emotions, will have to 1"' P ciled. One other stepi I, to give the full breadth of meaning in our phrase, " religion of humanity." It La very characteristic of the thought of the pr» day. that it has followed up, with extraordinary in- dustry and zeal, the study of Comparative religions. So long as Religion was thought of as consisting in one single, unalterable, revealed type of morals and doctrine, it. had to be the religion of a ra church, or dispensation, and not of humanity at I A> late as fifty year- ago, to the average mind, the terms "Mahometan and Pagan* 1 were enough to map out, rule out, cast contempt upon, all forms of faith outside the Christian world. Thus " Imposture" and "Idolatry'" were the words sufficient to cover them all in a certain lofty, possihly pitying, condemnation : — at best pity ; never an approach to sympathy or respect. 174 THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY. Contrast with this the wealth of knowledge, the greater accuracy of discrimination, the attitude even of discipleship toward special phases of mental or moral life, found in the study of the world-religions to-day ! The patient, homely, plodding morals of Confucius ; the charity, humility, and austerity of the Buddhists, with their strange tenderness to inferior creatures; the wild Brahman imagination, with its ancient and elevated forms of piety ; the Parsee wor- ship of Light and struggle with the powers of Dark- ness, from which the battle of Good and Evil was adopted into our own doctrinal tradition ; the ad- venturous enthusiasm contrasting with the absolute submission of Islamism ; " the fair humanities of old religion" in Greece and Eome, with what may be gathered from remoter Egypt and Assyria, — these make up the rich, varied, magnificently impressive panorama of the great faiths of mankind, before or beside the traditions of our Bible or creed. How striking, how immense the contrast presented in this view, when set beside the horror and repugnance of the early Church, and the virulent hate or else pity- ing scorn of the later Church, for all forms of faith except its own ! It is the task of the Eeligion of Humanity not simply to recognize the broad field of various beliefs in which the races of mankind have been trained, but, far more, to recognize whatever common spirit of jus- tice, mercy, and truth may be in them all. It is not itself the creation of science, or the outgrowth of those comparative studies. It takes science for its instruc- tor and guide ; it takes comparative study for its [PABATIVE BELICH 175 wealth of illustration. But in itself it is that spirit of consecration to a better life, of willing service to mankind, which avails itself of these guides and helps. Its aim will be to gather and | what- ever is good in the tradition to be found from every source. But for this it must have an independent life of its own, — as much as the corn that is pi or the acorn that is dropped in a soil enriched by the wash of a continent Without it, the richest of will give us nothing but weeds. The characteristic life was hidden in the tree from which the acorn fell, or the harvest-field from which the corn was gathered. [tis the chi( 4 Christianity to have se< i and ripened the seed that was to be cast inl erous a soil. The of humanity hereafter may be more wise, more fruitful, more various; but it will never be more tender, generous, and devout than it has been during the 1 of its training, The air foundation H is under- mined and fast crumbling away. In that process of undermining, I nitarianism has had its share to do. A candid view of it will show that it has done its task, in the main, with a reverent, patient, horn not always a skilful hand. Partly in the work it has done, but much more in the minds it has nurtured and the souls it has comforted and fed, it has given its share towards preparing the way for a broader and stronger life. VIII. THE GOSPEL OF LIBEEALISM. MY object, in what I have now to say, will be to consider, as attentively as I can, some phases of religious thought and life which come nearest home to us, especially those included under the broad term Liberalism. But I wish to hint, at the start, the limitation con- tained in the phrase "Gospel of Liberalism." A gospel is not a theory or a sentiment or a speculation or a creed. It is something greatly more noble and broad than either. It addresses not primarily the understanding or the affection, but the conscience and the soul. To the one, it is a law of life ; to the other, it is a home of rest. It means an authority that commands obedience, and a deep foundation of spirit- ual peace. A gospel is something to live by, and it is also something to die by. Above is Duty, " stern daughter of the voice of God ; " underneath are the Everlasting Arms. What we call a gospel, then, — as distinct from a theory, a sentiment, a speculation, or a creed, — contains these two fundamental ele- ments of the religious life. And it is in view of these — that is, with a practical and not a speculative aim — that I shall attempt to trace some of the bear- ings of our position, here and now. OUR OWN posit; 1 77 I : the Harvard Divinity School has been con- nected, in a very special way, with the history of religious liberalism in this country, and is responsible for a good many of its feature*. I need not recite the list of bright names that are scattered along its record, running back now sixty-five years, — that is, nearly two generations of the sons of men. You will recall them easily in one swift glance of memory; and you will see how they not only include those names of love and honor which represent the mo learning and soberer piety of an earlier time, but cover the most radical and brilliant thought of a young ttion, that an* rapidly pushing Dfl who stand on th«- ripe side of fifty towards the eternal shadow. It i-^ ii"t for as, certainly not I much as by a thought or hint, to disown either por- tion of ;t life so broad and ample. If I might be allowed to saya word for myself, it would be that my heart lives SO largely in the gracious and venerable of our eoniniunion. and that my thought goes forward with SO keen and active sympathy with those younger minds to whom the privilege of my place brings me into daily near relation, that it would be impossible for me to say a word that should put me, consciously, at difference with a Bingle phase of it that has been honestly thought or lived. And yet my purpose is as far as possible from the vague glorying ami complacency which are often in what we say when we speak of the triumphs and ad- vances of liberal thought. On the contrary, the tem- per in which we have just now to regard the situation is that which sees it as grave, perhaps critical ; at 12 178 THE GOSPEL OF LIBERALISM. least, which is willing to see what there is in it of grave and critical. Of all forms of Epicurean de- light, perhaps the most repugnant to such a temper is the easy-going optimism which turns religion into an idle sentiment, and parades, under the name "lib- eral," an inane triumph at the mere levelling of the shrines of an austerer faith. The walls of old Error may fall to the sound of trumpets and shouting. The bulwarks and palaces of the new City of God will never be built but through skill and patience and toil and prayer and pain, one hand holding a weapon to strike for the Truth, the other a tool to build for the Life. I do not speak of our denominational fortunes, or the prospects of any particular form of opinion and belief that we may hold in common. But it is true, now as ever, that the Power which presides in hu- man things exacts heavy pledges of fidelity of the agents honored and commissioned to do its work. The prophetic office was evermore a " burden ; " and it was never taken up with a light heart by any one worthy and fit to carry it. He is " driven of the Spirit," like Jesus. A " necessity is laid upon him," like Paul. And, as Milton says, " When God com- mands to take the trumpet, and blow a dolorous or jarring blast, it lies not in man's will what he shall say or what he shall conceal." The occasion is al- ways great to him who can conceive it greatly. And the greatness of the occasion is measured not by the joy and applause alone, or the expanding sense of power, but by the pain and fear and danger of the way, and by the weight of that burden of misery and ni:kd Of a GOBPEL want and crime which our Gospel is commissioned to relieve. So, then, what we mean by a G pel of Liberal- ism,' 1 if there is Buch a thing, Lb not a theory that fits smooth and soft to the methods of oar understand- ing; not a sentiment, bright, comfortable, and to the moods of our emotion. Nor is it even, in a more generous way, that I rmpathyand faction with which we feel OUTSelveS t<> walk in tin; direction of the world's pro ad to work in the front lines of the world's work. It is not Bummed up, again, in the word Culture, which had a Cert iin claim to be the :_'h<]><'1 of half a century ago, ao matter how ; rich, and deep ense we give thai word; any more than in the older and profounder word Salvation, narrowed to mean our own rescue from the wrath to ooma Its watchword is at once lowlier and nobler, — that is, Service. And it is not till we have measured the whole sweep of the peril, tic terror, and the wrong from which mankind is to he delivered ; not till we have Bounded that deep sea <>!' unbelief, ungodliness, despair of the future, which threatens to drown men, as of old, in destruction and perdition ; not till we know in me Positivist conception, mon (distinctly realized, of what is coming to be called "the religion of humanity." Whether that Of DOt, at all • Borne sort of " i iliation — sum.- visible organization, perha] stent, at, and lil«', which are so grievously at discord now. But any "positive" theory of know] very tar, as yet, from making the basifl of a religion. For tie- realisation ho talked of it would l»c cheap t>> wait not twenty years, hut ten or twenty times as long. Consider that it has already taken four hundred years, since the ghastly collapse of Mediaeval faith, to bring us where we are. Consider the taskfl of scientific theology yet before as, hardly attempted or 1 OOnsider the slow development of an independent ethics, large and delicate enough t<> take in all the complexities of modern life: — and these are hut two of the conditions. Any perspective shallower than that of centuries will scarce give OS the equipoise we need, in dealing with so large issa We are working unconsciously — we ought to be working consciously — for a future that is a great way off. The intellectual patience so essential, without 182 THE GOSPEL OF LIBERALISM. any lack of ethical fervor, can absolutely be had only by the familiar habit of dealing with historic periods and long lapses of time. " Providence," says some French writer, "moves through time as the gods of Homer through space : it takes a step, and ages have rolled away." But we fidget and are impatient. At every little advance of our knowledge we must out with our pocket-rule, and measure how the new piece will fit the majestic heavens and the rolling earth. At each fresh phrase of each new school in meta- physics we fancy we have found, at length, an ade- quate theory of creation and providence. These theories, all the way from Plato down to Spencer, are the playthings of the mind ; and we use them, as children do, in childlike unconsciousness of the dif- ference in scale between those crystal spheres and our round nursery globes. In my own brief recollection, two or three very promising theories of the universe have come up as a flower and been cut down ; and I fully expect to outlive that which seems most fash- ionable now. I have no mind here to criticise the philosophy of Evolution, so called, either for attack or defence. That task should be left to competent specialists. An amateur in such things is apt to be a bungler, and most of us are amateurs. It would even be an impertinence in me to say that I accept the theory, — except as probably the most instructive, certainly the most entertaining, way to co-ordinate and har- monize certain known facts, and help us deal with them practically ; not at all to account for them, in any philosophical sense, theoretically. To account A FATALISTIC DRIFT. 183 for facts of life by laws of growth, for existence by laws of similitude and BU I of phenomena, is too plain than an all to it hen.-. It is only the presumption which expounders of the new creed have found in it, in the direction of fatalism and denial of the moral life, that justifies even this allusion, Not that these premature assumptions are matter of complaint i from <»ur point of view. Ou the contrary, it is ground of real congratulation, as : Is the true interests of the religious life, that the theory has been run out so East in the din of blank and blind v y ; that m has shown us hand, before the capacity of devout emo- tion or moral enthusiasm had been slowly smothered under it. The brutal materialism which we have seen cited in Buchner's exposition of it strikes quick, like those swift sounding-leads that go like a bullet into the sea-depth-, against the indomitable bottom fad of human consciousness, tl of moral fir. (loin. As soon a^ we Bee just what that logic can do, and JU81 how far it will go, we may breathe free again, and take Up, cheerily and patiently B . the suspended thread of the relig i lotion. Our relation as " scientific " theologians to the larger world of science is at once that of willing learners, and of independent co-workers and explor- ers. We want the enterprise and coinage of natural science, not its limitations; it- freedom, not its hon- or constraint; most of all. its affirmations ; least of all, its denials. What it can give us we take for our help; but there is no need that we put ourselves 184 THE GOSPEL OF LIBERALISM. 1 in servitude to any man or creed or school that claims to speak its final word. We have to do, not with cosmogonies, whether gnostic or agnostic, or with theories about the origin of the lower forms of life. Our proper business is with the highest forms of all. We were not in at the birth of things, and we shall not be in at the death. Not where life begins, and not where it ends, but where it culminates, is the portion of it given us to explore. Our business, as explorers, is with primary facts of human experience, and with what, in scientific phrase, are called " laws of similitude and succession " of those facts ; that is, the laws of human character, human life, human destiny, within the horizon that bounds our observation. The "phenomena" we have to watch include the height of aspiration, the depth of passion and contrition, the wealth of experience, which make up the higher life of men. The " facts " we are called to study and account for are known by such grand names as salvation, regeneration, atonement, holiness, religious peace, faith, self-knowledge and self-conse- cration born out of conviction and experience of sin. These, on their human side at least, are neither "improvable" nor " unverifiable." Now those great words mean something: for us, not (it may be) dogmatically, but at any rate relig- iously. It is our business to find out what they mean. Their religious sense, rightly caught, becomes their scientific sense. Most likely we reject the dog- matic sense fastened on them in the old theology. But the moment we ask what brought them into use at all, what has given them their weight and power DATA OF THE RELIGIOUS LIFE. I ors in human life, we see that we are dealing with * foundat: character an I duct. While Christianity is the a of those v. holds tl. situation. Without I call- . i fumble about the 1 .: evet \ nted — of its spect from the full meani • human history. Iiti. ha thin] scien- tific theol be found, not in being, but in adding <>ur indej azploi k of data and | . which any most Our I field is tb which lie - character and conduct ; or, I : which ha forward t of human instil and even;- W and - . which aim] roblem by ignorii . and im- portant of its conditions. The higl in human natur inch a fact, and as valid any number co-ordii. of the Uni at lar_ gin of life as a molh> . I whatever for 186 THE GOSPEL OF LIBERALISM. we translate our thought, the thought remains true that Life ebbs and flows in the veins of the mighty Mother that has borne us all, and has its source in the Heart of all things, which we can call only mys- terious and Divine. And now, a word as to the situation. A few years ago grave warning was given, under the alarm-cry " Eocks Ahead," of a widening gulf between the popular faith and the belief or no-belief of educated minds. Our own public has heard something since of the peril of a " moral interregnum," and of " cer- tain dangerous tendencies in American life," threat- ening from the divorce which to many eyes seems imminent between the science and the religion of our time. I take these hints simply to fix our point of view, not seeking to add emphasis to them by any words of mine. After all, the spectre of doubt or disbelief must be looked straight in the face, to see what it really is. It will not vanish by any pious closing of our eyes to it. The problem, to be sure, is no new one. It is just over seven hundred years since the Mediaeval Church, startled from its sense of secure dominion, began to feel its way slowly, with many a misgiving and hor- rible recoil, towards the suppression of dissent by force. What that led to, we know by such names of terror and hate as the Inquisition and the Wars of Eeligion. Those methods are now by some three cen- turies happily obsolete. What we have now to heed is not so much the world's hate as its indifference and contempt, — a phenomenon new to our time, in HISTORICAL CONDITIO] strong contrast to the passions and violences of the past. A thou I force, the ac- tive thought, the political life, drifted just as steadily towards the great Catholic organization as they are drifting from it now. Allinn^p of ( hurch and Empire was as natural, as needful then M the divorce of secular and spiritual authority -.lay. Charlemagne v. much a product <>f his ti::. Gladstone and Bismarck are of ours. Let as i moment on the signifi . 1 the bearing of that change. Its movement is liketl logy. Its ultiin in the elemental life of tli:' IT be- yond the strength of the ' will, tl. the most skilful policy, t<> control That i> why we call it "drift" : its course i- d< 1 QOt by con- scious engineering; hut by granite walls of circum- stance. Hildebrand and Barbaroesa break vainly, alike, againsl those adamant hound-. Their work is caught up and swept on, alike, by that n At best, we, may do something to understand the and Bweep i historic fon likely that any effort or thought of ours will do much to help or thwart them. But, indirectly, thought n thing t«» trol the movement which it is impotent of itself to create or check. Else, why endure the burden and pain that go with all serious thinking \ Even that vast curve, which at first sight seems to trace out fatally the orbit of human things, it may be possible to deflect a little, as soon as we can read its formula and understand the law of its ^pneration. Events in 188 THE GOSPEL OF LIBERALISM. the large are ordered by a Power as much beyond our comprehension as beyond our reach. Events in detail are ruled for the time by passion, compulsion, and authority. Providence is on the side of the strongest regiments, when a particular issue is to be fought out. But in the long run of any one genera- tion, — much more, of a hundred years, or of twenty generations, — the course of events is guided by the course of general opinion. Thought is the engineer that traces the channel of the stream, deepening it here, cutting it off there, and so at length controlling its direction. Science finds and equips the pioneers, who go in advance of those strongest regiments. Its pioneer work, for us, has been well and thoroughly done. Liberalism, following close, is already well able to hold the field of mind. There is little to dread from the spiritual despotisms of the past. Whatever disturbance religious passion may bring into the political conflicts of the day, Thought at least is free. , A reaction towards ecclesiastical tyranny is neither possible (we may hope), nor even conceiv- able. Yet Liberalism cannot afford to extenuate or dis- parage the forces of its two great adversaries, Ecclesi- asticism and Dogma. Outside the range of pure intellect, it is as yet far inferior to either. In the sphere of religious education, pious emotion, and moral influence, the Papal Church is all the stronger, perhaps, since twelve years ago it was disencumbered of its hampering temporalities. One word from the Vatican to-day could stir or still a tempest of religious fanati- cism in Dublin, Vienna, or Warsaw ; in Quebec, New IBM AND DOGMA. 180 York, or San Francisco. Home has even some special advantage here, in the easiness of our laws, in the enormous accumulation of untaxed proper ty pecially in the great immigration of its obedient sub- jects, who vote as they are told, whose party leaden are true to that one interest, and who have been said to hold twice as much political pt I BO many Protestants, owing to their remarkable skill in mul- tiplying votes. It is not for us in America, at to think Lightly of that power. So too, religiously, Liberalism is for inferior to that pliant, zealous, many-headed, many-handed organiza- tion known as Protestantism, even to ; its oongei i< l& Broken and ■ as it may seem, looked at intellectually, Protestant- ism is yet, looked at religiously, the chii force in bhe three great political : Engl • I Ger- many, and America, It has command of prodigious wealth, and includes a large part of the wealth-pro- ducing skill of the world. It has still a very large and enthusiastic body of adherents, whose zeal it keeps op I srous enterpi h as mis- sions, charities, and education It has imm resources at its command, to nurture the religious sentiment, to cultivate religious sympathies, and to inculcate religious belief. Not, certainly, with a futile and vain notion of its weakness, but with a distinct apprehension of its very great and still preponder- ating strength, should we suffer ourselves to speak of its system of opinion (which we are so apt to do) as doomed and perishing. It may be so ; but not yet, not in our day. 190 THE GOSPEL OF LIBERALISM. Of Protestantism as dogma we take the less ac- count, however, since in the argument it rests on is the one fatal weakness : it must appeal to Keason to maintain itself against a claim of authority far weightier and older ; it must appeal to its own slen- der Authority to defend itself against the reason it has invoked. Protestantism as a life has been very great and noble. As dogma, it has been simply an ex- pounding and attenuating of the older creed. For theology, it still remands us to Augustine, Aquinas, or the Eeformers of the sixteenth century. It has gained little in these three hundred years, except the accumulation of great stores of learning, most of it valuable only as material for the historian or anti- quary ; while in the same period it has lost its mili- tant, heroic, aggressive character, and been put at heavy disadvantage in the fight. It is never once thought of by sagacious Catholics as a formidable, hardly even as a serious, enemy. The political power of Protestant countries they may very likely fear and hate; but Protestantism as a system of thought serves them only (so to speak) as a break-water, pro- tecting them, so far as it goes, from the only enemy they do fear, — namely, Modern Science, and the un- belief that comes from science, against which, with pathetic simplicity, the present Pope is setting up the interior pasteboard defences of Scholasticism. Sentimentally, Protestantism helps to keep up the tradition of ecclesiastical authority, in belief and practice, with the unwholesome craving for it ; and so plays fatally into the hands of its opponent. Intel- lectually, Catholic theologians hold their Protestant WEAKNESS 01 PROTESTANTISM, 191 adversaries -justly or not) simply in contempt, or at least take pains to make us think bo. Their own learning is at Least equal ; their reliance on authority is far more i .: and distinct. But behind Protestantism itself there La a spirit and a | rned of Protestantism, which they do fear, — a spirit and a power which they know they will have v> meet presently , and take account with, fa They understand, as well as we, that the really formi- dable alternative is not ' Ti itestant or Catholic,'* but •• Reason oi Bonn There would be Bometbing ludicrous in the I and confident way we BOmetimeS have in B] . them as Unitarians ; that is, as the Bmallest of Protestant a wned or ignored by nearly all the rest Why largely and confidently is ; we feel oun consciously allied with vaster forces, which w< assured will have the heritage of the future. sonally, I am a Unitarian, and hold that birthright very dear ; just as historically 1 am a Christiaj kstically a Protestant, and hold that birthright very dear. But, as students of opinions and 1 we are obliged to take in a much larger field. It is on that large field that we must watch the slow un- folding of human thought We cannot u f| > hack on ahway which the human mind has followed in its irresistible advance. We cannot unsay the word, or undo the work, which has reduced not only these beliefs and dogmas of the past, but the forms of ex- perience they grew from, within the categories and methods of scientific criticism. From that tribunal 192 THE GOSPEL OF LIBERALISM. it is too late in the day to hold any mode of opinion, or any moment of evolution, secluded and enshrined. Our view of the Past must be swift enough and broad enough at least to guess what the coming stage of development is to be. A single aspect of this wide view is all that con- cerns us now. Let us look a moment, then, at the supplanting of the received Cosmologies by larger and more precise conceptions of Nature and Life, with the resulting effect on current religious ideas. Five hundred years ago, Dante's scheme — of Hell as a great cavern running through the earth, of Pur- gatory as a hill on the other side, and of Paradise as filling the nine concentric celestial spheres — was a fair enough picture of the way the most highly edu- cated looked on things ; a long advance on the earlier notion of the earth as a four-square plane, patterned like the tabernacle of Scripture, with the lake of fire below, and the solid crystal vault above. Copernicus was ten years older than Martin Luther ; and his sys- tem (which Melanchthon would have violently sup- pressed, as atheism) gave the first, by far the rudest, shock the old belief has ever felt. Think of the steps that have been taken since : — Galileo's discoveries about the planets, suggesting a plurality of inhabited worlds ; Kepler's laws of plane- tary motion, dissolving away the solid spheres of the old astronomy ; Newton's theory of universal gravita- tion, displacing arbitrary will as the direct cause of the celestial motions ; Franklin's proof that lightning and electricity are the same, doing away the super- stitious awe at thunder-storms; Laplace's nebular sir. LDVAXCE IN BCIE> hypothesis, so generally accepted, carrying back the origin of the solar system to incalculable remoto d Ualton's demonstration of definite -inns and elective affinities in chemistryj making ridiculous the old notion of " dead matter" astheantitl Spirit or the enemy of Good; demonstration of the - of light and di toying nl Id belief in a local h< the aniformity of cosmic I I antiquity of the globe, disproving absolutely the popular chronology of creation ; d to the the sun and the light widening SOUsly and at OH OUT ]»h> the well-establishe I • stion and equivalence of energy, with its far-reaching our conception of the laws of life; and now the scheme of evolution by natural pi pparently destined, with whatever modification, to rap and swallow up every Other thfl the trans- mission «•{" Life and tin- inheril or evil. Thea ur half of them taken within li vim: memory — in telly, not as so many advana ;' human intellect, hut as they hoar 00 Conceptions and ideas which were once wrought up without question into mi ions belief, and were hold n • t<> their salvation. very impressive to Burvey tl. a in their connection and in their order of sequence, if we only a moment to reflect how prodigious is the men- tal revolution they imply. To take one step the other way. to roll hack by ever BO little an arc the driving- 194 THE GOSPEL OF LIBERALISM. wheel of that revolution, is manifestly impossible. And the steps have been coming with increasing fre- quency and increasing weight. With a wise instinct, the Church — or the theologi- cal spirit it had trained — tried to throttle at the birth those twin earth-born giants, Natural Science and Free Thought. It burned Giordano Bruno. It silenced Galileo in the cells of its Inquisition. It allowed the Newtonian theory to be taught only when it became absolutely necessary in courses of the higher mathe- matics, and then only as hypothesis, never as fact. It continued to pray for rain and against thunder, and so continues to this day. It protected the first chapter of Genesis by frivolous and grotesque inter- pretations, and tries so to protect it now. It insisted that fossil remains were manufactured in that shape by the Almighty, and packed into TOCK-strata when the earth was built. And its advance lines are only beginning to fall back from the defences, somewhat hastily thrown up, to resist the threatened attack of the new philosophy of Evolution. The tendency which these things indicate, it is safest for us to accept as fixed and inevitable. It is no part of our business to add to their momentum, or to oppose any feeble check of our own. We may as well think of trying to push on the rapids above Niagara ; we may as well think of trying to stop them. Our only concern with them, as religious thinkers, is to see, as clearly as we can, how they touch or define for us the conditions of religious thought. But observe, asrain, that all this series of great TENDENCIES OF LIBERALISM. shocks against the ancient faith have affected only what was outside and incidental. They have not touched what is inward and potential Religion may yet be saved whole and unharmed, we think ; but only by that cordial co-working with the spirit of the time, which La the very thing we mean by a I faith. And what does this imp! Liberalism is not a code of opinion. It ifl limply a habit of mind, making the atmosphere of opinion-. What those opinion- nelson a j many things. Sometimes they will be Buch as to k.-rp one very close to the old theology and ti I in it ; only, while theirs is a d his is a sentimental belief. Sometimes they will be such as to repel him violently from them, and put him in the attitude oi rive radicalism. But, in general, it is away from, Dot towards, the establish 1 It begins, for example, with criticism of text or doctrine ; 88 "ii with more and more searching criticism of the Sacred Books themselves j until it sets seriously about the task .which is that of the more advanced scholarship now) of bringing the entire record under enerally received canons that apply to all his- tories of men ami all growths of opinion Oi' course, it tends thus to discard miracle in the sacred narrative: not that it necessarily denies the facts which looked miraculous once, but that, when it accepts them (as Dr. Furness does), it seeks to put a natural interpretation on them ; and this, while it leaves unimpaired their value as appeals to pious sentiment, quite destroys their value as evidences of religious dogma. 196 THE GOSPEL OF LIBERALISM. It rejects, without hesitation or fear, all doctrines — such as election, reprobation, and an endless hell — which affront either reason or natural justice or the character of the Divine government. It loves to re- cognize what is attractive in other forms of religion, — as Buddhism, Brahmanism, and the rest, — some- times to the unjust disparagement of Christianity. It inclines strongly to humanity, kindliness, natural charity, as against set acts of piety, in its view of human duty. In its social theory, it disinclines just as strongly to admit the hard facts or accept the hard conditions of human life. Its working plans are at once expanded by a generous sympathy, and weak- ened by an amiable sentimentalism. Its moral peril is, of too strong recoil from austere bigotry to indo- lent laxity of judgment. And it too easily admits an over-conceit of itself, which leads to spiritual impo- tency, cowardice, and self-indulgence. Away from this moral peril, the great glory and strength of Liberalism are in its cheerful, courageous, confident piety. The sweetest of hymns and the serenest of good lives have flowed from it. Passion and fervor of the religious life it is apt to lack. That spirit belongs rather to a more stern and ascetic faith. It comes from a sense of terror, a depth of contrition, a gratitude for rescue, which Liberalism cannot feel, since the only God it knows is a God of love. And it is weak in this, that it does not recognize — what Nature alike and the deep conviction of sin declare — a God of terror and a God of wrath, as well. In the several forms in which we have known it hitherto, Liberalism has given to the world many of WEAKNESS AND STRENGTH OF LIBERALISM. 197 the noblest, purest, gently serene, obedient, and holy Uvea But of itself, and intellectually regarded, it is only a Step of transition. It is very for, in any exposition it has made of itself as yet, from even at- tempting to state a theory of the Divine government so as to take in the dark Bide of it. as Calvinism did. It is very far now from being a great power to more the world, as Calvinism waa It is, as we may say, the religious, pietistic, sentimental aide of our modern thought It - 4, but i off to the harder and more practical, the positive, the scientifio lida And our best wish for it is that it may survive as the gracious, beaming, benignant soul, making glad, hopeful, and bright a world whose glory seemed threatening to depart For, as we cannot tail to see, those steps of mental revolution which I have spoken of ha. oed to many grave thinkers the coming on of the chill pe- numbra that betokens before long a total ecli] faith. Even it' it were SO, the body that intercepts the light is. after all. a celestial hotly, though earthy and opaque, and its shadow will doubtless presently pass away. And there i> compensation, even here. We may, indeed, for a generation or two, lose that near and comforting assurance of the Divine Personality which, 1 am sure, will come baek to us in a glorified form when our minds are grown to apprehend the condi- tions under which it must he held. As it has been held by many, and still is, it is a mere idolatry — sometimes cringing and cowardly, sometimes inso- lently familiar — which we shrink from as blasphemy, 198 THE GOSPEL OF LIBERALISM. often, in the prayers we hear and the threats addressed to men's religious terror. If our speculations on the Divine Nature fail us, let us first think worthily of the divine reality in life. Then, it may be, we shall have clearer vision of the Living God, who is the fountain of universal life. So, too, it may be needful that men should lose for a season their clear and vivid conviction of the Future Life, — seeing what evil use has been made of it in the craven fears and selfish hopes that have constituted the buttress of ecclesiastical tyranny; seeing how multitudes of religionists have deliberately sacrificed the urgent duties and forgotten the deep wrongs and griefs of the life that now is, in their self-indulgent brooding on joys or terrors of the life to come. It were better for us all to ask less how we may be sure than how we may be worthy of that incomprehensi- ble and august destiny. The nobility of the Hebrew race began when it left behind the Egyptian creed of another life, and entered on the wilderness of wan- dering and pain, believing only in the present Deity ; when it cast aside the " Book of the Dead," with all that solemn ritual and imagery, and the grave judg- ments of Osiris beyond the dark river, and accepted instead, for its sole portion, the Ten Commandments, as it began its bleak but valiant march. From that seed grew its later, better faith in immortality, and the larger life which is ripening to-day. If it is true, then, — and I do not say that it is, though many will say it for me, — that there is going to be an eclipse, for longer or shorter, of those two great lights of faith, one of two things will certainly THE ETHICAL FOUNDATION. 199 occur. Either our intellectual creed will drift stead- ily into that sombre pessimism which is the last word of a merely fatalistic evolution, while a practical ma- terialism will come more and more to hold the field, in a godless science, a rudei scramble fox wealth, a baser giving up of ourselves to sensual delight, a widening of the insolent and crnel distinctions of rich and poor, learned and ignorant, with the ever- impending danger of a war of classes, threatening to blot out the glory and life of civilization itself, — that "ii the one hand; or. on the other hand, salva- tion must be found where ii of old, in deepening and renewing the springs of life in the son! itself And here we must bear in mind that, while nothing we can do ox say or think can alter in the least the ! \ p of the Divii rnmentor our own nltim destiny, yet oux own relation to that government or that destiny depends wholly on what we do and think and are. The lessons of Christian history, which make by fax the most profound and instructive chap- ter in the moral history of mankind, have taught us little, unless they have shown how salvation, at the hour of extreme crisis, has always been found in one way, — that is, by returning upon ti ' moral convictums of the soul. Not speculation, not emotion, but Conscience is the true foundation of the higher life. It has alw,. begun with an intense conviction of Sin and sense of personal need, or else with an intense perception of the Evil in the world to be overcome by good. It has always worked out in a new freshness and vigor 200 THE GOSPEL OF LIBERALISM. in the sense of right and wrong, in a more living conception of practical righteousness. It was so with Jesus ; it was so with Paul ; it was so with Augus- tine ; it was so with Luther ; it was so with those disciples who one by one embraced the stern, sad, valiant creed of Calvin, and through it saved to the modern world most of what makes its life worth saving. With each of them, it was associated with doctrines, or forms of thought, which are seen now to be outgrown, and which the world must soon in- evitably leave behind, — with false Messianic hopes ; with crude anthropologies ; with dogmatic creeds, strange and effete ; with impossible socialistic dreams. But with each of them it has left not only great ex- amples of personal fidelity : it has left also a distinct lesson, as needful to-day as then. It is a very pitiful and meagre thing to have exposed their error, unless we have grasped and interpreted their truth. And, finally, what is that truth, as it bears now on our thought and life ? For answer, think what it was at the time of the decline and fall of Kome. Then, as now, there was a system of material fatalism l coming to be widely ac- cepted among cultivated minds. Then, as now, old creeds were dissolving. The restraints of ancient piety being loosed, whole communities were plunged into scepticism, and with that into the luxuries and vices for which scepticism offers a cheap and easy excuse to self-indulgence. Imperial Eome was then what, with a startling likeness, imperial Paris seemed 1 Under the name Manichaean. — see "Fragments," etc., pp. 131-133. ETERNAL RIGHTS 201 fifteen years ago. And then the key to a nobler life for Humanity was found in the soul of one man, 1 who with passionate earnestness sought to cleanse himself of hifl persona] share of guilt, and so found anew the sense of moral freedom, and the solution of life's problem, in absolute surrender of himself to an Almighty Will. v, whatever else the course of thought may leave behind, it remains that every man of healthy intelligence knows there is a Right and there is i Wrong, and that the difference between them m< area the highest law of his being. The foundations of the Onivi far, very far, beyond our sight; but we know they must be laid in equity. There is "an Eternal, not ourselves, that makes for righteous- ness." " II" tli is fail. The pillared firmament ia rotteno And eeitl rill on stubble." This deepest law of our life we cannot ah learn by way of theory. So much of it as concerns ourselves we learn by way of obedience. One may be our Theology; the other is our Religion. When the desire to know and the purpose to obey have taken full possession of a man ; when they mount in his aspiration, and flame in his passion, and breathe in his piety, and give their color to his thought, and nerve him to bis work, — then we have the true Re- ligion which our time demands, independent of all its Philosophies, and nobler than all its Creeds. 1 Saint Augustine. APPENDIX. MEMORIAL ADDRESS .). cU tJi-- Annual M' i ting <>/ th- Am> rica Bl Ki.v. FbeDERK II. II.' : . I'D. MR. PRESIDENT,— We do well to «1- rote a portion of this anniversary day of our Association to the memory of those servants of our cause who daring the past year, baring finished their work, have retired from our ranks to "join the ohoir invisible," snnn w. bellow It fulls to in.- to speak of Dr. Bellows, who, if less im- pressive as a preacher than the honey-lipped Nestor 1 who hastened to follow him in death, has had in all our annals no equal aa a man of action. Two years ago, we oalehrated the memory of that illus- trious divine 2 whom we regard as OUr father in the faith. To-day, we commemorate the disciple and brother by whose organizing genius that faith has been made to take to itself a body as compact as our unformulized theology and the right to differ, which we all claim, will allow. 1 Dr. Dewey. '-' Dr. Charming. 204 APPENDIX. He was our Bishop, our Metropolitan. The dignity is unknown by name in our communion : the office has no place in our acephalous, isocratic polity. But this once in our history, by this one man in our brotherhood, the func- tion was exercised, and that by no robbery but by univer- sal consent of the brethren. It was no rape of clerical ambition, but a lot which fell to him by native gift. He took possession of his see by supreme right of natural leadership and self-evident vocation, — a see extending from the Bay of Fundy to the Golden Gate. An ecclesi- astical Centurion, "set under authority," he said to this man, "Go," and he went; to another, "Come," and he came. He ordered us hither and thither, and we surren- dered ourselves to his ordering. One day, he summoned us to New York, and founded the National Conference of Unitarian Churches. Another day, he summoned us to Springfield, and established the Ministers' Institute. These organizations, which we trust will survive him and last as long as our communion shall maintain its specialty and continue a separate fold in universal Christendom, testify of his far-seeing sagacity as well as his far-reaching zeal. They are his monument, had he no other. They are his " epistle written in our hearts, known and read of all men," — " written not with ink, but with the spirit of the living God." St. Paul, enumerating the trials and triumphs of his mission, boasts that he was " in journeyings often." Our Unitarian missionary, in journeys not less frequent, ex- ceeded, if journeys be estimated according to their length, by many a meridian the apostolic mark. When Starr King died, he hastened to San Francisco, while as yet no rail had pierced the Rocky Mountains, comforted the orphaned diocese, with counsel and ordinance confirmed the church, and established a pastor in the vacant pulpit. This was HKNKY W. BELLOWS. one among many of the generous impromptus of his alert and enterprising spirit. Bia qualifications lor the office he assumed were, first of all, faith m the cause and fervent love of the cause he espoused* With the heart, and not with the undei ing only, he believed in the Liberal gospel of our Church. With the heart he d . . and extend its beneficent influence in the land. He was not content to hold tin' beliefs he cherished as a prn trim- by which 1m- had b ad cheered and inspired he burned to impart to others for their enlighten- ment, encouragement, and inspiration. He believed in its final triumph, hut not without adequate efforts d< t-» that end. I should not )"• wanting. To these moral incentives we must add a folicitou and extraordinary p laptation Qe discerned two hostile ■ work : on the one hand, a beadlong, radi- cal spirit tending to Nihilism ; on tin- other, a timid, servative temper threatening arrest in the past and captivity ma and the letter. Se set KimaAlf to medial tween the two. His own theological pro iivities inclined to the conservative side, hut his convictions were not very exigent Se could practise a tolerant frankness, which by conciliating dissent might limit the aphelion of denial, while it shamed stagnation and Loosened the hands of custom. Be craved popularity, he needed it for the end h< at heart. And he liar. Innocent of duplicity, by virtue of a never-failing suavity, he could be all things to all men, conciliating the self-willed, humoring the weak, noticing the obscure, acknowledging the claims of the em- inent, paying tribute where it was due, and collecting it from all. Always the man he talked with deemed him 206 APPENDIX. his particular friend. There was no falsity in this and no hypocrisy : it was pure affability, the easy libation of a fluent nature and a brimming cup. I note in this man the rare combination of the conse- crated soul with the boon companion, the enthusiast with the man of the world. He was not one of those of whom it could be said, as Wordsworth said of Milton, "His soul was as a star, and dwelt apart." He was not one of the bloodless hermit saints, who seem not to belong to this world, attached to it by only the slenderest thread of animality, whose soul " Scarce touching where it lies, Bat gazing back upon the skies, Shines with a mournful light." He was no ghost, no lank ascetic, but an honest, whole- some son of earth, at home in the flesh, who without being in the least a sensualist, not living by bread alone, yet lived by bread in the widest sense, — a boon companion who enjoyed the feast and the jest, could give as well as take of that coin, was quick at repartee, met the worldling on his own ground, and charmed the table with the bright- ness of his wit. Yet he never unfrocked himself, nor pained his friends with any sense of incongruity between his discourse and his calling. As in Philip Neri, the jester was the foil of the priest. Withal, as I said, a consecrated soul. If he shone as a man of the world in worldly converse, he had none the less his conversation in heaven. His supreme aim in life, embracing and subordinating all secondary aims, was in one or another way, by this or that ministry, to fix and extend the kingdom of heaven on the earth, everywhere rooting out evil and planting good. For this and in this he lived and moved and had his being. Time, money, HENRY W. BELLOWS. 207 and pen were at the service of every good cause. In what charity was he not active] In what philanthropic move- ment did he not lead ] As champion and advocate of all the humanities, that great and populous city of his abode had no citizen more honored and called for, no voice more prompt and commanding. Kemember that shining episode of his public life, the Sanitary Commission ! AVho of us, brother ministers, his survivors, can be named \ ord contains a chapter like that, so replete with laborious, needful, beneficent servicel Few who were not intimate with <>ur brave brother can know what toil and cares, what runnings to and fro, what appea ls to the indifferent, what wrestlings with officials, what liberal expenditure of pri- vate meana thai enterprise involved. And he was the soul of it all. It is not too much to say, that, although without him it would doubtless have originated, and in the hands of Olmsted and other willing and able coadjutors have done a good work, it could not without him have been the power and the which it was. We learned from his example that the age of chivalry was not past, as Lurko complained, when this new Hospitaller and Knight of St. John took the field in the cause of mercy. I visited not long sin.-.- the cemetery at Arlington, where thousands upon thousands of the soldiers who (ell in the war of the Rebellion are interred. Afl I wandered among those mostly nameless graves, 1 reflected that perhaps not one of that mighty host had perished without having experienced, directly or indirectly, some alleviation of his sufferings through the hand of that great charity of which our brother was the head. And all the while, through all the years of the war, he retained his cure of All-Souls Church, preached in his pulpit, and fulfilled the duties of his pastorate. I recall with wonder his indefatigable diligence, hia 208 APPENDIX. amazing activity. The steam was always up in that fierce engine that was in the body of him, of which his life was the fuel. The driving-wheel was never still. Even in his dreams, I think he must have been at work. Minister of a cultivated, intelligent, and, as one might suppose, ex- acting congregation, he satisfied their demands with his preaching ; and yet preaching was but a small part of his activity. Often, his sermons were written at one sitting. But haste was not apparent in them. The same sermons would have cost some of us whole days in the preparation. Then, he found time for other writing in many kinds and various interests, literary and practical, spiritual and tem- poral, and conducted a correspondence that might have taxed the ability of a statesman. He never neglected a letter due. Indeed, writing was as natural to him as breathing. It seemed as if the pen were a part of him, a supplementary organ which Nature, foreseeing his needs, had attached to his finger-joints, and which could be sheathed or unsheathed at will. At houses where I have visited with him in his vacations, he would sit up late after the rest of us had retired, and rise before we woke, to write. It was thus that he composed his history of the Union League Club. You will say that with all this activity, with this ex- cessive giving out, there could be no time to take in, no time for study and reflection. As to reflection, I cannot say. Long, deep, silent, patient brooding, I suppose, was not in his nature. But this I know, he was a diligent reader. Scarcely a book of special importance in the province of history, or popular philosophy, or even fic- tion, was uttered by the press but he somehow found time to acquaint himself with its contents. The one talent denied him was that of repose. He could not do nothing ; he could not lie by. Of leisure he HENRY W. BELLOWS. 209 had no experience, no relish, scarcely knew what it meant. His health breaks down from overwork and he goes abroad, undertakes a grand tour for its recovery. But the tour is turned to ii'-w t<«il. Half the night Lb spent in bringing to protocol the observations and events of the day. From the railway, from the saddle, from rounds of sight-seeing, straight to the ink-stand, The written sheets are sent home, are committed to the press; and when the journey is ended, behold ! it is a book. I say this not by way of commendation, but of characterization. I do not think it is the way to get the full benefit ■ [tisn " wi -nt out for to see." What • only to describe on th much advai ith the i To see well, one inn r end, n. sire, must l.-t one's upon by the thing seen, — must be one's self (so to speak) the Object! and the thing seen the Subject Bu1 such passivity was not in Bellowa's make: he must ith the will, if at all. He could not be intellectually and active at the same tin. Dally in the sense in which "Tl r lent his hand To the vast soul that o'er him plain, Occasionally. II i s to apeak :er-trait of our friend, a ground principle in his mental constitution, not to mention which would be a grave omission. I am at a loss by what term to ex p ro sa it. If I cared to be pedantic, I would say, in the Greek sense of the word, daemonic. I will call it, in plain speech, an extraordinary capacity of pure inspiration. Xo one has really heard Bellows, no one really knew him, who has not heard him at his best on the platform. He was not always at his H 210 APPENDIX. best, though never prosy. But when he was ! We talk of extempore speech. In my experience there are two kinds : one that is good, but is not really extempore ; and one that is extempore, and is not good. And there is another which is miraculous, — incomparably better than anything the speaker could have possibly compassed by careful preparation or conscious effort. " Take no care how or what ye shall speak, for it shall be given you in that same hour what ye shall speak." One must be an exceptional nature for whom this shall be a safe rule. For ordinary mortals it is a very unsafe one. I have known but two preachers in whose case it was ap- proved ; but two who could be effectively beside themselves, who could trust their good genius to bear them better and higher than their own wit ; but two whose wings were di- vinely assured to them. One of these was the late Father Taylor, and the other was our Brother Bellows. With other men, their best things come to them by lonely mus- ing ; his, in the torrent and storm of public speech. It was wondrous to listen to him in those exalted moments when fully possessed by his Daemon, — " Filled with fury, rapt, inspired." You could not report those flashes with anything like a reproduction or justification of their effect, any more than you could write the aurora or stereotype the lightning. It was not so much the words themselves which he uttered as the spirit which gleamed in them and through them that thrilled you. Of the moral qualities of this hero of our homage I need not descant to you. It might be safely assumed, did we not otherwise know it from personal acquaintance with the man and his record, that such power as he exercised and the influence that went forth of him must have had RALPH WALDO DCEBS I'll their source iu great virtues. Hut it needs no assumption. All who knew him can testify of a moral courage which quailed at nothing, which braved all ri-ks and defied all consequences ; ■ gener rity which took no counsel of - prudence, and i ther, richer men would have reckoned, his pecuniary ability ; a tender sympathy with bich affliction nei Jed to in vain ; a loyalty which made his friendship a Uineas of nature which m ihine where he came. Such was our brother in his lift and w.-rk. V. claim f.»r him the vision of to I claim for him the penetration of th . d thinker, dot the erudition <>f the deep ro ad scholar, nor even the in- the emancipated critic What we do claim for him is a transcendent p n. Be has left DO written w«.rd which, like that of Planning, has M for itself a wide acceptance and s long future; none which will worthily represent him to posterity. But the spirit in which he wrought, is it oof immortal 1 His work, it not survive in its fruit B I The lesson of his life, .shall it Dot abide with us, thongh his place in our ranks can know him no more i Will thai place ever be tided again by one so brave and strong 1 The best that aid of any man may surely be said of him, — that he was one of those "who passing through the valley make it a well." It is good to celebrate such. It is better, SO far as our meaner gifts and feebler will may suffice, to fallow them. BALFB WALDO SKKB80N. And now, Mr. President and Friends, I crave your in- dulgence for one more word, — a brief word in memoriam of another preacher of our communion, more recently de- ceased ; once for a few years a preacher in the technical, ecclesiastical sense, occupying a pulpit in this city as his 212 APPENDIX. father had done before him; always a preacher in the higher, universal sense. — a prophet, — the greatest, I think, this country or this age has known. Your thought will doubtless have anticipated me, when I name the name of Emerson. Prevented by accident from assisting at his interment and offering my tribute with others at his bier, I desire in this presence to acknowledge the debt we owe him as pro- moter of the cause to which this association is vowed, — the cause of spiritual emancipation. An emancipator he was by the positive, affirmative method, so much rarer and more effective than the neg- ative, aggressive one adopted by most reformers. In the words of Dr. Holmes : " Here was an iconoclast without a hammer, who took down our idols from their pedestals so tenderly that it seemed like an act of wor- ship." Let me say, then, that Emerson, in my judgment, stands at the head of American literature in two of its most im- portant functions : as philosophical essayist, and as lyric poet. As philosophical essayist he is marked by absolute sin- cerity, independent judgment, and the freshness of original thought. His aim is not to set forth in conventional phrase the prevailing sentiment of his time, not to voice the accepted doctrine of "good society," but to face the primary fact, and to state in terms of his own what "the brooding soul" has revealed to him of the aspects and meaning of life. An original observer of Nature's plan and of human ongoings, he does not strain or strive to see and understand; he does not worry to detect the truth of things, but trustingly accepts what comes to the open sense and the waiting mind. " Stand aside and let God think " — his own memorable saying — expresses the RALPH WALDO KMEB80N. 213 mental process by which he gained his insight and reached his coo It was not lore of singularity, as hostile critics alleged, but plain sincerity, that made his views and his writi unconventional, and that hare and there shocked pr op riety with.- tling contradiction. It might tune, but it was not hie fault, that he could not see things as others saw them. He mc saw them him—if And the different viei meaning, the unwonted phrase. inciter among as has incurred more ridicule and en- countered mora abuse than this, our joj and our pride, in irlier atteranoes. "What will this babbler Hit speech was characterized as "the most amasing ring of one who could "not pat two ideas together," as sheer " blasphemy," by tie- tie • day, the self-constituted guardians of right thinking and g The angry invectives launched ■'.- him by his censors might grieve one who pria . as another the good-will of his kind ; but they could not turn him from his orbit, nor bailie his serene - .: sion, nor extort one syllable of wrath in reply. "Has Nature covenant. -d with me that I should never appear to disadvantage, never make a ridiculous figure 1" "1 see not any road of perl which a man can travel but to take counsel of his own bosom." With - timents as these he steeled himself against the shafts of his series, and steered " right onward." And now, what a change] "Who names him but to praise] He has created his own public, lb- has formed, as Wordsworth did, the taste by which he is enjoyed. Did ho write : " Greatness, once and forever, has done with opinion'"? He has conquered opinion. So truly he prophesied : " Let a man plant himself indomitably on his 214 APPENDIX. own instincts and there abide, and the huge world will come round to him." Two streams of tendency appear in his Essays. As a philosopher he is both Platonist and Stoic : a Platonist in his contemplation of nature ; a Stoic in his practical view of life. Locke still held sway when he began his career. The " Essay on the Understanding " was the text-book of philosophy in his academic years ; but the whole being of the youth inclined in the opposite direction, and though not directly and at first hand conversant "with the new German philosophy, he welcomed the first breathings of its spirit, which saluted him through Coleridge, and he found the fundamental principles of " transcendentalism " in his own mind. And, on the other hand, in relation to the conduct of life, as the " Meditations " of Antoninus were the favorite study of his youth, so he echoes and reproduces that imperial strain in his ethic. What more Antoninian than this : "To find the journey's end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom. . . . Let us be poised and wise and our own to-day. I settle myself ever firmer in the creed that we should not postpone and refer and wish, but do broad justice where we are." A Stoic he is in the emphasis with which he affirms Right to be the absolute good, — right for its own sake, not for any foreign benefit. " There is no tax on the good of virtue, for that is the incoming of God himself, or abso- lute existence without any comparative." " In a virtuous action I properly am" And what a triumphant optimism in his view of human nature! "Nothing shall warp me from the belief that every man is a lover of truth. There is no pure lie, no pure malignity in Nature. The entertainment of the pro- position of depravity is the last profligacy and profanation. RALPH WALDO EMEBSOH. 215 Could it be received into the common belief, suicide would unpeople the planet." No writer is so quotable. Scarcely a page, especially of the earlier it supplies some terse and pregnant saying, worthy to be Inscribed in a golden treasury of portable wisdom- And this is the signal merit of hie phi- losophy; it gi\ raits i r i -t « ;i. 1 of ] sharp statements of weighty truths instead of long disquisitions. On.- pungent Baying, one compact axiom that pi is better than pages of laborious demonstration. Demon- strations « md witty we remem- ber j they score themselves in the brain. state- ment, the surprise of fitness, the hitting of the nail on the head, u of Emerson's writing the Distinguishing trail N o mora] teacher has been so instructiTe to his generation. I place Emerson at the head of the lyric | Amer- ica. In this judgment I anticipate wide dissent ; but the dissent, 1 think, will be less when I explain t!. which the affirmation is intended 1 do not mean that Mr. Emerson excels his competitors in] On the contrary, the want of art in his poetry may once for all he oonceded. The ? eree s often halt, the conclusion sometimes and metrical propriety is recklessly violated. But the defect is closely connected with the characteristic merit of the i t, and springs from the same root, — his utter spontaneity. Ami this spontaneity is perhaps but a mode of that sincerity which I have noted in his prose. BCors than those of any of his contemporaries, his poems for tie- most part are inspirations. They are not made, hut given : they come of themselves. They are not meditated, but burst from the soul with an irrepressible necessity of utter- ance, — sometimes with a rush which defies the shaping intellect. The inspiration is not always continuous or equal 216 APPENDIX. throughout ; often the beginning of the poem is better than what follows. It seems as if it were not the man himself that speaks, but a power behind, — call it Daemon or Muse. Where the Muse flags it is her fault, not his ; he is not going to help her out with wilful elaboration or emendation. There is no trace, as in most poetry, of joiner-work, and no mark of the file. Wholly unique, and transcending all contemporary verse in grandeur of style, is the piece entitled " The Problem." When first it appeared in the Dial, forty years ago, come July, I said : " There has been nothing done in English rhyme like this since Milton." All between it and Milton seemed tame in comparison. Some of its verses have been found worthy of a place in Westminster Abbey, the spirit of whose architecture and that of kindred temples they so fitly express. What was said of Emerson's prose is equally true of his poetry ; it is eminently quotable. More than those of any other poet of our time his lines establish themselves in the memory. His life is a measure of the liberty wherewith he has made us free. If forty years ago one had ventured to commend him to this Association, he would have pro- nounced his own doom of ecclesiastical ostracism. Forty years ago he was a heretic, a blasphemer, a pest and peril to Church and State. To-day he is acknowledged a pro- phet, and those who reviled him are ready to garnish his sepulchre. Thus he verified his own words : " Patience and patience and patience, and we shall win at last." As a preacher born and nurtured in our communion, he belongs to us ; and I have to say of him that, as a preacher, he was one of the few in all the ages who in the realm of spirit have spoken with authority, — authority in the high sense in which the supreme Teacher from whom our Chris- RALPH WALDO EMERSON*. 217 tendom dates was said to speak " as one having authority, and not as the scribes.* There is an authority to which the many bow, — the authority of place, of other, the au- thority of tradition, of t:. . ithority of th B - the authority of an original, independent witness. "I am an inquirer with no peat behind mi ." b most men see only through : — a vision unt lent, unbiassed by tradi- tion, uncontrolled by th*- will, onbribed by inter I Such vision v • him through that unconditional surrender to the spirit • in_\ •• >t tnd aside, and let God thins To sec thai P re priv:! .■ saw dling and prophet mission II v only what he saw, only what lie found the warrant fol in his own vision and experience. and saying, — this is testimony which we mu ["his is authority. II | with .1 "There! e I into the world, that I .>hould bear witxu — of the truth." The sect of Pliends have a phrase, — "to live near tho truth." Such living is more common with people of low unknown to fame than it is with men of puhlie note. Of all distinguished men I have known, Emerson was the on-- who lived nearest the truth. He was truth's next neighbor, and then a. In my life- long converse with him, I could detect nothing between him and the truth, — not only no hy] I pretence, but no wilfulness, no vanity, no art to win applause, no ambition even — " That last infirmity of noble minds." He was not covetous ><{ Bpeecb, He had no hankering 218 APPENDIX. for the ears of men. He did not go about seeking oppor- tunities of speech, as some who are reckoned philosophers use. If he could hold his peace, he chose it rather. To be, not seem, was his intent. When his house was burned, friends who had long waited a fit opportunity, under pretext of rebuilding it, sent him a large donation of money. In his letter of ac- knowledgment he wrote : " The salvages are greater than the damage." As I have looked upon him in these last years, when his power of communication was impaired by a troublesome aphasia, and have seen in his face the old serenity, the old dignity, and more than the old sweetness, it has seemed to me that the salvage was greater than the loss. A loss which he felt most keenly, but bore how patiently ! To be, not seem, is the lesson of his life. So living, he has lived down censure, has lived down ridicule, has lived down slander, oppugnance of the worthy and the unworthy, and is now accepted by us all as our best preacher of true manliness, of patience, of sincerity, of faith, of moral free- dom and independence, of "whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, lovely, and of good report." " He spoke, and words more soft than rain Brought the age of gold again. His action won such reverence sweet As hid all measure of the feat." INDEX OF PEBSONS. .. ./, Louis, 157. Alcott, a. l; Allen, Joseph, 88, 84. Andrew, .1. A., Bancroft, Aaron, BertoL. I I < .. 127. Bellows, II. N\ . 14, -17. 11 1. 115, -11. Birney, J. <;.. 61. Bismarck, 158, 187. Boyle, Robert, Bradford, 0. P., Brownson, < ». A . Buuhner, 1 1 Bnckminnter, .1. I Burke, Edmund, 18, 14. l BuahneU, Horace, 181. Carlyle, Thomas, 7". 162. Carpenter, W. I'. . Channing, W. I . 22, ':7. 42, 102, 152, - Clarke. .1. F., 69, 141. Clay, Henry, 01. 100. - . . Comfc . 156. . 102. :. Wllli.il! Dalton, " Dam in, ,127. . . 27, 110, S Dickei Lhright, .'. - . 71. 121, 211-S ■ : Iward, 20, I I Franklin, I Frothingham, < ». I'.. I Fuller, s. V, Furneea, W. II.. 68, 141. Cum. Gannett, W Greenwood, F. \v. P., 4_». . inn. i ;-•■». ' Hdge, F. H., 22, 28, M 14--'. Appendix. 220 INDEX OF PERSONS. Helmholtz, 155. Hollis, Thomas, 36. Hopkins, Samuel, 45. Howard, 1«35. Hume, 126. Huxley, 127. Jofferson, Thomas, 12. Kepler, 192. King, T. Starr, 28. Laplace, 192. Lardner, N., 12, 126. Lawrence, A., 25. Leo XIII., 170. Leroux, 87. Locke, 9, 146. Longfellow, H. W., 30. Lovejoy, E. P., 60. Lowell, J. R., 71. Luther, 192. Martineau, James, 21, 24, 143, 157, 181. May, S. J., 84. Melancthou, 192. Mill, J. S„ 162. Milton, 9, 55, 79, 109, 171, 178. Morse, Jedediah, 35. Newton, Isaac, 9, 192. Newton, John, 53. Norton, Andrews, 24, 28, 6S, 126. Noyes, G. R., 28, 68. Paine, Thomas, 15. Paley, William, 13. Palfrey, J. G., 28. Parker, Theodore, 22, 24, 28, 44, 64, 70, 72, 74-78, 80, 85, 90-113, 120, 125, 126, 127. Peabody, Ephraim, 28, 42. Peabody, E. P., 69. Phillips, Wendell, 60. Pierpont, John, 28, 64. Price, Richard, 14. Priestley, Joseph, 14, 16. Putnam, George, 27, 69. Quincy, Josiah, 29, 41. Ren an, E., 162. Rice, Asaph, 38. Ripley, George, 69, 70. Rousseau, J. J., 147. Schleiermaeher, 127. Sears, E. H., 141. Shaw, Lemuel, 29. Socinus, F., 7. Spencer, H., 127, 163, 182. Spinoza, 159. Stetson, Caleb, 69. Strauss, 127, 162. Sumner, Charles, 29, 80. Tuckerman, Joseph, 59. Tyndall, John, 127, 156, 157 Voltaire, 147. Walker, James, 28, 141. Ware, Henry, 27, 36. Ware, Henry, Jr., 68. Webster, Daniel, 110. Weiss, John, 91, 97. Whitefield, 39. Messrs. Roberts Brothers Publications. HEBREW MEN AND TIMES FROM THE Ipatrtardjs to tlje fRtttltii. l;v JOSEPH HENRY ALLEN, Lecturer on ECCLESIASTICAL HlSToai IM Harvard L'mvikmiv New Edition, with an Intr •ament criticism. Chronological < Hitlinc and Index r Price, $1.50. Tones. 1. The Patriai 4. David ; 5. Solomon ; The. I • ; . The Captivity; 10. i andriana ; 12. The Messiah. : 1 clear, hrit-f sketdi, or outline ; one that should spare the . e re- sults of scholarship; I -ace the historical sequ •: nnec- cions, without being tangled in questions of mere erudition, or literary discussions, or theological polemics ; that should preserve the honest inde- pendence ' ag with the tern; that should not lose 1 the broad perspective of secular history, while it should recognize at each step the han ience as manifest in Israel.' Socfa a want as this the present volume aims to meet." . O. B. Ft ■: the Chris: ::r. " We shall be satisfied to have excited interest enough in the theme to induce readers to take tip Mr .-Men's admirable book and trace throuch all the richness and variety of his detail the eventful history of this Hebrew thought. His pages. J with which we have no fault to find save the very uncommon fault of being too crowded and too few, will throw light on many thincs which must be utterly dark now to the unlearned mind; they will also revive the declining respect for a ven- erable people, and for a faith to which we owe much more than some of us suspect. For, however untrammelled Mr. Allen's criticism may be, his thought is 1 serious and reverential. And the reader of his pages, while confessing that their author has cleared away many obstructions in the wav o( history, will confess also that he has only made freer the access to the halls of faith. There is no light or loose or unbecoming sentence in the volume. There is no insincere paragraph. There is no heedless line. And this perhaps is one of the greatest charms of the book ; for it is rare indeed that both intellect and heart arc satisfied with the same letters." Sold everywhere by all booksellers. Mailed, post-paid, by the publishers ROBERTS BROTHERS, BOSTON. Messrs. Roberts Brothers Publications. CHRISTIAN HISTORY IN ITS THREE GREAT PERIODS. By JOSEPH HENRY ALLEN, Late Lecturer on Ecclesiastical History in Harvard University. First Period. "EARLY CHRISTIANITY." — Topics: i. The Messiah and the Christ; 2. Saint Paul; 3. Christian Thought of the Second Century ; 4. The Mind of Paganism; 5. The Arian Controversy; 6. Saint Augus- tine ; 7. Leo the Great ; 8. Monasticism as a Moral Force; 9. Christianity in the East; 10. Conversion of the Barba- rians; 11. The Holy Roman Empire; 12. The Christian Schools. Second Period. "THE MIDDLE AGE." — Topics: i. The Ecclesiastical System; 2. Feudal Society; 3. The Work of Hildebrand ; 4. The Crusades ; 5. Chiv- alry ; 6. The Religious Orders ; 7. Heretics ; 8. Scholastic Theology; 9. Religious Art; 10. Dante; 11. The Pagan Revival. Third Period. " MODERN PHASES." — Topics : 1. The Protestant Reformation ; 2. The Catholic Reaction ; 3. Calvinism ; 4. The Puritan Commonwealth ; 5. Port Royal ; 6. Passage from Dogma to Philosophy ; 7. English Rationalism; 8. Infidelity in France ; 9. The German Critics; 10. Speculative Theology ; 11. The Reign of Law. Each volume contains a Chronological Outline of its Period, with a full Table of Contents and Index, and may be ordered separately. Volume I. ("Early Christianity ") is, with a few additions, — the most important being a descriptive List of Authorities, — the same that was published in 1880, under the title, u Fragments of Christian History." 3 volumes. i6mo. Cloth. Price, $1.25 per volume. Mr. Allen's writings, ''Christian History in its Three Great Periods," 3 vols., $3.75; " Hebrew Men and Times from the Patriarchs to the Messiah," #1.50; "Our Liberal Movement in Theology chiefly as shown in Recollec- tions of the History of Unitarianism in New England," #1.25, may be had, the five volumes, for $5.50. Sold by all booksellers. Mailed, post-paid, on receipt 0/ advertised price, by the publishers, Roberts Brothers, Boston. Messrs. Roberts Brothers' Publications. Outline of Christian History. A D 50-1880. By JOSEPH HENRY ALLEN, tf " Hebrew Men and Times,'' " Chr: Great Periods?' u Our Lil t i6mo, Cloth. Price, 75 Cents. "'Outline" is designed by u a manual for class instruction. It is printed in ci. and the twelve chapters are to be stui. the por- pe, — in which t : events are clea: - .if ter which particular peri" . tn lied in more detail. It is a very valuable epitom--. ,! be found a re extended study of I selected inic Period, the M troversies and Creeds, the Church and Bar: iwn of the M • in of Reli. English Modern Christianity, the Nineteenth Century, and an Index of Topics an J Names. — Journa. The little work, as its title indicates, is designed as a manual for class Instruction on the origin, growth, and principles of Christianity from its foundation to the present time. It twelve chapters, and each chapter is devoted to one particular epoch of Christian history. It is one of the most carefully and skilfully compiled volumes of religious hi-: have yet seen, an 1 will be found invaluable to students, old as well as young. — Saturday I aid seem impossible to cover such a space with so limited a manual, but it is happily and ably accomplished by Mr. Allen. His three or four historical compendiums of ecclesiastical events are well known. The present handbook forms an admirable text-book for a class of young people in ecclesiastical history, and will afford to 1 good idea of ress of the Christian Church, with its most noted names and de- nominational families, during the whole period from the first centur to our days. There seems to be a marked fairness in the condensed sketches of men of different sects and their special religious movements. It is cer- tainly a useful little manual. — Zian's H. ■ Sold by all Booksellers. Mailed, oost-paid. on receipt of the price, by the Publishers. ROBERTS BROTHERS. Boston. Messrs. Roberts Brothers' Publications. POSITIVE RELIGION. ESSAYS, FRAGMENTS, AND HINTS. By JOSEPH HENRY ALLEN, Author of " Christian History in its Three Great Periods," u Hebrew Men and Times," etc. I6MO. CLOTH. PRICE, $1.25. Among the subjects treated may be noted the following, viz. : "How Religions Grow," "A Religion of Trust," "The World-Re- ligions," "The Death of Jesus," " The Question of a F'uture Life," " The Bright Side," " Religion and Modern Life," etc. The subjects are discussed, as one will indeed plainly see, by a learned Christian scholar, and from that height in life's experience which one reaches at three score and ten years. They treat of the growth of religion ; of relig- ion as an experience; of the terms "Agnostic" and "God" ; of the mystery of pain, of immortality and kindred topics. The author is among the best known of the older Unitarians, and the breadth of his views, together with his modesty of statement and ripeness of judgment, give the book a charm not too common in religious works. The literary style is also pleasing. — Advertiser. This little volume of 260 pages contains much that is fresh and interesting and some things which are true only from a Unitarian standpoint. It is always delightful to read an author who knows what he is writing about, and can present his thoughts in a clear and forcible manner. His intention is to exhibit religion not so much 4i as a thing of opinion, of emotion, or of ceremony, as an element in men's own experience, or a force, mighty and even passionate, in the world's affairs." Such an endeavor is highly lauda- ble, and the work has been well done. — C/iristian Mirror. A collection of a acute, reverent, and suggestive talks on some of the great themes of religion. Many Christians will dissent from his free handling of certain traditional views, dogmas of Christianity, but they will be at once with him in his love of goodness and truth, and in his contention that religion finds its complete fruition inthe lives rather than the speculative opinions of men. — - N. Y. Tribune. Mr. Allen strikes straight out from the shoulder, with energy that shows his natural force not only unabated, but increased with added years. " At Sixty : A New Year Letter " is sweet and mellow with the sunshine of the years that bring the philosophic mind. But we are doing what we said that we must not, and must make an arbitrary end. Yet not without a word of admiration for the splendid force and beauty of many passages. These are the product of no artifice, but are uniformly an expression of that humanity which is the writer's constant end and inspiration. In proportion as this finds free and full expression, the style assumes a warmth and colgr that not only give an intellectual pleasure, but make the heart leap up with sympathetic courage and resolve. — J. W. C. Sold everywhere. ROBERTS BROTHERS, Publishers. Messrs. Roberts Brothers Publications, FREDERIC HENRY HEDCE'S WRITINGS. REASON IN RELIGION. INTRODUCTORY. — Being and Seeing, " Natural and Spiritual." Book First. — Religion within the Bounds of l hi Book Second. — Rational Christianity. trth edition. \dmo. doth. Pn THE PRIMEVAL WORLD OF HEBREW TRADITION. I. The World a Divine Creation ; II. Man the Im III. Man in Paradise , IV Hie Brut I reation; V*. ParadiM VI. Cain, or Property and Stril ts in Civilization ; VII. Nine Hundred ai ty-H VI1L The Failure of Primeval Society; IX. Tin I raham; XII. 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