LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, tp^rtg^t l}tx< Shell -v UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION ELEVEN LECTURES BY REV. HENRY R. ROSE, B.D., Minister of Elm Street Universalist Church, Auburn, Me. " Theology will find out in good time that there is no atheism at once so stupid and so harmful as the fancying God to be afraid of any knowledge with which He has enabled man to equip himself" — James Russell Lowell. / UNIVERSALIST PUBLISHING HOUSE Boston and Chicago 1894 Mqq*3 Copyright 1894 By Henry R. Rose Printed at the Journal Office, Lewiston, Me. DEDICATION Co tf?e BeloDeb tDife ^Whose gentleness, sympathy, and optimism have made my life and ministry full of joy and courage and aspiration, I affectionately Dedicate this Book. CONTENTS Lecture I. Reason in Religion. .... 1 Shows how one may decide what is true and what is false in Religion. Lecture II. The Bible. . . . . . 16 Shows what the Bible is not, what it is, and what it does . Lecture III. God. . . . . . 33 Shows that there is a God; that his nature is Love; that his relation to mankind is Parental. Lecture IV. Evolution. . . . . 51 Shows that the theory of the Evolution of the Universe, does not abolish God or his Providence. Lecture V. Man. ...... 75 Shows that the fact of the Evolution of Man calls for new doctrines of his nature, history, duty, and destiny. Lecture VI. Jesus Christ. . . . . 101 Shows that the humanitarian doctrine of Jesus is true. Lecture VII. Salvation. . . . . . 127 Shows what man really needs to be saved from, and how he is to be and is being saved. Lecture VIII. Hell. 153 Shows that the dogma of endless punishment is neither Scriptural nor Christian. Lecture IX. Annihilation. . . . . 178 Shows that it is not possible for sin to destroy the sinner. Lecture X. Immortality. ..... 200 Shows the reasons for predicting the future conscious existence of the soul. Lecture XI. Heaven. . . . . . 221 Answers certain burning questions about the Future Life. Texts Supporting Doctrines Advanced. . . 238 Choice Bibliography. ...... 240 PREFACE This volume tries to answer the question: u If a person use Good Sense in considering the familiar and vital subjects of religion and theology, to what conclusions will he come?" This attempt was made from the pulpit of the author's church. The people of Auburn and Lewiston were invited to come and learn "What Universalists Believed," the implica- tion being that Universalists, by using Good Sense in Religion, had reached certain conclusions worth hearing about and worth tying to. As a result of this public invitation, the church — capable of seating 1,000 people — was filled for eleven alternate Sunday nights by members of every religious sect. Universalists, Unitarians, Congregationalists, Calvinist Bap- tists, Free Baptists, Episcopalians, Methodists, Adventists, and Roman Catholics were in constant attendance. The night of the last lecture, the church was so crowded that people were turned away. At the close of the course, requests came from all sides for the lectures in book form ; and in answer to this demand they are published now, substantially as delivered. The author feels relieved of much of the responsibility which attaches to the bringing forth of another book, inasmuch as most of the burden for the issue of this one falls on the broad shoulders of an enthusiastic public. The unexpectedly large audiences, their composite charac- ter, and the remarks made during and since the delivery of these lectures have convinced the author that religious people are not satisfied with the old and reigning theology of Christen- dom, and are seeking for something to take its place. A larger number of the laity of the "Evangelical" sects disbe- lieve, and "are rejecting the pivotal dogmas of the "Evangelical PREFACE Vll system of theology" than their clergy suspect. It is because of this deep-seated and wide-spread dissatisfaction, and because of the bearing of the theory of Evolution on theology, that so eminent a scientist, and so observing and candid a Presbyterian as Prof. Joseph Le Conte has declared: "We are even now on the eve of the greatest change in traditional views that has taken place since the birth of Christianity .... Not a mere shifting of line, but a change of base; not a readjustment of detail only, but a reconstruction of Christian theology " is needed and is coming. In view of such a necessary and imminent transformation, it behooves some one or some sect to come forward at once with a theology harmonious enough with the theory of physical, mental, and moral evolution and agreeable enough to the demands of Good Sense to take the place of the theology that is passing away and hold the ground permanently. The theological system outlined in this volume makes a modest bow to the public, and announces itself as the system competent to supersede the old. The doctrines set forth herein fairly represent the advanced and dominant thought of the Universalist denomination. These lectures are the first, so far as the author knows, that give, in printed form, the teachings of progressive Universalists in a systematic manner. They enable the reader to begin at the beginning and go on to the end in his endeavor to learn just what Universalism is to-day. The lectures on Jesus Christ, Man, and Annihilation are commended for very careful reading, especially to Universalists and to those who think Universalim lacks scriptural and scien- tific and philosophical foundations for its theology. The method of quoting almost exclusively from eminent clergymen and scholars of other sects in support of positions held by Universalists or taken by the author, was adopted because of the "Evangelical" character of the audience, and to show how surely and how widely "Evangelical" preachers and leaders are giving up the Old Orthodoxy. The author has felt more satisfied than ever with his course Vlll PREFACE in opposing ' ' Evangelical and Roman Catholic Christianity " since reading this declaration by the Rev. J. M. Buckley, D.D., editor of the (Methodist) Christian Advocate: " If we were to adopt the Universalist principles and methods of Scripture interpretation, we should attack the doctrines of eternal pun- ishment, the fall of man, the vicarious atonement, and every other evangelical principle with all the vigor we could command, but with courtesy and kindness of spirit. We should consider that we were doing a service to God and humanity to induce Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, and other evangelical Christ- ians to give up their dishonoring vieivs of God and human nature.'''' As Lyman Abbott said, in closing his lectures on the "Evolution of Christianity," so I desire to say in presenting this volume to the public : " I have tried to speak with abso- lute candor and with absolute frankness, and if what I have said has shocked your prejudices or seemed to treat with irreverence or disregard your sacred beliefs, I pray you to excuse me. It was not my thought, but it is my thought and my deep desire to do what in me lies to make the spiritual truth that underlies the faith of Christendom clear in the lan- guage of its close of the Nineteenth Century." Henry R. Rose. Auburn, Mb., July, 1894. GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION LECTURE I REASON IN RELIGION " Prove all things: hold fast to that which is good." — St. Paul. "Nothing can alter the responsibility which is laid upon each soul . ' ' — Westcott. No question is interesting and perplexing inquiring and earnest Christians so much as this one : " What is the Seat of Authority in Religion ? " by which is meant, " On whom or on what may we rely to determine whether religious doctrines offered us are true or not ? " People are be^innino; to ask : "Is there an infallible Guide for us to follow in our quest for certainty in religion? or an inerrable Book for us to consult ? or an authoritative Fac- ulty whose decisions we can accept as final ? " In answer to these questions three replies have been made by the three different parties in the Christian church. First came the Roman Catholics, declaring that there is an infallible Guide in religion, namely, the Church. Next came the "Evangelical" 1 Protestants, denying this claim of the Church of Rome, and holding to the infallibility of 1 Evangelical is "specifically applied to a section of the Protestant Churches who profess to base their principles on Scripture alone, and who give distinctive pre-eminence to such doctrines as the corruption of man's nature by the fall, atonement by the life, sufferings, and death of Christ, justification by faith in Christ, the work of the Holy Spirit in conversion and sanctification, and the divine exercise of free and unmerited grace.— (The Century Dictionary.) 2 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION the Bible. Then came the Liberal Protestants (the Uni- versalists and Unitarians) , saying that there is no infallible authority of any kind in religion ; and maintaining that among all the fallible means of determining the truth, Reason is supreme. And thus it stands to-day. There is a conflict of opinion among Christians, not only as to whether infalli- bility can be had in religion but as to where the highest authority is to be found. The Roman Catholic Position. The Church of Rome holds that there is a seat of authority in religion and that it is an infallible seat, namely, the Roman Cath- olic Church. * The keys to the counsels of God are held by the Church and the Church alone, and whatever it announces or declares to be true ex cathedra, through its Head, the Pope, is immutably true, and there is no other court of appeal. Therefore, it refuses the Bible and the Reason any place as authorities. Cardinal Newman said : " We indeed devoutly receive the whole Bible as the word of God, but we receive it on the authority of the Church ; and the Church has denned very little as to the aspects under which it comes from God and the limits of His inspiration. Not the Bible but the Church is to him [the Catholic] the oracle of revelation. Though the whole Scripture were miraculously removed from the world as if it had never been, grievous as the calamity would be, the Catholic would still have enough motives and objects for his faith ; whereas to the Protestant the question of Scripture is one of life and death." l The " Evangelical " Protestant Position. The f( Evangelical " Protestant turns upon the Roman Catholic and denies his claims, saying that the Church has no authority at all in religion, and holding that the Bible and the Bible only is infallible, and that it, therefore, is i A Study of the Sects, Lyon, p. 18. REASON IX RELIGION 6 the seat of authority ; the court to which all appeals must be taken. He excludes the Church and the Reason, refusing to one any voice at all, and granting to the other a little say, providing it is subordinated to and in harmony with the teachings of the Bible. The infallibility of the Bible is a matter of life or death to the " Evangelical " Protestant ; if its infallibility be disproved and its falli- bility and subordination proved and granted, he thinks Christianity and truth will go under and infidelity and error will clamber on top and stay there. Therefore, he pins his faith to John Calvin and iterates and reiterates Calvin's article in the Westminster Confession of Faith, as follows : " The whole counsel of God ... is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture ; unto which nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelation of the Spirit or tradi- tions of men." The Liberal Protestaxt Position. The Liberal is kindlier toward the Roman Catholic and the "Evan- gelical" Protestant than they are toward each other or him. He frankly refuses their claim of infallibility, either for the Church or the Bible. He believes that the Church may speak some truths and with authority because they are truths; and he is sure that the Bible is to be relied upon in many of its utterances, because it, too, teaches truths ; but to the mind of the Liberal, the say-so of the Church and the teachings of Scripture are not necessa- rily final, nor does either constitute the Seat of Authority in religion. With Lyman Abbott, the Liberal says, "The Bible is a means of revelation rather than a final state- ment. We shall go back to no creed or age of the Church for the final word." The Liberal believes that God may vet reveal truths not announced by the Church nor 4 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION stated in the Bible. He holds that Jesus was intention- ally cautious when he said, in his last words to his disci- ples : "I have many things to tell you, but you cannot bear them now. Howbeit, when he, the Spirit of Truth is come, he will guide you into all truth," a caution equivalent to a command that they and others should expect further discoveries of truth ; a reminder which finds modern expression in the advice which Phillips Brooks gave to the Yale Divinity students, as follows : ' ' Never forget to tell the young people that they are to expect more and more light and larger development of the truth which you give them. Oh the souls which have been made skeptical by the mere clamoring of new truth to add itself to that which they have been taught to think finished and final ! " The Liberal believes in perpetual inspiration and pro- gressive revelation, and he will not be surprised if the lapse of time develops something new and great concern- ing God, and duty, and destiny. The Liberal knows no infallible seat of authority in religion save God himself. God is the fountal source of truth, and the Church and the Bible are two of the many channels by which the verities of God are brought to men. God is the testifier, and the Church and the Bible are witnesses as to his testimony. As witnesses they must report to somebody or something. That to which they bring their testimony is the Reason. Reason, says the Liberal, is the tribunal and the highest tribunal ordained of God whereby man can decide upon evidence of all kinds. Its verdict must be solicited and accepted, sooner or later. Its decision can be relied upon above the decision of any book, creed, person, or institution. If it be said that Conscience is superior to Reason as a judge of religious truth, the Liberal REASON IN RELIGION replies that this is a distinction without a real difference, because Conscience is but another name for "Reason when exercised in the moral realm/' ! Therefore, the Liberal exalts Reason above the Church and the Bible ; above the decisions of councils and the dogmatism of creeds. He makes every teacher of religion submit his teachings to Reason for acceptance or rejection. The Liberal Position Justified. Now that we know the three positions of those who answer the ques- tion, "What is the Seat of Authority in Religion?" we are interested to decide which has the right of it. I have no disposition to enter here into a criticism of the Roman Catholic and "Evangelical" Protestant positions, except in a negative way. My purpose is to justify the position of the Liberal Protestant, and if I do this, I will have overthrown the claims of the two other parties. If I fail in establishing the Liberal position, the reader can investi- gate the matter further, and come to his own decision as to which of the others is right. 2 The Libera], be it noted, claims two vital things : 1, that man has a right to use his Reason in religion ; and, 2, that Reason, being the supreme judicial faculty of the mind, is the Seat of Authority in religion, as in every other department of inquiry and knowledge. I will prove these claims in their order : 1. JIan has a right to use his Reason in religion. This claim is supported, in the first place, by the lan- guage of the Bible. In the Old Testament we find 1,4 Conscience is that power by which moral law is recognized. It is Reason discovering universal truth, having the authority of sovereign moral law, and affording the basis for personal obligation." — (Calder- wood: Moral Philosophy, p. 65.) 2 See also lectures on The Bible and Man. b GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION Isaiah reporting God as saying to men: "Come, now, and let us reason together," as if the Almighty placed dependence on the reasoning ability of man, and was willing to convince and persuade rather than force man to obedience. In the New Testament there are a number of direct commands for men to use their reason in religion. Paul says, "Prove all things," and he could not have meant that the Thessalonians were to do this by referring impor- tant or mooted questions to the Church or to the Gospels, for neither the Church nor the Gospels were in existence at that time ! St. John says, "Beloved, believe not every spirit, but prove the spirits, whether they are of God." St. Peter says, "Be ready always to give answer to every man that asketh a reason concerning the hope that is in you." If Jesus nowhere explicitly tells men to rely upon their reason in determining God's truth, he nowhere tells them to rely on the Church or the Bible, or even on his word. He says : "He that doeth the will of my Father will know whether this doctrine be of myself or of God", a statement equivalent to an admission that he would not have men accept his doctrines because he taught them, but that he was ready to submit them to the trial of experience to establish their truthfulness. The claim that man has a right to use his reason in religion is supported, in the second place, by the example of biblical characters. Look at Paul, the great- est apostle of Jesus. He was a reasoner rather than a dogmatizer in religion. He was consistent. He told others to prove all things, and when he went among- men he appealed to their reason, with reasonable argu- ments, to win them to his ideas. Thus, while he waited at Athens he reasoned with those who met with him daily. And in Acts (xxiv : 25) we learn that Paul reasoned REASON IX RELIGION 7 with Felix and his wife about righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come, until Felix trembled. And in that great epistle to the Romans, after his magnificent exposition of doctrine, he commences his conclusion thus : " I beseech you, therefore (that is, in view of what I have made plain to you), by the mercies of God, that you pre- sent your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service." Not that they were to do this thing because he had said so or any one else had said so, but because it was obviously their reason- able service. Paul trusted the reason of men, and appealed to it constantly. 1 In the third place, the Liberal believes that the Chris- tian should use his own reason in religion, because such procedure is in thorough accord with the genius of Prot- estant ism . Luther and his followers were called protestants because they protested against the claims of the Roman ( liurch, especially its claim of sole and infallible authority in religion. Luther held that the individual can deal directly with God apart from the mediation of the Church, and tli at God's word verified itself, and must verify itself, in the conscience of the individual, apart from the authority of the ( Jhurch. ff The Church," said Luther, "cannot give more force or authority to a book than it has in itself. A council cannot make that to be Scripture which in its own nature is not Scripture." Thus did Luther and the early reformers sweep the authority of the church entirely out 1,1 St. Paul, though disclaiming as 'carnal wisdom' and 'the wisdom of this world ' the philosophic prepossessions of his time, is himself the subtlest of reasoners, an inveterate rationalist, never more thoroughly in his element than when urging the claims of Christianity on psycho- logical grounds, or boldly rationalizing the Old Testament to rebut the scruples of his countrymen."— (F. H. Hedge, Reason in Religion, pp. 210-211.) 8 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION of their religious system. But they went further, and denied all external authority in religion, making the indi- vidual conscience the interpreter of religious truth. The eminent scholar, Professor Marcus Dods, D.D., says : "Protestantism is not merely the substitution of one exter- nal guide for another : it is, rather, the exchange of what is outward for what is inward ; of what is indirect for what is direct. It is the exchange of God's voice recognized by the Church and interpreted by the Church, for God's voice recog- nized by the individual and interpreted by the individual. The Reformation was no doubt a transference of allegiance from the Church to the Scriptures, but that was by no means all that it accomplished ; it was also a transition from dependence on the Church's authority to dependence on conscience. It was essentially the assertion of the indefeasible right and duty of the individual to deal with God directly and for himself." This is precisely the position of the Liberal, and it enforces his claim that his course is in accord with the genius of Protes- tantism. And he is ready to say, with this same eminent Christian, " He is only half a Protestant who merely transfers his allegiance from the Church to the Bible, and leans upon this new crutch as the Romanists lean on Rome. To accept the Bible on the Church's authority, and to accept every state- ment in it as infallible truth whether it awakes response in conscience or not, is to remain precisely in the Romanist's position ! " 2. But the Liberal's contention does not end when it is conceded that men have a right to use their reason in religion ; he takes a further position and says that Reason is the highest court of appeal and the real Seat of Authority in religion. He proves his claim by the fol- lowing considerations. The Bible and the Church are not, properly speak- ing, seats of authority ; they are witnesses rather than judges of truth. They are channels through which divine REASON IN RELIGION y and human truth flows : basins in which the facts of God and the guesses and errors of men are deposited. They must be examined ; they must be analyzed in order that the truth may be separated from the error ; the genuine from the false. The Bible and the Church are means of revelation, not authorities on revelation. Like John the Baptist they come to bear witness of the truth, but their witness must be submitted to some court before its validity can be determined. Their testimony may be true or it may be false. If the Church says that the Pope is infal- lible and that Mary was immaculately conceived, or if the Bible declares that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, as if the sun moved ! or that the law of God is " an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth," their assertions must be considered by some tribunal. To say that these things are true because in the one case the Church and in the other the Bible says that they are true is to beg the question. It is not difficult, when such references are made, to see that the Bible and the Church are witnesses rather than judges ; that their office is to deliver things purporting to be true rather than to pronounce upon the truth of that which they deliver. The faculty to which they do and must address their message decides upon the merits of that message, and that faculty becomes the seat of authority, and its decisions are authoritative. Now the Liberal holds that this faculty which should judge all teaching and pass upon evidence of all kinds, is the Reason. Its function is judicial. It is not a channel of truth nor a reservoir ; it does not discover truth ; its great function is to verify or disallow testimony. 1 Not iThe office of reason in religion is not discovery, but verification and purification. Its function is to make and keep religion true and pure, by eliminating from the code of elementary beliefs the human additions and corruptions that have gathered around it." — (F. H. Hedge, Reason in Religion, p. 209.) 10 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION only is Reason judicial, he is the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the mind. Every other faculty defers to his authority ; the intellect and the feelings recognize that their verdicts must sooner or later be submitted to him for final ruling. He is no arbitrary judge ; he is the very incarnation of justice and, therefore, his verdicts are always just. Reason does not quit the bench to go in search of cases. He simply sits and waits, with placid brow, until the case is brought before him and the evidence is all in, and then he proceeds to render the verdict, and when he speaks his voice and manner show that he consid- siders his ruling ultimate and final. Therefore, in view of the fact that the Bible and the Church are obviously but witnesses of the truth, and in virtue of the fact that Reason is judicial and pre-eminent among the judicial faculties of the mind, the Liberal holds that his exaltation of Reason to the Seat of Authority in religion is justified. Eminent Corroboration. And he is pleased to quote the experience of men, and the testimony of able critics, in further support of his position. Is it not a fact that by every educated mind all inward appeals and all outward solicitations are referred to Reason before being allowed ? Passionate men permit the verdict of their emotions to impel their conduct ; thoughtless and timid men allow appeals to their sentiments and credulity to determine their beliefs and actions, but properly-bal- anced men submit every verdict of the feelings and every appeal from without, to dispassionate and impartial Reason. Thus do the highest minds recognize that Reason is the proper and chief seat of authority in conduct and belief. And when men read the Bible or listen to the doctrines of the Church, what do they consciously or unconsciously REASON IX RELIGION 11 do but rely upon their Reason to determine the truth of what they read or hear? " Who is at your elbow as you read Exodus and Leviticus to tell you what is of permanent authority, and what was for the Mosaic dispensation only? Who whispers to us, as we read Genesis and Kings, This is exemplary ; this is not? Who sifts for us the speeches of Job, and enables us to treasure as divine truth what he utters in one verse, while we reject the next as Satanic raving? Who gives the preacher authority, who gives him accuracy of aim, to pounce on a sound text in Ecclesiastes, while wisdom and folly toss and roll over one another in con- fused and inextricable contortions ? What enables the humblest Christian to come safely through all the cursing Psalms and go straight to forgive his enemy? What tells us we may eat things strangled, though the whole college of Apostles deliber- ately and expressly prohibited such eating ? Who assures us we need not anoint the sick with oil, though James bids us do so? " Does any outside person or institution do these things for us, or is it done by that inner voice ; by clear-eyed Reason, often called Conscience, and sometimes called Good Sense ? Surely, in these matters men and women of every sect rely upon the verdict of their reason, whether they are conscious of the fact at the time or not ; so that the experience of the most cultured minds and that of the humblest Christian meets in supporting the Liberal in the lofty and authoritative position he gives to Reason. And what say eminent scholars and undoubted Chris- tians, — men who are not Universalists or Unitarians, — about the claim of the Liberal ? Dr. Fairburn, of Mansfield College, Oxford, declares that, " Though by reason man may reject revelation, he can never without reason either know it or accept it." Professor Le Conte, an eminent Presbyterian, says : " There is, and in the nature of things there can be, no test of truth but Reason. We must fearlessly, but honestly and reverently, try all things, even reve- 12 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION elation, by this test," a declaration quite similar to that of the famous Bishop Butler, than whom Christianity never had a stronger defender. In his celebrated Analogy he wrote : 4 ' Reason is the only faculty we have wherewith to judge con- cerning anything, even revelation itself. .... Reason can, and it ought to, judge not only of the meaning, but also of the morality and evidence of revelation." Perhaps some of you recall the strong language of Henry Ward Beecher on this subject. He said : " God made the reason, and it is that by which we go back to Him. Without reason there is no duty, no interpretation of Providence, no knowledge of God, and no civilization. They who decry Reason as ' simply a natural faculty,' and therefore not to be trusted, rail against God him- self." It may surprise some to know that John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, declared that " every man must think for himself, since every man must give account of himself to God." And lest any one fear that this practice of letting every man think for himself; of urging men to use their reason in religion as in other things, may destroy faith and Christianity, let him listen to Dr. Hedge, that scholar of Christian gentleness and faith : u The cause of reason is the cause of faith. In affirming this, I but re-affirm what the wisest and devoutest of the Church have always maintained." And to Dr. Briggs, whose Orthodoxy is disputed but whose scholarship and honesty are widely conceded and admired, who says: " I rejoice at the age of Rationalism, with all its wonderful achievements in philosophy. I look upon it to prepare men to use their reasons in the last great age of the world. It is impossible that the Bible and the Church should ever exert their full power until the Human Reason, trained and strained to the uttermost, rises to the heights of its energies and reaches forth after God and his Christ with absolute devotion and self-renouncing love." 1 1 " From the genius of the gospel, no less than the constitution of the human mind, I infer the right of reason in religion. Christianity is REASON IN RELIGION 13 In these ways does the liberal Christian seek to estab- lish his position that Reason is the real and chief Seat of Authority in religion, and it seems to me that he succeeds. At any rate, the Universalist believes that these consider- ations warrant him in exalting Reason to the first rank among the authorities in religion, and he therefore submits all testimony purporting to be from God, no matter whence its source, to this bar, and if Reason approves, the Univer- salist accepts the testimony and uses it either for thought or conduct ; but if Reason disapproves, the Universalist rejects the testimony and refuses to let it influence his thought or determine his conduct ; if Reason neither disapproves nor approves, the Universalist, like a wise man, reserves judg- ment and waits for more light. We try to be consistent in our practice as we are in our theory of the office and authority of Reason in religion, and therefore our constant attitude toward every doctrine is one of inquiry, to wit : Is it Rational? not, Is it Scriptural? not, Is it in the " Evangelical " creeds ? not, Have the Councils endorsed it ? not, Does the Romish Church approve it ? but simply and always, Is it reasonable ? does my reason and the reason of reasonable men, endorse it? We are modest, you see, because we value the convictions and opinions of other reasonable men. We, indeed, recognize that each indi- vidual must decide for himself what is true and what is false, but we know that he is assisted in his decision by the reasoning of kindred minds. Truth is many-sided, professedly a revelation of reason. The first systematic statement of it by a competent witness affirms this, and justifies rationalism in one word. And that word is the Word, in the original tongue a synonym for Reason. ' In the beginning was the Word (or Reason), and God was the Word,' and in Christ was the Word ' made flesh.' The eternal Rea- son revealed in the human; not different from the human in kind, for it comes to 'his own,' and is the ' light that lighteth all who come into the world.'— (F. H. Hedge, Reason in Religion, pp. 210-211.) 14 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION and many seekers arc more likely to find it than one seeker. There are some truths that are self-evident, and every individual can see and accept them unaided. There are other truths that are difficult to determine, and many minds must work upon them and many reasons report their verdicts before they can be established. In religion, as elsewhere, there are times when we prefer to rely upon a "consensus of the reason/' rather than upon the verdict of our own individual reason. A story will illus- trate my meaning-. A gentleman, in crossing the ocean, found more than one mariner's compass in use by the ship's officers. Up aloft he saw a compass, fore arid aft were two more, on either side of the steamer he; found them stationed, and in the pilot house he saw another in use. He was surprised to find so many compasses aboard the steamer, and he asked the ( 'aptain what it meant. The Captain replied: "We need these compasses in different quarters in order to get our true; bearings. We find that the material of the vessel will deflect the needle in the pilot house just a little, that the atmosphere lias an influence at times, and that our- cargo also acts upon the needles. So we keep the compasses in different parts, and at certain intervals we consult them all, and then by comparing the directions they give, and striking an average, we feel that we have gotten pretty close to our true bearings." The pilot and ('aptain relied upon a consensus of the compasses in order to fie sure of the course of the vessel. And he who believes in the ability of the Reason to point unerr- ingly toward the truth, realizes that there are influences that deflect even its finger, and that the wisest, safest recourse 18 to consult a number of reasons, and rely upon the consensus of their decisions. Universalists also do another thing : they place much REASON IN RELIGION 15 faith in the voice of the emotions. They think the heart utters truth as well as the head, and they demand that every theory establish itself by satisfying both the head and the heart. If the heart condemn it, then we feel that there is something wrong about it, even though the head approves. AYe believe when the whole truth is found, it will be agreeable to both the head and the heart, and be favored with the benignant smile of Reason. JVow when it is taught that there is a God and that his nature is love ; that there is a soul and that its nature is immortal ; that there is a destiny and that its essence is eternal life, we ask are these things Reasonable? And likewise, when we are told that God is wrathful with mankind ; that there is a Devil and man is his child, not God's ; that there was a fall and man is totally depraved thereby ; that there is a hell and sinful men are to suffer its torments endlessly, we simply ask are these things Reasonable? And in the lectures to come we will keep asking this question : Is this a Reasonable doctrine ? We will summon dogma after dogma to the bar of Reason, and demand its credentials, and then pass the verdict. Our quest is Truth. Our guide and authority is Rea- son. Our one desire is to "prove all things, in order that we may hold fast to that which is genuine and good." " Two angels guide The path of man, both aged and yet young, As angels are, ripening through endless years. On one he leans: some call her Memory, And some Tradition, and her voice is sweet With deep mysterious accords. The other, Floating above, holds down a lamp, which streams A light divine and searching on the earth Compelling eyes and footsteps. Memory yields, Yet clings with loving cheek, and shines anew, Reflecting all the rays of that bright lamp Our angel Reason holds. We had not walked But for Tradition. We walk evermore To higher paths by brightening Reason's lamp." LECTURE II THE BIBLE "We believe that the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testa- ments contain a revelation of the character of God, and of the duty, interest, and final destination of mankind." — Winchester Profession of Faith. The argument of the previous lecture is admirably summarized in these pointed words of James Martineau : " Reason for the rational ; conscience for the right — these are the sole organs for appreciating the last claims upon us, the courts of ultimate appeal, whose verdict it is not only weakness but treason to resist." 1 " Evangelical " Christians have not yet come round to this point of view, but they are coming. There are some people in the world who pride themselves on saying, as Mr. Betteredge used to say, "I am (thank God) con- stitutionally superior to reason," but their number must steadily decrease and their confession must increasingly be to their shame. Impatience with the obstinate and the obtuse is beginning to manifest itself within the ranks of Orthodoxy. A distinguished Congregationalist clergyman recently said : 2 " On all other subjects besides religion, people are able to exercise their common sense. Why can they not use a modicum of the same common sense when they come to deal with religious truth ? " That is precisely the criticism we make and the question we raise. Indeed, how can we find out what is true unless we bring our Good Sense to bear upon the testimony 1 Seat of Authority in Religion, p. 129. 2 Dr. Washington Gladden. THE BIBLE 17 brought to our ears ? Here is a mass of information about religious things. Here are creeds upon creeds claiming to teach what is true of God and man, of duty and des- tiny. Here are books — sacred books of many nations and theological treatises of many theologians — all purporting to bring us certain trustworthy facts. Evidently they are all witnesses in religion. They cannot all be true nor is any one of them all true, for they contradict each other and even contradict themselves. How are we to know what part of this abundance of testimony to reject and what part to accept? Surely, we should be able to deter- mine. Surely, God has endowed us as rational creatures with ability to discriminate between truth and error in religion as in every other department of knowledge. The faculty which God has given us for this very end, is Reason. If we use it, and use it properly, it will lead us into all truth. One of the purposes of these lectures is to get people into the habit of using their Good Sense on religious problems, and to show them that only good can come to those who study the weightiest subjects in this manner. We begin our investigations with the Bible. We must determine certain things about it before we can hope to proceed on our course without friction. There are theories, clearly defined or hazy, in the Christian mind about the Bible that will keep rising up as obstacles if we do not encounter them at once and throw them aside forever. I. What the Bible is Not. It is important for us to learn what the Bible is not before we inform our- selves as to what it is. Rev. Washington Gladden, an orthodox clergyman, and therefore presumably familiar with the state of thought among ff evangelical " people, tells 18 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION us that the doctrine of the Bible now held by the great majority of Christians is that given by Dr. Charles Hodge in his "Theology," as follows : " Protestants hold that the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments are the word of God, written under the inspira- tion of God, the Holy Ghost, and are therefore infallible, and consequently free from all error, whether of doctrine, of fact, or of precept. All the books of scripture are equally inspired. All alike are infallible in what they teach." Dr. Gladden adds that " Intelligent pastors do not hold this doctrine, but the body of the laity have no other conception." 1 This is most unfortunate, and something ought to be done by all " intelligent pastors" to rid the minds of their people of doctrines like these which are not only palpably false but inherently harmful. I hope the following dis- cussion will help some layman or lay woman out of the~ bondage of error into the glorious liberty of the truth. Dr. Hodge's definition is very broad ; too broad to stand long. It covers three untenable dogmas : 1, Plenary and verbal inspiration. 2, Equal validity of all parts of the Bible. 3, Infallibility. Let us examine these claims : 1. Plenary and verbal inspiration. "Plenary" means full, complete, absolute. Plenary inspiration is " that kind of inspiration which excludes all defects in the utterance of the inspired message." Verbal inspiration is "that kind of inspiration which extends to the very words and forms of expression of the divine message." Plenary and verbal inspiration imply that from one end of the Bible to the other there is not an error of any kind ; the thought and language, and even the punctuation, are God's, and therefore accurate and authoritative. God used the authors of the various books of the Bible as one might use a phonograph or stenographer. He talked into i " Who Wrote the Bible ? " p. 356. THE BIBLE 19 Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah and the others, and they repeated what he said. They were automatons. When God spake they spake, and not until ; what God spake they spake, and nothing else. Hence, the Bible is "the word of God " ; it is from God in almost the same sense as if it had been dropped from the sky just as it is. Now such teaching is rendered absurd by an examina- tion of the Bible itself, for (1) nowhere in the Bible is it claimed that God is the author of its various books ; and (2) there are errors in the Bible. Open your Bible and read it from beginning to end and find, if you can, any speaker or writer claiming to be the mere mouthpiece of the Holy Ghost. You cannot. But you can find testimony to the effect that the writer considered that he himself was composing what he wrote. Turn to the gospel of Luke, for instance, and read the first four verses. What do they say? This : ' ; Forasmuch as many have taken in hand to draw up a narrative concerning those matters which have been fulfilled among us, even as they delivered them unto us, which from the beginning were eye witnesses and ministers of the word, it seemed good to me also, having traced the course of things accurately from the first, to write unto thee, in order, most excellent Theophilus, that thou mightest know the certainty concerning the things wherein thou was instructed." Here, evidently, Luke considered that he himself was inditing his version of the Life of Christ. He makes no claim of being under the control of the Holy Ghost. There is a passage in Timothy often quoted in defense of the mechanical theory of inspiration. I allude to II. Tim. iii., 16 : "Every Scripture is inspired of God," etc. But the correct translation of this verse, as given in the Revised Version, is : " Every Scripture inspired of God is 20 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION also profitable for teaching," etc. This leaves it an open question as to what scripture is inspired of God and what is not. Professor Ladd of Yale University says : "It is necessary to state again a fact that cannot be too often repeated. The Bible itself, from the first verse of Genesis to the last verse of Revelation, does not contain a single word to encourage the opinion that any special kind of inspiration was given to its writers in the act of writing, or to qualify them for writing. On the contrary, everything which the Bible actually does say discourages such an opinion." How plain it all is that God did not dictate the Bible when we examine it critically and reverently ! There are so many mistakes in language, in science, in history, in ethics and in prophecy, that it would make God imper- fect in his wisdom if we said he was responsible for them. A few errors, from the many that might be pointed out, will suffice to prove that the Bible is not plenarily nor verbally inspired : In II. Sam. xxiv. 1, we are told that the Lord moved David to number Israel and Judah ; the writer of I. Chron. xxi., 1, says that Satan moved David to number Israel. In I. Sam. xvii., the account is given of David's victory over Goliath ; in II. Sam. xxi., 19, we are told that Elhanan slew Goliath, and the writer of I. Chron. xx., 5, says that Elhanan slew Lahmi, the brother of Goliath. In Matt, xxvii., 9, cer- tain words are said to have been spoken by the prophet Jere- miah. They were spoken by Zechariah (Zech. xi., 13). In the story of the healing of the blind man at Jericho, Matthew and Mark expressly say that the healing took place as Christ was departing from the city ; Luke says that it was before he entered it. Matthew says there were two blind men ; Mark and Luke say that there was but one. Contradictions and errors like the above are numerous in the Bible. What do they show? That God makes mistakes, or that the Bible was THE BIBLE 21 written by fallible men? Of course they are not serious errors, but the most trivial misstatement is sufficient to overthrow these claims of inerrancy and infallibility for the scriptures. Did it ever occur to the framers of these dogmas that although similar doctrines about the Old Testament were in vogue in Christ's day, he repudiated them? Jesus would not admit that the Old Testament was plenarily or verbally inspired. He sweepingly condemned many of its precepts, and superseded them with his own commands. "Ye have heard that it was said an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth (Deut. xix., 21), but I say unto you, resist not evil." The fifth chapter of Matthew is filled with condemnations of the teaching and spirit of certain Old Testament precepts. He, then, who cannot and does not look upon the Bible as infallible is simply follow- ing in the footsteps of his leader, Jesus Christ ! 2. Furthermore, it is evident that the books of the Bible are not of equal validity. The claim that " all the books of the Scriptures are equally inspired " has no founda- tion in fact. Do you mean to tell me that the Gospels are on the same level with Deuteronomy, and with Ecclesi- astes with its one-sided and mistaken view of life, and with that revengeful fiction of Esther ? Do you believe that the law of " an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth " is equal in its validity with Christ's law of non-retaliation? And yet that is the logic of the theory that equalizes all the books of the Bible in inspiration and authority. Any one whose thought is not hopelessly biased by a theory can see that all parts of the Bible are not equally inspired or of equal worth. Professor Ladd is frank enough to admit that ' ' Some writings of sacred Scripture are for laying the foundation of doctrine, and some are not suitable or wholly trustworthy for 22 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION this use. There are degrees of divine insight which biblical writers display, grades of the completeness and of the imper- fection of the moral tenets they convey." These things are so clear to students of the Bible that the candid ones are acknowledging that the Bible is neither inerrable nor infallible. Rev. Washington Gladden, a Congregationalist of ability and renown, says: "The Bible is not an infallible book, in the sense in which it is popularly supposed to be infallible. It is not infallible historically. It is not infallible scientifically. It is not infallible morally. Not to recognize the partialness and imperfections of this record in all these respects is to be guilty of a grave disloyalty to the kingdom of truth." l Dr. Lyman Abbott has said: "For my part, I desire in this and every other matter to speak with perfect frankness. I disown the idea that the Bible is inerrant, and I disown the statement that it is infallible. I do not find anywhere in the Bible infallibility claimed by the Bible." 2 Dr. Briggs, the great Presbyterian biblical scholar, has confessed that " It is not a pleasant task to point out errors in the sacred Scripture. Nevertheless, Historical Criticism finds them, and we must meet the issue, whether they destroy the authority of the Bible or not. It has been taught in recent years, and is still taught by some theologians, that one proved error destroys the authority of the Scripture. I shall venture to affirm that, so far as I can see, there are errors in the Scriptures that no one has been able to explain away; and the theory that they were not in the original text is sheer assumption, upon which no mind can rest with certainty. If such errors destroy the authority of the Bible it is already destroyed for historians. Men cannot shut their eyes to truth and fact." 3 i " Who wrote the Bible," p. 352. 2 Christian Union, 1891. 3 Inaugural Address. THE BIBLE 23 Professor J. Henry Thayer, addressing an evangelical audi- ence in Boston, frankly said: "The critics are agreed that the view of Scripture in which you and I were educated, which has been prevalent in New England for generations, is untenable." Thus have the idols of verbal inspiration, equal validity and infallibility, fallen to pieces under the blows of intelli- gent and fearless orthodox scholars ! Why, friends, these doctrines were not believed in Christ's day ; they were not taught by the early apostles ; they were not held by the leaders of the Reformation or the early reformers. They did not come into existence until the seventeenth century. Listen to Professor Tholuck's description of the origin of an infallible Scripture : " In proportion as controversy, sharpened by Jesuitism, made the Protestant party sensible of an externally fortified ground of combat, in that same proportion did Protestantism seek, by the exaltation of the outward authoritative character of the sacred writings, to recover that infallible authority which it had lost through its rejection of infallible councils and the infallible authority of the Pope. In this manner arose, not earlier than the seventeenth century, those sentiments which regarded the Holy Scripture as the infallible production of the divine spirit — in its entire contents and form — so that not only the sense of the words, but the letters, the Hebrew vowel points, and the very pronunciation were regarded as proceeding from the Spirit of God." The lateness of the origin of these doctrines about the Bible is significant, and the fact that they originated in the heat of controversy and for polemical purposes warrants us in eying them with suspicion, and the considerations adduced compel us to reject them. Now a host of questions and objections will be raised by the reader. Some one will say, "If the Bible is inspired at all, it is infallible." Not necessarily. "In- 24 GOOD SENSE IX RELIGION spiration," as Professor Ladd says, "is not infallibility; and the claim that it guarantees infallibility of any kind is most distinctly denied." Another will say, "Well, if you show that the Bible is not infallible, you destroy its authority." Not so. We simply discredit any claim to infallible authority made for it. Another will say, "If you prove that there are errors in the Bible, you render everything in it worthless to me. When I reject a part of the Scripture, I shall be in a fair way to reject all." What logic ! The Bible makes no claim of its own to being infallible, and, therefore, to prove it fallible is not to make it a fraud, or unreliable. The stigma rests on those that make such a claim for it. And furthermore, that which is not infallible is not necessarily worthless. Your watch is not infallible ; is it, then, worthless as ar time-piece ? Your physician is not infallible ; is his advice and medicine therefore worthless? Bancroft's History of the United States is not infallible ; do you then discredit every statement in it? Surely not. Then why think that the Bible, when shown to be fallible, to contain errors, is worthless? Infallibility and inerrancy are not necessary in order to have genuineness, truth, and worth. The value of the Bible depends on the truth hi it : the insight that its writers display into verities ; the knowledge that they show of the character of God and the duty and destiny of man. 'The Bible," as a witty Catholic has said, "is to teach us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go." If it makes mistakes in astron- omy, as it surely does, where it says that Joshua made the sun stand still, as if the sun moved ! I say, if it makes mistakes in astronomy, it does not follow that it makes blunders in morality. In this field it may be very accurate, and therefore an authority. THE BIBLE 25 "As the physical and historical errors in Shakespeare do not mar i he aesthetic truth which Shakespeare meant to convey, or destroy the moral effect of his dramas, so any physical, his- torical, scientific or ethical errors that may be found in the Bible do not mar the religious truth which the Bible is intended to convey or hinder its religious effect." But these errors irreparably break down the dogmas of plenary and verbal inspiration, equal validity^ and infallibility ', as any one who uses his Good Sense mUSt sec. II. What the Bible Is. Having discussed the negative aspects of this subject, and shown what the Bible is not, I come to the positive side of my theme, which I assure the reader is much more agreeable to me, as I do not like destructive criticism. We now proceed to deter- mine what the Bible is ; to note the Universalis! and (iood Sense view of it. In the first place, the J>ihh' is clearly a literature. It is not the "Word of God," as that phrase is commonly used by those who believe in its verbal inspiration and infallibility. Said Robert J. Horton, one of the Leading preachers of London, to the students in the Congrega- tional Divinity School, of Vale University: "There is no foundation in tin- Bible itself for tin- common practice of speaking of it as the Word of God. Boldly challenge those who thoughtlessly employ the term. Ask them : What reason have you lor the presupposition, what, support in Script- ure, what assurance of prophet or apostle, what, hint, of the Lord Himself, that this collection of writings may he fitly described by so august a name? Startled as many good people are by the question, they yet, if they he honest, are hound to admit that the usage is without Scriptural authority; if they arc dishonest, they angrily turn upon those who put the ques- tion and denounce them as infidels." Clearly the Bible "is not properly a hook, but, a liter- 26 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION ature, composed of sixty-six books, written originally in at least three different languages. These books are the work of many authors, a few of whom are known with certainty and a few others with a high degree of probability, but a large number of whom are unknown and now, apparently, unknowable. This literature, the Bible, the product of such diverse authorship, is the result of slow growth, frequent editings, and much sifting. It is composed of history, biography, and the didactic or poetical expression of human experience. It contains myth, legend, tradition, story, annals, poems, prophetic rhapsody, sermon, proverb, simple narrative, picturesque parable, personal epistle and mystical apocalypse. Almost all of it is the record of human experience, but with this distinguishing and domi- nant quality — it is man's experience of God." In the second place, while the Bible is literature written by men, for men, and in the language of men, it is inspired literature. It is not, as we have seen, verbally inspired, but it plainly contains the thoughts, and records the experiences of men who knew God and lived in the spiritual realm. It breathes of God. The men of the Bible are inspired rather than their language. Inspira- tion in the primary and only strictly appropriate meaning of the word applies to persons and to persons only. "Inspiration is the influence of the Spirit of God on the spirit of man. It vivifies, it clarifies, it enables man to see as otherwise he could not." "Revelation is what he sees under inspiration." "Revelation is the revealing — that is, unveiling, and the veil is not over the face of God. It is over the face of the human soul. I do not know God in his fullness, not because he veils himself but because I am veiled." The Bible is a record of the experiences of the men who lifted the veil from their own souls, and saw the THE BIBLE 27 things that God had revealed of himself. Thus the Bible is not only an inspired literature, but it is a revelation. It helps us draw aside the veil and see God. And yet it does not stand alone in these particulars ; other sacred literature is of the same nature. The Vedas, the Tripitaka, the A vesta, the Frve Kings, and the Koran also lift the veil and let their readers see something of God and duty and destiny. "It cannot be that the new commandment of brotherly love was inspired when uttered by Christ and was not inspired when uttered by Confucius." l The Bible differs from other sacred writings simply in the larger revelation it contains. The Jews and the Christians saw more of God and his purposes than any other people, and therefore the Bible, which contains the record of what they saw, is superior to and must take the place of all other sacred writings ; it fulfills them as Christianity ful- fills all other religions. In the third place, the Bible is an inspired literature which must be interpreted. "It must be interpreted grammatically and historically, as all other writings must be interpreted." Owing to the human and divine ele- ments in it, and the errors mixed in with and in some cases overlaying its truth, it must be studied critically, though reverently, and its claims and teachings put upon their proper basis. Scholarship has its field, and is doing finely ; the individual Christian has his province, and he should occupy it. He is not to defer to the opinion of any Commentator, Creed, or Church, but he is to use his own mind, relying upon Reason to guide him into all truth. Reason is the great interpreter. Man can rely upon it. He should rely on it. It will help him to dis- tinguish truth from error ; the word of God from the 1 Professor Alfred Momerie. 28 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION words and guesses of men. The Universalist condemns that method of interpreting the Bible which seizes upon isolated texts and forces them to support a preconceived theory, or makes them yield a doctrine out of harmony with the general teaching of an individual epistle or in discord with the trend of the whole Scripture. There is a unity of thought and trend in this Bible ; a majestic sweep of truth bearing everything before it toward one sublime conclusion, and we hold that this main idea and main purport be kept in mind constantly by those who interpret single texts and particular passages or books. We make texts that contradict or oppose this central thought and dominant spirit of the Bible, go before us or stand aside as we pass by. Now, in regarding the Bible as inspired literature ancL in interpreting it in these rational, common-sense ways — methods that men employ when they take up the sacred writings of any other people or prophet — the Univer- salist arrives at certain conclusions respecting the Bible, and he states them in his creed as follows : " We believe that the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments contain a revelation of the character of God, and of the duty, interest, and final destination of mankind." Upon examining these statements you see that the Universalist believes that the Bible contains a revelation of these things. A jug contains water and oil, but the jug is not the water and the oil, nor is the contents of the jug all water or all oil. The Bible contains a revelation of God, but the Bible is not the revelation of God, nor is all that the Bible contains a revelation of God. We distinguish between the contents of a thing and the thing itself ; and we recognize that the contents may be made up of mixed elements. THE BIBLE 21) Furthermore, we believe that the Bible contains a revelation, not the only revelation. We finAze it > facts and listeni- ks, 30 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION truths. A revelation is supposed to be trustworthy, but we allow it only as it shows itself worthy to be trusted, and it does this by being true to the facts and wholesome to mankind. Truth is nothing more nor less than cor- respondence to fact ; and the testimony of the Bible is received by us as truth just so far as Reason decides that it corresponds to the facts. To be sure, we accept some things on faith, where we cannot know all or any of the facts, but faith is but a name for the approval of Reason in matters where such evidence as we have, although not enough for belief, is adjudged sufficient for trust. So that Reason is the great judge, and ho allows the Bible an authoritative voice in so far as it speaks the truth. He says the authority of the Bible depends on the truth within it and not on any theory about it. And as we study the Bible we believe that it bears witness to certain great and grand truths concerning the character of God, and about the duty, interest, and final destination of mankind. These truths will be elaborated and established in subsequent lectures. But it will be well to give their substance to-night. The God which the Bible reveals to us is a personal being, a spirit, who is all-wise and all-powerful. He made the universe, and He alone. His nature is love, and all that He does is good. He is, however, just, and moreover, merciful, leaning, if He leans at all, on the side of mercy rather than severity. He is not only the creator of the universe, He is the father • v£ mankind. He loves men as a parent loves his offspring, of (!A r M cnes over humanity as a mother bends over and caress r j ier fi rs t ] 3a l 3e> JJ e grieves when men are disobe- ^dr! ient ' ^-ts for them as they go into the regions of sin '., of waste their su ^ce in riotous living; He welcomes t^ el \ii home again wht n thev return with eyes downcast % THE BIBLE 31 and with prayers for forgiveness on their lips. He for- gives all the iniquities of men ; He helps them to live righteously. In a sentence, the God of the Bible loves and looks after men as the Eastern shepherd loves and looks after his sheep, ever going before them and ever showing them the way that shall ultimately lead them to green pastures beside still waters. Thus do the Univer- salists interpret the character of God as taught by the Bible — a God who is a personal spirit ; a God who is just ; a God who is merciful ; a God who is loving ; a God who is forgiving ; and above all, a God who is the Father, and Educator, and Perfecter of mankind. And we also learn that the duty of man is to love this God with his whole nature, and to love his fellow-men, having the same regard for their welfare that he has for his own. We find that the chief interest of man is to seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness. And we rejoice in discovering that the final destination of mankind is perfection ; perfection for the individual and perfection for the race, a destiny so well expressed in those words of Paul : " Till we all come . . . unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ." These are the views that the Universalis! holds con- cerning the Bible, and these are the doctrines which he finds in it that accord with his reason and satisfy his emotions. Our head and our heart accept these doctrines, and we believe them confidently and draw from them inspiration to better living and nobler hoping. And in view of these revelations, the Bible is a pre- cious book to us. We get our faith out of it, and rest most of our teachings upon it. It is in our pulpits every- where, and in all our homes. We love the Bible and prize it above all other books, 32 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION not for some magical power hidden within it or surrounding' it, making it a passport to heaven ; and not because its con- tents are thought to be infallible ; but because of the reason- ableness of the great, vital truths it brings to every open mind ; because of the great example it gives in the life of Jesus Christ to every person who is seeking to know his duty and attain his destiny ; and because of the mighty influence for good that its teachings have had on civilization and humanity. We trust the Bible. Its errors of detail and its incom- pleteness of doctrine do not injure our faith in the truthful- ness and trustworthiness of its substance and the accuracy of its trend. The destruction which sound and reverent criticism is wreaking within it, does not destroy its author- ity for us, simply because we recognize that it bears witness to certain truths ; great, fundamental, permanent truths ; and upon these verities we stand as upon rocks which cannot be removed forever ! The essential thought of the Bible suffices us. We draw our inspiration and best spiritual life from the current of truth that flows steadily on from Genesis to the Gospels, growing purer and broader as it reaches and merges in the flood of Christ's great life. This undercurrent is living water to us; it slakes our spiritual thirst; it builds up our character; we dip deeply and drink freely. We recommend the Bible. We call unto men who have gone from its well-springs of life because theologians have walled it in, or have been driven from it because religious bigots have vitiated its waters, — we call unto such men to come back and taste again and see that its waters are sweet ; to come to this fountain as we come to it, and see if it does Dot yield them wine and milk, and become in them a well of living water springing up unto Eternal Life ! LECTURE III GOD STANDING on the island of Time, encompassed with the waters of Eternity, listening to the booming breakers of the Past, and gazing upon the rolling billows of the Future, there arises in the mind of man three solemn questions : Whence ? Why ? Whither ? Whence came this island? Why am I upon it? Whither am I going? In order of time, and, perhaps, in order of impor- tance is the question, Whence ? What or who made the island — this sphere that floats on the bosom of space? What or who covered it with its turf, its vegetation, its fruit, its seas and its mountains? What or who called into existence its myriad people — the fishes in its seas, the birds in its air, the reptiles and the quadrupeds upon its land? Whence all these things, and whence, Man? What or who put him here, with his thoughts, and emo- tions, his questionings, his doubts, his hopes, his loves? Man has raised these questions from time immemo- rial — the remotest and faintest voice that speaks to us down the corridors of history, repeats this old, old ques- tion : Whence ? a question that becomes more earnest as man becomes more thoughtful ; a question that demands an answer as man becomes more enlightened. You can- not put him off with a wave of the hand, or by a simple "don't know." He cannot overcome, however hard he may try, the craving to know the Origin of the Universe, and of himself in particular. Must he be left in doubt 34 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION on this subject? I believe not. I believe this Universe must bear marks of its origin. There must be traces here and there which can be followed out until something certain is reached. Why not go to work on the problem, rather than merely raise questions ? Why not investigate things, instead of sitting still and sighing? Why not reach a conviction instead of holding an opinion or remaining agnostic ? Let us use our reason a minute. Here is the Universe ; it is a fact. How came it here ? There are but two pos- sible explanations : It is either the result of chance ; or the product of intelligence. There can be no other theo- ries as to its origin. The Universe is either accidental or intentional. Let us start with these hypotheses, and see which of them best explains the facts. The Doctrine of a Chance Universe means that all things are what they are because they happen to be as they are. Long ago, there existed an atom or a number of atoms. These were thrown together in some idle way, and in the course of ages by happy concoursing they took on the forms and shapes of this world. No superintend- ing hand guided their movements ; no contriving mind fashioned their product. They of themselves, by attrac- tion and repulsion, jostled out this universe. This is a preposterous doctrine, as the least reflection and investigation shows. Suppose I were to bring you a bag of type, which I had got at the printer's ; and a com- plete set of Shakespeare's writings, procured from the library. Now, suppose that I were to tell you that by merely shaking those types together in that bag, and tumbling them out on the floor, time after time, I had succeeded in composing the works of Shakespeare. What would you immediately say ? You would say : It is GOD 35 incredible ; I cannot believe it ! And yet to claim that the poems and plays of Shakespeare were or could be produced by chance, by accident, by the blind jostling and throwing of types, is a modest and reasonable claim com- pared with the claim that this Universe was produced in an accidental and fortuitous way. The chances against such an event are simply innumerable. An eminent mathematician says that all the paper ever made or that can ever be made would not hold the figures which show the chances against such a universe. Of course, no hypothesis would be incredible, how- ever multitudinous the chances against it, if it were the only hypothesis ; but where there are two suppositions, then the one with the least title to probability, is set aside. Hence, thoughtful men of every class are giving up the theory that this universe is the result of accident. And the only other hypothesis, namely that it is the product of intelligence, is gaining in favor. The Doctrine of a Contrived Universe holds that everything is the product of intelligence ; that there is a Mind which conceived and created this Universe, and is superintending and guiding all its movements. This doctrine bears the impress of truth upon its face. It looks plausible. It sounds rational. For it is difficult to conceive how such an orderly world as this could have been produced by a chaotic and disorderly crew of atoms ; and still more inconceivable is it to account for mind in humanity without mind in that which produced man. Xo effect can be greater than its cause, and every effect will generally bear resemblance to its cause, hence it seems probable that thought and love in the universe must reflect or express thought and love in that which made the universe. But we will not accept a theory because it is 36 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION plausible. We will try to make it highly probable, and certain, if possible. To this end, let us ask the aid of Science and Theology. It has been too long supposed that Science and Religion were antagonistic. Such is not the fact, as scientists and religionists are beginning to see. Between true science and true religion there ought to be the friendliest feeling. They are working in the interest of the same Lord and Master, Truth. Religion is the more comprehensive seeker, and it summons to its aid every other agent or agency. Science should be one of the handmaids of religion, as is philosophy and theology. And science will be taken into the service of religion more and more as the days multiply and her competency to teach truth is seen and admitted. Now what does Science do for those who believe that this Universe is the product of intelligence ? I will give her testimony in brief : 1 . She demonstrates that the Uni- verse is & product. She shows, beyond all doubt, that it is not eternal ; that there was a time when it did not exist in its present form. Scientists agree that the Universe is an effect. 2. She has practically demonstrated that the Universe has been evolved, not made outright, either as a whole or in parts. The Universe has grown like a flower, it has not been manufactured like a watch. The law of evolution is almost as well established now as is the law of gravitation, and it is almost as widely accepted by scien- tific men. 3. Science shows that the Universe is but a form of motion. All things exist in one of three states, solid, liquid or gaseous ; and these states are but forms of motion, either rectilinear, rotary or vibratory, simple or combined. As everything is an expression of motion, all things can be resolved into motion, just as a piece of coal GOD 37 under proper conditions vanishes into heat — heat being nothing: more or less than a kind of motion. 4. Science shows that the Universe is a unity. In that everything is in essence, motion, all things must be alike in the final analysis. If the universe could go back at once to its original condition, it would be a nebulous, homogeneous mass. These are some of the facts which Science gives us, namely, that the universe is an effect ; that it has been evolved ; that its original and permanent condition is motion ; and that, in spite of its seeming diversity, it is uniform and a unity. If you ask the scientist what he finds the first cause of the Universe to be he will answer, motion or energy ; he will say, that so far as I can see through my scientific glasses, there is an infinite energy from which all things proceed. It is not in his province to account for this energy, or force, or motion as it is variously called ; he properly leaves that to the philosopher and theologian. And they continue the search — the philosopher for truth ; the theologian, for God. And they both pause before the facts discovered by science, and observe their significance. If the universe is an effect, then there must be a cause ; if there is unity in the effect, there must be unity in the cause, therefore there must be but one cause ; if the universe is the effect of motion, there is doubtless a mover, for . motion cannot generate itself, and therefore there must be a first or prime cause. By some such process as this does the theologian and philosopher work from the data of science to the conclusions of religion. Motion is the bridge by which theology travels from the first cause as established by science to the final cause as established by philosophy. And it is done in this way. We know that so far as hitman experience goes all volun- 38 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION tary action is the result of will-power. If I lift my arm, it is because of will-power ; if I run or leap, it is because my will gives me permission and assistance. All motions that human beings set going within or outside themselves, can be traced to the action of the Will and to no other faculty. If this be so in human activity, why may it not be so in regard to the activity of the universe? To what else can we trace the motion of the universe than to an infinite Will which generates it ? This is what the theo- logian does, and he says that "the infinite and eternal energy from which all things proceed," is Will. But he does not stop here. In human experience we always find the will associated with two other faculties, namely, that of thinking and that of feeling. Hence, it may prove that this infinite and eternal will is also associated with the faculties of thinking and feeling. And straight- way the universe is investigated to see if it bears marks of thought ; and to see if it shows that its maker feels. And after patient study, the theologian says that the universe is covered with traces of a thoughtful creator, and is filled with evidences of his love. Hence, it is held confi- dently that the infinite and eternal energy from which all things proceed, possesses not only a will, but the faculty of thinking and the power of feeling as well. And what is this but to say that the first and final cause of all things is Mind, for mind is made up of these faculties of knowing and feeling and willing. And is this process anything short of proving that the Universe is the product of intel- ligence and not of chance ? But you say, you have not shown us any marks of thought, or any traces of feeling in the universe ! Is it necessary ? Can you not find them yourself? Have you thoughts? If so, where did they come from? Do you have arl I s 5 If so, whence their origin? Can yon attribute them to any other source than an infinite and nal thinker and lover? Do yon never exclaim with I, I think thy thoughts after thee!"* It you want evidences of thought and design in the physical w«.rld. they are nut hard to find. 7 Theologians were drawn into the battle because <>f the unfavorable bearing of the new doctrine upon .some of* their dogmas. This is the explanation of tin- first greal controversy. Bui ii is about over now, so far as scientists are concerned. Thirty-five years of criticism and inves- tigation and verification have sufficed to convince an overwhelming majority thai Cuvier was wrong in his hypothesis. There Is general agreement now amongthem as to the certainty that all living Organisms, animal and vegetable, have been derived from .some tew original, simple forms, possibly from one. Indeed, they leel that this vast extension of the law of evolution is so justifiable that they say, as Mr. John Fisko says : "There is no more reason for supposing thai this conclusion will ever be gainsaid than lor supposing thai the Copernican astronomy will sometime he overthrown and the concentric spheres of Dante's heaven reinstated in the min^s of men." But the theologians — some of them and perhaps most Of them — are not eon\ cited lo 1 he ext reme extension of the law of evolution; they still believe Cuvier and are fiercely, although it must he futilely, contending thai evolution does not apply to the origin of species. II" a lew theologians admit that species were developed, thej make an exception in the case of man, and hold that he at least was specially created. Well, they must battle on until they see the dense lolly of their Opposition, and then they will fall into line with science as lhe\ did years ago after vainly fighting againsl the universal extension of the principle of gravitation; and thej will learn that the vers fact they are now disputing will help rather than hurt the cause of true religion. The wider potency given the Inn- of evolution does not , as we shall see 9 make against any fundamental doctrine of a true religion. 58 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION Now, how have scientists and philosophers and some theologians become so convinced that evolution is the true and only method by which all living organisms came to be what they are? Simply by a study of the facts, and reasonings from them I Suppose we turn naturalists and philosophers for a few minutes, and see what our study of nature will lead us to. We might do many things first, but it will be best to try at the outset to classify the living- organisms of the earth that we are to make a study of. We can do this better than the ancient naturalists because they did not know enough of the multitudinous forms of life to classify them except on an arbitrary and crude basis. As we survey the vast field, 1 we find that it is possible to divide all living things into two kingdoms — the vegetable and the animal — on the basis of their structural and functional differences. In the animal king- dom we place the whole class of beings having animal life. In the vegetable kingdom we place all kinds of plants. Now we may still further divide and sub-divide the vege- table kingdom, but for our present purpose, especially to save time, we will confine our attention to the animal kingdom, and try to group its various members. After considerable study we find it possible to break this king- dom up into eight sub-kingdoms, each sub-kingdom being separated from its neighbor by pronounced differences in the structure or make-up of its members. Labeling or naming these eight sub-kingdoms, beginning at the earliest and lowest and simplest forms of organisms and ascend- ing, we have in order (1) the animalcule, (2) the sponge, !" There are two million species of plants and animals such as naturalists classify." — (Cosmic Philosophy II., 71.) " In the inorganic world there are only a few score of elemental substances combined in a few hundred molecular forms and associated in perhaps one thousand distinct crystalline shapes."— (Interpretation of Nature, 188.) EVOLUTION 59 (3) the jelly-fish, (4) the star-fish, (5) the worm, (6) the shell-fish, (7) the crab, spider and insect and (8) the back- boned sub-kingdoms. 1 In one of these eight great groups we may locate every animal we find, assigning it its place according to its anatomical or structural resemblances to the proper members of this or that or the other sub-king- dom. Still further. We find that each of these eight sub-kingdoms may be divided and sub-divided into classes, orders, families, genera, species, and sometimes interme- diate groupings. For instance, the backboned sub-king- dom or vertebrates is divisible into five classes — the fishes, the amphibians, the reptiles, the birds, and the mammals ; and each of these classes is further divisible into orders or families. If we take the mammalian class alone it will yield us as many as sixteen orders or families. And these orders or families are further divisible into genera ; and the genera are separable into species. This procedure would give us all the main divisions with which to beoin systematic classification, namely : kingdoms, sub-king- doms, classes, orders or families, genera and species. Now, suppose we had something to classify. Let it be a gray squirrel. What would we do with it? We would assign it first to the animal kingdom, because it had animal life ; to the vertebrate sub-kingdom, because it had a skeleton within the body, a brain, and a backbone ; to the class mammalia, because its young are nourished for a time by milk secreted by the mammary glands of the mother ; to the order or family rodentia, because of its large incisor teeth in each jaw distinct from the molar teeth whereby it gnaws ; to the genus sciurus, the Latin name for squirrel, because of its squirrel-like characteris- 1 Language a little simplified from Macalister's Zoology; Invertebrata, p. 14, as given in The Development Theory by Bergen, p. 24. 60 GOOD SENSE IN EELIGION tics ; and to the species gray squirrel, because of its color. In like manner we could and would deal with other animals coming under our notice until the whole animal creation was classified. Now, what would we note in our attempt to classify the plants and animals of the world? First, we would notice that each group, however small, however insignifi- cant, was related to every other group, naturally, in a real and vital manner. We would see that every animal was related to every other animal ; and that every plant was related to every other plant. Indeed, we would find that there was a point at the very beginning of organic life where it was almost impossible to tell the difference between plants and animals, so close the likeness or rela- tionship. Secondly, we would discover that this long and ramified series — whether of plants or of animals — had plainly pro- ceeded the one from the other, from the very lowest to the very highest, from the simplest to the most complex, through infinite and marvelous gradations. The members of the animalcule sub-kingdom we would find shading off into the members of the sponge sub-kingdom ; the sponge sub-kingdom into the jelly-fish ; the jelly-fish into the star- fish : the star-fish into the worm ; the worm into the shell-fish; the shell-fish into the crab, spider and insect; and the crab, spider and insect into the backboned sub- kinodom. And these transitions from one sub-kingdom to the other would be so gradual and so subtle as in many places to test our keenest powers of observation to tell where the separation began. The members of each lower sub-kingdom would be found to have prepared the way for the members of the next higher sub-kingdom. And from the highest sub-kingdom — that of the vertebrates or back- EVOLUTION 61 boned animals — this process of development would be seen to be still going on : the fishes changing into amphibians ; the amphibians into reptiles ; the reptiles into birds ; and the birds into mammals, each class giving way before the next higher class. The mammals, being the highest class, would be found developing progressively order after order, sixteen of them in all, from the monotremes up to the primates. Even here the unfoldings would not stop, for the order of primates would be seen developing genera, such as the monkeys, apes, and men ; and these, in turn, would be found developing varieties of monkeys, apes, and men. So that if some one should ask us after our study to put on the blackboard something to represent the way in which organic life had come to its present condition, we would draw a huge tree. It would have a short trunk, to represent the lowest organisms, which cannot properly be termed either plants or animals. This short trunk would then soon separate into two large trunks, one of which would represent the vegetable and the other the animal kino'dom. Each of these trunks would then oive off laro-e branches, signifying sub-kingdoms ; and each of these would give off smaller but more numerous branches, signi- fying classes ; and these would give off still smaller and still more numerous branches, signifying families or orders, which would ramify a^ain into genera, and finallv into the leaves, which might be taken to represent the species. 1 If some one should ask us what the sap was which vital- ized this wonderful living tree, speaking as naturalists we should say, heredity ; speaking as theologians we should say, God. 1 Darwin, and After Darwin, p. 29. 62 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION Now, we have not been giving our thought and time to an imaginary and impossible classification of the plants and animals of the world. This sort of classification which we have attempted is in vogue to-day among biologists. It is what they call the natural system, as contrasted with the ancient arbitrary and artificial system of classifying flora and fauna ; it has its basis in the anatomy which nature herself has given to her offspring. Biologists, whether they be botanists or zoologists, simply follow the course that nature has taken in the pro- duction of her children, and the result is this wonderful geneological tree ; this immense apartment house, with all its rooms occupied by relatives. Relationship and subor- dination are everywhere unmistakable. And, what is the inference : indeed, what is the plain doctrine of" a classification like this ? Does it endorse the idea that the vegetable and animal kingdoms were created separately and at once ; that each sub-kingdom was also suddenly made ; that the several classes and orders, genera, families and species came into existence each by itself and unre- lated to anything that had preceded it? Or, does it declare that the two great-kingdoms came up from pre- ceding conditions ; the sub-kingdoms from the two great kingdoms; the classes, orders, families, genera and species from the various sub-kingdoms and from one another? Plainly, it teaches the latter doctrine, and thus endorses, in a way past denying, the development or evolutionary theory of organic life. Indeed, no man to-day can attempt a classification of plant and animal life without being quickly converted to the evolution theory. We are not surprised to read that at the reopening of the University of Rome, Professor Moleschott, the German physiologist, reminded his assembled scientific brethren EVOLUTION 63 that, "to-day every organized form is fitted in, as an essen- tial link in a chain of derivation and descent. Nothing is now left of that fancy that saw in the plan of Nature a mass of accidental variations, like the caprice of an author who published at the same time with his finished works all of his rough draughts and printer's proofs." At this point let us remember two important things. First, that it is not possible for any one to go back to the very beginning of organic life. The fact is, says Pro- fessor Shaler, we can only "trace living forms from the present day downward through the rocks and backward through the geologic ages to the plane of the Lower Cambrian," a period somewhere about half-way down in the history of organic events. It is hardly possible that we shall ever get further back than this, for "the dead past has not only buried its dead but has quite effaced the burial places." Therefore, it is out of the question to ask biologists to furnish us evidence of each and every step by which life has come to be what it now is. There are "links" 'previous to the Lower Cambrian plane that cannot be furnished. The other reminder is this, that even above the Lower Cambrian plane it is not yet possi- ble to fill in all the gaps or supply all the links in the chain of being. "There are a great number of lapses, each of which has to be bridged with conjecture until the students of the earth are able, through discovery of other strata, to fill the gaps. A large part of the vast labor which is devoted to the interpretation of the rocks is directed to this end of supplying the missing links." However, these two admissions of naturalists — that they can exhibit nothing in the life-line earlier than the Lower Cambrian plane, and that there are many missing links yet to be supplied to the chain of being since that time — 64 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION these admissions need not cause us to give up the theory of evolution nor even to doubt its universal scope, for, on the one hand, we can very readily see that in the long- time- — hundreds of thousands of years (not to say mill- ions) — since life first appeared on the earth, and from the very structure of the earth, it has been possible and even inevitable that the earliest forms of life be effaced. And as for the links that are missing in the chain of descent since the Lower Cambrian plane, we are assured that many of them are being steadily found, and that others of them must not be expected as there are origins at times which may be called abrupt — a new species, or even genus, being produced abruptly from some other one % hence, there would be no link between the two. Farmers will understand how this can be, for they have seen field corn now and then bear a red ear — the red ear being a "sport" — something sudden, unlooked for. The same with animals. The celebrated Ancon or otter sheep was a "sport" or "freak" of nature. We could find, of course, no links between a " sport " and the species from which it "sported" if much time had elapsed between the time of its "sporting" and our search for the link. Nevertheless, though links are missing and may ever remain missing, there are enough found to make evolution certain and to justify its title to a universal law. All the links in the main chain of being by which we trace the general lines of development have been found, as I have intimated and as will be seen in my next lecture. The gaps that have to be filled in are those that occur in the life history of some species, or variety, or genus, or family, or order of plants or animals. If any one would like to trace the derivation of a species of animal now living from a species now extinct^ EVOLUTION 65 he could do so, and do it step by step. The life history of our modern horse furnishes a fine chance for any one to be convinced that the development theory is true. We are able to trace the history of our horse back as far as the mammalian age, some three million years ago. We may see how, beginning with an animal known as the eohippus, which was about the size of a fox, and had three toes behind and four serviceable toes in front, with an additional fifth palm-one (splint), and perhaps a rudi- mentary fifth toe like a dew-claw, our present horse has been evolved. Step by step we can trace the process, observing the horse, losing its toes one by one, and changing in size, and strength, and beauty, stage after stage, until it becomes the horse of to-day, with but one toe, and with a great, handsome body and a won- derful brain. Geology has furnished us all the fossils by which this progressive comparison may be made. And this is not the only instance of a long life-history which has been deciphered from the writing upon her rocks. If we would like to assure ourselves that one species or one genus could be transformed into another species or genus, we might do so by visiting Scmankiewitsch, the Russian naturalist. He would tell us, and perhaps show us, how he had taken a sort of brine-shrimp found in salt- water pools and changed its form according to the greater or less saltness of the water. By successive dilutions of the water, this naturalist succeeded in producing from the original shrimp what for all the world appeared to be distinct species. Indeed, the two leading forms which he obtained had before that time been known as two different genera. He thus proved conclusively that variation from one species to another is possible, and endorsed the doc- 6Q GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION trine that the present forms of life are all variations from one original form or type. Now it is not hard for us to see how scientists and philosophers, in view of considerations and facts such as we have been attending to, have come to the agreement — to quote the words of Professor Shaler of Harvard College, addressed to the divinity students in Andover Theological Seminary — that : "Organic life began with exceedingly simple combinations of a structural sort, which were formed in the earlier geologic ages, and has advanced by successive stages of evolution from its primitive simplicity to its present exceeding complication. The advance is exhibited not only in the material body but in the intelligence as well." And must not we, from what we have learned so far and from what we may learn by further study, follow the lead of these scholarly and reverent men in those depart- ments of knowledge where they are qualified to speak with authority? The doctrine of evolution as opposed to the doctrine of special creation has evidently come to stay ; the spirit of the age is more and more favorable to its universal extension ; and I do not see what theologians and religious people can do but accept the doctrine and modify their dogmas and views accordingly. Feeling how futile it is to dispute the law of evolution, an increasing number of theologians are joining the scien- tists in their acceptance of the law. But this is far from affirming that they are saying amen ! to all the things which some scientists have said and are saying in explana- tion of evolution. The fact of evolution is one thing — all may admit it to be a fact ; the factors in evolution are quite another thing — there may be radical differences of opinion on this matter : and there are. Indeed, the early EVOLUTION 67 controversy over the fact of evolution has been shifted to a contention over the factors in evolution. Our scientific brethren are in disagreement here. Even Mr. Darwin and Mr. Wallace, in perfect agreement as to evolution itself and equally sure that natural selection is a chief factor in the process, are yet disagreed as to the part that natural selection plays in the march of the generations. There are two great problems which the universe sets before the scientists and philosophers ; indeed, before every student. First, what is the explanation of the incessant transformations which the world manifests? Nothing in organic nature is at a stand-still ; change is taking place all the time. Why and how? Secondly, there is intelligible order in the world. How may we account for the existence of general classes of things, including minds, and for universal laws, and finally for that appearance of a rational end towards which all things tend? These are the problems which the scientists, with this wonderful key of evolution in hand, are trying to solve. They are very knotty, and it is no wonder that there are as many as seven distinct theories advanced as true solutions. But neither the scientific nor philo- sophic world, to say nothing of the theologic, is satis- fied that the problems have been as yet fully solved. However, the doubt and discussion, above described, as to the factors in evolution, is entirely aside from the truth of evolution itself, concerning which, as Professor Le Conte and others assure us, "there is no difference of opinion among thinkers." Furthermore, it is not a part of our duty nor is it sensible for us to refuse to accept the law of evolution because some speculation about the law is unsatisfactory or repugnant to us. We may grasp 68 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION the law with both hands and welcome it cordially, and leave the earnest men who are at work on the problems of the universe to reach an explanation that will really explain the phenomena, while we turn our attention to the bearing of the fact of evolution on certain theological ideas in which we are deeply interested. We must do this briefly to-night ; the coming lecture will do it more elaborately. Professor Le Conte, in the words read at the begin- ning of my lectures, declares that evolution is to revolu- tionize traditional theological and religious ideas. I believe him. I can see that the universal extension of this law must influence and modify our conceptions of the origin and. history of man. It throws a flood of light upon the mystery of conscious minds in dependence on physical bodies, and upon the dark problems of evil and suffering ; and with these matters, I will deal in my next lecture. I can also see that the idea of the evolution of the universe must alter some of the traditional notions of God and Nature. Some have feared that evolution would abolish God ; but such a fear is needless. Evolution, as we have seen, is simply a name to describe the manner in which things have come to be what they are. To say that the universe in its development has followed the law of evolution is not to say that no one invented that law in the beginning and has been using it ever since ; nor is it to say that the elements which have been obeying this law were not created at the outset. Indeed, evolution pre- supposes two things ; it presupposes the existence of some- thing to be evolved, and of Some One who has involved what is to be evolved. There must be involution before EVOLUTION 69 there can be evolution ! You cannot get something from nothing ! Naturalists have not felt that evolution abolished the Creator. They have seen that it was futile to try to explain the origin of matter or even of life on purely physical grounds, and therefore they have not attempted it. Professor Clifford, a distinguished and heart-broken atheist, said : " Of the beginning of the universe we know nothing at all." Mr. Darwin confined his efforts to explaining the origin of species. He found matter and life existing, and tried to show how the living things round about us came to have their present forms. He said that his discovery that they had been evolved did not necessa- rily overthrow the existence or the providence of God. He evidently believed that the original elements had been created, for in the last words of his famous book on the " Origin of Species " he says : '.* There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one ; and that, while this planet has gone circling according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning, endless forms, most beautiful and most wonderful, have been, and are being evolved." And we have, in the same strain, these words from Mr. Herbert Spencer, the man above all men who would account for the universe without a Creator if he could : " The genesis of an atom is no easier to conceive than that of a planet ; indeed far from rendering the universe less mysterious than before, it makes much greater mystery of it. Creation by fabrication (that is, by special creations), is much lower than creation by evolution ; a man can bring a machine together but he cannot make a machine that develops itself. That our harmonious universe should formerly have 70 GOOD i. i: in RELIGION cxihl<r evolution! Nor does evolution do away with design or purpose in the universe. Although Mi. Darwin, by his splendid theories of natural and sexual selection} has accounted for much of the intelligible order of the world by showing un Iiow adaptions have been brought about by purely natural <.ni i ■■ , he hai not shown nor claimed to have shown li< > w ii i that the creation, as ;• whole, has been moving from the very beginning toward definite and lofty goal. We have seen how ili<- whole universe Prom the moment the ftrst atom <>r if began to unfold, up to the present time, has been working unerringly and amazingly toward ili<" production :mn no oilier theory than that s Mind conceived an end like this :m pass, <:m we account for the progress :il! things have made :i n< I are making toward ;• perfected humanity. involution , then , does not rob us of our Grod nor wipe out the evidences of purpose from the universe* What ii EVOLUTION 71 does do, is this : It gives us a better and grander concep- tion of God than we ever had before ! We used to think, or at least many Christians thought, and perhaps there are some who still think, of God as a master-mechanic who had manufactured the universe, section by section, and had set it running as soon as every part was properly adjusted. He then withdrew from it, and dwelt off there in the depths of space, most of the time indifferent to and perhaps oblivious of the behavior of the world he had manufactured. There came times, however, when he revisited his creation, and if anything was found to be out of gear, he repaired it ; or if something he had neglected to think of in the beginning was seen to be desirable or necessary, he furnished it by creative fiat, and then withdrew again. That was the old mechanical theory of God's relation to the universe. But evolution has done away with that idea forever. It forces us to either think that God made the universe properly in the beginning so that it would come out just as he desired it in the end, and then deserted it altogether and has never and will never come back to it ; or else that God planned the world just as he wished to have it and in his plan has made it obliga- tory on himself to be never absent from it ; indeed has made the desired development of things to depend on his indwelling in his universe. The latter view is the one adopted by Christian evolutionists. I recall the great words of Mr. John Fiske : "Darwinism may convince us that the existence of highly complicated organisms is the result of an infinitely diversified aggregate of circumstances so minute as severally to seem trivial or acci- dental ; yet the consistent believer in God will always occupy an impregnable position in maintaining that the entire series, in each and every one of its incidents, is an immediate mani- 72 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION festation of the creative action of God." And of Professor Le Conte : ' ' Evolution has made us return to the old idea of direct divine agency, but in a new, more rational, less anthropomor- phic form. We see that God is an immanent God, that he is a God resident in nature, at all times and in all places directing every event and determining every phenomena — a God in whom, in the most literal sense, not only we, but all things have their being, in whom all things consist, through whom all things exist, and without whom there would be and could be nothing. The phenomena of nature are naught else than objectified modes of divine thought ; the forms of nature naught else than different forms of ODe omnipresent divine energy or will ; the laws of nature naught else than the regular modes of operation of that divine will, invariable because He is unchangeable. What is the law of gravitation? Naught else than the mode of operation of the divine agency in sustaining the universe — the divine method of sustentation. What is evolution? Naught else than the mode of operation of the same divine energy in originating and developing the universe— the divine method of creation." "There is no real efficient force but spirit, and no real independent existence but God." You remember the story of the atheist and his little daughter? He lay upon his bed dying. He had lived without faith in God, and his life had been lonely and unsatisfactory. He believed in mottoes and had hung one in his room just above his bed. It read : " God is nowhere." His feverish eyes now fell on that motto, and he was saying, Yes, God is nowhere, when his little daughter, her young heart full of faith in God and love for her father, clambered onto a chair, and with a pencil altered the motto so that it read " God is now here ! " That is what evolution does for the atheist and for the believer as well : it says, God is now here ! It says more : EVOLUTION 73 It says, God is God! He is the High and Holy and Mighty One His children think Him to be ! As evolution lifts the curtain that has long veiled Him from mortal eyes, God emerges to view in the regal form of a Being who knew what He was doing when He com- menced this universe, and who went about His sublime task as an infinitely wise and powerful being would natur- ally go. God, no longer, is to be regarded as an exper- imenter, who began a world which has been too much for Him ! God, no longer, is to be called a blunderer by those that hate Him, nor is He to be shorn of some of His power by those that love Him and deem it their duty to say that He contends with a Devil, in order to explain the seeming evil and failures in the world ! Xo, our God, my beloved brethren, is no experimenter : His mind was great enough to conceive of a creation worthy His infinity, and His resources were ample enough to realize His conception in every detail ! And this universe goes on its way to-day, just as its Creator expected ; and we may be sure that it will fulfill His intention and justify His wisdom ere the last curtain falls and the great drama is finished ! Evolution, therefore, is an optimistic theory. It does not say, as the special creation theory says : "God is an absent God, and this world is a failure." It says : " God is a present God. He is in His heavens and in His earth and all is well with the world." It taught Tennyson to say : " One God, one law, one element, And one far-off divine event Toward which the whole creation moves." It teaches us to reserve harsh criticisms of the Creator until creation is completed ; and warrants the Universalist 74 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION in believing that when the end comes we will see that we were wise in trusting, " That somehow good Will be the final goal of ill. " That not a worm is cloven in vain; That not a moth with vain desire Is shriveled in a fruitless fire, Or but subserves another's gain. " That nothing walks with aimless feet, That not one life shall be destroyed Or cast as rubbish to the void, When God has made His pile complete! " LECTURE V MAN Progress is The law of life; man's self is not yet Man! Nor shall I deem his object served, his end Attained, his genuine strength put fairly forth While only here and there a star dispels The darkness, here and there a towering mind O'erlooks its prostrate fellows. — Browning. It will be well to recapitulate the trend of the last lecture before entering upon our present theme. In that lecture, we saw ivhat evolution was — a drawing of one thing out of another ; we examined some of the proofs in favor of this law ; we saw that the law was evidently a universal one ; and we also learned that instead of abolishing God and His Providence, evolution brought Him into the universe more vitally than He had been sup- posed to be in it before, and made Him a provider whose loving tendance was never withdrawn from His children. It was admitted that there are gaps in many depart- ments of the classification of plants and animals, but it was shown that these gaps are to be expected ; that they are evidently missing parts of connected series ; and that, as a matter of fact, they do not invalidate the theory of evolution, simply because the evidence without them is overwhelming in favor of it. When we consider, that on the estimate of Sir William Thompson, one hundred million years, and on the estimates of others, three hun- dred million years, have elapsed since life first appeared 76 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION on the earth, we can understand that during so vast a period many life-structures have crumbled to dust or been destroyed by heat, and are forever lost. We can also see, in view of the fact that plants and animals sometimes "sport," why it is impossible at times to connect some varieties with preceding species. The marvel is, that naturalists are able to do as well as they do. It is aston- ishing that they have the fossils that they have. How amazing it is to trace our modern horse step by step back into the mammalian age, three million years ago, and locate his ancestor in the little eohippus ! We do well to congratulate the untiring geologists and biologists not only for tracing pedigrees through fossil forms, but for having discovered enough links in the chain of being to make it perfectly plain how plants and animals have come to their present condition. I suppose the most exacting critic ought to be satisfied if he could be shown the intermediate steps by which one great class or species passed into another great class or species. I suppose if it could be shown how a fish became a reptile, and how a reptile became a bird, and how a bird became a mammal, no one would doubt evolu- tion any longer. It would be too plain for them to deny, without stultifying themselves. As I promised to show some such transformation as this, I will do it now, and then we will pass on to the theme of the lecture. Evolutionists, like Mr. Darwin, in tracing the develop- ment of species, begin with organic life. They do not go beyond it ; nor seek to explain the origin of life itself. No one has solved the problem of the origin of life on purely natural grounds. I do not believe any one ever will, on purely natural grounds, for God himself is the life-giver. He is the vital force, whether physical or MAN 77 spiritual, that animates this Universe! Darwinians, as I say, commence their labors with the beginning of organic life. We may, however, go back to the dawn of creation before there was anything but nebula. Kant, Herschel, Laplace and others, by means of the nebular hypothesis, permit ns to take onr stand at the \er\ beginning <»t' things, before the mist begins to roll away into planets and satellites. On the nebular hypothesis, which is the favorite one with scientists and philosophers, We learn that before anything else there existed a vast, dilliised, revolving misty or cloud-like form of matter. This nebula, gradu- ally cooling and contracting, threw off, iii obedience to mechanical and physical laws, successive rings Of matter, from which, subsequently, by the same laws were produced the several planets, satellites and other bodies of the solar system. Our earth being thus evolved, began to produce Organic life as soon as it was sufficiently cooled. Organic life evidently has been derived from inorganic matter. We have the connecting link. It is the rhizopod, which is not organic and y^i possesses sensation and purpose ; show- ing that the inorganic may not only have the semblance of life but actually possess it. So that a recent hypothesis, that matter is ali\e, seems to have foundation in tact. Life having appeared, it soon became Organic. 1 The earliest forms of life having organs began to differentiate them- selves into two grand kingdoms, the vegetable and the animal. These kingdoms appeared at the same time. One did not rise out of the other; but both diverged from primeval Conditions. The Connecting link between them is the protista, or animals having functions of a vegetable sort, and plants having functions of an animal sort. The protista, which multiplied themselves l>\ subdivision, 1 Condensed from Powell's "Our Heredity From God." 78 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION developed into organisms which reproduced themselves by means of eggs. The sponge is such an organism. It lays eggs, and they are bits of protoplasm like other eggs. As soon as hatched, the embryo will attach itself to some object, and go on to attain the condition of an adult sponge. From such low forms to animals with back- bones is a tremendous stride, but Nature took it and brought forth the fishes. The lancelet is the connecting link between the mollusks and the fishes. Certain fishes began to long for land-life, and Nature gratified them by developing lungs as well as gills so that they could inhabit the earth, as well as the water. These new creatures were the amphibians. Our common frog is a representative amphibian. The frog, by the way, is a fine example of evolution, a splendid connecting link. He comes out of the water, exchanges his water structural affinities for those needed on land, and hops away croaking evolution ! evolution ! First a tadpole and a water dweller : swim- ming like a fish ; breathing with gills ; without feet or any other adaptations for the land ; presently four legs break through his skin ; lungs form within him in addition to his gills ; his tail shrinks up and is absorbed into his body. He is a tadpole no longer. He is a frog. A stand- ing vindication of evolution ! A link between the fishes and the amphibians. A link also between the amphibians and the reptiles, which next appear. By and by the fishes and reptiles wanted to fly, and Nature accommodated them by turning their scales into feathers, their gills into wings, and extending their backbones for tails. The archwoj)teryx, whose fossil remains were found in 1879, is the link between the reptiles and the birds. rf The fishes and reptiles and birds were egg-layers. After them came the milk-givers. Between the egg-lavers and the milk- MAN 79 givers there seems to be an impassable gulf. The distinc- tion, however, is only this : all life is from an egg ; but some creatures hatch the egg inside themselves ; others by heat applied to the egg outside. The general connecting link here is the marsupial family — creatures that bring forth their young in an immature state. The kangaroos and opossums are the main representatives of the marsu- pials. These mammals — milk-givers — were followed by mammals of all sorts,— the insect eaters, grass eaters, fruit eaters, and carnivora. The last of the mammalia were the primates — namely the lemurs, apes, and men. These last receive a combined heritage from all the above, and live equally upon flesh, fruit, and herbs." This has been the order of evolution — from the inorganic to the organic, — first, in the animal kingdom, came the mollusks then the fishes, then the amphibians, then the reptiles, then the birds, and lastly the mammals. I have named the links which bind each of these classes to the preceding class, so that the main chain of descent is so obvious and welded together so strongly that no one can break it and no one can easily miss its significance. Evolution is the theory and the only theory that fits the facts described. "One of the greatest pains of human nature," says Mr. Bagehot, " is the pain of a new idea." And especially is this true of a new idea that affects religious faith. Know- ing this, one is not surprised if the idea of evolution, including the evolution of man, brings pain to many people. Indeed, we should not be mystified if we found ourselves shrinking from this idea or suffering under it. Our human nature is to blame. But this does not excuse us from accepting new ideas if true. It is our duty, as cultivated minds living in civilized communities, to make 80 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION heroic and successful efforts to overcome this hostility of our humanity to new ideas which are obviously sound or which we may be able to prove sound. Our course, it seems to me, is not that of the timid and decorous lady who, on hearing an exposition of the Darwinian theory that men are descended from apes, said : " Let us hope that it is not true, or if it is, let us hush it up ! " The " hush it up " disposition is really a traitorous one. It would deal treachorously with truth. The course I believe in and the spirit I admire is like the course and spirit of Sir Charles Lyell, an eminent British geologist. He had defended the theory of " special creations " for more than thirty years, but when he learned of Mr. Darwin's researches and private conclusions, he joined Sir Joseph Hooker, a noted botanist, in urging Mr. Darwin to publish his discoveries and decisions to the world. And then, even at sixty years of age, he gave up the old ideas which he had loved and advocated, and became an enthu- siastic and mighty champion of evolution. One admires that aged or aging man or woman who is still young enough mentally to be receptive of new ideas even such as must revolutionize her previous habits of thinking. They are Christ's own followers who cultivate their minds and hearts so as to be able to welcome the Spirit of Truth, no matter whence or when it cometh. Certainly, it is only by the presence of such receptive souls in the world that Truth makes any progress toward her high seat of universal and beneficent dominion. It is obvious and gratifying that a great change has come over Americans in their attitude toward evolution. The doctrine is now meeting with a friendly reception almost everywhere in our land. Dr. Lyman Abbott steps MAX 81 upon the platform of the Lowell Institute in Boston and does an unprecedented and startling thing, — he lectures upon the Evolution of Christianity, arguing that Chris- tianity, the Bible, theology, the Church, Christian society and the soul are each and all products of evolution. His lectures are listened to by immense and sympathetic audi- ences. He is criticised, of course, but the criticism is not half so great nor by any means so harsh as his friends had feared and his opponents had hoped and prophesied. Professor Henry Drummond, whose little volumes have delighted thousands of Christians in all lands, comes to America, and from the same platform that Lyman Abbott maintained Christianity to be an evolution, argues for the Evolution of Man. His lectures are immensely popular. Hardly a word of dissent is heard either to his thesis or his treatment of it. These are signs ! They show that our people are thinking. When they see that scholarly and reverent and constructive Christians like Lyman Abbott and Henry Drummond accept evolution, even enthusiastically, they are inclined to do so too. Some one asked The Outlook this question : "Are there not scientists who believe in evolution in all things but man, and regard him as a special creation of the Maker ? " To which that well-informed and candid paper replied : " No scientist of high repute tolerates the idea of special creation." This being true, as it undeniably is, the time must come, sooner or later, when no one will tolerate the special creation idea. Wherever science leads with the torch of truth, humanity is bound to follow. I am glad that people are coming more and more to see, as Professor Drummond put it : " That as there is but one tenable theory of origin — creation, so there is but one tenable theory of progress — evolution. 82 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION Those who reserve here and there a point in their acceptance of the doctrine of evolution, for special Divine interposition, logically must exclude the Creator from the series. If He appeared occasionally, He must have been occasionally absent. The question is of an all-God or an occasional God." And I apprehend that Christians will not debate a vital question like this much longer : they will presently adopt the alternative of an all-God, that is, an always present God, re-enforcing their faith by the teachings of evolution which enable one to say that the continuous, progressive developments of the universe are due to an indwelling Will and an omnipresent Wisdom. There are those who do not yet accept the evolution of man even though the scientific world is practically unanimous in favor of it. Why do these hesitate or refuse to take the step ? Is it that they know something about the creation of the universe and of man that the scientists have not found out? Or, is it that they prefer their errors and prejudices to the truth ? Or, is it that they so dread "the pain of a new idea" that they intend to hold this idea at arm's length by sheer force of will ? There are some, undoubtedly, who hesitate to embrace evolution because the Bible seems to teach the other theory. The story of the creation of the universe and of Adam and Eve as told in Genesis seems opposed to the evolution of the universe and of man. Now, we must not blink the truth. We must frankly admit that the Genesis account of creation is quite different from the account given by geology, astronomy, and biology. The two accounts are contradictory. They cannot be reconciled. Prof. Ryle is right in saying that : ' ' No attempt at recon- ciling the first chapter of Genesis with the exacting require- MAX 83 ments of modern science lias ever been known to succeed, without entailing a degree of special pleading or forced inter- pretation to which, in such a question, we should be wise to have no recourse." The situation therefore is this : If the Genesis descrip- tion of creation is true, the scientific account is false ; and vice versa. Of two contradictories both cannot be true. Here is a dilemma, of course, for any one who thinks that the Bible speaks infallibly upon every subject it deals with, and who, at the same time, sees that the facts of science are facts that cannot be denied ; but for one who regards the Bible as it ought to be regarded, there is no dilemma. We frankly concede that the Bible is not infallible. We further admit that it is not a text- book on science. It is not a scientific treatise. Its object is to teach religion and morality. If we want to know what pure religion and the loftiest morality are we go to the Bible. If we w^ant to know about the constitu- tion of the earth, the laws of the universe, and the laws of the mind we should go to text-books on geology and biology and psychology. Of course, the Bible may furnish information that is scientifically true ; but, on the other hand, it may not. It may lead us astray scientifi- cally. For example: The Psalmist says, "The world is established that it cannot be moved" (or Ps. civ., 5). This may be taken as a literal truth. It may be held to contradict the declaration of. astronomy that the world is not stationary ; that it moves all the time. Indeed, the church in Galileo's day did this very thing. It held that the Bible, in saying that the world is established that it cannot be moved, told a revealed fact ; and Galileo was made to take back his doctrine, based on the plain teach- ings of astronomy, that the world moves. But you and 84 GOOD SENSE IN KELIGION I to-day are on Galileo's side and the side of astronomy in this matter. We hold that the Psalmist was either speaking metaphorically or else he was quite ignorant of the behavior of the world. Why do we take this view? Simply because we cannot doubt the facts that astronomy furnishes ; while we do reverently doubt the claim that the Bible speaks infallibly on scientific questions as well as on religious and moral ones. Now, in the story of creation as told by the writer of Genesis and that story as told by geology and biology, we have a case somewhat parallel with the fixity of the earth as declared by the Psalmist and its mobility as certified to by astronomy. As in the past respecting the conduct T of the universe, so in the present with respect to its formation, the Church is holding to the Biblical statement and refusing the facts of science. That such a course is as unwise and as useless as the course of the Church in the middle ages is very clear when we bear in mind that the Bible is not a scien- tific treatise, and examine carefully the story of creation as told in Genesis; The legitimate question concerning the Genesis story is this : " How did the writer get his information? Was it revealed to him by God?" He does not say that it was. He makes no claim to be inditing a revelation. Did he reach his conclusions unaided? No. We have data to-day for saying that the writer of the Biblical accounts of creation (for there are two accounts), of paradise, the first sin and the deluge, — in short, the first eleven chapters of Genesis — got his information from traditions handed down to him from the Chaldeans, Assyrians, and Babylonians. The excava- tions that have been going on at Nineveh have brought to light clay tablets which contain accounts of creation, paradise, the first sin and the deluge so similar in essence MAN 85 and, in many places, so like the language of the stories in Genesis that there can be no longer any doubt that they furnished the groundwork of the Genesis accounts. If some one says the stories on the clay tablets were copied from Genesis or derived from the Hebrews, it is sufficient to answer no, because said traditions were current among the Assyrians and Babylonians long before Abraham was born or the Hebrew race was formed. I wish I had time to quote liberally from the Assyro-Babylonian tradi- tions, but I must content myself by referring you to an article on " The Bible and the Assyrian Monuments " which appears in the January, 1894, Century Magazine. That article substantiates all I have said, and shows the reader where the author of Genesis got much of his information from. In view of the knowledge that scholars now have, they are admitting that the Genesis accounts of creation, of paradise, of the temptation and the first sin of man are not historical but legendary. They are saying, as Lyman Abbott said concerning the temptation of Eve and Adam : " If we met with such stories anywhere else than in the Bible, we would unhesitatingly consider them imaginary." Dr. Abbott sees no reason why we should not regard the story of the temptation as imaginary. He and other critics take the same view of the accounts of creation as they do of the para- dise story. "They are child-like attempts to explain the beginnings of things. We may take them poetically, but we must not take them literally." In that the Genesis story of creation is to be taken as mythical, there is no longer any scriptural stumbling-block in the way of one who is solicited by the numerous facts of science to embrace evolution as the true explanation of the method in creation. If some one ask whether the Bible anywhere implies that man may have been evolved, 86 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION I would answer, yes. The Psalmist, in speaking of his own origin, says : " I am fearfully and wonderfully made : my frame was not hidden from Thee when I was made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. Thine eyes did see mine imperfect substance, and in Thy book were all my members written, which day by day were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them." That is language that an evolutionist might use to-day in speaking of his origin. Those who clearly see that the Genesis story of creation is legendary may yet hesitate to believe in the evolution of man because there seems to be so great a gulf between man and the primates from which he is said to be descended. It is sometimes asked : " Is it possible that man with his great intellect, his fine aesthetic tastes, and his lofty moral sense, has come from such a source?" But the fact is, when any one asks such a question, he is thinking, not of the average man nor of the savage nor of the primitive man, but of the highly civilized man. He has in mind a Phillips Brooks or a Gladstone. But such a comparison is evidently an unfair and unsafe one. We must compare the men that are lowest down in the scale of humanity with the animals that are highest up in the animal realm in order to reach just conclusions as to their resemblances. Mr. John Fiske wisely reminds us that, "When we take the refined and intellectual Teuton, with his 114 cubic inches of brain, and set him alongside of the chimpanzee with his 35 cubic inches of brain, the difference seems so enormous as to be incompatible with any original kinship. But when we interpose the Australian, whose brain, measuring 70 cubic inches, comes considerably nearer to that of the chimpanzee than to that of the Teuton, the case is entirely altered, and we MAX 87 are no longer inclined to admit sweeping statements about the immeasurable superiority of man, which we may still admit, provided they are restricted to civilized man." Now a comparison of the physical and mental char- acteristics of the earliest and lowest men with those of the latest and highest animals makes it very clear that they are related. There is a class of apes which are called anthropoid because they resemble man in so many respects. The chimpanzee approaches more nearly to man than any other ape. It is not argued, however, that man has descended from the chimpanzee or any other ape. So that he who asks a naturalist to furnish him the link which binds man to his ape ancestor or to explain why apes do not evolve into man, asks a foolish question. What the naturalist does argue is this : that man and the anthropoid apes have sprung from a common source. He and the apes are members of the same family. Mr. John Fiske says : " Zoologically speaking, man can no longer be regarded as a creature apart by himself. We cannot erect an order on purpose to contain him, as Cuvier tried to do ; we cannot even make a separate family for him. Man is not only a vertebrate, a mammal, and a primate, but he belongs to the catarrhine family of apes. And just as lions, leopards, and lynxes — different genera of the cat-family — are descended from a common stock of carnivora, back to which we may also trace the pedigrees of dogs, hyenas, bears, and seals ; so the various genera of platyrrhine and catarrhine apes, including Man, are doubtless descended from a common stock of primates, back to which we may also trace the con- verging pedigrees of monkeys and lemurs until their ancestry becomes indistinguishable from that of the rabbits and squirrels. Such is the conclusion to which the scientific world has come within a quarter of a century from the publication of Mr. Darwin's ' Origin of Species,' and there is no reason for sup- posing that this conclusion will ever be gainsaid." 88 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION Now, if it be true that men and the anthropoid apes are descendants of a common ancestor and in many, respects have had a similar history in their earliest days, we should find resemblances between them. Indeed, on the theory of evolution, man will show both in his bodily and mental make-up likenesses to the animals that have preceded him and particularly to his nearest animal kin now living. Does man exhibit such marks of his remote ancestry? ( 1 . ) Take man in his embryonic condition , and embry- ologists assure us that in certain stages of birth he cannot be distinguished from the embryo of other animals. " Even under the highest magnifying power of the best microscope," says Haeckel, "there appears to be no essential difference between the eggs of man, of the ape, of the dog, etc." Looking at the embryo of the calf, the rabbit, and man in two distinct stages of development, it is impossible to say which is to become a calf, which is to become a rabbit, and which is to become a man. (2.) Embryology not only makes us see the likeness between the human embryo and other embryo, but infancy brings out the resemblances in a striking manner. Take a new-born babe and observe what a grip it has. Its tiny hands have a grasping power far beyond its experience or its needs. I have seen a photograph of an infant, three weeks old, supporting its own weight for over two minutes by grasping a horizontal bar. Whence this grasping power at so early an age? Dr. Robinson assures us that it refers us to our quadrumanous ancestry — the young of anthropoid apes being endowed with similar powers of grasping, in order to hold on to the hair of the mother when she is using her arms for the purpose of locomotion. (3.) Look some time at the lower extremities of a young MAN 89 child. The feet have a strong deflection inwards, so that the soles in considerable measure face one another. Then look some time at the feet of a gorilla or orang-outang and you will see that they are similarly curved inwards, to facilitate the grasping of branches. (4.) Not only do human infants resemble the anthropoid apes in these ways, but infant anthropoid apes resemble human infants in cer- tain habits. " The baby orang-outang does not begin to walk until it is one month old, and then it learns this art by holding on to convenient objects of support, like a human infant. Up to this time it lies on its back, tossing about and examining its hands and feet." Turning from the infant and looking at the adult man we discover many vestiges of a simian ancestry. The power to move the ears and the skin of the forehead and scalp is a survival of that power which was once useful to our ancestors in shaking flies off the skin. All people cannot work their ears or scalp, thus showing that the old power is dying away for lack of use. Professor Drum- mond mentions among other survivals of our simian con- dition, "the nicitating membrane of the eye, for sweeping that member clean ; and the rudimentary hair on the arm connected, in its direction, with the arboreal habits of the anthropoid apes. The hair on the lower and upper arm is directed toward the elbow, a peculiarity which occurs nowhere else in the animal kingdom, with the exception of the anthropoid apes and a few American monkeys." He also calls attention to that significant and dangerous organ, the vermiform appendage of the caecum, popularly called the "little sac," into which grape or apple seeds lodging produce inflammation and death. This little sac was of great importance to our herbivorous ancestors, but it is of great danger to us with our habits of diet. The 90 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION absence of a tail in man is popularly supposed to consti- tute a difficulty against the doctrine of his quadrumanous descent. As a matter of fact, however, the absence of an external tail in man is precisely what this doctrine would expect, seeing that the nearest allies of man in the quadru- manous species are likewise destitute of an external tail. Anthropoid apes have no tails. And yet, it is true that man at a certain time* before his birth, has a tail and muscles for moving it. There are survivals of this tail in adults, and in some instances the rudimentary muscles for wagging it are found. Turning from this testimony, from embryology and morphology, as to man's origin, I want to call attention to a striking anatomical fact pointed out by Dr. Clevenger, that man is only imperfectly adapted to the erect position : "Very many of the veins are provided with little interior folds or pockets which allow the blood to flow with ease in one direction but not in the other. Usually these serve a valuable purpose in preventing the blood from being driven away from the heart by the action upon the veins of the contracting muscles about them during active movements of the trunk or limbs, and in relieving the veins from the pressure of the long liquid columns that would, without the valves, bear severely on the lower portions of the longer vertical veins. But it is a singular fact that these very main trunks which traverse the body longitudinally are for the most part destitute of valves, while the horizontal veins, in which the valves would be of the least use, are often provided with them, and the jugular vein, or great vein of the neck, actually has its valves so arranged as to hinder the flow of blood to the heart." These curious facts Dr. Clevenger attributes to the origin of the race from ancestors whose normal position was horizontal or, at most, semi-erect. Restore the man MAX 91 of to-day to this ancestral posture and all these anomalous arrangements in the venous circulatory system will work smoothly, as we may suppose them to have done of old. So, too, the tendency to displacement of several important organs will be done away with. I will leave the evidence for man's physical descent from an animal ancestor, by quoting from Professor Henry Drummond, who says : " Take away the theory that man has evolved from a lower animal condition, and there is no explanation whatever of any one of these phenomena. With such facts before us, it is mocking human intelligence to assure us that man has not some connection with the rest of animal creation. That Providence, in making a new being, should deliberately have inserted these eccentricities, without having any real connection with the things they so well imitate, or any organic relation to the rest of his body, is, at least with our present knowledge, simple irreverance." Now, while evolution explains the origin of man's body, it has not accounted for the origin of his soul or mind — the two words mean the same thing. Some one asks : On the evolution theory where does the soul come in? The answer is: We do not know. That question is still a mooted question. The church has never settled it. Science has not settled it. Mr. John Fiske says : "Whence came the soul we no more know than we know whence came the universe. The primal origin of conscious- ness is hidden in the depths of the by-gone eternity. That it cannot possibly be the product of any cunning arrangement of material particles is demonstrated beyond peradventure by what we now know of the correlation of physical forces. The Platonic view of the soul, as a spiritual substance, an effluence from Godhood, which under certain conditions becomes incar- 92 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION nated in perishable forms of matter, is doubtless the view most consonant with the present state of our knowledge." Yet while we know not the primal origin of the soul; Evolution has taught us something with regard to the conditions under which it has become incarnated in mate- rial forms, and something very helpful as to the source of many of the traits of the soul. Evolution makes it cer- tain that many of our mental and emotional characteristics are derived from our animal ancestors. We have time merely to trace the origin of our emotions. Mr. Romanes has shown that the sense of fear — the earliest emotion — is manifested by the annelids — creatures very far down in the scale of life ; to the insects — somewhat higher up — we owe our social feelings, as well as our industry, pugnacity, and curiosity. Jealousy seems to have been born into the world with fishes ; sympathy, with birds. The carnivora are responsible for cruelty, hate, and grief; the anthropoid apes for remorse, shame, the sense of the ludicrous, and deceit. Professor Drummond observes that "there are almost no emotions in the child which are not here — this list, in short, practically exhausts the list of human emotions. With the exception of the religious feelings; the moral sense, and the perception of the sublime, there is nothing found, even in adult man, which is not represented with more or less vividness in the animal kingdom. But this is not all. These emotions appear in the mind of the growing child in the same order as they appear on the animal scale. At three weeks, for instance, fear is perceptibly manifested in a little child. When it is seven weeks old the social affections dawn. At twelve weeks emerges jealousy with its companion, anger. Sympathy appears after five months ; pride, resentment, love of ornament after eight ; shame, remorse, and sense of the ludicrous after fifteen months. It is a circumstance to which too much significance cannot be MAX 93 attached, that the tree of mind as we know it in lower nature, and the tree of mind as we know it in a little child, should be the same tree, starting its roots at the same place, and though by no means ending its branches at the same level, at least growing them so far in a parallel direction." But I have not time to go further into the evidences that man, physically and mentally and morally, has been evolved. It seems to me that the facts submitted to-night are conclusive. If I should add to them, as I easily might, the evidence would be simply overwhelming. It must be plain now to every reader why the whole scientific world and such theologians as Lyman Abbott and Professor Drummond among many others believe in the evolution of man, as well as the evolution of the universe. Now my object in the last lecture and in this one has not been to demonstrate evolution to be a universal law merely for the sake of such demonstration. My purpose has been a theological and not a scientific one. My func- tion is to use science for theological and religious and moral ends. And because I am so profoundly sure that evolution has a tremendous bearing on theoloow and life I have taken all this care and all this responsibility to show how well established the doctrine is. Evolution calls for a theology based on the facts of the formation of the universe , and of man as they are known to-day ; not as they were held thirty years ago . Consequently, evolution bears heavily and fatally upon the current theology of Christendom. The whole anm- ment of the evangelical theology rests upon one premise, namely, the Fall of the Race in Adam. 1 Lyman Abbott says that the commonly accepted theory in the evangelical 1 See lecture on Salvation. 94 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION churches is as follows : " An original state of perfection ; a fall by a representative of the race ; a consequent universal condition of sinfulness ; and a restoration to that state from which the race fell." Now it is plain as day that the doctrine of evolution is inconsistent with the doctrine of the fall and of redemption, as thus stated. Lyman Abbott affirms as much. He says : "It is utterly impos- sible to reconcile the two." Evolution teaches that ? 'all life begins at a lower stage and issues through a gradual development into a higher ; the theology just described affirms that man was made at the highest stage and fell to the lower ; evolution declares that life is a continuous and progressive change ; this theology, that spiritual life always begins in an instantaneous transformation ; evolu- tion, that each stage in the process of life is a step into a new life never before possessed ; this theology, that the end of all spiritual progress is a return to a life once possessed, now lost." Of course, evolution and the "evangelical" theology are irreconcilable. More than ten years ago, Henry Ward Beecher, who accepted the princi- ples of evolution and clearly foresaw the impending crisis, wrote : "To admit the truth of evolution is to yield up the reign- ing theology. It is to change the whole notion of man's origin and nature, the problem of human life, the philosophy of morality, the structure of moral government as taught in the dominant theologies of the Christian world, the fall of man in Adam, the theory of sin, and the method of atoning for it. . . . The doctrine of the fall of man in Adam is not an extreme or antiquated notion. It is the working theory of the Christian theology as much to-day as it was five hun- dred years ago. It is fundamental to the whole orthodox theology of the world. That system cannot stand a moment if it be exploded." MAN 95 Well, clear friends, evolution as we have learned and as we cannot doubt, is a universal law and is accepted as such. The theory of the fall of man is therefore exploded, and the theory of the rise of man established in its place. What say you must happen to a theology based upon an exploded idea? Must it not fall too? I believe that it must. And I believe that the utter collapse of the orthodox theology is now but a question of time. Another theology is needed to take its place. The times demand a theology whose doctrines of God and Providence are framed in accord with the manifest way in which the universe has been developed and is governed ; a theology which postulates doctrines of man in keeping with the knowledge that he began low down and has been rising ever since ; a theology which, therefore, sees that the salvation of man is deliverance from his animalism as well as his personal unrighteousness and directs its efforts accordingly ; a theology that regards this life as educa- tional instead of probational, and holds the future to be a continuation of the present, and sees man at the end of the ages, not what he was at the beginning, but perfect as his Father in heaven is perfect. Such is the theology required by evolution and by all the knowledge of these closing years of the Nineteenth Century. Is there such a theology in vogue? Yes. The Universalist church has such a theology. Its system of doctrines is entirely in harmony with the teachings of evolution, and, as it seems to me, eminently congenial to minds that think and hearts that love and hope. It is therefore not to be wondered at if the Univer- salist is delighted and encouraged to find the discoveries of science endorsing the theology that he has been advocating 96 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION for years against an unrelenting and even a persecuting orthodoxy. We may be pardoned for hailing evolution and its legitimate conclusions with gestures of joy. We are now surer than ever that our cause is a winning cause. We may say confidently that the day is near when the essentials in our theology will be the essentials in the theology of Christendom. Do you ask what our theology is that we claim to be in thorough accord with science and reason, as well as in keeping with the truest interpretation of the Bible? Our positions are briefly as follows : We hold that God is wise and loving, and that his universe is working unswervingly toward a predestined good end. We say that man was originally imperfect, with animal instincts and passions ; innocent but capable of virtue; ignorant, but capable of wisdom ; human, but capable of divinity. We say that salvation is not rescue from a personal Devil or from perdition, but education and growth in righteousness. We teach that under God's fatherly tendance this develop- ment in righteousness has been going; on even from the beginning and that man has been gradually rising from his primitive lowliness, and will eventually become the perfect being his Creator intended. Evolution supports every one of these positions. In our last lecture we saw that the universe is unfolding most wisely and most beautifully and is growing steadily toward a discernable perfection. In a coming lecture we will see that this process of salvation has been going on from the first inception of life even until now. In our present lecture we have noted man's animal origin, and have seen where many of his worst traits came from, and in our lecture on God we saw whither man was tending. It must now be obvious that there is no need of a MAN 97 Personal Devil to explain the so-called evil phenomena of the world. Evolution shows us that what we call physical evils are expected occurrences in a finite universe which is as yet unfinished — it shows us that they are really not evils when looked at from all points of view. It endorses the faith that ''partial evil is universal good." Evolution accounts also for human traits that, are ugly and destructive, not by saying that they are the planting of a personal devil, but by showing that they are part and parcel of man's animal heritage. Jealousy comes from the fishes ; cruelty and hate from the carnivora like the tiger, wolf, and bear ; and deceit from the apes. As for moral evil, called sin, evolution is silent except where it accounts for inherited tendencies to sin. Evolution does not account for sin, simply because sin is not an inheritance. It is a personal matter whenever committed. True, we may have inherited sinful tendencies, but a sinful tendency does not make us sinful by nature ; and certainly not guilty. "A tendency to sin is not sin, any more than a tendency to insanity is insanity." We sin only when we permit the tendency to become an actuality. If there had been an Adam and he had sinned, it would not have made you and I guilty one whit ! Whence then is the origin of sin on the Universa- list theory ? Not in a personal spirit of evil that tempts and seduces man. Science finds no Personal Devil and there is no need of him to account for temptation, and so on. The origin of sin, on our theory, is right here in the will of each man. Given certain divine and wholesome laws to be obeyed ; possessed with a knowledge of these laws and with the ability to obey or disobey them, each indi- vidual is guilty of sin before his God and his own conscience whenever he deliberately disobeys these laws. Each man, therefore, is his own personal devil when he transgresses 98 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION thus, and he should be man enough to lay the blame on himself and not shift it upon a mythical Adam or a myth- ical Satan ! In Conclusion : The word of Universalism to humanity, in view of the teachings of evolution and human history, is first a word of congratulation. We have no words of condemnation for this brave race of ours, although we must at times rebuke the wickedness of some of its traitorous members. We do not stand in this world and cry out to an aspiring humanity: "Woe, woe, you miserable sinners ; you outcasts from God ; you heirs of perdition." We do not look into the face of this hopeful race of ours and survey its magnificent attempts to realize its possibili- ties and then behold it brooded over by a malignant spirit gloating as he dashes its hopes and dreams and achieve- ments to pieces. We do not gather into our vision, through the lens of evolution, the rest of animate creation, and witness each class and species fulfilling its destiny ; acquit- ting itself worthily, and then turn to man, the highest and most favored creature of them all, and see him deliberately defeatino- his own destiny and mocking his Creator and thwarting the ends of Creation. No, no. Our view is truer and better and larger than that. Our eve ranges o JO along the ages and sweeps in man — man as he first appeared on the stage of existence, weighted with animal tendencies, with but a glimmering of intelligence and with the faintest whisperings of duty and destiny hastening through the chambers of his soul. We behold this man and his offspring at length looking up, searching the firma- ment above and the earth and water below for clearer light on duty and destiny — their hearts going out with insatiable and unique longings to worship and serve somebody. We witness the heroic struggles of this crowing- race to free MAN 99 itself of the beast and stand erect with the spirit of God and none other within its heart and His image upon its countenance. And, thank God ! we see it succeeding. "We confess that it has its lowest members as well as its highest to-day, but what a distance even its lowest members have gotten from animalism ! What a magnificent struggle the race as a Race has made ! What a distance it has come toward the glory of God ! In the beginning a creature half-animal and half-human ; now a being half- human and half-God ! In the beginning to be spoken of as a bundle of promises ; now to be regarded as a series of fulfillments ! Verily, we may congratulate our race on this record. We may reach forth and grasp its hand and say : Thou human race, it cost all the foregoing ages to form thee ; it will take eternity to ripen thee ; but thou hast proven worthy the cost ; thou art worthy the career that awaits thee ! Thy past is lustrous ; thy future shall be brilliant. To its word of congratulation, Universalism adds a word of encouragement to humanity. Concerning duty, we say to man : Study yourself. Study your fellow-men. See what you are made of. See what you are able to be. Note what you strive against. 'Tis not an external evil spirit as powerful as God. 'Tis not a personal spirit of any kind. 'Tis the beast within you and the beast in other men, — the tiger, the hyena, the bear, the ape. Fight that beast. Do not waste your strength on an imaginary adversary, but bear down upon the baser animal traits within you with the whole power of your manhood and womanhood. Let the divinity within you wrestle with your carnality until it throws it forever. Yes, " Move thou upward, working out the beast, And let the ape and tiger die." 100 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION Take courage in your conflict. Be of good cheer. Have great hope. It is not an unequal conflict for you any longer. God is with you. Evolution is with you. The whole universe is with you. "The supreme message of science to this age is that all nature is on the side of the man who tries to rise." "Evolution, development, progress are not only on Nature's program, these are her program. For all things are rising, all worlds, all planets, all stars and suns. An ascending energy is in the universe, and the whole moves on with one mighty idea and antici- pation " : the idea and anticipation of a perfected humanity ! " O rich and various Man : thou palace of sight and sound, carrying in thy senses the morning and the night and the unfathomable galaxy ; in thy brain, the geometry: of the City of God ; in thy heart, the bower of love and the realms of right and wrong" ! go forward and lay square by square, that City of God, and fill it with loving hearts who, knowing good and evil, choose only the good and delight in it. Go forward, arm in arm with the higher evolution, that a Spiritual Race may yet stand in the presence of its Spiritual God and justify His wisdom and power in its perfection and praise His name forevermore ! LECTUKE VI JESUS CHRIST " Who do men say that I, the Son of man, am ? . . . But who say ye that I am?" — Jesus of Nazareth. The Sphinx of the Christian religion, its enigma, its unsolved riddle, is the personality of Jesus Christ. The question, " Who was Jesus Christ ? " has been raised and discussed these eighteen centuries, and no unanimous decision has yet been reached. The discussion has nar- rowed itself down to three different views of him. One, that he was absolutely God ; the other, that he was abso- lutely man ; and the third, that he was neither God nor man but a being midway between the two. The first is the Trinitarian doctrine of the Deity of Jesus ; the second is the Unitarian doctrine of the humanity of Jesus ; and the third is the Arian doctrine of the pre-existence of Jesus. Universalists and Jesus. In the Universalist denomination all three of these views are current. We are not united on any one doctrine of the person of Jesus. Our creed is such that our preachers and people may be Trinitarians or Unitarians or Arians according to the view of God and Jesus which most satisfies their intelligence and devotional spirit. Hence, we have one clergyman and a few people who believe in the Deity of Jesus as defined by Trinitarians ; we have others, who do not believe that Jesus was God but believe that he pre- existed with God : and we have others who neither believe 102 GOOD SENSE EST RELIGION that Jesus was God, nor a pre-existent being, but believe that he was a man, like other men, so far as his birth and nature were concerned. The attitude of our denomination on this mooted and most difficult question has been one of concession and toleration. Some one wrote to Dr. Emerson, the editor-in-chief of the Christian Leader, doubtless our most conservative denominational paper, and asked him what a census of the Universalist church would probably reveal as to the position of our clergymen and laity upon the origin and nature of Jesus. Dr. Emerson replied to this eifect : ' ' We do not know what a Universalist census would reveal in regard to the subject of the person of Jesus. We only know that very great latitude of belief is not only tolerated, — of course tolerated, — but that it evokes no strong feeling of either dissent or assent. In regard thereto we succeed easily, where success is often difficult, in "agreeing to disagree." And yet I think it would be safe to say that the tend- ency of our denomination is more and more toward the humanitarian view of Jesus, — a view, be it noted, which does not necessarily deny the divinity of Jesus although it stoutly denies that he was the very and eternal Grod, and therefore is opposed to the Trinitarian doctrine of the Deity of Jesus. In view of this wide latitude of belief concerning the person of Jesus which is allowed in our communion, there is room with us for those who no longer believe in endless punishment and yet hold one of the three views of Jesus described. And there is also liberty allowed a Universalist, whether in the pulpit or in the pew, to determine for himself and to help others determine what the truest doc- trine of Jesus is. I am not one to leave a riddle unsolved if it appears JESUS CHRIST 103 to be solvable. I do not believe in creating any more religions sphinxes than are absolutely necessary. And I do love to see some of the old enigmas deciphered and set aside in the interest of advancing thought and truer life. Therefore, I want to make a careful and frank attempt to clear up the mystery about the person of Jesus, if possible. I believe that if we can determine who Jesus really and truly was, such knowledge will have a practical and whole- some effect on our religious thought and conduct. I. How to Learn Who Jesus Was. — I have no doubt if the problem were presented to us to determine who Buddha or Mohammed or Confucius or any other great religious teacher and leader was, we would go immediately to the records of his life. We would not stop to con- sider what other men had said of him in credal or sermonic form, but we would take up his autobiography or biogra- phy and try to reach a clear conviction from its contents. We would say, "give me whatever words you have that were surely or probably spoken by this teacher and leader, and point out to me such deeds as he really or probably did, and I will draw my own conclusions as to who he was." As we would do in trying to learn who any other great religious person was, so we should do in endeavoring to decide the origin and nature of our Brother and Leader, Jesus Christ. Does it not seem to you that the best way for us to learn who Jesus really was is to go at once to the records of his words and career and see what he thought of himself? We may then pass by the Athanasian and Nicene and other creeds, with their theological and philo- sophical subtleties, and take up the three Synoptic gospels — Matthew, Mark, and Luke — which give a tolerably full 104 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION and faithful account of Jesus. If we consult the Fourth Gospel, we must be careful ; because it is acknowledged to be and clearly is a philosophical interpretation of Jesus rather than a biography or memoir of him. Its facts are selected with reference to a certain idea and are used to establish that idea, as we shall see. The writer of the Fourth Gospel has gone to the facts in the life of Jesus and drawn certain conclusions from them as to who Jesus was, just as you and I are about to go to such facts as we can gather from the Synoptic gospels to deduce conclusions of our own. The Gospel Accounts of Jesus. At this point, we search the Synoptics to see how Jesus regarded himself ; to see whether he looked upon himself as Almighty God, or as in any way lifted above the sphere of humanity. And I think we will reach the same conclusions that so eminent and fair a scholar as Professor Toy reaches in his great work on the relation between "Judaism and Christianity." Professor Toy, in his admirable chapter on "the relation of Jesus to Christianity," says, in substance : ' ' It may fairly be said that the general impression left on us by the portraiture of Jesus in the Synoptics is that he lived and acted as other men ; that nothing was further from his mind than the desire to be looked on as a superhuman being. In his appeals to the people, in his more familiar intercourse with his disciples, in his arguments with his opponents, in his hours of prayer and of struggle he thought and spoke as a man." He claimed to be only a teacher of righteousness ; and certainly this was the impression received by some of his followers, — by the two who went to Emmaus, and by Peter himself, as will be shown. You remember the words of the two Jesus joined on the way to Emmaus after his resurrection? He asked them what they were discussing, and they sadly answered: "The things concerning Jesus of Nazareth, which JESUS CHRIST 105 was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people. We had hoped that it was he which should redeem Israel." No trace here that these disciples thought that their crucified leader was God or a superhuman being ! If Jesus claimed miraculous powers, the same claim was made by many others, prophets and apostles. As to the forgiveness of sins, he himself pointed out that this was no more a divine power than the gift of healing, and it is represented as belonging also to the disciples. Matt, xviii., 18: "Verily, I say unto you, what things soever ye shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven ; and whatsoever things ye shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven." The titles "Son of Man" and "Son of David" do not suggest a superhuman nature, nor, according to the Fourth Gospel, does a claim to such a nature reside in the title " Son of God." Turn to John x., and read from the thirtieth verse on : "I and the Father are one. The Jews took up stones again to stone him. Jesus answered them, .... for which of those works do ye stone me? The Jews answered, For a good work we stone thee not, but for blasphemy ; and because that thou, being a man, makest thyself God. Jesus answered them, Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods? If he called them gods, unto whom the word of God came . . . say ye of him whom the Father sanctified and sent into the world, Thou blasphemest ; because I said, I am a Son of God?" Here Jesus is represented as making an argument from the Old Testament (Ps. lxxxii., 6) : "I said, Ye are gods, and all of you sons of the Most High," to show that men might be called sons of God without making them equal with God or without blaspheming ; and, by parity of reasoning, showing that in saying that he was a son of God, he was not claiming for himself equality with God nor in any way blaspheming the Most High. His explanation and argu- ment satisfied the Jews, and they laid down their stones and he went his way. Had it been otherwise they would have stoned him or taken him before the Sanhedrin for trial. 106 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION Some one reading Jesus' declaration, "I and the Father are one," may ask what he meant by that if he did not mean that he and God were the same person. In what has just been said, light is shed on the question, and when we turn to John xvii., we see clearly Jesus' meaning from his prayer: ' ' Holy Father, keep through Thine own name those that Thou hast given me, that they may be one as we are ; as thou, Father, art in me and I in Thee, that they also may be one in us." These words make it evident that Jesus, by saying " I and the Father are one," meant that not only was he, like other men, a child or son of God, but that he was an obedient and responsive child and therefore at one, i. e., perfectly in harmony, with the spirit and will of his Father. Jesus Disclaims Deity. That Jesus never felt himself to be God or equal with God is apparent in such express disclaimers to deity and omnipotence and omniscience which he makes. He admits that he is ignorant of the time when certain things he has prophecied will happen. "But of that day or that hour knoweth no one, not even the angels in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father." Speaking of his power, he expressly says (Matt, xxii., 18): "All power is given unto me in heaven and earth." Is given, — given, then, by the Being, to whom it of right belonged ; that is, God. Jesus frequently confesses his dependence on God thus : "Verily, verily, I say unto you the Son can do nothing of himself but what he seeth the Father doing." And not only does Jesus admit his reliance upon God, he attests it in his habit of prayer. And his prayers are not pretences nor self-comm linings : they are most real, and some of them such as come from human souls when in dire distress, — for instances, the prayer in Gethsemane ; and that on the cross, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" JESUS CHRIST 107 "With such evidence as lies before us, it seems reasonable to conclude that Jesus laid no claim, in thought or in word, to other than human nature and power. It would indeed be a note- worthy thing that a Jew of that period, with the profound Jewish sentiment of the unspeakable distance between God and man, should have overstepped the boundary, and being in human form, have equaled himself with the divine. For so remarka- ble a departure from the national thought we naturally demand clear evidence, and such evidence we do not find in the existing records of the life of Jesus." What His First Disciples Taught. If we ask how his immediate disciples regarded him, we will be still further convinced that he did not teach them to look upon him as God or a pre-existent being. One day, when Jesus and his disciples had reached Cassarea Phillippi, he turned to them and asked : " Who do men say that I, the Son of man, am?" And they said: "Some say John the Bap- tist ; some Elijah ; and others Jeremiah, or one of the prophets." Then Jesus said: "But who say ye that I am ? " And Simon Peter answered : " Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God." This reply pleased Jesus and satisfied him, and on the faith displayed in it, he said he would build his church. But what was in Peter's mind and what was implied in this answer? Did Peter think he was talking face to face with God, or a superhuman being come from God? No. In saying that Jesus was the Christ, Peter meant that he believed that Jesus was the Messiah ; the expected redeemer of Israel ; in opposi- tion to those who refused to believe it. This was a sub- lime faith, but it did not carry with it any belief in the deity or superhumanity of Jesus, for we know, says Pro- fessor Toy, that "the Jewish monotheistic thought seems always to have conceived of the Messiah both as completely 108 GOOD SENSE, IN RELIGION subordinate to the Supreme Being and as an Israelite in origin and nature." And this idea, that Peter and the other disciples regarded Jesus as a man, although they held him to be the true Messiah, is substantiated by the language used by the disciples as they began to preach Christ after his ascension. Turn to the book of Acts and you will see that the first preaching after Jesus' death set him forth as a prophet. In Acts ii., 22, Moses is represented to have said : " A prophet shall the Lord God raise up from among your brethren, like unto me." Peter told his hearers that the crucified Jesus was this prophet, like unto Moses. Surely no one would say Moses was God or superhuman ! Peter opens one of his public addresses thus: "Ye men of Israel, hear these words: Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God unto you by mighty works and wonders and signs which God did by him in the midst of you," and so on. In other places, the early apostles speak of Jesus as a man and as the Messiah. Professor Andrew P. Peabody makes the comment that naturally would be made here by saying : ' ' If our Saviour were indeed the supreme God, a fact, no less striking and unaccountable than his own silence on the subject, is that the apostles did not proclaim him as God in their preaching to the unbelieving Jews and Gentiles. The cross, the ignominy, the lowly and suffering estate of Jesus, was the great stumbling- block to those among whom he preached ; and it was, therefore, a prime object with them to extol and exalt him, to set forth his claims upon the reverence of man, and to exhibit his intrinsic greatness and excellence. Was he, who was despised and rejected of men, indeed the Lord God Almighty? Of this fact, then, before all things else, would Peter have assured the unbelieving Jews, and Paul the inquisitive and credulous Athenians. This doctrine so momentous, could not have been suppressed in preaching to such a degree as not to find its way JESUS CHRIST 109 into the numerous discourses contained in the Acts of the Apostles. If Peter and Paul did not preach it, they cannot have believed it. If they did preach it, the eminently careful, faithful historian, St. Luke, could not have omitted this most prominent and striking point in their preaching." Does not the evidence reviewed make it quite clear that Jesus himself and those disciples who knew him by personal contact considered that he was a man, like other men so far as origin and nature were concerned, but far above other men by reason of his office as the Messiah ? It seems to me that Professor Toy is right in holding that this is the conclusion any one would reach if he confined his study to the facts as presented in the Synoptic Gospels and ridded himself of certain theological prepossessions, and avoided the metaphysical subtleties of the Fourth Gospel. The simple humanity of Jesus is undeniably the teaching of the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and of the earliest disciples. Whence Any Other View? Whence came the doctrine that he was God, and the doctrine that he was a pre-existent being sent into this world by God on a mission ? Both doctrines grew. They came, as many another theological dogma has come, through speculation. Neither doctrine was known or taught in Christ's own day. Paul originated the idea that Jesus pre-existed ; and the champions of Athanasius as against Arius in the Council at Nicea, in 325, formulated the dogma that Jesus was "very God of very God." So that it was nearly 300 years after Jesus' death that any one seriously held that he was God ! Paul's Doctrine of Jesus. Just how Paul reached his idea of Jesus, we do not know, because he has not 110 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION told us in any of his writings. We may attribute it, in part, to his habit of spiritualizing the things of Christian faith. With Paul, baptism and resurrection were spiritual, and not physical, facts. So with him, the real Jesus became an ideal person — the Christ ; a divinely commis- sioned Messiah, who had renounced the glories of his pre-natal existence with God that he might endure the pain and sorrows of man, and by bearing the utmost force of evil which man can suffer or inflict might emanci- pate man from it. "Therefore, Paul regarded Christ's life in the flesh as an episode between a life in glory before his birth and a life in glory after his death, and thus took him out of all the ordinary conditions of humanity." And in so doing, as Professor Edward Caird pertinently remarks, "Paul seems to deny that union between- the human and the divine which was the essential lesson of the gospel of Jesus ; and he gives occasion to all those theological puzzles about the unity of two natures in one person in which the later theology of the church involved itself." The Fourth Gospel. The writers of the Fourth Gospel and of the Epistles to the Hebrews, Ephesians, and Colossians take a view of Jesus very similar to Paul's and were doubtless largely influenced in their ideas by Paul's teachings. According to these writings Jesus was the word or logos, i. e., the reason or thought, of God, made flesh. It is an open question whether the Fourth Gospel meant to teach that Jesus, as the logos or word, pre- existed in the mind of God simply as an idea (just as the universe was in the mind of God as an idea before it was really made), or whether Jesus pre-existed at the side of God as a person before he took up his abode on earth in the form of Jesus of Nazareth. There are grounds for JESUS CHRIST 111 both views, and certain consequences flow from each. However, it is not necessary to go into the subtleties of this matter, even if we had time. We msf concede that some kind of a pre-existence of Jesus is taught by the writer of the Fourth Gospel ; and it is quite clear that his theory and the similar one of Hebrews, Ephesians, and Colossians prepared the way for the dogma of the identity of God and Jesus which was framed in the Nicene Creed. It is plain enough to me that in the Fourth Gospel we are dealing with a speculation as to the origin and nature of Jesus ; and fully one-half of the greatest New Testament critics agree that we are not dealing with the speculation of John the disciple but with that of some one who wrote the gospel bearing John's name, time uncertain but evidently while the ideas of Paul and a certain Alexandrian doctrine of the logos were cur- rent and influential. Why We Are Not Trinitarians. Be it noted at this point — and this is most significant — that neither Paul nor the author of John nor any other writer in the New Testament speaks of Jesus as though he were God. Everywhere, Jesus, although in some places highly exalted even unto pre-existence, is distinguished from and subor- dinated to God. "There is one God, the Father, and one Lord Jesus Christ," says Paul, and at the end "he shall deliver up his kingdom to God and be subjected to him who subjected all things to him, that God may be all in all." Now it is for the reason — and it is plainly a deci- sive one — that Jesus nowhere makes himself out to be God, and that none of his apostles allude to him as God, that Universalists, as a body, cannot and do not believe in the Deity of Jesus as defined in the Trinity. We find no sufficient sanction for that dogma in the Bible, there- 112 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION fore, we frankly deny it. The ideas of Jesus that are set forth in the Scripture are these two, (1) his simple and perfect humanity; and (2) his pre-existence. And it is open to you and me and to all men to hold either of these two ideas of him. We cannot hold them both at the same time, because they are not identical nor compatible. Those who can believe that Paul and the writer of the Fourth Gospel knew more about Jesus than Jesus knew about himself and his immediate disciples knew about him, will doubtless accept the doctrine of the pre-existence of Jesus as a person ; while those who feel that Jesus knew himself and expressed himself quite clearly and was under- stood correctly by his chosen disciples, will doubtless accept the doctrine of the humanity of Jesus. For myself, I prefer the latter view. It is simple, rational, and help- ful. I believe the philosophers of this day are better able to appreciate Jesus than the philosophers shortly after his death, influenced as they were by the Alexandrian philosophy and certain Jewish notions of the distance and antagonisms between God and man. To me, Jesus of Nazareth was the man Christ Jesus ; a man conscious of profound sympathy with the divine mind ; a man dissatis- fied and distressed by the formality and folly of the pre- vailing religion ; a man who believed himself to be and was a prophet raised up by God with a message of salvation to men, whom he embraced in his deep and yearning love ; a man who, in the intensity of his con- scious union with the divine Father, knew himself to be the Son of God. I can use the very words of Dr. Hedge, one of the staunchest followers Jesus ever had, and say : "All we behold in Jesus is essentially human, — human in its rudiment and type and idea, if not customary in its manifestation. And, although providentially, officially, he JESUS CHRIST 113 occupies a place peculiar to himself, — psychologically, there was nothing in him that is not, in its germ and possibility, in all men ; and which all, in the full unfolding of their humanity, may not hope to realize. Nowhere but in Jesus has our nature reached so ostensibly its true perfection ; and, but for him, we had not known what that nature is in its possibility and its calling — its highest and deepest capacity and strength." Now in this interpretation of Jesus, I am speaking for myself, not for my denomination, although many and an increasing number — may I not say a majority? — of our preachers and people are embracing it. I do not force the interpretation upon any one. I have given excellent Scriptural reasons for it, and am about to add some philosophical and Good Sense arguments in favor of it. It is within my province to commend this idea of who Jesus was, to your serious and prayerful thought. II. Objections Ansavered. I now proceed to consider certain objections usually made to the humanitarian view of Jesus, after which we will observe how wonderfully this view helps us in our ideas of God and of human possibilities. 1. It cannot be said that the doctrine of the absolute humanity of Jesus is not biblical nor historical, for we have seen that it is both. 2. A trite criticism on the humanitarian view of Jesus is that it makes him a "mere" man; But does not this objection show that, after all, it is the theory of man that has been at fault ? Are we not the victims of a false doctrine of human nature? When we find in popular hymnals that man is a ' f worm " and when we read in influential creeds that man is " wholly defiled in all the faculties and parts of his soul and body, and utterly indisposed, disabled, and made opposite to all good, and 114 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION wholly inclined to all evil," then we begin to see why Jesus Christ has not been regarded as a man, for was he a " worm ? " and was he by nature " wholly inclined to all evil?" and we also see how the phrase "a mere man" has acquired a low meaning. The logical and theological necessities of the doctrines of the fall and total depravity of man, if no other reasons, have made it essential that Jesus be deified or be placed in a class all alone. But we do not believe that there ever was a Fall, and, therefore, we are under no logical nor theological necessity of regarding Jesus as something else than a man, providing the record of his life and other considerations justify a belief in his perfect humanity. A New Doctrine of Human Nature. What we need in this age, and what we are going to have, is a new doctrine of human nature. Jesus Christ lias put us on the track of a new appreciation of our humanity, and the theory of evolution has come forward to aid us in properly understanding the essential nature of man and his relation to his Creator. We must distinguish between the nature of a thing and its character. The nature of anything is its inherent powers ; those that belong to it as a being and constitute it what it is. Nature is from nascor, to be born. Hence, the nature of anything is what it is by birth. Character is what is wrought into or upon anything. Character comes from a Greek root, meaning "to cut into furrows or engrave." Hence, character is that which is cut into or engraved upon the nature. In other words, character is that which is produced out of the nature by develop- ment, cultivation or training. The character of a thing is not the nature of a thing, but the product of the nature under any given environment. So that the nature of man JESUS CHRIST 115 is what man is by birth or origin ; his character is what he has become under cultivation. His character, therefore, may be good or bad, but his nature is ever the same. Indeed, to change his nature would be to destroy his humanity ; he would cease to be man. Now, is man by nature unique ; is he unlike every other existing being, or does the biblical saying that " God created man in his own image" hit the truth, affirming as it does that man by nature is like God? We have seen, in previous lectures, that the idea which holds that man is essentially, that is, by nature, God-like, is sound. True, mixed in with the nature of man are animal traits and tendencies which link him to his animal ancestors, but above these traits and tendencies and ruling over them are other faculties and powers not possessed by any other creature — namely, the reasoning faculty, freedom of the will, and a conscience — which link man to God imme- diately and vitally and continuously. These latter endow- ments or attainments make man, man ; they distinguish him from the rest of creation and ally him with God. In his nature, therefore, man is in the image of God ; which is to say, that man by nature is divine, for whatever is "of or like God" is divine. But the other theology will reply by saying "was divine " not " is divine " ; but our theology, in obedience to the teachings of evolution and anthropology, says "was and ever has been divine." If man was ever in the image of God, he has never lost that image ! His nature has always been the same. This is the testimony of history and science. It is a familiar and true saying that "human nature is the same everywhere." This, then, is the new doctrine of human nature which is growing up : "The old theology affirmed a difference between man's 116 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION nature — until transformed by a supernatural change — and God's nature, as radical as the opposition between darkness and light, evil and good. Modern religion recognizes not only likeness, but absolute identity, in the divine and human essence. ' All thought — all living thought — seems to be moving to the recognition of a profound and intimate union between the human soul and the infinite source of life." " Draw if thou canst the mystic line Rightly severing His from thine, Which is human, which divine! " As far as nature goes, the dividing line can not be drawn, but what of character*} Must we not confess that while man is in the image of God by nature, he is not a perfect image of God by character? Character, remember, is that which is developed out of the nature, and is the product of the good or bad use of our powers and opportunities. Obviously, human character, taken as a whole or in part, as embracing all mankind or a single individual, is not the divine character. It shows charac- teristics of the divine, but is yet far from perfect. As character is an individual and not a racial thing, we must be careful in making sweeping generalizations, but we may truthfully say that mankind is imperfect and sinful. Hence, it is plain that if there is any gulf between God and man, it is not in man's nature, but in his character. God's character is "righteous and holy altogether." The character of no living man is altogether righteous and holy. This is where God and man are not at one. Here is where God and many men are even in opposition and must be opposed until such men turn round and put themselves in the way of becoming what they ought to be and are destined to be. But we are sure that the character of humanity is and ever has been improving ; and we believe that the capacities and powers of human nature can be unfolded so that they JESUS CHRIST 117 will yield a symmetrical and perfect character — a character which will be like the character of God. So that man can be one with God both in nature and character ; he can be perfect even as his Father in heaven is perfect ! This, then, is an outline of the Universalist doctrine of man, — man by nature, divine ; man by character, not yet divine but in the process of development into divinity. What then is the difference between God and man? It has been well expressed by Lyman Abbott in these words : "I take it that the difference between God and man is two-fold, — one of quantity and one of quality, but not one of essence. God is infinite, man is finite — a difference of quan- tity ; God is pure, man is impure — a difference of quality." Man of course, must always differ from God in quan- tity, but it is possible for man to overcome the difference in quality, and so be at one with God. Jesus exemplifies this fact. TVho Was Jesus ? Indeed, in view of what has been said, we are able now to define the person of Jesus Christ, and see how truly human he was and at the same time how truly divine. By nature Jesus, owing to his true humanity, was, like other men, divine ; by character, he was, unlike other men, divine. Both by nature and by character, then, Jesus was divine, that is, God-like. He differed, then, from other men, in character and not in his nature. His character was perfect and righteous alto- gether. In the space of a few years Jesus developed a complete manhood. His character was an all-sided, perfect, symmetrical, sinless development of his nature. "Jesus increased in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and man." He was in all points tempted as we are ; yet he never yielded. Jesus grew ; he had a development. His 118 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION character was not imposed upon him, but was evolved from within him. His character differed from other men's not in kind but in degree. It was a character such as certain men, Paul for example, have in part, and all are competent to have completely. Paul says : "We shall be like him." We shall "all attain unto a full-grown man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ." Who, then, was Jesus Christ? He was a perfect man : the ideal, but not inimitable man. He was truly the Son of God, because like his Father by nature and in char- acter. He was truly the Son of Man, because like other men by nature and in the character possible to them. Now is not this a beautiful and rational and inspiring conception of' Jesus Christ? It is consonant with the record of his life and sayings, and it is acceptable to Good Sense. It obviates many difficulties, and takes away not one jot or tittle of the greatness and power of his life. I believe in the Divinity or Jesus ! When asked if Jesus was divine, those who hold this view can reply : Yes, divine by nature, as all men are ; and divine by character, as all men are coming to be. Therefore, I believe in the divinity of Jesus. And in that I believe in the divinity of Jesus, I believe in the divinity of man ! The divinity of humanity is one of the lessons of Christ's life! When it is said that to make Jesus a perfect man and nothing more is to make him a "mere" man, we can grandly and even indignantly say : " There is no mere man." There can be no mere man to those who believe in the essential divinity of human nature, and the possible divinity of every human character. There can be no mere man when we consider the worth of a human soul JESUS CHRIST 119 as evidenced by the infinite pains and care the All-Father has taken to beget and perfect even the humblest soul ! The view which regards Jesus as a perfect man, does not degrade him ; it exalts humanity and forever writes the lie across the phrase " a mere man ! " 3. Jesus a Leader of Humanity. If it be objected that to view Jesus as a perfect man is to destroy his spiritual leadership of the race, it can be truthfully replied that such is not the case. Jesus Christ is the spiritual leader of those who believe in his perfect humanity, and they follow him with the confidence that they can go wherever he leads. If viewed as God or as superhuman, Jesus Christ cannot be followed by man ; he cannot be imitated ; nor can his followers hope to become like him. As well might a glow-worm hope to become a star, as for man to hope to become God or superhuman, or even to emulate the earthly career of God or a superhuman being. But viewed as a man who had the appetites and passions and desires of human nature, and made them subservient to the loftiest ends ; who was subject in a true sense to the temptations and trials of humanity, but never yielded his integrity ; who had the aspirations of every human soul, and was able to fulfill them ; who longed to be like God, and had his longing met — viewed thus, and Jesus is an example that the weakest man can look up to in hope and that the strongest man can follow even unto perfection. It is the true humanity of Jesus that makes him the spiritual leader of men in a real and attractive way ; ever an example to be imitated and ever a guide to be followed and trusted. Jesus an Authority. "To be trusted?" some one asks. "Can you trust a man in religion; can he be an authority ? " Why not ? Must God himself or some 120 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION special creature bring us the truth in this department? Granted that it is of vital import to mankind, yet is it impossible for God to reveal religious truth through a man, as he has revealed other truths through men? Shall we deny the authority of men in the regions of science and philosophy because they were men, and most of them imperfect men? If scientific and philosophic truth has come to the world through such imperfect men as Socrates, Plato, Copernicus, Kant, Kepler, Newton, Darwin, Wal- lace, Spencer, and Fiske ; and religious truth through such imperfect men as Buddha, Confucius, Mahomet, and Moses, why not further truth and a greater quantum of truth through the perfect man Jesus ? Surely such a thing is not impossible nor is it improbable : indeed, it is a fact that truth has come into the world through Jesus Christ. But can he be trusted? Yes, just as every other witness of the truth is trusted, — in view of his ability to discover truth in his own realm and in view of the truth he dis- covers. Jesus Christ was fitted as no other man has ever been to discover and make known religious facts : by reason of his full humanity, he knew what was in man in potentiality ; and by reason of his oneness with God, he knew what was in God in reality : he knew the only and true God. And what he has revealed to the world stands upon its own feet. Truth is its own authority. Dr. Hedge says : ' ' On the whole we may say that truth is the only authority. He only speaks with authority who has that, and has it at first hand, who shows me the truth I had never seen before, or who makes me see it as I had never seen it before. And truth once seen may be safely left to its own oper- ation." That Christ was an authority in his own realm, is assented to by reason and is evidenced by the good influ- JESUS CHRIST 121 ence that his teachings and life have had upon civilization and human attainment. What Jesus Really Did. But as a matter of fact, Jesns did not bring any new truth to light. Scholars assure us that "There was no new truth taught by Jesus. The gospel contains no precept so peculiar, no moral so sublime, that the learned will not find you chapter and verse of some rabbi or ethnic philosopher where the same thing has been said before." But what Jesus did do was to live out those grand old truths. He so lived that men were made to see the old truths as they had never seen them before. So, while the doctrine was not new, the life was, and it has ever since been drawing all men unto it. Xow, what has Jesus Christ done for his race? He lias done many glorious things, but the grandest are these : 1, he has revealed the nature and character of God to it as it had never been revealed before; 2, he has revealed the nature and possibilities of man as they had never been dreamed of before. Jesus Manifested God. As I trace the revelation of God culminating with Jesus Christ, notice that the successive unveilings have been wrought by men, showing that it has not needed a humanized God nor a superhuman being to acquaint us with the mind and heart of the Almighty. The character of God has been dimly understood in all ages, and somewhat manifested by noble men at different times. Mahomet dwelt on His supreme sovereignty ; Zoroaster upon His purity. Buddha did not know Him at all, but fore- shadowed His love of mankind in his own life of loving service. It is the history of the Hebrew race that enables us 122 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION to trace the progressive revelation of the character of the true God. By a legitimate use of our imagination, we can think of God as the Great Love, who, before the universe began, felt the yearning for company and for some one on whom He might lavish His love and to whom He might express His goodness. This yearning begat the Universe. Out of His own being, came the worlds. One by one they grew and took their appointed places. When the music of the spheres had begun its play, animate creation marched into being, and the hum of life was added to the world-symphony. As the ages pass along, man emerges, stands erect, the crown and glory of creation, endowed to see and share his Creator's love. Slowly, but surely, he perceives the meaning of life, and refers it to powers not his own that gave it and preserve it. These powers are reverenced and worshiped. They are appealed to. Man is feeling after the true God if haply he may find him ! The years go by. Presently some one writes : " In the begin- ning Elohim created the heavens and the earth," and man begins to see that the universe is a creation. Presently, the universe and all that is in it, is discerned as the work of but one God ; and Jehovah is his name. The unity of God's nature is now comprehended. A Hebrew statesman and prophet climbs Mt. Sinai and comes down with a tablet, containing the laws of Jehovah, and God's character begins to be manifest : He is a law-giver and a law-lover. For a time men regard him as stern and exacting ; they call him Judge. But God is coming into sight more clearly. Moses speaks of him as gracious, compassionate, long-suffering, abounding in mercy and faith- fulness. The years pass along. The harp is struck, and David is singing : " The Lord is my shepherd." Out of deep sorrow and contrition, the Psalmist lifts his voice to tell all the world that God is interested in men, as an Eastern shepherd in his sheep, and is leading them through dark valleys and thorny places to green pastures, beside still waters. From the pro- tection to the love of God is but a short step, and Isaiah and Jeremiah and Hosea speak of that love. In all these revela- JESUS CHRIST 123 tions men and not superhuman beings are revealing truths about God. But in all these discoveries Jehovah is the God of Israel only — its law-giver, its shepherd, its lover. The centuries pass by. The voice of the sacred singer is hushed ; the cry of the last prophet is silenced. There is a long pause. And then the veil is lifted again, yea, it is drawn completely aside, and the character of God is seen in all its beauty and fulness. Jesus of Nazareth discerns it, is flooded with its radiance, filled with the glory of Him it reflects, and he goes forth with the message that God is love, and that He is a Father, and that He loves and is the Father, not of the Jews alone, but of all mankind. Now the revelation is complete, and God's character is fully known. Thus, step by step, epoch after epoch, we trace the growth of the knowledge of God, until it culminates in the revelation made by Jesus ! And here is where the uniqueness of Christ's revela- tion came in. He did more than merely say that God loved all men and felt as a parent toward all men ; he exemplified God's love and fatherly solicitude by deeds of love and a life of constant self-sacrificing endeavor to save men from their sin and folly. He taught that his love and his devotion to humanity reflected his Father's love and devotion to His children. "And so we believe that there is forever in God that which is manifested in what Jesus Christ was and did. I want to know about God : His power I see in nature ; His feelings toward men, in Jesus Christ. Does God care for the poor? Nature seems sometimes to say, ' Only to crush them ; ' Jesus preached the glad tidings to them, and fed them. Does God care for the sick ? Jesus went about healing diseases. Does God have sympathy for those who have broken his laws? Jesus prayed for them who crucified him. Does God care for the sorrowful? At the grave of Lazarus, Jesus wept. Does God regard the masses who struggle in sorrow and pain? Jesus cried, ' Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy 124 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION laden, and I will give you rest.' Does God really love men? The life of Christ, the teachings of Christ, the death of Christ, all answer : ' He seeks to save that which is lost.' " As Starr King splendidly said : " God is an infinite Christ." * Jesus Manifested Man. The other sublime thing that Jesus has done for his race^and especially does this appear if we take the humanitarian view of him — he has manifested the dignity and capacity of human nature. He shows man what man is, and is to be ! He not only says to man, " Be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect ; " but he virtually says : "Be perfect, because I, a man, have become perfect. What I have done you can do. Follow me ! " Jesus found his own nature at one with the divine essence that is in all men, and he felt that his character could become like the character of that same divine essence, and so he gave himself up to the will of God, permitted the spirit of the All-Father to play upon and through him, fought his moral battles in full sight of *" We are beginning to see that the Incarnation is something differ- ent from God and man— God coming down to the earth and walking along side of man and joined to him and making a God-man that is neither truly God nor man. We are coming to see that the true Incar- nation is God in humanity; and we preach a Jesus Christ that is a man like other men, whom God chose to be his tabernacle. It is the glory of God that God could enter into man, and the glory of humanity that God was willing to enter into man. And this is the doctrine of the divinity of Jesus Christ: not that he is a being set apart from humanity, not a being somehow different from other men, not a different kind of man from us, but a man born like other men, in whom God the Eternal dwelt, filling him to the full and radiating life from each touch of his hand, every intonation of his voice, every movement of his feet, every pulsation of his heart— God in man. That is tlie glory of the Passion week; the glory of Bethlehem, the glory of the Crucifixion, the glory of the Resurrection — that God entered into human life, and Jesus walked the path that all his followers can walk, because he was a man, and they are men, and man is God's child. It is not a smaller view of Incarnation than the older view, it is a larger and a diviner view." (Lyman Abbott, Christian Union, May 20, 1893.) JESUS CHRIST 125 God's approval and tendance, and at last became a man in every sense of that glorious word. And then he turned and looked at other men ; his eye went straight to their natures ; he read them ; he understood that they were akin to his own ; he saw the divinity there ; he saw the possible man there, and he said, man is the child of God ; all men are God's children. They most look up ; they can look up ; I will help them ; I will guide them ! And so he lived and taught and worked, to make men feel the glory of their humanity, and the grandeur of their destiny ; to give men courage in their battle with appetites and passions ; to give men hope and good cheer in their struggle after righteousness. In his sight there was no mere man ; in his pathway no human soul was ever spurned as a worm. No ! no ! But on every side his open hand was extended to the poor, the vicious, the sorrowing, the per- secuted. And in every word, there went forth his belief that here was a child of God, to whom it was his privilege to make known his inherent divinity and high destiny. And that man might never forget his relation to God and God's attitude toward him, he told a beautiful story, — beautiful in its sequel but sad in its implications, — of the boy who took his inheritance and went away from home and lived riotously ; fell so low that he became almost brutish again ; disfigured the image of his parent until it was almost obliterated. Of how, in the midst of his degradation, "he came to himself"; the old whisperings of love and home were heard in his soul, and he looked up, with tears in his eyes, and faced homeward. And there, upon the threshold of the old home, stood his father, waiting ! and as he leaped into those open arms, he heard the words, "This is my child that was lost and is found again. " God's child through it all ! and God waiting: 126 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION and expecting the home-coming of his child ! Never, so long as that touching story is in the human mind, can man forget his relation to God and God's attitude toward him ; never can man look down nor feel that he is not God's child and that God does not love him and wait for him ! The Secret oe Jesus' Power. Do you ever wonder why Jesus Christ is such a power in the world ? This is the explanation. It is due to his revelation of the dignity and possibilities of human nature, and the unchangeable relation that God bears to his children. He that discerns in humanity its divinity and calls it forth by his own life and promises, can never be ought than a power! And as men come more and more to believe themselves the children of God and capable of becoming like Jesus Christ, humanity will progress towards righteousness as it has never done in the past ; and Jesus Christ's leadership will increase in its universality and power. Man is longing to know what he is, and what he can become, and Jesus Christ answers his cry and shows him the way. And as Correggio, gazing upon Raphael's St. Cecilia, felt within himself an awakening power and exclaimed, "I, too, am a painter ! " so man, gazing upon the life and attainment of Jesus Christ, will feel an awakening affinity and will say, "I, too, am a Son of God ! I can be like him!" Oh, we do not rob Christ of his power by making him a man ; we increase it ; we increase it a thousand fold ! And when the pulpit takes hold of these two ideas, — man a child of God, and Jesus Christ a full-grown man — an example of what man can be and is to be and ought to be — then will it be of new force in the world ; then will the preacher have reason for his enthusiasm for humanity, and his words will stir men to nobler living and grander hoping and diviner attainment ! LECTURE VII SALVATION " Salvation has a large and practical meaning. It involves something more than rescue from future perdition." — Dr. Behrends. The subject of salvation would have no interest for us if we were not human beings. The fishes, the beasts, the insects and the birds do not bother themselves about salvation : they do not look with earnest and confident gaze for better things for themselves and their posterity. Man is the only being that longs for and strives after a larger and diviner life. He alone has the passion for progress ; and he alone has the capacity for spiritual improvement. Therefore, he is intensely interested in a subject like this, dealing as it does with the problems of his duty and destiny. As one ponders this matter of salvation, he is led to raise three questions : Why does man need to be saved ? What is he to be saved from? How is he to be saved? These questions have been asked from time immemorial and have been dealt with by almost every religious teacher. Every religion seems to have its reason for and means of salvation. Christianity poses before the world as having the one and only key to the secret. Perhaps I had better say that " evangelical " Christianity does this thing, for there are some Christian sects that dare not say that those who never heard of Jesus Christ are beyond the possibility of salvation. As touching " evangelical " Christianity , we are more 128 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION or less familiar with its answers to the three questions just raised. In answer to the query : " Why does man need to be saved ? " it says, "Because he is a sinner." In reply to the question " What is he to be saved from ? " it says : "From depravity and perdition," or "from Satan and hell." In response to the inquiry: "How is he to be saved?" it says : "Through participation, by faith, in the atonement of Jesus Christ." The assumptions here have so grave and wide-spread consequences that we ought to look into this theology quite closely. If it be true, we should accept it and espouse it with tremendous fervor. If it be false, we should reject it forthwith ; and give ourselves and our fellows a truer theory. The reasoning pursued in this theology is as follows : Man was "specially created " by God. " The Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life ; and man became a living soul." The Westminster Confession of Faith says : " Man at first, had a reasonable and immortal soul, endued with knowledge, and righteousness, and true holiness after God's own image, having the law of God written in his heart and power to fulfill it. His will was free to keep or transgress the law, but disposed to good." Adam and Eve thus endowed and constituted, were placed in the garden of Eden. . Upon the scene of their felicity and promise glides a sinuous betrayer, and under his soft glances and winsome seductions, Eve is led to disobey the command of God, and her husband is induced to join her in her unholy step. This was the Fall. It was, according to the theology under consideration, the work of the Devil, who assumed the shape of a serpent to accomplish his intention. Hence the Westminster Confession says : " Our first parents SALVATION 129 being seduced by the subtlety and temptations of Satan, sinned in eating the forbidden fruit. This their sin God was pleased according to his wise and holy counsel to permit, having purposed to order it for his own glory." And now came the fearful consequences of that sin. God finds what Adam and Eye have done. He curses the serpent and curses Adam and Eye and their progeny and drives them from the garden, never to re-enter it. (rod turns his back on his children and sets them adrift in a strange universe to toil and suffer and die and go to hell ! The Westminster Confession continues : ' ' By this sin they fell from original righteousness and communion with God, and so became dead in sin, and wholly defiled in all the faculties and parts of soul and body. They being the root of all man- kind, the guilt of this sin was imputed, and the same death in sin and corrupted nature conveyed to all their posterity descend- ing from them by ordinary generation. From this original corruption, whereby we are utterly indisposed, disabled, and made opposite to all good, and wholly inclined to all evil, do proceed all actual transgressions." In other, and awful words, mankind, from that time, has been totally depraved, the child and servant of the Devil, under the curse and wrath of God ! Xow, in what has been said, all Protestant churches, excepting the Unitarian and Universalists, agree. Up to this point, the Westminster Confession of Faith is assented to in substance by all but the liberal sects. Calvinists and Arminians alike hold to the fallen and reprobate condition of mankind. But there is a division among the "evangelical" sects when they begin to ask whether all men can be recovered from this fallen state and the perdition that stares them 130 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION horribly in the face. The Calvinists say, ne ; and the Arminians say, yes. The Calvinists, or those who accept the Westminster Confession strictly, say emphatically that all cannot be saved. They hold that the entire programme of this life was laid out in the beginning and that everything trans- pires according to the intention of God. Hence, they declare that God knew Adam and Eve would sin ; indeed, he had picked out a certain number of human beings for everlasting happiness and a certain number for everlasting torment ; and those that are predestined for hell shall go there ; for them there is no salvation. Here are the awful words of the Confession : "God from eternity, freely and unchangeably, ordained whatsoever comes to pass. By the decree of God, for the manifestation of his glory, some men and angels are predestined unto everlasting life and others foreordained to everlasting death. The number is so certain and definite that it cannot be either increased or diminished." One is constrained to exclaim, Surely no one in this enlightened age — no one with a heart — believes such teaching ! but the amazing fact is that the Westminster Confession of Faith is subscribed to by over 4,000,000 Protestants in America alone. The Presbyterians, the Regular Baptists in the South, the conservative Lutherans, the conservative Congregationalists, the Reformed German and the Reformed Dutch churches are all Calvinistic, and, therefore, they believe (or profess to believe) in foreordi- nation and pretention. The Arminians — those who hold the tenets of Arminius, a Dutch divine — reject the Westminster Confession of Faith in those parts where it teaches a limited salvation, and declare that all men can be saved, providing certain SALVATION 131 things take 1 place, but they limit the possibility of salvation to this world. One must be saved here or not at all. The churches that subscribe to the tenets of Arminius are the Methodists, the Free Baptists, Regular Baptists in the North, the Episcopalians, the liberal Lutherans, the liberal Conore2;ationalists an d certain lesser sects. Strange to relate, although the Calvinists and Armin- ians part company on the number that may be saved, they come together again on their theory of how man is saved. They both hold that salvation is accomplished through the atonement of Jesus Christ ; and they both insist that faith in the atonement of Christ is sufficient to salvation. In- deed, faith in the atoning blood of Christ is deemed so necessary to salvation by the Arminian churches that they declare that unless one have it, no matter how moral he may be, he is lost. Mr. Spurgeon used to say : " Be as good as you please, be as moral as you can, be as honest as you will, walk as uprightly as you may, there stands the unchangeable threatenino; : " He that believeth not shall be damned." Therefore, the dogma of the atone- ment, is the central and vital thing in the "evangelical" theory of redemption. In view of the importance of the atonement and in view of the consequences for good or evil to those who accept or reject it, we should suppose that those who taught it, would have a very clear idea of what the atone- ment was and would be able to say right off how it satisfies the justice of God and delivers man from God's wrath and Satan's power. But, startling as it is, such is not the case. Competent authorities confess that those who teach the atonement have no uniform and settled opinion as to how it saves any one from damnation. Dr. Bushnell, one of the most eminent theologians orthodoxy has produced 132 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION in modern times, in his book on "God in Christ," speaks of the great division in the minds of the orthodox as to the meaning of the atonement. He says : ' ' On the whole I know of no definite and fixed point on which the orthodox view, so called, may be said to hang, unless it is this : that Christ suffers evil as evil, or in direct and simple substitution for evil that was to be suffered by us." And then he goes on to oppose that doctrine and to say that it cannot be sustained ; that he cannot defend it. Henry Ward Beecher once declared with tremendous earnestness, "The idea that God had determined to destroy the whole world and that Jesus Christ said : ' I will go on earth and die in their stead,' is a doctrine as infernal as if it had come from the bottomless pit." Now, where there is radical disagreement among the defenders of a dogma as to the very dogma they would uphold, there is likely to be something wrong with the premises on which the dogma depends. And since the central idea in the current evangelical scheme of redemp- tion — namely, the atonement — is in dispute among its defenders, a seeker for the truth may fairly inquire whether the whole scheme is not un-Christian and unreasonable. It has such a pagan look and sounds so unlike the teaching of Jesus that we are more than half inclined at the outset of our inquiry to believe Dr. T. T. Munger, who says : "The doctrines of divine sovereignty, of total depravity, and of the atonement are shot through with colors drawn from the corruption of Roman society, from the Roman sense of authority and the Roman form of justice. . . . There is no denial of the fact that doctrines now regarded as parts of orthodoxy are the reflections of the social condition in which they were formulated. The Bible furnished isolated texts for holding these conceptions, but the Bible, as a whole, did not SALVATION 133 furnish the conceptions ; had it been used to furnish conceptions of doctrines, we would not have what goes for orthodoxy." This is the intelligent and frank judgment of a Con- gregationalist, and we can verify it as regards this subject of salvation, and we shall substantiate it further in the lectures to come. A Criticism. To criticise a theory that assumes to be Christian we must bring it to the words of Jesus and not the creeds nor to any apostle whose doctrines are counter to his. Take, then, the fundamental ideas of the orthodox theory and see if they are supported either by the language or conduct of Jesus. The fundamental ideas are : 1, that man is totally depraved, the child of Satan and enemy of God ; 2, that God is angry with man and has consigned him to perdition ; 3, that Jesus Christ, who was God the Son (t\ e., God himself), came into the world and by his suffering and death appeased the wrath and sat- isfied the justice of God the Father on the one hand ; and rescued man from the Devil and opened to him the pos- sibility of salvation, on the other hand. Now read the words of Jesus with these ideas in mind, and see how quickly you conclude that they are not founded in his sayings. Christ's Portraiture of God. The Fourth Gospel distinctly says that " God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth on him might not perish but have eternal life." It is a loving, not an angry, God, who sends a loved son, to deliver a loved people. Take the story of the Prodigal Son. What does that represent? An erring child and a wrathful parent ? or an erring child and a sorrowing parent who is watching and waiting for his return, glad all through when his boy finally comes home ? Take the parable of 134 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION the lost sheep. What does that mean? A wandering, willful child and a father with a stony heart oblivious of his wanderings ? or, a child astray in life and his loving parent in anxious search of him ? — searching until he, even the very last, is found? These parables and a multitude of the sayings of Jesus teach but one lesson — and it is diametrically opposed to the dogma of an angry, with- drawn Deity — they teach that God loves all his children, sinful though they are, and is seeking in every fatherly way to have them love him and become like him. Christ's Doctrine of Salvation. 1. What men are to be saved from. Jesus teaches that men are to be saved from their sins, and not from a personal Devil nor from a revengeful God, nor from the consequences of wrong-doing. Joseph and Mary named their son Jesus, because it had been told them that he was to save his people from their sins. And Jesus explicitly declared — ■ and his statement is recorded by Matthew, Mark, and Luke — "I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance." This declaration, by the way, implies that there were righteous people in the world in his day, and thus denies the dogma of total depravity. Indeed, Jesus, in his appeals to men to be righteous, assumes that they have the power to "go and sin no more." He nowhere says and nowhere implies that sinners are unable of themselves to repent and become good. You may be surprised, but it is the significant fact, that Jesus never mentions Adam, Eve, or Eden, or refers to the story of the Fall in any way. Therefore he never refers to the doctrine of total depravity, nor does he imply that the souls he addresses are not able to respond. 2. How Salvation is Accomplished. As to how sinners are saved, Jesus certainly does not teach that his SALVATION 135 death is to save them ; nor that the process is at all super- natural or magical. True, Jesus is reported as saying in one place, and in one place only, that he came to give his life a "ransom" for many, but this may be understood to mean that his sufferings would lead many through sympathy to him and thence to the kind of life he lived. Jesus came not to be ministered unto but to minister and to give his whole life of loving, helpful, self-sacrificing service to delivering man from his bondage to sin. "I am come," he said, " that they might have life and have it more abundantly." How were they to get this life? By abiding in him ; by doing his commandments — that is, by striving after it under his guidance and inspiration. Of course, Jesus demands that his followers have faith in him, but the faith he demands is not a simple intellectual assent to his claims, nor does he teach that it is sufficient to save. The faith that Jesus wants is that confidence in him which leads the believer to strive to live as he lived — at one with God and at one with humanity. James, the brother of Jesus, interpreted Christ's idea correctly when he said : "Faith without works is dead," for Jesus himself declared : "Xot every one that saith unto me 'Lord, Lord,' shall enter into the kingdom of heaven," — that is, not every one who merely says, "I have faith in the atoning blood of Jesus," shall be saved, — ""but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven," — that is, he who lives in obedience to the commands of God shall enter into the kingdom. This is why Jesus never told men who needed and wanted to be saved to simply have faith in him, but rather commanded them to " Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness ; " " to be perfect as their Father in heaven was perfect." Such seeking after right- eousness would lead to the perfection of God. The 136 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION perfection of God is synonymous with that oneness with God on which Jesus so lovingly and earnestly dwells. In the mind of Jesus this oneness with God — this harmony of the human character with the divine character — was salvation. Therefore, his daily prayer and daily endeavor was that men might become one with God even as he and the Father were one. And he sought to bring man and God together in this close and beautiful and enduring way here in this world by means of his teachings and example. He shows no nervous solicitude about the future world. He knows that after his death, if there be any souls still disobedient to God — if there be any spirits in prison — he will visit them and lead them out into oneness with their Parent. When Jesus dwells at all upon the efficacy of his death, it is with the thought that it will release him from his body and its natural limitations and enable his influence to be world-wide and all-powerful. And there- fore, he says, "And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me." Notice that he does not say, "I will lift up all men at the same time that I am lifted up," but that rf I will draw all men unto me." He will attract them to himself and thence to the fullness of righteousness that was in him, and hence, to God-likeness. Now, these are the teachings of Jesus regarding the condition of man and the way of salvation. To him, men are sinful. He does not explain how they came to be so ; he accepts the situation, and teaches that salvation is deliverance from sin. He assumes that all men can be saved, and that every man plays an important part in his own redemption. He deems himself a servant of God, whom he represents as loving and searching for his chil- dren — a servant of God commanded to seek and to save the lost by leading them through repentance and imitation SALVATION 137 to oneness of life with him and his heavenly Father. In other words, Jesus' mission was to help the sinful man "to come to himself," and to say, "I will arise and go to my Father," and to see that he was well started on the road homeward. Plainly, such teachings afford no foundation for a creed that declares God to be angry with men ; every man totally depraved, at enmity with God and in servitude to the Devil; and salvation, deliverance from the conse- quences of sin, original and actual, simply through faith — even blind faith — in the atoning blood of Jesus. There- fore, we must set the creeds of "evangelical" Christianity aside, and take the hand of our Brother and Leader, Jesus Christ, and walk with him out of the shadow and bondage of sin into the glorious light and freedom of a life with God. The Origin of the Evangelical Doctrine. Now I am perfectly aware what the Scriptural warrants are on which the " evangelical" creeds rest their theories of human nature and salvation. They base their arguments on the Genesis story of the Creation, and on the writings of St. Paul. («) But w T e have seen in previous lectures that Genesis claims no divine warrant for its statements and that modern discoveries have squarely contradicted its account of creation and the Eden incidents. The origin of man and his primitive condition and subsequent behavior as told by biology and history leave no place for the Gen- esis stories save among the legends of the past. That those legends have been made the basis of a tremendous system of theology is not the fault of their authors. That that system of theology must fall with their fall from history to legend is inevitable and, on the whole, desirable, (b) As to the teachings of St. Paul let us be candid. We must admit that he is not consistent. In one place he declares that man can do nothing toward his own salvation, that 138 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION God can save and God alone — thus teaching that man is to be saved by faith ; but in another place he tells men to work out their own salvation with fear and trembling, thus implying that man can do something toward saving himself and indicating that faith, simple faith, is not all that is necessary to salvation. Paul does indeed lay stress on the saving efficacy of Christ's death, but he also emphasizes the saving power of Christ's life, for he distinctly says : "Beholding, as in a glass, the glory of the Lord, we are changed into the same image from glory to glory, as by the spirit of the Lord." Christ's illustrious life draws men who study it intently and lovingly unto itself, and it will draw them until they all attain unto " a full-grown man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ." Paul's definition of salvation is the same as Jesus', namely, the reconciliation of man to God. With Paul as with Jesus, it is man who needs to be reconciled to God,~not vice versa, as the creeds would have us believe. Here are his words : " God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself." We must admit that in Paul's theology this reconciliation is effected through the mediation and death of Jesus, but whether Paul teaches that man's part in the process is purely a passive one, a matter of faith and faith alone, it is impossible to determine from the Apostle's writ- ings, simply because, as I have pointed out, he is not consistent. His statements are contradictory. Under the circumstances, it is scholarly and proper to turn to Jesus and accept his ideas on the subject. A Christian should accept Jesus before and above Paul, just as he ought to accept Jesus before and above the creeds. And in fol- lowing Jesus we come, as has been shown, to regard salvation as he did, — as deliverance from sin, through personal endeavor after the righteousness of God. SALVATION 139 The Universalist Doctrine of Salvation. With the present " evangelical " theory of salvation thus over- thrown bv the language of Jesus, we needs must o-ive the race a new and better one. I would never take any religious idea from any man, no matter what the idea was, unless I could give to him immediately something better in its stead. A mere destructionist is not a true follower of Jesus, nor a true friend of humanity. Christ came not to destroy but to fulfill. He had to destroy in order to fulfill, but his aim was fulfillment rather than destruction. And that has been my aim throughout these lectures. If I have seemed iconoclastic it has been because it was impossible to be constructive without first tearing- down. It is the purpose of my Church to build up faith rather than shatter or abolish it. We deny in order to affirm. We would take away what we believe to be neither true nor wholesome, that we may give what is true and good. Accordingly, the Universalis! church comes to men concerning this great subject of salvation, and says : "Come, let us reason together. Let us ask ourselves frankly and seriously, what does man as we know him really needs to be saved from ? What do we ourselves stand in need of deliverance from ? " How shall we deter- mine the matter? By what the creeds say? By what the Bible says ? Or, by an appeal to our own nature and condition? I believe Professor Du Bose speaks the truth in saying : " What salvation means and specifically what our salvation means is a matter primarily not determined by creeds, not by scripture, not by divine revelation, but by the facts of our own nature and condition." To arrive at a clear and true knowledge of what man stands in need of salvation from, we must study man in the light of his origin, present condition, and possible destiny. We must 140 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION also see what the forces are outside him, as well as within him, that tend to retard or defeat his progress toward his destiny. It is a difficult study, but if it be made wisely and perseveringly it will lead us to understand the what and the how of human redemption. What We Do Not Need to be Saved From : (1.) A personal Devil. Milton's "Paradise Lost" and Dante's " Inferno " have made Satan as vividly real as any diabolical myth could be made, but modern knowledge and modern orood sense are fast relegating Satan to the poems that have enshrined him ; and those poems are rapidly accumulating the dust of neglect. The whole notion of a personal Devil is a pagan notion, and it has been stabbed through the heart by the sword of investiga- tion in the hands of science and philosophy. The idea that a malevolent being is warring with God and tempting men is irrational, and even unscriptural. James gives us the New Testament idea of source of temptation and sin where he says : " Each man is tempted by his own lust, being drawn away by it and enticed. Be not deceived, my beloved brethren." (2). Man needs no rescue from a personal evil adversary, neither does he need to be saved from an angry God, for if Jesus spake of and represented God truly, as we believe he did, God is not wrathy with us. God knows our frame ; he remembers that we are dust ; that we are frail; that we contend against heredity and unhappy circumstances at times. Like as a father pities his children so the Lord pities them that dread him, — he looks sorrowfully on those that fear him, sad to think that his children could so misunderstand him as to imagine that he hates them. No, beloved, God is not wrathy with us. If the flowers in the spring-time, if the birds in the leafy SALVATION 141 trees, if the blue sky above, if the white blanket on the earth to-night, if the sanity of man, if the satisfactions that lie everywhere for all the best and noblest longings of our souls sig;nifv anything, thev attest God's love for us. " The ancient Gods are dead, No Roman despot sits on heaven's throne, Dispensing favors by his will alone; Sends some to heaven and some to lowest hell, In nnprogressive woe or bliss to dwell; Demands no horrid sacrifice of blood, Nor nails his victim to the cruel wood In others' guilty stead. " The ancient Gods are dead. Law rules majestic in the courts above And has no moods, but, hand in hand with love, Sweeps through the universe, and smiling, sees The spheres, obedient to her vast decrees, Proclaims all men the sons, not slaves, of God, And breathes the message of his Fatherhood. The true God is not dead." Here is the fact : God hates sin. He does not want it and he will not have it in his universe. But he loves the sinner, not because he is a sinner, but because he is his child. And what is more, God suffers with the sinner, as every loving parent suffers when its child does evil. Therefore, it would be truer to say we need to be saved from a loving rather than an angry God, that is, we need to be helped out of a state of living which causes our heavenly Father's heart to bleed. (3). Another thing we do not or should not want to be saved from is merited punishment for wrong-doing. One of the worst doctrines that has ever been taught to men is that they can escape punishment for sin and that they should try to do so. It is a vicious idea that leads any man to think that he can by any possibility avoid or evade the consequences of his sinfulness, or his disregard of 142 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION natural laws. The Universalist church has, of late years, set its face sternly against such a monstrous doctrine. It has said, although people persist in misunderstanding and misrepresenting its teachings, that the consequences of evil are unescapable. " Though hand joined in hand, the wicked shall not go unpunished " ; " Whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap." Those are Universalist texts. They should never fade from the memory of any mind. We believe in punishment ; in its absolute certainty, both in this world and the world to come if deserved there as it is here. We believe that punishment for sin is not deferred ; it comes right along with the sin as its concom- itant. As virtue is its own reward, so sin is its own retribution. You can imagine no worse consequence of sin than sinfulness, although there are other dire results that flow from it. The Universalist church says that man should not want to have it otherwise than that sin be surely and always punished, because we look upon punish- ment not as wholly retributive. It is also reformatory. If there were no severe consequences to sin, we might doubt if men would ever quit sinning. " For sin's so sweet, that minds ill-bent, rarely repent ; until they meet their punishment." The effects of sin help on the repentance and reclamation of the sinner. We know this. We see it every day. Therefore, we teach that there is a purpose in punishment ; it is not dictated by a revengeful nor sternly just God, but it cOmes from a loving Parent to admonish and reform a loved, though erring, child. Here is the true idea of the source and intention and result of punishment, fresh from the pen of the writer to the Hebrews — fresh I say, because for centuries it has not been promulgated from any " evangelical " pulpit and is therefore new to most people : — SALVATION 143 " Whom the Lord loveth lie chastenetli. God dealeth with you as with sons. We had fathers of our flesh to chasten us, and we gave them reverence. They, verily, for a few days chastened us as seemed good to them ; but he for our profit, that we may be partakers of his holiness. All chastening seemeth for the present to be not joyous, but grievous : yet afterward it yieldeth peaceable fruit unto them that are exercised thereby, even the fruit of righteousness." This is the only Christian and rational idea of punish- ment : punishment the chastisement of a good God, visited upon the sinner for his profit, that he may become holy as God is holy. It satisfies every normal mind to know that punishment is both inevitable and profitable. There is justice and mercy in such an arrangement : there is no justice and no mercy, truly speaking, in punishment that is purely retributive and endless ! What are we arguing for to-day with regard to criminals? We are arguing that they be punished for every crime they commit, whether they be rich or poor, but we are also demanding that the punishment be of a reformatory nature. We want our criminals to be so disciplined that they will come out of prison disposed and able to live upright. The demand of this age is for reformatories rather than for jails : disciplinary punishment rather than simple imprisonment. How far ahead in its sociolgy and penol- ogy Christendom is than in its theology ! How much better we are to entertain this idea ; yes, how much better the people of Maine are to have abolished capital punish- ment, than God is, if it be true that he punishes for the sake of punishing and even goes to the length of tormenting his victims forever rather than to mercifully annihilate them ! I suspect the humanity of this age, and particularly of the next, will effectually rid us of all these 144 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION horrible and really blasphemous notions of God's purpose in punishment and the duration thereof. The doctrine of the future, as it is the Universalist doctrine to-day, will be that of Christ, who said : " Verily thou shalt not come out thence until thou hast paid the last farthing," — announcing the certainty and sufficiency of punishment, and of his Apostle who said : "Afterward it — chastisement — will yield the peaceable fruit of righteousness unto them that are exercised thereby" — announcing the amendatory nature of punishment. What We Need to be Saved From. Now if we are not to be saved from a personal Devil, a wrathy God, nor the consequences of sin and folly, what do we stand in need of deliverance from? Just two things. (a). One of them is sin. The Bible is exactly right in teaching over and over again that man needs to be delivered from sin and should pray and strive for such deliverance. Sin is a fact. It is not an illusion nor a delusion, but a terrible reality. What is sin? It is con- scious disobedience of a moral law. If I steal, I sin. If I lie, I sin. If I think an impure or evil thought, I sin. I sin in these acts because I do what is neither according to the will of God nor good for society nor good for myself. Now, all men sin. Is there one here to-night who can say he never consciously violated a moral law? Not one. We all stand in need of salvation from sin. We need something to help us never to knowingly transgress the moral law. We not only need this salvation but there are times when we want it terribly. Have we never wrestled with sinful desires, as Paul wrestled ? Have we not said, as he did, " I delight in the law of God after the inward man ; but I see a different law in my members, SALVATION 145 warring against the law of my mind. wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me out of the body of this death?"' Sin is one of the facts of human life that all men need to be saved from. (b). But is this all? Is sin the only thing we need to get rid of? "What of ignorance ? What of superstition ? What of intellectual and emotional weakness ? What of the imperfections characteristic of humanity? Do we not need deliverance here too ? Verily, we do. Rid us entirely of sin, and we are not by any means what we are to be. Take away from our minds and hearts all jealousy and envy and malice, every lust ; cleanse us, make us pure, whiter than snow, and we are by no means "full-grown men." We have made a splendid stride toward destiny, but the journey is by no means at an end. Not until man is symmetrical, mentally and emotionally, as well as morally, is he fully saved. Human incompleteness as well as human sinfulness has to be overcome before the race stands upright in the perfection and glory of God. Therefore, sin was not the occasion of salvation, as the creeds assume. If man had never sinned, he would still have needed to be saved, simply because he has been and is imperfect. He has not yet attained. He has ever been stretching toward the goal of a completed manhood. What Salvatiox Is. Salvation, then, is a larger word than it is commonly thought to be. It covers that process by which mankind is delivered out of all its evil and all its imperfections. " Salvation for man must be not only from his evil to his good but from all his evil to all his good." And the process in salvation is growtli in manhood and womanhood, or, in one word, growth in character. Calvin said: " Salvation by grace " ; Luther said : " Salvation by faith " ; Universalists say : " Salvation 10 146 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION by character." We point to Jesus Christ as the typical man, as the only man who has attained salvation in this world, and say that when other men are like him they are saved, and not before. So that when we are asked : "Is a righteous life necessary to salvation ? " we answer, as Lyman Abbott did : " We do not think a righteous life is necessary to salvation ; a righteous life, if by that is included character, is salvation ! " How We are Saved. Have I time to suggest how our salvation is to be accomplished? I must be brief. Here are the two things we are to be saved from : Sin and Imperfection. How are we to compass this great result? In the simplest of ways, namely: "By co-oper- ating with God." " God is our Saviour," says Paul, " and he wills that all men shall be saved," God has filled the world with uplifting influences, and it is man's duty to discern these helps to destiny and lay hold of them and work in harmony with them. The deliverance desired must be gradual, because character comes slowly, but it comes surely to those who want it and are willing to endeavor for it. We may rest assured that we can all attain a God-like character. There is a fine verse in the old prophet Micah. It reads: "If I am a father, where is my honor?" In that God is our Father, his honor is bound up in our future. He is in honor bound to see that his children attain their highest good. He is pledged to them on the score of his Fatherhood to furnish the means whereby they can triumph over sin and incompleteness. Therefore, we may be sure that God has not left himself without a witness in any land or any age. We may rely on it that his world is filled with agencies calculated to bear men on to blessedness. SALVATION 147 Agencies ix Salvation. Think of some of them. Think of instinct, think of climate, think of nature * system of rewards and punishments, think of conscience. They are inviting and constraining men to sin no more ; to be perfect as their Father in heaven is perfect. Think of the two strongest incentives to progress toward perfec- tion that God has planted in every human breast, — the desire for happiness and the thirst for holiness. Take this desire for happiness. How insatiable it is ! How universal ! How uplifting ! \Ve see its mighty part in the development of the race when we realize that it is the underlying cause of trade, commerce, invention, science, education, government, society and the home. \Vhv do men trade? To get those things which minister to their comfort. Why this vast and magnificent exchange of produce called commerce? That men may tret monev to buy those things which will make them, as they suppose, happier. Why all the inventions of this inventive age ? if not to reduce the wear and tear of life and lighten its burdens. Why all the progress and activities of science ? Is it merely for the sake of knowl- edge, or is it to bless humanity through the channels of medicine, surgery, and hygiene? Education is carried on in the faith that knowledge will relieve men of the follies and vices of ignorance. Government is the expression of the desire to avoid anarchy, turbulence, and war, and to secure and preserve peace with its sweet amenities. Society is the growth of the wish to live amicably with one's neighbors and to get the encouragement and cheer o e o which such intercourse brings. The home is a signal example of man's dream of felicity, and his honest and beautiful purpose to find it, if it can be found anywhere on earth. 0OOD ought i'(>n\i ; men, themselves anii opines* themselves imbued --- it h the pui plea-<; and inspire their fellows. P j of faitfj peare, Wordsworth, Brcv .-.. and Whittier; it. ha- J has produced Copernicus and Galileo, Kepler and R ton, Btrffira, Lmn&us and Cuvier, Darwin, Wall : and philosophy in it-, splendid endeavor to reveal the mind of the Inft added Plato and Aristotle; Kant and H' aiming to leenre die right* of the people and to establish dei ight forth Burke and Chatham; Washington and Jef f er s on and Lincoln. Arid who can measure die influence for good that these men hare had upon the development of die race? Who v. ill -;>-, that these men hi d no part in wiving the Id ? 'I o my mind, the poets, die authors, die seienti die philosophers, die statesmen have been instrumental under the ordination of God in helping hum* ard salvation. But a mightier factor in human redemption than the longing for happiness has been the thirst for holim If, has been felt by men everywhere. 8aj what we will about the depravity of human nature, if is too true to be denied that amidst all his wickedness -Hid beastliness, man ha i ihown a hunger and thirst for something better. Jn his lowest depths he has cried out for the i. i d. His heart has panted for the watei brooks of goodni This thirst i'<>r holiness, iik<: the desire for happh has manifested itself. If is seen in die religious institu- tions, and teachers, and examples of die world. Sacri- SALVATION 149 fices, rituals, churches, precepts, prayers ; ;ill these are expressions of man's thirst for God and his righteousness. Religion has been well defined as "man's search for God/ 1 And as tin- search has gone on — we note it- beginnings in the dim ristas of history — eers find prophets and Leaders have arisen, each one bringing to eager humanity a message from the unseen and yet everywhere-present God. And the fad thai the religious leaders of the race have always secured the first hearing, indicates thai man instinctively l'<-<-.\~ that his religious interests are more important than his secular and temporal concerns. There- fore, the religious teachers have led the wrorld whitherso- ever they Listed, and, under God's providence, their Lead- ings have been safe and upward. Certain men have seen more of God than their fellows, and have told of their insights. They became great Leaders. They have been eminent among the saviours of the race. Pre-eminent among them all is Jesus of Nazareth. Now, through innumerable agencies, and especially these two just dwelt upon — the desire for happiness and the thirst for holiness, and the men who have ministered to and intensified and refined these desire — it is clear that God has been intent on developing the race and bringing humanity to its predestined stature. God has done and is doing lii- part . But God is not doing it all, nor indeed can be, Man i- a free agent, and has something to say about the matter of lii- salvation, and something to do towards it. Hence, (j<>(\ waits for man to co-operate with him ; to exert his will power in becoming what he was destined to become and in helping others to the same dignity and glory of attainment . We are to work out our own salvation, even with fear 150 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION and trembling, knowing this, that it is God who worketh in us both to do and to will of his own good pleasure. What God demands of you and me in order that we may be perfected is that we obey all the promptings of and appeals to our better nature and "deal justly, love mercy, and walk humbly before him." Nothing supernatural about our part ! Nothing magical in our salvation ! If through sin we arc disunited from God, we must through repentance and obedience become united with him again. Since through natural incompleteness we are still .short of the glory of the final man, we must aspire and achieve until we attain that glory. Christ's Part jn Salvation. Do you ask what part Christ plays in this scheme of salvation? Let me illustrate the answer. 1 Every soldier recalls the battle of Cedar Creek. You remember that the Union troops defeated General Early at Winchester and Fisher's Hill, and camped at Cedar Creek during the night. Their General was at Winchester, little dreaming that the enemy would renew the battle. But under cover of a dense fog and the darkness of early morning, the enemy stole in upon the Union troops, and a terrible rout began. Sur- prised, dazed, without a leader, they were beaten back and back by the enemy, leaving the dead and wounded along the path of defeat. The ■ nag was furled and the artillery wheeled backward unloaded. Sheridan heard the cannonading from Winchester, and knowing the importance of his presence, he put spurs to his coal-black steed. As he passed the fugitives along the road, he shouted, "Turn, boys, turn, we're going back." All at once a sergeant, standing on an eminence, descried in the distance a dark 1 Illustration suggested by Rev. Marion D. Shutter, D.D. SALVATION L5I object moving swiftly along the road. It was Sheridan and his war steed. The sergeant began to shout : "Sheri- dan is coming 1 Sheridan is coming!" Others caught his words as they sounded along theentire line: "Sheridanis coming!" Wha1 a change came over the repulsed and beaten army. The retreat was stopped. Every man turned right about and grasped his musket with a firmer hand. And when the intrepid General dashed among them he led them to a glorious triumph and retrieved the shat- tered fortunes of the day. Whatwroughl the transforma- tion? Faith, saving faith, in the military sense. Every man in that army believed in Phil. Sheridan ; believed in his generalship; believed in him as victory incarnate; and the soldierly qualities in Sheridan made a soldier of every man in the ranks. He saved them by the inspiration of his personality. So JeSUS Christ saves humanity '. at/ means of his personality and great assurances. He attracts men to him and holds them until they rout their adversa- ries. He came to men in his own day; men who were surprised by the forces of sin and iniquity and were; being rapidly worsted ; fleeing, many of them, they knew not whither. To the .Jews, the Romans, the (i reeks, Jesus came and cried : "Turn, brothers, turn ; follow me. I have Overcome the world!" He comes to men to-day; men who are sinful and wretched ; men who are being Steadily pushed back and Under by the treatment aeeorded them in this still semi-( 'hrist i;m age; and he erics : "In the world ye shall have tribulation, hot he of good cheer; I have overcome the world. Follow me." And to those who heai- his voiee and listen, he gives inspiring and saving assurances. Of God he says: "God is your father ; be is interested in yon ; he is your Saviour; and thus nivcs men what they need — hope in God." lie also says : " You 152 GOOD SEH8E IH RELIGION are a child of God : an heir of perfection : you can become rod. knowing good and evil but choosing only the good. I exemplify the dignity and capacity of human nature : of your nature : of every human soul.'" And thus he gi men hope in themselves. Then he turn- to other men and says : " These also are children of God ; divine by nature : to be made divine in character. Appeal to them ; work with them ; your efforts will not be in vain." And man has hope in man. Thus, led by Christ's matchless and magnetic personality and ringing words, to hope in God. to hope in self, to hope in man. the race is following Jesus : lifted up, he is drawing all men unto his stature ; men are mounting inch by inch the hill of perfection, through personal endeavor after likeness to it. and we may be sure that they will stand at last on its summit-. "Where he leads, I'll follow, follow all the way." we sing. If we are true to our -ong ; if we follow Je ail the way — if we live his life of inward truthful r - and outward devotion to God and man, we shall leave our sinfulness and imperfections behind us forever and be at _rh as he was — at one with God. at one with -elf. at one with man — saved ! LECTURE VIII HELL • If I be a Father, where is mine honor? '" — Malachi i.. 6. A question that thoughtful persons might profitably ask concerning the momentous subject of the fate of the wicked, is this : "Why does any one doubt, and seek to get others to doubt, that the doom of the sinful is eternal punishment? What is the motive in such a denial r" Speaking for the Universalis! Church, it can be said that our motive for continuing an organized crusade against the dogma of unending punishment is three- fold : First, we want to see the truth prevail. Secondly, we love God and cannot stand passively by and hear a dor-trine preached which to »>ur mind blasphemes Iris holy name and impeaches his honor. Thirdly, we are laboring in the intere-t ot humanity by seeking to rid it of this idea which Calvin himself pronounced "horrible." and which is the cause of bad religious practices and expectations and the source of much acute suffering. AVe see a great deal of unnecessary and very cruel pain Buffered by those who believe or are taught to believe in everlasting torment for the wicked. A physician said: -*I have seen to-day the most pathetic thing that I have ever seen in the range of my professional life. I attended a little child, live or six years ot' age. delirious with fever. She was talking incoherently and I bent down to hear what she was saying. As I listeued I heard her saying, plaintive, piteous tones. 'God save me from hell."" 154 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION Children, little children, have trembled under the fear of eternal torment ; grown-up people have even been crazed by it. A mother in Newcastle killed herself in a fit of desperation caused by the thought that her only daughter who had died outside of the church had gone to hell. A widow called me into her home the other day and asked, with tears running down her cheeks, if there was any hope for her husband who had died and was not a church member. Her own pastor, a Methodist, had told her there was no hope for him. These are but hints of the untold and unseen pain caused by the doctrine of everlasting punishment. It shadows many a life that else would be brave and cheerful and useful. It is a heartless, cruel dogma ; and in the name of God and humanity the Universalist Church renounces it. It is time that a doctrine which throws little children into deliriums, that crazes mothers, and sends widows through long years with bleed- ing and hopeless hearts — it is time that such a fearful dogma were looked at fairly and squarely by every genuine lover of his race and given its true place, — among the pagan notions of a pagan past. These three motives, love of the truth, love of Grod, and love of man, explain why Universalists have felt it their duty to deny this pre- vailing doctrine of Christendom and to submit to the persecution in the form of ostracism and obloquy that it has been their lot to bear. Now, it should be more generally known than it seems to be, that Universalists believe in the absolute certainty of punishment. The lecture on Salvation shows con- clusively that we teach that the consequences of sin are inevitable. "Though hand joined in hand the wicked shall not go unpunished." The crusade of Universalism is not against the doctrine of retribution, but against the HELL 155 dogma of endless punishment. Universalists rest their denial of unending torment on Biblical, Christian, and philosophical grounds. With the philosophical argument against everlasting punishment, I deal in the lecture on Annihilation. My present purpose is to show the Biblical and Christian reasons for disbelieving the dogma. © © A Change in Orthodoxy. It is evident that ortho- doxy has given up the old-fashioned idea of hell fire and brimstone as the abode of the wicked. According to the preaching of to-day, eternal punishment is to be mental and spiritual rather than material. This is a prophetic departure, and Universalists are pleased to find some of the "evangelical" clergymen giving the credit for it to © ©- © © whom it largely belongs. The late Rev. Frank Hinman, © © a Presbyterian, said: "Universalism lias done a good work for us all. It has eliminated forever the idea of a literal hell of fire and brimstone. It has re-emphasized the idea of the sublime love of God and taught orthodoxy a lesson in that the world was to be won more by an exhi- bition of love than by an exhibition of wrath. In many ways it is doing: a grand work for the world." "We are © © thankful for such appreciative words from so unexpected a source. We assure such kindly critics that we mean to go on in our grand work. Our mission in this direction is not ended : it can never end until the idea of unending punishment of any sort is abolished from Christendom. It is a relief to us that orthodoxy has given up the hell- fire aspect of future punishment, for we no longer need to explain texts which speak of punishment in or by fire. Such passages as, "The angels shall come forth and sever the wicked from among the righteous, and shall cast them into the furnace of fire:" and, "Depart from me, ye cursed, into the eternal fire which is prepared for the 156 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION devil and his angels," are being explained to-day by evan- gelicals as metaphorical. They are saying, what we have said for years, that they must be understood figuratively as expressing the severity of the punishment for sin and not literally as explaining the manner in which sinners are to be tormented. So far, so good. But can we not take a step farther? Can we not fairly say that the Bible not only does not teach endless punishment in fire, but that it does not teach endless punishment at all? Let us see. No Doctrine in the Old Testament. To every Bible student, it is plain that the Old Testament has no doctrine as to the fate of the good and the bad beyond the grave. Sheol is the word uniformly used in the Old Testament to designate the abode of all the dead. Sheol meant to the Jew what grave means to us — the place where the dead are buried. Those who gave us the old version of the Old Testament translated this word sheol, hell — a thing they were not justified in doing. The revised version of the Old Testament has changed the translation and substituted sheol for hell in every important place. Hence, instead of reading in Psalm ix., for instance, that "the wicked shall be turned into hell," we read that "the wicked shall return to sheol," that is, they shall die and be buried. In the earliest days, the Jews looked upon sheol as a place where the dead — good and bad — were in a perpetual, dreamless sleep. In later times, several centuries before the birth of Jesus, they began to think that the dead in sheol were dimly conscious, flitting about like shadows, and waiting to be resurrected. The resurrection, however, was to life on this earth. The good Jews were to come forth and be forever happy ; and the evil were to come forth, and be forever banished. That is the meaning of Daniel xii., 2 : "And many of HELL 157 them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to everlasting contempt or abhorrence." The idea of hell and its torments, such as is familiar to us, never entered the heads of the Jews in Old Testament times. Professor Crawford H. Toy, of Harvard Divinity School, assures us that, "the conception of hell is not found in the Old Testament ; there is no local distinction in sheol between good and bad ; no apparatus of reward and punishment. The reward of the righteous is long life on earth (Prov. iii., 16) ; the punishment of the wicked is premature death (Prov. x., 27) . The first departure from the old conception of the future is found in the book of Daniel (xii., 2) in connection with the idea of resurrection ; of those Israelites who are raised to life, it is said, some will be happy and some wretched." It is, therefore, plain that the Old Testament throws no explicit light upon the fate of the good and bad in the other world. For information on this subject we must rely wholly upon the New Testament. And it is rather significant, that except in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke and the book called Revelations, almost nothing is said of hell in the Xew Testament. The book called Revelations has puzzled the best scholars. It is hardly understood to-day. I think Professor Toy has given us the substance of its teachings in these words : " Revelations pretends to give a complete sketch of the fortunes of the earthly kingdom of God. The main point of this sketch is the double judgment. The destruction of the Roman Empire is followed by the imprisonment of Satan for a thousand years and by the first judgment. Those who had been beheaded for the testimony of Jesus and had not wor- shiped the beast — that is, had not acknowledged the religious authority of the Empire — are restored to life (the first resur- 158 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION rection), and reign with Christ a thousand years. At the end of this millennium, Satan is loosed from prison, and advances at the head of the innumerable hosts of Gog and Magog to attack the camp of the saints and the beloved city. Fire descends from heaven and devours the anti-godly army ; the devil is cast into the lake of fire along with the beast and the false prophet (the political and religious enemies of the faith) , and there they are to be tormented forever and ever. There- upon follows the general judgment, where every man is judged according to his works, and whoever is not found written in the book of life — that is, is not a believer in Jesus — is cast into the lake of fire. Then the first heaven and the first earth pass away, a new heaven and a new earth come, God makes his dwelling with men, and from the eyes of his people all tears are wiped away. There is a city, a new Jerusalem, which shines with an everlasting divine light, and a life radiant with everlasting divine blessedness." "It is evident that the body of this description was taken from the books of Ezekiel, Isaiah, aud Enoch." "The details of the picture belong to the thought of the times. By the author and many others of that generation, doubtless, the fulfillment of the prediction was believed to be imminent." There are those who still wait for the fulfillment, but their number is small and decreasing. Christianity has practically given up the idea of Christ's coming in millennial splendor, just as it has given up the notion of a lake of fire into which the wicked were to be tormented forever. Hence, it is only necessary for me to make clear the mean- ing of Revelations to have it ruled out of the evidences bearing upon the question of the fate of the good and bad in the other world. It relates wholly to this world ; it predicted things that were to happen ages ago, some of which happened ; others of which did not . Revelations has had really little favor in the church in recent centuries. HELL 159 Luther pronounced it, "neither apostolic nor prophetic;" and Zwingli said that it "was not a Biblical book ;" that it ought not to be in the Bible. The Biblical sources, then, of information as to the fate of the wicked beyond the grave are narrowed down to the Gospels, particularly the Synoptics, and the writings of Paul. The Teaching of Jesus. Every candid reader of the sayings of Jesus reported in the Synoptics, must admit that Jesus seems to have taught contradictory doctrines as to the outcome of life. One set of sayings attributed to him, seem to endorse the dogma of everlasting punish- ment ; another set seem to support the theory of universal salvation. For instance, we read that Jesus said: "The angels shall come forth and sever the wicked from among the righteous, and shall cast them into the furnace of fire." "Depart from me, ye cursed, into eternal fire which is prepared for the devil and his angels." "And these shall go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life." He is also said to have uttered the parable of Dives and Lazarus, which seems to lift the curtain between this world and the next and shows us the condi- tion of the good and the bad over there. Now, passages like these, seem to prove that Jesus believed in hell fire and unending punishment. And if these were the only sayings of his on the subject, we might fairly conclude that he did believe in hell fire and endless torment. But we find him making such confident and optimistic declarations as these : "It is not the will of your heavenly Father that one of these little ones shall perish." "I beheld Satan fallen as lightning from heaven." "Be of good cheer, I have overcome the world." "And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me ;" a declaration 160 GOOD SENSE IN EELIGION which Elizabeth Barrett Browning interpreted poetically thus : " So shall I lift up in my pierced hands, Beyond the reach of grief and guilt, The whole creation." Jesus also spake certain parables bearing on the out- come of human life. The parable of the lost sheep, pictures himself searching until the last lost one is found ; and the parable of the Prodigal Son represents the most abased child of God arising and entering again into loving fellow- ship with his heavenly Father ; and the parable of the Good Shepherd contains the great assertion that "there shall be one fold and one shepherd." Now, passages like these, seem to prove that Jesus believed in the efficacy of his life and teachings to save all men, and looked forward to universal salvation. And if these were the only sayings of his on the subject we would all agree that he was a Universalist. One thing is certain, no man durst say, in the face of the passages last quoted, that Jesus does not seem to teach the ultimate deliverance of all men from all evil. The question arises : How are we to under- stand Jesus ? Must we confess that his teaching on this point is contradictory ? or, must we take an agnostic posi- tion, as some are doing, and say we do not know what Jesus really did teach about the final fate of the wicked? Or, may we interpret his language in a way to make it consistent with one of the two doctrines under discussion ? Did Jesus Contradict Himself ? I do not believe Jesus contradicted himself, neither do I believe that his reported sayings give us no positive light on the fate of sinners, and I think all the words he actually spoke may be interpreted in line with the doctrine of universal salva- tion. Let me show why I think so. HELL 161 I. Consider the character of Jesus and tell me if you feel that some of the fierce utterances attributed to him could have fallen from his lips, or that he could have believed that his God would punish his disobedient children forever. The character of Jesus is manifested to us both in his deeds and words. He went about doing good, principally to the poor, and sick, and sinful. We think of him as a gentle, patient, sympathetic, hopeful, compas- sionate man. He was most loving. " ' See how he loved! ' exclaimed the Jews As tender tears from Jesus fell." Do not our grateful hearts cherish this thought of a tender Jesus, and delight to dwell on it? Think also of gracious words he uttered : "Resist not him that is evil, but whosoever smiteth thee on thy right cheek turn to him the other also. Love your enemies, and pray for them that persecute you, that ye may be the sons of your Father who is in heaven ; for he niaketh his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and the unjust. For if ye love them only who love you, what reward have ye? Ye, therefore, shall be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect. What man is there of you who, if his son shall ask for a loaf, will give him a stone ? If ye, then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more shall your Father who is in heaven give good things to them that ask him ! All things, therefore, whatso- ever ye would that men should do unto you, even so do ye also unto them." Now it is a fair question whether a man who taught and obeyed such sentiments as these, ever, in his heart of hearts, believed in endless woe for a single human soul, not to say anything about endless woe for myriads of souls. Some have contrasted certain sayings attributed to Jesus, 162 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION and have said they could not believe that the same man uttered both sets of words. "After making due allowance for changes in his methods and manner, from the sharpness of the opposition he encountered, the contrast is too violent between the beatitudes and the sentence to eternal doom to believe that both came from the same lips.'*' Observe the striking differences of temper : "Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy." " Bind him hand and foot, and cast him out into outer dark- ness ; there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth ! " "Resist not him that is evil." "The angels shall come forth and sever the wicked from among the righteous, and shall cast them into the furnace of fire ! " "For if ye love them only who love you, what reward have you?" "Ye serpents, ye offspring of vipers, how shall ye escape the judgment of hell?" "Love your enemies, and pray for them that persecute you, that ye may be the sons of your Father who is in heaven." "Depart from me, ye cursed, into the eternal fire which is prepared for the devil and his angels ! " I knew George W. Chilcls. I knew his reputation as a philanthropist. I knew how he loved men ; how he gave his money and himself to the poor, and delighted in such service. I have read his noble estimates of human nature and human possibility. Now suppose I should hear some one say that George W. Childs had, on several occasions, furiously upraided the poor, denouncing them as lazy and worthless, and had called upon the State to hang every one of them ; suppose I should hear such sen- timents and sayings attributed to that great, warm-hearted man, what would be my immediate and proper reply? Why, I would say such language never was spoken by George W. Childs ; it is utterly opposed to his character HELL 163 and reputation ; some one has invented it and shamefully attributed it to him. My denial would be based upon the knowledge I had of "the perfect temper, the perfect refinement, the deep sympathy" of Mr. Childs. "How much more shall I say that the awful anathema, r Go, ye cursed, into eternal fire,' is inconsistent with the character of him who wept over Jerusalem, and prayed God to for- give even those who crucified him ! " Because my idea of Jesus, gained from the Gospels, is that of a man with a gentle and forgiving disposition, I find it hard to believe that he uttered the terrible words attributed to him, or that he thought and taught that the wicked would suffer endless misery. If he did utter those terrible sentences, then I believe that they must have meant something else to him and to those who heard them than they do to us in plain English. May it not be that a study of the original language will soften their effect and cause us to see that Jesus did not convey to his hearers what his words convey to us ? Search out the passages in which it is alleged that he teaches unending punishment. The chief text, of course, is in Matthew, where the judge is represented as saying, " And these shall go away into everlasting punishment but the righteous into life eternal." All controversy over this passage would cease at once if our evangelical brethren would admit what the context requires them to admit, that the "judgment" referred to here was to have taken place and did in substance take place within the life-time of many of those who heard Jesus speaking. Matthew Mark, and Luke report Jesus as saying : " Verily, I say unto you that this generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled." The catastrophe that he was prophe- sying was the destruction of Jerusalem, and the separation 164 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION of the sheep from the goats to which he referred was to occur after that calamity, while some standing before him were yet living. Looked at in this light, as it ought to be, the sentence of the judge had nothing to do with a general judgment in remote ages to come, and should no longer be quoted as supporting the theory of such a judg- ment and its sequel, — unending punishment. However, since it is insisted that the end of this world and a final judgment are here depicted, let us see if the sentence of the judge is equivalent to endless punishment or is simply indeterminate. Look at the language in its Greek form. The two words translated "everlasting pun- ishment" are, in Greek, "kolasin aionios," "aionios" being the adjective rendered "everlasting," and "kolasin" being the noun rendered "punishment." Now, "aionios" is from the noun "aion," which means "an age." Therefore, a literal translation of the Greek would be " age-lasting " or "age-long," and not everlasting or endless. In this translation we have the support of eminent scholars. Canon. Charles Kingsley of the Church of England said : "The word r aion' is never used in Scripture or anywhere else in the sense of endlessness. It always meant, both in Scripture and out, a period of time." So that, so far as the word "aionios" is concerned, the period of time is indefi- nite. To learn how long the period will continue we must determine the nature of the thing of which it is predicted. Prof. Moses Stuart, for many years an honored teacher in Andover Theological Seminary, says of "aionios:" "The different shades by which the word is rendered depend on the object with which ? aionios ' is associated." Now, in this case the object is "punishment." Therefore, to determine how long this punishment shall last, we must see what kind of punishment is referred to. And as we study the meaning HELL 165 of the word "kolasin," translated "punishment," we find that it means disciplinary and not retributive punishment. "Kolasis" means to prune, correct, improve. The kind of punishment which tends to the improvement of the criminal is what the Greek philosophers called "kolasis,"or chastisement. Plato shows that the word has only that meaning. Aristotle says that "kolasis"is corrective, and has in view the good of the offender. This being the case, the punishment referred to by the judge must come to an end by having reformed the one punished, or by finding him incorrigible and giving him up. Of this last alterna- tive I shall deal in my next lecture. What we should now bear in mind is that our text should be translated thus : " And these shall go away into age-lasting disci- plinary punishment," or, "these shall go away into the disciplinary punishment of the age to come," that is, the post-Messianic age. This interpretation confirms our dec- laration that the judgment referred to happened long ago during the Messianic age. The sentence upon the wicked was an indeterminate sentence. When a boy is sent to the Elmira Reformatory, the length of his imprisonment is not stated ; he is sent there with the understanding that he shall remain until worthy to come out and live an upright life. A similar sentence is pronounced by the judge in this parable upon those who were not followers of Jesus in deed as well as in word. And this is all we can etymologically or exegetically make out of this oft- quoted text, when we admit, for the sake of the argu- ment, that a final judgment is described by Jesus. It teaches the certainty of punishment, but it does not say how long that punishment shall last, simply because the judge did not presume to know how long it would take to reform the sinners under condemnation ! 166 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION Now some one may say, "if 'aionios' applied to pun- ishment means age-lasting, and not endless, then ? aionios ' applied to life means age-lasting, and not endless : there- fore, this passage does not teach that the righteous are to receive as their reward, endless life." Such may be the case, but not necessarily so. It may be that the two words " eternal life " form a phrase with a special mean- ing. Let us recall the words of Prof. Stuart: "The different shades by which the word r aionios ' is rendered depend on the object with which r aionios' is associated." Here the object is life. Does "aionios life" mean "immor- tal life"? Or, is "aionios life" a certain kind of life? It is evidently, from the usage of Jesus, not a quantity but a quality of life. Jesus uses the phrase "aionios life" or "eternal life" in a special sense. He defines his meaning thus : " And this is eternal life, to know thee the only true God and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent." Eternal life, then, is in knowing God. A quality or kind of life. Something different from immortal life or endless life. Eternal life is not necessarily future ; it may be had now. Jesus said: "He that believeth hath eternal life " ; a present possession to those who knew God as Jesus knew him. This being clear, the old argument that if this passage does not mean that the wicked are to be punished everlastingly, it does not mean that the righteous are to live forever, falls flat. The judge is neither referring to unending punishment or unending life. The life he speaks of may last forever, and it may not. Its duration depends on whether the soul is immortal and whether the soul that once has " eternal life " ever parts with it or not ; questions to be decided on other grounds than this text. This definition of eternal life as the quality acquired HELL 167 by a soul that knows God, suggests what the punishment referred to by Jesus may be ; it may be and doubtless is the state of a soul that does not know God, either through ignorance of the true God or through rebellion against him. It was Jesus' mission to reveal the only true God, or reveal God truly, in order that men might have " eternal life " and cease suffering from not knowing or not loving- God. Jesus prayed and labored that men might become one with God as he and God were one. Jesus had "eternal life" in its fullness. Every soul in harmony with God as he was would have that life also. And that Jesus believed such harmony was possible and that it would come is to be inferred from his radiant declaration : "And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me ;" that is, unto his stature or into his oneness with God. Did Jesus look upon this life as the only scene of his savior- ship ? Did he think that the fate of all souls was deter- mined this side of the grave ? Not if he meant all men when he said he would draw all men unto him ; not if Peter understood aright when he said that Jesus after his crucifixion went to the spirits in prison and preached to them and delivered them ! The Parable of Dives and Lazarus. We pass over the passages that speak of "eternal fire" and "un- quenchable fire " because our evangelical brethren, as I have shown, concede that they are metaphorical expressions ; and because the fires pronounced eternal and unquenchable have gone out ages ago ! Gehenna is no more ; and the worm that dieth not has been dead a thousand years ! We pass over these utterances, with the remark that at most they express the severity of the punishment for sin and not its duration, and come to the parable of Dives and Lazarus, 168 GOOD SENSE IN KELIGION which is so often used to picture the condition of the redeemed and the lost in the beyond. In studying this parable we should notice that Dives is not in hell, but, according to the revised and accurate version, in hades or the under-world, and that Abraham and Lazarus are there too. What their final and permanent abode and state shall be, the parable does not say. Canon Charles Kingsley aptly and suggestively says : " The parable of Dives and Lazarus is the one instance in which our Lord professedly opens the secrets of the next world. He\ there represents Dives as still Abraham's child, under no despair, not cut off from Abraham's sympathy, and under direct moral training, of which you see the fruit. He is gradually weaned from the selfish desire of indulgence for himself to love and care for his brethren, a divine step forward in his life, which of itself proves him not to be lost. The impossibility of Lazarus getting to him, or vice versa, expresses plainly the great truth that, each being where he ought to be at that time, interchange of place (that is, of spiritual state) is impossible. But it says nothing against Dives rising out of his torment, when he has learned the lesson of it, and going where he ought to go." This is the exposition of that troublesome parable by one of the greatest scholars the Church of England ever produced. And, you see, it is quite in line with the thought that the punishment of the wicked in the life to come is disciplinary, and not merely retributive. A Catholic priest has Shrewdly observed that "Dives must learn to make his appeal, not to father Abraham, but to Abraham's Father, and then the gulf of separation will be quickly crossed." In the light of what we have so far learned, are we not prepared to believe that Jesus did not teach endless HELL 169 punishment? indeed, are we not ready to say that the words hell and damnation should not appear in the Bible at all? Sheol, hades, gehenna and aionios are the Hebrew and Greek words that ought to be there ; and if they were, what would become of this dogma of endless misery? It would be relegated to the pagan notions of the pagan Canon Farrar, the great English divine, says : "I ask you where would be the popular teachings about hell if we calmly and deliberately erased from our English Bibles the three words, damnation, hell, and everlasting? Yet I say unhesitatingly ; I say, claiming the fullest right to speak with the authority of knowledge ; I say with the calmest and most unflinching sense of responsibility ; I say, standing here in the sight of God and my Saviour, and, it may be, of the angels and the spirits of the dead, that not one of these words ought to stand any longer in the English Bible." This earnest declaration of Canon Farrar, made before the Bible was revised, had its effect, for those words, with few minor exceptions, are ruled out of the revised version. The Teaching of Paul. The character of Jesus, and the teachings of Jesus, when interpreted according to their meaning in the original Greek, convince me that he did not believe in nor try to lead others to believe in end- less punishment as the fate of the wicked. And when I turn to Paul, I see that he understood Jesus as I do and as disbelievers in unending punishment do. Paul explicitly teaches that punishment is remedial. "No chastening seemeth for the present to be joyous, but afterwards it yieldeth the peaceable fruits of righteousness." With pro- phetic vision he pictures the future : " Till we all attain unto a full-grown man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. Then cometh the end, when he, 170 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION Christ, shall deliver up the kingdom unto God, even the Father ; when he shall have abolished all rule and all authority and power, for he must reign until he has put all enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death. And when all things have been subjected unto him, then shall the son himself be subjected to him, that did subject all things unto him, that God may be all in all." If we think Paul thought that in this final triumph of Christ there would be a single voice hushed in eternal death, we hear him saying: "For, as I live, saith the Lord, every knee shall bow to me and every tongue give praise to God." There shall be no absent knees ! no silent tongues ! for every knee shall bow and every tongue give praise. Paul's shout, " O grave, where is thy victory," vents his sublime belief that, "as in Adam all die so in Christ shall all be made alive." He sees the time when the seed of woman, as was prophesied in Genesis, has triumphed over the seed of the serpent, and sin and its consequences are abolished forever. Thus we rise from a study of the Bible feeling that it does not teach endless misery ; that its trend is steadily the other way ; and we are astonished that we and others have so long thought that such a horrible doctrine was warranted by the teachings of Jesus and his Apostles. We now see why thoughtful and devout and hopeful Christians in all ages have held the doctrine of the final holiness and happiness of the whole family of God, and why men like Canon Farrar, Phillips Brooks, Lyman Abbott, heroically and forever broke with the dogma of endless punishment. I will quote Canon Farrar in a minute. I now give the words of Lyman Abbott. He says : "I have long since for myself repudiated as unbiblical and unchristian the old, horrible nightmare that some of God's HELL 171 children will go on sinning and suffering forever ; that some- where in the corner of God's great universe there will be a little prison-house where malice and hate and cruelty and revenge and wickedness will be triumphant, and from which God and God's love will be forever barred out." Why does Lyman Abbott describe the dogma of end- less punishment as not only unbiblical but unchristian? Simply because it is inconsistent with the character and teachings of Christ as we have seen, and contrary to every Christian conception of God, as we shall see. II. Let me briefly give what I call the Christian argu- ments against endless misery. The Christian, as a direct and beautiful result of Christ's instruction and example, regards God as a Father, whose love of humanity is uni- versal and constant. 1. A Fatherly-God, says the Christian, must have a merciful and forgiving disposition. The dogma of endless torment repudiates this claim, for if there be millions in hell in whose behalf God makes no slightest effort, he is not merciful or his mercy is not like your mercy or mine. To say that God's justice has consigned them to such a fate, is to travesty that too often travestied term, for no man could possibly commit in the longest earth-life enough sins to deserve endless misery. But suppose he could and suppose such a sentence were strictly just ; would it be merciful? Even granting that justice had first say, would not mercy mitigate the penalty ? The most that justice could do would be to pronounce a sentence of endless torment ; the least that mercy could do would be to arrest that sentence short of endlessness, and the most that mercy, especially the mercy of our heavenly Father, would do — who can tell? Why the 172 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION Christian can tell, because he knows that God is forgiving, and more so than any human judge or parent. There is not a sinner alive, according to the current theology, who cannot, even in his dying breath, receive full and complete pardon of God. If that be so, is it possible that this for- giveness is withheld those on the other side of the grave ? Is it conceivable that the heathen and unbaptized, infants awake in eternity to suffer forever ? Are there prayers that arise from hell which never touch the heart of God ? voices from that awful abode which beseech him in vain? That is what the doctrines of probation and endless pun- ishment mean. It is no wonder that such a scholar and Christian as Dr. Briggs calls out and says that the doctrine of probation and judgment at death has no warrant in the scriptures, and he might have added that it is not sustained by the best Christian consciousness. Hell paved with infants' bones not a span long ! They used to believe that; but who believes it to-day? Hell populated with the heathen who never had the gospel preached to them ! They used to believe that ; but who believes it to-day ? Repentant souls in hell whose prayers the All-Father will not hear nor heed ! Who in his heart of hearts believes that? The Christian mind revolts from such conceptions. The God who is humane and merciful and forgiving surely cannot endure the sight of innocent babes in interminable agonies ; of benighted pagans in unceasing torments ; of penitent sinners in endless misery ! 2. Furthermore, the dogma of endless punishment is not consistent with the Christian idea that God is self- sacrificing. That, really, is the great revelation of God's character which Christ made to man. A Father, who not only watches and waits for the home-coming of his willful children, but one who goes forth in search of them, as a HELL 173 shepherd goes forth to find his last lost sheep ; caring not for the briars and sharp rocks ; thinking nothing of his lacerated flesh and bleeding feet ; thinking only of the strayed sheep and yearning to take it in his arms and bear it joyfully back to the incomplete fold. That is the reve- lation of God's attitude toward sinful men which Christ has given Christendom. God a father who sacrifices for the sake of his children. But the dogma of endless pun- ishment says that such a revelation is a lie and declares in a loud voice that God is just and that his justice is inex- orable. There is no sacrifice on God's part if it be true that men go out from his presence never to be searched for until found ; never to be prayed over and plead with until penitent and saved ! 3. But, gravest of all, the doctrine of endless pun- ishment libels the Christian idea of God as love. To-day, as never before, the pulpit of every sect dwells fondly and eloquently on this aspect of God's nature. Ex-President Robinson, of Brown University, speaking of the Baptist denomination, laments the fact that in the churches of his faith the preachers do not present God in the aspect of jus- tice and wrath as they did of old. He says : " They dwell upon his mercy and forgiveness. Now, the ever-recurring text is, God is love ! Justice and penalty are alluded to only in doubtful undertones, but his benevolence and love are dwelt on with never-tiring emphasis." This fact causes the good old doctor to complain and grieve. Thank God ! say I, that such a change has come about. Thank God ! for the words of another orthodox scholar, this time the Rev. Dr. Briggs, who, far from lamenting the change, grandly says : "The conception of God as love, rather than as just and wrathful, may destroy our logic, our syllogism, our systems 174 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION and our methods. But the love of God to the world is more important than all the systems ever devised by men. It will shine forever as the central sun of the universe, when all the creeds and theologies have been buried in the oblivion of the eternities. It will go on through the centuries of the world, darting its heavenly light, its beams of divine fire, and its regenerating and transforming movements, until the world knows that God loves the world, and the world adores him with loving worship." And as this consummation comes to pass, signs of which are everywhere seen, think you that the dogma of endless punishment will be longer believed ? As surely as men come to regard God as love, and to believe it truly and understand its import and the sweep of its gracious meaning, that surely must and will they deny the doctrine of endless punishment and reject it with horror. They will say, with John Foster, "I acknowledge my inability (I would say it reverently) to admit this belief in endless punishment together with a belief in the divine goodness, — the belief that God is love, that his tender mercies are over all his works." Write over this pulpit : "God our father, — humane, merciful, forgiving, self-sacrificing, and loving ; " and then add : " He condemns his disobedient children to endless misery." Write there those words, and let him believe them who can. I cannot. They violate every concep- tion I have of God. They stab my heart. And where is the Christian heart that the dogma of endless misery does not stab? I have met men who, intellectually, because they thought the Bible taught it or because their logic necessitated it, accepted the doctrine of endless punishment ; but I have yet to meet the person who will confess that the idea is thoroughly agreeable to HELL 175 his heart. The affections of the best hearts are all against the doctrine. And it is useless to tell a mother that she can be happy in heaven, knowing as she must know, that the sinful child she was instrumental in bringing into the world is in endless misery. There can be no heaven for her, nor indeed for anybody, so long as there is a hell and endless torment for somebody else. Mr. Moody told a story in my hearing, of a mother whose son was very wicked. He committed crime after crime, and she followed him from place to place, getting him pardon after pardon. Finally, he committed murder. She could not save him. He was hanged, but she begged his body that she might bury it decently. One day they found her form stretched across the mound above his grave, and in her pocket a request that she might be buried beside her boy. She had died of a broken heart. Mr. Moody said, great as was the love of that mother for a wicked son, greater was the love of God for his sinful children. And as I listened, two thoughts came in my mind. Would a God whose love was greater than that mother's be less faithful unto the end than she? And could that loving mother be happy in heaven knowing that her boy, over whom she had wept and for whom she had sacrificed and beside whom she had asked to be buried, was consigned to end- less torment ? And my heart said no ! to both questions. God, whose mercy endures forever, would not forsake one of his children, and that mother's heart would never be satisfied until her prayers and tears had saved her boy. There is no doubt that the Christian heart revolts from the idea of endless punishment. There are many Christians who have said and to-day say, with Canon Farrar : " I here declare, and call God to witness, that if the popular doctrine of hell be true I should be ready to resign all hope, 176 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION not only of a shortened but of any immortality, if thereby I could save, not millions, but one single human soul from what fear and superstition and ignorance and inveterate hate and slavish letter worship had dreamed and taught of hell. I call God to witness that so far from regarding the possible loss of some billions of aeons of bliss, I would here and now, kneeling on my knees, ask him that I might die as the beasts that perish and forever cease to be, rather than that my worst enemy should enter the hell described by Tertullian, or Minucius Felix, or Jonathan Edwards, or Dr. Pusey, or Mr. Furness, or Mr. Moody, or Mr. Spurgeon, for one single year. Unless my whole nature were utterly changed, I can imagine no immortality which would not be abhorrent to me if it were accompanied with the knowledge that millions and millions of poor, suffering wretches, some of whom on earth I had known and loved, were writhing in an agony without end and hope." But, dear reader, the doctrine of endless torment is not true. The Bible does not teach it ; the best Christian ideas are all against it ; the finest Christian hearts cannot entertain it. It is, as Lyman Abbott says, an " old, horrible nightmare," and humanity is waking from its bad dream, and will by and by be entirely awake. And then all men will sing with Oliver Wendell Holmes : " While in my simple gospel creed That ' God is love ' so plain I read, Shall dreams of heathen birth affright My pathway through the coming night ? Ah, Lord of life, though specters pale Fill with their threats the shadowy vale, With thee my faltering steps to aid, How can I dare to be afraid ? Is there a world of blank despair, And dwells the omnipresent there ? Does he behold, with smile serene, The shows of that unending scene HELL 177 Where sleepless, hopeless anguish lies, And ever dying, never dies ? Say, does He hear the sufferer's groan? And is that child of wrath His own ? O mortal, wavering in thy trust, Lift thy pale forehead from the dust! The mists that cloud thy darkened eyes Fade e'er they reach the o'erarching skies! When the blind heralds of despair Would bid thee doubt a Father's care, Look up from earth and read above On heaven's blue tablet, God is Love ! " 12 LECTUKE IX ANNIHILATION " I take great comfort in God. I think that he ... . would not let us get at the match-box so carelessly as he does unless he knew that the frame of his universe was tire-proof." — J. R. Lowell. In the lecture on Hell it was shown, conclusively I think, that the Bible in its original Hebrew and Greek languages does not teach unending punishment. It justi- fies an expectation of future punishment, but necessitates our believing that future punishment, being remedial and reformatory, like the chastisement of God in this world, will come to an end. It was argued that the trend of the Bible, the character and power of Jesus Christ and the nature and purpose of God all lead to the conviction that when the punishment for sin has ended it will have reformed all sinners, and, together with other salutary influences, will have made the family circle of the Heavenly Father complete and holy and happy forever- more. I would have left this subject of the ultimate fate of the wicked with the discussion in the previous lecture had I not desired to examine in your presence certain argu- ments, not especially drawn from the Bible, although in some particulars re-enforced by its language, which are being used to disprove or at least to cast a doubt upon Universal Salvation. These arguments come endorsed b} r one or two great names and are therefore likely to seem plausible and to trouble the thoughtful person who, though he may feel that the Bible does not teach endless ANNIHILATION 179 torment, may yet be loath to embrace Universalism because of these seemingly psychological and philosophical objec- tions to it. I will bring the theories before you, one by one, and criticise them as fairly and as fully as our time will permit. They all come under the general theory of Annihilation — the doctrine that sin leads to the utter extinction or blotting out of the sinner. To annihilate means to reduce to nothing or non-existence. Sin, it is argued, Avill sooner or later destroy the very existence of the sinner. "Permanency or Fixedness of Character." Before taking up the several theories of how sin tends to such a frightful issue, we will do well to consider quite an opposite, but equally terrible doctrine, namely: "Sin, instead of destroying the sinner, tends to so fix him in the habit of sinning that he must sin forever and therefore suffer eternally." This is the theory of the permanency of a sinful character. According to the teachers of this doctrine, this present life determines destiny. They argue that the habit of sinning may become so powerful this side of the grave that it cannot be broken up in the world to come. They also argue that no attempt will be made in the next life to save sinners. An impenitent sinner at death must and will remain an impenitent sinner end- lessly. Lost this side of the grave : lost forever ! The Rev. Joseph Cook is the most noted exponent of this idea. It is a doctrine quite widely preached in " Evangelical " churches. Of course it is built on the dogma that this life is a probed ion ari/ state. Show that the dogma of probation is untrue, and the advocates of the idea that life here determines destiny there, are all at sea, for if it be that a sinner may be converted after death there is no sufficient 180 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION reason for arguing that an impenitent sinner in this world must continue an impenitent sinner in that ; for it is quite as impossible for any one to say that a sinful character over there will remain sinful perpetually as it is to predict that a person with a sinful character here in our midst will continue sinful until death. We have seen some of the very vilest of sinners converted in this life : why not expect to see like transformations in the life to come ? The necessary thing to do, then, is to show that pro- bation is not taught in the Bible nor sanctioned by Good Sense. The simple fact is, the word "probation" is nowhere to be found in the Bible. In one place, Jesus says : " Except ye repent, ye shall all in like manner perish," but this statement does not limit the time of repentance to this life. Nothing is said as to when one must repent in order to save himself from perishing. Prof. Charles A. Briggs says that the Scriptures do not teach judgment at death ; that there must be a chance in the other world, especially for infants and the heathen. And The Outlook, an able and candid and fearless Evangel- ical weekly, not long ago declared that, "The doctrine that Christ's redemptive work ends for every man at death, or, in more popular phraseology, that there is no probation after death, is a dangerous heresy." It further pro- claimed the dogma to be unscriptural and backed up its bold assertion by such references as these : ' ' The Old Testament writers projected the divine mercy into the next world. ' For his mercy endureth forever ' was the refrain of one of their Temple psalms. In the New Testament, when Christ foretells the founding of his Church, he declares that the gates of hell — that is, hades — shall not prevail against it. How Christ achieves his triumph for his Church, Peter declares : He enters into the under world to proclaim his Gospel to the imprisoned spirits. What this triumph imports, Paul declares : ' The ANNIHILATION 181 Christ shall reconcile all things unto himself, whether things in earth or things in heaven, that is, in the spiritual and eternal world ; and in his name every knee shall bow, of those in heaven, and those in earth, and those in the under world. How complete this triumph shall be, the Apocalypse intimates : Death and Hades are themselves cast into the fire, the second death — that is, utter and irredeemable destruction. This is, in briefest possible compass, the Scriptural statement of that faith which has found expression in the oldest, most revered, most universally accepted creed of Christendom — the Apostles' Creed — ' He descended into hell ' — the place of departed spirits. The Christ carries his message and works his work of love there also." Not only is probation unfounded in the Bible, but it is not sanctioned by Good Sense. Where are we? In our Father's house ! This is one of his many mansions. We are members of his family. Dr. Munger reminds us that " Probation may be involved in the idea of a family, but it is not the spirit or end of it ; it is simply incidental. The father indeed educates his children for future use and responsi- bility ; but only in some indirect sense are they under proba- tion : they are not reared in an atmosphere of ' chance,' even though fair, or of an overhanging doom to be averted, but are children in the Father's house, reared in hope and love and freedom." " Certainly no education can go on without trial, but we are tried that we may be educated, and not educated that we may be tried. The essential characteristic of a Father's love is that it is inextinguishable. If I am here simply on trial, if I regard God as One Who is keeping a debtor and creditor account with me, I may in word call him Father, and in word ascribe love to Him, but I cannot regard Him as Father." The reasonable and Christian view of the situation is ' ' that we are not in the world to be tested, but to be trained under God's lessons." And, as Dean Stanley said, " In the transformation 182 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION of opinion which is imperceptibly affecting all our conceptions of the future state, and in the perplexities and doubts which this transformation excites, the idea that comes with the most solid force and abiding comfort to the foreground is the belief that the whole of our human existence is an education — not merely, as Bishop Butler said, a probation for the future, but an educa- tion which shall reach into the future." Having thus shown that we have reason to give up the dogma that this life is simply probationary and to vie^v our present experiences as preparatory to and preparing us for experiences to come, let us ask if it is credible that a habit of sinning acquired in this life could compel us to mi forever. Think of it : a habit of sinning acquired in this world compelling one to sin forever and ever ! Hon. P. T. Barnum once remarked : " The force of habit is indeed strong, but to say that three- score years and ten give a character momentum for eternity, is about like saying that a child's toy pistol gives a Krupp gun projectile momentum to go around the world a million times !" But let us exchange rhetoric for logic. Here is the final and sufficient answer to the argument that character can ever become fixed either for good or for bad. Char- acter can never become fixed. Neither in this world nor in any other can it be said of a good or a bad character that it is permanent : that it cannot be altered. Consider. In order to have what we call character, we must have liberty. A person must be able to choose between good and evil or else he cannot be good or bad, morally speaking. Do you not see that " liberty " and " final " condition are incompatible, for he who can choose can never get himself into a fixed or permanent state, even if he were to choose to do so ! The power of choice would imply the power to get out of it. Therefore final impen- ANNIHILATION 183 itence is an unpsychological fiction. And the phrase, " permanency or fixedness of character " is a contradiction of terms. Analyze the situation and see if this is not so. Dr. Orello Cone, in his monograph on Salvation, makes so fine an analysis that I will quote his words : "A man, it is said, may become fixed in a habit of sinning, so that he cannot do otherwise than sin — that is, cannot choose virtue. But he who cannot choose virtue cannot choose sin. To him who can do but one thing there is no choice ; and where there is no choice there can be no sin, since sin is the choice of wrong when right might have been chosen. On this theory, then, a man may exercise and develop his power to sin to such a degree that he is no longer able to sin at all ! The doctrine leads to an equal absurdity on the side of virtue. It involves a con- tradiction to say that a man may become fixed in doing right in the sense that he cannot do wrong. For to do right in the ethical sense implies a choice of right, and there is no choice of right to him who cannot choose wrong, since in a choice there must be two possibilities. He, then, who cannot do wrong is not a moral being, and cannot do right. Accordingly the phrase "permanency of character" is a contradiction. A permanent character would be no character at all, since charac- ter involves freedom of choice." Xow thoughtful people must see, and indeed are seeing, the absurdity of the argument for endless sin or perma- nent sinfulness on the ground that character can become fixed in evil here or in the beyond, and they are aban- doning the idea. Really, the only alternative to Universal Salvation is Annihilation. Endless torment and endless sin are neither possible in the nature of things, nor reconcilable with the Christian idea of God. Annihilation of obdurate sinners is a more merciful and a more plausible doctrine than any other, save that of Universal Salvation. If I could not 184 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION believe in the salvation of all souls, I would believe in the utter destruction of incorrigibles. But as I can believe, with reasons, in the final holiness and happiness of the whole family of mankind, I gladly do so. 1. Doctrine of Conditional Immortality. However, let us see on what grounds certain persons argue for annihilation. Those who hold the theory of conditional immortality, teach that immortal life is con- ditional ; that it is not a natural gift made to all men, but a prize and reward of virtue. Immortality is therefore conditioned on virtue. The more virtuous a man is, the longer he will live; the less virtuous, the sooner he will perish. The advocates of this theory do not say that all souls will not survive death : they do not fix any moment or epoch in which an unvirtuous or wicked soul ceases to exist. They say that while all men may survive the grave, it does not follow that all men will live forever and ever. They teach that only such souls as acquire (and keep ?) the life that was in Jesus Christ will exist perpetu- ally. They teach that Jesus came to give men immortality. Now there are just two things to be said to this rather complicated theory. First, its advocates do not interpret Christ's mission truly. Jesus said that he came that men might have life and have it more abundantly, but what did he say the life he brought was ? He called it " eternal life," not immortal life ; and, he defined his meaning quite explicitly by saying : "And this is eternal life, to know thee the only true God and Jesus Christ whom thou has sent," evidently a quality of life rather than a duration of life ; evidently something different from immortal life. 1 Jesus assumed that men were immortal. He told the Jews that God was not God of the dead but of the living, for !Seep. 166. ANNIHILATION 185 all lived unto him. He was surprised that they could believe any other doctrine. But Jesus did not assume that all men had this peculiar quality of life which he called ff aionion " or " eternal," and he made it his mission to help men acquire it, even in this world. Therefore, I say, those who teach that Jesus came to give men immortality misinterpret his mission. Our immortality, brethren, as I shall show in a coming lecture, is derived from our son- ship to God : it is not dependent on a belief or an acquisition ; it is, if you please, a free gift of God, but it is given to every soul by reason of its origin, and not by virtue of its knowledge of Jesus Christ or its personal goodness. The other criticism that I would make of the theory of Conditional Immortality from a Universalist standpoint is, that it would not affect our position even if it were Scriptural and philosophical, because we would still reply that God through Christ and other agencies would see to it that every soul became immortal. 1 2. Annihilation by Degeneracy. A much stronger case is made against Universalism by those who, admitting that the soul is naturally immortal and can never be obliterated, maintain that its possessor may lose his personality or cease to exist as a person, through per- sistent sinning. The advocates of this theory hold that sin, persisted in, instead of begetting a permanent sinful character, destroys character altogether, and wipes the sinner out of existence. Man, they say, by constant sinning may eventually lose his will power and his con- !The doctrine assumes that immortality is the supreme desire and supreme good of souls — a half truth. Souls desire to live on that they may attain blessedness. That is what Christ offers under the name of "eternal (or 'aionion') life." 186 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION science and therefore cease to be a man! His soul, being immortal, will live on, but no longer with a person attached to it. It will become a thing, with the fate of things. This is the theory of the annihilation of the will and conscience by sin, and the transfer of the sinner from the category of responsible and enduring persons to the category of irresponsible and perishable monads. Metaphysically this doctrine has much in its favor. It is a plausible theory, and has received considerable importance from having been advocated by a man like Dr. Frederic Henry Hedge and apparently taught by a philosopher like Dr. James Martineau. Dr. Martineau, however, does not dwell upon this fate of the persistently wicked. He mentions it as a possibility in just one paragraph in his " Study of Religion," 1 where he is dealing with another matter. He is showing that Grod has made provision for the final extinction of moral evil or sin. He describes two ways in which this destruction is provided for in the nature of things. On the one hand, it is pro- vided for by the tendency which virtue has of increasing its possessor's power to continue virtuous ; and on the other hand, by the tendency which sin has to destroy the moral nature of the sinner and prevent him from sinning in an ethical sense. Dr. Martineau says that sin weakens will power until it is finally lost altogether and man sinks back among the animals and automatons. He is no longer a man, and is therefore irresponsible and therefore no longer sinful. Dr. Martineau says : "Thus neglect and misuse entail an eternal dying away of will, till the possibility of self-determination practically van- ishes, the moral life is to all intents and purposes expunged, and the human constitution reverts to the simply zoological.'' 1 Vol. 2, p. 107. Compare with p. 348, Vol. 1. ANNIHILATION 187 And in view of this possibility, Dr. Martineau sees how moral evil or sin may wholly disappear from the universe. Xow, the theory of annihilation through degeneracy or devolution is a plausible and formidable theory. It certainly has much to support it in experience. We know that vice and sin weaken the power of the will to resist temptation. We see men who sink so low that they are like beasts, and seem to await a brute's fate. Admitting these facts, it is, however, a fair question to ask if will power is ever utterly lost : if a human being can sink so low as never to rise again? Is anybody too bad to be salvable ? It is quite clear that we cannot say what may or can happen in the next life, simply because we have not been there to find out. We may believe that influences at work in this life are also operative there, and therefore deduce certain legitimate conclusions. However, in this matter, it is best to confine our inquiry to this life, and to see if we are warranted by psychology and experience in holding that sin can reduce a human being to the level of a monad or animal and thereby destroy him. And I apprehend that we shall see that the fatal objection to this theory is that it is not psychological as it professes to be. In saying that sin can destroy the will, it affirms that an acquired habit can extirpate an inborn and essential faculty of the mind, — a decidedly unpsy etio- logical conclusion ! A primary faculty cannot be destroyed by a secondary faculty or a habit. The primary nature of a man may be weakened and obscured, but being a primary and fundamental part of his being, it cannot give way to that which is second nature and therefore superficial. I lay down this proposition, then, that the will cannot be destroyed by sin. I acknowledge that its power can be 188 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION weakened and greatly reduced, but I affirm that it can never be utterly and irrevocably prostrated or extirpated. I want to back up this assertion by several quotations from able psychologists. Professor William G. Tousey, of Tufts Divinity School, says : "I can find no psychological evidence that disuse even actually extirpates or that it even tends to extirpate a faculty. Disuse certainly weakens memory ; weakens affection ; weak- ens will ; but never, so far as I can see, uproots the faculty or directly assails its general centre." Professor John Grote, whose " Explo ratio Philosophica " is known to students as a store-house of the most profound studies in mental science, says : " Habits of mind are analogous to those of the body ; a habit may be called second nature in both, but there is a considerable difference between the two according to the nature of that of which they are habits. Habits of body take their place in the material organization, which so far as it is matter is out of ourselves and beyond our will, and permanent states or confirmations are establfshed which no power of will can remedy. Habits of mind are always mixed with a certain degree of estimation, judgment, opinion, which is in its nature alterable and as such may lead to alteration of the habits. When, therefore, habits of the mind are considered to constitute a second nature, it must be considered also that mental nature can never be accounted as immovably and irremediably fixed, but, with reason, being always capable of adding fresh knowledge and feeling, being susceptible of fresh impressions , the greatest changes can be produced in the nature and character without destroying indi- viduality." Professor Sedgwick, speaking of the influence of habits of evil, says : " I recognize that each concession to a vicious desire makes the difficulty of resisting it greater when the desire occurs, but the difficulty always seems to remain separated by an impassable gulf from impossibility." ANNIHILATION 189 Now, having laid down the proposition that the will cannot be utterly destroyed by sin, and having quoted these able psychologists to support me in my position, what else remains to be done, save to turn to life as we observe it, and see if we have evidence of greatly weakened will power being restored and made dominant again over sinful tendencies and habits. The man who would say that he has discovered cases where the will power was utterly lost, would transcend the limits of knowledge, for, as I have said, no one knows what can be accomplished in the other life. And he would be a rash man who would say that even in this life there is any case of depravity utterly beyond recovery. Who has not known or read of men and women who have gone as low as low could be, being recovered and ultimately rendered virtuous? What is possible in one or more cases, surely is possible in others. The will is there, however weak it may be, and the right influences when brought to bear, strengthen it, and give it its intended and splendid supremacy. Take physical habits which have such control over the will. Take drunkenness. It is a disease. It becomes a mania. We know that the drunkard is actually compelled to drink. His appetite will not be refused. Now,, until certain remedies were discovered, almost everybody was ready to say that a confirmed drunkard was a hopeless case. But what are Ave saying to-day? We are saying, and others are showing, that the worst cases of drunkenness can be cured. The Keeley Cure is a Godsend. When Mr. Keeley first proclaimed its virtues, a certain Chicago editor doubted him. Mr. Keeley said: "Pick me out four of the very worst drunkards you can find in Chicago, and if I do not cure them, you may publish me and my 190 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION remedy as fraudulent." The editor got four of the vilest inebriates Chicago could furnish ; he sent them to the Institute ; and in about four weeks, Mr. Keeley sent them back to him, new men. They had no appetite for liquor, and they felt that they could live sober lives and they said they meant to, and they did. Now what does the Keeley Cure and the Bi-Chloride of Gold cure for drunkenness demonstrate ? They prove that the will is not extirpated by vice. Given the proper assistance or opportunity and the will once more assumes its beautiful sway. But it is not necessary for medical science to step in to recover fearfully depraved men. There are other influences at work in God's world which accomplish saving results. Read the life of John B. Gough and you will see how a swinish drunkard was reclaimed by faith and love. Or let me tell you a part of the life of Michael Dunn. He was brought up to steal. He inherited theft and was trained to it. "I was trained regularly to steal," he said. "Me an' me gran'mother, an' me aunt, an' me mother, every one of us was in together for thievin' and it came nateral as breathen'." He was sent to jail five times before he was in his teens. He spent thirty-five years in prison ; and fifty-three years in criminal life— his hand against every man and every man's hand against him. Sent from England to Australia ; shipped from Gibraltar with a free pass to America ; passed along from one community to another — anything to get rid of him, he was so desperate a criminal. Now, if Michael Dunn had died at that time, and we had asked the believers in endless sin as to his fate, they would have said that throughout eternity he would continue a sinner, without possibility of reformation. If we had asked some of the prison officials their opinion of ANNIHILATION 191 Michael Dunn they would have pronounced him incorri- gible. Fifty-three years of crime had seemingly placed him beyond all power of self-recovery and beyond every other reformatory influence. But developments would have discredited both theories. And I deem it right to ask if in this world the very worst men are frequently saved, what is to prevent similar recovery in the world to come ? One day, so the story is told in "Darkness and Day- light in New York," Michael Dunn drops into Jerry McAuley's and Jerry tells him that he can be an honest and a happy man if he will. "I looked at him kind o' dazed like," says Michael. " Me — honest and happy ! Me — that never had home or aught but from hand to mouth in the few months I'd be out ? " But Jerry McAuley's kind and trustful word had its effect. His prophecy came true. Michael Dunn, in spite of his long career of crime, took the last step, and then turned round and lived a life con- secrated to the service of humanity ! The old jail-bird became a saint. He built Industrial Homes in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Brooklyn; and to-day, hundreds, with tearful eyes, bless him for the hope he has put into their lives and the opportunities to noble living which he has given them. If a man after fifty-three years of sin , can so quickly and radically recover his lost manhood and live such a noble life, who dares say that a man at any age or in any world is utterly beyond recovery ? I am prepared to go to the extent of saying that it is not only possible for the vilest man to repent and be saved, but that it is a thing provided for and necessitated by the very nature of sin and the safeguards of man's nature and environment. 192 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION "Virtue is according to nature and vice against it. Evil is everywhere a condition of intrinsic disquietude and unstable equilibrium. In each soul there are moral forces, forces which so far from being extirpated from a course in evil indulgence steadily persist and secretly develop higher tension, as it were, and a kind of irritability and volcanic power, which at length is liable on the most trivial provocation to manifest itself in sudden explosion and moral revolution." The story of the prodigal son, while dealing with an imaginary character, nevertheless illustrates this truth. We see, there, that sin by bringing its victim so low brings him to himself, and he is yet able to turn round and start toward a better life. Carlyle has defended very vigorously the proposition that evil, tending for a while to magnify itself, has but a short run and is self-destructive. He praises God that things are so arranged that evil is suicidal in its nature. It destroys itself, and not the sinner. The sinner, by virtue of the never wholly pros- trate will and never utterly dumb conscience, has power to forsake his sin and walk righteously. Now, if in this world these things are true, as we cannot doubt they are, why not believe that in the great beyond, rid of the body, rid of evil associates, rid of many things that drag men down and keep them low, the vicious and depraved soul can and will be touched by some divine influence and saved? It seems to me that such a thought is rational. And therefore I maintain that sin can never put the sinner beyond recovery ; that Con- science, however his tongue may cleave to the roof of his mouth, is still able to speak the word of duty ; and Will, however prostrate he may lie, is still able to rise up and obey the command ! And, indeed, this seems to be the teaching of Dr. Martineau, for he says : ANNIHILATION 193 "And yet precisely because we believe in Retribution, do we trust in Restoration. The very abhorrence with which a man's better mind ever looks upon his worse, while it inflicts his punishment, begins his cure ; and we can never allow that God will suspend this natural law impressed by himself on our spiritual constitution, merely in order to stop the progress of moral recovery and especially enable him to maintain the eternity of torment and sin. And so, beyond the dark close of life, rise before us the awful contrasts of retribution ; and in the farther distance, the dim but glorious vision of a puri- fied, redeemed, and progressive universe of souls." Studies, p. 197. 3. Annihilation by Divine Fiat. There is just one other argument for annihilation which deserves considera- tion. It is said that man, owing to his freedom of the will, can forever refuse to become good. He can defy God to save him, and God being unable to overcome such an obdurate will, shall be under the necessity of utterly destroying its possessor. This is annihilation by the fiat of the Almighty. Yon see that those who advance this idea differ radically from those who hold that sin weakens and destroys the will. These teach that sin has no weakening effect on the will power but rather strengthens it ; permits and causes the sinner to develop such obstinacy and strength of will that God can do nothing with him, but annihilate him ! In criticising this doctrine, I submit the following observations. First, it is incredible that any sinner, however wicked, will forever refuse to become good. Human nature has springs that can be touched by the right appeal, and it is credible that God knows how to reach and save the wickedest of his children. Xo man that you or I or 13 194 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION anybody else ever knew was bad or pursued evil for the sake of being wicked. Dr. I. M. Attwood reminds us that " Only a devil could love evil for its own sake. Men are not devils. They love evil for the good that goes with it, or which they imagine goes with it. When they awake to the awful truth — as they may through fiery trial and bitter defeat — will they finally and definitely reject the good and choose evil?" It is incredible that any sane creature would do such a thing. Secondly, it i^ impossible for the will of man to forever array itself against the will and defeat the purpose of God. If it came to a final issue, God would prevail, and his righteous will would be done. This proposition can be made good on two grounds. In the first place, if the sinner prove defiant, God could bring influences to bear on his will which should make him tractable, and end in his obedience and right- eousness. In the second place, no sinner can forever defy God to save him, simply because God is the sovereign of this universe and has provided for the carrying out of his pur- poses, one of which is that all men shall be saved. Why, to teach that man can forever prevent God from saving him, is to teach that God is fated: that God must do as man wills, and not as he himself proposes. Lyman Abbott, who does not believe in eternal punishment, but believes in the possibility of annihilation, says: "lam not a Universalist because I am not a fatalist. I cannot believe that the human will is subject to the fatalism of even a divine purpose." To which statement the Universalist might well reply : " I am not a Partialist because I cannot believe that the Divine purpose is subject to the fatalism of the human ANNIHILATION 195 will. I do not believe that the divine will is subject to the human will." If God wills that all men shall be saved, as Paul says he does, it is not possible for man to defeat that purpose of the Almighty. And God can, and indeed is, carrying out his inten- tion to perfect all men, without interfering with or depriv- ing man of the measure of freedom with which he has endowed him. It is well to remember that man has but a small measure of freedom. No scholar teaches that man is an absolutely free agent. Many philosophers insist, and with reason, that his freedom is quite limited. He is hedged in at every side. He is under the dominion of physical and mental and moral laws which he must obey — he cannot say no to them. He that will not eat, must die. He that will not study, must remain ignorant. He that will sin, must pay the penalties. Man cannot do as he pleases. God's will is being done whether man rebels or not. There is, in the universe, a certain fatalism. There are forces at work accomplishing definite, pre- arranged ends, over which man has no control, and whose ultimate realization he cannot stay. Matthew Arnold wisely declares that "there is a power in this universe not our own which makes for righteousness." So that the Universalist is right in maintaining that as regards ultimate issues, God's will must be done. To say that man can defeat these ends, is to deny the wisdom, omnipotence, and sovereignty of God. But the Universalist says that man is not wholly a creature of fate. He has a limited but real freedom, by means of which he may delay but never defeat the reign of righteousness in the world and in his own soul. Man's liberty is sufficient to make him a responsible creature, and permit him to cultivate a virtuous character, but not 196 GOOD SENSE IN KELIGION enough to enable him to destroy himself or frustrate the plans of God. Professor Tousey says : "Whether I look on this problem from the side of philosophy or from the side of my experience in the world, I am compelled to believe that as respects certain great results, certain far-off ends, there is a positive determinism or fatalism in the course of nature and the ways of man.- While I know that there is a positive fatalism as respects the ultimate issues of creation, I at the same time realize that the line of one advance is not precisely fixed, that daily we may go to the right or to the left, infallibly, however, to find ourselves brought back from these excursions by scourgings and penitence. Such is the nature that has been given to us, such our environment, such the inevitable fruits of righteous- ness and unrighteousness, that it is not in the nature of things that we should forever persist in evil. We are doomed to be saved. However willful our wanderings, we must at the end reappear at our father's gate, though in the case of many of us that return be as piteous as the return of the prodigal." In view of this exposition I think it plain that it is incredible that man should use his freedom of the will to forever resist the appeal of God ; and that it is impossible for him to do so and thereby defeat the purpose for which God created him. "As I live, saith the Lord, to me every knee shall bow and every tongue give praise ! " Prof. Huxley is right in saying that life might be likened to a game of chess. The chess-board is the world; the pieces are the phenomena of nature ; the rules are what we call the laws, of nature. The Player on the other side is hidden from us. He knows every move, and is prepared to meet every advance we make. We have many moves, and a real measure of choice in our plays. We know that our hidden player is always fair, just and patient, and we also know that play as we must and play as we will he ANNIHILATION 197 will ultimately checkmate us. This metaphor will remind some of you of the famous picture in which Retzsch has depicted Satan playing at chess with man for his soul. Substitute for the mocking fiend in that picture, the calm, strong God of the Christian, who is playing for love, as we say, and you have an image of human life. The wisdom and love of God will finally prevail, and man will be checkmated in righteousness ! Why Universalists are Dogmatic. I often hear it said that Universalists have no philosophical basis for teaching that every human being will be saved. Have we not refuted that criticism? Have we not seen that it is practically impossible for any soul to defeat the purposes of God in its behalf? Universalism rests fairly and safely upon philosophical grounds. And I venture to claim that it is the only system of theology that is philosophical and consistent. Postulate the existence of a God who is good and wise and omnipotent, and you must, you posi- tively must, reach the conclusion that every child of his will achieve holiness and happiness. (Indeed, it is a mystery to me how any Christian can have a doubt of such an out- come. How can a Christian limit "the love and power of God?" Any other result than Universal Salvation limits the love and power of God. It also denies his wisdom.) Think of that trinity of attributes — Omnipotence, Wis- dom, and Goodness — ponder them, and then rise up if you can and say you see how God's purpose in creation may include less than the blessedness of all mankind or how his purpose may be eternally frustrated. If God is good, he intends the greatest good of every living thing ; he contemplates the highest blessedness of humanity. If it can be proved that the highest blessed- ness possible to man is not to be attained by some men, 198 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION then it is proved that God is not good. If one soul could speak from the depths of hell, it could deny the love of God. If one mother should miss the face of a child of hers from the company of the redeemed, she could impugn the benevolence of the Almighty. Either every soul is to be perfected, or else God is not good. Again, if God is wisdom, he has not only purposed the highest good of his children, but he has planned for it. For what does wisdom mean ? Webster says that it means "the knowledge of the best ends and the best means." What does wisdom imply? Whewell says it implies "the selection of the right ends as well as the right means." What, then, does wisdom insure? Prof. Valentine of the Lutheran Theological Seminary, by no means biased in favor of Universalism, says that "wisdom, being concerned with the choice of ends and the ways of their accomplishment, precludes the choice of either moral or physical evil as an end." Therefore, the wise God has not chosen endless misery or annihilation as the outcome of any human life. Wisdom means the selection of the right ends and the right means to those ends. Either every soul is to achieve a right end or God is not wise. Once more, if God is omnipotent, he has not only purposed and planned that every one of his offspring become holy and happy, but he is able to accomplish his purpose and his plans. Nothing can defeat the Almighty . An all-powerful God may be delayed in the accomplishment of his designs by the freedom he has permitted man, but he cannot be delayed forever. Either every soul will arrive at the goal set up by God in the beginning, or else he is not omnipotent : he is not God. We believe that God is omnipotent, wise and good — all Christians believe these three things of God. How ANNIHILATION 190 can they escape the Universalist conclusion? Only by practically denying what they theoretically profess to believe. Friend, if you believe God is all-powerful, all- wise and all-good you have reached a frame of mind which is Universalistic. Your only recourse is to avow Universal Salvation or change your frame of mind, and lose your God ! Why hesitate between such alternatives ? Why not take the very best view of God and his world that can possibly be taken ? Why not become a thorough- going optimist, especially as you have weighty reasons for looking; on the brightest side of the outcome of human life? Why not join in the song of clear-eyed Robert Browning, ff God is in his heavens : all's well with the world " ? or in Whittier's hymn of certainty : "Thro' all the depths of sin and loss Drops the plummet of the cross. Never yet abyss was found Deeper than the cross could sound." " I know he is, and what he is Whose one great purpose is the good of all." Why not have the true insight of the old mystic, Angelus Silesius, ana 1 say, as he said, "I know God cannot live an instant without me. He must give up the ghost if I should cease to be." Yes, why not believe that "Beneath the veriest ash, there hides a spark of soul Which, quickened by love's breath, may yet pervade the whole " ? That when the heavenly Father places his hand on the head of his most willful child as no human hand was ever laid thereon and speaks to the heart of that child as no human voice ever spoke to it, the gesture and appeal of love will not be in vain ? Why doubt Jesus Christ, who said, "And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me'" ? Why refrain from Paul's triumphant shout : " Every knee shall bow and every tongue give praise to God ! " LECTUEE X IMMORTALITY " One question, more than others all, From thoughtful minds implores reply: It is, as breathed from star and pall, What fate awaits us when we die ? " To a certain extent, this question has been answered in the previous lectures. We have seen that neither unending misery, nor endless sin, nor annihilation awaits us when we die. If nothing, not even sin, can annihilate us, neither in this world nor any other, then it is nega- tively proven that we are immortal. Our last lecture, in establishing the indestructibility of the soul, prepared us for hearing whatever positive reasons there may be for expecting a conscious, personal existence beyond the grave. It hardly seemed necessary to devote a lecture to justi- fying the faith in immortality which is now so common and beautiful, and which keeps gaining converts among the best intellects and purest hearts in every race. There never was a time when so many people expected to live after death as do to-day. Every existing and influential religion has now a doctrine of a future life. The Taoist, the Shintoist, the Modern Jew, the Brahmin, the Bud- dhist, the Mohammedan and the Christian each and all look for some kind of existence after death. And yet it is true that in every country and in every church there are some who deny or doubt the doctrine. In our own Christian land, we find not a few who raise the great IMMORTALITY 201 question that Job asked: "If a man die, shall he live again?" To which question some reply with a blunt No, saying that the night of the grave has no morning ; others simply confess that they don't know ; while others eagerly declare that they wished they knew certainly. For the benefit of those who are really seeking light on this sub- ject, I submit the considerations that follow. Doubts of Immortality. I. Many are inclined to doubt that there is a life beyond the grave because the departed do not return. Friends and loved ones, who have promised to reappear or make some unmistakable sign if they were still alive, have failed to do so. This failure has caused many to fear and some to disbelieve that there is any other life. But may we not say certain things which Avill remove the doubts that arise from this cause? (1). Jesus Christ came back. He promised to return, and he did. His reappearance is one of the best attested facts of history. (2). There are people to-day, whose character is sterling, and whose word is "as good as gold," who declare that they hold communication with friends who have passed into the other life. I have never had any such privilege, nor do I personally know any one that has, and yet I am far from denying such reports. "Psychic Science " is only in its infancy, and yet it has revealed some unheard of and almost incredible powers of the mind, so that it is not unreasonable that minds in the other life may communicate with minds in this world. (3). If, how- ever, it should prove, upon sufficient investigation, that no one reallv ever had interchange of thought with the . CO departed ; and if it could be demonstrated that such inter- change was physically and psychically impossible, the idea of immortality would not be exploded. For believers would say that they hardly thought it was possible for 202 GOOD SENSE IN KELIGION beings in the other life, constituted as spirits must be, to communicate in any sensible way with us in this world constituted as we are. Spiritual beings must be " spiritu- ally" discerned, and we must wait for the power of such discernment, until we are in the same region and condition as they. (4). However, this does not imply that the spirits of the departed are ever far from us, nor does it imply that we may not hold spiritual communion with them. It is fundamental in our theologies that while we cannot sensibly apprehend God, because he is spirit, we can yet hold true, spiritual communion with him ; for instance, through prayer. And I believe that this same doctrine holds with other spirits than Grocl. Paul spake reasonably when he said, f ' we are compassed about by a great cloud of witnesses." If (t death-bed visions " indicate anything they indicate that our departed live, and are never far from any one of us. II. As regards the oldest and perhaps the commonest and the most plausible argument against the immortality of the soul, namely, that the body and the soul, or the brain and the mind, are identical or related as cause and effect, and therefore the death of one means the cessation of the other, we are now able to say with scientific cer- tainty that the argument is fallacious. There is no evi- dence that the brain produces the mind as the dynamo generates the electric light. Modern physiological and psychological investigations show that the body and the soul or the brain and the mind go together not as cause and effect but as concomitants. The body affects the mind and the mind affects the body, it is true ; but their rela- tionship is co-operative ; not indissoluble. Neither is bound to the other inextricably, for in due time they kiss each other and part. IMMORTALITY 203 Mr. Herbert Spencer assures us, " that a unit of feeling has nothing in common with a unit of motion, becomes more than ever manifest when we bring the two into juxtaposition." Professor John Draper, in his Physiology, says : " It is for the physiologist to assert and uphold the doctrine of the oneness, the accountability, and the immortality of the soul, and the great truth that, as there is but one God in the Universe, so there is but one spirit in man. We have established the existence of the intellectual principle as external to the body." And Mr. John Fiske, whose word means much to every scholarly mind, declares that "The only thing which cerebral physiology tells us, when studied with the aid of molecular physics, is against the materialist so far as it goes. It tells us that, during the present life, though thought and feeling are always manifested in connection with a peculiar form of matter, yet by no possibility can thought and feeling be in any sense the products of matter. Nothing can be more unscientific than the famous remark of Cabanis, that the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile. It is not even correct to say that thought goes on in the brain. What goes on in the brain is an amazingly complex series of molecular movements, with which thought and feeling are in some way related, not as effects or causes, but as concomitants. So much is clear ; but cerebral physiology says nothing about another life. Indeed, why should it ? The last place in the world to which I should go for information about a state of things in which thought and feeling can exist in the absence of a cerebrum would be to cere- bral physiology." And he concludes by saying that " the mate- rialistic assumption that there is no such state of things, and that the life of the soul accordingly ends with the life of the body, is perhaps the most baseless assumption that is known to the history of philosophy." James Martineau pointedly asks : " If no one can discern the connection (between the brain and the mind) to be nec- essary, who can affirm their disconnection to be impossible? I conclude, therefore, that in the physical phenomena of 204 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION death there is nothing to prejudge the question of life beyond. Death is only the vanishing of the present evidences of life, and leaves it open to us to consider whether there are any other indications or reasons to replace them." A Caution. It is well for us to be cautioned against the expectation that the immortality of the soul can be demonstrated. In the very nature of the case this is not possible, for how can any one prove that any future experience or event will occur? You cannot be sure that the sun will appear again. You cannot declare positively that summer will return. You can predict these things : you can say you are as good as sure of them ; but because they are future events and out of your control and subject to the laws of change, you cannot prove that they will take place or affirm such a thing upon oath. If I chose to doubt your assertion that the sun would shine once more or that the summer flowers would bloom again, you would have to be content with telling me to wait and see. And yet your reply would not weaken your faith or your position, for you could marshal reasons enough to make it very probable that the sun and the summer would reappear. So with regard to the immortality of the soul. Being a future experience, it cannot be demonstrated any more than any other coming experience can be proved, but this admission need not weaken the faith or the position of one who is confident that it lies before every soul, for he has evidence enough to make it highly probable. The thing to be borne in mind is this : immortality is not a thing to be demonstrated as we demonstrate a mathematical 'prop- osition: it is a thing to be predicted: predicted in view of certain evidences that indicate it and even make it necessary . The fair question to ask is whether IMMORTALITY 205 the evidence for it is enough to warrant its prediction and to justify this almost universal confidence in it. I now proceed to give what impress me as among the weightiest reasons for the belief in a future life, prefacing my remarks with an endorsement of Emerson's frank admission that "after all, the best writing on immortality, leaves unwritten and unexpressed the really great forces of conviction." I. In examining the evidences for human immor- tality, first look into the constitution and condition of man. It is not unlikely that the expectation of a future life has grown up in the mind of the race — for it has been a growth — through the experiences and the study of the human soul. ( 1 ) . The first significant fact that meets us in our study of man is that he desires to live again. There are exceptions, chiefly among shirkers and scoundrels, but the desire for immortality is practically universal. Man wants to survive. He does not wish the grave to be his goal. Now, icant) whether regarded as instinctive or rational, is prophetic : it augurs satisfaction. All instincts have their correspondences. "A root strikes downward in the earth, seeking some- thing — seeking moisture. Moisture is. It does not go in quest of something that does not exist. The blade comes upward, seeking something — air and sunlight. Air and sunlight are. God has made provision for this want of the growing corn. So of every creature that lives. You cannot conceive of any want of a fish that swims, or a beast that roams, or a bird that flies, for which no provision has been made. And it is so with man. He is hungry, and the earth teems with abundance. He is thirsty, and a spring bubbles at his feet. He desires companionship, and friends are all about him to share his love and return their own." 206 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION The wants and desires of man's nature are therefore prophetic : they bid him look for and expect to find that which he instinctively craves. Hence this longing for immortality, is an augury of a continued life. It has become a powerful factor in the endeavor to prove worthy of living on, which is so splendid a feature of human activity to-day. And this endeavor has actually brought immortality to light in multitudes of souls ; they feel their deathlessness. So that Matthew Arnold spoke from expe- rience when he said : " O human soul! so long as thou canst so Set up a mark of everlasting light. Above the howling senses' ebb and flow, To cheer thee, and to right thee if thou roam, Not with lost toil thou laborest through the night; Thou mak'st the heaven thou hop'st indeed thy home." (2). In addition to man's instinctive and intelligent desire to live forever, we note that he has the capacity for endless life. The possibilities of man's nature are boundless. There seems to be no limit to the develop- ment of which his soul is capable. Think of his capacity for knoivledge. No human intellect has exhausted the facts of this universe, nor have the facts of this universe exhausted any normal human intellect. The mind of a Plato, stored as it was with knowledge, was yet able to take in more. The mind of a Spencer, or a Martineau, wonderfully rich in modern intellectual lore, is open to information ad infinitum. If we think of man's capacity for affection, we realize that it is infinite. Affection usually is circumscribed and often selfish ; but it can be unlimited and utterly unselfish. It is possible for man to love everybody and everything, as Plato taught, and as Jesus did. True love knows nothing of time or space. The soul's capacity to love is indicative of its ability to IMMORTALITY 207 inhabit a perpetual world. Think also of man's capacity for goodness, and you see a clear sign of his immortality. In this capacity, man leads creation : he was born to be good : he is commanded by conscience to become alto- gether righteous, and he feels that it is possible for him to obey the command perfectly, but not at present. The time is too short for him to round out his character here. The simple fact is, man's capacity shows that he was built for immortality. We see in this expansiveness of his nature a provision for endless life. Infinite capacity does not mean temporal existence ; not in a rational universe ! (3). Man has the desire for immortality ; he has the capacity for profitably and pleasantly employing endless years ; he has also an endowment of faculties which especially fit him for another world than this. Plants and animals, so far as we can see, are fitted out with powers and instincts sufficient only for this fleeting life and capable of being fully satisfied here. But with man it is different ; he has a spiritual nature which does not and cannot find its full satisfaction either in this world or in this body. "Appetite, passions, instincts, man shares with the animals, gets them from the animals, if you will, but satisfy them all, leave him not a physical need unsatisfied, nor a bodily want unsupplied, and only then does he really begin to live." Reason, intellect, awe, wonder, the sense of beauty, conscience — these are endowments in excess of man's physical and present needs. He could get along perhaps more easily, and certainly more happily than he now does, if he were simply endowed as the highest animals are. This over-endowment then must mean something in a rational universe. " Some sort of proportion we expect, and never fail to find, between the endowment of a nature and the persistency 208 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION and range of its achievement ; just as, in human productions, the material selected and the refined pains spent in perfecting them, are no uncertain index of the service expected of them. The parcel to be delivered in the next street, the tradesman does not wrap up in waterproof and fasten with wire ropes ; for a few weeks' encampment, you spread your canvas and do not build of stone ; nor is it for a summer's lodging, but for your ancestral house, that you set up fountains and plant oaks. When, on this principle, you place side by side the needs of human life, taken on the most liberal estimate, and the scope of the intellectual powers of man, I shall be surprised if you do not find the latter to be an enormous over-provision for the former," and to suggest that the scene of human existence and achievement is to shift from this world-stage to the spiritual arena of immortality. Man has already broken loose from physical environment and has passed up, through, and beyond it. He waits for deliverance from his body : his spirit looks toward that city not built with hands, eternal in the heavens. (4). How firm this conviction that man is immortal grows, as we see, furthermore, how incomplete men are, even at their best estate, in this world. The greatest men are still unsymmetrical when called to quit this sphere. Three-score years and ten are far too few even for the most gifted and most privileged and most responsive nature to become what it wants to be or is able to be. No man counts himself to have apprehended. Every man is still pressing on toward the prizes of the high calling of spiritual life. We hear this confession and see this incompleteness on every side. Says Dr. Hedge: " Everywhere we see great powers and small performances, vast schemes and petty results, thoughts that wander through eternity and a life that ' Can little more supply Than just to look about us and to die.' Who ever lived to accomplish his utmost aim ? What career IMMORTALITY 209 so complete as to comprehend all that is wanted in this world? We all retire with imperfect victory from the battle of life. The campaign is not finished when we strike tents. The scholar has still unsolved problems at which he is laboring. The phi- losopher is summoned in the midst of experiments he cannot stay to complete. The philanthropist is overtaken in projects of reform that are to add new value to human life." James Martineau, at more than eighty years of age, standing near the close of a career marvelously full of attainment, exclaims: "How small a part of my plans have I been able to carry out ! Life, even at its fullest on earth, is a fragment." Not only is life too short to carry out one's plans, it is too brief to perfect character. Victor Hugo, in his old age, declared : " For half a century I have been writing my thoughts in prose and verse. History, philosophy, drama, romance, tradition, satire, ode and song — I have tried all. But I feel that I have not said a thousandth part of what is in me. AYhen I go down to the grave, I can say, like so many others, ' I have finished my day's work,' but I cannot say I have finished my life." Incompleteness, both of work and character ; what does it prophesy but completion? "The half-finished picture, the partly-chiseled statue, the roofless edifice, bid us wait, that the end is not yet. Wherever we see wisdom and purpose displayed in man's productions, and find incom- pleteness, we believe that the task is not finished. And so far as we have beheld the processes of nature, we know that she never stops short of completion. The egg in the nest is not the end ; the tiny form within the egg, is not the end. Only when the shell bursts, and the songster spreads its wings and soars and sings, is the task finished. The egg was an augury of the bird. The wings prophesied its element and its power. These latent abilities within 210 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION us ; the incomplete faculties which we all possess, wait on another and longer life in which to be developed and per- fected. They indicate the relations we are to enter into. They bid us feel sure that the grave is not the end. They warrant Victor Hugo's last words : " My day's work will begin again the next morning. The tomb is not a blind alley ; it is a thoroughfare. I close on the twilight, to open with the dawn." Knowing man's desire, knowing his capacity, knowing his spiritual characteristics, and knowing his sad incom- j)leten*ess, we are justified in thinking that when he knocks at the door of death, it will swing open that he may con- tinue his onward and upward walk ! II. We become surer of this eternal prospect for every soul as we turn from a study of man's constitution and condition to an examination of the nature of God and HIS PURPOSE IN CREATION. A wise philosopher has said : "If once you allow yourself to think about the origin and the end of things, you will have to believe in a God and immortality." A certain minister was presenting a course of thought on " The Immortality of the Soul," when he was approached very early in the course by a Scotch parishioner, who remarked, "You make a deal ado over a sma' matter ; postulate God and immortality follows." This reminds us of the argument of Rousseau, another swift and effective nature. Said he : "I believe in God as fully as I believe in any other truth. If God exists, he is perfect; if he is perfect, he is wise, almighty and just ; if he is just and almighty, my soul is immortal." 1 (1). If we regard God's nature as love, as the Bible and best Christian thought teaches us to do, we have an indubitable argument for our doctrine of immortality. 1 " "Witness to Immortality." — (Gordon.) IMMORTALITY 211 God is love ! that is the ultimate and grandest word about God. The core of God's heart is love. Everything else we predicate of God, except his infinity and omniscience and omnipotence, grows out of his love or is regulated by it. ''Wisdom and power are the instruments of love; justice, and mercy, and pity, and -righteousness are inflec- tions of love." The characteristic of the highest love we know anything about, namely, love as displayed by Jesus, is that it seeketh no selfish or partial end, but looketh to the highest good of others. We must believe that God, like Jesus or like a loving parent, seeks the utmost good of his children and finds his truest joy in their highest attainment. Therefore, we must believe in the immortality of every soul because endless life in a love-ruled Universe is a desirable inheritance, and necessary to the utmost o-ood of humanity. God's children would fall short of their highest good if they missed immortality, for they cannot reach perfection in the time alloted them in this world. The love of God, which relates him parentally and vitally to every human being, we may be sure led him to begin creation and to appoint the great destiny we are taught to believe is before us and to arrange the course by which our perfection is to be achieved. It should not surprise us in studying our present constitution and the world in which we live to find evidences of an Infinite Heart working steadily and beautifully in our behalf. And what is the history and the prophecy of this universe as revealed in the light of the theory of its evolution ? " Way back yonder, in the unremembered past, on the bleak and barren hills lay one single germ of life. Nowhere else in all the world was there a single twig or grass blade to keep it company. It had only the sun and stars for companions. But the winds kissed it, the sun called to it, the rain watered it. 212 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION Wait a million (or was it ten million?) years. Lo ! the hills are covered with verdure, great trees lift themselves in air, the forests are vocal with the song of birds. All this gar- ment of green, these mighty trunks, these singing birds, were hidden away in that first life-germ. Suppose you could see a common piece of moss unfold before your eyes — see it passing into grasses and trees and lilies, — by silent stages see it pass into animals, until at last the moss has become a singing bird, soaring upward into the deep of heaven, which it floods with melody. Would you need any other miracle than that to teach you of a purpose infinite? Such is the story of science, and still the tale unfolds. At last — and how countless the ages between ! — it issues into man, — man with infinite capacities ! Crude and savage at first, but slowly unfolding, until, at last, an eye looks out upon the world which knows that it is beautiful ; looks back over the long, long journey which he has come, and at least in part comprehends it. And now the cycle seems to be complete. Nature has travailed through countless ages, a child is born that looks up into her face, and loves her, and knows that she is beautiful. It is as when the mother, after years of watching over her baby boy, until he has grown strong and true, at last looks into his frank and open face, and says : 1 Now I know by the love gleaming in his eyes that I can trust him. For this I have yearned, in this I find the reward of my pain and deprivation, — in this love that answers mine.' So out of the heart of Nature there comes a voice to me with 4 accents sweet and tender as a mother's, saying : ' My child, I love thee.' Nature is God ; God says : ' My child, I love thee.' What then? Does he lay us one by one into the grave never to see us again ? Has he planned it that even as the universe must one day be dissolved into its elements, all his children must likewise pass away and forever cease to be? What an end of the story of creation ! ' Nothing, absolutely nothing but gas and smoke. There, after the birth-throes of ten million reons, after all the struggles and the sacrifices, loves and hopes and aspirations of humanity, — there, in a IMMORTALITY 213 wreath of smoke which no eye beholds, in lurid flames which leap out into the bosom of chaos, there it ends. So considered, creation becomes a meaningless riddle. There is no meaning in the story unless something abides." That abiding something must be the human soul in which alone the hope of immortality and the capacity for it are lodged. Not one soul only, or a few souls, but all human souls, for the heart of God, like the heart of a devoted mother, is as warm toward one child as another and seeks the perpetuity of all. Well does Mr. John Fiske say : " From the first dawning of life we see all things working together toward one mighty goal, the evolution of the most exalted spiritual qualities which characterize humanity. Has all this work been for nothing? Is it all ephemeral, all a bubble that bursts, a vision that fades? On such a view the riddle of the universe becomes a riddle without a meaning. The more thoroughly we comprehend that process of evolution, by which things have come to be what they are, the more we are likely to feel that to deny the everlasting persistence of the spiritual element in man is to rob the whole process of meaning. It goes far toward putting us to permanent intellectual confusion, and I do not see that any- one has as yet alleged, or is ever likely to allege, a sufficient reason for accepting so dire an alternative. . . . For my own part, therefore, I believe in the immortality of the soul ... as a supreme act of faith in the reasonableness of God's work." In the very nature of things, man must be immortal. If man were to sink back into nothingness, God would forfeit his title to wisdom, justice and love, and the uni- verse would lose all significance to reasonable minds and great hearts. On the reasonableness of God's work, that is, on the orderly and definite and ascending development of the universe, we ground our faith in the immortality of the soul as upon a rock. And if we could but stand at 214 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION the side of God and see all things from his point of view, our belief would be confirmed and glorified, for in God's vision there can be no death : what seems so to us, to him is transition, for in his sight the whole boundless universe must be alive. Verily, as Christ said : "God is not God of the dead, but of the living, for all live unto him ! " III. The study of the longings and possibilities of man and the study of the history and trend of the universe lead us to but one conclusion — man was created to be immor- tal and is destined for so great a lease on life. Are there no confirmations of this magnificent faith ? (1). Run back through the ages and stand in the twilight of Christian history. Before you looms up a cross, around it mocking soldiers, upon it the purest soul that ever trod God's earth. The darkness deepens, a sigh of grief and a word of trust fall upon the trembling air, and the tragedy is finished. The body is entombed ; the friends have dispersed ; the curtain in what promised to be a drama of human redemption seems fallen never more to rise. But no ! The stone is rolled away from the tomb, the Christ reappears, is seen by his own and a mul- titude, walks and talks with his disciples, gives them instructions, blesses them, bids them good-by and ascends to his Father and their Father, his God and their God. They believe that they have seen the crucified Lord : they believe that he has recommissioned them to save the race : they believe that he has arisen and will be with them even unto the end of the world, and Christianity begins its mar- velous career. The resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ remain to-day two of the best authenticated events of history. They are confirmatory of our belief in the resurrection and ascension of the dead. If these events are too far away or if they partake too much of the mirac- IMMORTALITY 215 ulous to help some of us, then we may look in other directions for the confirmation of our hope. (2). Look within. Let us ask ourselves some prob- ing questions. " O soul, can you think of being anni- hilated? extinguished? blotted out?" "Nay, Master, I cannot think myself annihilated." Where is the soul that can conceive of its own extinction? "Let a man imagine himself dead : he is a beholder of his lifeless body : he looks upon his own coffin : he is present at his own funeral : he sees his own grave dug, filled in, covered over, and the flowers of love resting upon it. He cannot .think of himself as dead. He may imagine his body to be lifeless, but he is still soul and more alive than he ever was." The unthinkableness of the death or extinction of one's soul testifies to our spiritual deathlessness. (3). Ask your soul another question. " O soul, have you ever been annihilated?" "Nay, Master, though the bodies I have tenanted have come and gone, a new one every seven years, I have held to my identity, as I see when I look through the pages of memory. I to-day am the soul that you had in infancy ; permanent amid every change." This knowledge of the persistency of one's self, substantiates the argument that the soul and the body are merely associated together and not inseparably related to each other. That which has been able to sur- vive one or more complete dissolutions of the body, will surely be able to go its own way when the last dissolution is done. (4). Ask yourself a further question. "Have you never vividly realized the possible independence of your soul of your body?" Let me ask the paralytic, if while he could not move hand or foot, his mind was not as clear and as resolute as it ever was, waiting as it seemed 216 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION to leap out of an unresponsive frame and pursue a free career in another state? Let me ask the dreamer, if he has not at times in his dreams quitted his tabernacle of flesh and roamed at will, and delightfully, through other scenes than those of earth? What are these experiences but auguries ? They indicate the separableness of the soul, and prophesy its future career. (5). But go deeper. Ask yourself if you really expect to perish. Do you in your heart of hearts look EOR extinction at death ? There certainly is no righteous man or woman before me who anticipates annihilation. It is a remarkable and significant fact that as one grows in goodness, the conviction of immortality deepens. The meaning of Christ's paradoxical saying that "He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live ; and whosoever liveth and believeth in me, shall never die," is this : Those who are in sympathy with the life of God through holy living and holy aspirations neither die nor ever think of dying. The more of God's life we have in our souls, the less attraction the earth has for us and the greater our certainty of a future life. Matthew Arnold has keenly said that the certainty of immortality flows out of "the Sense of life, of being truly alive, which accompanies righteousness. If this experimental sense does not rise to be stronger in us, does not rise to the sense of being inextinguishable, that is probably because our sense of righteousness is really so. very small. This strong sense of life from righteousness ... is the true basis of all religious aspiration after immortality." Through the sense of righteousness, Socrates laughed at those who thought in burying his body they would be burying him ; through righteousness, Jesus when he quit this earth informed his friends that he would meet them IMMORTALITY 217 again ; through righteousness, Paul and the long line of saintly men and women down the Christian centuries have lived immortal lives and in passing away have commended their spirits trustingly to God. 4 'The Mussulmans have a fable about Moses, that, when the hour of his departure was come, God sent the angel of death, who appeared before him and demanded his soul. Moses greeted the angel Avith a friendly salutation, but ques- tioned his right to touch a soul that had had communion with God. The death-angel was baffled by such assurance, and knew not how to proceed ; for death and Moses, it seemed, had nothing in common. Then the Lord deputed the angel of Paradise to convey him an apple of Eden. And, as Moses inhaled the immortal fragrance, his spirit went forth from him, and was borne upon the odors of Eden into the presence of the Lord." This is the Mussulman's parable, and this is the interpretation of it : the righteous know they are immortal ; they never think of dying ; they expect to part with their fleshly bodies, but as for themselves, — well, let Death catch them if he can ! You cannot convince a soul that holds sweet com- munion with God that its communion will ever be broken up, nor can you make a person who loves believe that love is not deathless or that love can ever lose its own. Probably no man ever struggled with the problem of the future as Tennyson did. A man of great and keen intellect, master of modern knowledge ; and a man also of deep and wide sympathies, he found himself plunged into a terrible problem by the death of his bosom friend, Arthur Henry Hallam, whom he loved as his own self. "Loss, inexpressible loss, opened the poet's eyes to the appalling fact of death. Love made him eager to believe in immortality, and able to conceive of that immortality in the noblest and so in the most creditable form. His 218 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION subtle, questioning intellect made belief difficult, and thus raised the issue, Is the soul, after all, a deathless thing ?" The matchless poem, "In Memorium," is the outcome and the record of Tennyson's soul toward the light. From beginning to close, it shows the stages by which that big intellect and bigger heart came to join forces in favor of immortality. The heart triumphed. Doubts were dispelled, and Tennyson said : "If e'er when faith had fallen asleep I heard a voice, ' believe no more,' A warmth within my breast would melt The freezing reason's colder part, And like a man in wrath the heart Stood up and answer'd, ' I have felt.' " The history of the intellectual and spiritual struggle with the problem of immortality told in that poem, is a history that finds duplication in countless lives ; and as there, so elsewhere, true love wins the victory and looks steadily forward to further life and reunions. Whittier, in " Snow-Bound," has recorded the same splendid triumph of heart-faith over intellectual doubt, by saying : " Yet love will dream, and faith will trust (Since he who knows our need is just), That somehow, somewhere, meet we must." (6). Speaking of the dream-side and imaginative- side Of life, WHO HAS NOT HAD INTIMATIONS OF IMMOR- TALITY? Some in dreams, some through recollections, some by premonitions, have become sure of a life beyond. Many, like Wordsworth, have been able to remember the sensations of their childhood days, " When meadow, grove, and stream, The earth, and every common sight did seem Apparaled in celestial light," Indicating the heavenly origin and heavenly destiny of the soul. IMMORTALITY 219 " Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The soul that riseth with us, our life's star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar : Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory, do we come From God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Shades of the prison house begin to close Upon the growing boy, But he beholds the light, and whence it flows, He sees it in his joy." Although our crowded life is a forgetting of early years and early impressions, yet there are times when the visions of childhood are granted us and the intima- tions of immortality we felt then, return with sweet force. Some recall the intimations of immortality felt in child- hood ; others stand firm and expectantly because of the intimations experienced to-day. "A vague, con- straining sense of invisible beings, by whom we are engirt, fills many of us. We blindly feel that our rank and destination are with them. Lift but one thin veil, we think, and the occult Universe of Spirit would break to vision with cloudy crowds of angels." Are we deceived? or, are these premonitions? They are premonitions, if the glad exclamations and gestures of the dying are to be relied upon. The phenomena of a mental sort associated with physical dying, are precisely such as we should expect if life were continuous, and what we call dying were cross- ing the threshold. When Dr. Lyman Beecher was dying, he saw what caused him to rouse not only from dying stupor, but from a mental stupidity of years, and to shout his joy. "Do you see Jesus?" asked a by-stander. "No ! no !" he replied. "All is swallowed up in God." Almost every physician and nurse can tell you of dying 220 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION utterances like this. A keen thinker has said: "You may as well say the first cry of an infant indicates no rela- tion to a new phase of life, because it is uttered on the inner threshold of the womb. It is an absolute misappre- hension of facts to assert that dying in the majority of cases, or even the large minority, appears to be a passing out of existence. The testimony is astonishingly the other way ; and the exceptions are positively rare where there is not something to indicate a passage to a higher state of being." I have not tried to demonstrate the immortality of the soul : I have simply sought to justify the faith of Christen- dom and the serene confidence of most of the greatest spirits of all ages in a future conscious existence. If evidence is worth anything at all, we have examined enough to convince us that our life is not to be confined to this present world. I have come to feel that Emerson was right in saying that, "It is a mark of the sanity of a man's nature to believe in immortality '." Every soul should, and every loving soul does, join in the song of the dying Tennyson : " Sunset and even star And one clear call for me! And may there be no moaning of the bar, When I put out to sea; But such a tide as moving seems asleep, Too full for sound and foam, When that which drew from out the boundless deep Turns again to home. Twilight and even bell, . And after that the dark! And may there be no sadness of farewell. When I embark; For though from out our bourne of time and place The flood may bear me far, I hope to see my Pilot face to face When I have crossed the bar." LECTURE XI HEAVEN " We must come to believe that countless spirits go into the next life to meet trials and burdens which are not punishment or doom, but discipline, education, the preparation for life." — T. Starr King. "In the middle of the room, in its white coffin, lay the dead child, a nephew of the poet. Near it, in a great chair, sat Walt Whitman, surrounded by little ones, and holding a beautiful little girl in his lap. The child looked curiously at the spectacle of death, and then inquiringly into the old man's face. ? You don't know what it is, do you, my dear?' said he. 'We don't, either.' Mary Mapes Dodge, taking this touching incident as a text, has written a poem, "The Two Mysteries," in which she says : " We know not what it is, dear, this sleep so deep and still; The folded hands, the awful calm, the cheek so pale and chill; The lids that will not lift again, though we may call and call; The strange, white solitude of peace that settles over all. But this we know: our loved and dead, if they should come this day, — Should come and ask us, ' What is life? ' no one of us could say. Life is a mystery as deep as ever death can be." It is true that life and death are mysterious : no one has as yet solved all their problems for us ; but much light has been thrown on each phenomenon. We have probed the mystery of death sufficiently to see that it is not the final event in the history of a soul. We have many and cogent reasons for looking upon it as but an incident in the career of man. Death simply arrests the body, and releases the soul. 222 GOOD SENSE IN KELIGION The question arises : What will be the experiences of the soul after its bodily release ? What of the future life ? It is impossible to glean from the Bible any details by which to describe the scenery of the future life, for (a) Jesus Christ, the only traveler that has ever returned from that other land, has furnished us not a word descriptive of it. He has assured us that certain cherished things would take place there, but he has not told us where or what our future abode is to be. (6) . The writer of Revelations has not helped us any. He was not describing a future existence beyond this earth, but a New Jerusalem that was to take the place of the Old Jerusalem there in Pales- tine. His imagery had reference to an earthly renovation which did not come when prophesied, and to our mind will never come in the paraphernalia described by him. (c). It is also difficult, as Dr. Hedge has confessed, "to deduce from the Scriptures of the New Testament a doc- trine of the life to come, which shall fit all the texts and satisfy all the requirements of the subject ; which shall harmonize the Apocalyptic vision of the " new earth " and the New Jerusalem upon it, with Paul's conception of being raised from the dead and caught up into the clouds to dwell with the Lord in the air ; which shall harmonize any doctrine of final resurrection with the words of Jesus to the thief on the cross, "This day shalt thou be with me in Paradise." Whatever the reasons for the meagerness and diversity of information on our subject in the Scriptures, and in spite of the warnings about the futility and even the danger of trying to look into the future, man still has an insatiable curiosity to know something about it. When Gen. Armstrong, among his last words, said, "I am most curious to get a glimpse of the next world," he voiced the HEAVEN 223 craving of almost all people. Furthermore, the mind will not rest content in ignorance. It will dream of the future, it will seize the brush of imagination and paint pictures of its own and deem them realities. The Christian has his dreams of the coining life. They grow out of the teachings of his particular sect or take color from his experiences. Some accept the glittering tropes of Revelations as statements of realities, and others receive the visions of a Swedenborg as veritable pictures of eternity ; but the majority of Christians are more sen- sible in their expectations, and think of the beyond as being all that they would supremely like the present to be. Whatever our imaginings, we all echo the poet's sigh : " O for a nearer insight into heaven, More knowledge of the glory and the joy Which there unto the happy souls is given, Their intercourse, their worship, their employ." Such nearer insight into the beyond must come, it seems to me, mainly through inference. We cannot lift the veil between the two spheres and gaze with entranced mind upon the other scene, but we can reason from what we might call " the nature of things " and arrive at some trustworthy and wholesome conclusions. In the nature of things, it seems to me that the most reasonable theory of the future life is that it is a con- tinuation of the present life. John Stuart Mill, in his essay on Immortality, closes by saying that " all the probabilities in case of a future life are that such as we have been made or have made ourselves before the change, such we shall enter into the life hereafter ; and that the fact of death will make no sudden break in our spiritual life, nor influence our character any otherwise than as any important change in our mode of existence may always be expected to modify it. Our thinking principle has its laws 224 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION which in this life are invariable, and any analogies drawn from this life must assume that the same laws will continue." Although I do not agree with some of the conclusions Mr. Mill arrives at in his essay, I do heartily accept the ideas just quoted. The Christian and most rational view of death is that which likens it to sleep, with the impor- tant difference, that whereas in ordinary sleep we awake, our body still with us, in the death sleep we awake, out of our body. rr We " awake ; that is, our soul awakes, while our old body slumbers on forever. Now inasmuch as our true life is not something outside of us, but within us, our life will not be materially altered by the scenes to which death introduces us. Of course, in stepping out of the fleshly body, we shall get rid of all the appetites and passions and needs peculiar to the flesh, but we shall retain all the appetites and passions and needs peculiar to the mind, together with our memories, our knowledge, our loves and hates, and our mental and moral habiis. In a word, ive shall be in the other' life just what we were in this life, minus the influences and habits of the corporeal body. If it were possible to tell just how much of our thinking and feeling and doing were due to our body, we would be able to know what our thoughts and feelings and volitions would be apart from this fleshly tabernacle. We maybe sure that "when we go from this world, we shall be released from ten thou- sand things that belong to our physical state, and that tend to hinder our spiritual development," but we may be equally sure that we will retain our personality, and every trait and habit of a spiritual kind. In whatever way we may prefer to fill in the details of this picture of the life to come, I think we must con- clude that to regard it as a continuation of the present HEAVEN 225 essential life of the soul is scriptural and reasonable. "As — after the same manner that — we have borne the image of the earthly, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly." I. Now let us see what follows from this theory that the future life will be such a continuation of the pres- ent life. (1). This view makes it impossible for us to conceive of the future as divided into two places, answering to the words Heaven and Hell, and peopled, the one with good and happy spirits ; the other with evil and unhappy souls. There is no such arbitrary division here, and we may be sure there will not be and cannot be any such arbitrary separation there. To say nothing of the great difficulty, if not absolute impossibility, of draw- ing the line between the good and bad in any world, it is evidently God's method in developing the race to keep the good and bad together, that they may act and react upon each other. What he is doing here he is likely to do else- where. God, as he surveys the other life, sees the same commingling of spirits as he sees when he sweeps in this life. He sees the good working for and influencing the evil. He sees man lifting man higher and yet higher in the divine and blessed life. The saintly have something to do in the other life besides rejoice in their own salvation and sing anthems. It is an egregious error, then, to think that heaven and hell could be places. Do we not know that environment, — that is, surrounding conditions, influ- ences, and forces, — does not make our lives heavenly, using the word to mean either God-like or happy ; or hellish, using the word to mean either satanic or unhappy? Our happiness or unhappiness here does not so much depend on where we are as on what we are. A man may be in Southern California — one of God's earthly gardens — and yet be miserable ! A man may be in the bleakest part 15 226 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION of the earth, where flowers seldom bloom and birds rarely sing, and yet be contented and happy. Indeed, the mere transporting of a soul from one part of the universe to another or the confining of a spirit to one particular place would not suffice to keep it happy or unhappy, neither would it succeed in keeping it good or bad. Put an evil man in jail ; lock him up with other evil men, and only evil men, and would you be sure he would remain evil? Have we not seen criminals soften under the shame of imprisonment, and become reformed ? Their environment rather stimulated them to alter their ways, than confirmed them in them. There is in this human nature of ours a power that so persistently and so effectively works for righteousness, that if there were a local hell it would erelong become an incipient heaven. Take Tasmania, formerly called Van Diemen's Land. It was originally settled with convicts, but to-day many of the descendants of those transported criminals have become law-abiding and God-fearing citizens. That one's sur- roundings cannot bring perfect happiness was realized by many a person who attended the World's Fair. If the New Jerusalem portrayed by the Revelator ever came nigh unto this earth, it came in the White City on the shore of Lake Michigan. Some one has said : ' ' There was the Holy City itself, appearing suddenly, as if let down from heaven by the very hand of God, containing no temple, because it was itself a vast temple, pervaded every- where with the presence of the Spirit, knowing no alternation of the darkness of the night with the brightness of day, because the night was as fair as the day. And there were the nations walking in the light of it, and the kings of the earth bringing their glory and honor into it ; and the pure stream flowing forth from the throne in the midst of it, to fill HEAVEN 227 all the channels by the side of which stood, here the majestic trophies of industrious man, and there the evergreen trees of inspiring, renewing, nourishing, and all-healing Heaven, while everywhere sounded the blending melodies of happy souls floating upon love-lit waters of the River of Life." Everywhere? Xo, not everywhere did you catch the joyful tone or delighted look of happy souls, for even in that City — so heaven-like according to the traditional heaven — there were unhappy souls. One evening, as the twilight deepened, and the electric lights sprang into brill- iant being, I saw a woman sitting in the Court of Honor, the most beautiful and inspiring place in all the grounds, but she was not enjoying the scenery. Her eye had a distant gaze and her face a sad look — she was thinking of home, perhaps, or of some experience that made her heart-sick. That woman's yearning gaze made me think that the traditional Paradise could be unsatisfying to many a soul. It convinced me that one's surroundings do not necessarily bring pleasure or pain. Therefore I say it is not where we are but what we are that makes us happy or sad. Hence, the idea of heaven as a place, must give way to the idea of heaven as an internal condition of the soul ; and the idea of hell as a place must likewise be abandoned for the idea of hell as an interior state of the soul. 2. Not only does this theory, that the coining life is a continuation of the present life, abolish the dogma that heaven and hell are places over there ; it also makes us see that it is imjoossible that the next life is one of perfect bliss or unalloyed misery. It will be a life of mixed experiences just as this life is. It is very common to say that 228 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION " Heaven is the land where troubles cease, Where toils and tears are o'er; The blissful clime of rest and peace, Where cares distract no more; And not the shadow of distress Dims its unsullied blessedness." This doctrine is very common and very delightful, but can it be true ? Can an existence where human spirits are in all grades of development be absolutely and unqual- ifiedly blissful? Can a life where there may be willful disobedience of the highest, and where there is the possi- bility of remorse for a sinful past, be aught than a world of mingled joy and sadness ? If we are the beings there that we are here ; if our characters are the same after death as before ; if our sympathy grows tenderer and deeper as we advance in the spiritual realm, I do not see how we can help suffering at times over there as we do here. I remember that Channing has said : "I do and must regard heaven as a world of sympathy. Nothing, I believe,, has greater power to attract the regards of its benevolent inhabitants than the misery into which any of their fellow- creatures may have fallen. The suffering which belongs to a virtuous sympathy I cannot, then, separate from heaven." It stands to reason that in a life the counterpart of this, where the endeavor after personal righteousness must require struggle, and where labor in behalf of the right- eousness of others must demand self-sacrifice, the state of its inhabitants will be that of mingled joy and sorrow, and this must last until all souls have reached the perfection of God. Does some one say that it is a discouraging portrait- ure of the future to depict it as being an era of mixed experiences ? It may repel those who have erroneously been led to think of it as an existence of unalloyed bliss or unmitigated misery, but to a thoughtful mind this idea HEAVEN 229 is quite agreeable, and even attractive. Can you not see, in the light of the implication that our present internal state of soul will have a vast deal to do with the measure of our future pleasure and pain, why it was that Jesus urged men to lay hold of what he called " eternal life " at once and firmly? Jesus knew that the only possession which insured man a surplus of happiness and peace in this world and the next was the possession of ' ' eternal life." Let a man know God; let him be in loving sym- pathy with his Heavenly Father ; let him be daily growing in God-likeness, and it shall not matter to him whether he is here or there ; he will have joy and hope in God ; he will find that his own struggles to be good and his sympa- thy for those who are battling or ought to be battling as he is toward the heights, while they may bring him sorrow, they will never cause him misery. A spirit of peace will be his, even the peace of Christ. "Eternal life" — that is, a knowledge and love of God — is the necessary and suffi- cient preparation for a satisfactory existence in any world. 3 . We must also notice that the theory that the future life is to be a continuation of this makes it impossible for that existence to be a scene of indolence. If we are under the same necessity there as we are here of working out our own destiny, we shall never be able to fold our hands and say the task is finished. If we sigh for rest, as the tired soul often does, we must learn that our rest can never be that of indolent inaction ; it must be the rest of repose — resting in duty rather than resting from duty. Phillips Brooks has cautioned us to bear in mind that " heaven will not be pure stagnation, not idleness, not any mere luxurious dreaming over the spiritual repose that has been safely and forever won, but active, tireless, earnest work ; 230 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION fresh, live enthusiasm for the high labors which eternity will offer." If we reflect at all, we see that we are under the neces- sity of going on. We are not yet what we shall be. We are in process of evolution. We are caught in the current of development and cannot get out of it. The future, therefore, will be a scene of service' and progress. All souls will continue to mount the ladder of perfection, round by round. It will be an ascent in spirituality and love. And this, really, is what virtuous and virtue- aspiring souls want. Virtue ". . . desires no isles of the blest, No quiet seats of the just; To rest in a golden grove, Or bask in a summer sky; Give her the wages of going on, And not to die," and she is happy and strong. II. Now that we have seen what is impossible in the future life viewing it as a continuation of this, let us look at a few things that are made highly probable by this theory. In the first place, it is evident that the souls there are interested in the souls here. If memory survives and love not only continues but deepens, how can the departed forget us? Instead of growing away from us, they will grow toward us, for their growth is love-ward. Where their treasures are, there will their hearts be also. In the next life we do not lose our identity, and for this reason, I believe, in the second place, that the spirits of the departed are always near the souls in this world. The cry of the human heart is for its beloved. Lowell said, after the burial : HEAVEN 231 " Immortal ? I feel it, I know it; Who doubts it of such as she ? But that is the pang's very secret — Immortal away from me ! Communion in spirit ? Forgive me; But I, who am earthly and weak, Would give all my income for dreamland, For a touch of her hand on my cheek." Of course, it is unreasonable to expect to hear the voice or to feel the physical touch of our beloved, but it is entirely rational to believe they are just as near to us as spirit can come to spirit. Think of the possible activity of the soul. Like thought, it can travel anywhere, and with the swiftness of light. From one planet to another, up and down the boundless universe, the liberated souls may go, and yet return to us instantly and be with us almost constantly. It is sometimes asked : Where are the dead ? Where in space may they be found ? Of course no one knows, but is it not inevitable for us to think of them as being here : in this earth, amid scenes familiar and with loved ones dear ? What spot in all the universe could attract you or me so strongly as the spot whereon our friends and loved ones dwelt? What scene could have a greater attraction for the reformer than this earth which had been the arena of his contests for humanity? What world can be a greater object of solicitude to the saints above than this sphere in which all souls are taking their first and serious lessons in destiny ? I think it is true that we are ever surrounded with a great cloud of wit- nesses. I think "It true that angels hear us, When we sing our songs of praise; That bright wings are waving near us, When to heaven our thoughts we raise. It is true that when we're praying Radiant forms are bending near; That they know what we are saying, And our every word can hear." 232 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION Ever since I learned that Jesus said, "Lo, I am with you always," I have felt certain that the future life and the present life were close together and that those who passed from our physical sight and touch came back to be ever in spiritual contact with us. There is a beautiful and inter- pretative poem which makes this very clear : " Beside the dead I knelt for prayer, And felt a presence as I prayed; Lo! it was Jesus standing there, He smiled: ' Be not afraid! ' " ' Lord, thou hast conquered death, we know: Restore again to life,' I said, ' This one who died an hour ago.' He smiled: ' She is not dead! ' " ' Asleep then, as thyself didst say, Yet thou canst lift the lids that keep Her prisoned eyes from ours away! He smiled: ' She doth not sleep! ' " ' Nay, then, tho' haply she do wake, And look upon some fairer dawn, Restore her to our souls that ache! ' He smiled: ' She is not gone! ' " ' Alas! too well we know our loss, Nor hope again our joy to touch Until the stream of death we cross! ' He smiled: ' There is no such! ' " ' Yet our beloved seem so far, The while we yearn to feel them near, Albeit with thee we trust they are.' He smiled: ' And I am here! ' " ' Dear Lord, how shall we know that they Still walk unseen with us and thee, Nor sleep, nor wander far away? ' He smiled: 'Abide in me.' " Abiding in Jesus. What does it mean ? It means to have the same comprehensive view of existence and the same spiritual sensitiveness that he had. Gain these and God becomes a God of the living in our sight ; and all souls are seen not only living unto him, but unto us ! HEAVEN 233 How splendidly this line of thinking helps us to answer those familiar and earnest questions : Will we meet each other there? And shall ice know each other ivhen we meet? We shall meet our loved ones, for " Will not their hearts demand us there, — Those hearts, whose fondest throbs were given To us on earth, whose every prayer Petitioned for our ties in Heaven, Whose love outlived the stormy past, And closer twined around us here, And deeper grew until the last, — Such hearts will surely meet us there." Knowing as they do our present lives, following us every- where, and waiting for our coming, we cannot doubt that they will meet and welcome us. Do you recall that exqui- site picture which Dickens drew of the attitude of those in the other life toward those in this earth, in his " Child's Dream of a Star " ? A little boy and his sister select a star which seems to shine more brightly than all the rest right over the spire of the old church in the grave-yard. Every night they vie with each other to see who can first say, " I see the star." As they lie down to sleep they say, " God bless the star." Presently there is a new-made grave in the church-yard, and the little brother is left alone. Night after night he singles out the star that he and his departed sister used to Avatch. One night he dreams that the light from the star is a sparkling road, and he sees angels traveling up and down it, the star opening to let them in and out of heaven. As the star opens, he sees angels with beaming eyes waiting for those constantly coming up the shining stair-way. As the waiters, one by one, welcome their loved ones, they turn and disappear into the brilliant depths of heaven with them. But there are many angels who do not go away. Those they wait for have not yet come. The brother descries his sister among those still waiting at the entrance of the star, and he hears her ask of the leading angel that has 234 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION just brought other souls thither : "Is my brother come?" and as the leader says " No," she is turning hopefully away when the dreaming brother stretches out his arms and cries, " Oh sister, I am here ! Take me." And she turns her beaming eyes upon him — and it is night, and the star is shining into the room, making long rays down towards him as he saw it through his tears. From that hour forth the boy looked upon that star as the home he was to go to. As the touching story continues, Dickens represents the sister as coming to the portal of the star when every fresh convoy of souls arrives, and asking the same eager question : "Is my brother come ? " always to receive the same negative reply, although one after the other she welcomes an infant daughter of her brother's, their own mother, and then his maiden daughter. The years pass by ; the brother has grown old and weak. One night as he lies upon his bed, his children standing round, he cries, as he cried so long ago : " I see the star ! " They whisper one another, "He is dying." And he says, "I am. My age is falling from me like a garment, and I move towards the star as a child. And O, my Father, now I thank Thee that it has so often opened to receive those dear ones who await me ! " Yery beautifully and very truly, it seems to me, this allegory represents the attitude of those who have gone before toward those remaining behind. They are watching for us and waiting for us, and they will meet and welcome us at the last. Shall we know them? If Swedenborg's idea is true, we shall know such of them as we have been associated with for any length of time. We shall recognize them as we recognize our friends and loved ones in this world after a separation, — by their appearance and manner. If Swedenborg's idea be not true, or if we have had but a brief acquaintance with them, the recognition will come from their side. They will know us and make themselves known to us. As the growing sister kept watch over her HEAVEN 235 darling brother, — as she welcomed him with gestures of love and joy to the eternal abode, so we may be sure that our departed are ever watching over us and will greet us in the sweet by and by in ways that will reveal who they are and fill us with delight. 4. There is one other important question to be answered before I close this discussion of the future life, namely : Will there be any missing faces there? The reply has already leaped into your minds. You are saying : If the next life be a continuation of this, there will be no missing faces there. Our theory makes it certain that every child ever born into this world has been re-born into that. If one soul survives the grave, all souls survive. They are all there : all of God's offspring. Yes, the good and the bad are there together, mingled as they were here ; and the same processes of development are there going on which are here lifting the race higher and yet higher in goodness. The bad are becoming good ; the good are becoming better ; and all are growing toward the best. God, the loving Father, as he looks on the two worlds, sees all the children that ever sprang forth from him ; sees them coming slowly up to the standard he erected before they were born ; sees the time when they shall be what he intended ; and hears afar the song of praise that shall roll in upon his heart when the Race has reached Maturity ! This portraiture of the future life may be new to some. It may suggest questions I have not had time to answer. But it is a picture which has its warrants in the Bible and in Good Sense, and does it not satisfy and stimulate? It was Starr King who said: "To my mind one of the sublimest records of history is the reply of the old heathen Socrates to his judges, when they condemned him, at seventy years old, to die. 'If death,' said he, 'be a removal from 236 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION hence to another place, and if all the dead are there, what greater blessing can there be than this, my judges? At what price would you not estimate a conference with Orpheus and Musa3us, with Hesiod and Homer? I go to meet them, and to converse with them, and to acquaint myself with all the great sages that have been the glory of the past, and that have died by the unjust sentence of time.' That is what we need, — to think of the future, not as the dungeon where the wicked are locked up forever in an arbitrary doom, and the good shut apart from the evil to enjoy forever the consciousness of being saved from perdition, but with vigorous imagination to regard it as a great sphere of life, filled with society amid whose myriads we must rank according to quality, overarched with all the glory of God's wisdom, and flooded with the effluence of his holiness and love, with continual occupations for the exploring mind of Newton, for the massive understanding of Bacon, for the genius of Shakespeare, for the reverent intellect of Channing, for the saintly heart of Fenelon, — with duties for every faculty and every affection, and with joys proportioned exactly to our desire of truth, our willingness of service, and the purity of love that makes us kindred with Christ and G-od." It is glorious to look forward to thus going on, in company with our friends and those we dearly love and the great leaders of all ages, working out the marvelous destiny the wise and loving Father has appointed us. Expectations like these enable us to join in the peaceful, trustful, radiant prayer of the gentle Whittier, who said : "When on my day of life the night is falling, And in the winds from unsunned spaces blown, I hear far voices out of darkness calling My feet to paths unknown, " Thou, who hast made my home of life so pleasant, Leave not its tenant when its walls decay ; O Love Divine, O Helper ever present, Be Thou my strength and stay. HEAVEN 237 " I have but thee, O Father ! let Thy spirit Be with me, then, to comfort and uphold; No gate of pearl, no branch of palm I merit, Nor street of shining gold. " Suffice it if, my good and ill unreckoned, And both forgiven thro' thy abounding grace, I find myself by hands familiar beckoned Unto my fitting place. " There, from the music round about me stealing, I fain would learn the new and holy song, And find at last beneath thy trees of healing, The life for which I long." SCRIPTURES THAT SUPPORT THE DOCTRINES ADVOCATED IN THIS VOLUME.* 1. Conscience sacred; inquiry to be full and free. Luke xii., 54-57; Rom. xiv., 1-5; 1 Cor. x., 15; 1 Thess. v., 21. 2. The Bible the most important and sacred of books, but not to be accepted as infallible, because in some of its parts opposed to the teachings of science, the best conscience and reason of our time, and the teachings of Jesus. Matt, v., 33-44. Compare Matt, v., 44 with Ps. cix. ; with Deut. xix., 13-21; with Josh, xi., 6-23; and with 1 Sam. xv., 2-11. Josh, x., 12-13 ; Jonah i., 17, and ii., 10. 3. One God, and only one, the Father, a Spirit, the only proper object of worship ; in contradistinction from a trinity, and worship of Jesus or of the Virgin Mary. Matt. vi.. 9 ; Mark xii., 29; Jno. iv.,24; xvii., 3; xx., 17; Eph. iy.,-6; 1 Tim. ii., 5. 4. Human nature not inherently evil (or, as the creeds of at least two of our great Christian denominations say, "dead in sin, wholly defiled in all the faculties and parts of soul and body, and therefore bound over to the wrath of God"), but, formed "in the image of God," and even in its lowest estate containing much that is beautiful, noble, and well pleasing to God. Gen. 1., 26, 27 ; Rom. ii., 14, 15 ; Mark x., 14, 15 ; Luke vii., 1-9, 36-48 ; Ps. cxxxix., 14-16. * Quoted almost verbatim from Rev. J. T. Sunderland's tract on "What Unitarians Believe," thus showing the practical oneness, theo- logically, between Universalists and Unitarians. It is true that Univer- salists and Unitarians have some very conservative and some very radical preachers and laymen, but the rank and file of each denomination occupy ground between these two extremes. The tendency of both sects is progressive. TEXTS SUPPORTING DOCTRINES ADVANCED 239 5. Jesus not God the Son, but the son of God (his sonship consisting in moral god-likeness, many others besides him being called in Scripture " sons of God") ; not Deity but divine (all humanity being the "offspring of God," and therefore, in the degree of its perfection, divine) . Matt, xvi., 16 ; Acts ix., 20 ; xvii., 29 ; 1 Jno. iii., 1,2; Hosea i., 10 ; Matt, v., 9 ; Gen. i., 27 ; James iii., 9. 6. God's love universal and everlasting, extending as much to the next world as to this ; all punishment remedial and disciplinary ; all men finally to be saved. Is. xlix., 15 ; Jer. xxxi., 3; Ps. cxxxvi., 1; Matt, xviii., 14; Col. i., 20; Heb. xii., 5-10 ; 1 Cor. xv., 22-28 ; Luke xv., 20-24. 7. The soul immortal; its highest possession, "eternal life;" its ultimate condition, " perfection." Jno. xiv., 1—4; Luke xx., 37, 38; 1 Cor. xv., 1-58; Eph. iv., 13; Matt. v., 48; Mark, x., 30; Rom. vi., 22, 23; Jno. xvii., 3; Jno. x., 28. A FEW VERY CHOICE BOOKS RECOMMENDED FOR FURTHER READING. 1. Reason in Religion and the Bible: Seat of Authority in Religion, Martineau; Gospel Criti- cism, Com-: The Gospel and its Earliest Interpretations, Cone: Tht Bible, Sunderland; The Bible of To-day, Chadwick ; Back to >h> Old Testament for the Message of the New, Curtis; Revelation,* Atwood. 2. God: Belie/ in God, Schurman; The Idea of God. Fiske; The Pwrposi of God, Dodge : The Fatherhood of God,* Adams. 3. Evolution and Man : Thr Origin of Man, Darwin; The Descent of Man, Darwin; Our Heredity from God, Powell; Darn-in and After Darwin, Romanes; Weismannism, Romanes; Cosmic Philosophy, Fiske; Destiny of Man, Fiske; Evolution and it* Relation to Religious Thought, Le Conte. 4. Jesus Christ and Salvation : Christ in the Life,* Wbodbridge; Atonement,* Tucker; Salvation,* Cone; Seat of Authority in Religion, Mar- tineau. 5. Hell and Annihilation: Universalism Asserted, Allin. 6. Immortality and Heaven : Witness to Immortality, Gordon. * Manuals of Faith and Duty.