LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 
 
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 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 
 
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istie-w IBOOIKIS- 
 
 Fall of 1881. 
 
 MAN'S ORIGIN AND DESTINY. Sketched from the 
 Platform of the Physical Sciences. By Prof. J. P. Les- 
 ley, Secretary American Philosophical Society, etc. 
 New and Enlarged Edition. 8vo. Cloth. $2.00. 
 
 ECCE SPIRITUS. i2mo. Cloth. $1.25. 
 
 A STUDY OF THE PENTATEUCH. By Rufus P. 
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 THE WAY OF LIFE. By George S. Merriam. i6mo. 
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 A YEAR OF MIRACLE. A Poem in Four Sermons. 
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 TENDER AND TRUE. Poems of Love. Selected by 
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 GEO. H ELLIS, Publisher, 
 
 14.1 Franklin St., Boston. 
 
ECCE SPIRITUS. 
 
 A STATEMENT OF THE SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLE 
 OF JESUS AS THE LAW OF LIFE. 
 
 " Howbeit y when he, the Spirit of Truths is come, he will guide 
 you unto all truth." 
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 Or CONGRESS 
 
 WASHINGTON 
 
 
 7 
 
 BOSTON: 
 
 George H'. Ellis, 141 Franklin Street. 
 
 1881. 
 
 

 Copyright, 
 
 1881, 
 
 By Georgb H. Ellis. 
 
Dear Spirit, if within thy sunny heart 
 
 A memory lives of this which is so fraught 
 With thee, since once we shared it, thou hast part 
 
 In such fulfilment as this day has brought. 
 Yet what sweet hope was in the work we wrought 
 
 Of word of thine, beyond the world's dispraise, 
 To crown it worthy ! And what bitter thought 
 
 Now it falls silent in the empty ways ! 
 And yet could aught without some virtue be 
 That once was thine, and still so speaks of thee ? 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. The Negative Work and Positive Want of 
 
 the Nineteenth Century, i 
 
 II. Sources of Christian Authority, 17 
 
 III. Natural or Supernatural, 34 
 
 IV. Christian Power, 49 
 
 V. Spirituality, 63 
 
 VI. Nature and Spirit, 84 
 
 VII. God or Christ, 99 
 
 VIII. Doctrine vs. Personal Endowment, 114 
 
 IX. Selfhood of Jesus, 130 
 
 X. The Personal Element, 144 
 
 XI. Life, 154 
 
 XII. Immortal Life, 175 
 
 XIII. Immortal Life {Continued), 193 
 
 XIV. Symbolism of the Cross, 210 
 
 XV. The Faith of the Future, 224 
 
CHAPTER I. 
 
 THE NEGATIVE WORK AND POSITIVE WANT OF THE 
 NINETEENTH CENTURY. 
 
 To one who watches the revolutions of religious 
 thought, without any faith in human progress or abil- 
 ity to see beneath the shifting surface an underlying 
 principle ever tending toward harmony and positive- 
 ness of result, there must be much of discourage- 
 ment. It has been the sad duty of modern times not 
 to inaugurate, — for the tendency has long been latent, 
 — but to carry out to full effect the battle against 
 time -honored comforts and sacred associations, a 
 duty from the sadness of which no one has been able 
 wholly to escape. Those who would not fight must 
 perforce witness the battle, and share, if only inciden- 
 tally, in its sorrow. Even to stand aloof in such age is 
 to be disturbed and unsettled by the din of intellectual 
 warfare, and choked and blinded with the smoke of 
 controversy; while so-called liberalism, beyond its 
 own inner struggle and loss, has suffered under the 
 added necessity of bringing pain to others. 
 
 The age shows two marked characteristics, not 
 peculiar to itself, but emphasized as they never were 
 before : the unflinching honesty which does not hesi- 
 tate to test traditional faith by the facts of science 
 
2 JEJcce Spiritus. 
 
 and the highest reason ; and the radical unrest, the un- 
 satisfied craving, the uneasy consciousness of spiritual 
 need which go with it. The age is in that undesira- 
 ble, that intermediate condition, where the things of 
 childhood are no longer tolerated, while the things of 
 manhood have not yet fully come. But herein there is 
 one certainty: fidelity to the facts, absolute honesty, 
 are here ; and they are here to stay. Whatever else 
 men would have, they will have no denial of the cer- 
 tainties of nature and that reason which is from God. 
 Christianity has been particularly unfortunate in 
 the influences to which it has been subjected at the 
 hands of its successive adherents. If it were not 
 something definite and unmistakable of itself, it must 
 necessarily become an ever-varying quantity accord- 
 ing to the shading it would receive in different states 
 of society and stages of culture. That it was such 
 has been the assertion of its representatives, and yet 
 its history is the record of continual growth and 
 change. It has been affected by the course of civiliza- 
 tion, but cannot claim more of cause than effect in 
 the general modification of race tendencies. The tide 
 of a new life of intellectual, social, and material power 
 had already set in before Christianity had entered 
 upon its best development, and helped to lift it yet 
 higher. It could not have come to anything like ful- 
 ness of j^ower, even externally, except in an age of 
 general awakening to and aptitude for light. But it 
 was inevitable here, as in its earliest inception, that 
 its acceptance should take on a very positive form. 
 There was nothing of the philosopher's position in the 
 
Work and Want of the Nineteenth Century. 3 
 
 attitude of the primitive Christians. With Grecian 
 many-sidedness of intellectual vision, they did not fail 
 to see anything of special sacredness in the breadth 
 and comprehensiveness of their outlook ; but, with a 
 certain narrowness that verged to the other extreme, 
 they dogmatized the statements of Jesus into a rig- 
 idity and positiveness that they would not bear. 
 The new church was new only in name, form, and 
 intensity. The power, authority, was old, even 
 before Abraham was. Hence, infinite harm to the 
 movement, in an assertiveness which went far be- 
 yond any sanction given it by the Master, — a barm 
 which is seen more clearly with every year of its 
 developing life. From this came the utter deadness 
 of the Middle Ages, and that immorality which tran- 
 scended ail the recorded wickedness of men in the 
 hypocritical sanctity that characterized it. Then, 
 the first blow was struck against traditional Chris- 
 tianity, in its claim of authority and salvation in and 
 of itself to the disregard of all living and higher 
 necessities. The first protest against false assump- 
 tion and perversion came not from without, but from 
 within. It was not unevangelical free thought, but 
 the resuscitated spirit of Jesus within the lines of 
 recognized communion, which first revolted from 
 traditional Christianity. The negative work began 
 in the Church; and the Church, not science, has to 
 bear the responsibility for that movement of emanci- 
 pation by which it has itself been constantly weak- 
 ened. The faithlessness and unspirituality of our 
 day lie at the door of council and priesthood. The 
 
4 Ecce Spiritus. 
 
 holy function, the divine principle, have been mixed 
 with falsity and overstatement so long that an at- 
 titude of doubt — nay, worse, of indifference — has 
 been bred both within and outside of the Church. 
 Christianity has claimed both too much and not 
 enough. It has omitted to see the facts as they 
 are, and to harmonize itself therewith ; and it has 
 monstrously overestimated the prerogative delegated 
 by Jesus to the Church. Hence came the spirit out 
 of the loins of Christianity itself, which has been 
 silently, but surely, undermining its power. Science 
 and its attendant material prosperity have helped this 
 on ; but the real j>rotest has come from the religious 
 nature of man, from the reason unsatisfied, the spirit- 
 ual need unmet, the integrity of mind and heart be- 
 trayed and duped on every hand. 
 
 The influence of the scientific tendency has been 
 far overrated in this connection. The spirit of inves- 
 tigation and mental activity cannot be hostile to the 
 reception of any genuine comfort and assurance which 
 is craved by the nature of man. It becomes one of 
 the friends of that most truly religious attitude which 
 would be satisfied, not falsely supported and momenta- 
 rily quieted, in its longing for the highest. The spir- 
 itual life of the world can have suffered nothing at 
 the hands of an age of keen and not easily satisfied 
 pursuit of truth. Science with religion struck at the 
 false and superstitious, readily echoing and carrying 
 out the progressive protests of a Luther, a Wesley, a 
 Fox, and a Channing ; but the negative work of the 
 nineteenth century is the immediate product of the 
 
Work and Want of the Nineteenth Century. 5 
 
 cloister and a reactionary congregation. It is inci- 
 dentally the result of general forces working in our 
 life; but, primarily, the dogmas have been relin- 
 quished, because the religious nature has found them 
 groundless and not calculated to satisfy. 
 
 History and science show that there can be nothing 
 lost of forces working honestly and consistently, that 
 they can but make for order, wholeness, and positive- 
 ness of result. There can be no really destructive 
 work on the part of science. It is everywhere posi- 
 tive, on the side of the facts, everywhere the lover 
 of truth. It is the Church that has to deal with the 
 problem of an apathy and faithlessness which is born 
 of the deepest religious consciousness. Science has 
 helped the emphasis laid by the soul upon the unsatis- 
 factory position of the Church. It has thrown into 
 stronger light the necessity for fact, and all harmony, 
 with fact, as a sufficient basis for spiritual assurance. 
 But it is the religious consciousness, the inward and 
 eternal needs of the soul, that the Church has to rec- 
 ognize and meet, not science. If it subdues again to 
 its lost allegiance the whole rounded nature of man, 
 it has nothing to fear from the universe. The of- 
 fended deity of fact and reason it is to placate is in 
 the mind, and not in any revelation of matter. It 
 has taken the soul of man, honestly hungry after 
 truth, into a sphere of assumption and makeshift 
 reality which it has not suffered man to gauge at its 
 worth, but has insisted upon with dogmatic finality 
 as sacred and certain. The reaction which came 
 was, as might have been expected, revolutionary and 
 
6 Ecce Spiritus. 
 
 sweeping, having to do not only with the credal state- 
 ments, but with the entire attitude and spirit of the 
 Church as well. As was but too natural, the denial 
 did not stop with doctrine, but touched the Church 
 whose existence was bound up with it, nay, even relig- 
 ion itself. And the destructive work was not seen 
 alone in the constantly increasing ranks of those 
 who put themselves entirely outside the sphere of 
 religious things, but equally in that painful doubt 
 and indifference on the part of those who outwardly 
 profess and further its cause. The keenest thrust 
 under which traditional Christianity writhes is the 
 toleration and temporizing among its own adhe- 
 rents. The doubt and questioning, the want of rest 
 and satisfaction, which drove the free thinker out of 
 church fellowshij^, did not go out with him; they still 
 remain emasculating the meaningless iteration of faiths 
 and formulas which pass the lips, but find no intel- 
 ligent response from within. The saddest thing, 
 about the Church in our day is the excuses that are 
 openly made for its existence. Socially, morally, 
 even financially, it is admitted to be a public neces- 
 sity ; for no one would think of locating in a town 
 unprovided with churches, no matter what his indi- 
 vidual convictions might be. Then, since in the 
 minds of even its members, disheartened in the effort 
 to reconcile present want with wornrout opportunity, 
 the Church is no longer what it pretends to be, 
 a saving and special sanctity, the aisles are filled 
 with mildly incredulous or disrespectfully doubtful 
 or wearily indifferent faces. The many who to-day 
 
Work and Want of the Nineteenth Century. 7 
 
 attend its services and tolerate its creeds do not con- 
 stitute the strength, but the real weakness of evan- 
 gelical Christianity. There are only the elements 
 of decay in such half-way adherence. The Church 
 has grown tentative in its efforts after divine verity. 
 A trembling hesitancy, a half-apologetic honesty, 
 mingles with the utterances of positive statement. 
 The very tone of the verbal response, and the frank 
 confessions of the street, rob the service of its in- 
 tended efficacy, and indeed tend to surround the 
 whole subject of churchly worship with an air of 
 insincerity. 
 
 Let us not exaggerate here. There are still many 
 who consistently hold to the old beliefs; but the 
 churches are by no means filled with such, nor is the 
 drift even of church life toward, but rather away 
 from, greater strictness of accord between thought 
 and worship. But the age, its spirit and truest life, 
 is not wholly represented in the churches. Statistics 
 everywhere confirm the impression of a vast falling- 
 off in all outward recognition of religion. The real 
 thought of the age is not uttered in pulpit avowals 
 which find more or less of a response from the pews. 
 The word " negation " does not adequately express 
 the attitude of the time. Complacent toleration, 
 which is only a more fatal form of the same disorder, 
 and utter indifference, are the still more dishearten- 
 ing phases of our life with which the restatement of 
 spiritual consciousness has to contend. And the sad- 
 ness of this position does not lie in the fact that men 
 do not want to know, but, beyond this, in the fact 
 
8 JEcce Spiritus. 
 
 that, baffled and bewildered alike by the tone of relig- 
 ious history and the confusion and unsatisfactoriness 
 of present opportunity, they have been thrown back 
 on the one resource of careless indifference. They 
 have watched the long trial and evident failure of 
 dogmatic religion, and have declared in all practical 
 ways that dogma is no longer what men want. But 
 they are hungry for life. An insatiable craving for 
 insight and assurance is the accompaniment, many 
 voices to the contrary notwithstanding, of great intel- 
 lectual activity and wide achievement in every other 
 sphere. The increase of material comfort only em- 
 phasizes the need of inward experience. The under- 
 standing of nature intensifies in just the ratio of its 
 completeness the longing for higher and more endur- 
 ing knowledge. This is the final and sure result, how- 
 ever untrue it may be of the first stage of awakening 
 to a wonderland of fact and certainty just at hand. In 
 the dead ages there has been equal deadness of intel- 
 lectual and spiritual life. Science and spirituality 
 have in general risen and slumbered together, the 
 former stimulating the latter none the less because it 
 has introduced new and higher standards and made 
 the acceptance of faith far more difficult. It has 
 never seriously affected the spiritual impulse, even 
 while insisting that its premises and conclusions were 
 false to the facts. 
 
 In the pushing, practical, never-satisfied life of our 
 day there is found no exception to this statement. 
 Never did a deeper unrest pervade society, implying, 
 as it does, ceaseless effort and longing to attain relig- 
 
Work and Want of the Nineteenth Century. 9 
 
 ious certainty. There is wide-spread want, the ache 
 of hungering natures, in the negations, nay, in the 
 utter lifelessness, of the time. Out of our wonderful 
 material prosperity comes intensified longing, born of 
 the bitter contrast between outer and inner establish- 
 ment, and of a demand for that inward harmony 
 which is now all that is needed to complete the 
 comfort which becomes the more imperious as a con- 
 sideration amid circumstances of external fulness and 
 beauty. With a world subject to our use, a longer 
 average and more healthful record of life, has yet 
 come no proportionate advance in soul assurance. 
 The fall to the inevitable state of human trouble 
 is all the more sudden and unbearable, and the re- 
 covery, the reaction, which can alone come from 
 forces within, is all the more appalling in its diffi- 
 culty, amid surroundings of ease and plenty. The 
 negation is itself largely negative. It is not so much 
 assertive as sad. It sees no added hope nor joy, and, 
 painfully conscious of the difficulties arrayed against 
 it though it be, confesses by its very activity the 
 presence of a something yet seeking satisfaction. 
 Its incredulousness must not be mistaken for unwill- 
 ingness to be enlightened and enlivened. Supernat- 
 uralism has failed to satisfy, and is moreover opposed 
 to the entire spirit of the age. If anything else were 
 possible in its place, not so opposed, and as truly 
 reliable as it is consoling, it would eagerly accept it. 
 But, in the lack of hint or hope of such a consumma- 
 tion, it settles back, sad and unexpectant, yet proudly 
 unwilling to complain of the common lot. 
 
10 Ecce Spiritus. 
 
 For the comfort of such, a mental position, it may 
 be said that there is all history to prove that this state 
 of things cannot be more than temporary and transi- 
 tional. There is a negative stage in human progress; 
 but in nature, as in life, there is no negation. The 
 race cannot stop here, nor indeed anywhere. "We see 
 a time of movement, but not of disintegration. Law 
 and precedent have not been for a moment set aside. 
 The unmistakable drift of life, seen here as every- 
 where else, forbids the assumption that this is all. If 
 indeed it were, we should still say that the destruc- 
 tive work, so far as it had reference to the facts, was 
 right and good, at the same time that the spirit of 
 it was false and fatal. "We can find no sympathy with 
 iconoclasm which exists for its own sake ; while we 
 must regard the pioneer work, which clears the ground 
 for a better growth, as one of the most positive and 
 beneficent factors in human life. There can be no 
 school of the negations. Men cannot rally around 
 nothing. To die for a fallacy or a superstition, as yet 
 undisproved, has a certain logic, where to live for a 
 moment in utter denial would be impossible. The 
 positions of even materialism have been on the side of 
 a more positive spirituality, so far as they have existed 
 at all. They are often sad, but never, when honest, 
 despicable. Even they have confessed that there is 
 something in nature whereby they are vaguely im- 
 pressed, as if, they cannot well see how, a God were 
 back of all the 23henomena of change. Xow and then, 
 the momentary detection of what seems to them the 
 movement of a divine impulse in human history and 
 
Work and Want of the Nineteenth Century. 11 
 
 experience stirs them to a faint responsiveness. But, 
 ere they are aware, the chain of evidence is inter- 
 rupted by something chilling in themselves or from 
 without, which does not so much call in question, as 
 discover an inability to longer sustain so sublimated 
 a flight. 
 
 If it be true that the honesty of the facts is fixed 
 as one of the conditions of our possible religious life, 
 it is also true that the needs of our time are not 
 gauged by any external standard. There is predic- 
 tion of something satisfactory to come in the very 
 imperiousness of that want which, while unwilling to 
 ignore the testimony and bearing of matter, cannot 
 be fulfilled therein. The question grows almost to 
 painful suspense with the weight of the interests at 
 stake, if, out of the negative work done, anything is 
 left of possible and satisfactory religious life. The 
 want looks as a necessity to that which is positive, 
 the positiveness of which, however, must rest on a 
 new and better basis. Everywhere, the need is 
 acknowledged of comfort in trial, of fresh incentives 
 in life, of an outlook more inspiring; and all to be 
 not antagonistic to, but harmonized with, the existing 
 law of things as revealed in the study of the universe 
 as it is. 
 
 It will not do for us to overlook this present neces- 
 sity, which is here with a deep significance. Any 
 want of satisfaction in a nature and time like ours is 
 of itself portentous. The moment for an understand- 
 ing of the subtle relationship there is between the 
 negative work and the positive want, which alike 
 
12 Ecce Spiritus. 
 
 characterize our age, has come. At least there is a 
 class of minds ready for the undertaking. Out of 
 that deep expectancy of our time, — an expectancy 
 found alike in philosophical and religious circles, — of 
 a new era of spirituality, of a reaction which shall 
 throw mankind higher than ever before upon the 
 shore of certainty, comes indeed the necessity for this. 
 
 Man can never return whither he has come. Any 
 hope of a renewal of religious life must be based on 
 the perception of this fact, and the necessity for a new 
 departure in method and stand-point. A new set of 
 elements have entered into the account. He is as- 
 sured, beyond the possibility of any future question, 
 of certain fundamental conditions which must for- 
 ever incapacitate the old data for satisfying his reason. 
 They have had thorough trial, and he is incredulous 
 until the key-note of a widely different position is 
 struck. He can go back to the heart, the reality of 
 religion, but never to the assumptions of supernatu- 
 ralism. Religion must square itself to a new rule in 
 all his future acceptance. 
 
 Man is not what he once was, and never can be 
 again. The years of change and waiting under the 
 influence of a new set of certainties have made over, 
 not the real nature of the man, — for his needs and pos- 
 sibilities spiritually are the same and indestructible, — 
 but the mental constitution through which their satis- 
 faction must come. Religion itself has met with no 
 change, but man's capacity to receive it has been won- 
 derfully affected. The possession is possible, as of 
 old; but the approach has gained at the same time in 
 
Work and Want of the Nineteenth Century. 13 
 
 dignity and difficulty. Man's hunger for inward com- 
 fort and peace is not denied in the facts of science 
 and history, but the old condition of satisfied want in 
 the sweat of the brow is emphasized anew in the 
 realm of religion. And the immense gain in the pos- 
 sibility of firmly rooted convictions, instead of readily 
 accepted although utterly impersonal faiths, has be- 
 come the reward of the patient struggle. 
 
 So much is certain: that, with all our boasted knowl- 
 edge and our apparent prosperity, we are not happy. 
 The age that allows in book form such questions as 
 "Is Life worth living?" which comes out of a vast 
 truth of experience, whatever may be the immediate 
 end to which it appeals, is not an age satisfied and at 
 rest. There are hunger and heartache at the core of 
 life, such as indeed have always been there, but felt 
 to-day with a new-found intensity and meaning. The 
 want is no fancied one, no sign of an intellectual lux- 
 uriousness sated with triumphs in the sphere of sense, 
 but real and deep and humble with the direst needs 
 of life. It is a mistake to suppose that mankind has 
 grown away from the religious verities. Its very 
 lapse from the falsity and unreason has been a positive 
 step in the direction of the reality. But the retracing 
 of steps amid a mighty forest of bewildering growths 
 most naturally leads to a confusion of ways and a 
 sense of being lost. There comes a time, however, 
 when even forest paths are turned into highways for 
 the world. 
 
 Of all the people who think at all upon religious 
 matters, we might make three distinct classes : those 
 
14 Ecce Spiritus. 
 
 whose thought is traditional, whose minds are subject 
 to certain modes of faith and feeling which obtain in 
 the Church, as methods by which it impresses and 
 holds its members; those who bring to bear upon 
 religious problems nothing but purely rationalistic 
 processes ; and those who stand between these two, 
 the converts of neither, and yet indebted to each for 
 a side to the completeness of their faith. 
 
 Those of the first class ensconce themselves in a 
 quiet corner of the Church, away from the din of the 
 controversies which distract the age, but half -aware 
 of, and in general indifferent to, the vast changes that 
 have come here as elsewhere in the course of human 
 development. The fact that others struggle and 
 suffer, nay, even perish with despair, does not ruffle 
 that mystical meditativeness and that satisfaction 
 with artificial illumination which is only consistent 
 with unwillingness to open one's windows to the 
 light of day. With a mental constitution easily sat- 
 isfied, a faith capacity naturally receptive and not 
 too strongly dominated by the intellect, the nine- 
 teenth century emphasizes in them no new needs. 
 They are sometimes faintly stirred in their traditional 
 security with the ripple of the stormy waves outside. 
 Sometimes, they for a moment seem vaguely conscious 
 of the bitter conflicts of the age, as they look in mild- 
 eyed wonder at the phenomenon of a soul that is 
 willing to be at peace, yet struggling with what to 
 them seems a self-imposed necessity. The day is 
 coming when even these will be shaken from their 
 security, and will more than dream of the warfare of 
 
Work and Want of the Nineteenth Century. 15 
 
 elements outside ; but at present there is little to be 
 said that could hope to reach them, and this word 
 does not especially have them in view. 
 
 Those of the second class, shutting out all the calm 
 fixities of the foregoing, stand at the other extreme, 
 where no acknowledgment is made of any authority 
 outside of matter and the mentality that is coexten- 
 sive with it ; and, since with the faculties brought 
 into use no other result is possible, they profess them- 
 selves satisfied with the critical processes by which 
 what is left to the reason alone is elaborated into 
 intellectual fineness and proportion. Seeing clearly 
 the impossibility of traditional methods of faith, and 
 deprecating all positiveness in religious matters, they 
 rest content in the nice processes of rationalization. 
 An unconquerable distrust of finalities grows into a 
 dread of dogmatism. With some hope still left of 
 processes, they have only faithlessness of results. 
 These latter are not yet, if ever; and, in a world of 
 change, to think, to generalize, to skirt the heavens 
 in only modest peepings at Promethean fire, is all 
 that is consistent with the best spirit of the age. 
 
 Between these two there is a class, never wholly 
 absent, but of late growing in number and impor- 
 tance, who count themselves satisfied with neither of 
 the above positions. They are rationalistic in method 
 and in sympathy with every negative result that has 
 been wrought by the study of the facts, and yet un- 
 willing and unable to rest there. With no fear of 
 science and all due respect for its wonderful work 
 of revelation, they are conscious of something in 
 
16 Ecce Spiritus. 
 
 them more real in fact and more satisfactory in recog- 
 nition, not yet accounted for. Whatever the failure 
 of current Christianity to harmonize these two appar- 
 ently antagonistic positions, they are not wholly with- 
 out hope of a j)ossib]e meeting ground between faith 
 and fact. As before said, this class is growing in 
 number and importunateness of demand. Their po- 
 sition is characteristic, in greater or less degree of 
 acceptance, of a large proportion of earnest thinking 
 people to-day all over the world. To these especially 
 is the following word directed, in the hope that it 
 may do at least something toward meeting the deep- 
 est need of our time. 
 
CHAPTER n. 
 
 SOURCES OF CHRISTIAN AUTHORITY. 
 
 It is now understood that the essence of history, 
 and especially that portion of it which has to do 
 with the life and character of individual men, is 
 that part of it which is least easily caught and made 
 plain to others because of its independence of details. 
 There is an illusive something in every personality 
 which, while most readily felt, seems at best but to 
 hover about the records of its life. It is there as the 
 vital fact, and must be caught in at least some approx- 
 imation, the degree of which latter will determine the 
 truth and power of the transcription. We are grate- 
 ful for the settings of experience, and all minor mat- 
 ters of detail in their time and place ; but our real 
 desire has to do not with the incidents and accidents, 
 but with the man. Death or the distance of complex 
 living have separated him from our loving regard, 
 and we sigh for the nearer look of him who has made 
 us hapjDier or better. It is the personal element that 
 we miss, and which history sets itself about giving us. 
 The very existence of historical attempt is a confes- 
 sion of this object. It takes note of the fact that to 
 know a man's works is not enough : they have only 
 whetted our appetite to know him. Their highest 
 
18 Ecce Spiritus. 
 
 office was the creation in us of that human attitude, 
 which can only be satisfied with one more added to 
 the nearer circle of friends. 
 
 Biography is, moreover, a confession of the fact 
 that in some sort its subject is alive, and that itself is 
 to be the living impression of it to others. It cannot, 
 then, be content with anything short of that which is 
 essential and personal, as far as this is possible, in its 
 presentation of the man. 
 
 And especially is this true if the history have to do 
 with one who lives below the surface of after time, 
 affecting mankind not as an executive power, but as 
 a subtle personal influence in all that it is or does. 
 There are names which have a race quality, the his- 
 tory of which is bound up largely in the conscious- 
 ness and current living of the nations. They have a 
 vitality, a potency to-day; and the biography which 
 reaches our need must not merely outline, but make 
 them live. 
 
 Thus, the real history of Jesus is found, not only in 
 the Gospels, but in that sum total of all the influences 
 which as inspirations from him have been, and still 
 are, shaping the world's thought and life. But there 
 is a view of the Gospels in which they are seen to 
 have succeeded in their biographical intent far better 
 than we commonly think. In the matter of incident 
 and detail, they may be faulty and unsatisfactory, and 
 indeed their scantiness in this direction gives little 
 positiveness of form to the outward picture of the 
 man ; but in some subtle way, difficult to acquire and 
 almost equally difficult to describe, they have affected 
 
Sources of Christian Authority. 19 
 
 us with his personality, made clear to us the life that 
 was in him, and, what is of yet more importance, 
 given us a vivid impression of him as a still existent 
 fact. They have answered the conditions of that 
 higher history which has to do with, but is not 
 wholly bounded by, the details. The crowning touch 
 is seen in that motion and color which give life to the 
 recital of dead facts. We rest our satisfaction in the 
 Gospels, not in their fulness and literary finish, but in 
 the man that seems to live and move in their graphic, 
 though fragmentary, accounts. We think and care 
 little about the books, being so stirred with this soul 
 of the subject still speaking through them. Inasmuch 
 as the literary element has subserved the living pur- 
 pose, and in no wise stood in its way, we can but con- 
 clude that the highest demands of history have been 
 met in the Gospels. 
 
 And no less, also, because they have not done too 
 much, have not striven unduly to master the impres- 
 sion for us. The Jesus we seek is there, but not too 
 readily caught in the surface. He resides in and ani- 
 mates the heart of the narrative, but only our best 
 mood, our highest reach of intelligence, will find him. 
 He will elude us, unless we are competent to read be- 
 tween the lines. The gospel writers were not suffi- 
 ciently skilled to more than construct the literary out- 
 lines, from which the secret of Christian history will 
 appear only when the keenly visioned and sympathetic 
 mind approaches them. 
 
 It must ever be that there is something central in 
 every highly organized life, which does not easily re- 
 
20 JScce Spiritus. 
 
 veal itself; and this will be true just in proportion to 
 the intensity of the experience. The literary crafts- 
 man can but hope at best to catch its essential feat- 
 ures between the lines of his faithful work. The 
 most searching and comprehensive analysis appears 
 but the body, which some latent sensibility fills out 
 with the motions of vitality. The Gospels might have 
 been fuller and more specific, but we doubt if we 
 should in that way have known more of Jesus. As 
 yet little has come — so it often seems — from the 
 outward record, but superficialness and that low sub- 
 serviency to the letter, which Jesus himself so emphat- 
 ically rebukes. The evident need is not so much one 
 of greater external fulness, as of finer insight and 
 ability to get below the surface on the part of those 
 who read. Enough is there, to him who approaches 
 the narrative with this equipment, to more than out- 
 line the man. Beyond the statement of what he is 
 and thinks, and the exemplification of this with which 
 he lived before men, there is still left a personal re- 
 siduum which is far truer to the man, as well as much 
 more effective as a mover of mankind. 
 
 That the results of gospel interpretation have not 
 been hitherto altogether satisfactory is not because of 
 any essential fault in the narratives themselves, but 
 because of the imperfect attitude on the part of the 
 student and would-be follower. The Gospels have 
 utterly failed, if below their verbal inaccuracies and 
 contradictoriness of detail they have not given us 
 something which corrects and harmonizes them into a 
 living picture and impersonation, — in short, the reality 
 
Sources of Christian Authority. 21 
 
 of the Being of whom they treat. By this test we 
 try them, convinced that their real exegesis is not 
 textual, but intrinsic and spiritual. The last analysis 
 of their collective statements is this : What character 
 as a whole appears from the mass of incidents and 
 accredited words, and is he, when so brought before 
 us, a consistent, living, and efficient creation? Does 
 he answer with the motions of vitality to the honest 
 needs of mind and heart? Whatever may be the 
 fault of the story, is the man clear and living, a pict- 
 ure, nay, a person, not a dead fact? Does a heart 
 with the currents of the life-blood in it come close to 
 ours? Are our steps henceforth attended and our 
 hands clasped in some nearness of spiritual compan- 
 ionship ? 
 
 The ages have with one voice answered this ques- 
 tion, believers and unbelievers alike conceding that 
 about the man there can be no shadow of doubt. In 
 general, Jesus has never been far misunderstood. The 
 character, personal superiority, and immense effective- 
 ness of the man in the best thought and life of the 
 world have gone unquestioned. Jesus has in great 
 measure been spared the sufferings of so-called Chris- 
 tianity at the hands of destructive criticism. Even 
 the unsparing tests to which the literal claims of the 
 Gospels themselves have been subjected have not 
 touched the transcendent personality of the man, 
 whom no false literalism and no perverted inference 
 can hope to hold. Ecclesiastical assumption has been 
 arraigned on every hand ; and the basis of Christianity, 
 as it is seen to exist in its most authoritative utter- 
 
22 JSJcce Spiritus. 
 
 ances, has been declared a myth. But the most ultra 
 radicalism has been linked with respect for the man, 
 and at least some faint understanding of him. 
 
 Indeed, Jesus is the only part of Christianity that 
 has not been underrated nor outgrown. In the inter- 
 ests of schemes and systems, his utterances have been 
 a thousand times mutilated, the schools themselves, 
 never stationary, having frequently shifted the basis 
 of Biblical interpretation ; and all the time the Jesus 
 of human history has stood out as an object of rever- 
 ence and study alike to Christians and critics. It is 
 here, then, that the real gospel begins and ends. The 
 man is the gospel. He tests and measures the record. 
 The real exegesis is in the application of the character 
 to the context. It is he that inspired the statements, 
 it is he alone that with any clearness and consistency 
 comes out of them to-day. The texts do not prove 
 the life principle which he announced, but the princi- 
 ple proves the texts. There are no contradictions in 
 the character. In its wholeness, all differences of in- 
 terpretation disappear. The churches have been built 
 up on the conrprehension of a single side ; hence the 
 necessity for many churches. The Gospels are the 
 work of different men, and hence individual. But 
 Jesus is one, and no consistent Christianity will ap- 
 proach him from any stand-point of partiality. His 
 principle of life is one, and fails utterly, if it allows 
 any difference except in the progressive appreciation 
 of men. 
 
 Textual Christianity is giving way to the Chris- 
 tianity of spirit, which asks not what is the result of 
 
Sources of Christian Authority. 23 
 
 this text pitted against that, but what, between and 
 beyond them all, is the real, the essentially true Jesus; 
 and then what is the gist, the outcome of his peculiar 
 genius, — the spirit, not the letter of his message. The 
 records have so fully done their work that they have 
 given us something truer and more consistent than 
 themselves. This spirit not only inspired them in the 
 beginning, but in the end will be seen to be the only 
 power that can save them. Their sufferings at the 
 hands of criticism have only been the foretaste of a 
 yet wider defection in popular acceptance ; and either 
 the heart of them must be newly understood and in- 
 sisted upon, or they will fall utterly from their high 
 position of usefulness and regard. The question must 
 be asked, What remains to-day, in the light of all 
 destructive facts, still true and saving? What is 
 there that is perennial in them, that no criticism can 
 touch ? If they include nothing but what scholar- 
 ship can undermine, we may well substitute our 
 understanding in place of their outgrown signifi- 
 cance. 
 
 This inner meaning and message will be found to 
 reside in their wholeness rather than in their separate 
 facts ; in the man they present and his completeness 
 rather than in the partialness of any statement, how- 
 ever impressive, which stands by itself. Christianity 
 is a great deal truer than the Gospels, as any soul is 
 truer than the body in which it resides. It antedated 
 and will outlast them. It is the very work of Chris- 
 tianity to get the gospel into universal consciousness ; 
 and, when this shall have been accomplished, the out- 
 
24 Ecce Spiritus. 
 
 wvrd record will receive a new preciousness and dig- 
 nity. It is not so much the books that support Chris- 
 tianity, as it is Christianity that supports the books. 
 
 Without, then, bringing any learned exegesis to 
 bear upon the textual side of Christianity, we may 
 claim to have studied the man of the Gospels in sym- 
 pathetic reverence for him and his truth as therein 
 revealed. We have been able to see how the gospel 
 writers have given more than they intended, written 
 deeper than they knew, and how, by that authority 
 which is not in and of themselves, the records reveal 
 that which contravenes all their possible error and 
 falsity. We go to Jesus to prove the textual verity 
 of any given passage, gauging its accuracy and sin- 
 cerity by the consistent wholeness of his character, 
 which no variations in the narrative have ever com- 
 promised. When we see him, we learn of the short- 
 sightedness and superstition of his historians, who, 
 while everywhere honest and devoted, are so placed 
 toward the vast suggestiveness of his principle of life 
 as to be unable wholly to escajDe a narrowness of in- 
 sight and statement, which no one was so quick to 
 notice and rebuke as Jesus himself. It was this in 
 them that so grieved and disappointed him through 
 life, and especially in those last trying experiences 
 which so severely tested the quality of their appre- 
 ciation. 
 
 Nevertheless, it is not possible for them to wholly 
 distort the truth of such as he. It yet remained his 
 truth, not theirs. Their honesty gave us the man, 
 while their distance from his exalted stand-point pre- 
 
Sources of Christian Authority. 25 
 
 rented them from always giving accurate estimates of 
 his words. They labored as they could, not only con- 
 scientiously, but adequately. It is not in the j)ower 
 of man to put the life of such as he into perfect 
 statement; nor was it, so far as we can see, in the plan 
 of Providence to thus relieve future generations of 
 any part to do in the saving work. It is there in suf- 
 ficient fulness, but not unless ice are prepared to find 
 it. A perfect record had not made a perfect Christi- 
 anity, which is not an intellectual statement, but a 
 living power. It is here, not for acquiescence, but for 
 stimulation. There is a logic which puts the mind at 
 rest, but that utterance is better than logical which 
 stirs the soul to life and effort. 
 
 With this view of the Scripture record, we shall 
 gain nothing by assuming the position that in one pas- 
 sage Jesus teaches his Godhead, while his crowning 
 and essential manhood is asserted in the next. We 
 cannot mistake him and the great drift of his thought 
 and life. We send the characteristic principle he ex- 
 emplifies through the complex statements, like a ray 
 of light shot through confusing ways, and learn every- 
 where of a pinnacle Humanity, so reaching up to and 
 touching Deity as to transcend the narrow significance 
 of either claim. It is useless to replace one literalism 
 with another, to disprove one text by its neighbor. 
 Each is true, but there is something truer than them 
 all, — the man and his spirit as their aggregate out- 
 come. This spirit tone of his uncaught and transcen- 
 dent message, this life power and life drift, every- 
 where setting away from the verbal landmarks and as 
 
26 Ecce Spiritus. 
 
 law abiding in its operation as it is illimitable in its 
 sweep, is the gift and glory of Christianity. 
 
 The Gospels will continue to be loved and honored; 
 but their place will still further shift in the estimation 
 of mankind, when they shall be no longer held as a 
 blind guide or a delusive authority. They will then 
 be blessed as the imperfect vehicle of a vast influence 
 which lives below their cunning in the suggestiveness 
 of their lines. And as we do not exalt the canvas, 
 but the S23eaking face and form ingrained in its mean- 
 ingless texture, so it is the man of wholeness we re- 
 gard, and not the ^>sei^o-sacred books. They have 
 done a mighty work, but the real Christ has got be- 
 yond their keeping. Destroy them, if we might, we 
 could not touch the spirit which has already become 
 a race possession. 
 
 Jesus has been born into universal consciousness, 
 and has become part of our very intuitions. Heredi- 
 tary prepossession, transmitted education, and all 
 atmospheric and unconscious influences that do so 
 much to shape the thought and animate the heart of 
 living, confess him. He is largely instinctive with us 
 now. Whether we will or no, there is something of 
 him still left in our mental and spiritual constitution. 
 Nor need we fear that the world will ever lose Jesus. 
 Its service may be for a long time outward, or its in- 
 sistence upon such service be altogether given up ; but 
 it can no more eliminate him from human conscious- 
 ness than it can destroy life itself. The world is fast 
 losing its respect for the many who have come in his 
 name, and in his name taught many false doctrines; 
 
Sources of Christian Authority. 27 
 
 but Jesus continues to dominate the motives that color 
 and control the entire outlook and inlook of humanity. 
 
 But, beyond this, there is that in the Gospels, taken 
 verse by verse, before which no wise and consistent 
 Christian philosophy need acknowledge its powerless- 
 ness. With the principle in our minds which Jesus 
 everywhere insists irpon and applies, there is really 
 no contradictoriness in their separate versions. The 
 minute Jesus is understood, the Gospels grow plain. 
 Nor is there anything illogical in this precedence of 
 the subject over the story. Their harmony is not in 
 and of themselves, intellectually considered, but in the 
 spirit that lives below every line of their writing. 
 
 It is frequently said the Bible proves one thing as 
 well as another, and hence the growing disregard of 
 the creeds as possessing any peculiar authority, — a dis- 
 regard which goes deeper than appears, since it affects 
 the real allegiance of even those who outwardly con- 
 fess them. If this objection be valid, it is more fatal 
 to any claim of authoritative utterance on the part of 
 the New Testament than we commonly think. Either 
 the Gospels must stand clear of this charge, or they 
 will fall, as indeed they seem to be falling, from popu- 
 lar credence and regard. If it be true that they sub- 
 stantiate one theory as well as another, then is it true 
 that they authoritatively teach nothing. If one 
 credal statement is as truly based on Scripture as an. 
 other, then are the Gospels nothing but a do-all for 
 the churches, and the groundwork for denominational 
 efficacy. In such a case, one sect is as valuable as an- 
 other, and none of them of more than very limited 
 importance. 
 
28 JEcce Spiritus. 
 
 There can be no half-way position in this matter. 
 Either the Gospels teach something, something defi- 
 nite, certain, and consistent, or they teach nothing. 
 Reasoning people are coming wisely to insist upon 
 this as a fundamental condition of their acceptance, 
 and, in the failure of agreement, on the part of those 
 who profess to consider them saving, as to what this 
 something definite is, are concluding that their claim 
 is mythical. 
 
 It seems plain from the history of the past, which 
 has only illustrated successive attempts to demon- 
 strate this on the basis of separate passages, that it 
 can only be shown from the record as a whole, re- 
 garded in the light of its consistent spirit rather than 
 of its varying letter. One unmistakable thought, pur- 
 pose, principle, must furnish the ground for their 
 authority. When seen in the light of this, their con- 
 tradictoriness disappears. They remain flexible in 
 application, but absolute in expression. Their inspi- 
 rational claim rests on that which unites and harmo- 
 nizes them, and will attest itself in the faiths newly 
 built up around them ; while in nothing will it be so 
 far disproved as in the position which bases this claim 
 upon the perception of one side of the vast truth they 
 convey. The Gospels stand or fall by themselves, nor 
 need we unduly exercise ourselves with the question 
 of their special inspiration. That they are inspired 
 is certain, but it is with the honesty and mighty im- 
 port of the facts. They will never become plain and 
 consistent until they are measured by the spirit, the 
 life, and principle of Jesus, which was their inspira- 
 
Sources of Christian Authority. 29 
 
 tion, and remains the key to all their conclusions. 
 Then their contradictions will resolve themselves into 
 complemental parts of one stupendous truth, as broad 
 as the being and possibility of man, and as high as 
 eternal Wisdom and Love. 
 
 While not the property of the Gospels, Jesus yet 
 owns them in their integrity as stepping-stones into 
 human consciousness. That human consciousness is 
 to-day the great revealer of the Master, who has 
 countless historians. Nor can he fall by any Script- 
 ural inaccuracies. He profits by the very ingen- 
 uousness of the gospel writers, which transforms 
 their short-sightedness into supreme honesty. In 
 their essential integrity, they have given us the 
 man they did not understand, but not alone the man 
 of their misapprehension. Side by side with the 
 ignorance and error goes the rebuke with which he 
 met their want of appreciation. It was the ache 
 and sorrow of Jesus' life that they confronted with 
 bald literalism every utterance of higher philosophy, 
 every statement of spiritual truth he ever made. It 
 was his keenest pang in the bitterness of death that 
 even the nearer few had failed to know him as he was. 
 
 But all this was well, since the writers did not hesi- 
 tate to give us the rebuke side by side with the gross 
 misconcej^tion. They have impressed the man upon 
 us, even if every inference that they made from him 
 was false, in giving him just as he was, not wholly 
 their misunderstood Jesus, but the one who corrected 
 and shamed them. That was all we could in reason 
 ask of them, and all they could by any possibility 
 give. 
 
30 JEcce Spiritus. 
 
 The Gospels are simple records of simple men, more 
 impressed with than able always to comprehend the 
 person and principle of which they treat. In truth, 
 they make little obvious effort to understand Jesus. 
 There is frequent questioning, but almost no attempt 
 at systematic study or appreciation. They are only a 
 favored few of an expectant nation who are at the 
 outset prepared to reverence much they cannot com- 
 prehend in so exalted a being. They neither dog- 
 matize nor sum up, but simply relate the incidents 
 and state the facts as best they might. They loved 
 him no less, but more, for what was beyond their 
 power of intellectual or spiritual sympathy ; for were 
 they not subject to his wonderful personal influence, 
 as well as dominated by the strength of a race idea ? 
 Was he not pure, mighty, magnetic, unselfish? Was 
 he not the prince of friends ? They bowed before 
 him, served and followed in his train, not because they 
 fully understood him, but because he was an object of 
 deep and distant wonder. Awe stood in the place of 
 understanding. They spare neither their questions 
 nor their surprise. They nowhere catch the full drift 
 and inclusiveness of his thought. But few in number, 
 and suspected by the powers that were, his disciples 
 followed him with a faith capacity that centuries 
 of waiting had brought out into intense st activity. 
 When at last he had come, it was as one strange and 
 incomprehensible, building a different kingdom from 
 that of which they had dreamed, but infinitely lovely 
 and unmistakably grand. 
 
 Accurate and exhaustive critical work was not to 
 
Sources of Christian Authority. 31 
 
 have been expected in the books which came out of 
 the same race spirit, the same intensity of national 
 thought and life, out of which as an environment 
 sprang Jesus himself. For with all his peculiar an- 
 tagonisms to Jewish law and formalism, Jesus, in that 
 extreme sensibility and impressionableness of his nat- 
 ure, in that clear-seeing faculty and that strong self- 
 centred bearing of his, was the natural outcome, the 
 typical representative, of the most individual nation 
 earth ever saw. This " peculiar people," unitized in 
 life and race characteristics, with a firm faith in a 
 special God origin and a sacred history, living in an 
 almost daily realization of a common hope, could not 
 but have been the loins out of which should spring 
 the representative, not of their own narrowness, but 
 of the best possibility of humanity. Jesus was the 
 product of race sentiment, yearning, and aspiration. 
 A deep under-current of popular protest, of spiritual 
 instincts demanding recognition and enlightenment, 
 had dictated that age-long anticipation of a Messiah. 
 This had grown out of common want to a national 
 faith. The universal need called for a representative. 
 It was a race law, a race necessity, that he must come 
 as the natural crown and culmination of its life. The 
 feeling, the expectation, is abroad everywhere, — in 
 the temple, the home, the very atmosphere. The 
 mothers share it in a peculiar sense. Women are 
 very sensitive to certain sides of political life ; and, 
 while never the broadest, they are often the intensest 
 of politicians. They get together and dwell upon this 
 tender hope of a restorer of the nation's life, until 
 
32 Ecoe Spiritus. 
 
 some one is found rightly constituted and situated to 
 incorporate it into the structure of her own changing 
 system, stamping the mind and character of the off- 
 spring she bears with the intense longing of the peo- 
 ple, in which she herself shares, moulding and shaping 
 its nature to the white heat of her own passionate 
 devotion to the national idea. 
 
 Out of this strong and reverent faith came the ready 
 response on the part of his followers to the call of 
 Jesus. Out of this spirit, the writings were conceived 
 in the minds of men vacillating between the old in- 
 stinctive faith and the strange personality of the man 
 who at the same time moved and bewildered them. 
 But this did not too greatly trouble them ; for were 
 they not there to follow, to serve, above all to learn ? 
 How imperfectly they grasped the situation is often 
 seen ; how sincere and practically sufficient the record 
 they left as frequently appears. A superficial Chris- 
 tianity sprang up, but the hard shell enclosed the 
 vital germ. It has been there, as a sort of later sal- 
 vation, ever since, developing in the best life of the 
 Church ; from time to time, correcting its abuses and 
 shaming its falsity, until out of much progress the 
 deathless principle comes to light again, to be known 
 for what it is. Not only is it now permitted out- 
 wardly, but it is also inwardly possible to state anew 
 the unspent spirituality of Jesus. 
 
 The books have weakened in their hold : priest and 
 ritual in popular estimation have lost their saving 
 sanctity. Yet nothing has touched with the hint of 
 incaj)acity the name and power of Jesus, except want 
 
Sources of Christian Authority. 33 
 
 of understanding on the part of those who profess to 
 represent him. Again, an era of fresh, free religious 
 life succeeds the ages of formalism and subserviency 
 to dead letter. Again, the times await the Messiah, 
 promised of old, but not yet wholly come. In the 
 wilderness of our later Jordan, we wait to welcome 
 him who comes with healing on his lips. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 NATURAL OR SUPERNATURAL. 
 
 When we consider the source of the peculiar power 
 which Jesus exercised, we are led into a wide field of 
 search. The suggestiveness of his life takes us out 
 into the broad expanse of nature, as well as into the 
 loftiest reach of spirituality. There is nothing that 
 we can leave out of the account, when we consider the 
 sources from which he derives the material of his 
 thought. It is a case of the broadest and keenest 
 sympathies. His disciples themselves seem to have 
 regarded him from the stand-point of their Jewish 
 predilections alone, linking him back by their local 
 and traditional thought to the lineal prophets of the 
 race. At first, he was to them one who should restore 
 the fading splendors of their people; afterward, he 
 was a new strange potency which entered into their 
 life and swayed them beyond their understanding and 
 will. 
 
 But this inference of the Gospels, which sees only 
 the traditional side of Jesus' origin, finds no sympathy 
 at his hands. At the very outset, he denied any par- 
 ticipation in the old Jewish idea of his origin, and 
 ever afterward went so far contrary to the popular 
 faith and expectation as to render himself as much an 
 
Natural or Supernatural. 35 
 
 enemy in the estimation of his own people as in that 
 of the Roman government. It was to flee the distrust 
 and opposition he met among his own family and 
 from his neighbors in Nazareth that he passed into 
 the freer air of Capernaum. Here there was less of 
 this conscious necessity of looking backward, and 
 more readiness to accept the truth of to-day. The 
 earliest record of his doings at the age of twelve 
 indicates a strangely sceptical attitude in one so 
 young, and a premature ability not only to question, 
 but to answer, the finalities of Hebrew doctrine. 
 Manifestly there was no disposition on his part, 
 even as early as this, to identify himself with the 
 course of traditional thought. Nor does the subse- 
 quent development of his personality bring him any 
 nearer to the popular expectation. He uses and 
 regards the Scriptures from a twofold stand-point, 
 showing himself keenly alive to their poetic and lit- 
 erary worth, and ever willing to take advantage of 
 their already assured impressiveness to bring his own 
 truths home to men's minds. There is no exclusive- 
 ness in his thought : it is ready to accept the attesta- 
 tion even of a set of doctrines which have been for 
 the most part outgrown. But he is careful to say, 
 "It is written in your law," not my law, nor even 
 our law, but in yours. He participates in all truth, 
 but shares in the sacredness ascribed to no narrow 
 formulation. 
 
 Jesus refuses to be localized. He owns no nation- 
 ality, confines his followers to no section, sending 
 them unto all nations. He was born with the race 
 
36 Ecce Spiritus. 
 
 feeling, a fellow of mankind, with humanity at his 
 heart. He is conscious of no prophet-descent, no 
 lineal obligations to preconceived ideas. It is God- 
 descent that fills his consciousness, responsibility to 
 One alone, and that his Father. It is the new wine 
 and the new cloth with him, and he stands clear of 
 patched garments and old bottles. The entire drift 
 of his mind, as well as the expressions of his peculiar 
 principle in its vast application, show that originality 
 characterizes that wonderful possibility of being which 
 not only made him so great, but resulted in the end- 
 less cycles of his most exalted influence upon man- 
 kind. It is not necessary in the light of his consistent 
 thought and life to trace his lineage back to David, or 
 base his power upon the Isaiahn prophecies. Jewish 
 history is the record of a vast preparation, an inten- 
 sity of race life and longing out of which it was 
 necessary that he should come. Further than this we 
 need not go, since the mother that gave him birth 
 refused him sustenance, and, indeed, from the earliest 
 days of his maturity knew him not. It is not always 
 the physical parents who deserve the child's regard, 
 nor who claim the child's allegiance. The foster 
 mother, who bears the growing life, in the womb of 
 a daily wisdom and tenderness, through the period 
 of most critical change, is nearer than the natural 
 parent who only brings forth to curse and to neglect. 
 It was well that Judea rejected him. Thus at the 
 outset was he denationalized, and became the world's 
 possession. It was, moreover, in the line of the en- 
 tire plan and purpose of Jesus' life, which was a com- 
 
Natural or Supernatural. 37 
 
 plete subjugation of the outward to the inward. It 
 put the emphasis at once on that other nearer birth, 
 which had to do with his coming into the conscious- 
 ness and exercise of spiritual power, and which he so 
 often refers to as the one necessary condition of sal- 
 vation. The physical birthright becomes abortive, is 
 ignored, and made of none effect on every side, in 
 order that the real man, the one who thought and 
 wrought and suffered and triumphed from an entirely 
 new stand-point, might be the more prominent. It is 
 this that he means when he speaks of himself, differ- 
 ing radically from those around him in his estimate 
 of the make-up of personality. 
 
 Consider him on any other side than this, and he 
 becomes vague and unsatisfactory. He is the most 
 illusive and impersonal of all great historic characters ; 
 never egotistic, and utterly unrelated to his fellows 
 in the ordinary conditions by which personality loves 
 to exercise and complete itself. From any common 
 stand-point, the human interest is entirely wanting in 
 his life. He neither loved as other men love, nor 
 married, nor lived in his children, nor endured the 
 supreme tests of the home. In political and social 
 life, he gave no answer to the great demands that in 
 every age call out the highest practical and moral 
 gifts. He was impersonal everywhere, except where 
 most men are the merest human abstractions. In 
 the higher spiritual prerogative, they are hardly more 
 than pale reflections of that which in Jesus was robust 
 and vital. His spiritual personality was so intense 
 and vigorous that, with the force of the mission that 
 
38 Ecce Spiritus. 
 
 early laid its hand upon him, he had room in his 
 short life for nothing else. The first expression of 
 his mind of which we have any record, the expres- 
 sion of what would commonly be considered a boy, 
 but which in this case indicates the serious caste of a 
 mature and already preoccupied soul, is, "Wist ye not 
 that I must be about my father's business?" There 
 and then, in the already denationalized Jewish boy, 
 was born the Jesus of humanity. The intense spirit- 
 ual life — absorbing the entire realm of material things 
 as a mere contingent and accessory of his present 
 existence, closely and consciously related to the su- 
 preme source and centre of being, God, and alone 
 bent on the higher welfare of a world grovelling in 
 the literalism of sense — had become not the posses- 
 sion, but the very personality of Jesus. As such, he 
 shines out unmistakably in the Gospels. The man is 
 intangible, vague, perhaps unsatisfactory. This Jesus 
 lives consistently in all, harmonizing every seeming 
 difficulty and establishing the substantial genuineness 
 of the record beyond a reasonable doubt. 
 
 We perceive here at once the presence of some- 
 thing so unique and individual in the make-up of the 
 man as to lead us again to ask as to the peculiarity in 
 kind, the nature of the power, on which Jesus rested 
 his independence. If he could stand outside of all 
 traditional sanctity, whence came his prerogative, and 
 the consciousness of it, so all-sufficient in him ? 
 
 A glance at the wholly inadequate position of the 
 Church in this matter will give us the negative side to 
 the answer. Starting with the assumption that man 
 
Natural or Supernatural. 39 
 
 was inherently, or by transmitted disobedience, de- 
 praved, it has necessitated the introduction of some 
 striking and unusual element in the scheme of salva- 
 tion. In the first trial of life, the race tested the 
 method of nature and found it a failure. Creation on 
 its natural side turned out to be faulty and insuffi- 
 cient. God saw His mistake, and essayed to complete 
 His half-way work by an intervention. The universe 
 had never been anything but a thing of law, but law 
 He pronounced a failure. It was large enough for all 
 other purposes in the life and surroundings of man, 
 but had not included and could not include the sal- 
 vation of the race. Consequently, God entrenched 
 Himself in the resource of an arbitrarily constituted 
 being who should institute an entirely new order of 
 things, and became the type of a great lawlessness. 
 Nature was wrong, ineffective, — nay, worse, — foul 
 and sinful. To complete and save it, there must be 
 the interposition of supernatural efficacy. 
 
 Certain it is that such a theory, however service- 
 able in the early centuries before even a Luther had 
 come, cannot satisfy the enlightened thought of to-day. 
 It puts itself fatally outside the beautiful cycle of law 
 which the modern mind, having once seen in the uni- 
 verse, will never again give up, though all the systems 
 of theology fail. It is, moreover, as inconsistent with 
 the sense and spirit of Jesus' life as it is with the en- 
 tire tendency of modern thought. It cannot serve us 
 any longer ; and the attempt to enforce it only results 
 in the blank atheism and unchurched indifference, the 
 practical dechristianizing and want of spirituality so 
 characteristic of our time. 
 
40 Ecce Spiritus. 
 
 One thing is fixed and certain : the religion which 
 gains any acceptance now and henceforth among think- 
 ing people must be in harmony with, nay, based upon 
 and a very part of that system of perfect and un- 
 changeable law which is not only everywhere seen in 
 the universe, but is also seen to be the fittest type of 
 God's being and providence. It is the God of nature 
 men seek, not the supernatural abrogator in religion of 
 the laws he has instituted everywhere else. With such 
 a being, they have hope of understanding and of being 
 themselves understood. They know and reverence 
 law, and by no stretch of the imagination can they 
 reverence anything that would deny its evidently 
 divine function. Religion they want, and would 
 have, — but not if it contravenes the facts of that 
 part of God's creation of which we already know; not 
 if it must, infant-like, play hide and seek behind the 
 worn-out entrenchments of superstition and unreason. 
 In such a case, the age has only one answer to make. 
 It will give up the suppositions of religion sooner than 
 renounce the facts of science. It knows of the latter, 
 and cannot well afford to give up certainty for uncer- 
 tainty. Science has been of late so busily at work 
 unearthing God, that the Church, unwilling to acknowl- 
 edge or accept its results, has been driven to make a 
 wider gulf between itself and thinking people in the 
 restatement of beliefs which, while honest once, are 
 inexcusable now. Certain facts exist ; and, whatever 
 else falls, they must remain. Creative force is the 
 rigid and uncompromising expression of law-abiding 
 instincts, and creative personality in all its relations 
 
Natural or Supernatural. 41 
 
 with the created must of necessity be the same. If 
 religion is to run in harmony with this, and be as 
 much a product of natural law as the veriest material 
 procedure, it not only will not at the outset excite 
 distrust, but will appeal to just those faculties which 
 in this age have supremest activity and inspire most 
 universal confidence. It will not be the product of 
 reason in this age any more than it has been in any 
 other, but it will be so peculiarly reasonable that no 
 objection and no want of respect shall come from that 
 at present authoritative quarter. There is no opposi- 
 tion to spirituality, except so far as it is baseless and 
 contradictory of known facts. But if it can be shown 
 to be natural, law-abiding in the same sense in which 
 the universe is, and in harmony with, not opposed to 
 and nugatory of the facts that science has revealed, 
 the age not only can accept, but is hungry for it. 
 
 It will be for our future consideration to see how 
 nature and spirit agree, nay, at least in one of their 
 aspects, are one and the same thing, so that there is 
 not only no opposition between natural and spiritual, 
 but perfect sympathy and accord. Suffice it now to 
 assert that such a religion as above described, as the 
 only one possible in our time, is found in that of 
 Jesus, and to show one of the aspects in which it is 
 an eminently natural and not a supernatural product. 
 TTe refer now simply to its origin, the order out of 
 which it came, whether that of preconceived and prov- 
 idential law, instituted in the beginning and made a 
 part of the very structure and condition of things, or 
 unrelated to law and interventional, supernatural in 
 
42 Ecce Spiritus. 
 
 the sense of transcending in its coming all the known 
 methods of God's working. 
 
 Observe that we say the religion of Jesus, and not 
 Christianity; and yet there is no possible objection to 
 the word, if Jesus, and not the intervening ages of 
 theological distortion, be allowed to fill out its mean- 
 ing. For Jesus draws his peculiar environment from 
 as fine a natural selection, as pure a succession of law, 
 as any development of life within the scope of scientific 
 observation. No statement could be simpler nor more 
 readily accepted than that life, as we know it, is an 
 ascending and descending* scale between the two ex- 
 tremes of moral and spiritual attainment, tending in 
 graded steps, now toward some typical and irresist- 
 ible virtue, and now toward some representative evil. 
 Thus, in general, men are neither very good nor very 
 bad. The mass of mankind are within the circle of a 
 conflicting allegiance, and not in any sense represent- 
 atives of either of the moral extremes. We say that 
 every person has at least a latent possibility of good, 
 and in general none are so consistent in their virtue 
 as to prevent the appearance of frequent imperfection. 
 And yet there is very manifest variation in the bal- 
 ance of tendencies in different individuals and classes 
 of society, the law establishing that the goodness or 
 badness of no two shall exactly coincide, each one 
 differing a shade in worth or degradation from his 
 neighbor. In some, the balance is nicely kept, and 
 neither virtue nor vice wholly gains the ascendancy. 
 In others, enough good predominates to warrant the 
 general title of virtuous, or enough vice intervenes to 
 
Natural or Supernatural, 43 
 
 stamp the character with a decidedly unwholesome 
 taint. But, in general, such distinctions are very- 
 vague and of only relative importance. 
 
 It is evident that the law, ever one in the total of 
 experience, and with an aggregate that never varies 
 except in the slowly ascending ratio of man's progres- 
 sive development, allows, we had almost said necessi- 
 tates, this spiritual individuality in some large view 
 of the purposes of life. But it is also evident that 
 the law cannot stop here in its complete working. It 
 has provided for the ordinary necessities of an experi- 
 ence which transcends the physical, and cannot be 
 shown to be perfect until it has gone further, and in- 
 cluded beyond its limitations an extreme expression 
 which shall show the fullest possibilities of life. The 
 variation in either direction must lead us out to 
 representative character. Down among the immoral 
 growths there must be one who shows the possible 
 limits to which human depravity can sink. There 
 must be one lower than all the rest, more hopeless 
 than whom no man can ever be. It is not our prov- 
 ince to decide who that revealer of unregenerateness 
 may be, since here our means of knowledge of the 
 comparative sort are few and scanty. Men have not 
 troubled themselves with the nice question of relative 
 moral littleness. History has merely outlined the 
 picture, at which mankind shudders and turns away 
 in loathing. It is of no consequence whether the un- 
 enviable palm be accorded a Judas, a Nero, a Caligula, 
 a Duke of Alva, or a Henry VIII. Suffice it to say 
 that somewhere on that low plane exists one more ut- 
 
44 Ecce Sjnritus. 
 
 terly without good than his fellows, one who stands 
 type and symbol of all to which human badness can 
 attain. 
 
 By the same law, just as the race declines on a 
 nicely adjusted scale to such representative sinners, 
 by an equally fine gradation it ascends through the 
 philanthropic and saintly names to some pinnacle 
 character, some instance of phenomenal attainment in 
 the region of the good. In stricter language, these 
 are the limits within which the law of life expresses 
 itself. With all the freedom of the individual, and 
 any changes that might be made in the moral stand- 
 ard, there must be a worst and a best, a sufficient 
 warning and an inspiration out of the actualities of 
 life in their natural evolution adequate to all the 
 needs of life. The representative Good must be the 
 fulfilment of the law which includes and necessitates 
 the struggle and final conquest of man. The condi- 
 tions of life into which he is born surround him with 
 a spiritual environment of baffling necessities, unsatis- 
 fied longings, and illusive ideals. The law of his 
 being gave him these, but did not, could not, stop 
 here. It had one crowning representative expression, 
 which gave him, whatever the degree of his indi- 
 vidual endowment, that which his limitations lacked. 
 If he were in any sense lost, either by nature or per- 
 sonal neglect, in the midst of this environment into 
 which he was born, then the same conditions must 
 furnish him a saviour. We are bound in the law of 
 being for good and bad, but never beyond the fact of 
 a possible deliverance. That which limits must per- 
 force furnish a way out into fulness. 
 
Natural or Supernatural. 45 
 
 This is a condition of nature, as we commonly un- 
 derstand the word, a part of the very structure of 
 things, not new, not interventional, but a side of the 
 necessity that was seen in creation. It is a law just 
 as positive and certain as that of gravitation, and 
 brings us to our spiritual Saviour with no strain nor 
 stretch of strictly natural symbols. It is just as truly 
 the provision of God for his children, the expression 
 of that loving foresight which in the beginning, at 
 the very inception of things, not only ordained life, 
 but so conditioned it that it should of its own neces- 
 sity be brought back to him. Salvation was no after- 
 thought of the Almighty. If there were any elements 
 of estrangement in the conditions into which man 
 came, neither the law nor its Creator could have been 
 just, and left out of its fixities the means of reconcili- 
 ation and restoration. Such a revelation, a part of 
 fact and the very order and completeness of nature, 
 we can understand. It derogates in no degree from 
 our respect for God, — a respect learned in a universe 
 of most wonderful elaborateness and reliability, and 
 appeals at once to our confidence and comprehension. 
 While violating in no slightest ]3 articular the facts or 
 the order of nature, it is a most beautiful and tender 
 illustration of the fatherly care of the Creator. Re- 
 ligion can ask for no grander proof of a providential 
 and beneficent government than this. There is no 
 clinging weakness and no honest want that cannot 
 shelter itself under such a conception. 
 
 Nothing has been more grossly misunderstood than 
 the idea of God's providence. A low, poor word has 
 
46 JEJcce Sp>iritus. 
 
 vitiated its sublime import, by taking it out of the 
 sphere of law. It has been linked with special, and 
 negatived altogether. Providence is a seeing before; 
 a foresight, not an afterthought ; an anticipation, not 
 an intervention. There is, and can be, no special 
 providence where all is providential, and has been so 
 from the earliest creation of an all-wise God. He 
 p?*o-\ide& for all his creatures in the establishment of 
 laws which, in their inevitable working, included the 
 conditions of his possible salvation. There can be 
 no providence outside of this, nor is one needed. 
 God does his work wisely and well, and will not avail 
 himself of any of our suggestions or corrections. It 
 was all right in the beginning, and will be in the end. 
 
 Nor is it true that the honest human heart asks for 
 itself any more than this. We can well be content 
 with a forethought that resides in the very inception 
 of things ; we can well rest in a providence so much 
 older even than our history, as tireless as creation 
 itself, and far more consoling than the idea of a God 
 who intercepts law for our especial benefit. There 
 can be no sadness in this thought, nothing that wars 
 against human joy in effort and attainment. There is 
 blessedness everywhere in man's adaptation to God's 
 law. There is no blessedness outside of this ; and for 
 want of it is all the ache and incompleteness, the 
 despair of life. 
 
 When we look for this highest outcome of our race 
 possibilities, w T e have not far to go. That Jesus stands 
 in that position will be a matter of doubt to almost 
 none. Any scepticism which touches him has refer- 
 
Natural or Supernatural. 47 
 
 ence solely to the supernatural claims put forth for 
 him by his followers ; but men most radical, most pro- 
 fessedly outside the pale of Christian fellowship, agree 
 in reverence for the man. He was good, — utterly, 
 unmistakably good. He was radiantly pure, grandly 
 unselfish, uncompromisingly true. What more can 
 we ask in our pinnacle character ? Without any un- 
 due Christian bias, we can say of him that he is a man 
 of men. Taken simply as a product of history, one of 
 the great names among many, there are at least none 
 greater in goodness than he. 
 
 But he is more, infinitely more than this, as we 
 shall see later on, alike in his providential character 
 and his strict truthfulness to nature. He is in all 
 respects the highest possibility of man, touching, nay 
 exhausting, ranges of being that transcend even the 
 moral. The fever and stress of life, its joy and sor- 
 row, are caught up in him and there find their har- 
 mony and completeness. But ever in the fulness of 
 his prerogative he remains humanity's representative 
 by no supernatural, no especially divine endowment ; 
 a creature of no interrupted law, but an embodiment 
 of life's best in being and possibility provided for in 
 the necessary conditions of the race. 
 
 We do not need to go outside of law to find him. 
 Whenever we come to human history in its whole- 
 ness, we shall be sure to meet him in his antipodal 
 virtue, completing the long line of spiritual develop- 
 ment which begins in the polar depravity of a Nero. 
 He is a race necessity, provided for in the beginning, 
 included in a law so perfect that it needed no inter- 
 
48 JEcce Spiritus. 
 
 vention ; a revelation out of man's own loins of the 
 God that first breathed in him the breath of life, and 
 was never more to be a fact wholly separate from 
 him. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 CHRISTIAN POWER. 
 
 With the question as to the source of Christian 
 power answered, that as to its specific nature conies 
 next in order. It has already been said that Jesus 
 stands representative of the sum total of man's highest 
 possible attainment, but the statement will not at first 
 thought be fully understood. According to the esti- 
 mate of the man will be the conception of what is 
 highest for him ; and here it is evident that Jesus 
 differed from those about him, as well as from a large 
 class of thinkers to-day. When the phrase "greatest 
 of men " is used, there are many who mean nothing 
 by it but man with reference to his power to think, 
 to organize, and to execute. The great intellectual, 
 artistic, and mechanical triumphs are their measure 
 of the man, that which in their minds links him 
 closest to the vast intelligence that originates and 
 orders in the sphere of the universe. 
 
 The fact remains, however, that there is something 
 of man back of this, which is more truly himself 
 and more genuinely powerful than the exercise of 
 any merely intellectual faculty. For instance, a man 
 recombines crude elements of power, which were 
 before meaningless, so that now some wonderful me- 
 
50 Ecce Spiritus. 
 
 chanical result is attained. Manifestly there is some- 
 thing godlike in this leading where others only follow, 
 in this co-ordinating power, akin to that by which 
 God works, which gives him this strange mastery 
 over cause and effect. But after we have exhausted 
 the wonder, the beauty, or the use of his creation, 
 and come back to the man himself, we find that, great 
 as was his invention, he himself was infinitely greater. 
 The machine is no measure of the man. He made 
 it, and something else made him what he was, as 
 seen in that creative possibility. The mechanical 
 ingenuity was subordinate to that in the man which 
 enabled him to wait and struggle, which sustained 
 him with hope and armed him with courage. No 
 one compasses anything that is not less than himself; 
 and, although his mind might have conceived of the 
 machine, his hand never could have carried it through 
 to perfection, in the face of countless obstacles, with- 
 out that something back of it which was more truly 
 himself than the mechanical skill. The world must 
 first be indebted to him for what he was, before it 
 could have any occasion to thank him for what he did. 
 The last outcome of the man is personal, and the 
 person is jnore than a set of faculties. He presides 
 over, resides in these, but is no one of them, nor all 
 of them taken together; but some aggregate and out- 
 come of separate functions become One, regnant, and 
 personal. As himself, he is a power far back of any 
 cunning he can put into the dead possibility of iron 
 and steel. When you have found him, you begin to 
 know something of the real potency which did not 
 
Christian Power. 51 
 
 so much create, as inspire and make creation possible. 
 You feel that he cannot be identified with his power 
 to do, any more than God can be confounded with 
 that which he has created ; that, when you name him, 
 you name some power of being beyond all the expres- 
 sions, however mighty, of his originating faculties. 
 Out of these in their separateness, the man is some- 
 thing individual and entire, seen in each, and yet 
 more than all. 
 
 In other words, the man is spiritual. The last 
 analysis of that which is most peculiar and personal 
 and essential about him is spirituality. This, also, is 
 his highest outcome and measurement. This is Jesus' 
 test of manhood. This in its completeness of reali- 
 zation was his phenomenal attainment. 
 
 Let us consider this further in illustration. In com- 
 mon parlance, we know each other when we are able 
 to distinguish through the senses that which out- 
 wardly characterizes us. But intimate knowledge and 
 affection claim that there is something more separat- 
 ing and individual, which, present or absent, we 
 recognize afar off as our friend. What would he 
 say and think? How would this or that affect him? 
 What expression would his sympathy give to our ex- 
 perience ? It is knowing this that constitutes real ac- 
 quaintanceship. The reproduction in imagination of 
 the bodily likeness gives no sense of reality to the 
 thought of any person. When we think of him, we 
 think of his attitude, his feeling toward some one of 
 the states of being which may be affecting us ; we get 
 his relativity to some of the inward matters that ex- 
 
52 JEcce Spiritus. 
 
 ercise our minds. When we have settled it how he 
 would be placed toward circumstances such as ours, 
 we feel that in some sort we have had communion 
 with him. 
 
 With this sort of recognition between friends, 
 though space can disturb, it cannot wholly separate. 
 We often say, "I have been with such an one all day/' 
 and come back to the ordinary intercourse of life with 
 something of the same subdued seriousness which ever 
 attends the reuniting of distant friends. Others rally 
 us on our abstraction, the indifferent manner, the far- 
 away look of the eyes, the difficulty of at first under- 
 standing what is said about us. They say we are 
 absent-minded ; and nothing could be truer to the 
 fact. The soul at its highest expression is not neces- 
 arily where the body is. It is wherever that is in 
 which it most lives. You can keep the body here, but 
 nothing can shut the soul from its own. In such case 
 in reality ice are not here. Our affection, our sym- 
 pathy, rules our environment. If a thousand miles 
 are as one to God, so are they to a soul, just so far as 
 the exercise of its functions is godlike. 
 
 This is Jesus' conception of man, as one who has an 
 expression higher than the external, which is yet most 
 distinctively himself. It is the highest of mankind in 
 this sense of which Jesus stands representative. He 
 is the Phenomenal Man by reason of no attainment of 
 virtue which merely outshines the ordinary in the 
 degree of its possession of his nature, but because of 
 the dominance in him of a manhood distinct in con- 
 sciousness and standard from any yet seen or in- 
 
Christian Power. 53 
 
 culcated. He had not to give them anything, for he 
 possessed no arbitrary power, but simply to bring out 
 that which was latent in them to life. They were 
 spiritual in possibility, but did not know it ; and 
 herein lay the key to the sadness of the situation. 
 Jesus, seeing man from another stand-point, did not 
 merely ask him to accept this virtue or abandon that 
 vice, but demanded an entire change of outlook, work- 
 ing down at the roots of being, and purifying the 
 springs of action at their source. It was more than a 
 revelation, a revolution, sweeping and radical, which 
 was to leave nothing unchanged in the structure of 
 man's thoughts and motives. It was man he modified, 
 not the teaching of the schools. 
 
 Our measure of the highest in man must answer to 
 a three-fold test : it must be that which is rarest, most 
 comprehensive, and most exalted. That spirituality 
 meets the first condition, the age in which Jesus lived, 
 as well as every subsequent one, sufficiently attests. 
 The cultured are to the unconxpromising as a million 
 to one. The perception of good is far in advance 
 of its realization. Consciousness speaks once of 
 things real and eternal, where speculation and doubt 
 are heard a thousand times. That it is comprehen- 
 sive no one will question when it is seen to include all 
 there is of a man, all that can go to the make-up of 
 his possible wholeness, all science, culture, art, equally 
 the true, the beautiful, and the good. It refuses no 
 fact, and scorns no inspiration. It welcomes all into 
 the mighty human possibility. It absorbs from all 
 sides, but never compromises, never ceases in its in- 
 
54 Ecce Spiritus. 
 
 clusiveness to remain itself, one and entire. It takes 
 all there is of a man to be spiritual, — head, heart, 
 limbs, and life; all thought, all emotion, ail love, 
 while spirituality is itself their co-ordination or control. 
 It will not be classified nor divided, is neither morality 
 nor religion; but that in which they, as ministering 
 functions, become one. The reason why there are so 
 few spiritually great characters is because of the al- 
 most irresistible human tendency to be one-sided and 
 partial. Men of the latter description are the kind 
 of men we commonly remark and honor; while the 
 spiritually great, by reason of the roundness and bal- 
 ance of their faculties, often escape the notice so 
 easily gained by the narrow specialist. There are 
 religionists great in organization, pietists with a pecu- 
 liar genius for evangelization, moralists apt at precept. 
 There are natures fiery with the enthusiasm of reform, 
 or dry and compendious with the nicely graded ethics 
 of the schools ; but the race of whole men began and 
 ended with Jesus. He was no specialist, neither 
 ascetic nor prodigal, certainly not a moralist in the 
 sense that Moses or Confucius were, and, least of all, 
 an ecclesiastic. His manhood was complete and en- 
 tire, yet through all the spiritual was distinct and 
 dominant. 
 
 Yet, although he was inclusive and cosmopolitan in 
 the matter of his human interest, his breadth did not 
 diminish the loftiness of his range. If there were 
 none broader than he, there was also none more 
 exalted. He would stop no step this side of the 
 Supreme Being. It was God, unconditional purity 
 
Christian Power. 55 
 
 and truth, life consciously akin to divine life, he alone 
 accepts. He put everything but this under his feet, 
 and could in that act go no higher. His spirituality 
 does not despise the earth, but it has a winged step 
 and moves high up among the realities. It cries out 
 for the truth that only he wh© is high can see. It 
 dignifies and elevates all to its own level. 
 
 There can be no further test needed for the endow- 
 ment of a human Saviour than this. It is salvation 
 out of humanity, and yet divine with that divinity 
 which hedges round humanity, and only needs awak- 
 ening at the hands of a Master to save and bless. It 
 is so far forth divine that it is the very power by 
 which God works, that back of all other power of which 
 the world knows anything. We exalt the manifold 
 agencies by which our material splendor comes, and 
 rate our grandeur by the mastery we attain over elec- 
 tricity, magnetism, and steam. But spiritual power 
 is the primal potency back of them all. It moulds 
 and masters even matter, and in the resolution of each 
 element back to its source stands out as the reality 
 even there. It is, in fact, the only real power there 
 is. It is the only shaping, guiding force we know. 
 Matter is limited in its manifestations, but, blind as its 
 agencies seem to be, they are motions of God's power, 
 which is purely spiritual. The sphere of the latter is, 
 however, unlimited. It is causative and controlling 
 in every realm of being, masterful alike in things of 
 time and of eternity. There is no power anywhere 
 but God's power, and we can conceive of his using no 
 other than this. It created and sustains and allows 
 
56 JEcce Spiritus. 
 
 that infinitely fine and delicate relationship of things 
 outward with things essential, which we are all the 
 time coming more clearly to see. It is the only real 
 potency that man possesses, making every creation of 
 his possible, dictating all the expressions of his genius, 
 just as in the sphere* of God it is the agency out of 
 sight behind all physical manifestations in the uni- 
 verse. 
 
 Nothing is now better understood than that the 
 best in a man not only has a faculty of finding an 
 outward expression, but also dominates his physical 
 structure and environment. There are ample illustra- 
 tions around us of startling changes wrought in feat- 
 ures, form, and the entire carriage, by the awakening 
 of spiritual forces within. All the outward character- 
 istics, the very material make-up, answers by some 
 subtle law of subjection to the new motives. We 
 first hear of the change in our friends, but know all 
 about it as we see them. The physical responds as 
 surely, if not as quickly, as the mind to the influence 
 of culture. Refinement and elevation cannot be kept 
 in. The soul tends ever inward to the heart and cen- 
 tre, the reality of all things, but has equally a tendency 
 outward, as a transforming and subduing element m 
 the sphere of matter. A coarse and irregular face 
 finds a new harmony under the inspirations of cult- 
 ure. The features are smoothed out, and another 
 tone given to the before meaningless countenance. 
 The boy returns from college with a readily-divined 
 change in his form and carriage, which is more than 
 the simple maturing of years. Age, sickness, climate 
 
Christian Power. 57 
 
 cannot more subtly modify the man outwardly, and 
 put him beyond the recognition of his friends, than 
 the power of education. The difference between the 
 cultured and the rude is nowhere more marked than 
 in the countenances they respectively lift for our 
 inspection. So that the cause of culture means much 
 even to him who is merely in search of outward 
 beauty. And if so of ordinary education, it is still 
 more so of that which is higher and more essential, 
 and that, too, in proportion to the elevation of the 
 sphere. 
 
 Take a sorrow that, properly assimilated, becomes 
 the nutriment of spiritual life, and will it not beautify 
 the features as well as the character? See how a 
 high thought or aspiration, a holy purpose, cannot be 
 kept wholly out of sight ! It is a startling fact, a sug- 
 gestive field for inquiry, as yet bat little touched, how 
 it is that the inward is the source and measurement of 
 outward development. There is a law here finer and 
 more mighty than any that Newton or Galileo discov- 
 ered, a law that lies close in to the heart of things, 
 and explains most of our mysteries. 
 
 Whether or not Jesus ever uttered the words at- 
 tributed to him by only one of the Gospel writers, — 
 "Now all power in heaven and on earth is given into 
 my hands," and whatever may have been the circum- 
 stances out of which the utterance actually came, — 
 it is certain that there was a point even earlier in his 
 career than the one instanced, when he might truth- 
 fully have made the statement. What other power 
 in heaven or on earth is there beside spiritual power ? 
 
58 Ecce JSpiritics. 
 
 He has mastered earth, standing as he does above it, 
 by the exercise of that very force which is back of 
 its every manifestation. He has triumphed over 
 matter, put all lower considerations under foot, in the 
 conscious possession of the very power of purity and 
 truth that are in God. The mastery of earth is the 
 condition of his hold on heaven. This assertion 
 would not be the identification of Jesus with God, 
 but the transcendent utterance of one standing on 
 the pinnacle of possible development, humanly con- 
 scious of the vast spiritual prerogative bound up in 
 the being of man. 
 
 All through his life, Jesus was dealing with this 
 problem of power, and the issue was never doubtful 
 to one who watched from beginning: to end his con- 
 sistent course. But there came a time when, with 
 the last step taken, and the final enemy consciously 
 under foot, he could feel that nothing stood between 
 him and the final statement of his triumph. 
 
 We do not in the least know the fulness of this 
 power which we see so imperfectly in the working of 
 God, and which resides as a possibility in universal 
 humanity. It is yet to be studied reverently, though 
 with scientific accuracy. It will make clear to us 
 those things in the life of Jesus which, between un- 
 thinking, superstitious faith on the one hand and 
 blind materialism on the other, have had no chance 
 of being understood ; and it will take the sting and 
 doubt from much of our daily experience. That this 
 possession did in the hands of Jesus become a won- 
 derful vehicle of power over men, and even over 
 
Christian Power. 59 
 
 outward nature, giving a sensitive sympathy with and 
 sway over much that remains beyond our ordinary 
 understanding and control, there is no reason to 
 doubt; yet it never could have been for a moment 
 outside of or antagonistic to the system of law. It 
 is part of, not opposed to, the laws of nature; a 
 higher possible expression of them, never for an in- 
 stant overlooked in their inception. The larger view 
 of nature — to be elaborated later on — finds nothing 
 strange nor out of keeping with strictest certainty of 
 action in this assertion. That Jesus actually per- 
 formed miracles in the common acceptation of the 
 term is not for a moment to be inferred. It was as 
 far from him in spirit as it would have been in possi- 
 bility to have entertained such an idea. It would in 
 every way have thwarted the intent of his life and 
 negatived all his thought. He was guilty of no such 
 inconsistency in his attempt to complete nature, to 
 fulfil law, and carry these out in conscious service on 
 the part of man to legitimate results. He was here 
 to enlarge, not to belittle, the world ; to establish the 
 larger law, not to deteriorate the less. If he could 
 have contravened one of the simplest of nature's 
 fundamental principles, his own system — nay, God 
 himself — would have been lost. 
 
 He did, then, no miracles in this superficial sense, 
 while he was not guiltless of wonderful things in 
 proportion to the strength of his spiritual endow- 
 ment. If God is a spiritual being, and the Creator 
 of the universe, it follows that, as man becomes one 
 with God by the exercise of the spiritual possibility 
 
60 Ecce Spiritus. 
 
 in him, he approaches to the supremacy which God 
 has in the sphere of created things; always, however, 
 as with God himself, in strict accordance with, nay, as 
 a very part of, law itself, and not to circumvent, but 
 to complete nature. 
 
 This is first seen in the body, where a wonderful 
 subordination appears. But the body is a type of 
 all matter, in sympathy with, and an epitome of, 
 nature as a whole. Its laws are substantially the laws 
 of the universe. No one who has not first gained 
 supremacy here knows how subtle an insight, how 
 powerful a sway, comes over matter at large. It was 
 this that Jesus learned through the possession of this 
 same power of subordinating matter. It did not pre- 
 cede, but followed. It is what is back of any mastery 
 over matter that we are interested in. That he was 
 what he was is much. That he did one thing or 
 another amounts to but little. 
 
 It is the more gratifying to be able to look at the 
 question of his miracles with this indifference, because 
 of a strong conviction that the value and validity of 
 Christianity in no sense depend upon the substanti- 
 ation of his wonder-working power. Every other 
 great religion has grounded itself on the assumption 
 of miraculous and interventional efficacy, — a claim so 
 old and commonplace that Jesus could not but suffer 
 from its too great prominence in his own case. If it 
 should be that he ranges himself with the rest in this 
 respect, it would only be left us to choose between 
 the different sets of wonders of the several miracu- 
 lous saviours of mankind. Whether his were better 
 
Christian Power. 61 
 
 or worse than the others, or not, they would certainly 
 be neither original nor commanding. Simply as mir- 
 acles, they prove nothing, for the other religions are 
 founded upon them as well. Nor is there anything 
 especially fresh and inspiring in the miracles he is 
 supposed to have wrought. We should rather refuse 
 to rest so splendid a mission, such an exalted power, 
 on a claim so superficial and inadequate. 
 
 Without doubt there was a foundation in fact for 
 the narrative of the Gospel writers in this respect. 
 Two elements enter into the account : what Jesus 
 actually did, and what sort of an interpretation the 
 writers themselves would have naturally put upon it, 
 — an interpretation of diminishing value by reason 
 of every hand through which it passed in trans- 
 mission, and every year of deepening wonder which 
 intervened between the actual occurrence and its 
 reduction to writing. Unquestionably, Jesus aston- 
 ished them with the exercise of a power, strange to 
 them, but as simple and natural, and as much in har- 
 mony with known law, as any in the universe. It is 
 to this that our science and culture, as well as our 
 larger religion, are bringing us, asserting no special 
 prerogative of one man in the centuries gone by, but 
 the universal goal of all human progress and enlighten- 
 ment in the finer perception of the larger relationships 
 of the laws by which we are surrounded. We are 
 working away from miracles, and yet toward the heart 
 of a wonder that surpasses even the magician's dream. 
 
 It is useless to say that if, then, the narrative be not 
 accurately true in every matter of detail, it utterly 
 
62 Ecce Spiritus. 
 
 fails of authority as a whole. The fact remains, patent 
 to the most literal believer in the inspiration of the 
 Gospels, that Jesus' nearest disciples did not under- 
 stand him. He never uttered a sjiuritual truth that 
 they did not stumble at ignominiously, distorting it 
 into bald literalism or utterly failing to grasp its 
 divine significance. Their materialism daunted and 
 dismayed him. Side by side with an expressed re- 
 buke was a sadness of questioning, as if, so it seemed 
 to him, they would never see and never understand. 
 
 If they themselves confess so much in their life of 
 him, have they not confessed precisely what is here 
 claimed? They could catch facts which they were 
 not able to comprehend. They could relate that 
 about which their inferences were all false. There 
 was no philosophy of history then. The crudeness 
 and simplicity of the records constitute half their 
 value. If we take them at their exact worth, they 
 are infinitely valuable. But, from their own state- 
 ments, no person in actual contact with Jesus, and no 
 gospel writer, in the least comprehended the power 
 which in his hands inspired them with awe. But 
 they, in their acknowledged ignorance, have given us 
 sufficient groundwork for the statement of a fact 
 which we must have believed of him, even on slighter 
 grounds of knowledge than we now possess, — that, 
 being such as he was, Jesus could not have helped 
 possessing a certain conscious power, incident to his 
 spiritual endowment, in the sphere of nature. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 SPIRITUALITY. 
 
 If it were possible to remove at once the idea of 
 vagueness which surrounds the common conception 
 of this word, "spirituality," it would be seen how 
 much of the difficulty connected with the subject 
 would disappear. Unconsciously, our modern thought 
 separates it immediately from everything definite and 
 certain, considering it as lawless and capricious, in 
 some sort a part of the mystic's reverie and the poet's 
 dream. So long as this is so, the difficulty is increased 
 of making progress, between superstition on the one 
 hand and materialism on the other, out into inclusive 
 light and life. It must be taken from the realm of 
 vagaries, and shown to be something capable of defi- 
 nite and scientific statement, not as a dogma, but as a 
 law, a principle, before it can accomplish the full work 
 for which our time is hungering. In other words, it 
 must, in some degree, as far as is possible in the nature 
 of things, and yet always far enough for the compre- 
 hension of those spiritually inclined, be stated in the 
 terms of the understanding. It is no mere theory : 
 it is life, conscious fact, practical reality. It can 
 moreover be shown to be a part of the demonstration 
 of things, bound up with the procedure and destiny 
 
64 JEcce Spiritus. 
 
 of everything that has life. The universe is just as 
 incomplete without it, as is the nature of man. Man 
 completes the order of creation, and creation tends to 
 find its fulfilment along the line of that peculiar power 
 which is not only exercised by, but is God himself in 
 action. 
 
 There is a sense in which we are not able to state 
 spirituality in terms of mathematical exactness, but 
 this in no degree proves anything derogatory to its 
 reality, but rather, on the contrary, places it among 
 the superior facts of consciousness, whose demonstra- 
 tion lies deeper down than arithmetic. There is not 
 necessarily any life, anything real in that sense, in 
 the theorem in geometry that we prove beyond all 
 shadow of a doubt. Of the deepest, truest in us, we 
 have no other demonstration than our own conscious- 
 ness, sufficient unto us, but unavailable to others. It 
 is only the superficial facts that we can prove : the 
 realities are always lived. Experience is the greatest 
 of all proofs, and yet it is about the only thing that 
 cannot be demonstrated to others. It was never or- 
 dained that there should be any truck and barter in 
 life. He who knows most about it would be the last 
 to dream of proving it. It lies too far in to the 
 centre to be a subject for the sciences as we now 
 know them. 
 
 Nevertheless, while rejoicing in this reassuring fact, 
 the time has come when some attempt at stating and 
 understanding with all possible definiteness what we 
 mean when we speak of spirituality should be made. 
 It has been one of the stock words of literature and 
 
Spirituality. 65 
 
 religion for centuries, serving in turn the preacher 
 and the poet in his direst need, the key-note of the 
 philosophy of a Goethe or Schiller or Wordsworth 
 or Carlyle, as it has been in dim understanding the 
 mainspring of the martyr's faith. And yet the world 
 knows just as much about it to-day as it ever did, and 
 no more. There is hardly another subject which it 
 has not traced back with scientific accuracy to its 
 source; but "spirituality" remains a word, with a 
 vast, mysterious, indefinable background of phenom- 
 enal attainment in the region of the good, but no 
 theoretical understanding and practical statement. It 
 may mean much or nothing, but no one knows exactly 
 ichat it means. Life has done far more to realize it 
 than language, and this is in general wise and suffi- 
 cient. It has to do with that which we can make 
 plain to God, for the simple reason that he knows it 
 already. There are many things we should not 
 dream of telling to one who did not already know 
 them. 
 
 So, at the outset, there is to be something presup- 
 posed on the part of him to whom the statement of a 
 spiritual fact is directed. There is nothing strange 
 nor harmful in this acknowledgment. The limitation 
 does not inhere in the nature of the thing itself, but 
 only in the circumstances surrounding it. An illustra- 
 tion will make this plain. Music most deeply affects a 
 large class of people, and stands in their minds as 
 something real, a fact of consciousness and life. 
 There is that in them as undeniable as it is undemon- 
 strable which springs into being under the influence of 
 
66 Ecce Spiritus. 
 
 music. It opens another world, a strange new set of 
 relationships, a vivid consciousness of delight, which 
 they can yet in no wise make plain to another not so 
 constituted as to perceive all this in and of himself. 
 To assert over and over again out of the fulness of 
 experience that which has no proof outside of experi- 
 ence will not satisfy one bent alone upon the scientific 
 formula. According to such a standard, all such state- 
 ments are valueless, since they cannot realize the facts 
 of musical consciousness to the mind of him who is 
 unable to hear anything but mere sound in the music. 
 The only possibility of such a realization lies in the 
 possession of a sense or capacity adapted for its recep- 
 tion. Externally there is a mathematical law upon 
 which music is based; but this in no wise accounts for 
 it. The mathematical laws upon which the proced- 
 ure of music is founded may be understood without 
 any appreciation of the reality of music. The most 
 conscious believer in that reality cannot tell what 
 and why it is. He only knows of a fact for which 
 he can find no intellectual formula. But the point 
 which principally interests us is that to the large 
 class who turn away, bored or unaffected by the fact 
 of music, the reality of the fact cannot possibly be 
 demonstrated. Yet v all this does not the least disturb 
 the confidence of those who have personal knowledge 
 of its power. 
 
 A step further shows that there are in music widely 
 different schools of criticism. A Wagner appears, 
 with a wonderful grasp of technical effects in orches- 
 tration, by which a clever presentation of purely in- 
 
Spirituality. 67 
 
 tellectual ideas is made. Even unmusical minds catch 
 the drift of the intonation, see the lightning, hear 
 the thunder, and perceive in a pictorial way, through 
 the medium of sound, the conceptions which the 
 composer desires to impress. But the critic boldly 
 denies the artistic truthfulness of all this, and asserts 
 that, beyond the technical skill in orchestration and 
 the cleverness of the imitation, which no one would 
 deny, this is far from being music, in any adequate 
 use of that term. A majority of musically cultivated 
 people will support this position, reasserting as pos- 
 itively as he the conviction that the method of 
 Wagner is false to art. They will declare, with no 
 question as to the poetic value of the Niebelungen 
 Lied, that the music will not serve the theme, but the 
 theme the music, that music in its sphere will wait for 
 no intellectual conception to call it into being, but 
 must exist for its own sake alone. But how will they 
 prove, or even make plain to others, this of which 
 they are themselves absolutely conscious and certain? 
 The moment the attempted demonstration is made, 
 they are forced to enunciate the truth, equally true 
 and incapable of logical proof, that there is at the last 
 analysis only one criterion in matters musical; and 
 that is a purely musical sense. The intellect cannot 
 arbitrate here. It deals alone with intellectual con- 
 ceptions, and is authority only in the sphere of intel- 
 lectual truth. It can answer for the correctness of the 
 effect to be caught by imitation ; but to know musi- 
 cally of the truth of any artistic representation re- 
 quires, at the outset, a peculiar, inborn capacity for 
 
68 JEJcce Spiritus. 
 
 music, which art culture of the highest kind has edu- 
 cated into a special sense, judging out of its own suffi- 
 ciency, and absolutely final, as well as beyond the scope 
 of ordinary reasons in the opinions it delivers. The 
 musical sense, educated and developed into conscious 
 sufficiency, decides all the nice points of criticism. 
 It may not make itself clear to the terms of the ordi- 
 nary understanding, but in the sphere of music it 
 is the only guide and authority. There are musical 
 ideas, — just as there are intellectual ideas, — incapable 
 of being stated in the language of the intellect, but de- 
 manding for their interpretation and expression a 
 special sense corresponding strictly thereto. A musi- 
 cal idea can be said to be true only on the authority of 
 that to which it can hope adequately to appeal. 
 
 It is only in the most primitive state of self-con- 
 sciousness that a man will be content with the com- 
 mon assignment of five senses. When science has 
 reached from the rocks to man, and from man super- 
 ficially to the real test of his humanity, it will be 
 seen that these five are but the bed-plate and begin- 
 ning of senses innumerable, and of vastly greater 
 rano;e and significance. 
 
 There is a spiritual sense, not yet pronounced in 
 all, and often dormant, like the apjDreciation of reality 
 in music, but authoritative in matters spiritual when 
 once possessed and developed. It then becomes 
 acute and wonderfully real, more consciously a part 
 of the self than any of the superficial senses in their 
 dealings with matter. To such as possess this in 
 conscious activity, we can appeal in our spiritual crit- 
 
Spirituality. 69 
 
 icism ; but there is no hope of a response from those 
 who are not only without, but repellent of it. As 
 well describe scenery to a person born without phys- 
 ical eyes, or play Beethoven or Mozart to another 
 destitute of musical sense, as to hope for understand- 
 ing of spiritual realities at the hands of one spirit- 
 ually blind. Jesus found this difficulty in his day, as 
 he finds it now; although happily there has been 
 a preparation going on through the centuries for a 
 renewal of his message, with the prospect of better 
 results. To-day there are hungering souls and awak- 
 ening natures, thrown off alike by the unscientific 
 character of current religion and the irreligiousness of 
 science, who will rejoice in an attempted recognition 
 of that most profoundly real and inspiring in them, 
 which yet at the same time eludes the ordinary power 
 of statement. 
 
 On every hand there is a prophecy of the coming 
 of this. There is expectation in philosophy, as well 
 as growing faith in religion, that the work of the past 
 few centuries has been a preparation and forerunner 
 for this. Science has but begun its mighty task, but 
 the nations will not long be satisfied with the surface 
 of truth. We have infinite faith in the future of 
 man. We fear neither materialism nor any threat- 
 ening form of atheism. The hint of happier reaction 
 is heard on every hand. Already there is deep ex- 
 pectancy of a reign of spirituality about to come. 
 It will come, and will save Christianity, whereof the 
 age has despaired. It will dissipate the sadness of 
 life, and put the lost heart into the new effort. This 
 
70 JEJcce Spiritus. 
 
 salvation, like every other lasting one, will be from 
 within outward. In Christianity, torn and distorted, 
 there is enough to save it and the world. But Christ 
 must come anew. Happily, he can. Happily, he did 
 not die on Calvary, and occupies no tomb. Happily, 
 his promised comforter of the ever-living Spirit can 
 come, and lead us into all truth. 
 
 There are in the life of man three spheres, so 
 graded in ascent from lower to higher that each in- 
 eludes the other or others below it. Thus, the mate- 
 rial sphere is in and of itself, taking no cognizance 
 whatever of the intellect or spirit. The intellectual 
 sphere, however, is the very one which in the exercise 
 of its own power has reduced outward nature and 
 man physically to scientific enumeration. While the 
 spiritual, stepping on to a still higher plane, subordi- 
 nates intellect and body to a more radical comprehen- 
 sion. Physically, man lias found his relations with 
 nature ; mentally, he perceives men and matter more 
 comprehensively. Man then becomes social, and the 
 world responds to his thought ; while his spiritual facul- 
 ties have co-ordinated nature and human fellowship 
 into the higher union with God. It is this co-ordina- 
 tion alone which has in any adequate degree approxi- 
 mated God. Abraham caught it in fleeting glimpse, 
 when he stood upon the height, and questioned sun and 
 moon and stars as to the sovereignty of the universe, 
 coming at last to the consciousness of the unseen God, 
 who made them all, and was alone to be worshipped 
 and adored. It was a part of the inspiration of 
 David, as far as it was possible to one who lived amid 
 
Spirituality. 71 
 
 the peculiar moral environment of his age. The 
 power in large measure of natural capacity was given 
 to him ; and he only lacked the presence of a loftier 
 ideal to have made him king of the higher life of his 
 time, as he was of Hebrew song. 
 
 But Jesus first grasped it — or, rather, it grasped 
 him — in the iron grip of a deathless necessity. He 
 rejected nothing, not even the dead formalism of 
 Pharisaic law ; but what profound meanings he threw 
 into the universe and the life of man ! He announced 
 this one great necessity of life, — that the soul, cre- 
 ated in the possibility, but cut off in the practice, of 
 spiritual communion, has come under the power of 
 a death more fearful and fatal than mortal disease. 
 He went further than a mere announcement: he 
 embodied the message. He was no herald, but the 
 practical fruition of what man needed. He showed 
 the point and limit of earth's possible meaning, 
 having first to do with the capabilities of life here 
 and now; and then, by pointing men on, though not 
 too exclusively, to a w^orld beyond, he transfused and 
 exalted this to a significance of which they had never 
 dreamed. 
 
 In any adequate summing up, the meaning of his 
 life was this, that he was absorbed in God. And yet 
 not without a reservation. The word is apt, but mis- 
 leading. In ordinary use, we have no other idea 
 of absorption except as a process which draws from, 
 without adding to. It is a complete surrender, a 
 sinking of self, a losing of individuality, if not of 
 identity. But here nothing of this sort is meant. 
 
72 JEcce Spiritus. 
 
 Absorption in God is peculiar in this, that by the 
 very nature of things the spirit finds accretion in- 
 stead of depletion in sinking itself in its source. 
 God is not the receiver, but the giver : he can gain 
 nothing, and must impart by virtue of his very being. 
 Everywhere, the lower tends to become the higher. 
 It is in God, in infinity, ever reaching down to finite- 
 ness, that the progress comes. Absorption in God 
 means being the recipient of continual gain in com- 
 munion, means the exercise of power and love in us 
 toward constant amplifi cation. 
 
 This is, however, only another way of saying " spirit- 
 uality." It emphasizes the fact that there is conscious- 
 ness of life, peculiar and separate from all purely 
 animal instincts, in an active alliance with the higher 
 life of God. On any plane above the common, a per- 
 son's life is the measurement of w r hat he can know 
 and love. But as bodily life is not comprehended 
 merely in the functions of the hand or foot, or even of 
 that fine nerve power at their source which electrifies 
 them into motive and action, — so the soul's life is a fine 
 fusion of spiritual attributes, which moves even back 
 of these expressions of intelligence and feeling. It is 
 the state of being conscious of inner and essential 
 experience, closely allied to and consciously commun- 
 ing with God. There is nothing more natural than 
 this, nothing more surely subject to laws and exacti- 
 tudes which limit it in the sphere of cause and effect. 
 Nothing could be more normal and' healthy than the 
 growth of a person along this line. It is only when 
 the subject has been looked at unscientifically, when 
 
Spirituality. 73 
 
 men have been thrown off from the hard, dry exte- 
 rior of selfishness, superstition, and formalism to the 
 blind zeal of fanaticism, that any hint of reproach 
 has fallen upon it. In this latent spiritual preroga- 
 tive, men have ever found a refuge from what was 
 false or cruel. They have even accepted the reproach 
 of science, and delighted to be as lawless and ungov- 
 ernable in this expression of their nature as the power 
 which oppressed them was mighty in its mechanical 
 certainty. Oppression has always been the parent 
 of unreason and license in the sphere of spiritual 
 things. The reaction from the icy logic of formalism 
 is a fiery enthusiasm, as faulty in expression as it is 
 true in spirit. 
 
 Hence, much of the distrust under which the facts 
 of the spirit rest in the eyes of the scientists. Hence, 
 even, much of the sadness and want of relation 
 between outward fact and inward ideal in the minds 
 of those who have given themselves up utterly to 
 spiritual standards and pursuits. They have failed in 
 the first instance in allowing that they were cut off 
 from nature, or in any sense out of harmony with or 
 antagonistic to the most law-abiding expression of life 
 the universe can reveal. There has been something 
 forced and unnatural in their refinement, setting them 
 off one side from the sphere of order and harmony 
 and health, of which nature is our nearest embodi- 
 ment. It has often seemed as if to be abnormal, iso- 
 lated, and unsympathetic were thought to constitute 
 the necessary condition of spirituality. Only base- 
 ness could be associated with anything connected with 
 
74 Ecce Spiritus. 
 
 the body. The spirit was divine, and hence matter 
 was to be cursed, physical laws neglected, and even 
 health ignored, so long as aspiration remained. 
 
 It must be understood that one law runs through 
 the various spheres of man's nature, the highest ex- 
 pression of which is spirituality. This latter is only 
 the co-ordination and completion of even physical 
 law. The creation was one, and the law must be 
 one also. There can be no true sj^irituality with- 
 out health, or at least the appreciation of and struggle 
 for health. It means full and harmonious develop- 
 ment from the basis in the body to the loftiest reach 
 of aspiration in the soul. It means respect for the 
 universe and every law thereof, and reverence for, not 
 rejection of, that physical being which is so closely 
 allied with and typical of the spirit. It is a unity of 
 laws otherwise at war with and subversive of each 
 other. It enlarges instead of narrows the sphere of 
 possible enjoyments, takes the despair out of poetry 
 and the lamentation out of religion. Its highest ex- 
 pression is a free, healthy sympathy with life and law 
 everywhere. Reverencing all spheres of creation, it is 
 uncompromising in its devotion to the highest. It has 
 a tendency away from all incompleteness, but it is no 
 craven's flight. It is rather like the sustained passage 
 of the bird, which keeps the nice proportion in its 
 outlook between a world never lost to view beneath 
 and the boundlessness of immateriality above. 
 
 Perhaps no well-known character better illustrates 
 this incompleteness of conception than the poet Schil- 
 ler. Side by side in his experience, we see an extreme 
 
Spirituality. 75 
 
 spirituality, an uncompromising pursuit of high ends, 
 and an attendant want of relationship to the lower 
 and basal facts of his nature, which resulted in distor- 
 tion and unhappiness. While we are ourselves so far 
 from a true understanding of spiritual laws as to feel 
 that nothing could in his case have been more natural 
 and inevitable than such a result, we profoundly ad- 
 mire the man's exaltation of mind, and that singleness 
 of aim which counted suffering as nothing to the ac- 
 complishment of enduring ends ; but we also confess 
 that all this was attained at the expense of breadth 
 and naturalness, that a resultant want of harmony and 
 a sharpening of the sense of failure, in short, a certain 
 narrowness of spiritual conception, must of necessity 
 have followed. 
 
 The criticism begins in the fact that Schiller, and 
 such as he, have loved the higher to the exclusion, 
 nay, to the abhorrence, of the lower. Instead of har- 
 mony on a more comprehensive plane of understand- 
 ing between the spheres of man's nature, a warfare 
 has been introduced. Instead of giving a basis to 
 aspiration in the reverent study of natural laws, spirit 
 has been pitted against matter. What wonder that, 
 too often wounded to despair in the unequal conflict, 
 the former has been borne in conscious bitterness 
 from the field of life! Thought and life, which 
 should have been rounded out to fulness by contact 
 and sympathy with the facts as they are, have per- 
 sistently narrowed themselves to a purely ideal con- 
 ception of a world and a humanity as they ought to 
 be, in the fancy of poet or pietist. Health would 
 
76 Ecce Spiritus. 
 
 have come with the fundamental truth that this is 
 God's universe, and not ours, and that our work is not 
 to correct, but to cany out and complete it; that we 
 are to study the facts, find the laws, and work out the 
 harmony, rather than in scorn of the body God has 
 given us, and in a disgust at men as they are, which 
 is an insult to the Being who made them and us, to 
 submit our souls to the torments of a spiritual alle- 
 giance, divorced from the basal conditions in matter. 
 There are manifold wants and miseries in men, 
 which, while being strictly human, are not graceful 
 in expression ; but they will be found full of an 
 infinite grace to him who bends to their necessities. 
 This is the first condition of even poetic truthfulness. 
 There can be no artistic happiness where these con- 
 ditions are ignored. Schiller himself confesses that 
 the failure to see this had been one of the great mis- 
 takes of his life. Carlyle has described the prevailing 
 tone of spiritual coldness and isolation in Schiller's 
 life in his description of the sort of hero Schiller 
 most loved to paint. This type he finds in Posa, 
 whom he pictures as " towering aloft, far-shining, clear 
 and cold as a sea beacon." "In after years," says 
 Carlyle in comment, " Schiller himself saw well that 
 the greatest lay not here. YTith unwearied effort, 
 he strove to lower and widen his sphere." The fine 
 spiritual culture of a Channing came to the same 
 result. After intense suffering and a life-long isola- 
 tion, depriving him of a world of sympathies which 
 even he could not afford to lose, Dr. Channing came 
 to see the partialness of his attitude. His advice to 
 
Spirituality. 77 
 
 a young man was to get close to humanity, — an ad- 
 vice which was emphasized by the confession that, 
 if he were to live his life over again, he would mingle 
 more unreservedly among men of all classes. 
 
 Spirituality has tended too often to become fastid- 
 iousness. Robustness and vitality have not charac- 
 terized its expressions so much as aesthetic fineness. 
 Delicacy of insight is not necessarily depth of vision, 
 as removal from men is not always the condition of a 
 higher humanity. The repose of the heights may be 
 only negative. Certain it is that there is a repose, 
 as there is an individual perfection, so unrelated to 
 the warm and living realities as to be akin to death. 
 There is a region, cold and sunless, that seems to be 
 high simply because it is far from earth, but not nec- 
 essarily on that account any nearer heaven. 
 
 See how practically this extreme position becomes 
 a fatal limitation in the sphere where it seeks freedom 
 and harmony. In his JEsthetic Letters, Schiller dis- 
 cusses the question of the advantage gained by man 
 in his struggle out of mere animalism and his sub- 
 jection to new and higher spiritual motives. Even 
 while uncompromisingly true himself, and conscious 
 all the time that he is himself the representative of 
 the result he pictures, he yet declares that it is but 
 the loss of " the happy limitation of the animal, and 
 the unenviable superiority of missing the present in 
 an effort directed at a distance." 
 
 But let us notice the experience out of which such 
 a discouraging** statement has come. Schiller asserts 
 that sadness, and not health and harmony, is the por- 
 
78 Ecce Spiritus. 
 
 tion of the uncompromising. The trouble here was 
 not in spirituality so much as in Schiller's particular 
 illustration of it. With no disposition to forget the 
 painful circumstances which hurried Schiller on to a 
 forced productiveness in violation of the simplest laws 
 of health, the fact must nevertheless be stated that a 
 criminal neglect of the basal conditions of well-being 
 and happiness lay behind that arraignment of spiritu- 
 ality. He forgot to base his superiority in the funda- 
 mental facts of nature, — the first laws legislated by 
 almighty wisdom into the make-up of man, which even 
 animal creation, in the sufficiency of instinct, the more 
 rigidly obeys. He failed to see that the harmony of 
 the highest will include that of the lower as well; and 
 the pursuit of the ideal is only incongruous with the 
 present, when it ignores and falsifies the bit of heaven 
 that God has intrusted to every day. 
 
 The fact of this inward depression in the face of 
 the necessary conditions of existence was not due to 
 the presence of spirituality in the case of Schiller, but 
 to the absence of that respect and obedience to merely 
 physical laws upon which lower and higher happiness 
 are alike dependent. The mood of distrust comes 
 with the unnaturalness, not with the idealism. " He 
 forced his sickly body," says a recent writer, in speak- 
 ing of Schiller, " so that the spirit should have com- 
 plete control over his intellectual working power. 
 With him was no hesitation, no jDatient waiting till the 
 hand of Fate beckoned him on : he tore off recklessly 
 the fetters which bound him to real lifer We all 
 have in mind that pitiable picture of the strong spirit- 
 
Spirituality. 79 
 
 ual giant dragging that wronged and suffering body 
 through the strain of night work in a defiance of nature 
 which was based on a false and fatal stimulation. 
 Surely, from such a source, though countless forms of 
 poetic beauty may not fail to come, our last word upon 
 spiritual possibility shall not be drawn. If Schiller 
 had accorded to his nervous system one-quarter of the 
 respect he paid to his spiritual nature, much of that 
 sadness and want of relation between outward reality 
 and inward ideal had disappeared. The testimony of 
 poetry and religion has been jarred out of tune by this 
 presence of a vast body of basal laws forgotten in the 
 pursuit of abstract perfection and purely ideal ends. 
 When spirituality shall have been reconciled with 
 that law which our science is teaching us to revere ; 
 when it shall have broadened and deepened as well 
 as uplifted man's outlook, — it will then be a power 
 making for the conscious increase of human happi- 
 ness. The despair of idealism and the sadness of 
 thought in our day, and in all days, has not been be- 
 cause men looked too high, nor because the price of 
 wisdom is necessarily sorrow, but because they have 
 not looked broadly enough, and have not based the 
 airy superstructure of their faith on sufficiently firm 
 foundations. When the idealist is the one who has 
 most profound respect for law everywhere, even in 
 the body, he will become what he was intended to be, 
 not only the most complete, but the happiest of men. 
 The whole tone of past experience, all the writings 
 and traditions on this subject, must be forgotten, and 
 a new start taken. Spirituality has not yet had its 
 
80 Ecce Spiritus. 
 
 full and final expression. It is profiting by the condi- 
 tions that science has created in modern thought. 
 Though long held in abeyance, when it comes again, 
 it will come full-orbed and powerful, with the facts 
 instead of unreason in its appeal to mankind. Then, 
 it will have no bitterness as the expression of disap- 
 pointed ideals, knowing that the highest can never be 
 lost, since it is a part of the evolution of apparently 
 most insignificant material laws. It will be the sim 
 of health and of a joy in nature which comes from the 
 infinite enlargement of its sphere. No one will be 
 thrown off from it by reason of the minor key of its 
 utterance, but will welcome it as a way out of con- 
 scious weariness and discord. No sigh of resignation 
 will be taken as its true representative expression : it 
 will turn earth's sadness into a song. 
 
 Spirituality, then, is an attitude, an aim, an atmos- 
 phere, a dominance of sphere. It allows degrees, 
 steps in progress and attainment. It is a growth, but 
 a final perfection. It has to do chiefly with the mo- 
 tives and aspirations, the heart and centre of conduct. 
 As it was in Jesus, it appears plain and full and many- 
 sided; a calm assurance in himself, with certainty 
 beyond. As seen in us, it is manifold in its phases, 
 evolutionary and uncertain in attainment. But it is 
 that which lies at the root of being, that which, above 
 all the petty standards of men, a spiritual God must 
 last of all consider in us. It is practical Judgment 
 Day already come, deciding beyond recall the position 
 we hold in the heavenly scale. It is the religion that 
 unfolds and unitizes all things, harmonizing all con- 
 
Spirituality. 81 
 
 flicting forms in one supreme and common statement. 
 There are many religious systems, but only one spir- 
 ituality, which is the basal truth back of them all. 
 Truly religious natures always find that they agree, 
 no matter how widely they differ in theologic state- 
 ment; and this comes the minute they touch the 
 spiritual verities which underlie every honest expres- 
 sion of faith. It is a great bond of brotherhood in 
 the much-divided temple of the world's worship, 
 doing away with nationalities and ecclesiastical dis- 
 tinctions. 
 
 In this, the schemes of redemption and retribution 
 find their reconciliation. God neither rewards nor 
 punishes, having much too mighty business on hand. 
 He is no taskmaster nor apportioner of gifts. His 
 law is large enough and perfect enough to take us 
 back to him. The rest lies with us. But the law is 
 no abstraction, no dull round of mechanical cause and 
 effect. It is full of the tenderness and possible com- 
 munion, which in truth may be said to be the law 
 itself. It is fundamentally the condition of close and 
 intimate relationship with God. It leaves out nothing 
 of warm and helpful and personal contact. Least of 
 all an abstraction, it is to him who is exercised thereby 
 the most real and vital part of consciousness. 
 
 We call the vehicle of our higher converse prayer, 
 and it is well that we do ; but the vast significance of 
 the word has not yet been understood. Men are still 
 in the body of it, caught in the meshes of fine-spun 
 sentences, with the heart of the reality too often left 
 out. How simple the test of God, and how delicate 
 
82 Ecce Spiritus. 
 
 the power of infinite understanding, Jesus, that much- 
 worshipping, but yet silent nature, illustrated! His 
 life was a prayer, but how scanty and brief the ]3eti- 
 tions ! How conscious the nearness and reliance, how 
 certain the peace ! They, too, had their prayer- 
 gauge and the measurement of husks. Jesus con- 
 founded them not with an argument, but with the 
 statement of a larger fact. There was nothing that 
 they should not receive, if they prayed for it ; but no 
 one knew better than he that prayer is communion, 
 and has no favors to ask, — that it seeks oneness with, 
 not concessions from, almighty wisdom and love. It 
 is heart to heart, and he knows nothing can be denied 
 to that attitude. It is close to the law of things, 
 yearning to be one with it. It is the utterance of 
 man's respect for God and his universe, and hope of 
 final harmony with both. It would lay no finger on a 
 single law of God, reverent to the last of divine pur- 
 poses, and simply asking to get back where the finali- 
 ties are, and away from the imperfections in itself. 
 It is not an act, but a life ; a nearness, not an utter- 
 ance, although it sometimes must speak. But, even 
 then, the language is the least of.it. It knows that it 
 is answered, has gotten all that it has asked for or 
 can ask for in this way, when it has brought the soul 
 back to God. When one has the Whole, he can 
 surely want no more. 
 
 When Jesus speaks of prayer, he has reference to 
 those things in the sphere of prayer. He is ever 
 inside the circumference, at the heart and centre, in 
 his talk of spiritual realities. It is his supreme task 
 
Spirituality. 83 
 
 to get men's thought off from that which is outside, 
 and rest it on the truest in themselves. The king- 
 dom of heaven is within you, he tells them ; and so 
 are all possible hells. The old questions of our child- 
 hood find no longer a place upon our lips. He knows 
 of heaven who has been in heavenly states, and no 
 other one ever will know. Spirituality does away 
 with all the theologic interrogatories. An answer 
 must come to us out of the consciousness of experi- 
 ence, or we remain baffled questioners on the spiritual 
 outskirts. But more of this later on. This, how- 
 ever, is here and always certain : that the realities 
 of life, — that which lies nearest our consciousness, — 
 find expression and fulness alone in the attitude of 
 spirit to spirit, in the outpouring and incoming of 
 such power and such love as are possible between 
 us and God. 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 NATURE AOT> SPIRIT. 
 
 It would at first thought appear that this idea of 
 Christian power were inconsistent with the prevailing 
 notions of scientific accuracy, that there were, indeed, 
 no possible harmony between such a conception of 
 spiritual religion and the facts of nature as we have 
 come to know them. The reasoning of our age, an 
 age of purely transitional work, which in finding 
 the new has superficially abandoned the old without 
 striving to discover the real truth and relationship 
 between the two, has declared that the spiritual in- 
 stincts and the understanding of man are antipodal 
 extremes of the human make-up, capable of no recon- 
 ciliation, and, wherever found, antagonistic to each 
 other. 
 
 Thus, a spiritual man may be good and poetic, 
 and fit for a metaphoric heaven, but he can have no 
 part in the nice system of law which science reveals 
 as the fundamental condition of all things in nature. 
 He is a mystic, a dreamer, an abnormal growth of the 
 sentiments, cradled in the centuries of superstition. 
 The scientific man may be accurate and profound, but 
 his reliability is suspected the minute he begins to 
 generalize outside of the well-understood sphere of 
 cause and effect. 
 
Nature and Spirit. 85 
 
 But the fact is, spirituality is the outcome of the 
 development of the very laws of man's being. He is 
 not a creature of fixity on one side of his nature alone, 
 but bound by a law as many-sided as his being itself. 
 Moreover, the conditions, as seen in different spheres, 
 here physical, there intellectual or spiritual, are in 
 reality one condition. The law of human develop- 
 ment is from lower to higher; but it is one law, 
 whether seen in the realm of body, mind, or soul. It 
 has manifold expressions, each perfect in itself, but 
 none of them unrelated to the final crowning expres- 
 sion to which all are subordinated. Man's spiritual 
 development is in perfect harmony with the laws of 
 Nature everywhere. It sympathizes with and com- 
 pletes them. Nowhere can there be distrust or an- 
 tagonism between the two. The facts to be especially 
 noticed here are that spirituality in man proceeds ac- 
 cording to law, and that, too, a fundamental law ; and 
 that the lower is not only related to, but completed 
 in, the higher law. 
 
 Man's progress is from without inward. He begins 
 a child of sense, pleased with material toys, satisfied 
 with physical attainment. He never ends save at the 
 highest, a man of the mature reach of the before 
 latent but now regnant faculties of his spiritual nat- 
 ure. We hesitate to call it spiritual, for fear of mis- 
 understanding. We mean nothing but the man 
 himself, simple and natural, untouched by the super- 
 stitious, and every way in normal poise of intellectual 
 and physical health. We mean the most thoroughly 
 vigorous and most finely balanced manhood, with all 
 
86 Ecce Spiritus. 
 
 the vitality and zest and eagerness of life about it, a 
 lover of the sunshine, and believer above all else in 
 the progress of action. Then we ask simply for the 
 highest and completest development of the being that 
 this represents. How shall the unknown quantity, the 
 potential man, appear? Where does he come into 
 supreme consciousness of his powers and faculties, 
 and realize himself so thoroughly and completely that 
 he can never take a stej) further in sphere ? Where 
 does he begin to subordinate on the one hand, and 
 refuse to compromise on the other ? 
 
 Manifestly, at the spiritual point. This is the cul- 
 minating step in man's evolution, according to the 
 strict laws of his being:. And this we have said is 
 every way natural. It is not only the condition of 
 his higher nature, but it began in and is harmonious 
 with the laws of Nature as we commonly understand 
 that term. The assertion is amply sustained by a full 
 showing of the facts. 
 
 There is no word of our language more misapplied 
 in common use than the word "nature." It is made 
 to mean something fixed and certain, something that 
 can be defined and understood, in contrast to spirit, 
 which is vague and lawless. Whereas, in point of fact, 
 spirit is in almost universal use, as well as in fact no 
 less clearly understood, and no less definable than 
 nature itself. If we employ the superficial etymology 
 which derives the word from the past participle of 
 the verb nascor, referring it merely to that which has 
 been born, to creation as an already created, fixed, and 
 finished work, we may have the shadow of a support 
 
Nature and Spirit. 87 
 
 for a real distinction here. If, on the other hand, we 
 trace the word back more carefully, and see how the 
 structural significance of it when so found harmonizes 
 completely with the position here taken, we shall say 
 that the word stands in either sphere of spirit or mat- 
 ter for precisely the same kind, if not almost the same 
 degree, of knowledge and certainty. The fact so often 
 asserted by materialism of the definiteness of nature, 
 as well as its entire inference from this assumption, is 
 seen to be false when we find our word rather in the 
 future participle, a derivative from naturus instead 
 of natus, and referring not so much to what has been 
 born as to that which is ever about to be born, a 
 future, unknown, untableted possibility, as becomes 
 the creation of a God who is not dead, but as much 
 alive and as truly creative now as ever. God is the 
 only example of finished work, if, indeed, such a state- 
 ment may be made of Him ; the rest, all the rest, lives 
 and moves, and has its being in Him. It either answers 
 this condition or is finished in the sense of being dead, 
 which no creation of God ever is or can be. The 
 ancients, though infinitely less scientific, were far truer 
 to the reality of things when they made their word 
 natura, than we moderns have been in our application 
 of it. In their day of modest attainment, it was, per- 
 haps, easier to see that nature is, as far as we can 
 understand, a process and not yet a finality, than it 
 is in ours of boastful but not over-discriminating 
 attainment in the field of science. 
 
 The last and greatest assertion of science is that nat- 
 ure is not yet completed, and in no wise likely, even 
 
88 JEJcce Spiritus. 
 
 in the theories of the wisest investigator, to be soon 
 understood or exhausted. We have a vast array of 
 data, and know some of its superficial facts; but, until 
 it ceases to be an infinite process, we can only hope to 
 see the beginning. The most deeply learned can tell 
 us nothing of the end. Indeed, the why and the 
 whither are what we hear least about. He can indeed 
 assert, with no longer any fear of intelligent contradic- 
 tion that the world was never created, sprung out of no 
 mythic Genesis period, but was only set in motion. It 
 is still a naturus, still a development and an unknown 
 possibility ; never natus, but about to be, in a procession 
 never ended; something to-day which is only the con- 
 dition for that which is to be yet farther on. So far 
 as we can see, it is, like spirit, everywhere and always 
 the great To Be. 
 
 Is it winter? No. There is deception in the aspect 
 of effortless sleep that suggests the name. In reality, 
 it is all the time busy with the beginnings of spring. 
 It is never spring, but always becoming summer. 
 Even summer will not let you rest without continual 
 hints that autumn is maturing in the lap of apparent 
 freshness. At no point can you catch and fix Nature 
 long enough to tabulate her. She has no seasons that 
 are not pressing on to, nay, are very parts of others. 
 The universe is restless and insatiable, and the solution 
 of its secret is not yet. We talk of sunrise; but even 
 the night is restless, and hints of day long before the 
 sun has reached the morning line. Almost in the heart 
 of the summer night there was a faint lifting on the 
 eastern ridge, and there was something of morning 
 
Nature and Spirit. 89 
 
 even in the midst of night. There is no moment of its 
 life, no spot of its changing surface, but tells of a 
 world in motion, an eternal looking forward to some- 
 thing which never is, except as a farther step toward 
 that illusive fulfilment which can never be understood 
 from any other than the higher stand-point. 
 
 Science has made no approach to a comprehension 
 of nature in a sense that satisfies the real craving of 
 the mind for knowledge. It knows more of what there 
 is in nature, but nature itself is yet as difficult to un- 
 derstand and describe as ever. It is a " divine mys- 
 tery," equal to any that true religion presents, a vague, 
 vast potency, which our history and science are alike 
 powerless to solve. It is simply God in outward ac- 
 tion. Its laws and purposes are expressions of his will 
 in the sphere of matter. We are permitted to see the 
 process, but the heart of the mystery flies from us here 
 as elsewhere. 
 
 Even the reality of spirit is not more utterly beyond 
 the full comprehension and the exact tabulation of 
 man. Nay, it lies far nearer in to the centre of con- 
 sciousness, with facts in its sphere fully as vital and 
 certain, — indeed, much more so, — and a declaration of 
 knowledge vastly more intimate and satisfactory than 
 any investigations of science have yet brought. The 
 latter can tell only of what it sees, with the limitations 
 of that most delicate of all human organs, the eye, ap- 
 pearing at every step ; while the assertions of spiritual 
 experience, — the testimony of human consciousness, 
 are a test of knowledge which is, to the individual at 
 least, absolute. 
 
90 Ecce Spiritus. 
 
 Not only is there one common condition for nature 
 and spirit, but it is, beyond this, true that they are in 
 different realms of action one and the self-same thing, 
 a power or expression of God, seen here operative ma- 
 terially in the universe and the motions of man's phys- 
 ical being, and there in the movements of his spiritual 
 universe as we know it reflected in the life of the soul. 
 
 Hence the strange illusiveness of our life : the sad- 
 ness, the lack of co-ordination between inward ideal 
 and outward reality, the dreamlike swiftness of its 
 passage from night to night. If it is true that spirit- 
 ually man finds no resting-place, has and is yet nothing 
 final, it is equally certain that materially he is in a sys- 
 tem of tireless change and progression, wherein no 
 definite and fixed attainment of knowledge can stay 
 and satisfy his nature. Nowhere is he a part of the 
 natus, nowhere fully born into finished and sufficient 
 conditions, but everywhere a motion of the naturus 
 tending through lower nature up to higher nature, and 
 never satisfied save in the All, the infinitude of blessed- 
 ness and power. 
 
 Hence, also, his outward sphere and surroundings 
 are in exact keeping with the laws and conditions of 
 bis internal structure. In both, he is natural. His 
 nature is the possibility of a long line of development 
 which begins in the first molecular motion of matter, 
 and ends only with the very closest relationship in 
 conscious activity of his spirit to God's. The laws of 
 his body and his soul agree. Indeed, they constitute 
 one law, with reciprocal working. He thus needs 
 nothing opposed to nature to save him, — not less 
 
Nature and Spirit. 91 
 
 nature, but more. He is lost simply for the want of 
 that fine relationship between the two spheres wherein 
 are life and health and all possible human perfection. 
 
 Somewhere, he will find the sinfulness of this ab- 
 normal denial of nature. Sometime, he will see that to 
 go counter to nature is, after all, the only unpardona- 
 ble sin. It is the greatest crime of man's possible utter- 
 ance against the Holy Ghost of God to say one word 
 against the condition which he gave to man funda- 
 mentally, as the one hope of reconciliation. When a 
 man violates nature, he is estranged from God; and 
 the vindication of all moral law lies in the renewed 
 obedience. When a person does not know God, it is 
 simply because only half his nature has been recog- 
 nized or cultivated. Convert him up to himself, and 
 there is no need of farther effort. We can trust the 
 spirit to find God, the only trouble in the matter be- 
 ing with the want of the former, and not with any 
 doubt as to the existence or accessibility of the latter. 
 
 It is, then, more nature that we need to fix and 
 complete our religion. It matters not whether we 
 say physical or spiritual nature : it is all one, with dif- 
 ference only in the degree and sphere of exercise. 
 The natural man is the spiritual man. The unspirit- 
 ual is the only unnatural, the only lairfess, the only 
 erratic one. There is no distinction between nature 
 and grace. Nature is grace. It will save the unnat- 
 ural and the sinful with the very health and healing 
 that resides in God's sweet, pure laws. 
 
 The grace of Jesus Christ is the normal growth of 
 every soul out of low limitations and false stand- 
 
92 Ecce Spiritus. 
 
 ards of living into life and light. The sin against 
 heaven, the only one for which God, in the presence 
 of his laws which he has ordained to carry out not 
 only his righteousness, but his mercy as well, will 
 ever hold us to account, is the violation of one, even 
 the simplest, of those conditions engrained in the 
 structure of our being, by which the end of our exist- 
 ence is attained and we come constantly nearer him. 
 Jesus came solely for this, — to bring man back to 
 nature, himself, his God. He offered no substitute 
 for this, — not even himself, personally considered, as 
 we shall see later on, — no sign and catchword, no 
 ordinance and hierarchy, but only law in its whole- 
 ness ; not lower nor higher, but One as from the crea- 
 tive hand, and tending through manifold spheres and 
 expressions to one great end. 
 
 But the thought has many ramifications, nor can we 
 yet say that we have in any sense exhausted the sug- 
 gestiveness of the theme. TTe can, however, pause 
 here only to notice one common error into which 
 some of the best thinking of the world has fallen. In 
 spite of all the enlightenment of science, the fallacy 
 is still rife that man upon his natural side is perfect, 
 and only comes to disease or death by reason of some 
 failure in obedience to the laws of health. Nature, 
 it is urged, — and the word is here used after the com- 
 mon custom as synonymous with the universe of 
 matter, — is perfect ; and, if man had never disobeyed, 
 he would neither suffer, nor cease physically to exist. 
 This is substantially the statement, with perhaj)s cer- 
 tain modifications in the case of some thinkers, of a 
 
Nature and Spirit. 93 
 
 wide-spread feeling that there is something unnatural 
 in disease and death, some disturbance of the plan 
 which intended for man only an endless enjoyment of 
 physical functions and an uninterrupted inheritance 
 of the earth. 
 
 Unquestionably, it is true that there is hardly any 
 preaching more in demand at the present time than 
 that which holds up a greater reverence for and obe- 
 dience of the laws of health, to the end that the 
 misery and needlessly premature decay of man's phys- 
 ical powers may be arrested. Without doubt, health, 
 happiness, life itself, are more truly in the hands of 
 the race than we, in the light of our superficial moral- 
 ity, are willing to believe, — but always within certain 
 well-defined limits. Nature is perfect in her sphere, 
 but her sphere is circumscribed. It is finite, and 
 necessarily has a point beyond which no care, no 
 painstaking, can carry us. Man physically suffers 
 under a transmitted weakness and death-rate, which 
 it must be the work and pride of his future science 
 and religion to decrease. He is doing it now, and will 
 continue to do it more and more by every sign of the 
 times ; but, physically, man never had and never can 
 have anything but a limited goal to his efforts after 
 physical perfection. Indeed, his chief encouragement 
 in the work comes not from a hope to be physically 
 immortal, but from the fact which he will grow to see 
 yet more and more clearly, — that this fulness of obedi- 
 ence to natural law is the condition, nay, a very part 
 of his spiritual perfection and his more essential con- 
 tinuance of life. His desire and effort for obedience 
 
94 Ecce Spiritus. 
 
 will be the same, but bis point of view will be shifted 
 from the material to the spiritual. 
 
 But beyond all this there is in the current notion a 
 gross misconception of nature as well as injustice to 
 man. The traditional idea says that man was created 
 perfect, but fell in Adam (which latter is in some 
 sort a metaphor for an inherent but, it must be con- 
 fessed, contradictory weakness of will and liability to 
 sin), and was then redeemed substitutionally by Christ. 
 But nothing is plainer as a matter of fact than that 
 man was not created perfect. Nature, his influential 
 environment, his own physical, and hence necessarily 
 finite, constitution, were his limitations at the outset. 
 lie fell in no Adam, but was borne along a sliding plane 
 of inherent imperfection, which was to be the condi- 
 tion of his development, the test and possibility of his 
 virtue. And he was saved by what Christ can help 
 him to be, from the past sin which spirituality sinks in 
 dominant virtue, and from all future failings which 
 through the same power can be averted from him. 
 
 It must be that Nature is looking to ideal perfec- 
 tion in the future, be it here or there; but, as we know 
 her, she is but a finite possibility. Her life includes 
 two principles, seemingly forever at war, but at last 
 known to be but complemental parts of a great whole, 
 — propagation and destruction, existence and death. 
 While she keeps the germ of everything, she has 
 no respect for individuality. In this sense, so far as 
 physical faculties alone can see, she destroys. In this 
 sense there is torture in her ministry to man. 
 
 But it is Nature herself that surfers and dies. 
 
Nature and Spirit. 95 
 
 There is the epitome of every human sorrow or ter- 
 ror in the universe itself. The world is bright and 
 sunny and hopeful; but the world is troubled as well. 
 Nature has sickness and health in a strictly unthink- 
 ing sphere where no question of choice or will, as 
 in the case of man, ever enters. The very laws of 
 her being, with which no metaphoric Adam ever tam- 
 pered, work themselves out in this reciprocal action 
 of forces apparently opposed and yet really one. 
 She is not always the embodiment of smiling fresh- 
 ness and perennial vigor. She knows in the econ- 
 omy of her life lassitude and inanition, times of weak- 
 ness and days of spent vitality, when the whole aspect 
 of the world is one of intense struggle or unmis- 
 takable agony that rends the earth with efforts after 
 renewed harmony, or a weary lifelessness that steals 
 the tonic from the air and the very curl from the 
 grass blade and the leaf. 
 
 Nature goes on in health and freshness for a certain 
 time; and then, out in the world, as in the body of 
 man, the waste of active forces, accumulating, must be 
 thrown off, and she becomes sick. Her very life is an 
 alternating process of waste and repair. The former 
 we call " death," the latter in its preponderance we 
 call "life"; but it is the presence of both in proper 
 proportion that in reality constitutes life in any of its 
 strictly human forms. Nevertheless, this is the very 
 thing that we call " disease " in man, causing disturb- 
 ance and struggling and often desolation in nature. 
 It is a process of death in her members. It is the 
 normal way of purification, though here and there a 
 
96 Ecce Spiritus. 
 
 man dies or a tree is turned up rootless or a feeding 
 ox is struck dumb in the healing process. The in- 
 herent waste goes on accumulating to the limit which 
 nature's finiteness ordains, and then the black €loud 
 gathers upon the horizon, and the flash and thunder 
 put man in awe of so stupendous a natural retribution 
 in the very air. Or a sudden tempest goes forth, 
 sweeping before it harmless forests and innocent men, 
 both doomed alike of Nature in her integrity. Or a 
 pestilence rages, that has no connection whatever with 
 human remissness, as in the case of those which the 
 early adventurers found in their second visits to this 
 coast, when whole tribes of Indians had been obliter- 
 ated or driven away, and the very face of the country 
 for hundreds of miles of almost primitive wilderness 
 showed the desolation. We can fi]l up the swamps 
 and find in some measure the cure and preventive of 
 malaria ; but it does not alter the fact that the earth 
 has always been in and of itself subject to sickness 
 and death, nor furnish sufficient ground for hope that 
 it will not always have weak spots in its surface as 
 well as contagion and destruction in its air. Nature 
 herself does not die, nor, so far as we know, the race 
 of man as a whole ; but the process of a continual ex- 
 tinction of both animate and inanimate creation is the 
 very condition of nature's life. Man never changed 
 and never can change the fact. He has limits within 
 which he can modify and improve these things ; but 
 the real hope and blessedness of this lies not so much 
 in what he can do to make earthly conditions perfect, 
 as in the fact that he by his effort here is bringing his 
 outward environment into harmony with his higher 
 
Nature and Spirit. 97 
 
 life, becoming, by the breadth of his obedience, natu- 
 ral everywhere. 
 
 So he founds and bases his religion. He is not at 
 war with matter, but only labors to subordinate it to 
 that which is higher. He knows that Nature just as 
 she is, after man has done his utmost to avail himself 
 of her fullest possibility, is right. The body is his 
 special sphere ; and, although it may suffer and die, it 
 is yet capable of spiritual domination. But his spirit- 
 uality would not so much crowd it down as lift it up. 
 It is higher than it seems, a fundamental part of 
 spiritual nature. The unity of the ultimate end of 
 both, and the community of law proceeding through 
 both back to God, its originator, elevates and digni- 
 fies this loftiest form of matter into something worthy 
 even of spiritual culture and respect. 
 
 The assertion that Nature in her sphere and possi- 
 bility has limits does not conflict with what has gone 
 before. So much is certain, but we have not yet de- 
 fined those limits. The boundaries of even the finite 
 have not opened out to us the fulness of this human 
 possibility, nor its infinitely important relationships 
 with spirit. In its sphere, it is fixed and determinate; 
 but we are now hardly more than in the beginning of 
 our comprehension of that sphere. Nature is simply 
 the blank possibility of matter, just as spirituality is 
 the unknown possibility of the soul. The truth is, no 
 one knows so much of what the world is and contains 
 as he who approaches it with the spiritual vision. 
 Lower nature is fulfilled and completed in the higher. 
 He is the true scientist who puts the facts together, 
 and sees that, even in outward nature, which does not 
 
98 JEcce Spiritus. 
 
 reside in the mere proportions he can weigh and 
 measure. Reciprocally, also, he is most genuinely 
 spiritual who gets closest to the heart of nature every- 
 where, who studies and sympathizes with the humblest 
 expression of its law-abiding unity. He first subordi- 
 nates sense that he may be truly sensible of the vast 
 import of this world, as well as by that means also 
 thoroughly spiritual. Thus, the outlook comes with 
 the inlook; and the loftiness of his point of vision is 
 the condition of his conrprehensiveness. This would 
 constitute the spiritual scientist, the one for whom the 
 world, already too long fed on husks, is waiting. And 
 he will come at length, when his schooling shall have 
 been completed, and finish the work of the stone- 
 breakers. 
 
 It was in harmony with such a view of nature, and 
 in sympathy with law as seen in, but not monopo- 
 lized by the outward world, that Jesus came, as the 
 most natural of men, and comes again to-day. He is 
 all in all spiritual, and yet through all natural. He 
 knows no compromise, but infinite relation and adapta- 
 tion. He is everywhere a lover of men and of nature, 
 and in these supremely one with God. It is here that 
 he rises to his kingship. He alone can take all crea- 
 tion back, by no strain and stretch of purely natural 
 symbols, to the Creator. It is here that he found his 
 power; and here came to him his clear conception, 
 nay, his realization of God. He learned little from 
 the schools and the books; but his nature in the possi- 
 bilities which he was supremely fitted to develop 
 opened up the kingdom of God out of, not in opposi- 
 tion to, the kingdoms of this world. 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 
 GOD OR CHRIST. 
 
 In" whatever way we consider Christianity, it was 
 of all religions the most radical. Not only did it 
 strike at the roots of being, but, independent of all 
 systems, it struck at the root of every existent con- 
 ception of religious life. It was fearlessness itself, or, 
 rather, it was that utter absorption in what it held 
 to be true which allows no thought of consequences. 
 Jesus was the king of sceptics, the prince of radicals. 
 He absolutely disregarded the sanctity of the tradi- 
 tional; while the fine flavor of ancient things, merely 
 as such, had with him no sacred acceptance. He did 
 indeed declare that he had come, not to destroy, but 
 to fulfil ; and here it is that the tendency of the genu- 
 ine radical is so commonly misunderstood. He was 
 there for positive work, to build fairer and larger 
 than any before him. But he must first clear the 
 ground and prepare the soil for the reception of an 
 entirely new growth. In all this, however, he was 
 eclectic and comprehensive. He saw, what the mod- 
 ern radical is coming so grandly to apprehend, the 
 universality of truth, the necessity for finding in 
 every outgrown fallacy or worn-out statement the 
 germ of an unseen verity. He knew that truth be- 
 
100 JScce Spiritus. 
 
 longs to no man, is the exclusive property of no 
 system. Every earnest mind and every honest for- 
 mulation needs but a larger view infused into its 
 localized or narrow statement; and he rejected no part 
 of truth already uttered or put into practice. For 
 the old, he seems to have had no undue respect ; but 
 he knew that truth is old. He paid no reverence to 
 tradition, but had no quarrel with the kernel of divine 
 verity enclosed in the imperfect human shell. 
 
 The law, in a certain sense, he accepted, simply 
 because his was in no wise the work of a law-maker. 
 So far as laws were needed, and could in their sphere 
 be successful, he was satisfied with those already ac- 
 cepted. With all their limitations and dangers, they 
 played a certain rudimentary part in the elevation 
 of the race. No more were needed ; and none could, 
 on the whole, better answer the purpose they were 
 there to subserve. They had already, moreover, a 
 well-recognized sanctity, and, so far as they could 
 substantiate what he had to enforce, furnished an au- 
 thority universally acknowledged, to which he could 
 appeal. Whenever the truth he uttered had already 
 been made current with the stamp of Moses or the 
 prophets, he did not hesitate to convict or coerce 
 them out of their own sacred writings. He had no 
 spiritual pride, no priestly arrogance. He was willing 
 to share the message so far as it had in any degree 
 been grasped by the holy men of earth. 
 
 He was, moreover, steeped in the poetry of the 
 Old Testament writings. His evident familiarity with 
 them must have grown out of long and loving study ; 
 
God or Christ. 101 
 
 while his readiness to quote and apply relieves him, 
 in all his iconoclastic work, from any charge of nar- 
 rowness or jealousy. He was, too, Hebraistic in the 
 character of his mind, as all his expressions show; 
 and the bond of sympathy with the spiritual singers 
 and prophets must, of necessity, have been great. He 
 was not so. much unlike, as more than they. What 
 came to them in glimpses, was to him a steadily shin- 
 ing light. He asserted from daily consciousness what 
 they barely hinted at in rare and only half-understood 
 moments. But the poetry that colored his whole life, 
 and ran through his every utterance, was a part of 
 that Hebrew heritage which he shared in common 
 with them. 
 
 But the bent of his genius, the entire spirit of his 
 work, was away from all such purely ethical methods. 
 Indeed, Jesus has been as widely misunderstood by 
 those who have narrowed him to the position of a 
 merely moral teacher, as by those who have persisted 
 in limiting Christianity to considerations of doctrinal 
 and ecclesiastical efficacy. He found the principles 
 of morality, largely the same in all times and under 
 the various national systems of religion, already ex- 
 pressed with sufficient pith and clearness. Their 
 demands would not generally differ from those he 
 as a moralist should make. Incidentally, he added a 
 few, or put in more comprehensive form others 
 which were vastly older than his own system; but 
 this was not his object. The reason why they did 
 not live up to their laws, why the work of the wise 
 teachers they worshipped had become of none effect, 
 
102 JEcce Spiritus. 
 
 was not because they needed more or more perfect 
 moral precepts, but because something else, vastly 
 more radical and effective than ethical principles 
 alone can ever be, was wanted. Their code was well- 
 nigh perfect ; but it was written in stone, while he 
 stopped at nothing short of a heart newly made over 
 from the springs and beginnings of conduct to the 
 crowning expressions of the entire nature of man in 
 vital fusion with the highest. He had no greater 
 charge to bring against their law than that it left 
 them dead. It was good as far as it went ; and he 
 was glad to have it constitute a part of the ground- 
 work, the bedplate, of his own more sufficient minis- 
 try. The principles of morality are largely the prop- 
 erty of the race, and the especial work of no one in 
 particular ; and he does not need to proceed much 
 further in this direction. But he does see that, while 
 nearly perfect as a written system, Hebraism was 
 abortive as a living and practical reality; that ade- 
 quate motives were wanting to its proper exercise; 
 that, in short, it was largely a dead letter on the 
 statute books of the State. It was his to supply the 
 needed soul to this shapely but corpse-like body. 
 The law might stand, but, as one of the incidental 
 effects of his own more positive work, it must come 
 to new and larger significance. Spirituality is every- 
 where seen in synrpathy with the highest morality, 
 but it is infinitely more than morality. It is often 
 the most ethical of men who deny both spirit and 
 God. But Jesus, finding so valuable a legal system, ac- 
 cepted its letter, at the same time that, as with every- 
 
God or Christ. 103 
 
 thing else, he filled it out with the spirit of his own 
 diviner work. It remains, however, theirs, not his. 
 The characteristic bent of his own calling must not 
 for a moment be confounded with the more super- 
 ficial sphere of the projmets. " It is written in your 
 law," he says, — not ours, nor mine, but yours. 
 
 All this was in perfect keeping with the brave and 
 comprehensive task he had set himself to do, which 
 was nothing short of the most positive assertion of 
 the one essential truth of God, joined to the most 
 catholic and liberal spirit toward every form and ut- 
 terance of it, however partial, which it had taken in 
 men's minds. The singleness of his aim in nowise 
 suffered from the breadth and inclusiveness of his 
 vision. It was no truer of him that his eye penetrated 
 to the supreme centre of truth than that it rested as 
 well on the outermost rim of its vast circumference. 
 And this is the one fact, taken in connection with the 
 quality of his message, and the utter thoroughness 
 with which it was carried out, which has given him 
 his perpetuity of influence in the face of infinite per- 
 version. Least of all disputatious, he saw and used 
 everything which in any degree made for the estab- 
 lishment of his end. He was eminently, though not 
 narrowly, practical. For, while directly at war with 
 the logical results of the Jewish law in social and in- 
 dividual life, he could yet declare that he had come 
 not to destroy, but to fulfil its unseen or forgotten 
 spirit. He saw alike the surface and the centre, but it 
 was the latter alone that he kept always in view. 
 
 It is this method or spirit of Jesus which the Jews 
 
104 Ecce Spiritus. 
 
 found it most difficult to understand. He was so near 
 to them, and yet strangely alien to their most cherished 
 convictions; so sympathetic with, and so much a part 
 of them, and yet, withal, so uncompromisingly antag- 
 onistic. It was a Jew speaking to them in the com- 
 mon tongue, with the very language of their own 
 sacred fathers ; and yet what a strange, incomprehensi- 
 ble message ! Abraham, Moses, David, or Isaiah might 
 be heard in what he said ; but his strain was not of 
 them, and never rested with their words. Nay, more, 
 it said nothing about himself, except as he chose to 
 consider himself in the light of an instrument or a re- 
 flection or a something outside himself which makes 
 for righteousness in all men. It was not his own 
 strong individuality which pushed his opinions, but 
 his opinions, vitally fused and peculiarly imperative, 
 which made him what he was. The strength of his 
 endowment was in the intense and personal relations 
 he enjoyed with God. With him, it is everywhere 
 God that must be considered. They must not even 
 call him good. There is only one good, and that the 
 Father. 
 
 But here the spirit of Jesus has been equally mis- 
 understood by the Church, which has since stood, to a 
 great degree, in the precise attitude of the people of 
 his time. It cannot harmonize with the radical method 
 of his thought, but stops on the surface, refusing to un- 
 derstand the obvious intent of all his words. It has 
 said, and still says, that historical Christianity is a truer 
 criterion of Jesus' intentions than the primitive and 
 unformed spirit itself, which stands to-day just as it 
 
God or Christ. 105 
 
 did when first perverted, as plain and as much a first- 
 hand source of authority to us as to the earliest synod 
 that ever met. It says practically, in answer to the 
 question what the Christian Church is to effect, that 
 the end and object of all is Christ. He taught a per- 
 verted humanity, a way of salvation, and a possible 
 heavenly state ; and all this is only another way of say- 
 ing Christ. He taught himself, whom we are to ac- 
 cept, to live with and for, to cat and drink, to serve in 
 some especial sense, as Head and Lord and King. 
 
 Jesus, on the contrary, insisted on one thing, the 
 immanence and mightiness of God. And his concep- 
 tion of Deity was not only strong and forceful, but 
 also new and original. There was no real God in the 
 universe until him. He had neither faith nor fellow- 
 ship in the abstract Jehovah of Jewish thought, a be- 
 ing relegated to a realm so far distant from any actual, 
 every-day comprehension as to be practically of no ac- 
 count save as an intellectual conception. This being, 
 whose name could have no place in their common 
 speech, for fear that utterance would contaminate its 
 sacredness, to mention whom in any conscious sense 
 of human relationship became a sacrilege, was no 
 part of the paternal discovery that Jesus made out of 
 the needy and loving depths of his own soul. The 
 blasphemy of his familiar expressions of nearness and 
 love startled them into fear and hatred. It was not 
 anything he claimed for himself, in his assumption of 
 the Christ, that aroused their opposition, but his un- 
 righteous handling of a name they themselves hardly 
 dared to speak. The pure, living, regnant theism of 
 
106 JScce Spiritus. 
 
 Jesus was the chief cause of all the bitterness that 
 assailed him. He was there, not to supplement the 
 statute-books in their bald statements of the fact of 
 Deity, but by reason of what he himself knew of God, 
 because of some positive certainty. It was a different 
 God, as well as one realized in his own consciousness, 
 which he brought to their knowledge ; an entire change 
 of attitude toward Deity, and the relations which man 
 sustains to him. Before Jesus there was a God, but 
 no God-companionship, no genuine and tender com- 
 munion. He took religion out of its abstract relations, 
 and made it living and effective. He not only en- 
 larged, but realized the highest conceptions of Hebrew 
 faith. It was not so much the might as the nearness 
 of God; not his power, but his presence, that he saw 
 and rejoiced in. lie first established the family rela- 
 tion in religion. Father and Son are the words he 
 loves best. He revels in his own assertion of sonship, 
 coining his highest title out of the simplest realities of 
 his daily communion with God and man. He could 
 afford to ignore their short-sighted charge of bringing 
 God down to men, since he was only conscious of the 
 effort to lift men up to God. He was not here to 
 state, but to realize; not to define God, but to deify 
 man. It was a larger, not a less divinity that he saw. 
 And he saw it with a single eye, and with the one sole 
 aim of bringing men to the point in spiritual expe- 
 rience where he himself stood. He first prayed, and 
 set that divinest prerogative of man's nature in its true 
 light, not as a delegated and formal function, but the 
 nearest and simplest and most natural exj>ression of 
 
God or Christ. 107 
 
 human life. With a breath of his honest and manly 
 courage, he blew away cant and script and priestly in- 
 tervention, and said, Let the coming be heart to heart. 
 He taught God first and last of all, keeping himself at 
 the same time as far as possible out of sight. They 
 had no claim through him, but a privilege and duty 
 in and of themselves. It was his aim to awaken them 
 to the life in the developed possibilities of which lie 
 the necessities and certainties of spiritual communion. 
 He called out the God in them, so long dormant, that 
 now revealed to them their true selves. Then he as 
 quickly and silently as possible withdrew. 
 
 In the light of these facts, the answer to the ques- 
 tion as to what constitutes the true Christian is sim- 
 ple and sure. Xot he who worships Christ, but he 
 who worships the Father. Every earnest, honest 
 God-worshipper, even if he never utters, nay, even if 
 he never heard of, the name of Christ, is a Christian. 
 He is and must be one with Jesus, amenable to all his 
 methods, and inspired toward the peculiar kind of ex- 
 perience which dominated all his development. A 
 chance, then, for the nameless, Christless God-wor- 
 shipper of every land and time! The ban of the 
 churches is dissolved, and every childlike heart comes 
 back to the consciousness of a genuine and tender 
 communion. Nay, more, even he who, while at peace 
 in conscious nearness to the Father, believes himself 
 lost and utterly unfellowshipped in the great com- 
 munion where he would gladly bear his part, now 
 comes to stand beside the "lonely Jesus,'' admitted 
 into that inner, smaller circle which is presided over 
 
108 JEcce Spiritus. 
 
 by his spirit. He who, in the tenderest of religious 
 relations with God, feels himself forced to renounce 
 the name which has been burdened with so much nar- 
 rowness and falsity, again rejoices in the title of 
 Christian, from which no bigotry without and no 
 honest scruples within need longer estrange him. If 
 he knows, loves, serves God, he is the only Christian. 
 He may drop the word from his vocabulary, if he 
 will : he cannot lose the fact. He is what Jesus was, 
 and the heir of all his influence, the rightful owner of 
 every privilege his name confers. 
 
 There is something singular in this word, which has 
 been so long an all-powerful shibboleth in the world. 
 It has been of vast import in the history of the past 
 eighteen centuries, ranging in significance from geo- 
 graphical and political distinctions to the arbitration 
 of personal opinion and experience. Its force has 
 been felt not only in the privacy of the heart, but 
 in the entire course of human development. It has 
 even gone beyond the mysterious line that sepa- 
 rates life and death, and laid exclusive claim to 
 the prizes of eternity. It has been secularized, and 
 prostituted to a thousand uses, and stands to-day in 
 the minds of millions of people the test of worthiness 
 here and happiness hereafter. And all this in the 
 face of the fact of the utter want of assumption on 
 the part of him in whose honor it is worn. To be a 
 follower of Jesus is with him to worship God, to be 
 consciously and vitally related to spiritual things. 
 The objective point in the distinction is God, not 
 Christ. There is neither desire nor demand on the 
 
God or Christ. 109 
 
 part of Jesus that his name should be used as a 
 watchword, except so far as it may be helpful and 
 inspiring. His is the way, the truth, and the life: 
 make them ours, and we shall, like him, be one with 
 God; and nothing further is required even for the 
 fullest Christian fellowship. 
 
 It has been this which has occasioned the frequent 
 willingness on the part of conscientious thinkers to 
 renounce the name altogether; to exalt comparative 
 religion over the claims of any narrow and sectional 
 school. The significance of the name has been 
 stretched too far; and the spirit of Jesus, offended 
 in the literalism of his would-be followers, transfers 
 its sympathy to those who in brave honesty stand 
 entirely apart from the perverted symbol. But the 
 word is, after all, but the body of something which 
 the later, fuller Christian thought labors to fulfil. It 
 is the bald literalism which no completer spirit can 
 afford utterly to ignore. The spirit can get outward, 
 and cleanse and purify and make new the distorted 
 symbol. The real Christianity exists, breathless and 
 unnoted, beneath the worldly systems that have 
 sprung up in its stead. It is the Hercules that will 
 yet rise up to sweep out the Augean stables of its 
 own great corruption at the hands of men. It will 
 save all the false establishments, the work even of the 
 make-shift synods, by the necessity it will force upon 
 them to be born anew. It is the corrector of its own 
 abuses, and hence a perennial power in the world. 
 
 There is, however, one more test that Jesus gives, 
 beyond the fact of intimate and loving relations with 
 
110 JEcce Spiritus. 
 
 the Father ; and that is the possession of the Christ- 
 like spirit. "If any man," says Paul, "have not the 
 spirit of Christ, he is none of his." He cannot be a 
 Christian, and keep any narrowness and exclusion. 
 The spirit of Jesus is everywhere free and liberal. 
 The method and object of his work alike forbid any 
 fatal limitation of the term in its application to all 
 truly religious beings. It is his work to bring to- 
 gether, not to separate, the spiritual elements. There 
 may be outward dissension in the day when the first 
 struggle from lower to higher necessarily becomes a 
 battle, but the ultimate drift of his influence is toward 
 the reuniting; of all on the higher and more enduring 
 plane. He is to re-establish the spiritual family, so 
 long and cruelly divided. In him, all are to be one 
 in God. 
 
 The radicalism of Christianity more fully appears 
 when we pass from its relations to the ages of tradi- 
 tionalism from which it sprung to the present, and 
 see how broad is its essential sympathy with the hon- 
 est iconoclast of to-day. 
 
 We feel that Jesus now, as of old, is with every 
 conscientious protest, every profound yearning for 
 free, untrammelled light and life. The simple bond 
 of brotherhood that welcomed all who were willing 
 to live his life, without the slightest reference to doc- 
 trinal qualification, reaches down the centuries of 
 inevitable human formulation to us, gathering all 
 earnest souls into the capacious fold of Christ; but 
 only the positive and constructive, only the reverent 
 and comprehensive. Radicalism too often is born 
 
God or Christ. Ill 
 
 out of the exclusiveness that dwarfs and kills. There- 
 fore, it must have no sneers and no reprisals, but open 
 arms and the sweep of the horizons in its outlook. It 
 must be, like the radicalism of Jesus, a cry for more, 
 not less, a progress from negation to fuller affirma- 
 tion. The higher form is always the more inclusive, 
 and the drift of divine things is never toward a nar- 
 rowing, but rather a broadening out. 
 
 But there is this never to be forgotten in the posi- 
 tion of the independent, in the student of comparative 
 theology who scorns all names in his sufficient theism, 
 that, acknowledge it or not, as he may, he is yet, in all 
 his spirituality, the heir of the Christian centuries. 
 He may say, and say truly, that his religious expe- 
 rience is so vital and personal, his relations with God 
 so direct and conscious, as to remain intact, even if the 
 Bible were lost, and the whole Christian record proved 
 a myth. But when he inquires into himself for the 
 sources of his spiritual insight, when he asks whence 
 came the fulness of God knowledge which makes this 
 ultimate independence possible, he is met by the fact 
 that he is what he is, because Christianity, which has 
 modified the thought and life of the race, was born in 
 him, and was unconsciously absorbed in all the pro- 
 cesses of his education. Enough of the spiritual princi- 
 ple of Jesus inheres even in the falsity and superficial- 
 ness of ordinary interpretation to have made transmis- 
 sible all the higher expressions and experience of our 
 race. Christianity has been so far forth true to its pur- 
 pose that it is in some sort possible in these days to live 
 without it. That is to say, one can be, nay, must be, 
 
112 Jficce Spiritus. 
 
 genuinely religious and like Christ spiritually, if he 
 thinks and lives at all on the higher j)lane, by reason 
 of the now structural, the inborn and unconscious bent 
 which the ages of Christian influence have supplied. 
 He cannot eradicate the fact from his nature, though 
 he may have lost the original source of its operation. 
 Jesus has so far taken possession of humanity that, 
 even if he were historically disproved, he would ever} r - 
 where be found actually present. This is because the 
 real Christianity is deeper and more essential than the 
 apparent one. It is the Christianity born in us that 
 thus defies the more superficial one of the creeds. 
 
 The fact is, Christianity has fathered all our radical- 
 ism. Out of its own truest impulse has come the 
 courage to reject a symbol falsely interpreted. It has 
 tinctured our hereditary thought, given us new eyes 
 and minds and motives, until, at last, so near in to the 
 centre of being does it lie, we neither know it from 
 ourselves, nor suspect that it is speaking even in our 
 honest protest or denial. It is written all over our 
 history, and in the more imperishable life of the soul. 
 It had its birth anew when we were born, and in us 
 answers as of old, with its unquenchable fire, the flame 
 of society's fagot. We can go far, but not far enough 
 to escape it. The elevation and honesty of all things 
 confess it. Only the charlatan and the depraved are 
 without something of its saving power. Nominal 
 independence of it may be virtual reliance upon it, 
 while acceptance of it breathes in every true theist's 
 prayer. Wherever men come to God in genuine and 
 conscious communion, it is witnessed anew. It is rad- 
 
God or Christ. 113 
 
 ical, at the roots of being, because it is the only ade- 
 quate conception of life, the only actual realization of 
 God. In these two spheres, of God and self, it has 
 found the double solution that has ever eluded the 
 search of man. It makes plain the cause and the con- 
 tingent, and the arithmetic of the soul is henceforth 
 within the power of man to solve. 
 
CHAPTER VIIL 
 
 DOCTRIXE YS. PERSONAL ENDOWMENT. 
 
 We have found that the answer to our question, 
 What is that of which Jesus stands the representative, 
 resides in the emphasis he everywhere puts upon spir- 
 ituality. This he enforces as originating cause in all 
 things, as a sufficient philosophy for all the needs and 
 problems of life, and as an ever-present destiny, here 
 and now and everywhere and always. 
 
 But the statement becomes bald and inadequate, a 
 mere formula, until we take a step further, and ob- 
 serve how it is that he illustrates this vast principle, 
 so as to take it out of the sphere of abstract things 
 into that of living reality. It does not answer the 
 requirements of a supreme mission, such as Jesus had, 
 to say merely that he taught spirituality. A man 
 can be a theorist in every other department but that 
 of life; but the minute a theory finds acceptance 
 there, it begins to take definite and vital form as a 
 part of his very self : the higher it is, the more cer- 
 tain that he will henceforth enforce not it, but him- 
 self. Especially is this true of spirituality, which 
 is the crowning and all-inclusive verity, the only pos- 
 sible reception of which becomes not a statement, but 
 an embodiment of itself. 
 
Doctrine vs. Personal Endowment. 115 
 
 Our needs here being not abstract, but practical, it 
 follows that something more than the most conclusive 
 statement of truth is essential to their satisfaction. 
 Even heaven, with its perfection, does not wholly 
 meet the present case, which has a want as well de- 
 fined and legitimate as any which the future is des- 
 tined to create and meet. Jesus saw the folly of 
 abstractions, the inadequacy of the most perfect state- 
 ment of truth. The best conscience of the Hebrew 
 race, sifting down through a mass of trivial and cor- 
 rupt history, had crystallized into dead forms and 
 meaningless observances. Truth stood on the stat- 
 ute-books, and there was worshipped. Association 
 rendered the loftiest utterances of prophets and mor- 
 alists and spiritual poets sacred, until the people had 
 sunk so low as to wear bound upon their foreheads 
 that which had little relation to their life. Not only 
 was the real heart eaten out of religion, so that 
 spiritual want went unsatisfied, but there also began 
 to appear the danger of a positive moral insincerity. 
 The priest himself was deluded in deceiving others, 
 positively demoralized in the negative wrong he did 
 to them. Jesus marked this present death resulting 
 from formalism, and, further, the irresistible tendency 
 of human thought in general to render truth value- 
 less by converting it into the dead letter of a set, 
 prescribed system. He saw the danger of all del- 
 egated authority, and indeed especially in spiritual 
 things, and accordingly sought not only to impart 
 a life which should be unorganized and perennial 
 in its freshness in his own time, but to enunciate 
 
116 Ecce Sjriritus. 
 
 a principle which might ever act untrammelled on the 
 minds and hearts of men. 
 
 It is not necessary to pause here upon those evident 
 perversions which came into the Church as soon as the 
 impression of the personal influence, the spirit, of 
 Jesus, had become faint enough to allow of organiza- 
 tion. That evangelical Christianity is widely sepa- 
 rated, both in spirit and teaching, from the pure, 
 simple principle of Jesus, — however true it may be to 
 a post-apostolic Church, and however serviceable, in 
 want of a better, — even its candid adherents them- 
 selves admit. The Jewish system was the strongest 
 religious organization ever seen, and Jesus had studied 
 this in full operation and completeness of result. He 
 saw doctrine deified on every hand, and the question 
 of right merged into that of legality, until there was 
 no room left for either genuine rectitude or conscious 
 spiritual life. Religion was but a faint germ of pos- 
 sibility in the hard shell of formalism in which it was 
 enclosed. 
 
 He was necessarily forced away from all this. The 
 exigencies of his own peculiar work and ideas would 
 have stood one side, opposed and antipodal, even if the 
 barefaced failure of Judaism to effect any worthy re- 
 sult had not been plain to see. From the side of ex- 
 perience, as well as from his own truest instincts, came 
 the command to teach no system of doctrines, to make 
 no formulation of living truth into the dead letter of a 
 creed. The disciples were to spread his gospel among 
 all nations ; but an understanding of that gospel as it 
 was in him gives ample denial to the supposition that 
 
Doctrine vs. Personal Endowment. 117 
 
 he even dreamed of an ecclesiastical hierarchy founded 
 on his name. He did indeed see the danger of this, 
 the inevitable human tendency to monopolize the per- 
 son of the announcer of truth for purposes of outward 
 aggrandizement ; and it was especially to prevent this 
 very thing, which afterward took place, that he left 
 his truth unformulated, in the hope that it might rest 
 in the heart and life. He knew the very fact that he 
 had set his influence against the dead forms of his own 
 day would furnish future generations a lever with 
 which to lift themselves to what they would consider 
 purer phases of organized power. He foresaw that his 
 name might readily become a catchword, about which 
 to cluster fresh abuses of the spirit which he lived to 
 liberate. Often and again, he beseeches them not to 
 be deceived with false prophetship, brought in his 
 name, to the establishment of new applications of his 
 teaching. Indeed, his forecast of the future, and his 
 fine understanding of the immense leverage there is in 
 a truly good and popular name, evince great natural 
 acumen as well as comprehensive observation of life. 
 
 It is difficult for us to understand the rigor of He- 
 brew ritualism, the iron rigidity and mechanical com- 
 pleteness, the absolute finality of its unquestioned let- 
 ter. But the moment it is seen what utter spiritual 
 lifelessness went side by side with its perfection of 
 form, the aptness and timeliness of Jesus' word and 
 work are realized. One needs to go back into the 
 repressive atmosphere of the time, and live and strug- 
 gle and surfer and starve as men's souls did then, to 
 appreciate the coming of his great, free, light-loving, 
 
118 JScce Spiritus. 
 
 and life-bringing nature. He can only approximate to 
 this by a poor comparison of the life to-day, and an 
 observation of how far the honesty, the faith, and the 
 freedom even of our time are crushed out by the 
 unyielding systems of the Churches. He will then 
 come to see that the essential principle of primitive 
 Christianity, which is the only power that can prune 
 off these false growths and excrescences, is just as 
 possible and potent to-day as ever. 
 
 If not so, he will ask, would not Christianity be 
 outgrown ? It must be this, out of ordinary sight, and 
 least suspected by those who arrogate to themselves 
 the sole possession of the Christian name, that has kept 
 Christianity, in spite of all perversions, still powerful 
 and respected. Men are too much burdened in their 
 progress to long carry worthless treasures. The house- 
 hold gods, disproved and put to shame through pa- 
 tient trial of credulity, are soon thrown away. But, 
 notwithstanding all of Christianity that has been de- 
 nied, there is something in it which the most critical 
 cannot help reverencing, as well as something which, 
 even in extreme dilution, is able to continue and bear 
 up under a mass of falsity and error. The Church 
 has changed, and is still at war among its members. 
 The papal and Protestant arms divide, and know not 
 of the doings of each ; while the unnoted or forgotten 
 heart of Christianity beats faintly underneath. This 
 was the supreme test of its power, to endure unspent, 
 and with perennial possibility of renewed and renew- 
 ing purity, through all the ages of misconception. 
 
Doctrine vs. Personal Endowment. 119 
 
 And it is this undercurrent, this buried river of un- 
 expended influence, that bursts the surface now and 
 then to show that Christianity is a deathless adapta- 
 bility to the needs of life. It speaks to our time, and 
 summons it, as of old, to freedom and freshness of 
 spiritual being. But it does so distinctively in oppo- 
 sition to everything formal. It must remain a princi- 
 ple, a spirit, a life.. It will body itself forth in us, but 
 will not itself be bodied. It will tend toward forma- 
 tive results, but will itself remain unfettered. We 
 can cage the bird, but are by no means sure of catch- 
 ing his song. There are some things which cannot be 
 imprisoned. Religion has been nicely locked behind 
 inclusive dogmatical bars, but the spirit prisoner has 
 oftenest refused to sing. 
 
 And this, too, the higher up we go. Comte's re- 
 ligion of humanity, or Confucius' worship of ances- 
 tors, or the Moslem's faith of Mahomet, will find a 
 statement far more readily than this spirituality, ut- 
 terly unsensuous, of Jesus; although, doubtless, each 
 of these may have at heart a certain reality, which we 
 should lose in any attempt to deduce them from their 
 most elaborate verbal record. 
 
 Hence it was that Jesus absolutely ignored system- 
 atic statement, announcing neither creed nor dogma, 
 and making no formal test of faith. Every saving ut- 
 terance on his part is the statement of a principle 
 broad as life itself, and, like life, impossible of tabu- 
 lation. The heart, the mind, the life, can hold and 
 transmit it, — the books, in more than a slight degree, 
 never. If Jesus had attempted this too common 
 
120 Ecce Spiritus. 
 
 experiment, and left us as his only legacy such a sys- 
 tem as we now have attributed to him, it would be 
 seen that, when the form and finality of a set doctrine 
 had been worn away by the attrition of modern pro- 
 gressive thought, there would be nothing left to save 
 and rejuvenate it. 
 
 It is manifest, at the outset, that religion must be a 
 soul, not a body. There must be no sign of limita- 
 tion about it. It is essentially the heart of life, the 
 unseen centre of perennial interests, and is itself peren- 
 nial. It recognizes the practical need of organization, 
 but on a vastly different basis from that which the 
 Church has commonly held to be essential. Jesus him- 
 self organized his followers for the spreading of his 
 grand but eminently simple gospel of life, without 
 one reference to dogmatic qualifications or technical 
 means of impressiveness, but with every insistence on 
 themselves as living and practical embodiments of 
 that which they did not so much have, as, in a truer 
 and grander sense, was to possess them. The test of 
 their discipleship was this mastery of a mighty life- 
 principle in their members, their words and deeds. 
 The entire sphere of their influence was to be com- 
 mensurate with this. It was the lodgement of the 
 truth in them, as they had seen it regnant in the 
 whole nature of Jesus, that was to send the gospel 
 home, not to the thought, the intellectual allegiance 
 alone, but to the lives of men. 
 
 It was the failure of religious organization on the 
 basis of dogma that Jesus saw and insisted upon first 
 of all, — the inadequacy, nay, the positive harm and 
 
Doctrine vs. Personal Endowment. 121 
 
 wrong, of demanding, in beings born into distinctively 
 different temperaments and intellectual leanings, one 
 and the same expression of faith. He would bring 
 individuality of thought into sympathy of life and 
 effort, and organize on the basis of work, charity, 
 helpfulness, and peace. He was no impracticable 
 dreamer to ignore entirely the need of combined and 
 outwardly equip ped effort ; but it was humanity he 
 considered, and no sect in its sinfulness, its virtual 
 denial of him, setting itself apart and condemning the 
 honest dogmatic difference of brothers united to them 
 by a common spiritual bond. His idea of organiza- 
 tion had in it nothing hostile to the most marked 
 individuality, and his life does not record a single in- 
 stance of difference in opinion rebuked by him. The 
 persecutors for opinion's sake have served the Christ 
 of their own hearts, rather than the Jesus who 
 preached the spirit so unassumingly, and with such 
 almost utter absence of doctrinal limitations. 
 
 So far as we can see, there would be nothing incon- 
 sistent in any form or ordinance which remained such 
 in the mind of the Christian. But no one saw with 
 clearer demonstration than Jesus the danger there is 
 in these things. He knew human nature and its 
 irresistible tendencies, and had marked how the 
 efficacy went out of the formularies the minute they 
 were considered saving. And then came the convic- 
 tion, arrived at intellectually, as well as instinctive 
 with him, that the truth untrammelled, and left to 
 have free course and sway, is better than the best 
 statement fossilized into a dead form. His organizar 
 
122 Ecce Spiritus. 
 
 tion, therefore, was one of mutual and charitable 
 helpfulness in spreading the one true Life, rather 
 than in compulsory allegiance to a fixed and inelastic 
 creed. In his system, if we may give such a name to 
 the Christianity of Jesus, he evinces no ambition to 
 settle all the questions of the universe ; and any one 
 may well suspect any assumed Christian catechism 
 which goes outside the sphere of spiritual things. 
 The final conclusion of the last scientist will not be 
 found to be less, but more in harmony with the entire 
 teaching of Jesus. His spirituality can never enlarge 
 as a conception, except in the comprehension of man: 
 it is, and was, the one and only way back to God and 
 life. But the boundaries of man's knowledge in the 
 sphere of God's creation cannot widen out to such 
 proportions as not to be in accord with this unwritten 
 but necessarily limitless creed. Jesus has and need 
 have no quarrel with his Father's universe at any 
 point of its progressive development. It does not 
 tend away from, but ever toward, the centre of his 
 own revelation. 
 
 It is here that all the prescribed faiths have failed, 
 in their fear of new facts, and the inevitable want of 
 elasticity in their fixed statement. Each has grasped 
 a truth, and quickly shut it away from all possible 
 co-ordination into the wholeness of truth. The creeds 
 have come to us for selection, largely as a matter of 
 choice. Which, on the whole, suits us best ? Personal 
 peculiarity answers for each ; but when the choice has 
 not resulted, as so often happens, in the fatal zeal of 
 bigotry and narrow partisanship, the churched believer, 
 
Doctrine vs. Personal Endowment. 123 
 
 still unsatisfied in his exclusion, has been forced to 
 steal the needed blessings of the complemental creeds. 
 But Jesus sees that there is only one religion among 
 the multiform theologies . God is one, and there is 
 only one communion, worship, service. The spirit of 
 it must ever be the same, however much individuality 
 may modify its expression. He knows how quickly 
 the influence of the polemic passes, his fabric of un- 
 erring logic shattered in the movement of the world's 
 progress. But the unspoken spirituality, which as 
 a principle of life lies fallow in germinal possibility 
 in every human heart, responding ever and again to 
 the only touch that can move and inspire it, is as 
 indestructible as being itself. It can never be left 
 nor outgrown, but ever leads just in advance of man's 
 loftiest attainments in knowledge. 
 
 To have said that Jesus refused to be a theologian 
 means much as to the method as well as to the sub- 
 stance of his message. Thus, it would not be adequate 
 to say that he taught spirituality. Without giving up 
 any of the traditional reverence for the teacher, it 
 may yet be said that his work is by no means the 
 highest. From time immemorial, he who has exer- 
 cised this function has received peculiar respect ; and 
 surely in these days, when knowledge of all kinds is 
 everywhere exalted, he suffers from no danger of a 
 diminution of influence. Nevertheless there is a side 
 of life upon which the importance of teaching, merely 
 as such, has been vastly overrated. The instructor 
 in morals or religion, or even in educational matters, 
 must ever be subordinated to the inspirer. His very 
 
124 Ecce Spiritus. 
 
 position as such, at the outset, puts him at a certain 
 disadvantage with those who feel themselves lacking 
 in the excellence and acquirement that he represents, 
 whereas the unconscious influence of a position that 
 assumes nothing technical, and only rests its hope of 
 irnpressiveness on the natural and living expressions 
 of itself, is one of the most irresistible powers for 
 good. 
 
 Indeed, it is here that so many of our means of 
 culture are cheated of their end. Those capable of 
 moving, inspiring, touching with new eyes and hearts 
 and minds and motives, are few in number compared 
 with those who can merely impart separate facts. 
 Knowledge can never be imparted, but only the im- 
 petus to knowledge. One can really learn of another 
 only the method and spirit of his learning. Nothing 
 comes out from us which we have not first made our 
 own, and intellectual possession is something that no 
 one can give us by proxy. The presence of another's 
 aspiration or ideal is not important to us because any 
 part of it can be given in exchange for our attention, 
 but sinrply because it stimulates and guides us to the 
 creation and consciousness of our own ideal. It is 
 not so much a positive factor as a negative, tending 
 toward positive results in us. The decline and degen- 
 eracy of the Jewish Church were begun in the day 
 when the expounder of the law usurped the place of 
 the inspired prophet. And in any day, when the 
 mere teacher, the sermonizer, the religious logician, is 
 everywhere sought and reverenced, a low, mechanical, 
 and unspiritual outlook will not be far distant. 
 
Doctrine vs. Personal Endoicment. 125 
 
 Jesus sinks in our estimation the moment we make 
 him a mere teacher. That he was such, incidentally 
 and accidentally, is true. But that one who found a 
 world starving, spiritually, under a most exact legal 
 system and a punctilious observance of scholastic dis- 
 tinctions, should make no attempt at systematic ex- 
 jDOsition, might naturally be expected. And every 
 attempt since to evolve out of his memorials an exact 
 and final statement of doctrines has lamentably failed. 
 Rival movements have sprung up, and made of the 
 Church's work of evangelization a petty theologic 
 warfare that has only served to perj^etuate the bitter- 
 ness of sect. 
 
 Jesus struck deeper than this. He assumed no ped- 
 agogic gown, stepped upon no rostrum, and accepted 
 no acolytes that were not able to live the life he did. 
 The hand of anointing had been laid within ; and he 
 had little to say, but vast life-issues to work out and 
 enforce. His first and only disputation was in the 
 temple; but all his positive — for he was ever grandly 
 positive — and authoritative utterances were given in 
 the fields or the living-rooms of humble people, into 
 the sphere of which his earliest inclinations led him. 
 Indeed, there has been nothing more painful to the 
 countless Christians who have looked for light from 
 him amid the inadequacies and cruelties of the creeds, 
 than this paucity of utterance. Why did he say so 
 little, where so much was needed? And yet more 
 would have been too much. The minute he had 
 formulated anything, we should stop there, and there 
 would be no longer any hope of life. He gives us 
 
126 Ecce Spiritus. 
 
 the germinal truth, the all-inclusive principle, not in 
 its abstraction, nor yet in its complete logical state- 
 ment, if such a thing were possible of a living and 
 eternally progressive reality, but in vital personal 
 fusion. Make the life yours, and you have it all. 
 But Jesus declines to do the work for us, and utterly 
 refuses to surround the one pure spiritual influence 
 the world has had with the dangers of attempted 
 definition. Christianity must not be caught in a mesh 
 of words, but must remain a life influence, tending 
 toward life. We hear the sound of the spirit, and 
 know absolutely of its reality and power, but happily 
 cannot tell whence it cometh or whither it goeth, 
 except as these things are in God. 
 
 Jesus cared not where he gathered his congrega- 
 tion. Indeed, it was always around him; and his 
 method was the yet untried one of nature. He put 
 his heart close to the bare, empty spots in human 
 experience, and whispered low, or uttered forth in 
 silence, the living language of that answer which 
 had been wrought out in him. He did, in truth, 
 enlighten and enlarge the comprehension of men, 
 and infinitely elevate their outlook; but he was not 
 a dogmatist, and had little to do with the teacher's 
 superficial methods. He struck at the roots of being, 
 using such instruction as the situation unconsciously 
 required. But he was peculiar in this : that, so far 
 as he was a teacher, he addressed himself to the very 
 quick of conscious experience. He had a wonderful 
 faculty, rare among the saviors, of keeping down to 
 the vital need. He reveals himself in the fact, not 
 
Doctrine vs. Personal Endowment. 127 
 
 in the elaboration of his message. He addresses the 
 experience and the motives with a subtler logic than 
 that of the intellect, which the intellect nevertheless 
 confirms and strengthens at every point. 
 
 Jesns is the only character of history who im- 
 pressed himself deeply upon human thought and life, 
 and has had an enduring claim to grateful remem- 
 brance simply by reason of what he teas. Unlike 
 others, he cannot be contemplated outside of his 
 work, nor can his work be separated from him. His 
 work had become personal, and himself a doubly 
 energized personality. Then for the first time in 
 history appeared a man who was himself, utterly, 
 wholly, unreservedly. The message he bore had 
 become a revelation in and through himself, so that, 
 while he in no sense elaborates spirituality, he yet 
 lives and enforces it. What he said has value as 
 teaching, but his mission was so close to life that it 
 can be fully received only by some degree of spiritual 
 contact. Spirituality is the only thing you cannot 
 teach. The higher the subject, the farther is it re- 
 moved from prescribed methods of instruction. We 
 can teach letters, but not life. The latter impresses 
 us more directly, turning mental processes into mo- 
 tives. We can impart all symbols, types, and illus- 
 trations of life, but not that illusive but most central 
 reality which inheres in and appeals to consciousness 
 alone. Consciousness can be quickened, awakened, 
 formed, but not informed from any outside source. 
 It can gain everything, but be given nothing. What 
 another has, can never be ours ; but we may be so 
 moved by him as in time to possess like realities. 
 
128 JEcce Spiritus. _ 
 
 Manifestly, one can teach nothing of God, except 
 that which he himself knows; and it is one of the 
 truisms of spiritual experience that what we know of 
 God we can never tell. Our neighbors will in count- 
 less ways discover the fact, which we shall shrink 
 from even the attempt at uttering, just in proportion 
 to the genuineness of our knowledge. Language is 
 a wonderful vehicle in the hands of a master, but it 
 utterly fails to circumscribe the facts of conscious- 
 ness. The nomenclature of a nation is solidified long 
 before its best experience comes; so that, in the 
 dearth of fitting words, consciousness must needs find 
 other and subtler means of communication. 
 
 Even in the sphere of the commoner affections there 
 is no language of the heart. What two people, keenly 
 sympathetic, feel in communion, is revealed in no 
 other way than by a silence which each, neverthe- 
 less, fully understands. The word of intensest mean- 
 ing would strike like a chill of avowed unworthiness 
 on that eloquent stillness. Acquaintances, meeting, 
 find no difficulty in expressing their formal interest 
 in each other's welfare; but the nearer companion- 
 ship, that is parent of the glory and despair of life, 
 goes unspoken, in spite of all the novels and poems 
 to the contrary. It would be indeed a hopeless task 
 for him who would attempt to convey in words the 
 deepest that he knows and feels. 
 
 There can, therefore, be no school of the real the- 
 ologies. What men have known of God is not in the 
 books, but in the soul. What Jesus knew of God is 
 not in the gospel statement, nor did he ever intend 
 
Doctrine vs. Personal Endowment. 129 
 
 that it should be. It was in him ; and we see it, feel 
 it, know it wherever and whenever we meet him. In 
 this sense, and it is the only essential one, Jesus has 
 been given us in the Gospels with utter faithfulness. 
 Though the writers erred occasionally in their inter- 
 pretation, they never failed in the man. His message 
 and meaning always shine out clearly through the 
 partialness of their comprehension. The true science 
 of God is in the processions of the soul. Experience 
 knows, while our intellectual statements only hint at 
 Him. Spirituality alone reveals and commands the 
 spiritual ; and, for this reason, Jesus came a man of 
 few words. Surface and show, and the elaboration 
 thereof, were all around him; and he stood uncom- 
 promisingly for a realization of that about which 
 others only talk, and for an attestation of it which 
 could never be perverted by the limits of a definition. 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 
 THE SELFHOOD OF JESUS. 
 
 Not to incur the charge of abstractness, let us illus- 
 trate the practical sufficiency of this method of Jesus. 
 There are, in general, two ways in which goodness 
 may be impressed upon others. We may draw nice 
 distinctions and so define and exalt ethical standards 
 as to create an intellectual appreciation and under- 
 standing of them ; and this is good and helpful in a 
 world so eager for helps as ours. But the goodness 
 about which we ourselves say and know least, so near 
 home to the modesty of personal possession does it lie, 
 is the only real and potent mover of men to virtue. 
 "No one knows, nor ever will know in this world, the 
 sum of this silent influence. Personal virtue is never 
 without its effect : it is felt everywhere and always ; 
 while abstract morality, the assent of the intellect, 
 has been too often divorced from adequate fulfilment 
 to longer remain the centre toward which wise effort 
 is directed. It is not what men get hold of, but what 
 gets hold of them, that moves and saves. The mor- 
 alist is the guide-board : the really good person is the 
 savior. The soul of goodness and its real potency is 
 in the being good. The ethical difficulty lies not in 
 the theories, — the summaries and maps are all com- 
 
The Selfhood of Jesus. 131 
 
 plete, — but in the need of that which shall drive virtue 
 out of the mere intellectual assent into the realization 
 of life. 
 
 With such a consciousness of his mission, it is 
 evident that Jesus could not long hold the truth he 
 had at heart in its abstractness. Indeed, it early took 
 possession of him, and became so interwoven into the 
 texture, not of his beliefs, but of his being, that it was 
 structural, that which in certain relations he thought 
 of and meant when he spoke of himself. Publicly, 
 when speaking authoritatively to those who doubted 
 or misunderstood his claims, he ceased to be the 
 individual, the Jesus of their commoner moods of 
 intercourse, and became the embodiment of that 
 which absorbed and filled his being. So far as man- 
 kind and his relations to it are concerned, he speaks 
 of himself as Spirituality. It was a higher, not a 
 lower, personality that he found in the designation of 
 that sphere of his nature which dominated all the rest. 
 They were all so individual on the misleading plane 
 of sense that he passed all the more readily from the 
 first person to the third in the assertion of a higher 
 selfhood in the spiritual. 
 
 It must, however, be understood that Jesus lost 
 nothing, but only completed his self, in this apparent 
 renouncement. Least of all would he have given 
 occasion for those false appeals, made in the name of 
 religion, which call upon men to crush out and deny 
 the self, as something inherently base and misleading. 
 Jesus did not in the best sense deny himself when he 
 took up the cross, but rose from the lower to the higher 
 
132 Ecce Spiritus. 
 
 affirmation. He shows keen appreciation of individu- 
 ality in others, studies and allows for it, and never un- 
 derrates its legitimate influence. There never was a 
 more thoroughly individual character than his, and 
 never one that respected its peculiar self more, to the 
 utter refusal of every thing which interfered Avith it. 
 Self in its truer interpretation was what he was aiming 
 at in all his work, to bring men back from aberrations 
 to that supremely high and holy something in them- 
 selves, which it is their especial prerogative to follow 
 and fulfil. No false religion must for a moment inter- 
 fere with this. There is neither beauty nor power in 
 an abnegation toward any but positive ends. The 
 true Christian can subordinate much, but relinquish 
 nothing. One cannot follow God by giving up self, 
 for it is the self that finds him. Jesus took no part in 
 the old Jewish notions of sacrificial efficacy, — notions 
 which speedily crept even into the system founded on 
 his name in the later doctrine of the atonement. This 
 we shall see more fully exemplified later on ; but, for 
 the question in hand, it is sufficient to say that his 
 progress is positive, from lower to higher, and not a 
 negative throwing away of that which men are vitally 
 and essentially, in order that something outside and 
 arbitrary may take its place. 
 
 Jesus had, as was necessary on his pinnacle and 
 representative plane, two states of consciousness. 
 Always, he was individual and personal, at his high- 
 est, most truly and uncompromisingly himself; and 
 ordinarily, in common intercourse, he was simply a 
 man among men. In the second stage, when stand- 
 
The Selfhood of Jesus. 133 
 
 ing face to face with sense and sin, and feeling the 
 force of reaction, he was exalted into the higher range 
 of his consciousness, so that he now spoke of his life, 
 his being, as spirituality. But, even here, he would 
 be no abstraction. In him, that spirituality had been 
 bodied, absorbed into personality; and hence it acted 
 and spoke and influenced in him. He was it, and it 
 was he. He knew that abstract spirituality is impo- 
 tent. When it is embodied and utters itself authorita- 
 tively from within, it becomes impressive as a practical 
 salvation. 
 
 Furthermore, he sees that the man must come and 
 go. The Christ of their deepest expectations could 
 move them only momentarily, to be soon superseded 
 by another savior. He accordingly identifies himself 
 with his cause. When he says, "I am the light of 
 the world," he intends no self-stultifying egotism ; but, 
 projecting his personality into the higher range of 
 consciousness, he means that he has become utterly 
 spiritual, and that spirituality is the light of the 
 world. When he says, "I am the way, the truth, and 
 the life," he airs no self-conscious vanity, and claims 
 no worship of himself. There is no other way, truth, 
 or life but that which was dominating Jesus as he 
 spoke. Because of this regnant consciousness of his, 
 he can truthfully assert, "All things are delivered 
 unto me of my Father," by reason of this privilege he 
 enjoyed of participation in the highest. And from 
 that exalted stand-point he can see, as can no one 
 lower down, how true it is that the higher includes 
 and comprehends all that is below it. " And no man 
 
134 Ecce Spiritus. 
 
 knoweth the Son" — again the utterance of the spirit- 
 ual consciousness, the truths of which men surely did 
 not understand — " but the Father, neither knoweth 
 any man the Father save the Son, and he to whomso- 
 ever the Son will reveal him." Plainly, the creature 
 who stands above, and representative of, every other 
 creature in spirit and attainment, will be the only one 
 who will approach a comprehension of the Creator. 
 When Jesus speaks of himself as the Son, he almost 
 invariably alludes to his higher spiritual conscious- 
 ness, as the embodiment of that ideal toward which 
 mankind is ever looking. He tells his disciples not to 
 mention him to others as Jesus, the Christ, fearing 
 the shibboleth that his name would shortly become. 
 He asks nothing of men for himself, but everything 
 for them and truth. What he stood for, lived, and 
 died for, must not be lost to view in the worship of a 
 sacred name. It was man-worship, and all other fast- 
 ening of the soul's life to material symbols, which 
 accounted for the too prevalent death. Standing as 
 he does on the summit of human possibility, and con- 
 scious alone of his divine mission, he sees only the 
 supreme end, and everywhere ignores the instrument 
 upon its human side. He moreover asks others also 
 to overlook it. He demands this, even when he makes 
 that simple but yet grand summing-up of his position, 
 in answer to the doctrinal difficulties of Martha, "I 
 am the resurrection and the life : he that believeth in 
 me, though he were dead, yet shall he live ; and who- 
 soever liveth and believeth in me shall never die." It 
 is the spiritual life that cannot possibly die and that 
 
The Selfhood of Jesus. 135 
 
 is here speaking to her. He means it in his command 
 to the disciples to beware of false prophets, who shall 
 say unto them that Christ is here or there, when he 
 asserts that the coming of the Son of Man shall be not 
 a localized nor a material affair in which they can rest 
 their worship, but as lightning that cometh out of the 
 east, and shineth even unto the west. The coming of 
 the Son of Man will be that of spirituality, intangible 
 and eternal, that lighteth up the entire sjDan of knowl- 
 edge and of being. 
 
 The same truth in continual reiteration runs through 
 the Gospels. Jesus will be himself, at his best and 
 truest. The Ego of the Son of Man is the utterance of 
 humanity's highest. Spinoza catches the germinal 
 truth of Christianity with far more insight and accu- 
 racy than the mass of its professed representatives, 
 when he says, "It is not absolutely necessary to know 
 Christ after the flesh ; but it is otherwise when we 
 speak of that Son of God, that is to say, that eternal 
 wisdom of God which has manifested itself in all 
 things, and more fully in the human soul, and, above 
 all, in Jesus Christ." 
 
 Let us not find fault with this position of Jesus, 
 which may at first thought seem mystical and unsatis- 
 factory. He found himself in the midst of countless 
 difficulties. Beyond the fact of his own distrust of 
 statements in the sphere of life, and the certainty of 
 any spiritual utterance of his being misunderstood, — 
 alike by perverted Jews and not yet sufficiently edu- 
 cated disciples, — the force and fire of his own nature, 
 the exigencies of those moods which were stirred in 
 
136 Ecce Spiritus. 
 
 him by the low outlook of humanity in his day, de- 
 manded an utterance at once brief, authoritative, and 
 uncompromising; and, if his language seems sometimes 
 sublimated and inadequate for common comprehen- 
 sion, it is because of the palpable and utter failure of 
 the many forms of temporizing common in his day. 
 Of all prophets, moreover, Jesus is the most far- 
 sighted, and least likely to have confined his view of 
 his mission to the necessities of his own time. An 
 ideal for humanity must be one to lead all human 
 progress, to inspire its study and effort forever; so 
 high that the history of the centuries will be that of 
 an ever-nearer approach to its comprehension and re- 
 alization. This is why the power of true Christianity 
 is perennial. Nineteen centuries, with their accumu- 
 lated culture and their intenser consciousness, have 
 only brought men a little nearer to the heart of its 
 sublime reality; and the widening science and deeper 
 personality of the future will be the key to yet 
 clearer understanding of those apparently mystical, 
 but eminently simple, statements of life as it was in 
 Jesus. For his own time, they were sufficient as they 
 stood. Wonder and childlike awe at any form of 
 actual superiority, however imperfectly understood, 
 had not yet exhausted themselves. What the world 
 was not then prepared to comprehend was, neverthe- 
 less, able to be a vast power of subjugation over the 
 lower in its nature; while the advancing life of all 
 time would find in its higher and completer statement 
 a perpetual goal of promise and attainment. Nothing 
 phort of this would have answered the requirements 
 
The Selfhood of Jesus. 137 
 
 of a mission such as that of Jesus, and surely nothing 
 less could have furnished mankind with a truth which 
 is ever an incentive rather than a sedative. It is not 
 the truth simply and abstractly which Jesus has in 
 view, so much as the truth embodied in life. The 
 race is to work toward it, to make it its own, to iden- 
 tify it with its entire growth. It is not for men as 
 yet to say that they comprehend it ; they may now 
 comprehend only its drift and purpose, its reality 
 beyond everything else. It is not for us, even though 
 with tears in our eyes, to complain that our consola- 
 tions are not yet complete. They are enough, when 
 rightly understood; and, for the rest, there is icork 
 for us to do. We are not left to stagnate in our 
 finalities, but are invited, nay, forced onward, to the 
 blessed consummations of life. 
 
 Jesus not only ignored the narrower sense of his 
 personality when he appeared as an authority before 
 others, but he desired them likewise to do so. He 
 asks mankind to look upon a grandly poised selfhood, 
 which found its supreme exercise in merging itself in 
 the very highest. When he awoke to himself, and the 
 awakening was very early, his whole nature became 
 fused into the white heat of spiritual intensity. He 
 saw the new, the needed, the vital work ; and all else 
 slipped out of sight. Like every other great soul 
 girded for a work of inspiration, — only supremely 
 so in his case, as befitted the peculiar character and 
 absoluteness of his calling, — he was himself not 
 sunken in, but enlarged by, the thing to be done. 
 It was identification and consequent increase of per- 
 
138 Ecce Spiritus. 
 
 sonality, and no belittlement, that came to him in his 
 higher assumptions. 
 
 In order to understand the peculiar make-up of 
 the man, we must keep in sight the character of his 
 object, and its accompanying influence on his life. 
 This was of no ordinary kind, and held with no 
 common devotion. It was not a part, however in- 
 spiring, of the kingdom of truth, but the very high- 
 est and most inclusive of all its realities. It was God, 
 and all possible communion with him, and man at his 
 hitherto unknown possibility, including the entire 
 range of the vast thing so often named but so seldom 
 understood as life, that he had in hand. To have been 
 burdened with the secret of some farthest star on the 
 boundary of human knowledge would doubtless have 
 been much ; but to have come from God, and the one 
 closest insight and communion ever vouchsafed to man, 
 and from the outermost limit of life's unseen possi- 
 bility, was an endowment so much greater than the 
 highest common to men as to have eliminated the 
 element of egotism from its possession. "Before 
 Abraham was, I am," he asserts. Does he mean the 
 man of their daily intercourse and understanding, the 
 Jesus on his commoner side ? IsTo : he is speaking out 
 of a present, all-absorbing, soul-consciousness, of a life 
 principle in direct and eternal communication with the 
 Father, which antedated all the centuries. The peo- 
 ple about him are localizing their faith, shut out from 
 all advancement by their willingness to bound their 
 own insight by one narrow and occasional experience. 
 He is forced out of all commonplaces into a supreme 
 
The Selfhood of Jesus. 139 
 
 and authoritative statement. He has not a word to 
 say against Abraham; but, long before him and his 
 incidental glimpse of God, spirituality, full-orbed and 
 self-conscious, could assert itself to have existed. With 
 that deep inlook which came to him in the fulness of 
 his spiritual consciousness, he could well antedate all 
 their petty limitations. There was and is nothing 
 earlier than this. The secrets of creation as well as 
 of destiny are in its hands. There is nothing to gain- 
 say it. 
 
 Jesus had now become wholly spiritual, and it was 
 hence easy for him to assert his oneness with God. 
 Out of his nearness to imperishable things, he could 
 speak authoritatively of a life as unconscious of begin- 
 ning as of end, earlier than the patriarchs in its divine 
 origin and continuance, now brought to realization. 
 The life of which he had become conscious waa the 
 very life of God, once imparted and never by any 
 possibility withdrawn, separate from which we have 
 and can have no real existence. This he does not 
 have, for he is it. Awaken men to it, and he claims 
 for them a like newness of self-consciousness. They 
 will not need to go backward nor forward, but will 
 be superior to all considerations of time in the su- 
 preme and present facts of existence. The moment 
 of consciousness is of less account than the hind of 
 consciousness. There is a sort that includes all. It 
 is possible to be so filled with the essential principle 
 of life as to pass beyond the sphere of incidental 
 questions. If Jesus had reached this point, he had a 
 right to his statement. 
 
140 Ecce Spiritas. 
 
 Other men have had this, in faint approaches to 
 the clear realization which came to the mind of Jesus. 
 But, unlike them, he never doubted nor questioned 
 nor speculated. It was consciousness that spoke in 
 him, and made possible the clear, calm certainties of 
 his life, the almost utter absence of the things that 
 cloud and embitter our experience. He talked of 
 God as if he had but just left him, as in truth he really 
 had. It never occurred to him to prove his existence. 
 That attempt was left for an age stranded on the 
 shallow reaches of scientific certainty. He introduced 
 no mathematics into the demonstration of facts that 
 are so consciously real. If he had stooped to the 
 poor expedient of external proof, the world might 
 well have doubted his claim to anything but the 
 knowledge of the empiricist. 
 
 It is not by the processes of logic that men come to 
 God. There are not enough formulas and symbols in 
 the universe to prove him. It is He that hoi Is and 
 comprehends creation, and not creation that holds 
 and comprehends Him. We prove what is less than 
 we arc, that which we can master. We are too small 
 intellectually to demonstrate infinite being, but it is 
 the very fact of God's existence that proves ours. The 
 certainties of our life lie in him, and nowhere else. 
 Without him, it will be a delusion and an unreality. 
 If we insist upon proving God, we are lost ; while our 
 salvation comes in allowing his existence to demon- 
 strate and make reasonable our own. 
 
 Jesus sees that God lives in the facts of conscious- 
 ness, a demonstration far more certain than any that 
 
The Selfhood of Jesus. 141 
 
 merely appeals to either the reason or the senses. 
 Last of all would he doubt this^ knowing that an eye 
 shall be color-blind or an ear deceptive as to sound, 
 before the soul shall deny its own. He puts no im- 
 putation on the senses, but holds them rigidly to the 
 interpretation of matter. They are unquestioned 
 authority in the sphere of tangible things, but they 
 can go no further of themselves. With a soul back 
 of them, they reveal a world of wonderful meaning 
 and suggestiveness, types and symbols, representatives 
 and correspondences everywhere of that which is 
 essential and imperishable. Jesus has no quarrel with 
 the fleshly witnesses, but would confine them to their 
 sphere. Understood at their real worth, and related 
 as they were intended to be to the higher spiritual 
 faculties, of which they are but feeble representatives 
 in the sphere of matter, they become at their highest 
 development the source of mighty use and beauty. 
 But, turning from the last and grandest utterance 
 they can make, Jesus asks what the soul has to say. 
 And, as he listens, the front he gives the world grows 
 grandly calm. The poise of eternity is in that assur- 
 ance of an undivided nature ; not the bravery of a 
 petty trust, an emasculated courage, — such as we 
 often see extolled in the name of religion, .although it 
 is robbed of everything but weak and meaningless de- 
 pendence, and unfounded on that knowledge, sympa- 
 thy, and understanding of nature and the providence 
 of God, which are, in at least some degree, demanded 
 of us; but that of a soul marching through destiny 
 
142 Ecce Spiritus. 
 
 with undisturbed tread, heaven in his outlook and the 
 certainties in his steps. 
 
 Nor do we forget the rare moments of a strictly 
 human emotion, when, for a moment, his soul seemed 
 to fall from its equipoise. But it was only for a mo- 
 ment, — only enough to relieve us of the fear that, 
 after all, this cannot be the life of one like us, that this 
 can be no mere humanity, so firm and exalted, — but 
 rather some strange divinity ; only enough to bring the 
 lesson home to men who, like him, are called to suffer 
 and to triumph in strictly human ways. And even in 
 the garden, and on the lonely mountain-top, it is not 
 dread, nor complaining, nor any form of recreancy, so 
 much as the purely natural feeling of disappointment 
 and sorrow for a world so tenderly loved, and so soon 
 to be left in its degradation and need. It was apos- 
 tasy and blindness in those who should have under- 
 stood and sustained him in the trying hour, those 
 arid wastes of unsympathetic questioning on every 
 hand, that for the moment unmanned him. Add, if 
 you will, an instant of purely human recoil from the 
 prospect before him, — which nevertheless was not al- 
 lowed the slightest weight in the strong determina- 
 tions of his life, — and nothing has been allowed which 
 in the least derogates from his most comprehensive 
 claim. 
 
 Jesus, then, is to be regarded as peculiar in method, 
 as well as in the subject-matter of his mission. The 
 message even transcends mere truth in its abstract 
 relations, and becomes the highest and most effective 
 of all agencies in its quality as an embodied, personal, 
 
The Selfhood of Jesus. 143 
 
 practical verity. When it becomes operative, truth 
 is supreme : as a living, breathing reality, it has dis- 
 tanced the most complete assertion. The truth as it 
 was in Jesus — and the truth had become himself — is 
 loftier and more lasting than any message he merely 
 announced. His own inward necessity, as well as the 
 exigencies of his work, demanded that his truth 
 should take form, but that form must be a living one. 
 And the result was every way what it should be as 
 left by his hand. Had he lingered too long, or allowed 
 men to look too much at the truth as it was in him, 
 rather than at that which was to be in themselves, a 
 radical weakness would have appeared in his work. 
 But, w^ith a foresight that has in it nothing sad, he 
 assures them that it is expedient for them that he 
 should go away. They have seen the truth embodied, 
 but it is still the truth, and not the body, at which 
 they must be forced to look. It is expedient for their 
 highest, purest vision of reality that, beyond a certain 
 point, the man should disappear. That which should 
 be in themselves must not be worshipped in another. 
 "For," he explains, "if I go not away, the Com- 
 forter will not come unto you ; but, if I depart, I will 
 send him unto you." And again, in the same connec- 
 tion, " Howbeit, when he, the spirit of truth, is come, 
 he will guide you into all truth, for he shall not 
 speak of himself" etc. In other w^ords, this spirit of 
 truth cannot come, so long as there is one clinging 
 literalism in the worship of man. Even he must be 
 careful not to stay too long. It is the spirit that is 
 to be all in all. 
 
CHAPTER X. 
 
 THE PERSONAL ELEMENT. 
 
 From one point of view there is no stronger posi- 
 tion of so-called Orthodoxy than that which under- 
 rates merely abstract statements of truth in the 
 presence of a j> er sonal Saviour. The strength of 
 evangelical Christianity among the masses has been 
 far from proportionate to the insight and accuracy of 
 its stand-point of faith mainly through this fact, that 
 it has appealed with a peculiar power to the most 
 strictly human side of men's minds, enforcing itself 
 through living pictures of truth in the concrete. Men 
 who could not judge between the fine points of doc- 
 trine have been made to feel the man Jesus. Rhe- 
 torical art finds no difficulty in giving that fine human 
 touch which speedily puts into oblivion, or subtly har- 
 monizes, the strange jugglery of theologic conceptions 
 which precede it. The mystery is stated ; but the ele- 
 ment of mystery is made to seem only apparent when, 
 at the next moment, the man, with his wonderful and 
 many-sided experience, is brought forth to embody 
 and substantiate it. There is enough in such a life 
 and character to float almost any doctrine which has 
 serious intent ; and the mere fact of the close identifi- 
 cation of dogmas of monstrous perversion with the 
 
The Personal Element. 145 
 
 living personality of a man who suffered and loved 
 and died as Jesus did, has accounted for the currency 
 of a vast system of false teaching. 
 
 Unquestionably there is power in the conception of 
 a truth embodied, which must ever be denied to the 
 most complete of abstract statements. The mind has a 
 natural appetite and capacity for truth infusion, taken 
 up and vitalized, and made effective through that 
 readiest of all means of effectiveness, the personality. 
 It is doubtful if indeed truth can ever be adequately 
 stated in abstract terms. It has, to be sure, an intel- 
 lectual formula; but that is not it, and can never be 
 more than one way of showing it. We do not see 
 the truth until we see it in action, working out itself 
 with an utterance far more adequate than that of lan- 
 guage. Truth itself is not abstract. It is the life, the 
 constitution of God, and never, so far as we know, ex- 
 pressed by him intellectually, but vitally. It was only 
 for lack of the living form that man ever flew to the 
 logic, When the groping consciousness could not find 
 the too distant Father, the last resource was to im- 
 prison him in thought. Unconsciously, we assume 
 that the essence of truth is intellectual, and its appear- 
 ance in living form is only one of its many applications. 
 But there is no truth apart from the being of God. It 
 exists in vital form, and our broadest intellectual state- 
 ment of it is only in reality one of its applications. 
 With no disposition to undervalue the sphere of 
 thought, we may say that it is not the only, and cer- 
 tainly not the nearest, method of approach to the high- 
 est. It is certainly linked with all the best that men 
 
146 JEcce Spiritus. 
 
 do and become, and it must be found in any full and 
 adequate experience. We are so constituted that, to 
 think aright, nay, to think at all positively and hon- 
 estly, is to furnish the motive and the standard with- 
 out which we can at the outset attain nothing. 
 
 But there is thought and thought. We are in the 
 habit of conceiving God as the archetypal Thinker, 
 but see how closely his thought has been related to 
 life. He did not merely think out the universe, but 
 by that act created it. With him, the intellection of a 
 thing is its projection into being. In no other way 
 does he work save by reason of his prerogative of Cre- 
 ative Thought. The progress of man has been in all 
 ways tending toward this same result, as a possibility 
 for himself, so that, whereas formerly the brute force 
 of brawn and muscle was the most powerful factor in 
 life, the advantage has now shifted to the higher plane 
 of thought. This has now become the measure of our 
 modern life. Men do not so much as formerly employ 
 hands and feet to minister to their desires and attain 
 their ends; but, by following out the most abstruse 
 processes with an inventive genius that sometimes 
 seems almost akin to the creative skill of God, they 
 have evoked all the forces of earth and air to do their 
 bidding. What they have accomplished by thought 
 they have made to serve their thought. The laborious 
 processes of navigation, of messenger, express, or 
 even locomotive service have been largely superseded 
 by cable, telegraph, and telephone, so that now hands 
 and feet rest, while men merely think their thoughts 
 and wishes, and they are heard and obeyed. We 
 
The Personal Element. 147 
 
 have thus taken a long stride nearer that method of 
 the Almighty which reduces matter to the simple ser- 
 vice of mind. We think, with God himself, to thrill 
 the most stupendous forces of nature to ready obedi- 
 ence. We think alive : our thought has form, propul- 
 sion, outcome. Our practical civilization has not been 
 without its gain in higher power and suggestiveness. 
 One mistakes who merely sees an age bent solely on 
 material prosperity and devotion to physical science. 
 It is the grandest age in history, when thought, eman- 
 cipated from the metaphysics of a preceding era, 
 has marched out into the universe, and reduced mere 
 things to expressions of man's thinking power. We, 
 in our sphere, think the universe into action daily. 
 We have learned that there is something stronger 
 even than the limbs of Hercules. We have found 
 that the metaphysician who masters time and space, 
 and light and warmth, by thinking himself into wood 
 and iron and electricity, is vastly nearer the creative 
 intelligence than the one who merely plays with the 
 abstract symbols of reality. The world, so long in the 
 hands of the power-men, now answers to the mind. 
 But it is not merely the thinker, but a new race of 
 thinkers, who rule the world. The first step is seen 
 when the rude, rugged energies of men, unconscious of 
 any but material wants, and content to satisfy them 
 by the sweat of the brow, give place to the fine flash- 
 ings of intelligence, which in our day dignify even 
 the crudest labors into something of scientific ease. 
 The crowning step will come later, when the tendency 
 has had full development, and reached even to the 
 
148 JEcce Spiritus. 
 
 highest. Then men will think God-thoughts, thoughts 
 that move irresistibly to action, and complete them- 
 selves in life. 
 
 Mark, then, that the drift is away from a simple in- 
 tellection oi God, to some living realization of him, — 
 some perfect idea projected into personality. Para- 
 doxical as it may seem in speaking of a Spiritual 
 Being, God is not a mere abstraction, and can be 
 neither portrayed nor impressed abstractly. Jesus 
 had thoughts of God most high and complete ; but the 
 strength of his influence lay in the fact that those ideas 
 had taken possession of him until they issued forth, a 
 new personality. They had become living, formative, 
 effective in him. They were himself; and, by all the 
 personal power possible to him or any man, they ut- 
 tered and impressed themselves. When they became 
 a man, there was immediate hope of their effective- 
 ness. They were as true intellectually before, but 
 now for the first time they were plain and potent. 
 
 We have much to say about the triumph of truth, 
 but there is no such triumph outside of men. The 
 hope of such an issue will rest upon the likelihood of 
 truth finding embodiment and coming to conquest 
 through the only really impressive means of influence, 
 the human personality. There is no power outside of 
 this. Truth is truth ; but men never see its full rela- 
 tions, nor feel its greatest effectiveness, except by 
 means of men. There is but the shadow of power in 
 a mere idea which gains mental allegiance without 
 reaching the motives ; but the ideas that have been em- 
 bodied and pushed by men have swayed not only the 
 
The Personal Element. 149 
 
 thinking, but the life of the race. Bunsen says that 
 personality is the lever of the world's history; a truth 
 which is only restated by Renan in that justification he 
 makes for the biographical form he has given to what 
 he originally intended as a history of Christian doc- 
 trines, — his Life of Jesus, — when he says: "But I 
 have since learned that history is not a mere play of 
 abstractions, that in it men are more than doctrines. 
 It is not a certain theory in regard to justification and 
 redemption which produced the Reformation : it was 
 Luther, it was Calvin. Parseeism, Hellenism, Juda- 
 ism, might have combined in all forms. The doctrines 
 of the resurrection of the Word might have been de- 
 veloped for centuries without producing this fecund, 
 unique, sublime fact, which is called Christianity. 
 This fact is the work of Jesus, of Saint Paul, of Saint 
 John." 
 
 Jesus gave more than the rationale of the great 
 human possibility: he brought to light the living 
 potency of a personal absorption. His truth acts 
 directly. We get near to the man, not as an indi- 
 vidual, not merely as a man, but as an embodiment of 
 something higher, to feel the full effect of his message. 
 Indeed, herein lie both the deathless power and the 
 danger of his peculiar method. If we stop with the 
 man, as we shall frequently be tempted to do, we 
 shall lose the very result he had at heart. Not for a 
 moment would Jesus have men regard him : he is 
 only too eager to reject even the ascription of good- 
 ness, so modest and filial is his spirit. Nevertheless, 
 the fact of his spiritual personality, vivid and strong 
 
150 Ecce Spiritus. 
 
 and uncompromising, can never be left out of the 
 account in any adequate estimate of his mission. Or- 
 thodoxy split upon this too easy rock, and, disregard- 
 ing the express wishes of Jesus, as well as utterly 
 overlooking his principle, according to which every 
 inference from his words is to be squared, rested its 
 worship in the individual. It is a far different thing 
 to come under the influence of his personality, to 
 see the truth, the principle, in him, and not him in 
 the truth. He is never the objective point, — that is 
 found in spirituality. It must be shown and im- 
 pressed in human ways; but the man is only the 
 vehicle, the principle is all in all. The means are 
 infinitely dignified with the message, but it is the 
 message at which we look. This personal aspect of 
 the man does not refer to the accidental or transi- 
 tory in his experience, but rather to the essential. It 
 is utterly himself, but in a sense the perception of 
 which can never harm another. It is far removed 
 from egotism in the subject, and from narrow worship 
 of the object of its influence. The human instrument 
 must be neither overlooked nor confounded with the 
 message it impresses. The truths of being reside in 
 him, and through him we see them; but they still 
 remain truths of being, and not of this man or that. 
 It is so God presents himself to the minds of 
 men. There is a vast deal of futile reasoning as 
 to the personality of God, simply because personality 
 is misunderstood. It is a question that lies at the 
 heart of the deepest need of the day. The vague 
 deistic position, which is almost universally conceded, 
 
The Personal Element. 151 
 
 has taken the place of the idolatrous dogmatism of 
 the ages of faith, largely because of the common con- 
 fusion as to personality and individuality. Men at 
 their accidental plane are both personal and indi- 
 vidual: it is only at the fuller point of conscious 
 development to which the race is ever more nearly 
 approaching that all other distinctions are swallowed 
 up in that of ripe and rounded personality. God is 
 not an individual in the sense that we are, but the 
 divine Personality is the very essence of himself. 
 With no disposition to dogmatize in so metaphysical 
 a matter, we may yet say that the question of God's 
 personality seems to be one which should never for a 
 moment be entertained. If God is the parent, arche- 
 typal Life, — and he can be nothing else, — we have but 
 to acknowledge that the only form under which we 
 know or can conceive of life existing is the personal 
 one, to sufficiently answer the question. It is not 
 possible for the mind of man, out of its widest ex- 
 perience, to evolve any other conception of life than 
 this. We are asked, and we are allowed, to go no 
 further than this. The ever-living God may have 
 some form of life utterly different from anything we 
 can ever know ; but, if we came from and are to go 
 to him, if there is honesty in the equipment of con- 
 sciousness, experience, and even intellectual data, 
 received as a possibility from Him, his life can be 
 none other than a personal one. He cannot be, he 
 cannot live, — and surely he is the God of the living, 
 — under any other conception of deity. 
 
 The clear spiritual vision of Jesus revolted at the 
 
152 Ecce Spiritus. 
 
 cold Hebraic abstraction, — the Jehovah removed so 
 far from the possibility of human apprehension and 
 approach. It was the strength and fineness of his own 
 personality that led him so familiarly to the Person 
 of the Father. It was the prime factor in himself, 
 which at once separated him from the people, and 
 drew them, awe-stricken, to his feet. In his hands, it 
 was a power to work a like result in others, bringing 
 them not to him, but to themselves. It was himself ; 
 but it worked to create, not to copy. It was his best 
 and grandest, that which alone gets hold of and moves 
 us; but it is because he had come to his higher self in 
 the truth, because he had become the truth, that we are 
 affected. It is the truth as it was in Jesus, not Jesus, 
 that we worship and especially emphasize. 
 
 There is a personality that we wish to gain, and 
 one we are very willing to lose. We say that a truth 
 divorced from the living capacity of the giver not 
 only becomes inoperative, but so far forth tends to 
 weaken the wholeness of influence which is born out 
 of character. On the other hand, the weak imitation 
 and want of genuine and strong personality in the 
 holding of truth, the too common aptitude for reflect- 
 ing it on the surface from others, is one of the great 
 dangers to be met by him who exerts influence, even 
 though it be of the highest. Men need an inward 
 spur, an incentive toward self-creation, and a higher 
 personality, but least of all to lose themselves in 
 another. 
 
 The worship of Jesus, then, drops out of any con- 
 ception of Christianity which is referred to the primi- 
 
The Personal Element. 153 
 
 tive spirit and teaching of its Founder. Christianity 
 is a worship and service and personal embodiment of 
 God's truth, impressed upon humanity through the 
 highest form of human creation and development 
 known to the race. Jesus is more than a mere exem- 
 plar, and both more and less than a savior, in that 
 he makes us possible saviors of ourselves. He in- 
 spires a rightful love and reverence toward himself, 
 but is wronged and shamed by the narrow partisan- 
 ship that will see and worship him, and only him. 
 There is something almost cruel to the memory of so 
 modest, so manly a man, in this perpetual clinging 
 to his cross. The religious leech, that passively ab- 
 sorbs another's salvation, can have no part in that 
 triumph which Jesus wrought out in his own soul 
 between himself and God. The way thereof he has 
 made plain, but the cross and the triumph must be 
 our own. 
 
CHAPTER XI. 
 
 LIFE. 
 
 It has been already stated that Christianity has to 
 do peculiarly with life. In fact, it not only furnishes 
 an impetus in this direction, but also an entire view 
 of life different from that in acceptance at the time 
 of its promulgation, as well as strange to our own 
 common conception. It first went to the roots of liv- 
 ing, and based its ideal of life on the widest possible 
 understanding of its facts, its tendencies, and its pos- 
 sibilities. It said that to know how to live, and to 
 carry knowledge into execution, was to be as near 
 God and the idea he had in creation as possible. 
 That was religion and a great deal more besides, not 
 commonly included in that specialized word. 
 
 It is singular that the last thing of which man 
 comes to full consciousness is life. His advance in 
 boasted knowledge has been along the line of separate 
 facts. There is a science of everything but life. 
 There is a professorship of every least and most 
 trivial branch of its vast reality, but no one who at- 
 tempts to teach it as a whole. Meanwhile, is it any 
 wonder that the world is full of dissatisfaction and 
 despair ? We are taught to analyze in the sphere of 
 matter, to reconstruct the mathematical problems, to 
 
Life. 155 
 
 understand the various forms of speech, to exercise 
 abstractly the faculty of thought, and to generalize in 
 the realm of history. Then, for the rest, after men 
 and women are sent out into the world, they speedily 
 become distraught with a thousand special and press- 
 ing issues with which they find themselves utterly 
 unable to deal. All the perplexing questions which 
 agitate society and the individual are summed up 
 and answered in the single, and in one sense simple, 
 science of life. Our frequent and anxious agitation 
 of reform is simply an unconscious acknowledgment 
 that men have not been formed, have not been trained 
 and educated in that most important of all sciences, 
 how to live, and must needs by constant and laborious 
 process be brought back and reformed. So long as 
 we are educated in everything else but life, in all 
 of its separate branches and superficial accomplish- 
 ments, instead of striking at the heart of this great 
 reality that is missed or violated on every hand, and 
 as the very highest test of our culture, — so long our 
 best effort will be but a track forever travelled back- 
 ward. 
 
 And the evil lies very deep. In the first place, life 
 is that of which we are least conscious. It is a law 
 of our being that we are most readily conversant with 
 things on the surface. It is the deepest and most 
 central that we commonly ignore or undervalue. Life 
 is so familiar a fact, so co-extensive with our earliest 
 knowledge and experience, that it is in general the 
 matter about which we think last and least. It is 
 the accepted fact, the common, little-to-be-noted oc- 
 
156 JEcce Spiritus. 
 
 currence, while the countless methods of making it 
 spirited or amusing constitute the chief objects of our 
 attention. Almost no one starts out to live, to study 
 the facts, the laws, the possibilities of life, and by 
 rigid adherence to these to be a master in the sphere 
 of being. Each chooses to excel in some particular 
 branch for its own sake, and not for its possible re- 
 lations to life as a whole, as a vantage-point from 
 which to conquer the whole field. Even the clergy- 
 man, set apart to the highest, wants to convert souls 
 technically or to build up a particular church, while 
 the infinitely wider realm of life is left comparatively 
 untouched. Religion as a separate function is vastly 
 inferior to life. There can be no full true life that 
 is not religious ; but there has been a great deal of 
 religion that was so technical and narrow as to be 
 lifeless, while even the purest spirituality, the minute 
 it becomes exclusive, defeats its own ends and becomes 
 inoperative. 
 
 So widely has this attitude prevailed, of indifference 
 to, or even weariness of, a life that was irksome be- 
 cause not studied nor understood, that in some degree 
 religion has sprung up in the heart of man as a relief 
 from or added conrpletion to it. In its common forms, 
 religion has ever underrated life, teaching its worth- 
 lessness, and pointing man on through sacrifice and self- 
 extermination to something beyond, which, however 
 comforting and inspiring to a morbid religious faith, 
 is certainly very different from anything we know as 
 life. The vague and pietistic dreamings of church- 
 men, shut off from the joy of keen and many-sided 
 
Life. 157 
 
 activities, and almost wholly given to abstract stud- 
 ies, bear no relation to the rugged energies whereby 
 healthy nature has ever found its only taste of life. 
 All these must be tamed and attenuated, until out of 
 the weakened body and abnormally stimulated imagi- 
 nation should burst some glowing apocalyptic vision 
 of the world to be. The radical error in the position 
 of the pietist lay in the fact of the too easy relin- 
 quishment of life as a problem. Its weakness and 
 un worthiness were readily seen; and then, instead of 
 addressing itself to the study and normal solution of 
 its mystery and want, the Church turned its back 
 upon it as something inherently evil, and betook itself 
 to the makeshift expedient of something entirely 
 without precedent and theoretically perfect. It of- 
 fered, in place of a limited and painful experience 
 here, an existence which, if had at all, must be had 
 with fixed and rigid necessity, — an arbitrary election, 
 which doomed the saved recipient more than did his 
 supposed loss of life the unredeemed sinner. His 
 was a genuine and so far forth satisfactory extinction, 
 while the elected saint was practically lost in the 
 arbitrary conditions of his sainthood. Henceforth, he 
 did not so much live as revolve around the infinite 
 and incomprehensible Life. The ache and incom- 
 pleteness of existence were not looked at in their 
 larger relations to the purposes of God bound up in 
 the very being of man. They were evils born of the 
 evil in humanity, demanding not elucidation and a 
 higher vision to interpret their place and meaning, 
 but simply an antidote. Religion came, in their con- 
 
158 JEcce Spiritus. 
 
 ception, because life was a failure, hence the relief and 
 remedy must be radical and distinctive. This world 
 was wrong, hence the objective point of their teach- 
 ing was heaven. Since man was proved to be impo- 
 tent, a martyr was better. Crucifixion, self-denial, 
 practical extinction, became the very price of the 
 larger and more enduring inheritance. 
 
 The truer view of religion, the only one that can 
 stand the tests of deepening culture and experience, 
 regards it not as the relief from life, but as its crown 
 and completion. It recognizes life first of all, not 
 here nor there, caring little about the question of 
 worlds, and being so full and conscious of this won- 
 derful possibility in the very heart of being itself. It 
 comes not to take away, but to hallow man's grief ; 
 not to destroy, but to deify the world. It is a part of 
 human joy, felt in every thrill of ecstasy and every 
 pulse of power. It is no remedy, no negative and 
 complement al element in the make-up of man, but 
 a fact, a reality, of which all the separate spheres of 
 existence are mere accidents; in short, in the com- 
 pleter sense, life itself. 
 
 The history of the growth of religious thought has 
 clearly demonstrated this as a tendency more strongly 
 emphasized at each successive stage of human devel- 
 opment. Thus, it has hapj)ened that life, though com- 
 monly ignored as a conscious issue, has been unwilling 
 to be left out of sight in any adequate scheme of sal- 
 vation. In spite of the still too great want of consid- 
 eration for being as the central field of study and 
 effort, the race has nowhere so rapidly advanced as 
 
Life. 159 
 
 along the line of self-consciousness. Life is not recog- 
 nized in its entirety, its specific relations, as it will be 
 later on. Nevertheless, everything that goes to make 
 it in its separate fields and functions is scanned with 
 almost preternatural intentness. A deep-seated curi- 
 osity watches every j)hase of matter, every movement 
 of the mind. As we know and feel life now, it was 
 never known before. Alongside of the waste and 
 fever of practical activity has come the culmination 
 of the two great intellectual tendencies, the meta- 
 physic and the scientific. Introspective and analytic, 
 with eyes turned inward as well as outward, to watch 
 with tireless vigilance the processes of bodily, intellect- 
 ual, and spiritual being, the man of to-day is no more 
 like the primal man, the metaphoric dweller in the gar- 
 den, than the child is like the patriarch or the savage 
 like the savant. For the first time, the race wakes 
 up to the primary inspirations of life. Full conscious- 
 ness has not yet come ; but out of the intense individ- 
 uality, never so deep and vital as now, and the subtle 
 realization of everything that goes on within and 
 makes for the existence of man, which characterizes 
 our age, we may look for the time when life as a rec- 
 ognized study will outrank all the sciences in the esti- 
 mation of mankind. 
 
 Then, when life as such is understood, there will not 
 be so much talk about the religions. It will be seen 
 that there is, and can be, only one sufficient life, and 
 that religious ; as also only one religion, and that the 
 religion of life. Even now, we are coming to see that 
 whatever finds credence and enduring power with the 
 
160 Ecce Spiritus. 
 
 mass of men must appeal to this awakening self-con- 
 sciousness, must be in the line of this practical ten- 
 dency which studies the facts without and within, 
 must be in harmony with and not antagonistic to the 
 pride and the joy and the blessedness of life. The 
 age will have nothing to do with churchly slurs on the 
 vast and hopeful activities which animate its effort : it 
 will take no part in pietistic cant about the worthless- 
 ness of life, and the glory of fagots and consecrated 
 resting-places. The time has this answer to all false 
 underrating of the active self-consciousness of the day, 
 that the evil of mankind, as well as of the Church, has 
 been in its ignorance and rejection of life ; that, while 
 studying everything else, it has been content to evade 
 the actual conditions out of which come health and 
 happiness. It has filled the world with the cries of its 
 agony and want of harmony, demanding the pity of 
 men everywhere, through history, poetry, art, and re- 
 ligion; while it has all the time refused to live, declined 
 to look on life as a problem, preferring rather to con- 
 sider it as a debtor, upon which it has an especial and 
 constant claim. The vital relations of man in the 
 threefold sphere of his being, to God, to man, and to 
 himself, are left to the study of the specialist, sepa- 
 rated as far as possible by the very exigencies of his 
 position from the facts, and doomed to the abstract 
 methods and narrow i^remises of his fatal inheritance. 
 While the government has its accredited and utterly 
 untrammelled students of the rocks and stars, life, 
 not sectarian, not religious, in the narrower sense of 
 the term, upon which, more than anything else, its 
 
Life. 161 
 
 very institutions rest, is left to the fate of chance. It 
 is not until very recently that the Church has said 
 anything about the necessity for life. Every move- 
 ment of Protestantism has been born primarily of this 
 fact, the new Church becoming powerless as soon as 
 the fire of the momentary protest had faded, and life 
 had been forgotten in the fresh but equally lifeless 
 formalism. Men are just beginning to understand 
 themselves, the world in which they live, and that 
 mutual relationship, that interblending of ties and de- 
 pendences between it and them and God, which fur- 
 nishes the true conditions of life. Now there bids 
 fair in time to be a science deeper than all the sciences, 
 one that shall do more than merely teach us how to 
 subjugate the earth or to read the stars, important and 
 inspiring as these undoubtedly are, in teaching us to 
 live. Religion will not suffer, except superficially and 
 healthfully. It will lose much, as is well, and entirely 
 shift its stand-point ; but it will gain much in getting 
 closer to the centre and all the realities of life. This 
 science of life, made up of all, yet deeper, truer, more 
 pervasive than all, will be the religion of the future ; 
 and there will be nothing in heaven or on earth, no 
 power, material or spiritual, which will not come into 
 its hands. Its demand will be everywhere for more 
 life, not less. It will take no especial account of this 
 world or the next, but will first insist upon the dignity 
 of man as man, as originating in and ever more and 
 more consciously related to God, and then solemnly 
 call upon him to live. 
 
 By the frequent use of the word "life," it must not 
 
162 JSJcce /SpiHtus. 
 
 be supposed that anything is intended in contrast with 
 the very highest conception man has ever had of a 
 possible existence. The object is not to put the lower 
 in place of the higher, but to show the unity of the 
 one and only life in all its varied spheres, and to in- 
 dicate that, so comprehensive and vital is its scope and 
 meaning, we need, least of all, to supplement its sub- 
 lime reality with any theological substitute. It is no 
 undue preeminence conceded to physiology over biol- 
 ogy, or biology over spirituality, but the insistence on 
 the fact already too long deferred, — that life is one, 
 nay, infinite, and large enough to account for everything 
 in the sphere of its manifestation, as well as to meet 
 every demand in the present and future of mankind. 
 It is to suggest the grandest thought and the most 
 significant theme of human intelligence which has for 
 so long, in its larger relations and its scientific aspects, 
 been kept in the background. 
 
 Life is all that there is. When everything has been 
 sifted, it alone remains, the one thing that never 
 lessens. It is the fixed quantity of experience, that 
 which, amid frequent shiftings and dismemberments, 
 not only animates time and space, but lays hold of 
 eternity. These four letters spell out the grandest, 
 most inclusive and inspiring word in the language. 
 Life combines all things in itself, is all the j)arts of it 
 you can name, — all science and spirituality, all history 
 and philosophy, all art and nature, jill possible thrills 
 and ecstasies, all griefs and glories; yea, and some- 
 thing more and greater besides, made up of the aggre- 
 gate of all experience and yet through all and above all 
 
Life. 163 
 
 an entity. The activities, interests, and ideals of one 
 generation, give way to those of another. The lights 
 and prophets rind benefactors are for a day, but life is 
 ever one. It reaches back and gathers up in tireless 
 transmission the roots and tendencies of every throb 
 and motion of being, and knows that it is deathlessly 
 related to every breath of most remote existence, a 
 part of all coming bane and blessing. No part of it 
 is ever lost or unrelated to the whole. Everything 
 ministers to life. Everything witnesses it. For it the 
 earth was created, and at its fulness it is something 
 the heaven of heavens cannot contain. It makes 
 everything tributary, but is itself never subject. It 
 demands and holds itself worth infinite sacrifice of 
 momentary ease and enjoyment. To have lived — 
 nay, to live — is much, everything. Through mani- 
 fold apparent loss and misery, the great fact stands 
 out in all its majestic import, that existence is grand. 
 To have suffered means both less and more to him 
 who appreciates the prerogative of being, than it 
 does to one who lives upon the surface. He knows 
 that nothing can be lost to life, that out of its 
 wholeness all partialness is made good. He knows 
 that God lives, is God simply by reason of his in- 
 finitude of life ; that He is not merely the originator 
 and destiny of being, but the absolute and perfect 
 realization of it. God is, and that fact transcends all 
 possible distinctions of love, power, justice, truth. 
 The " I Am " of Jehovah outweighs the most minute 
 and accurate category of divine attributes and 
 qualities. When a human being has reached the " I 
 
164 JEcce Spirit its. 
 
 am " point, his education and salvation have com- 
 menced. Then force, beauty, grandeur, begin as 
 conscious possessions. Then there will no longer be 
 estrangement from the Great, the Parent ; * I Am," — 
 nor incompleteness nor aberration in the rounded 
 orbit of perfected action and exercise. It is simply be- 
 cause men do not know, or have forgotten themselves, 
 that they pursue so exclusively the many poor and 
 trivial ends. The objective point of all moral and re- 
 ligious enlightenment is the re-creation of the positive 
 consciousness of being. To have awakened men to 
 the fact that they are really alive, not superficially nor 
 accidentally nor temporarily, but actually and inher- 
 ently alive^ is to have begun the one process of re- 
 demption which needs no other to complete its work. 
 
 TTe have said that God is Life; yet men have 
 sought him in everything else, and with every other 
 kind of searching save that of developed being in 
 themselves. TVho by searching can find God? Surely, 
 if he is far off, we cannot hope to reach him. Either 
 He is near, a p ssible realization from within, or it is 
 a lost cause with humanity. It is life alone that finds 
 Life ; and only in proportion as we live, roundly and 
 fully, do we come to a consciousness of God. 
 
 The fact of divine creation suggests this wonderful 
 quality of life as it is in Him. Although He constantly 
 imparts, He remains the infinite fulness. Life is the 
 only thing that can be given without loss. To impart 
 is its exercise, its completion, the test of its vitality. 
 Death withholds everything, life nothing. Its per- 
 fection comes alono* the line of its g;enerositv. Its 
 
Life. 165 
 
 seeming negation is the very condition of its positive- 
 ness. Consequently, when man sprung into being, 
 although his sphere was circumscribed, — the principle 
 being the pure parental one, — he was amenable to 
 the same law. Not only must he be creative and 
 unselfish, but he must come vitally into relations with 
 God. The responsive complements the creative in 
 divine nature, and man finds the actual and constant 
 necessity of spiritual contact with his Source. 
 
 It was this that Jesus saw so clearly amid the 
 short-sightedness of his time. He found God an 
 abstraction, and he left him a Father. He went 
 further than the Jewish mind, which saw little beyond 
 the fact that God had made the universe; he said that 
 God not only thought out the universe and set it in 
 motion, but evermore lives in it, in the beautiful order 
 and fixity of divinely established law. But the most 
 vigorous blow he struck was against the Jewish con- 
 ception of law itself. This, in the hands of God, was 
 large and living, ever spiritual although material in 
 its occasional sphere of manifestation, and inclusive 
 of the most intimate and loving relations between off- 
 spring and Creator in the boundlessness of its working. 
 He declared that the material evidences of a living 
 God were insignificant compared with those from 
 within, that the soul of man is the direct mirror of 
 the Creator. There, in its irresistible instincts and 
 tendencies, its intense and unquenchable longings, its 
 energy that, though often dormant or perverted, is yet 
 never lost, is it seen how truly in the sj)here of his 
 creation God is alive. 
 
166 Ecce Spiritus. 
 
 The Jewish theism began in Abraham, in the fresh, 
 free, mountain glimpse he caught of the all-pervading 
 Spirit principle. Moses saw the fading glow, but lost 
 it in the attempt to imprison it in stone. Then, as 
 the clouds of literalism gradually cleared, the arch 
 of the rainbow of spiritual promise rested its span 
 from Abraham to Jesus, with Moses lost in literalism 
 between. The relief of occasional prophetic protests 
 was but momentary, until Jesus came, charged with 
 more than a mere protest, to declare that God is 
 alive ; that life is the one perennially important and 
 unchangeable thing to man ; that in the active, con- 
 scious union of the two is all that humanity ever re- 
 quires. His very personality was keyed to this great 
 certainty. For it, he was prepared to live and die. 
 God being Life, he asserted that it is life alone that 
 can know him. And this he knew by reason of the 
 presence of this same thing in himself. Out of his 
 own experience, his struggle and suffering, his con- 
 scious strength born out of determined and uncom- 
 promising adherence to the highest, lie knew that it is 
 simply the lack of this in others that makes God seem 
 to them so vague, abstract, and distant. 
 
 To find people who really live is so rare that we 
 are profoundly impressed when one comes to our 
 knowledge. We are awed, and stricken with the 
 desire to canonize. It was this that gave Jesus so 
 ready a sway and influence. Nor was it strange that 
 an element of worship, as if sometimes he were a 
 God, entered into the reverence for the man. It is 
 ever so. Men refuse to live that for themselves which 
 
Life. 167 
 
 they adore in others. Unquestionably, Jesus was 
 phenomenally endowed, the product of race influences 
 that culminated in him, but not so much so that he 
 did not call all men to the same full exercise of 
 the functions and possibilities of being by which he 
 gained his own supreme exaltation. He was able to 
 proclaim the living Fatherhood by reason of the liv- 
 ing sonship in himself, which it was his object to de- 
 velop out of the universal human possibility. This 
 is the very heart of his message. Beyond his declara- 
 tion that he is the Life, thus ignoring every other 
 quality in himself as subordinate to this of being, he 
 declares that he is come that men might have life, and 
 have it more abundantly. He reiterates this again 
 and again, under varying forms of statement, until 
 this becomes the chief point of difference between him 
 and the other founders of religious systems. He is 
 never on the surface, but always at the heart and 
 centre. His word is vital and vigorous, such as men 
 full-orbed and manly can understand. It appeals to 
 those who are alive and in earnest, while it is a re- 
 proach, a rebuke, to the morbid and slothful. It has 
 a thrill, and jmlses through us. It does not play and 
 coruscate upon the merely intellectual or imaginative 
 side, but gets into the hands and feet, and makes us 
 over daily. Its range is limitless and its sweep 
 mighty. It leaves out nothing, and can look down 
 as well as up. There is only one Life, and the lower 
 must be made the higher. 
 
 The Church has tended to exalt religion, technically 
 considered, over everything else; while its instra- 
 
168 Ecce Spiritus. 
 
 ments of books or creeds or formulas have too often 
 overshadowed the near and conscious functions of 
 man's nature. But Jesus says Life, — whereof religion, 
 as we commonly use that term, is only one side. Life, 
 rightly looked upon, is religion, since it is that which 
 brings us back to the Parent Life ; but religionism is 
 only one of its countless expressions. It is ever seven 
 times one, instead of one in seven. Religion is the 
 highest side, but surely no one would think of claim- 
 ing that it is all of life. Using the word in its eccle- 
 siastical relations, religion is a part. The pure 
 rationalistic order that succeeds it is another. But 
 life is the whole, and will yet show how all things 
 work together for good to them who live up to its full 
 privilege. It culminates in its filial expressions of 
 joyous and dutiful union with God. It exists in 
 makeshift incompleteness in countless forms of igno- 
 rance and perversion, but is only found real and 
 representative at its fullest and highest. 
 
 We question how many shall know it hereafter, 
 when the fact remains that so few have known it 
 here, that the heaven beyond is hardly more vague 
 and incomprehensible than the heaven at hand. How 
 vast, how sweeping, then, the revolution of Jesus ! 
 How radical the revelation which cleared up and in- 
 spired man's present as well as future existence with 
 the light not of promise nor of hope, not of contingent 
 life, but with the conscious certainty of a large and 
 living reality. He brought no new and different kind 
 of being, which man was incapable of comprehending, 
 no mythic immortality, when earth and its opportu- 
 
Life. 169 
 
 nities had failed to satisfy, but only something more 
 and finer of the same sort, of which in their better 
 moments they had had faint experience. Indeed, he 
 brought nothing. He was an essential evolutionist, 
 touching the inner springs in all men, and calling out 
 the latent strength and beauty of insight to supreme 
 exercise. He showed them simply how blind they 
 were. He had much to say about the possession of 
 eyes which could not see ; and his ultimate demand, 
 ever held in reserve, was, He that hath faculties to use 
 let him use them. He gave them a taste of harmony. 
 The silent harp in life, once swept with a master hand, 
 would tune experience to a loftier strain through- 
 out the centuries. He brought his life close to theirs, 
 so that even in their spiritual apprenticeship they were 
 wonderfully touched and moved. 
 
 To see how truly Jesus is the apostle of life, com- 
 pare his method and its conclusions with those of 
 Buddha. Both were early impressed with the hol- 
 lowness and inadequacy of much that is dignified 
 with the name of existence, and both were infinitely 
 saddened at what they saw. Both were brought 
 close to experience, although approaching it from 
 external stand-points that were widely apart, — the 
 one rich and royal, and the other poor and without 
 place in the social scale; but the attention of each 
 was chiefly caught by the surface-living of men. 
 The worship of sense, with its attendants of sin, 
 of loathsome disease and premature death, was, it is 
 true, abhorrent to them ; but they saw alike that this 
 was not the root of the difficulty. Each felt that 
 
170 JEcce Spiritus. 
 
 this was the negative result of a positive something 
 wanting in the common make-up, which, above all 
 else, they must labor to supply. 
 
 But the coincidence stops with the perception of 
 the difficulty, since the methods and results of each 
 were as widely separated as the poles. Buddha, 
 seeing how unsatisfactory, nay, how wrong, life is, 
 abandoned it altogether, as something beyond the 
 hope of amelioration, and, going into the desert, 
 announced, as the crowning revelation of his years of 
 study suffering and self-abnegation, that the only 
 relief, the only good, lay in non-being. Whatever 
 nice question may lie between the scholars as to 
 the full and precise meaning of Nirvana, it is certain 
 that Buddha came to the calm, unshaken conclusion 
 that life is an evil, and that the only salvation from it 
 is to get as close as possible to unconsciousness. He 
 proceeded at once to reduce the sum of evil as a 
 negative quality by diminishing the positive quantity 
 itself. The curse to his mind was not in perversion, 
 but in creation itself. Hence his cry was for non- 
 being, for less life instead of for more. 
 
 With equal study, suffering, and self-abnegation, 
 Jesus worked out the same problem in his own way. 
 Keeping clear of the desert, and with only occasional 
 excursions into places of solitary communing, in most 
 of which he was attended by a saving few, in order 
 that he might never lose sight of humanity, Jesus 
 held himself close to life. If existence were wrong, 
 it was in the midst of it, among its facts, its possi- 
 bilities, its unseen or uncomprehended verities, that 
 
Life. 171 
 
 lie must move to find the solution. The salvation 
 of life, he saw, lies in nothing apart from life. 
 " Subsists no law of life outside of life." The desert 
 has no gospel for the crowded thoroughfare. The 
 cell has no answer for the tears and prayers of the 
 home. Jesus lived, drove the wandering thing called 
 life back to its last, secret hiding-place ; and there, 
 with his foot on the folly, the error, the caprice, he 
 lifted up his voice above the cries of earth, and pro- 
 claimed the sovereign remedy. It was more life, not 
 less ; true life, not false ; the ascending, not the de- 
 scending scale of being. He pointed men not down 
 to non-existence, but up to life's Infinitude. His was 
 no meagre God, but the Father of fulness. His was 
 no negative escape, but a more positive approach. 
 He would fill out, not narrow down. It was not 
 the easy giving up, the coward's cold shoulder, but 
 the grander taking hold. It was what the world had 
 been waiting for, and what its richest experience has 
 not yet out-grown. 
 
 To see how true is this distinction in the case of 
 Jesus, watch him in the records of his daily work. 
 He is a living rebuke to the narrowness of those who 
 have here and there earned the name of benefactor 
 by a conception of duty which has limited rather 
 than enlarged the outlook of man. He challenges the 
 ecclesiastic as well as the partial scientist with an ex- 
 perience as fresh, free, natural, and many-sided as that 
 of the highest. Was religion beautiful? Yes, engag- 
 ingly, absorbingly so. It employed all the faculties 
 and resources ol his nature in. joyous exercise. It 
 
172 Ecce Spiritus. 
 
 measured him and everything else in the capacious 
 possibility it assumed to his mind. As a thoroughly 
 spiritual man, he was in love with God's world, the 
 nearer world of men, all social and aesthetic circles of 
 enjoyment. 
 
 He love 1 the waving fields of corn, even though it 
 be on the Sabbath of a Jewish formalism, the woody 
 shores of Gennesaret, and the flowering banks of the 
 Jordan. He sat by the seashore; and, when the me- 
 tropolis choked his nature-loving heart with the dust 
 and disturbance of its streets, he fled to Olivet, with- 
 out the city, for the communion of the fields and sym- 
 pathetic friends. How near his heart to nature! 
 Like every poet soul, he carried his thirst and repres- 
 sion to the still, solemn rustling of solitary trees. In 
 the universal Gethsemane, he found himself and his 
 God, not as temple worshipjDer, as fingerer of the sa- 
 cred books, but warm with the currents of that nature 
 love that lies so near the sympathies of our race. 
 
 Had he not been more and greater, he would have 
 stopped to be a poet. A little more of the Greek in 
 him, and he had been a dreamer in that most glorious 
 system of aesthetics the world has ever seen. But 
 thank God for the Greek in him. Fused as it was 
 into the higher make-up, he was, through it, only the 
 more cosmopolitan in his genius and influence, only 
 the truer man, and nearer to the great human heart. 
 He could not pass a wayside well, where in the sun- 
 shine stood a woman with the sign of earth's work 
 and weariness in her hands, and the deeper, more illu- 
 sive look of earth's sin and sorrow in her sad eyes, 
 
Life. 173 
 
 without making an excuse to talk. Did we think of 
 him as absorbed in his truth, in this abstraction of a 
 mission to men, absent-minded and self-centred on 
 the mighty conceptions that filled his mind? Per- 
 haps we could have forgiven him if he were, as the 
 grateful world has forgiven many another narrow 
 savior. But no, he is thrilled and filled with life, 
 only keenly sympathetic with the actual needy real- 
 ity, wherever it is found. The world's problem 
 can be dropped : rather, here is the problem. The 
 metaphysics paled before a simple Samaritan maiden 
 with one gleam of the world's sorrow in her eyes. 
 We learn of him at the wedding, funeral, and social 
 visit, and infer that these most frequent occurrences 
 are commonly omitted from the narrative because of 
 their frequency. As truly a socialist as a poet, a 
 lover of the world as well as keenly keyed to the 
 pleasures of solitude, he is everywhere at home, 
 always himself. He never in all this for a moment 
 forgets that great call to his Father's business; and 
 yet so unassumingly and so unconsciously does he 
 work that they never seem to have suspected him 
 of half his happy seriousness. 
 
 But the strength and beauty of this lay in the fact 
 that he found it all so sinrply and naturally in God. 
 The range of his sympathies was no wider than it was 
 high. It is in the light of this truth that his character 
 comes out fullest and clearest. He does not abandon 
 his fresh, free naturalness, and assume the long face of 
 Pharisaic formality when he enters the Sacred Pres- 
 ence. Putting off nothing and taking on nothing, he 
 
174 Ecce Spiritus. 
 
 forgets to be anything but himself. There he does 
 not live, and pray here. There he is not Jesus, and 
 here the posing Christ. There he is not sportive, 
 and here so covered up and abnormally straightened 
 that even God cannot recognize him. Here as there, 
 he is alive and at home. You see life only, but it is 
 its crowning expression, its moment of supreme ex- 
 perience and exalted consciousness. In his relations 
 with God there is something inexpressibly confiden- 
 tial and tender and manly and sweet, as if the 
 faintest barrier separated them, and the knowledge 
 of each other had been from of old. With no servile 
 fear on his part and no undue desire to propitiate, the 
 rendering of filial trust and love becomes the service 
 of a childlike joy. He will not gain God at the cost 
 of underrating any part of his creation. God must 
 not be glorified at the expense of man. Aspersion 
 plays no part in his eminently manly approach to 
 divine things. God has first been seen to be good in 
 humanity and nature. The worship has basis, and 
 finds the Highest no less surely on that account. 
 
CHAPTER XII. 
 
 IMMORTAL LIFE. 
 
 Thus far, we have seen Jesus in his relations to life 
 in general. A step further will show us the larger 
 bearings of his principle to life, so considered as to 
 leave out no possible sphere and function. His first 
 office is the elucidation of the existence of to-day, — 
 not in any narrow nor merely material sense, but of our 
 existence tested by the highest possibility of now and 
 here. Then he proceeds by a fine spiritual logic, not 
 stated but everywhere implied, to build up in men's 
 minds the conditions, as well as to show the necessities, 
 of a life related to the present, although unlimited 
 by it. 
 
 It is sufficient to say, in justification of such a state- 
 ment, that the possibility of all this, as we can now 
 set it forth, has come from Jesus. It is useless to 
 claim that he has no logic, no systematic elaboration, 
 according to the scientific notion of our day. He is 
 no logician, no scientist; but with a subtler, surer 
 method, and often fully as much by what he does not 
 say as by what he says, he makes plain to the sympa- 
 thetic student the law which he himself may reduce as 
 far as possible to intellectual statement. This latter is 
 not the work of Jesus. Other less great and less en- 
 
176 JScce Spiritus. 
 
 lightened men can write the specifications of the won- 
 derful spiritual mechanism he has fitted to its work. 
 It is his principle that makes us capable of such a 
 statement, which we therefore do not hesitate to refer 
 to him. We may make deductions which he never 
 definitely stated; but we cannot carry out his princi- 
 ple, everywhere and unmistakably seen, to its full 
 application, without finding our inference necessarily 
 implied. Nay, more, it will be in the facts which are 
 patent to our own observation and experience of life. 
 It will be the last word of the best and most enduring 
 reality we have ever known. All life is a corrobora- 
 tion and restatement of the words of Jesus. What 
 he knew so sufficiently in the primitive exj)erience of 
 nineteen centuries ago, we know in the light of the 
 ripest culture of to-day. The age has borne away 
 from the perversions of the Apostolic Church, but 
 not from the simple statements of Jesus. But, faintly 
 understood, they are yet enthroned in the deepest 
 consciousness of the race. We find them in seed 
 form, germinal with a possibility which it devolves 
 upon us to fulfil, in the Gospels; and we may well 
 refer the ripe fruit which haply falls into our hands 
 to the parent source. 
 
 We have, however, to proceed carefully at this 
 point, as we are now upon the most delicate ground of 
 our inquiry, as well as nearest to the heart of the 
 whole matter. We are met at once by the inadequa- 
 cies of a language formed long before men nad arrived 
 even at the conscious necessity for spiritual things, by 
 habits of thought and methods of expression which 
 
Immortal Life. 177 
 
 have become, to a certain extent, fundamental, as well 
 as by an attitude common to all ages, but, in some es- 
 pecial sense, characteristic of our own, which insists 
 upon the employment of scientific principles in the 
 proof of spiritual realities. Deprecating none of these 
 things, and only too glad of the hints and warnings 
 they have thrown in the way of the later exponent of 
 spiritual truth, we are confident that language and life, 
 and even scientific methods themselves, are sufficient 
 to answer the purpose of the most anxious inquirer into 
 the principle of Jesus in its application to human need. 
 
 But, to a certain extent, we must start new in our 
 work. Much of the old questioning, with its baseless 
 stand-point, its talk of hopes and faiths, its willingness 
 to hold the understanding in abeyance if it could only 
 hear an authoritative utterance from without, must be 
 abandoned. We must shift our ground, remodel our 
 terminology. We must get inward to the laws and 
 facts, and, forgetting to talk about faiths, be satisfied 
 only with the necessities of what we seek, as we find 
 them grounded in the nature of things. 
 
 At the very outset there is error in the common 
 estimate of our means of knowledge, the sphere and 
 method by which we are to arrive at certainty of en- 
 during life. This has led to serious disappointment 
 in many a faithful believer, who has come to think that 
 there is something faulty in the position of Jesus. 
 Looking, as he thinks naturally, for a definite state- 
 ment in a matter so important, and finding it left so 
 apparently in darkness, he has been thrown back upon 
 himself, without the understanding that that is what 
 
178 JEJcce Spiritus. 
 
 Jesus wisely intended, and without the insight neces- 
 sary to see that in this way his principle comes to 
 proof. He hears others assert that Jesus nowhere 
 explicitly teaches immortality, and, at best, only im- 
 plies it, and is thus at last content to give up the 
 matter in inquiry as beyond the capacity of man. If 
 Jesus had meant to teach so transcendent a doctrine, 
 he would surely not have left it to chance, but fixed 
 it in a statement about which there could have been 
 no question. 
 
 The radical error in this too common position is the 
 readiness to accept vital, personal truth from without 
 in the form of finality. It is the undue leaning upon 
 authority which Jesus dreads in the attitude of men 
 toward himself. Men want it all stated with nothing 
 more to be done, so plain that they cannot but accept 
 it ; and then how easily they are saved ! But Jesus 
 meant there should be no short road to divine things. 
 They exist in living verity, and must be duly appro- 
 priated. He left out nothing essential in the state- 
 ment of the all-sufficient principle, but was careful 
 not to defeat the great end by doing man's work for 
 him. He had no cheap, easy salvation in mind. To 
 picture heaven was not his object, but to build it 
 up in human lives. It was all in the principle which 
 he announced with sufficient fulness, but we must 
 come up to the principle. It cannot come to us until 
 we are prej)ared and ready. It must be the lower that 
 ascends, and not the higher that descends. The prob- 
 lem being already complete in its solution, it remains 
 with us to work it out, each one for himself. 
 
Immortal Life. 179 
 
 To leave for a moment the question of immortality 
 and go back to a subject discussed in a former chap- 
 ter, we have seen there that Jesus illustrates and 
 seeks to impress an original conception of life. He 
 lives out in detail, but more particularly in principle, 
 an ideal and utterly uncompromising experience, 
 which at once separates him from the mass of men ; 
 and this through no social nor aesthetic fastidiousness, 
 — for he was ever one of and one with the people, — 
 but by reason of the originality and strength of his 
 conviction. By that life, he was related first to God, 
 but secondarily, through the harmonies of a law that, 
 though complex and various in working, is ever one, 
 to all created and circumstantial things. The fact 
 that he filled out the universe with spiritual relation- 
 ships did not in the least affect the purity and divin- 
 ity of the spiritual principle. In rooting the growth 
 of his philosophy (let us not be afraid of the word : 
 it is one of our oldest and best, and means more than 
 even the schools have dreamed of) deep down and 
 firmly in the soil of a natural origin, he in nowise 
 curtailed its capacity for mounting to the stars. 
 Quite the contrary. It is because of this fact that 
 we go the more confidently forward with him, as- 
 sured that he will not violate the fundamental cer- 
 tainties which our science, and his, have taught us. 
 It encourages us to hope for a conscious immortality 
 which is consistent, which is natural not supernatural, 
 necessary not arbitrary. 
 
 The position of the modern questioner who refuses 
 to accept a faith or doctrine in the face of opposing 
 
180 Ecce Spiritus. 
 
 facts is right in {principle, so far as that principle goes. 
 The honest investigator who relinquishes the hope of 
 life he would gladly possess because of stern adher- 
 ence to the truth as he can see it is, in his way, a 
 martyr to the highest. Doubtless there is blame 
 somewhere else, if no better, truer method is shown 
 him, one which will not contravene, but, rather, com- 
 plete the knowledge he has gained in the sphere of 
 nature ; but no reproach attaches itself to his honesty. 
 The sensitive distrust touching any declaration of cer- 
 tainty in regard to a sphere of life which lies, or is 
 supposed to lie, entirely outside of this life, with sym- 
 bols and terminology different from those which we 
 use here at our highest, is, after all, well founded. 
 And the only way in which to meet this inborn intel- 
 lectual aversion is to show that life, in its largest 
 and most enduring relations, requires none of these 
 things. The materialist, the boldest scientist, knows 
 and believes in life ; and it is only at a certain stage, 
 when the physical darkness sets in, and the human 
 eye can see no further, that he begins to doubt or dis- 
 trust. It is evident, then, that any elucidation of its 
 farther reality must lie along the line of that which 
 he already knows. He will reject any de novo con- 
 cejDtion of an existence added to this he now has 
 and given upon arbitrary conditions to complete it. 
 Knowing and believing in this which he feels is all 
 that he has, he will resent any aspersion upon the 
 goodness of this world, and will only be helped 
 toward heaven by the discovery that the conditions 
 of it are indestructibly bound up in the life of which 
 
Immortal Life. 181 
 
 he is now conscious. If you will develop the con- 
 sciousness of the indestructibility of life out of that 
 life of which he is already conscious, there is hope 
 that he may be convinced. 
 
 At the outset, Jesus presents no conception of im- 
 mortality at variance with or divorced from the facts 
 already known. The life he lives is that of nature, 
 but the highest step of its most stupendous reach is 
 related to the lowest. It is the breath of God, — 
 taking breath merely as a symbol to signify the most 
 vital function of life, — a part of himself sent forth by 
 that creative energy which characterizes infinite 
 being, and able by no possibility to drop out of the 
 sphere of living things any more than can God him- 
 self. If God can die, the soul can. But this is of 
 little consequence as a separate fact. If the soul 
 cannot know and feel something of all this, it would 
 be of little value as a bare statement, open as it is 
 to the attacks of material disproof and spiritual un- 
 consciousness. Its demonstration or its denial does 
 not come within the sphere of external data, but only 
 within that of inward experience. This must of 
 necessity be so. Such a fact comes under the gen- 
 eral law which forbids the sufficient outward demon- 
 stration of any reality of inward experience. Nay, 
 more, immortality never has been and never can be 
 proven in any sense that will satisfy the scientific 
 meaning of that term. So far at least, the mate- 
 rialist is right, and always will be right. Matter with 
 its corresponding symbols in thought is the only 
 criterion he acknowledges, and from this test of 
 
182 JScce Spiritus. 
 
 proof the highest and most perennial truth of being 
 will ever be withheld. 
 
 Immortality will never be grasped by the intellect- 
 ual faculty alone. Consciousness is the final authority 
 upon which it must rest, and consciousness last of all 
 rounds itself out into intellectual statement. It is 
 valueless as a dogma, since the assertion of another's 
 certainty will not answer for oar doubt. We can 
 only be satisfied with our own assurance. It is not 
 enough even that Jesus knew it, until we, too, have 
 been through his process, and arrived at his result, 
 — which is nothing, if not personal. 
 
 We are thus thrown back to the wholeness of his 
 experience, to the study of the elements out of which 
 such certainty of God-knowledge, such self-confidence, 
 came. The belief goes with the being. An immor- 
 tal sort of life, a life kept close to the imperishable, 
 knows of the deathlessness, and none other can know. 
 The authority is not arbitrary, but essential. This 
 life of God in us has relationship and destiny, as 
 well as origin, in the Infinite. It has, moreover, 
 powers and functions allied to those of God, by which 
 in supreme use and exercise it completes itself. 
 These are spiritual, as it is spirit ; while spirituality 
 is the consciousness of it and them. But you cannot 
 learn these facts from any one, and can only be con- 
 scious of them. Then alone do they have meaning 
 to you and may be said to be known. God being a 
 spirit and man likewise a spirit, how do they come 
 consciously together? Man knows and loves, that 
 which these functions of intelligence and feeling 
 
Immortal Life. 183 
 
 comprehend constituting all of life there is for him. 
 But as bodily life does not reside merely in the func- 
 tions of hand and feet, but more essentially in the 
 nerve power that back of both electrifies them into 
 motive and motion, so the soul's life is a fine fusion 
 of spiritual attributes which moves even back of 
 these expressions which we call wisdom and affec- 
 tion. The spirit at its highest moment of conscious- 
 ness is an entity which will not be put down by the 
 partial facts of science. It awaits the larger science 
 which shall relate itself not to the superficial, but to 
 the essential. 
 
 There is being as the animal knows it, fitful, par- 
 tial, and with only at best a faint approach to self- 
 consciousness. Then there is the existence of man, 
 physically considered, in which self-consciousness, un- 
 related as it often is to the supreme facts and possibil- 
 ities of his nature, is one of the saddest things in life. 
 It is just this in our time which causes the deep un- 
 rest, the vague, unsatisfied yearning, the hopeless out- 
 look of humanity. It has asked and failed to answer 
 the question, Is life worth living? Awakened self-con- 
 sciousness is a crying evil, unless it be harmonized 
 with the supreme facts of being. Far better to be as 
 the brutes, if one must range no higher than they. 
 Self-consciousness adds nothing to the joys of light 
 and air and food and motion, but only a dread fear, 
 an intangible longing, a fitful hope that often grows 
 to an ache. 
 
 It was out of a dim understanding of this that all 
 the philosophies came, all the systems of thought 
 
184 JScce Spiritus. 
 
 which have attempted now in one way and now in 
 another to reason into harmony and peace an active 
 self-consciousness, which was, however, unrelated to 
 the higher facts of life wherein alone its order and 
 completeness lie. Each one has in turn excited the 
 eager curiosity of man's hungry nature, failed to sat- 
 isfy, and given place to the next, or continued to 
 exist only as a contestant in a noisy war of words. 
 Hence came Epicureanism out of this despair, or 
 Spartan rigor out of the natural reaction, or Plato- 
 nism out of man's last and highest alternative, the 
 pure reason. 
 
 But all have failed to meet life's need. They have 
 answered much, and given many solutions to near 
 and needy questions; but life is as restless and unsat- 
 isfied as ever. Nay, more so. The hunger deepens, 
 and has already begun to prey upon the vitals. It 
 has struck into the heart, and fatally touched man's 
 capacity for faith in anything higher than to-day. 
 We are better clothed and fed than ever. All our 
 powers are active as never before. But still the 
 heart, needy and naked, stands shivering in an atmos- 
 phere that chills even the first putting-forth of faith. 
 Beneath the ever more and more beautiful surface 
 the despair deepens. And there is no hope of relief 
 and enlightenment except from between the two ten- 
 dencies of materialism on the one hand, and the faith 
 that compromises with superstition and rejects the 
 facts on the other. The time has something to say ; 
 and we are willing to accept its disparagement of 
 faith unrelated to any other faculty of the mind, and 
 
Immortal Life. 185 
 
 to rest any satisfaction we may hope to find upon the 
 facts alone. The heart itself has something to say 
 here as well. But it is out of experience, self-con- 
 sciousnes active in the sphere of the highest, that we 
 must expect to find the certainty and the reason- 
 ableness that will come to refutation in no sphere of 
 facts. 
 
 Jesus is at once in harmony with this so common 
 attitude, which says that now and here are the basis 
 of our knowledge of life, which is unwilling to look 
 too much beyond that which is already known. He 
 ignores the questions of where and when almost alto- 
 gether. He himself disclaims knowledge of details 
 as well as indifference to them. So strong and suffi- 
 cient in him is the main fact, the reality, that he can 
 afford to remain in ignorance. His message is not 
 one of " times and seasons," never on the surface, and 
 always close to the centre. The golden throne and 
 pearly gates are no part of his expression. He is in- 
 terested in one thing, and that is life. To know 
 this at its fullest is to be conscious of a deathless en- 
 ergy, is to participate in realities which are by their 
 very nature independent of considerations of time 
 and space. He knows that spiritual experience is not 
 localized ; that heaven is not here nor there, but with- 
 in, in spiritual conditions. He accordingly makes no 
 definition, paints no pictures, in no wise maps out so 
 vital a possibility. The very depth and certainty of 
 his conscious realization is the reason why he has so 
 little to say except as to the fact of life. If his ex- 
 perience had been more superficial, his explanation 
 would have been far more elaborate. 
 
186 Ecce Spiritus. 
 
 He simply says : A life such as this which I have 
 realized, and which is possible to all, a life which is 
 consciously related to God through the unfolding and 
 development of its spiritual prerogative, emancipated 
 even here at its highest from limiting circumstances, 
 cannot be destroyed. Nay, more, it is conscious that 
 it cannot be destroyed. The life so experienced is its 
 own sufficient proof of perpetuity. There is nothing 
 to destroy it, nothing higher, stronger, more death- 
 less. Of its own self, it cannot cease, except for a 
 time, when it lapses into disuse or degradation. It 
 can suffer manifold changes in sphere, and, so far as 
 its earthly experience is concerned, come under the 
 universal law of extinction. But its first assertion 
 of itself, its awakened and sovereign consciousness, is 
 an ever-growing independence of all limitations, while 
 its final assertion is the inward certainty that, what- 
 ever else passes, it can never die. It is satisfied to 
 let the matter rest in the assurance that, if God can 
 cease to exist, so can it. 
 
 Infinite life means the utter absence of even such a 
 thought as that of death, and just in proportion as 
 any life approaches this perfection in experience will 
 it not so much argue the question of immortality as 
 forget that there ever was any question. Life is the 
 only thing that refutes death. The certainties of a 
 future are in those of to-day. You cannot talk death 
 to life, for it is alive and takes no account of death. 
 But death is ever ready to hear of itself. Death- 
 lessness can never be argued nor demonstrated ; but 
 it can be known, and that is enough. Life proves 
 
Immortal Life. 187 
 
 itself in its own way. The consciousness of each 
 individual soul is the last witness to which we can 
 appeal. Life, as we have already stated it at its 
 fullest and highest, needs no qualifying adjective to 
 complete its meaning. To one who really lives, the 
 term immortal life is tautological. We might well 
 spell life with a capital letter, and let the adjective 
 go. The adjective confesses too much. It refers at 
 once to a doubt in our minds, and means reassurance. 
 It weakens the idea it is intended to impress. It begs 
 the question: "If we live, then are we alive?" 
 
 Again, the word "immortality" is unfortunate, in- 
 asmuch as it puts the emphasis in the wrong place. 
 The insistence should be on the positive, not on the 
 negative fact, on lifeliness rather than on deathless- 
 ness. It is life that we would dwell upon, not believ- 
 ing in the value, altogether too much insisted upon, 
 of the contemplation of death. Half the vitality 
 wasted in discussing death and preparing for a grave 
 we shall never by any possibility occupy, expended 
 upon positive experience and the preparation to live 
 in a cheerful looking forward to life's fulfilment, would 
 result in far greater certainty than is within the reach 
 of impractical piety. We need a new word, which 
 shall have no insistence upon death, but reference 
 only to the positive, conscious, and enduring fact. 
 The first work of spirituality when its age of suprem- 
 acy shall come will be to purify its terminology. 
 Language and life have alike suffered in the too fre- 
 quent and painful lapse of reality from its symbol in 
 speech. 
 
188 Ecce Spiritus. 
 
 We shall never have peace until we are prepared 
 to look for certainty in the sphere of life rather than 
 in that of death, and to invert the proverb that in the 
 midst of life we are in death. Death is the transient 
 and accidental. Life is the central fact, always upper- 
 most, always last heard from. We do not refer to 
 the feeble faiths and tear-dimmed hopes which have 
 so long in a very circumscribed sphere combated the 
 stern necessities of death. These have done their work 
 in tiding men over the days before the demand and the 
 possibility for something higher and more certain had 
 come. Indeed, the place of faith has been very much 
 overrated in the common scheme of divine things. 
 A faith in immortality may have a certain intellectual 
 value, although nothing will suffer so much at the 
 hands of purely intellectual criticism ; but it has very 
 little reality. Immortality as a spiritual conception 
 must be grounded deeper than that ; while its power, 
 beauty, and reliability as a fact can come only from 
 the perception of its necessity, nay, from its very 
 conscious and present possession. It must be based 
 on some understanding of the laws of life, and of the 
 infinite relations life sustains, not only to God as seen 
 in nature, but also to God as seen in the special sphere 
 of inward observation. When life is so understood, 
 the discussions in regard to immortality will cease. 
 Then the most sublimated faith will be relegated to 
 its place among the things of the race's childhood, 
 to be listened to with only a commiserating patience. 
 Either let us know that we must, nay, that we do 
 live, or let so vast a subject alone. Let us be con- 
 
Immortal Life. 189 
 
 tented with no half-way methods, no makeshift au- 
 thorities, knowing that from the nature of things 
 immortality must be near and vital and capable of 
 conscious possession, if there is to be any such reality 
 at all. It can by no means be held at a distance, and 
 considered apart from ourselves. It is no arbitrary 
 gift to be imparted later on to non-being. You can 
 only give life to life. We are either alive or dead. If 
 we are dead, there is no hope of life for us ; for death 
 can only receive of its own. If we are alive, all 
 knowledge and certainty of life reside in, and can 
 only hope intelligently to appeal to, that fact of life. 
 If we can die, that is the end of %is ; and there is no 
 use of any farther taking stock as to what is left us 
 in the future. If one can acknowledge such a possi- 
 bility as death in and for himself, — let the word "self" 
 be kept to the highest reach of consciousness, and not 
 degraded to a narrow transient use, — there is from 
 that point onward no grounds for discussion. The 
 life has arbitrated for itself, has practically denied its 
 being and its conscious Source, and having become 
 death can take no account of life. Then the saving 
 work does not lie in any possible argument, but sim- 
 ply in revivification. 
 
 The salient point in the entire consideration is in 
 the supposed ability to die. The first question a soul 
 that is thoroughly alive settles is with the facts of 
 being. And life of the higher, completer sort has only 
 one answer. It is conscious of itself and of nothing 
 else. There would never be any death in a man's 
 thoughts, if he did not see others apparently dying, 
 
190 JEJcce Spiritus. 
 
 and hear so much miserable rhetoric that makes 
 death-beds the centre of all saving appeal. If a per- 
 son has no higher stand-point than this from which to 
 address men, if he has no great, positive, breathing 
 reality with which to animate and enliven mankind, 
 a world already too much befogged and degraded 
 would thank him for his silence. Let him speak of 
 the fact, not of its accidental phases. Let us have 
 the reality, and not the semblance. Men are already 
 sufficiently caught in the appearance of things. Life 
 is the real, positive, universal quantity that every- 
 where needs to be insisted upon. There is no death 
 but in feeble, transitory expression. Death plays nega- 
 tive to life's grander positive, it is the shade of noon- 
 day coolness to the power and intensity of sunlight 
 quivering with creative perpetuity. It marks, but it 
 neither makes nor unmakes. As a conception, it is 
 unworthy any but the most obscure place among the 
 thoughts of living and consciously quickened men. 
 As a iinality, it shames the very philosophy that is 
 willing to split upon its rock. It drops out of the 
 mind at a point where it is not so much conquered as 
 forgotten. 
 
 Immortality cannot remain a faith. Even material 
 certainty is too strong in its positiveness to leave it 
 long unassailed. Already, it totters before the rude 
 attacks of a scientific attitude and arraignment of 
 facts which cannot be gainsaid. Its only alternative 
 is to base itself upon still other and higher facts; not 
 to oppose, bat to complete law ; to speak consciously, 
 or to wait that crownino- moment out of stern life 
 
Immortal Life, 191 
 
 processes, when at last it shall be able to speak. But 
 of feeble whisperings, of plaintive, untaught yearn- 
 ings, of vague and misty poetizings, such as have so 
 long constituted the stock of religious experience, let 
 there be an end. Glimpses of heaven out of tear- 
 dimmed eyes play their part in the commoner econ- 
 omy of living; but they will not longer be held to 
 answer the full requirements of man's nature, nor 
 will they longer meet the exigencies of man's grow- 
 ing necessity for certain knowledge of the supreme 
 facts of being. Either immortality (we must use the 
 word for want of a better) is, a fact ingrained in the 
 fundamental conditions of being, a necessary part of 
 the nature and law of life, or it is not worth talking 
 about. Better prepare to accept this world as all, 
 and address ourselves to the sole thought of now and 
 here, than waste precious moments in vain specula- 
 tion as to the future. Speculation cannot hope to 
 reach what must be so much a conscious certainty, or 
 nothing. 
 
 The day has come when, out of the dire need that 
 surrounds suffering and bewildered men, the mystics 
 and the poets must step aside; and the man of life, 
 not the possessor, but the one possessed, who has been 
 led up of life, through nature and the scientist's rich- 
 est stores and ripest methods, to the heart and cer- 
 tainty of divine things, He must lead them between 
 the Scylla of superstition on the one hand, and the 
 Charybdis of materialism on the other, to the calm 
 open waters of a spirituality which has no quarrel 
 with any genuine science or religion. 
 
192 Ecce Spiritus. 
 
 He, when he comes, will not needlessly attempt the 
 proof of being, but will address himself to being 
 itself. He will say, if he say anything, that the only 
 answer that can come for any question of life must 
 come out of life itself; that consciousness — not the 
 arithmetic, the crucible, not merely intellectual logic 
 — is the sole source of proof. He will talk of life, 
 be full to the limitless possibility of its tender, sweet, 
 and grand significance. He who sits at his feet will 
 find his questions dropping from him. He will forget 
 to ask about the future in so plenary a present. The 
 self, awakened in him to regal consciousness, will only 
 sigh for field and scope in this immensity of being 
 into which he has come. 
 
CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 immortal life (continued). 
 
 There is a point at which what has already been 
 said becomes more than an abstract statement, — a 
 matter of experimental knowledge. If what has gone 
 before be true, it will follow that the lower the plane 
 of living spiritually, the less of certainty will be found 
 in the belief in the indestructibility of life; while 
 the higher the plane, and, in general, in direct ratio 
 to its elevation, will be the resultant certainty. 
 
 But by the use of the word " lower " is intended no 
 moral implication, but a reference solely to that qual- 
 ity of current living by which man feels himself re- 
 lated, in some natural and conscious way, with God. 
 Indeed, a great deal of the ordinary difficulty in the 
 discussion of these matters has arisen here. There 
 is a distinctive and oftentimes predominant moral 
 development, which, while separating men and women 
 from the masses in the quality of their current living, 
 and the standards of high and unselfish devotion to 
 others, is by no means equivalent to the possession of 
 a spiritual capacity quickened into active realization 
 of unseen things. There is no reflection upon one's 
 moral excellence, because of an innate inability to 
 appreciate the delicious harmony of music. Such an 
 
194 Ecce Spiritus. 
 
 unfortunate incapacity we might commiserate, but 
 would hardly condemn. Neither would one in the 
 least reflect upon the eminent virtues and graces of 
 a character like that of Harriet Martineau, which, 
 while perfectly at home and decidedly a power in the 
 realm of ethics, was lamentably deficient in that pecu- 
 liar sense we call spiritual. And it seems all the 
 more trying to be obliged to make such a statement 
 of one who so long and faithfully identified herself 
 with the cause of practical goodness, without leav- 
 ing the least possible reflection upon her life. There 
 will always be those who ask if this is not enough; 
 who will say, What more and greater could she 
 have had? 
 
 But only a slight comparison of her experience 
 with that of many another, equally virtuous and phil- 
 anthropic and with fully her completeness of mental 
 equipment, will convince us of the partialness of her 
 capacity. There was a dull hopelessness in her life, 
 grand as it was in its aspect of Spartan rigor and 
 absolute integrity, but yet grand, as we cannot but 
 feel, at the expense of something infinitely truer and 
 sweeter and more helpful. If that, indeed, were all 
 that was possible to her, consistent with strict intel- 
 lectual honesty, then did she do well to die with 
 what calmness and composure she might in her 
 finalities. For her stern, uncompromising sadness 
 was better than any certainties, however sweet, which 
 must have been purchased by her at the cost of delu- 
 sion. A man would better hide himself in the rocks 
 and caves, where no meaningless din of prima donna 
 
Immortal Life. 195 
 
 may reach him, but only the honester cry of hungry 
 crows, than stultify himself with Mozart's praises and 
 a headache when there is no room for music in his 
 soul. Nevertheless, the testimony of any such shall 
 not be taken as to the genuine increase which musi- 
 cal possibility adds to life. 
 
 There is nothing sadder than the sadness of such 
 people as Harriet Martineau, who with what seems 
 the fulness of mental endowment yet miss the one 
 faculty that crowns and harmonizes all the rest. 
 The much that they are and do, their unquestioned 
 effectiveness in many of the most needy quarters of 
 life, its charities, reforms, and ameliorations, renders 
 it a delicate and certainly a disagreeable task to criti- 
 cise. But the fact cannot be overlooked that, where 
 they see nothing, others, no more to be despised intel- 
 lectually than themselves, find the deepest realities 
 and most undeniable facts of consciousness. 
 
 When, therefore, it is said that the certainties of 
 life, and the ability from within to ignore the appar- 
 ent limitations of that life are determined by the 
 plane of living, it will be understood that reference 
 is made fully as much to the stand-point and capacity 
 of vision as to the theory of conduct. The latter is 
 always only an expression of something more radical 
 and essential within, and can never be a first-hand 
 source of authority. Spirituality does not ignore 
 conduct, but addresses itself to that out of which 
 conduct springs and of which it is merely an index. 
 It has to do with the motives, the will, the aspira- 
 tion. It lies in at the heart, although we hear of it 
 in manifold forms of expression. 
 
196 JEcce Spiritus. 
 
 The elevation of this plane (a thought which most 
 quickly suggests itself to our minds), it is evident, is a 
 matter largely within our control, as well as measura- 
 bly dependent upon natural capacity. It is some- 
 thing within the easy grasp of a few, born through 
 stern struggle and bitter trial in the many, and appar- 
 ently beyond the reach of a certain other few, who 
 have in them no innate possibility of apprehending 
 the spiritual relations of things. That it is open to 
 the majority of mankind as a capability that only 
 needs culture and exercise to become a conscious 
 power is, we believe, just as true as that for a minor- 
 ity we can yet see no hope of its communication; 
 although, in the latter case, we have no right to judge 
 in a matter about which so little is yet practically 
 known. The same culture wisely and efficiently 
 brought to bear here, that is directed so persistently 
 toward superficial acquisition, might reveal a spiritual 
 capacity as universal as that of life itself. 
 
 We have no quarrel with Providence in this respect, 
 but take the facts as we find them. We have no right 
 to arraign the wisdom that sends beings blind and 
 deaf and dumb into the world, least of all until we 
 have studied deeper into the possible laws which gov- 
 ern such incompleteness, and have gained the fuller 
 obedience in which lies its prevention. Neither would 
 we question the wisdom which permits the too com- 
 mon inability to appreciate spiritual reality, assured 
 that, when at last the day of fuller science and riper 
 obedience shall have come, it will then as well be in 
 our power to avert the half conception, and utter 
 
Immortal Life. 197 
 
 want of real education which ushers into the world so 
 many abnormally constituted and undirected beings. 
 
 The more closely people stand related to these 
 things, the clearer and more indubitable they will 
 appear. But this fact in no degree derogates from 
 the positive reality of spiritual things. There is 
 nothing which comes within the sphere of our possi- 
 ble understanding, which is not bounded by the same 
 law. Even the world itself depends for its concep- 
 tion in the mind upon the attitude and developed see- 
 ing power of the subject. Not as a bare material 
 mass, although here there is sometimes difference of 
 statement of the same external fact ; but the uni- 
 verse, in its larger and higher relations, is not found 
 in the hands of men to be one, but manifold in aspects 
 and meanings, according to the eye or the mental 
 attitude wdiich surveys it. We might almost say that 
 no two persons see nature absolutely alike. Hence, 
 the possibility of such a word as "original" in the no- 
 menclature of poets and thinkers. All, in general, can 
 see ; but many, it is evident from countless testimony, 
 cannot see what there is to be seen. No intellectual 
 person would deny that it was necessary to get close 
 to the heart of nature, to study her in constant and 
 loving appreciation, to be in willing and receptive at- 
 titude toward her suggestiveness, in order to have an 
 adequate and a satisfactory knowledge of the world. 
 Even here, there are those who answer the commonest 
 expression of delight in its beauty with scepticism. 
 Even here, in the commoner sphere of outward 
 nature, men often need a work which goes to the 
 
198 Ecce Spiritus. 
 
 root of vision itself. It is the same eye of which 
 Jesus spoke so often as seeing, and yet seeing nothing. 
 There is no field of inquiry more interesting, in this 
 connection, than that of the peculiar limitations of 
 the visual organ, — an inquiry that is almost as old as 
 the power of vision itself, but which has, of late, come 
 into special prominence as a study of scientific and 
 practical importance. Daltonism struck a blow at 
 the arrogance of the materialist's position, more dam- 
 aging than any which could come from the purely 
 spiritual side ; and, while its bearings upon the ques- 
 tion of spiritual certainty may yet be indeterminate, 
 it furnishes a very suggestive field of study and com- 
 parison, the possible importance of which we are not 
 now prepared to estimate. So much, at least, it has 
 demonstrated, — that defective vision is more common 
 than absolute blindness, and by no means peculiar to 
 any realm of sight, be it spiritual or physical. Not 
 only are there persons born with eyes perfect in every 
 other respect, who can distinguish only a limited 
 range of colors; but it is by no means certain, as is 
 acknowledged by those most conversant with the mat- 
 ter, that black and white, about which they have no 
 apparent difficulty, mean the same to them as to the 
 mass of people. The matter is still in dispute, and 
 seems likely to find no absolute demonstration. The 
 natural or rather unnatural inability to see the true 
 relations of moral purity and defilement, or to make 
 material and spiritual distinctions, may be only an- 
 other phase of the same structural incompleteness. 
 One person in every twenty-five is more or less in- 
 
Immortal Life. 199 
 
 capacitated for distinguishing color. Says Goethe, 
 " The remarks made by color-blind persons as to ob- 
 jects about them are so perplexing as almost to lead 
 one to doubt his own sanity." But they are no more 
 so than the asseverations of those who, wanting noth- 
 ing else, are impelled to ridicule the things so real to 
 others who are possessed of spiritual sight. 
 
 With no disposition to carry this comparison far- 
 ther than our present knowledge will allow us, we 
 can yet assert that common incompleteness of vision 
 has no more bearing against the facts of vision in 
 one sphere than another; and if, by reason of this, 
 spirituality must be doubted, so must material cer- 
 tainty as well. Manifestly, the higher the sphere, the 
 rarer the perfection of insight ; and the fact remains 
 that the boasted definiteness of matter and its prop- 
 erties has been assailed almost equally with the posi- 
 tions of spirituality by the science of the day. Further, 
 when we come to the assertion that spiritual insight 
 is a power to be educated and developed, we find that 
 it is supported by the experience of the race, in the 
 more primary realm of physical perception. Mr. Glad- 
 stone has advanced the theory illustrated from Homer, 
 that in ancient times the sense of color was generally 
 crude and incomplete; and that, from the time of 
 man's initial efforts to see, there has been going on a 
 process of gradual development of the organ of vision. 
 In other words, nothing was given to man complete, 
 but everything, lower as well as higher, subject to 
 growth and improvement. Probably there are pro- 
 portionately fewer people color-blind in the world 
 
200 Ecce Sjnritits. 
 
 to-day than in the time of Homer, while the possi- 
 bility of still further reducing the proportion is a 
 matter in the hands of the scientific educators of the 
 day. It may even be found that this is a primary 
 step in the direction of that other fuller power of 
 sight, which is to be unfolded from within, nay, which 
 is to be born into, the human possibility, by those who 
 now take up and carry on to practical fulfilment the 
 work that Jesus began. 
 
 Evidently, the first thing to be done is to awaken 
 the sense of need. The root of the difficulty, with 
 the lower class of minds, is in the fact that they ques- 
 tion little, because but slightly perceptive of the value 
 of spiritual things, and as yet unconscious of any 
 want of them in their lives. Among people who 
 earnestly desire to go below the surface, the strength 
 of this yearning to know is the prime condition of 
 enlightenment. But there is on every hand a too 
 ready acceptance of such temporary makeshifts as 
 come in the way, a willingness to halt at the first rude 
 rebuff to a nature keyed to the intensity of longing, 
 and in sadness or bitterness to attempt the glorificar 
 tion of negative resignation or loud denial of man's 
 ability to know. The need is hushed to sleep by 
 the song of habitual and uncomplaining indifference. 
 The great gain which resides in the fact of its very 
 perception is lost, and the advanced position of a 
 nature consciously awakened to the want of some- 
 thing higher is abandoned to the enemy. 
 
 The vision begins as a possibility in the perception 
 of the need. That need is born of life, while the 
 
Immortal Life. 201 
 
 vision at its fullest exercise creates a new possibility 
 of life. He will be apt to live most, who sees most 
 and looks most clearly into the things which make up 
 and minister to true existence. Accordingly, he will 
 go for the root and authority of vision, not to philos- 
 ophy nor science, but to life itself. When he would 
 ask out of his quickened delight and consciousness of 
 being if this can possibly come under any law of 
 death, he will go to the same source. What, in an- 
 swer, does life say? Nothing save this: that it is 
 sufficient unto itself, takes no account of death, ac- 
 knowledges none, fears none. Even the pagan Soc- 
 rates can say, with a laugh for all his tormentors, 
 "Bury me, if you can catch me." It is only when 
 one is not conscious of himself that he acknowledges 
 a possible grave. But, when he is so conscious, he 
 does not stop to argue the question for which there 
 is no room in his philosophy. 
 
 Life, at its best, is so large as to crowd out minor 
 issues. It is vital and positive, and not too easily 
 disturbed. The crown of its elevation and thor- 
 oughness comes in a composure that will not be 
 lured away from the heart and centre of reality. It 
 is not strange, but eminently natural and proper, that 
 the thought of death should strike terror to one who 
 is conscious of nothing but materiality, whose highest 
 intelligence and affection are conceived to be wholly 
 bound up in the motions of the body. Death is no 
 merely occasional event in the life of man. He does 
 not live, physically speaking, for seventy or eighty 
 years, and then by reason of a purely new factor, now 
 
202 JEcce Spiritus. 
 
 for the first time introduced into his experience, die 
 once and for all. Death is the constant companion of 
 physical existence. Beginning with the first breath, 
 it completes itself in tireless process every seven 
 years. The man has died all the time that he has 
 lived, his life consisting of two complemental proc- 
 esses, forever going on side by side, the one a con- 
 tinual tearing down of tissue, a waste of vital sub- 
 stance, and the other a power of repair, a recuperative 
 energy, which is not life itself, but only one phase of 
 the physical reality. The nicely balanced thing we 
 call life resides fully as much in the waste or dying 
 as in the recuperation. It matters not which stops, 
 the person dies. It is as fatal to arrest the due pro- 
 portion of waste in the system or to overstimulate 
 the recuperative activity as it is to lack vital energy 
 itself. Physical life does not consist, as many seem 
 to think, in the mere ability to repair waste, but in 
 the presence of waste as well. Every time he breathes 
 or thinks or moves, the man dies, stimulates the proc- 
 esses of disintegration, in order that he may take a 
 fresh start to live. One day, be it sooner or later, the 
 nice equipoise of waste and repair forces within him 
 is jostled out of order; and one or the other, it mat- 
 ters not which, stops. Then, since dying and living in 
 him are no longer preserved in finely balanced adjust- 
 ment to each other, he dies utterly. But the signifi- 
 cance of the actual moment is vastly overrated in 
 our thought. Death has the closest and most vital 
 relations to physical life at every point of its progres- 
 sive development. The well-taught person, who lives 
 
Immortal Life. 203 
 
 his life as a problem of infinite possibility at his 
 hands, and not as an irresponsible something upon 
 which he has a never-failing claim, knows that death 
 is not an alien entity introduced into life at the mo- 
 ment of its culmination, but only a little more of the 
 same sort of which it has ever been made up. 
 When it comes, it is with no jar, no break, in the 
 continuity even of his thought. It has never been 
 absent from his consciousness, even though conscious- 
 ness has never acknowledged its essential reality. It 
 is one of those things which men may be conscious of 
 without ever realizing. 
 
 What wonder that one who knows all this, or even 
 is dimly conscious of it, without anything else in the 
 inclusiveness of his word " life," should be unable to 
 get beyond the grave in his conclusions ! Speaking 
 on the higher plane, we are either alive or dead. If 
 dead, there seems to be no hope for us but to die still 
 further in the contemplation of the annihilist's heaven 
 of unconsciousness. There is logical virtue in this 
 intellectual conception of the annihilist. It is good, 
 relatively, with the merit of all the positive consis- 
 tency which can be brought to bear against the posi- 
 tions of life. It is infinitely better than the half-way 
 platitudes which bring the whole matter of immor- 
 tality into intellectual confusion, by claiming an arbi- 
 trary existence after death, based upon nothing but 
 the say-so of ecclesiastical synods and priestly assump- 
 tions. We have not had a good time in this world 
 and therefore — oh, much-suffering therefore! — an- 
 other world must be provided. As if it took a special 
 
204 Ecce Spiritus. 
 
 universe to correct the mistakes of the Almighty ! 
 Not to be, we say, is infinitely preferable to this 
 makeshift immortality, which belies God and belit- 
 tles life; which, founded on no adequate reason, 
 grounded as a necessity in no universal law, and 
 with but little understanding of the life it would 
 perpetuate, asserts that imperishable being is to be 
 given later on to non-being, by an arbitrary creation, 
 as in some sort a religious reward of merit. 
 
 If we are alive, — we do not say have life, for it is 
 life that has us, — there is no possibility of our dying. 
 Here, as in physical nature, there may be a process of 
 death spiritually going on beside, and at times defeat- 
 ing, the full consciousness of life. But the only true 
 life of which Ave know is related to God, and shares 
 by nature and necessity in his indestructibility. 
 
 We have only enlarged the facts already stated in 
 regard to life, and carried out to legitimate and nec- 
 essary conclusion the principle they illustrate, to 
 understand the very simple and logical position of 
 Jesus with reference to a future existence. As we 
 have described the attitude of the well-taught and 
 serious person toward the facts within him and their 
 inferences as to the future, so Jesus approaches the 
 whole matter. Indeed, it is that which we most rev- 
 erence and admire in him. He said so little of the 
 future, but fixed it so certainly, so irrevocably, in a 
 network of actual present experience in him made 
 available to humanity. In him, we ever seem to 
 hear the reiteration of the Greek Nemesis, "Not too 
 much, not too much," where overstatement would 
 
Immortal Life. 205 
 
 have undermined his efficacy. We cannot with the 
 would be dogmatist deplore the want of explicit 
 teaching; nor can we assert with the unbeliever that 
 in consequence of this Jesus must be said not to have 
 taught immortality. He feels the supreme need of 
 keeping their thoughts down to life, and of impress- 
 ing its great reality first of all and without any rela- 
 tion to conditions of here and there. He must not 
 say too much of the future, lest they look ahead and 
 forget to live. Nor will he lower his conscious cer- 
 tainty to the belittling exigencies of proof. Every 
 attempt at demonstrating the doctrine of immor- 
 tality, as if it were something that needed proof and 
 had to be thrust upon the consciousness from with- 
 out, has reacted to the weakening of the faith of 
 those to whom it has been directed. The ages when 
 there has been least spiritual life have been the ages 
 of the most elaborate attempts at proof. Outward 
 demonstration is the lame resource of a low state of 
 living. 
 
 But read the life of Jesus, and carry out to logical 
 deduction the entire drift of his thought, and see if 
 the fact of a life unconscious of any possible extinc- 
 tion is not everywhere present. Apply his principle, 
 as seen everywhere else, and no other result will be 
 attainable here. It is basal, and hence out of sight ; 
 a part of every-day consciousness, and therefore not 
 to be much talked about nor insisted upon. But 
 what he does say has in it the positiveness of asser- 
 tion, the calmness of a certainty which goes even 
 beyond the statement of facts, to the habitual silence 
 
206 Ecce Spiritus. 
 
 which takes them for granted. There is a root-prin- 
 ciple below all his incidental teaching, and to this we 
 must go. All that he stood for necessitates and in- 
 cludes a conception of life consciously and eternally 
 related to God, and unaffected by the fear of death. 
 He did not so much reveal immortality, as relieve life 
 of the contingency of possible extinction. 
 
 Jesus is here original chiefly in the conception and 
 method of his statement rather than in the fact which 
 he impressed. The idea of immortality was old, but 
 he pushed the idea into reality. Nor will the claim 
 put forth by his admirers that he actually originated 
 or introduced a life where there was nothing but 
 death before, stand the tests of reality. Jesus made 
 no such claim for himself, nor could he in the nature 
 of things have done so intelligently. The fact of 
 enduring life is bound up in the constitution of the 
 being received from God, nor could it by any possi- 
 bility be divorced from it. Life cannot be given to 
 anything which does not already live by virtue of its 
 very creation. Death can impart only of itself, and 
 life only of itself, but neither can pass into the other. 
 Jesus found this fact early in his experience. Then, 
 resting upon it as a foundation, he turned his atten- 
 tion to men. They, and not the doctrine, are his 
 chief difficulty. It was enough for Jesus to have 
 brought life and immortality to light. He addresses 
 himself to the death in man's consciousness, and finds 
 a ready mastery there. The trouble is not that men 
 have no potential life. The facts are all on their side. 
 But their sole difficulty is in non-realization. Accord- 
 
Immortal Life. 207 
 
 ingly, he left the facts as they were, fundamental and 
 indestructible, and needing no help of his ; and, with 
 barely more than a calm inference as to their reality, 
 he strove to bring man up to them. They were clear 
 to him, but must be made clear to the universal com- 
 prehension. The danger is in man, not in the facts 
 themselves, which can be surely forgotten or tam- 
 pered with or overlooked, but never rooted out. 
 
 Therefore, Jesus directs his effort toward man, and 
 not toward the metaphysical difficulty. He is every- 
 where practical, and supremely fitted for effective 
 savior ship. Let men live up to their full capacity, 
 and the work of controversy will stop. The Chris- 
 tianity which is to be the outcome of his spirit and to 
 carry on his delegated work must be a simple and 
 natural evolution of the facts of being out into con- 
 scious and supreme exercise. It must show what 
 makes against and harms true life, what keeps man in 
 darkness and disbelief. It will not say to humanity, 
 You in and of yourself are dead, — except in trespasses 
 and sins, tamperings with the higher privilege, — but, 
 if you embrace a technical form of faith, you will by 
 that act inherit an immortality otherwise impossible 
 to you. But rather it will say, You can come to con- 
 scious perpetuity of life only through spirituality, — 
 the method, the spirit, the principle of Jesus. It will 
 not say, The prize of your faith will be to live for- 
 ever, but To live will be the converting of your make- 
 shift faith into a conscious certainty. It will have no 
 reference to rewards of merit in its assertions as to 
 the future, fearing punishment far less than it loves 
 purity and truth. 
 
208 LJcce Spiritus. 
 
 People ask if they shall live after death who have 
 not yet lived at all, and the only answer is Live now! 
 As well display the learned conclusions of the college 
 before nursery benches as hope to help the world's 
 dead with the vision of heavenly glory. The certain- 
 ties of the future lie in the positive realities of to-day. 
 People think that they can merely exist now, and then 
 be ushered by and by into the completest conscious- 
 ness and enjoyment of life. But it is worse than use- 
 less for one who does not in any sufficient sense live 
 now to question as to the hereafter. The problem 
 lies nearer home, while the final answer for him must 
 yet be far away. The crucial moment is ever the 
 present. The wise man has not far to look to find his 
 future. And, when the experience of to-day is deep- 
 ened and lifted to its limit of current blessedness, 
 from that lofty altitude the mysteries of the Highest 
 will not be too distant. Indeed, they will be mys- 
 teries no longer, except in matters of detail, which 
 latter in any sphere are generally interesting in pro- 
 portion to the faintness of the perception of the 
 central and abiding fact. 
 
 With such a lofty outlook, and an inlook so pene- 
 trating and comprehensive, we do not wonder at the 
 calm assurances of Jesus' life. We see them taking 
 hold of and moulding his entire nature, until the high 
 commission grows to be part and parcel of his very 
 consciousness; and he lives his own life in living for 
 humanity. His was the pivotal experience. His con- 
 sciousness of divine things stands ever in from our 
 commoner circumference of knowledge, drawing us 
 
Immortal Life. 209 
 
 to the heart of the great reality. From the centre 
 streams the light that makes our object and our 
 way plain. It is the illumination of true, perfect life 
 shining into and shaming all poorer experience. It is 
 God's light, that only fails to brighten the outermost 
 circumference of being because men bear too far 
 away. The cry then is, To the centre! 
 
CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 SYMBOLISM OF THE CROSS. 
 
 Naturally enough, Christian interest and affection 
 have ever centred about the tragic element in Chris- 
 tian history. Nothing in the life of Jesus is so effect- 
 ive with the mass of people as his sorrows. He is felt 
 to be through these things in some especial sense the 
 interpreter of the shadier and deeper sides of human 
 experience. But nowhere is the attention so fixed 
 upon this figure of the man triumphing through 
 struggle and suffering as in the closing scenes of his 
 life, when he stands helpless and alone before the 
 very worst that earth can do. The boy in the temple 
 attracts our instant notice. The hint, the promise, the 
 suggestion of something mighty to come from this pre- 
 mature intentness, gives an engaging flavor of romance 
 to the deep-felt seriousness his words and attitude 
 inspire. We are powerfully moved by the man met 
 at the threshold of active life with the peculiar temp- 
 tations of genius, — tempted, as such are, not so much 
 from without as by the strong and as yet unsubdued 
 energies in his own soul. We feel the eager beating 
 of that Jewish heart, in which age-long hopes and 
 deep popular currents of feeling had culminated. 
 We seem to see the race in conflict with a new-found 
 
Symbolism of the Cross. 211 
 
 motive to the Highest in this fine, susceptible nature 
 of its crowning character. It is the past, the nation's 
 heart and history, the hardened fibre of its traditional 
 thought and life, struggling against a principle which 
 has now, for the first time, emerged into the con- 
 sciousness of a representative it is not prepared to 
 receive. But, when the tragic element that runs 
 through all the lonely experience — the self-abnegna- 
 tion from within and the painful opposition from 
 without — culminates in the cross, all other feelings 
 are merged in profound reverence for the man. 
 Everything has led up naturally to this point. It is 
 what we must have expected, feared, hoped, from the 
 beginning. It did not seem difficult to picture this 
 character, so consistent everywhere else, in this 
 crowning, ordeal that was to come. But, when he 
 actually comes before us bearing his cross in a double 
 sense, — a sense we can scarcely hope to comprehend, 
 — from which he rather seems to suspend himself, 
 through that strong bending of his nature to higher 
 necessity than to answer any trivial end of his tor- 
 mentors, we are forced from our attitude of criticism 
 to that of pure wonder and awe-stricken love. But 
 the exigencies of our later mood, while not in the 
 least affecting these primary inspirations, call for an 
 understanding of this most striking and characteristic 
 event in human history. If it be merely the pageant 
 of a man dying for his convictions, as countless 
 others in times before and since have done, we shall 
 only vouchsafe to this particular martyrdom a mo- 
 ment of our long attention and wonder at the mighty 
 sacrifices of men. 
 
212 JEcce Spiritus. 
 
 If this be all, Jesus is no sterner, no more fearless 
 and uncompromising, than many a Hebrew prophet, 
 and is at best but the beginning of a new series of 
 martyrs in a cause that, though newly named, is as 
 old as humanity itself. This is a common spectacle 
 in the history of every religious system. There are 
 none of them which have not been built up on daily 
 and final crucifixions innumerable. And it is not 
 until we discover the original motive and meaning in 
 this crucifixion of Jesus that it becomes charged 
 with peculiar impressiveness for our minds. Mani- 
 festly, so individual a character, a life so utterly 
 moulded to singleness of aim, and guided by a prin- 
 ciple never for a moment lost sight of, must have 
 intended more than a simple spectacle in so hack- 
 neyed a resource. It cannot be that we reverence 
 Jesus merely because he was a martyr, but because 
 of some peculiar and all-sufficient import in the sacri- 
 ficial act. 
 
 The Christian world has done well to insist upon 
 the mighty meaning and saving efficacy of the cross; 
 but, when we come to the almost universal under- 
 standing of what is comprehended in that word, the 
 idea for which it stands, approbation is not so easy. 
 As a symbol, it has been made readily effective, capa- 
 ble as it has been of conceptions popularly useful, but 
 neither accurate nor adequate to the highest needs. 
 It is said that the cross symbolizes an act of substitu- 
 tion, that Jesus in this painful process of dying took 
 upon himself the sins of mankind, paying for them 
 and pacifying offended Deity by his blood, — a view 
 
Symbolism of the Cross. 213 
 
 utterly abhorrent to our most fundamental and cher- 
 ished notions of God, as well as hostile to all the 
 known facts in regard to sin and its possible vindi- 
 cation at the bar of broken law. It mutilates the 
 character of that consistent Being who works so nat- 
 urally and orderly by processes grounded in the law- 
 abiding structure of things. It so wars against our 
 root conception of what God must be, if he be at all, 
 as to invite the alternative of consistent atheism 
 rather than this conception of a contradictory Provi- 
 dence. God does not need to be appeased by butch- 
 ery; nor have his laws 5 ordained in the beginning, 
 ever yet failed to take care of sin in their own good 
 way and time. By no possibility of divine or human 
 law could one being bear the sins of another, or one 
 death in any degree remit the universal penalty 
 thereof. Sin is a violation of law; and Jesus said he 
 would save from sin, but it was by restoring the 
 law to its supremacy. It had reference to future 
 transgressions rather than to penalty for those already 
 committed. His salvation was one from sinfulness, 
 from sin in the singular, and all disposition and desire 
 to trespass, rather than from sins. He would not 
 pamper, bat perfect the race. Least of all would he 
 take away the necessary expiation wrought out in 
 suffering in every individual soul, by which alone it 
 can hope to be purified. 
 
 Without entering upon a technically theological 
 discussion, we need not suppose as a motive of the 
 cross any such strained and arbitrary disposal of 
 human responsibility for sin, so long as law can be 
 
214 JBcce Spiritus. 
 
 seen to be adequate for such an end; nor have we any 
 right to ascribe to Jesus in this one experience a con- 
 ception of God which violates the entire spirit and 
 teaching of his life. 
 
 Nor can we agree in that view which regards the 
 cross as a necessary test of unselfish devotion to man- 
 kind. This supposed motive still needs a farther 
 motive, a specific end to be gained, inasmuch as to 
 merely die for another is a questionable service. Our 
 ideas of martyrdom have been modified to this extent 
 that we now think it a greater test of devotion to live 
 in self-sacrificing helpfulness to one's friends than too 
 easily to resign the struggle. We are all familiar 
 with the terror of death, but there are no sensitively 
 organized natures that do not dread many of the 
 alternatives of living more. In spite of all our shrink- 
 ing, the fact remains that death is one of the readiest 
 solutions for countless evils, a solution which men 
 accept every day rather than face the inevitable. 
 Voluntary death is not a common type of courage, 
 but of cowardice. Bitter as the ordeal of death is, it 
 takes vastly more bravery and strength of character 
 to live than to die. 
 
 " When all the blandishments of life are gone, 
 The coward sneaks to death — the brave live on." 
 
 The sufferings of parting from the flesh are as noth- 
 ing to the despair and miseries of earth. Criminal 
 statistics show that the almost universal choice of 
 State prisoners is the gallows rather than such life 
 as is left to them, while the annual record of suicides 
 
Symbolism of the Cross. 215 
 
 indicates which way the balancing stands in many 
 minds. There are many things, evidently needful 
 and salutary to be borne, which men would rather 
 die than meet. The courage is all on the side of 
 living. 
 
 Jesus sees this, and it is in no temporizing spirit that 
 he approaches his martyrdom. He can look ahead 
 and see what is before him, a life whose trouble at the 
 best would far outweigh any that he has ever known, 
 a life of hunted tearfulness, of strange and bitter 
 vicissitudes, of faithless friends and implacable ene- 
 mies, a life stripped of joy and rest because of this 
 salvation men despised. He knew that the short-lived 
 agony of the cross was preferable to this. The shame 
 of it could not touch his conscious purity. The pain 
 of it could not daunt one already pained to his being's 
 core with the almost universal spiritual death of the 
 people he loved and tried, with so little apparent suc- 
 cess, to serve. He saw that, if it were possible in the 
 exigencies of the higher purpose which by his martyr- 
 dom he was to subserve, it would have been better for 
 him to live. Spiritually, they needed the contact and 
 constant inspiration of the man. They would suffer 
 for the want of his clear insight into shams, his caustic 
 rebuke of all superficiality, his moving assertions of 
 oneness with God. He foresaw, what speedily fol- 
 lowed his death, the temporizing and worldliness, the 
 fatal tendency to formalize, that sprung up the moment 
 his living influence was withdrawn. Doubtless, he 
 longed to stay, had not a grander necessity absorbed 
 his attention. He did not accept the cross as the 
 
216 Ecce Spiritus. 
 
 opportunity for a great spectacular triumph, which 
 should henceforth catch the wandering thoughts of 
 men, and call to himself ready sympathy and not over- 
 discriminating regard. The great spiritual hero of 
 humanity stands above any such vulgar resort, with 
 attention fixed alone upon the heart of things and the 
 very highest possible motives. 
 
 As yet we have found no intelligence in the crown- 
 ing act of the great Christian drama. We still lack 
 adequate motive for so commonplace a claim upon the 
 admiration and wonder of mankind. If we go no fur- 
 ther than this, the cross rather tends to weaken than 
 to strengthen our regard, seeming, as it does, so 
 unworthy of the exalted mind, the consistent and pro- 
 gressive purpose of the man. So far, Ave have not 
 seen, what ought certainly to appear, the necessity for 
 the cross. We cannot fully yiel 1 our reverent allegi- 
 ance until we see some place that it is to fill in the 
 unbroken chain of Christian influences. Its sacred 
 significance lies not with us, but in itself. We are not 
 responsible for even our indifference, before it has 
 shown some mighty claim in and of itself to our faith 
 and affection. 
 
 Jesus, then, was here, as before indicated, for the 
 full and perfect development of the spiritual idea. 
 This was his sole object, — the complete triumph of 
 spirit over everything else, and the due subordination, 
 not condemnation, of matter. There are eternal con- 
 siderations, and low and temporal ones. What is 
 their order and place in the true scheme of life? 
 That is the one vital question of life and religion. 
 
Symbolism of the Cross. 217 
 
 Jesus had shown this everywhere else, had proven the 
 principle in every minor issue of experience; and 
 there yet remained for him the supreme test, the 
 crowning expression, which, was to fix. the application 
 for all emergencies and forever. His way to the 
 headship of the race lay through martyrdom of the 
 lower to the higher. Without the cross, his system 
 would have been incomplete. It meant sinrply No 
 Compromise. 
 
 Bit how? Could he not have shown this in some 
 other way than dying? Let us ask again, What wars 
 against spirit? The answer is, Low subserviency to 
 matter. What stands in the w r ay of life? Death. 
 If men can rise above these two in conscious suprem- 
 acy, their salvation is assured. But to meet death 
 from the stand-point of superiority is both the most 
 difficult and most comprehensive test. As an ordeal, 
 it tries as nothing else the strength and fineness of 
 our spiritual vision. It is not one of the issues, but 
 the issue of experience, most sharply outlining as it 
 does the two spheres and the respective motives of 
 each. If spirit is to triumph, here is the thick and 
 bitterness of the fight. 
 
 But this is not all. Our motive is not yet complete, 
 until we see the peculiar necessity which existed for 
 this in the case of Jesus. At the very outset, the spir- 
 itual principle for which he stood was brought into 
 contrast with considerations of external grandeur and 
 power. All through his ministry, he struggled with 
 a gross and radical misapprehension in the minds of 
 his followers. To them, he was the possible restorer 
 
218 JEcce Spiritus. 
 
 of the lost Jewish splendor, which all their traditional 
 expectations had taught them to look for in a Messiah. 
 Even at the last, the old hope had not been completely 
 rooted out, in spite of the stern rebukes of the Mas- 
 ter, who was offended by nothing more than by this 
 clinging literalism, this narrow nationalism, against 
 which his pure spirituality seemed to make so little 
 impression. The conviction grows with him that this 
 attitude on their part, which is typical as well of the 
 attitude common to all men and times, must ever stand 
 in the way of a complete realization of his object. 
 The line must be closely and clearly drawn, the tem- 
 poral distinguished from the Eternal. The spiritual 
 must rise up clear of the low entanglements of sense. 
 The spiritual must be all in all. It had become neces- 
 sary, such were the conditions surrounding him, to 
 yield something, to compromise somewhere, or to suf- 
 fer at the hands of the powers he had offended. He 
 could not longer carry on his work, and hope to escape 
 the vigilance that was waiting to entrap him. If he 
 would not yield his principle and mitigate his inci- 
 dental hostility to the Jewish Church and the Roman 
 government, he knew that he must die. He could not 
 compromise. Hence the alternative. 
 
 But in all this there was more than a simple dying 
 for the truth. It was in a special sense the natural 
 and necessary evolution of his spiritual principle out 
 of abstract conditions into organic unity and practical 
 effectiveness. He did not die merely to avoid re- 
 nouncing his position, but to carry out and fulfil it. 
 It was a positive, not a negative step in his progres- 
 
Symbolism of the Cross. 219 
 
 sive career. It had meanings deeper than at first 
 sight appeared. Dying, under such circumstances, be- 
 came the only life. It was in reality a life issue with 
 him, and not one of death. It was the insistence on 
 the essential, the grand assertion of indifference, on 
 the part of one so occupied with the vital fact, to all 
 accidental phases of experience, which is the neces- 
 sary condition of true life everywhere. It was here 
 that the spiritual neophyte would halt and fear and 
 tremble in the insufficiency of all partial acceptance 
 of the highest. Death is the door at which all sys- 
 tems of faith wait in trial; but the spirituality of 
 Jesus takes the initiative, and tries death itself at 
 the bar of a conscious and positive superiority. The 
 suspended Christ means this, — means spirituality. 
 The body is there, but we do not see it. Least of 
 all would we try to picture the cross in all its gross 
 and hideous details. We would not linger too long 
 on the outward symbol, hastening on to the real 
 cross, which was and is inward. It was the soul 
 that triumphed, not the body. It is spirituality that 
 comes out clear and distinct from the fading outlines 
 of the earthly man at rest in the painless sleep of 
 death. 
 
 But mark the j)eculiar conditions of Jesus' martyr- 
 dom. He was young, barely past thirty, in the full 
 health and vigor of early manhood. The records do 
 not agree with the common impression which makes 
 Jesus one of that order of beings which we call effemi- 
 nate and poetic. They represent no weakly dreamer, 
 but a man whose life was passed out of doors, whose 
 
220 Ecce Spiritus. 
 
 arms were apt at labor, and whose pulses were keyed 
 to the enjoyment of uninterrupted health. No phase 
 of nature, and nature's zest in purely physical bright- 
 ness and perfection, escaped him. There are no mor- 
 bid fancies, no touches of melancholy, in this emi- 
 nently healthy nature, which so willingly relinquished 
 a world it loved for the sake of that which demanded 
 greater love and allegiance. Indeed, that world meant 
 both more and less to him who read deeper into 
 its meanings than to those who lived upon the sur- 
 face. Surely, he was not incapable of being stirred 
 by the prospects which in a special sense it held out 
 to him. Not yet was he hunted and persecuted to 
 the extent of weaning him from the love of the 
 world. He did not die a weary, broken-down, dis- 
 heartened man. But two years had passed since he 
 began his wonderful work, a period full of many 
 inspiring thoughts and pleasant memories; and he 
 was yet fresh and free and youthful. There were no 
 wrinkles on the forehead of the face, which in its 
 dark outlines bore the sternness of the prophet race 
 from which he was descended, together with the 
 marks of that later and peculiar fineness which had 
 stamped him as of a new race. Although estranged 
 from Judaism, he was yet a Jew in all outward char- 
 acteristics, and had none of the Grecian fairness 
 which Christian idealism has ascribed to him ; never- 
 theless, the character and physique were Grecian in 
 that pure and painless love of nature, which reacted 
 in physical health and harmony. 
 
 Contrast the sickly body of Paul, with its evident 
 
Symbolism of the Cross. 221 
 
 influence on his mind, his hasty and sometimes narrow 
 judgments, his sudden shif tings of religious ground, 
 his volcanic impetuosity of temperament, with the 
 calm and normal poise of Jesus' nature. Paul was 
 always longing for martyrdom, only too ready to con- 
 front death with his consuming zeal. Jesus, on the 
 other hand, approaches his cross in calm deliberation 
 and a full conviction of the meaning of the act. He 
 will not be caught unaware nor surprised into the sit- 
 uation, observing the wise caution of a man who is to 
 make external misfortune serve an end determined 
 from within. He will not hasten the end ; but, as the 
 end draws near, he will himself go to Jerusalem. 
 
 So the sacrifice of Jesus becomes representative. 
 It is a man giving up all of the lower; we do not use 
 the word merely in its moral relations, but relatively, 
 as referring to spheres of enjoyment that might offer 
 a possible compromise with the highest. His posi- 
 tion is inclusive, and covers all the ground. In all of 
 its shadows, the light of his pure principle is clearly 
 brought to view. Jesus could not have perfected his 
 spirituality and made it plain to others in any differ- 
 ent way. From one side, it has many relationships 
 with the lower, as being the higher law that completes 
 it, but also, from another side, it stands out opposed 
 and uncompromising. The antagonism of matter is 
 not in itself, but in the human attitude which accepts 
 the material in place of something more enduring. 
 The cross is that line of demarcation between com- 
 promise and conscientiousness, whereon is the rad- 
 ical insistence of Christianity. Along this line there 
 
222 JEJcce Spiritus. 
 
 is nothing given man to enjoy in which it is not law- 
 ful to participate. But until this line is fixed, not 
 arbitrarily, but as an essential, vital principle, not as 
 a narrow letter, but as the very spirit of nature's laws, 
 it is useless to talk of salvation. It was necessary, 
 then, that Jesus should put this principle to severest 
 test. He must furnish not a single ray, but the broad 
 sunlight of life. There must be no situation and no 
 emergency uncompr eh ended in his sublime attestation 
 of the highest. So long as he can live out his prin- 
 ciple, he will gladly live; but it must be the princi- 
 ple that lives, and no vain semblance of himself. Up 
 to the date of the cross, he had shown his principle 
 of life : then and henceforth, it showed itself and him. 
 lie did not die, but life as a concession and death as a 
 terror. 
 
 The spiritual facts were structural, but this was 
 their first realization and expression. God had never 
 been afar off, but now he was near in possible con- 
 sciousness. Sin was still here, but it had come under 
 a new law. Men were called upon not to think too 
 much of their imperfections, but to dwell on the 
 highest. Human lowness had found its alternative. 
 In them, the alternative was to live the higher; in 
 him, it was to live also, until a compromise ajDpeared, 
 and then it was to die. He did, indeed, bear the 
 sins of the world in his suffering to show men the 
 way of life, but he was no spiritual Atlas with human- 
 ity's load on his back. He bore them rather in the 
 hand of a new and better possibility. A soul was 
 born in them, with at last the conscious power to 
 transform, not deny, the inheritance of matter. 
 
Symbolism of the Cross. 223 
 
 So a natural, healthy spirituality rises out of the 
 grave, calling upon mankind in practical application, 
 not necessarily to die for its attainment, but to vital- 
 ize in experience the principle of life it brought to 
 manifestation. To live is the burden even of the 
 cross. 
 
CHAPTER XV. 
 
 THE FAITH OF THE FUTURE. 
 
 The test of a religion being its practical effective- 
 ness, — the widest possible adaptability to the need of 
 men both individually and collectively, — what shall 
 we say of Christianity as it has been herein considered 
 in view of this demand ? Surely, all has not been said 
 in the fullest statement of its abstract relations. The 
 question still remains unanswered, whether religion is 
 to pass from the common keeping of the race and 
 become a sublimated and purely individual commun- 
 ion between man and God. Are the needs of human- 
 ity as such to be left unrecognized in any future ser- 
 vice? Is the human element to disappear from the 
 worship of God, man caring no longer for the nearness 
 of man, but only for union with the divine? In short, 
 is a church possible without supernaturalism ? Is 
 there any bond of sympathy and fellowship in a pure 
 Christian spirituality? 
 
 Manifestly, the time for such a criticism will come 
 when it is seen how the principle of Jesus creates a 
 new life and dependence in the individual soul, estab- 
 lishing as it did in his case, and does in the case of 
 all, direct relations with the Father, and putting the 
 law of life in the heart and members over any 
 
The Faith of the Future. 225 
 
 external statement or bond of union. Not only will 
 this spiritual independence be urged against it, but 
 also that the strength of religion as a power in the 
 world has ever been in the creeds and formulas 
 which have banded and kept men together in a tan- 
 gible sort of way. 
 
 But, whenever the criticism may come, the question 
 as to the continuance of the Church is already here, 
 born not of any fresh interpretation of Christianity, 
 but of that earlier traditional form which with all its 
 practical and tangible appliances has been so long on 
 trial before the world. The negative spirit of the 
 age, the product of false assumption and unreason in 
 religion, has reached not only to the theologies, but 
 to the instrument of all theologies, the Church itself. 
 One whose interests and affections are still in the 
 sanctuary is startled and disturbed by the frequently 
 expressed opinion that the Church has had its day, 
 and will in the future be voted inoperative and obso- 
 lete. A ready reference is had to the statistics, which 
 reveal a steadily decreasing rate of church attendance, 
 a falling off in that practical test of faith which leads 
 young men to prepare themselves for the work of the 
 ministry, as well as a universal lessening of that tradi- 
 tional reverence paid aliRe to ordinances and func- 
 tionaries in the Church, which is the surest sign when 
 found that organized religion lias a vital hold upon 
 the people. The drift of the age is seen on the one 
 hand in that return to ecclesiasticism which means 
 retreat from the living issues of the day to safety 
 within sanctified walls ; and on the other in the more 
 
226 Ecce Spiritus. 
 
 wide-spread and characteristic tendency toward indif- 
 ference as to surroundings and toward simplicity of 
 method in the public approach to God. Between 
 which two, it is feared that the instrumentalities of 
 religion are losing their influence, and that, whatever 
 of unseen and individual communing there may be, 
 there will soon be no longer any "visible church"; 
 that whatever religion may run the gauntlet of nine- 
 teenth century criticism will remain a personal experi- 
 ence rather than seek to become a public expression. 
 There can at the outset be no doubt that religion 
 is primarily personal and private. Christianity in the 
 hands of Jesus becomes in the main an individual 
 oneness with God, so irresistibly full and inspiring as 
 to constitute its chief leverage for moving men. The 
 mighty aim and inference of his completed work is 
 the establishment of like personal communion in all 
 men. With Jesus, they are to first realize God 
 within. All other steps fail until this is accom- 
 plished. The individual is first and last; but Jesus 
 shows clearly the qualification which cannot for a 
 moment be overlooked, that the individual finds 
 accretion and completion from two sides, the human 
 and the divine. There is a law of the soul, broader 
 than that of strict individualism, which necessitates 
 sympathy and strength in union, which asserts that 
 any adequate view of religion must not only recog- 
 nize creator and child, but be as truly the unit of 
 human interests, making men one in the highest, har- 
 monizing race life, and establishing out of multiform 
 humanity the crowning order of Mankind. 
 
The Faith of the Future. 227 
 
 Religion can never be divorced from the widest 
 possible conception of a Good and a True that are not 
 merely personal and peculiar, but in the best sense 
 universal. It exists to bring God and man together, 
 but also, since the way between them lies at least in 
 jDart through humanity, to find a nearer relationship 
 of man to man. It has to do with the higher family, 
 founded on more enduring ties, of which God is 
 surely Head, but to which no child of his is wholly 
 unrelated. Man's love to God must ever be man's 
 love to man. Every approach to divinity is a new 
 step taken in the direction of the highest human rela- 
 tions. There is no possible partialness in the highest 
 expression of man's nature. 
 
 This being so, the demand, the necessity for a 
 church, will still exist with the survival of the relig- 
 ious instinct, no matter how many changes in its out- 
 ward form may come. It may or may not be true 
 that the plainest assembly room will be deemed suffi- 
 cient, or even that the " Forest Hymn " of Bryant will 
 supersede the costly chants of the sanctuary in a 
 worship beneath the skies and trees. We are not 
 concerned with incidentals, but with the vital fact 
 that service of some sort, in which there is the union 
 of man to God and man to man, on a higher plane 
 than the ordinary, is an essential part of religion. 
 More even than this, it is born of the needs of human 
 nature, and not in any danger of being outgrown until 
 that nature itself radically changes. But here we 
 have a fixed quantity. Experience is one and the 
 same thing for all ages. It is the old sorrow that 
 
228 Ecce Spiritus. 
 
 mirrors itself in every fresh-falling tear. Our joy is 
 as ancient as life. There is in general no new expe- 
 rience and no new need. There is different consist- 
 ency and relation in the elements of life, but life's 
 problem and hunger repeat themselves in tireless 
 adherence to the purpose they were given to serve. 
 Comforts and alleviations, new data and fresh incen- 
 tives, in no wise essentially modify that hunger of 
 the nature for human nearness and spiritual help. A 
 stricter logic may enter into the mental acceptance, 
 but the condition of want is a never-varying quantity. 
 And, until the facts of human nature change, we need 
 not be apprehensive of any greater indifference to the 
 true service of God. 
 
 Indeed, with the purification of the instrument, 
 which must follow a clearer conception of spirituality 
 as it was in Jesus, we must believe the Church will 
 attain fresh suggestiveness and meet more general 
 acceptance. The worn-out associations will take on 
 a new significance as God comes closer to the realiza- 
 tion of men, and as men in ever-widening circles of 
 knowledge grow to a truer understanding of each 
 other and themselves. New life and beauty, and a 
 power never dreamed of before, will come to a com- 
 munion that asks for no compromise on the part of 
 any believer, which demands for its acceptance the 
 entire rounded orbit of man's faculties. The bond 
 will be sweeter, stronger, which is found in the com- 
 mon nature of men, and not in arbitrary conditions 
 which require either a peculiar mental constitution or 
 an intellectual compromise for their reception. 
 
The Faith of the Future. 229 
 
 A church is the formulation of the religious idea. 
 It is spirituality organized. There is a public life as 
 there is a private, and with it the necessity for a pub- 
 lic as a private recognition of the Being who is as 
 truly the Father of Humanity as of the individual 
 soul. In any other than a purely selfish conception 
 of its character and mission, religion must meet the 
 wants of the race viewed in their most comprehensive 
 aspect. But here is seen the chief difficulty. Here, 
 primarily, the assumed Church of Christ found its 
 greatest stumbling-block. To organize effectually and 
 lastingly is one of the most difficult of undertakings 
 in any sphere, and it is especially so in spiritual mat- 
 ters. The bond must be firm, but at the same time 
 elastic. It must not be from without, but from 
 within. It must represent the love and mental alle- 
 giance of the subject, and that, too, in their develop- 
 ment rather than in any period of apparent fixity. 
 There must be conviction, but no coercion, in its 
 adherence. It must touch the purpose it would sub- 
 serve at the one vital point, leaving all unessentials to 
 the easy play of individualism. 
 
 Mark how absolutely fitted to such a standard was 
 the Master's own requirement. Jesus was too prac- 
 tical not to see the necessity for combined and con- 
 centrated effort in an age so spiritually dead as the 
 one to which he especially came, and he organized 
 such elements as he could find to spread the gospel 
 life and light. But what simplicity of method, what 
 understanding of human nature, and of the theoret- 
 ical necessities of truth in its spread and continuance! 
 
230 JScce Spiritus. 
 
 Such as come to him, touched with the new fire from 
 heaven, he sends unto all nations. First, they are to 
 go, half the consecration resting in the readiness, the 
 willingness, and determination to do something. Then, 
 they are to preach the gospel to all men. The gospel 
 was the bond of organization. And what was it? The 
 good news. And what news so good, so important, 
 so sufficient for unitizing purposes ? That a way had 
 been found back to the Father, a way so simple, so 
 sure, so comprehensive that henceforth there need 
 be no stumbling along blind theologic paths; that 
 God had been brought back from that far corner 
 of the universe where a false Jewish reverence had 
 thrust him, to a possible realization that indeed 
 
 " Closer is He than breathing, and 
 Nearer than hands and feet " ; 
 
 that man had found himself anew, in the facts of a 
 nature perhaps hitherto suspected, but now for the 
 first time consciously known ; that the plane of life 
 was lifted \ that human nature had passed from heir- 
 ship to something of inheritance in the divine ; that 
 new dignity and grander responsibility were awaiting 
 the acceptance of a higher human destiny. It was 
 peace on earth and good-will to man. Not immunity 
 from outward struggle and warfare, — for Jesus said 
 that he came to bring not peace, but a sword, in this 
 sense, — but inward harmony, self-containment, spirit- 
 ual tranquillity. No guide can take us beyond the 
 battles, but this one shows us that in soul equipoise is 
 the only possibility of peace. It was an adjustment 
 
The Faith of the Future. 231 
 
 and reconciliation of all shortcomings and contentions 
 out of a spiritually awakened and regally conscious 
 nature. It was such good-will to men as was willing 
 to live this out before them in the face of every 
 temptation and sacrifice. 
 
 There were, to be sure, other incidental commands 
 as to the manner of their going, the purely spiritual 
 attitude they were to assume toward those to whom 
 they preached ; but, in general, the bond that held them 
 to a single aim was the ability and willingness to live 
 the life he did, and to restore men in the same silent 
 and effectual ways to their conscious manhood. He 
 organized his followers solely on the basis of practical 
 effectiveness. There was no doctrinal test in their 
 coming or their going. To believe in spirituality as 
 it was in him was the only requirement. The bond 
 had reference to mutual helpfulness, charity, sympa- 
 thy in action. It was to do something, with reaction- 
 ary effect upon men, not on the Church. The Church 
 was made for men rather than man for the institu- 
 tion. 
 
 Such, we believe, the bond will be in the future. 
 The organization of the Church will be inclusive, not 
 exclusive, and will exist to do the needed Christ-like 
 work among all classes of sinning and suffering men. 
 Philanthropy, charity, enlightenment, and all manner 
 of unselfishness and goodness, will be the gospel that 
 shall bring men together, and hold them in unity. 
 Spiritual propagandism will take the place of sectari- 
 anism, oneness of spirit and intention will supersede 
 community in opinion. 
 
232 Ecce Spiritus. 
 
 A glance at the thought and life of our time will 
 show that the drift is in this direction. There is a 
 sense in which men are growing apart, in which 
 individuality is taking the place of the old-time 
 dependence of one upon another. The race is 
 stronger, more self-centred than formerly; and the 
 element in social life which deified the pattern in men 
 has given place to that of independent personality. 
 And yet in many ways, and on the whole, the ten- 
 dency seems to be in the other direction. Individ- 
 ualism has culminated in an age of coldness and 
 exclusion, and out of the undue pursuit of selfish 
 ends comes a desire to draw closer the lines of com- 
 mon interest and helpfulness. The necessity is felt 
 upon every hand of reducing as far as possible the 
 waste of living by sharing minor cares and responsi- 
 bilities. To combine, to concentrate, to simplify, is 
 the desideratum of an age in which life has become 
 complex. Race existence first tends to spread itself : 
 then there comes the need of a closer union. A social 
 and an intellectual life so vast as ours is the condi- 
 tion of an immense loss in possible power, and men 
 are seeing that the only resource is to get nearer 
 together again. Inventive genius, that is doing so 
 much to simplify all processes of toil, cannot obviate 
 the necessity for that centralized social effort by 
 which alone human life is made easy and pleasant. 
 Indeed, it is working precisely in this direction. 
 It annihilates distance, enabling men to exchange 
 thoughts from separate homes or places of business, 
 nay, from continent to continent, almost as readily 
 
The Faith of the Future. 233 
 
 as if they were in the same room. There is no 
 longer any isolation. Our city streets and railway 
 lines, even ocean itself, have become great whisper- 
 ing galleries, in which all the world becomes as one 
 family. There is a movement in large cities looking 
 toward many homes in one, where the care and 
 drudgery of separate households, by being shared, 
 are felt by none ; and in the country the same ten- 
 dency is working toward a village life based upon new 
 scientific and social conditions, which shall do away 
 with the loneliness and dearth of resource which char- 
 acterize ordinary farm existence. The old-time am- 
 plitude of surroundings, with its attendant individ- 
 ualism, gives way before a constantly increasing 
 population. Outward need and intensifying experi- 
 ence demand the sacrifice of a few for the good of 
 the many. Civilization cannot go on without this 
 consolidation for mutual convenience and improve- 
 ment, and its work will be seen in the future still 
 more than in the past. 
 
 The inevitable result of this is a more intimate 
 knowledge of the affairs of men and nations, and an 
 intensification of the feeling of human brotherhood. 
 The community of human interests is established on 
 a new and firmer basis. Our close commercial rela- 
 tions, our wide-spread means of almost instant infor- 
 mation, in a day when the press is the gossip-monger 
 of the world, have tended to break down the barriers 
 of ignorance and prejudice which keep men apart. 
 Education is of the comparative sort, inclusive, not 
 exclusive. Attention was formerly given entirely to 
 
234 JEJcce Spiritus. 
 
 the "branches," but now it is the root below all 
 branches toward which in their separate study the 
 effort is directed. A science or religion, a history 
 or language, can only be left when its relativity to 
 others and the whole is ascertained. It is not con- 
 sidered by itself, so much as with reference to sci- 
 ence, religion, history, or language in their entirety. 
 The remarkable stimulus of steam was not confined 
 to external enterprise, but had as well its influence 
 upon charity, fellow-feeling, oneness of thought and 
 life. While the sects have been separating men, a 
 stronger current in the life of the world has been 
 slowly drawing them together. Religion is now more 
 frequently seen to be one, as government is ; and it 
 is the people, not priest nor potentate, who have 
 both in hand. "Behold the people is one," is again 
 the cry in a new and far more fundamental sense 
 than that it took as the utterance of Hebrew race 
 life. The people is one, and nothing that deeply 
 concerns its slightest part can be a matter of indiffer- 
 ence to the whole. A Church is coming, independent 
 of state or artificial process^ out of this very com- 
 munity of life and interest, which will more nearly 
 realize that simple social life in things religious which 
 Jesus created and sanctioned. The arbitrary barriers 
 which have separated men, and the externalities 
 which have been as stumbling-blocks, will still further 
 give way to conditions common to all, leaving noth- 
 ing to be gained by any form of exclusion. Even the 
 practical tone of life in general will be in accord with 
 the natural desire for all hek>ful and generous com- 
 
The Faith of the Future. 235 
 
 munion in the most central and inspiring sphere of 
 existence. There will be more rather than less relig- 
 ious association in the future, when the greatest 
 spiritual good of the greatest number shall be the 
 motto of the true Church of God and man, in which 
 sign and symbol shall in no wise shut the soul from 
 either the perception or the realization of truth. 
 
 This cannot come until the sacredness and power 
 of the Church have been accepted from a new stand- 
 point in the minds of men. Not until it is regarded 
 for more than its archaeological interest, as a mere 
 link with the past and that which preserves the 
 sacred, will it come to its full dignity and usefulness. 
 It asks for no excuses for its existence. It either is 
 or is not something definite and sufficient in and 
 of itself. There is infinite weakness and danger in 
 the position that a person owes his attendance upon 
 church service simply because of his children or soci- 
 ety. There is common confession that there is noth- 
 ing left in the Church but the occasion for setting a 
 righteous example. To stay at home until the chil- 
 dren are old enough to be harmed by the influence 
 of the habit is at best but to half-save them and to 
 insult the service of God. Either, we repeat, the 
 Church is something in and of itself, something need- 
 ful to every individual soul, without any reference to 
 others or any possible jDOsing for example's sake, or it 
 is nothing. 
 
 Indeed, the need is the fixed quantity in the prob- 
 lem. The body daily recognizes the want of nourish- 
 ment, while countless forms of intellectual pabulum 
 
236 Ecce Spiritus. 
 
 minister to the mind. The last factor in the human 
 trinity remains still unnoticed, and unmet with any 
 form of stated nutriment, until that spiritual force 
 which resides in sympathy and communion of soul 
 with soul supplies the needed food. So long as life 
 lasts, the various means of inspiration and impres- 
 siveness which a true Church of God can bring to 
 bear will have an important part to play. But the 
 Church must be careful to recognize and meet the 
 need. It must be honest, manly, simple, and sincere, 
 with the manliness and simplicity of Jesus. With 
 the gravest of responsibilities, it must be true to the 
 highest, and yet true in all practical and helpful ways. 
 The Church can no longer hope to stand in the - 
 strength of impregnable doctrine, but in its own 
 living desirableness, in the claim that is recognized 
 by every touched and satisfied consciousness. It can 
 always prove itself good and true in that sphere 
 which most readily yields allegiance, the inner life of 
 man. Here, it must pass on from bald statement to 
 actual realization, speaking out of consciousness the 
 last word it knows. Its virtue resides not in its spec- 
 ulative acumen, but in its experimental certainty. It 
 is a living voice, a personal power, and must get in close 
 to the realities. Its appeal is to life, and it utters 
 nothing that has not been lived. It does not hasten 
 away from the bed of sickness or the door of death 
 from sheer want of something to say or do, but is 
 born of a call that antedated all the parishes, in the 
 suffering and sweetened depths of actual experience. 
 To have assimilated temptation and sorrow in a per- 
 
The Faith of the Future. 237 
 
 sonal triumph is the only consecration to the min- 
 istry of God. 
 
 The faith of the future, using that term in its or- 
 ganized sense, will have to do with stimulation, and 
 not with undue soothing of the insatiable craving to 
 know. And yet it will be in no sense a chair of the- 
 ological learning. The lesson will be nothing until 
 it is driven home. It will not so much think as set 
 others thinking. A little contagious thought is better 
 than the most masterful but unmagnetic of ratiocina- 
 tions. The Church will be a power in the opinions of 
 men, but will not strive unduly to impart mere knowl- 
 edge, seeing how readily the human mind takes to the 
 condition of a sieve, and convinced that receptivity 
 of mind is less vital than exercise. Well-filled tables 
 without intellectual money and personal price have 
 never ministered greatly to the world's strength of 
 thought and life. The method of Jesus in thk; 
 respect must return, in teaching men to save them- 
 selves. He died for men, but for does not mean 
 instead of So he thinks for the benefit of mankind, 
 and in no sense to the lightening of its responsibility 
 
 The Church is the logical result of all right think 
 
 © © 
 
 ing in vital fusion, and operative directly and prai 
 tically in personal ways. To know about the soul 
 is not enough. Soul knowledge and its utterance 
 
 © o 
 
 and action constitute the only religious effectiveness. 
 The lecture is not going to take the place of the 
 sermon ; but the sermon itself is to be taken back 
 to the Mount, and dipped in the dews of a new con- 
 secration. The literary function of the puipit is to 
 
238 JEJcce Sjnritus. 
 
 give way to the living : the power of personality is to 
 do the saving work so long delegated to mere opin- 
 ion. It is to exist, not to ornament, but to energize 
 into vital play the realms of thought and feeling. " It 
 is not for the preacher," says Grimm, in his recent 
 Life of Goethe, u to offer on special occasions care- 
 fully studied productions, afterward to be printed, but 
 at every opportunity to pour out from a full heart 
 living words." 
 
 Life is perennially needy, but inspiration is born 
 of the need. The faith of the future will be a life 
 rounded from the body up to a realization of the 
 highest spiritual prerogative. Speculation may fail, 
 but life is larger than speculation, and may be trusted 
 to verify its own best intuitions, and find its way out 
 into certainty and peace. If the questions of the soul 
 rested in any more partial hands, we might well 
 despair for the future of religion. But, since all of 
 man is in the need, the coming experience of his life 
 and its history must be full of hope. So long as we 
 are sure that we cannot get away from ourselves, we 
 have no fear. When life ceases to be all there is, it 
 will be time for life to utter its complaint. Its fear 
 has ever come from without. It can find no fear in 
 itself, when it has come to the recognition of its 
 essential existence. And this inward assurance will 
 learn to find its completest expression as men come 
 together on the higher plane, as they associate and 
 sympathize as spiritual beings. True life needs a 
 new insistence, which can only come in its fulness 
 through this communion of soul with soul. 
 
"A VERITABLE HAND-BOOK OF NOBLE LIVING." 
 
 THE DUTIES OF WOMEN. 
 
 A COURSE OF LECTURES 
 By FRANCES POWER COBBE. 
 
 CRITICAL NOTICES. 
 An eminent American clergyman, writing from London, says : — 
 " It is the profoundest, wisest, purest, noblest book, in principle, aim, and tone, 
 yet written upon the True Position of Woman in Society. It should be circu- 
 lated far and wide among all classes of our countrywomen. It should be made 
 a class-book in our schools. It should become the ' Hand-Book ' and Vade Mecum 
 of young American girls." 
 
 " As I turn the pages of this book, I am struck with its candor, sympathy, and 
 insight, and wish that it might be read and pondered by both conservative and 
 radical women. The former might learn the relation of freedom to duty, and the 
 latter may well consider the perils which surround each onward step. „ . . Miss 
 Cobbe might have called her book 'Old Duties in New Lights.' It must help 
 many women to lead sincere, self-reliant lives, and to determine at critical 
 moments what their action shall be."— Mrs. Elizabeth K. Churchill, in the Provi- 
 dence Journal. 
 
 " The best of all books on 'Women's Duties.' Now that George Eliot is gone, 
 there is probably no woman in England so well equipped for general literary 
 work as Miss Cobbe."— Col. T. Wentworth Higginson, in Woman's Journal. 
 
 " I desire to commend it to the careful perusal of women in our own country, 
 as a book full of timely counsel and suggestion, and to all, as a valuable contri- 
 bution to the literature of ethics."— Julia Ward Howe, in Christian Register* 
 
 " Just now, the first ' Duty of Women ' is to read this whole book with studious 
 self-application: for it is rich in saving common sense, warm with the love of 
 man, and consecrated by the love of God." — Miss Harriet Ware Hall, in Unitarian 
 Review, 
 
 " What is best in the whole book is that she founds her teaching for women so 
 strongly in the deepest and simplest moral principles that her thoughts come 
 with a force and breadth which win for them at once a respectable hearing."— 
 London Spectator. 
 
 "One of the notable books of the season. . . . No true woman can read these 
 lectures without being stirred by them to completer life. "—Morning Star. 
 
 "In Miss Cobbe's latest book, ' The Duties of Women,' there is much to be com- 
 mended for its common sense and its helpfulness. Miss Cobbe goes down to the 
 principles underlying the topics of which she speaks; and the strength with 
 which she utters her thoughts is the strength of conviction and of earnest pur- 
 pose."— Sunday School Times. 
 
 " This is the very volume needed for parents to intrust to their daughters 
 when leaving home for school, and for earnest friends to offer young brides, as 
 a wedding gift." 
 
 Fourth Edition. Cloth. 12mo. &1.00. 
 
 New Cheap Edition. Paper. 25 cents. 
 
 For sale by bookseller 's, and mailed, postpaid) on receipt oj the Price y by 
 
 Geo. H. Ellis, Publisher, Boston. 
 
INSTITUTE ESSAYS; 
 
 READ BEFORE THE " MINISTERS' INSTITUTE," PROVI- 
 DENCE, R,I M OCTOBER, 1879. 
 
 CONTENTS : 
 
 Introduction, Rev. H. W. Bellows. 
 
 Father, son, and Holy Ghost, Rev. S. R. Calthrop. 
 
 The Relation of Modern Philosophy to Lib- 
 eralism, Prof. C. C. Everett. 
 
 Influence of Philosophy upon Christianity, F. E. Abbot. 
 
 Monotheism and the Jetvs, Dr. Gustav Gottheil. 
 
 The Idea of God Rev. J. W. Chadwick. 
 
 The authorship of the Fourth Gospel, . . . Prof. Ezra Abfot. 
 
 The Gospel of John Rev. Francis i iffany. 
 
 Methods of Dealing with Social Questions, Rev. J. P. Harrison. 
 
 Ethical Law and Social Order, Rev. Geo. Eatchelor. 
 
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 THREE PHASES OF MODERN THEOLOGY? 
 
 CALVINISM, UNITARIANISM, LIBERALISM. 
 By JOSEPH HENRY ALLEN, A.M., 
 
 LECTURER OX ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY IS HARVARD UNIVERSITY. 
 
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