MASTER NEGA TIVE NO. 92-80549 MICROFILMED 1992 COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES/NEW YORK as part of the "Foundations of Western Civilization Preservation Project" Funded by the NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES Reproductions may not be made without permission from Columbia University Library COPYRIGHT STATEMENT The copyright law of the United States - Title 17, United States Code - concerns the making of photocopies or other reproductions of copyrighted material... Columbia University Library reserves the right to refuse to accept a copy order if, in its judgement, fulfillment of the order would involve violation of the copyright law. AUTHOR: COBBE, FRANCIS POWER Ji JL J[ JLjmJj • RELIGIOUS DUTY R Lj/\ \^ MJJ • LONDON LJ jl\ a mJj • 1864 COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES PRESERVATION DEPARTMENT BIBLIOGRAPHIC MICROFORM TARHFT Master Negative # Original Material as Filmed - Existing Bibliographic Record Restrictions on Use: » « ■ " » :24 \ _ IC4 I (Xl t C^-C'^H-cJ cUiM.1 ^■f 5 3/ Jo. 0. 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'[ V i; ■I ADVERTISEMENT. LONDON : WILLIAM BT1V1W8, PBINTEH, 37, BKLL VAKD, TEVPLK SAB. This Essay on Religious Duty was originally destined to form portion of a treatise wliich should have included both the Theory of Morals and also three books of Practical Morals, Religious, Personal, and Social. The volume on the Theory of Intuitive Morals* has been published both in England and America, and the latter edition is still to be procured ; but the books on Personal and Social Duty will pro- bably never see the light. The present volume (which forms a complete treatise on its own topic) is re-published therefore independently, the first edition having been long ago ex- hausted. ♦ An Essay on Intuitive Morals, by FEAifCES Power CoBBE, 12mo, pp. 279, uniform with Religious Duty, Boston : Crosby & Nichols. London : Triibner & Co. a2 15073 I PREFACE. The Treatise on Ecliglous Duty contained In the present volume is designed as a contribution towards a vast object— the development of Theism as a Religion for the Life no less than a Philosophy for the Intellect. Hitherto the latter task has necessarily engaged chief atten- tion ; but now that Free Thought has sufficiently vindicated itself, it would seem that the time has arrived wlicn Free Feeling also may begin to trace out the fresh cliannels into which a wider and purer faith will henceforth cause it to flow. No pretension can be made in this book to accomplish such a purpose in any way adequately, far less exhaustively. It will be tlie endless, happy work of better minds, better ages, better worlds than the present, to follow out to its consequences the doctrine of the '■fiifc ■iMbpxMpaM*'^-^ mr-^H—^mlm VI PREFACE. Absolute Goodness of God, and demonstrate all which that creed demands from us of love and veneration, all it sanctions for us of trust and joy. These pages contain only such simple results of the great truth as the writer perceives. At best they may show a few paces of the path of Right immediately before us, a faint gleam of that Paradise ever descried through the strait vista of Duty. F. P. C. ^ CONTENTS. ■\ C OL.COLL. ^ NAORn i CHArTER I. The Canon of Religious Duty CHAPTER II. Religious Offences. Sect. I. Blasphemy II. Apostacy . III. Hypocrisy IV. Perjury . V. Sacrilege VI. Persecution Vll. Atheism VIII Pantheism IX. Polytheism X. Idolatry XI. Drmonolatry CHAPTER III. Religious Faults. I. Thanklessness II. Irreverence PAOB 1 17 20 31 40 43 47 55 65 66 67 79 Sect. >t 84 86 w^ I Vlll C'ONTF.Nl'S. Sect. III. Praycrlessness ,, IV. ImpenitcTico ,, T. Scepticism VI. Worldliness >f PA OB 94 96 98 104 Sect. ♦? >> CHAPTER IV. RELTorors Obligations. I. Thanksp^iviiig II. Adoration . III. Prayer IV. Repentance V. Faith VI. Self-consecration 109 142 164 231 282 310 CHAPTER I. RELIGIOUS DUTY. It is not the concern of the moralist, but of the psycho- logist, to investigate the fundamental principle of the Religious Sentiment in the human soul. That senti- ment may be, in its germ (as Schleiermacher has affirmed), a mere " sense of dependence." More ac- curately defined (as by Schenkel), it may be " a sense of dependence ethically induced."* In its perfect form it would seem to be best described as " the sense of abso- * (< 'A mere feeling of dependence still falls short of any moral element, wliich is never wholly absent from religion. Hence Sehleier- niacher's view decidedly needs correction on the ethical side. Not till it is ethically induced — not, that is to say, till it arises from a function of the conscience — docs the feeling of dependence properly pass into religion. And if we may say that there is no religion void of the element of dependence, we must, on equal grounds, affirm that there are (absolute) feelings of dependence which do not fall within the pro- vince of religion." — Article "Abhangigkeitsgefiilil," by Dr. Schenkel, in the Real Ervcy<^opddie fiir protcstantische Theologie und Kirchc, quoted in the Westmxfisier Review. The doctrine of Schleiermacher has been ably attacked by Mansell, Limits of Religious ThougfU, Lecture iv. Vlll CONTENTS. Sect. III. Prayerlessness . ,, IV. Impenit en 00 V. Scepticism VI. Worldliness tf PA OB 94 06 98 104 CHAPTER IV. Religious Obligations. Sect. I. Thanksgivinpf . 109 II. Adoration . . 142 III. Prayer . 164 IV. Repentance . 231 V. Faith . 282 VI. Self-consocration . 310 ■4 CHAPTER I. RELIGIOUS DUTY. It is not the concern of the moralist, but of the psycho- logist, to investigate the fundamental principle of the Reliofious Sentiment in the human soul. That senti- ment may be, in its germ (as Schleiermacher has affirmed), a mere " sense of dependence." More ac- curately defined (as by Schenkel), it may be " a sense of dependence ethically induced.''* In its perfect form it would seem to be best described as " the sense of abso- * "A mere feeling of dependence still falls short of any 7noral element, which is never wholly absent from religion. Hence Schleier- macher's view decidedly needs correction on the ethical side. Not till it is ethically induced — not, that is to say, till it arises from a function of the conscience — does the feeUng of dependence properly pass into religion. And if we may say that th'fere is no religion void of the element of dependence, we must, on equal groimds, affirm that there are (absolute) feelings of dependence which do not fall within the pro- vince of religion." — Article "Abhangigkeitsgefiilil," by Dr. Schenkel, in the Real Eiicyi^opddie fur protcstantische Theologie und Kirchc, quoted in the Westminster Review. The doctrine of Schleiermacher has been ably attacked by Mansell, Limits of Rcligix)us Thought, Lecture iv, « B v\ 2 RELIGIOUS DUTY. lute dependence united with the sense of absolute moral allegiance;** tlie Being on whom we depond being recog- nised as possessing the Right to claim, as well as the Power to enforce, our absolute obedience. In whatever depths of our nature the religious senti- ment may find its source, it is, however, sufficiently patent that the duty which it entails upon us is a real and actual one, not lying hidden among the obscui*e and vague feelings of the heart, but rising to the surface of speech and action, and demanding even the highest place among our recognised affections. Through that sentiment we have received intimation of, and have entered into relation with, a Being who, when so recog- nised, acquires in the nature of things a whole series of claims upon us. Had we no such sentiment, our under- standings might possibly have worked out inductively the " hypothesis of a God," though it is far more pro- bable they would have utterly failed to do so. But the " Great First Cause," even if thus brought within the field of our philosophy, and recognised further to be necessarily a perfect moral Being, would have remained for ever on the outside of our consciousness and beyond the sphere of human duty, had He not given to our souls an organ to perceive Him, a sentiment which can love our unseen Father. Possessed of this religious Sentiment, our religious Duty follows of necessity ; nay, it follows that all duty acquires a religious obligation, •and man becomes, before all other characteristics, a religious being. I RELIGIOUS DUTY. 3 In the first place, religion is ethically incumbent on all moral agents, because the absolute holiness of God constitutes Him their moral King and Master. This truth, in a certain vague manner, is so commonly recog- nised that there seems almost a degree of irreverence in attempting to show the grounds of that Divine authority which in our ordinary consciousness precedes any abstract morality, and is itself the sanction of all right. Never- theless, for religion's own sake it is most needful that we apprehend truly its real basis, whereon alone we may build such a faith as shall include all duty and all love, and shall exclude alike all idolatrous worship of the imperfect, and all demonolatrous dread of evil power or evil wisdom. God Himself, in making us rational creatures, has implicitly rested his title to our allegiance on His own moral perfection, for to such perfection alone is it lawful for such creatures to bow. He has given us natures which can regard with no veneration even Om- nipotence itself, if represented as united with the moral attributes of a fiend. We must know that God Himself is riffhteous before those hearts which he has made can adore Him. He deigns to receive no servile homage. Further, a religion which shall be identified with sound morality must recognise distinctly, not only that God is goody and so deserving our love and reverence, but that He is infinitely good, and so entitled to our absolute fealty and obedience. We must not regard Him (as a finite being, however virtuous, must be regarded) as a fellow-subject of the necessary law. He resumes the B 2 RELIGIOUS DUTY. ' whole Qf it in His own absolute holiness ^ and therefore rules us as King. His will is co-ordiiuite with all right ; He is the impersonation thereof, Himself the eternal Living Law. No ethical limits exist to His jurisdiction over us, for it is conterminous with morality itself. Inasmuch as any act is right, in so far it is God*s com- mand : inasmuch as it is God*8 command, in so far it is right. According, then, to this first grand view of the case, it appears that all duty, whether towards ourselves, our neighbour, or more immediately to God, is properly in strict ethics Religious Duty. But beside this primary relation of moral subjects to our King, whereby aU our duties acquire religious character, we stand in several other most intimate rela- tions to God, and from the imion of these necessarily arises the special duty which constitutes the third great branch of practical morality. This directly and ex- clusively Religious Duty, comprehending the actions and sentiments due by man immediately to his Maker, is the subject of the present book. We must briefly review the nature of these human and DiN^ne relations before investigating the principle of the obligations which are their ethical result. " Man owes all to God.*' It is a common kind of phrase. "We rarely pause to consider what it includes. Physically, he owes Him life, here and hereafter, his body and his soul, all his past, present, and future pos- sessions. Intellectually, he owes Him all he knows, all religious duty. he can erer know — the mental powers by which he acquires knowledge, and the instruction which men, books, and nature, have given him. Morally, he owes Him freedom — the vast and wondrous power of his own will to choose the right and reject the wrong ; and he owes Him the inward grace and outward moral provi- dence by which he is continually assisted in so doing. All these are his debt to God in the one character of his Creator y and a religion of gratitude necessarily founds itself upon them. But God is man's Judge, as well as his Creator. To Him it pertains to uphold the moral law throughout the universe of which he is King. Every breach of that^ law must be an offence against Him, as every act of obedience to it is one of obedience to Him. The sins we have committed during our lives, even those which were most directly offences against our neighbour or ourselves, were also so truly sins against God, that the cry of penitence (overlooking the lesser in the enormity of the greater offence) is almost justified, " Against Thee, Thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in Thy sight.'* We are thus placed before our Judge in a different position from that which we should have held had we not broken His laws. It is true that He knows no " wrath," that His goodness remains for ever unchanged while acting in accordance with His justice in executing the retribution, which is also correction. Nevertheless, we have become criminals before Him. To our religion is added, then, a third element beside moral allegiance and gratitude — that of « 6 RELIGIOUS DUTY. RELIGIOUS DUTY. contrition. And lastly, God is something else to us beside Creator, Benefactor, Teacher, Helper — something else beside Moral King and Judge. He is also the End and Aim of our whole being. We are created on pur- pose that we may know the ineffable glory and bliss of loving and adoring Him. We are moral beings, because such alone can apprehend his moral perfection ; we are immortal, and eternity will not be long enough to learn all His goodness, and grow more fit to worship it. In Him, and to Him, and for Him, are all things that we are or ever shall be — all the duty, glory, and joy of our everlasting existence. These things being so, the relation of man to God being such as I have described, the task seems no diffi- cult one to discover some maxim which shall express, at once, all the multitudinous rights of action and senti- ment thence arising, the aonom which shall embody all our own past and present intuitions of religious duty. Whenever these relations in which we stand to God have come out clearly before our minds or hearts, when we have studied His works and thought of Him as Creator, when we have striven for the right and looked to Him as Helper, when we have sinned and recognised that he was our Judge, when we have rejoiced in our human affections and thanked Him as our Father, when we have mourned beside the dead and turned to Him who alone is Lord of Death and Life, what are the intuitions which have come to us concerning the right tribute owed to Him ? Indifference, hatred, fear, irre- > verence, thanklessness, or thanks of lip-service ? Such ideas are absurd. Probably not one of them, save fear, has ever even presented itself to a human mind, far less commended itself as necessary and imiversal. Supposing that fear has sometimes seemed the fitting tribute from the powerless to the Omnipotent, will it stand the test of Necessity? Can we imagine no hour of joy, no paradise of blameless delights, wherein some other senti- ment, save dread, should move the heart of the blessed towards the Benefactor? Has it ever been our own sole intuition that we should /ear God? When we have awakened from our sins to abhor and renounce them, and turned in contrition, and yet in infinite hope of succour and restoration, to the Father of the Prodigal, was our cry one of slavish fear ? Only in the most im- mature and partial religious experience can this senti- ment have suggested itself at all, and even here it could never be recognised by the mind as of universal obliga- tion, as a necessary result in all time and space, and under every varying condition of the whole compound relation of man to God. But if fear cannot be accepted, nor bear the test of a sentiment of universal obligation, and if indifference, or irreverence, or thanklessness, be too obviously absurd to deserve consideration, what sentiment is there remaining which can possibly apply to the case ? There is but one, and that is love. The canon of Christ offers the definition of man's religious duty — ' 8 RELIGIOUS DUTY. Thou shalt Love the Lord thy God with all THINE Heart, and Soul, and Strength. This answers to the intuitions which have sprung in all our hearts in life's most living hours. And this finally approves itself as the one sole " law fit for law universal,'' the only principle which we can represent to ourselves as applicable to every case, holding good for all creatures for ever. Love is claimed from us by the perfections we per- ceive in our Creator and the benefits we receive from Him, and it is actually the only reciprocation possible under the circumstances. It is the sole reality in that return of debt which the eternal right requires should be made to such a benefactor as God; and it ought to be the germ of every outward religious serv ice or sacrifice which, with that love, and springing from it, is holy and good, and, without it, is worthless and insulting. It is true that objections have been sometimes made to the propriety of ranking the love of God as, literally speaking, a moral duty. " Love," it is argued, " is an emotion which is called forth by the presentation of lovable objects, and its nature is necessarily free, and unconstrained by the rigid mandates of the moral wiU.'^ This view, if fully carried out, would strike at the root of all morality, inasmuch as it would forbid the attempt to regulate those Emotions which are not only the springs of our outward actions, but are themselves inward acts, far more closely connected than any RELIGIOUS DUTY. 9 external ones with our progress towards that virtue of rational souls which is the ultimate fulfilment of the moral law. It is an indispensable postulate of all sound ethics, that the sentiments of all rational free agents possess a moral character no less real and necessary than their actions. And if this be so, the love of God must stand in the very foremost rank of those sentiments which are eternally and necessarily right for man to feel. We may prove the same truth negatively. The h}^othcsis is absurd that the performance of any num- ber of outward actions of respect, obedience, or worship, would fulfil the duty of spiritual beings towards the Lord of Spirits, while unaccompanied by any feelings of gratitude, trust, or adoration. We, ourselves, who can but little discern the inward movements of our brothers' hearts, and who can and do receive benefit from outward actions performed in our favour, though unaccompanied by genuine sentiments in the actor, even we disdain the oflfering of respectful but insincere words, unloving benefits, and heartless eye-service. How doubly mon- strous, then, it is to think of outward duty towards God, otherwise than as the manifestation of sentiments on which the value of those outward acts depends, as shadows depend on substance ! There is here no distinction of subjective and objective duties, no question of acts having an external legality divisible from the internal moraUty of their motives. God can be benefited by nothing that the whole created universe can do. There B 3 10 RELIGIOUS DUTY. is no virtue or happiness of His to be aided or produced by tbe children of earth. Our position is clear. We owe Him our all, and we must pay that debt to Him with Love, or pay it with Mockery. We ought then to love God. It is a hateful and odious thought, that of a moral being receiving such benefits as we receive, and recognising such perfections as we recognise, and yet feeling no love for the Good and Holy One. Does any man still reply, that what- ever he ought to do, he cannot love at word of command? Let him ponder a little Who it is that he is commanded to love. Cannot he, indeed, love that Being ? Does he feel that he must wrench his nature with some ter- rible violence, to make himself love the All-adorable Lord of Love and Goodness ? Questions like these are rank absurdities applied to the religious duty of a worshipper of the true God. So long as men believe that the Deity has displayed in human history a multi- tude of characteristics repugnant to their natural ideas of justice and goodness, so long there is perfect reason in the complaint that they are commanded to love that which, from the constitution of their hearts, they can- not love. But the case is reversed the moment we gain the blessed faith, that whatever we feel to be just and good, that, and infinitely more than that, is God — that whatever we feel to be unjust and evil, that He never has been nor will be. To love God now is merely to love that which we feel to be lovely— our own ideal of all amiable and venerable attributes. Thus the "conmiand** RELIGIOUS DUTY. 11 to love God, issuing, as it does, from our own true self, is simply the legitimation and consecration of our highest spontaneous affections, not the forcing of them into imnatural channels. As has been often said, it is much more the permission, "Thou mayest love thy Lord," than the command, "Thou shall love Him." Here is the culminating point of humanity and morality, and the result is a sublime and transcendent harmony. But, on the other hand, it is not only a permission. So weak are we, so easily led away by our lower interests, that we continually cease to think of God*s claims to our love, cease to cherish our holy affections, cease, perhaps, to live in such wise as that we dare to love God. Then comes in the command, "Thou shall love the Lord." It is a duty incumbent on us to do so. He has a right to it : our nature is in disorder and degradation without it : the eternal law of the universe is unfulfilled till we do it. It is indeed a privilege, a birthright, but tre- mendous is our sin if we relinquish or renounce it ! One objection, however, to the whole doctrine of reli- gious duty (and more especially to that of religious worship or service) may possibly have presented itself to the reader. "We may owe service," it might be said, "to any being whom such service can benefit. For example, we owe personal duty to ourselves, and can actually benefit our own natures; we owe social duty to our neighbours, and can contribute in reality to their welfare. These are intelligible duties, because their performance actually tends to a good result. But ■ ' - r * 12 RELTGlOrS DUTY. RELIGIOUS DUTY. 13 how can we owe a duty to a Being whose holiness and happiness cannot be increased? God does not want either the love in our hearts or the outward acts by which we display it. Our thanks, adoration, faith, can no more make Him happier or better than our blas- phemy, sacrilege, or atheism could injure Ilim. Unless, then, as a mere branch of personal duty, as an artifice for increasing our own sentiments of gratitude and reverence, what is the meaning of a religious duty? Why should we do service to One who cannot be served by anything we can do ? "* Here comes in one of the grand distinctions between dependent and independent morality, between a system of ethics which assumes the right to be merely the shortest path to the useful, and a system which proclaims it to be the sacrosanct necessary obligation of all rational free agents. If "right" and "useful" were really convertible terms, it would be impossible to find any warrant for religious services of love and thanksgiving other than in the direct mandates of the Being to be worshipped ; and these, if accepted as veritable, coidd, on the assumption in question, be only supposed to be * ** Inter Deistas quidam fueruiit, licet j>erpauci nuniero, qui omnem cultiim etiam internum rejecerunt, asserentes Deum nihil de illo curare, religiosisque actibus non moveri." — Anqladis SthicUf Pars. ii. Di3. 1. It is necessary often to state objections and difficulties preparatory to demonstrating tlie tnie ground of doctrines, but it is not always necessary to attribute every possible error to an actual flesh and blood heretic. issued for the benefit and educational training of the worshipper. Such, indeed, is the aspect given to their cultus by many Churches (especially of the Evangelical class), and the result is undoubtedly a lowering of the conception of worship from its proper character of the most sublime office of which man is capable, to the rank of a mere method of improvement, little, if at all, above that of listening to sermons or reading books of divinity. Further, the worship which is consciously self-educating, and nothing more, is, from that very circumstance, dis- qualified, in a great measure, from that purpose itself. A man who should ofier thanks to the Giver of his hap- piness solely because he hoped, in accordance with the laws of his mind, to increase his own virtue by such spiritual g}Tnnastics, such a man's self- prospective thanksgivings would possess little or no warming or elevating power, even if his system permitted him to seek his virtue as an end in itself, and not merely the means of his admission to Paradise. Each great branch of human duty has its own independent claims as a separate law of the eternal right. A man's own virtue IS the end of his creation. " Be perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect," is the first law of his being, which can be postponed to no other. But as it is not merely to warm his own benevolent afiections that he is bound to feed the hungry and clothe the naked, so neither is it merely as an excitement of his sentiments of grati- tude and veneration that he is bound to ofier thanks- giving and adoration for the infinite blessings and '^ 14 RELIGIOUS DUTY. RELIGIOUS DUTY. 15 perfections of his Creator. He is bound to worship because it is right that such a being as man should worship such a being as God. It is as much a part of eternal justice that the rational recipient of unnumbered benefits should return gratitude to his benefactor, as it is a part of justice that a murderer should be punished. It is Eight, necessarily and immutably Right, ante- cedently to all consideration of additional benefits to be obtained by such gratitude for the creature, or the ex- pression of a desire for it by the Creator. In the first place, then, as I have said, worship is demanded abstractedly by the eternal moral law. We have sufficient intimation of this truth by intuition; nay, the recognition of it seems to have long preceded the Evangelical idea of worship as merely the " means of grace.'' Heathens, in very low stages of religious deve- lopment, have counted thanksgiving as a debt obviously due to their invisible benefactors — to Jupiter the Libe- rator, to PhoDbus Epicurios, to ^sculapius the Healer. All ancient liturgies, Jewish and Christian, are full of that Praise which the more or less anthropomorphic creed of the worshipper substituted for adoration* In the second place, worship is incumbent on us as the means whereby we may obtain God's aid towards * "For with us, too" (as with the early and middle r>eriods of the Church), "the burden, the staple of the service is, it may be confidently affirmed, and will be more fully shown hereafter. Praise."— 7%<; PHn- eiples of Divine Service in the English Church. By Philip Freeman. Chap. i. sect. vii. the perfecting of our natures by His grace and inspira- tion. It is obvious that if we be morally bound to seek our personal virtue, we must be bound to seek the best assistance offered thereto. From the direct rightfulness of the case, arising simply from the relative positions of man and God, all religious Offences stand condemned, and the Duties pro- ceed of Thanksgiving, Adoration, Repentance, Faith, and Self-consecration. From the indirect rightfulness of the case, arising from the assistance offered therein to personal virtue, the duty proceeds of Prayer. The various religious obligations deducible from the canon of love to God may now be discussed in succession. Like social and personal duties, those of religion may of course be either fulfilled, or neglected, or contravened. The fulfilment of our duties towards God is (what may be termed) religious Virtue ; the neglect of them is a religious Fault ; the contravention of them a religious Offence. Religious obligations may be included under the heads of Thanksgiving, Adoration, Prayer, Repentance, Faith, and Self-consecration. The first three are the right acts for man to perform towards God ; the last three the right conditions of his soul. Religious faults may be similarly classified, as Thank- lessness. Irreverence, Prayerless habits, Impenitence, Scepticism, and Worldliness. Religious offences are Blasphemy, Apostacy, Hypo- i \ 16 RELIGIOUS DUTY. crisy, Perjury, Sacrilege, Persecution, Atheism, Pan- theism, Polytheism, Idolatry, and Demonolatry. I shall commence by discussing Religious Oficnces and Faults, of which a slight notice will show the im- morality, and then proceed to a more ample view of religious Obligations. CHAPTER 11. RELIGIOUS OFFENCES, SECTION I. BLASPHEMY. The moral law requires us to love God. This love is claimed by His moral perfection and by His beneficence specially displayed towards us. Now, a love which arises from adoration of moral perfection and gratitude for benefits received is manifestly exclusively a Ee- verential Love. In such a case it cannot be said that Reverence is founded on Love, but that Love is the climax and culmination of Reverence, the flower which ought to bloom out of its highest shoot. Further, in the case of a purely spiritual object of love, no human afiection, no pathological liking, being possible, the simply moral sentiment alone is capable of application. To detract then from Reverence towards God is to cut from under us the sole support of Divine love. Man could not pay, nor God receive, the smallest bud of love growing on any other stem. Of all actions which detract from Reverence, the first which present themselves are Blasphemies. These are not mere Faults of Irreverence, negations of due f 1 18 RELIGIOUS OFFENCES. honour. They are affirmative insults. The question which involuntarily suggests itself on contemplating in this light the sin of Blasphemy is, " How comes it that such a crime has ever been committed ? Where could this world produce the temptation overwhelming enough to force any rational creature to so mad an act ?" Alas ! it is precisely the sin of all others most com- monly perpetrated with temptations so small, that the moralist is at a loss to define wherein they may consist! Objectively considered, the degree of guilt of a blas- phemy is of course determined by the amount of con- tumely expressed therein. This standard, however, will be modified, and often reversed, by the subjective mea- sure of the blasphemer*s temptation. Phrases so hideous that to repeat them would be itself impiety have often been wrung by sharp agony from human lips. Are these to be compared to the sacrilegious scoffs of men in health and ease, whom the vanity of creating surprise at their audacity, or the merest wantonness of irreligion and carelessness, lead to hurl insults at the awful ma- jesty of God ? In these, as in all other religious offences, there is a singular sort of self-deception often existing in the mind of the offender. Accustomed to dread only the punish- ment, and not the guilt of sin, the man no sooner rises so far above anthropomorphic ideas of God, as to see that He can feel no personal vindictiveness against those who offend Him, than he leaps to the conclusion that there is no further fear of the great Judge inflicting any BLASPHEMY. 19 retribution whatever on religious delinquencies. It is almost superfluous to refute such a delusion. Sin against God can possess none of the palliations which the cha- racter or conduct of any other being sinned against may place in behalf of the offender. Objectively, therefore, religious offences are the greatest of sins. Ingratitude to a human benefactor, be it never so little excusable, cannot be equal in guilt to ingratitude to the Divine Benefactor, whose gifts have incalculably exceeded all others, and from whose love no mutability or fickleness has ever detracted. This moral guilt God, as Judge of the universe, will assuredly visit in exact proportion to its absolute demerit. It is not a vindictive being, neither an unheeding one, whom the blasphemer reviles ; but it is an all-righteous Judge, an ever- vigilant Witness, in whose presence he commits an offence of magnitude stupendous and terrific. The mildest form of this sin, which yet must be classed under the same head, is the practice of " taking God's name in vain " — using, in carelessness and jest, a refer- ence to Him whose awful holiness should be present to our hearts in solemn veneration whensoever we think of Him. Of course custom is commonly the immediate cause of blasphemies of this sort ; but it may well " give no pause '* to think how such habits can ever have been formed and have become common. How little can any man revere, in his graver hours, the dread sanctity of his God, who, in his lighter ones, is for ever associating His name with folly and profaneness ! 20 RELTGIOrS OFFENCES. SECTION II. APOSTACY. Bet^veen the offences of Blasphemy, Hj'pocrisy, and Perjury, and partaking of the guilt of all three, lies that of Apostacy. It is obvious that to constitute a moral crime this act must be either — 1st. A genuine lapse from a higher to a lower faith, or — 2nd. A false recantation of a faith really held by the apostate, and recanted hypocritically, from hope of some advantage or fear of some injury. As it is impossible, according to the constitutions of our minds, that the lure of a reward or threat of punish- ment can actually change the opinions of any one, and as such lures and threats can only warp the judgment where moral earnestness is deficient, we may consider that the first class of apostacies must always result either from such spiritual unfaithfulness as blinds the inward sight to the difference of truth and falsehood, or to such moral declension as exposes the judgment to be perverted by external hopes and fears. The offence then lies in such unfaithfulness and declension. The final act of profession is only the appearance on the surface of deep- I APOSTACY. 21 seated mischief below. There is no offence, however, of which we are less competent than this to form a judg- ment of guilt in any individual case. Even when we have convinced ourselves that one creed is actually purer than another, when both are thorouyhhj developedy it by no means follows that the particular proselyte to the lower creed has understood the dcA'elopments of either. Probably, in nine cases out of ten, public recantations which seem to us apostacies are actually, so far as the individual is concerned, the renunciation of doctrines which brought him no spiritual light, and the adoption of others among which he found some truths specially needful to his soul. The second class of apostacies, or those recantations which hope or fear leads a man falsely to make, con- stitute an offence against God of patent heinousness. That light which has been vouchsafed to us we deny and repudiate. We speak and act a lie in God^s sight, concerning directly God's own truth. I have said that the sin is related in guilt both to blasphemy and perjury. To the latter it belongs, inasmuch as the sanctity of the subject, even if no direct oath be made, involves the case in similar reference to God. To the former it belonjrs also, from the fact that the apostate must always profess to believe and actually assert God to be less perfect than in his heart he knows Ilira to be. He blasphemes, by affirming that the heathen Jove's character and history were attributable to the Father of Christ, or that a wafer could become a portion of Godhead. 22 RELIGIOUS OFFENCES. An apostacy committed from hope of some advantage, as to obtain favour, rise to a higher rank, or form a desirable alliance, is so manifestly impious that it is unnecessary to discuss it further. Very different, however, from the renegade who seeks rewardy is the imhappy apostate who shrinks from such punishments as human tyranny has often inflicted on the professors of an outlawed faith. Here is, indeed, the ultimate test and supreme trial of morals, that a man be called on to choose between death and a crime. That he is morally bound to suffer any torments, and sacrifice his life, sooner than renounce his religious faith, it ought to be superfluous to demonstrate. Yet, since the happiness-seeking philosophers have leavened the whole mass of popular thought, it has become not uncommon to hear it asked, " Were the martyrs bound to suffer as they did? Should we, in similar persecu- tions, be morally obliged to follow their example ? No doubt their acts were heroic and magnificent, but, surely, though duty may sanction, it cannot demand such a sacrifice. We might refuse it, and commit no heinous crime after all. What signify a few words of recantation obviously insincere, compared to a human life?" In the first place, it may be observed that the Personal duty of veracity ought, singly considered, to be felt sufficient to forbid all such lying recanta- tions. The law of truth permits of no exceptions. A man must not lie to save his own or any other life. APOSTACY. 23 Nay, as personal virtue is the end of the creation of each rational soul, the achievement of so noble a degree of it as the sacrifice of life in the cause of truth would be one of the terminations of this stage of existence which a man, fully imbued with the desire of that holy end, would accept in all readiness and cheer- fulness.* Secondly, false recantations are also offences against the Social duty of conducing to our neighbour's virtue. God has granted us a certain truth, and instead of sharing it with our brother, and proving to him how dear and sacred we hold it, we solemnly abjure it before him, and show it to be powerless over our dastard fears. Thirdly, and chiefly, false recantations are, as we have seen. Religious offences of direst guilt, involving at once perjury and blasphemy, the solemn, deliberate repudiation of God's most sacred lessons of truth. It is no marvel that the noblest human soids have preferred all deaths and agonies sooner than commit a crime like this, which seems the direct self-exclusion of the apostate from all future enlightenment of God's spirit. How dare a man hope to be led further to truth, nay, to be permitted to retain any spiritual sight, after he has deliberately abjured the light God's mercy has already bestowed ? If we may trust the history, the heathen Regulus attained this supreme achievement of virtue ; and that, too, when men believed the future life to be only a realm of shade, and that — ** Better, though oh the worst of terms, is life Than the most glorious death. " I 24 RELIGIOUS OFFENCES. But none the less — ay, all the more — for its imperative obligation, ought we to look to that awful duty of con- stancy with a veneration, making the martyrs' names the dearest in all human story, the glorious incentives to every achievement of ^'irtue. They are the heroes of the van-guard, who have stormed the citadel while we are lying without feebly beleaguering the outermost walls. And shall we dare, like the cold-blooded critics of the last degenerate age, to make light of those deeds which are the glory of our race ? It will freeze every generous impulse in our hearts to do so. " Vanity," " love of admiration,'* these, in sooth, are the springs to which men like Gibbon, writing in their luxurious libraries, would strive to trace the martyrs' valour. " Vanity ?" If vanity can do miracles like these, if vanity can make men stand firm to be devoured by lions and torn by human devils, to be lashed, crushed, flayed, and slowly roasted to death, then this vanity must be a splendid, a stupendous thing! something, I ween, capable of more glorious achievements than any senti- ment in the powdered head of an eighteenth century historian ! Away with such folly. Few evidences of scepticism show it to be more pro- found than the effort to trace great events to base causes, and heroic actions to degraded motives. There is, in truth, nothing more imphilosophic than such an attempt. The human soxil, with all its failings, is capable of being roused by noble motives and great demands, as it can never be wakened by selfish and petty ones. Who has APOSTACY. 2rj not seen how some poor, feeble-brained man or woman has answered the call of some emergency of affection, and has displayed a courage and wisdom such as the selfish cares of ordinary life had never brought to light ? And when we see a really great achievement of human virtue, we may ever feel assured that there is a great and a true motive in the heart of him who accomplishes it. Perhaps he does not recognise it himself: perhaps he may profess that he has some lower one — the hope of heaven or fear of hell. Believe him not. He could not have done a really noble deed had it been so. Love of God or love of man must needs have nourished the root of every martyr's palm. And what, after all, if, with the pure love of God, the sufferer for religion's sake has sometimes asked also for some last drops of the sweet love of human hearts to taste once more upon his cross of agony ? '\\Tiat if that " tliirst for the crown of martyrdom " which the hap- piness-seeking moralists of our day dare to speak of contemptuously, what if this almost superhuman ambition have mingled sometimes into one aspiration the elements of that Divine love which longs to suffer in God's cause, with that thrice purified human love which desires to bequeath a memory which shall be a religion — what of this, O scomer ? Are thy motives in seeking ease and wealth, and the pitiful distinctions of social Hfe, so super- exalted, that thou may est justly point the finger at the one poor human hope which the martyr has not resigned upon God's altar ? c 26 RELIGIOUS OFFENCES. 19 ) Never must we suffer the honour of these heroes of our race to be tarnished by vile suspicions ; never must we rob a leaf from their palmy crowns. Such glories as theirs are of endless use in showing us what man may become of great and holy, even here on earth. They are " the stars of our mortal night," and to draw a cloud over them is to consign ourselves to gloom. But pointing to them, believing, as we may believe, that what was of such radiant glory to human eyes was no less pure before Him who saw their consecrated souls, how fear- lessly may we answer all the dark doubts and accusations brought against humanity! Is that nature "totally depraved," all baseness, all weakness, which has proved its capacity for such transcendent virtue ? Against the hosts of sin we set the noble army of martyrs, and we challenge all the fanatics in the world to scorn a race from which that God-like band has been recruited from age to age in every land beneath the sun. Herein, too, lies the glory of it, that no Church can claim to be the sole " mother of the martyrs," or say that the nature originally " depraved " has been regenerated in her communion alone.* Every creed, even down to hea- • I have been anxious to form a list of the martyrs who suffered expressly for their denial of that doctrine of redemption whose accept- ance the popular creed asserts can alone restore virtue to our degenerate race. It is very difficult to construct such a martyrology, owing to the extreme paucity of sympathizers to record them — a paucity, by the way, which removes from these martyrs the last suspicion of a motive lower than the purest self-devotion. The following are a few of the best known : — APOSTACY. 27 * ^ thenisms, poor and low, have sent their contingent to the ranks; nay, it is the rule that men and women prefer martyrdom to apostacy, and the exceptions are the cases wherein they have swerved before any torment which cruelty could invent. The guilt of apostacy which would attach itself to a recantation uttered from fear of death belongs, of course, with infinitely less palliation, to those repudiations of religious faith which are made continually in our day, from motives of interest, subservience, dread of ridicule, Valentine Gentilis, a Neapolitan Arian, suffered death at Berne, 1566. (Mosheim.) Jacob Palaeologus, of Chio, burnt at Rome for Unitarianism. (Mosheim. ) Servetus, burnt by Calvin for Anti-Trinitarianism. George Van Paris, burnt in Smithfield, temp. Edward VI., at the request of Cranmer, for denying the proper Divinity of Christ. (Tayler's Retrosj)ccty p. 324.) Francis Wright, burnt for Deism at Norwich, in 1588. Bartholomew Legate, burnt in Smithfield in 1612, for Arianism. His life was offered at the stake, but refused. (See Robert Vaughan's Memorials of the Stiuirt Dyii.y p. 331.) Edward Wightman, burnt at Lichfield for Ebionite and Arian here- sies, 1612. (He and Legate were the last martyrs burnt in England.) Bainham— burnt in Smithfield for asserting that "if a Jew, Turk, or Saracen do trust in God and keep His law, he is a good Christian"— may perhaps be regarded in a still more interesting light, for his heresy consisted in denying the importance of creeds to salvation, yet he died sooner than recant his own. (See Froude, Hist. Eiig., vol. ii. p. 85.) To these may doubtless be added the hundreds of Arian, Jewish, and Moorish martyrs of the Middle Ages. Among Confessors stand fore- most the Unitarians Davidis and Emlyn. c 2 fl I 28 RELIGIOUS OFFENCES. in a word, from the thousand petty hopes and fears which our social state brings to bear on the actions of daily life. In some cases these hopes and fears may, even now, be of considerable force. Some charitable persons and societies do not scruple to offer the bribe of their dole to the subscription of their peculiar confession of faith. To refuse such terms when that assistance is really wanted nmst be an act of virtue in whose per- formance the charitable association has the share which Calvin had in the virtue of Servetus. On the other hand, parents, employers, teachers, in a word, superiors of all classes, work on the fears of those beneath them in thousands of cases, and bend to an outward acquies- cence in their creed many a soul which inwardly revolts from it. Even when there is no actual power of perse- cution, ridicule, or withdrawal of wonted kindness and affection, are influences of terrible weight on natures over -sensitive or deficient in moral courage. Very miserable sophistries are current on the subject of our duties in these matters. Few of us have not much to repent in the way of unworthy silences on our true faith, silences which, if caused by tenderness, were weak — if by any fear, cowardly and base. Vast numbers of free-thinkers especially, and, above all, the elder deists, seem actually to have accepted their antagonists* view of their own creed, and to consider that the next best thing to not knowing a truth was the not spreading it. Others, like Sterling, say that, as they are not pro- fessional teachers of religion, they may teach (even their APOSTACY. 29 own children !) the opposite errors ! It is marvellous that men do not see the turpitude, religious, personal, and social, involved in such conduct. For ourselves, a life in which the inward and the outward are in har- mony is absolutely needful to all moral health and pro- gress ; and that the stunted religious growth of many free-thinkers may be attributable to this inner rotten- ness, no one who knows his own nature can doubt. As to our neighbour, the simplest principles of bene- volence require us to share with him the truths which have been vouchsafed to us, and, even if he will not accept them from us, to set them before him freely with all the attractions we can give them. Each religious truth is an aid to virtue, it is a thought to enlarge the mind and to make it better. True, our power to spread it may seem almost null, but- Moses was "slow of speech," yet his stammered words are echoing still, and shall for ever echo down " the corridors of time.'' Who knows what fires we may ^indle if we will but speak that which we know — fires " to shine all England through ;'* ay, through all the world, perchance, when we lie sleeping ? It is not the strength of the hand which holds the torch, but the flame which crowns it, which causes the fuel to blaze. But be our powers small or great, they are those which God has committed to us. We are more account- able in his sight for not exchanging this talent of truth, than for hoarding all the gold in a miser's coffers. There is no measuring the consequences which would ensue if we all took to heart this duty of " casting our 30 RELIGIOUS OFFENCES. spiritual bread on the waters." Twelve fishermen changed the world's history by possessing a truth and believing that God required them to spread it. " There is plenty of truth in the world," says Philip Ilarwood, " but until it is spoken truth, nobody is the better for it. There is truth enough in England at this moment to bring the whole ecclesiastical and sectarian power of the coimtry to the ground in one week, if it were but spoken truth/' * Suppose that Luther had been checked by his fears from without, his self-distrusts within ! t * Lecture on Priestley, p. 13. t **How often have I," he wTites, ''in the bitterness of my soul, pressed myself with the Papists' argument, 'Art thou alone wise ? are all others in error ? have they been mistaken for so long a time ? What if you are yourself mistaken, and are dragging with you so many souls into eternal condemnation ? '"—Sir J. Stephen's Essays, b. i. p. 315. I "i HYPOCRISY. 31 SECTION III. HYPOCRISY. In the preceding section I spoke of that form of Hy- pocrisy which is more accurately classed as Apostacy, and consists in the profession of a creed in which we do not really believe, or the abjuration of one which in our hearts we hold to be true. Hypocrisy, as I shall here regard it, does not refer to the intellectual creedy but to the religious and moral feelings. It is the offence of pretending that we are more pious and virtuous than we know ourselves to be, or (singular paradox) of pre- tending that we do not feel and care about religion and duty, as in truth we do. Assuming that we are bound to " love God with all our hearts," and that He, at all times, sees into those hearts, and knows whether we fulfil this obligation, it is clear enough that to act before Him the living lie of a pretended piety is, in an outrageous degree, offensive and insulting. It is unnecessary to enlarge on a topic so fuUy imderstood. The actual gross hj^ocrisy of the Tartuffe and the Mawworm is abhorred and condemned by every heart and tongue. Not equally recognised, however, is the guilt of some of the milder forms of this vice, wherein the simplicity 32 RELIGIOUS OFFENCES. 1 of religion is still, although less grossly, violated. Nay, to many the concealment of serious religious feelings under a light demeanour is, doubtless, an act of hypocrisy done out of the very hatred of the offence in its opposite development — yet, in whatever way we falsify our true religious condition to the eyes of our fellows, must it not always involve offence before God ? Are we not boimd to live out simply and uprightly before men that which He sees us to be ; to acknowledge alike our heart's fealty to our liege Lord, and the miserable short-comings by which we fail in our allegiance ? In the first place, there is an hypocrisy of appearing hitter than we are, which shelters itself under the pre- tence of serving as an example to others. The man is not base enough to seek worldly gain or aggrandizement by such means, but he conceals his sins and errors on the ground of " preserving his usefulness," " saving the credit of his sacred profession,'* not "throwing a stumbling-block before the weak," or " giving occasion to the enemies of the Lord to blaspheme." He also attends public worship, observes the Sabbath, fro^Tis down free talk, and affects great gravity on religious matters ; all for the sake of good example, and because such things, though of no consequence to his soul, are doubtless so to the weak and ignorant. What ruin to the singleness of a human heart must be such a course as this ! How all real earnest repentance for a sin must be stopped, when, instead of sorrow for the past and resolution for the future, the mind is occupied by efforts HYPOCRISY. 33 ! to make the spectators believe it has never slipped, or, perhaps, that its fall was no moral lapse at all ! To be a contrite sinner in the eyes of God, while we strive to be a stainless saint in the eyes of men — what a contra- diction ! The pretence, too, of avoiding injury to the cause of religion is utterly futile. The world always does know, sooner or later, the most secret errors. There is no word more true in the Bible than that which declares " that what is spoken in the ear shall be pro- claimed on the house-tops." Hypocrisy only adds a double shame to the sins of " professors." And if there be any way in which erring man may really help his brother's soul, it is by showing him that he hates his own sin so heartily that he is willing to bear its shame, and hastens to renounce it openly and utterly. The more the repentant man is raised above us by age, character, parenthood — the more his frank avowal of error would affect us beneficially. Of all this much will be said hereafter in discussing the subject of repentance. As for the attendance at worship, &c., " for the sake of example," it is marvellous how any human creatui'es have ever had the presumption to entertain such an idea. Let any sane man consider what he does when he enters a church, and ask himself how his ** exemplary " behaviour therein must appear to God, and I cannot but suppose he will be sufficiently shocked to abandon such attempts for the future. For, either he must intend really to worship, to thank, to adore, and pray to the great Lord of all, or he must intend to make an outward c 3 34 RELIGIOUS OFFENCES. stow of 80 doing without any uplifting of soul. The latter conduct is grossly insulting to that God who watches him entering, with affected meekness, His house of prayer, and going through a pantomime of supplication and adoration which he declines to offer in earnest to that awful Searcher of hearts ! On the other hand, if he intends really to pray and give thanks, is it not the extreme of folly and presumption to think of performing such acts (the most solemn and sublime a created being can aspire to do) for the sake — not of his own soul, which he is imploring God to save — not of the endless mercies for which he is thanking his Benefactor — not of the Holiness he is adoring — but to show his neighbours that he thinks it fit and proper that men should worship God ! Conceive a man speaking out to God such ideas as these ! Conceive him commencing his prayers by the preamble, " O Lord, I come into Thy presence prin- cipally that I may show my servants, and my poor neighbours, that I consider it right and proper to honour Thee. And, being here, I confess I have sinned grievously,'* &c., &c. Either ** going to Church for example's sake" means this, or it means nothing, and the sooner we abolish the cant of it the better. On the other hand, the man whose hypocrisy con- sists in making himself appear woi^se than he is, stands in a position scarcely less false and morally wrong. Whatever his motive be — the fear of ridicule, or hatred of the opposite canting sort of hypocrisy, or false 1 m I HYPOCRISY. 35 humility* — in any case he sins both against God, his fellows, and his own soid. For ourselves, nothing is more needful to the health of conscience than that our inward life and outward profession should be in harmony. Well said Chaucer — " Truth to thine own heart thy soul shall save." If we desire to grow better than we are, we must, in the first place, be openly what we are. We must live out our own life of duty faithfully, uprightly, humbly, never trjdng to conceal our faults, and making no prudery about such poor withered charms as our virtues ever possess. The life of virtue is before all things a life of simplicity. The man who professes selfish worldly motives when he is conscious of better ones, who jests about lax and \dcious habits when his own are pure, runs most imminent risk of very shortly adopting those motives in earnest, and falling actually into those evil habits. When good thoughts come to him, as they come to us all, he is placed in the contemptible dilemma of either keeping silent because they are good, or uttering them with a blush, mayhap an apologetic sneer. But in larger ways than these, also, the position in which we stand with our fellows reacts on our own minds, and in a thousand different channels brings to us good or evil influences according as this position is true or false. • '* Dost thou for humility's sake lie ? Know that God doth not accept thy lying humility." — St. Augustine, Serm. cxxxi. iMta 36 RELIGIOUS OFFENCES. HYPOCRISY. 37 |l i In social duty such hj-pocrisy makes us offenders also. To show our brothers the " practicability of virtue/* * that is, of a hearty pursuit of it, even with all the failings they see, is the one great service we can render to their moral natures, and instead of this we do them the grievous injury of countenancing their errors. None may calculate the influence which we exert over each other in these ways for good or evil ; none may calculate the good which one individual may accomplish by simply and invariably (whenever it may be done without pre- sumption) upholding the right in every argimient at which he chances to be present, the true, just, kind, noble view of every question mooted before him ; none may calculate how the petty, but most grievous oppres- sions of domestic life are repressed by the knowledge that one spectator sees and reprehends them, if it be but by a reproving look to the offender, an encouraging smile to the sufferer ; none may calculate how many bad feelings die out under the consciousness that their utter- ance will find no sympathy, and how many good ones blossom and bear precious fruit in their natural atmo- sphere of confidence. In the case of very close relation- ships, where such influences for good or evil go on reacting immediately, the result is soon visible. A little prepon- derating good or evil at first start often decides the whole upward or downward tendency in the characters of husbands and wives for life. It is true that mere • S«e Kaut's Didactic of EUiics. ' negative virtue is always impotent. Divines tell us that ** man brings with him a corrupt nature into the world,*' that " one bad example can draw him into further wick- edness than twenty good ones will avail for his refor- mation,'* that "one corrupting discourse will instil more evil than twenty demonstrations from the pulpit will be able to overcome.*** It is all very true as regards the powerlessness of " twenty examples ** of no other good than external decent demeanour, or "twenty demon- strations** of utter platitudes, such as we commonly hear from the pulpit. But let the examples be of living, loving, energetic virtue, the " demonstrations ** — ** Words fierily fumaced In the blast of a life which has struggled in earnest, "t and we shall hear another story of their influence. The kingdom of heaven will spread like the " little leaven," and shoot aloft like the tiny " mustard seed.** But all influence for good is abdicated by him who is either v/eak enough to be ashamed of his true honour, or un- faithful enough to shrink from committing himself in the eyes of men to a consistent course of virtue. And lastly, towards God what cowardice, what meanness it is for a man to hesitate to own openly his allegiance to duty, to fear to wear always on his breast the badge of his liege Lord ! Truly there are canting, whining formulas, * Jones of Nayland, Serm. xxiv. t Lowell, said of Theodore Parker. 38 RELIGIOUS OFFENCES. HYPOCRISY. 39 which a self-respecting spirit will infallibly spurn ; but when is a man ever so manly as when, amid the thought- less or the scoffing, he simply avows that he does believe in the God of Heaven, and does desire to obey His righteous law ? It must not be urged that such simple acknowledg- ment of fealty as this, is in the remotest way to be iden- tified with that profaning of sacred feelings by exposure which is even more odious as regard religious affections than human ones. The distinction is immense, and is recognised on all hands in every other relation. Before an enemy every son will proudly confess his father, every soldier his sovereign. If either ever stand by silent while parent or king are insulted, and claim not to be his child or servant, we do not deem it " delicacy," but meanness and poltroonery. But, on the other hand, to speak to a stranger of the inner affections of the heart, for a husband to describe his tenderness for his wife, a friend for a friend, is felt by every one to be worse than indecorous — unfeeling. The deep personal sentiments, whether human or religious, are so sacred that no hand save that of love should ever be permitted to draw aside their veil. There is a spiritual immodesty as well as a corporeal one, and both are hideous. Yet I have sometimes thought that there lies a large margin beyond these purely personal experiences and sentiments, wherein we well might strive to meet our fellow-creatures' sympathies far oftener than we do. Oiu* brothers are not all enemies, all scoffers, for all that fanatics may say. In thousands and millions of hearts at this moment we may be assured a love warmer than we know is glowing unseen, or smouldering for want of aid which we perhaps might give with a few words. That we ought sometimes to share such blessed sym- pathies, to strive to kindle and cherish each other's good, none will deny. But how is this ever to be done if we take such precautions never to reveal any share of our own feelings till our brother has shown us his ? Who is to begin ? I doubt not, if we sought it more, and in fitting time and place, we should often find that between us and God's other children, instead of a barrier of sepa- ration, there is a bond of tenderest and holiest union. 40 RELIGIOUS OFFENCES. SECTION IV. PERJURY. Another form of direct insult to God is Perjury. It is a mooted question among moralists whether a judicial oath can properly be considered a " calling on God to witness our words/' or a simple expression of our con- viction that He does witness them. Under either view an oath is an introduction of God's name into trans- actions not strictly religious, and its lawfulness stands open to the question which from very early times has been asked, " Is it consistent with the reverence we owe to God, thus to make His name a guarantee of veracity in the petty concerns of human life P'* ♦ • The Christian ethics of swearing are altogether undetenninable. Christ says (Matt. v. 34), "Swear not at aU." St. James repeats the injunction (James v. 12) : -Above all things, my brethren, swear not." Yet, not to mention the instances in the Old Testament {e.g.. Psalm ex. 4 ; Gen. xxii. 16 ; Num. xiv. 28) wherein God Himself is represented as performing the act, in Him so incomprehensible, we find also the chiefest of the Apostles swearing in his inspired writings (2 Cor. i. 23) : " Moreover I call God for a record upon my soul," Ac. ; and (Gal. i. 20), "Behold, before God, I lie not." St. Chrysostom' tried to escape the difficulty by the dangerous expedient of a shifting morality: "What, then, is not sweaiing of the Evil One? Yes, indeed, it is altogether of the Evil One, that is now, after so high a rule of self-restraint, but then not so. But how, one may say. should the same thing be at one time good and at another not good ? Nay, I say PERJURY. 41 The intuitive view of the case would, it seems, be this : that, as God is the Supreme Judge of the uni- verse, wherever the sacred interests of justice are at stake it must be His justice which is concerned, and we may fearlessly consecrate our acts by invoking His presence as witness. Also, when a man undertakes an office to which solemn moral obligations are attached, such as a legislator's or a magistrate's, a minister of reli- gion's or a husband's, it seems perfectly reverent that his engagement to perform those sacred duties should be made with an appeal to God. On the other hand, to take oaths for the convenience of a mercantile trans- action, and use God's name to save other security, this is 80 obviously profane, that if custom did not blind him to its nature, no pious person could endure to do it.* the very contrary, how could it help becoming good and not good, while all things else are crying aloud that they are so — the fruits of the earth, the arts, and all things else ? And why do I mention these things, when killing, which among all is acknowledged to be of the Evil One, caused Phinehas to be honoured with the priesthood, and Abraham also, on becoming, not a manslayer only, but, which was far worse, the slayer of his child, won more and more approbation?" (Chrys., Hmn. xiv.) Slippery grounds, these, of traditional morals. St. Paul's Epistles were written between the issuing of the inspired precepts of Jesus and James. Was he inspired to disobey them ? ♦ " A judge may acquire a knowledge of the truth by the oath of the parties, if he cannot othenvise ascertain it. But let no man of sense take an oath in vain, or on a trifling occasion ; for the man who takes an oath in vain shall be punished in this life or the next. Headlong in utter darkness shall the impious wretch tumble into hell who, being interrogated in a judicial inquiry, answers one question M9^\y.''— Institutes of Mcni(.y b. vi. v. 109, and b. xii. v. 16. 42 RELIGIOUS OFFENCES. SACRILEGE. 43 a Supposing the oath taken to be on a lawful matter, of what nature is the guilt of perjury P Excluding aU consideration whether the false witness we give be for or against any one, or whether benevolent or malevolent motives may incite us, the sin is this: we appeal to Hhn to witness a lie, of whose law that He is an infraction, and thereby we insult Him in a manner at once out- rageous and complex ; God's omnipresence. His legisla- tive and His retributive characters, being each especially contemned, and in the peculiarly offensive manner of an outward semblance of respect. This crime is manifestly so great, that even the most abandoned criminals have commonly showed a dread of committing it. It ought to be equally borne in mind by legislators, or any persons imposing oaths, that to require them of our feUow-creatures when we have reason to fear they wiU be taken falsely, is a social offence of deep character— it is leading our brother into the temptation of an enormous sin. The irreverent manner in which oaths are often administered, and the levity displayed by lawyers in their questions to sworn witnesses, are of course offences to be classed under the head of blasphemy. Of the casuistics of perjury nothing need be said. Those moralists who admit that the law of truth has exceptions are necessarily sorely puzzled when the case becomes complicated with oaths ; but he who holds that ''nothing can justify a lie'' has no difficulty in adding that, a fortiori, nothing can justify a perjury. SECTION V. SAC;RILEGE. An unusual number of errors have crept into the popular idea of this sin. They have arisen from the common anthropomorphous views of the nature and character of the Being against whom it is committed, and it would be a divergence from the path of the philosophic moralist to expose and refute them. To rob the Pos- sessor of heaven and earth is as impossible as to strike the incorporeal spirit, and it is scarcely less absurd to define the one imaginary crime than the other. Nevertheless, there is undeniably such a sin as sacri- lege, and it consists in this : the desecration of holy things. Externally considered, the ethical delinquency of such acts lies herein, that they are obstructions to the performance of man's religious duty of worship. The means which we or others possess for that purpose are thereby removed. It is not that the sacrilegist ** robs " God of His Church — for the universe of suns is but the porch of His infinitude — but he takes from man his ** house of prayer ;" and man cannot always pray equally in all places. Thus sacrilege is an offence against God, inasmuch as it is the placing of a stumbling- block, the addition of some new difficulty, or the sub- ^1* 44 RELIGIOUS OFFENCES. SACRILEGE. 45 traction of some facility, in that path of approach to- wards Himself which it is His great design that all His creatures shoidd tread. Considered with reference to the offender's own senti- ments, sacrilege has this guilt : that it evidences want of loving reverence towards God, in want of respect towards objects associated with His service. The prin- ciple in the human mind is fully recognised whereby all things animate and inanimate become endeared to us by association with beloved persons, and receive, as it were, the shadows of the sentiments we give to them. It has been the spring, not only of many of the tenderest passages of private life, but also of great historical events and institutions— of the Crusades and Moslem pilgrimages, and of the whole Christian and heathen relic-worship. And as this principle holds fully in religious matters, it is clear that we must manifest con- tempt towards God when we display it towards objects which are connected with Him. They are "consecrated" by the unchanging natural law of association of ideas. Of course it is not as directly an insult to God to commit such sacrilege as it is to commit blasphemy or perjury. The objects we misuse are only secondarily connect^ with religion ; their sanctity is a derived one, and must 'depend altogether on the fact and on the degree of their association with His worship. By viewing this crime thus, in its rational light, a great many difficulties are obviated respecting the nature of a consecrated thing. Beyond his Bible and his bishop-sanctified church and burial-ground, the Englishman is not a little at a loss to define what is an object which it would be sacrilege to treat contemptuouslv, or apply to profane uses. Now it becomes manifest that the crime of sacrilege is involved only in two cases — Ist. When it deprives ourselves or others of the means of worship. 2ndly. When it proves want of reverence to God in want of reverence to objects associated in our minds with Him. The narrowest closet, the poorest melody, may be as much needed by some human soul for its prayers, as the grandest cathedral ever conse- crated by the pomp of a hierarchy, or the most exquisite Miserere ever sung by the papal choir. And to take the " poor man's lamb," liis small and humble " means of grace," away from him, may be a greater sacrilege than ever Cromwell's troops committed in the proud fanes of England. Thus, however, we arrive at the discovery that sacrilege, instead of being a rare and almost unheard-of crime, against which it seemed super- fluous to guard ourselves, is, in fact, one continually committed by all classes. The ruffian who breaks into the church to steal the sacramental plate, he is not the sole sacrilegist amongst us. Even supposing that we have never interfered with the physical facilities offered to our fellows' worship, never kept them from services they desired to attend, never deprived them of opportunities which separate apartments, books, good companions, might give them, still which of us can say that in our assumption of knowledge and fastidious taste we have 46 RELIGIOUS OFFE^'CES. -. I. \t' not desecrated to their mindsy books, places, music, sermons, poetry, which were to them actual aids to devotion ? And to ourselves also, have not our irre- verent modes of speech and thought, our carelessness of the externals of private worship, deprived us of many a holy influence ? t PERSECUTION. 47 . SECTION VI. PERSECUTION. The crime just discussed of sacrilege has been com- monly defined to include the injury oi persons (as well as things) consecrated to God. I consider that all injuries of persons which can be classed as religious ofiences will, with greater propriety, be ranked under the separate head of Persecution. The injuring of a man because he holds an office which the injurer's conscience admits to be sacred, or has done an act which he feels to be right, or upholds a faith he believes to be true — these are offences we cannot suppose have ever taken place. Two modes of this offence then are alone possible : — 1st. Injuries done from some personal malice or interest, of which the religious character of the injured party is either made the excuse, or is not so sufficiently regarded as to form his protection. 2nd. Injuries done from mistaken ideas of religious obligation, the injurer believing himself called upon to pimish the man who holds a faith he believes to be false, or performs actions he conceives to be impious. It cannot be doubted that a considerable nimiber of the acts of persecution recorded and unrecorded in 48 RELIGIOUS OFFENCES. PERSECUTION. 49 h history would be placed, by any one who could see the hearts of the persecutors, in the category of injuries done through personal interest or malice, and falsely coloured by the pretence of religious zeal. In all great national persecutions these private feelings must have had considerable share in guiding both accusers and judges. The charge of heresy or of witchcraft was the easiest weapon for the destruction of a rival or a foe which interest could use, and the cruellest which malice could desire. It is superfluous to point out all the personal and social crimes, falsehood, injustice, and cruelty involved in such acts. Their religious offence also is patent, the insulting God by using the pretence of zeal for His service to cover a crime. Injuries which are not done on pretence of religion, but from which the religious character of the injured might have guarded him had it been duly regarded, are acts whose share of religious offence, over and above their social crime, seems to be on this wise :— All men are God's creatures, children of His love. Thus (as I shall show in speaking of social offences), whatsoever injury we do any man, it is an offence also to God as his Creator and Protector, as well as our Judge. Some men are in a more peculiar manner God's children. They are saints living visibly in the light of Ilis smile, and imitating His goodness. Some of them are of the greatest service to mankind, assisting both by precept and example in the general virtue and religion. To injure such men is necessarily more closely to offend God than to injure others ; and if we go so far as to take from such saints their lives or means of spiritual useful- ness, we commit a sacrilege more fatal in its results than the demolition of any temple made with mortal hands. Lastly, the guilt of such acts reaches its culmination when the most saintly and useful man is engaged in such acts as cannot fail to remind the injurer of his relation to God, and consequently of the religious offence he will incur by his crime. A murder would undoubtedly l)ear the added shade of sacrilege which should be com'- mitted on a good man at his prayer, on a minister of religion striving to quell the rage of an insurrection with Divine lessons of peace. It is manifest, however, that these principles afford no shelter to the by-gone superstitions, which represent as sacrilegious the inflic- tion of deserved punishment on the priest or king whose outward consecration has neither made him a saint of God nor an auxiliary of the virtue of mankind. 2nd. Persecution committed in sincerity, from a mistaken sense of religious duty, must always be ranked as a crime of error, and its guilt must be calculated by the sin involvcxl oiiginally in the reception of such error.. The usual way in which persecutors have argued seems to be this :— The religious opinion which they persecute they have conceived to be not only false, but productive of mischievous results, temporal or eternal. To the Roman Proconsul the Christian was a rebel, a partisan and propagator of doctrines subversive of civil order. To the Papist the Protestant is a reprobate, a holder and D I' f I IP 50 RELIGIOUS OFFENCES. PERSECUTION'. 51 teacher of doctrines leading men to eternal damnation. The Roman punished the rebel on the usual principles of state policy, precisely as a military tribunal in our own times orders the execution of a mutineer, not con- cerninsr itself to hold the balance between crime and retribution, but simply adopting the readiest means at liand for preserving discipline. The Papist punished the Protestant on still stronger grounds. The mischief lie strove to prevent was as much greater than the other as the perdition of souls is worse than the disturbance of public order : nay, he had further some actual show of justice ; viz., the retribution on a crime which he rated equal to high treason against God. If expediency, then, were to be admitted as the funda- mental principle of civil government, the modern Englishmon would find it hard to define wherein lay the offence of the Pagan or Papist persecutor.* The * Unless, indeed, on the plea that their persecutions were not expeilient, in which case the objector is compelled to admit the morality of those which actually extirpated the offence. Thus an fj:terminatuig persecution (like those of Charles IX. and Louis XIV., which saved France from Protestantism) would be moral, and only those less cruel and complete, immoral ! Again, it is sometimes said that persecutions are inexpedient because the "blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church." But though everyboecial object of their worship a ina7i elevated to Deity — Goutama and Christ — both miraculously born, but still in- heiitors of human nature ; both teachers of righteousness, and adored unqucstional>ly from the influence their moral elevation exercised on the minds of men : these are their resemblances. Their difference, l>hilosophically speaking, lies in this : that Christ is the ideal of virtue, the finite impersonation of right, in a soul exposed to trial and shut in by all the limitations of creaturehood, and yet absolutely victorious 72 RELIGIOUS OFFENCES. It is undoubtedly the most natural of all theological errors, to imagine that that Will which we recognise as the Supreme Will of the universe should resemble all other wills with which we are acquainted, and be in some similar manner enslirined in a material bodv. • Probably no religion can ever have sprung up indi- genously in a nation without passing through a stage of anthropomorphism. Further, such conceptions of the Divine nature have the additional attraction of seeming to present a firmer hold for our religious affec^ tions. The more we represent God to ourselves in the likeness of a man, the more tangible points seem offered for our sympathy, admiration, and love. No one over every temptation. Ooutania, on the contrary, seems to confound in his own person the moral attributes of Gotl auti man. There is no Infinite Creator or Father al>ove him. He has surpassed Mahabralim, and before his human birtli he was a god. I^rn the son of a rajah, ignorant, till maturity, of pain and death, he attained his dignity of Buddha solely, as it would seem, by solitary, contemplative asceticism. Whether this name of Buddha signifies "Wise," or, as others interpret it properly, " Holy, " it would seem that the essential idea connected with Goutama is far more the divine repose of absolute sanctity (at- tempted to be represented in his statues), than the virtm victorious over agony eternized in the crucifix of Christ. Perhaps our present knowledge of Buddhism hardly warrants the al)ove parallel ; and in the innumerable discrepant statements mad*- concerning its doctrines there are some which assert that suffering formed the step to Goutama's deity. (See A Description of the liuddhist Doctrine, sent, in 1766, to the Governor of Ceylon, by the High Priest of the Temple of Mulgirri Galle, trans, in British Museum. But -* , , per contrd, the Buddha Guadmu's doctrine, by Modeliar Rajah Paxe, in the Mahaioanse, p. 161.) IDOLATRY. 3 wonders at the Swedenborgian reaction against spirit- ualism, any more than at the lamentations of Serapion for his embodied Deity.* Nevertheless, it is but a specious illusion which makes us thus suppose we could love God better if we believed Him corporeal. It is the living 5om/ itself, the righteous willy which we love in our human friends. Their bodies are dear to us only for the sake of the unseen, intangible reality of which the flesh is the clothing and the index. Take away the fairest of earthly forms, and suppose the spirit within still able to commune with our own, and impress it equally vividly with its existence and love ; our affections, so far from being impaired, would only rise to still greater heights of purity and fervour. Thus, in the endless oscillations of the human soul between pantheism and anthropomorphism, though the first has much to lose, the second has nothing to gain, over the most philosophic and spiritual theism. The sin of idolatry possesses, then, no excuse in the real constitution of the human heart. On the contrary, it distinctly tends to reduce the power of the religious sentiment. Whatsoever it gains in human sympathy, that it loses in the awful reverence, the trustful de- pendence which belong to Divine religion. I may here remark, that much of the Protestant reprobation of Romish image- worship is singularly • ** Heu me miserum ! Tulerunt a me Deum meum, et quem nunc teneam non habeo, vel quem adorem aut interpellem jam nescio." — Gibbon, chap, xlvii. 74 RELIGIOUS OFFENCES. IDOLATRY. 75 iUogical. The idolatry of the Papist is chiefly directed to pictures and statues of Christ and the Virgin. In the latter case, polytheism is the off'ence involved, and not the particular mode of worshipping a fictitious deity. In the case of Christ, the Trinitarian Protestant believes that a God was actually incarnated in material form, and consequently he himself worships him (I assume) nearly always under the mental image of the '' Man of Nazareth.'' Certainly he would deem it no duty to endeavour to dissipate any such Eidolon into an incor- poreal Deity ; but, on the contrary, would probably congratulate liimself on the vivacity with which he was able to picture the affecting countenance of the Saviour. If such mental imagery be lawful, wherein can He the offence of perpetuating it in stone and canvas to waken the same lawful feelings in all beholders ? A human face expressing any virtue, such as courage, resignation, gratitude, benevolence, is actually a lesson of that virtue, not only of wider comprehension than any which written language is suited to convey, but also possessing far transcending power of inspiration. And why ? Because the human soul which obeys the right becomes the finite impersonation of it, even as God is the infinite impersonation of all right ; and it is the nature of the body to servo as an index of the soul, and **show through the alabaster the lamp within." When we see a human countenance radiant with love, glorified in adoration, we behold those blessed things shining through their veil of flesh, or rather moulding that flesh into a form most mystically embodying them- selves. In raising the minds of the ignorant outcasts of society, next to a living righteous man or woman moving and spreading love among them, there is no lesson equal to a picture which delineates the face of such a person idealized and perfected.* "Words (it cannot too often be repeated) have no absolute meaning, and can only signify to any individual what he is able to convey into them from the results of his own inward life.^t The abstract names of goodness and wickedness, honesty and dishonesty, chastity and profligacy, are mere sounds to those unhappy beings who have passed their whole lives steeped to the lips in the dread cess- pools of a great city's vice. Even to the educated, and those who are not practically ignorant of the deep mean- ing of moral truths, how often it occurs to discover all at once how words and formulas they have used for years have failed, till that happy moment, to bear to their minds any sort of reality ! Now, just as a virtue acted out before our eyes, as a loving, forgiving, truthful deed, will speak to us and claim our veneration long before an abstract, verbal definition of the virtue will so impress us, in like manner, and sometimes hardly in a lesser degree, a picture will do the same. I cannot attempt here to discuss the philosophy of the Beautiful, or show • See the accounts of soft feelings first manifested by juvenile criminals at the sight of religious pictures. — Miss Carpenter's Jteforviatary SckoolSy p. 45. + Morell's Psychology, p. 197. E 2 4 RELIGIOUS OFFENCES. IDOLATRY. 77 how it co-acts with the Good. It is enough to notice a fact which none will dispute. The heroic patience of a St. Sehastian, the divine tenderness of the Virgin, the rapt adoration of St. Cecilia, the heart-rent repentance of Magdalen, the resignation of Christ, these are lessons in which the painters of Christendom have taught as many souls, and taught them better than ever the priests have done from all their pulpits. To condemn an fengine to which God has given such beneficent power as this, it must be shown that the mischiefs it works surpass the benefits. But what, then, are the mischiefs which the iconoclast would obviate ? It is not the abstract worship of the Virgin and saints. That is another matter from idolatry. It is the offence of polytheism, and may be carried on perfectly well without any statues or pictures whatever. It is not the attributing a human form, and consequently the limita- tions of humanity, to beings receiving DiWne honours. This he does himself, and defends imhesitatingly in the case of Christ. There remains nothing for him to con- demn unless he maintain that the image- worshipper actually transfers to the material stone or canvas his adoration of the invisible saint or Saviour it represents. Now, it may be reasonably doubted whether the worship of stocks and stones as stocks and stones has ever existed, even among the veriest fetichist savages in Africa or Polynesia. The notion that some unseen potentate lurks in the block, and may be there addressed and conciliated, seems to be the very lowest idolatry to which man ever i 9 'I descends.* When an image or picture, however rude, is attempted, it may be understood either to be an emblem of the attributes of the Deity (like the half-animal forms of Egjrpt and the many-headed, many-handed figures of India), or else to be intended as a portrait of what the god, when visible to mortal eyes, resembled. If Pro- testants imagine that an Athenian of the days of Pericles believed any one of the three Minervas on his Acropolis to be actually the goddess herself, wooden, marble, or chryselephantine, they are as absurdly mistaken as if they believe that other " virgin queen of heaven " is now worshipped by two-thirds of Christendom as com- posed of Raphaers pigments and canvas. f Superfluous it doubtless is to refute an error so gross as this, yet it is well, in all discussions on idolatry, to keep clearly in view wherein the offence thereof really lies, lest, while • lamblichus indoed especially asserts that the image is only ex- tenially enlightened and adorned by the divinity, and asks if a man be not ashamed to introduce the idea of circumscription of a corporeal form into the notion of Deity. — See Jainblichxcs on tfu Mysteries, c. ix, t '• What temple by a skilful builder reared Can in the circuit of its walls contain The person of a God ?"— EuRiP. Frag. ** Canst thou believe the vast eternal Mind Was e'er to syrts and Libyan wastes confined ? Is there a place which God would call His own Before a virtuous soul, His Spirit's noblest throne ? Why seek we further ? Lo ! above, around, Where'er thou gazest, there may God be found. And prayer from every land is by His blessing crowned." LucAN. — P/iarsalia, b. 9. ) 78 RELIGIOUS OFFENCES. DEMON OLATRY. condemning the vast majority of our race for a sin no man ever committed, we fail to note that in which we may be falling at the same moment. The only religion which can miite with pure morality is the worship of an absolutely holy being. No being can be absolutely holy unless he be Infinite. No cor- poreal being can be infinite. To worship, then, a being whom we believe to be corporeal is not (in so far as the rigid science of the case can be applied) to worship an absolutely Holy Being — i.e. God. Our religion, such as it is, may be exonerated by morality as involuntarily false, but it cannot be sanctioned by it, or accurately and perfectly united with it. Where this error thus exists, and God is not wor- shipped as absolutely holy, it matters nothing at all, except as it affects the degree of distinctness in the error, whether any image or picture be used to represent the supposed Finite Deity. Where, on the other hand, true worship and allegiance are paid alone to the absolutely Holy God, and the broad line drawn between such fealty to our king, and the esteem due to our fellow-subjects, then no possible offence, but great benefit, can be obtained by imaging that VIRTUE which in those fellow-subjects we esteem, and conveying its glory to our souls by every means within the resources of art. SECTION XI. DEMONOLATRY. The distinction between idolatry and demonolatry is this: that while idolatry worships an imperfectly righteous God, a being whose finite nature precludes infinite holiness, demonolatry worships a being not riirhteous at all, and whose nature is recognised as not merely falling short of the moral law, but as opposed to it. Religion and morality are here not merely disse- vered as in idolatry, but pitched directly against one another. It is needless to point out the immense offence, amounting to entire dereliction from duty, involved in any conscious act of demonolatry. There is always some truth at the bottom of any great popular senti- ment, and it may be believed that the persecution of witchcraft, dark and bloody chapter as it is in human history, may not be without some palliation in the intui- tive consciousness of men, that if a rational being were to renounce the worship of a beneficent deity for that of a maleficent one, his crime would be of mortal magni- tude. Whether such maleficent deity actually existed or accepted the demonolatrous worship, is a question morally unimportant in determining his guilt. Two forms of demonolatry are possible and extant. 4 i 4 80 RELIGIOUS OFFENCES. Ist. The first consists in paying homage to one or more beings ostensibly evil, and believed to oppose the supreme good God. Yezidisra, with sorcery and witch- craft (wherever the latter were not conscious impos- tures), are the patent instances of this offence. 2nd. The second consists in attributing to a supreme and nominally good God, actions and sentiments which actually are evil, though decorated by specious titles. The worship of Jupiter, who was styled " Optimus Maximus," but whose supposed actions were cruel, vin- dictive, and impure, entailed obviously this form of demonolatry. It is of far less consequence to us, however, to dis- cover what ancient creeds involved religious offence, than to note how far opinions, even now commonly leceived in Christendom, may not entail the very guilt for which we condemn them. Our interest is with the question, Does not the acceptance of such a doctrine as the existence of a devil, and the attribution to him of such powers as excite our fears, involve a modified degree of the guilt of demonolatry ? Are not such fears and belief in his successful opposition to God's designs a species of worship, a Dulia if not a Latria derogating from the claims of the good God to infinite trust and absolute reliance on His solipotence ? Doubtless, it would shock those many excellent persons who lay immense stress on the belief in a personal devil, to think that by doing so they are paying to another the homage due to God alone. But the line between such DEMONOLATRY. 81 fear as they give to Satan, and such other fear as they most especially deem part of the honour owed to God, is altogether evanescent and undistinguishable. When we find the precept of Christ, to " fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell,'' interpreted by one divine* as a recommendation to fear the devil, and by another as an exhortation to fear God, we cannot deny that in a religion which inculcates such fear, it is sufficiently perilous to pure monotheism to admit the existence of a '* ghostly enemy." ** When the ungodly curseth Satan," says the son of Sirach, "he curseth his own soul." A true theist knows that his sins are all his own ; he reproaches not an im- aginary devil but his own weakness for their perpetra- tion, and he places absolute trust in God's will and power to bring about at last that end of virtue for which he made him. But he who believes that whenever he breaks the law, there is a personal tempter seducing him by quasi-godlike spiritual influences, and that this tempter has succeeded, and shall while the world lasts succeed, in enticing millions to their everlasting perdi- tion — how can he rightly take on himself the whole weight of his transgressions, how can he lean with absolute trust on God ?f Take it how he will, shuffle as he may between God's *' permission " and His " will," it remains that a God in whose universe there is a devil * Maurice's Theological Essays. t Ipse Diabolus gaudet cum accusatur vult ut a te ferat crimiua- tionem, cum tu perdas confessionem. — S. Aug. Serm. xx. E 3 82 RELIGIOUS OFFENCES. and a devil's hell, is not a perfect God, or one whose power and will we may absolutely trust, and whose justice and goodness we may absolutely adore. All that is deducted from God's power by this doc- trine is given necessarily to a devil, and precisely in the same ratio must the creed inclusive of it be held to in- volve the guilt of demonolatry. And for the second form of this offence, is there nothing in the Calvinisms creed that "attributes to a supreme and nominally good God, actions and senti- ments which are evil, though decorated by specious titles ?'* If an action or sentiment be not what we call " right," it is not right at all, but, according to the laws of language, must be called wrong ; precisely as a line which, if it be not what we call " straight," must, by the laws of language, be called curved or crooked. The righteousness of God must be what we call right- eousness ; i.e., that character adorable and venerable which we designate by the word, and which our Creator (whoever he be) has made it our nature to adore and venerate, while we despise and abhor its opposite. No- thing, then, can be more monstrous than the practice of attributing to God acts and sentiments which depart altogether from our idea of right, and then justifying the blasphemy by the odious scholastic doctrine of an " Occulta Justitia," different from natural justice, yet not the less to be revered. The admission of a doctrine like this is tantamount to the destruction of all true religion, whose root is veneration for the moral perfec- DEMONOLATRY. 83 tion of God. If this perfection involve acts and senti- ments which our hearts do not, and cannot from their very natures venerate, but, on the contrary, despise and abhor, then there is an utter end of all religion for beings so constituted. But if an " Occulta Justitia " cannot for a moment be admitted to cover ascriptions of unrighteous acts and sentiments to the Deity, then it follows that every such ascription involves the guilt of the second form of de- monolatry. Whoever affirms that God has at any time done anything which in his own heart he cannot justify, he is guilty of this sin. Well said Malebranche: " II faut aimer TEtre infini- ment parfait, et non pas un fantome epouvantable, un Dieu injuste, absolu puissant, mais sans bonte et sans sagesse. S'il y avait un tel Dieu, le vrai Dieu nous defendrait de Tadorer et de Taimer. II y a peut-etre plus de danger d'offenser Dieu lorsqu'on lui donne une forme si horrible que de mepriser ce fantome."* * TraiUdela Morale, c. viii. THANKLESSNESS. 85 CHAPTER III. RELIGIOUS FAULTS SECTION I. THANKLESSNESS. In Social Ethics it is universally admitted that there is a double dereliction from the law of love involved in Ingratitude. There is in the nature of things an obli- gation on all rational free agents to testify special bene- volence towards those who have already displayed it towards themselves. The principle of Religious duty by which the fault of Thanklessness towards God stands morally condemned differs from the social principle only in this, that none of the palliations of human ingratitude can be admitted, and that every enhance- ment possible must belong to its guilt. We are bound to love God for His perfect goodness, and we are bound specially to love Him for His imnumbered benefits bestowed on ourselves. No human benefactor can be equally love-worthy, nor can his benefits be of com- parable magnitude. In the succeeding chapter (Section I.), I shall endea- vour to set forth at some length the grounds of that Duty of Thanksgiving from which this fault is the obvious dereliction, and by the imperativeness of whose obligation its amount of guilt is determined. I 86 RELIGIOUS FAULTS. SECTION II. IRREVERENCE. Reverence for the moral attributes of God is the nucleus of religion. Between that Duty of Adoration, which embodies such reverence, and the opposite Offences of Blasphemy and Sacrilege, there lies the negative Fault of Irreverence. It consists in this : that the goodness and justice of God are either forgotten and disregarded, or remembered with no fitting sentiments of veneration or actions of homage ; that the things associated with religion derive thence no sanctity, and are treated with no tenderness. In thus withholding from God the debt which, as moral agents, we owe to the Supreme Holiness, we of course incur the guilt of a religious delinquency pro- portioned to the exalted rank of that duty in which we fail. It is, however, a matter of no easy decision to mark the point whereto the natural principle of association of ideas ought to carry us in affixing reverence to things connected with religion. Many causes have contributed to the practice of attaching to objects a sanctity quite disproportionate with their real relation to religion. Besides the arts naturally employed by a sacerdotal IRREVERENCE. 87 order to magnify themselves and everything connected with their office, and besides the natural gravitation of the human mind from the spiritual to the material, two other reasons are obvious to every reader of history why such excess of claims should be advanced in our day for the sanctity of the two greatest of these " idols of the theatre." There is a Book so full of wisdom, grandeur, piety, that all other books sink in comparison with it. The great souls of the Hebrews, rising almost from the first from the vantage-ground of the purest of the early monotheisms, fulfilled most perfectly the conditions under which inspiration is granted to man. The literature which they have bequeathed is the noblest heirloom of the human race. But as the child deems his father's knowledge infinite because it far exceeds his own, so have men still further exaggerated the marvellous wisdom of the Bible. From the Greatest of Books it came to be deemed a book altogether sui generis and alone. It was not the "large sheaf" in the harvest of human thought, it was bread-corn of heaven, sent miraculously to a sterile and famishing earth. But still higher have risen the Bible's claims since the days when the far-seeing pilots of the Reformation left the old ship of the Papacy to settle down slowly into the ocean of time, and looked around anxiously to find whereto they might anchor the new-launched boats which tossed about so wildly under "every wind of doctrine." There was but one ground near, and into it they drove their grapnels. " The Bible, the Bible only, i\ 88 RELIGIOUS FAULTS. 1RREVERE^XE. 89 is the religion of Protestants." But lo ! the deep divers of modern criticism have shown that the old anchorage of Luther and Calvin is, after all, but shifting sand, and ere our chains are dragged too far our new pilots look ahead, and cry, " Behold the Church ! Let us take shelter in the safe harbour beneath its holy walls." It may not be ! That semblance of a Church is but a Fata Morgana after all ; and no devices of man will give to it material substance or open out a haven beneath, wherein the storms of doubt may not make shipwreck of our souls. One believer may inspire a million more, but a million of unbelievers will never make one believer. The dead soldiers on a battle-field will form no army, even if found in strictest uniform. Festivals and sacraments, rubrics, and articles, richly endowed hierarchies and splendid fanes, cannot infuse the vital spirit into a Church. Nay, if the life be departed, such outward vestments show ghastlily, like the gorgeous robes on a dead Greek bishop, carried rocking on his throne through the busy streets, and offering to living men the mock-benediction of his stiffened hand. Either the Church of England is a true Church, " a congregation of faithful souls," and then the faith of each soul is its own salvation ; or it is a mere effigy of what a Church ought to be, and will never support the weight of u soul burdened with a doubt. Neither Bible nor Church can afford a final resting- place for the soul. Both are venerable, rightly under- stood. Neither have a right to the blind unreasoning homage which has been claimed for them. Nothing can be more unwarrantable than the attempt to force us to revere, as a Divine Oracle on which all our conduct and all our hopes must depend, a Book, and every sen- tence in a Book, the evidence of whose authenticity would be insufficient to estabKsh our claims to the smallest heritage disputed in an English court of justice. Nothing can be more puerile than the attempt to elevate the trifling details of a cultus into matters of vital im- portance, while the spiritual earnestness, which alone can make worship real, receives comparatively small attention. To hear some divines talk, we should be tempted to believe that such things as actual sin, pro- fligacy, dislionesty, drunkenness, and impiety, were things unheard of in a Christian land, and that the great concern of our pastors was to intone the appointed prayers with accuracy, and to compel the congregation to turn their faces to the east. Another party are equally intent to stir heaven and earth to make one proselyte ; but when we ask to what is he converted, we find it is to reading the Bible and adopting the pass- words of " depravity " and "salvation," not to becoming a manly and virtuous human being. Who would dream that our great army of souls is every hour in fierce war- fare with our deadl}^ foe of sin, and that tlie half of us are sluggards sleeping at our posts, or traitors desert- ing to the enemy, while all the time our leaders do but exhort us to a little greater accuracy of drill? ■' .g l M.'lil! 90 RELIGIOUS FAULTS. For those who push the claims of reverence to every article of Church furniture, every page of either Testa- ment, this answer must suffice: — Proportion must be observed in all our sentiments. If we adore the One Great God of heaven so that we name Him only with heartfelt awe ; if we give to the earnestness of prayer and thanksgiving all the care we can bestow ; if we deem the moral nature of our fellow-men inexpressibly venerable ; if we hearken with ready submission to every whisper of the divine voice of conscience ; then it is not possible for us equally to talk "with bated breath" of altar-cloths and faldstools, to attend anxiously to the thorough-bass with which our prayers are chanted, to treat episcopal ordination as altering the moral relations of men, or to revere alike the curses of David and the precepts of Christ. We honour God before His Church ; God's law in our hearts before any law in a book ; a godlike man before an ungodlike priest. God, and virtue, and conscience are venerable primarily, in their own right. The Church, the Bible, the priest must prove themselves first to be God*s Church, a true Bible, a virtuous priest, and then we will give them the se- condary reverence they derive from such rektion. Just in proportion, and neither more nor less, that anything is united with God and goodness, in so far, and no more, is it deserving of our reverence. If these views of the grounds of the duty of reverence be correct, it will follow that the claims advanced by Christians for holy places, books, and days are all to be IRREVERENCE. 91 admitted under the conditions — first, of entire subordi- nation to the realities of religion ; and secondly, to the establishment of their actual relation to those realities. Within these limitations, however, many will be startled to find can very easily come the claims of other religions than the Christian to a share, though it be comparatively a trifling one, in our respect. Surely the time has arrived when the absurd notions of the Fathers concerning the demoniacal nature of heathen gods ought to cease to influence men of the nineteenth century in their treatment of creeds differing from their own.* It would seem as if the reaction from the old Roman and Greek latitudinarianism had be- queathed to Christendom the con\T[ction that if we dis- approve of any one article in our brother's creed, his religion loses every claim to our regard, nay, that it is a mark of our orthordox piety to pour some degree of con- tumely thereupon ! Since a better light is rising amongst us ; since we begin to recognise that God is the One '•Father of all, in every age, in every clime adored," it is fit we should renounce this vulgar and ignorant contempt for the religion of our brothers. Though, as we have seen, nothing short of the recogni- * See Tertullian, Apol. i. 23. His translator, in the Lib. Anglo- Cdtholic Th4'X)l.f says that the notion that demons actually lurked in the heathen idols was maintained by Justin Martyr, Tatian, Origen, Minu- cius Felix, Chrysostoni, and Gregory Nazianzen. See also Athena- goras, Leg,, p. 27. \ 92 RELIGIOUS FAULTS. II IRREVERENCE. 93 tion of the Infinite Impersonation of the right in the Deity, constitutes a religion strictly and scientifically identifiable with morality, yet it is not endurable to suppose that involuntary mistakes in such matters have excluded the millions of God's children from a real access to Him, however much they have clouded His aspect to their sight. Does a mother, leaning over her infant's cradle, refuse to attend to its cries because its utterance is inarticulate, or because it babbles some other name than " mother ?"* No man, howsoever enlightened, can boast of being removed above error to such height that he may re- pudiate all fellowship in the religion of another. Abso- lutely true theology, absolutely perfect worship, is not * Tlie names which have been given to God by diflferent nations afford a curious insight into the theology of the people choosing them, and also have doubtless contributed to influence by reaction those theologies themselves. The j)Ower, wisdom, eternity, goodness, father- hood of God, must in each case be the central idea of the creed which calls Him by names derived from one or other of those attributes. Even the shades of feeling of members of the same nation in different ages may be traced by the preference manifested among the various titles proposed by their creed. How the noblest of all His names, our glorious old Saxon "God," is removed from us into the cold pseudo- philosophy of the last century by the phrases of " the Deity," "the Supreme Being!" We may lave our "God," our Good One, but we can only bow the head before an impersonal abstraction of the Deity. Again, the still common name for Him, "the Almighty," how little does it express the loving reverence of a moral being for his Father in heaven, like whom he aims to be j)erfeot ? The whole point of religion is lost when we adopt such words as the natural utterance of our idea of God. 1 for man. It is all a question of degrees. In his gaudy wihare, the Buddhist to-day lifts feebly his wavering hands to "feel after God," the unknown Holiness above him. In the mighty fanes where, in future ages, the Theist nations shall adore their only Lord, still poor and all inadequate must be their offerings of prayer. There is no line to be drawn ; lower and lower we may descend, till the One seems lost in the many, and all the moral attributes are soiled by the foulest mythologies. Less and less must of necessity grow our sympathy in such worship, less is it possible for us to join for a moment in the prostration or the sacrifice. Yet at its utmost depth of ignorance and degradation, the religious senti- ment of a human soul has a right to receive from us whatever share of deference its claims to be religious may warrant. It may be that we see the first feeble struggles of a new-born life ; it may be that we witness the expiring throes of an outworn faith. Tenderness is the due, then, of infancy, and mournful pity of old age. Methinks that to a religious man, standing amid the ruins of Luqsor or Baalbec, beneath the columns of the Olympium or in the sculptured caverns of Elephanta, it would seem only a natural impulse to turn his thoughts upward where those who could not love God as he may do, had yet striven through darkness and error to ap- proach Him — that it would be a blessed thing to bow where dead generations had bowed, and draw perchance once more from the sublime creations of their awe and veneration, fresh hallowing influences to a living soul. M. 94 RELIGIOUS FAULTS. SECTION III. PRAYERLESSNESS. pRAYBR, in its direct aspect, is more immediately a Personal than a Religious duty. The neglect of it is primarily a disuse of the most powerful instrument in our reach for the assistance of our virtue. Nevertheless, the unspeakable blessing and honour of communion offered to us by God in prayer renders our rejection of them a religious Fault tantamount to a general delin- quency in all religious duty. lie who cares not to obtain the aid of God's grace, or feel the joy of His presence, is manifestly in a condition wherein the reli- gious part of his nature must be dormant. Such senti- ments as remain to him can scarcely possess ethical merit, inasmuch as they must be merely the residue of those natural instincts which, if duly cherished, must have led him to prayer. The occasional God-ward impulses which show themselves in all men, so far from constituting the fulfilment of this obligation, form the very ground of their guilt when left barren. IVithout such religious sentiments, man could have no religious duty at all. Possessed of them, he is bound to cultivate and display them in all the forms of direct and indirect worship. I ^ PRAYERLESSNESS. 95 These observations of course refer only to such as accept the great lesson of both intuition and experience, and believe that prayer for spiritual good receives a real answer from God. It is possible for religious minds at an early stage to make mistakes for a time on this matter, and to suppose that it were better for them not to pray than to presume to approach the Majesty of Heaven in the imperfect attitudes of reverence to which alone they could force their wandering thoughts. Doubtless there is no moral sin in such error, and doubt- less God never leaves any loving child to suffer from it long, but by some tender kindness touches the heart so that its flood of gratitude breaks forth and carries away for ever the gates of overstrained awe and fear. 11 < 96 RELIGIOUS FAULTS. SECTION IV. IMPENITENCE. Impenitence is the persistence in any offence or fault, personal, social, or religious. The original transgression being accomplished, and the righteous will so far over- powered, impenitence consists in the prolonged subjuga- tion of the higher self to lower desire, the continuance, either by sentiment alone or by both sentiment and action, of the offence or fault. It is obvious that in a state of impenitence we momen- tarily accumulate fresh guilt in addition to the primary transgression. Nay, in many cases the stubborn senti- ments and slow determined actions so committed, must be held far to exceed the measure of the first offence, even as rancorous and unrelenting hatred and cruelty exceed in guilt the anger excited by momentary provo- cation. Impenitence usually lacks the palliations of the primary sin. Either the sudden overwhelming desire or passion has somewhat subsided, or conscience has had time to recover from her surprise, to review the field of contest, and perceive the whole magnitude of her defeat. When all hurry and surprise are over and we stand calmly face to face with our sin, if we then resolve to persist in it, we surely incur a new guilt I IMPENITENCE. 97 which must go on growing in an ever-increasing ratio while we resist each softening influence of time. In the aspects now described, impenitence is a fault in personal duty, and such of course, in a great measure, it must be considered. Its religious bearing is, how- ever, so much more prominent in the intuitioris of every believer in a God " who forgiveth sins,** that it is under the head of a fiiult towards Ilim that it will most fitly be classed. In the ensuing chapter the grounds of the Duty of Repentance will be so set forth as to show, as far as possible, the guilt incurred by its neglect. 1^ 98 RELIGIOUS FAULTS. SECTION V. SCEPTICISM. The causes of scepticism are somewhat paradoxical. It may arise either from fervent Love of Truth or from Indifference towards its attainment. Scepticism exists as a constitutional tendency where the Love of Truth is great, but displays itself rather on its neo-ative side as Hatred of Error, and is insufficiently balanced by the affirmative tenacity of discovered truth. An intellect Sceptical in this way presents the converse weakness of the Dogmatic mental constitution, which sees whatsoever truths it has found in a light so vivid that it perceives none of their collateral modifications. Scepticism exists as a moral fault (and can therefore alone concern us now), when it arises either from In- difference towards Truth or else from Faithlessness in Goodness. Indifference to truth produces a scepticism of a very opposite kind from that which, as we have just noticed, springs from an imperfectly ordered love of it. In the book on Personal Duty, I shall hope to show that the endeavour to form our opinions with the utmost possible approach to absolute verity, is not only innocent, but notably one of the foremost duties a man SCEPTICISM. 99 owes to himself. The unwearied and disinterested pur- suit of truth is in fact the duty attaching to our intel- lectual natures ; and like all other virtues, the love of truth must have its negative side in due correspondence (though, as above shown, not in preponderance), and must include the careful rejection of error. It is absurd to suppose that a man can seek truth and be content to receive what, for all he knows, may be a falsehood. People who adopt opinions without scrutiny, and boast of " entertaining no doubts '' concerning them, do not merely risk failure in intellectual duty, if it chance that their opinions be erroneous : * they incur the certain delinquency ; for no man holds a truth morally till he has examined his tenure of it. Only when he has a right to say *' It is true," he possesses it as a truth. Until then it is to him merely a notion acquired by haphazard ; and to be content wdth such, in serious matters, is a moral fault. f Such being the nature of man's duty as regards the pursuit of truth, it is clear that no moral dereliction can lie in the same line as that of free earnest inquiry. If there be such a fault as scepticism at all (as the universal intuition of mankind pronounces there be), it must be of altogether a different kind. Nay, as it concerns the • ♦• If your religion is too good to be examined, I doubt it is too bad to be believed." — Tillotson. t **A8 I take my shoes from my shoemaker, and my coat from my tailor, so I take my religion from my priest."— Goldsmith, quoted by Boswell. F 2 100 RELIGIOUS FAULTS. very same department of our natures, it can only be a failure in that precise duty of seeking for truth which concerns that department. Thus I should have classed scepticism under the same head as other Personal Faults, save for the reason that it is the scepticism of relUjious and moral truths, which so far exceeds the importance of all others as to monopolize our attention when we consider the subject, and that thus scepticism being, in its relif/lous aspect, a religious faidt, and herein acquir- ing a peculiar guilt, it will more fitly be here discusscfl. It is not that other scepticism involves no sin, that all indifference to the truths of science and history is not a Personal fault, and all distrust in the fundamental spring of goodness in our fellow-creatures a Social fault. These have their place ; but infinitely more injurious and universal in its action is that scepticism which con- sists in indifferuncc to Religious truth or faithlessness in God's goodness. But, now, as regards this religious scepticism, wherein nmst lie actually its guilt ? Assuredly we cannot fail in our duty towards God by fulfilling the duty lie has appointed us towards ourselves. It is gross superstition U) suppose that while He desires us to seek all other truth as truth ; that is, by the use of the mental powers lie has given us for its discovery — Ke desires us to accept the truths which concern Himself as if they were falsehoods ; that is, by a blind acquiescenee in unscru- tinized testimony. Our duty towards religious truth must only be to give it yreater carnes^tness and patience SCEPTICISM. 101 of investigation hi proportion to its greater importance. Thus, then, our sin of religious scepticism must be to fail in this dutv. And how is this done ? I have alreadv indicated the two chief lines in which this fault may work. " Indifference towards truth " is displayed, first, by those who never make any inquiries at all respecting the grounds of their faith ; and, secondly, by those (to whom the name of sceptic is usually applied) who stop short at that stage of inquiry where they have only learned to doubt, and, lacking interest and patience to pursue the road to "the new firm lands of faith beyond," remain wandering idly about the ** howding wilderness " for the rest of their lives. ** Faithlessness in Goodness " is displayed by those who w^ould fain make such inquiries if they dared, but are withheld (perhaps unconsciously) by the hidden fear lest their search for truth might either displease God or lead them to conclusions they are beforehand resolved to reject. In all the churches there are, doubtless, thousands of persons who go through life timorously, as if walking on thin ice ; knowing and dreading the cold waters below, and aware of the weakness of their frail support ; yet without courage or faith to trample through and take their stand on the rock which lies beneath both the water and the ice. Priests have everywhere persuaded men that to leave their narrow folds is to enter upon a path wdiereon no smile of God can lighten, and leading every wanderer sooner or later 102 RELIGIOUS FAULT?^. SCEPTICISM. 103 to the bottomless pit of atheism. Who has not felt the influence of this threat ? To which of us was it not a discovery of unutterable joy that he could pray to God beyond the walls of the churches, and lift to heaven the hands from which the manacles had fallen for ever? Everywhere there is this faithlessness. The churches will not reform tlieir creeds, translations, liturgies, and politics, because they have no faith in them. Move a beam in those rotten houses, and they fear that all will crash in dust. Men of intelligence will neither examine their traditional creeds nor quit them, nor suffer their wives or dependents to do either the one or the other, for they have no faith either in the creeds or in any truth beyond, or in the chastity of woman or the honesty of man, save backed by the very threats and bribes which, beyond all other things, they disbelieve. How many thousands of men now living in England, tell us, in evers^ key, that without hell in the background private virtue and public order would be at an end ! Yet, meet those thousands in a theatre, where the jest turns on the perdition of some Don Juan, and what tale tell the shouts of laughter in our ears concerning the faith of the assembly in the reality of any hell or devil ? Now, both these forms of Scepticism, indifference and faithlessness, must be religious faults of great magnitude. The sin, as has been well said, is precisely this, " that there is not in the soul a deep and strong yearning and earnest desire to find solutions of our theological diffi- culties, and that the great facts of Divine religion are H % if ■5 'i not experienced to the required degree ; that we are not sufficiently reliffious to be assured of certain facts of which religion in its lofty moods would inform us."* ^yiiensoever we find ourselves wanting either in interest in truth or faith in goodness, we may be assured that we are morally deficient somewhere : in fervour, in sincerity, in earnestness of obedience, or above all, in seeking to renew, in God's communion, our spiritual sight. * Quinqucncrgia, p. 51. I i 104 RELIGIOUS FAULTS. SECTION VI WOKLDLINESS. It was a grand contiibution to moral science, tliat which we attribute to Christ in the severance of "World" or " Mammon " service from the service of God. ^luch as bigotry and spiritual pride have misused it, tlie dis- tinction has been of infinite use in clearing up to the consciences of men that hazy portion of self-conscious- ness which belongs to inner feelings and motives when outward actions are not visibly implicated. There is a mode of life adopted by thousands, in all ages, in which the external conduct is decent and unexceptionable, and the social sentiments on the whole kindly and good- natured. Religious services are performed with punctu- ality, and the personal duties of temi>erance, chastity, and veracity receive no infraction. At first sight a life of this kind appears unquestionably to take place in the ranks of virtue; nor can it often belong to any save the man who leads it to question its right to do so. Yet if (as he himself may know) the ambitions and pleasures of earth occupy the foreground in his thoughts, cares, and desires, it is clear that he fails in the whole spirit of virtue, which must needs " seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness." lie is guilty of that fault of tvorld- liness which is co-extensive with his entire inner life. WORLDLINESS. 105 % 1 Of the universal deterioration of the character which has once been inoculated with the taint of a worldly spirit, it needs small observation of life to detect. There are probably few who have not known the pang of gazing, after a lapse of years, into some once single and beloved heart, and finding that *'the world's breath hath been there." There is no simple afifection or enjoy- ment left. All are sunk together in that base pitiful care, " how will it seem .?" Of all faults, worldliness brings the largest share of punishment in thus poisoning all the springs of plea- sure, and leaving nothing to be done or enjoyed for its own sake, but everything for the sake of an intangible something else beyond. We do not half realize to our- selves the fact that petty cares and gratifications of vanity and ambition, being opposed to the natural expansion God intends for our souls, are necessarily full of uneasiness. The mind, which is hourly bound down to the pitiful details of worldly cares, is like the foot of a Chinese woman, ever cramped and aching. Duties, however small in outward guise, have always a moral grandeur, in which the soul expands healthfully. But selfish ambitions bring nothing but pain, or if they have pleasures at any time, it is only (as Mackintosh says of spite and revenge) the pleasure the gout or the toothache may be said to bring when they obtain momentary relief. ^Twere better far for us to endure real privations, real sufferings, than to have our souls dwindled by worldly struggles. Twere better to live F 3 h 106 RELIGIOUS FAULTS. ill tlie shadow of some tremendous gloom — even of Calvinism itself— than to be blinded by the glare of the thousand foot-lamps of social vanities. I know not whether this fault be really increasing among us. All such things alter their aspect w^ith chano-ing manners, and we notice the new form and forget the old, and so conclude we are worse than our forefathers. It startles us to find Longinus say of avarice, that " the whole world is sick of it beyond a cure." But, growing or stationary, worldliness is, indeed, fearfully prevalent amongst us ; which of us can say he is free ? It seems as if the seeds were latent in us all, and that the moment we come under con- ditions favourable for their growth, they spring up spontaneously. Once developed, nothing but a strong pure love of God or man ever stops their fatal luxuriance. A fair test of our own worldly spirit, I think, is this. It happens to us all often to consider the difference which some lapsed period of time, a year or a decade, has made in our condition. Honestly let us answer, What circumstances of that condition is it that we regard with most interest ? Are we saying to ourselves, with complacency, "I have risen a grade in my pro- fession ; I have become more respected ; I have added to my capital ; I have made an honourable alliance ?" If these things be so, we may rejoice at them, but must we not much more rejoice to say, " I have conquered such a vice; I have improved in such a virtue; my heart is wider than it was in human benevolence; my faith • WORLDLINESS. 107 firmer. God has surely blessed my efforts, and will help me to subdue the errors which remain?^' That these are our real interests, after all, I suppose every one will admit. God did not create this world of trial, and place His children's souls at school therein, that they might win toys. If the end of a man's existence were that he might become a general or a millionaire, God would hardly have made all this paraphernalia of a moral Hfe. Such " ends " might have been accomplished easily for a nation of ants. In so far as we are men and women, we can only be in the pursuit of our right interest when we simply and unaffectedly place our progress in Virtue foremost in all our hopes and efforts, and every other object subordinate and secondary thereto. It is needless, however, to enlarge on a fault w^hich is, at least theoretically, well recognised, and whose con- demnation is reiterated more frequently perhaps than any other from the pulpits of Christendom. Let it suffice to note, that so insidious is this endemic of earth, that some of its most virulent and complicated forms fester perennially those very circles of exclusive reli- gious profession wherein are loudest lieard the repro- bation of its simple manifestations. Rarely is it, that in the veriest devotee of fashion, whose years are wasted between the park, the opera, the race-course and the ball-room, there is half the essential spirit of worldliness which exists in the Pharisee of the country town, w^ho shakes his or her head with sternest rebuke at the follies out of reach. Whether we consider that >vorldliness be I 108 RELIGIOUS FAULTS. more basely displayed in the worship of wealth, or of rank, or of notoriety, or in the excessive desire of appro- bation and fear of censure, or in the attaching of vital importance to trifling details of comfort or gossip which deserve no attention from rational moral creatures, in each case the members of our pious coteries must stand the worst in the comparison with those who, at least, do not add to their fault the assumption of superior sanctity or the profession of a higher morality, and who seldom descend to the pettiness of ambition or of spite which marks too often the behaviour of their judges. CHAPTER IV. RELIGIOUS OBLIGATIONS SECTION I. THANKSGIVING. A CAUSE to which I have already adverted, namely, the ordinary ignoring of the abstract Rightfulness of wor- ship, has tended in modern times to displace Thanks- giving in an extraordinary manner from its natural important position. Let any dispassionate person ex- amine the Liturgy of any one of the great Christian Churches, or let him collect together what he may remember of the extempore prayers of Dissenters, and he will, I venture to predict, be surprised to observe how marvellously the story of the lepers is verified every day ; how for ten Prayers there is but one Thanks- giving. " We bless Thee for creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life." Some few short words like these at the end of whole Litanies of minute peti- tions are thought sufficient to dismiss the million million benedictions which our Creator is for ever pouring like sunbeams on our heads. Now, if it be right to pray for every sort of desirable object, for dry weather and for no ■\ RELIGIOUS OHLIOATIOXS. rain, for victory over our enemies and for deliverance from lightning and tempest, plague, pestilence, and famine, battle, murder, and sudden death, sui'ely it can- not be thought superfluous to thank God for similar blessings with at least equal assiduity. Yet, for the sunshine and the moonlight, for summer's stores and winter's healthful snow, for the radiant earth and solemn sea, for fruits and flowers, and brutes and birds, for our own wondrous frames of flesh, for sight and hearing, taste and smell and feeling, for sleep, for lan- guage, for human love, for intellect and memory, for all the wondrous powers which permit the child of yesterday to converse with the dead of all the ages, and to soar in thought through the realms of boundless space— for these blessings what liturgy pours its long strains of thanksgiving before the throne of the merciful Bene- factor ? It would seem, too, as if the things for which we do return some expressions of gratitude were only the blessings which come to the lower part of our nature traditional thanksgivings, if I may call them so, for the mercies men in ages of barbarism felt to be greatest. We say " grace before and after meat ;'' we have forms of public thanks for good harvests and for victory over our enemies. These are well. Even that poor formality of grace, as it is commonly understood, it would be sad to abandon, profaned though it so often be by the levity of its insertion between the paragraphs of a jesting tale, or the retorts of an angry argument. But why are no THANKSGIVING. Ill other blessings save food and safety made themes of praise ? These are the dews about our feet ; have we no thanks for the showers on our heads? It might almost be questioned whether any of the peculiar mer- cies which we possess over those which belonged to onr ancestors have been recognised in any social worship by thanksgiving. What forms have been ever proposed for blessing God for the great discoveries of modern science and the progress of political freedom ? — for our fire-horse, the steam-engine, whose fodder of coal was laid up so carefully a million years ago ; for the facili- tation of all kindly intercourse throughout the world ; for medical and surgical discoveries without number for the relief of human suffering; for the unspeakable blessing of a righteous jurisprudence ? Have we no thanks for things like these ? Should the Benedicite of the " heir of all the ages " be no stave the longer than that of the serf and monk of the centuries when oppres- sion and ignorance darkened Europe with their double night ? Methinks that each generation of men ought to add a strophe, and that ours ought to add many a strophe, to the universal h)^mn of God's happy children. If we would understand the nature of the blessings God bestows on us, we should do well to remember that in Ilim are united the two characters to which we look with greatest trust and veneration. He is at once the Father and the Mother of the world. It is only human nature completed and perfected, male and female united, that can offer to us any Image of Ilim. If we think, as 112 RELIGlOrS OBLIGATIONS. we SO often do, of Him only in one relation, we shall lose unspeakably. The '* Parent of Good, Almighty " is both Parents in One. As the Father of the universe. He gives us life and provides with all a father's care for our preservation and for our progress towards that immortal virtue for whose sake the life was given. As the Mother of the world, He adds to our existence every unhurtful pleasure which the tenderest of woman's hearts could devise for the innocent happiness of her child. If the Father's gifts be greatest, these are per- haps dearer still, for they prove tlie love of God to be something so tender, so inexpressibly gentle and indul- gent, that our hearts at their very hardest are melted when we do but remember it ;* even as the most aban- doned of reprobates are softened when reminded of the mother's love which once has blessed them. Surely there is something wonderful in the thought of those countless millions of little joys which the Wisdom and the Power which guide the systems of the suns have designed and wrought out for every child amongst us ! Let us note a few of these little tokens of God's tender love.f ♦ "Car I'aniour nous touche beaucoup plus (^110 lea bienfaits, parceieu. OCuvres in fol. t They were very heathen gods truly of whom it was said '* They take care of great things, and disregard the small." (Cicero, de Nat. Deor., b. ii. c. Ixvi.) These are the^u'^e deities whom it is Idolatry to worship. THAXKSGIVIXG. 113 It is a trite remark that w^e are nearly always stimu- lated to the various actions needful for our life by a sense oi pleasure quite superfluous, where mere want and pain would have equally compelled us to exertion. Men eat, drink, sleep, or take exercise, because these acts are pleasures much oftener than because forbearance from them entails pain. Each sense has indeed for itself a garden of its own delights : — Beauty, and music, and perfume, and the tastes of food and drink, and the alternations of warmth and coolness, exercise, and repose. Blanco White said that a whole Bridgewater Treatise might be written on the proofs of beneficent design manifested in the laws of harmonious somids and the adaptation of the human ear to their enjoy- ment. Still wider diffused is the delight in beauty, of which the whole earth and sky afford one endless spec- tacle. Even the liumbler sense of smell gives ua a variety of delicate pleasures which we should rank higher than we do were we to pay attention to their beneficent power over the memory and the animal spirits. Why has God made us to enjoy beauty and music? or why simply has He made the flowers but out of love like that of a mother? We could have lived very well, I suppose, without roses, and jessa- mine, and heliotrope, and mignionette. They do not seem of any sort of use to our life, nor do they afford special service (at least their beauty or perfume do not) to any bird or insect. Why, then, did God make those little flowers so bright and sweet ? Why did He give 114 RELIGIOUS OBLIGATIONS. man the innocent occupation of improving them by culture, and yet spread wild ones almost as fair over every spot of earth ? Why, but to make us happy, to gladden our hearts with His beautiful works, to put some proof of Ilis love into every path our feet may tread ? Even among our human friends, we feel that there is a peculiar tenderness in a gift of flowers which the donor has culled especially for us. Many a large dotation of lands or gold from a father has called forth less grateful feelings than the little bunch of our favourite roses which a mother's gentle hands have arranged to greet us in our chamber. And shall we have no swelling heart, no tearful eye, for Ilim whoor mortality is ever clothed with, i of our existence no cause for thankfulness ? Have we no gratitude to God that He has not made us like the grass, to spring up for an hour in the morning sunlight and feel that every cloud of resentment was gone to return no more. But this is only the negative side of the case. We may all have noted in life how, when we do see into the depths of any human heart, we discover, almost with a start, something which calls forth a peculiar love to that being. It is the mysterious self we have seen at last, and each living soul has its own awful individuality, known perfectly to Goeing, and which are determined, a jrriori, by pure reason itself, and necessary {i.e., both virtue and happiness). Happiness alone is, in the view of reason, far from being the complete good. Reason does not approve of it (however much inclination may desire it), except as united with desert. On the other hand, morality alone, and with it mere desert, is likewise far from being the complete good. To make it complete, he who conducts himself in a manner not unworthy of happiness nmst he able to hope for the possession of happiness. Even reason, unbiassed by private ends or interested considerations, cannot judge otherwise if it puts itself in the place of a Iking whose office it is to disi)ense all happiness to others. For in the practical idea both points are essen- tially combined, though in such a way that ixirticipation in happiness is rendered possible by the moral disi>osition as its condition, and not, conversely, the moral disposition by the prospect of happiness. For a dis;K)sition which should reiiuire the prospect of hapiuness as its neces- sary condition would not be moral, and hence also would not be worthy of complete happiness."— Kant's Kritik, •'Transcendental Doctrine of Method," chap. ii. sect. 2. These persons commonly thrust out of sight the alleged destiny of the wicked, and rest their gaze exclusively on a brilliant picture of ecstatic Paradise, to which they expect direct admittance through the door of the tomb. Dazzled by the visionary glitter of the golden streets of the New Jerusalem, they turn contemptuously from the man who can only point calmly to the stars of an actual heaven, and avow that he looks for a continu- ance in other worlds of the laws which have ruled his existence here. Absolute and immediate happiness, which shall never know diminution or increase, and a sinlessness which shall for ever exclude the possibility of trial or temptation ; these are the hopes which are said to leave the faith of nature in the shade. I will not now ask whether these brilliant pictures be true, whether they be even possible. Let us suppose that a finite creature could be impeccable, and j'et something higher than a brute. Let us suppose that we have evidence that God has revealed to His creature that such a Heaven awaits the just. Would it be, indeed, a joy to anticipate it ? Should we prefer it (even after refining away every image of earthly grandeur into an emblem of purity and spiritual glory) to the immortal Progress which intuition teaches us to expect ? It seems to me that the higher we have ascended in the path of virtue and religion, the less we should desire the Paradise of unbroken repose which is offered to us. It is the best — perhaps the only — test of tlie G 2 124 RELIGIOUS OBLIGATIONS. Sincerity of repentance for past sina, that we should be willing and glad to suffer their just expiation. If a man feel in dying that justice has not had its claims satisfied as regards him, that he has suffered ver\^ little and sinned a great deal, such a man ought undoubtedly to look forward with a solemn rejoicim/ to the fulfil- ment, in another life, of that Divine retribution which he adores. A stricter school and severer chastisement have nothinj? to dismay him. He feels that they would be Right and in accordance with God's character ; and the wish of his heart is, that the Right may be done, and God's perfect attributes maintained. This he must feel independently of the knowledge that the Divine Retribution is also the Divine Correction, and that the faults of his present disposition will be healed by such merciful medicine. To tell a man who feels like this, that ho is going to instant, endless beatitude, would only be to throw his mind into amazement and to con- found all his sense of justice.* On the other hand, let us suppose that a man has faithfully worked his way through the trials of life, and stands on the shore of the dark river with his loins still girded for the great race of virtue, and his heart filled with holy ambition to grow evermore better and nobler. And let us suppose that after the first burst of joy at *' Nor would the latter be satisfied by tlie additional assurance that this unaccountable defalcation in the Divine Justice was the result of the sufferings of a being who had not sinned or deserved any suffering whatever. THANKSGIVING. 125 finding himself suddenly advanced to that incompre- hensible state of sinlessness, an angel should convey to him this decree : — " The stage you have now reached of moral progress is the highest to which you shall ever be permitted to attain. Throughout all the millenniums of your immortality your felicity shall remain imbroken, and never once be ennobled or freshened by a single act of self-sacrifice. Never more shall you be allowed to offer to God one poor effort of obedience, or do for Him a task which shall cost you a moment's pain. And, as the consequence of this, you shall never be nearer to God than you are at this moment, never gain that larger, stronger soul which would make you more sensible of Ilis presence, and enable you better to apprehend His goodness. You shall love Him and know his love only as you do now through all the ages of eternity." Would not a sentence such as this sound like a curse to the ears of the true child of God ? After centuries of that stagnant heaven, would he not pine even for our world of trial, where virtue is at least a thing living and growing, not a mere embalmed mummy, and where love can yet offer the sacrifice in which it is its nature to delight ? * * Perhaps it will be answered that there is no necessity for supposing that the absolute felicity, of the blessed should exclude them from pro- gress. 1 answer that the hy^wthesis that a finite Ijeing could enjoy absolute felicity, and could be absolutely impeccable, are already two absurdities, to whirh it is indeed easy to add a third ; namely, that, bci)ig impeticable, he could still grow in virtue {i.e., in the strength acquired by self-conquest in peccable beings). It is, however, sufB- 126 RELIGIOUS OBLIGATIONS. No ! there is nothing happier to be conceived of by heart of man than that which is actually true ; that which the intuition God has given us, and the whole analogy of His government, lead us to expect : an immortality of progress, an everlasting growth in virtue and in love. If, then, we are grateful to that Good One for the ** life that now is," should we not also bless Him for "that which is to come?*' Should we not sometimes raise our thoughts to view the whole scope of our existence, and the nature of the boon it really is, viewed in one vast perspective of endless good? It would have been a great benefaction (as many a noble soul doubtful of its immortality has cheerfully admitted) merely to have been given existence for a few years in this world of beauty, to have been called to behold even one little scene of this splendid drama. But when our faith embraces what God has actually designed for us through all the cycles of unending futurity, it is some- thing so stupendous that we become ungrateful from the very impossibility of conceiving the magnitude of the gift. Rightly comprehending the meaning of our existence as an everlasting progress, in which Happiness is only the secondary, and Virtue the primary end, we shall also be better able to estimate the value of those blessings which tend more directly to assist our ciently foolish to argue at all on a self-contracliotory hyiMJthesis. 1 wished simply to show the moral answer to the objection sometimes made to the philosophic idea of the immortal life. THANKSGIVING. 127 moral life. Of course, all that God docs for us helps this great design, for which He made us at first, clothed us with garbs of flesh, and built for us this planet- home. We may take everything that preserves our animal life, everything that assists our intellect and our afiections, as God's instrument to bring us onward and upward. The necessaries of existence do this by afford- ing a ground for the moral life. The luxuries, which add happiness to that x^hysical existence, do it by warming and encouraging the better sentiments of our nature, proving to us God's tender care, and offering us opportunities of self-sacrifice for others. Further yet, beside the necessaries of life and the joys thereunto added, God helps us by suffer in c/s. These are often the very best helps, and consequently the best blessings of all, healing our sinful hearts and making us advance with tenfold rapidity on the path towards our glorious end. Hereafter, I doubt not, when we look back to earth from the high spheres of our future being, we shall all thank God most fervently for these very sufl'erings. The memory of the dear homes of our child- hood, of the scenes of requited affection, or of honest joy in the success of noble labours— even these will fade before the stiU more grateful recollection of the sick- beds where our strength and health were struck down, and of the graves where our dearest human affections lay buried. And yet further does God help us, and more power- fuUy, more directly, than by suffering itself. Over the IS, 128 RELIGIOUS OBLIGATIONS. THANKSGIVING. 129 chaos of our conflicting will and desires His Spirit broods, " moving on the face of the deep/' and stilling into sunniest calm the night-storm of tliose howling waves. For the inspiration which has enlightened the conscience, for the grace which has melted and purified the heart, who shall thank God enough ? Who shall count the value of each holy thought, each tear of penitence, each throb of aspiration, which he has caused to start in the darkened mind, the hardened conscience? lict us hope that these spiritual blessings at least are rarely received thanklessly. Perhaps their most unfailing result is to flood the soul with a sense of gratitude unutterable, while we think that to sinners like us the holy Lord of Heaven stoops to give llis aid. If these be the grounds for gratitude from man to God, we ought not, I think, to have much hesitation in granting the principle with which I started ; namely, that it is absolutely Right for man to pay the direct worship of Thanksgiving to his Creator. Antecedent to the demand of it from God, or from any prospect of gain to our own virtue, is it not rif/ht that such gifts should draw forth thanks? When we read of some cruel despot going down peacefully and triumphantly to the grave, unrepentant and even exulting, we feel that there would be something wrong somewhei'e if that wretch did not suffer a portion of the agonies he has inflicted. When we contemplate the immeasurable benefits which God has heaped on his creatures, do we not also feel that there would be wrong somewhere if He received no gratitude in return ? But how is such gratitude to be displayed? I answer, Let it only he felt j and then it will be displayed in every action of our existence. If we could but feel it as we ought, ay, or but a hundredth part as much, it would colour our whole nature, and break out in every brightened glance of our eyes and gladdened tone of our voices. It is the sentiment of gratitude which the Eternal Right demands as the tribute from a finite to an infinite Spirit, and the action can be of value only as the token of that sentiment. Man is a being so constituted that his sentiments naturally express themselves in his deportment, words, and actions. We are all so well aware of this, that, unless we have reason to suppose the exertion of a strong volition to control the display of any sentiment, we invariably doubt the veracity of such as do not show themselves externally in all these ways. In like manner we may well suspect the sincerity of our own gratitude to God when we find that the expression of it begins and ends in a few words of formal thanksgiving, mostly repeated with even greater coldness and careless- ness than degrades our prayers. To make our gratitude credible to ourselves we ought to be able to trace its impulse through our whole outward bearing. Beings blessed as we are, and capable of comprehending our blessings, ought to live and move in an atmosphere of love and trust ineffable. Our faces ought to reflect G 3 lao RELIGIOUS OBLIGATIONS. back the sunshine of heaven, and the joyful tones of our voices to seem the echo of its halleluiahs. What fitness have the clouded brow, the peevish whine, for the creature who knows that Infinite Love is guiding every turning of his path, purposely to lead him to everlasting blessedness ? Our forefathers attributed to Odin himself the saying, ** There is no malady more severe than not to be contented with our lot."* Perhaps we might add further, " Nor any sin worse than a repining of spirit." If we were really thankful, we should show it in some such ways as these : — We should be absolutely content at heart; not merely resigned, but cheerful. There seems great error current still in the world on this point. Time religion is and ought to be something more than "Islam." Resignation, patience, submission, belong, not to the happy rule of human life, but to the exceptional hours of grief and agony, when our poor hearts can ascend to nothing beyond. For the vast majority of our days, when God is actually loading us with joys of the senses, the intellect, and the affections, to talk of " resignation" seems almost a mockery. What if we can imagine some other pleasures beside those He has seen best for us ; if we yearn for larger spheres of mental action, or more tender bonds of human love ; if we chafe against the fetters which weakness, or poverty, or the conduct of others, places on our freedom ; if we smart under * Havd-mal (Song of Songs), trans. Mallet. THANKSGIVING. 131 frequent bodily pain, or the worse pangs inflicted by unkindness — what are all these, and the thousand trials like them, compared to the great overweight of blessings in the opposite scale ? Cannot we trust God, who has given us ninety and nine pleasures, that, if He withhold the hundredth, it is from no forgetfulness, no niggardli- ness ? Cannot we feel assured that He ever makes us — "As blest as we can bear ;" as happy as will consist with our highest welfare now and for ever ? We all believe this in theory, but yet our spirits are for ever falling back into the same repining state, which we attempt to cloak under the name of resignation. The martyr of an agonizing disease, who knows he must endure tortures ending only with his life, the bereaved heart which aches in utter solitude ; these may be " resigned." It is a noble and holy sight to see how in such trials even the weakest often rise to most beautiful virtue, and " in patience possess their souls." Sometimes even under such torments men have ascended still higher, and have spoken of joys of Divine Love pouring into their wounds a peace ineffable. But is it for the healthy and the beloved to talk of the same " resignation," as if, in relinquishing the one pleasure denied them out of their full harvests, they were exercising the same virtue ? When we cease to relish the joys God grants us because there is still another He does not grant; when we sit down with 132 RELIGIOUS OBLIGATIONS. THANKSGIVING. 133 folded hands and say to our great Parent, ** Without this gift we cannot enjoy any other of Thine innu- merable provisions for our happiness, so we do not pre- tend to be cheerful ; but we are resignedy oh, perfectly resigned'* — is it not most puerile pretence? Does not old Selden say well, *' If a king should give you the keeping of a castle, with all things belonging to it, orchards and gardens, and bid you use them, and withal promise you after twenty years to remove you to the court and make you a privy- councillor ; if you shoidd neglect your castle, and refuse to eat of those fruits, and sit down and whine and wish you were a privy-councillor, do you think the king would be pleased with you? Whilst you are upon earth enjoy the good things that are here (to that end were they given), and be not melancholy and wish yourself iu heaven." * It was a great word of Paul, and worthy of his mighty soul, " Rejoice in the Lord alway : and again I say, Rejoice."t Only with the spirit of religious joy * Tahle-talk. Butler understands resignation in a far nobler sense tliau this. "Our resignation to the will of God may be said to be i)er- feet when our will is lost and resolved up in His ; when we rest in His will as our end, as being itself most just, and right, and good. And where is the im^wssibility of such an atiection to what is just, and right, and good, such a loyalty of heart to the Governor of the universe as shall prevail over all sinister indirect desires of our own ? Neither is this at bottom anything more than faith, and honesty, and fairness o mind, in a more enlarged sense, indeed, than those words are commonly used." — Butler, Sernwiis on Uiutmn NcUure, xiv. t PhU. iv. 4. I can the great duty of gratitude be fulfilled, and every other duty made perfect by alacrity and delight. Surely it ought not to be very hard to be content with that lot which Wisdom Infinite sees to be best to bring us to the very highest end attainable by a created being, and which the God we love guides every moment accordingly ! Even if this were not so, if it were for other great and holy ends in His creation that God sometimes withheld our joys or inflicted our sufferings, and if we obtained no indi\idual benefit thereby, could we give up nothing, endure nothing^ for His sake, and to aid His blessed designs ? It is utterly vain to talk of reliarion at all, unless we can be Content, unless we can merge our selfish cravings for happiness in God's righteous will.* Animal spirits, there is no doubt of it, have much to do with cheerfulness and contentment. Many of us can be gay and satisfied under circumstances which would sorely try our less elastically constituted neighbours. To one the duty is generally so easy as to demand no moral exertion whatever. To another it is the very culmination of his highest efforts. But small or great the difficulty, on all of us it lies. If we have natural cheerfulness, we must keep it equable, when our spirits (as they do in every one) fluctuate from want of excite- * *• Believe me now, when I tell you the very bottom of my heart. In all the difficulties and crosses of my life this is my consideration : since it is God's will, I do not only obey, but assent to it ; nor do I comply out of necessity, but from choice." — Seneca. 134 RELIGIOUS OBLIGATIONS. ment or over-excitement. If our cheerfulness comes not naturally from our bodily state, then it must come from something far higher, from the resolute virtuous will, at one with God, and loving all that God ap- points. Secondly. We should show gratitude by actually expressing our thanks in the words which would spontaneously issue from our lips were our hearts truly kindled. Our acts of worship would often include recitals of the benefits we receive, and at every moment of enjoyment where formal worship was impossible we shoidd send up to God the thought of gratitude. I believe that few things would more completely modify our lives than such habitual thanksgiving. Suppose that, instead of confining our grace to one meal in the day, we were ea^h to say in our own hearts a little grace after each successive occupation. The business of the field or the office honestly and punctually performed to the best of our abilities — a kind act which we have been permitted to accomplish, whether with or without self-denial — a study which we have pursued to the enlargement of our minds — a conversation which has aided our own or another's good thoughts, or warmed our kindly sympathies with friendly inter- course — a walk or ride in the fresh air, invigorating brain and limbs — are not all these worth a " grace" as well as the best of good dinners ?* And if we were thus ♦ The Rabbins appoint benedictions for every event of life. The following are from Leo of Modena. In the morning, on awaking : THANKSGIVING. 135 to accustom ourselves to thank God for the innocent pleasures of life, how sharp a line would it force us to draw between them and the guilty ones, for which we could not dare to bless Him ! After spending hours of idleness, when labour was due ; after self-indulgence, when we might have benefited our brother ; after read- ing bad books ; quarrelling, slanderous or unclean talk ; meals at which we sunk our souls in gluttony and excess — could we ofier thanks after these things to Him whose gifts we had polluted? Surely not the most impious among us all! Thanksgiving then would divide, as with chemical test, the evil pleasures from the good. And it would hallow and endear these good ones beyond our conception. To a loving heart even the merest trifle becomes precious when accepted as a token of care for our welfare ; and so every blessing of mortal life may be taken as proving the tender mercy of Him whom we may reverence and love beyond the noblest and nearest of earthly friends. These feelings come to us aU, at times. There are days (perhaps most commonly when the heart is softened by penitence), blessed days, when we trace everything to God's hand, ♦' Blessed be Thou, Lord our God, King of the world, who restorest life to the dead, and who enlightenest the blind." On applying them- selves to study the law : "Blessed be Thou, O Lord, who hast given us the law." On taking food : ** Blessed be Thou, who bringest bread out of the earth. Blessed be Thou, Creator of the fruit of the vine." On smelling flowers, &c. : -Blessed be Thou, who hast created odour." On seeing a high mountain or the sea : '* Blessed be Thou, Lord our God, Creator of all things at the beginning," &c. L -jMtol"*^ 136 RELIGIOUS OBLIGATIONS. THANKSGIVING. 137 I and are ready to weep in very tenderness for the prim- rose which has blossomed in our favourite nook, or the caresses of the poor dog, which its Maker and ours has taught to sympathize so wondrously with our joy and sorrow. Oh that we coidd keep for ever fresh such feelings as these ! It is not they which are false and exaggerated. It is our ordinary coldness which is a mockery of the great reality of God's goodness and man's obligations. Nor is it only for ourselves and our own blessings that we ought to give thanks to God. I have already said that we should bless Him for tlie beautiful and beneficent Order of His creation, and it is not merely inasmuch as this benefits ils that we ought to do it. Surely a good given to our brother is a source of gratitude. Surely the happiness of the myriad mil- lions of our fellow-creatures, rational and irrational, in the past and in the future, is a subject fit for thanks- giving. We have spoken often of the abstract wrong there woidd be were crime to remain for ever unpunished. Does it not seem there would be also a wrong if this whole lovely planet should roll on for age after age around the life-giving sun, followed by the sweet, holy moon, enjoying all the beneficent alternations of summer and winter and day and night, freshening its great oceans with the tides, and covering its shores with the gorgeous robe of vegetable life, giving birtli and suste- nance to all the joyous tribes of insect and fish and bird and brute, and yet that from this happy sphere no incense of thanks should ever ascend into the heavens to bless the Lord of all for the order of His beautiful universe ? A thousand centuries ago, when God looked down on this third planet of this solar system in this galaxy of suns, there was (as we think) no living soul who trod its surface endowed with the power to apprehend its bounteous intent, or to return Him an expression of gratitude. The mighty Ichthyosaurus wallowing in those turbid waves, the fearful Pterodactyle spreading his bat-wings in the heated air, the giant Megatherium trampling through the forests of primeval pines— what knew thev of the Maker who built their monster forms, and planted their luxuriant woods, and sent the light of His sun to their large horny eyes, and made His rain to grave its traces on that red sandstone of the olden world, even as to-day He sends it on the cultured fields of the rational sons of men ? And now, when perchance many a hundred thousand years have passed away since the far-off epochs of the Saurian and the giant Sloth, when God looks down now on our garden- globe, how many does He see, upon all its smiling surface, offering up the dumb world's thanks to Him, its kind and careful Lord ? It is but a few, even now, who can thus be the spokesmen of the silent earth. The brutes, and birds, and fish of our time are as insensible of religion as the monster creatures of old ; the ass and the ox of to-day know the crib and the fold, as the mammoth and the hyena knew the ancient I 1% -ii: 138 RELIGIOUS OBLIGATIONS. THANKSGIVING. 139 caverns where their petrified bones have Liin all these millenniums ; but no steps of advance can we yet trace in their knowledge of Him to whose infinite heart their hungry cries have never appealed in vain, " who open- eth His hand, and fulfilleth the desire of every living thing." Man's sacred race alone may yet produce aspirants for the solemn priesthood of our world ; and of that great family how few are the happy sons who can stand forth in that high office ? Take away the child in years and the child in knowledge ; take away the savage whose creed has not yet reached even the polytheist's power to thank under many names the One Giver of all good ; take away all these, and how few remain who can look up to God with that tear-brimming eye which must ever turn to Him after any wide survey of His bounteous world ! Surely, then, it becomes well every soul amongst us which is capable of it to take on itself this blessed work, to leave not wholly and for ever unthanked God's goodness to those who cannot thank Him, but to put aside for awhile the thought of our own present and everlasting joy, and turn to bless our Benefactor for being also the kind and tender Parent of all our count- less fellow-creatures. Let us thank God for ourselves; but let us also thank Him for others. Let us thank Him for His good provideace towards all the tribes of men now living or departed ; for His care of them on earth, for His love for them when gathered in by death still closer to His infinite bosom. Let us thank God that there are millions who share all our joys, and that there are millions who have joys which we shall never share. Let the blind, and deaf, and crippled thank God for the seeing, and the hearing, and the healthy limbs of their brothers. Let the hungry praise God that others have food, the bereaved that others have the joys of affection, the orphan that others have parents, the childless that others have children. And what if we should go yet a step beyond our own race, and bless God sometimes for the brutes ; bless Him not only that He has made so many of them useful to t^, but that He has made them all for their happiness ? If we could embrace in one view all the innocent delights of all the dwellers in earth, and sea, and air, what moun- tainous worlds of bliss would seem piled up before us ! The shoals of the merry fish swimming in the blue waters those same endless dances which the insects fly in the summer air and the little rabbits and mice run along upon the ground ; the stately beasts browsing or ruminating gently over earth's broad pastures, from the Tartar's grassy plains to the measureless savannahs of the West ; the birds singing at their work as they build their nests in the love that knits their little fluttering hearts, whether beating beneath the splendid plumes of the tropic tribes or clothed in the " russet livery" of those humble sparrows whose fall Christ knew that God will mark— what oceans of joy are here ! The elements absolutely swarm with beings whose delight is visible to 140 RELIGIOUS OBLIGATIONS. our eyes every day ; * and if we turn to count the tiny beings which dwell unperceived around us, down to the infusoria, of which two drops of water hold a population larger than the whole human race, by what arithmetic * •• Look over the bountiful distribution of joy in the world. It abounds in the lower walks of creation. The young fish you shdl even now find on the shallow beaches of some Atlantic bay, how happy they are! Voiceless, dwelling in the cold, unsocijd element of water, moving with the flapping of the sea, and never still amid the ocean waves' immeasurable laugh— how delighted are these little children of Cod ! Their life seems one continuous holiday, the shoal waters a playgi-ound. Their food is plenteous as the water itself. Society is abundant, and of the most unimi>eachable respectability. They have their little child's games, which last all day long. No one is hungiy, ill-man- nered, ill-dressed, dyspeptic, love-lorn, or melancholy. They fear no hell. These cold, white-fleshed, and bloodless little atomies seem ever full of joy as they can hold— wise without study, learned enough without book or school, and well cared for amid their own neglect. They recollect no past ; they provide for no future : the great Ootl of the ocean their only memory or forethought. These little short-lived minnows are to me a sermon eloquent : they are a Psalm to God above the loftiest hymnings of Theban Pindar or the Hebrew king. On the land see the joy of the insects just now coming into life— the adven- turous birds— even the reptiles. The young of all animals are full of delight. A new lamb, or calf, or colt, just opening its eyes on the old world, is happy as fabled Adam in his Eden. As they grow older they have a wider and a wiser joy— the delight of the passions and the affections, to apply the language of men to the consciousness of the cattle. It takes the form not of rude leapings, but of quiet cheerful- ness. The matronly cow, ruminating beside her playful and hornless little one, is a type of (juiet joy and entire satisfaction ; all her nature clothed in well-befitting happiness. "—Parker's Sermoiis of Religion: Sermon vii., Conscimis Relicjioii as a Svurcc of Joy. THANKSGIVING. 141 shall we estimate the gifts of life and joy rained down from the infinite love of Heaven ? Surelv, surely, it would be right that we should some- times lift our souls to God in thanksgiving for all His endless care and goodness towards the creatures whom He has not disdained to make happy, though tliey can never bless Him for their happiness. 142 RELIGIOUS OBLIGATIONS. SECTION II. ADORATION. If we distinguish the duty of Adoring God (that is, of feeling and expressing towards II im a reverential love founded on His moral perfection) from the duties of Thanksgiving and Prayer, we shall arrive at a more accurate comprehension than is usual of the various phases of the religious sentiment. The moral love of God, which is the spring of Adoration, is in fact the primary fount of the whole religion of all moral creatures; for (as I observed in diseu5.«5ing the canon of religious duty) a mere Sense of Dejx^ndence, be it never so entire, even if it include deix'ndence for existence itself and all its blessings, still falls short of being a Religious Sentiment till tlie ethical element of a sense of Moral Allegiance be added thereto. Adora- tion, to our moral ideal, is that which makes thanks- giving to our heavenly Benefactor a Religious act ; and the same holds good with respect to prayer, since it would be altogether out of question to implore grace and light, except from a Being recogniscnl as the All- Righteous God of Truth. Adoration, then, taken in its largest sense, is relio-ion : it is the nucleus round which all grateful feelings, all ADORATION. 143 holy aspirations, cluster and shine together in that one heavenly star. This may be deduced from the great canon of religious duty itself, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart." If we understand this Divine love in its strictest sense, we shall find the law of adoration, properly so called, the law of that reverential love towards the morally perfect Being which it behoves all moral creatures in the universe to entert-ain. If we give a wider significance to the canon, it includes all those sentiments of gratitude and aspiration (besides subordinate feelings of the love of the beautiful and of the true) which, as I have said, cluster round adoration, and, while deriving their sanctity from it, add doubly to its attraction and its lustre. For the present I shall confine myself to the topic of adoration considered in its stricter sense as that form of worship which consists in reverent love both felt and expressed for the moral attributes of God. And, in the first place, I hope I may assume that it is practically superfluous to prove to any one that it is right he should adore God so soon as he recognises His good- ness. Nevertheless, as it is the office of a moralist to show the derivation of each duty on which he would insist, I shall briefly observe that the actual rightful- ness of adoration must be understood to stand immedi- ately on the nature of God and man, and to result necessarily from the moral relation of the latter to the former. AV^e are here absolutelv at the basis of all 144 RELIGIOUS OBLIGATIONS. ADORATION. 145 morals ; for the original obligation to feel and do all those sentiments and actions which according to the necessary eternal distinction are Right, that same obli- gation holds us to venerate that Eight, not only in the abstract as the ideal Law, and in its imperfect concrete presentations in human Virtue, but supremely in its perfect personification in the absolutely Righteous God. So clear is this great truth, that it seems not only superfluous, but almost impious, thus to demonstrate the duty of adoring God, as if all duty was not linked by a thousand chains to His throne, from wliich alone it has reached and bound our souls ! But unhappily such arguments are not wholly needless. On one side men have lost sight of the necessity of moral distinctions, and so, by making good and evil consist merely in the arbitrary decree of God, have practically denied the reality of His moral attributes, and thus have, to a certain extent, demoralized religion. On the other hand, men have recognised the necessity of moral dis- tinctions, but have failed to perceive with sufficient clearness the absolute identity of that eternal necessary Right with the one holy Will of infinite God, and so have aimed at morality dissociated from religion, and, by severing it from all the hallowing influences of pietyi have, as far as such a thing was i>ossible, desecrated morality. A true scheme of ethics must steer clear of both errors. It must show the absolute unison of morals and religion. It need not be ashamed to prove that *' the Law requires man to adore his God,*' for that truth (which God Himself, be it remembered, gives us in our moral natures to discover and obey), that same truth will help hereafter to strengthen its great converse, " God requires man to obey the Law." Led for ever nearer to God by Duty, that personal love and adoration which abstract Duty itself cannot win, but which our souls are made to give to God, shall I'oll back with tenfold force the whole strength of our natures into the channels of Duty, and we shall love the Right as God*s own Right all the more for this, because we have learned truly to adore God for His Righteousness. And this is, as I have so often repeated, the true ground and centre of religion, the Adoration for the Moral Perfection of the Supreme Being.* The greatness of God, His stupendous power and wisdom, and the unnamcable magnitude of His eternal and infinite existence, these are no uncommon themes of human thought. They are by no means, however, the topics of most vital interest to us as concerns our relation to Him. Wonder and overwhelming awe are the sentiments which mere greatness is calculated to awaken in our souls ; and though these have their use in afi()rding a continual balance, a sort of centrifugal force to counteract the familiarizing effects of constant * ** Epicurus says the Divine nature is the best and most excellent, but he will not allow it to be susceptible of any benevolence. By this he destroys the chief and peculiar attribute of the most perfect l>ting; for what is better and more excellent than goodness and beneficenc*^ ' ** — Cicero, De Nat. Deor.y h. i. c. 44. H 146 RELIGIOUS OBLIGATIONS. ADORATION. 'V. approaches to God in supplication, yet in an ethical point of view mere wonder and awe have not a moral character, and only acquire one in a secondary sense by such utility as that above stated. Like the delight in Beauty and the love of Truth (of which I shall presently speak), they serve to imite our souls to God in admiration and sympathy when we keep duly in pre- eminence of adoration the moral perfection of the A11- Powerful, All-Beautiful, All-Wise One. But awe without such moral reverence has no ethical merit whatever. The awe, for instance, in which our ances- tors stood of the imaginary devil was actually a lurong sentiment, implying as it did a want of faith in the supremacy of good and a belief in the potency of evil, indicative of a low state of moral energy. The mere greatness of God is not, then, the foundation of the duty of adoration for a free intelligence. Were He as great as He is, and evil also, should we still adore him ? It would be impossible. So nobly has he Him- self constituted our souls, that the moment such a chimera rises before us as that of personified evil clothed in the grandeur of a God, that moment no sentiment save horror attaches itself to the attributes of mere greatness, to absolute wisdom and almighty power. There is no fear we lack reverence for the true God in thus rendering our adoration to that in Him which is of right adorable. He Himself has so made us that it must be thus. Not on His greatness, not even on His benefits, has He founded His claim to the homage of 147 beings to whom He has given the rank of moral intelli- gences. Man may not love the holy Lord of Good as a dog loves his master, or as Ecloge and Acte loved Nero. He has made us to adore Moral Perfection, and to regard other attributes with veneration only when possessed by a Morally Perfect Being.* And God is that which He has so made us to love. We have but to descend into the sanctuarj^ of our souls, and ask the oracle therein what is the justice, the good- ness, the holiness we spontaneously adore, and we shall obtain an answer which will shadow forth our Father in Heaven better than any formulas can do, and as well as our minds at their particular stage of growth can understand. As we ourselves grow more like Him, that ideal will continue to rise higher and higher in its positive conception of what justice and goodness mean ; but at all times it is negatively true. Nothing that we ever think unjust, cruel, or unholy can belong to Him who has made us despise and abhor whatever we feel to bear those characters. The species of definition or description of the Deity (if I may so call it) which we intellectually construct in our minds, partly from some of the data given by * " He (Fenelon) has not stated, and, in truth, very few do state with sufficient strength and precision, the moral foundation and the moral nature of religion. He has not taught with sufficient clearness the great truth that love to God is from beginning to end the love of virtue. He did not sufficiently feel that religion is the expansion and most perfect form of the moral faculty of man." — Channiug, Remarks on the Character of PirUUm. H 2 I 148 RELIGIOUS OBLIGATIONS. ADORATION. 149 intuition, and partly from the negations furnished by the logical understanding — such descriptions, I say, always seem more or less different from tliat idea of God which rises before us whenever we actually pray, and approach Him in spirit as our moral Judge. I do not mean that they contradict or oppose it. If we follow faithfully the light granted to us, it is the tendency of our religious creed to harmonize itself continually more and more in all its parts ; and while our foundation is laid on the direct intuitions of God in our souls, we build into the superstructure of our temple every fact and thought hewn out of the visible universe by the labour of the understanding, till at last the building stands forth the consummation of our whole mental and moral natures. Nevertheless, while this work is incomplete, the results attained by the logical understanding are not always in exact coinci- dence with intuition, and the latter is itself often but imperfectly produced. I mean that, when we are engaged in a purely intellectual study of theology, our ideal of God is apt to be confused, or at all events less bright and pure than when we " seek His face " in directly religious exercises. It is a solemn subject, and one on which it is hard to speak with enough diffidence; but I think the experience of my readers will probably corroborate what I would advance — namely, that the God they find in prayer is a more holy Being than they can place before them in any other attitude of the soul. A vision is opened at those hours, of such awful purity. ' such relentless and tremendous justice, such unbounded unutterable love, that we seek in vain to behold it afterwards except in the reflection of memory. We never construct a God like Him who so reveals Himself to us. In prayer Intuition is the dominant faculty, and the other powers of the mind sink into their due subordination. In attempting to speak of the holiness of God, I shall, for these reasons, refer rather to the experience of my readers* hearts than to any logical definition of the Divine attributes. We may say over and over again, that God is pure and righteous and altogether holy, but these words only convey to us what may have been taught us by intuition concerning these attributes, and nothing beyond. We must, if we would know what such things are, go back to those blessed lessons, or (what is better far) go forward to fresh ones, and ask of Him " who giveth to every one liberally,'* and by whom no son craving for the bread of life hath ever been sent empty away. Now, when we do thus obtain a transient glance into the abyss of our Creator's holiness, what is the sentiment which floods our souls ? What seems to us, then, the Right tribute for sinful man to offer up for ever to the sinless Deity ? Is it not Adoration ? Do we not then recognise that that mingled burst of love and venera- tion, and an admiration for which human language has no name, is the only fit emotion of the soul when it con- templates that unutterable sanctity ? 150 RELIGIOUS OBLIGATIONS. It has not been without perception of the tnie nature of adoration that it has been represented in the Christian creed as the emplojTnent of blessed souls throughout eternity. Of course there is error in excluding our other moral, intellectual, and affectional faculties from their proper share of growth and employment; but undoubtedly there is a principle of self-perpetuation of a very peculiar kind in adoration. The more we dwell on the idea of goodness, so much the more we love it ; the more we contemplate the nature of holiness, the more power our souls acquire to revere it. Grievous have been the errors of the creeds which have repre- sented such things as Repentance as if they were, or ought to be, perpetually progressive. These are acts of the soul, not sentiments. I shall speak on this subject more fully presently ; but here it is enough to remark, that the attempt to renew with increasing fervour those passages of the moral life which are in their nature intended to be accomplished at once, is fraught with danger to the simplicity of the heart. Such things cannot go on for ever. No man can weep over his thousandth wilful and presumptuous transgression as he wept when first the love of God and hatred of sin broke upon his soul. But he can and does exult the thousandth time, far more than the first, when his spirit soars up in adoration of the infinite holiness of the Supreme, while ever wider his strengthening sight stretches out over the boundless horizon of purity and love. How far this may extend in the ages of ADORATION. 151 immortality before us all, what tongue may tell, what heart imagine ! When we trace the progress of adora- tion in our souls, and note the law of its growth, it would seem as if the Seer of Patmos had indeed fore- heard the cry which, day and night, in worlds above, our spirit voices shall repeat deeper and with profounder awe and love for ever and for ever — "holy! holy! holy! lord god almighty!" The duty of Adoration, to be rightly fulfilled, requires, as I have said, that we should rest it primarily upon the Moral Perfection of God. Nevertheless, this being recognised, and to the utmost of our soul's power duly adored, it is fit that all the other attributes of that Perfect Being should also receive from us the honour they deserve. The love of the Beautiful, the entrancing delight which we take in the harmonies of the visible universe, is a sentiment which may and ought to become a Reli- gious one, when we recognise that earth and sky are the works of that same God whose righteousness we worship. But the love of Beauty goes beyond mere admiration for the external object, for the form of the mountain, or the colouring of the forest. We feel an actual sympathy with the great Architect and Painter of those glorious things. Just as, among human beings, we are attracted towards the man whose tastes correspond with our own, and entertain feelings sometimes amoimting to actual love for the artist who creates what we admire ; 152 KELIGIOVS OBLIGATIONS. SO, as regards God, it will be found that every mind deeply imbued with a sense of the beauty of nature has in its depths a vague love for the great Power which called into being this world of grace and grandeur.* Nor is there any sort of error in this love. God himself is manifestly pleased (if we may use such a phrase) with Beauty. It cannot be only a beneficent adaptation of our planet- home and our aesthetic tastes to one another, for which He has made idl lovely things. There lies a whole world of beauty under the great southern oceans, where it is impossible to suppose that any created being who takes delight therein may ever behold it. Who but God has ever looked down since Creation's dawn into those blue depths — *' Where, with a light ami gentle motion, The fan -coral sweeps through the dear, deep sea. And the yellow and scarlet tufts of ocean Are bending like corn on the upland lea ?" * How clearly we see this in the great atheist poet! When the sorcery of genius has evoked the vision of Nature's heauty, the unbidden Divinity is straightway found standing in the midst, and enforcing hi« homage : — ** Fit throne fof such a power ! Magnificent ! How glorious ait thou, earth ! And if thou he The shadow of some spirit lovelier still, Though evil stain its work, and it should be. Like its creation, weak yet beautiful, I could fidl down and worship that and thee, Even now my heart adoreth : Wonderful ! " Promdheiut Uriboujidf act ii., sc. 3. I I ADORATION. 153 Who but He to whom it was equally easy to make all things beautiful or hideous, endlessly various or un- changeably monotonous, and who has preferred to adorn tVem with such wealth of loveliness? God must in some way love that same beauty which, in His tender kindness, He has made us also to feel and to enjoy. There is here between Creator and creature an actual s\TDpathy, as there is between man and man. What the poet is to the reader, the musician to the auditor, the painter, sculptor, architect to him who gazes at their glorious works, that is God to the lover of nature. And He is even something more ; for is it not our Father whose Art calls forth in us a filial sjTnpathy in creation ? Is it not He who made us, our own all -blessed God who speaks in the roar of the magnificent storm, and in the voice of the joyous birds which fill the forests with melody? Is it not He, whose chisel shaped **the liuman form divine," and made the face of woman love- liest of the sights of earth ? Is it not He who has coloured the green earth and azure sea with their broad lines of beauty, He who has painted the rainbow and made the sunset sky blaze with His glory, and then has stooped down to finish into perfect grace the tiny shells beneath the waves, the flowrets under our feet ? Is it not He who has built the holy cloisters of the woods and piled the white Alps for His temple- columns, and arched over all that grandest dome whose lamps are the shining tiers of a thousand heavens of suns? Is it not our Father who has done all these H 3 154 RELIGIOUS OBLIGATIONS. things, who is this mighty Artist, ay, from whom aU human art has come, taught by Him and Ilis glorious works to Phidias, and Ictinus, and Michael-Angelo, and Milton, and Mozart ? Well may we then sympa- thise in our humble love with our great Parent's joy in His creations. It is not only natural, it is reasonable and right, for man's heart so to do. " Even the Chris- tian's temple has a gate called * the Beautiful,'* a gate by which thousands of souls may enter and wor- ship." But even this sympathy with the Beautiful, fit and noble as it is, is almost valueless if not duly subordi- nated to the still nobler sentiment of Adoration for the Good. A religion which begins and ends in the vague, though perhaps deep and tender, admiration for the Divine Author of Beauty, is no religion for a moral being. A nature still in the rank of the brutes and un- endowed with moral freedom might, for all we know, be susceptible of it. It is incapable of producing Virtue ; and its inadequacy as a preservative from Vice has been demonstrated by the flagrant wickedness of ages and countries devoted, to the worship of the Beautiful under all the forms of art. The greatest dilettante in history is Nero! It may, indeed, be even ques- tioned whether the refinement of luxury produced by the culture of beauty may not to thousands prove the Mokanna-veil of a Sensuality which, if beheld in * Hertha. ADORATION. 155 its naked hideousness, they woidd have disdained to follow.* To a moral being, as I have so often repeated, the moral perfection of God must be the sole ground and motive of religion ; nay, this is so exclusively the case, that every other Divine attribute must be honoured by him precisely because it belongs to a morally Perfect God. Just as it would be base to worship mere power in a tyrant, so it would be base to worship mere artistic genius in a depraved fellow-creature. Nor does the case alter when we ascend above humanity. A beaut y - creating devil would be no more adorable than an almighty devil. Power and wisdom and the creation of beauty are all adorable in God, because He is more than almighty, all- wise, aU-lovely — because He is absolutely good. Let us but neglect this thought, and our religion is worthless ; let us carry it with us, and instantly Art becomes Religion, and the love of beauty binds us to God by a new tie of exquisite tenderness. It would seem, indeed, that minds of high aesthetic power are * To women in particular, with whom the senses are commonly ot less comparative power, the easiest of all modes of declension seems to be that of an excessive pursuit of the beautiful to which their natures are predisposed, and which their ordinary education fosters, to the exclusion of all intellectual exercise. The narrowness of their sphere of thought and action still further contracts what might have remained ennobling in the worship of true art ; and the result is, that we find in thousands the exalted sentiment of the love of the Beautiful dwindled down to the contemptible passion of the love of costly furniture and fantastic dress. 156 RELIGIOUS OBLIGATIONS. ADORATION. 157 peculiarly liable to temptation from this side of their natures. It has been long ago observed that the ten- dency of such minds is to a pantheism losing sight of that personal holy will which remains clearly before every soul in which religion has arisen on its proper ground of morality, and God has been primarily recog- nised and supremely adored in His moral character. The remedy of course must lie in the direction of the mischief. There is no use tr>'ing to argue a man into belief in the personality of a God of nature. Let his attention be turned to his own transgressions against the eternal law, let him attain a living sense of the existence of his own moral will by actual conflict ^^-ith his lower passions (it is by antagonism alone that self- consciousness can be developed), and then ho will learn to seek in prayer the help of that Will (like his own in that it is a will, unlike his own in that it knows no weakness), who rules the world of spirit, to bring out of it at last a fairer Cosmos than the material universe can ever be made to show. On the other hand, it cannot be doubted that bigots have severed most cruelly from the perfect form of reli"-ion its lovely, albeit inferior, limb of aesthetic sympathy. No natural religion — that is to say, no reli- gion springing directly in a human heart — could ever do this ; but, when the fount is very far off*, and the waters have run for ages in the clayey channels of tradi- tion, it happens sometimes that men divide altogether the God who revealed himself to their dead forefathers * J from Ilim who makes this living world so glorious. God's concern w4th the earth seems to them to have been confined to the six days in which they think He created it six thousand years ago, or to the time when He worked miracles on it eighteen centuries since. To them the heavens no longer " declare the glory of God/' nor is the earth filled with His goodness. The beauty of nature and the inspiration in human art are alike foreign to their religion, and have no more con- nexion with it than the market-place has, in their opinion, a connexion w^ith the church. It would be "profane'' to "mix up*' religion with such things. God's own groves and hills are only fit for heathens to make places of prayer to Amnion and to Ormusd. The Lord's House must be a cathedral or a conventicle; His Holy Land only the narrow desert of Palestine. Thus some of the most softening and hallowing influ- ences are excluded from religion, and many a heart grows dry and withered which would have blossomed into loveliest piety if permitted to receive the sweet dews of nature's beauty, and to assimilate them into its own life, blending, as the Creator intended, the love of Himself with the love of all things beautiful. The remarks above stated, on the relation of religion to the love of Beauty, hold nearly equally valid respect- ing its relation to the grand corresponding passion of the human soul, the love of Truth. As in one class of mind the scsthetic part of our nature takes prominent position, so in another class no way less noble, does the i 158 RELIGIOUS OBLIGATIONS. ADORATION. 159 intellect assert itself. The love of Truth for its own sake, irrespective of any possible utility to be derived from it, is in fact a still stronger passion than the other when freely indulged, and Science has always counted more " martyrs " than Art could rival. Here also it is natural for him who takes delight in the exquisite order and wondrous wisdom which science traces through all the realms of nature and of human story, to look up with sentiments of admiration towards the invisible Orderer and Designer of the whole splendid scheme. He who honours for their achievements Solon and Archimedes, Watt and Copernicus, is little likely to withhold some sentiments of reverence from the Great Lawgiver, Geometer, Mechanician, and Star-Orderer of the imiverse. Nor is this sentiment any way less rational than that of him who loves in God the source of Beauty. The truths which our Creator has permitted us to trace, and in which He makes us feel such intense interest and delight, are actually the products of His divine mind. Order, harmony in infinite variety, end- less adaptations to beneficent purposes — these lessons which science reads on earth and sky, all shadow forth real attributes of the Creator. Each new Truth gained by man is a new Thought of God revealed to him,* and the sympathy between his intellect and the great Intelligence from whom it is derived, is as veritable ♦ Kepler, on discovering tlie law of the planetary distances, ex- claimed, "Oh, God, I think Thy thoughts after Thee !" tin and more deep-seated than that which exists between him and his brother philosophers on earth. Here again, however, the feelings which are excited by mere intel- lectual communion with God, are altogether imperfect if not based on the moral sympathies of man's highest na- ture. As Power and the creation of Beauty would deserve no reverence if exhibited in an evil being, so neither would Wisdom if possessed by one who should use it for immoral ends, even as the mythical Satan is represented to do.* God's wisdom is adorable for this reason, that it is the wisdom of absolute goodness, and in every trace of it throughout the universe we read the designs of justice and of love. Exclusive devotion to the pursuit of knowledge has also its peculiar danger, and a worse one than attends exclusive worship of the beautiful; inasmuch as Atheism is worse than an impersonal Pantheism. Here the tendency is to stop short in the study of that sequence of physical laws which remains unbroken through so vast a field of human research, that the attention is whoUy engrossed thereby. The marveUous chain seems sometimes to the man of science to com- plete itself in a circle, girding in inexorable necessity the AU of things. He looks not further, where a higher phHosophy beholds it grasped by that mighty • "DevUs, indeed, are in all mythologies endowed with peculiar cunning. That of the Mexicans rejoiced in the appellation of Tla. leatecolototl. or 'the Rational Owl. "'-See Mexico, by Brantz Mayer, voL i. p. 107. 160 RELIGIOUS OBLIGATIONS. Hand in which it is but the leash whercb}^ God guides his flock of worlds.* Nor is it even here desirable to meet on merely intellectual grounds the errors which have arisen from the neglect of* the supremacy of our moral nature. To argue the existence of a God with a disciple of the " Positive Philosophy'' is to involve him and ourselves in a maze of metaphysical subtleties, out of which our mental powers afford us no means of egress. We must move the trial into another court, and urge our suit in that of the Conscience instead of that of the Intellect. There is no man who, when made to stand — ** Before the jiulgment-throne Of his own awful soul," does not there recognise that there is a "power un- known '' behind that seat of conscience. It is not in the natural laws (great as are the evidences they bring of God's wisdom and immutability to him who studies them in connexion with his own moral and religious consciousness), it is not singly or even primarily in these that we — who are above all other characteris- tics moral beings — can find our moral Lord ; and the exclusive devotion of the mind to them will always tend towards atheism. Nor will this seem strange when we remember that the moral Will is the true Self of man, • See some curious remarks on the connexion between empiricism and atheism in Kant, TraiiscciuUntal Dialectic, "Of the interest of Reason in the Antinomies. " ADORATION. 161 y the highest region of his nature, and that, therefore, there alone he may expect a clear consciousness of that Being who is Himself the supreme Will of the Universe, and with whose nature the earthly clay of man's senses and the clouds of his understanding have no analogy.* Finally, cruel as it has been for bigots to exclude the love of Beauty from religion, still worse has been their effort to shut out the love of Truth from that domain. It is doubtless becoming every day a more rare sacrifice ; but even now there are men who think, like Pascal, that they can best honour the God of truth by laying aside, to rust in uselessness, the wondrous instruments of reason and memory which He has given them for its discovery. Even now there are men who have " deter- mined to know nothing else " but one historic fact — one theologic dogma. That single page of God's great book (if it be, indeed, as they read it, a page thereof) ^ once i>erused and conned, no other must ever be opened. God may speak to them hourly in all the voices of nature and human history; but only to those few w^ords which tell of the story of Juda)a must they ever listen. The moral mistake of such a system is enormous; for, even admitting the monstrous assumption that virtue is the immediate product of that one seed alone, still, weak and poor must be the virtue which grows in the • ''Thv life, as alone the finite mind can conceive it, is self-forming, self-manifesting will. "—Fichte, Vocation of Man, b. iii. 162 RELIGIOUS OBLIGATIONS. arid soil of an uncultured mind. For the sake of religion itself no one can hesitate which to choose as the best soldier in the service : the soul which stands armed at all points with learning's glorious spoils, brave with the courage of mental freedom, and strong and agile in its well-trained powers ; or the starveling soul which has chained itself to its solitary pillar of a dogma, and lies there naked to every shaft of ridicule or argument, and crippled in every cramped and stiffened limb of its long-fettered faculties. Let it be remembered that in thus defending the ardent pursuit of knowledge, I do not do so on the grounds of the Happiness to be derived from it. Though it be in truth the most unmixed, the most enduring, and the most irreproachable of human delights, the one before which almost all other earthly joys grow stale and tedious ; * yet it is not for this cause that I would save the student's lamp from the bigot's ruthless hand. It is because the love of abstract Truth is the passion which, above all others, tends most directly to help the great end of our creation. Though our affections are needful to warm our hearts, and our aesthetic tastes to refine them, it is only through the intellect that they can be enlarged— i}i,xi their capacity for virtue and religion can be increased. It is as a • " Et puis il n'y eut jamais homme de ceux qui sont enamourez de s<;avoir qui ait en ce monde assoui son desir de la connaissance de verite et de la contemplation de ce qui est. "— Plutarque, (Euvres Morales, in fol. 1604, p. 293. ADORATION. 163 means to that great purpose, and always keeping pre- dominantly in view the moral perfection exhibited in every trace of our Creator's wisdom, that we must rightly cherish this noble desire of knowledge. Thus mav we fitly train our mental powers for our Master's glorious work. Thus may the love of the true, equally with, and perhaps even more firmly than, the love of the BEALTiFUL, bind us to the throne of God, with that triple cord whose golden strand is the passion far nobler than them both, the one sole interest and desire of man's highest nature — the love of the good. 164 RELIGIOUS OBLIGATIONS. PRAYER. 165 SECTION III. PRAYER. The third great branch of religious duty is Prayer. As I have already remarked, it does not proceed directly from the abstract Rightfulness of the case, as do Thanks- giving and Adoration, but takes its place as a Religious Duty more as the religious means of assisting the per- formance of both Personal and Social duties. In the Theory of Morals I maintained "that the law of spirit is, that light and strength are bestowed by God on man, according as the latter places himself further from or nearer to their source.* The plant which is sickly, weak and white, growing in the darkness, acquires health and verdure when we bring it into the sunshine. * The magnetic bar which has lost its power, regains it when we hang it in the plane of the meridian.' " Thus (whatever other prayer may be) the prayer for Spiritual good is the direct mode of obtaining assistance to our virtue, in accordance with the fixed laws of Providence. Every act of religious worship, * "The Supreme Being seems to be distant from those who have no wish to attain a knowledge res j)ec ting Him, and He seems to be very near those who feel a wish to know Him."— Ishopanishad, 1st chapter of the Yajitr Veda. \ and also every act of social duty, is indirectly the means of performing personal duty, by perfecting our natures in the culture of the various virtues of gratitude, vene- ration, benevolence, &c. ; but the particular act of spiritual prayer is the direct "means of grace," as bringing to our virtue an external Help, of whose value and extent it is difficidt for us to form a sufficiently high estimate. It will be seen here that I assume it to be proved that there is an actual answer given by God to our requests for His assistance. I assume that the strength which comes to us in prayer is not merely a subjective phenomenon, the strength acquired by the Will by its own act of exercise.* If any one demur to this assump- tion, I have no answer for him but this. The fact is a fact of consciousness, w^hich in the nature of the case must rest on the experience of each individual, and he may, at his choice, attach more or less credibility, according as his philosophy may dictate, to such expe- rience of it as his own life may have presented. The light, and warmth, and vital strength imparted by God to the soul, must for ever remain not only imperceptible to the bystander, but even to the man himself, so blended with the subjective accretion of strength which his own (necessarily simultaneous) effort will produce, that it can hardly be analyzed or defined. We feel it, believe it, bless God for it sometimes with thanksgiving unutterable. That is all we know — all man can know * See this fallacy admirably refuted in The Smd, chap. iii. 166 RELIGIOUS OBLIGATIONS. on the subject, except that such objective reality of Divine Aid was a priori credible. " God is a spirit — omnipresent and omniactive — He must therefore be always present and always active in the souls of his creatures As God fills all space, so He must fill all spirit. As He influences and constrains unconscious and necessitated matter, so He inspires and helps free and conscious man. There is a natural supply for spi- ritual as for corporeal wants. As we have bodily senses to lay hold on and supply bodily wants, so we have spi- ritual faculties to lay hold on God and supply spiritual wants."* It is not only our bodies which live by the bread He daily gives, but our spirits also which must receive sustenance from His aid. The higher our powers are, the nearer they must be to Him, the more capable of contact with Him ; our bodies first, then our intel- lects, then our moral and religious affections, rising up purer and higher, till at last the contact becomes con- scious in the awful communion of intensest prayer. All this is natural, normal. It is not a miracle that the Omnipresent is close to us — that the Omniactive moves our hearts. It is not strange that the Infinite Father, who bears us in His everlasting arms, should supply the cravings of our immortal souls while He feeds the ravens and gives the young lions their prey. It would be a miracle — it would be as strange as terrible were it otherwise. The argument, then, stands thus : " He who doubts ♦ Discourses of Religion, by Theodore Parker, p. 174. PRAYER. 167 that God hears prayer denies that we have " proof" of the fact. But what "proof" would satisfy him? If he say "none," this would imply that there is an essential absurdity in the case ; but we must then call on him to point out the absurdity, since we do not see it. But if he admit that the thing is not in itself absurd and self-contradictory, then it seems to me he cannot ask any other proof than exactly that which abounds — viz., the unanimous testimony of spiritual per- sons to the efficacy of prayer. He may reply, " Yes, that is the heart acting on itself;" but he might deal exactly in the same way with the evidence of sense. Perhaps there is no outer world, and our internal sensations are the imiverse ! Syllogistic proof of an outer world will never be gained, nor yet syllogistic proof that God exists, or listens to prayer."* Assuming the objective validity of spiritual prayer, the obligation of its use is seen to possess a religious force peculiar to itself. It would seem as if here God had set afresh the seal of His approval on the perform- ance of human duty, and had crowned it by a stupendous honour. What awful mystery lies in this " hearing of prayer!" That feeble incense, even if it ascended ceaselessly from our burning hearts, how should it ever reach those infinite heavens, and bring back thence the blessing from the " Majesty above ?" Of course all duties are Divine commands. The right- eous will of God willeth that all things right should be * The Soul, p. 120, 2nd edit. 168 RELIGIOUS OBLIGATIONS. done by every moral agent In the universe. As regards our religious duties, then, God desires tliat we thank Him as our Benefactor, and adore him as personified Eighteousness. But there is nothing in this view of the Di^dne Lawgiver to warrant us in anticipating that marvellous boon which ever and anon is given to bless and consecrate, beyond all human language, the prayer for light and grace. It is in the true Fatherhood of God, in the omnipresence of His loving spirit through all the spirits He has made, that we find first the hope and then the explanation of this great mystery which lays on prayer the crown of such inexpressible sanctity and glory. To the soul which has reached that stage of spiritual life wherein such culmination of worship takes place, it is revealed that God does actually hear, accept, and bless — ay, and in a certain sense {U we may dare to symbolize His awful nature) desire the prayer of His child. It is His directly revealed will that we should thus address Him. All the rest of the moral law, and this also. He has written in the intui- tions of our reason, nay, made the natural law of our true selves. But to this sj^ecial duty He has, as it were, again, afresh, personally affixed the token of His appro- bation. It thus becomes a duty doubly incumbent on us; we have learned it in two Divine lessons. Or rather let us say, that it is a glorious privilege, which we hold by a double tenure, and which God, who gave it, has ratified and confirmed by a grant of most un- speakable honour. Is it not marvellous to think that PRAYER. 1C9 our hearts can ever be dead to an appeal like this ? God, the Almighty Lord of all the worlds, desires the prayers of man, and man knows it, and he does not pray! I know that it would seem fitting, in a didactic treatise like the present, to proceed at this point, after having laid down the grounds of the duty of prayer, to explain what are its proper objects and limits — what we may and what we may not ask of God, and how those blessings which we receive can be bestowed on us by Him in accordance with the laws of mind and matter. I cannot proceed far on this course. The following remarks must suffice on this almost inapproachable theme : — 1st. We ought not to pray for anything which a sound philosophy forbids us to entertain a reasonable hope that God will grant. 2nd. Nor for anything which piety forbids that we should desire Him to bestow. Let us see what results follow from these principles. Does philosophy warrant us to expect that God will grant any prayer for physical good — for abmidant har- vests, favourable weather, recovery from sickness, or so' on? It seems to me that if we can safely form an opinion on any subject of the kind, it is precisely this : that it is not to be expected that God will attend to such prayers. The immutability of natural laws is demonstrated by every sound method of reasoning. It results a priori from the nature of God, whose i 170 RELIGIOUS OBLIGATIONS. PRAYER. 171 wisdom to construct Ilis machine, and power to sustain its order, are both opposed to the hypothesis of a changeable law. It results a posteriori from the in- duction of the vhole volume of pliysical science, in no page of which a trace of mutability has ever become visible. The truth of this is so obvious, that no one does consciously ask for a change in a physical law : from the moment he recognises that there is a law in the case in question, he ceases to pray. No man now dreams of asking that the sun should rise at midnight to suit his convenience, or that the lead he throws into a crucible should come out gold. Here it is known clearly enough that a law must be broken (or, as it is popularly said, ** a miracle wrought ") for the prayer to be fulfilled. But it so happens that the laws of the two sciences of meteorology and hygienics are more obscure at our present stage of knowledge than either astronomy or chemistry. AYhereas the law by which the sun rises at its proper hour is sufficiently understood, the law by which certain conditions of the atmospheric gases produce rain is only capable of statement in gene- ralized formula) which do not admit of specific predic- tion of results (a defect owing partly to the incomplete state of the science, and partly to the variety of conditions to be taken into consideration and the difficulty of their precise constatement). There is, therefore, left in the minds of the majority a space for vagueness when they contemplate such a thing as prayer for rain. Because they do not see all the causes at work in the case, they forget that they must exist, and they imagine there is a sort of interregnum, affording room for their prayers to move the effect independently of the natural cause. A man does not pray for rain actually to fall from a cloudless sky ; but he supposes that clouds will be gathered, and sent over his field, and that then the rain will fall " in accordance with the laws of nature." He does not see how clouds are gathered, else it would seem to him that to ask that the action of caloric on hydrogen gas should be altered from the natural one would be quite as ** miraculous " as that rain should fall without a cloud. Of course, if it were going to rain without his prayerSy if the atmo- spheric influences working, perhaps months ago, in the Pacific, were bringing about a fall of rain in England, his prayers are superfluous. He prays, therefore, on the presumption that it will not rain unless he prays. The prayer, consequently, is as distinctly one for what he calls a " miracle "as if he asked for the sun to roll back in the heavens instead of for the meteorologic phenomena to be thrust out of their natural course. To make my meaning more clear, let us take an example. A. B. lives at Dover, and his wheat-crop is failing from drought. He has been taught that in such cases it is lawful to pray for Divine aid, and he does so. What is his prayer ? He does not simply pray that his crop be saved, and imagine that God may do so without rain. No ; he knows there is a natxiral law that wheat I 2 172 RELIGIOUS OBLIGATIONS. requires moisture for its growtli. He prays, therefore, distinctly for rain, assuming, be it observed, that theVe is not a law regulating the fall of riin, like the growth of wheat. Now let us suppose that a cloud hangs over Calais, but the wind at Dover is from the north. Will the wind change at A. B.*s prayer, and send the cloud over his field? But that wind arose from certain atmospheric changes six weeks before in the Arctic Sea, and there are no causes to produce a south wind in its place. Tkoo miracles are wanted now. And if we go back through the chain of causes of storms, calms, drought and moisture, we shall always find that some link must be broken if A. B.*s fields are to receive rain which they would not have received without his prayer. To pray, then, for rain is not only as foolish as to pray that a wheat-crop should thrive without moisture, but it involves the additional absurdity of pointing out to God how He can fulfil our wish (i.e., save the crop), by an interference with His laws involving a much wider scope of consequences than the miracle of making a field of wheat grow in drought. I have minutely examined this one case, because it may fairly stand as a sample for all prayers for physical good. If our science were complete, we should recognise that every department of the world of sense is equallv ruled by fixed laws. Alchemists of old times may have prayed for the transmutation of lead to gold, because they did not believe it was against a natural law ; but what should we think of Faraday putting up prayers PRAYER, 173 for the same purpose? In like manner, a sick man, swallowing a medicine of whose nature he was ignorant, might pmy that it should restore his health ; but, if he knew that the liquid was a deadly dose of strychnine, would he dream that any prayers could make it beneficial ? If we pass in review the whole series of such supplications known to us as ofiered habitually by individuals or churches, we shall find that it invariably happens that prayer begins where science stops, and that as science advances prayer retreats. As soon as we clearly discern the physical cause for a desired effect, that moment we cease to pray for the effect, but go back to the cause ; and if the cause of this cause be unknown, or imperfectly known (as in the case of the cause of the rain which causes the good harvest), we pray for that cause, till we discover that it also is only another, and equally immutable link m the universal chain. In future ages, when epidemics and meteorology, therapeutics and political economy, are knoTiTi as we now know astronomy and chemistry, men wiU smile at the idea of praying against cholera, and potato-blight, and dry weather, and sudden death,^ and war, and famine, just as we smile at the notion of praying against the changes of the moon, or entreating that strychnine should prove wholesome. But there rises an objection more decisive than this of its inutility, against the practice of praying for physical good. The second test of the lawfulness of a prayer proves still more unfavourable. Does piety 174 RELIGIOUS OBLIGATIONS. PRAYER. 175 towards God permit us to desire that He will grant prayer for physical good ? Ijet us analyze what is involved in the notion of a change in a physical event being \iTought by God in compliance with prayer. I assume it to have been proved, in the first part of this Essay, that the primary end of creation is the Virtue of rational free agents. The secondary end of creation (which is always postponed when needful to the primary) is the Happiness of rational and irrational beings. On this system the Laws of Matter are of course assumed to have been expressly fitted to for- ward these great ends of creation. Tlieir primary purpose must be to afford a ground and work-field for virtue; and their secondary purpose, the produc- tion of the happiness of both rational and irrational beings. Two theories are commonly propounded respecting the particular results of these laws of matter. The first of these maintains that it is only the general results of the laws which are absolutely good, and that God has made each law for the sake of such general good results, albeit, some of the particular results are exceptionally evil. The reason why He permits of the e\41 particular results is, that the immutability of the law is needful to afford a fixed warp wherein alone human ^-irtue can work. The second theory asserts that it is not only the general, but every particular result of each physical law which was foreseen by God from the first, and was directly intended by Him as good when He gave that law to matter. The first hypothesis has been framed, I venture to think, under a limited view of the Divine wisdom, and with too much leaning towards the error of supposing human happiness an equal object of God's design with human virtue. If we truly recognise the fact that suffering is necessary to trial, and trial to virtue, and that God can never hesitate to permit the suffermg which shall conduce to the virtue of His creatures, there will be no a priori reason for supposing the apparently harsh particular results of physical law to be opposed to the Divine plan, unless we deem it impossible for God to have constructed those laws, and the world m which they act, in such manner as to meet aU the con- tingencies involved in human freedom. This is obviously a most unwarrantable assumption. Machines of human invention are capable of showing the principle of com- pensation to an immense extent, and of adapting their action to varieties of temperature, moisture, &c., without loss of accuracy.* To suppose that the Omniscient could not have made His chronometer of the umverse to keep His time because of the variations which (within such narrow limits) He permits man's free will to pro- duce, is surely anything but philosophical. The suffer- ing of the irrational and unmoral creatures affords, I confess, an a posteriori presumption that there is in the nature of things an inherent impossibihty ot • See Oersted's Soul in Nature, p. 173. I 176 RELIGIOUS OBLIGATIONS. constructing laws which should be immutable, and yet whose every result should be beneficial. It is hard to think that God actually designs the pain of the wild creatures who are mutilated or slowly devoured by their enemies, and yet have no connection with man, whose freedom might bo involved in the transaction. On the whole, and as a general law, it is quite clear that suffer- ing is indeed, as it has been well called, only the " girdle of the brutes*' — a sense given them to preserve their lives and the integrity of their bodies. If pain were imknown to the beasts, the length of their pleasures in the enjoyment of life would he curtailed enormously. Thus its general purpose is seen to be in full harmony with the Divine benevolence. But what of the par- ticular ? I answer that if we exclude those sufferings of the beasts caused by man (for the high end of whose virtue and its necessary substructure of freedom the happiness of the brutes must of course be postponed, even as their whole existence is only the complement of the great scheme of which that virtue is the object), then the remainder of suffering belonging to the animal creation seems, in all cases, to resolve itself into a more or less speedy death. Now I cannot but think that we are far too slightly acquainted with the nature of the feelings immediately preceding dissolution in men, and, d fortiori, in animals, to be able to decide whether slow deaths or quick deaths are least painful. Many of the convulsions and other piteous-seeming symptoms are, as we know, unaccompanied by any suffering ; and of the 1 PRAYER. 177 various degrees of it which may be endured by the crea- tures which die of hunger, of cold, or of mutilation, it is quite impossible for us to form a judgment, so as to warrant us in asserting that the accidental death which we behold be in reality any worse than the natural decay for which our ignorant mercy would have pre- served it. There are, it must be admitted, some diffi culties in the case ; still, I cannot think they are suffi- cient to form grounds for the immense assumption that God did not intend and could not avoid the sufferings of the poor birds in the snow, or of the lamb devoured by the wolf. As I remarked in a former volume {Intuitive Morals), "through what stages life and consciousness, and self-consciousness, may be evolved by the Creator, is a mystery at present quite beyond our reach ;" and the share of suffering in conducing to higher results than as yet we dream of for the brutes may chance one day to reveal to us reasons for the pangs of the linnet and the lamb, which shall fill us with fresh adoration for those tender mercies of our God which are now and ever " over all His works.'* Without pressing this controversy further, however, I proceed to observe, that whichever theory concerning the physical laws be actually true, the bearing of either of them is of nearly equal weight against the fitness of prayer for physical good. On the first hypothesis it is clear that God definitely wills the immutability of His natural laws— wills it so strongly that He never permits them to be broken, even when their results are not I 3 178 KELIGIOUS OBLIGATIONS. absolutely in accordance with Ilis designs — wills it because He sees that their inviolability is a greater good than could be compensated by any advantage arising from interference with particular evil results. Here, then, to pray for change is directly to pray against God's will to keep his laws inviolate. On the second hypothesis the same view arises not less clearly. God is now recognised to will directly each result of each law, because that result is absolutely just and good. Here, then, also, to pray for change is directly to pray against God's will that such a particular event should take place. Now, to what does this amount? Of course, in each case, to a prayer that God will change His will, either in the matter of the inviolability of His law, or of the event in question. But why does God will anything ; say, for instance, that the physical laws should be immutable, or that a certain sick man should die ? Does He will such things arbitrarily, as a mere matter of fancy ? Even man must always have some motive of choice— either the eternal Right, self-legis- lated by his higher self, or the gratification of some desire blindly sought by his lower nature. God*s sole motive can never be other than that everlasting Right, of which His infinite and perfect will is absolutely the personification, and which with Him is never drawn aside by any lower nature's desires whatsoever. To say, then, that God wills this or that event is tantamount to saying that that event is the most just and the most good event possible in the case. He wills it simply PRAYER. 179 because it is so. Now comes His creature man, and prays, " God, do not will that most just and most good event, but will the opposite one." If God were to grant such prayer, would He be equally just and equally good? What would become of His infinite and absolute attributes of justice and goodness, which for ever know, and choose, and perform the absolute right throughout the universe ? Man is actually pray- ing God to be less than perfect— to derogate from His o\^ goodness— to turn aside the wheels of the tremen- dous justice of the heavens, because he has faUen in their path and must suffer a pang as they pass over him. Is this piety ? Is this true love of God ?* Of all the thoughts which can torture a religious soul, there is not one so dreadful as that which suggests a doubt of the absolute perfection, the everlasting immu- tability, of God's justice and God's goodness. " No,'' it cries ; " let my heart be ground into the dust ; let the universe, if need be, crash in final ruin ; but let God reign over all, perfect and righteous for ever- more." The truth is, I believe, that no one ever does pray for physical good after recognising the true relation of the Divine Will to the laws of nature. Just as the Philosophical error of believing in the efficacy of such prayers rests on imperfect knowledge of the sequence of ♦ Yet prayers like these are commonly called Devotions !-" Devc tions," in sooth, in which we devote no fraction of our desires to God, "but beg Him to give up His wiU to ours ! ' 180 KELIGIOUS OBLIGATIONS. PRAYER. 181 cause and effect obtaining in all departments of nature, so the Religious error of desiring to change the Divine Will rests on an imperfect apprehension of the Moral Perfection of God. The man whose science is im- mature imagines thi t there are some departments of nature wherein, as he does not trace it, the rigid chain of law may not be binding. The man whose religion is immature imagines that there are departments of the Will of God determined, like his own lower nature, by motives independent of moral ones, and not necessarily involving questions of justice or goodness to be infringed by a change wrought therein by his prayers. So soon as it is recognised that God never does anything but became it is right, so soon every soul retaining a spark of true piety must cease to pray, and at least endeavour to cease to desire that God should alter these acts which are determined only by His righteousness. In a word, he ceases to try to turn God's Will (which is always right) to his desires (which must be, in so far as they are opposed to it, wrong), but, on the contrary, bends his strength to subdue all his desires to God's will, and sums up his whole Litany in one sole prayer : ** Father, not my will, but Thine, be done.** I know it will be said that in all this I have much misrepresented the case of Prayer for earthly good. I know that the thousands of excellent persons who use it daily never do so with the consciousness that their act is such as I describe. On the contrary, they always think that they pray in " full submission to the Divine Will.** N But this is mere self-deception. Of two things one must hold in every given caae. Either God would do what we desire without our prayer, or He would not do so. If He would, prayer is a superfluity, and aU its earnestness and agony of supplication must become im- possible to the man who understands that he is only praying in case what he desires will take place without this prayer. If He would not, prayer is, as I have described, an attempt to persuade God to do that which He does not wiU. One only hypothesis remains; namely, that our prayer has already been taken into account; that God, foreseeing it from all eternity, has ffiven it a place among the causes of events, and wiU grant to our prayers that which His physical laws accomplish, they having been arranged so to do m pre- vision of the praver.* I confess that this hypothesis possesses much plausibility ; nevertheless, I venture to think it fails to offer a satisfactory solution of the dilh- culty. It is quite true that there is no past or present with God. The prayer we say to-day has been said, to all intents and purposes, from all eternity, so far as He is concerned. But it cannot be so with i.^. Our will that this or that event take place is a wiU in time. We must be actually wishing at a given moment that God's WiU should be done, or should not be done, m • «^Quand un fidele addresse k presc^nt k Dieu une pri^re digned'^tre exaucee, il ne faut pa. s imaginer que cettc priere ne parvient qu ^ exaucet, u . ^ . ^. ti „ ^j^u eiitendu cette pnere depuis nresent a la connaissance de Dieu. uaaejaeutc i retemite."-Euler. Lettrcs d un Princessc cTAUermgiie, vol. i. p. 357. 182 RELIGIOUS OBLIGATIONS. the case in question. As I have said before, the prayer must be either a superfluous one, or against God's Will. Thus, if the Philosophical objection be done away with, the Religious will remain in full force. But the philo- sophical objection itself is not so easily disposed of. God has, indeed, foreseen our prayer when He fixed His laws, just as He has foreseen every other thread of the great tissue through which they work their way and fulfil His behests. But how ought our prayer to have influenced His decrees ? Have we not recognised that all God does is done because it is absolutely the just act, the good act in the case in question ? To revert to our old example : if God causes A. B/s crops to fail, must it not be because it is just and good they should do so, and because it would bo less just and less good that they should prosper ? How can A. B.'s prayer, though foreseen from all eternity, alter the ever- lasting Law of Right, or God's Will to perform that law to the uttermost ? Here, also, there is a theory to answer me, and it is one which concerns importantly the whole end and purpose of prayer : it is the doctrine of the Forgiveness of Sins. A. B.'s sins (it will be said) deserved that his crops should fail, so that it was just and good they should do so. But A. B.'s prayer and repentance having obtained the remission of his sins, it is now just and good that his crops should prosper.* 1 « PRAYEK. 183 * t( We humbly beseech Thee, that although we for our iulijuities have worthily deserved a plague of rain and waters, yet upon our true I shaU discuss this subject of the Remission of Sina at full length in the ensuing Section. It will there, I hope, be demonstrated to the reader's satisfaction, that the doctrine, in any sense applicable to the averting of physical calamity, is whoUy untenable. The Retribu- tion which the eternal principles of justice affix to every transgression must inevitably, sooner or later, be in- flicted on the transgressor by Him to whom it belongs to execute that justice throughout the worlds He rules. The perfection of the Divine character requires that there should be no retrocession from such complete retribution, and experience demonstrates that actually the order of God's Providence on earth holds its un- broken course in the punishment even of the most sincerely repentant offender. Thus, I believe, every hji^thesis on which prayer for physical good can be supported is open to refutation, and the practice is shown to be neither philosophically nor religiously defensible. Let us now, however, turn to the subject of prayer for spiritual good, and examine whether it may better stand the tests by which we have tried the lawfulness of that prayer which would change the order of natural events. • ■, ^\. In the first place, it is to be observed that neither the philosophic nor reUgious objections against other prayer repentance Thou wUt send us such weather as that we may receive tir fruits of the earth." ftc-Prayer for Fair Weather, En,luK Liturgy. 184 RELIGIOUS OBLIGATIONS. PRAYER. 185 bear upon this in any way. There is no law to be infringed when God gives His grace to those who ask Him, but only a law to be fulfilled, just as when a man suffering from cold walks to the fireside, or when a withering plant is placed under the rain. There is no question of " miracle *' in the case. The intuition of the noblest human souls has taught us, and all experi- ence has ratified their teaching, that " every one that asks *' of God light, and strength, and patience, receives them; and that to him that knocks at the " wicket gate" of the true path of right, " to him it is opened/' Nor does the strictest philosophy oppose in any way this doc- trine. As I endeavoured to show in a former volume lutuitive Morals, chap, iii.), the highest schools of meta- physics recognise distinctly that thore is a world of realities behind the world of appearances which alone our senses perceive, and that the fixed chain of necessary sequence, which binds all things in the world of sense, cannot bind the supersensible world, whereof (as well as of the lower) man is an inhabitant by right of his two- fold nature. In that upper realm of realities man is free, and from it he descends as an agent into the world of appearances. Nothing hinders, therefore, that in the supersensible world God should hear and answer prayer for supersensible blessings. God is Himself a Super- sensible Being ; and so also, in his highest nature, is man. Creator and creature meet then in that world where the chain of physical laws has never been ex- tended. It becomes no longer a question, ** IIow God, consistently with law, could grant prayers ;'' but rather, How there can be any sort of severance between the infinite and finite spirits, so as to leave intact the free- dom of the creature who must be, if we may so express it, permeated by the Divine Spirit, living and moving in it at all times. All that we can see is that God has reservcni in some degree such freedom for us. It is when we ask it that His aid is most surely given. Then descends on man that awful, unutterable benediction, that INFLUX of God's light and grace, of which no human tongue may fitly speak, which it is not the office of our intellects to scrutinize, but of our hearts to adore. Thus the double power of the true self, to Know the Right and to Do the Right, becomes, by God's help, at once clear and strong. We are ^'strengthened with might by God's Spirit in the inner manr * No philoso- phy need or can afford a better definition of the mystery. Let us pause here for a moment to contemplate the immense, the unspeakable importance and value of this wondrous gift wherewith the love and condescension of the Almighty has endowed us. It is hard enough to conceive that there is such a thing, actually, as a direct instrument of intercourse between the soul of a creature, creeping out his poor, weak, sinful Ufe upon this dust- spot of a world, and Him, the unnamable, uncompre- hended Spirit, whose Being fiUs the heaven of heavens. • Eph. iii. 16. \ 186 RELIGIOUS OBLIGATIONS. Men admit, perhaps, theoretically, the objective validity of prayer — that God does actually hear and answer it — but they stop short commonly, in practice, at the con- sideration of its subjective utility. The first is too great and wonderful a thought to be often realized. They pray under its impression sometimes : no man really prays at all except in the faith that there is some- thing more in prayer than a self-acting spiritual exer-. cise. But few of us can keep clearly in mind at other hours the stupendous fact that we possess a means of direct personal access to God, through which it is at our own choice to ask and obtain from Ilim the very liigh- est gifts for which our souls can crave. When we do believe this, practically and continuously, a new life for a man must begin. It must always, however, I suppose, remain a source of wonder that such things should be true. The very extent of the power of prayer, the sudden flood of light and life which it opens sometimes to the soul, is so vast a matter, that a fresh sort of scepticism springs up in contemplating it. I do not doubt that many of the errors current among Christians concerning " Election," and " Predestination to Life,'* have their source in the natural incredulity of the religious man's mind at the immense results arising from an act apparently so poor and weak as his own prayer. Like the child which has held a powerf'al burning-glass in its feeble hand, and is amazed at the fire which ensues, he exclaims, "/have not done it: I could not do it! My act could never have brought ■ PRAYER. 187 from heaven the flame which has changed my whole nature : God must have done it all independently of my wretched prayer, and the difference between me and those who have not felt this fire of heaven must be all His ' Election ' and ' Predestination.' " But these things are not so. God has made prayer the " means " of an immeasurable " grace ; " and He has laid open those means to every one of His children. Sooner or later we shall aU pray, pray with spirit, strength, and " find what comes" of such prayer. That any act of religious aspiration should be efficacious or acceptable, it appears that only two things are necessary— no/ unhesitating and entire faith ; for that is one of the gifts which prayer must bring rather than take-not by any means a belief " keeping whole and undefiled " a series of intellectual propositions ; for there is but one which concerns prayer at all, namely, that there is a God who may hear us-»o/ absolute virtue ; for it is to help us to this that prayer is chiefly „iven-but these two things: sincere Earnestness, and a wUl struggling to obey in all things the Will and Law of God. Prayer which is not really Earnest, as earnest as our poor wavering hearts, and wandering thoughts, and imperfect consciousnesses can make it. is not prayer at all. It is a talking to the winds, not to God. The arrow which is to shoot into heaven must fly from the bow strained to its very utmost tension. After all, if we understand rightly what we are to ask of God, there 188 RELIGIOUS OBLIGATIONS. is not very much to be said at any one given hour of prayer; and the case is not merely that one single fervent ejaculation is worth as much as pages mumbled over in drowsy half- attention, but that it only is prayer, and the rest is all heathenism and solemn mockery. People do not mean it so, and doubtless God forgives the sins of our stupidity no less than of our unavoidable ignorance ; but in reality nothing can well be conceived more truly irreligious than the common habit of mum- bling over the most solemn invocations to the Almighty, asking Him to listen to our supplications for the most stupendous of gifts, while the whole time we afford the subject precisely that fraction of our mental, moral, and affectional powers which ordinarily suffices to sing a lullaby to a child ! We are all agreed on this point. Even preachers who have just read out prayers so prolix that scarcely the spiritual wing of a seraph could follow them in one continuous soar are ready enough to lash the languid life of our devotions. But if the in- attention be not quite so gross as that I have described, still the whole system of prayer which I believe to be usu- ally followed almost necessitates a minor degree of it. Such a multitude of requests are to be proffered consecutively, prayers for all sorts of blessings on everybody are so mixed up with mucli praise and little thanksgiving, all to be uttered at the one hour of worsliip, that it is quite impossible that the human mind, in its present consti- tution, can grasp them all. How much the partial in- attention thus rendered unavoidable leads to habitual PRAYER. 189 drowsiness and carelessness, no one can doubt. It were greatly to be wished that it could be impressed on us all, that, as prayer is the act of most majestic dignity attached to our manhood, so it is the most vigorous exercise of which our souls are capable. Not till the soul acts with all its strength, strains its every faculty, does prayer begin. To lay out, then, schemes for a cultus, private or pnblic, wherein the natural difficulty of such high exercise is doubled by varying and repeated demands, is obviously absurd. We are wearied out by being marched round and romid the temple, and are actually discouraged from ascending the steep steps and pressing through the portal. It wiU be said, " If nothing less than this vehement action of the soul be really prayer, then we cannot pray so often as we desire.'' I answer, unhesitatingly, no- thing less deserves to be caUed by the same name as that most'' awful passage of mortal experience ; but it does not follow that nothing else is worship, By-and-by I shall speak of that indirect worship wherein it is to be hoped all life at last may merge for us, wherein not only we shall know that— " Laborare est orare,** but aU feeling shall be holy feeling, all thought shall be pure, loving, resigned, adoring thought ; so that at every moment of existence we shall " glorify God m our bo