Columbia ®nit)f m'tp 
 
 THE LIBRARIES 
 
M 
 
ONE WORLD AT A TIME 
 
ONE WORLD AT A TIME 
 
 A CONTRIBUTION TO 
 
 THE INCENTIVES OF LIFE 
 
 BY 
 THOMAS R. SLICER 
 
 How good is man's life, the mere living ! how fit to employ 
 All the heart and the soul and the senses for ever in joy ! 
 
 Browning's Saul 
 
 G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 
 NEW YORK & LONDON 
 Cbe Iknicl^erbocl^er ipiess 
 
 1902 
 
Copyright, igo2 
 
 BV 
 
 THOMAS R. SLICER 
 
 C\V 
 
 .1 
 
 / 
 
 
 Ube ftntcftcrbocfier press, IRew ffiorft 
 
A FOREWORD TO THE READER 
 
 THIS book is not written for people who 
 are satisfied either with their reHgious 
 opinions or with their doubt of other people's 
 religious opinions. It is sent out as a con- 
 tribution to the incentives of life for those who 
 feel that life is not very much worth while, 
 and who, in consequence, are looking forward 
 to another life, while missing the joy of this ; or 
 else, are dealing in a sluggish way with the or- 
 dinary experiences of life, not much caring 
 whether it is worth while now or anything is 
 to follow. The writer believes that life is very 
 much worth while ; that a beautiful life may 
 be lived in God's orood world on terms con- 
 sistent with self-respect, and increasingly satis- 
 fying as life unfolds and the beauty of God's 
 good world is more and more borne in upon 
 the mind and heart. 
 
 Of course, the book is written from the 
 standpoint of a believer in the good news of 
 God which the Unitarian faith announces ; 
 but it is far more interesting to think of the 
 
 323415 
 
vi A Foreword to the Reader 
 
 multitude of those who hold this faith without 
 knowing it, than it is to imagine that any addi- 
 tions shall be made to Unitarianism by afresh 
 accession of disciples because of anything that 
 appears here. There are in America about 
 five hundred Unitarian churches ; but there 
 are so many unconfessed and unconscious 
 Unitarians in all the churches and outside of 
 all the churches that, if a census should be taken, 
 the way of looking at life that is called Uni- 
 tarian would probably have a larger constitu- 
 ency than any of the so-called evangelical 
 faiths. 
 
 It is in this conviction that this appeal is 
 made to the reader. It is not an appeal in the 
 interest of a body of doctrine, but of a way of 
 looking^ at life. The author has often been 
 asked by persons curious as to the working of 
 the human mind, why it is that, with a long 
 ancestry of the ministry, called evangelical, be- 
 hind him, he thought it worth while twenty 
 years ago to separate himself from the com- 
 munion of the orthodox churches and start 
 again in the ministry of a free faith. This 
 book is the answer to many such questions. 
 These questions are not construed as personal 
 to the writer, but as due to a natural curiosity 
 and to real interest in the state of mind of one 
 
A Foreword to the Reader vii 
 
 who, being upon what seemed to be a perfectly- 
 safe saiHng craft, preferred to go overboard 
 and swim ashore. It is hoped that proof is 
 given here of what was found on landing ; and 
 since the world grows increasingly beautiful, 
 and life adds evermore to its charm, the author 
 is bold to address you directly in the hope 
 that if the aspect of life is to you pale and in- 
 effectual, it may flush with new feeling ; if the 
 uncertainties of the mind are burdensome, they 
 may be reassured ; and if in a lonely and un- 
 befriended way you have been working out 
 for yourself a philosophy of life in terms of a 
 freer faith and larger hope, it may be seen 
 here that there is a great company who find 
 in that freer faith and larger hope an illumina- 
 tion and joy. 
 
 The title, "One World at a Time," is not in 
 any sense to be construed negatively. It af- 
 firms " the life that now is," in the faith that if 
 the life that now is can be made strong and 
 gracious and full of delight, the suggestion 
 that it shall ever end will be the last one the 
 mind can be brought to entertain. It is good 
 to be alive ; but that it may seem as good as 
 it ought, it is important to focus the interest of 
 life well in the foreground and near the ex- 
 perience of to-day. It is hoped that no one 
 
viii A Foreword to the Reader 
 
 will be disturbed by these pages to the hurt of 
 his peace ; but it is necessary for the truth to 
 be told always (the truth as it is understood 
 by him who speaks), and it is necessary for one 
 to be sufficiently disturbed to be awake, in 
 order to hear it. 
 
 Thomas R. Slicer. 
 
 Church of All Souls, 
 
 New York. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER FAGS 
 
 I. — The Sceptic i 
 
 II. — The Agnostic 24 
 
 III. — The Believer 47 
 
 IV. — From the Sermon on the Mount to 
 
 THE NiCENE Creed .... 73 
 
 V. — Why do Christians Differ? . .119 
 
 VI. — What is it to Believe in Christ ? . 137 
 
 VII. — "A Cold AND Intellectual Religion" 164 
 
 VIII. — "A Difficult Religion "... 181 
 
 IX. — Does Unitarianism " Pull Down and 
 
 not Build Up " ? . . . . 200 
 
 X. — What has been Built Up . . . 218 
 
 XI. — How Religion may be Taught . . 234 
 
 XII. — The Passage from Traditional to Per- 
 sonal Religion , , , . . 254 
 
ONE WORLD AT A TIME 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 THE SCEPTIC 
 
 THE man who never had a doubt never had 
 a mind. Given a mind, a doubt must at 
 some time or other invade it, for the reason 
 that the sceptic is the inquirer. We do not 
 inquire as to that we already know — we in- 
 quire where we are in doubt. The inquirer's 
 business is to find things out ; and for the 
 most part, he finds things out for the other 
 man who does not care to find them out. The 
 result is that two classes have been concerned 
 with the bettering of the human mind in its 
 attitude toward the greatest realities, — the 
 sceptic, who has kept the air clear about the 
 fires of devotion, and the mystic, who has fed 
 the fires with fresh fuel that they may flame. 
 These two, — the one who provides the atmo- 
 sphere of crystalline clearness of inquiry ; the 
 
2 One World at a Time 
 
 other who provides the sacrifices upon the 
 altars of devotion, — these two have been most 
 concerned with the progress of religious 
 thought. 
 
 The sceptic is the inquirer. His inquiry 
 addresses itself to three distinct subjects. 
 For instance, he is conscious of himself. He 
 is a being. Naturally, unless he is content 
 simply to accept his animal sensations, he has 
 to inquire what that being is. He is placed 
 as a being under conditions of life, and unless 
 he is content simply to stay where he dropped, 
 he has to inquire what those conditions are, 
 and whether they can be bettered. He is con- 
 scious of himself and his environment. He 
 has a third question pressing upon his atten- 
 tion. It is the question. What is to become 
 of me? He wants to know whether he is to 
 be snuffed out like a candle, never to be re- 
 lighted ; he wants to know whether there is 
 any other world ; he wants to know what the 
 conditions are that now guarantee to him a 
 hold on life that cannot be killed. He wants 
 to know these things. So, the sceptic, if he 
 has a mind ; if he is not simply a doubting 
 machine. There are intellectual outfits that 
 seem not to be minds ; they are mere inter- 
 rogation points ; if you were to take a magni- 
 
The Sceptic 3 
 
 fylng glass of great power and take off the 
 skull-cap over the brain of that kind of man, I 
 suppose you would find the grey matter of his 
 brain covered over with little interrogation 
 points ; and they would be so knitted together 
 that they would have taken the place of the 
 free matter in his brain. Your chronic doubter 
 is like the chronic complainer. He asks ques- 
 tions for ever as the other man sighs and groans 
 for ever. But the real sceptic — the man who 
 is a real inquirer, who " wants to know," as 
 the Yankees say — is out on a voyage of dis- 
 covery ; he perhaps does not know whither his 
 ship is going, because we sail the sea of life 
 under sealed orders, and get far out into the 
 deep before we realise which way we are head- 
 ing, and what our destiny is ; presently we 
 pass over some degree of latitude or longitude 
 that indicates whether we are going north or 
 south or east or west and whither our general 
 direction is likely to take us ; but if he is a 
 real voyager, he is more concerned with the 
 ship than he is with the destination. He 
 understands, in the first place, that the anchor 
 is not the whole equipment of a ship. There 
 are people who continually say to you, " Why 
 do you go on asking questions, inquiring, rais- 
 ing these doubts ? " We do not raise them ; 
 
4 One World at a Time 
 
 they are raised in us by the very condition of 
 things that confronts us, whether in ourselves, 
 our environment, or our destiny. We are told 
 if we go on raising these doubts, entering into 
 inquiry, we will lose our moorings ! Think 
 of that being said of a full-rigged ship ! Lose 
 its moorings ! That is the thing it means to 
 do. It means to have its anchor up and sails 
 spread and helm held with a steady hand, its 
 compass true and its bow cutting the sea be- 
 fore it as it goes. That is the description of 
 a ship that is on the business that belongs to 
 the great deep. Lose its moorings ! There 
 are ships that never have lost their moorings 
 in years, and the scum hangs on their sides 
 and barnacles have gathered on their bottoms, 
 and their copper is eaten through, and their 
 timbers are rotten. They have not a sail that 
 is not mildewed. They have not a chart that 
 is not a hundred years old. They have not a 
 compass that will stand the slightest presence 
 of any deflecting agency near it. That is the 
 condition of a water-logged human mind. 
 Now the sceptic is not always wise — I shall 
 not defend him under all conditions ; but I say 
 that the sceptic is an essential element in hu- 
 man society, and his business is to inquire and 
 to have it out with himself, with his environ- 
 
The Sceptic 5 
 
 ment, and with the questions of his day. Keep 
 those three things in view, if you please, while 
 I am trying to outline the condition of the 
 mind that I am now describing. 
 
 For instance, the inquirer wants to know, as 
 to his being, whether he is a mechanism or 
 whether he is a spirit. You have to determine 
 whether you are a body carrying around a 
 soul, as Emerson says, " like a fire in a pan," 
 or whether you are a soul equipped with a 
 body for the holiest uses. That is the ques- 
 tion that is before you as to your being. You 
 have to determine whether man has a body 
 and himself is a spirit ; or whether man is a 
 body without a spirit. For practical purposes 
 you can determine that. " The body without 
 a spirit is a corpse. The spirit without a body 
 is a ghost." It is the combination that makes 
 a man. But when you have said that you have 
 only said an epigrammatic thing. The prob- 
 lem still arises. What is due to each of these ? 
 Shall I put all my forces upon the spiritual life 
 and live as a spirit should ; or shall I put all 
 my weight upon the bodily life and live as an 
 animal must live ? For the fact is, the peace 
 of life and the power of life depend upon the 
 place we give these two elements of our being. 
 Given the body as the sum of our concern, you 
 
6 One World at a Time 
 
 can grow a brute that will be a splendid model 
 for a sculptor, but he would not make a nurse 
 for a sick child. Given the whole emphasis 
 laid upon the spirit and the body neglected, 
 you get what would serve as a significant spe- 
 cimen in morbid anatomy. The probability is 
 that he will have visions of the right that the 
 brutal man never had, but the difficulty with 
 him is he will not have locomotive power 
 enough to carry his vision around. So you 
 see the real business of life for the sceptic is to 
 inquire what he owes his body and his spirit ; 
 and, since he is made up of these two elements, 
 to live his life on terms that will bring the best 
 union between the two. 
 
 First, his being. The sceptic has to inquire 
 what he shall do with it. Now the problem 
 having been set, how much he owes his flesh 
 and how much he owes his spirit ; having de- 
 termined, perhaps, as Browning said, " that 
 flesh helps soul," the sceptic has to inquire 
 how he can get the best out of himself. 
 For the fact is, the business of life is the 
 investing ourselves at the highest rate of 
 interest. One man takes it in terms of work, 
 another man in terms of joy, another man in 
 terms of neither work nor joy, but just plain, 
 unadulterated worry. He joins a " Don't 
 
The Sceptic 7 
 
 Worry" Club, and then has nervous prostra- 
 tion. The trouble was not with the club ; it 
 was with the applicant who went to join it. 
 He had fallen into a chronic condition of 
 nerves. Everything hit them on the ends and 
 nothing laterally. Now nerves played on lat- 
 erally will make music like any other stringed 
 instrument. But with the irritated ends ex- 
 posed from the finger-tips to the soles of the 
 feet, — a man in that condition is only fit to be 
 wrapped in cotton and taken care of by some 
 good woman. 
 
 I hope to prove to you before I get through, 
 at least in a sufficiently conclusive way to make 
 a working-theory, that the business of religion 
 is to add zest to life. If it does not do that it 
 does not do much. If you have only enough 
 religion to be thoroughly miserable you had 
 better get rid of the little that you have, and 
 start in business again with better capital for 
 which there is a fairer market. The sceptic's 
 inquiry is, How can I make the most out of 
 myself ? How put myself to the highest uses ? 
 So when we deal with the being of man, we 
 deal with it in the attitude of scepticism. If 
 we do not do this we shall simply sink into a 
 flaccid and pulseless condition which will miss 
 the very joy of life. 
 
8 One World at a Time 
 
 But the sceptic also has to do, as I have 
 said, with his place in life. He has to inquire 
 whether it is a fit place ; whether the environ- 
 ment is right. Let me quote to you a saying 
 of Herbert Spencer, which is for its purpose 
 as good scripture as that which was written 
 eighteen hundred or two thousand years ago. 
 Herbert Spencer says, "If there were no 
 changes in the environment except such as 
 there were adapted changes to meet in the 
 thing environed, that would be eternal peace 
 and eternal life." That is true. That is, if 
 you could build up tissue as fast as it broke 
 down, you would have constant being ; if you 
 could feed in fuel as fast as you exhausted it, 
 in running a machine, you would have per- 
 petual motion. For instance, mechanics know 
 that on every machine sit two little sprites, 
 one Rust and the other Friction. Rust says 
 to the machine, "If you stop I will eat you 
 up." Friction says, " If you keep going I will 
 wear you out." That is exactly what happens 
 in the human creature. His study is to get 
 himself into such relation to his environment 
 that he can run at the greatest speed without 
 loss of structure, without a breaking down 
 of the mechanism ; or rest in most complete 
 quietude without danger of rusting out. 
 
The Sceptic 9 
 
 That is what we mean by adjustment to 
 environment. 
 
 What happens in the Church as the resuh of 
 this? In the Church men grow restless under 
 conditions of their birth and training, and 
 they begin to move uneasily, just as birds do in 
 the nest when they feel their wing-feathers com- 
 ing. The bird knows perfectly well that he 
 does not belongr in the nest for ever. He sees 
 the flitting of other birds full-fledged upon the 
 wing. The little thing that was hatched in 
 the nest chipped its shell and was a most out- 
 rageous looking thing when it came into the 
 world. It had no feathers ; it was just a little 
 blob of meat ; it never suspected it would ever 
 sing. There it is in the nest ; but there comes 
 a time when the pin-feathers begin to grow. 
 The longer feathers follow. Then the wings 
 begin to get a little plumage upon them, and 
 finally are covered. Then there comes a day 
 when it sits on the edge of the nest and falls 
 out, but it does not do that many times. The 
 mother finds it on the ground — this little 
 helpless thing, scared because it has fallen 
 out of the nest. She encourages it to hop a 
 little, to flutter its wings a little, until pre- 
 sently it gets upon the wing and goes from 
 twig to twig — to go back into the nest ? 
 
lo One World at a Time 
 
 Never, Not until next year when it has a 
 brood of its own and eggs to sit upon and 
 song-birds to hatch out. Next year it will go 
 into some other nest that it has made ; but for 
 this year it is on the wing. That is the con- 
 dition of the sceptic who finds himself born 
 into a set of beliefs that he cannot possibly 
 hold, if he would fly. Now he simply tumbles 
 out of the nest and wallows around in the dust 
 at the foot of the tree. The fall from the nest 
 was because he did not understand flight ; 
 and you and I in shifting our relations to the 
 things we have been taught get many a fall 
 and bruise by it. God knows how sore we 
 are some days when we have been beaten 
 down below the point of faith and hope, and 
 feel as if ** the heavens were rolled together 
 like a scroll to be unread for ever." Let him 
 not disturb himself, this fledgling of the nest 
 of inherited belief. There shall come a day 
 when, by the example of those that have 
 learned flight before him, and encouraged by 
 those that have learned to sing that were in 
 their nests before him, he shall flutter his 
 wings and lift himself, and know the beautiful 
 and splendid experience of being, not a bird 
 on the ground, but a bird in the air. You 
 remember those lines of Victor Hugo : 
 
The Sceptic ii 
 
 " Let us be like a bird, a moment lighted 
 Upon a twig that swings ; 
 He feels it sway ; but sings on unaffrighted, 
 Knowing he has his wings ! " 
 
 That is the whole story. The sceptic that 
 only knows how to fall out of the nest has not 
 learned much. He must learn how to fly in 
 his native element. 
 
 So with society. People who are busy with 
 the work of life complain that, they are not 
 satisfied with their surroundings. They are 
 sceptical as to their environment. You say 
 you think Lessing was wrong when he In- 
 sisted that this was the best possible world. 
 Being a true sceptic, you say Instead, This Is 
 the best possible world up to date, but " to- 
 morrow Is another day." It Is another day, 
 and If the world does not rise to meet It, then 
 It Is not the best possible world ; for every day 
 must bring not only Its discontent, but Its 
 betterment. It Is the business of the Inquirer 
 to see to It that he fits the environment of the 
 day so well that, like the beetle whose shell 
 you find upon the trunk of the tree, he shall 
 burst It and find wings. That is the business 
 of life — growing to your environment, and 
 then changing It by the expansion of the 
 human mind. I have very little concern with 
 
12 One World at a Time 
 
 discontent upon the part of those who are dis- 
 contented with other men's discontent. I say 
 that the struggle of soul that comes to the 
 social state is the salvation of that social 
 state — that there is nothing so bad for the 
 great mass of men and women as to be pulse- 
 less, content, sordid, mere lumps of humanity, 
 dropped where they fall, and content to stay 
 where they drop. There is a divine discon- 
 tent moving in every great nation's heart, by 
 virtue of which it becomes a greater nation ; 
 in the heart of every social state, by which the 
 social state is bettered ; and the business of 
 the sceptic is to find the conditions under 
 which he lives, and to make them better. For 
 instance : The Tenement-House Commission, 
 studying conditions of city life among the poor, 
 convicts the Building Department of the city 
 of neglect and violation of law. Do you 
 suppose it was the business of the Tenement- 
 House Commission to do that ? It was their 
 opportunity. It was their duty. But the busi- 
 ness lay with the tenant. He should have 
 been discontented to have an air-shaft that 
 substituted inches for feet. He should have 
 been discontented to have cubic feet of space 
 insufficient for the breathing of God's good 
 air. He should have been discontented to live 
 
The Sceptic 13 
 
 in rooms that had no approach to the external 
 air. Why, if you were not restless enough to 
 change your place, your mind would fall sick 
 and feeble, as a body gets bed-sores lying 
 supine wherever it may be placed ! Salvation 
 of society lies in the struggle of society for 
 the social betterment. 
 
 I will not touch the question of destiny now. 
 That belongs in the discussion of the next 
 chapter, which deals with the agnostic. He 
 knows all about it — or does not know all about 
 it. I am going to deal with him as Izaak 
 Walton says about the minnow, " Put him 
 upon the hook as though you loved him." I 
 think I can show that he has, as the sceptic 
 has, his place in the sum of things, and has 
 done vastly better than he is commonly cred- 
 ited with doing. 
 
 Now, what are the conditions under which 
 scepticism appears ? 
 
 All progress in science is made by discrim- 
 ination. What would be the use of the science 
 of microscopy unless you could distinguish 
 between the white and red corpuscles of the 
 blood ; between those things that in a general 
 way we sum up as microbes, which we fear 
 and call by bad names ? Scientific advance is 
 made, as John Fiske says, when men come 
 
14 One World at a Time 
 
 to see dissimilarity against a background of 
 uniformity. We know the stars in the sky 
 because they hang out dissimilar against a 
 background of black in the night. The uni- 
 form background throws their brilliancy for- 
 ward in differing radiance to the eye of the 
 observer. All progress is made by discrimina- 
 tion ; and discrimination is the business of the 
 sceptic. For instance, the sceptic is usually 
 the man who, in advance of his time, if he be 
 serious, finds himself holding a losing cause. 
 Socrates was the most believing man in the 
 Greek lands, and they called him an atheist. 
 That is, he was so much an inquirer that he 
 was discontent with little gods, and wanted a 
 god great enough for the soul that entertained 
 him. And if you will read the Dialogues of 
 Plato where Socrates Is represented as speak- 
 ing, you will be struck with the fact that the 
 questioner is really the man of faith. It is 
 the friends who are about him who are nerv- 
 ous about his condition. Take that splendid 
 passage In the Dialogue where Socrates dis- 
 courses upon his death. He Is about to drink 
 the hemlock. He who believed In God ; has 
 been condemned to death as an atheist, as 
 a corrupter of youth, who simply taught them 
 to know themselves at their best. We see 
 
The Sceptic 15 
 
 him sitting there — a quaint, squat figure, with 
 curious physiognomy, the very face seeming 
 to be one great interrogation — and someone 
 says to him during a pause in the conversa- 
 tion, "Socrates, where shall we bury thee?" 
 He looks about upon them, and finding the 
 questioner, Crito, says : " Crito, have I been 
 so long with you, yet do you speak of burying 
 Socrates ? You shall bury me if you can 
 catch me. But when you have buried my 
 body, do not say that you have buried Soc- 
 rates." This is the man who was condemned 
 to death because he did not believe ; yet that 
 inquiring spirit was really the only profound 
 believer in the group. For inquiry is essential 
 to real faith. Luther was inquiring, labouring 
 up the great stair at Rome upon his knees, 
 when there sounded a voice to him saying, 
 " The just shall live by faith." Read your 
 New Testament, and see if in all the pages of 
 history there be so radical an inquirer as Jesus 
 of Nazareth. We speak of him in the terms 
 the theologians teach us. We speak of him 
 in terms the doctrinal teachings have inspired. 
 But when we begin to read the book for our- 
 selves, what do we find ? We find exactly the 
 same spirit that was common in the prophets 
 of his own race, — Amos, Nahum, Hosea, and 
 
1 6 One World at a Time 
 
 Joel. We call them the minor prophets ; they 
 were really the great statesmen of Israel. We 
 find in Jesus the same spirit. He confronts 
 those about him with such a statement as this : 
 " Ye have heard it said, * An eye for an eye, a 
 tooth for a tooth.' I say unto you. Resist not 
 evil." That was his practical challenge to the 
 ancient past. Mark those two sceptics as they 
 face each other, — Pilate, the bullet-headed 
 Roman, heavy in the jowl and thick in the 
 neck, set upon the precarious throne in Jerusa- 
 lem, and standing before him this simple 
 working-man, Jesus of Nazareth, charged with 
 sedition. Pilate asks, " Art thou a king ? " 
 They had been saying, " We have brought to 
 you a king ; so he calls himself." I can see in 
 my mind that figure hardened by work, a 
 young man, a little over thirty years of age, 
 a Galilean carpenter, straightening himself be- 
 fore the throne that represented the power of 
 the Roman world, his hands bound together 
 and the rude sceptre between them in mock 
 sovereignty, and upon his shoulders the cloak 
 of some Roman soldier, cast there in derision, 
 — I can see him straighten himself before the 
 Roman procurator and say, when asked, " Art 
 thou a king ? " " For this end was I born, for 
 this cause came I into the world, that I should 
 
The Sceptic 17 
 
 bear witness to the truth. Thou sayest it. I 
 am a king." Pilate, the sceptic of the other 
 type, says, "What is truth ?" He turns away 
 without an answer, expecting none, and goes 
 to give judgment against his prisoner. That 
 is the sceptic for whom the world has no use, 
 and who is only remembered, or largely re- 
 membered, by virtue of the man whom he 
 condemned. The real inquirer into the truth 
 of things and the secret of Being is a sceptic 
 of quite another kind. 
 
 Let me name two or three conditions which 
 the sceptic who is the true inquirer — the man 
 who asks questions and wants them answered 
 — is to observe, if his scepticism would lead to 
 life. 
 
 The first is, that he shall never shirk the re- 
 sponsibility of the answer. Now, a man who is 
 simply flipping questions as to his being, his 
 environment, and his destiny, without expect- 
 ing any answer, who likes the mental agitation, 
 does not care for the responsibility that his 
 question raises. The true Inquirer never asks 
 a question the answer to which he Is not will- 
 ing to hear. It is the very essence of his 
 courage. I remember a splendid man, self- 
 educated, who came to be the President of the 
 Board of Trustees of a great university, a man 
 
i8 One World at a Time 
 
 of business and great affairs, who said to me, 
 " I was tauorht that God was a God of wrath. 
 1 was taught that there was such a place as a 
 cureless hell. I was taught this and this and 
 this," reciting the horrible details of instruc- 
 tion in his youth, " and I worried myself with 
 inquiries as to how this could be ; how I could 
 love a God who was not lovable ; how I 
 could care for a God who could consign those 
 I loved to endless ruin. And one night, tort- 
 ured until early morning by these inquiries of 
 my doubting spirit, I made up my mind that if 
 God was a Being of that sort. He might do 
 just what He pleased with me, but I would 
 never love Him; and I turned over and went 
 to sleep." He took the responsibility of his 
 inquiry, and satisfied himself, not with the an- 
 swer, but that the answer could not be incon- 
 sistent with the sanity and sanctity of human 
 nature. So the responsibility that comes with 
 the inquiry must never be shirked. Other- 
 wise you had much better not ask the ques- 
 tion. You had much better be satisfied where 
 you are. Inquiring what you are, be satis- 
 fied just to know you are alive and no more. 
 Inquiring where you belong, that you are just 
 where you are put, and no other where. In- 
 quiring what is to become of you, put your 
 
The Sceptic 19 
 
 hand in somebody's hand, and ask him to look 
 out for you as you go through the deep waters. 
 There is no other way unless you are will- 
 ing to take the responsibility of the inquiry. 
 It is a serious matter to raise a doubt in your 
 own mind, unless you are going to follow 
 it to the end. The other sort of man is 
 what we mean by the " doctrinaire." He ap- 
 pears in all fields of inquiry in the scientific 
 and the practical world as the theorist. I was 
 once with a number of people who were all 
 going down to the shore together, and some- 
 body remembered that one of the young men 
 in the party probably was not safe in the 
 water. He said to him, " Can you swim ? " 
 The young man answered with perfect calm- 
 ness, " I understand the theory of swimming." 
 We did not let him take to the water. We 
 kept him on shore, because the man who 
 " knows the theory of swimming " belongs on 
 land. It is the condition of inquiry that you 
 shall follow it clear through, not in the doc- 
 trinaire spirit, the spirit of the theorist, but in 
 the spirit of the practical, hard-headed inquirer, 
 dealing with life as the most serious thing we 
 have to deal with. Why, what is your busi- 
 ness compared with your being ? What is 
 your daily occupation compared with the 
 
20 One World at a Time 
 
 betterment of your environment ? Is there any 
 question so serious as the question of the de- 
 stiny that awaits you ? What are you fit for ? 
 I say to you in absolute confidence, The thing 
 you are fit for, you will get. You do not 
 believe that you will get it here ? No, not al- 
 ways. Daily destiny does not apparently take 
 the lines of fitness. But I have known thou- 
 sands of people, and most of those that did not 
 get placed in life had not prepared themselves 
 for any place. I admit the artificiality of 
 society. I admit the unnaturalness of some of 
 the conditions. I admit the fact that some- 
 times men have not the opportunity that other 
 men have, and men are not equal in oppor- 
 tunity or power. But, I believe, given a good 
 body and a good brain, the whole business of 
 life is making one's self fit. Destiny takes 
 care of itself. 
 
 The second condition is, not only that he 
 shall not avoid the responsibility of the an- 
 swer, but that he shall not shun the struggle 
 of soul. If the sceptic is a serious inquirer, 
 if he is an inquirer intent upon the answer, not 
 afraid what the answer shall be, prepared to 
 take his share of the risk of having raised the 
 question, then he must not shun the struggle 
 of souk It is struggle of body that brings 
 
The Sceptic 21 
 
 health. It is struggle of mind that brings 
 intelligence. It is the faculty of thought ex- 
 ercised that makes it easy to think and a de- 
 light to think. // is struggle of sottl that 
 saves. " We must so trust the order of Nature 
 as to believe that whatever questions the 
 universe inspires us to ask, the universe can 
 answer." So said Ralph Waldo Emerson. 
 Someone said to Father Taylor, the Methodist 
 chaplain of seamen in Boston, when Emerson 
 had uttered such a sentiment, " He is a 
 wonderful man, but he will surely go to hell." 
 Father Taylor had a kind of mild belief in 
 the pit, I suppose, but he turned to the man 
 who said Emerson would go to that place 
 and answered, "If Emerson should go to 
 hell, he would make a change in the climate, 
 and migration would set that way." As to this 
 view of destiny what has happened ? The 
 people who have been consigned to cureless 
 ruin have somehow banked the fires and 
 slowed down the motion of the world's hate. 
 
 If the sceptic be serious, not a mere 
 trifler, the final condition he must fulfil is 
 that he shall not shirk the discipline of life. 
 It is of no use for you to go out with a ques- 
 tion on your lips unless you will take the re- 
 sponsibility of the answer and be prepared for 
 
22 One World at a Time 
 
 struggle of soul — unless, above all things else, 
 you are willing to stand up to the discipline of 
 life. Suppose a conviction seizes upon a man's 
 mind that a certain course of life is the only 
 one for him to follow ; he may be a doubter as 
 to the social standard ; perhaps all society is 
 running the other way ; perhaps the whole 
 trend of mind about him is taking another 
 course. He may be utterly wrong, mistaken, 
 but his mind is dealing with things at first 
 hand. To him that course seems to be the 
 only course to take. Let him hold that course 
 to the end. It may be that he shall find, as 
 we do in the Adirondack and Maine waters, 
 that he has only taken a short cut across the 
 bend, and comes out with his companions 
 who have gone a more circuitous way around. 
 He has found the short cut to the end ; and 
 conviction, and resolution, and struggle of soul, 
 and sense of responsibility, and verve and 
 power and energy of the individual mind have 
 driven him through obstacles that would have 
 impeded men of more timid soul. 
 
 We must take the discipline of life. It is a 
 splendid thing to stand up and take your pun- 
 ishment if you have invited it. I know a man 
 whom I greatly revere, who is distinguished in 
 his profession, a man of great capability in the 
 
The Sceptic 23 
 
 work in which he is engaged, who in his early 
 Hfe, from this very curiosity and inquiry, made 
 a radical mistake, which he never could cor- 
 rect. He has gained all that he has gained of 
 power and purpose by taking his punishment 
 without whining. There is no place in the 
 world for a whimpering man. We were set 
 squarely on our feet. We were given power 
 and force, clearness of thought, right feeling, 
 and we were given these things that we as 
 part of its creative power might mould the 
 world or fashion it according to the fashion 
 that in our moments of inquiry we have seen, 
 fashioning ourselves together with it by force 
 of our splendid inquiry and conviction. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 THE AGNOSTIC 
 
 THE term " agnostic " has a singular fascina- 
 tion for many minds. It would seem that 
 a term which means " not knowing " would 
 hardly have fascination for a mind the busi- 
 ness of which is to know. I suppose that 
 fascination which is exerted by the term arises 
 in part from the association with the distin- 
 guished name of Professor Huxley, for it was 
 Professor Huxley who made agnosticism popu- 
 lar and respectable. In the last night of 1856, 
 Professor Huxley, at the very beginning of his 
 fame, sat alone in his study waiting for the 
 birth of his first child. The tension of his 
 mind was stretched over the pains of advent 
 into this life, and he set himself to say to 
 his journal what his ambitions in life should 
 be for the three or four years stretching ahead 
 of that hour. All that was best in him was 
 involved in the holy sacrament of his child's 
 birth, and he wrote in his journal : 
 
 24 
 
The Agnostic 25 
 
 " I am resolved to smite all humbugs, however big, 
 to give a nobler tone to science, to set an example of 
 abstinence from petty personal controversies, and of 
 toleration for everything but lying ; to be indifferent 
 as to whether the work is recognised as mine or not, so 
 long as it is done." 
 
 He had started upon his course, which he went 
 on in the pages of his journal to describe in a 
 German verse of which the translation is in 
 part this : 
 
 " Wilt shape a noble life ? Then cast 
 No backward glances to the past. 
 And what if something shall be lost. 
 Act as new-born in all thou dost." 
 
 And so on through a verse of noble purpose. 
 Just below this he writes : " Half-past ten at 
 night. I am waiting for the birth of my child. 
 I seem to fancy that it shall be the pledge that 
 all these things shall be." A little farther 
 down he writes : " Born five minutes before 
 twelve. Thank God ! New Year's Day, 1857." 
 That is a painful page, as we continue our 
 reading, where, just below, he records in Sep- 
 tember, i860, that this same child, "Our 
 Noel " (he was born so near Christmas they 
 gave him the name), 
 
 " Our first-born, after being for four years our delight 
 and joy, was carried off with scarlet fever. This day 
 
26 One World at a Time 
 
 week he and I had a great romp together. On Friday 
 his restless head with its bright blue eyes and tangle of 
 golden hair, tossed all day upon his pillow. On Satur- 
 day night I carried him here into my study and laid his 
 cold, still body here where I write. Here, too, on Sunday 
 night came his mother and I to have the holy leave-taking. 
 My boy is gone ; but in a higher and a better sense than 
 was in my mind when I wrote four years ago what stands 
 above, I feel that my fancy has been fulfilled. I say 
 heartily and without bitterness, ' Amen ; so let it be.' " 
 
 I have quoted these extracts from the journal 
 of a great scientific man, that you may know- 
 two or three thino-s about the man with whose 
 history the term " agnostic " is most associated 
 in the popular mind, and those two or three 
 things are : First, that the cause which led him 
 first to declare his agnosticism concerning im- 
 mortality was a letter of Charles Kingsley, 
 perhaps the noblest man in the English pulpit 
 of that day, who wrote to Huxley trying to 
 comfort him and give him grounds of belief in 
 immortality. Huxley, in the tenderest and 
 kindest way, challenges Charles Kingsley for 
 his proofs, and declares that until some fact 
 like the facts of Nature is presented to him, he 
 must simply say he does not know. The let- 
 ter is a model at once of manly courage and 
 paternal tenderness, and I could almost wish 
 that the people who claim they know so much 
 
The Ao'nostic 27 
 
 ■■t) 
 
 would know as little as Huxley did in that 
 hour of what nobody can know. In saying 
 this, however, I must call your attention to 
 certain limitations upon his statement that ap- 
 pear also in this journal and in the letters. 
 Huxley was not an atheist. He was so much 
 of a scientist that he knew perfectly well that 
 philosophic atheism is impossible. Practical 
 atheism is possible. That is, a man can live 
 as though there were no God, but he cannot 
 give a reason for it based on the fact that there 
 is no God. In other words, philosophic athe- 
 ism has gone out of fashion with the common 
 mind, because the scientific mind, led by men 
 like Huxley, and Spencer, and Darwin, and 
 Wallace, and their co-workers, has given it 
 such proofs of the ordered world as to leave 
 the being of God the most rational solution of 
 that order. So that when Mr. Huxley says 
 of the birth of his child, " Thank God ! " he is 
 not in the attitude of the French atheist who 
 said, " I thank God that I am an atheist ! " 
 Mr. Huxley says in another place : " Our true 
 attitude is to sit down like a little child before 
 the facts of Nature and apprehend them on 
 their own ground." And that is the teachable 
 attitude. 
 
 I will not trouble you with further extracts 
 
28 One World at a Time 
 
 from that wonderful life now just published, 
 but will proceed at once to the discussion of 
 what agnosticism really means, and to the 
 discussion of whether it is a rational state of 
 mind. 
 
 I hold, as I said of the sceptic, a brief for 
 the agnostic on certain lines, because the busi- 
 ness of every man who professes to be a 
 teacher of the religious life, or a teacher of 
 ethics, or an intelligent man busy with his 
 kind is to try to get the other man's point of 
 view. It is a narrow ledo-e that has not room 
 for two people to stand on it and see the view 
 together ; it must be hard climbing and a 
 perilous poise if there is only room for one. 
 So that the business of life is really to try to 
 get the other man's point of view, to see what 
 he sees. He may see the rush of the stream 
 and say it is a first-class place for the estab- 
 lishment of a mill. I may see it and think 
 that with its rushing stream it is the most 
 beautiful landscape I have ever seen. An- 
 other man may see it and say that the water- 
 course argues rich pasture land in the meadows 
 through which it flows. Each will see it from 
 the standpoint of his attitude ; but I am 
 bound to try to understand why one man 
 wants to build a mill, and why the other man 
 
The Agnostic 29 
 
 wants to cultivate a farm, when I only want a 
 picture ; the difference is between the practical 
 man of affairs and the more practical man, the 
 poet, as I hold. I hope to prove to you that 
 the man who simply insists upon the things 
 that he knows, and declares that he knows he 
 cannot know any more, is not the most prac- 
 tical of men. 
 
 The term " asfnostic " did not oriofinate with 
 Mr. Huxley. He adopted it, not knowing, 
 I think, that he adopted it from the early 
 Christian Church. Mr. Huxley was not a great 
 theologian. He was not a great student of 
 the early church. If he had been, he would 
 not have given so much attention to the story 
 in the New Testament of the devils which went 
 out of the man and entered into the pigs. 
 The real difficulty in that story is, Who paid 
 for the hogs ? I never could believe in the 
 morality of that story because the swine were 
 a dead loss to the owner ; and if there are 
 any devils they probably were not drowned ; 
 so the whole thing was a loss on all sides. 
 Mr. Huxley was continually quoting this in 
 his Essays, as though it were a sample mira- 
 cle. I refer to this to show that he was not 
 a great theologian nor a great biblical critic. 
 But the fact is, in the early church, the term 
 
30 One World at a Time 
 
 " agnostic " was assumed by a sect in op- 
 position to the " Gnostics," a group of people 
 who appeared in the Eastern Church here 
 and there, of whom not so much is known 
 as one could wish, but who were the "know- 
 ing" people, the mystics of their day. The 
 " Agnostics " were the men who claimed that 
 God did not know everything, that He was not 
 omnipresent. So, gradually, the term came 
 to be applied to men as not knowing. Grad- 
 ually Herbert Spencer took it up and devised 
 out of it the term, " Unknowable," as applied 
 to God. So we get it in all variations. It is 
 a kaleidoscopic term, and yet most men who 
 use it and say, " I am an agnostic," simply 
 mean, "There are some things I do not know, 
 and therefore I will not debate about them." 
 Too often they mean, " There are some 
 things I do not know because they cannot be 
 known." And it behooves them to inquire 
 whether that definition is correct or not ; and 
 that is the purpose of this chapter. 
 
 Now the position of the scientific mind on 
 the subject is this : nothing can be known ex- 
 cept from experience. The idealist and the 
 experientialist, to use the philosophic terms, 
 are opposed the one to the other. The ideal- 
 ist lives in a world of visions. The experien- 
 
The Agnostic 31 
 
 tialist lives in a world of experiment. And 
 yet, when you come to analyse the term " ex- 
 perience," it marries itself to a very beautiful 
 poetic idealism. Let me tell you how the 
 term was first used in a way that included both 
 meanings. In the French guilds of artisans, 
 the skilled silver workers and gold workers of 
 the Middle Age, the apprentice worked seven 
 years upon his tasks. When he had wrought 
 out some beautiful thing, perhaps in beaten 
 silver, he brought it to the master of the 
 guild and said, " Behold my experience ! " We 
 take over into our Eno-Hsh tong-ue that word 
 "experience." He meant by it the sum of all 
 his experiments. He had been an apprentice 
 these seven years. He had spoiled many a 
 good bit of metal. He had dulled the edge 
 of many a good tool. He had spent painful 
 days and nights of labour. He had given him- 
 self to the work with enthusiasm, but the whole 
 of it was in this little bit of work here — his 
 experience, the sum of his experiments, was 
 there, and upon the acceptance of it by the 
 Master of his Guild, he might take his kit of 
 tools and go out as a journey workman, mas- 
 ter of his craft. In other words, the practical 
 workman was proved by the beautiful thing he 
 had done, and the ideal there embodied was 
 
32 One World at a Time 
 
 the ideal of his experience there wrought out. 
 The scientific man says, " I can only know by 
 experience." Now I would say, in general 
 terms, that that is true. I have no quarrel 
 with that proposition. I am an idealist and I 
 am an experientialist in the same sense in 
 which I am an individualist and a socialist to- 
 gether. Let me say to my socialistic friends 
 that the solution of their difficulties lies along 
 the line of individualism, as the difficulties of 
 the experientialist may be solved along the 
 line of intelligent idealism. The socialist, 
 when he comes to understand, as I think more 
 and more he is coming to understand, that 
 " society is an organism in which every cell has 
 consciousness," will discover that the health of 
 the tissue depends on the health of the indi- 
 vidual cell ; so that if he is to have an organic 
 whole that is absolutely in health, he must 
 start with the health of the cell and see to it 
 that no part aches through disease or is lost by 
 dismemberment. So in the other field, the 
 field of experience, the result depends not sim- 
 ply upon the sum of experiences, but on the 
 elements that go to make it up. Have I no 
 experiences but such as come through the 
 senses, or does the union of them in contact 
 with their environment constitute another ex- 
 
The Agnostic 33 
 
 perience ? I incline to feel that the touch, 
 smell, taste, sight, and hearing senses do not 
 sum up the whole experience of life. I know 
 that there is a narrow school of experience to 
 which the most radical agnosticism turns, that 
 says, " You cannot know anything except what 
 you can see, hear, feel, taste, or smell." Well, 
 then, you do not know more than a dog, be- 
 cause he has all those senses. His scent is 
 keener than yours ; his hearing is keener than 
 yours ; his sight is as good as yours ; he is so 
 swift of foot that he can tell the contact of his 
 touch sense with the ground quickly enough to 
 lift his foot and go on, while you have to pain- 
 fully learn to walk after months of trying. All 
 his senses are more alert than yours. But this 
 man, who claims to belong to the most radical 
 school of agnosticism, and says that he knows 
 nothing that he cannot see, hear, feel, smell, or 
 taste, I think would hardly agree that the sum 
 of life is in the sensations of life ; for the rea- 
 son that, if that were so, one artist would be 
 as good as another. They use the same col- 
 ours, they handle the same pigments and the 
 same utensils of their art, the same tools of 
 their craft. They see the same view, and they 
 have an equal desire to sell their pictures. 
 Still, it is not true that artists are all alike. 
 
34 One World at a Time 
 
 Some artists see Apocalyptic visions such as 
 visited John on Patmos, and others will paint 
 you a portrait of an onion, and think that is a 
 picture. Artists are not alike. Pictures are 
 not alike. I heard of a man the other day who 
 made up his mind that the reason he could not 
 write good poetry was that he did not drink. 
 He said, in general terms, " Now I am a moral 
 man and an abstainer ; but, as I read, the 
 great poets — most of them — indulged in liquor, 
 and their best poems were written under the 
 influence of drink." I suppose he had heard 
 about Poe and a few more who were weak in 
 this direction. He told a friend of mine that 
 he determined to write a great poem, so he 
 bought half a pint of whiskey and drank it all. 
 What happened? He went to sleep and did 
 not have a single idea. Poets are not all alike, 
 but they all have the same senses, if not all 
 the same sense. I think we shall have to en- 
 large the boundaries of what constitutes ex- 
 perience of life, and say that it is not summed 
 up in the five senses. The soul sits central, 
 and caravans come in through the senses, bring- 
 ing traffic from the outside world. The touch 
 sense drags its caravans forward, the eye sense 
 beckons them near, the ear sense hears their 
 footfall from afar. So through these gateways 
 
The Agnostic 35 
 
 the central soul receives the tribute of the 
 world. What does the soul do with it? That 
 is the problem. This is exactly what Brown- 
 ing means when he says that when you strike 
 a chord upon an instrument you do not get an- 
 other note; you get "a star" — you get some- 
 thing that all the notes have contributed, which 
 the aesthetic sense in the musician recognises 
 as a new thing, and calls it a chord. That is 
 what Emerson meant when he said, " If two 
 and two did not sometimes make five, we 
 never would get on." That is perfectly true. 
 It is the " unearned increment " of the two and 
 two that makes the additional one that makes 
 five. Two and two have gone out at interest 
 and have received their interest in a new convic- 
 tion, in a new emotion, in a new ideal, in a new 
 sensation, which is a new experience in the 
 mind. This narrowing of experience by the 
 agnostic to the senses, who says that he does not 
 know anything that they do not register, has its 
 parallel in the working-man who comes to you 
 and says with perfect candour and frankness 
 that there is " nothing that makes wealth 
 but labour." He means that ; and by labour he 
 means that which takes the strength, that ex- 
 hausts muscular effort, that wears upon the 
 nerve, that breaks down tissue. He means 
 
36 One World at a Time 
 
 work, labour, — " nothing makes wealth but 
 labour." Now, he really believes that. So I 
 turn to him and I say to him, " My dear friend, 
 1 sympathise with your wish to exalt labour, 
 but I will take you down here to the East 
 River and show you, what has ceased to be a 
 wonder, the Brooklyn Bridge. The Brooklyn 
 Bridge was a mathematical problem before it 
 ever was a bridge. Every worker in metals 
 knows that a given grade of steel can be estim- 
 ated to the fraction — the smallest fraction— 
 of weight as to the strain that it will bear for 
 every cubic inch of its length. Every yacht 
 — even the keenest racing-machine — is not on 
 paper first as a diagram and model ; it is on 
 paper as a mathematical problem calculated 
 in terms of figures, signs, and mathematical 
 nomenclature ; it is a study in mathematics, 
 not a study in labour, before ever a keel is laid, 
 before ever a sheet of iron or steel is forged. 
 The whole thing has sailed the seas of some- 
 body's mind before it sailed the Atlantic. The 
 Brooklyn Bridge hung up complete in the 
 head of the engineer before it ever spanned 
 the East River." You are compelled to enlarge 
 your meaning of labour, just as the agnostic has 
 to enlarge his meaning of experience. Now, 
 if by experience I mean a larger thing than the 
 
The A8:nostic 37 
 
 ■■fc 
 
 senses can reveal, how far shall I carry the 
 meaninor of that word before I reach the limit ? 
 
 o 
 
 Well, I am going to carry it into the mind 
 first. I insist that I can grasp a thought, but 
 not with my hand. I insist that I can see a 
 proposition that is not discernible to the eye. 
 I insist that I can hear music that never was 
 on sea or land, and that haunts the chambers 
 of the mind, and is the cause, in those who are 
 competent, of the great oratorios and operas 
 that have been given to the musical world. No 
 eye saw them ; no ear heard them ; no hand 
 touched them. They were regnant in the soul 
 of the composer. A competent musician will 
 take the score, the orchestration of such an 
 opera, and, with the mere score in his hand, 
 sit and hear the whole orchestration without 
 an instrument being present. Is that an ex- 
 perience ? I hold that it is ; and if a man 
 comes in and says, " There is no music except 
 what the violins make with the accompany- 
 ing instruments," I turn to him as that great 
 musician would, and say to him, " The concert 
 pitch is not in the instrument, it is in the mind ; 
 and we know when the orchestration is in per- 
 fect accord by the registry of the consciousness 
 in terms of thought, and not simply in terms 
 of the auditory nerve." Take the eye as an il- 
 
38 One World at a Time 
 
 lustration. I want to get my agnostic on the 
 plane of intellect, and away from the plane of 
 the senses. Take the eye as an instrument. The 
 eye is a thing to see through ; it is not a thing 
 to see with. It is a telescope, a microscope, if 
 you please. The eye's spot is not behind my 
 glasses, but from within the brain ; and a blow 
 on the back of the head will produce blindness 
 quite as certainly as a blow in the face. The 
 instrument can be disfigured, and yet the vis- 
 ions it has seen remain ! Let me with one 
 single example show you what I mean. There 
 was a beautiful story told of Helen Keller, 
 and I sent to Helen Keller to know whether 
 it were true. You know that Miss Keller, 
 who is now a student in Radcliffe College, 
 Harvard University, was, at the beginning, 
 blind and dumb and deaf, absolutely. The 
 painful, careful training by Miss Sullivan and 
 those associated with her has made that young 
 girl capable of taking her Latin and Greek ex- 
 aminations for entrance into Radcliffe College, 
 and has widened her information beyond that 
 of most girls of her age. This is the story : 
 They were very careful that she should never 
 have any religion taught her, because they 
 wanted to see whether there is an experience 
 that does not depend upon sight or hearing 
 
The Agnostic 39 
 
 or speech, the ordinary avenues through which 
 rehgion comes, — the reading of religious 
 books, the hearing of argument, and talking 
 with people of religious tendencies. That 
 was shut away from her by intention. It is 
 said that Phillips Brooks was brought finally 
 to visit Helen Keller and to talk with her 
 about the Fatherhood of God. And he spoke 
 of God, our Father, as only he could speak, 
 in terms so natural that God was broucrht 
 near ; in terms so tender that she was not 
 afraid ; in terms so real that it seemed a com- 
 panionable thought ; and when he stopped, 
 she turned her sightless eyes to him and said, 
 in the language she had learned by painful ef- 
 fort through the years, " Dr. Brooks, I have 
 always known Him, but I did not know His 
 name." Will my agnostic friend insist that 
 there is not a field of experience that is within 
 the horizons of the mind, helped only a little 
 by the slightest contact, such as this girl had, 
 with the external world ? 
 
 One other suggestion. I insist that the ag- 
 nostic must understand one thing most clearly, 
 and it is this : the laws of the mind are as 
 much laws of nature as the laws of matter. 
 Indeed, I would be willing to say that they 
 are more the laws of nature than the laws of 
 
40 One World at a Time 
 
 matter. There is not a man so scientific, or 
 so wise in his own conceit, that he would be 
 able to demonstrate to anyone else whether 
 spirit is a sublimation of matter, or matter is a 
 precipitate of spirit. You do not know ; and 
 you do not know, because there is not a man 
 in the world who knows. Some people guess, 
 but this is not a subject for conundrums ; it is 
 a field for earnest questions. The conun- 
 drum is a question the answer to which you 
 have to guess, and in that it differs from the 
 rational question, the answer to which some- 
 body knows. I insist, therefore, that the laws 
 of mind, the terms of consciousness, are the 
 real terms, in which the world is known. 
 Some reader of these pages may ask, " How 
 do you know that there is another life?" I 
 answer you now that I do not know. Then, 
 he will probably say, " And are you a Christ- 
 ian minister ? " And I will say, " I am a 
 minister of a Christian Church, and I hope I 
 am a Christian minister, but I would rather 
 the congregation would testify to that." The 
 fact is, the experientialist is right in that re- 
 gard. It was that to which Huxley addressed 
 himself. You cannot know that which you 
 have not experienced, and another world, an- 
 other li'fe, is a thing that you cannot experi- 
 
The Agnostic 4^ 
 
 ence while you are occupied with this world 
 and this life. If you ask me if I can make an 
 argument for immortality, I will say with per- 
 fect frankness, " Yes, I think I can make an 
 argument, the probabilities of which are all on 
 the side of remaining for ever a personality in 
 God's world." I think I can make an argu- 
 ment for that. This is not the time for it. 
 But if you were dying, and you were to call 
 me to your bedside and ask me whether I 
 could guarantee you by proofs known to me 
 that you should go out of what you call life 
 into life for ever, — in spite of the desire in my 
 mind to help you, — I must still say, I do not 
 know. On that subject agnosticism is per- 
 fectly justifiable, because it is outside the 
 plane of experience. Now I believe I shall 
 live for ever ; and I can argue that question 
 down to the ground. You ask me if I know ; 
 and the agnostic attitude is, I do not know, 
 because it is not within the horizon of my ex- 
 perience. The first reason for this is, that 
 testimony is not evidence in this sense ; and 
 all the relicrious books of the world mig-ht be 
 piled one upon the other to say that men 
 believed in the eternal life, in " the other life," 
 as they are in the habit of calling it, — and 
 yet, when you are through, you simply have 
 
42 One World at a Time 
 
 accumulated testimony of extremely good peo- 
 ple, who thoroughly believed, and lived in the 
 terms of their belief, that they should never 
 pass out of existence ; but it would not be 
 evidence. What they knoiu is the life that 
 now is — - they have the power to live in such 
 sublime terms as to feci the promise of "the 
 life to come." 
 
 The second reason is this : the only way 
 to find out about dying is to die, and nature 
 seems to have arranged it so that after you 
 have done that you cannot tell what the 
 experience is. There may be among my 
 readers people who believe profoundly in 
 spirit communication, and I expect to hear 
 from them on this subject, I want to say to 
 them now, that I do not deny that perfectly 
 plausible reports may have come to perfectly 
 credulous people from "the other world," as 
 they call it. I am prepared to say that ; but 
 what I contend is, that you cannot know it 
 as coming from the other world. Why ? 
 Because you can only know it in terms of 
 your own consciousness, and the moment 
 you know it in terms of your present con- 
 sciousness, you have to take the "other- 
 world " tag off and put this world's tag on. 
 That is the difficulty. The moment I know 
 
The Aonostic 43 
 
 £) 
 
 it, I know it in terms of my present exper- 
 ience, therefore it is not from the " other 
 world'" to me. 
 
 The further reason touches the people that 
 get these marvellous communications — which 
 I do not deny ; I am agnostic with regard to 
 them ; I do not know them, I have never 
 had them. The only attempts made upon 
 my credulity in that direction were so ridicul- 
 ous and so inconclusive that when the partici- 
 pants in the Sceance were through I asked 
 them if I might have my inning, and they 
 said I might. I said if they did n't mind, I 
 would lead them in prayer, and I had a service 
 of religion with those people. It seemed to 
 be a shock to them, but it was a practical 
 way. I thought that you might speak to the 
 Cause of being with such confidence that all 
 other questions were insignificant in compari- 
 son. We must also remember the human 
 mind is much less explored up to date than 
 the continent of Africa. That is, we know 
 more about the continent of Africa than 
 about the human mind. When you get 
 certain psychic results that are reported to 
 you as having come from some "other world" 
 you are not sure when you have heard it that 
 it is not a report from some interior province 
 
44 One World at a Time 
 
 of the human mind, from which some wan- 
 derer of consciousness has come in to report 
 his tribe and the conditions of their Hfe as from 
 an unexplored continent and an unknown tract 
 of the world. That is the difficulty about the 
 whole question ; and for that reason I insist 
 that the plane of experience must be nar- 
 rowed in that particular. You ask me — to be 
 very personal — if I hold this view, that no 
 man may know with respect to the future life, 
 why it is that I hold firmly to my own belief 
 that I shall never die, — I mean In the sense 
 of being snuffed out like a candle. I do 
 not expect to be snuffed out like candle, 
 never to be relighted. Why am I not an 
 agnostic with regard to that in the plane 
 of my own belief ? For this simple reason. 
 What I know is that I am alive. Every sense 
 registers it. Think of it ! The sensory 
 nerves, coming in contact with some external 
 object, telegraph the central office in the brain, 
 and the message goes back over the motor 
 nerves, and an act follows. That goes on all 
 the time. It only goes on, so far as we know, 
 in living men and women. I know I am alive. 
 It rests upon you to prove, if you deny that I 
 shall live for ever, that I shall ever die. The 
 consciousness of life is the present fact, and 
 
The Agnostic 45 
 
 I hold this relation to the life of God as se- 
 curing it in the life of God ; and I hold more 
 than that, — that the experience of life and 
 the experience of the love of the Eternal 
 and the sense of the Fatherhood of God, 
 the sense of relationship between the child 
 and God his Father, is so real that I cannot 
 die unless God dies. I cannot understand 
 how the Sum of Life can cut me off as 
 dead. 
 
 The best things in life are the things you 
 do not know in the sense that the agnostic 
 says they cannot be known. For instance in 
 your own home you have a little child. When 
 you come home from work, she climbs up 
 upon your knee and you wonder whether she 
 ought to ; you are dusty from the day's work, 
 and you wonder what the mother will say 
 if there is a speck on her best clothes ; but 
 she climbs up just as if she were not afraid 
 of dirt, and puts her arms around your neck 
 and looking into your eyes, — tired eyes, tired 
 with the moving panorama of the world, tired 
 with straining all the acquisitive power of 
 life to get enough to keep her living and 
 get her educated and place her in life — she 
 says, *' Do you love me ? " And you say, 
 " Why, yes." You do not have to argue that ; 
 
46 One World at a Time 
 
 you know it ! You do not have to calculate 
 and see whether you really love her. You 
 can shut your eyes and love her. All the 
 senses might have gone into oblivion for a 
 moment, but you would love her. So you 
 say " Yes." And she says, " So do I." And 
 neither of you knows why. You could not 
 tell anybody that asked you why. If you 
 say that you love the child as the tigress 
 loves her cub, as the eagle loves its young, 
 I say to you that between the way in which 
 a tigress in the cage will turn her cub over 
 and lick it and paw it about and mumble it 
 with every sign of motherly affection for it^ 
 — the difference between that and what the 
 woman does who nurses the child, and would 
 die for it, separates these two by celestial dia- 
 meters. They are not the same thing at all. 
 The instinct of motherhood in the beast, and 
 the instinct of spiritual affection in the wo- 
 man, are as separate as two things can be. 
 All the best things in life are the things we 
 cannot prove, but they are things that dwell 
 in the very consciousness and constitute the 
 experience of sensitive souls. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE BELIEVER 
 
 WE come first of all to the importance of 
 the subject itself. I hold, and have 
 maintained throughout these pages, that re- 
 lig-ion is a natural function of the human soul ; 
 that it belongs to human nature ; that the man 
 who has religion in excess is as ill-balanced as 
 the man who has it deficiently. There is no 
 reason why we should call a dwarf in religion 
 a man, or why we should call a freak in religion 
 a man ; because religion belongs in human na- 
 ture in its place, proportioned to the other 
 faculties of the human mind. It is not the 
 sole business of man, but it is his business, 
 nevertheless. The importance of the subject 
 arises not only from the fact that religion is a 
 natural function of the human creature, — that 
 his soul is adjusted to the uses of its spiritual 
 functions just as the eye to light, the ear to 
 sound, and the lungs to atmosphere, — not only 
 is this so, but the beleiver represents the only 
 
 47 
 
48 One World at a Time 
 
 operative class in the world of mind, namely 
 the optimist. I believe there is a moral use in 
 optimism that the pessimist never can reach ; 
 that there is a moral function for the optimist 
 which the cynic wholly ignores ; that the op- 
 timist, the man who believes not that things 
 are at their best, but that things are coming to 
 their best, is the man who must of necessity 
 be classed with the believers, as the pessimist 
 must be classed with the deniers. I under- 
 stand perfectly well — every man of experience 
 must understand — that there is a nether side 
 to life, that it is not all shining and brilliant, 
 that it is not all fair and attractive. The man 
 who says there is no nether side of life, no 
 tragedy that is played without any interval be- 
 tween the acts, no pathos that wrings the heart 
 and drives men to despair, — the man who says 
 there is no nether side of life, is not an optimist, 
 he is an idiot. He does not understand that 
 there is a side of the embroidery, however 
 beautiful the pattern may be on its upper side, 
 that when it is reversed seems disaster and 
 contradiction, and the stitches all awry ; and 
 yet the optimist and the believer belong to 
 the same class ; they belong to the class 
 that has in charge the moral triumph of the 
 world. 
 
The Believer 49 
 
 Let us consider certain distinctions between 
 the behever as the representative of faith, and 
 what have been mistaken for aspects of his voca- 
 tion. ** Faith " is a much misunderstood word. 
 It is supposed to be the prerogative of people 
 who " get religion." I want to say here with 
 great distinctness that you cannot " get reli- 
 gion ; " you cannot get rid of it. It is in the fibre 
 of your nature. It is part of your tissue. It is 
 woven, interwoven, and complexly involved 
 with the whole structure of the human mind. 
 People get up in the morning and say, " Go to, 
 now, I am going to get religion to-day." They 
 are only going to change the costume of their 
 thinkinor and their attitude of mind. When 
 evening falls they will not have got any new 
 thing whatever, except a new attitude toward 
 some fancy of their own. So the word " faith," 
 as thought to beloncr to the religrious world 
 alone, is misunderstood. I have said religion 
 is a function of the human soul. Faith is the 
 exercise of that function. There is a passage 
 in the New Testament which declares that 
 " faith is the substance of things hoped for, 
 the evidence of thino^s not seen." There is 
 a better definition of faith given by a mod- 
 ern man, more easily understood, more strik- 
 ingly stated, it seems to me, less invested with 
 
so One World at a Time 
 
 mysticism, more practical to the common mind. 
 He declares that " Faith is the conviction that 
 in the universe there is something that corre- 
 sponds to my best." That is the attitude of 
 faith. "In the universe there is something 
 that corresponds to my best." When I am at 
 my best, the universe and I are in intimate 
 correspondence. 
 
 Let me give you an illustration of the uses 
 of faith in other aspects than religious. Take 
 the man who believes in himself. We all 
 have to be on good terms with ourselves if we 
 are to live comfortably in the world and do 
 any good work. The man who hates himself 
 has sapped the energy of his purpose in life. 
 The discouraged man has to get over his 
 discouragement before he does any good work. 
 Self-respect is of the very essence of moral char- 
 acter. The man who believes in himself is an 
 example of faith as a natural function. He 
 believes he is a man of destiny, that he is a 
 man of power, of opportunity, that he has fac- 
 ulties which he must seriously consider and 
 constantly use. When his faith in himself is 
 excessive, he is known as an egotist, — that is, 
 he travels with the sign of the perpendicular 
 pronoun all the time, and " I, I, I," stands 
 as a kind of exclamation point of all the 
 
The Believer 51 
 
 performance of his Hfe. A most unpleasant 
 man ! But he simply has faith in himself in 
 excess, which is as genuine a faith as a man 
 ever felt in moments of worship. He is his 
 own idol, and worships at his own shrine. 
 
 Take the man who believes profoundly in 
 his fellows. He believes in the " essential 
 dignity of human nature," as Dr. Channing 
 would phrase it. He believes in the " sov- 
 ereignity of the human mind " as George Will- 
 iam Curtis would have said. He believes in 
 the capacity of human nature for all good. 
 He does not believe in man "as ruined, but as 
 incomplete," and that he rises by continual 
 ascent in a way that discounts and contradicts 
 the old doctrine of the " fall of man." Man 
 never fell. He has been rising since the be- 
 crinninor. This man believes in his fellows. 
 They are his fellows ; they are not strangers 
 to him, not alien. He lives the line in Ter- 
 ence's play which electrified and astonished 
 the Roman audience that first heard it, — " I am 
 a man, and nothing that is human is foreign to 
 me." This man believes in his fellows. We 
 call him a lover of his kind, a philanthropist ; 
 and he loves them so much that he is not part- 
 icular that they shall be just his kind. He 
 will allow them to be a variation from his 
 
52 One World at a Time 
 
 kind, and love them still. He is an example 
 of the exercise of faith in an object that is 
 worthy of its bestowal. 
 
 Carry now the exercise of faith to its limit 
 as applied to the Infinite and Eternal. The 
 believer, the man of faith, who has come into 
 correspondence with the Ultimate Reality in 
 the universe, who may call that Ultimate 
 Reality by a name that is in no liturgy nor in 
 any scripture, but who has projected his life 
 upon the confidence that God is, by whatever 
 name he may be known, — that man is exercis- 
 ing the same faculty exactly as the man who 
 believed in himself and the man who believed 
 in his fellows ; but he is believing profoundly 
 in that Ultimate Reality which in moments of 
 divine communion he calls the Great Compan- 
 ion, and in moments of revery seems to him 
 the very palpitating heart of the universe it- 
 self. He is a believer in God. Now if you 
 dispute the term, I am not particular about it. 
 To one who asked me if I was not playing 
 fast and loose with that term, I gave the an- 
 swer which I repeat now. I care nothing for 
 the term. In all the world, no human being, 
 from the most developed saint of any creed or 
 kind or relio-ion, down to the creature who 
 bowing down before stock or stone worships 
 
The Believer 53 
 
 there, was ever left unheard by the Being 
 who made him. If the saint has his idea of 
 God, and the savage his symbol, — the totem- 
 stick, or whatever it may be, — that is simply a 
 question not of religion but of development. 
 The mystic, to whom God has no form nor 
 name, simply represents the other antithesis, 
 the extreme, the ultimate pole from this un- 
 developed savage with his stone image or his 
 totem-stick. He only represents religion in 
 another aspect of its development. The name 
 is never the Reality. It is for faith in that 
 which is above all names I plead. 
 
 Let us come to certain other distinctions. 
 Faith is not synonymous with credulity. Cred- 
 ulity Is simply the open mouth of the sewer, 
 with the lay of the land in that direction ; so 
 that you only need a freshet to fill the drain. 
 It may be clean water that runs in. It may 
 be the very distilled snows of heaven. But 
 still the open mouth receives it, unquestioning, 
 and the transit of it from the conduit is unim- 
 peded. That is the attitude of credulity, which 
 accepts whatever it is asked to accept. It has 
 an unfailing appetite and an unappeased curios- 
 ity, and the sceptic is as likely to be credulous 
 as any other man in the world. I will give you 
 an illustration of the kind of thing that happens. 
 
54 One World at a Time 
 
 A woman said to me years ago : " I think it 
 is about time my daughters were learning 
 something about the Christian religion." I 
 said I thought it would be a good plan. She 
 proposed to send them to a class I was hold- 
 ing, and said : " My daughters are so ignorant 
 of the Christian religion that they asked me a 
 question the other day that surprised me. 
 They know all about other religions." I con- 
 gratulated her, but I wanted to say that there 
 were people, like Max Miiller, who had studied 
 all the Sacred Books of the East and would 
 not claim that. She said : " My daughters 
 asked me this question — ' Mother, who lived 
 first, Moses or Jesus?'" "Well," I replied, 
 *' that was rather an astonishing question for 
 grown-up people to ask." Just to try her as to 
 this credulous attitude, — she was an excellent 
 woman, full of all good works, and not full of 
 good knowledge, — I added to her : " I would 
 not have been surprised if your daughters had 
 wondered who lived first, Jesus or Moham- 
 med." "Oh," she said, "they could not have 
 made that mistake. If there had been no 
 Mohammed there could not have been any 
 Christ." She was only six hundred years out 
 of the way on the wrong side of the Christian 
 Era. That is the credulous attitude of mind 
 
The Believer 55 
 
 that beheves the new thing proposed the real 
 thingf, because it is so new it has not lost 
 the tag off it yet. That is not faith. That 
 person is not a believer. He is simply a man 
 with a morbid appetite for receiving things 
 without examination, without test. This man 
 is not a believer, he is a mere receiver, whether 
 his credulity be pseudo-scientific, the credulity 
 of the man who reads the newspaper, or the 
 credulity of a corrupt official, for instance, who 
 believes all the things he wants to believe, or 
 whether it be the credulity of the religious 
 man, the man whose mind has been filled up 
 with everything that comes to hand. The 
 tip-cart of the world's knowledge has just been 
 backed up to his mind and dumped in. He is 
 not a man of faith. He is a man of varied 
 and unassorted beliefs, and is not, therefore, 
 in the best sense, a believer. That distinction 
 must be made between faith and credulity. 
 
 A distinction must also be made between 
 faith and speculation. There is a speculative 
 quality in the mind for which I have contended 
 in these pages. The sceptic, as the inquirer, 
 must have all things subject to him by way of 
 stimulus to the desire to know. But the spec- 
 ulative plane of thought is not the plane of 
 the religious life. It is wholly different. Re- 
 
56 One World at a Time 
 
 ligion is met upon the plane of the practical 
 reason and not upon the plane of the speculat- 
 ive intellect. The passage has to be made in 
 theology from the plane of the speculative 
 intellect to the plane of the practical reason, or 
 you would never get applied Christianity or 
 applied anything else in the name of religion. 
 The trouble with the theological world has 
 always been that it has been content to specu- 
 late with infinite variety upon an infinite num- 
 ber of subjects, about most of which no human 
 being can know anything at all. The exercise 
 has been immensely entertaining, but it has 
 not built up the religious life. It has strength- 
 ened the mind of the speculative reasoner 
 because it has given what any mental exercise 
 will give, increased power of concentration and 
 ability to handle his own thought. But always 
 before he was through, he had to make the 
 descent from the plane of speculative reason- 
 ing to the plane of practical reasoning. 
 
 A distinction must be made also between 
 the believer and the nominally religious man. 
 There is a great contempt abroad for the 
 "professor of religion." It is partly justified, 
 and partly unjust. I have the good fortune 
 to belong to a church that does not put any 
 premium upon a man's making a profession 
 
The Believer 57 
 
 of religion. It puts a vast deal more empha- 
 sis upon the character of the man, and the 
 question of his alliance with a church of any 
 form of faith that he is satisfied to assume 
 is left entirely to his own private judgment. 
 Still, I believe in the Church, or I would not 
 be a minister of religion in charge of a church ; 
 but I believe in the Church as an assemblage 
 of people given over to an earnest devotion 
 to the will of God, not an assemblage of peo- 
 ple whom you can designate by the badge 
 they wear or the phrase they use. In the Egyp- 
 tian Book of the Dead, among the splendid 
 passages that are written concerning the soul 
 as it goes up to be weighed and passed on 
 into the Courts of the Blessed, — in that ancient 
 document, antedating by at least twenty-five 
 hundred years probably by four thousand 
 years, the era we call Christian, — this signifi- 
 cant thing is added to all the other virtues : 
 "he hath the right tone." It does not mean 
 what we mean by a "high-toned" man, a man 
 of right character. It means that he could 
 say the holy things in the holy way. It 
 means what old Betty Higden meant, in one 
 of Dickens's stories, when she cuffs her son 
 for reading the newspaper in a sing-song, and 
 says : " How dare ye read the paper in the 
 
58 One World at a Time 
 
 Bible twang ! " The Egyptian Book of the 
 Dead means the man who can say the holy 
 things in the holy way. That has gone out 
 of use except in rare and isolated instances. 
 There is only one tone for character and for 
 religion together. So that the distinction 
 must be made between the " professor of re- 
 ligion " and the man of faith. Many a man 
 of supreme faith has never been a professor of 
 religion in the nominal and usual sense of 
 that word. The deep, profound, earnest con- 
 victions of life are not easily adjusted to the 
 usual demands of the church as to its mem- 
 bership or the articles of a creed. The pro- 
 fessor of religion is not, therefore, in this 
 statement, to be confused with the believer. 
 He may belong under both designations, but, 
 because he is despised by you, for instance, 
 as a member of a church, he should not, there- 
 fore, be dismissed without investigation as to 
 whether he is really a believer or not ; and for 
 this reason I come now to the major thing I 
 desire to say to you. 
 
 Religion, I have said, is a natural function 
 of the human creature. It belong-s to man. 
 By virtue of it all art in its appeal to the 
 aesthetic nature has its share in religfion. 
 It is safe to say that without it three things 
 
The Believer 59 
 
 would never have been for your edifica- 
 tion, — the great works of sculpture and paint- 
 ing in the graphic arts ; the great works of 
 architecture, where religion was enshrined, 
 sometimes buried ; and the third thing that 
 would not have been left to you is the work 
 of the musical world, most of which we should 
 not have had but for the contribution of re- 
 ligion to it ; and still a fourth thing — your 
 boys would have no Latin and Greek classics 
 to study in the schools if it had not happened 
 that when Cassiodorus was secretary to the 
 Eastern Emperor in the sixth century, he 
 found on his hands a lot of monks, whom he 
 set to work copying the Latin and Greek clas- 
 sics, thus preserved to this age. So, even 
 in the schools themselves there is this ser- 
 vice done by religion as a servitor of man, 
 creating and preserving art and literature 
 in an ag-e when the learned and servants of 
 art were to be found only in the churches of 
 Europe. 
 
 The main reason for declaring for the be- 
 liever as the exponent of religion is that the 
 believer represents a quality in the mind rather 
 than expression on the tongue. I am very 
 anxious to have you understand that religion 
 is not only natural, but is easiest handled and 
 
6o One World at a Time 
 
 most potent when reduced to its simplest 
 terms. Religion, faith as its expression, and 
 the believer as its exponent, represent a quality 
 of mind based in reverence. Is it not true 
 that there is a grave danger that the quality of 
 reverence shall disappear from the younger 
 life of our time ? Things pass so readily be- 
 fore the mind, so easily command the atten- 
 tion, the world is so interesting, so various, 
 so multiform, its industries are so many, its 
 pressure is so great, that the meditative qual- 
 ity, the brooding faculty, the power to take a 
 thing and hold the mind over it until it in- 
 cubates the egg of thought, until it brings the 
 singing thing out of the egg that was in the 
 nest of the moment, — that quality declines ever 
 more and more in this time in which we live, 
 in this land in which we live. The German 
 child, the English child is more deferential than 
 the American child. The American child has 
 been a little nineteenth-century philosopher. 
 The twentieth century is now on his hands, 
 and he knows not what to do with it. He 
 is deferred to, he is coddled, and cared for ; 
 he has more playthings than he can play with ; 
 he grows tired of the things heaped upon him. 
 He lives in the rattle and bang of a great city 
 perhaps, and grooves are made in his brain by 
 
The Believer 6i 
 
 the mere impact of noise, until I have known 
 children of the poorer East Side homes to 
 whom the most dreadful thing in the world 
 was silence ; they could not endure to be si- 
 lent. It is the growing shame of every great 
 city, the intolerable burden of men and women 
 of the poorer class of the great city, that they 
 never have the privilege of being alone ; which 
 the human mind needs. The human mind 
 needs to be alone with itself. It needs to be 
 quiet and to brood and fashion its own life out 
 of " reverence for the things that are above," 
 as Goethe has said, " for the things that are 
 around, and for the thinofs below." That is an 
 essential quality of the well-ordered mind. 
 The things above provoke it to worship ; 
 the things around produce in it the sense of 
 fellowship ; reverence for the things below 
 inspires it to the great compassions of life. 
 Reverence is an essential quality of the well- 
 ordered and normal mind, and the believer 
 is dealing with the reverential quality in the 
 mind. Your children are sometimes a surprise 
 to you by what they say. You think them ir- 
 reverent. No ; it is the wonder-element in 
 them, born of their very reverence. They live 
 in a world of mythology, of fancy, of fairy 
 stories. They say things about the Eternal 
 
62 One World at a Time 
 
 that seem very comical and sometimes irrever- 
 ent. But it is their very reverence that leads 
 them to say these things, — that is, if they have 
 been brought up under conditions of reverence 
 in the household. That same wonder-element 
 in the childhood of the race produced the mir- 
 acle, produced the prophet, and religion for 
 many and many a generation was supported 
 upon the two great pillars of prophecy and of 
 miracle. Take any of the old books about 
 religion. You will find the argument for re- 
 vealed religion to be that prophets prophesied 
 what came to pass, and miracles were per- 
 formed to prove that the prophecy was true. 
 That is short and easy ; but it is not true. In 
 the first place, most of the prophets were not 
 prophesying ; they were talking about some- 
 thing in their minds and hearts ; for their own 
 time they were the statesmen of Israel, deal- 
 ing with great state questions. For instance, 
 the Book of Daniel, which has been regarded 
 as a great prophecy, was not a prophecy. It 
 was written about i6o b. c, and was a war doc- 
 ument intended to inflame the patriotism of 
 the Jews. The time came, however, when this 
 structure of the temple of religion, standing 
 upon its two pillars of miracle and pro- 
 phecy, built out of the wonder-element in the 
 
The Believer 63 
 
 primitive mind, was entered, as the bhnd Sam- 
 son entered the temple of Dagon, by the 
 giant we know as Common-sense, ordinary rea- 
 son, natural penetration ; as Samson came 
 into the temple of the Philistines, and, led by 
 his guide, the blind giant flung his arms about 
 the two pillars on which the great temple was 
 supported, bowed himself between them, and 
 pulled the building down upon his enemies, 
 so Common-sense entered into the temple 
 of Religion, supported upon its pillars of 
 miracle and prophecy, and bowed himself be- 
 tween them, and they fell, and the literary 
 world of criticism took up their fragments to 
 examine them ; btit the temple stood ! The 
 temple stood ! Why ? Because it did not 
 really rest on miracle and prophecy. It rested 
 upon the profoundest convictions of the hu- 
 man soul and the ultimate reality of the uni- 
 verse ; and the theologians had come in and 
 built up other supports in contradiction of the 
 well-known architectural rule that you shall 
 not put a support that does not sustain any 
 weight. They built up these supports under 
 the structure, and able scholars in divinity 
 schools and in churches taught that miracle 
 and prophecy were the props of the Christ- 
 ian system. But the temple of religion was 
 
64 One World at a Time 
 
 older than these artificial supports ; it was 
 founded on human nature and buttressed in 
 the needs of men. 
 
 Still further, the believer represents not only 
 an attitude of mind based on reverence, he re- 
 presents a quality of life. 
 
 I like those phrases, the " low-grade " man, 
 and the " high-toned " man. I was speak- 
 ing on a platform one night, and a 'cello, 
 strung just as the musician had set it down, was 
 standing behind me, and as I spoke I could 
 hear it answer. Every tone of my voice was 
 taken up by the tense strings of the musical 
 instrument, which repeated behind me the 
 thing I was saying to the audience. So is 
 the high-toned man, strung to the tension of 
 his greatest power; he makes the music of 
 the world by the virtues which he discourses 
 to the world in which he is placed. He is 
 high-strung, he is " high-toned." On the other 
 hand, there is the man that is put together so 
 loosely that I should suppose, when he was 
 made he was made just out of ordinary tow, 
 and they forgot to put in any twist. You 
 have seen such a man. He will not bear 
 a pound's strain. He frays out, pulls apart. 
 He is just oakum that has ceased to be rope 
 and can be used only as filling. As the 
 
The Believer 65 
 
 calker, with this frayed-out, tarred rope that has 
 been brought into this fluffy condition, calks 
 up the seams in the old ships hauled up for 
 repair. That is the kind of man that cannot 
 be religious ; he cannot be a believer until he 
 gets over the condition of slackness of soul, of 
 the loose quality of his mind. For religion is 
 not something to be left, as men so super- 
 ciliously say, to women and children. If the 
 women had not cared for it it would not 
 have lasted for men. It would not have been 
 in the world to-day but for the essentially re- 
 ligious quality in women. It was a right in- 
 stinct in the Catholic Church that put in 
 her place the mother of Christ as the repre- 
 sentative of religion in an age when human 
 nature was so meanly thought of that only 
 a miraculous birth and a pure virgin could be 
 the representatives of religion. No ; the time 
 has gone by when we can leave religion to 
 women and children. It takes a good deal of 
 a man to be a believer, because of the quality 
 of life that it involves. The reason that so 
 few people are genuine believers is that the 
 strain is so great — not upon credulity, but upon 
 integrity. 
 
 This brings me to a point to which I want 
 your attention with all the fixedness that you 
 
66 One World at a Time 
 
 can command. A man who is a genuine 
 believer has as a fundamental postulate in his 
 thinking, the belief that this world is essentially 
 moral. He believes in the essential integrity 
 of the universe. The other type of man be- 
 lieves that there is a " short cut across-lots." 
 He thinks there is some indirect way by which 
 he can achieve his ends. Whereas, if he is a 
 business man he knows if that were true the 
 business of the world would not last five years. 
 The business world is built up, with all its de- 
 fects, with all its want of commercial integrity, 
 as we sometimes see it, — it is built up upon 
 the abiding conviction that morality is an es- 
 sential part of human life. Yesterday the busi- 
 ness world did ninety-five per cent, of its work 
 upon credit. If you were, because you dis- 
 believed in common integrity, to call back, 
 during this new century upon which we have 
 entered, the whole business of the world to a 
 cash basis, you would destroy the commerce 
 of this country before the year was out. No ; 
 it is because human nature is essentially de- 
 pendable ; because the universe is essentially 
 moral ; because the vast majority of people are 
 really honest, that the great mass of business 
 in the world every day of the world's life is 
 done upon a system of credit. 
 
The Believer 67 
 
 The common beHef in the integrity of man 
 must be carried through and apphed to the 
 universe at large. The universe is man's 
 home. If man himself is essentially honest, as 
 I believe he is ; if he is essentially right, as I 
 believe he is, the universe must be of the same 
 kind. His environment and himself must 
 come together on even terms. I believe that 
 the only solution of life is on the basis that the 
 universe from core to rim, from centre to cir- 
 cumference, is moral through and through. 
 In your school life you learned this axiom : 
 " A straight line is the shortest distance 
 between two points." It is just as true in 
 morals. You learned that " The whole cannot 
 be greater than the sum of all its parts." It is 
 just the same in morals. You learned that 
 " Two things equal to the same thing are equal 
 to each other." These mathematical axioms 
 that are the very substance and foundation of 
 the science of geometry are also axiomatic in 
 the moral world. Directness of intention, sin- 
 cerity that is crystalline and clear — these are 
 qualities a man must have in a universe he 
 believes to be moral. He can so be a believer ; 
 and not on any other terms whatever. 
 
 I want to call your attention, finally, to cert- 
 ain conditions under which the believer lives. 
 
68 One World at a Time 
 
 The first is a sense of proportion. I belong 
 to a class of people — ministers of religion — 
 who I suppose show the gravest defect in this 
 particular of any class in the world. The 
 ministry of religion has been said to be con- 
 scientiously and consistently disproportionate 
 in its thinking. For instance, it has empha- 
 sised the other world and not this. It has 
 emphasised the spiritual and not the natural ; 
 revelation and not Nature ; miracle and not 
 common force ; prophecy, and not plain sense ; 
 prayer and not work. It has emphasised death 
 and not life, and feels that its churches are 
 more to be maintained than the truth. 
 Let the ministry work out its own salvation. 
 Sometimes it will be saved because it is really 
 true. Sometimes it will have to take refuge, 
 probably, in the general amnesty that is given 
 to unconquerable ignorance. But in the com- 
 mon mind, in the average layman, if he is to 
 be a believer in a world that is worth living in, 
 the sense of proportion must have a promin- 
 ent place in the ordering of his thinking. 
 
 Proportioned thinking, giving to every phase 
 of life and character its due proportion, is ac- 
 companied, in the next place, by crystalline 
 sincerity. You cannot believe anything that is 
 worth believing which has to do with character 
 
The Believer 69 
 
 until you have purged your mind of all cant. 
 Never say the thing that you do not believe. 
 Never think the thing that you cannot summon 
 before the bar of reason and adjudge its place 
 and value. Never use an influence that you 
 do not want used for you. Take no attitude 
 toward the great realities for another mind 
 that you would not assume for yourself. Take 
 no attitude for yourself that you would not be 
 willing to be found in if God should call you 
 that moment to your account. You say these 
 are high qualities. They are not too lofty for 
 a man to claim for himself. A man knows 
 whether he is a clean man or not. A man 
 knows whether he is dealing with things in a 
 shifty way or not. He knows whether he is 
 using words in two senses or only in the sense 
 in which they can be used. He knows whether 
 he is shuffling and shifty in the attitude he has 
 toward life. He has a right to say that he is 
 absolutely and entirely sincere in his own judg- 
 ment ; and he cannot believe anything that is 
 worth believing unless he is. It is not worth 
 while for a man to live who has a debate with 
 himself for ever, who has to arrange all the 
 things he has ever said or thought, before he 
 can say the next thing. That is a farce with- 
 out being interesting, — the worst kind of a 
 
70 One World at a Time 
 
 farce ever put on the boards. The secret of 
 the directness of Jesus of Nazareth was that 
 he had no debate with himself. When they 
 said to him, " Shall we pay tribute to Caesar or 
 no ? " he said, " Show me a coin." And they 
 showed him a denarius. He said, " Whose 
 image and superscription Is this ? " They said, 
 " Csesar's." Then he said, " Give unto Caesar 
 the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the 
 things that are God's." 
 
 There was a man In the synagogue who had 
 a withered hand, so the story says, and they 
 watched Jesus whether he would heal him on 
 the Sabbath day. Think of their state of 
 mind, that they watched the Great Benefactor 
 to know If he would be kind to a helpless crip- 
 ple on the Sabbath day ! He, perceiving their 
 thought, said unto the man, "Stand forth." 
 Then turning to that group of people whom he 
 knew, he said, " Is It right to do good or evil 
 on the Sabbath day, to save life or to kill ? " 
 And they answered him not a word. That 
 was a straightforward question that could be 
 answered by sincere minds, and they were not 
 up to It. They held their peace. The story 
 goes on to say that the helpless man was told 
 to stretch forth his withered hand. You can 
 see the palsied hand pointing out uncertainly 
 
The Believer 7^ 
 
 into that audience which could not answer a 
 straightforward question. And the Master 
 said to him, " Go unto thy home. Thou art 
 healed." That was the way in which he dealt 
 directly with men, because he had no debate 
 with himself. He had not to ask himself 
 whether he thought so and so, before he could 
 say what he thought to other men. 
 
 So I leave with you this subject of The 
 Believer, hoping that you belong to the great 
 multitude of those who are profoundly be- 
 lievers in something that is worth while. If 
 you ask me where you shall begin, I say. Be- 
 gin with these three qualities, two of which I 
 have already named. First, begin by putting 
 the emphasis In life where it belongs, in due 
 proportion. Begin by dealing with yourself in 
 terms of absolute sincerity, and then add to 
 that a passion for righteousness that shall leave 
 you a believer in the essential righteousness of 
 the universe, although you may doubt every 
 proposition that has ever been proposed by the 
 Church of God. A passion for righteousness 
 Is the very essence of faith, — a faith that Is 
 represented In the Beatitude as " hunger and 
 thirst for righteousness." Fronting the cen- 
 tury of promise, and looking back over the cen- 
 tury that has been a century of emancipation, 
 
72 One World at a Time 
 
 not for the slave only, but for the human 
 mind — standing here and looking out upon the 
 new century, give the weight of your faith to 
 the idea of being faithful ; give the emphasis 
 of your mind to the Ultimate Reality that is in 
 the universe, and is the substance and sum of 
 its life ; give your love and labour to that, 
 and whenever the time shall come in which 
 you answer the roll-call, saying, " I am here," 
 you shall be able to look into the faces of 
 those that are about you unashamed, because 
 at least one thing in life you believed pro- 
 foundly and fully, and followed it to the end. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 FROM THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT 
 TO THE NICENE CREED 
 
 F 
 
 ROM the earliest apprehension of God as 
 actual to the final conclusion that " God 
 is All " the ascent of the mind is immense. It 
 constitutes the history of the soul's life. In the 
 passage from worship as fear to worship in love 
 one marks the development from polytheism 
 to monotheism. The Jews, a people of re- 
 ligious genius, accomplished this passage early, 
 and they maintain its conclusion still. The 
 Semite rises out of polytheism to the concep- 
 tion that God is One. The Aryan rises out 
 of a terrestrial polytheism to a polytheism no 
 less evident though celestial. To the Semite 
 one God is an intellectual certainty and a 
 moral inspiration. To the Aryan many gods 
 are a necessity and a hindrance to ethical 
 unity. The Jew, the finest product of the 
 Semitic stock, raises his hands in prayer and 
 utters his creed : " Hear, O Israel, the Lord 
 our God, the Lord is One." 
 
 73 
 
74 One World at a Time 
 
 The supreme flower of the Jewish genius 
 for reHgion was Jesus of Nazareth. He was a 
 Jew in body, in mind, and in motive; a Jew 
 after the pattern of those sturdy defenders of 
 splrituahty in reHgion, Amos, Micah, Joel, and 
 Isaiah ; a Jew appearing in a time of decay of 
 spiritual worship to declare that God is Spirit ; 
 a Jew surveying the formalism of his age to 
 declare that " the pure in heart shall see God " ; 
 a Jew renewing the ancient hope of God's 
 Kingdom and its Messiah, but declaring : "It 
 cometh not with outward show but is within 
 you " ; a Jew suspected of making Innovations 
 upon the ancient faith, but answering him who 
 asks for the " greatest of all commandments " 
 In the words he had repeated each day In the 
 worship of the synagogue In his native village, 
 " Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord 
 Is One. And thou shalt love the Lord thy 
 God with all thy heart, and with all thy mind, 
 and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength. 
 This Is the first and great commandment." 
 The second Is this, "Thou shalt love thy 
 neighbour as thyself." Jesus made the sayings 
 of the Jewish fathers the groundwork of his 
 teaching. The Sermon on the Mount and the 
 Lord's Prayer may be found substantially In 
 the aspirations of the devout prophets and 
 
God is One 75 
 
 psalmists of Israel. Jesus, like the other great 
 prophets of his race, arraigned the narrowness 
 of religious dogma, and tested it by the breadth 
 of religious need. He contradicted only to 
 enlarge. He made innovations only as the 
 pioneer fells a forest to plant a field. That 
 which does not seem Jewish in the words of 
 Jesus was the Jew fulfilled, enlarged, and 
 sublimated. 
 
 Christianity, then, was Jewish in origin and 
 essence. That it ceased to be Jewish in ex- 
 pression was the accident of history, not the 
 purpose of its founders. Jesus, Paul, and 
 Simon Peter, with all that noble company ac- 
 counted the apostles of the religion of Jesus, 
 when they were most emphatic for the uni- 
 versality of religion, spoke as Jews. The words 
 ascribed to the Master phrased the conviction 
 of the disciples, " Salvation is of the Jews." 
 It was well for Paul that he had been a dweller 
 in Tarsus, for he knew what it was to be a 
 Roman born and a Greek by association ; but 
 in religion he was so narrow a Jew that he 
 persecuted those who were disciples of the 
 larger Hebrew faith. When the struggle came 
 between the religion of Jesus, the Son of Man, 
 and the religion of the temple of the sons of 
 Israel it was Paul's declaration, " After the 
 
76 One World at a Time 
 
 manner which they call heresy, worship I the 
 God of my fathers." The test of orthodoxy 
 is thus declared to be spiritual communion. 
 This is the key-note of Christianity — that it 
 finds its ground of being" in God. It is Unit- 
 arian in its origin, since it is Jewish and there- 
 fore monotheistic ; it is a divine impulse from 
 the life of Jesus of Nazareth, the Hebrew, 
 which finds its source in God's unity, its ex- 
 pansion in man's brotherhood, its inspiration 
 in man's relation to God the Father, and its 
 mission in revealing the Father to His children 
 who " ignorantly worship " him. The Greek 
 Aryan, with his "gods many and lords many," 
 was to find in the unity of God the ultimate 
 fact of his philosophy and the justification of 
 his ethics. The conversion of the world to 
 Christ was an effort to reduce the confusion 
 of the Aryan Pantheon to unity of worship 
 in the religion of Jesus, the Semite. The 
 Scriptures of the new faith were Jewish, every 
 line. The teachers of the faith were at first 
 Jewish, every one. The philosophy of life, at 
 once simple and strong, was the conception 
 of a Galilean. Essential Christianity is essen- 
 tially Jewish ; therefore, essential Christianity 
 is Unitarian. 
 
 The history of the Unitarian idea, from the 
 
God is One 11 
 
 Sermon on the Mount to the Nicene Creed, 
 can be traced here only in outHne. We must 
 throughout remember that the absorbing zeal 
 of a true Hebrew gave it birth that the uni- 
 versalism of Paul the Hebrew set it free ; that 
 the hope of the coming Messiah held it to- 
 gether and the Unity of God and the Brother- 
 hood of Man afforded it motive for worship 
 and communion. Let us pass in brief review 
 the processes which confused its simplicity, 
 and substituted at length, in the fourth cent- 
 ury, a metaphysical speculation for the re- 
 ligion of Jesus, and thus introduced the great 
 Apostasy. 
 
 The first break away from Jewish origins 
 which appears (in the Book of Acts) is the 
 appointment of the seven deacons " to serve 
 tables." All the names are Hellenic. We 
 must take account of the classes first affected 
 by the new movement. There were the Jews 
 by birth and religion, who were Palestinian 
 as to residence and Aramaic in language ; 
 or Alexandrian as to residence and Greek in 
 language. There were those who were Greeks 
 by birth and Jews in religion, — "proselytes 
 of righteousness." In the third place come 
 those who were Greeks by birth and re- 
 ligion, — converts from paganism to the new 
 
78 One World at a Time 
 
 faith. Here is the material for the contro- 
 versy which appears in the Book of Acts 
 of the Apostles and in the Epistle to the 
 Galatians as a conflict between the believers 
 in Paul's gospel and the Jerusalem-party — 
 those who insisted upon the universality of 
 religion and those who admitted that it might 
 become universal but must be Jewish first. 
 The struggle was maintained until the de- 
 struction of the centre of worship at Jeru- 
 salem made all authority turn upon ideas, 
 unsupported by appeal to holy places and 
 their associations. But the contention still 
 survived in the Judaic sects, not so much 
 heretical as narrow, " who still sought to 
 particularise and contract Christianity, as 
 Gnosticism enlarged it to vagueness," Several 
 well-defined claims were now put forth, all 
 Jewish in origin. Of the most important, 
 the Messiahship of Jesus, Baur well says : 
 
 " Had not the Messianic idea — the idea in which Jew- 
 ish national hopes had their profoundest expression — 
 fixed itself on the person of Jesus and caused him to 
 be regarded as the Messiah who had come for the 
 redemption of his people, and in whom the promise 
 of the fathers was fulfilled, the belief in him could 
 never have had a power of such far-reaching influence 
 in history. It was in the Messianic idea that the 
 
God is One 79 
 
 spiritual contents of Christianity were clothed with 
 the concrete form in which it could enter on the path 
 of historical development. The consciousness of Jesus 
 was thus taken up by the national consciousness and 
 enabled to spread and become the general conscious- 
 ness of the world," 
 
 If it be asked how could such a hope, local 
 and national to the Jew, be transferred to 
 Greek minds, we are reminded of several well- 
 established facts, (i) The great body of Ro- 
 mans and Greeks converted to Judaism in the 
 century preceding our era had given Judaism 
 a singular and significant place in the Roman 
 Empire. It was a religion allowed and set 
 apart, literally assigned the place it claimed ; 
 whatever enthusiasm stirred its heart would 
 make its pulsation felt throughout the Roman 
 world. In the first century of our era Alex- 
 andria, Rome, and other great metropolitan 
 centres were as Jewish as New York is to- 
 day. (2) Ethically disquieted, the Roman 
 world looked with hope for a deliverance 
 answering to human need, correlative to the 
 national hope of the Jew, to whom all ques- 
 tions were centred in religion ; the human- 
 ity of the Greek, which found expression in 
 philosophy and art, in the Jew blossomed into 
 psalm and prophetic writing. " Great hopes 
 
8o One World at a Time 
 
 are for great souls." This was a people 
 chosen from above for the purposes of God, 
 because moved from within for the uses of 
 religion according to a genius which was in 
 its inception Jewish, but has been found in 
 its expansion simply human. (3) To any 
 who might inquire what had become of the 
 " Messlanlc-hope " the answer was always 
 ready, that It had been pushed forward to 
 the " second advent." The chief inspiration 
 of Jew, Hellene, and Roman convert now 
 became an ardent hope for the reappearing 
 of Christ In the clouds of heaven to Introduce 
 a millennial reign. Already the wholesome 
 conceptions, of the Jewish king who should 
 rule In righteousness, of the chosen people 
 who should constitute Messiah in a corporate 
 Israel, and of the great Deliverer of those 
 who would live in the Spirit, had taken on 
 world-large proportions and in one of the 
 earliest of the Christian documents find such 
 expression as this : 
 
 " Then cometh the end, when he shall deliver up the 
 kingdom unto God, even the Father ; when he shall 
 have abolished all rule and all authority and power. 
 For he must reign, till he hath put all his enemies under 
 his feet ; the last enemy that shall be abolished is 
 death. And when all things have been subjected unto 
 
God is One 8i 
 
 him, then shall the Son also himself be subjected to 
 Him that did put all things under him, that God may 
 be all in all " (i Cor. xv. 24-28). 
 
 In many forms these words of Paul are re- 
 peated for three hundred years ; they are the 
 Messianic hope of the Jew taking shape as 
 the universal hope of the Church. 
 
 In view of this second advent, the Parousta, 
 martyrdom became a virtue, marriage an in- 
 convenience, and personal possessions a hind- 
 rance. But however the Messianic idea may 
 change, there has been no change in the mono- 
 theism of the religion of Jesus. The Jew had 
 never declared that the Messiah would be God. 
 Between Jehovah and Messiah there was all 
 the distance between the Ineffable and Un- 
 approachable and the king of Israel whom 
 He ordained for righteous rule ; the Messiah 
 was never to be an object of worship, or in 
 any sense supernatural. Those who fixed 
 their eyes upon the clouds, looking for the 
 second advent, in ascribing a nature not sim- 
 ply human to Christ in no way exalted him 
 to the place of God ; the subordination of the 
 Son to the Father survives, as crucial and 
 invariable beneath all efforts to phrase his 
 nature and define his being. However large 
 his figure grows ; however insufficient his 
 
82 One World at a Time 
 
 earthly parentage appears ; however necessary 
 to the imagination his miraculous birth seems 
 to be to account for his power and character ; 
 however the pendulum of faith swings from 
 the belief in the reality of his humanity to the 
 belief in that humanity as the mere phantom 
 and apparition in which the Father appears to 
 suffer, no Father of the Church for three hun- 
 dred years lost sight of the distinction be- 
 tween absolute Deity and its representation 
 in the terms of human life ; always the Son 
 is sicbject to the Father. The monotheism 
 survives strongly in all the deliverances con- 
 cerning the Being of God. The Synod of An- 
 tioch rejects and condemns the term 6/aoouo-ios 
 (consubstantial) as used by Paul of Samosata 
 to indicate the identity of substance between 
 the Father and the Son ; and though, in the 
 next century, the Council of Nicaea returned 
 to it as the test of orthodoxy, it left its testi- 
 mony to the subordination of Christ to God in 
 the Nicene Creed in the terms, " Very God 
 out of very God." 
 
 If we turn to the Shepherd of Hernias 
 we find such statements as this : " First of all, 
 believe that there is one God, who created 
 and formed all things out of nothing. He 
 comprehends all and is alone not to be 
 
God is One 83 
 
 comprehended (limited by definition), who can- 
 not be defined in words, nor conceived by the 
 mind." This is a favourite passage with Iren- 
 seus, as we might expect, with Origen in the 
 third century, and in the fourth century with 
 Athanasius, to whom has been ascribed a doc- 
 trine of a Trinity of which he never dreamed. 
 
 This, then, is clear, through all intricacies 
 of doctrine, that the absolute Being of God re- 
 mains untouched by the growing claims of 
 Christ. If the cause of this be sought, it is to 
 be found in the unmistakable Jewish enthus- 
 iasm for the Eternal which penetrates the ex- 
 pressions looking to subordination of the Son. 
 
 To Clement of Rome, " Christ Is sent forth 
 from God and the Apostles are from Christ ; 
 both came of the Will of God in the ap- 
 pointed order." So In ''the Teaching of the 
 Twelve^' God Is " the Almighty Maker," and 
 Jesus "his servant." Clement's Epistle to the 
 Corinthians bears rich testimony to the Script- 
 ures of the Old Testament and quotes the 
 precepts of the New. He proves the resur- 
 rection, not by referring Deity to Christ, but 
 by the analogy of the Phoenix, as Herodotus 
 and Pliny tell the tale of Its return from 
 death. 
 
 Polycarp, to whom we owe, according to 
 
84 One World at a Time 
 
 Harnack, " an instance singular in history of 
 a chain of unbroken tradition," is saturated 
 with the New Testament spirit in his letter to 
 the Philippians. It would seem an echo of 
 Paul, when we read Polycarp's blessing of the 
 Church : " God and Father of our Lord Jesus 
 Christ, and he himself who is an everlasting 
 High Priest, the Son of God, even Jesus 
 Christ, build you up in faith and truth." 
 
 In the Gospels and the Epistles, the strong 
 monotheistic tone of all the utterances is to 
 be noted ; even in the Apocryphal documents, 
 and especially in the Fathers of the second 
 century, we get the same insistence upon the 
 absolute Being of God. How this was pene- 
 trated by the suggestions which later de- 
 veloped into a vague tritheism we will notice 
 later on. 
 
 If we turn to the Teaching of the Twelve 
 a late-discovered second-century document, or 
 even to the catechetical instruction in the 
 Alexandrian churches, we have the clearest 
 proof that the magnifying of Jesus Christ has 
 in no way obscured the supreme object of 
 worship. I quote from the instructions of the 
 Alexandrian catechumens : " I believe in one 
 true God, the Father Almighty, and in His only 
 Son our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, and 
 
God is One 85 
 
 in the Holy Spirit who giveth life." At the 
 close of the third century, this doctrine of 
 "subordination" holds its place, though much 
 overlaid by later thought : 
 
 " I pledge myself to Christ and I am baptised in the 
 faith of the one Supreme Uncreated God, in Jesus 
 Christ, by whom the universe was created and formed, 
 and from whom all things proceed. I believe in the 
 Lord Jesus, His only Son, the first born of all creation, 
 begotten before the ages by the good pleasure of the 
 Father, not created, by whom all things in heaven and 
 earth were made, visible and invisible. In the last 
 times he descended from heaven and took upon him 
 our flesh. He was born of the Virgin Mary. He lived 
 holily and blamelessly in the world, walking in all the 
 commandments of his God and Father" 
 
 The earliest Christian Inscription of any 
 length which we have is the epitaph upon the 
 tomb of Abercius, Bishop of HIeropolis, dis- 
 covered by Mr. Ramsay in 1882. It Is signi- 
 ficant as a survival of the faith of the second 
 century near Its close : 
 
 " I, the citizen of a chosen city, made this in my life- 
 time, that in due season I may have a resting place for 
 my body. Abercius by name, I am a disciple of the 
 pure shepherd who feeds his herds of sheep on the mount- 
 ains and plains, who has great eyes that look on all 
 sides ; for he taught me faithful writings, who sent me 
 to royal Rome to see it, and to see a golden-robed, gold- 
 en-sandalled Queen, and there, too, I saw a ])eople that 
 
86 One World at a Time 
 
 has the bright seal. And I saw the plain of Syria and 
 all the cities, even Nisbis, crossing the Euphrates, and 
 everywhere I had companions. With Paul I followed 
 and Faith led me everywhere, and everywhere served up 
 to me for food a fish [the cryptogram for Christ] from 
 the fountain, very large, pure, which a pure Virgin 
 grasped, and she [Faith] gave this to friends to eat con- 
 tinually, having excellent wine, giving the mixed wine 
 with bread. These words, standing by, I, Abercius, bade 
 to be thus inscribed. I was truly living my seventy- 
 second year. Let every fellow-Christian who reads this 
 pray for me." 
 
 This is not simply curious, coming so late 
 in the nineteenth century from the close of the 
 second century, but it is instructive also as 
 showing how simple were the phrases in which 
 Christ, the Church, baptism, and the Lord's 
 Supper were conveyed. It is the undogmatic 
 age to which belong the last of the Apostolic 
 Fathers and the Confessors. It is the century 
 of Ignatius, Justin Martyr, and Irenseus. It is 
 not yet conscious that the Good Shepherd has 
 " two natures " or is God, or that the simple 
 Christian meal is a mystic sacrifice. The dox- 
 ology of Flavian of Antioch had not yet been 
 heard in any church. Men did not yet " shout 
 forth Glory be to the Father and to the Son 
 and to the Holy Spirit." This, according to 
 Philostorgius, was new to the Church, which 
 
God is One 87 
 
 before that time had used the form, " Glory 
 be to the Father through the Son in the Holy 
 Spirit. Though some also said, ' Glory be to 
 the Father in the Son and in the Holy Spirit.' " 
 The Church was still dependent upon "the 
 heart, which believeth unto righteousness," 
 rather than upon nice distinctions of the spec- 
 ulative intellect. 
 
 But already, in the Christian "gnosis" of the 
 second century, a process was at work that was 
 to prepare a soil congenial to the tangled crop 
 of dogma which would cover the third century 
 with its rank growth. The Gnostics, whom 
 the Church repudiated, had infected the Church 
 itself with their methods, though in the school 
 of Philo, and in the Rabbinical science of num- 
 bers, a strong tendency had prepared for the 
 change. We find the Old Testament searched 
 for allusions to the growing Christology of the 
 Church. Wherever " Wisdom " is spoken of, 
 it is the Logos doctrine of the New Era ap- 
 pearing in the ancient writings. Wherever it 
 is possible to find a reference to "wood," it 
 prefigures the cross ; the " stone " is Christ 
 himself ; the pastoral psalms are full of the 
 Good Shepherd, and the sorrows of Messiah 
 are located in Gethsemane and on Calvary. 
 The Eternal Reason, which the Hebrew makes 
 
88 One World at a Time 
 
 to dwell always where the Eternal One is, 
 teaches the pre-existence of Christ. To our 
 age many of these constructions are not only 
 false in exegesis and far-fetched in meaning, 
 they are also known to be false readings of the 
 Septuagint Scripture by Greeks ignorant of 
 Hebrew. 
 
 The text of an ancient writing begins to 
 claim the first place in the attention of the 
 Fathers of the Church ; and those who depend 
 upon the Old Testament, repudiating the 
 pagan writings, match in ingenuity of inter- 
 pretation those who quote Homer, Plato, and 
 Hesiod, as did Justin, and, later, Origen. The 
 second century is preparing its doctrine of In- 
 spiration, which will grow narrower and nar- 
 rower, until the fourth century shall declare 
 the sublimest utterances of antiquity " a doc- 
 trine of devils" unless they arose in the He- 
 brew mind. 
 
 The strong anti-Jewish temper of the Church 
 in the second and third centuries, which re- 
 pudiated the Nazarenes, the Ebionites, and all 
 the Judaic survivals of the simple religion of 
 Jesus, was guilty of that strange inconsistency 
 which the Church still perpetuates, of despis- 
 ing the very sources of the Scriptures upon 
 which it hangs in helpless servility. The 
 
God is One 89 
 
 Hebrew genius for religion produced for these 
 early centuries the Word of God, and enriched 
 the nations to whom, on their own theory of 
 Revelation, God had never spoken. 
 
 The essential and absolute being of God 
 became more and more difficult of apprehen- 
 sion. An instrument of creation was de- 
 manded by the popular imagination. Already 
 in Egypt the material for this idea was ready 
 to hand ; the Greek Cosmogony supplied its 
 share ; and the Demiurge of the Gnostics and 
 the LoQfos of the Orthodox contended for the 
 mastery ; often there was but little to choose 
 between the one and the other theory as it 
 was worked out by its partisans. This creat- 
 ive agent is not one and the same at all 
 times ; sometimes it is the Son, sometimes 
 Wisdom, sometimes the Holy Spirit. So late 
 as the time of Gregory Nazianzen, a.d. 390, 
 we find diversity of view concerning the Holy 
 Spirit. He says : ** Some of our theologians 
 regard the Spirit as a mode of the Divine 
 operation ; others as a creation of God ; others 
 as God Himself ; others again say they know 
 not which of these opinions to accept, from 
 their reverence for Holy Scripture, which says 
 nothing about it." 
 
 These later speculations did not belong to 
 
90 One World at a Time 
 
 the Apostolic Fathers. The ApostoHc Age 
 set itself just two problems and no more : it 
 was intent upon purifying society ; and it was 
 intent, as a means to this end, on proclaiming 
 the Supreme God as the object of worship, 
 revealed in his servant Jesus so clearly as to 
 make him seem the Son of God, " only begot- 
 ten." Vice and polytheism found their an- 
 tagonists in a faith which proclaimed, " Hear, 
 O Israel, the Lord the Eternal, the Eternal is 
 One," and then summoned to that purity of 
 heart which was to be the preparation to see 
 God. This, and no more, was the essential 
 message of Jesus Christ to the age called 
 apostolic, as they understood it ; the adjust- 
 ment of human relations upon the terms of a 
 Love which in God is Fatherhood, and in 
 man is brotherhood. It was not an age of 
 dogma. They were to "do God's will " as a 
 means of knowing any teaching to be author- 
 itative. There was no consensus of opinion. 
 There was the freest and most inexact recital 
 of the incidents of the life of their Master. 
 They were not yet so far separated from their 
 Jewish beginnings as to excite recognition as 
 a new religious cult. The Christian guild, as 
 a Jewish organisation, was tolerated long after 
 Greek and Roman guilds had been prohibited. 
 
God is One 91 
 
 When we pass to the Martyr Age we find 
 that we have not yet reached the age of 
 dogma. Still it is believed that the sanctity 
 of high courage and consistent purpose takes 
 precedence of the " form of sound words." 
 The martyrs did not die to vindicate a body 
 of doctrine ; they were sacrificed sometimes at 
 the instigation of personal hatred and private 
 spite, sometimes through suspicion of their 
 secret assemblies, which in the case of the 
 Roman and Greek guilds had been forbidden 
 by law. Sometimes the enthusiasm for death 
 made them rush upon martyrdom, goading to 
 violence a orovernment unwillinor to sacrifice 
 its subjects. Sometimes the necessity of pro- 
 viding" actors in the orladiatorial shows and 
 cruel sports of the amphitheatre made a levy 
 upon the ** suspects " a convenient resource. 
 Sometimes the government referred to these 
 proscribed ones the pestilence or famine for 
 which a superstitious age could not account 
 by natural causes. Some are surprised that 
 the best emperors were the keenest persecut- 
 ors ; but the Roman idea of the State made 
 it inseparable from religion ; disloyalty was 
 atheism, and the feeling as to any independ- 
 ent organisation within the State is reflected 
 in the saying of Marcus Aurelius : " What is 
 
92 One World at a Time 
 
 not useful to the swarm is not useful to the 
 bee ! " 
 
 From whatever motive, when Carthage, 
 Smyrna, Antioch, Rome, or the churches of 
 Gaul furnished " confessors " to death, none 
 of them died who were willing to curse Christ 
 or sacrifice to the image of the Emperor. 
 Such a sacrifice was never interpreted as a 
 disbelief in the ultimate Deity to whom Christ- 
 ian and Roman referred religion in its last 
 analysis. There was no examination in the 
 terms of theology which a later age vainly 
 sought to identify with Christian faith. The 
 martyrs of the second century would have 
 died as readily upon the demand to believe in 
 a Trinity as they would upon the demand to 
 believe in the Pantheon of Roman divinities. 
 The Emperor was to them a man to be argued 
 with, as the Apologies of Justin, Tatian, and 
 Origen show ; worship of him was forbidden 
 by their belief in the Eternal One and their 
 adoration of the purity of His Son, Jesus 
 Christ. This age of the martyrs speaks in 
 the words of Ignatius of Antioch, 115 a.d. ; 
 he beseeches his friends at Rome not to in- 
 terfere, by petitions for his release : 
 
 " I am fearful of your love lest it injure me. For you 
 it is easy to do whatsoever you please, but for me it is 
 
God is One 93 
 
 difficult that I should attain God if indeed you do not 
 spare me. For I shall not have such an opportunity to 
 attain God ; nor will ye, if ye now be silent, ever have 
 the benefit of a better work. If ye keep silence about 
 me I shall become God's speech, but if ye love my body 
 I shall be again an echo of myself. It is well that I set 
 from the world to God, that I may rise with Him. I am 
 God's wheat, and by the teeth of the beasts am I ground, 
 that I may become God's pure bread." 
 
 The passage from the fathers of the faith to 
 the Fathers of theology is made by Justin Mar- 
 tyr (a.d. 163), naturally, for he was a student 
 of philosophy, and a Greek, though born in 
 Samaria. Henceforward religion will express 
 itself in the terms of philosophy, borrowed 
 from Greek, Roman, and Oriental sources. 
 Even its martyrs will make their Confession 
 in philosophical terms ; and emperors will 
 eventually cast in their lot with one party or 
 the other in the debate of the schools. The 
 strenuous faith of early Christianity will soon 
 be overcome by the strident declamation of 
 controversy. 
 
 The very protests of the so-called heretics 
 are as instructive as the trend of authority 
 against which the protests were made. Marcion 
 (a.d. 130-180) leads a revolt from philosophy 
 in favor of a religion of the New Testament. 
 He is so persuaded of the benignity of the 
 
94 One World at a Time 
 
 Father as Jesus taught of Him, that he cannot 
 identify Him with the Jehovah of the Old 
 Testament. Jehovah may be a God for the 
 Jews, but he is not the Father of Jesus. The 
 Jew's God was, perhaps, a just God, but the 
 God of Jesus was love. The passage to dual- 
 ism is easy. The supposition of subordinate 
 gods to account for evil is natural. The 
 charge of Gnosticism was early made against 
 Marcion ; Marcion and Basilides were certainly 
 the best of the Gnostics. The cardinal points 
 of Marcion's system are these : (i) The Su- 
 preme God, who is absolutely good, cannot 
 possibly enter into any union with matter ; the 
 material world cannot, therefore, have been 
 created by God, but it is the work of an infe- 
 rior being, who is ever in conflict with matter 
 but cannot overcome it. (2) The Supreme 
 God has once, and once only, revealed Himself, 
 in Christ ; Christ and Christ's religion are 
 therefore, for man, the only possible manifest- 
 ation of the absolute good. (3) Absolute 
 goodness consists in love and love only. Just- 
 ice, or the retributive principle, is in its nature 
 opposed to love, and therefore cannot be 
 affirmed of the Supreme God. 
 
 Marcion's disciple, Hermogenes, attempted a 
 solution no more logical but more poetic : 
 
God is One 95 
 
 the Eternal One attracts out of chaos order 
 and Hfe as by a creative attraction analogous 
 to that of beauty upon the mind of man, or, as 
 Aristotle says, " He influences it as the be- 
 loved object influences the lover." Creation 
 is progressive from eternity ; matter eternally 
 opposes, and is eternally attracted into, form 
 and life ; moral evil occurs when this attrac- 
 tion is successfully resisted. Irenaeus and 
 TertulHan opposed to this the orthodox no- 
 tion that God created all things out of no- 
 thing ; this may still be good doctrine for the 
 unscientific, but it has been repudiated by all 
 students of cosmogony. 
 
 The essential heresy of Marcion, Basilides, 
 Valentinus, and all the Gnostics lay in their 
 denial of the Unity of God. They were not 
 arrayed against the claims of the Trinity, for 
 such a doctrine had not been even remotely 
 foreshadowed in their days. The eternity of 
 matter, the creation of the world by Inferior 
 powers, and the two-God theory horrified 
 Irenseus as later they did Orlgen and Tertul- 
 Han ; the letter of Irenseus to his old fellow- 
 pupil Florlnus, who had embraced the teachings 
 of Valentinus, Is an effort to reclaim him to a 
 belief In the Unity of God. The opponents 
 of Gnosticism felt a greater solicitude because 
 
g6 One World at a Time 
 
 they foresaw that, despite the noble lives of its 
 first exponents, there would logically attend 
 upon Gnosticism the same degradation which 
 had debased both Stoicism and Epicureanism. 
 Their opposition was justified by the result as 
 shown in the Cainites and other sects, who 
 claimed that the best way to resist the assaults 
 of evil was to yield to its immoralities as of 
 no account to the spirit and unworthy of at- 
 tention, being only in the flesh. The gross- 
 ness of life which resulted proved that with 
 the common people the ethical tendency of 
 Gnosticism could be only evil. It is therefore 
 an error to suppose that the enthusiasm of 
 Irenaeus, Origen, Hippolytus, and Tertullian 
 was because they were lacking in regard to 
 God's Unity. It was the very reverse of this 
 which gave power to their assault upon 
 Gnosticism. 
 
 Still another class of heretical opposition is 
 represented in that vindication of the liberty 
 of prophesying which takes the name of Mon- 
 tanism. Montanus, Prisca, and Maximilla, the 
 founders of a Society of Friends during the 
 reign of Marcus Aurelius, were perhaps in- 
 cited to a philosophy of salvation, a study of 
 the life of the soul, by the example of the 
 Stoic Emperor, or goaded to it by the growing 
 
God is One 97 
 
 licentiousness of a court over which a philo- 
 sopher reigned, but which a profligate woman 
 and her son Commodus actually ruled. Le- 
 galism was strangely united to liberty in the 
 teaching and practice of Montanism. Fast- 
 ing and asceticism commended the heresy to 
 the fiery soul of Tertullian. He declaimed 
 against its frenzied prophesying until he was 
 himself in an ecstasy of passion in which he 
 passed to adhesion to the sect (a.d. 202) which 
 fulminated from Carthage its anathemas 
 against the license of Rome. The heretic was 
 more orthodox than the Church in behaviour, 
 and, with a strange mingling of doctrinal ex- 
 actness and personal self-denial, held aloof from 
 the communion of Christianity as breeding 
 a schism, only to form a sect still narrower, 
 which, living through the third century as " Ter- 
 tullianists," made prophecy ridiculous and 
 asceticism contemptible. 
 
 The church in the West, under Tertullian's 
 lead, was governed by a spirit entirely foreign 
 to the liberality of Jesus and Paul in life and 
 teaching. It did not maintain in any just de- 
 gree the feeling of Justin, Clement of Alex- 
 andria, and Origen that God had spoken by 
 other lips than those of Jews. " There is one 
 River of Truth, but many streams fall into it on 
 
98 One World at a Time 
 
 this side and that," said Clement. Truth is 
 one, but its aspects are various : " A drachma 
 is one and the same ; but if you give it to 
 a ship-captain, it is called a ' fare,' if to a re- 
 venue officer it is called a ' tax,' if to a landlord 
 ' rent,' if to a schoolmaster a ' fee,' if to a shop- 
 keeper a 'price.' Still in each case it is the 
 drachma." Clement's generous attitude was 
 like that of Irenseus, whose mission from the 
 churches of Gaul to Victor of Rome pleaded 
 for moderation toward Montanism, since it 
 held strongly the doctrine of the Word, of the 
 Holy Spirit, and the liberty of the soul to know 
 the will of God. Clement declared that " the 
 cure for error is more knowledge." Such was 
 not the attitude of Tertullian and Tatian ; 
 these masters of abuse were most orthodox in 
 declaring all philosophy " a doctrine of devils." 
 Their motto was, " Only believe," a motto en- 
 forced by a picturesque blasphemy against 
 human error, which left nothing to be supplied 
 by a later age In Its trials for heresy. 
 
 Tertullian, Indeed, speculated upon the 
 orlorlnal riofhteousness of man, fulfilled In the 
 Ideal humanity of Christ ; but his fine phrase, 
 " Man first, then God," was so twisted by his 
 bias against his opponents that he never rises 
 to an "enthusiasm of humanity." He was 
 
God is One 99 
 
 tenacious of a Trinity, and for this reason he 
 crept back into the Roman calendar of saints 
 with all his sins of unholy speech and vicious 
 temper full upon him ; but his Trinity was 
 neither logical according to later standards, 
 nor scriptural according to earlier standards. 
 He wrote and spoke with unremitting vehe- 
 mence. His "testimony of the soul" makes 
 the claim for Christianity that it is grounded 
 in the nature of man and meets his deepest 
 needs. But he is more interested in thing's 
 against which his own soul may testify, — 
 "against the Greeks," "against the Jews," 
 "against Hermogenes," who claimed that matter 
 was eternal, " against the Gnostic Valentinus," 
 " against all heretics," denying them any claim 
 to tolerance, "against Marcion," "against 
 Praxeas," who seemed to imply that God suf- 
 fered in the flesh of Christ and whom he 
 taunted with " crucifying the Father." There 
 was much, besides, on which Tertullian had an 
 opinion : he wrote on baptism, on the flesh of 
 Christ, on the resurrection of the body, on 
 penance, prayer, and patience. He wrote an 
 address to the martyrs ; he unreservedly con- 
 demned the shows of the theatre ; he fixed the 
 place of idolatry in the calendar of hate. He 
 was wise about the dress of women. He gave 
 
loo One World at a Time 
 
 final judgment as to veils or no veils for un- 
 married women. He opposed second marriage, 
 and rather deprecated any marriage at all. 
 His asceticism gave weight to fasting ; he ar- 
 gued the right and wrong of military service ; 
 he defended a Christian soldier who refused to 
 wear a wreath in one of the festivals of Severus ; 
 he discussed the question whether in perse- 
 cution one might avoid his doom by flight. 
 Thus did he know and say much about many 
 things ; for most that he said the Church cares 
 but little now, but it turns to his doctrine of 
 the Nature of God and declares him a Father of 
 the Faith on the only subject upon which he 
 could knozu absolutely nothing. He was a man 
 of credulity and yet of spiritual insight ; he 
 could say, " We believe, because it is impos- 
 sible " ; but he could also say " The soul divines 
 what is divine." Such a man, with his barbar- 
 ous African Latin and his Latinised Greek, is 
 vehement for the Trinity, but it is a trinity of 
 his own making ; it is neither that of Sabellius, 
 revived in the nineteenth century by Bushnell 
 and borrowed by his later imitators, nor that 
 of Hegel, who is now the consolation of the 
 " Broad Church." Even to Tertullian the 
 subordination of Christ leaves God supreme : 
 " Christ is God's ray, as the rays shine forth 
 
God is One lor 
 
 from the sun in the heaven ; as I call the ray 
 sun but not the sun ray ; so I call the Son God, 
 but not God the Son." He speaks the lan- 
 guage of simple religion when he appeals to 
 the soul itself as the witness to Christian faith : 
 " I summon thee, not such as when, formed in 
 the schools, exercised in libraries, nourished in 
 the Academies and Porches of Athens, thou 
 utterest crude wisdom. I address thee as 
 simple and rude, unpolished and unlearned, 
 such as they have thee, who have only thee ; 
 the very and entire thing that thou art in the 
 road and in the weaver's factory." 
 
 The student of the second and third centu- 
 ries, following the lead of most modern writers, 
 will come upon a group of names classed in a 
 loose way as " the first Unitarians." We have 
 already claimed as the first Unitarians the Jews, 
 to whom Jesus, himself a Jew, spoke of the 
 Fatherhood of God ; the first Unitarian re- 
 cords are the Scriptures of the Old Testament, 
 to the reading- of which the chief Church 
 Fathers and champions of Christian doctrine 
 declare their conversion from paganism was 
 due. Such is the testimony of Justin Martyr, 
 Origen, and Athenagoras. 
 
 By "the first Unitarians," however, most 
 Trinitarian writers mean quite another matter. 
 
I02 One World at a Time 
 
 They have forgotten the Jewish origins of 
 Christianity. They have lost sight of the 
 facts that its earliest converts from paganism 
 came through Jewish channels, and that from 
 the Jew Philo and his compatriots in Alexan- 
 dria Neo-Judaism, Neo-Platonism and Christ- 
 ianity have all drawn their stock theories for 
 the Lopfos-doctrine, without which it is doubt- 
 ful if the Christian Church would have lapsed 
 into the Trinitarian belief, or returned to ex- 
 press its theology in terms of a pagan myth- 
 ology and its faith in the symbols of the 
 same mythology, or to be glad with a sacred 
 joy as it celebrates the old pagan festivals 
 put to new and strange uses. 
 
 With serene oblivion of such facts, certain 
 names are pilloried as Unitarians and con- 
 demned. They are the group who, without 
 perfect logic, but with a certain instinct for 
 the facts of early Christianity, sought to re- 
 vive the old doctrine of the Unity of God, 
 unconfused by the newer doctrine of the 
 Looros in its manifold varieties of statement. 
 They are defenders of the primitive faith, not 
 seceders from the orthodox teaching. Who 
 are these men ? Many of them are known 
 to us only by name. Some who early saw 
 the inconsistency between the history of Jesus 
 
God is One 103 
 
 in the fourth Gospel and that given in the 
 Synoptics, the contradiction between the intro- 
 duction to John's Gospel and the birth stories 
 of the Synoptics Matthew and Luke, were 
 stigmatised as Alogians, " Deniers of the 
 Word." Others made a feeble attempt at 
 New Testament criticism and held that we 
 have a record of little more than a single year 
 of the ministry of Jesus ; still others, with 
 quite excusable rationalism, said of the Apoc- 
 alypse, "Of what use is it all?" In this 
 group must be placed Theodotus of Rome 
 and that other Theodotus who came to Rome 
 from Bysance ; their disciples we know as 
 Asclepiades, Hermophiles, and Apollonides. 
 
 But attention is chiefly riveted by the bril- 
 liant career and acute intellectual gymnastic 
 of Zenobia's officer, Paul of Samosata, Bishop 
 of Antioch, a.d. 260-270. His doctrine was 
 much hurt by his vanity ; yet the record of this 
 must be not too credulously received. For 
 the most part he and all others whom the 
 councils of the fourth century condemned 
 are known to us, like Celsus, that early scien- 
 tific and speculative genius, only from the 
 statements of those who have left us the 
 condemnation of their heresies. They all 
 knew " the gentle art of making enemies " ; 
 
I04 One World at a Time 
 
 and the enemies wrote their histories. Paul 
 of Samosata may well stand for all the rest. 
 His views are thus summed up by Pres- 
 sense, a Trinitarian writer : 
 
 " The Bishop of Antioch carried out the principles 
 of Theodotus and Artemon (monarchianism) to their 
 extreme consequences. He lowered the dignity of 
 Christ so far as to liken him to a mere man. Denying 
 his pre-existence, he admitted no distinction of persons 
 in the Godhead. The Logos was for him simply the 
 consciousness which God has of Himself, not a separate 
 Person but the simple consciousness of His own person- 
 ality. In this sense man is the image of God, but he 
 can never attain to essence with the Divine Being, not 
 even by Jesus Christ. There was a positive action of 
 the Word upon the man Jesus. The Spirit of God 
 had descended upon him, but this action was merely 
 an influence and did not imply unity of essence. Jesus 
 was indeed born of a virgin, but he was none the less 
 in his nature a man like other men, with this difference, 
 that he realised holiness and thus merited the grace of 
 God in extraordinary measure. The Divine Logos ani- 
 mated him by inspiration, but was not incarnate in him. 
 ' Wisdom,' said Paul of Samosata, ' did not enter into 
 substantial union with human nature.' Thus the dif- 
 ference between Jesus Christ and other men is relative 
 only. Wisdom simply dwelt in him in an exceptional 
 manner, and it was by the measure of this Divine 
 communication alone that he was raised above our- 
 selves. How, indeed, can it be maintained that Jesus 
 is the Son of God ? Is not that name already given 
 to the Eternal Wisdom ? It would follow that there 
 
God is One 105 
 
 must be two Sons of God, in the absolute sense, which 
 is impossible. Jesus was not, therefore, the Son of 
 God when he was born of the virgin, but acquired that 
 high dignity by virtue of his holiness. The Word 
 was greater than Jesus, but Jesus was exalted by Wis- 
 dom. ' There was no other mode of union between 
 various natures and various persons except that which 
 proceeds from the will, remaining pure from sin. Christ 
 enjoyed union with God, and this oneness of the will 
 in love is far higher than mere unity of nature. Jesus 
 is the ideal man who flashes before our eyes the purest 
 rays of Divine wisdom.' " 
 
 With this utterance of the third century 
 compare the words of James Martineau, pre- 
 eminently the prophet of the Unitarian faith of 
 to-day : 
 
 " When it is said, of this personal appearance of divine 
 qualities of mind on the theatre and under the con- 
 ditions of human life, that the 'Word ' itself was ' made 
 flesh and dwelt among us,' the phrase simply affirms that 
 these qualities are not mere earth-born and animal phe- 
 nomena, but are really the living word of a heavenly 
 sphere, and speak of God. This is no more ' a figure 
 of speech ' than the plainest sentence we can frame re- 
 specting things transcendent. I know not whether 
 others can draw a sharp line of separation between the 
 human spirit and the divine, and can clearly say where 
 their own soul ends and God's communion begins. 
 But for myself, with closest thought, I confess my dark- 
 ness ; and can only say that somehow He stirs among 
 our higher affections and mingles with the action of our 
 
io6 One World at a Time 
 
 proper nature. If in Christ this divine margin was not 
 simply broader than elsewhere, but spread until it cov- 
 ered the whole soul, and brought the human into moral 
 coalescence with the divine, then was God not merely 
 represented by a foreign and resembling being, but per- 
 sonally there, giving expression to His spiritual nature, as 
 in the visible universe to His causal power." 
 
 This comparison of utterances sixteen hundred 
 years apart gives to the Unitarianism of Paul 
 of Samosata no mean distinction. 
 
 We find the same insistence upon moral 
 union with God in Artemon and in Beryllus, 
 Bishop of Bostra. We are inclined to suspect 
 there was good foundation for the statement 
 of Artemon that this view was the faith of all 
 the bishops of Rome to the time of Victor, the 
 thirteenth in order, whose successor, Zephyri- 
 nus, formulated the Catholic theory, thereby 
 corrupting the simplicity of faith. Zephyrinus 
 was himself no more orthodox, but inclined to 
 the opposite extreme of Patripassianism. This 
 claim of Artemon has much to support it in the 
 writers of the second century, writers who lie 
 under no suspicion of heresy. 
 
 A curious testimony to this early faith as 
 Unitarian is to be found in Tertullian, who 
 admits that his view is not easily or generally 
 apprehended by the believers. His admission 
 is singularly convincing. He says : 
 
God is One 107 
 
 " The simple (I will not call them unwise and unlearned) 
 who always constitute the majority of believers, are 
 startled at the oiKOvo/Aia (or dispensation of the three 
 in one) on the ground that their very rule of faith with- 
 draws them from the world's plurality of gods to the one 
 only true God ; not understanding that, although He is 
 an only God, He must yet be believed in with His own 
 oijioroj^iia. The numerical order and distribution of 
 the Trinity they assume to be a division of the Unity ; 
 whereas the Unity which draws the Trinity out of its 
 own self is so far from being destroyed that it is actually 
 supported by it. They are constantly throwing out 
 against us that we are preachers of two gods and three 
 gods, while they take to themselves pre-eminently the 
 credit of being worshippers of the one God." 
 
 Tertullian is referring to the common people 
 to whom the Supreme and Eternal One, re- 
 vealed in Jesus Christ His Son, was the ground 
 of faith, and to whom no definition of God's 
 inner Being, no theory of a new God in the 
 world, could yet remove the conviction that a 
 new sense of God and a new regard for man 
 was the contribution Christianity had made to 
 the world's happiness. 
 
 With this view we find a striking agreement 
 in documents admitted to be the most precious 
 relics of the faith of this time. The letter to 
 Diognetus holds high rank, as a record of the 
 faith of the second century, but there is no 
 Trinitarianism in it. The Teaching of the 
 
io8 One World at a Time 
 
 Twelve belongs to the same century, but the 
 "Mighty Maker" and his "servant Jesus" 
 sufficiently explain baptism in the name of the 
 Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost as 
 no declaration of Trinity in Unity. Even the 
 celebration of the divinity in Christ which we 
 encounter in Justin is not confused by any 
 effort to make him the equal of the Father. 
 For Justin declares : " We worship and love 
 next to God the Logos that is from the unbe- 
 gotten and unutterable Deity, since for us he 
 became man that he might share our sufferings 
 and effect our cure " 
 
 What is called " Origen's Platonic taint " ac- 
 cords better with the thought of the third 
 century at large than with what is expected 
 of it by later controversialists. To Origen 
 
 " God is the One Absolute Being, not supra-cosmic 
 only but transcendental, the self-existent and self-suf- 
 ficing monad, who alone contemplates Himself in un- 
 changing perfection, called in Scripture the Father. 
 Even the Logos does not contemplate the Father as the 
 Father contemplates Himself. The Son and Spirit are 
 not necessary to the Father so far as He is absolute God, 
 but only so far as He is Love, Father, Creator." 
 
 Here begins to appear the triumph of Greek 
 philosophising over the simplicity of Christian 
 
God is One 109 
 
 faith in its devotion to the person of Jesus 
 Christ and its defence of his ideals with 
 ethical passion. Origen and Tertullian are 
 far nearer to the Nicene speculation than 
 their contemporary, Minucius Felix, who in 
 that gem of dialogue, Odavius, omits all the 
 doctrines upon which the others most insist. 
 He knows nothing of the Trinity, and hints 
 only at the divinity of Christ or of the Holy 
 Spirit. It is entertaining to hear the com- 
 plaint of those who would use his apology 
 for Christianity, that while " none of the apo- 
 logies is so elegant, none is so barren of 
 distinctive teaching ; ... as a statement 
 of the Christian case it is extremely incom- 
 plete " ; yet those who have deprived us of 
 so much touching the second and third cent- 
 uries have carefully preserved this apology 
 of the age of Severus (225 a.d.) answering 
 the charges made by Csecilius against Christ- 
 ianity. We cannot make the writers of the 
 third century speak the metaphysics of the post- 
 Nicene Church. If we find a gratification 
 of later claims in Origen and Tertullian and 
 Athanasius, we find the failure of such ex- 
 pectation in most of the others. Even these 
 champions of the Trinity are inconsistent with 
 the orthodoxy of a later time. They repeat- 
 
no One World at a Time 
 
 edly refer to the fall of man, which Jesus never 
 did, so far as any record shows ; but they did 
 not make it the foundation of their system 
 of thought as does modern orthodoxy, which 
 collapses upon the disappearance of the 
 original apostasy from innocence in Eden. 
 These strenuous advocates of the Nicene 
 tendency did not argue from the total cor- 
 ruption of human nature an atonement in any 
 of the modern uses of the term ; they did not 
 reason from ruin to redemption, but rather 
 from the original order and ideal to its realisa- 
 tion in Jesus Christ. According to Origen 
 the ransom for man is paid to Satan by God. 
 " The general characteristics of the theology 
 of the second and third centuries are still 
 liberty and diversity upon the common ground 
 of a livinof faith in Christ." 
 
 Platonism had made God inaccessible, the 
 later Greek thought made God inconceiv- 
 able. It remained for Roman Imperialism to 
 make God unlovable. So, in a sense the 
 Patripassians never dreamed, the Church "sac- 
 rificed the Father " in the ardent longing to 
 have a God lovable enough to be counted 
 human, loving enough to be deemed Divine. 
 
 There can be no proper orthodoxy where 
 there is no uniformity in the Church, and that 
 
God is One m 
 
 no unity in this sense existed is easily shown. 
 As late as the second half of the second 
 century " catholic " does not mean ** orthodox " 
 but " universal." It looks to church-extension, 
 but does not imply uniformity of thought or 
 form. Melito, who seems to recent writers 
 the perfection of orthodoxy, was not orthodox 
 to Orig-en or Tertullian. Orio-en was not 
 ortiiodox to Tertullian, nor was Tertullian 
 to the Bishop of Rome. His pupil Cyprian 
 defies Roman interference with Carthage ; 
 Minucius Felix omits the doctrines upon 
 which both Origen and Tertullian insist. The 
 Shepherd of Hennas seemed to Irenseus in 
 line with scripture, but Tertullian thought 
 it a recital of " weak visions " and treated 
 it with scorn. This difference was expressed 
 by the parties to the contention in language 
 neither elegant in form nor Christian in spirit. 
 The struggle against heresy was a struggle 
 for the unity of God, which was endangered 
 by dualism, and for the real humanity of 
 Christ, which was endangered by those who 
 made his earthly life a mere phantom, " an 
 envelope for God." The Fathers were not 
 always clear as to their own belief or clear in 
 its expression, but they saw what imperilled 
 its essential principles ; these, prevailing from 
 
112 One World at a Time 
 
 first to last, are the absolute being of God 
 and the real human life of Christ. On these 
 points the Church maintained its faith and 
 united, while dividing everywhere else. 
 
 Uniformity is not more evident if we turn 
 to the councils. The synods between the Ni- 
 cene Council, a.d. 325, and that at Constantino- 
 ple, A.D. 381, were utterly without agreement 
 as to what had been done at Nicaea ; the 
 council of Ephesus, a.d. 431, repudiated the 
 work of Constantinople fifty years earlier and 
 forbade the use of any other creed than the 
 Nicene, promulgated in a.d. 325. Thus to- 
 day that late creed called " Athanasian " is 
 under the interdict of the very council which 
 determined the Nicene supremacy, and the 
 church which recites both in one service 
 recites creeds which mutually exclude each, 
 other. 
 
 The statement of Dr. Martineau, " To see 
 the process of the formation of a doctrine is 
 already to behold its dissolution," comes con- 
 stantly before the mind in such a survey as 
 this, When you have the Egyptian triad, 
 you have the easy illustration of what is soon 
 to be the Christian Trinity. When you read 
 the doom of Osiris and how his merits are 
 claimed for the Osirians, you already have the 
 
God is One 113 
 
 germ of the vicarious atonement. The strug- 
 gle between the pictorial triad (Egyptian) and 
 the philosophical trinity (Greek) is, from the 
 latter part of the third century, the problem 
 to be solved by speculative minds in the Christ- 
 ian Church. In its lowest form the result is 
 mere tritheism, and so expresses itself in Art. 
 In its subtler form it is mere metaphysics, and 
 separates itself from the human soul in the 
 very effort at definition and symbolism. Unity 
 loses its ethical value ; its service to the intel- 
 lect also declines, and that confusion ensues in 
 spite of which Christian thought has been crys- 
 talline in its moments of devotion, while turbid 
 in its efforts at theological uniformity. The 
 centre of gravity was shifted, and men declared 
 that intellectual accuracy is orthodoxy, while a 
 holy life, without orthodoxy, is " the devil's 
 way of serving poison in a clean cup." As in 
 Egyptian, so in Christian thought : 
 
 "All that was needed was one more effort of abstrac- 
 tion, to put above and behind the triad the Being in 
 whom it was resumed and into whom, so to speak, it 
 melted ; that higher Unity was sometimes found in the 
 First Person of the triad, regarded as reproducing itself 
 by eternal generation ; sometimes in a ' Spirit more 
 spiritual than the gods ' ; the holy soul which clothes 
 itself with forms, but itself remains unkonwn.'. — G. 
 d'Alviella, Hibbert Lectures, 1891. 
 
114 One World at a Time 
 
 In the period we are surveying, there ap- 
 pears a singular event. Rome is no longer 
 the imperial centre, except for the Church. 
 Constantinople grasps the sceptre and holds 
 the throne. The world is Christian, but in a 
 sense Jesus never knew and his apostles never 
 intended. Alaric is Christian — and a bar- 
 barian. Honorius is a Christian theologian — 
 and a craven soul. Soon there will be no 
 empire but that of the Pope, an empire he 
 disputes with the Eastern kings of Constanti- 
 nople, — a Christian empire in which Christ 
 would have found a speedier crucifixion. It is 
 the age of the great apostasy ! An apostasy 
 which boasted its orthodoxy and proved it 
 upon the bodies of all who differed with its 
 exponents. An apostasy beyond doubt, in 
 that the unity of God had been lost to philo- 
 sophic thought, and the Fatherhood of God 
 sounded strange to hearts foreign to all com- 
 passion. The Brotherhood of Man had been 
 swallowed up by the unclean doctrine of total 
 depravity. The sublime doctrine of the Holy 
 Spirit as the purifier of the heart had sunk 
 into the theory of the dispensation of the 
 Holy Ghost as a prerogative of the Church. 
 The religion of the Man of Nazareth had been 
 transformed into conflicting theories about his 
 
God is One 115 
 
 person, for which councils contended with 
 blows and scandalous uproar. 
 
 The simple religion which had transfigured 
 the life of Israel's last great prophet, and from 
 that pure heart of boundless benevolence had 
 gone out to bless the world, — this stream of 
 pure affection, sprung at once from the remote 
 past and flowing afresh from the crystal fount 
 of a sublime life, had now sunk as a desert 
 stream in the sand. The stream was lost for 
 ages underground, reappearing at intervals as 
 a spring to flow for a little way, but lost again 
 and again in subtilties of speculation or im- 
 purities of life, or used only to move the ma- 
 chinery of Christian institutions. 
 
 Secular history calls the ages beginning with 
 the sixth century " dark." But the history of 
 the Church closes its short day before the 
 light declines upon the imperial countenance 
 of Constantine ; when his politic edict is ut- 
 tered the Church has confessed that endorse- 
 ment by a murderer can give it peace. The 
 scenes of the arena show no longer the calm 
 courage of martyrs upon the one side and the 
 fierce hunger of the wild beasts upon the other. 
 The conflict is transferred to the councils^ 
 where the antagonists all make the sign of 
 the cross but shout opposing battle-cries of 
 
ii6 One World at a Time 
 
 doctrinal contention ; where surely " the wrath 
 of man worketh not the righteousness of 
 God." Holiness of life is as nothing ; but 
 lips false in all other things speak the shib- 
 boleth without stammering. The Church has 
 decreed what shall be the rule of faith since 
 it has forsaken what was the rule of faith. 
 Solemn processions march to the sanctuaries 
 singing the doctrines in Greek doggerel ; 
 one party led by a gaunt Arian, the other by a 
 fat eunuch of the Empress, meet in the streets 
 of Alexandria and stone each other, while 
 cries of *' homoiousian " and " homoousian " 
 proclaim that " they slay each other for an iota!'' 
 The Athanasian doctrine is at the flood, 
 but it will find its ebb within this fourth cent- 
 ury. While the Arian emperors re-establish 
 the mongrel doctrines of Arianism, there ap- 
 pears upon the sky the afterglow of Pagan- 
 ism which Julian vainly calls a new dawn, not 
 knowino- that the sun of Paganism is set. At 
 the centres of power, Arianism again declines, 
 but its missionaries are carrying a conviction 
 that they teach "the truth of the Old Christ- 
 ians " to the hearts of the Goths. In the 
 far-off forests of central Europe the work of 
 Ulfilas shall last when the decrees of the Arian 
 emperors have been revoked at Rome, 
 
God is One 117 
 
 The century closes ; as the torn scroll of its 
 achievement is rolled together we read that 
 the Empire is divided between East and West ; 
 the great schools of theology are forging the 
 arms for new contentions. Upon the vacant 
 throne of Roman Imperialism in the West sits 
 the Bishop of Rome. The world is Christian 
 according to its own confession, and Pagan 
 according to every test which the life of Jesus 
 and his great words about God's love can 
 supply. Two sounds accompany the opening 
 decade of the new century. Alaric strikes 
 with his sword-hilt upon the gates of Rome 
 and demands the surrender of the Imperial 
 City to the barbarian. Safe behind the 
 marshes of Ravenna, the Emperor Honorius 
 clucks to his chickens in their golden cages. 
 The Church has gained a creed and lost an 
 Empire. Its monotheism has been swamped 
 by its explanations about God. The reality 
 of God is obscured by its definitions. Ortho- 
 doxy is established among the ruins of a 
 divided Church. The perdition which had 
 been declared to be the punishment of sin has 
 now become the penalty of a mistake. The 
 only heresy which has nothing to recommend 
 it is now universal, — the heresy which declares 
 that intellectual accuracy is the condition of 
 
ii8 One World at a Time 
 
 salvation^ and a formula of belief the guarantee 
 of religion. 
 
 The tinity of faith perished in a struggle for 
 uniformity of statement. Henceforward the 
 simplicity of religion in its earliest Unitarian 
 thought is to be obscured and complicated by 
 contentions as to what is the true opinion. 
 The critic takes the place of the believer — 
 and for fifteen centuries " the battle of the 
 Churches" is waged. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 WHY DO CHRISTIANS DIFFER? 
 
 THE battle of the churches is over. If 
 not in complete peace, we are at least, in 
 a condition of unarmed neutrality. There is a 
 uniform and widespread armistice proclaimed. 
 There is no confusion, except in the minds of a 
 few, concerning the vital questions of religion ; 
 indeed, some of us sometimes fear that there 
 is inertia, stagnation, in the place of whole- 
 some agitation. And yet, we are not of the 
 number who seek to project a conflict. 
 Rather let the pools of thought cleanse them- 
 selves by the freshets of contemporary opinion 
 flowing into them. Let not any devout soul 
 stir them, lest, if there be stagnation, their 
 miasma get abroad, and lest they simply set- 
 tle down to their own sediment again. Rather 
 let the new streams of contemporary thought 
 flush them out, while we watch to see the 
 progress of the human mind. 
 
 I call attention now to certain reasons 
 119 
 
I20 One World at a Time 
 
 for the critical attitude prevailing in spite of 
 these conditions that I have named. How is 
 it that the faith held by a great number in the 
 world of modern thought becomes a subject of 
 dispute and criticism in other minds? How 
 does criticism of Unitarianism arise ? 
 
 First, then, because of a misplaced emphasis 
 in those critical minds. What a sentence 
 means depends largely upon its emphasis, and 
 what a mind means depends largely upon its 
 emphasis ; and when the emphasis is laid in 
 the wrong place, however actively the mind 
 may express itself, it expresses itself to small 
 purpose. It is difficult for two minds, differ- 
 ently emphasising what they consider import- 
 ant, to get together, to see alike, to say the 
 same thing, to be in unison ; and much of the 
 criticism to which I shall refer in the follow- 
 ing pages is due to a misplaced emphasis in 
 religion. 
 
 For instance, it is never said that people 
 of our way of thinking are immoral. On the 
 contrary, we are accused of having " mere 
 morality." What "mere morality" may be, in 
 a universe so closely knit together in its parts 
 as this in which we live, I fail to understand. 
 How morality can be other than the guarantee 
 of religion, it is difficult to determine. But we 
 
Why do Christians Differ? 121 
 
 are never called immoral. It would be a vain 
 attack which should take that form. For, 
 however the saintliness in those who are saintly 
 may be accused of being only "good form," 
 it is good form still ; and I suspect it is 
 good form in the Kingdom of Heaven. So 
 the emphasis is not laid upon life at all. The 
 objection is not made that we do not live 
 well, that we do not behave well, that we do 
 not deport ourselves consonantly with the in- 
 terests of society. We are not accused of 
 being law-breakers or offenders against any 
 code of good behaviour. On the contrary, we 
 are said to be quite complacent and well- 
 behaved people ; we are accused of being too 
 serene and undisturbed. That is not true ; 
 and to the answer of that criticism I shall 
 come later on. The emphasis of the critic is 
 misplaced ; it is laid upon doctrine and not 
 upon life. If the emphasis were laid on life, 
 then the exactness of our deportment, the 
 rectitude of our behaviour, the integrity of our 
 method, the whole moral tenor of our life 
 would receive the emphasis ; for, after all, the 
 business of life is living, and Matthew Arnold 
 was inside the truth when he said : " conduct 
 is three-fourths of life." I should say it is the 
 other fourth also, and that conduct is all there 
 
122 One World at a Time 
 
 is of life. Whatever may inspire the conduct, 
 whatever may grace the conduct, whatever may 
 adorn the conduct or may result from the con- 
 duct, still, after all, I am conducting my life on 
 a given principle. 
 
 Now, the emphasis, if laid on doctrine, 
 misses altogfether what life means. What is 
 doctrine ? It is a more or less accurate defini- 
 tion of how one man interprets religion to 
 another man. If men were isolate and alone, 
 separate, secluded, each man might be able to 
 conduct his religious life on terms of the 
 highest rectitude, without the necessity for 
 definition. But the moment another man ap- 
 pears and says, " Why do you worship, and 
 whom ? What do you believe, and why ? 
 What are the motives of action, and how did 
 you come by them ? W^hat is the experience 
 of life in its highest terms ? " immediately there 
 must be definition. In other words, I must 
 define or delimit, draw a line round and make 
 a demarcation of the whole plat of my think- 
 ing. I must map out my mind to the man 
 who inquires, so that he will know where to 
 find me on this or that aspect of life. That 
 is definition. But when a man comes and 
 says, " Now you have not the right definition," 
 it is like saying to a cook who Is preparing a 
 
Why do Christians Differ? 123 
 
 repast, which is, by the proof of her experi- 
 ence, Hkely to be a very deHcious repast, 
 " But you have not the right recipe." She 
 points to the viands, and says, " Why ? They 
 are edible, dehcious, approved by the house- 
 hold." So somebody who thinks definition is 
 the thing, — that the recipe is the food, that the 
 prescription is the medicine, — arraigns another 
 man on the ground that he has not the right 
 definition. It is exactly like one who has 
 found a new star by the telescope in the ob- 
 servatory being accused by another astron- 
 omer, who has been working on the matter 
 mathematically to see where the star ought to 
 be in the sidereal universe, that he has not 
 shown the formula by which the calculation 
 was made, by which the star was discovered. 
 He says to him, " You cannot give the defini- 
 tion ; you cannot state the formula." The 
 other man turns to him and says, ''There is 
 the star / " So the emphasis is laid on the 
 wrong thing when laid upon accuracy of state- 
 ment, upon definition, upon opinion. These 
 all change, and human life, with a certainty 
 that is simply sublime, goes on calmly ripen- 
 ing its experiences, developing its powers, 
 and assuring itself by converse with reality. 
 The emphasis is misplaced not only in the 
 
124 One World at a Time 
 
 fact that doctrine is put instead of life, but 
 also because the objector is often not con- 
 cerned about the right thing. If you are con- 
 cerned about the saving of your soul, as the 
 major part of the Christian Church used to 
 be concerned, then the emphasis is misplaced, 
 for you cannot save your soul. If you are 
 ever saved, your soul will do it. You could 
 just as well talk about a man, saving his seed- 
 wheat by keeping it in his barn. He saved 
 it ; and his field has grown up to grass. He 
 has not any harvest, but he has saved his 
 seed-wheat. Another man does not save it 
 at all, but flings it into the ground, which he 
 has ploughed and harrowed, prepared and 
 mellowed, until it is ready for just that kind 
 of thing that seed-wheat is. He flings it 
 away and says, " I don't want to save it " ; 
 but the next autumn the abundant harvest 
 of his rich acres will show that his seed-wheat 
 saved him. It is just so with the soul. You 
 cannot "save your soul " without "losing it." 
 If you are ever saved your soul will be the 
 saving power ; and it will not be saved, in 
 my judgment, unless it is worth it. So that, 
 if the emphasis is laid upon salvation, in the 
 sense of taking care of your immortal soul, 
 the result, when it is not ludicrous, is tragic ; 
 
Why do Christians Differ? 125 
 
 and the objector who comes and says, " You 
 don't try to save your soul," is quite right. 
 We do not. That is not our business. God 
 put into man the breath of Hfe, and said to 
 him, " Save your kind." So the emphasis of 
 the objector is laid in the wrong place, be- 
 cause it is laid on the wrong thing. He is 
 not concerned about the right object of life, 
 which is not saving one's self, but saving the 
 other man. Swim ashore, let the other man 
 drown ! stand dripping, and see him go down ! 
 That is the attitude of a man who wants to 
 save his soul. The business of life is to get 
 a grip on something that is not strong enough 
 to strike out for itself. The whole business 
 of life is to make the world better. I think 
 that God did not make it very well in the 
 beginning, simply to give us a task ; just as, 
 in the old legend, He brought the creatures 
 before the first man, it is said, " to see what 
 he would call them." That is a touch of 
 comedy in the ancient story. He made them 
 pass before Adam " to see what he would call 
 them," and when he had given them all names, 
 God said to him, " This garden is for you 
 to cultivate. Let yourselves be fruitful and 
 multiply and replenish the earth. Cultivate 
 and dress the garden." And ever since the 
 
126 One World at a Time 
 
 first work-day in the world, the business of 
 life has been to carry on what God started, 
 but did not make complete. We are there- 
 fore "workers together with God" ; and when 
 we are objected to on the ground that we are 
 not saving our souls, we answer : " From the 
 time of Channing in the century that has just 
 passed, until now, the emphasis has been upon 
 public life among us. From the days of 
 Tuckerman in the last century, until now, the 
 emphasis has been upon scientific, organised, 
 capable work with our fellows in what is now 
 known as organised charity ; and in our own 
 theological schools, so much is this emphasis 
 understood that in each of them there is a 
 chair of Sociology, on the ground that a 
 minister who knows theology and does not 
 know sociology is only a half-equipped man." 
 Indeed, I think all theology might be left 
 one side, provided we knew about folk and 
 worked upon our fellows for the bettering 
 of the world. The business of religion is to 
 add zest to life, to make it so well worth liv- 
 ing, in the religious man's estimation, that he 
 shall hunger in heart to make it more worth 
 while to the other man. So this misplaced 
 emphasis is the first reason for the arising of 
 criticism. 
 
Why do Christians Differ? 127 
 
 The second reason for its appearance is 
 ignorance. One body of Christians criticises 
 another, largely because of the lack of exact 
 knowledge. Now, ignorance is a very relative 
 term. A banker would be perfectly justified 
 in saying to the clergyman : " Your specialty is 
 not banking ; therefore I hold you to be, from 
 my standpoint, ignorant." But the clergyman 
 might retort, " Your business is not knowing 
 the philosophy of religion, the history of the- 
 ology. You are not dealing continually with 
 the souls of men at first hand, in that per- 
 petual confession that comes into a minister's 
 life ; therefore, so far as my vocation is con- 
 cerned, I hold you to be an ignorant man." 
 And so it would run all the way through. 
 The musician says to the man who sings four 
 different tunes to the four lines of a hymn, 
 " You are ignorant of music." He is quite 
 right. The only trouble with the man is that 
 he is not dumb as well, so that he attempt not 
 the impossible. The artist says to the people 
 in the inartistic walks of life who cannot under- 
 stand a black-and-white drawing, who cannot 
 see anything in it, but must have something 
 that is in sharp contrasts of color, " You have 
 not an artistic appreciation." He is quite 
 right. Ignorance is a movable term. So I 
 
128 One World at a Time 
 
 say of people who offer criticism of us, they 
 are ignorant about the thing of which they are 
 talking. Let me tell you what they ought 
 to know in order to be competent to offer 
 opinions of a critical kind on the Unitarian 
 faith. 
 
 They ought to know the struggle of soul 
 which comes to one who wants to find God 
 for himself. They may have that ; they must 
 have that in order to offer an opinion about 
 anybody's religion. Then they should know 
 the first three centuries of Christianity better 
 than the last three centuries of human history, 
 or as well, if they are particularly apt as histor- 
 ical students. In the next place, they should be 
 experts in Biblical criticism, both of the Old and 
 the New Testaments, and have a large general 
 knowledge of universal religion. They should 
 be more or less familiar with the great ethnic 
 faiths ; should know the Dhammapada ap- 
 proximately as well as the Sermon on the 
 Mount ; should know the Bhavagadghita ap- 
 proximately as well as the Gospels of the New 
 Testament ; should know the Vedic Hymns 
 as well as the hymns of the Christian Church. 
 When they are dealing in criticism of people 
 who claim to go back to universal religion, to 
 deal with things at first hand, who do not care 
 
Why do Christians Differ? 129 
 
 for sacerdotalism of any kind or institutional 
 life as affecting the Church, then they must 
 know these things and many others. And if 
 they do not know these, and, nevertheless, of- 
 fer their criticism, they are simply skimming 
 the surface of their minds. It is very im- 
 promptu, — very much like an improvisation of 
 criticism about an historic fact. 
 
 Ignorance may be of another kind, — ignor- 
 ance of the motive-power of the religion criti- 
 cised. There is a vast deal of that. For 
 instance, take the administration of the United 
 States, for illustration, — to venture upon deli- 
 cate ground. If I am a critic of the administra- 
 tion of my country, I should not only have, as 
 in the other matter just referred to, as much 
 knowledge of the facts as the administration 
 has, so that, if I were given the opportunity, I 
 could step into the Cabinet and bear my share 
 of the responsibility, take the portfolio of the 
 Secretary of the Navy or of the Treasury, and 
 bear my part in the place of the absentee whose 
 place I have taken, — I must not only know all 
 these facts, but I must understand, in addition 
 to them, the motive and genius and method of 
 the administration in a given period. I must 
 know what it never has told to any man. I 
 must know what it hopes to achieve in the 
 
130 One World at a Time 
 
 end, which does not yet appear as a matter of 
 history. That is the reason some of us feel 
 impatience with critics of great national ques- 
 tions, — that they have no trust except in the 
 edge of their own scalpel, and they dissect and 
 dismember and criticise without knowledge, 
 because they are ignorant, first, of the facts 
 which to-morrow's paper may contradict, as 
 they apprehend them ; and, second, of the mot- 
 ive and genius of administration, which lies 
 behind the things that are being done. So in 
 religious movements ; for religion has a mot- 
 ive-power ; it is directed toward a definite 
 end ; it seeks to achieve by a given method a 
 given result. Just as in Rome you say the 
 motive was power ; in Greece you say the mo- 
 tive was art ; in the Orient the motive was 
 meditation, and in the Occident the motive 
 is enterprise ; so in every division of the hu- 
 man family you discover the motive, and then 
 have the key to unlock the secrets of its his- 
 tory. So, in every religious movement there 
 is a conviction that characterises it, a method 
 of thinking that belongs to it. I think Ed- 
 ward Everett Hale is not far wrong when he 
 says that the establishment of an Unitarian 
 Church in a town means increased facilities 
 in the sanitation of that neighbourhood. It 
 
Why do Christians Differ? 
 
 i^i 
 
 means also a tightening up of the whole of 
 life's obligations ; it means a simplifying of the 
 terms of religion. 
 
 Still another reason for criticism among 
 Christians is the dependence upon atUhority. 
 Usually the critic is somebody who is quoting 
 somebody else. He is " a scribe and a Phar- 
 isee " in that sense. They marvelled at the 
 teaching of Jesus, because he spoke " as one 
 having authority, and not as their scribes," 
 who always quoted something somebody else 
 said. So the critic is quoting his criticism. 
 Students of literature know how true that 
 is. You sometimes stumble upon a man 
 who " knows everything there is in Shake- 
 speare." I came upon such a man the other 
 day, and he commenced to recite Shake- 
 speare to me ; but as he made two or three 
 radical blunders, not in reading, but in the 
 meaning of the text, I did not remain. I 
 could not afford the time. He was a simple 
 Shakespeare parrot, without its colours and 
 its excuse for being. So those who are study- 
 ing literary criticism, as every man in the min- 
 istry must, know perfectly well that for the 
 most part the critics are retailing some ancient 
 opinion about the thing in hand, and when 
 you get a man who deals with the matter at 
 
132 One World at a Time 
 
 first hand you receive a kind of shock. The 
 conclusions of such a critic may not be exact ; 
 but he is dealing with things at first hand. 
 
 So the critic of a religious kind is often 
 simply a quoting person, who says, " Dr. So- 
 and-so said," or, " The commentator of such a 
 period has said," or, " This or that Church 
 holds concerning you." Send him away until 
 he can come with something which is his own. 
 A friend of mine heard a distinguished Eng- 
 lish preacher in a cathedral in the Orient, 
 and she came away saying, " The Canon said 
 ' this is the received doctrine of the Church,' 
 ' the Church has always held,' ' It is com- 
 commonly believed amongst us,' but he 
 says nothing of what he himself believes." 
 Then the distinguished preacher was ac- 
 costed by his friend who heard this state- 
 ment and repeated it to him, saying, " My 
 daughter says you said nothing out of your 
 mind this morning, but said, ' The common 
 opinion is,' ' The Church has always held,' " 
 his answer was, ** How very acute ! Few 
 persons would have observed it ! " That is 
 trifiing. That just escapes being wicked by 
 being inane. A man with the serious business 
 of life on hand covers his statement with quot- 
 ation marks, as though he knew nothing of 
 
Why do Christians Differ? 133 
 
 his own mind ! That is the usual attitude 
 of the critic of another man's rehgion. He is 
 retaihng at a lower price something that he 
 has found, and therefore can afford to sell it 
 below the market value. It was not a discov- 
 ery on his part. He did not make it. He 
 did not dig it out. He simply picked it up. 
 It was not his. He then passed it along with 
 just a little acid added. Now, if there is any- 
 thing more useless than that, I do not happen 
 to remember at this moment what it is. 
 
 Finally, criticism of one form of faith by 
 another often has its root in denominational 
 pride. I can understand anybody's being 
 proud of what has been achieved. We 
 ride with Paul Revere because he dared, and 
 stand with " the embattled farmers " at Lex- 
 ington because they dared. We review the 
 great periods of our national history because 
 it is something done, something achieved. We 
 take up the autobiography of Booker Washing- 
 ton, Up from Slavery, and follow the boy from 
 his almost unknown beQfinninor until he becomes 
 the most useful man of his race in America, 
 because it is something done, something ac- 
 complished. But why should anybody get 
 excited about a table of statistics ? Shown by 
 the census, the cost of church building in this 
 
134 One World at a Time 
 
 country, proportionate to the number engaged, 
 falls first on the Jew, and then on the Unitarian. 
 But it was a mere matter of fact ; not a sub- 
 ject for boasting. Or when great annual meet- 
 ings are held by denominations, to recite their 
 achievements of increasing membership, of 
 churches built, of enriched liturgy, of what- 
 ever it may be, it is a thing to be allowed by a 
 sane mind, but it cannot be very interesting to 
 anybody that has anything to do. I am re- 
 minded of the dialogue between Emerson and 
 Lowell on top of the tower of Notre Dame in 
 Paris. Emerson was talking about Alcott, and 
 he said to Lowell, " I asked Alcott what he 
 had ever done. He said he had written so and 
 so, he had thought this and that. * But,' I said, 
 ' What have you ever done ? ' And then," said 
 Emerson, " the Brahmin turned to me and said, 
 ' If Pythagoras should come to Concord, whom 
 would he ask to see ? ' " There you have it. 
 You say that is colossal self-conceit. Well, it 
 is the same thing as denominational pride. It 
 is the "counting of the hosts of the Lord." 
 It is as the old story in that charming legend 
 of Gideon, who, when he found there were ten 
 thousand who were ready to take sword against 
 the enemies of Jehovah, had impressed upon 
 him by the Divine command that there were 
 
Why do Christians Differ? 135 
 
 too many, and so he led them down to the 
 stream, and nine thousand seven hundred fiuno- 
 themselves down upon their faces and swilled 
 the water out of the stream as a preparation 
 for battle, and three hundred lapped it out 
 of their hands, drinking as a dog drinks; and 
 these three hundred were chosen. The feel- 
 ing comes upon the human mind that not 
 numbers, nor institutions, nor popularity, nor 
 fashionable adherents, nor anything else 
 counts, but simply ability to swing the weapon 
 and cut your way through ; and denominational 
 pride has much to do with the criticism which 
 says, " Why, you are one of the smallest de- 
 nominations on the face of the earth." We 
 had not denied that fact ; and sometimes that 
 church that rates us as small, is itself only sixth 
 in the order of denominations of the country 
 at largre, but swells in numbers where reliofion 
 is made easy and popular and fashionable. 
 
 So when we examine the criticisms that 
 we are to analyse in these succeeding chap- 
 ters, we have to bear in mind that they arise 
 either from misplaced emphasis, or from the 
 domination of fear, or from denominational 
 pride, or from some merely meretricious and 
 external thing, and that therefore, whilst they 
 do not hurt us, they ought to be considered 
 
136 One World at a Time 
 
 for the benefit of those, most of all, who, 
 being almost as uninformed as the critic, 
 are more easily affected by the criticism 
 itself. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 WHAT IS IT TO BELIEVE IN CHRIST? 
 
 J APPROACH the subject with some diffid- 
 A ence, not because I am not sure of what 
 Unitarians beheve respecting Jesus of Naza- 
 reth, but because it is so easy, when one is 
 touched to the quick by such a criticism as 
 this, to put into the answer a Httle more feel- 
 ing than a judicial attitude of mind would war- 
 rant. For this is about the only thing that is 
 said asfainst us that we care for. We do care 
 when people say that we do not believe in 
 Christ, and for various reasons. 
 
 In the first place, we are sorry that people 
 should make such a mistake, because the mis- 
 take hurts them. It cannot hurt us except in 
 one way, and that is, it keeps reverent people 
 from coming to us who have nowhere else to 
 go. There are many people who have fallen 
 out of line with much of the received doctrine 
 of the churches called Evangelical, who are 
 hindered from allying themselves with the 
 
 137 
 
138 One World at a Time 
 
 Unitarian method of life and faith, because 
 they believe when it is said that Unitarians do 
 not believe in Christ that something true has 
 been said. And we lament this ; although 
 we are not given to proselyting and do not 
 care to make many disciples for disciples-sake ; 
 we feel with Emerson when he was reproached 
 with having no disciples at the end of twenty- 
 five years of teaching, and said, " What 
 should I do with them if they came to 
 me ? I should have to send them back to 
 themselves." So discipleship for discipleship's 
 sake does not appeal to us. But, in spite of 
 this, we have a hospitable faith. We do de- 
 sire to receive amongf ourselves those whom 
 we may help ; and when reverent people, who 
 are the only people we care about having 
 come, are kept away by the false statement 
 that we do not believe in Christ, we mourn 
 for their sakes that about the only place where 
 they could have a reverent attitude toward 
 Christ, having given up the other forms of 
 faith, has been shut to them by this aspersion 
 which is not true. 
 
 There is another reason why this criticism 
 touches us. It gives us a feeling of hopeless- 
 ness about the religious education of the world. 
 When a thing so simple is so completely 
 
What is it to Believe in Christ? 139 
 
 misunderstood, it makes one feel that no- 
 thing can be explained ; and that if such a 
 mistake, with so small an occasion, with such 
 an abandonment of all proper inquiry, can be 
 made, almost any mistake might be made that 
 hinders the reliijious education of the world. 
 
 So much for the subject, which I approach 
 with diffidence, as I say, because I shall try not 
 to put into it that deep feeling with respect to 
 the criticism which we all feel when it is made, 
 for reasons a part of which I have given. 
 
 We come immediately to the inquiry. What 
 would it be not to believe in Christ ? There 
 are only three ways in which it is possible 
 for a human soul not to believe in Christ. 
 
 The first is to believe that he never existed ; 
 and a very large school — the Tubingen school 
 of criticism, led by Strauss and Baur — for a 
 whole generation maintained " the mythical 
 theory " with regard to the gospel narratives of 
 the life of Christ. It only needed fresh insight 
 into history, and new study of the gospels 
 to dismiss that "mythical " theory. It is not 
 held by any German scholar to-day, so far as I 
 know. I believe there is one man in the Uni- 
 versity of Berlin who holds it with a kind of at- 
 tenuated adherence, and claims the " mythical " 
 theory of the life of Christ ; but of this I 
 
I40 One World at a Time 
 
 am not quite sure. But the school of Strauss 
 and Baur, however useful they may have been, 
 — Strauss being made familiar to readers of 
 English through the translation of his Life of 
 Jesus by George Eliot, — was only for a time. 
 It was an evanescent protest against the his- 
 torical Jesus. There are a few unthinking 
 people — people who do not read, nor study, 
 nor think things down to the ground — who be- 
 lieve that Jesus never existed. They might be 
 said not to believe in Christ ; and the remedy 
 for them would be to put into their hands 
 the argument of an English Ecclesiastic, 
 who applied the same theory and system of 
 reasoning to Napoleon Bonaparte and proved 
 that he never existed. That is the easy 
 answer to those people, whose theory is based 
 in sophistry and lapse of logic, the assumption 
 of premises that are not premises, and then 
 the application to them of a logical process, 
 which may be accurate enough when the false 
 premise is admitted. So that if it were true 
 of Unitarians that they did not believe that 
 Jesus ever lived, they might be said not to be- 
 lieve in Christ. But, on the contrary, if there 
 is one body of people, one set of scholars, who 
 have rescued the historical Jesus from the en- 
 wrapping, disfiguring disguises of theology, it 
 
What is it to Believe in Christ? 141 
 
 is the people of our faith. We have re-estab- 
 hshed as a historical verity the life and method 
 of life of Jesus Christ ; so in that sense it can- 
 not be said that we do not believe in Christ. 
 
 There is a second way in which It might be 
 true that one did not believe in Christ. It 
 might be said that one did not believe in 
 Christ who agreed that he did exist, but that 
 he was not such a character as he was repre- 
 sented to be. That Is, that the stories of the 
 Gospels and the other writings of the New 
 Testament gave a roseate hue to a life that 
 was not really as It was represented. That 
 would mean that the writers out of their own 
 consciousness had evolved a character for 
 which no actuality existed, no possible author- 
 ity could be given. They would be exactly 
 in the situation of the man who *' evolved the 
 camel out of his own consciousness." It was 
 a creature unknown to zoology, absolutely 
 unrepresented In any museum or menagerie ; 
 but he evolved the camel out of his own con- 
 sciousness — he had a camel-consciousness. So 
 that If one were to say that Christ did exist, 
 but was not the character he was represented 
 to be, such a person might be said not to be- 
 lieve in Christ. On the contrary, we have 
 taken pains to find out what his character was ; 
 
142 One World at a Time 
 
 we have discriminated between the documents ; 
 we have separated them by the keen edge of 
 critical discernment, saying that such and such 
 things could not possibly be true of him, be- 
 cause they are inconsistent with the consensus 
 of what his character was. We have put away 
 from him those things which tradition had at- 
 tached to him as a reproach. For this reason 
 the Church set aside all the Apocryphal gos- 
 pels, not because there was nothing good in 
 them, but because the consensus of them was 
 untrue to the Gospels of the New Testament 
 which gave us the character of Jesus. So in 
 that sense it cannot be said that Unitarians do 
 not believe in Christ. 
 
 The third way, and only other way I can 
 conceive of in which one may not believe in 
 Christ, is, though he admit that Christ did 
 exist and was just the character described in 
 the Gospels, that he deliberately say, " That is 
 not the kind of character that I desire ; that 
 is not the sort of leader I will have ; that is not 
 the Saviour I want; he is nothing to me ! His 
 open-handed generosity taught the trustee- 
 ship of all good gifts from God ; I prefer to 
 grab everything in sight and keep it for my 
 own. Instead of being the disburser of God's 
 mercies, I prefer to be the grave of God'^ 
 
What is it to Believe in Christ? 143 
 
 mercies. If he says, ' Blessed are the peace- 
 makers,' I prefer war. I believe the sword is 
 the arbiter of human destiny ; not reason nor 
 the spirit of love." So such a mind might run 
 through all those splendid utterances which 
 constitute the law of human life, and say, " I 
 will have none of it. His character does not 
 please me. His leadership shall not lead me. 
 I will go my own way in spite of him, although 
 he lived and was such a character as he is 
 represented to be." That man would em- 
 phatically be chargeable with not believing in 
 Christ. 
 
 These are the three ways in which one may 
 not believe in Christ. First, that he did not 
 exist ; second, if he existed, he was not the 
 person described, third, if he existed and was 
 the person described, he was not the kind of 
 person to love and follow. 
 
 Now, having dismissed those three as utterly 
 inapplicable to our state of mind, I ask you. 
 What is it to believe in him ? 
 
 The first business of the believer is to know 
 what he believes. A general, vague suscept- 
 ibility to anything that comes our way is not 
 faith. That is credulity. That is what hap- 
 pens in a street when the rain flushes it with 
 water and the sewers are open. Everything 
 
144 One World at a Time 
 
 runs whither gravitation tends, into any open- 
 ing that appears. That is the attitude of 
 simple credulity ; it is not the attitude of faith. 
 No utterly credulous person can be a believer. 
 A real believer must have as one of the ele- 
 ments of his belief the element of scepticism. 
 That is, he must be an inquirer. He must 
 understand the difference between this and 
 that. He must carefully discriminate in terms 
 that make him sure ; so that, when he has 
 weeded his garden, he shall enjoy the flowers ; 
 when he has picked off the defective fruit, the 
 fruit that is forming shall have strength to 
 grow ; so that when he has cleaned up his 
 mind, the things he holds to, he holds to tena- 
 ciously, and with a grasp that nothing can 
 loosen. The first condition of believing in any- 
 thing- is to be sure of it. For that reason we 
 claim that we pre-eminently believe in Christ, 
 because we try to realise what he was. The 
 very first thing to that end is to acquaint one's 
 self with the documents that tell about his life. 
 No man has any standing in any case who 
 argues it out of his prejudices. No man has 
 any right to expect a hearing upon any subject 
 who does not know the elements which go to 
 make it up. In law, he has no standing in 
 court ; in philosophy, he has no standing in 
 
What is it to Believe in Christ? 145 
 
 learning ; in literature, he is a mere pot-boiler, 
 as we say of the man who writes for what he 
 can get, without any reference to the facts of 
 the case ; — he will write a historical novel in 
 which if the characters came to life they 
 would be utterly lost in the situations por- 
 trayed. So with all the other conditions of 
 learning. We must examine the facts. We 
 must get at the basis. We must reason the 
 thing down to the ground. We must go back 
 to " the law and the testimony," as the old 
 phrase is ; and, examining the Gospels, and the 
 Epistles of Paul, and the other related docu- 
 ments of the New Testament, and the writings 
 of the earliest Fathers of the Church, we try to 
 set Jesus of Nazareth against his own back- 
 ground, to put him in his own belongings ; to 
 make him not a Greek philosopher, when he 
 was a Jew and a peasant and a carpenter ; to 
 make him not a nineteenth-century man when 
 he belonged to the first century ; to make him 
 the thing he was by getting at what we call 
 " local colour " and the atmosphere of his human 
 life. That is the first condition, and the man 
 who attempts anything else, or neglects this 
 and then delivers himself authoritatively with 
 regard to the life of Jesus of Nazareth, has no 
 standing with students. He is talking out of 
 
146 One World at a Time 
 
 his prejudices. He is skimming the top of his 
 mind. He is merely putting his feelings into 
 words. He illustrates what Froude says, that 
 " Reason is no match for superstition, and one 
 great emotion must be expelled by another." 
 So the only help for such a man is to have the 
 flood-tide of some great emotion visit him, 
 and then he may perhaps be driven back to 
 find what Jesus really was in the records of the 
 Gospels and the history of the early Church. 
 No man can realise what Jesus really was un- 
 less he discriminate between the historical 
 Jesus and the theological Christ. The atti- 
 tude of Jesus himself toward the Messiahship 
 seems to have changed during his ministry. 
 The records of the early part of his ministry 
 do not seem to apply to the latter part of it. 
 There is a growing revelation of what Jesus 
 thought himself to be, which we must deal 
 with most carefully, with discrimination and 
 most studious attention, most loving and affec- 
 tionate reverence. The man who does not 
 do that simply cannot be reckoned with, — 
 that is all. So the first business of believ- 
 ing in Jesus is to learn who he was. This 
 brings us at once into collision with very sin- 
 cere people who do not think as we do. In 
 the first place, we are in collision with the 
 
What is it to Believe in Christ? i47 
 
 people who worship the theological Christ, 
 but who will admit, when questioned, that if 
 they had been present when Jesus of Naza- 
 reth was on the earth, and had attempted to 
 say their prayers to him, with his Jewish par- 
 entage and Jewish training, and his abandon 
 to the unity of God as expressed in the great 
 Shema which he uttered every day of his life, 
 they would have been lifted from their knees, 
 while a look of horror would have passed over 
 his face to think they should have worshipped 
 him. He would have said to them as he said 
 to the young man who came to him, " Why 
 callest thou me good ? There is none good 
 save one, that is God." So this adherence to the 
 theological Christ rather than to the historical 
 Jesus brings us into collision with those who 
 hold that view. If you will run over the pages 
 of an Evangelical hymn-book, the hymn-book 
 used in the churches that are really consistent, 
 you will find that a large proportion of the 
 hymns are addressed to Christ as prayers, or 
 adoration, or tributes of praise. But there is 
 not one of them that any early disciple could 
 have sung. There is not one of them that the 
 Master would have approved. They are an 
 affront to the truth for which he stood, namely, 
 the adoration of the only God, whose revealer 
 
148 One World at a Time 
 
 he was, whose interpreter he was, whose ex- 
 pression in terms of human Hfe we thoroughly 
 believe him to be. But we must find out what 
 he is, even though it brings us into collision 
 with these sincere people who hold to the 
 essential Deity of Jesus of Nazareth in more 
 or less defined terms. And this collision is 
 real. It is a point where we cannot give up, 
 by so much as the slightest concession, our 
 profound belief in the simple humanity of 
 Jesus ; and the reasons are very simple. 
 
 In the first place we have to take the Script- 
 ures which record his life as we find them. 
 There is not any reference to him except as 
 human in any epistle of Paul, who seems not 
 even to have known — at least not to have re- 
 membered to state — any story of his unusual 
 birth ; who, it would have seemed, must have 
 mentioned Mary in writing to the churches 
 that he sought to establish in the faith of 
 Christ, if Mary was mother of the Lord, not 
 only, but " mother of God " as well. In the 
 Gospels there is no reference, except in 
 the isolated passages in the first part of 
 Matthew and the first part of Luke to 
 Jesus as other than human. Mark's, which 
 is the oldest, as we have the Gospels, be- 
 gins with the baptism by John the Baptist, 
 
What is it to Believe in Clirist ? 149 
 
 and ends with the burial of Christ. These 
 two passages alone, in the prefaces to Mat- 
 thew's and Luke's Gospels, of the whole mass 
 of the New Testament, are the insufficient 
 supports of a doctrine that has spread until it is 
 like an inverted pyramid, standing upon these 
 two points as the apex, and spreading its great 
 base in the air. We cannot accept the view 
 that Jesus was other than simply and purely 
 human, for we think we know what he was. 
 We ask others not to accept our statement, 
 however, but to work their way back through 
 the accumulated debris which has been de- 
 posited generation after generation upon the 
 plains of thought ; until, working their way 
 back, or, to change the figure, cutting their 
 way through the tangled thicket of opinion, by 
 any process known to them, with the sharp 
 cleavage of their logic, or with the disengaging 
 power of their affection and sincere devotion, 
 — so finding their way back by any method, 
 they discover that one statement after another, 
 as to how he was God, disappears, disappears, 
 disappears, until they stand face to face with 
 the disciples who dared rebuke him when they 
 thought he was wrong, and dared lie upon his 
 bosomwhen they thought that hewas in trouble; 
 who tried to comfort him as one human soul 
 
150 One World at a Time 
 
 would comfort another : such a review of the 
 evidence finds only these two isolated texts as 
 ground for a faith that characterises the whole 
 thinking of the Evangelical churches. And 
 why ? Because, having accepted the total de- 
 pravity of man, they could not think of Jesus as 
 really human. His character was too beautiful 
 to allow that ; the majesty of his life forbade 
 those to think meanly of him as human, — 
 who thought meanly of man because he was 
 human. They accept the total depravity of 
 human nature and the story of the Fall of man, 
 to which Jesus never refers in any record that 
 is left to us ; it appears nowhere in any gospel 
 in his words, — indeed, every utterance of his 
 seems to be a denial of the total depravity of 
 man or the Fall of man from original purity ; — 
 having accepted the total depravity of man 
 and its necessary corollary, the Fall of man in 
 the beginning of the race, they needed the 
 intervention of a Saviour to work out an atone- 
 ment, not between them and sin, but between 
 them and God. And so we insist it is the 
 depth, the unconscious depth of profanity, 
 the absolutely blasphemous attitude toward 
 the great God, that our Father should be 
 thought to be one who needs an atonement to 
 reconcile himself to His children, whom He has 
 
What is it to Believe in Christ? 151 
 
 made, and in whose care they have always 
 been. We must differ with these, because we 
 think we know what would have been the at- 
 titude of Jesus toward the Father. 
 
 In order to believe in Christ, not only must 
 we realise what he was, but we must accept 
 his leadership. The attitude of the great 
 body of orthodox Christians who maintain 
 the Deity of Christ as against ourselves be- 
 lieving in his perfect humanity, and who 
 charge us with not believing in Christ, may be 
 expressed as devotion to a formula without any 
 correspondent devotion to the destiny to which 
 that formula should lead them in their thinking. 
 It is amazing how many things are said that 
 are not meant. Often a very good man on his 
 knees before the Father of our Lord Jesus 
 Christ, uses a phrase because it is in a prayer- 
 book, that his soul protests against, that his 
 mind denies, because, as he says, he " uses it 
 waiting for something better to come along." 
 Now the only way to get anything better, if 
 you have what is not good, is to go and get 
 it yourself. The man who, like Micawber, 
 waits " for something to turn up," is far below 
 the man who goes and " turns it up." The 
 orthodox position, therefore, upon this point, 
 is that they do not accept the leadership of 
 
152 One World at a Time 
 
 Jesus really. Now I do not say that these 
 people are not good people. When we say 
 that they do not logically accept the leader- 
 ship of Jesus, we do not mean that. They 
 might have been absolutely good people, 
 though they had never heard of Jesus. There 
 are four and a half millions of good Buddhists 
 who do not accept the leadership of Christ. 
 I do not mean to asperse the characters of 
 these people or their sincerity. I mean to say 
 the habit of accepting opinions ready made 
 makes against the power of using one's own 
 reason. It is the assignment of your own 
 intellect to the keeping of somebody else. In 
 the Protestant, as in the Catholic, it is the 
 same thing : The priest knows a thing ; I 
 know the priest ; therefore I know the thing 
 the priest knows. Now that is not a syl- 
 logism. Those three conditions do not hang 
 together. You can only know that which you 
 have yourself discovered or had revealed to 
 you in terms your consciousness approves, or 
 that you have experienced in the contact with 
 human life. Those are the only three ways 
 of knowing anything. You must have known 
 it by your experience, or must have accepted 
 it in your consciousness, or must have dis- 
 covered and verified it for yourself. That is 
 
What is it to Believe in Christ? 153 
 
 not the attitude of those who hold to the leader- 
 ship of Jesus as a formula. 
 
 Now what is leadership in this sense? It 
 means we must adjust ourselves to the life of 
 Christ so as to get his view of God. That is 
 the first thing. If nothing in your religious 
 experience were gained except a view of God, 
 that would in itself be sufficient for the forma- 
 tion of character and the direction of life ; and 
 the use of Jesus, as we apprehend him, is to 
 be a revealer of God to us in terms of human 
 life. I do not want God revealed to me in 
 terms of angelic life. I do not want Him re- 
 vealed to me in terms of brute life. If the 
 brute has any consciousness of the Ultimate 
 Cause, to the bull God is a bull ; to the lion 
 God is a lion ; to the eagle God is an eagle. 
 But I am a man and I want to know what 
 God is like in terms of human life. I can 
 only know that by finding some life that is 
 stirred with the sense of God; so "brought 
 Into moral coalescence, the human with the 
 divine," in its relation to God, that it becomes 
 to me the lens through which I look, by which 
 the whole atmosphere is cleared and the stars 
 are brought near, as the sidereal universe 
 through the telescope becomes as though it 
 were near and familiar. That Jesus of Naza- 
 
154 One World at a Time 
 
 reth does for the believer who accepts his 
 humanity. We try to get his view of God, 
 which is a great deal better than getting a 
 view of him and stopping there. That is 
 what most people do. They come up to 
 Christ, look in his face, picture his beauty to 
 their imagination, idealise him to their senti- 
 ment, worship before him, and forget utterly 
 that he said, " I am the Way." But a way 
 points some-whither ; it leads somewhere ; " I 
 am the Truth." The truth is the expression 
 of an ultimate reality ; " I am the Life," said 
 he. Life was not self-existent in him. He 
 was born into the world as we are born into 
 the world. But, " I am the Life," proceeding 
 from the Final Life of all. " No man," said 
 he " cometh unto the Father but by me." His 
 whole teaching in that, as in every other case, 
 is that he is a means to an end, that end, the 
 Father ; an approximate to an ultimate, that 
 Ultimate the Father. Our effort is to climb 
 where he stands and see what he sees ; that is 
 believing in him. No mountain climber ever 
 yet climbed the Alps to any accessible height, 
 where the guide had not gone before, or did 
 not know the way ; and when he climbed, 
 tied to his guide, the same rope around his 
 waist and around the guide's waist ; — and 
 
What is it to Believe in Christ? 155 
 
 when he reached the beethncj diffs to which 
 he had chmbed, and stood, perhaps, on top 
 of the Matterhorn, or some great peak of 
 Switzerland, he drew in his delight in panting, 
 short breaths ; but he did not stand looking 
 at the guide. He gioj^ied in the guide's 
 strength ; he rejoiced in the guide's skill ; he 
 had followed in the guide's footsteps ; but 
 he tried to see what the guide saw. That is 
 our attitude ; that is belief in Christ, — to get 
 his view of God, and of life, and of human 
 destiny. That is what we mean by saying 
 that our business is " to discover the secret of 
 Jesus." It is better than mere imitation, 
 which is mechanical. It is trying to live the 
 life he lived, in the terms of your life, which 
 is a great deal better than living his life 
 over again. At school you were told to write 
 the thing you knew ; to make your composi- 
 tion out of something that you really under- 
 stood; to say the thing that was in your mind. 
 How unsatisfactory it would have been, and 
 how deadening to all your future knowledge 
 of English literature or interest in English, 
 if you had simply carried into the class-room 
 time after time something you had copied out 
 of some master of English style ! You would 
 have imitated the style but lost the power to 
 
156 One World at a Time 
 
 think in English. Our attitude is to find 
 "the secret of Jesus," and to live his life over 
 ao-ain in terms of our own life. 
 
 Most of all, I think this criticism that we 
 do not believe in Christ is offered to us be- 
 cause of our refusal, as I have already said, 
 of any theory of the atonement. But I 
 assure you that there is no theory now ac- 
 cepted as applying to the atonement which 
 existed for the first nine hundred years of the 
 Christian Church. The people in the pews 
 are not expected to be experts in Church 
 history ; but no minister in our faith can 
 afford not to be. It is safe to say that 
 any well-equipped Unitarian minister has to 
 know the first three centuries better than 
 the last three, if he is going to vindicate 
 what he thinks about the early Church ; and 
 I say with perfect frankness, and ask you 
 to verify it, that no " mercantile " theory, 
 nor " moral influence " theory, nor any one 
 of the remaining twenty or more theories of 
 the atonement as known in the early Church 
 until after the ninth century. The theory of 
 the early Church after the second century and 
 until the time of Anselm and Abelard, with 
 their contending theories, was that this earth 
 had fallen into the hands of a malign power 
 
What is it to Believe in Christ? 157 
 
 called Lucifer, Satan, the devil, the adversary, — 
 that he was " the prince of this world " ; that 
 there must be some provision made for get- 
 ting it away from him ; God had lost control 
 of part of His estate ; part of it had been " sold 
 for taxes," as we would say, and had passed 
 into the possession of another being called 
 the devil. And Christ, in the councils of 
 heaven, after the manner of the old Roman 
 Horatii, stepped forward, or as David before 
 Goliath, and offered to do battle for man 
 and overthrow the enemy ; and Jesus being 
 put to death, the bodily nature of Christ 
 perished ; but that was only the vindication 
 of his power as divine. In other words, as 
 one of the old preachers of that time said : 
 " God angled for the devil with the bait of 
 Christ, and the devil did not know it had 
 a hook in it." The hook was the Deity of 
 Christ. It impaled the jaws of him who had 
 overthrown the humanity of Christ. There 
 is no human being in the world now who 
 believes that, and yet for eight hundred years 
 the Christian Church as a whole believed some 
 such theory. Then came the theories of 
 Anselm and Abelard, followed by one theory 
 after another, until Horace Bushnell in the 
 middle of the last century taught the "moral 
 
15S One World at a Time 
 
 influence " theory ; that is, that the sinner 
 comes to Christ, for whose sake Christ dies, 
 and the sinner is broken-hearted by the sight 
 of what sin has cost, and turns to God because 
 sin is overthrown by the vision of the suffer- 
 ing Messiah. Then they said, who beheved 
 the other views, that Horace Bushnell did not 
 beHeve in Christ. That is an easy charge ; 
 and is as irrelevant as it is slanderous. The 
 view held by Bushnell is now held by thou- 
 sands who call themselves orthodox — and en- 
 tertain toward those who differ with them 
 the same critical attitude from which Bushnell 
 suffered. 
 
 Finally, we try to think what Jesus of Naz- 
 areth would like us to do. We do not simply 
 ask what would he like us to be. I think 
 what he would like us to be is to be our 
 best selves, enlightened by his example, in- 
 spired by his spirit. He would like us to 
 be our best selves ; but what would he like 
 us to do ? When the Unitarian leaders of 
 the last century answered that question, Doro- 
 thea Dix liberated the insane from their 
 chains, and turned the madhouse from a 
 place of torture into a place of healing. 
 When Abraham Lincoln and Charles Sumner 
 and William Lloyd Garrison, and the others 
 
What is it to Believe in Christ? 159 
 
 of our faith in the anti-slavery contest, together 
 with the good Quaker Whittier, who himself 
 was a believer in the humanity of Jesus, asked 
 what Christ would have them to do about 
 the slave, they contended for his freedom even 
 to intemperance of utterance and action. John 
 Brown's ill-considered raid was the very ex- 
 pression of what he thought Christ would 
 have him to do. The Abolition Party of the 
 North all asked just one question, " What 
 would Jesus of Nazareth have me do ?" And 
 four to six millions of people were freed, 
 because the nation arose and answered that 
 question. There were very good people on 
 the other side of the question. They said : 
 " What does the Old Testament teach about 
 slavery ? Did not Abraham have slaves ? 
 Did not David, who was ' after God's own 
 heart,' have slaves ? Did not the whole of 
 the Old Testament recognise slavery ? " They 
 refused to add concubinage and polygamy 
 and gambling and all the other evils that 
 were practised in the twilight times of the 
 Old Testament. They forgot to ask whether 
 it was " a square deal," as we would say now, 
 between Esau and Jacob as to the birthright. 
 They only said, " What did the Old Testament 
 allow as to slavery ?" It was a very different 
 
i6o One World at a Time 
 
 question from asking, " What would Jesus 
 have me to do about slavery ? " So this 
 country has been made over by people who 
 have asked themselves that question ; and in 
 the answering of the race-question, the leaders 
 have been Unitarians. I offer you this as my 
 challenge, — to say whether the great propor- 
 tion of those who have been moved by that 
 motive, and regulated in the method of their 
 thinking by that motive, were not believers 
 in Christ. The race-question which now 
 convulses the South would be settled if 
 the faith of the Unitarian Churches prevailed 
 there. 
 
 I desire in one single word to say that 
 to believe in Christ is to repeat his life, 
 not in words, but to repeat his life in 
 terms of life. There is many a thing that he 
 said that you have to take with a difference. 
 As Lecky shows in The Map of Life, you 
 cannot put up over any savings-bank the in- 
 junction, " Take no thought for the morrow." 
 You cannot bring into any court of justice the 
 statement, "If a man take thy coat, give him 
 thy cloak also." All these, that are the nat- 
 ural utterances of his time, have to be ad- 
 justed to the really higher ethics of this time. 
 Believing in Christ is repeating his life in 
 
What is it to Believe in Christ? i6i 
 
 terms of our life ; to indulge in a heresy 
 hunt because somebody does not believe in 
 Christ, illustrates what was said in a recent 
 theological controversy, " It was like a battle 
 of two dogs in a flower-garden, that settled 
 nothing but the flowers," That is what al- 
 ways happens. The beautiful things perish in 
 the time of controversy ; and there is nothing 
 so true as to the charge that we do not believe 
 in Christ, when it is followed up by the as- 
 perity on either side which that charge pro- 
 vokes, as the complaint that " he is wounded 
 in the house of his friends." 
 
 The following poem by Arthur Munby has 
 come under my notice in the Spectator as I 
 close this chapter ; and it so well phrases what 
 I have been claiming for faith in Christ that I 
 add its strong appeal to my own plea. 
 
 CHRISTUS CUNCTATOR 
 
 So far beyond the things of Space — 
 So high above the things of Time — 
 
 And yet, how human is thy face, 
 
 How near, how neighbourly, thy clime ! 
 
 Thou wast not born to fill our skies 
 With lustre from some alien zone : 
 
 Thy light, thy love, thy sympathies, 
 Thy very essence, are our own. 
 
1 62 One World at a Time 
 
 Thy mission, thy supreme estate, 
 
 Thy life among the pious poor. 
 Thy lofty language to the great ; 
 
 Thy touch, so tender and so sure ; 
 
 Thine eyes, whose looks are with us yet ; 
 
 Thy voice, whose echoes do not die ; 
 Thy words, which none who hear forget, 
 
 So piercing are they and so nigh ; 
 
 Thy balanced nature, always true 
 And always dauntless and serene, 
 
 Which did the deeds none else could do, 
 And saw the sights none else had seen, 
 
 And ruled itself from first to last 
 
 Without an effort or a pause. 
 By no traditions of the Past — 
 
 By nothing, save its own pure laws ; 
 
 All this, and thousand traits beside. 
 Unseen till these at least are known, 
 
 May serve to witness far and wide 
 That thou art he, and thou alone. 
 
 But oh, how high thy spirit soars 
 Above the men who tell thy tale ! 
 
 They labour with their awkward oars 
 And try to show thee — and they fail. 
 
 They saw thee ; yet they fail like us 
 Who also strive to limn thee out, 
 
 And say that thou art thus or thus, 
 
 And carve our crumbling creeds with Doubt; 
 
What is it to Believe in Christ? i6 
 
 Or build them up with such a Faith 
 And such a narrow, niggard Love 
 
 As clings to what some other saith, 
 Or moves not, lest some other move. 
 
 Ah, none shall see thee as thou art, 
 
 Or know thee for himself at all. 
 Until he has thee in his heart, 
 
 And heeds thy whisper or thy call, 
 
 And feels that in thy sovran will 
 
 Eternal manhood grows not old. 
 But keeps its prime, that all may fill 
 
 Thy large, illimitable fold. 
 
 o 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 "A COLD AND INTELLECTUAL 
 RELIGION" 
 
 {SUPPOSE there is nothing about which 
 people so differ as the weather. Some 
 people like a dull day, because they enjoy 
 their own melancholy ; and others almost 
 dread a radiant day because it makes them 
 restless and long for the woods and " God's 
 good outdoors " ; and between these how great 
 a multitude of those who, when they wish to 
 know whether it is cold, consult the thermo- 
 meter, and whether it will rain, inspect the 
 barometer. In the same room it often hap- 
 pens that one will say, " It seems to me dry 
 and hot, so that I can scarcely breathe " ; whilst 
 the person addressed will say, " I have a con- 
 stant feeling of cold at the back of my arms, 
 — a little shiver somewhere about the spine." 
 I use this parable of the weather to point the 
 fact, that when, in the contemplation of religion, 
 a critic says it is cold, the simplest answer is, 
 
 164 
 
" A Cold, Intellectual Religion " 165 
 
 that all questions of cold and heat are referable 
 always to the temperature of the complainant. 
 It is cold to him who is cold, and it is warm to 
 him who is warm ; and there is no settling the 
 fact by the barometer or thermometer or any 
 scientific registry of facts ; there is no settling 
 the question of comfort except by the circula- 
 tion of the comfortable. 
 
 Now, we Unitarians are quite comfortable. 
 We are called complacent, self-satisfied. Let 
 us thank God there is a complacency possible 
 in God's good world, which God has so divinely 
 ordered and so supremely and infinitely ad- 
 ministers. It would be unwholesome if human 
 beines in God's world were so sin-ridden or 
 sorrow-laden that they could never be quiet in 
 spirit, nor complacent ; but to be self-satisfied 
 is quite another matter ; and no human being 
 can tell that another human being is self-satis- 
 fied without being that very self, because quiet 
 of the external manner may very well be a 
 mask to hide inward convulsion. We wear our 
 masks not only for protection but for decency's 
 sake ; and it is well that the world shall get 
 the idea in good company that people are 
 satisfied enough not to make others dissatisfied. 
 A Japanese, who is the very perfection of good- 
 breeding, will smile while he tells you of the 
 
1 66 One World at a Time 
 
 death of someone near to him, — not because 
 death is not the same thing in Japan where peo- 
 ple love as in America where people love, but 
 because the idea has been Ingrained through 
 generations that It is the business of life to 
 make life easy for the other, and that we have 
 no right to load our burdens, even for our own 
 relief, on other souls. It Is the high prerog- 
 ative of souls to take burdens from others, but 
 it is not ours to give them. So that In the last 
 analysis we say that the question of whether it 
 is cold or not is a question of the temperature 
 of the complainant, and there is no way of 
 making the constantly chilly soul warm by 
 any external pressure or kindling from the 
 outside. 
 
 My answer to those who are critics of our 
 faith, who say It Is a cold religion, Is that you 
 must carry your own coals. If I am going 
 Into an arctic region I will see to It that pro- 
 vision Is made for fuel which Is heat producing. 
 I venture Into the arctic cold, but I would not 
 venture unprovided. So that to anyone who 
 says an Unitarian Church Is a cold place — the 
 simple answer Is that It Is cold to you. Those 
 who are accustomed to the atmosphere need 
 no artificial protection ; their circulation — the 
 intensity of their own feeling — warms them ; 
 
'' A Cold, Intellectual Religion " 167 
 
 and you must bring your own coals if you 
 would come. 
 
 Take a step farther. To the complaint that 
 it is a cold and an intellectual religion let me 
 answer that the emotions are not the test of 
 reality. We do reach God by the affections 
 and not by the intellect : there is no question 
 but that the path to the Infinite is through the 
 affections and not through any speculative 
 faculty whatever ; but the affections are not the 
 emotions. The emotions bloom upon the root 
 and stalk of the affections ; but it is not the 
 flower that is the thing ; it is the bloom of the 
 thinof itself that is the emotion ; and affection 
 is not judged by its flowering ; it is judged by 
 its constancy and the power of self-sacrifice 
 that is in it ; and to the gay and jocund nature 
 it may be quite possible that there is no depth 
 and power of loyalty whatever. It does not 
 follow that this is so ; but it may be so. That 
 for which men go to the stake, — whether it be 
 the quick incineration of some martyr fire, or 
 the slow burning away of life under some per- 
 petual sorrow for love's sake, — that which takes 
 them to such martyrdom, is no mere quick and 
 sudden overflow of emotion, but the alliance 
 of the soul unto reality, for which it must die, 
 whether by slow torture or quick fire ; whether 
 
1 68 One World at a Time 
 
 in the tragedy that has no record, or in the 
 martyrdom that writes the page of history ; it 
 is the consciousness of alHance with the real 
 and eternal, and this cannot be made depend- 
 ent upon any day's emotion. 
 
 I do not decry emotion in religion. If it 
 were not for emotion we would have few 
 prayers and no hymns. All hymns are born 
 of spiritual emotion, and prayers are wafted 
 upon the aspiration of the soul's outbreathing. 
 Its inspiration comes to it and it breathes 
 again unto high Heaven the thing which has 
 been inspired in it. But when all has been 
 said and done, in religion as in life it is reality 
 that counts; it is constancy that is dependable; 
 it is the marriage of the soul to an abiding 
 principle that remains. We reach God by the 
 affections : it is not possible that any religion 
 could be purely intellectual. 
 
 Now if you will recall for one moment the 
 reaction of the Protestant Reformation you 
 will realise that it was a reaction violent in 
 feeling and in method ; its reverberation has 
 been in the Dissenting churches ever since ; it 
 has set a kind of tone ; it has been a drum- 
 beat, a rally, a bugle-call, a championship to 
 enter the lists against the foe. But it has no 
 more value as the expression of fact than the 
 
'' A Cold, Intellectual Religion " 169 
 
 great musical history of the Roman Catholic 
 Church. The music is built upon the aestheti- 
 cism of human life, and is a legitimate con- 
 tribution to it. It was born of it, bred in it, 
 returned to it as a contribution to the aesthetic 
 in human life ; and the Protestant revival, 
 whether in the Church of England, in the Ger- 
 man Reformation, or in the sturdy contribution 
 of Methodism in the eighteenth century in 
 England, — when it in turn floated upon the 
 tides of emotion a higher life than that which 
 the English Church knew, — no matter from 
 what source it comes, nor to what end it 
 moves, it is, so far as its emotion is concerned, 
 but an incident; it is not the very thing 
 itself. 
 
 In the last and final statement, Religion 
 has this for its guarantee, in the words 
 of Martineau, that " for all time the differ- 
 ence must be infinite between the partisan 
 of beliefs and the man whose heart is set 
 upon reality." In the man whose heart 
 is set upon reality you have the registry 
 of fewer emotions, but when all the efferv- 
 escence has subsided, when all the quick 
 breath of adulation and praise and adoration 
 has gone by, he shall be found abiding, as 
 one who has found " the shadow of a ereat 
 
I70 One World at a Time 
 
 rock in a weary land" ; his "heart is set upon 
 reality." 
 
 I come back for a moment to consider the 
 statement that religion cannot be purely in- 
 tellectual, for the reason that it must be 
 thoroughly rational. Now, rationalism in re- 
 ligion, which so many people dread, includes 
 the speculative faculty, which is the instru- 
 ment of inquiry; includes the faculty of the 
 critic which is the discriminating faculty ; in- 
 cludes great affection, which is the conserving 
 faculty. To be wholly rational a man must 
 be clear ; but to say that religion is purely in- 
 tellectual — meaning that it dwells in the upper 
 chambers and clear air of speculative beliefs — 
 is not to state what can be true of religion as 
 a whole. If that objection were well taken, 
 it would be our condemnation. We do claim 
 that reason is the great final appeal ; but by 
 reason we mean the whole man. He is a 
 rational being- who " looks before and 
 after " ; whose " roots are in the soil and whose 
 head is in the sun " ; who has reasons for his 
 action, motives for his behaviour ; whose affec- 
 tions are the root of his principles and whose 
 principles are the regulation of his affections, 
 the one the sanctification of the other. Re- 
 ligion has to do with the whole man ; and 
 
"A Cold, Intellectual Religion" i;^ 
 
 religion must be rational or else it is super- 
 stition ; and so far as it lacks rationality it 
 partakes of the superstitious. 
 
 We are set against all superstition. But 
 we examine the myth and miracle as we 
 examine the fact ; for the myth is as legiti- 
 mate, — a flower growing upon a fruitful stem, 
 and the miracle as legitimate, — a fruit growing 
 in a credulous age, — as any fact that history 
 reveals ; and the myth and the miracle are 
 part of the poetry of religion ; for there is a 
 poetic interpretation of religion which is as 
 legitimate as its facts. 
 
 Religion is not a matter of statistics. You 
 cannot sum up its effects by the number of 
 " souls saved." That is a curious phrase in the 
 Book of Acts, which records that in one day 
 three thousand, and on another day five thou- 
 sand, proclaimed themselves disciples of Jesus ; 
 the record reads, " And the Lord added to the 
 Church daily those who should be saved!' It 
 is a question of character, fitness, and adjust- 
 ment, "who shoidd be saved"; the potential 
 mood coming in there is the interpretation of 
 the idea. So that when we contemplate a re- 
 vival of religion we never fail to welcome it, 
 but when it is over we wonder what will be 
 left. 
 
172 One World at a Time 
 
 Horace Bushnell pointed out to the Con- 
 gregationalism of his day, that " Christian 
 nurture " is the prime consideration in the 
 Christian life. It is one thino- to be born into 
 the world, and it is another thing to be well 
 nursed to self-supporting life. I should say, 
 that however many souls may be borne into 
 the Kingdom of God upon some tide of emo- 
 tion, you can only know what has lasted, re- 
 mained, by the achievements of those who 
 have constantly, steadily, loyally worked to 
 bring in the Kingdom of God in their turn. 
 Many a revival of religion has left the shore- 
 line strewed with the exhausted souls of peo- 
 ple whose whole psychical nature has been 
 involved in some tempest of emotion ; it may 
 be magnetism, or some mere phase of the 
 multiform psychic development of which we 
 know so little ; but it can be as surely produced 
 by artificial means as it can be perceived 
 when it is natural. This tide of emotional 
 and psychic sentiment is not to be deplored 
 any more than it is to be sought. He who 
 seeks it is to be deplored ; but he who de- 
 plores it knows not all of the human soul. 
 
 But religion in its last analysis must be 
 rational ; that is, it must be made up of these 
 constituents : there must be an awakened 
 
** A Cold, Intellectual Religion " 173 
 
 soul to which it comes ; it must be an alert 
 spiritual nature which participates in it, and 
 that spiritual nature must involve the whole 
 man from top to toe, — from the highlands of 
 his nature down to the very basilar instincts ; 
 the whole man is involved. It is not given to 
 us simply to feel deeply, but to think clearly 
 on the thought side of religion. It has been 
 well said by one of our thoughtful people : 
 " There are certain natures upon whom the 
 destiny has fallen of deep feeling and high 
 thinking ; and there is no rescue for them but 
 in deeper feeling and in higher thinking." 
 Many elements are involved in religion : a 
 basis of relief, which is intellectual apprehen- 
 sion ; a principle of action, which is the motive 
 of conduct ; and adjustment of the affections, 
 which is the unfailing source of devotion both 
 toward God and man. To the soul intent 
 upon the religious life there must be a strug- 
 gle to attain these. There are some, how- 
 ever, who grow weary of the struggle ; they 
 fall supine upon some ready-made profession 
 of faith and say that the Unitarian churches are 
 cold and purely intellectual places ; they have 
 not proved their criticism true ; they have 
 only registered the fact that they are tired 
 because they are not strong, — that is all ; and 
 
174 One World at a Time 
 
 they belong in some of the hospital sects 
 which take care of tired people who are not 
 very strong. I should say without the slightest 
 hesitancy to such people, " You belong here, 
 and here," and point them, as far as my advice 
 would go, to the place to which they should go. 
 If a man in any congregation belonging to 
 the Unitarian faith were to fall into that re- 
 laxed intellectual state in which he should say 
 to me, " I must have authority, some man's 
 statement for the final fact " ; if I were con- 
 vinced that that claim was grounded in the 
 necessity of his nature, and that there was no 
 resource for him in independent and rational 
 life, I would commend him at once to en- 
 roll himself somewhere in the multitude of 
 churches of the Roman Catholic faith, be- 
 cause there, at least, he would get authority 
 that has fifteen hundred years back of it, — 
 not always preserving the continuity of his- 
 tory, not always adorned by beauty of life, 
 but sometimes sanctified and purified by the 
 most celestial experience the world has ever 
 known ; but it is the radical distinction be- 
 tween such a Church and the Unitarian faith 
 that the one is based upon authority, and the 
 other stands unabashed before the tribunal 
 of reason. There are people who must be 
 
" A Cold, Intellectual Religion " 175 
 
 Roman Catholics by the structure of their very 
 spines, — they must be adherents of the Roman 
 Catholic Church ; they do not stand for any- 
 thing — they adhere to something ; just as 
 there are people who must be Quakers, to 
 whom all symbolism is an horror ; to whom all 
 ritual is an offence ; for whom " the inner 
 light " alone shines ; and its radiance from that 
 central place of power of the human soul 
 shines daily upon every act of life ; they must 
 belong to the Society of Friends. And if 
 some young girl or lad should say of the So- 
 ciety of Friends that it was cold or formal in 
 its beliefs, that they must go to some em- 
 broidered ritual, to some modern phantasm of 
 religion, — they must believe in some painted 
 hell of which they might be afraid, some 
 mythical heaven before which they might 
 prostrate themselves in imaginative delight, — 
 saying this they simply show that the faith of 
 their fathers and mothers has not yet been 
 awakened by spiritual experience in their 
 lives ; and they are like the people who would 
 say, on the one hand, " We must be clothed " 
 (yes, for warmth and decency), and, on the 
 other, " What is the latest fashion in clothes ? " 
 (That has nothing to do with warmth and de- 
 cency). Such claims in the name of religion 
 
176 One World at a Time 
 
 are on the mere fringe of the mind ; it is 
 not even an emotion ; it is the sHght scum 
 that rises upon the pool of thought, and may 
 be skimmed off, and may every season form 
 again according to the fashion of the time. 
 That is neither thought nor feeling ; that is 
 simply vapid and inane trifling with Eternal 
 Verities. 
 
 Let me call attention to a consideration 
 that must never be lost sight of. What is 
 the object of religion ? I have no hesit- 
 ancy in saying that it is the formation of 
 character. If it does that, it is good so far as 
 that is done. If it does anything else, not 
 doing that, it is evil. If the Roman Catholic 
 faith saps the foundations of reason it is so 
 far evil ; for it produces the saintly character 
 in perhaps the most useless form of life that 
 the world has ever undertaken to follow, — the 
 monk, who sits in his monastery, and the nun 
 who fades out in her cloister. Still, the Cath- 
 olic faith produces often the sublimest type of 
 spiritual devotion, — the sublimated character. 
 If the Protestant Episcopal Church, for in- 
 stance (since I must be specific in these il- 
 lustrations), gathers to itself for prayer by 
 quotation those who can never pray for them- 
 selves, the people who like to have their 
 
**A Cold, Intellectual Religion" 177 
 
 religious services mapped out for them, — there 
 is nothing to say but that they are that kind 
 of people; but the test still remains, — does 
 character result ? Many a time, yes ; because 
 many a diffident soul in this world, meaning 
 some time to go upon some errand of love, to 
 find his mate, has been encouraged by reading 
 the love-passages of other biographers, and 
 has learned the habit of the lover's mind from 
 the printed page, regulating his instincts and 
 adjusting his emotions by what has been 
 proved lovable and adorable. It is true, but 
 it is remote : it seems rather a playing at 
 love ; a childish make-believe which the grand 
 passion of life shall sweep away when it floods 
 the soul. 
 
 I do not wish to say one word depreciatory 
 of any faith that makes character. I do not 
 care how it is made, of what stuff it is made, 
 how long it takes, what sorrows it involves, 
 what joys it insures, what high-hearted hope 
 it engenders, what great, black despair the 
 soul passes through in the process, if in the 
 end character be formed, of which the tests 
 are three : First, how does a man feel when 
 he is livinor with himself ? Second, how does 
 anybody feel who is living with him ? Third, 
 what place does he take in the social order, 
 
178 One World at a lime 
 
 and how bear his share of the social respons- 
 ibility ? The religion which does that well, 
 and in the ratio in which it does it, is the 
 religion for that man, whatever it may be for 
 the next ; for all forms of faith are 
 
 " . . , but broken lights of Thee, 
 And Thou, O Lord, art more than they." 
 
 A single suggestion. Much of the warmth 
 of the so-called emotion of religion is impos- 
 sible to us, and ought to be impossible in this 
 age to anybody. For instance, there is no 
 human being called by our name who has the 
 slightest interest in that form of theologic 
 presentment which belonged to the chromo 
 period of ecclesiastical art, which depicts an 
 uninteresting Heaven largely derived from Mil- 
 ton's Paradise Lost. The Book of Revela- 
 tion also is so often quoted for proof-texts, 
 that it seems well to say it does not re- 
 fer to Heaven, from the first to the last. It is 
 the story of the New Jerusalem on earth, the 
 vision of the regeneration of human society. 
 But the Divines, so-called, who live their little 
 lives tied to their body of divinity, after the 
 manner of Paul when he cried, " Who shall 
 deliver me from the body of this death ? " — for 
 a " body of divinity " is always a corpse, — 
 
"A Cold, Intellectual Religion " 179 
 
 these Divines have pictured Heaven to make 
 men want to go there ; but they have never 
 made them in any haste to die. They may 
 also picture Hell to make sinners want to stay 
 away, and it is an interesting experiment in 
 the ghost -lore and spook -lore of primitive 
 faiths, but it has nothing to do with religion. 
 
 If a human being goes to an incurable hell 
 there is no God ; an incurable hell and a lov- 
 ing God cannot be in the universe at the 
 same time. You cannot have an incurable 
 hell and an unexhausted compassion at the 
 same time ; with all such aspects of doctrine 
 we have nothing to do. We cannot make 
 people feel, if that makes them feel. They 
 are in the condition of those who cannot sit 
 down and read a drama and see it enacted 
 in the mind ; they must have melodrama on 
 the stage, — the "barn-storming" type of act- 
 ing, and all the other exciting conditions of a 
 half-developed art. That is their situation, 
 and they must get it where they can. We 
 cannot furnish it, thank God ! If that con- 
 stitutes the chill, then it is the chill of early 
 spring, in which all the buds are swelling in 
 spite of the chill of the atmosphere, because 
 the sap is running up and the vital forces 
 of the world are reviving and calling the 
 
i8o One World at a Time 
 
 summer to banish laggard winter from the 
 world. The man who feels this chill must 
 go back into his shell until he has been 
 furnished the temperature which his thin 
 blood invites. 
 
 For the most of us God's outdoors in the 
 open weather is good enough, and we need 
 neither heaven nor hell of the old proportions, 
 nor yet a God of the old revolting type, 
 " to make us feel." The eternal compassion, 
 the unfailing goodness of God is not en- 
 throned now remotely and alien from man ; 
 it is simply in the world to rational faith ; 
 kindled in all its emotions by unfailing affec- 
 tion, He is enthroned in every worshipping 
 heart ; so that a new Deity needs a new 
 worship, so much larger is the fact of God ; 
 and prayer must take on an adoration which 
 the old type of supplication would not allow ; 
 and praise must sound in terms so great that 
 its old feebleness shall seem like the plaintive 
 echo of spirits in prison longing for the light 
 of the outer world. " Great hopes are for 
 great souls ! " 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 "A DIFFICULT RELIGION" 
 
 WHAT people mean by a form of faith 
 being " difificiilt " may be of two kinds ; 
 either they may mean that it is difficult to 
 understand, or they may mean that it is diffi- 
 cult to carry out in practical living. These 
 are the only difficulties that confront people 
 in the consideration of a religious faith : 
 either their minds do not grasp it easily, 
 or their lives do not adjust themselves to 
 it readily. 
 
 Now, what do we mean by a statement of 
 religion being difficult to understand ? We 
 mean that its definitions are hard to come at. 
 That is the only thing there is to understand 
 in religion ; all the rest is experience. For 
 instance, when one declares that he misses 
 an elaborated theological statement in Uni- 
 tarianism, we answer : That is our boast, that 
 we do not make an elaborated theological 
 statement. For if you will analyse any of 
 
1 82 One World at a Time 
 
 the histories of dogma running through the 
 Christian centuries, you will discover that 
 they are taken up, for the most part, with 
 what no human being ever could know ; that 
 is, they are discussing questions that are not 
 only impossible of determination, but they 
 are impossible of adjustment to practical 
 living. How can any human being know 
 whether God is one, or three, or a million ? 
 " No man hath seen God at any time." If 
 I am asked if the unity of God is theolo- 
 gically true, I say, I do not know whether 
 it is theologically true. I only know that it 
 is philosophically necessary, because you can- 
 not get on in the study of a universe that 
 has no centre. You cannot get on in the 
 study of forces that are modes of manifest- 
 ation of one energy if you are not sure that 
 the energy is one. You are immediately 
 caught in the snare and stumble on the 
 difficulties of contradictory first causes. The 
 very phrase is contradictory ; there cannot 
 be two first causes. I am not concerned 
 as to whether the unity of God is theo- 
 logically true ; I am only concerned with the 
 question whether it is philosophically neces- 
 sary in order to my thinking, and whether 
 it focuses the mind best, and brings the 
 
-A Difficult Religion" 183 
 
 human enerofies to their acts of devotion 
 and acts of service with least distraction. 
 People who want a theory of the Trinity go 
 browsing back through the various pasture- 
 lands of theological outcropping, and gather 
 here a form of tritheism, and there a modal 
 form of manifestation ; and when they are 
 through it is something no human being 
 can know. So with regard to the question 
 of the deity of Jesus of Nazareth. People 
 say, '* It is so easy to believe that he was 
 God." And no one of them can tell what 
 God is like. They really mean what Starr 
 King — our splendid Starr King — said when 
 he declared, " O God, Thou art an infinite 
 Christ." In other words, he meant what they 
 mean, that the divine quality that is in Jesus 
 of Nazareth, his perfect manhood and hu- 
 manity, are in such terms of sublimity and 
 grandeur and purity, that if we could have 
 them infinitely extended, we would have a 
 Being whom we could worship, and it would 
 be God. That is what they mean when they 
 say, " It is so easy to believe that Jesus is 
 God." In saying this their logic breaks down, 
 but their impulse is just right. So, if a man 
 should come to me and say, as men have 
 said, " What would you do with me in the 
 
1 84 One World at a Time 
 
 Unitarian Church if I came in and said that 
 Jesus is God ? " I would say to him at once : 
 " I would not quarrel with you at all. I 
 would infinitely rather have you say that 
 he is God than that he is 'mere man.'" 
 That is the most disagreeable phrase in the 
 language to a Unitarian ear, — "mere man." 
 For no human beinor knows what " mere man" 
 is, any more than, as someone has said, he 
 knows what " mere Alps " or " mere solar 
 system " is. We do not use diminutive terms 
 when we speak of the finest things human 
 nature has ever seen. If a man says, " Jesus 
 was God," he would be mistaken in the fact, 
 but if he said, " Jesus was mere man," that 
 would be a mistake in his morale. In one 
 instance he would be exalting the human be- 
 yond its proportions ; in the other instance 
 he would be degrading it below his respect. 
 The first is an intellectual misapprehension ; 
 the second is a moral error. So when we 
 make a distinction between deity and divinity, 
 we are encountered by people who say : "It is 
 extremely hard to understand. What is the 
 difference between deity and divinity ? You 
 say 'Jesus is divine; all humanity is divine.' 
 What do you mean ? " I mean that it has in 
 it the stuff that God can show Himself in. 
 
A Difficult Relidon" 185 
 
 fc>' 
 
 That is to be divine. But there is but " one 
 God, the Father, whose we are, and whom 
 we serve." We are all stuff that He can make 
 Himself manifest in. Suppose you have a 
 sculptor with every ideal of art in his mind, 
 with all the beautiful visions of his mind, 
 seeking expression in some material that is fit. 
 Phidias could not have made his figure for 
 the Acropolis out of sponge. He needed 
 gold and ivory. He needed workable material 
 that was susceptible of fine finish. He needed 
 the gold's lustre and the ivory's shine, and 
 the pliability of each to the graver's tool. If 
 he had taken sponge or cork, or some porous 
 substance, he might have had an idea like 
 God, but when he got through he would have 
 had a thing like a sponge. That is what we 
 mean by the divine quality in human nature, 
 and in Jesus, its best representative ; and 
 the only reason that people find it difficult 
 to understand is that their minds are sophis- 
 ticated by theological preconceptions ; and 
 there is a law in physics that you cannot put 
 two things in the same place at the same time. 
 If the mind is filled up with theological junk, 
 the only thing to do in order to find Unitari- 
 anism easy, is to clear out the old stock and 
 start in business from the basis of something 
 
i86 One World at a Time 
 
 that the world wants. So, in all the history 
 of dogma, people miss the things they have 
 somehow or other attached to religfion. I 
 remember distinctly the first day on which, 
 when I was twenty years of age, there came 
 to me the conception that religion was some- 
 thing that could be stated in terms of soul, 
 and was not necessarily stated in terms of 
 theoloorical definition ; and I grathered that 
 from the earliest book of Dr. Martineau, £n- 
 deavors after the Christiaii Life. I remem- 
 ber standing up in the middle of my room, a 
 young Methodist preacher in the country, in 
 Maryland, and opening that book, and saying : 
 " Here is a discovery. Here is a man who 
 tells about religion in terms of soul. If he is 
 dealing with Christ, it is not in terms of an 
 atonement. If he is dealing with God, it is 
 not in terms of a Trinity. If he is dealing 
 with the future life, it is not in terms of heaven 
 and hell. It is all in terms of soul." To 
 anybody who has had the other training, 
 that comes with a shock and surprise. The 
 student who has been taken out of the secul- 
 arism of his life and put under the training 
 of academic professors in a theological semin- 
 ary gets caught in the mesh of the net, so 
 that he does not swim clear for quite a while, 
 
"A Difficult Religion" 187 
 
 no matter how deep the sea is, nor how 
 pellucid the waves. So they say Unitarian- 
 ism is difficult, because of the trailing re- 
 mainder of theory in which they tangle their 
 feet when they are trying to be free. 
 
 Now when we come to the second form of 
 difficulty — not the difficulty of understanding, 
 for our scheme of life, our method of looking 
 at things is perfectly simple — but when we 
 come to the other, the task of adjusting life to 
 it, there is a real difficulty. I have no interest in 
 easy religion. Easy thinking is apt to be foolish 
 thinking. Easy ethics is either morals turned 
 loose, not girded as to the loin, not tightened as 
 to the purpose ; or else it is small moralities ; 
 and there is a great mass of people in the congre- 
 gations of the Christian churches who are best 
 satisfied when there are being peddled out to 
 them small moralities, — a kind of retail busi- 
 ness in " fancy notions" in religion. They are 
 perfectly satisfied under those conditions. Now 
 I have not the slightest interest in that. The 
 religious life should be difficult in its thinking, 
 difficult in its purpose, difficult in its struggle, 
 to the point where it is victorious, in some 
 phase of experience, and from that time on 
 that phase of it, at least, becomes easy. Why 
 should the apprentice make infinite blunders 
 
1 88 One World at a Time 
 
 in his craft ? Why should the artist struggle 
 through years of preparation ? Why should 
 the medical student find the utmost difficulty 
 in getting anybody to let him experiment 
 upon him ? Why should any of the crafts 
 and skills of life come only by infinite strug- 
 gle, outlay of effort, mind, and exertion the 
 most strenuous and insistent, and the religious 
 life, which is the science of manhood, the re- 
 ligious life, which is the splendid achievement 
 of the human soul, — the making of a human 
 soul, which is the only business you have in 
 hand, — why should that come easily to peo- 
 ple who six days out of the week are plunged 
 in a bog of daily duties, and come out on Sun- 
 day to sun themselves for an hour ? The fact 
 is, the religious life ought to be difficult, if it 
 is worth while. I do not mean to say it is 
 difficult because it is unnatural, abnormal, or 
 supernatural. It is the natural that is so diffi- 
 cult. In a group of sycophants it is difficult 
 for a sincere man to speak the truth. In a 
 group of traders, by some occult process of 
 the markets, it is difficult for a man who has 
 something to sell and knows its value, either 
 to set his price or to get it. A man said to 
 me, when I asked him why two immortal souls 
 should be six weeks buying a horse, " If we 
 
" A Difficult Religion " 189 
 
 came to terms within three days, we should 
 each think the other had cheated him ! " It is 
 the natural that is difficult. I n a period of court 
 manners, the natural man is called brusque 
 and lacking in the diplomatic address of the 
 court. So with regard to the whole range of 
 life. Our first struggle is to get back to the 
 simplicities of nature. Any woman in the 
 midst of " the season " will tell you that much of 
 her time is given to the study of what is ex- 
 pected of her, to the study of the conventions 
 that cloister her on every side, to the weigh- 
 ing of probabilities as to the effect of this or 
 that method of life, dress, and behaviour. 
 The inanities of this sort that come to a min- 
 ister's knowledge would make a comic issue of 
 the book of life if it were not for the tragic 
 waste involved. And all for want of sim- 
 plicity, directness, and naturalness of life. 
 Somebody starts out who is perfectly natural ; 
 and he is immediately called Bohemian, irregu- 
 ular, daring. He is living his own life on his 
 own terms. Of course, he must moderate his 
 own terms to conform to the social contract, 
 for he is not living alone, he is living in society. 
 I use this illustration simply to call your at- 
 tention to the fact that it is not because re- 
 ligion is abnormal, unnatural, supernatural, but 
 
iQo One World at a Time 
 
 absolutely an expression of nature, that it is 
 difficult to conform to its simplest require- 
 ments. 
 
 What is involved, then, in the Unitarian 
 faith, as it applies to life ? 
 
 First, passion for the Truth. There is a very- 
 good definition given of the true, the good, and 
 the beautiful, that "The true is what is ; the 
 good is what ought to be ; and the beautiful is 
 what is as it ought to be." That is a very good 
 definition ; and if we will just think for a mo- 
 ment how far we live aside from that require- 
 ment, how far we are from demanding what is, 
 — rather asking to hear what we can bear, and 
 to see what we ought to gaze upon, and to walk 
 by paths that are safe, going cannily even then, 
 — when we realise that this is the common de- 
 mand, then the passion for the truth, as the 
 thing that is, comes before the soul as almost 
 an impossible ideal. And yet in a world of 
 fancies, the only Infallible Pope is the fact. 
 The fact is the only infallible thing in the 
 world ; and the search for the thing that is, as 
 to the soul, as to the soul's endeavour, as to the 
 will of God, as to the adjustment of the right 
 relations of life, as to character, — the passion 
 for that marks a demand that is difficult, but 
 is as necessary as it is difficult, if our interest 
 
"A Difficult Reliction" 191 
 
 t>' 
 
 is in the forming of character, in the living of 
 the higher life. And by the higher life I simply 
 mean human life ; by the lower life, brute life. 
 The higher life is the human life : carried to its 
 infinite extension, you get The Christ ; carried 
 to its infinite possibilities, you get the humanity 
 of God. 
 
 So we are given, not only to the passion for 
 the truth, but to the love of goodness. Often 
 the incisive, the far-down, deep trouble with us 
 is that men do not believe in the triumph of 
 goodness. Men who believe in that would 
 stake everything on it ; but you will meet other 
 men at the crossing of the roads of some moral 
 action, and if you could look into their minds, if 
 you could know what they were thinking about, 
 almost unconsciously to themselves, at the 
 cross-roads between right and wrong, where 
 that road leads to death, and this to life, — you 
 would find them standing there wondering if 
 there be not some short road across lots ; they 
 spend their energy and power of mind and 
 strength upon a nice balancing of probabilities, 
 as to whether they can sail close to the reefs 
 of wrong-doing and yet escape. They spend 
 upon that question energies of soul and mind 
 that would make saints of them if it were ap- 
 plied to the real development of the spiritual 
 
192 One World at a Time 
 
 life. Our real trouble is that we do not believe 
 in goodness. We worship smartness ; we 
 worship cleverness ; we worship wealth. What 
 a sickening thing it is to have the papers con- 
 stantly filled with just two items : one, the fam- 
 ilies that have gone to pieces over night ; the 
 other, the fortunes that have been made in the 
 last twenty-four hours ! The triumph of good- 
 ness is better than the divorce court ; and the 
 vindication of goodness is better than the for- 
 tune of a millionaire. I do not q-q so far as 
 the proverb that says, " Better is a dinner of 
 herbs." That might be very well for a man who 
 had everything and could make proverbs for 
 people who had nothing, as Solomon did. But 
 the real necessity is, that the man in the rough 
 and tumble of life — the man who is underneath 
 the crowd that is piled on top of him — if he 
 would save himself alive, must believe in the 
 ultimate triumph of goodness. Failure here is 
 the only infidelity left in the world. A man 
 cannot philosophically say, "There is no God." 
 We have worked out of the materialism in 
 which it was said that man had no soul. That 
 Slough of Despond has been waded, and we 
 are on firm land, philosophically and scientifi- 
 cally. The only real infidelity is that of the 
 man who prefers to get on, no matter how 
 
*' A Difficult Religion " 193 
 
 soon he may have to get off. His ideal of 
 success is accumulation, aggrandisement, posi- 
 tion, elevation ; when, if for one day he were 
 enamoured of goodness, these things would 
 seem to him so empty that he would feel as if 
 he had been walking in the midst of shadows, 
 and living to no purpose whatever. 
 
 Finally, there is the adoration of what ought 
 to be in perfect character. The Unitarian 
 churches are not allowed by their code of 
 what is right to boast of perfection. We 
 know that we are not perfect. But between 
 boasting of ** sanctification," " perfection," 
 speaking of the Infinite Being as though He 
 were somebody that lived around the corner, 
 in the most irrelevant and irreverent way, — 
 between that and the struggle to be good, the 
 adoration of character, there is all the stretch 
 of celestial diameters. And the business of 
 religion is the formation of character. The 
 people who find this difficult come to us and 
 say : " When you speak of being saved by 
 character, are you not arrogating to yourselves 
 righteousness?" Our answer Is very sim- 
 ple. We do not know of any righteousness 
 except our own. If there be any righteous- 
 ness that I can have " imputed " to me, It will 
 not be mine, any more than somebody's else 
 
194 One World at a Time 
 
 costume would be mine if I appeared in it. 
 If I may have a righteousness that is not 
 mine, there must be some means of communi- 
 cation between my soul and God to make it 
 mine. The fact is, there is only one kind of 
 righteousness that a man can know, — the 
 kind that to him is ideal ; he sees it in another 
 and he strives for it himself. That is the 
 whole problem of life. There is no system of 
 atonement ; no attributing to me of the vir- 
 tues of another; no saving of my soul by any 
 process that is outside myself that can possibly 
 be effective. Would you save your soul by 
 some process of theological insurance ? If 
 you are saved, your soul will do the saving. 
 In other words, you will come up by soul-force 
 into the life, whatever it is, that belongs to 
 the Great Father — the life that is in reserve 
 for us ; you will come up into it as the seed 
 comes up into the summer, because it has the 
 power of fertility and life in itself. 
 
 The problem of saving the soul is to have 
 a soul that is worth saving. Now, no man 
 can say that of himself in any arrogant 
 way ; but, after all, it is the thing we be- 
 lieve concerning those whom we feel have 
 been brouofht out of death into life, out of 
 trouble into victory, out of temptation into 
 
" A Difficult Religion " 195 
 
 achievement : that they were there by virtue 
 of a faculty in them which could not be killed 
 nor set aside. If you are ever saved, your soul 
 will be the instrument of your salvation. No 
 miner ever carries out his work in the vein 
 where he does not expect to find ore. It is 
 the real, essential value of human life that it 
 cannot perish without affecting the life of 
 God. 
 
 Unitarianism is an exacting faith. There 
 are apt to be in all our churches people who, 
 because they are affronted by Orthodoxy, 
 think they are Unitarians ; because they have 
 found it impossible to believe the old state- 
 ment, say, "We are Unitarians." The idea 
 is very common that, because you can swear 
 at a thing in which you do not believe, you 
 have sworn to a thing in which you have 
 come to believe. Mere revolt, mere angry 
 denunciation, mere protest, is not religion. 
 It is only a convulsion of the mind. When 
 you get over your convulsion, and conditions 
 of health set in, you are ready to be brought 
 out to a larger and better faith. 
 
 We must allow for these people who are 
 clinging to a raft because they have escaped 
 from the wreck — which is a very natural atti- 
 tude ; if the ship has gone to pieces and you 
 
196 One World at a Time 
 
 are in the sea, you naturally cling to the thing 
 that is afloat ; it may be a bit of timber, or it 
 may be a life-raft ; but after we have allowed 
 for this flotsam and jetsam of the theological 
 world, we come to those who are strueoflinof, 
 with devotion to the truth, the adoration of 
 goodness, the endeavour for character that is 
 safe because it is sound. What is the exaction 
 upon them? There are just three particulars. 
 The first is that religion is an experience and 
 not a theory. It is a conscious, deliberate, 
 constant realisation of communion between 
 the soul and God. If that were not known by 
 thousands upon thousands in all the churches, 
 then the Church would have ceased to be effect- 
 ive, and the ministry would have come to be 
 the mere show of a profession. That is the 
 first exaction that Unitarianism lays upon 
 the soul, because it has no artificial helps for 
 the soul. It does not furnish emotional 
 gatherings, in which, by excitation of the 
 emotions, the religious life is made to seem 
 possible for the moment. It does not have an 
 elaborated liturgy with its services. It makes 
 its own service in each instance. If it rises to 
 power and efficiency, that is because the peo- 
 ple engaged in it have power. There are few 
 helps in Unitarianism of an external kind. 
 
" A Difficult Religion " 197 
 
 We do not believe that man is lame, so we do 
 not furnish crutches. We do not believe that 
 man is sick, so we do not prescribe nostrums. 
 We do not believe he is lost, so we do not 
 propose for him salvation from hell. None of 
 the pictorial conditions are with us that are 
 furnished by other churches. We are saved 
 much time and much endeavour, and get down 
 to the central fact in all religion, under all 
 names, namely : Can the soul know God, and 
 does it know when God speaks to it ? And 
 that is the thing for which you and I are to 
 struggle from first to last ; and if we do not 
 realise it in some sense, we have not touched 
 the border of the religious life. 
 
 The second difficulty arises from the fact that 
 we have focused responsibility upon man. We 
 stand by the order of Nature — and Nature 
 does not allow us to put our sins on anybody 
 else. You charge your sickness to the drainage ; 
 but you have to take your own medicine — 
 you do not pour it down the drain. You say, 
 " I was hurt by a blunder of the motorman." 
 Very well ; but it is not the motorman's legs 
 that are put in splints. The whole system of 
 thought with us is that you have got to focus 
 responsibility well in the foreground of your 
 life. We do our own book-keeping, and 
 
198 One World at a Time 
 
 balance our debit and credit as the days go by. 
 The system that relieves man of responsibil- 
 ity, defrauds him of moral power. There is 
 a vulgar proverb in the Old Testament in 
 which Jehovah is represented as saying, "Ye 
 shall no more say, The fathers have eaten 
 sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on 
 edge. I say unto you that all souls are mine. 
 As the soul of the father, so the soul of the 
 son is mine, and the soul that sinneth it shall 
 die." That is the teaching, not of the Old 
 Testament alone, but of the New. Did Jesus 
 deal gently and suavely with life ? No ; he 
 dealt with life as a surgeon. He said, "Why 
 beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's 
 eye, but considerest not the beam that is in 
 thine own eye ? " He dealt with things as 
 they were, and built from the ground up. The 
 whole business of life is to get your respons- 
 ibility so near home that you can attend to it. 
 
 The Unitarian faith is difficult because it in- 
 sists that you shall look out for the other man. 
 There is not room in it for selfishness, and a 
 selfish Unitarian is no Unitarian at all. If you 
 are intent on your own condition, your own 
 affairs, you may go somewhere else and attend 
 to them. There is no room for anybody 
 who is self-centered and focused on his own 
 
" A Difficult Religion " 199 
 
 affairs ; there is no room in life, in nature, 
 where everything is related and nothing stands 
 alone, — there is no room for the man who is 
 only taken up with himself. " Thou shalt love 
 the other as thyself," is not new with us. It 
 falls from the lips of Christ, and we believe, as 
 one of the fathers of the Church well said : 
 " Man first ; then God." And I doubt whether 
 any human being ever knows God in any sav- 
 ing and powerful way who has not known 
 man in some intimate and sympathetic way. 
 
 These are some of the exactions ; and when 
 men say that we are difficult, they lose sight of 
 the fact that thousands of people have found 
 it not too difficult to live the sublime and 
 radiant faith that they believe. Indeed, it is 
 true of all life, that the radiance and joy of our 
 inner experience is in the very ratio in which 
 we entertain high ideals. The human soul 
 that in a large, strong, intimate, and real way 
 deals with things as they are, because the soul 
 is struggling toward God, finds its heaven here, 
 and its divine communion lasting. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 "PULLING DOWN AND BUILDING UP" 
 
 SOMETIMES it is said that Unitarianisin 
 is a religion of denial ; sometimes that it 
 is a religion of negation ; sometimes that it is 
 entirely occupied with the critical faculty. But 
 I have stated the objection in its simplest and 
 most understandable form, namely, the con- 
 stantly recurring criticism that Unitarianism 
 pulls down but does not build up. There could 
 not be anything more untrue ; but that is not an 
 answer ; that is a protest. If this criticism 
 were true, then Unitarianism ought to go out 
 of business. If it were only partially true, it 
 would be a serious arraignment of its useful- 
 ness. But since it is absolutely untrue to the 
 last degree as touching anything that ought 
 not to be pulled down, my answer may meet, 
 in several particulars, I hope, the criticism that 
 it is a religion that pulls down but does not 
 build up. 
 
 What do the critics mean who say this? 
 
*' Pulling Down and Building Up " 201 
 
 They mean that Unitarlanism has encouraged 
 free inquiry ; and this, to one who wishes to 
 wall himself up in dreams, or immure himself 
 in theories, 'or hedge himself by traditions, or 
 embark upon a raft that never goes anywhere, 
 but is in perpetual oscillation on the high sea 
 of mind, is a horror and a distress. There are 
 people who are perfectly willing to anchor to a 
 floating bog, and when they think they have 
 made progress, it has only been because their 
 anchorage has shifted ; they have not gone 
 anywhere by intention. There are people who 
 are entirely satisfied to regard the anchor as 
 the entire equipment of a ship, making no pro- 
 vision for sails, or steam, or cordage, or even a 
 binnacle-light, to say nothing of chart and 
 helmsman, and all the splendid equipment of 
 the voyage of mind and the adventure of the 
 spirit. These are the people who discount 
 free inquiry. These are the people who have 
 forcjotten that it was a Church Father — St. 
 Hilary — who said, "If offence come with the 
 truth, then better the offence than that the 
 truth should be concealed." What this class 
 of critics has forgotten would make a library ; 
 and what they have not known would equip a 
 great university with material of literature and 
 knowledge. What shall the human mind — 
 
202 One World at a Time 
 
 the thinking machine of the world — do but 
 think, inquire, put a premium upon investiga- 
 tion, lay bare by the scalpel the tissues of the 
 thing inquired into, subject to the close 
 scrutiny of the microscope every great thought 
 nature has to reveal, and point the tube of 
 their far-reaching inquiry by the telescope into 
 the stellar spaces, to find God still at work ? 
 
 But if anybody is afraid to have his mind act, 
 and does not like to carry his personal sover- 
 eignty under the crown of his own hat, and wants 
 to have what the mercantile classes call " ready- 
 to-wear " opinions ; why, then, to such people, 
 Unitarianism in the process of free inquiry, 
 seems to be pulling down and not building up. 
 And yet, these very people, if they are devot- 
 ees of art, would have stood rejoicing when 
 the wall of the church was ripped open that the 
 Venus of the Capitol might be rescued from 
 Its Immured condition. The monks walled up 
 the chaste figure, because they were afraid of 
 their own emotions ; and a later age ripped 
 open the sacred structure that it might recover 
 an ancient work of art ; and it did well. But 
 these who, for the sake of sesthetlc beauty and 
 the history of art, would have countenanced 
 such a sacrilege as that, when the human mind 
 is Intent upon discovering the beauty of life In 
 
" Pulling Down and Building Up " 203 
 
 terms of power, seek at once an anaesthetic, an 
 opiate, something that will act as a sedative 
 upon inquiry, and they shy at the word " scep- 
 tic," forgetting that it was Jesus himself who 
 said to Thomas : " Reach hither thy finger and 
 see my hands ; and reach hither thy hand and 
 thrust it into my side ; and be not faithless, but 
 believing." This was what the Master of the 
 art of living said to the sceptic among the 
 disciples. 
 
 This criticism that Unitarianism pulls down 
 and does not build up, arises also from the 
 fact that Unitarianism has set personal re- 
 ligion over against authority. There is not a 
 member of the Society of Friends believing 
 in the "inner light" — there is no Methodist 
 intent upon the revival of religion in the 
 terms of the ministry of the Holy Spirit, — 
 there is no lay churchman of the Protestant 
 Episcopal Church, busy with evangelical asser- 
 tion of the rights of the human soul as against 
 ritual, — there is no Catholic mystic dreaming 
 of communion even upon terms so carnal as 
 those that appear in the words of Mary of the In- 
 carnation, whose " marriage to Christ " affronts 
 our taste, — there is not one of these who be- 
 lieves more profoundly that religion is not a 
 theory, but an experience, than do those 
 
204 One World at a Time 
 
 Unitarians that are worth naminor in this con- 
 nection. ReHgion is not a theory ; it is an 
 experience. Its definitions are theoretical ; 
 but men do not live in definition. Men fight 
 over definitions ; they grow rabid about defini- 
 tions ; they are contentious over definitions; 
 we range all the way from mild protest to 
 violence and bloodshed over definitions. And 
 the only corrective to that insanity is the com- 
 mon experience of divine realities. Men un- 
 derstand one another who speak the language 
 of the spirit, who never could understand each 
 other when speaking the language of speculat- 
 ive theology. Men understand one another 
 who can pray together ; just as men with the 
 blazon of the cross before them marched from 
 every part of Europe, speaking every language 
 of the Western world, to rescue the sepulchre of 
 Christ, because they were inflamed by one 
 common purpose that to them was the experi- 
 ence of a great emotion ; and they fulfilled the 
 splendid phrase of one of the fathers of the 
 Church, who speaks of " the expulsive power of 
 a great affection." 
 
 There is only one kind of way to love purely 
 and strongly in the world. There is any quan- 
 tity of diversities in the theory of what love is 
 like ; how love is provoked ; what course love 
 
" Pulling Down and Building Up " 205 
 
 may take ; what are the physiological and psy- 
 chological elements that enter into affection ; 
 how far it is based in brute instinct, and how 
 far it is the result of celestial visitation. All 
 this, that might be extended to a programme 
 of infinite absurdity, has to do with the defini- 
 tion ; and the world goes on loving in its old, 
 plain, splendid, regenerative way as the genera- 
 tions go by. Religion is an experience of 
 divine realities. It is not to be had by au- 
 thority, because no human experience can be 
 transplanted from one human soul to another. 
 It grows in every case from the seed, and the 
 seed is harrowed in by the necessities of the 
 spiritual nature, and free inquiry and personal 
 obligation are necessary to the mellowing of 
 the soul that it may be sowed with the seed of 
 a real experience. Now, if anybody is satis- 
 fied with authority, then that is the kind of 
 thing he wants, and he is of no concern to 
 this discussion. If anybody must have author- 
 ity that runs back at least fifteen hundred years, 
 he should go, as I have said, into the Roman 
 Catholic Church. It is not the genuine thing. 
 It is the first great schism in Christianity, 
 but it has its fifteen hundred years. Let him 
 go there if he must have authority ; that is, 
 if anybody is so constructed that he must 
 
2o6 One World at a Time 
 
 have crutches when he is not lame, then the 
 Catholic Church furnishes the most admirable 
 adaptation of fictitious supports for beings 
 that have legs. But that is not a substitute 
 for personal religion. A woman who has been 
 in one of the great churches comes to me 
 and says : " When I came face to face with 
 the death of the person whom I loved best 
 in all the world, I wanted to know for my- 
 self what were the issues of life and death." 
 And that, every minister of religion confronts 
 over and over again. For calm weather, when 
 indifference is quite a sufficient equipment for 
 the soul, authority is quite comfortable, just as 
 securities are well placed in some bank of safe 
 deposit ; but when you want to use the thing 
 you own as quick assets at a crisis, you must 
 know whether it is negotiable in the market. 
 That is the whole situation. That is the 
 whole question : Whether I can take another 
 man's opinion for a thing that is tearing the 
 soul out of me. Whether I can take an- 
 other man's discovery for my consolation when 
 I am lost, and whether a chart that was made 
 in the seventeenth century is good sailing 
 directions for a voyage made in the twentieth 
 century. Because Unitarianism has insisted 
 upon personal religion as an experience, it is 
 
"Pulling Down and Building Up " 207 
 
 said that it pulls down and does not build up. 
 Another reason that affects the people who 
 are influenced by numbers : There is always a 
 large contingent in the world who never believe 
 that anything is so unless somebody is shout- 
 ing about it, and unless a great many people 
 are endorsins^ it. A thinof is true in the 
 ratio of its popularity; and Unitarianism has 
 not set itself to make proselytes nor to build 
 churches except as incidental to the great work 
 of building character. So it is asked : " Why 
 is it that you have less than five hundred 
 churches in America ? " There is no answer 
 to that, except that building churches would 
 possibly have diverted us from the great task 
 of building a literature, which we have done. 
 Every man of the first rank in the literary 
 group of the last generation, with one or two 
 exceptions, was a member, avowed and devoted, 
 of a Unitarian Church. This is not a boast ; it 
 is a fact. They did not apologise for it. Why 
 should I apologise for them ? I simply state 
 the fact, that the great names, which I will not 
 take time to rehearse, with the exception of 
 Washington Irving and one other, were Unit- 
 arians. They were busy with the production of 
 what has been the companionableness of liter- 
 ature in this country, and which was supposed 
 
2o8 One World at a Time 
 
 to constitute a literature until Mr. Barrett Wen- 
 dell wrote his book a few months ago. 
 
 Unitarians are reproached with not being 
 many. Well, that is not their method. That 
 is not the method of sane government in matters 
 secular. We believe in a democracy ; but we 
 commit the administration of it to a few. We 
 j believe in the ideal of free trade, but we see to it 
 that protection lasts until free trade is possible. 
 We believe in the absolute right of all men to 
 have whatever they can hold ; but, after all, if 
 you should divide all the wealth to-day, in ten 
 years it would be back in the hands of those 
 who could hold it. So that we are not to 
 I blame for not multiplying churches. We have 
 -' been buildingf schools. We have been endow- 
 ing universities. We have been creating a 
 literature, and we have been trying to build 
 up character. And numbers are not the test 
 of truth in any instance. If that were so, then 
 Christianity must go by the board, for the vast 
 majority of the human race do not profess it. 
 There are four hundred millions of Buddhists 
 who repudiate it with absolute ease and de- 
 ligfht ; but that does not invalidate its truth to 
 anyone who believes in its efficiency as a rule 
 of life. 
 
 These characteristics that I have named : 
 
" Pulling Down and Building Up " 209 
 
 the right to free inquiry — free inquiry as a 
 duty, personal religion as an experience, and 
 the absence of nervous anxiety to add to the 
 statistics of our ecclesiastical history, make us 
 seem, to those who criticise, people who are 
 not concerned to build up. 
 
 What are the facts? The facts are that 
 Unitarianism builds up personal responsibility, 
 while it emphasises personal liberty. Now, 
 there are Unitarians and Unitarians. There 
 are people who have been born into the Unit- 
 arian churches, who have never given religion 
 any serious thought since. I do not know what 
 their state is. Their opinions are not worth 
 anything. The fact that they were born under 
 given conditions does not entitle them to be 
 heard. Only the student of a subject is fit to 
 speak upon it. He may be mistaken even 
 then ; but at least he has given the matter at- 
 tention ; he has focused his mind upon it. I 
 do not claim that all Unitarians are saints, 
 though I have known a vast number who, 
 tested by character in its robuster elements, 
 were so pre-eminently good, that if they had 
 given me their opinions in a language I could 
 not understand, and when it was interpreted 
 to me would have been found to be a doctrine 
 of which I had never heard, I should still have 
 
2IO One World at a Time 
 
 been compelled to make the appeal back to 
 the rectitude of their lives and the beauty of 
 their character, and say : " That is the vindica- 
 tion of what I fail to understand in terms of 
 speech." I have been with people of our faith 
 in dying, in disaster, and in prosperity, in their 
 delights of common life and in the sadder ex- 
 periences of our common history ; and I say, 
 not simply as John Wesley did of the early 
 Methodists, " Our people die well," but that 
 these have lived so well I cannot think of them 
 as dead. 
 
 In the building up of personal responsibil- 
 ity and personal liberty, we have necessarily 
 pulled down the traditions. There are people 
 for whom the New Testament was bound in 
 heaven and let down to mortals, to put it 
 very plainly ; and they require you to believe 
 every line of it or else be charged with 
 destroying it. Now, the business of every de- 
 vout, inquiring mind is to open it up ; and 
 what seems to the worm that has been hatched 
 down at the heart of a rose, when the rose 
 unfolds and the light comes into it, — what 
 seems to the grub a pulling down, because the 
 petals open out to the sun and its poor little 
 squirminess is exposed to the light, to the 
 rose seems the fulfilling of its destiny, and, to 
 
'•Pulling Down and Building Up "211 
 
 the gardener who discovers the worm, his op- 
 portunity. The business of the inquiring mind 
 is to open up the Scripture ; and the fact 
 that Unitarianism devoted itself to the Higher 
 Criticism, keeping up with it at every advance, 
 has resulted for us in restoring the New 
 Testament to the use of thinking minds, in- 
 stead of having it repudiated by those who 
 found parts of it impossible to believe. I 
 will give an illustration : Take the story of 
 Jesus cursing the fig-tree. If that were true, 
 I should have to let the character of Jesus go. 
 Nothing he could do after that would restore 
 it to me. To have cursed the fig-tree and 
 withered it, even if it were given to any being 
 to do that thing, because it had no figs on 
 it when he was hungry, would have forever 
 deposed him from the leadership of men. 
 No creature can claim to lead or save who 
 is kindled to ignoble anger by personal dis- 
 appointment. I have no trouble in saying it 
 never happened. It is the business of people 
 who think for themselves to say that. When 
 I find in the New Testament that only in 
 the preface to Luke's Gospel and the preface 
 to Matthew's Gospel is the abnormal birth of 
 Jesus of Nazareth referred to, — and that it is 
 not known to Paul, who writes the earliest 
 
212 One World at a Time 
 
 documents in the New Testament record, — I 
 am obliged to make a distinction between the 
 divine character and the miraculous birth. 
 When you do that, for these people who say you 
 must take it all or leave it all, though they do 
 not do that with any other literature in the world, 
 though they do not do that with any day's diet at 
 the table, though they do not do that even with 
 the characters of their own friends, — this pro- 
 cess of inquiry, of personal responsibility and 
 personal liberty, seems to be pulling down and 
 not building up. I will venture the statement 
 that but for the work which began with Semler 
 in 1 790, that has been known during our lifetime 
 as the Higher Criticism of the Scripture, the 
 Bible would have ceased to be read, as a book 
 of impossible miracles and unworkable ethics. 
 It is because students have discriminated be- 
 tween what was the word of God to the 
 human soul in a progressive revelation, and 
 what were the accidents of literature in a 
 moving procession of the centuries, that the 
 Bible is prized to-day as never before by 
 thinkino^ men. 
 
 Still further. Unitarianism not only insists 
 upon this personal liberty and constant revela- 
 tion, so that God speaks now as He always 
 has spoken to the listening mind, but it insists 
 
'* Pulling Down and Building Up '* 213 
 
 upon a personal responsibility which requires 
 no atonement outside the soul itself. Now, 
 a shudder passes over the evangelical mind 
 when you say that. They say you have 
 denied the Atonement. You cannot deny a 
 thing that never happened. You can only 
 deny the statement that it did happen. I 
 said in the beginning what I repeat now. — 
 we have never pulled down a single essential 
 element that went to the making of human 
 character, or to the vindication of the truths of 
 history, or to the affirmation of the facts that 
 lie in the Ultimate Reality of things. All 
 that we have insisted is, that you shall not 
 write out a new code with every generation, 
 and declare that unless a man believes that, he 
 is to be consigned to condemnation now and 
 eternally lost. This difficulty is illustrated 
 by what happens in the Church of England. 
 The Athanasian Creed is recited. When 
 they have recited the Athanasian Creed, 
 which belongs to the eighth century, they 
 have consigfned themselves to eternal con- 
 demnation for having previously recited the 
 Nicene Creed. There they stand — in the 
 same book, recited in the same church, and 
 you have your choice on which terms you will 
 go to hell. We insist that that is inconsistent 
 
214 One World at a Time 
 
 with personal responsibility, inconsistent with 
 salvation which is sanative. Salvation is 
 moral health, and you cannot have it proceed 
 outside the individual soul. All the thought 
 of the ages may be spent in providing the 
 instruments of salvation, but only the struggle 
 of soul can make that salvation a personal 
 experience. 
 
 Finally. What I have intimated must still 
 further be enforced, namely, that the test of 
 religion is in the character it produces. One 
 of the most entertaining and exasperating 
 things in public discussion Is that your an- 
 tagonist will continually try to run you on 
 a siding ; so that when you say that the test of 
 religion is in the character that it produces, the 
 critic immediately responds, " Do you pretend 
 to say that the orthodox faiths do not pro- 
 duce good character?" That is what they 
 say every time, you can count upon it with 
 absolute certainty. No, that is not meant. 
 What I say is this : That the test of a religion 
 is In the character It produces by virtue of 
 that which the soul got out of it ; and it is not 
 the test of a religion as to the character it pro- 
 duces by what the soul carefully excludes and 
 forgets that it teaches. That is the situation 
 of our evangelical friends. Mr. Beecher used 
 
*' Pulling Down and Building Up "215 
 
 to say, twenty years ago and more, that he be- 
 lieved there was a creed in the church safe, — 
 a Confession of Faith, — but, having lost the 
 combination, he preached what he pleased, and 
 people were not interested in distinctions of 
 theology ; they believed profoundly what they 
 heard, to the very great benefit of their souls. 
 Now, when a commercial theory of the Atone- 
 ment, which makes God buy back children He 
 never lost, and puts the sacrifice of their sins 
 upon a being who never committed them, in 
 order that they may escape a hell which He 
 made, and be relieved of the temptations of a 
 demon who could not have grown up with 
 God, — I say, when that theory of the Atone- 
 ment is proposed to a human mind, under 
 conditions evangelical, and good character 
 comes under those conditions, it comes in spite 
 of a theory which is essentially dishonest, un- 
 just, and which if it occurred in the business 
 walks of life would exclude a man from the 
 world of trade ; because it proposes a fictitious 
 condition, to be relieved by a dishonest process. 
 There is nothing sacred about the doctrine 
 of the Atonement, except the sacred emotions 
 which are associated with it. It is only as old 
 as Anselm in the eleventh century. It was 
 utterly unknown during the first years of the 
 
2i6 One World at a Time 
 
 Christian Church. It has no place in the New 
 Testament. But, because somebody insists 
 upon it with determined iteration, it has be- 
 come as sacred as any other idol that has often 
 enough been shown to the worshippers. Now, 
 I say that anybody who wins good character 
 out of that, wins it in spite of that condition. 
 There are many doctrines that are not ger- 
 mane, that have no influence whatever upon 
 character. I do not understand why a person 
 should not be as devout and godly of character 
 believing in the Trinity — which is a proposition 
 in philosophy, and has nothing to do with re- 
 ligion whatever — as under the conditions that 
 we represent of the unity of God. But they 
 cannot be philosophically clear. They are in 
 some confusion when they pray. For even 
 the most modified theory of the Trinity as 
 a series of manifestations has its difficulties. 
 Those are difficulties of mind, of the specul- 
 ative faculty, and not difficulties of character. 
 I insist, that the test of a religion is to be 
 found in the character it produces by virtue 
 of what is believed. The Fatherhood of God, 
 infinitely fatherly; the sense of communion 
 that nothing can interrupt ; the experience of 
 heaven here and now ; the consciousness of 
 the forgiveness of sins, which has been pro- 
 
'* Pulling Down and Building Up " 217 
 
 vided for between the soul and God, with no 
 mediator between, — these are elements that 
 are easily transmuted into character, for their 
 very essence involves the sense of personal 
 responsibility. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 WHAT HAS BEEN BUILT UP 
 
 Certain things have been built up. In the 
 first place, the faith we contend for has 
 built up the courage of those who hold it. 
 If I were asked to name any one thing that is 
 most saving to human life, I should say cour- 
 age. A discouraged man puts the enervation 
 of his own nature into his work, he puts the 
 dulness of his own spirit into his work. His 
 eye is dull. The work of God cannot be 
 seen with eyes as dull as those of a stale fish. 
 The eye must be purged of all film, all ob- 
 scurity, and the heart must be true to every 
 motion of the spirit's intention. The one 
 thing we need in order to get on in life is not 
 simply to make the best terms that we can, 
 but to compel it to the best terms that we 
 need ; and the motto that I saw over the 
 door of George MacDonald's house in Old 
 English, " Corage : God mend all ! " is the 
 motto of every soul that is imbued with 
 
 218 
 
What Has Been Built Up 219 
 
 the faith that we profess. This courage is 
 based first of all on the fact that God is good, 
 and God's world is a good world to be in 
 with God ; that there is nothing out of which 
 God can be driven ; that I cannot even by my 
 sins escape Him ; and the only way I can run to 
 ever outrun my sin or my sorrow is to run 
 to Him. And what the child feels who is lost, 
 and works its way through the labyrinth of 
 streets and finally sees that it is near home, 
 every soul of us feels — that we are not far from 
 God and the home of the soul ; that God is 
 " infinitely Fatherly" ; that ** there is no place 
 where earth's sorrows are more felt than 
 up in Heaven " ; that the goodness of God 
 is wide "like the wideness of the sea" ; and 
 that therefore, instead of the old, diabolical, 
 immoral, vengeful occupation of a throne out- 
 side the universe by a God who watches it go, 
 we have substituted in our thinking the Fath- 
 erhood of God, never remote, always, as Jesus 
 said, "seeking those to worship Him who 
 worship Him in spirit and in truth." It is a 
 great thing to dismiss the fear of God in this 
 abject sense from the human soul. 
 
 More than this. We have dismissed the 
 fear of the destiny of man, as to the order of 
 man's life. There are two things that disturb 
 
220 One World at a Time 
 
 us. The first is, " What am I to do ? " The 
 other is, " What is to become of me ?" And 
 between those two affrights, all their life 
 long some souls have been held in bond- 
 age. What am I to do ? How can I work out 
 my career ? I often find in the ministry of re- 
 ligion people who are saying, " How am I to 
 get on ? " What a useless question for a hu- 
 man soul ! There is nothing to be done in 
 this world about getting on, except to be fit to 
 get on. Any human being who knows any 
 one thing well that anybody else wants to 
 know, has an audience and a purpose and an 
 opportunity ; and any human being that can 
 do anything well that anybody wants to have 
 done, is sure of occupation. And so we have, 
 as fundamental to our thinking, the idea 
 that every man's life is a plan of God ; that 
 it is part of the order of nature, if you please, 
 which is just the same thing as its being the 
 plan of God. For this is not an atheistic 
 world ; it is not a world without God ; it is 
 not a world in which any part of our work can 
 be done alone. The great purpose of life is to 
 do with contentment whatever the Divine Will 
 appoints. It is of no concern at all what you 
 do ; but the manner and style of doing it are of 
 great concern. I am only concerned that it shall 
 
What Has Been Built Up 221 
 
 be something that shall be creditable to my 
 Maker. I am more concerned, as every loyal 
 subject of a king must be, that it shall be to the 
 honour of the king than that it shall be felicit- 
 ous or comfortable or favourable to the sub- 
 ject. The honour of the Maker is in the 
 hands of His creatures ; and the dreadful 
 thing about sin is not simply that it is sin- 
 ful, not at all that it shall be punished, — it 
 ought to be, and no noble man who sins, even 
 by mistake or indirection, would wish to 
 escape his punishment, or have anybody else 
 pay his debt, — the dreadful thing about sin is 
 that a being who was made in the image of 
 God, and into whose keeping God put His 
 work and His will, should be disloyal — the 
 worst word in the language. He can never 
 come to the " Land o' the Leal," because he 
 is a traitor to the very conditions of his birth 
 and being. That is the fearful thing about 
 sin, that the thing God made is a standing 
 reproach to his Maker. Destiny is taken out of 
 the realm of fear and put into the keeping 
 of God ; and this building up of the courage 
 of life is one of the things we have done for 
 those who accept our faith. 
 
 We have done another thing. With no in- 
 vidious purpose whatever, I must still insist 
 
222 One World at a Time 
 
 upon the fact that the other churches have 
 been trying to make a nice adjustment be- 
 tween the things they thought were true and 
 the things that the scientific inquiry of the 
 world has proved to be true. While the 
 churches have been trying to see how little 
 they could allow to the natural world and to 
 scientific and philosophic inquiry, the Unitar- 
 ian ministry and laity have been united in one 
 single inquiry, — "Is it true?" Proven true, 
 it becomes part of our gospel. Demonstrated 
 true, though it reverse all our opinions, we 
 must accept it, because there cannot be two 
 antagonistic truths in God's world. What is 
 theologically true must be true in the scientific 
 sense as well. There cannot be a true world 
 and a false theology which can be made to 
 agree. We are pledged to the advance of sci- 
 ence. We do not say that the doctrine of evo- 
 lution has been finally proven ; but it is to-day 
 the working hypothesis of the whole scientific 
 world, and it is our working hypothesis as ap- 
 plied to theology, to the Bible, to human life ; 
 that is, we examine a text of Scripture by the 
 scientific method, just as you would examine 
 the specific gravity of a metal, or would apply 
 a physiological test or a chemical test, or 
 test by the microscope or telescope. When 
 
What Has Been Built Up 223 
 
 we employ the scientific process we mean that 
 things are tested by a procession of thought 
 from the fact to the conclusion, not from a 
 supposition back to the fact. The scientific 
 method is applied in religion. The scientific 
 method is the only safe method to apply. So 
 we have welcomed science. I do not believe 
 there has been a man of us, in all these one hun- 
 dred years that have gone by, that has written a 
 single book or preached a single sermon or said 
 a single word to reconcile science to religion. 
 We have been reconciling theology to the 
 facts of the universe, because theology is only 
 the more or less scientific statement of our 
 conclusions concerning facts. Every man 
 stands fronting two sets of phenomena in the 
 world : one set, the phenomena of the mate- 
 rial universe ; the other, the phenomena of the 
 spiritual universe. Why should he suppose 
 for a moment that he can adjust himself to the 
 material universe in terms consistent with his 
 well-being as a creature without also, by the 
 same endeavour and purpose, adjusting himself 
 to the spiritual universe as a child of God ? 
 The two things go together, and the separa- 
 tion of them has been the reproach of the 
 churches. Take any group assembled to dis- 
 cuss the revision of a Confession of Faith. 
 
2 24 One World at a Time 
 
 With the best intentions in the world, with ab- 
 solute sincerity, with all the honour of the 
 Church in their keeping, why should there be 
 any question among them as to an ancient 
 document, if it can be stated in terms level to 
 the facts of modern life ? I believe in the con- 
 tinuity of Christian thought, and these ancient 
 formulae are part of the history of the ecclesi- 
 astical development of the world ; but they 
 have no sanctity except the sanctity which went 
 into the lives that made them and the sincerity 
 of purpose that produced them ; and I should 
 think that a group of men of God, gathered 
 together over the question as to whether they 
 should revise the formulae of religion in the 
 terms of modern thought and the necessities 
 of the modern mind, would aspire to just one 
 thing, and that is, to be for their generation as 
 sincere as the people that made the formulae 
 they are investigating ; and if they were as sin- 
 cere as that they would give us a different thing. 
 The absolute sincerity of the Fathers is unques- 
 tioned. The absolute sincerity of the Consti- 
 tutional Convention of 1787 is unquestioned ; 
 but that did not hinder the passage of the Fif- 
 teenth Amendment to the Constitution, that 
 gave four millions of slaves their rights as 
 citizens. And yet there were people in the 
 
What Has Been Built Up 225 
 
 days following the Civil War who talked about 
 the invasion of the Constitution, as though it 
 were to be thought of in the same moment 
 with the invasion of human rights ! When 
 you erect a document into a fetich, you are 
 simply in a retarded state of spiritual develop- 
 ment ; between the lower orders of civilisation, 
 with a fetich or an amulet or a totem, there is 
 not much to choose as compared with those 
 who take a document or a statement which, in 
 its day, was a very Ark of the Covenant to sin- 
 cere souls, and who say : " For all time this is 
 to abide. The human mind has learned many 
 a thing, but concerning these things it has 
 stood absolutely still." That is an inconceiv- 
 able state of mind to us ; and, whilst we always 
 assume the sincerity of those who hold it, we 
 lament the loss of time and spiritual power. 
 
 We have also built up, not only this courage 
 of the human race, as far as they have heard 
 and believed our word, we not only hold this 
 open-minded attitude toward the progress of 
 the human mind, but we have insisted upon 
 the dignity of human nature. When Dr. 
 Channing, in 18 19, in Baltimore, set the dignity 
 of human nature over against the total de- 
 pravity of man, challenging the doctrine of 
 total depravity of the race by the doctrine of 
 
226 One World at a Time 
 
 the dignity and divinity of human nature, it 
 was as notable as any Declaration of Independ- 
 ence ever penned ; for it was the statement 
 that God had not made a thing of which He 
 need be ashamed. Now of the doctrine of 
 total depravity you say, " Nobody believes it." 
 Well, perhaps not, for himself. I have never 
 met a man who thought he was totally de- 
 praved. I have seen some people who gave 
 ample signs of it to the external ohserver, — 
 abnormal specimens, distorted and morbid de- 
 velopments, — but those we relegate at once to 
 the field of imperfect development or misdi- 
 rected development. So I suppose that no 
 one for himself or for anybody he loved ever 
 believed in total depravity. And we insist 
 that the field of the world cannot be planted 
 with seed that is rotten to the core. Farmers 
 are beginning to put their seed into the ground 
 and to get ready their gardens for the summer, 
 and they are throwing out of the heap of their 
 seed potatoes every one that is rotten to the 
 core. You cannot grow a crop of any kind — 
 men, or any other crop — out of stuff that is 
 totally depraved. And when the Church de- 
 clared its belief in total depravity, and then 
 started to live up to its faith in total depravity, 
 it reproached God and entered upon a dis- 
 
What Has Been Built Up 227 
 
 pensatlon of despair. And here was the ter- 
 rible thing that happened : they began to 
 think meanly of God, because they thought so 
 meanly of man. The rescue of the character 
 of God has to be achieved in the terms of the 
 dignity of man. A Being that made man so 
 that He could not save him, or must enter into 
 an immoral contract to save him, which all 
 theories of the Atonement in some aspect are 
 liable to involve, — the Being who is thus limited 
 has lost more from His own character in the 
 minds of His worshippers, than man has lost of 
 character by the formulated statement of his 
 depravity. We have insisted upon the dignity 
 of human nature, — that we are children of the 
 great God and we belong to Him ; that He 
 cannot get rid of us; that He brought us into 
 being and is accountable for us ; that our 
 business is to grow into His image and be like 
 Him; that moral health is salvation; and to 
 conform to the image of His son, to the like- 
 ness of his moral qualities, — this constitutes 
 the Atonement. And this conviction we have 
 built up in spite of every effort to the con- 
 trary ; so that in all the churches to-day, the 
 doctrine of a cureless hell, of an inextinguish- 
 able retribution, has disappeared, except in very 
 remote districts and very uninformed minds. 
 
228 One World at a Time 
 
 The Universalist Church was built upon the 
 protest against the doctrine of irremediable 
 ruin. The Unitarians took the other side of 
 the same proposition, and claimed that the 
 character of God forbade the ruin of man ; so 
 that when Charles Carroll Everett uttered the 
 phrase which has passed into a commonplace 
 in our thinking, that "Human nature is not 
 ruined, but incomplete," it carried immediate 
 conviction. Is it not evident that on that 
 basis we are ready to begin any work and 
 do anything for the betterment of our kind ? 
 But if humanity be totally depraved, then 
 the sooner it is snuffed out the better. You 
 cannot keep an unremedied and contagious 
 disease in contact with the race without hurt- 
 ing it ; and if that be the condition of God's 
 creatures, there is no remedy that we know 
 except extinction ; that would make it safe for 
 the Elect ; and that was the doctrine of pre- 
 destination reduced to its crudest form ; — if 
 that be true, then I want to go with the other 
 folk. I have been spending the thirty years 
 of my ministry trying to look out for the 
 " under dog " in the fight, for the man who 
 was not quite up to the mark, and for the 
 man who needed help and teaching ; and if 
 God has just a few who are to be saved, 
 
What Has Been Built Up 229 
 
 then I would wish to go with the crowd. 
 But we do not have to come to that conclu- 
 sion. The dignity of human nature is shown 
 in every aspect of human life. In the ministry 
 of the last thirty years, surprises as to the 
 dignity of human nature have come upon me 
 again and again ; from the most unexpected 
 sources the beauty of human life has appeared, 
 as when one stands surprised at the radiant 
 beauty of a cactus-bloom that grows out of the 
 thorny plant. The dignity and divinity of hu- 
 man nature we insist upon ; and it were better 
 to have human nature divine in character and 
 no God in the universe ; the ideals which it fol- 
 lows true, and no God to match them, if that 
 philosophic proposition were possible, than 
 to have a Beingf of whom it could be said, as 
 Browning wrote : 
 
 " The loving worm within his clod 
 Were diviner than a loveless God 
 Within his worlds." 
 
 We are as much concerned with saving the 
 character of God as with glorifying and digni- 
 fying the nature of man. 
 
 The Unitarian faith has built up another 
 thing, the truth of Inspiration from God ; and 
 thus it has built up not itself alone, but has 
 joined the great company of those who are 
 
230 One World at a Time 
 
 building up a confidence in the revelation 
 of God's Word. We do not restrict it to 
 the Bible of the Old and New Testament. 
 There are world-scriptures. The great eth- 
 nic scriptures of the world are to be con- 
 sulted. In my own judgment as a student, 
 they are not to be compared in richness 
 and power with the ethical passion of the 
 Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian Script- 
 ures. But they are deliverances of God to 
 the Hindu, to the Mohammedan, to the 
 Zoroastrian, and the great company of those 
 of whom it is said, " He hath made of one 
 blood all the nations of the earth ; that they 
 should seek God, if haply they might feel 
 after him and find him, though he is not far 
 from each one of us." We have declared for 
 that study of the Scripture, that " Higher Crit- 
 icism," which has practically restored the study 
 of the Bible to the intelligent mind of man 
 and has made it possible for him to inquire, 
 not for the infallible Word of God, as you 
 would go to a book of infallible statutes ; but 
 as to what God said in the ancient time to 
 His children ; he is thus encouraged to wait 
 and listen for what God shall say to him. 
 And that is the doctrine of the New Testa- 
 ment. In the Epistle to the Hebrews we read : 
 
What Has Been Built Up 231 
 
 ** God, having of old time spoken unto the 
 fathers in the prophets by divers portions and 
 in divers manners, hath at the end of these 
 days spoken unto us in his Son." And this 
 element of devotion to the life of Christ as 
 the revealer in terms of humanhood of the 
 life of God, is pre-eminent amongst us. 
 
 Finally. We have built up character and 
 practical achievement. It would be a stupid 
 man or woman who would turn from these 
 pages and say that I declared that there was 
 no character formed by the other faiths. That 
 needs no answer ; it is simply not true. What 
 I say is that the character that is formed in 
 spite of these beliefs is formed under diffi- 
 culties that we whose character is formed be- 
 cause of our beliefs, do not have to encounter. 
 If I have to love God in spite of a cureless 
 hell, I am in a very different position intel- 
 lectually and morally from loving God because 
 of an unfathomable mercy. If I have to 
 follow Jesus of Nazareth as a composite being 
 made up of God and man in terms I cannot 
 define, whose human nature presents no valid- 
 ity for me, because it is a human nature I do 
 not possess, and whose divine inspiration pre- 
 sents no validity to me, because it is different 
 from anything that I can have, — then my 
 
232 One World at a Time 
 
 attitude toward him as the leader and helper 
 of my life must be entirely different from 
 what it is now, when the processes we call di- 
 vine are translated in terms of an absolute 
 humanhood, simple humanity, pure humanity, 
 daily living as a means of learning the Beat- 
 itudes. So that when I say we build up 
 character, I mean to say this : that we do not 
 ask a human being to go through the con- 
 vulsions of some fictitious repentance for sins 
 he never committed and lay claim upon an 
 atonement which can only save if the field 
 of its operation is in another mind and not 
 in his own, and then to be adopted into the 
 family of God, whose child he always was, 
 and to have a hope of Heaven based upon 
 a work done for him by the Saviour of the 
 world, and to think that part of his joy there 
 will be in seeing the sufferings of the damned. 
 If that is my attitude, then any character I 
 get in that process I get in spite of it ; and 
 it is a tribute to the essential soundness of 
 human nature that such beautiful character, 
 such glorified character is possible to those 
 who believe all those things. There is some- 
 thing in human nature that you cannot kill 
 by theologic statement. There is something 
 in human nature that resists the poison of 
 
What Has Been Built Up 22,^ 
 
 vicious suggestion, just as there is something 
 in every man and woman that leads him and 
 her to go through a vicious world untouched 
 by its sin and uncorrupted by its influence. 
 We build up character in the terms of the 
 Fatherhood of God and of the dignity of 
 human nature and by the direct approach 
 of the soul to God, unmediated and alone, and 
 this we call practical religion. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 HOW CAN RELIGION BE TAUGHT? 
 
 SOME confusion must necessarily arise in 
 any contemplative mind when the word 
 religion is pronounced ; because the religions 
 are many, and religion is but one. The 
 churches are many, and there has been a battle 
 of the churches in order that only one may be 
 left. For it would seem that there could be 
 no other motive for ecclesiastical contention, 
 unless it were to kill off the remainder and 
 have the survival of — the one that was left ; I 
 cannot say " the fittest," because the contention 
 in which they were engaged was not fit for the 
 Church of the living God. So some confusion 
 always must appear in a contemplative mind 
 when the word religion is uttered. It sees 
 tribal religions which are bounded by the peri- 
 phery of the tribe's own existence. It opens 
 the Scripture of the Old Testament, and finds 
 that Israel passed through three distinct phases 
 of its sense of God. There was the time when 
 
 3^4 
 
How Can Religion Be Taught ? 235 
 
 Yahweh — Jehovah — was only a tribal deity. 
 There was the time when he was the great 
 Deity, — tribal still, but greater than all the 
 rest, and subduing them unto his own rule ; 
 and there was the final conception of God as 
 the Lord of the whole earth. There were also 
 adumbrations of what we now hold to be uni- 
 versal religion ; that is, religion which, under 
 all its aspects, is one in essence. As we say of 
 Nature, that there is but one energy and all 
 forces are but modes of its manifestation, and 
 count it now an axiom to say that ; so in re- 
 ligion we say there is but one religion, and all 
 religions are modes of its manifestation. 
 
 So we come to feel that a definition of re- 
 ligion is necessary. We turn to the great ex- 
 ponents of the root thoughts of the human 
 mind, and we come upon such a definition as 
 this of Goethe : " All religions have one aim, 
 — to make man accept the inevitable." But 
 there is no delight in that ; and if there is any 
 purpose in religion, it must be to add zest to 
 life by putting life into right relations, so that 
 that which belongs to it shall come to it ; and 
 that power of reserve shall be in it, that not only 
 stoically accepts the inevitable, but splendidly 
 prepares for the next stage in life's develop- 
 ment. So that Goethe's definition that " All 
 
236 One World at a Time 
 
 religions have one aim, — to make man accept 
 the inevitable," does not provide for develop- 
 ment ; it provides only for defence ; and if I am 
 simply in the attitude of defending myself 
 against the gods, then I am in a very primitive 
 form of religious thought. For that is one of 
 its early aspects. The gods are inimical to 
 human joy, and the purpose of being on terms 
 with them is not to let them have their way 
 with me. Therefore that cannot be a defini- 
 tion of religion, for it does not provide for de- 
 light and for development. 
 
 Frederic Harrison's statement is, that " Re- 
 ligion is summed up in duty." But I can have 
 no duty to God. God is the source of every 
 aspect of duty in me. His life would go on if I 
 were utterly regardless of Him. Not so the 
 life of my fellow. It does not go on unless I 
 help it. Therefore, in this definition, you 
 must separate religion from ethics. It is not 
 summed up in duty. It is not even summed 
 in love that is without duty, and it certainly 
 cannot be measured by duty without love. 
 
 Or again, with the deference that we feel to- 
 ward everything that John Morley writes, we 
 read this definition in his estimate of what re- 
 ligion is : " By holiness do we not mean some- 
 thing different from virtue ? It is not the same 
 
How Can Religion Be Taught? 237 
 
 as duty. Still less is it the same as religious 
 belief. It is the name of the inner grace of 
 nature, an instinct of the soul, by which, though 
 knowing earthly appetites and passions, the 
 spirit, purifying itself by itself, and independent 
 of reason, argument, and the struggles of the 
 will, dwells in loving, patient, and confident 
 communion with the seen and the unseen 
 good." Now there is much, very much, of 
 truth in that. It is beautifully stated. It is 
 fine. But it is just a little too fine. For it is 
 abstruse, involved, prolix, and cannot be ex- 
 plained to the uneducated ; and any definition 
 of religion that cannot be explained to the 
 least instructed cannot be explained anywhere 
 satisfactorily. The Bowery must have a de- 
 finition, as well as the upper ranges of what we 
 vainly and idly call " society." 
 
 There is also this difficulty with Mr. Mor- 
 ley's definition, that he says religion is in- 
 dependent of reason ; whereas reason is the 
 supreme court before which it is tried. If it 
 is not rational, then it is not for rational be- 
 ings. We can no longer say in one mood of 
 Tertullian, " I believe it because it is impossi- 
 ble." We say rather in the other mood of 
 Tertullian, " The soul divines what is divine." 
 It is said by Mr. Morley " that holiness is 
 
2i2> One World at a Time 
 
 independent of the struggles of the will." 
 But the struggle of the will is part of holiness 
 itself. It is not a temperature that comes 
 upon you without sharing in the will. It is 
 not a mere condition of temperament, even, 
 in which the will has no part. So I think we 
 must examine a little more closely as to what 
 religion is before we can say how it may be 
 taught. 
 
 I call your attention, therefore, to three 
 stages, briefly expressed, which must enter as 
 contributory to the conception of religion at 
 all. The first is the sense of dependence. 
 This may be expressed as " Man and God," — 
 the sense of obligation. I can have no duty 
 toward God, but I have a duty from God to- 
 ward the other man. The race passes from its 
 childhood to its adolescence, in which, as in 
 the individual, egotism is replaced by altruism, 
 and the love of self is followed by the love 
 of the other. When we get to the great 
 " Other," who is God, the original " Other," 
 the prototype, the archetypal pattern of all 
 that is, then we find ourselves in a realm of 
 dependence upon God as source, and the 
 aspect of religion cannot be avoided that, It 
 consists in a relation of dependence of man 
 upon God. For instance : the man who is 
 
How Can Religion Be Taught ? 239 
 
 so trivial or superficial as to say that there is 
 no God ; the man who has not read much in 
 the last twenty years ; who has made no in- 
 telligent study of physical science ; who is not 
 familiar with the natural world ; who there- 
 fore has not passed that period known as 
 "philosophical atheism"; that man, by the 
 very struggle to be independent and alone, 
 gives a negative argument for his dependence, 
 by the struggle it costs him to reach his inde- 
 pendent attitude. So the sense of depend- 
 ence is elementary to religion ; but it makes 
 no provision for an enlarged experience, and 
 most of all it makes no provision for an unex- 
 pected crisis, which, unless the soul be related 
 to God, it is conscious of bearing alone. Our 
 lives are a succession of catastrophes if we 
 are alone ; they are a succession of experi- 
 ences if we are bound up in the bundle of life 
 with Him. To be alone would be a tragedy 
 in life's catastrophes. 
 
 There is a second condition contributory to 
 religion. Not only must there be the sense 
 of dependence, which may be expressed as 
 " Man and God," but there must be the 
 sense of relation, which may be expressed as 
 " Man like God." The effort of religion grow- 
 ing out of dependence is to build a bridge 
 
240 One World at a Time 
 
 between man and God, or to run a tunnel, a 
 subway, under the superficial aspects of life, 
 by which there is a means of communication 
 between us and God. This rises at last to 
 the conception that not only am I dependent 
 upon God because I am helpless ; but I am 
 related to God because I am like Him ; I share 
 His nature. In the fourth century, Athanasius 
 made a statement which was afterward hard- 
 ened into dogma, instead of allowing it to 
 remain fluent as poetry ; he declared that 
 " The Son is not of like substance with the 
 Father, but the Son is of the same substance 
 with the Father " ; he had a great revelation 
 of the fact that there is but one ground of 
 being in the world, and that no son can ever 
 be other than of the same substance with the 
 father. So when Jesus says in his splendid 
 phrase, " I and my Father are one," he is not 
 stating a mathematical identity ; he is stating 
 a moral coalescence ; he is stating just what all 
 the prismatic rays are stating, divided into 
 their rainbow hues through the great primordial 
 colours ; suddenly the prism is taken away, and 
 you stand in white light. It is optical coalesc- 
 ence ; it is the coalescence of colours. " I 
 and my Father are one " is the statement of a 
 relation that may be expressed, whether by 
 
How Can Religion Be Taught? 241 
 
 Christ or by any humblest follower of his, or 
 any meditative soul that never heard of him, 
 as " Man with God." That is essential to 
 religion. 
 
 The third condition contributory to religion 
 is, not only dependence, or man and God ; 
 not only relation, as man with God ; but a 
 sense of common purpose, namely, " Man for 
 God," as the instrument of His manifestation, 
 as the medium in which He works. Does the 
 sculptor take the clay ; does the painter take 
 the pigments ; does the musician wish for his 
 instrument ; does the great violin-maker say 
 God could^ not make it without him ? So in 
 every aspect of life the sense of common 
 purpose is seen. " We are workers together 
 with God." We are not only His husbandry, 
 as Paul says ; we are not only His building ; 
 we are not only the product of His creative 
 power ; not only so, but He never has stopped 
 creating, has never got done with what He 
 was doing ; and He has left us some little 
 fragments of work that we may do, so that we 
 may not be idle in a world which is not yet 
 done. If the universe is not yet finished, it 
 behooves us to have a share in the making 
 of it. Every shiver of an earthquake is test- 
 imony to the cooling of a planet that has 
 
242 One World at a Time 
 
 not yet cooled enough for man's safety. We 
 have our contribution to make ; and religion 
 that is not "Man/brGod" has missed one 
 essential element in it. 
 
 The first contribution, Man and God, which 
 takes the form of dependence, is expressed 
 in the statement made by a woman who was 
 talking to a friend a little while ago. One 
 said to the other, " Why do you go to such 
 a church, where the mythological aspect of 
 the service certainly affronts your reason ? " 
 Her friend answered : " I go there when I 
 want to bite the dust ; because every con- 
 dition of the service implies that God is 
 everything and man nothing, — a mere insect, 
 ephemeral in to-day's radiance, floating in the 
 sunshine of the divine outpouring." That was 
 the impression the service made upon her 
 mind ; and so when she got into an abnormal 
 state of continued repentance, a kind of serial 
 repentance that is " continued in our next 
 issue," she went to that service because she 
 wanted to "bite the dust." That is primitive 
 religion devising mythology to satisfy its own 
 sense of dependence. 
 
 The second contribution Is found in the 
 higher aspects of religion. It is found, as I 
 have Intimated, In the life of Christ, whose 
 
How Can Religion Be Taught ? 243 
 
 " great renunciation " is as real as that of 
 Gotama Buddha ; greater indeed, for sweeter 
 and higher and more full of joy — the great 
 renunciation of Jesus was as full of depend- 
 ence on God as one can conceive : and yet 
 it was the statement that all union with the 
 Ultimate Divine was meant to be a prepara- 
 tion for carrying out the divine Ideal which 
 that union had procured. Brought into the 
 circle of the Divine Presence, " thinking 
 God's thoughts after Him," there grows up 
 In the soul a divine Ideal. I must realise 
 It, and make It plain In the terms of com- 
 mon life ; and so you get to the third element, 
 Man for God. 
 
 The soul Is dependent, as I have implied, 
 for inspiration, not for rescue. For religion 
 Is not a process of Insurance. The Being who 
 could devise in the human soul a plan by 
 which it was to be Insured against Himself 
 would require to take out a policy that would 
 cover the Infinite ; for nothing under that 
 aspect would require so complete an Insurance 
 as God. That would be the terrible thing 
 about It, that the smallest of all God's senti- 
 ent and rational creatures being at risk from 
 the Being that made him would be an Im- 
 putation directly upon the Being Who made 
 
244 One World at a Time 
 
 him as being non-moral, or immoral. That is 
 our protest. We are not dependent upon 
 God simply for rescue, but for inspiration. 
 We look to Him for revelation ; we want to 
 have Him made plain. " No man hath seen 
 God at any time. The only-begotten Son 
 which is in the bosom of the Father hath 
 declared Him." You can imagine all men 
 near-sighted, never having seen a star, and 
 then the world coming in procession to the 
 telescope and revealing the new heavens, — 
 the sidereal heavens made plain to a near- 
 sighted world. This is just what happened in 
 Jesus Christ. Men had not any view of God 
 that would satisfy until they learned it, appre- 
 hended it, had it made plain in terms of a 
 human life. That was the lens through 
 which God showed Himself to the eye that 
 searched for Him. 
 
 In "Many"^r God," I think we get a very 
 simple definition of religion, — that it is a pas- 
 sionate devotion to the will of God. Here 
 I outline what I mean by the teaching of re- 
 lieion. Take this definition, which seems 
 to me enough, that religion is a passionate de- 
 votion to the will of God. To teach religion 
 is not to teach its definitions. When a clergy- 
 man a little while ago said to me, " I cannot 
 
How Can Religion Be Taught ? 245 
 
 conceive how reHgion can be taught without a 
 catechism or a formulated statement," I said to 
 him, " Cannot you teach cooking without a 
 cook-book ? Cannot you teach carpentry with- 
 out a treatise upon mechanics ? Cannot the 
 living soul that knows a thing show how it 
 knows it without defining the terms in which it 
 knows it ? Do I require a chemical analysis 
 of my luncheon, in order to know that it is 
 palatable ? Serve up your dinner with a 
 chemical analysis, and see how much you would 
 eat at the end of the week. You would dread 
 the chemical analysis more than you would 
 want the dinner. The prescription is not the 
 medicine ; the theory is not the fact ; the de- 
 finition is not religion. We give the definition 
 of religion as " a passionate devotion to the will 
 of God," — but in this religion does not appear 
 as having a definition of what God is, nor how 
 the will is related to Him, nor what we mean by 
 devotion, — whether saying prayers or praying, 
 whether reciting a creed or living it. It does 
 not require a definition of the primary passions 
 of life to know what a passionate devotion to 
 the will of God is. There are four volumes of 
 metaphysic enclosed in that sentence : the first 
 having to do with the primary passions of 
 human nature ; the second with the rites of 
 
246 One World at a Time 
 
 religion as formed in devotion ; the third with 
 the ethic of the soul ; and the fourth with a 
 theologic statement of the theory of God. 
 You might have all that in the terms of every 
 seminary in the world that teaches. ..what it 
 calls a " body of divinity " ; — that is, it lays 
 upon the dissecting-table the dead form of Re- 
 ligion, and calls the class round for a clinic, — 
 you might have all that, and be just as free 
 from all religion as some of the seminaries 
 are. One man, at least, should be kept in the 
 faculty of every Theological School who has an 
 enthusiasm for the pastoral office, and knows 
 the souls of men in the active work of the 
 ministry. Why ? Because it is absurd for a the- 
 ological school to be made up simply of aca- 
 demic instruction. That is necessary. You 
 must have the study of church history for 
 the sake of the history and not for the sake of 
 the church. You must have all that goes 
 with the whole curriculum of a well-equipped 
 theoloo;ical school. But there must be in all 
 such schools human souls that have a pas- 
 sionate devotion to the will of God. I do 
 not say that definition is not useful. I do 
 not say that when you want to draw a line 
 around things you have not to define them ; 
 but I shall never be convinced, I think, — at 
 
How Can Religion Be Taught ? 247 
 
 least in my present condition of rationality, — 
 that the survey of a field is a substitute for 
 the crop you can get out of it. So we must 
 have something else than definition in the 
 teaching of religion. There must be the 
 statement, as I have said, of the phenomena 
 of religion ; as, for instance, in thinking of 
 the Being of God. Let me use that as an 
 illustration. It would seem that "He that 
 cometh to God must believe that He is." That 
 is fundamental. It is not important at all as 
 to the fact of religion, but it is as to the 
 character of it, what God seems to him to be 
 like. "He that cometh to Him must believe 
 that He is " ; or else he is going on a fool's 
 errand. He is not going at all ; he is simply 
 wandering around. He is simply a lunatic 
 outside bounds. " He that cometh to God 
 must believe that He isT What I maintain, as 
 I have said, is that the fact of religion is not 
 dependent upon his determining what God is 
 exactly like. 
 
 An elder in a recent session of the Presby- 
 terian Assembly rose in his place and made 
 this speech : "How do we know that God 
 could save the race ? We do not know. If 
 God had said, ' I propose to save the whole 
 human race,' Satan would have risen in his 
 
248 One World at a Time 
 
 place, there and then, and would have said, 
 ' That is just what I told Eve, Ye shall not 
 surely die.' " Now, I can believe easily, that 
 he was a good man, in spite of this foolish 
 statement. The statement is foolish, because 
 it is a bit of mythology flung into the face of 
 the twentieth century. It is based upon the 
 first chapter of the Book of Job, where God 
 is represented as an Eastern sovereign, a Shah 
 of Persia, with provinces, outlying districts, 
 and satraps of these provinces bringing in 
 their reports. So the first chapter of the 
 Book of Job opens, '* Now there was a day 
 when the sons of God came to present them- 
 selves before the Lord, and Satan came also 
 among them." Then the book goes on to say 
 that they made their various reports, and the 
 Being, the Shah of Persia, is represented as 
 saying, "There is a man in my province, Job. 
 Hast thou considered him ? for there is none 
 like him in the earth, a perfect and upright 
 man." Then they have a dialogue about Job ; 
 and Satan proposes certain tests of Job's 
 goodness. He says, " He is a rich man, a 
 prosperous man ; but if his goods are taken 
 away, he will renounce thee." And his wealth 
 was taken away ; but Job blessed God. Then 
 Satan said, " Lay thy hand upon his body, and 
 
How Can Religion Be Taught? 249 
 
 he will renounce thee." So Job was afflicted in 
 sore ways ; and he still blessed God. In the 
 midst of it all he said, " I know that my Aven- 
 ger liveth ; and that he shall stand up at the 
 last upon the earth ; and after my skin hath 
 been thus destroyed, yet from my flesh shall 
 I see God, whom I shall see for myself, and 
 mine eyes shall behold, and not another." This 
 was the mold in which the Presbyterian elder's 
 thouQfht about God was cast. 
 
 The effort of this good man to say what 
 God was like did not invalidate the fact of 
 religion in him at all. It only impaired his 
 usefulness as a teacher of theology. In 
 other words, a man out of the Middle Ages 
 cannot have a chair in a theological school 
 in the twentieth century with advantage to the 
 school. Here was a group concerned with 
 the revision of the Westminster Confession, 
 and for that reason the thinof that was said 
 was perfectly apt to the occasion ; for one 
 form of mythology was matched with another. 
 It is the illustration of what Froude says so 
 splendidly : " Reason is no match for super- 
 stition ; one great emotion must be expelled 
 by another." What God is like is subject for 
 debate. What God is, and that God is, is sub- 
 ject for the soul's apprehension and adoration. 
 
250 One World at a Time 
 
 In order to the teaching of religion, then, 
 in any real way, there is but one thing to be 
 considered, namely, the giving of direction 
 to the temper and spirit of the taught. It 
 involves a crystalline sincerity. That is the 
 first step. A crystalline sincerity, an un- 
 clouded eye to see, an ear hospitable to every 
 voice that has anything to say that means 
 good, — this implies a teachable spirit. Un- 
 willingness to be convinced is the beginning 
 of perdition to the soul. There must be an 
 open-minded hospitality, so that light may 
 enter into the mind. 
 
 Two other elements enter into the condi- 
 tion of this directed mind ; not only that it 
 shall be teachable, willing to know, not only 
 that it shall be sincere, with clear vision, 
 when the thing to be known is presented ; 
 but there must be in it earnestness. Men 
 demand easy religion ! Nothing else is easy 
 in life. Ask the man of whom you speak as 
 having life on his own terms, whether life is 
 on his own terms or not. Ask him what anxi- 
 eties corrode his mind, what solicitudes per- 
 plex him ; what embarrassments impede him. 
 He will tell you there is no life that is easy, 
 and it ought not to be. As in the natural 
 world the struggle is the process of survival, 
 
How Can Religion Be Taught? 251 
 
 so in the moral world it is struggle of soul 
 that saves. 
 
 Finally, there must be an unselfish devotion. 
 Without teachableness we have no advance. 
 Without crystalline sincerity we have no self- 
 knowledge. Without earnestness we have 
 no momentum. Without unselfish devotion 
 we have no usefulness. Whatever you acquire 
 in the name of religion is only taken to your 
 mint to be put into the current coin of the 
 realm. It must go into circulation thereafter. 
 It is the thing men trade in and need for the 
 sustenance of life. 
 
 The teaching of religion depends, most of 
 all, upon the impact of one nature, upon an- 
 other. Over and over again I hear the teach- 
 ers in Sunday-school say, " I remember a 
 teacher whom I had in my early boyhood or 
 girlhood. I cannot remember more than her 
 name. I do not remember anything she ever 
 taught me ; but somehow or other she made 
 me believe that God was real, and that God 
 was known to her." That is the impact of 
 one spiritual nature on another. That is 
 essential in the teaching- of religion. The 
 most brilliant discourse is as vain as the most 
 flippant language, unless the discourse carries 
 with it the sense that the man has contact 
 
252 One World at a Time 
 
 with divine realities. When Bunsen lay dy- 
 ing, looking into his wife's face, he said, 'Tn 
 thy face have I seen the Eternal." That was 
 what John meant in his Gospel about making 
 God plain in terms of human flesh. You 
 remember, in Robert Elsmere, how the dying 
 workman called Robert to his side and told 
 him how he had made him, by the very aspect 
 of his life, believe in God ; that is to be the re- 
 vealer of God in terms of human life. 
 
 Many persons have been thrilled to hear 
 Robert Collyer tell how, after he had come 
 into the Unitarian ministry, he went back to 
 Yorkshire, and preached to the congregation 
 in which his aged mother sat, who had never 
 heard him preach since the days when he 
 was a Methodist. She took his arm going 
 home from church, and gave it that little hug 
 that mothers will, and said to him, " Ah, Rab- 
 bie ! I didna understand much thee said, and 
 what I did understand I didna like ; but I 
 believe in thee." That is the real thing. " I 
 believe in thee ! " That is what Paul meant 
 when he said, " Whose I am, and whom I 
 serve." That is what he meant when he said, 
 '* Faithful is he that called you, who also 
 will do it." That is what he meant when he 
 said, " All things work together for good to 
 
How Can Religion Be Taught? 253 
 
 them that love God." That is the final con- 
 viction in the teaching of religion. It is the 
 impact of a believing soul upon the soul 
 which seeks to believe. 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 HOW TRADITIONAL RELIGION MAY 
 BECOME PERSONAL 
 
 JESUS among his people stood in the 
 midst of institutions hoary with age, him- 
 self a youth, vital with spiritual consciousness. 
 They quoted against his enthusiasm the age- 
 long antecedents of their cult, and he chal- 
 lenged them to show that they were operative 
 in the achievements of the spiritual life. 
 
 The process is historic, as well as individual, 
 in which, through all time, the passage has 
 to be made from the speculative reason to the 
 practical reason before we are sure of any one 
 thing. The speculative reason is the field of 
 our gymnastic ; the practical reason is the 
 arena of our conflict and the opportunity of 
 our work. This was what Jesus continually 
 contended for. The woman of Samaria, a 
 woman without character, said, in absolute 
 devotion to the orthodoxy of her religion, 
 which had not touched her life in any way : 
 
 254 
 
Personal Religion 255 
 
 " Our fathers worshipped in this mountain, 
 and ye say that in Jerusalem is the place 
 where men ought to worship." That is tradi- 
 tional religion asserting itself through the lips 
 of an immoral person, and absolutely correct 
 in its differentiation between " this mountain " 
 and that, between this "worship" and that; 
 and the reply of the Master of the art of living, 
 the simple man whose chivalry did not even 
 abash her, nor send her other than repentant 
 away, was : " Neither in this mountain nor yet 
 in Jerusalem shall men worship the Father. 
 The Father seeketh them to worship Him who 
 worship Him in spirit and in truth." It is the 
 passage from traditional religion to personal 
 experience. It is the problem which Luther 
 solved when, toiling on his knees up the 
 great stair, — a stair built on the treads and 
 uprights of traditional religion — he heard a 
 voice in his ear that said : " The just shall 
 live by his faith." He arose from the toiling 
 on his knees to the activities of his life, turned 
 his back upon the monastery and upon the 
 cloister, and entered into marriage and work 
 and beneficence as a man and not a priest. 
 
 For religion in its last analysis is personal, 
 not traditional. It is traditional in that it 
 may be carried across from age to age. It is 
 
256 One World at a Time 
 
 traditional, for instance, in the Philippine Isl- 
 ands, where every question yet of personal 
 religion and of national ethics is to be solved. 
 The friars own the land, and the people do 
 not own themselves. It is traditional in those 
 great Catholic belts of Southern America, in 
 which every punctilio of service is observed, 
 but where civilisation languishes for want of 
 humanness. It is observed if you would go 
 to an audience with the Pope of Rome. You 
 would be inquired of, not whether you be- 
 lieved in the personal sanctity of Leo XIII., 
 in which we must all in large measure believe 
 who know of the devotion and sympathies 
 of this beautiful old man ; but you would 
 be asked by the master of ceremonies if you 
 understood "the etiquette of the occasion." 
 The etiquette of the occasion does not mean 
 that you shall accept the vicar of the Most 
 High as a person charged with a message 
 to you. It means that the women must go 
 veiled, and the whole company must kneel 
 when the Pope enters his audience chamber, 
 and if he is gracious enough to present his 
 signet they must kiss it. This is tradition- 
 alism. 
 
 So, throughout the whole world, the effort 
 of man has been to put himself into actual 
 
Personal Religion 257 
 
 relations with the universe, and he does so 
 when he leaves the pages of the past in which 
 that effort is inscribed. He reads there the 
 history of religion, the history that followed 
 its traditions, that is made up in part of what 
 it did and in part of what it dreamed ; but no 
 man finds his adjustment to the universe in 
 the pages of history. To recite trippingly 
 upon the tongue some creed of the past may 
 be most useful, as putting you in line with the 
 continuity of religious thought. But it is 
 quite possible to say the things impossible to 
 believe, and a useful exercise goes on in all 
 sensitive souls in the recitation of the forms 
 of faith, — a translation out of the archaic 
 phraseology, reciting the phraseology of the 
 past in the terms of present emotion and of 
 present faith. So that when a clergyman of a 
 New York church was asked, " How, in view 
 of the fact that you believe in the essential 
 humanity of Jesus of Nazareth, are you able 
 to recite the Apostles' Creed ? " he answered : 
 " I say to myself, ' who is said to have been 
 conceived of the Holy Ghost and born of the 
 Virgin Mary.' " That parenthetic process 
 goes on all the time. Into that interval of 
 the parenthesis dropped the sincerities of his 
 life. Into the chasm in his thinking dropped 
 
258 One World at a Time 
 
 the directness of his mind ; for the passage 
 from traditionahsm to personal religion must 
 be made, no matter where you start. You 
 may start at the antipodes, of the Catholic 
 Church upon the one side, and at very liberal- 
 ism upon the other ; but still, what relation do 
 you own to the Infinite ? That is the problem 
 set for all of us. It is the source of the soul's 
 struggle. It is the major premise in all the 
 soul's argument with life. 
 
 I do not for one moment lose sigfht of the 
 thought side of religion ; but the thought side 
 of religion cannot be a thought quoted with- 
 out ceasing from intellectual eminence. Em- 
 erson said, very well, that next to him who 
 uttered a great thought was the man who 
 quoted it. But to be perpetually in quota- 
 tion is to be ever in process of rehearsing 
 tradition. The tradition preserves that which 
 constitutes the background of our thinking ; 
 it is not thinking itself. It was thought ; but 
 it is not thought, you perceive. Whatever 
 creed is stated, the moment any man says, 
 " Credo," " I believe," he is in active, intel- 
 lectual, moral, spiritual process ; but the next 
 man who says, " I believe," and quotes him, 
 does not say the same thing at all. He says : 
 " I believe what the other man believed," and 
 
Personal Religion 259 
 
 he is one remove away from that warm centre 
 of conviction which in the first man made the 
 statement of his faith. Take, for instance, 
 the creed called the " Creed of Nicsea," be- 
 gun in 325 in the Council of Nicsea, and 
 formulated and completed in 380 in the Coun- 
 cil of Constantinople. Examine that state- 
 ment. I do not intend to controvert any 
 element in it. I believe profoundly that the 
 enunciation of it saved the Christian Church, 
 as I could prove to you by a most simple 
 process. When it was declared that the Son 
 was of the "same substance" with the Father, 
 the first utterance was made which modern 
 thought expresses in the integrity of all life 
 and the essence of all life. It was a wonder- 
 ful declaration. Not Arius, but Athanasius 
 saved the Church. But when the modern 
 man, dusty with his business, brushes himself 
 off and goes to church, or shifts his business 
 suit for his holy cloak, and goes into the place 
 of prayer, and begins to recite the Creed of 
 Nicsea, he is not at all conscious of the strug- 
 gle that went to the making of it, — how, in 
 that convention of ecclesiastics, blows were 
 struck and oaths were uttered, and anger 
 was hot for the integrity of the faith. He 
 is trying to put into his Occidental way of 
 
26o One World at a Time 
 
 thinking, into his Western mind, a philosophic 
 statement produced largely under Asiatic con- 
 ditions ; for of the 318 bishops and ecclesi- 
 astics that constituted the Council of Nicsea, 
 only some twelve or fifteen were from the 
 West of Europe. It is a philosophy of re- 
 ligion that he is reciting, and you can imagine, 
 as he stands there and recites the Nicene 
 Creed without much thought, able sometimes 
 to remember what it really is, and most often 
 reading it from the book, — as he stands there, 
 you can imagine the surprise of all the mar- 
 tyrs that died for the truth, and all the angels 
 that attended their flight from earth, to see a 
 modern man reciting a philosophic formula, of 
 which he has never weighed one syllable per- 
 haps in all his days, and calling it an exercise 
 of personal religion ! It is quite possible for 
 him to make that personal, — quite possible 
 for him to apprehend what Athanasius was 
 struggling for, and enter into that struggle of 
 soul. If he can believe it, and adjust it to his 
 life, and make it practical in his common af- 
 fairs, he has solved one problem in religion, — 
 he has passed from traditionalism to personal 
 experience. But you have not in that creed, 
 nor in any other, so far as I know, — a state- 
 ment of personal religion. I do not know in 
 
Personal Religion 261 
 
 one of them anything that can be parallelled 
 with the Beatitudes, which deal with life and its 
 blessedness. The creeds deal with thought and 
 its accuracy ; and between the blessedness of 
 life, the beatitude of experience, and accuracy 
 of statement, there is all the difference be- 
 tween the rosy child that is so full of life your 
 arms can scarcely hold him while 3^ou love 
 him, and the placid and statuesque perfection 
 of the dead. 
 
 " The soul divines what is divine," said 
 Tertullian in one of his better moments. 
 " The soul divines what is divine." And our 
 modern statement of it is, " That is inspired 
 which inspires." 
 
 I am not for one moment to be un- 
 derstood as declaring against the traditions 
 of religion. I simply say they are not relig- 
 ion's self. They are useful, as the museums 
 are useful, as the history of the literature of 
 the world is useful ; but between the living 
 creature, that looks at the preserved specimen 
 in the museum, and the fossil itself are all the 
 diameters that we mean by life, — so wide that 
 they cannot be compared by their measure- 
 ment together. The living child, wondering 
 before the great restored fossil creature, that 
 after being exhumed has been set up in its 
 
262 One World at a Time 
 
 skeleton as it was in antediluvian days, — the 
 living child standing wondering at it, is greater 
 than the thing at which it looks ; because all 
 history — is implicit in the child, and this other 
 has been left a remainder from the past. The 
 skeleton dug up and a history in process are 
 things so different that one can scarcely com- 
 pare them together. 
 
 One grows weary of the people who have 
 the theory of things ; — the great dramatic 
 critic who cannot write a line that anybody 
 can play on the stage ; the great musical critic 
 whom you would dismiss, that you might hear 
 an old darky sing with his mellow voice, into 
 which generations of tears have gone, and the 
 agony of his people ; a minister of religion, 
 whom you are glad to detect in any useful 
 employment ; you follow him up with detec- 
 tive exaction, and, beyond the theories of the 
 philosophy of religion which he may have, you 
 at last discover him in the practice of the 
 things that he preaches ; in all these instances 
 we find the passage from traditionalism to what 
 is personal and immediate. 
 
 What do we mean by personal religion ? 
 Religion is a passion, a devotion to the will 
 of God. It does not much matter what the 
 god is called, or how his will is conceived, 
 
Personal Religiion 263 
 
 '& 
 
 or what degree of passion is maintained, so 
 that the soul have passion, devotion to the 
 will of God. For it is our relationships that 
 matter, not the definition of what those re- 
 lationships should be. Better give one's self 
 absolutely to worship than to be most emi- 
 nently wise about idols, and go from one 
 pedestal to another until one's fancy is pleased 
 with a god. That is not worship ; that is 
 not devotion ; there is no passion in that. 
 That is fooling with an aesthetic sense in the 
 name of a great process in human life. It is 
 for this reason that Calvin and Theodore 
 Parker are equally admirable in their attitude 
 and relation to that which they believed, 
 Theodore Parker said he agreed with Calvin 
 perfectly, for Calvin's God was his devil. 
 Still, the relation was exact between the being 
 whom Calvin worshipped, and whom we abhor 
 in his description of him, and the being 
 whom Theodore Parker worshipped and whom 
 we adore in his description. It is relation 
 that is essential ; and the relation, being vital, 
 carries worth with it. Take the commonest 
 relation of life. Marriage is an instinct based 
 in the physical nature of the race. Marriage 
 is a passion in which an instinct is kindled 
 until it flames. Marriage is an ideal in which 
 
264 One World at a Time 
 
 all the basilar instincts are subordinated and 
 sublimated at once to the service of the soul. 
 Marriage is a beatitude, a sacrament. The 
 Church of Rome is right in calling it one of the 
 seven sacraments. It is a sacrament in which 
 stand hand in hand the man and woman, and 
 they bow themselves before God unashamed. 
 This one word that I have used — relation — 
 makes the difference from first to last. 
 
 So religion is a passionate devotion to the 
 will of God. That is definition enough, I 
 think. In what sense, then, is it personal ? 
 I have already intimated to you that every 
 tradition clustered around some warm-hearted 
 faith. The aberration from that centre of 
 summer in the soul was when intellectual ac- 
 curacy was substituted for an experience of 
 life. That is the great heresy. The world 
 has never entertained any heresy which for 
 hurtful influence is like that ; and that lies 
 at the root of insistence upon traditionalism. 
 The comical little catechism, quoted in a New 
 York newspaper a while ago as having been 
 put out by the Anglican Catholic clergy, 
 represented everybody who is not in what 
 they call the " ark of safety," with the other 
 animals, as in the great wash of the deluge. 
 It is a very small vessel for so large a sea. 
 
Personal Religion 265 
 
 and so many people will be drowned around 
 it, that I think the waters will be clogged 
 up as in the Sea of Sargasso. The heresy of 
 it is that it insists that tradition is authority ; 
 that accurate statement is salvation ; that con- 
 formity to a form of words has saving power. 
 That is the great heresy wherever it is found 
 in the history of the world, — that exactness of 
 definition is reality. I have many a time 
 called your attention in these pages to 
 this fundamental distinction which we must 
 maintain or be lost in our thinking : that defi- 
 nition is never the thing defined. The pre- 
 scription is not even the drug, and the drug 
 is not the cure ; and yet to be wise in pre- 
 scriptions makes an apothecary, who must yet 
 take his own drusfs to be cured. Definition 
 is not mathematics, ranging from the simplest 
 primary question of addition and so on clear to 
 higher mathematics, where most of us get lost ; 
 and yet the wise wren builds her nest and 
 broods her young, and the spider knows how 
 large the door of his little hole in the ground 
 must be to serve as a trap to pull after him 
 when he goes in, and " nature loves the num- 
 ber five," and does not know why, — all inno- 
 cent of mathematics, because the definition is 
 not the reality, — the reality is the cause of the 
 
266 One World at a Time 
 
 definition. In the wide spaces of Arabia the 
 mathematical science was born, and the heavens 
 lent their aid to the calculations of him who in 
 algebra and its kindred sciences sought to con- 
 stitute a science under the light of the stars. 
 
 The definition is never the reality. That is 
 the vanity of the people who say : " I am a 
 Channing Unitarian," or, " I am a Theodore 
 Parker Unitarian." Phillips Brooks had the 
 right idea about that. When somebody was 
 asked by him why she attended Trinity 
 Church, this simpering woman said : "I do 
 not know why, but I suppose I am a Brooks- 
 ite." And he said : " Good-day, madam." 
 That was the only answer. A Channing Uni- 
 tarian, if he would read Channing, would 
 discover that he was the most vitally and im- 
 mediately religious of men. He was dealing 
 with things as he found them, and seeking to 
 help the age in which he lived. He was dealing 
 with questions from Napoleon in his greed of 
 conquest to slavery in its enormity of guilt ; he 
 dealt with the common vices and virtues of the 
 time In which he lived, In a way that showed the 
 living soul. That Is the way to be a Channing 
 Unitarian, — to have your soul alive to every 
 blessed and Infernal thing in sight, and seek to 
 change the nether side of life to Its beatitudes. 
 
Personal Religion 267 
 
 This must be, for the reason that all rela- 
 tions are personal. The moment the human 
 consciousness arrived at the concept of per- 
 sonality, it set up personal relations with the 
 universe. If you stand at all — as you must if 
 you are aware of modern thought — for the 
 natural function of religion, you are dealing 
 with a part of your nature just as much as 
 when you are learning the laws of light as 
 related to the eye, or the laws of sound as re- 
 lated to the ear. You are dealing with a 
 function of your daily life in religion. Over 
 and over again men say to me : " I have at last 
 come to the conclusion that I must attend to 
 the religious side of my nature." Well, that 
 late conclusion does them credit, for the re- 
 ligious side of their nature has been knocking 
 and knocking, and asking attention. Let it be 
 attended to ! It has been whispering ques- 
 tions to them that nothing else answered, rais- 
 ing conflicts in their minds that nothing else 
 could allay, presenting conditions of human life 
 as they arise year by year In terms of gladness 
 and sorrow so that nothing else could adjust 
 them ; and at last they are attending to what has 
 been there all the time, — the religious side of 
 their nature. I say to you with all the serious- 
 ness of which I am capable, that you cannot 
 
268 One World at a Time 
 
 neglect it without dwarfing your powers, and 
 that that relation is a personal relation ; for 
 the reason, if I may make this plain by an 
 illustration or two, that all the achievements 
 of life come, sooner or later, in their highest 
 terms, out of a conscious adjustment of the 
 person to the nature of which he seeks to in- 
 quire. For instance, shut the eye away from 
 light long enough, and it is blind. Keep the 
 arm, as the Indian ascetic does, lifted toward 
 heaven long enough, and it is paralysed. 
 Stand with Simon Stylites on his pillar, with 
 his rope girdle, long enough still, and decay 
 sets in ; and yet the ascetic is doing it in the 
 name of a personal relation. What I de- 
 sire to bringf home to the mind of the reader 
 with all possible directness is this : That when 
 a human being gets down before God in prayer, 
 or stands, as our Oriental friends would in 
 prayer — no matter what the attitude, if the soul 
 is going out toward its source of life, is seeking 
 its springs in the Being that made it — when that 
 transpires the relation is as real, as vital, and 
 as natural, as when the eye is delighted with 
 the first kiss of light, or the ear is delighted 
 with the first matin song of birds, or when 
 your child crawls into your bed in the morning 
 and snuggles down ; that is an act of personal 
 
Personal Religion 269 
 
 devotion to you out of whose being it came, 
 and into whose arms it is folded for safety and 
 infantile delight. I believe in God, but that 
 is not enough. I must believe God. " I know," 
 says the apostle, not " i^i whom I have be- 
 lieved," but " I know whom I have be- 
 lieved." That is personal relationship. When 
 we speak into the ear of the Most High, we 
 are not crying into the void. All definitions 
 of philosophy are inapt, incomplete. The 
 relationship between the soul and God is a 
 relationship that must be personally realised, 
 personally believed. No knowledge of tradi- 
 tion is a substitute for it, and no delight in 
 tradition can take its place. And nothing that 
 any human soul can do but the abandon of 
 itself unto the Infinite, can be called in any sense 
 the passage from traditional religion to religion 
 that is personal. For religion is not a theory, 
 but an experience. Religion is not a guess, 
 but a certainty. There are theories mani- 
 fold, but they are not itself. There are 
 guesses multiform, but they are not itself. 
 The reality is never the thing described. 
 The soul is an explorer for reality, and its ex- 
 ploration is its experience, and its experience 
 is its life. This is religion. 
 
.COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 
 
 0035521813 
 
 
 
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